Serotonin Purge

[Right]

Hi all! I'd like to suggest purged buffs return after 7.5 minutes (or some appropriate length of time)

Some context; I use Serotonin purge religiously on my main character's build. I observe two frustrating things:

1. People might take purge off their toolbar, or be asked to not use purge, often as a courtesy because no one wants to rebuff. Not doing so can invite agitation.
2. In PvP, after a group wipes, it can be a big slow down when people pause to rebuff
   

 

[NORD]

Hi all! I'd like to suggest purged buffs return after 7.5 minutes (or some appropriate length of time)

Some context; I use Serotonin purge religiously on my main character's build. I observe two frustrating things:

1. People might take purge off their toolbar, or be asked to not use purge, often as a courtesy because no one wants to rebuff. Not doing so can invite agitation.
2. In PvP, after a group wipes, it can be a big slow down when people pause to rebuff
   View attachment 173

There is currently a combat revamp being worked on, and I would expect purge to be addressed.

 

[Tdeadly]

If you going to want to get it back make it after your death. Taking away the buffs is to help kill someone. But once they die they should return.

 

[Right]

There is currently a combat revamp being worked on, and I would expect purge to be addressed.

Can you share the tentative plan so we can share feedback?

 

[Vikingmando]

Can you share the tentative plan so we can share feedback?

At this time we can't as its still in testing. Keep an eye on announcements in the next couple of days though. There is something coming that the community may be interested in.

 

[Right]

Is this the purposed long term solution?

https://www.swgevolve.com/threads/304/

If this is the plan, seriously, just take it out of the game instead. Alternatively, I would strongly recommend that theres far more interesting ways to keep this skill relevant without being more frustrating than other debuffs.

 

[Rezec]

Taking it out of the game completely would ruin some PvE gameplay. At the moment this is the long-term. Solution and one that fits with the same way we've made buffing less of an issue for people, buffs do not decay during PvP and they don't fall off on PvE deaths. It is a huge time killer waiting on people to rebuff all the time and normally causes PvP to end early. Many events on this server you already hear people on both sides agreeing to no stripping. This is the most logical choice even if it's not a popular one.

 

[Right]

I've been doing some sound boarding with 4-5 guildmates on this. We seem to unanimously agree its a time killer and often frustrating mechanic right now. But it is also an extremely important tool as one of the only options against wild buff stacking or stalemates. And with the proposed attribute stat changes which represent a significant improvement in those stat's benefits, buff stacking is going to even more important, further widening the valley between elites and casual players - something that will reduce fun for casuals, and some will not stick around to try to become elites (not their playstyle, or not enough time).

Removing Purge from PvP completely will disproportionately favor elite players. Those are players which are frequently in the highest level circles providing suggestions and encouragement, risking a group-think. (No offense Nord - you are part of that demographic; are vocal, influential and carry strong, often inflexible opinions which support the way you want to play the game.)

There are a lot of creative options to either tweak this ability to eliminate the time-wasting and most frustrating aspect about it, or reinvent it. My friends had dozens of solid ideas in our discussion which I'd be happy to share. Again, if this is committed to as the preferred approach, please just remove it from the skill tree all together and make room for something relevant. (Edit: I can't think of any PvE situations currently where purge is important. Yes it works on some NPCs, but with jedi solo-ing every instance except EK without purge, evidence suggests it's not important.)

 

[NORD]

I've been doing some sound boarding with 4-5 guildmates on this. We seem to unanimously agree its a time killer and often frustrating mechanic right now. But it is also an extremely important tool as one of the only options against wild buff stacking or stalemates. And with the proposed attribute stat changes which represent a significant improvement in those stat's benefits, buff stacking is going to even more important, further widening the valley between elites and casual players - something that will reduce fun for casuals, and some will not stick around to try to become elites (not their playstyle, or not enough time).

Removing Purge from PvP completely will disproportionately favor elite players. Those are players which are frequently in the highest level circles providing suggestions and encouragement, risking a group-think. (No offense Nord - you are part of that demographic; are vocal, influential and carry strong, often inflexible opinions which support the way you want to play the game.)

There are a lot of creative options to either tweak this ability to eliminate the time-wasting and most frustrating aspect about it, or reinvent it. My friends had dozens of solid ideas in our discussion which I'd be happy to share. Again, if this is committed to as the preferred approach, please just remove it from the skill tree all together and make room for something relevant. (Edit: I can't think of any PvE situations currently where purge is important. Yes it works on some NPCs, but with jedi solo-ing every instance except EK without purge, evidence suggests it's not important.)

The gap between casual players and "elite" players will actually be much, much smaller with the combat revamp. The extreme levels of tankiness from being able to stack 60%+ of each defensive stat from expertise, crazy amounts of healing, and crazy amounts of damage all at the same time are largely gone. If you haven't already had a chance to, I encourage you to hop on the TC and try things out for yourself.

 

[Rezec]

And if you've been reading the TC patch notes, we are moving away from buffs going off constantly during PvP, aka the officer/sl go to for procing action.

Why? Because Everytime these pop off every single player in your team, the enemies team or whoever is running the buffs on macros are causing every stat, every combat calculation to be completely recalculated every second of the fight for every single person who is out there.

At its core this is why NGE fast paced content is a slide slow on many servers after a certain number of players. The combat code is extremely inefficient.

A large part of this revamp has been spent of making that combat code more efficient. We are caching more combat calcs on a player than the NGE by far. This is cached again anytime you equip or unequip any items and gain or lose a buff. These are the natural times that they NEED to be calculated and cached.

Debuffs will always be a thing in PvP BUT most of them are single target. This is why less stressful of a recalculation on the game code than full group buffs.

So the idea of purging and people constantly reapplying group buffs goes against any of the efficient changes we are trying to make. So yes in a way this update will dynamically change the face of combat.

 

[Griffy]

I've been doing some sound boarding with 4-5 guildmates on this. We seem to unanimously agree its a time killer and often frustrating mechanic right now. But it is also an extremely important tool as one of the only options against wild buff stacking or stalemates. And with the proposed attribute stat changes which represent a significant improvement in those stat's benefits, buff stacking is going to even more important, further widening the valley between elites and casual players - something that will reduce fun for casuals, and some will not stick around to try to become elites (not their playstyle, or not enough time).

Removing Purge from PvP completely will disproportionately favor elite players. Those are players which are frequently in the highest level circles providing suggestions and encouragement, risking a group-think. (No offense Nord - you are part of that demographic; are vocal, influential and carry strong, often inflexible opinions which support the way you want to play the game.)

There are a lot of creative options to either tweak this ability to eliminate the time-wasting and most frustrating aspect about it, or reinvent it. My friends had dozens of solid ideas in our discussion which I'd be happy to share. Again, if this is committed to as the preferred approach, please just remove it from the skill tree all together and make room for something relevant. (Edit: I can't think of any PvE situations currently where purge is important. Yes it works on some NPCs, but with jedi solo-ing every instance except EK without purge, evidence suggests it's not important.)

Stalemates only happen on the Live Evolve server due to everyone having every single defensive they could possibly take along with the 60% healing and 20% glancing blow increase, which are so easily accessible. There's pretty much zero reason you'd stalemate otherwise. After revamp you'll see the need to purge will be non existent because not everyone will be able to have everything.

Buff stacking is the easiest thing to do in this server. Each side pretty much has full buff bots running in buff houses for every single person who would like them. You do not have to go out of your way to find these and usually they have med buffs, ent buffs, squad leader buffs, banner buffs. The only thing you'll have to fend for yourself is food, drinks and spice. I don't see how that could be seen as an elitist part of the game here when they are obtained so casually.

 

[Yatoya]

I personally still run into stalemates even after the Evolve Combat Update (awesome by the way), mostly caused by me having a Tank build with Doctor Stance. After reading through the discussion on this topic, I started to think of a compromise. I hate purge just as much as most do.

How about Serotonin Purge be a debuff that can stack up to 5 times which lowers defense of players? Applying -1% dodge, -1% block, -1% evade, -1% glance, stackable up to 5 times.

 

[Karrec]

I like the idea. Would be nice to have a non-IO solution for the ultra tanky/unkillable builds.

As combat is now you could probably up that to 3-5% per stack with it being removable by serotonin boost/cleanses. Impossible odds removes way more than 25% defenses and some people still tank it without cleansing or using LoS. (Not saying IO is balanced, could benefit from an adjustment to the amount of luck needed to use it effectively)

If the DRs are adjusted, the values could be lower

 

[Right]

I personally still run into stalemates even after the Evolve Combat Update (awesome by the way), mostly caused by me having a Tank build with Doctor Stance. After reading through the discussion on this topic, I started to think of a compromise. I hate purge just as much as most do.

How about Serotonin Purge be a debuff that can stack up to 5 times which lowers defense of players? Applying -1% dodge, -1% block, -1% evade, -1% glance, stackable up to 5 times.

Definitely! Stalemates are just as common so far as I can see. And this is not just in 1v1s either, entire group stalemates can happen too. I feel purge still has a huge role to play to help destabilize and bring these fights to an eventual victor. Instead of making it work against debuffs, it could absolutely be tweaked to just provide a generalized penalty. I'm not sure -5% would do it though. I was thinking along the lines of:

1. Uncleansable stacking debuff with 5 minute duration if not renewed. It would also clear upon cloning (but not player revive). This has a really cool potential affect of creating a back and forth win/lose dynamic. If you and your team are at a disadvantage, with persistence pushing multiple times after cloning, you can eventually have a good chance to take down the enemy team
2. Very slow ramp up of effect, similar to how purge used to work (it took sometimes 5 minutes of purging to see the full effect). 1% penalty to defense roll (the result of this is that it starts by reducing dodge, then moves on to parry, etc...)
3. Very high potential effect. Max debuff stack of 75 (it would take a single player 8 minutes of non-stop purging to reach this point). So if a purged target had 25% dodge and 75% block, they would still have 25% block at a minimum.

As Karrec mentioned, Impossible Odds (and also Feeling Lucky + Lucky Break) can bypass 100% of defenses with immediate effect, so this wouldn't be as nearly as strong as that.

 

[Karrec]

Something like that could work.

Though, I think it would need to be cleansable one stack at a time or have a lower duration. I think groups with high stacks will completely disengage until it wears off to avoid fighting with a disadvantage.

75 stacks is pretty intense too, could buff it up to 3-4% penalty and have it go up to 20-25 stacks? I know with armor break and DoTs, sometimes the strategy is to LoS until the duration runs out. If its uncleansable, having that as a potential solution would be nice too.

 

[Right]

Thats a great point, something that occurred to me shortly after as well. God, the penalty for death is so low its crazy to me the lengths people will go to avoid a trip to the cloner. But I guess it comes down to the fact that PvP can become fiercely competitive whether I like it or not, and we have to anticipate that mentality.

However, I think it will really limit it's utility to make it directly/conventionally cleansable. At the risk of complicating it, maybe it could start clearing off like 1 stack every 3 seconds when you /sit (which can only be done out of combat)? That way you're best option is to stay put and rest as much as possible before the next fight instead of leaving the area to wait out a timer. But then again, maybe people would just ITV to safety to sit and clear in that case too.

I might have to give up on the idea of an enduring effect between fights to avoid re-creating the old problems again. A lower duration like 60 seconds may be the simplest approach then.

3% @ 25 stacks seems plausible as well. That would take 3 minutes in a 1v1.