Improved Hacking in Force Multiplier, Combat Auras and UM

**GoDGiVeR**

As far as I can take from these, these are "fixes" (or whatever you would call them) that would be needed:

Combat Aura 1.0: Add Thrown Acc (+ Viral Acc?)
Combat Aura 2.0: Add Thrown Dam
Improved Hacking: Change to short-autorefreshing ability like Combat Auras, Deflect Bullets and mainly every other dam/def/acc based ability in the whole Force Enhancer tree

UM: Add Healing Dam

Explanation:

Force Ehancer has always been used soley because of IH, because it's a simple permanent AREAL buff for hackers (simple does not imply it's high IS cost). Although UM always had Viral Dam it always lacked Healing Dam and the next downside is that it's only for 1 person at a time while IH can buff a whole team of 6. But IH is unlike any other accuracy / defense / damage based ability in the whole Force Enhancer tree. Every ability like the Combat Aura are short self-refreshing abilities, while IH is a permanent buff. Why? I see this as a definite design error. Also the lack of thrown acc on Combat Aura 1 and thrown dam on Combat Aura 2 is an error in design. One thing remaining would be short-time refreshing areal Viral accuracy buff. I doubt one should add that to either IH or the Combat Auras but still, it's a point still missing.

As far as UM goes, the only thing this one lacks is the Healing Dam.

Yeah yeah. I know what many of you'll be saying to the IH thing: ZOMG, we have your Artillerist/IH tree. Screw you and your idea.
My answer to that would simply be: I just pointed out an error in the design of the tree. If you don't agree with it and stay on your biased view, so be it.

**Pylat**

I don't think you thought this change through at all. Firstly, it's going to destroy so much game balance it's not funny so I'll go through each change one by one.

Changing healing bonus from IH to UM: One word, Trauma Surgeons. As if them putting out massive heals wasn't such a huge problem already. Many people say "But they can ONLY heal, they can't fight or do much else" to justify why they are balanced. What kept Trauma Surgeons balanced is the fact they had to load up IH to get the uber heals which gave them a lot of useless abils. If people could Load UM AND still have uber heals I know I'll be extremely angry. You still see a few UM loads around where people beat their opponent to death in IL on regular power tactics with a cheap shot thrown in every now and then, but if they could spam 700+ heals at the same time while shooting you for 400 dmg with a Shotgun I think balance is going right out the window.

IH Being a short term Aura like Combat Aura: If you want to balance it like that then the Viral Shielding abil in Trauma Surgeon that improves Hacker defense should also be a short term buff just like Deflect Bullets 2.0, to keep things consistent of course. Cause right now it's very easy for people to ramp up their viral defense with little effort.

Adding thrown acc and damage with Combat Aura 1.0 and 2.0: Why not viral acc aswell? And on that note give me viral acc with combat enhancement aswell. But then you'll go "ZOMG, then hacker will be overpowered!!!", but it's already taken enough nerfs and you want to weaken it further. Well you simply can't do that without compensating it in some way and I think this is a great method. And if your gonna add thrown acc and damage then Enhanced Dodge needs to increase Thrown defense aswell, but then you go "ZOMG, then UM's will be impossible to hit!!!". Welcome to the world of a hacker, where EVERYONE is hard to hit, and this change will simply make it worse cause we won't be as effective with this nerf, assuming we can hit you of course.

Now IH is a lvl 47 abil. It's further down in the tree than combat aura and takes more memory to load. So why should Force Multipliers have to load more abils and take up more memory simply to grant the same bonuses to hackers that they could to everyone else with a different ability? It is a 300 second buff because it's a higher level ability and higher level abilities ARE BETTER than their lower level counterparts. This change will simply be another middle finger right in the direction of hackers.

You think that it's an oversight? It's very easy to counter this damage bonus. It's called Personal Firewall, and it ONLY adds to Viral Resistance. IH may be a boost specifically for hacks, but there are a lot of specific buffs that are very much ANTI hacker. If you want to stay consistent then Personal Firewall needs to improve ALL resistances.

**GoDGiVeR** · 07/09/2007 01:56:56

You said it yourself that Force Enhancer is (apart from IH) a very useless tree. The thing that kept Traumas balanced are all the useless abilities that FE give you, your words.
Also, the reason why uber heals are possible is the fact that AOE and single heals do NOT work as their damage counterparts. If you take Howitzer with their areal attacks and their IS cost and then Ballista with their single attacks and IS cost, while considering their damage output, you clearly see the difference. Single heals use way too much IS and heal hardly more than their areal counterparts, which cost less than the singles. So where's the balance there?

I agree with your argumentation which would make hacker undergo an overall change. But I still don't agree with your IH argument. It doesn't matter if it's a high-lvl ability. FE is built upon abilities like the combat auras, and IH is the only thing that breaks there. IH is also the sole reason why ppl even load this tree. I don't see this being right, in more ways.

In order to make FE a tree with at least more than 1 use (IH), much balancing would be needed.

And Pylat, where did I say "nerf nerf nerf"? You always cry out "omg you wanna nerf, ZOMG". I don't say that. I never do. I just gave you my opinion, where things need to be looked at, need a change. Nothing more.

And I want that you add your opinion to what I stated, otherwise no progress will be made. What I said was to start an feeback and brainstorming round about FE.

Arcanoloth wrote:

I don't think you thought this change through at all. Firstly, it's going to destroy so much game balance it's not funny so I'll go through each change one by one.

Changing healing bonus from IH to UM: One word, Trauma Surgeons. As if them putting out massive heals wasn't such a huge problem already. Many people say "But they can ONLY heal, they can't fight or do much else" to justify why they are balanced. What kept Trauma Surgeons balanced is the fact they had to load up IH to get the uber heals which gave them a lot of useless abils. If people could Load UM AND still have uber heals I know I'll be extremely angry. You still see a few UM loads around where people beat their opponent to death in IL on regular power tactics with a cheap shot thrown in every now and then, but if they could spam 700+ heals at the same time while shooting you for 400 dmg with a Shotgun I think balance is going right out the window.

IH Being a short term Aura like Combat Aura: If you want to balance it like that then the Viral Shielding abil in Trauma Surgeon that improves Hacker defense should also be a short term buff just like Deflect Bullets 2.0, to keep things consistent of course. Cause right now it's very easy for people to ramp up their viral defense with little effort.

Adding thrown acc and damage with Combat Aura 1.0 and 2.0: Why not viral acc aswell? And on that note give me viral acc with combat enhancement aswell. But then you'll go "ZOMG, then hacker will be overpowered!!!", but it's already taken enough nerfs and you want to weaken it further. Well you simply can't do that without compensating it in some way and I think this is a great method. And if your gonna add thrown acc and damage then Enhanced Dodge needs to increase Thrown defense aswell, but then you go "ZOMG, then UM's will be impossible to hit!!!". Welcome to the world of a hacker, where EVERYONE is hard to hit, and this change will simply make it worse cause we won't be as effective with this nerf, assuming we can hit you of course.

Now IH is a lvl 47 abil. It's further down in the tree than combat aura and takes more memory to load. So why should Force Multipliers have to load more abils and take up more memory simply to grant the same bonuses to hackers that they could to everyone else with a different ability? It is a 300 second buff because it's a higher level ability and higher level abilities ARE BETTER than their lower level counterparts. This change will simply be another middle finger right in the direction of hackers.

You think that it's an oversight? It's very easy to counter this damage bonus. It's called Personal Firewall, and it ONLY adds to Viral Resistance. IH may be a boost specifically for hacks, but there are a lot of specific buffs that are very much ANTI hacker. If you want to stay consistent then Personal Firewall needs to improve ALL resistances.

*CENSORED* Pylat ... you sure know how to point out the facts boi SMILEY

... Way to go ... /dap

**Sphairo**

No to all the changes stated in the original post because of all the reasons stated in the third post.

**Carloss**

"You said it yourself that Force Enhancer is (apart from IH) a very useless tree"

Hooooold up! Useless?? have you not checked the buffs from the passive abils? plus, its an AoE buff tree. logically speaking, it's not meant to be as good as 'single target' boOfs! in terms of PvP, it's an IS drainer, but works wonders for boosting acc and dmg. not to mention an awesome area heal that you can use in and out of IL.

Oh and GG, I see what you mean about the Thrown acc/dmg for aura's. But if you think about PvP tactics for an mkt, their normally away from the main force and work alone. so give them UM buffs.

They need to make Combat Training and Weapons Boost have priority over combat aura 1.0

They shouldn't make IH an aura, can you imagine trying to run 3 aura's at the same time? ofc you don't have to have them all running, but when times are rough you can use aura 1.0 and 2.0 and lose a small chunk of IS. having IH as an aura would leave an FM useless. so having 1 dmg buff as a temp perma buff seems to balance the IS control of FM.

oh and the FM buff gives a minimum of 10% IS cost reduc, a concentration bonus and periodically removes debuffs...hardly useless

Lossa!

**Sphairo**

Hmm, come to think of it though.. something does need to be done to get people using Force multiplyer again.. it contains alot of useless abs at the moment. (Except for IH and the sweeps)

**Gerik** · 08/29/2007 22:45:09

**Pylat**

Sphairo87 wrote:

Hmm, come to think of it though.. something does need to be done to get people using Force multiplyer again.. it contains alot of useless abs at the moment. (Except for IH and the sweeps)

Read this and tell me what you think.

**Endomorph**

Some people have loaded this up in pvp with the Auras spamming and doing 600 free fire with a hasley.

it just comes down to would you want an area buffer? or a area healer?