Passive Buffs/Debuffs abuse...
LucasBishopX
Member Posts: 30 ★
I honestly feel that making champs with abilities to stop “unstoppable” or shrug off “bleed” is cool, until they become useless by the over abuse of “passive” buffs/debuffs.
It’s like having an account with money and a bank card to access that money, then after the fact saying “this bank card doesn’t work to access this money because we moved the money into a no-withdrawal account.”
I don’t mind “passive” occasionally, but it seems to be becoming the new “normal” and it’s deteriorating the value of champions with special abilities.
It’s like having an account with money and a bank card to access that money, then after the fact saying “this bank card doesn’t work to access this money because we moved the money into a no-withdrawal account.”
I don’t mind “passive” occasionally, but it seems to be becoming the new “normal” and it’s deteriorating the value of champions with special abilities.
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Comments
Passive abilities exist in the game since the very beginning. Nothing new, nothing to complain right now
Buffs are active abilities and they can't be passive while being active at the same time (if that makes sense).
Just because they just do the same as some buffs that previously existed doesn't mean they are "passive buffs"
Passive abilities made more sense in the beginning. Groot and Ultron did not have blood, and therefore were bleed immune. Now Sabretooth can convert a fury buff into a fury passive. WTF? That makes no sense, except as a game mechanic. Kabam will continue to explore all of the combinations that they can program. They added persistent charges first. Now, the Human Torch has different modes that you can select before the fight, and I am sure we will see more champs with this option in the future. The game has to get harder or will get "beaten."
1. There are buffs, and they can only be on or off. These are ALWAYS denoted as a circle with a slightly white-ish border of the same color. These can always be interacted with/countered/removed. Buffs can NEVER be passive.
2. Abilities are different than buffs, and can absolutely be passive. We as a player base mistakenly think these are “Buffs” because they can either provide a benefit (or detriment). The simple truth is the developers need a way to display that certain things are happening in the fight, but they are extremely limited in how to display them. The wording in the descriptions of characters will very cleverly never use the word buff, but rather something like the word "effect."
Thus we have to check the in-game wording very carefully.
Example 1: Ghost Rider Lifesteal. “Gain a lifesteal passive effect.” Notice, nowhere does it say Buff.
Example 2: KM has a Passive armor to start the fight. Notice the wording here? It does not state buff, but rather it’s a passive ABILITY. I know, I know it’s very dumb, but since it is a passive ability, it has its own unique rules on how it can be interacted with. In this case, you cannot nullify it, but you can break it.
Example 3: GHulk’s Adoration of the Crowd (or more specifically SMASH). You have in the upper corner the crowd excitement. This is a passive ABILITY that has specific rules for interaction, getting hit or delivering a hit. SMASH, while it does provide an attack boost, is also not a buff, but a passive ABILITY.
Easiest Example: Hyperion. You will notice his wording says “Buff” all over the place, except when you get to his cosmic charges, then the word “Buff” is never used to describe the cosmic charges.
The biggest issue here is not so much the wording used in the game, because once you dive into it, you will notice Kabam (with a bitter taste in my mouth) has done a good job. (Man that hurt to say). HOWEVER! The massive inconsistency with DISPLAY, is a problem, but there is no way around it.
While it might not make you feel better, I know it doesn’t make me feel better, I do hope that this helped to clear up confusion.
When these are outlined with a white border on the top and bottom, they are considered to be “passive.”
Passive buffs and debuffs are exempt from manipulation by a champions special abilities to negate them.
For instance, if I used my CapIW with kinetic charges to nullify a passive “unstoppable” it would not work. Even though his abilities state that he can do so while kinetically charged.
I hope this clarifies the confusion from my previous statement.
"As long as Captain America has at least 1 Kinetic Potential, he’s is considered to be Kinetically Charged, and gains the following bonuses as Passive effects:
[...]
100% chance to Nullify Unstoppable Buffs on hit."
They keyword here is "buffs". In his abilities, it says he can nullify an unstoppable buff from the enemy.
Nowhere does it say he can remove an unstoppable effect, which would include the passive unstoppable. Passive unstoppable wasn't created to counter Cap IW, since that exists in the game way before he was introduced
Also, this isn't the correct usage of the word "ability" either. What you're referring to as an ability the game refers to as an effect. Effects can be designated as a buff, as a debuff, as a passive, or as something else entirely. "Passive" is a type of effect, not a Description of an effect; for example, there's no such thing as an "Active" effect in the game, except what players colloquially call active effects. But the problem here is thinking that "active" is the opposite of "passive" and thus anything not a passive effect must be an active effect: i.e. either a buff or a debuff. But that's not the case.
For the purposes of consistency, the devs are trying to use the terms in this way. There are effects. These are things in the game that get applied to a target. An effect has a type. This type can be "Buff" or "Debuff" or "Passive." It could be something else entirely. These words are labels, not descriptions. You can have "Buffs" with a capital B that don't buff the target in the colloquial sense. Loas, for example, are "Buffs" that don't "buff."
Because those words are labels that define the type of the effect, all effects can only be one of them.
Basically, you never get to have a "top level" effect that supercedes all others. The devs will keep making more top. Even effects like passive degen have their counters in abilities like Face Me. The only thing that is never going to change is the fact that things are always going to change.
It really is just this simple. You can't expect or demand or really even complain to profitable effect about things changing value up or down in a game like this. You can lament, but not to any effect. And resource depreciation is fundamental to games like this. It is what allows them to even exist for any length of time.
I hope a moderator will chime in on this discussion too.
Passive effects is just the how. The core of the argument isn't about passive effects but about what they do. They "break" the rules of effects like nullification, by being immune to those effects. And it is that "override" that is both the source of the complaint, and the reason why the complaint won't change anything. You can argue against passive effects, but that's just a technicality. You can't argue for nullify always working against everything forever and ever.
Except some people do argue for that while trying to avoid stating it directly, because they believe if they rank up a champion because that champion does something, introducing new champions or effects that the champion they ranked up doesn't work on is somehow cheating, because the game made them an implicit "promise" to not change things once a decision is made upon them by the player. But this gets to the root of the problem: the game makes no such promise, never will make such promise, and players have to work within an environment where anything they do with anything they have can change over time.
If the content developers make rows, it is the tech developers - the "engine guys" that make the columns. And every column is extremely expense to make, relatively speaking. The technical expertise to make a column is extremely high, and the risks associated with altering the game engine to make a column are also very high. So making a new column is not a trivial exercise. And an important question that gets asked whenever a dev team decides whether to invest in making a column is: how often will it be used. A column intended to be used for one champion, and that's it, is simply not worth making most of the time. That column has to be used many times to justify its existence, and to pay for its costs to implement.
There's lots of ways to implement counterplay against buffs. But the game team isn't going to make fifty of them. They are going to make one, and use it as many times as possible in as many ways as possible. Because if the content developers don't promise to use the column a hundred times, the engine developers won't waste their time making it in the first place.
Again, this is tremendous oversimplification and there are always exceptions and alternatives, but I think this is at least generally recognizable for anyone that has worked in this environment in the past.