2001

that’s the backstory (things that happen before the game) the actual story as you play through isn’t very coherent and I agree with whoever said it’s just a collection of small side-events thrown together.

There is no real arc’ing story here, which I think is the point that was being made.

2002

Wait, WTF is with the superstat thing? Should I not bother pumping those up with talents now?

Fucking jerkasses.

2003

The superstat change just limits the bonus damage you get at some point in the low hundreds. A quick check at level 20, and I’d just nearly reached it in my two main stats.

Doesn’t bother me, as it means you can branch out a bit without gimping yourself, where previously you essentially had to stack your superstats as high as they could go. That said, I’d be interested to see details about the impact on high end PvP, and how the across the board damage reduction compares to defenses.

Some quick checking in the powerhouse, and the Fire changes seem fine to me too. Pyre still gives nearly as much DoT as it does up front damage, and judging by how I raped people in PvP with it probably did too much before. Thermal Reverbration now is actually better for what I use it for (PvP, where you can’t really get more than one person to sit in the flames anyway), although it’s no where near as effective as it was when you had a ton of people burning. Both changes are less stiff than what I would have done – simply have AIs run out of the fire.

2004

How else are they supposed to sell you retcon tokens for cryptic points?

Of course, a lot of what they did in this patch is baffling. Nerfing particle mine two ways? Seriously? Nerfing thermal reverbration, in a further attempt to force fire players to take the broken presence stat? Nerfing ego sprites, nerfing condemn further, majorly nerfing intellect and as a consequence seriously nerfing power armor players who used it to combat their sky-high energy costs? A hard cap on superstats? There’s just a lot of stuff in here that seems utterly baffling, and it’s made worse by the fact that the game is still utterly without an articulated master plan for what they want game balance to look like. Do they really want to reduce their powers framework to ‘everything is exactly the same, with different graphics’, or is this just a continuing desperate attempt to buy time by making players weaker with each patch to prolong leveling until they have something approaching a reasonable amount of content?

Did they just cap the damage bonus or every bonus (like LR dex scaling?) Maybe their goal is to make everyone so weak, that they can sell ingame damage boosts. Heh.

At this point, the community mood is understandably pretty sour, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for a lot, if not most folks, the expectation is that any power you have that currently works well is going to be made useless or mediocre, while your broken or useless powers will remain as they are, untouched. This is, needless to say, not the mindset you want in a game you’re trying to enjoy.

Yeah, it sounds like whoever their game designers are could be just flat out misreading the statistical data being pulled from the server.

2005

Either that, or perhaps they have some reasons. Fire for example got nerfed because of the brutal power of Fireball + Conflagration. Power Armor is the change that’s got me scratching my head, but then again I never really messed around with that enough to see whether I could break it.

I’m just happy that I’ve heard Tazer Arrow is apparently now in line with what it’s description says it does. Still quite good, but no longer much better than other holds.

I wonder if they’d be better off if they explained a bit more which broken combinations made them consider balancing things? So far, all the powers I’ve used that have been toned down clearly deserved it, once you saw the abusive angle in question.

I’m still ticked though that when the reduced the damage on Sonic Device they apparently made it no longer reliably go off. Or maybe that’s just the lag. :-/

2006

the superstat thing was a stealth nerf the community found out about on ptr, just like the stealth nerf to crafted items. it is just capped at 32%. I just feel compelled to stack dex because i have LR and before they nerfed the dodge rate recently, everyone said you needed like 80% to be effective with it. I only have around 66% and i was formerly at 34% damage bonus from dex.

The nerf doesn’t help me either as really the only stats i use a lot are ego/dex/con. Well, i don’t think it does, but if bullet ballet is counted as a melee attack, str might scale it as well i suppose. I suppose if i had more recovery i could get sonic device and then have the starting energy to do a sniper rifle + sonic device though which would be cool.

I might take a small break from my bullet ballet hero to try to make a space marine though. It will be hard though since i don’t want to make it a munitions hero. Maybe a gadget or melee (space marines like their power axes/swords i think) hero.

2007

Looks like they broke crafting of custom items. Bravo!

2008

Oh, I’d thought it was 35%. Looks like I’m at it then, and hit it fairly early on…

Really, they should have just made all powers do 50% more damage, and ignored the unintuitive damage bonus from super stats. Everyone is going to swiftly reach such low caps.

2009

The higher level you go, the more of each stat you need to reach the cap. Go up one level, and you’ll need more of your superstat to maintain the same damage bonus.

2010

i am 90% sure it is 32% as i was 34% last night and i remember hearing 32% on the ptr forums (the only way you know what is actually in the patch sadly).

That is true roBurky, but you also get better gear to mitigate that so i still think it will be easier the more you level up to hit that cap. At 26 my gear is pretty decent, but it isn’t optimal which is something higher level stuff would fix, yet i am easily above the cap in both superstats. I don’t even focus on ego much at all compared to dex (i think i have like 130dex and 100 ego from memory).

ps anyone know any good ways to go HEAVY gadgets and still do good? I think my beta gadget char did much less damage (as well as generally being significantly worse in every way) than my current munitions hero and that was before the gun/heal bots were eviscerated.

2011

Nothing whatsoever was changed about the combination of Fireball + Unstable Accelerant + Conflagration (or any other fire DoT). The change was to Pyre, and to Thermal Reverberation, the fire energy recovery passive.

2012

Not so much. There aren’t that many good damage dealers in the gadgeteering tree. Orbital Cannon with Anvil of Dawn is fantastic, of course, and a must have. Experimental Blaster is terrible. I don’t know about attack toys, but I see a lot of people using the munitions bots, particularly in turret mode, and they seem pretty useful. Most of the gadgeteering passives are crap - unstable… something… a passive that returns energy every time a power comes off cooldown, used to be great for power armor, but was nerfed into the ground and now returns almost no energy whatsoever.

Sonic Device was nerfed, particle mine, already the worst AOE in the game, just got nerfed even more, as part of their new ‘Click PBAOE powers must never be worth taking’ policy. What else does that even leave? Chainsaw Gauntlet is fantastic in melee, but as such, will probably be nerfed soon. I hardly see the healing bots anymore, after their nerf, so cannot speak to their current effectiveness.

2013

I’ve stopped playing (it got me to re-up back to City faster than I thought I would, actually, so there’s that), and am now in the phase of being mainly interested in whatever the game turns out to be in about a year. I do think there’s a really good game in there struggling to get out, and it’ll be a shame if it can’t.

I do like to skim the forums from time to time for entertainment value, and just now found this unsurprising (but still funny) gem from the poor bastard who’s the main community rep at this point:

…Currently, we’ve got 6 community reps spread across two games and three languages, and there’s nothing we can do to fix that.

Which I realize is nothing unusual for an MMO’s forums, but is one of those nothing-unusual things that are still remarkably baffling.

2014

You can no longer so easily use Thermal Reverberation to fuel Conflagration. Unstable Accelerant also no longer stacks as well with Pyre’s DoT.

2015

You’d need to take advantage of the AoE attacks combined with Gadget’s damage boosters. Sonic Device is still quite good, typically killing groups of Henchmen in one shot. Toxic Nanites is good. Haven’t tried the Miniaturization power, but it looks amusing at least. You’d want an AoE from outside Gadgets though, although the energy builder I guess works. Make sure to test it out, as Toxic Nanites at least doesn’t seem to work with all AoEs (it does work with Pyre).

Chainsaw is also decent , perhaps with Entangling Mesh, and I disagree with Quatoria that it’s due for a balancing. Melee is relatively weaker than Ranged, and I haven’t seen any steps towards exacerbating that. If anything the majority of melee attacks should be boosted to the level of Chainsaw, Laser Sword, and Scything Blade, though I haven’t seen any steps that way either.

Unstable Molecules might be workable, although you’d have to find a quickly cycling power (Shuriken? Grenade?), as the main point is to work its healing upgrade. Not great, but it does work in Support Role, which is pretty good.

2016

So oddly enough it looks like Black Planet will actually be buffed and not nerfed by this patch (unless her stat damage buff was much above the cap – no idea offhand). But none of her electricity powers were touched, and they actually seem to have improved the arcane circles by eliminating the 100% energy cost, (the defense circle was already overpowered IMO) so what the heck…

2017

Okay, so the topic is totally irrelevant, I know. But here’s an update on where things are today:

* Critter damage was decreased last night, however players report an increase. We are investigating this immediately to find the cause.
* Defenses from items were not touched in the patch, yet players are reporting a decrease. We are also investigating this.

As you can see from the above points, neither of the changes that the community is reporting were intended, and the designers are ripping apart the code as I post this to get to the root of the issue immediately. We apologize profusely for the frustration this is causing you today, and I’ll update this thread with more news when I get it. Thank you all for your patience.

Daeke

Oy. The fun part - both those problems were reported in the PTR forums, before the patch went live. There really is no actual function for the test server, it seems.

2018

I remember seeing one of the community reps confirm the nerf to crafted items on one of the huge threads on the subject on the ptr forums. This may have just been the stat values and no the defenses though.

Jasper: i’m not really worried about minions as sonic blaster combined with sonic device will probably still destroy them, but i don’t really see any heavy hitters for use against stronger stuff in the gadget power set other than than chainsaw. Orbital cannon is nice, but i don’t believe it is comparable to the attacks of other power sets power wise due to the long delay.

quatoria: remember the time they said they made respecs cheaper but the cost actually went up…

2019

And also apparently no function for Cryptic QA. How can you not test an announced feature in a new patch?

2020

So what do I look for to know when I’m wasting talents on my super stats?