Arcanaville

For years the anecdotal evidence was all over the place. Some people said blasters were awesome, some said they were lagging. It was difficult to know what the truth actually was, on average. Were blasters high performing only because those players specifically played them that way, or was the blaster design itself conducive to being high performing and the low performance complaints were the anomaly.

Now we know: in Issue 10 the devs collected performance data for all players playing all archetypes at all level ranges and under all teaming conditions, and discovered that all blaster powerset combinations performed, on average, lower than average by a significant amount. That prompted them to change Defiance from the version you knew before you left to the version that is in here now.

Even at the time, people were still saying that they just *knew* blasters were high performing and the devs must be wrong, but that doesn't seem likely given the data they collected and the way they looked at it: there were few ways they could have screwed that up because these are statistics the game keeps as part of its normal operations, going all the way back to launch. They form the basis of many balancing decisions over the years, most generally in the favor of the players like XP leveling.

Defiance used to grant an exponentially scaling damage buff as you got lower in health, until it maxed out at the damage cap (when you were practically dead). Now, all blaster attacks have a short-duration stacking damage buff, kind of like a follow up buff, and the first two blaster primary attacks and the first blaster secondary attack are all usable while mezzed.

Those changes were made because the data indicated that part of the cause of blaster underperformance was that they died far more often than other archetypes, and when they died very often they were mezzed when they died. The conclusion was that Blasters were a little too fragile, and mez was making them so. So allowing Blasters to shoot a couple attacks while mezzed was seen as a compromise to prevent them from becoming too vulnerable while mezzed. The devs also suspected that Defiance 1.0 was encouraging players to enter melee range and become more vulnerable than they should be for their skill level just to try to boost the Defiance bar.

In either case, given how low we now know Blaster survivability was, relative to the anecdotal evidence, we now know that Blasters are much weaker intrinsicly, and its only the skill level of advanced players that make them look much better than they are. For advanced players, blasters are playable while things like scrappers are trivial. For the average player, its scrappers that are playable while blasters are difficult. The gap is just much harder to see when player skill is high, but its still there.

And given that, there's now an increased awareness that whether Blaster damage is preeminent or not, its definitely not so high that its unambiguously higher than everyone elses. And everyone else's has continued to go up. Tankers got bruising which increases their damage somewhat, and significantly against single hard targets. Dominators got their damage smoothed out by removing the damage buff from Domination but then having their modifiers permanently boosted to damage-dealer levels (Dominator modifiers are now 0.95 and 1.05 for ranged, and melee). Even Brutes had Fury rebalanced so that it decays much slower: while its harder now to reach levels of fury significantly above 80% (+160% damage) its much easier to reach and maintain high levels of fury because it decays slower: *average* Fury has gone up overall, and its all but certain that average Brute damage is higher now.

More recently, Stalkers have had their damage looked at; in the past their critical chance was made to scale with the team, but more recently their single target offense was completely overhauled so that their reliance on the hidden state is much lower and assassin's strikes were made much less situational. The net result is a very large increase in single target offensive output.

Blaster damage, on the other hand, is probably not that much higher than it was when Defiance 1.0 was added years ago: D2.0 probably adds some damage relative to D1.0, but it keeps blasters alive more than it actually buffs damage. The buff isn't insignificant, but that's offset by the fact Blasters were getting substantial buffs from D1.0 - they had to be, because they were dying more often than normal, and therefore at low health more often than expected.


A lot of people say their blaster is awesome, tanks for teams and wipes out spawns in seconds. Some of them are telling the truth, some are exaggerating, but what's certain is that none of them accurately represent the intrinsic value of the blaster archetype. Some people are doing fantastic things with the tools in the toolbox, but there's now unambiguous evidence that the tools in the toolbox are subpar.

And that begs the question: is blaster offense *really* as good as it is *supposed to be* - whether some people think its fantastic or not? And is blaster survivability too low given what small advantage if any they have in offense?

Here's an experiment I did myself a while back. Write down all the damage self-buff powers that damage dealers have. Not fulcrum shift or anything like that: damage dealer damage self buffs. Build Up. Aim. Rage. Follow Up. That sort of thing. Now how many do blasters get? Now rank them in order of strength. How many of the top ones do blasters get?

If they are supposed to be the preeminent damage dealers, does that result seem appropriate?


Why are people talking about it more now? In the past, people would mention these things and no one would say anything and then the line of thought would die. Its been like that for maybe five years now. Recently, I've taken an interest, and tried to spark discussion whenever this topic comes up. I like to think that I've helped matters, but less by instigating the conversation and more keeping it alive so those that were already interested in it feel more encouraged to contribute to it, rather than simply see it die like it has always done in the past.

Also, this time I'm taking my concerns to the devs, and they've at least agreed to hear them out and think about them.

If the archetype was a remix of existing power sets with tweaked gameplay: 800-1000 points

Examples: Assault/Control flipped dominator, Ranged Blast/Scrapper Melee secondary, Buff-Debuff/Assault defender/dominator hybrid


If the archetype introduces interesting new gameplay options but with mostly existing powers: ~1200 points

Examples: Buff/Melee buffing tanker, Control/Control super-controller, fury-driven defensive (instead of offensive) brute.


If the archetype introduced radically unique gameplay options: 1600+ points

Examples: disposable pet-based summoner (think things like photon seekers, tornados, soul extraction, up to the phantom army and gang war), power vampire (ability to remove powers from target and grant them to self), astral projector (ability to confuse, then take over control of NPC targets like a mastermind).

You ain't from around these here parts, are ya stranger.

That would be wasteful, when teleporters don't cost rent.

Now I'm bemused.

Whether they do or not, you said they *should*. And furthermore, that they should actually run out of endurance trying to keep up with Scrappers.

If you want to "prove" that the average Scrapper outdamages the average Blaster, by all means please do. If possible, please also objectively prove by how much. That's not really an easy thing to prove absolutely, but if you can I'm all ears. Such a proof would be extremely useful.

Increasing taunt +1000% would only affect the strength of powers with the taunt effect. Things that don't have taunt would not be affected. Even things that do have taunt would not have the range of those effects affected nor would they have increased aggro limits. There's probably some tankers, brutes, and scrappers that would welcome the effect.

What you were probably thinking was something that granted a zone wide taunt aura to the player. That would cause the player to attract the attention of everything in the zone, closest things first, seventeen at a time.

Which would be a farming bonanza the likes of which we haven't seen since Rads stopped herding all of Perez Park to the gates with debuff toggles.

Logging in your Blaster would be suicide, but logging in a high level tanker with a damage aura would be an ATM machine. If anything, the problem would be getting enough things to aggro you, with all the other farming tankers logged in simultaneously. That would be a strange, strange week before the devs reversed that one.

If I was going to run a test like this pacing a Blaster against a Scrapper, I would probably pick AR/Energy vs BattleAxe/Invuln. They are probably about as close to average performance in each archetype and comparable to each other in damage types as you could get. Its a bit too much AoE on the blaster side, but the better equivalent from that perspective and damage mitigation perspective would probably be radiation blast, but that's a completely different damage type with no easy comparable melee side set. Electric melee has drain which complicates the comparison: that drain is almost useless against minions and Lts which would dominate the early parts of the test.

I don't have the time to dedicate to this type of testing at the moment, but that's probably the combination I would use if I did. No combination would be perfect, though, so a better test would probably pick a few combinations to test against each other collectively.

That's an interesting collection of "facts."

I'm not sure that does quite what you think it would.

To be specific, power boost increases the strength of the controls. Nearly all control *powers* are designed to increase their duration when their strength is increased.

Its theoretically possible for power boost to increase magnitude, if the power was designed that way. But no player power really is at the moment though.

The rule is: whatever an enhancement would do to the mez effect, power boost will also do. Its not baked into power boost to only boost duration. Its a good rule of thumb that power boost only boosts duration *today* but that could theoretically change one day. Unlikely, but possible.

Actually, the return on farming with the duds going higher and the blockbusters going lower is slightly lower now than before. What you've gained in the duds being worth 50-100 million or thereabouts you've lost in the damage procs, the defensive procs, and the top three Panaceas all dropping severely in price.

For me personally, I tend to play the game making two assumptions:

1. The world is what it is. Its not a poor imitation of our world, or a comic book world, it is what it is, period, and I have to live in it.

2. My character is what I conceive her origin to be, but in all other respects is me. I don't roleplay someone else: I tend to roleplay me with a different history.

95% of the time, that works fine. Gameplay conventions tend to be easily ignorable. Sometimes it glitches a little, usually when game presents situations that are contradictory even within its own world, but that's usually not a problem either. Occasionally, like when I side switch for badges, its highly confrontational. Badging is itself a meta-gaming activity, and side switching requires proceeding through content that is often highly morally objectionable. I can't be me but different in them. Me but different usually wouldn't run them. So I have to turn my brain off and tell my hands to do it without me.

You can only pretend to be mind controlled or possessed or drugged or insane so many times before your character would probably just kill herself already.

Both interestingly and disturbingly, SSA7 demonstrates the devs do not seem to intend to keep a Chinese Wall between the mechanics of side-switching and the canonical storytelling of side-switching. From a game design perspective I'm intrigued. From a player perspective, I'm personally disturbed.


In any case, the direct answer to your question is that in general I see the game as an environment I choose to enter, and I obey its rules once I do. I fit into the game. I do not see the game as a tool to instantiate my own environment. I do not write my story. I *act* my story, within the limits of the game. I'm perfectly fine with other players seeing the game as a canvas to create their own story, such that everything that isn't a tool is an impediment, but that's not how I see it.

I could, but I don't. There's a number of reasons why, but its specifically because I don't that I'm also generally less critical of those that do.

Also the only way I could significantly improve on Snow Globe's trial record would be to shoot all the bad players that show up, and clone the rest. And believe, me, to get Preservation Specialist the thought has crossed my mind, although it seems far easier to kill Synapse in his sleep and replace him with an imposter that lowers the badge requirements.

I understood the point: the problem with it is that it doesn't actually translate to a real depletion of characters for trials on Triumph. Heavy trial runners have more alts than actual trials get run. The people will less are also less likely to have highly shifted characters and thus can't contribute to shift depletion. This would only be a real problem if a trial were to tie up the actual players and not just characters for 20 hours.

To be more specific, Kepler discovered his laws of planetary motion by in effect data mining them from observations, particularly Tycho Brahe's after he died. It was the accurate data of Tycho that allowed him to determine that planetary motion was elliptical, and not circular. Kepler's biggest indictment of Ptolemy was not just on geocentricity, but on the conclusion that planetary bodies moved in ellipses. This was a serious blow to the notion that heavenly motion was "perfect" and "perfectly architected" by God. Instead, it was imperfect, and not designed to be beautifully arranged.

What's most important to take away is that while Copernicus was technically correct in designing a heliocentric model that contradicted the geocentric Ptolemaic model, without accurate data his idea of what the simplest and best model would be turned out to be wrong in important ways, and attempts to salvage it with epicycles actually made it worse. Data saved the Copernican model, because without it the model itself had no rudder to steer towards the truth.

For those not keeping score at home, here's the estimated time to level for the Blaster and the Stalker for levels 4 through 10 (the data was a little ambiguous for level 3, and it didn't seem that important anyway):

Times are in minutes to achieve each level (not time spent in the level). In other words, it took 46 minutes for the Blaster to level from level 9 to level 10.

Deaths seem to be costing about one minute of travel per. The two Stalker deaths after level 10 aren't represented yet: they should have a material impact on relative leveling speed for level 11, depending on the survival rate of the blaster.


Working backwards, assuming the average player might not have ninja run, and might zone somewhat slower (a one-ish minute travel time implies fast zoning) lets say the average travel penalty for dying at these levels is closer to two minutes total. How many times would a blaster have to die to make the performance gap at these levels, where there is no debt, equal to about a 20% performance gap, something that would be unambiguously noteworthy? About 14 deaths, or about two per level. Actually slightly less, because at the moment the Blaster is leveling slightly slower even factoring deaths out. Is that an unlikely outcome for average players? Hard to say for certain, but its certainly not a ridiculous level of dying: one bad situation such as that the stalker ran into with the Goldbrickers can generate that sort of thing. Hover blasting with a ranged mitigation set can avoid them (hover + tohit debuff, or hover + knockback, say) but not all blasters will have those tools. Its certainly possible for less experienced players to be in that situation. How often is the question.

Actual debt is going to change things significantly past level 10, and in moderately predictable ways. My guess is that a death will raise in effective penalty from about a minute or so to something closer to 3-4 minutes, at least at these levels, due to debt repayment.

Although patrol XP will complicate things a little. Its important past level 10 that each character is played for about the same amount of time, and always in the same order. The difference is not high, but there's no reason to create a variable skew that doesn't need to exist. Flipping back and forth will create a slight wobble in the amount of patrol XP earned, amounting to a an hour or two which is worth a percent or so of oscillation.

I should point out that portraying Prometheus in this way doesn't automatically make the writers stupid, it makes Prometheus annoying. Its how we are eventually written to deal with Prometheus that is the ultimate question.

It just happens to be an exception that covers the entirety of the specifics of what's being discussed.

Can't have it both ways. If you believe SnowGlobe's actions have consequences outside of Triumph, I can respond to your statements within that context. If you believe SnowGlobe's actions have no consequences outside of Triumph, then mentioning other servers is irrelevant to SnowGlobe's conduct. You have to pick one or the other, but at the moment you are attempting to use both and deny both.

You should probably make it snappy, because SnowGlobe's going to be pretty busy soon, and he gets cranky when my badge count gets within a dozen of his.

Too much work. I'm going to play a game of Scrabble and wait for someone from Iceland to call.

I'm following along. But you also suggested that how SnowGlobe runs trials has some relevance to how they are run on other servers:

As far as I know, SnowGlobe doesn't run trials on other servers, so if you're implying that what he does has relevance for other servers, that also implies you also believe there exists the possibility that what he does can degrade trial running on other servers by perpetuating a philosophy that degenerates over time. That's a slippery slope suggestion. He does it, so other people will do it, and that will get worse over time.


Which is *another* slippery slope argument. Except while that could happen on other servers, it basically can't happen on Triumph because the trial running population is too small for that to happen, and because of the way trials are run on Triumph. If you were on Triumph, you'd know the "other trials" you are worried about don't exist. Except for the first few weeks of I19 release, do you know how many times I've had to choose which trial to run of more than one being run? Probably less than ten. Out of hundreds. Its been even less often that I've heard of a trial being formed while I was actually on a trial. I'm not on as often as some people, so perhaps it happens more often than that. But it doesn't happen often in any case.


What happens on Triumph is that Lambda, BAF, and Keyes are run far more often than any other trial, and on those trials everyone is basically free to bring anything. Its those trials that *create* +2s and +3s. Requiring people to bring +3s to MoM, Underground, and DD doesn't self-reinforce only bringing +3s, because running them isn't necessary to create a +3 on Triumph. +3s are created elsewhere: in Lambdas and BAFs especially. So long as those trials are being run far more often than the other trials, there is no positive reinforcing cycle that can lock people into only playing +3s. The most commonly run trials don't require +3s, and they ultimately create +3s.

That might be problematic if all our enemies look like this:



and this:



and this:

Especially Undergrounds. That Preservation Specialist badge isn't going to just miracle itself into my badge tray, you know.

I think Snow Globe should practice first on some easier content, like Master of Lady Grey and Master of Fifth Column. And I will go along to observe and make sure he makes significant improvement before going back to lead trials.

And if that's not enough, then I think he should lead, hmm, twenty-four consecutive weekly strike forces and I will demorecord them to ensure there is a record of perfect execution of the content.

I can assure you that I will not rest until Snow Globe becomes the perfect league leading machine even if I he has to acquire every last badge I'm missing. And if even that's not enough, I have alts.