Power-up Rebalancing

[T-Hybrid]

Bottle Rockets (and Road Rage) have always been able to trigger Blast Notes.

Ah, I thought somebody said once they don't. But maybe it just seemed that way because the effect of a Blast Note looked the same as the splash from Bottle Rocket.

[Epsilon82]

I'm sure Jackpot/Flame/Super will remain on top though

I have no doubt that's true in general, but for me personally, I think I have spoiled myself so much with Blast Notes that I have a very hard time scoring well on the few times I've tried Flame notes. I think it's because I usually tend to have the most success on shorter, busier songs with Road Rage/Blast Notes/Super, and between Road Rage and Blast Notes, keeping the multipliers up is much easier. When I have neither of them, I find myself coming up short on multipliers way too frequently, which seems to outweigh the points I get from hitting Flame Notes under Jackpot.

Of course, I've been pretty much playing everything once and then moving on. Now that this 1,000+ song bug is on my radar, I'll probably start repeating songs and trying for optimal scoring on many of them.

[HeyRiles]

I think that Bottle Rocket and Flame Notes compatibility needs fixing. It appeared as though that when when I am using Flame Notes and use a Bottle Rocket, the Flame Notes jump to notes that I've already hit (or invisible notes basically) and since I can't hit them, the Flame Notes streak ends. Hopefully this can be corrected

[Meat-Popsicle]

I think that Bottle Rocket and Flame Notes compatibility needs fixing. It appeared as though that when when I am using Flame Notes and use a Bottle Rocket, the Flame Notes jump to notes that I've already hit (or invisible notes basically) and since I can't hit them, the Flame Notes streak ends. Hopefully this can be corrected

That's pretty much why I don't use Flame Notes. Is this an intentional feature? I'm guessing it is, but this behavior really does weaken that power-up significantly, and I really can't think of a gameplay motivation for this. But I doubt they can change this feature without a patch, even if they wanted to, which they might not.

It took me a long time to figure out that using Bandmate doesn't seem to get you credit for playing "Super [instrument]". I'm still not 100% sure of this but I have noticed that my Super score is always lower than I expect it to be whenever I let the power-up autoplay that instrument. You get the solo bonus when some / most / all is played automatically, so I had been guessing that it wouldn't work that way.

[Numskull]

It took me a long time to figure out that using Bandmate doesn't seem to get you credit for playing "Super [instrument]". I'm still not 100% sure of this but I have noticed that my Super score is always lower than I expect it to be whenever I let the power-up autoplay that instrument. You get the solo bonus when some / most / all is played automatically, so I had been guessing that it wouldn't work that way.

I believe that's because the extra points are reflected in your bandmate total, not your super instrument total.

[Meat-Popsicle]

I believe that's because the extra points are reflected in your bandmate total, not your super instrument total.

Aha! Now that would make sense. My Bandmate usually gets a lot of points. I guess that section total includes Flame Notes that the Bandmate hit as well?

Even better than the "20 coins to find out what your opponent used in Score War" feature would be the, "what was the breakdown by category for each high score". I would pay like 100 coins for that. When someone gets 500,000 to my 400,000, and used very similar power-ups, I'm left wondering, "what am I doing wrong"? Not staying in Blitz for long enough? Not playing the Super instrument enough? Or are they just playing far more raw notes (concentrating on the dense sections without worrying about missing a note occasionally)?

Or maybe they just never miss a note.

[Epsilon82]

Aha! Now that would make sense. My Bandmate usually gets a lot of points. I guess that section total includes Flame Notes that the Bandmate hit as well?

Even better than the "20 coins to find out what your opponent used in Score War" feature would be the, "what was the breakdown by category for each high score". I would pay like 100 coins for that. When someone gets 500,000 to my 400,000, and used very similar power-ups, I'm left wondering, "what am I doing wrong"? Not staying in Blitz for long enough? Not playing the Super instrument enough? Or are they just playing far more raw notes (concentrating on the dense sections without worrying about missing a note occasionally)?

Or maybe they just never miss a note.

I definitely agree with this. I'd even pay 5,000 coins for such a feature (it helps that I'm nearly a millionaire coins-wise at this point.) On the non-super-popular DLC songs, I regularly end up at or near the top of the leaderboard (on PS3), but on many occasions I see scores that just seem ridiculously absurd ahead of me, and I find myself extremely curious as to how it was accomplished. It's one thing if someone just has a ridiculously effective run with Pinball...there's not much I can do with that. But if it's using some of the less popular powerups that just so happen to be particularly effective on a given song, that would be very interesting to know.

I think there are a few reasons why they wouldn't want to do this; first, it would eliminate a lot of the incentive for experimentation with powerup combinations. Second, they'd probably rather foster discussion and debate on forums like this and elsewhere rather than allowing people to just buy a cheat sheet.

Third, and this may or may not be completely true, but I suspect such a feature might reveal that effective use of Jackpot/Flame Notes/Super X is almost universally the killer combo. I'm willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of top scores (aside from perhaps a few ludicrous Pinball runs) are people who have figured out ideal paths to activate Jackpot and hitting Flame Notes while it's active.

Since they've seemingly adopted a universal "no nerfing" policy with respect to existing powerups, they're probably trying to cook up ways to get more balance by boosting the others. They probably don't want to encourage everyone to fall into the habit of using one powerup combination all the time.

[TheInsaneSamurai]

Woot! I love that things are getting rebalanced, and only in the positive. With that said though, I did some testing and it seems that on many songs, shockwave and bottle rockets still don't add up. They're definitely better, and I imagine they may be the "best" powerup for a couple more songs than they used to be. It seems like they both need something else though, perhaps more than just point boosts, and I was brainstorming a bit on ways to make the underpowered guys a bit more useful. So heres some ideas:

Shockwave: Travels slightly farther for each energy note it passes over

Bottle Rockets: Explosion radius gets slightly larger with each use, or perhaps provides a point boost when hitting purple notes(this would at least give it some kinda compatibility with flame notes, right now those 2 are the peanut butter and hair for sure)

Runaway notes: Gain a little energy when you catch it, or perhaps make it worth 15k or 20k instead at first, but have that bonus fall down to 10 over time, so the faster you catch it the more points it's worth. Or perhaps go the other route and make the trail notes you hit provide a few extra points, so the optimal thing would be to keep it running from you rather than chase it down asap. Either way, I think this one needs the most help right now, and it also needs something to distinguish itself from being basically the weak version of flame notes IMO.


Well, that's all I have for now. I was thinking about pinball a bit, but I have no idea whether it needs help yet. While I did test that as well, it seems like it requires a LOT more testing than the other powerups to really judge it. Either way, its fun to try out all this stuff I barely even used before, so excellent job on that

[spoonmanx]

I applaud Harmonix for these tweaks. It shows they really care about both the game, and the players.

That being said, I'm really happy to see an improvement on the bottle rocket power up. For some reason my songs still pause/skip every once in a while making it impossible to do well with the Jackpot power-up and that seems to be what anyone is always using lately. This may give me a chance to GS the 2 last songs (Shout) and (Cult of Personality) . I've been able to gold star everything else using the bottle rocket/bomb/super *.

I hope this tweak is enough to help me.

[Numskull]

I applaud Harmonix for these tweaks. It shows they really care about both the game, and the players.

That being said, I'm really happy to see an improvement on the bottle rocket power up. For some reason my songs still pause/skip every once in a while making it impossible to do well with the Jackpot power-up and that seems to be what anyone is always using lately. This may give me a chance to GS the 2 last songs (Shout) and (Cult of Personality) . I've been able to gold star everything else using the bottle rocket/bomb/super *.

I hope this tweak is enough to help me.

Cult of Personality is "goldable" without Jackpot, trust me. Use Flame Notes and hound them relentlessly. And Super Guitar, of course.

As for Shout, the big Jackpot payoffs come in during the long sustains, so the lag skips will very rarely be an issue there.