Arcanaville

I know SnowGlobe can be a bit pedantic, but I've never seen one of his trials last more than fourteen, fifteen hours max including instructions.

If damage meters existed at the beginning of time, everyone's damage would have almost certainly been normalized around average defender damage.


I have often heard it said that one of the things that's very hard to get out of the invention system is damage. But to me that's an incredible assertion to make, because the number one most popular optimization path through the invention system has always been to stack recharge specifically to increase damage. AoE always benefits from recharge, and single target always benefits from recharge as long as you have at least one or two high DPA attacks that you can preferentially use.

High recharge probably accounts for most of the offensive escalation since Issue 9. We build for more recharge than many MMOs are capable of giving to their operators even with admin codes.

Granted. The proper thing to say is that most stalker sets have significantly less than the average amount of AoE as Scrapper, Brute, or Tanker offensive sets do.

Not if you like playing melee characters you don't.

That's actually false. Both debuffs and damage can saturate. Ask any debuffer what happens when damage exceeds a certain critical level: they end up deploying debuffs on corpses. And while damage doesn't saturate in the same way, it quickly reaches a diminishing returns area due to the discrete nature of damage. You cannot decrease the time to defeat a spawn by a fraction of one attack.

At the point where damage and debuffs reach diminishing returns levels, the optimum strategy is to split the team into two groups. This requires two separate aggro control sources to do effectively.

Moreover, while damage is always useful, its also something everyone actually always has. It is *far* more likely for a team to lack enough aggro control to function effectively than to lack enough damage to function effectively.

In that situation fighting one AV, how many Blasters do you need? How many Scrappers? A debuffing defender is often incrementally better than a blaster or scrapper in that situation specifically, even if we focus purely on offense.

I'm certain lots of people do.

I understood what you meant. I should have made a stronger distinction between "I wish there were some way to address that" and "on a related matter, I've suggested in the past..."

There's no way to address the league star being assigned to a vegetable except kicking, separate from addressing the long-standing issue of league star walkabout in the first place.

I wish there was a way to address that. I have suggested in the past granting the league leader in a league the ability to send messages to any player right on their screen so it cannot be blocked or ignored. I don't see what the downside is, because the league leader by virtue of his leadership position already has an enormous arsenal to grief the league with and you can still vote psychopaths off the island.

Also won't help when Mecha-TopDoc simultaneously logs in his 3893 farming alts and the alignment vendor explodes.

Duck.

Mine would probably be better if most of it wasn't redacted.

I wish the markets had real time streaming quotes just so I could sit back and watch the fireworks on the day the alignment merit patch goes in.

With the release of the Incarnate version of Dark Astoria, in a real sense you can get past 50 outside of an itrial. All Incarnate shifts work there, so you could be 50+3 towering over the native 50s there, or creeping up on the 54s in the higher areas of the zone.

Actually, I was stating an intent, not an argument.

By granting them features they were not originally intended to have, and putting them into conflict with other archetypes instead?

Right now we have two force multipler archetypes hero side, and two non-multiplier archetypes, and one solo-optimized archetype. If Tankers become direct team force multipliers by design fiat, then I'm going to demand that the only other non-solo optimized blue side archetype also become one. And furthermore, because tankers already have a strong team role, the remaining archetype should get demonstrably higher force multiplication.

I'm sure the defender and controllers will want to jump in after that, to ensure their actual stated buff/debuff roles are preserved during that process, and I'm sure every villain archetype will not want to be left behind on an almost faction-wide buff.

They were not. Every archetype inherent was explicitly added for one reason only, to address a perceived weakness or deficiency of the archetype, until Vigilance. Gauntlet, Defiance, Criticals, and Containment were all added not for flavor, but to correct a deficiency. But when four of the five archetypes gained inherents, Defenders claimed they were *denied* an inherent as if they were left out, so the devs added Vigilance. Really, although the devs wouldn't admit it at the time, just to get the players to shut up.

It wasn't until CoV archetypes were created that the devs decided to take the concept of inherent powers and extend them to add differentiating features to the archetypes. But even there, in some cases they were more placeholders than anything else. The stalker inherent, for example, was just a description of a subset of its actual powers. That would be like calling Range the blaster inherent. And originally the Mastermind inherent was less than now: bodyguard was added later (the original was supremacy without bodyguard).

In both cases, the inherent powers were not "perks." Perks implies its something extra. Stalkers didn't get hide, placate, and assassins strikes as a perk. They got hide, placate, and assassin's strike as their central set of powers. Brutes didn't get fury as a perk, they were originally designed to start low and build higher. Its just that fury has been the subject of bad balancing coupled with historical inertia.

Gauntlet is not a perk. Gauntlet is an omission by the devs they should not have presumed all tankers would take the presence pool. Defiance is not a perk. Defiance is the consolation prize Blasters get for being designed to be dead. Assassination is not a perk, containment is not a perk. And really; fury, scourge, supremacy, and domination are not perks either.

That implies that the problem with tankers is that they are not force multipliers, or lack team utility. But how do you justify saying that tankers, with their aggro control tools, lack team utility while blasters and scrappers, without even that team role, don't have the same or worse problem?

The archetype special bonus nonsense is nonsense because its inappropriately lifting individual properties from archetypes in isolation.

The Stalker special "bonus" is that it has mechanics to significantly boost single target damage, coupled with the fact that most stalkers have no AoE damage. That's not a bonus: that is a shift in focus, towards single target and burst damage, and away from AoE. Brute Fury is the special bonus that goes along with having the lowest damage modifier of any actual damage dealer. It tends to more than compensate for that, but that's a question of numerical detail, and it doesn't always work that way. The Blaster special bonus of damage buff and shoot while mezzed comes coupled with having nothing but damage and being killed while mezzed.

You don't get to cherry pick "special bonuses" out of other archetypes, and you don't get to have the strengths of other archetypes without the weaknesses of other archetypes. If you want to put Scrappers into the roulette wheel of archetype "bonuses" you can't say "gimme fury." No, you take your chances. You might land on containment coupled with less actual attacks, or you might land on shoot while mezzed and no mez protection at all.

You don't hit 20 just because the person seated to your left has blackjack. You stand on 20 knowing you've probably already won the game. And asking for an archetype-wide "special bonus" triggers an archetype-wide review before that can happen. Yes, even if someone claims its not really a buff so its ok. Its not an all-win scenario. The last time Brutes were looked at, *both* lowered resistance caps *and* lower fury levels were on the table. Both required a lot of effort to stave off (and I'm not sure they were supposed to win, either). Think it can't happen to Scrappers?

Its actually an extremely good point. What matters isn't unique mechanics but unique gameplay. Each archetype should offer a different an in at least some respects unique gameplay experience to the players that select it. That's the whole purpose behind having multiple archetypes: to provide gameplay choices.

Scrappers do not play the same way as Tankers or Brutes or Stalkers, because they explicitly do not have to rely on Fury or special critical mechanics, nor are they designed to draw aggro like Tankers. That makes them provide a different gameplay experience, or at least the option for it. The notion that this has to come through some special mechanic is an odd notion to me.

It became that years ago when J_B stated directly that all the people who had ever advocated for Tankers or assisted with their development over the years, including all the old school tankers that worked with the devs to get punchvoke, to better balance primary defensive strength, to focus attention on the ability to generate aggro and survive damage, were all part of the problem.

That's honestly the only serious problem I have with J_B. That he asks for impossible or game balance-ludicrous things isn't unique. That he often asserts that he's the only person who cares about tankers, and anyone who claims to but doesn't share his view of them is either ignorant or a liar, is what makes his position on tankers abrasively untenable.

I wonder how many casual players who don't know much about the game and who team infrequently realize the same thing you mention above and thus tend to take more secondary attacks than primary defenses as they are leveling up, only taking defenses when they feel they have enough offense. That may mitigate some of the attack chain gap issues, at least for enough of the player population to shift the averages.

If the people who team more than they solo tend to take more defense, and the people who solo more than team tend to take more offense in the early levels, then they would be self-selecting themselves to avoid the worst of this problem.

I don't know that for a fact. They might on average, but the offensive difference in Tanker primaries might be higher than the difference between the average tanker and average scrapper, say. If the overlap is high enough, and the overall average difference is not high, the difference may be within the acceptable limits of a game that cannot exactly match the performance of every powerset combination identically.

Or, the devs are not good at fine tuning. I should point out that the original version of the Brute ATIO did almost nothing. Was their original intent to deliberately do nothing?

In the trinity era, yes. Tankers had less damage and more survivability as a calculated measure to make them dependent on the offense of others, in the same way Blasters were given high damage and no survivability, to make them dependent on the defense of others.

Current tanker damage bears absolutely no resemblance to the notion that they rely on the damage of others. Their damage modifier plus the effect of bruising places them in striking distance of Dominators, and Dominators are declared damage dealers.