Stormfront_NA

Guess you can play lawyer with words...


You imply that because one set of LTs is really out of wack, that there is no issue at all, and all is fair and correct.

I contend no set of anything should be that much out of wack.

I can see your technicallity in a very close minded sense of a way, the controller's mez has been and still is MAG-3, thus it never changed, talking about a weasel view here too, ha ha ha. The mob MAG resistance went from a 2 to heck of a lot, beyond dominace ranges; therefore the Controller and Dominator was not intrinsically nurfed, but their environmental performance in BAF went to the garbage instead.

I judge a class AT performance based on performance at their environment as a whole, kinda like a systems engineer looks at a problem.

Normally a Controller type is expected to lock down a minion and LT in a single MAG-3 mez application, taking 2 such applications to take on a boss. I would take this performance as a benchmark, when you go to a TF or any other activity and this benchmark changes, it will result in a change of AT performance, if the mob's MAG mez resistance drops (as if that would happen) the AT performance pragmatically improves, if the mob's MAG resistance increases, then naturally the ATs performance deteriorates, any moron can understand this basic concept.

There are in game instances on making Controller effectiveness deteriorate such as eminators on devouring earth, force bubbles on malta, Roman gains after a roar, etc. In some cases the deterioration is within moderation and others excessive. In some cases you can counter act it by destroying the emanators or force field generators, or pre-empting the screaming romans. But in BAF you get no such choices, they are there on your face.

While the Controller's mag-3 hold has not changed, they are uncapable of holding the running LTs in BAF, so while their power has not been nurfed, their performance has been significantly nurfed, thus my choice of the word "essentially". If you can understand this very simple principle, you may understand why it saddens me that a developer could not find a way to challenge us without disabling an ATs main power.

Sue

Note: While the power works just fine, if the target to be used against is made immune to it, the power has been in all practicallity dis-abled, as in no longer able to do its purpose.

I have news for ya...

Both Lamda and BAF are filled with ambush squads, stealth does not work. Also in Lamda and BAF they have mobs that just "saturate area attacks", being stealthy does nothing to keep you safe.

When I look at the sense of game balance, Support ATs are reminicent of the "Red Shirts" in the old Star Trek TV series. The red shirts were often murdered by monsters in horrible ways, so we the audience could go "wow, how powerful the monster is" and then be more awed when Kirk kicks their buns. I tend to feel support AT's role in CoX is to be the red shirts in this game, so we can go "wow, look how powerful the monsters are" and then be appropriately awed at the melee Ats when they beat them up. Little surprise when you look at PUGs compositions and they are melee heavy...

Now don't totally despair, once you suffered through the never ending humiliation of being a pansy during these trials, eventually you become less woozy as you slot up your incarnate slots. By the time you get Destiny and Lore to tier 3, and given Alpha is level 3 too, you can become an equivalent level 53, making you much less "blah" effective during the trials.

A great thing despite the horrid humiliation we must endure in the trials is that we can get Clarion from the destiny pool, and finally have some protection versus mez, FINALLY!!!!

Judgement gives non blaster, support ATs one hard hitting attack, deserving much respect, call it the squoshie basooka, lol

Now there are parts, I truly frown with BAF, and that is having particular AT abilities essentially disabled.

My first very bad experience, amazingly happened with my Tanker. I had always prided myself with having a very well developed and effective taunt. Then on BAF, I could not taunt a LT, how humiliating! I mean a LT!!!!!!! Come on!!!! What gives?

My second aweful experience, was with my dominator, also in BAF. I tried to hold the mobs and LTs simply gave me the bird and continued going. Once more, LTs? Come on!!!! What gives with this? I thought as a Dominatrix my holds were my bread and butter, what happened? I mean, I can't hold a LT? That is simply ridiculous.

But I guess, with great sadness, the devs are uncapable of providing us challenge with out disabling AT powers. So sad, and such a terrible trend...

sue

You make an interesting brain teaser here...

When you say the Devs have every right to manipulate and force, that is a very interesting concept you bring to table for at least myself to contemplate over.

Please note that I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with you, its just something to think about.

But I wonder how your statement collides with the rights of the customer?

We do pay a monthly subscription for a service, and we have as the lawyers will say "a reasonable expectation" for a reasonable quality product and service associated.

I find intellectually stimulating trying to figure where that boundary is, where the devs have a free reign of whatever they do as opposed to the customer is alway right. At the end, I suspect it is all subjective, and the "proof of the pudding" is when the devs finally went too far, and the customer gives them the extended middle finger by leaving the game, with their monthly subscription going to their competition.

Sue

I never meant to make LAMBDA harder nor to increase the minimum requirement, I am simply asking to allow it to be as many as 24, so when groups form up to do a BAF, the same league can switch over and do a LAMBDA with out having to kick people off.

Sue

You are right about the blasters, but I was comparing the Stalker burst DPS to the Blaster burst DPS, and feel they should be near enough. Why? The Stalker after their first assasination strike is now left with very weak DPS melee attacks; the Blaster after enhancing their snipe, but after the burst damage they still have very damaging attacks and AOEs as well, thus their normal DPS is not that inferior to their burst dps. This why I did compare the burst damage of both ATs, and IMO the Stalker should be able to single shot kill Bosses, and then go back to less than desirable dps.

Why should a Scrapper have better DPS, they don't stealth attack and thus lack that "Wanna be" magnificent assasination strike; thus for balance sakes their superior DPS. Frankly since the assassination strike was nurfed to not kill bosses in a single shot, the overall DPS of the Stalkeres should have been increased to approach the damage of the Scrappers.

But then its me, I believe in within AT balance, thus if you remove offense, you increase defense; or if you remove defense, you increase offense...Within AT balance. Unfortunately the developers and many in the community does not believe in this. For instance take the Controllers who depends on their mez to survive, in order to make the game more challenging, the devs have been making the mobs increasingly more mez resistant (ITF after Romans roar for instance, and trials really takes this to an extreme) thus IMO since the controllers were robbed of their offense to an extent, should they have not received some form of balance compensation such as better unconditional protections?

Sue

Do you program at all? If you did, maybe, just maybe, you would be able to understand the most basic principle I was describing.

Sue

Actually your assertions are right, and your conclusion may not be entirely correct. The difficulty to overcome your assertions is not likely to be challenging to the devs to actually resolve. Of course it involves the 4 letter word "work" which to some could be translated as "challenge" To which I do not believe the Devs are against. let me expand on this some, I differentiate tedius from intellectual work or activity. Tedius is not challenging, its a lot of mechanical things to do and likely boring. Intellectual is in fact challenging, for you actually have to think your way through it.

The can't invite cross-faction is merely a flag set by the devs themselves with good purpose, so blue can't invite red by mistake for blue content; same is true for the red side. But if you send a league invite, as opposed to a normal invite; the flag could be turned-off by the devs and "presto" you can invite across zones and factions. There may be an issue, when you league for blue or red proper content such as hamies, banners, etc. where if you disable the flag you could erroneously invite a player of the wrong faction. This could also be resolved by adding another conditional flag where the league leader can set up to say "same faction only" which in essence turns the normal flag back on. Its work, but I would think of it as a light intellectual and light tedium type effort, since most of the mechanism are already there, all you really need is an upgrade to the GUI to activate and deactivate a present flag.

To begin with, if you do a search for players at a map zone, you actually get levels and AT types. So essentially the information is already there, but available in a different venue. So there is little reason why a player's AT can't be shown during a league invite (flag off mode as per above), it is essentially a matter of re-pointing the software to a database with the correct information and perhaps creating another 36 cell temporary data storage matrix to hold the pertinent information. This is in essence another light intellectual challenge with a medium tedium load. A very very cool innovation could actually be done at this stage as well, but it would be more tedius work as opposed to intellectually hard work: The player information could include primary and secondary power names, and a display of the 4 incarnate slots with a number indicating to what level they have been progressed. But this last part, is a nice to have, not a do or die kinda of thing. This last display effort would be a medium intellectual and heavy tedium load.

Can't arrange the teams, it kinda is a mix of the two above. Obviously if you don't know the AT types, optimizing the team compositions, just can't be done in a practical manner. And the league GUI is flagged not to allow manipulation until players are there or perhaps till all the data of the player is displayed, not sure which or what is the trigger for the flag. If the trigger is player is not there, that flag can simply be de-activated. If the trigger is lack of information, doing steps 1 and 2 above solves that issue. Given steps 1 and 2 are allready there, I see this last piece as a light intellectual and light tedium kind of effort.

I expect a few of you, will be very quick to challenge, how dare I categorize the work? What knowledge or experience I have to base such judgments?

And you may be very correct to do so, I do not know the OS used to run and program the game, but I am fairly certain that regardless of the OS and development format used the overall "good-practices" are essentailly the same. I actually can program in several computer languages, I do so as a hobby, but I do have many friends who are professional programers for NASA and DoD, and they do critique and teach me on such practices. Among those practices, is the concept of modular programming; a wonderful practice. Thus once you have a module completed, you then have central code which serves as a traffic control system and you use flags to regulate the traffic control system as needed. Thus a "GUI" is a means to control those regulatory flags and where to "point" the program to collect information to be displayed by yet another software module. With this in mind, you have to decide how difficult is to do any given component of the process. The GUI usually is more intellectually challenging to do than a module, I said normally, modules can get pretty hairy at times. But in the case above, setting a data storage matrix is not particularly difficult. Loading the data into said matrix is a bit more intellectually challenging, but again not that difficult since its a matter of pointing the loading mechanism to the correct module containing the data and being instructed on how to collect it. Once more these efforts are not that intellectually challenging, they are every day occurring events, but they are mildly tedius to do.

I also asked several of my software programming friends over this game and what I suggested, and I got mixed responses . One commented, are they trying to simulate landing an instruments package on an asteroid millions of miles away? Guess that kinda places things into perspective, does it not? On the other hand, one did comment "Unless they have attrocious software development practices, and have spaguetti code as a result, then even the most rudimentary change could easily be a nightmare"

So maybe I may be mistaken, but I would think that our devs are truly pressional and are sharp folks, and as a result, they do follow industry good practices.

Hugs

Sue

Sue