**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
Either way, an entire overhaul only for her damage to be increased and some her stuff to actually be nerfed is bad.
Are you saying The Hood buff wasn't good? I use him a lot now. He's awesome.
These buffs are for champs that people were not using, so either you like the buff and start using them, or you hate the buff and continue not using them.
First: The vast majority of players probably hear Buff, and make no distinction between Moderate/Value and Overhaul (and that's not even counting when there were three categories). Even those that are aware of the categories are confused as to what they mean (As Champions that had received a Moderate buff seemed to be more drastically changed/improved compared to some Overhaul champions). So, there needs to be some clarity as to what level of Buff we can expect as players, and what the categories actually mean.
Second: Community Fan Vote Part 1 - This ties into my first point, but seemingly a lot of reasons people posted about wanting Guillotine buffed over Antman was related to them liking Guillotine but wanting a little more from her. Conversely, Antman people argued that he has much less in his kit, and thus needs the buff more. These arguments are related to the word 'Buff', but are arguing for different categoryies of Buff. If Kabam made the category of buff more explicit, would that have impacted voting? (ie. Would more or less people have voted Antman if they knew it was a Moderate or Overhaul buff planned?)
Third: Community Fan Vote Part 2 - There seemed to be an expectation that Community Fan Vote Winner = God Tier champion. This is based solely on one data point (Hercules), yet that seemed to be the expectation. (We also saw this type of thinking after the Magneto/Colossus buff; players expected that buffed champion = god tier; Most people were rapidly disabused of the notion, and Kabam also later stated that explicitly). Some clarity is probably needed - that the winner just means that the champion/buff will exist in the game sooner rather than later.
The second issue, also related to communication, is response or lack thereof, to feedback. As people have mentioned, more beta testing or more response to CCP would be beneficial. Even if Kabam doesn't do more beta testing, communication that they are listening, would be better.
If overhaul meant new abilities then every moderate update is now an overhaul. Gambit didn’t used to have reduction of passive damage on his mediums, is his an overhaul?
Hell, even gamora would be considered an overhaul. She didn’t used to have a miss counter. It’s a new ability, therefore by your logic it’s an overhaul.
I’m not saying the Hood buff wasn’t good, I’m not sure where that inference came from but I’ll set it straight now. His first buff was bad for removing the fate seal, but his second buff was good. He’s not my personal cup of tea, but a good buff nonetheless.
“either you like the buff and start using them, or you hate the buff and continue not using them” What about people who liked them before the buff, but no longer like them after the buff? I’ve seen someone with an r3 Guilly who ranked her up before the buff was announced because they liked the abilities. Now, they don’t like the new mechanic, heavy playstyle or anything else.
Dr. Zola
Having that type of schedule does not present a problem, especially not in the here and now. Right now, there are more than enough champions who could benefit from a complete overhaul to fill out those spots for (most likely) the rest of the game's life.
So how did we, despite this, end up in this mess? That I cannot answer. We shouldn't have landed here. I think Kabam simply was out of touch with why people liked Guillotine and what they wanted from her. Even if we look past what was needlessly taken away, I don't think anything was added that was in line with what people wanted from her. One of the complaints I've seen the most is that she didn't receive any sort of utility - especially any mystic utility. She has no way of dealing with buffs or power-controlling the opponent. The only thing in her kit that has to do with buffs is that her chance to bleed is increased for each of the opponent's buffs, but even that was nerfed so she only reaches her previous level of bleed chance at 3 buffs (and even then, those bleeds are weaker than they were before because...reasons?).
I was looking forward to a mystic brawler that would place lots of bleeds on the opponent while at the same time having more mystic utility. There were so many things they could have done with the soul mechanic that would have been really cool. Maybe the duration of the opponent's buffs is decreased by let's say 5% for each soul she has? Maybe their potency? Maybe the opponent is unable to gain buffs while they are bleeding? Maybe her critical hits could remove a soul, nullify a buff and place a bleed?
Just something to make her more of a mystic. But no. Instead, they both kind of doubled down on who she was pre-buff while simultaneously removing a lot of what was her most popular features pre-buff. It's such a weird buff design.
Let me ask you this, if you go through every champion right now, how many do you think need overhauls? I understand this may take a little while, but even just a rough number.
However, my point is that I don't think we should necessarily read too much into how Kabam schedules things as an indication regarding how many champs they think will ultimately need any specific type of buff. Even if they only consider 24 champs to be in need of an overhaul, having one overhaul and one tune-up/moderate buff per month might just be a workable pace for the next couple of years. After that, they could just switch out the overhauls in favor of other types of buffs.
With that said, I do agree with you that there are definitely safer bets in terms of which champions could receive a complete overhaul. Ignoring the champs that people really want to see overhauled the most (like the OG Avengers) only to instead overhaul those in lesser need of it is...weird. I absolutely think OG Abomination needs an overhaul but I think it would benefit the game immensely more to overhaul OG Captain America before him. They have some strange priorities when it comes to buffing champs. I generally try to not lower myself to those silly "Why would you allow this buff to take the place of that buff!?" arguments/rants, but I do think that certain obvious buff candidates' absences are becoming quite noticeable.
With all of that being said, I've been having a headache this whole day so I feel like I'm maybe not quite as sharp as I normally believe myself to be.
I’m fine with it. I realize resources are finite and it takes a lot to produce new content every month. Redesigns may be too much to ask right now, and I 100% understand that.
Dr. Zola
Luckily, I've got all of them in their 5 and 6* versions.
“we’re going through the whole roster, and we’re putting all the Champs into 4 categories:
Balanced – Champions that are “Good Enough for Now”, or better.
Tune-Up – No ability changes just tuning up numbers (Torch or Sentry)
Update – Numbers and Minor Ability Changes but largely the same kit (a la Red Hulk, or Carnage)
Overhaul – Whole new kit time. (Think Hulkbuster or Colossus)”
I mean, they actually say they’ve put all the champs into those categories. Meaning, they still have enough overhauls by which they could get through 1 tune up or 1 moderate update per month and they’d still have overhauls to go through.
Again, there may be a link in the chain that Kabam haven’t informed us of. But as of the current information, Kabam have more overhauls than tune ups and moderates combined, which makes me think they’re a little over-eager to put a champ into the overhaul category
If you take a champ and increase their chance to bleed from 12% to 15%, you're not going to radically change how they play. You are unlikely to make qualitatively dramatic changes in their performance. Your changes are likely to have "linear" effects. But when you change how things work and interact, you can get strange amplifications, you can get strange interactions, you can get dramatic changes in performance. Just the possibility of this demands a completely different update process.
Take Guillotine. Let's start with G1.0, and just add G2.0's enhanced bleeds to her. What happens next? Her sustainable healing drops severely. Why? Because her heal was a life transfer, and that only worked on damage from attack hits. If Guillotine shifts her damage from strikes to bleeds, her healing drops substantially. That's why people who say the devs should have left her bleed exactly as it was before are actually wrong: doing so would have reduced her healing about as bad or worse than G2.0 nerfed it. Doing nothing would have been just as bad of a nerf.
That's why mechanical or interacting changes require the full overhaul process. You're going to start breaking things when you change mechanics or radically change things that interact with each other, and once you open that door, everything unavoidably ends up on the table. That's why you need good design rules that guide the developers in terms of what they should avoid doing in the net result, and what they should be aiming for by default. Guillotine is what happens when those rules don't exist or are not followed.
The overhaul process isn't explicitly intended to make champions unrecognizable. The overhaul process is intended for when a champion has to be taken apart and put back together, either because the devs want to add things that won't just bolt onto the champion from the outside, or because the champion is put together in a way that the parts can't be changed without globally affecting the whole in unintended ways (or in extreme cases, when there's basically nothing to take apart). Guillotine was always going to have to be taken apart. We couldn't have protected her from that. The rules have to make sure she gets put back together the right way.
I’m not even sure if it’s still in the thread, but I suggested earlier that the Cage/Rhulk/Venom buffs were great examples of more or less working within the kit. All of those champs already had something they did, and their updates capitalized on those things and added to them to make them better (and arguably still relevant today).
Study those kinds of champs and understand them. While I’d love for a champ like Dr. Strange to get a Mags level update, I think I would be even happier if batches of okay champs got the Cage/Rhulk/Venom treatment.
Dr. Zola
Now that we're down to 2 buffs a month, all buffs should just be "buffs". No tweaks, no overhauls, just buffs. The exact buff that the champ in question needed. Categorizing them just puts unneeded scrutiny on something that should be simple.
I just think that removing these categories as a whole and just referring to them all as buffs would be a very beneficial move. I feel that would allow them to really help organize their buff timeline without having to worry about rushing champs just to say they buffed someone.
As for my Guilly, I duped my 6* just before the buff announcement and debated ranking her versus my 6* Tigra. I wound up choosing Tigra (although I’m not as proficient with her mechanics). I had not used the 6* version, but my 4* and 5* versions were frequent members of my team for Act 4 and Act 5. She’s always been a smooth champ and easy to play—I was optimistic a community choice buff would make her 6* someone I’d want to rank up.
Hope that helps.
Dr. Zola
Before disagreeing, hear me out.
Kabam can obviously pull data to find out who has champs at what level.
Why not have part of the program be to query that data prior to announcing a buff and give champ specific RDTs to anyone who had the champ ranked up.
@BitterSteel I'll use you as an example since you started this thread. You love Mr. Negative, and I think have him as a 6*R3, so you obviously like him as is.
If a year from now Kabam gives him a tune-up that for whatever reason nerfs his degen ability, you would get to decide for yourself if you want to keep him at R3, or take him down if you think the tune-up was actually a tune-down.
It would obviously still suck for you, because you liked his kit, but you likely wouldn't feel as bitter (sorry....pun intended), because you could get back those resources.
I would suggest contingencies be applied to these hypothetical RDTs.
1) RDTs are only given to those summoners who had the champ ranked up prior to a buff announcement, so if you heard "Guillotine won the summoner's choice!" and immediately ranked her up, you don't get an RDT, cause you jumped the gun.
2) RDTs are only valid for 30 days. That gives time to thoroughly test the new kit yourself and decide. You don't get to wait a year, pull a shiny new champ, then decide to use the RDT simply cause you want to rank up the new champ, and haven't used Mr. Negative in eight months.
3) Sig stones are only returned if the sig was explicitly changed (I'd be open to debate on this).
Ultimately, as I laid out at the beginning, I know the sheer mention of RDTs creates a ton of backlash, but I think it solves a major problem associated with the program, which is the risk of alienating some, if not all, of the community who already had the champ ranked up for some reason.
In the end, every individual gets to decide for themselves if the buff was good or bad for their roster, cause if I've learned anything reading and posting on these forums, the only way to please the entire community is to make every champ a God.
I did a contract job for a game studio once. I said the system in question required X, Y, and Z. I was told they could give me X and Y, and if I needed Z it just wouldn't happen at all. I made it work with X and Y.