Arcanaville

Actually, mez itself makes this false even on paper. Because blasters don't have mez protection, they are in danger the moment mez lands. So "kill so fast he's never in danger" means killing before any foe can use a mez. And as a practical matter, that is very close to being able to instantly kill everything. Blasters are never going to get that ability, so they can't really get that "kill before being killed" ability designed into them.

In practice blasters tend to survive not by using abilities they are designed to have, but rather abilities they are allowed to have, to a point. Mez and debuff, for example. Ice blasters survive on their holds and slows. Energy blasters survive on their knockback. These are not things blasters *must* have - Fire/Fire blasters don't in large part - but are *allowed* to have so long as its not too much.

It would be a click power, and when you activate it you'd summon a Hickman NPC to act it out for you. If you buy the premium edition, he does it while wearing pants.

Not directly, but there's no such thing as seriously balancing anyone's single target damage without ultimately involving DPA.

Where I think the original designers fell down was in not even realizing DPA was at all important, or even really have any idea about the concept at all, and I mean that literally. I think Castle was willing to experiment with it, but I don't think he had a strong enough handle on how it worked dynamically (and completely flattening it to a constant in PvP was an error). A real balancing effort around DPA would take what I would describe as "high computational effort" and I don't think the current devs think its worth it, except in spot cases. It also starts to put animator time into play when you start mucking with cast times, and animator time is almost as costly as Zwil's hat budget.

With SO slotting:

BU + AS + Placate + Eagle's Claw + Cobra + CAK

1070.49 + 893.09 + 299.75 + 324.2 = 2587.53

1.32 + 5.148 + 1.716 + 2.772 + 1.848 + 1.848 = 14.652

I can see Beam Rifle generating 2570 damage (approximate boss health at level 50) at level 50 about as fast as that, but not massively faster. Certainly not enough to compensate for the fact that the stalker has the same health, personal damage mitigation, and mez protection.


This comes up a lot with archetype comparisons. A does X well, and B only does Y well but Y doesn't matter. Stalkers get personal protection, but that doesn't matter in teams because the tanker has all the aggro. But conversely, if one blaster can take out 75% of the spawn, then your offense doesn't really matter either.

In real play, defense matters because in real play blasters die. Mez protection matters because in real play blasters die to mez often. Prior to the last round of changes, that was the most common datamined cause of blaster death. That's why Defiance 2.0 allows Blasters to shoot through mez: it was seen as the best way to give them a chance to break out of a mez that would otherwise eventually kill them.

And its a lot easier to pop reds than greens. There's no penalty for running out of reds.

Dominators got a design pass not that long ago; among other things their damage was increased substantially to make them offensively balanced archetypes. I could argue that the archetype that is most in need of a balance pass is Blasters. Blasters have been waiting for a secondary powerset design pass for longer than Dominators have existed. In fact, Dominators and Scrappers have a higher melee damage modifier than Blasters do, which is nonsensical.

If I had to rank which archetypes deserved the most attention overall, the list would be:

Peacebringers
Blasters
Stalkers
Everybody else.

The only reason I put PBs ahead of Blasters is just because the disparity between PBs and WSs is ludicrous, and because I don't think Kheldians get enough special benefits for being quantum-bait.

In this game, attacks perform tohit rolls against defense, and only if the attack hits does any of the damage components strike the target. There is no such thing as damage that ignores defense: its not that it can't be done, its that that sentence literally does not parse into anything meaningful in this game.

If you mean is it possible for an attack to "ignore" some defense, that is possible: tohit buffs mechanically do that. However, tohit buffs affect an entire character; there is currently no way to give a single attack a tohit advantage separate from all other attacks. An individual attack can have heightened accuracy, but that does not mechanically do what you're asking about. There is a mechanical trick that would allow assassin's strike to essentially have heightened tohit using special procedural clauses, but my guess is the devs are not likely to resort to that unless there was a really good reason to do so.

Alternatively, it is possible for a damage effect within an attack to "ignore" resistance, unresistable damage will do that. The devs are extremely reluctant to give us unresistable damage, because it can break the way other things are designed in terms of their heightened resistance.

In my opinion, not in this context. Stalkers are giving up defensive mitigation (aka "survivability" according to Synapse) to get "burst." For that trade to make sense, the burst itself has to partially compensate for the lower mitigation. Which basically means the burst has to eliminate enemies. Eliminating enemies randomly throughout the fight makes your damage more jumpy and unpredictable, but for the burstiness to be a genuine frontload, it has to happen at the start of the fight. If it happens in the middle or at the end, its not functioning effectively as a substitute for mitigation.

Basically, increasing AS utility while not hidden is really making it a sustained damage tool. It increases overall DPS, but doesn't really provide an option to frontload offense and kill speed to the start of the fight. Adding criticals all over the place makes damage more "spiky" but not more "frontloaded." In fact, since the Assassin's focus stacks, that benefit is actually more of a *backloaded* benefit rather than a frontloaded one. You're more likely to get criticals *later* in the fight rather than earlier, specifically because it stacks.

More directly "X is broken because of the cottage rule" is always false. The cottage rule doesn't prevent the devs from changing a powerset to fix something that is genuinely broken. The rule doesn't even say "don't change." It says "these changes should be performed only as the last resort." If X is broken, its either because the devs don't think its broken, or because they haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. Its not because the cottage rule prevents them from fixing it.


As to my own costumes, I tend to try to save costumes when possible, burning new slots to make new costumes. But on my oldest characters, that wasn't possible, and eventually I overwrote some of the original costumes for those characters. I have been *tempted* to buy costume slots *specifically* to create those original costumes again, just because. Its weird, but its like I loaned those costumes out, and now that its possible I want them back.

Paragon Studios explicitly stated that the "Freedom" of City of Heroes Freedom was two-fold: to offer a way for players who did not want to subscribe to play a smaller subset of the game, and to offer more game by making options available to everyone.

The ala carte element of City of Heroes wasn't just to provide a way for Premium players to buy their way back to subscription, it was a way for the devs to add more features to the game by creating options that *some* players who wanted them would be willing to pay for.

Set aside the Premiums for a moment. If the devs want to make a larger game with more content, they have two options: make all that content optional and sell it to the subscribers ala carte, or just increase everyone's subscriptions period, and you either pay more, or quit altogether. The "point" to making things that *some* subscribers want and are willing to pay for, and others don't, is to increase the *options* available to subscribers without *involuntarily* increasing their costs.

If the Paragon Store was any other store, and someone's job was to ask "I wonder what people would be willing to pay for; I wonder what will attract some of them to the store and spend money on" that would be totally uncontroversial. That's what stores do: they sell things they think other people want to buy. Our subscriptions fund a part of the game, and the store funds another part of the game. Ideally, the store should be as profitable as possible without detracting from the core subscription game. And that means adding items that are attractive without being necessary. And one way to do that is with consumables: when you sell permanent items, there's always going to be someone that says "I need that, that's not optional." It happens more frequently with permanent items, because they can permanently change a character or the play experience. Consumables tend on average to avoid that problem. You can still have consumables that are so beneficial they are seen as necessary, but they are less likely to be seen as permanent fixtures.

That's the logic behind making consumables. You hope you make something that some players are willing to spend money on, but the rest of the playerbase is free to ignore. Everybody wins: the players that are willing to spend money on that feature get that option, everyone else's gameplay is unaffected and they do not have to spend money on that option.

That's actually more or less what they were supposed to be from the start as I understand it, so what you're thinking and what I remember from CoV beta seem to be roughly in sync.

But here's the rub: given how at this point recharge is basically the playerbase's prison girlfriend at this point, do you believe its possible to give anything, stalker or otherwise, better burst without simultaneously giving them better sustained damage without using stronger mechanical trickery than what we're using now for stalkers?

Also, allowing assassin's strike better usage out of hide is much more of a sustained damage buff than a burst damage buff. That's fine, but does that mean you're at least roughly happy with the burst damage of stalkers at this point and are now looking to smooth over the rough spots elsewhere, or there's still more burst damage refinement coming in the future?

When I think burst damage, particularly burst damage as a form of mitigation, I think this: if A and B can both kill ten targets in sixty seconds, but while A kills one target every six seconds B kills the first five in 10 seconds and the last five in 50 seconds, B has a burst advantage but no offensive advantage. They both kill at the same speed overall, but B ends up taking a lot less damage than A. The tools I'm seeing aren't frontloading tools that compensate for lower mitigation, they are looking more like straight up offensive buffs.

I have often wondered if the best way to give stalkers better burst is to simply give them reverse fury. They start at maximum, and as they attack it decays. So at the start of the fight they have maximum damage, but the longer the fight lasts the lower their damage becomes. When the fight ends, they recover that advantage. By being less "binary" you get more of the feel of "building it up" and then "using" the burst advantage. Its like a frontload meter you spend by attacking.

And to make sure it doesn't get ludicrously high for soloers but is high enough when in teams, just make the fury meter scale a scaling buff like against all odds. So a stalker that enters a three minion group with full meter gets like a +50% damage buff to start, while a stalker that enters a twelve minion group with full meter gets like a +150% damage buff to start. As they attack, the meter drops from 1.0 to 0.0, dropping the buff accordingly. When they aren't attacking, the meter rises again. You could even make things like Placate add points to the meter (it doesn't have to reset to full, it could add 0.5 to the meter, or whatever). How fast the meter decays would determine how focused the frontloaded burst damage buff would be.

That to me sounds like a burst damage tool, and it wouldn't be difficult to add in theory, although it would take some time. The question is is it a reasonable request given the intended target for stalkers?

I think its safe to say that none of the archetypes actually follows their on-paper design imperatives perfectly. For one thing, calling stalkers "melee blasters" begs the question as to what "blasters" are supposed to be.

In the context of stalkers, though, the thought was that stalkers would pick up a specific original design intent of blasters: that up-front burst damage would represent a substantial part of their survival. That's why they have low health: they were intended to be squishy and trade defensive strength for burst damage "DPNow" mitigation.

The main problem was that just like for blasters, DPNow mitigation doesn't really work on teams**, and it doesn't scale to higher-difficulty content.


I think, as with all changes, it would be helpful if we knew what the intent was, besides the general "make things better." If stalkers are really supposed to be preeminent single target melee attackers, players could test for that. If they are instead supposed to be average single target attackers but specialized burst damage attackers, we could test for that. But I think the kinds of feedback you're going to get will be colored by everyone's individual opinion on how stalkers "should" work. Some believe they are scrappers with less health, and thus should have universally higher damage in single target and AoE. Some buy into the attack from stealth aspect, but wonder why the burst damage isn't higher if sustained damage is definitely lower. I think everyone is wondering what the benchmark is. What does "competent" mean in the context of how much damage stalkers should deal?




** and I was on those all-stalker CoV beta teams where among other things we all lined up on a target and did the 3-2-1-AS thing just to try to figure out how stalkers were supposed to work on teams.

A -maxhp of X% functions mathematically identically to a -res debuff of (1/(1-x)-1)%.

It doesn't matter how much health the target has. It doesn't matter how much regeneration the target has. It doesn't matter how much damage resistance the target has. Nothing matters because these two situations are numerically congruent. It also doesn't matter if the debuff hits, and then expires while the target is still alive. So long as it lands at the same time as a hypothetical resistance debuff, and expires at the same time as that hypothetical resistance debuff, the effect is still congruent.

In fact, in a hypothetical version of the game in which all the numbers were removed from combat chat and floating text, it would be impossible to distinguish -res from equally strong -maxhealth just from looking at the motion of your health bar. That's what makes them both effectively the same effect, just implemented in different ways (they stack differently with themselves and one is typed and the other obviously untyped, but that's separate from what the effect of a specific max health debuff would be verses a specific resistance debuff against its explicit type).

But what about...? Doesn't matter. Numerically congruent. Even if...? Yes, even if whatever.

Clearly, the devs let us resistance debuff AVs but are worried about us health debuffing AVs, so I'm guessing they just don't know this. Keep in mind that if the -maxhealth debuff was uncapped then the problem would be a theoretical -100% maxhealth debuff would be equal to an infinite resistance debuff and the target would essentially be immediately dead. But a capped debuff that cannot exceed X will always have an equivalent resistance debuff cap of (1/(1-x)-1) just as above, which means you can always guarantee the maxhealth debuff does not exceed the maximum debuff allowed by reactive.

An *uncapped* maxhealth debuff is dangerous to have around because it can quickly build to immense strength. But as long as its limited, its limits can be made identical to resistance debuff limits.

Specifically, the problem is when you make them attune enhancements, you have to make them more expensive: even your prices might be too low for attuning. I intended to suggest both unlocking and attuning as separate things so each could be cheaper than the combination one, but then honestly couldn't think of a reasonable fair price for attuning off the top of my head.

In general, though, I was trying to think of things that were cheap enough you would encourage people to splurge on them even if they were just nice to haves rather than must haves. So I limited myself to things that I thought would cost 150 PP or less.

Sigh.

The "cottage rule" is a design principle that the devs follow which was named after an off the cuff comment Castle made about a power creating a cottage.

The actual design principle states that the devs will not make certain mechanical, usage, or structural changes to powers and powersets unless there is an overriding balance-significant reason for doing so.

Before Castle made the cottage statement, he explicitly endorsed a post I made regarding powerset changes which were essentially the cottage rule before the cottage rule term was coined. That post stated the following:

1. The devs won't change the order of a powerset without a critical balance-significant reason.

2. The devs won't change the mechanical execution of a power (whether its a toggle or a click, whether its a targeted power or a location AoE, etc) unless there is a powerset imbalance that requires such a change to resolve.

3. The devs won't remove a primary power usage effect without a balance-significant reason for which there exists no other options to resolve.


Tradition has nothing to do with it. The fact is no matter how much you think a power "obviously" is broken, there are players that like it, take it, and use it for precisely the reason you think is worthless. Those people have the same rights to have the power as you do to change it. When its your preference against their preference, no change is made. To make a change likely to change a power out from under another player, there has to be a balance-significant reason. By the devs' definition of balance significant, not the players'.


Fundamentally, the cottage rule is there to protect the interests of the 95% of players that don't nag the devs.

The notion that stalkers were designed to be "melee blasters" was discussed during CoV beta, with dev participation, alongside discussions such as "brutes are not redside tankers" and "masterminds are (partially) meat shields, not redside controllers." It was never a player rationalization; in fact the prevailing player notion at the time was that stalkers were just scrappers with stealth, a notion disavowed by the dev team at the time.

Honestly, I tend to do that also, but there's a catch. If the leader wants to run the trial on chokepoints, and I think there's a pretty good chance the league is full of relatively new players and players like me then I'll stand on the choke point like a good little soldier. The reason is that there's two ways I can contribute to a failure, and I want no part of either. I can disobey the leader in a way that compromises the league's performance, which for me is virtually impossible. *Or* I can encourage *other* players to disobey the leader because hey, I am.

If I disobey, and I encourage other players to disobey, and that general chaos causes a failure, then I'm partially responsible. As would be any other player that contributed to that situation, regardless of their character's capabilities.


A *really* smart player would start on the chokepoint and watch carefully for leakers. If none appear, then its all good. If any appear, they would relocate to deal with them and then shift to the most problematic door without the other players noticing.

Energy Aura should be higher than SR against endurance drain.

I find that with Underground other player skill is more important.

Well, it would be helpful to compare your build and your wife's build, to see if they really are comparable in expense and efficiency. For example, your posted build isn't optimal in a few areas. Without increasing the cost of the build much or at all, Dark Regeneration can be slotted a lot better for someone that intends to attempt x8 soloing. Rather than slot with in accuracy IO and a set of Touch of Nictus (minus the proc I assume), which *heavily* overslots for heal, I would frankenslot DR with one accuracy IO, one end/rech IO from Numina's, an acc/end/rech from ToN and ToE, and heal/end/rech from Doctored Wounds and Miracle (all cheap).

Your slotting ends up with Dark Regen having 68.9% accuracy, 83.32% end, 97.49% heal, and 47.7% recharge. Mine gets to 79.9% accuracy, and 95.84% end and recharge, and 40.5% heal.

That slotting is just as cheap, but far superior in almost every situation. The only thing its inferior to is heal strength: yours heals for about 61% per target, mine for 42% per target (separate from any other set IO buffs).

Because Dark Armor is a different kind of and less straight forward set, different players can experience vastly different performance. If you had just used my slotting instead of yours you definitely would have avoided that first death. Perhaps not the second, but that's just with one cost-neutral single power slotting change.

And the fact that its irrelevant: the issue being discussed is scarcity, and whether it is explicitly intended to force farming. The empyrean merit cost of the pistol is not relevant to the drop rate of the recipe as it pertains to whether that drop rate is designed to encourage undesirable repetition. The only point in bringing it up was that its not scarce: its a non-rare method of acquiring the feature.

Then I don't see what your problem is with my original characterization of your position. I said your position was just to say "no, don't do that, ever." And that's simply not useful feedback, because its extreme. No, never, even in the case of making the bypassing of a gate scarce means in spite of the fact you say you understand gating in this case, you're still going to fault the devs for supporting the gate. To be consistent, you should simply state that you oppose all gating of this form, period, and all collateral actions that support them.

It would still be, as I see it, not particularly useful feedback, because the devs have already stated repeatedly by statement and action that this game is about balancing gating, not eliminating gating. Citing examples of where the devs removed or ameliorated gating to contend that the devs at any point believed the best thing to do was eliminate gating entirely was mistaken. And this is a mistake that keeps getting repeated for some reason, every time the devs add a new gate.

They can gate poorly: the original stuff in the empyrean merit stores was almost certainly poor gating by most measures. But that doesn't mean telling the devs "just don't gate, ever" is useful, in the literal sense, meaning "advice they will use." All game design is a compromise between competing factors, and all such absolute rules or suggestions have no way to operate in that environment. Its not that they will not take your advice, its that they cannot take your advice. It runs contrary to the way they develop the game.

And I'm not the one spinning anything: you're the one applying spin to state relative certainty in the devs' ulterior motives. I haven't stated anything about the devs' motives except that I believe your interpretation of them is extreme, and not useful. Please quote where I attempted to apply any spin at all to this situation.


One last thing:

No, that's not what he said. What he said was:

The recipe drop is a bonus. Any character (who can use it) is able to do so after completing the trial. That's not my spin, that's what he literally said.

He also specifically said, in his follow up post:

That doesn't sound remotely like "we put this in here so people would have to run the trials over and over again." The easiest way to do that would be to *only* have the recipe drop, and not the merit unlock.