Archimedes

Heh. I work nights and I don't have classes tonight, so I'm basically chilling here (no pun intended).

But... it's got nothing to do with Ice Armor or Energy Absorption. So, it really doesn't belong here.

Err... wrong forum, Havok?

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Couple of changes we're making in I5:

1) Instead of the first five levels being debt free, the first TEN levels will be debt free.

2) XP debt will be halved on mission maps (that includes outdoor mission maps, too).

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The first one is cool, thanks! But could you elaborate a little on the second one, please? Are you saying that a character would get half the debt they get now while on a mission map, or that they earn half as much debt back while on a mission map? Thanks.

I can't speak on the effect for Fire Tankers. But I can for Invulnerability Tankers, thanks to my spreadsheet.

With just one Kora Fruit, an Invulnerability Tanker becomes almost 87% more effective than an Ice Tanker. Just one.

To bring this post back on topic...

I couldn't come up with an Ice vs Fire spreadsheet. Burn presents too much of an 'X Factor', since I don't know how to get it to fit. And it can't be ignored, since the fact that the Burn patches are, essentially, an indirect method of damage mitigation (ie enemies die quickly, thus being unable to attempt to attack a fire tanker). So for now, I've put that aside.

But while I was doing that, a really depressing thought came to me.

What's purple, accessible to anyone at level 40, and easily obtained over and over?

Kora Fruit. 50% defense with a click of a button. No endurance cost, and the defense remains until the time expires, so it can't be lost with toggle drop.

In essense, anyone can have better than Ice Tanker defenses with just 2 of these; and since they're guarenteed to be found in this mission, and with the mission being infinitely repeatable... well, do I really need to go on?

*sigh* Yet another kick in the pants for Ice Tankers.

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I'm a Domesticus 50 MA/Regen scrapper who loves being with my friends. They let me go and maul stupid LTs and even let me keep them for food, so they're nice! It sure does feel kind of crappy being on a leesh sometimes . *smells a bunch of bad guys* Let me go let me go, *growls* kill kill kill! *gets let loose, goes and mauls a Kronos*

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3 stars for you. Great post.

I'm posting from work right now, and the spreadsheet's on my home comp; when I get home (around 6:45am est) I'll arrange with Snorii to get it up.

I'm not done yet, though. Next project: working out how Ice fares against Fire and Stone. Firey Aura will be really hard, since (for the most part) their best defense is a good offense. Not saying this is good or bad, just a statement of my opinion.

Once I get the percentages for Stone and Fire versus Cold worked up, I think we'll finally have the proof needed, once and for all, to show that not only does EA not need a toning down, but that the set needs some real attention.

I have to sorta agree on the PvP part. Got into a 2v3 fight (two ice tankers versus an invuln tank, and fire controller and some other kind of controller, our earth controller split on us).

Closest I came to dropping was when the invuln tanker finally managed to get a brawl off on me, though from the looks of things he'd been trying to hit me with that most of the match. But I had a break free, once I was out of stun I just popped EA (sucking end off of the little fire imps that weren't doing squat for damage against me, even when they did hit). That gave me plenty of time to bring my toggles back up. Match ended in a stalemate with no defeats on either side. It was boring, actually.

Don't try 1v1 against a scrapper though.

As an aside, I've just about gotten that spreadsheet done, with a lot of help from Circeus (thanks man! ). I don't have anyplace to host it, so I'm just trying to figure out the best way to post it here without the information being too difficult to read.

I will say this, though; as better as invulnerability is compared to ice, it only gets worse with buff/debuffs.

I've actually counted.

If you include Inspirations (but not APPs, since no Tanker APP gives any), there's more than three times as many ways to gain defense as there are to gain resistance in this game. 19 buffs/debuffs for Defense versus 6 buffs/debuffs for resistance. Ain't that lovely?

The biggest reason I want to include buffs is pretty simple; to show how much more Invulnerability benefits than Ice, just to put things into perspective.

Take Fortitude, for instance. It provides a base +25% bonus to Damage, Accuracy and Defense.

For the Invulnerabilty tanker, the damage and accuracy bonuses aren't going to be as effective as it is for Ice, simply because of Invincibility (since it allows the Invulnerability Tanker to skip slotting Accuracy enhancements into their attack powers, allowing them to slot more Damage instead). But a Tanker's job is to take damage. On the other hand, the Defense buff is of great help to the Invulnerability tanker; less hits taken means that their overall damage taken is less.

On the other hand, the Damage and Accuracy buffs do tend to help Ice Tankers more, since we generally have to slot Accuracy enhancements into our attacks. Again though, we're there to take damage, not deal it, so as far as this disccussion is concerned isn't really a benefit. And (this is really the big difference), the Defense buff is almost wasted on us. Unless we're facing lots of enemies with high Accuracy and/or Defense debuffing abilities, more Defense is just overkill and unnecessary.

Overall, this tends to further push the Invulnerability tankers ahead of Ice tankers, since now they're taking almost as few hits as we are, and receiving much less damage because of the resistances available within their sets.

D'oh! Sorry, had to read and post quick, didn't catch that second link. I'll download it when I get home and do some number crunching with Excel tomorrow as time permits. Thanks!

Almost! That chart has recharge times, but not the length of time the buff/debuff lasts. Thanks again though!

Thanks, LeMoi. It's definitely going to help, but to get a full picture, I'm also going to need base recharge times and the base buff time length as well.

One thing I've been considering lately about Circeus' calculations involving Ice vs. Invulnerability; how much do teammates' buffs alter these numbers?

The reason I ask is because of my experience last weekend, when I was by myself out in Crey's Folly and happened to see Jurassik walking around. As it turns out, a good friend of mine that with two accounts was online; her player has a L50 kinetic/electric defender and a L39 peacebringer that they typically duo (if you're on Virtue, you know Kaloseidos and Kalos Eidos). Soon as she knew about Jurassik, I dropped down in front of him, Taunted, then crossed my fingers and hit Hibernate. Luckily he missed, so he was still bashing on me when the Kalos twins showed.

Over the course of the long fight (I think it went a good 10 minutes?), the kin defender twin hit Jurassik repeatedly with both Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift, while keeping Increased Density cast on me. Even with me running Frozen Armor, Wet Ice (no sense in using Glacial Armor, all his attacks seemed to be S/L) and hitting him with a 3 def slotted Wet Ice, he managed to tag me quite a few times (don't have Hero Stats, so I can't give an exact number). But because of the buffs I got, the most damage he did to me was 700.

The reason I mention this is because of this: while there are more defensive buffs then there are resistance buffs, if Ice were given a small amount of S/L resistance, could the teammate resist buffs be enough to help push Ice to being as effective as Invulnerability?

If I have the time this weekend (I have to work, so it'll be a little harder), I want to put together a listing of all defensive and resistance buffs for a comparison. I already know that there are more of the defensive type, but I'd be interested to see how much benefit each skill grants.

By the way, sorry if the posts rambles; writing it at work.

First off, I hope that none of my posts have looked as I were complaining to/whining to/accusing the devs of doing things that weren't helping Ice Tankers; I honestly tried to keep my posts impassioned without being flammatory or derogatory. Enough of my friends on Virtue have heard that (and to them, I extend my heartfelt thanks for listening to me gripe and bellyache about this since I've played here, and putting up with me).

The fact that they are listening gives me a sense of relief. I love my Ice Tanker Halley's Comet, and would love to be able to continue experiencing all the game has to offer with her. The current state of EA on Test had me quite concerned that even being able to tank was going to be extremely hard without a respec and lots of work.

EDIT: Typing on 3 hours sleep = lots o' typos

I do like the idea of adding a damage debuff to Icicles; as it stands now, the relatively small amount of damage it does hasn't been enough for me to take it, given its prohibitive Endurance cost. However, my only concern with this is how much would it need to do, to be effective?

After all, it's often the alpha strike (ie the very first attack) that sends an Ice Tanker to the floor, so the debuff would have to be large enough to make a difference right away, while at the same time it can't be so much that Bosses and lower-classed villians are nearly dropped to null damage. Also, there aren't Damage Debuff enhancements presently in the game, so we would have no method of enhancing how much debuffing we would be doing.

And it also doesn't address the problem of Permafrost still being completely useless for our set. There are virtually no enemies that use Ice-based attacks; the only ones that come to mind are Council Marksmen, Outcast with Ice powers, Crey Scientists and Crey Cryo Armors.

Instead, I'd like to offer a counter-proposal. One, place a small amount of S/L resistances into Permafrost. The amount an Invulnerability scrapper gets from RPD (9.375% base + 1.875% per SO if I remember correctly). Secondly, make the Damage Debuff into an Accuracy Debuff. This works more in theme with the Ice Tanker set (by making us that much harder to hit), plus since there are Accuracy Debuff Enhancements, we can tweak them if we so desire.

EDIT: Added the Outcasts to the list of enemies that do Ice damage.

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As to the small string of Bobcat comments, I've fought Bobcat 3 times, once when she was 3 levels above me, and twice when she was 2 levels above me. I had 5 slotted Tough and didnt die once. Sure, I came a bit close, but nothing worrisome.

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Not counting any other buffs, you had (20% + 5*4%=40%) s/l resistances, therefore reducing the amount of damage she was doing from her max hit (2052) down to 1231. Assuming perma-Hoarsfrost, that's surviveable.

But why should ice tankers have to go to Tough? Tough should be an option, not a requirement. This isn't a case of a min-maxer looking to squeeze every single advantage out of the game that they can. Without Tough, an Ice tanker just doesn't even come close to having the amount of surviveability any other Tanker has.

I don't want the other Tanker primaries dropped. I don't want them dragged down to our level, Tankers in general have had it bad for so long anyways.

Nor do I feel any of us are asking for a lot. I don't want resistances to everything in the game at higher base values than Invulnerability, or for Icicles to do more damage than Burn, or to have the same (or better) defense buff Stone gets versus Psionic.

Myself, I just want some s/l resistances. Enough that I can do my job versus monsters and archvillians, without having to have a defender strapped to my hip or having to give up two powers to get a power pool.

How is this so game-breaking? Why is it so hard for the developers to understand this? And why are they now putting a cap on EA, when we have to wait eight more levels for a power that only begins to narrow the gap between ourselves and the other Tanker primaries?

Much as I'd like to hope that as well, if geko believes that Energy Absorption is overpowered as it stands now, it leads me to believe that he's looking at this power in a vacuum; that is, he isn't considering how much an Ice Tanker depends on this power to function with the rest of his/her powers in order to try to do their job.

He must see something like, 'oh, an ice tanker with 6 end drain SOs can take any minions/lts/bosses +X levels to zero endurace, this needs to be fixed.'

What he doesn't realize is:[*]AVs and Monsters are immune to end drain. I have EA 5 slotted, I took out all but the one end drain SO I had and replaced them with 4 more end drain SOs, then hung around Crey's Folly on Test until Jurassik spawned. His end bar barely quivered when I hit him with EA.
[*]End drain doesn't last long even against minions. All enemies seem to regain endurance at a fairly fast clip; without taking Hasten (which I have not, no real point when I already have my character set up to a point where I don't have too much of an end problem) EA needs at least 2 recharge reducers in order to effective keep enemies below monster class drained.
[*]Surviving the alpha strike: it's not so much a problem these days with stacking armors, but it still happens. The alpha strike can drop an ice tanker before they get EA off, thus negating any controlling effects EA may or may not have. A tanker can't do anything if they're kissing concrete.

The fact of the matter (in my eyes) is that, in designing the tanker primaries, the devs left Ice substandard by not including a useful and necessary amount of resistance into the set. All of the controlling abilities in the set are moot when you're defeated. And having to go outside of our sets to get this? I thought the devs had figured out already that we hate having to do that when they made Taunt work like it used to do, thus making it not necessary to pick up Provoke.

It seems they still haven't figured that out completely yet.

Just to be absolutely sure, I retested EA on the test server this morning. I went out to Dark Astoria (since it was the nearest hazard zone to where I logged in), and found the first big group of enemies. It was a group of 8 Banished Pantheon, L22.

Since they would not draw aggro unless I did something, I dropped into the middle of the group, and fired EA. As soon as I had, I counted how many enemies had lost end.

It was only 5.

Please don't feel I'm trying to be snide with you Bluefan, or that I'm attempting to single you out. I do realize that you have a different point of view, and have had a different experience playing an Ice Tanker than many others who have posted to this thread have. This is the main reason why I re-tested, just to be absolutely sure.

The point you seem to be missing is that this doesn't affect the defense bonus (though this is enough as it is, thanks to all of the ways that defense can be debuffs and/or accuracy can be buffed versus the ways resistance can be debuff, which are damn few).

There's also the fact that the number of enemies Taunted by EA just got capped, and the number of enemies we can End drain (and thus control by lowering the number of attacks they can use) just got capped.

Then, add that with the fact that (for all purpose since Ice damage in PvE is quite rare and not everyone will be trying PvP), Ice is defense and not resistance, and it's easy to see why Ice Armor tankers are considered 'gimped' by most of the playerbase. I can't count the number of times I was dropped from a team or had an invite revoked once the leader found out HC was Ice. People know that Ice cannot handle the same sort of challenges that the other Tankers take for granted. All because we have zero resistances to Smashing/Lethal damage.

Hell, besides SR scrappers, we're the ONLY set that has one method of gaining S/L directly from a skill. Every other AT has two, since all of the blaster, defender and controller APPs grant access to a S/L resist power.

And I, for one, am really tired of playing second fiddle to any other tanker, of being the 'backup' because an Invulnerability, Fire or Stone tanker can handle the sort of enemies that people want to face without really breaking a sweat. Especially given the wide array of defensive options available versus resistance.

Where did you get the impression that any of us are starving for slots? I never said that, and neither did Circ.

The problem is simple, and has been stated numerous times: Ice Tankers are the ONLY set that can be one-shotted by an AV or monster class villian, unless we give up two powers in order to pick up Tough. With the disperancies both between the number of defense buffs versus the number of resistance buffs AND between resistance and defense, Ice Tankers cannot compete with any other Tanker primary.

And now geko seems under the impression that Energy Absorption (which only barely begins to help Ice Tankers narrow the gap) is way overpowered and is nuking it to near-ineffectiveness.

From BuffyASummer's research:

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Tough (Fighting pool) is 20% resistance to smashing and lethal (15% for Scrappers) and each SO DamRes enhancer provides 4% more (3% for Scrappers).

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20% + (6 * 4%)=44% resistance to S/L damage.

The problem here is two-fold:
[*]It's a toggle, unlike RPD and Stone Skin; so, like Firey Aura tankers, we can lose this if we get stunned. It also means it requires Endurance to maintain it; thus, running it with 6 damage resistance SOs would only add a further endurance burden to an already toggle- and endurance-management heavy set.
[*]It's the third choice out of a power pool set. So, not only does it require sacrificing at least 2 slots to get, but it's a selection any AT can pick up; in the end, this still puts Ice Tankers behind the other armor sets, since any AT (including other Tankers) can get it as well. This isn't to say that many will, so this last point is not so much an issue.

Still, in the end, it's the same problem that Ice Tankers have been trying to get addressed for as long as I can recall; we can't adequately do the jobs of the other Tanker primaries. We can't tank any AV or monster without heavy assistance or by sacrificing skills and slots by dipping into the power pool. Add this to the fact (and yes, I have checked) that there are many more ways to get defense (as buffs, as inspirations) then resistance, and what you end up with is that Ice Tankers need some help.

The solution is easy, and has been suggested by many Ice Tankers, many many times: S/L resistance in Permafrost.

Easy to code. Easy to monitor.

Making the least-used and most unappreciated Tanker Set even worse by nuking our best skill only puts us further in the doghouse.

EDIT: That's the last time I try to do math in my head while juggling a phone call from an irate department leader...

Ain't that the truth.

Just thought of yet another way this change hurts Ice Tankers. Now the limit on the number of enemies we can aggro with EA just got capped.

That's right ladies and gentlemen, on top of putting a cap on the amount of defense one can get (and since it's been well established that medium defense + medium to high resistances >> high defenses...) and the number of enemies we can draw end from, there's the chance that our base end drain for EA was lowered, and for certain, now Ice Tankers won't be able to use it to hold aggro on large groups of enemies.

Thanks devs. You've gone and taken the best power of the weakest tanker set, and made it mediocre.

Where does that leave Ice? Further behind any other tanker primary in the game (which wasn't anything close to begin with... )

Try three times, Circeus.

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o Defenders and Controllers will now drain more Endurance when using powers that drain endurance. More specifically, Defenders will drain more endurance when using Electricity Blast than a Blaster using the same power. Controller will now drain more endurance with powers such as Transfusion, but Defenders will still drain more than Controllers.

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Wanna lay even odds that EA's base end drain got lowered as well?