Test Discussion Survival Mode: Content

R13 & R15 progress point not showing - 1:34:20

Fix dual wield WM combos before SM go on live servers. 99% DPS on test just spam dual wield flurry shot, even support roles forced to use this damn combo. Testing like that is just waste of time. Every play style should be competitive.

This is why I wanted a standard 1-1-1-1 with no battle roles to be the bar for standard completion time. Otherwise, if you're not running battles roles with Flurry or Claw, you're at an irritation disadvantage, and there's a section of the community who don't have an armory/artifacts or sp/are too lazy to set up to battle roles for their supports. Outside of nature, the other high end dps powers that are might based take a lot of power to where they can't dps consistently without the passive phylak bonuses even with a troll without using a soder frequently to boost their power pool back up which means no soders for near 1shot catches or after deaths. Not a problem for regular alerts/raids, but SM is different. Flurry is a convenience for dps in that sense, and it's easier to just get a weapon box and switch sp, than to change your loadout and lose your sustainability for some damage moves.

Problem not in battle roles, but in broken combos that is currently the only way to successfully completing SM content. If you not use dw wm - you will be kicked form group. Easy peasy. And it's test server... Imagine what will be on live.

Do you happen to have a list of the attacks and mechanics that can be bypassed with Movement Mode? Providing more details will allow the developers to make a more informed decision on the matter. Disabling movement mode would be a drastic change.

More notes on rounds 11-14. As I mentioned in an earlier post it bugged out and didn't save our progress point. Each round took approximately 15 minutes to complete and the setup was:

Rage Tank CR 270 SP 243
Munitions Troll CR 270 SP 280
Nature Heal CR 271 SP 249
Gadgets DPS CR 270 SP 231

We went 1-1-1-1 for the boss fights, but attempted 2 dpses and no troll for a little bit on Savage. However with these later rounds it's better to have a troll for the attack and defense debuff, so we switched back.

Round 11 - Lex
There's nothing new with these bosses except that they hit harder and take longer to kill. The only issue we had was that he would aggro all the pets we had out on his special attacks. This means that for almost every laser, orbital, and melee aoe he targeted our sidekicks near him. I don't know if this is meant to be but it makes our jobs way easier. I think it would be better if he doesn't aggro them as much because even if he constantly orbitals or lasers the group they are avoidable. The tank has to kite in every round here on out so the melee attack doesn't hurt the group, as long as people are a little over max range the laser won't hit us, and the orbital gives us enough time to role out of it.

Round 12 - King Shark
The only difference between round 2 is that it took longer. No real danger in the fight. The AOE for the hurricane moving around is tiny too, at times I would forget it was there because we even clipped it a couple times and didn't get damage.

Round 13 - Baron Von Savage
The attacks need to be jacked up. The spear combo skull doesn't have that much reach so it doesn't touch the tank if they're kiting, the map AOE barely does damage, swarm shield can block all of it. The lunges are the only real threat and then again you can block through it no problem. He is easy to fight because half his combo's are lungeable if the tank kites and the boss follows him.

Round 14 - Johnny Quick
It's an interesting fight, same moves. We had both the tank and healer be on top of lunges and we were spread out, so there wasn't a threat. I think this round is fine in terms of difficulty for round 14.

Overall the rounds were easy but tedious, but that's what SM is. And just to add to the point being brought up on movement mode people are mostly talking about the supercharge shields. So in this case people were wondering why I was running dash attack on my healing loadout. The reason being the shield is strong in healing stance and not only can I make a quick getaway if Johnny spawns on me or Ultraman flies towards me (because I would have a lot of unlucky aggro), but I can also dart across the map and pick up a body with a shield on me. Again for both this and precision DPS combos, we only run it because they are strong and mesh well with our tactics. If they need to get nerfed then so be it we'll just find another way to run hybrid roles.

This might be an important point to note as well. Are all members of your group running a hybrid loadout? How is the SP allocated, etc? If all 4 are running dps/hybrid-dps, it would also affect completion time significantly compared to groups with a single DPS only, I imagine.

No one's fully hybrid yet. Our troll, tank, and healer were full support in terms of gear, sp, stats, arti's, etc. The only other person running flurry shot aside from the dps was me in healing stance. But it was only for the combos, so no sp/gear/artis used for prec. Except cog to boost our dpses dmg. All of the damage was from that single DPS. We haven't tried any hybrid methods yet because there isn't a need. Once we do it will most likely be for rounds 20 and above.

Thx for clarifying!

Thanks for making trolls important again!

Thanks, the roleless buff was irritating ^^

Got finally into testing.

Group: 1 Rage Tank, 1 Water Healer, 2 DPS (1 Water with off-role, 1 Gadgets with off-role not the go-to group build though).Combat Rating 270. Max artifacts. Stats are way below life characters. The tank at least is 200 SP below his life toon, lacked the op items and was missing rank 23 adaptive augments. Lack of access to certain consumables that are on live working (see bottom).

tl:dr: SM starts at round 20, everything before it was a loot handout. I'm sure we could have continued but stopped at this point, there was nothing that felt remotely hard to not to pass but 20 would have been slightly more time-consuming than the rounds before. At this point I don't think I test further as it would ruin the fun to run it on live + it isnt representative due to the heavy stats difference between test and live toons.


Several bugs or gameplay issues:

- obv the rolebuff
- after r11 onwards if a wipe happens or the break comes into play and the group warps out of the zone and wants to vote restart there wa s achance that you ended up in round 1 instead of - in our case - 17
- bombs keep spawning on round 19 when wiped on boss, I assume it can happen on 9 and 29 too
- Ultimate Soldier can be heavy damaged through his bombs making the round easier as intended
- We had a 10 minute break before round 20 which sounds odd considering its only on the progress point ones like 19, 21, etc.
- Ultraman mechanics overlapping with each other like in the raid and potencially killing you regardless of taken action against it cause a mine can drop on you while being lassoed or in ice form or Ultraman charges with backhand at you right in that time. Heavy luck factor in this fight, no so much on 10 but 20 / 30 for sure. A wipe should happen through players fault not faulty mechanics.


buff requirements:

- minotaur is doing nothing but running in a circle + the charge into the chains can only be done every 2nd time since the chain isnt respawning fast enough (could be intended but still mentioning) - healer + troll isnt needed on this round even without rolebuffs


From a difficulty pow it felt less engaging (until 20) as only one boss comes with certains limited mechanics. Thats what I liked about the old one that 2 bosses had more to take care of. I also fear the estimated difficulty/progression from devs towards the players is getting underestimated again. Regarding that I hope there has been a "fail"-save being implemented on round 30 like the last version of Happiness Home that made it unbeatable by default.

Sadly disconnects happened too.


Consumables:

Couldnt check but I fear that diverse consumables could make certain rounds easier as intended. Mainly the Vampire Lord from Darkness Rising and his adds could potencially be burned faster with episodes consumables. Could that be checked, if possible?
The usual Qwa-Bombs (also for any boss adds like Vampire Lord ones).

Devs probably do need to consider this and what they want from this and make it clear, the tool tip just says "damages vampires etc" it does have "Justice League Dark" in yellow so the devs need to decide is it intended these apply exclusively to "Justice League Dark" hence the yellow text or is that text just meant to indicate they're obtained from Justice League Dark, the issue is that they don't have the adds anywhere else in game until now.

It's probably also worth pointing out that these are not an infinite resource they do have to be farmed and obtained or bought so if a player did assert their prerogative to use a consumable on only one set of adds/boss they're still having to actually play to make an effort to obtain said consumables to obtain the circumstantial advantage, they also do have a cool down significantly longer than the likes of qwa bombs. thought that was just worth pointing out

Mepps, with all due respect, if this line is related to mentions of DW flurry shot, it is specifically about the content. You cannot separate the 2.

If everyone on test is using DW flurry shot, support roles included, & this SM is balanced around this, it leaves all but a select few non precision users at a disadvantage in this content.

If the test server is full of groups specifically asking for precision dps & roles, how do you expect this to play out on the live server?

The fact is, the devs cannot be unaware of the debates which exist on the forums surrounding DW flurry shot, & yet they proceeded to produce an SM which exists almost entirely of single target boss fights.

Added to this, with the Crowns you have made PvE competitive. But it's not a fair fight, not if you consider the stated goals of the stats revamp.

When I heard SM was going to be a thing again, I was really excited. That excitement has dwindled, because as a might dps/superpower spec'd troll, I am a persona non grata.

One issue with this though is how do you fix it?
- Add another boss to some rounds -> Everyone goes nature might based. Top ranged aoe dps in the game for 2-3 targets. Can burn both extremely well at the same time or go heavy single target that can rival Flurry while still doing passive damage on the other boss.

- Add several bosses to some rounds -> Everyone goes elec might based to abuse powers not splitting damage.

Regardless of what the developers do, another thread of what testers or people on live are using is going to come up. There's always going to be something that looks op because everyone wants to use whatever is best for that situation. If you're going to get yelled at either way, why not just stick to the original concept. SM originally had 2 bosses for 8 ppl, and that's being halved. SM was always single target, we were just in an AM era where every powerset was aoe and weapons were useless outside of flipslash/other melee/midrange moves that would get you killed in SM high rounds.

Can't really argue with anything you said.

I would have preferred alternating boss setups, 1 boss single target, next boss 2 or more.

Certain powers would do well in both setups, but I don't think the discrepancy would have been quite so pronounced.

I don't pretend to be at the same level as some of the posters on here, but I have made it to round 14/15 in the previous iteration of SM, so I'd like not to at least make it to double figures.

Fortunately I'm in a pretty active League right now so that should help, but I'd be loathed to be relying on lfg right now as I was back then.

There's the late reaction element like Juvenile pointed out but another is the going on for dlc's cheese with flight. This is one somewhat recent example of atomic using flight:


Attacks and mechanics that I can think of that might be dodged using flight possibly:
- Every melee combo/attack used by adds and most bosses. Considering they're not in range, they should be scripted to just do range attacks. At which point, assuming you had enough control of your screen (would be easy if you're pc and comfortable with the controls), you could change your camera angle and lunge while in the air. Lunging triggering the dodge mechanic which would avoid the majority of the range damage now coming at the tank. This is also assuming you don't have an atomic who's just going to spam pull moves and keep the adds in a dropping/cancelling animation cycle. Some adds they can't do that on, but the first bit should work for every add.

- Cyclones from Shark flight avoids
- I don't know if Baron von Savage's jump to the group can actually occur in the air? (would he jump and smash in mid-air like he's doing a double jump to do damage to you and then fall afterward?
- Can the fire area that US Solider creates on you be in the air?
- I know you can get a higher distance from Johnny Quick's clones going into the air than you can horizontally going toward to the door. Not sure if that's far enough to avoid the damage like most people do in the raid, but if it is, then that's another.
- Does the Shadow Wolf from Vampire Lord have ranged attacks/combos to attack people in the sky? And even if he does, point 1 still works. Do the alert mechanics apply and it transforms people? Can it transform at a range?
- What is the range on the Black Manta bombs?
- Does the spinning Minotaur hammer go into the air or is it floor-bound like the Tornado?
- Is the ceiling high enough to avoid the Minotaur charge damage by just being above him like in the alert?
- How does the minotaur ground smash work? Does it have a range? Is the ceiling high enough to avoid that?
- Is the Minotaur tall enough to still do melee attacks against someone at the ceiling?

Giving specific feedback on how movement mode supercharges can be used to bypass mechanics is more useful than a very broad statement.

Thanks. This type of feedback helps the developers out a lot.

-US avoiding the fire pit
-Dodging Shark's charge
- Dodging Minotaur Charge
- Getting out of the range of a Black Manta bomb assuming it's not the entire room
- Bunker Buster from Lex
- Savage's jump
^ things along those lines. Things you normally have to react and roll early basically on, you get to do it slightly later/cover more ground if you have dash attack. Tumbling mastery often helps alot covering distance but for people not running that, Dash Attack is significantly better than the standard roll. in R1-10, might live through these flat out with the shield. Given it's only 30s, you can possibly have a Dash Attack waiting for each of these mechanics just to eat the hit whether you're a tank,support or dps.