What does "wet" mean in terms of conditions?

[BasiliskXVIII]

I've just recently come back and have been playing around with some new characters. I noticed this on several of my Storm Blast Corruptor's powers that the tooltips say +Wet, and there's an occasional message in the combat log saying that "<Enemy> is now Wet". My Water Blast characters have the same. Looking through the detailed power description, though, doesn't really give any details about the wet condition or what it represents. Is this just the "dripping water" effect that shows up on the affected character, or does "wet" do something else, possibly in conjunction with one of the other new power sets?

[Glacier Peak]

Scrapped power mechanic. 

[BasiliskXVIII]

Ah, so at this point it doesn't so anything other than make the green text show up in the combat log?

[Maelwys]

It currently does precisely nowt.

 

At one point it was allegedly a "for flavour" bonus:

 

Quote

It is a thematic bonus, where if you are wet and you touch something extremely cold, you will get stuck (folks who have seen Dumb and Dumber or a Christmas Story will be familiar with the scene where the person licks a frozen metal pole).

 

It's there for flavor, it's a minor buff if you can thematically match it with a set that provides "Wet" to a target, but it's minor enough that it does not invalidate the use of other sets with Arsenal Control.

 

 

 

 

[Frosticus]

It was a mechanic the devs wanted to test out. It made some people extremely angry (understatement) for a variety of reasons. The flag remains on a fair number of powers, but currently doesn't do anything.

 

Hopefully the devs revisit it along with some other conditional statuses as it could open up a bit more depth to some areas of the game.

[tidge]

Wet status doesn't make me mad, but I definitely felt like it was a step in a wrong direction (for everything except the animation effect):

• It was a plan to boost the effects (status, not sure what else was on the table) of certain cold powers used by anyone; cold is already one of the better options across all AT
• It has echoes of Pokemon cross-type battles for effectiveness/non-effectiveness
• Once one player's elemental attacks apply this sort of effect, there is literally no place to stop trying to do it.

I can understand why the idea of trying to explicitly build in potential synergy was appealing, but this wasn't going to be particularly good to "balance within a single power set". It wouldn't be well-received to do something like "reduce damage across the board for all powers that apply Wet" just because of the potential for the extra effects... and NOT doing that would have been an unbalanced boost to sets that apply Wet.

 

One my last bullet point above, players would start to argue that enemies with Wet status should take less damage from some attack types (e.g. Fire) and more damage from other types (e.g. Electric). Then folks might start wondering about other powers and effects. It's not so much a slippery slope as the edge of a cliff face.

[Snarky]

[BasiliskXVIII]

2 hours ago, tidge said:

One my last bullet point above, players would start to argue that enemies with Wet status should take less damage from some attack types (e.g. Fire) and more damage from other types (e.g. Electric). Then folks might start wondering about other powers and effects. It's not so much a slippery slope as the edge of a cliff face.

 

I have to admit that wet giving a bonus to cold was not at all my first instinctive guess. If anything I would have thought that it would react with electricity, similar to Baldur's Gate 3 where splashing someone with water makes you deal more lightning damage to them. However, since I was playing a storm/storm, it became pretty clear that my various lightning powers didn't seem to do anything special to a wet enemy. Dealing less fire damage was my next thought, but even without testing that, the idea that a water or storm blast character could just screw over a team by making things harder for fire characters to deal damage seemed unlikely.

[Octogoat]

https://media.tenor.com/9TOSR3fZBgsAAAAM/zoolander-ben-stiller.gif

[tidge]

1 hour ago, BasiliskXVIII said:

... the idea that a water or storm blast character could just screw over a team by making things harder for fire characters to deal damage seemed unlikely.

 

The current devs don't seem motivated to add either straight buffs(*1) or straight nerfs to current power sets, so I want to believe that it was recognized buffing cold via +Wet didn't fit things as is. IMO Marine is in the top tier, and Water Blast is well. I don't think there were any thoughts about making Fire do less damage to Wet enemies, mostly because I don't think the Wet concept was thoroughly considered. "Balance" is a handy reason to drop it altogether.... besides, CoH isn't Pokemon. The game already implements a straightforward method of type/positional resistances/defenses with no need to try to work "combo mechanics" from multiple different attack types.

 

(*1) There are "clumsy" mechanics that have been reworked/revised since relaunch of course. Water Blast even got a 'fix' with respect to how Tidal Power used to be able to be consumed without benefit.

[Frosticus]

As far as I remember the "wet" status was only granted an interaction with a single power (nitrogen) and never got past the phase of discovering which powers applied it (or should apply it).

 

Interactions with lightning such as spread, or  a steam burst from fire were never implemented or even indicated by the devs.

 

There was no indication that a wet target would take less fire damage, as that goes against pretty much everything in the game.

[tidge]

On 12/1/2024 at 2:48 PM, Frosticus said:

As far as I remember the "wet" status was only granted an interaction with a single power (nitrogen) and never got past the phase of discovering which powers applied it (or should apply it).

 

Interactions with lightning such as spread, or  a steam burst from fire were never implemented or even indicated by the devs.

 

There was no indication that a wet target would take less fire damage, as that goes against pretty much everything in the game.

 

All true, but...

 

...If a power's effect is going to apply any sort of net buff (to damage, to control) then it needs to get a "balance pass" which sometimes means that the power that could be granting the buff gets 'gimped', relative to similar powers. For this sort of proposed interaction with Wet, it would me more trouble than it is worth.

 

I mentioned the "Fire attacks may do less damage to Wet-affected critters", because once the game started to include such interactions like "Wet allows for Hold/Slow/Immob/KD/whatever when used with XXX, from anybody" players would naturally start asking for all sorts of other effects based on attack types... because Pokemon.

 

Ultimately my opinion was that it was a cute idea, but not a sustainable one to implement... unless TPTB were ok with a straight-up buff for (some combination of) characters.

[Frosticus]

I mean, that's certainly a thought process. Players ask for things all the time, some good, some bad.

 

I'm all for doom-casting and enjoy pretending the devs are out to ruin the game as much as the next guy, but it doesn't really hold up under scrutiny.

 

The closest recent comparison I can think of is static for Tesla cage and how elec manipulation for blasters is allowed to build it. It only has an interaction if you pair them. Did elec blast or  manip get nerfed as a result? Nah, elec manipulation is in the running for the strongest blaster secondary.