Let's discuss new difficulty options in the IO/Incarnate Meta!

[Auroxis]

As others mentioned, the best approach is increasing end-game difficulty.

 

While I'd like something akin to the Path of Exile Map system in the game, a simpler and more pragmatic approach would be giving extra reward merits for completing challenge objectives (like no deaths or a fast time). Then progressively adding more challenge objectives (double archvillains, speed boosted enemies, etc)

 

As for Incarnate Trials, you could have badge objectives give 2 astral merits instead of just one.

Edited August 12, 2019 by Auroxis

[Myrmidon]

1 hour ago, Auroxis said:

As others mentioned, the best approach is increasing end-game difficulty.

 

While I'd like something akin to the Path of Exile Map system in the game, a simpler and more pragmatic approach would be giving extra reward merits for completing challenge objectives (like no deaths or a fast time). Then progressively adding more challenge objectives (double archvillains, speed boosted enemies, etc)

 

As for Incarnate Trials, you could have badge objectives give 2 astral merits instead of just one.

Agreed. I’m certain that we would have much more access to post-Incarnate difficulty content (other than raids) in the past seven years if the old reality was still active. I’m sure that we will get some of this for future updates, however, don’t expect things to move as quickly here as they would with a full time development team and you won’t be disappointed.

 

Until then, why don’t those of you that are unhappy with the current IO system go back to using SOs (and even IO commons) and play the way that you like. Maybe you could form an SG of like-minded players to play without being impacted by those that don’t follow your game philosophy.

 

[nihilii]

12 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

... what about those of us who like sets like Force Field?  Those of us who want to make YOU untouchable (on top of your existing protections) ...?

 

We are rendered irelevant everywhere by plentiful and strong Set bonusses to defense.

The whole IO system, vs the unique FF powerset. Brings to mind analogies of tables with one broken leg and what to do about it, doesn't it?

I like the idea of giving DDR to FF, although in practicality if you bubble an already softcapped toon, you're giving him a solid margin of error against defense debuffs. There's been suggestions to give FF +absorb, too, which would be fairly thematic, useful and unique.

This might sound out of left field, but echoing Bentley's point on already existing harder content... I think we could see much greater returns on liberal applications of XP bonuses on a per mob basis.

The mechanic already exists ingame, although it's been scarcely used since the very beginning. Paragon Protectors give about +40% XP compared to normal mobs, likely to account for their strong powers.

What if this was expanded to the whole game?

The risk/reward ratio is completely out of whack in CoH, and some Homecoming changes push the needle further in that direction. You've got tasks of widely different difficulty giving equivalent rewards. Lambda Sector vs the Mother Mayhem trial. Battle Maiden warriors vs Rularuu.

"Play your way" is not a bad philosophy (actually, it's a pretty good one). But it doesn't mean we have to forgo risk/reward entirely.

Speed has been the only criteria for risk/reward balance, generally in the context of Task Forces <=> Merit Rewards. This is the part of the system that arguably works great! Log in game and you will see people running a variety of TFs. So, expanding that balancing effort to exp/inf and incarnates could have good results as well, who knows.

[Myrmidon]

18 hours ago, XaoGarrent said:

Yes, because ED 2.0 is suuuuch a gooood ideaaaa.

 

...And before someone responds "akchtually, itsch not enhantchment divershification:" That's not the point.

I see that someone else remembers the forum storm that happened when the players said that ED was another powers nerf and Emmett and crew said something like “We didn’t touch the Powers, we just changed Enhancements!”. 🤣

[DSorrow]

12 minutes ago, nihilii said:

The whole IO system, vs the unique FF powerset. Brings to mind analogies of tables with one broken leg and what to do about it, doesn't it?

I like the idea of giving DDR to FF, although in practicality if you bubble an already softcapped toon, you're giving him a solid margin of error against defense debuffs. There's been suggestions to give FF +absorb, too, which would be fairly thematic, useful and unique.

I don't think it would be bad for FF to have not just defense, but also other sorts of debuff resistances added. Empathy might also benefit from some lingering effects in the heals. Traps could have cooldowns reduced for many of the powers or have some of the made mobile like FFG. Not sure what to do with Trick Arrow because I've never played it. Other than that I think most support sets are in a pretty good place when it comes to what they can add to a team full of end game characters.

 

20 minutes ago, nihilii said:

This might sound out of left field, but echoing Bentley's point on already existing harder content... I think we could see much greater returns on liberal applications of XP bonuses on a per mob basis.

Definitely! TFs seem to be very well balanced at around ~1 merit/minute with end game stuff being generally slightly above and easy TFs slightly below that, but XP/inf doesn't quite have the same balancing when it comes to enemy group difficulty. I'm also wondering whether or not it would be possible to adjust recipe drop rates for more difficult enemy groups such as Vanguard or Rularuu. Arcanaville mentioned having done an XP scaling project for custom enemies in AE based on their ability selection so I hope our mathematical monarch could be summoned to tell us about also implementing such a system outside of AE.

[Galaxy Brain]

On the note of difficulty or new enemy types... we could just do what was already established with Kheldians and their unique Quantum spawns.

 

For reference, Kheldian players have a chance for Quantum typed enemies to appear in any given mission which have different powers than the standard enemy they should be.

 

What if we introduced  "Enhanced ____"? Or even "Incarnate ______" enemies?

 

Enhanced types could just have various perma buffs as noted earlier where they have say, perma speed boost, perma damage rez unless mezzed, or are mez proof but no other protections, etc.

 

Incarnate enemies could in turn have new powers that would require thinking. For example, an Incarnate enemy that could slap Radiation anchor debuffs on you with great effect that would make that player want to reposition else get their team debuffed, or other such effects that coerce you to approach content differently and with better equipment (IOs and Incarnate abilities) going in. Then you could see "Enhanced Incarnate _____" .....

[Galaxy Brain]

Just want to mention that I have converted the thread to talk more about boosted challenges instead of nerfing IOs/incarnates.

 

As mentioned, we can all play like we want where you dont go into IOs or Incarnates, feel OP with them in normal content... but we dont have a 3rd option where there is tweaked difficulty just for OP characters. Hell, said content could re-balance certain sets like Stone Armor or Force Fields where the extra mitigation is useful again.

[Auroxis]

I'm gonna quote a post I made back in 2015 on CoHTitan:

Quote

If I were to simulate the map system PoE offers, it would involve revamping the difficulty scaling NPC:

1. Select mob difficulty as per usual (up to +4, x8)

2. Select extra difficulty levels: 1, 2 or 3 randomized difficulty modifiers. For each extra randomized modifier you get an extra random reward.

Difficulty Modifers can be:

• An extra AV/Hero per mission
• Mobs have +100% recharge and movement speed
• Mobs have +50% Mez resistance and +1 KB protection
• Mobs have +20% Damage and Resistance
• Mobs can spawn with an elite boss with leadership powers

Rewards can be:

• One bar of double XP gained at mission completion
• A glowing clickable in the mission that gives you a random rare invention recipe
• A glowing clickable in the mission that gives you a lot of influence
• Your inspirations all become tier 3 at mission completion
• Gain 2 reward tokens at mission completion

 

 

Edited August 12, 2019 by Auroxis

[Steampunkette]

I'd like to see a system  that allows players to create an AE Enemy Group which must have (insert list of requirements, here) then creates an "Enemy" tag for that specific group.

 

The player then goes about their regular business, but Paper/Radio missions gain a new variable at all level ranges: Enemy

 

Wind up rescuing Lois Parker from your personal Nemesis Group once in a while. Have the "Named Entity" mob -always- spawn the current Elite Boss in the Enemy Group Requirement unless you're set to AVs while Solo, in which case you get that group's AV.

 

It'd be a great way to expand our personal canon into the game world. And we all know AE Enemies with Player Powersets are more dangerous than generic Council or whatever (Unless you specifically design them to suck compared to your character, obviously), so that could increase the difficulty a bit for 50 +4x8 teams with Incarnates.

[PaxArcana]

36 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

The player then goes about their regular business, but Paper/Radio missions gain a new variable at all level ranges: Enemy

So, basically, a group arch-nemesis system?  I'd be down with that.

Even better, make it part of character creation - with much of it being determined automatically bu things like your chosen Origin, Archetype, and even Powersets.  You get to name them, and have at least some limited control over their appearance.

And the group-nemesis grows as you level (exact mechanisms for this TBD of course).  

[XaoGarrent]

5 hours ago, Myrmidon said:

I see that someone else remembers the forum storm that happened when the players said that ED was another powers nerf and Emmett and crew said something like “We didn’t touch the Powers, we just changed Enhancements!”. 🤣

Funny story: I didn't actually play CoH around that time. I was LOOKING INTO joining the game around that time. Basically, everyone I knew who played it told me they were quitting, and not to touch it with a ten foot pole, and directed me to that exact thread as the reason why. Y'know the one, the one that had so many pages of angry players that I think it actually broke the forum software. As you can guess, I went "nope" and went to spend my time and money elsewhere.

 

I actually didn't start playing until I9. And after they nerfed some powers I liked and it became abundantly clear how grindy (at the time) it was to get a character IOed out, I quit the game. Once it came out, I moved to Champions Online. Which I then quit for reasons that should be fairly obvious, lol. I came back to it when they started un-nerfing stuff, only to quit again when the nerfing started again (as well as broken garbage like Gravitard), leaving the entire Superhero MMO genre (and for that matter MMOs altogether) in the trash bin until Homecoming came online.

 

I still have a great screencap of the forum meltdown that Champions had after the launch day patch that ruined literally everything in the game. I *probably* should have screencapped the chat in the MSR I was doing the other day, where a bunch of people were lambasting Jack's name with an impressive level of hostility. Anyone who thinks this stuff doesn't kill games is woefully naive- It doesn't just kill games, people remember and hold grudges and it can hurt entire studios.

[Infinitum]

22 minutes ago, XaoGarrent said:

Anyone who thinks this stuff doesn't kill games is woefully naive- It doesn't just kill games, people remember and hold grudges and it can hurt entire studios.

Sadly I quit shortly after the EM nerf, hindsight I wouldnt have because when I returned the game was sunsetted a month later, and had so many unfinished things I wanted to do on here.

 

The EM nerf still sucks but there are ways to work around it, but the game was so grindy back then it was nearly impossible to test things out like you can now.  I had all my eggs in one basket and they cut the handle off the basket.

 

Things are very fun right now, there is even content that is challenging for fully IOd characters, and if you dont believe me go try to fight the jade spider.

[XaoGarrent]

5 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

Sadly I quit shortly after the EM nerf, hindsight I wouldnt have because when I returned the game was sunsetted a month later, and had so many unfinished things I wanted to do on here.

 

The EM nerf still sucks but there are ways to work around it, but the game was so grindy back then it was nearly impossible to test things out like you can now.  I had all my eggs in one basket and they cut the handle off the basket.

 

Things are very fun right now, there is even content that is challenging for fully IOd characters, and if you dont believe me go try to fight the jade spider.

I think the EM nerf was one of the ones I quit over, too.

 

Also, Carnies exist. Carnies will laugh at your IOs and spit on your grave.

[tatmia]

1 hour ago, XaoGarrent said:

Also, Carnies exist. Carnies will laugh at your IOs and spit on your grave.

Can confirm.  My level 41 Bots/Storm MM is nicely IO'd and this morning I had to admit that I needed to lower my difficulty settings if I'm going to run through Madeleine Casey's arc.  

[Murcielago]

Incarnate enemies exist in the signature story arc. This could and should be proliferated into new content whenever that gets created. Just level shift everything to +10 and bam game is back to running almost dead fest. 

[ZeeHero]

On 8/11/2019 at 6:26 PM, PaxArcana said:

... what about those of us who like sets like Force Field?  Those of us who want to make YOU untouchable (on top of your existing protections) ...?

 

We are rendered irelevant everywhere by plentiful and strong Set bonusses to defense.

you fix force field to be useful. change how it works. such as adding a certain amount of  damage absorb applied every few seconds the shield is up.

[ZeeHero]

On 8/12/2019 at 10:35 AM, Galaxy Brain said:

Just want to mention that I have converted the thread to talk more about boosted challenges instead of nerfing IOs/incarnates.

 

As mentioned, we can all play like we want where you dont go into IOs or Incarnates, feel OP with them in normal content... but we dont have a 3rd option where there is tweaked difficulty just for OP characters. Hell, said content could re-balance certain sets like Stone Armor or Force Fields where the extra mitigation is useful again.

Yes this, not nerfs, is the answer. Why can't we set challenge to +5 or +6? and have enemies gain extra debuffs or powers above +4?

[DSorrow]

1 hour ago, ZeeHero said:

Yes this, not nerfs, is the answer. Why can't we set challenge to +5 or +6? and have enemies gain extra debuffs or powers above +4?

This should be the solution, in my opinion. Level difference, team size, and actual enemy difficulty. For a completely arbitrary example, you could have a standard minion with Flares, Fire Blast and Fire Sword. Enemy difficulty could add powers like Blaze, Incinerate and Fire Ball making the individual enemies more dangerous. In addition, the enemy difficulty could add special enemies into the groups you otherwise don't encounter, like Quantums, but with more generic powers such as Leadership or other team buffs / debuffs. Basically the thing that's going on with the Family at low levels vs their level 50 version.

 

Unfortunately I have no idea how difficult the implementation of a system like this would be.

[arcanaville]

On 8/12/2019 at 1:09 AM, DSorrow said:

Arcanaville mentioned having done an XP scaling project for custom enemies in AE based on their ability selection so I hope our mathematical monarch could be summoned to tell us about also implementing such a system outside of AE.

The developers originally took standard rewards away from custom critters in AE, because it was too easy to make a critter that was basically a punching bag for power leveling.  I worked with them to come up with a system that would "judge" a custom critter to determine if the critter was "dangerous enough" to award normal rewards.  If not, rewards were nerfed on that custom critter.

 

That's a relatively simple system although the tricky part is actually making it not exploitable by enterprising players.  Its possible to extend this outside of AE to modifying rewards in the normal content, but you have to consider two separate things.  First, you have to consider what the appropriate scaling rules are in general.  That's mathematically hard, but straight forward.  The more critical thing is if you want this system to be automated, the system has to somehow figure out what the original intent of the content was, in order to "know" how to modify rewards.  What I mean is, if there's some standard content that was explicitly intended to be a "gimme" for the players, it could be considered exploitable to allow players to "scale up" that content for more rewards, knowing that no matter how they scale it up it won't make it really any harder.  And when it comes to end game content, there's often very good reasons why end game rewards seem "lower" than you'd expect for their difficulty - for example to prevent end game players from exponentially running away from the rest of the players with a cycle of escalating power gaining escalating rewards.

 

That kind of stuff would make a customizable reward system more tricky to think through what it is even supposed to do.

[LaconicLemur]

On 8/14/2019 at 5:07 PM, arcanaville said:

The developers originally took standard rewards away from custom critters in AE, because it was too easy to make a critter that was basically a punching bag for power leveling.  I worked with them to come up with a system that would "judge" a custom critter to determine if the critter was "dangerous enough" to award normal rewards.  If not, rewards were nerfed on that custom critter.

 

That kind of stuff would make a customizable reward system more tricky to think through what it is even supposed to do.

 

I'd like to get back to the simpler idea (which I also proposed in the Tank/Brute thread) of adding more difficulty/notoriety levels.  Not saying customizable critters are a no-go, but that they are a future iteration for consideration. Also for future consideration is adding the extra difficulty and commensurate rewards for all task forces, regardless of level. (But maybe only accessible if the leader is 50, for example.)

Edited August 19, 2019 by LaconicLemur

[Cidri]

As a FF Defender (my first 50 on Homecoming) I must say that I feel useful all through incarnate content. Mobs there have extreme ToHit and -Def numbers. Even with bubbles, people are not hit proof (but close).

 

Defense debuff numbers are significant enough that the main strength of Super Reflexes lies in the almost total Defense Debuff Resistance you get.

 

Softcapped defense without defense debuff resistance is an appropriate defense for squishies - it works for maybe 30 seconds before it get debuffed thru the floor, and those 30 seconds are very valuable. A good blaster might have won the fight in those 30 seconds. But it is nothing like invulnerability.

[Cementi]

On 8/11/2019 at 7:16 PM, Infinitum said:

Kinda like you Are calling for sweeping changes to a system that was designed to step outside the box and do things that wasn't possible before and only limited by the imagination of the user?

 

Are you seriously talking about balancing around PVP

No simply stating that it destroyed pvp. Pvp had a great deal more depth before everyone became their very own tankmage.

[Cementi]

On 8/11/2019 at 8:06 PM, PaxArcana said:

Translation:

I want this thing and I don't care how many other people dislike it, I want it and that is all that matters.

:sigh:

Interesting interpretation considering if you read my entire post I specifically recognized that my feelings are certainly in the minority and I accept that.

However when balancing a game you have to accept that there are those that will lose their minds no matter what you do. Those people are irrelevant as they will never be happy and I am not concerned with making them happy.

That is far different than saying I want what I want and don't care that you all don't want it. What I am saying is you cannot simply keep buffing the underperformers. You have to be realistic and accept that at times something has to be nerfed. It isn't the end of the world and the ones that act like it is are not worth listening to.

[Cementi]

On 8/12/2019 at 4:40 AM, nihilii said:

The whole IO system, vs the unique FF powerset. Brings to mind analogies of tables with one broken leg and what to do about it, doesn't it?

I like the idea of giving DDR to FF, although in practicality if you bubble an already softcapped toon, you're giving him a solid margin of error against defense debuffs. There's been suggestions to give FF +absorb, too, which would be fairly thematic, useful and unique.
 

FF is used so often as an example of what is wrong with IO's because it was made totally redundant. Cold Domination felt the pinch too but as it was a more modern set it has other tools to fall back on and as such remains a very good set though I personally am not a fan that is simply preference.
 

One of my first 50's back on live was an Ice/FF controler. Great character before they changed how Ice Slick worked. Then it was an ok character and I was fine with the nerf as turning an entire mob of purples into a popcorn popper was a bit over the top. Then Io's hit and It wasn't long before people simply didn't want FF buffers on teams. I knew a few people who ran into that mentatlity. That probably is why it keeps getting mentioned as a casualty of IO's.

FF needs a revamp and I am glad they are considering the absorb mechanic. Its one of the things I thought would be a good fit. I would personally also like to see the damage of the "attacks" raised to make them worthwile. A solid -regen debuff in the detention field could work too. High enough that it effectively causes stuff to take some damage. Allthough I did enjoy trolling stalkers by placing well timed detention fields on assassin strike targets heh. I only did that if I knew the player.

[Cementi]

To those advocating raising end game difficulty rather than the occasional nerf......that will just bring in more elitest snobbery. There are allready people demanding people be level shifted for content that does not need it. 

Though truth be told I am ok with them advertising that kind of thing. Lets me know in advance that they are not the kind of players I want to play with.