Feedback and discussion about Enhanced Senses changes/huntress gameplay

[plum]

There was some good discussion on Discord about the recent changes to Enhanced Senses and how that might affect the hunter playstyle. As we move forward, I thought it might be interesting to hear from other players actively engaging with these mechanics: what do you think about them? Have you found more or less success as a hunter? How do you generally approach finding other characters? Have the changes impacted your character builds? Do you have any suggestions for other changes that might make your experience more fun? (Or really anything along those lines.) The goal is to make sure that hunting (specifically locating and killing other player characters, "PKing") remains an enjoyable and interesting way to play Nexus Clash.

[pyroshroom]

I love it, shadow wrap and hiding outside is now even better since even imps/wisps/aethers can't find me in my perma-hidden state.

Good bye extended invis potions, hello shadow wrap.

[Weirdomen]

So, I just want to preface that I can only praise a dynamic game where developers constantly strive to improve game mechanics.
I'd like to comment not specifically about the PK aspect, but more generally. Enhanced Senses made a Revenant build quite unique among the other characters I play. Jackie would take bat form, scan the neighborhood, and Evil/enemy characters she'd kill, good/allies she'd heal, neutrals she'd perhaps emote about. Fellow revenants she'd leave be with a wink, even if they were evil (hi Hunter). Seeing hidden characters was something special that made her "her" to me.
If the difference between having and not having Enhanced Senses is now all in chances (certainty of finding someone vs search %), then a unique and fundamental (passive) character trait has become a somehow useful ability you'd use perhaps. But I certainly wouldn't spend an AP per tile searching.
Proposed change, if you don't want to completely revert: add a flavor text to rooms that contain hidden characters [Edit: only visible to chars with ES, I mean]. That way, the skill still mantains a cool passive component in nature, and the character can choose whether to act on it (search and find) or to ignore it.
Bonus coolness if the text distinguishes T2/T3 classes according to their alignment (e.g. "The smell of sulphur / The aroma of paradise lilies / The scent of lavender* lingers in the room"), while for T1 it's a mortal-related text ("You hear someone breathing").

* OK, I really couldn't find something decent that the Transcended would smell like. But the idea is still cool.

[Klapaucius]

Thanks for the big update. Overall I very much agree that some of the mechanics needed shaking up. I have major misgivings about some of the immediate gameplay ramifications, but I'm hoping its a step in the right direction. Thanks for making the thread plum! I'll throw my thoughts in here.

Hide
- Buffed to the point where it's a full troll raid stonewalling strat. Pot up, shadow wrap. When someone starts hitting you, unhide then shadow wrap again. Waste multiple AP of theirs for everyone one of yours.
- Hiding outside is gonna be basically unbeatable outside of absolute AP dumping to find someone. I can think of places where a hidden character will probably not get found until the end of the breath.
- I think hiding in your own SH is perverse, and this will encourage pervents in partaking in this activity

ES
Nerfed to the point where I'd be refunding it once I'm maxxed, probably, except maybe to mitigate the above hide strat. No longer a hard counter to shadow dancing strats? I'd say the new paladin skill probably better now.

Detect evil
The new, better version of ES? This is an extremely strong hunting skill compared to the other stuff on the table. 5 mp to save 3! AP compared to using ES to hunt. Amazing. You can churn through a good number of tiles with this, and if you find people to kill that means more targets. I actually think it's a pretty fair skill, I don't necessarily think it needs a nerf but other T2s should get something of similar strength.

Edit: I now understand that it won't check inside if you're outside. That brings it down to ES power levels, or maybe slightly worse.

Bonus AP while outside
I kinda hate this in the context of how easy it's gonna be to hide in outside locations. It's basically free AP. I want people in SH so I can kill them during raids, not dispersed around the nexiverse so they can grind slightly harder. I like the idea of hunting being part of the meta, but it should be strategic and end-game relevant rather than 'lol free AP'. I think something more like tying the infusion infusion mechanic would be a lot better overall.

New reveal and show hidden spells
- 3 mp reveal is cheap, but by and large people aren't hanging out invisible in places you're going to spam cast this. This is a nerf to stonewalling with invisibility potions
- 7 mp to show hiddens to the caster is just... old reveal? I'm not convinced that reveal needed an overall nerf. I'd consider, at the least, reduce MP cost of this skill to 5

[NearNihil]

I like the incentive to do stuff outside of the stronghold. It's not too good on its own - you forsake a 1000hp disincentive to get slapped, interacting with your faction mats in the stronghold and stronghold upgrades for 25% more AP regeneration - but a strong incentive. I know there are some "demilitarized" zones that are just a straight upgrade now though. But at least some DH can just plop in, AoE the lot, and be back in home for tea without having to bash.

I don't like the massive buff to hiding. Feels like it basically counteracts the people being outside, with fewer people being in a stronghold and the ones that are, are probably going to be both invisible and hiding. I'd argue to change Sixth Sense to be a 10-15 minute self buff during which you basically get old Enhanced Senses, and to revert Reveal to what it was beforehand.
With pets no longer doing the easy dirty work (which I don't mind) there has to be some AP-efficient way to find people to interact with - inside or outside a stronghold. The ES nerf also reinforces this train of thought, which is probably intended, but I'd argue this is going to make the world feel even emptier as people can just... go hide someplace and it'll take forever to be found. For the CP of Spellcasting somehow + Shadow Wrap you can just get Hide and Advanced Hide on any character (heck, even just Hide is probably good enough) you'll be extraordinarily hard to find. Even if you take neither of them, with increased AP regeneration you'll have 25% more opportunities to try and hide again, so if you spend 8 AP before bed to try and not die overnight it'll be worth it. Worse yet, ducking in and out of hiding is now viable since you can disappear from view and people have to spend yet more AP despite literally just shooting you in the face.

Removing barricades, capping Death Touch, spellgem changes, spell rebalancing, T2 Cosmic Affinity, Detect Evil, Prayer Beads, all good. But I feel the changes to hide and seek will just make the characters spread out more, and more difficult to find with the end result being a mostly desolate game world.

I may be wrong of course. Who knows what'll actually happen. It's a good effort. I just had to vent a bit.

EDIT: having given it some more thought. The incentive to "camp out" is nice, but what if it turns out the 1 AP per hour is seen as more valuable than the camaraderie of a strongold? Infusion, then, is way less important. Faction vs faction warfare harder and more complicated. Hmm...

[nopedope]

i am reseting all my petmaster no pet enhanced senses no fun just a squishy with a sidekick(s)

[erikune]

As someone who used to have a Lightspeaker with Shadow Wrap, I can say that hiding in some random off-the-path tile where no pets will attack you (Elysium, back then) is just outstanding. The Lightspeaker could stay alive for a month or more without any concerns. This looks like it will be a mirror of that, just happening in a larger scale. Do you realize how many random croplands, factories, apartment buildings, and so on are all over the place? It's rare to get found in one even with the older hiding mechanics; never mind now, when you could even hide outside and not even be found by random wandering pets.

This feels like it will be a big hit to wandering hunters, at least those with ES. Popping in/out of a house to find anybody hiding was a useful way of locating targets, and trust me, it was still hard to find anybody. Now it's 5AP to look into a single house tile (one to move, one to search outside, one to go inside, one to search inside, one to go outside) and I hardly think that it will even be worth it. A Quick Brown Fox will still be going Revenant, but I doubt that I'll be eagerly trying out other hunter classes with this change.

This does seem to vastly improve Demon Tracker/Angel Hunter, though. It's pretty much the only way to easily locate where hidden characters are. Although it would also give transcendents a buff by being much harder to find. Void Walker becomes nearly unlocatable as well, since there are few options - Demon Tracker, Bat Rev searching squares, casting Reveal + Sixth Sense on every tile - which would easily locate one. I mean, I guess you could cast Reveal on a tile and then wait for your invis-seeing pet to try attacking something.

Overall? My impression of B5 is that it's been much more favorable towards non-combat skills and classes, with combat still at the difficulty of around B2 or B3 classes. This seems to make it even harder to find targets, at least for the Myrmidon classes. Not that it's a bad thing, just different, at least it's been my experience so far. We'll see as I get more characters to T3 just how much of a difference this makes.

[SignedName]

As I talked about on the Discord, I think hunters having passive abilities would make hunting more appealing to do- arguably, that's what made ES so popular in the first place, since it gave you tons of info passively. Restricting this to Myrms made them OP compared to other classes for hunting, but granting it to every class would make hiding pointless, so I see why it needed to be reworked. I think passive skill checks, instead of guaranteed information, would make more sense as an adjustment for the skill, however.

Say, whenever a Myrm with ES takes an action, they roll a check to search for hidden characters. This takes some of the onus off of hunters to search every tile they're on, and makes it so they can hunt over larger ranges instead of spending 5 AP for each tile they move through, while not giving them total or guaranteed information like ES used to.

Along the same lines, I think Detect Evil could be buffed by making it a timed skill rather than single-use per click (also makes it complement Demon Tracker instead of Demon Tracker making it redundant). Nerfing it to only tell you that there is an evil presence instead of exactly how many there are around would probably be necessary, however (passive but imperfect information).

[sekki]

My understanding of the desire here is to get people out of the sh’s more and also to perhaps protect new/not very combat-y players from being plastered all the time. (But if this is wrong I’d love to know what the ideal end state here is)

Building on some of the earlier suggestions - what if ES provided an on-tile description of a hiding or invis character if they did fighting or active infusion recently.

So for example - if they recently killed someone the scent of blood/ozone lingers in the air here, or perhaps you hear blood dripping/heavy breathing/etc. or the temperature of this place is noticeably lower/the air crackles with residual energy - anyways you get the idea.

This makes it easier to find people actively engaging in hunting or raiding or infusion (kinda like EoD does, but in a much more localized/less powerful way)

Edit: Could even be not limited to ES but ES extends the time horizon. So for example maybe everyone sees it within 6 hours, but es gets it up to 24 hours (in addition to the current functionality of es).

[NearNihil]

One and a half week in, some observations on the whole patch:

- Getting killed when out and about seems a lot rarer than it used to be. Just sit in a random building with no lights, don't even need to hide, and odds are you'll live. Just don't do it in a resource building.

- Raids have slowed down significantly, at least in the factions I'm in and in my timezone. Some factions raided almost daily but I've been on maybe two since the patch. Part of it is, I suspect, the unknowns at the time of the space station: how it works, how to effectively communicate, what the goodies/boons/badge is/are, etc. The prospect of being able to fill out the 50CP from exploration badges sure made me prepare for the event, with AP and potions and stuff. But that means AP not spent fighting other characters in this PVP game we are playing.

- The goodies from the space station seem strong, but not quite sure how they'll impact the meta. There's limited ammo for one. Not entirely sure on if there's melee weapons worth mentioning though. Not like a handful of extra damage points is worth talking about on an IB or whatever anyway.