Originally Posted by
Traderjill
I'll just give my opinion from a PvM standpoint. The issues I have with deflect being introduced (in no particular order):
* It is going to make long fights that much longer. We don't need longer PvM fights in AO.. we need fights that are more interesting and are more than tank and spank (think more like DB3 and less like Beast).
* It is 100% luck based without the illusion of any counter. When someone tries to run a hostile nanoprogram on me, it checks against my Nanoresist. I can reduce the chance of a crit landing on me by increasing my critdecrease, etc. Granted there is still a RNG factor but I can make an active choice to raise skills to reduce the chance of something landing. As far as I can tell, deflect doesn't check against anything and I suppose that from a game experience standpoint I don't care for that. I deal with it in other games but AO has always taken a different approach in that our decisions regarding IP expenditure seemed to matter. Deflect takes that away.
* The luck factor is really out of whack and, in some cases, so badly balanced that the feeling of progression is gone. I should be able to log my soldier and annihilate mobs in Nascence (grey) and the fights should become progressively harder as I head north in shadowlands. As it stands now with deflect, that really isn't the case. My full autos seem to be just as crappy in Nascence as they are in inferno. I've killed quite a few mobs with my soldier and I can't seem to calculate any noticeable difference even in the deflect % of mobs as I go from a lower to higher playfield. If I went to Nascence and my full autos were hitting for 15k 100% of the time then in Ely it was 95% then Scheol 90% all the way up to Pande at 70%, I still wouldn't like it but at least it would make some sort of sense. But me missing on Full Auto or hitting for non-15k hits on silvertails in Nascence doesn't make any sense, not even in a fictional online universe.
* Deflect kinda spits in the face of twinking... at least for me. I mean really what's the point? This is a game where we go through major pains for that extra bit of dmg. We do it because we like to see our toons perform at their maximum. Honestly, deflect really has the potential to deflate people's motivation to twink their toons (especially in PvM). Go through a ton of trouble to twink out a full auto toon, at any level, just to watch your gun hit for 1k full auto? Yeah.. no thanks.
I don't think PvM needed deflect. What they could have done is removed all parry/deflect from mobs and made the skill completely irrelevant in PvM (i.e. player hits don't get deflected and mob hits don't get deflected) and then just made deflect a PvP skill. I also wouldn't have minded much if Deflect was some sort of perk, activated when your deflect skill is over X points (sorta like backstab gets activated for shades and advys). That way you can choose when to use the perk/special attack and it becomes part of a larger strategy when playing your toon. Even without a direct counter or skill to check against it would still be more skill based than just luck as you'd have to choose the right time to use it. And yes, I like choices but do we really need another skill to IP at this point? It would've been better off as a perkline (4 to 6 points) or increase IP. I was looking at my 220 enforcer's IP and maybe I can cut a bit off on multi-melee and perhaps a few points off comp lit but it seems like I'm going to have to cut down on weapon skills in order to be able to IP deflect. And that's on a melee toon... it probably won't even be worth the effort to bother with on my ranged.
I agree on every point there Jill and to confirm that last point, I ip'd into deflect on a fixer and it did absolutely nothing but rob ip from other skills, it had next to no effect at all, as it currently is, it's utterly useless for fixer/soldier/keeper even with green deflect skill on the keeper in PVM.
On a positive note Mich is taking in the feed back received and changing things around, but having to remove it or rescale it on mobs was always going to be a nightmare; exactly as I was saying back in February, and when I compared it precisely to the last time parry was enabled.
Though this like so much other feedback has come to light since AUTO was introduced and people where able to test 18.7 seriously, instead of scraping around to 220 the hard way.