macskull

I'm pretty sure they can give us checkboxes for everything except:

1. Mez system
2. Damage balancing
3. Unresisted damage and debuffs

Unfortunately, without those three things you're never going to get even close to the old system. I suppose an argument could be made for damage balancing being a "good" thing (since it doesn't fundamentally change how damage works, it just changes which powers and powersets are best), but the new mez system severely hampers powersets based on offensive toggles (hello, Rad and Storm) and the lack of unresisted damage (hello, Blasters) and unresisted debuffs (hello, Defenders) means that even if you got rid of DR and free base resists, if you brought a lineup similar to an I12 sonic team (2 Emps, 2 Sonics, 2 Rads, 2 Blasters, and no Kins since travel suppression is an all-or-nothing deal these days) everyone would have capped resists and the only useful damage type would be Psi since you couldn't meaningfully chew through those resists. Just look at the ladder matches people tried to run before we got a "no heal decay" option - getting kills against a team with a competent Emp was difficult unless you employed one or two very specific tactics, and that's pretty one-dimensional.

Ideally I'd like to see PvP base resists removed completely, so Sonic and Therm shields would still be useful under DR. I don't see them removing DR completely from the game, so they can't balance around the assumption that everyone will play with DR off. These days if you want unresisted damage, you either AS someone or you slot procs in your attacks. I don't think it would be too bad if they added the 10% (or even 5%) unresisted damage back to Blaster attacks, and put unresisted damage on Scourge and crits again, but I'm really starting to think campaigning for meaningful changes will ultimately be a lost cause, because whatever changes they have planned for GR probably won't be what we're asking for. The only thing I can think of that suggests otherwise is knowing how absolutely ****** base raids would be under the current rules, so either they're going to change PvP with the nuances of base raids in mind, or they're going to change base raids to "work well" with the new system (guess which seems more likely?).

Talked to Sunstorm about that a while back - he said it's very unlikely simply because setting up a new server is time-consuming and expensive, and re-purposing one of the existing live servers for PvP wouldn't go over well with the players on that server. I still think they could just repurpose training room 2 (keep the character copy tool so people can dupe IOs and copy characters at will, but keep it on the same build as the live servers so players don't have to worry about losing access during betas), or add a very limited third server. However, I wouldn't hold my breath - the best we can ask for at this point that wouldn't require a new server would be cross-server arena and zones.

1. Not really, but DoTs in general have very limited use in this game. Notable uses are interrupting certain powers like snipes and Aid Self, or keeping Stalkers out of hide, but none of the DoTs you'd find a common Fire Blast PvP build would last long enough to have a meaningful impact on your opponent. Snowstorm, however, will interrupt most powers (but won't keep a Stalker out of hide since it's not a damaging power).

2. Presence is a really really bad pool. Especially with the way mezzes work in PvP, there are very few builds that can take advantage of that pool in PvP, and a Fire/Cold isn't one of them. More likely than not the power pools you'll want will be Fitness, Speed, Leaping, and something else of your choice (Leadership if you take Leviathan Mastery, or Concealment for Phase Shift if you take Mace Mastery).

3. For the majority of combat in arena and zone these days, slotting up Super Jump and Super Speed, and running them in conjunction with one another, will be more than adequate. Many players take Hurdle from the Fitness pool (as a gateway to Stamina, mostly) but giving that power anything more than the base slot is usually a waste.

And nothing would change if content was added that you never did, but it would retain subscriptions of players who were looking for a challenge that is above what you consider to be a "challenge."



Essentially here, you're saying you can either have a challenge, or you can have a really good build, but that the two are mutually exclusive. That directly goes against the concept of character advancement - what's the point in even having the IOs there in the first place if I have to take them out of my character to be "challenged?" Lord knows there's sure as heck not much to do in this game once you hit 50, and the invention system provides yet another thing, but you're saying I shouldn't bother with it because it makes the game too easy. Yeah, that makes sense... Is it too much to ask to have both a challenge and a really good build? Not really.

Amusingly, there is often a small squad of PPD outside the Faultline MA building, and once or twice I've heard one say something along the lines of "Isn't it odd how we haven't made any progress on rebuilding, but they just put up this giant building?"

Giving players more options isn't a bad idea until you overdo it. Villains only had one university location, and people complained because they didn't want to run to Cap (or their SG base, or get the Field Crafter accolade) to craft stuff, so the abandoned labs were added. The Black Market was added to Port Oakes for convenience purposes (amusingly, PO already had a Black Market, though it was a single contact and wasn't shown on the map, and he's still there even though PO has a "proper" market now). It's an issue of convenience and time savings - getting between Mercy and Cap is a pain because you either have to take the ferry through Port Oakes (which requires you to run all the way across Cap, assuming you're at the "center" of the zone where the trainer, MA building, university, and market are) or take the helicopter, which again requires you to cross the zone. Likewise, Nerva is a spread-out zone, with most of the QoL locations in the southern part and several mission doors in the northern part.

Giving the players more options isn't a bad thing, but I agree that having an MA building in every zone wasn't necessarily a good idea - it doesn't help that the building itself isn't very good-looking, and it's huge to boot. Only city zones that don't have one are Croatoa (removed because it looked terrible compared to the rest of the zone's design) and Grandville (presumably because there was nowhere to fit one). While having fewer locations for amenities means players can congregate in one place, having more players in close proximity also means more work on peoples' computers. It gives the illusion of population and social connectivity, but in a game heavily based around instances and global chat channels, those amenities are little more than places to go because you have to.

They couldn't speed up flight because of how the power works - the flight cap is slower than the SS or SJ caps simply because the system can't handle it being faster. Thing about travel powers is they're all equally viable for out-of-combat movement, but for in-combat movement you just can't beat SJ+SS because of all the powers available to players. It was like that before the changes, it's still like that.

You mean the all the nasty bugs and glaring imbalances that were pointed out while I13 was still in beta, and persist over a year later because the devs are "happy with the changes?" Yeah, those didn't stop I13 from happening.

Congratulations, you figured us out. However, I'm able to laugh at you for being a complete moron - no one I know that plays this game is still "hurt" over I13. Every sensible player I know has realized that while the changes suck, a lot, they're not going to get pulled out unless there's some divine intervention, and the only thing we can do is campaign for things to get fixed and balanced from what we have. The idea that people would cling to the old system so much yet still stay subbed for over a year to a game they didn't want to play is ludicrous at best. Some PvPers that didn't like the changes quit right away. Some stopped PvPing. Some stuck around, and while they didn't like the changes, realized it was better than most of the other games around, and kept playing. Me? I'm here because of the people, not because of the game.

Thanks for taking the time to participate in this wonderful social experiment (and lol @ thinking I care what someone I've never met, played with, nor particularly cared about thinks about my "forum cred").

EDIT: I think DR would be a fine system in and of itself, as long as it didn't come along with the bad additions like free base resistances that make DR complete garbage in PvP. SO'd builds would experience little to no effect, and you'd have to make variations in your IO builds so not to run up against DR softcaps on certain aspects, and you couldn't pack multiple kinds of the same buffs on your team - basically, DR is ED for buffs. While I agree it would cause a drop in subscriptions, particularly from the powergaming crowd, it would be interesting to see what might happen.

That's part of the beauty of it - fighting NPCs in a PvP zone is significantly more risky than the same NPCs in a PvE zone. They didn't rebalance the NPCs in PvP zones to account for the new rules - why should they? They'd be back at square one. It's the imbalance that makes it challenging. All the changes would do is normalize things so performance between ATs and powersets is roughly equal and no one has a huge advantage over anyone else just because they invested more time or have better enhancements. And yes, the tech is there to apply the PvP ruleset to every PvE zone - currently the PvP rules work by checking what zone your character is in, and all they'd have to do would be add the PvE zones to that list.

I chuckle every time I read this thread because it's full of PvEers who are so desperately trying to defend the way the system works that they're pulling out the big guns and using solid logic (I'm not being sarcastic here) to explain why the changes would be a terrible idea. The funny thing here is that the PvP population tried to do the same exact thing when I13 landed, but the devs decided to go through with it anyways, and the only thing stopping them from doing the same thing to PvE is the fact that they really would kill the game. Just look at what happened to the PvP population after I13 - many PvPers left, organized high-end PvP simply died, and those who have been trying to push for changes for the better have been seemingly ignored. Don't get me wrong - I hated the I13 changes then, I hate them now, and I wouldn't want to see them applied to PvE. One of the reasons I can even stand to PvE in this game is because it's the closest I can get to pre-I13 PvP. Just know that if, for whatever reason, the devs actually did decide to dump some of the PvP rules onto PvE, no amount of dislike, logical explanation, or people quitting would be able to stop it.

The reason PvP was changed in the first place is because people were too used to PvE, where they could be buffed to the gills and herd up groups of dumb AI-controlled NPCs and AoE them to death with almost no risk to themselves. That didn't work in PvP, so rather than actually trying to figure out what did work, they just whined and asked for everyone else to be brought down to their level.

You're joking, I assume?

Exactly - it's not fair that someone who's invested in their character can solo a hard TF, or an AV or GM. Why should they have the advantage over a player who is just learning the ropes? It would be much better if everyone was on an even footing to begin with, and if that was done by bringing down the high end instead of bringing up the lower end. Just make it so that it's impossible to solo those TFs, or AVs/GMs, and then no one will complain, right? Right?

Agreed here, it's silly how Kins allow people to bypass travel suppression, allowing them to kite groups of NPCs with no risk to themselves. In fact, wasn't that why they added travel suppression in the first place? Doesn't make sense for certain powers to bypass something that was put in place for balance restrictions...

Oh, and giving squishies free resistance to everything means the Sonics and Therms wouldn't have to come to the forums complaining about having to re-shield everyone every 4 minutes!

I'm not saying that at all - I'm saying that because I am putting more time and effort into getting my characters ready for PvP and practicing playing them in PvP, regardless of what I'm doing (accolading, IOing, messing around with friends in the arena, or whatever else), I should have an advantage. If I don't have an advantage after all that, why should I bother in the first place? If there's zero incentive to improve, why bother? Using the market to buy the IOs I want for my characters is only part of that (interesting point to note: I haven't engaged in any serious market PvP in probably 18 months, and yet I've managed to amass a large amount of inf and enhancements simply by selling what drops and storing what I can use). Checkers and chess aren't related except they use the same board and have pieces with two different colors. Apples and oranges are related because they're both fruit, therefore if I like apples I should like oranges.

The market's a mini-game. Badging and accolading are mini-games. PvP isn't a mini-game in the same way PvE isn't a mini-game.

There is no handicap in PvP (well, there wasn't before I13, but now the entire system is one giant handicap). There's "baseline" and there's "above baseline." You come up against someone that's not as good as you, and you want to play down to their level, that's fine - but know that you won't be helping them improve because you won't be giving them a meaningful challenge, and you won't be doing yourself any favors in the process. One of the problems with the entire I13 system is that it forced the changes upon everyone at all levels of play - high-end team or 1v1 arena was forced to get dumbed down as well, even though the players participating in that were perfectly capable of using the system that existed at that time. Here's something from Sirlin's "Play to Win" article:
At any rate, I'm going to step away from this discussion now, as we've managed to deviate pretty far off the original point, and I don't wish to intrude on AF's amazing insight into how the game and even the world around us works.