UberGuy

Go talk to Tavish Bell.

I couldn't imagine that your comment was about soloing pylons, as people in this forum don't normally bring an inspiration stack in order to do that. (Why not bring a stack of Rages?) I would have hoped that was clear, since I spoke about drops, and no one is going to get inspiration drops soloing a pylon. Also, my first post in the thread was that I thought SM would be bad for DPS in a pylon soloing exercise.

On teams especially, I find inspiration drop rates abysmal. I have found I cannot rely on it if I actually need it to achieve any given performance/survival level. If I need inspirations to survive, I bring them (edit: and if I need them for very long, then they run out.) In my experience, looking for them as drops is not viable unless you're (a) solo, and (b) strongly AoE enabled. I've tried relying on drops even solo with a single-target oriented primary, and it's just not viable for sustained performance above what my build can handle on its own. With decent AoEs, it works much more reliably.

Good luck getting a purple inspiration back as often as you can use Shadow Meld on an IO'd build.

If you're actually talking about general play and not Pylons, which was the OP's question, I find this comment/advice pretty laughable. (edit: If you're running an AoE-heavy build it can work out. If you're running something like DM or MA as your primary, it doesn't.)

But the OP's question was about soloing Pylons.

I'm well aware. I was here from pre-release and aware of the game's goings on (through others) for more. I had a Regen Scrapper as early as the very end of I1.

The fact that it was a toggle before does not mean that the devs would give us its current level of HP recovery as a toggle now, even reduced from its glory days as it is now. My statement stands that compares to asking for things like Build Up as a toggle, as long as one is aware I don't mean for the comparison to convey true scale. The devs would not give us Build Up's click power stats as a toggle, and I don't think they would give us IH's click power stats as a toggle. Both would be reduced.

That is so not when that happened, or why.

And no, there's no way it would become a toggle at its current power. I'm not saying the level of power is the same, but this is fundamentally like asking for Strength of Will or Build up to be made into toggles. Sure, they could be, but they would not be nearly as strong as they are as clicks.

It quite assuredly does not suck for Justice.

Against level-shifted stuff, yes. Effectively, we could be looking at the equivalent of fighting +14 foes. (Level 54 plus as many as 10 level shifts.) That's just not even worth thinking about.

It brings up an interesting thought, though. Con color is already railed at purple for level 50 characters looking at level 54 minions. I wonder what a level-shifted mob looks like in terms of listed level or con color. A level 54 boss with 10 level up-shifts would, without some other indicator, look like a normal level 54 boss, but would abruptly wipe the floor with a non-incarnate level 50 character.

I know I wandered across it in my own musings back during the great I4 Regen wars. It pops out of a fairly basic attempt to calculate how long a given average DPS that's going to kill something eventually takes to do so.

T = HP/DPS

But when there's regen in the picture, "DPS" has to be "net DPS", which is (applied DPS - HP regen rate). Since we are talking about DPS that will win out, we know that regen rate is lower than applied DPS, so the quantity has a reasonable sign.

T = HP/(DPSa-R)

Applied DPS is the part of raw DPS that gets past your mitigation.

T = HP/((1-M)*DPSr-R)

All that's left then is to note that average raw DPS can be expressed as Damage/Time.

T = HP/((1-M)*Damage/T-R)

That can be rearranged into the formula posted before.

Seriously? Good luck convincing them that this is "griefing".

Giving people "last warning" over such thin threats rings extraordinarily childish, IMO. "Look out, I'll totally put this paper cup on your head!"

And can you tell me how often it matters in practice whether that is 15 seconds of 17 seconds? If you needed 16 seconds to win and you were going to die in 15, did you just stand there and die?

Do not translate across to what? I'm sorry, but does your CoH client somewhere list for you the DPS that AVs deal? Do you sit around and calculate the DPS that a Council spawn will deal, and compare it at various team sizes and level offsets? How do you come up with the numbers you will plug into these absolute expressions of survival you put forth as the better way forward? And I'm lost in a sea of numbers?

You've said it yourself - the answers to what's better is completely situational. But that's a non-answer to the question of how to improve a build in broad terms. To actually decide on something, you have to make assumptions. The immortality line model is based a set of assumptions. It happens to be a set of assumptions that work based on observations about how a lot of people play.

I'm going to reiterate that you did not show that. You made a statement about what you think it shows, and then you shot that down. Except that's not what it shows, so it's not very compelling that you shot it down. You didn't prove anything wrong except for, well, invalid conclusions to be drawing from the immortality line.

Yep, it sure hasn't been working for me all these years.

Sure, but that's not the same thing as what they do with Shards, and that's what was asked in the OP.

It's not that one mob has 8x the chance to drop one Shard when faced with a team of eight players. On every mob defeat, everyone has a chance to get a drop. Multiple people can get a shard from the same mob. Same result on average, but very different mechanic.

I'm not sure if you're just not very good at English, or if you're actually very dense, but that's not what I said. I said they seek conditions where their long-term trend is immortality.

There's a name for what you're doing. It's called a strawman argument. You're claiming my position is both something it's not and something that's very easy to prove wrong. Then, disproving this thing (which I didn't say), you claim you win the argument. Doing that is called a logical fallacy, and to be clear, someone who uses it is not winning the argument.

No, that is not what you displayed. You displayed a case when mitigation <<< damage, and you showed that a higher immortality line did not indicate which mitigation source gave the best time to defeat.

There are so many things you're doing here that are confusing the issue.

All critters in the game have hit chances calculated like so.

FinalHitChance = TotalAccuracy * (50% - TargetDefense + AttackerToHit)

There are limits on both the total and the parenthetical expression - they cannot be below 5% or over 95%.

Let's consider an imaginary minion had one attack on a 4-second timer that deals 100 damage. It would have a raw DPS output rate of 100/4 = 25 DPS. Its chance to hit an same-level character with no defense would be 50%, so the character would experience 12.5 DPS from our minion. Without something else in the picture, it's impossible for the character to experience 100 average DPS from this mob. Even if the character were badly defense debuffed the mob's hit chance can't exceed 95%.

But if this was now a +2 boss, its accuracy would jump to 1.56, and it would have a base chance to hit of 0.78, and our defenseless character would experience 19.5 DPS.

Give our character 5% defense, and he mitigates 10% of the average damage he would experience with 0 defense. Why? Because of the formula
above.

Minion Before:
25 DPS * 1.0* (50% - 0%) = 12.5 DPS

Minion After
25 DPS * 1.0* (50% - 5%) = 11.25 DPS

11.25 DPS / 12.5 DPS = 90%

You take 90% of the damage, and so 10% of it must have been avoided.

Boss Before:
25 DPS * 1.56* (50% - 0%) = 19.5 DPS

Boss After
25 DPS * 1.56* (50% - 5%) = 17.55 DPS

17.55 DPS / 19.5 DPS = 90%

So 5% defense allows you to mitigate 10% of the damage you would have otherwise taken, not 5%.

This is not plus five percent. This is 5% absolute defense score.

It's your approach to defense values as absolute rather than proportional mitigation that's at the root of why you're in such disagreement with so many other posters.

Except that's not usefully portable. I can't do anything with that in the game based on ordinary play experience. I can use the ratio approach.

If I know that I can survive forever standing in the middle of X mobs, I know that if I increase my defense enough to halve the average damage I am admitting then I know I can survive in the middle of 2*X mobs. I don't have to know what DPS they are dealing. I only need to know proportions.

If I can't survive forever standing in those X mobs but I can win, I don't know for sure that I can defeat 2*X mobs if I increase my defense enough to halve my average incoming damage. However, the closer I am to full health at the end of a fight with X mobs, the more likely it is that I can win against 2*X mobs, or something close to it. This gets back to the heart of the assumptions about playing for the immortality line.

If I wasn't clear before, and looking back I can see I probably wasn't, I wasn't trying to state that the immortality analysis gives you the knowledge to pick the best combination of mitigation (defense or DR) and HP recovery to any given DPS. It simply lets you pick a maximal value you can survive forever. You are correct that how that value was arrived at from its component values will affect how it performs under different DPS loads in excess of the immortality rate.

This in no way invalidates the usefulness of the immortality line model. The central notion behind the immortality line is that, over relatively long stretches of play, such as a single kill-all mission, a player seeks conditions that meet their immortality line. If their trend through a mission is to continually decrease in remaining HP, they tend to slow down, kite foes, reduce their difficulty, or take some other action to reduce the average damage they are facing and drive their HP trend towards infinite survival. Under these assumptions the difference in being defeated in 15.38 versus 17.38 isn't especially germane. The key is that the player was going to be defeated at all and so likely took action to avoid it. The higher the character's immortality line, the more combat stress the character can manage and still survive. Assuming increased combat stress has a relationship with increased reward, a higher immortality line will allow the character will be capable of a higher reward per unit time.

You're arguing for a different analytical situation, where that model arguably breaks down. You want to analyze the situation where a player and a mob (or two players) duke it out and race to see who dies first. As you point out, there's no way we can analyze that in the general case, because we can't predict what the foe's DPS output is going to be. But that doesn't mean that the immortality analysis is wrong. It means its not meant to model that situation.

And none of this has anything to do with what you argued against in your original post. Multiple posters in this thread have addressed that with very firm math, and you have not once responded to it. You have instead wandered off into other territory (taking the rest of us - including me - with you) about with the relationship between values of defense and regen for a given DPS. That's a different topic than the one you mentioned in your OP.

(As an aside, those are not the defeat time numbers I got for reasons relating to what Chaos String mentioned. You seem to be assuming that whatever is attacking you is missing 50% of the time at base. This is a poor assumption. Mobs above your level and/or above minion rank have greater-than-unity accuracy, making their base hit probability greater than 50%. All you can say with certainty is how your defense affects their damage relative to no defense at all. However, that's not especially germane as it doesn't change the outcome in your example.)

But if you choose a given DPS target, as the immortality line model does, you can see which changes move the time you survive higher. That's all that matters. That's mathematically the same as choosing a duration you'll survive and seeing what makes the DPS you'll live that long against go up.

A higher immortality line always means you live longer on average in the face of any average damage for which you will not already live forever. The actual numbers do not matter. I don't know why you keep referring to the exact damage for the immortality analysis. No one cares about that number. We only care about changes to a build that make it better.

Actual (random) variations in burst DPS may mean that real performance deviates from the average, but that's a limitation inherent in the math being used by everyone in this discussion.

Edit: if you are possibly trying to say that you don't like the limitations in the time averaged assumptions of the immortality or time-to-defeat model (the more general case Umbral posted and which I also use), you're doing so incredibly obscurely.

Do you understand what percentages represent?

He expressed change in incoming damage as a percent. There is nothing wrong with that statement. He did not change the definition of anything.

You don't have to know the absolute number to know that removing a larger percentage of any number is better mitigation. We don't understand why you can't see this.