I think the update on the whole is amazing and the variety of strategies and builds with the new substats is certainly great. don't mean to complain too much when the devs have been working really really hard.
I still have issue with piercing making defense redundant, in theory at least. This is unrelated to the bug Liam noted above. if you read all the
guides posted by top players like moisterrific, yujipooji etc., defense is always a top-tier substat worth twice as much as hp. maxing defense essentially doubles your effective hp. almost all players who invest canopy heavily on moves to upgrade them, for the 20 rift defenders, would feel the paIn as they would have maxed defense substat on almost all of their rift defenders.
Because you can't have negative defense, getting defense only becomes useful if and only if the rift attacker does not get piercing and vice versa. so you have this guessing game going on like some have commented on earlier with the attacker guessing if he should bring out piercing moveset and defender wondering if he should equip defense. This seems balanced at first, but actually heavily favors the attacker. The attacker just has to invest 50 move substat points into piercing to double his damage. These are unlikely to feel wasted as the defender has +15 base defense from upgraded skilltree and rift defenders usually have some armor proc from catalysts or SA like resonant evil which piercing also works to nullify. Thus, when in doubt, the attacker is likely to go ahead and equip piercing.
Also, the rift attacker has the advantage in the guessing game as he can sneak peak your top fighters moveset from the profile and change his movesets accordingly. In contrast, the rift defender has to equip all the defensive moves before searching for a rift battle as rift takes a snapshot of the defensive fighters equipped moveset.
Thus, from a rift defender's perspective, the enemy can easily check if I have defense equipped and nullify it with piercing. This in practice makes defense somewhat useless and thus a slap to the face of all who invested heavily in equipping 20 defense heavy movesets on their rift nodes. The only way to counter this is to have your top 13 fighters not used at all in your rift defense to hide movesets from attacker, which is possible, but places a heavy onus on the rift defender to have 20 + 13 strong fighters. And as analyzed earlier, rift attackers are likely to go ahead and equip piercing anyway.
I am not sure if the developers introduced piercing as a response to players complaining that rift feels too hard to the boss node. Judging by nerfs to futile resist, perhaps there were complains about that Bigband boss
node with 3 bigbands max marquee, +200% hp movesets being impossible to clear (on a side note, I rarely see a bigband boss node for diamond 1 opponents and above). But if the bigband node feels impossible to clear, that is because the defender probably invested a lot of canopy into maxing marquee, maxing catalysts, and maxing movesets. As the attacker, you kinda only having to max moveset and level for one carry and have two supports. Attackers also have access to Xeno doom and Purrfect Dark permacurse. And, maxing movesets to lvl 15 increases damage of that move substantially ontop of stat bonuses while defenders get nothing else but stat bonuses. I think there are already many many options for rift attackers to clear even the hardest rift defense nodes. There are counters to every node if your collection is wide enough.
TLDR, piercing, with doubling of damage for just 50 substat points, just breaks the game for rift players who are interested in, and have invested heavily in rift defense nodes. I believe the original intention of rift was to allow players to design their own puzzle box and provide difficult challenges to test the collection size of attackers. I think piercing, with the doubling of damage, just makes it too easy for attackers to brute force and ignore the puzzle box aspect of rift. In a real puzzle box, a rift node should be near-unbreakable without the correct counter (key). Now, attackers can only be punished with the loss of hp or time points if they brute force with a not correct counter. Rift is still competitive in that aspect, but the puzzle box design is just gone.
Some suggestions on rebalancing piercing so it is not too powerful:
1) remove piercing, increase accuracy cap to 100% and allow negative resistance. For example, if a rift defender has -100% resistance, SA and defensive SA will not proc at all. at -80% resistance, SA only has 20% of original chance to proc. This will give attackers the option to nullify rift defensive SA while also increasing the chance of their own offensive SA proc.
2) piercing is a chance, up to 50%, to ignore defense (like ultraviolent SA). so that it is not a 100% damage increase but a 50% at most only.
3) piercing works as originally designed to nullify defense and armor directly, but activates only on critical hit. This allows defenders to counter piercing by getting crit resist which has been an underutilized substat in my opinion. Attackers can then counter-counter by getting precision buff. At least this gives defenders a way to counter piercing.
4) piercing is a chance on hit to apply armor break and armor break can stack till 5 stacks (to mirror armor so 3 stacks at -60% would nullify the 50% from defense). this gives defenders an indirect way to counter by using resistance and autoimmune.
5) remove the tag-in cd substat (which will be likely be abused by unblockable tagin peacock marquee in my opinion) and replace it with a untouchable substat. Untouchable caps at 50%, provides a chance to ignore damage from a hit (like untouchable peacock SA), directly counters piercing and piercing directly counters it. This will mirror the accuracy-resistance interaction. (From reading the comments of others that do not like stats being negated by another stat, this is the last option and the above options should be considered first).
In general, defense and armor should be considered balanced in the game. It has been around since the start and working fine. Defense should not be thought of as something that had no counter/broken/please nerf and needs a direct counter. Thus, if piercing is to be introduced as it currently is, a counter to piercing is necessary for balance in my opinion. This will mirror how accuracy and resistance was introduced.
