CoX Issue 12 starts work on improving PvP
City of Heroes Issue 12: Midnight Hour, now in Open Beta, brings with it a vast assortment of Quality of Life fixes and tweaks.
One small but highly significant fix slipped through the net and missed appearing in the first round of patch notes: the buildup of Brute Fury in PvP and against Archvillain and Giant Monster class enemies has finally been persuaded to work the way it should have. Brutes gain an additional 5 points of Fury when attacking these targets, which more than doubles their Fury building rate. The short version: a Brute can now kill you far faster than you'd expect, and can contribute more to drawn-out fights against the game's toughest enemies.
The Brute community has anticipated this change for a long time now. Without the fix, their viability in PvP was not much to write home about. Now, Castle the Powers Guy has made a lot of Brutes very happy.
Kaiserin tells the story best, with a one-shot painted comic strip.
Other features that swing the balance back towards the Villains in PvP are the addition of a Perception buff to O2 boost, adding a valuable low-level counter to stealthy heroes, and the hero Psi Blaster being a less fearsome opponent than many Villains had feared.
Knockback in PvP has been radically revised, with Acrobatics no longer giving near-total immunity. Caging powers now follow suppression rules, meaning you can't keep some opponents locked out of the fight. Most impressively, Power Boost has been nerfed, its effectiveness cut by a third; and it now won't stack, meaning it will no longer be possible to achive godlike debuffs and holds. This directly tackles one of the Villains' main complaints about Hero Epic power pools, namely the easy access to Power Boost which they did not have.
It looks like this the start of a continuing trend. The Arena has already seen some fixes, and a long list of known issues suggests that more are on the way. Pohsyb, the ingenious developer responsible for implementing the huge array of user interface improvements in Issue 12, has told us the Devs 'will be revisiting all that is bases and base-raiding'. It's common knowledge that the base raid system intended to be launched with CoV has never gotten off the ground properly. Now, at last, there is hope for this potential to be realized.
[Thanks, Kaiserin!]
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