Arcanaville
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Quote:I guess it depends on your definition of "close." I was fiddling around with my SR build and tried to see what I could do in terms of +health, and with very minor tweaks I was able to beef up the slotting in Aid other and adjust the slotting in Aid self, physical perfection, and Health to get four sets of four Numinas in there. That grants a total of +24% heal. With Spiritual Alpha I can get an additional 33%, for a total of +57% heal. The bottom tier Destiny rebirth core epiphany +health buff is about 5% (Mids lists it at 4%, but its rounding down: its 4.7%). That buff is affected by both Alpha and invention bonuses, so the bottom tier buff is +7.4% health. The build starts off with 148.9%, so that would mean at worst it would have 156.3% health. Half the time it would have at least 163.7% health. That's not the cap (~80%) but its not bad.Originally Posted by Werner
I think two can and should (Invulnerability, Regeneration) and two others can but shouldn't (Willpower, Shield Defense while One with the Shield is up). Did I miss some tricks?
I think going Rebirth Radial Epiphany is better in the long run, but I think it might be possible to push that number into the 160s definitively. Just not exactly sure how yet.
Interestingly, even if I don't go Rebirth Radial, I think this new build is actually better. It trades some recovery and regen, but ends up with marginally higher defenses and the same amount of net regen in points. When regen is the same in points and health is higher, that's a win for +health period.
Its 3.7% more survivable, but hey, that's almost as good as slotting a Shield Wall +3% res IO, so its tempting to respec into it. The only problem is it will be kind of expensive, since it uses five partial sets of Shield Wall, up from two. It also finally beats Iggy's version of my build, haha! -
Quote:Well, I don't think you fully grasp the complexity of the idea, but that shouldn't stop you from thinking about it. Everyone starts off ignorant, including me. Everything I know, or think I know about this subject is something I've learned, starting from back when I knew nothing. Its ok to ask questions as long as your goal is to strive for honest answers.Originally Posted by Kangstor
Well I already know devs won't look at this thread or even if they did they won't take it consideration since probably they opted the the choice out a long time ago. Its just I missed old SWG (partly because of new SWTOR release coming close) and was getting this kind of things filling my head recently and just needed to get it out of my system. Responses were not bad either (neagitve or positive they had a certain maturity level. Well maybe except one)
For all I know you're the person that invents the solution to the problems of making such a system that gets implemented in a live MMO. I just think its unlikely.
I should also point out that in spite of the fact that I say this is an incredibly difficult problem to resolve, and that most avenues to attack it have critical failures, I think after thinking about it for a *very* long time I could do it, albeit with a completely different way to structure powers in the game (and a lot of new mechanics). I don't think this is impossible in principle, I think its so hard its impossible to even know how hard without actually attempting to untangle all the knots in the problem. -
Quote:It would be cool, but in most MMOs it would also be avoidable. Can you imagine the uproar in this game if the devs added non-optional opponents designed to actually be difficult to defeat no matter how strong you designed your build?. Its a social dynamic thing: when this game was young the Praetorian arc was considered a good challenge. At some point, that changed to being a tedious and sometimes impossible to solo speed bump. I actually watched it happen unfold in real time.Originally Posted by Shagster
Which starts me thinking how cool it would be if there could be an algorithm in the game that could produce an opponent tweaked to be an extra challenge for a given character, for "special occasions".
Like, at the end of a storyarc, Nemesis deploys a robot specially made to fight your character. It gets a +20% resist bonus to your primary damage type and it's attacks are typed to where your Defense / Resists are weakest. Could also be used for story ideas like a Malta assassin specifically prepared for your character, and so on.
Probably would be way too programmer-time intensive to implement for a gimmick that, to be fair to the players, should only be used rarely.
But I would love it if in some future Storyarc, Dr. Aeon dialogues "You think you've got me, $CharacterName? Hah! This robot has been designed to resist your $AttackPowerset attacks! I made is specifically to fight you and your powers! $CharacterName Slayer-Bot Deploy!"
An MMO with GM-like enforced challenges would have to somehow seek out and find a playerbase that actually wanted such challenges, and the MMO playerbase in general is primed to believe its their god given right to choose for themselves what content to play. This doesn't happen in PnP games because the GM is himself or herself a living breathing human being that you'd have to stomp all over. In a computer MMO, that GM would be an impersonal and easy to ignore machine.
We treat GMs as people that themselves have a right to gain something out of the gaming experience. They are usually a friend or acquaintance, and we trust them to at least try to provide a nominally entertaining experience as part of their role in the roleplay. But its obvious MMO players treat the computer as just a tool, and a tool has no feelings and no rights, and can be exploited without restraint. And since the human developers are just an extension of the computer, very often the developers also become things without feelings or rights. The only thing with rights is the paying player, and the attitude is consistent with that feeling.
That makes it hard to make a computer game that behaves like a GM. Even if you could make the technology work, the computer would tend not to have the respect of the players necessary to make it work. -
Quote:Honestly, I don't think there is such a thing among scrapper sets in terms on one set that can be built to be as good or better than all others in all circumstances. You're going to be hard-pressed to beat Invuln in a clean mish-mash of well-blended damage because most damage is smash/lethal, and Invuln eats smash/lethal damage as light snack. If you can build strongly enough, the smash/lethal/psi winner is probably Willpower, although Dark Armor is also a very strong choice. Its also very good at resisting endurance and recovery debuffs. In the old days, my perma-elude SR would laugh at sappers because even if they hit me, all my protection was tied up in a click that couldn't be detoggled, and it drained me to zero every couple minutes anyway all by itself. Today, one unlucky hit from a sapper and SR folds like an origami frog. Dark Armor still laughs at those. The mechanics of Dark Regeneration make it a bit rollercoaster, though.Originally Posted by Panikaze
Which secundary can provide maximum survivability of all scrapper sets?
The all-around quickest to immortality is SR, that can soft-cap fast. However, once it does it has trouble gaining any other tricks because resistance is much harder to build for than defense and most scrappers can hit the +health cap or get close to it. If you soft-cap Shields you end up with a somewhat stronger build, albeit its harder to soft-cap Shields.
I still think Regen is a joy to level, but its path to power once you hit level 50 is still tricky and expensive, and if you're not thinking about a leveling build I would mostly recommend Regen to min/maxers that want a challenge. -
Too many people to list, actually. Especially in-game some who probably don't want the recognition either, so I won't list them specifically but they know who they are.
I will say in terms of my earliest formative forum years I can think of a few people who managed, probably without knowing it, to set me on the path to where I am now. Amauros, the original SR scrapper god (before the Confessor, all hail the King) gave me a lot of insight into pre-launch SR and some inside dirt I wasn't originally a party to, and much of my eventual work on understanding all scrapper secondaries starts with him and his guides.
Before that the En/En thread/guide started by SnipeFu was probably the first discussion thread about a powerset combination worthy of the term "discussion." A lot of interesting debate, and information, and it made me think the forums might be good for something other than parody song lyrics. That thread actually caused me to sign up for the forums, so you can blame him.
And indirectly, going all the way back to the Powers Quantification Project, Topdoc pushed me to switch from informally measuring things to formally measuring and releasing information about things. He's actually in many ways a more dedicated quant than I am, and he goes way back literally to the beginning. I was experimenting with demorecord measuring of cast times about the same time he was, and you could say Arcanatime traces its lineage all the way back to the PQP.
And I'm going to mention someone that *didn't* influence me, but I feel deserves some mention here anyway. People who spent all their time on the US forums have probably known me as the Maven of Mathemagic for nearly seven years. But in a parallel dimension we know as "Europe" there was a player paralleling me and in some ways exceeding me on those forums, who I didn't even hear about until I think late 2005. I don't even know if he still plays or not, but Dr. Rock deserves some mention here because he was doing a lot of what I was doing up to about 2006 and getting a lot less credit for it. He even wrote a damage mitigation comparison *program* that I think might still be floating around somewhere, something I never had the energy to do.
There's also a ton of players past and present who remind me why I do what I do even when it sometimes seems like a lot of work for something I pay to entertain me. People like BuffyASummers who hasn't been around for a long while (at least on the forums), people like Stupid_Fanboy who was more active in the past but is still around now, and people like Zombie Man who I've clashed with in the past at times but does a great service to the community with his guides. In naming them, I'm probably doing a disservice to the many others I've looked upon as examples to try to match but haven't mentioned: I'm sorry about that.
And yeah, Snowglobe, your badge guides count so its ok to be mentioned in the same breath as me.
I also should mention Castle, who was not the first dev I ever talked to, but was probably the first dev to talk to me as a relative equal (way back in CoV beta, probably before he knew any better, heh). I learned a lot about the game from him, and I tried to return the favor whenever possible. But between Castle, BaB, and pohsyb, all of which have moved on, I know probably more about the game than anyone outside the four walls of Paragon Studios. The current devs continue to treat me nicely, but they were the first three to let me peek behind the curtain (after I cut a hole in it and set it on fire, of course). If my understanding of the game is valuable, they deserve at least some of the credit for that.
There are a lot of great people who make this game: producers, writers, artists, and I love our current dev team, but I bet there's not a quant out there that wouldn't kill to have an afternoon alone with the one-time lead powers person, the one-time lead animator, and a core programmer of the game engine, free from restrictions on what they can talk about. I consider myself very lucky to have had those three people count as friends of mine, even with the professional distance required.
I also have to thank Positron in here, even though the dude still doesn't answer all my PMs, for something. However, I can't say what that thing is. Thanks anyway.
Basically, the devs have made it possible for me to know everything I do now, and the players here and in-game remind me why I even care to know everything I do now. -
Quote:Within the context of discussing them as applicable to the scope of MMOs, an open powers system in any game including a wargame would have to at least satisfy six requirements:Originally Posted by Another_Fan
What would you consider an open powers system in a wargame ? If I have a well defined question it will make it much easier to provide an answer.
1. There is a system whereby players construct entities with abilities from a list of abilities.
2. To within a reasonable degree, the list of abilities is not trivially restrictive in scope. Obviously if I make a game where you can only take one of a hundred attacks, and all hundred are numerically ultimately identical, that's not really broad scope for the choices involved.
3. The abilities materially affect the ability to complete game tasks in non-trivial ways.
4. The abilities can be selected and combined *after* the game tasks are known.
5. The system does not restrict which abilities can be taken in combination, or has extremely minimal such restrictions, although it can have rules for synergistic combinations that contain both advantages and disadvantages.
6. The way the abilities work obeys precise predefined rules without the need for human arbiters.
To not be a *bad* example of an open powers system, it must at least satisfy three additional requirements:
1. It does not obviously funnel players into only a few optimal choices.
2. It does not rely solely on rock-paper-scissors balancing in PvP only (although this can be a significant part of the system, it cannot be the *only* basis upon which its balanced).
3. It should generate a spectrum of performance results that are not only superficially dissimilar. Its fine if it can generate very bad results for the player with bad decisions, it just cannot generate only a few obvious optimal ones and it cannot literally be designed to generate only homogenous ones.
The trump card of most PnP games is #4 above. No matter how you min/max a character, the GM can always shift the playing field to one where you are strong, but not optimal. And in fact its a presumption that the purpose of a good GM is to challenge players without assassinating them, which means almost by definition no matter what you make, the GM is going to throw you content that you cannot trivially handle. Rule #4 is extremely difficult to enforce in an MMO.
I would not say the list above is complete: its a complicated thing to judge game balance. But I would at least concede that any wargame that satisfied all the above strongly (particularly #2 in the first list and #3 in the second) would be worth additional study. -
Quote:Because a) self debuffs don't automatically translate to the pets and even if they did b) pets are immune from all recharge strength effects.Originally Posted by Leo_G
And how does Granite not debuff ranged? Because of the speed debuff?
The -30% damage would be important, if it wasn't for the fact that mastermind pets have an intrinsically higher damage modifier than tankers do in the first place which neutralizes much of that difference. Comparing a Granite/Mastermind pet to the offense of a mastermind is missing the point: its turning a Granite tanker into a credible ranged offensive attacker.
A broken combination doesn't have to do everything better than everyone. That's gravy. It just has to do way more than ever intended. If I made an archetype with 95% of blaster ranged damage and 95% of tanker damage mitigation strength, the combination would be inferior in damage to a blaster and inferior in damage mitigation to a tanker and bat-**** crazy awesome. -
Quote:One problem with commenting on suggestions like this is that I know virtually *any* combination of decisions is going to lead to a broken system, but the precise *way* you make them changes how they are broken. For example, you say a /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. Why? Pets and other entities always use their own damage modifiers. Controllers and Dominators don't have different damage scale pets.Originally Posted by Leo_G
Devil's Advocate...
If I read the OP correctly, your primary chooses which AT you'd 'technically' be and/or give you the choice of what inherent you can have.
A Stone Armor/ character would be automatically be categorized as a Tanker so /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. You can keep foes taunted to yourself up to cap, but pets bypass that cap and without support to keep your pets alive, they'd probably die eventually. The combo would be an aggro monster but probably not much else.
Conversely, if you change the game radically to implement that kind of thing, what happens to FireBlast/Robotics blasters. Do they get a complement of bots that all shoot from range with blaster modifiers and Defiance buffs?
In such a game blasters, defenders, and corruptors basically disappear. There's almost no reason to make one of any of them. All three have a ranged attack set, which means all of them can pick it as primary and then take blaster mods. Blasters have the highest health. Blasters have the highest ranged damage modifier. The isn't a really good compelling reason to make a blapper that doesn't have a defensive powerset, and there's only a very weak reason to trade better buff modifiers for better damage *and* higher health. If the trade between corruptors and defenders is even, and it might not even be, then the trade to a super corruptor with blaster health and the blaster modifier and damage cap would be better. Scorge is great in certain special circumstances, like using Blizzard. But I suspect having almost twice the maximum ranged damage potential will be better, and some corruptors will have an easier time getting there than blasters.
The thing to realize is that each powerset was designed in a particular way to match up with the kinds of other powersets it could pair up with. When you allow anything to be a primary and anything to be a secondary and any two to combine, you're going to pair up things not just not intended to be combined, but things designed on the *premise* that they would never be combined. And then you're going to have game-breaking problems.
And remember that all of this has to work from 1-49 played by average players slotting normal enhancements. How it breaks or doesn't break at level 50 is the least important concern. -
Quote:Most can't, but that's really besides the point. I asked people to think about *why* that powerset combination would be broken, because its critical to understanding how this game is constructed. Bodyguard was put in to give masterminds, with low health and no personal defenses, more survivability. Giving any tanker bodyguard, much less a tanker that can come close to capping resistances on everything, obviously breaks the design of bodyguard.Originally Posted by Nihilii
Standard MMs are more than able to keep the aggro cap of targets on them, thanks to their buff debuff secondaries, bodyguard, provoke and/or APP AoE immobilizes. Having stone armor instead of buffs debuffs would just lower damage in most situations.
Conversely, giving Granite tankers a ton of ranged offense that Granite itself cannot debuff breaks Granite. If you want to say that giving a mastermind granite level survivability is a non-issue, you're talking about an area of game design and game balance far outside the realm of reasonable discussion.
There are other more obvious performance-stretching combinations, but this one seemed to me to best illustrate the design-breaking issues intrinsic with allowing free form powerset and inherent ability combinations. -
Quote:I didn't say either game was a wargame, although Traveller did have expansions with wargame-like gameplay. That wasn't relevant to my point, because what I said was:Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I may be misunderstanding but HERO system isnt a wargame, and Traveller was only barely a wargame in that book 5 Highguard had rules for ship to ship combat.
a) I don't feel most if any wargames even *have* anything I would consider an "open powers system" in a close enough sense to this context (which means I cannot then mention any that have them) and
b) The examples people *most* talk about when talking about "successful" open powers systems are things like the HERO system. I have never seen anyone within the context of discussing game design bring up a wargame that they attempted to make the case did a better job of presenting and balancing an open powers system than the HERO system.
So if you want to mention one and make the case that as much as HERO is lauded for it when it actually fails to deliver it upon serious analysis, this game is a much better example, please do. I'm not a wargaming expert, so its entirely possible there exists such a game that I'm unaware of and no one has thought to mention in any debate about this subject I'm aware of. -
If Steelclaw Were An Arch-Villain...
Obviously:
He should award a Top Ten Reasons I Defeated Steelclaw badge if we farmed him ten times in a row. -
Quote:This game might be easy to you, at least you claim it is. However, it is objectively provable to not be trivial for most people who play it. We can see that in the data mining the devs do, and the changes they've made over the years.Originally Posted by Pureshadow2
Why did you even quote me? You didnt retort anything.
What you said, which I'll remind you because you seem to have forgotten already was:
What I said is yeah, if you just farm and do trials with friends this game is easy. I don't even know how you could notice what patches do when most don't affect farming and the itrials, which you said these days is all you do.Quote:I just farm and do trials with friends. Not really a challenge in this game and its getting a whole lot easier every patch
So just to make sure you don't miss the retort, since you missed it the last time, you implied this game was trivially easy, but I'm saying its only that easy for some, and not the majority of the playerbase. You say you just farm and iTrial, and I'm saying someone who does that doesn't have any real perspective on the challenge presented by the game.
You even go so far as to use as an example of how "easy" this game is an instance where you were -10 and healing the team, avoiding aggro completely. I don't even have to reply to that, my "retort" is just to point that out it, and let that statement speak for itself. -
Quote:Most war games do not have open powers system in the same sense we're discussing here. Actually, none of them to my knowledge have such systems that are required to be overseen my computerized systems.Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I don't follow you. Are you saying that all the developers of a single-character centered RPG need to do is copy the open power selection system used in "most" war games? If so, then no, it won't work, or someone would have done it with success. I also don't know what "most" of these war games you are referring to are.
The canonical example often brought up as a good open powers system is the HERO system, aka Champions. But that system only works because human being can constantly adjust to is imbalances, and more importantly because human GM can constantly toss challenges at the players that they are not optimized for and have no real ability to simply avoid. HERO would be a computerized disaster.
If you have human players willing to play the meta game "how can we make this work" almost anything is possible. After all, people played Traveller. But the requirements of computer MMOs are such that all of these examples are worth less than nothing. -
Quote:There's no challenge when you farm your way to the top, cherry picking what you fight, and then fight only with maximum power builds. If that's what you enjoy doing, great. If you don't enjoy doing it but you do it anyway, that's insane.Originally Posted by Pureshadow2
SS/FA is probably gonna be flavor of the decade.
I think this game has always been easy. Before ED your could just 6slot resistance and tank +8-10 level mobs.
Healing doesnt aggro.
Inspirations are op.
Incarnate powers are op.
Games adding more incarnate powers.
I just farm and do trials with friends. Not really a challenge in this game and its getting a whole lot easier every patch.
Actually playing through the regular content without twinked builds is still interesting, even though I know this game so well that I could actually tell you exactly what the data looks like for every critter in my gunsights. If I wanted to, I could play this game like Neo plays the Matrix. If I wanted to, I could shift my perspective so all I see is entity, entity, attribmod, attribmod.
I don't do that because that would be idiotic to do to something I want to enjoy playing. -
Quote:The fact that FOTM builds exist doesn't prove this game promotes them. Those are basically unavoidable, and they aren't always even rationally based decisions.Originally Posted by DreamsRazor
The game does promote, being the same. FOTM builds and how many SS/FA brute farmer threads are out there, bear this out.
This game does a decent job of promoting diversity, although it does not do it as effectively or as consistently as it could. Min/maxers tend to gravitate to certain kinds of builds for certain kinds of situations, but I think it says something when not even the min/maxers fully agree on the best builds for the best situations in all cases. Sure, if you're trying to optimize farming, then its basically maximize AoE damage, and that comes down to just a couple of factors: high damage AoEs with high target counts, high ability to self damage buff in some way, and enough damage mitigation to survive being attacked by the aggro cap.
But ask min/maxers in this game "what's the strongest build" period, and you'll have a fight on your hands. And among the min/maxers with any real brains you'll get a healthy fight, with the full awareness that "strongest build" is a vague target to begin with, and encompasses lots of things that can be done well by lots of things. In this game, if you ask "what's the best" the reply will be "best at what" and even if you answer that, there will probably still be questions.
The "perfect" character in City of Heroes would have very high damage mitigation to all types of attacks, have strong stealth, have the ability to taunt and placate, have high AoE, have high single target damage, have the ability to buff and heal themselves and their team, have strong foe debuffs, have strong mez, have mez protection, and have the ability to rez themselves and their team. Anyone missing any of those things is not perfect, and no one has all those things.
In some games, its possible to become the best at everything, or at least the best of everything that matters. That's still not possible in City of Heroes, which is why for all the talk that this or that is redundant or obsolete, most of the time most characters can make themselves useful on most teams. That is not to say that some characters aren't stronger than others in some way, or more versatile than others. But while I've been on teams that have not needed me in the literal sense, I have never in seven years been on a team that couldn't *use* me. Because chances are no one on the team can do exactly what I can do, and even when that happens no one can do it so well that they can do more of it than the team can make use of in all areas.
My longest running characters are also still the characters I play the most, going back to the very beginning. They are my Energy/Energy blaster, my MA/SR scrapper, and my Ill/Rad controller. All three play totally different, all three are totally different. Just those three characters alone provide a wider set of gameplay possibilities than both superhero MMO alternatives combined. And this game encourages me to make more. I'm leveling a mind/psi right now, here and there. She plays totally different. My Kat/invuln plays totally different than my MA/SR. My TA/A plays differently than any of my other characters, as does my MA/Nin stalkers, my Necro/Dark mastermind, by Energy/Dark brute, my Sonic/Energy blaster, my Ice/Cold corruptor, my Stone/Stone tanker. They are all different, and none of them are gimped for being different.
I'm not going to blow sunshine up anyone's skirt and say there are no balance problems in the game, and there aren't some powerset combinations that are obviously stronger than others in certain ways. There are, and there are. But this game's combination of enforced archetypes and powerset distinctions creates a game environment that comes the closest in my mind of all the MMOs I've played to encapsulating the Perl motto: "there's more than one way to do it." There's more than one way to make a really good, really strong character. And if you pick a random archetype, a random primary, and a random secondary, the chances are pretty good that is one of those ways. -
Quote:I will eventually, but since the players already have you on the ball at the moment I'm spending my time working on something a little more, shall we say three-dimensional.Originally Posted by Dark_Respite
EDIT: BTW, Arc, I still think some of my videos look stupid. Give it a try anyway. What do you have to lose?
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Quote:He seemed to have stealth when I encountered him, so that's interesting.Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
im not 100% sure, i need to look at how much stealth radius his power grants (ill prolly get back to this thread with that later today, just woke up lol)
edit: looking at calebs stats in AE it does not appear that he has any kind of stealth ability (stealth radius is marked as 0 ft. another interesting thing is that he has a fairly fast fly speed, around 37.3 MPH, i did a few tests to see how far i could see him and i could see him from around 55-58 yds, past 58 yards is when he fades our of view (i cant see him but i can still tab target him), i think hes just very hard to spot at night because hes somewhat dark colored and blends in very well and has a fairly fast fly speed (double checked on his powers and he doesnt appear to have any stealth powers, so im guessing hes just hard to find due to blending in with the background too well)
But you reminded me of something else I did when looking for him. First, I turned off my own stealth: I want him to see me and attack if nothing else. And two, I used TAB a lot: TAB can target things your own eyes might not spot, and Caleb is TAB-targetable when he gets close enough. -
Quote:One of the things I've always wanted to try my hand at is making CoH videos out of edited demorecords, but I just do not have the time to invest to get to the point of not looking totally stupid. But the closest I came to seriously considering it in recent times came when dual pistols came out: I wanted to make a video to the Nancy Sinatra song. I settled for writing a parody of that song in the beta, which now I can't even find which annoys me greatly.Originally Posted by Dark_Respite
*reads and immediately has to squash the notion of doing a video of the character to the Ricky Martin song*
That song is a slow floater right over the center of the plate, seriously. -
Quote:I'm not sure for certain who first used the term "soft cap" to refer to any other attribute in City of Heroes, but unless Dr. Rock beat me to it on the Euro forums, the first person to use the term "soft cap" in reference to defense in City of Heroes was probably me, and I used it occasionally to answer people's questions about "how much defense do you need to X." Prior to I7, critters had variable tohit. So people would ask how much defense do I need to floor everything in an invincible mission, say. Prior to I5, I would say that the worst case scenario by default would be a +5 boss who would have a base 100% tohit, which required 95% defense to reduce him to the 5% floor. But defense debuffs and tohit buffs would adjust that picture dynamically.Originally Posted by rina_
The statement was that an SR can ignore def debuffs. This is a wrong statement, it needs to be qualified to be accurate. The accurate statement is that an SR that builds to have a buffer against def debuffs can ignore them.
Soft cap means that an attribute is still increasable but will yield insignificant to no return afterwards. It's not called soft because it is fluffy or can be punctured by def debuffs. It's a term that has been used far longer than CoH exists.
Within the scope of City of Heroes, the term "soft cap" was originally used *not* as some think to refer to the fact that you can go higher but higher would have no effect. That was part of it, but the more significant aspect of the soft cap was also that higher values could help situationally. If you could buff defense higher than 95% but that would *never* have any better effect, that would not be a "soft-cap" that would be an "effective cap." The effective cap would be the point beyond which increases might be numerically possible but would do nothing.
Long before I7 which introduced the concept of base 50% critter tohit, we were using the term soft-cap for defense to refer to the amount of defense necessary for a particular situation: +3 missions, +2 AVs, hunting the turrets in Striga, etc. Each one had a different level of defense that was necessary to floor the attackers specified within that mission not counting dynamic effects like defense debuffs and tohit buffs.
The term was used infrequently until I7, when the term re-emerged essentially to refer to "45% defense" because all those different scenarios suddenly collapsed into just two: all standard critters from minions to AVs excluding pets and turrets from even con to +5, and everything else. However, when I7 came out I was quick to remind people that 45% was an *arbitrary* value situationally. More defense than the "soft cap" would help specifically against debuffs and foe tohit buffs, plus pets and turrets. The soft cap was soft, because more would be helpful, just situationally helpful. And there was no way to state what the effective cap was, because that was so highly variable. For SR today, the effective cap is about 50% defense against standard critters without tohit buffs. There's almost no way to stack enough defense to budge 50% SR defense below the mitigation soft cap of 45%. Unless the debuffs are autohitting and unresistable, in which case you're screwed either way.
Different games use the term "soft-cap" in different ways. In some games, the term is used to refer to the point of diminishing returns on an attribute. That is not how the term has ever been used here, and it would in fact contradict its usage here. In other games it refers to the point where a particular aspect of an attribute caps out, but the attribute as a whole doesn't. So a particular attribute might do two things, but one of them reaches its maximum at some point while the other keeps going. If the maxed attribute is considered the more important one, that point is sometimes referred to as a soft-cap on the attribute.
What they all have in common is the notion that the rule of thumb involving that attribute changes dramatically at that point, where upon increases beyond that point have either very small or situational benefit. But in City of Heroes, the term "soft-cap" has been used really only in one context: to refer to an attribute that can be numerically increased but increases beyond that point only have situational benefit and in most cases have no additional benefit. -
Quote:You can't ignore them when you are constructing a build, but you can construct builds that can ignore them in actual play.Originally Posted by rina_
Yes, you can ignore them after you did something specifically because of them, this is by definition not ignoring them as a whole.
There's a reason the soft cap is called "soft." -
Quote:Ah yes, back when there was no movement floor.Originally Posted by Vermain
Remember the good old days of RoF + Caltrops?
Ah, to return to innocence.
Dark Astoria, for those that haven't been here since launch, refers to the fact that at some point, someone realized that the devs, in a conceptual nod with unforeseen balance consequences, made the zombies in DA vulnerable to fire. And these same people realized that Fire/Energy blasters got an awful lot of fire damage and early build up, and could obliterate whole groups of DA before they could shoot back. And the groups in DA were really really big.
At one point you could rip through DA at speeds that would be respectable farming rates today, even given the fact the leveling curve was far worse then than now. You could walk into DA a 21 and walk out a 28 in an afternoon. -
Quote:If you were following along the conversation, which goes back three whole posts, the topic was centered around which archetypes have been involved in the general conversation of top performance in any particular area. Since I managed to beat an awful lot of players actually making serious attempts to reach the level cap fast, I legitimately (at the time) could make the claim that stalkers, contrary to some reports, were completely able to solo quickly, and when driven by a maniac could actually blast through missions very quickly.Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
If racing to the level cap was the best way to gauge performance, /FA anything would be the most powerful set in the game.
Times and circumstances have changed, but back then leveling quickly through running standard content - since there was no AE and no real sense of what good farming missions would be on the red side, and difficulty sliders and exemplar worked differently than they do now - was non-trivial.
Stalkers have their issues, and have had then since the beginning, but on the other hand they have never been as bad as some have claimed, and I've played stalkers since day negative forty two. -
Quote:When CoV released, I rolled a character in head start and decided to race the pack to the level cap, something I rarely do (try to level as fast as possible). I am pretty sure I was within the first seven people or so to the level cap of 40 on my server: there were not many people in that first group of fast levelers and we all hit 40 within a day or so of each other.Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
Peacebringers? Stalkers?
MA/Nin stalker. Keeping up with the brutes and bots. -
Quote:Well, I don't die often in the trials on my blaster either, and that's usually due to smart inspiration usage (and actually paying attention, which interestingly seems to happen more often on Lambdas than BAFs). If there are enough insps in the world to keep my blaster alive, there certainly are enough to keep a well-built regen alive. That doesn't specifically speak to the question of whether Regen is as strong as the other sets in the trials, just that it can be strong enough to succeed which is a somewhat different statement.Originally Posted by Crysys
I really didn't realize there was that much -REGEN on the iTrials. But as I've said before and will again, I don't die on iTrials. I solo crates/chambers all the time. I don't think the critters powers really matter all that much since once you get to 50+1 everyone is spamming incarnate powers left and right anyways. And at that level....even a blaster isn't gimped.
So no, don't feel gimped on the iTrials at all. I have now T4'd out a BS/Regen, a Elec/SD and a DM/SR scrapper on the iTrials. The BS/Regen still feels the most survivable to me and definitely does the most damage (although the Elec/SD with Shield Charge and Lightning Rod makes quick work out of whole spawns of IDF). -
Quote:I remember when the best giant monster solo killers were defenders. The only archetype that hasn't been talked about as being on the high end of the performance curve for a very long time is blasters. Last time "blaster" and "top performance" were used in the same sentence was from the time smoke grenade was still bugged, to the day in the distant past when Fire/Energy blasters discovered this place called "Dark Astoria."Originally Posted by Biospark
I am not trying to start a fight, just that my observations have shown me that folks who mainly play "self-sufficient" ATs like Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes fail to realize that what they can do is not the same as other ATs. And its not ONLY about skill.