Arcanaville

I don't have to imagine that. All fourteen archetypes are designed to deal substantial damage. And they keep dealing ever more damage over time. Except one.

CoH dev diary 3

Jack's statements from those dev diaries are a lot more trustworthy than other statements, because they were statements he made at the time of development. His opinions of what things should be became more, shall we say fluid over time.

However, at the beginning of time only *one* powerset combination got the reverse treatment, and that was the Melee/Defense one. And it was because Jack felt there was a difference between hitting hard and absorbing a lot of damage. If he didn't, we'd have only one Melee/Defense class, and it would have been Scrappers.

Tankers only exist *because* of Jack's belief that there was a distinction between a class that was capable of absorbing more damage but did less damage than the class that did more melee damage but was capable of absorbing less damage.

It might be simpler to return to an idea mentioned earlier in the thread: "breaking" out of mez using tier 1/2 attacks. Have those attacks provide a very large but very short mez resistance buff. Say +100% for three seconds. And actually this is not difficult to balance, because to a first order approximation what that does is reduce the mez duration by three seconds. So each time you shoot, any mez effect on you has its duration drop by about three seconds. It sounds like it should be more complicated than that, but if you think about recharge the way I think about recharge then its pretty obvious that a +100% mez resistance buff is basically the same thing as a recharge buff that speeds up the expiration of mez, and a 100% mez resistance buff burns an extra second off the clock for every second its up.

Doing this exacerbates a problem, though, that D2.0 already creates. You aren't required to take both attacks: you're only required to take one. But the more archetype-survivability tools we stack into those powers, the less optional they really become. If you intend to solo a blaster at all, I don't really think they are all that optional now. If they are not just the mez-avoiding powers, but also the mez-cracking powers, I can't see not just plain giving blasters both powers right from the start.

Which would be interesting, actually. Give blasters the tier 1 for free, make them then automatically take the tier 2 at level 1, and blasters effectively get an extra ranged attack right out of the gate. Which *would* be a very significant offensive advantage for blasters clear into the 30s when attack chains fill up solidly.

I can already see the problems that would cause though, not in the blaster archetype but in other archetypes that would scream for similar free power choices to support their "inherent."

That's not a special quality of bruising: its true for all debuffs. So in particular, its true of defender debuffs. Since defenders have even lower damage modifiers than tankers, its equally true that defender debuffs are really helping tankers, scrappers, and brutes more than themselves, and they shouldn't really get credit for those debuffs increasing team damage, only their own.

The same thing should be equally true for defender damage *buffs*. So in fact, defenders really should get credit for almost nothing except healing and their own damage, and should therefore be in an even more seriously disadvantaged state than tankers.

Well, if you solo a lot mind/fire dominators can solo everything in the game without having to worry about being team multipliers.

But yeah, if there's no reason to roll a tanker when scrappers and brutes do more damage, then there's no reason not to roll the highest damage scrapper or brute either. Why lump scrappers and brutes on one side, and all tankers on the other side, when some tankers outdamage some scrappers? Why not just say there's no reason to roll anything except Claws/Fire brutes (or whatever) and everything else is redundant?

Logically, the end game was aimed at players that wanted something substantively more and different than anything the standard game offered at that time. Because if it was aimed at anyone else, it would *be* more standard content.

*In what ways* it should be different from standard content is a matter of debate, but that it actually *is* different is not. That is the only reason it exists at all.


Edit: and logically, one should assume that the solo incarnate path, whatever it is, will likely retain that attribute of being substantively different from standard content in non-trivial ways.

Not really: your choices are restricted to taking one from column A, and one from column B. If I could skip Lore and take two Destiny powers, it would be more of a pick and choose what I want system. But the design of the powers themselves points to the reason its not: powers like Lore and Destiny have very specially crafted uptimes which only work if you can only have one.

That's a pretty big hand-wave. The original designers of the game made a similar hand-wave, and as a result attacks they thought were reasonably well balanced against each other were actually wildly different. And even the players initially fell into the same trap of evaluating attacks in isolation, based primarily on their damage. See really old powerset guides for examples.

As it turns out the effectiveness of an attack is based primarily on two factors: its damage over its total recharge cycle (DPS), and its damage per activation-second during its casting (DPA). When you do not have enough attacks to make a full attack chain, net overall effectiveness is dominated by DPS. But as attack chains become full, net overall effectiveness becomes dominated by DPA, because attacks that can deliver more damage within shorter activation times become more valuable when you have more than enough attacks to attack continuously.

What's more this is separated by single target attacks and AoEs, and also by a difficult to compute metric of efficiency that determines the degree to which a set of attacks can be packed together to make a completely full attack chain.

In other words, in this game the value of an attack is strongly determined by the rest of the attacks you have. An attack that deals 500 points of damage in one second is a really good attack, but in an otherwise slow powerset its just flashy. A set full of such attacks would be game-breakingly overpowered. That's actually somewhat unique to City of Heroes, and gives our combat a unique feel. It also makes min/maxing more complicated here than elsewhere, and makes the notion of valuing individual attacks by points extremely complicated.


And this is just attacks. When we get to mitigation, we get to an entirely different set of challenges that are actually even more difficult. All because of the way mitigation stacks in City of Heroes.

More sense than thinking about Blasters holistically, no. But:


Mez is something that just isn't well thought out in the game, and things like the 30 second stun grenade are just the most obvious examples. But I think this is a case where the devs believe that if we have it, the critters have to have it, and they can't take it away from the players.

I think its worth noting that when the City of Villains archetypes were being created, every archetype with significant melee attacks (stalkers, brutes, dominators) had some form of mez protection guaranteed and *no* CoV archetype is actually *barred* from having mez protection. Not all Masterminds and Corruptors have self mez protection, but *some* do, which means the archetype definition doesn't prevent them from having it.

As far as I know, only the blaster archetype as a whole is *barred* from having significant mez protection. The devs had to make a special exception just for Burn: its only immobilize protection, but they almost revoked it anyway.

And that means when you look at NPC mez, you have to consider its effects on blasters differently than any other archetype. A critter mez is something of limited or no importance to things with mez protection. Its a differentiator for archetypes that have scattered mez protection in some sets: some sets will do better than others in that setting. But that mez is something all blasters of all levels as a practical matter will be vulnerable to.

What you mean is a points-based ability purchase system, kind of like the HERO system aka Champions PnP.

This would be *incredibly difficult* to do with the current powers system. It would be easier to do for NPCs because you can err on the side of caution when it comes to building NPC ability. The Architect custom critter system works on a very simplified version of such a system.

But to do this on the player side would require so much limiters and cut-offs you'd just be fielding complaint after complaint about why this power costs this much when it should cost that much, from people who were just wildly guessing. Unless your system was anchored in bedrock, it would be a huge mess to deal with.

I say that as someone who's thought through the entire process from beginning to end, without skipping any steps, with real numbers. Its not impossible, but with our system you either hit the bullseye, or you end up completely broken. There's no middle ground.

A while back I was playing with a metric I was calling "leverage." Leverage was basically a theoretical measure of the ratio between player damage divided by critter health, and critter damage divided by player health.

So for example if the players had 1000 health and a minion had 100, and the player did 50 dps and the minion did 40 dps, then the player ratio was 100/50 = 2, and the critter ratio was 1000/40 = 25. Leverage would then be 25/2, or 12.5. It would suggest that, at least within this rough arena, the player could kill the minions 12.5 times faster than the minion could kill the player. That was the "leverage" the player had to defeat the critters before they could defeat the player.

True leverage is difficult to actually measure, but we can approximate it in different ways. For example we can use damage modifiers and some reasonable guestimates for how full player and critter attack chains are on average at different levels as proxies for the offensive output.

I have a feeling if I normalize these numbers correctly, they will show a really important aspect of archetype balance because it directly looks at offense vs defense in the right way, instead of comparing something's offense to its own defense, it compares offense to opponents' defense and vice versa, and then compares those two results. But its something I haven't really had the time to dig into very deeply since my original foray into the subject, and that was years ago.

There's no question, though, that as we level the amount of attacks we need to use to defeat a critter rises, and the amount of attacks the critters need to defeat us drops. That basically says that in a normalized sense, as we level our offense gets weaker, while critter defense gets stronger. Any archetype that relies on killing them before they kill you is bound to run into a break even point somewhere along the line, and then its all downhill from there.

And the reason why blasters should have less than full protection is? Because, and I'm totally serious here, Blasters are the only archetype which is defined to have to occasionally die to be seen as working as intended.

Dominators get an entire control primary for damage mitigation but its not seen as extravagant for them to get mez protection - the real kind - in domination. It didn't seem extravagant for Widows to get it, and few thinks melee characters aren't entitled to full mez protection by divine right.

Not that I'm specifically asking for mez protection per se, but rather mentioning that giving blasters melee attacks without careful consideration of how they are supposed to use them, said consideration being consistent with the consideration given to all other archetypes, is part of the general problem of blaster secondaries not having a specific purpose. You look at Ice Manipulation and you think, ok, well that might make sense. Ice Patch and melee attacks; seems logical. Then you look at Fire Manipulation and you think, ok, six PBAoEs and no damage mitigation: that's suicide for most players. And it probably is.

Actually, I wouldn't be so sure. I think alone among the powersets, the blaster secondaries were cobbled together at the last minute without a clear vision for what they were supposed to be. Clearly, at one time they were basically supposed to be "melee" sets: that's obvious going all the way back to pre-beta, when Blasters were conceptualized as "ranged damage/melee damage" or "damage/damage." At some critical point, someone realized that would be problematic, and started trying to diverge the blaster secondaries from the tanker secondaries; note the differences in energy melee vs energy manipulation in powers like energy punch. But eventually, they clearly decided to punt that problem, call the sets "manipulation" and do the best they could to fill them with reasonable powers.

I don't think there's any other explanation for Fire manipulation's *six* PBAoEs. And on the subject of stalkers, if stalkers were at least originally supposed to be somewhat squishy, why do they have mez protection? There's a reason that was articulated in beta: they were going to be in melee range, where - so the thought process went - they would be more exposed to and more vulnerable to mez. In other words, being in melee range all the time was a strong indicator that you likely need mez protection. Stalkers have it, Scrappers, Brutes and Tankers have it, and even Dominators and Widows have it. While all archetypes have some melee ranged or PBAoE attacks, only one is intended to operate in melee range for a substantial percentage of time by design and doesn't have mez protection.

I invented the term "DPA" to be "damage per activation-second" because the term "DPS" was consistently overloaded to mean both "damage divided by the cycle time of the power" and "damage divided by the activation time of the power." I decided to call the former "DPC" and the latter "DPA." DPA caught on; DPC did not: instead the term DPS became synonymous with "damage over time" which served both to describe a single power's damage divided by its cycle time, and an entire chain's damage divided by its cycle time, the former being a limiting case of the later.

Any chance you could start on about a dozen more kids, so in six years I can run Underground trials with them? I'm hoping they can help me get the Preservation Specialist badge.

This isn't a trend, this is an experiment. There's no question in my mind those four sets were strategically chosen for their value. The devs are attempting to see what the net effect of selling such enhancements in the game are, and one of the things they are interested to know is whether the players will balk at the idea of paying for that level of performance, or whether the majority of players are both comfortable with it and willing to spend money on it.

Personally, I'm not thrilled. But I'm also morbidly curious to know how that sale goes as well. Its always useful, if not always heartening, to know in which direction the majority leans.

Up to this point I think the devs have skirted the line in some areas. These enhancements almost seem chosen to *deliberately* cross it. It'll be interesting to see if the rest of the playerbase, particularly the store consumers, agrees or disagrees.

If there's one area where the devs and I part company, its that they tend to believe the only valid way to learn stoves are hot is by touching them.


Incidentally, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I'm not as uncomfortable with the archetype IOs in the Super Packs. I think partly its because selling these specific IO sets undermines the auction house economy, and that makes it problematically unfair to those that buy and sell those items in the in-game economy. The archetype IOs don't exist in-game except (eventually) as super pack items, so there's no pre-existing economy surrounding them.

Honestly though, I can't really fully rationalize that feeling. Its just a feeling.

I don't think its anything trivially simple like stalker defense being between scrappers and blasters, so stalker damage has to be proportionately between scrappers and blasters or anything like that. But I do think Stalkers and Blasters are linked by dev statements, including the most recent ones in this thread, that those two archetypes are both defined as trading away survivability for some offensive benefit of some kind. That trade is specific to those two archetypes and no others. So how one of them executes that trade can shed light on how the other one should work, and conversely the problems one faces can shed light into the problems the other faces.

You could argue a similar relationship exists for scrappers relative to tankers, but I don't think that relationship has anything to offer here. In broad survivability and offensive terms, scrappers and tankers function mechanically very similar. Probably too similar, but so similar that there's nothing interesting to learn in terms of what happens when this trade mechanically affects how an archetype functions.

Why is this trade so critically special? Because when you trade one kind of offense for another kind of offense (ranged attack for ranged control, say) you're trading one kind of tool for another kind of tool useful under similar circumstances. Those are easy trades to balance. Same thing goes for trading one kind of defense for another kind of defense. But when you trade across offense and defense, giving up one for the other, there are special problems. You need both, so giving up too much of one for the other is counterproductive. Give up too much offense for defense, and you end up being unkillable but slow. Give up too much defense for offense, and you end up dead (and no longer generating offense).

The former is a potential problem, but it can be mitigated: you can convert extra defense into rewards by using the difficulty slider. But the latter doesn't have the same mitigation option: you can use the difficulty slider to lower difficulty, but that comes with a reward penalty. There are ways to convert extra defense into something useful. Its much harder to convert extra offense into something useful if you do not have enough defense.

The "break mez" effect was suggested when D2.0 was being fiddled with, but as above, I think the problem was that the devil was in the details. Exactly how it would work could easily make it overpowered, or worthless. It isn't immediately obvious there exists a happy medium.

Don't even get me started on those stun grenades.

Inexperienced players would see experienced blappers in-game and hear them talk about blapping, and think it was an extremely survivable mode of play relative to ranged blasting. And it was, if you knew what you were doing. If not, you'd be dead.

Blaster survivability does come mostly from mez, not from insta-kills. And blapping always involved megatons of mez. When total focus was mag 4, energy blappers could keep a couple bosses permanently stunned. Total Focus and Air superiority could wreck havok on a spawn in a way few ranged chains could.

It wasn't about efficiency, it was about staying alive.

It certainly can't hurt, but I don't think that should happen except as part of a larger revamp. There are some issues. For one thing, the ranged modifier was increased but explicitly not the melee one to balance out a perception that blapping was a more effective mode of blasting than ranged attacking, since it usually was coupled with much better counter-mez and much higher DPA attacks, albeit single target ones. The notion that blapping was a better strategy was problematic because it was only so for players experienced in blapping. In combination with Defiance 1.0 it was just getting players killed.

If we want to maintain that ranged/melee skew to counterbalance intrinsic melee offense advantages, boosting the melee modifier would seem to indicate a boost to the ranged one as well. But I'm not sure how much higher the devs really will feel comfortable going.

Just in passing, a trick question. Who has the highest melee modifier? Scrappers of course (1.125), followed by Dominators (1.05) followed by Blasters (1.0). Now who has the highest ranged modifier? Its Blasters, but not exclusively: they are *tied* with Scrappers at 1.125.

Trick question because the Scrapper ranged modifier is actually 0.6. But they don't use it, ever. By decree, ranged Scrapper attacks always use the melee modifier. All melee archetypes, scrappers, stalkers, brutes, and tankers, use their melee modifier for all attacks, whether they are ranged attacks or not. Which makes the whole notion of them having higher melee modifiers and lower ranged modifiers moot, and essentially mocks the notion of a "ranged archetype" having a ranged advantage.


Really, what I want more than anything else is an answer to the question "what are blasters supposed to be?" And "they do damage" is not an answer to that question: everyone does damage. To me, its not really a numbers problem. Its more of a "why does this archetype exist" problem. Even stalkers have a reason to exist: they support a particular playstyle (stealth, alpha) that doesn't really exist without them. Whether everyone likes that style of play or thinks the game doesn't need that style of play is a separate issue. Its obvious, though, that the current best reason for blasters to exist as an archetype is to die. That's not an exaggeration: they are defined by what they don't have as much as they are defined by what they do have. They are defined to be weak to damage, weak to mez, they trade "being in jeopardy" for dealing presumably more damage. And that trade isn't a real trade unless blasters actually die. Although the devs don't actually want blasters to die far more often than everyone else, I also think that hidden in the way they see the archetypes, they kinda actually do.

Above all else, I want to break that notion. The rest is numbers fiddling.

The other reason why I think blasters really are in more serious need of a rethink is because many (not all) the arguments for reexamining stalkers are of the form "stalkers have less survivability than scrappers, ergo they should do more damage." Even when you factor range into the equation, that logic should be amplified massively for blasters. But we've already buffed everyone's damage so much that there's virtually nowhere left for Blasters to go. If we keep buffing everyone's damage and do Blasters last, we *won't* have anything left to do to Blasters. We'll have given everyone else all the interesting damage mechanics, high burst, high sustained damage, and all that will be left will be tinker toy concessions.

Any edge blasters had in offense is now at best measured in percentage points. Its survivability gap is measured in orders of magnitude. And this squeeze gets worse as time progresses, because the *one* archetype the devs do not protect against encroachment is blasters, because the devs have already conceded that *all* archetypes must be able to do good damage, the one thing blasters were supposed to be better at.

In fact, you could argue its the Defender complaint on a massive scale. Defenders often complain that what they are supposed to be best at (buff/debuff) Controllers are pretty good at. Blasters can argue that what they are supposed to be best at everyone is pretty good at. And the longer everything else is tweaked, the more wedged into a corner blasters will get.

If the tanker has all the aggro and the blaster is killing everything, your role is comedic relief. Its the only role left. You could have enough damage to one-shot every foe you target, and you'd still be contributing basically nothing. For that matter, all other blasters are also contributing basically nothing.

All this is a paper discussion. In practice, what we learned before the Defiance 2.0 changes was that blasters were dying far more often than any other archetype solo or on teams. So this role you think blasters should just automatically be the best at, I know for a fact they weren't reasonably fulfilling it at least prior to D2.0. And the paper argument doesn't account for D2.0, so that's irrelevant. The paper argument clearly overlooks something if on paper blasters should have no problems with aggro, be completely free to unleash their ranged damage with impunity, and in the actual game were dirt napping themselves into high debt.

Even if I concede the role issue, though, its still the case that leveling slower than everyone else presumably implies a worse problem than not having an good role on all teams. At one time, that was the blaster problem. I don't know for a fact if they still have that problem to the same degree, but I do know most of the structural problems blasters have *can* cause that problem, because prior to D2.0 they had it. And by default, that trumps "vague team role." Being dead is worse than lacking team synergy.