page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Invulnerability Adjustments

[The Curator]

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Invulnerability

• Unstoppable
  • Cast time lowered from 3.1s to 1.67s
  • (PvE Only) Recharge lowered to 400s.
  • (PvE Only) Duration reduced from 120s to 40s.
  • (PvE Only) Now provides 25% -endurance, -recovery, -Def, -Recharge and -Speed resistance
  • (PvE Only) Endurance cost increased from 2.6 to 10.4
  • (PvE Only) Crash Eliminated

[bAss_ackwards]

The crash removal has me considering taking it for all my Inv Scrappers. The rest of the changes are a bonus on top.

 

Previously to this, the power had always been regulated to don't take or take it for set mule but never use.

[Night]

[Apologies for cross-posting, I was told that's the best way to give feedback specifically to the relevant T9s while there's no Focused Feedback thread specifically for those changes]

 

TLDR: The way those T9s are presented are a massive nerf to what an armor T9 offers and the lowered recharge is not worth the massively reduced scaling and duration, cutting down a power's duration to 1/4th and sometimes 1/6th of its current duration, and the quadrupled activation cost. Those are not worthwhile tradeoffs for what we have now and a huge departure from what those T9 armor powers offer currently.

 

Reduced scaling means you'll be hit more often and harder when going up against anything at a higher difficulty or against any enemy group with ToHit buffs, meanwhile right now Elude/Overload/Kuji-In Retsu softcaps you all on its own and it's very useful if you wanna survive an encounter, activate it when getting up with a wakie or a rez and get right into the fights, or if you run out of endurance and don't wanna die from all your toggles dropping. 30 seconds is also not long in a fight and when you activate a godmode you wanna feel powerful and survive whatever bad situation forced you to pop it in the first place.

 

 

I think that defense/resistance-oriented T9s should still keep their current scaling, putting you at defense softcap out of the box is what they do now and lowering that would only be an unwanted nerf. It's also useful in situations when you're just getting up with a wakie, or running out of endurance and needing to get your defenses back instantly so you don't get defeated, or getting attacked by an ambush or a giant monster (particularly during a zone event) and activating that so that you can get right into the action and ignore your actual defensive toggles for the moment. That's also an argument for keeping the endurance cost low as quadrupling it only removes its use as a panic button.

 

Level difference between you and the enemy and their rank will still affect their accuracy to a significant degree even if it's an accuracy modifier instead of ToHit one, there's usually many consecutive attacks swinging at you every few seconds and that builds up. Also big number is nicer than small number.

 

 

Using Moment of Glory as a blueprint for godmodes is also misguided. Moment of Glory started out as a clicky that maxed out your defense and resistance (to all but psi, and probably toxic) for a few minutes but it set your health to 25% and prevented you from healing in any way (aside from increasing your max health number via Dull Pain). The way the power worked was changed because preventing yourself from regenerating health went against the idea of Regeneration as a whole. It was also a death sentence when fighting Psychic Clockwork or Carnies.

 

That way the new (current) Moment of Glory was also changed was so that you would be able to survive a mob's alpha strike, the initial mass of attacks a big group hits you with when you first charge in, before the rest of the team could join you to help you or so that enemy attacks stagger out instead of hitting all at once, allowing for the bulk of the set, its passive regeneration and clicky heals, to keep you alive. 

 

 

Since Moment of Glory seems to be the main inspiration for these changes, we must look at what Regeneration as a set was, from the wiki:

"This set has been in the game for Scrappers since Issue 0."

"This set was included with the original release of Stalkers in Issue 6."

"This set was proliferated to Brutes in Issue 21."

 

For the massive bulk of the game's lifespan, Regeneration was not a set designed to be the sole tank of a team and with its many, many nerfs, only recently was Regeneration given a long-deserved glow-up. This kinda design does not apply to every other armor set.

 

That and low-duration buff powers provide a massive benefit, so instead of nerfing their scaling, they should be heavily buffed to make you actually unkillable for this heavily reduced duration. Even now Moment of Glory offers ~70% defense and resistance values.

 

 

 

There are three main suggestions I propose for those suggested T9s:

 

1. Make them into a mutually-exclusive option to the current existing T9s that retain their current existing scaling, features, cost, and their current existing durations without any changes.

 

2. Make them into a mutually-exclusive option to the current existing T9s that retain their current existing scaling, features, cost, and their current existing durations while also adding minor buffs to the current existing T9s, such as simply removing the crash and reducing their recharge times while still being fully enhanceable, and changing nothing else, no nerfs.

 

3. Try out the idea of applying a form of adaptable recharge into the T9s and turn them into Incarnate Hybrid-style toggles that have a maximum duration (2 minutes and 3 minutes depending on T9, as they have now) but can be detoggled early for reduced recharge time. So that each second of use adds one second of recharge time. Meaning that if you toggle a T9 for 30 seconds, it goes on a 30 second cooldown, but you can also toggle it for its full duration of 2 minutes or 3 minutes depending on the T9, with their full current scaling and all current benefits, and afterwards let it go on a 2 and 3 minute recharge respectively. It could be adjusted so that the power has a base recharge of ~30s onto which use-time is added, so that if you use the T9 for 10 seconds, the recharge time is 40 seconds, and so on, but that's for later.

 

Personally I like option 2 since it's a simple buff to the powers' functions and covers the goals of the changes without turning them into completely different powers. At the very least those suggested T9s should be added as a mutually exclusive option to choose between that and the current T9s and not be forced into these suggested versions as they deviate so much from their current originals that they do not cover the same bases anymore.

[Faraday Gauss]

Love this. Any chance we could get the Flex from Tough or Blood Thirst from Savage Melee activation animations for Unstoppable as alternate FX options?

[bAss_ackwards]

After playing around with the crashless Unstoppable on my DM/Inv Scrapper - I can say I am pretty pleased with it! Between Shadow Meld and Unstoppable, I've got some great options for extra survivability, which in turn lets me crank it up in difficulty level!

 

My end game build has it around: 155s for Recharge, 40s uptime

Shadow Meld is at: 32s Recharge, 15s uptime

 

Possible changes not withstanding, I'm looking forward to having this new build I made ready to go on Live. 💪🥳

[Biff Pow]

This is just a patch note clarification but Unstoppable is currently 180 seconds, not 120. But that also might be an argument for a reduction to 60 seconds instead of 40?

[Super Atom]

Aside from the outliers of Meltdown. Para and a couple others which were fine or got reworked already, the tier 9's have felt like abandoned content since even Legacy Live days. It's really nice to see it finally addressed.

Edited December 9 by Super Atom
made it look better

[kittowam]

Rebuilt my Inv/SS tanker on Beta and dropped the fighting pool in favor of the new Unstoppable, which I previously never took. Have to admit, I really like it. It gave me more than enough survivability to get past +4/8 Romans and Arachnos before adding incarnate powers. Looking forward to this change making its way over to Live.

[Captain Powerhouse]

Note on the Crashing T9 power changes:

 

We have decided to roll these changes back. At least at this point there are no plans to revisit them in the future. That of course might always be subject to change.

 

Due to the holiday break, not sure when the rollback will be hitting the open beta server, so if anyone still wants to play around with the current versions for any reason you might have a few days to do so.

 

Other changes to any of the sets those powers are in will likely continue testing and iterating and we will continue to gather feedback. Do note nothing is considered final until it reaches release candidate status.

 

[This particular thread might be locked soon since this is the only change being discussed on this thread but that will be a call made by forum mods]

[Super Atom]

This is fairly disappointing.

 

Unstoppable remains stopped.

[arcane]

1 minute ago, Super Atom said:

This is fairly disappointing.

 

Unstoppable remains stopped.

We just got beanbagged

[Super Atom]

3 minutes ago, arcane said:

We just got beanbagged

 

Saying [beanbag] in general chat on everlasting has brought me more fun and good friends than actually playing CoH.

 

best change ever tbh

[Lazarillo]

3 hours ago, Super Atom said:

This is fairly disappointing.

 

Unstoppable remains stopped.

The changes were for the positive, IMO, but meh, still didn't make it (or the other updated t9s) worth taking.

[Kaballah]

Baffling and awful decision

[bAss_ackwards]

That's too bad. Hopefully its revisited in the future with a solution for all players interested in keeping the old version and playing with the new T9s.

[kittowam]

Too bad, really enjoyed the changes to Unstoppable. Guess it's back to the drawing board on a new build after this patch hits.

[Shin Magmus]

   The debuff resistance in Unstoppable was a good idea, that should probably be added to the current version of the power anyways and it made sense for Invuln.

[Myrmidon]

The last time that I used this power was when you could make it Perma, so no loss there. I look forward to seeing what you go with for these T9s (outside of niche) to make them worth taking in the future.

[Super Atom]

i know multi-choice is becoming too common of a suggestion but honestly you already did the work on the new ones and half of us seemed to like them at least. Could we not just do both and be over it until someone gets the desire to look again instead of nothing changing on them?

[Shin Magmus]

   Really the issue was, and is, what others echoed in many different threads already: 30s and 40s durations are too low.  People weren't upset about the powers being weaker in exchange for not crashing: that's expected and just normal balancing.  People were upset about durations too short to last through most of the use-cases for these powers, or even more than 2 full spawns on common teams/content.  If the minimum duration for every T9 power (except MoG) was 60s, I think these changes would have gone over much better. 

[OverkillEngine]

And as far as use cases, partial uptime powers can also be problematic design; if your mob spawns have enough variance and difficulty spikes to make them useful, it means they are getting into the realm of becoming required takes that reduce build diversity. But without that, they risk becoming "win harder" powers instead. Threading the needle on that is going to be difficult.

The former basically recreates the issue with mezz protection toggles; I remember when not every armor set offered comprehensive protection to most mezz effects. But the content punishes not having that to the point that it became required for certain AT's to function, so it ended up getting added.

And as such now we have a situation where virtually no one that has any clue of how to play skips the mezz protection toggles.

[Super Atom]

6 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:

   Really the issue was, and is, what others echoed in many different threads already: 30s and 40s durations are too low.  People weren't upset about the powers being weaker in exchange for not crashing: that's expected and just normal balancing.  People were upset about durations too short to last through most of the use-cases for these powers, or even more than 2 full spawns on common teams/content.  If the minimum duration for every T9 power (except MoG) was 60s, I think these changes would have gone over much better. 

 

I would have done T9's very differently as I'm sure most would have, but I'd still rather have short useful unstop over not taking it all unstop. because it looks like that's the only two options on the table if it's not too late entirely.

 

I just flat don't believe someone who says they need the current unstoppable for anything. 🤷‍♀️

[Shin Magmus]

   Current Unstoppable is a way to win a fight that you'd absolutely otherwise lose, against enemies dealing exotic damage that you aren't capped to.  A lot of times it happens on small teams or bad teams, but you might have to tank the 100% Energy dmg mobs and you sure as heck don't have permanent 90% Energy Res, so Unstoppable means you can not die to them now and win this fight (but probably die later, hopefully when it doesn't matter and the hard stuff is over.)

[Super Atom]

Yeah and beanbag's stun is crowd control

[Night]

3 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:

   Current Unstoppable is a way to win a fight that you'd absolutely otherwise lose, against enemies dealing exotic damage that you aren't capped to.  A lot of times it happens on small teams or bad teams, but you might have to tank the 100% Energy dmg mobs and you sure as heck don't have permanent 90% Energy Res, so Unstoppable means you can not die to them now and win this fight (but probably die later, hopefully when it doesn't matter and the hard stuff is over.)

 

The long duration, high scaling defense/resistances, good recovery, and low cost to activate are all what make the T9s really nice. People seem to not wanna think that many simply play on SOs or in lower level content rather than farm an alt up to 50 and instantly IO out into a god build in which T9s see little use. A T9 godmode also doesn't make you unkillable, just much more durable as needed for a panic button.

 

There were some good ideas to buff them too floating around, like adding defense debuff resistance to resistance T9s. I still think that simply removing the crash and doing nothing else to them would immediately make T9s more desirable. Otherwise, just have two version, one current and untouched, one the shorter (the weaker and more costly for some reason) version with low recharge so you can pick which one you want. But that doesn't matter anymore and I still prefer the current un-nerfed T9s.

Edited December 15 by Night