1.05 Malice

Bump for you thoughts?

I don't think it works at all now. They nerfed it with the number of targets it could affect and then they nerfed it again with how the damage is distributed. If the damage does ever get applied, it unfortunately only gets applied after malice ends, so it gives your opponent even longer to cause damage against you even if the ship has already racked up enough damage via malice to be destroyed. Also, you can't select what malice gets applied to, which basically ruins its effectiveness. This balance change seems to have made things worse.

I figured out that it's the number of targets that upgrades with the level ups, its just not noticeable because malice is lame now, and its kinda hard to get that many people grouped together and actually notice the difference. Ah well, the shield ability is pretty awesome too and the advent have the most useful colonizer anyway.

It is terribly AWFUL. Pre-patch, it was without a doubt one of the best abilities. Almost defining really. Only thing that could work better if properly applied was cleansing brilliance. I would never use it in a serious game now.

This is how we balance stuff here. Nerf everything good, so it is as worthless as all the bad things. Then we can fight each other with cobalts. Never mind stuff like Marza lvl 6 ability NEVER worked properly, and it is very good if it worked. But keep the eye on the prize, don't fix what's broken, break more stuff!

next will be vengeance

Vengeance is pretty bad as is, I don't see why they would touch it!

A few points:

- Changes to malice were necessary to improve its impact on runtime performance in large battles; the large volume of weapons fire made it too computationally expensive to spread damage each time any of the dozens of affected targets received damage. The ability is functioning as intended in its redesign, although a bug that reduces its damage potential caused by multiple Progenitors staggering their use of malice has been identified. This will be fixed in the 1.1 patch.

- Marza's missile barrage ability will also be fixed in 1.1

- Contrary to the expectations expressed in prior posts in this thread, vengeance and many other abilities have been buffed in 1.1

Now that Advent have an awesome LRM it is just fair that they get their uber special cap ship ability taken away.

That's great, I just love that ability to counter frigate spam :LOL:

GREAT that Marza ability is finally fixed! What's next? Fix all the colonizing abilities perhaps? Sky is the limit! I apologize, I'm cynical by nature.

I think you completely missed the boat on this one. I don't recall reading a single complaint about Malice affecting performance. Nearly everyone has complained about the Guardian shield causing performance problems. People complained about Malice being over-powered, and thus you gave it one of the biggest nerfs of any unit in this game. You did the same thing with the LRM's and the siege frigates weeks ago. People complain, you change it drastically, then bring it back into line a little bit. Now that you've changed Malice people are complaining about Returning Armada again (rightly so). While patches and support are nice, you guys need to learn not to make drastic changes. Going from unlimited affected units down to 8, 16, or 24 on top of changing the way damage is calculated is a HUGE change and not a minor tweak especially when you're not taking into consideration the scale of some of the longer single-player games.

I used to enjoy things here, but these constant major balance changes based on what's popular to complain about are tiresome. Play your own game and figure it out. I've really become irritated with the way you guys seem to be eliminating what different specialty that makes each race unique and focusing changes on smaller online matches. Again, it's not that I don't appreciate support and patches, it's that major changes or multiple compounding changes to the same item keep happening instead of tiny tweaks that take into account the variety of scales of battle. Not everyone plays this game online on maps consisting of a single star and a handfull of planets. Some of us play games with multiple stars and dozens of planets.

Yes ZJBDragon, it is very hard to balance something for the small and big environment. They must walk a thin line. A lot of people playing the short game complain a lot of the techs are useless, which they aren't since on a big map they make sense. Thou I wouldn't mind reworking them to be more beneficial on smaller maps. You can make things work better for both short and long games

As far as drastic changes, I agree they go too far too often. It should be a small down tick and big up tick. Instead it's always huge nerfs and tiny buffs. Rendering something useless all of a sudden does no one any good, regardless of the reasons behind it.

However, I will say that MP brings out more things to light than SP, as long as the people reporting are well informed about all aspects of the game. So that they can figure out where the thing they are criticizing fits in the puzzle.