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Which Powerset Revision do you think was the Worst? Why?

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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    Bestial Supernatural
    Interesting... would you consider bad character builds "player mistakes"? Or would you say that a random heap of powers is currently viable for endgame(to include Telios Ascendant)? It sounds like what you're actually saying is "The game is easy when you know how to play it right".
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  • zaosha#7725 zaosha Posts: 5 Arc User
    The thing about defense is, once you have enough, anything beyond that is wasted, while you can always win faster, so there's no similar cap on offense.

    It seems like defensive stats are practically irrelevant for DPS for the overwhelming majority of the content in the game; a complete glass cannon build is perfectly viable with an R3 block and proper execution. In most instances, survival in CO is simply not an issue if you position properly and block when you need to - and often times, failure to follow mechanics will still kill you even with a substantial investment in Def and/or HP. I could go through my logs, but if I had to guess, roughly 70% of my deaths in game are raid wipes where no conceivable investment in def stats would have mattered.





  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Power Armor
    It seems like defensive stats are practically irrelevant for DPS for the overwhelming majority of the content in the game
    Well, they matter when you don't have a tank (soloing, PuG alerts/rampages). In team content, Gravitar (both regular and TA) and Qwyjibo punish really squishy builds and you probably want an active defense to reliably survive the baby spawn at Teleiosaurus. But yes, most of my dps don't take con, though I usually have an active defense.
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    So yes, this depth is not warranted besides maybe those fights for a hypothetical difficulty that doesn't exist. Hm, yknow what? Back to calling it fake difficulty :smile:
    People fail at cosmics. They fail for hours, sometimes. That's real difficulty. Now, the technical skills required to beat those encounters are not particularly advanced or sophisticated, and those fights are not particularly complex, but difficulty and complexity are not the same thing.
    Post edited by pantagruel01 on
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Bestial Supernatural
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    My wording was a bit off, my apologies. If you think Champions has any difficulty, besides player mistakes(I guess that, if you want to consider, could be fake difficulty)

    This is quite interesting because what you're saying here is actually the opposite of what fake difficulty's definition is. You're saying "player mistakes" are fake difficulty, when in fact player mistakes leading to failure is how real difficulty works. Meanwhile, fake difficulty means you lose even if you made no mistakes. I'll give some examples:

    Real Difficulty

    You're fighting a boss in Sekiro. You make a mistake: when the boss does an unblockable sweeping attack that you were supposed to jump over, you instead tried to dodge to the side, and as a result you took damage, were killed, and failed the fight.


    Artificial Difficulty

    You're playing World of Warcraft and you face off against a boss. You do the fight perfectly as far as actions are concerned, you don't make a single mistake. However, because your gear isn't of the level the fight requires, you lost anyways because your healer couldn't out-heal the damage the tank was taking.


    So you see, player mistakes leading to failure is not an indication of fake difficulty. In fact, it is a very reliable indicator of real difficulty, because skillful play means not making mistakes. In the case of artificial difficulty, player mistakes can become irrelevant, because whether you made 100 or zero mistakes, there was an artificial barrier to victory that would keep you from succeeding either way.

    So no, you couldn't call "player mistakes" a source of fake difficulty. Also, we don't have the kind of gear tiering structure in this game to produce the results indicated above. The only artificial difficulty we have in CO is levels, i.e. a lvl 10 can't beat a lvl 40 npc. Everything else is real difficulty.​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    Artificial Difficulty

    You're playing World of Warcraft and you face off against a boss. You do the fight perfectly as far as actions are concerned, you don't make a single mistake. However, because your gear isn't of the level the fight requires, you lost anyways because your healer couldn't out-heal the damage the tank was taking.
    That's still real difficulty: 'in order to do X, you first have to gear up' most certainly makes X more difficult. It just doesn't make X more technically challenging. It also doesn't match any of the examples given in TvTropes.

    The apparent intent of 'Fake Difficulty' is actually to target bad difficulty, and the term fake is chosen for some rhetorical purpose, probably to delegitimize anyone who disagrees (which is why I take offense at the term. It's not that some kinds of difficulty aren't bad, but don't play rhetorical games).
  • xcelsior41xcelsior41 Posts: 1,056 Arc User
    spinnytop wrote: »
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    My wording was a bit off, my apologies. If you think Champions has any difficulty, besides player mistakes(I guess that, if you want to consider, could be fake difficulty)

    This is quite interesting because what you're saying here is actually the opposite of what fake difficulty's definition is. You're saying "player mistakes" are fake difficulty, when in fact player mistakes leading to failure is how real difficulty works. Meanwhile, fake difficulty means you lose even if you made no mistakes. I'll give some examples:

    Real Difficulty

    You're fighting a boss in Sekiro. You make a mistake: when the boss does an unblockable sweeping attack that you were supposed to jump over, you instead tried to dodge to the side, and as a result you took damage, were killed, and failed the fight.


    Artificial Difficulty

    You're playing World of Warcraft and you face off against a boss. You do the fight perfectly as far as actions are concerned, you don't make a single mistake. However, because your gear isn't of the level the fight requires, you lost anyways because your healer couldn't out-heal the damage the tank was taking.


    So you see, player mistakes leading to failure is not an indication of fake difficulty. In fact, it is a very reliable indicator of real difficulty, because skillful play means not making mistakes. In the case of artificial difficulty, player mistakes can become irrelevant, because whether you made 100 or zero mistakes, there was an artificial barrier to victory that would keep you from succeeding either way.

    So no, you couldn't call "player mistakes" a source of fake difficulty. Also, we don't have the kind of gear tiering structure in this game to produce the results indicated above. The only artificial difficulty we have in CO is levels, i.e. a lvl 10 can't beat a lvl 40 npc. Everything else is real difficulty.​​

    Well alright then. However I do think the level of difficulty is beyond trivial. I mean, look at the beginning of the game up until endgame, where you can literally ignore the game's mechanic of blocking and hell, don't even need a self heal or anything defense wise, and can level with no threat from enemies(the occasional hold and/or T1 blast from an enemy might give you a smidge of trouble). Endgame? That kinda spikes the difficulty but I mean, if the game is trivial difficulty, barring first encounters, endgame is moderate. Minus Eido, that's what I consider(barring the bug) reasonable endgame difficulty
    Buffing everything to stupid high levels and nerfing everything to piss poor levels yields the same results, but not the same community reactions.

    42 40s, LTSer.
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Bestial Supernatural
    That's still real difficulty: 'in order to do X, you first have to gear up' most certainly makes X more difficult. It just doesn't make X more technically challenging. It also doesn't match any of the examples given in TvTropes.

    The apparent intent of 'Fake Difficulty' is actually to target bad difficulty, and the term fake is chosen for some rhetorical purpose, probably to delegitimize anyone who disagrees (which is why I take offense at the term. It's not that some kinds of difficulty aren't bad, but don't play rhetorical games).

    This is actually the most commonly used example of artificial difficulty. It doesn't make the fight more challenging, it makes it impossible. No matter how skilled you are, you will fail <--- hallmark of artificial difficulty. Now I know TvTropes is the go to academic source but... well it's not.
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    Well alright then. However I do think the level of difficulty is beyond trivial. I mean, look at the beginning of the game up until endgame, where you can literally ignore the game's mechanic of blocking and hell, don't even need a self heal or anything defense wise, and can level with no threat from enemies(the occasional hold and/or T1 blast from an enemy might give you a smidge of trouble). Endgame? That kinda spikes the difficulty but I mean, if the game is trivial difficulty, barring first encounters, endgame is moderate. Minus Eido, that's what I consider(barring the bug) reasonable endgame difficulty

    Breaking News: CO is an easy game.

    Now if the last few years have been any indication, someone is going to come in here and very angrily tell you that you're wrong about that n_n let's see if that's still a thing​​
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Bestial Supernatural
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    Well alright then. However I do think the level of difficulty is beyond trivial. I mean, look at the beginning of the game up until endgame, where you can literally ignore the game's mechanic of blocking and hell, don't even need a self heal or anything defense wise, and can level with no threat from enemies(the occasional hold and/or T1 blast from an enemy might give you a smidge of trouble). Endgame? That kinda spikes the difficulty but I mean, if the game is trivial difficulty, barring first encounters, endgame is moderate. Minus Eido, that's what I consider(barring the bug) reasonable endgame difficulty

    Breaking News: CO is an easy game.

    It's a good thing somebody finally told me about this because all these years I've clearly been laboring under the presumption that this was dark souls o3o​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    This is actually the most commonly used example of artificial difficulty. It doesn't make the fight more challenging, it makes it impossible.
    No it doesn't. Nothing is stopping you from gear grinding until you can finish it. Now, you aren't going to finish it any time soon in that case, but...
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Bestial Supernatural
    spinnytop wrote: »
    This is actually the most commonly used example of artificial difficulty. It doesn't make the fight more challenging, it makes it impossible.
    No it doesn't. Nothing is stopping you from gear grinding until you can finish it. Now, you aren't going to finish it any time soon in that case, but...

    That's exactly why it's artificial difficulty. If there wasn't an artificial barrier in place preventing you from succeeding then you could beat it just through skill alone. If you have to go do something else to make a fight not impossible then that is the clearest definition of artificial difficulty you can get. There is no better example and that's why MMOs with gear ladders are so commonly used to illustrate what artificial difficulty is.​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    That's exactly why it's artificial difficulty. If there wasn't an artificial barrier in place preventing you from succeeding then you could beat it just through skill alone.​​
    It's not an artificial barrier. It's just that the dungeons are not self-contained challenges.
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Bestial Supernatural
    It's just that the dungeons are not self-contained challenges.

    Which is a hallmark of artificial difficulty. You keep presenting this as if it's an argument for these encounters not being artificial difficulty, when you are in fact listing an attribute common to encounters that employ artificial difficulty.

    Here's another example:

    I make an encounter in CO that has an enemy NPC that constantly hovers 1000' above ground, and has attacks that can reach you no matter where you are in the stage. You enter that fight with a character that cannot fly. No matter how skillfully you play, you cannot beat this fight.

    But hey, this fight isn't a self-contained challenge, part of the "challenge" is going to the powerhouse and changing one of your TPs to flight. Now sure, you might have to grind out some resources to do that, but that's all part of the "difficulty" of the fight! The artificial difficulty that is.

    Once you have flight, the fight is a cake walk. You fly up to the boss, hit him three times, and they're dead. The need to go and do something else didn't make the fight any more difficult, it simply made it impossible until you did whatever you had to do to make it easy. The MMO gear-ladder examples are often the same because the same artificial barrier that makes them impossible at first, later becomes a means to make the fight trivial - once you have gear several tiers above the fight it actually becomes nearly impossible to lose.

    This is why levels, as they are generally set up in MMOs, are similarly a form of artificial difficulty. What might have been impossible at level 10, becomes a trivial one-shot at level 40. The difficulty of the encounter, and your chances of beating it with the use of skill, are less dependent on your actual skill than they are on some arbitrary number. Now of course, levels doesn't always mean artificial difficulty, some games have it set up to where no matter what level you get to fights still remain challenging. However in MMOs this is generally not the case.​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    It's just that the dungeons are not self-contained challenges.

    Which is a hallmark of artificial difficulty. You keep presenting this as if it's an argument for these encounters not being artificial difficulty, when you are in fact listing an attribute common to encounters that employ artificial difficulty.
    Point is, the difficulty isn't fake. It's real, just of a type you don't like.
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Bestial Supernatural
    Point is, the difficulty isn't fake. It's real, just of a type you don't like.

    Well no. The requirement to leave an encounter and do something else isn't a type of difficulty, it's a type of prerequisite. It's like if you're in a boxing ring with an opponent, and at some point someone gets in the ring and says "Hey Pantagruel, please leave the ring and go buy an ice cream sandwich or I'm going to ring the bell and declare you the loser". Did that person make the fight more difficult in some form, or did they just add a prerequisite for allowing you to continue to attempt to win it?​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    Did that person make the fight more difficult in some form, or did they just add a prerequisite for allowing you to continue to attempt to win it?​​
    They made obtaining victory more difficult, by saying 'you must do both X and Y to win' instead of 'you must do X to win'.
  • I think you two are using slightly different definitions of "difficulty" here.
  • xcelsior41xcelsior41 Posts: 1,056 Arc User
    spinnytop wrote: »
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    Well alright then. However I do think the level of difficulty is beyond trivial. I mean, look at the beginning of the game up until endgame, where you can literally ignore the game's mechanic of blocking and hell, don't even need a self heal or anything defense wise, and can level with no threat from enemies(the occasional hold and/or T1 blast from an enemy might give you a smidge of trouble). Endgame? That kinda spikes the difficulty but I mean, if the game is trivial difficulty, barring first encounters, endgame is moderate. Minus Eido, that's what I consider(barring the bug) reasonable endgame difficulty

    Breaking News: CO is an easy game.

    It's a good thing somebody finally told me about this because all these years I've clearly been laboring under the presumption that this was dark souls o3o​​

    Why did you reply to my post twice?
    Buffing everything to stupid high levels and nerfing everything to piss poor levels yields the same results, but not the same community reactions.

    42 40s, LTSer.
  • jonesing4jonesing4 Posts: 800 Arc User
    Fire
    "Character Select" powerset was the worst revamp. Nerfed into oblivion, and it wasn't even OP.
  • themightyzeniththemightyzenith Posts: 4,599 Arc User
    Single Blade
    jonesing4 wrote: »
    "Character Select" powerset was the worst revamp. Nerfed into oblivion, and it wasn't even OP.

    :+1:

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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Bestial Supernatural
    xcelsior41 wrote: »
    Why did you reply to my post twice?

    Apparently the forum saw my edit and was like "nah, both versions of this post are so amazing that they both need to be posted".​​
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Bestial Supernatural
    They made obtaining victory more difficult, by saying 'you must do both X and Y to win' instead of 'you must do X to win'.

    No, they didn't make obtaining victory in that encounter more difficult. They made it absolutely impossible. You're trying to insist that the challenge of an individual encounter has to be looked at in terms of things that occur outside that encounter. The reality is that while you're engaged in that encounter none of that other stuff is a factor. You're facing this encounter, with your current stats and your current inventory and your current level of ability, and the question that is posed is "is this encounter testing your skill in regards to the mechanics of the game?". If nothing you do can cause you to win the encounter, then it's not.

    Your other claim that "this is just difficulty you don't like" is interesting. So if I say I like it, does it stop being artificial difficulty? I mean honestly I'm not averse to the idea that "The fire golem is completely immune to any attacks, unless you're wielding the Sword Of The Water Goddess". I like that sort of thing, it speaks to the D&D nerd in me. However, it's definitely artificial difficulty. So I like it, and I'm calling it artificial difficulty. So, how can me calling it artificial difficulty mean I don't like it?​​
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Power Armor
    spinnytop wrote: »
    They made obtaining victory more difficult, by saying 'you must do both X and Y to win' instead of 'you must do X to win'.

    No, they didn't make obtaining victory in that encounter more difficult. They made it absolutely impossible. You're trying to insist that the challenge of an individual encounter has to be looked at in terms of things that occur outside that encounter.
    That's because games are not a cluster of distinct encounters, they're a whole entity.
  • kallethenkallethen Posts: 1,576 Arc User
    I'm a bit saddened that Heavy Weapons wasn't listed on this poll. I still very much dislike how they incorporated Clinging Flames as a main mechanic of the powerset. They effectively turned it into a Melee Fire powerset.​​
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  • lezard21lezard21 Posts: 1,510 Arc User
    Munition
    kallethen wrote: »
    I'm a bit saddened that Heavy Weapons wasn't listed on this poll. I still very much dislike how they incorporated Clinging Flames as a main mechanic of the powerset. They effectively turned it into a Melee Fire powerset.

    I added it to the strawpoll version of the poll (link in first post) since forum only allows 10 options to vote from​​
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    Bestial Supernatural
    spinnytop wrote: »
    They made obtaining victory more difficult, by saying 'you must do both X and Y to win' instead of 'you must do X to win'.

    No, they didn't make obtaining victory in that encounter more difficult. They made it absolutely impossible. You're trying to insist that the challenge of an individual encounter has to be looked at in terms of things that occur outside that encounter.
    That's because games are not a cluster of distinct encounters, they're a whole entity.

    No, games are absolutely a collection of distinct encounters. You know why? Because you as a player don't experience the entirety of the game simultaneously. Also that has nothing to do with whether artificial difficulty exists or not. Whether you look at a game as its component pieces or the full finished product, artificial difficulty continues to exist as a concept. Perhaps you're experiencing it right now in this encounter, or perhaps you're looking at it in the context of a system that permeates several encounters. Either way, you're still looking at the same thing just from two different angles. In fact, you see it the clearest in the latter viewpoint.​​
  • spordeliaspordelia Posts: 460 Arc User
    Telekinesis
    Telekinesis.
    But only because two of my favorite powers were kind of ruined (visually). Otherwise a good revision.
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