Dev Discussion GU111: Survival Mode Season 2

I really love to play paper rock scissors without rock, is so interesting. You know what, can we get rid of Scissors, too? Cause heck it gives so much work to fix.
I support kiting, kiting is one of the tools a tank can use, however being max range for the full duration of a fight inst tanking, is just plain boring. I'm against lunge spam and i even suggested resolutions to the problem.

No one talked about gear, I think your hard work should be rewarded sp, gear, etc. However, i'm against artifacts inherent its stats on SM, because 5% health * 3 artifacts is alot of stats. If the developers have in considerations this additional stats, its makes harder to balance or to generalize SM, specially the earlier rounds r1-10, plus the amount of artifacts you have can only be translated in the amount of money u spent, after all thats the definition of p2w not hard work nor skill.



Sorry for not being able to support the game as much as you, I can't afford to spend 200 bucks in the game specially has an university student. I defend if you like something you should support it, I play as premium, in order for me to get in-game cash I'm forced to farm the metro collections and ask my friends to get my tc items. I can tell you is pretty tough, but still that didn't stop me from being in Elite lgs. Should I quit even though I know so much about this GAME? Or try to make it as much skilled as possible?

If you fund me I will be happy to carry u Obsidian senpai, now serious. I believe there should be a normalization of all powers across the board, every power should have the same capability as ice, and vice-versa. If you have people using power tokens to change into ice, you have a problem. I didn't check the API yet, but i can bet there is a lot of liquid and frozen water.
Nahh, I love rolling. I don't have dash attack so thats the only thing I can use to get away, I also use lunge clipped with e-chain, but hey, secret strats.
Well im currently at r19 ,solo tanked until now as rage, with 200 manacles, 160 seven and 139 prototype. I can beat US, but Zeus I dont know yet. I do have a strat to beat him that could prob work for r30, but again i don't have the artis to do it. Getting this far just by pugging is pretty remarkable, you are entitled to think otherwise.
I really want to slap that ice loadout;_; Dam. But once rage, forever rage;_;

Some more feedback:
30 Rounds are great, but having everyone across the server spread out over 15 different checkpoints makes it quite annoying, playing with others, since - especially in higher rounds - people tend to not want to help others as much as lower rounds for obvious reasons.
Cramping the same amount of content time into 20 rounds will make them last forever. So, a way of helping with that could be a weekly checkpoint increase. Every week the next checkpoint gets unlocked without doing anything until round 10 or 20 maybe.

That way its much easier for new players to get into higher rounds for an even greater challenge, but it also helps in populating SM more towards the end. Thinking of last season, people went for high rounds only, after a couple of weeks and players that didnt start or were stuck in round 14 or so had a really hard time to find groups.

The incentive to play low rounds will still be there due to the loot but its going to be more accessible to go into high rounds.

Round 20+ is obviously the endgame, so progressing the auto checkpoint beyond that would destroy the whole point of SM of course.

Example: i reached round 12 in the first week.
1st weeks checkpoint increase will be round 3.
2nd weeks checkpoint increase will be round 5.
and so on.

What would the point be of having 5 tank powersets if they were all normalized? why not just have 1 tank power and force every player to use it? You want to normalize Ice only having shields vs Rage which heals back 85% of all incoming damage? You want to balance earth which relies on defense and or pet tanking against fire which has self heals? That isn't even possible and it's the whole point of the tank powersets being unique. You didn't hear or see the entire game wanting Ice tanks for Trigon COUE did you? nope you saw fire and rage tanks in the corner face tanking multiple eye add waves. Different tanks are used for different things which is the point of having variety.

I agree with PTFreeze

Just posted this on another thread and then saw this one!

'Definitely something wrong with Manta. Sometimes his eye beams don't even register they are hitting you and others its a one shot even while blocking.

In the Mr Freeze round I have had more than one instance where the furnace doors cannot be targeted and you have no way of destroying them.

Besides that I am surprisingly enjoying this season, I would enjoy it more if you could find a tank without an hour of looking on LFG.'

I'm still trying to experiment with manta and see if its maybe range related. Don't think so but still just trying to see if it's intended. But weekends are for feat runs so tune in again tomorrow

I'm completely in favor in every tank having their unique way of tanking, however I believe every tank should have the tools for the job, but first i will do a general breakthrough about what I think its lacking in this game.

Aggro Visualization

I would like to address the first problem dcuo has in regards of tanking that is the poorly aggro visualization. There is no way to know when a boss is aggro'ed or not. Yes, you can spam your pull, use a shield in its face, but u can never be certain when the boss aggro is about to expire.

Aggro Distance

There was a reason why I previously mention aggro visualization, It makes no sense for a person to be at max range to have the full duration of aggro. I would suggest 3 tiers:

• close range -> aggro takes full duration (6 seconds)
• middle range -> aggro expires slightly faster (4.5 seconds)
• out of range -> aggro expires like sonic (1.5 seconds)

It makes no logical sense a boss chasing a 2 miles tank if an healer or a dps are just by his side.

Combat System
We all know my stand on combat system, I think has a tank combat system is all that matters, being able to counter the boss and putting him down the most amount of time is and should be the only way to go, as simple as that.
In regards of atomic, I think there should be adjusted in a way that allowed it to use combos while countering a boss. My suggestion would be something similar with rage but different, atomic tank due to its nature delays all damage received into the future reducing it by performing combos.

Tank Normalization
I believe all powers should have the capability to tank in different situation without compromising their unique designs. I can tank with both ice and rage, so I will explore a bit those, but I'm pretty sure this could be applied to other tank powers.

Rage

We all know the main rage tanking mechanic, while sever punishment is active all damage received is healed back in 85%, additionally we gain the buff Fervor that grants you 50% defense. However, if you take a hit higher then your Health you die. My suggestion would be to grant invulnerability or semi-invulnerability while in Sever Punishment State in combination of a supercharge like vindicator.

For example Vindicator could be something has while in sever punishment state all damage exceeding your total health is reduced preventing you from meeting your demise.

Analysis: This is healthy in way that if you take 2 hits for example from US you die, but assures that u survive the first hit. Plus, you wouldn't have vindicator all the time requiring group coordination and ping pong between tanks.

Ice

Ice has somewhat to interesting SC, Ice Elemental and Hibernation. I don't think Ice needs any buff in regards bosses. But, drastically needs alot of helping with crowd control and especially pulling adds. Ice Elemental, could be the answer, by empowering ice in a way that gave it more accessibility to strong moves, like for example Ice Elemental due to its offensive nature triples all the non shield powers.

Analysis: Could u imagine doing one Inescapable Storm in \|/ directions, or maybe doing 3 gales in 3 different set of adds?(Fie weapons for example) Its healthy and gives space for the tank maneuver.

So again, what u think of this suggestions that require highly coordination between tanks and ping pong aggro vs the current meta of staying out of range the full duration of the fight while letting the support troll/support tank perma lunging the boss?

Bug:

Round 26 King Shark keeps resetting and going back to full health. Worst of all, if he didn't reset 5 times in one fight, we would be in round 27 now. Just lost the will to try again.

I believe the bug u describing occurs if you have a gadgets player in your group that uses invisible, that may cause the boss to reset. Happens in all rounds by the way. Sadly I can't smash my ice loadout never gonna reach that r27 shark

I'm not even using stealth in that round, though I am on the previous round.

I can tell u is something with gadgets, what else you using that could cause the boss to reset?

Pretty sure it's not a bug... just a very rude and unprecedentedly cheesy way for the devs to say "do this one-trick-pony's counter mechanic or we won't let you pass this fight even if you think of a different way to do it," instead of just having him enrage like Mino/Deathstroke do and I'm pretty sure he did the same thing last year (but people generally didn't notice because we... y'know... actually fought bosses while tanking). I don't know why they decided to do King Shark this way..... but basically if you don't actually evade then counter him he will eventually reset.... and the only way to figure that out is to have our time wasted beating Freeze enough times for trial & error to reveal there's only a single, arbitrary way to do KS and that the game has basically become a poorly conveyed "combat" puzzle.

At 26, loadout barely matters, holding aggro barely matters, stats barely matter, artifacts pretty much don't matter at all, powers only matter insomuch that you shouldn't cast them at any time where the animation prevents dodging... it's just "go into range > dodge his PvP attack > counter > repeat" such that we're no longer actually playing a game or engaging in combat, we're exploiting the incredibly dumb AI's scripted behaviour.



Strongly suggest just going back to round 6 and letting the tank practice the roll timing... then doing the same thing with Deathstroke's pre-emptive counter requirements and Lex' RA dodges at 7/8 before doing 27/28 and so on. Becomes a game of finding the AI exploit and you can find it just as easily on 1-10 as you can on 20-30 so there's really no reason to subject yourself to 26-30 without already knowing the exact specific "this is a million times easier than the lunge exploit some people used" cheese for each boss.

What he should have, if the intent is what it appears to be, is a room-wide AoE (like Morgwar's) if he isn't allowed to do his PvP attacks for too long of a period.

Round 25 and beyond makes it feel like zero consideration was given to tank abalnce in that everything becomes an explicit burst eHP check combined with an AI-exploitation check where, once someone knows the boss gimmick, they've effectively won before they've entered and it's just a matter of grinding it out. I don't understand how you can release episodic content with healthy tank balance and variety with consideration given to all tank powers' strengths and weaknesses then turn around and release what's supposed to be this glorious event with the worse tanking balance I've ever seen (even worse than last Season's). You can't just have every single round play to a specific tanking strength. There has to be variety such that different rounds favour different tank powers while giving others a hard time and vice versa.

Fire's tanking kit requires maintaining Fire Soul... which requires us to maintain our hit counter and our PI.... which requires us to be in range, actively fighting the boss. If we go 3s without hitting the boss, our entire tanking kit goes bye-bye and we're basically a DPS with a soft shield until we can get 5 hits in again. Ice's tanking kit requires pressing a button. You made every boss from 25 onwards require either constant movement/evasion or carefully baiting specific attacks... for which it is no longer remotely practical to consistently maintain our hit counter without being animation-locked when the time comes to react or die. Not being allowed to properly counter BBs by lunging them while actually fighting a boss means that Fire is made pointless compared to Ice yet again this SM. Ice just has to press a button and gets DEF+100% for a ridiculous amount of time on top of their beefy shields and high eHP, allowing them to sit their cheesing the AI as seems to have been intended. All of these fights, just like last Season, feel like they were specifically designed for and evaluated exclusively for Ice tanking and this season in particular feels like it was made with no appreciation of the importance of a functioning counter system whatsoever.

Compare clearing R25 as Fire to doing it as Ice. This was the first round where it became clear that Fire tanking wasn't going to be practical anymore, because its where you started to scale the damage-in such that even with Fire Soul maxed, max CR/SP, max possible defense (even with an additional 10-15% from Mystic/EC), max possible health (including all possible group buffs), all max/strongest consumables, and full shielding, it was still possible for a Fire tank to be 1-shot by pretty basic hits that are nothing on Ice... So this is the first round where it became more practical to use a derpy "Ice-lite" max-range weaksauce kite loadout like this instead of actually fighting the boss while kiting and actively PvPing them the way the core gameplay would expect and the way my tanking kit demands...




Then comes R26, where you scaled the bosses to the point that it's not really DCUO anymore, it's just "find the AI cheese" Simon Says test-taking and actual tank combat becomes not only redundant but outright detrimental to cheesing the AI.... so instead of subjecting myself to the same BS I did last year in taking Fire to R30 I saw the writing on the wall and switched to Ice... because if we're just standing around baiting, dodging, and occasionally taunting then Ice has a ridiculous advantage.

This was the second time I had ever tanked as Ice, the first time being the day we cleared round 30 of Season 1, so my experience level with the power is negligible compared to 10 years and thousands of hours on Fire. R25 as Ice, even with an intentionally derpy loadout, was about as threatening/engaging as R11/21 was to Fire. While that doesn't mean that every player is going to have an easy time just because they're Ice, it does mean that an Ice player has a comparatively easy time tanking than Fire to the point that, as Ice, the content was making me drowsy. Even mimicking my derpy ubermax range Fire loadout, the difference was still insulting. I barely had to care about my shields... almost never had to care about whether or not I was in range... knowingly/intentionally sat in multiple simultaneous attacks/mechanics... Completely ignored the Freezing Rain mechanic multiple times out of boredom... constantly ate full-bore combos and sustained attacks... and in general just soaked worst-case scenario damage-in that would have 1-shot my best-case scenario on Fire a hundred times over. The APM difference was also stark and flabbergasting to the point it wasn't even the same game anymore.




The pre-boss adds are more of a threat to Fire than the bosses are to Ice. It's exacerbating. This content has all this fanfare about it then it's released with a gamebreaking counter change that completely screws over a tank power and fundamentally dumbs down the nature of combat in general. To top that off, you scaled the late-stage bosses and adds for Ice's eHP such that even if it weren't for that, even if we could stay in combat and still counter while maintaining Fire Soul, you still made it completely pointless to play as Fire in that our healing capabilities don't do a damn thing if we can't actually take basic hits to survive to heal in our best-case scenarios. You buffed Fire and still managed make the tank balance drastically worse than it was in Season 1 via even worse arbitrary scaling and the removal of a mechanic that Fire requires to function.

I had high hopes seeing the server stability being much better than it was around this time in Season 1 but this is just a gross imbalance. It's honest-to-god so bad that you should be gifting players 2x Power Respec tokens for SM to compensate players on powers which depend on the part of the game you deleted. This would also ensure that what's supposed to be something of a competition is a fair and balanced competition without players having to open their pocketbooks to compensate for the lack of attention paid to tank balance. Because of the Simon Says nature of the later stages, every tank can feasibly still do them.... but the amount of skill and effort required on different powers isn't remotely close and the margin for error isn't remotely the same.

Logged in to double check last night and our same team s still loot locked for round 19 even tho we haven't gotten there yet. We are planning on running again tonight but will probably stop to see if this gets sorted. Seems like a rather large waste of effort to do knowing we won't get any coins.

And no, it will not let us use the lockout as a starting point ie we can not start at lvl 19. Had to try lol.

Manta, still the same and distance (other than just being too far for him to hit) doesn't matter. Sometimes it 2 or 3 ticks thru a block and shield and sometimes does not. I've started saving a shield for it and it's still just a block works or a block let's you die deal still.

And it's not just an UI bug. When I got to 19, I didn't get the data chips. It hurts because if it didn't bug like that, I could have my Freeze Drone now.

At round 23 you're gonna start to need using Amazonium Deflect against that laser if you wanna survive, might as well start doing it now.

I always forget about that. Thank ya. And bummer about the coins. We're only doing 2 rounds a night (so far smoothly) so hoping this gets fixed before we get there. Not going to use rps since it may just lock us out again at the same round.

So i dc'd and my team beat it and i can't get credit

Killer Shark at 16 & 26 needs to be looked at and readjusted. It's a ridiculously cheap fight that is a complete event ruiner.

KIng

shark is ridiculous, this whole SM fater wave 15 is ridiculous tbh.

King shark OS a tank fully full gear fully buffed with 2x HP trinket and hard light shield on.

This is what you call difficulty Daybreak? or skill? This is nothing else than broken mechanics, you can be the best tank in the world and get OS by a simple attack. stupid.

*Breif update* I'm currently at r21 as rage with 200 manacles, 160 seven and 139 prototype.
Thanks to max range cheese and another person countering boss, I'm pretty sure I can beat R30. Yea! (Still sad for not being able to slam that ice loadout)

Since SM is made taking in consideration max artifacts stats, everything from r15 onwards is a 1 shot.

It feels I'm doing R25 on R15, again if this stats from artifacts were removed like legion open world, SM experience in general would be much more enjoyable.
What l previously complain about SM difficulty still upholds true, I just encounter today an Ice tank on round 22 receiving to the face all minataur BB's and still surviving. Bro Canom, US single BB to me gives me 1 shot, If I don't dodge Zeus BB I also get 1 shot.

I love SM being my favourite Oan specially Zatanna fight. Even though I play as premium, SM in my eyes is one of the things that makes this game so unique and exciting.
However, for SM to shine it needs to be made having in consideration all roles. I don't think the game should take the shortest route to resolve a problem, instead of the correct one.
To address the combat system problem, would be interesting to revise all weapons lunge speeds and BB speeds in order to prevent certant weapons from being exploited.

I did sent a pm to Meeps on forums in order to create a discord server that would help testing this SM and saddly I not only got no reply, but also SM didn't reach test server. However, later tomorrow I will contact Meeps and may post the link here.

My normalization word may had been a bit 2 strong, so what I really meant to say was, every power should have the tools for the job. Alot tank powers are struggling because they are lacking either in sustain, mobility, crowd control.
It sucks to die form a single normal range attack from a boss to mitigate this I'm forced to run 2sheilds on top of sever punishment, the way I'm currently tanking is a great example of not having enough tools for the job, I'm literally running away naked when sheilds and sever punishment are on cool down.
The shields should be used for when sever punishment is on cooldown.

Should I be able to run away if I don't have nothing? Yes.
Should I be running away for the duration of the entire fight? I don't think so.