Can someone Explain?

[Zerethon]

Why the absolute HECK Blazing blast has a mag 3+ knock and a Mag 8 REPEL attached to it now?

I thought it was someone else in the team, until i went to do the incarnate arc and realized my lazer was a yeet lazer

Was this always a thing and i just never read the power, or is this new? hadn't played this char in like a year.

Edited June 28, 2021 by Zerethon

[Aracknight]

I don't know the answer to your question, but Yeet Lazer is my new favorite powerset.

[oldskool]

14 minutes ago, Zerethon said:

Was this always a thing...

 

Well, it isn't new that is for sure.  

If anyone ever complains just do what I do and say...

 

"It was Agatha all along!"

[Zerethon]

It's as amusing as it is annoying, it's basically a staple of your DPS rotation but against 99% of enemies you just keep pushing them around or tossing them out of your OWN damage effects (Because i totally enjoy throwing people out of my fire rain radius 😕)

 

I Mean, it's so annoying i got rid of it for now, every other "Blast" converted snipe is basically just the snipe attacks, dunno why they felt fire of all sets needed a hold, knock and repel all tacked onto the death beam. when none of it adds to the power in the first place.

[drbuzzard]

24 minutes ago, Zerethon said:

Why the absolute HECK Blazing blast has a mag 3+ knock and a Mag 8 REPEL attached to it now?

I thought it was someone else in the team, until i went to do the incarnate arc and realized my lazer was a yeet lazer

Was this always a thing and i just never read the power, or is this new? hadn't played this char in like a year.

 

This power is why I avoid fire blast sentinels. I'm not sure what the designer was on at the time, but he sure wanted to piss off the players. I used to put in something to remove the knockback, but it does no good with the repel. It's had that since the start of HC. I've been calling for the repel to go away for a while now, to no avail of course. Then again many have been calling for help for sentinels since the start, also to no avail. 

[Zerethon]

14 minutes ago, drbuzzard said:

 

This power is why I avoid fire blast sentinels. I'm not sure what the designer was on at the time, but he sure wanted to piss off the players. I used to put in something to remove the knockback, but it does no good with the repel. It's had that since the start of HC. I've been calling for the repel to go away for a while now, to no avail of course. Then again many have been calling for help for sentinels since the start, also to no avail. 

I noticed, was basically gone for a year, came back, and we're still in the same kinda "Meh" state, not unplayable, but still lagging behind because some super easy basic fixes/changes haven't even been ATTEMPTED let alone actually done

[Sunsette]

2 hours ago, Zerethon said:

It's as amusing as it is annoying, it's basically a staple of your DPS rotation but against 99% of enemies you just keep pushing them around or tossing them out of your OWN damage effects (Because i totally enjoy throwing people out of my fire rain radius 😕)

 

I Mean, it's so annoying i got rid of it for now, every other "Blast" converted snipe is basically just the snipe attacks, dunno why they felt fire of all sets needed a hold, knock and repel all tacked onto the death beam. when none of it adds to the power in the first place.

 

While I share frustration that much hasn't been done with Sents when getting them to parity would be as simple as a scale tweak, it's worth recalling these are unpaid volunteers doing their best with limited time, and the AT performs well enough for the majority of players such that Sents are reasonably popular for alts.

 

As for what they were thinking with Fire Blast, they wanted to give Fire some utility rather than just being 'more damage more harder' -- where they erred is twofold:

- Spamming CC as part of your attack chain just means your attack chain is mindless. 

- KB absolutely should never be spammed rather than purposefully used.

[Underfyre]

My only concern is that you can't change the KB to KD.

[drbuzzard]

1 hour ago, underfyre said:

My only concern is that you can't change the KB to KD.

Yeah, I was downright ticked when I went to the trouble of getting the KB->KD IO from SBB for it, and it didn't really help. 

[Zerethon]

1 hour ago, underfyre said:

My only concern is that you can't change the KB to KD.

It's because it's not just KB.

It's got a random hold, mag 3-ish KB, and a mag 8 REPEL, so you can turn the KB to KD but the repel will still push enemies.

[SmalltalkJava]

4 minutes ago, Zerethon said:

It's got a random hold, mag 3-ish KB, and a mag 8 REPEL, so you can turn the KB to KD but the repel will still push enemies.

Lol,  that sounds like its a troll ability almost.   Has anyone actually bug reported it?

[Sunsette]

Just now, SmalltalkJava said:

Lol,  that sounds like its a troll ability almost.   Has anyone actually bug reported it?

 

It's probably patterned off of Blaster's Martial Combat Ki Push, which is a well-received repel + KB. Notably, however, Ki Push is relatively unremarkable damage for a Blaster; you appreciate not taking a total DPS loss for using your CC, but it's a CC first.

[Zerethon]

15 hours ago, Sunsette said:

 

It's probably patterned off of Blaster's Martial Combat Ki Push, which is a well-received repel + KB. Notably, however, Ki Push is relatively unremarkable damage for a Blaster; you appreciate not taking a total DPS loss for using your CC, but it's a CC first.

Exactly, the problem here is that it's Blazing blast, which like every other sentinel set is a Snipe converted into just a click damage power to act as another part of your DPS rotation, it's a bleedin' Tier 8 ST attack

However, for fire in this case, somebody was absolutely drunk, tacked a bunch of dumb onto it, and basically ruined what should be one of the most useful powers in the set. and then did NOT CHANGE THE POWER DESCRIPTION TO INDICATE THE EXISTENCE OF THE DUMB

overall, i feel like as i go through more sentinel builds, i'm going to find a lot more dumb changes/"Tweaks" hiding in powers now that probably contribute heavily to the meh-ness

[Sunsette]

Most of the sets have descriptions that are extremely off, yeah. You need Mids to easily realize that power push is the best attack in Energy Blast, and it's still a like 16 Magnitude KB. The snipe replacements are mostly mediocre except for frankenslotting, and there's lots of these attempts to combine CC and DPS in the oldest blast sets as part of the Sent attack chain that just doesn't seem as well thought out as most homecoming changes. 

 

The later sets like DP, BR, and Water don't have these strange combinations.

Edited June 29, 2021 by Sunsette

[drbuzzard]

1 hour ago, Sunsette said:

Most of the sets have descriptions that are extremely off, yeah. You need Mids to easily realize that power push is the best attack in Energy Blast, and it's still a like 16 Magnitude KB. The snipe replacements are mostly mediocre except for frankenslotting, and there's lots of these attempts to combine CC and DPS in the oldest blast sets as part of the Sent attack chain that just doesn't seem as well thought out as most homecoming changes. 

 

The later sets like DP, BR, and Water don't have these strange combinations.

The odd thing, is that that newer or older, the sets all predate sentinels and their associated ports. 

[Sunsette]

it doesn't seem that odd to me. I think it was a well-intentioned attempt to backport some of the newer design conceits found in those later sets without making the older sets unrecognizable. Unfortunately, I don't think it succeeded and it would have been better to actually engineer a new primary type; energy patrol, etc. For whatever reason, a lot of the ingenuity that was clearly present for the redesign of several defensive sets wasn't quite there for the offensive ones (maybe the designer had a lot more familiarity with tankers and brutes than blasters).

Edited June 29, 2021 by Sunsette

[Zerethon]

On 6/29/2021 at 2:57 PM, Sunsette said:

it doesn't seem that odd to me. I think it was a well-intentioned attempt to backport some of the newer design conceits found in those later sets without making the older sets unrecognizable. Unfortunately, I don't think it succeeded and it would have been better to actually engineer a new primary type; energy patrol, etc. For whatever reason, a lot of the ingenuity that was clearly present for the redesign of several defensive sets wasn't quite there for the offensive ones (maybe the designer had a lot more familiarity with tankers and brutes than blasters).

Honestly, a lot of it feels more slapdash than skilled.

Some sets (Like my beloved Electric blast) Work perfectly fine, no random stupid, the damage is OK and the increased damage on the hold works well for making it a DPS staple if you know your anim/cooldown times so you can do speedy chains of hits over and over

It's just, the messed up descriptions and constant missing updates for primary/secondary powers combined with the seeming lack of Care for the ONLY custom AT on the server, makes it a bit painful when you spend a while levelling a new build, only to find that it's painful to play because you didn't realize that this port has some idiotic change (Like Blazing blast)

What we seemingly really need is someone on the dev team to dedicate like, a day or two to go through, update descriptions, and remove some of the stupid changes, and then they can spend some time looking at like, 2 years of data and tweaking the classes powers and ports to start improving them overall.

[Sunsette]

I get where you're coming from, and I mostly agree with the sentiment, but I'd like to remain more... careful? in how we criticize the changes, because -- again, they're unpaid volunteers who have a lot on their plate and it can get tough to read the negativity over and over. I'd prefer they feel comfortable on this forum so that we can have an open dialogue as opposed to a repeat of the way Super Strength change discussion went down.

[Zerethon]

1 hour ago, Sunsette said:

I get where you're coming from, and I mostly agree with the sentiment, but I'd like to remain more... careful? in how we criticize the changes, because -- again, they're unpaid volunteers who have a lot on their plate and it can get tough to read the negativity over and over. I'd prefer they feel comfortable on this forum so that we can have an open dialogue as opposed to a repeat of the way Super Strength change discussion went down.

I missed that, now i have to go look up what happened with THAT, because i'm curious now.

The thing though, is it's been at least ~750 days with no changes to boot to what is more or less some Excel files, but a new zone, some costume updates, whole powerset "Balance" changes and more have all happened

So why SHOULDN'T we critique them for sentinels still being in a sorry state with powers that were heavily modified from their base versions as drunken experiments that make what has been an pretty dang fun AT to play an occasional utter nightmare of jank if you don't spend 4 hours poring over the "Stock" and sentinel sets to see what was changed, commit that perfectly to memory, then build around it because nobody went through and edited most of the power Descriptions, despite having gone through the secondary sets and modifying/editing powers all willy-nilly sometimes for no reason at all other than "Balance" or something. Like why did /Nin get a stealth power, but energy aura had it's stealth removed entirely?

With the big update that's planned, it definitely wouldn't hurt to have someone look over and dig through the AT, and at least fix the broken descriptions and fix some of the powers that have either dumb changes, or holdovers from their original versions that don't work for the role they fill for sents.

[Sunsette]

I mean, criticism and kindness don't have to be at odds. We're not paying customers with a right to expect anything in particular, just the ability to leave if we're unhappy and communicate kindly otherwise. I left for two years and now that I'm back I'm focused on blaster. 

 

As long as you're not leveling gold side, Sent is a fine and popular solo experience; still better than many other ATs. Inaccurate descriptions in many cases goes back to the original blast sets -- power blast used to have a different range -- and isn't unique to the Sent. This also happens with some blasts adapted to Dominator Assault. The AT stumbles hard for power players, but those are only a fraction of the playerbase. Further, the immediate reaction to many on the creation of the Sentinel was that the very idea was inherently broken.

 

The HC team appears to have calculated that the best decision to take with the Sentinel is to be very slow since it's mostly working, and make sure the ATs it conceptually competes with are fine first, to allay concerns of broken. I disagree with that sentiment, especially since I think it harms attracting people back to the game to find out there's not a lot new, but I don't think it's wise or proper to go from "I disagree" to "idiotic" under those circumstances 

Edited July 1, 2021 by Sunsette

[Snarky]

On 6/28/2021 at 11:11 AM, Zerethon said:

Why the absolute HECK Blazing blast has a mag 3+ knock and a Mag 8 REPEL attached to it now?

I thought it was someone else in the team, until i went to do the incarnate arc and realized my lazer was a yeet lazer

Was this always a thing and i just never read the power, or is this new? hadn't played this char in like a year.

I now want a character with sort of "stealth" KB powers.  Everyone knows an Energy Blast set does tons of KB....but grab a bunch of odd stuff and slot it for KB... then if anyone complains point fingers at others on the team.  It may not be Recluse level of Villain.  But someone has to pick up the grounders.

[Luminara]

10 hours ago, Zerethon said:

The thing though, is it's been at least ~750 days with no changes to boot to what is more or less some Excel files, but a new zone, some costume updates, whole powerset "Balance" changes and more have all happened

So why SHOULDN'T we critique them for sentinels still being in a sorry state with powers that were heavily modified from their base versions as drunken experiments that make what has been an pretty dang fun AT to play an occasional utter nightmare of jank if you don't spend 4 hours poring over the "Stock" and sentinel sets to see what was changed, commit that perfectly to memory, then build around it because nobody went through and edited most of the power Descriptions, despite having gone through the secondary sets and modifying/editing powers all willy-nilly sometimes for no reason at all other than "Balance" or something. Like why did /Nin get a stealth power, but energy aura had it's stealth removed entirely?

With the big update that's planned, it definitely wouldn't hurt to have someone look over and dig through the AT, and at least fix the broken descriptions and fix some of the powers that have either dumb changes, or holdovers from their original versions that don't work for the role they fill for sents.

 

The HC team didn't create sentinels.  The faulty power descriptions, the changes to powers, the design of the archetype, all of that occurred eight years ago, when a completely different group of people were in charge (SCoRE).  And the HC team has their own prioritization of what needs to be addressed, and different skills and levels of capability with the existing tools, so they're doing what they can when they can, in the areas of expertise in which they can best contribute.  That they haven't addressed sentinel issues yet is neither an indication of lack of interest nor grounds for accusations of laziness, only that they haven't gotten that far down the list yet.

 

But don't let facts interrupt a perfectly good tantrum.  Please, carry on.  I'm sure the people who spend their free time working on the game, with no compensation beyond the expressions of gratitude from others, are delighted to be called to task and verbally abused over things they didn't do or for failing to acquiesce to your whims.

[Warboss]

On 6/28/2021 at 11:11 AM, Zerethon said:

yeet lazer

 

Lol, love the term, stole the name for a toon. Sorry bud, you can have it on any server except Torch.

[Underfyre]

I mean, I feel like literally, literally, anybody can do a write up for ability descriptions and they can be copy/pasted into the files. We can groupthink the stuff together in a thread and offer it up for them to put in.

[Snarky]

9 hours ago, Luminara said:

But don't let facts interrupt a perfectly good tantrum.  Please, carry on.  I'm sure the people who spend their free time working on the game, with no compensation beyond the expressions of gratitude from others, are delighted to be called to task and verbally abused over things they didn't do or for failing to acquiesce to your whims.

now that is Kobe beef quality Snark right there.