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[CoH/V]The Nerf Debate
s3rial one
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am bitter, because CoX had so much potential, and I honestly feel that it's only been changed for the worse since release (expansion notwithstanding).Scooter wrote:Cryptic hasn't nerfed anything in almost a year and a half. You're coming off a bit bitter.
The most grievous changes, I think, have been the ones that've slowed the pace of the game down. I don't think there's ever been a game that encouraged altoholism the way CoX does, but instead of leaving the leveling curve where it was relatively short and painless, at every turn they've changed the game to make leveling any single character as much of a chore as possible.
...and then you get up to the higher levels, and you get bullshit abilities like Tornado? Or the oh-so-lame-looking blaster PBAE nukes? Sure, melee classes tend to get some cool stuff at higher levels (Seismic Smash, I'm looking at you), but that's only because the first 20-some odd levels were spent taking boring garbage.
Again, if I just though CoX was a crappy game, it wouldn't bother me so much. There's a rumbling of a really good game in there, but the devs - at least in the past - have just been on a mission to bury it and make it a generic grind like every other MMO before it.
s3rial one on
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Since release, they've also increased XP for missions, increased XP after level 25, etc. Honestly, you progress faster now than you did at launch even with the nerfs.
Also, Tornado is an awesome ability, if you know how to use it. Get an enemy in a corner with Hurricane and Tornado will perma knock them down, and chew the hell out of their health.
Many Blaster nukes got revised graphics in Issue Seven too.
This is what it always comes down to. Someone saying "if you know how to use it." The point is, Tornado is antithetical to a controller's job. You wait until the last stages of your career, and get what is, essentially, a niche ability that does mediocre damage under relatively specialized conditions only.
If there were lots of abilities, I wouldn't complain. If it was a really powerful niche ability, I wouldn't complain. If it was a lot earlier in the game, when the acquisition rate of abilities was faster, I wouldn't complain. But it's late-game, it's not very useful, it's very specialized, and it's not very powerful. There aren't enough cool abilities any given class will get to justify junk like Tornado. Or Fissure. Or for that matter, about 50% of the abilities in any given blaster secondary.
This I didn't know about. I'd be interested in seeing them, but I don't see myself spending $15 to reactivate just to see a few abilities, many of which I don't have access to.
Anyways, I'm sorry for the derail. I just had higher hopes for CoX. Based on what Statesman's said post-launch (e.g. archetypes were a mistake), the developers seem to agree.
I gotta say though, a lot of the stuff you mentioned like the purple patch was back in about July of 2004, you try talking about it to about 95% of the players now and they won't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. And that includes the players who were there at the time. The purple patch had absolutely zero effect on me, and if I wasn't a forum reader I would've never known it existed. Bringing up things they changed in the first few months after release is a bit irrelevent to new players.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I'm still pissed over ED, though. It hit some ATs VASTLY harder than it did others, and with the terrible reduction in defenses for tanks it completely crippled the early game. If it wasn't for team night and a guaranteed 6-8 person team I wouldn't be playing another tanker.
Explain to me how it in any way helped anyone. I'm aware there's the endurace discount, but that came at the expense of slotted Stamina.
The nerf changed all that. Whilst I understand many people are sore over it, I just can't help but feel it was good for the life of the game.
ED? Maybe a step too far, but they really did this to get hammyo's under control in my opinion. Still, i'm sure many were still sore after the first nerf. But me being me, didn't care much because I can still play the game like i used to. The number's aren't quite as high as they used to be, but it was hardly noticable.
The hardest hit charcter I had through all this was my fire/fire tank. I never used him to heard though, and actually, I took him from 33 to level 50 post both nerfs, and i still enjoyed it.
Plus it helped diversify things a bit. No more 1xAcc 5xDmg for the majority of attacks. I know most people bitch that it took away the choice to slot anyway you want. That ignores the fact that the benefit of six slotting Def/Res or 1xAcc 5xDmg was so large that any other slotting combination was fairly silly. Also we sort of got more slots to play with since six-slotting things like Hasten or most Shields became stupid. They lowered the difficulty and did other changes to help ease the pain but melee was hurting pretty bad at first, I think they are great now. I know ED in the long run helped my Scrapper and Tank. The uber builds suddenly weren't so uber and we started to see some of the rarer sets get used once more.
Now I know the complaint is the weaker sets should have been buffed to be equal with the stronger sets but that isn't realistic, especially when you consider how strong Regeneration or Invulnerability or Fire AEing or Illusion or whatever was. Honest to god the game was fucking boring and players were hitting the buff cap without the aid of buffers. It all felt so mindlessly easy.
EDIT: Acc missed a post and is re-adding it here.
You neglect to mention that unyielding provides resistance to status effects, which is a pretty freaking big thing. (For those that do not know, resistance to status effects prevents things like holding - which freezes your character, dropping all active defenses you may have - as one example.) It's fair to question why they have left that defense penalty in, but then again why dosen't fire get any knockback protection?
Anyways if my fire tank can hack a full teams spawns then any invuln tank should be able to do it too, without powerpools (as i didn't have any of the recomended pools, aside from leaping.
I also might point out that there was a defense buff a short while back, that brought defense much more in line with resistance.
Yes, it's resistance to status effects, but it's not like it's free. You still pay End for it, which is the same fucking thing any other melee set deals with, except that they don't have the dubious defensive part. There's a downside to Rooted, but that's more than made up for with the regen aspect.
Ice - 30% Cold resistance, minor defense
Stone - Slowed, no jump, large heal buff. Combined with Health they can regen as fast as a Regen Scrapper without IH.
Dark - Large Psi resistance
Integration - Heal buff
SR - Click power, cheaper to use than a toggle and cannot be "dropped"
Elec - Split over a toggle and a passive, gives good active psi resistance, and good passive neg. energy and energy resistance (better passive than Resist Energies)
EA - This one is weak too, but it protects against Repel and TP Foe, the latter of which is good for PvP (although the set sucks overall for PvP)
Fire - Glaring hole with no knockback, EXCEPT that they run 2 shields for mez and damage resistance, not 3 like other sets. Somehow that gets ignored.
Inv - The basis for the non-s/l resistance in the set, which is negated by the def debuff inherent in the power. Ironically, it's only against tougher mobs that it "pays out," as they have higher accuracy.
EDIT - And I don't think Defense scales as well as Resistance does, actually. I'm going to dig around in the guides to see how mob accuracy scales up.
30% resistance is 30% resistance. If a mob hits you for 100, you take 70. If a mob hits you for 1000, you take 700. Defense, however, doesn't mitigate damage. If you get hit, you still take full damage. And mobs' accuracy scales with their level relative to your own.
Without having to trot out the math, suffice it to say that while resistance is consistent across any level differential (with the added bonus being that consistent damage means healers have an easier time doing their jobs), as a mob's level goes higher, defense mitigates proportionately less and less damage. That is to say, 30% resistance is 30% resistance no matter what, while 30% defense may mitigate 30% damage against an even-level mob, and only 15% against a mob a couple levels higher.
Knowing Cryptic, they "fixed" defense by afflicting resistance with the same problem.
Edit: And I'm not even pretending to be unbiased, here. When I think Cryptic, the first image that pops into my head is Statesman wearing red nylons with a purple towel tied around his neck, cut-up bucket on his head, slobbering on himself with a crazed look in his eyes, clenching a giant Nerf baseball bat.
...I just can't help myself. :P
Basically, Defense scales better against higher level foes now. They didn't nerf resistance.
Of course, this is all ancient history at this point.
PB/duck, they reduced the Defense debuff on Unyielding a while back. They should have gotten rid of it entirely, but at least you can basically cancel it out Combat Jumping and Invinc now. The penalty there is pretty retarded though. Unyielding is basically a one of kind issue though. And hey, it could be worse. It could still root you in place! :P `
As for ED, it really didn't promote build diversity. The posters on the CoV Beta boards (where ED was first unveiled) figured out the new optimum slotting of 1 Acc, 3 Damage, 1 End, 1 Recharge within minutes of the announcement. If anything, ED reduced the number of potential build and slotting options, as slotting more than 3 of the same type of enhancers is no longer an option, and some powers can't be slotted with more than one type of enhancer (Stamina, Health, Invuln Passives, etc).
Anyone who wanted to slot in the ED fashion prior to ED could have, and no one would really have known. There is no way to see another player's slotting in game.
ED was basically the devs doing their final overall balancing to the game. They did it at the time of the launch of CoV because they knew they would be getting an influx of subscribers and cash from CoV that would cancel out any loss of subscribers due to the rebalancing. The boys at Cryptic may be crazy, but they aren't stupid.
Now, if you want something current to bitch about in regards to Cryptic, their failure to get updates out in a timely manner in the last year would be the axe I'd choose to grind.
Before I get into a big long post, let me make sure I understand Defense. I'm under the impression that outside of to-hit buffs, it's just Accuracy - Defense, isn't it? If I'm wrong go ahead and rip me a new one.
I dunno. There still seems like there's a lot of "right" and "wrong" choices out there, even when you don't compare primary and secondary synergy.
That's basically the biggest thing that pissed me off.
Also Energy Blast needs more help than just doubling the range of Power Burst :P
Actually it was both, being able to take the best of each power type availible, and also the worst.
Well, it basically showed how useless Energy's AoE was, which is a pretty important part of being a Blaster.
Oh man, despite my earlier posts (or it may shine through), I was exactly like this. "Okay, got it - more then three enhancers are bad - let's go fuck some shit up."
That was incredibly frustrating, and one reason why I started checking the official forums, though for a long time I basically stuck to the Defender forum exclusively, trying to figure out why Dark Miasma was so bad.
For the amusement of others, here's what DM was like at launch:
*The heal had a really long animation and healed for less if you targeted off a higher level mob
*Tar Patch didn't have -Res
*Darkest Night didn't have -To Hit. Then when they added -To Hit, slotted To Hit Debuff enhancments didn't do anything!
*Howling Twilight had a really short range, and like Twilight Grasp, its heal was based off the level of the mobs you targeted, and was very low. Ask Ghost about me rezzing him to 1 HP.
*Shadowfall couldn't be slotted for Damage Resistance, though Steamy Mist, essentially the same power in Storm Summoning could be slotted for Damage Resistance.
*Fearsome Stare made everything run away
*Dark Servant was rooted, cost more endurance then controller pets and didn't last as long. It also cast the scatter causing Fearsome Stare
The sets come along way, with the exception of Black Hole, which still sucks.
Anyways, I understand the whole not wanting to gimp yourself thing, but to me this game has always been extrodinarily tollerent of gimps. I mean, back in the day, my TA/A defender was was something that should have been wearing a rubber mask and some nipple clamps, but I got onto teams all the time and people didn't care that i was le gimp, they just saw that I was making an effort to help the team and were happy with that.
It's always been about choosing powers that are fun to use, rather then the most useful, to me at least. Which is why I like this game more then any other mmo, as it often let's you get away with that.
(Except in PvP which is why I generally avoided it, unless I had a team that insisted on going there.)
Overall, I'm not happy with the way things turned out. Hell, I wasn't happy with the Purple Patch way back when. But the way things are now I don't see more diversity at the high levels. Going into the PvP zones now after a year or so after CoV release you wonder if there are any other hero builds other than Ice/EM and Ill/Emp.
Overall . . . :v:
Frankly, the content in this game is mind-numbing, and the leveling curve is atrocious. If it weren't for the variety of characters available, I would never play.
Solo in all MMOs bores me to tears.
My problem with the storyline/missions isn't that they're boring, it's that they're all too alike (in CoH at least, less so in CoV). The devs could've done themselves a lot of favors by fixing up the mission system in a few simple ways. Even adding some new maps, or making the spawns less static, or the objectives more complex. To say nothing of bringing the CoH missions and contacts up to CoV standards.
And then there's the issue of making the missions fit leveling better. Outleveling arcs and contacts should've been eliminated long ago.
Anyway, I'm off topic now. Back to nerfs!
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
1) It's way too repetitive. You'll be sick of the insides of warehouses and office buildings by level 10, much less level 50.
2) There just aren't enough powers or diversity within power sets.
3) It's way too easy for uninformed players to just fuck everything up. Sure, this is true in a lot of MMOs, but I find it especially problematic given that my favorite class is the controller.
I throw Earthquake and Quicksand. Another controller drops an AoE root. Or some idiot energy blaster starts knocking mobs out of the Earthquake. Have a really bad pull and throw an AoE sleep as an emergency? Captain no-brain can't have that! Time to bust out the pitiful AoEs! Energy Torrents for everyone!
Add this to the fact that most people act like you just asked them to murder their own mothers if you dare suggest that they not spam Energy Blast as fast as it cycles, or not throw some pointless AoE root on top of your AoE knockdown, and it's just a recipe for infuriating gameplay.
CoX is demanding enough of players that, at least on higher difficulty settings, you need support and people that're willing to cooperate. Unfortunately, it seems most people aren't. It doesn't help that 9 out of every 10 energy blasters - who are way overpopulated to begin with - aren't smart enough to use walls or hover and bounce mobs off the floor.
Ugh... The average player in CoX is so inept and mindless, it makes WoW seem like a bastion of intelligence.