page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Willpower Adjustments

[The Curator]

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Willpower

• Resurgence
  • This power can now be activated while conscious
  • If used while conscious, the power will:
    • Heal you for 25% of your base HP
    • Apply a scale 0.5 Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative, Toxic and Psionic resist buff for 10 seconds (Does not stack with itself)
    • Apply a scale 0.5 Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative, Toxic and Psionic resist buff for 60 seconds (Does not stack with itself)
    • Recharge in 90s
    • You will gain an auto-self rez if you are defeated in the next 35 seconds.
  • If used after being defeated, the power will apply the current effects
    • Apply a +100% recharge buff for 90 seconds.
    • Apply a scale 1 Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative, Toxic and Psionic resist buff for 90 seconds (Does not stack with itself)
    • Recovery and +End effects are no longer enhanceable
    • No longer provides Damage or ToHit buffs
    • No longer give a damage buff or crash
  • This power no longer takes Endurance Modification enhancements or sets.
  • This power now takes Resist Damage enhancements and sets.
     
• Reconstruction (Stalkers)
  • This power has been replaced with Up to the Challenge, a regenerative toggle that does not require targets in range to grant it's regen buffs and currently available to Sentinels.
  • The healing is now moved to Resurgence.
  • Players that already owned Reconstruction will now have Resurgence in their builds instead
• Rise to the Challenge
  • This power now grants 7.5% resistance to -regeneration for the first target and 2.25% for each target for a maximum 30% resistance.
• Up to the Challenge
  • This power now grants 15% resistance to -regeneration.
• Strength of Will
  • Cast time reduced from 3.1s to 1.67s
  • (PvE Only) Duration lowered from 120s to 30s.
  • (PvE Only) Recharge reduced from 300s to 120s.
  • (PvE Only) Crash eliminated.
  • (PvE Only) Smash/Lethal resistance increased from scale 2.5  to 4.5
  • (PvE Only) Non Smash/Lethal resistance increased from scale 1.25  to 3.25
  • (PvE Only) Now grants Taunt Protection
  • Now grants 25% resistance to most debuffs for its duration.
  • Now grants a scale 4 damage buff for its duration.

[FinalCyclopedia]

Love the changes on paper, but I was wondering why Quick Recovery didn't get the same debuff resistances that it got in the new Regen.  Also, why doesn't Indomitable Will get the same defense debuff resists as Heightened Senses?  Would that be too much considering Strength of Will now has "25% resistance to most debuffs".  Speaking of Strength of Will, it still does not accept recharge enhancements.  and its uptime has been reduced from 40% to 25%.  But considering the damage resistances are now higher, maybe that was intentional.  I would prefer a greater duration and longer recharge with the ability to enhance it's recharge.

 

It will be weird having to click both Resurgence and Strength of Will fairly often to get maximum performance.  Willpower has always been a hands off jack of all trades set.

[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.

 

 

Uniquely to Willpower, the buff to Strength of Will's resistance scaling is a nice addition, and the power doesn't suffer to the same degree as all others from the lowered recharge side of it as its recharge is uniquely unenhanceable, but reducing the power's duration by 1m 30s still makes it worse for it. The increase to resistance scaling could be ported to the base/classic version though alongside the new mutually exclusive version.

Edited Saturday at 06:35 PM by Night

[Uun]

Ran a tips mission vs. Arachnos and a radio mission vs. CoT on my WM/WP brute, both at +3/x6 (+1 lvl shift). 

• Changes to Resurgence are good. This was previously a skippable power. Having an emergency heal is useful, as is the auto-rez. The resistance buff is largely unnecessary due to its small size. This power was only 1-slotted for testing and probably deserves more slots.
• Changes to Strength of Will are very good. Although the live version of the power has a 120s duration, the resistance buffs are too small to be useful. I primarily use it to mule the Gladiator's Armor unique and in a pinch if my toggles get dropped and I lose my mezz protection. The test version increases the resistance buff significantly, allowing me to cap my resistance to just about everything (except toxic) for 30s. This gives regeneration an opportunity to refill my health bar.  The 120s recharge provides a lot of up time, although I didn't need to use it often, just once or twice when things went sideways. This power was 2-slotted for testing (one of which was the Gladiator's Armor unique). Don't know if it needs more slots or if I just need to tweak my build a little.

[Vanden]

I think these changes are mostly in a good spot, but they are very disruptive to Stalkers. Other ATs are gaining a click heal, but Stalkers already had a click heal available at level 4. For a Stalker, that click heal now takes 50% longer to recharge, and comes 24 levels later. The new toggle does mostly make up for the loss in survivability from having the heal take 50% longer to charge, but the issue there is it's another toggle to run on the only version of the set that lacks Quick Recovery. I think if Stalker-Willpower-Fast Healing got the same treatment as Stalker-Regeneration-Fast Healing, and a +Recovery buff was added to the passive, it'd be pretty much fine. I still won't be a fan of the disruption to existing builds, but that's a scrape that'll heal with time, I guess.

 

I still don't really like the auto-rez effect of Resurgence. With the buffs it gives, I'd really appreciate being able to observe and activate the rez manually at the most opportune moment. Can it be changed to instantly recharge Resurgence if you die within a certain time-frame of using it while alive? If not, then I'll be sad, but I'll live. From my testing, the +Stealth added to self-rezzes does appear to be working as intended, so that's good.

[Major_Decoy]

13 minutes ago, Vanden said:

The new toggle does mostly make up for the loss in survivability from having the heal take 50% longer to charge, but the issue there is it's another toggle to run on the only version of the set that lacks Quick Recovery. I think if Stalker-Willpower-Fast Healing got the same treatment as Stalker-Regeneration-Fast Healing, and a +Recovery buff was added to the passive, it'd be pretty much fine.

I don't think it'd be too greedy to ask for Fast Healing to be rolled into High Pain threshold and just get straight up Quick Recovery. 

[Luminara]

24 minutes ago, Vanden said:

I think these changes are mostly in a good spot, but they are very disruptive to Stalkers. Other ATs are gaining a click heal, but Stalkers already had a click heal available at level 4. For a Stalker, that click heal now takes 50% longer to recharge, and comes 24 levels later.

 

 

[oldskool]

I play a Willpower/Super Strength Tanker from time to time. 

The changes to Willpower are pretty damn good. I was very much hoping to see Resurgence get a treatment like Second Wind in Regeneration. This did not disappoint, and the in-kit heal was a welcome add on. 

Strength of Will was one of the few T9's out of the box that was decent for what it was, and so I will miss the longer duration from before. In trade, I get a MUCH stronger defense steroid which the set didn't have. Willpower can struggle a bit raising up defense layers like some other sets, and Strength of Will letting my temporarily cap all my resistances (due to what I had for slotting on Test) was a majorly welcome change. 

Overall, no notes. Good changes no bugs noticed during my session. 

Edited yesterday at 02:37 AM by oldskool

[Uun]

4 hours ago, Vanden said:

I still don't really like the auto-rez effect of Resurgence. With the buffs it gives, I'd really appreciate being able to observe and activate the rez manually at the most opportune moment. Can it be changed to instantly recharge Resurgence if you die within a certain time-frame of using it while alive? If not, then I'll be sad, but I'll live. From my testing, the +Stealth added to self-rezzes does appear to be working as intended, so that's good.

The auto-rez only happens if you use it up to 45s before you die. You still have the option to simply use it after you die.

[Vanden]

Regarding the T9 rollback: 

 

I will go to bat for the Strength of Will changes. They take a power whose only real benefit was a tiny extra bit of +Recovery and give it an actual purpose within the set. I absolutely think they should be kept in despite the general rollback of the armor t9 changes.

[Uun]

2 hours ago, Vanden said:

Regarding the T9 rollback: 

 

I will go to bat for the Strength of Will changes. They take a power whose only real benefit was a tiny extra bit of +Recovery and give it an actual purpose within the set. I absolutely think they should be kept in despite the general rollback of the armor t9 changes.

THIS