**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
This game was hard when all the tools we had, Parry, Dexterity, etc, worked perfect. But now that the parry and dex timings have been “narrowed”, we have Increased block stun. And the Ai still fires specials on block, but we can no longer can block that special. (You used to be able to block if you threw a light)
It has limited our toolset as players and leaves up deeper in the hole of “have this counter or lose”.
I would like to see these changes reversed.
And the Champion fight, while there is meta gaming tactics involved in choosing the best champions and there's a skill component in knocking out the indestructible charges, honestly the first time I brought him down I was very pleased with myself (and possibly frightened the neighbors) but I wouldn't call that fight fun, exactly. If it was like Infinity Thanos, just that one fight on a short path, I might have found it more fun. But it took me a lot of practice to get it right, and after a couple of resets I decided to just keep reviving, not to spend past it, but to literally practice the one fight without having to rerun the path to get to him over and over again.
I'm not the best player in the world, but if it is taking me revive after revive after revive just to get that one phase of the fight down, I can imagine how frustrating it must be for players who are less masochistic.
I'm not sure if the high difficulty will cause a lot of players to quit any time soon: most players aren't there yet. But it isn't a good thing if players think there's an impenetrable wall to progress ahead of them. It can make even earlier progress seem pointless.
Thanks. I'm definitely an average-ish player; luckily I'm philosophical enough to play the game for the enjoyment it brings, rather than feeling the need to 'finish' it.
I like the idea of keeping current Act 6 as an Epic version of itself; with a more achievable version created with less of a difficulty leap. I'm sure there would be some complaints; but far fewer than if they nerfed the whole thing.
Out of curiosity, it'd be fascinating to see whereabouts the Special quests (ROL, LOL,AOL, Variants) plotted on that graph of yours. Not that I'm setting you homework, or anything 😏.
Great stuff, man.
Look at rol. Champs there have huge hp, but without sp3 active they are super easy to deal with
Obviously the current iteration would be considered the "variant" so that would be the higher reward tier, so what sort of things would players actually expect with quest difficulty significantly reduced? I myself couldn't see more than about what the current variant quests offer being offered. I'm just not sure that would actually be enough to appease the player base.
Wouldn't we just see more about "the rich getting richer" and the sort, as we already get that sort of thing pertaining to the variant quests when people haven't developed enough to complete them. The player may not be roadblocked in the story progression but I'd still assume, based on how reactions tend to go here, we'd just see constant posts about not being able to expand 6* rosters or get R3 6*s while those completing the higher difficulty were. Would a random 4 to 5 gem, a small amount of 6* shards, and some 5* crystals really be enough for most that are roadblocked by the current version of Act 6?
So I think the only option is have the current rewards be for the higher difficulty and a lower set offered for the new one. All that does is create even more of a rift between the top and the rest in my opinion.
It's interesting to think about it and I'm curious if they could actually pull it off without just creating a different problem. I just don't see it happening with the difficulty getting slashed but the current set of rewards still being there. I know I wouldn't be particularly thrilled if they issued a reduced difficulty act 6 for the same rewards and then I got a title, a badge, or some cavs retrospectively.
Also, Quakes ability accuracy reduction (along with Arch Angel) is what makes her so useful and I don't think she is the natural counter for any content outside of Thing map 7 mini boss.
That’s a lot of research work by you.
Frankly speaking i just explored 6.3 and believe me except 1-2 paths no paths were fun.
Attack ratings were way too high and on the top of that some disastrous nodes with disastrous champs place on them with the sole objective of pushing to use revives. This led to consume my most of time watching videos so that i use accurate champs and don’t waste units as I’m F2P player
I might not be that skilled but yes I have explore all variants and LOL and did Abyss 1 round.
In terms of difficulty i find V1 and act6 on par
The opponents won’t give you second chance if you get clipped. Even i found abyss better in terms of attack ratings and even if you don’t have Ægon you can go through the fights (i used ægon only for 3-4 fights including collector)
The rewards too aren’t great because Act rewards are permanent rewards and they must offer some guaranteed returns in the exchange of time and resources spent but 1 month of AQ & AW overshadow them in totality if you playing on higher tiers.
Lets see in which direction they pushing the game...??!!!
Been playing the game for two and a half years and have enjoyed the progression up to 6.1- it felt challenging and rewarding. 6.2 onwards is another story altogether. It feels overtuned, expensive and unenjoyable, and your analysis has made me feel a lot better about being roadblocked by it.
Kabam should seriously consider hiring you as a consultant!
Also, the numbers don't just add to the tactical nodes, they kind of synergize in a way that amplifies both. In general, high attack reduces the margin for error in the fight, because it reduces the number of mistakes you can make in the fight, and many nodes punish you for making even tiny mistakes in the fight. So it is even harder to quantify, but for my purposes it was enough to know that the non-attack/health nodes generally make things harder, in an increasingly difficult way. Those nodes do not, in general, reverse the steepness of the difficulty curve.
But I acknowledge this is a separate, and important problem to work on. Whenever you change or evolve difficulty, you have to consider how the reward balance should work. If we decide to treat difficulty of the core story content differently than we do now, we should also consider reevalulating how we apportion rewards to that difficulty as well. I don't claim to have an answer to that problem, in part because solving that problem depends on how we try to solve the difficulty problem first.
I actually enjoyed doing the podcast, sleepy and all: they asked very good prompting questions, and now when people TL;DR the post I can point them to the audio book version.
My evil mind did, for a brief moment, consider answering all their questions with one word answers.
Second thing I wanted to add is the story mode/variants are what keep people playing this game. I know a couple of people that like AQ and AW but for the vast majority of players, they don't care about those modes. I have a main account and an alt account. My main is in a top 60 AQ ally, some pretty big spenders and my alt is just with buddies who play casually. In BOTH allies, everyone complains about story mode starting with act 6. I think act 6 really needs to be toned down. And Book 2 needs to be toned down as well. 6.1 isn't that bad but once people get to 6.2, there's nothing to keep the player playing. EQ, incursions, AQ, AW? Nah, none of those keep the player engaged in this game. So if they don't tone it down, people have nothing to do to progress their accounts and just quit.
We all love the game and want it to continue with as many players as possible for as long as possible, and I really hope people in Kabam management and game development listen to @DNA3000 ‘s analysis.
In the Book 2 beta I offered a couple of other possibilities, which I'm going to combine into a single idea here. Let's hypothetical around Act 6, even though Act 6 is obviously already out. Let's say the devs released 6.1 as it is now, but they also added 6.3-like buffs that would make it much easier to run, at least for one or a couple paths. Anyone could use the buffs to lower the difficulty at least for completion (and maybe for exploration as well) and get a certain level of rewards. But if they don't use those buffs, the rewards are higher. Forgoing the buffs would be a kind of "challenge mode" version of the content, which anyone could eventually attempt, if they were strong enough, which would give out higher rewards. Let's call this the Variant difficulty of 6.1. Then you tie the Legends title into this system. Instead of giving the Legends title to the player that completes 6.1 the fastest, you instead give it to the first players to complete the Variant difficulty mode (aka, no helper buffs) under an even higher challenge condition. I suggested Itemless (inspired a bit by Brain Grant doing his best Don Quixote impersonation) but it could be something more moderate.
When 6.1 pops out, you'll have average players trying it in easy mode with helper buffs. You'll have the stronger end game players trying it without easy mode buffs. And you'll have the very top tier players attempting Legends runs where they can't just blitz the content out in a day. They will have to think, play carefully, strategize, maybe even restart multiple times to complete the content without violating any of the challenge requirements. It is conceivable that the top tier end game players could finish it *after* the lower tier players, while they chase those legends titles.
All of this while the content itself is the same content offering the same rewards for the same effort. Tier 1 rewards if you do it easy mode. Tier 2 rewards if you do it hard mode. Legends rewards if you do it in legend challenge mode.
By the way, I've always thought the completion/exploration thing was a potential landmine of a problem. Exploration rewards are usually something on the order of twice as good as completion rewards, more or less. But they can take many times more effort to get. And it is worse than just more paths, because of course people tend to do the path they find easiest first. So full exploration could easily be ten times harder, or twenty times harder than first completion when you factor in both the number of paths and the relative difficulty of them, relative to that specific player. If the content is worth doing, those exploration rewards can look juicy. I think a lot of people see Variant that way. But the full exploration rewards for Acts 6.x, and the whole banana for Act 6, can seem a lot less worth it when you're potentially plowing dozens of times more effort into Act 6 full exploration than single completion.
Now if they refunded me the thousands of units I used to actually take out the champion that would actually make a difference lol. But we all know that won't happen either.