issue 27 Patch Notes for February 20th, 2024 - Issue 27, Page 7

[lemming]

47 minutes ago, Sovera said:

Might be funny considering how Sentinels are sneered at but would I be wrong in saying that it feels like Storm Blast was tailored for them? Every other AT who gets Storm Blasting has to juggle their secondary, be it throwing melee attacks, or spraying buffs/debuffs. In the meanwhile the Sentinel is pewpewing with no shits given and focused solely pn their primary.

I have a Storm/Dark Sentinel that was fun before the changes.  I do need to retool them a bit, but looking forward to running them through more stuff later.

[Arc-Mage]

So the new Villain Striga mish "Defeat the Last Witch of Striga"

 

When I realized I killed Stephanie Peebles my Heart sank a bit. 

 

Thanks guys. :(

[Vinceq98]

In one of the BETA BUILDS, Controllers where getting the POP UP for CONTAINMENT. Much like a stalker does for CRITICAL STRIKE.  Has that change been reverted? If not how can i turn it on?? I thought that was a neat quirk and helps me feel like my little controller is doing damage.

[Neuronia]

Finished a 1* LGTF a few hours ago and it's so fun. A lot less annoying than ITF with the Nictus possessions and stuff. A lot of the stuff is avoidable and rewards team play and the new dialogue/cut scenes/map architecture is sublime. You have done very well, this is VIP level content under the old system and we're just getting it so....thank you very much!

[VinceBlood]

19 hours ago, Maelwys said:

my AssBot's Burn Patches end up scattering large spawns across the map again.

 

I'm gonna put my question of "do masterminds need to have significant crowd control given all the other things they do" aside and say that there really are some powers in thie game that need their mag-4000 avoid factor removed posthaste.  I hate having moderately-strong abilities that make the game's AI lose its marbles for 30s-2m (yes, I have timed an enemy fleeing from Category Five and it tops out around 2 minutes in the worst scenarios).  There's just no satisfying gameplay reason for it, especially when you can circumvent it with an immobilize.

[Paragon Vanguard]

I don't usually complain, in fact I like what the team has done up to this Issue. The mob revamp has turned incarnate into ..... well, nothing. Pretty much negates the fact that the toon is suppose to be very powerful compared to normal people/super people. Mobs.....not special named bosses, just regular ole mobs, now have an "equal" feel. That would be fine if we got something in return, besides debt. I don't mind the debt badges. I dont mind playing it on hard mode, but come on, sometimes you just want to relax with a minimal amount of worry. My shield brute, who I was just starting to get going, now gets pretty much executed walking into X8 mob (he is a low level incarnate). I see where he will do better in time, but you have to earn the xp and the cash to get there.

Maybe if they could have tied the new mob powers to incarnate level shift? Or am I missing something?

 

For the record my main invuln/ tank, Paragon Vanguard, is doing fine. He is pretty much incarnate max, set maxed, etc. But you gotta kill stuff to get there.

 

It isn't just the mobs that made me not like this, but it is what effects me most. I give this patch a D, at this time. Maybe a D+. It could have been thought out better, it really feels forced, no matter how long it took. With that said, I have not played this Issue enough to really judge it, so that D may be too low.
 

Edit Update: I tried other spawns and did much better with my /shield brute.  Just fyi. I may give it a C but there are things to work out, like "TIP" "TIP" "TIP" constantly showing up. I know things can be buggy when first put out there. Still would like to see enhancing mobs a little more thought out. Still have other new content to try out that may negate all my negativity (which I dont like to be negative, especially toward this awesome team).

 

Love you guys, and thank you for the hard work. I hesitated writing this, and in the end I may be in the vast minority on how I feel, and my feelings may change. I know nothing will be changed back, but in the future maybe take some of this into consideration, if it is even read. 

 

Thanks for reading! My 2 cents, not really worth a dime! 🙂

Edited February 22 by Paragon Vanguard

[JelloMold]

Chiming in to add another two inf to Storm Blast Feels A Little Worse Somehow. This is Vibes Based and my own experience playing it from one day to the next. I did not pull combat logs and fire up Excel.

I started my first Storm Blast toon last week and was hooked. It felt a little weird that I never really had a chance to make use of my secondary, but it turns out that I picked the two Blaster sets that each require multiple casts to make any one power work well (Storm which needs Storm Cell running and properly placed before any fight I want to go well plus Time which needs the T1 debuff running on enemies I want the rest of the Time attacks to actually impact). On the whole I felt strong (when I had time to set up the battlefield and my prerequisite powers were off cooldown and the pseudopet was able to identify the enemies standing right next to it). Single target felt good with an AV inside a storm. AOE felt alright, but I was mostly running solo and small teams, so there wasn’t a lot of need for it.

 

New Chain Lightning is really missing those three amputated feet in its jump radius. Thankfully it’s not the intended -5. It feels even more situational now than before. If the mobs are not standing on top of each other, then it’s a weak ST attack that might splash if I get a really lucky wandering enemy mid-cast. ST on bosses feels slower, which is odd because I’ve enhanced my attacks more since the patch dropped. It feels like the help Storm Cell was giving me on bosses (when it behaved) has diminished. Cat 5 remains as weirdly situational as ever because it alerts enemies (unlike Storm Cell) rendering my opening snipe useless unless there are teammates to distract them while I spend a few seconds preparing to enter the fight already in progress. The fact that my Tier 9 not-a-nuke scares enemies out of it while also sitting perfectly still for its full duration doesn’t help me figure out how to optimally use it. Is there an optimal use for it? On the plus side, I might actually use my secondary a little more now because I have to with fights taking longer.

 

On the down side, Storm Cell remains the slowest, dumbest pet in the game. And I play Necro MM. I hope future adjustments will focus there. It needs either a shorter recharge to be forcibly relocated more often or faster movement so it can actually keep up. Adding flight and increased perception to it would be even better - watching my rain storm try to climb trees or navigate wonky pathing to get to me as I tried to steer it onto enemies was funny the first few times. Flying enemies are just immune to it, and I can’t even summon it unless I can find a patch of ground in range. Then again, I feel like by the time Storm Cell becomes less frustrating, we might as well make it the T9 pet for Storm Control and rework the blast version into a low-cost, low-recharge ally/enemy/self (all 3??) toggle in the vein of the Sonic sets.

[tricon]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:24 AM, bustacap said:

I’ll have to check the bonfire changes as I thought the changes affected epic pools and not the fire control set. 
 

this may be a sign I should only make scrappers and blasters

 

Nonono, if you play now scrappers the chance goes higher that Shadow Meld ends with a 10min timer and snipes now end up with 40sec 😉

 

 

On a serious note, I will see what happens after the have gone through all the phases. On the beta serve there was a respone om Booper so this is not the end

 

 

 

 

It would just be nice if some things were better communicated as to what they actually envision in detail. As an example . Dominator sleet got the time increased to 2min and the new added tar patch in the epic pool has the timer set to 3min. Now the base timer in the primary sets e.g. Defender Tar Patch is 90 sec and Sleet is 60 secs and you get Sleet a lot later in your build then Tar Patch. 

 

So from that pov I can understand it. but now we are tallking about epic pool from the dominator and if you compare them there it makes no sense that Sleet has a cd that is one min less vs Tar Patch considering that the former is a lot more powerful and adding 15sec to the duration of the later is not exactly something that would compensate for that, 

 

 

For my part, I will simply wait and see what our devs have planned for later. I still like the game and I think the positive effects are much stronger.

Edited February 22 by tricon

[Maelwys]

On 2/21/2024 at 6:45 AM, Wavicle said:

I don't have an issue with Bonfire getting nerfed.

I just wish they had nerfed the Damage but left the Control (mostly) alone.

Over the recent beta release candidate patches; Bonfire varied wildly.

It started out as a MAJOR nerf to KB chance (from 140% to 115%) in Release Candidate #1.
Then they reverted part of that nerf in Release Candidate #2 (raising it a bit to 120%) but introduced a ToHit Check for the damage component.
Release Candidate #3 (which made it to live) kept the changes from #2.

I can't find any hard numbers on the KB -> KD IO "reduced effect"changes themselves, but I did a fair amount of personal in-game testing on Brainstorm with my MM... and over a reasonable sample size (5 AE farming missions with several hundred mobs) the resulting flop rate of Level 50 - 54 mobs was very slightly less than it was on Live. The actual observed increase in foes staying upright within Bonfire's radius was only about 8% (and whether I used a 'Sudden Acceleration' IO and/or an 'Overwhelming Force' IO made no noticable difference; and neither did combining either/both of them with a 'Ragnarok: Chance for KD' Proc).

It was the other changes to the Epic Pool variants of Bonfire which have unfortunately resulted in my MM having to respec - the Epic Pool version of Bonfire was also hit with a vastly reduced Radius (25 -> 15ft) and Duration (45s -> 30s)... and that radius reduction in particular was enough to seriously cripple their performance. However neither of those changes affected the Controller/Dominator Primary version of Bonfire.

 

Edited February 22 by Maelwys

[Belazarius]

17 hours ago, BlackSpectre said:

Agreed. But the real problem is Patrol XP itself and how little it matters. The entire Patrol XP system needs to be revamped and improved so that it actually gives us something fun and worthwhile to do.

 

Ooooo!  After thinking about this for a sec, patrolling (superheroes moving around looking for trouble to stop) could be a lot of fun if designed properly. It would be something different than just missions to do and could reward the player with all kinds of things, badges, real XP, unlocking special abilities, influence (reputation), etc.  

Giving heroes doing their missions in the same zone where the patrolling heroes logged off an option to chose from : get 3 random heroes in the list of all disconnected heroes - choose one. You get this hero as a teamup npc during your mission.

 

This would be a dream come true.

[Vermithrix]

So Masterminds ... how you going keeping your pets alive vs Circle of Thorns and the new Council at lvl 50? I was playing +2x8 before patch. After playing on my main, I knew things had certainly been shaken  up, so I lowered to +1x5 and my bruiser got utterly disintegrated through Pain bringer and World of Pain on the first fight. I tried a Council mission and got through that basically by leaving a graveyard of thugs behind me. At one point, again, my bruiser got one shot by an archon. I absolutely accept this may be a case of "PEBKAC", but I blinked and my Bruiser was just deleted. 

 

Also, after seeing the wizardry the devs have pulled off with this patch - the thugs are feeling pretty old and lack luster ... just saying, i know your busy, sorry, thank you for your wonderful efforts, the game is a joy to play again. 

Side note: I love the changes btw. May have killed the whole power levelling on PI radio missions thing, but yeh, I actually have to use cool-downs and my incarnate powers without feeling like its overkill. Council resurrection and cross healing is a bit much maybe. Took my stalker and tanker a solid 3 minutes to kill 4 archons because they wouldn't stay down and kept healing off the tank, or the bodies on the floor ... not quite sure how they are healing yet. The bubbles, mitigate damage or something? The purple patch on the ground, syphons health off surrounding players? And yes, we were geared - I can solo +4x8 on my stalker no probs normally even after the patch, but with the health scaling, and what I assume is damage reduction from those bubbles, wow, they were hard to drop.  Either way, its good the game feels more challenging now at higher levels and difficulties in certain fights. 

 

PS: thank you for changing the Werewolf AI so they don't run to the horizon when they get a little scuffed up. If you had done nothing else this patch, it would have been a winner in my books ;D

[WindDemon21]

17 hours ago, nightchrome said:

I dunno if it's just poorly thought out design or an actual bug, but the fact that Liquid Nitrogen doesn't do any damage at all unless the enemy falls down AND it has an accuracy check pretty much means that in low-middle levels when you don't have a lot of acc and at endgame where most unoptimized people don't have enough acc vs +4 foes means that it basically never does any damage at all. Not to mention that bosses/EB/AV will have status protection and almost never fall down, plus then the acc check, so it will never damage them. Why couldn't this just be Ice Slick but with a different animation?

On a +4/8 leveling team from 1-20 last night with half the team being arse control, liquid nitrogen did a grand total of zero damage that I could see. A far cry from the large amount the power says it does and what shows in mids.

Also note, that mids says it accepts slow IO sets, which it currently doesn't, nor kb sets. Even though it, ice slick, and ice patch SHOULD.

[Vinceq98]

2 hours ago, Vermithrix said:

So Masterminds ... how you going keeping your pets alive vs Circle of Thorns and the new Council at lvl 50? I was playing +2x8 before patch. After playing on my main, I knew things had certainly been shaken  up, so I lowered to +1x5 and my bruiser got utterly disintegrated through Pain bringer and World of Pain on the first fight. I tried a Council mission and got through that basically by leaving a graveyard of thugs behind me. At one point, again, my bruiser got one shot by an archon. I absolutely accept this may be a case of "PEBKAC", but I blinked and my Bruiser was just deleted. 

 

Also, after seeing the wizardry the devs have pulled off with this patch - the thugs are feeling pretty old and lack luster ... just saying, i know your busy, sorry, thank you for your wonderful efforts, the game is a joy to play again. 

Side note: I love the changes btw. May have killed the whole power levelling on PI radio missions thing, but yeh, I actually have to use cool-downs and my incarnate powers without feeling like its overkill. Council resurrection and cross healing is a bit much maybe. Took my stalker and tanker a solid 3 minutes to kill 4 archons because they wouldn't stay down and kept healing off the tank, or the bodies on the floor ... not quite sure how they are healing yet. The bubbles, mitigate damage or something? The purple patch on the ground, syphons health off surrounding players? And yes, we were geared - I can solo +4x8 on my stalker no probs normally even after the patch, but with the health scaling, and what I assume is damage reduction from those bubbles, wow, they were hard to drop.  Either way, its good the game feels more challenging now at higher levels and difficulties in certain fights. 

 

PS: thank you for changing the Werewolf AI so they don't run to the horizon when they get a little scuffed up. If you had done nothing else this patch, it would have been a winner in my books ;D

Honestly pain and any of the non def sets just are behind Time, Trick Arrow, and Dark in terms of providing Offense+Defense to your pets. I had a pain MM I shelved because resisting damage doesn't stop the barrage of CCs and attacks being launched at your pets. If you can regularly solo Banished pantheon +4x8 or Carnies or Longbows then the new council and thorns have just been updated to their level of status. You need to disable mobs hit chance or buff your pets def to softcap in order to feel safe against the new thorns mobs. I'd probably rethink using empathy or pain or thermal radiation unless you want to just endlessly spam your healing auras

[Kazgaroth]

Please give us a way to choose between the new and old tip systems. Otherwise, thanks for all of the hard work.

[Maelwys]

4 hours ago, Vermithrix said:

So Masterminds ... how you going keeping your pets alive vs Circle of Thorns and the new Council at lvl 50?

I've not observed much difference on my Bot/Kin if I'm being honest, at least vs CoT (they've always been annoying, for all the crappy cave maps if nothing else).
Council have gone from "facerollingly boring" to "may need to press an extra button or two occasionally".

Admittedly that toon is pretty much twinked out, so the deck is rather stacked in favour of my henchies even without Bonfire.
 

Spoiler

Mostly-Softcapped Positional Defences (dips down to 42.76% for the last 120 seconds of Barrier Core Epiphany; but can spike higher on demand via Insps or my Hybrid or Lore abilities); a decent spread of Damage Resistances (~40% Fire/Negative/Toxic, ~70% Smashing/Energy, ~70-89% Lethal/Cold/Psionic), Mez Protection to pretty much everything (Bot Inherent + Increase Density covers all except Endurance Drain and Slows. Transference and Speed Boost helps vs endurance drains; and henchmen simply don't care about recharge buffs/debuffs), a Spammable AoE Heal, and Siphon Speed/Siphon Power/Fulcrum Shift.

 

Edited February 22 by Maelwys

[SuperPlyx]

Quote

Passport (and Long Range Teleporter) is now unlocked by acquiring any 10 exploration badges, instead of one exploration accolade.

So did this on a new toon but had to get 11 badges to get the TP.

After I got 10 and no LRTP I tried zoning, then changing alignment still nothing. So picked up another explore badge and got LRTP.

 

I took a screenie of the 10 explore badges I grabbed can post if needed

[Uun]

Cimeroran Traitors

• Incarnate-level Minotaurs and Cyclopes re-tuned to make them more manageable in non-Advanced Mode content.

Running Sister Solaris arc, I'm not noticing any difference. What changed? The last mission in her arc still spawns for a team size of 8 regardless of your notoriety setting. The 4 groups of Minotaurs and Cyclopes aren't any more manageable than they were before the patch. 

[BlackSpectre]

QUICK LOOK...  first off, I LOVE the command. It's a great thing to put on the left mouse drag binding. It's a clear improvement in the UI and gameplay. However, it suffers from the same problem as /camreset... it does not snap back to the same or a standard VERTICAL position, only a horizontal position. 

 

It has always been a bit difficult to look up and down and all around when trying to spot an enemy, especially while in combat.  Quick Look has the potential to allow players to look for an enemy, identify them, and then snap back to continue attacking an enemy in front of us.  Without resetting the VERTICAL alignment, it's still hard to do.

 

So if you have a chance, can snapping back to a veritcal as well as a horizontal position be added to Quick Look and /camreset?  (also, how about a slash command for Quick Look?). 🙂

 

 

 

[BlackSpectre]

POWER TRAY LABELS... great idea! Love it! One problem though, if a Power Slot is bound to a mouse button, no label appears below the power slot. 

 

I assume the bind labels are constrained to 3 characters, and M is already taken by the keyboard. However M3 (for mouse button 3 or mbutton) would work. The number would differentiate it enough from the letter M.  Buttons 1-3 are all standard on all mice these days. COH can go up to Button8. However, I can see where creating bind labels for non-standard buttons would be a problem (some mice have over 20 buttons). To do that, COH would need profiles for every gaming mouse on the market. To me that seems very labor intensive, so I'm not too keen on it. But who knows? It might be easier than I think? Anyway, any chance of adding labels for M1-M8 at least (or as many as you can)?

[Chris24601]

On 2/21/2024 at 9:50 PM, Arc-Mage said:

So the new Villain Striga mish "Defeat the Last Witch of Striga"

 

When I realized I killed Stephanie Peebles my Heart sank a bit. 

 

Thanks guys. :(

I knew the “last witch” would be Ms. Peebles just from the title. I’m holding off running until I get a confirm on whether or not there’s a morality option to not kill her.

 

I felt a bit of mood whiplash running through the new Striga material, particularly that it was gated in order so you can’t, say, skip working with the Nazi/5th Column if you want to the heist against the Sky Raiders or the dealing with the Banished Pantheon’s curse.

 

I always go rogue immediately (I’m already hitting Null to turn off the movement power popup bar… it’s an extra two seconds) and have a rather curated list of “merc”, “strike it rich schemes” and “going after worse guys” arcs I pursue since I loathe playing straight-up cackling evil villains (it’s also ultimately why I end up just going hero eventually… once you hit Grandville there’s a real derth of Rogue morality content; the Vanguard arcs and Rogue tip missions can only carry you so far).

[DukeGude]

Enjoying the Lady Grey Task Force (LGTF) revamp, and ship navigation/tension was pretty fun. Not sure if it is supposed to disable all temp/travel powers though - but the prestige powerslide worked so I was able to move faster than my irl jogging speed lol.

[bustacap]

On live anyway,

 

Took Midnight Cinders to PI and pulled a council radio 4x8. 

 

The only thing I dint notice, is the entire mob flopping on bonfire cast (acc needed check). MC is a full T4 incarnate fire/dark contrroller with 45% M/r/A and maxed s/l/d resist and bountiful regen/recovery. And barrier.  I don't usually cast flashfire at 50 whose cast time could have been adjusted for the nerf... Its just undeeded with bonfire/cages/patch. If needed on bosses I hate there's always ff and HT combo. 

 

I noticed no difference in mobs flopping with the amounts of global accuracy I was pushing. It still flops everything in what appears to be in a frequency with no noticible difference. Other that in no longer completely eliminitating the alpha its fine.

[FrostedHarbor]

Quote

Teleport & Combat Teleport

• Several new alternate Teleport customization options added:
  • Murder of Crows
  • Rikti
  • Smoke Bomb
  • Tornado

It would be awesome if these customization options could be applied to Sorcery > Translocation in a future update. I have a Magic Defender that I would love to be able to use Murder of Crows with.

 

Thanks for putting out such an ambitious update! Really exciting stuff!

[kelika2]

On 2/21/2024 at 9:50 PM, Arc-Mage said:

Villain

 

[ZamuelNow]

Oh wow, the revamp of the AE in RWZ is classy.  Almost wish a couple more of the buildings got revamped like this.