Arcanaville

Because manipulation sets now have a historical precedent for the template under which they are constructed. They can't overhaul that template by just introducing new sets that break that mold while leaving all the other sets the way they are.

Keyes.

I think all the Master badges that require zero deaths are on one tier: Master of ITF, Master of STF, Master of LRSF, Master of 5SF, Master of 5TF, Master of LGTF. Which ones are easier or harder depend mostly on team composition. But for all of them, if you have enough overkill to do the task force at all, you have enough to do it without getting killed if you're moderately careful.

I think Master of Apex is easier, and Master of Tin Mage is harder that the zero-defeat badges mostly due to the Director 11 fight. Either you know how to do it or you don't, and accidents can happen even with nearly perfect tactics. Its also harder to assemble an Tin Mage than, say, an ITF.

I think both Master of BAF and Master of Lambda are harder than Master of TM: BAF because of Separated and Lambda because of Lambda Looter, both of which I think is harder than Dodger.

Keyes is definitely harder than MoLam or MoBAF due to both Green Stuff and Loves a Challenge are at least as hard if not harder than Separated and Lambda Looter, because in both cases everyone (or at least everyone engaged in the last fight) must all perform perfectly. That isn't true for Separated and Dodger.

I don't have MoUnderground yet, but based on what I've seen once people get the hang of it my guess is MoU will probably be roughly on par with MoLam and MoBAF.

In beta I called Time Manipulation the Willpower of buff/debuff sets, with all that implies.

Interesting. I thought the purple patch would shift the res procs too low to be effective, but its worth a second look.

To soft-cap defense under DR requires about 75%ish defense. I *think* the pillboxes offer 25% defense, so a soft-cap scrapper plus the pillbox might have gotten there or close to there. That would be helpful, as would the Regeneration buff. A scrapper or brute sitting in the bubble might have the survivability to tank at least one AV without insps. If you can lead them there, that then makes it a straight up damage race.

The big problem with a brute is DR really hurts fury: if you manage to get something like say +170% from fury and about +100% from slotting that +270% damage (370% total) would be reduced to about +170%, or 270% total. That's rather low for a brute: it would be the equivalent of a scrapper under-slotted with +80% damage. I guess the spiders do deal a lot more damage than I give them credit for.

You know, although I knew about the bubbles, I didn't think to use them. Must have completely slipped my mind. Now that the badge-pressure is off, I might give that another go.

I figured if anyone else had found a way to do this, you'd probably be one of the few.

Do you say this to convince other people, or yourself? I ask because either way it doesn't seem to be working.

Actually, there's no reason specifically that they should. In fact, they shouldn't. The fact that they do is an accident of history: they often have gigantic DPA and that was something that happened back when the devs literally didn't understand the concept of DPA (and for that matter, neither did the players really).

Castle specifically increased the ranged modifier to be higher than the melee modifier partially to eliminate the "blapper trap" on blasters: Blaster melee attacks were sufficiently better than ranged attacks that the devs felt that *encouraged* blapping, and because blapping requires a lot more skill to pull off that was also encouraging blaster deaths in the same way Defiance 1.0 was encouraging blasters to deliberately hang around at low health which increased the likelihood of death.

The intent of the damage modifer increase was to try to *equalize* the value proposition between melee and ranged attacks so there wouldn't be a strong obvious damage dealing preference between the two. It kind of worked, to a degree.

People for a long time thought that the melee attack advantage was a reward for taking on the risk of being in melee, forgetting that advantage was never put in there deliberately. Its also been deliberately softened: that's why all or nearly all the 0.67 melee attacks have longer animations now.

Beautifully so. Its more powerful than it should be, but not so powerful it demands a post-live nerf. That's as close to perfection as you can get in a set, if you want the strongest possible set. Anything stronger would have been nerf-batted by now.

Being consistently irrelevant is one thing, but could you at least be timely with your irrelevancy. Oh my god, Build Up generates huge numbers every couple of minutes! I guess blasters have to suck then.

If Black Scorpion used that argument on me I would have Second Measure slap him in the face. But Black Scorpion isn't an idiot, so I don't have to worry about that one.

The thing is we're not talking about a Mids contest here, we're talking about the willingness of the devs to alter modifiers. They were willing to bring dominator modifiers to within 7% of blaster modifiers which means they are valuing an entire control set as being worth 7% of a damage modifier, *or* they are saying blasters are at the damage ceiling and even if they deserve more damage they cannot give it to them.

A control set is not worth 7% of a damage modifier, which leaves just the one other possibility.

Which archetype has the better debuffs between blasters and dominators I feel safe in saying as exactly zero percent chance of having an impact on the balance discussions between the two archetypes. Its far outside the realm of having a material impact.

Concentrated Strike's chance to instantly recharge Power Siphon is 20%. CS's recharge is 20s base. The odds of PS being up when FE recharges, assuming a 90s recharge on FE, are not bad.

Authoritatively, Blasters are damage dealers not ranged damage dealers. I've been saying it for years, and I also have a quote from Castle on the subject stating that as the dev official position on Blasters (which I assume hasn't radically changed since his departure). Blasters have ranged offense and melee offense because their design is to have offense, period. If their design was intended to be ranged offense, they wouldn't have so many melee attacks.

The problem with this design element is that blasters are *also* intended to *leverage* range. Range does reduce damage: critter ranged modifiers tend to be 60% of their melee modifiers, so if you force a critter to use ranged attacks damage will go down. Ranged attacks also tend to be AoEs more often than melee ones and that also reduces the damage per second output of the critter (relative to one target) due to the AoE balance modifier.

And that problem has two components to it. First, it means to get the offensive ability blasters are supposed to get, they have to sacrifice the limited mitigation they are intended to also get. As any blapper knows, your sole mitigation at this point is kill speed and attacks with a ton of mitigation. That's why so many blappers took air superiority. It was often our entire defensive "set."

The other problem is that in a quirk, staying at range can expose you to more mez. Mez is more commonly a ranged attack, and in melee critters will often switch to attacks that don't have mez, or have less mez. That's not 100% true across the board, obviously, but it seems to be true statistically. Unless you're standing right next to the tank and eating a lot of AoE, you're statistically more likely to be mezzed at range than in melee range, which is weird, and not so good for blasters.

The overall problem of blasters having melee offense but being encouraged to stay at range is, I believe, another symptom of Blasters being defined by what they are not supposed to be, rather than what they are supposed to be. If they were supposed to be explicitly the best melee damage performers, I think the contradiction in blaster range preference would be more obvious. As it is, the fact that blasters *have* and *can use* strong offensive melee and are also encouraged to stay at range isn't seen as a blatant contradiction, its just seen as an option. They have it, but its up to them to decide to use it. If they do, there is a trade off. At least, so I believe the thought process goes.

If blasters were defined in terms of being, provably, the best offensive performer at melee and at range, I think its obvious things would be different. You only have to look at dominators to see what happens when an archetype is defined by what it is and not what it is not. Dominators *are* supposed to be offensive archetypes, roughly balanced between control and attack as scrappers are attack and defense. So says the devs. So their offense was changed to be less up and down through domination and their damage modifiers increased substantially, both melee and ranged.

Worth noting that blasters have only a 7% modifier advantage in ranged and about 5% advantage in melee modifier over dominators, and dominators have control. Blasters can more easily make full ranged or full melee chains, but dominators with strong control can often just enter melee range and use all their attacks in a full hybrid chain.

The box that blasters live in is, I think, bracketed by Dominators, Scrappers, and Corruptors. And its a very small box.

I would tend to disagree, because the devs were willing to create an innovative way to increase tanker damage with bruising, and in fact dramatically raised the tanker damage mod from launch as well. While people think the devs don't look at Stalkers as much as they should, when they did they had no compunction about increasing their damage or their team synergy. It doesn't specifically seem like there is an off-limits rail for either tankers or stalkers, with the exception of the AoE rail for stalkers.

Its hard to say if Defenders are pigeonholed, because they've never had significant enough trouble to be able to observe the devs thought process on balancing them. In fact:

That may be true, but its an argument *against* pigeonholing when one archetype starts intruding into another. If Defenders were in a pigeonhole with Corruptors on one side of it, the devs would be much more cautious about making sure Defenders didn't leave the box towards Corruptors.

Pre-ED I used pulling to try to solo them on my blaster: you could pop some lucks for survivability and just drone one to work on the other. Post ED I couldn't stack enough insps to make that viable on a blaster, even with range-boosted snipes: it was too unpredictable when they would catch up to you and take a shot at you, or break off aggro. A melee archetype could do it though.

Separate from that though, a heavy all by itself doesn't seem to do enough damage before it gets killed, unless you draw all the aggro onto yourself and then the question is can you make a build that is survivable enough and that has enough supplemental damage. Moreover, we're talking about the Heroes in AV, not the Villains, which means you'll be using the spiders not the mechs. Their punching power seems a bit lower.

Have you actually done it with a villain + mech, and if so with what villain?

Comparatively speaking, it does. And here every little bit helps. If you are around the 170 dps that MA seems to do with good chains then against a +2 AV, which you can get with Alpha and an ultimate, your damage is down to about 135 dps not counting resistances. That is only 35 dps above the 100 dps regen rate of a level 54 AV. Even very small increases in damage above that rate are noticeable because you are operating so close to the regen rate. Fire Melee is a whole lot faster because of that.

The Lore pets can make that moot, though. They aren't affected by DR, and even something like tactics can radically increase their damage output due to their base 50% chance to hit.

Except this is not the end, this is the beginning. There's no "again" in an arc intended for the very beginning. Updating the intro arcs so Arachnos doesn't factor into them strongly would make no sense when players would subsequently venture past them into arcs that *are* heavily influenced by Arachnos.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The problem is that Blasters are *not* the *only* damage specialists. They are the damage *exclusionists* (or nearly so in most cases). There are (at least) three other archetypes that also specialize in dealing damage: Scrappers, Stalkers, and Brutes. But they specialize in *melee* damage. Blasters are the ranged damage kings, but not the total damage kings.

But getting back to the whole "critters tend to clump up" thing, range is an offensive advantage only when getting into melee range is a significant disadvantage. And if the critters are all mostly in one place, its not: once you are in melee range of one critter, you are usually only a couple of footsteps away from all the other critters.

And even when you look at the tools blasters have in terms of damage, you see oddities. Its the *melee* archetypes that have AAO, not blasters. Its the melee archetypes that have Fiery Embrace, not blasters. The melee archetypes get Power Siphon, they get Rage, they get Follow Up. I find it peculiar that *most* of the self buffs related to offense are powers that *melee* archetypes get, but not blasters. That's not counting any of the ally buffs that happen to buff the caster also, like say Fulcrum shift. Leaving those aside, the best damage utility powers are in the melee archetypes, not blasters. And the *only* explanation that fits the facts is that the devs are afraid to buff blasters, but not afraid to buff melee. There is no other logical explanation. And I think some of that fear is justified, but most of it is not.

Honestly, I think so long as Fire Manipulation has Build Up and Fiery Aura has Fiery Embrace, you cannot make the case that the devs honestly, genuinely want blasters to be the best damage specialists. They want them to be damage exclusionists. They want blasters to only deal damage. They don't care how much.

And not to sound like I'm piling on here, but I don't think the devs have ever actually cared all that much. At least, not enough to make it a priority to resolve. Even when they were crafting Defiance 2.0, it seemed they were tentative about giving blasters too much damage. I have never seen them to be tentative about giving anyone else too much damage. In beta, things always seem to do too much damage and then are dialed down. Except blaster primaries, and except for Defiance 2.0.


Sometimes, knowing the numbers intimately gives you a perspective into the design you don't necessarily want to have. Question: how many targets do you need to average within the radius of AAO before it outperforms Build Up on average? Answer: slightly more than one. One??

Of course, Shield Defense is more offensively focused than, say, Super Reflexes. Is it more offensively focused than Energy Manipulation? Apparently so.

I think the problem you had, and its a problem I think you tend to have with introductory content, is that the devs tend to assume in most of the low level content that whatever your backstory from the perspective of getting to the point of becoming a hero or villain in the game your real adventures mostly start with the beginning of the game. The game doesn't assume you've had decades of adventures and are now taking a vacation in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. They don't assume you have already decided a trajectory for your character. They assume you're mostly a blank slate, and will adapt to the story line.

That's not always a safe assumption, but there's no way to make any other assumption that will work for even a tiny percentage of the players, unless you make the stories themselves be such blank slates there's little story in them.


Personally, I don't mind the villain side intro story too much. I think it does a good job of easing people into the game which is its primary purpose. I do think that the mechanical criticism that in trying to string the player along in a step by step tutorial it can introduce things too late relative to just blandly telling me up front is valid. I haven't put enough thought into it to have an opinion on the best way to resolve that, though.

Incidentally, I didn't feel the arc was forcing me into the pigeonhole of being a shallow opportunist myself. I thought it left a door open to being a crafty opportunist interested less in "hitting it big" and more in playing along to expose what was going on. It didn't specifically address whether I was forced into cooperating with Arachnos, or was willing to play along with them as well to keep the game in motion. I did tell them to stuff themselves at the end, the option of which I thought allowed me to assert that I wasn't serving Graves and I wasn't serving Arachnos either, I was just trying to expose what each was up to for my own purposes.

That's fixable. Just make the HoT a Cur instead of an Abs. As a 0.0021 Cur, I believe it would always be 0.21% of total health, no matter how much max health was buffed (or debuffed).

I love the show *because* its part awesome, part wacky. Then again, I like the movie Xanadu.

I don't think ultra-high regeneration resistance makes sense for the Regeneration set. First because I think the basic argument for it isn't really strong, and second because I think it won't even do what the proponents of the resistance think it will.

First, there is the issue of the argument. The argument tends to revolve around two assertions:

1. Regen is the singular critical component of Regeneration's mitigation.

2. SR's DDR demonstrates that you're supposed to be able to retain such critical components of your mitigation without being significantly debuffed.

Both assertions are false. First of all, regen is not the singular critical component of Regeneration's mitigation. About one third of it comes from healing - reconstruction and the heal within Dull Pain - and only a bit more than a third comes from regeneration from all sources. The rest, a little less than a third, comes from +health and its resistances.

Second, SR's DDR keeps getting held up as "proof" of some kind or precedent of some kind that its ok to basically make something almost immune to debuffing if the thing "relies" on that debuffing. That's utterly false: if I thought that was the reason for the devs adding DDR to SR *I* would have objected to it and asked them to remove it.

The problem with SR is almost unique, especially when DDR was added. SR's damage mitigation is almost completely focused on defense, unlike almost any other set. And if that defense is debuffed not only does it take more damage, it also takes more debuffs, becaue avoidance is its only defense to debuffs (pre DDR). So SR was almost uniquely vulnerable to cascade failure. A *single* debuff landing on SR could kill it, because that single debuff could debuff defense enough to make it so much more likely for other debuffs to land that its entire defensive wrapper could disappear rapidly. For this cascade failure situation to occur, three things must be true:

1. You rely on something almost exclusively for protection.

2. Debuffs have a disproportionate effect on reducing its effectiveness.

3. Those debuffs are both common and increase the ability for future debuffs to land.

Cascade failure was almost exclusive the domain of SR scrappers when DDR was first added, and it was due to the fact that unlike damage resistance which resists its own debuffs, defense avoids debuffs and that avoidance can be debuffed simultaneously with its damage avoidance. DDR reduces, or nearly eliminates cascade failure.

Now, doing so could also eliminate *any* ability for damage to land, but that's also not a problem with SR. SR is still vulnerable to tohit buffs which cannot be resisted (by the target) or avoided. They are, in effect, autohitting unresistable defense debuffs. SR is also vulnerable to non-positionally typed attacks, non-positional psi in particular. So eliminating cascade failure doesn't eliminate all ways to make SR vulnerable: non-positional psi would still hit, tohit buffs would still negate defense, and autohitting damage would still land (i.e. caltrops).

Is *any* of this applicable to Regen? Not really. First, Regen doesn't rely exclusively on regeneration, so even when all of it is debuffed away Regen still has resistances, +health, and healing. Second, regeneration (the mechanic) isn't vulnerable to cascade failure. However, vulnerable Regen is to regeneration debuffs, it doesn't get *more vulnerable* when regeneration debuffs land. Regeneration debuffs also have the exact opposite mechanical effect as defense debuffs. In the same way that defense stacks in an accelerating manner, with defensive buffs being incrementally stronger as they are stacked on more defense, defense debuffs proportionately affect things with high defense more than things with low defense. A 5% defense debuff means almost nothing to someone with no defense, but to someone with 40% defense it means a 50% increase in incoming damage. With regeneration the opposite is true. -100% regen is meaningful to someone with low regeneration, but almost meaningless to someone with 1000% regen. Higher regen dilutes debuffs, while higher defense magnifies defense debuffs.

Basically, using the SR argument is a losing proposition for Regen. Even mentioning it is actually a better argument against having debuff resistance as it is in favor. I can't even imagine why you'd want to include SR in any discussion of getting debuffs: it would be better to pretend SR didn't exist in any such discussion.


Tossing the SR argument aside, Regen might need regeneration debuffs for its own unique reasons, and here the argument is potentially far better. In the past, regeneration debuffs didn't even exist, but as they have been added to the game they have been added at sometimes extremely high levels. At those levels Regeneration's intrinsic ability to dilute them is partially or totally negated. Personally, I'm not fond of such super-high debuffs but that's a separate argument (and I address it below). The question is whether Regen deserves debuff protection because those levels of regeneration debuff are excessive.

Here we get into a question of what sort of threats exist for different sets and to what degree those threads should be common or uncommon. Psionic damage exists for many resistance sets that lack psionic protection. Tohit buffs exist for defensive sets. The question is are regeneration debuffs so common and so strong that they stand out as being a materially higher threat than psionic damage and tohit buffs and things of that ilk? So far, I haven't seen an argument that addresses that point, except in the end game which I'm going to address separately. And personally, in the conventional game, I don't think you can make a case that it is.


Setting all that aside, there's the question of whether its even a victory to convince the devs to add ultrahigh regeneration debuffs. And the answer is, I don't think so. You have to ask why regen debuffs exist in the first place? They didn't exist when the game was launched, they were added later. One of the questions I asked Statesman when he was here was "why are there huge amounts of defense debuffs in the game but no regen debuffs" and he said they were specifically working on adding them to the game. They released in the very next issue. And the reason was specifically because debuffs are intended to hurt, and they are intended to hurt different things in different ways. The fact that regeneration was practically impossible to debuff meant the only things that could kill a Regen were things with ultrahigh burst damage, and those things can kill everybody. Having no weaknesses at all was a problem for Regen which regeneration debuffs were intended to address.

So what happens when you add 95% regen debuff resistance to Regen and basically take that away? You prompt the powers team to add more and more regeneration debuffs to compensate. Its inevitable: if regeneration becomes highly to regeneration debuffs, you have to add more of them. That's what they are there for: to hurt Regen. If they can't, they'll get cranked upward until they can. Or more likely, they will become more common rather than more powerful, so they can stack. That's somewhat of a pyrrhic victory, and in the meantime everyone else will just have to deal with being constantly bombarded with regen debuffs, just as they are now constantly bombarded with defense debuffs as a legacy of the last time a game mechanical arms race took place (and is still ongoing).


For the most part, I think Regen is fine in the conventional game, and has been for quite a while. But I'm not saying I think there's no room for improvement, especially in the end game. There's no question that in the end game Regeneration is at a disadvantage. It normally holds an advantage in having its protections split up between multiple things that require different debuffs, and some that can't aren't debuffed much at all. The end game stuff is getting super-saturated with debuffs, and the problem with regen is that it can be simultaneously hit with regeneration debuffs and recharge debuffs and reisstance debuffs and defense debuffs and the combination of all of them can cause Regen to catastrophically fail. But is there a way to address that without overbuffing Regen in the conventional game from level 1 to 50? I think there is.

The one thing that isn't debuffed heavily in the end game most of the time is heal strength. Recharge is, and that can neutralize a heal all by itself, but heal strength is less commonly debuffed and doesn't need to be *because* recharge can be. We can exploit that to provide Regeneration with some end game cover that won't cause an arms race. The secret is to convert some of Regen's regeneration into a Heal Over Time.

Suppose we take Integration, say, and we take the +100% regen that is enhanceable and turn it into a heal over time. That 100% regen would equate to 0.42% health per second. Integration ticks every 0.5 seconds, so what if we converted that buff into a 0.21% heal.

That would give you the same amount of health over time, and ticking every half second you wouldn't even notice it as a heal really: it would look an awful lot like regeneration. Heal enhancements would buff it just as much as they would have regeneration. You'd get the same amount of heal back. But it would be completely immune from regeneration debuffs. What's more, it would also be completely immune from recharge debuffs: you can't debuff the tick interval of a toggle.

In effect, *some* of regen's regeneration would be immune from debuffing (normally: heal strength debuffs would work on it in theory), and the rest would still be vulnerable. This is a lot better than giving huge amounts of regen debuff resistance because no matter how much you ask for, the devs can simply add more debuff strength. Its not like they are unwilling: they are already fine with adding -1000% regen debuff. The thing is, though, that regen debuffs would still work against Regeneration, so we haven't nullified them: they would work, but only to a limit. Some percentage of Regen's regeneration could be lost to debuffs, but not all of it. That makes a lot more sense because this means regen is still vulnerable to debuffs while leveling, but isn't overly vulnerable to debuffs in the end game.

I'd probably do something similar to Instant Healing: some stays regen, some goes heal over time. I'd probably skew the ratio in favor of HoT, just because of the point to Instant Healing which is to provide something close to but not exactly tier 9 class protection.


It should sound vaguely familiar, this separating regeneration into a debuffable part and a not debuffable part. Its the same concept that underlies Elusivity, just adapted for Regeneration. I'm not the only one that has suggested it, although I've thought about it since long before Time Manipulation.

I didn't know they made patch cables that reached that far.

It was added a while ago, so I took a stroll down memory lane and watched a few recently. That's why Bem up there was on my mind. If it wasn't for that, my response to "Eh, when i accepted the EULA i lost my right to assemble" would have been:


No Disassemble!


So you can thank Netflix for that one.

This is unfortunately not far from the truth. Blasters are the only archetype, in my opinion, that is defined more by their limits than by their capabilities. Until that changes, I don't think the devs will ever genuinely be in a position to grant performance parity to blasters.

I recognize that one of the major hurdles is a balance-significant one. Of all the things players can do, only one of them really earns rewards: damage. Kills generate rewards. Buffs don't, debuffs don't, and not even unlimited survivability can generate rewards in the general case. Only damage can do that. All the other things can do is help damage. So if your target for defense is X, and you end up giving someone 100 times X, or worse Granite Armor, that is only a minor problem in the grand scheme of things: Granite Armor doesn't show up as even a blip in their data mining statistics.

But you give blasters twice the damage they have now, and that would create a game-breakiingly large spike in their performance numbers. So its for Blasters, and *only* for Blasters that the devs' aim must be true. And I don't think they trust their own aim in that context.