During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.
When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)
The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.
Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.
This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.
What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?
On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.
However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.
Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments.
I think these could be interesting as a more permanent addition to the game even outside these past 2 galactic seasons. But in that case imo they need to add some more crazier player buffs/effects, but also some more crazier enemy effects for these. Also i'd like to see them add a conquest objective for like completing a veteran and/or master mode flashpoint with whole group having a stim active, or a similar objective as a future galactic seasons weekly objective. Maybe some Czerka Combat Enhancers achievements too? I feel like devs could do some more interesting things with these and they could be a fun little extra permanent addition to the game.
ReplyDeleteI take it you haven't had any issues with people not liking them then. ^^
DeleteWhen I think of "unpredictable combat effects", I immediately think of the old Wand of Wonder from D&D. (The D&D 5e version is here.) It's specifically designed for the "Let's have a little more chaos in our D&D campaign, shall we?" sort of mentality.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately these stims aren't anywhere near that interesting.
DeleteThe effects are too weak compared to the downside of higher health enemies. There is no advantage of using them if it just makes the flashpoint take longer.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why people didn't complain about it with uprisings. All I can guess is it's because flashpoints are more popular, so more people are exposed to the buffed enemies than in season 8 (the only people that did uprisings in season 8 were the ones that cared about season objectives).
Here's how I would buff the abilities:
Destruction Overload (every 5th enemy explodes) - The damage is fine, but the radius of the explosion should be increased to 30m. Also let the player choose when to use the 5 charges to trigger the ability, so they can hit a group of enemies with it instead of it being wasted on the last enemy in a group.
Czerka Combat Drones - Cap the number of drones but increase their damage to be equal to 30% of the character's basic ability damage (with all buffs applied). With 5 droids, it would do 150% basic ability damage per second, a good damage buff.
Unstable Radiation Field - The damage is fine but center the AoE effects under the mobs the character is fighting rather than under the character, where it often doesn't hit anything. Also increase the AoE effect radius to 15m.
Experimental Repulser Field (lift, throw)- Greatly reduce the knockback so it doesn't split up mobs and make AoE harder. Increase the damage to be similar to Destruction Overload (kills most basic mobs, silvers survive with half health).
Projectile Probes (floating turrets) - Increase the damage of each turret to 50% of the character's basic ability damage (with all buffs). It's like a free GCD of basic ability damage. Czerka Probes would be ideal against bosses, slower build-up but more top-end damage. Projectile Probes do instant full damage, so more useful against trash mobs, but still useful against bosses.