Changes to the spheres.

Firstly, both the Damage Sphere and Invulnerability Sphere were too good for the Extreme AM. Not only were they only paying half price for running them, but the spheres were also 1100 units in radius compared to 900 for normals AMs - which gives approx +50% on cross-sectional area. So Extreme AMs were getting 3x the benefit of normal AMs. The cost is now 3/4 that of a normal AM, so the Extreme AMs get approx double the benefit of AMs.

Then the Damage Sphere has changed. It no longer pays xp according to the number of people in the sphere. Instead, if a kill is made by someone who has double damage from the sphere, then the sphere owner gets a bonus 50% of the kill xp.

So for example if I start a sphere, and a player X is in the sphere, he will get the DD effect. If X kills a skaarj, which would give him 6 xp, X gets his 6 xp but I also get 3 xp. All spree bonuses just go to X.

The idea is the DD helps you kill twice as much, so the sphere creator gets a bonus of half the kill xp. So the xp reward is directly linked to the extra benefit it provides.

I wanted to do a similar thing for the invulnerability sphere - link it to the damage it prevents. But this is going to be a lot trickier since I can't get hold of the data. Since you are invulnerable, it doesn't bother processing the damage, unless it is friendly fire for some reason. It will take slightly longer to change this one. 

Doing the same for the invunrebility sphere may be exploitable. I could for instance continually run into titan rocks, which would deal massive damage to me and probably give me too much xp. 

I do gotta ask about the damage sphere xp though. Isnt XP on a damage basis and not a kill basis anyway. (10xp mob, every 10% of damage gives 1xp). So a person killing a half health Skaarj would only get 3 or 4 xp total since part of the xp was already given out to someone else that did damage to it.

Or it it already taken in account for this and basically every 2 xp that someone earns, the AM thats running the sphere gets 1 xp. 

If you wanted to go ahead with changing it, it would prob be easier to just set it at a per hit basis (Like 4 XP anytime anyone in the sphere is damaged from a giant rock to a pupae hit) but how often are players hit would be the balancing factor. 

Rod damage reduced from 6 per adrenaline to 4 per adrenaline 

               |Rod |Curr|Upd.|
 Monster--|Life|Dmg.|Cost|Cost|
 ---------|----|----|----|----|
 Titan----|1200| 100|  15|  25|
 Queen----| 800|  80|  12|  20|
 Warlord--| 500|  50| 7.5|12.5|
 G. Gasbag| 600|  60|   9|  15| 
 L. Skaarj| 250|  25|3.75|6.25|
 Skaarj---| 150|  15|2.25|3.75|

I gotta a question about one of the upcoming changes.

Rod damage reduced from 6 per adrenaline to 4 per adrenaline 

Thats a pretty significant nerf to the rod as that is a 40% nerf to rod's damage since it currently sits at 15% of the damage done. (Damage done being either 10% or 100 hp, whichever is less).
That puts the current rate at 6.666 damage per adrenaline up to a max cost of 15 adrenaline for 100 damage........

It would really hurt players that don't have increased adrenaline pools and because of the delay that you can't turn it off for a few seconds, they will find themselves with 0 adrenaline in an instant. If any form of basic nerf to it outside of the triple use was need, it prob should instead do less damage per tick. Because it works on a percent basis in all cases besides titans, it should if anything been changed to do 8% damage per tick instead of 10% with a max of 100. This would lower the killing power slightly but not make it a huge adrenaline hog for turning it on in an inoppurtune time. ....... 

First, I have to say that with all the repeated "X is too powerful, it needs to be nerfed" stuff is making things much less enjoyable for me. 

Let us be realistic for a moment... RPGs unbalance play, creating a situation where a level 500 player will **generally** outscore a level 250 player, who will in turn generally outscore a level 5 player. Yes, there are exceptions. But with a player of all three levels on, that is the way it will be. You should expect that higher level player to kill a monster in 1-2 shots which would, all else being the same, take the lower level player 10 or more shots to kill. 

Secondly, I am concerned that as we go around nerfing X, we throw off other calculations. Be it the rod, the bolt, the beam, megablast or what ever, these are the items with which an extreme AM is **EXPECTED** to do the majority of their killing. As I have mentioned before... there is no ammo to run out of on turrets, sentinels or vehicles (or monsters for that matter)... and WMs have separate ammo supplies for each individual weapon, so they can switch back and forth between a flak and rocket with no worries about running the other out of ammo. But with the AM based attacks, especially for the EAM, everything they are supposed to be doing revolves around that single adren pool. I have lost track of the number of times I have run out of adren (say because part of my surge/leach has not occurred because of damage by another player, such as a Engi, Generalist, or Bezerker)... if I ghost, I hope my ultima manages to get me some adren, because when I ghost, it is the result of running out of adren. It is going to get better at the end of waves, where we will be "resupplied" with some adren, but still... if we nerf the damage done by an artifact, I hope the adren usage is nerfed at least to some degree along with it. Because if not, I think the result will be in people either ceasing to play certain classes like AM and EAM, or stop playing all together.