Bill Roper (Chrononaut) speaks on Champions Online on opening day (and beyond):
In reaction to concerns that things are “too easy” …
We reduced the effectiveness of Slotted Passive Defense powers, Active Defense powers, and Defense from upgrades. The total bonus of all combined defenses was reduced from a 75% net defense bonus to a 66% net bonus. The biggest change was made within the Passive Defense powers which our players noted were far too effective and trivialized the threat form Henchmen level enemies.
Well … I have still been dying. Though only when seriously ganged up on. Though that’s not difficult to happen when traveling through a Crisis zone.
We increased “non-shtick” enemy damage to compensate for AI / animation delays. This particularly affects Henchmen who did not attack at the expected rate on which other areas of combat effectiveness are balanced. The change represents a 25% increase in this type of damage.
We also increased “shtick-based” damage for Super Villain class enemies and above. They were incorrectly using the Master Villain class damage tables, making our most difficult enemies much weaker than intended.
Lower defense against more damage. Well, at least we can stock up on healing potions …
Finally, we have removed the consumable items that were giving a straight 33% increase to Health and Energy from vendors. These were artifacts of the beta test that were accidentally not removed from the live version of the game.
Yikes! Well, no, not a huge problem, I don’t think. We’ll see (esp. in context of soloing).
We’ve fixing a data bug where players incorrectly received 75% of an enemy’s experience amount no matter the disparity in level. More than a difference of 4 levels now gains the player no experience.
Oh, and less XP. 🙂
The top speed of travel power speeds has been reduced by 15% as part of how we’re addressing reported frame-rate issues because heroes are simply traveling faster than the server can update their position.
That’s unfortunate.
We found and fixed an error in the overall drop-rate tables that drastically reduced the number of upgrades coming from defeated enemies. This change increases the number of upgrades that drop from enemies in the approximately four-fold.
Woot! More loot!
Retcon cost has been lowered across the board, making alterations in your character’s powers and advantages much simpler to accomplish.
I haven’t done a lot of retconning, obviously, but I like that it’s cheaper. Having expensive or difficult retcons/respecs has always struck me as punishing the player for lack of in-game knowledge.
There’s other stuff mentioned, too, but I’ve included the items I was most interested in.