Focused Feedback: VEAT Updates

[The Curator]

Arachnos Soldier / Arachnos Widow Updates & Power Customization

• Arachnos Soldiers and Arachnos Widows are now able to customize the colors of their powers in the Power Customization menu.

 

New Widow Powers:

•   Pain Tolerance  Auto: Self Res(All DMG but Psi), +MaxHealth

  • Available to Night Widows at Level 1 (after respec).

  • Night Widows who possess Pain Tolerance are resistant to most damage types, and gain additional hit points. This power is always on and costs no Endurance.

•   Fate Sealed  Auto: Self +Mezz, +Res(Mezz)

  • Available to Fortunatas at Level 1 (after respec).

  • Fortunatas who possess Fate Sealed gain resistance to all control effects and empowers their own control attacks. This power is always on and costs no Endurance.

 

"Hidden" Changes:

• Mask Presence and Cloaking Device can now stack with other stealth toggles (similar to Hide for Stalkers).
  • Bane and Night Widow's stealth radius is now 55' in PvE and 500' in PvP (no change for Fortunatas)
• Critical Damage from Hidden for Bane attacks now do 100% scale damage (previously 67%).
• Critical Damage from Hidden for Night Widow branch attacks now do 100% scale damage (previously 67%). This affects Slash and Eviscerate, only
• Placate's cooldown reduced to 35s

 

Alternate Animations Feature:

• Several powers from the base Arachnos Soldier kit now have alternate animations available in the power customization menu, to visually utilize the Bane Nullifier Mace, or Crab Spider backpack, IF the player has spec'd into the appropriate tree. For example, if a Bane spider chooses the Bane animation for Wide Area Web Grenade, it will use their mace weapon for the attack. However, if a Bane spider chooses the Crab animation for Wide Area Web Grenade, it will instead default to using the rifle animation. This feature has been extended to the following powers:
  • Burst - Now has Crab Longfang alt animation.
  • Wide Area Web Grenade - Now has Bane Grenade and Crab Grenade alt animations.
  • Heavy Burst - Now has Crab Longfang alt animation.
  • Venom Grenade - Now has Bane Grenade and Crab Grenade alt animations (still mutually exclusive to Crab Spider's Venom Grenade).
  • Frag Grenade - Now has Crab Grenade alt animation (still mutually exclusive to Crab Spider's Frag Grenade).

 

Animation Changes:

• All Mace attack's cast times reduced to 1.67s.
• Pummel's cast time reduced to 1.17s.
• Channelgun's cast time reduced to 1s
• Longfang's cast time reduced to 1.33s
• Psychic Scream's cast time reduced to 2s.
• Scramble Thought's cast time reduced to 2s.
• Mind Link's cast time reduced to 2.97s.
• Frenzy's cast time reduced to 2.23s.
• Heavy Burst's cast time reduced to 2.5s.
• PvP Damage adjusted to reflect these cast time changes.

 

Other VEAT Changes:

• Mace Beam's cooldown increased to 6s and damage increased to 1.32 scale.
• Mace Beam Blast's cooldown increased to 10s and damage increased to 0.784 scale. Now has 100% chance for knockback.
• Mace Beam Volley's cooldown increased to 10s and damage increased to 0.824 scale.
• Summon Spiderlings and Call Reinforcements now set to Replace stack type, instead of Ignore (summoning while pets are still alive will now destroy the current pets and replace with new ones).
• Channelgun's cooldown increased to 5s and damage increased to 1.16 scale.
• Slice's cooldown increased to 6s and damage increased to 1.32 scale.
• Longfang's cooldown increased to 10s and damage increased to 1.96 scale
• Suppression's defense debuff increased to 10s duration.
• Arm Lash's defense debuff increased to 10s duration.
• Frenzy's defense debuff increased to 10s duration. Radius increased to 10' and damage reduced to 1.424 scale, per design formula.
• Omega Maneuver
  • Cooldown reduced to 240s.
  • Explosion and Taunt subpowers now both have 20' radius and can hit 16 max targets.
  • Stun duration from explosion increased by 25%.
  • Taunt effect now properly enhances (Bug Fix).
  • Taunt effect now works in PvP.
• Confront now applies a -75% Range debuff on target for 12s.
• Mental Blast's cooldown increased to 6s, damage and endurance cost increased accordingly
• Scramble Thought's damage is now a growing DoT. It will do 5 ticks for a total of 1.75 scale damage, with the tick's damage sequence set to 0.25, 0.30, 0.35, 0.40, 0.45. Also, this power now does PvP damage.
• Total Domination's hold duration increased by 50%.
• Psychic Wail now has a 1.4x accuracy modifier.
• Night Widow's Psychic Scream
  • Cooldown increased to 20s.
  • Debuff duration doubled to 20s.
  • Max targets increased to 12.
  • Arc widened to 45 degrees, range reduced to 50' and damage increased to 1.4931 scale.
• Fixed PvP effects in Soldier armors that had their duration set too low (Bug Fix).

[Wravis]

On 11/22/2023 at 11:45 AM, The Curator said:

Mind Link's cast time reduced to 2.97s.

This is huge. This is amazing. Thank you so much!

[blue4333]

Butt capes for male widows please 

[Dispari]

Having a Widow as my main and having done a bunch of testing of the Bane changes, I'll say all the stuff here is very very good.

 

The new powers for NW and Fort are nice to have. While I don't think the Fortunata one is a must-have, I can see some people using the power if they want to be slightly more mez-focused. Pain Tolerance however is a huge buff. It scales up to +30% maxHP (something Widows struggle with) and around 7% RES (all but psi). It drastically increases the durability of Night Widows and gives them a viable existence alongside Forts, which are usually considered strictly better.

 

The alternate animation option for Bane/Crab is a great QoL change and keeps most of the power animations snappy. If I might suggest anything else, I would say offer an option for Build Up to also have a gun (or no weapon) option, for Huntsmen builds. I believe it's the only power that still forces drawing a mace after these changes (...except the mace attacks, ofc).

The animation changes for Bane attacks are VERY good. The AT went from being very sluggish to feeling powerful. Nearly all of these powers were 2 seconds or longer, and now they're much faster. Some of the long animations for Crab and Widow were also brought down.

Overall these are all great changes and I have no complaints.

[Wravis]

1 minute ago, Dispari said:

The new powers for NW and Fort are nice to have. While I don't think the Fortunata one is a must-have, I can see some people using the power if they want to be slightly more mez-focused. Pain Tolerance however is a huge buff. It scales up to +30% maxHP (something Widows struggle with) and around 7% RES (all but psi). It drastically increases the durability of Night Widows and gives them a viable existence alongside Forts, which are usually considered strictly better.

 

 

Just checked. It's 5% base. Still great!

[Dispari]

Yeah but slotting it makes it around 7.75% or so depending on ED 😄

[skoryy]

7 minutes ago, Dispari said:

Pain Tolerance however is a huge buff. It scales up to +30% maxHP (something Widows struggle with) and around 7% RES (all but psi). It drastically increases the durability of Night Widows and gives them a viable existence alongside Forts, which are usually considered strictly better.

 

sighs

 

I'm going to have to dust off the ol' night widow and level her up, huh.

[KaizenSoze]

Overall, I am very happy with the changes.

One change that wasn't made that I think should be made. Not being able to use mace animations for Frag nade.

 

One change I think that might fly under the radar, that folks should check out.

 

Mace Beam Blast's cool down increased to 10s and damage increased to 0.784 scale. Now has 100% chance for knockback.

Bane ranged attacks are still meh damage wise, but a quick recharging AOE with 100% KB chance is very nice for setting up Venom nade and crowd control. Also, it has the radius as frag nade.

But opinions differ.

 

[ScarySai]

The changes made are more or less good, though I'd like some minor things like mace beam blast to be KD by default, it's odd for a power like that on a melee character to knock back rather than keep things in crowd control range.

 

Only real complaint would be the fact that it really seems like a barebones buff for a sort of middling AT. Some long requested changes sit ignored, such as psinado still having the old values that made it essentially trash without procs to carry it, or banes not being given a clobber clone of some kind to give their melee chain a sizable buff.

 

One thing I would really like to see, is for the widow runner problem to be addressed in some form, since their poisons tend to ironically cause more mobs to run due to the dot and debuff stacks it applies, but it's not really strong enough to stop them. One solution to this could be to allow slow slotting on widow attacks. Procs shouldn't be a concern to bar it, here, since you can already full proc pretty much any widow attack.

[KaizenSoze]

Another change that I would like to call out that is more powerful than is obvious from the description.

Placate's cooldown reduced to 35s
 

This makes placate both an offensive and defensive power.

First, you can easily get the recharge under 15 secs, more with Ageless.

• Getting overwhelmed, placate
• Ghetto taunt, or at least cause most mobs to start walking instead of running away
• Placate half the spawn and deal with key mobs first
• All this before even thinking about the DPS improvements

[Cobalt Azurean]

If we could get Mace Mastery: Shatter Armor to get the Executioner's Strike option from stealth, that would be fantastic. Thematically it makes sense, and I think it would bring Banes back into line as a solid single-target DPS contender.

I know its not necessarily powers-related BUT if we could get some additional options for Mace skins, like the Fire and Ice Sword - Elemental, would be great too. Or even this, from another asset (Rikti Computer) within the game, would be fancy option for not just Banes but Swords across the game.

Edited January 20 by Cobalt Azurean
grammars

[akumamishima]

32 minutes ago, KaizenSoze said:

Another change that I would like to call out that is more powerful than is obvious from the description.

Placate's cooldown reduced to 35s
 

This makes placate both an offensive and defensive power.

First, you can easily get the recharge under 15 secs, more with Ageless.

• Getting overwhelmed, placate
• Ghetto taunt, or at least cause most mobs to start walking instead of running away
• Placate half the spawn and deal with key mobs first
• All this before even thinking about the DPS improvements

Quoted for MF Truth! This was how Bane VEATs were designed in the i12 Beta, originally. Placate had this shorter timer making it a versatile tool to compensate for their comparatively weaker passive damage mitigation stats.  But then it got Castle'd before live and the rest is history.

This is such a fantastic change.

[Wravis]

43 minutes ago, KaizenSoze said:

Another change that I would like to call out that is more powerful than is obvious from the description.

Placate's cooldown reduced to 35s
 

This makes placate both an offensive and defensive power.

First, you can easily get the recharge under 15 secs, more with Ageless.

• Getting overwhelmed, placate
• Ghetto taunt, or at least cause most mobs to start walking instead of running away
• Placate half the spawn and deal with key mobs first
• All this before even thinking about the DPS improvements

Does Night Widow's poison DOT still break stealth? If so, placate is useless on them.

[KaizenSoze]

9 minutes ago, Wravis said:

Does Night Widow's poison DOT still break stealth? If so, placate is useless on them.

Not found it to cause an issue. And I have tested a lot.

[ScarySai]

Almost forgot: There's still no reason, lore or otherwise, for banes to not be able to fire frags from their deathstick.

 

1: It already fires web grenades, the space age beatstick can probably fire other variants like most grenade launchers do.

 

2: The player character is essentially a rogue agent, standard issue for NPC banes doesn't really apply to someone who can have all sorts of reasons to justify a difference in weaponry. How many bane spiders pull out a submachine gun and full auto your whole team?

Edited January 20 by ScarySai

[KaizenSoze]

11 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

Almost forgot: There's still no reason, lore or otherwise, for banes to not be able to fire frags or venom grenades from their stick.

 

1: It already fires web grenades, the space age beatstick can probably fire other variants like most grenade launchers do.

 

2: The player character is essentially a rogue agent, standard issue for NPC banes doesn't really apply to someone who can have all sorts of reasons to justify a difference in weaponry. How many bane spiders pull out a submachine gun and full auto your whole team?

You can fire venom nade from the mace. But not frag nade which I agree doesn't make sense.

[Dispari]

Frag Grenade does seem like an oversight.

[ScarySai]

8 minutes ago, Dispari said:

Frag Grenade does seem like an oversight.

It was for a reason, but the reasoning didn't make sense, so it should just be added.

[FupDup]

The lore reason for frag exclusion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

 

My own headcanon reason is that the devs want to push people to take the Bane's beam AOE powers instead of relying only on grenades (which are much more effective). But they also don't want to buff the beam powers "too much" so that's why your grenade launcher can't load frags. 

Edited January 20 by FupDup

[PoptartsNinja]

My personal want would be to give Banes the Stalker/Scrapper APPs since they're more damage oriented and it's weird that they can't get the mace sniper attack; while Shatter Armor effectively gives them two of a power they already have. With them getting easier access to venom grenade, the appeal of shatter armor drops off pretty hard.

I haven't played Widows so I'm not sure if Fortunatas/Night Widows are in the same boat.

[ScarySai]

3 minutes ago, FupDup said:

The lore reason for frag exclusion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

 

My own headcanon reason is that the devs want to push people to take the Bane's beam AOE powers instead of relying only on grenades (which are much more effective). But they also don't want to buff the beam powers "too much" so that's why your grenade launcher can't load frags. 

Then they should have made the bane beam aoes actually good. Anim cuts are nice, but the scale changes aren't terribly game-changing.

 

Plus, they still have the knock tax, on a character that's essentially a skirmisher - blast before jumping in. It'd be far better if they had a low mag knock that could be enhanced to KB, but KDs by default rather than the other way around. Too stubborn with the wrong things.

[Dispari]

Let people make their own power choices!

It's not like drawing a different weapon really changes the strength of the power. We already changed the redraw system and have established that redraw doesn't really change anything in the long run. So it's definitely not for a balance reason that it can't fire a Frag Grenade. All you're really doing is messing with people's visual aesthetic and theme. Don't do that.

[KaizenSoze]

11 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

My personal want would be to give Banes the Stalker/Scrapper APPs since they're more damage oriented and it's weird that they can't get the mace sniper attack; while Shatter Armor effectively gives them two of a power they already have. With them getting easier access to venom grenade, the appeal of shatter armor drops off pretty hard.

I haven't played Widows so I'm not sure if Fortunatas/Night Widows are in the same boat.

Alas, VEATs get access to the same four pools.

I will say that Leviathan is now pretty darn good. Even w/o procing it to death.

[drbuzzard]

I'm respeccing my SoA and it's calling me a tanker when I check the information on powers. 

 

Ok, it's weirder than that. The attack data is all off during this respec. When I was looking in a respec earlier, it seemed to be correct, but now values are completely different than when I check in the enhancement screen back out of the respec. 

 

Further weirdness, just did /respec again and now it sees me as a SOA and the numbers are correct again. 

 

Previously I had been running a 1* LGTF on a tank if that had something to do with it. 

Edited January 20 by drbuzzard

[Taxes]

Made a level 50 soldier and played some mishes. The changes feel really good. I like that we can ditch the gun now if you just want to go all mace and still have access to some of the grenade powers. Though I agree, frag grenade not being included seems like an oversight. Also Shatter still feels a tad ponderous in its animation speed. Did it somehow miss the cast speed update? Maybe it's just me.