Dev Discussion Episode 39: General/Overall Feedback

I unfortunately have not had a chance to use Quislet on live, as I don't have the luxury nor money to bring him up in a way that he would be useful at the moment. He's stuck at 79 because I don't have the marks for the cats at the moment.

But when I was testing it, he was interchangeable with Grim if you run Source + Quislet + Trans. And not worrying too much about generating SC.

Keep in mind this page has only been up for a few days, right after launch of the DLC and a big charity live stream. I'm sure they are reviewing the comments and something will come of it shortly.

Computo and quislet have definitely been not well received but I think it may be due to their respective "best paired with" suggestions.
Anyone wants to give these a whirl on test, please do. I'm giving my pc build to my nephew so it's all boxed up already.
Quislet suggests pairing with source shard and grim. Meh. Neither does enough damage to care about buffing them vs bat construct or seemingly even sidekick which is what most source users cycle thru. Grim is very important for setting pi, not for the damage he does. But since he's out, he's getting the buff. So look at quislet not pairing with those. A lot of people use grim to apply pi. A lot don't. And then some players apply their pi as does their grim, wasted slots. So if a player that does use grim ditches grim and applies their own pi, quislet becomes viable since he will eventually do more damage than grim. Rsk is terrible and dead every 5secs now. Passive damage of quislet is probably on par with him and he can't die since he can't be summoned. Even if he did, I imagine he just pops back up like grim. So as far as pairing him goes, that brings us to computo...
Pets are filling the prec bar. So take a rage character for instance. Combing those two arts with amulet (or tetra if there isn't a buff troll and healer) gives rage a viable st range loadout. Won't be op but would make sense that it's a lot better than what it usually is. I'm sure other powers would be the same way. But since rsk is just so useless and takes a slot, quislet is the better (imo) choice especially if you're already running grim and double pi'n. Computo puts out decent damage when 2 bars are full and over 100k for 3 bars if I've been told correctly.

I really wanted to try out Computo because it’s awesome we got a dedicated hybrid dps arti, but I just don’t have room on my tray for the special ability.

Yeah, I'm not sure what powers would be able to give up a slot butttt if it was that pairing of arts and you were already using rsk, that's your slot. Obviously trans/strat/sa is the baseline for every build so if that's what you're already using, I doubt it could beat it. But if you're generally a melee type, you can't melee often in elite so the blast you get from computo could be handy. Just thinking of viable pairings vs forcing pairings that just wouldn't beat already possible ones.

Edited to say tetra pairing not trans

I just wanted to point out that Hydra is not new. We've faced him before in Amazon Fury Part 2, in the alert "Act of Defiance".

Also, you mentioned that Emerald Empress never used the power to mind control in the comics. I just wanted to point out that in the comics the Eye of Ekron is capable of hypnosis, which has caused others to do the bidding of Emerald Empress. Might not be technically "mind control" but it's in the same vein.

I like the episode a lot. It's a lot of fun. I'd love to see a follow up that adds more legion members and the rest of the Fatal Five.
One thing I have to say is that the way this episode is built, it is A LOT more ALT friendly than Wonderverse.
The bounties seem quite a bit faster and smoother than in the last episode and I love that too.
Personally I like the bounties. They're fun. Would I liked to have see a solo or duo? Sure. I don't care much about two raids though. We get the same amount of currency with the weekly bounty mission so it's quicker and easier.

After playing through the content more now I'd like to add a couple thoughts.

My initial first impressions still apply and can be found here.

Characters involved:
It's super disappointing to see how prevalent the Titans are in this content. A lot of LoS fans waited years for a LoS DLC and it's heavily centered around the Titans essentially. Titan clones, Titans allies. I mean I like the Titans but this was a chance to see Legionaires and play alongside them or fight their characters. From a Dev perspective I suspect a lot of that has to do with not being able to properly portray those LoS characters in the game (like their powersets) -- at which point I have to remind people this is just another argument for continuing to add new powersets and iconic powers.

Tangent: New powersets/weapons/travel modes etc don't just generate revenue via respec tokens, they contribute to the players' ability to customize and therefore retention. They also allow the game to recover development costs spent on creating iconic characters. If a wider more representative selection of powers/powersets, weapons, travel modes etc were in the game the Dev team would more easily and quickly be able to add those characters and make them properly representative of the source material. The same is true of powerset styles -- often characters have similar or identical powers but just have different signature looks to them which means they could use the same powerset if it's skinned differently for that character. Powerset styles would make this easier and faster to deliver. New powersets etc are essentially an infrastructure investment that allows the dev team to more easily add new content that features a wider variety of characters without misrepresenting them (and disappointing players).

And coming back to characters.

I want to reiterate from my first impression how disappointing it is to fight SG, LL and CB instead of the rest of the Fatal Five. It probably ties into not being able to properly portray them as mentioned above, but it's just really disappointing. And also again, please stop enlarging these characters for fights and justifying it with creative license. It takes the game into a stylized zone that isn't welcome to a lot of players.

Testing Feedback:
It's a little discouraging to see feedback delivered on test make it to live. Especially when it's relatively easily fixed stuff like textures. Balancing changes I could understand because they require more testing and crunching but texture updates take little effort. Although I'm aware that something like adding civilians and (likely) pathing for them, does take work still. In cases like that, at least address the feedback and interact with it though.

My conclusion is about the same as it was from my first impressions. I think the quality of the content is excellent, but I'm unhappy with a number of creative decisions that take away from my enjoyment of the DLC which in turn diminishes my enthusiasm for the content (meaning I won't run it as much) , and lastly, there just isn't enough content to keep busy with for 3-4 months.

To me these bounties with the feats, increased prices and XP for op item droprate are some form of having the bounties look "good" so that it can be claimed they were a "success" despite the "success" of them shoved down our throat with listed stuff. Reduced feats, less grind on them and only every 2nd episode is more than enough. It's the second episode with this stuff and its completely burned out. I don't know how I feel about the upcoming episode when I just look back on Legion bounties.

With the massive amount of lore (people, places, stories, etc) in Legion of Super-Heroes history this should have been a two-part, like Metal. Content in this ep would have been just right for a part 1 followed by a larger part 2. Obviously too late now; a missed opportunity. I'm 100 percent certain you'll do more with the Legion in the future, so looking forward to more.

a reverse flash emblem and more speedforce stuff, and a actual negative speedforce material

I have a request: Increase the drop rate for the experience item for Static's Goggles! I haven't seen a single one since day one, no matter how many boxes I open or Bosses I fight!

I hate, despise, abhor, and dislike this bounty system. What was wrong with the bounty system of the past several DLCs with JLD, Metal 1/2 and BoP? You had 2, that took a grand total of maybe 5 mins to kill. These bounties are lazy. Its a cheap source of grind. And as Elusian put it earlier:

I don't call bounties content. I want meat, and these bounties are barely gristle. They aren't fun. I fall asleep doing them, I and many others. Strip away this bounty nonsense, put it back the way it was, give us more raids. Remember when we used to get 3 raids? It seems like we're getting less and less content but artificially bloated with nonsensical grinding to make it last...YET we're still getting charged the same in membership. This is awful and irritating. Wonderverse used to be my least favorite DLC....guess what Legion takes the cake.

I can't agree with this more. They took our feedback from last DLC, scrapped it, and double down. Wonderverse used to be my least favorite/most hated DLC, this one has taken that crown. This is what gives me doubt that our feedback means anything at all, because of stuff like this. Because it seems like they're going to do whatever the hell they wanna do and the only feedback they actually care about comes from our wallets, rather than posts in the "feedback" sections of the forums. In fact I've looked through all of the feedback threads for this DLC and I've seen radio silence from the devs/Mepps when it comes to this negative feedback. Almost as if they think if they ignore it, it doesn't exist and everything is hunky-dory.

1.I and many others are tired of Bountys if you really want to keep it why not make it just 1 bounty boss instead of 4-5 and focus the rest of the time in other things? You can still keep the system this way but the dev team will have more time for the episode itself (multiple Raids)

2. We need multiple large long exciting raids per episode for example Why are we getting these short simple raids? Its just boring! Awesome raids like Khandaq or the Tier 2 raid brainiac Sub-Construct and the Tier 3 raid Power Core are longer ,better , more interesting and are more fun to play then the current ones and they are around a decade old. Also especially paradox was the best Raid i played difficulty wise,Making such great raids will benefit this game much more and will have a large impact on getting players that quit back into the game And also keeping them interested.

3. Elite raids should have something what paradox had where people could adjust the difficulty higher (making it harder) by taking all sidebosses out at once and get increased rewards for doing it the harder way.

4. The open world areas are very big and fancy looking i dont think this is needed at all why not use (modify slightly etc) older openworld maps and save alot of time then use the rest of the time into making more 8player-4player-2player etc instance based content? Im not gonna play a dlc because of the open world and many others the same but because of their instance content and the longer , interesting etc (especially the raids) are the more i and many others would be interested in playing the game. I feel like the openworld aestethics etc got more love then the raid and alert did. Shouldnt it be the opposite way?
Elite alerts should be in each episode they are great. And give people some renown that cant do the raid and make support rolls outside of Raids more needed.

5. Give some small amount of currency (or the chance for a seal of presevation to drop) for people so they can run raids and get something small back instead of nothing without using replays for those that wanna enjoy the raid but arent able to reset it.


Summary. focusing making pure instances based episodes,I would love to have this i pay membership for the instances especially Raids not the openworld. I and many others started playing this game when it was about raids and so on not bountys. People want to play dc but the episodes arent enjoyable to me and many many others alot have already quit due to this Bounty stuff and im sure more Will stop.

no more bounty based dlcs guys, not a fan. i only log in once a week, on thursdays now rather than daily.

Ok. So I've had more time for my opinion to firm up. So here it is.

DLC seems light (very light) and propped up by the bounty spam. WV had that issue as well, but the raid was more fleshed out and even though it was a long 'add crawl' map, it was pretty and had some interesting aspects along the way. This one does look nice, but the boss fights are cake and the adds inconsequential...might have just had 2 boss fights back to back with the jumping stones in between...more people get wiped by those than the adds ever will.

The lack of a solo/duo is just awful. I'm sure working remote and Covid have something to do with that, and as much as we would have complained about a lackluster one on a used map, I'd think one could have been thrown together in a pinch. Maybe something in a less used map like Metropolis University (power girl Villain mission) or something that kept the 'campus' theme going.

The alert is ok, although the cutscenes are pretty drawn out. I know you guys put time and effort into writing these, but as we'll be running this for 3 months more than likely (it's one of the few methods of getting episode currency) the cutscenes get very, very old quick. How about a selection in the system settings for 'auto cutscene skip' or something where if everyone in the group has it selected, they are skipped....1st run notwithstanding. As far as the mechanics, the fights are fine, the legnth is good and the map works well, if a bit dizzying.

As far as the return of the Elite alert, I think that's a welcome thing. I've only run it once, so I won't speak to the difficulty of it, but having an alternative for Renown is nice, albiet a low amount (100 would seem more appropriate). Kudos for listening to the feedback that Elite alerts were a thing we wanted to see return.

The prices. Just ridiculous. With the lack of ability to get marks from a solo/duo (especially the loss of the extra 2 marks with +2 17 head mods) the prices are too high. Add to that the bulk of what we are doing...again...is bounty spamming that rewards no episode main currency, it's a lot of marks to try and accumulate. While that might be great for replay sales and use, it's not really fair and kind of distasteful.

The OP grind is also crazy bad. You guys got it right with JLD...some reasonable amount of food to feed the gear, a few cats which dropped reasonably often(for getting as drop or buying in broker) and the final cat which could be purchased after a few weeks of grinding out the content. The newer foods drop too infrequently so they are hard to come by as drops and are insanely high in the broker as a result. The cats required same thing...the drop ones are too scarce, especially as we won't get any from the nonexistent Solo/Duo, like we were able to with the seeds in WV. Kudos on making the OP goggles something you can use out of the gate however. Unlike the last few dlcs where it's just a box that sits there till you can do something with it, or something you delete as useless on toons you know you'll never level it.

These bounties. Oh god the bounties. I'm still not sure if you guys ever look at the math for these things? WV had 50+ hours just to get the count feats...then another 20+ or so hours to buy the items you buy with the currency dropped. So this time we lowered the counts (thanks) but raised the prices so that you have to put MORE hours into the bounties. You obviously heard some of the feedback on the feat counts, so why raise the prices? BTW...can we raise the cap on the currency? 999 is too low considering there will likely be new items coming, once or twice as the DLC progresses and they will likely be 500+ marks each, on top of the already high weapon, etc, prices. Kudos on making Validus come up each time though, much better than Hydra where the 30 min rotation could be wasted by one loss along the way. Big negative on having no gear drops after 310. Again, as this is going to be what we are primarily doing for the DLC's life, getting no gear to salvage or apply to a 2nd role is a big issue.

Prestige. With 1 raid and 1 alert, prestige is becoming an issue. If there will be more heavy OW stuff in future DLCs, you need to sprinkle some prestige tokens around either on OW drops or in the daily loot boxes.

Artifacts....haven't even looked at them...so 0 feelings one way or the other.

So overall, the DLC is just 'meh'. I had the same feelings on BOP, but at least there the CT raid was interesting and fun and the prices seemed to be in line with the currency capabilities.

Final thoughts. Please no more of these bounty spam DLCs. It's mind numbingly boring and as they are going to stack up end to end with each other, will be quite impossible as time goes on. WV is already getting tough to find a group, I'll guess impossible by the time the next DLC launches. I'd never believe it if you told me there was a more boring option than the 'kill XXX adds' weekly missions we had, but I'd have been wrong. At least those didn't require dozens of hours and a full group to complete. And I'd guess most would agree that if having to add a solo/duo added a few weeks or months before a DLC could be launched, we'd rather have it that not. I might be wrong on that one, but the lack of it on this DLC really shows. Another week or 2 of WV wouldn't have been that bad. Assuming one was thought about, but scrapped for time constraint vs never having been on the table.

Please, make possible to buy the Stygian potent water with regular episode currency or marks. Is really difficult to get a group of people to run WV bounties.

Remember when we all said we hated the OP crafting method, and after a couple of Episodes they finally gave us one that was equippable from the beginning, and upgradable along the way? That was awesome.

In the spirit of that, I'm going to propose some similar small changes. Things that wouldn't require the development team to abandon this new direction for the game (even though I deeply preferred the older Episodes with 2 raids and none of this open world stuff). These are small changes to the delivery that would greatly help.

Join Phase/Split Phase. Phasing needs to be something that happens. We need to be able to get into the same phase as our groups. If the phase starts to break that 50 limit and lag is going to be an issue, the phase itself splits, dividing the population in two, but keeping groups together. Better to have 2 shards of 30 people than to have 1 of 50 and then 10 people who can't play.

No timers; minimal waiting. Remember Metal II? You kill Synn. Then Giant Hawkman spawns. Kill Giant Hawkman, then Synn spawns. Back and forth. Forever. Never do they despawn until they are killed. Never is there some stupidly long 5 minute break in between them to bore players into quitting. Boom. Boom. Boom. One after another, always. If we're going to have to spam 80 rotations of this stuff, then let us truly do it at our own pace. Spawn Cosmic Boy, and leave him up FOREVER until he gets killed. When he dies, give it 30 seconds and then spawn Saturn Girl and leave her up FOREVER until she gets killed. Then Lightning Lad. Then Validus. Over and over. Never despawn them before they die. Never force the players to wait for the next one. Let us set the pace.

Cap on this 2nd currency needs to be 9999, like Source Marks. If we're going to have to farm several thousand of these marks, then let us bank them and spend them as we see fit. It's a shame that low level characters can earn the stuff, but cannot actually purchase the Mainframe Mods or the OP catalysts or anything, so they reach the cap. Then, when the finally level up high enough that they can buy those things, they will have to spam the bounties all over again to earn the currency.

Freaking Mods. Lower level characters get a useful piece of attunable gear that will increase their CR from every single boss. Endgame characters get... just the currency. And occasionally a Mainframe Mod. That often comes in the wrong flavor so it doesn't even work for your role. Heck, just give me the same green/blue/purple drop that the low level characters get. At least then I can salvage it for exobytes and pass it down to my alts for something useful, instead of vendoring it for some pathetic couple of dollars. Heck, maybe it'll help me finish some of these purple styles.

Enhanced Purple Style/Legendary Boxes. You might have think your Legendary Subscribers didn't notice when their completion boxes were quietly taken away, and instead of getting tradable versions of the Enhanced style that we could sell on the broker, and occasionally an extra mark, we got... nothing. But that style that we used to get for free and actually be able to sell for a profit, now it became another thing that we have to grind currency for. Gee thanks. You took away something else from an already lackluster subscription package, gave it to everyone else for free, removed one of our abilities to make money and replaced it with an extra grind. Not a good way to treat your supposedly "legendary" customers.

Reduced involvement rewards. You know what role 95% of the game plays? DPS. You know what roles we need more of? Tanks, Controllers, and Healers. You know what it takes to earn full rewards from a bounty? Meeting a DPS threshold. "Hello Nature Healer who has no powers that actually do damage. In order for you to get full rewards, you have to either quit being a Healer and start DPSing, or you need to do a bajillion bow flurry shots and hope that you can score enough damage. Your healing earns you nothing; literally you have programmed the game to grant variable rewards based on the DPS scoreboard, and punish your Support players. Power Out and Healing Out need to count towards credit for the boss. In fact, they should count MORE than DPS, so that maybe these bounties might actually encourage some people to learn their support role. You are punishing a group that we desparately need to see more of.

Bounty Vendor Items made Account-Bound. Everything that can be sold for that secondary currency needs to be made account-bound. It is unreasonable to expect anybody to do these 100+ hour grinds on multiple characters. Not just the cosmetics, but everything. If I buy the OP Catalyst with an alt, it still took me 20 hours of farming to get it. Let me trade it up to my main.

Bounty Vendor items as an alternative. You know how the purple set drops in the content, but we can also just buy it on the vendor in case our RNG is bad? That is good. You know how the Episode Augment Catalysts drop in the content, but we can also just buy them on the vendor in case our RNG is bad? That is good. You know how the OP Item Catalysts drop in the content, and have such terrible drop rates that many players complain they cannot get enough of what they need, even when they run every single lootlock? And how you created the bounties to be an infinitely playable system so that people could always feel productive? And how the OP item catalysts that drop in the content are NOT contained on the vendor? Can you connect the dots and think of a way that we might be able to fix some of this terrible RNG? Bingo! Let's put those things on the vendor as well. Then, if your luck is great, then awesome. But if your luck stinks, you always have the option to grind 10 more hours of bounties in order to just buy that catalyst outright.

Respawn Timers - They should remove the 30 minute cycle and replace it with 2 minute respawn timers on every sub boss following their defeat. (there probably needs to be a gap to keep it smooth). I do digress off your idea a little though and suggest there could then be fire pots like in wonderverse that all have to be set a light in a phase for the larger boss to be summoned, motivating players to cycle bosses, but still giving them the freedom to choose the order or even stay and potentially farm one of the bosses over and over for feats. This would also restore an element of the feel surrounding the previous bounties, but just be more of them.

I agree, the cap should be raised and the currency should be account bound like Quarks, it shouldn't matter what character you're farming the bounties on at any given moment, the reward goes towards an overall account progression pool, to be used on whatever character you see fit.

100% agree here, they were slipped out to compliment the new reward vendor but now cost marks from both DLC and bounties, these need to be altered to bounty only marks if anything, we shouldn't be using DLC marks for rewards we previously got for free, just because you felt the vendor needed padding to make it more appealing, cause that's how it appears/feels.

Couldn't agree more, people need to be rewarded regardless of role when participating in open world bounties, they do seem to be ok now though in terms of rewarding support roles, but there's always room for improvement.

Making the mark account bound is the same as making the rewards account bound and in my opinion is a better option.

Agreed.