Let's talk Shock (and Burnout)

TetchtaTetchta The Innocent
edited April 2022 in Sparring Grounds
We're getting close to our third month now with the new Shock/Burnout mechanics. The details are outlined in Announce 3311 "Combat Changes," but the basic idea is this:
  • Shock removes your ability to recover your celerity. You get this affliction when you dip below 25% health. The way Celerity works, as per AUDIT, is you get so many rooms per second you can move. So if you have 5ps celerity, you can move 5 rooms in one second, then have to wait until the second rolls over for that 5 room pool to be replenished. The CELERITY skill halves this recovery time. So if you get damaged below 25% health in one room, you get the shock affliction, and that means you can move however many rooms are currently in your "celerity pool." If that's 5, and you have all 5 rooms filled, you can run 5 away before you'll be halted until the affliction cools down. The affliction lasts for 20 seconds.
  • Burnout is a bit simpler to understand, it just increases your cooldowns by 20% while you have the affliction (which also lasts for 20 seconds after you get reduced to below 25% mana). The only real caveat here is that it can likely make some cooldowns dramatically longer, like turning a 10min cooldown into a 12 minute one.
I've not been impacted highly by either of these mechanics as a whale, personally, but I think we've all been sitting with it for a while, and it's probably time to open up a community discussion around it and air our personal experiences and opinions. Several rejected ideas that have attempted to get rid of it have stated that they are considering adding something in the HUNTING skilltree to deal with it, though what that might be isn't clear yet.

Sryaen

Comments

  • The idea behind Shock, as I understood it, was introduced as a way to work around the 'reset meta' in PVP. I can't say there's really ever been a time that I've gotten shock in PVP where I wasn't going to die anyways, and never from 1v1 combat. Shock just makes PVE that much more brutal, and is a massive deterrent for me to even want to pursue bashing in any high-end areas like Dovan, Eftehl, Memoryscape, Welto, etc. Burnout is probably fine, but Shock is just awful in its current iteration and I have never heard a single positive comment regarding it from the other players I've talked to.


    Tell me how I'm doing!
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    TetchtaWjoltyrBenedictoLinTeaniLenoriel
  • TetchtaTetchta The Innocent
    edited April 2022
    I rolled a few lowbies at one point and messed with it and I got rocked by shock a lot. It really seems like something that punishes you for being a newbie/lowbie/not-a-whale. It also seemed to punish experimentation, because when I was trying to figure out if my lowbie could handle an area at a low level, instead of being like "OW" and quickly running away, it was like "OW. Oh I'm dead." It's probably class dependent on how much it bothers you, as well.

    At its best it's irritating, and feels like all it really managed to do was make bashing worse across the board. I'll admit, though, I'm kinda curious about the proposed changes to deal with it. If they ended up pivoting shock so it actually made bashing better than it was before, I could get behind that.

    But that 0 Celerity Regen really does suck. I feel like maybe it'd be better if they tweaked it so you have highly reduced celerity instead, or you regenerate at 1/2 the speed or something.

    Mati
  • With the stated intent of affecting PvP, and not really affecting PvP but instead dramatically affecting PvE, I'd say it's a swing and a miss. To stick with the baseball analogy, the bat left the batter's hands. Literally announced under "Combat Changed", Announce #3311 refers.

    I don't mind some places being super tough or basically requiring a group to bash it, it makes it interesting. It does make extra-squish classes extra brutal to bash in for run of the mill places. Looking at you, Scio. Glass Cannon is way worse when everyone is a hammer throwing Koopa Troopa. Just gonna stand over here and shatter all over myself.
  • edited April 2022
    I can't remember exactly who brought it up in Spirit web, but someone may have been memeing when they suggested that getting Shock should also increase your PVE damage by 50% or something. Maybe not that drastic of a percentage, but I wouldn't be opposed to this. Shock sort of makes sense from a 'medical' standpoint, I suppose. But why not give a buff called 'adrenaline' or something that lasts for half as long as Shock does, but increases your PVE damage output to compensate for this? There's definitely real-world examples of people being able to do seemingly superhuman things when the risk of imminent death is looming (having the strength to push a boulder away, or lift a vehicle, etc), and I'm sure there's got to be some sort of science to support the physiological effects of such.

    Edit: Also, @Wjoltyr I'm glad you mentioned the areas requiring a group to bash. My specific gripe about Shock comes mainly with the introduction of the Oblivion's Portent instance, where the end battle essentially requires players to move and do the mechanics otherwise they will wipe the party or get themselves killed. Shock seems just exceptionally punishing not only because the Avatar hits incredibly hard, and combined with some of the mechanics like Lament, Voidmark, etc, it seems like just one more thing tossed in there to make it unnecessarily difficult. For Portent, I would love to see the difficulty lowered and the cost of rewards higher, because that instance is so integral in the current storyline that Aetolia is experiencing. I'm not a fan of it being, in my opinion, still a bit too overtuned for your average, non-whale to participate without being fully carried.


    Tell me how I'm doing!
    (Web): Mileta says, "Okay... Sry is an edgelord..."

    (Web): Dreww says, "Sryaen just wants to be the best Dhar boi and slaughter everyone."
    Wjoltyr
  • TeaniTeani Shadow Mistress Sweden
    > @Wjoltyr said:
    > It does make extra-squish classes extra brutal to bash in for run of the mill places. Looking at you, Scio. Glass Cannon is way worse when everyone is a hammer throwing Koopa Troopa.

    I've got quite a few artifacts, some might even call me a whale, and as a Shifter this change has caused a lot of issues even for me. Where some classes have been able to tank a number of aggros, I've had to set things up to skip rooms with more than one aggro. Sometimes the system moves a bit too slow, causing aggros to follow into the next room after I skip it, and at that point I'm basically dead. It should be noted that I have run with pretty much constant hazelnuts, whites and caramels to up my chances of survival on top of artifacts and still have this issue with shock.

    If they didn't mean for it to have an impact (or at least not as much of one as it does) on pve they ought to have planned better for the Hunting skill they mentioned when this was brought up. Especially now after all this time and people mentioning the problems with it.

    That it impacts newbies/lowbies is even worse. Pve should not be made more difficult for lower levels, since that is when one might be testing where one's class fits in according to the (somewhat outdated) Areas list.



    WjoltyrTetchta
  • @Teani Tank meta reigns supreme, doubly so now. The crit changes also further shifted towards survivability and punishes classes relying on just happy murder times as quickly as possible.
  • AeryxAeryx Docking Nipsy's pay
    It does seem to me that there's something going on here in general with these two afflictions that aren't being told to us. I'm no expert, but it feels like it would be pretty easy to only make them apply if they are triggered off health or mana damage received, and only received from player sources. At that point, if it truly was only player sources that trigger it, I'd probably raise the threshold too, because like @Sryaen said, if you're at 25% health for shock in PVP, you're probably dead soon after anyways regardless of what it does.

    In my experience from doing the stream, and going to the townhalls, it does seem like the Pools have the sentiment of 'PVE power creep' existing and being a thing they're aware of. I can understand that sentiment to an extent, but this does not seem to be a great way to go about fixing it, as has been stated repeatedly.
    Childhood's over the moment you know you're gonna die.
    SryaenSeurimas
  • edited April 2022
    Just tossing my two cents in re: hitting newbies particularly hard. Maybe it's because I have played this game long enough that I know what areas will give me the best exp return that I can still survive, but I get shock very often, and since newbie celerity is typically very low, it kills me semi frequently. When I'm on Mati it's not as big a deal, but still definitely smarts in areas like Arbothia or Tiyen where aggro mobs are a dime a dozen and running more often than not puts you in another aggro room. I like the idea of making bashing a little less brrrrrr but I remain unconvinced that this was the way to do it. Unless the object was to just slow us down and make areas we could previously reliably bash now more dangerous, which also would be more pleasant of an implementation if there was some reward for overcoming/surviving. Maybe a small exp or timed damage boost for killing the mob that gave you shock as an exhilarating vengeance type thing? Or maybe make you temporarily immune to shock for having done so?

    But I would just as soon/maybe sooner have the recovery time be 1/2 instead of 0. And that's likely the easier fix.
    TetchtaSryaen
  • edited April 2022
    It was kinda... Off-putting to hear the exact phrase, "We're pretty happy with how Shock currently is." on all the fairly tame 'ideas' suggesting changes for it. Considering there's not a single person in the game, who has reacted positively to it at all. Reading back, it seems pretty close to the same backlash that the celerity changes received, and those were overturned pretty quick.

    Surely after 3 months, there'd be something more than, "We might have stuff interact with it soon. We like it now tho, lol." - Yeah, I'm annoyed.
    SryaenTetchtaLenorielAxiusXavin
  • edited April 2022
    As a PVP affliction, I can't really see how this made that much of a difference - the vast majority of PVP kills are from affliction locks or autokill setups. Of my last 10 PVP deaths, the only time I died from straight-up health depletion, I was locked to the tits with afflictions anyway and couldn't have run if I tried. From my own battles and duels, I've seen more people run away from affliction stacks than health damage, especially since there are so many ways to regain health unless you're deeply afflicted.

    As a PVE affliction, I agree with all of what was stated above. And in addition, it severely inhibits exploration. It's not only mobs that deplete your health. Want to do quests or explore in Bloodloch's sewers? Tough titties, you can't just run in and run out now. One bad flare of lava fumes and that's it George, you're done. You want to take a speed tour through Albedi areas? Good luck, kid. I've never used an autobasher on any char, so I can't really speak to how shock inhibits that, but it's *awful* for even people who walk through manually and take time and care with their targets. And my newbie alt? Forget it, shock destroys her because her celerity is so low that follow-aggros catch right up and finish the job.


    My thoughts:
    -If the goal of shock is to keep people from running and resetting in combat, I still see that happening, because what they're generally running from are aff stacks
    -Shock hasn't made it any easier to pin down a PVP opponent - in group combat, you just move to the next target anyway, you can't split up and chase people down, even if they're stuck only a few rooms away. In duels, the emphasis is rarely on pure health damage,
    -Pure health damage IS the focus in bashing, though - namely, the mobs damaging you. Or the environment doing so.

    and most importantly

    >> Any change that disproportionately punishes low-level, new, or unartifacted characters is not one that I agree with or support. <<

    The Divine voice of Ictinus, the Architect echoes in your head, "I think you are cursed."
    TetchtaSryaenLinXavinEakuAxiusAlmol
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