Another_Fan

Exactly my point. Post defiance I13 we now have travel powers of all kinds at level 4. Ninja run, hoverboard, coyote run, etc, and that doesn't even include the ability to take regular travel powers at 4 without prerequisite. You also now have the AE, and an endless slew of powerleveling options that weren't available before.

The problem is these changes haven't fixed poor performance they only minimize the penalties for poor performance. If you take it to the extreme case you could reason by plotting the changes to travel time from the hospital to the mission, and blaster earning problems the best way to fix the AT would be to install mission transporter booths in hospitals and further cut down the amount of debt blasters incur for dieing.

As a matter of fact adjusting the amount of debt blasters incur and decreasing their travel time to the mission would be the method, that breaks the fewest things in the AT and requires the least effort to implement. It just happens to be horribly wrong.

Do you seriously think that the availability of Ninja Run, inspirations at the hospital, travel powers at level 4, and the reductions in death penalties only applied to THB or that they wouldn't skew any and everyone's results ?

Sorry you have completely missed it.

The point here is that much of the death penalty is gone.

You can now see what I have been talking about all along. Relying on statistics can paint a completely false picture.

If you go by reward generation and leveling speed the blaster is doing better. If you go by success in accomplishing tasks the stalker is doing better.

What I really hope to see from this is just how much changes in the game change the nature of the signals the devs can pick up from the variables they monitor.

No. Epicycles and Luminous Ether, Chinese cosmology and atronomy are what you get when all you demand from your theories is that they fit the available data. Beautiful, descriptive and even powerful over the range of data that were collected, but all completely wrong and not even close to right.

In this case there is no excuse not to model and use the model to make the judgment call. Its not difficult if you have the data available in a usable form. Its hardly an unreasonable expectation that devs would have the information available.

Edit as to the rest, sorry its just making excuses for not doing things properly.

The keep TopDoc down protocol, or didn't you think they might be worried that a few people with hordes of Hero Merits and recipes might totally destroy the market ? Not to rub salt here but you can still run the SSAs for regular merits. Anyone with as many alts as you claim should be able to accumulate hordes of merits in short order.

Well it's only a SO build on both and inspirations are freely used, I'd think the blaster can keep competitive till the mid 30s.

Hail of bullets is not only a non crashing nuke, but it also includes a defense buff to make certain you can actually use it.

That is the problem. The only thing that statistics about people taking snipes tell you is how popular it is as a product.

You are much better off listening to the people who have long complained about snipes, listening to their complaints and then checking statistics to see how badly changes to the power will affect the people that actually use them.

By what measure underperform ? The defiance 2.0 changes were based on the idea that they underperform in earning rewards. If the devs sample for that information again and the signal is not there would it imply blasters were functioning well enough ? Despite the fact that blasters are the most abandoned AT ?

I look at the numbers for the combinations I have run and I see a sufficient vulnerability to mez and difficulty in building for softcap defense on blasters that there is a clear difficulty when upping the difficulty and placing them in more challenging situations.

If nothing else the contortions you have to go through to make a survivable blaster build constitute a problem of their own. Being forced to take tier1 and tier 2 blasts, the tier 1 secondary attack just so you can have a little more active ride to mez death, the inclusion of damage auras on an at that will be dead before they can be retoggled all are problems. even if they don't show up in the reward/time stats.

Which is why actually modelling the problem is necessary. If the model shows a performance problem relative to what other ATs can achieve blasters should get the buff no matter what the stats show. If the model doesn't indicate a problem but the stats do, its time to examine the assumptions in the model. The 'Range is a blaster's defense" might well be an assumption that is baked into the dev's formulas for balancing ATs that is just not valid. (Hover is just too much of a pain for the majority of players to take ?)


THB's test case can't be called an anecdote. He has a methodology for recording the data and reporting it that is non subjective and usable by others. I don't know if it will shed more light on blaster performance or changes in the game but at the very least it should provide some insight on how the ranged damage AT does against a melee damage AT in a variety of situations.

If the model doesn't predict the data the model is wrong, correcting it is called science. If your model is nothing but curve fitting to the data, that is called religion.

I would hold that the neutral view of the archetype is required as the starting point no matter what. Without the model of why the AT is underperforming even a perfect set of statistics of the performance won't necessarily give you any insight in what to change to fix it. At that point you just have a guessing game of what to change.

Just as an example here but I don't think its a great stretch to say that snipes are the least taken of all the powers in the blast sets. That statistic doesn't tell you anything about why nobody likes snipes. If you go over to the fix snipes thread there are 50 different ways to fix snipes. If you examine how well the people who take snipes do, you get a strange mix of people that don't think snipes are bad, people that are using the snipe for outlying purposes (set mules, pulling av's on a baf, blowing up bombs on an underground, etc) . You just haven't gotten anything but that there is a problem and some confusing information about the problem.

An easier way to see this problem is how using average times to adjust the merit rewards have completely broken the payouts for them. You have the redside SFs all having disproportionately low payouts because originally redside attracted more power gamers. If instead of mining the average run time for the activities and then adding in a fudge constant, the devs had of worked from a minimal amount of kills/effort to complete then added in a fudge constant for difficult to quantify items (travel time, difficult AV etc) we would have a much better reward system, and one that wouldn't start activities at 2 merits because there wasn't run statistics.

Edit: If you just look at THB's results you see the blaster has one more death than the stalker. These days that is no big deal at one point that would have been a problem. Does nerfing the effects of death constitute a buff to blasters relative to other ATs ? If it does is that the way anyone wants to fix an AT ?

A single example can be a more powerful statement than reams of statistical data.

I am certainly not in the blasters don't need to be fixed camp but statistical sampling of performance is certainly going to be way off. People make choices based on their abilities and resources about what they play. This inevitably skews any data you might get from taking a snapshot of the AT. I am a prime example of this phenomenon. After I played my first blaster to 50, I stopped with the AT until I felt I was able to kit it out sufficiently to overcome the difficulties. Even at that point, I went through combinations of primaries and secondaries that both performed well and were fun to play. There was also the fact that certain combinations like Energy/Energy (an above average survivor) had to be excluded because of KB and the prejudice against it.

The only way to do the job right this time, is to model the problems blasters have versus other ATs on a primary and secondary powerset basis then see if the sets need reworking or you can slide by with a minor adjustment.

I freely confess to not having done the work. (If you understand how much work it is you can see why I wont do it unpaid). My gut feeling looking at how blasters work is that they need equal to slightly better damage output than the melee damage types, limited mezz protection, a 50% base boost for their pool defense/resistance numbers and a look at secondary sets that dont offer AoEs.

Yes I understand that is much to do, but if you look at this games history it is resounding proof that the most expensive effort is wasted effort, and it is wiser to get things right the first time instead of trying to correct over and over.

Evil Geko and Johnny Butane, Separated at birth ?

Remove the interrupt and shorten the cast time.

Actually that is something that should be done with all the interruptible combat powers, including aid self.

If you look up thread you might see yourself saying this.

Now aside from the fact that you don't mention which version of PvP, how good a player the tank was or how good the build was, I am genuinely curious why anyone would think this is meaningful for the set ?

Good strategy for the fire tank would be to catch you off guard lock you down and then beat the stuffings out of you. Wandering into your traps is poor play on his part.

But once again why is it relevant ? There is less balance in PVP than there ever was. If this would bring devices up to competitive more power to it.

Fair is fair, I was asking my questions because I wasn't certain you were saying anything relevant.

If you put that in the description people saw when creating blaster there wouldn't be a problem with them because almost no one would ever bother to roll them. It's really not right to ask people to deal with an AT that is in that position when that is not what is being sold them

People when they roll a blaster expect over the top damage in exchange for a loss of survivability. They don't get damage what they do get is a weaker AT. That's why people abandon blasters. There is just no place in this game for an AT that must have team support.

Several years now

Why is that relevant to anything ?

I don't doubt this. What I take away from it though is something different than you do. To me it's just an example of bad pvp.

Well we might have to have a loss someplace, is a bit of a stretch for a powerset that definitely needs a buff.

Seeing as it is safe to say that buffs are coming for blasters, I doubt Arcanaville would take a chance on having reversed his/her position on blasters and rushed to the head of the parade if, it weren't already a done deal. It would be nice to get the real problems with blasters properly addressed.

So what you are worried about is once every two minutes or so you will be able to put out a series of attacks that do less aoe damage than any other blaster can do in 20 seconds ?

Or that in pvp /dev blasters might gain an attack more effective than dropping caltrops and webgrenade then running away to fight at range ?

That raises another issue with blaster powerset combinations. Mismatched control options. There is very little reason with the possible exception of fire (Trades everything for damage) that you shouldn't be able to match the controls between primary and secondary. The combinations where you can stack the control type, be it kb, stun or hold really do considerably better than the combinations that don't.

In the case of holds you can usually fix it by taking an epic pool but there isn't anything for stuns or fear.

The secondary sets are occasionally described as utility but it seems even that is pre nerfed

Your conception of boosters and the Dev's conception are in divergence. I personally think you have the much better concept but somehow I think the thought of people buying these things over and over and over again dances in the Dev's heads.

That is A basket not A one basket. I just need really big baskets.

Just a statement of fact.

If you are going to do impressive things with the market INF is usually preferred .



I long ago reached the point where mine is too difficult to store properly.

I wasn't kidding when I told Top Doc most of the bids for level 10 glads were mine

Then you are very late to the party.

Well seeing as they didn't give a respec this issue, despite the fact they created giant needs for them, you are probably right.

As to being a dangerous precedent most people would call it normal business practice. Imagine if you were in a restaurant and after you had ordered they get new menus in with revised prices. You would hardly expect to pay the revised prices and the restaurant would hardly expect you to.

Of course this is the problem with selling power in game. Its one thing to change part of how a game works, its another thing to sell people one thing and change what they bought post purchase.

That makes no sense. If blasters are relative under performers whatever boost they get should overwhelmingly benefit them to the exclusion of other ATs that demonstrably don't need it currently. It should be fine grained and easy to adjust if needed in the future.