Creston Heights and Pandora's Box (02/25)

**lithium** · 02/24/2006 23:23:50

First off I would like to thank everyone who participated and helped make this QA Test Work: HCFrog, Broin, Yotogi, Xtreem, Da6onet, and ManicVelocity!

Early this morning on Feburary 25 while Update 6 was live on QA myself and several Furious Angels tested several aspects of CR2.0 PvE.

We started with 6 people with the following loads: hacker, karate, upgrader, kung fu, aikido, and spy. We attempted the Creston Heights Hideout first.

We had little trouble and moved at a fairly steady pace. It took probably a half-hour to get to the second floor. We lost a player or two due to disconnects when we where a little past halfway. We ran the rest of the way to the exit. Only half made it across to the teleport.

We noted several bugs along the way. The biggest was that some of the NPCs where doing very low damage on their special attacks and on some regular tactics.

We also noticed that NPCs special attacks text in the system bar appears as light blue, which normally means is good for you but in fact it should be red because it is damage against you.

The following image shows both low damage and blue special attacks.

Also the free fire damage of the NPCs seemed low averaging around 50 or lower. Overall most of us felt these lower numbers where nice for the amount of time free fire successfully hits.

Moving on we attempted an Arc 4 Pandora's Box which was supplied by HCFrog.

Upon opening the box we quickly realized we needed to try to get them one by one by ganging up.

The first wave we where able to take down in about 20mins. The NPCs where easy for an organized group of 6 to handle and we did good damage against them.

We ran into a brick wall on the second wave. Pulling them one by one was a challenge in itself. We managed to kill about 4 before the box timed out. Each kill took 10 to 15 mins. We where do insanely low damage against them. On a 3 cheveron level 58 nobody was about to exceed a hit of anything over 100 the spy came closest with a damage of 80 once. Also some of their specials where bugged just as the NPCs in creston doing low damage and appearing blue in the system bar.

I also discovered a bug when sitting down free fire attacks did very very low damage usually 1ptas seen in the screen below.

After taking down about 5 of the second wave all but 3 NPCs disappeared. The remaining stood in place and were not attackable. We stood around for 5mins more and they where still jsut standing there. (Head to the building east of Edgewater West and they still may be there! lol)

In closing we compiled a list of major noticable bugs we found.

- Clicking Interlock button on an NPC that is already in interlock causes your interlock and freefire timer to roll, meaning you need to wait to interlock someone else or free firing.

- Interlock Immunity could be done away with.

- Evade Bug! We almost had a PB NPC dead and he freaking evades! How Annoying!

- /sit does not work while in combat stance.

- No easy way to switch hotbar numbers (advanced keybinding options stink!)

- IS regen may be a tad low. Hackers need to sit a lot.

- Sneak Detection was inevitable if the NPC looked at you.

- Many hacker animations are not sync'ed to their new cast times (Despoil and Dev Field are obvious ones)

And I am sure my buddies that tagged along will put their two cents in two!

Again thank you HCFrog and everyone who helped!

Message Edited by lithium on 02-25-200602:23 AM

**Dagonet**

Aye it was a fun time. This was the first time I have logged onto the test server since it first became available, as well the first time I spent more than an hour on the server. Please forgive me if my comments are outdated.

*Also note the following is from a Karate GM point of view

A few things that I DID like about CR 2.0 in it's current form:
-The special ability indicator telling you whether or not your special goes off in interlock.
-20 Hotbars
-Clothing doesn't make a huge difference
-I get the sense that PvE will have to be a team effort and no more area hacker farming high level mobs.
-Animation tweaks ups are nice looking
-Elimination of the "dueling boxes"
-Interlock alot smoother/faster.

A few things that I DID NOT like about CR 2.0 in it's current form:

-Either tone down evade bubbles, or give more/increase abilities which force combat.

-Damage given and received needs to be balanced more, either doing too little or doing way too much.

-When you activate a special that uses up the last potential IS, the bar blacks out and does not indicate whether or not it will execute.

-There is no way to switch between 20 hotbars and hotkey 20 slots without using your mouse. This is distracting and detracts from the fight.

-While I know you can't eliminate clothing buffs completely, I just thought I'd ask.

-What do people who want to farm solo do?

-Things get a bit jittery looking when both people land hits, especially gun vs ma both hitting at the same time.

-Some of the buffs you activate deactivate upon going through a hardline. When I was killed during the PB box, all of my buffs were considered "viruses" and I could no longer remove them.

-Tactics change without my permission SMILEY

After I'm done killing someone or an NPC, I cannot activate buffs/abilities "while using that tactic" yet I did not switch my tactics to block at all during or after the fight, so I have to select a new tactic to release the message.

-No more sizing up your enemies
I would like to expand on this, because it speaks to the very heart of CR 2.0 and much of the dissention from "good" players. By removing combat data from the system window, yes it is easier to read, but now there isn't much point to read it. Are we supposed to just jump into fights assuming that the outcome is luck rather than skill? The current live system is zero-sum, but it makes it such that you interlock someone who is buffed and you know right away they're going to kick your *CENSORED*. With the current CR 2.0 system all you have to go on is their title and level. I will submit an example of two martial artists, n00b and pwnz. Both players know what buffs they're supposed to use.

n00b's method of combat is, "i like wanna clicky on Body-shot first, that attack looks cool"
pwnz method of combat is, "sidekick combo rolls really high, i'll open with that" or "lol, my base score is 245, this guy's is 215, pwned!"

In the current live system, pwnz is going to win
In CR 2.0 it is purely luck who wins aside from the rock-paper-scissors "tactics"

So explain to me where skill comes into play in CR 2.0

davemusic

DA6ONET schrieb:

In CR 2.0 it is purely luck who wins aside from the rock-paper-scissors "tactics"

So explain to me where skill comes into play in CR 2.0

Sry, I don´t agree. While Hacker is completely unbalanced i can only talk about the Operative here.
But since i' ve learned how to use the tactics, how they influence my rolls and damage, the whole combat suddenly lost a lot of it´s randomness for me.

>link<

dave

HCFrog

Thanks for the feedback everyone! This rocks SMILEY

**Dagonet**

davemusic wrote:

Sry, I don´t agree. While Hacker is completely unbalanced i can only talk about the Operative here.
But since i' ve learned how to use the tactics, how they influence my rolls and damage, the whole combat suddenly lost a lot of it´s randomness for me.

I'll clarify, if two people have the exact same loadout, same attributes, same buffs running, and most likely wearing the same clothing (in terms of buffs); as it is the case now on the live server for martial artists, how much thought does it take to win or lose? What's to stop someone who plays by doing what looks cool beating someone who calculates every step of the fight?

SilentW

"- /sit does not work while in combat stance."

Um, yeah. This is a bug even on the current live servers!
But anyway, speaking as someone who can't quite get onto the test server (but has posted in the "my character is not copying" thread), I think it looks fantastic. The UI and the general look and feel of the game has improved immensely.

**Symmetric**

I think the ability to /sit while in combat was purposefully removed. People would use it to their advantage to regain HP/IS at a faster rate than intended, thus, it was taken out. IMO, this is how it should be.

**EndlessVoid**

I've never seen the need for the removal, honestly.
Two shots while you're sitting is enough to kill you when delivered from an opponent of the same level.

However, if the "you can't sit in combat stance" thing sticks, I'd like to see a removal of the bug where you are always stuck in your combat stance.
I know that one's been around a long, long time.

As for switching between hotbars with hotkeys... Right now, we have numbers to use abilities, and shift+numbers to switch bars. The problem with that is that we don't have 20 numbers, and having something like shift+1-10 and shift+ctrl+1-10 might seem like a good idea, but it would be more likely to switch between the first ten bars on the top hotbar, and the second. Having it do anything else might confuse players.

That said, perhaps we should simply return the old functionality, with an explanation that only the first 10 hotbars are hotkeyed. Then, people would stack their most-useful abilities in the first 10 bars, leaving other bars for supplemental loadouts.

- Void

**Dagonet**

EndlessVoid wrote:

That said, perhaps we should simply return the old functionality, with an explanation that only the first 10 hotbars are hotkeyed. Then, people would stack their most-useful abilities in the first 10 bars, leaving other bars for supplemental loadouts.

- Void

To be honest, the setup I use now makes it so that shift 1-5 switches the top hotbar 1-5 and crtl 1-5 switchs the bottom hotbar 6-10 and I'm ok with that

I'm all for the 11-20 being supplemental, like for clothing, macros, less used loadouts, etc

I really really want to be able to use all 20 slots via hotkey. Currently 1-10 will control each slot 1-10 but only on the top hotbar. The "advanced" options haven't been updated to allow me to bind keys the way I would like and no way to hotkey the bottom hotbar.

For those of you who don't think it's important, just my duelist/vd build requires 13 slots for abilites, 5 slots for macros, and that's not including hyperjump/speed/dodge/mobius/evade, clothing, or consumables (which I gave up using anyway about 3months ago because I got tired of farming for subroutines/info)