Arcanaville

Since before you joined the game, the people that care about Tankers worked to improve their aggro holding role. While I'm sure there were some people who felt like you do, your self-proclimation that they are the true tanker advocates is wholly fictional. In fact, until about I2 it was essentially *impossible* for any significant number of players to feel as you do, for the simple reason that the information necessary to begin to make such an assessment and the analysis tools necessary to frame the position simply didn't exist in a way accessible to players. By the time it did and in a form generally accepted, we were already arguing the I5-I6 changes which were *again* focused less on your offense issues and more on tanker defensive issues.

You have the right to want whatever you want, but to characterize what you want as somehow caring more is something I actually find insulting. Most of those people aren't around any more to defend themselves and what they wanted, but that doesn't mean there aren't people around that still remember that players who cared about the archetype existed before you came along, will exist long after you depart, and wanted what tankers are, not what you insist they are supposed to be.

-Res, like all buffs and debuffs, is additive.

True, and lots of real world effects complicate matters. For example, some attack chains rely on stacking resistance debuffs, but that takes time to ramp up.

As an aside, one thing that came up while I was thinking about this question was Oil Slick Arrow. Its cast time is actually quite low compared to its total damage potential. In damage scale terms I believe it approaches 4.0 DS/sec if you do not specifically factor in extra time to ignite it (i.e. if its used in an environment where it can be ignited automatically or as a side effect of some other power). I just couldn't think of a way to leverage that high DPA given its long recharge: even at the recharge cap its still recharging in 36 seconds, which means it cannot be chained to autoignite (15 second burn time). And its net benefit gets diluted because it can only be used occasionally.

Or, they sometimes PM me to ask if there's any way for you to not be on their side.

The thing about telling all tankers that you know for a fact that most of them don't care, and you only speak for the few because they won't speak up for themselves, is that the most likely situation is you're wrong, and have simultaneously flipped off most of the people who you claim to represent.

That's pretty much the definition of doing it wrong.

But what is that obvious purpose? I did read your suggestion, but there wasn't an obvious unifying concept being directly implemented. Explaining the reason for adding the effect is not exactly the same thing as having a unifying concept or purpose.

The primary difference between giving broadsword -res instead of adding direct damage in terms of broad effect is that more damage means the broadsword wielder deals more damage, while -res means everyone on the team deals more damage. There's no clear justification given for why broadsword should have that effect. In this game, very hard smashing damage doesn't equate to becoming more vulnerable to more damage: if it did, that same conceptual justification should apply even more to Martial Arts, which in this game is all about smashing impacts far more than broadsword. It would apply even more to something like War Mace. And I think there should be some conceptual consistency between the powerset definitions, or they are just ad hoc excuses.

I like the idea of replacing Build Up with something unique: the whole idea of unique build up is actually something I've advocated for a very long time. It was a short cut to give most powersets a copy-paste build up, but things like Follow Up and Soul Drain provide better diversity. But rather than suggest a more fury-like effect you mentioned something related to Rage, which is not so much a totally different power as just a longer duration (and fundamentally because of that, almost always better) build up with a crash. A short duration rage that can stack is more of a follow up-like effect. Something *totally* unique would be something I would be more inclined to like. Like suppose we replace Build Up with a power with 30 second duration and 180 second recharge, and while it was up it offered a damage bonus that quickly ramped up from zero to a maximum (say, 125%) in ten seconds, then slowly decayed to zero over the next 20 seconds. More like a go berserk mode that slowly wears off.

It would still be "just more damage" as EG says but this wouldn't be here to explicitly add a radical new feature to Broadsword, and more to simply qualitatively distinguish it from Katana. Its "unique purpose" would still have to come from something it could do better than katana (and presumably most other sets).

When you spend years advocating to buff an archetype, and the actual players of that archetype tend to roll their eyes when you post, you probably are in fact doing it wrong.

As I discovered recently, Kim Jong Il is apparently a protected class of person.

If I ever decide to quit the game, I'm posting a shop of Kim Jong Il riding a nazi dinosaur tank shouting his version of giddy-yup.


Sometimes, reading the summaries and imagining the ustreams can be just as entertaining as actually watching the ustreams.

Around these parts, are there any uncertain ones?

Fundamentally, that's true. But in this case the rationale for that is specifically that it seems to have always been the intent for Broadsword to be the harder hitting set, and for Katana to be the faster set. However, in making Katana the faster set they inadvertently made it, by an important metric, the harder hitting one as well. Making Broadsword universally higher damage would be broken: we'd be back to where we are now but with Katana and Broadsword reversed. So adding bursty damage and having that damage be a different type of damage seemed the most logical way to satisfy that requirement.

If there was an obvious concept for Broadsword that suggested an alternate avenue of powerset focus, I'd probably do that instead.


As to AoE being the only thing that matters, right now I believe its a worthy goal to not succumb to that notion. When I decide its no longer a worthy goal I'm going to flip to the opposite side and demand massive AoE for *everything* with a commensurate evisceration in rewards. A part of me really doesn't care which way that goes anymore. All I know is the silly inchworm ratcheting of AoE is the most intellectually dishonest approach to the issue which I will never be a party to.

Assuming my back of the envelope calculations are correct, if you were at the damage and recharge cap and cycled shriek, scream, and shout, including the stacking resistances the defender would stabilize at about 198 dps, the corruptor at about 252 dps, and the blaster at about 357 dps.

The reason it turns out that way is because the *proportional* difference in strength between the three in resistance buff is lower than it can appear. Suppose you quadruple stack the defender debuff (-20%) and the corruptor debuff (-15%). That's -80% and -60%. That looks like a big difference: 25% difference in fact. But that actually translates into 1.8x damage and 1.6x damage, and the proportional difference is actually only 1.8/1.6 = 1.125. In other words, the better defender debuff is translating into 12.5% more damage. But the corruptor ranged modifier is higher than the defender one, 0.75/0.65 = 1.154, or 15.4% higher. The corruptor modifier has a bigger edge than the defender debuff modifier, at least in terms of single target single character damage (the higher debuff would ultimately translate to a higher *team* benefit). That's before factoring in the damage cap difference.

The blaster situation is more pronounced: while its debuffs are even lower, it starts off with a 1.125/0.75 = 1.5 or 50% edge on the corruptor in damage modifier, and that's a gap the corruptor simply cannot make up in higher resistance debuff.


Incidentally, my suspicion is that overall it will be difficult to beat a Fire/Fire scrapper that is sitting at the recharge and damage cap. The net effect of having both the Fire DoT and Fiery Embrace more than half the time will be difficult to beat, even with debuffing masterminds (if pets responded to recharge, it would be no question masterminds).

The classic free to play model generally relies on essentially infinite treadmills. Games like Farmville can trivially add content at a pace faster than nearly all players can acquire it, so there is only a small chance of someone actually outpacing development: it takes a huge investment in time and a lot of money to outpace those kinds of games usually, and their strategy is to essentially trade money for time: you can buy your way further along the treadmill. They don't care, because the treadmill is incredibly long.

Most MMORPGs are not like that, and cannot be like that. Neither our no all other sub MMOs I'm aware of that are now implementing Hybrid models can or do follow that model, because the content pipeline simply cannot keep pace with it. If you let people simply buy their way down the treadmill, you will run out of treadmill. So the monetization of more standard MMORPGs has followed other paths: monetizing customization, for example.

Its one of the reasons why incorrectly called City of Heroes a "free to play" game is not just a matter of incorrect semantics. The business models of virtually all the genuine free to play games and all the hybrid ones tend to be completely different, and applying the thinking of one to the other invariably fails to be remotely relevant.

Over the years I've noticed that -res seems thematically appropriate for everything. By my recollection, its been thematically suggested for Martial Arts, Dark Melee, War Mace, Spines, Radiation Blast, and Brawl.

Stackable -res seems to be one of those things the devs really hate, until they come up with it themselves and add it somewhere. So its something I generally avoid suggesting.

In terms of true perma pets that don't need to be recast (at least on time scales of a day: all pets technically expire eventually), that's true. If you relax Agent White's requirement that a perma pet is only a pet that sticks around mostly "forever" and include all pets that can be slotted in a way to be out all the time, then its probably Illusion with its three PA, one spectral terror, and one Phantasm, all of which can be made to be effectively perma.

Much of the time, you'll have six pets: the Phantasm itself casts a decoy, and *that* can be perma in theory as well (if the phantasm decides to cast it, and it generally does).

I do sometimes miss the pre I5 days of stacking controller pets: my Illusion controller could have 15 pets out simultaneously (on average), which was competitive even with Fire/Kin imp armies. And twelve of mine (on average) were completely indestructible.

That wasn't true with 90s MoG, if you'll recall. Moreso for the longer recharge MoG.

Amusingly, the old MoG would today be better than the current MoG in some end game content (i.e. Apex, Lambda, BAF), and totally broken in others (i.e. Keyes). If they didn't change it back then, they would have probably had to do something to MoG to make it compatible with Keyes and Underground besides tell everyone not to use it.

The problem here is two-fold. First, the vast majority of players just aren't as picky as is sometimes portrayed on the forums. Its just not common to see people getting kicked from teams or selectively ignored just because of their archetype, except under very unusual circumstances. Second, players are fickle, and balancing archetypes based on what players today think is good or bad implies that players' judgment doesn't change substantially over time. It does.

So this is not a good foundation upon which to build an argument in general. It tends to be too transitory and too easy to counter-argue.

Also, I think its totally unfair that l-isomer proteins were preferentially selected in the Precambrian. If you want to be a d-configured being today, you just can't. And if you can't even choose your own chirality, what's the point.

"Roles" tends to imply playstyle, and I don't think the game should in a literal sense dictate playstyle. I prefer to think of the archetypes as having strengths and weaknesses: like any tool what you do with it is a combination of what the tool's strengths and weaknesses are, and what your strengths and weaknesses are. Roles are things players fill, not characters, and whether they are any good at that role depends on their skill and the tools they chose to try to fill that role. You can make questionable choices in tools, but the tools themselves don't have explicit roles stamped on them.

Wow. You actually have patch cables that can reach Palo Alto?

When actual blasters have numbers higher than that, maybe. So long as the melee blasters have near-scrapper survivability their modifier numbers can't be higher than the other kind of blasters with no defense and no mez protection.

But by your own apparent admission, neither change actually does that. If you're going to change Broadsword in such a way to make it specifically excel in one area, accepting weaknesses in other areas, you should say what that area is, and then prove the changes actually allow the set to excel in that area without making the set too powerful in general. The changes seem to be less making it excel at anything, and more using the fact that it doesn't excel at anything as an excuse to add more AoE to the set. Which would be one of the best ways to ensure I'm not going to like the change in general.


If I was going to alter Broadsword with an eye to differentiating it from Katana, I might consider doing something like adding smashing bonus damage to Broadsword, to make it a harder hitting crunch set. In fact, perhaps the best way to do that would be to give Broadsword build up the Fiery Embrace treatment, and have Broadsword Build Up add a large smashing bonus damage component to Broadsword attacks rather than just buffing damage strength. The numbers could be fiddled with to provide Broadsword with an edge in periodic burst damage without being unbalanced.

Sure, if you want to make the game three times more expensive to play for all the server resources required to support such combat, on top of the fact that those nine guys will still be worth about the same as one or two minions: you're not going to level nine times faster just because you believe comic book heroes are supposed to take on nine things at once.


More or less, this is basically where the game's difficulty is calibrated to, except for some reason you seem to think Lts should be 4.5 times stronger than minions rather than about twice as strong, and there shouldn't exist anything between a minion and something over four times stronger than a minion. In effect, you seem to want a City of Heroes that used underlings, Lts, Bosses, EBs, AVs and Giant Monsters and got rid of minions. That's an interesting preference, and I can see certain interesting advantages to that, but I don't see it as an actual improvement on the game.

1. I've beaten Trapdoor with SOs. In no case so far have inventions determined for me the difficulty of Trapdoor. When we're talking about a single fight against a single foe, inspirations are and have always been the representative upper bound of what players can accomplish, and those cost basically nothing.

I don't often need those for Trapdoor either, but I can't think of anything I play that couldn't beat him with an SO build and a tray of small insps.


2. You can define winning for yourself, or you can obey someone else's definition of winning. The latter tends to be far more problematic than the former.

As I've been reminding people for seven years, if you don't think its a problem to be 5% higher than someone else, you shouldn't mind being reduced to 5% lower than someone else.

If its important enough to argue against, that implies its important enough for someone else to argue for.