UberGuy

I have a buddy who's very much not a n00b at the game who was unable to beat original Trapdoor with an SO'd Fire/Fire Tanker build. I'm pretty sure the build would not be considered optimal, even by the friend in question - the character hadn't been updated in a long time and was in need of a respec. (Thanks to I19 and some good PvPIO drops, that character is now a beast and would probably tear a hole in new Trapdoor.) And when I say "not optimal", I mean as a Fire/Fire Tanker, not in the sense of "don't bring a Tanker."

However, I'm pretty sure of two other factors.

1. He didn't use any inspirations in the fight.
2. When he had trouble, he got help. He was disappointed that his Tanker couldn't pull it off, but he had no shame in dealing with that by getting someone else to assist.

So do I think there are probably people with characters that can't pull this off? Without inspirations, definitely. Do I think there can be those who can't pull it off even with inspirations? I certainly think it's possible, and people have posted to that effect. Do I think that these people have to be able to solo him? No, I don't. And I solo a lot. If you can't solo something, you get help. If needing help means a character falls off your list of viable "mains", well, that's up to you, but it's not the approach I would take.

I guess I don't really understand the point. It seems a bit like talking about God creating oxygen, hemoglobin and lungs, but blaming people for breathing. I know that's an overboard analogy, but what's the point in "blaming" people for making use of what's available to them? If people have the means, why wouldn't they use them? If you create variable strength of arms you will get an arms race, because some people will obtain the highest strength of arms, and other people will want to match them in order to win against them. Personally, I have no problem with an MMO's PvP working that way, but if you don't want an arms race, you don't create variable strength of arms.

There have been relatively recent changes in the spawn rules that make the distribution of bosses more random. The game no longer follows the old "rule" that you didn't get bosses at all unless there were seven people on the team. Seven (almost?) always get one boss per spawn, and eight (almost?) always gets two, but you now sometimes get a boss in a spawn set anywhere from four to six players, with it seeming to be more likely the larger the team or setting.

(Note that I'm talking about entities that would be bosses if you have bosses enabled, or if you have a team and aren't solo.)

I liken this a bit to the now fairly old change where they caused more LTs to appear where we used to get uniform minions.

I won't claim this didn't happen to any degree, but that you seem to think that this is all that happened, I have to wonder if you PvP'd at all, or if you did, if you had any idea what was going on when you did.

I liked old PvP. I didn't play it much because I prefer FPS PvP, where twitch skill determines things like whether you hit a foe, not a random number generator and your build. But even though old PvP was fun, there were things that were essentially pointless to bring, whether you brought them on a team or solo. If you brought certain powersets to PvP, you were bringing a spitball straw to a capital ship exchange, and if you brought them on a team, you were dead weight. Anything that relied on sustained DPS instead of burst damage, anything that relied on defense that wasn't through the roof, anything that lacked KB protection (still true), pretty much anything that used fly as its sole movement power, anything that relied on ground patches... there was a long list of stuff that was pretty "lol worthy". If you brought these things to a team contest and they mattered much, it wasn't because PvP was balanced for teams, it was because your opponents weren't very good.

Remember, I'm saying I liked the old PvP mechanics. But there was a whole lot more going on with why they were changed than you're suggesting. Unfortunately, some of the things that were no good in old PvP were like that because of what I think was one of old PvP's best features - high speed mobility. In a highly mobile, 3-dimensional playfield, a long animating debuff patch is mostly pointless, and nothing is going to change that. But I wanted them to keep the high mobility, not create the feeling we have now in PvP zones that everything is coated in lead-based glue. The harder thing to fix was how rooting animations interacted with mobility to make many melee builds low-value. I don't know what a good alternate fix for that would have been, but what they did was the last thing I would have wanted - neuter the mobility that I think was this game's PvP's distinguishing feature. This was the MMO that felt like an FPS. Now, not so much.

wut?

It's not stupid at all. It's quite sensible.

Here's what the devs can probably feel comfortable that they know. They know they have a decent handle on what PvE players here like. They have had successes with that. Sure, you're right, every new thing they add to the game is a gamble, but if they don't rewrite the existing game, their worst-case scenario is that they wasted time on that addition. They don't generally speaking need to essentially re-balance the existing game to add new stuff, though they may need to work carefully on balance with the new stuff itself. The new Incarnate content is a good example of this, and look at the approach they're taking with it - they're adding it a bit at a time spread out over a pretty long time, and meanwhile, everyone's got all the stuff they already released. When the devs make an incremental PvE change, they know they will get tons and tons of feedback and available datamining info as people play it.

I don't see how PvP fixes would work that way. Compared to PvE here, PvP has a tiny playerbase. The devs can't add new core PvP mechanics the same way they can add new PvE content, and the problems with PvP actually do necessitate changing its rules, affecting all its existing "content" and not just new additions. If anything, the devs have shown they don't have a handle on how to do that well, meaning that doing anything is even less sure to be a success than any PvE thing they might add. They can make incremental changes to PvP to be sure, but incremental changes may not bring back incremental participation increases, and if they do not, the devs will have very limited data or feedback to gather to determine if the early incremental changes are "good". That could be bad, since the early changes set a foundation for the direction things take.

So even though spending time and resources on any given PvE change is never a sure thing, compared to their track record on PvP changes and the challenges they face in correcting where its at now, PvE changes probably feel like investing in gold during ahead of a financial meltdown.

Actually, they can, and to some extent, they do. AE missions quite simply are not held to the same standards as developer-made ones, even if the developers may also create farmable content. We may not like that, or agree with it, but they have the power to make it so. Positron said rather explicitly that the AE is not meant for farming. That said, the truth is that the devs themselves police it for that very weakly. Anything that's not truly a full-blown exploit is not likely to be found unless another player reports it. However, if a player reports a mission that looks like a farm, it can be locked, and has been before.

The process for determination about what is and is not a farm (by both players and the CS staff who respond to reported content) is definitely subjective, and this has lead to no small amount of drama and argument around the AE. That sadly means if you're making a mission, you should consider whether it might seem like a farm. Likewise, if you do make a farm, it's worth taking the effort to make it at least not look like a blatant one.

I never said that this was needed. I said that if you do it, you can increase your rate of gain over more generic foes.

What does it make one if they can hear the soundtrack that underlay at least one of the original source?

Tell that to folks who made endless variations on ambush maps in the AE.

(But seriously, I do get the point.)

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that either. I mean, OK, it's sort of realistic. After all, if you could duplicate yourself to hell and back and become indestructible, why wouldn't you? (Wait, why is he worried about getting the artifact to work again?)

Actually In a "realistic" scenario, Trapdoor wouldn't be hanging out with the Council - he'd have 10,000 of his clones manning the base when you got there. But that wouldn't be very much fun for the player, and I sure don't think he should do that only after you show up and get defeated.

Edit: As for proof it's actually in the game, it should be easy to verify using the Attribute Monitor and a power like the Power Analyzer mk III. Barring that, though, I do see values that line up with Statesman's posts in the AT spreadsheet (the one originally given out by Iakona) under the ResMin row for toHit.

Don't forget that LTs and bosses also inherently resist the effect, which stacks in a multiplicative way with the effect of their being over your level.

And yeah, damage should not be able to affect the -toHit debuff.

Oh, I do think you're numbers crazy...just in different (and much more scientifically credible) ways.

Warning: Incoming wall of text.

As a member of a team that develops applications for a very broad user community, I disagree very strongly with that koan.

A key difference in what you may be thinking there and what I am thinking of is this: I think this is stuff for which there is no end-user requirement that it work this way. Broadly speaking in regards to software (and not games in specific) if the end users of software don't tell the developers exactly how they think something should work, thus leaving the implementation details to the designers and developers, and then dislike how the end product works when it's working both as specified by the users and as intended by the developers, then that is not a bug. Instead, it's a failure to produce good requirements. That may seem like a really ridiculous distinction to make, but I promise you there's a good reason for it.

Allowing gaps in requirement to be classified as bugs allows end users to dictate that "common sense" on the part of designers and developers should fill in the gaps in software specification. "You should have known this is what we wanted" isn't a valid software requirement - it's far too subjective. Among other things, users given such leverage will often classify anything they didn't adequately specify (and which the designers or developers didn't realize was poorly specified) as a defect on the part of the developers or designers, even though they never actually said they wanted it to work a given way. This leads to scope creep, as defect reports are being used to change (or insert) requirements. Sometimes allowing the scope creep really is the right thing to do, because sometimes the failure in requirements is so severe the software would not be fit for purpose, but that's an extreme scenario, and one the requirements gathering process should strive hard to avoid.

Now, from our perspective as players, we are not actually in the position to provide our input to a game's developers as user requirements. If we're lucky we get to provide feedback during betas, but any actual "user" requirements are developed internally by some part of the game's design team. If we players don't think the resulting software does what we think it should, either in a beta or on live servers, the best we can do is question whether something is working as the devs intended, and if it is we can make a request for a requirements change.

Since we players are external to the whole process, including most of the requirements gathering, I can see where you might want to classify seemingly common-sense failures in the game makers' requirements gathering as "bugs" too, but I still wouldn't agree with even that. I still feel that something like that is a request for change, not a bug fix. It may just be a request for a very sensible change. I do think this discussion about Real Numbers and power accuracy is a good example of that. As a developer, though, I do take a pretty uptight stance on what constitutes a bug fix versus a change request. I understand that end users often do not care about that distinction, but the two often have very different prioritization paths in a development organization, so identifying which category a given issue belongs in is very important to them.

Edit: Specific to the matter at hand, Real Numbers is a retrofit onto a system where we actually were never intended to see the numbers in question. Based on things Statesman and probably some other original devs posted, that we not be shown the numbers was actually probably a software requirement. Based on that, the developers probably created a system that did not care about what the users would see if shown the numbers, because the users were never supposed to see the numbers. Once that requirement about not showing the numbers changed, it was probably too late - they couldn't reasonably rework how the system was built internally. They also probably had limited time for handling display of special case powers, like pseudo-pet attacks. As a result, we probably got something that met a limited requirement, and so it displays most things right but a few things confusingly at best. I wouldn't be surprised if there's not a post-it-note or whiteboard somewhere with "improve real numbers display" as a to-do on it. That still doesn't mean what it's doing now is a bug!

Typically, I get the sense from a combination of orange float text, or (less reliably) step changes in the target's HP based on when I appeared to attack. As you say, though, those are highly subjective.

However, I always log my chat. Chat logging also logs things like damage dealt and received. While occasionally data doesn't make it into the chat tabs, this seems more common for ranged attacks against distant foes than melee ones against nearby one. So when I get that sense of high DPS I'm referring to, I can often refer to those logs to get a sense of whether it was valid. By itself it would be basically impossible to deconvolve that from damage buffs, and DR debuffs, but I always monitor damage buffs, so unless they vary wildly through a given fight, I can get a decent feel for those. That leaves debuffs, which can still be a wild card. If I don't have a good idea how many were in play I'll generally discard that set of data, but if I do (or know, for example, that there were none) I can usually make an estimate and back out my approximate "real" DPS.

I'm not saying I do all this analysis all the time, and not just with my Stalker by any means. I do it when the fancy strikes me, when I feel like I was doing especially well. Overall, my gut feeling seems to line up well with the numbers when I check them out.

None of the above. I just couldn't resist poking fun at the compound failure asking this question with that grammar.

Um...

That's factually wrong. You're calculating effective damage scales after criticals, which are a multiplicative factor on top of damage buffs. External damage buffs are an additive factor inside the base value.

ScrapperDamage = ScrapperCriticalFactor * ScrapperBase * (1+buffs)
StalkerDamage = StalkerCriticalFactor * StalkerBase * (1+buffs)

For external buffs not provided by the character onto itself , the term (1+buffs) will be identical - a Scrapper and a Stalker get the same buff from a Defender's Assault or a Corruptor's Fulcrum Shift. That means that for situations where the Stalker's critical factor puts them in the lead, external buffs do nothing to pull the Scrapper back ahead.

Firey Embrace, Soul Drain and AAO are the ones of those likely to let a Scrapper handily outshine what a Stalker can do. You can't argue with that, except at the damage buff cap. Stalkers and Scrappers share a +400% cap, so if external buffs can rail both characters, the only power that still keeps the Scrapper in the lead is Fiery Embrace, which is an increase in base damage which a Stalker cannot replicate.

Since I spend a lot of TF time on teams with very high-order damage buffs during the AV dog-pile in particular, with most of my team very near around me*, I notice that I'm often running very competitively with my Scrappers. Frankly, after the changes to Brute Fury, the interaction in damage buffs and Fury's bonus and the reduction in the Brute damage buff cap, I'm likely usually above what a Brutes can contribute unless they're a /FA Brute using Fiery Embrace.

Which is not a rebuttal to my claim.

I'm sorry, what has how impressed you are got to do with the price of tea in China? I made a claim about DPS performance, and nothing more. If you're going to bother responding to me, it'd be nice if you actually responded to what I said.

To be clear, I am not saying there aren't problems with the Stalker AT. I'm rebutting a claim about team performance about a hard target, which to me means an AV or a GM. You've provided some edge cases where my rebuttal may not hold true, which I either acknowledged (for Fiery Embrace) or mentioned an edge cases to your edge cases (operating at the respective damage buff caps) but nothing else you responded with is relevant to what I said, or the specific topic to which I replied.

Probably around the time people on the internet all start using punctuation to separate phrases. If they start capitalizing acronyms, that would make it even more likely.

I don't really know the under-the-covers mechanics for it, but there may be precedent for a way to deal with this. We have several examples of critters who do not con the color we think they should using other known rules. For example, Rikti Communication Officers con as if they were LTs, but have the "physical" stats of minions. Perhaps whatever is being used there could also be used to indicate shifted "false con" for MMs pets.

Alternatively, they could move away from the abrupt "step" change MMs experience currently at certain levels, and use the tables or debuffs to provide a more gradual flattening of pet power with level.