Good morning folks. We have a few targeted changes planned for titans in the October release and we’d like to hear your feedback on them. We had some very productive discussions with the CSM about both of these changes at the recent summit and we’re now ready to open the dialogue to the rest of the community.
These two proposed changes address separate issues but since they’re both fairly limited in scope and they both impact titans we’ll put their discussion in the same thread.
Removal of the AoE damage whenever a titan dies
We are looking at this change primarily as a way of improving server performance slightly for large fleet fights.
I don’t want to oversell the expected results here: titan AoE death damage isn’t a huge contributor to server load but it does have some impact (roughly similar to a small bombing run) and since the death AoE feature does not serve a very important gameplay role we believe that in balance it’s a worthwhile idea to cut the feature.
Extension of tether prevention after titans fire their doomsdays
An issue was discovered in recent months that causes titans to re-tether quickly after firing doomsdays if their target dies immediately. This was allowing some titans to use their doomsday devices without appropriate levels of risk.
To solve this issue and generally enforce a good amount of risk on the use of doomsdays we are currently planning on extending the existing debuffs that prevent titans from jumping, docking, or cloaking for 5 minutes after firing their doomsday devices to also prevent tethering during this time.
To be clear: this second change is being made purely for balance reasons, not for server performance reasons.
Both of these changes will be testable on Singularity this week. Thanks for taking the time to join this discussion thread, and we look forward to hearing what you think about these proposals.
It all sounds good. Still, the lag issue lays further upstream, where the issue is like a patient hemorrhaging in the ER and, instead of undergoing intravenous access and fluid resuscitation (active measures to address the real issue), the doctors (CCP) are concerned about mopping blood up off the floor (titan changes that are vaguely, if at all, related). To make matters worse, the costly procedure is paid for by other folks via insurance - the subscribers.
These are good changes, in my opinion. Without feeling the need to explain why, as you have obviously arrived at the same conclusions- I will in short say, good stuff.
I don’t like the 5 minute idea. Sure it is great for titan fights on citadels but fucks over any titan pilot with balls big enough to risk a drive by. That being sed the focus DD is not enough to kill most capitals these days anyway and ccp did say a while ago you would also buff it…
Im very happy to see that these changes are coming relatively quickly (pretty much at the perfect time). No big war where one side can claim bias or other crap.
HAW titans and faxes are still things to look at but i guess you guys take a little more time for that but like i said im glad you atleast fix the obvious simple things asap.
Solid Changes, nice to see that the easy problems are getting fixed fast. A lot more changes are needed like HAW and FAX, overall position of dreads, hopefully the capital changes is on the way.
I don’t know if I agree that the time should be 5 minutes though. A standard aggression timer is 1 minute. Depending on your skills, a DD recycles at a decent pace. I think I would be more in line with the 1 minute aggression timer -or- somewhere in between up to the full DD recycle with skills included (But, I imagine that would be a coding headache).
I say this being one of the titan pilots shooting INTO people tethering up over the last few titan fights. I think 5 minutes is pretty extreme. I think tether play on a keepstar is pretty broken, but it was a valid tactic with the mechanics.
As it stands, I cannot think of anything that has a 5 minute aggression timer to dock.
