Arcanaville

Quite right: I forgot to add in the 51-53s although I don't know why because I did remember to actually count them; the total number of bids for all level 51 through 53 recipes and crafted inventions of all kinds is about 9230. That's not a lot: at 200 million per bid that's about 2 trillion inf, and about 9 trillion if they were all billion inf bids (which seems unlikely).

That still doesn't get into numbers that would seem to be likely if hundreds of trillions of inf were in circulation. And even if I overlooked an item somewhere, we're talking about something on the order of a half a million bids necessary to store a hundred trillion inf. I don't think its likely I'm going to find half a million bids somewhere storing inf. You'd expect to find hundreds of items storing thousands of bids, but the top dozen items probably has over half the storage bids and in just a few hundred to a few thousand per item.

In actual fact, it is likely that the total influence stored in the bids I mentioned in the first post is vastly lower than what I calculated: that was just the upper bound for the amount of inf that was likely tied up in those bids. Only a small fraction of them are likely storage bids of some kind.

But that makes the projected amount of influence in the markets even lower: possibly as low as ten to fifteen trillion as a ballpark figure.

Are you right handed? Because I'm in the left forward arc, diverting power to neutrino bolt.

So then my idea to implement CoH with the Star Fleet Battles ruleset would be considered unconventional, I guess.

There is a social element to teaming that is orthogonal to the combat mechanics of teaming that makes this change something I would overrule if I was in charge, and I suspect the current design lead would do likewise. I actually considered this to be a noteworthy flaw of that recently released MMO with the four player team limit.

Also that same feeling you get that anyone is replaceable on a team of eight means teams can better dynamically handle players entering and leaving the team. In smaller teams, a single player dropping out can disintegrate the team. The law of unintended consequences says that when you make things more valuable, you make their loss more critical. You cannot have one without the other. By definition if you are necessary your loss is intolerable. If your loss is tolerable, you're not necessary.

In either case, its obviously possible to make games with smaller team limits, so its not impossible to implement such a limit here. But doing so would dramatically change this game into something else completely different separate from altering the combat power limit of a single team.

Beyond a certain point, I don't think it makes any sense for the critters to even bother shooting back. All of them standing in a huddle without moving or rushing up right into AoE oblivion without exceptions crosses that line for me.

But the question was what would I do that would cause players to hate me, and while most things I would not do specifically *because* they would generate player hate, improving the critter AI is something I would do in spite of knowing some players would hate me for it. And I suspected you'd be one of them.

Sometimes plus damage could help a light attack defeat a target, but on the other hand light attacks may not always have enough damage to be worthwhile if recharged quicker.

That skew really needs to be eliminated.

During those periods of time you're not in combat either: +DMG also has no effect.


It does not. You assume the "optimal" attack chain is the one that generates the most damage over an unbounded amount of time. More recharge than that just makes attacks recharge and become available before the chain "needs" them. But having powers recharge faster than the "optimal" chain needs them means you're more likely to have alternate attacks available other than that nominally projected by the "optimal" chain. And that means you increase the likelihood that you can reduce overkill by selecting the lightest attack that will still kill the target.

Right now the dumb AI causes the critter to run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run. And when you chase them, they don't turn, fire, and then run. They run some more.

Are you saying you prefer that?

Probably a lot less hypothetical than the OP intended.

Why would a large amount of play have no buff at all?


If you are going to bring discrete effects into the discussion, once again you have to be fair. +15% damage doesn't necessarily always increase effective damage output for the same reason +15% recharge doesn't necessarily always improve attack speed; in this case its because critters have discrete amounts of health and any amount of damage dealt higher than that is wasted. +X% damage doesn't always reduce the number of attacks required to defeat the target for this reason.

You cannot dismiss one while highlighting the other.

That's a very crude way to attempt to approach the mechanic, but it doesn't generate the desired results in a number of respects not the least of which is that the delay is fixed relative to the cast time of the attack it boosts and it doesn't offer a way to improve the benefit from its fixed value. Basically, it doesn't scale.

It also buffs things that should not be buffed by this mechanic, like damage auras.

Alternatively, we're getting the Cape of the Two Winds in Issue 24.

The Chair Leg of Truth demands to be heard.

Rikti Ordinance Officer: Work Here, Just. Complaints: Designated Target: Entity; Attribute: Expresses Care. Contingency Plan: Tree: Execute Ascension. Self: Job: Directed Application of Force: Permission Granted.

Rikti Ordinance Officer: Apologies. English: Language Immersion Priority: Low. Initial Designation: Bomb: Atomic Reaction; Fuse: Extended Delay. Override Source: U'Kon Gr'ai. Appellation Assertion: Fail: Epic.

I wouldn't retro this game, but if I had the opportunity to design combat mechanics for a brand new game, I would redo the whole concept of "defense" and "resistance" entirely. The biggest fundamental flaw defense has in City of Heroes in my opinion is that attack types are conceptualized around how the attacker delivers the damage, and not on how the defender could avoid that damage. And that's backwards, because as attackers our attack types are not things we really have any control or decision over. But as defenders, we have lots of choices over how we defend against attacks, from how we build our defenses to which ones we decide to use in combat.

That first error begat the second error: creating the fuzzy distinction between positional and non-positional defenses. And then the stacking rules. And then the damage/defense mismatches.

Attack mechanics are one of the things that honestly City of Heroes has done a great job in teaching me how not to do them, at all. Nothing of CoH attack mechanics would survive to see another game if I was asked to design combat mechanics.

Here's a mechanical element I would create that doesn't exist in CoH. When you're attacking a high defense target, the only thing you can do is pop tohit buffs (inspirations, Aim, etc) or swing wildly until you get lucky and connect. Think Paragon Protector in MoG. I would allow the attacker to trade speed for accuracy: attack slower, but increase the chance for the attack to hit.

It averages out to significantly more than a LotG proc which people pay a significant amount of influence for. So the value of that recharge is, as judged by the playerbase, significant.

And verses the argument that because people build for recharge that makes it less valuable at higher levels, that would be tantamount to saying that each LotG you buy makes the next one less valuable. Almost no one should buy and slot four or five, because those must be practically worthless. That doesn't happen either, because recharge isn't really a diminishing returns thing in the normal sense (there's a more complex discussion about the effects of fixed cast time that make it somewhat diminishing, but that's a different effect entirely).

The fact that it fluctuates on a time scale of a couple of seconds is something almost no player is capable of noticing. When we discuss regeneration we talk about it like its continuous, we don't say +75% regeneration cuts the tick interval by 0.833 seconds. But that's what it does (assuming slotted Health).

Yes and no. Mostly no. If powerset A outperforms powerset B, it does so whether people perceive it to do so or not. If super reflexes gets hit less often than Energy Aura, it does so whether people perceive it to do so or not.

The perception of balance is governed by two things. The first is the belief that the game should be balanced based on the player's criteria, whether it actually is or not. The second is whether or not based on that criteria the player judges the game to do so.

The problem is everyone's criteria are different and their judgment radically different, and those perceptions on average change over time. So you can't specifically target them, even if you wanted to. The game has to be balanced based on objective criteria, and then player perceptions have to be managed relative to that.

Generally, the best way to do that is to create meta balancing metrics that are mostly independent of the objective fundamental ones that factor in enough of the prevalent perceived criteria for balance, and attempt to balance those *enough* to whether the perception of balance changes.

In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, you balance your game objectively, and then you manipulate your players into believing their personal criterias form the basis for that balance, when in fact they do no such thing. Or another way to put it is that game balance is not a matter of perception, game design is partially a matter of manipulating perception.

Pretty much exactly like City of Heroes.

Actually, my background in physical sciences is what you might call better than average. My claim to fame in college was auditing graduate level coursework in science and engineering and doing better than most of the graduate students, while simultaneously failing to show up for my actual classes and nearly flunking out of them.

Unfortunately, that doesn't average out.

That's a good question. But let me ask you a question in return. Do you actually have a choice?

You seem to be saying why should the passive offer more benefit than the toggle, because if it does you'd choose to run the passive instead of the toggle. But that actually doesn't represent reality. In reality, assuming you have both powers (more on that in a minute) you have no choice but to run the passive: its always on. The only choice you have is whether you run the toggle or not. You do not get to choose between running the passive or the toggle. You can only choose to run either the passive, or the passive and the toggle. And the passive plus the toggle is always more, so in fact you always get more when you burn endurance than when you don't.

But, you might say, you could choose to not take either power. The choice could occur when you are constructing the build. But in that case, the question then is: is that be a real choice? There are four possibilities: take neither, take the passive, take the toggle, or take both (looking at the simple case of one passive and one toggle: the logic applies to more complex situations as well).

Lets look at the simple case of Super Reflexes (simple because for each positional type there's one passive and one toggle offering defense to that type, and the values are the same for all three types and for passives and toggles). We'll assume SO slotting for discussion purposes. The slotted passives are about 8.8%. The slotted toggles are about 21.6% (for scrappers, brutes, and stalkers). The combined total is about 30.4%.

So the four choices are: take nothing and get nothing, take the passive and get 17.6% mitigation, take the toggle only and get 43.2% mitigation, and take both and get 60.8% mitigation. Value-wise, the difference in survival is proportional to the inverse of those numbers: you either take 100% of incoming damage, or 82.4%, or 56.8%, or 39.2%.

The passive only choice causes you to take 45% more damage than the toggle only choice. If we are assuming you don't take both (if you take both, see above) the choice is take almost 50% more damage, or take the toggle with its endurance costs. And this assumes no power pool defenses stacked on top. Is that really a legitimate choice?

When we look at sets with passive and toggle powers doing similar things in the same set, it seems to almost *never* be a legitimate choice to take the passive only. Specifically *because* the passive is so small it only has real value when stacked onto the toggle. But notice that's an inversion of reality. In reality the toggle is stacked on the passive, not the other way around. Because you can't turn the passive off. When you have the passive, its always on. The only choice the player has is to turn the toggle on, or turn the toggle off. They can't choose to turn the passive off. They can choose to take the toggle only, but rarely the passive only, because the passive is simply too small.

If the choice doesn't really exist as a practical matter, its worth looking at the situation where you have both again and see what the real choice is. And using SR as our example again, we can note something very interesting. The differential difference between toggle on and toggle off is *huge*. With the toggle off, you have 17.6% mitigation and take 82.4% of incoming damage. With the toggle on you have 60.8% mitigation and take only 39.2% of the incoming damage. That's a difference of a whopping 210%.

In a build that has both the passive and the toggle, the difference between running the toggle and not running the toggle is over double the damage (in this example). That's why detoggling is so catastrophically dangerous. That's why players don't often toggle-manage. The toggle is numerically larger, and then the way stacking works in this game that numerical value gets amplified when it comes to defensive and resistive toggles (the situation is more complicated for regenerative toggles, but a more complex version of this argument applies to them). When the difference between running and not running the toggle is that vast, even *that* is not much of a choice.

Even the devs say we shouldn't directly compare two different powers in different sets, because individual powers are designed for the sets they are in. That's why we can't compare the endurance costs and strength of RTTC and Focused Senses, say. But that's actually true even *within* the powersets: each power was designed to fit within that set: comparing one to another within the set as if they were separate individual options is equally wrong. The correct thing to do is to look at the powerset as a whole and ask what options it really presents to the player.

If you really wanted to present *valid* build options to the player, then the all passive route would have *most* of the strength of the set. Then the toggles would have the rest. So you could get 75% of the strength of the set, for example, without toggles, and the last 25% would cost you more. That way, you end up with escalating costs and diminishing returns. Instead, the all passive option is basically for fools, and the only real option is all toggles or everything. And in terms of endurance, once you've decided to take all the toggles there's little point in passing on the passives, so long as you can fit them.

But the idea is that you only pay endurance if you want the *best* performance. Right now, you pay endurance if you want *any* real performance. Because the passive-only option is usually farcical.

Similarly, if you want to present a tactical choice to the player - run or don't run the toggles - the difference between the two options can't be astronomical. If it is, then the endurance cost becomes a lesser issue. It becomes more a case of "can I afford to have very little protection?" If the answer is yes, you can turn the toggle off. If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter what the endurance cost is: you have no choice but to run it. The choice is pretty binary because the difference between toggles on and toggles off is night and day.

If the difference were lower, then the question would be more reasonable: do I accept only being at 75% strength, or do I burn endurance and get 100%? That's a valid tactical option. Do I accept only being at less than half strength, or do I burn endurance and get back to 100% is much less reasonable a choice.


If you are comparing the endurance burn vs strength of a passive vs a toggle, you're doing exactly what the devs say not to do. And yet they do it, specifically for the case of both powers being in the same set. But there's no reason to make that distinction. In both cases, the powers are being compared out of context. The real question is are *all* the powers in a powerset designed correctly for the powerset as a whole? And that question cares nothing about the numerical balance between two powers in isolation. The question is what role do those powers play in the powerset. What choices if any do they present to the player? And in more cases than not, strong passives and numerically smaller toggles presents better choices, given how this game is currently implemented (in terms of powersets and mitigation stacking). The way toggles and passives are currently designed, they only present the *illusion* of choice, but its obviously an illusion because almost no one takes that choice seriously, except for conceptual reasons totally disconnected from performance completely and therefore outside the scope of discussing the numbers.

If this was a points-based power system where we could pick any power from anywhere, it would be really important to make sure every power choice was balanced against each other. But we don't have that choice. We don't get to choose between RTTC and Focused Senses. If we pick Willpower, we're locked out of the second choice; if we pick Super Reflexes we're locked out of the first. That choice doesn't exist. But in a real sense, we don't get to choose between Focused Senses and Agile either. Once we pick Super Reflexes, we've picked a set designed around both powers. We can choose to dump one if we want, but we have to accept the consequences of that decision if we do. And for most situations, dumping the toggle has consequences that make the choice not very reasonable.

Its a question of thinking about powersets holistically, and not as separate independent pieces. Because those pieces were never actually independent pieces.


You can't change this dramatically and suddenly, but if I was in charge would I try to steer future powersets in this direction? Maybe.

Oh, that reminds me. Toggles and passives are designed wrong in this game. Passives should be stronger than toggles most of the time, particularly for mitigation powers.

No, I'm not kidding. I've mentioned it before, but this is a case where the devs do not see the forest for the trees. Its not that this is another way to do it. Logically, its the only correct way to do it.

Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking about posting a thread proposing almost exactly this exact mechanic as the basis of a future archetype (and I'm also acknowledging that similar ideas have been discussed on the forums many times in the past, albeit not recently).

I was going to propose it as a question: would you be willing to have unlimited endurance recovery via click powers if it meant your normal recovery was permanently suppressed to zero?