Bring Balance to Homecoming

[Lines]

I think we need to do something about all these suggestion threads pretending to be general discussions.

 

*Picks up a chair to herd the thread back into the box*

[Skyhawke]

All I can say is...

 

 

[High_Beam]

All the response emoticons shall be his/hers.

[tidge]

4 hours ago, Lines said:

I think we need to do something about all these suggestion threads pretending to be general discussions.

 

But, but... the suggestions forum is only populated by negative-minded gate-keepers who only derive purpose in life by tarnishing the brilliant ideas of right-minded folks!

[dukedukes]

9 hours ago, Videra said:

 

He's right though lmao.

No? He's just making stuff up, sharing his fantasies basically. It's filled with logical fallacies, straw man, ad hom. Attacking competence and discrediting people instead of arguments. People essentially want more challenge and personal attacks is the best argument this thread has been able to muster up. I don't agree with some of the OP's points, I guess I better brush up on my personal attacks, lol...
 

9 hours ago, skoryy said:

 

I see we're redefining 'balance' and 'vile' in this here thread.

Extremely unpleasant behaviour is redefining vile? More fantasies from the emotional crowd.

[skoryy]

1 minute ago, dukedukes said:

Extremely unpleasant behaviour is redefining vile? More fantasies from the emotional crowd.

 

L O L

[Seed22]

10 hours ago, dukedukes said:

 

Could you be any more vile?

Uh oh! Someones not being excellent! Googly, do the thing!

Edited 6 hours ago by Seed22

[Seed22]

9 hours ago, Videra said:

 

He's right though lmao.

A hit dog will hollar and they're howling right now. Let em get it out, venting is good for the soul after all.

[Snarky]

5 hours ago, Lines said:

I think we need to do something about all these suggestion threads pretending to be general discussions.

 

*Picks up a chair to herd the thread back into the box*

i think you might get stuck mid plan...

[dukedukes]

48 minutes ago, Seed22 said:

A hit dog will hollar and they're howling right now. Let em get it out, venting is good for the soul after all.

 

Venting is certainly something you like to do, I hope you feel better. Let's follow Seed22's lead and keep attacking each other to be excellent I guess and not call out poor behaviour? Check my post history and you'll see no personal attacks. I look at yours and I see a very different and consistent picture. No credibility for you guys, sorry.

[battlewraith]

I can sympathize with what I take to be the OPs complaint--that almost everything in the game revolves around damage spam and that emphasis leads to absurd outcomes (eg players relying on insps for def) and a general devaluing of roles for different ATs.

 

Personally, I see this as the outcome of too much balance. The game is structured so that pretty much any AT or team composition can do perfectly well in the majority of the content.

Early on in the development, there may have been a time when the devs could've really embraced the notion that different ATs were necessary for something. Maybe there would've been content where controls were necessary for the successful completion of a mission, for example. I would've even liked to see a scenario where your character origin actually mattered. Maybe your science based character actually needs a magic-based support character to empower them to deal with certain threats. That ship has long since sailed. What we got was an emphasis on convenience and accessibility--if your character has a limitation it's trivial to find a way to patch it over. 

 

Ultimately, I don't think tweaks to the current state of affairs would really do much to address that issue. It would just aggravate people who are used to the way things are now.

[Snarky]

Yes the game, in the basic, relies in DPS.  Spoiler, every combat video game does.  
 

My “best” toon is a Fire Fire Fire Blaster.  I can tank 4/8 ITFs on it.  DPS wins. I play it regularly, it is not my main. 
 

My main is a Dark Dark Corruptor that is what I think my Snarky Vampire would be in game.  
 

What this game is, to me, is creating the characters in my head.  Not massive DPS or “beating da game” or w/e.  Badges are a fun group activity, and being helpful to the team is cool. But it is seeing my creations in game is the huge win.  

[skoryy]

5 minutes ago, Snarky said:

What this game is, to me, is creating the characters in my head.  Not massive DPS or “beating da game” or w/e.  Badges are a fun group activity, and being helpful to the team is cool. But it is seeing my creations in game is the huge win.

 

Can I hear an 'Amen!'

 

And can I get you over on Everlasting? Your snarky vampire and my young werewolf can go find an Abbott and Costello to terrify.

[dukedukes]

1 hour ago, battlewraith said:

Personally, I see this as the outcome of too much balance. The game is structured so that pretty much any AT or team composition can do perfectly well in the majority of the content.

Thank you for giving me hope in this forum, you brought up great points.

 

You're treating balance as nebulous here, really it's two different approaches: solo viability as a result of power creep (everyone does good damage and is tanky) vs AT identity (you excel at a specific thing). I only point this out because it's an unfair dismissal, the issue is created by the former approach while people are arguing for the latter, while both are 'balance'. A more balanced game toward improved AT identity and viability would arguably be a more interesting game in isolation, at least for people who like overcoming challenges. In reality though it's more complicated.

 

1 hour ago, battlewraith said:

Early on in the development, there may have been a time when the devs could've really embraced the notion that different ATs were necessary for something.

The position it's too late to change anything doesn't stand the test of time given things do change. A common dismissal of balance changes brings up the most extreme example someone can think of to point to the balance change as being 'pointless'. You're kind of doing this here by bringing us back to the early days of balance and potential decision making. The topic is not asking for 2004 COH, they're asking for smaller changes that push things in a direction they view as fostering better gameplay. They're not asking for a complete overhaul.

 

What I'm seeing the HC devs do in their approach is increase challenge with new content. Enemy revamps, new enemy types and mechanics. If enemies are more dangerous the AT roles become relevant again. We're going to see more changes in this direction and I think that's awesome, it's the best approach.
 

1 hour ago, battlewraith said:

Ultimately, I don't think tweaks to the current state of affairs would really do much to address that issue. It would just aggravate people who are used to the way things are now.

 

You're right, nerfs aggravate people, and balance changes in this direction should be treated very carefully. Let's not forget though the hypothetical world where nerfs don't happen does not exist. We recall tankers were nerfed last patch? So nerfs happen. Devs have several tools to try to improve the gameplay and nerfs are one of those tools. Sometimes you can solve an issue with other tools but every now and then a nerf is what makes the most sense, unfortunately for some. You can disagree on the root issue of a nerf but arguing against nerfs as a tool is a lost cause.

[Troo]

22 hours ago, Mopery said:

Why insist on buying a Yugo, when you have the means to buy a Ferrari?

 

"the Yugo is gaining ground on the collector car market"

"they can be fixed “with a butter knife and a rubber band.”"..

 

 

.."Some will argue that’s a good thing, because it needed mechanical attention on a regular basis."

[ZeeHero]

The OP is just a fun hater and I hope the devs are intelligent enough to ignore him.

I do partially agree about MM though, it still needs help. Mostly in pet management QOL than anything else.

[Ukase]

23 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Limit the /ah command to game masters only.

Why in the blue hell would you want to do this? And why would a GM even need this if the players can't use it? Is that a case of rank having privileges? That's a slippery slope. 

How in the world do you think this would add balance to a game that has never had any balance? What does that word even mean? I'll tell you. It means about 5,368 different things to the 5368 people that play this game. And yeah, I pulled that number out of thin air. 

 

23 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Lower the in-game e-mail storage back down to 20 like it was on live.

Let's reduce the inf cap to 100k while we're at it. Dude, what in the world am I supposed to do with the inf I have stored in those emails? Buy a bunch of winter packs that will take me even longer to open? I still haven't opened all of them from the last time they were on sale! I know, I'll bid on non-existing items like Iron Will, and next patch, they'll get snuck in and I'll have blown 700 Billion on Iron Wills. Yay me. 

 

23 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Make non-weapon ranged damage power set nukes crash again.

I don't really care what they do with procs, but some consideration needs to be considered about them. Is it rational to have a proc in a power where it won't fire but the minimal 5% of the time? No. So why is it in that set that goes into that power? If you can slot it in a power, it should work every time it passes a toHit check. And that should all be clear to the player before they slot it. 

Let me get this straight. You want people to log in, and not enjoy the game. Am I smelling what you're cooking? 
If that's what balance looks like, I don't want it. 

As for MM pets being the same level, that's a no-brainer, and should have been done before they were released.
Incarnate stuff being only in incarnate content? Fine by me. I rarely use them outside of incarnate stuff because when I'm 50, other than the labyrinth, I'm only doing incarnate stuff. (except maybe for a weekly, but even then most of those are sub level 45 and you can't use them anyway.)

 

Controller ranged modifier increased? Fine by me, but it doesn't need to be increased. Why? My plant/natty and plant/dark were chewing up mobs at 0/8 at level 26-28. Couldn't quite handle +2 with the natty, but the dark had more options for more recharge, and chewed through the +2 easily. Granted, not every controller primary is plant, but if you raise it across the board, some other adjustments would need to be made. 

And all of that effort would just result in masses of people despising the changes. For what? Balance? None of those changes would balance the game. Blasters would still be king of damage. Tanks would still be kings of survivability. Corruptors would still scourge. All your proposed balance changes would do is piss off 90% of the players. And the other 10% should probably remind themselves of how boring it was with 2 accs, 3 damage, 1 recharge or some similar variation in their slotting. 

CoH somehow rose from the ashes mainly because of it's people. Not because of the game balance that never existed. (at least, not for me) 
Right now is as close as anyone can get to feeling super in this game, and you want to take it away? How does that help you have more fun? 


Say you got all those things, and suddenly your version of balance is in game. How does that help me have more fun? Or you? Does my accessing the AH from a remote floating island in ouroboros foul up your playing experience? 
Does my blaster using blizzard and then having to retoggle everything help you enjoy your game in some way? How? 

How does limiting emails have anything to do with game play? I hear about people putting ultimates and such in their email. I've never done it. I don't have room for that trash. I have an insp tray for that garbage. I doubt many people use email for that. In battle, they open their email and have to scroll through and find the right insp? That's just madness. It doesn't even make sense why anyone would need to do that. But hey, people do things that don't make sense to me all the time, and I can't assume my experience is typical. But that's the only thing I can think of that you're trying to prevent - people using email for inspirations. There's easier and better ways to stop that. 

I kind of think this whole post was just trolling, it's just so bad. Balance? Madness you mean. Insanity. 

[skoryy]

8 minutes ago, Ukase said:

I kind of think this whole post was just trolling,

 

Bringing real balance to Homecoming would be disabling 'Win Of The Day' and any tracking of reactions and replies.

[macskull]

49 minutes ago, skoryy said:

Bringing real balance to Homecoming would be disabling 'Win Of The Day' and any tracking of reactions and replies.

Entirely nuking the forums would

probably be a simpler and better option, since the GMs seem to have zero desire to actually action bad apples in any meaningful way.

[Fade]

One thing I agree with the OP about is the issue of inspiration storage. I think it is bad to allow players to ignore the inventory limit on inspirations as long as they are dedicated enough to load up their email ahead of time. It incentivizes monotonous actions to play at the optimum levels with what I would consider to be an abuse of a communications system.

But I wouldn't try to solve it the way the OP does, which puts a limit on everyone else's capacity to use the email system. Instead, I'd propose a limit to accessing email attachments to wherever the /ah command is currently accessible, which I believe is only in the "publicly accessible" city/isles zones. This wouldn't completely eliminate the playstyle of using inspirations as the primary mode of defense, which I think is the OP's goal (although I think the OP's proposed changes wouldn't be able to do that either), but I think it would at least make it harder to ignore a hard limit on the number of inspirations you're allowed to have stocked up in a single mission. Players would still be able to reload all of their inspirations between missions (which I think is a fair and intended behavior, considering the availability of inspirations from NPCs and the auction house), and they could even leave a mission partway through to reload their inspirations if they needed to (which would be absolute anathema to speedrunners and highly efficient players).

 

If you really wanted to curb the power of defensive inspirations, you'd actually have to address the source - the defense inspirations themselves. Maybe some kind of diminishing returns on stacking them. I don't think that needs to be implemented, though. Players who want to play with defensive inspirations should be able to do so. They just shouldn't be able to bypass a limitation the rest of us have while they do it.

 

I'm not going to go line-by-line on the OP's post, but I think I disagree with most of the rest of it.

Edited 1 hour ago by Fade
I have to remember to put more line breaks between paragraphs for legibility

[macskull]

1 minute ago, Fade said:

They just shouldn't be able to bypass a limitation the rest of us have while they do it.

Every player has the exact same limitations. You refusing to do something because you don’t like it is not the same as that option being unavailable to you.

 

At the end of the day though, does it really matter if a player is using emails as inspiration storage? All that extra work for slightly faster completion times? No.

[ZeeHero]

1 hour ago, skoryy said:

 

Bringing real balance to Homecoming would be disabling 'Win Of The Day' and any tracking of reactions and replies.

Yeah it serves no purpose. a popular opinion is not neccessarily a correct one.

[Ghost]

32 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:

Yeah it serves no purpose. a popular opinion is not neccessarily a correct one.

The award is not for the most correct opinion of the day - it’s for the one that generates the most reactions.  This, the most popular.