Arcanaville

Lets take a step back. If we're saying that Brutes might be a bit too powerful, we can't turn around and say "compared to brutes, tankers need a buff." That's illogical. If tankers need a buff, it has to be compared to stalkers and scrappers. Compared to stalkers, no they don't. Compared to scrappers, its very debatable that they need a buff. Quantitatively, I don't see it.

Going back to brutes, even setting aside that most people think they are at least performing higher than likely originally intended, if not outright overperforming, the question is what sort of buff would it dictate to tankers even if that fact is neutralized. Having identical defensive caps is not the same thing as having the same defenses, no matter how much people like to compare to maximal conditions that occur in 1% of the actual game (in teams with the levels of buffing commonly considered to be normal on the forums no one would ever die unless they deliberately used self-destruct, but we know they do). For the most part, with a few corner case exceptions, brutes have about half the defensive survivability of tankers. The offensive gap is closer to 40%.

If you're an offensively minded player, its better to have 40% more damage and 50% less survivability, but if you're a defensively minded player the reverse is true: its better to have 100% better survivability 29% less damage (the numbers are relative, which is why they are different going in the opposite directions). What happens if you are offensively minded and pick a tanker? Then you picked wrong.

There's no singular quantitative way to say X% more offense is equal to Y% defense any more than there's a way to say that A% regen is exactly equal to B% resistance: they not just quantitatively different, but qualitatively different. So the question is whether they are *close enough* by important metrics that are quantitatively measurable, and if the qualitative option they present to the players addresses a valuable gameplay option.

Or to put it simply, the question is not whether Tankers should have less offense and more defense relative to Brutes in the way they do. If its *too* far out of whack that it affects overall performance that should be addressed. But once the difference in performance enters an acceptable range, the question becomes should we *allow* players to decide, for themselves, to select more offense and less defense, or more defense and less offense. If the answer to that question is yes we think its a reasonable choice and yes we want to offer it, then the "trade" is a good trade to *offer* players. Its up to the individual players to decide which way they want to go, and there's no justifiable reason to take that choice from them.

Which choices we present to the players is design prerogative for the devs. But the only choices provably bad are choices where the options are qualitatively congruent and one is quantitatively superior to the other (in other words, one is in all respects calculably better) and choices where unknown to the players the combination of factors will create a situation where they will underperform in a way the game deems unacceptable, for example by statistically being likely to level vastly slower than other players.

Its too easy to build fury. The end.

If you're going to use Superman as the prototypical Tanker, then I'm going to use the Silver Surfer as the prototypical blaster. Then you can have brute level damage on your tankers, and I'll have tanker level defenses on my blasters and you can punch anything you want as hard as you want.

I'm perfectly willing to let the devs decide if that is a rational course of action or not.

To repeat: Tankers did not pay anything for Bruising. Reducing Scrapper damage modifiers and replacing it with a resistance debuff has to be justified. I only said the change would be an even swap given your stated assumptions about it. By mine, it would be a nerf with no justification.

Attempting to portray it as an equivalent situation doesn't make it one. We can talk about certain differences as being "trades" from a mathematical perspective for simplification purposes, but from a game design perspective Tankers trade nothing for Bruising. Bruising is itself a free damage buff that has no justification for its existence except to make Tankers that want more damage than the archetype can quantitatively justify happier. Its only problematic for people who believe their own personal concepts for how things should work supersede game balance requirements.

I believe you should do the discrete calculations. I don't think I'm going to logic this one out of this issue.

Then its a break even effect at best.


It does help on teams. But tankers did not take a damage hit to get that benefit. Tankers started off with low damage as their archetype specification dictates. Their damage modifier was buffed from around 0.65 to its current 0.8. That's more (+23%) than the Blaster ranged modifier was buffed (or for that matter how much the Scrapper modifier was). And then on top of that they were given a resistance debuff that increases their own damage even further. That has a damage increase benefit, and a team-offensive benefit which is separate from that.

If we take everyone's post-launch damage buffs away, we end up with Scrappers with no intrinsic critical effect and a 1.0 modifier, and Tankers with a 0.65 modifier and no bruising, and the gap between Tankers and Scrappers would actually be slightly larger than it is today.

The AoE issue isn't relevant to calculate average critical chance, because that's normalized to AoE damage. Or to put it another way, the critical chance is being estimated in the first place to see how it affects damage output in general, and that means what's important is not the crit rate per second, but the crit rate per damage point. Whether five targets are hit by an AoE or by five single target attacks in rapid succession won't affect the critical chance contribution to damage output.

Or if that is not convincing, you can always long-hand a calculation with one boss, three LTs, and six minions and see if whether you use AoEs or not to defeat those targets will be meaningful to the calculations. Considering that whether you analyze each target separately or groups at the same time shouldn't generate different results might be helpful.

The fact that minions die faster than bosses due to AoE damage can affect their relative threat to the player, but that wasn't being discussed in relationship to how the variable critical chance affects damage output.

0.8 * 1.25 = 1.0. That part is a break even. The fact that the first attack doesn't benefit from the buff makes it an overall nerf.

And this time the gunslinger fled across the desert.

You say that now, but in a year you'll just be saying J_B ascended to an even higher level than King.

It is precisely because its unique and easy to compute around that you have to be extra careful in including it, and not other comparable options, when discussing game balance. You cannot simply include the critical chance ATIO and not damage proc ATIOs just because the damage proc ATIOs are more difficult to calculate the effect of. That's not kosher.

In my opinion, only two balancing points are particularly relevant to overall average game balance. First, there's the general case of general mission scaling. For sufficiently large teams or high difficulty sliders, the proportion of bosses, Lts, and minions tends to be about one boss to three Lts to six minions. In smaller spawning and at settings where bosses are blocked, the ratio tends to be closer to one LT to four or five minions.

At sufficiently high levels, the ratio of health between minions, Lts, and Bosses is about 1:2:6. So in effect, in terms of the total damage you have to generate, you end up with the equivalent of six minions, 6 minion-equivalents of Lts, and 6 minion-equivalents of bosses. Which is actually probably not a coincidence: its probably embedded deep in the spawning code to generate these weighted results.**

So in terms of balancing things like critical chance, the most appropriate thing is to balance on the assumption that the critical chance is equally weighted between minions, LTs, and Bosses, in the large scale case. In the small scale case, its four to five minions to two minion-equivalents of Lts, a ratio of about 2:1 to 2.5:1.

That means for most Scrapper attacks that follow the 5%/10% rule, the average critical rate should be about 8.3% in the large case and 6.4% - 6.7% in the small case. Which is one of the reasons why for years now I've generally split the difference and assumed its about 7% for balancing purposes.



** And for long, long, *long* time forum readers those numbers should look familiar because they came up during Ice Tanker balancing: those rough numbers were used in Circeus' calculations based on Havok's spreadsheets and conversations with the devs on refining his target-mix calculations

Except that's actually a net damage nerf.

Yeah, and Blasters and Scrappers also have very comparable survival potential.

How much they actually have is vastly more important than how much they can theoretically get on paper. The average tanker is far more survivable than the average brute and that survival margin is not immaterial to survival. So long as that is true, the potential survivability will be not very relevant. Controllers and Defenders have the same buff and debuff potential, because the strength caps and floors for allies and enemies are identical regardless of the identity of the buffer and debuffer.

If you're always running around with damage capped and resistance capped Brutes, then you should a) always play brutes and b) recognize that your experience is sufficiently far outside the norm for it to be irrelevant to game balance. If you're always capped, you're exactly the type of player that doesn't need help of any kind. Game balance is for the normal players to get normally balanced gameplay propositions in normal gameplay situations.

Basically, if you're always damage capped, then even your Tankers are doing more damage than 90% of all the damage dealing characters in the game, from Scrappers to Stalkers to Blasters to Brutes to Dominators. Asking for even more in that situation is ridiculous.

If you're not always damage and resistance capped, stop mentioning the situation like its relevant.

Compared to soloing an unenhanced blaster through incarnate class critters, a 10% increase actually seems small to me.

Are you recommending we go back to the two-legged kind, or forward to the six legged kind?

Laurell K. Hamilton skews the average upward by twelve thousand percent.

Since he only dies once, he was probably an Archery corruptor.

If everyone was supposed to have it in equal quantities, I would just change the mez duration formula instead. These tick-y stack-y powers have a disproportional impact on server resources.

I23: Bases get doggie day care room

I24: Wolves added to Gladiators

I25: Armored bear riding

I26: New AE objective: walk dog to location

Ever see the movie The Neverending Story? You're sort of in it now.

That depends: when do we get the giant dogs as pets?

Scaling mez resistance is, I believe, the best way to deal with excessively long duration mez. Separate from that, I also prefer a more proactive method of dealing with mez, which is why I suggest counter-mez in attacks: it is not only good for countering mez, its good for countering damage in general and aligns well with the offensive focused nature of the blaster archetype.

My guestimate given prior calculations is that the average cost of purples is currently about the same, and the average cost of PvPIOs has dropped only slightly. Its just that the most expensive stuff has come way down, but a lot of cheap stuff has gone up. But if you were considering making a very expensive invention build, unless you were a controller or mastermind the cost of making that build has almost certainly gone down. In that sense, buying power has increased for people pursuing those builds.

As to making money off of converters, I didn't really do that yesterday, but as its turning out there are lots of ways to do that which I don't think people have thoroughly considered yet. That's generally the way I like to operate. I like doing things until everyone else figures it out, and then move on: I hate fighting crowds.