Lash (Demon Summoning) KD/KB scaling adjustment

[Luminara]

Lash, the second attack available to masterminds in the Demon Summoning set, states that it has a chance to knock a target down.  However, the KD scales with character level, and at level 27 it crosses the KD threshold and becomes KB (0.76).

25 levels is a long time to become accustomed to how a power functions, and KD switching to KB is a rather marked change in functionality that players are not given any reason to anticipate, or notification which allows them to prepare for it.  The effect should be consistent, either always KD or always KB.

 

There are other powers which scale KD to KB in this manner.  Dual Wield and Empty Clips in the Thugs set are two examples (Empty Clips is locked at 0.66 for other archetypes).  I believe it would be worth spending some development time to sift through KD and KB powers to locate anomalies like these and deal with them.

[Bill Z Bubba]

5 hours ago, Luminara said:

However, the KD scales with character level, and at level 27 it crosses the KD threshold and becomes KB (0.76).

 

Time for me to have some learnin. I thought KB < 1 = KD. Is that not true?

 

Lvl 1:

 

Lvl 45:

 

Lvl 50:

 

Other bits: For the Demon Lash, it's called knockdown in the description but becomes knockback where Claws' Focus is called knockback but is always at .67 so always knockdown. It'd be nice if descriptions matched what the powers actually do.

[Rudra]

The report from one of the devs is that the previous iteration was KB <1 was KD. However, it should either no longer work like that or will no longer work like that with the upcoming update. KD is its own animal now. So you can have a KD of 5,982,627,519 and it will stay KD. (Edit: It just has a better chance of getting past the target's KB resist to inflict KD when you get the higher magnitudes.)

Edited July 22, 2022 by Rudra
Edited to correct to less than 1.

[Luminara]

20 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Time for me to have some learnin. I thought KB < 1 = KD. Is that not true?

 

KB mag 0.75 or below causes KD, KB mag 0.76 and above causes KB.  Or is it 0.74 and 0.75... I forget.  @arcanaville was the one who clarified the exact breakpoint, back on the original forums.  At the time, we were all throwing around the 0.67 number as gospel, then she dug up the scalar and modifier values and schooled us.  The majority of KD powers were set to 0.67 KB specifically to prevent -1 critters from being knocked back (0.67 * 1.1 = 0.737) by powers expected to cause KD, so players would have a sense of continuity.

 

But until the HC team finishes switching over to the new vectored KB system, anything above 0.75 is currently KB.  And the powers I listed, which are unlikely to be the ones, suddenly change to KB because they scale up KB mag with character level.  The magnitudes should be locked, but for some reason, they aren't.

 

37 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Other bits: For the Demon Lash, it's called knockdown in the description but becomes knockback where Claws' Focus is called knockback but is always at .67 so always knockdown. It'd be nice if descriptions matched what the powers actually do.

 

Focus was KB, originally.  A lot of melee powers were.  Cryptic want bananas with KB when they originally designed the game.  Then they increased the KB mag in most of the melee powers months after launch, because they felt it was "more comic booky".  It wasn't until after the forums went nuclear, and they did a check on powers taken and realized that damn everyone was skipping the melee KB powers, that they went back in and revised most of the melee KB to KD.  The inaccurate description for Focus is a holdover from the earliest days of the game.

[Bill Z Bubba]

Thank you for the learnin.

[Rudra]

With the vector changes, maybe this suggestion should be put on hold?

[Luminara]

56 minutes ago, Rudra said:

With the vector changes, maybe this suggestion should be put on hold?

 

When?  Page 97?  There's no timeframe for when all KB will be changed to use the new system.  This problem exists now, it needed to be brought to the HC team's attention now, not in a few months or years.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

With the vector changes, maybe this suggestion should be put on hold?

 

...

 

 

Yea, I'm gonna be using this a LOT.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

 

When?  Page 97?  There's no timeframe for when all KB will be changed to use the new system.  This problem exists now, it needed to be brought to the HC team's attention now, not in a few months or years.

 

On 11/17/2021 at 2:15 PM, Number Six said:

As some of you may have noticed, a while back we quietly and without much fanfare slipped in an effect that had never been seen in the City before: Gravity Control’s singularity pet was changed to pull enemies towards it. This kind of ‘reverse knockback’ or ‘negative repel’ is something that had long been asked and theorized about, often in the context of crazy ideas for how to implement it with various hacks like spawning dozens of carefully positioned invisible pets.

 

Those with even sharper eyes may have noticed all the way back in April 2020 when, for a day, Brawl was sending its targets flying in all sort of random directions.

 

Both of those were tests of a new engine feature that we developed in February of 2020 that has a lot of exciting potential, far beyond simply sucking stuff to a central point. It gives power designs a new level of flexibility they never had before, and quite literally changes the game. Far from being just a new feature, the vectored knock system replaced the existing knockback mechanics entirely, which is part of why we were extra cautious about rolling it out and wanted to make sure it didn’t change the ‘feel’ of knockback in any way.

 

Now that it’s been well over a year since the system was in place and nobody noticed the difference, we’re starting to see content that takes advantage of it emerge from the development pipeline. I’ll cover it in more detail further down, but the new system is used quite a bit in the new Strike Force and powersets being rolled out in Page 3. In this series of posts, I'll do a deep dive into the development of this feature and some of the technical underpinnings of how it works.

Looks to me like it has already been at least partially implemented in the game.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

...

 

 

Yea, I'm gonna be using this a LOT.

I'm not debating the forum. I'm just saying a fix is already being developed.

[Luminara]

49 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Looks to me like it has already been at least partially implemented in the game.

 

"Partially" is not complete.  "On the way" is not here.  "Eventually" is not now.

 

You believe a solution is already complete, or potentially near enough to make no difference, but instead of simply saying that, you actually told me not to ask the HC team to look into it.  I don't know if you're deliberately being contentious, a busybody, or just socially inept, but I neither seek nor require your permission or approval to post anything, and I am not the person with whom to try that shit.  If your only contribution is to tell someone not to post, take your own advice.

[Rudra]

15 minutes ago, Luminara said:

ou believe a solution is already complete, or potentially near enough to make no difference, but instead of simply saying that, you actually told me not to ask the HC team to look into it. 

That was not my intent and I apologize for giving that impression.