We need alternative options to stats clamping...

I may have said it sarcastically but it was the truth. THIS was how I got Odyssey - solo. Using a character who was artificially scaled to the point of being a tactical nuclear weapon.

Now, I was legitimately solo'ing Prime, Sunstone, and Themyscira before that all came about, I could beat Raven and Dr. Light when it was pretty much impossible to do, and I did at least 30 of my 50 Princes solo (so I know what lane I'm actually in) but still - if you're really a "been here forever" cat (and I've been here for just shy of nine years, so I qualify) then there are some things you did the old fashioned way, and some things you just went back and stomped on afterwards to knock it off the to-do list.

And looking at the clamp? I'd still say we're overgeared enough to knock it off the to-do list. Maybe not to the point of an under-three-minute finish in a top-end Raid, but still - overgeared enough.

is this one still going? guys, there's another thread started up! let's all go over there!

I dunno, I'm still trying to decide if I should respond to being called a shill for the devs or not. LOL

Obviously it becomes too much once low sp players are finishing an alert or raid boss fight in less than 10 seconds, like in pre HoL. I don't think anyone should be able to one shot a boss fight, but I also think that, eventually, something like The Sixth Dimension Elite Critical should be doable by average joes without them having to be there for 2 hours once it's in clamp territory.

100% this! I don’t want to oneshot a boss. I just don’t want to be oneshotted myself. If to use your example, I could one day make or join a group on LFG for SDe critical, and have a reasonable chance of success like I would doing the same for normal today, I think that would be great.

Oh my god....I had so much typed up, but just whacked it all. I'll just leave it with this. You obviously aren't following anything I'm saying or you'd know that IF a clamped run were an option, I'd also want to queue it short....so that 'new player' wouldn't be subjected to me one shotting a boss or 30 second botttle duo. I've always advocated for AQS, waaaay before there was ever a clamp on the table.

I still like the fact that you pretend anyone is learning anything in the clamped, random runs....it's cute actually. Never knew you were such an optimist. I'm sure by their 249th bottle duo that 2nd guy is still learning something in there and wouldn't want to get to #250 any quicker (even 1 min quicker). Keep the faith....I lost all mine in the other players of this game around my first 10 runs of SSE watching people not grab the bombs that keep killing them.

I agree with this, I agree things need to get demonstrably easier and certainly accessible and achieveable with age, just not the open slaughter that came with being entirely unclamped

I got called in to help with a DWF run about 3-4 months ago, near the end.

So we're fighting Darkseid, at 10 above CR, with a bunch of randoms - now, I learn fast, but I wasn't playing when DWF came out so I've literally never played it clamped. Pretty sure the other people in the run had never played it at all. So we wipe. Someone else leaves, and is replaced by Someone Who Knows What They Are Doing, and How To Tell People How To Also Do That Thing.

We DID wipe one more time, but that was mostly due to people not coming into the room before the fight started - which was, I'll grant, mildly hilarious. However, it only took a few sentences of explanation, a little assistance figuring it out and we didn't wipe again.

So education works - if it's not working for you, well, maybe work on your presentation method, Iono. I do know I've seen it work because I've done it and I've seen it work because I learn from other people doing it too.

All it takes is communication and a willingness not to die, and you can usually find the latter in ready supply in a situation like that.

Kimone, please help me to understand what you are talking about. You said "HIS was how I got Odyssey - solo. Using a character who was artificially scaled to the point of being a tactical nuclear weapon." - Does this mean your character was a low level CR who got "up scaled" to the content in 2:30 - 3 minutes in the solo?

But you also indicate that stat clamped high CR player would not finish in same time frame. I am truly not understanding any of this, and nobody will try to explain it to me. It goes back to my original thoughts that stat clamp is for the new / lower CR players and a punishment for high CR players.

Thank you

Elite Content - Definitely should not be clamped.
Open World Areas - Should not be clamped.
The content in Typhon Gotham and such where you have to kill upwards of 200 or so adds should be lowed by at least half as well.

As far as other content goes...the rewards such as marks should be much better than shorter instances like FOS3. and many of the raids stated were a problem before the clamp. I do think that allowing us to play non-endgame content over and over and still get source marks and not be loot locked was a smart move. If I'm not mistaken, even on Endgame content if you get disconnected you still get decent rewards but not the specific mark if you have to replay a boss or two.

Sidebar - I would also like the option of having the Stabilizer event return. I would much rather use my replays to play that over and over so I can open lockboxes. I do like the vault returning for seasonal stuff.

I’m on mobile rn and there’s too much to go through and quote so I’m just going to respond:

It’s not being contradicting to not support selling sp in the marketplace but support options for unclamped… because having an unclamped option is no where close to being equivalent to buying sp in the marketplace. One is a transaction for instant results and the other still requires thousands of runs and coordinating with a group for hundreds of feats. You still have to learn mechanics for many that you can’t just burn through. What unclamped really does is just reduce the amount of time it takes to complete the instance in most cases, which after YEARS of having these episodes isn’t a bad thing.

In terms of “education” and “learning” I’m failing to see how the clamp is contributing to that. Many pro-clamp people have even acknowledged themselves in past threads that the problem with the learning aspect of the game has been an ongoing issue and that other systems should be in place to help newer players. So why that’s being brought up now to defend the clamp I have no idea. I’m seeing just as many people ignoring mechanics, running rainbow augs and artifacts that are not good for their roles, and using subpar loadouts now as I was before the clamp. Nothing about the clamp is teaching them how to improve any of that because the reality is that they still getting carried, it just takes longer. And if they aren’t, they are getting kicked. Which in my personal experience most of the time it’s the latter of the two. In fact in many of the pug groups I run, people are actually quicker to kick because of the fact that it takes more to carry someone now and they don’t want to.

Also, I’ve seen multiple times now people mentioning others not being good enough or potentially needing to get better, and yet many of the people on this thread including myself that are pro-options have >500 sp. You can advocate for other people without being bad at the game.

It's essentially a cautionary tale. Lemme see if this helps make sense of it for you:


A few years ago there was a brief moment where the game was functioning on a system called CR Differential : CR Differential was a system that basically performed a similar function to what would happen if you removed all SP from the unclamped system and instead had performance based purely on your Stats, artificially scaled by your CR.

The difference between your CR and your targets CR was expressed as a scalar advantage / disadvantage for the purpose of dealing and receiving damage. Essentially it would apply a percentile modifier - positive or negative - based on how far your CR was from your target's, and whether or not that was in or against your favor.

What this meant in practical terms was that, if you were too many CR below a given target or opponent? You could not functionally damage that opponent - if you were in the same range, you could fight more or less on the same terms we do now in relevant content, and if you were above them, you would deal artificially inflated damage to demonstrate how "overpowered" you were compared to them.

So, Paradox is normally a CR 85 entry instance - at the time I think Galea's CR was between 160-180; functionally twice the content CR, so the amount of damage she was dealing due to CR Differential was absolutely insane. As a result of this, she could go into any walk-in Raid and flatten it solo.

Someone else (who is actually here on the forums) was running a "contest" on their stream at the time - how quickly can you beat Paradox, solo. We weren't exactly friendly at that point in discussion, so I wasn't on the stream; but a challenge is a challenge so I wanted to see how Galea would do and so I ran it.

2 minutes, 38 seconds, start to finish. Just went into the main room and killed everything using the Mental Advanced Mechanic (another terrible idea, parts of which are still around to this day albeit in a more sensible format) which essentially turned Mass Terror into a blanket insta-kill.

This is a screenshot of a DPS parse from the same era -



I did that in the Spectre Solo.

CR Differential and the sheer amount of trivialization of lower content are probably the best standing arguments against the reversal of the clamp at this point in conversation, because taken to an extreme?

You get things like 28 million damage/s or 2 and a half minute long Paradox runs.

"And now you know the rest of the story".

1) yes, if i got nothing for the effort there’d be no point in chasing the feats.
Remember i agree or acknowledge that there are some would chase for the achievement and/or whatever cosmetic (per the suggestion) but i doubt most of us would. Currently almost all players choose to go for feats and thats better then them changing it to system where a large amount of us wont.
I dont see that as good or productive. Part of the claim here is that feats are too hard to get or too time consuming (even tho we ALL go through it). This suggestion will make them even harder or more time consuming so the idea runs counter to one of the premiss’s of the discussion.

2) maybe we have dif definitions of gatekeeping? The term was used in this discussion to say that players like us who have lots of SP are wanti g to prevent others from getti g the SP because we are pseudo-elitist.
That couldnt be further from the truth and directly what i was referencing. Im not gatekeeping anything which was insinuated. I simply acknowledge the system as is and have t heard a suggestion in this thread yet thats better (IMO) or solves more issues than it creates than what we have is all.
I also did say im a fan of a revamp. I do not think the system is perfect by any stretch.
I just dont accept thats its too hard an should be changed to make it easier for these players on the basis that it wasnt too hard at relevancy and clamped your OP compared to relevancy so yea, i do t accept that excuse (and its an excuse NOT an argument).
Now for the feats like PvP or maybe an old counter feat or maybe the artifact feat in nexus another one mentioned, yes, some of those may be much harder or impossible in some cases or we may be unwilling (i will never re-do the PvP feats on this acct).
The difference is i understand others out the time, $, effort, etc into having those feats and i didnt/wont. So its simple, i won lt get those feats.
So i dont accept the excuse that its too hard or impossible. Deal with it like we all do and go get the feats you can get.

3) its an MMO, teams stuff is part of the deal. It is how these games work. I dont accept the premiss that all ways to obtain stats should be based only on solo “acts” because that wouod basically eliminate the MMO part of it being an MMO.
Now, if by “solo” you mean like no death as an individual for example then yes, im a fan of these types of changes but i see the value in coordination and communication. For example, my original league i founded years ago on my old acct, havin mic and using it was a requirement to join the league because communication was (and still shouod be) important. No content was so easy you could Q up day 1 an run silent in a pug group w/no idea what to do an pass it. Thats a “now days” thing i can only assume to accommodate how “bad” the players today are at the game.
To that point, overall im not a fan of any system that makes these things easier than they are. The quality of player now days is Objectivly far lower than in the past and the content reflects this and maki g any of this easier or more accessible will make that worse not better.

4) its an example, i dont think that ONLY noobs are asking for this and never said only noobs are asking for this.
Thats quite the conflation but a mis-characterization of my position.
Now, you didnt just whine an cry its too hard like the obvious handheld roomies are which is why my responses to you are differently worded.
(You get what you give). Come here throwin a fit like a child, whining an crying and demanding with this false sense of entitlement and you get reality explained. Come here like you did bringing up points and having an adult conversation and we can do that

Side note* to ur first point also of being squishy as a dps, heres the thing. Dps is squishy by design and this game defines hard in most cases is scripted 1-shots and smulls and that extra little bit of health u can get from all the extra SP aint savin u from that so undont become un-squishy as your comment suggests. You be ome slightly less is all and thats really negligable

I get it, and yes....obviously a few of the nimrods can learn. A broken clock is right 2 times a day too.

Oh, and my presentation? It's 'do this mechanic, this way'....1 time...if I think it will maybe stick. Otherwise I'm out the door. I teach leaguemates or friends or those who might ask for the help. I don't teach randoms that I don't even have an idea if they are reading what I write or even speak the language I write it in.

Fell into an FI (with another forumite by the way) at 2nd boss. Not sure how long they were in there, but I think I was the 6th body in at that point, and the scorecard was already off the screen. Before we went in I said "we need to get the anvils as soon as they come up". We went in, they all went to center...I got my anvils....the floor flooded and we died because the other 2 remained untouched. I said again "we need 2 people on each anvil so we can grab them right away....the lava will kill us". We went back in....a few people started near the anvils, but quickly went to the center...I got mine, the floor flooded and we died.. All the while this is happening, we've had a few more bodies come in and out and 1 DPS continues to keep going in and starting the fight solo....dying and then doing it again....so a few people who came in...saw they were locked from the fight and left.

Anyway, we finally had 8 guys....the wild DPS stopped after we said a few times 'QUIT STARTING IT'....I repeated the anvils bit. We went in, the anvils came up, I grabbed mine, the floor flooded and we wiped. I waved goodbye and wished them luck, then left expressing apologies to the other Forumite that sorry I had better things to do....he agreed BTW...that it was a 'bad' group.

Is this a 'bad' example? Well, no more than I could say your DWF was a good one. I'd say it's average for anything with mechanics. Could I stay in and repeat it 5 times, or try to invite some poor friend of mine? Sure. Would the next staffing switch have brought good blood? Could be....but could be worse too. Now this is more of a comment on the Omni, than the clamp, but those 2 go hand in hand unless you are willing to build a group. And if building the group was the solution all along, why all the conversation about one OP DPS 'ruining' things for the randoms? Cause yeah....that also has been tied to the whole clamp/omni system.

SIDE NOTE:
The other guy sent me a message maybe 40-45 min later. They finally finished the run. Of course I had run a DD omni raid, my 3 solos, dailies in LOD and was in the Omnil alert near finished by then....so I had no regrets for missing out.

Just because someone agrees with someone else doesn’t mean they are a white knight. People who don’t agree with you get called a white knight because you don’t like their opinion. That I’m itself used idiotic.

As a relatively casual and new player to DCUO on an extremely low population server I just look at old feats and think yeah I totally cannot be arsed griding 500 paradox reapers for 1 star or whatever and wonder if I should just open my wallet and buy emblems off the Quarks vendor instead. Then decide to do neither and just stop caring about it.

Admittedly I didnt read the thread. A lot of new changes are nice like the choice to do Omni and things like free episodes. But a lot of old stuff for me now is just totally cannot be arsed with that instead of grind while I watch TV material if I am honest. And I wouldnt expect people who already have most old stuff to invest time in a lot of it either when there seems to be lots of tiers of difficult end game stuff to be working on instead.

I dont need it so I just dont do it now because it takes a hell of a lot longer to do. Nothing looks like its going to change that much.

This. I love all of this.

Oh it took way longer then it had to and I was actually really shocked that they were doing pickups consistently. No one was knocked fully out of the fight due to lack of pickup and I think there was only 1 or 2 people that never managed to start blocking. If the Tank and Heal (which is the two of us who knew the mechanics in this case) are the only ones living most battles can still be won and the group carried. I've seen it even on end game content when running with random groups. With a different role for the high SP characters this would likely not have worked and we would not have been able to carry the group through to the end.

I honestly expected to have to wipe and then explain that they needed to keep a target lock on Carol so they can see when it's her Skull to block. It is really rare to see consistent pickups like that so that's a nice change from normal. And most of the players did pickup to block half way through so they will hopefully recognize the mechanic in the future for other raids.

Ultimately what I think this comes down to is are the new players who don't know the Mechanics willing to learn or ask what the mechanics are after they see the failures become consistent. Along with this are the experienced players willing to explain the mechanics when the group stumbles. I've also seen plenty of experienced players get frustrated and leave when the group isn't capable of old content on the first attempt. Patience is something everyone is going to need to relearn.

Instance chat has also been dead for awhile outside of Elite. It'll be interesting to see if more people shift to using it again to help the group coordination real time.

Kimone is talking about a long-deprecated system, not stats clamp in its modern/current form.

What would actually be nice would be a way to archive or hide feats that I just dont want to look at anymore