Arcanaville

In a crowd where everyone has their own definition of the word, yeah. But I don't have a communication problem with the devs when we discuss balance, even if my definition isn't precisely the same as theirs, because I acknowledge what they mean and they understand what I mean. Which is how all two-way communication works.

D2.0 might be less efficient, but we don't yet know that the combination of D2.0 and mez-immune sustain is less efficient. The problem with D2.0 might have always been that we expected too much from it. Every archetype has an array of mitigation tools. Mez protection is just one piece of the puzzle for melee archetypes, and not one they think about constantly and specifically. Its just one among many protective powers. Archetypes like controllers and defenders don't have a mez protection substitute, they just work completely differently and have a totally different array of powers that work together. D2.0 needs a supporting cast of characters to go with it to make a whole, and we need to see if Sustain is enough to make D2.0 + Sustain a strong duo, or if the pair needs a little more support to make the whole work well as a team.

Unless you have a high AoE tanker with a gigaton of recharge, I would imagine so. But probably not enough to claim that Judgment is great and Hybrid is worthless.

Not to mention the ability to violate the laws of physics, which would make them God.

Why not just go all the way. If your definition of balance is "every player must have exactly the same experience under all conditions" then the only way to do that is to restrict your game to having only one player. And they can only play the game once, because their experience on Tuesday won't be balanced with their experience on Wednesday. And they can only play the game at noon or their morning experience won't be balanced against their evening balance.

Any balance goal that requires all elements of a purportedly heterogeneous game to be identical is best dealt with by eliminating that goal. Such goals aren't about balance, they are a perversion of balance.

That's probably more of a specific limitation of Fire Blast than anything else. Most blaster tier 1 and tier 2 ranged attacks have some form of secondary mitigation built into them on top of damage. On Energy Blast, Assault Rifle, Beam Rifle, Dark Blast, Ice Blast, Psionic Blast, and Water Blast you have two bites at the apple: you can outright kill the target you're shooting at, or you can apply significant damage mitigation through a secondary effect or debuff.

And that isn't counting the secondary tier 1 which in most cases is a ranged immobilize and should be able to keep one or more attackers out of melee range while you're mezzed (or in the case of power thrust knock them out of melee range).

I think the classic portrayal of Blasters as being so fragile they always get killed in the blink of an eye promotes a false sense that only mega survivability buffs would even be noticed. But that's not true: in actual fact blasters die far more often from the death of a thousand cuts (or at least twenty or thirty cuts). D2.0's ability to shoot at targets while mezzed generally both softens the blow of being inactive while mezzed by making the blaster not actually inactive anymore, and also helps reduce the impact of mez on both offensive output and damage intake, which helps overall survivability.

Dual illusionists used to be extremely dangerous prior to D2.0 because unless you had a break free to deal with them, they could chain mez you to death. That's far less likely now, because the damage output you can generate under D2.0 while mezzed is usually high enough to kill them before they can blind you to death. While that's an example of the impact of D2.0, in now way is it limited to individual niches such as that (nor would I call that a niche either: its basically inevitable and common in Carnie missions to face that combat situation).

I don't agree. Controllers, Defenders, Corruptors, all work just fine without mez protection. Its possible to make archetypes very powerful that do not have intrinsic mez protection. The blaster problem wasn't lack of mez protection, it was lack of everything including mez protection.

In I24 they won't lack everything anymore. And Blasters also have the closest thing we currently have to "partial protection" from mez: their intrinsic regeneration mitigation doesn't suppress, and they can shoot three attacks while mezzed. They still lack true mez protection, but they have significant mez mitigation now.

I think its significant but I do not have specific numbers. My understanding is that it offers the Mez+1 mez break for several seconds, and a significant mez resistance effect for longer (to reduce the duration of future mez and to help decay the current one).


That's more of a min/max issue: most blasters do not have soft-cap defenses to detoggle. For most blasters, most of their survivability in I24, more than half numerically, is going to come from sustain, which won't suppress.


Some of the changes slant towards other archetypes but they still benefit blasters significantly. And actually, blaster *preference* doesn't seem to be as serious of a problem as blaster *performance*. If the changes make blasters stronger and also increase the perceived favorability of defenders and corruptors that might not be all bad. Blasters appeared to be more popular than corruptors and defenders by a wide margin in terms of players rolling them initially, but then suffered problems harsh enough to cause many players to abandon or significantly slow their play of them. Increasing their performance would help with that problem, reducing the issues that encourage abandonment. But its also fine if less people initially rolled blasters in the first place and started rolling defenders and corruptors, because those two archetypes were rolled far less often than blasters in the first place.

An I24 where less people rolled blasters, but more of those that did were happy with them, would be a double win in my judgment.

If there is a singular problem that posters like Rakeeb amplify, its the artificial tension between game balance and game entertainment value. A lot of people, even sometimes the devs, believe these are mutually exclusive objectives and in wrongly promoting their preferences as objective balance they just make this fallacy harder to dismiss.

Game balance has nothing to do with entertainment value, because game balance should be judged within the context of the entertainment value you're trying to deliver. Saying its harder to make balanced games entertaining or vice versa is like saying its hard to make blue cars fast, because the faster you make them the more red they have to be.

This game has a certain feel, it delivers a certain gameplay and has a certain entertainment value. Anything that purports to "balance" the game while destroying those things isn't meaningful balance. That's the difference between game design and arithmetic.

Can we balance this game, with ugly mechanics and quirky classes? Yes, we can in theory, and in practice we can keep improving even if we never actually get there. In our game, balance is not about the scale damage of blazing bolt. Its about core content, progressional opportunity, and reward earning. If every archetype/powerset combination choice had approximately the same ability to deal with core content, if they all had a similar if not identical opportunity to use the progressional systems of the game (i.e. inventions, incarnate powers), if they all had a similar ability to earn rewards, then it doesn't matter if someone has 21.6% more AoE damage and someone else takes down pylons 18 seconds quicker. That's arithmetic. Meaningful balance is about the experience the game delivers. Sometimes that involves numerical balancing of specific game effects. But always with an eye to the overall big picture of the gameplay we deliver.

Its ok if we all can only take on three things. Its also ok if we all can take on twelve. Three is not a magic number. Ok, it is a magic number, but not for game balance. What matters is what the game intent is. If we intend players to be far more powerful here than in other MMOs, that's fine. Blasters are not in competition with Jedi Knights or Blood Elfs. They are only in competition with Tankers and Stalkers and Dominators and Masterminds. We decide what is "balanced" for this game in terms of our relative capabilities. And then math takes over and tries to deliver on that decision.

But what we care about most here, what we've always cared about most, is not trivial number crunching. That's just a tool to help with the real game design, which is to offer the players fair choices in archetype and powersets. And fair in this case is what I mentioned above: similar ability to run core content, similar ability to use optional progression systems, similar ability to earn rewards.

Are we there yet? Of course not. We don't need posters like Rakeeb to lecture us on that. But we also don't need posters like Rakeeb to tell us the entire game we play is wrong, and we're all wrong for liking it, and if we weren't so wrong we'd see why we should discard eight years of City of Heroes to make City of Rakeeb.

I like City of Heroes. I like it even though its imperfect and I spend a lot of time trying to improve it. I don't want to trade City of Heroes for City of Rakeeb. I don't think I would like City of Rakeeb, even though in many ways it might implement many of the mechanical changes I've advocated for years. Because City of Rakeeb doesn't care about players, it cares about Rakeeb mechanics. It cares about arithmetic more than gameplay. And as surprising as it might be to some people when I say this, it should not be surprising to people who have read my stuff since 2004. I don't care about arithmetic. Numbers to me are just language. They aren't the game any more than English is the game. Often, number are extremely important to defining and describing the game, but numbers don't *decide* the game.

We do that. We the devs and we the players (moreso the former of course, but we have more input here than anywhere else). So anyone that says they don't care what the players think and what the devs think doesn't care about this game. They care about this other thing in their heads that they wish could replace this game.

We've been asking for it for about that long. But we know the set's been in development for probably about six months.

You there. Keep at it.

I believe the current recharge for the power is somewhere between 480 and 600 seconds. Its a once every five to ten minute escape from trouble. That's a long enough recharge for mez breaking that I think saying its so powerful it either needs to be nerfed or everyone else has to have it is exaggerating the net effect.

Simultaneous with granting Martial Combat a very infrequent mez breaker Arbiter Hawk also softened the threat mez has by making the sustain powers very strong and unsuppressed under mez in I24. That means the true benefit of Inner Will in I24 will be significantly lower than it would be if it was introduced in I23.

Synapse said something to me way back in January I think when I was discussing blasters with him. He said that the "blaster metagame" was going to be radically different in I24, and therefore I should be careful about extrapolating too much about the blaster state into the next issue. He didn't clarify at the time, but its obvious that for the most part he meant at least that:

1. Blasters were getting very large survivability boosts via Sustain effect.

2. Blasters were getting a hedge against mez by virtue of Sustain not being suppressable.

3. Power pools were being altered, altering the build options for blasters (among other archetypes)

4. Ranged sets were being improved, increasing the viability of stand-off blasting

Those are enough simultaneous changes alone to change the blaster landscape significantly. Ignoring who benefits more from what for a moment, in absolute terms the game blasters are going to be facing in I24 is radically different. Until we all test it and rethink the blaster metagame of surviving in combat under I24 conditions, we shouldn't jump to conclusions on what the impact of any one particular thing will be out of context. In I23, Inner would be an exceptional stand out power. In I24 it might be a good, but not game-changing power.

They should retcon Quesada and spend the next ten years publishing the alternate history version of their comics if he hadn't tampered with their stories.

Actually, my best estimate is that my Assault Core Embodiment ultimately provides a comparable level of net damage benefit as my Ion Core Final Judgment does in actual play. Performance-wise they are close enough to be a wash.

I'll just quote this part here, take a step back, and let everyone else judge whether the correct response is to laugh, to sigh, or to roll their eyes.


You're the only one willing to destroy the game to save it. You've explicitly stated that you don't care what the devs think, and you don't care about what the players think, and yet you want people to care about what you think. Good luck with that.

Doing things just for the hell of it that don't match the current design requirements of the game set precedents that are both dangerous and foolish.

Its stupider than it sounds in summary form.

If that's what your digestive system does after being subjected to Fruit Loops for three straight days, I would recommend never attempting to see what it does after five.

That listing seems to have one error and the order scrambled. Based on the video, this is what I have for Martial Combat for Blasters, in the order the powers were listed in the powers menu shown:

Martial Combat (blaster secondary)
1. Chi Push: foe repel, knockback, damage similar to power thrust
2. Storm Kick
3. Reach for the Limit: passive, chance for +33% dmg/+15% tohit per attack
4. Burst of Speed: self teleport, PBAoE damage, triple use before recharge
5. Dragon's Tail: PBAoE melee
6. Reaction Time: +absorb, +recovery, foe -speed, -recharge; 10s self +speed/+rech on toggle off
7. Inner Will: self heal, mez protection; requires self <50% health or self mezzed
8. Throw Sand: Cone foe stun, -perception
9. Eagle's Claw: high smashing, foe -recharge, -range

I believe Reaction Time is specifically targeted for tier 6 to be available at level 20 like almost all the sustain powers are (the exceptions are Energize in Energy Manipulation which is tier 5 and level 16 and Frigid Embrace in Ice Manipulation which is tier 4 and level 10).

Also, I got kinda close.

I don't think it was ever explained when the costume toggles first arrived. I have a sneaking suspicion there is no reason: at least no specific restriction that mandates it. It may have been done that way for certain expediency reasons, but I can think of no practical reason why even then with the tech available at the time they needed to be exclusive of stealth powers.

According to this theory, -8.3% of all players would play blasters.

Hey Ring Mistress! Come here lemme show you something!

It often helps if in those situations you temporarily move your camera angle pointing generally downward at the ground. I've so far never failed to easily spring attack when my aiming point is firing towards the ground rather than sideways alongside the ground.

That's often how I use Spring Attack actually: just jump in place and you have a good AoE. The teleportation in Spring Attack is gravy for when repositioning yourself would hit more targets. For blasters, we'll have the option to jump into combat, jump out of combat, jump in place, jump between targets, or jump to optimize AoE. And we have three jumps to play around with.