March 9th 2017 Update Discussion

[mjmxiii]

Hi Sparton,

Just to reinforce Slauki's post.

First, quick selection for teams/toons would be very much appreciated.

Second, and this is big, the issue with the Prisoner really is that it allows teams to attack with immunity first round no matter what. Top players with Prisoners used to be able to go with Hell Hound or Artillery Dog against non prisoner teams, so they would pretty much only lose to other prisoner teams. (I'm guessing ones with "taunt fest" or a full GRE + AoF)

Now prisoner teams don't even need a Hell Hound or Artillery Dog, and they can go with immunity against other prisoner teams too. I mean, top players with prisoners will have a hard time losing.

I recently pulled an artillery dog and after using it I can say I was not fully aware how big of an advantage going with immunity first round really represents, it's HUGE. (I'm using mine without any skill shards and with lv3 talismans just for fun, that's how big that is).

I'm convinced that this is the unbalance that creates the gap (showed in our weekly results thread) between guys with prisoners and guys without him, and the immunity talismans made it worse.

So, I think it's either taunt fest for everybody, or no taut fest for everybody, and I actually think taunt fest is necessary with the current AI.

There is no real counter to the prisoner's passive, perhaps the best thing would be to change it's passive to siege. Lot's of lv 5 toons but, really, nothing matches him, not even close.

This is sad for me to say, but I was wrong, some hard nerfing is indeed needed.

(sorry guys with prisoners!)

agree with you on the dogs mentioned.. artillery has been a game changer for me.

Prisoner should be left alone and the chars that are "bosses" in the game should render passive aggression inactive.
AG, WM, CG could easily be his true nemesis

[slauki]

Siege strips a lot of defensive options from you, but neither Angel of Pain nor Death Dog are particularly durable, and Angel of Pain won't do a lot of damage to you unless it burns most of that team's power on it's power skill. They're still very potent characters in the arena, and we are keeping that in mind when considering changes and additions for subsequent updates (including potentially improving Immunity and Shell talismans if necessary).

thank you for the very detailed explanation, i really appreciate and respect that.

the problem is that siege takes away all possibilities to defend against stuns, freezes , taunts and blinds.everything else isn't that important i think. so basicly you are naked against siege.
so if you go 2nd, chances are very high, that you cannot take control of your team and so you will loose very high % of the time. then we have a luckfest, a tauntfest and
not a strategical game. okay i get that defenses should have something to gain some hold% but it should be something reasonable not something gamebreaking like that.

that said, the blessed ones with the prisoner don't have this problems when attacking, which is an unbelivable huge advantage. i condsider this even
as a unfair advantage, and i hope the numbers of the next weekly pvp threads will proove me right. i hope one guy will come up with
600 fights and 600 wins, and i really belive it's easily doable to win every single fight out there when you have the prisoner...not to mention the huge time and attacking advantage some guys
like jofer have.

anyway, still happy about the direction of the game, and i really belive/hope you guys will iron this out soon. understandable that you need more data, but i'm very sure
the metadata will show these imbalances very clear, if you put on the right filters

cheers

[gmac]

agree with you on the dogs mentioned.. artillery has been a game changer for me.

Prisoner should be left alone and the chars that are "bosses" in the game should render passive aggression inactive.
AG, WM, CG could easily be his true nemesis

A buff on other toons like you suggested would also work, point is siege has to work on Prisoner teams somehow. He already can stun for 2 rounds with his basic attack... No counter to his passive is out of order. Maybe that passive is too much for PVP.

[Nine]

Thanks again for clearing things up, Sparton. Really didn't expect to misunderstand Scourge a second time The "issue" there is explained then.

I'm curious how many skills there are that people misinterpret - especially when they aren't reading around here. On top of that there are soo many skills where it is just ambigious how chances are calculated precisely. Take Gunner Bomber Boy's Bomb as an example: What does a 45% chance to apply up to two burns mean? 45% chance for "something happens" and that something is 1 burn with X% and 2 burns with Y%? 67% per burn? Just picking something out of the blue, but I guess you are aware of issue. The explanation you guys give for new toons coming out certainly do help a lot preventing misunderstandings.

[Jofer16]

It would also be highly appreciated if you could adjust the AI of the Navigator. Most notably is that he uses Charted Course a lot right now. And a lot means twice in a row most of the time, even when at full health. That is basically wasting a turn. Crashing Rock and Scourge are never used and Roaring Wave is used at the worst opportunities. If Scourge and Crashing Rock can't be worked in it might be more convenient if he stuck to Landfall, uses Dead Reckoning when there is available power and heals himself when necessary.

This is super annoying, I've been playing around with it and it seems isolated to arena. There must be different AI versions? He'll habitually try to heal himself, even in worst case scenario with your team at full health and fury up. But in secret locations, campaign modes he doesn't behave like this and wrecks shop as he's designed. I wonder if it has nothing to do with the heal aspect of the ability, but instead the attack debuff and defense buff. AI decides to buff/debuff and act as support instead of attacking. I bet if the buff/debuff parts of the ability were removed and it was a straight heal he wouldn't try to use it until needed. Other healing focused characters don't even spam heal abilities in this manner. The secondary enhancements of the ability shouldn't be coded to have priority over the main function of the ability (to heal). Or maybe I'm overthinking it

[Nine]

This is super annoying, I've been playing around with it and it seems isolated to arena. There must be different AI versions? He'll habitually try to heal himself, even in worst case scenario with your team at full health and fury up. But in secret locations, campaign modes he doesn't behave like this and wrecks shop as he's designed. I wonder if it has nothing to do with the heal aspect of the ability, but instead the attack debuff and defense buff. AI decides to buff/debuff and act as support instead of attacking. I bet if the buff/debuff parts of the ability were removed and it was a straight heal he wouldn't try to use it until needed. Other healing focused characters don't even spam heal abilities in this manner. The secondary enhancements of the ability shouldn't be coded to have priority over the main function of the ability (to heal). Or maybe I'm overthinking it

I don't know where you were using him in PvE, but I bring him with a Warrior Troll and Sentinel Soulless Demon to farm GoD and he heals himself/debuffs there all the time, so unfortunately it is not limited to arena. I, too, had the interpretation that it is treated as a debuff. It is still strange, however, that he seems to be the only character who repeatedly buff/debuffs multiple turns in a row. Maybe Sparton can give us some insigths when they found out what's wrong.

[Jofer16]

I don't know where you were using him in PvE, but I bring him with a Warrior Troll and Sentinel Soulless Demon to farm GoD and he heals himself/debuffs there all the time, so unfortunately it is not limited to arena. I, too, had the interpretation that it is treated as a debuff. It is still strange, however, that he seems to be the only character who repeatedly buff/debuffs multiple turns in a row. Maybe Sparton can give us some insigths when they found out what's wrong.

Oh weird, was doing madness uw game of death and madness bf point of no return. Was paired with warrior troll and AoF. Also secret locations for the day, same team makeup.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Second, and this is big, the issue with the Prisoner really is that it allows teams to attack with immunity first round no matter what. Top players with Prisoners used to be able to go with Hell Hound or Artillery Dog against non prisoner teams, so they would pretty much only lose to other prisoner teams. (I'm guessing ones with "taunt fest" or a full GRE + AoF)

[...]

I'm convinced that this is the unbalance that creates the gap (showed in our weekly results thread) between guys with prisoners and guys without him, and the immunity talismans made it worse.

That's a reasonable hypothesis, yes, and I can assure you we're continuing to monitor the situation. We just don't want to be too hasty with changing things, and we also need to work within the constraints of what the system actually allows (there's some potential solutions that we feel would be most fair which are not completely possible right now without some additional coding).

Hey Sparton, just wondering, in PvP will we ever be able to setup DEF scheme/strategy? Seen this kinda asked before, but didn't see if it got answered... and just to be clear, some kinda "all out attack" or "defensive shell" style options at DEF setup screen just to give it a bit more importance and help the AI to play it a lot more like we would if we could.

Step one for us is getting the AI to be more modular and capable at understanding different strategies in different situations, which has been one of the developer's side project for a bit. Once that's done, I'm hoping we'll be able to extend that further to having some straightforward "aggressiveness" options you can tune for your defense team, but I don't foresee something like that coming in the near future, sadly. Other fish we want to fry first.

the problem is that siege takes away all possibilities to defend against stuns, freezes , taunts and blinds.everything else isn't that important i think. so basicly you are naked against siege.
so if you go 2nd, chances are very high, that you cannot take control of your team and so you will loose very high % of the time. then we have a luckfest, a tauntfest and
not a strategical game. okay i get that defenses should have something to gain some hold% but it should be something reasonable not something gamebreaking like that.

It's not bullet proof, but I've found that taunt teams that rely on taunting to disrupt you can be pretty easily crushed by bringing strong Warrior attackers to pushing the taunts, whereas those who try to maximize CC (by using freezing/stunning as well) usually don't have a Prisoner and/or Siege user, so a team cleanse ends up letting take most or all of your turn and shift momentum in your favour. Even those with a Prisoner won't do anything to a team cleanser. I'm sure there's other strategies that work, too (we've seen plenty of threads pop up with interesting suggestions), and if every team tries to build itself to counter that by having both Prisoner and Angel of Pain/Death Dog... well, that's half their team comp which is not a major offensive presence, and that has it's own weaknesses.

(As an aside, one of the developers in our office was doing some fights against one of the other developers earlier. Developer A was attacking and had no prisoner, developer B had prisoner and has pretty tooled out toons. Developer A was able to beat Developer B's team twice, on auto (and that was 2 wins without losing once, not just trying auto a bunch of times and getting lucky). Both sides are running 5 star characters with 5 star talismans and with mostly or entirely max level skills.)

Thanks again for clearing things up, Sparton. Really didn't expect to misunderstand Scourge a second time The "issue" there is explained then.

No worries. Some of our skill descriptions (or effects) definitely can be kind of confusing... in Navigator Eddie's case, it's definitely different from others, but we felt it would be valuable to go that route because of how that's situationally better (or worse) to help make him a better or worse choice for some battles.

I'm curious how many skills there are that people misinterpret - especially when they aren't reading around here. On top of that there are soo many skills where it is just ambigious how chances are calculated precisely. Take Gunner Bomber Boy's Bomb as an example: What does a 45% chance to apply up to two burns mean? 45% chance for "something happens" and that something is 1 burn with X% and 2 burns with Y%? 67% per burn? Just picking something out of the blue, but I guess you are aware of issue. The explanation you guys give for new toons coming out certainly do help a lot preventing misunderstandings.

Yeah, we've not had the best history with skill descriptions, but usually we try to find a middle ground between telling you the useful information you need to compare the value of one character to another while not overloading the player with tons of small details that may make that decision overwhelming for some people.

I don't know where you were using him in PvE, but I bring him with a Warrior Troll and Sentinel Soulless Demon to farm GoD and he heals himself/debuffs there all the time, so unfortunately it is not limited to arena. I, too, had the interpretation that it is treated as a debuff. It is still strange, however, that he seems to be the only character who repeatedly buff/debuffs multiple turns in a row.

Oh weird, was doing madness uw game of death and madness bf point of no return. Was paired with warrior troll and AoF. Also secret locations for the day, same team makeup.

Yeah, Kaz and myself a pretty perplexed as to what he's doing, but he's definitely deciding to use that skill for it's other value or something at times where it's probably not nearly as valuable. Maybe to do with the random deviation chance or something (to make AI not completely predictable), so sometimes he'll psych you out and other times he'll try to do straight damage.

Also, welcome to the forums, Jofer16! Sorry about the forum registration problems you were having.

[Frost]

For 400 points it should be siege-free. We are humans not robots or monkeys to play 24/7 speding tons of ironite to have 6 sets, and even if we were just a very few toons can use them.

[Jofer16]

Yeah, Kaz and myself a pretty perplexed as to what he's doing, but he's definitely deciding to use that skill for it's other value or something at times where it's probably not nearly as valuable. Maybe to do with the random deviation chance or something (to make AI not completely predictable), so sometimes he'll psych you out and other times he'll try to do straight damage.

Also, welcome to the forums, Jofer16! Sorry about the forum registration problems you were having.

Thanks! And feel free to send that trooper request again if you want. I didn't see it until a few hours before expiration, got sidetracked looking for someone to delete and fell asleep haha. Couldn't recall your magic 4 digit code to search.

And I'd argue that skill has no other value when it relates to deciding the characters action outside of the heal. There's never been a time when id increase defense and lower the attack of the enemy over any sort of damage dealing or super useful support ability, those are just add on fillers to make it more than a simple heal. Shouldn't affect the ability prioritization whatsoever for AI in the code.