Arcanaville

Among the actual mez effects, only Nova's KB and Blizzard's KD are likely to be effective against a boss (if you count KB as a mez effect). But most of the crashing tier 9s have *some* mitigation that is effective against a boss. Just not enough in my opinion (Blackstar has -tohit, Thunderous Blast as drain and recovery debuff, Psychic Wail has recharge debuff).

The crazy ones are Atomic Blast which does -DEF and Dreadful Wail which does -RES. Both fine debuffs if you had any endurance left to attack the targets with. These two suggest that those two nukes are intended only for being used in teams, or only being used if you can cheat your way out of the crash with insps. But trading mitigation for offensive debuff in a power that crashes you to zero and suppresses your recovery is quixotic to say the least.

(The remaining crashing nuke is Inferno, which at least sensibly tries to do more damage in exchange for having no mitigation - it has a legitimate shot at taking out Lts with its average damage without Build Up or Aim).

Actually, I do realize that: I wouldn't know that much about what happened on the Euro forums, but by about the middle of 2005 I started to get pointers to balance discussions on them, particularly when it involved posting of data. That's how I became familiar with Dr Rock, for example.

But that just means I wasn't pointed to any of your posts. My prior request still stands. Some examples would be nice, because even if you come from Pluto the statement that you agreed with everything Jack said (about game design) except for a couple minor math errors is still rather astounding.

Unless they were also sending Jack's posts through Babelfish at the time.

Given that you picked the two most different groups of people that can still claim to be genetically human beings, that's saying something.

Not exactly. Kepler eventually came to the conclusion that Mars' orbit was elliptical from the data initially provided by Tycho. However, Kepler's formalized (three) laws of motion, which was being discussed, were not derived until after Tycho's death, and were based on Tycho's larger data sets. Every astronomical history text I've seen credits Kepler "acquiring" Tycho's data after his death with his being ultimately able to formulate the laws of planetary motion. Even his first law - that planetary bodies move in ellipses - postdates Tycho's death.

EMP has a 22 second mag 3 hold with a 50% chance of mag 4 which holds bosses, it does not crash endurance, and it only suppresses recovery for 15 seconds, which is shorter than its mez duration. It doesn't deal damage (usually) but its mechanics are actually logically designed to be a panic button. You can still act (you still have end) and you will recover before the targets and you will take out a significant percentage of even boss-class targets.

Some examples might be helpful, especially because I'm still having difficulty placing you in the context of those early game balance discussions.

This is an especially jarring statement because with as much benefit of the doubt as I give Jack, a significant number of things he said were either exactly the opposite of what he meant to say, or completely wrong. And not just in terms of small mathematical errors either. When Jack said *anything* about the design or implementation of this game, I always read the thread, and almost always participated in it. I know what his batting average was. The Blaster/Scrapper damage changes were particularly egregious, and I'm the source of the "in the hallway" comment regarding his ED statements.

Also, most of Jack's forum statements date from before your forum registration. Did you swap accounts at one point? That's a serious question, because you have implied in the past you participated in discussions that my recollection says occurred before September 2005. Most of Jack's game balance pronouncements, for example, date from before that date, like the three minions statements, the boss changes, the invuln changes, etc; even his statements about respec date from long before then.

I will say doing some memory refreshing going through all my saved threads and PMs brought back some blasts from the past, The_Gamesmaster, Circeus, Amauros, even Mieux and da5id. Also, I'm a lot more certain I was the first to talk about DPA, because every time I did I got questions about what the heck that stood for.


You're aware that the devs messed around with endurance before settling on the way it factors into the balance equations now, right?

To be fair, Nova's KB is 100% as is the mez effect in most crashing nukes, but except for the ragdoll weirdness MajorDecoy mentions (which is sometimes *very* weird: I have a tendency to Nova critters into the Philadelphia experiment) Nova's KB knocks them down for about 5 seconds and crashes my endurance for 20s. Spring attack knocks down two thirds of the targets and crashes the user not at all, so its mitigation is a lot more effective unless you only use Nova with crash management tools, like having a lot of blues and conserve power.

The part I laugh at is that Nova's defiance buff is about 10 seconds, while its endurance crash is 20 seconds. Now that's funny.

Only one crashing nuke actually incapacitates (in theory) the target for at least as long as it crashes the player, and that's thunderous blast (which amusingly nullifies the recovery of both the player and its targets for 20s). The only other one with an effect that lasts that long off the top of my head is Blackstar which crashes the player for 20s and debuffs the target's tohit for 20s, which is not the same thing as incapacitating it. Having no endurance or recovery for 20s is by almost any criteria worse than having -35% tohit.

Once I choose the quick and easy path, forever will it dominate my destiny.


Wait, there's no MoTriumph? Dammit.

Its probably somewhat low. And tempting.

He wasn't really good at communicating it, though, because people got the wrong impression about 90% of the time. That's why people still think he expected players to have a hard time defeating three minions, why Johnny_Butane still thinks Brutes stole Fury, why people didn't realize that after the I4-I5 power balance pass an enhancement pass was coming next, why I had to go figure out personally what exactly defiance 1.0 was doing, the most likely reason Statesman was against publishing numbers, what he thought about discretionary respec, and basically nearly everything he actually said anything about.

It took me a while to realize Jack tended to speak in generalities and specifics intermixed, so he was often more general than people thought he was being, then over-generalized when he was trying to be very specific.

I'm certainly not an expert at Jack, but in my opinion nearly everything commonly believed about Jack with regard to the design of this game is probably wrong. And that's a lesson the devs learned about being "open" about intentions. You can be open, but unless you're eloquent being open doesn't mean the players will actually know what you're trying to express to them. If anything the players are more likely to invent a narrative that vaguely resembles what the devs actually said.

I still shake my head over the whole "three minions" thing.

I was thinking more Starscream.

Pretty quiet past I6. The last major blaster performance debate I was involved with on any serious scale was when Pilcrow and I were discussing Controller damage relative to Blaster damage with the pet+containment change. Just saying the last major performance discussion I had about Blasters was with Pilcrow says an awful lot about how long its been relatively quiet.

Because Tony Stark is never wrong.

I've seen people on Underground trials shoot at the wrong bomb, stand next to a bomb while shooting another bomb, run past a bomb, teleport to a bomb, run pets past a bomb, and try to solo a bomb (unsuccessfully). Until now, I didn't think that was all the work of a single player.

I'm often in a position to know when a player has completely misread the devs' intentions. Amazingly, not all that many players take advantage of my pointing that out. I'm not specifically commenting on EG here, but in general. Its strange to me, because it means many players would rather be ignored than corrected; its rare the devs pay significant attention to a post that starts off asserting the devs think something they don't, and try to draw a conclusion from that false premise. Its not like any player seems to enjoy being put in that position; I don't know why anyone would think the devs would be any different.

I have to go dig it up, or I could just rewrite it if I can't find it. But it probably helps more to understand how the devs think if you keep firmly in mind that:

1. There is no one at Paragon Studios named "The dev."

2. The sum total of the decisions made in this game were made by many different people. Just the powers decisions alone were made by Geko, Castle, Black Scorpion, Sunstorm, Synapse, Arbiter Hawk, and a bunch of other people. None of them think exactly like the others.

3. Some decisions have to survive lots of review. Some are the brainchild of a single developer. Sometimes a single developer will do something that on average the dev team doesn't do, because they think differently. Sometimes the exact converse happens: a decision is made by a collection of devs, and because that decision has to represent the consensus of many different developers what happens is something that reflects *none* of their perspectives exactly.

4. In my experience, the chain of command is less likely to tell a developer what to do, and more likely to reserve judgment for vetoing things they really don't want to have happen. So although I don't sit in design meetings, my experience suggests that when Synapse works on something, he has a lot of latitude to do what he wants up to the point when Black Scorpion vetos something he really doesn't want to have happen, but he'll allow things he wouldn't do, but don't exceed his limits. Similarly, Black Scorpion wields that discretion right up to the point where someone like Positron might step in and veto something himself, but that too is probably limited. And I'm skipping over people and process a lot here.

5. Side effects and unintended consequences happen often. I could write a book.


What you see is a combination of what the designer who's working on it thinks is a good idea, combined with what the lead powers guy thinks is acceptable, combined with what the lead game designer thinks is reasonable, combined with what the producers decide is doable, combined with the resources available, combined with the fact that the developers' individual views evolve over time.

And they sometimes make mistakes. So the game is a combination of what the developers want, what they need, what they got away with, and what they accidentally put it. Governing that is a design philosophy: the developers don't work at random, although they don't all interpret it in exactly the same way. But because it doesn't lead in a straight line to every number in the game, its not always easy to witness either.

Because Whedon is involved, I'm going to assume that any villain other than Loki that isn't a minion is going to be a teaser for Avengers 2. So yeah, if Thanos is in here anywhere its likely to be as someone doing something in the background that eventually leads in to the next Avengers story.

A sequel is not going to happen. One: they've looked at doing a sequel before, in fact at least twice before, and decided it wasn't in the cards. Two: Paragon Studios isn't going to work on three games at once, and the "other" game is unlikely to be complete vapor with both Second Measure and Television going to work on it. In fact, I would imagine that neither of them would take the job if it wasn't a definite thing. Nothing in life is certain, least of all game development projects, but I believe those two signing on means the project crossed the credibility threshold.


Now, as to people saying the game is nearing its end, its been nearing its end from the moment it launched. What no one knows, and so far everyone has gotten wrong, is at what point "closer" becomes "close." We're three years past the point when people thought we only had a year or two left, and five years past the point when people thought we would only be in maintenance mode in just a couple years.

Anything is possible, but if NCSoft was stupid enough to sell lifetime subscriptions tomorrow, I would be the first one in line to buy one. I pay $143.40 for a year's subscription. If the lifetime sub cost $400 I would consider it a bulk savings and buy one for each VIP accounts I have. I would bet double that much with anyone who wanted to bet I wouldn't make my money back.

One day I'll probably be wrong. But if everyone who pretended to know what the future of this game was, was willing to bet real money on their failure mode predictions I would already have won enough to retire, and I'd be making this bet with the house's money.

Also, no one's shutting down anything until I get the last of the Master badges.

Also, they had to cancel the raffle to win the right to ski down Second Measure's north-facing side.

Probably not, but what I told you was an amalgamation of every balance consideration the devs have ever expressed to me when it came to accepting, modifying, or rejecting a suggestion. Collectively they do think about the game in roughly that way, albeit perhaps not in every single way all simultaneously.

But the summary of what I told EG is that the devs do not have a singular vision of "balance." What they have, for lack of a better way of explaining it, are "balance concerns." Many, many of them. And I once posted a list of about a dozen of them, and Castle actually publicly acknowledged that every single one of them came up regularly in internal discussions, plus he said there were many more that were not on that list.

Depending on what you mean by "anywhere near" I believe its extremely likely that solo play is about as common as teamed play, on a player-hour basis.

It cannot be exceptionally uncommon, that much I'm certain of, or certain things would not be true that are true about the way the devs manage and balance the game.

Which Dominators have a better version of, called "Domination."

Its not that bad. In the center radius, Lightning Rod only does about 3.6 DS, but it also does that on the 1.0 mod (for Scrappers: its independently balanced for Brutes, Tankers, and Scrappers) which means relative to Nova it actually does something a little closer to 3.2. Nova averages 4.875 DS. So lightning rod is only about 66% of the average damage of Nova.

With no crash and cycling four times faster and activating faster and with a built in teleport. In other words, psychotically bad, but not as bad as it could be. If it outdamaged Nova also, then it would be as bad as the developers could possible make the situation.

You want to be depressed, compare Nova to Spring attack. Yes, I said Spring attack. The scrapper version does effective 1.5 DS at the center and 1.0 DS in a larger radius. It recharges three times faster than Nova and costs only 13.52 end with no crash. Its target DPS over cycle time is about 92% of Nova and its outer DPS over cycle time is about 61% of Nova. And its a power pool attack.


And if that doesn't chamber a round for you: the blaster version is weaker than the Scrapper version, because the Blaster version uses the melee modifier. Spring attack, which has a range of 60 feet, uses the melee modifier for Blasters. So not only are melee archetypes allowed to benefit from using the higher melee modifier for ranged attacks, blasters are occasionally penalized into using their lower melee modifier for ranged attacks.

Spring attack did even more damage in beta - a lot more. It was reduced when I pointed out the original version was arguably better than lightning rod. I don't fault the devs for wanting to give the players a nice AoE attack in the power pools, and add some flair to the leaping pool. That's all good. But why is it so easy to make a powerful Spring attack, but so difficult to say "maybe the nukes should all be really useful." More thought was placed into making spring attack worth taking in a couple months than has been spent on the same for Nova in eight years.