Well its been a month of Champions and it's been rather bumpy ride, not to say the most bumpy. During this month of CO, many
retcons have been given out after many big changes to some powers. Cryptic has certainly proven themselves very responsive to the community regarding most issues. This
firt month look will attempt to look back at the month to see what has changed in Champions.
Powers:
A lot of changes have been done to powers, some of these changes significantly affecting the way it is used and some just tweaking small details or bugs. The most actively discussed powers during this month include Ego Blade Breach (EBB),
Taser Arrow, Mini Mines and the Chill effect.
EBB is one of the new
FoTM skills that has seen light since players discovered the true damage it does using a series of paranormal damage resistances. EBB is still very deadly due to its tap effect and damage.
Taser Arrow was a old
FoTM skill that was used in the early month. Many players who did use it would have commented on its seemingly permanent hold. The
Taser Arrow is now not as much used but still proves a strong hold.
Mini Mines was around the same time as the
Taser Arrow, it did
a lot of damage for a low amount of energy and could be used to take down a large amount of enemies, being an
AoE skill. This was however changed as Cryptic soon caught on to this and
nerfed the damage not once, but twice.
The Chill effect was an effect that most people complained about. It was a slowing effect that reduced the movement speed of the opponent by up to 90%. This meant that chill was an instant game over spell that allows a team to focus on the player that cannot get away.
These powers were the biggest on the forums during their respective times. powers in overall however are not even near completed to be balanced. The main culprit for games that promotes
PvP is that with
PvP balancing (Most posts that showed the flaws to the powers above were made by players dying from it during
PvP combat) come some
nerfing to
PvE scenarios. Some of the powers that were once considered over powered are now near useless in not only
PvP scenarios but
also PvE.
Missions:
The XP gap was contained within the beta testing phase but even as the game grew live, it still had a content gap that required the player to complete nearly every single quest in order to get to the max level of 40. This should not be the case - CO should have an overflow of missions that has some movement as to which quests people can do.
A recent patch added some content into the gap but is far from sealing it up. This gap between 32-33 was 'solved' by Cryptic adding in a new chain of missions that added a small XP boost for that level paring.
Hopefully in the future, more missions or even a new zone will be implemented as to completely seal off the gap. Another suggestion is to improve the crim computer to not on ly show you missions that are avalible, but to also show missions that can still be taken but will not show due to the player outleveling the quest.
Mission bugs have also been stamped out, most missions function properly however some of the quests as the high 30-40 range still need difficulty tweaking and also contain more bugs than their 1-29 mission counterparts.
Others:
Some other aspects of the game such as UI and world graphic bugs have been fixed. The UI has also been modified in a way that allows for an easier overview of the characters statistics. The UI has also been optimised and some users report framerate improvements.
Stats have also be reworked, with the Crit and Crit severity being affected the most. The new soft caps mean that the characters with DEX and EGO stats will be ideally nerfed. This nerf was probably used to to reduce the strength on players that use telekinetic blades but unfortunately also nerfed the munitions tree. Since munitions is not an overpowered tree, it has got more then a powerful blow to the strength of munitions.
Although most of the patches did good things, some have been used as temporary solutions to the bigger problems. Hopefully most of the patches to come will stamp out all of the common bugs and also continue to tweak Champions into a sucessful game for time to come.
and it shows you all the quests you havent completed yet, including the type of quest (Help a Citizen, Nemesis, etc), the zone and location, and even a custom map showing you exactly where the quest giver is located.
