The Council change was not good

[DrRocket]

On 10/3/2024 at 2:18 PM, jthequietone said:

If it had just been at 50, fair enough, but when you're a level 40-something blaster and doing content that was meant for you, like a solo radio mission set to solo difficulty type settings and you randomly get a boss werewolf that is an absolute health sponge and can boulder throw murder you?

 

That's not fun. The Council change made what was extensively already a chore, solo leveling, into just a hot mess. If I wanted something harder, I had options, but now I just feel like I look at the choices of which villain group in a radio mission and go "would you like this to be obnoxious and annoying... or annoying and obnoxious" 

 

After years of playing and happily doing radio missions to my hearts content while I listened to music, chatted with people, or had a queue of story/lore videos running... It's just not fun to deal with that. 

The change did make them competitive, but how it was implemented can be very abusive, like having the ones who rez after defeat (copy of freakshow) and then unbalancing the council team with many of them, now that is abusive and ruins the experience

[Triumphant]

59 minutes ago, DrRocket said:

The change did make them competitive, but how it was implemented can be very abusive, like having the ones who rez after defeat (copy of freakshow) and then unbalancing the council team with many of them, now that is abusive and ruins the experience

I don't agree, though I do agree (as other's have commented upthread) that they shouldn't appear when the "No Bosses" option is selected in notoriety settings.  In every other case, simply turn your difficulty setting down. 

 

I enjoy them and think they were a much-needed upgrade to Council for high-level play.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Triumphant said:

I don't agree, though I do agree (as other's have commented upthread) that they shouldn't appear when the "No Bosses" option is selected in notoriety settings.  In every other case, simply turn your difficulty setting down. 

 

I enjoy them and think they were a much-needed upgrade to Council for high-level play.

Galaxy Adjutants, the lieutenants, also self-rez. Unlike the Freakshow outside of the Super Stunners though, Galaxy mobs can only rez if there is an enemy within 25 feet of them. So if you finish them with a KB attack or you break off from melee and finish them with a ranged attack, they won't rez. (Same with the boss.)

[ViridianDev]

Wish I could have stumbled on this thread sooner, but I suppose it's really not that old and better late than never.

 

Hi everyone; in case you don't know me, I'm Viridian, a developer on the Homecoming Team, and the one that helmed, designed and developed the Council revamp. To put to rest guesses of intent posed in this thread, and help clarify some mechanics, here's an impromptu dev diary.

 

The goals of the Council revamp were twofold:

• Adjust the higher-level units in the faction to an appropriate difficulty comparable to other endgame factions
• As a commonly run radio mission faction, crank up the rewards to provide a solid alternative for players that don't want to farm

Pre-revamp, the Council were easily the weakest of the core factions encountered in the 40-50 range (which I'll be referring to as endgame for brevity); Galaxy minions had the lowest DPS of any mob that could be encountered in endgame, for example. Steps taken to crank up the difficulty were to bring up mobs encountered at lower levels (lycanthropes, dark vampyr archons), add exotic damage types (nyctwolves, galaxies), and tweak powers (Vortex CL Archons would sit and spam their Missile Launcher all day and completely ignore their other attacks until interrupted with a knockdown or mez, soldier minions had high cooldowns on their weapons so they'd attack once and then get stuck in a Brawl loop).

 

On the second goal, we were coming off some recent AE farming nerfs from a previous page, so I wanted to encourage an environment where players could gain additional rewards provided in the base game with some level of interactive gameplay. Steps taken here were to increase the reward scales of some enemies (galaxies were increased by 20%-40% depending on rank, lycanthropes increased by 50%), compounded with resurrecting enemies (galaxies) to further increase reward-per-spawn rates.

 

Now that the goals have been outlined, and it's been a decent amount of time since the changes have gone out and been played/experienced, it's time for some critical self-evaluation.

 

Based on forum/discord discussions, and sentiments expressed while running in teams, the Galaxies were the ones that missed the mark the hardest. Their power suites were modeled as Warshade-flavored counterparts to the PPD Awakened Peacebringers (a faction in the same level range bracket), with the self-resurrections adjusted from being chance-based to player input; dodge the radius, guaranteed no rez, closer in behavior to a Super Stunner, which players are familiar with. Despite the fact that a boss slot in a spawn yielded an additional +180% in xp and inf, the additional effort needed to take down one of these enemies (especially when they appear en masse), winds up being too tedious, and creates this feeling of sponginess that outweighs the rewards returned.

 

Today, I believe the Council revamp was mostly successful but flawed; created in time where I had less knowledge of the engine than I do now, still learning to navigate feedback. It's not perfect, but as a first-ever feature, holding myself to an expectation of perfection would have been simply unrealistic.

 

I can't guarantee that they'll get a second evaluation in the near future, but if they were to, there would be several things I'd like to do to adjust to player feedback; increasing the delay before resurrection for Galaxies to give players more reaction time, reducing both the rate at which they rez as well as the amount of self-healing they get, and reducing the amount of mobs with access to the critical knockback.

 

On the topic of lycanthropic transformations, allow me to clarify a few of the rules:

• A mob that naturally spawns as a lieutenant will never be able to transform into a boss (ie, player has bosses turned on, mob encountered is a lt, transforms into a lt)
• A mob that naturally spawns as a boss downgraded to lieutenant due to bosses turned off will transform into a boss (I don't know about the mechanics for live, but this has always been the case on Homecoming to my knowledge. It was certainly not something accidentally changed during the Council update, as mob ranks are controlled by a completely different set of code)

Without segueing into a design discussion of whether or not this SHOULD be the case, it is not something obvious and readily fixable, so I wouldn't expect the behavior to change anytime soon.