Dev Discussion GU 47: CR Differential Adjustment Update

^^ They are planning to overlap tiers, so you won't have that problem.

We had been told that if you were 2 tiers over a piece of content, it should be possible to solo it. That doesn't seem to quite be the case. I took a CR111 quantum troll into FOS2, and the first mob wiped me out. Leaguemates are mentioning similar issues.

Additionally, I'm hearing that it's not just T4 that needs the difficulty checked. Paradox Wave was also mentioned as being a problem, with mobs one-shotting people.

These problems are in T3, T4, AND T5. Mist recovery is completely undoable at the same level, barely doable as a CR 114. I suspect there were a lot of custom stats tables being used and not all of them were adjusted. They really should have moved them all to a universal stats table for each level mobs. Meaning, all T5 mobs should have the same base stats for damage, defense, health, etc.

Also, the mobs should not be equal to or 1 level below the level of the boss you are fighting. This is common in a lot of raids right now which adds to the problem. The tank has no problem surviving the mobs, but the rest of the group gets demolished.

In Trigon Prison, the demons that carry the 2-handed weapon, can't be countered. Blocking does nothing to their weapon attacks.

The demons spawning during the last fight are way too strong and too many. I understand a tough fight, but that's punitive, not challenging.

Raven Dark Projection, in the Gotham Wastelands, has a lingering AoE that kills CR 114 characters in 3 seconds. The area is so wide that to evade it you have to run beyond weapon range... are you serious guys? Why don't you make it larger so that it can kill everyone on the map? My CR 86 character can only take 2 ticks before being annihilated. If she casts it while I am in medium range, I will never evade it in time. By the moment it becomes visible I already got almost 4000 damage, meaning that if the healer doesn't keep my health at least at 80% all the time, I am going to be one-shotted. The 3 CR 114 guys that were helping me wiped 5 times.

P.S.: For some reasons, the Teleportation in Gotham Wastelands toward the Hero Outpost wasn't working for me, but i saw other people using them just fine.

You still get the drops from the lower tiers. If you feel your character is not geared enough to play the actual tier you are supposed to play, you can build your equipment in the easier tiers. Nothing prevents you from doing that.

yeah except you get no marks me I just logged on my character ice tank post GU cr 52 sp 122 now cr 61 sp 122 and the content that gives me marks kills me in two hits, before and you know damn well because you had to do it too to level you character you did all the instances why because you got marks for it and the lower cr's are running into allot of problems like ncps doing one shoot kills or not enough people for groups.
This GU 47 was a bad idea just look at the server populations people don't want to play a game that isn't fun me ill still play but because i like my characters but this GU is a bad idea.

Well, it will take one more day of playing, to get geared enough. It's not a big deal. They are widening the relevancy window, so that your character will be able to get marks also from the previous tier for a while, meaning that a barely T3 character will get marks from T2 content as well, while one near to be T4 will only get marks from the T3 content.

There is still a lot of tweaking to do with the difficulty of the sessions. As of it now, neither I am completely happy with this GU, but I think they are going in the right direction. It requires time to be optimized.

Get back Gu 46 If u dont have membership or dlc's u can't grow up ur character , and its too dificult to entry instances now

I have no problem with difficulty, I prefer the game to be more difficult. My problem is like yesterday upon reaching level 30 on another character, all of its gear was level 24 and higher but it was gear from drops or mission rewards, all except for one piece of cr40 gear I had in the shared bank. So I ran 2 of the T1 alerts and am already to where I have to run T2 to obtain marks while some of my gear is still as low as level 24. I ran 2 T2 solos today and from drops I didn't even want being in my inventory my cr went from 43 to 50 from just 2 solo challenges and it's not even healer gear which is the role I'm playing on this particular character.

My concern is my gear is good enough for T1, probably doable for T2 since I know the instances but if I get pushed into having to run T3 content while potentially still having a few items not even level 30 then I would assume adds and bosses would kill me really fast. The adds in T2 solos were draining my health fast, although I completed them it just makes me wonder if I should just level another character for now and wait until the devs overlap tiers because as it currently is regardless of my skill and knowledge my character would be virtually useless running the content it will have to run for marks.

If I run a T2 raid today I bet my cr would end up going to 53 forcing me to move to T3 to earn marks. I know I can just run T1 and T2 content and hope to get the drops but too often that just means my cr will continue going up from dps gear which I only use for solos and duos on this healer, otherwise the dps drops are useless to me. I think this would be completely fine for running a character as dps since the drops for dps are easier to get. It just seems like it's going to **** anyone running a support role while progressing through the tiers. I don't want to be forced to run content that exceed the gear I have to the extent that my restoration would be too low to be effective healing.

I was solo healing on a hero character of mine back when people used 2 and sometimes even 3 healers in raids a couple of years ago so skill is not an issue at all but too low of stats can be a limitation that skill can't overcome since it's a support role, this one being healer. My quantum troll I'm leveling, if it has this problem then it wouldn't have enough vitality to feed much to the group. If it were a tank then it's dominance might be too low to be effective and the defense might be too low as well. I'm only posting this because the devs read this section so I'm hoping they fix this a bit.

If the devs would change gear so that it doesn't count towards total cr until integrated or equipped at least once then this wouldn't be such an issue but any non tradeable dps drops I get will immediately boost my total cr even if I never equip it and even if I destroy or salvage it. When I level up an alt for being mainly dps I don't see any real problems but I'm guessing anyone leveling and gearing up as a support role will have a rough time of it until this is dealt with. Devs said next week they'd fix some of it, hopefully it will be enough. I'm all for challenge but I don't want to deal with something being tedious and annoying due to stats being too low from being forced to move into higher tier content before the stats reflect the content accordingly.

Anyone else having this problem? I have a 'gold' ring, level 78. After the update it has almost no stats - 0 might. It is also account bound, which means all my toons on that account get the CR bump. This is not a good thing since the ring itself is virtually useless. I've been forced to the next tier with the ring but don't get the bonuses that would be appropriate for a level 78 item. What's worse is I read that I can't get rid of the bump even if I dump the ring. Does anyone have any more information on this?

Apparently, there are a number of items with incorrect stats. Should be fixed soon.

Hopefully. Because a leaguemate at CR113 (and he has 1 skill point more than I do).. has more health than me. Amusingly.

I'm in half elite gear, with mask of OP... lol.

Here's an example of two pendant's I have. One at level 32 and a Gold one at level 78. I have a ring with similar garbage stats:

Blue Pendant Level 32
Health 191
Power 166
Precision 24
Might 135
Restoration 68
Vitalization 18

Gold Pendant Level 78
Health 114
Power 15
Precision 7
Might 75
Restoration 0
Vitalization 0

If you're in melee range of her, the aoe won't hit you.

I did the T1 duos today. I was a CR 39 Gadgets Troller and my partner was a CR 37 Quantum DPS using the AM. Both of us had less than 40 SP and no WM combos.

General comments on difficulty: The duos are noticeably harder than they used to be. The difficulty was ok for us, we didn't even die, but you do need to be careful with the T1 difficulty. New players often have much worse gear than we had, because they group for leveling missions, and they usually haven't figured out their powers yet.

Bugs: I found two bugs in the Gotham University duo.

When you first encounter Necro Magent Gruhn and he summons a bunch of extra enemies for you to fight, the extra enemies have a bit too much health and do way, way too much damage. We were able to survive by popping sodas, pulling out sidekicks, and throwing 8 person stuns at them. But if we were a pair of Fire dps, for example, we'd have been screwed.

2nd bug: 2nd encounter with Necro Magent Gruhn, after Gruhn went into his shield he didn't come out for more than a second at a time. He summoned sarcophagi about 4 times, but was never out of his shield for more than a second. We eventually wore him down through his shield.

Edit: Just wanted to add, the 2nd bug reminds me of a bug that the Soul Alchemy end boss has/had. Last time I played Soul, like a year ago or something, the boss did the same thing while in its Scientist phase. It was more annoying though, cuz you can't damage it at all while it's shielded.

I didn't know. Thanks a lot!

I did Nexus.

It was an OP group, most players were 110+. It's definitely more difficult, you actually need at least one of each support role. The difficulty was manageable, and the enemies still die fast, but it honestly felt like they were hitting harder than enemies in Necro do.

My main complaint is... THOSE [EXPLETIVE] SPARKS!!!!! People kept waking them up, and they caused the team TO WIPE!!!! THREE TIMES!!!! I know people are going to say something about situational awareness, and I agree, but T5 sparks should not be able to 2 shot 114 players. It's unnatural.

There is a lot of bad feelings about GU47 in-game. People in the raid group discussed how hard it is to get people for T5 raids, how difficult the mission was/was likely to be, how much they dislike the GU, how stressful and time consuming everything is now, and a couple of them are thinking of taking a break from dcuo. I haven't really done any group missions since it came out, was interesting to see what non-forum people are thinking.

My friend and I ran BIA yesterday (both cr 113) and we ended up wasting a lot of our time.
I understand that it should be slightly more difficult to run, but this seemed ridiculous. Not only did the enemies (lvl 95) hit like trucks, but they appeared to take much longer to defeat than when Origin Crisis first came out.

Our damage total as a team was slightly over 15million damage out, no one shotting even fathomable against the wrath brought upon us in the instance.

I know for certain that I won't be running these instances any time soon for feats due to this insane change of difficulty. I'll be better off running things for marks at the same, if not easier, difficulty.

I and a few league members have been running some tests in regards to stat leveling and have discovered some evidence that "leveling" is an incorrect term.

Upon entering each instance, we reviewed our own stats to see they were unchanged regardless of what CR were were running. What we instead found was that the instance itself was adjusting it's difficulty based on two factors...
1: Tier level of the player who cued the instance.
2: Highest tier level players in the instance.

Examples:
I ran my 114/113 equipped/184SP fire DPS through Circe's Stronghold. It took a total of 993K damage out to clear all the adds and bosses for completion.
I ran the instance again with a 112/107 equipped/184SP Sorcery DPS. Again, at they are in the same tier, it took 993K to clear all adds and bosses.
Running on the each character again, I cleared the Spark of Paralax solo with a total of 732K damage output. (200K less than the T3 solos required.

Running Duos:
We have discovered that, using characters of various levels, the amount of total damage out was directly connected to WHO initiated launching the instances.
Example:
If a T6 player cues Shady Nightclub, it requires 900K damage out total to clear regardless of the tier level of the second player.
If a T3 player launches the duo, the needed damage output is reduced by 180K to 720K, a 12.5% reduction in damage need to clear the instance.

This is not stat flattening, this is "instance stepping". If shown on a bar graph, you'd see that the increase in instance difficulty does not follow a straight line but instead appears as a series of steps of roughly 12.5% increases between tiers.
This is especially important in regards to T4 content. As T6 is actually broken down into T6a and T6b, the game is over compensating T4 for the higher level players by adding an extra tier increase. That results in a 25% increase in needed damage out to clear the instances AND the NPCs and bosses INDIVIDUALLY are getting that same 25% increase in their health, defense, and damage dealing stats.
This is why we are seeing threads that some groups are finishing the T4 content fairly easily while other groups are getting wiped, ESPECIALLY in pug groups. The INSTANCE stat changes will be determined based on which player the game awards the LEADERSHIP position to AND, unlike CR that jumps to a specific tier, each player's GEAR increases along a CURVE while the instance itself jumps up a full step in tier level.

One example of note...
Running T4 eight man operations, stat stepping is problematic when running with AT LEVEL healers. Higher CR player stats do not change at lower levels and have larger health and power bars to keep full. This, combined with as much as a 25% increase of the damage all members of the group are being subject to, is why they simply cannot keep up. Their restoration levels are too low to compensate that much damage, ESPECIALLY if they are trying to solo heal.
The same mechanics apply to Controllers. They may be doing everything they can but higher level players use MORE power to perform power based attacks than their lower vitalization can provide because the DPS power usage is percentage based and NOT using static numbers.
Needless to say, tanks playing at level while the instances have been increased in difficulty suffer the obvious problems of being unable to survive as easily. This is less of an issue due to the increased blocking stats that were released with GU47...if they block when needed.

wut, that means that if an high CR player queues into an instance, it's a certain doom for players in lower CRs? like an evil form of "auto level" like elder scrolls 4: Oblivion?