Kabam... what is your policy on Pure Skill and the ignorant?

There was a topic where someone was asking what Pure Skill did because he had invested in it but didn't see a change based on its description.

For newer players and those that don't visit the forum, they are ignorant of Pure Skill's current brokenness.

If they were to send in a ticket, wouldn't this qualify them for a complete refund of all resources placed into it?

Currently, they have no way of knowing this talent does nothing.

It's been two years... nothing has been done... which I can somewhat understand; however, shouldn't the game team remedy the potential ignorance by either sending an in-game email or lock Pure Skill?

I'm just thinking from an empathetic standpoint here... and how angry I would be to find out my resources had been wasted.

Comments

DNA3000

I haven't checked recently, but last I looked when this was still an active topic of discussion Pure Skill didn't do "nothing" it did something, but what it did for complex mechanical reasons often saturated for most situations you would encounter in the game after tier three.

The full explanation for why this happens is so complex, if it was up to me I would literally change the mechanics to make them easier to explain than try to explain what was going on to the average player. To fully explain what's going on here, you have to explain how critical damage works, how armor and resistances work in the current flat stat game, and how pure skill interacts with both. What makes this a complete mess is that all of these things worked differently prior to 12.0, and were changed more than once post 12.0 until the current version (and I have no idea if they were changed in the last year, because changes in how any of these things work produce usually subtle results in game that are difficult to notice if you aren't specifically looking at them).

The short but not exactly correct explanation. Pure Skill allows critical hits to "ignore" armor. But critical hits already ignore armor intrinsically: 20%. So for anything with less than 20% armor, you're already ignoring all of their armor: Pure Skill can't do much in that situation. In situations where the target has more armor Pure Skill has something to do, but tier 5 allows you to ignore 64% armor. That means your critical hits can now ignore 84% armor. When this was tested post 12.0, that combined with developer statements suggested that this meant you would ignore all armor up to 84% armor (and not, say, 84% of their armor rating). But almost nothing has that much armor. In the flat stat world that would be comparable to 10,500 rating (ten thousand five hundred), outside of external armor buffs.

Basically, high tier Pure Skill is silver bullets in a game where werewolves are extremely rare. The problem is that it isn't Pure Skill that is bugged: there's no way to fix PS itself. Except by adding a lot of werewolves to the game, and no one really wants that (super high armor champs you can't damage without critical armor penetrating hits). The only real solution is to completely change what Pure Skill does so it does something that players more commonly need. And Kabam (like most game developers) are hesitant to do that. Also, because it does *something* it is just uncommon, they can't just arbitrarily yank it from everyone: someone out there probably likes it and would complain.

So basically what PS does few players need most of the time, which makes its benefits dubious. But it does actually do something, so it is problematic to take away from everyone that has it. And the full explanation for why this situation exists requires a lot of backstory on how the game mechanics work, which would be difficult to add to the mastery description. The best thing would be to change it, but I don't know what the second best thing to do is.

GroundedWisdom

Technically, it doesn't do nothing. It's the fifth and sometimes the fourth Points that cannot reach more than they already are. That's the trickiness of the situation. Not exactly your question, but I was just clarifying.

GroundedWisdom

DNA3000 wrote: »

I haven't checked recently, but last I looked when this was still an active topic of discussion Pure Skill didn't do "nothing" it did something, but what it did for complex mechanical reasons often saturated for most situations you would encounter in the game after tier three.

The full explanation for why this happens is so complex, if it was up to me I would literally change the mechanics to make them easier to explain than try to explain what was going on to the average player. To fully explain what's going on here, you have to explain how critical damage works, how armor and resistances work in the current flat stat game, and how pure skill interacts with both. What makes this a complete mess is that all of these things worked differently prior to 12.0, and were changed more than once post 12.0 until the current version (and I have no idea if they were changed in the last year, because changes in how any of these things work produce usually subtle results in game that are difficult to notice if you aren't specifically looking at them).

The short but not exactly correct explanation. Pure Skill allows critical hits to "ignore" armor. But critical hits already ignore armor intrinsically: 20%. So for anything with less than 20% armor, you're already ignoring all of their armor: Pure Skill can't do much in that situation. In situations where the target has more armor Pure Skill has something to do, but tier 5 allows you to ignore 64% armor. That means your critical hits can now ignore 84% armor. When this was tested post 12.0, that combined with developer statements suggested that this meant you would ignore all armor up to 84% armor (and not, say, 84% of their armor rating). But almost nothing has that much armor. In the flat stat world that would be comparable to 10,500 rating (ten thousand five hundred), outside of external armor buffs.

Basically, high tier Pure Skill is silver bullets in a game where werewolves are extremely rare. The problem is that it isn't Pure Skill that is bugged: there's no way to fix PS itself. Except by adding a lot of werewolves to the game, and no one really wants that (super high armor champs you can't damage without critical armor penetrating hits). The only real solution is to completely change what Pure Skill does so it does something that players more commonly need. And Kabam (like most game developers) are hesitant to do that. Also, because it does *something* it is just uncommon, they can't just arbitrarily yank it from everyone: someone out there probably likes it and would complain.

So basically what PS does few players need most of the time, which makes its benefits dubious. But it does actually do something, so it is problematic to take away from everyone that has it. And the full explanation for why this situation exists requires a lot of backstory on how the game mechanics work, which would be difficult to add to the mastery description. The best thing would be to change it, but I don't know what the second best thing to do is.

Thanks DNA. I was just trying to say the same thing, in fewer words, at the same time.

Wakandas_Finest

The easiest fix to pure skill would be to simply change what it does. Instead of having crit hits ignore armor have it crit through blocks {x}% based on level and combo meter.

DNA3000

Wakandas_Finest wrote: »

The easiest fix to pure skill would be to simply change what it does. Instead of having crit hits ignore armor have it crit through blocks {x}% based on level and combo meter.

That sounds like it would be easy to implement, but it also sounds like it has significant material consequences for alliance war that would require (or at least I would want) extremely extensive testing.

DrZola

Like @Wakandas_Finest said—have it operate on a block penetration basis, allowing for crits through blocks (already a mechanic in game) or something ananlogous.

Dr. Zola

NOOOOOOOOPEEEEE

I mean they could make Pure Skill just operate like a greater Cruelty mastery and have Skill champs just deal more crit damage in general.

Wakandas_Finest

DNA3000 wrote: »

Wakandas_Finest wrote: »

The easiest fix to pure skill would be to simply change what it does. Instead of having crit hits ignore armor have it crit through blocks {x}% based on level and combo meter.

That sounds like it would be easy to implement, but it also sounds like it has significant material consequences for alliance war that would require (or at least I would want) extremely extensive testing.

I see the potential impact in AW but no worse than MD. I'm sure Kabam would test it thoroughly

Kabam Miike

Hey all,

I know it's been a long standing issue, but once again, I have to bring up that Pure Skill is not broken, and is more effective than it was before 12.0. Ranks 4 and 5 are not as useful as they were before, and we still are going to address this in the future, but we are still not sure what we can do with it at this time.

We know it's been a while, and we did say that it would be something we focus on after Mystic Dispersion, and that is still true. We've looked at some options (Could we change it back to the way it was before? Could we change what it does?), but are not satisfied with out conclusions yet.

We welcome more suggestions on the subject, but I'm going to close this thread down because having a conversation on how to address the mastery was clearly not the intent of the post.