Assault Battles Idea: Persistent Debuffs Could Make Stages 1-7 Relevant Again
April 16, 2019 5:07AM
edited April 2019
So, while I was typing up my suggestion question for the Q&A, I talked about how frustrating it is to play the first 7 encounters of AB to get to the 8th encounter.
But why is that? It's because the first 7 encounters are completely irrelevant in most cases. Except with the NightSister/Phoenix AB and the nasty Darth Sidius in Stage 4, if you can beat the 8th stage, the first 7 don't matter.
Now, my preferred solution for this is to ditch the first 7 battles for Mythic Assault Battles. The Mythic battle can be as hard as you want, but you don't need to wait through 10-20 minutes of irrelevant tedium to get to the final battle.
But, entirely by accident, thinking about the issue also gave me an idea for how to make the first 7 battles more interesting and more relevant if EA decides to keep them.
Imagine an 8th battle that was slightly easier, but enemies along the way are able to inflict locked debuffs that persist from one encounter to the next, all the way to the end of the AB, even after death and revival. There's precedent for this kind of thing with Armor Shred, which continues to be locked on a toon through death and resurrection.
So, if you have a debuff that reduces speed by a flat 5 points and another that reduced crit damage or crit chance by 5%, then picking those debuffs up along the way might actually make the final battle harder than it is now, even though the opponents in that last battle are made slightly less powerful.
In fact, there's no reason that the final opponents can't be made significantly less powerful, but the buffs hard to avoid picking up in large numbers unless all the first 7 encounters are crushed hard and crushed fast. It should be absolutely impossible to pick up NONE of these persistent debuffs, but if you can overwhelm stages 1-7 you might only have 1-2 per toon, while others who can only barely beat the first 7 stages might have 5-10 stacks per toon.
Indeed, this way you could easily fail in stage 5, 6, or 7, while right now it's essentially impossible to fail there: if you get through the stage 4 test, you are guaranteed to at least survive until the opening volley of stage 8. It would be even more interesting if the effect of the persistent debuffs depended on the number of stacks in a non-linear way. Imagine a debuff that removes 1% of speed for the first stack, but the 2nd stack removes 2% and the third removes 3%, and so on. By the time you reach 4 stacks, you've lost 10% of your speed total instead of 4%. If you get only 2 stacks more, you've lost 21% of your speed. One more stack? You're down 28% of your speed total. That first one might not seem like it matters much, but by the time you get that 7th stack you're cursing every single time you could have played just a little better on a single stage to avoid just one of those stacks.
I'd still prefer to just eliminate stages 1-7 and face a single hard battle. However, if you're going to have stages 1-7, let's have them actually matter. Persistent debuffs is a great way to make that happen.
But why is that? It's because the first 7 encounters are completely irrelevant in most cases. Except with the NightSister/Phoenix AB and the nasty Darth Sidius in Stage 4, if you can beat the 8th stage, the first 7 don't matter.
Now, my preferred solution for this is to ditch the first 7 battles for Mythic Assault Battles. The Mythic battle can be as hard as you want, but you don't need to wait through 10-20 minutes of irrelevant tedium to get to the final battle.
But, entirely by accident, thinking about the issue also gave me an idea for how to make the first 7 battles more interesting and more relevant if EA decides to keep them.
Imagine an 8th battle that was slightly easier, but enemies along the way are able to inflict locked debuffs that persist from one encounter to the next, all the way to the end of the AB, even after death and revival. There's precedent for this kind of thing with Armor Shred, which continues to be locked on a toon through death and resurrection.
So, if you have a debuff that reduces speed by a flat 5 points and another that reduced crit damage or crit chance by 5%, then picking those debuffs up along the way might actually make the final battle harder than it is now, even though the opponents in that last battle are made slightly less powerful.
In fact, there's no reason that the final opponents can't be made significantly less powerful, but the buffs hard to avoid picking up in large numbers unless all the first 7 encounters are crushed hard and crushed fast. It should be absolutely impossible to pick up NONE of these persistent debuffs, but if you can overwhelm stages 1-7 you might only have 1-2 per toon, while others who can only barely beat the first 7 stages might have 5-10 stacks per toon.
Indeed, this way you could easily fail in stage 5, 6, or 7, while right now it's essentially impossible to fail there: if you get through the stage 4 test, you are guaranteed to at least survive until the opening volley of stage 8. It would be even more interesting if the effect of the persistent debuffs depended on the number of stacks in a non-linear way. Imagine a debuff that removes 1% of speed for the first stack, but the 2nd stack removes 2% and the third removes 3%, and so on. By the time you reach 4 stacks, you've lost 10% of your speed total instead of 4%. If you get only 2 stacks more, you've lost 21% of your speed. One more stack? You're down 28% of your speed total. That first one might not seem like it matters much, but by the time you get that 7th stack you're cursing every single time you could have played just a little better on a single stage to avoid just one of those stacks.
I'd still prefer to just eliminate stages 1-7 and face a single hard battle. However, if you're going to have stages 1-7, let's have them actually matter. Persistent debuffs is a great way to make that happen.
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Replies
This is exactly how I feel and why I prefer them to simply reduce Mythic to a single encounter. This idea is presented as an alternate if EA isn't willing to go as far as cut those first 7 stages. I actually think it would be easier for end-game players to auto the Mythic tier if part of the difficulty was created by not performing well in the first 7 stages, since then if you have toons that will overwhelm the first 7 stages on auto, you can also auto stage 8.
Right now there are plenty of ABs that are easy to auto stages 1-7 but you have to constantly monitor them so that when it hits stage 8 you're ready to take over. What a waste of time and attention.
But when I was first struggling to beat mythic tiers, I would have loved knowing that not just beating the first 7 tiers, but how well I beat them actually mattered. Otherwise what are those tiers even for?