The Enzyme Nerf Cometh

I think it is very telling that you refuse to say "exploit fix" or "exploit", instead favoring words like "changes" and "bug". In any online game, true exploits(like the use of +Def HO's in AD to gain unintended DDR) inevitably get fixed, especially those that are abused the most. Writing pages of straw man arguments in an attempt to garner some kind of sympathy does not change the fact that you abused a known exploit and are now upset that you will no longer be able to do so.

There's no need to call the exploit fix a "nerf", because that's exactly what it is not. It's a fix, plain and simple, to something that was never meant to be used the way players like you have used it. Your other comparisons are like apples to oranges.

I think it is very telling that you use the word exploit. It implies a certain level of cheating, of game-breaking, when used in an MMO world. It paints those that use it with a broad brush, and it equates this with things that truly affect the game-world, like AE farms and kheldians one-shotting hami. I don't use the word because it is an exaggeration. The HO-bug isn't by nature abusive and didn't guarantee unbalanced levels of rewards for those that used it. At worst, it slightly gave shield an edge on balance by making it too well-rounded, and I have agreed that other sets should be closer to shields in regards to balance (by raising the DDR in other sets and making SR better).

And almost everyone of my posts was a reply to people trying to demonize me in one way or another. Demitrios has put it most blatantly, suggesting I and every other player that used it get banned, but JustBling, you, and others have all made arguments that people that used this glitch to gain either slightly higher defense for less slots or higher levels of DDR (and of course the PBU thing as well, but I never used that) are evil exploiters that are bad for the game.

I have suggested ways to make this change good for the game in general. I have tried to be constructive despite the fact that I feel this removes an aspect of a character I enjoyed and doesn't help overall game-balance. Painting me negatively is unnecessary and petty. I don't call it an exploit because it wasn't exploitive; I gained no unfair rewards from using it. If you claim that my performance level was in itself exploitive and generated unfair rewards, than any higher level of performance would also be exploitive, and you don't want to go down that road. 25% DDR isn't game-breaking or earth-shattering to balance, but it makes me feel completely different when playing the character.

Attempting to justify and downplay your use of a well known exploit does not change the fact that it is, by definition, an exploit.

I have said no such thing. I have neither called you an "evil exploiter", nor have I said that you are "bad for the game". My stance this entire time has been that you are exaggerating the effect of an exploit fix in an attempt to draw sympathy for having used it in the first place. You knew it would be fixed someday, but you chose to use it anyhow, so accept responsibility for your actions instead of continuing to attack straw men in your attempt to avoid the facts of the matter.

When a redname comes along and tells us, point blank, that it's an exploit, everyone has a pass at calling it that, period.

He went on to qualify that it wasn't a very severe exploit (at least in his opinion), and one for which there would be no explicit attempt to punish players, but that we should expect it to be fixed some day because they considered it an exploit.

When the people who make the game call it an exploit, whether you agree with them or not is really a moot point. You can disagree with that all you want, but you should not expect anyone to take it seriously.

Here's why this is actually a more complex subject than it seems on the surface. Suppose we take SR, and assume its SO slotted defense is about 30%. That equates to 60% damage mitigation, so lets compare 30% defense SR to a hypothetical resistance-only set that has 60% resistance.

If we give SR 60% defense debuff protection which is comparable to the 60% resistance debuff resistance that the resistance set has, it looks equal but its not equal, because while SR will resist defense debuffs just as much as the resistance set will resist resistance debuffs, that's only true for debuffs that land. In actuality, SR will *avoid* 80% of all debuffs aimed its way (base 50% tohit), *and then* resist 60% of the 20% that that. The resistance set will avoid 50% of the debuffs aimed its way (no defense, but base to hit is still 50%) and then resist 60% of the rest.

Notice that in this case, defense debuffs have a weaker effect on the defense set than resistance debuffs have on the resistance set for the first landed debuff. And even as defense spirals down to zero (and so does resistance) SR still resists just as much as the resistance set, but also avoids more of them right up to the point where defense drops to zero.

This would suggest that SR should have less than 60% DDR, but if it has less, then for many cases its protection will be weaker. And how do you factor in the fact that defense debuffs are more common than resistance debuffs, deliberately so on the part of the devs?

This then begs the question: if you are going to give every single defense power DDR, what amount should it be? Since the amount you'd likely want to give has some situational elements to it, can you give the right amount to things like power pool powers?

And what does that do to defense sets when *everyone* can build high levels of DDR? DDR is already a tricky thing to set "correctly" (for some definition of correctly) can you also ensure that the *relative* amounts of DDR between sets with different reliance on defense get proportionately similar ones? If you can build Shields to have comparable DDR to SR, what's the point of SR? And its not a trivial escape hatch to say "just buff SR" because its impractical to buff its defense, and tricky to buff anything else. Eventually you have every single defensive set having regen, defense, and resistance, and significantly increase the homogenization of the sets. I'd be opposed to that in general.

The proliferation of defense buffs has already marginalized defense *sets* in the high performance arena, because even freaking blasters can soft-cap now. DDR is one of the few ways left to distinguish the high, medium, and low reliance defense sets. But if everyone who wants it can also buy DDR, that to me makes a difficult situation worse.


DDR is more a powerset thing, not a power thing, because defense intrinsically does protect against debuffs: it avoids them. The problem is the second and third debuff: the cascade effect, and the degree to which that defense should hold up against debuffs is more of a holistic powerset question than a power by power question. You could even argue that power pool defenses and invention bonuses are there as a counter to defense debuffs in terms of being offsets: we can buy power pool defenses and invention defense bonuses, and those offset the defense debuffs that we can be hit by. But if that's the case, its not at all clear they should also *resist* those debuffs, because that would be, in a sense, two bites at the same apple.

Or to put it another way, all debuffs exist for a reason: to weaken us. The fact that a debuff makes us weaker isn't necessarily wrong; that's the point of the debuff. The question is whether the debuffs in strength or prevalence affect everyone in the way that is reasonable and fair. The obvious problem with defense debuffs is that unlike resistance debuffs, they affect things with defense more than things without defense. The question is whether that was intentional. You could argue that it was intention in the case of sets like Invuln: Invuln has resistance and +health and a heal, and a small amount of defense that can scale up to a significant amount of defense situationally. Its entirely reasonable to believe that in other situations, where defense debuffs are more common, Invuln would have a significant amount of that protection stripped. However, you could also argue that SR (and Energy when it arrived) were in a much tougher boat, because they were affected so much more strongly, and their net protection dropped so much more steeply, that that wasn't intentional.

Because you can make such situational arguments for different powersets, DDR itself should likely remain something that is configured per powerset, based on the degree to which its designed to be more or less vulnerable to defense debuffs in the first place.

Widows are a little iffy to me. On the one hand, the amount of defense they have and their reliance on it would suggest they deserve a lot more DDR. On the other hand, they sort of have a lot of defensive protection period: more than you'd expect given the capabilities of the archetype. It makes we wonder if the high defense *itself* is supposed to be the Widow's hedge against debuffs. In other words, rather than give Widows moderate defense and moderate DDR, they were given high defense and low DDR instead, which nets out to a similar overall protection scheme, but frontloads that protection in higher defense up front that can be debuffed later.

And that doesn't count the fact that on top of that they get tanker mods on power pool defenses.

Widows might have been deliberately designed to be stronger than normal, but more brittle than normal, in other words.

Can you slot a Defense IO or SO in Active Defense and gain DDR? No you can not. Had Active Defense been intended to work in that way, you would be able to slot Defense IO's and SO's to gain DDR.

Can you currently(pre-i22 release) slot an HO that gives +Defense in Active Defense and gain DDR? Yes, and until i22 is released you will still gain an unintended benefit by doing so.

The other cases you've declared as possibly unintended are only achieved by IO sets, specifically global recharge and defense bonuses. Have IO set bonuses been declared as known exploits by the devs as the HO exploit has? No, therefore they must be working as intended.

Outside of a poster's declaration of emotion(ie-"I'm angry about..."), no one knows what that person feels. It is from their words alone that we will know what they think or feel.

It doesn't let you do things that were unintended. It *does* things that are specifically contrary to intent.

So this being the case, wth are people upset at it getting corrected?

For me, mostly because I had thought HOs were in the same dark corner of design as bases and PvP, and that if Devs ever took a look at them they would take some time to rebalance them with the game rather than making them even less useful.

The devs did say directly and on multiple occasions that if the technology became available to fix this problem they would likely do so, and that no one should rely on this behavior being sanctioned indefinitely. While some people may not know that, there is no ambiguity in their long-time stated intent.

For every other bug in the game besides the multiaspect HO bug, no one should presume anything else other than that bug is also subject to being fixed without warning or discussion. There are no exceptions.

A bug's a bug, the end. If you think this behavior is so valuable, advocate to have it added explicitly as a feature. If the behavior is as overwhelmingly beneficial as you claim it is, generating support for that change should be trivial.

LOL, if it was 'the end' this thread wouldn't exist. That's the point of this thread, we're discussing our opinions on this change.

But the devs did have your attitude when they changed pvp and energy melee, and those both worked out great, so maybe you're right.

I've explained why I think leaving the HO's as they are would be beneficial - if you'd care to refute my points, that would be great, but since you think 'a bugs a bug, the end', I'm not sure why you'd bother to post any more about a dead subject.

You're free to discuss the matter: I'm not specifically saying not to. But I am saying that by policy bugs get fixed. That's a fact, not something that discussion alone alters. And its a policy that would require a better argument than I've ever seen to overturn. Its certainly beyond my ability to even attempt.

I'll assume you meant HO's when you said IO's, no big deal, typos happen. Apparently the game developers care about what was intended. That the exploit gave people extra options on how to build their characters I have little doubt, but using exploits and expecting them to never be fixed is a fool's wager.

The only reason the enhancements were worth so much in the first place was the large demand by players who wanted to use a well known exploit. When it became public knowledge that the exploit will be fixed with i22, of course the value of those enhancements dropped. The only players limited by the exploit being fixed are those who chose to use it.

As can be inferred by Combat's following statement and mathematical derivation, by utilizing the HO exploit his Shielder was six times stronger against defense debuffs than it would have been without it.

Significant enough that without use of the exploit, he no longer deems the character worthy of playing.

To be fair, after the initial shock I softened somewhat. And it was always more of a "well, he'll never be as good as before" thing rather than a "OMG, look how weak he is now" deal. The closest change I could compare it to, feeling wise, would be the energy melee change.


On a slightly different note, I think part of the reason these enhancements were so expensive is because most HOs were fairly worthless (comparatively, an HO pick was a risk because you easily get something worth less than the merits). Dam/Mez HOs may be useful in a few situations to a small number of people, but people only picked the HO option for Enzymes, Membranes, the travel/end HO, and Nucleoli, as those were the money makers. So someone looking for those specifically would have to wade through Crap of the Hunter type HOs to get to the ones they want. That is because most of the HOs do not do a job better than IO equivalents, or at least not good enough to compete with set bonuses. At current levels, this will dissuade people from picking an HO option, which may make the others even more expensive or simply turn people off from the HO system altogether.

Maybe the alpha slot just gave them the code they needed to easily fix the issue, but I simply figured that at some point in the future they would take some time and truly fix HOs, including this bug. It feels like they only went halfway on this change. Now, from their side it may not have worked or felt that way.

It just seems right for them to try and fix the issues around HOs. The bug was around for so long that receiving only enough attention to fix it seems a little shortsighted. Will we have to wait a similar amount of time for developer attention to turn back to HOs a second time and finally make them competitive?

Excuse me? I never called you evil. I was suggesting that your feelings for the changes to your character were prompting you to make irrational claims. I used the term "nerdrage" a couple of times, but that's it. Again, no morality involved.

You seem to be getting a persecution complex about this issue.

I just suggested that you find a constructive way to discuss the change, rather than blowing the significance of this fix out of proportion.

What would you suggest I do differently? Despite my defensiveness, I accepted that my Shielder's DDR was unintended by the devs (despite the fact that I think that defense set should have high levels of DDR to protect against cascade failure), and have suggested ways to make this change palatable and even beneficial to the game.

Yes, I defended myself. The reason I "blew the significance of this fix out of proportion" was I was offended by the sentiment that this change was *no big deal*. To me, that would have been like telling energy melee that the fix to ET was no big deal. This change WAS a big deal to me, and it will have a large impact on any high-end shielder.

I also am opposed to any argument that states that this should be fixed primarily because it is unintended by developers, as it sounds way too much like Emmert's rationale. That is why I went after those that vilified the bug and its users, because that line of thinking is potentially destructive.

FRemember how long it took for the developers to fix this, and realize that it may take an equal amount of time for them to get back to HOs. If they are going to focus on this issue after years of waiting, at least go all the way and adjust HOs to the modern game.

I suggest you stop doing this:

Italics mine, and may I remind you that you pointed me out specifically in your previous post. With that in mind, you are exaggerating in every instance.

The only positive change I recall you mentioning is a change to the effectiveness in Hami's. I agreed with your statements about Hami's multiple times. Yet somehow I'm still vilifying you.