Balance

[Troo]

9 hours ago, MoonSheep said:

nearly 6 years haven't made any adjustments to regen

4 hours ago, Skyhawke said:

Balance Regen. 

3 hours ago, Captain Fabulous said:

Patience, grasshopper.

3 hours ago, FFTMime said:

Remember when Regen got nerfed 3 times in the span of less than a year

2 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

current state of Regen,

 

 

[Glacier Peak]

Regen Regeneration 

[DarknessEternal]

This is Blizzard saying their players don't want Classic.  Then finally making Classic and it being overwhelmingly more popular than the modern game.

 

These developers are idiots and you should not play their game.

[Latex]

Well balance in CoH revolves around debuffs, I'd say -RES is the most powerful debuff (maybe -Regen, idk), when I see my Battle Axe critting for 2400 on a debuffed target that defines my fun, it's fun to just smack stuff as hard as possible, bigger number better, this is an RPG and all RPG's since the dawn of time rely on bigger number better it is the entire progression system of every RPG ever.

There are outliers that are flat out terrible in terms of... everything, no matter how you IO build them, they'll always be terrible. Psi Melee, Regen, to name a couple off the top of my head. I'd love to use Psi, it has some cool unique animations but it's so utterly unfun for someone who likes the RPG staple of 'bigger number better'.

I'm all for total revamps of drastically bad outliers like Psi and Regen. Some powersets need a rethink from the ground up to be competitive and thus fun for many. You will be hard pressed to find someone who finds the weakest powersets fun in any other RPG, DnD session or anything 'I like this, but I wish it was a bit better.'

[PoptartsNinja]

4 minutes ago, Latex said:

I'd love to use Psi, it has some cool unique animations but it's so utterly unfun for someone who likes the RPG staple of 'bigger number better'.

If you haven't, try it on a Stalker. It trades the awful Psi Blade Sweep for Assassin's Psi Blade, giving it an extra, strong, fast-animating single target option that makes it pretty good at killing big single targets.

 

It'll never be an AoE powerhouse, but Stalker Psi is less single-target focused than Stalker Kinetic Melee. I'd argue that the Stalker version of both Psi and Kinetic Melee are huge improvements over the 'standard' versions of the set, and that both are in a solid B+/A- range.

[Captain Fabulous]

15 hours ago, battlewraith said:

 

I think that kind of sums up the problem though. "Every AT with any combination of powersets will have a place at the table" in practical terms means a bland sameness to the game. There will still be favorites, but the end goal is to make characters broadly interchangeable. And the things that might make a specific set or build stand out get nerfed into mediocrity so that nobody else feels insecure that their character 's performance in general.

 

An example of this mindset, for me is impale. Back in the early days, impale had a long range like a sniper. It was a cool little feature that I liked about the set. Then at some point the devs nerfed the range "to bring it in line with other ranged attacks blah blah blah," Why? It's not like impale was a super damaging power that was upsetting game balance. It just fell prey to this impulse to put everything into neat little predictable boxes. 

 

I has hoped early on that the different sets would be given different zones or TFs or somewhere that they would shine, Instead they went with the assumption that the entire game is one table(except for pvp) where anything should perform at the same level in any context.

 

 

It's not really what that means tho. Sets can be functionally different in terms of how they play while being functionally similar in their effectiveness, and in that just as useful to a team as any other. I think the HC devs are far more willing to create unique mechanics and innovative sets than the live devs, who were painfully insistent on every single set in an AT following the same cookie cutter mold.

[Captain Fabulous]

13 hours ago, battlewraith said:

Back in the day I had a dm/inv scrapper and it was badass, I could herd all of the wolves on that one AV map and bring them all over to the corner where the blasters would nuke them. If you were one of the people waiting, you'd see this writhing carpet of wolves approaching. People want fun. They want something epic. And they will always seek out the option that is different, the one that allows them to outperform in a cool way. 

 

Under those circumstances, you expect the cool thing to be nerfed. Even things that are just somewhat overperforming get nerfed. When that happens, the fun experience is gone. Nobody gets anything positive out of it--people just don't have a reason to be jealous of other players. But that type of player just thinks perfect balance is wonderful. Unfortunately, I think they are the easiest to please.

But this is not sustainable, which is why every MMO nerfs such things. Remember when this game became City of AE? I do. And I'm glad AE was nerfed into near-oblivion because it pushed a huge chunk of people back into doing normal content again. So yeah, mega AE and map herding may have been great fun for those who partook (and back in the day I was one of them), but it really sucked for those who didn't, who just wanted to play normal content but couldn't.

Balance doesn't only apply to powersets and DPS numbers, it also means doing what's best for the majority of a game's playerbase to ensure the continued health and longevity of the game.

[Riverdusk]

17 hours ago, battlewraith said:

 

Back in the day I had a dm/inv scrapper and it was badass, I could herd all of the wolves on that one AV map and bring them all over to the corner where the blasters would nuke them. If you were one of the people waiting, you'd see this writhing carpet of wolves approaching. People want fun. They want something epic. And they will always seek out the option that is different, the one that allows them to outperform in a cool way. 

 

Under those circumstances, you expect the cool thing to be nerfed. Even things that are just somewhat overperforming get nerfed. When that happens, the fun experience is gone. Nobody gets anything positive out of it--people just don't have a reason to be jealous of other players. But that type of player just thinks perfect balance is wonderful. Unfortunately, I think they are the easiest to please.

 

Exactly as @Captain Fabulous said.  Perfect example of different definitions of fun for different people.  Waiting around for a scrapper/tank to herd the entire map (usually to the infamous dumpster) for the blasters to then annihilate everything in 2 seconds I found was the most boring thing imaginable to me.  I avoided those teams like the plague back in the day.  Problem was that it wasn't the 'different' option, it became the norm.  It got hard to find teams that weren't playing that way.  At least that is how I remember it, I found myself more and more playing solo and at one point quit the game entirely for a while from boredom.  

 

You can still get what I'd call a similar play experience to that now if you want though (honestly seems very similar to modern day farming to me).  However, teams seem more varied in what they are doing now a days, at least compared to that time period.  So personally I chalk that up as a 'balance' win, imo.

Edited March 22 by Riverdusk

[tidge]

6 hours ago, Riverdusk said:

 

 Waiting around for a scrapper/tank to herd the entire map (usually to the infamous dumpster) for the blasters to then annihilate everything in 2 seconds I found was the most boring thing imaginable to me.

 

To add to the hate for those Unai farms, factor in the time wasted waiting to recruit a player at a "bridge level".

[American Decoy]

At the end of the day, I take my blue jeans off by balancing on one foot, one foot at a time. 

 

 

That's enough balance for me.

[Blastit]

On 3/21/2025 at 4:52 PM, battlewraith said:

 

Back in the day I had a dm/inv scrapper and it was badass, I could herd all of the wolves on that one AV map and bring them all over to the corner where the blasters would nuke them. If you were one of the people waiting, you'd see this writhing carpet of wolves approaching. People want fun. They want something epic. And they will always seek out the option that is different, the one that allows them to outperform in a cool way. 

 

Under those circumstances, you expect the cool thing to be nerfed. Even things that are just somewhat overperforming get nerfed. When that happens, the fun experience is gone. Nobody gets anything positive out of it--people just don't have a reason to be jealous of other players. But that type of player just thinks perfect balance is wonderful. Unfortunately, I think they are the easiest to please.

 

The reason this was "cool" was because it completely upended the difficulty balance and the effort:reward ratio balance, though.

 

 

The eternal problem of discussing balanced gameplay is that some people use it to mean "any given option will overall deliver on its gameplay fantasy without feeling like you're wasting your time and being a hindrance to your team (with caveats for circumstances that gameplay fantasy is inherently bad at)" and some use it to mean "everything is exactly the same".

 

Additionally, people are just psychologically different. Some people genuinely just think that seeing lots of wolves is SO COOL and can do that for hours every day while other people want varied and challenging gameplay and would honestly imprison the first group if they could. It's like how last I played Hearthstone the eternal battle was between players who wanted their choices to matter and players who just wanted to see things happen.