FC.31.20230614.5 - Patriot Event/Gear

kaiserin · June 2023

Patriot Celebration

Added Star and Maple Drift auras to the event store.
Added color variants to the Glinting aura to the event store.
Note: New costumes will be added next week to pts.

Cosmic Gear

Cosmic Strike: Once at 10 stacks, sets Critical Severity to 150%.

Onslaught Gear

Added Grond's Onslaught, Medusa's Onslaught and Gravitar's Onslaught gear to the Onslaught store.

Onslaught Gloves of the Slicer

To address an issue with this gear dealing a specific damage type as its bonus damage (as we have no intention of releasing any other gear with this effect for other damage types due to the performance issues it causes), this gear now instead directly increases your base melee damage by 5%.
Additionally increases damage by 1% for 10 seconds if your target is affected by a resistance debuff (demolish, shredded, etc) that you applied. Stacks up to 5 times.

Onslaught Gloves of the Sniper

To address an issue with this gear dealing a specific damage type as its bonus damage, this gear now instead directly increases your base ranged damage by 5%.
Additionally increases damage by 1% for 10 seconds if your target is more than 20ft away. Stacks up to 5 times.

Grond's Onslaught

Increases your base damage by 5%.
Increases your base damage by an additional 1% for 10 seconds when you fully charge a power. Stacks up to 5 times. Partially charging a power will also refresh existing stacks on you.

Gravitar's Onslaught

Increases your base damage by 5%.
Increases your base damage by an additional 1% for 10 seconds when you fully maintain a power. Stacks up to 5 times. Partially maintaining a power will also refresh existing stacks on you.

Medusa's Onslaught

Increases your combo power base damage by 5%.
Increases your combo power base damage by an additional 5% for 10 seconds when you complete a combo. Stacks up to 9 times. Starting a combo power will also refresh existing stacks on you.
Reduces all non-combo direct damage by 50%.

Gear

Fixed a bug where the +to non superstats effect could not stack from multiple sources.

Misc

Added Rainbow Krackle Auras to the debugger store.
Fixed scaling issue with Krackle Hand Auras.

crypticbuxom · June 2023

Medusa's Onslaught
Reduces all non-combo direct damage by 50%.

Why the hate for builds that likes using combo powers and other powers? Yes it does have a higher buff overall when you use exclusively combos than the other pieces, but it didn't have to be.

shiningdarkness · June 2023

kaiserin#0958 wrote: »

Patriot Celebration
Medusa's Onslaught
Increases your combo power base damage by 5%.

Increases your combo power base damage by an additional 5% for 10 seconds when you complete a combo. Stacks up to 9 times. Starting a combo power will also refresh existing stacks on you.

Reduces all non-combo direct damage by 50%.

Fact that it does not buff any other damage powers is ALREADY good enough reason people will not use this with any non-combo focused build, so why the 50% damage nerf to everything exists on this item?

Also why it stacks only 9 times and not 10 times?

All of that makes no logical sense...

monsterdaddy · June 2023

Love the Medusa's Onslaught gloves, could make for some very interesting builds using just combos. Awesome!

monsterdaddy · June 2023

"Reduces all non-combo direct damage by 50%."
Would you consider exempting Ultimate powers? (and Ultimate devices). Given their nature, I think they should not have their damage debuffed by the Medusa gloves.

gammabreaker · June 2023

Savior gloves appear to be working on the new PTS build. Thanks for the fix!

phasestar · June 2023

Very interesting changes and good fixes, going to give these a test!

rinzler156 · June 2023

I will say, the Base Damage buffing should be doubled, at least go up to 20%

rinzler156 · June 2023

I changed my mind, I was wrong

misterspider · June 2023

Cosmic Gear - finally items for the mysterious Cosmic category in the AH.

jaazaniah1 · June 2023

rinzler156 wrote: »

Kind of feels like they are trying to somewhat weaken OSVs and buff Cosmics to make them more equal?

rinzler156 · June 2023

> @jaazaniah1 said:
> Kind of feels like they are trying to somewhat weaken OSVs and buff Cosmics to make them more equal?

Well there has got to be an easier outlet to get tokens for OV’s. It’s become extremely redundant.

shiningdarkness · June 2023

Did some tests and new onslaught stuff is slightly worse than gear we have currently on live due to deminishing returns on +base damage buffs. I think it would be fair to either remove deminishing returns from base damage buffs or to increase onslaught gear damage buffs.

Also if you want to make new cosmic gear not be useless and people actually want it, simply remove "only on one hit" from their effects.

kaiserin · June 2023

Hey all, going to chime in and say we are not going to go above 10% on damage bonuses. Keep in mind this is base damage, so it's a true 10%, not reduced by diminishing returns.

The point of this change was to allocate the 10% damage proc on the old versions into something that any damage type can take advantage of, instead of being limited to slashing/piercing, while also keeping it from causing performance issues in large group settings. This is a global boost to the existing gear.

As for Onslaught token rate, that is not something we will be looking into right now, but will likely look into it the next time Onslaught week rolls around.

jaazaniah1 · June 2023

kaiserin#0958 wrote: »

As for Onslaught token rate, that is not something we will be looking into right now, but will likely look into it the next time Onslaught week rolls around.

Just turn Onslaught Week into Onslaught Century and it is all fixed.

jaazaniah1 · June 2023

rinzler156 wrote: »

> @jaazaniah1 said:
> Kind of feels like they are trying to somewhat weaken OSVs and buff Cosmics to make them more equal?

Well there has got to be an easier outlet to get tokens for OV’s. It’s become extremely redundant.

Tell me about it. I have OSV gear on 94 characters. That's a grind!!!!

ultronyte · June 2023

kaiserin#0958 wrote: »

As for Onslaught token rate, that is not something we will be looking into right now, but will likely look into it the next time Onslaught week rolls around.

Awesome, looking forward to this in 6 months or however long it takes for an OV week to drop. The OV grind has been an issue for ages now, and adding all this new shiny gear and expecting players to grind that out again is not gonna work out.

shiningdarkness · June 2023

kaiserin#0958 wrote: »

Hey all, going to chime in and say we are not going to go above 10% on damage bonuses. Keep in mind this is base damage, so it's a true 10%, not reduced by diminishing returns.

The point of this change was to allocate the 10% damage proc on the old versions into something that any damage type can take advantage of, instead of being limited to slashing/piercing, while also keeping it from causing performance issues in large group settings. This is a global boost to the existing gear.

As for Onslaught token rate, that is not something we will be looking into right now, but will likely look into it the next time Onslaught week rolls around.

From live server with slicers:

From pts server with fully stacked slicers:

If what you have just said was true, and there were no deminishing returns, tooltip would've shown 909 damage, because 826+10%=908.6.

phasestar · June 2023

In my testing so far, the new Onslaught gear is about equivalent to the improved Cosmic gear, it's just that there are different abilities to choose from. The 10% bonus does seem reasonably strong, like what you get from the power set utility mods I guess. Also, having these now boost your existing damage is much better than adding piercing/slashing IMHO.

I definitely like that we have more options and so far while I haven't tested many of the pieces, everything seems to be working. Will chime in with more test results by Monday.

phasestar · June 2023

kaiserin#0958 wrote: »

As for Onslaught token rate, that is not something we will be looking into right now, but will likely look into it the next time Onslaught week rolls around.

I am cautiously optimistic. If Onslaught were made more fun and less grindy, it would be a great thing.

h4forums · June 2023

.

nacito · June 2023

The new OV gear looks fine...ish, but I think the new cosmic gear feels... unbalanced. There's way too many offensive gear options now, I guess it makes sense so you don't have too many bonuses overlapping each other but you could always make them exclusive to others, like how some have 10 and -10% threat gen already
I suggest shuffling some around, like...
Make cosmic wonder a utility piece, since it gives bonuses to cooldown like utility pieces.
make cosmic ambition a def piece since it boosts def stats.

the other option is to give other util/def options on those slots, because this looks kind of way too lean into offensive gear.

gammabreaker · June 2023

So far I'm liking the new OV and Cosmic options. The Cosmic options present something for people that don't want to deal with OV grinding, which has been long missing besides Eido secondaries. The Cosmic capstone pieces are more niche, but having the option is important.

The addition of Grond and Gravitar OV gloves is also a good option for builds that lean entirely on one type of power activation. They also present an option for ranged builds that have to park on the boss (Vladic comes to mind).

Medusa gloves are interesting if narrowly focused, but they might enable some very specific combo builds. Especially since the global activation delay reduces combo DPS by about 20-33% from its values on paper.

Losing the OV slashing/piercing proc is something I won't entirely miss. The upfront damage was nice, but they probably clogged the server's processing ticks during large encounters anyway.

I haven't found any bugs with the new effects yet, but I do have a couple of suggestions.

Medusa's Onslaught
Exempt Ultimate tagged powers (and UVDs) from both the bonus and penalty damage; effectively losing the use of most ultimate powers feels bad.

Cosmic Ambition
Moving the 10% resistance from the post-block effect to the Cosmic Threat lingering 10 second buff would be more appealing for tanks to consider these against OV Defender gloves. Edit: Leaving the Block Tag effect for the one time effect, of course. I'm referring only to the lingering resistance value.

nacito · June 2023

OV gear should not be tagged as purple gear, it has way too better stats and takes a lot more to farm than the cosmic secondaries, cosmic gear is really good for DPS and healers, not so much for tanks, even now with these changes
that or let it slot rank 7s

phasestar · June 2023

nacito#6758 wrote: »

Make cosmic wonder a utility piece, since it gives bonuses to cooldown like utility pieces.
make cosmic ambition a def piece since it boosts def stats.

I think the intention in having them all in the offense slot is that you have to choose which one you want based on your role and powers. If they were split between slots, you could have multiple of these unique bonuses in the same set of gear.

phasestar · June 2023

nacito#6758 wrote: »

OV gear should not be tagged as purple gear, it has way too better stats and takes a lot more to farm than the cosmic secondaries, cosmic gear is really good for DPS and healers, not so much for tanks, even now with these changes that or let it slot rank 7s

I agree that since they're on par with the Cosmic Gear, they should probably show up as the same rarity.

Unknown · June 2023

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redcastle56 · June 2023

With Gravitar's, Partially maintaining a power isn't refreshing stacks unless you actually hit something.

If you have PBAoE or other untargeted attacks, you can build stacks up out of combat. tested with Gravitar's and lacerating cyclone, was able to get 5 stacks without being in combat. There are lots of PBAoE maintains. There are a few PBAoE charges as well (Energy Wave is one), but I haven't specifically tested if it works for them as well.

The timing difference between charges and maintains really makes Gravtar's somewhat redundant. Having to fully maintain a power takes so much longer then having to to fully charge one. (Unless you pre-stack it as above). There is no cool down on building stacks, so a low (or no) cooldown fast charging power will build your stacks much faster. Maybe make it 50% maintain to be a little more fair.

shapey · June 2023

Bug: The Infernal combo power Lash is not classified as a Combo by the Medusa Onslaught gear.

This is the only combo that is not caught by the Medusa Onslaught gear, after taking every single combo I could find.

thisiscraftaaa · June 2023

After mucking around with each of the new OV gloves on the PTS plenty, I have a few suggestions to make based on where they're at right now, to make them more pleasant to use (and balance them a little more.) I also have one minor bug I've encountered to report on top of that.

Bug: Slicer gloves only proc on direct-damage melee attacks, despite their tooltip reading that any effect that benefits from your defense debuff on the target should proc Onslaught stacks. Either the tooltip should be updated to reflect this if this is intentional, otherwise this needs to be looked at. If this is not intentional, then I understand it still having a direct damage requirement so that Slicer gloves can't be buffed to max and maintained effortlessly via a single Mental Storm tap, or Will-O'-The-Wisp tap, or Frag Grenade tap, or anything else of the sort, but at least allowing direct-damage ranged attacks to proc it would be helpful for flexibility's sake.

With that said...

Suggestion: make the timer for each of the gloves' buffs 20 seconds instead of 10. This doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things; merely A. allowing to more easily maintain buffs through things like Teleiosaurus and Hatchling's back-to-back bubble spam that can last upwards of 15 seconds straight (which is incredibly, INCREDIBLY annoying) and B. allowing for maintaining glove buffs between groups of regular mooks when running from place to place in lairs. Essentially, this makes maintaining them similar to maintaining stacks of toggleform, which still expire if you aren't actively trying to keep them up,

Suggestion: make the bonus to base damage that Slicer/Sniper/Grond/Gravitar gloves provide ALL damage rather than all base melee/all base range/all base direct/all base direct, respectively. There's this weird bit of wiggle room with the old gloves compared to the new gloves where, if you're using a lot of DoTs, Gravitar/Grond is objectively worse than Slicer/Sniper, and if you aren't using any, Gravitar/Grond are objectively better than Slicer/Sniper. Additionally, if using a mix of melee and ranged powers, you're forced to use Gravitar/Grond, unless you're using exclusively melee and ranged combos, which, well... you get the idea. Equalizing them to all (except Medusa for obvious reasons) provide a bonus to ALL base damage would mostly eradicate the issue of the old gloves being worse than the new due to slightly differing bonuses alongside activation requirements, as well as spare the effort of poor old-hands who might have to re-grind dozens of characters worth of OV gloves otherwise if they want to keep their characters functioning in top shape. The activation requirements alone would still ensure that some of these gloves are better in some situations than in others, which is all you'd need, and this change would even allow Slicer gloves to have a (limited for obvious reasons) use for ranged DPSes, and Sniper gloves to have a (limited for obvious reasons) function for melee DPSes, much closer to how things are for Gravitar/Grond gloves.

Suggestion: change the activation requirement on Sniper gloves to "attack a target with a ranged attack." Slicer gloves already, in testing, only activate if you directly hit your debuffed target with a melee attack, and they don't care about range; you can be hugging a target as closely as possible and proc it, or you can sit at maximum melee distance with a melee power that has more than 10' range (like any HW attacks for example) so why not apply the same to Sniper gloves? This both ensure Sniper gloves continue to be useful in close-range fights, especially forced/mandatory ones such as Vladic Dracul in TT and the TTAlerts, and opens up Sniper gloves to being usable for point-blank ranged DPS builds.

Edited/updated post with this suggestion: change the activation requirement on Slicer gloves to "attack a target with a melee attack." Much like Sniper gloves suffer for no good reason in close-range fights, which some parts of the game happily force you into, Slicer gloves suffer for no good reason against groups of trash mobs, which teammates kill quickly enough that by the time you've applied most defense debuffs, there's no time for you to actually hit to refresh Onslaught stacks off of. This is a minor concern in the grand scheme of things, but Grond and Gravitar gloves- which already have the benefit of not caring if you're melee or ranged, both for building/refreshing Onslaught stacks AND for their damage bonus- are effortless to manage stacks with in comparison, as are Sniper gloves, at least at 20' distance or higher. This suggestion/change would merely serve to ensure that Slicer gloves don't fall behind the others due to mobs being too squishy or teammates being too good as it were.

Edited/updated post with this suggestion: add an exchange system for old/unwanted OV gear to reduce the grind on players who already have gloves but want different ones. Something like 3k OVT per unwanted piece, so that the initial grind to break into the set is still there but replacing a piece is just a much, MUCH lighter five days would be nice. Anyone out there who's grinded up OV on dozens of characters needs this to be a thing. Seriously.

And now for some more wild suggestions for the sake of more toys to play with:

New Onslaught gear suggestion: Experimental Teleiosaurus's Onslaught. Increases direct-damage base damage by 5% (or all base damage by 5% if the suggestion I made above is taken.) Increases by another 1% up to 5 times, once every two seconds, each time damage is taken, refreshing existing Onslaught/buff stacks in the process. Uses the Offense 3-piece set bonus. Solo-build fodder and off-tank/dual-role-but-only-bothered-to-gear-one-set fodder, also useful for tanks wanting to toe the line between survivability and DPS as they'll be taking damage more reliably than anyone else.

New Onslaught gear suggestion: Experimental Teleios's Onslaught. Increases the base damage of all [INDIRECT] damage by 10%. Further increases base [INDIRECT] damage by 10% with each stack of Onslaught gained, up to 9 total (or 100% total,) stacking once every two seconds and refreshing existing stacks, each time you deal [INDIRECT] damage to any target. Decreases all direct base damage by 50% while slotted. Uses the Offense 3-piece set bonus. Since we're giving love to somewhat-neglected combo builds this update, let's give some to the mythical "pure DoT" build as well. Congress Of Selves wept.

warcanch · June 2023

shapey#5696 wrote: »

Bug: The Infernal combo power Lash is not classified as a Combo by the Medusa Onslaught gear.

This is the only combo that is not caught by the Medusa Onslaught gear, after taking every single combo I could find.

Just cuz I'm too lazy to check, but did you try any of the "combo power" devices? Such as Magic Imbued Gloves and Cloak of the Infinite Planes?

sergeantmahoff1 · June 2023

can you get rid of the 20 feet requirement at least? 50 feet dps would appreciate it

rinzler156 · June 2023

sergeantmahoff1 wrote: »

can you get rid of the 20 feet requirement at least? 50 feet dps would appreciate it

The buff stays when you go within 20 ft Mahoff. I think you'll be fine.

shapey · June 2023

warcanch wrote: »

Just cuz I'm too lazy to check, but did you try any of the "combo power" devices? Such as Magic Imbued Gloves and Cloak of the Infinite Planes?

I tested Magic Imbued Gauntlets, Cloak of the Infinite Planes, and Therakiel's Blade. All of them are indeed working with Medusa Onslaught gear. Though...

Bug: The Therakiel's Blade device is proccing the Medusa Onslaught damage increase on every swing, rather than on completion of the combo.

Does that mean every hit of Therakiel's Blade is considered a finisher?

crypticbuxom · June 2023

monsterdaddy wrote: »

"Reduces all non-combo direct damage by 50%."
Would you consider exempting Ultimate powers? (and Ultimate devices). Given their nature, I think they should not have their damage debuffed by the Medusa gloves.

I agree. I have HW characters that use Cleave and Crushing Ruin. If I get these new pieces, I'll have to just dump the Ultimate now?

Just makes Medusa's fall in line with the other sets of gear. Unless you want to introduce full charge or full maintain powers with the same benefit. I want to use combo powers, but never exclusively on any build.

gammabreaker · June 2023

shapey#5696 wrote: »

Does that mean every hit of Therakiel's Blade is considered a finisher?

Considering that every hit is as slow as a finisher, it would otherwise take 30s+ to reach 9 stacks, as compared to 13-15 seconds for most combos. It's also the hardest combo to complete without being disrupted due to those activation times.

redcastle56 · June 2023

Out of curiosity, what are PA toggles considered. Would they only work with Snipers?

phasestar · June 2023

All the gear I tested this weekend worked well and deciding which combination to use for which character is often a close call. Overall, compared to what we had for secondary gear before the last few PTS updates, this is a major improvement.

rinzler156 · June 2023

redcastle56 wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what are PA toggles considered. Would they only work with Snipers?

Yes

Unknown · June 2023

This content has been removed.

shapey · June 2023

redcastle56 wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what are PA toggles considered. Would they only work with Snipers?

I can happily report that Power Armor toggles are actually compatible with the Gravitar gear, so they have an option other than just Sniper.

theravenforce · June 2023

shapey#5696 wrote: »

redcastle56 wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what are PA toggles considered. Would they only work with Snipers?

I can happily report that Power Armor toggles are actually compatible with the Gravitar gear, so they have an option other than just Sniper.

Makes sense! Good to know...

theravenforce · June 2023

Bug: Special effects do not expire upon gear switching. Please fix this.

(The above was a very very slow manual gear swap)

theravenforce · June 2023

Fairly sure the following is intended, but if not...I'll bug it.

Bug (?): As you utilize multiple maintains the damage bonus appears to decrease.

(this is the lowest I've managed to achieve in about 3 minutes of testing).

My assumption is that this is intended to split the percentage between each maintain used.

Might be worth just writing a line which says:

"Multiple maintains will not each be boosted by 1% but will receive a lowered value which totals 1% per stack."

theravenforce · June 2023

A few minor suggestions

Suggestion: Please add consider swapping the text here, so that ONSLAUGHT CHARGE is the first effect players read. I can see instances where someone just purchases it without reading and gets "scammed".

Suggestion: Please add consider swapping the text here, so that ONSLAUGHT MAINTAIN is the first effect players read. I can see instances where someone just purchases it without reading and gets "scammed".

kaiserin · June 2023

shiningdarkness#0716 wrote: »

What you see there is a result of how the game rounds out total values, changing up your various bonuses would adjust what you see in the tooltip. At most you'll see a +-1% difference. Base damage has no diminishing returns at any amount.

FC.31.20230614.5 - Patriot Event/Gear

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