Are Carrion Creepers broken ?

[Heatstroke]

I know a lot of changes were made with Carrion Creepers that changed how Procs work in them but it feels to me like something is way off. 

Maybe its just a visual thing but in the past before update you would get a carrion creeper for almost every foe in the area. Lately i'll attack a group of three and there is one vine. Or attacking a large group ( say 6-8 ) i'll ony get three vines. Is the damage still being applied? I cant tell. Sometimes ill get a " good " amount of creepers and sometimes I get very few. 

 

It also seems like it is taking a LONG Time to spawn anything.  The effect of the vines moving is cool and all but sometimes it seems as if they stop behind me and dont engage the mob in front of me properly as they did before.. Also the patch will often sit there and spawn nothing for a while.. Sometimes I'll defeat the mobd before it spawns anything. 

 

To me is was better that they just popped up in front of me rather than trying to make this " Cool " graphic follow me which seems to make it worse.. 

[Black_Assassin]

Welcome to playing a set that got nuked

[Psyonico]

2 minutes ago, Black_Assassin said:

Welcome to playing a set that got nuked

Here's an entirety of the patch notes for Carrion Creepers:

 

Carrion Creepers

• VFX now moves along with the pet patch.
• Carrion Creepers can now proc Domination, Containment and Overpower.
• This power should no longer execute an excessive proc cascade.
• Vines should now be able to trigger Containment (for reals this time)

 

Nothing about that says anything about the vines spawning less.  I haven't played a ton of plant since the patch, but in my limited testing it didn't feel like the vines were spawning much less than pre-patch.

[tidge]

Disclosure: I had gotten as much fun out of Plant Control as I wanted long before the i28p2 changes, so I only did a little bit of revisiting of that set with the i28p2 changes,

 

My take, w.r.t Carrion Creepers, was that the part of the power that made replication/extra-spawning of the creepers work was essentially responsible for the incredibly reliable %proc chances (upon each extra-spawn). I do believe that some on the dev team have a little more sensitivity to %damage from procs than I do, so while they aren't wholesale nerfing %procs, they have been tweaking powers and effects that have been extraordinarily good at getting more damage from %procs. There are some pseudopets that are still pretty good (and not really lopsided, IMO), some that are mediocre, and some that can take %procs but won't ever trigger the procs they can take. I feel that Carrion Creepers was in the 'lopsided' category and now it is closer to the piss-poor end of the 'mediocre' category.

 

If a player experiments with different types of (pseudopet) powers and consults City of Data to see the power coding, it is possible for the player to get a sense of what effects can trigger %procs, if they need accuracy, areas of affect, etc. In the specific case of Carrion Creepers it looks like the change to tamp down %damage is also responsible for (my) general feeling that I'm just not getting as many Creepers as I used to get. Certainly the damage is far less, and given that more damage led to more Creepers, it isn't easy for me to say if any one change is producing more of an effect than another.

 

I'm not anywhere close to being as worked up as some others about the changes to Plant Control, but among the changes that were made I feel like final effect of the sum total of changes to Carrion Creepers was the most brutal. For me... it was a power that I felt offered a lot of options when it came to slotting, now it just feels like another power to drop a 5-or-6-piece set in (I'd probably got with 6xCupid's Crush) for set bonuses.

[Heatstroke]

I never proc'd the powerset so I dont have any experience with that. What I am noticing is that it just taking a long time to do anything. and that it seems like many of the foes arent even being affected by it. I probaly need to look at some damage data.. but something feels very off.. 

 

The patch doesnt stay in place. If I spawn it farther away it will move back towards me.. never did that before. 

 

Just now I laid down a patch against TWO foes and it too at least 8-10 second before a vine even formed and look at the combat log the enemy never took any damage from the patch. 

The Creeper Vine is NOT spawning under each foe consistently.. sometimes it does.. sometime im facing 3-4 foes and get one vine.. 

 

The Vines can be knocked back.. I dont remember that happening before.. 



 

[Riverdusk]

13 hours ago, Heatstroke said:

 

The Vines can be knocked back.. I dont remember that happening before.. 



 

 

That I can definitely say did happen pre-patch.  Noticed it even long ago often when fighting knockback happy mobs like council.