18.7.0.20 - Traders!

[Raggy]

From a Lore Perspective, the creatures of the Shadowlands have endowed us with Redeemed/Chosen armour that is bright gold. It's actually nanite-infused metaplast gold made out of credits stuck together with PVA glue.

[lufa1982]

Yeah, lets just stick to the point here, no reason to get carried away with RP perspective too much. For profession that's literally themed around taking things from other people, it doesn't take much effort to come with feasible lore explanation.

Not to mention half of the stuff in this patch doesn't have any sensible lore justification whatsoever and devs don't seem to be bothered much.

[Saetos]

Heh, I suppose.

So -

1) Quicker NBS cool down. DTN multipler set to 2 instead of 2.5.
2) Shutdown Skills returning. Remove positive benefit.
3) 45-60 second debuffs in PVP. 90% check on Divest/Sabotage.
4) Access to Unstunnable.
5) PERSONAL] Move all Distill Life perk bonuses to Accumulator. Improve Reap Life. Add scaling benefits to Hagglers and Health Plunders with each point of Distill Life (or add %HealEff), with a proportionately large bonus from perking DL10 than just stopping at 9.
6) [PERSONAL] Severely nerf the JAME to make it less disproportionately powerful when equipped by TL2 Traders. Increase its drop rate (along with Nippy Stilettos, Skylight Shield, and Jobe Pistols).

[lufa1982]

I'd honestly say SS wouldn't be necessary as long as we get Unstunnable. They both serve similar purpose, which is giving us those precious few seconds of preptime when an attack is incoming. Apparently they see SS as unhealthy gameplay, which I can sort of agree on, it just shuts down everything and you're standing there eating all the Trader debuffs. Unstunnable wouldn't cause any similar concerns. Everybody can still go ham on us, we're just able to respond now.

However, we'd essentially NGB tank any incoming player that's not a Doctor, so HH@B active effect needs to be brought back as an emergency way to fill that nanopool. I think that might be planned anyways cause some professions were already given it.

Agreed on the rest. Unstunnable, reduce NBG cooldown, increase drain duration a bit and I'll be good. Clearing up some of the perks would be preferable as well, Trader profession specific perks in general are a bit of a mess.

[Saetos]

Fantastic. With a bit more general consensus we can get the ball rolling here, and once we do I can edit the main post to reflect what we want - and hopefully Michi can take over from there.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

The only thing I see here as a potential issue - but I don't have enough experience to really quantify it - is whether NB defence will provide enough repeatable defence?

Just to put it in perspective, say...

A first line defence - cocoon, provides 10k absorbtion every 2 minutes at 220.

If a trader pops NB defence, soaks a (say) 30k damage alpha, and 60% of that goes to nano at a rate multiplier of 2, then 30000*0.6*2 =36000

I assume a trader has 13k nano

So realistically, you could soak roughly half a 30k alpha into nano with a stim in the middle - right?

Now, assuming you've survived the alpha and you got all your defences up and stuff, you now got to 1. heal up the damage that made it thru, and 2. replenish your nano so you can survive the next alpha which is coming in <60s

Yes, 220 traders have GTH
Yes, lower level traders have a small version of GTH (15% nano over 15s seems weak)
Yes, you got triple implanted ND - or do you? (Artilleryish traders are probably missing ND in RA/RW which means a hell of a lot smaller tick)
Yes you got accumulator (is it perked? is distill life going to merge with acc to make sure we got enough nano coming in?)
Did you perk genius and how fast can you re-stim? at 220 you probably got a fair chunk of -skill lock so you will probably have your next stim ready in 30s but that leaves you MAYBE without a stim during the next alpha? At lower levels definitely.

But you Also have to heal up... and that costs nano - but your nano pool is bone dry.
So you got to spam the slow nanodrains, GTH, and heals

meanwhile your opponent is just spamming specials on you with you already at lowish HP and bone dry nano.

Honestly, in Paper PVP, traders still look cooked after the first alpha, and I'll tell you right now that every other prof has a lot more survival than just one alpha's worth of defence.

2:1 damage to nano seems steep. Personally, I'd say you need to put a 1k nano cap on the NBG so it doesn't leave you bone dry and then at least you can spam necessity heals or the nanodrains/GTH to start replenishing...

Or, as lufa+vispa mentioned... trader really need a (i'd even say) 3 minute CD nano replenisher. comparable to the ring... but even lower cooldown. I honestly don't see how a trader is going to function without that.

But, this brings up the problem lower level traders will have: lower level traders have traditionally always been able to get "unperkable" by stacking drains, but I just don't see how that's possible given the new checks in game at TL5 you got 179 AAD - honestly that's often not even enough to GET into non-perkable by SL perks now, but then you got to land a 130% check on top of that... but at those levels you'll never even get a second chance at surviving an alpha because you could never recover the nano needed from the first one.

Basically, my point is, the proposed fixes are OK for Tl7 - but still probably sub-par, but they won't carry down to lower levels because some of the skills required to fill nanopool rapidly just aren't there at lower levels (mainly ND, ND tick frequency, higher chance for accumulator procs, higher accumulator proc amount, higher stim amount, lower skill lock %, and lower levels never had a apocalypse ring).

Edit: It would actually seem fairly reasonable for a trader via spamming the crap out of nano drains and nano regen tools that he should be able to keep nanobot defence active throughout an entire encounter, Which... would only terminate once the trader had drained his opponent of all his nano. Once his opponent is out of nano, the trader drops to 0 nano as well very quickly and then the race is on - no more casting, only fighting. The trader would then have 20 more seconds (length of debufs) to kill his opponent and once that 20s is up, he'd be toast.

[Saetos]

Well, all I know right now is that we basically auto-lose against Martial Artists now, especially as any MA worth their salt is going to farm Wistful Apparition for high QL Upon a Wave of Summers. I spammed Divest against Rocts' MA on Test and never landed it once - and NBG was no help.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

Ma's are very powerful right now.

[lufa1982]

Yeah, I guess If we were to fully rely on NBG, devs might need a closer look at its other aspects, not just the cooldown.

We only really know how it works on live, where reflect is bigger, some perk alphas are shut down right after SS+CP, and most of perk alphas are shut down after all debuffs are in. That'll be no longer the case. It would take a week of theorycrafting of all the pre-drain/post drain NBG variants, and then another week of rechecking it on test server vs. all the appropriate professions, to figure just how much worse things are.

Obviously it needs to be in that sweet spot between "I'm always dead no matter what" and "look, I can tank Jesus", but where exactly that spot might be, we're basically just guessing.

[Raggy]

See, my problem with unstunnable is, it doesn't actually do anything about the literal sh*tstorm of damage that comes from most alphas. Our inherent squishyness and lack of static evades means we'd just be smeared over the ground just as fast if we didn't have the perk.

Assume this:

Trader and Shade in a duel.

Shade hits 'I-win' button, queues the large majority of his perks. At the same time the Trader lands his first drain. Now, the damage incoming from the Shade is already going to hit, so NBG will be our first line of defence there. But would it be enough? So far we've been perked for a huge amount of HP, our NBG has/will soak 60% of it into a dwindling nanopool and we havn't even landed our second drain yet.

We either need the chance to make some perks miss, which is the static defence route (CiB/Acrobat).
Or
We focus on making NBG a bit more funky, which has the added benefit of not really screwing with the lower levels.

So far I'm leaning towards NBG being tinkered with a bit more, in a good way ofc. Also just had an idea about NBG in PvM, what about making it land on all teammates? Sort of like a mini Purple Heart where 40% or so of the damage the team receives is reflected and we lose all our nano like usual afterwards? I'd like a little bit more team function outside of AC drains and Umbral

[lufa1982]

Well, Unstunnable doesn't make a difference in itself. What it does, however, is allowing you to pop NBG those precious few seconds earlier, instead of taking full damage to the face with bunch of big specials and perks, before you can even react.

E.g. Shade typically will open up his alpha with Disorientate, 4 second stun, and then queue the rest. Without stun resist, by the time Disorientate stun runs out, you are already flatrolled. With Unstannable, you can do 1-2-3 combo of NBG-divest-ransack, nearly instantly.

Agreed on the rest, though. Unstunnable is basically an attempt of somehow emulating the role of SS. Instead of disabling the opponent, they opponent now can't disable us. Seems fair to me. But the hole in our defense still needs to be adressed. And yeah, the advantage of just buffing AAD, lies in the fact that we could very accurately predict a treshold point, where it would actually help us survive. Much harder to do that with NBG.

Speaking of NBG, I've played around on test and I've noticed two things:

- it doesn't drain nano for 1 minute anymore. The nanopool is just reseted to 0 after NBG runs out, and that's it. Which definitely helps with the concerns that quicker NBG cooldown would constantly disable our ability to debuff. We won't be filling our nanopool back to full without GTH, but we should be able to keep casting with just Accumulator, nano delta, occasional stim etc.

- the root/snare removal from NBG is gone, which is terrible, terrible news. We'll be much easier to pin down now,on top of all the other nerfs.

[Poko]

The regular drains do last 60s in pvm, Is there anyway we could get IS/CP to last 60s, maybe even 40s in pvm?



Also, seeing as we haggled are way to nbg, why not do the same for NS? ;D

[Raggy]

The regular drains do last 60s in pvm, Is there anyway we could get IS/CP to last 60s, maybe even 40s in pvm?



Also, seeing as we haggled are way to nbg, why not do the same for NS? ;D

Our proposed changes to NBG are to fill a 700 AAD hole being left by overwriting CP/IS on targets. As far as I know NS is still as good as it was

[lufa1982]

The cooldown system for drains is also rather silly. If you land all 4 drains on first try, everything gets a global cooldown for 9 seconds.

Which basically means that even with 100% landrate, it is mechanically impossible to debuff more then one person.

[nanoforcer]

It would help a bit if the drains affected all the persons in the (drained) team as was suggested by the former GD iirc.

[lufa1982]

Yeah, or just make it small range AOE debuff aura with a center on a debuffed target.

Wouldn't even be that powerful when you realize Crat auras effectively "debuff" AR of everyone who attacks Crat's team by -510, and everyone's evades by -350. And they don't require any casting.

[Raggy]

Ok, so, I finally got around to playing around on Test with the PDKP.

Equip: Full CSS/Beta Symbs (Art in Shotgun areas, rest Sup), HUDs were a mishmash of bits left over from putting in the betas. So nothing spectacular.

The PDKP has a Flingshot of 6 Seconds and a Burst of 8 Seconds.

Bursts can reach upto about 6.5k. Crits are around 4.9k-5.1k. Is 1/1 in Full Def. It's overall, a bloody good Shotgun and with the Shotgun perks available to us, I am fairly certain it can outpace an MA build. This is just conjecture though since I havn't been able to run an equivalent MA build alongside it to really see the difference, but it certainly looks and feels good.


Now, I also got into a few duels as well and did a little bit of testing with our NBS. From a 220 Soldier using Envy/OH. Full Auto/AS/Fling/Burst against our NBS will drop our nano to around 25% which is frankly, unacceptable. GTH will keep the shield up for about 5s longer, but won't be enough to offset the rest of the incoming damage, especially if the enemy has perks at their disposal, which most do.

There are two solutions to this.

A) Drastically drop the DTN ratio from 250 to about 85.
or
B) Remove the NBS and GTH CD to allow for a perpetual cycle, making GTH and NBS lock one another out to stop us having a perma 60% DTN shield.

Our static defence, which we have already discussed to death, is literally none-existent.

Evade Clc -2050
Dodge Rng - 2151
Duck Exp - 2167

This was with Evade HUD3 and iQU running. The Soldiers resting AR was 3205. Divest/Plundered: 2595. CP/IS: 2570.

So if we add the +300 AAD from CP/IS to our sitting evades, we are still below the AR of the Soldier in terms of evades 2467 being our highest evade (Duck Exp).


Meaning we would still be entirely perkable despite being advertised as an Evade class.


I will be running some DD logs at some point to really push the PDKPs and get some more solid numbers.

[Cratertina]

Super nice, Pdkp any good for pvp? Maybe troaler + PDKP?

[Raggy]

Super nice, Pdkp any good for pvp? Maybe troaler + PDKP?

It has a 97% Check meaning it'll land more in PvP by a small margin. I'd probably say the Craphander would be a good tie-in.

[lufa1982]

Good to hear about DPKP, rest of it is quite depressing though