Work in Progress: Combat Balance

I agree with you in theory but I really dislike that you used "professional" in regards to certain groups of players in this game. There are no professional dcuo players. At least not to my knowledge.

I'm average at best but I've gotten EO. I don't consider myself remotely professional.

To each his own. it's easy to write off other players because we are so full of ourselves that we can't look past our own logical abstractions. Somewhere, you can't seem to hear anything other than your own argument. You term others perceptions as intellectual dishonesty while your holier than thou assessment is infallible.

Same as you can't step into others shoes, the others won't oblige you either.

With openness can one have a discussion and there are no two ways about it.

While I including others are willing to constructively engage in a discussion, a firm stand on one or the other end won't bring out a resolve.

We welcome the idea of Weapon Mastery and game balance but are you and the developers willing to engage meaningfully?

I guess not.

Anyway, it's not the end of the world, those that must survive shall and those who fail to grow will stagnate and wither.

It's really a numbers game. It's easier (read takes less effort) to "nerf" one aspect, rather than "buff" multiple other aspects. Of course, the issues here is not really about that, though it's understandable to look at them that way, as they will change the way the game is played. Fact is that the Devs have stated that JC is not working as intended, so they are adjusting it. Likewise, they are adjusting ability animation times to make them more uniform for purposes of balancing.

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I am talking about EO before nerf and when 88 dropped constantly off role. Id like to hear your comment after this consideration.

You (general you, I guess I should specify) might actually get more developer engagement if you were to engage meaningfully with the topic yourself. Talking about WM in the combat balance thread is not meaningful, and saying 'don't remove jump cancel, it'll ruin X powerset' isn't either.

They've made it clear that a change to jump canceling WILL happen. What is up for discussion is what exactly that change will be/how large a change it will be. In that context 'don't change it at all' is a useless response.

nah, too long. for something that has been quick and by nature is intended to be quick 1sec is too slow. look at Detonation and GaussGrenade and the like anim times. JumpC is skilled technique and should be left as such.

by that i mean, tack on a min anim time to channels before jump. that way when you do jump the weapon and power rotation/timing is still all up to you. 0.5 sounds fair to me. rather than, changing jump into an ability with anim times and 'dovetail' properties, that is.

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Still seems wrong to me.

Ah, I see what you're saying. I don't think that's what they are looking to do, though. The idea, as I understand it, is to have a non-zero dovetail animation that would prevent another attack for it's duration. Having a separate, non-visible "cooldown" time associated with JC is something else entirely...and not something I'm in favor of, BTW.

As we know, a construct combo chains from a might attack. The might attack needs to animate before the construct combo can kick off. Yes, the combo itself is clippable by another might attack but then that might attack needs to animate before it can be chained into a construct combo. Plus if you chain a second (or hypothetically more) construct combo off the first, even though they're precision, they're not clipping each other...they're animating. It just happens that HL rotations start with short-animation might attacks (ram) and don't chain a second construct combo unless the first construct combo (snap) is a short animation itself. It then focuses on clipping longer animations like whip or hold claw. In the future version, the animations you are sitting through will all be be 1.0s-1.2s. That's going to make WAY more difference than JC.

Feedback on JC is just pointing in the area of least effect, and isn't going to get much traction if you ask them not to do it at all. Feedback asking them not adjusting animation times is also likely not getting traction. That's just reading the wind.

If you want to give feedback that might make a difference then it'll probably need to be more like this, "SOE, will you be adding base damage, adding AoE, or giving more favorable splits to the damage attacks that get their animations increased from <1s up to 1.0s-1.2s?"

@Solar Spectrom

Again, I believe you are missing the point of why this needs to happen. It is not about catering to any single type of player. These changes are being done because there is a great imbalance between those of us who use mouse and keyboards and those of you who use gamepads. We are in an entirely different league in terms of what we can do compared to what those with gamepads are capable of.

They are trying to balance mouse and keyboard vs gamepad, all power sets, and all play styles at once. So it really is about skill and not who can macro faster. Yeah that's one of the benefits of using a mouse and keyboard. I personally have never used them, but I know MANY who do.

Think about the future as well, say they merged the servers tomorrow, do you REALLY think it would be fair if we used our mouse and keyboards against you guys using gamepads? No it would not. There is a reason they are keeping us separated, and the reason is all of these imbalances between player preferences. If they make everything equal and uniform, a server merge would be more likely down the road.

These changes aren't going to make the game slower than any other MMO on the market. Even after these changes, this will still be the fastest MMO on the market. Do not sweat it.

This is the sort of discussion this thread needs. And yes, I include myself in the failure to bring this sort of stuff up yet.

I wanted to post a Gif, but no Gif or internet meme of a facepalm would do this one justice.

HL doesn't jump cancel??????????

A little education is needed here.

Any combo using Fan will involve a jump cancel. You could opt to do the infinite combo but it's just not good damage, it's an efficient option.. really overly efficient in most situations.

For example, the infinite is Claw-ram-st-fan. That's th rotation. If I were to do the rotation it'll take me X time. Now if I stop in the middle and substitue a power I can negate the animation time of Ram by doing Claw-Ram/St-Fan, where the ST is a power. That will make it X-Ram animation time for the total time. Increasing it's DPS as it's time variable has been reduced.

Also, the combo is MELEE range required as claw will make you lunge your target each time you use it. So if I'm doing Ram-ST-Fan, it would be silly of me to continue to a melee option if I wanted to stay range right? So my option would be to jump cancel the fan, or sit there and let it play out the animation. Letting it play out the animation initiates a sustained pull effect... no extra damage, and as a DPS I would lack the dominance to even utilize that pull, so agian, why would I do that?

HLhas the heaviest reliance on the jump cancel. It's a requirement for range play.

But why are they choosing to move the fast animations up to match the slower animations, why not the other way?

That, my friend, is a legitimate question.

I think at least some of the arguments being had here are partially because not all the information has been given, or at least it seems like it to me. There's a bunch of arguments that because the powers are being normalized to 1.0 to 1.2 seconds it's going to have the huge effect on certain powers dos. That argument is assuming they aren't adjusting the damage done by the powers as well, which they haven't said whether they are or aren't adjusting the damage associated with the powers along with the speed. I don't see how you can really have a discussion on how dps is going to be affected without having the whole picture.

I didn't say anything about ranged-only Light play. I said you didn't have to jump cancel with Light. And you don't. Because it has a built-in gimmick to make it the most power-efficient set in the game, and jump cancelling negates that advantage.

Balance?

Besides, I haven't actually gone through and timed animations, but I'd be surprised if there weren't more longer-than-1.2-second animations than shorter ones. Probably by a decent margin.

yeah yeah, backpeddling, sure, cool.

And the infinite combo really isn't better than just spamming weapon attacks.

The follow-up argument is that even if they do adjust the damage, it's not as fun because it's much slower. I think the HL crew is making statements that either would not yield a change at all or would moreso suggest an end result where they're allowed to have their sub-second animations but they'll not see any of the damage bumps other powers will see, might even see some damage reductions, they'll probably have to eat the JC dovetail animation, but they'll get to keep their speed.

As long as they're not asking for their power to be mechanically better than other powersets (because boy wouldn't that undermine any arguments they'd be making if they were), they are asking to be able to get the same result as everyone else but want to get to that equal level by being busier.

What do you mean Balance? What makes slowing things down to 1-1.2s more balanced than having it at like .75-1s?

The timing I have has most mental powers at ~1s, with some being 1.5 (those will be sped up) but then basically all of gadgets grenades or quantums fast stuff are under a second, and being slowed. Most of HLs stuff is under a second, and a couple celestial ones.