Arcanaville

You're asking the wrong question. I've always believed, but couldn't prove, that blasters severely underperformed everything**. The discussion surrounding the Defiance 2.0 changes made that moot: I didn't need to prove it, because it was datamined by the devs to be blatantly true. Blasters had a problem, period, the end.

The question was why they had that problem, and the obvious answer was that they were pigeon-holed too strictly into damage on the one hand, while everything else gained a lot of damage on the other hand. That meant the one thing they were designed to be good at wasn't enough, and conversely even the one thing they were good at everyone else got good at also. Quantitatively, that meant blasters were going to underperform.

I can't prove they *still* underperform after the D2.0 changes, but I do believe the burden of proof is now on the people who think everything is fine. Blasters gained only a small amount of additional damage from the D2.0 changes, and the increase in survivability they got (shoot while mezzed) seems small compared to the large increases many other archetypes received in damage and otherwise.

That's the objective problem, and its concrete. The subjective problem is that Blasters very obviously do not get a lot for trading away almost all of their right to control, buff, debuff, and defense. While its true that *some* blaster sets get *some* of that, the larger truth is that Blasters are entitled to none of it: at the moment there's no grounds for a Blaster to argue that they do not have enough control, or buff, or personal defense. There *are* grounds for other archetypes arguing they don't have enough damage: this argument was won again and again by Tankers, Dominators, Stalkers, and even Scrappers of all things. No one has ever successfully argued for Blasters to get more of anything besides damage, and even that seems to have a glass ceiling on the maximum they are allowed to have.

The subjective trade Blasters make doesn't seem like an especially good one, but that is subjective. The fact that its paralleled by the incontrovertible evidence that the trade has completely failed for most of the entire existence of the game gives that subjective argument significantly more weight.


So the answer to your question "why is it a problem that blasters are the 'pure' damage archetype" is: the devs haven't figured out yet how to make a "pure" damage archetype that isn't broken when played by our playerbase. Everything else does too close a level of damage to blasters, and the devs are reluctant to give blasters significantly more damage to compensate. But that would be the only way to equal the performance of other archetypes that have so much more survivability and utility.

A fair "pure" damage archetype would do enough damage that if I asked whether my energy blaster does more damage than, say, a fire tanker, it should be too silly a question for anyone to take out their pencils. No one starts whipping out pocket calculators to figure out if my energy blaster is more survivable than a fire tanker. Its not even worth thinking about for more than a second.

That level of damage may simply be unacceptable to the devs. If it is, the pure damage archetype isn't a viable concept without a blanket statement that it, and it alone, is exempted from the objective and subjective balance requirements we place on every other archetype.


** It was even worse than I thought. I used to think that Blasters underperformed everything except solo Defenders as an archetype. Wrong: the data showed Blasters collectively underperformed them as well. They basically underperformed everything, everywhere, under all circumstances. That proved that as bad as I thought it was, it was worse than basically anyone would have guessed prior to that point.

Probably not. But on the subject of endurance drain, I was also wondering what the very best I could do with an all passive defensive set would be:

Dodge
Agile
Lucky
Bane Spider Armor Upgrade
Resilience
Foresight
Combat Training: Defensive
High Pain Tolerance
Fast Healing


This should give me (extrapolating Tanker numbers)

35% def Melee
23.4% def Ranged/AoE
31% res all but psi, 62% res psi
scaling res: 0.89% res s/l/f/c/e/n per percent health below 75% to 60%
scaling res: 1.89% res s/l/f/c/e/n per percent health below 60% to 0%
(+13.4% res s/l/f/c/e/n @60% health, psi caps 90% res @ 52.28% health, s/l/f/c/e/n caps 90% res @ 35.9% health)
Mag 4 status protection
~ +150% regen

I can add inherent fitness to this, and get more regen, and I can theoretically slot at least Steadfast, Glad Armor, and Shield Wall procs and get an additional 6% defense to all and 3% resistance to all, still with no defensive toggles or clicks. In an invention build you should be able to cap melee and get pretty good ranged/AoE defense. You don't have a lot of non-positional psi defense but you do have a ton of psionic resistance.

End drain is at least defensively moot. The bigger problem is the low mez magnitude protection. You could drop some defense and resistance and get more by stacking Crab Spider Armor Upgrade.

I thought about making an indestructible character, but I think something pretty simple works well:

Focused Fighting, Danger Sense, Dodge, Agile, Lucky, Minerals

- Using Tanker numbers, that's 40.56% defense to M/R/A, 39% defense to psi, and capped 95% DDR before power pools, and scaling resistances.

Integration, Dull Pain, Energize

- Mez protection, +regen, enddisc, recovery, heal

I haven't tried to make an actual build with those powers, but you should be more than capped to melee, ranged, AoE, and psi, and have capped 95% DDR. You'll have a lot less resistance than Infini's build, but probably a lot more regeneration (and the scaling resistances will provide some resistance).


There's also an option I consider cheating even under the circumstances, but it technically works:

Granite Armor
Obsidian Shield
Entropic Aura
High Pain Tolerance
Energize
Focused Fighting
Danger Sense
Foresight
Chronoshift

You should be able to get to capped defense, capped resistance, capped DDR, and undo most or all of granite's self recharge debuff.

If I deal enough damage to draw aggro away from a tank, I'm generally drawing aggro from a set of smoking holes in the ground. Gauntlet's leverage alone is high enough to make it extremely difficult to yank aggro from most normal critters without actually killing it.

Maybe when she's in a hurry she flies feet first.

It is definitely one of the best, although it probably would have been better if I had stumbled across that title after it had concluded. If it has a flaw, its that the ending is very anticlimactic for the readers that were following along as the title unfolded. Geologically.


Transmet is to me the definitive Ellis work. So says the Chair Leg of Truth.

Incidentally, Transmet would make an *awesome* MMO setting. And ironically, our incredibly broken powers system could be perfect for that setting.

No timegate in this game is arbitrary, in any applicable sense of the word.

That's a case for taking taunt. Now make a case for taking a primary other than Stone or Invuln, say. Or to put it more directly, make a case for not specifically avoiding Fire, if your goal is maximum tanking ability.

The intended behavior of an enhancement that claims to boost X buffs is that it does not boost X debuffs. However, the game implementation makes that tricky to actually implement. This was discussed thoroughly when the Hamidon trick was first discussed openly on the forums, and periodically since, and especially when the Alpha slot tech was revealed (particularly by me).

Furthermore, and possibly more importantly, the behavior of a *power* that claims to be only enhanceable by a certain list of strength is that it will not accept enhancement based buffs of any other type. The combination of these two intents was subverted by the multi-type HOs and the limitations of the game engine, but they always existed.

As I mentioned previously, there are huge swaths of player who were never a party to those discussions, and for whom the intended behavior may be unclear. But its not unclear in an absolute sense: I can tell you what the intended behavior is, and I can state that with 100% certainty.

There's a difference between a narrative description (how a game mechanic is explained within the context of the in-game logic) and the actual specific design reason for something.

Separate from that, one of the explicit intents of the store is to provide ways to purchase QoL enhancements and that includes reducing the amount of time it takes to do things in-game. All rules involving how much effort it should take within the game to do something aren't applicable to a store specifically intended to allow players to purchase options without having to satisfy those requirements.

It may be senseless to you, but that's not because its actually without reason. The decisions must seem capricious to you if you think there's no reason behind them, but that's because you don't seem to want to accept what those reasons are. That's a problem beyond the ability of the devs to address.

Blasters from day negative one hundred were all about damage. They were originally designed to be the Ranged Damage/Melee Damage archetype in the dev diaries published while this game was still in early beta. The melee damage sets were renamed "manipulation" sets to give them some additional utility and self buffs, and in some early documentation called "support" sets. But they were not support in the sense of ally support they were in the sense of blaster self-support. The devs actually used basically these exact words to describe what the blaster secondary "manipulation" sets were supposed to be: they are designed to support the blaster in its primary role of dealing damage.

This hazy definition of the manipulation sets are exactly why they are in the funny state they are in: every generation of dev team from Geko to Castle to the current team admits or has admitted that the manipulation sets are weird relative to every other powerset type in existence precisely because they were hasty conversions from melee damage sets, and never given a solid purpose after being retooled.

"Cover" and "Suppression" to the best of my knowledge comes from the original alpha design of this game which predates the invention of archetypes.

Jack stated in his dev diaries that Blasters were designed to be Ranged Damage/Melee Damage. In beta, they originally were Ranged Damage/Melee Damage. Castle stated during the revamp of Blasters that they were intended to do Ranged Damage and Melee Damage. I'm currently talking to the devs about examining blasters, and question number one is how do we change the definition of blasters from just dealing damage to allow for productive changes to occur? The fact that Blasters are primarily designed to be just damage dealers is an objective fact, and a specific problem for the archetype that requires a solution.

This is a losing proposition. If five years from now a new character is introduced that is part man, part hyena, and he joins the Freedom Phalanx calling himself Mister Whiskers, and is represented in the game as a Claws/Electric Brute, and sits in Statesman's old chair people will be saying see, I told you the devs were bringing Statesman back.

It does not. If you believe the reason behind the time gate is that it should be impossible to switch sides any faster, that's false.

How is that relevant? You seem to be saying that if the store offers it instantly, that justifies eliminating the time gate in-game. But why is that relevant? If the store purchase is designed to buy your way past the time gate, saying that the existence of the store item invalidates the reason for having a time gate is illogical.

Thank you, 80s robot.

They could have then, then being some time in 2005. Doing it now, after years of essentially offering amnesty in the past, would have been unethical.


Edit: even then, it would have been questionable. The documentation in and out of game is extremely sketchy about what "legal" slotting is, and most players probably assume if a slot takes it, its meant to take it. Its not at all clear that the average player who does not visit the forums would know that slotting those enhancements generated better than intended results.

This is an unusual case where the player isn't obviously getting something for nothing: they are getting more than what they should get, and that's not easy to unilaterally blame on the players especially when the average player is not an expert in the mechanical rules of the game. It would be extremely difficult to segment the player population into those who knew better and those who did not.

Technically, I don't know how it was made so I don't know if I would have done it the same way. But since I once created my own version of Martial Arts for fun, I'm guessing the methodology is similar.

Most 90s comic books weren't even a good idea in the 90s. The 90s convinced me to take a break from comics altogether. If it wasn't for Warren Ellis taking over Stormwatch and starting his run on Transmetropolitan, I might never have come back at all.

It was also stated in the past that while this was an exploit, the devs did not consider it an Exploit with a capital E that warranted punitive action. It was more of a loophole the devs eventually intended to close, but did not believe the consequences of exploiting required any action beyond closing the loophole.

The change is intended to make them work as intended. If they could have done this in 2004, they would have. That's not speculation: the devs said so both publicly and privately that if the tech was available to make them work this way at any time in the past, they would have eventually used it.

When the Alpha slot tech was introduced, I told people the HO change was inevitable, and it was only a matter of time, and not to bother speculating on whether it "should" happen or what the devs "motives" would be. There is no need for any motive beyond "they now work as intended." The devs have done so many times in the past, and will do so again in the future.


I can *speculate* completely independently that with this new tech and with the existence of the invention system, after this change goes in there *might* be an opening to negotiate with the devs to return HOs to their original strength, which was also the intended design of HOs that were curtailed prior to ED making that curtailing moot.

If the playerbase agrees with you that an LotG is just as good but cheaper in all respects, then the cost of HOs will necessarily come down. They are only expensive because they are bid up, because people think they are better in some circumstances. Scarcity is irrelevant if functionality is identical: rare or not people will flock to the cheaper alternative if it is in fact a genuine alternative with identical performance.

Most people tend to assume the juicy backstage truth is actually, in fact, juicy. Most of the time the truth is actually very pedestrian. It is precisely because the truth is very pedestrian but just slightly off center that most people never guess the truth.

Incidentally, I could have made the staff video also. I all but sent a specific recipe for doing so to pohsyb years ago in another context. Very few people are capable of doing that correctly for an unreleased powerset, but that number is certainly not zero. Essentially everyone I'm personally aware of that is capable of leaks like this follow a similar code as I do; I follow the Iakona rule that prohibits me from revealing information about game content before the devs discuss it first or release it in-game. However, sometimes people's enthusiasm gets the better of them, and things happen.

Tornado 1, Heroine 0.