GU73: The Stats Revamp - July 21, 2017

Hello! As we work towards the Stats Revamp's launch, we are focusing most of our attention on addressing feedback, fixing bugs, playtesting, and finishing up some last internal initiatives.

Most of the feedback we have received lately fits within the following categories:

• Players wanting to feel more powerful
  • Stronger in out-leveled content
  • Stronger in on-level content
  • Healers: bigger heals
  • Tanks: more tanky
  • Everyone: more power
• Players wanting more parity between the focuses and powersets

On top of these two major feedback buckets we also want to do the following things:

• Fix content-specific issues
• Polish usability features
• Fix bugs!

Feedback Feedback

It’s time to address feedback!

Players want to feel more powerful. We totally get it and in this update we have responded with a number of buffs to bring players up in overall effectiveness. We are opening up the gates to allow you to do some bigger things.

/begin aside

Before I get to the buffs we are unleashing on you, I want to talk about a shift in the meta game of DCUO. We understand that every player wants to feel like a superhero or supervillain, but what is a hero or villain without an excellent foil? In order to create excellent enemies in DCUO we need to make their abilities and mechanics important to gameplay. In previous iterations of combat (with AMs, WMs, etc), players have been able to out-heal, out-tank, out-power-heal, and/or out-DPS bosses, to the extent that their boss mechanics never triggered or could be completely ignored.

This was and is not the intent - mechanics require skill and coordination to overcome, not just button mashing. We have heard your prior feedback that some fights were too ‘tank and spank’. We intentionally balanced the game so that boss mechanics are a big deal and create stressful situations. However, we also provide you with the tools to take these bosses out and be the bad *** you want to be. Don’t forget to use the tools at your disposal (powers, mods, gear, trinkets) and you will stand victorious in the end.

/end aside

Support Roles

There was a lot of feedback this cycle from support roles – mostly from tanks and healers. You guys want your heals to be bigger and your tankiness to be… tankier. In order to meet these bits of feedback, we have done the following things:

• Increased passive restoration for healer roles.
• Added bonus support stats to the Hybrid Focus.
• Improved tank passives for Atomic, Fire, and Rage (to bring in-line with Ice and Earth).
• Increased power from socket bonuses (I will explain more soon).

General Balance

We addressed a ton of balance concerns with this update. Mostly we adjusted playstyle focuses and combos, but there are some updates to powersets. We plan on updating on Sunday with some powerset tweaks. The general idea of these balance updates is to bring other playstyles in-line with Weapons Expert, and bring everyone up a little bit. Here are the changes we made to make this happen:

• The Hybrid Focus and Superpowered Focus now have bonus passive stats.
• We shifted bonus damage from standard weapon attacks to Weapon Mastery attacks in order to require more depth from Weapons Experts – the DPS output for Weapons Experts should remain similar.
• We tweaked some combos abilities that were out of line (some up, some down).
• We shifted superpower combo damage to later in the combo chains to encourage going deeper in the chain.
• We shifted some effectiveness from mods to socket bonuses. This makes socket bonuses much larger than they previously were (by about 2x) and will grant the average player who mods much more power or health (based on your role).

Content Updates

We have been testing all forms of content LIKE CRAZY lately and making adjustments where we need to. We determined that we want to address the difficulty of playing older content and helping out non-standard groups. The changes are pretty straightforward:

• Roleless buffs got increased to allow players in non-standard groups to more easily complete alert content.
• We now grant an increase to your mitigation when you play content you have out leveled. This increases, to a maximum, the more you have out leveled the content.

Mod Transition Plan

Something I am excited to talk about (but can’t quite yet) is our mod transition plan. This plan allows for players to easily transition mods on characters from pre Stats Revamp to post Stats Revamp. This change over was going to be in this build, but there was an unexpected issue, so it will be appearing in a hotfix to Test server within a few days. We are taking care of you on this one. The plan is very generous.


Finally, and as always, we will be looking for and reviewing your feedback on these changes over the weekend. Please let us know how it plays!

FULL UPDATE NOTES HERE: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/test-server-hotfix-july-21-2017.288685/

More update notes here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/test-server-hotfix-july-23-2017.288738/

SUPER GREAT!!!!

*cough*5 days left*cough*

BLOODY HELL!!!! ( Gentleman Ghost Voice)

Awesome can't wait this update is gonna be awesome

Love the Rage changes. Cant wait to take a look at it. Nicely done with the playstyles and Tank love.

Looks good. Ty for listening.

Feedback Feedback

It’s time to address feedback! READY TO TAKE OFF ^^

Players want to feel more powerful. We totally get it and in this update we have responded with a number of buffs to bring players up in overall effectiveness. We are opening up the gates to allow you to do some bigger things.

/begin aside

Before I get to the buffs we are unleashing on you, I want to talk about a shift in the meta game of DCUO. We understand that every player wants to feel like a superhero or supervillain, but what is a hero or villain without an excellent foil? In order to create excellent enemies in DCUO we need to make their abilities and mechanics important to gameplay. In previous iterations of combat (with AMs, WMs, etc), players have been able to out-heal, out-tank, out-power-heal, and/or out-DPS bosses, to the extent that their boss mechanics never triggered or could be completely ignored. GLAD THAT THIS WILL BE OVER (HOPEFULLY) SOON

This was and is not the intent - mechanics require skill and coordination to overcome, not just button mashing. We have heard your prior feedback that some fights were too ‘tank and spank’. We intentionally balanced the game so that boss mechanics are a big deal and create stressful situations. However, we also provide you with the tools to take these bosses out and be the bad *** you want to be. Don’t forget to use the tools at your disposal (powers, mods, gear, trinkets) and you will stand victorious in the end. YES: PLAYERS WILL NEED TO RELEARN TO LOOK OUT FOR THEYR SURVIVABILITY: USING SHIELDS, HEALS ETC. PLEASE: JUST NO ONE HITS, OK? I FOUND THE DIFFUCULITY LEVEL OF SELF SUSTAINING IN ALERTS PRETTY GOOD ACTUALLY

/end aside

Support Roles

There was a lot of feedback this cycle from support roles – mostly from tanks and healers. You guys want your heals to be bigger and your tankiness to be… tankier. In order to meet these bits of feedback, we have done the following things:

• Increased passive restoration for healer roles. WHY NOT GIVE EVERYONE A VERY LOW HEALTH AUTO RECOVERY?
• Added bonus support stats to the Hybrid Focus. why is hybryd not buffed 5%might+precission?
• Improved tank passives for Atomic, Fire, and Rage (to bring in-line with Ice and Earth).
• Increased power from socket bonuses (I will explain more soon).

General Balance

We addressed a ton of balance concerns with this update. Mostly we adjusted playstyle focuses and combos, but there are some updates to powersets. We plan on updating on Sunday with some powerset tweaks. The general idea of these balance updates is to bring other playstyles in-line with Weapons Expert, and bring everyone up a little bit. Here are the changes we made to make this happen:

• The Hybrid Focus and Superpowered Focus now have bonus passive stats. very well!!!
• We shifted bonus damage from standard weapon attacks to Weapon Mastery attacks in order to require more depth from Weapons Experts – the DPS output for Weapons Experts should remain similar. VERY GOOD CHOICE AND DECISSION
• We tweaked some combos abilities that were out of line (some up, some down).
• We shifted superpower combo damage to later in the combo chains to encourage going deeper in the chain.
• We shifted some effectiveness from mods to socket bonuses. This makes socket bonuses much larger than they previously were (by about 2x) and will grant the average player who mods much more power or health (based on your role). TC MODS?

Content Updates

We have been testing all forms of content LIKE CRAZY lately and making adjustments where we need to. We determined that we want to address the difficulty of playing older content and helping out non-standard groups. The changes are pretty straightforward:

• Roleless buffs got increased to allow players in non-standard groups to more easily complete alert content. why just in alerts? is something in alerts, what makes them special to other contend??? why not the same in solo missions, duos and also in raids? please help me understand why this is only necessary in alert instances...
• We now grant an increase to your mitigation when you play content you have out leveled. This increases, to a maximum, the more you have out leveled the content. HOW ABOUT ADJUSTING CC EFFECTS ON TARGETS WAY BELOW? i can not stun enemies in kandaq at cr201!!! i mean, what was that willpower stat again, why not just using different dominance values for CC effects?

Mod Transition Plan

Something I am excited to talk about (but can’t quite yet) is our mod transition plan. This plan allows for players to easily transition mods on characters from pre Stats Revamp to post Stats Revamp. This change over was going to be in this build, but there was an unexpected issue, so it will be appearing in a hotfix to Test server within a few days. We are taking care of you on this one. The plan is very generous. I CAN ONLY THINK OF THIS AS SOMETHING LIKE OLYMPIAN-/ SPECIAL-FORCE REMOVAL KITS...


Finally, and as always, we will be looking for and reviewing your feedback on these changes over the weekend. Please let us know how it plays! LETS GO TEST SERVER RIGHT NOW ^^

QUESTION: did you found irregularities in older content, mostly for teleporter raids?
did you adjust numbers or anything? i found kandaq as hard as nexus... how is that even possible?
overall, my impression is very good so far!!

Is it possible to get in some PvP tweaks?

The breakdowns are posted in the Patch Notes section. Details the Playstyles and changes with the hotfix. Some good stuff.

These changes look great accross the board. One question regarding the Masteries (I'll test them myself tonight too, but just a quick question).

• Hybrid Focus - Added 10% Might, and 5% Dominance, Restoration, and Vitalization bonuses.
• Superpowered Focus - Added 10% Might and 10% Power bonuses.

These look great now compared to Weapon Expert, and I think that's awesome. Is PftT now exceeding the dps potential of Hybrid, and that's why the 10% might buff was added to Hybrid as well?
The reason I'm asking has to do with the controller buff in raid content (20% I think it is now?). Unless there are a lot of Weapons-Only dps (which is technically a possibility but not probably likely), will hybrid players be more likely to receive it always, or will both PftT and Hybrid powers have an equal chance? 20% is a lot, and I know it's necessary to bring WE damage up to par with the others. Just a question.

Feedback:

Still don't like PFTT after the update. With how powersets are built around alot of 300's, this is gonna be an issue.

So I've noticed improvement within Quantum using this loadout:

Gravity well(300): Time Bomb(300), Lift(200), Gravity Bomb(200), Inspiral waves(100), and then a Supercharge.

Now note: I only have 2 300 abilities in my loadout bar... Now what I've found out from my testing today is that if you use anymore than 2 300 abilities(dots or slow moving ones to be exact) power won't be manageable.

How is this a problem? Let's use Good Old Fire for example shall we? Basically powersets like Fire have tons of 300's and it's severly lacking in 100 to 200 cost department, your only choices are Detonate, Flame cascade, and Spontaneous combustion(With it's 6 second overkill cooldown)

Since Fire has so many 300's and you can't use more than two of them without running out of power, this means you'll have to severly limit your DPS potential to conserve power or be really demanding on the controllers.


Quantum for me is also efficent, but likewise: If I place another 300 amongst Gravity well and Time bomb I won't be able to continously play from the tray without resorting to spamming 100 power costs.

Suggestion: Maybe PFTT should get a little bit more extra regeneration bonus or Powersets like Fire get some Power Costs Reductions across the board.


Thanks again for the changes, but I feel as though PFTT isn't quite there unless powersets like Fire are A: intending to be limiting on damage potential or B: really demanding on power consumption.

QUESTION: why does hybrid not buffs all stats for 5%? why might for 10% and precission gets 0%?

Seems pretty good from what i read. Will be heading to test on sat/sunday to test the changes.

Edit: League mate on test atm was in FoS3 and said the mitigation part seemed fine as far as the damage in. But damage out still seems low. Is this intended so people have to run this old content as a group?

Can i ask why ya use lift? Ive seen 2 other people who keep using it and i cant understand why.

Looks great on paper, will test in more detail in about <30 min

Mepps any plans to remove relevancy with these difficulty changes? Completely not sarcasm or being malicious.

Thanks mepps. I must of skipped over that part when reading. I think u guys should seriously think about removing the relevancy and let players get rewards for the old content if its going to require players to run old content in that way.

I understand the issue of high cr players blazing thru the content and ruining it for lower new players needs to be addressed. Im not gonna say what u guys have done is clamp high players in old content but im sure someone is going to bring it up/say it. Again i think removing relevancy is needed. I personally dont care much about soloing old raids. But i know some do.

ugh, i just hope it's not GU47 all over again, with the players divided in who want to smash things and who want to not able to do so.