New Notoriety Option: No Enhancement Set Bonuses

[Greycat]

2 hours ago, Voltak said:

 

"Entire second build" ....   

As if a build with no IOs is much of a thing to do. 

No IOs and only SOs is very easy to do.  

You have 3 builds available that YOU can do 

Respect are available 

Hardly anyone has all three builds taken up

You don't need Devs to put in work or effort to do this for you to play with only SOs 

I don't know why this is so hard to grasp 

 

You're talking to someone who's an advocate of second and third builds. Have been since live. I know *perfectly well* how easy or hard they are to do.

 

This is an *option* for something people may want to do *once in a while.* And so would not want or need an entire other build for it.

 

I don't know why this is so hard to grasp.

[Alchemystic]

2 hours ago, Voltak said:

You don't need Devs to put in work or effort to do this for you to play with only SOs 

I don't know why this is so hard to grasp 

 

I only play with SOs

 

And I advocate the idea for a notoriety option that disables set bonuses.

 

Options are good, especially ones that don't actually need a lot of 'work or effort' to implement.

[Voltak]

6 minutes ago, Greycat said:

 

You're talking to someone who's an advocate of second and third builds. Have been since live. I know *perfectly well* how easy or hard they are to do.

 

This is an *option* for something people may want to do *once in a while.* And so would not want or need an entire other build for it.

 

I don't know why this is so hard to grasp.

People can play with no IOs when and if they want

They don't need a Dev to enable that 

If you want to play with only SOs, just go play with no SOs. 

You want to change that?  Fine, put IOs when you want. 


Why you talking as if you ignore this then ?

[Blackfeather]

6 hours ago, Doomguide2005 said:

Thanks, that's what I thought you intended as globals are treated like set bonuses and the others are not.  Seems like an idea worth pursuing, an intermediate difficultly between no enhancements and all things IO in use.

 

Happy to clear things up a bit! And yup, hence the whole framing as "no set bonuses" - given this constraint, I visualise enhancements such as Sudden Acceleration: Knockback to Knockdown working as normal under this Notoriety option too.

[Greycat]

27 minutes ago, Blackfeather said:

 

Happy to clear things up a bit! And yup, hence the whole framing as "no set bonuses" - given this constraint, I visualise enhancements such as Sudden Acceleration: Knockback to Knockdown working as normal under this Notoriety option too.

 

Which makes sense if the set bonuses themselves are what's being disabled. So something like the Command of the Mastermind set would still give you the +Defense pet aura (since it's part of one of the enhancements,) but not the damage, recharge or health boosts (the set bonuses for 2, 3 or 4 pieces.)

[golstat2003]

6 hours ago, Tyrannical said:

 

I only play with SOs

 

And I advocate the idea for a notoriety option that disables set bonuses.

 

Options are good, especially ones that don't actually need a lot of 'work or effort' to implement.

 

If team leaders are able to set this and as long as they ANNOUNCE IT  when they are LFG that they have Set Bonuses turned off, I have no issue with this notoriety setting.

Edited March 23, 2021 by golstat2003

[Blackfeather]

1 minute ago, Greycat said:

Which makes sense if the set bonuses themselves are what's being disabled. So something like the Command of the Mastermind set would still give you the +Defense pet aura (since it's part of one of the enhancements,) but not the damage, recharge or health boosts (the set bonuses for 2, 3 or 4 pieces.)

 

That's right - I used the proc enhancements from Stalker's Guile and Assassin's Mark as examples of things that'd continue working under this new setting in my original post. Though that being said, I think Command of the Mastermind and the other pet defense/resistance aura IOs function as globals rather than as procs, so they might also be disabled under this new Notoriety option...not sure though.

[Blackfeather]

On 3/23/2021 at 4:11 AM, JAMMan0000 said:

I can relate to this. Once getting to 50 and incarnates, teams are so overpowered, its not fun any more. Then my 50 pretty much just gets shelved.

I often find myself, looking for lower level teams to join, just I/we are handicapped enough that there is a little bit of a challenge and some satisfaction from teaming. 

For me most of my issues could be resolved if there was just a Notoriety option to set my level to any level below my 'natural' level, and use all of the existing standard exemping rules to handicap my powers available, IO scaling, set bonuses, etc. That way;

- If I don't want to play with Incarnates, I could just set my level to 44, get exempted down to 44, recruit my team (all exempted down to 43) and do regular PI level content.

- If I want to do earlier out leveled content missed previously, I just set my level to the appropriate level, get exempted down, recruit my team and go for it. 

 

Being able to set our level would increase our access to content and allow us to control difficulty to keep the fun and challenging at any level.

 

Going to start off by saying that for me, I personally have fun across the entire spectrum of the CoH level range for different reasons, which I can see why that could be a potential turn off for some, hence the introduction of additional difficulty options to help cater for that, regardless of level.

 

This does sound quite interesting - it sounds almost like the ability to exemplar down regardless of location/content. While I'm not sure how that'd translate in-game, it might be a fun discussion to look into.

[Normal Thomas]

This is a cool idea. I am all for more novel forms of introducing difficulty than simply adding extra numbers to enemy levels or spawn sizes. I however, would add a sliding scale like:

 

Max 3 set bonuses (Rule of three)

Max 1 set bonus (Rule of one)

No set bonuses (Rule of none)

No set bonuses, procs or global enhancements (Classic mode)

 

Considering how the game considers set bonuses, global enhancements and procs and the like as powers I imagine it wouldn't take too much tweaking to limit them in any capacity. Plus, you're going to have to categorize all of these powers to limit them for no set bonuses, you may as well allow for a full range of options.

Edited March 24, 2021 by Normal Thomas

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Normal Thomas said:

Max 3 set bonuses (Rule of three)

 

Given this is one of my "I wish they'd limited it *there* to begin with" items (in the inevitable "what's breaking the game/making it too easy" threads) I'd frankly love to run with this. Just to see how big of a difference it makes.  It'd likely have to be with a set group of people, but still.

[Blackfeather]

5 hours ago, Normal Thomas said:

This is a cool idea. I am all for more novel forms of introducing difficulty than simply adding extra numbers to enemy levels or spawn sizes. I however, would add a sliding scale like:

 

Max 3 set bonuses (Rule of three)

Max 1 set bonus (Rule of one)

No set bonuses (Rule of none)

No set bonuses, procs or global enhancements (Classic mode)

 

Considering how the game considers set bonuses, global enhancements and procs and the like as powers I imagine it wouldn't take too much tweaking to limit them in any capacity. Plus, you're going to have to categorize all of these powers to limit them for no set bonuses, you may as well allow for a full range of options.

 

2 hours ago, Greycat said:

Given this is one of my "I wish they'd limited it *there* to begin with" items (in the inevitable "what's breaking the game/making it too easy" threads) I'd frankly love to run with this. Just to see how big of a difference it makes.  It'd likely have to be with a set group of people, but still.

 

It'd definitely be a neat idea, and another way of upping the game's difficulty progressively - I know I've been on groups that go "let's start off with +1, and see how we go" and so on to see how the team functions, and adjusting it to find a nice medium. Having another spectrum of toggles that'd affect the game would be interesting to play around with, I think.

[Blackfeather]

Hey there @RogueWolf! I saw your thread about team difficulty and the like - given your stance on the matter, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about your thoughts on this proposal. Given that this suggestion is basically designed for this kind of use case, I'd love to know whether or not it'd be something that'd appeal to you. 😄

[Blackfeather]

On 3/23/2021 at 8:10 AM, Replacement said:

Fun idea, and I really like the idea of adding new notoriety options for increasing difficulty... But I don't want this one particularly. At least it's not at the top of my list.

 

Reason: this affects some builds more adversely than others. Note, I am not talking about player combinations (particular power sets or ATs), I mean more like "I modded for a lot of recovery and endurance modification via sets instead of endurance reduction enhancements directly, and now my toggles are too expensive." Someone else might have the same build except they built the recovery into their base enhancements and used sets for a more "icing on the cake" stat.

 

I'm sure someone will read this far and say "good, that's the point." But the issue is if this difficulty setting has any tangible reward whatsoever, it selects for builds that are less impacted by the loss.

 

This is why I hate "mutators" in games. If you have a mode that makes enemies explode on death, you have just encouraged the playerbase to self-select away from melee, leading to homogeny in what people build. This isn't so different.

 

I should stress this is not a huge deal given the rest of CoH's non-elitist nature, especially if there are other modes. But if you have all these options, you know it's a matter of weeks until players begin measuring their performance of a given build based on its ability to clear "full" notoriety.

 

(Interesting solution: don't let players activate all notoriety options. If you have up to 3 to choose from a list of 10, this would work well as one of them)

 

Hmm...I'll admit I'm not entirely convinced, at least with the example that was brought up - taking a look at practically any IO build on the forums for instance (and of course my own!), both the Health and Stamina pools are generally slotted with procs with a side of Performance Shifter: Endurance Modification, but usually not much more in terms of slotting there.

 

It's for that reason that only set bonuses were suppressed here: procs make up a lot of an IO build's endurance gain with any endurance discounts/gain usually coming as a side effect of attempting to achieve some other goal - endurance management usually isn't a thing that's considered necessary to actively slot towards outside of the usual Panacea/Shifter/Miracle, which would function as-is under this Notoriety option. On the other hand, attempting to softcap one's defenses, or trying to reach perma-Hasten is, for example.

 

I'm also not that convinced that this proposal would appeal to players who wish for maximum performance either: having their IO set bonuses suppressed isn't going to be doing favours for them in that regard, outside of bragging rights (which, given how that just amounts to playing the game as it's balanced around, really isn't that much to talk about).

 

That being said, I do agree that multiple different modes of difficulty would be neat - I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on @Normal Thomas's own proposal here, along with the kinds of Notoriety options that'd appeal to you!

Edited March 24, 2021 by Blackfeather

[biostem]

I'd love to see more difficulty settings made available:

 

No set bonuses

No enhancement bonuses at all

All minions/lieutenants/bosses

And pretty much any combination people can think of.

[MTeague]

I love the idea. 

Now, it's true it may affect some builds more than others.... but I would actually see the main use case for this not being solo, but doing some "oldschool" runs of misc content for giggles.

 

Absolutely, 100%, it would have to be advertised. 

a) Just basic politeness / common decency

b) enlightened self interest.  no team leader enjoys when people ragequit in a huff not realizing due to wildly different team expectations. (well, okay, there's always that one guy who takes sadistic pleasure out of it....)  Most people just want to put together a team and keep that team for a few hours anyway.  If I'm recruiting I want people to know up front what the deal would be.

 

But if we take set bonuses off the table, okay.  Maybe your perfect IO build now lacks severe amount of recharge. Maybe your Perma-Dom can't Perma-Dom anymore. Or your may find that you selected so few attacks because your focused on a few *very* hard hitting winners that came back fast enough with set bonus recahrge.  And then you're feeling sliightly gimped at first. I get that. 

 

Then the /kin on the team Speed Boosts you, and the Rad Emission guy hits you with Accelerated Metabolism. 

You're back in business, wrecking face, but you're keeping an eye on your buffs and staying in buff range again. 

 

Or you lose a ton of End Reduction and your toggles are bleeding your blue bar dry. 

Until you get Speed Boosted. And the Empath uses Recovery Aura.

 

Or your Defense are now so low you feel like a fragile porcelin vase lying in the middle of the mud on Monster Truck Sunday. 

Until you get Bubbled by the Force Fielder. And maybe pick up a Fortitude from the Empath. 

 

Is this going to be everyone's cup of tea?  F**K NO.

I'm sure some players would shake their head and wonder why it was enjoyable to have to check in with buffers, to wait for debuffs to be applied, instead fo just being the invincible tankmage. And hey, that's cool. Perfectly Cool and Froody for anyone to say "nope, not interested" and ignore the recruitment, just as I ignore all speedruns and incarnate runs.

 

Why make it a Notoriety Option?

To allow people who haven't specifically planned for this, to decide "what the hell, it might be fun" on the spur of the moment, without needing to spend the time to setup an extra build (assuming they have one to spare) and then crafting the plain IO's or buying the requisite SO's to slot in every power, and then having to deal wtih both builds on every respec.  This lets people TRY IT, just on a What-The-Bleep, 100% risk free. 

 

/signed /endorsed

Edited March 24, 2021 by MTeague

[Normal Thomas]

20 hours ago, Greycat said:

 

Given this is one of my "I wish they'd limited it *there* to begin with" items (in the inevitable "what's breaking the game/making it too easy" threads) I'd frankly love to run with this. Just to see how big of a difference it makes.  It'd likely have to be with a set group of people, but still.

You are exactly the person I had in mind when I was thinking of this 🙂

[Zeraphia]

Hmm... I can understand the desire for adding difficulty for such a task force by this implementation, but I'm honestly lukewarm about this mainly because personally, I will never use it, and I can't see this being a mainstream thing that many people will use. 

 

Maybe the future can change? Maybe people will start forming TFs with this setting all the time and make it very worthwhile? But I highly doubt it honestly. This would probably be sadly one of the most under-utilized additions... THAT said! Not against it!

[kelika2]

All or nothing.  OP lost me at numina proc as an example being omitted.  This would also mean Miracle, panacea and Perf Shifter

Plus the enhancements used are all hybrids, even without set bonuses you are still pretty well off since you also have healthy amount of rech/end on top off acc/dmg in attacks.  ATO/Purple/PvP pretty much max out acc/dmg/rech/end in attacks

 

While being killable sounds like what the OP wants, the absolute power of IOs turning Footstomp into a 9s cooldown, or nukes being down to 60 seconds, etc is still there.  In which case, all you need with this whole idea upside down is making a bubbler/ice shielder/sonic reso a mandatory member

[Blackfeather]

4 hours ago, biostem said:

I'd love to see more difficulty settings made available:

 

No set bonuses

No enhancement bonuses at all

All minions/lieutenants/bosses

And pretty much any combination people can think of.

 

13 minutes ago, kelika2 said:

All or nothing.  OP lost me at numina proc as an example being omitted.  This would also mean Miracle, panacea and Perf Shifter

Plus the enhancements used are all hybrids, even without set bonuses you are still pretty well off since you also have healthy amount of rech/end on top off acc/dmg in attacks.  ATO/Purple/PvP pretty much max out acc/dmg/rech/end in attacks

 

While being killable sounds like what the OP wants, the absolute power of IOs turning Footstomp into a 9s cooldown, or nukes being down to 60 seconds, etc is still there.  In which case, all you need with this whole idea upside down is making a bubbler/ice shielder/sonic reso a mandatory member

 

Hey there, thanks for dropping by!

 

The intent in allowing procs to function as usual was mainly to preserve an IO build's endurance gain, similar to if they had just slotted out their Fitness pools normally (i.e. like an SO build). I even highlight Panacea as an example when I expand upon my reasoning about this here - needless to say, this was indeed quite intentional.

 

If that's not to your preference due to the other things that procs can do, I think that's all the more reason to provide some additional Notoriety options to increase its granularity, such as was proposed over here - can't go wrong with more options! 😄

[Blackfeather]

13 hours ago, MTeague said:

I love the idea. 

Now, it's true it may affect some builds more than others.... but I would actually see the main use case for this not being solo, but doing some "oldschool" runs of misc content for giggles.

 

Absolutely, 100%, it would have to be advertised. 

a) Just basic politeness / common decency

b) enlightened self interest.  no team leader enjoys when people ragequit in a huff not realizing due to wildly different team expectations. (well, okay, there's always that one guy who takes sadistic pleasure out of it....)  Most people just want to put together a team and keep that team for a few hours anyway.  If I'm recruiting I want people to know up front what the deal would be.

 

But if we take set bonuses off the table, okay.  Maybe your perfect IO build now lacks severe amount of recharge. Maybe your Perma-Dom can't Perma-Dom anymore. Or your may find that you selected so few attacks because your focused on a few *very* hard hitting winners that came back fast enough with set bonus recahrge.  And then you're feeling sliightly gimped at first. I get that. 

 

Then the /kin on the team Speed Boosts you, and the Rad Emission guy hits you with Accelerated Metabolism. 

You're back in business, wrecking face, but you're keeping an eye on your buffs and staying in buff range again. 

 

Or you lose a ton of End Reduction and your toggles are bleeding your blue bar dry. 

Until you get Speed Boosted. And the Empath uses Recovery Aura.

 

Or your Defense are now so low you feel like a fragile porcelin vase lying in the middle of the mud on Monster Truck Sunday. 

Until you get Bubbled by the Force Fielder. And maybe pick up a Fortitude from the Empath. 

 

Is this going to be everyone's cup of tea?  F**K NO.

I'm sure some players would shake their head and wonder why it was enjoyable to have to check in with buffers, to wait for debuffs to be applied, instead fo just being the invincible tankmage. And hey, that's cool. Perfectly Cool and Froody for anyone to say "nope, not interested" and ignore the recruitment, just as I ignore all speedruns and incarnate runs.

 

Why make it a Notoriety Option?

To allow people who haven't specifically planned for this, to decide "what the hell, it might be fun" on the spur of the moment, without needing to spend the time to setup an extra build (assuming they have one to spare) and then crafting the plain IO's or buying the requisite SO's to slot in every power, and then having to deal wtih both builds on every respec.  This lets people TRY IT, just on a What-The-Bleep, 100% risk free. 

 

/signed /endorsed

 

I'm very happy to hear that this idea interests you!

 

And I'm of similar mind - per @golstat2003's post, changes to the game's Notoriety should definitely be said beforehand in a team to let others know what they're getting into: that's indeed just common decency. I know I certainly wouldn't appreciate walking into a +4/x8 without being told that was the case.

 

I also think your post addresses a lot of @Voltak's questions about the why behind such a feature too, better than I could have expressed for sure, which is a double bonus. 😊

[Blackfeather]

Hey there, @mechahamham! I saw this thread of yours quite recently:

Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this proposal of mine - I think it might be to your liking given what you're trying to achieve in it!

[Blackfeather]

Hello @CFIndustries! I took a look at your post quite recently over here:

It was an interesting read for sure, and in light of it, I would definitely be interested in hearing your thoughts on this proposal, if you're happy to share them! 😄

[Naraka]

On 3/22/2021 at 6:55 AM, Voltak said:

I was thinking and this occurred -->

Why is this even being suggested for the Devs to step in and grant YOU the ability to choose this?

Right now you can play the game with no IOs.   

If you really wanted that, and one of the reasons you used was that in your mind the game is not balanced towards IOs, then play with no IOs.  

You have the ability to have several builds in your toon 

One of the builds can be no IOs or no set bonuses 


Simply , change to the build you want with no set bonuses and you are done

Or is it that you want your team mates to play with NO IO set bonuses 

With a game that had very little resources, this option of YOU making one of your builds with no IO set bonuses and having the Dev put time and effort to make this happen, but I am sorry, you can play the game with no set bonuses and you are done with the issue. 

You have three builds to choose from in your character.  Why not just switch to the one you have no IO set bonuses?

If @Solarverse  finds the game too easy, just play the way we, the old school players who were here since the beginning, play like we did -- play with only Dual Origins and Single Origin enhancements.   

Just do that, then come back to the forum and tell us how many builds were "too easy" to solo with and how many were not "too easy" to solo with only SOs or DOs.  

I played the game a whole lot when no IOs were out

I already know the kind of experience it was.  

The answer: we already do.

 

The only real issue comes when trying to play content with many people. To preface the whole team with "if you have IO bonuses, you need to change build" then further policing this throughout the whole process, while possible, it's not feasible.

 

The additional rebuttal to that is "make a SG around it and blah blah blah". That is a lot of extra work to just want to play the game with some challenge to make things interesting. So then you get players like me who just don't care and, at best, just go with the flow while falling asleep when stuff just doesn't put up a fight.

[golstat2003]

1 hour ago, Naraka said:

The answer: we already do.

 

The only real issue comes when trying to play content with many people. To preface the whole team with "if you have IO bonuses, you need to change build" then further policing this throughout the whole process, while possible, it's not feasible.

 

The additional rebuttal to that is "make a SG around it and blah blah blah". That is a lot of extra work to just want to play the game with some challenge to make things interesting. So then you get players like me who just don't care and, at best, just go with the flow while falling asleep when stuff just doesn't put up a fight.

 

Yep. More difficulty options is always a good thing for folks who want that that challenge. I've been saying that on these forums for over a year.

 

As long as team leaders who choose those (future) options SAY SO when putting out feelers on LFG, I have no issue.

[Blackfeather]

Hello @VinceBlood! Saw your post about difficulty options here:

Given this, I'd definitely be interested in hearing your thoughts about a Notoriety option such as this one! Hopefully it's something that you're interested in - if not, would love to hear what kind of options you had in mind instead. 😊