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PTS Update (9/23): FC.20.20110915.3
Archived Post
Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
FC.20.20110915.3 Patch Notes
General Gameplay:
Monster Island
Nemesis
Powers:
Archery
Bestial Supernatural
Celestial
Darkness
Dual Blades
Electricity
Force
Gadgeteering
Ice
Infernal
Martial Arts
Power Armor
Sorcery
Technology
Telekinesis
Telepathy
Items:
UI:
Known Issues (Please write in red text when submitting bugs to this thread so issues are easier to find.):
General Gameplay:
- VIPER: Psionic Pummelers: Knockback Resistance is now properly applied when this critter knocks you back with its Telekinetic Wave.
Monster Island
- Radiation Caves: The Science Robot now expresses itself verbally when stopped due to an enemy presence.
- Radiation Caves: It is no longer necessary to restart the Remote Access mission if an earlier escort attempt fails.
- Viper Nest: A buff icon has been added to Draysha Gas.
- Viper Nest: UNTIL commandos now follow player even after completing "Go! Science Commandos!"
mission. - Viper Nest: Security consoles can now be interacted with even if the "Serpentine Network" mission isn't in progress.
- Viper Nest: Dr. Demogaard's scientists now have callout text.
- Viper Nest: Teleiosaurus Hatchlings should no longer despawn when Dr. Demogaard dies.
- Viper Nest: Scientists should no longer have trouble reaching their consoles in the dome.
- Viper Nest: Dinosaurs summoned during Demogaard's fight should no longer grant XP and resources.
- Viper Nest: Icons have been added to the Draysha Gas and Grenades used by Dr. Demogaard.
- Viper Nest: All critters in this lair are now Tough, except for those in boss encounters.
Nemesis
- Nemeses with Telepathy powers now use the correct powers.
- Nemesis missions will now always reward some Nemesis Tokens.
Powers:
Archery
- Gas Arrow: This power is no longer capable of getting a Critical hit.
Bestial Supernatural
- Command Animals: The tool-tip on the Bleed debuff has been corrected to reflect its actual function. The debuff has been renamed to Feral Bleed, which can stack only once per pet.
- Massacre: Should now properly grant Focus stacks when charging this power and using Form of the Tiger.
Celestial
- Imbue: This power no longer affects Damage over Time effects, which includes many abilities that summon objects or critters to do damage for you over a period of time. The description has also been updated.
- Conviction: Reverence: The heal provided by this advantage now properly scales with Presence.
Darkness
- Ebon Ruin: The Damage over Time portion of this ability can no longer be Dodged.
Dual Blades
- Sword Cyclone: Challenging Strikes and Toxic Nanites, when applied by this power, should no longer fall off when you stop maintaining this power.
Electricity
- Electrocute: Description now reflects how many targets arcs will hit on a full charge. This is only a description change.
- Ball Lightning: This power is no longer capable of getting a Critical hit.
Force
- Personal Force Field: Updated the description to state that Defense and Energy Boosts restore a portion of your shield. This is just a description change.
Gadgeteering
- Sonic Boom Generator: Updated tap description to match the power. This is just a description change.
- Toxic Nanites: Now properly has an icon in the Advantage window.
Ice
- Avalanche: Hue change now affects the color of ice debris.
- Snow Storm: Eye of the Storm: Descriptions have been added to this advantage. This is only a description change.
Infernal
- Devour Essence: Ranks 2 and 3 will now properly increase the amount of healing this power provides.
Martial Arts
- Lightning Reflexes: Heals can no longer be dodged by this power.
Power Armor
- Laser Sword: Particle Acceleration: Advantage's description now correctly reflects its function. This is only a description change.
Sorcery
- Sigils: These powers are no longer capable of getting Critical hits.
Technology
- Implosion Engine: This power is no longer capable of getting a Critical hit.
Telekinesis
- Ego Surge: This power is now properly considered as an Energy Form at Ranks 2 and 3.
- Telekinetic Assault: Explosive Potential: This advantage should now properly have an icon.
Telepathy
- Ego Storm: Malevolent Manifestation: The advantaged version of this power is no longer capable of getting a Critical Hit.
Items:
- Hang 'Em High: The Upgrades rewarded for this Open Mission were being granted at too low of a level. They will now be granted at the correct level.
- Become Djinn: Sand Lunge now properly applies stun.
- Necrullitic Elixir (The Primary Utility): This item is no longer capable of getting a Critical Effect. Now places a buff icon on you while it is active.
- Necrullitic Elixir (The Secondary Offense): This item has been renamed Nacrullitic Might.
- Neuroelectric Pulse Generator: No longer has the MeleeDmg tag. Now has a 0.5s Activate Time, instead of not having an Activate Time.
- Eruption: This item was referencing the wrong damage table. This has been corrected, which has resulted in a roughly 40% reduction in the damage this power deals.
- Punji Stick Trap: This item is no longer capable of getting a Critical Hit. In addition, the damage has been reduced substantially.
- Dark Lightspeed: Item no longer grants the Travel Power until it is equipped.
UI:
- Shared Banks: Double-clicking on items will now automatically move them to your inventory.
Known Issues (Please write in red text when submitting bugs to this thread so issues are easier to find.):
- Known issues will be posted here.
Post edited by Archived Post on
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Comments
Awesome.
What does this mean exactly? Is it a visual change, or an actual mechanic fix, or something else?
That... gave me a good laugh. Thanks, Cryptic
Good call...
...*covers ears before the uproar begins*
It is a fix for this bug.
Indirect powers due to the fact that they either crit for every hit or for no hits. If in the future they can fix that, they will likely change it back.
Viper's Nest bugs look good.
Oh the irony
-ROAR-
Joking, mine has been bound forver XD
(Guess Kenpo was right for saying that as soon it was in the open, it'd get a fix :-p)
Proves that if things had been done the right way from the start...
...and/or he may have run out of patience at the wrong time. Gentleman_Crush arrived this month, works on "Cstore stuff, powers, items, enemies, etc", and based on his posts has both very active and very responsive to player input. If he has not been tied down by the PvP item rework or the Unarmed review, he would potentially be capable of all manner of fixes.
tldr Gentleman_Crush nerfed all your favorite powers and devices, get him!
Totally. Every power/device he showed is getting some love...
Yepp .. i can only repeat he should have posted that first, instead of just moaning about everything is too easy
Also .. good that i don't have any character with imbue or sigils
Hm.. ok i was just thinking about reactivating an old level 26 character with Sigils .. but she has a forced retcon
since her passive was removed .. so i also was unsure what to do with her
I offer into evidence of my assertion, Punji Stick Traps...
Try to find a post complaining about them working with Imbue. I can find an old post or two saying they do too much damage, nothing about Imbue...
Imbue + Punji featured in Snake's video... <glances at PTS notes>
Yeah... Musta been a coincidence... :rolleyes:
Because it was overperforming right ?
Told ya that'd be a priority fix, didn't I?
Exactly, that stuff was posted a LONG time ago.
This too. Looks like after several months of good progress we're back to heavy handed nerf bat-ism. Looks like I need to get ready for another CO break.
Although the dodge-immunity of Ebon Ruin's DOT makes me wonder why the same can't be applied to stuff like Sniper Rifle, Focused Arrow, and BLEED. Regular bleeding.
I am so ninja I will evade crippling blood loss. And visibility.
(The removal of so many crits worries me. It seems like a 'HAMMER SMASH BUTAN' scenario. I really, really hope they test changes like that fully before pushing them live, because otherwise it signals the start of another downward decline. Don't want to go there again. Really, so many crits removed? It seems silly.)
Exactly, the jumping on those issues so soon after the video is cataclysmically obvious.
Then you should probably talk with Ame, who seemed to agree with the more rational view that DoTs should check to crit individually on each tick. That you guys lack the programign tools to do it right doesnt change what right is, and yes, this solution you have introduced (we can't do it right dso its not going to work at ALL) comes off as hamfisted and more than a litle blind to the environments you are altering.
The big issue with these powers is that we currently have no way for Damage/Healing over Time items to crit properly - they either crit for the entire duration of the power, or not at all. The desire is that they crit on a per tick basis, but due to the way the DoT/HoT powers work, this is not an easy fix. When we eventually have that fix, these powers will most likely regain the ability to crit, on a per tick basis.
We have been aware of this issue for a while, and we worked on a fix, but the fix didn't work well enough. We have enough issues with these powers that we believe the best short term solution is to prevent them from critting entirely, until we can get a real fix in. These aren't design decisions where we think the powers need to be weakened, it is solely an issue of "this is not how crits are supposed to work." In addition to providing additional damage (which could or could not be fine with these powers) they also count as repeatedly getting crits. We have several powers that, design wise, are not allowed to crit and are compensated for that fact with increased damage. If we make a decision to keep any of these powers unable to crit for the long term, compensation will be added to those powers.
This will have the largest impact on people using Imbue, but it will also have some impact on people using these half dozen powers (and handful of items) while using a crit heavy build. It's unfortunate that we don't have a better solution at this time, but we believe this is the best decision at this moment, and will continue to work on a better fix for these powers.
Yes, I did forget to mention this bit when I posted. Sorry for any confusion guys!
Does it mean nothing that this item is extremely rare and that most who have it spent dozens of hours farming it?
What criterion do you use to decide how powerful rare items should be? Do you simply compare them to regular powers?
Also the patch note left out an important detail: the KB distance on the item has been reduced. I'm mentioning this in case it's an unintended over-nerf since it doesn't appear in the notes.
Query:
Is the present situation actually unbalanced to the point of being destabilizing? Because (and I'm not pretending to know everything) this is one thing I've heard zero complaints; and there plenty of ways to inflict damage more rapidly and heals more rapidly than critting with Over Time effects.
It just seems to me that this is a change that's just going to annoy people for little benefit, when it could probably be put off until there's a real fix available.
It'd be different if this was something that was causing massive balance problems but... I just don't see it as being that big a thing from what I know.
Right, so now lets put it into context:
I just blew through Aftershock on Elite difficulty, picking off the Army of One perk on the way through as a footnote with a build that was my 2 prefered defensive powers, some good gear, and a COMPLETELY RANDOM assortment of attacks chosen for the damage type perks it would increment. Zero attack synergy. I forgot I even was on Elite until about episode 4.
There's not much balancing to be done or hoped for in the PvE side, because the game is trivial if you have strong defenses.
Where there are balance questions to pursue is in the PvP environment where people actually pit attacks and defenses agaist something that is potentially able to fight back. There, if you look, I think you'll find a strong concensus that several defensive powers/combinations grossly outperform all but the 2-3 strongest attack comboes in the game.
So here you come skipping along merrily and change stuff, calling it a 'fix' to yourself, and what you change is to weaken the offensive side of the teeter-totter, which was already running a bit high and dry.
If you don't have the tech to do it right, maybe try not to bung things up worse?
Its a good attempt at a fix, but only in a vacuum. Even this whacky band-aid approach would have been a lot more popular if it had been done after addressing some of the other much more glaring issues that your band-aid is only going to exacerbate.
I'd just like to take this time to make you aware that fixes like these are why a portion of your population holds on to what they find rather than telling you about them... Myself not excluded. If I thought you guys could fix things properly, id probably be more inclined to tell you guys what i've found. Instead, we get stuff of this nature.
But I will say, I do appreciate you coming out and talking about it with us as opposed to just pushing it through without hearing our side of it. I will give you guys credit where credit is due.
^^This, exactly This^^
This. Also, I get the idea that most people stack defenses like IDF, which means DoTs and anything that ticks does crap damage compared to single spike damage anyway...
Its really interesting to see once more that noone of my characters are hit by the nerf, but the same persons
that were complaining that everything was too easy now are complaining about the nerfs :rolleyes:
Ayup. Especially this part.
Seconded/Thirded/Fourthed, etc.
I'm glad you're communicating with us on this issue, but I think the problem of DoTs/HoTs critting for the full duration has been a "problem" for so long that at this point we expected it to be fixed properly, instead of the half-way band-aid of lameness we're getting out of this patch. This band-aid could have been applied months ago if it was really that big of a deal.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in that schedule constraints limited your ability to apply this temporary fix, but honestly it's a little too coincidental these fixes are occurring so soon after forum meltdown. I sincerely hope that, since you're applying the band-aid now, that you intend to truly fix the issue within the next month or two. If we're left with a half dozen powers that simply don't interact with a major synergy point in a lot of builds for an extended period of time, expect rage.
But mostly we just expected these effects to consume imbue, rather than bypass it. /boggle
I hope youre not talking about me. The game is easy with or without this "fix". The build I made to solo tele doesn't use any of the things getting nerfed and since thats all I do anymore anyway (kill tele that is) these changes don't effect me in the least. As a matter of factly, they actually buffed me with this patch (which was also retarded in my opinion).
What im upset about is that once again, theyre nerfing powers and calling it a "fix" when its not.
That's the part I'm surprised at. I expected them to consume Imbue, and not just completely disable their ability to crit. To be honest, if I had to make a guess, there's no way to get them to consume Imbue because they're classified as summons or whatnot, without making a lot of changes behind the hood (just like how they can't make DoT powers have a chance to crit for each tick without a lot of work).
In short, this was the simpler fix.
I agree that one shouldnt compare a very effective power to one that is remarkably less so.
And today we have this:
I just want to point out that this is inconsistent and unfair. But I understand, you want to please the majority, you got complaints about the NPG in PvP, therefore it's perfectly acceptable to nerf it since only a few players will lose a hard-earned reward in exchange for pleasing a lot of whiners.
I guess there is nothing else to say: the current Dev team doesn't believe in rewarding player effort on the extreme upper end. Whether it's Dark Speed being orders of magnitude easier to obtain than CTPs, the total devaluation of VB costume pieces, or nerfing these epic items like months of player farming doesn't matter at all, you can go in and erase the reward for that in the name of "fixes."
To be fair, this accident was an unintended stroke of genius, which is probably the only reason it made it off the PTS in the first place. They basically gave us what is essentially the ghetto version of set bonuses with the Algo gear.
On the flip side, I believe they said they weren't happy with CTPs as it stands, which suggests that it's a possibility they'll go back and make that and things like it less grindy. While that's still unfortunate for the people who already got this kind of stuff, at least you can look forward to an easier time getting it on an alt.
Ebon ruin buffed
Ego storm not critting but the hold mechanic is still broken
This patch basically destroy all those crit hit. I wonder if they're going to give DW a 100% Penetration in the next patch or something to deal with tanks inside PvP if this is how they fix stuffs.
Energy cost needs a LOT of work. It's too easy to get infinite energy. DoT are suppose to be buffed because they're extremely weak but instead, they continue to get a nerf and do only 1 damage on everyone that isn't squishy. This is very nice.
Power animation doesn't change no matter which blast type you pick (Palm/Fist/Head or Chest). Still doing the same animation.
Also as I mostly run Lemurian Antiquities with my test toons
Millenium City : Nemesis Missions: Lemurian Antiquities
- Sometimes character stuck on enterance, you can leave and re-enter to move in mission map but nemesis and minions act weird (either don't attack, spawn crush test dummies etc.)
I hope this is the right place to post those.
I see what you did there.
Either you're deliberately trying to ruffle certain people's feathers (and I think I know who) for no reason or you're clueless to the reality that this nerf fixes some of the complaints about imbue while 1) ignoring what the real complaint was (powers not consuming imbue) and 2) nerfing people that were not even using imbue in the first place. And let's not talk about making rare items that take significant investment of the player to acquire being made not worth the effort.
Translation: You're comment is off base. This has next to nothing to do with game difficulty.
While i can understand the need for fixes, it's just a bad moment of fixing them after Snake's crusade. Feels kinda wrong. Maybe we should post all the other exploits?