Test Discussion GU97: Weapon Combat Update

That has nothing to do with the developers needing to alter the functionality of a power or artifact. That is on the individual(s) testing damage amounts to not use a Controller or other outside buffs that will skew the results or at the very least factor them in when comparing results.

As Crappy said, we need standardized testing procedures to follow so everyone is on the same page. A player giving out standardized testing procedures will hold little to zero weight but if a Developer does it, like one did back in the day, then more are likely to listen and follow along.

honestly i find it quite ridiculous how invested players are in numbers. seeing a name on top of the leader board is more satisfying than actually just having fun. which is why ill never put doing damage before playing my support role.

Devs just went through adjusting weapons to make them more achievable to play with in content something the game has been lacking since revamp and not much "thanks devs" or "nice to see some improvements" going around just because its not (perfect yet) or because my out of whack artifact is nerfed and now says 12% buff. just a bunch of tears and complaining

This says weapon balance not powers vs weapon balance or scoreboard balance.

in my opinion if you dont like the update you were never a fan of weapons to begin with you were a fan of the venom wrist 54% damage buff obviously

And that's why I have 4 stages when i test weapons:
- by myself
- troll dump
- troll dump + tetra
- troll dump + cog + tetra

So that I know what my min and max damage parses are and what situations I can and can't compete with

If I have to lay out standards everyone will listen OR ELSE!!!

Haha jk, but if we do as players end up having to layout some standards I hope that people who are serious about testing would follow them.

Or else they won't get tacos after we finish testing. More to go around ^_^

Shhhh your not supposed to tell them about the tacos!!

That will never happen lol, just look at how many dcuo players either post results on the forums here with zero context or stats at which they were tested, look at the youtubers who post dps videos or guides and don't show stats or even damage parsers sometimes or still have them set to after combat. Look at some of the test server videos were weapons are tested with multiple pets and trinkets being used in rotations.

You can't even use damage parsers as an indicator as precision. You could do 5 WM combos in 10s with 1 weapon and then only do 3 with another in 10s and then you say weapon 1 is way better look at its damage like wut? i've yet to see actual spreadsheets of weapon baselines being tested by many of the "weapon testers" giving feedback with crits not spec'd and doing 30-50 combos gathering a damage range and comparing to what it is currently on live server or finding information from before to see where the actual "buffs" and "changes" occurred. You can't even start to get practical testing with artifacts or powers until that is done. People think they can just spec a weapon max their stats with 200 artifacts and go to the 3 targets and do combos and think that is actual "beneficial testing"

It's not all on the players as they released too much content at once to be done in 2 weeks. I, myself didn't even get to weapons we had 22 artifacts with new ranks to test and combinations at 200 for synergy and then a solo, alert, 2 raids, 2 elite raids with constant changes to address that players are spread to thin for feedback. Not to mention they had a double mark weekend & double nth metal weekend on live server and expect players to spend hours on test server as well at the same time.

Agreed but there are still a few of us who actually test things and it would be nice for others who are interested to be able to have something to go by.

From today's notes:

I'm noticing that DP Sweep Shot has been fixed. Some other attacks may have been tweaked too.

Was literally signing in to test some things myself since this was probably the final pass. 1 thing less to do.

Just like I did with celestial and it's one of the more balanced powers. The issue isn't personal agendas, it's not enough voices. It's not enough results to compare each other to. The personal agenda argument is dumb, cause everyone has a power or rotation they want to be viable, otherwise they wouldn't be following the testing forums or testing in the first place. Sure, some lie and bend the truth, but when you have multiple people testing the same thing and posting results, it's easy to tell who the phonies are.

I don't think people really understand how much power and influence they have with a test server that's free to everyone...

Wait! There's tacos?!

Although i appreciate the sentiment you're expressing, i can't say i entirely agree.

There are 100% personal agendas when testing that is because players cannot test without their personal biases showing, including myself, that is why players aren't really good testers

This isn't a critque of you but celestial is an example of your own personal bias.

You care about the other powers, but celestial is your favourite, so although you have a level of interest in the balance of other powers your primary focus is celestial and that creates a bias that can and at times certainly does affect the game.

There are also players who quite openly test content while skewing data, skewing feedback and they also attempt to find and exploit things only to not report them so they can be abused later, this isn't by any means you by the way, I'm only saying this because we both know these people exist.

You're also right about there not being enough voices and if im brutally honest i think we're all to blame for this and I'm by no means excluding myself here, but at times us players drive others away through poor communication that is sometimes even destructive.

Calling each other scrubs, no tolerance for misunderstandings and no desire to really rationally explain or positions, this is often done to the point where people that might have otherwise provided valuable testing can no longer be bothered.

We have to remember that testing might be free, but it still takes your time and your time is worth something, if you think other players are railroading your feedback or that the devs aren't listening or are only listening to a select few people even if that isn't true and is only a perception, players won't participate.

I think the devs need to make an effort to engage with new players in the testing section and not just quote the usual suspects because that's how that perception arises fair or otherwise.

If you want an example look at where we are now, i railed against vwd and prec imbalances numerous times on these forums and there were a few savage players that just continued to lie about it, continued to try and villify me, tear me apart and make me look like an idiot and here we are now with a nerf to the vwd and the weapon balance pass that should've happened ages ago, I'm glad it's happening now and i guess it turned out I was right all along, most people would've just given up though and wouldn't have bothered given the persistent attacks that came in from the usual prec players.

I have been quietly testing a few things over the past few weeks and i honestly haven't had a lot of time to do it, and although i think there's definitely some room for improvement, we're heading in the right direction.

As was said earlier in the thread i just hope the momentum is maintained when this goes live and that the devs spend a few months continuing to tweak things and not leave it another 12 months.

Metal Part 1 will be out in 2 days. This thread has the most number of comments which means it is safe to say that theres a good amount of issues that needs to be addressed. And yet, were not even getting any form of updates from DCAutymn.

*crickets*

Breaking this game single-handedly.

*crickets again*

See, comments like this piss me off. I'm irritated as well at the lack of communication exhibited in the thread, but that is by no means reason to accuse them of single-handedly breaking the game. This game has had bad code for years and several of the issues with weapons and powersets are things that were bad design moves that we're trying to loophole and find a way around the issue without having to redo the entire system. Given by your status on the forums, I would assume you're new to this section and don't know that Autymn wasn't here for previous weapon updates in the past. Getting brought up to speed on formulas,the way weapons and abilities behave, and how we "want" them to behave isn't something you pick up and deal with in 2 weeks. Weapons are lowkey the most complicated system in the game when it comes to testing because you have baseline weapons without clipping, weapons with might clipping, weapons with speed clipping, weapon mastery without clipping, and weapon mastery with speed clipping, each of them needing to be accounted for in relevance to each other as well as to might powersets, dual scaling factors from precision and might, and different powersets sync well with different forms of the following. And while we as a playerbase have high standards in terms of bug fixes and developers being able to find and execute solutions in a short time period, this is realistically not the case in every scenario especially for bigger projects and any veteran tester knows this. I at least give credit to Autymn for attempting to bring weapons where we needed them. And despite the rants of many people on the forums, I have had the most fun on test server in the past two weeks than I have in years since back when stats revamp was first being tested and before that back before WM and AM were introduced to the game. And currently, I have Dual Wield, Martial Arts, Dual Pistols, Bow, Brawling, Handblasters, and One Handed that coupled with the right loadout can produce in the same range if not above where Rage and Earth parse (50-60). Going from 1 wm combo to 7-10 hybrid combos for aoe melee and last time I checked, we had 4 wm combos instead of 1 that can produce good damage ranged and we have HB solar flame clipping back that can compete with Nature and Elec might based if you're Gadgets or Mental. . That is as Proxy said a step in the right direction. And I still have to finish testing tomorrow to see if the WM combos got buffed on melee to add to the list I previously mentioned. What's breaking the game isn't the developers, it's people like you jumping on the bandwagon to insult someone as soon as you see a problem but never being grateful for the things that you have.

I agree with everything basically, but another point I want to make is a lot of people also stick with what they know. Example, I know celestial the best, so I stuck with that most of the revamp. When players try to breach over into territory that they're not familiar with, that often leads to personal attacks and others accusing of them of breaking their powers, which is why I'd rather we have many players with bias for certain powers of weapons to test what they're good at instead of a small group of players trying to cover everything. I don't know HL as well as others, so you won't see me over in a HL thread trying to provide feedback, I'll leave that to the experts.

I get what you're saying about destructive behavior and pushing testers away, which is why I think we just need more voices, period. Enough people giving feedback it increases the pool of information for the devs to pull from so not one person's feedback stands out over the rest which will partially help eliminate that bias where it seems like they only listen to certain people. Until we have that, large updates like this will always be wonky and confusing with folks stepping on each other's toes trying to get to the same destination.

I do hope this thread didn't discourage them from working on weapons some more, but part of me is worried if they feel they can't get them right, then weapons will be abandoned like PvP was.

Well said!!

I have to agree, I tend to also wonder too though whether testing shouldn't be incentivized, at the moment the developers are relying upon the goodwill of the player base to test the game and it seems to me like some times player feedback is perhaps relied on just a little bit too much, I'm sure that isn't necessarily perceived to be the case, but it seems like a lot of weight goes in to player testing, especially in that last 2 weeks of DLC development when it goes on test.

I think it would be great if they started giving people exclusive rewards to incentivize them to test and participate in the threads with meaningful feedback, that way the players aren't being expected to effectively work for free on a game they're then helping develop, just a thought I guess.

I know on SWTOR for example they're giving people rewards for testing.

I'll leave it there though cause yea this is a weapon thread

Step in the right direction? What's the point of buffing every weapon if they all parse lower than every might power in every single way. Yes we got balance between weapons in what way? You still are going to use 1 weapon for each s/t aoe melee aoe range because it isn't balance and the only difference is the weapons parse way lower than might now lol. 30k parsers on 3 targets where might lowest power can hit 40k easily and 50k with 200 rank artifacts. Sure this is a step in the right direction, I agree the attempt was valid but it didn't work out. If you think prec is in a better state because you can use more weapons that all equally do little damage, you are right. Now we can use any weapon because it's all bad. I don't care because I was always staying prec no matter how bad it is now. Those who swap to prec and have to swap now to might is the ones I feel bad for. I don't have to worry about how good my dps is when I am lucky to have a good league who can beat elite content without artifacts if we tried hard enough. The others though good luck to them.

^^^This! It blows my mind that this game continually introduces major game play changes at the exact time that new content is being released. There have been 5 months since the last episode and 5 weeks since the Switch launch. The artifact and weapons pass should have been on test at the switch launch so players over there would have known major combat changes were taking place in a little over a month. This also would have allowed time for player to test these changes before having to test new content.