Dev Diary: Cavalier Difficulty in 2021 and Beyond - New Buffs for February!

MCOC Team

Summoners!

Everybody's favourite Balance Designer and sick beast of a gamer, Kabam John, has taken some time to jot down some thoughts on Cavalier Difficulty, what we've seen so far, and what's to come in the future! There's also a sneak peek at the new Buffs coming in the Cavalier Difficulty Event quest in February!

Read the post here!

DNA3000

I disagree on the skill one though. Lowering evade chance means slowing down the fury buildup. Disorient fails to give fury at times due to AAR. Iirc it’s around 30% if you’re using NF.

I think the problem with the Skill nodes is they are a little too narrow. One way to offer a skill-path through the Skill nodes could be to assert that if the champ is blocked from evading due to stun, that counts as an evade prevention. That way separate from the three debuffs, every skill champ would have a theoretical way to get a momentary evade prevention (via parry-stun), which would make every champ usable (but with a much harder way to get the buffs and get in attacks).

You might need to lower the evade chance if you allow that, but maybe not.

Doing so, as you mentioned, will allow all skill champs to do that. However, I believe the intent of having these nodes is for the playerbase to develop a wider roster, and not relying on ABC champions. It was either this, or gates (tbh I prefer gates. It’s faster and more straightforward).

Anyway, because of this intent, it’s counterproductive to allow all skill champs to do the quest, rather than the 30-40% or so due to the restriction.

I agree in general, but I don't think this needs to be binary. Which is to say, the gates don't have to promote roster growth by separating the champs into "can do" and "cannot do" which is what some of the previous nodes did. I think it is acceptable if the nodes present "works great" "works so-so" "barely works" and "doesn't work" as options. Allowing the parry-stun/evade option would make all champs workable, but not especially well. That seems to be closer to the spirit of the changes they made to, say, cosmic and science.

incidentally, this is also why I prefer this kind of content to gates. Precisely because it isn't straight forward and it requires more thought. Gates can only be passed through in the way the designer intended: by meeting the explicit qualifications of the gate. Content soft-gates like those used in CavEQ don't have that limitation: they reward innovating thinking beyond what the designer intended. So long as that innovation doesn't become harmfuilly exploitive, I think rewarding players who think outside the box is a good thing. Gates have no real outside the box options usually.