Unyielding on Test - Brutes and Scraps(7/13 patch)
By
Aett_Thorn,
Posted on: 2006-07-13 14:36 in Tankers
To make running Unyielding optional, the entire game would have to be reworked, especially in the upper levels.
Check the Fiery Aura Thread, that drekstorm there is just about knockback!
Tanking without all around status protection has become pretty much impossible.
Well, not only tanking, meleeing in general, there's a reason why Blappers become rare in the later levels.
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I'm not responsible for misinterpretation ;p
Powerset balance means internal powerset balance and balance between powersets, as opposed to the -def being intended to balance Invuln considering pre-ED/nerf levels of invuln uberness, which is the assumption made by many, many posts in this thread.
If you want to talk equations
a = b
and ED+Global Defense nerfs gets
(a/2) = (b/2)
or
invuln = dark armor
invuln-ED/Nerf = dark armor-ED/Nerf
But what people are SAYING is
invuln-DEF = Dark Armor
invuln-DEF-ED/Nerf != Dark Armor-ED/Nerf
Yes there are problems with powerset balance. Noone has to demonstrate this with Unyielding except through their pieholes.
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If it's impossible to finish a fight with a reasonable team, QA should notice.
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But the fights were never impossible to finish with a reasonable team. Just very difficult. (Afore-mentioned damage insp huffing included) And it's not their job to make balance calls. The overriding priority of QA is making sure the frigging thing works. Cryptic takes care of balance and stuff, Thats why they have an internal test server.
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And God help us, if this is true it fully explains the state of the game today. If developers don't LISTEN to their playtesters when they tell them something feels "too hard" or "imbalanced" (regardles of how peachy it looks on paper), then you basically wind up with the frankenstein game we have now -- grossly imbalanced; frustrating, not fun; much too difficult for the casual or semi-casual player, especially at higher levels; too much reliance upon certain powersets to accomplish simple tasks; etc.
I gotta say that I really try to resist demonizing the developers, cause I don't really think they set out to make us miserable. But at the same time I think they really need to be smacked around a little, step back (WAY back), and try to take an unbiased view of what they have wrought. And frankly, it ain't pretty.
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Sad that it's probably not going.
Good that it was reduced for scrappers and brutes if it's not going.
I hate compromises like the above.
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Word.
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But the fights were never impossible to finish with a reasonable team. Just very difficult. (Afore-mentioned damage insp huffing included) And it's not their job to make balance calls. The overriding priority of QA is making sure the frigging thing works. Cryptic takes care of balance and stuff, Thats why they have an internal test server.
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The internal test server is the QA server.
Also, your math is silly because it is there to support your assertion that if the debuff is balanced before issue 5 and 6, then it must be balanced after. Since the debuff did not change, but Invuln lost a large chunk of defense capability, it cannot be balanced by definition. It's even arguable whether it was balanced before.
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It makes me think that they thought of only 8 powers, but had to fill in 9 tiers. So... let's subtract DEF here (UY) and put it over here (TH), to tone down the potential DEF provided by Invinc. Viola! 9 powers!
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Unyielding was originally Unyielding Stance and it had no -DEF component. It did, however, make you immobile. This was incredibly unpopular and it was decided to remove that penalty. At that point, the -DEF was added to replace the Immobilize penalty.
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How about changing the -DEF for +Slow? Any other ideas anyone?
Why any penalty, before having Granite like survivability?
INV already has enuff penalties in its base structure as is.
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It makes me think that they thought of only 8 powers, but had to fill in 9 tiers. So... let's subtract DEF here (UY) and put it over here (TH), to tone down the potential DEF provided by Invinc. Viola! 9 powers!
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Unyielding was originally Unyielding Stance and it had no -DEF component. It did, however, make you immobile. This was incredibly unpopular and it was decided to remove that penalty. At that point, the -DEF was added to replace the Immobilize penalty.
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How about changing the -DEF for +Slow? Any other ideas anyone?
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The proper "penalty" is to remove the -DEF in unyielding, and remove the initial defense in invincibility. That's really what the -DEF is there for anyway: to prevent invincibility from scaling too high. Prior to 28, Invuln tankers and scrappers would not have the penalty, and above 28 with invincibility they would basically be right back to where they are now. Its a low level buff but a neutral high level change.
The only difference would be a lower toxic penalty (which I don't think is supposed to be there conceptually) and a lower psionic penalty (which I don't think is that big of a deal: if they wanted Invuln tankers and scrappers to not have such covering protection, they wouldn't have buffed dull pain in the first place; the dull pain buff basically overrides the psionic -DEF in unyielding if you slot DP).
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If you want to talk equations
a = b
and ED+Global Defense nerfs gets
(a/2) = (b/2)
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Except, as I said many times when it happened, neither the GDF, nor ED, nor the combination of both, had that effect, in even remotely gross terms. Its trivially easy to demonstrate that regardless of whether you think the sets are balanced now, or were balanced then, they were all affected differently by ED and the GDF, because of how the sets are constructed (talking about the damage mitigation sets that existed at the time: scrapper secondaries and tanker primaries).
It isn't even true that the scrapper version of Invuln was hit identically to the tanker version of Invuln, because of how damage mitigation works. They weren't even hit similarly between different damage types. In other words, the relationship between Invuln tankers and Invuln scrappers in terms of true damage mitigation was different after I5/ED, than in I4. Its impossible for the debuff to have been balanced in I4, and also in I5, except by incredible coincidence.
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