Arcanaville

Basically all mind control attacks, even Levitate, are psi-only. Levitate is less common than Mesmerize on critters, but it does show up here and there (Dollface has it, the Coralax Shaper does, and Numina does off the top of my head). Except the Seer version is typed Ranged. No idea why.

Besides Mind Control and Blind which are all typed Psi, almost all versions of Fearsome stare are typed negative only. Unlike Terrify, no damage. Like Terrify, ridiculously long terrorize SR often has to just wait out.

I got Zookeeper by betting a friend I could achieve the badge in less than four hours on Monster Island with an energy blaster. I lost, finishing in four and a half hours of blasting, although I took a short break in the middle.

Now go one step further. That's the player side of the game. The developer side of the game is different. Somehow, they have to know how to make a "block forward" and "block spherical" power that is reasonably balanced. They need to knock how much the block power should block and how often the interrupt ability should interrupt. The player doesn't need to know these things precisely, or even at all, but the devs do.

When you say the game shouldn't have to "obfuscate the numbers" actually, it does. The players either see the qualitative differences, or they see the quantitative differences between the powers, but within the game engine itself its all numbers. The system must be capable of showing the devs the numbers, so the devs know how to design things. It must then make the qualitative differences preeminent, so most players focus on those. You can call that obfuscation if you wish, but its not a bad thing in this context. You mention Darksiders as a game with no numbers intruding on your gameplay. That's a form of obfuscation, because there are numbers ultimately governing your gameplay.

The game just tricked you into thinking you don't need to know them. If the qualitative differences are strong enough, many players will settle for that, which means they won't feel compelled to learn the numbers. That's the best outcome possible here. Its not really possible to make a game in which knowing the numbers plus having unlimited analysis capability wouldn't provide an advantage. But we can reduce the edge to make the effort less worthwhile relative to just playing the game. That can be an actual design goal of a game, but it ultimately comes down to a combination of qualitative diversity, and mechanical obfuscation.

Incidentally, obfuscation is not the same thing as concealment. The SR passive resistances are not concealed. What they do is precisely known. Their survival value is obfuscated, because its mechanics make it impossible to compare in any simple fashion to any of the standard static mitigation types. The truth is virtually nobody knows what they are actually worth exactly. And to the extent that I know, I can't even trivially describe because of its highly complex situational nature. But anyone can play SR and formulate a subjective opinion fairly easily and fairly quickly. Just one very difficult to put in a spreadsheet and calculate around.

The entire game could be like that: I believe its actually possible to construct a game in which many elements are easier to create an intuitive value for than to measure, even if no data is concealed from the player. If enough elements are, that swings the balance to subjective evaluation and in-game playtesting, and away from numerical paper min/maxing.

In I24, there's an invention proc that offers scaling resistance. Starting from 100%, the lower your health the higher the resistance. It offers MIN((100 - Health)/9,10)% res. Zero at full health, 10% at 10% health, and linearly increasing from full to ten. No concealment, perfect transparency. What's it worth?

What you seem to be doing is what everyone else does when they calculate survivability. 40% defense is 80% mitigation. 45% defense is 90% mitigation. Everyone knows not to presume that means 45% defense is 13% better. You seem to think that the standard mitigation calculations assert that. They don't. The standard model says if you're going to compare 40% defense to 45% defense, you compare incrementally. 40% defense gets hit 10 times out of 100, 45% defense gets hit 5 times out of 100 (oversimplifying here for the even minion case). Thus, 45% defense is twice as good.

What you've done is redefine the term mitigation to mean something it does not mean. Mitigation is what gets blocked, but you've decided to redefine the term to mean what gets let in, just because you don't find what gets blocked to be useful. Rather than do that, because that's wrong, I defined Mitigation to be something that actually relates to mitigation, and I use a completely different set of calculations to calculate survivability, and called them "Survivability" so I didn't have to radically alter the definitions of the words.

Other players do likewise: both Werner and Starsman I believe create and use metrics that is essentially a survivability rating to compare different levels of defense, resistance, and regen. There's nothing stopping you from doing likewise. But if you call it mitigation in defiance of the english definition of the word, you'll only be introducing confusion into the conversation.

Back when we could debuff AV tohit, DM/Regen was better, because of quick recovery (and DM could make you pretty tough to hit all by itself).

It would be fairly trivial to implement, but the devs have in the past felt there were PvE balance concerns with it.

I'm not sure even the SR scrappers would be as thrilled with the idea today as when the idea was first proposed. Remember: regular defense doesn't stack with Elusivity. That means SR would not have the easy road to soft-capping it has now. What it would have is defense basically impervious to tohit buffs. Today, Elusivity would have to be integrated into a game where soft-capping with inventions is far more common than it ever was in the past. A lot of players might prefer super-strong but brittle defense to weaker but super-stable defense.

It does suggest, however, that Elude could be turned into an Elusivity buff for use when tohit goes berserk. It would still be avoidance, but not defense, and nearly impervious to tohit buff avoidance. That plus regular defense would really make you nearly unhittable under all conditions for three minutes, and would have less PvE collateral balance issues (because Elude as a tier 9 defense is supposed to be unusually strong anyway).

Although that's another example of math being done for math's sake, completely disconnected from reality. I remember in the aftermath of the banking crisis people were saying they were worried if investment banking compensation was reduced you'd see a massive drain of smart people from the banking industry.

To which my first reply was "what smart people?"

My second reply was "I would rather have dumb people that don't understand how derivatives work and stay the hell away from them handling my money, thanks. By all means let all those 'smart' people leave the financial world and see if they can find real jobs."

That's tricky. Without the license as T_J mentions above, Masterminds and Controllers are out. Ranged squishies have difficulty consistently soloing AVs and GMs even *with* inventions without very strong builds. In almost every MMO if you want to go one on one against the strongest NPC foes, you need enough defense to keep yourself alive, enough damage to bring them down, and enough sustainability (endurance, mana, power, whatever) to last long enough to make it happen. Most things for obvious reasons don't have all three automatically.

I think your best bet is a high damage corruptor, something like Fire/Rad or Fire/Kin. With just SOs, you're not going to bring an AV down without help, but fortunately for you in City of Heroes we can cheat like no other game. We have inspirations which are little temp powers that can give us a temporary boost to damage, defense, resistance, heal back some health, etc. By level 50 you'll have twenty slots of these, and some inspirations are very powerful and not difficult to get. Medium strength lucks, for example, are strong enough that two will buff your defense so high it will reduce an AV's chance to hit you to the game's minimum floor and they last a minute each. You can easily have ten minutes of being nearly impossible to hit.

If you use inspirations to take care of the defensive side, its possible you can build a ranged character with SOs that is strong enough to get there on the offensive side, and you're there.

The fact of the matter is, if you're limited to SOs, you're never going to have a build remotely as strong as what a player with inventions can make. So if you're looking for some trick there, there isn't one. But if you don't care about that, you just want to be able to play the game and do most of the things other players can do, that's possible in this game because so much is within reach of players that take advantages of the tools available to them, including temp powers, inspirations, and the like, most of which are available to premium players.

Me either. But that doesn't mean its impossible to be invented. And I don't subscribe to the notion that lots of smart people make games, so if it was possible it would already have been done. Its probably more likely that everyone capable of doing it is making ten times more money doing something else.


See, that's amusing to me because I've never, ever done that. I play my characters and when they burn up endurance too fast I slot more end reduce and I build up a sense of how my character plays over time.

And then I hit 50 and Mids my brains out. But I don't chart out endurance to figure out I should maybe slot more end reduce into my attacks. Enhancements cost something between nothing and twice nothing when you're leveling if you just dump your drops into the market. But I would rather learn by learning, than by calculating. And its always worked for me.

Now, if you want to get the best performance, you have to min/max, and that takes effort. But I don't honestly expend a lot of concern over players who wants to be the best and only wants the effort required to be on their terms. That's a shame, not a design problem.

Mitigation doesn't determine survivability. Its inverse, what I call Admittance, does (that one hasn't caught on though). No level of damage avoidance equals survivability. What hits you is either enough to kill you or not, regardless of how much is mitigated.

We compare defensive powers by how strong they are, which is a measure of how much they can mitigate. But that's a relative value, useful to compare mitigators to each other. We actually measure survivability by calculating admittance, whether anyone calls it that or not. Its 1-Mitigation, but then translated into absolute (not percentage) values. Its often done in reverse, by calculating the maximum survivable damage. per window of time.

Its grounding in reality that is really a flaw in your version of mitigation. By attempting to bend it to serve the function Admittance really serves, it completely breaks any sense of connection to reality. My definition of mitigation is an operative definition. Which is to say, its defined based on how we would measure it. We measure the mitigation of X by flipping X off, measuring how much damage we take, flipping X on, measuring how much damage we take, and subtracting. Or, because its more convenient in the long run, dividing to get a percentage.

Human beings are not good at observing small changes in things accurately, but when the changes are high enough they can judge gross changes in survivability. If you have 40% defense, a 5% defense power will halve the incoming damage you take; conversely it will double the damage you can survive. Players can notice that. On a relative basis, 5% defense is offering an incremental 50% increase in damage mitigation, which exactly matches players direct in-game experience. They know its *not* "only" taking out another five hits out of a hundred.

Its five out of a hundred theoretical attacks. Its five out of ten actual hits. Both mathematically true, but only one of them is something anyone cares about.

Players cannot observe what doesn't happen. They do not observe that that power blocks 5 more attacks out of 100, because they cannot observe the 100. They observe that they used to get hit by 10, and now they get hit by 5. That's half, and that's the value of that power in that circumstance.

The circumstance by which we judge totals is relative to starting from zero: zero defense, zero resistance. We compare to that standard, because players do not judge a power on the basis of what it does absolutely, but what it does relatively. What benefit does it convey in reality, right now, relative to what I start with. All other definitions of mitigation are academic curiosities, but don't match players experience.

The fact that the "standard model" of mitigation is essentially the *only* one that is used when mitigation is discussed publicly is a testement to the fact that it as demonstrated over the years to match people's in-game expectations, even when for various reasons it doesn't always match people's calculation expectations.


Also I should point out that while I say this is "my" system, that's because its always been the way I've done it, going back to when nobody was doing it. But its not my system in the sense I'm its lone proponent or even its singular defender. The system doesn't really need defending: its the system: the system everyone uses now, the system that has been reinvented many times over by other players, the *only* system that has proven to be effective at functioning as the foundation for productive mitigation discussions. People do occasionally come up with their own proprietary systems, but there is no minority circle of people using another system incompatible with the standard one anywhere I'm aware of besides within their own heads. Lots of other systems have been promoted as the "better" one, but they all eventually get discarded because no one can find a practical use for them.

Nova hitting an entire room full of demons did that with more kaboom. Or rather, more Kaboo.

You can't mitigate what would have never hit in the first place.

Here's a different angle at the problem. Suppose you have 90% resistance. Virtually everyone calls that 90% damage mitigation. But lets say you also have soft-capped defenses. So, for even minions, only 5% of all attacks get through. But that means your 90% resistance is only reducing that 5% down to 0.5%, cutting 4.5% of the original damage.

Is 90% resistance only offering 4.5% damage mitigation in this case? What does that even mean?

What we normally say is that 5% of all attacks *land*, and 90% resistance mitigates 90% of what lands. So its legitimately 90% mitigation. If you flip that resistance off and on, while under soft-capped defenses, you'll see incoming damage drop by 90% of what it is when that resistance is off. Its that relative difference that is the basis of how we judge mitigation for resistance, and essentially no one argues with that.

Defense must be judged in the same way, or it becomes impossible to compare the two together in a consistent fashion.

I think you're confusing it with Issue 7: Arcanaville Fixes All the Defense Things.

When you want your characters to be able to take more damage, do you take tough or do you slot sprint? How do you *know* its better to take tough than slot sprint? Are you certain the speed increase you get from slotting sprint won't allow for more damage mitigation? Have you done the analysis to be certain?

Any good powers system that offers options should have an intuitive path to choosing those options that may not be optimal, but allows for approximation and reasonable decisions. There should be structure to those decisions, so you aren't choosing between a million different options, but between three or four different options, each of which could have five or six different variations, each of which may have several ways to tweak them.

If you want more defense you take a defense power. If you want more speed you take a running power. To a first order approximation that will always be a reasonable choice. You may have different defense options, but there will always be a reason for taking them. One buffs you a lot. One buffs you less, but also buffs your team mates. Which one do you choose? It depends on which one you want to do. Once you decide you hate your team mates and want a power that buffs just you, you're done. Until it comes time to tweak that power with enhancements: do you want more defense, or do you want it to cost less to run?

In another thread the subject of incomparables came up. One way to make systems with lots of choices more manageable is to make those choices obvious qualitative choices rather than quantitative choices. Do you want to do this, or that. Those choices aren't quantifiable because they are an expression of value that is dependent on the player. And because they aren't quantifiable, they aren't directly comparable.

There's absolutely no reason for a complex system to present its choices in a complex way, unless you are attempting to trick people into thinking the system is more complex than it is. A good system is one that presents its choices in the simplest way possible but still generates rich complex results.

Wait till they announce the changes for Issue Arcanaville: Arcanaville

Well, that's usually because they have something else already. For me, my focus tends to be on +regen for SR because its relatively easy to get and any way to recover health within soft-capped defenses has a proportionately higher value. On live I'm currently sitting at about 31 h/s at level 50 which is pretty good. In I24 I'm looking to see if 50% s/l resistance is feasible (without changing a thing my live build translates to 32%ish s/l at the moment). That plus SR scaling resistances plus the scaling proc and I'll cap out s/l at about 40% health remaining.

I only specifically heard it mentioned for Aid Other.

Why choose SR?

1. It reaches high levels of defense quickly. Shields needs help from inventions and pools. An SR tank can be basically perma-eluded almost the instant SOs become available. SR scrappers and brutes can't quite get there that easily, but they still outmatch Shields until basically the end game.

2. As previously mentioned, DDR, DDR, DDR. I've seen Cims defense debuff Granite Tanks into the dirt. They kind of tickle my SR scrapper.

3. Strong set for natural concept characters.


When you can soft cap basically everything, SR loses some of its appeal. But not everyone plays multibillion inf builds. And for those that do, SR can still be turned into a pretty powerful build. And with the resistance bonus changes coming in I24, I can't even tell you how my SR build will improve in I24 anymore. I just know it will be more powerful than now, and its pretty powerful now.

If nothing else, you can start leveling it now and when the devs finally come to their senses and buff the set, you can say you knew it back when. I remember when SR was one mez protection click away from being an oversized power pool. Its probably just one heal/regen/maxhealth buff away from being competitive at the top end with Shields.

The standard mitigation definition - which also matches what people think mitigation generally means - is the percent of attacks or damage that are nullified relative to what would have hit otherwise. So we don't normally say everyone starts off with 50% mitigation, because those attacks wouldn't have hit anyway. And if we say that, we then have to say everyone starts off with 35% mitigation against even Bosses. And 25% against even AVs. And so on. And it also means 50% resistance becomes 75% mitigation against minions.

When I say "the standard matches people's expectations" people sometimes believe that mitigation should be calculated in one way or another, but the rosetta stone is "what is 50% resistance?" Almost everyone says that's 50% mitigation, and from there the standard follows. 25% defense generates the same average mitigation, so 25% defense must also be 50% mitigation. It must be 50% mitigation vs minions, bosses, and AVs, because it generates the same average result as 50% resistance verses all those enemies.

That basic principle then translates into math from first principles. Mitigation is the number of attacks that miss divided by the number that would have hit, because that's what the expectation above is equivalent to. For even minions, the number that miss is your defense, and the amount that would have hit is minion base tohit, so mitigation = defense/basetohit = 25%/50% = 0.5, or 50%.

This extends to things with accuracy. The amount of hits a boss will normally land is 1.3 * 50% = 65% - Boss intrinsic accuracy is +30%. The actual amount of hits that will land (on average) is 1.3 * (50 -25) = 32.5. So the amount of misses generated is 65-32.5 = 32.5. We then have mitigation = 32.5/65 = 0.5, or again 50%.

The base number of hits (with no defense) will generally be Accuracy * Basetohit. The number of actual hits will be Accuracy * (Basetohit - Defense). The number of misses will be Accuracy * Basetohit - Accuracy * (Basetohit - Defense). That reduces to Accuracy * (Basetohit - (Basetohit - Defense)) = Accuracy * (Defense).

Thus, mitigation = Misses/BaseHits = (Accuracy * Defense) / (Accuracy * Basetohit) = Defense/Basetohit.

QED

Against incarnate critters, base tohit is not 50% its 64%. An SR scrapper with 30% defense is in some sense behaving like they have 14% less defense - 16%. But that's relative to a base 50% world. Its slightly misleading in that most people believe that's comparable to 28% resistance, but against Incarnates that's not true: 30% defense is comparable to 46.9% resistance, because its equivalent to 46.9% damage mitigation.

So 30% defense is like 16% defense when facing incarnate critters, but not like 32% resistance. Probably most people would make that intuitive but incorrect leap, because in any situation where base tohit is not 50%, people's intuition about the relationship between defense and resistance will be wrong.


If you're talking about how much harder something is to a defense set outside of comparisons to other things, its usually fine. If you're talking about a disadvantage relative to other things, its sometimes misleading. Mathematically correct so long as you do not generalize, but probably misleading.

Some of these thought exercises have had some practical benefit, but not in an easy to describe way.


I should mention as a food for thought item that while two methods for creating a complex free-form power system were mentioned above - fixed resource knapsacking and complexity theory-based emergent systems - that's not the current methodology I'm most interested in at the moment. I'm currently considering a line of thought that uses cryptography as its launch point, specifically the zero-knowledge proof analog to obscuring simpler foundations of more complex systems, so that simple but provably balanced systems can be used to generate more interesting ones.

In an alternate universe, such a system could have been the foundation for City of Heroes 2.

While its theoretically possible to make level-less games, you have to specifically design around that design principle, and its not easy. This game has a purple patch because not only does it need levels, the levels themselves aren't even enough.

One ancedote does not a counter-argument make, but my counter-anecdote is that Guild Wars very strongly encouraged to me looking at characters as essentially build containers. Guild Wars is far more end-game focused, making any attachment to pre-end game anything far less meaningful. And because you can earn and swap skills around the game strongly encouraged widening progression rather than alting. In Guild Wars, exploring the skill tree is a major part of the "content" of the game and that's what keeps players playing past the level cap.

Free form explicitly *precludes* having such a rich differentiated skill tree, because in free form you would be essentially creating your own skills from a much smaller set of ability components. That exploration wouldn't exist in the same way.

If you mean technical reasons, there's no technical reason it can't be made an inherent for all players. If you mean non-technical reasons, there's tons of those.

You have to take into account the relative change between people with defense and people without defense because that's how we define and normally use and judge mitigation. Otherwise its misleading because when you say its "just like having only 16% defense" most people will assume that means they are only mitigating 32% damage. But that's not true: your damage mitigation is still almost 50%.

To put it another way, 30% defense against 64% incarnates is a much better situation than 16% defense vs normal 50% critters.

If you want to look at it the way you're looking at it, all sorts of things you probably take for granted and most other players take for granted you'll no longer be able to. For example, I say that defense is just as strong against minions and bosses since I7. You can't, because the net chance for a minion to hit a 30% SR is 20%, but its 26% for a boss. Which is "like" having 24% defense. We today consider SR's defensive mitigation to be the same for even minions and +3 bosses. But the way you're looking at it, a +3 boss would have a net chance to hit of 33.8% - basically identical to even con Praetorian minions. So +3 bosses "nullify" just as much defense as Praetorian minions.

But complicating that even more, +3 bosses hit things with *zero* defense more often than even con minions, so +3 bosses are actually nullifying defense that isn't there. Even more than SR: net chance to hit is 84.5%, equivalent to increasing chance to hit by 34.5 percentage points, compared to the 13.8 percentage point increase for SR.

*If* you only look at the final chance to hit and derive your perspective from that, to be logically consistent you have to start making statements that will confuse everyone else until they do the math. Like accuracy nullifies less defense the more defense you have. If you vary accuracy defensive mitigation changes while resistance mitigation doesn't, even if they both end up admitting the same amount of damage.

The "normalized" mitigation approach I strongly encouraged back in the day which most people use now is something I liken to the invention of arabic numerals over roman numerals. The math is the same regardless, but the non-normalized perspective makes it almost impossible to talk about defensive mitigation in a systematic way.

+Tohit does increase critter threat, and it does so far more verses defensive sets than non-defensive sets in general. But you have to be careful about equating an increase in tohit as being identical to a decrease in defense. In some cases that's true, but in other cases its not. In an absolute case its true, but in a relative case it can be misleading. When it comes to judging Praetorian difficulty, the relative perspective to me is much less misleading, because the absolute one doesn't separate the increased difficulty everyone is facing from the specific one SR is facing, and because it cannot be extrapolated to the normal game. Its not like having 14% defense exactly. Its like having 14% defense while all non-defensive sets are under a -30% resistance debuff that SR avoids automatically. Something weird like that.