Arcanaville

Those numbers imply 80% damage mitigation. No one said Sustain would replace 80% damage mitigation, but that's not the same thing as saying its "minor." By your own numbers it radically increases what you can take on normally. In the situation where you are mezzed, it would not help greatly but if that actually happened to you often you'd be dead all the time. The same things you're doing now to mitigate that situation will still work in I24, but Sustain will have a significant impact on your sustainability beyond that.


For me personally I tend to run near the limit of what my build is capable of. Which means no matter how much survivability you give me, I'm going to occasionally exceed that level. Rebirth buys me out of a bad run of the RNG or a miscalculation, which is something Barrier can't do as well. Theoretically speaking Barrier could allow me to average higher survivability, but my playstyle would tend to "spend" that extra survivability rather than keep it in reserve for emergencies.

Not really, but the more they overlap the more the devs will encourage comparisons they won't be happy about encouraging. There's a difference between not fixing the air conditioner and setting the house on fire.

Hmm...

I'm thinking of making it six, but I'm worried I will be summoning myself everywhere along with a mini-me.

Lowering my defense from 45% to 43% is like getting hit with an autohitting -40% resistance debuff constantly. That's not a tad anything.

But it is true that 43% can be "nearly immortal" depending on what you face. For that matter, so can 33% defense, 20% resistance, or slotted health.

Against +0x1 most scrappers would be nearly immortal with no secondary.

But why is "immortality" not overrated? Because most players probably play the game within a factor of two or so of what they could play at. Players generally don't build hyperstrong builds and then play at +0x1. They build strong to play at higher difficulty. If they never encounter anything that gives them any challenge, they are not likely to spend time improving their builds, at least not defensively.

*Most* of the players running around with 43% defense are likely to be facing things that are at least nominally capable of challenging 43% defense. Even if they like to cruise without difficulty they will still be cruising at a difficulty level that 43% defense allows to be easy.

For those people, the difference between 43% defense and 45% defense will tend to be noticable. The people for whom 43% and 45% defense look exactly identical are extremely unlikely to possess 43% defense in the first place.

So long as they exist they need to be differentiated. If the devs ever forget that, they will have no one to blame but themselves for the self-inflicted consequences they will generate. They will be harsh.

Grr, I'm going to have to add alpha now.

Touché. And just to completely confuse people, I've settled on a forum avatar.

In the general case, none of the powersets are really transferrable directly in a way that preserves archetype intent. Some just break less things than others.

And that's after first handwaving away all the "obvious" problems with proliferation: removing or rewriting criticals, eliminating or altering gauntlet - we just *assume* the inherent or archetype-specific features are just plug and play, but they aren't always. Martial Arts is a canonical example of what happens when you adapt one set to one archtype: the better you fit it to one, the harder it becomes to port it to others. But the alternative of making sets that fit nothing, so every archetype is equally unserved by it and thus creates no proliferation problems is highly unpalatable.

This doesn't just happen to melee archetypes. Containment alters the way control sets benefit Controllers and Dominators: its possible for a control set to work for one but not the other, to be too powerful for one but not the other.

Rage would do three different things for the three different non-stalker melee archetypes, if we look specifically at damage buff:

1. It buffs +80% dmg for tankers

2. It buffs +80% dmg for brutes, which including fury is proportionately about half the benefit.

3. It would buff +100% for scrappers without a proliferation adjustment.

There's no reason to believe its performance as a tanker secondary correlates to its performance as a brute primary or that either would correlate to its performance as a scrapper primary. Rage is 25% stronger on scrappers than tankers, and 50% weaker on brutes than tankers. Those are balance-significant numbers. Even if you assume Rage gets adjusted for scrappers, which target do you aim at: the Brute target or the Tanker target? They are a factor of two apart.

Super strength cannot be balanced for both Brutes and Tankers simultaneously with that huge difference in damage buff benefit. Particularly as its facing the wrong way: towards a higher offensive benefit for Tankers.

If we're talking about a level 50, tier 4 Barrier Core offers at least 5% defense and resistance constantly (higher at times, but that's the strength of the "tail" that buffs the last 60 seconds of the 120s cycle).

If what you want is debuff resistance, Ageless Radial Epiphany offers significant debuff resistance. 21.25% DDR minimum, higher for earlier parts of the cycle.

Whoever said this:

is wrong.

I should be more precise: everyone who has said that, player and dev, was wrong when they said it. That if-then statement is false regardless of utterer.

The thing is, who's going to jump from having a build that can barely take on x2 to attempting a x8 spawn? That would be nuts. What is true is that the sustain will take what you have now, whatever that is, and more or less double or triple its strength. If you can only take on x2 now, you might be able to take on x4 in I24 which is a huge difference. But if you can take on x5 or x6 now, you will have a shot at a x8 full spawn (the numbers scaling is not linear due to quadratic alpha damage). The presumption is that if you are at that level now, you must have some means of dealing with alphas now, and that will be amplified in I24.

I play with Rebirth now, and I can say with certainty that even the back half of the buff that will be comparable to the I24 buff makes a significant difference to survivability. The notion that most blaster deaths happen due to an instantaneous alpha burst is simply not true. Its incredibly rare. In fact, I've tested how long it takes critters to kill mezzed or undefended blasters quite a bit. Even three mezzing bosses combined can't kill a blaster in one mez duration generally.

Given the strength of the Sustains, I'm very likely to be switching from Rebirth to Barrier on Incarnate blasters. The problem with Barrier has always been that it couldn't bail me out of a low-health jam, but with the sustains that will be less of an issue.

Except whether a powerset specifically performs in a particular way within the context of a particular archetype is not a matter of opinion. Fury, for example, materially changes the impact of damage buffs within a damage set. It is therefore mathematically *impossible* to make any damage set work in the same way for Brutes and non-Brutes if they contain significant damage strength buffs. The archetypes simply do not scale proportionately in that fashion.

The notion that if a powerset works for archetype X it must work for archetype Y has been proven false countless times over the years. Whether its possible to balance an offensive set in other ways between the archetypes is a separate question, but the notion that its automatically true that a set balanced for one melee archetype must be balanced for the other three is objectively false.

Except that "slicing" is the only thing we can perceive, and the only thing that directly affects our survivability. I'm not sure why people think its reasonable to compare 43% defense an 45% defense vs zero, but if there was no floor it would be equally true that the last 2% of defense from 48% to 50% would be the same 2 less hits, except that last 2% defense would also be absolute immortality (outside of direct defense counters). That should be enough to eliminate the idea that 2 less hits always has the same value, but if its not the long explanation is several pages longer.

Under the right conditions a trained observer can actually *see* 2% defense in action. When Evasion was announced to have increased by 1.875% in I6, I could actually see it hadn't been just from playing SR, in the days before Real Numbers and City of Data, and that prompted me to construct a test to prove it.

Let's ask the crew of the USS Pueblo:

Just because it might not be possible to win, doesn't mean you shouldn't recognize who the real enemy is. The real enemy is the game dev, and the real game is against him. The MMO itself is a meta game. Win or lose, my sole goal would be to beat the dev. Everything else is a distraction, even if a very dangerous one.

I wouldn't estimate a target I had to kill for real. I'm not an anime villain. If my life depended on surviving City of Heroes combat I would use my entire inspiration tray to kill a minion, and I would use nukes on a player with only five points of health left. And then I would run out to sniper range and wait to see if it rezzed. While stealthed. And running a full complement of amplifiers. With all the base buffs.

The only thing killing me in a deathmatch MMO is the RNG.

Keyboards. Such a quaint technology:

I've always wanted to play Energy Blast/Energy Aura, but with the I24 changes coming to Energy Manipulation I'm getting something not bad at all.

DP/MC might be a close analog to DP/Invuln: its going to have a strong Absorb toggle like Ice will and its going to have a PBAoE mitigation aura, albeit a recharge debuff rather than a scaling defense buff. With the fighting pool stacked on top, its going to be pretty tough damage mitigation-wise.

I mentioned it to Arbiter Hawk and he's considering it.

Resists take effect first, then the remainder deducts from Absorb until its gone, then the rest hits health. Its because resists reduce the damage that hits the absorb shieds that resistance synergizes well with Absorb. The object of the meta game for Absorb is try to keep the damage below Absorb's limit long enough for the next tick to refresh absorb back to full.

So if you have ~50% resistance in the situation above, its actually that the damage gets reduced from 42.5% to 21.25%, and then reduced to only 11.25% from the Absorb (and then the Absorb shield is gone until the next Absorb tick).

I wrote a computer program to extract the data to make a graph.


Its still not as whacked as opening 2400 superpacks, though.