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Post by drunkensolamnic on Oct 2, 2016 16:13:47 GMT -5
So, I'll start by saying I get why the self-heal on triage got a nerf. I can't say I disagree with it after seeing every single PC pop up with it and not seeing it being applied to party members per use in general.
The last triage/first-aid balance in effects happened prior to mobs being given grenades in Beta, and its honestly the grenades that are the source of most damage out put that turns being able to restore 80+ points of damage in a couple rounds necessary in most cases. This is damage that previously you needed a string of shit armor rolls to take, or the mobs needed to roll really well to produce. Now in almost every fight where mobs have grenades, this damage is almost instant. Unfortunately movement to avoid these grenades quickly becomes non optional due to close quarters and the reliance on terrain to prevent large swarms from just rolling past "the line" into the soft targets standing behind said line.
The danger of these fights comes from someone going down instantly, or the melee-dps sorts getting pushed off the main fight to heal up for too extensive a time, which essentially removes the terrain blocking they provide and lets mobs swarm singular tanks etc. In all it basically comes down to this: through 50+ DR, Traige, and potions.. mob damage out-put still exceeds what can be countered, or even have the edge taken off of.
So, I have a few suggestions that hopefully both preserve the intent of the initial nerf and address why the ability was so popular in group play, adjusting the balance to restore the previous level of group suitability.. while saving the "1v1" or "solo" potential.
1.) Allow the secondary effects provided at the T3 level to fire at 100% while the HP restore remains halved. This means the utility of damage-cleansing or tox removal remains without the raw HP restore being unnerfed.
2.) Improve the heal-other potency on triage so that "line" characters can effectively be kept in the fight by support. (There's an effiency that other Players can't bring compared to rotating potions and traige due to the visiiblity of the toxicity bar, this would help replace that lost efficiency with the nerfed self-heal).
3.) Allow increased % of self heal with further ability point buy-in. Triage 1 may be 50%, but as you go up the abilities maybe by T5 you're doing 75% on a self heal (this also scales vs the increased damage out put of high level mobs).
4.) A new Triage line that forgoes secondary benefits for a larger heal pool in general, meaning you can do more for your friend and more for yourself in raw HP even at 50%.
5.) A new triage line that forgoes secondary benefits to increase the effectiveness of self-usage. Maybe +25% with capstone removing the AoE?
6.) Similar to 2, Increase the stamina cost and HP reward of traige, now its something that is done, and you don't get to do it again soon, but it was effective and everyone returns to the fight. Basically instead of me spending 3 rounds not swinging and triaging, I've spent 1 round doing so and now have 2 rounds to try to end the fight faster. This also allows PCs like Emmanuel to do something other than queue up Triage uses in a harder fight.
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The power of this ability in group is the ability to keep people up and swinging, given that it works 100% of the time it will always be stronger than any effect that relies on a D20 roll vs the ever growing AC of enemies. Therefore it is always going to be more prudent to burn your round and stamina usage on healing yourself or a low party member than trying to end the fight quicker; until that T3 offensive ability threshold gets passed where usage can actually begin to turn fights.
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Note triage provided the benefit of toxicity-free healing in addition to what could be accomplished via potions. Essenitaly it let PCs turn their stamina pool into an extra HP/Tox pool for themselves and friends. This is a functionality that injectors and "Drink more potions" doesn't answer.
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Post by Psionic-Entity on Oct 2, 2016 16:30:20 GMT -5
If a nerf to one ability is able to make dungeon runs impossible (or at least substantially harder) then that ability was overpowered and dungeons are too hard. Individual abilities need to be balanced against other abilities and dungeons should be balanced for parties of PCs using a wide range of styles. I don't think any of these suggestions will accomplish that, in fact it looks like they'll do the opposite by buffing back something that's already way more useful than other comparable uses for stamina.
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Post by Lugwy on Oct 2, 2016 17:52:36 GMT -5
As mentioned in Discord earlier the post-triage difficulty seems to stem more from dungeon balancing issues, as if you are hinging dungeon survival on 1 sole ability and fold like wet paper otherwise, that may indicate the ability is too powerful, and/or the dungeon is too difficult.
If grenade profusion is a problem then it may help if mobs bearing grenades are restricted, perhaps 1 per 2-3 players in a party?
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Zoomshot
Gumshoe
A Shields-man stands before all, a boundary of protection and security.
Posts: 77
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Post by Zoomshot on Oct 2, 2016 17:53:46 GMT -5
If a nerf to one ability is able to make dungeon runs impossible (or at least substantially harder) then that ability was overpowered and dungeons are too hard. Individual abilities need to be balanced against other abilities and dungeons should be balanced for parties of PCs using a wide range of styles. I don't think any of these suggestions will accomplish that, in fact it looks like they'll do the opposite by buffing back something that's already way more useful than other comparable uses for stamina. What you're stuck with then is nerfing the enemies dmg, or giving them less grenades or something. Atm, Azir doesn't have the armor, and even with gear his skill, his armor would only be the same as with Immovable active. At current spawns. Azir is down in, what feels like, less than a minute. Even before Khannon and Kit went heavy on healing me. Doc alone wasn't doing enough to keep Azir up. Actually, as is, even if you weaken their dmg a little. he still isn't healing enough. This is based on my experience for doing this dungeon for about a week now. The issue is almost always the same .last week when we use to get to the joker, we had more than one person healing the piss out of Azir while Ini, Clive, or James. Most often just Clive and James doing what the NPCs did. Bomb them like crazy and hope our bombs get them before they get us. Edit Grenades are not always an issue. Earlier we went to Wyler with... 4? I think people? We got 14-16 spawns for that. Azir was shoved out of the door by their closeness. Then he was in circled and instant killed. Even with all the bombs going off. There are a number of other factors that make teams go for spamming Triage. To keep themselves up, to help the Healer and even then its not enough.
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Post by Psionic-Entity on Oct 2, 2016 18:33:38 GMT -5
1. Wyler isn't designed around 14v4. Point out where and it will go back to something reasonable.
2. When spawns aren't 1-1 with PCs they could probably use an adjustment to grenade potency. I'll look at doing that.
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Zoomshot
Gumshoe
A Shields-man stands before all, a boundary of protection and security.
Posts: 77
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Post by Zoomshot on Oct 2, 2016 18:48:21 GMT -5
right wing, first door. I went to the hallway and open the first door on the right and then left. I ran right back to the entrance. There was definitely at the very least around 12 of them. DS and Khannon where there. I don't mind the number being that many, its fun. There just needs to be "something" there to make it do able is all I mean.
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Post by Psionic-Entity on Oct 2, 2016 19:12:09 GMT -5
Ideally if #enemies > #party you get more use out of splash damage attacks and less from single-target CC. I'd find it "balanced" if melee types were spending stamina on whirlwind, shield rush, sweeping charge, etc. instead of triage on themselves.
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Zoomshot
Gumshoe
A Shields-man stands before all, a boundary of protection and security.
Posts: 77
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Post by Zoomshot on Oct 2, 2016 19:27:21 GMT -5
Ideally if #enemies > #party you get more use out of splash damage attacks and less from single-target CC. I'd find it "balanced" if melee types were spending stamina on whirlwind, shield rush, sweeping charge, etc. instead of triage on themselves. Ideally, but that is not whats happening. I don't have the armor to make it happen. As is, its *Gets overwhelmed and dies* Okay, so that didn't work. new plan. The new plan consists of me going out, grab them all and use the door to force a 3 on me fight. Kit and Khannon as melee can't do melee AoE, so that means its Demo people doing it. We can't actually lure them in, and use melee aoe skills. I simply can't survive it. No medic can get close enough to help me survive it. If they try, the are instant gipped. : /
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Post by kaincallavis on Oct 2, 2016 19:33:25 GMT -5
Being one of the characters that solos and one of the players that uses triage having a dislike is probably expected.
I do feel triage needed a change since people felt strong-armed into getting it.
Dungeons should be tweaked slightly, and they are being tweaked, but that is only part of the issue. Besides, we love the niche difficulty. We want that to continue.
But there is that silly little nagging side effect of us wanting to be able to actually do the awesome content as well... go figure.
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Nerfing the self-heal aspect will damage players' ability to complete the content, encourage back-up healers which were absolutely vital to give the skill up entirely.
Not to mention, while we get that there needs to be some group structure to complete content- especially level appropriate + content, the versatility of having other players who could heal allowed groups to half-hazardously function through a dungeon when the one healing PC is not online...
Emmanuel is a main healer. More power to him. But even he wants to toss grenades, shield bash - etc... This is no way an attack on him; however, it does prove that everyone wants a slice of that badassery and not everyone wants to be a dedicated healer.
Roaen and Octavia are healers but real life > video game - and their real life is allowing less video game time.
I've heard the response: Obviously there need to be more healers. Once again, even the healers want some versatility. They want a slice of the badass pie. It takes a special kind of person to want to be a dedicated healer. Forcing people to play something they are not into is worse than the change. And for a server that is talking about advertising and wants to encourage a larger player base "sticking to your guns" and forcing this will deal a blow.
Today was the first day I actually felt like putting EoA down for a bit. The blow hits home for several of the players.
The blow to triage and the blow to pets may be "balancing flavors" but they are also more breaking than balancing.
--- Short segway: (and opinion-based) Pets' damage prior to the update was already mute. Their only redeeming quality was that they were a half-decent dodge tank that could potentially save the tank some ass-kickery or even taunt an enemy at least surviving for a few rounds. Now they are pretty disgusting, and require a ton of feats to even bring them back up to the level of "pathetic at best." ---
The argument was:
-triage is obviously way too good. -dungeons may be too hard. -most of the players are taking it.
Triage is great early on. Perhaps triage should be a skill that that is not available off the bat at level 1 - instead level 10 skill? Or self heal should have another feat-line that brings it back up so it is still a huge investment but then the players who would like to be able to play the game solo can still do that in some fashion.
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I really don't mean to state the obvious. Sure it is a great feat and should be adjusted. But it was also looked at from a 97% top-down view only... That's right, I just came up with a bullshit statistic to validate the point. Just let it happen. Seriously though, from the perspective of a player. There were no suggestions or bugs. As far as I understand, no one even complained. This, and performing the cigarette stomp on the poor lovable man's best friends is "fixing" things that weren't broken.
^ Just my opinion, you may go back to utterly disregarding now.
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Post by Psionic-Entity on Oct 2, 2016 20:41:34 GMT -5
I have basically no sympathy for anyone feeling sad about the pets thing. People have had well over a month to report that pets were getting 10 AC higher than their stats indicated. Knowing that I will need to be a lot more careful with changes going forward, and that means doing substantially more testing than previously. The right way to approach something like this is to report it as soon as you see it, and maybe to add that you think the fix would make them underpowered.
Similar story with Triage. One ability can't be the determining factor in whether you can survive and do dungeons. Going by the reactions to changing it I'm thoroughly convinced that Triage was (and maybe still is) such an ability. You yourself just said you need it working at 100% to play solo. That's a huge problem that would be made worse by putting it back to where it was. Like the other fix, this change was abrupt because I basically had to discover the problem myself. A little bit of good faith feedback about a make it or break it ability would go a long way.
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Zoomshot
Gumshoe
A Shields-man stands before all, a boundary of protection and security.
Posts: 77
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Post by Zoomshot on Oct 2, 2016 20:59:03 GMT -5
I have basically no sympathy for anyone feeling sad about the pets thing. People have had well over a month to report that pets were getting 10 AC higher than their stats indicated. Knowing that I will need to be a lot more careful with changes going forward, and that means doing substantially more testing than previously. The right way to approach something like this is to report it as soon as you see it, and maybe to add that you think the fix would make them underpowered. Similar story with Triage. One ability can't be the determining factor in whether you can survive and do dungeons. Going by the reactions to changing it I'm thoroughly convinced that Triage was (and maybe still is) such an ability. You yourself just said you need it working at 100% to play solo. That's a huge problem that would be made worse by putting it back to where it was. Like the other fix, this change was abrupt because I basically had to discover the problem myself. A little bit of good faith feedback about a make it or break it ability would go a long way. I've been here near two weeks. It was only in, I think the last three days? That I've really started experimenting with pets. I also reported their bugs everytime I noticed them. People in my position shouldn't be punished.
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Post by kaincallavis on Oct 2, 2016 21:03:29 GMT -5
Weapon stats and "paper doll" stats are often different. I don't think people were actively hiding it from you, PE.
Likewise, the triage but was not even a bug... It literally worked as intended until you saw players liked it, used it, and decided it was too good.
Basically your comment equates to:
"Players don't like the change? Don't care" *actively chases players around, mwuahaha*
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Post by Theorem of Neutrality on Oct 2, 2016 21:05:41 GMT -5
Playing one of the three dedicated medics around regularly - I can say that the type of character this nerf affects the least is us.
And that's exactly why it's important.
It's easy to feel entirely useless in the scope of everyone else being just as able to do raw HP recovery.
That said, I know it's not always possible to find a specific type of character around, so I have a suggestion to help offset some of the issues people feel are occurring: lower the toxicity on potions.
Potions provide more health per tick than activated abilities past a certain threshold, and enabling tanks to be able to medicate themselves more effectively might provide a good compromise.
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Post by drunkensolamnic on Oct 2, 2016 21:06:54 GMT -5
Part of the issue on both of these... is that its impossible for us to know that it wasn't working as intended. The pets seemed fine, because they hit softly, and lived long enough to help.. but weren't game changing in my expereince. It seemed like the high dodge ac, low HP combo was a way that they'd be helpful until a mob got a few good hits in. It was working out pretty well but wasn't overwhelming.
With Triage... I can't think of a single game I've played where getting healed mid-combat is important. I can think of a number times I potion-spammed my way through Elder Scrolls fights. Even League of Legends, the ability to heal mid-fight is vital. We don't know the intended way combat should play out, so we don't know to report it. Healing yourself and your friend is always a nice skill to have, and at 1 ability pt and taking it first thing off.. is a good way to make combat way more forgiving while new players learn the system. ence it gets recommended.
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Post by eba on Oct 2, 2016 21:09:13 GMT -5
It's simply impossible to tell, often, what is and isn't a bug
Triage wasn't ever a bug even. It was simply, in your opinion, too good.
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