Arcanaville

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Stealth, Grant Invisibility, Invisibility,Combat Flight, Weave, Maneuvers, Vengeance, and Combat Jumping will grant a Defense bonus to Smashing and Lethal Attacks in addition to Melee and Ranged attacks.

I added the same to Controller/Illusion/Group Invisibility.

The result of this is that ALL defense builds will benefit from Pool powers. Previously, Ice Tankers suffered somewhat because the Pool defenses did not stack with their defense powers. This is now rectified.

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So, I'm kinda confused. How does this "defense bonus" work? Is it a bonus on top of the defense inherent in the power?

Is this how it works:

Stealth Defense + Defense bonus (if Smashing/Lethal) = Stacked Defense.

Anyone wise enough to the comprehend the mystery that is "Defense" implementation in this game?

Oh yeah, how much of a bonus Statesman? 5%? 10%? 91.6667%? And can you add to the defense bonus if you slot defense enhancements?

Me No Comprende. Es muy difícil.

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No, I believe Statesman is saying that all power pool defenses, in parallel with providing melee/ranged defense, will also be providing smash/lethal defense.

Right now, if you have a melee defense, like say focused fighting, then combat jumping, which offers melee/ranged defense, stacks with it for melee attacks. But if you have smash/lethal defense (say, Frozen Armor), then combat jumping *didn't* stack, because smash/lethal doesn't currently stack with melee/ranged.

In effect, what Statesman is saying is that power pool defenses, like combat jumping, are being changed from melee/ranged, to in effect melee/ranged/smash/lethal - all with the same value.

There is no "bonus" actually being "added" to the power pools, they are just being made to stack with different (and orthogonal) attack types.

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Stealth, Grant Invisibility, Invisibility,Combat Flight, Weave, Maneuvers, Vengeance, and Combat Jumping will grant a Defense bonus to Smashing and Lethal Attacks in addition to Melee and Ranged attacks.

I added the same to Controller/Illusion/Group Invisibility.

The result of this is that ALL defense builds will benefit from Pool powers. Previously, Ice Tankers suffered somewhat because the Pool defenses did not stack with their defense powers. This is now rectified.

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In the broad strokes, it does, and I figured that something exactly like that was the likely solution that was going to be pursued.

But because of the stacking rules, there are a lot of intermediate and odd corner cases that are possible, mostly because this sort of thing isn't being done consistently. For example, deflection shield (FF) has smash/lethal and melee defense, while weave has smash/lethal and melee/ranged defense. That's a little odd. Will the average player - or the experienced player, really - have an "intuitive feel" for what happens when an SR scrapper with focused senses, a deflection shield, and hover is going to end up with, or to emphasize the point: will any reasonable player know intuitively that there will, or will not, be a benefit to turning on hover?

The specific problem was "should power pools always benefit someone?" But the general problem was this: "if a player has X, Y, and Z defenses, and he or she has defense W not yet turned on is it always the case that W will improve defense, short of reaching the tohit floor?"

MOST people seem to think that intuitively, the answer to that question should always be "yes." That is, I think, what most people are thinking when they say the current system is too complex or non-intuitive: it non-intuitively creates situations where a defense power might not help. Making sure that there is always "a stacking opportunity" helps, but doesn't resolve, the core issue.

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If the target's Defense is broken out separately, it would change the attack resolution to:


The attacker has a base chance to hit; this is modified by the level of the target and any accuracy modifiers from the power being used, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.

If the resultant chance to hit is lower than 5% or higher than 95%, it is capped to these values.

A random number is generated; if it is lower than the attacker's modified hit percentage, then they hit, and damage must be assessed; otherwise, attack resolution stops here.

Determine the target's Defense from powers and inspirations; if this percentage is higher than the AT-specific cap, the cap value is used instead.

A random number is generated; if it is lower than the target's modified Defense, the attack misses, and attack resolution stops here; otherwise, continue.

The attacker has a base damage for the attack, modified by level, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.

If the resultant damage exceeds the damage cap for the attack, the damage is capped to that value.

If the target has a Resistance to that attack type, the damage is reduced by the Resistance percentage. The Resistance value may be capped according to the target's AT; if the modified Resistance exceeds the cap, the cap value is used instead of the modified Resistance.

The remaining damage is applied to the target.


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You don't really need to roll twice: this is functionally equivalent to making defense work this way:

net tohit = base tohit * (1 + tohit buffs) * (1 - defense)

However, you have to be careful about dealing with things like debuffs, and especially the tohit floors and ceilings.

The basic idea was hashed out in two threads, one of which is lost to the ages, but the second of which is here. Take a look, see if that is more or less what you were thinking (it doesn't specifically deal with resistance, but that is a trivial addition).

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As some players have pointed out, Defense builds (Super Reflexes, Ice Armor, Stone Armor to a degree) have an inherent weakness in that there are a plethora of powers that debuff Defense in PvE and PvP.

In order to rectify this situation, we will be adding a Resistance to Defense Debuffs to a number of powers. This Resistance will not be enhanceable, but it will increase over level.

The Resistance % for the powers and Archetypes are as follows. The two numbers represent the Resistance at levels 1 and 50, respectively:

Scrapper
Super Reflexes
Focused Fighting: 4/21.6
Focused Senses: 4/21.6
Agile: 2/10.8
Dodge: 2/10.8
Lucky: 2/10.8
Evasion: 4/21.6
Elude: 10/54

Tanker
Ice Armor
Frozen Armor: 5.2/27.2
Wet Ice: 5.2/27.2
Glacial Armor: 5.3/27.2

Stone Armor
Rock Armor: 5.2/27.2
Rooted: 5.2/27.2
Crystal Armor: 5.2/27.2
Granite Armor: 13/68

The way this works is that the % above represent the amount subtracted from the incoming Defense Debuff. For instance, a level 50 Scrapper with Agile has any incoming Defense Debuff lessened by 10.8%.

Our general philosophy was to make it so that a player could achieve at level 50 high protection against Defense debuffs; a Defense build absolutely depends on the enemy missing his attacks!

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Of course this happens while I'm two thousand miles away from my PC. Although I'm basically happy with the idea (given the fact that I've been begging for it forever) and I'm still mulling over the top-end numbers (assuming I understand how they are supposed to stack) I think there's a problem with the overal implementation.

A 2% resistance is going to mean diddly-squat. At low levels, defense numbers are low, the likelyhood of being hit with a defense debuff is high, but the villains are just as accurate and the debuffs are just as strong.

A 10% defense debuff that gets reduced by a 2% resistance to 9.8% defense debuff is, well, ridiculous. The base 6% resistance you'll have if you have both the passive and the toggle (assuming that they stack only in that way) is not much better.

Lets keep in mind what the problem with defense debuffs really were, and it isn't the lack of resistance to them per se. The problem was that they subtract from defense, which makes them much more powerful than resistance debuffs. That is a mathematically consequence of the fact that Resistance (with the captial R) has inherent resistance to resistance debuffs built in, *and* built in scalable to the actual resistance (higher resistance = higher resistance to debuffs) AND MOST IMPORTANTLY the resistance to debuffs that Resistance has cannot itself be debuffed.

*That* is the critical difference betweeen defense and resistance. In effect, because Resistance always "fights" debuffs just as hard, Resistance does not, and cannot, suffer from spiraling collapse.

It is important to realize that Defense (with the capital D) had a form of "resistance to debuffs" as well, something the devs certainly must have been thinking all along: defense "resists" debuffs by avoiding getting hit, thus in effect evading some of the effects of defense debuffs (by not getting hit by the debuffs).

The core problem has always been not that Resistance resists resistance debuffs, while Defense does not, but rather than High Resistance permanently stays high in the face of resistance debuffs, while High Defense can get quickly blown apart, because Defense's "inherent avoidance of debuffs" is itself vulnerable to being debuffed.

Its the "vicious cycle" some have referred to: defense gets hit with a tiny debuff (in numerical terms) but its enough to lower defense enough to make it much more likely to be hit with the next debuff.

And the debuffs are GIGANTIC compared to defense. The low end defense and resistance debuffs are about 10% in the PvE environment (in the PvP environment, this is a completely different can of worms altogether). The numeric value of resistances for sets that rely on resistance is in the 50%-90% range. The numeric value for defenses for SR and Ice are 30-50% - at *high* levels. At low levels, they are trivial: 15%-30%.

The "small-sized" defense debuffs are strong enough to rip away a third to half of a defensive set's defense numbers. That's one third to half on a numeric basis: its essentially *most* of the actual mitigation capability.

(if you have 35% defense facing base 50% tohit minions, you have 70% damage mitigation: a 10% defense debuff reduces you to 25% defense, and 50% mitigation. But you were being hit 15% of the time, now its 25% of the time - a 67% increase in net incoming damage.)


So: defense debuffs (again, speaking strictly about PvE) are higher in magnitude than resistance debuffs (before we even talk about debuff resistances), and resistance gets to "ratchet up" resistance to debuffs simply by upping damage resistance powers.

The question is: how much debuff resistance should SR have? And the answer is: I don't know. Gonna need to think about it carefully, given how the devs decided to implement it. But here's one (alternate) way to look at it:

When I originally suggested adding this sort of thing, one thing I suggested was to make it work much like the way resistance debuffs work. In effect, Resistance has two actual resistance components: Damage Resistance, and (Resistance) Debuff Resistance. The simplest thing (conceptually) to do is to do the same thing for Defense: split Defense into a Damage Avoidance Defense and a Defense Debuff Defense, and simply make Defense Debuff Defense immune to debuffing. Why immune? Because Resistance Debuff Resistance is similarly immune. A resistance power that confers 75% damage resistance might get "debuffed" to 70% in terms of damage resistance, but that same power continues to resists 75% of resistance debuffs.

If an SR scrapper with 35% defense could be debuffed to 30% defense, it should still have 35% defense against actual defense debuffs.

Do that, and defense debuff "resistance" would work similarly to resistance: defense sets could be debuffed and thus hit, but their ability to continue to "avoid" defense debuffs, independent of actual damage/hits, would be preserved - just as it is for Resistance.

If, however, you decide to do it Statesman's way, as a fixed resistance, things get ugly. Even at the piddly 17% defense levels of a low level SR scrapper, that still equates to 34% "pseudo resistance" to defense debuffs - in terms of avoiding them (from minions). But the very first debuff that lands blow the protection clean away. The teeny tiny resistances that the devs are adding do not in any way change that.

The top end - ~30% resistances - does feel like it would balance out the high end somewhat, although defense would still be much more brittle than resistance. I'd have to look at what happens when debuff resistance is lower, but constant, to see if its really as effective as it ought to be.


Statesman: you keep saying Defense is about not getting hit. Consider the above an alternate way to implement "Resistance to Defense Debuffs" that is much more fair to Defense relative to Resistance, and preserves that basic concept. The flat resistance being added doesn't preserve the concept of "Defense is about not getting hit" because with the large reduction in defense numbers, and the still sky-high (relative) values of defense debuffs, I5 Defense is really about "Avoiding defense debuffs in terms of being in a different zone from them, because once they land, you can't avoid them anymore." Resistance is about resisting: they can still resist even after they are hit with resistance debuffs: they can still fight them off. Defense currently has no such inherent capability, and I'm not sure the fixed (and initially miniscule) debuff resistances really do it for SR and Ice.

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Generally speaking, the following has been true:

* If Statesman says something in the pipeline, we do get it - or we get a reason why we didn't. The weight of examples is the former, and not the latter.


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Technically, this is true. Statesman did say (several times) that he felt Super Reflexes was underperforming, and that they would look into it, and that changes were coming. In fact, they did look at it, and they did change the set in I5.

The fact that they lowered SR defenses more than any other scrapper set is a tad surprising, but doesn't contradict the statement.

You know, most airlines consider a flight "departed" as soon as it backs away from the gate, even if it subsequently sits on the runway for an hour, for the purposes of "on-time departure" statistics.


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* If a change makes the game painful to play, it gets rolled back or altered so as to remove the pain. Boss boosts in I3, for example, and the purple patch.

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This is also true, but a qualifier has to be added: if it is painful to them. The boss change is a change that people considered painful, and it was rolled back. Travel suppression was considered painful to some, and it was left alone. INT+IH exclusivity was considered painful, and it was rolled back. The enhanced ("bug fix") crash for the blaster nukes is considered painful, and its being left alone. The devs are probably batting .500 on "pain" issues.

Also, not a change, but practiced brawler's root has been considered painful since the beginning of time: I've actually /bugged it just to express my feelings on that one.

The problem is that sometimes "pain" fits their vision. Vision trumps pain.

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New note:

All powers that debuff Resistance have less effect than they did before Issue 5. This includes all versions of Enervating Field, Freezing Rain, and Tar Patch.

Dev. Note:

In the Global Defense Decrease, all Controller and Defender powers that modify Resistance were decreased in effect. This global change altered debuffs as well as buffs. While this part of the change was not explained before, it was intentional and it was taken into account during balance testing of Issue 5. With the defensive buffs lowered in effectiveness, the debuffs would have been too strong in comparison if left unchanged, making power sets with debuffs too powerful compared to others.

We apologize for not having this out with the rest of the patch notes.


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I wonder if this includes villain resistance debuffs as well. Because defense debuffs are still pretty freaking sky-high by comparison, and lowering the effectiveness of resistance debuffs, the thing that didn't do much in the first place, while leaving defense debuffs the same, would be pretty much insane.

In fact, I'm really wondering just exactly what whichever dev told you this was thinking when they told it to you. Resistance debuffs have the same effectiveness regardless of actual resistance, except for defenders in the arena - as far as I've seen. This means lowering resistance debuffs to balance lowered resistance buffs makes no real mathematical sense as such.

Of course, saying a power change makes no mathematical sense seems to have about the same effect as saying a power change isn't sufficiently yellow, it seems. I'm actually amazed, seriously amazed, that the devs would look at resistance and resistance debuffs, defense and defensive debuffs, and apply the fix the defensive situation needed to the resistance situation, and then leave the defensive situation alone.

Thats a cross-up you typically only see in bureacracies hundreds of times larger than Cryptic can field.

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I think it actually goes something like this:

Resistance < Defense < Resist + Defense

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No, Defense is definitely on the bottom. It's more like this:

Defense < Resistance < Resist + Defense

Pure Defense is inferior to Pure Resistance for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that there are 10 times as many defense hosers as there are resistance hosers. But the biggest reason is that Resistance buys you *time*.

Example: An enemy has a 50% accuracy and will kill you in 4 shots. So on average you'll be dead in 8 shots.

With 25% defense, the enemy will kill you, on average, in 16 shots.

With 50% resistance, the enemy will kill you, on average, in 16 shots also.

But here's where it differs: The defense hero will be dead after 4 hits. It's just that it will take an average of 16 shots for those 4 hits to happen. They *could* happen right away, and the hero will be dead after only 4 shots. Every shot that does hit is still 1/4th of the hero's health. After the hero is hit 3 times, there is a 25% chance that hero will be killed by the next attack.

The resistance hero will be dead after 8 hits. On average, that will be after 16 shots...but it will never be less than 8 shots. Every shot that hits is 1/8th the hero's health. After the hero is hit 3 times, he can still take 5 more hits and is in no immediate danger.

Defense is random, and fighting a hero with defense just takes luck. Resistance is reliable, and fighting a hero with resistance takes *time*. And time introduces a factor that you cannot stick into any spreadsheet -- player reaction. That player has time to eat an inspiration, get healed by a teammate, turn on another power, or just run away. The defense hero doesn't get those options. Resistance gives you time to play this game interactively. Defense is just like rolling dice.

Defense sucks.

It boggles me that the devs don't understand this, but it's infuriatingly obvious that they do not. At all.

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If you have enough defense to mitigate against 90% of all damage, and compare to something with enough resistance to mitigation 90% of all damage (basically, 90% resistance) then of all possible circumstances you are likely to be in, the effects of resistance will tend to be superior to defense.

In actual practice, there's a catch. The to-hit floor is set to 5%, while the resistance cap is set to 90% (75% for scrappers). This means that defense has the potential to exceed resistance damage mitigation. When it does, the "time factor" can swing strongly in the opposite direction: because of "bad luck" defense might fold quickly, but resistance might fold even quicker even with "good luck" because of the mitigation disparity.

But even with equal defense and resistance numbers, there are other factors that seem to come into play, some of which even surprise me. I'm working on an update to my scrapper secondaries comparison, SR vs invuln vs regen, that uses simulations instead of equations (because time-to-live equations were starting to make my head hurt). Those are telling me that even when defense and resistance have equal mitigation, as you change variables such as incoming damage, speed of attack, and the speed at which the scrapper defeats things, you can get interesting situations where (keeping defense and resistance numbers static) changing a single one of those variables creates a situation where defense starts off better for survivability than resistance, then resistance gets better than defense, then defense gets better than resistance again. Its very non-intuitive, but also not uncommon among all the scenarios I've looked at so far.

But it actually matches up with reality quite well: most people who have played very high defense and very high resistance heroes seem to know intuitively that sometimes, you run into the odd circumstance that for whatever reason seems almost engineered to "magically" hurt you a lot more than you predicted it ought to, and it doesn't appear to be an unusually bad luck streak in and of itself, but something more inherent to the situation.

The notion that defense is subject to bad luck, but resistance is not, and that's a critical flaw with defense, is common, but not usually important in actual play. Much more important are the environmental factors that hurt defense: to-hit buffs, defense debuffs, and the purple patch (including team scaler and mission slider mandated) accuracy increases.

There are situations where resistance will *never* get killed but defense has a *chance* to get killed. But those are balanced by situations where resistance is *guaranteed* to get killed, but there's no actual guarantee that defense will be. The reaction time factor is a potential deficit to defense, but it isn't universally a good thing that resistance gets hit constantly for a little while defense gets hit occasionally for a lot: within those gaps is where a defensive set (like my SR scrapper) can use interruptible heals like Aid Self.

Whether you like the probabilistic nature of defense or the steadier nature of resistance is a personal perference, not an absolute or provably better preference. Defense as a concept and as a mechanism is fine: defense sets just need to not be overwhelmed and hit in the head by literally everything higher than an even level minion.


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Defense sucks.


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I5 defense sucks. I4 defense is below average in a lot of cases. I3 defenses, at least sometimes, were absolutely stellar. Perma-elude was fantastic. Perma-MoG was no slouch, either. The strength of invuln comes/came partially from resistance, but *mainly* from invincibility.

In your example, you compare the situation of the defensive hero after three hits vs the resistance hero after three hits. That's not quite fair, since on average in the time it takes for the defensive set to be hit three times, the resistance set will have been hit six.

Here's the actual survivability chart for both of those heroes, assuming no health regeneration and equal starting health:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Time (in attacks)/percent chance for defense to be dead/percent chance for resistance to be dead

0 0% 0%
1 0% 0%
2 0% 0%
3 0% 0%
4 0.4% 0%
5 1.6% 0%
6 3.8% 0%
7 7.1% 0%
8 11.4% 0.4%
9 16.6% 2.0%
10 22.4% 5.5%
11 28.7% 11.3%
12 35.1% 19.4%
13 41.6% 29.1%
14 47.9% 39.5%
15 53.9% 50.0%
16 59.5% 59.8%
17 64.7% 68.5%
18 69.4% 76.0%
19 73.7% 82.0%
20 77.5% 86.8%
21 80.8% 90.5%
22 83.8% 93.3%
</pre><hr />

Notice, defense starts off with the lower survival odds, because resistance can "defer" death a bit. Then as the actual odds start to kick in, resistance catches up and then passes defense in terms of probability of death. Interestingly, resistance is referred to as "buying time" but in actuality, its short term time: defense buys better long term time. This particular example is a bad one because the numbers are so huge it makes it seem like defense is only better than resistance when its hopeless anyway, but that's not true: you see this seesaw behavior almost all the time in more realistic situations. Notice, this is for defense and resistance numbers that are *exactly even* in terms of average damage mitigation.


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It boggles me that the devs don't understand this, but it's infuriatingly obvious that they do not. At all.


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I don't think anyone fully appreciates the nuances of defense and resistance, because probability and statistical iteration isn't really intuitive. Even as I continue to look at it from different angles for balancing analysis, it occasionally throws me a curveball.

I was originally going to post this as a suggestion, but it seems more appropriate as a question to Manticore, given its story-element connection:


In CoH, story arcs and missions are designed around villain groups; in a sense they are somewhat related to origins (magical arcs, tech arcs etc). Everyone can do them all, but of course, as we know, certain villain groups present higher difficulty to some ATs than others. That's reasonable.

Have you considered adding story arcs based on archetype, with missions calibrated and balanced for certain ATs by default? Lets say, story arcs or missions primarily geared for a blaster, where the average mission was comprised of villains with shorter range, weaker ranged attacks, but heavy duty melee. The tricky missions would have more mez or higher damage at range, perhaps more stealth-busting snipers. Tank missions would tend to have more minions, and more healers and buffers to confound tanker slower attack chains (i.e. sorcerers).

Everyone could theoretically do them, but of course "crossing over" would be in a sense running a mission at a potentially higher difficulty level - or encourage teaming for cross-AT missions. Although the mechanics seem tricky, it also seems to be a way to help soloers (by crafting mission arcs geared for their AT specifically) and teamers (by allowing people to create teams to go after mission arcs outside their strength) simultaneously.


Also, I want to know if there is any thought to expanding the souvenir system, to create a journal or "log" of a hero's experiences in the game. Something like an automatically compiled story of the hero we could read or even share out (via the info panels). Even a rough list of the missions we've done by date and time would be pretty cool:

"9/14/04 21:35: after foiling the Nemesis in mission whatever, Lady Arcana answered Indigo's call and proceeded to Faultline where she defeated a bunch of Knives and spent twenty minutes figuring out how to get back to the gate with superspeed."

I.e., the "script" of our own story as we play the game. If the game autogenerated stuff, and we were allowed to add to it, that would I think be extremely entertaining for some of us: comparable to the time we spend in Icon.

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but to debate over +/- 1% is re-damned-diculous.


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People interested in the defense sets tend to quibble over small percentages because the way defense stacks, small percentages can sometimes mean a great deal.

1% difference in EA translates to 14% with the maximum number of targets for EA. 14% extra defense is almost two whole levels higher defense. In other words, your defense is just about effective on targets 2 levels higher if its 14 percentage points more.

I4 SR scrappers were adding 1-slot stealth for only 9 percentage points more defense, and that was (for some builds) reducing damage from +1 bosses roughly in half.

Here's a little tidbit from the dev response tanker thread that might have some specific relevance to Ice tankers (presuming that the defense numbers themselves can get worked out):

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Second, Tankers have a higher Resistance cap than the other Archetypes (90%). I confess that currently they share the same defense cap &amp;#8211; but that doesn't sound right, does it? So we're raising the defense cap for Tankers. Thus, Tankers will be able to benefit most from Resistance and Defense buffs.


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I can't be sure, because there is no defense cap, but I think he means lowering the to-hit floor for tanks, which would theoretically improve damage mitigation for ice tanks (over over ATs like SR scrappers, but necessarily over other tanks) if they could actually get to the floor in the first place.

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Wanted to explain the reasons for changing Burn...

It became apparent that Burn was the trump power...with it, a Tanker needed to do nothing else. He could lay down a Burn patch and Taunt foes in and out of it. The damage was so great that the Burn patch itself would do the defeating; the Tanker only needed to hit Taunt.

The question has come up - "what's the point of Burn now?" Well, it still offers Immobilization defense (we're actually going to increase that duration). And Burn does do a lot of damage. Taunt alone might not bring mobs into Burn continually, but stunning, holding, immobilizing mobs in Burn is just plain devastating.

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This is how we get into trouble.

If burn is too powerful when it is used to maximum effect don't make it harder to use at maximum effect - only to nerf it again when too many people figure out how to do it.

Think long and hard on this: if ALL fire tankers figured out a way around the burn changes, and they were incinerating things just as well as they do now, would you consider that a problem?

If the answer is 'yes' don't do it. Do not give the players a problem and then punish them for solving it. If you don't care how effective burn is as long as it takes a certain skill level to use it, then its fine. If you are merely assuming that the change will lower the effectiveness of burn because people will not be able to overcome the obstacle, that's a bad assumption.

If its ok for fire tankers to have burn's damage, but you believe it should take more skill to get it, say so specifically, and be done with it. If you're only assuming people won't be able to leverage burn successfully, don't - just take burn away and give fire tanks something that they can use in a tanking role: hot feet seems to fit that role perfectly, and the fire blasters are more than happy to let us have it.

I think it would be very bad if three months from now we were here again, saying "all fire tanks need to do is lay down burn and stun things to keep them from running out of it, so we need to nerf burn again."

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Adron's comments brings me to a solution I came up with to make DEf equal to RES.

The problem lies in that DEF is *subtracted* from accuracy, while RES is *multipled* against damage.

ie: Accuracy = Base - DEF, while Damage = Base * (1-RES)

I propose we change the calculation for how DEF is applied, making it:

Accuracy = Base * (1-DEF).


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I proposed exactly that in a thread that was purged, but a continuation of the discussion of it is here. That thread includes things like how to make Ice's defense inherently stronger than SRs, how the purple patch ought to work, how debuffs work, and what the difference is between a defense debuff and an accuracy buff. If nothing else, it might be a useful starting point for thinking about the idea.


Because I figured the odds of the devs actually changing the underlying equations for defense were slim, I proposed an alternative which adds, without altering or removing anything, an alternate form of defense that acts to give some of the flavor of this solution in a way that you can retrofit it into the existing game: elusivity.

Family comes first. Its important to keep your priorities straight, and I think everyone in the community can agree that your time was properly spent in this case. Here's to a very boring and uneventful deployment, and I hope he returns home safely and soon.


Fixing defense is second, though, right?

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Fire has 30% resists vs. Smashing and Leathal, Ice has about 15% defense vs. Smashing and Leathal. Is this balanced in I5? Of course either tank is likely to pick up Tough as an addition to this, but I don't think 15% base is enough.


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The sixty four thousand dollar question, and its a question I've put forth in posts and PMs regarding SR scrappers in a slightly different light.

Against minions 30% resists is the same damage mitigation as 15% defense. Minions have base 50% to-hit, so 15% defense is 15/50 = 30% damage mitigation.

Ah, but against anything other than an even level minion, 15% defense is lower mitigation. Against an even level boss, for example, its equivalent to about 23% resistance.

Now, the big question: because defense's mitigation is dependent on to-hit, while resistance is not, you can only balance their mitigation by picking a to-hit standard: either pick a target and balance based on that target as the representative target, or pick a mix of targets, and balance based on average mitigation.

So if I decide to balance Frozen Armor's defense against Fire Shield's 30% resistance against an even level LT, FA's defense ought to be 17.25%. If I decide to balance against a spawn of one boss, two LTs, and 8 minions, it ought to be 15.7%. Pick your average, and you have your number.

Except, in teams where the ice tank is tanking, its very often the case that the minions are wiped out very fast: its the bosses that are left standing for a disproportionate amount of time. There is a case to be made that - for ice tanks to function as team tanks - frozen armor ought to give comparable defense against a boss as 30% resistance gives to a fire tank. That would be 19.5% defense.

You could also make the case for saying Ice tanks should have the same mitigation against AVs as fire tank resistance, but there you might be venturing into unbalancing territory: by balancing against AVs (22.5% defense, btw) you'd be making Ice tank mitigation superior to fire resistance in all other situations (outside of high to-hit buffs, and its pointless to go there - Ice tanks would need higher than 200% defense to be balanced against resistance in those situations, so that's not going to happen).

Its a little tricker than that because fire does not have a dull pain equivalent, it has a self-heal instead. But as a first order approximation, these are the numbers Ice ought to have, plus or minus, to have comparable damage mitigation to fire tanks - at least for this one power comparison in particular.

Its this crazy "how do you keep defense from being so unstable in its mitigation" that prompted me to propose a supplemental form of defense and a different way to hand out accuracy to villains, by the way. Although I tend to talk about SR scrappers, its mainly because I've played one to 50 passing through release numbers, I1 numbers, perma-elude, I4 toggle builds, and I5 where-did-my-defense-go numbers, and so my experience is more rooted for SR than Ice, but the problems are very similar.


Tough makes life more complicated, because tough stacks with resistance and defense in different ways. Assume (so the numbers are relatively simple) that both tanks have tough slotted for 20% resistances (this appears to be well under the maximum value for tough in I5, but it serves to illustrate the point). Stacking 30% on that gives 50% mitigation. To get the same mitigation would require stacking about 24.375% defense on a boss to get to 50% mitigation (assuming both have 20% tough resists). Notice this number is higher than the number computed in the absence of tough (19.5%). If Ice tanks are balanced assuming both have tough, they'll be better if neither have tough. If they are balanced in the absence of tough, they won't be able to achieve the same maximum mitigation. It gets even more complicated if you assume both have weave.

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If a minion currently has 50% accuracy, a Lt has 55% and a Boss has 60% accuracy...

Then Ice Armor Tankers need to be able able to reach at least 60% Defense to be viable. They should be able to floor at least even-con Bosses (putting SR Scrappers at 48% Defense). This would also put AVs/Monsters (going to 75% accuracy) at 15% to hit. Does this seem reasonable?

Also, what if Energy Absorption acted as a reverse Invincibility, adding to Resistance rather than Defense? Say 5% Resistance per foe, up to 3 foes or so (Enhanceable to 11% per foe)?

This seems to indicate that after slotting, Wet Armor and Glacial Armor ought to grant around 40% to 60% Defense each, with Frozen Armor granting 25% to 30%. Or is my math off again?

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The numbers I'm currently comfortable with are 50/57.5/65 for to-hit on minions/LTs/Bosses. Flooring a boss would require 60% defense in that case.

However, I should state that I would rather not perpetuate the original mistake made in balancing the twin invuln sets, by presuming that if Ice tanks end up having top defense around 60%, then SR scrappers "ought to have" 48%. Ice tanks ought to get the defense they need to do their job correctly, and so should SR scrappers. If scrappers are supposed to attack bosses, giving us 48% defense against a base 65% to-hit boss gives us 74% damage mitigation, which might be just barely right, but its also true we might be almost as well off standing at range and firing laser beam eyes.

That also scales off quickly with higher level foes (which you'll see in teams even if you leave the slider on heroic).

If it turned out that Ice tanks needed 60% and SR scrappers needed 60% also, then so be it. If Ice tanks need twice the defense of SR scrappers to function in the environments they find themselves in, they should get it. The defense requirements of Ice tanks should not dictate SR defenses, or vice versa (SR is currently topping out at 37.5% - that shouldn't dictate Ice getting 48 if SR isn't changed).

With SR scrappers having no dull pain, and Ice tanks having hoarfrost, Ice tanks already theoretically can have twice the health of SR scrappers. The 80% "rule" is meaningless when comparing the two.

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This change didn't actually BUFF Ice or SR, which is what is needed. This patch effectively buffed EVERYONE which doesn't make Ice or SR better sets since ALL sets became better from this change.

Seriously, Statesman, you need to BUFF Ice and SR not nerf the mobs. The logic here baffles me. Dont' just run defense vs resistance numbers either, numbers and how it actually FEELS when you play the sets are entirely different.

PLEASE play an Ice and SR, have some members of the dev team play them as well at all levels (but especially 30+).

Please.

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Its important not to think of it as a buff or a nerf at all. The way to look at it is this:

For low defense sets, the base to-hit of a villain is not a critical factor in survivability. When defense is low, all high to-hit means is you're going to get hit a little more often. My invuln scrapper (on live) does not look at a boss and think "oh, he's more dangerous because he's more accurate."

Defense-oriented sets, like SR and Ice, care very much about base to-hit, because most of our damage mitigation comes from making the villain miss.

On one level, the higher boss to-hit hurts everyone, and conversely, lowering the gap in base to-hit between minions and bosses helps everyone. But the devil is in the details: specifically the details of how defense works.

If bosses hit *everyone* 50% more often - if that was how their accuracy worked - then higher boss accuracy would be fair to everyone. Instead, based on my best understanding of how to-hit calculations work, higher to-hit for bosses means that bosses hit high defense sets disproportionately more often than low defense sets: bosses are all effectively tuned to defeat defense, but not resistance or regeneration.

Saying that increased boss accuracy hurts everyone is like saying if all boss attacks had -regen that hurts everyone also.

If bosses and AVs used accuracy enhancements instead of having higher base to-hit, higher boss accuracy would be fair to everyone. Instead, it disproportionately hits defense.

Thus, narrowing the base to-hit range of minions, LTs, Boss, and AVs is an actual benefit for SR and Ice tanks, although its important to note that this reduces a pre-existing imbalance, it doesn't provide an actual advantage.

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Forgive my laziness, for those who are passionate about this issue; but what exactly is the problem with stacked quicksands? I've done hordes of COT casters, and from a controller's perspective, they've never been an issue that led me to cry "nerf!"

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A single minion auto-casted 2 Quicksands and I honestly believe that one of the casts was, in actuality, Tar Patch with the -Res and Slow.

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Ok. What sort of builds did you have available on your team? For instance, did your controller pop in stealthed/inviso to AOE hold them, preventing most/all of them from throwing the QS at you? Did you try teleporting/hovering out, or throwing pets in their LOS so they absorbed the QS attacks?

What were your tactics at the time that were failing? Because the Devs as my witness, I've never had an issue taking these mobs out with a healthy application of tactics based on the team's build. I'm primarily a controller, but I've also done /NRG blaster and Warshade on these mobs, and each one has its own way of dealing with the situation - so that's 3 ATs that, AFAIK, can take these mobs on without realistic suffering.

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My controller, and energy blaster don't specifically have problems with ETCs either. My energy blaster flies, my controller teleports (and also flies), and both have ranged attacks. My squid will probably obliterate the ETCs in most teams when she reaches the appropriate level.

My scrapper (actually, both of them), now that would be different. Neither (in the 30s) have stealth. Neither have any true ranged attacks. Quicksand, as applied by the ETCs can eliminate SR defenses. As in, completely eliminate.

They created the red light/green light arrow for controllers just because there was one case where controllers felt their primary ability was being negated - in an environment where you aren't supposed to solo anyway and usually controllers could either continue to deploy their pets for damage or use their secondaries for team benefit. Controllers weren't utterly negated, just their main ability.

An SR scrapper without range can have her melee attacks negated and her defenses negated simultanously by two quicksands, which you can encounter in a solo heroic mission. All other melee scrappers just get offense significantly negated (by being slowed and unable to reach the ETCs). Insps and tactics notwithstanding, thats a much more extreme situation than "controller can't hold AV" and its not unreasonable to believe that type of thing should be moderated also.

If ETCs deployed an AoE drop that offered mag 3 mez defense to all CoT in range, I'd be similarly concerned about that significantly hurting controllers. Imagine a mission where that was quadruple-stacked, like quicksand currently is. Would it be fair to tell controllers to "use alternate tactics?"

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Earth Thorn casters appear at level 30 and up. There are no thorn casters prior to level 30.

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I did a couple of CoT missions with a level 39 scrapper this past weekend. It was absolutely ludicrous to note that the hardest way to do the missions would have been at heroic or tenacious; half the minions would still be ETCs. At rugged, unyielding, or invincible, the minions would always be air thorns.

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Just a quick note since this is a hot topic. Regarding the issue of Earth Thorn Casters stacking multiple Quicksands (and such).
Without getting into details, ALL CoT Thorn Casters have been reworked. The amount of control powers these minions have will be severely reduced or outright removed. Expect other related changes with all Thorn Casters.

This change will come in Expansion 5.

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But will they get/keep cool debuffs to make them dangerous without being all-or-nothing?

If not that, will they get crazy elemental kung fu?

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They'll all be issued six-demon bags, where they will be able to unleash wind, fire, and all that kind of thing.

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Without getting into details, ALL CoT Thorn Casters have been reworked. The amount of control powers these minions have will be severely reduced or outright removed. Expect other related changes with all Thorn Casters.

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I hope they're not getting too dumbed down. The Earth Casters were out of control for sure, but the others were a reasonable challenge, anyway.

Have you thought about making Lt. versions with the hold powers to complement the minions without?

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This is probably the best way to handle it. One or two control-wielding thorns - especially the earth thorns - is a challenge. Five, six or more was getting ridiculous. Adding the control to LTs makes a lot of sense, because the LTs are a bit hardier and more difficult to kill, but there are/can be less of them over all, which makes massive overstacking less of an issue.

Maybe even make it so that only one or two thorns have the heavy duty control, but you can't tell which one before you engage. If its just one or two, you can't automatically single them out and avoid the control entirely, but the actual amount of it would be much lower.

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As I remember it, Mr. E. was discussing a few ideas in the context of animal or pet sidekicks


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I hear "Mister E" and I think white trenchcoat, dark glasses, and cane.

If Jack Emmert was dressed like that, I would want pictures.

Hmm... "Mister E" ... "Cryptic" ... hmm ...

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Scrappers are the natural soloists, but they are not implemented to match their AT class description. They should have no range, their defenses should be less effective than tanks under normal, not extreme circumstances, and they should be significantly outdamaged by blasters.

Right now I'm of the opinion that blasters probably do more damage than scrappers, but the problem is that its not *blatantly so* which makes it impossible for blasters to fulfill one of our original "roles" - to overshadow scrappers in the damage department while the tank is overshadowing the scrapper in the defense department.

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Earlier today, I was on a team with:

1 level 40 D3 (me)
1 level 43 Fire/Kinetics controller
1 level 42 Fire/Energy blaster
1 level 40 or 41 (not sure) BS/SR scrapper
1 level 41 FF/Psy defender
1 level 29 Fire/Fire tanker (sidekicked)
1 level 20 Ice/Ice tanker (sidekicked)

The blaster and both defenders used our nukes - the blaster every single time it came up, me whenever I got hit with fulcrum shift and it was up, and the FF/Psy seemed to be somewhere in between. Otherwise, the main damage came from the fire blaster, who used ball + breath. She never benefited much from Fulcrum Shift because she didn't want to run into melee range. She did benefit from my tar patch, when I was able to lay it before everything died.

After a couple of fights, the scrapper started charging into every spawn ahead of the rest of us, and after a full mission, she switched to her AR/Dev blaster. She said that she was running ahead so she could get a few attacks before everything was completely wiped out, and just got tired of not being very decisive compared to the blaster on the team and switched to her blaster.

I relate this because this is how things go pretty much every time I play a scrapper on a team with blasters. Even my spines scrapper experiences this. Overshadowed? The only time I feel my damage actually contributes is when we're fighting single hard targets - bosses at the minimum, up to AVs and maybe monsters.

I tend to find, having played a tanker, defender, peacebringer, and two scrappers into the mid-late game, that blasters do the damage on teams. Spines comes closest with its AoEs, but its overall damage is lower to compensate for both its range and its AoE.

I dunno, I could agree with you on this point if I believed there was actually a point to having non-blaster primary damage dealers on a team with blasters.

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The combination that tends to "overshadow" scrappers in teams is tank(s) + AoE blaster(s). If the AoE-capable heroes are free to fire ranged AoEs without fear of aggro because of a tank holding aggro, then a melee attack class is going to tend to be left out in the cold.

I'm not sure that is fixable, nor am I sure that's actually "broken" in the first place. For example, in a team with a good tank and a couple ranged AoE shooters, even my ill/rad controller can get effectively trumped. Everything can be dead before I can get toggle debuffs deployed, and my pets will lag behind unless I teleport myself directly into the spawns. What I tend to find myself doing is EMPing an adjacent spawn and then letting the pets whittle them down a bit before the group destroys the rest, or sometimes try to race the tank to a group and cast the PA into it for fun.

Even in those kinds of teams, though, my scrappers and my controller, and heck even often my energy blaster, will realize the minions and LTs are worm-food in seconds, and target the boss(es). Bosses do not go down in the AoE alpha-strike in most teams that I've seen, and I can at least start wearing them down prior to or during the alpha strikes.

I have a potential idea for maybe "solving" the alpha strike problem. If I think it through, I'll Suggestions and Ideas it.

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And they do hit hard, I don't know why you don't think they hit hard, how hard do you want them to hit?

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I said not all hit hard. TF definitely hits hard. Bone smasher does as well. Power thrust does not. Stun and energy punch are just a waste of my time.

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Interestingly, energy punch is one of the highest dpa attacks that exist. If the quoted number for energy punch is accurate (and I have no reason at the moment to believe its not) then energy punch does 9 brawls/sec of damage during its activation time. I know of no other attack that does that sort of damage except for its electrical twin, charged brawl. True blappers tend to always take it for that reason.

If you could sustain energy punch's damage continuously, at level 50 you could do about 480 dps just with energy punch 5 slotted for damage, and kill a boss in about five seconds.

If energy punch had even power bursts range, it would probably be the best energy attack in existence (it does, in fact, outdamage power burst).

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I'll take that bet.

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*eyebrow*

Okay, but if I win, you have to take your armour off and run a lap around Steel Canyon while the Benny Hill theme plays in the background.

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You.....DO realize that if he takes off that suit, antimatter will mix with matter, and there'll be a huge explosion. Right?

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Also if he fails to recharge the containment power source by using a special device that can't be replicated before the timer expires. Oh wait, I'm thinking of a different kind of antimatter; the kind no one has ever heard of and crazy physicists stockpile in plastic bombs.

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Yeah, we really do...

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...

BAD DEV. NO COOKIE.

Edit: Oh, I just BET there's a 'witch hat' temporary power. That would so rock.

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I'll take that bet.

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Hmm...

I bet there isn't going to be a broomstick temporary travel power.