Arcanaville

My views on this particular subject predate the existence of this game, and on a matter of this nature are not primarily informed by MMO players, but rather by the fact that what you call backstage I call my front yard.

I can think of no reason why the devs would not make a mixed weapon powerset, beyond the normal disclaimer that powersets take a lot of resources to make and the devs have a limited amount of time and a long list of ideas to choose from, so any one particular idea is not very likely in general.

The devs did say directly and on multiple occasions that if the technology became available to fix this problem they would likely do so, and that no one should rely on this behavior being sanctioned indefinitely. While some people may not know that, there is no ambiguity in their long-time stated intent.

For every other bug in the game besides the multiaspect HO bug, no one should presume anything else other than that bug is also subject to being fixed without warning or discussion. There are no exceptions.

That's a given, which I acknowledged in my post. The problem is even with a new geometry model, its unclear how that new geometry model would interact with scaling chests and moving bodies. Most tops with geometry have some margin for error by not having to follow the contours of the body precisely, and the ones that try to some degree often are the ones with the clipping problems.

Actually, I believe he's asking for Support/Melee with tanker health and assuming that large health and the right support powers would make an adequate tank. Which is interesting, but unlikely to happen.

To the OP: this game is built upon a small set of archetypes with a larger set of powersets on top. Archetypes aren't something that are created very often, and in fact only twice have standard archetypes been created: at the launch of the game, and at the launch of City of Villains. The only other archetypes that have ever been created besides those demonstrate the problem with creating new archetypes: the Kheldian hero side epic archetypes, and the villain side VEATs. Typically, an archetype has lots of primary and secondary options to fill out its design. The time necessary to create a whole set of primary and secondary options simply no longer exists as a practical matter. The HEATs and VEATs are both essentially locked to a single choice of primary and secondary deemed appropriate to that one archetype - in the case of the VEATs they are branching choices, but still a single main choice each.

Speculating about all new archetypes is an interesting mental exercise, but its unlikely to ever happen in the foreseeable future.

It doesn't let you do things that were unintended. It *does* things that are specifically contrary to intent.

I'm not saying all DVD sets in existence do not have ways to purchase the individual discs separately, so a counter-example isn't probative.

I bought this for a friend that is a big fan of the show NCIS, because it has the spin off episodes they never saw. Let me know if you find a way to legally purchase just that disc.

That's a subjective characterization. I rarely have to deal with merchants putting elaborate systems between me and the items I want. I have to deal with things being in sets of other things all the time and having to choose whether I want the thing badly enough or not to purchase the entire set. Like in the case of DVDs (sometimes I want a specific one out of the set and they don't sell it separately), food (sometimes X comes with Y and the restaurant won't substitute Z, nor sell their food ala carte), service plans (sometimes I want a specific set of services, but no such limited package exists) - I see it every day, and every day I make my choice and move on without thinking that the people presenting that choice are in some way cheating me by doing so.

Me: Hey Mayhem, what's that down on your shoes?

Mother Mayhem: Wha? <snikt>

Me: Quickest AV kill in history.

Widows are a little iffy to me. On the one hand, the amount of defense they have and their reliance on it would suggest they deserve a lot more DDR. On the other hand, they sort of have a lot of defensive protection period: more than you'd expect given the capabilities of the archetype. It makes we wonder if the high defense *itself* is supposed to be the Widow's hedge against debuffs. In other words, rather than give Widows moderate defense and moderate DDR, they were given high defense and low DDR instead, which nets out to a similar overall protection scheme, but frontloads that protection in higher defense up front that can be debuffed later.

And that doesn't count the fact that on top of that they get tanker mods on power pool defenses.

Widows might have been deliberately designed to be stronger than normal, but more brittle than normal, in other words.

Here's why this is actually a more complex subject than it seems on the surface. Suppose we take SR, and assume its SO slotted defense is about 30%. That equates to 60% damage mitigation, so lets compare 30% defense SR to a hypothetical resistance-only set that has 60% resistance.

If we give SR 60% defense debuff protection which is comparable to the 60% resistance debuff resistance that the resistance set has, it looks equal but its not equal, because while SR will resist defense debuffs just as much as the resistance set will resist resistance debuffs, that's only true for debuffs that land. In actuality, SR will *avoid* 80% of all debuffs aimed its way (base 50% tohit), *and then* resist 60% of the 20% that that. The resistance set will avoid 50% of the debuffs aimed its way (no defense, but base to hit is still 50%) and then resist 60% of the rest.

Notice that in this case, defense debuffs have a weaker effect on the defense set than resistance debuffs have on the resistance set for the first landed debuff. And even as defense spirals down to zero (and so does resistance) SR still resists just as much as the resistance set, but also avoids more of them right up to the point where defense drops to zero.

This would suggest that SR should have less than 60% DDR, but if it has less, then for many cases its protection will be weaker. And how do you factor in the fact that defense debuffs are more common than resistance debuffs, deliberately so on the part of the devs?

This then begs the question: if you are going to give every single defense power DDR, what amount should it be? Since the amount you'd likely want to give has some situational elements to it, can you give the right amount to things like power pool powers?

And what does that do to defense sets when *everyone* can build high levels of DDR? DDR is already a tricky thing to set "correctly" (for some definition of correctly) can you also ensure that the *relative* amounts of DDR between sets with different reliance on defense get proportionately similar ones? If you can build Shields to have comparable DDR to SR, what's the point of SR? And its not a trivial escape hatch to say "just buff SR" because its impractical to buff its defense, and tricky to buff anything else. Eventually you have every single defensive set having regen, defense, and resistance, and significantly increase the homogenization of the sets. I'd be opposed to that in general.

The proliferation of defense buffs has already marginalized defense *sets* in the high performance arena, because even freaking blasters can soft-cap now. DDR is one of the few ways left to distinguish the high, medium, and low reliance defense sets. But if everyone who wants it can also buy DDR, that to me makes a difficult situation worse.


DDR is more a powerset thing, not a power thing, because defense intrinsically does protect against debuffs: it avoids them. The problem is the second and third debuff: the cascade effect, and the degree to which that defense should hold up against debuffs is more of a holistic powerset question than a power by power question. You could even argue that power pool defenses and invention bonuses are there as a counter to defense debuffs in terms of being offsets: we can buy power pool defenses and invention defense bonuses, and those offset the defense debuffs that we can be hit by. But if that's the case, its not at all clear they should also *resist* those debuffs, because that would be, in a sense, two bites at the same apple.

Or to put it another way, all debuffs exist for a reason: to weaken us. The fact that a debuff makes us weaker isn't necessarily wrong; that's the point of the debuff. The question is whether the debuffs in strength or prevalence affect everyone in the way that is reasonable and fair. The obvious problem with defense debuffs is that unlike resistance debuffs, they affect things with defense more than things without defense. The question is whether that was intentional. You could argue that it was intention in the case of sets like Invuln: Invuln has resistance and +health and a heal, and a small amount of defense that can scale up to a significant amount of defense situationally. Its entirely reasonable to believe that in other situations, where defense debuffs are more common, Invuln would have a significant amount of that protection stripped. However, you could also argue that SR (and Energy when it arrived) were in a much tougher boat, because they were affected so much more strongly, and their net protection dropped so much more steeply, that that wasn't intentional.

Because you can make such situational arguments for different powersets, DDR itself should likely remain something that is configured per powerset, based on the degree to which its designed to be more or less vulnerable to defense debuffs in the first place.

DDoS attacks to change the opinion of members of Congress is like shooting missiles at the moon to get McDonalds to add tacos to their nationwide menu. How many members of Congress would even notice unless their teenage children told them?

Cyberterrorism is one of the canonical justifications used for gaining more power and control over the internet. I can verify this personally. Anonymous supposedly stands for unrestricted and unmonitored free speech and access to the internet, and they consistently perform deleterious actions that can only be controlled by monitoring and regulating access to the internet. That's like someone saying they oppose a gun control law, and to protest that they will shoot up one school a week until its repealed.

Anonymous and groups like them don't want the internet to be policed, and to promote that agenda they become the most dangerous internet criminals in need of policing. No matter how many times I say it to myself, it never sounds any less idiotic. Peaceful protests have demonstrated that we probably never needed them, and if we ever did need them we've certainly outgrown them. And when I say "them" I mean all groups that believe unfocused, attention grabbing violence is necessary, on the internet or otherwise.

Anonymous are chimps with pistols. Dangerous, unpredictable, and sometimes amusing, but in the end I'm also not going to be sad when the guys with the tranq guns put them down.

Defense avoids debuffs, Resistance resists them. However, the asymmetry between them is that Resistance resists resistance debuffs before the debuffs themselves are counted. So if you have 90% resistance, you always resist 90% of all resistance debuffs, even if you have enough resistance debuffs stacked up to make your resistance only 50%. You will only resist 50% of all damage, but you will still resist 90% of the debuffs.

Defense doesn't, and can't work that way. If you have 45% defense, you're going to avoid most of the debuffs that would otherwise have landed. But the debuffs that do land reduce your defense, which will make it easier for debuffs to land.

Something that most people continue to misunderstand is the purpose to DDR. DDR is not there to protect defense sets against defense debuffs. Sometimes even the devs get this wrong. *Defense* protects defense sets against defense debuffs, and for that matter all debuffs. DDR is there to protect *defense* from losing its ability to protect against defense debuffs. Or to put it another way, DDR exists to prevent cascade failure.

Cascade failure is when your defense drops, making it easier for defense debuffs to land, so you eat more debuffs, so your defense drops, making it easier for defense debuffs to land, so you eat more debuffs. So as you become weaker to debuffs, you become weaker to damage, which makes you weaker to debuffs, which makes you weaker to damage. And then your damage mitigation zeroes out and you die.

The thing is, true cascade failure leading to a complete or near-complete loss of damage mitigation can only really happen for powersets that rely exclusively or almost exclusively on defense. Sets with low defense or that don't rely exclusively on defense can have their defense stripped away, but can't have all of their protection stripped away at the same time because it isn't tied up all in defense.

Mechanically, this can happen even to a Regen scrapper with zero defense. They start off avoiding about half of all attacks just due to critter base accurate, but then they get hit by a defense debuff and now they get hit more often, and that allows them to get hit by more debuffs, etc. But that's characteristically not as severe as cascade failure: the worst case scenario is a less than doubling of incoming damage.

Even for a non-softcapped SR scrapper, things are much worse. They can go from about 30% defense to zero very quickly, which increases incoming damage by a factor of four. And as a practical matter, even non-softcapped SR scrappers are likely to be higher than 30% defense due to powers like combat jumping. An increase of a factor of five (increasing incoming damage to six times normal) is not unusual. DDR is designed to soften that significantly.

Because defense avoids debuffs anyway, giving defense sets perfect or nearly perfect DDR can be overkill. SR has way more DDR than normal damage mitigation calculations would suggest. But that's tempered by the fact that defense debuffs are so common, and SR is so heavily reliant on defense. They sit at an extreme case. In any case, rather than do calculations, which have significant judgment associated with them as well, the devs have decided to guestimate how much DDR seems reasonable for the sets that have it, and they tend to fall into the low (~30%), medium (~50%) and high (SR, and some stacked tier 9 cases) realms. Shields is in the medium category.

Is it fair? Well, if the devs granted DDR by the methodology I originally suggested when DDR first appeared (which predates Shields) then Shields would have something in the neighborhood of 40-60% DDR.

Many people have suggested that DDR and RDR should work in exactly the same way. Unfortunately, that's impossible because Resistance resists a percentage of an effect, while defense avoids all or nothing. That critical asymmetry makes it impossible for defense debuffs and resistance debuffs to work the same way, or even approximately the same way. We can attempt to make them work in somewhat analogous ways, but nothing would be perfect. To be honest, while there are definite wrong ways to do this, the exact right way is something of a judgment call, specifically because the one thing that can't be done is to replicate the average behavior of resistance across all debuffing domains.

Why do you think Frankenslotting should automatically be worse (not that I'm conceding that its worse in all cases)?

The devs have datamined that players *love* slotting recharge, and recharge bonuses. That appears to be the most valuable bonus, as voted on by the players with their in-game actions. So allowing high order recharge to sit very low, and be potentially stackable, seems less likely even if you think Frankenslotting should be in some manner less optimal.

My own opinion is the two strongest bonuses are the s/l defense and the recharge, and one exists within the first three slots, and one exists above that. So you get an early big buff, and a later one if you slot more of the set.

Under those specific circumstances and standards, I can also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the most competent Tanker won't be Fire (cannot reach top tier Tanker damage mitigation). Or Willpower (taunt aura duration).

Taunt may be a significant power in the tanker arsenal, but within the context of "most competent tanker" there are lots of other things that will prevent that from being true, that are options within the player's sphere of control. The question is whether that fact is material in a specific circumstance when all others are not.

And blinked?

I acknowledged that specifically: the point to the passage you quote is encapsulated in its last sentence: you can choose to believe that the devs don't care about the some of the players whose suggestions went unfulfilled, or you can choose to believe they do care, but that fact alone wasn't the only deciding factor.

The more specific point is you chose to portray the choice as one between dollars and players:

What if it was a choice between players that wanted the exclusivity, and those that did not?

All hail Xenu.

Alternate realities don't count. There are lots of alternate Statesmans (Statesmen, Statespeople, whatever) also.

Thus creating Zombie Statesman, the next big threat after the Coming Storm.

Are you saying you only grocery shop, or you always find yourself in a situation where you are allowed to buy what you want, and only what you want, in the specific manner you want?

That would be nice in general, but are you actually suggesting creating a inverse breast slider texture map to fill in boob cleavage on tights to make a stretched look? My brain is having difficulty conceiving of that.

A carefully guarded secret at Paragon Studios is that Zwillinger's hats emit mind control shields. He changes them periodically because they keep burning out.

That day he forgot his hat? Beast Mastery on beta.