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Oh yeah, its a total gamechanger* for many powers. IMHO

*That is if you prefer KD to KB.

I can see this IO selling for lots.

Catalytic is not going to be happy about that.

Most powersets also lose effectiveness from dying. Willpower, Dark Armor, and Fiery Aura are notable rare exceptions. Why does the game allow players to die?

Hear! Hear! Arcanaville supports player immortality! Neidan powersets for everybody!

I see what you did there.

I'm all for it, but technically I should have said the game allows characters to die. It also allows players to die as well, but even fewer players are effective after death as characters are.

What powers have dying as a secondary effect?

Self Destruct.

And indirectly: potentially anything with a crash.

Correct, a fun power that comes as part of a costume pack offers a non-debt death. Is that death sold as an advantage? Is it not implied that the secondary effect isn't necessarily a good thing?

Knockback is sold as some kind of advantage, when it is almost always a detriment. The analogy Arcanaville sets up is inapposite. The game allows players to die to represent failure. I'm not sure, but it seems that Arcanaville is saying that knockback is in the game to represent failure.

If that's what she meant, I agree and am glad we are finally getting a way to correct that mistake.

You haven't played a blaster in a while have you?

A few do, but I don't see how the source of the effect is relevant. More directly, many things in the game have as their *primary* intended effect an attempt to kill the player.

Some people don't like scatter but I'll bet even more don't like dying. And yet the game explicitly tries to kill you, while it does not explicitly force you to scatter enemies nearly as often. I should not have to state the obvious, that just because players don't like a thing that does not mean the game would be better without that thing, and therefore any attempt to argue the justification of a game element by appealing to the percentage of players that explicitly enjoy that game element is, or at least should be, worth exactly nothing in and of itself to a game designer.

All good game designs - all of them - offer choices to the players that do not have obvious optimal solutions**. Choice with obvious optimal solutions are not real choices, at least none a legitimate game designer should take credit for. The most obvious way to provide non-trivial choices to players is to atomically bundle different things that cannot be identically optimized. Basically, that's the heart of advantage/disadvantage game design that no one alive has found a way to improve on, and I think is very likely to be mathematically impossible for any game that values player choices explicitly within its design.

Knockback is one of those rare effects in City of Heroes that is tactically neutral: it can have advantages or disadvantages depending on how it is deployed and depending on the skill of the player, and depending on the particular situation it is used in. Eliminating or greatly curtailing that aspect of knockback would be a case where the devs elected to take one of the few mechanically correct things in the original design of the game and nullifying it for no game design benefit. If the only game design benefit is "players would rather not see scatter" I reiterate that more players do not want to die, and accepting one preference without accepting the stronger one and altering the design of the game around it is not something I would be proud to put on my resume.


** Anything that doesn't offer such choices might be good, but its not a game

Beautiful.

Both this IO, and the inevitable reaction from the haters and forum goers pretending to do whatever suboptimal strategy for the sake of looking different and "cool".

Just beautiful.

Ice Blast and Fire Blast have secondary effects that cannot be identically optimized. Ice Blast's slows and -recharge is valuable in places where Fire's DoT damage isn't. At times both are useful. Never, in my experience, have either been a detriment. I can't say the same for Knockback. In my opinion, Knockback is not an example of a good tradeoff of advantages/disadvantages. It's mostly disadvantage. Which means it's an obviously poor choice.

The advantages of Knockback are not worth the disadvantages. That's not an opinion. Knockdown offers almost all of the same advantages with none of the skill required. In general, I agree with your premise. I think whenever a power or effect requires greater skill to leverage than average it should offer greater advantages. But that's not what Knockback is. It's almost the opposite. It offers inferior advantages to similar effects while at the same time requiring specific scenarios and skills to shine. That's broken.

Well, I disagree that it's mechanically correct. I think that's absurd. Over the years folks have offered what I thought would make KB mechanically correct and that is additional damage when KB applies. KB then provides a benefit for its higher skill requirement. Now it offers nothing. The game design benefit I see is that players who care can now eliminate the detrimental aspects of knock effects while retaining their benefits.

Further, I think it's incorrect to say it's being 'nullified'. A toggle that turned KB off at no cost would be nullifying it. What is being done is providing a reward that allows those who wish to nullify the detrimental aspect of knock. That's no different than putting an endurance siphon IO in Dark Regen. That eliminates the downside of that power's endurance cost. That's what IOs do, they allow you to be more than you are at base. But you have to earn or purchase them. How is this different?

Players right now have tools to eliminate scatter from their game. I can choose never to make an Energy Blaster, kick any I see from my teams or quit teams where I'm not the leader. I can fully escape knockback in this game. All this IO does is allow me to play certain sets and still escape this pernicious effect.

Welp.

Personally I plan to take full advantage of this proc, hopefully to such effect that the devs notice how broken it is to be able to keep things permanently controlled while also doing farmy-damage to them.

Yeah, I think I'll go with this stance, too on that IO. Go ahead, abuse it. See what happens. Maybe nothing does, maybe it turns out that the IO is too powerful in some powers, maybe even to the point of breaking something. I kind of hope it does, really. Not quite sure what power it'd be that would get that awesome from this, although I have a kindling of an idea.

There is an issue with knockback, but this thread isn't the one to deal with that. There's way too much joy of getting break the game in this thread to have any kind of constructive debate on knockback here.

Its a statement of fact, and its false.

there is only one IO made that was too powerful for the powers it was slotted in. Instead of fixing the IO, the devs removed the entire IO type from being slotted into the powers that use it a specific way.

Key game show music....

That IO was Triumphant Insult : Chance to Disorient. That one IO changed changed taunt auras to no longer accept IO sets. It is by far the most powerful IO ever made.

The inevitable change of knockback to knockin and how it's a horrible choice that will split the community and shatter this game.

LOL

Oh you are serious?

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

So you have said before....in this thread.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Yeah, I kind of see this set getting disallowed in quite a few powers, too. Like most placeable powers. Honestly, this thing needed a proper full beta pass before going Live.

Prove it. Prove how your infallible knowledge counters the collective wisdom of the playerbase.

EDIT: Let me take a stab at the counter-point. KB's advantage is that it removes an NPC from combat for a certain amount of time and it allows a player to position NPCs into hazards (like lava...oh wait, or over ledges, etc.) The disadvantages of KB is that it interferes with a large number of powers that rely on NPCs staying in a tight cluster. An abridged list of those powers include:

BLASTERS:

Fireball; Fire Storm; Inferno; Ice Storm; Blizzard; Rain of Arrows

CONTROLLERS:

Shadow Field, Quicksand, Volcanic Gasses, Conductive Aura, Static Field, Ice Slick, Spectral Terror, Carrion Creepers, Poison Trap, Venomous Gas

DEFENDERS:

Sleet (Freezing Rain), Tar Patch, Repulsion Bomb, Choking Cloud, EM Pulse, Disruption Field, Liquefy

TANKERS:

Taunt Auras (all); PBAoEs (all)

SCRAPPERS:

See Tankers above. Also see powers that are not taunts but PBAoE buff/debuffs


I would go on, but I need to get to KB's other disadvantages. Unless a player has a ranged attack, KB requires that the player close the gap to melee in order to defeat the knocked entity. That takes away time that could be used in killing. KB also can encourage some NPCs to switch to ranged attacks. Where you're dealing with AoE knockback this can make combat even more dangerous because now the NPCs are spread out and can't be easily dispatched, but can still attack the player. This hurts both melee and ranged characters to some degree.