Dear Cryptic,

I have carefully read through the complete patch notes for today, and found this statement:
"Very small reduction in damage for all critters."

I would like to point out that due to some unannounced changes, critters are doing significantly more damage than before. Not slightly less... I may not be a Rocket Scientist, but small reduction in damage for all critters to me means that I would expect to take slightly less damage per hit from monsters my current level? It most definitely does not translate into "Very significant increase in damage for all critters". This is most likely due to the defense of items being reduced. There is nothing in the patch notes along the lines of "Item Power levels have been reduced."

If you want to keep your players happy then get your act in a bag. Give us patch notes that are reflective of what the state of the game really is after each patch instead of leaving us having to second guess ourselves. We are your paying customers, and deserve nothing less than a quality product and service. So in the future please get your facts in order about what you're releasing to your customer base, so that we may make more informed decisions about what to do with our characters.

-Dolor

^ What this guy said, pretty much if u did wat u said u were gonna do and nerfed the dmg critters did before this patch a smidge, i would say it would be perfect. Not so little that u could cake walk over everything, just enough as to pose a bit of a challenge when it comes to big groups and master villains etc.

Hopefully this is just a temporary bug and it gets set like that, would just be good to see some acknowledgement from the devs as its a pretty big issues, especially for new ppl to the game.

This bug was on test. It was bugged by a number of us. Nothing was fixed prior to it going live.

Someone really screwed up.

Gear changes across the board are responsible for this. Defense and other stat values have gone down and also give less overall effect than they used to. Most existing equipment did not change, but as soon as you go to upgrade or outlevel your current equipment, you will feel the massive change.

Not doubting you, desseb, but do you have numbers to back this up? I only ask becuase my gear has a lot of numbers on it that i didnt' screenshot or log anywhere, so if there were changes, I doubt I'd be able to recall from memory what changed.

I'd hate to have to start screenshotting all my gear and character sheet numbers before each patch in anticpation of something like this getting slid under the table. With no way to export from the chat logs (i.e. take combat logs and compare them pre and post patch), it's tough for me to tell if I'm taking the same amount of damage as before and it's just my health is way lowered as a result of the gear nerf or if villians are doing more damage than before...

I'm sorry I do not have hard numbers myself, but there was a LOT of testing done in the test server forums if you're curious.

I checked the only item I was bothered about (level 40 nemesis purple) and it hasn't changed. Looking at my stat screen all the important ones are where they were before (ie the ones with + from gear) So not all items were affected.

I think low levels items were affected much more than lvl 40 items, based on the discussion in the test server forum.

Also, item quality now makes a much bigger difference.

yeah, ive been complaining about the devs making undocumented changes for at least a week. one of the devs, Ame i think it was, even responded saying that they don't make undocumented changes. the next day my patch client downloaded roughly 20 megs and patched something. there were no patch notes. the day after that, another slightly smaller patch was downloaded and applied. again, no patch notes. i asked Ame about it in a pm, but got no response. at this point, they're basically just doing whatever they want to do and obviously don't really care too much what players think.

Yeah, we need hard, factual numbers to whine about!