Arcanaville

Actually, just like Dominators, Stalkers were changed because the devs perceived that players were unhappy with a certain aspect of the archetype's design: specifically the focus on stealth and damage mechanics connected to stealth (and the hidden state specifically, which is something a bit different). Jealousy or nomenclature probably had nothing to do with it. In this case, the devs thought about the complaint, decided that they agreed, and then decided to change things.

Dominators were changed under the same auspices. While some players did like the "Jekyll and Hyde" aspect of them, the devs felt that a majority of players did not, and that it was causing players to believe that perma-dom was a necessity rather than an option. That caused the devs to reduce, but not eliminate, the advantages of Domination and redefine Dominators as explicit damage dealers by role, increasing their damage modifiers to grant them that damage dealing strength all the time instead of during Domination only.

Either that, or like excessive steroid abuse apparently the incarnate "fast path" has more deleterious side effects than we were initially led to believe.

We're a creative bunch. I'm sure we'll think of something.

Aww man, now I can't make my true colors shining through joke!



Now I'm going to have to save it for some weekend when the mods are at the beach.

To some degree that's true, but there's still the question of when does a dev team go along with the concept, and when are they willing to significantly modify it to fit their game design requirements. For example, does anyone think that the vast majority of potential players for a hypothetical Star Wars MMO envision Jedi wearing armor? Even if there are examples of that in the expanded universe, there's no question in my mind that the armor came first, and the justification for the armor came later.

In City of Heroes, we specifically had such a loose design that anything goes, and anything did go, and that has evolved over time into a philosophy that what the players can do is more important than the game environments they can do it in. If we can teleport to the mission, then players will be traveling through the actual zones a lot less. No problem. The devs lean in the direction of giving the players the ability over worrying about the parts of the game that ability makes less valuable. That's not always a good thing, but it is something that generates results you don't often see elsewhere. In a sense, the genre gives them the excuse, but its still a conscious decision to interpret the genre that way.

Even that other MMO justifies a slowly recharging teleport to destination as a shuttle trip. You can justify anything if you want to. The question is therefore when does a dev team want to, not whether the genre gives them the cover to do so.

Perhaps the phrases more and less unique start to lose meaning, so I'll say that I still think our situation is markedly different, even compared to other games progressing on similar lines. What seems not as unique as I first thought is that anyone else *is* trying to proceed along similar lines. I did not have that impression.

But here's an example of how we might still be unique in our outlook. I happened to talk to the devs about the current difficulty slider when it was being developed. I warned them that there were potential issues with the slider: it could be used for farming purposes, for example, and it could even be *construed* as the devs giving tacit approval for all farming performed under its settings.

However, *knowing all that* the devs still felt that it was more important to give the players that convenience option to adjust difficulty both for solo players and for different compositions of teams, that it overrode the potential problems associated with indirectly encouraging farming.

In this case, QoL trumped farming. Does that type of prioritization happen often in other MMOs of similar nature? It doesn't even happen here all the time. Even our dev team has its own limits. But it does happen often.

I would have it do different things for different primaries, based on their theme.

Whatever it is, it should have some amount of soft-control or actual control. Because movement slow alone wouldn't prevent chain mez. One of the things shooting while mezzed should allow a blaster to do is at least attempt to prevent more mezzes from landing. That requires interfering with the enemy's ability to either shoot at you or affect you (i.e. prevent attacks from firing, or debuffing either tohit or effect strength to prevent attacks from landing or dealing their normal effect).

Lack of proper planning crippled it, but no one wants to admit it was their fault.

Actually, you don't. See, theorizing that one could time travel in his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Becket stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by unknown force to change history for the better.


Also, this is what happened when I stepped into Praetor Duncan's personal story last night.



That's less Quantum Leap and more telepod from The Fly.

That's technically not possible unless you don't fight bosses at all. Many bosses will, before they can kill you, actually drain their own end low enough to begin to impede their own ability to use their attacks at maximum speed. By definition, any endurance drain at all will speed that process up and generate significant damage mitigation. However, it seems most people only consider endurance drain to be of any benefit if it stops the critter from attacking at all, and it usually won't do that.

We already have a good mechanism for that for Blasters: Defiance 2.0. If the active mitigation mechanism is something put into most or all single target blaster attacks, its going to be in the two ranged primary attacks blasters are allowed to use when mezzed.

Currently, being mezzed means Blaster offense is degraded down to the point where you have basically two or three attacks with which to kill your attackers before they kill you, or at least last long enough for the mez to expire. With splashing counter-mitigation effects in those two powers, the equation changes to using your D2.0 attacks to simply continue to hit the most dangerous targets, and keep them from damaging you too much until mez expires. That's a significantly better option for two reasons: splashing effects mean you can affect more targets than the one or two you could normally engage with tier1/2 blasts, and offensive counter-mitigation would allow you to gain some benefit from your attacking besides maybe killing the target, which is a binary benefit: either it dies or it doesn't.

I've actually been conducting a long-term experiment on my own blaster to see if this actually works. Since I19, I've been playing a build that takes both Bolt and Blast (not all energy blasters do) and builds for ultrahigh recharge. When I do get mezzed, even if I have a break free most times I will try to see if simply using those two powers, cycled as fast as possible, can keep me alive until the mez expires. And they can. Sometimes, and if I switch from trying to kill the most dangerous target, to cycling through everyone and trying to hit as many targets as possible whether I kill them or not. The problem is that even with the ability to cycle those two powers almost by themselves without gap, they are just single targeted and their knock has only a low probability of firing. And most blasters are not going to have +150% recharge to use them that often.

But a mitigation effect that happened all the time or nearly so, that hit multiple targets with each shot, that could be fired while mezzed (as the tier 1/2 attacks can be), that I think would work for everybody.

Mez would still be dangerous. You'd lose all your defensive toggles. And mez would still negatively affect blaster performance: you'd lose all your AoEs and most of your single target damage when mezzed. But you would have a way to stay alive long enough for the mez to expire. It would be less likely to kill you.

Better yet: this is just as useful even if you are not mezzed. This is not a break out of mez power that if you're not mezzed has no benefit. You can use this *proactively* to try to *prevent* mez, by using it to go after the mezzers directly.

About the only thing its likely to not be useful for directly is boss fights where everything else is dead and its just the boss left. Which is why I've suggested that it should do one more thing: when there's only one target left and there's nothing to splash, it should turn around and hit the intended target harder. Still working out how to do that, though.

Having banner text show up on the screen when a Blaster dies while mezzed that reads "Its your fault you died" is not likely to be considered a reasonable balancing option for the archetype.

Prometheus is actually Blue Steel's side kick. Blue Steel sent Prometheus to help us combat the Well because the Well was grey to Blue Steel.

You're comparing the 1% of the game that involves trials to all of teaming in another game and telling me I can't be selective about what areas to compare teaming to?


*How* to prioritize these issues is a matter of opinion. *That* they are the foundational issues every MMO dev team has to consider isn't an opinion. Its a generally recognized fact.

But this gets into a bit of a side-track: comparing our precise teaming mechanics with another game's. That's not the point. I'm not explicitly trying to make the case that teaming sucks in that other game. That's not even remotely a unique idea to me. What might put me ahead of the curve is that I was calling this particular game a massively single player online roleplaying game long before I heard anyone else describe it that way (there are people on these forums that have PMs from me describing it that way long before it was released). Are all of the people now saying that teaming seems to suck in that game all wrong? Doesn't matter to me. What does matter to me is what people are saying would be the right way to fix it, of the people who do think its broken. And a sizeable chunk of those people are saying that the problem with teaming isn't that the barriers are too high, its that there aren't enough tasks which mandate crossing those barriers.

I conjecture that the dev team for this game itself probably feels not too dissimilarly, because this particular dev team hails from a company that isn't known for being ignorant on the impact of gameplay mechanical decisions. Especially because while so much of our casual friendly nature is demonstrably accidental in nature (like for example the original powers design team couldn't balance a checkbook in three tries) so much of why teaming barriers exist in that game appear to be the result of very specific design decisions that correctly generate other desirable game features. They do not appear to be accidents.

Why does it take so long to join other team mates? Because its supposed to take long to get anywhere, because its not supposed to be easy to bypass different physical regions of the game with different challenges. Because actually reaching a location is often part of the design of the content, and because a lot of the non-linear content is based on side-track missions and hidden contacts and discovered locations. You do not do all of that and then just accidentally forget to think about what impact that has on teaming. You *know* what impact that will have, and you either assume most people will get circumstantially lucky and not face those issues, or you believe that's a reasonable price to pay to team.

To a certain extent, I think both assumptions are probably ones the developers adopted, but I would also bet money that both assumptions turned out to be far more likely to be false than the devs predicted.


What if you think teaming *isn't* broken in that game? Well, then you probably don't believe it needs to be fixed by being made more mandatory either. I'm commenting on the surprising percentage of people who believe it does.

That doesn't really address the part that makes me uncomfortable. It's probably nothing, but the last time I felt this way about a technical description, I uncovered a discrepancy that unfortunately I can't discuss, due to a peculiarity in the way implementation was first described and then paraphrased.

I disagree. I think we were better at launch than most MMOs including the referenced one are now, we're just even better now.

I also don't think its fair to compare raid content in this game with teaming in general in that game.


Its that very reputation for quality that gives them less cover to say they are just learning the ropes and you can't expect them to get silly things like talking to other players right the first time. You can claim other dev teams might just be idiots, but you can't claim Bioware is clueless when it comes to gameplay. So either their experience is extremely brittle and they couldn't transfer it to the requirements of MMOs, or else they were fully aware of the issues, and just didn't think they were important enough.

Most of the "errors" our dev team makes isn't because they are too stupid to see the issue. Its because they didn't prioritize them high enough relative to the requirement to release the content or spend more time perfecting it, or they underestimated the consequences of the issue. The same is almost certainly true for Bioware, but in this case its on issues that to my way of thinking are foundational ideas of MMO game design. Those are not things you just change your mind about overnight, not even with a gun to your head and not even if your entire customer base demands that you do. Human beings do not work that way.

My personal explanation is the writers wanted to create a cliffhanger that was sufficiently ambiguous and left enough openings to resolve their loss of the portal in any way they wanted next season. Finding something from the the pseudo-future in the terra nova past implies that there is another way to travel between time lines, but what that thing is could be anything at all. I doubt the writers knew for certain what that would ultimately be.

And even if they claim to know, these days I wouldn't believe them without proof. Writing teams seem to believe you can lie about this with impunity.

Honestly, my spider-sense has been tingling ever since I read that description of ppm procs. Something about it "feels" wrong, but I have no evidence to support that feeling. Besides, of course, the obvious problem that recharge time is not the same thing as cycle time.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the PPM rating supposed to be the "limit" of how fast the proc can work, not the actual guaranteed amount? I thought the 3 ppm value was just a ceiling for the proc, and it was actually supposed to proc about as fast as the in-game one did. Only if you slot this into some click where you could get a lot of activations per minute did this 3 ppm rating actually factor into anything.

Even in PnP games, you only get to create your own motives and backstory. The GM creates the backstory of everything else, and you generally have no say in the backstory of NPCs.

Far from being the point of a role playing game, I'm unaware of any role playing game MMO or otherwise where the player gets to dictate the backstory of the environment outside their own characters.

Ironically, Dark Astoria is the first time in a long time my Blaster has felt more "heroic" than "horror movie survivor." Usually, I'm proud of the fact that I blasted my way through content and am not dead yet. In DA, I can bring the full power of my Incarnate status onto content that I still get full rewards for, but can drop the hammer on. And its readily apparent that at least in the early arcs the critters are no match for me unless I deliberately crank difficulty up high.

I've shifted from spending all of my effort to survive to just cutting loose and shooting in all directions until I stop hearing return fire.


In either case, I've felt "heroic" in other gameplay circumstances besides DA and also DA, so if I'm not allowed to, I am apparently allowed to break the rules.


As to the personal stories: I consider those nothing more than interactive cut scenes. I think it detracts from my own gameplay experience about as much as the loading screens of the game do, that also don't have me in them. I am still the central character in all of my gameplay: I always have been. What's happening in the rest of the world is what's happening in the rest of the world. I'm not the most powerful person in the Real World either but I am still the central actor in my own life. Watching the news and noticing I'm not in it does not change that fact. Knowing more about the NPCs that I'm interacting with and seeing some of their story doesn't change the importance of my story to me.

And yet: the devs still went out of their way to make Touch of Fear in Darkness Manipulation have 50% less intrinsic fear duration, which coupled with the fact that Scrappers have a higher fear modifier (because who knows why) makes Touch of Fear for Blasters only half the strength of ToF for Scrappers. That's factoring in the fact they *also* increased the recharge from 8s to 10s for Blasters, while simultaneously lowering the duration.

The question is whether Dark Blast and Darkness Manipulation is the exception or the rule. I think its a little of both, but given there is still a prejudice that Blasters must not have strong counter-mez in melee suggests that what keeps Blasters down is not attributable to any one person. They've had issues through three separate powers leads including this one, although I think Blasters have the best shot with this one yet.

And keep in mind that the same dev team that is allowing Blasters to have Dark Blast is also buffing everything else commensurately higher, and not just individual powersets. Dark Blast alone is not going to help Blasters achieve the performance they need to have to fit into the modern conception of what the archetypes are supposed to achieve relative to each other.

Yes and no. Conceptually yes. But look at Stalkers. They just had a major "overhaul" that actually amounted to only a very small set of mechanical changes - but a huge conceptual one ("stalker performance should not rely on stealth mechanics").

Change one relatively simple thought, and lots of things become possible.

Just for example, think of what becomes possible if the Blaster archetype was defined this way: Blasters are the offensive powerhouses that specialize in defeating enemies while interfering with their ability to counter-attack.

That one small addition says Blasters should have short-duration offensive mitigation (controls, soft control, debuff) that degrades the ability for attackers to shoot at the Blaster while the Blaster is in the process of attacking them first. Offense as best Defense without having to one-shot everything. It changes everything: right now its unclear how much control and debuff *all* Blasters should have, *if any*. That one statement says exactly how much they should have, and more important it says all Blasters should have it, or else be compensated significantly for the lack of it.

Adding it would not require a complete overhaul of Blaster powersets. Conceptual overhauls do not require implementation overhauls.

Conceptual overhauls ask why things are the way they are, and whether that logic actually makes sense. Why does Elude last three minutes while Nova lasts three seconds? Why do they both crash? Is the logic reasonable given each other's existence? I'm not the first to ask those questions, but I have asked them in the past and I think its long overdue they have answers. The answers don't necessarily mandate radical changes, though.

It is not mutually exclusive to grant Blasters a buff that benefits them more than anyone else, but is also something they lack and other things have more of at the present time. The specific mechanics of how it happens can be unique to Blasters for gameplay purposes, but that doesn't mean the intended benefit has to be unique in a broad sense.

So for example if Blaster gained significantly better ranged soft control or defensive debuff, that would be something other archetypes have - controllers and defenders in particular. But that would be a buff that explicitly focused only on Blasters and would benefit them exclusively.

But if Blaster survivability included control and debuff tools, then the only way for the devs to make critters more dangerous to blasters would be to make them more dangerous to defenders and controllers also - by making them more resistant to debuffs and control. There's no easy way to single out Blasters, as there is now.

Its a form of defense in depth. We want to give blasters a better set of tools to keep themselves alive, but the question is which tools. Mez protection seems to be dangerous to give to blasters to me, because they will always play second fiddle to the melee archetypes in that regard: its so easy to make critters that overwhelm blaster mez protection but not melee mez protection, because mez protection is so binary in nature (its not absolutely all or nothing as some people have pointed out, but its not that far away from being that either). Soft control is not binary, you cannot make a critter that ignores blaster soft control but not defender and controller soft control: it doesn't generally work like that.

To put it another way, mez protection is brittle, and Blasters would probably be served with a less brittle tool: something that bends before it breaks. Given how mez protection works and given how melee archetypes treat mez protection, its likely that mez protection would fracture far more easily under the weight of future content than soft control, debuff, or other non-boolean effects.