Arcanaville

For the most part, but they don't get identical powersets. Statistically speaking, Tanker secondaries have more mitigation than Scrapper primaries (although proliferation is closing the gap over time). The sets Scrappers have that Tankers don't (Claws, Katana, Broadsword, Spines) tend to have less mitigation than the sets they don't that Tankers do (Ice, Stone, Energy, Super Strength). The swords are the big exceptions, but probably not enough to completely overcome the overall gap.

Proliferation has made this gap very small though.


This one turns out to be counter-intuitively not true, at least to a very large extent. Imagine a fight lasting 60 seconds from the beginning of the fight to the end of the fight. You take a certain amount of damage from that fight. Now imagine increasing your kill speed. The fight now lasts 40 seconds instead of 60. Do you take less damage? Yes. But what's the *average* damage you take? In the first case, its the total damage divided by 60. In the second case its the total damage divided by *40* because the fight is shorter. If the kill speed was higher, but proportionately higher, you probably took 33% less damage in 33% less time. The average damage rate is about the same, to a first order approximation.

Now, if in the second case you stood around for 20 seconds so that you went at the same pace, one spawn every 60 seconds, that extra kill speed would in fact be reducing your average incoming damage significantly and improve your survivability. But players don't do that. Kill faster, and to proceed faster, and that counteracts the damage mitigation benefit of killing faster. Not completely, because there's travel time between spawns which remains mostly fixed, so there is *some* advantage. But its surprisingly small.

What's more, if you think about fights like this, as a continuous set of spawns starting at high damage and ending at zero in a roughly triangular sawtooth pattern, there the interesting question of AoEs. There's no question that AoEs at the start of the fight can wipe out critters fast enough to radically reduce incoming damage. That has to help survivability, and it does because it basically takes that downward damage curve and makes it steeper at the start, and then level off at the end. It looks like something took a bite out of the damage triangle, and that translates into lower average damage. But what if you use AoEs in the *middle* or *end* of the fight. Then, the triangle falls off faster at the end, like half a triangle with the right side taken off. In that case, average damage over time actually goes *up* because you spend more of your time facing lots, and less time facing less, because you're wiping them out closer to the end.

Which actually means even AoEs do not automatically improve survivability in a mission by much. If specifically used at the start of a fight, they do. If they are used randomly, or as often as possible, and that happens at different random times during the fight, they can actually average out to neutralize their own survival advantage.

More damage always means faster kills in the general case. It means finishing missions quicker and earning rewards faster. It does *not* actually directly translate into more survivability, because players don't pace themselves in a manner to make that possible. More damage at best has only a marginal impact on survivability except in the degenerate cases where things are being wiped out so fast they can't attack back.


Actually, anyone who's farmed with melee probably knows this intuitively. The only way fast kill speed helps with survivability tends to be when you kill so fast you earn insps faster than you can burn them. But separate from that, if anything higher kill speed can cause you to face spawns at full strength increasingly more often, which actually requires *more* survivability to be able to do. The higher kill speed can translate into the need for a defensively stronger build, because of this effect.

This is also why the devs have had difficulty balancing anything with the notion that offense equals defense. It doesn't, which is what has made things like Fire Tankers and Blasters in general problematic to balance. Pumping offense into them doesn't make them more survivable in practice. It just makes them kill faster.

Burst damage, specifically used at the beginning of the fight and specifically at no other time, improves survivability. That is the only time more damage directly translates into higher survivability. In other cases, it has at best an indirect and weak effect on survivability, and can sometimes have the exact opposite effect.

Even if it can't be driven, it can still be used by the Mythbusters.

Are those three mutually exclusive?

The largest of those issues is that the devs have allowed every other archetype to continually poach offense from them without either giving up anything in return or eliminating the converse restrictions on blasters to acquire non-offensive capabilities, to satisfy archetypal desires that defy good game design.

80% of the Blaster ranged modifier and 100% of the Blaster cap is all you need? Well why didn't you say so in the first place.

An entire critter group would have been plenty enough.

Yes it does, if you're designing Ferraris for 12 year old novice drivers. If you aren't, then that's a ridiculous situation to evaluate.

We design archetypes for the players of the game. We therefore judge archetype performance based on how all of the players of the game combined do with them on average. That's what matters. With regard to archetype performance balance that's the only thing that matters.

I think it would be better at this late stage for the developers to add sufficient customization to allow the players themselves to decide how their origin affects their power options. You can't respec your origin, and no matter how the devs try to reflect origin in power visuals and mechanics they will unavoidably alienate players with different concepts. The benefit doesn't seem to outweigh the costs when it comes to applying origin-specific restrictions.

A brand new Ferrari might not look broken when you drive it, but if its put into a cross-country race with a bunch of 767s, its still an obviously broken entry.

That is wise, since a safe bet for me is a bet I cannot lose.

In this game, that word also has a very specific definition: "does not meet its design requirements." Blasters objectively met one criteria for absolutely broken in the past: every single powerset combination underperformed the average performance of all players by a considerable margin. At the time, that level of broken was unique, and its unclear if it has ever been matched before or since. That's not an opinion, that's a fact.

Whether they still have a similar degree of problems is a conjecture, but the burden of proof is on the people that insist the problem doesn't exist, since they were already provably wrong at least once before.

It is not a specific goal of mine to convince everyone. It is not really a specific goal of mine to convince anyone. I'm secondarily interested in sparking discussion among the people that recognize the problem, and primarily interested in eliminating the problem. But there comes a point when the evidence of something becomes so overwhelming, that trying to convince the marginal deniers is about as useful as debating the Flat Earth Society, and Blaster issues are way past that point.

If I could prove any controller couldn't out-control an electric blaster, I could get that controller looked at by the devs tomorrow. Maybe in your world that's not broken, but your opinion doesn't govern the design of this game.

This notion that the problem with the Blaster archetype is the fault of the players comes up year after year. Its specious and irrelevant, because in this game archetypes are not supposed to be judged based on whether someone somewhere can manage to succeed with them. They are supposed to be judged based on whether they provide a similar level of tools to succeed, as judged by whether or not there's a strong disparity in the percentage of players that eventually make them succeed, and the degree to which they succeed.

That disparity is going to be eliminated. The only question is how long it will take to happen, and whether it happens a piece at a time or all at once. I don't care how many people insist on denying it exists.

They are unlikely to do that just to implement a scattering of power customization for pool powers. Its a safe bet to assume Sorcery is a brand new power pool powerset.

Wait: you're not comparing my numbers to THB, are you? Because my numbers *are* THB's numbers. I was just summarizing them because its not easy to compare THB's blaster and stalker at a glance from his raw data.

Did you accidentally push Issue 25 instead of Issue 23 to the beta server?

The buyers?

My guess is that the number of active marketeers is probably less than a hundred, definitely lower than one thousand. There's likely to be hundreds of players for every marketeer, if not thousands. And those hundreds of players are probably earning hundreds of millions to billions of inf a week per marketeer. The players amassing influence are probably getting it collectively from large numbers of players who aren't. And I suspect the number of people who continuously amass influence even after they have a hundred billion or more is even lower, because past that point there's little point to it and it becomes more work to manage than it can possibly benefit them.

I would bet also that the people making billions one week might often be the same people spending billions another week to outfit a new alt, tossing a percentage of that influence back into circulation to make someone else a few billion that week.

It is a nice collection of attributes, but its unclear how they turn the tide of a fight. That expression refers to a fight that starts, then goes bad, and then someone does something special that changes the fight to bring it back to a good result.

And the level of control you mention is something the average random controller has. Its great for a blaster, but that wouldn't even be worth mentioning on a controller. If I said "hi, I have a controller, and he can hold a boss indefinitely and mez an entire spawn" people would think I was on drugs. That's the minimum that all high level controllers should be able to do. A halfway decent one should be able to do far more, because they specialize in control. Any controller that can't outcontrol an electric blaster is actually demonstrably broken.

And nothing everyone has, like temp powers or incarnate powers, can be noteworthy in terms of which archetypes are particularly good at turning the tide of a fight. A level 50 with no primary or secondary but with temp powers and incarnate powers can do that, so to be noteworthy you have to exceed that ability.

There's no tide turning possible in battles where everything dies in a couple seconds.

... ?

Don't most incarnations of Atlantis, from the historical to the modern, involve magic of some kind?

Now you're having difficulty remembering what you said minutes ago. Have you considered the possibility you're currently experiencing a stroke?

Quantifying that might be tricky, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that Blasters have the best tools for aggro management or controls and secondary effects, and prioritization of targets is a player skill and not an archetype tool. DPS and ability to kill things quickly is something theoretically Blasters can do, but in terms of turning the tide of a fight going badly its very difficult to make the case that blasters have such overwhelmingly higher damage that they can do that fast enough to make a bigger difference than any other damage dealer could. In particular, Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators all have the damage dealer moniker, and all have ways of both dealing high damage to a troublesome target or otherwise nullifying it.

When other archetypes have undeniably better tools to do half the things on that list, and other archetypes have very credibly at least equal tools to do the other half of the list, while I can't say I can say in what place Blasters are, I can say with certainty they aren't in the top half.


But this is more critical to the "turn the tide" issue. When I'm playing my blasters, there's basically only two modes I'm playing them in: casually and focused. My tactical options are usually limited to shoot fast, shoot faster, shoot really really fast. I can decide what to shoot at, but not so much what I shoot with, because I'm usually cycling my arsenal pretty fast either way. I have some choices, but not many. I have far more choices when playing a controller. I have controlling attacks, I have buffs and debuffs, I have heals. I can't use them all simultaneously, so I'm focused on particular things at particular times. I can change that focus. I can switch to more healing if that's required: I can switch to more debuffing if control is less necessary. If things are really hitting the fan I can EMP everything in sight, which pushes a pause button on nearly the entire fight. I can turn the tide of a fight because if the fight is not going the way I want it to I can change what I'm doing. On a Blaster, my damage might be making a difference, but it can't switch to better damage if I need to: what I have is all I have. The way I turn the tide of a fight on a blaster is I stop goofing off and unload my insp tray and then apply my offense in the most optimal way to alter the course of the fight. But that's entire happening in my head, my blaster isn't giving me a whole lot of alternate tools to work with.

If my team mates are about to die I can't save them. I can keep up the fight and hope they can rez back into it. If we aren't doing enough damage to a hard target I can't switch from doing more damage to amplifying my team mate's damage. All I can do is decide to kill this guy or decide to kill that guy or shoot in all directions, which is something pretty much anything can do to some degree.

Quantifying "best" may be tricky, but qualifying who has the best tools is not: whoever has the most diverse set of tools that are strong enough to be meaningful usually wins this one. And controllers are among the strongest of the diverse toolsets: they tend to have most or all of control, buff, debuff, heal, damage, pets. And the ones that are missing any one of these tend to be really strong in other areas (mind control loses pets, gains massive confuse ability).