Arcanaville

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Its a high mitigation set. Super Reflexes is a defensive set. Dark Melee is very strong defensively for a melee offense set.


It takes a lot of recharge to kill infinitely faster with Titan Weapons. But if that's what you want to do, the game offers you Titan Weapons as an option.

And while your opinion is that the best defense is overwhelming offense, there's an entire archetype that would like to suggest that the best defense is defense. Unless you can kill everything literally instantly, high offense doesn't translate to high survivability. What happens is you just end up killing faster, and thus moving quicker and facing more things, and taking a comparable level of incoming damage. That's why blasters can kill fast and still die. The faster kill speed just puts them right back into harms way quicker.

High offense is high offense. High offense is not equal to high defense. Its always been assumed that there was some equivalence between the two, but to a first order approximation there's no connection between the two at all.

The original argument was that the superpack design was so problematic they would likely fail. Now the argument is going to be that since they are successful, its safe to tamper with their design?

I have always felt a little jealous about logical arguments that work no matter how many of their premises are negated, because I could never construct them myself.

I would not have implemented DR on recharge had it been my decision to make, but conversely I would not reverse it by fiat now that its been around for as long as it has been.

Me too. And now I'm going to hang with my insectoid friends and watch all 56 minutes of it. Come and get me CBS.

Actually, I think I used to know this long ago, but completely forgot about it. Rather than bind it to a key I think I will add it to my custom popmenu, because I find it tends to double as a good reference for commands I tend to forget about. If I bind it to a key I might just forget it exists again.

Of course, in that case the numbers showed KM was good. The problem was that it seemed only my numbers showed that, because only I use organic high quality free-range numbers.

Math is easy:



QED

That sounds less like a zone revamp (i.e. on the level of Faultline) and more of a zone touch up; something even less than Atlas.

With that rule change, I would have shifted gears to Eden. I would make it an extension of the Hive, and be the place where the DE spill out of the Hive and try to extend into Paragon.

I would add Sirens Call-like hot spots of DE activity that culminated with a triggerable zone event where the DE pour out from a spot near the Hive entrance into the zone for players to fight, the trigger being pegging a meter like the zone victory meter in Sirens. All the DE in the zone would be giant monster flagged so players of all levels could participate (although there might still be a minimum level) and there would be a tunnel system that would allow low level players to get there from the Hollows (without having to cut through Founders Falls).

My inclination is also to make it a shared zone, with an entrance to it for villains from Cap au Diable. I also have this half-formed idea for a way to make a shared zone more interesting. The basic idea is that there would be two different things you could do in the zone: run instanced missions and participate in the activities in the zone (like Sirens) which provides an option for solo players. And in both cases, the fiction surrounding the activity is written to either be heroic or villanous in terms of trying to halt the DE spread into Paragon or try to destabilize the situation against Paragon. However, the net *gameplay* result is that the players would not be acting directly against each other's interests: rather they would be accelerating the event to its conclusion in two different ways. You would either get triumphant heroes and grudging villains, or vice versa.

Its a germ of an idea, but I envision that heroic players would be trying to stop the DE invasion by squashing hot spots, but that eventually triggers the mass invasion they would then have to stop. Conversely the villains could be trying to directly trigger the mass invasion by other means, to use as a distraction that draws everyone away from a separate goal the villains could attempt to complete - stealing some will of the earth macguffin of some kind perhaps - which can only be attempted while the DE invasion was happening.

Story-wise, the villains would be trying to trigger an invasion of DE as a distraction to their true goal. The heroes would be trying to stop a DE invasion from threatening Paragon City. But both would be in effect trying to do the same thing to a point in game play terms - trigger an invasion - and then each could either help each other or go their separate ways in the event.

I think this "competing but not competing" idea might be a new twist on the co-op zone. The players can easily roleplay actively acting against each other's interests, while simultaneously cooperating to push the event along in the same general direction, before parting at the end.

That's because you live on Earth-217, the boring Earth. Here on Primal Earth, everything pops, whirs, whistles, crashes, buzzes, clangs, glows, flashes, vibrates, rumbles, clashes, sparkles, pulses, and thunders. On Primal Earth, the SOSUS warning system was discontinued in 1971 when it was overwhelmed by Captain Aqualung every time he activated tuna summoning.

If you wanted to shoot a torpedo at everything that made a metallic sound off the eastern coast of the United States on Primal Earth you'd have to nuke the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Keep in mind also that an invasion by Nemesis in some parts of Paragon City would be considered "just another Wednesday."

We roll a little differently here on Primal Earth. We invade Praetoria and the leader says "I'm the only thing standing between the people and the Hamidon, and if you challenge me I'll nuke my own city" and we say "what size is that helmet you're wearing again?" Besides, Nemesis knows if he isn't actually standing in front of a hero or next to a teleportation target, its not like the heroes of Paragon City are going to go out of their way to find him. Not enough XP.

Dark Melee is a high mitigation set (with the combination of stacking tohit buff, self heal, and ultra-high uptime terrorize). It lost the buzzsaw title years ago when in rapid succession Shadow Punch's animation and cast time were increased and the server alignment discovery (aka "arcanatime") caused a realization that low cast time doesn't translate into true high DPA, because arcanatime roundoff is disproportionately higher for low cast time powers.

The changes to midnight grasp significantly improved its single target damage, but the ultrahigh DPA that SP "had" and no longer has (it never really had it: that was an artifact of incomplete understanding of attack timing) and to a lesser extent the same for Smite are such that I haven't heard Dark Melee referred to as a "buzzsaw" set in a long time except in historical contexts.

I should point out *I* only do so when the discussion specifically surrounds AoE damage as an academic topic. I do not do so when evaluating the on-paper performance of an offensive set as it pertains to set balance.

Its the responsibility of the person saying a set is "unbalanced" to explain by what specific set of metrics they are arriving at that conclusion. And its not enough to mention metrics that *can suggest* that conclusion: they have to be compelling enough to be considered reasonable measures of the set.

To be honest, I already had a spreadsheet with all these numbers precalculated as ratios from the superpack testing I did in beta and the numbers posted by the devs on the card weights. So it wasn't that hard to add a new set of calculations that scaled those upward to 600,000 packs.

The hard part was coming up with the estimates for superpack distribution (what the rarity mix was per pack) which required opening 2000 superpacks on beta. I'll admit that was a little crazy, although it took less time than when I ran 700+ radio missions to measure the Pool D drop rate in Issue 9 beta because I had a "feeling" it wasn't the 10% that was reported (it turned out to be 7.2%).

Actually, you're correct. I made a typo that affected very rare (more precisely, I used an older version of my spreadsheet that had the same typo I made the last time, forgot to sync dropbox). This affects ATIOs, Reward Merits, Catalysts, and the Black Wolf Pet.

The correct numbers for those are:

Enhancement Catalysts: 67,005
ATIOs: 384,106
Merits: 30,764,225
Black Wolf Pets: 2,482 (one in 242 packs)

(In every case, significantly more than my prior calculations).

Coming from the person whose career involves dealing with internet personalities every day, that's saying something.

Interesting. Under those rules, I think I could have made an extremely compelling case for Skyway, with only minor modifications of what I posted above.

Actually, that's not true. The value of a metric is the degree to which it performs compared to alternatives. Here's your rankings *and* the numerical value for them:

That's each set with your computed rating, plus the actual number of AoEs in the set and their net target cap.

Your metric places the three sets with the most AoEs at the top which most metrics would do. It places *almost* all the sets with one AoE at the bottom, as most would do. You counted Dark as having three, but two of them have inconsequential DPC so Dark is really another 1/10 set.

The most noteworthy aspect of your metric is that it seems to go out of its way to elevate Super Strength. But it also does some very bizarre things, like claim Battle Axe with three AoEs has only 22% more AoE potential as Martial Arts, or Ice and Dual Blades are basically tied. It says Tremor all by itself is 50% better than all of War Mace.

This metric doesn't correspond to my experience at all, nor does it correspond to anything that resembles conventional wisdom. You point out the top and the bottom, but the top and bottom were practically predestined. The top four also have the highest number of AoEs, except for Claws that has a broken AoE damage formula and has known AoE advantages. The bottom three are essentially all of the one AoE sets - except for Super Strength and Stone. And no one thinks Stone is an above average AoE set.

If I resort your list just by number of AoEs and target cap total, I get this:

My guess is that's closer to people's expectations, and that metric doesn't even look at what the AoEs do. A more refined metric should do better than that, not worse.

As an aside, my motivation for doing these calculations started off with trying to figure out how many ATIOs were probably put into circulation due to super packs. Given the market activity on them, my suspicion was that it was thousands *per enhancement type* given very rough estimates on the amounts likely to have been generated from superpacks vs other means. That guestimate seems to have been confirmed by these numbers: in average terms superpacks have put about 3600 of *each* ATIO into the game, whether they end up being slotted or traded first. That's on top of merit purchases.

My guess is that there's so many of them in circulation most of them could still be sitting in players' character claim bins because it makes no sense to yank them and sell them and people are just holding onto them until they find a use for them.

Another way to look at it is that its about $150,000 to $240,000 per month averaged over the 75 days between their release and the end of April (the numbers likely would be slightly higher through the end of April than what was presented). Taking the low figure of merit, and assuming that fully half of all superpacks are purchased with either stipends (factoring in the fact that points are fungible) or reward tokens, and assuming that overhead is another 25% of the cost of selling anything through the store, that leaves about $56,000/month net revenue from superpacks. My suspicion is that it takes a lot less than $56k/month of development time to produce them, so they are contributing a net benefit to the rest of the game in terms of resources. They aren't likely to be stealing resources from the rest of the game, in other words.

To put it another way, removing them from the game would cause a net reduction in everything else as well. So I think in the overall sense, they've been a net benefit to both Paragon and the playerbase in general.

There's no way to estimate the number of those that were awarded because you can only get one of each and unlike the Black Wolf that is rare enough to make its statistically unlikely many players would buy enough super packs to theoretically average more than one (I suspect only a small fraction of buyers have bought more than 600 super packs) the costume parts are heavily weighted to award quickly. Realistically speaking, however, the average super pack has only about one of such costume part per pack for the average player for the first ten packs, and then that drops off even faster through the first thirty packs. The numbers above factor out the elemental costume parts as not being significant to the distribution. My guestimate is that at best they might account for a 5%-10% shift in the numbers above at most.

Assuming we have about 100,000 subscribers and premium players who actually buy things, plus or minus, that would be six packs per player. My suspicion, however, is that the total participation is less than that, perhaps a quarter of that number. Assuming about 25,000 players are buying or have bough at least one superpack, that's an average of 24 packs per player. If they all received all eleven elemental costume parts, that's 275,000 out of 3,000,000 cards, or 9.2% of the total. That would reduce the numbers above by roughly 9% (the details would be a little different due to the rarity of the cards).

I suspect if a lot more than 25% of all players were buying superpacks, marketing would be highlighting that fact.

My calculations on Staff are incomplete because ironically I've been spending too much time actually playing my Staff alt, but that's not inconsistent with the estimates I've been generating for Staff. For Tankers, I would currently estimate Staff to have slightly below average single target, and significantly above average AoE numerically, and in median or ordinal terms (meaning by rank instead of by value) its about average in single target and above average in AoE.

I'd be interested to see Krogoth's methodology myself.

The bigger problem now that it has been mentioned to me, is that there is no obvious way to factor global recharge out of slotted recharge in PvP. You can't just say that if we have S+G, we'll just take S and DR it and then factor that in. I suppose theoretically you can, but its not really mathematically kosher. I suspect you'd be fudging the numbers looking for something that generates reasonably acceptable results.


Good try, but unless the devs were already planning on nullifying DR, I don't think any change to the proc system is going to be the impetus for doing it.

I should point out your original contention was that Staff was a "second tier" AoE set just behind TW, Claws, and SS. And I pointed out that with the errors in the SS analysis, that left only two by your reckoning that were definitely better.

Now you've invented a different metric, but its really difficult to judge it because:

1. What that metric says is that all other things being equal, an AoE with a target cap of five and a radius of 20 is twice as good as one with target cap of five and radius 10. On what basis do you justify that metric's calculations?

2. I'm not sure I'm even judging the actual metric you used, because I cannot generate the numbers you show with any variation of the metric you post above.

3. I can say that any metric that shows Super Strength's one single AoE being 50% better than all three of Staff's AoEs is obviously broken. As we've gone over already, even if you believe the best way to judge the sets is by piling AoEs from patron pools into them, this new metric you're presenting here says that SS *without them* is *50% better than Staff*. That's simply numerically impossible.

The problem is this metric hasn't been sanity checked for reasonable results in simple to check situations. If they can't be relied upon in areas we *know*, they cannot be trusted in areas we don't.

To be honest, I believe you believe in Footstomp so much, you're looking for metrics that emphasize its strengths. There's no justification whatsoever to multiply target cap and radius. But if you think there is, an interesting exercise (which I can't do: as I said I can't make your formula work to generate your numbers so there's something wrong somewhere) would be to perform the calculation for Explosive Blast. Just Explosive Blast all by itself. Where would a blaster that only had that one AoE place in your list?

Not even right enough to be wrong.