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Upcoming Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw Balance Changes
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Something I've learned over many years giving feedback to game developers is there is no other side. You're not in competition with the players who disagree with you. It is not like whichever side wins the forum argument gets to give the design team orders. There's only one side, and it is the game developers' side. They are the only ones that can change the game, and the only way for you to affect the game is to change the minds of the developers. Changing the minds of other players helps exactly zero. Winning arguments against them helps exactly zero. It can actually hurt, in fact.
If you say there's no justification whatsoever for the devs' actions, you'll certainly get a lot of forum posters agreeing with you. But they can't help you. You'll probably get most if not all of the developers choosing to ignore you, and they are the only ones who could possibly help you.
This seems counterproductive to me.
When we see the same parties time after time doing Kabams bidding by attempting to justify tactics that are completely unethical, it gives the impression that it is somehow acceptable. That's my issue with the usual suspects. They do what they do to try to derail topics and create a false sense of OK where OK doesn't exist.
Players have power when we come together. To insinuate otherwise is showing your belly.
We saw this with 12.0 itself. Everyone was calling for a boycott for every little problem after 12.0, and were literally being laughed off the forums. If everyone on Earth agreed to do it we could start calling the sky green. But that's not going to happen, and saying "if only" is being silly.
Your problem doesn't seem to be the forum posters who disagree with you. It is the thousands of players who simply don't care about the problem as much as you. And in my experience it is far easier to convince someone who disagrees with you to change their mind and agree with you than it is to convince someone who just doesn't care about what you care about to start caring. At least the people who disagree with you care enough to do anything at all. You can't even engage with the players who don't care, because they won't even tell you they don't care. Because they don't care.
Also, I don't like framing things this way, but I think we would both agree that absent some very large protest, Kabam will do whatever it thinks it should do, even if there's going to be a large amount of disagreement on the forums. So again, absent a very large outside protest, if my strategy is to reach the developers with a reasoned argument and yours is to marshall the player community on the forums and we both succeed, who's going to win?
Whatever else you might think about my posts, I don't as a rule suggest future changes to the game that I think the majority of players would likely oppose. I'll support an unpopular change after the fact if I agree with it, and I'll discuss unpopular changes if they are brought up by someone else, but I don't actively promote them. Call it hubris, but I don't believe this would be fair.
Players have the ability to allow things, do you honestly think we would have got a rank down ticket for shehulk without the long thread of complaints? Lets stop the games, players don't control everything obviously to infer that there is no impact is just false.
Changes aren't always going to be additive. That's just not how balancing works.
A rank five with suicides at 10 charges could do ~450k+ sp3 damage. That's a lot, but he was unusable in most areas and damage was his only utility.
At the highest levels, nobody used him in Alliance War or Alliance Quest, or in Labyrinth or many lanes in Act 6. Cull was very niche. No immunities, no sustainability, and only worked under a very specific set of conditions: can he parry opponents, inflict armor breaks, and proc his own buffs? No to a lot of that.
Procing his own buffs (rout/thanos' favors): buffet, fisticuffs, pilfer, tranquility
Being able to parry: limber, stun immunity, debuff immunity
Inflicting armor breaks: armor break immunity, debuff immunity, nodes that shrug off debuffs faster
Cull was working as intended until a few months later they decided he wasn't. How is this system any good for players?
If you have such a case, I would be interested in reading the decision. If you can't find a public link, you can give me a case number or a lexis citation search that leads to it, and I can find it from there.
When he DIDNT have the crazy damage bug, a rank 5 at sig 1 at 10 missions with a lot of armor breaks (15+ at least), and suicides he did 450k+ damage easily. Remember that sig doesn't matter if were doing attacks during his rout buff. Sig only increases damage during the fury stage.
Here's a rank 1 6* which is slightly weaker than a rank 5 doing 480k+
1. Publish/Post your data. That's transparency. Cull Obsidian was bugged for a LONG TIME. Not keeping his charges. Then when you guys fixed that, the damage got wonky and huge. Are you mistakenly looking at that?
2. I have R5 Sig 200 5* Cull Obsidian. I use him for a lot of events, but I have to pump him with potions early on. Even then, he doesn't auto win. Pretty sure he's the perfect champion that you guys want. You are incentivized to buy/use potions on him.
3. There are tons of nodes that easily counter Cull Obsidian. Spite, Fisticuffs, Rage, Caltrops, Thorns, Invade, That one that increases power gain for armor breaks, Buffet......
Really. Post your data so other people can look at it and double check your work. Summoners already double check the champions for bugs after release.
Dude, I don't agree with what Kabam is doing, I think they really need to do something about the lack of testing, but ask for data? to what end? What are you going to do with that ??? check it?? come on..
let's stop with this, it's ridiculous to even ask for that