The Enzyme Nerf Cometh

Ummm...wow. While I've continued to say it was a fix and never once called it a nerf. Calling most of the scrapper posters lowest of the low for using this. o.O I'm not saying everyone used it, but I recall seeing many a build posted that used it.

Personally, I thought it was a great slot saver. Even used the Heal/End one on my Scrpper for RTTC.

Really, your post is coming off as some sort of "I got beat in PvP" or "I never could get the Hami Os to use it, so I hate you all." or worse yet "I have a superiority complex and want to feel like I'm on some sort of moral high ground."

The basic argument was that the change to shield is inconsequential. I've tried again, and again, and again to show that it IS a big change.

What you call being butthurt is what I call having character. I don't think this is right, and I'm not going to shut up about it, back down to competition, or retreat just because you tell me to (what happened to "I'm not telling you to shut up?"). I have a fairly long record of being a high-quality poster, and I'm not inflating this thread because I like to throw tantrums or because I am pissed about one character being weaker. I'm doing this because I do not feel it is good for the game. And just like your "real numbers", which do not accurately reflect what happens in the game, you have made the argument that an exploit should fixed regardless of the actual affect on the game. That, my friend, is the main argument. I think a change should, or should not, happen because of what it does to the game.

You are the one trying to make a real numbers vs proportion numbers argument. And despite what you seem to think, your math does not apply to the game. It doesn't. Mine does. I can tell someone that they will be twice as survivable if they get to 45% defense as compared to 40%, whereas your method states that they are only 5% stronger. In every way, my method makes predictions that accurately shows what actually happens in the game world, which makes it makes it the better math, end of story.

When I say that now defense debuffs are 6 times stronger against my shielder than they were before, that is literally true. It means that now I have to be 6 times as much defense over the softcap (30% was chosen for easiness sake) for the same security, which wrecks havoc over any min-maxed build.

At the same time, this only positively affects balance between 2 powersets, SD and SR (and SR was the one needing love). Note, that SR actually had the most potential of ANY class to use enzymes, as virtually every power in the set could have used the enzyme side of the exploit, so it is also negatively affected. SD was powerful, yes, but it was already overshadowed by fire and was below every set besides SR for actual survivability (and I'm not saying THAT should change, but that SD was balanced at that point). And outside of melee characters, it doesn't compare in team or solo situations to the top sets (Illusion, Sonic Blast, Traps, Cold Domination, Radiation, etc.).

Additionally, this change makes HOs even more irrelevant. They are too rare, and thus expensive, to be used by casual frankenslotters, and yet offer very little over IO sets (which can even get to similar levels of enhancement in some situations). I wouldn't have a problem having enzymes fixed if it meant that cytos were more made more useful, but as of now all it does it make me use IOs in every defensive slot.


And looking back at the thread:

1. I stated I am fine with shielder being nerfed if it is good for the game, multiple times.

2. I stated I am fine with HO fix in general, if HOs became more useful, multiple times.

And failed.

I didn't tell you to shut up. I still haven't, I'm just pointing out that your arguments aren't as compelling as you feel they are, which I have every right to do.

Which has nothing to do with the value of your current argument.

Actually, they are directly deterministic of exactly what happens in game from the inside.

I don't recall saying that. What I was saying was that the devs said they were going to fix the bug, and they did so. The only thing I recall calling a positive change was that the devs were getting around to fixing long-standing bugs.

Ha ha. Okay man, whatever, clearly there is no reasoning with you. I've acknowledged the instances in which your math is easier to work. Your error was stepping away from "6x more survivable" to "it's just like 83% DDR". Using numbers in that manner is nearly the same as making crap up. I'm not trying to shut you up, I'm calling you as I see you, in the hopes that someone else who is on the fence won't take your arguments at face-value.

I do hope, when this is over, you return to being a high quality poster.

We're done here.

It is never a good idea to allow broken things to remain in the game just because players like their side effects. If players like their side effects and its acceptable for those side effects to exist, the broken thing should be fixed and the side effects placed back into the game deliberately. It is never, ever, ever a good idea to let bugs accumulate by fiat just because they seem to be ok today. Even tolerating such bugs temporarily because they cost too much to fix at the time should be considered a temporary tactic at best.

How very weird.

I guess it explains why my shield scrapper usually gets knocked by the regeneration terminals exploding in Keyes, though. I'd wondered about that.

"Hamis are fixed, suck it up and move on."
Its about my integrity. You are attacking my character when you accuse me of throwing a temper tantrum and call me an exploiter that abuses the game without thought to the consequences. I have a history of doing things that are constructive. You don't. I have a history of reasonableness. When it comes to character, I have proven myself by my history.

And? My numbers still predict outcomes better. My numbers show that going from 0 to 83.3% can be equated to going from 70 to 95% in that both reduce incoming debuff by a factor of 6 from the previous level. Arguments can be made over whether 70% is enough DDR, and on whether game-impact of giving a resistance set DDR is equivalent to that of the same proportional change in a defense set, but not on the factual correctness of the the statement. You have attacked the math.

A newcomer to the game could correctly infer by my approach that defense, resistance, and debuff resistance all increase in strength nonlinearly, and become more and more powerful the closer they are to the relevant cap. Indeed, knowledge of this this fact is critical to understanding survivability in this game.

Personally, I don't even like DDR. I think it should work like RDR (resistance debuff resistance), or in other words, defense should resist defense debuffs. Obviously, we can't change the mechanics of game to do that, but we can approximate it by giving defense sets higher DDR. Given how easy it is for IO-sets to softcap defense, perhaps IO sets shouldn't give DDR, but I could easily see giving defensive sets equivalent amounts of DDR to their defense. In fact, I thought it was a bad idea to give AD DDR at all, as it doesn't give defense. I would rather have the DDR of AD distributed across the other powers in the set.

My math being easier to work has nothing to with it. It is just that my math can be used to make predictions. With my math, I can tell a player exactly what magnitude of extra defense to build over softcap to prepare for x amount of defense debuffage.

To be clear, however, I am not making the argument that going from 95% DDR to 70% reduces survivability by a factor of 6, but rather that the change in effectiveness vs a very common debuff is affected in a way that is numerically similar. Which is why it is such a big deal to me; my shielder couldn't beat mobs as easily or quickly as one of the signature options (SS/Fire for melee, examples given numerous times for other sets), but he was good enough and consistent enough to beat a wide variety of foes. In order to be as consistent, I would have to rip my build up and probably would lose either the recharge necessary for the top chain or the ability to sustain it, which means that I cannot use him as a general soloer in the way I did before.

That's almost certainly a bug. I'd PM that one to Arbiter Hawk and Synapse.

Done.

I regarded the HO exploit (as described by Castle) as something I myself didn't want to do. That was my choice. I am not going to call players who used it themselves names, however.

Now I'm wondering if this post was satire.

Me and JustBling got into an argument/shouting match. Mostly over my use of proportional math vs. his "real numbers". Others joined in. Also argued about other stuff, but the math argument was the main one (though not actually my main point).

Arcanaville posted smart stuff.

Demetrios ranted about HOs.

That's about it.

Combat and I had it out over why he's posting. I claim he's simply butthurt, and is making up all sorts of crap to support the position that he holds. I further contend that he shoulda gotten over the sting a few pages ago.

He claims he's not butthurt, he's fighting to correct a great injustice, because apparently when the dev's fix a long standing issue, and it's not in certain players' favor, they don't have the best interests of the players at heart.

Oh, and he's defending his reputation as a high quality poster.

P.S. I may have slightly exaggerated portions of the argument for impact. Welcome to the internet.

Hella lot of whining.

I think the dev's should make new Hami-o's to replace the functionality of the fixed ones, and have them drop from the Avatar at the end of the UG and similarly beefy critters. (Looking at the Seed zone event, for one.)

I agree with bolded. And I think that simple fix is to give greater enhancement values to Hami O's.

While the 50% enhancement to everything may be to much, I don't think the 45%/33% for schedule A/B aspects of the enhancements is a bad idea.

It's what the alpha slot does, and it allows the Hami O's to be used as better fraken slot enhancements than some of the multi aspect IOs.

Making Titan O's and Hami O's non level based would also be a good think imo. People could make use of them while leveling up. Maybe put a limit of "must be level 10 to use" or some such, but I hope the fixing of this long standing bug, is just paving the way to making these enhancements more worthwhile to majority of the player base.

And no one remembered to bring the cheese

On a lighter note... Why don't we have some kind of Hamidon Origin drop/reward somewhere in the Incarnate/First Ward stuff for 50's? It makes sense thematically that one of the Praetorians may "accidentally drop" a synthetic HO they acquired during all their bouts with Hami/Devouring Earth. It would increase their spread, lower their difficulty to obtained, and maybe make them a little more integrable into game-society than they are currently. Maybe a random chance to have the option on your Reward List for an iTrial, or stick them in an iTrial "Very Rare" drop category. I'm sure the developers could make this make sense somewhere.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Actually, scratch that. I was thinkin' too small.

I think the Hamidon should get a new set of Hami-O's choosable from reward tables.

I think the Battalion should get a new set of Batal-O's choosable from reward tables.

I think the Rularuu should get a new set of Rulu-O's choosable from reward tables.


(Those are my three guesses as to the Coming Storm baddies.)

Better even still, these O's should all be different. Duo's, trebles, quads, quints, and throw in oddball buffs like mag 1 status, global inf boosts, prestige bonuses, PBAOE ally buffs, etc, etc.

Hell, even some DDR. Get creative with it!

Inventions are awesome, no doubt, but it's been YEARS. How about some new stuff?

Let's not get that crazy! All we hear now is complaints of all the different loot!

Dark Miasma? Gimped? Did the nerd-rage break something on your mind? :P

Sorry, is a bug fix. If you (not Combat, I mean anyone) were using a exploit, you have no right to complain when such bug is fixed.

If this is not about a bug fix, and rather about a set that underperforms, feel free to open a thread stating why and why such sets underperforms, suggestions on how to fix, and whatever

Just to clerify for anyone following along at home. /SR has 3 powers that can slot enzymes that would benifit from the additional defense. The teir 9 power already soft caps you so there's no need for more defense. The passives cannot slot enzymes as they don't use endurance. Quickness can't slot it.... Practiced brawler uses endurance so it can slot it, but it doesn't give defense.

In my building experience, /SR gets to the soft cap so easily that I have the spare slots to use 4-6 slots in defense powers and get some of the other wonderful set bonuses that come from the defense sets. Where I really use/abuse the enzymes is when working with a non-defense based set and I'm tight on slots because I'm trying to get everything I can out of my defense and resistance powers. I do frequently find myself 2 slotting defense powers or 3 slotting with 2 LoTGs and an enzyme.

I see this as similar (but less drastic) then the change to the BoTZ set. /SR isn't all that affected because the top teir /SR builds (mine at least) didn't use/abuse the enhancement. Whereas other sets were using/abusing the enhancement as part of their ability achieve what /SR does and more.

Not Dark Miasma now. DM at I0. There were a few differences:

Fear made baddies run away instead of cower/attack, making it virtually useless.

Tar Patch didn't have -res.

Dark Servant was immobile, had worse powers (including the runaway version of FS).

I also believe that twilight grasp didn't have -regen, and was weaker (and possibly that howling twilight lacked that affect as well), but I am not certain.

Of course, when DM was buffed it immediately went from suckiest support set in the game to overpowered, as they gave tar patch the same amount of -res as it had now with the ability to stack 3 at once, along with the sudden strength of having 3 fluffies out at once. And then subsequent reduction gave us the set we know today.

Woops, my bad. For some reason I forgot that Enzymes required endurance reduction and misremembered putting them in an /SR build before they became very expensive. Completely wrong on that. Energy aura could use it a bit though more though, with 5 eligible powers.

And just so people listening at home can understand what I was trying to argue:

My personal reason for disliking the change was that it changed the feel of SD, by giving it a new weakness to a very common threat (my DM/SD character was created as a thought experiment originally, as a melee character that could solo the broadest swath of content).

I responded to claims that it wasn't that big a deal by showing that a relatively small change in DDR of 25% would actually make shields 6 times weaker to debuffs.

I did not mean to make any claim that SD was weak or needed help because of this, as it is still a balanced set on the fringe of being too powerful for a melee set. However, the change definitely changed Shields relationship to FA for the worse, despite the fact that SR gained an advantage over SD; but more importantly to me it makes the character completely different (which I is why I felt I needed to show that I had some reason to feel like my character was greatly changed).

The rest of my argument was around the nature of the exploit because I felt that my character was in question from using the bug. Arcanaville is 100% right, of course, that leaving bugs in a system is generally not a good idea. However, in this specific case it appeared to give HOs a unique advantage that IOs couldn't (and those advantages are very small in number), and taking that away would cause more harm than good to enhancement balance unless the developers gave something back to HOs.

It was then that I started talking about why exploiting is not necessarily evil. The main argument I had heard for the change was that the bug itself wasn't intended by the developers, and that the lack of intention was enough, in itself, for a change. I disagreed with that idea because it seemed very similar to the old Jack Emmert style of design, and because accepting that argument would allow it to be used on more extreme examples of developer disagreement. I combined with the supports vs melee argument to show that just about anything could be against developer intention, as the strength of the strongest support classes was certainly NOT intended by current or former devs. I don't want support classes to be nerfed to make them equal to melee, and that was actually the point of my argument. The difference is that support characted benefit from an unintended scale of strength, while SD and those using the HO bug benefits from unintended code.

So, in TLDR form: Yes, SD is powerful. My character will be feel completely different after the change, and that was reason enough for me to scrap him for parts (I didn't delete him though). Even after this SD will be a decent set, with less survability than other sets but added offense, but will be outclassed by fire in many situations.

However, changes should not be made just because "the developers didn't intend it", but rather on whether they affect the game positively or negatively. This change would be positive if they made HOs a better alternative to IOs, and the easiest way to do that is to boost the levels of enhancement.

Actual TLDR version:

HOs are fixed, but are now even worse than IOs. Make them comparable, and I won't even be mad about my Shielder.

This exploit fix is not "giving it(SD) a new weakness to a very common threat", it is removing your ability to game the system by giving Shield Defense a level of DDR it was quite clearly never intended to have.

The rest of your argument is merely a straw man.

Since you're comparing a 25% vulnerability to 5%, I think the number is more like 5x more vulnerable. Even if I'm willing to grant you 6x, it's a comparative measurement, so you have to compare it to the previous vulnerability, which was only 5%, because of the cap. The more important question to ask would be whether or not it makes the set unbalanced in comparison to its contemporaries.

I believe you answer that concern right here:

I agree with your assessment completely.

Maybe I didn't realize this, but you haven't actually played the toon after the change (hell, maybe it's not playable yet, I dunno), and you're ready to scrap him already? In fact, you have scrapped him already?

Hey! I agree with that too, one more time and we can make out and stuff!

I "tested" it by removing the membranes on live (not sure of character is working), and realized that defense debuffs are EVERYWHERE. So I used the wrong tense, should have been "has" instead of "will"

And given the change in value for membranes/enzymes, would have have waited to remove them? Sure, I have a lot of assets, but I didn't want to pay the billion influence opportunity cost. Anyone that had these HOs in their powers and didn't sell them off lost 200 million per HO. After I had removed the 5 or so HOs in the build (2 enzymes in deflection, 3 membranes in AD, maybe another enzyme or two thrown into odd powers), and played around for a bit it was clear that my playstyle and/or build would have to change quite a bit to enjoy the character, and instead I decided to liquidate so I could enjoy my next "main". Probably gonna be crab spider, and I already got all the purples, PvP IOs, etc., I need!