Arcanaville

Critters work exactly identically to players when it comes to endurance drain. If you do not have enough endurance to activate the attack, you can't use it.

Players build for having enough attacks and enough recharge to attack continuously or nearly so. Critters do not. So you notice endurance drain more on a player. If you are constantly trying to attack, temporarily having little or no endurance is immediately noticable. Its not on a critter if the critter is waiting for recharge anyway. It becomes noticable on a critter when attacks start to recharge and become available, and many of them require more endurance than they have. In that case, they must wait for an attack to recharge that doesn't cost more endurance than they have. That's why you observe critters using lower end attacks more: that's all they can afford.

One other thing is that recovery is not continuous: it happens in ticks of 6.67% endurance per tick: faster recovery speeds up the ticks. But that means everyone including players and critters goes from zero to 6.67% endurance in a single jump of recovery. For players with base endurance and minions, that is 6.67 end. For LTs with 150 max endurance, that is 10 end. For Bosses with 200 base end that is 13.34 end. For AVs with 800 base end that is 53.36 end. So if a critter has an attack ready to go and it requires 12 endurance, you can keep a minion or Lt from ever using it by just continuing to stack drain. They'll never have more than 10 end at a time. But a boss will go from 0 to 13 end in one jump and will have a moment when they have more than 12, and they will be able to use that attack as will AVs. The only way to prevent a boss from being able to use an attack that requires 12 end is to either debuff recovery so they cannot get any recovery ticks, or stack drain so fast that the split second they have a recovery tick is not long enough for the critter to decide to fire the attack (they usually take a quarter of a second to "decide" to attack, so that drain has to be basically right on top of the recovery tick).

As a practical matter, drain (without recovery debuff) can *prevent* the use of an attack that needs more endurance than a single recovery tick. It can only *delay* the use of an attack that needs less than one recovery tick.

Critters actually take more endurance than players do to activate a comparable attack. What costs us 5.2 endurance costs them 7.0. The only advantage critters have over players when it comes to endurance drain is that some critters have more max endurance, and they ironically don't have full attack chains and so are waiting around for things to recharge more than players, so drain is a problem less frequently.

Also, if they can't see you they can't shoot you, and if they can't shoot you then you can't die.

Someone told me that back when I first started playing the game. An AR Blaster I think it was. He spent a lot of time dead, but I can only assume that was because he made too much noise.

People have been saying this for years, but now there is an objective response. The response is: if your perspective on blasters is accurate, what in this perspective explains why blasters were dying at far higher rates than everyone else prior to D2.0, and coincidentally were spending far more time being mezzed?

Incidentally I like many players used to wonder why the game grants a badge for being mezzed. I wonder if it has occurred to anyone besides me that that badge exists because how long a player spends mezzed is actually a performance metric statistic the devs monitor, so it was just easy to make a badge for that.

You earn less rewards than the average, by more than the devs consider to be a reasonable range of performance centered around the average.

And given how rewards are doled out in teams, the fact that blasters underperformed even in teams says something extremely dramatic about how blasters functioned before D2.0, and how they likely perform now.

Is that a yes?

I could argue that the problem could have equally been that your playstyle was inconsistent with leveraging the best out of the other archetypes. However, it would be better to simply presume that the average player is the norm by which archetype performance should be balanced around. Whether that is because the archetype is more difficult to play than anything else or lower performance than everything else is somewhat irrelevant.

I can say that "melee-centric" playstyles are unlikely to be the sole or primary cause of the problem, because if it was you'd expect that variable to vanish for new players playing blasters as their first character. But I don't believe that segment of the player population overperforms with Blasters.


As to the original question, that blasters are likely to be underperforming at this moment is a conjecture on my part, based on the following observations:

1. We know Blasters underperformed** by a very large amount prior to the D2.0 changes. Not only that, but to repeat something I said then, I was allowed to state that according to the devs datamining, all powerset combinations for Blasters underperformed the average performance of all players by a significant amount, and this was true at all level ranges, and for all teaming situations from solo, to small team, to large team. That's actually an amazing statement, because its a difficult thing to do that deliberately. Just the variations in powerset performance alone would make that very difficult to do.

2. This means Blaster performance has always been overestimated, at least up to that point, because almost no one attempted to objectively argue that in all facets of the game Blasters underperformed. No one, not even I, would have had the guts to claim that all blaster powerset combinations significantly underperformed the average performance of all players while solo while the defender archetype on average did not.

3. We know Blasters have, historically, been popular archetypes to make but less popular archetypes to level: the archetype creation and population statistics we have from the past show blasters created at a higher rate than any other archetype but their popularity drops with level.

4. Of the two hero-side archetypes I originally cited as the ones most statistically likely to be abandoned from initial creation, one of them - Scrappers - was stated to be the most popular archetype at level 50. Conversely, Blasters shift from first to third in the same data. This suggests that the slowdown in Scrappers from 1 through 49 is more than made up for by an increase in viability or desirability at level 50 - and this statistic precludes the incarnate end game. This reinforces the hypothesis that Blasters have the *highest* problems with performance over time, because while some archetypes get better as they level, and Scrappers (probably because they start off so good there's not as much room to get better) don't but are otherwise highly attractive, Blasters have an intrinsic problem that makes them slower to level, more likely to be abandoned before 50, and much less attractive to play at level 50.

5. Its unlikely D2.0 could have completely reversed these issues. It certainly could have helped, but if the largest contributor to Blaster underperformance was mezzing as the devs suggested, D2.0 doesn't eliminate that problem, it only reduces it. And its not the case that the other squishies could have possibly been getting mezzed and then killed at a similar or even lesser but appreciable level because if that were so they would also have seen a significant performance penalty due to that. If almost everyone is very infrequently killed due to mez and blasters were, D2.0 is not likely to have reduced that number to the same trivially low level.

6. Datamining performance can only understate performance differences, not overstate them. There's no way for someone to earn rewards slower than the game records them to. Its possible for someone to earn rewards faster than the game records them to, if the game incorrectly accounts for the time necessary to earn that reward. Diluting reward earning rates by overcounting the amount of time it takes to earn them necessarily reduces the gap in performance for everyone.

As an example, if one character earns rewards twice as fast as another character while doing the same mission, but the devs count travel time to the mission in their statistics, then the first character will not be datamined to be twice as fast: he or she will be datamined to be somewhat less than twice as fast.

7. This means however badly Blasters underperformed everyone else prior to D2.0 they almost certainly have to be doing even worse because their methodology dilutes differences.

8. This also means if you do only enough to make the difference disappear from your datamined statistics you're guaranteed to have not done enough because you would have to have placed Blasters at the lowest possible performance which fails to show an underperformance in the data.

9. Since the data behind D2.0 was collected, other archetypes have had changes done which are likely to have improved their average performance. Brute Fury is now easier to sustain, and that would likely average out across the entire playerbase to a net benefit relative to the loss of the ability to sustain extremely high Fury levels. Defenders have had their damage increased, at least solo. Tankers have gained Bruising. Stalkers have had critical mechanism improvements. All these things are far more likely to have shifted overall average performance upward rather than downward, and that increases the likelihood that the D2.0 benefits were further reduced on a relative basis.***


Therefore, without contrary data, I believe the most likely scenario, by overwhelming odds, is that Blasters still underperform, by probably a lesser amount than before, but still do.


** Performance, as defined by the devs, is the rate at which a character earns rewards such as XP, influence, and drops.

*** This is not a case of "if everyone else goes up by 5%, Blasters must also" - the power creep argument. If Blasters underperformed by 5% and everyone went up by 2% so Blasters were now 7% under average, that would not necesarily be significant. Nothing is perfect and someone has to be on the bottom. But if Blasters were underperforming by, say, 30% and that was considered too high, then if D2.0 reduced that to 20% and everyone else went up 5%, that 5% would be very significant because it would be undercutting a mandatory performance adjustment, not just a desired one.

Has that always been true?

That has always been true in the past, and it has largely contributed to the *actual* problem I think Blasters have, which is that every archetype has, over time, gained capability in at least two different areas based on their functional definition, as the devs see those archetypes. One of those things is offensive output, due to the "every archetype should be able to solo at a reasonable pace" design rule. And one or more other things based on the individual archetype's specific design imperatives.

Blasters had only one design imperative. Be the best at damage. And when the devs added the rule everyone must be able to solo well they in effect undercut that rule. Without that rule we could enforce it by giving everything else low or lower damage. With the rule we cannot.

Blasters have no other design imperative, except for the overall design rule that says they cannot be datamined to severely underperform everything else.

Look at how the devs have approached Stalkers, Dominators, Kheldians, and Tankers over time. They have always asked, and usually answered publicly, what those things are supposed to be, or what they used to be and what the devs are now trying to make them. We know Tankers aggro role, Dominators past domination dependence and their now more stable damage dealing design, we know the prior reliance on stealth and current focus on burst damage of stalkers. There are people that argue with those design decisions, but we know what they are because they guide the devs in telling them what those things should have, and what the devs should buff when they feel the archetype needs a boost.

When Blasters were reviewed for D2.0, we found out what the devs believe Blasters to be, because I explicitly asked the question and got an authoritative answer, at least at that time. Blasters are supposed to be damage dealers. Not ranged damage dealers or melee damage dealers or AoE damage dealers. Damage dealers.

Wait: not "the best damage dealers?" Not once did I see any developer make that claim. But scrappers are damage dealers, dominators are damage dealers, stalkers are damage dealers, brutes are damage dealers. Are blasters explicitly supposed to be the best damage dealers?

Technically yes, because they do nothing else. However, even the devs are extremely cautious to put that down on paper, because in practice it would be extremely difficult to buff blasters in a way that would make this obvious. They are worried about giving anything too much damage.

However, there is an unspoken additional Blaster design imperative that I've never heard a dev explicitly state, but I have seen used to justify changes or a non-changes in the past. And that is this one: Blasters are supposed to be vulnerable.

And that is the Blaster problem. Maybe someone thinks they underperform. Maybe someone else thinks they perform fine. What is definitely true is the devs would not be comfortable with a change to Blasters that made them not vulnerable. That is not true for any other archetype.


Is the issue mezzing, or snipes, or damage, or melee secondary focus? Those are symptoms of the problem, not the problem. The problem is that the one thing the devs believe Blasters should have is something they are not willing to ensure they have the most of. And the only other thing they really think about Blasters collectively is that they should be vulnerable.

The problem that needs to be solved is that Blasters need a new definition, one that doesn't suck. Right now Blasters are not vulnerable to mez because there's a numerical or quantitative or balance-specific reason. Its because someone has to be, and Blasters are the vulnerable archetype, so they volunteer. Does that mean making Blasters less vulnerable to mez would "fix" them? Not necessarily. Its just one symptom in a long laundry list of symptoms, all of which end up saying the same thing: Blasters must be vulnerable. That's why the original tier 9 blasts crash: because we can't have Blasters killing Lts without being vulnerable for half a minute. We can have scrappers killing everything in sight with impunity for *three minutes* before they have to pay with a crash, but three seconds is all Blasters get. And everyone knows why sniper blasts don't do more damage: because one-shotting an Lt would be horribly unbalanced. Being totally invulnerable to LTs is okay, but one shotting them from long range is out of the question for blasters. They wouldn't be vulnerable any more. And that's why Blasters, even when the devs had overwhelming evidence that mez was causing them to horribly underperform, only got a *hedge* against mez. If it was determined that *tankers* underperformed because of mez they would have been given mag 50 protection the next day. If Controllers were determined to underperform because of mez they almost certainly would have been given actual mez protection.

We don't actually know if D2.0 goes far enough to solve the underperformance problem. But that's the point: if it was any other archetype, the devs would have made sure they did enough to solve the problem. As long as Blasters are the only archetype that simultaneously is the only one known to have severely underperformed in the past and yet is also apparently the one one that is too dangerous to buff in any more than a moderate capacity, they will have problems. Because that *is* a problem.

Add in capping health, regeneration, and damage strength, and that would be an even better starting point.

They are mathematically equivalent, not logically equivalent. They are only logically equivalent if we are talking about two different perspectives to analyze the same situation. They are not logically equivalent if one perspective causes the players to lose the benefit of the situation.

The logical flaw is the assumption that there are two possibilities: we get the buff and we see it as an occasional buff, or we get the buff and its seen as an occasional nerf. There is a third possibility: we don't get the buff because people see it as an occasional nerf.

You can only see an occasional buff as an occasional nerf if the possibility of actually having the buff all the time is real. That's why most people not completely insane at least come to the same conclusion that Build Up is an occasional buff, not a most-of-the-time nerf. The idea that we could just have Build Up's buff all the time, and BU actually nerfs that situation is ludicrous. But when the devs propose a possibility when its a somewhat smaller buff, people believe they are entitled to believe they could have gotten the buff all the time when that was never a possibility.

And people do not do themselves any favors when they believe that anything is possible, and the devs only withhold buffs when the buffs are obviously ridiculous, or they are just being cruel.

Positron specifically stated that in his opinion, players would perceive a buff that sometimes turns off as a penalty that sometimes turns on. And a bunch of players promptly jumped in to prove him right. And then I remembered why I cheer for the aliens in Independence Day.

Then my work is done.

As you may recall, the problem with all ideas related to that in general was not that they couldn't work, but that they fell into the category of "stances" and the devs felt that players would not accept stances by any name. I suggested something similar but with a different way of handling mez protection, and it was shot down on the exact same basis.

Its an irrational limitation, but its unclear where the irrationality is more concentrated: with the devs who think the players would not accept such a solution, or with the players who would not accept such a solution.

Changed my mind. I'm taking the brain cells also.

Well, what I was thinking is that there's no explanation for Thor actually being on Earth. So I'm guessing that somehow Thor decides to return to Earth, maybe to deal with Loki, and Iron Man and Captain America are send by Shield to investigate his arrival because Shield doesn't know Thor has returned and assumes the worst (Shield was able to detect something when the Asgardian bridges were in use). Rogers doesn't know anything about Thor and somehow they get into a fight, and then Iron Man jumps in to help Cap. The scene with all three standing around is probably the moment they all realize they are all on the same side, probably because Thor lets slip he's after Loki or something like that.

Because that's the rank where I would expect someone to command a naval vessel or conversely an advanced weapon systems project. The rank equivalent to O-3 or an Army captain would be a naval Lt, which can also work.

The typical age of Lt. Commanders is mid 30s, but I've seen examples of younger Lt Commanders. The first place I checked was astronauts: a likely place to find smart and aggressive career people. Bruce McCandless was I believe a navy Lt. Commander at age 29 when he was chosen for the astronaut program in 1966. Given his timeline for college and career, its possible he could have reached that rank a year or two earlier, and I also don't know his date of rank: he could have been an Lt. Commander for a period of time before being selected.

It would be highly exceptional to be an Lt. Commander at age 25 at any time other than wartime. However, your character could be an Lt prior to whatever alien invasion happens. Once that happens, all bets are off on normal rank trajectories. In World War 2, ensigns were sometimes becoming Lt Commanders in less than four years.

Its not like I was going to physically take the brain cells it was embedded in. You were going to get to keep those.

The Timverse Justice League animated series seemed to handle that ok, by essentially "normalizing" everyone's powers to be much more closely matched in general. It worked out ok because people were willing to let that material stand on its own rather than have to ape the comic books precisely. And even the Avengers is clearly bringing Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk to a more even level, and I think they are doing fine with dispensing with the magic and "godlike" aspects of the Asgardians and making them essentially superscience. If the Avengers can do it, Justice League could do it.

But clearly Marvel is doing it very carefully and very smartly. The decision to make the individual Hulk/Thor/IronMan/Captain America movies first is, in my opinion, going to turn out to be the biggest genius decision they've made to date. We're not just introduced to the characters, we're introduced to a lot of other stuff that will help make the Avengers make sense. We've been introduced to the power levels of Iron Man, the Hulk, and Thor. We don't need to take our cues from the comics, we can take them from the movies. This is the Marvel Movie Universe, not the comic one, and expectations have been recalibrated. And they all already look like they exist in the same world.

Nolan's Batman doesn't look like he exists in a world with Superman. That already makes it harder to make a JLA movie. You'd have to reinvent Batman. And maybe Superman. And no one has yet rolled the dice and tried to figure out how to make Wonder Woman work. We already know Cap works, Hulk works, Iron Man works, and Thor works, at least well enough for the Avengers purposes. Heck, with the other characters to play off of, they each might even work a little better.

To me the problem is not what the DC characters are like in the comics. To me the problem is that you need to make a new world that the characters can interact in for the big screen, and you can't do that in one movie. Marvel figured out how to do that without having to do it in one movie. DC is going to have to figure out how to solve the same problem if a JLA movie is to become a reality.

However, I think DC animation is still doing a better job of that. To me, the JLA story you want to tell on the big screen eventually is Tower of Babel, but it would take a long time to get there. I don't think DC has the patience. Meanwhile, DC animation has no problems getting there because we already have a sense of these characters from the various animated versions. Its a pseudo-Timverse story, so they do not have to start from scratch.

That's another very interesting perspective.

That's actually a very interesting idea. I'm going to steal it.

Well, when I tried to import an error popped up. Are there problems that can cause an error to pop up? It was an error, but it in another window so I closed it. I can't tell you what was in it because now Mids won't open at all. It can't be a virus, because I just installed an antivirus program yesterday when my computer told me I should. It was a 2012 edition, so I'm sure its up to date.

No, I think having thought about it that the best option given everything you've mentioned so far is to make "the captain" a Lt. Commander in the Navy. You want the character to have some specialty which in some ways is related to high technology, and her career path can take her through Naval Air Station Patuxent River, aka Pax River which is is a center of naval weapons system research and development for naval aviation. And there's a historical parallel: Rear Admiral Nora Wingfield Tyson, current commander of Carrier Strike Group Two, served at Pax River before becoming a Rear Admiral, and as far as I know the highest ranking women in the US military that has command of combat forces. Ironically, legally she can't actually *be* a combatant, but she commands one of the largest military strike forces on Earth (but her command is not unjustified given her prior service: she rose through naval aviation which is one of the few career paths available to women which parallel serving in combat units, and eventually served in command roles in naval surface ships including carriers).

I could imagine a woman navy officer rising through the ranks as a combat systems person, both as a systems operator and eventually a commander of a weapons development program of some kind. Say, commander of a missile frigate or cruiser testing a new navy railgun system. Such a person might conceivably have technical skill, but also command skill and was eventually moved up from someone working on combat systems to supervising the development and testing of same.

Its not perfect, but it seems to parallel something similar to what you seem to be aiming for. The critical area you're always going to have to smudge a bit is that no one who is incredibly good at making things work gets promoted to supervising that work and still has time to actually do it. In other words, "Scotty" is extremely rare in real life. Actually, you have to wonder what all the rest of the engineers were doing on Star Trek.

As far as I know, women can now serve in combat areas but they still cannot, to the best of my knowledge, serve as direct combatants. This restricts their ability to participate in any of the special operations command units, but it does not bar them. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (aka the Nightstalkers of Blackhawk Down fame) apparently is allowed to recruit women, but only for non-combat staff positions.

Actually, in keeping with the Marine Corp philosophy that every Marine is a combat rifleman, any specialist position that is incompatible with being a combat soldier is provided by the Navy. As I understand it, another thing the Marines do not have are chaplains: they are not infantry soldiers, so they are not Marines: they are always Navy personnel assigned to the Marine force.

I believe the Mobile Infantry that Heinlein invented for Starship Troopers was based in large part on the Marine Corp, both because of its relationship to the Navy corresponding to the Mobile Infantry's relationship with the starship navy, and in particular with the Mobile Infantry's moto of "everyone drops, everyone fights." Its said in the novel that in a hypothetical division of 10,000 Mobile infantry, exactly 10,000 are fighting soldiers. If the job can be done by non-infantrymen, the MI hires civilians to what anyone can do and asks the Navy to do what it cannot do like transport them across the galaxy.

It is I believe unique among western militaries that in the US Marine Corp, the fighter pilots are trained infantry riflemen, the truck drivers are infantry, the cooks are infantry, the mechanics are infantry. They must all remain fit and qualified to be rifleman as a Marine.

I suppose its worth mentioning that actually reading Starship Troopers might be valuable research material for thinking about a hypothetical military force set in a sci-fi environment. The MI are probably one of the core inspirations for all "space marines."

Its much more complicated than that. I used to be one of the best pullers around, and I did that with energy blast including sniper blast. So much was situationally based on range, perception range, even the directions mobs face (they don't "see" in one direction, but their aggro detection area is lopsided in the direction they face). I used to spend my free time figuring out how to execute pulls that were stated to be impossible on the forums, just for fun. Like pulling a boss out of a group of minions, or pulling two bosses apart, or pulling exactly half a group.

I can't even remember the last time I pulled anything on energy blast because I'm not really built for it anymore, but the "control equals bad pull" conjecture isn't true. At least, its not absolutely true, whether it made adjacent spawns more susceptible to aggro alarms is still an open question for me.

The real problem with pulling and particularly single pulling with snipes is that if snipes were meant for pulling they would do less damage and recycle fast, so you could selectively pull from very long range. Instead, you have a single very powerful shot that can basically kill a minion outright, but if you use it to pull then after it discharges there's basically nothing to do but wait because blasters generally have no attacks with significantly more than 80' of range and less than sniper range of 150'. While the critter(s) is running towards you, there's nothing you can really do until he enters normal range of 80', which is also going to be his range, because the one attack you have that hits at that range is recharging, since you just used it.

Its tactically strange.


One thought experiment I've been thinking about for a while with regard to snipes is this question: suppose sniper blasts had *zero* recharge. What problems would occur that we'd have to fix?

Its an interesting thought experiment, because so far I haven't thought of any. The numbers are also interesting, because a blaster cycling a sniper shot from long range over and over has basically limited himself or herself to single target damage at a DPA level comparable to the average Defender, but with no defender buffs or debuffs in play.

That's a fascinating coincidence.