The Expose Exposé

NotReallyAJedi
91 posts Member
edited June 2017
So as many of you have posted about, we have an “issue” with the Expose debuff and it’s impacting the Resistance faction. Sooooo, I’d like to take a minute (just sit right there), and I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air we approached this bug, what happened, and what we’re doing next.

Heads up, this will be a long-ish post, so TL;DR:
  • We had 2 versions of Expose in gamedata
  • Resistance was using the OLD version, which would not apply the same as the NEW version
  • Fixing Expose for Resistance potentially meant breaking the game, so we tried leaving it alone and just updating the language
  • Old Expose and Current Expose did not play well together
  • We’ve now fixed all versions of Expose to operate exactly the same (even on Resistance)

Alright, so now we can settle in for the good stuff!
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What’s Going On?
So there was a bug in which the older, original, version of Expose was not working as intended. Essentially, if an enemy unit has the Expose debuff active on them, and you attack with a unit that can apply Expose on hit, the attack should do the following:
  1. Attack successfully lands
  2. Consume the existing Expose debuff and trigger all effects of Expose on that unit
  3. Roll to see if you reapply Expose
  4. If you can reapply, and it’s not Resisted, reapply Expose

With Resistance characters, the issue was that the Expose inflicted by Finn, Resistance Trooper, and Resistance Pilot were preventing other Exposes from reapplying in the same action, which in turn meant that these characters were not receiving Turn Meter (Guerilla Tactics) or Cooldown Reduction (Balanced Tactics) as frequently as they could, which is potentially every turn, instead of every other turn.


Why Did You Just Do a Text Fix Instead of Fixing It?
In short, because we thought it would break the beans out of Raid damage.
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Where We Goofed
We run a pretty lean team (although we are getting bigger) and we maintain a pretty aggressive content release cadence. We decided to take a Sprint and just do a massive bugfix release and so we picked up as many character bugs as we could and got them fixed.

Coupled with the R2-D2 content we were preparing, we did not give as much rigor to the Expose solution as we, in retrospect, should have. When the Character Designer and our Game Balance Specialists came to me and pointed out the issue, and their concerns with fixing the Resistance version of Expose, we opted for a simpler fix, rather than potentially nerfing Finn’s Leader Ability.

Allow me to clarify a bit here: The main concern was that the new version of Expose would trigger Finn’s Leader Ability (Balanced Tactics) and effectively create an unstoppable loop of DPS goodness—or “mad deeps”, as the kids call it.
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What We Should Have Done
Frankly, we should have pulled the bug and put it in to a later Sprint as there was another, even more fundamental issue, in which the new version of Expose and the old version of Expose don’t exactly interact very nicely with each other. So we are now faced with the problem of having inconsistencies even when the text says there shouldn’t be. To quote our awesome Character Designer:
We thought that clarifying the text to say “the Expose from this ability can’t happen if they were already Exposed” would solve it, but that actual behavior is much more convoluted: “the Expose from this ability will prevent other Exposes from being applied in the same turn, maybe?”
So. After reading your feedback, we said, “Why not just test Resistance with the new version of Expose” and see what happens…

So Now What?
It looks like giving Resistance the new version of Expose is the solution we should have gone with from the start, and it’s looking really good right now.
  • Yes, Resistance is doing more damage because of the fix
  • No, it’s not game-breakingly OP because it’s not as consistent as, say, Biggs/Wedge
  • Yes, Resistance is going to do some more damage in a specific phase of a Raid (I’ll let you figure it out)
And there you have it. We will be fixing Expose to work exactly like Expose should work and reverting all of the ability text on Finn, Resistance Trooper, and Resistance Pilot.
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I want to stress that we do NOT want to nerf Finn’s Leader Ability, which is why we’re doing everything we can to make sure we have the right solution to this bug.

This fix is currently in testing and we expect to deliver this fix to you in an upcoming update.

Thank you so much for your patience and your feedback!

It’s been awesome!

//NRAJ
Lead Game Designer (Live), Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes
Post edited by Kozispoon on
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