changeling?

[drbuzzard]

Ok, I'm kind of piecing this together from various mentions, but could someone explain in simple terms what this trick amounts to?

[Glacier Peak]

Just now, drbuzzard said:

Ok, I'm kind of piecing this together from various mentions, but could someone explain in simple terms what this trick amounts to?

 

[drbuzzard]

So, correct me if I'm wrong since it is not directly spelled out. There's a bug in shape shifting which recharges powers immediately and perhaps also cuts activation times. This allows flipping between optimal attacks to make a crushingly good attack chain. 

[Maelwys]

You're right it's not, that thread intentionally skirts around the whole "Infinity Changeling" thing (which is a stupid name that keeps making me imagine stuffing Garth Logan into a Von Neumann woodchipper) other than listing a few binds.

 

In short, swapping Kheldian forms essentially nullifies the remaining time of any currently active attack animations. So the effective animation time of each attack becomes a few tenths of a second (best case = two Arcanatime ticks IIRC) whilst still dealing full damage. Endurance consumption obviously skyrockets alongside damage output; but that can be mostly worked around via slotting +End procs in the form toggle powers.

 

The real headaches are that (i) it's a known bug, albeit one that the Devs have effectively said they're not going to discipline anyone for taking advantage of because Kheldians as a whole need a major rework and it's easier for them to just leave this bug in place for now (ii) the resulting graphical vomit from repeatedly form shifting several times every second looks utterly ridiculous and cannot be overridden with Prismatic costumes etc.

[drbuzzard]

Thanks. 

[Thraxen]

It is an exploit really.  Like Maelwys says though they know about it and not fixing atm.  I agree that it looks horrible and sounds even worse.  It also absolutely ruins immersion for me so never even tried it.   

[drbuzzard]

OK, respecced my WS into a build to use it. It does seem to work, and certainly improves damage over my former all human form build. However it certainly is hard on the eyes. I play with sound off so at least I was spared that part. There's also issues in getting stuck in a form you don't want and having to get back to human, but that could be dealt with given practice. 

 

It may well put khelds up in the DPS sweepstakes, but it doesn't really make we want to play mine. I'll wait on a revamp. 

[Maelwys]

32 minutes ago, drbuzzard said:

There's also issues in getting stuck in a form you don't want and having to get back to human, but that could be dealt with given practice. 

 

That issue is pretty easy to work around by tweaking your binds to detoggle any active forms prior to activating powers.

 

If you use static binds like the below then appending a command or two to the end of one or more of your movement keys that detoggles both Dwarf and Nova form can help.

/bind 1 "+$$powexec_toggleoff Bright Nova$$powexec_toggleon Bright Nova$$powexec_name Bright Nova Bolt"

 

If instead you use rotating keybind file loads (in order to trigger completely different command strings on keypress and keyrelease) then you'll always be calling the detoggle in the right place + so this should never be an issue in the first place (assuming that the actual loading of the bind files itself doesn't get out of sync... which it never should since you can always just include a few calls within the files for bind#1 to silently reset bind#2 back to its defaults and vice versa!)

 

[drbuzzard]

Appreciate the suggestion, and if I have a hankering to play the khelds again, I'll probably do it. 

[SableShrike]

Agreed on the graphical vomit.

 

My try at a changeling build lasted for a solid five minutes before I said “screw this” and dropped it.

 

I do have Big Stompy Boi on my Shade, but I don’t use it as a changeling.

 

I expect the devs will kill this during any real  Kheld revamp.  Given that, I can’t recommend anyone spend hours and millions of influence building around it.  A more traditional build will be far less affected by changes.

Edited January 2 by SableShrike

[Black_Assassin]

I can recommend putting in the hours and the influence. 

 

If you want to meaningfully contribute on a team and not be mostly deadweight, play infinity changeling.

 

If/when changes come, then at that time rebuild as necessary. Not like you don't have enough respecs to pull all uneeded IO's out in the change comes. 

 

Changeling has made washades playable again.

[tidge]

I don't use the Changeling exploit... although for certain solo content I can 100% understand why it would be appealing. On teams I find it a lot less important to maximize DPS for a Kheldian... this is just me, but I try to be engaged enough with the team and the content being played so that I don't feel like I'm "dead weight". I feel like I can generally swap forms quickly enough to do different things without leveraging the exploit.

 

As for when/if the "changeling exploit" would ever be prevented: I'm not entirely certain that it could be... perhaps by introducing some extra level of "handshaking" between the client and server? This is the sort of thing that strikes me as being a serious amount of work! I'm also not sure what the power's team's consensus is for how to scale up the (spawn clear times, at certain levels) performance of Kheldians without using the changeling exploit... so I feel like its the sort of thing we'll pretty much always have.

 

I have ideas how the Kheldian DPS (and thus clear times) could be improved (mostly by subtle tweaks to the Nova form powers) but my ideas would simply improve the Changeling Exploit.

[Thraxen]

It should be called glitch mode lol

[Laucianna]

It's 100% not needed to play or enjoy your kheldian, the same as if you decide to only play as a human form kheldian 💛

Yes it does almost triple your damage and increase your survivability but this game is SUPER easy, you don't need to do crazy damage to clear content, personally I have the single press binds for my Kheldian and just change the tempo of how fast I go depending on how I feel, I don't always go super speed as it's not needed, plus my fingers would kill me 😜 

I also wouldn't be put off trying it because of the eventual rework, Homecoming are not a triple A studio and these huge reworks are going to take a lot of time and from what I have heard, Kheldians aren't going to be looked at for a while (I would say minimal 2 years until looked at), since they aren't OP even when using the changeling binds to max effect, and the Kheldian community can be very vocal at times (Myself included 😄) 

[Black_Assassin]

14 hours ago, Laucianna said:

I have the single press binds for my Kheldian and just change the tempo of how fast I go depending on how I feel, I don't always go super speed as it's not needed, plus my fingers would kill me 😜 

 

 

QFT

 

 Mostly just pootle about usually at about 60-70% capacity. Feels like my fingers can sustain that for much longer than attempting to go full speed. That tends to be saved for instances of where there is an extreme imbalance in the 50s vs non-50s in the team, against an AV, or when there are other changelings in the team (you know who you are!). Then I feel a need. THE NEED FOR SPEED.

 

I must also add that I use a Razer Naga mouse. So all my actions are being triggered (mostly) by thumb presses. Hence why cannot go full speed for long time spans, as my thumb meat just gets over tenderised 😂

 

 

Otherwise, I just take it chill. 

 

I guess the binds just make the whole experience feel so much more fluid. The feel is more important than the actual raw numbers. As who are we kidding? We aren't going to out damage blasters any time soon.