[City of Heroes] If ringthree gets to do it, I get to. :p Rather than posting everything, you can go check it out here. CoH has the nice aspect of including a comment on why things are getting love or nerfs.
I already told you the new and exciting things earlier: new zone, new powers, new events, some retrofitting. Also some very nice quality of life improvements, such as making the Shadow Shard and Rikti Crash Site more viable. Blasters seem to have gotten most of the love, with a higher damage cap, more hit points, damage increases as they take damage, and another Ancillary Power Pool. Scrappers got more damage.
And of course…the nerfs. I mentioned last month that the Hami-O thing was not much of a nerf. This is a nerf. Defenses and AE damage have taken a hit across the board. Maybe the magnitude is small, I don’t know yet. In order to give Controllers a more balanced experience across levels, they gain some damage capacity, lose a large amount of AE control, and got a large pet nerf; Dark Miasma Defenders were caught in the wake of this, losing some control. AE attacks now hit a limited number of targets. There are two screens full of defensive powers taking a hit. I suppose they could have just said, “All except X,” but I’m not sure what is in X yet. I don’t see Eclipse on the list, or Fire Tankers. Some classes of enemies’ accuracy was also reduced, so that might offset it.
The funny thing is, I feel somewhat struck by the defense nerf even though I play mostly squishies. Very few of my characters would see any penalty from the round of nerfs, except for the squishiness of teammates. Except for playing a */Devices Blaster, most of the nerfs in the game have missed me. Maybe it is just that the list of defense nerfs is two pages long and includes some characters I was thinking of playing.
Fire Tankers’ defenses aren’t on the list. That’s kind of funny. Because, hey, there aren’t enough of them yet. I wonder if Burn is affected by the AE damage nerf.
More as the patch develops. Or, actually, probably not much, since I avoid exploding with every change. Tip to Cryptic: make the ‘love’ section of the patch look longer than the ‘nerf’ section. For example, don’t sum up a new zone and five new power pools in half a screen at the beginning, then go on to have a few screens worth of nerfs. List out those power pools, for example. On another note, front-loading all the nerfs then scaling them back and/or adding love over time helps calm complaints, but it does train players to complain about any change with the expectation that nerfs will be scaled back based on the volume of complaints.
: Zubon
