Dev Chat Highlights, October 5: Record Low 1.5 Tangents and Street Justice with Synapse

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes.



Yes.

Never been big on cheap solutions like increasing enemy stats and decreasing player stats by a fixed amount to create "difficulty". More often than not, it ends up being tedious rather than actually difficult, as you just spend more time doing the task.

That said, personally I find praetorians fine on +0/x8 or +1/x6 at low levels, as a solo player. Getting into a team changes that. If I still had enough friends interested in this game, I would bet even +4/x8 praetorians as soon as level 12 or so wouldn't constitute a challenging experience (whether that's adequate or not is another debate, personally I'm fine with games being mostly devoid of challenges, which is why I enjoy this game, whereas most of my friends get bored and leave). I have serious doubts on the legitimacy of claims that people can have trouble fighting praetorians at +0/x1. I do not believe for a second it is possible to truly have trouble on -1/x1 (barring physical disabilities, which is unfortunate but not something you can balance a game around if you want to provide any kind of meaningful experience for the majority of people who are more lucky).

Praetorians are great in that they have actually some interesting mechanics that discourage you from wading in and pressing 1 2 3 4, i.e. ghouls heal each other so you may want to keep them separated or not AoE willy nilly minions while a boss is almost down, resistance aggroes from far away which incites to care a bit more about positioning and breaking line of sight, etc..

To put this another way, your option for easier includes starting in AP or Mercy, and doing years worth of content. It's much easier to make the game easy than to find difficulty that doesn't revolve around straight number increase to enemy power level and decrease to player power level.

Making enemies that are harder than normal (IE Praetorian content) already includes just increasing enemy stats. They do more damage, have more defense, or debuffs than normal spawns. They have more attacks than normal enemies in that level range, the attacks hit for more, and they have +ToHit buffs and other things. What you're arguing is that you shouldn't have to buff enemy stats, they should just already have buffed stats. Which again goes back to excluding other players.

And your solution for people who can't handle new content because it's too difficult is to not do the content at all. Neither of these answers actually address the issue.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Yeah, that was great! That thing Synapse accomplished.

Uh...what thing are you talking about? Could you link or quote something? I've searched all 3 pages of this thread.

As far as I know, the only place you see the enhanced Praetorian 64% base tohit critters is in the end game trials, and DE tip missions. There might be the odd one floating around somewhere, but the rank and file stuff you run into in Praetoria have base 50% tohit as far as I've seen.

Setting aside what you define to be challenging, +4x8 praetorians at level 12 would assassinate more than 90% of all teams in this game.

And honestly, I'd like to see you cruise through +1/x6 solo in Praetoria below level 20. I'm not saying you can't do it; its certainly not impossible. But not many things could do that consistently, and its certainly non-trivial. To me that sounds significantly more difficult than being able to solo +4x8 at higher levels.

An example of Runaway Fanbase that takes an offhand remark by a Dev, morphs it into What They Always Wanted and then expect it to show up the next patch.

Synapse mentioned liking and thinking about a melee based support toon. That's it. Nothing more than that.

It has morphed in some forumites' minds as a brand new AT that's in the pipeline. The fact that you can add team buffs to a Defense Set (see Shields) doesn't seem to deter folks from thinking that they must create a new AT to make this happen. Or.. it can be a new AT -- we don't know. Seems more of a pipe dream at this point than in the pipeline.