Arcanaville

I proposed a mechanism that would reduce the problem of overstacking defense bonuses as well.

The Manimal archetype is going to be ranged/defense? Giveth to blasters with one hand, taketh away with the other hand.

Ironically, the same zeal I see being applied to Blaster changes implies that any changes to the melee archetypes would not likely be conservative ones. That's of some concern because Blasters were so far out of whack it was practically impossible to overbuff them, or cottage rule slam them. But that's not remotely the case for the melee archetypes, for which making a dramatic change to one could easily start a holy war across all of them.

The stalker changes were pretty deft not just because of their numerical benefits, but also because complaints about them across the melee archetypes was minimal - at least as minimal as such things ever get on the forums. But changes that homogenize brutes and scrappers, or radically shift the roles of brutes, scrappers, and tankers, are inherently dangerous in that regard.

True, but consider that the vast majority of the mitigation your Dark Armor brute has doesn't scale either. Having the best heal in the game freed you to go nuts soft-capping it, but your soft-capped defenses were invention-purchased, they were not intrinsic to the set.

I24 blasters have to be judged in the same way. Sustain doesn't make a high performance build any more than Dark Regen does. But Dark Regen wrapped within soft-capped defense does. The resistances within Dark Armor are relatively small compared to the strength of your defenses and your heal. An I24 min/max blaster build isn't going to take Sustain and then try to get more non-scalable regen. Its going to bank Sustain and then wrap it in soft-capped defenses just as you did. And a soft-capped blaster with sustain is going to be a lot stronger in I24 than a soft-capped min/max blaster is now.

Now consider the best case scenario to go up against soft-capped dark. Soft-capped blaster, with Martial Combat's very high Absorb (3.33% per second of Absorb shield), *and* significant invention-based regeneration, and a long-recharge mez-breaker, and a mez-protection proc.

The single sustain power is just a piece of the puzzle, just like Dark Regen is just a piece of the puzzle. But if its possible to make the build work (I haven't actually tried to construct it yet), won't it be potentially very strong even compared to your Dark Armor brute? It won't exceed it, but won't it at least be playing in the same ballpark. And isn't that saying something amazing?

Is an errant legend one step down from a false god?

That's true, but we're talking about a regen buff that will more than double most blaster's net regeneration. So while regen does have an element of diminishing returns as damage gets higher (its less that the return is numerically lower, and more that the time it buys gets proportionately shorter), doubling regen is still going to be noticeable in my opinion even at relatively high threat levels. Its not going to double your ability to scale higher, which is why I said its likely someone already built to take on x5 or x6 has a shot at x8, which is a noticeable improvement. But I don't think someone that can only handle x3 will be able to scale all the way up to x8 even if Sustain improves regen by 160%, because it doesn't scale that way. I doubt if the triple strength Absorb will get you from x3 all the way up to x8. But it will very likely get you from x3 to x5, which again is a noticeable improvement.

The threat level that would make a doubling of regen seem unnoticable is probably out in the stratosphere of sustainable +8x8 or higher. Meaning someone that managed to build to take on +8x8 might not notice a significant improvement in what they can take on if their regen doubled. Its also true my energy blaster wouldn't be able to tell the difference between current regen and twice the amount facing a +8x8, but that's because I can't sustain anywhere near that level of damage in the first place, so that's a matter of twice nothing still being nothing. What I can handle at all, I24 sustain will noticeably improve, because my current mitigation is not insignificant verses what I take on normally. For all players, that statement is generally true: their mitigation is significant verses the content they normally play against. And doubling that mitigation's regeneration component should produce a noticeable non-trivial benefit relatively speaking.

If you're actually trying to make an energy/energy tank? Depends on what you're willing to do. One thing you should keep in mind is that unless you're willing to build it and then redo it again in a month or two, I24 is going to change the options around completely. In particular, any attempt to build a high mitigation energy/energy should reserve at least four slots for conserve power, because its becoming an Energize variant in I24. That means it will have a small heal, and a large regeneration buff in it, and it will be possible to make it perma which means you'll have perma-conserve power (possibly at a lower discount value, but still pretty strong).

Also, I think your build doesn't use the +3% Gladiator proc, and these days that's just a few hundred million, not two billion.


One tough call is whether to go scorpion shield for maximum defense, or go bonfire with the knockdown proc to get a serious amount of close-in mitigation. If you're going to try to jump into a spawn and mix it up in or near melee range, Bonfire could actually provide more mitigation than defense will verses critters without knockback protection.

Just to be different, while I can't quite figure out how to get the level of defense I want out of this build, maybe someone else can improve it. Its a powerboost defense, zip in, drop a bonfire, melee smash everything build:

It reserves four slots for conserve power which is becoming energize in I24. It should be pretty tough against smash/lethal enemies, and decent during the power boost uptime against energy/negative. The weakness I'm most uncomfortable with is the AoE hole, but hopefully most things will be flopping around too much to throw a lot of AoEs.

Technically, defense and resistance are not sides that need to be made fair. Its the net impact on powersets that is important, and you have to think these things through carefully. For example, it was originally thought that the huge amount of defense in the invention system was good for defense sets but as I tried to argue during I9 beta, the opposite is true. Once you can add more than about 10% - 15% defense in the invention system, the advantage swings the other way: defense sets cannot benefit as much from higher than soft-capped defenses (its just debuff hedging at that point) but resistance sets can benefit a ton.

Adding resistance bonuses just to make it "fair" implies that the invention system should have tons of +maxhealth and regen bonuses and absorb just to make sure all the other anthropomorphic game mechanics don't get sad. The real question is which powersets are disadvantaged by the lack of resistance bonuses, compared to who might get disadvantaged by having an overabundance of resistance bonuses. And I'm afraid we won't even know for certain before the entire thing leaves beta.

I don't have a specific objection to increased resistance bonuses, I just think the odds of nasty and irreversible unintended side effects from that increase are extremely high.

That's normal. Power boost increases the strength of defense powers, no different really than Build Up increases the damage strength of damaging attacks. Its a pretty big boost, higher than the boost you get from actually slotting the defense power itself.

The problem is that unless you have enormous recharge in your build, Power Boost cannot be made perma (it requires 400% total recharge to do that). But some people use it at the start of the fight to have maximum defense during the alpha volley of attacks from the spawn.

That would be out of character, as its clear Cole believes in his utopia. He never once, not even in his personal story, expressed regret for the price the Hamidon deal extracted. I believe Cole preferred Praetoria over how it used to be. Primal Earth is just a reflection of the messy past of Praetorian Earth, and not something Cole would ever want to return to.

The Magisterium trial makes it clear that Cole feels death is a better fate for his people than being forced to surrender to Primal Earth. If he's willing to kill his people to fight off Primal Earth, he's also going to be likely to consider death to Hamidon preferrable to surrender to Primal Earth.

I hope a gigantic one, because duration resistances don't stack in an accelerating manner like magnitude resistances**, making the tiny duration resists a bit quixotic.


** In other words, a 3.75% defense bonus is sometimes very small, and sometimes very large in effect when its stacked up. 10% mez resistance is always small, and increasingly unnoticeable as its stacked up (although its return is technically linear).

Hamidon pretends humanity doesn't exist, and Cole makes sure humanity doesn't do anything to get noticed.

That's not my greatest trick. My greatest trick was to convince the devs to constantly redesign the game to exactly match my posts so it looked like I was smarter than I am. Getting a game credit for it really puts it over the top I think.

Of course, when you're as good as I am at convincing people you know far more than you actually do, the reward is worth the effort. I have no idea why you do it unless you just love trying, since there appears to be no reward for it on your end.

Err...

You have to admit I probably could have negotiated a better deal than Cole.

That wasn't really a question. That was a statement essentially asserting that such a consideration was not meaningful.

Well since those are the ones you end up posting, I don't see how that helps the rest of us any.

Well lets see now...



Well there goes another wasted pie chart.

Just think: I had to be present for almost all of them. No matter how long winded anyone thinks I am, I had to read even more of them.

But only for the games you personally balance.

Avatar of Hamidon vs Avatar of Arcana. Confusion verses Bewilderment. Excessive prologue verses excessive exposition. The worst the devs can conjure verses the worst the devs can imagine.

The 400 had the membrane keyboard. The 800, and the XLs had regular keyboards. The C64 had the keyboard where the space bar kept falling off.

Hamidon has arrived to seal your doom humanity! I will wipe mother earth clean of your rotten infes...


Where'd everyone go?

Hello, 1%.


Except for a few of its specific weaknesses, soft-capped Dark is far away from everything. My SR Brute can't get there running enough amplifiers to make my kidneys glow.

Although, in I24 Blasters at least have a shot at doing interesting things with invention builds. Soft-capped martial combat with both mez-breaking and the mez proc will have survivability approaching or more likely exceeding I2 perma elude. And I remember Arbiter Hawk or Synapse mentioning something about fixing Entropic when it converted to PPM.

I'm thinking the horizon of performance for my I24 Water/MC blaster is going to be so far above anything I've had with any blaster in the past it'll seem like playing a completely different game.