Arcanaville
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Quote:It depends on how high is high. If you can soft-cap Willpower, I think it can exceed Invuln on Tankers. But if you can't, the combination of high smash/lethal, perma dull pain, and invincibility is not easy to beat in most content.Originally Posted by StratoNexus
I'd likely put WP and Invuln in a tie for 2nd when it comes to straight mitigation on high end builds.
Still, anyone who doesn't put Invuln up there as a strong tanking build has suspect judgment, and anyone who doesn't put Electric up there is probably extremely dated in their knowledge of the sets. -
Quote:Well that explains why the level cap is now 55 in the latest patch.Originally Posted by Steelclaw
Every prophecy of End Times carries with it harbringers of the upcoming Doom. By these portents you may come to realize that the end of the world is upon us.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you news of just such an event.
At 6:49 PM Eastern Standard Time on December 12th, 2011... playing strictly by the rules of my Tournament... one of Steelclaw's characters finally...
... FINALLY ...
... reached 50th level.
I shall now be relocating my computer to the nearest bomb shelter... just in case. -
Quote:By way of addressing this, I believe the way around the problem is the general principle of allowing players to become more powerful the longer a task lasts, rather than become less powerful through attrition.Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
Indeed, and this is my last post about this since it's a bit off-topic, and I know you're much better at the math than I but...
Maybe a possible solution (to your issue that you bring up) is to have NPCs that you can add to your team (like Guild Wars/etc); when you add an NPC (and you chose the "tank" NPC); it knows not to continue to increase the difficulty? *shrugs*
I know there are tons of variables but...I was mainly thinking of what I said in regards to solo play...in teams...meh, "deal with it" like all MMOs do now.
This general principle is designed to ensure that when you make something difficult, the difficulty curve is tied to the reward curve. MMOs are balanced around reward rates not rewards. That means it doesn't matter how much rewards something gives, what matters is how long it takes.
The penalty for lower combat performance doesn't have to be failure, it can be a lower reward rate. Literal failure could be the absolute worst case failure mode, but it doesn't have to be the primary one.
Recognizing that, rather than scale difficulty to the player, you could let the player scale their capability upward by trading time for buff. MMO tasks can be designed so that they are intrinsically difficult, but contain within them enough assistance to neutralize that difficulty. That assistance would come at the cost of extra time to get it, and would have its own lower difficulty curve.
NPC allies you rescue or otherwise co-opt could be one way to implement this, but its not the only way. The important thing is to make sure the side tasks themselves do not have a high reward rate themselves, otherwise the best earning rate will come from doing them whether you need to do them or not. There's no penalty for doing them, and therefore no benefit to being capable of doing the tasks without them.
The trick is to wrap the assistance in a way that doesn't trivialize the core capabilities of the player, or dilute their overall contribution to the completion of the task. But this allows players to tune their own scaling rather than have the game have to do this dynamically and differently for each team of players.
Capability-aware difficulty scaling is an enormously difficult thing to do. This sort of thing is far easier, and only requires clever mission design. -
Quote:The scary thing to me is that this error is something you couldn't have gotten me to sign off on with a gun to my head, and I'm not an academically trained civil engineer:Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
I wouldn't have hired 90% of the Computer Science students I graduated with, and that was in 1990. How much has really changed since then in this respect?
And yet, at least it caused a change to both building codes and explicit professional standards. Name one time ever when a computer programmer error caused a change to the way the profession was managed.
Trick question: you can't, because the profession isn't managed. We are unlicensed, we have no professional code of ethics, we have no professional code of conduct, we have not even a vague nebulous set of professional responsibilities. And that's why no matter how many mistakes we make or how large they are, no one else is required to learn from them or even hear about them except by chance. -
Quote:Not if they are a statistically insignificant number, and therefore have effectively zero representative value for the industry as a whole. And that number is vanishingly small. People will give lip service to quality, but would you jeopardize your job for it; your entire career for it; will you walk away rather than sacrifice it; will you replace yourself with someone better qualified to ensure it? The number of such people is exceedingly rare.Originally Posted by FourSpeed
So, explain to me how these two statements do NOT conflict?
If some folks have higher standards, and they're in the industry, then clearly
the industry *does* care about quality.
While its always a good thing to advocate for better quality, step back a bit from claiming the people you're asking it from are either extraordinary in their lack of it, or equally that you obviously know how to remedy such an institutional problem. Lots of people try, virtually all fail, and claiming to be different in that regard is an extraordinary claim. It is, and yet is not, a simple problem to solve. Its easy to express: virtually impossible to enact.Quote:The point I'm trying to make, is that the apparent standards exhibited here
with recent releases appear lower than mine - both as a customer, and as
a programmer.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make <shrug>. -
Quote:I don't have to be mysterious about it, I can just tell people what to test and let them do it themselves. Find the high level tip mission full of Nemesis LTs in the caves. And try to tank that on an SR tanker, when the critters end up buffed to the tohit cap, without killing one thing at a time to prevent vengeance from stacking. QED.Originally Posted by New Dawn
What I do Dechs is test different factions at the same settings with different Tankers as I level up. I usually have 3 tanks leveling together and quite a few too.
I like to find them all at a reasonable similar level of survival whilst they are leveling up.
Some mobs are more dangerous than others but one way or another they're not too extreme.
The I get to a potential Dark/Set without build up by X number of levels
or a Dark/Set with a tohit buff power that requires actually hitting a mob.
These mobs I am testing against on a mission I do still have for anyone who'd dare, are reasonably fine with basically all my tankers but one, one that fulfils the criteria in the above paragraph.
I would have to use upto 9 normal yellows in a single group in order for Dark Regen with 2 Accuracies to hit a single mob. That's a lot of tohit debuffs.
All accuracy powers under this scenario do miss and when they miss they waste end which isn't too bad because death is near enough imminent anyway.
Maybe I am soo much better with every other tanker type despite a DA tank getting to -2.91% tohit wasting all accuracy based powers. A combination of powersets over a certain level range 20-25 versus a certain level of mobs of a type of faction has a gapingly lower level of survivability which sticks out like a sore thumb to me.
They could change the faction that would work or they could add tohit debuff resistance to Dark Armour.
Some sets proliferated into a new role sometimes still have a bugbear a longtime later. I could lower the level difference but it still doesn't change anything when it comes to what I see as not balanced.
Or how about trying to tank any of the tip missions with the Praetorian DE, where critter base tohit is 64% rather than 50%. Unless you build for the incarnate floor, everything will be hitting you far more often *before* the LTs start dropping quartz enimators.
Its not like it takes special reserved missions to find the cracks in other powerset's armor. Anyone can replicate those tests without me having to hold a special mission for them. -
Quote:That's not the only problem. Suppose you find you don't quite have the aggro control you want, perhaps because of player skill or build efficiency or whatever. So you recruit another tanker. The problem is that this sort of system would then scale the mission to require another tanker. There would be no obvious way to fill a deficiency, and no obvious way to improve relative to the content in the general case. Even if the system worked perfectly, its that very perfection that would permanently lock you at a very specific threat balance relative to the team. And you can't easily work around that with linear difficulty scalers.Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
I can see a conflict between game design philosophies possibly arising from this. One philosophy says that the content is the content and it is up to the players to formulate teams with the necessary resources to accomplish all the goals. This is certainly true for the Incarnate Trials. But I think that philosophy can fail utterly for solo play.
The other philosophy is to tailor the content to the composition/abilities of the team, even if it is a team of one. Some will dislike this as it smacks of a game system deliberately making everything equally "doable", with the danger that nothing would ever be a challenge unless some key set of abilities is missing and players must be forced to find tactical workarounds.
This is really not even an easy problem to express the desired behavior for, much less create a system capable of delivering it. -
Quote:I believe that sort of thing would require far more stringent control over what players are allowed to do than this game limits us to have.Originally Posted by Wing_Leader
But does it have to be that way? I mean, do the devs really have to make these assumptions (and be wrong half the time)? I've been on trials which was 95% melee, and only 5% ranged/support/control. And I've seen solo toons that have a little bit of everything at their disposal. In an ideal world, the content would adjust itself to the characters more dynamically. Simply scaling up the number of mobs, their level, or the EB/AV toggle isn't really adequate, as this issue clearly exposes.
It seems to me that the game needs a smarter way of encoding a character's "combat DNA", if you will. A way to account for all a toon's abilities (and weaknesses) and adjust missions accordingly. But I suspect that it would require too great a leap in design innovation to implement something like that. -
Quote:I would say Ramiel is more difficult than standard content in throwing four Elite Bosses at you in succession, in having one of them having unconventional defenses (Trapdoor bifurcation), two of them appearing together in a high density room, one of them heavily ranged and the other very resistant to control. Minos is, admittedly, anticlimactic after the Honoree, but he's still got unstoppable (which is good and bad).Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I get that they're of a higher difficulty, but I'm not sure I understand how they're of a SIGNIFICANTLY higher difficulty. Could you explain this to me? And I mean that as a genuine question, not a trap. I get that the Honoree is a tough EB, but then so is Miss Liberty and Silver Mantis and Lord Recluse with his zillions of boss spanws. I get that Trapdoor is a gimmick fight, but then so is Castillo and the Cooling titan, and so is Protean. It's harder, yes, but is it really by this much? Why? Hell, I'd say the "zillions of Ghouls" mission in Praetoria is much harder, and the one from Sister Airlia where four Longbow ambushes, including a Ballista, all spawn on top of you at the same time, and you only have to lose Ghost Widow who shows up there as a fragile EB.
And again - if the solo Incarnate difficulty were as hard as Ramiel, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Ramiel's base missions are about stock, the enemies aren't that bad, and it's the occasional fights with named enemies where the difficulty really spikes. And, really... That's how it should be. I've always wanted most of a mission to be fairly easy to build up both confidence and ego, only to end in a hard fight that contrasts the rest of the content so as to make it seem more serious. Eventually winning that fight is, then, that much more satisfying because it was a "harder" fight, but still successful.
I'm guessing that the solo path will have harder minions, but not likely harder end bosses, at least initially. The initial incarnate solo path has to be able to accomodate not just high powered incarnates, but players that haven't started the incarnate path yet, and aren't strong incarnates already. And that means the solo path has to be only moderately difficult.
The reason why a solo incarnate path has to be much less difficult relative to the combat strength of the trials is that with the trials you can assume getting some mix of stuff: melee and squishies, buff and debuff, melee and ranged damage, offense and control. With solo missions, you have to assume the player could have just one or two of those, for all reasonable combinations of those. You will have blasters with no defense or mez protection. Controllers with strong debuffs. High mitigation tankers. You have to make the missions passable with any combination of high and low melee damage, high and low ranged damage, high or no control, high or no debuff, high or no healing, high or no damage mitigation. In essence, the trials assume you have the best of all worlds, while the solo path has to assume you have the worst of most of them.
Which is not to say that down the road the solo incarnate path won't be much more difficult, to accomodate players that have advanced significantly in incarnate power. Its also possible it will release with a range of difficulty from Ramiel-level to just short of iTrial difficulty. But I think that is less likely given the amount of content required to do that, and the pace at which iTrials themselves are released.
The devs follow their own counsel on incarnate content, though. I have expectations, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on them. -
Quote:The issue is that would then make combat jumping pretty much necessary for a Willpower anything. The problem with immobilization is that immobilize tends to have very long durations relative to recharge. Many critters, even minions, can perma-immobilize. If you don't have range, and you don't have immobilize protection, you can find yourself basically permanently locked into an inescapable situation. I posted an example in beta where I was basically stuck in a perma-immobilize with no possibility of breaking it short of using veteran ranged attacks which not all players would have.Originally Posted by MayorOfAngrytown
I wasn't active during /WP beta, but that's interesting considering how easy it is to get immob resistance from power pools.
The immobilize resistance granted in Weave would also help, but only to shorten the immobilize durations: they would still land and affect the target for a majority of the time, and Weave has high prerequisites. -
Quote:However high you think your standards are, there exist people with higher ones. Or in this case, more rigorous ones.Originally Posted by FourSpeed
This, I disagree with as a blanket statement.
Worth keeping in mind, when deciding which standard is appropriate to judge other people upon. -
Quote:Because mutated magician rope twisters have notoriously poor attention to detail.Originally Posted by Trickshooter
And Cord, the Mutant/Magic Dual Origin Enhancement, doesn't enhance Toxic Resistance.
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Quote:If it doesn't have enough offense to comfortably solo, I'm not going to get to level 50 to find out in the first place. But then again, even when I roll Emp/Electric, I'm going to find some way for it to kick some ***.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
How about characters that don't have a lot of sets, set bonuses, or even generic IOs in addition to being more support oriented? I know... Tactics and inspirations. My favorite tactic in that position? Ask a friend with a very powerful Ill/Storm to help me.
But as I said, that's just me. Trapdoor and the last mission are significantly higher in difficulty than the average standard content. So anything that doesn't breeze through standard content will have an even higher difficulty with Ramiel. That's probably intentional: I would suspect that, setting aside the discussion of gameplay tricks like Trapdoor's bifurcation, the solo incarnate path will likely be something between standard content and Ramiel, with Ramiel's difficulty being at or near the upper end of what's likely.
Incidentally, the last time I did Ramiel it was on a Bots/Sonic mastermind slotted mostly with SOs and a few common IOs. I had to chase Trapdoor a bit but I got him on the first try. I had to pull the EBs in the last mission, which I'm not doing often on a mastermind, and I got them both in two deaths. -
Quote:Crazy, silly, and groovy. A+Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Yay video! Here's an artist's conception of what a Toxic-oriented Arachnos Soldier would be like.
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Quote:It may still do: its was one of the last holdouts going back a long ways, but I don't think its really supposed to. Base defense works against everything, even so-called untyped attacks. It would work against Hamidon's attacks, in other words. I don't think anything is really supposed to.Originally Posted by Trickshooter
Doesn't Personal Force Field offer Base Defense outside of PvP?
Maybe the devs just don't care because PFF has an OnlyAffectSelf effect. Or maybe they just haven't thought about it too much. In PvP, my recollection is it only offers damage-oriented defense: it doesn't buff melee, ranged, or AoE defense. That's also odd, but again since PFF prevents action the devs may not consider this a big deal. -
Quote:Willpower's mez hole was originally conceived to be immobilization. However, that proved to be extremely problematic (for melee archetypes when many critters have perma-immobilize capability) and that specific hole was removed, and not replaced with anything else.Originally Posted by Kioshi
Shields has Fear protection as well. I actually find it quite strange that the two newest armor sets have complete mez protection, SD and WP have it all, even confuse.
Shields probably has basically complete coverage because the designer of Shields didn't want to mess with that situation again. -
Quote:Probably my fault. I encouraged the programmers to add Toxic_Attack (and Elusivity for that matter) so that it would be available to the data people (i.e. the powers designers) so that when the data people then had the time it would be waiting for them to use, and they did: however I was never able to convince Castle to leverage that capability, because he never had the time resources to work out the details of using them in a wide capacity (except for Elusivity in PvP) and retrofit them into the game.Originally Posted by Schismatrix
Well, the statement from the Devs at least five years back was that they couldn't add additional defense types to the combat engine. That was also long before elusivity was added, so maybe it's changed, but then i don't why they wouldn't have added it to some of the armor sets. It seems like an odd thing to add the capability and then to not use it at all.
Some may recall this was all part of my master plan for getting a big change to defense: step one: convince the programmers to add the tech necessary in a way that was backward compatible with the existing game (so that it could be added without altering current game behavior); step two: convince the producers that addressing the issues I had was a priority; step three convince the powers designers to use the tech in the manner I thought would best address the issues.
I basically got stuck on step two and a half. -
A couple of things:
1. Its not easy to add attack types or damage types to the game. Having said that, the Toxic_Attack type was added a couple of years ago, but it hasn't really been used. No defense power I'm aware of offers protection to that type, which makes the type essentially meaningless at the moment.
2. The toxic damage type wasn't exactly added to the game, rather the game engine originally supported over a dozen damage types, some of which were not (and still are not) used. One of those was renamed "toxic" and then used, and protection powers given resistance to that type. That's what made it easier to add than adding a whole new type.
3. Its impossible to have "untyped damage." You can have an untyped *attack* - that is an attack that honors no defensive types, and therefore no defense power works against it, except for something called "Base Defense" which is what is debuffed when you are defense debuffed. At the beginning of time, some actual defense powers offered base defense including Elude, but now no player defense buff offers this (because it would then work against untyped attacks like Hamidon).
4. Vahz used to do an unnamed special damage type. That was then changed to fire as the closest match to "acid" in order to ensure it was not totally unresistable by players, and that was a stopgap until "toxic" could be added to the game data. The act of adding toxic wasn't just adding the type: power designers had to go through the game's power database and change all these special damage effects to toxic, and then decide how they were going to add toxic resistance to the players. This took significant time.
5. The reason why Vahz damage was called "untyped" and the phrase "untyped damage" came into being was because combat chat didn't show a type. Instead of being "30 points of fire damage" it would just say "30 points of damage." That's because the type was a special internal damage type the original powers designer probably didn't want to show up in the chat (like Special4 or something). The players interpreted that as being "untyped" damage, because no type was listed. But as mentioned previously, all damage must be typed: there is no such thing as untyped damage because damage must affect *something*, and that something is the damage type. *Attacks* can be untyped because attacks must list which defensive types work against it, and that list can be empty. Vahz "toxic" attacks were positionally typed, but had no damage-oriented defense type, so in that sense they were "untyped" as attacks: damage-typed defense didn't work on them. And since no player power offers toxic defense, that's still true. -
Quote:I've found Ramiel to be sometimes easy and sometimes hard, but I've honestly not come across a powerset combination that at level 50 with reasonable inspirations and tactics couldn't do it. However, I build everything to solo reasonably well, and that includes ensuring that by high levels I can generate enough damage to take down a reasonably strong Elite Boss with normal insps for assistance. Without that level of damage, I could see many more support-oriented builds having extreme difficulty with Trapdoor, or being stuck at the end in the Rikti portal room.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Actually, it isn't players. It is AT/Powersets though. Some of my characters could breeze through Ramiel's arc, others couldn't. One had a tough, but ultimately successful fight with Trapdoor. Others, even loaded with T4 inspirations, multiple temp pets, and Ultimates couldn't get the job done because of power activations were not fast enough.
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Quote:Dark Regen does not have a "weakness" to endurance burning. What it has is a different way of burning endurance. Its heal scales for fixed endurance, so its HPE can be manipulated in a way most heals can't. So DR offers the potential to players to have a very high heal per endurance point, balanced against the possibility it can generate a very low heal per endurance point under other circumstances.Originally Posted by JayboH
Exactly. At least admit there is a weakness when it comes to end burn using SOs - but he won't even go that far.
It has a weakness when it comes to endurance burning in the same sense invincibility has a weakness to endurance burning when compared to Mind Link. Its a weakness that is impossible to disentangle from its greatest strength, so its a weakness I would prefer the devs don't "fix." -
Quote:I believe the lesson learned with powers like Instant Healing is that this is virtually impossible to balance reasonably.Originally Posted by Vicar
An interesting idea to this would be make them toggles with VERY high endurance costs.
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Quote:This probably comes the closest to what my opinion on the whole matter has been, since the very first time it appeared on the forums until now. Put simply, in the general case I will always support someone that says "I would like something more than this." I will always oppose someone that says "I would like something *other* than this." If you want an option the devs don't provide, you have every right to ask for that option specifically and I'm all for it. If you have to bolster your argument by claiming the options we do get are somehow wrong and shouldn't exist, you lose me right at that point.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
At the end of the day, games and entertainment in general sell us fantasies, and much as we try to "rise above" the more questionable cliches, the fact of the matter is that they're cliches for a reason - because we still want them. A lot of the time, people seem to want to "fix" the game's representation of women or "fix" people's costume-making practices. Far too often we see men who make skimpy-clad women ridiculed here on the forums, and I really don't think that's the point. That's part of why calls of sexism rub me the wrong way.
The whole drive here is to give people a choice. Those of us who don't like cheesecakes sometimes feel slighted by what the art team offers us, as though we're expected to have come to the game for the heels and the corsets, and giving us more choice is the request. But that's not to say that the "cheesecake" choice needs to suffer for it, because people like that, too. Hell, I like it from time to time. A few mean words were said in the various gender equality threads as to which outfits were good or bad and which people were good or bad for wanting to use which outfits, and again, that's not the point.
The point is always choice, and I think that's what MOO was saying. But choice means being able to choose the "moral high ground" AS WELL AS being able to choose the "moral low ground." That's kind of what choice is, which we seem to forget from time to time.
The fact that we can't have everything because resources are not infinite means ultimately everything we get is something else we don't get. But that doesn't change the fact I believe its productive to ask for what you want that you don't get, and destructive to ask for someone else to not get what they want in order to get what you want.
Its really that simple for me, and gender issues with costumes are only one specific case of that principle.
For me, there is no moral high ground (I know what you meant, just saying). This is escapist fantasy. Armor-clad fire blasters are no more the high ground than bikini-clad dual blade slashers. No one's preferences are higher or lower than anyone else's. No one's preferences are better or more justified than anyone else's. -
Quote:Warning: The Return of the King is very difficult to forget.Originally Posted by Moderator 13
I think I saw part of a LotR animated movie once ... they were in Moria, and I remember thinking it looked stupid (I was fairly young at the time). I'll take a look though!
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Quote:That doesn't apply in this case, because in that case you're talking about attempting to reverse a transaction that was already completed. In this case NCSoft does not have to reverse that transaction: they could just disable Titan Weapons at any time for any reason or no reason. They could delete any characters made with that set for any reason or no reason.Originally Posted by Arilou
I should just note that in at least a couple of jurisdictions it's very tricky to revoke a sale you've made. Even if you didn't intend to sell it at the time, if the information provided and payment given was legit, it's very hard to take back.
I seem to recall some an instance of prices decimal points being in the wrong place (basically reducing prices by a factor of ten) and the people who bought the products at the reduced prices were allowed to keep them.
Basically, if you leak something yourself, upon your head is it. -
Quote:From the developer standpoint, creating a new archetype is currently infeasible. However, that doesn't mean redefining multiple classes simultaneously is significantly more likely.Originally Posted by Ultimus
Also think of it from a developer standpoint, is it easier to create an entire new AT with new powersets, etc, or to modify one class to give additional benefit?