PrincessDarkstar

Pretty much every time I see a post from someone coming back to the game it is 'because incarnates wasn't what I was looking for, but now I am back because DA means a solo route'. That tends to signal to me that there are likely lots of people who have left for the same reason and never come back. I know I left for that reason and have really struggled to find a team on the character I rolled when I came back because everyone is raiding, and by everyone I mean the same group of people over and over.

Either way changing the dynamic of the game from casual and 8 man max teams to raiding is not usually a good idea and even if there is no proof of it I hope you can see that the change had the potential to alienate most of the existing playerbase.

End game content never needed to mean huge multi team raids, it meant clever mechanics and content that got harder and harder. They should have stuck to the formula that had served them well up until that point. Or at the very least they shouldn't have introduced a new type of incarnate only reward. Allowing people to unlock incarnate stuff from normal XP and drops would have meant those who had no interest in raiding could have continued as they were and still not been left behind.

I honestly expect it to get worse and worse because the more +levels you need to do the new content the more those who aren't farming the trials are going to miss out and the harder it will be to catch up. We will then see even more people leaving. And if you don't think people have left I would point you to the amount of dots on the server status page, only 2 servers now ever seem to have more than 1 dot, and that wasn't the case before incarnates.

In that case the set looks really, really nice.

Being able to pick and choose which parts are covered is a nice touch. Just needs a revamp of spines now

I like this suggestion.

I am in the camp that the change is pretty poor (Because fast snipes won't make much difference since the thing snipes needed was damage just as much as activation time and ST powers have narrow use anyway) but completely unfair to several combo's.

Regardless of how good or bad the snipes end up, it should be set in a system that every powerset has an equal chance of leveraging it, and ideally in a way that you cannot build to take greater advantage of it, or at least do so without being forced into certain powers. Even worse it should not be set in a way that a team can completely change the way a power works for you to the degree that this can.

If they really only want fast snipe with Aim/BU but are worried about sets without those powers why don't they just change the recharge so you can't mash it?

You might be getting your wish in a semi roundabout way now.

Which is the exact issue.

Not 100% true because although you have some contol there are some sets where you cannot reach 2% without outside help or Aim/BU. Which puts it outside of what I would call reasonable control.

It also leads to situations where you might not have as much fun on a team if nobody else has Tactics, which is a pretty bad piece of game design.

I think this is where our disagreement lies, before IO's (I can't actually remember much about that time to be honest) I was perfectly happy with the performance of my characters. It wasn't until the ability to run at */x8 came along that I really noticed some of my characters pulling ahead of the others.

Now when I look at blasters I don't expect to be able to take a full spawn alpha in the face, or run at that kind of difficulty on SO's, but I do expect them to have the potential to reach that kind of level (Because all other AT's have that potential, desipite different playstyles). My sadness comes because these powers to nothing to help that.

Picking nukes as the priority above snipes would have at least come closer to giving them enough damage to clear a spawn should you manage to survive the alpha, the snipe change doesn't really help even if abused.

I too hope this is just step 1 on their tentative plan to bring blasters in line, I just can't help feeling that they are aiming for a different performance level from me, or are badly judging the starting situation.

Which really confuses me, why bother putting the survivability into a toggle at all if you have to change a second bit of code to stop it supressing? Just have it passive and be done, then you can still actually revamp the awful powers to make the sets appealing for more reasons that 'this sustain power keeps me alive better than that one'.

I think this is a good suggestion, whatever mechanic they pick should be fair across all powersets, so something like this would allow them all to leverage it in the same way.

I think it is probably (Sadly) against the intention because Hawk doesn't like us using our powers very often and thinks inconsistency is great fun (Yes that was a dig at Hybrid).

I think the quote was 'any toggle to do with survivability will no longer be supressed' or words to that effect.

I wonder if that is across all AT's? And if it would include debuffs like Darkest Night.

I think they mentioned having them no longer supressed, but I could be wrong.

It isn't usually a good idea to have side effects (Good or bad) that some people can make use of and other cannot.

If the intention was that it should be a once every so often ability then they should have used a different mechanic.

It is unfair that certain sets will be able to spam their snipe and others will not, because god knows they all need the boost.

Instead of relying on an outside source they should have something inbuilt that works like your suggested 70% chance for breakfree's. Which then gives them just as much chance as other AT's to get a red which they can use whenever they want without worry.

If blasters had so much damage that they found reds (Or some other flavour of insp) as useless as other AT's find breakfrees then I could see it working, but they don't.

NPC's don't need to have fun.

For example I played SWToR for a while and one of the (Many) things I disliked was that everything knocked me back, which I found a really frustrating way of slowing me down.

This type of thing works backwards as well though, for example I remember playing Baldur's Gate and when fear is used against you and your party spreads to the 4 corners it causes all sorts of problems, but you using fear just meant you had to wait for the runners to come back.

Some AT's should have to worry about mez, because different people find different things fun, but making a change now which 'could' have such a massive effect would be fatal. I am not saying they suddenly will make scrappers vulnerable, but it worries me.

I guess we disagree on just how significant the changes are.

I think the snipe changes are poor (Though well intentioned in part). I think they will probably create a fairly large ST disparity between those who leverage them and those who cannot. They should have used a mechanic easily leveraged by all, or that couldn't be abused at all. Thankfully in an AoE focussed game better ST damage is niche. My largest complaint about this is those sets that finish at 19% tohit, when you get on a team you might love your toon, then be dissapointed when you end up solo, even though a faster snipe would actually be MORE use when you are solo!

I think the sustain changes are woeful (In execution and intention), changing the downtime period on an AT who's downfall is being killed VERY quickly does next to nothing in my eyes (If I see a Fireball getting to the mob before me I know pretty soon there will be a dead blaster behind me, but it is only blasters that have such a problem), and the changes have been tacked onto powers that create an imbalance between the sets because some got good powers and some didn't. It also makes it harder to make the grand changes I think are necessary because now every set has an overpowered power that they rely on and are nearly required to take (Which is always bad design).

Lastly I think the very fact this is the way they chose to start means the devs either think the tank already has more than 12 gallons in it, or that they would be happy filling it to 18. Or worse, that they can't afford the petrol to fill it all the way to 20.

Coming very late to this thread and not sure if his has been replied to yet or not, but a power similar to Hide would work here, but instead of +invis it would give -aggro. So the opening power on each volley would cause no aggro.

This is very similar to a suggestion I made for a chance to stun on all AoE's which will ensure that alpha strikes are staggered. You could have 75% chance for 1s stun, 50% chance for 2s and 25% chance for 3s (Non stacking). So at any one time only a portion of the group would turn around and shoot you in the face, giving you chance to kill a few before all the damage comes.

One gives 5% defence and 10% resist! Which at mid levels can take a defence toon from good to awesome.

Arbiter Hawk mentioned somewhere making the buff cancelable, which will see me cancelling anything that isn't that one (Or other good ones I might be forgetting). Personally he would be better off making the buff selectable instead of random.

I see the need to start small, but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the changes I (And many others by the look of it) think are necessary. It also shows me that they don't see 'most secondaries are useless' as being a problem because they are keeping the powers people now think are useless, and rather than making the power useful, they are tacking on an extra benefit to using it.

But the other Fortunes are all very beneficial so its almost cutting off your nose to spite your face.

1 other person who took a specific power that I don't see many people using at the moment.

It also helps create the situation where you may find it great fun being on a team where you get perma-snipe then find it disheartening when you have to solo, which is never really a good situation.