Map 5 was fun until this week and then hello 340k health, 20k attack torch, with 15% Regen buffet on day 3 and all named champion defenders 5/65 6* so taking 25% damage reduction sure to Challenger rating. So now I have Alli chat filled with grumbles again and a bunch of 11k to 12.5k prestige people wondering if it all is worth it anymore.
Not sure what you mean here: challenge rating doesn’t directly reduce your damage.
Torch is getting … interesting on Map 5 though. I’ve taken all of them so far, and while it is within my skill and roster limits (barely), I suspect weaker players are cursing the heck out of that guy, and probably wondering what’s even killing them (my guess, going nova super quick and removing all your block in the process is something most haven’t seen in-game before).
Challenge rating reduces your chance to crit and a 5/65 six star defenders, means a 5/65 five star attacker crits less. Add to that a 5/65 six star has more armour and yes, damage reduces. So does challenge rating directly reduce damage? .
Op couldn't agree more. I've mentioned it in previous posts, annoying fights have become far too much of the norm.
The funny thing here is I've long been a hater of war in its current incarnation. It's just never struck a cord with me. Anyway, it is now my favorite game mode. I was quite surprised when this revelation came upon me.
So I examined why that might be. How can a mode I think falls so short, now be the best? It's not like aw has somehow drastically improved... it hasn't. The rest of the genre has FALLEN that far. So why?The answer, for me, was simple. The fights are generally challenging ( other than the lame potions tax... like seriously) and brief.
That last part is particularly important for me it seems. Every fight length has been artificially lengthened... just to do it. This is incredibly frustrating to me. It's not difficult, but it ain't fun.
Meanwhile, aw has been providing me with challenging fights at, what I consider appropriate length. The side quest is a great examine. Jacked up health pools just to lengthen the fights....becuase. That's boring, creatively blank game design imo and nothing about 7.4 alleviated my concerns
Judging by the amount of agrees on the OP, I think it's safe to say a lot of us are feeling this way.
The game feels like homework. I did an initial clear of 7.3 and it just took a while and wasn't specifically fun. Paradox lanes were terrible. The amount of work I did to keep my paradox charges down, with such minimal benefit from having them there was not a fun experience.
It would be interesting to try and have fights (not all fights!) but a lot of lanes tested for length. For instance, if I'm taking a minute trying to bait out a special or dex attacks to lower my paradox charges, I should be doing some fantastic damage in the periods where it's safe to do so to compensate for this. That would make it fun.
Fights can be lost in just a few too many blocked hits, or one slip up of the block.
If fights could be tailored so that ones, where you spend a lot of time managing different aspects of the fight to stay alive, would make you do huge damage (basically paradox but would make it so your not fighting for 3 minutes), or if they aren't as dependant on restrictions and take a little longer make it so that when you get hit, it's not game over. Getting hit should be punishing. On the other hand it shouldn't punish my passion for the game or want to make me stop playing which is basically what has happened the past few months.
Map 5 was fun until this week and then hello 340k health, 20k attack torch, with 15% Regen buffet on day 3 and all named champion defenders 5/65 6* so taking 25% damage reduction sure to Challenger rating. So now I have Alli chat filled with grumbles again and a bunch of 11k to 12.5k prestige people wondering if it all is worth it anymore.
Not sure what you mean here: challenge rating doesn’t directly reduce your damage.
Torch is getting … interesting on Map 5 though. I’ve taken all of them so far, and while it is within my skill and roster limits (barely), I suspect weaker players are cursing the heck out of that guy, and probably wondering what’s even killing them (my guess, going nova super quick and removing all your block in the process is something most haven’t seen in-game before).
Challenge rating reduces your chance to crit and a 5/65 six star defenders, means a 5/65 five star attacker crits less. Add to that a 5/65 six star has more armour and yes, damage reduces. So does challenge rating directly reduce damage? .
How does challenger rating reduce crit chance?
When you open up the stats of a character, where it shows crit rate, armour, block penetration etc, those percentages are against a rank 5 4 star, or challenge rating 100.
A 5/65 six star has challenge rating of 150 (a 3/45 has 130). The lower the challenge rating of your attacker, the lower your crit rate and associated damage. It's a huge increase in challenge rating.
Couldn't agree with the op more. I literally shared this post with my Ally leads and said "this is exactly how I feel right now". I timed out 5 times in the first two days of map 8 on path 2 in section one. That path is absolute garbage. Any path that says "you have a 0% chance to clear this path at full health, no matter how skilled you are" should be removed.
Op couldn't agree more. I've mentioned it in previous posts, annoying fights have become far too much of the norm.
The funny thing here is I've long been a hater of war in its current incarnation. It's just never struck a cord with me. Anyway, it is now my favorite game mode. I was quite surprised when this revelation came upon me.
So I examined why that might be. How can a mode I think falls so short, now be the best? It's not like aw has somehow drastically improved... it hasn't. The rest of the genre has FALLEN that far. So why?The answer, for me, was simple. The fights are generally challenging ( other than the lame potions tax... like seriously) and brief.
That last part is particularly important for me it seems. Every fight length has been artificially lengthened... just to do it. This is incredibly frustrating to me. It's not difficult, but it ain't fun.
Meanwhile, aw has been providing me with challenging fights at, what I consider appropriate length. The side quest is a great examine. Jacked up health pools just to lengthen the fights....becuase. That's boring, creatively blank game design imo and nothing about 7.4 alleviated my concerns
War was pretty much all that was keeping me interested prior this late spattering of overly annoying content. As you said, it's challenging but far from tedious. With the introduction of map 8 and my alliance's insistence on continuing with it (which I don't hold against them in the slightest), that option is no longer available to me so here I am for the foreseeable future.
Well map 8 was the nail in the coffin for me as far as taking this game seriously.
In the middle of a T1 war season on course to finish Master in, that I was also deathless in with 4 of the 5 boss kills so far so it's not like I was struggling, I decided to leave my alliance and be done with a game I've loved for years and have invested a ton of time and money into.
Between the likes of 7.3, the 7.4 beta, V8, and now map 8, I've decided that I just have zero interest in the current direction of the game.
With so much new content just spamming massive damage reductions, tons of power gain, constant unblockable opponents, and punishing simple mechanics such as blocking and dexing, along with unreliable input controls for months, the game has just gotten to a point of annoyance. Everything seems designed to just slow things down to a crawl (which is super fun and interactive in a 3min fight) and just be generally as annoying as possible.
The vast majority of the paradox lanes in 7.3 were just a massive nuisance that often you were better off ignoring completely and just using a nuke option to blast through it. Instead of actually listening when countless people said this, they instead doubled down and slapped them all over 7.4 as well. I ran two paths in the beta and decided I couldn't be bothered to touch it again.
With map 8, it's full of damage reductions and incredibly passive AI so that even top meta R3s were timing out on day 1. That's absurd. Opponents are either gaining massive amounts of power or have nodes/mechanics so that for 3/4 of the fight you're doing basically zero damage bc of trying to bait specials from uncooperative AI or juggling some stupid damage reduction timers. The fight timers weren't increased to compensate for this which is laughable.
V8 was supposed to be targeted at mid range progressing players but even end game players with massive rosters felt it was too restrictive. That's not even touching on the fights that were so bugged or poorly designed at release that even I can't believe they made it through in house playtesting.
I'm not really sure what their goals are for content these days but if it's to annoy their playerbase into never wanting to play their game, great job Kabam you're killing it. I'm not quitting forever or never touching the game again but you've done a great job at turning someone that typically spent at least 4-5hrs a day on this game and has spent tens of thousands of dollars on it into a casual player that will probably log in a few times a week at most for the time being. Congrats.
Wow I know we had our back and forth's but I couldn't agree with this post more. Map 8 passive AI and damage reduction is definitely taking my fun away as well. I appreciate you making a stand.
@Worknprogress How would you have them ramp up the difficulty? I agree that power gain is lazy, but highly effective in ramping difficulty.
I think they are running out of ideas. (I'm pretty impressed with the number of nodes they have come up with.)
Would you prefer less power gain, but gates that require sub-optimal counters?
Honestly curious. If we can brainstorm some good alternatives, maybe they will take them.
You can't have both power gain and a passive AI. If you have huge power gain you need to have the AI cooperate within one or two baits. On map 8 I baited Penni's specials 4 or 5 times before she threw her unblockable sp1 and its like this consistently.
Map 5 was fun until this week and then hello 340k health, 20k attack torch, with 15% Regen buffet on day 3 and all named champion defenders 5/65 6* so taking 25% damage reduction sure to Challenger rating. So now I have Alli chat filled with grumbles again and a bunch of 11k to 12.5k prestige people wondering if it all is worth it anymore.
Not sure what you mean here: challenge rating doesn’t directly reduce your damage.
Torch is getting … interesting on Map 5 though. I’ve taken all of them so far, and while it is within my skill and roster limits (barely), I suspect weaker players are cursing the heck out of that guy, and probably wondering what’s even killing them (my guess, going nova super quick and removing all your block in the process is something most haven’t seen in-game before).
(Challenge rating reduces your chance to crit and a 5/65 six star defenders, means a 5/65 five star attacker crits less. Add to that a 5/65 six star has more armour and yes, damage reduces. So does challenge rating directly reduce damage? No....
But... Fighting a 5/65 six star, compared to a 5/65 five star, does reduce damage output of your attacker.)
All true, but when you said "25% reduction" that sounded like a common misunderstanding of how challenge rating works. Higher defender CR will lower your DR-affected stats and it can scale up the defenders damage mitigation somewhat, but all of this would probably amount to single digit reductions in damage output for the most part and different for different attacker/defender combinations.
You guys need rank 3 KGs. No items, no timeouts, just fun
Herc also works, at least on Map 5. You fight the mini, you die, you kill the mini while immortal, you willpower your suicides back to 15-20% health, you fight the next mini, you die, you kill the mini while immortal. If you make a mistake, you use one of those cheapo revives no one else uses, repeat.
I'm a bit late on this, but I absolutely agree with you about the 7.4 Beta. I ran three paths on the first quest and decided that it wasn't worth my time since there was nothing new or exciting about. This is the feedback I gave Kabam on the beta survey: "Look, I’ve done a lot of the betas and this is the first time that I didn’t even complete the chapter. It’s not because I didn’t have the time or the right champs, it’s because I didn’t have the motivation. There is nothing really new about this chapter. Sure, there new boss nodes, but they’re mostly inconsequential. There is no new and exciting aspect to this chapter (like paradoxes for chapter 3 and superiority for chapter 2), it’s just rehashing the previous too, thus I didn’t feel motivated to test the beta because I know I already like the features in it because I’ve already faced them before. Look, chapter 4 is fine. It’s boring, but fine. It’s not going to be exciting to go through, but it’ll be challenging and difficult for most players. As far as I’m concerned, I won’t bother playing the new chapter for a while unless: 1) there’s a new title associated with it 2) the final boss is something new and fun or 3) the rewards for both it and the act are damn good. Otherwise, I just don’t care about the new chapter. It’s bland. It’s boring. It’s old. It’ll just be something to slog through to get rewards, it won’t be exciting or enjoyable since there isn’t anything that makes it different than the previous acts."
This game is getting incredibly stale and has stopped being fun. I've cut down the amount I play and spend on it by a huge amount--I'm not even spending any money on Cyber Weekend. I'm no whale by any means, but in my three years of spending money on the game, I have spent around 5K on my account. This year, I've spent about 600 dollars only, including July 4th and Spring Cleaning. The only reason why it's that high even is because I keep getting the sigil because I want to awaken Switch. After that, I'm dropping the Sigil and probably the Unit Daily Card too. Why? Because this game just isn't fun enough anymore to warrant investing my money into. Hopefully Cyber Weekend will reflect the state of the community's frustrations and inspire some change in Kabam's team, but I have little hope.
Map 5 was fun until this week and then hello 340k health, 20k attack torch, with 15% Regen buffet on day 3 and all named champion defenders 5/65 6* so taking 25% damage reduction sure to Challenger rating. So now I have Alli chat filled with grumbles again and a bunch of 11k to 12.5k prestige people wondering if it all is worth it anymore.
Not sure what you mean here: challenge rating doesn’t directly reduce your damage.
Torch is getting … interesting on Map 5 though. I’ve taken all of them so far, and while it is within my skill and roster limits (barely), I suspect weaker players are cursing the heck out of that guy, and probably wondering what’s even killing them (my guess, going nova super quick and removing all your block in the process is something most haven’t seen in-game before).
Challenge rating reduces your chance to crit and a 5/65 six star defenders, means a 5/65 five star attacker crits less. Add to that a 5/65 six star has more armour and yes, damage reduces. So does challenge rating directly reduce damage? .
How does challenger rating reduce crit chance?
When you open up the stats of a character, where it shows crit rate, armour, block penetration etc, those percentages are against a rank 5 4 star, or challenge rating 100.
A 5/65 six star has challenge rating of 150 (a 3/45 has 130). The lower the challenge rating of your attacker, the lower your crit rate and associated damage. It's a huge increase in challenge rating.
Let's run the calculations with an example to see what the difference is. I'm going to use rank 3 X-23 as an example of a champion with decent crit rate and crit damage, and see where the base values go.
Crit rating is 756. Against CR100 this would be 756 + / (756 + 1500 + 5*100) = 27.4% crit rate. Crit damage rating is 922, which would be [ 922 / (922 + 1500 + 5* 100)] * 5 + 0.5 = 2.08 bonus crit damage. So the total average bonus damage from critical hits would be 0.57x base damage.
Increase the defender to CR150 and crit rate changes to be 756 / (756 + 1500 + 5*150) = 25.1% Crit damage becomes [ 922 / (922 + 1500 + 5* 750)] * 5 + 0.5 = 1.95. Overall average crit bonus drops to 1.95 x 0.251 = 0.49. This is a 14% reduction in critical damage bonus, and a 5.1% reduction in overall total damage.
On the flip side, let's take a moderately tanky champ like Juggernaut on defense. His armor rating at 6* rank 1 is 391. It scales up to 517 at rank 4. That's a bigger jump than most people are probably seeing with the scaled up champs (because armor scales more tightly with rank than rarity: a 5* rank 3 Juggs already has armor rating of 440). Let's assume the attacker is using a 5* r4 attacker, which is CR 110. This would imply that 6*r1 Juggs would have an armor value of about 16%, while the 6*r4 Juggs would have an armor value of about 20.1%.
Let's assume that in the CR100 case armor was 391 and in the CR150 case armor was 517 (the difference would likely be smaller). This would make the overall perceived damage in this case (factoring in damage out and damage mitigated by armor) 0.84 + 0.57 = 1.41 in normalized terms for the CR100 case and 0.80 + 0.49 = 1.29 in the CR150 case. That's an overall reduction in effective damage of 8.5% factoring in the reduction in critical bonus damage due to DR and the overall reduction in landed damage due to scaled up armor rating. This likely overestimates the mitigation delta by quite a bit.
@Worknprogress How would you have them ramp up the difficulty? I agree that power gain is lazy, but highly effective in ramping difficulty.
I think they are running out of ideas. (I'm pretty impressed with the number of nodes they have come up with.)
Would you prefer less power gain, but gates that require sub-optimal counters?
Honestly curious. If we can brainstorm some good alternatives, maybe they will take them.
You can't have both power gain and a passive AI. If you have huge power gain you need to have the AI cooperate within one or two baits. On map 8 I baited Penni's specials 4 or 5 times before she threw her unblockable sp1 and its like this consistently.
I think this touches on a very complex subject that I suspect most higher tier players are aware of on some level, but isn't often discussed. Difficulty doesn't scale linearly. There are lots of reasons why, but one important way is that there's only so much margin for error in the game. You can't demand higher and higher play precision, because there's nothing more than 100% perfection. If the game asks for 45% precision of play, it cannot double the difficulty by doubling the amount of precision it asks for. That reduces the margin for error from 55% to 10% (when precision required goes up from 45% to 90%). We're starting to reach precision points where it might be theoretically possible to always win, but it requires gameplay such as precision baiting that humans cannot do (and cannot even see the cues *to* do) to effectively manipulate the AI fast enough. In the OG 7.1 beta I expressed this issue as stating the best option for many players could be to just do the same path over and over until they get lucky circumstantially - everything lines up just right for them to complete it - if the energy refills were far cheaper than potions.
That's one of the reasons why "interesting content" has been an ongoing pet peeve of mine. The content designers have to become more creative, not just because players like interesting content more than scaled content, but also because they are simply running out of scaling. They have an infinite range of numbers to use, but they don't have infinite humans that can deal with them.
This game is getting incredibly stale and has stopped being fun. I've cut down the amount I play and spend on it by a huge amount--I'm not even spending any money on Cyber Weekend. I'm no whale by any means, but in my three years of spending money on the game, I have spent around 5K on my account. This year, I've spent about 600 dollars only, including July 4th and Spring Cleaning. The only reason why it's that high even is because I keep getting the sigil because I want to awaken Switch. After that, I'm dropping the Sigil and probably the Unit Daily Card too. Why? Because this game just isn't fun enough anymore to warrant investing my money into. Hopefully Cyber Weekend will reflect the state of the community's frustrations and inspire some change in Kabam's team, but I have little hope.
you have probably hit the end road, the game is not infinite and you have done/explored every solo content possible.
even for progresing players, kabam are making resources so available, people clear content too fast. the only thing for true endgame players (not wannabes ehm e.g. thronebreakers), the only thing left is aw, aq and hopefully soon 1v1 mode. kabam can defos add more game modes or add some inteteresting feat into 7.4, but seems like their development team are quite poor or inexperience. they do need to invest in or retain quality talent more.
That's true, the only content I have yet to 100% explore is V8 and that's only because it just came out and it sucks, so I have little desire to do it. However, that is the issue. There is no serious content made anymore, at least not anything that is meant for Endgame players. The closest that we've had recently is Summer of Pain and even that wasn't all that. The game would massively benefit from some type of new Everest content like Abyss of Legends, though hopefully not one that is designed solely to be a resource/unit sink.
I'm there with you. I'm going to finish off this season of war and then take a break. Sure, part of that is a vacation at the end of the year, but a month an a half off might be the nail in the coffin for me as well. I can't help but think there was a slight miscalculation in having SOP and the Gauntlet both run at similar times of the year. SOP remains my favorite event that Kabam has ever released. But then months of nothing. Act content is no longer interesting and some of it is far more annoying that fun/enjoyable.
Usually, I am pumped about July 4th and Cyber Weekend. The problem I am having this week is that I'm not sure there is anything Kabam can offer that will get me excited. Like others have mentioned, chasing my first r4 is not overly exciting. So the other thing they could offer is crystals and shards (i.e., champ acquisition). But champ acquisition from crystals (even nexus crystals) is becoming harder over time. Should I be excited about spending units or money on (for example) a Mutant nexus crystal to target Magneto? I've opened far more nexus crystals with three bad champs than nexus crystals with even one good champ. My spending dropped on the 4th and it may drop to zero this weekend.
I do find that taking breaks helps...I'm just not sure I'll be back to competitive gameplay after this one.
As for those mentioning not being overly rushed to take a champ up to R4: I agree. I am not hyped about that myself. At all. If I can (and I’m close), I probably will, but bar the prestige boost if you take, say, Doom up, it seems inconsequential. And being in a semi-retired alliance, prestige is the least of my worries. With much of the contest becoming more restrictive again – either because of specific champ requirements, like in V8, and/or because damage output is forbidden by fun and interactive nodes – the bump doesn’t have much real life consequences.
Sure, if I took up BWCV to rank 4, I might not time out to an AQ map 2 (!) Beast mini, like I did again today – a whopping 150 hits in – with my R3. However, I rather doubt that’s the right incentive. Also, even a rank 4 champ won’t clear content that (I don’t imply malice aforethought) seems to specifically play into the myriad of bugs players experience. Such as fights where you have to intercept/parry to be able to clear corresponding prompts. I dunno. If solo competitive doesn’t spice thing up, I can’t see myself playing this time next year. Let alone spending.
I have no excitement to receive my first R4 either. It will likely be surfer for prestige purposes but even if I had Doom it wouldn't be fun because the node stop you from feeling the impact of increased damage in most game modes that are end game.
This game is getting incredibly stale and has stopped being fun. I've cut down the amount I play and spend on it by a huge amount--I'm not even spending any money on Cyber Weekend. I'm no whale by any means, but in my three years of spending money on the game, I have spent around 5K on my account. This year, I've spent about 600 dollars only, including July 4th and Spring Cleaning. The only reason why it's that high even is because I keep getting the sigil because I want to awaken Switch. After that, I'm dropping the Sigil and probably the Unit Daily Card too. Why? Because this game just isn't fun enough anymore to warrant investing my money into. Hopefully Cyber Weekend will reflect the state of the community's frustrations and inspire some change in Kabam's team, but I have little hope.
you have probably hit the end road, the game is not infinite and you have done/explored every solo content possible.
even for progresing players, kabam are making resources so available, people clear content too fast. the only thing for true endgame players (not wannabes ehm e.g. thronebreakers), the only thing left is aw, aq and hopefully soon 1v1 mode. kabam can defos add more game modes or add some inteteresting feat into 7.4, but seems like their development team are quite poor or inexperience. they do need to invest in or retain quality talent more.
That's true, the only content I have yet to 100% explore is V8 and that's only because it just came out and it sucks, so I have little desire to do it. However, that is the issue. There is no serious content made anymore, at least not anything that is meant for Endgame players. The closest that we've had recently is Summer of Pain and even that wasn't all that. The game would massively benefit from some type of new Everest content like Abyss of Legends, though hopefully not one that is designed solely to be a resource/unit sink.
yeh agreed, i am unfortunately closing in myself - v1, v8 explore is what's left, and i am only bringing in 5* to v1 just to keep challenging myself. v8 is dead boring, but let's hope they issue gm's gauntlet chapter 2 soon and the new sets of Karinas challenges dont suck!
i think some developers said they are not going to create abyss like quest, which is shame.. i personally enjoyed abyss lol
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about Carina's Challenges. Talk about a successful failure. Carina's Challenges missed the mark about 6/9 times (an argument can be made for 5/9) but the 3/9 times that they hit the mark, they really hit it. I would love to get Volume 2 of Carina's Challenges so long as there aren't any more "Take Four Stars in LoL" or "Use two of the worst three star champion in the game to beat the Collector" challenges.
The worst is getting ripped off by bad or shady AI and bad inputs.
You're trying to bait a special 6 times in a row and they're still not throwing it and you get cornered or sp3'd.
You try and dex but parry instead.
You get a mix of passive and aggressive AI that stutters and spazzes out at the worst times and ends up catching you while you dash back.
Or you dex with certain sized champions and the spacing isn't large enough and the AI follows up with another attack.
Then you always dash back TWICE so you don't get hit with a follow-up but you end up getting cornered because the AI decides not to give you space or throw a special.
And inputs are so broken that you can't tell if it's the game or you're playing bad. I mean, I know how to dex, been doing it fine for years, why is it an issue now?
I know these things are probably bugs and bad systems but I can't help but think some if it's on purpose too. "Let them struggle baiting specials or landing attacks in time sensitive situations like in power gain or damage reduction nodes".
Test this out. Use anyone but Ghost in a fight and stand there at the start with your block open and see how the AI reacts. They punch you 90%+ of the time. Now use Ghost and see what happens. AI suddenly gets passive, dashes back or comes in at the last second, and or they just wait out the phase entirely. I'm not against them tuning things but it feels so petty.
The AI being passive is completely intentional, I don't think that is up for debate. The worst part of what they're doing is cheap at best. Passive AI, plus power gain, equals timeouts or you getting cornered even if you play it right. The game is far too reliant on baiting and throwing specials for that to be held against that. All AI should be aggressive outside of specific fights niche fights.
Let me throw something out there that hasn't been said that can help with the difficulty we been looking for that hasn't been experimented yet. Why don't you create mechanics that are actually challenging to learn but doable like dodging Apocalypse's specials. Hard doesn't always have to equal stacked nodes with 5 to 10 total counters. We already explained a couple years ago that it isn't fun.
I had to break out quake for map 8 just to be ultra safe to avoid item usage due to the weird mechanics and I'm almost timing out in 3 mins with less than 200k health. The artificial nerf damage has got to stop.
The worst is getting ripped off by bad or shady AI and bad inputs.
You're trying to bait a special 6 times in a row and they're still not throwing it and you get cornered or sp3'd.
You try and dex but parry instead.
You get a mix of passive and aggressive AI that stutters and spazzes out at the worst times and ends up catching you while you dash back.
Or you dex with certain sized champions and the spacing isn't large enough and the AI follows up with another attack.
Then you always dash back TWICE so you don't get hit with a follow-up but you end up getting cornered because the AI decides not to give you space or throw a special.
And inputs are so broken that you can't tell if it's the game or you're playing bad. I mean, I know how to dex, been doing it fine for years, why is it an issue now?
I know these things are probably bugs and bad systems but I can't help but think some if it's on purpose too. "Let them struggle baiting specials or landing attacks in time sensitive situations like in power gain or damage reduction nodes".
Test this out. Use anyone but Ghost in a fight and stand there at the start with your block open and see how the AI reacts. They punch you 90%+ of the time. Now use Ghost and see what happens. AI suddenly gets passive, dashes back or comes in at the last second, and or they just wait out the phase entirely. I'm not against them tuning things but it feels so petty.
The AI being passive is completely intentional, I don't think that is up for debate. The worst part of what they're doing is cheap at best. Passive AI, plus power gain, equals timeouts or you getting cornered even if you play it right. The game is far too reliant on baiting and throwing specials for that to be held against that. All AI should be aggressive outside of specific fights niche fights.
Let me throw something out there that hasn't been said that can help with the difficulty we been looking for that hasn't been experimented yet. Why don't you create mechanics that are actually challenging to learn but doable like dodging Apocalypse's specials. Hard doesn't always have to equal stacked nodes with 5 to 10 total counters. We already explained a couple years ago that it isn't fun.
I had to break out quake for map 8 just to be ultra safe to avoid item usage due to the weird mechanics and I'm almost timing out in 3 mins with less than 200k health. The artificial nerf damage has got to stop.
The game feels like it did when Seatin called out the game and Kabam created the roadmap and promised to change. Without a roadmap or something major this month I feel spending will be way down for cyberweekend unless you can buy a wish crystal or pick your champ crystal.
I said the same thing yesterday. It’s felt like that for quite a while. I think the Deadpool gold offers cheered everyone up but it only kicked the can further down the road. Cyber weekend will probably have the same effect.
Some kind of meaningful engagement with the community would be a start. The default seems to have reverted back to radio silence whenever the forums are erupting with one issue or another.
The game feels like it did when Seatin called out the game and Kabam created the roadmap and promised to change. Without a roadmap or something major this month I feel spending will be way down for cyberweekend unless you can buy a wish crystal or pick your champ crystal.
I said the same thing yesterday. It’s felt like that for quite a while. I think the Deadpool gold offers cheered everyone up but it only kicked the can further down the road. Cyber weekend will probably have the same effect.
Some kind of meaningful engagement with the community would be a start. The default seems to have reverted back to radio silence whenever the forums are erupting with one issue or another.
I predict this being the lowest earning Cyber Weekend in proportion to active accounts in the game's history
The worst is getting ripped off by bad or shady AI and bad inputs.
You're trying to bait a special 6 times in a row and they're still not throwing it and you get cornered or sp3'd.
You try and dex but parry instead.
You get a mix of passive and aggressive AI that stutters and spazzes out at the worst times and ends up catching you while you dash back.
Or you dex with certain sized champions and the spacing isn't large enough and the AI follows up with another attack.
Then you always dash back TWICE so you don't get hit with a follow-up but you end up getting cornered because the AI decides not to give you space or throw a special.
And inputs are so broken that you can't tell if it's the game or you're playing bad. I mean, I know how to dex, been doing it fine for years, why is it an issue now?
I know these things are probably bugs and bad systems but I can't help but think some if it's on purpose too. "Let them struggle baiting specials or landing attacks in time sensitive situations like in power gain or damage reduction nodes".
Test this out. Use anyone but Ghost in a fight and stand there at the start with your block open and see how the AI reacts. They punch you 90%+ of the time. Now use Ghost and see what happens. AI suddenly gets passive, dashes back or comes in at the last second, and or they just wait out the phase entirely. I'm not against them tuning things but it feels so petty.
The AI being passive is completely intentional, I don't think that is up for debate. The worst part of what they're doing is cheap at best. Passive AI, plus power gain, equals timeouts or you getting cornered even if you play it right. The game is far too reliant on baiting and throwing specials for that to be held against that. All AI should be aggressive outside of specific fights niche fights.
Let me throw something out there that hasn't been said that can help with the difficulty we been looking for that hasn't been experimented yet. Why don't you create mechanics that are actually challenging to learn but doable like dodging Apocalypse's specials. Hard doesn't always have to equal stacked nodes with 5 to 10 total counters. We already explained a couple years ago that it isn't fun.
I had to break out quake for map 8 just to be ultra safe to avoid item usage due to the weird mechanics and I'm almost timing out in 3 mins with less than 200k health. The artificial nerf damage has got to stop.
Oof, hate to see Quake being used
Yeah I thought I was done with her but with my bath any two of the same basic attacks you go unblockable. I could do it with Fury and others but why risk it?
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The funny thing here is I've long been a hater of war in its current incarnation. It's just never struck a cord with me. Anyway, it is now my favorite game mode. I was quite surprised when this revelation came upon me.
So I examined why that might be. How can a mode I think falls so short, now be the best? It's not like aw has somehow drastically improved... it hasn't. The rest of the genre has FALLEN that far. So why?The answer, for me, was simple. The fights are generally challenging ( other than the lame potions tax... like seriously) and brief.
That last part is particularly important for me it seems. Every fight length has been artificially lengthened... just to do it. This is incredibly frustrating to me. It's not difficult, but it ain't fun.
Meanwhile, aw has been providing me with challenging fights at, what I consider appropriate length. The side quest is a great examine. Jacked up health pools just to lengthen the fights....becuase. That's boring, creatively blank game design imo and nothing about 7.4 alleviated my concerns
The game feels like homework. I did an initial clear of 7.3 and it just took a while and wasn't specifically fun. Paradox lanes were terrible. The amount of work I did to keep my paradox charges down, with such minimal benefit from having them there was not a fun experience.
It would be interesting to try and have fights (not all fights!) but a lot of lanes tested for length. For instance, if I'm taking a minute trying to bait out a special or dex attacks to lower my paradox charges, I should be doing some fantastic damage in the periods where it's safe to do so to compensate for this. That would make it fun.
Fights can be lost in just a few too many blocked hits, or one slip up of the block.
If fights could be tailored so that ones, where you spend a lot of time managing different aspects of the fight to stay alive, would make you do huge damage (basically paradox but would make it so your not fighting for 3 minutes), or if they aren't as dependant on restrictions and take a little longer make it so that when you get hit, it's not game over. Getting hit should be punishing. On the other hand it shouldn't punish my passion for the game or want to make me stop playing which is basically what has happened the past few months.
A 5/65 six star has challenge rating of 150 (a 3/45 has 130). The lower the challenge rating of your attacker, the lower your crit rate and associated damage. It's a huge increase in challenge rating.
"Look, I’ve done a lot of the betas and this is the first time that I didn’t even complete the chapter. It’s not because I didn’t have the time or the right champs, it’s because I didn’t have the motivation. There is nothing really new about this chapter. Sure, there new boss nodes, but they’re mostly inconsequential. There is no new and exciting aspect to this chapter (like paradoxes for chapter 3 and superiority for chapter 2), it’s just rehashing the previous too, thus I didn’t feel motivated to test the beta because I know I already like the features in it because I’ve already faced them before. Look, chapter 4 is fine. It’s boring, but fine. It’s not going to be exciting to go through, but it’ll be challenging and difficult for most players. As far as I’m concerned, I won’t bother playing the new chapter for a while unless: 1) there’s a new title associated with it 2) the final boss is something new and fun or 3) the rewards for both it and the act are damn good. Otherwise, I just don’t care about the new chapter. It’s bland. It’s boring. It’s old. It’ll just be something to slog through to get rewards, it won’t be exciting or enjoyable since there isn’t anything that makes it different than the previous acts."
This game is getting incredibly stale and has stopped being fun. I've cut down the amount I play and spend on it by a huge amount--I'm not even spending any money on Cyber Weekend. I'm no whale by any means, but in my three years of spending money on the game, I have spent around 5K on my account. This year, I've spent about 600 dollars only, including July 4th and Spring Cleaning. The only reason why it's that high even is because I keep getting the sigil because I want to awaken Switch. After that, I'm dropping the Sigil and probably the Unit Daily Card too. Why? Because this game just isn't fun enough anymore to warrant investing my money into.
Hopefully Cyber Weekend will reflect the state of the community's frustrations and inspire some change in Kabam's team, but I have little hope.
Crit rating is 756. Against CR100 this would be 756 + / (756 + 1500 + 5*100) = 27.4% crit rate. Crit damage rating is 922, which would be [ 922 / (922 + 1500 + 5* 100)] * 5 + 0.5 = 2.08 bonus crit damage. So the total average bonus damage from critical hits would be 0.57x base damage.
Increase the defender to CR150 and crit rate changes to be 756 / (756 + 1500 + 5*150) = 25.1% Crit damage becomes [ 922 / (922 + 1500 + 5* 750)] * 5 + 0.5 = 1.95. Overall average crit bonus drops to 1.95 x 0.251 = 0.49. This is a 14% reduction in critical damage bonus, and a 5.1% reduction in overall total damage.
On the flip side, let's take a moderately tanky champ like Juggernaut on defense. His armor rating at 6* rank 1 is 391. It scales up to 517 at rank 4. That's a bigger jump than most people are probably seeing with the scaled up champs (because armor scales more tightly with rank than rarity: a 5* rank 3 Juggs already has armor rating of 440). Let's assume the attacker is using a 5* r4 attacker, which is CR 110. This would imply that 6*r1 Juggs would have an armor value of about 16%, while the 6*r4 Juggs would have an armor value of about 20.1%.
Let's assume that in the CR100 case armor was 391 and in the CR150 case armor was 517 (the difference would likely be smaller). This would make the overall perceived damage in this case (factoring in damage out and damage mitigated by armor) 0.84 + 0.57 = 1.41 in normalized terms for the CR100 case and 0.80 + 0.49 = 1.29 in the CR150 case. That's an overall reduction in effective damage of 8.5% factoring in the reduction in critical bonus damage due to DR and the overall reduction in landed damage due to scaled up armor rating. This likely overestimates the mitigation delta by quite a bit.
That's one of the reasons why "interesting content" has been an ongoing pet peeve of mine. The content designers have to become more creative, not just because players like interesting content more than scaled content, but also because they are simply running out of scaling. They have an infinite range of numbers to use, but they don't have infinite humans that can deal with them.
However, that is the issue. There is no serious content made anymore, at least not anything that is meant for Endgame players. The closest that we've had recently is Summer of Pain and even that wasn't all that.
The game would massively benefit from some type of new Everest content like Abyss of Legends, though hopefully not one that is designed solely to be a resource/unit sink.
Usually, I am pumped about July 4th and Cyber Weekend. The problem I am having this week is that I'm not sure there is anything Kabam can offer that will get me excited. Like others have mentioned, chasing my first r4 is not overly exciting. So the other thing they could offer is crystals and shards (i.e., champ acquisition). But champ acquisition from crystals (even nexus crystals) is becoming harder over time. Should I be excited about spending units or money on (for example) a Mutant nexus crystal to target Magneto? I've opened far more nexus crystals with three bad champs than nexus crystals with even one good champ. My spending dropped on the 4th and it may drop to zero this weekend.
I do find that taking breaks helps...I'm just not sure I'll be back to competitive gameplay after this one.
Carina's Challenges missed the mark about 6/9 times (an argument can be made for 5/9) but the 3/9 times that they hit the mark, they really hit it. I would love to get Volume 2 of Carina's Challenges so long as there aren't any more "Take Four Stars in LoL" or "Use two of the worst three star champion in the game to beat the Collector" challenges.
Let me throw something out there that hasn't been said that can help with the difficulty we been looking for that hasn't been experimented yet. Why don't you create mechanics that are actually challenging to learn but doable like dodging Apocalypse's specials. Hard doesn't always have to equal stacked nodes with 5 to 10 total counters. We already explained a couple years ago that it isn't fun.
I had to break out quake for map 8 just to be ultra safe to avoid item usage due to the weird mechanics and I'm almost timing out in 3 mins with less than 200k health. The artificial nerf damage has got to stop.
Some kind of meaningful engagement with the community would be a start. The default seems to have reverted back to radio silence whenever the forums are erupting with one issue or another.