Trials of Valor Expansion

[Ali Afif]

When will the update go live on the apple store? Been waiting all day

[Travis | Support Mgr.]

We are anxiously waiting for Apple to approve the build and make it available.

[Daemonfyre]

When is the big promotion? Can't wait.

Also, did anyone buy the stormgun yet?

Yep, missed my chance on Stormblade not knowing there would never be another offer or similiar things offered regularly so I jumped on this.

It's got a pretty decent proc rate, good stats and just plain looks cool. For .99 plus gold and gems it's a steal.

[nb2]

Update: I now have a full apprentice set at level 70 and it does help/make up for a good deal of the lost CL damage but without it it's pretty rough. Still need to craft jewelry but damage is starting to look a bit better anyways...

[Bryce Solomons]

Lvl 70 gear from higher trials does seem to be stronger. i have ALOT of epic and legendary gear from my trilas (2 stashs full) runs and the stuff dropping from the higher ones seems better. For example from the lvl 73 trial an ax tops out at 1606 damage, where another lvl 70 one from a lower trial tops out at 1312. I have noticed this on armor as well.

Just a note on the Nerfs. Apart from crit rating (got up to 17%) i am now stronger at lvl 70 then i was at 60. Overall my damage is probably down due to crit but yeah. On a side note i was only cl 60 and didnt have great gear so most of this is due to getting awesome gear from trials. Maybe that is what the devs have aimed at. You get to 70 and then can have fun perfecting your gear in a more linear manor. The whole CL thing probably needs some tweaking but i think we should all give it a week or 2 more to see how fresh characters leveling up plays out.

[Adrian (Developer)]

Thank you for all the feedback.

It seems that the balancing change is the hot issue here. I'll elaborate a bit on why we did it.

1. Critical Rating reduction
We think that scoring a critical hit is more fun if it happens less often than a normal hit. If you have a 70% critical chance then normal hits start feeling like critical misses.
As such we think that a 20% - 40% critical hit chance is more balanced and fun.

2. Champions Level bonus reduction
The Power and Attack Speed bonuses were scaling the damage by a 5x factor in high CL levels, creating a huge discrepancy between new players and veterans.
That discrepancy in power will still exist, but it won't be that big.
We care about balance because very soon we'll introduce Trial of Valor leaderboards, and we want new players to have a fair chance to compete there.

We did reduce the monsters power to match the hero nerfs, but it seems that we didn't reduce it enough. Ideally, you shouldn't have felt the nerf.

That can be easily fixed but I need a bit more information from you: how do you find the monsters health and damage on normal / heroic / legendary? Compared with how it felt before.

[Stab]

Testing out Havoc 2 piece set missile bonus. The missile seems to fire in a random direction, often not even hitting a mob.. Maybe the mob I was firing at died as the missile launched, but it's not very effective at all LOL.

Text should read "Fires a missile in a random direction like cheap bottle rockets."

Hmmm. This seems to be getting better as I level. Maybe because mobs are more likely now to still be alive after the missile launches?

A few more suggestions:
Make scatter shot have a slightly longer range, or make the character get slightly closer before starting to fire.
Still issues with bullets getting stopped by an invisible force even at close range on flat terrain with no obstructions.
In the Trials, Gorgana spawning healers around corners is annoying. Maybe make their healing "line of site" so that they have to come over to see her like I do to shoot her?

[Jane Swarn]

My 2c about the update.

I'm CL 201, and I admit I was kind of bored, but kept playing gorgona and legendary levels from time to time, I was slowly pushing while hoping for some exciting content.
I was close to killing gorgona on legendary when this upgrade came in. First 3 enemies on gorgona level had a healer among them, I could not get past! Block and Heal, Block and Heal, full red bar, it was like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity, not fun.

So I could get past this nerf, one just needs to work hard an he'll get back, right? In how many years? I'm not even joking, how many more hours would I need to play to kill gorgona on legendary if I can't kill a single character on that map right now?

This is not fun, this is not something to come home and relax to after a tiring day. Not for old players.

[Bryce Solomons]

Thank you for all the feedback.

It seems that the balancing change is the hot issue here. I'll elaborate a bit on why we did it.

1. Critical Rating reduction
We think that scoring a critical hit is more fun if it happens less often than a normal hit. If you have a 70% critical chance then normal hits start feeling like critical misses.
As such we think that a 20% - 40% critical hit chance is more balanced and fun.

2. Champions Level bonus reduction
The Power and Attack Speed bonuses were scaling the damage by a 5x factor in high CL levels, creating a huge discrepancy between new players and veterans.
That discrepancy in power will still exist, but it won't be that big.
We care about balance because very soon we'll introduce Trial of Valor leaderboards, and we want new players to have a fair chance to compete there.

We did reduce the monsters power to match the hero nerfs, but it seems that we didn't reduce it enough. Ideally, you shouldn't have felt the nerf.

That can be easily fixed but I need a bit more information from you: how do you find the monsters health and damage on normal / heroic / legendary? Compared with how it felt before.

When i initially 1st logged in i would say it was taking me 2-3 time longer to kill heroic critters. So even with the health nerf it needed to be WAY more.
The damage monsters are / is doing i actually didnt think was that bad. My defensive stats took a small dive but nothing massive. What is occuring to kill us quicker is that we take longer to kill them and get less life steal so we loose the battle of attrition. Take for instance a mob of elite ranged hunters or robots. If they all do their scatter shot without stunning you die. But if you can kill them or some before that happens you win. With the reduction of damage output from reliable crits this ceased so you need to now adjust tactics. My adjustment has been to get ALOT more parry and dodge to counter the above issues.
Could you provide us with numbers on reductions?

I would also like to mention that 40% crit seems very optimistic (i might be able to scratch to 20 if every item had it on it). I have 5 items with crit rating and 3 sockets with crit gems and i have got to 16% crit (876 crit rating total). Is it a linear scale or a diminishing one? As i would need around 2500 crit rating for 40% crit i would guess. If you can give some numbers and or consider maybe dropping the curve a bit.

[Mauro Tamm]

Thank you for all the feedback.

That can be easily fixed but I need a bit more information from you: how do you find the monsters health and damage on normal / heroic / legendary? Compared with how it felt before.

Not endgame - but at around lvl 20 range, survivability and loss of damage has seriously hurt the gameplay - like i posted before - i was annihilated in the endless wave 1 with score 0.

Also if crit is the "wow" moment - the crit damage should be higher to compensate, instead of the " oh i sometimes do a little bit more damage".

Flat out reduction hurts lower levels - stats should perhaps have diminishing returns the higher it gets instead?

[Stab]

Thank you for all the feedback.

It seems that the balancing change is the hot issue here. I'll elaborate a bit on why we did it.

1. Critical Rating reduction
We think that scoring a critical hit is more fun if it happens less often than a normal hit. If you have a 70% critical chance then normal hits start feeling like critical misses.
As such we think that a 20% - 40% critical hit chance is more balanced and fun.

2. Champions Level bonus reduction
The Power and Attack Speed bonuses were scaling the damage by a 5x factor in high CL levels, creating a huge discrepancy between new players and veterans.
That discrepancy in power will still exist, but it won't be that big.
We care about balance because very soon we'll introduce Trial of Valor leaderboards, and we want new players to have a fair chance to compete there.

We did reduce the monsters power to match the hero nerfs, but it seems that we didn't reduce it enough. Ideally, you shouldn't have felt the nerf.

That can be easily fixed but I need a bit more information from you: how do you find the monsters health and damage on normal / heroic / legendary? Compared with how it felt before.

I understand the discrepancy between new players and veterans with high CL issue, but there SHOULD be a discrepancy. Its an effort vs reward issue in time and gameplay. Who cares if I put hundreds more hours than a person that just started and are therefore considerably more powerful in my own instanced game? Leaderboard issues? Yeah I don't know how you keep the older players from dominating the leader boards, but should you? You would run into the same problem with people that have been luckier with drops or perhaps spent more money on gear... Perhaps CL range brackets are in order for the leader boards, like weight classes in boxing. But to drastically nerf veteran players for enthusiastically playing your game doesn't seem like the answer.

I played Everquest to the end game guild raiding, then beta tested Starwars Galaxys and played it until "the everyone is a Jedi" debacle, Then beta tested Everquest 2 and Played it for a couple years at end game guild raiding level as the #1 ranked Swashbuckler world wide. There will always be balance issues between rewarding veteran players and making new players not feel impossibly behind. I don't envy that project in any way , but I think the balancing needs some tweaking.

On a side note, I'm experiencing some lag problems in the trials on my Galaxy S6 Edge.

[nb2]

Hey Adrian. First thank you to you and your team for all the work you've put in. I love the game! There are many things I like about the new release but as you said the hot topic is balancing!

As a mage i tried to get as much dps as possible so that I could kill the enemy faster but since they take longer to kill there's a higher chance i'll take more hits, therefore, die a lot more and quickly. My damage isn't taking them down fast enough.

At lvl 70 mage with a full apprentice set playing a story line map on legendary, I get hit very hard and die a lot (depending on the map) and that's due to it taking a lot longer to actually kill all targets. Before I was pretty much able to walk through the maps easily in DPS gear and easy enough in exp gear.

I can say my dps output isn't quite strong enough to kill magroth on severed consistently anymore on legendary and without the full apprentice set enemies are really a struggle in story mode legendary. I haven't tried the other bosses yet on legendary though.


Basically I don't feel as at ease, or as powerful, and mobs are really a struggle still at this point. I simply can't take them down fast enough. At the end game level you expect and should be almighty and powerful!

I'll have to make better jewelry, as that might help a bit and see how that goes.

[Marc Laplante]

We are anxiously waiting for Apple to approve the build and make it available.

Come on apple, approve approve! I can't wait to start playing!!!!

[Holly Norton]

How would it not work? All they need to do is disallow CL bonuses in PVP to level the playing field. That's a common practice in open world PVP play. (Think Destiny RAIDS, etc.)

As for the CL nerfs, SUPER extreme. Those of you with 100's of CL need simply turn them off or allocate far fewer points to increase your personal challenge level. No need to make the game tedious and frustrating for new players, or for those not yet at max level. The entire point of CL/Paragon in ANY game is to become outrageously powerful (for the heck of it, with existing characters) as well as to encourage trying different classes (since one need not restart the same ole dull content from absolute ground zero). I've only ever bothered replaying two games across all available classes EVER, in over 40 years. Borderlands 2 - because that game gave you REASONS to want to try the other classes, and Diablo 3 - for the achievement, coupled with the fact that Paragon points made it worth my time to restart the full campaign with a new class.

This update to M&M has some pluses (the color scheme/graphics, audio track changes, new class, and the trials - once they get fixed) but they are outweighed in the extreme (IMHO) by the negatives. I've gamed long enough to see classes, gear, CL levels get nerfed before in many other games, but never anything like this.

[Destro]

I'm a newbie so take my opinion with a grain of salt but I think that there SHOULD be an extreme discrepancy between a level 70 hero and a level 70 + 1000 CL champion, in fact there should be no contest between them at all.

As someone else suggested have CL ranges based leaderboards and eventually pvp, like a level 30 should not get to fight a level 10 or CL 200.

A CL 935 like Ezcry should be able to wipe the floor with dozens if not hundreds of level 70s, otherwise what's the point of CLs?

Again I'm a newbie whose highest leveled character is just 55 so I may be wrong.