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Suggestions for further Mistlock Instability improvements


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It's been a while now since there was a major overhaul of the Mistlock Instabilities, and although we did get the (much needed) removal of Birds and Slippery Slope, there are still a number of Instabilities that don't feel like they meet the goals that Anet set out to meet with the rework. In addition to this, there are a few that desperately need QoL adjustments:

Flux Bomb - I personally think FB is a decent instability, but it shouldn't be applied at the very start of combat. For many bosses, the first few seconds of the fight are crucial both to CC the boss, and to capitalise upon the damage buff from breaking it. The appearence of Flux Bomb frequently amounts to simply blocking one player from actually contributing while they deal with the instability and for many encounters there just isn't any counterplay to this. An example of this is Ensolyss - A skilled group can instantly break the boss, but the time it takes for the defiance bar to appear coincides with the Bomb, which leads to effectively needing to "reroll" the start of the fight in the hopes that it is given to a class who can CC while dealing with the Bomb. Alternatively the group can simply abandon attempting the instant break, which amounts to removing skilled play from the game.

Frailty - It's bad enough that this instability effectively just amounts to "take more damage" with no counterplay, but the positive effect is useless as it does not stack with the swiftness that most groups will have anyway! Honestly I feel like this instability should just be removed, as it is uninteresting and plain horrible when combined with the other "take more damage" instabilities.

Social Awkwardness - This should really only be active in combat, as it is incredibly frustrating to have everyone jostling for position around the many awkwardly placed Mistlock Singularities.

Sugar Rush - More interesting than Frailty, and as with that instability the positive effect does not stack with the boons that most groups will already have. Perhaps having the instability apply quickness rather than a generic attack speed boost would work better.

We Bleed Fire - The "boss" version of this Instability was not updated along with the base version. Hence it still does not reflect, and applies the very long duration burning.

I don't by any means think that my suggestions are absolutely the best way to fix these instabilities, but I do believe all 5 of these need a rework of some kind. I've tried to focus more on the instabilites that create systemic issues based on my experiences, rather than just my personal opinions so I'm interested to see people's thoughts!

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Here is my take: experienced and good players do not care about instabilities because they have been gutted far enough again to not matter, less experienced and weaker players who struggle in T4 would struggle even without instabilities, just a bit less.

As to the instabilities you mentioned:Flux Bomb - drop the bomb on the other side of the boss and benefit from it affecting enemies too. Not an issue if players are able to stack. Stacking is not a skill I find difficult or hold in high regard. If you are unable to stand on 1 position as a group, you have issues with your eyesight.

Frailty - only negative to low hitpoints classes since medium and high hitpoint classes still have enough base life to take more than 1-2 hits. Yes, it's unfair to elementalists.

Social Awkwardness - making this only active in combat would create way bigger issues than having it on all the time. Imagine someone getting in combat while Uncategorized and suddenly 4 people who wre jumping with said person suddenly go flying. The only place outside of combat where this would be not noticable is on terrain which is insignificant in the first place.

Sugar Rush - effect on champions is 15%, so nearly insignificant since most of them still have slow attacks and barely move. Who cares about elite and trash enemies? Maybe an issue on Siren's Reef, but that is more due to the bad design of that fractal. This one is mostly a free instability slot which does not matter.

We Bleed Fire - the instability was nerfed so far already. Dodge or reflect it or simply heal through. No issue, even less on bosses where it triggers once ever full moon.

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@Adotiln Urthadar.1823 said:The issues I was trying to address were not with difficulty, but rather with design. The very fact that these instabilities seem irrelevant is a flaw.

and yet half your suggestions are ideas how to make the mentioned instabilities weaker or having them removed.

As far as instabilities being irrelevant, we had the opposite in place. The casual crowd went wild. Instabilities were removed.

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Difficult is not automatically better. An instability that caused enemies to instantly kill you when you get within 300 units would be hard, but wouldn't be fun. As I stated, if instabilities are intended to have both positive and negative effects, then those that have no positive effect are failing to meet this goal and the only "fix" would be to make them easier by providing some positive effect.

Regarding the removed instabilities, it had nothing to do with "casuals". Hardcore players hated them just as much because Slippery Slope removed control from your character and broke the function of several skills. Meanwhile birds would trigger without warning and blind you in the middle of critical skill casts.

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@Cyninja.2954 said:Here is my take: experienced and good players do not care about instabilities because they have been gutted far enough again to not matter, less experienced and weaker players who struggle in T4 would struggle even without instabilities, just a bit less.I agree, and with Cyn's specific comments about the listed instabs.

For me, instabs serve two purposes:

  • They provide a type of barrier-to-entry for T4 that is skill-based, rather than the effort-based, which is what we used to have (getting enough AR to manage Mai Trin/L50).
  • They add some variety to the daily experience, so that one day feels different from another.

Unless ANet adopts new instabs and updates them every balance patch, experienced players are always going to evolve to ignore them. And less-skilled players will continue to struggle, until they, too, become experienced.

I'd love to see ANet modify instabs more frequently. But, unlike the OP, I don't think it will really matter. Every time ANet has done so, experienced players adapted, and there's been tons of whining from others. It's true some instabs are more annoying, some more fun. In the end, though, they are just one more mechanic to learn and some people learn quickly.

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frailty is honestly, honestly, not that bad

saying that as someone who pugged t3s in the horror time of new instabs (fire pre-nerf + birds etc) as full zerker's s/d weaver, w/o defensive pots, w/o healers most of the time

frailty was always one of the instabs i was happiest to see; it hardly offers anything vastly different/challenging while still encouraging better gameplay

i mean, you should probably be dodging a 9k one-shot anyway

(NOT THAT I DO bc wats dodging, and wow having a healer makes everything so much easier, but i never felt unfairly punished if i went down w/ frailty)

flux bombs are really annoying when pre-booning; if they could be disabled in some vicinity of the mistlock, that would be great (or at least just pre-booning for skorvie in shattered observatory, bc there's only that small little platform)

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so we have negative effect and positive ones. in case of npng, positive one is so little, that this instab is alway pure cancer to deal with.make stripping boons daze/stun enemy, or transfer stripped boons to allies in range.can agree with ur point of flux bomb, getting it at the start of some bosses can just force group to gg, imo rest of instabs are ok.

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Yea frailty on its own is... fine, but it's just really boring - almost all the other instabilities at least require you to take some action or modify your playstyle whereas frailty just... makes you take more damage. And the main problem is when it's combined with something like Outflanked. This turns almost anything into a one-shot and on Siren's Reef or Deepstone or Artsariiv or the altar section of Nightmare there is just so much ambient damage floating around that you can't avoid it all. Constantly having to res someone because a random mob sneezed at you is just tedious.

For Frailty, SR, and WBF. Even though these instabilities often aren't a problem my issue with them is really about design - I can't help but feel that when they updated WBF they just forgot that there were two version of it so I would like to see that fixed, and as meaningless as the "positive" effect on NPNG might be at least there is one you can technically take advantage of which is simply not the case for Frailty or SR.

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I have some suggestions too.We Bleed Fire — attacking an enemy will give you a stack of burning, instead of initial 6k and burn for 1k every tick.Flux Bomb — I have 2 ideas:

  1. Remove the aoe effect and deal increased damage for every player withing the range. Something opposite to green in Siren's Reef. If you're alone - take no damage. 20% dmg increase for every "catched" person (for whole party it's damage of 80% total HP).
  2. Something similar to point 1. but it dazes instead of dealing damage.
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how about we push it even further??

like the crown pavillion queens gauntlet. we get to chose our penalties (instabilities now) for increased rewards

bad teams can take easy ones and be happy, good teams can put some challenges on themselves (increasing max amount of instabilities allowed so you can have like 5-6 of them)

rewards scale with instabilities used

everyone happy both casual and elite

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@Cyninja.2954 said:Sugar Rush - effect on champions is 15%, so nearly insignificant since most of them still have slow attacks and barely move. Who cares about elite and trash enemies? Maybe an issue on Siren's Reef, but that is more due to the bad design of that fractal. This one is mostly a free instability slot which does not matter.

Sugar Rush imo is one of the few actually dangerous Instabilities in Fractals with a lot of trash (Molten Boss etc.), especially in combination with Outflanked or Afflicted it can actually do quite some work.

Most others are just things you either don't even notice are there or just provide some minor annoyance to make the experience worse.

I still think the only two really well designed Instabilities are No Pain No Gain and We Bleed Fire.They can be quite punishing if not countered but have active mechanical gameplay counters and when properly countered have no effect at all, aka they are neither a permanent annoyance nor completely irrelevant and ignorable while requiring active gameplay to counter.Afflicted to a degree as well.

Instabilities that are just active all the time to annoy you like SA can gladly go in my opinion.

@melandru.3876 said:how about we push it even further??

like the crown pavillion queens gauntlet. we get to chose our penalties (instabilities now) for increased rewards

bad teams can take easy ones and be happy, good teams can put some challenges on themselves (increasing max amount of instabilities allowed so you can have like 5-6 of them)

rewards scale with instabilities used

everyone happy both casual and elite

The reason that doesn't work is because people always want to play the most rewarding content, even if they don't want to put the effort in to become good enough to beat it, so they rather complain in hopes to have it nerfed down to their level while providing the same rewards.

Just like people who struggle with T4 now don't drop down to T3, everybody will want to play with the most challenging 6 Instabilities to get maximum loot everytime, even if they can't handle it.Additionally, a system like that would mean playing with the same instabilities everyday, completely defeating the purpose of the system of putting a slightly different spin on the same content every time you play it with different Instabilities.

@"Antycypator.9874" said:I have some suggestions too.We Bleed Fire — attacking an enemy will give you a stack of burning, instead of initial 6k and burn for 1k every tick.

That would pretty much instantly kill everybody with 100+ stacks of burning withing seconds.If it had an ICD, it would just be a quite boring instability, like a reverse Afflicted except just for burning and no incentive to add clear.

We Bleed Fire is good as is, no reason to change it.

If I had my way with Instabilities I would keep We Bleed Fire, No Pain No Gain, Afflicted, Fractal Vindicators, Hamstrung, Last Laugh, Outflanked, Toxic Trail and Mist Convergence as is.I would look at Adrenaline Rush, Flux Bomb, Vengeance, Boon Overload, Frailty, Stick Together and Sugar Rush to slightly tweak or rework, especially the ones that are pretty much just incoming damage modifiers without real counterplay, to find ways to make them more interesting and interactive.

Social Awkwardness, being just a constant annoyance without any active gameplay counter, I would want to completely remove and replace with something interactive like "Earthquake: Every 20 seconds the ground shakes and knocks everybody down for 2 seconds. Stability you apply grants an extra stack."Which would be countered by Stability and indicated by a slight rumble sound effect and some visual like the yellow border indication from Raids when standing in hostile effects about to go off, happening every 20 seconds, with the effect actually triggering 2-3 seconds later to provide time to counter, which would then reset the 20 second timer (in combat-, or maybe even in boss fights only).

Another new Instability I can think of, maybe to replace Frailty, would be something like Cairn CM, where everybody gets a Special Action hotkey similar to Celestial Dash with a lower range and quite a bit longer CD for mobility, but if not pressed for some time while cooled down activates on it's own, dashing in a random direction.

Just more active stuff that actually changes the tools you bring into the Fractal depending on the Instabilities and/or changes the way they are played with active components I think would greatly improve the system.

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@Asum.4960 said:I still think the only two really well designed Instabilities are No Pain No Gain and We Bleed Fire.They can be quite punishing if not countered but have active mechanical gameplay counters and when properly countered have no effect at all, aka they are neither a permanent annoyance nor completely irrelevant and ignorable whileI can't agree about npng. Let's take outflanked as example. If u position urself correctly as groups u take less dmg. U get some positive thing for using this instab.Npng always leads u to dps lose no matter how well u adjust ur gameplay to it. If u strip boons u deal 1k dmg? But first of all bs or rene has to sacrifice a lot of dps by going spb or malyx. Also if ur bs goes spb, u lose cc (plz correct me if I'm wrong) and if rene is stripping he has to start each phase on malyx which leads to bad scholar uptime (with no healer comp).U only sacrifice, but don't gain anything.I can agree WBF is good tho.

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@Safandula.8723 said:

@Asum.4960 said:I still think the only two really well designed Instabilities are
No Pain No Gain
and
We Bleed Fire
.They can be quite punishing if not countered but have active mechanical gameplay counters and when properly countered have no effect at all, aka they are neither a permanent annoyance nor completely irrelevant and ignorable whileI can't agree about npng. Let's take outflanked as example. If u position urself correctly as groups u take less dmg. U get some positive thing for using this instab.Npng always leads u to dps lose no matter how well u adjust ur gameplay to it. If u strip boons u deal 1k dmg? But first of all bs or rene has to sacrifice a lot of dps by going spb or malyx. Also if ur bs goes spb, u lose cc (plz correct me if I'm wrong) and if rene is stripping he has to start each phase on malyx which leads to bad scholar uptime (with no healer comp).U only sacrifice, but don't gain anything.I can agree WBF is good tho.

Aren't Instabilities meant to mainly be a drawback though? The whole minor positive aspects were added just recently to them.So I don't really mind if some are more of a plain drawback as others, especially since that perspective heavily relies on the comp as well.

Thinking of the current meta, sure NPNG always seems like a drawback. I'm guessing the original thinking behind that Instab was to reward or increase viability of skills which benefit from ripping boons (Spinal Shivers and Break Enchantments, or Corruption in general come to mind), which would have inbuild positives for the Instability.But even if those aren't meta or even commonly run, I feel like NPNG is in a decent spot by adding some mechanical complexity, even though it's nothing fancy.

I definitely don't feel like it's bad design like some others.

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I would assume that insabilities were intended to be a drawback. Or at the very least, a drawback if not dealt with perfectly.

I think NPNG feels ok to me - if there's an issue with it, it's more to do with how rare boonstrip is: Only spellbreaker, revenant, necromancer and mesmer can do it and all have to give up a lot to do so (hell, chrono can't even do it properly any more as they don't count as a clone).

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@"Adotiln Urthadar.1823" said:Frailty - It's bad enough that this instability effectively just amounts to "take more damage" with no counterplay, but the positive effect is useless as it does not stack with the swiftness that most groups will have anyway!

It never made sense to me that you gained run speed as a counterbalance to lower health pool.

They should either provide increased endurance regen for more dodging (part of Hamstrung) or perhaps health regen or toughness added when you successfully evade an attack. But run speed? lawl.

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