Make Serum not a joke

[Elthenar]

I'm not trying to fool anyone. People are objecting to my proposal on the basis of the Cottage Rule, and I'm pointing out that the Cottage Rule is easily worked around in an environment where powers can be optional.

 

Furthermore, I'm not pretending I don't want a place where I could put some of the Aura IOs. Of course I do. I'd like Mercs to not be STRICTLY INFERIOR to all the sets that have such powers.

 

Well, maybe you're fooling yourself. Putting a different power alongside Serum might follow the letter of the Cottage Rule, but completely ignores the spirit of it.

 

If those two IOs that Mercs can't use are so powerful that the set is strictly inferior for the lack of them, the IOs are probably the outlier and should be nerfed. And I don't think anyone wants the IOs nerfed.

 

Actually I think you're unclear on the spirit of the Cottage Rule. The purpose of the Cottage Rule was always just to not leave existing players feeling bait-and-switched. As long as the original power remains and is not taken away from players who liked it, the Cottage Rule is respected in both letter and spirit. It never had anything to do with balancing.

 

Hence my original suggestion. Serum does have a use as an "OH CRAP" button. It's just that this use isnt worth a power slot given that it's not broadly useful. That's why I made my first suggestion. Leave it more or less as is but add a passive ability, like what the Beasts get with Fortify Pack. No one really takes that for the defense buff, they really want the passive.

 

My suggestion was to add a passive resist all to your pets. That's not the only possibility. Perhaps add the chance for your pets to apply a lethal DOT to represent what happens when 6 dudes with rifles start causing lead related blood loss.

 

Whatever it is, the passive would be the meat of the power, the current clicky would be the gravy, something you dont need from fight to fight but will occasionally save your butt, or really let you pour it on an AV at the end of a TF.

[Galaxy Brain]

I mean, if we are throwing away the cottage rule... replace it with Gun Drone?

[Chance Jackson]

Honestly I'd rather Serum temporarily turn the Mastermind into a Super Soldier granting the mastermind new attack powers ala keldian shapeshifts

[malonkey1]

Even with the argument that "sets aren't balanced around IOs," which I find dubious, IOs are undoubtedly balanced around sets -- new pet or MM IO sets will have to account for different MMs having significant differences in even the ability to slot the sets

 

I don't think they totally ignore IOs, but I think they prefer not to worry too much about IOs unless they cause an obvious problem with them. To take an example from Magic: the Gathering, with most Standard-legal sets they design, they are designed for Standard format. They will try to consider their ramifications in other formats (How will this affect Modern, Legacy and Vintage? Should we make this quirky Rare a Legendary for EDH? etc. etc.), but those other formats are a secondary concern. The powers are designed with IOs in mind, but they aren't balanced for IOs.

 

Non-IO play is what the sets are chiefly balanced around, at least in theory, so that the game can be balanced in a way that allows those that can't or don't want to optimize their build with IOs can still play through the majority of the content. The depth of the IO system is there mostly to appeal to Spike (and to some extent Johnny) players, while the powersets have to have appeal and playability for anyone who wants to roll a character with that set, from casual players to die-hard optimizers.

[kelly Rocket]

Actually I think you're unclear on the spirit of the Cottage Rule. The purpose of the Cottage Rule was always just to not leave existing players feeling bait-and-switched. As long as the original power remains and is not taken away from players who liked it, the Cottage Rule is respected in both letter and spirit. It never had anything to do with balancing.

 

And what is the difference, exactly, to a player who wants Serum but knows it's bad, if the devs simply give up on it and put another power in its place, mutually exclusive with it? If that's the approach they take to add the utility to Mercs that Serum is failing to provide?

 

I'm gonna make some friends here and say, er... you're both mistaken?  Cottaging is about preventing drift -- it's a rule of procedure that stopped the Paragon developers from 'changing their mind' about one power at a time, leading eventually to sets that look and play nothing like their original implementation.  It's a lot less about a per-power, keep things as they are system (obviously players are going to choose to respec or even have to respec after merely 'numerical' changes, too) as it is about a 'don't rebuild the town after every strong breeze.'  If that analogy makes sense.  Not all games have a similar design rule and many games do fine without it, but it is something that 'flavored' CoH.

 

10/9 sets do evade the cottage rule in its literal sense, but they undercut the spirit of it because there's no bright line guideline to stop 11/9, 15/9, 27/9 sets -- which would be, if anything, worse than the situations cottage rule is supposed to prevent. 

 

I'm ultimately (I think) with kelly here.  I think this is a situation where cottaging is warranted because the arguments here convince me the power is under-performing in a practical sense and at a design sense (since it affects the meta-balancing of IO sets.  Even with the argument that "sets aren't balanced around IOs," which I find dubious, IOs are undoubtedly balanced around sets -- new pet or MM IO sets will have to account for different MMs having significant differences in even the ability to slot the sets).  I also don't play MMs often at all, so that's my disinterested opinion.  But I do have to say -- cottage or don't cottage, but don't 10/9 just to evade the literal "rule" and destroy its intent.

 

Honestly, I would welcome 27/9 sets. Having choices is always good.

[jack_nomind]

Honestly, I would welcome 27/9 sets. Having choices is always good.

 

It's the illusion of choice.  An interesting game gives players dilemmas, forcing them to develop strategies out of limited tools.  Removing the limitation on tools removes the dillemma.  The metaphor I use most often is asking a dozen people to fix something that's broken, say a table, and letting them pick a limited number of tools/equipment from a set to do it -- say four tools from a set of ten.  The catch is, none of the tools are quite right for the job.  You have a hammer but no nails, screws but no screwdriver, the wrong kind of glue to hold it together, a random rusty spoon -- etc.

 

You'll probably end up with a dozen or so solutions because everyone is going to figure out different ways to make do within the limitations of the problem.  But if you give people the option of the best tools for the job -- or if you let them pick all the tools on the table -- you end up with very few solutions, approaching just one^*.  Paradoxically, too much freedom of choice removes the reality of choosing.

 

_{* but there's always one crazy bastard who chooses the spoon.}

[ryuplaneswalker]

To take an example from Magic: the Gathering, with most Standard-legal sets they design, they are designed for Standard format.

 

That is not actually remotely true. 95% of cards are designed for Draft environments.

 

As for Serum - It doesn't need a redesign, it just needs a buff. Halve the base recharge. Get rid of the Crash, and maybe have it heal the targeted minion to full so it can be used as an "Ohcrap button" that gives a pet that has gathered aggro a way not to die.

[Redlynne]

Drug use for Dull Pain?

Say it ain't so!

[Tater Todd]

I'm glad someone brought up this Horrible power.  To add insult to injury my first Mastermind was a Mercenaries/Poison on Live.  *Whew*  If I knew then what I know now I would of deleted that toon and never looked back.

[Vanden]

To take an example from Magic: the Gathering, with most Standard-legal sets they design, they are designed for Standard format.

 

That is not actually remotely true. 95% of cards are designed for Draft environments.

 

As for Serum - It doesn't need a redesign, it just needs a buff. Halve the base recharge. Get rid of the Crash, and maybe have it heal the targeted minion to full so it can be used as an "Ohcrap button" that gives a pet that has gathered aggro a way not to die.

 

Halved recharged would still be very long, and the power kicks in much too slowly to use it as an "oh crap" power for a pet that is low on health.

[Galaxy Brain]

If we are throwing out the cottage rule, simply porting in gun drone / turret would be fun.

 

If not, I'm strongly in favor of turning it into a single target, 3rd upgrade type of power to boost mercs up to a higher lvl at the cost of time / endurance.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Once Enhanced with a base 8 Minute recharge it would come down to around 4 Minutes, which would give it outside of any other factors a 25% uptime on a power that gives Massive Resistances. Remove the Crash and you have a very respectable power given that the player version of the power would have a 8 Minute Up time with 3 minute duration, and a massive crash at the end.

[Galaxy Brain]

So, thinking on this more I think the resistance it gives is really kind of moot given that most MM secondaries can keep your pets alive relatively well, and as an "oh crap" type of power it is sort of meh as it would only make a difference on the commando since it has some HP.

 

Gonna do something dangerous and link up tv tropes:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuperSerum

 

The trope of a super serum is that it pretty much changes the taker of said serum into a super being for an extended time. Current serum definitely makes them super, but really not for long.

 

If possible, could we just gut the effects down to like a generalized "20% boost to every stat!", on a ~4 min recharge and high end cost? This would take about 25 minutes to fully serum up your mercenaries at base, but once done you have a team of truly super soldiers.

 

The boost should last a very long time, if not perma like normal MM upgrades, and would help mercs as a set by allowing you to pretty much slap a 1.2x modifier to any relevant stat.

 

Thoughts?

[Vanden]

My gut says the big downside there is that if a fully-Serum’d squad is possible, it’ll get very frustrating when the pets inevitably die, or the MM levels up and needs to resummmon to get the pets to level up too. It’s possible that Mercs is at a point that making perma-Serum achievable, with the numbers you gave, might not be too unbalanced. It could be the Mastermind equivalent of Super Strength, with its perms-Rage. It would need some downside like Rage has, though.

[Bossk_Hogg]

My gut says the big downside there is that if a fully-Serum’d squad is possible, it’ll get very frustrating when the pets inevitably die, or the MM levels up and needs to resummmon to get the pets to level up too. It’s possible that Mercs is at a point that making perma-Serum achievable, with the numbers you gave, might not be too unbalanced. It could be the Mastermind equivalent of Super Strength, with its perms-Rage. It would need some downside like Rage has, though.

 

Why? Mercs are the weakest set. There isnt a downside to Hell on Earth, Gang War or Soul Extraction, and all of those allow for more slotting of pet globals. The sets without those are at a disadvantage compared to the sets with temp pets due to IO options. Repair Bot needs a complete overhaul as well.

[Galaxy Brain]

My gut says the big downside there is that if a fully-Serum’d squad is possible, it’ll get very frustrating when the pets inevitably die, or the MM levels up and needs to resummmon to get the pets to level up too. It’s possible that Mercs is at a point that making perma-Serum achievable, with the numbers you gave, might not be too unbalanced. It could be the Mastermind equivalent of Super Strength, with its perms-Rage. It would need some downside like Rage has, though.

 

Hm, reapplying is a fair point.

 

What about treat it like the bubbles FF gets where its fast rech, hits the mercs, and has to be applied every ~2 min.

 

Then it gives 10% to all stats (hp, regen, recovery, movement, slow resist, damage, acc, resist, def, etc)

[Vanden]

My gut says the big downside there is that if a fully-Serum’d squad is possible, it’ll get very frustrating when the pets inevitably die, or the MM levels up and needs to resummmon to get the pets to level up too. It’s possible that Mercs is at a point that making perma-Serum achievable, with the numbers you gave, might not be too unbalanced. It could be the Mastermind equivalent of Super Strength, with its perms-Rage. It would need some downside like Rage has, though.

 

Why? Mercs are the weakest set. There isnt a downside to Hell on Earth, Gang War or Soul Extraction, and all of those allow for more slotting of pet globals. The sets without those are at a disadvantage compared to the sets with temp pets due to IO options. Repair Bot needs a complete overhaul as well.

 

They're not easily permable (if at all) like Rage is and theoretically Serum would be. (And Soul Extraction does have a downside, you need a pet to die to use it.)

[Xaeon]

Honestly mercs could have permanent crashless serum for all of its pets forever and it'd still be worse than Bots, Thugs, or Demons by a country mile.

[WumpusRat]

I was thinking about this again the other day, since I was pondering posting a suggestion about some tinkering to several of the mastermind sets.

 

But after some thought, I started wondering about making Serum operate more like Fortify Pack from the Beast Mastery set. And came up with something like this:

 

Serum

Just choosing this power injects all your mercenaries with a low-level, but permanent super-soldier serum, granting them +5% smash/lethal/toxic resist.

Activating the power with no target selected charges all your mercenaries, granting them +10% damage, +10 smash/lethal/toxic resist, +5% dodge, +7.16 run speed and 10.0 protection against confuse and terrorize for 20 seconds.

Activating this power with a mercenary selected supercharges that mercenary, granting him +30% damage, +40 smash/lethal/toxic resist, +20% dodge, +15 run speed and 10.0 protection against all forms of cc for 20 seconds.

Cooldown set to 5m.

 

 

[Vanden]

I would like to keep the mez and KB protection, especially the KB protection, since that can severely cripple your pets.

[Galaxy Brain]

I was thinking about this again the other day, since I was pondering posting a suggestion about some tinkering to several of the mastermind sets.

 

But after some thought, I started wondering about making Serum operate more like Fortify Pack from the Beast Mastery set. And came up with something like this:

 

Serum

Just choosing this power injects all your mercenaries with a low-level, but permanent super-soldier serum, granting them +5% smash/lethal/toxic resist.

Activating the power with no target selected charges all your mercenaries, granting them +10% damage, +10 smash/lethal/toxic resist, +5% dodge, +7.16 run speed and 10.0 protection against confuse and terrorize for 20 seconds.

Activating this power with a mercenary selected supercharges that mercenary, granting him +30% damage, +40 smash/lethal/toxic resist, +20% dodge, +15 run speed and 10.0 protection against all forms of cc for 20 seconds.

Cooldown set to 5m.

 

I like this idea too, but as Vanden said how about giving them low lvl mez/in protect at all times too? Like mag 2 just to avoid minor stuff.

 

Then when activated it gives much bigger boosts.

 

I like the dynamic between the no target / has target, but I think meeting in the middle with just an AoE serum might be better. :)

[Tater Todd]

Honestly mercs could have permanent crashless serum for all of its pets forever and it'd still be worse than Bots, Thugs, or Demons by a country mile.

 

This ^

[khy]

IMO half of Serum's effects - the resist and status protection - are fine but lackluster on their own.

The parts that need to be adjusted are the tohit, the damage, and the crash. 7.5% damage and tohit were 'OK' back in Issue 5 when the set came out but with the amount of power creep in the game it's fallen far, far behind. And the crash is just kicking us when we're down.

 

I'd like to see one of two things happen :

 

Either Option 1 :

Increase the ToHit bonus to 20%, increase the damage bonus to 50%, and reduce the cooldown to 360s. Eliminate the crash, but still only affects 1 pet.

 

Or Option 2 :

Increase the ToHit bonus to 15%, Increase the damage bonus to 25%, reduce the cooldown to 360s, reduce the duration to 30s, and reduce the Resists from 52% to 35%. Keep all status protection as is.

Then eliminate the crash and apply to all pets.

 

That seems like it'd put the serum in line with other powers in terms of usefulness, and definitely wouldn't violate the cottage rule.

[Galaxy Brain]

On 7/2/2019 at 1:42 PM, khy said:

IMO half of Serum's effects - the resist and status protection - are fine but lackluster on their own.

The parts that need to be adjusted are the tohit, the damage, and the crash. 7.5% damage and tohit were 'OK' back in Issue 5 when the set came out but with the amount of power creep in the game it's fallen far, far behind. And the crash is just kicking us when we're down.

 

I'd like to see one of two things happen :

 

Either Option 1 :

Increase the ToHit bonus to 20%, increase the damage bonus to 50%, and reduce the cooldown to 360s. Eliminate the crash, but still only affects 1 pet.

 

Or Option 2 :

Increase the ToHit bonus to 15%, Increase the damage bonus to 25%, reduce the cooldown to 360s, reduce the duration to 30s, and reduce the Resists from 52% to 35%. Keep all status protection as is.

Then eliminate the crash and apply to all pets.

 

That seems like it'd put the serum in line with other powers in terms of usefulness, and definitely wouldn't violate the cottage rule.

I think either option would be great, but I lean more on option 2 given the nature of Mercs over a set like Demons which also has a single target buff.