Why are Nodes tied to opposing Champions

BostonSpidey124

I have noticed this behavior a bunch of times and I finally had enough of it that I wanted to see if I could get an answer. Why are the nodes for a fight tied to the opposing Champion? If you don’t understand what I mean here is an example from this month’s event quest. Chapter 2.1 is for #Mercenaries and I brought in Domino. When a #Mercenary stuns an opponent with parry, the champion applies a passive bleed. However sometimes when I parried with Domino no passive bleed was applied (yes the opponent was stunned) and the opponent then took critical failure damage from Domino’s signature ability. So that says to me that Domino’s ability reduction that was applied to the opponent also applied to the node designed to help me in the fight.

Last month I saw similar things in the chapter designed for Tech champions. If you parried an opponent when your Tech Champion has an armor buff, you were supposed to power drain them and gain a passive Fury. I have the Pacify mastery maxed out so when my champions inflict stun, the opponent’s ability accuracy drops 30%. Sometimes I didn’t drain the opponents power and sometimes I did but didn’t gain a Fury.

So it gets back to the original question, why are nodes, especially nodes designed to help us in the fight, tied to the opponent such that when you reduce the opponent’s ability accuracy, you have the potential to stop nodes from working?

CyborgNinja135

Because nodes are considered an extension of a champion's abilities. That's why Falcon and AA can shut down so many annoying fights. AAR has always been a double edged sword with the EQ nodes.

K00shMaan

That's fair but their appears to be no limitation in the ability to have nodes that are housed on the Attacker as well. It seems that we've reached a point of complexity in this game where we can have fights where certain nodes are on the defender and interact to AAR in that way while other nodes are on the Attacker and this interact with AAR differently. Battlegrounds even specifically says that there are "no nodes on the attacker" in the pre fight screen. To me that seems like they've already opened the door of this design space.

Short answer is it works like this since it always has. The more we discuss whether that's the best way to do it or not, the more likely we are to have the alternative way become a more frequent occurrence.

DNA3000

BostonSpidey124 said:

So it gets back to the original question, why are nodes, especially nodes designed to help us in the fight, tied to the opponent such that when you reduce the opponent’s ability accuracy, you have the potential to stop nodes from working?

The short answer is that is the way it has always generally been done, and there's no obvious way to universally solve this issue.

The longer answer is I don't think this works the way players conventionally describe it as working. We think about the nodes being "attached" to the attacker or the defender, but I don't think that's actually a thing. I think the nodes are just there, and the "orientation" of the nodes is a more complex thing that affects how the nodes work.

I'm reminded of "defensive ability accuracy" where there used to be all sorts of theories on what counted as defensive ability accuracy and what didn't. Turns out there's no such thing as defensive ability accuracy at all. A defensive ability accuracy debuff is an ability accuracy debuff that takes effect when the target is struck and at no other time. But it is all just ability accuracy: there's no separate kind of ability accuracy called defensive ability accuracy.

GinjabredMonsta

This reason is why I and other have also taken the pacify mastery off. While it can help, it negatively interacts with a lot of nodes now and just does more harm than good