Hmmm … I don’t recall downloading a patch tonight. Oh, wait — it’s on Test. Anyway …
COMBINED NOTES
Powers
• Burn: Normalized all versions of ‘Burn’ to now have a recharge time of 25 seconds. This is a reduction for Tankers, and an increase for Brutes and Blasters.
Made changes to the following graphics effects for performance improvements:
• Psychic Shockwave
• Drain Psyche
• Oppressive Gloom
• Death Shroud
• Whirling Hands
• Foot Stomp
• Stalagmite
• Circle of Thorn Crystals
• Devouring Earth Eminators
• Poison Gas Arrow.
• Brute and Scrapper versions of Invincibility taunt effect should now work properly.
• Animate Stone’s attack powers now use knock down, not knock back. Really. We mean it this time!
• Power Thrust: Corrected an issue with PvP Knockback suppression.
• Assault Rifle Sniper Rifle animation: Fixed the ‘hitch’ in the that happened if used in conjunction with Targeting Drone.
• Assault Rifle will no longer root the player while being drawn.
• Assault Rifle/Sniper Rifle power animation will no longer interrupt itself, which will prevent the power from appearing to be interrupted when it’s really not. This was specifically reported as happening with Targeting Drone active.
• Will Domination and Dominate rooting time while flying is now the same as standing.
• Drain Psyche’s rooting time has been reduced and changed to work more consistently.
• Added priority values to help correct Mastermind Thug pets from wearing the incorrect costumes and Kheldian from slipping back into “human” mode.
UI
• Base Salvage is now all categorized under “Base”. This is done to clean up the lists for when Invention Salvage is added.
Game
• The storm that had blown over Founders Falls and Croatoa has moved on and the more appropriate sky should now be seen there.
• Improved Game Stability, including correcting an issue with capes that could lead to a client crash.
Hazoo! I hope that this is a large improvement.
I haven’t really run into a lot of stability problems of late (at least none I could blame on CoX).
The stability for me has been awful on some toons, but not all — Markov Chain is the worst — I get kicked from the game and have to restart and reverify the CoX files before logging back in, pretty much every time I move across town from one mission to the next — I’m usually able to avoid it if the missions are close to each other, but sometimes that doesn’t help, and it seems to happen a lot more when I use Inertial Reduction, which (ironically) would help me get to the mission faster. It’s robbed me of any desire to log that particular toon in.
The reduction to Burn is, let me mention, HUGE. Back in its heyday (when Fire Tanks were referred to as Fire Scrappers, due to their insane DPS with Burn going), the Burn cooldown was 15 seconds, and it RAN for 10 seconds, so a couple of recharges in it was enough to give you a permanent PBAoE that even overlapped for a second, sometimes. I5 (I think) moved it to a glacial 45 second cooldown, which meant that with three-slotted Hasten (Burn being the only reason I *got* that power) and Burn itself three-slotted for recharge reduction, you could squeeze it down to about a 15 second cooldown, essentially like the old unslotted version. Between that and the increased ‘scamble away’ effect, it made the power… well, not pointless, but a lot less useful.
This change… I’m very happy about.
I’m also not surprised I didn’t know that Burn cycled faster on Brutes: since Icy powers don’t exist in CoV (for all that the Hellions have TONS of Ice Brutes in CoH), there’s no convenient Ice Patch power to mate with Fire Brutes to keep the enemies on the Burn Patch — between that and the fact that it doesn’t feed into Fury (nor, I would guess, get buffed by it, as it’s basically a stationary pet) — you never see it over there.
In short, this is going to make Hype verah happy. Might have to dust him off when this comes out.