So. I have been watching interesting videos from people like Game Maker's Toolkit and a dbd youtuber who gave me an idea. Should advanced mechanics come back? What was the game like pre revamo? For me, fire was unsuseable as it did very little damage. Granted. I was still learning the game back then, but it has made me wonder. Did the am give the powers unique identitys?
No!!! AM should stay gone. They are lazy dps and very unbalanced. Why be nature and electric trying to set up dots when any someone else just does 1234 and nukes the adds. Earth and sorcery pretty much could only use pet builds. And HL was the most boring power. Just keep comboing the power….. nope. AMs should stay gone and never come back in any way.
NO! HELL NO, NO WAY. We spent over a year on the stats revamp to revert AM and its not 100% done yet. We dont ever need to even think about going back to a lazy 12345 system without any margin of loadout possibilities or weapons, AMs and their game updates almost killed dcuo for good
https://dcuniverseonline.fandom.com/wiki/Advanced_Mechanics I played during AM era somewhat, and while I sometimes get nostalgic about it, it was very unbalanced. Basically, every power had a fixed loadout. Any step away from it would result in a damage loss, as well as power regen loss. Electricity and nature were the worst dps powers, to the point that sometimes you were getting kicked out of raids simply because you played that powerset. Ice, Gadgets and Mental were the top 3. Earth and Sorcery were also strong but all their damage came from the pet, if I recall correctly. Gadgets and Mental both had the same pattern: hit three specific abilities and one other ability after that would do a big boom. Ice had that mechanic where you all you needed to do is spam Arctic Gust after getting enough Chill Effects which, again, came only from specific abilities.Quantum relied on the Time Bomb. Combo powers like Celestial and others were precision-based. What is now a Weapon Buff was required in every dps loadout back then to increase damage. Supercharges were uncommon. Powerset tree was also limited. You only had 15 power points and could only unlock so many abilities. To get stats, you needed to invest SP into weapon trees. No augments (had to craft colored socket mods instead), no artifacts. No Water. Although I do kinda miss Bitter Winds being a shield and the old Quantum Tunneling. The game was still, if not even more fun to me - for the reasons that have nothing to do with balance. There are plenty of Advanced Mechanics videos on Youtube. You can see what it looked like in case you're curious. So... no. AM shouldn't come back. Stats Revamp, even with all its flaws, is way more balanced. But that's just my opinion.
I do miss 'some' of the advanced mechanics. It was fun and was very selective for loadouts and made some powers be trash and booted from groups..cough..electric..nature...cough. Best moment is prolly pw and a scorecard that popped up before the other bosses appeared with a time of 49 seconds, iirc. And as if you needed to guess what powers were in that group...gadgets. So much for the speed feat of 15 minutes.
Lets see! Nature and Electric was like someone(s) in Texas kicking rocks that apparently looked good in a vertical format while Earth and Sorcery threw Iceberg sized boulders around at enemies crushing them. Gadgets and Mental were the insta-nukes like in zombies and everything died. Quantum was good at the beginning until they capped it and then was completely useless. The buildup powers hit harder than what timebomb did, so sad. Mental had same setup about and crit for 1m plus and quantum be like 50k. Mental: Go invisible Pop mass terror Damage done: 1 million Quantum: Cast time bomb Time shift: 60k Distortion wave: 80k Tachyon Blast: 60k Time bomb goes off Damage done: 50k How did 200k equal 50k??? I'll never know!
it wasn't a million... it was only like 300K if you split it all up... but mental could invis, psychic resonance, immediately mass terror, reset resonance, 3 contributor burst, mass terror, grandeur, mass terror, 3 contributor burst, mass terror, invis, instant mass terror, ad nauseum so it wasn't exactly "challenging" - nowadays, even though a Mental Might DPS CAN still beat you that badly, there's actually a little effort involved in that rotation... but yeah, no AM, thanks...
1. Some of y'all gotta chill. They just asked a question. They're seemingly new. Very aggressive in here. 2. Time bomb hit for a stupid amount of damage upon its AM release. Everyone went quantum much to my chagrin. Then because they didn't really know how to balance it they put a cap on time bomb based on a percentage of your might. Thats why you got the odd numbers after.
Well. I wasn't expecting a Tsunami of replys, but let give me my 2 cents. Dps powers today have little in the way of standing out bar a few exceptions, and am made each power stand out in a unique way. But the devs didn't realize it left the powers extremely unbalanced. So, the revamp happened and to me. Every dps bar sorc, rage, light and mental don't stand out. In other ways. The balances came with stripping away the identity of the powers. Honestly, if the devs ever make a new mmo. They should try to balance creativity and uniqueness with balance better. Am is where they went too far in one direction and revamp. They went in the opposite direction. Only depth left is to inficit your powers's damage debuff on a enemy and call it a day.
Correction: AMs left every power locked into a SINGULAR useful loadout and rotation, leaving all of the powers woefully more useless than they were before AMs. There was ZERO uniqueness in powersets or rotations. You followed a pre-scripted path of "this ability followed by the next" in a chain order in order to regen power and get the highest potential damage. Any deviation from that set path meant improper power regeneration if you were lucky, and bottom of the barrel DPS numbers if you were unlucky. You seeing AMs as unique is rather baffling. The stats revamp may not have been a homerun for every player, but it was/is magnitudes better than the well intentioned but poorly executed Advanced Mechanics. I think if you actually play/test all of your currently available options now and taking Artifacts into consideration, and you might see that you have more options, or variant ways to play the same powers we have. As opposed to being locked to just ONE optimal loadout and ONE optimal rotation.
I am glad that the AM era is over and don't ever want to see that dumpster fire come back again. It's been years now since we've been away from that era....yet it still cheeses me how Electric and Nature got such a raw deal for too damn long.
I didn't mind AMs, but that's because ice might DPS was one of the beneficiaries of being on the high end of things and now is decidedly in the "meh" category. I'm still not convinced we'll ever really get to a point where there isn't an optimal rotation/loadout for any given powerset/weapon combo/both that just about everyone uses...unless this diversity of playstyle is tons of blue beams being fired at a single target. Much uniqueness.
Well. Judging by everyone's reactions. It seems like AM is a mistake. Hopefully. If Daybreak ever takes another crack at a mmo. They don't repeat their mistakes.
The only thing positive I can remember about AMs was that pvp was better. I mean AMs still played a part in PVP’s downfall but it was still somewhat fun meanwhile I wouldn’t dare touch PVP nowadays.
I like this post^ After revamp, nothing really stood out in differences. I'm surprised that someone else even noticed. All the cooldowns are the same, powercosts are the same, dots are weak as feathers, bursts are like bricks, supercharges are like a pillow full of cotton balls, mods are all the same, how we spec is pretty much the same, cc got nerfed badly, need i go on. There are practically two loadouts for each powerset now, its either weapons (flurry shot) and dots, or superpowers and bursts. To me, thats the same as AM era but with the option of a precision build. Most powers are still useless and really need redone.
If you need to use those 'blue beams' to perform damage being quantum lets say, then its either you dont want to be quantum and wanted to be fire or your powerset is weak as fudge and the only way to deal damage is using an iconic power. Most of the time when i see a person spamming it, i have no idea what power they are as they just spam that iconic. And i swear ppl use movement mode stuff to push forward to try and scoreboard chase and use a spin move so they dont have the 'slow speed' active when coming out of using a power. It is really pathetic what this game has become after stats revamp.
