Has anyone seen any updates regarding Pure Skill?
AngelDorantes
Member Posts: 16 ★
Been a couple of years since it was nerfed, this is the last we heard from @Kabam Miike almost 2 years ago, we have been patient, maybe it is time to just refund what we spent on maxing it out. 2 years seems long enough to fix it or compensate.
3
Comments
No. Fix Skill, Tech, Cosmic, Science, and Mutant while you are at it.
This should definitely be a FAQ item, something I've been working on off and on for a while now. Pure Skill wasn't changed. Pure Skill causes critical hits to ignore armor. The problem is that champions have less armor today than they did before 12.0, due to diminishing returns scaling. Being able to ignore 64% of armor means something when you're attacking something with 80% armor. It doesn't mean a lot if you're attacking something with 18% armor.
This puts Pure Skill into a weird sort of limbo. It isn't broken, but it doesn't have the value originally intended. But directly refunding Pure Skill would set the precedent that if the game changes in a way that makes older things less effective than they used to be, players deserve refunds. For example, there was a period of time when many vocal players complained that the devs were deliberately adding champions that Blade was less effective at (because of bleed immunity or not being tagged to allow Danger Sense to work, etc), and that this should be considered "essentially a nerf" to Blade. That's nonsense.
Pure Skill is very much like that, but the change is significant enough that it isn't completely nonsensical either because the value proposition for the top two tiers of Pure Skill are not just lower, but extremely low. But they aren't zero, which is probably why the devs haven't been able to come up with a resolution they are comfortable with.
Buried in all of this is a very mathy technical discussion about precisely how Pure Skill functioned under the hood. There is some question about that, but the fact is this behavior (depending on which version you subscribe to) cannot be "reverted" for two reasons: one: armor itself doesn't work the way it did prior to 12.0, so a blind reversion isn't possible, and two: trying to recreate the older math in the current game would, at best, make the higher tiers slightly more valuable at the expense of making the lower tiers less valuable, which would hurt even more players.
Every changes in masteries resulted in a refund for whatever was spent to get it, why is this not happening to those that went to L5?
Exactly, it was acknowledged as a problem that needed to be fixed, It hasn´t been fixed, so it is about time for a refund, at least for whatever we invested to unlock levels 4 and 5 which are the ones that got most dramatically affected.
Resolution would probably require doing two things simultaneously: refunding the top two tiers, but also changing Pure Skill so it does something different that roughly replaces the value of the top two tiers, so players have a choice between rebuying those tiers or spending elsewhere. I think Kabam is reluctant to just straight up refund PS4 and PS5, because of the precedent I mentioned earlier. Maybe if PS was made viable at tiers 4 and 5, that would be enough for them to find refunds more acceptable.
That's my best guess at the moment: if they could agree (amongst themselves) how to address the top tier valuation problem, they might also consider allowing players to respec out of those top two tiers because, ironically, Kabam would have significantly changed them. It would then be a true statement that Pure Skill was changed, and thus refunds would be warranted under that principle.
Without reading all of DNA's above, I think that was on target. Basically Kabam saying that Pure Skill had become too powerful if each mastery level continued to ramp up at the same rate. And so while Level-1 was perhaps now much stronger than pre v12 and because of other newer champs, something like the “diminishing returns” escalation was used for the higher levels of Pure Skill.
Anyways, whatever final comment it was by Kabam had said they are leaving Pure Skill the was it is now. (as opposed to your earlier clip from a time when they were still looking at it).
The relevant statement is: "I want to reiterate, Pure Skill is not broken. It is more effective now than it was before our 12.0 Update. The issue is, that because it's so effective, the last couple ranks are sometimes not useful unless it's against a Champion with a bunch of extra Armor, or against Hulkbuster specifically."
To be honest, I'm not even sure if Kabam Miike actually understands this or if he is simply passing along information from the developers, but this takes some parsing. Pure Skill is literally doing the same thing today as before. The logic behind saying that it is "more effective" is because armor is now less effective. But this statement has so many qualifiers and exceptions, I wouldn't say it myself. But he does correctly identify the problem: Pure Skill compared to today's armor is so effective that in most cases it is "ignoring" all the armor that is there by the time you reach tier 3. There *are* situations where tier 4 and tier 5 do something, and in those situations it is still highly effective. The problem is that there are *fewer* such situations today than in the past. It isn't less effective, it has less opportunities to show off its effectiveness.
As far as I'm aware and as far as actual testing was able to confirm back in the day, there is no "diminishing returns" being applied to Pure Skill. The problem is really just this simple: if the target has 20% armor, then there's no difference between ignoring 32% armor or ignoring 64% armor, in both cases you're ignoring all the armor. This was true back before 12.0 as well. Back then, *sometimes* you faced 20% armor and Pure Skill tier 5 did nothing, and *sometimes* you faced 50% armor and Pure Skill tier 5 did something. That's still true today, only 50% armor is much less common today. That's what Kabam Miike means when he says that sometimes, the last couple ranks are not useful. That was always true. It is just true a lot more often today.
The only complexity comes in all the special mechanical math, like the fact that critical hits already "ignore" some armor. We see Pure Skill tiers as 4%/8%/16%/32%/64%, but that's on top of critical damage's intrinsic armor bypass (note that Pure Skill says it ignores "additional armor"). If we add the intrinsic 20% on top, what Pure Skill is actually doing by tier is ignoring 24%/28%/36%/52%/84%. That might better show the problem. How often are you facing more than 36% armor? How often are you facing more than 52% armor?