[OPEN BETA] Patch Notes for May 31st, 2025 - Issue 28, Page 2 - Build 3

[Electronuts]

On 6/2/2025 at 9:29 AM, Wavicle said:

Of course they are, Tanker damage got nerfed. I would be concerned if they WEREN’T slowing slower clear times.

The change comes along with increased arc / radius and target cap on many powers, so it could have been intended as no overall impact, but as far as I can tell they have not stated the intented outcome on this one. I can see that sets like SS would be hit worse than others, as they dont gain from the increased radius and target cap, it is just a straight nerf across every power from a weaker Rage.

 

It would be useful if all the changes had a little bit of commentary on what the intentions were.

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Riverdusk said:

But sure, everyone pick apart my attempt at some testing and ignore the bigger point.

If a test is invalid, then it's invalid.  And your test is very emphatically invalid because you are not using the full range of your available powers nor dealing the damage a lvl 40 troller is capable of dealing.

If your test is invalid, then there is no bigger point to be had.

[ivanhedgehog]

4 hours ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

Hello everyone.

 

Wanted to drop a quick note on the regeneration changes. 

 

These changes are in average of negligible impact. On a level 50 minion, this increases average regeneration rate by 1.795 HP per second. On a boss regeneration goes up from 5.59 HP per second to 10.7.

 

Neither of these will shift a fight on either direction. What this change does, and is intended to do, is enable content designers to use regeneration buffs as a durability stat on critters instead of just slapping resistances to everything. It simply gives them one more tool to work with.

 

An example that was found thanks to players testing these changes are Arachnoid enemy units. A minion has a 800% regen buff. With these changes, the regen buff can be lowered to 200% for a similar net effect. It also allows content designers to create critters that can more easily share the same power.

 

There are always chances that some other units have extremely high regeneration buffs, and that is why we are testing this: so those can be located and addressed.

 

As of today, we have a beefy report to go through but there is still a chance some units may be missing, so keep your eyes for anything you see that is regenerating unnaturally fast.

 

There is a very high chance this wont make it in page 2, or at least not on the initial rollout, as the number of critters that already need adjusting is higher than the mission content team feels comfortably tweaking on a short notice. So, unless you love running farms where you give your critters instant healing, you not have to worry about these changes from a farming point of view.

if they are so negligible, why are you doing them? does this change add anything of value to the game? Does this somehow add any balance to the game?

[lemming]

3 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

if they are so negligible, why are you doing them? does this change add anything of value to the game? Does this somehow add any balance to the game?

If you read the entire post, the Captain explains the why.

[ivanhedgehog]

4 minutes ago, lemming said:

If you read the entire post, the Captain explains the why.

they already HAVE regeneration. what does doubling it change? Its not like they never had it. they didnt add regeneration, they doubled it.

[Riverdusk]

8 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

If a test is invalid, then it's invalid.  And your test is very emphatically invalid because you are not using the full range of your available powers nor dealing the damage a lvl 40 troller is capable of dealing.

If your test is invalid, then there is no bigger point to be had.

 

I was interested in seeing how the change affected the typical main damage power of quite a few of my controllers.  I isolated other variables and tested how it affected that power and it noticeably made it worse.   Hence suggested a slight buff to it (speeding up the dot, something many have suggested in the past even prior to this change).  I personally think It is a little hard to suggest changes to individual powers without testing those powers in isolation.   If everyone is calling testing that way invalid though, I won't bother sharing those tests anymore, simple.

 

However, I guess I can say I believe the power that makes up the bulk of my single target attack chain being negatively affected is going to slow down defeat times.   I don't need to throw in my other, also anemic, single target damage powers, to believe that.   Especially since they are powers that many controllers may not even slot to be damage powers (the hold) or not necessarily taken or part of the primary (pool powers).  

 

Vast majority of my characters kill things fast enough that critters don't have any chance to really regen anyway.  For most characters the change really is negligible, was just trying to highlight some cases where it might not be (mostly my controllers).  Anyway, devs will do what they'll do, I'll adjust or move on.

[Dragotect]

2 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

If a test is invalid, then it's invalid.  And your test is very emphatically invalid because you are not using the full range of your available powers nor dealing the damage a lvl 40 troller is capable of dealing.

If your test is invalid, then there is no bigger point to be had.

A test that minimizes variables to isolate the impact of a change will never be considered invalid. In fact, they're among the most valid tests you can find. That isn't to say the opposite isn't valid though. If throwing all the powers at it produces no noticeable difference, then there doesn't need to be a change. As I stated before, to do so is specifically targeting the players/characters who don't have the damage output to deal with the regen, who were already having the worst of baseline critter regen before the change doubled it.

While it would be nice to have regen, HP pool, defense, and resistance to tweak... it perhaps shouldn't be a blanket thing? I could see making a new villain group for a new TF have high regen so suddenly -def and -res isn't as effective of a tool to bring them down. But to double it for EVERY critter in the game is a bad idea. It's like doubling the resistance of EVERY critter in the game. Or doubling defense of EVERY critter in the game. It just isn't the way you balance encounters. You have to be surgical with those changes, ideally I would hope the changes would be thematic too. IE, it doesn't make sense for a Council grunt to have doubled regen... but maybe the Vampyrs (but don't double it, maybe increased by 12.5%)?

[skoryy]

On 6/2/2025 at 12:04 AM, lemming said:

I will note that I took my Elec/Time Controller thru a mission just to check out the new control bits and the noticeable difference was I blew thru it.   I wasn't doing anything very difficult, but this is something that should be tested, not just read.

 

Yeah, my Elec/Time can blow through Council at +4/x8 now.  Still have to be careful about aggroing extra spawns, but she can handle one easy.

[Doc_Scorpion]

2 hours ago, Riverdusk said:

I was interested in seeing how the change affected the typical main damage power of quite a few of my controllers.  I isolated other variables and tested how it affected that power and it noticeably made it worse. 

You didn't "isolate other variables" - by not using your full spectrum of available powers, you created an unrealistic test that's not representative of the actual combat capability of a lvl 40 controller against a high level mob.  As such, the test is invalid for supporting the claim that the changes to critter regeneration have hampered the combat abilities of the toon in question.

 

2 hours ago, Dragotect said:

A test that minimizes variables to isolate the impact of a change will never be considered invalid.  In fact, they're among the most valid tests you can find. 

True - if the test is well designed.  As I explain above (and others have pointed out), the test was not well designed for its intended purpose.   It was the equivalent of "isolating the variables" by pulling the spark plug wires from four of the five cylinders of my car's engine.  If I did that and them complained that it could no longer make highway speeds, you'd be quite right in looking askance at my complaint.

Meanwhile, in an actual functional test using the full spectrum of his powers, my level 36 controller is barely inconvenienced if at all.
 

[Maelwys]

9 hours ago, Electronuts said:

The change comes along with increased arc / radius and target cap on many powers, so it could have been intended as no overall impact

 

Unfortunately there are no net arc / radius increases.

The global increase from gauntlet was removed, and instead each AoE (with a radius <15ft) had its base radius increased. As a result, Radius stayed the same but Arc actually decreased (so melee cones hit less targets) and the base damage of each affected attack was lowered (because they had their Area of Effect adjusted without their damage being renormalized again afterwards) and the likelihood of Procs to kick in on them was reduced (as Base radius is a factor in PPM calculations).

 

Then on top of that you have the separate "overcap" damage reductions: if an AoE has a target cap of 16 on Tankers but 10 on other ATs , regardless of radius, then targets #11-16 on Tankers will take vastly reduced damage. With an even harsher curve on Cones that have a target cap of 10 on Tankers but 5 on other ATs.

 

Taken all together it's not a pretty picture. There are even some Cones - such as Staff's Guarded Spin - which you can hit 10 targets with on Brainstorm and still deal less overall damage than hitting 5 targets with them on Live (and that's before you even consider the reduced proc rates!)
 

Edited June 4 by Maelwys

[Riverdusk]

Well, I signed on and was doing more testing, at least of using all the plant powers, but then remembered (and double checked with power analyzer) the changes have already been reverted, for now.  Interestingly enough even without the health regen changes the killing times were slower on test than live, by a non-negligible amount (wasn't even testing with procs in creepers either).  Not sure exactly why, but only ran it twice, so may have been fluky.  Anyway, will have to wait until the health regen thing comes around again I guess.  

 

Or maybe I should try electric control now with the way people are talking about it.

 

 

 

Edited June 4 by Riverdusk

[Dragotect]

1 hour ago, Riverdusk said:

Well, I signed on and was doing more testing, at least of using all the plant powers, but then remembered (and double checked with power analyzer) the changes have already been reverted, for now.  Interestingly enough even without the health regen changes the killing times were slower on test than live, by a non-negligible amount (wasn't even testing with procs in creepers either).  Not sure exactly why, but only ran it twice, so may have been fluky.  Anyway, will have to wait until the health regen thing comes around again I guess.  

 

Or maybe I should try electric control now with the way people are talking about it.

 

 

 

I'm not 100% sure if plant does -regen, but that could be why. The -regen resistance buffs are still on minion-boss critters. Which would mean regen rates are slightly higher, making it slightly longer to take things down. Slightly being the key word there, but even slightly adds up if you're taking down 100+ things.

Also, this is the insanity of balancing MMOs. Yeah, electric control could very well be the new meta so if you aren't testing that your test is invalid /s.

Edited June 4 by Dragotect

[Dragotect]

7 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

True - if the test is well designed.  As I explain above (and others have pointed out), the test was not well designed for its intended purpose.   It was the equivalent of "isolating the variables" by pulling the spark plug wires from four of the five cylinders of my car's engine.  If I did that and them complained that it could no longer make highway speeds, you'd be quite right in looking askance at my complaint.

Meanwhile, in an actual functional test using the full spectrum of his powers, my level 36 controller is barely inconvenienced if at all.
 

False analogy. What they were doing would be akin to visually inspecting each spark plug to find out why one of your cylinders isn't firing. Not the worst thing to happen to a car, but a cylinder that isn't firing WILL have an impact on speed and mileage. Even if you might not notice it, unless you're paying attention. And I know this to be a fact as I had a cylinder not firing on one of my cars and never noticed until I went to fill up and got about 20% less MPG. If I hadn't been tracking my MPG, I never would have known until enough, or the right ones, failed that it DID become noticeable.

And the culprit? A bad spark plug.

No way you cut it, the test was good. They chose a power that hadn't been altered by other changes in the patch, so the damage output would be the same. They picked a level where they could survive a battle of attrition with relative ease to test the regen rate. They picked a critter with a large enough health pool that it has a chance to regen. And, most importantly, they weren't testing take down time. They were testing regen rate.

It would be stupid to test take down times with ONE power. I tested take down times on a fully kitted out brute and found instances where it WAS very noticeable (master illusionists and high HP pooled bosses) as regen scales with length of encounter AND the initial health pool. It wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the goal for the change was to make encounters "harder" (read take longer), if it wasn't specifically noticeable on a damage AT that are already the harder ones in the game.

Edited June 4 by Dragotect

[DarknessEternal]

9 hours ago, skoryy said:

 

Yeah, my Elec/Time can blow through Council at +4/x8 now.  Still have to be careful about aggroing extra spawns, but she can handle one easy.

At level 25?  I doubt it.  

 

This change triples Minion regeneration and doubles Lt and Boss regeneration.  At low levels, regeneration was already very noticeable.  This change is oppressive.

 

A better change, if one even needs to be made at all, would be to scale the increased regen instead of making it static.

 

I'm of the opinion this change is unnecessary though.  It punishes the non-optimized and weak.  Making the weak weaker is a way to drive off players.

Edited June 4 by DarknessEternal

[Dragotect]

3 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

At level 25?  I doubt it.  

 

This change triples Minion regeneration and doubles Lt and Boss regeneration.  At low levels, regeneration was already very noticeable.  This change is oppressive.

Luckily it was reversed in favor of just keeping the -regen resistance buff (which will have a much slighter impact).

This is the fundamental of issue of MMO balance. There are so many considerations that should be addressed. What level? What AT of the over one dozen ATs? What powersets of the thousands of combinations of powersets? Is it solo or team play? Is it PvP or PvE? Is it endgame content? What kind of critter? Is it worth buffing standard critters instead of spending time to develop new mechanics for high end critters like AVs and GMs to make more challenging NEW content?

I have come to the conclusion that MMO balance is just impossible.

Edited June 4 by Dragotect

[DarknessEternal]

1 minute ago, Dragotect said:

Luckily it was reversed in favor of just keeping the -regen resistance buff (which will have a much slighter impact).

No, he said it might be reversed for this patch only.  Only maybe and only temporarily.

[Dragotect]

2 minutes ago, DarknessEternal said:

No, he said it might be reversed for this patch only.  Only maybe and only temporarily.

Hopefully meaning it would be a more targeted approach (as they also mentioned they didn't have time to do a critter by critter basis). Thematically it could make sense for some standard mobs to have better regen, while it makes terrible sense to do a blanket change.

But yeah, if it comes up that they want to do a blanket change in the next patch, all the same valid reasons to not do it this time will still exist and I'll be sure to bring them up again. They'll need a GOOD reason to do this.

[skoryy]

1 hour ago, DarknessEternal said:

At level 25?  I doubt it.  

 

No, at 50.  Who's running +4/x8 at 25 even?  If you're running at a difficulty level where minion regen matters at 25, that's more a you problem than a dev one.

[Captain Powerhouse]

Just clarifying, the -regen change was reverted but only temporarily. It will be coming back either next page or on a post-launch patch. There is just not enough time to evaluate the full list of impacted critters that we compiled.

[Doc_Scorpion]

5 hours ago, Dragotect said:

It would be stupid to test take down times with ONE power.

Yet, that's exactly what they did, and exactly what you're defending - they attempted to take down a boss with a single power to test take down on Beta as compared to Live.  (And even admitted it was only just barely possible on Live.)

 

5 hours ago, Dragotect said:

It wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the goal for the change was to make encounters "harder" (read take longer), if it wasn't specifically noticeable on a damage AT that are already the harder ones in the game.

The OP didn't demonstrate that it was specifically noticeable because they didn't test under actual conditions.

Meanwhile, I did do so (prior to the revert) - using the full suite of powers available to my SO only lvl 36 controller.  Completion times were not significantly/noticeably longer.  (Which jibes with what Captain Powerhouse said yesterday, the increase isn't actually as significant as the overblown rhetoric here indicates.)

Since the changes have been reverted, I've said my last on this topic.

[Riverdusk]

Probably going to regret this, but getting back into it again.  The point of my test wasn't to show "clear times".  Maybe I wasn't obvious enough, but the point was to test how increased mob health regen specifically affected long slow dot damage powers, in a disproportion way compared to more instant damage powers.  Throwing in other plant powers isn't going to help a test looking for the affect on long slow dots specifically.

 

When it takes 9 seconds for a power to do its damage and a mobs health regen gets increased a significant amount, it is going to hurt that power more than one that does its damage instantly.  That was my main theory.  I thought it was pretty obvious of a point, but maybe some think dots are just as good as an instant damage power.  Hence testing and then asking specifically if they could look at speeding up the DoT on that one power.  

 

Also, I probably confused things by also saying that some extra -regen in something would be nice, which I shouldn't have thrown in there, although it'd still be nice. 

 

Honestly would still be happy if they'd just speed up that stupid DoT.  Do note that most DoT powers in the game do bonus damage compared to their instant damage alternatives, but controller tier 1's do the same whether dot or instant, which I think violates a basic game formula.  So, even on that point alone I think the slow DoT's should be either sped up or given a damage bonus.  But that's a different discussion, but one that I have brought up before in the past.

 

If people think that is still looking at things in too much of a vacuum or whatever, fine.  They can rip into as much as they want of course.

 

As noted, I also was in the middle of doing a test on "clear times" as well, when the changes were reverted.  That is a different test.  It can also be different even on that one depending on whether you include secondary powers, pool powers, incarnate powers, temp powers, even loading up on red inspirations.  People can test for different things using different parameters.  If someone doesn't think it is a useful test then remember people are free to do their own. 

 

 

[Riverdusk]

7 hours ago, Dragotect said:

I'm not 100% sure if plant does -regen, but that could be why. The -regen resistance buffs are still on minion-boss critters. Which would mean regen rates are slightly higher, making it slightly longer to take things down. Slightly being the key word there, but even slightly adds up if you're taking down 100+ things.

Also, this is the insanity of balancing MMOs. Yeah, electric control could very well be the new meta so if you aren't testing that your test is invalid /s.

 

Thanks, but I think it finally dawned on me, at least part of it.  I noticed sometimes my fly trap didn't seem to be doing anything on my test server run.  I forgot about the new controller commands so it was probably on defensive mode by default.  From experience as a mastermind I know if you don't get attacked for a while and a pet is in defensive they will stop attacking even in the middle of a fight until you get attacked again.  This can happen when all the mobs are controlled or slowed enough.

 

On live controller pets are pretty much default "aggressive" mode, behind the scenes.  

 

But yes, it'll actually be nice to have the regen buff separated so it can be tested better on its own without all these other massive changes making things harder to parse.

[Doc_Scorpion]

30 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

Thanks, but I think it finally dawned on me, at least part of it.  I noticed sometimes my fly trap didn't seem to be doing anything on my test server run.  I forgot about the new controller commands so it was probably on defensive mode by default. 

Yeah, even though I'm an experienced MM player, that bit me in the butt a few times too...  Not used to playing 'troller and having to think like an MM.  It's going to be a big adjustment for folks, especially since MM is usually judged to be one of the more difficult ATs to play because of the need to pay attention to the pet's combat stance.

[GM Crumpet]

5 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Yeah, even though I'm an experienced MM player, that bit me in the butt a few times too...  Not used to playing 'troller and having to think like an MM.  It's going to be a big adjustment for folks, especially since MM is usually judged to be one of the more difficult ATs to play because of the need to pay attention to the pet's combat stance.

Oddly I find MM's easy. Highlight an enemy, click the pet attack button. I don't find the considerable number of macros useful. and I've never had the need to use the bodyguard feature. 

[Riverdusk]

1 minute ago, GM Crumpet said:

Oddly I find MM's easy. Highlight an enemy, click the pet attack button. I don't find the considerable number of macros useful. and I've never had the need to use the bodyguard feature. 

 

For me, I think it really depends on difficulty settings.  On low to moderate settings I find they are the easiest AT to play because you can pretty much go on cruise control.  At high to max difficulty settings they can start to be really hard for me as I find micromanagement can become more and more important.