OFFICIAL: 4.0.2 Update Notes (Available now!)

Reading the discussion about move stats made me realize I never gave my input on it as a whole, I only mentioned the conversion of the old stats.

Personally, I think the new move stats over-complicates gameplay.

For example, You need Piercing to counter Defense, and you need Accuracy to counter Resistance.
A major problem with this is that you cannot inspect your opponent before fighting them, so how are you supposed to know to bring out your 50% accuracy fighter?

Besides that, the new stats themselves feel a bit redundant.
The defender works towards 50% resistance while the attacker works towards 50% accuracy. The result? It evens out to 0%, which makes it feel like you're wasting stats on just cancelling out your opponents stats because that's the new meta.
the same can be said about Piercing & Defense. Imo, Piercing would be better if it didn't counter defense, and only "pierced" through armor at the percentage of the stat (using multiplication, not addition/subtraction).. but then again, we have armor break to remove armor already.

As a summary, here's what I think about the new stats:

• Accuracy - Only exists to counter the new resistance stat.
• Resistance - Feels a bit too OP and easily accessible, which forces investment in accuracy.
• Piercing - Makes defense feel useless. Would be nicer if it only ignored armor.
• Tag Cooldown - Feels like a niche, the game was fine without it.
• Special Cooldown - This is nice for move-oriented loadouts. A nice counterpart to meter gain but for moves.

I apologize if it seems like i'm complaining too much. The new update is amazing in so many ways, it's like SGM has reached a whole new milestone. I just can't help feeling the way I do about the new move stats.

 

So far the update for me has been pretty ok! The new versus mode is nice! I got my three wins outta the way, I feel bad though because sometimes the hits seemed like it blocked but it ended up being a hit taken and I can just feel a players frustration a million miles away.

The new stats didnt affect me too much because I'm sorta casual and didnt put too much thought into resistances, although now I can with that general one! Thing is that this is that I can speculate that these new stats are gonna create a whole bunch of like, storaged moves where I'm gonna start storing moves with ATK,Piercing, and Accuracy and some for Tanky fights like Defense, Resistance and HP, and its just a whole lot of move grinding for the best combination of stats except a bit more easier.

The only thing that's sort of bothering me is just the load out time on the loading screen which might take me 15 seconds to a whole minute just to load.

I'm sure that after a while it'll all smooth out!

 

absolutely correct assessment. Here is my two cents on how the substats will impact high-level rifts:

• Resistance vs accuracy: resistance on rift defense won't counter xeno-using attackers. Xeno users will invest in a single accuracy moveset usable across multiple xenos, which is relatively easy versus getting resistance on movesets for all 3 to 9 defenders on top 3 nodes. Result: resistance is not going to counter xeno since attackers will cap out accuracy way faster than defenders can build resistance. but resistance will still be useful in general against other debuffs and will likely be a good choice nevertheless since defense is now somewhat redundant.
• Piercing vs Defense: This will just double the attackers (50% defense goes to 0) damage in all high-level rifts. Double the damage is insane. And there is literally nothing rift defenders can do about it. There is no counter to piercing. Piercing will always be a better stat investment for rift attack than meter gain or hp/defense. Realistically, when in doubt, near everyone will run with a 50% piercing moveset. Result: Rift defense just became near impossible as the attackers can easily double their damage. The chance to get a defense win by stall / time-out is greatly reduced if the opponent runs with full piercing. The meta might shift to reflect damage defenses to just subtract points off hp loss since stalling for time is now just a hopeless strat.
• Tag-in cooldown: This will get abused by rerun and a full unblockable tag-in marquee peacock team.
• Special cooldown: This will get abused to make Cerebella attack teams even more dominant in the rift attack meta than they already are. Just run a SINGLE att, piercing, special cd, defense moveset that you can swap between all your diamond Bella fighters and you should sweep most rifts. Bella is just too strong in rifts now due to the reduce meter marquee coupled with Merry gorilla spam.

In general: Rift offense got boosted to high heavens. Rift defense is now extremely difficult. Perhaps the buffed special exception may help, but it is unlikely the AI knows to use specials especially when the attacker is just looping Merry Gorilla grabs upon getting up.

 

No Balance Changes in this update?

 

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.

 

Some comments regarding the Special Move tuning:

Spoiler

Big Band Burst: Armor Break -> Cripple, makes Band tankier, at the cost of damage amp and armor removal. Questionable, but okay overall.
Cerebella Diamond Drop: Regen -> Heavy Regen, I feel this is over-tuned partly because Cere is already powerful enough, and doesn't need more sustainability, that shouldn't be her role in my opinion. Plus Diamond Drop is a great unblockable finisher, regen was icing, and now it's even more powerful.
Double Bandwagon Rushdown: Hex 12s max -> 10s max, isn't this a nerf? I thought these were to make the moves punchier?
Double Flesh Step: absolutely nothing, why no love? surely 1 stack of a 1/2 second Evade would be somewhat like Flesh Step was in consoles
Eliza Sekhmet Turn: I'd actually like to see this move me multi-hit automatically and reduced to 25% a la the Sekhmet Fury change.
Painwheel Burst and Fracture Reaper: Gains access to Death Mark, makes crit builds more viable, but unsure how I feel about losing cripple entirely, even if the rates were low. Also, I'd love to see Fly Mode expanded in certain moves being made Air Okay.
Parasoul Egret Call: Enrage -> Precsion stacks, arguably a straight downgrade, nearly every Parasoul builds crit rate (especially with Marquee), and 3 boosted attacks is lower damage potential than 15s of Parasoul's only Enrage through moves. This change does prevent Risk Ginger from being overpowered however.
Parasoul Inferno Brigade: Heavy Bleed -> Bonus Damage I'm going to miss the Heavy Bleed
Peacock Lonesome Lenny: Functional Hooray! Do on Hit effects on Lenny still get applied to you? I'm looking at you Taser.
[/Spolier]

 

Hey, think there was a typo on x-bot's second signature ability. The " for " seems extra. Maybe it is, " also gain barrier and heal 3% health."

I'm ambivalent about it.

 

it's correct wording.
"heal for 3% health" in this sentence implies X-Bot is damaged and recovers 3% health, but if you remove "for" from the sentence, it makes it sound like her health is the subject getting healed, which sounds a bit off. The health recovers. X-bot is healed.

 

Hey, you're right. " heal 3% health " is wrong in this context.
However, " heal for 3% health " still seems off. The reasons being,
1. preposition is never followed by a verb. And if i'm not wrong, heal is the verb and for is the preposition.
2. For can be used to specify duration/time. In this regard, if it were, " heal for 3 seconds " rather than "heal for 3 percent," it would've been correct.

Of on the other hand, is used with measurements and expressions of time, age, etc. E.g. 2 kilos of potatoes. Maybe it is, " also gain barrier and heal 3% of health."

And combined, " gain precision, inflict death mark, gain barrier and heal 3% of health after 3 second(s) while far away from opponent."

Seems wrong? Cause i still am ambivalent.

Not trying to come off as a grammar-nazi .

 

Ok i have a question.
What will happen with the players that don't update the game to 4.0.1? They are still benefiting from the bugs.
There will be a forced update or something?

 

You can't enter the game without updating to 4.0.

 

I mean the bug fix they just released

 

Oh, thanks

Oh thanks for the explanation.

 

Visual bug ?

 

I apologize if it will be something that is not clear as I use a translator.
My question is about stat accuracy. I read the examples that were in this post, but I still can not understand the coverage area of this stat.
For example, take the Salt Flip (yes, this is the name of the diamond Parasoul if translated from Russian) how exactly does SA strengthen it? Take the same 50% accuracy.
Signature Ability 1
Opponents lose 1 BUFF and 1/2/3% HEALTH every 2 seconds while near a TEAR
Signature Ability 2
When DETONATING at least 3 TEARS at once, REMOVE all DEBUFFS and gain 3/4/5 stacks of PRECISION. The detonated TEARS also deal 100% BONUS DAMAGE
Which of these digital metrics does accuracy enhance? There are many such examples, and I'm just trying to figure out which characters to take this stat for.
If possible, specify how this stat affects percentages, time of action or response, increase in stacks of any effect.

 

Hello! I have a question.
What is the damage calculation formula including DEFENSE and PIERCING?

After applying the 4.0.1 update, a fighter with 50% PIERCING has attacked another fighter with 50% DEFENSE.
Then, the damage was lower than when attacking a fighter with 0% DEFENCE.
ELEMENT and CRIT had no effect.

In this case, is another calculation applied instead of [50% (DEFENCE) - 50% (PIERCING) = 0% (NO DEFENCE)]?
Or did the calculation change when the 4.0.1 update was completed?

I'm sorry for my poor English. m(_)m

 

As far as I undestood, Accuracy only affects those SAs that operate with chances and probabilities. If you have some effect applied with 20% chance, Accuracy can bring it up to 30%. In your example, Summer Salt has her Salt Rifle SA effects applied every time the conditions are present (opponent near the tear, tear detonation) with 100% chance, so Accuracy would do nothing - there is just no chance to improve, it's already at its maximum of 100%.