Test Discussion Solar Amplifier Bug

I'll answer the two points that pertain to what I said.

1. Trans and Strat make a huge impact on Solar's effectiveness and the dots matter a great deal. HV has 5 hits and then 12 dots. When I use HV on 3 targets, generally the dot crits will proc on 2 of the 3 targets; on 8 targets they generally crit on 3 to 4 of the targets. The dots do split on multiple targets like they are supposed to, there are 12 ticks on the dot and they add up to about roughly 13k of damage. My toon is Munitions, Flak and Shrapnel have 6 dot ticks.

With HV's 12 ticks I have double the opportunity to proc Strat. When Strat procs I get about 65K worth of damage per target that it procs on. So while HV's dots are getting me 13k of damage on their own, they are getting me 130k worth of damage on 3 targets and 260k worth on 8 targets.

When I use HV on 3 targets and Strat procs on 2 of those targets I've gotten a total damage of 310K. On 8 targets, Strat procs on 4 of those targets and I get a total damage of 538K.

In comparison:

Mini Nuke splits damage on all targets, almost never procs on 3 targets, and on 8 targets it procs on about 1 target and I get 100k total damage compared to 538K.

Chain Gun hits 4 times, and when Strat procs on 2 of 3 targets I get a total damage of 180k; I had to use CG 5 times to get it to proc on two targets, and it's almost always 2 targets with HV's dots. I could only get Strat to proc on 2 of the 8 targets for a total of 181k total damage.

Railguns hits 4 times, procing on 2 of 3 targets got a total damage of 232k, on 2 out 8 targets total damage is 243k.

Solar with Trans and Strat makes HV roughly 75%+ stronger than any other power in the powerset.

If anyone doubts what I'm saying here, go to your league hall, change your combat log to show damage out, combat parser interval to after combat, and only use HV with those three arts on the targets and see how it procs Strat, which gets the boost from the increased crits of Trans. Then try the other powers in your rotation and see how often they proc Strat.

2. You clearly show that there are Arts intended primarily for ST and can be used in AOE rotations. I'm glad you mentioned Gem of Horus because I think it lends credence to the intention of Solar Amplifer.

Gem of Horus is ST until you reach level 200. At 200 it will hit 8 targets for 300% of the base damage and the damage splits like it's supposed to.

If we were using Gem with Trans and Strat, the bleed dots would proc Strat and Talon Strike's damage would be split over the total targets in an AOE situation, which is what Solar and HV did before it was given rank 200, and the Dev's have stated was the intention.

We have enough empirical data to conclude that HV wasn't working as intended.

To your point about the company and money. It cost $165 to go from level 160 to 200. When Solar when to level 200, many end game players where leveling it 200 just for the extra might stat boosts. People were leveling it to 200 before they knew it could be used for AoE.

While I get that many people who came back to game after it was discovered that Solar was viable for AoE damage may have been told by youtubers and league mates to level it up 200, that doesn't negate the fact that many people leveled it 200 solely for single target and might stat boosts; thus people would have still leveled it to 200 even if it wasn't viable for AoE damage. Considering ST damage is really more important in Boss fights than AoE damage, it is still one of the most powerful artifacts in the game.

I 100% agree with you that the Dev's were negligent in both their communication and follow up to bugs/balance in this game. If your argument was that the Dev's should do something from a customer service stand point for dropping the ball, I'd completely support you, but arguing that the Dev's shouldn't fix something that isn't working as intended because people prefer it broken isn't a winning argument to me.

BTW, I love the work you put into your might guide. I recommend it to people all the time. Thank you.

In regards to individual attacks, yes, we'll absolutely see that difference because it's like "proc if we flip a coin and it's heads" where some attacks flip one coin and some flip multiple. In regards to the whole rotation flow though, it ends up coming out in the wash because we're constantly flipping coin after coin after coin faster than we can actually use all the "heads" we get anyways. It's a snowball effect that just keeps rolling. If we take two rotations with vastly different hit/crit rates, even a 100% difference or more, the strat contribution ends up being the same when we're actually doing our rotation because of that. It's the same reason Strat doesn't make DoT-only rotations any more viable. It's pretty well balanced in terms of its actual function.

Solar Amplifier's AoE DoT has never split. Not ever. As soon as we had access to AoE DoT, it was a non-split AoE DoT. You would have known if it was splitting because you would have been seeing ~20 dmg ticks at the time. It has been non-split the entire time it's existed. Mepps/Batuba already updated test to reflect that at 200 as well.

Gem of Horus becoming AoE at 200 is a liability. It would be a better artifact without it specifically because it does split the way it does to the detriment of the intended target. We can say it's "supposed" to do that but I'm sure they didn't intend to make something that's pretty terrible either. Someone with more experience than me with it PMed to confirm my suspicions after that post:

I addressed those 3 ST artis in my very first QA: that's how they were made, that's how they were sold to us, and that's how they've always been, which is fine, and we knew what we were getting. Solar Amp 200, however, was made, tested, and sold to us in a form that had it in line with the other 85% of artifacts that are ST/AoE hybrid. Mono-use artifacts have significantly less overall value now and, as people in test pointed out at the time, they weren't going to level it to 200 if all they got was stats and Empowered Channeling.

We have to remember that they can only build the game so well without feedback and not every artifact gets very good feedback or very much testing. Eg. Lernaea's Amulet would have been pretty much completely unusable and underpowered if not for everyone's testing and feedback. We can't just take one artifact and say "it should be as bad as this other artifact because they have a similarity."

Reality doesn't intrinsically reflect intent, so even if dev intent was for the 200 burst to split does that actually mean it was the intent for the artifact to not be AoE viable at all? Because that doesn't make sense from a design and marketability standpoint, especially when compared to the overwhelming majority of other artifacts. Has a misconception merely led devs to believe the artifact is overperforming and that nerfing it will keep it viable? (It won't). Is it the dev intent to remove 20+ rotations from the game? Or have they simply not yet recognized that that will be the case? Devs aren't gods and they depend on us, especially in this game because of the insane number of balance variables there are. The "this is their intent" mentality is actually harmful to them and the game overall because they can and do make mistakes just as easily as us, except their mistakes have an impact on the entire playerbase. If you were in their shoes, wouldn't you want to know when you were making a mistake? I would be very surprised if their knowing, willful intent was to remove more DPS play variations from the game than we'd get if they added ~5-6 brand new powers.

While I appreciate where you're coming from, that's not really true though. It's not like no one got to use it before we paid for it. It went through the normal test server release. We all saw there was no split and no one had an issue with it, balance or otherwise, devs included. When it actually went to market, it was known to be viable for both ST and AoE. No one had to buy it blind. Also, my 5th point in the consequences section highlights that $165 to us is a prohibitively **** ton of money to some players in other countries due to regional pricing. If they nerf it, those players will have invested heavily for an artifact that, like trans/strat, was a two-for-one deal only to have that value stripped away completely.

The thing is that since this will also have the unintended consequence of stripping a third of all ranged might AoE rotations from the game, we don't even need to have the artifact to be affected by this. Play diversity just plummets in general. It basically sends might back to the stone age in terms of AoE build options and removes any chance of having HV's unique visual effect spice up hallways, even if it is doing less damage. If this was just a buff artifact, I wouldn't care as much. I just don't support the game so it can have fewer options.

I agree that if they push this nerf through that players should be compensated. I think it would be insane to nerf any artifact this impactful (to even people without the artifact in terms of the visual diversity it adds) without at least doing a Nth 2x xp week. However, just because something's not working as intended doesn't mean it's not better that way or that it needs to be fixed. A lot of the most iconic and historically influential aspects of gaming were a direct result of unintended behaviour which the devs had the wisdom to look at and say, "you know... this is actually better this way!"

If we believe it was an accident, there's a lot more value in the devs having accidentally created an artifact so perfectly balanced that it expanded player AoE choice by 33%, adding ~20+ extra options to the game than there is in setting the clock back ~2 years in terms of play variety. That's a lot of rotations and variations... like 5-6 new power's worth of DPS options. The devs should be proud they did that, since it's more variety than has been introduced to the game in half its entire lifespan. The loss of all those rotations is something that hadn't even occurred to me until yesterday and I wouldn't be surprised it it hadn't been factored into the reasoning for this.

Very pleased to read that ^^.

When I replied to you earlier I was in my league hall using HV on all the targets available.

On the Single target my dots were hitting for 500-900 and criting for 1000-2000+.

On the 3 targets the dots were hitting for 200-400 each.

On the 8 targets the dots were hitting for 100-200 each.

As I said earlier, if you don't believe what I'm saying go on the live server and do exactly what I did. The info is right there.

AV, I respect you and appreciate your hard work, however I have to end this conversation, I wish you the best my brother.

I have to ask myself if this splitting bug had been fixed while Solar was on test server back during the release of 200 artifacts, mind you that GU:97 in a 14 day span also had an entire dlc episode along with a full weapons balance pass lol would there have been such a push on the forums to have Solar Amplifier at rank 200 changed to act like it was on test server and not split damage? or would it just have been long forgotten and accepted that it was how the artifact was supposed to be? I think very much it would be the latter.

That's very bizarre. At 160? I'd have to go back through my records but I honestly don't remember that behaviour and the test server has had 160 with non-split DoT but split burst as well.

Are you 100% sure you're not just seeing the natural min:max spread and just getting weird RNG? Cuz it ranges from like 300-1200 at CR321 for me, non-crit, regardless how many targets I hit. The only difference is when I'm hitting more targets I see both higher and lower numbers more frequently (but because I'm just seeing more numbers faster in general). On test server when it was splitting I was getting double-digit ticks most of the time.

If I'm wrong on this I'll admit it but between my recollection, the og test behaviour, and the live spread I see, that just doesn't sound right to me. A year ago if we were seeing DoT split at 160 we'd have pretty much only gotten double-digit ticks and I'm 99.9% sure that wasn't the case (but it has been a very long time), cuz seeing numbers that low feels godawful.

Edit:

On live, single target, at CR321 and ~80k might I just went:

358
456
1418 crit
1930 crit
1342 crit
884
1023 crit
1207 crit
443
1468 crit

Mind you that's with Trans on but we can see that it's a pretty wide min:max. It's not lining up with what you're getting at all though, especially for you to see such a narrow non-crit spread in general regardless of the circumstances. I'm getting almost 2x the base dmg spread as you. Something is off.

I just checked (3 minutes for each group of targets (1,3,8)) on one of my alts, which has just SA at level 160, the damage from the DOT, regardless of the number of targets, is within 290-1777 range. DOT has a very large spread of base damage.

I don’t understand how anybody could have thought this was intended. It’s written in plain clear english what breaking through to 200 is supposed to add to the artifact. I’m pretty certain that within the artifact system as a whole, the devs hiding easter egg benefits at random breakthrough levels isn’t a thing.

The fact that the bug is present is not difficult to understand, the problem is that without the specific words of the developers, it can be one of 3 bugs: 1.description error . 2. incorrectly working level 200. 3. incorrectly working levels 120 and 160.

But this is not the essence of this whole discussion, the point is that the SA on the live server with the present bug is more balanced in relation to other artifacts than the SA without a bug on the test server .
The bottom line is that how now SA on the l server is better for a variety of play styles than on the test server.

Made the above post to help demonstrate how non-split balance works, as I was under the impression some people may have interpreted the higher relative output on some non-split rotations to be indicative of actual performance.

The answer to the rhetorical question is: Insufficient data was provided to be able to tell. Non-split AoE powers start weak and get stronger when more targets are present. The more non-split powers used in a given rotation, the higher the upper limit will be and the lower the lower limit. The only way to determine the actual DPS value of a rotation containing non-split elements is to take the average of the 3-target and 8-target performance. Sometimes those rotations will do better, sometimes they'll do worse, and content & group performance are factors. Ironically, non-split's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness in that killing mobs faster = fewer mobs = lower damage and it trends towards the middle. That average is the only way to quantify their DPS in a useful way. If we don't do that when non-split is a factor, it is easy to accidentally make a very weak rotation while simultaneously overestimating it.

Note: For context, FGS has a good mix of small, medium and large groups. We went through it with the tank pulling as aggressively as possible to see what our average number of targets was. I was the only non-pug DPS so our overall burn wasn't great yet there was still only a single instance in the entire raid of hitting 8 targets due to targets being eliminated as new ones became available (there was one additional opportunity but I got CC'd while casting and a mob died). Average targets hit looked to be ~5 (or somewhere in the realm of 4-6). In some raids the average will be lower and in some raids it will be higher. That's obviously anecdotal but it goes to show why knowing the average DPS of a non-split is important, as knowing either the upper or lower limit by itself is practically meaningless on its own.

We've been working on Elec and, when doing so, we have to look at the upper and lower for each case (also I was wrong and its non-Solar was better than its Solar after all, Solar was still just an extra option):

(Didn't increase my test CR for this but I will when I update the guide sections. 293 on test here)

Ranged:

Lower: 60617


Upper: 90109


DPS = 75363

4-Power Melee:


Lower: 66139


Upper: 91703


DPS = 78921


5-Power Melee:

Lower: 70057


Upper: 99021


DPS = 84539


With this we can see just how nasty the spread gets with non-split powers involved and how they look artificially overpowered when we only consider 8-target performance. The more non-split effects, the greater the gap between the lower and upper limits of the rotation's potential. It's an interesting and unique way to play since it's a bit of a gamble.

If we look at the guide, though only the upper limits are shown we can see on most of the Solar Amp AoE that they'll only be average at best when compared to the other AoE options we've seen in here and which we're slowly starting to add.

On top of that, we have to look at the fine print of each rotation, Eg:


- Expect major losses due to use of stationary damage field with 12s CD.
- Expect losses due to death of targets before DoTs reach maturity, especially due to application late in mob lifecycle.
- Expect occasional major losses due to Heat Vision interrupt due to battlefield physics or bursts bugging on forced target swap
- Major warning: This requires large, stationary groups of tanky adds to be successful. Most content will not allow this rotation to reach close its full potential.
- Low burst damage and relatively slow damage accelaration

^ Basically that particular rotation is a Paper Tiger made out of all the most inconsistent and unreliable damage types in the game. Looks sick vs Sparring Targets but extremely situational at best unless coordinating specifically to do it... and even then it takes a bit to get into full swing and everything's usually half dead from everyone else.

If the devs put the live version of Solar Amp back onto test in some form, we can evaluate Heat Vision AoE rotations this way and tabulate the results alongside the best non-Solar ranged and melee rotations so we can observe the overall AoE combat envelope for every power. It doesn't change the already demonstrated fact that it's contributing less towards our DPS than other artifacts in a given rotation but if it indicated a discrepancy in rotation performance one way or another (with consideration given to its drawbacks and weaknesses) the devs could do a minor tweak instead of simply killing off all its rotations and slashing its value in half.

On top of that ....when you read the description on powers within power sets and you see words like “hitting enemies, or “enemies near you target will also take damage. You clearly know these type of moves will do a form of split damage And even if you don’t you will soon find out when you play with the powers but when you read the description of solar amp that says


* Your eye beams overheat and explode, damaging enemies near your traget

all of a sudden somebody would think the non split damage is intentional?

Batuba might as well go through every single power set and tweak every power description if that’s the case

So currently on test the effects I see are:

Rank 80 - Eye beams turn blue-white, +10% damage - applies burning PI to enemy on the first tick of damage, burning dot starts after heat vision damage stops (after the first tick of damage if you jump cancel, after the last tick if you let it play out)

Rank 120 - Burning PI gets applied on the first tick of damage, DoT on primary target starts after the last tick of heat vision damage including if jump canceled as per rank 80. Last tick of Heat Vision causes the enemy to explode, causing full damage to the target but split damage to the enemies around it. The explosion also sets a burning PI on the enemies around the target, which does not split.

Rank 200 - Same as rank 120.

So you get the burning PI on the primary target after the first tick of damage in all cases, but you only get the explosion and the spread burning PI if you let Heat Vision finish.

But the thing is, the bug only happens at 200. At 160 when you unlock the ability you mentioned it performs as intended. I suppose people who just paid to get the artifact from 0 to 200 and never played with it below 200 have an excuse to think it was intended. But anybody who leveled it over time and actually used it at 160-199 cannot possibly think that empowered channeling somehow astronomically increases damage, especially when parsing.

Well, when they were working on that update SA was bugged and allowing characters to move around. People asked that they not fix it. I imagine if people knew the same about the damage splitting being a bug, they would have asked that it remain as well. BTW have you learned how to pronounce melee yet?

I mean who’s fault is it they took there artifact straight to 200 without doing there homework?

Yea imagine there was more pressing bugs with Solar Amplifier at rank 200 that had to be addressed, and I can't speak for others but at least I would primarily test a single target artifact on single target and didn't personally catch the splitting issues just the primary 2 bugs as seen in the clip below. If I had simply been more observant I could have point it out and saved players like AV the dramatic PTSD that these changes will have.

My main concern with the whole thing is letting players dictate the way the artifact should play will only open up a can of worms and kind of sets a bad tone with potential future unintentional bugs

Players Will spend there money to rank the next future artifact to 200 and if there’s an underlying bug that goes unoticed or isn’t fixed in a quick enough time frame your gonna have players complaining that they thought it was intentional and will bring up this exact topic of how the devs Never fixed solar amp and that it’s unfair While they claim the artifact needs to stay the same or give me my money, catalyst, xp back etc etc.

That’s why I say the devs should just let the artifact play the way they intended for it to be played.

There are artifacts that get released every dlc that will always open up more new playstyles at the end of the day.

They probably don't operate that way for the same reasons they didn't name the "Testing Feedback" section the "Go Suck Eggs... We Do What We Want" section, or the "Provide Random Conjecture Here Without Testing" section.