Dev Discussion GU111: Survival Mode Season 2

That was found and fixed yesterday. Should be hotfixed soon. Trophies you've earned will be there still after the fix.

Could I potentially buy the cosmetics for my alt that’s not at the required cr

Minor issue. Johnny Quick and Lex Luthor have the wrong adds in their round, like they’ve swapped. Doesn’t really affect gameplay adversely, just triggers my OCD.

Fixed and checked in. It will go out in a hotfix soon™

it's an event made for players like you... Devoted

you have fun, I play Everquest instead

issue with the johnny quick fight, after doing his mechanic where he summons illusions of him self he will sometimes teleport outside the map

God do I live SM the one time I feel like a Alpha playing this game. The one piece of content that requires team work failing and coming up with ideas.

Experienced one glitch today. We took a quick break after level 13 to go buy some more supplies. Came back in and it told us we were loot locked till level 19. Aside from that, still only the black manta eye beam sometimes killing when blocking and sometimes not hurting at all. Feeling like it's not intended.

FYSA the changes to lunge have broken the game's counter system in that now it's just, in SM, a "knock your target down while you eat full damage to the face" system, except against a few specific block breaks while pre-lunging with a Rifle. We confirmed this by checking on test server to ensure it wasn't simply a server lag issue.

Countering, like in any game, is supposed to actually prevent the damage from the attack being countered. In DCUO, that means getting credited with a "dodge" when properly PvPing your target. The lunge changes have resulted in the following issues:

- The window for getting a dodge credit on a lunge counter now is infinitesimal to the point that it's meaningless (especially when combined with server issues). We basically either knock the target down before they reach the damage proc part of the animation or we eat full damage as though we never countered the attack at all (or worse if we cancelled a more defensive action in order to counter).
- Some combos deal their damage the instant they reach the final input of the combo. This is the case with Solar Flame. Solar Flame is supposed to be HOLD > TAP and is supposed to be counterable for the entire portion of the combo. In testing, getting the "dodge" was only possible when getting credited for a counter a few frames before the Solar Flame part of the combo actually began. SM Lex Luthor has a special variant on Solar Flame that is TAP TAP TAP, which makes it uncounterable until it reaches the Solar Flame part of the combo... and since the Solar Flame damage procs immediately this means that Lex Luthor this year at higher levels effectively has a free, uninterruptable, Skull++ tier 1-shot-capable attack that can't be pre-empted, interrupted, or avoided in any way if the player is in range (which 3/4 tank powers kinda have to be to keep their kits up).
- Standard HOLD BBs like Hammer Toss/Stomp Smash can only have their damage prevented now if the attack is pre-empted, ideally with a rifle. The timing for the counter on those BBs was always tight but now it's outright disgusting if we aren't heavily pre-lunging.
- Rolling Barrage and Flip burst can only be counter-dodged if we have immunity leading into them (they cc before they become counterable) and even if we do it looks like only the final tick of the attack might sometimes be mitigated (on test server, live lag may make that worse).

The lunge-away spam exploit needed fixing but not like this. We now have three tank powers with kits that require active combat participation, meaning we kinda gotta be in range more often than not... and if we can't counter in SM it's kinda busted altogether. This wasn't an issue in Season 1 in that no matter how bad the server lag got on most bosses their combos could still be mitigated with a properly timed counter. This gives Ice a cheesy advantage in this SM vs the repeating bosses in that it doesn't have to remain active in combat, can keep its mitigation kit capped when out of range, and never actually needed to counter in the first place as long as its shielded.

I appreciate it might be challenging as this has already launched but this is probably the most fundamental mechanic in the entire game. If you could roll a fix out to either adjust the damage proc timing on BBs & ranged combos in this SM to actually allow the damage to be prevented the way it's supposed to be or to fix the lunge mitigation window when using the mechanic correctly by actively countering a target's attack, it'd be swell.

SM isn’t designed to be easy. It’s the hardest content on the game as intended. Work on your in game abilities and not depend on gear and artifacts only form a team of players you know and work on it.

I would literally quit this game smh this is the entire point of SM the one mode where progression means something.. this move would literally kill of the rest of the hard core player player base

Nah you not saying what people want this form is care bear status you have the normal raids and events that can be walked through without effort or team work don’t mention SM at all.

Agreed. I don’t know why they didn’t just add a cooldown to the lunge immunity. It was the spamming that was the issue, not the mechanic itself. Also, this all goes doubly for atomic, it’s hard enough to cancel put of combos to lunge but getting it early enough in the animation to negate the damage is damn near impossible to do 90% of the time.

Yeh as Fire I can still at least pre lunge some things before the damage procs but I thought I was going crazy when I'd still always get dropped to low health no matter when I'd counter Solar Flame in particular. Then noticed if I didn't pre-lunge other things the counter wouldn't actually protect me. Pretty dumb that it's currently safer for me to sit their channeling than it is to properly counter the attack. Felt like half the fun of SM was mastering their PvP while tanking so this is disappointing.

Edit: Also, both on live and on test, the "dodge" text almost never appears so those times where the counter seemed to work I was just stopping it before it started, not actually receiving the benefit of the mechanic.

Gonna be honest this is by far the most busted SM ever released.
There is currently no skill in this SM, any noobie tank with 200arts is gonna surpass any experience player that just has 160 arts. There is only one way to solve this REMOVE THE stats of artifact. They are already overloaded with bonus, there is no need to increase the inbalence in a content that is made to prove your skill.
Combat System, again the current changes are awful, yes you can't abuse lunge, but now u can't also use the combat system the most basic concept EVERY Tank should know. The lunge spam problem was terrible addressed, a reajustement of the timer in the fastest weapons or a limit of lunges per second would have solved the problem while incentivising skilled tanks to active tank the boss.
Currently the unbalance across all tank powers is so extreme that it really DOESN'T demonstrate skilI.
Want to beat R30? You have tons of money? Upgrade Manacles, Prototype and EoG to rank 200. Buy a power token to ICE, buy a moviment power to get the overloaded super-speed, then use the following rotation: 1)Pull, 2)Wind Ward clipped with HL Sheild, 3)Phase Dodge, 4)Amazonian Deflection, 5)Dash Attack.
How to tank bosses? That's easy, use either 2) or 3) then pull, then 4) wait for boss to come near then use 5) to get out of range.

If you guys really want to make SM skilled based alot of things have to change. First Active tanking should be the Only way to pass the rounds, not running out of range(aggro drop or faster decrease in aggro would resolve this issue).
Second all moviment powers should be revised and made equal if super speed has phase dodge all moviments powers should have phase dodge. Additionally, there is a desperate need for more tanking options, the iconics powers are yet to receive an update since the game was released.

In terms of balance all tanks powers should be equal, what's the best power or interaction a tank let's say ice can do: HL Sheild + Wind Ward, how much damage can that sustain? Based on that every tank power should be normalized, using rage as example, Sever Punishment + HL Sheild? Again there is the need to normalize all the tank powers across the board, if the only tank capable of tanking SM is ice there is a problem.
There is alot of solutions like pre-defined values etc, but in the end if a x value kills one tank in the best scenario of that given power, every other tank power should die too.

You want to make SM skilled based? Analyze Fie 1st Boss amazing for tanks, Check MachE (Hive Master) Donna Troy, a boss hitting like a truck ins't skill is just pure and only Raw Stats. (CouE Trigon is the pinnacle of a terrible boss, there is barely any meaningful interacts, eyes damage can't be dodged and it just raw stats)
Still want to make SM Skilled based?

So having the best gear shouldn't be a factor when creating Survival Mode content in 2021? We should balance SM around 120 artifacts? Does that sound logical when the groups specifically trying to complete SM will already have multiple rank 200 artifacts? Dodge rolling is also a fundamental mechanic of a tank but you didn't mention that, just lunging, which would seem would be the only reason why so many groups completed Season 1 considering SM has been out for over 2 days and there are only 13 groups in the entire world that have cleared Round 25. Round 25 isn't even hard, you still have much harder rounds from 26 through 28 and yet so little amount have completed Round 25 so far. That would seem to point that this Survival Mode is actually much more difficulty, or perhaps you would like to slap on that ice loadout and demonstrate how simple 25-30. I'm sure with how little skill it takes this SM you shouldn't have any trouble just breezing through it for us all to see.

look forward to it, thanks

I wasted almost the whole day in R16 yesterday (as Tank) because of trying to counter king shark instead of rolling. Also had some serious stealth lag issues, however, it just doesnt feel right to go max range as a Tank and dodge 90% of the fight.

Dodging as a mechanic is perfectly fine for tanks... but not if the fight consists of 90% dodge... or not? R16 felt like R26 by the amount King sharks range attack hits imo. Meaning, that in R26 any missed dodge is a guaranteed death. This is also kind of ok since its meant to be hard, but ultimately forcing a 2 Tank setup again... wich misses the point of a 4 man SM completely like in Season 1.

Overall agree tho, that it has to be balanced off max stats ofc.

I simply dont get why you can lunge an enemy and get the full damage of its attack... i lunged king shark within 0,1 sec and i still got the full damage... this is super frustrating. After finally beating R16, R17 and R18 were 1st try... now im at Ultimate Soldier and its like king shark all over again... annoying, sadly.

Would love to get the "Lunge spam" formula back. Meaning, you gain invincibility for the next attack after a successful lunge. But instead of working after any lunge (like SM Season 1), working only after a successful counter. If that doesnt work, whats the point of having a counter system in the first part for instant hitting attacks...?

I will test it further today, but every time i counter an enemy, the damage will still hit me (when its a weapon combo - like king sharks stomp smash or Ultimate Soldiers Mortar).

It was the same concept in the past, instead of being out of range for counters you could face tank with a single neck mod that when you blocked absorbed 80% of incoming damage. Imagine a Tank artifact came out that said it absorbed 80% of incoming damage? There would be so much complaints saying that's OP but older tanks that is 2nd nature because we had a simple white neck mod that made it infinitely easier to face tank. You pick your poison, you either have something like fortified blocking which makes surviving in melee range trivial or you range tank/kyte.

I'm not saying that lunging was in a perfect state after the adjustment, but who's fault is that? the community for abusing the living hell out of an exploit and then defending said exploit because "working as intended" so of course the developers are going to take the path of least resistance and just remove the damage component of a lunge which was the route of the issue.

As for forcing a 2 tank setup, SM since 2014 was the exact same pushing 4 tanks in a 8 man group, once again that was 2nd nature to expect that if you wanted to proceed to certain rounds you had to have the required group setup, no different for Season 2. If anything Season 2 is even easier, I didn't even switch battle troll until Round 20, I was just at DPS 1-20 and there was no power issues or needing debuffs.

While the way the counter system is now is broken, they can't balance tank powers with this method. Eg. Ice has the highest and most consistent eHP because that's all it's got to survive.. that's its whole kit. It doesn't heal, doesn't have pet mitigation, doesn't gain health. If other tanks had Ice's eHP they'd be effectively unkillable while active in SM, which wouldn't be fair either and they wouldn't really be tanking anymore. Different situations favour different tank powers and the problem with Season 1 and Season 2 is that all of the Season 1 bosses and 8/10 of the Season 2 bosses play 100% to Ice's strengths and only 2 bosses have a meaningful chance of capitalizing on its weaknesses. Other tanks have to do all the same things Ice does with much less useful & effective raw, instantaneous mitigation/eHP and while jumping through way more hoops to keep their respective kits up (which, if they don't do, they'll simple die). If they wanted it to be balanced, they'd need a mix of encounters that played to the different tank powers such that no one power had an overall/discernable advantage. Some non-SM fights are trivial on some tank powers and challenging for others and vice versa, regardless of stats/artifacts. DCUO achieving balance of diverse powers via content variety is one of the game's greatest strengths, so it's flabbergasting that SM has been a fairly one-dimensional exception so far (ie. "Make it hit harder!" eventually only works with one tank power).

I agree that Ice alone will not carry a tank that lacks the knowledge/gear/skill through SM but the dodge rolling thing actually makes it even worse in favour of Ice on the bosses that have an encore from Season 1 (and if they're just spamming roll, then on every boss where they're doing that). On Fire we can't exactly just ditch my Fire soul to be pre-rolling when they get to their BB phases (and we can't be maintaining Fire Soul via ranged taps or we'll be 1-shot by a lunge counter). We can't transition from active tanking to rolling fast enough to do it reactively due to the animation times and server... and we can't do it proactively without either letting our Fire Soul expire or clipping with PD or comparable (which defeats the purpose). That leaves zoning or outright ignoring the mechanic and hoping to survive as the only consistently viable options.

Other tanks have to maintain their active tanking kits or even non BBs will 1-shot (for example simply initially pulling the bosses, or even high level adds, on Fire is the most dangerous part of every encounter because if they decide to immediately open with something that normally needs countering before Fire Soul is maxed, they have a good chance of 1-shotting through mitigation). This basically ends up just being a different flavour of cheese as last time because 3/4 tank powers have to actually fight a boss and one tank power gets the highest eHP by pressing a button and can just react, zone, and mitigate (which, tbf, doesn't make it universally good outside of SM... but SM really shouldn't give certain tank powers such a disadvantage against 8/10 bosses). This isn't an attack on Ice or on Ice players, just that the current system in this SM is pretty broken. Without even wiping on climb it just straight up feels wrong as a tank right now, even if I was Ice tanking.

To be fair, it's been out for less than 48 hours over two days during the work week (eg my group has only had ~4hrs to climb and had to stop for our irl schedules after completing 18 despite never having issues/wipes). Also people are just starting to realize that the counter system is actually fully broken and not just the lunge-away exploit, and only a handful of people have the SP and/or group buff setup needed to shrug off unmitigated BBs so there's gonna be some major adjustments for a lot of tanks to have any hope of survival.

100% agree the community shouldn't have exploited lunging but it shouldn't have worked like that in the first place. Other games manage to have conditional counters, ie. counters that only work on the things they're meant to counter without negating damage from every source. Agreed removing the dodge reward on proper counters was the path of least resistance but this has created a sillier situation. It's actually worse now in that we don't even have the option to play properly anymore. It would be like deleting prec attacks from the game to stop weapon spam speedhackers.

Ideally, only the dodge from lunging at the wrong times (or in the wrong directions) should have been removed. Barring that this needs to be fixed via either:

1. Moving the damage profiles of counterable attacks far enough to the right to prevent all of these BBs from ignoring the fact they've been countered to make them work like they did before from a PVE standpoint (especially Lex' Solar Flame, for which it appears to be impossible to prevent the damage from procing because he has a bastardized version of the combo). This would likely require the most effort and would be the only way for them to allow these BBs and non-forecast ranged combos to retain their extreme, skull-tier damage.
2. Drastically reduce the damage of non-skull SM BB attacks.

Bonus Point: Fix the way that Ice temporarily loses all of its defense buffs for a split second before block kicks so it has a reason to actually do block mechanics instead soaking stuff to avoid the risk of complete mitigation loss. I'd recommend this be done by having the block buff kick in before Ice Armor disappears instead of the other way around... just for it to be such a tight overlap that it wouldn't be abusable from a practical standpoint.

Option 2 is likely the path of least resistance. It's also the only fix that would simultaneously address tank balance this Season, as there really shouldn't be one tank that has the best chance of surviving non-forecast 1-shots by simply pressing a button and rolling around while ignoring combat mechanics while other tanks need to actively engage the bosses in combat. I mean... we put a Skull on Lex Luthor's mechanics.... which are some of the most blatantly forecast attacks in the entire game and which give the most reaction time. If we're gonna simultaneously make every 1-shot capable BB's damage essentially unpreventable then that doesn't make a lick of sense.