Arcanaville

If it was *only* a PvP issue it likely wouldn't have been changed. It was not just a PvP issue that energy melee had a power with twice the DPA of its closest competitor.


But definitely should have been, and at least now new sets tend to acknowledge. My primary disagreement with the activation-time based changes was that I do not believe they should have literally flattened DPA to nearly a constant and they shouldn't have so radically departed PvP performance from PvE performance. But the notion that hey, its ok if the best single target attack has six times the DPA of the worst one is fine because the game is all about AoE anyway is one of the few things that makes me want to literally strangle someone.

The problem is that however superficially similar stalkers and scrappers appear to be, stalkers are, or at least were originally designed to be melee blasters not stealthed scrappers. To the extent that the devs keep conceding ground on the initial design and balance them by comparing them to scrappers themselves, they increase the redundancy of stalkers altogether. The game doesn't need a scrapper archetypal variant. Archetypal variants are more appropriately addressed in powersets in this game. We don't see three different kinds of blasters with different inherents.

It would be a case of essentially unequivocally bad game design in this context if one archetype was better in all respects than another. That's not strictly speaking true for Brutes and Scrappers, but its arguably too close for comfort in that area.

More or less, although if you want something to puzzle over, Spectral Wounds is described as an illusion: the damage isn't real, although the target takes some damage because its convinced it took damage. That attack is typed Ranged (and Psi). Blind is described as a literal flash of light that blinds the target: its not an illusion because the bright flash can be strong enough to affect targets nearby. It has no positional component.

It gets better: the actual sleep component of Blind (which comes from a pseudopet) has no attack types at all. In other words if you have a target with 100% defense standing next to a target with no defense and you hit the second target with Blind, you will probably land a sleep on the first target with no problem. It probably has no attack type because Blind has no positional type so it has no positional type, and since it does no damage the sleep component has no logical non-positional type to give it (except possibly psionic).

I've only had a chance to do some preliminary tests, but I can confirm that the DoT is not cancel on miss (if it misses, the rest of the ticks can still fire). So the description is a bit off: its not a 75% chance for a five tick DoT, its a five tick DoT with a 75% independent chance for each tick to fire (or whatever the percentage happens to be).

Actually, after talking it over with Arbiter Hawk, I believe Synapse and I were both wrong in how this effect works. There is new tech in the Interface DoT specifically that I did not take into account, and the net result of all of that is that apparently the DoT can stack up to eight times total. That's eight times total from all players that possess it, no matter the form of the DoT. Meaning, if I slot core and another player slots radial, we have different chances to proc the Dot. But we have the same DoT, and we're combined limited to eight stacks on a single target. If the entire team was interface slotted, the entire team would be limited to eight simultaneous DoTs combined from all reactive sources.

The fact we don't see very many ticking at one time in testing is because we were all assuming we'd see a 10 second DoT, so there's plenty of time to stack up the DoT in 10 seconds. But because its only 4.3 seconds long, its actually not easy to consistently get more than 2 DoTs running. You're seeing slightly more than two, because you're probably getting between two and three DoTs to fire within that 4.3 second window.

What's more, I'm not quite sure yet if the DoT will actually be a 75% chance to run a full DoT. Thinking about it, its possible that we aren't getting a 75% chance to *have* a DoT, we might be getting a DoT with a 75% chance to proc *each tick* of the damage. I'm in the process of engineering some test to try to confirm all of this, and I'll post when I have more information.

Technically, that's what the destiny buffs are sort of intended to do: allow for ultra high buffing of the players, including resistance, but only for limited times.


Well, its really just SR scrappers and tankers that have that 95% debuff resistance. Outside of that defense debuffs tend to have a higher effect on high defense than resistance debuffs tend to have on high resistance because of cascade failure.

Lets simplify a bit: lets eliminate DDR from the equation for a second and look at comparing 45% defense to 90% resistance. We'll throwequivalent strength debuffs at them: -5% defense and -10% resistance. Here's what happens. The resistance set gets hit with the -10% resistance debuff, but 90% is resisted so it only gets hit with -1% debuff. That reduces resistance from 90% to 89%. In return, the damage it takes from a 100 point attack increases from 10 to 11 points of damage. Note that this is actually 10% higher damage. The way the math works out, a 10% resistance debuff increases the damage you take by 10%. Its not that the resistance debuff does that directly, but the math ends up that way.

Now without DDR, the defense set will get hit with the entire 5% debuff, but unlike the resistance set the defense set will *avoid* 90% of these debuffs relative to the resistance set. If we're talking about a 50% base tohit attacker, the resistance set will get hit with 50% of those debuffs, while the defense set will only get hit by 5%. The defense set gets hit 90% less often. So while the resistance set gets hit for only 10% of the debuff, the defense set gets hit for all the debufff 10% of the time. That should average out over time, and it does. Or it would, if it wasn't for cascade failure.

Resistance doesn't just resist resistance debuffs, it always does so at full strength (barring unresistable debuffs: it gets a little more complicated when those enter the equation). So even though while debuffed the resistance character has 89% resistance instead of 90%, that character still resists 90% of all incoming resistance debuffs. Their ability to resist debuffs doesn't go down. As more and more debuffs land they will take more and more damage, but they will still be resisting 90% of those debuffs, so each will continue to land at -1% debuff.

However, the defense set was counting on *avoiding* those debuffs, and once it gets hit by a debuff, its defense goes down. That defense is what was preventing the debuffs from landing, and with defense debuffed more of the debuffs will tend to land. This causes defense to spiral downward, which each debuff making it easier for the next one to land. While resistance maintains its protection against debuffs, defense doesn't. Once debuffed, those debuffs accelerate the effect of more debuffs, and you get a cascading effect while I called "cascade failure" when I described the effect it had on perma-elude scrappers. It still applies today. While resistance continues to protect against resistance debuffs, and thus its actual damage protection drops in a constant fashion under debuffing, defense loses protection against debuffs at the same time it loses protection against actual damage, and that causes an accelerating effect that causes defense to lose protection to both debuffs and damage, and you can quickly end up with no protection to anything (at least via defense). That can't happen to resistance: a large enough debuff can neutralize resistance, but it cannot be picked apart in this way.

For the situation to be at least roughly symmetric, defense sets have to be able to *consistently* reduce the average magnitude of incoming defense debuffs to roughly the same degree resistance sets with comparable levels of resistance do. Unfortunately, that is really really difficult to do. If we set DDR to be roughly the same thing as the equivalent resistance, then a defense set will have the benefit of both DDR *and* avoidance, and their protection will be better. But if we don't, then we end up with a slower downward spiral of defense and by the time debuff protection equals resistance debuff protection, actual *defense* will average a lower value, making defense less able to actually protect against damage. Its nonsensical to explicitly make defense protect against defense debuffs as well as resistance protects against resistance debuffs, but have the actual damage protection be weaker.

So this is a case where the devs have to make a qualitative decision, and the decision tends to resolve itself this way: in general powersets with sufficient dependency on defense will tend to have an amount of DDR which is very roughly comparable to their dependency on defense, not their actual defensive strength. Invuln depends a little on defense, but its protection is balanced between defense, resistance, and +health/heal. Its actual reliance on defense is low, so its DDR is low. Shields relies a lot more on defense, so its DDR is higher. SR depends almost entirely on defense, and its DDR is astronomical. Beyond that, its a purely qualitative judgment call. It is not intended to produce a numerically equivalent situation, because such a numerically equivalent situation is not, in the straight forward sense, possible.

There is a certain logic to this: so long as there was no way to actually choose between Scrappers and Brutes, the value proposition between the two of them wasn't directly comparable. They then only needed to serve the limits of overall performance balancing metrics, and both are close enough to each other that if one was performance balanced, the other was likely to be also.

However, this isn't just a question of jealously, as it was sometimes portrayed in beta, nor is it a simple matter of now potentially being on the same teams. Now that it is actually possible to choose between the two as a free choice, without any other real restrictions between those choices in a lot of ways (the exception being unshared powersets) good game design demands a much more carefully engineered relationship between the two. The notion that brutes are "fine" is not relevant to this issue. It wouldn't be so if people said things were fine about something you wanted to change, it should not be relevant if its said about something you want to keep the same. Its that simple.


I don't think anyone is certain why it was nixed: it could have been as simple as the CoV team decided to take the feature for brutes, leaving it then unavailable for Tankers.

But as to Scrappers and Tankers, I've generally also been of the opinion that Scrappers and Tankers, and as a logical extension Brutes, should all have been the same archetype, for the simple reason that the original premise behind the Scrapper/Tanker dichotomy was actually false from the start. Jack felt that there was a spectrum of things that had both personal toughness and fought in melee range, and they tended to be either focused on defense or focused on offense, thus the two archetypes. Even by his own perspective, that's false in the sense that type of distinction as he portrayed it doesn't exist in that way in the game he was helping to design. Because our MMO has character progress you can't just say if X has more defense than Y, X focuses on defense more than Y. In the game, X has more defense than Y if X is just more developed: higher level or more powers or both, for example. A level 40 Scrapper has a lot more personal protection than a level 12 Tanker, both because of levels and because of more defensive powers better slotted.

So the real question was is there a strong dichotomy in the comic book genre between things that have more offense than they have defense and vice versa. And actually, while such things exist, they tend to be the exception to the rule, not the general rule. Most comic book things tend to have about a balanced amount of personal offense and defense. Think about a comic book melee fighter taking on a near duplicate of itself. Do you expect the fight to a) end in two seconds with one obliterating the other instantly or b) end with the two trading blows for the entire comic with neither actually noticing the other? Neither: you tend to expect one to fight the other and eventually for one to wear the other down and win, most of the time on a moderate time scale.

Since the majority of the time comic book characters are fairly balanced between offense and defense (especially around melee fighters: if they weren't fights would tend to be boring between enemies of similar power) making one archetype that "focused" on defense and one that "focused" on offense is not really a particularly good idea. Especially because the scrapper archetype cheats the definition and is actually a balanced one anyway.

Tankers only exist because the original dev team felt we needed to have an MMO tank class. Brutes exist because the devs felt CoV needed a balanced melee archetype but didn't want to exactly copy Scrappers.

Stalkers are a totally different animal. They are actually an experiment to make a melee blaster in concept.

"Unadulterated" doesn't mean ... eh, also too easy.

I'm only a casual baseball fan, although I did follow the rise of sabermetrics starting in the early 90s. What I find most facinating about sabermetrics in general is that baseball is *sold* to its fans in large part through its statistics: moreso than any sport baseball is known for its statistics. Historically speaking more kids have an entire team's statistics memorized than can name *one* quarterback rating.

And yet, baseball is *run* by a bunch of old guard traditionalists who believe in judging things based almost entirely on gut instinct and tradition. Its that dichotomy, more than the actual statistics, that I find interesting. It would be almost as if the NFL featured and highlighted quarterbacks in all of its promotional material and you discovered virtually all the coaches and general managers in the NFL thought that left tackles were the most important player on the field.

There is a historical bias built into the game that since defense "doesn't always work" it can afford to be numerically stronger than resistance. And for the most part this is actually true. Defense "doesn't always work" for two reasons: the first is a colloquial way of saying defense is statistical, so its vulnerable to random bursts of damage (I'm sort of giving more credit than is due here, because in fact the early devs did think of defense as sometimes on, and sometimes off). The second is that defense debuffs are by far and away the most common debuffs in the game, and they tend to have a stronger effect than resistance debuffs do for technical mechanical reasons having to do with what resistance actually is.

Outside of current day Super Reflexes scrappers (and tankers) that have astronomically high defense debuff resistance, it tends to be far easier to strip defense than resistance from a target, and defense will always have a disadvantage in that area most of the time.

Where this flips is in the end game, where *all* debuffs are pretty much flying around at often saturation levels. In that situation, being able to avoid *anything* is better than getting hit from everything and then resisting the damage. Its specifically in the end game that defense becomes much more preeminent than resistance. Outside of it, its much more balanced: defense avoids debuffs, but defense itself can be much more easily removed.

In fact, its specifically because the devs have always had the ace in the hole that they haven't been as bothered by giving out lots of defense, in power pools, in invention bonuses, etc. The devs wield two trivial ways to nullify high defense: defense debuffs which work on almost everyone, and tohit buffs which work on everyone. Keep in mind that the primary way to punch through resistance is to increase damage, and that doesn't just offset high resistance, it kills everyone else. The alternative is something the players often find far more "cheating" than tohit buffs: unresistable damage.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way. This arms race-like situation with defense and defense debuffs and tohit buffs has been a pox on all houses. It sort of works, but its definitely not ideal.


As to powerboost, this requires a bit of explanation. The crux of the problem is that there is no such thing as "boosting resistance." Resistance is "resistance to damage" and its an aspect of the individual damage types. Lets focus on just one damage type for simplicitly: smashing. We deal smashing damage, and we have smashing resistance, but the thing that buffs both is Smashing Strength. This one thing makes your smashing damage higher, and the smashing damage you take lower if you have smashing resistances. Its the same thing.

So why can't powerboost buff your smashing resistance? Well, the only way to do that would be to buff your character's Smashing Strength, and that would also buff your Smashing damage - Power Boost would simultaneously be Build Up. In fact, *all* powers that boost "damage" are intrinsically *trying* to boost your resistances as well: they are the same effect. So to make sure that all damage buffs aren't simultaneously resistance buffs the devs at the beginning of time set all resistance powers to ignore all buffs except those slotted into them. As a result, resistance powers can't be buffed by Power Boost even if the devs wanted Power Boost to do that: the resistance powers themselves are designed to ignore that.

This doesn't affect defense because defense has nothing to do with damage. What we call "smashing defense" doesn't have anything to do with smashing damage at all: its actually something called "smashing_attack" defense, a totally different thing with a similar name. These are what we call "attack vectors" and every attack is tagged with them. To put it simply, if a power deals smashing typed damage, its obvious dealing smashing typed damage. But if a power deals smashing typed damage, that has nothing to do with what defense works on it. If, and only if, the devs have tagged the power "smashing_attack" will smashing defense work on it. If they don't, it won't.

Defense and Resistance are based on totally different mechanisms that have nothing to do with each other. But Resistance is linked to Damage, and that's why it has entanglements with how Damage works. Defense is totally unrelated to damage.

Whoa, full stop. That rule is not my rule of thumb. Personally, while I understand the spirit of the rule, I've always thought it was dangerously misleading; ironically the only people who can safely use the rule are people who don't need a rule of thumb. The problem in this game is that even eliminating all other situational issues, that rule only works from zero: it works to compare *total* defense to *total* resistance from zero. It does not work as an incremental rule to compare the benefit of two powers or effects, due to the nature of stacking in this game.

There's only one speed: the wrong speed. The probability of anyone actually hitting the right speed is negative zero.

Its hit and miss: I was pretty busy this weekend and didn't check the forums. Super's formulas appear to be correct, however.


There isn't one. The general rule of thumb on DoTs is if the DoT occurs within or essentially within the cast time of the power, it should really count as part of base damage, but if it occurs mostly outside the cast time of the power its "bonus damage" and bonus damage can be almost anything within broad limits. For reference, Fire attacks typically have DoT damage equal to about 40% of their base damage. That is among the higher levels of DoT in the game, so I would be hesitant about creating any set of attacks that did more than 1.4 times the allowed damage by formula in terms of base damage plus DoT combined.

I'm not sure it does make perfect sense, since we had to establish in another thread we're all made of meat in this dimension.

Then I get 240.26 dps for the Brute, 238.59 for the Scrapper, compared to the original numbers of 235.9 and 235.1 respectively. That's assuming Fury increases from +170% to +180%. But I'm not sure that's what will happen with the AT specific set. If its Fury *generation* that increases by 10%, that won't translate to a 10% higher Fury (which would be 95% and 190% damage) or even a 10% higher damage buff. There's a diminishing returns curve near the top of the Fury bar that I don't think is going to be eliminated, and that will act to reduce the total benefit of having a higher generation rate. I would have to go back to my notes on Fury from when I was testing the changes to be able to predict what that would do.

The point of showing the numbers, though, was to show the actual change will be relatively small. The reason why is that an increase in critical rate from 10% to 12% increases damage effectively from 1.1 to 1.12, which is an increase of 1.12/1.1 = 1.018, or about 1.8%. Which is how much that would increase damage if all of your damage was subject to criticals, but its not because a portion of your damage is the DoT stream, which doesn't crit. So the net change is slightly less than 1.8% more damage.

I should point out, though, that people chase invention set damage buffs, and those are usually smaller in magnitude. The critical boost is going to be equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of +3.5% damage strength, more in some builds. That's halfway between a red and purple tier damage set bonus (3% and 4%).

And yet, after reading that, I'm not.

When Zwillinger randomly kills players, he makes sure to pick people he doesn't know at all so it can't be traced back to him.

Its just a matter of collecting all the bug reports of mailboxes freaking out and hitting players with total focus, and sending back an email saying the programmers are investigating.

It depends on whether the things you are typically shooting at will live, on average, at least ten seconds or more. If they don't, some of the DoT isn't realized. Against a pylon, or an AV, or even a Boss, most of the DoTs you stack you'll get full value for. They will speed up the time to defeat. But in a typical mission with mostly minions and Lts, the resistance debuff might speed you up more. That's something these calculations don't really look at.

My guess is the DoT is almost always better than the res debuff, but that's more of a feeling informed by the numbers than a conclusion based on the numbers.

I'm not sure they did that directly on purpose, but I would have. My own philosophy on game design is to give people all the numbers, and then make them impossible to min/max around without a supercomputer and a PhD in game theory. You'd be surprised how easy that is to do: there is *still* no general consensus as to just how strong the SR passives are, my own analysis on the subject notwithstanding.

To me, that's brilliant. Not deliberately so in that case, but still brilliant.

Just like people were willing to forgive Nolan for putting Katie Holmes in Batman once he decided to have Maggie Gyllenhaal play her.

If someone were to say "I can't see the numbers for SJ nor do I have a way to preview the powerset before buying it, so without that information I can't make an informed decision and thus can't buy the set" I would say that person has a valid objection. To a point, granting such players more information would be a good idea.

However, someone that says "I can't see the numbers for SJ nor do I have a way to preview the powerset before buying it, so I'm going to buy it and if I don't like it I'm going to demand a refund" I would say does not have a valid complaint.