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Glazius posted:Ah yes, squishy ATs that wanna play solo, notable for their massive disparity between smashing and fire defenses. Scorpion Shield only covers smashing/lethal and (a lesser amount of) energy. The notes there say they're splitting attacks to prioritize the most "exotic" damage types present. The existing strategy is to build to just cover S/L/E since they're typically the 3 most common at endgame and typically at least one component of an attack, so the defense works. Now if it's a fireball, it's only gonna check fire. If it's an ice blast, it's only checking cold. And most builds don't accommodate that solo. But positionals are a-okay so now you just have to build a hover blaster for the same result. Hope you don't have any powers that only work on the ground!
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Jul 9, 2022 00:18
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Abroham Lincoln posted:Scorpion Shield only covers smashing/lethal and (a lesser amount of) energy. The notes there say they're splitting attacks to prioritize the most "exotic" damage types present. The existing strategy is to build to just cover S/L/E since they're typically the 3 most common at endgame and typically at least one component of an attack, so the defense works. Now if it's a fireball, it's only gonna check fire. If it's an ice blast, it's only checking cold. And most builds don't accommodate that solo. Why should you have to take Scorpion Shield to solo? Shouldn't you be able to solo with whatever ancillary pool fits your character best? ...are we talking about "do content at all" soloing, or are we talking about +4/x8 soloing?
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Jul 9, 2022 00:32
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Glazius posted:Why should you have to take Scorpion Shield to solo? Shouldn't you be able to solo with whatever ancillary pool fits your character best? I mean it's that or Frozen Armor, but that's purely smashing/lethal defense. Scorpion Shield is also just a glowing aura which is pretty concept neutral. But if your point is like, "I should be able to take Munitions Mastery and be as survivable as Mace lets me be" then like... yeah, I agree with you, but that's not really what the change is about. And with everything, what you can survive and solo is a scope based on your build and what enemies you're facing. If your barometer for balance is "can I clear it at all" then sure, everything is perfectly balanced since you can just set the difficulty to -1x1. But it's also nice to be able to do x8 against a wider variety of enemy groups with some builds as is, or +4x8 against easier groups, and the changes will narrow that scope down and limit options pretty much exclusively for ranged/control ATs and pretty much exclusively solo. Melee will seemingly go largely unaffected since typed sets cover just about every type already (aside from some notable, intentional holes) and group play will have enough support ATs and incidental buffs to make it not matter.
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Jul 9, 2022 00:53
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This is a dumb change that is going to gently caress over the common S/L/E resist strat and just make things pointlessly harder for more casual players. This won't affect me one iota and I still hope they reconsider this deeply stupid idea.
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Jul 9, 2022 02:17
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Abroham Lincoln posted:I mean it's that or Frozen Armor, but that's purely smashing/lethal defense. Scorpion Shield is also just a glowing aura which is pretty concept neutral. But if your point is like, "I should be able to take Munitions Mastery and be as survivable as Mace lets me be" then like... yeah, I agree with you, but that's not really what the change is about. Yeah, this is where our concept of "soloable" diverges. I build myself to create something of a difficulty aperture between "lol" and "no", but I've never deliberately tried to softcap any of my defenses, and I really don't go to x8 when I solo on anything, at least not for fun. Generally I tune my multiplier to be challenged by two groups at once, so I can just pick a bigger fight if I feel like it and don't have to scramble when I'm incautious or get a bad room setup or an ambush happens at a bad time.
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Jul 9, 2022 02:26
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ded posted:this is all being done because 1 dev is a big baby and wants an attack on a mob they are making to have a cold damage only attack Do you have a link to this thread? I can't find it and I want to see what kind of feedback they're getting.
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Jul 9, 2022 02:51
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Glazius posted:Yeah, this is where our concept of "soloable" diverges. I build myself to create something of a difficulty aperture between "lol" and "no", but I've never deliberately tried to softcap any of my defenses, and I really don't go to x8 when I solo on anything, at least not for fun. Generally I tune my multiplier to be challenged by two groups at once, so I can just pick a bigger fight if I feel like it and don't have to scramble when I'm incautious or get a bad room setup or an ambush happens at a bad time. That's valid, but I'd wager the change only hits casual players even harder in this instance. The player building IOs for softcap has something like 45 and 10% def to smashing and cold respectively, whereas a casual player even with the same power choices probably has something like 25 and 0%. And like yeah, control or support or blaster sustain will keep you alive in base difficulties but it's a dumb move overall. Kinda like the devs' repeated suggestions for proc nerfs; I've seen the "make proc damage go off of AT scalars" thrown out before by devs and it's just, why? Why do defenders need to have a more miserable time soloing? Pretty bizarre choices.
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Jul 9, 2022 03:10
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Harrow posted:Do you have a link to this thread? I can't find it and I want to see what kind of feedback they're getting. nah i just copied those shots from the clown basket discord. tommy 2.0 posted it all.
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Jul 9, 2022 03:13
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Honestly the reasoning for the change is confusing to me because my understanding was that all powers are just manually tagged for what defense types they target anyway. Hence how Mind Control is able to simply not have a positional component, because they deliberately never picked one for it.
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Jul 9, 2022 03:33
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Abroham Lincoln posted:That's valid, but I'd wager the change only hits casual players even harder in this instance. The player building IOs for softcap has something like 45 and 10% def to smashing and cold respectively, whereas a casual player even with the same power choices probably has something like 25 and 0%. And like yeah, control or support or blaster sustain will keep you alive in base difficulties but it's a dumb move overall. Sorry, I should have specified - I do that even to solo with my squishier characters who have, like, 10-15% defense all around, who didn't take an ancillary pool for defense against anything. Though honestly I have no idea -- what's this change actually going to do after you can take Scorpion Shield? Council and Nemesis and Malta get grenades, but that's AOE damage and not on as big a scale. Maybe the gunslingers get nastier? The circle demons and pantheon demons get nastier in melee. Maybe Crey gets a little meaner cryo? Am I missing some common enemy group that did hybrid damage with fire or cold? The Cheshire Cat posted:Honestly the reasoning for the change is confusing to me because my understanding was that all powers are just manually tagged for what defense types they target anyway. Hence how Mind Control is able to simply not have a positional component, because they deliberately never picked one for it. The one thing I always remember is that the underlying code is weirder than it appears. Attacks have a position but their elemental defense type is determined by some function of their damage entries? I won't say it can't happen.
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Jul 9, 2022 06:58
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Glazius posted:Though honestly I have no idea -- what's this change actually going to do after you can take Scorpion Shield? Council and Nemesis and Malta get grenades, but that's AOE damage and not on as big a scale. Maybe the gunslingers get nastier? The circle demons and pantheon demons get nastier in melee. Maybe Crey gets a little meaner cryo? It's all of fire/cold/negative/psi/toxic that are opening up on meta builds. So Longbow, CoT, just about everything in Dark Astoria, and pretty much everything that uses grenades now too. Most negative attacks are typed with smashing, lots of psi has a psi/smashing component, toxic def doesn't exist so you're hosed if it's dual typed. Probably a lot more than I can't think of because I'm not a breathing encyclopedia of how every attack is typed.
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Jul 9, 2022 08:20
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This is a mostly fine and good change, the only thing that gives me pause is the decision on how to prioritize 50/50 attacks. That only concerns me because I'm assuming such attacks are very common, but I don't know that for sure. I presume the devs actually making the change have a better idea than I do on what all it impacts. Having a primarily cold-based attack require cold defense makes perfect intuitive sense though, and it's not like you don't know when you're coming up against such a thing and can't plan accordingly. Primarily S/L and Energy attacks are still the vast bulk of damage in the game. This really just impacts s/l softcapped players' ability to handle the more exotic enemy groups without assistance or insps. I think that is fine and good, and I wonder if some of the folks here have somehow just forgotten that purples exist. Also, lol at the idea of describing a def-softcapped blaster as 'casual'. And the game already has a mechanic for being able to solo everything, it's called "-1/x1". You aren't relying on your capped defense to clear content, you are relying on it to clear it for the most xp/inf you can get, and if that's what's important to you just fight something your character is good at fighting instead. zzMisc fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Jul 9, 2022 |
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Jul 9, 2022 08:22
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maybe it's just because i mostly stopped playing CoH long before it closed, but my experience on homecoming has been pretty weird in terms of the extreme level of player power compared to the first three years of the game's life. i'm totally unsurprised that the devs want to find interesting ways to pull back on some of it and it was always kind of weird that you could just kit out for s/l/e and be fine against exotic attacks. i suspect they'll need to do some serious revision of defensive powers so that some powersets aren't completely helpless in certain situations, though
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Jul 9, 2022 08:33
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Tyool 2022 and people still feel the need to invent poo poo to get mad about. The rationale given makes perfect sense and has nothing to do with "pet characters". (People used to literally claim Jack Emmert was nerf-happy for no other reason than nobody was allowed to be stronger than Statesman! poo poo's loving evergreen.) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea to overhaul this now, and it's bound to have unexpected consequences, but the reasoning is pretty straightforward.Harrow posted:Do you have a link to this thread? I can't find it and I want to see what kind of feedback they're getting. It's not on Homecoming beta, it's on SCORE beta. (Which incidentally means it hasn't even finished being raked over the coals by that bunch yet.) John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Jul 9, 2022 |
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Jul 9, 2022 11:08
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I think it just seems like it's inevitably going to backfire. It's a very, very hard sell to say "hey, those meta builds you've been putting together for the last 3 or so years? They don't work anymore," especially on a private server of an old game that is only sporadically getting new content in the first place. It just seems like a bad idea to try to overhaul systems in that context. I also don't really get their justification. Going by the screenshotted post, it sounds like they can already set an attack to have 100% of one damage type if they want to. That seems to solve the problem already? If they want individual enemies to have specific hard-to-dodge attacks (which is a good idea and can make those enemies threatening and memorable) can't they just already do that by making them 100% elemental and leaving out S, L, and/or E?
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Jul 9, 2022 13:18
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Harrow posted:I also don't really get their justification. Going by the screenshotted post, it sounds like they can already set an attack to have 100% of one damage type if they want to. That seems to solve the problem already? If they want individual enemies to have specific hard-to-dodge attacks (which is a good idea and can make those enemies threatening and memorable) can't they just already do that by making them 100% elemental and leaving out S, L, and/or E? They want more wiggle room to design enemies that can break through weak elemental defense without automatically being stronger against weak elemental resistance at the same time. If they want an attack that hits more often but is more easily resisted via split damage, they're kinda SOL. Can't just crank up the raw accuracy or add to-hit either, since that affects positional defense at the same time. It's a weird situation because I was always under the impression whether intentionally or by happy accident, elemental defense got the benefit of checking against all damage types to help balance it out a bit compared to positional defense which has always been vastly more reliable. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Jul 9, 2022 |
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Jul 9, 2022 14:29
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Abroham Lincoln posted:It's all of fire/cold/negative/psi/toxic that are opening up on meta builds. So Longbow, CoT, just about everything in Dark Astoria, and pretty much everything that uses grenades now too. Most negative attacks are typed with smashing, lots of psi has a psi/smashing component, toxic def doesn't exist so you're hosed if it's dual typed. Probably a lot more than I can't think of because I'm not a breathing encyclopedia of how every attack is typed. I think you're overestimating things a little. A lot of player negative damage is typed with smashing, but I can't think of any enemies that go big into dark melee besides Skulls... and Black Swan Shadows. CoT use some dark melee but it's on their ghosts, and since ghosts aren't real it's psi/neg instead of smash/neg. (similarly, the Pantheon demons are made out of hatred and do neg/cold instead of smash/cold.) Most enemy psi damage is similarly pure psi outside of TK blast, which is actually majority smashing and might wind up hitting pure smash defense after this? It will be interesting to see which way the various lethal attacks with a toxic DoT break. Does a DoT even count in this calculation? The big winners among the DA crowd are going to be the various iceblasters in the more mystical groups, and the CoT fire demons. Everybody else was mostly doing pure damage already, on in the case of the BP demons a mix of two non-scorp types.
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Jul 9, 2022 17:35
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Glazius posted:Why should you have to take Scorpion Shield to solo? Shouldn't you be able to solo with whatever ancillary pool fits your character best? the OG devs had some terrible notions of game design, "blasters/support ATs shouldn't be able to solo period" was one of them.
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Jul 9, 2022 18:00
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Jazerus posted:maybe it's just because i mostly stopped playing CoH long before it closed, but my experience on homecoming has been pretty weird in terms of the extreme level of player power compared to the first three years of the game's life. i'm totally unsurprised that the devs want to find interesting ways to pull back on some of it and it was always kind of weird that you could just kit out for s/l/e and be fine against exotic attacks. i suspect they'll need to do some serious revision of defensive powers so that some powersets aren't completely helpless in certain situations, though It's because you stopped playing CoH long before it closed. We were absolutely just as busted back in the day.
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Jul 9, 2022 22:09
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Flesh Forge posted:the OG devs had some terrible notions of game design, "blasters/support ATs shouldn't be able to solo period" was one of them. Keep in mind, when CoH launched in '04, the 'Holy Trinity' was gospel. The very idea that an MMO player could solo was heresy.
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Jul 9, 2022 22:13
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it wasn't easy to solo as a blaster at launch but it was totally doable. good luck on a defender tho
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Jul 9, 2022 22:18
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Gynovore posted:Keep in mind, when CoH launched in '04, the 'Holy Trinity' was gospel. The very idea that an MMO player could solo was heresy. Honestly it's still kind of amazing to me that CoH seems to still have been the only major MMO to successfully break away from that model. Hell even a lot of single player RPGs these days have you more or less requiring a party composition of tank/healer/DPS.
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Jul 10, 2022 00:27
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Jazerus posted:it wasn't easy to solo as a blaster at launch but it was totally doable. good luck on a defender tho You could do it, but the game goes out of its way to punish you for it with lame poo poo like 30 second mag 1 stuns etc. Reasonable on lowest difficulty settings but meanwhile many power combos of scrappers and tanks (and later brutes of course) could do +4/x8 no problem The Cheshire Cat posted:Honestly it's still kind of amazing to me that CoH seems to still have been the only major MMO to successfully break away from that model. Hell even a lot of single player RPGs these days have you more or less requiring a party composition of tank/healer/DPS. Best thing about the game is that practically any combination of 8 random characters can do practically all the content at max difficulty Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 06:01
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Jazerus posted:it wasn't easy to solo as a blaster at launch but it was totally doable. good luck on a defender tho Yeah, defenders and corruptors are the ones I'd say have the short end of the stick, as far as soloing goes. Unless they happen to pick a support or a blast set that does okay control, or the couple of support sets that can do self-target status protection. In order to successfully solo you need some way to either resist enemy controls or slap your own controls on them first. The same could also be said of damage, but not getting controlled is how you stay at range and keep enemy damage fairly low.
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Jul 11, 2022 04:07
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Glazius posted:Yeah, defenders and corruptors are the ones I'd say have the short end of the stick, as far as soloing goes. Unless they happen to pick a support or a blast set that does okay control, or the couple of support sets that can do self-target status protection. In order to successfully solo you need some way to either resist enemy controls or slap your own controls on them first. The same could also be said of damage, but not getting controlled is how you stay at range and keep enemy damage fairly low. True, but also high defense is very effective control mitigation, especially coupled with even a very small degree of protection. Even just one mag 2 hold protection will protect you from the 1 in 20 times you get hit, and you're very unlikely to get hit by a hold twice in a short amount of time. Of course, now that cold/hold attack will need cold def to dodge. But IMO squishies getting wrecked by elemental attacks where their smashing def made them invincible before is kind of a good thing.
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Jul 11, 2022 04:27
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zzMisc posted:True, but also high defense is very effective control mitigation, especially coupled with even a very small degree of protection. Even just one mag 2 hold protection will protect you from the 1 in 20 times you get hit, and you're very unlikely to get hit by a hold twice in a short amount of time. Most cold holds and sleeps are already pure cold damage. Malta gunslinger rounds are like the one big exception there. Maybe ice arrows are also lethal-typed? Not sure, they don't actually do damage.
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Jul 11, 2022 05:02
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Glazius posted:Yeah, defenders and corruptors are the ones I'd say have the short end of the stick, as far as soloing goes. Unless they happen to pick a support or a blast set that does okay control, or the couple of support sets that can do self-target status protection. In order to successfully solo you need some way to either resist enemy controls or slap your own controls on them first. The same could also be said of damage, but not getting controlled is how you stay at range and keep enemy damage fairly low. oh i mean on homecoming and even mid-life live you could solo as a defender. i had a dumb archery defender that did okay for himself a few months after the CoV launch. but this was categorically not the case at launch, you'd just get pasted
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Jul 11, 2022 08:30
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Yeah way back at launch even the concept of a Scrapper of all things soloing missions was considered bizarre. Sometimes people even reacted with outright hostility to the idea!
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Jul 11, 2022 12:25
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quote:DEFENSE CHANGE I went through most of the enemy groups that I could think of at the back-end of the game and this is what I came up with; specifically showing the ones that would get moved from smashing/lethal/energy to a more exotic damage type. I don't think that the proposed change is *nearly* as far reaching as some have claimed it is, it's a handful of enemies per villain group and Smashing/lethal/energy defense would *still* top of the heap as far as enemy attack prevalence, just less so than before. The only part that I'm concerned with is the toxic-targeting attacks, Arachnos and Arachnoids are *already* nasty and don't really need the help. Crasical fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 21:19
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Yeah as far as I'm aware toxic defense is kind of an oddball in that it literally does not exist - not just that powers don't have it but there's not even a definition for it in the game's data so they couldn't even give it to powers if they wanted to. So anything that was split toxic/something else before basically just becomes a "positional defense only" attack, which is going to be a big problem for about half the defense sets in the game.
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Jul 11, 2022 21:23
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well they did it
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Jul 12, 2022 20:51
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There's also some big aggro changes so nearby enemies past the aggro cap will still hit you from ranged so I guess they really did wanna just nerf solo blasters But hey toxic defense exists now and it's on like 3 sets! 
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Jul 12, 2022 22:38
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So aside from the mentioned defense shenanigans, there's one new arc, one new repeatable contact, the ITF getting the Aeon difficulty settings, a powerset and a half that I don't think was on anyone's radar, a bucket of costume stuff, and some other RP toys. Oh, the Mercy Island AE building burned down due to fire farms. (The Atlas Park AE lost their lease, so folks will actually have to zone transition at least once before getting power leveled to 50). Also, once you hit 50, no more XP from AE unless you're in a Dev Choice arc.
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Jul 12, 2022 22:57
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getting rid of toggle dropping when CC'd entirely, good loving riddance to that insulting nuisance mag 1 sleep bullshit
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Jul 12, 2022 23:02
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Fearless_Decoy posted:So aside from the mentioned defense shenanigans, there's one new arc, one new repeatable contact, the ITF getting the Aeon difficulty settings, a powerset and a half that I don't think was on anyone's radar, a bucket of costume stuff, and some other RP toys. whats the new powerset?
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Jul 12, 2022 23:21
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Fearless_Decoy posted:So aside from the mentioned defense shenanigans, there's one new arc, one new repeatable contact, the ITF getting the Aeon difficulty settings, a powerset and a half that I don't think was on anyone's radar, a bucket of costume stuff, and some other RP toys. loving lol well time to remove this again
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Jul 12, 2022 23:23
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Flesh Forge posted:getting rid of toggle dropping when CC'd entirely, good loving riddance to that insulting nuisance mag 1 sleep bullshit Yeah it was always odd to me that like, they'd addressed this with defensive toggles by just having them suppress while mezzed instead of detoggling, but for whatever reason decided that exact same solution couldn't be used on offensive toggles.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:25
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Tabletops posted:whats the new powerset? Symphony Control for trollers/doms, and Sonic Assault for doms. The effects look pretty good  but also they lowered Sonic Blast's animation times and damage, and also toned down the -res debuffing by a whole lot. Currently it does a flat -20% res per attack that's only limited by the debuff timer so you can spam stack it. Now it's split by a nonstacking unique -12% from any attack, and a second -8% that's unique per attack so you have to juggle 5 of them for way less result. 
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Jul 12, 2022 23:36
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They also put a respectable amount of damage on Siren's Song and Screech, so Sonic has full ST and AoE attack chains. The idea was to make it a better blast set without juicing its attack numbers, and it is, but anybody who skipped Siren's Song or Screech is going to reshuffle things a little.
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Jul 13, 2022 14:20
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Fearless_Decoy posted:a bucket of costume stuff It's mostly stuff that were used by some mobs/npcs, but there's a couple new patterns for your tights. I really feels like they've squandered their time. This sort of stuff could've been done much sooner.
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Jul 14, 2022 03:02
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