Jam negatively affects scores

"MasterSeedy;d-267674" wrote:
We will likely not see any revision to the Jam ability, but I thought I would throw a couple ideas here anyway, since we may see something like it in the future.

1. Rather than having Jam reduce the health of future enemies directly, give allies +100% TM when new enemies enter. The effect is like a free shot that reduces the **current** health of the enemies rather than the **max** health of the enemies, thus giving the heroes the full score for defeating them, but easing up the future difficulty. Jam used in this way does not come into play until new enemies are summoned (just as happens now). It also has the story-telling effect that it resembles ambushing the ImpTroops, which is thematically appropriate since jamming would mean that they weren't warned of incoming enemies, so they're not actively fighting back until after your first shot.

2. A certain amount of Jam on a character gives that one character +100% TM and resets Jam to zero. The storytelling here isn't as compelling, but it does allow you to cycle through cooldowns a bit more quickly. I mention it because there might be a future raid where this makes more sense.

3. Jam functions oppositely to how it does now: you give Jam to your enemies, and if they gain enough, they lose a turn (similar to a stun) presumably because they're trying to use an ability that is disabled by your electronic interference. This makes your enemies less capable without reducing max health, again making it possible to gain the same scores while using Jam.

4. Jam reduces your cooldowns by 1 at first but more than 1 later in the battle. This simulates the enemy taking turns to deal with the jam rather than fight, but without giving you a free shot at them. Though it doesn't have to, this could occur only when new enemies enter, so that your specials are available (or more likely to be available) from the beginning -- the rationale being that since the enemies were jammed, they took longer to show up which allowed you a single "turn" outside of normal combat where your cooldowns cycled, but there was nothing to shoot at.

5. All allies gain Advantage for their first turn after new enemies enter, all enemies gain Accuracy Down for their first turn. This occurs only if you have sufficient Jam. For less Jam there can be no effect or half effect (e.g. allies gain advantage, but enemies do not gain Accuracy Down OR all allies gain advantage, but all these buffs disappear as soon as one ally scores a critical hit, while all enemies critically hit by this attack gain Accuracy Down for one turn -- which could be all enemies if the attack was an AoE)

6. Reduce the Enrage timer by 10% when new enemies enter. This doesn't make things easier during normal play, but it does give the player more time to try to beat the last wave before Enrage kicks in. This would require enough Jam that it would be impossible to trigger more than 3 times and unlikely to trigger more than twice. The rationale here is that the Enrage timer is cumulative. It doesn't start over for each new wave of enemies. But maybe it should, if the new enemies aren't communicating with the earlier enemies because of Jam. Effectively Jamming delays the reactions of the enemy, in this case the reaction to Ally attacks that help stack Enrage.

7. More than one of these. If Jam is cumulative over the course of the battle, it would be easy to imagine +100% TM after wave 1, CD reduction after W2, TM + CD reduction after wave 3, TM+Enrage reduction after W4, TM + Advantage+AccDown after W5, Everything after W6.

Again, I know that CG is unlikely to change the raid now, but adding abilities which reduce player scores if used seems a bad idea, especially when there are thematically appropriate and story-appropriate ways to represent Jam that would not cause such problems.

I think if they just changed it to reduce the amount of enrage for killing enemies instead of reducing the quality of the enemies, it might end up being worthwhile. With the ewok modifier, focusing on timber becomes a viable strategy if and only if having stacks of jam doesn't also work against the primary goal of achieving a good score.

I really would have thought ewoks would be the shining stars of this raid but trying to leverage their faction bonus results in lower scores than ignoring them completely - at least that's what I've found so far - which is unfortunate for folks that have had to relic them for platoons - or people that just enjoy using them.

If I'm wrong about that, I'd love to hear about successful strategies for leveraging the ewok faction bonus - but the way the jam mechanic applies to enemy quality erases any benefit you're getting, and you hit enrage long before a reasonable score can be achieved.