Hanzo Ninja Clan: Dew Bee's Newbies!

Gear trends and the new shuffle!

I'm not going to get into each piece of gear here. I'll just say that this is one of the absolute overall best shuffles to date. This is both pleasing and disconcerting for a few reasons. But we'll get into that in a bit. I will say that, if given the opportunity, I highly advise spinning this shuffle. There is a lot of gear here that has value. Very few pieces are meh. The gear in this shuffle are both strong and diverse, allowing to not only enhance pre existing suit designs, but also add new affects that couldn't fit easily into one's designs before.

For example, "Flexotensors" give 22 initiative. My current highest initiative using suit has 40 initiative across 6 gear slots. By using 2 "Flexotensors" instead of my current initiative gear, I not only improve my initiative by 4 points, I also free up 4 gear slots to either increase my initiative further, increase my numbers for other effects, or add new effects into my suit I wasn't previously able to fit in. That's huge!!!!

You'll find small amounts of move squirreled away into gear slots not commonly known for move. "Overloader", "Polyfilament arms", and "Thunderstruck" all have move bonuses in slots that fill rings and arms. Typically, move is found in legs and boots.

Players will find tons of gear sporting stat steal and redux, as well as life stealing effects. The popular and dreaded poison effect makes an appearance with "Tabernus Celeritas". While super natural poison has already made its appearance in the shuffle, magic poison has only shown its face on 2 pieces of gear, the "manticore venom ring", found in patrols, and the "sentient growth" found in raids. "Tabernus Celeritas" changes that with a strong entry into the poison category that is easy to build upon through basic and advanced game play.

A new effect has also entered the fray, and one I find most welcome. Disrupt aura can be found on the very stylish "Hatter's Pride".

There was a lot of concern when auras first came out that they were too powerful. We've since learned this not to be the case. Most auras have little in the way of producing large amounts of damage. However, this isn't the case with the two most popular forms, nightmare and magic auras. These 2 auras have are in plenty of supply. In order to combat this, nick came out with disrupt effects to counter them. That's fine when attacking an opposing toon, but what about when defending? I don't want to have to take away from my toon's overall effectiveness by being forced into packing in all these defensive measures to cover all my bases, while my attacker gets to streamline his build specifically to battle mine. The more I have to pack into my suit for all comers, the less effective that suit becomes to any one attacker, and thus to all attackers.

So now, with all the different damage types available, i have to use core resist, stun resist, prevent burn, disrupt this aura, disrupt that aura, disrupt the next big aura. It's really getting ridiculous for the defending player to try to keep up, while the attacking players is handed more and more openings. Luckily, this new effect gives us a glimmer of hope. It only has 5% disrupt aura, but that is effective against all auras and gives us a sneak peak into the future when we'll be able to replace all our aura disrupts with just 1.

This part is for the devs.

I'd like to double back to initiative. A lot of folks seem to think initiative might be game breaking. It really isn't. It takes up room on your suit to effect 1 round only of the entire fight. Now, that round could make a difference. But it also can be dodged and now all that space that went towards initiative just went up in smoke. Initiative really has its most affect when 2 "leech and drain" builds are fighting each other, and even then it can be dodged. So it isn't game breaking. The funny thing is that initiative was already built into the game and didn't need this effect. And now, to try to balance out the initial shock initiative brought on, it seems like the devs are flooding the market with it. So now each player has to use up more and more gear slots to compete for the highest initiative to increase their odds of going 1st........ When there was already initiative built into player builds to begin with.........

I guess I'm saying I wish the devs would reel back some on all the "great ideas" they try to roll out to make the game fresh and new. We don't need a constant rollout of new effects. When new effects do come out, they should be well thought out with thought put into how this could affect the game environment. Is it broken? Can it be broken? Does it help or hinder players more? Ask the players what they think before making a new rollout. They might see issues far in advance that you don't think about. Better to discover the potential problems before a rollout, rather than have to jump to create a fix, that just might create more issues. Case in point: too many things players now have to defend against causing imbalance between attackers and defenders. If you want to make the game exciting, we could use more content and event variety, and prizes that get us excited. I find myself more excited over what a belt will look like on my avatar far more than the gear I would win.