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Quote:Well in the team case the assumption was that there was enough survivability buff, to essentially render the blaster immortal. So you would have to violate the model to argue survivability buff.OK, sounds like you agree the damage cap thing isn't valid in the solo case.
Regarding the team case, I see where you're coming from, but if you start considering outside buffs you open a pretty big can of worms. For example if we assume a kin is teamed with the scrapper to always keep him damage capped, couldn't we equally well assume that an empath is teamed with a blaster that keeps Fortitude, CM and AB on the blaster at all times, and throws him an occasional heal? (I don't think this is too outlandish - this is how I buff when I play my empath.) These buffs can make the blaster easily as survivable (or more) as the scrapper, completely negates the END crash from her nova, and lets the blaster use her best AoEs more frequently and for more damage.
Of course, steering the argument in this direction really just muddies the waters because suddenly we're arguing whether kin buffs or emp buffs are better, which is pretty far afield from the original blaster vs. other AT comparison. I think it would be cleaner just to consider each AT on its own.
Though, thinking about it, a case could be made that blasters benefit the most from team buffs; since they have the highest damage multiplier and effectively no defense, resist or healing, they stand to gain the most from +DMG, +RCHG, +DEF, +RES and +REGEN buffs.
But lets see
+HP, blasters get the least benefit from +HP of squishies because of the lower cap
+Def, Because of the blasters lower numbers to begin if there is enough to bring them to the softcap,they will get a greater proportional gain than an at, that starts with higher numbers will get if brought to the softcap.
If there isn't enough +def to cap the blaster the AT with the higher base numbers will gain more.
+res, ATs with higher Res caps will gain more the blaster has a 75% cap brutes and tanks have a 90%, some others have an 85% cap.
If its squishy ats, the blaster will gain more because of higher hp if and only if there is enough to put the blaster at the cap. IF there isnt the at with the higher base gains more. -
Quote:This can easily become a discussion that warrants its own board. The sampling problem is that 2 sample points are simply not enough to reconstruct the population signal, and there is just no way to get around that.The alias that occurs at level 50 isn't a sampling problem: its a reflection of an actual fencepost in the data. Unless you turn off XP, there's a practical limit to how long you can play a level 1 before it levels and is no longer level 1. Ditto every level up to 49. However, a level 50 can play as level 50 forever. So its entirely possible for an archetype to be very popular from 1-49 and then suddenly downshift to a lower popularity at level 50. In this case, it can happen if Blasters level slower, and then are played less often at level 50 than other alts, once leveling is over. And that can be strongly influenced by the sort of invention-based end game builds that can be made with other archetypes. For example, blasters and scrappers are pretty close in popularity, so it would not take very much at all for the players that play level 50 scrappers a lot to edge them into first place ahead of blasters. The shift from blasters going from #1 to #3 at level 50 is not as dramatic a shift as it might appear. Only one archetype really has to strongly overtake blasters at level 50 given how close blasters and scrappers are, and it just has to be something people like playing a lot more at level 50 with strong invention builds than blasters. Brutes or Controllers, say (in the past, the data suggested that Controllers tended to gain on other archetypes with increasing security level).
The other problem is we don't know how popularity is defined in terms of these rankings. It could be anything from a simple headcount, to some sort of weighted measure of the time they spend in game.
That is why I described it as undersampled and under reported.
Your scenario is that other ATS get really played when they hit 50, mine is that as content becomes painful for blasters people stop playing them -
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Quote:You forgot the crit.Honest mistake, I saw the numbers you were using and knew the actual numbers were different. There is a thing called arcanatime. Arcanatime is = [RoundUp(CastTime / 0.132) + 1] * 0.132. This means that the actual animation of Charged brawl isn't .83. It's actually 1.056. When you use the correct animation time, the blaster's version wins at the recharge cap. 3.056/1.656= 1.85 or scrapper gets 1.85 charged brawls to the blaster's one. 57.8*1.85 = 106.93. Not by much, but it wins. Which is still entirely irrelevent, and not an accurate representation of the AT's damage.
Quote:I assumed that your results were because you were buffing the scrapper not the blaster. I was wrong. You were still wrong, but I admit I misread what you were saying. At least the first two lines of my post. The rest of what I said is still accurate.
Quote:Also, I've shown that you were wrong with your method of comparison. The Damage per cast cycle of one power isn't an accurate comparison of the two ATs damage outputs, even more so when you don't even know what the cast cycle is. You made the claim that scrappers outdamage blasters. Still waiting for you to prove it.
Where are these phantom analyses you speak of ? -
Quote:It would be completely disingenuous to do so in the solo case, and in the replies to Mr. Valence's posts I am never really sure what he is arguing, he bounces around like flubber.Isn't it a little disingenuous to consider the scrapper inherent but disregard the blaster inherent, which also buffs damage (and, in fact, in a more predictable fashion than crits)? I see that you specifically call out "at the damage cap" but this is not something a scrapper can inherently reach. If you want to argue that scrappers are especially good on teams with fulcrum shift, then yes, this is certainly true. But cannot be generalized to "scrappers are always better".
It's worth noting that most blasters also have noticably more AoE attacks than most scrappers. If a blaster is hitting 2 targets with the same attack that a scrapper is hitting 1 target, then the blaster is landing double damage effectively giving them a higher damage level for an equivalent level of damage buff. Even more, if the blaster manages to hit 3 targets.
In the team case its not really unreasonable to be able to dig up a kin for a team and it only takes one to cap damage for the scrapper or one good one for the brute.
Edit: Just as a note of the irony, the blaster is meant to be the AT that is more team oriented, but their inherent actually gets in the way of their taking full advantage of the team. -
You mention nethergoat and deluded in the same post, did you mean the same nethergoat who started this thread
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/searc...rchid=11732721
With the the thesis that patience is the ultimate virtue in the market because if you wait long enough someone will make a horrible error in your favor ? -
Quote:No. Once again I suggest basic reading comprehension for you.Did you really just compare a kin buffed scrapper to a vannila blaster and try to use that to prove a point?
Impressive.
Quote:Oh I know recharge thats the ticket. Lets see the recharge cap is 500% Well I suppose a few kins will help here, at the cap scrapper charged brawl cycles every 1.43 seconds to blaster charged brawls 2.8 this is looking good for you cheer up. 2x57.8 =115.6 vs 109 Oh noes it looks like you still don't know what damage output is -
Quote:Ill fold the reply to grey pilgrim in here as well. I'd like to see blasters properly balanced relative to other ATs. They trade a boatload of survivability for literally no extra damage. Ideally I'd like to see them get either the damage they were supposed to get, or some of the survivability back.A_F, why are you so committed to your belief that blasters are terrible? I can see why Johnny Butane is so revved up about tankers, because lobbying in favor of an AT has had positive effects in the past. He may be more hyperbolic than Halley's Comet but at least his heart is in the right place.
On the other hand, you seem to have dedicated your posting life to tearing down blasters, in the face of 80% of the forum telling you they're fine as well as the devs obliquely pointing out that they're fine and, as if that weren't enough, simple polls of popularity demonstrating that they're beyond fine. At this point it seems less like playing devil's advocate in order to pull for buffs and more like some kind of ancient tribal vendetta.
As to the forums, you have to be kidding. I mean 3/4s of the forumites have near psychotic reactions if you say anything critical and they are willing to go to incredible lengths to prove it. If you remember the defiance 2.0 arguments on the forums you had people saying that blasters who had 0 mezz protection and went around saying "DON'T HEAL ME" so they could get better damage output were just fine.
Look above, the guy comparing charged brawl to charged brawl had to put one had over left eye put his nose up to the screen, and only then could he proclaim "Aha blasters are doing more damage"
Just relative to grey pilgrim
Quote:He refers to a completely unneeded and incorrect comparison and basically says "I'm right, the other side is wrong and won't even admit it." It's the complete, unassailable bastion of opinion. It negates anything the opposing side would say.
Quote:Electric blaster vs electric manipulation: Charged brawl (scrapper) = 57.8 damage <> Charged brawl (blaster) = 109! ]
Code:Damage/cycle time AT Scrapper Blaster Base 140 109 Max Rech 115.6* 109
Edit: Back at please recycle, the popularity polls, at least the data the devs have given us really don't say what you are saying they are saying. These are very very hard things to get a correct interpretation of, and they are even harder to ask the correct question initially.
For all we know from the information given, blasters could start popular because people think the name BLASTER sounds cool -
Quote:
Also, please, please, please, please, PLEAAAAASE show that other ATs can do just as much damage as blasters. PLEASSSSSE!Code:Damage Scale AT Melee Ranged Blaster 1.000 1.125 Scrapper 1.125 0.500
Go figure
But wait a minute don't scrappers have an inherent ? Why yes they do, its called critical hit. It lets them land double damage effectively giving them a higher damage level for an equivalent level of damage buff.
Quote:Again, the discussion is if blasters are bringing something to the table that other ATs cant, or do other ATs bring everything blaster's do and more. Blasters bring the highest level of damage available.
Quote:The discussion is not, if blasters underperform in solo situations.
Quote:Wait, you may have just tried to back something up!
Shouldn't have gotten myself so excited, you're still just spouting off random stuff that doesn't make sense. Blaster ranged mod 1.125 melee mod 1. Scrapper melee mod 1.125. WAIT 1.125!!!!! SCRAPPERS DO MOAR DMG ONOEZZ!!!111!!!1
WAIT! Lets look at a real world situation and see if this is even possible (see what I did there, and if you'd take my advice and actually see if the problem you're preaching exists, then you'd be less laughable)
Electric blaster vs electric manipulation: Charged brawl (scrapper) = 57.8 damage <> Charged brawl (blaster) = 109!
Oh wait a sec, Blaster charged brawl recharges in 10seconds scrapper charged brawl recharges in 3.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
That wouldn't have an effect on the damage output of a power would it ?? I mean if you were trying to compare powers you might want to mention something like that, otherwise someone might think you are being deceitful.
I mean just on the face there, charged brawl has a .83 second animation, and a 3 second recharge so its going going to fire 2.5+ times as often, so over time its doing roughly 140 damage to charged brawls 109. Hmmm Boy isn't math fun.
Oh I know recharge thats the ticket. Lets see the recharge cap is 500% Well I suppose a few kins will help here, at the cap scrapper charged brawl cycles every 1.43 seconds to blaster charged brawls 2.8 this is looking good for you cheer up. 2x57.8 =115.6 vs 109 Oh noes it looks like you still don't know what damage output is.
so just again
Code:Damage/cycle time AT Scrapper Blaster Base 140 109 Max Rech 115.6* 109 *Not considering critical hit blaster doesn't consider defiance because we are talking max buff
Were you trying to show something ? Because when you take your real world situation it doesn't seem to say what you think it does
Indeed this math stuff is fun. -
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Quote:LOL, lets go through this, in a subthread talking about how survivable blasters are you did an analysis of their damage. Even at that you didn't consider that other ATs can just as much damage as a blaster and didn't need the full team to support them doing it.No, the equivalent is me showing there's a point where damage is more important to a team or at a certain point enough damage makes survivability meaningless and any addition to the team is meaningless, and you continuing to say that blaster's are replaceable on teams. And one better, that I'm ignoring the value of splitting up and not taking TEAM CONTENT on as a TEAM.
Now finally :
You can't grasp the idea that it's better to be able to two or more things at once than being able to only do one thing at a time, I have no idea what I can do to help you, except maybe ask how many cores does your cpu have and are they hyperthreaded.
To go back to what you showed, it is that at some point adding a high damage scale AT is better than adding more buff/debuff. Its not even a complete analysis from the point of considering the other high damage ATs versus the blaster. Seeing as Scrappers have the same damage scale for melee that blasters have for range and also crit even when at the damage cap thats a problem.
What you are missing is that I never argued with that.
Quote:Is the AT obsolete and passed up by every other AT? NO. That's the issue.
If you feel that isn't the case argue with Arcanaville here http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...0&postcount=86
Her logic is flat out wrong from the inception but at least I won't have to wast effort on the argument.
Or maybe you feel defiance 2.0 was enough to take the worst to being not the worst ? -
Quote:"There were nerfs" != "There were nerfs to the way Fury is generated which for some people lead to less overall DPS and burst damage, therefore there was less of a reason for someone to play a Brute over a Scrapper when GR launched, which is why Scrappers were not made obsolete when it did"
Some forum folks assume everyone else reads every patch note. This is what I was driving at - you shouldn't assume specific knowledge like this, despite how "common" you think it should be. (Also, I found the Fury changes to be an overall buff for all of my brutes.)
Granted. I really don't put much effort into most of my replies on this topic. For me its like talking to a young earth creationist, after I have shown them that a volcano has rebuilt itself 4 or 5 times or the eroded strata in the grand canyon whats the point ?
All the creationists do is put their fingers in their ears and start repeating themselves. The CoH equivalent is this http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=265933 -
Somebody says "People kept saying the low countries would be flooded out and look that never happened", its really not a stretch to expect that person to at least realize they have put in place enormous flood control projects.
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Well I suppose that uniquely qualifies you to comment on team composition.
Quote:"Fixing" blasters takes away a big element of their current gameplay, reliance on teammates (or an expensive IO build and good inspiration use). It is tough to reconcile a gameplay element that is as far out of "balance" as blasters, but I think it is kind of cool.
That being said, there are still many, many things that could be done to improve the blaster state without making them just like the other ATs.
Nukes that don't crash (maybe a modestly faster recharge as well).
They could get a bonus to their move speeds, the better to facilitate moving in and out of melee. Possibly even added control and friction.
Snipes with some advantage (for starters, it could gain a defiance bonus that actually represented its full animation time).
Offensive toggles do not shutdown when mezzed, just suppress.
Perhaps some +perception/perception debuff resistance to Aim and maybe even Build Up.
They could regain the endurance advantage they once had over other ATs.
As the AT that is designed to "require" ally support, I think they should be able to benefit from it more than they currently do. While raising the HP cap or resistance cap are ideas along this vein, there are other unique things that could be done that do not infringe as much on making them more like scrappers. The unique things may be harder though, because they would likely require new techs.
More specific stuff could be done for individual sets, Swap Ammo could be made to matter more, /Devices could be given a once over, VS could be made less of a hassle, Blazing Aura could be altered, etc.
I think you have missed a few things. The original design of blasters was that they were supposed to get trashed on a regular basis. I have no idea why that would have been considered a good idea, but I also have no idea why the lead developer would tell blaster players to leap off a building before fighting.
The simplest thing to do by way of correcting blaster problems would be to just correct the kluge that was defiance 2.0. Instead of having a mini fury on an AT that has trouble surviving, the bonus damage should be averaged and added into the base damage modifier for the AT. This would at least be consistent with blasters trading passive survivability for damage output.
I see you didn't mention your idea of click mezz protection with Aim and Buildup. 10-20 seconds of mezz protection with those powers brings nice gameplay opportunities for the AT
The snipe, crashing nuke, and offensive toggles that detoggle aren't problems for just blasters. Snipes and defiance is a unique blaster problem, but its mitigated by the fact from what I have seen few blasters bother to take the snipe to begin with. Otherwise the crashing nuke, skippable snipes, and damage auras that go away when mezz are all problems that affect multiple ATs. The problems just aren't as apparent on better designed ATs. -
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6 slot it for the best ranged defense bonus in the game
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Quote:1st when the data was released, has nothing to do with weather or not there is sufficient data points to paint a meaningful picture. Looking at just the level 50 data is even less informative.The data was released by the Devs just a few months ago. I don't think I'd call that under sampled. Even if we remove the 1-49 data from the equation and look specifically at L50 data, Blasters being the #3 played L50 AT in the game, after Scrappers and Controllers, tells me that they aren't nearly as bad as you claim them to be, nor are they as superfluous as the OP claims them to be. Now, if Blasters went from the #1 AT to #6 or lower, then you might be on to something. But to go from #1 to #3 isn't that bad.
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Quote:Brutes got a nerf just before GR, Tankers got a buff.
With GR and side switching why would anyone play a TANKER when they can play a Brute
With GR side switching why would anyone play a Scrapper when they can play a Brute.
With GR will anyone even play Defenders again now that they can be Dominators of Corruptors
Defenders also got a buff. -
Quote:Well I suppose we look at data in different ways. Somebody tells me that from 1-49 this is so, and at 50 that is so, my first thought is the data is undersampled/ or reported to be a good representation of what is going on.Apparently sarcasm and humor is lost on you.
Truth is, yes, Blasters go from the number 1 played AT to the number 3 AT in one level and only for 1 level. Why do you think that is? Because they suddenly have a huge drop in performance in that one level? I find that very hard to believe. From my observation, the reason is quite simple. Blasters do not farm as well as Scrappers or Controllers.
Here is an easy to read description of the effect.
http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261/aliasing.pdf -
Quote:There are the dev numbers and my own surveys. You can do your own informal checks, just check how many you see on your teams, and how many you see when you search for them.Severe? I do not think that word means what you think it means. I have seen some stuff that indicates a mild drop, but nothing that indicates a severe one. What are you referencing when you say we know of a severe drop off in blaster popularity in the high levels?
Quote:Going from the number one archetype in the game to number three is, obviously, a Massively Huge decline in the number of Blasters. Having eleven other archetypes with a lesser population at level 50 is completely irrelevant because we are talking about Blasters.
This is obviously every Blaster in the game when they go from L49 to L50, as played by Another_Fan. -
Quote:Do they ? And how was that determined ? It would seem to be very dependent on strategy. In the stop everything at the doors and peel off strategy, dominators, and anything with damage auras and massive pbaoe seems to do very well. The chokepoint strategy favors, dominators controllers, anything with slows or persistent patches.The BAF escape phase is probably one of the purest situations that require the best possible *application* of damage, rather than contrived situations like pylon farming: targets that you can only stop by killing them with direct fire, from whatever range you can engage them in, that can't be easily herded. Blasters generally outperform everything else in that phase.
I can see them doing well in hybrid door chokepoint strategies where they are covering a door and a path simultaneously shifting their aimpoint accordingly I don't know that I would rate that an outperform.
Blasters lose out on several of there self buffs in the escape phase. The 2+ seconds it takes to hit aim and buildup is an eternity
Quote:If that was the *only* place blasters outperformed everything else, then that would just be a curiosity. But it suggests, because that situation isn't really obviously contrived to somehow favor blaster offense over anything else directly, that because its so difficult to judge who is really delivering the most damage most effectively in team situations, that paper analyses of those situations might not be as trustworthy as we think they are. There's nothing about BAF that says those paper analyses would necessarily be totally inapplicable, but they clearly are.
As to not being obviously contrived ?? I am sorry you are talking about a situation that resembles ducks in a shooting gallery being moved on a pulley belt. The escapees don't fire back they are moving through the firing arc of the blaster. About the only other thing that comes close, would be a blaster blowing up objects on a mayhem mission.
Quote:I actually happen to think that the BAF escape phase probably says more about how blasters perform as damage dealers for most of their existence leveling up for the average player than most other things do. The one thing that the escape phase does is allow people to see the true ability for a blaster to deliver damage when they can focus entirely on that, and not have to focus on trying to stay alive while under extreme fire. If they aren't at risk of death, they actually do quite well at delivering damage.
Quote:Which suggests that in teams where there is enough support to eliminate the chance of death, blasters might also be excelling at damage dealing over other archetypes in many situations where the optimum on-paper circumstances don't occur frequently enough.
Either way, the amount of effort the team has to dedicate to keeping the blaster alive, is comparable to any other squishy, but the blaster is contributing less to the survival of the team.
Quote:Its interesting to note that in the super-saturated optimal conditions most people talk about when comparing blaster damage to defender or corruptor damage, or any other archetype, the blaster shouldn't be at high risk of death. But we know in actuality, blasters die very often, and that is what causes much of the performance lag for them. But if they are dying that often, that suggests that perhaps those optimal situations that trivialize blaster damage don't occur often enough to negate blaster damage. There may be many situations where there are enough buffs to keep the blaster alive, but the optimal situations don't occur where blaster damage is trivialized. And conversely there many be lots of situations where there aren't enough buffs to keep the blaster alive but there are enough situations that occur that neutralize blaster offensive advantages. Its very difficult to say, because these are areas that the very people who debate these topics never seem to find themselves in: highly suboptimal and situationally inconsistent situations that apparently nearly everyone else but forum posters find themselves in almost all the time.
Once again I don't have the raw data, but the number of situations where blasters were performing poorly, was enough to get us defiance 2.0. If those numbers have shifted, I would hazard that it is because the makeup of the blaster population has changed.
We know that blasters start off as the most popular AT and at some point they have a severe drop off. Just as a possibility the people that keep playing blasters, are those with enough resources both in terms of inf and in game associations, and other well equipped characters that when they play their blasters its in circumstances where they will do well. If this is the case, you would see a steady performance curve, but taking its product with population curve would show a cliff like drop off. This doesn't say the blaster AT is doing well but quite the opposite -
Quote:Yes because the ability to separate the team into multiple independent units is valueless, and the ability to complete tasks in parallel brings nothing. /sarcasmIn a situation where the survivibility threashold has been reached, Damage > all. It isn't a given that a debuffer will provide more damage than a damage dealer, so adding a def/corr/cont isn't a given. In team makup situations where survivibility threashold is reached and the damage dealer is > the force multiplier, the blaster is -THE- best choice. My proof was that a Force multiplier isn't always the best choice, and it can be beat by pure damage. (BTW this -was- addressed in my other post)
However when the ability to survive the challenge hasn't been met, that's the priority. Remembering that you need less survivibility when you have more damage. It's in these team combinations that Brutes/scrappers are a better choice, because they bring lesser ammounts of damage, but the survivibilty to deliver that damage. Combine that with enough supplementary damage, and their lesser mitigation becomes just enough to defeat a given challenge, with less concern toward gaining more survivibilty.
Adding a Tanker is usually enough to hit the survivibility threashold. Again, once the ability to survive incoming damage is reached, the priority is maximizing outgoing damage.
This is a delicate balance of numbers, that you've shown a complete inability to understand. However, the point is that blasters are not replacable by other ATs and, as expected from a game, some choices are better than others a certain times. The great thing about this game is, that better doesn't mean absolutly neccesary.
Edit: Perhaps that was excessively confrontational, but the blaster is almost never the best choice. There are very very few blaster combinations that can actually outdamage scrappers, what blasters bring is AOE, which frankly everyone brings and it is hard to have a team that doesn't have more than enough even before judgement. -
Quote:Actually 1-20 there is no AT i prefer to blasters, 20-30 they are easily in the top spots.Blasters are actually terrible at any level, but especially at high level. Incarnate powers make them obsolete as do all fourteen of the fourteen archetypes. The only way justice will be had for blasters is if they are combined with tankers into a super AT that does the best dps at range and has the best survivability.
There you go A_F, I took care of that for you.
Blasters have a bunch of problems as the levels get higher. The overall effectiveness of defiance decreases. The ability to fire 3 powers when mezzed is overwhelmed by not being able to use many more powers. Blasters taking pool and epic powers get incredibly poor numbers for their trouble.
Edit: Best advice for blasters, One reduce the numbers you are fighting. The devs tried for an active defense concept in blasters, think phalanx gun or the newer close in weapon system, I don't want to say they failed but they gave blasters abilities that scale incredibly poorly against larger numbers, especially when individual enemies can take out the blaster.
Second: Learn how to jump. Travel suppression was a horrible thing for blasters, you can still avoid it by jumping. So make sure you can jump and jump well.
Third: Turn off bosses. They hit very hard, have fuller attack chains, and can't be taken out quickly -
Quote:Is that what you thought you were doing ?Ah ha! I see where my mistake was. I was assuming you were contributing to the coversation of whether or not blasters were surpurlous on teams. You know, the point of the thread.
Instead you were going off on some terribly pointless tangent on the classification of Corruptors as damage dealers, and if their health should count as damage dealer's health.
My bad, I shouldn't have assumed you were adding to the actual conversation.
Then you needed to do the analysis with regard to whether adding a scrapper a brute a tank or other at represented a better choice than adding a blaster.
That would be just one more thing that you missed. -
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TANKS, SCRAPPERS AND BRUTES are the grunts fighting on the front line.. BLASTERS are the artillery chewing up the battle field and everything on it.
There is no such thing as artillery in this game. The entire concept of artillery is gaining a range advantage over your opponent and that just doesn't happen with the possible exception of energy manipulation.
Blasters may have been envisioned as artillery, but giving nearly everything in the game the ability to outrange them invalidated that.