Arcanaville

Which is my point: the argument works with all the badges or none of them. If you don't want me to blame you for not being able to acquire that one badge, then I would expect contrawise for you not to blame other people for being unable to get badges you could get.

There are people who believe its perfectly fine to dismiss any concern about anything acquirable in this game on the presumption that the fact they have it means there's no problem by definition. I have nothing but contempt for that attitude, and I have no problem using Bug Hunter or anything else to express my contempt for that attitude.

I personally don't feel any sense of superiority for possessing Bug Hunter: I've been on both sides of having and not having Bug Hunter, and I've defended that badge throughout that entire time as being interesting, but not proof of anything in particular from a gaming perspective. However, to the extent that someone believes their in-game accomplishments give them the right to judge other people's, I don't feel particularly bad about denigrating theirs relative to mine. Turnabout is fair play.

I don't think I'm being clear. The idea isn't to make range an advantage or a disadvantage. The idea is to recognize range's non-binary nature and balance within the different range regimes.

Or to put it more simply, given the fact that blasters were given multiple ranges and not just "range" we look at blasters, and we balance them (vs the critters) on the assumption critters are always at 80 feet, and never get any closer. *Then* we go again and balance them assuming critters materialize at 40 feet, and never get closer or farther away. *And then* we balance them *again* assuming critters are in melee range and never leave melee range.

We end up with blasters having the correct damage and mitigation at *all* ranges, so *all* ranges become valid options for blasters. None of them have any "special weaknesses" or "special strengths." Blasters would have the specific strengths they need to work properly at all ranges. They don't need any special weaknesses, because they are already possess all available weaknesses possible: low resistance, low defense, no mez protection, no heals, no regeneration, no health boosting.


Interesting food for thought question: what would the effect be if Blaster snipe's recharge was set to *zero*? In terms of DPA they have nearly the worst damage output of any blaster ranged attack. Even if you could cycle it over and over in normal combat you wouldn't because it would actually suck to do so, and that's before it starts getting interrupted.

The only circumstance this is remotely helpful within is the case when you're using it from extreme range and the critters (usually) can't shoot back. Here, you're in almost perfect safety but generating basically half the damage - single target only - you would be generating if you closed to 80 feet or less and started blasting with conventional attacks.

Is it worth killing half as fast - less than half as fast counting AoEs - to be killing from a safe distance. Keep in mind this is like being in perma-debt. In other words, using this tactic is worse than our current death penalty.

Interesting. And that's what I mean when I say: think about every range option separately when thinking about balancing blasters. Because the different range options are different, because the devs gave us different tools that work in those different ranges. And ask questions about whether each individual range option separately and by itself actually makes sense, or could be made to make sense, in light of how MMOs are actually supposed to be balanced: primarily around their reward earning rates. When I do that, some very interesting questsions come to mind that I don't hear people usually asking.

In the theater I first saw that preview in, I have to admit I had trouble understanding Bane. I heard "hwum Gotham uff Ahthah, you harph my permifing to die." In the internet posted versions, I can hear and understand him perfectly fine (except for the single word "is"). Ironically, its possible the lack of bass in my PC speakers is preventing his voice from being muffled too badly, which means it will be difficult to judge anything from internet videos.

I didn't have a problem with Bale in The Dark Knight, so maybe I won't have any Bane issues either.

If blasters were designed to have intrinsically appropriate offense and mitigation at different ranges, then by definition they would always be correctly balanced against the PvE content regardless of what range you were forced to fight at. Being forced to fight at close range would eliminate a tactical option, but the remaining options would have been explicitly designed to be better balanced against the content than they likely currently are.

In other words, in a system like I'm describing, you'd be paid for your trouble of being forced to fight at close range. Balancing around ranges doesn't mean there's a preferred range. It means all of them work for all blasters.

Believe me when I say they are extremely cognizant of that problem, as am I. I would sooner forfeit an award than promote the appearance of impropriety.

Interestingly, that's what impairs my ability to read the actual *comics*. Relative to anyone that started reading comics in the 70s like I did, most of the current stuff is an Elseworld spin off of an Elseworld. It is as unrecognizable compared to the 90s as the 90s were to the 70s and 80s.

But unless you want to live in the past, at some point you have to let it go at least enough to appreciate the new stuff on its own merits. And anyone who can do that with the actual comic books, presumably can do that with things like the movies. The comic books themselves have no special right to reinvent that other genres do not.

Its incredibly tricky because the game doesn't so much hand us things as we always have them and they get "unlocked" as we progress. But then other parts of the game presume a certain kind of progression and trigger off of what we have without regard to how we got it. The combination of the two without strong sanity checking creates all sorts of weird opportunities for strange bugs when you try to mess with progression.

There are bugs involving progression so nightmarish I cannot even discuss them on the open forums, and I can't even say why I can't. But those slots may be a long time coming, depending on the level of resources allocated to ferreting out all the potential problems.

Not specifically responding to dugfromtheearth here, I'm actually responding to Sam, but in a roundabout way which will become obvious. Technically speaking, this isn't a true statement because its ill-defined: what does it mean to be "balanced."

A thing can't be balanced: balance involves at least two things. You balance A against B, you don't "balance A." When we say a character or a powerset combination is balanced, we usually mean "against the PvE content" by default.

But what does *that* mean? I think too many people assume that "balance" means "a balanced fight." I win, but it wasn't too easy. But that's not actually the most important thing in MMOs. The most important thing in MMOs is actually reward earning rate. We assume that the best way to regulate that is to regulate combat difficulty: "harder" things generate more rewards, "easier" things generate less rewards.

But "harder" and "easier" don't actually mean much if you always succeed, and most players fight fights in which they almost always succeed. And the secondary balancing factors that would kick in within other games don't work as well here: cooldown, recharge, endurance (or other power meter). We don't have resources that we run out of that we can't get back trivially quickly in broad terms.

What's really important isn't how much rewards something gives, but how long it takes to get it, because its all about reward *rate*. That last word seems to get forgotten a lot. Question: how much rewards per unit time would it be fair to get at *zero* risk?

I'll bet a lot of people think the correct answer is "none." I'll bet the devs think that also. But that's not true. In a sense, the game is designed around a certain reward earning rate. Anything lower than that rate is actually a penalty of sorts. That's what debt does: debt penalizes the player by slowing them down. In effect, any activity that earns rewards slower than some base rate is in effect a form of debt penalty.

Now lets look at a blaster sniping a long-range target. As Sam points out, that's pointless in a sense because once you fire that one shot, you can't do anything anymore until snipe recharges (and its recharge is long) *and* meanwhile the other critters will start to close towards you and start shooting when they enter their range, which might be longer than your range outside of snipe. But what about hover sniping, as mentioned above? That eliminates the problem of the critters closing into range. But it retains the downside of being a very slow way to kill. Is that problematic?

The devs seemed to think so in the general case: they actually took steps to prevent hover blasting *except* for that one case of extreme range hover sniping. The question, though, is was it actually problematic? As we've seen, in general most of the offense that blasters have requires being within 40 feet of the target or less. Beyond that range, blasters have a lot less attacks, and thus a lot less offense. They kill slower outside of 40 feet than within it, in other words.

Technically, you could use that fact to balance an archetype with no (or little) mitigation by default. We could make it so that blasters had one kill speed at long range and a faster one at short range. At long range they would be relatively safe, but at shorter range they would be in greater jeopardy. In effect, range would be their mitigation, but it would also be a damage debuff. And that's theoretically a valid method of balancing blasters, at least in theory.

Which gets to the question of do blasters really have too many attacks or alternatively not enough useable ones? Right now, yes. But that very problem could be leveraged in theory to create a better balancing model for blasters. Draw three circles around a blaster: point blank, 40 feet, and 80 feet. Now, instead of "balancing blasters" we instead balance blaster offense and vulnerability at each of those three ranges, and couple that with balancing the combined damage and vulnerability against the PvE content.

That might be too much work, but it would at least work, in theory. Also, I wish I could point to my Make Range Mean Something thread, but its long gone.

Neither is a prerequisite for Bug Hunter. In fact, many of the early Bug Hunter awards I'm aware of satisfied neither requirement.

Without rooting there's no penalty to moving at all: in the days before suppression even rooting wasn't a big penalty.

And critter AI used to cause an even bigger problem than that: until not that long ago, running around in circles around a spawn reduced their damage output by over 50%. That's been mitigated, but I don't know if its been solved. This was so dramatic that I didn't really discuss it much on the open forums because it was bordering on an exploit, but I know I'm not the only person to have noticed this oddity.

What we have now allows for hit and run, but without rooting you can have hit while running, and that's potentially bad. Separate from on-paper AoE calculations that only matter to 0.1% of the players, it allows for a lot of tactical options that aren't or at least weren't intended.

Replacing rooting with suppression would solve some of those problems, but there's another catch: in this game we have very powerful and long-duration movement affecting powers, like slows or speed buffs. Our buff/debuff system can interact unexpectedly with changes like this: its pulling one thread that then starts unravelling others.

Keep in mind I'm all in favor of rootless combat that's balanced in theory: that's just going to be very tricky and time consuming in City of Heroes because its not just about eliminating the root.

This past weekend I was lightsabering my way through an unnamed MMO when I realized something I didn't fully appreciate until just then. Among the many, many good thing this game does in terms of promoting casual teaming, one of the least appreciated of them is travel powers.

It sounds almost too stupid to say out loud, but you can't team with people if you can't get to where they are. If you're a level 20 and you want to team with your level 40 buddies, supersidekicking enables you to do so without having to suffer a huge combat penalty, but the only way that's going to happen at all is if you can get to where they are when they invite you. And I do not have to imagine what it is like when you are in an MMO where when you invite someone for team content that requires additional team members, you may have to wait as much as five or ten *minutes* for them to reach your spot. *Per person*.

Super speed, super jump, recall friend - we literally take distance almost completely for granted in this game. We complain when the vault is not in the same building as the market. If it takes more than one minute for a team mate to arrive we wonder if they've been disconnected.

The way in which each game's features - and even its design flaws - interact can be very tangled and far-reaching.

Either the argument "if I can get it you can get it" works for all of badges, or none of them. There's nothing I did to acquire that badge that anyone else couldn't have done.

In fact, unlike many badges including the iTrial ones, Bug Hunter has no minimum requirements on the player at all except for brains and time. There is no requirement to team, no requirement to have level 50 characters, no requirement to participate in any content in particular.

Your perspective on that particular badge is no more legitimate than mine is on, say, Preservation Specialist.

This sounds like two different objections. The first is rooting: being unable to move while also attacking simultaneously. And a conflation of "clicks" with "spells."

Second one first: in City of Heroes, most attacks are basically activated powers. The exception are damaging auras that you emit continuously from yourself (that basically pulse damage periodically while they are toggled on and do not require any additional action on the part of the player) and things like pets (which obviously attack on their own: in City of Heroes this includes an array of "pseudo-pets" that aren't exactly pets, but attack separate from the player: castable gun turrets, for example).

I take it then that your preference is for an attack system where your character just "autoattacks" on its own, and clicks are reserved for "special" attacks? I ask because that seems to be to be a less active, not more active combat system and I would normally equate that with a less fast paced, not more fast paced combat system. Its a reasonable preference, it just seems to be an odd way of describing it.


First one second: rooting is controversial in City of Heroes. Most players that have seen MMOs without movement rooting often find the rooting we have to be constraining. But there's a catch. In most MMOs the notion of significant travel and movement ability doesn't exist. In City of Heroes, we can superspeed at 70 miles an hour to a target, attack it, and then zip 70 mph in the opposite direction and hit a different target, with just a short period of travel suppression that slows you down when you attack. And that's only for actual travel powers. We can create characters that use powers that affect movement but aren't literal travel powers like sprint (which is faster than most MMOs best case ground-travel speed) and swift and be able to move very fast on the battlefield when not attacking.

Do you feel that rooting is sufficiently harsh that its too high a cost for being otherwise able to move very fast when not specifically attacking. In other words, do you feel that always moving slowly but never rooted is better than being rooted when attacking but being able to move around in and into combat very quickly? Because that's sort of the trade off City of Heroes makes: for obvious reasons we cannot have both high unsuppressed movement and no rooting: we'd be able to dance circles around the critters and kite them without them being able to catch us. I noticed in your review video there were times when you paused, then jumped quickly back into the fight. I'm guessing that was without even trying to boost your movement rate. Imagine having twice or three times that ability, in exchange for rooting. Is it in your opinion not a good trade in terms of having good combat flow?

You might kill yourself before learning that you can't effectively make the heating elements from steel, and if you get lucky you may run out of batteries before you realize you're shorting all of them out too quickly.

You would probably be better off using some steel bits and pieces and a car battery to make a lighter and toast your bread over a fire.

You could lose the scientists and engineers and work with the remants of what you have: you'd still have mechanically inclined people to make it work.

You'd tolerate the loss of every physician on the planet less. Civilization would survive for a while, just with less people, but then you run the risk of very serious things getting out of control that currently are controlled by the current modern health care system in most of the world: mass immunization would be difficult under those circumstances, and with that gone general epidemics would return.

You cannot simply reinvent twentieth century medicine from reading books in a short amount of time. Vast amounts of knowledge and skill exist primarily or solely within the minds of living physicians. Even where things are written down, it often takes trained physicians to know where to look, and what to read and what to ignore.

Depending on your definition of "engineer" there would be some significant side effects of losing literally all of them simultaneously. They include people running things that aren't designed to operate without them indefinitely: the national power grid, nuclear power plants, chemical processing facilities, etc.


Reinventing technological civilization, even with documentation, always tends to sound easier than it actually is, because so few people are aware of all the tiny details that are critical to making it all work correctly. Real scientists, engineers, and doctors know when the books are misleading or wrong or incomplete. Most people will not, and it will be costly in many ways to discover. Its not that its impossible, its more a question of how many human beings would be left alive by the time we figured it out, and also whether we would all collectively put enough effort into actually doing it. We're not really marshalling humanity's best efforts to combat global climate change even though the potential downstream effects could be catastrophic. Is it automatically true that humanity would marshal its best efforts to preserving, and then reproducing modern technology if they were told all the people who used to do it are now gone and this will have a potentially serious impact at some indetermined future date.

That's the sort of problem humanity historically has a very poor track record on.

Its the internet. Mentioning corn on the cob will cause rage somewhere on the internet.

Fair enough. I have two.

First, as I mentioned above, I think CoH's combat system was something the original team sort of stumbled into, and it shows insofar as its almost unique: only Champions Online is similar for obvious reasons. But my question is: you mention that on the one hand City of Heroes makes you push a lot of buttons constantly to fire attacks, and on the other hand combat in other MMOs seems to you to be more "fast paced." To most City of Heroes players, that probably sounds like a contradiction: because CoH doesn't have global cooldowns you can fire attacks pretty much constantly provided you have enough of them and they recharge fast enough. In the early levels you can have only few attacks recharging slowly, but for damage dealers that usually resolves itself once you're around level 20 or so, if not earlier.

Have you seen combat at those higher levels, and if so how would you compare its "pace" to other MMOs with global cooldowns where there is enforced waiting after action?


Second: what do you think of our powers system in general. In general, in most MMOs where powers are balanced with very tight limits (which is not the same thing as balancing "correctly") generally the only thing that dramatically changes your ability is the acquisition of a specific power or ability. That one ability can dramatically change what you can do as a character. But enhancing that ability, or using skills to improve that ability, is usually highly restrained. You're often fighting for a percent here and a percent there. Here, when we enhance an attack for damage its *normal* to increase that damage by 100%, doubling its damage on the target. Its not abnormal to also improve the recharge of that power by 33% or more, allowing us to use it 33% more often. Invention builds that allow all powers to be used *twice* as often, sometimes even *three times* as often, are not entirely rare.

I think most City of Heroes players, if they thought about it, would agree that this wild and admittedly crazy power system works well for the superhero genre, where vast levels of power are the perceived norm. Separate from your experience with the character customizer where you can customize your appearance, what is your personal take on the nature of customizing your performance? Do you notice it at all, and if so what is your opinion on how effective or not effective it is in creating a more "powerful" feel to the combat in the game?

Consider this: if you want to solo something in this game that is not directly intended to be soloed, its often the case that a tray full of inspirations - which are specifically intended by the game to be chomped like chicklets as you get them to keep giving you bursts of superpower - will allow almost anyone to defeat almost anything short of Monster-class critters (like the Jello mountain, Karem Rularuu-Jabar, and the rest of your poster). And we tend to like it that way. But it does have detractors. What's your take?

I believe the review was fair because it seemed clear to me the idea was to provide an impression of what a brand new player would know and observe. A brand new player would not know all the things some people assume the review should have taken into consideration. It was not intended to be an advertisement for the game or an authoritative encapsulation of it as far as I could see.

Strangely, it is precisely in Lambda steamrolls that you see (voluntarily) player roles materialize. Tankers jump in and grab aggro just about as Ion and Blaster AoEs are landing, controllers and dominators start neutralizing the spawn, and people are already leaving for the next spawn or the spawn after that while Scrappers and Brutes take out the hard targets that remain after the alpha strike. Its not that simple and clean, of course, but its not that far from reality either.

When its working well, no one is redundant or idle unless they choose to be. There is no such thing as too much taunt, too much control, too much damage, or too much buffing. Its all good. Granted, its a corner case.

To be precise, only three non-situational (as you put it) Energy Blast attacks have a range higher than 40 feet: Power Bolt, Power Blast, and Explosive Blast. The other two powers with range above 40 feet are Sniper Blast and Power Push. One is a situational attack that is interruptible, and the other is more of a soft control than a legitimate attack.

Energy Torrent has a range of 40 feet, as does Power Burst.

If one of the offensive advantages of Blasters is that they have plenty of attacks, and another one is that they have range, the problem is that those two don't overlap much. They only have a lot of attacks in melee range, and only a moderate amount of attacks outside of melee range and often only a few attacks outside of 40 feet.


There's an enormous difference between saying Blasters have range as an advantage, and Blasters have the ability to slot for range as an advantage. Range is already competing with accuracy, damage, recharge, and endurance slotting in attacks.

The problem is not just a trivial matter of not having as much range as I would like. The problem is two-fold. First leveraging range isn't binary: the more you have the more advantage you get: being at longer range reduces the amount of attacks the critters have that are also in range (sometimes) and increases the amount of time it takes for them to close to melee range. 40 feet is very low tactically speaking. Second because Blasters have attacks with different ranges, the advantage of having long range is diluted by the fact that being at those ranges is in effect a damage debuff: you're eliminating the possibility of having your own attacks usable.

Perversely, having incompatible ranges can actually kill you, or threaten you worse than if you didn't have it at all. The devs give a lot of critters attacks that have more than 80 feet of range, so that Blasters can't kite them (I guess unless they slot for range, which reduces their damage and thus does the devs dirty work regardless). So if you snipe a critter from sniper range, the rest of the spawn sometimes runs towards you until *they* are in range and then start shooting. At that point *you* might not be in range. It would have been better to move all the way to being in range of *your own* non-situational attacks and *then* snipe, because the advantage of the snipe is primarily the burst damage, not the range. Except for certain kinds of pulling, the actual range of sniper blast above 80 feet is really an on-paper advantage only: it has no value in conventional combat.


Which is why you think I'm being snippy, when in fact just about every blaster reading what I said understood what I said as a simple fact of life and not a quip. The "80 feet" issue is an obvious long-standing one to people who play blasters: it isn't a special thing about 80 feet of distance, its a set of problems that surround the fact that although Blaster standard attacks have 80 feet of range, there aren't actually that many of those attacks.

Here's the entire breakdown of Energy Blast:

Power Bolt: standard attack, 80 feet range
Power Blast: standard attack, 80 feet range
Power Burst: short range attack, 40 feet range
Energy Torrent: Cone, 40 feet range
Sniper Blast: interruptible sniper attack, 150 feet range
Explosive Blast: targeted AoE, 80 feet range
Power Push: ranged knockback, 70 feet range
Aim: Self buff
Nova: crashing PBAoE.

Standard attack usable outside 40 feet
Situational attack or attack restricted to 40 feet or less
Non-attacks

So even if I count explosive blast as a "standard attack" I only have three with the same standard range. To get access to more attacks I have to close from 80 feet all the way down to 40 feet, and that still only nets me five. To get more I have to be in actual melee range.

So the direct answer to your question "How many non-situational attacks does a character need?" the answer for blasters is "more than they tend to have at meaningful ranges."


Not quite: the meta problem is that blasters don't all have consistent and meaningful side effects that would benefit from such a treatment directly. But that drifts into areas I'm trying not to discuss too much before the devs get to tankers.

Ironically, what I first looked for was a blinking *book* that you'd pull out of the bookcase. Then I looked around the room for something like a bust or other object. Then I went back to the bookcase again and that's when I waved my mouse over it, and basically headdesked my way through it.

Not only does this work for aggro control, it also works for *damage*.

Contrary to what some people say, there is a point of rapidly diminishing returns on damage on a single spawn. Its simply not true that "more damage is always better." That extra damage can get lost in massive overkill or inefficiency: hitting something with a single target attack that will get hit by a finishing AoE anyway a second later for example.

I've been an advocate of the "tanker leapfrog" tactic for years, but I've also pointed out that steamroll teams with tons of damage do it also with the actual damage dealers: some damage dealers skip over a spawn they get to last, and instead of just pumping damage into nearly dead things they blow past it and attack the next spawn. If you have enough damage - and aggro control - you can leapfrog even and odd spawns.

If you haven't been on a steamroll team that does this, the more modern iteration of this tactic tends to happen in the Lambda trial where incarnates with lots of Judgment powers have so much AoE they start leapfrogging the outdoor spawns.

So in fact there is no such thing as "too much aggro control." There is oversaturation of aggro control for a single spawn, but that's also true for control *and* damage. When you have enough aggro control and damage, leapfrogging becomes a viable tactic. And in fact if you have enough aggro control and mitigation, it becomes a viable tactic even without overkill of damage. Its not true in reverse: overkill in damage cannot be leveraged into leapfrogging without some minimum amount of extra aggro control or damage mitigation.

That's almost exactly what happened to me, except first I spent about a minute wondering if I was supposed to be looking for a very small blinkie in that room that controlled the secret passage first.

Actually, the point was that your assertion that people are asking for the badges to be trivialized is itself a worthless statement that does not further the discussion. To reinforce the point, I assert that the effort and accomplishment I've made in many of the badges I've acquired dwarfs anything you're ever going to manage to. Don't look down on others unless you want others looking down on you. As far as I'm concerned one invites the other.

By the way, if you've gotten the same badges I have twice, does that include Bug Hunter?

Actually, I'm unaware of any MMOs similar to CoH where you can act more than once per second. Some have *animations* less than one second, but they also have global cooldown which prevents you from doing anything after that half second for an additional second or so.

I think the "slow combat" perception actually comes from the fact that in other MMOs there are "bread and butter" attacks you can cycle quickly, and situational attacks that you use every so often. We don't have that. We have to construct attack chains. If you roll up a character and take two attacks, you'll find yourself waiting for those attacks to recharge a lot. But with no global cooldown by the time you have four attacks you'll be attacking almost constantly with no need to ever wait for a cooldown. You don't have to wait for recharge if you have another attack: this is something fairly unique to City of Heroes but a cognitive dissonance for people used to other MMOs, particularly anything that looks like WoW's combat system (in other words, almost anything else not based in Asia).

The closest thing to us that I know is CO, and its potentially faster paced with energy building. But other than that, I think the "slow combat" thing is something that is an artifact of the fact our combat system is so different from other MMOs. And its also fixable: we could simply change the design rules so that the tier 1/2 attacks for every archetype recharge faster by fiat, so they *become* bread and butter attacks. This wouldn't cause too much in the way of balance issues, because it only speeds up activity levels in the early game. It doesn't do that much in the later game.


Overall, though, I found the review to be fair. In fact, I'm surprised he didn't eviscerate us for the bad store implementation. I would have. But that's not the focus of a free to play player, fortunately.