GU50, Tunso Testing, and Player Testing

TUrning adds in BP is such a simple thing that we told all our tanks to do. We have had Nature players use Dog form as a result.

So is every other DPS that has a good melee loadout. This statement means jack and spit

It was merely an example of how the newer content can be successfully meleed, in response to a prior post to the contrary. You are agreeing. Not sure why the snark.

Hopefully the breathing room in the new content can continue to allow for melee dps to succeed. However Rage, dog form, melee HL should all inherently do more damage than fire and ice imo.

If they Are going to make melee easy then no. This would result in all the garbage dps going meleev abd dying everywhere

When I think about it, the fact that Nature, Electric, Earth, etc need time to warm up for good damage, isn't enough to keep up with the 12345 Mental, Gadgets and the Mobility Ice and Fire AM's.

Buffing these powers simply won't help, in the fact that when killing mobs your still warming up, whilst Ice and mental are smashing within seconds.

Idk, but why mental got a small buff in gu51, but I think Ice, Fire, Mental and Gadgets, should receive a small nerf for the benefit, because they realistically hit to hard to fast.

I have recently took a break from Celestial in the last few weeks, and gone Mental, Ice and Fire for a change and test to see, and saw that I'm doing allot more damage, even when I'm still prec modded and speced.

The way I see it, these 4 powers need a small beneficial nerf. Also the last few groups I've been in, nearly everyone are them, which is saying something.

You have just described the dot vs burst dps dilemma that has plagued MMOs for quite some time. Frankly, it's a false comparison. On trash mobs or when content is severely over-leveled, burst dps will appear a lot stronger because DOTs don't have time to work before the targets are dead. On bosses or other targets with large health pools, DOTs and their sustained DPS have no problem keeping up with and surpassing burst DPS in both total damage done and overall damage per second during the encounter.

Unfortunately, the scoreboard has no way of showing this as it only captures total damage done over the course of an entire instance. Numbers get inflated by worthless trash damage, making burst seem WAY better than sustained DOT specs. It's a perception problem compounded by the scoreboard's inability to only show the damage that matters: boss damage.

It doesn't help that a lot of encounters in this game are designed such that there are burst windows followed by periods of movement or other mechanics (shields or reflects, for example) or are far too short for sustained specs to shine, even at level. Encounters such as these are where burst will pull ahead. But, give us a boss you need to keep distance from with a TON of health, especially if there are also adds that we can spread DOTs to as well, where the encounter lasts 5 minutes or more and DOT specs will poop all over most burst specs.

Even if the powers are totally balanced within 1% of each other, the perception of imbalance will still exist in the community because of the DOT vs burst issue. If content is not designed in a way that utilizes both DPS types and lets each shine as much as the other, this work will not matter. Raids will stack the more effective dps for the instances and we'll still see people being sat due to their chosen power. This work will lay the groundwork for what will come next. It doesn't end with balancing the damage potential, it's about designing content so both DOT and burst are viable over an entire instance. Yes, one will overshadow the other on certain encounters and that's fine. But, overall, they should both be just as powerful as the other.

However, this topic is not really related to Sore's thread so I will go back to read only mode until I get off my lazy butt and start testing stuff.

The problem is that in DCUO it's not the case, all types deal "equal damage" meaning electricity/nature wont surpass and in most cases wont keep up with ice, gadgets, fire, mental.

I covered that in my original post. Once the damage potential is balanced, it will come down to, in part, content design. An encounter that favors burst will make DOTs seem weak but one designed differently will cause the opposite perception. Once the baselines are in balance, I'm sure the team will look at all of these other things.

That's a big IF. Look at melee powers, no content has been altered to favor the use of them and the base damage is "equal" to midrange. I highly doubt that older content will be overlooked in order to balance things out to make DoT powers somewhat more useful. Future content - maybe but highly unlikely judging how poorly current content is not melee friendly.

You can melee the entirety of Bombshell Paradox.

I'm sure players can, but most who are doing it hardly pug. We can't revolve gameplay around league runs.

Post a video of someone doing only melee in it and I'll believe you. I've tried to melee it and so far only on adds I felt "confident" enough to pull it off. Which is better than HH or NGN where even the adds are a huge threat but still far from being melee friendly.

When the AMs were just getting started, the development team shared a chart showing top players just in boss battles, broken down by power. They're probably still collecting that data. Trying to optimize that whole thing at once is too hard of a problem though. This effort toward making things roughly equal in the simplest case will remove a lot of the complexity out of that.

To put that another way, you can't balance ice melee with high burst vs. nature melee with high DOTs in boss battles when the top melee potential for ice is much higher. That difference is so large it's hiding more subtle details. You need the basics to be at least on a similar scale before you can get down to meaningful burst vs. DOT comparisons.

The devs communicated a plan to do a baseline balance pass as step 1, scaling balance pass as step 2, and then range balance pass as step 3. They haven't communicated any steps beyond that. I think burst vs. sustained is something worth looking at. I also think interruptability is another. I think single target is another. They're not in the cards for steps 1-3 but they are fair considerations.

Just keep in mind the difference between Ice and Nature isn't all burst versus sustained DPS. Ice has better scaling than Nature does. So some of that will be teased out in step 2.

Exactly how much better is Ice's scaling, anyways?

We're not exactly keeping up on Live Tests in the last two weeks because it adds a lot of retesting effort and the live tests aren't being guided by the devs so we don't want to put that effort in and have them not use that spec. That's not to say it isn't insightful. It's certainly extra credit.

Sustenance and Interrupts is definitely where Celestial Sorcery and Earth fall short.
Im curious to see what happens with those 3. Scaling is also another thing.

I would love to see something done with Penetrating Strikes. When it was released, I assumed that it was related to weapon damage based on the name. Maybe that is what is needed to help powers that rely on weapon attacks?

You don't need to convince me, I already know that. Try talking to Pults and DarkenedByLight.