devtrackers.gg
It was stated from "Bunheadwhat" in the unofficial community Dauntless discord that Pacifier and the Math of how cells work with each other will be changed to more intended states of design. Those changes will be added to the patch notes later tonight. This currently solves 2/3 of the current issues we have with the meta. With that said, the cookie cutter setup of today is officially no more.
Now, this does leave one thing that I was hoping to have changed personally, and that is how the elemental weapon calculation works currently. Right now elemental weapons currently have the ele power portion of the weapon added into the power calculation of the weapons, instead of in addition to it. This means that on heroic behemoths, only 390 power is actually dealing HP damage to the behemoths, rather than the full 430 power. This is why neutral weapons are currently stronger than elemental weapons, because neutral weapons deal their full 430 power on heroic behemoths, thus gaining an increase HP damage over elemental weapons.
To those who don't know about how the ele portion of elemental weapons works, right now that bonus only helps you deal increased part damage, not HP damage.
With all this said, while the cell meta will change some on what is considered "cookie cutter", this probably means neutral weapons will remain the king of damage dealing. The only exception is if the elemental procs for the faster hitting weapons or builds become so significant that it's worth dropping 20% damage to utilize the ele effects. It's to be determined as of right now obviously since we can't play with the changes yet, but I hope that it's enough to make them worth using for at least CB's and maybe the pike.
My hope is that the new ele changes can spawn multiple variations of a damage build setup that allows us to differentiate how we stack our damage depending on what ele we utilizie. My fear is neutral weapons will remain king even with CB's and the only thing that really changes is using different cells to stack.
I do recognize that neutral weapons in their current state would be useless to use if elemental weapons dealt the same HP damage as neutral weapons do, but I simply disagree that this is the best way to handle the current weapon design system. I don't really know what to suggest to help make neutral weapons worth using compared to ele weapons if such a change were to occur, but I do feel like the attention should be brought towards improving the weapon design system as a whole in the future.
EDIT: It was confirmed by /u/phx_subninja that the power calculations were actually changed to mirror that of neutral weapons. So basically the feedback above is mostly irrelevant.
External link →