On the new CoT and council......the good and bad so far.

[Sunsette]

I'm glad it's not just me that feels this way. I didn't test out these changes on the beta server because I liked the sound of them and welcomed the idea of shaking up stale groups, but the execution has felt somewhat misaimed. Though as always, I acknowledge this is a tricky thing to execute.

[Sovera]

Leveling and meeting the new Council left me with that sense too. They were not harder, I now just had to kill a respawned boss. Since I was soloing I just dragged it to the next spawn and went back to AoEing. But at some point I had four transformed bosses and sat down to finish whittling them since they had been softened by all the AoEs.

[Cheli]

34 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

 

If that is the fact, I have no idea why you are continuing to discuss this.

 

 

Because it effects other people, Like I said, in the post you didn't read, it impacts the exact opposite of the people you and others are insisting this change is meant to impact. For folks with tweaked builds it turns Council into slightly-more-annoying Freakshow clones and evinces - as others have pointed out - a design tendency to equate "slog full of HP punching-bag" with "difficulty". For the old-fashioned types who run around with SOs and don't engage in forum feedback threads and already weren't soloing Council at +4/x8 and complaining about the game being "too easy" - many of which do still exist - these changes probably are very noticeable. 

 

I'm not terribly committed on these changes either way - but when I feel like they're evidence in a broader picture of the direction the HC team is taking on balance, I certainly think it's worth talking about it. And I have no problem pointing out that extremely compelling counterarguments like "well you complained the game was too easy, get good noob!!!!" aren't all they're cracked up to be.

 

34 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

And your point here being that you aren't intentionally trying to make personal attacks?

 

Your claim that you aren't making personal attacks is ...

 

 

So. I'm done.

I'll make it easy for you and put you on ignore so you don't have to feel like the bad guy.

Your signature suggests to me you probably have a history of saying silly things to people, being called on it, and then claiming victory by publicly announcing you've ignored them. There's a common denominator there... and it isn't me. Such is life.

 

 

[Sovera]

5 minutes ago, Cheli said:

Your signature suggests to me you probably have a history of saying silly things to people, being called on it, and then claiming victory by publicly announcing you've ignored them. There's a common denominator there... and it isn't me. Such is life.

 

UltraAlt is one of the very few persons I have on ignore in this forum, so you might be on to something 😄

[skoryy]

1 hour ago, Sunsette said:

I'm glad it's not just me that feels this way. I didn't test out these changes on the beta server because I liked the sound of them and welcomed the idea of shaking up stale groups, but the execution has felt somewhat misaimed. Though as always, I acknowledge this is a tricky thing to execute.

 

I did some beta testing to see just how tough the new Council was, I didn't have any problems then.  It didn't really hit me until this afternoon when I was slogging through Warwolf bosses during lunch. I thought I could do a quick hero tip and that quite didn't work out.

[DrunkFlux]

16 minutes ago, skoryy said:

 

I did some beta testing to see just how tough the new Council was, I didn't have any problems then.  It didn't really hit me until this afternoon when I was slogging through Warwolf bosses during lunch. I thought I could do a quick hero tip and that quite didn't work out.

Thats largely why my stalker ended up clearing the mobs faster than my blaster, it was 'entirey' the warwolf boss spawns making them effectively more annoying freakshow.  My blasters I feel were only getting closer risk of being defeated purely due to the bosses simply living longer, while my stalker was fine simply due to being able to survive a protracted fight against boss ranks and also had far superior single-target DPS, that her inferior AoE was entirely negated compared to the blasters.

 

It'll always take a long time to clear through council now.

[DrunkFlux]

19 hours ago, WumpusRat said:

CoH's rng has always been loopy. That's why they added the streakbreaker in the first place, because you'd often see 6-7 misses in a row even with a 95% to hit. 

 

Its clock based RNG and yes, very badly designed, and always has been more working against the player than the enemy mobs, rather than evenly between the two.

 

My most frustrating deaths on defense based builds have always the dreaded "double hit" where I get hit by two attacks at the same time rolling sub-5, not even a proper defense cascade, no time to react, just full health to zero in an instant.  Because the two mobs attacked at the same time when the RNG clock happened to be sub-5.

This also leads to an annoying factor with the player when the same attack in the attack chain, and one of your better attacks, missing every time.  Wait about 1 second before attacking and it stops suddenly, every single time.

Edited March 5 by DrunkFlux

[DrunkFlux]

On 2/29/2024 at 4:51 AM, ZemX said:

 

More redirect it, I think.  AE farming is there for people who want easy farming and sitting their way to 50.  Out in the game world, it's a good thing if you don't have pushover enemies like old Council that become everyone's punching bag because that causes teams to be more boring and repetitive.  Newbies joining those teams might be more quickly turned off if it's just an endless stream of Council punching-bags.

 

If this means less "Council PI Radios" teams then it's a success.  Doesn't mean PI Radios won't still be used as a leveling platform but if it means more people are just running whatever the police scanner hands them instead of reloading, reloading, reloading to get more easy Council to bash... so much the better.

Honestly AE farming shouldn't be the only way to rapidly level toons from 1 to 50.  in fact, AE farming is almost akine to cheating practically, always has been, only reason it never seems to get hit hard as AE fire farmers always claim is because its the fire farmer doing all the work, no one else ever joins in except hitters like blasters with max fire-resist and high defense on top of that.

When we just close off power leveling routes players find other ones, its true, and then close those off all it'd do is just make the HC team come off as nothing but nerf-heads.  And honestly I don't think most players have the kind of time required to level toons from 1-50 normally.  Even con enemies give such low exp that I barely notice the bar moving, when I join friends in non-50 content exemplared down to say, mid 20s I often don't notice the exp bar climbing at all, even on non-50s with double exp.  I run say, 6-7 missions with them and only gain like, 3-4 bars of exp at most in that time span.

 

Edit: I am fine with PI teams going for others but I had seen one PI team only go after council still, like the team leader hadn't caught onto how the council play being much harder for lowbies to survive and the teams killing power wasn't quite high enough to stop warwolves from popping up.

Edited March 5 by DrunkFlux

[KITANYA]

15 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

Thats largely why my stalker ended up clearing the mobs faster than my blaster, it was 'entirey' the warwolf boss spawns making them effectively more annoying freakshow.  My blasters I feel were only getting closer risk of being defeated purely due to the bosses simply living longer, while my stalker was fine simply due to being able to survive a protracted fight against boss ranks and also had far superior single-target DPS, that her inferior AoE was entirely negated compared to the blasters.

 

It'll always take a long time to clear through council now.

 

Also, the Council Vampires can turn into Werewolves when they go down! 😄

 

Hilarious! 

[Ruin Mage]

Here's my 2cents;

By the time you are in the 46-50 range, you should be facing groups at their full might. This means there should be no real "easy to farm/mow down" group in my opinion. There should be something that makes you consider even the lightest bit of strategy. Does that mean the groups in the 46-50 range need to be Omega Hard? No. But the abilities they have/the tools they have need to put characters to the test just a little bit.

The reason I say this is because we have the ability to adjust our settings for what difficulty we face. We're also not playing a static/content-locked version of the game and haven't been since HC started. Things needed, imo, to be adjusted to match the level of power our characters can reach. So this type of thing was what I think we needed for those level ranges. The Council is probably just more tedious than anything, but its better than keeping things as is. More adjustments might be needed.

[ZemX]

17 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

Honestly AE farming shouldn't be the only way to rapidly level toons from 1 to 50.

 

This is an opinion, and one that depends on what you consider "rapid" which might not be the same as what I consider rapid.   I see plenty of people leveling on radio teams still even after that Page 7 update.  I really can't imagine why people need to level any faster than 2XP on a PI radio team already provides, but if they do, and want to do it AFK even, they can do so in AE.  So no, don't really see any need for more powerleveling options than already exist.  And I don't see a whole lot of concern other than your post here, that it's a big problem right now either.

 

17 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

And honestly I don't think most players have the kind of time required to level toons from 1-50 normally. 

 

If one doesn't enjoy playing their way to 50, why NOT sit in an AE farm?  If one does enjoy playing... then what's their hurry getting to 50?   If you don't have as much time as someone else, you won't end up with an MANY 50s as someone else, but so what?

 

This is kind of like when I see people complain they don't have the time to play big open world single-player games.  They say they "don't have the time" for THAT much content.  "So what are you doing after this game?" I'll ask.  "Oh... playing another game!"   🤣

 

17 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

Edit: I am fine with PI teams going for others but I had seen one PI team only go after council still

 

Not surprising.  I've seen that too.  Not everyone pays attention to updates.  Self-correcting problem though...

[skoryy]

UPDATE: Warwolves HATE this one trick!  (It's the stalker ATO procs.)

 

Also, I once again forgot how tanky my elec/elec/mu stalker was.

[skoryy]

The more I think on it, the more I really should put up a post on how HC has shaken up the S/L/E defense meta.  I'm getting a lot more mileage out of other sources of damage mitigation now.

[KaizenSoze]

20 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

Honestly AE farming shouldn't be the only way to rapidly level toons from 1 to 50.  in fact, AE farming is almost akine to cheating practically, always has been, only reason it never seems to get hit hard as AE fire farmers always claim is because its the fire farmer doing all the work, no one else ever joins in except hitters like blasters with max fire-resist and high defense on top of that.

I think one apple in basket of reasons that people rush to 50, then start over on again. Leading to people hyper focus on power leveling. Is that the end game is boring outside a few specific things. Page 7 made the high end a little more challenging.

 

 

[ZemX]

3 minutes ago, KaizenSoze said:

I think one apple in basket of reasons that people rush to 50, then start over on again. Leading to people hyper focus on power leveling. Is that the end game is boring outside a few specific things.

 

The end game is boring but powerleveling... isn't?   I had always assumed people farmed 50s so they could engage in the endgame.  I cannot imagine farm-sitting my way to 50 only to put that toon on the shelf and start another.  Why not just play Progress Quest?

[Sunsette]

4 hours ago, ZemX said:

 

The end game is boring but powerleveling... isn't?   I had always assumed people farmed 50s so they could engage in the endgame.  I cannot imagine farm-sitting my way to 50 only to put that toon on the shelf and start another.  Why not just play Progress Quest?

 

The endgame isn't *as* boring as much of the leveling content. The most fun I have with any character is typically the first month after 50 where I'm figuring out how to maximize both my playstyle and my build to their most idiosyncratic. Once I've solved the problems presented, it's very likely I will stop playing that character unless I am really, really taken with how it plays in general and those characters get to stay and become part of my permanent roster.

 

There's also psychology around success conditions that only apply for some people to games that people actually play. We are incredibly convoluted thinking machines, and there are a lot of reasons why we do anything we do.

Edited March 6 by Sunsette

[Clave Dark 5]

3 hours ago, Sunsette said:

The most fun I have with any character is typically the first month after 50 where I'm figuring out how to maximize both my playstyle and my build to their most idiosyncratic. Once I've solved the problems presented, it's very likely I will stop playing that character unless I am really, really taken with how it plays in general and those characters get to stay and become part of my permanent roster.

I've usually got all that figured out - even the "do I bother keeping this character?" - by the time I've leveled to 50, which is why I prefer leveling normally.  Whatever works for you though works, yeah.

[Sunsette]

5 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

I've usually got all that figured out - even the "do I bother keeping this character?" - by the time I've leveled to 50, which is why I prefer leveling normally.  Whatever works for you though works, yeah.

 

I prefer to level normally as well! I have not seen the inside of a farm map in ages, I barely do radios, etc. I make all my money through regular gameplay. I just can understand the perspective presented.

 

I usually have figured out most of a character by the time I hit 50 but I've still had four semi-major build revisions on my latest only about a month after capping. The margins of change become smaller and smaller, but I do make adjustments and sometimes even the very small adjustments are satisfying.

Edited March 7 by Sunsette

[FupDup]

My observation from playing on a 4-man beta team was that the newly revamped factions were only a little bit harder than before, mostly just a bit slower...but that's on teams. 

 

Doing it solo, however, was quite a bit slower than previously, especially the new Council being very bullet-spongey. I'm not a fan of pillow fight pacing. 

 

I feel like these two outcomes are kind of backwards. There are indeed a good number of complaints about stuff being too easy and enemies dying too fast for people to use their powers, but those complaints are almost always coming from the context of a steamroller team. If you're flying solo you're not going to be worried about whether or not enemies live long enough for you to do stuff. That's a team problem, it needs a team solution. 

 

My take is that most faction revamps should focus on making team play moderately or even significantly harder (depending on exactly what the starting point was) but having a relatively modest solo impact. As for how to do that, IDK if it's possible in this game's engine but I'd like something similar to Diablo games where enemies scale in power based on how many players are present. There would need to be a max limit somewhere so large leagues don't get totally hosed by this of course. 

[Cheli]

2 hours ago, FupDup said:

My observation from playing on a 4-man beta team was that the newly revamped factions were only a little bit harder than before, mostly just a bit slower...but that's on teams. 

 

Doing it solo, however, was quite a bit slower than previously, especially the new Council being very bullet-spongey. I'm not a fan of pillow fight pacing. 

 

I feel like these two outcomes are kind of backwards. There are indeed a good number of complaints about stuff being too easy and enemies dying too fast for people to use their powers, but those complaints are almost always coming from the context of a steamroller team. If you're flying solo you're not going to be worried about whether or not enemies live long enough for you to do stuff. That's a team problem, it needs a team solution. 

 

My take is that most faction revamps should focus on making team play moderately or even significantly harder (depending on exactly what the starting point was) but having a relatively modest solo impact. As for how to do that, IDK if it's possible in this game's engine but I'd like something similar to Diablo games where enemies scale in power based on how many players are present. There would need to be a max limit somewhere so large leagues don't get totally hosed by this of course. 

The attitude some people have towards this game is eerily reminiscent of WoW players who analyze the game exclusively in the context of the meta; that is, because some people spend most of their time steamrolling, theoretically everyone could do it, which means we must assume everyone is always doing it and that's the only way anyone is playing and therefore it's not just a problem but the problem all conversation has to revolve around. In WoW, if a raid tier was finished by world-first professional video gamers 'too fast', or some meta comp developed that let people blast through high-level keystone dungeons, everyone from the top-to-bottom of the playerbase would say the game was 'too easy' even though literally 90% of players had never seen any mythic bosses or done a key above a +15. 

 

People see that some teams are full of procced out IO'd invincible heroes nuking half the map in 30 seconds, and even though most gameplay doesn't take place in that atmosphere, we must always assume everyone is playing like that all the time, and all balance discussion has to take place in that context. I think even in the context of teams it can be overgeneralizing to assume every team is mowing maps down. I'm sure many are, but even in that context, how many of even those teams mowing maps down are complaining about things being too easy? I feel like it's a percentage, but one small enough that they're probably satisfied by things like hardmode TFs and other optionally applicable changes. That's sorta why I feel like any sweeping changes to difficulty, even in a team setting, should be either very subtle, or strictly opt-in. 

 

I definitely agree, though; if we're going to have these kinds of changes, they should be tightly tailored to the actual problem. I don't think the Council changes really were.

[StarkWhite]

This would be a nonissue if people didn't react to the suggestion "if it's too hard/slow/whatever, turn your difficulty down" as if you'd suggested they eat their firstborn child.

[Sunsette]

1 hour ago, StarkWhite said:

This would be a nonissue if people didn't react to the suggestion "if it's too hard/slow/whatever, turn your difficulty down" as if you'd suggested they eat their firstborn child.

 

This does not reflect the majority of the negative feedback in this thread.

 

I've never had an issue dropping my difficulty and in fact, prefer not to run most of my characters at +4x8 by default outside of stress tests. I readily drop my difficulty against Talons of Vengeance on almost all characters. But the Talons of Vengeance are relatively interesting difficulty. nuCouncil are not.

 

I really like that HC is taking steps to try and make old groups more interesting. I can safely say if nothing else that nuCouncil are more visually interesting, which counts for a lot. I just don't like the mechanics. They're slow and boring.

 

Today I completed the HC John Houston Rogue arc, and I have so many good things to say about it. It's some of the best writing in the game on multiple fronts, and there's so much lovely attention to detail in environments and ambient chatter. And in many ways, it truly was a story that justified its very narrow and unique alignment band, which I didn't expect. I have so much good I can say about it...

 

And then there's the fighting. I leveled into nuCouncil range and I was at +0x3 for much of it with a character that can comfortably handle more, in large part because I didn't want to deal with the resurrections. That didn't honestly help a lot. It was still irritating that I had to keep dealing with a handful of rezzing stragglers that pose no threat to me but do annoy me. There's no counterplay to the auto-rez.

 

There's also boss fights that end two of the missions in this arc which follow the design pattern I'm getting a little worried about. I got an HP sponge of an Elite Boss thrown at me, and it looked for a little bit like he was supposed to have associated mechanics since I got a notice once about his shoulder armor (? I think?) and then not again. And it was hard. My still-leveling tanker is capable of handling +2x4 comfortably (haven't tried to go way higher) and was actually at 0x3 for the mission, but got slowly ground down while being unable to overcome its regeneration. When I got help from two brutes, we still almost wiped -- they both went down and I was down to yellow health before they rezzed and came back to bring down the boss from the last 10%. All of this was a very mechanic-free fight from what I could tell, just bearing down and smacking things that hit hard. And I don't get it. I had AVs off, this thing seemed pretty comparable to an AV for a level 40 Arc!

 

I don't, in and of itself, have a big problem with the boss' difficulty either (although, the mission badly needs map markers for its three or four doors to different maps to recover from a wipe). Narratively it made sense that it was tough, and it was just a single enemy each time, so it wasn't a repetitive experience. However, I keep seeing HP Sponge design in HC enemies and I don't know why that seems to be a big part of the toolkit for every situation. Part of it is surely to benefit single-target specialists like stalkers, scrappers, and -res debuffers, but I can't escape a feeling of overuse. I'd like to compare vs. the final fight that ends the Wards story in Praetoria, which is a painful double elite boss fight with a lot of allies and (when the allies aren't glitching...) gives room for play by having you juggle two mobile hostile targets that I want to say can potentially invoke adds though it's been a little bit and I am usually mid-panic in that fight. I am a lot of things during that fight -- screaming, panicking, running for dear life -- but bored isn't ever one on any at-level character taking it on. 🙂

 

As a bonus point of comparison, there were actual basic mechanics on the quirky miniboss squad of Hero Corps in the last mission -- that was enjoyable. I was drowsy and starting to fall asleep from clearing trash encounters and that woke me up! So I know they're capable of doing more than the HP Sponge thing, but they seem to keep going back to it.

Edited March 7 by Sunsette

[FlammeFatale]

On 3/5/2024 at 8:13 PM, Cheli said:

 

Because it effects other people, Like I said, in the post you didn't read, it impacts the exact opposite of the people you and others are insisting this change is meant to impact. For folks with tweaked builds it turns Council into slightly-more-annoying Freakshow clones and evinces - as others have pointed out - a design tendency to equate "slog full of HP punching-bag" with "difficulty". For the old-fashioned types who run around with SOs and don't engage in forum feedback threads and already weren't soloing Council at +4/x8 and complaining about the game being "too easy" - many of which do still exist - these changes probably are very noticeable. 

 

 

I agree 100%.

 

I will just copy-paste something I wrote in another sub-forum:

 

"Maybe it is only me, but I feel the page 7 patch, which increases some enemy groups difficulty, has widened performance disparity between powersets. My stronger characters remain unaffected by the patch, while my weaker characters feel the increased difficulty. My kheldians are mid-tier performers and do not notice any increase in difficulty. My VEATS which were already extremely strong are buffed, WTF?

We have a situation, unchanged strength and weaker weakness, which is the opposite of balance."

 

I should add I do not have real issues with the council and CoT changes, except that I have never liked self-rezzing mobs.  It does not add difficulty, only tediousness. What bothers me most is the change to Arachnos Tarentula Mistresses. Confuse and fear immunity to whole enemy groups is a nerf to some weaker ATs like controllers. 

 

I do not blame the devs who are a small volunteer team doing a great job. They cannot test everything and foresee every potential unbalance increase. But I feel if you cannot test thoroughly, then perhaps you should not make too many changes.

 

[Sovera]

8 hours ago, FupDup said:

My observation from playing on a 4-man beta team was that the newly revamped factions were only a little bit harder than before, mostly just a bit slower...but that's on teams. 

 

Doing it solo, however, was quite a bit slower than previously, especially the new Council being very bullet-spongey. I'm not a fan of pillow fight pacing. 

 

I feel like these two outcomes are kind of backwards. There are indeed a good number of complaints about stuff being too easy and enemies dying too fast for people to use their powers, but those complaints are almost always coming from the context of a steamroller team. If you're flying solo you're not going to be worried about whether or not enemies live long enough for you to do stuff. That's a team problem, it needs a team solution. 

 

My take is that most faction revamps should focus on making team play moderately or even significantly harder (depending on exactly what the starting point was) but having a relatively modest solo impact. As for how to do that, IDK if it's possible in this game's engine but I'd like something similar to Diablo games where enemies scale in power based on how many players are present. There would need to be a max limit somewhere so large leagues don't get totally hosed by this of course. 

 

I keep advocating for an HP buff that is related to team size: One person: normal HP. Two persons: 20% more HP. Three persons: 50% HP. All the way to 8 persons and... 200%? Numbers would be tweaked.

 

This would let mobs last longer and not crippler a soloer.

[KaizenSoze]

2 hours ago, FlammeFatale said:

"Maybe it is only me, but I feel the page 7 patch, which increases some enemy groups difficulty, has widened performance disparity between powersets. My stronger characters remain unaffected by the patch, while my weaker characters feel the increased difficulty. My kheldians are mid-tier performers and do not notice any increase in difficulty. My VEATS which were already extremely strong are buffed, WTF?

We have a situation, unchanged strength and weaker weakness, which is the opposite of balance."

Since, I am one of the resident VEAT nuts. Fortunatas were extremely strong and got a bit of a buff, which was nice but unnecessary, the animation changes were good enough. The rest though need some help, especially Night Widows.

 

What power sets, maybe this should be a different thread, are you finding are suffering disproportionately more now?

 

To be clear, I am not part of the dev team. I did help test the Council and CoT changes a lot, they were actually weakened a lot from their initial buff point. I organized three different open beta radios groups test nights for folks to bring out whatever build they wanted to test. Only had a full team once, the first, barely four people, the next two tests.

 

You're right, the dev team is small and cannot test everything. The player base needs to test more. The open beta was up for weeks. I encouraged players on the forums to go test when the servers when down for long unexpected maintenance.  Not saying you are one of the folks FlammeFatale, nice name btw, but players need spend a little more time testing during open beta and less time complaining after it's release.