Arcanaville

I think you're overreacting. The Facebook page is basically a marketing outlet, not a place to exercise your right to free assembly. Its not a wiki.

Mostly true, but the issue is not forcing the player to take a mez protection power, but making sure that a buff intended to buff the entire archetype is something the entire archetype actually gets. If we're doing it because we think the entire archetype is underperforming, and this buff is something all blasters should have, are we going to force all existing blasters to respec, and possibly lose one of the powers they already have, in order to get the full benefit of the buff?

It has its moments.

As opposed to what? What is my blaster doing on Keyes? Waiting for the tauntbot. Epically waiting, while flaunting my extra damage strength cap.

You don't like being a tauntbot. You don't like really being in charge of aggro at all. You say that's because its not needed, but when it is needed you denigrate it. You only want to draw aggro if it means the critters all run up to you and then you vaporize them. You still have this vision of the tanker as being just plain the most powerful thing on the board. The devs aren't going to give it to you, and no matter what they do to tankers they will eventually do something similar to everything else, putting you in the same position again.

Although, its difficult to say these days if your position is to get tankers to be something that would be stupidly broken, or if your position is just to complain about the fact the devs haven't gotten around to making them stupidly broken.

As long as I can respec my blaster into a defender, why not?

As far as I'm concerned, there hasn't been an actual Transformers anything since the '86 movie.


Although the giant robot thing Michael Bay did was not bad at times.

You can gunfight in a bikini if you want to - in fact, if you pick the female gunslinger costume set option in the costume editor right off the bat, you will be - but I'd be concerned about not having anywhere to keep a pistol, and my entire outfit being set ablaze by a stray ember.

If you're talking about the end game, the end game is actually more friendly to tankers than say scrappers. Its not like my damage edge - whatever that might be - is significant in the end game on a scrapper vs a tanker. But the trials actually created things for tankers to do: on Keyes, on Underground, and even to some extent on BAF. And on Lambda, for the most part its all about personal survivability in the collection phase and then a big dogpile at the end.

I'm far more concerned about masterminds on iTrials than Tankers. I'm far more concerned about stalkers on iTrials than Tankers. And unless you really know what you're doing, you're going to have far more problems on a blaster than a tanker on Lambda, and I'm saying that as someone whose main is a blaster, and thus takes blasters everywhere, constantly.

Except that's an assumption, and not one I accept as true. In fact, given everything we've been told about the average player's performance, when blasters were revised, when the leveling curve was adjusted, and every other time difficulty was tinkered with, I would say there's overwhelming evidence that says that's not true: that tanker mitigation is not overkill in 99% of all standard content.

What I've seen over the years is the way statements like this get ultimately justified is to simply eliminate all other circumstances as irrelevant. In other words, any content that does require a tanker over a brute is broken, or too difficult, or content no one does. The only teams that need a tanker over a brute are bad teams. Eliminating all the teams that need a tanker, and eliminating all the content that needs a tanker, we're left with the "real" game that makes tankers redundant.

Seen it happen time and time again, talking about blaster melee, defender buffs, stamina - heck the great irony is that the *first* time I saw this line of thought that I can recall it was about Scrappers and how they were completely redundant on teams. It was the devs bending to this sort of line of thought - which I disagreed with throughout that time - that gave Scrappers a higher damage modifier and pervasive criticals.

I'm actually willing to mostly sit back and see if the current powers team buys it as the prior powers teams bought it in the past. Because if they do, it says a lot about whether I should use measured tactics to get other balance problems looked at, or if I should just make stuff up and see what sticks.

Almost always, actually.

Irony also. Don't forget irony.

Not with our powers system it doesn't. Its a lot easier to do this in conventional MMOs where the powers balance places *extremely* narrow limits on what both individual players and teams can do.

Something we often forget is that by almost all other MMO's standards, we're insanely broken. Insanely broken just happens to work surprisingly well for the genre of superheroics (and supervillainy) but you put our powers into WoW, and we'd be blasting through their content like their highest raids were tip missions.

Except, that's not true. You might be thinking it, people in general might believe it, but that's not what's being said. What's being said often is something along the lines of "enough of this" as if we shouldn't make the options any more, and also a lot of denigrating of the options as if the people who do like them shouldn't.

There's a fine line between asking for different options, and gunning down the options that exist, and I've never seen that line not erased in any of these threads.

There's nothing *wrong* with the female set in the gunslinger pack except that seriously there's no way that's a gunslinger. Except maybe in the 1800s version of Charlies Angels. And what species of miniature bovine did I assassinate to get those little cow skulls?

Something I keep reminding people, especially (although that hasn't happened here yet I think) when people say things like "the devs need to hire an actual woman to make female costumes" is that thinking your taste is representative of anyone but yourself is highly risky.


I was really hoping for an actual female gunslinger. Even if its intended to be a costume and not plain-jane attire, a hyper-embelished version of something Annie Oakley would wear to an exhibition would have been plenty fine. Or alternatively a modern version would have also been fine. If anything, I blame marketing. This is at best a western set, not a gunslinger set, because there's no female gunslinger.

That's really my main beef with the set. There's no female gunslinger. Everyone who wants to charge misogyny hill be my guest. I just want a female gunslinger costume. Something I can add dual pistols to and look cool wearing. I don't even think the cow horns go with all the bows, much less that costume go with pistols.

Also, please please tell me that the concept art for the set wasn't created after a screening of Jonah Hex.



There's only one gunslinger in that picture, and I'm pretty sure its the one on the right.

That was more or less correct. Technically, while recharge matters to a single attack, what determines its overall damage over time is its damage per cycle. I'm assuming that's what you meant by "recharge matters." But in terms of optimal attack chains, the best heuristic we have is to use your highest DPA attacks first, and fill with descending DPA until you're full. But that heuristic doesn't always work perfectly. It can happen, for example, at a given recharge, that when you try to construct a chain you end up with 1.5 seconds to go to fill, and you have one attack that does 0.9 DPA and has total time of 1.2 seconds and another attack that does 0.75 DPA and has a total time of 1.5 seconds. Using the better one might leave you with a 0.3 sec gap, and actually end up worse than using the slightly lower DPA attack that fills the chain completely. Or sometimes the reverse is true: its better to use a lower DPA attack because its also shorter, while the better DPA attack is so long its far longer than it needs to be and while its better DPA its still lower than the top attacks. In the old days before it was buffed and made the point moot, some dark melee chains included siphon life even though its DPA was lower than the alternative, because the alternative was shadow maul and its total duration lowered the chain's overall DPS.

Magnitude is exploitable. My energy blaster would have that magnitude protection up all the time. I have more than 150% global recharge *and* slot the force feedback procs: when I say "all the time" I literally mean all the time.

Because power thrust is melee only, balancing the defiance mez breaker around using all three D2.0 use while mezzed powers is problematic for energy manipulation blasters: by balancing around just the tier 1/2 attacks as in ranged primary attacks, you eliminate that problem. Which is why I referred specifically to those powers, and not to the secondary tier 1.

You'd think that changing the gravitational constant of the universe would be something that would require a design review at least.

And I'm pretty sure that wasn't just a joke either, since I've known for a while the bug had to be in the physics engine and it explains how knockup has subtly altered as well (as if everything was noticably "heavier.")

The issue is not the act of unlocking, but what the NPCs do when they are unlocked. If the solution to most problems is "find someone else that can do it for you" that will get old pretty fast. It won't seem like progress to most players if their trajectory through the solo incarnate path was mostly unleashing NPCs against the content.

Ok, even I have to take out a calculator now, Encino man. Tanker sets had a similar range of damage way back when to scrapper sets. Most powers were between 0.8 DS and 2.5 DS; what we would have called 2.222 BI and 6.944 BI.

The only single target tanker attacks that did more damage than 6.333 BI (2.28 DS) were: Cleave (2.76), GFS (2.44 + DoT), Seismic Smash (3.56), KO Blow (after the upgrade - 3.56), Total Focus (3.56) and Energy Transfer (4.56). Not that many powers have had their damage substantially changed in Tanker secondaries, so a quick glance at City of Data will show the range of damage in the sets is and was similar. Jab is and always was 0.68 DS, for example (i.e. 1.8889 BI).

Different would be better than just numerically tweaked better.

For a long time I was an opponent of powerset proliferation, not because I thought the sets shouldn't be converted from one archetype to the other but because the sets were just being transferred from one archetype to the other without regard for the fact different archetypes have different requirements. Before Brutes came along Tankers did have markedly different offensive sets from Scrappers in having far more soft control in general. That soft control was a form of extra mitigation over and above defensive numbers and it made them play substantially different. Brutes and powerset proliferation blurred that distinction somewhat in a counter-productive way.

PBAoE soft control should have been the primary forte of Tankers over Scrappers and even Brutes, but Brutes basically made that impossible to do directly. But given the mechanics of gauntlet, the devs should see an obvious way to do it indirectly.

Is there any other kind?

NPC helpers can help to an extent, but they aren't a panacea and its different in the end game. In the standard content, helper NPCs can be very powerful because they are used sparingly. They can practically solo the content themselves, and that's fine because in the standard content that's not a big deal. But in the incarnate solo path, if the player isn't doing most or all of the heavy lifting, its a meaningless trajectory.

The only way I can see making a meaningfully interesting (in terms of difficulty) solo path that is actually soloable is to make every mission have a quick and hard path, and a slow and easy path, and let the player decide how steeply uphill they wish to go. Sort of like farming for EoEs, you could make the incarnate solo path something where its extremely difficult, but there are ways to spend time gathering resources that will make it easier. If that gathering must be done by the soloer themselves and the work cannot in any way be transferred, everyone could solo at the pace they are capable of soloing at: more powerful characters quicker, less powerful characters slower. And separate from raw power, if a mission requires something you don't have, there should be ways to earn it with side tasks.

In effect, rather than scaling the critters with gimmicks, you leave them at full strength and let the players scale themselves upward with gimmicks instead. Temp powers, special buffs, ultimate inspirations, there are lots of ways to allow players to temporarily build up enough power to take on a specific task solo.

That takes a lot of load off of the game engine to try to scale content upward for teams. Instead it only has to scale content upward in simple ways, and the players scale themselves upward in more complex and optional ways, and the difficulty ramp meets in the middle.

Unlocking NPC helpers could be one way for solo players to scale themselves upward to face harder tasks, but it can't be the only way or even the primary way in most cases, because it detracts too much from the player actually accomplishing anything.

The same question was asked about the issue of eliminating archetypes. The question was "how does that affect you: if you think its a bad idea, just continue to make characters that fall into the conventional archetype limits."

In practice, though, there is a very obvious gulf between the player philosophy that prefers the open selection system in CO and the player philosophy that prefers the fixed archetype/powerset system in CoH. Adding powerset respec moves this game closer to CO in character mutability, and I don't think that is in the best interests of either game.

That is really, really hard to do. Or rather, its really really hard to do correctly.

The definition of "balance" changes radically in the end game. The definition of "balance" as it pertains to powerset or archetype performance from level 1 to level 49 is earns XP and other rewards at rate reasonably close to the average earning rate across all players for the set of circumstances being examined. That definition obviously becomes problematic at level 50.

There isn't an obvious way to quantitatively balance the archetypes in terms the players tend to see things, which is more of a "I feel like I'm just as good as everyone else in the areas I think are most important." You start getting into areas like "tankers have more mitigation but that doesn't matter: they have less damage and that does matter." At that point, you might as well manage the game design with a ouija board.