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6.0 PTS Refresh #5 Operations Notes (17 September, 2019)


MattPucevich

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  • Dev Post

 

*construction noises in background* Polish and PTS iteration are ongoing. Here are some notes for you all.

 

Refresh Notes:

 

Operations (Global)

General

  • Lockouts for Story Mode operations have been globally changed to 24h.

 

 

 

Nature of Progress Operation

 

General

All Modes

  • We have re-enabled lockouts for Story Mode. Consistent with the change noted above, the lockouts are 24h.
  • CI-Synapse Accelerator Serum (more commonly known as "The Stims"):
    • Rewrote the CI-SAS Stim ability tooltip to completely explain all of the wonderful things stims can do. Apologies, it's a little long...

    [*]Loot rockets should no longer land on a dude in a white track suit.

    [*]Corrected a spelling mistake in the name of Incendiary Shriek

    [*]Peacekeeper turrets should be a little more aggressive about exiting combat with things when nobody's around.

    [*]Death no longer dispelled stacks of tiredness, as it appears that there is not, in fact, any rest for the wicked.

 

 

Red

All Modes

  • Made some adjustment to Synthium Derpridic growths to make them easier to see/use:
    • Growths now have an emissive glow to help them stand out from the environment.
    • Did a bit of hedge trimming around the growths so that there is less context foliage masking their locations.
    • Slightly increased the size of growths to make them easier to spot.

    [*]Red's Venom is now properly tagged as AoE.

    [*]Red's Venom damage has slightly increased.

 

 

Breach CI-004

All Modes

  • Damage from the holding pens coils can no longer be reflected because that's silly.

 

 

Super Mutant Trandoshan Action Squad GX: Shining Hunter Force of Justice Brigade

Musco note: Still not the real name...

 

All Modes

  • Corrected the size of the indicator for Greus's Trandoshan Torch AoE to match the effect size.

 

Story Mode

  • Hissyphis's and Greus's HP has increased a bit in Story Mode.

 

Veteran Mode

  • Titax Strike's damage will now be properly reduced if the target is knocked into a goo tank.

 

 

The Huntmaster

 

All Modes

  • The Huntmaster encounter now properly cleans up after itself when the encounter is completed (so no more getting stuck with the Lunch debuff, theoretically)
  • The Lunch debuff is now actually a debuff so that it can't be clicked off.

 

 

Apex Vanguard

 

All Modes

  • Scrubby Sprinkle Spray FX updated!

 

Story Mode

  • Use of the Ventilation and Scrubber stations now consumes one charge of power off of the battery (up from 0).
    This is a learnability change. Previously, only the EMP [Disruptor Pulse] station changed the power level on the battery. Because that station specifically always drains the battery, Story Mode players could only ever see the battery either completely full, or completely empty. Since players never saw the battery in a state of partial charge, there was no opportunity to learn or understand what the charge indicator was actually representing (Is it all or nothing? Does it have three charges because the indicator is broken up into three color regions? Does it have six charges because there are six bars?), and confusion about when or why the battery became uncharged (Was it every 3rd station use? Was it using the same station twice in a row?).
     
    This is one of those interesting situations where making one thing slightly harder will probably make the encounter easier overall.

 

Veteran Mode

  • Apex Vanguard's missiles actually do damage!
  • Apex Vanguard should now actually drop loot and set a lockout.

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Locking out the Story Operation for only 24 hours is not the point of a lockout. The only reason you would do that is to prevent anyone from doing the operation over and over again.

A lockout was intended not only to prevent spamming the same operation (time gating), but to allow a group to pause for the night and pick up on a different day.

So I see it as an either or situation. Maintain the week long lock out(no change) set it for 48 hours (middle ground) or no lock out.

A better idea would be to require all bosses to get credit for all quests and missions for said instance.

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Locking out the Story Operation for only 24 hours is not the point of a lockout. The only reason you would do that is to prevent anyone from doing the operation over and over again.

A lockout was intended not only to prevent spamming the same operation (time gating), but to allow a group to pause for the night and pick up on a different day.

So I see it as an either or situation. Maintain the week long lock out(no change) set it for 48 hours (middle ground) or no lock out.

A better idea would be to require all bosses to get credit for all quests and missions for said instance.

 

I feel like 24 hours does what its meant to do. People generally finish SM Ops in a single go like 99% of the time, the only reason to keep them unfinished is to abuse LBLO throughout the week. While a 24 hour lockout doesn't eliminate LBLO, it does force you do utilize the lockout entirely in a single day, so its a step in the right direction.

 

On the flip side, a 24 hour lockout limits the number of clears a single character can to once a day, instead of the infinite amount that comes with a no-lockout system.

Edited by Terro_Fett
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Did HM today with friends. So it was the first time we went so far in the landscape with the first boss. After finally dealing with invisible Stampeding Bull that was wiping us (i still cannot tell if its a mechanic or a bu..feature), we managed to get to the endgame where boss enraged at 18%. The new hit points pool seems to be way too large. Okay, there is a lot of room to use but the mechanics do not differ and it just becomes 8 minutes of the same old things. Plus the enrage doesn't actually seem to work properly - its not 300% damage, its at best 30% damage increase.

 

Also the newly added trees add a lot of complexity with line of site and boss positioning. Not sure if that was what you had in mind..but nice trap :rak_01:

 

On second "boss" adds hitpoints also seem rather high. Especially the droid. This doesn't feel natural. I doubt people will do hardmode only when they are in full 306 like we were. In 306 it should feel easy because this is the overgear, isnt it? But in 306 we feel like we are 1 or 2 tiers behind because everything dies so slow.

 

We also didn't get past 2nd boss because of the door, but you probably know about it. Thanks for being ready to let us through @Matt and even looking for us on repside, but at that time we gave up already.

Edited by Prog
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We did some testing this thursday in HM and the changes that were made to the first boss in terms of hp are very nice to have. We were 7-manning it and we still had a lot of buffer till enrage (kill time of 5:18), but this is more than fine considering our gear and bugged general sets (referring to the additional amplifiers on the berserker set). The changes that were made to the second boss are very welcome aswell. The ability of the warden droids in the last room should probably be on the earlier warden droids as well since it would introduce you to the new mechanic you now have to deal with. Sadly the warden droids on the last room are bugged, so we weren't able to progress further in the operation, but please try to keep the difficulty of the fight with the bugged warden droids. With a planned interrupt rotation and some coordination we were very close to killing the bugged version of the fight and it was a lot of fun trying to come up with a strategy for this and actually trying to execute it properly, especially because most of the other encounters are very straight forward.
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