That power cancel, switch, power cancel, switch...is broken.

[Laucianna]

7 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

As a player, I always found khelds really underwhelming and meh as I got overwhelmed with the vast array of options and very little knowledge of how to actually play one. Indeed, I made and deleted a WS and PB several years ago, having got to around level 20 then power levelling to 50 to see if they got better, but they didn't. Last April I made one of each during the mapserver event and once they hit level 50 I parked them up thinking I'll get round to trying them again at some point but never did. Then I met Laucianna by accident and came across her rather excellent guide, plus the fact she worked with me one to one to help me understand the mechanics, and to make a good build based on my own play style. I started with Dooms builds, then tweaked them.

 

And you know what? They are so much fun. I'm busier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs and occasionally find I need my self rez as part of my attack chain, but playing a tri-form is just so enjoyable. They tank, just not as well as a tank, they blast, just not as well as a blaster, they buff and debuff, just not as well as a defender/controller. Yet somehow the combination is more than the sum of it's parts. I don't use the macros, I just have the forms on a key and a flick of the key and they swap between them. The TP is on one key, the form changes are on others. Move my little finger slightly and press. Instant form change. For me that's what makes khelds so versatile. WS teleports in, shadow slip, eclipse, mire, dwarf, mire, human, nuke, back to dwarf. Slap things till they stop moving. Dark extraction and move on. PB I find easier, light form, squid, shoot things, lobster as needed. Nuke on demand.

I admit, I'm at the point where inf isn't a problem, so slotting the best enhancements is automatic, but even with less expensive enhancements a good knowledge of the mechanics of how to optimise your playstyle makes a confusing array of abilities much easier to get your head round. I've never had to spend as much inf as I have slotting my khelds. As with masterminds, you can tweak macros and binds to fine tune how you want to play, but at the risk of an outcry (No Crumpet you're an idiot!!) you don't really need much. When I play a mastermind I only use the default pet command buttons and don't see any need for anything more complicated. Same with khelds. Outside of some keybinds to make the most used powers easy access I don't feel like I'm at any great disadvantage not having a tray full of macros. Seeing the love given to some of the MM sets like Undead and Mercs to make them very playable I'll be interested to see what the devs have in mind with the khelds. Hopefully they will listen to and take feedback from the leaders of the kheld community like Laucianna before they make any final decisions. No point asking me, I just listen and  pay attention, then implement the suggestions to make me better. I'll tell someone if there is a must have power like light form or self rez, or argue that I don't find a power effective, but for the most part I just follow the experts and look at how they do things and try to copy them.

Thank you for the kind words! ❤️ And you have it spot on imo, you can't expect to beat another AT at what they do best but that doesn't mean you can't be good at it (And a lot of the time a player who is good at playing a Kheldian is better then someone who has just picked up an AT as one of their million alts) And what you said about knowledge outweighing enhancements is spot on, an unslotted Kheldian who knows what they are doing regarding the AT is far better then someone who is boosted to max level and brought all the super expensive sets.

 

 - Lauci x

[GM Crumpet]

1 hour ago, Laucianna said:

Thank you for the kind words! ❤️ And you have it spot on imo, you can't expect to beat another AT at what they do best but that doesn't mean you can't be good at it (And a lot of the time a player who is good at playing a Kheldian is better then someone who has just picked up an AT as one of their million alts) And what you said about knowledge outweighing enhancements is spot on, an unslotted Kheldian who knows what they are doing regarding the AT is far better then someone who is boosted to max level and brought all the super expensive sets.

 

 - Lauci x

Very true. Also don't underestimate the boost from other AT's when in a team. I was doing a Market Crash the other say and was absolutely owning it on my WS. So many enemies to suck dry, plus the bonuses from the other 7 players. I was tromping over the top of everything. Crimson thingy at the end was very obliging about supplying endless minions for me to feed off, though I did have to have self rez as part of the chain to get eclipse back up 😛 

[Yep, Nope is right]

The joke of it is, all they did by making the shapeshift 'instant' was restore kheldians somewhat to the way they played for YEARS before the devs on live suddenly decided they had made a mistake in the way the shapeshift animation was working. There's a huge thread in the old live kheldian forums where they explained why this change HAD TO BE MADE, and the players begged them not to make that change after seeing it on the beta server, but they insisted. And overnight kheldians went from slightly subpar but 'good enough' that a lot of experienced players enjoyed them, to a VERY small population of diehards still playing and pretty much universally condemned as badly underperforming. PB went from one of my favorite ATs that I was spending most of my time on, to something I couldn't bear to play any more. I recreated my peacebringer on HC and finally took her to 50, but I would never pretend it is at all as much fun as it was originally on live. And I am not sure I played that hero at all for probably the last several years before the sunset. It went from being smooth, fun, and exciting to being too clunky to bother with.

 

The REAL problem with that change, which I and several others tried to point out to them at the time, was that they waited WAY too long to make that drastic a change. All the people playing kheldians had more than enough time to train their attack chains and opening moves and stuff into motor memory. It's a HUGE problem to then change things around and force people to retrain.

 

Developers (not just MMOs) in general just seem to have no understanding of how badly it affects users to make even subtle changes to the timing of how powers fire, or more generally sequences of physical movements to perform a task. It is FAR harder to retrain any motor skill than to train it into muscle memory in the first place. 'Only' hundreds of repetitions to get it down in the first place, but once it becomes an unconscious skill; if the sequence or timing is changed you'll need to practice the NEW version far more to first 'unlearn' the old one, then get that new sequence smoothly committed to motor memory. Ask any good piano teacher or sports coach or sensei about that, it's the basis of the famous Lombardi quote "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

 

Think how hard it was when you first learned to drive - now, you literally do it most of the time without thinking about what you're doing. Until you switch cars, and some of the controls have been rearranged - same problem. How many times have you found your fingers unconsciously doing a sequence of keystrokes you've repeated thousands of times for another character which don't work at all for the one you're actually logged into? That's exactly why - you've hammered that sequence so many times you do not have to think about it at all. By the time your conscious mind catches up, you've already run thru the whole string. That simple change of timing and some tweaking to do with the way the queue processed the shapeshifts was disastrous for the population of kheldians actually being played for years afterward. 

[SwitchFade]

I'm sure the bug will get patched.

 

And, Kheldians need the damage cap raised, it's far too low now.

 

And human form needs 1 mag prot added to each shield, get all 3 and get 3 mag prot.

 

This would make kheldian mainstream.

[Clam Leader]

I figured since some folks werent sure what this was I would upload a video.

 

This was a pretty average run. The personal best was about 7 seconds faster before I gave up on the build, when the 'rework' was announced.

 

 

 

Edit: Woops just noticed Luciana posted a video guide already. Regardless though I did see one thing I disagree with. The statement was made that a PB cant compete with damage ATs with changeling set ups. As demonstrated above PBs can hit a level where only the most optimized of dps ATs can compete.

Edited November 26, 2023 by Clam Leader

[Laucianna]

23 hours ago, Clam Leader said:

I figured since some folks werent sure what this was I would upload a video.

 

This was a pretty average run. The personal best was about 7 seconds faster before I gave up on the build, when the 'rework' was announced.

 

 

 

Edit: Woops just noticed Luciana posted a video guide already. Regardless though I did see one thing I disagree with. The statement was made that a PB cant compete with damage ATs with changeling set ups. As demonstrated above PBs can hit a level where only the most optimized of dps ATs can compete.

That's an amazing job! I would love to see your build to see what kinda set up you are running as yeah that is amazing damage hun!

 

 - Lauci x

[nihilii]

On 10/4/2023 at 10:38 PM, Yep, Nope is right said:

Developers (not just MMOs) in general just seem to have no understanding of how badly it affects users to make even subtle changes to the timing of how powers fire, or more generally sequences of physical movements to perform a task. It is FAR harder to retrain any motor skill than to train it into muscle memory in the first place. 'Only' hundreds of repetitions to get it down in the first place, but once it becomes an unconscious skill; if the sequence or timing is changed you'll need to practice the NEW version far more to first 'unlearn' the old one, then get that new sequence smoothly committed to motor memory. Ask any good piano teacher or sports coach or sensei about that, it's the basis of the famous Lombardi quote "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

 

Think how hard it was when you first learned to drive - now, you literally do it most of the time without thinking about what you're doing. Until you switch cars, and some of the controls have been rearranged - same problem. How many times have you found your fingers unconsciously doing a sequence of keystrokes you've repeated thousands of times for another character which don't work at all for the one you're actually logged into? That's exactly why - you've hammered that sequence so many times you do not have to think about it at all. By the time your conscious mind catches up, you've already run thru the whole string. That simple change of timing and some tweaking to do with the way the queue processed the shapeshifts was disastrous for the population of kheldians actually being played for years afterward. 

Gold-tier post, applies to all software in my opinion - and more than just software, of course, but software seems to be the most egregious example where makers believe they've got unilateral right to radically change the lived experience of their users, with full disrespect for continuity and permanence.