Let me start by saying that I have confidence in the devs, they’re professionals who know their jobs and how to do them. They want only the best for this game and to provide an entertaining experience for the players, both now and for a long time to come. And changes certainly need to be made. Some systems have gotten so bloated and difficult to manage that it’s becoming harder and harder for them to get anything else done, and it will only get worse if things continue this way unchecked.
Characters are wildly out of balance, with some being blatantly OP and others, frankly, garbage in comparison. Instead of trying to rebalance them one by one, they decided to do it all in one fell swoop, streamlining the way they operate at a fundamental level and potentially offering far more depth and options for playing them however we choose. Whether this succeeds or not is yet to be determined, but I trust that they can pull it off and if nothing else it couldn’t possibly make the inherent imbalance already present any worse. I’m personally not a fan of the one hotbar thing, but that’s because I feel the characters should be balanced against one another based on their total potential and there’s nothing wrong with some requiring more skill on the part of the player to achieve that potential than others. It is a purely personal preference that they do not share and I’m okay with that. If the Powers revamp accomplishes what it’s intended to, that’s a fiddling small detail that I am not going to sweat.
Gearing and loot is, to be honest, a nightmare for us and them, although more so for them. On the player side, there’s too much crap loot for every piece of good (and what constitutes ‘good’ differs from player to player) and the variability is just too extreme. Speaking only for myself, I’ve only very seldom ever used Cosmic gear on any of my characters, even while leveling (and I have all 59 characters at level 60 now) because there was so much more Epic gear to be found that you could almost always find one with better affixes and rolls than any piece of Cosmic that was likely to drop, which strikes me as incredibly counter-intuitive. And Uniques are cool and almost (Squirrel Girl, I’m looking at you) always give you the things you need most, but they’re so morbidly obese with affixes that finding (or rerolling) one that actually does them all well is prohibitively difficult and giving you what you need isn’t always the same as giving you what you want. On the dev side, Uniques especially are nothing but trouble since they’re all individually hand-crafted and therefore need to be individually hand-balanced any time the power paradigm shifts one way or the other. So, they’re redoing the entire loot progression and instituting Omega gear, which will be much easier to create and balance and have more versatility, giving us a reason to go out and hunt again and more options for increasing your individual power in the way that you choose. I think this is awesome.
And since nothing exists in a vacuum, every other system in the game is affected by the aforementioned. Everything from enemy Health and damage, crafting options and costs, loot drops, everything has become too unwieldy to manage thanks to the underlying issues with creating and balancing characters and gear. And what, you may ask (and many people do), about content? More enemies, more Zones, more Terminals, more Chapters? Well, having an awesome man-cave in the basement is all well and good, but not if the rest of your house is threatening to collapse at any moment and crush you while you’re sipping a brew and watching Netflix. By undertaking these changes and making the content that’s already present significantly easier to maintain, they’re enabling themselves to finally devote time and resources to creating more. Everybody wins.
So no, I don’t have a problem with any of the overall changes they’re implementing. I think they’re absolutely necessary for the health and stability of the game and will provide more options for more people over a longer period of time. However, with that being said, I definitely think there’s some wiggle room in the way they’re being implemented. I think the things they’re adding are good, my issue is with what seems to be being taken away, perhaps unnecessarily.
Even with all their metrics as far as how many people use this or that power or what have you, Gaz still depends heavily on player feedback via the forums to understand the whys and wherefores, to gauge what the players actually want. And they do listen and have a long history of making sure the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so to speak. The problem, as I’ve stated before, is that they can only gauge the feedback that’s given and all too often people only give it when they’re unhappy about something. There’s nothing wrong with giving the unhappy people what they’ve been clamoring for, but in doing so it’s easy to fail to realize that plenty of other people are perfectly happy with this or that, they simply haven’t felt the need to raise their voices and say so.
I’ve read every post in all the Dev Blogs and FAQs thus far and collated 11 pages of comments from close to 300 different people in the last two alone. Admittedly, nearly a quarter of those weren’t really very insightful, ranging from “I am crapping my pants with excitement!” to “This sounds like a bad idea”, but several people have raised very valid points, both for and against. One of the biggest trends, though, which is exemplified the most by the responses to the Infinity System reveal, is the loss of fun, flavorful, individualistic options in gameplay style. First, let’s look at the changes as they have been put forth to us.
Omegas will be the new high-end gearing option, using the names, icons and flavor text of current Uniques. They will have five random affixes (potentially one or more fixed and the rest random, although I haven’t seen a firm yea or nay on that yet) filtered on a per-character basis from a shared pool with static values based on item level and one Omega Power that will affect one or more (more general Omega Powers have been mentioned but not as yet confirmed to my knowledge) of a character’s Powers to a greater or lesser degree. There will be several (5-7 was originally cited, but @Asros has stated that they are considering increasing that number) available to each character upon rollout, with more slated to be added as time goes by.
Pros: They will be infinitely easier to create and balance than Uniques. They will provide more versatility to those players who want to tweak their characters’ efficiencies in the ways that they choose and don’t mind additional RNG to do it. They will enable impactful build choices by altering the manner in which some of a character’s Powers perform.
Cons: They will be more heavily RNG-dependent, while some players prefer the fixed buckets of stats and affixes that Uniques provide. They will have an equal chance of having any affix that the character they are for is capable of utilizing, which means that extremely versatile characters in single damage-type builds especially will have a harder time finding an Omega to suit their particular needs than a more specialized character would. Until such point as there is an Omega available for every one of a character’s Powers, they will actually limit build diversity insomuch as only supporting those builds for which an Omega does exist; if something happens to postpone the creation of new Omega gear, much of the build diversity created by the Powers Revamp will be lost. They will have none of the flavorful, lore-based abilities and procs that currently exist on Uniques, which many people enjoy. The use of the same names and icons for two different sets of gear could cause confusion for some people.
Uniques will no longer drop, but any that players already own will still continue to exist as unsupported legacy items. Boss-specific Any Hero Uniques will be redesigned into other item slots, while Hero-specific Uniques will be altered to be in line with the Powers Revamp (i.e. no Power Points) and generally balanced so as to not be overtly more powerful than Omegas. The flavorful and lore-related procs and abilities on them will not be present on Omegas but ways are being looked into to add them to other items at some point down the road.
Pros: Those players who don’t read the forums and know this is coming won’t log in one day to find all their characters inexplicably naked with no explanation. The devs will no longer need to spend time and resources individually handcrafting and balancing these difficult to maintain items on a regular basis. Veterans who currently own Uniques will have a head start on getting to higher difficulty levels to find better Omega gear.
Cons: It is inevitable that, for a while at least, some Uniques will continue to be BiS over Omega gear, as the devs themselves have admitted, but new players will not be able to obtain them. Many players will, by choice or necessity, continue using Uniques for an extended period of time, potentially causing resentment among newer players who can’t get them and potentially further increasing the ‘vets’ vs. ‘newbies’ mentality which to a degree already exists. Many of the unique abilities inherent to them may never make it back into the game, and if they do they will most likely require the players who want them to give up other, potentially better, items just to get back something that they already had.
There are 99 Achievements that involve or require Unique items or SHIELD Med Kits, for a total of 1,760 Achievement points. There are an additional 44 Achievements that reward Unique items, StarkTech Power Cubes, SHIELD Med Kits or Mysterious Blue Omega Boxes (all of which are also going to be removed), for a total of 594 points. There are six Achievements that require accomplishing other Achievements that require Unique Items, for a total of 195 points. There are seven Achievements which are more nebulous, as it is unclear whether Omega gear will support Enchantments or Challenge Bonuses and what will become of Cosmic Upgrade Tokens and Danger Room Black Boxes, for a total of 130 points. All of which adds up to 149 (possibly 156) Achievements for 2,549 (possibly 2,679) Achievement points that will be affected by these changes. Some of these will be adapted to require or reward other items, others will be retired and become Extraordinary Feats.
Pros: Newer players will be on an even footing with veterans as far as Achievements that have not already been completed.
Cons: Many players will come very close to completing one or more Achievements, only to have their feeling of imminent accomplishment snatched away when the Achievements themselves disappear out from under them. Those working for the End of the World Achievement (and that sweet Gambit costume) especially will potentially (depending on how many of the applicable Achievements they’ve completed thus far) have nearly a third of the points required for it simply vanish. It will be a lot of work for the devs to go in and adjust or remove all those Achievements, to say nothing of creating new ones to go with Omegas, as they have stated they intend to do.
The Omega System is being replaced by the Infinity System, which will be streamlined to six sets of thematically similar options, six options per set. Five out of the six options per set will have limits, the last (increasing the stat appropriate to the set in question) will provide unlimited advancement. Beyond this, the only things known at this time are that the options will provide specific direct benefits to the character in question (presumably things like +Damage, +Health, etc.), that stats are being reworked as well, that there will be no limit to the number of Infinity Points you can earn and that the XP to Infinity Point conversion will scale similarly to the way XP converts to Omega Points currently. It can be assumed that each Infinity Point will require ten times the XP as each Omega point does currently, due to the fact that they are dividing current Omega Points by ten to determine starting Infinity Points. Appearances would seem to indicate that the more flavorful but less efficient nodes will all be removed, with ways being looked into to add them back in in other forms at some point down the road.
Pros: The current Omega System is something of a mess, with the same benefit scattered in multiple places, with many less desirable effects required in order to unlock each one; this will make it much easier for players to prioritize the effects they want without having to put points into ones they don’t.
Cons: The unlimited nature of the Infinity System has given rise to concerns about the lack of a clearly defined ‘finish line’ as it were and the ‘pay-to-win’ potential of unlimited Infinity gain vs. selling XP boosts; I don’t necessarily agree with those concerns but I can’t deny that there’s at least some merit to considering them. Even more so than Uniques, the current Omega system is the single greatest concentration of versatile character customization in the game, with benefits, drawbacks, procs, summons and the like that can be used to make your character truly one of a kind and many players who care more about flavor and fun than peak efficiency use it as such. Much like the abilities on Unique gear, there is no guarantee that the more flavorful effects of the removed Omega nodes will make it back ingame in any form and if they do then the same concern about giving up other, potentially better items to get them applies here as well.
