Mobility Creep

[Zunayson]

I assume this suggestion will be unpopular, but here goes:

I have been taking a stab at lowbie (10-44) pvp and other than how boring it is to not have so many abilities overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how clear gameplay was without so many mobility options that come online in the 60s.

Reducing absolute mobility across the board has a couple of perks

• Reduce skill gap. New players learn the game by questing, which does not prepare them for the speed of pvp.
• Engine, latency, and desync is much worse now.
• Huttball becomes more engaging again.

Done properly, the relative mobility of the classes should still be balanced.

• Powertech Hydraulic Overrides speed boost should be reduced to 30%
• Operative Evasion speed boost should be reduced to 50%
• Predation speed boost should be reduced to 50%
• Force Speed cooldown should be increased
• Remove Mad Dash (2), Shadow Step (2), Merc blink, and sniper hololocate.
• Remove the Second Wind Legendary

This is not completely exhaustive because there are so many passives, but the idea is to revert mobility to around 2017 or so. Tell me why this is a horrible idea.

[RACATW]

It’d be horrible because snipers exist 

[Liarrrra]

Removing mad dash would mean removing any survivability jugg has. o7 Might as well reroll

[septru]

6 hours ago, Liarrrra said:

Removing mad dash would mean removing any survivability jugg has. o7 Might as well reroll

Off topic. But jugg doesn't need mad dash. It would help, but the survivability is there without it. Especially with second wind. 

[Liarrrra]

On 10/28/2024 at 6:51 PM, Zunayson said:

Remove Mad Dash

 

On 10/28/2024 at 6:51 PM, Zunayson said:

Remove the Second Wind Legendary

Yes, off topic.

[DeannaVoyager]

18 hours ago, RACATW said:

It’d be horrible because snipers exist 

Maybe he plays a sniper. Because that would explain. 

[Zunayson]

This list is not exhaustive. Probably for Sniper, the roll reset on Evasion would need to be removed and also countermeasures speed boost duration needs to be reduced to 3 seconds. Roll seems fine to me. 

[RACATW]

1 hour ago, Zunayson said:

This list is not exhaustive. Probably for Sniper, the roll reset on Evasion would need to be removed and also countermeasures speed boost duration needs to be reduced to 3 seconds. Roll seems fine to me. 

I think you are missing the point. Have you ever counted how long a sniper can keep you rooted in one place for? We are not even talking about the slows or knock backs here, just the roots.

[Zunayson]

47 minutes ago, RACATW said:

I think you are missing the point. Have you ever counted how long a sniper can keep you rooted in one place for? We are not even talking about the slows or knock backs here, just the roots.

I was definitely missing your point because you mentioned snipers and didn't mention roots. When I think of a sniper, I think of their unparalleled mobility and not really their roots, but I think I see what you mean now.

It sounds like you're saying that classes need mobility in order to overcome sniper roots. Of course the sniper will laugh in your face and roll 3 times in a row. The only conclusion I can possibly come to, based on your argument is that snipers are currently overpowered on live.

I think mobility and roots are not related and are not counters to each other. The way to deal with roots is root immunity, and not mobility. 

Without phase walk or 3 rolls, the sniper won't be able to create so much distance so effortlessly, and so it won't require so much mobility to overcome it. To answer your question, it's 19 seconds if the marksman sniper plays perfectly, I think.

[SentinalMasterWW]

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Reducing absolute mobility across the board has a couple of perks

• Reduce skill gap. New players learn the game by questing, which does not prepare them for the speed of pvp.
• Engine, latency, and desync is much worse now.
• Huttball becomes more engaging again.

So dumb down PVP to players who cannot be bothered to learn it? Seriously I see so many PVE players come in with 324 gear into arenas; no tactical or implants nada. So lets ruin the fun for the experienced players to dumb it down to a player base who cannot even come in properly geared. 

 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

• Powertech Hydraulic Overrides speed boost should be reduced to 30%

If you want to see 30% Hydros play merc. It is basically just enabling jog again. 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Operative Evasion speed boost should be reduced to 50%

Operatives already are in a bad state with how easily they get shut down by other classes. This would further make them worse. 

 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Predation speed boost should be reduced to 50%

No, Predation is an amazing raid buff to your team both in PVE and PVP. Predation is basically the identity of Maras right now and is really the only thing they bring to the table. 

 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Force Speed cooldown should be increased

Again no. Force speed should only be adjusted for Madness Sorc and its cooldown reduction passive via DOT's. Reduce how often the cooldown can proc on Madness and its DOTs. 

 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Remove Mad Dash (2), Shadow Step (2), Merc blink, and sniper hololocate.

H to the e to the l l no. That would butcher those classes even more than broadsword already has. Mad dash for me is almost mandatory nowadays given how many roots and slows exist in the game. I'm assuming with shadow step you mean shadow stride for Assassins, which basically means removing the shadowcraft implant since it relies on it, and a ton of other passives to sin. Merc Blink I am assuming is merc rocket out, again it butchers the class even more. Merc's already have garbage mobility and this just lets classes have a free for all on the class. 

Removing hololocate is basically a punch in the face to all snipers. Hololocate is basically their get out of jail card. I notice you didn't put Sorc's phasewalk up there too so Sorc's can keep theirs but snipers loose theirs? 

 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

This is not completely exhaustive because there are so many passives, but the idea is to revert mobility to around 2017 or so. Tell me why this is a horrible idea.

Even in 2017 mobility was far better and we literally had these abilities back in 2017 before they pruned everything in 7.0. It is a horrible idea because it does not account for the inane amount of roots and slows in the game currently. The only thing I agree on is this point 

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

Remove the Second Wind Legendary

 

The better solution is to undo pruning and give all the classes their abilities back, make the ability trees actually worthwhile and not total pieces of garbage. Than maybe we will see better performance in classes.

[Zunayson]

1 hour ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

So dumb down PVP to players who cannot be bothered to learn it? ...

Let me know if I'm misunderstanding anything you say here:

First, you say "Some players do not bother to gear right, and they don't bother to pvp right - and it's those players fault." For the first part - it's a commonly held view that you're wrong and actually that 7.0 gearing is the problem - it's too complicated. It shouldn't be much of a stretch to say the second part is probably wrong too. PvP is too complicated, hard to learn, and skill-based right now. It was way easier to learn to play in 1.x and 2.x eras when pvp was as slow as the questing experience. When did you start playing the game?

Next, you list every class in the game and say, "this will GUT them!" But if all classes are nerfed, then really none are. It means I did a pretty good job, right? The only class that didn't elicit this reaction from you was Sorc. The reason I didn't suggest removing Phasewalk is that it has been in the game since 2.0 IIRC, and hololocate was only added in 6.0. 

Thanks for the correction about 2017. I did not realize how quickly time had flown. I am actually suggesting we return to around 3.0 mobility, so 2015.

Obviously this entire thread is just for fun, since one of the first replies was correctly pointing out that this game is in Maintenance mode.

[septru]

I want to clear up a few things and respond to a couple points people have made about movement. I do this (a) knowing that any suggestions are pointless because the game is in maintenance mode. (b) knowing that these issues are irrelevant because the average player skill has plummeted to all time low and PvP in the current game is far from competitive. 

 

I have been talking about mobility creep since its inception 7ish years ago. Here's a post I found 5 years ago that I wrote about it. Extreme mobility (abilities like phase walk, maddash, exfilitrate) was added to the game around 3.0 as a way to make the game more dynamic. But since its creation in 3.0, these extreme mobility abilities have given way to an unbalanceable mobility arms war: the only way to balance 70% marauder predation is to give sorcerers phase walk and the only way to balance that is to give powertechs 75% hydros and so on and so on. And it didn't stop there. With extreme mobility came extreme slows and roots meant to balance out for the extreme mobility, 90% passive slows, reapplying deathbrand, pen blast root. But that did not help. This mobility arms war has created several issues: 

 

(1) Extreme mobility creates dsync. It doesn't take a genius to realize that abilities like chain lightning root and predation significantly reduce the FPS of the game. Using exfiltrate to roll off platforms on the z axis almost always results in dsync. Dsync is almost causally linked to extreme mobility.

(2) The mobility arms race with its extreme roots/slows and extreme mobility has created the current game where players are either moving very fast, or not moving at all. I either have complete immunity to every root in the game, or I don't have any immunity and these roots reduce my speed by 90%. 

(3) Most importantly, extreme mobility has reduced overall skill by eliminating a crucial part of the game, positioning. With extreme mobility, positioning has become irrelevant and poor positioning, no longer punishable. Take a sniper that has over extended, rolled into the enemy line, even come out of entrench. Who cares? He can just holotraverse back to safety. 

 

I know none of this matters. Ranked PvP is gone, the average player has no idea how to play their class, and there hasn't been any changes to PvP in 2 years. But extreme mobility is undoubtedly a bad thing for this game. The best thing the devs could do to fix the game would be to cut back on all mobility across the board. 

[septru]

 

12 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

If you want to see 30% Hydros play merc. It is basically just enabling jog again. 

30% hydros is only slow relative to everyone else who has a 70% movement speed increase. 70% movement speed is absolutely unnecessary. There is literally no reason to have it in the game. This includes 70% predation, 200% operative evasion, sniper entrench, sniper evasion, jugg enrage, 100% sorcerer polarity shift (iirc it was removed from the game), assassin and operative speed buff after holotraverse/phantomstride. All of this should be nerfed or removed from the game entirely. 

12 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

H to the e to the l l no. That would butcher those classes even more than broadsword already has. Mad dash for me is almost mandatory nowadays given how many roots and slows exist in the game. I'm assuming with shadow step you mean shadow stride for Assassins, which basically means removing the shadowcraft implant since it relies on it, and a ton of other passives to sin. Merc Blink I am assuming is merc rocket out, again it butchers the class even more. Merc's already have garbage mobility and this just lets classes have a free for all on the class. 

Removing hololocate is basically a punch in the face to all snipers. Hololocate is basically their get out of jail card. I notice you didn't put Sorc's phasewalk up there too so Sorc's can keep theirs but snipers loose theirs? 

The point is that classes should not have get out of jail free cards. Snipers have entrench. They should literally never be getting stunned. Hololocate almost entirely eliminates any punishments to a sniper who is successfully CCed. Operative already has roll. Holotraverse entirely eliminates any punishments to an operative that uses their rolls poorly. Juggernauts have insane movement speed and immunity through jump and enrage. Maddash eliminates any punishment to a jugg that does not maintain this immunity and movement speed. These get out of free jail cards are pointless. 

 

I'm open to a case by case basis. For example, I think sorcerer should have phase walk because it doesn't have CC or root immunity apart from force speed. But the "get out of jail free" abilities you defend are exactly what lowers the skill level of the game. 

 

Edited October 31, 2024 by septru

[AocaVII]

No one is playing this anymore. The queue times are very long. I don't play only very rarely. And when you do finally get a pop the war zone is so unbalanced because you have very very unskilled players versus very skilled players. 

These things that you're talking about are not an issue; people must be forgetting about the lack of mobility and how every ranged class was like a turret and used to get destroyed in one second by melee. It was a total disaster.

The one thing that the developers did get right was giving  mobility to the ranged classes  which isn't as good as it used to be but it fixed the game because it was impossible to play a ranged class at one time once everybody got good at melee classes in the beginning of the game if you played a sorcerer, Merc or sniper you were destroyed in one second.

The real issue is the war zones themselves. Or rather the lack pops and of competitive war zones.

In the last two weeks I've removed probably 60 people from friends list that PVP because no one is playing this anymore. I think you should address the first problem that no one's playing this anymore because of the imbalance.

The 20 minute q-pop times and then the 80 kills versus 1 kill are a major problem. And it's not because of any mobility that people aren't playing. The war zones aren't fun because the majority like 90% players aren't good at PvP. They're only in the war zones for rewards they don't care if they win or if they lose the type of gear they wear they don't care about anything they just are there taking up space.

By the way the sniper roots are for 2 seconds and then once you take damage the root disappears so it's a 2-second root snipers can't root you indefinitely. It's a few more seconds if you take no damage. 

Edited November 1, 2024 by AocaVII

[Monterone]

20 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

Again no. Force speed should only be adjusted for Madness Sorc and its cooldown reduction passive via DOT's. Reduce how often the cooldown can proc on Madness and its DOTs.

I unsubbed, but as far as I remember that proc only works every 5s, so it can proc twice.

The better solution is to make sure that the two talents that improve Force Speed are both in the same tier. One up in top tier reduces the CD of FS by 5s (along with some other things), the other lower one works off dots. If you put both of them in the same higher tier, people could only pick one.

[Dyne-]

On 10/28/2024 at 10:51 AM, Zunayson said:

I assume this suggestion will be unpopular, but here goes:

I have been taking a stab at lowbie (10-44) pvp and other than how boring it is to not have so many abilities overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how clear gameplay was without so many mobility options that come online in the 60s.

Reducing absolute mobility across the board has a couple of perks

• Reduce skill gap. New players learn the game by questing, which does not prepare them for the speed of pvp.
• Engine, latency, and desync is much worse now.
• Huttball becomes more engaging again.

Done properly, the relative mobility of the classes should still be balanced.

• Powertech Hydraulic Overrides speed boost should be reduced to 30%
• Operative Evasion speed boost should be reduced to 50%
• Predation speed boost should be reduced to 50%
• Force Speed cooldown should be increased
• Remove Mad Dash (2), Shadow Step (2), Merc blink, and sniper hololocate.
• Remove the Second Wind Legendary

This is not completely exhaustive because there are so many passives, but the idea is to revert mobility to around 2017 or so. Tell me why this is a horrible idea.

Yea, I can't imagine how this suggestion would ever become popular. Ability pruning already stripped the game of the majority of its complexity (i.e. fun). If the developers ever needed a coup de grace to get rid of players that enjoy competitive PvP and high APM gameplay, this is probably it.

Personally, I just don't see more pruning being the solution to ability pruning. 

[Beyrahl]

On 10/30/2024 at 10:34 PM, SentinalMasterWW said:

If you want to see 30% Hydros play merc. It is basically just enabling jog again. 

Merc hydros during predation are actually incredibly fast for some reason, nearly on par or better than PT's without pred. They've never interacted before with each other but ever since 7.0 they seemingly have. Interesting change none the less, sadly marauder/sentinel is in a laughable state. 
 

On 10/31/2024 at 10:45 AM, septru said:

Extreme mobility creates dsync. It doesn't take a genius to realize that abilities like chain lightning root and predation significantly reduce the FPS of the game. Using exfiltrate to roll off platforms on the z axis almost always results in dsync. Dsync is almost causally linked to extreme mobility.

It's not even extreme mobility that causes it. Just mismatch with the server and client, generally players on laggier PCs (nearly everyone) or bad internet connections / wifi etc. Will cause this in just common play - even in lowbies, midbies, where they notoriously run 10x better than 80's due to the lack of things going on. Most of it stems from packet loss and ping spikes initially, if the game updated twice as often as it currently did it'd likely be better but we're still limited by players PC's, server engine & internet connections. 
In any range for 80's it's nearly always a combo of the three with majority being engine. 
tl;dr even something as simple as jumping will cause desync if your PC/internet connection is bad. It doesn't need to be the mobility options available. Nearly any other case is the combination of CPU's not being powerful enough while also the server struggling itself. It's night and day a lowbie match FPS versus a lv 80 match FPS.
 

On 10/31/2024 at 10:45 AM, septru said:

The mobility arms race with its extreme roots/slows and extreme mobility has created the current game where players are either moving very fast, or not moving at all. I either have complete immunity to every root in the game, or I don't have any immunity and these roots reduce my speed by 90%. 

Playing anything without force speed, a cleanse / purge or two or hydraulics is just a chore against certain comps. The issue is definitely stemming from the pruning not bothering to touch slows past 50% or limiting the amount of rotational slows, or even roots that exist in-game. Myself and many others thought that was their approach until we all saw juggernaut get obliterated on PTS & we all assumed after they fixed juggernaut after complaints the rest would follow in suit -- however they did not. 
Pressing things with intent, it's not a complicated thought process, force slow does what? Who still has it? Sin? smh.. Isn't my biggest gripe but this is definitely the larger issue, this is what should of been pruned - like the AoE 75% slow on PT that was removed. Massive W, many forget how perma that was in any melee cleave. 
 

On 10/31/2024 at 10:45 AM, septru said:

Most importantly, extreme mobility has reduced overall skill by eliminating a crucial part of the game, positioning. With extreme mobility, positioning has become irrelevant and poor positioning, no longer punishable. Take a sniper that has over extended, rolled into the enemy line, even come out of entrench. Who cares? He can just holotraverse back to safety. 

It's not lowering skill, it's just a tool & or utility, used in the same way anything else would be. Generally more can be better but isn't always. In this case instead of adding proper defensives to a class designed from the ground up to be a channeled DPS they gave it more mobility so it cannot do any meaningful damage while playing defensively, unless Pidgeon held into specific talents and tactical. This is arguably the issue, if there was another useful option defensively or they were more defensively sound like how Viru/DF gains 15% DR on absorb it would be insane with having hololocate also. The ability itself is really strong and when used well with all of its mobility it makes it almost impossible/really unfun to chase unless the map is smaller. That shouldn't be the case if the class was just.. Designed better. There's always been plenty competent players giving feedback & PTS feedback regarding things, including even when Sniper was laughably easy and overkitted to the point you could get away with doing everything wrong and popping defensives at 1-5% hp and live.
The class is lost, just like marauder. They simply don't know what they want to do with the two classes. Sniper more mobile than marauder? Crazy. Sniper more bursty too? dang. Sigh.
 

On 10/31/2024 at 11:58 PM, Dyne- said:

Yea, I can't imagine how this suggestion would ever become popular. Ability pruning already stripped the game of the majority of its complexity (i.e. fun). If the developers ever needed a coup de grace to get rid of players that enjoy competitive PvP and high APM gameplay, this is probably it.

Personally, I just don't see more pruning being the solution to ability pruning. 

It's like slapping the game with ffxiv treatment, may aswell full send.

 

On 10/31/2024 at 6:40 PM, Monterone said:

I unsubbed

Honestly, I hate to say it but I am still subbed because I am curious about the next stream. I want to know what happens, casually playing here and there. Regardless I am not making use of it but want to support a game I love but is ultimately cannibalizing itself, even though there's been warnings, feedback, constant forum posts etc. Literally everything a player knows how to do to try to reach them and nothing has worked or seemingly will. 7.6 might be the last of it imo. If they refuse to respect anyones time still wanting to play the game then why should you.

Anyway.
Being able to queue 8's was a terrible mistake. Nobody wanted nor asked for it. A lot of people didn't even know it was in the game until someone tried it. I think it was in the game for at least 1-2months before I ever saw someone make an 8. That then repeatedly destroyed the queue and caused a lot of drama and ultimately slowly killed off what competitive players who stuck around for casual play. There's so many different manipulative types of groups, while they may not have ill intent, the casual and solo q player suffers the most from it. With TTK being as fast as it is, most casuals don't even bother to learn. 
Which leads into what I want to say is that even with this pruning, good players are still going to nuke you and they're going to do it while you cannot escape. All of these theorized changes would just make PT even more busted, making things like pulls and slows even more valuable -- which pt has two options for slows, double leap, hydros, and could take double grapple if it wanted to. Nothing will ever be perfect. 
But in general buffing healers, improving gear, adding in bolster or just additional stats for missing augments & or pre-augmented stat wise PvP gear that cannot be augmented becoming BiS for PvP. Removing the need for the grind and making it more accessible. Or just flat out equalizing stats and being done with it. It's a silly back and fourth and nobody would really be happy in the end I feel. I would love 336+aug stats combined into new gear and that being the cap for PvP. It wouldn't be BiS in PvE for obvious reasons as it'd just be equal to 336 with augments. 

There's solutions, they just have to try something instead of trying nothing. Whens the last PvP change that was positive? Quesh removal? 
im done, starting to get annoyed. 
Their silence is something I have hated ever since 2.0 -- it's crazy it's still a staple for them to not communicate with their players.