Arcanaville

That's not what I was thinking. It would perhaps be better to state that I have thought of ways to make the AI not do obviously stupid things, and not act consistently predictably.

For example, having the critter AI ignore taunt breaks the intent of taunt. But having taunted critters that have no melee attacks at all run up to the tanker when taunted is idiotic. In fact, running out of the county when the thing you're primarily attacking is itself a melee character is equally idiotic. It makes more sense to run thirty feet and then turn and start shooting again.

"Smarter AI" as I am thinking of it doesn't mean "figure out the best way to frustrate the player." Its more of "always act with (apparent) purpose." Why move closer if it doesn't help your offense? Why continue to run if the attackers can't hit you? Why watch the players kill something right in your line of sight? Why stand all in one place? Why patrol in a straight line without ever looking behind?

The problem is people think addressing these issues would require massive computational resources, but I don't think they do. I think you can leverage the principles of emergent behavior to engineer simple AI that generate complex results when perturbed by situational changes.

Your assertion has tended to be that Staff's single target damage was below average, and that wasn't compensated for by having sufficiently high AoE damage:
You've also called Staff "unbalanced" because of this. But those kinds of statements presume you can actually judge Staff AoE reasonably, and the only metrics you've presented to do so have been faulty in serious areas. If your premise is that Staff single target is below average, that only requires an examination of the single target damage output of Staff. But if your premise is that Staff is unbalanced, because its AoE is not high enough to compensate for below average single target, you can't say its too difficult to quantify AoE. Your assertion relies on having a reasonable way to evaluate AoE offense that is reasonably accurate.

There's a lot of things I would do *except* for the fact they would piss off the playerbase, and as a dev I would not advocate doing things just because I want them if the playerbase didn't.

But the one thing I can guarantee I would do as a dev that at least *some* of the playerbase would hate me for is that I would make the critters smarter.

Much, much, much smarter. Or at least apparently so enough so as to be basically indistinguishable from that.

Its something I've put a lot of thought into. Whatever else they had me working on, this is what I'd be working on all of the rest of the time. My metric for success here is when multiple players posted on the forums "I've wanted the critters to be smarter for years, but not *that* smart."


Its probably easier for me to think of what I would do if I was the design lead that would make all the *devs* hate me rather than the players. I would institute one global design rule: everything has to make sense. Story has to make sense, plot has to make sense, rewards have to make sense, power design has to make sense, all the balancing metrics have to make sense. I'm a stickler for sanity checking everything twice, and my threshold for consistency is astronomically high when its my call to make.

Probably eaten by the forum grues by now.


You keep suggesting people are asking for some "complete proof" as if the critiques so far have been unreasonable, but you haven't acknowledged basic fundamental errors in your analysis which generate wildly incorrect results. You seem, if anything, to believe they should be overlooked as being irrelevant to the point of the analysis. But as you point out, rarely is an analysis absolutely perfect, so the critical goal of any analysis should be to build credibility that the conclusion generated is a safe one. Usually, that's done by being conservative, and when erring always attempting to err on the side *opposite* that of the conclusion. You very obviously don't do that; instead you reach for the conclusion by first assuming its true, and then looking for numbers to support it. You still haven't told me what a player with nothing but Explosive Blast looks like under your revised AoE metric, and whether your analysis generates a reasonable result for that situation. You still haven't justified how having just one AoE for SS and Stone somehow translates into those two sets having more "AoE potential" according to your metric than many sets with provably higher AoE.

By not acknowledging, much less attempting to fix any of these anomalies, it seems you're metric-shopping: it looks like you're going to continue to invent metrics until you find one that generates the results you want.

As to the difference between your impressions and your analysis, you started by saying the set was more or less ok, perhaps with some issues, but as the thread progressed you started conflating "second tier" with "underperforming" in many contexts, and attempted to claim there was a strong numerical basis for that assertion. It is at that point that your numerical analysis became fair game for review and critique.

Yes it has, because its been reached many times in the past. I don't know what you're representing that requirement as in terms of unknown variables, but proper, rigorous analysis has demonstrated powersets to be underperforming in the past. Specifically for offensive sets, in the case of Broadsword, for example, or Archery. Or the non-domination-boosted offense of the entire Dominator archetype. I successfully made the argument three separate times for three separate versions of Martial Arts.

Your analysis just seems to mash numbers up, and you seem to believe there's nothing between mash numbers up and omniscience. More conservative and accurate analyses have been done in other situations that were sufficiently compelling to be considered probative.

This would not be a violation of the cottage rule. It might be a violation of some other rule, but not the cottage rule. The intent of the cottage rule is not to alter a power in such a way that the players that currently have it would be affected to such an extent that what they are currently using the power for no longer works at all. That's why conserve power can become energize. Lots of things changed, but what didn't change is that it was still a click power that provided sizeable endurance discount. It now *also* provides heal and regen. That can make the power valued *more* for its heal than its endurance management, but that's not the same thing as saying you cannot use it as a conserve power tool any more. You can, so the spirit of the cottage rule is maintained.

In general, adding without taking away is allowed, and tweaking numbers without dramatically eliminating a general feature is allowed. Provided that doing so has other valid reasons *for* doing it, the cottage rule generally doesn't stand in the way of such changes.

Incidentally, saying "power X is only useful to me when value Y is Z, and now that its lower than that its useless" is an irrelevant complaint within the context of the cottage rule. That is explicitly *not* what the cottage rule protects. No rule protects against such changes.

It probably doesn't count when you spawn them on yourself.

Also, this thread does not have enough doom:












There we go.

If I understand what you're saying, then what you're saying is that the actual forums themselves have been incorrectly cut and pasted onto the background image at inaccurate scaling, which means it will never actually look like what is being represented.

*If* I understand what you're saying, then in actual fact at that resolution if you actually opened a browser to that width exactly it would actually look like this:



Which seems a bit pointless, particularly for Penny. And if you shrink the window so that the actual forums are narrower but the background remains static rather than scaling, as the current forums do, then you'd get this by the time the forums themselves were as narrow as your images represent:



Which also seems kind of pointless, this time for ShadowHunter. I tried to be close to pixel perfect, and If I'm doing this right, it seems there's only an extremely narrow range of browser widths that will make this background (both of them really) not be obscured in odd ways. That's why our current one sits *above* the forum panel and not to either side: its reasonably visible at all browser widths.

Its not that the background isn't 100% visible, its that it truncates extremely badly in my opinion. Assuming you're correct and no changes are made to the stylesheet for the forums that alters the gutter proportions.

Anything is possible, but that assertion has yet to be demonstrated by any analysis I've seen so far.

Mostly, academic.

What, only two Lore pets?

I'm going to craft them all and then lobby for Omega to let me cast them all simultaneously. Because that's going to be a big honking can of Omega on whatever I unleash that on.

When you put it that way...


To be honest though, I actually think this brings up the very good point that I would rather not have excessively large margins or conversely detail outside the margins that I won't see. In both samples only slightly more than half the width of the screen is actually being used to show the actual forum content. That seems to be a rather low percentage that overlooks the primary function of the forums.

Unfortunately for Positron, his attempt to embezzle those points ran into a problem when he discovered there was no way to convert them back into cash, and in an ironic twist the only thing he could spend them on was super packs.

Depends on the size of the team. Lets say that you are on a full team of eight, and you're doing about average damage compared to your team members. And lets say that using Eye of the Storm costs you three seconds of basically half your normal damage. It will then boost the damage of all the team members by 7.5% for six seconds.

For three seconds the team's damage will drop from 100% to about 93.75% Then for six seconds the team's damage will increase to 107.5%. That's a net increase. In fact, the break even seems to be around four to five players.

To a first order approximation, you have to remember that the +7.5% is multiplied by the number of players being boosted, while any relative deficit EotS causes in a reduction in damage is only suffered by one player, and the "penalty" for using EotS in DPA is suffered for only its cast time while the resistance debuff is over twice as long. So in a team of four, that +7.5% resistance debuff has effectively eight times leverage (4 players, double the duration) relative to the damage penalty of using EotS, at least in rough terms.

For sufficiently large teams and a sufficiently hard target, resistance debuffs accelerate damage faster than anything can actually deal damage on its own due to the leverage of multiplying the damage increase by a lot of separate attackers.

Compared to the number of empyreans, even moreso. I'm assuming Uberguy burned a lot of empyreans crafting very rares or something, but kept his astrals mostly untouched altogether.

Or, if you sometimes get lazy like me:



Note: Wolfram says you put one too many parentheses, but he'll let you off with a warning this time.

It does, and it is less efficient because of that, but since I forgot the command existed at all at least once, the popmenu thing is a good way to leave myself a permanent reminder. Mine has lots of commands that I don't really often actually use from the popmenu, but they are there to remind me that they exist at all.

I usually just /ah to get to the auction house, for example, because at my typing speed that's faster than navigating the pop menu. But /auctionhouse is in my popmenu just in case. In fact, whenever threads like this come up, if I see an interesting command I didn't know about but wouldn't even necessarily use normally, I will sometimes put it in my popmenu just as a reminder it exists.

In a sense, I tend to use popmenu as a hyperlinked command reference, not as a replacement for hotkeys. I still have hotkeys and clicks for teleport, toggling superspeed off and on, hover/fly binds, target_enemy_next, even a +forward$$++up thing for auto-pilot superjumping, because I use those often enough and on enough alts that I can reserve keys for them and not screw them up. But like costume change stuff, I'm not going to remember that and its a pain to look up, so into popmenu it goes.

Edit: although I can see the utility for two-key popmenuing, I don't really use it myself. But given what the trays on my main looks like, I may eventually get there myself.

That is a non-sequitor.

AVs don't have that "special resistance" to resistance debuffs. They can't, because by definition** resistance to resistance debuffs is resistance: its damage resistance. The only way the devs can add 95% resistance to resistance debuffs is to actually make the AV 95% resistant to all damage.

And even in that case, a -7.5% resistance debuff would increase your, and all of your team mates' damage, by 7.5% as Uberguy states.

Edit: Also as Combat states.


** The game engine doesn't support "resistance to debuffs." Resistance to debuffs is resistance period. Defense debuff resistance, for example, resists all defense changes. It would resist your own ability to buff your own defense with defense toggles if those were not unresistable by design. To go even farther, defense debuff resistance would resist defense debuff resistance buffs if *those* weren't also flagged as unresistable. Defense "debuff" resistance is actually defense resistance: it resists all attempts to do anything to defense, including changing defense resistance itself, except for unresistable effects.

I'm not sure I would, but then again even at level 50, I'm rarely fighting a single solitary AV solo. Solo, it probably is not a good option. In teams, the -7.5% resistance debuff affects the entire team, and I'm not religious about my floating numbers: whatever kills the target faster is what I'm going to do, and I'll let philosophy majors decide if its "my damage" or not. In those circumstances, EotS might be the best attack, simply because in a large enough team the net effect of resistance debuffs are amplified strongly.

That's like saying the content in this game should succeed or fail without the crutch of awarding XP.

The Super Pack "mechanic" is its design, in totality, from the method of award to the details of its contents.

If there is one attack I would change in Staff, its probably Sky Splitter. But I don't think the set underperforms with Sky Splitter in its current configuration. I just think its cast time is too high given the normal design rules for attack sets. It should probably be no higher than 2.17s, or it should have been a cone. I have a nagging suspicion the power got trapped between those two decisions, and ended up with single target damage in a cone cast time.

To repeat: I don't think the set underperforms with Sky Splitter. I just think sky splitter doesn't have the numbers it should. Eagle's Claw should be at the outer limits of lower DPA for an attack like that, because the only reason EC even has the DPA it does is to preserve the backflip animation, or it would currently have better DPA. No comparable attack, in my opinion, should go lower than EC's DPA.

Right now my Staff/SR Brute is getting a lot of use from the drop in the bucket mind bonus, because I don't know any other Brute combination that I get to level while running all my SR toggles while running three AoEs as fast as they recharge. The fact that I'm always soft capped to melee is just an extra bonus.


Not sure I buy that. At the extreme high end there is only room for one top build in AoE damage, so by definition everything else is subpar. But I think I'm going to be perfectly happy when I invention-out my Staff/SR and switch from Mind to Body, getting +7.5% resistance and a -7.5% resistance debuff out of it. I'll probably be around 30% resistance to smash/lethal before scaling passives in a maxed out invention build with tough. Or maybe because I don't really need recovery or recharge at the high end I could just go musculature for more damage. I believe there's still room at the top for increasing the strength of the build.

Completely ignoring everything except its offensive output, I would say Staff Fighting's offensive output is within the desired range of melee offensive sets.

In fact, since Staff does far better than most sets in the early levels (i.e. every level before 47) due to its enhanced endurance and/or recharge, and since as you point out you can build anything to take x8 in the end game with a strong enough invention build, I would say that Staff's advantages more than counterbalance its disadvantages, since when its strong there are few alternatives for other sets to catch up, and where its (debatably) weaker everyone is ultra strong anyway and the difference is unnoticeable.

Actually, for a significant contingent of the playerbase, usually referred to as "the vast majority of all players", who actually level their characters and don't twink them out with massive invention builds before reaching the level cap, Staff Fighting probably is, in many respects, a top tier set. It can make a nearly full AoE chain before many sets can make a full single chain. It can power continuous AoE offense on top of toggles before heavy invention slotting. It can offer powerset combinations without unlimited endurance extra endurance management and powerset combinations with unlimited endurance extra recharge. It packages this up with stackable self +Def and a combo system that doesn't care what order to use your attacks.

As long as you are fighting two or more things most of the time and running an SO or common IO build, Staff is going to do extremely well against other melee offensive options *including* Titan Weapons in real gameplay.