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The disconnect between "continuing to add no-skills tabula rasa challeges" and the balance choices being made at Overkill is pretty blatant. Skill buy-in used to be "make something good" and now it's "make something barely functional" ... so yeah, really not excited to do the new heist with Maniac tabula rasa style, let me tell you.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:19
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Psion posted:The disconnect between "continuing to add no-skills tabula rasa challeges" and the balance choices being made at Overkill is pretty blatant. Skill buy-in used to be "make something good" and now it's "make something barely functional" ... so yeah, really not excited to do the new heist with Maniac tabula rasa style, let me tell you. What achievement is this?
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Dec 16, 2016 19:26
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It's one of the new trophies.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:27
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clockworkjoe posted:What achievement is this?
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Dec 16, 2016 19:45
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I, personally, am basically done with buying DLC, possibly forever, until the devs settle on stats/skills. It is so goddamn annoying to sit through regular huge PD2 patches only to have to sit for the next 45 minutes studying up about how they've arbitrarily changed weapons/damage/enemy health/skills/etc. Pretty much all of my regular crew has dropped out, citing pretty much these exact same concerns, so there just isn't as much motivation to boot it up anymore.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:04
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:I, personally, am basically done with buying DLC, possibly forever, until the devs settle on stats/skills. It is so goddamn annoying to sit through regular huge PD2 patches only to have to sit for the next 45 minutes studying up about how they've arbitrarily changed weapons/damage/enemy health/skills/etc. Pretty much all of my regular crew has dropped out, citing pretty much these exact same concerns, so there just isn't as much motivation to boot it up anymore. Last DLC I picked up was Sydney, and will likely continue to be the case until Almir/Jules get their heads out of each others asses and unfuck the mayhem+ bullshit they've created with idiotic and arbitrary design choices based off really poor lines of thinking that don't actually work in the game.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:25
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:I, personally, am basically done with buying DLC, possibly forever, until the devs settle on stats/skills. It is so goddamn annoying to sit through regular huge PD2 patches only to have to sit for the next 45 minutes studying up about how they've arbitrarily changed weapons/damage/enemy health/skills/etc. Pretty much all of my regular crew has dropped out, citing pretty much these exact same concerns, so there just isn't as much motivation to boot it up anymore. Same. I was excited originally with the thought that I could use Mayhem to start my normal crew into DW stuff - now they've outright stopped playing because the difficulties are hosed, the spawn groups are hosed and the official response is utterly perplexing. The melee nerf is just nonsensical, for example. Literally half the weapons in the game are unusable past Overkill, but hold up, gotta buff the fuckin' Broomstick to be the best pistol in the game because ???.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:32
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I've been investing myself in other stuff/trying to chip away at my backlog some more, but yeah the frequent and bizarre balance changes that do gently caress all to actually address core problems and Jules's overall lack of a clear direction for the game have left me less than enthused to jump back in. The Scarface stuff at least sounds interesting, but I'm long past paying launch price for the DLCs.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:35
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Laputanmachine posted:It's one of the new trophies. Yep. Scarface heist, mayhem+, all crew using maniac perk deck, no skills. don't get me wrong - I know we can do it, and probably will today, but it's just so stupid on principle. Who's talking to each other over there at Ovk HQ? Not the people responsible for trophies and balance, clearly.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:43
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This is the exact same type of thing that slam dunked the Killing Floor 2 player base into the dumpster too.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:44
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Just dedicate 28 skill points to Frenzy/Berserker and go from there.  Really though who knows what the gently caress they are thinking. Also Almir is just a PR guy. It can all be laid on Jules.
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Dec 16, 2016 21:07
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Practically speaking, I think the easy (well, "easy") solution to the mayhem no skills achievement is to stealth it as far as possible, then go loud at the end.John Murdoch posted:I'm having trouble even parsing this. Is the idea that due to unfixable reasons melee is a little clunky, so they're trying to forcibly balance it in such a way that players will want to use it as little as possible? My understanding is as follows. 1. Melee was originally intended to be a special, once-in-a-while extra attack, but players wanted to build around it. 2. They tried to accommodate this with more weapons, and with perk decks/skills, but it's an ongoing problem because of the clunkiness of the pull out/put away. 3. Around the time of the katana/Jiro, there was an uptick in complaints about imbalance/P2W on the steam forums (which has since gone away). Jules wrote this down as something that needed fixing. 4. Jules saw the changes as a way of a) making melee more balanced and b) giving dedicated melee players a dedicated approach if they wanted to. 5. A bigger overhaul might happen some day, but it would take a lot of resources, so don't hold your breath. I agree, it's not...great reasoning. I think this may partially stem from Jules using a balance to-do list that may be outdated. Most of the things that have been tweaked lately seem like they were things people were complaining about around the time of the big weapon/skills rebalances. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 21:41
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Or is he saying that melee was always meant to be a special, once-in-a-while extra attack...which means that nerfing the base numbers is the complete opposite of what he's trying to accomplish?
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Me and the regular folks I play with still play the game, but it is severely reduced these days. The new "balance" changes has been far more damaging than anything else and doesn't look like it is going to change. The Crimefest previous balance pass was really good and had us playing more because it was really fun. Yes it made the game easier but it is so much more fun with an increase in the number of DW ok weapons and fun is the number one thing in a coop game. DMR dominated(This was a pretty good warning sign when dealing with HP etc) but if you brought something else you weren't completely boned.Prokhor Zakharov posted:This is the exact same type of thing that slam dunked the Killing Floor 2 player base into the dumpster too. I am in complete agreement that this is Payday 2's Killing Floor 2 moment. They still have time to tell Jules to gently caress off and undo the damage, but that window is starting to close.
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Dec 16, 2016 21:43
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I was one of the first to vocally call bullshit on these changes (and probably the only person besides Vox who is constantly posting feedback on their official forums, which is the only place they see it) but y'all are acting like the game is completely unplayable. Yeah it sucks that they ruined the insane variety, but really with how often people ask for builds in this thread it's obvious that you're not all mouth drooling pubbies who dump all 120 points into Fugitive and call it a day. There is *a little* logic to what's happening here. The bare minimum ICTV skeleton build has 88 points left over , so you get a lot to play with. Jules' stated intention has been to force players to take buffing skills, so you dump points into your weapon of choice for said build. Depending on how strong or weak your weapon of choice is, you may end up taking everything in a tree (that's 20-28 points). Where I start disagreeing with him is that he also wants us to be taking damage booster skills. Your best bet really is Frenzy/Berserker, which is 28 points, but limits your deck options heavily to Maniac and Armorer. You can use Infiltrator, but the multiplicative nature of DR means you get diminishing returns quickly. Up to and including Deathwish you can save points and just take crits or silencer skills. One Down is still a largely gimmick difficulty that relies on metagaming even harder, but it's not insurmountable - just really telling that Jules posting examples for builds had them taking every damage boost possible. Now, you might say that having to invest so much into making a build good for one weapon type stinks, and I agree with you, but also we have 15 skill slots now so just make different builds for pistols, shotguns, etc. tl;dr Just put some more thought into your build and you too can go back to running around with a Compact 5 on Deathwish. Please don't actually use the Compact 5 ever
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Dec 16, 2016 22:04
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UnknownMercenary posted:use the Compact 5
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Dec 16, 2016 22:14
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That "tiny" bit of logic doesn't remotely excuse how unfun the game is on anything higher than overkill gimmick or no gimmick. Before this DW was at the point yeah, this is fun, maybe not everyday fun, but we weren't groaning when we play Mayhem+ like it is now. Meta harder is not something you should ever see in a coop game, it's excusing bad, bad design. Having 15 slots is not an excuse. It's "Oh look! a UFO" sucker punch. Jules is just poo poo., no reason to defend him, that time has passed.
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Dec 16, 2016 22:21
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oohhboy posted:That "tiny" bit of logic doesn't remotely excuse how unfun the game is on anything higher than overkill gimmick or no gimmick. Before this DW was at the point yeah, this is fun, maybe not everyday fun, but we weren't groaning when we play Mayhem+ like it is now. Meta harder is not something you should ever see in a coop game, it's excusing bad, bad design. I honestly enjoyed DW up till the Mayhem patch. I thought the gun rebalance was great, and the Skill tree rebalance was amazing. This poo poo, I hate having to play the meta, chase the ONE TRUE BUILD bullshit that they're forcing the game into. I stopped playing MMOs because they all boil down to this. The gently caress do you need to do this level of meta gaming in a goddamn co-op for.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:16
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UnknownMercenary posted:I was one of the first to vocally call bullshit on these changes (and probably the only person besides Vox who is constantly posting feedback on their official forums, which is the only place they see it) but y'all are acting like the game is completely unplayable. Yeah it sucks that they ruined the insane variety, but really with how often people ask for builds in this thread it's obvious that you're not all mouth drooling pubbies who dump all 120 points into Fugitive and call it a day. People aren't complaining because the game is unplayable, they're complaining because the game is now tedious. Which, honestly, is one of the worst things a game can be.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:43
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:People aren't complaining because the game is unplayable, they're complaining because the game is now tedious.
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Dec 17, 2016 00:14
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UnknownMercenary posted:One Down is still a largely gimmick difficulty that relies on metagaming even harder, but it's not insurmountable - just really telling that Jules posting examples for builds had them taking every damage boost possible. Now, you might say that having to invest so much into making a build good for one weapon type stinks, and I agree with you, but also we have 15 skill slots now so just make different builds for pistols, shotguns, etc. I haven't actually seen any of the example builds he's posted, but taking every possible damage boost for OD shows that he's a crap player. Grenade launchers require absolutely no skill points to make them good, do 700 (Arbiter) or 1300 (all the others) damage, and even have decent ammo pick-up rates. Plenty of points left over for team-based, QoL and survivability skills! As for old and new DW, I haven't actually detected that much of a difference. My old DW builds still work well on 'new' DW and I can still use a healthy diversity of builds on it. Shooting waves of policemen is still as fun as ever. Melee is hosed, yes, but I don't care about that because all I need is the Golden Grin buzzer. What else exactly changed between 'old' and 'new' DW?
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Dec 17, 2016 03:18
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It was in the very first difficulty feedback thread during the Housewarming event, when he was fielding people's suggestions to make One Down viable builds for guns. With respect to Deathwish, it's mainly that Berseker is totally a thing tm again. Pretty much with the massive buff to many guns during Crimefest '15 there was little reason to take it anymore, even with the skills update making it easy to take it wasn't necessary as long as you were good at clicking heads. So for me in particular I don't really feel like it's tedious so much as they're backpedaling a lot on the stuff they did to make the game more accessible. Tedious for me is doing One Down for the sake of just doing it; I can still play Deathwish casually so long as the team doesn't spread out too much. If you want hard numbers on things that changed between old and new DW I could pull those, but it's generally an across the board health and spawn numbers increase. The beta changes that went live do a little bit to ameliorate the problem, but if you want to shoot mans with a 45 damage rifle it ain't gonna feel great unless you have some sort of straight damage boosting skill on top.
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Dec 17, 2016 04:09
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Yeah they increased cop health and damage while increasing spawn rates and loving with the spawn composition.
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Dec 17, 2016 04:46
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Mayhem's a bigger mess than One Down as its still harder than Deathwish. Making it a complete failure as a difficulty that's supposed to wean newer players into Deathwish. It's a Frankenstein's monster of Deathwish, One Down extra health and mixed up spawn rates for gen-sec cops into a sort of OVERKILL setting with little thought into how this will all work together. In better news, I present to you, the beauty of Tony's pager lines. "I WAS TAKING A poo poo, CONTROL. YOU GONNA GET OFF MY rear end HERE OR WHAT?" Crabtree fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 04:50
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UnknownMercenary posted:It was in the very first difficulty feedback thread during the Housewarming event, when he was fielding people's suggestions to make One Down viable builds for guns. With respect to Deathwish, it's mainly that Berseker is totally a thing tm again. Pretty much with the massive buff to many guns during Crimefest '15 there was little reason to take it anymore, even with the skills update making it easy to take it wasn't necessary as long as you were good at clicking heads. So for me in particular I don't really feel like it's tedious so much as they're backpedaling a lot on the stuff they did to make the game more accessible. Tedious for me is doing One Down for the sake of just doing it; I can still play Deathwish casually so long as the team doesn't spread out too much. This is the biggest problem I see. Ultimately, OVK has to decide if they want the game to be something people can play on most difficulties (or all!) for a couple hours after work with friends, or if it's something where groups have to min/max their builds (and strategize on who carries what skills for team utility) to play the hardest heists. Either one of these is perfectly fine - flip flopping between them is not. And for a game that's 2+ years old now, flopping to make it overall less fun, more punishing, and more difficult to get into at higher levels is probably the wrong move - there are a ton of other, newer games out there that many casual players will happily move onto. At the same time, there will always be players who want the upper tier difficulties made even harder - I don't get that myself, but I understand that people like that exist. I'd put myself as a better than average casual player probably (feel free to disagree, anyone). I haven't bothered with the OD mask or most of the heists - on the rare occasion I boot up this game it's primarily because I really enjoy the people I play with rather than the recent changes OVK has made to the game. To be fair, I can't offer much constructive criticism to OVK because I've played it so little - that's on me, not them. It would be nice to hear directly from Overkill/Jules exactly what their intent was going into this, and even better would have been for them to leave difficulties up to and including DW alone. But as someone with well over 1k hours in the game, I'd agree with what's been stated above - the game has gotten tedious rather than enjoyable and personally, I've largely moved on. If continuing to sell DLC and developing hype for the eventual Payday 3 is their long term goal, maintaining their playerbase should be their primary concern today. And has been said by other goons in this thread, I'm not the only one that just doesn't boot it up as much.
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Dec 17, 2016 04:58
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Crabtree posted:In better news, I present to you, the beauty of Tony's pager lines. "I WAS TAKING A poo poo, CONTROL. YOU GONNA GET OFF MY rear end HERE OR WHAT?" CLOAK THAT, YOU MOTHERFUCKER.
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Dec 17, 2016 05:09
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Yeah they increased cop health and damage while increasing spawn rates and loving with the spawn composition. I haven't noticed the health increase to be honest, but yes, I did notice that the spawns went up. More progress towards the Robbed a Cop trophy (kill 658000+ cops) I guess! What did they change about the spawn composition though? I notice that tasers and shields sometimes spawn in groups of 4, but that's about it. They also did remove the incredibly annoying hostage rescue team and veteran cops who could down players in 2-3 shots, though, and good riddance to that. Related: summing up the PD2 community with respect to difficulty.
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Dec 17, 2016 05:09
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Bulldozers also now always come in pairs (and IIRC, only two can even exist at a time). Even if you're equipped to handle double dozers on whatever difficulty you're on, it's predictable and boring.
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 05:22
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 pictured: silence skill broomstick with pretty much everything that would gently caress up concealment VS. the western revolver also i still don't get continent coins for completing heists, that's intentional, right?
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Dec 17, 2016 06:21
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You should be getting coins. It is tied to how much EXP you get. IIRC its 1 million points a coin. But if you don't get one on that heist the EXP rollover into the next heist and so on until it reaches 1 million.
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Dec 17, 2016 06:28
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Wastrel_ posted:I haven't noticed the health increase to be honest, but yes, I did notice that the spawns went up. More progress towards the Robbed a Cop trophy (kill 658000+ cops) I guess! They removed HRT and all the other glass cannon cop units like veteran FBI except for scripted spawns. Instead of having more and more different cop units as difficulty went up everything is now standardized to "light" and "heavy" cops. Cloaker spawns got lowered; tasers spawn in pairs (up to a max of 4); shields spawn to a max of 8; dozers and medics spawn in pairs. Shooting Blanks posted:This is the biggest problem I see. Ultimately, OVK has to decide if they want the game to be something people can play on most difficulties (or all!) for a couple hours after work with friends, or if it's something where groups have to min/max their builds (and strategize on who carries what skills for team utility) to play the hardest heists. Either one of these is perfectly fine - flip flopping between them is not. And for a game that's 2+ years old now, flopping to make it overall less fun, more punishing, and more difficult to get into at higher levels is probably the wrong move - there are a ton of other, newer games out there that many casual players will happily move onto. At the same time, there will always be players who want the upper tier difficulties made even harder - I don't get that myself, but I understand that people like that exist. I think the game was at the best it's been in a long time when they finally ironed out most of the bugs from the skills update. We had like 2 months of that, tops. Then they blew it all up with the Housewarming event. The worst part is that they're looking at all these different systems individually and not the game as a whole, and we get these buffs or nerfs without any rationale for them. The Broomstick is garbage; great let's buff it but now it's better than every other pistol because??? The de-casualization of the game is also killing the Steam marketplace for it. It is a loving bastard trying to sell skins for anything when they nerfed 99% of the guns indirectly. UnknownMercenary fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 10:34
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One of the biggest examples to me is Robbedacop. I've put in a thousand+ hours and get some absolutely nasty kill counts, and I'd be genuinely surprised if I've gotten near the trophy amount in my entire career, and I certainly don't expect to get it now.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:04
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Plan Z posted:One of the biggest examples to me is Robbedacop. I've put in a thousand+ hours and get some absolutely nasty kill counts, and I'd be genuinely surprised if I've gotten near the trophy amount in my entire career, and I certainly don't expect to get it now. I think GeneralMcBadass figured based on his FBI files stuff that he'd have to play Payday for three more years to get it.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:18
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UnknownMercenary posted:I think the game was at the best it's been in a long time when they finally ironed out most of the bugs from the skills update. We had like 2 months of that, tops. Then they blew it all up with the Housewarming event. That was a great time, and when I was talking about (I think) - DW was doable but some of the maps were still a challenge, and you could still get wiped by bad circumstances. Huge diversity of viable builds, although the better the group, the more builds were viable (as will be the case in any game of this nature). Adding 1D to that (including medics!) by adjusting spawns, buffing specials slightly and regular cops a bit more and of course the 1D change would have changed the meta enough to make it riskier for groups, but still viable. As for the Steam marketplace - I think when they got the backlash on the safes and decided to remove keys, they stopped caring about the marketplace. I'm not sure if OVK even sees revenue from the marketplace, and if they do it's probably a fraction of DLC sales. Sorry bud. I still think that whole fiasco was a mistake - This was a $40 game new, with an absurd amount of DLC, and adding on the paid drills for safes was just salt in the wound. I never bought a drill and didn't care but drat, it was kind of a kick to the balls just how much they wanted to monetize this game.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:33
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I have to say that after the skill tree and weapon re-balancing that DW became mostly too easy, with the exception of very few heists, such as Aftershock (and that mainly due to the insane spawn at the very end) or Goat Simulator Day 1. My usual crew were certainly beating almost all heists with very little difficulty by then. The idea of tweaking the difficulty certainly made sense, and I can actually accept most of the things they did with One Down except the insane damage done by enemies. As I stated earlier I think it's that damage that pushes people towards a certain few builds focused on dodge/health and armour regen/converts. I do think they should do something to make heavy armour builds usable on One Down, but I'm not sure what that could be. In fairness they've done a fair bit lately to alleviate some of the fake difficulty, eg making flashbangs thrown by cops with a couple seconds' warning before they blow rather than arbitrarily spawning them at players' feet entirely without warning, and reducing the frequency of flashbangs overall, and also removing glass cannon cops from the spawn.
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Dec 17, 2016 18:19
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Plan Z posted:One of the biggest examples to me is Robbedacop. I've put in a thousand+ hours and get some absolutely nasty kill counts, and I'd be genuinely surprised if I've gotten near the trophy amount in my entire career, and I certainly don't expect to get it now. I have about 630,000 lifetime kills according to FBI Files, only 50k of that actually counts to the trophy. It's atrocious.
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Dec 17, 2016 18:29
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Shooting Blanks posted:As for the Steam marketplace - I think when they got the backlash on the safes and decided to remove keys, they stopped caring about the marketplace. I'm not sure if OVK even sees revenue from the marketplace, and if they do it's probably a fraction of DLC sales. Sorry bud. I still think that whole fiasco was a mistake - This was a $40 game new, with an absurd amount of DLC, and adding on the paid drills for safes was just salt in the wound. I never bought a drill and didn't care but drat, it was kind of a kick to the balls just how much they wanted to monetize this game. If they stopped caring entirely I think they would have just pulled the feature altogether, not keep it going without the paywall. Anyway as the resident Payday skin baron I can tell you the market actually exploded with activity once they pulled the paid drills. It was in a downturn by summer's end due to a lowered playerbase when Overkill went on vacation then new meta killed it.
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Dec 17, 2016 18:32
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Pfft. How can you be a skin baron when you only have one mint legendary skin?
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Dec 17, 2016 18:42
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Wastrel_ posted:I have to say that after the skill tree and weapon re-balancing that DW became mostly too easy, with the exception of very few heists, I lay blame squarely at the feet of Frenzy. Yes, there's other things that ended up making DW become semi-easy, but Frenzy is by far the worst offender. 28 point investment translates to -25% damage taken, +30% or more damage, plus likely also walking around with +300% melee damage and double-speed reloads at will? And that's after the nerf? That's one of the best (if not the best) point investments in the game, and the way it interacts with heavy armor/Anarchist has skewed a lot of difficulty. I just still can't wrap my head around how much of a fuckup the difficulty rebalance has been.
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Dec 17, 2016 18:53
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Discendo Vox posted:Pfft. How can you be a skin baron when you only have one mint legendary skin? I own things that only exist in single digits and the value of my inventory exceeds my playing time.
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Dec 17, 2016 19:03
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UnknownMercenary posted:I own things that only exist in single digits and the value of my inventory exceeds my playing time. See, when you say "skin baron" you're thinking numbers, and I'm saying you should be in a big marble hot tub having a bubble bath talking about pelicans.
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Dec 17, 2016 19:18
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