Originally Posted by
bunnymustdie
This is true. Scale (even partial) is the line where the new changes are annoying, but mostly within the realm of tolerable as far as game experience goes from my observation. I control my own characters with and hunt manually, and for me, being in soft leather/robes after these changes makes for a plain unfun experience. I guess soft leather/robes are probably still workable if you bigshot your characters, because then all you see is that you're now dying X% more, and that's all.
The changes are not that bad for my one character in plate, and I wonder if most of the internal testing done for the update was done mainly with a plate wearing character, that might explain a lot.
The annoyances of the PSM 2 update basically came about because they merged two different systems into one.
Before the change, you had the SMRv2 system, where you had a comparatively decent chances of dodging the attacks made through it. This was balanced by the big defense penalties applied to your character when you're stunned, prone, injured or whatever when you DO get hit, which made you vulnerable to follow up maneuvers. Fewer hits, but potential for big trouble when you are hit - this mostly worked fine for player experience, except for outliers like earthen fury (917), which is a series of SMRv2 attacks made to you in quick succession, where just being hit once means all the subsequent hits can be pretty nasty, and incidentally, is something very disliked by many players.
Before the change, the CML system had a high chance of hitting you in regards to skills you had no knowledge of. However most of these skills, such as sweep or hamstring, are pretty benign. Since the defense penalties from stuff like stuns or prone are comparatively lower in this system, being hit once by a CML does not make you crazy vulnerable to subsequent CML hits, and as such, you can tank your way through a CML hit better than the new SMRv2 versions of these skills. This system wasn't perfect either, since outliers like charge or occasionally shield bash results in very annoying one hit kills. Incidentally, if you had knowledge in a particular CML skill (maybe rank 3+), you can become basically immune to all but open roll attacks of that particular skill made against you.
The balance got out of whack after the PSM 2 update because numerous different factors got modified in the merge.
Stuff that was originally SMRv2 now have a bigger chance of hitting you, and yet the big penalties from negative status remains the same. It's a pure downgrade here.
Stuff that was originally CML that you had no knowledge of now hits less often, but now come with much bigger penalties from negative status and thus, gives you much greater vulnerability to subsequent maneuver attacks made against you after the first hit. Here, it's a wash if you manage to only solo critters, but is a downgrade if you're dealing with more than one creature in a room, which happens often in higher level areas, or if you just generally does not play very, very carefully. As a upside, Outlier CML like charge was improved to be less obnoxious for the player on the receiving end of them.
Stuff that was originally CML that you had knowledge in? Pretty much just a downgrade since you get hit more often on these now, on top of the new downsides from the CML => SMRv2 conversion mentioned above.
-------------------------
tl;dr
SMRv2 and CML each worked differently to contribute to a player's overall game experience. Certain things that are potentially obnoxious in SMRv2, such as the big defense penalties from being stunned/prone/whatever was balanced by being rare - because SMRv2 did not hit as often, and because a lot of maneuvers you saw were CMLs which did not come with similarly big penalties on negative status. The overall game balance and player experience degraded when the PSM 2 update came out because this balance was basically destroyed, since all CMLs were converted to SMRv2s, and all attacks that were originally SMRv2s now have a higher chance of hitting.
To put it a different way; you know how players hate being hit by earthen fury (917)? Because once you get hit by the first attack, all the subsequent hits in the cycle are gonna be pretty bad on account of the defense penalties? This update basically turned all maneuver attacks into a potential mini earthen fury scenario where just one hit will make you very vulnerable to other maneuver attacks that come after. On top of that, not all, but many of the maneuvers you encounter in your everyday hunting now have a higher chance to land that deadly first hit.
Reply With Quote