Arcanaville

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Actually if you look carefully you'll see every time I've suggested something like this, its been for SO-time and higher only. in other words the base damage is identical to scrappers until 22~24, at which point it quickly jumps up [in the span of 2-3 levels] to the new amount.

Thing about teams is that we're almost always already at or near the cap once we get our hands on SO's; so really, damage buffs aren't what we need in teams later on anyways even right now; 400% is 400%, and the most that defender can do for us is make save us an enrage or two, or make us need buildup somewhat kinda less often. So it wouldn't change that aspect of teaming all that much, while the small handful of extra defensive slots would get to stack with whatever forcefields, fortitude or other stuff they use on us.

Its true that there isn't much room left for those extra slots. Perhaps 3 or 4 by level 50 that find room in some defensive power that wouldn't otherwise be six-slotted, though that's already better than nothing.

The main effect would be to allow those other enhancements in the attacks. Yes, that could mean less dependance on hasten/stamina. Or a marginal range increase to at least equal the CoT.

I definitely WOULD love for buildup to be seperate from the enhancements... or perhaps a scaling base-damage modifier...

25% at level 1, 50% by level 50... but applied to actual base damage [like switching to nova-form], and thus affected by the enhancements...

Though that might be a rather nasty blow to Devices unless the drone gave a mild boost of its own.

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Yeah, but devices was always the odd man out. Here's what I would give devices in exchange for lacking build up:

Trip Mine gets replaced by Grenade: change it from a drop to a ranged drop (ala caltrops) so you can lob it at range, its still triggered like trip mine.

Time Bomb stays time bomb.

Both get one more modification: the deployer, and only the deployer, can shoot them, ala explosive barrels. They can't benefit from Build Up or Aim, so add a little more utility to them to compensate.

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Well that's one of the ways my suggestion of lower-cap/higher-scaling (post20) would come in handy.

Scale blaster damage so that starting in the early 20's, when SO's become available, base damage quickly shoots up within 2-4 levels to roughly twice that of scrappers.

"You crazy? that's sick!"

Ah, but not if you drop the cap to, say, 200~250% ! That's right, in one simple fix give us a mild range-boost, mild defensive boost, slight accuracy boost and whatever else the player himself can think of, by simple virtue of not having to 5+1 (or 6 for /dev) damage/acc in every attack!

This means the average power needs two or three SO's in damage to reach full effect with buildup,etc. This means you have either better range/effects on your powers (offensive boost), and/or a few slots to spare to improve defenses, recovery, protection, etc etc etc...

The simple act of having more slots to spare means we get all those minor improvements we're wanting with just one fix. And you don't have to worry about 'secondary' effects of the fix (like how particular boosts in one aspect might lead to uber-builds if combined with some other powers) since that's what you're giving off as the actual 'buff', nice and controlled by slotting!

Damage doesn't really change [right now blaster attacks are all pretty much slotted for that 266.6~300%+BU/AIM setup to reach 400 reliably all the time] since 200% of 200 is the same as 400% of 100... just with less enhancement slots required to hit it.

Also makes teams more valuable to blasters [compensating for the increased death they bring us] thanks to improved effect of power-boost/fulcrum-shift, and even defensive powers [since def/res stack up...]

(one problem though; since temp.powers are based on base damage, that would mean once the scale-up kicks in they'd deal double damage. should be a way around this though...)

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I would rather go the other way: leave base damage alone, give us a scalable build up (100% at level 1 scaling up to 300% at level 50, or just make build up boost net damage, not base damage), and increase the damage cap, or better yet, allow build up to ignore the cap the same way criticals ignore the scrapper cap.

Lowering the cap doesn't mean we get better on teams, it means we get worse, because defender buffs obey the cap - we'd be constantly capped, and therefore our damage cannot be buffed.

Higher base and lower cap means blasters get a big boost below 22 when I don't think they really need it much, and the sole advantage above 22 becomes freeing up slots. The problem is that we don't have enough beneficial things to burn the slots on to make this enough of a big boost. Especially things available to us in the 30s when blasters often first start to feel problems.

If we had a few more power choices and power pool options, the extra slots could have a significant benefit; also, if the devs added damage mitigation powers into our secondaries that required extra slots, this might also be a potential benefit.

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Something I've always wondered...

Why do people feel the need that they *have* to be "Optimal" to have fun? Why does everything have to boil down to the numbers?


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Well, sometimes I think casual players could go about their business happily not knowing the numbers. When you are slotting damage, the difference between four slots of damage and five slots of damage is kinda what you intuitively expect, whether you know the numbers or not.

The problem comes for attributes in the game that are not well behaved. Resistances, for example, don't work like that. You are building to a cap, and anything less than the cap can be catastrophically less (the difference between 90% resistances and 70% resistances is you are going to take three times the damage, which is kinda a lot).

If you didn't know how recharge worked, you might think that slotting recharge would be a reasonable alternative to damage - shoot faster instead of harder (even with the end drain). The problem is the game engine (wrongly in my opinion) doesn't count activation time as part of the recharge cycle, so recharge doesn't have the effect you think it might - there is no way to slot power blast so you can fire it continuously; at some point, the recharge is totally wasted (it starts off only partially wasted).

Honestly, in my opinion the game mechanics were not designed for casual intuition to work right, something that should have been fixed from the start if the game was intended to be "numbers-blind."

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When I was thinking about range, this was the obvious first thought. The problem with it is that a simple -acc on all ranged attacks effectively gives everyone ranged defense, not just blasters. The problem with that is that when it comes time for balancing, guess what's going to happen when the devs realize scrappers aren't taking enough ranged damage. Ranged damage will go up, or villains will start getting accuracy bonuses.

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At this point, Scrappers are mini-gods of death and destruction as it is, might as well just give them something if it benefits us more.

As it stands this will change nothing really for them but the run up is less harsh, and it was pretty mild as it is anyway, at some point the devs will actually go "oh look, Scrappers are just safer then blasters, period." and give us the 500% damage cap, or lower Scrapper's damage cap to 400.

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If the game is being balanced around scrappers, changing the game mechanics in any way that helps them identically to us is not a good thing. If it benefitted them less, that might be ok, but - even though scrappers can tolerate the attacks better than we can - a blanket nerf on villain ranged attacks will eventually cause the devs to boost range, accuracy, or ranged damage of villains to balance them around the scrapper pivot point. Blasters are always going to get the short end of the stick when things go up up up. Even if they buffed blaster damage to compensate we'd still be just as dead if ranged attacks became harder hitting.

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As Bunny_Man suggested, if ranged attacks were less ACCURATE than melee attacks, there would be no problem. The additional damage would not counter the lower accuracy, and so although you would likely take a great deal of damage if you WERE hit (like an SR Scrapper) your survival time would be significantly greater, for the remainder of the time. You would still be at considerably more risk than you were at lower level, but at least there would still be a reason to avoid melee.


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When I was thinking about range, this was the obvious first thought. The problem with it is that a simple -acc on all ranged attacks effectively gives everyone ranged defense, not just blasters. The problem with that is that when it comes time for balancing, guess what's going to happen when the devs realize scrappers aren't taking enough ranged damage. Ranged damage will go up, or villains will start getting accuracy bonuses.

Making the -acc a flat penalty out beyond a certain range was the next thought, but then the problem with that was that since a lot of blaster attacks have short range, blasters would often be forced to close to within the range where the accuracy penalty disappeared, and blasters couldn't regain the advantage easily by slotting for range, because range enhancers are fairly weak.

Next stop: accuracy penalty based on the maximum range of the attack. When anyone with a ranged attack fires, their accuracy is based on how much of maximum range they are using for that attack. Long range attacks are penalized less than short range attacks, blasters can choose their arsenal, and range slotting might actually help more.

Its not a perfect solution; there are some valid criticisms involving balancing blaster net damage output against scrappers and tanks, but it does seem to work for the one-dimensional issue of allowing blasters to benefit from being at range. If such an accuracy penalty was put into place and blasters started to appear unbalanced relative to scrappers and tanks, boosting blaster range overall or adding small accuracy bonuses to blaster attacks would balance them again.

This time, the ranged accuracy penalty wouldn't help melee as much as blasters, because villains can easily close to inside the accuracy penalty range, while still being outside melee range; the AI would just have to be adjusted to make the villains want to do that.

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... And if you stack BU and Aim, the combined accuracy completely overcomes the -50% on superspeed, so you can do this combo while fully protected by stealth+SS.

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And here I was just about to ask... "Say SnipeFu, how do you think the ToHit debuff on Super Speed and Super Leap will affect Energy blasters? Have you tried macros or binds to turn them off when attacking? Because that 50% is nasty unless you have HOs."

Well, OK, I'll ask it anyway. Any comments?

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Even with 6 HOs you will still miss a lot. I have a feeling the acc debuff is applied to final accuracy taking it down no matter how much acc is slotted in the attack. HOWEVER, buildup or aim will each negate the debuff very well.

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I've seen the same thing, and that is really, really odd, because it means the -acc does not work the way we traditionally think about acc debuffs. Aim effectively erases the -acc on SS, but 4 HOs (+200% acc) don't. That's either a sign that there are some debuffs that don't work they way we think they do, or the debuff is actually bugged in its strength.

I suppose its also irrelevant as well, but it might be relevant down the road for figuring out how the -acc in fly works.

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This idea has merit...but as always the devil's in the details. Of course, such a mighty foe would be immune to holds and debuffs, most likely, so I fail to see how a Controller/Blaster/Defender could participate as well.


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Blasters don't have long, drawn out fights. I wish they could. Blasters bushwhack some poor villain or die within 15 seconds, usually...


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The way difficulty is handled in the game is usually "more, more, more" which creates problems for blasters. Ironically, especially for people who disagree with nerfs on principle, "less, less, less" might be better for this reason: with big numbers flying around, someone is going to lose, and lose big. And its blasters, who might be able to throw big, but can't eat big, that will get squished by the "bigger=better" arms race.

If we did less, the developers could theoretically allow the foes to do less, and we'd have a slower game all around. Slower in terms of raw numbers, anyway.

With lower numbers, the devs could afford to do things like speed us up, so the game is a little more action-oriented, and less waiting-around oriented. They could make things hard less by making everything able to kill you, and more by making things harder for you to kill. "Risk" would be less "risk of death" and more "risk of failure." You fail to complete the mission on time; less xp. You fail to rescue Joe Shmuck so the Malta relocate him; you have to do it again. You fail to defeat that last carnie, and instead of wandering around a bunch of caves for an hour, the carnie makes a break for it and escapes, warning the Dark Ring Mistress, and forcing you to do another mission to defeat *her*. It wouldn't take all that much work to add this; the missions could be randomly generated filler when you "fail."

Heroes do sometimes die, or get seriously incapacitated. But usually, they just *fail*. You can still make "failure" cost something; no mission bonus is comparable to death (not numerically identical, just the concept).

I have never argued against the death-penalty in CoH - I was on the side of the devs when that one made its rounds. But I do think that the game could be predicated more on the risk of other bad, xp-slowing events other than death.

When we do less damage, and the villains do less damage, the thing most likely to happen to a blaster that isn't currently scrapper-locked is the blaster has to run away. And the villain might give chase. And the blaster might still die, but its more the case that the blaster's vulnerability is causing the blaster to slow down by being unable to defeat the villain in a timely manner, or faster than the villain is whittling the blaster down, and thus must disengage. You'd die only if you decided to roll the dice and hang in there.


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If this wasn't a casual-play solo-friendly MMO? Sure! That would be awesome!

I fail to see how that would be workable in CoH though... but what do you mean by a really long time? 5 minutes? 15? Half an hour?


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My own feelings of what would be a good time are highly subjective, but my feeling is that missions should be all about sneaking past or running over the minions and LTs guarding the "goal" or "goals" (the boss, the crate, the prisoner, etc) in anything from 5 minutes to thirty minutes, on average, but the "climactic battle" at the end, if its a boss, could be ten to fifteen minutes at least, all on its own. Minions wouldn't go up in difficulty all that much, LTs somewhat (to near boss-like levels now) and Bosses to near AV-levels now. But remember, while I say "AV-like" - this is in the new regime where Bosses don't have the damage to just one-shot you, I mean AV-like in the sense of having a lot of health and defenses, and should take a long time to whittle down. Maybe they have extra trickery, like immobilizes, holds, summons, whatever - but still, in a lower-numbers game, these things are a problem, not insta-death, even for a blaster (most of the time).

Its a thought, and I'll be the first to admit, its more of a concept than a full-fledged suggestion. The principle sounds nice, but to actually implement this would be a significant undertaking to balance out all around. But since they seem to need to do that anyway, perhaps the extra work required to gravitate in this direction is no higher than what they are doing now. They may even be moving in a direction similar to this now, and we just don't know it.

Well now...

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Yeah but thats only for a few seconds what do I do the rest of the time ??? This SS debuff sucks..

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Run around a lot. SS is still plenty fast. During the 13 seconds of downtime when BU and Aim are recharging, you have 4 seconds to run to a contact, 2 seconds to buy two acc insps, 4 seconds to return, and 2 seconds to pop them both, and then 1 second to get a shot off, and then BU and Aim will be recharged again. Simple.

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Concern, I have great respect for you as a source of good ideas. That said, I can't go along with this.

If the game truly becomes harder, leveling will slow. The downtime between taking on more powerful mobs for more XP will ensure this. I was going to rant about this in a seperate post, but I'll get into it a little here....


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Leaving aside perma-elude for the moment, I actually agree with Concern about the difficulty. I think, and have always thought, that a superhero game should not have heros defeating hundreds and thousands of villains. I've already defeated more villains in a year than every single Marvel and DC hero has defeated in seventy years combined. I think each and every fight should be a longer and more tactical affair. Not harder, necessarily - longer. Longer fights give time for actual tactics to come into play, create less opportunities for eye-blink oops-you're-dead issues, and more time to allow a variety of powers and effects to have an effect.

This wouldn't necessarily slow down leveling speed, because as Concern mentioned, you can always recalibrate xp per villain to compensate. Consider that people like doing missions now, even with the downtime between missions, because they are fun, and also because the bonuses are more than just the seat-cushion loose change they used to give us.

If you could earn half a bar of xp for fighting one boss and a couple of his minions in half an hour, I think that would be better than earning half a bar of xp for fighting two hundred minions in a half an hour.

Actually, I was a proponent of putting dampening fields in the arena (like jails) that would slow down the combat there - lower damage, health recovery, and a little less end drain, so that fights wouldn't be over in a couple shots.

That's in principle. In practice, there's a lot of catches. For the casual player, they might not be able to finish a mission in the one hour a day they have to play - missions would have to be interruptable or continuable the next day.

I think the fights we now have with AVs is kinda what boss fights should be like. The devs don't want AVs to be soloable, but that means one on one 10 minute or 15 minute fights - some of the most enjoyable - are going to go away. Bosses will never be that hard, and AVs are going to be put out of reach.

Upping the difficulty - and the xp reward - gives some wiggle room to create those knock-down drag-out fights that are both enjoyable for large teams and also enjoyable for a solo player.

Wouldn't it feel really heroic if every once in a while, say once or twice a level, you were forced to fight a really tough baddie that took you a really long time to beat, and bang, two or three bars of xp for chasing him all across Talos and finally nailing him at the foot of the Talos statue?

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Remind me again: 1SO, 3SO, 6TOs max per power altogether, or is this a per-type restriction per power.

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Correct. 1 SO in a power max, 3 DOs in a power max and six TOs max. Any all origin (Hammidon, Eden, Hydra) enhancements will go take up an SO for slotting puposes.

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That's what I remembered.

Do you think this, as an unfortunate side effect, punishes people that currently slot for variety to begin with? If I want to slot recharge, or range into my attacks, I now have to choose whether I get to have an SO of range, or an SO of damage, and that really takes the wind out of the sails of slotting variety.

Would it be better if the restriction was 1SO of each type maximum? So that it was still legal to slot 1 SO of damage, 1 SO of accuracy, and 1 SO of range into a power?

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This is a good point; I misunderstood you. However, since the difference between Heroic and Invincible is, er, 2 levels... I think that making one a death march and one an easy challenge is going to be.. hard.

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1SO, 3DOs, 2 Training enhancements. Try it out. It is not as hard to balance as you think.

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Remind me again: 1SO, 3SO, 6TOs max per power altogether, or is this a per-type restriction per power.

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This is not what mieux is saying in my opinion. I believe he is saying if I am reading correctly that the game is as hard as it is for blasters so that they can continue to challenge scrappers and tankers and that all classes should be challenged. In other words he thinks that scrappers and tanks are overpowered and thus that is the reason that the game is so hard for blasters. On the other hand maybe I am completely off base.


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Up to this point I cautiously agree. But then there is the question of making the leap in terms of by what metric should scrappers and tanks be "challenged."

There is a fundamental difference between the classes that makes balancing them tricky if you attempt to use the same mechanism for all three. Tanks are supposed to be able to draw all the aggro and associated damage from an entire 8 person team. *Anything* capable of doing that will be, effectively, at zero risk in his own solo missions. He may be slow, but if his risk facing a solo-scaled mission is any significant non-zero number, it will be too high to do his job scaled to 8 people.

So then the question becomes: should we even be comparing the "relative risk" associated with the different classes. Because there isn't a good way to do that given what we expect them to do, across the large span from solo to large team.

If tanks automatically spawned many more minions in their missions than blasters to challenge them, risk could be better balanced. But that opens a whole different can of worms: relative leveling speed. If tanks get to boost their missions to whatever they like, they can hit leveling sweet spots much easier than can any other class.

So I think mieux isn't giving full credit to the complexity of the problem, if this is what he is actually asserting. This is not to pick on mieux specifically either; anyone suggesting nerfing down the other classes to be comparable with blasters, or in any way balancing them based on a nebulous concept of "risk" is bound to run afoul of critical (I believe fatal) problems with any such attempt.

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That ludicrous. Have you even seen an AV, or fought one before?


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Bingo! It is ludicrous...but your the one who said fighting 3 is fighting three regardless of what lvl you are at.


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I said fighting three MINIONS is the same regardless of what level you are at, especially if they are basically the same level as you or close.

This is why I ask the question: have you ever seen an actual AV before. Because unless you are simply trying to be deliberately argumentative, no one else on these boards would even think of suggesting that fighting three AVs was anything remotely similar to fighting three minions.


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lol...you don't even understand this example do you Arcana? Read what I wrote again. read what it is in response to.


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Honestly, I keep quoting you with your words in their entirety and you seem to be able to consistently backpetal away from what you wrote by resorting to:

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you are trying to tell me what I meant. hahahahahaha.


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I'm not hazarding any real guesses on what you mean, or if you meant anything at all. At this point, for the benefit of anyone else reading, I'm responding to what your words say, thats all.


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I've tried it. But you aren't even parsing my words correctly. I thnk part of the problem is you want me to argue A so you can argue against it. You don't have an argument against B which is what I am arguing but you have one against A so you are looking for ways to construe A regardless of what I say.


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Anyone who cares can see I quoted your posts completely, and anyone who cares can decide for themselves if you are actually making any sense at all. However, if I refute something you said and you decide to truncate and reprovision your statements, as you do here, I'm prepared to let everyone else judge for themselves without further comment.

Apparently, if you just keep on going, when you get to 4 50++ recharges in torrent, you can get a T+EB+T sequence to fire in about 6 seconds total, and it takes out minions. 6 seconds is fast enough that things are not really shooting back at all anymore.

I don't know if anyone is crazy enough to 4-slot torrent with recharge, but it does seem to work for the alpha strike alone. And if you stack BU and Aim, the combined accuracy completely overcomes the -50% on superspeed, so you can do this combo while fully protected by stealth+SS.

You're going to have energy blasters going nuts trying different combinations of this, DustKing.

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SO's would not be an issue if the enemies had a brain.


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To a degree. It would also help if the villains were not all primarily hitpoint baskets with turrets. If the villains had all sorts of range, maybe slotting for range would mean something. If some had better defense, maybe accuracy slotting would mean something. If they could chain knock you on your tail, maybe you'd want to slot recharge for a faster attack chain yourself (interrupt slotting really ought to reduce activation time, even though I understand exactly why it is not allowed to).

AoE vs single target damage wouldn't be a problem if villains were not always bowling pins.

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The problem with nerfing individual powers because of a certain combination of powers is broken is that unoptimized builds become weaker than the devs intend.


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Some of this is because of lack of knowledge, but a lot of it has to do with the way the math actually works out. So you miss 10% resistance. Should that be a problem? Well, if it is the difference between 80% resists and 90% resists, then, yeah, its gonna matter a great deal.

Blasters aren't usually facing this problem, because 5+1 slotting, if not "perfect," is hard to beat, and certainly isn't broken.


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Nerfing is always an option. It's even good in certain cases. The problem with nerfs is that, unlike the purple patch you mention, they are currently very specific, and that's bad.


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There is another way to look at self-nerfing: people identify with and make a connnection to their characters. Most people are going to react adversely to a perceived reduction in their characters, and that should be avoided whenever possible.

But people self-nerf all the time. If the issue is making sure people do not gain xp faster than they ought to, or burn through the content faster than they ought to, then in fact some of the things that people call "broken" are in fact self-nerfing of a sort.

Every time people set to invincible instead of unyielding, they are fighting higher level foes for no increase in xp (I and many others confirmed this when the sliders came out - unyielding appears to be the sweet spot). They are in effect making themselves weaker for no reward. Why do they do it? Because people don't mind going after a harder challenge even if there is no proportional xp gain.

They will even take a substantial xp hit. Every time someone "solos" an AV (why in quotes? Well, my ill/rad never actually "solos" anything), they've smacked themselves big time. Their net xp/minute goes way, way down. A big team would obliterate the AV (AVs do not scale with team size). A solo player can take a half hour or more to defeat an AV - and playes often die trying, even if they eventually succeed.

So they take longer to do what a team would do quicker, they take less xp per minute doing it, and they actually spend more time running through missions ("the content").

This is bad because?

In a certain sense, an issue with blasters is that their risk/effectiveness scale is completely different from everyone elses. They cannot, even under penalty, experience some of the content that all other classes can at least take a credible swing at. In teams, they are the ones most likely to have their difficulty and effectiveness ratchet upwards much faster. My Ill/rad controller can run with people five, seven, even ten levels higher and still do something. My blaster can mainly grant invisibility if teamed with people that much higher (theoretically, and in the past - obviously no one is ten levels higher any more). Not that I didn't try to act as a blaster in a team four or five levels higher - but it wasn't easy (a severe understatement).

The best way to "self-nerf" is to give players a way to ratchet up the difficulty - give them the option and most people will take it, because most people want to enjoy the game, most people will enjoy the challenge, but everyone will calibrate their challenge level differently.

The important thing isn't so much what we can do at what level, but whether all of us scale at reasonable (if not necessarily identical) curves. That way, in a team with a very high difficulty slider, blasters might be in over their heads, but only in the deep end of the pool, not the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Reducing the overall effectiveness of things certainly has to be done when there are critical imbalances, but they should always be a last resort, in my opinion, not a first resort. It can't be a last resort if the highest the slider goes is invincible. My blaster can run invincible missions solo, and any set with defenses, like scrappers and tanks must be able to do better, or the defenses are meaningless.

Blasters should go up to the level of scrappers in offensive capabilites, or be superior - we will never equal them in defensive capabilities, and that is what will ultimately retard our ability to "move higher." Even large offensive increases will prevent my blaster from going much higher than invincible while solo. Scrappers should be balanced: they should "run out of defense" at the same time they "run out of offense." Tanks should never run out of defense, they should be limited by what they can kill.

Under that point of view, blasters are somewhat underpowered on the offensive side.

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Well, can you fit two ET's into one BU AND Aim cycle?

Since BU takes a moment to activate and Aim takes a moment to activate...

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Nope, since Aim takes 2 seconds to activate, if I tried to stack BU and Aim, the second torrent just missed. I forgot to test two recharges with BU+Aim. I think two will fit, but I honestly forgot to test, I was too busy trying to see if I could actually hit a group with all three, and to see what happens when I use this tactic on possessed LTs.

For the munitions people, an interesting chain is BU+torrent+sleep grenade+wait+torrent.

Darn, well, back to test again

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no. I am not supporting your contention. Your contention is based on the myopic view that fighting "3" at lvl 1 is the same as fighting 3 at lvl 40. By your definition, if we start out fighting 3 civililians, and end up fighting 3 AV's....we are still only fighting 3. Ridiculous.


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That ludicrous. Have you even seen an AV, or fought one before? The actual experience of fighting an AV is wholely different from fighting minions. The experience of fighting three level 50 minions is identical to fighting three level 20 minions. Take the numbers, the color cons, and even the names away, and I can tell the difference between an AV fight and a minion fight.

This, by the way, would be an excellent example of hyperbole.


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If they can do their jobs of drawing aggro for the team, they are going to have to be at massively lower risk exposure than the rest of the team combined.


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yet another erroneous conclusion. A tanker can be all defense and no offense. Which mean his/er ultimate ability to survive is zero. A blaster can be all offense and no defense and given the DPS he/she needs to put out to kill the mobs before they kill him or her, his or her ability to survive is zero. Combine the two...the tanker holds the aggro, the blaster kills the mobs. Very very very simple concept.


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Actually, you seem to be having serious difficulty with the concept of "zero" so I wouldn't attempt anything more complex yet. When my tank engages a group that her defense is completely solid on, but can't kill, her "ultimate ability to survive" is not zero, its one, or certainty. Her risk exposure is zero, or near zero. As I said the first time, its actually beginning to amaze me that you are willing to assert with conviction statements that anyone who thinks about them for more than two seconds can prove to be false.


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Reading is fundamental, Mieux. The original post which I responded to was this:


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yes...reading is fundamental...let's look at what is being said:


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You say you agree with "this." Here's the "this" you were referring to, since you excised the quote yet again:

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OK, let's assume that everyone is nerfed to the level of Blasters, and the game is a challenge for many people on Heroic.


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So:

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But you saw this:
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it was not a good idea necessarily for everyone's power level to be brought down to the level of blasters, and you contradicted them and further stated that this was not only the devs goal, but personally desirable to yourself.


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Literacy is a good thing. It's good when you can responed to what someoen is actually saying and not what you want them to say to suppport your claims. I say the game should be challenging to the "first time" player on heroic and you accuse me of saying that we should play like blasters....


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Yes, that is exactly what I saw. Someone said it was not necessarily a good idea to nerf everyone down to the level of blasters, and you immediately followed with a post where you

a) quoted the statement, including the "nerf part"

and then

b) responded to it by saying that both "the devs think so" and "I agree." I cannot possibly be taking your statements out of context when I quote them in their entirety.


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well, it's not like I'm going to convince you with reason.


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Maybe you should try it once or twice first before you make such a statement, advice that has wide general applicability here. You might be surprised. I've been convinced by reason before on these very forums.

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Defamation is not your style, Arcana. I'm not having trouble with logic nor reasonability. I'll let my posts speak for themselves.


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Actually, I think that would probably be best all around.

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If you have even a single iota of analysis in that head of yours, you'd recognize how ridiculous it is for people to argue we should fighting +3's instead +0's. The game does not assess your power lvl and code the mobs accordingly. Are even lvl Sappers the same threat lvl as even lvl Outcast Initiates?

If the game removed colors and rank, this silly notion of not increasing in power would evaporate. What they should do is get rid of color coding after lvl 10 and have Mrs. Liberty tell you that

"Do to the growth of and uniqueness of your powers and slotting, the city can no longer determine your power lvl compared to the mobs....though we can tell you when you are probably way outclassed" (+4's and higher will still be purple).


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And if you were not illiterate, you would see you are directly supporting my contention, which is that the color coding and level numbers do not matter. If we start off fighting 3, and end the game fighting 3, the game does not change. Its fighting 3.

You have a nasty habit of being the most annoyingly assertive when you are also the most completely off the mark. But, okay, lets see:


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that doesn't bode well for tanks.


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First off, Tanks are the most overpowered AT of them all once they get in the 30's. Talk about zero risk. Tankers should be defeatable by something they encounter in a mission at the hardest settings....from lvls 1-50.


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I figured intelligent people would get my point, which is that if they are balancing the game for the same identical risk for everyone, tanks, which are supposed to draw aggro, are going to have difficulty doing their jobs. If I need to spell it out more: if scrappers are being brought down to the same level of risk as blasters, then the same should be true for tanks. And if tanks are going to face the same risk as blasters, they are going to be at even higher risk when they draw aggro away from blasters and everyone else on the team. And unless your definition of risk doesn't match the english one, that means they are going to die. If they can do their jobs of drawing aggro for the team, they are going to have to be at massively lower risk exposure than the rest of the team combined.


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Maybe thats good for first time players - every class, no matter what they pick, will play with the same sort of rollercoaster death-around-every-corner pace.


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Hyperbole. You are exaggerating. Risk =/= death around every corner. You are creating a false comparison to support an otherwise invalid assertion.


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I'm not exaggerating. You are attempting to sound intelligent by stating your premise authoritatively, but without any support. I'm not generally impressed by it, I see it a lot.

If you are at risk, you are going to die eventually. If you never die, by definition your risk exposure was zero. That is how risk is actually defined - a probability of an event occuring. If you are at risk of being defeated, you will eventually be defeated. If your risk of being defeated is higher than someone else, you will be defeated more, or the person who calculated the risk failed to carry a two somewhere.

It is not hyperbole. If the risks are being calculated to be relative to blasters, then most blasters would say that, in fact, every engagement has some not insignificant risk of defeat. So my statement fails to meet the definition of hyperbole, because it is not exaggeration.


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When your blaster can take on 10 +4 Crey without inspirations, come talk to me. When your blaster can take out 6 +4 Malta, come talke to me. When your blaster can take on 8 +4 Nemesis, come talk to me. Your /SR may play like blaster because you've refused to use Toggles for 39 lvls. Mine doesn't. My guess is yours doesn't either.


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I have no idea what yours plays like. But quite honestly, if you are going to call me out for playing with less toggles than you, I'm calling shenanigans and asking you to stop talking about elude changes while you are still 37. Or for that matter discussing any end game issues while you are still in the mid-game.


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Perma-elude only affects people who can even get to level 40 in the first place


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So now we're talking about Perma-Elude in the blaster damage thread?


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Reading is fundamental, Mieux. The original post which I responded to was this:

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OK, let's assume that everyone is nerfed to the level of Blasters, and the game is a challenge for many people on Heroic.


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The devs believe this is desirable. I agree with them. It should be challenge for first time players on heroic. It should be nearly undoable (without a single defeat) for veteran players on Invinc. Think Halo on Legendary.


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I hope you remember it, its your post. The specific topic was that someone argued that it was not a good idea necessarily for everyone's power level to be brought down to the level of blasters, and you contradicted them and further stated that this was not only the devs goal, but personally desirable to yourself. I'm not sure why I have to remind you what you yourself said, but you seem to have forgotten.

Within that context, I mention perma-elude as a change that serves to reduce the play difference between scrappers and blasters, at least for me. You might disagree with the point, but I didn't think I needed to draw a picture for you not to get lost while I made it.

Although I try to avoid being antagonistic, its clear to me that you are primarily someone for whom it is more important to sound clever than logical or reasonable. To take quotes out of context, even when the context is your own words, just to sound intelligent tells me you lack ammunition to sound intelligent any other way. You nit-pick posts while doing nothing but asserting things without basis, support, or anything approaching reason. And you seem to have no problem attempting to sound authoritative about things you aren't necessarily fully familiar with.

On top of that, your sarcastic tone really makes it difficult to treat you in the sort of civil manner I try to accord every poster in these forums.

a) One recharge is definitely enough to get two torrents under one build up window. When I took out the 50++ recharge and put in a straight 50, the second torrent was getting in on the last second of BU, about what the calculations say should happen.

b) Although I thought I was good at hitting a group with T+EB, T+EB+T makes me look like a rank amateur. If I get half of them with the second T, I'm surprised.

c) Only one recharge leaves a large gap between T+EB and the last T, and they tend to shoot back. In fact, its a good idea to wait to the count of two to fire off the EB, to pace the knockback. A second recharge cuts the wait time by about a second, which might be meaningful.

d) I forgot to test Aim carefully, its definitely 60% plus or minus 5%, which haha doesn't answer the question. Oh well, next time.

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OK, let's assume that everyone is nerfed to the level of Blasters, and the game is a challenge for many people on Heroic.


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The devs believe this is desirable. I agree with them. It should be challenge for first time players on heroic. It should be nearly undoable (without a single defeat) for veteran players on Invinc. Think Halo on Legendary.


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I cannot express my disagreement with this strongly enough.

Extrapolating outward, then, if the only way to make it interesting is to make sure 3 whatevers can kill you, that doesn't bode well for tanks. Or are they the ones that will be bearing the burden of being bored so the rest of us can have an exciting game?

Eventually, when everything can kill you, thats just as boring as when nothing can kill you. Right now, my tank, my scrapper, my blaster, and my controller, all play differently on live. The SR changes makes my SR play the same as my blaster.

Maybe thats good for first time players - every class, no matter what they pick, will play with the same sort of rollercoaster death-around-every-corner pace. But for long term players, thats equally boring.

If I want to play like a blaster, I play my blaster. When I want to play like a tank, I play my tank. When I4 goes live, I will not have a high level scrapper to play, I will have a blapper, and with free copies to test and 3 respecs left, I can make a blapper whenever I want. I will not have a scrapper. I'll switch to my kat/invuln, because she still plays like a scrapper.

When my controller plays like a blaster, and my tank plays like a blaster, I will eventually have nothing but blasters with different costumes. I can tell you that will burn me out much faster than if my scrapper is "boring" - which I've never thought she was.

Why take the variety away? Perma-elude only affects people who can even get to level 40 in the first place, and the devs have gone so far as to state that many, if not most, casual players do not get to 50, given the small relative numbers of 50s. It was mainly a "problem" for people devoting the time to drive their characters into the high levels - where the late game challenges are the Rularuu, AVs, etc. The devs seem to almost be saying "we expected the stuff 40+ to really jump up and kill you, and if it doesn't, we need to tweak it so that it does."

If the game is supposed to "look" the same from level 1 through level 50, why have levels? Why not eliminate levels altogether from the game. If the game, balanced in accordance with what the developers feel is "good" starts off with one hero challenged by 3 level 1 minions, and ends with a level 50 hero challenged by 3 level 50 minions, get rid of the numbers, they are only psychologically sapping.

I believe that the game should escalate from 1 hero challenged by 3 level 1 minions, to 1 level 20 hero challenged by 3 level 22 minions, to a level 30 hero challenged by 8 level 33 minions, to a level 40 hero challenged by 3 level 42 bosses, to a level 50 hero challenged by an archvillain, his five lieutenants, 30 swarming minions, and oddjob's hat.

If its always exactly the same, just the numbers are different, keep in mind I don't actually *see* those numbers when I'm playing. I see my scrapper fighting 3 minions, over and over again, for 50 levels. In my honest opinion, thats poor design in that it doesn't take human psychology into account at all. It presumes people will spend hundreds of hours paying monthly fees to play PacMan vs the same four ghosts forever.

I'm going to state categorically right now perhaps a very controversial - and odd coming from me - position. It is more important that the AT classes are different than they are balanced. If they are different but unbalanced there's always hope, because people might not play the way you want, but they'll play. If they are balanced but identical, people will not necessarily play just because they appreciate the academic accomplishment of making a balanced game. I believe I'm in as good a position to judge balance as anyone else, and I know that balance is important, but while it is a long-term necessity, variety is the short term imperative. Without variety, you won't hold subscribers long enough for them to notice the game isn't balanced.

Preserve variety, and then try real hard to balance within those variety parameters. You shouldn't necessarily mortgage tomorrow for a better today, but if you are going to sacrifice variety, you are wrecking today for a tomorrow that may never come.

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yup. There's no reason why a less defense-equipped AT must ALSO have less HP than others. It'll lose it faster, but it can take a few extra hits of just about any type [rather than many many many many more of one type, and only many many more of the second, which is what you get from various defenses].

If what we take in terms of HP chunks is to make range defense equal to scrappers, one way could be to give us... now don't all start screaming now...
...
...
Tanker HP.


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More thematically in sync with the notion that blasters are "squishie" but ought to survive better at range is to make ranged attacks inherently less accurate, so we get hit less often.

It completely fits the comic books, action movies, and all other cultural touchstones that when the hero is over here, and the bad guys is over there, the bad guy might spray hundreds of bullets trying to hit the good guy. If any of the comic book villains had even my aim and a good pair of glasses, none of the "squishy" blasters in comic books would survive to page 8.

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Ok, unless I completely suck at CoH math (which is possible, the last time I tried doing math I managed to get 80% defense using Power Boost >_&gt, then these are the numbers for Energy Torrent with recharges (assuming ET is slotted with 1 Acc, 2 Recharge, and 3 Damage):

(1.8333 + .8333) * (1 + (1 + .65 + .33 * 3)) * 2 = 19.412848

That's in one BU+Aim cycle... Fire Breath is

(1.6250 * 3) * (1 + (1 + .65 + .33 * 5)) = 20.9625

Holy crap that's close o.O

I'm still not sure if you can do it with only one recharge, but if you could... (1 Acc, 1 Recharge, 4 Damage)

(1.8333 + .8333) * (1 + (1 + .65 + .33 * 4)) * 2 = 21.172804

O_O

Wow...

Lemme see if that works...

EDIT: Does my math suck? Please don't tell me it sucks >_>

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Yup, you got it.

Torrent is 1.8333 + 0.8333 = 2.6666 like you said.

BU+Aim+3dmg = 1+0.6+1 (My figure for Aim is 0.6, not 0.65, but its not all that important - I'll check it tonight to be sure).

Net damage is 2.6666 * (1 + 2.6) = 9.60. Two firings is 19.2

One mistake: Fire breath cannot go as high as you calculate:

(1.625 * 3 ticks) * (1 + 1 + 0.6 + 1.66) = 1.625 * 3 * (4.26)

4.26 is above the 400% blaster damage cap. Capped, fire breath is:

1.625 * 3 * 4 = 19.5

Its practically a wash, although we have to fire twice to get there.

If we can do it with 1 recharge like I think we can (I'm definitely double checking tonight) then:

2.6666 * (1 + 1 + 0.6 + 1.33) * 2 firings = 2.6666 * (3.93) *2 = 20.96

Higher than fire breath, but again, this sequence (BU+Aim+T+T) takes about 12 seconds. You will want to shove EB in there - even if the thing is unslotted for damage - just to keep knocking them around during the 7 seconds you are waiting around for T to recharge.

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It would be nice if we can get back to blaster damage in this thread.


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Long, long, long ago, I think the subject of movement came up as a related point to blaster damage; if blasters have to move more, then even if their raw damage numbers were intrinsicly higher than scrappers, their net damage output might be lower in real combat because of time lost to maneuvering.

I believe that is theoretically true, but as a practical matter most blasters that develop a more maneuverable style tend to gravitate to superspeed jousting. Almost by definition, if their play style requires a lot of moving, and they can't move fast, they'll die.

So connecting this whole line of thought back to the original question, I believe that while blasters may or may not need to move more, the cost for burning time to move around is so high for (defenseless) blasters, that they almost never pay it - they switch to another style that requires less movement, or switch to SS jousting.

In other words, the "cost" for maneuvering is theoretical only, the tendancy is for the average blaster to pay for the maneuvering cost by picking up superspeed, not by losing time to jog around. That time wouldn't just be costing dps, it would be exposing the blaster to more damage, which I think most blasters un-learn to not do.

Blasters are only standing around not firing if they don't have an available attack, not because they are changing scenary. So they are usually fighting near their best damage output, at least solo. In teams, some blasters seem to hold back deliberately because of aggro concerns. I don't, so I can't address how much of an impact that might have through personal experience. If my damage output is not near my maximum, I'm chatting on the SG channel or on a bio break.

So I think its fair to look at our high end damage output without a lot of corrections factors. What I don't think is fair is comparing it to scrapper damage to see if its "good enough." Blaster damage should be compared to blaster health, not scrapper damage. The only relevant question is: do blasters do enough damage to defeat what they are "supposed" to be able to defeat, before they die. If they do, then their damage output is satisfactory. If they don't, then its not. It doesn't matter if blaster damage is 10% of scrapper damage, or 200% more than scrapper damage.

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I just wanted to post something I found out with Energy Torrent and Explosive Blast...

I slotted Energy Torrent with two recharges, so with that and Hasten, I can fit two ET's into one BU+Aim cycle. With this and EB, I can "alpha" up to oranges, if I knock them back into walls. They don't really get any return fire since they're all on the ground.

Sooo this was just a really cool find for me. Now I can actually blow groups up =P

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I've been playing around with recharge myself recently - I've got a test build with one recharge slotted into everything. Its a little weird - I'm so used to just firing off attacks as they recharge, and with energy, usually exactly one attack is recharged at any one time once you unload the alpha strike. I think you can do this trick with only one recharge, and I don't think you need to stack BU on top of Aim either - I think T+EB+T will take out +2 minions without stacking Aim on top. It wont take out LTs, although thats no problem, because you have a pause between EB and the next T, so you can squeeze another shot in there and take out an LT within the combo.

I've been saying all along that you can easily drop EB right on top of torrent without torrent's scatter being a real problem, but can you actually stack T+EB+T consistently on a single pile? The big problem I'm having right now is getting into the optimum position to pull this off, which is real up close and personal for the initial torrent.

On test, where I'm testing this, that's not as easy anymore with the SS debuff. Maybe you will need to stack Aim on top to make this work - but I hate to give up BU/Aim alternation.