FC.31.20170531.14 - Patriot Event/Power Changes

kaiserin · June 2017

Please post all Telekinesis feedback here: https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline#/discussion/1208644/telekinesis-changes-discussion-thread

Please use this thread for any of the other changes.
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Patriot Event
Added the following to the Patriot store:

Maple Leaf Trail Aura: Color, White, Black, Rainbow.
Star Trail Aura: Rainbow.
Falling Star and Orbiting Star Auras.
Canadian Flag: Speed, Acrobatics, Athletics.
Flag: Acrobatics, Athletics.
Justiciar action figure (formerly in the ZEN store).
Valiant emote.

Red Winter

This alert now requires you to defeat the soldiers around the bosses to complete the first phase of the alert.
Increased the aggro radius of the bosses in the alert.
Fixed a bug where NPC Medical Nanites did nothing. This passive now provides a small flat number heal over time to the boss and nearby allies. Soviet Guard has always had this passive.
Soviet Guard's Rally power, which provides a damage boost to nearby allies, has a much higher priority on his attack list now. This means he'll try to use the power when it becomes available, instead of never using it.
The bosses in the alert now have unified power color tinting. Previously they used whatever the default color the power had.
During the Patriot event this alert has a chance to drop bind on equip versions of the auras, emotes and action figures that are available in the patriot store.
Added healing to the scoreboard points.

Power Changes

Corrected a bunch of tooltips. Known Issue: A few Instances of Ego Leech in tooltips has been replaced with the text Mental State, this will be corrected next patch.
Added a buff icon for telekinetic reverberation.
Renamed the buff that Sharp Shooter grants to Precision.
Telekinetic Strike is no longer tagged as an energy builder.

New Power: Mental Precision

Ranged damage form that scales off of Dex.
Triggers when applying Mental State effects.

Mental Discipline

Moved to Tier 1.
Change the activate animation and made different versions for Single or Id Blades.
Optimized the fx for this power.

Ego Blade Annihilation

Fixed a bug where Ego Annihilation's rupture was scaling its damage off of Strength instead of Ego.

theultimax · June 2017

Where is the patriot store?

chaosdrgnz43 · June 2017

Boo, no more prioritizing killing bosses to fight Soviet Guard quickly...

sterga · June 2017

Woo! Star auras and stuff.

kaizerin wrote: »

Red Winter
This alert now requires you to defeat the soldiers around the bosses to complete the first phase of the alert.

Fixed a bug where NPC Medical Nanites did nothing. This passive now provides a small flat number heal over time to the boss and nearby allies. Soviet Guard has always had this passive.

Boo on killing the trash.
Considering it's the Soviets and they cut corners like mad when making stuff, it totally makes sense for Med Nanites to do nothing. To keep with proper theme, Med Nanites should be reverted to a broken state.

aesica · June 2017

gradii wrote: »

Uh huh, Soviet guard always had medical nanites... Pretty sure he had Lightning reflexes or Defiance. I'm sure that's a typo, right?

I'm pretty certain at least one of his sidekicks has lightning reflexes. So yaay, one aoe heals and the other has damage reduction. On a timer. I hope this doesn't turn into another Duratok/Ironclad, forcing most groups into a DPS race they can't win.

Especially since a fail in Red Winter gives you nothing.

I hope some considerations are being made for how this could affect groups that aren't super-geared, or below 40.

avianos · June 2017

kaizerin wrote: »

Patriot Event
Added the following to the Patriot store:
Valiant emote.

Oh please, please tell me it's the epic heroic Hands on Hips layer/Akimbo pose

I'm going to have a Field day farming that alert for that specific emote

EDIT: Apparently Liberty Guard is not in PTS so nobody can test it and tell me

Red Winter
This alert now requires you to defeat the soldiers around the bosses to complete the first phase of the alert.

BOOOOOOO
Way to pander the alert

guyhumual · June 2017

I can only imagine how the discussion over at Cryptic went:

"So how can we make this Alert less fun and more tedious for our players, people are having fun, we have to quash that."
"Oh I know, make them have to kill all the soldiers!"
"Even the ones that get stuck or hidden in the missiles?"
"Oh yes, we can probably cause an auto fail or two."
"Nice!"
"Nice!"
"Awesome!"
"Wait, what if we made the villains regenerate?"
"Hmm, that could be a bit much, but how were you thinking of doing that?"
"Well we could say Soviet Guard has medical Nanites, that would let him heal his teammates."
"Wasn't he the heavy hitting, tank like leader of the group? Didn't he have a tanking passive or something?
"We'll just say he has medical nanites, and has always had medical nanites, they just weren't doing anything before"
"Nice"
"Nice"
"Super!"
"Not quite Cybermind material yet, but we're getting there. Great work team, soon nobody will enjoy CO content and that will cause our profits to sore! When every mission is the most tedious, boring, slogfest imaginable we'll rake in thousands of new subscribers who will all want to spend money on this game."
"That, my friend, is flawless logic."
"Now let's move onto inconveniencing players with recon forcing power changes . . ."

sterga · June 2017

Med Nanites isn't that good. I don't think the low heals and minuscule damage resist is going to make the Soviets megabuff tanky-mctanks. Not that I don't think to keep with proper Soviet theme that there should be stuff that's broken or catastrophically fails.

If it does turn out to be a horrible disaster, I expect it to get nerfed. Even Ao'Q got nerfed to hell so Pyramid Power is actually winnable by less than epic dps teams.

shadowolf505 · June 2017

New emote!

guyhumual · June 2017

sterga said:
Med Nanites isn't that good. I don't think the low heals and minuscule damage resist is going to make the Soviets megabuff tanky-mctanks. Not that I don't think to keep with proper Soviet theme that there should be stuff that's broken or catastrophically fails.

If it does turn out to be a horrible disaster, I expect it to get nerfed. Even Ao'Q got nerfed to hell so Pyramid Power is actually winnable by less than epic dps teams.

Well I don't think my little scenario is at all based on fact, so I wouldn't take what's said there too seriously, but I have in the past had that end fight come a bit close, and so for some team ups this added small amount of healing will make the fight a fail. Personally I'm actually not all that worried, but I do have to question why mettle with something that doesn't seem to be getting complaints? Couldn't that effort be spent on something new or something broken?

avianos · June 2017

I don't think Medical Nanities are dangerous on NPCs' hands

Worst Case scenario: the pug gets underleveled members with really low damage output and they run out of time

speaking of time limits, will it get an increase now that the enemies got buffed?

lunnylunny · June 2017

gradii said:
Uh huh, Soviet guard always had medical nanites... Pretty sure he had Lightning reflexes or Defiance. I'm sure that's a typo, right?

Hammer and Sickle both have Lightning Reflexes. Soviet Guard had Med nanites, that I'm sure of. I have this weird feeling that he had two passives, Defiance & Nanites, but my memory is most likely messing with me.

Interestingly enough, it's the only custom alert that is timed and every single boss has a bulky slotted passive.

I don't get why people are freaking out over these changes. Most Red Winter runs have over a minute of time left after each of the three bosses. If it's so problematic then I guess we'll need a little bit of a time increase, but this is better overall. Avoids having the ones who know the alert leaving the newbies behind who end up dying to the mobs.

However, I feel that there needs to be a better reward table for when this isn't during the event. Including fixing the reward it already has, not necessarily taking away the XP reward but making it better. Or just changing it to be yet another resource-reward custom alert.

andondarkmore · June 2017

Where is the Patriot Store?

pantagruel01 · June 2017

I wouldn't expect the changes to this fight to matter much unless there's map problems that cause vanishing adds (e.g. they get knocked back through a geometry hole); if takes incredibly low dps to fail at the moment.

It would be nice if they occasionally made encounters more difficult by adding actual challenge, though, instead of just increasing the difficulty of the dps test.

guyhumual · June 2017

Well after doing the Red Alert special alert 6 times today I found Soviet Guard had defiance all 6 times. If he's always had Medical Naniates he's also always had defiance as well.

kaiserin · June 2017

This was mostly just a clean up of the alert. The soldier defeat was added so players weren't left behind while other players sped ahead. The Medical Nanite fix was because the passive was broken to the point where it had no effect on any NPC that used it.

Barring time there may some some additional changes to the alert to make it more interesting, but this was just a quick pass.

championshewolf · June 2017

guyhumual said:
Well after doing the Red Alert special alert 6 times today I found Soviet Guard had defiance all 6 times. If he's always had Medical Naniates he's also always had defiance as well.

Multiple passives is not uncommon. Bludhound in the Vibora Alert has two; Pestillence and Defiance.

guyhumual · June 2017

kaizerin said:
This was mostly just a clean up of the alert. The soldier defeat was added so players weren't left behind while other players sped ahead. The Medical Nanite fix was because the passive was broken to the point where it had no effect on any NPC that used it.

Barring time there may some some additional changes to the alert to make it more interesting, but this was just a quick pass.

I hope nobody's feelings were hurt by my little play, it was meant in jest, but I was indeed wondering why you guys were tinkering with this alert. Thanks for the clarification.

guyhumual · June 2017

championshewolf said:

guyhumual said:
Well after doing the Red Alert special alert 6 times today I found Soviet Guard had defiance all 6 times. If he's always had Medical Naniates he's also always had defiance as well.
Multiple passives is not uncommon. Bludhound in the Vibora Alert has two; Pestillence and Defiance.

Well Bludhound is also a vampire and a werewolf. Maybe he's a unique case because of that? I'm not saying they can't have multiple passives, but it does seem like a strange passive for a might tank to have is all.

aesica · June 2017

kaizerin wrote: »

The soldier defeat was added so players weren't left behind while other players sped ahead.

While I'm one of the few who actually agrees with taking measures to prevent this, I don't think it's actually going to stop people from speeding ahead. As long as there's a time limit that can fail the mission, as long as people can use their zippy travel powers, as long as people lack patience, and as long as they think "the rest of the group can clean up the crap while I solo-hero tankpwn the next boss," there's always going to be the guy that zips ahead.

The only way to truly prevent this is to not spawn Group B until group A is completely defeated, not spawn group C until Group B is completely defeated, and not spawn The Trio until Group C is defeated.

pantagruel01 wrote: »

It would be nice if they occasionally made encounters more difficult by adding actual challenge, though, instead of just increasing the difficulty of the dps test.

Definitely agree. DPS checks are the low-hanging fruit when it comes to adding challenges to content. Something that required situational awareness or problem solving instead of racing against a timer would also be more inclusive to low-level groups.

heartstringsk3 · June 2017

Is there any chance these events could introduce an account-unlock version of the various emotes? Like, price it as much as an archetype or vehicle or even more, 650-700 or even make us get up to the 800-token cap for it?

sterga · June 2017

guyhumual wrote: »

I hope nobody's feelings were hurt by my little play, it was meant in jest, but I was indeed wondering why you guys were tinkering with this alert. Thanks for the clarification.

Most people aren't malicious. Stupidity or "good intentions" (path to the darkside) are far more likely.

People who get "left behind" wouldn't be if they just moved on and never attack the trash in the first place. The aggro magnet should have all of the attention, leaving less beefy toons in the clear. Plus, as others have pointed out, this alert could fail due to stupid BS like mobs falling under the map or spawning in places players can't reach. The museum alert has this issue except no one has to kill that one mob, just have a second person diffuse the bomb while the first keeps aggro. I'll take someone getting crushed by trash over failing due to buggy crap any day.

pantagruel01 · June 2017

guyhumual said:
Well after doing the Red Alert special alert 6 times today I found Soviet Guard had defiance all 6 times. If he's always had Medical Naniates he's also always had defiance as well.

Pretty sure he didn't always have medical nanites; I don't think medical nanites existed at launch, and the character did.

avianos · June 2017

well he definatly doesn't have medical nanities in the Nemesis mission

theravenforce · June 2017

Patriot Event should be up and running as the Patriot bags are dropping, however I cannot find the vendor, nor am I able to find the Valiant emote. (I suspect it is crossed arms over chest pose?)

sekhmet46 · June 2017

Can someone post a pic of the Alien set hands?

kurski · June 2017

It's now getting to the point where your beefing up alerts but tuning down powers for players some of the changes you guys are making are getting out of hand. Your upgrading alerts but the drop % is bad you wanna make it so its team friendly but even doing the xp alerts you put buffs on them for lvl 10 players like putting them to lvl 30 is gonna make a difference. Most of the alerts are still broken and then you take powers and change them like gonna work better welp they don't you just make them even worst and pointless to take. I have been playing this game since beta and some things I understand need to have been changed. Yet some things are just plain out stupid to have touched or moved. Still trying to figure out why Might has fire as buff but ehh.. or why you would just buff everything and call it fixed/

bluepanda8 · June 2017

Yes more auras.

violetnychus · June 2017

kaizerin said:
This was mostly just a clean up of the alert. The soldier defeat was added so players weren't left behind while other players sped ahead. The Medical Nanite fix was because the passive was broken to the point where it had no effect on any NPC that used it.

Barring time there may some some additional changes to the alert to make it more interesting, but this was just a quick pass.

Kudos for this and explanations of the rationale for various decisions can help A LOT to generate better trust in the game direction.

Before I had acrobatics I hated how people would run ahead.

Could you please explain why the sword animation was added to a form? At the moment it apparently is a conscious effort to decrease the build versatility of a power across frameworks, thematically instead of balance. I am hoping that is not accurate to describe the intent?

kaiserin · June 2017

Form of the Tempest is the dual blade form, it was an error that it was not using the dual blade animation. All of the other MA forms have appropriate animations suited to their weapon.

The Unarmed form is likely going to have an additional proc criteria added in the near future. Something along the lines of triggering off of Chi effects (example: Burning Chi Fist's dot) so The Fist archetype can have a thematic functional Form in the near future.

violetnychus · June 2017

So apparently it was a bug fix more than a reflection of design philosophy?

Consistency is nice, but it would definitely be better for practically everyone, and arguably better consistency, if MA forms are animation-wise theme-agnostic the way every other form, AFAIK, is.

Concept builders would lose that disadvantage compared to non-concept builders.

You guys in development would not get any responsibility to consider or create additional animations or deal with a particular framework being 'deficient' that way like the current unarmed situation.

FC.31.20170531.14 - Patriot Event/Power Changes

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