Arcanaville

Actually, the very first numerical anything I did on the forums was an analysis of the game population, taking multiple measurements across all the zones at multiple times of the day, analyzing by level. Based on that I could come up with an estimate for blaster (and all archetype) density per combat level range, which allows an extrapolation of the creation rate (at least in terms of characters that leave the tutorial).

Its also possible to extrapolate from the archetype popularity data posted by BaB. In between, I've asked the devs occasionally on a couple of occasions, specifically within the context of discussing blaster improvements.

Any one of these things is subject to moderate error bars, but they all converge on the same range of values in the high 30s (percentage points), across many years. And its consistent with the notion that beginning players (especially beginning to MMOs) will often take the options described as having the best offense, without knowing how low or important defense might be in that game. And in the early game, that faith is rewarded because threats are too low to be a serious impediment to blasters.

Plus, in a game where lots of players take every travel power and use whirlwind as the prototypical costume change emote, shooting things from range tends to sound more fun regardless of numerical performance. Its not surprising that blasters are rolled very often.

Its actually part of a display structure we used to use for trade shows. The lumber ended up in my office when we stopped using it. I've used some of it for some spacers, one piece just sits next to my desk. Years ago there was a mild but credible potential threat to our office by someone (not an employee) and I kept the 2x4 *on* my desk for a few months: now I mostly use it to remind vendors that when I say I would be disturbed if they did a particular thing, "disturbed" may have a different meaning for me than it does for some of their other channel partners.

Also, its gotten more use from me than IE8 has.

Mine isn't solely based on numerical analysis. You specifically brought up the subject of balance within the context of advantages and disadvantages. You therefore have the obligation to at least mean something by that. If you mean the HERO system actually *implements* within itself a framework that presents the two in a way that the system itself makes a serious significant effort to value consistently, that's provably false. On the other hand, if you mean the HERO system has some qualitative, but impossible to quantify or objectively articulate property that makes it somehow function in a manner you call "balanced" but isn't quantitative balance, then bringing it up as an example is by your own definitions inappropriate, because if you can't articulate in what way HERO is balanced, how can it be a good example, or even a bad example, of anything?

What you are now saying is that you basically said here's this thing: it has properties I can't articulate, but if you tried to base an MMO on it there would be problems. Ok, that's not disprovable, but it also doesn't say anything. I always assume the poster is trying to say something rather than nothing. If the poster wishes to claim that they were not saying anything and that's why their post can't be false, I always accede to that assertion.

They decline in popularity relative to increasing combat level. But I don't think they are declining as a percentage of new characters being created. That number has been in the high 30ish percentage range since practically the day the game launched, and I've never seen a period of time from then to now when that was not true. Admittedly the last time I looked carefully was almost two years ago, so if they are in decline it would have to be within that time frame. And I don't think that is the case or Scrappers would have overtaken them in the devs own posted statistics more recently, unless *they* were also in significant decline, which I think is even less likely.

It can't work at all in non-survivable circumstances, but that's not the fault of Defiance's limitation if even without those limitations the situation is still not survivable. There are lots of situations where without D2.0 at all I'd be dead, but with D2.0 the situation converts to being very survivable. Situations with Malta that use flash bangs before I can defeat them, for example. 30 second stun with Malta around is often mortal without breakfrees, but its survivable with access to my primary attacks. Spawns with multiple Illusionists (but not specifically MI bosses) are often mortal situations because they can combine to perma-hold (also, at +1 the hold becomes theoretically perma if a single illusionist doesn't miss), but become survivable with access to two ranged and one melee attack (in my case).

It was a common misconception prior to D2.0 that mez was not just a kill on blasters, but an insta-kill, which was a silly misconception: anything with the damage potential to insta-kill you doesn't need to mez you. Mez tended to kill on moderate time frames, either by freezing you and then pelting you to death from range, or by allowing something like a Carnie Strongman to walk up to you and bash you over the head while you couldn't react. D2.0 generally gives blasters either a ranged immobilize or a melee knockback power, plus two primary long ranged attacks. That's enough to get blasters out of many dangerous situations. You're not going to farm 0x8 with it, but that's not what its there for.

Six-boxing constantly might be a drain on many people's hardware. It might be better to level-pact them in pairs, and PL three of them one at a time, if you aren't religiously opposed to PL.

I don't PL main characters I actually play, but I do PL them in test accounts to test power features. I'm not against PLing fillers in Premium accounts. Although I'd have to either do it in normal missions or buy AE access for all of them, since Premium doesn't gain XP in the AE by default.

If you're religiously opposed to PL, then the alternative is you roll six new characters that will level reasonably fast, level pact them each with one character in each of your six premium accounts, and then level each character in turn normally. When you've leveled those six to 50, you'll also have six fillers in the Premium accounts. Assuming premium can participate in level pacting.

Of course, this will require as much effort as it takes to level twelve characters to 50, but there are some short cuts. Running WSTs whenever possible for the initial XP burst will help. Double XP tokens could help: is it cheating if you're opposed to PL, but you level pact yourself then use a double XP token?

Hmm, maybe its better not to think about this too much. I might end up making a spreadsheet to lay out all my rules for playing the game, and who knows what nightmarish place that would lead to.

Not VIPs. Just you. Maybe a handful of other players.


I subscribe to cable. Oh but I also bought a TV. That's confusing. When did I buy the right to watch cable, so I can stop paying for one of them. Can someone help me out here, I lost the instructions to both.

Its probably put more players to sleep than all the Tsoo Yellow Ink Men in Talos.

I'm pretty sure mine paid for pizza last week.

I know, we'll give tankers brute damage, but in trade we'll have to reduce tanker damage mitigation to brute levels. We'll also reduce tanker health to brute levels.

But that would make brutes a little redundant, so we'll also increase brute health and damage mitigation to distinguish them from tankers. But we'll have to take brute damage away if we do that. I think a reduction to about tanker current levels will be about right.

This is kind of a radical change to the two archetypes, though. So we'll grandfather everyone. Everyone playing a tanker or brute now will keep their current numbers. But anyone making a tanker or a brute after that will get the updated numbers.

That would probably work for me. Although I'm worried the names aren't the most appropriate after the changes. I'll think about a solution to that, but in the interim lets just switch the two names and see about a more permanent fix down the road.

I have a feeling my experience with blasters has little chance of being inferior to yours. I've played and studied blasters at least twice as much as, say, Scrappers. They are, in fact, they only archetype that I've ever actually written guides about, back when I used to write guides.


And with all my powers rather than just three, without inspirations I would be just as dead. You need to find an example where three powers is ineffective but having them all would make a radical difference. Actually, to make your argument you'd have to find a lot of such examples: enough to prove the percentage point.

They gave you the option of playing Brutes. And they are awesome. Jeez what more do you want?

The simple answer is that everyone already kills almost as fast as can be balanced for, so blasters have limited headroom to buff damage.

To oversimplify greatly, the difference between two-shotting and one-shotting is that when you one-shot and you get to shoot first, you can reduce the amount of attacks you have to deal with to zero. One-shotting is a form of infinite damage mitigation. But there's no such thing as one and a half shotting. Its two shotting or one shotting. Anything that isn't one-shotting is two-shotting or higher.

That's a huge oversimplification to illustrate the more complex and subtle problem: blasters kill pretty fast, and they take a certain amount of damage and other foe effects during that window of time. But that time isn't evenly and continuously reducible. When you have combat taking twenty shots to defeat a foe, going down to 19 or up to 21 is pretty fine control over offense. But when you're averaging 3 shots, going up to 4 or down to 2 are enormous jumps in effectiveness. It doesn't take very much of a push to turn blasters from being pinatas to being alpha strike obliterators that literally take no return fire.

Case in point: way way back when I was leveling my main, back when dinosaurs walked the Earth, I fell into the content gap at 27. How did I crawl out of it? I hunted greens and blues in Talos. Why? Because green and blue minions could be defeated by the combo of Torrent + Explosive Blast, which meant I had a fairly reliable two-shot kill on them. *And* there were lots of big spawns of them in Talos, so I could create regular hunting loops through Talos (I used to orbit from the Natural Store west between the buildings and loop back up to about the Mutant Store). Even though I was attacking lots of Ink Men (and the occasional LT) who had lots of debuff and mez, they rarely got to use any of it on me. Bang Bang, I shot them down, Bang Bang, they hit the ground, and it was off to another spawn.

And its not like Energy Blast is a particularly high damage or AoE-focused blaster primary. But how much buff would it have taken for me to graduate up to doing the same thing to whites and yellows? Not much: maybe 20-30% increase in damage.

The original rate of combat, a feature many consider one of this game's more casual-friendly, superheroish, and MMO genre-breaking features when it was launched, also places blasters in a very tight corner between having so much damage they basically have unlimited damage mitigation through kill speed, and having so little protection that any damage they do take is potentially mortal. Where they are is actually not all that bad given the two very hot rails they are close to, its just that where they are isn't especially great either.

Some people believe the Earth is flat also.

This has nothing to do with situations like restrictive EULAs. This is really simple. If you believe you have purchased access rights to the content in Going Rogue, then you believe if you stop subscribing you should still have that access. If you believe you've purchased access rights to *all* the content released up to this point, then you should believe subscribing is itself meaningless, since it purchases no benefit (at least as it pertains to accessing the game).

If you believe that your subscription buys access to the game and that's why you subscribe, but you also believe you bought access to the content permanently by buying the boxed editions of the game, then you are in fact an idiot.

As to people who think using an unauthorized server to play the game not thinking that was illegal (which is different from knowing its illegal and doing it anyway), see flat Earth above.

To take this point in a serious direction, the difference between MMOs and PnP games isn't just the question of GM control. Its also that MMOs are shared consensus realities with a single set of rules while PnP games are really frameworks that thousands of small groups of players customize to some extent to generate a unique experience. Its unclear if the two are compatible with any level of technology, because there may be irreconcilable differences in culture. In PnP games, there is only a loose sense of being part of a larger world that encompasses all players playing campaigns in the same system. But in MMOs, there is a sense that everyone is playing in the same world with the same rules. It may actually be improper to compare a PnP "ruleset" with an MMO one because a PnP ruleset is really the sum total of a PnP framework and all of the collective (and sometimes unspoken) house rules that make up a gaming session. Those individual PnP rulesets may be too focused on the specific needs of its target group to be generalizable to an MMO.

In other words, the very things that make PnP game frameworks successful might make them impossible to translate into MMO mechanical systems and vice versa simply due to the scale. Its more likely that with infinite technology PnP games can evolve directly into interactive custom simulations still focused on a small number of people, while MMOs evolve into more generalized simulations of large scale environments with less customized and more generalized physics.

Or to put it another way, it may be that the fundamental difference between PnP games and MMOs is not the human GM or the rules or the computer technology, its that in PnP games the players and the GM ultimately craft the experience in conjunction, whereas in an MMO because of the sheer number of players all of them submit to the will of a singular authority to dictate the experience. These are two logically incompatible experiences, driven by scale. An MMO played with PnP-like participation fragments into many small experiences rather than one consensus one. A PnP game played with MMO-like participation becomes too authoritarian within small groups. That's a difference in psychology not technology and may not be ultimately resolvable by technology.

Not really, but then again none of that is really news to me. I'm just happy they finally started talking about the thing, because its so relevant to discussions about the intended direction of Freedom as it pertains to veterans and subscribers (and veteran subscribers).

You have no idea how often I warn the devs that saying anything other than the absolute minimum irreducible truth is likely to be misinterpreted, often deliberately, by a possibly large number of people, and its something they should avoid whenever possible.

But either way, its blatantly obvious that we as customers bought boxed editions and booster packs that included content AND we pay a subscription that entitles us to access that content. NO ONE has ever bought access rights to anything explicitly because only subscriptions grant access to any part of the game. Anyone who thinks they "bought" access to anything in this game is essentially saying their subscription dollars are just a donation that don't buy anything.

The more I hear the "logic" behind the argument that all the content in boxed editions is "bought" and therefore should be "owned" by players whether they pay a subscription or not, the less I think its a good idea to even entertain the notion. Its a sense of entitlement I increasingly think isn't just nonsensical and safe to ignore, but rather dangerous and should be actively quashed by the game's structure itself.

Or to put it more directly, the more this argument is made, the more I find myself less thinking its not a good idea, and more thinking its an increasingly bad idea, because the logic behind it is completely untenable. The number of people who believe also becomes increasingly irrelevant the less reasonable it increasingly appears to be. That's the hallmark of an incredibly toxic idea.

Heck, until you reach level 10 there's no penalty for death at all: after that its just very small. So cranking up the difficulty just to see what happens is not a big deal. But I echo what other people are saying: the missions scale upward with the number of people you have on the team, so your missions are already scaled for 3 and probably include bosses in many of the spawns. So you're probably engaging something like 5-8 targets per spawn most of the time. That's a decent amount of threat to get started with while you're still learning. I would wait until you get at least to level 15 before you start tampering at all with increasing difficulty. If anything, as mentioned above by other posters, if things get too hard in the early going you can actually drop difficulty to -1 level.

You're going to be leveling pretty fast if you team together a lot compared to most MMOs. You'll probably be in your twenties on a time scale of a couple dozen hours of combat if not less. But don't be afraid to stop and smell the roses either: there's no rush; the rest of the game will be waiting for you when you get there. Racing to level 50 is like racing to the end of your vacation.

Somehow, I have a feeling that the general response to your postings will have little impact on attracting new and former subscribers, if for no other reason than only a small percentage of players ever read or post on the forums.

That's completely separate from the fact that I still haven't seen a coherent point being made. You seem to have a bunch of contradictory foundational ideas that you're leveraging to justify whatever it is your preferences happen to be, under the guise of them having an objective benefit to the game as a whole. It is apparently not enough to some people to simply say "I would prefer X; I have no specific justification for that preference other than I would prefer it." They have to believe that their preferences have some objective net benefit in all cases and will manufacture such when its not obviously so.

This does not match actual gameplay. There's a reason those short range blasts were favored more by blappers than ranged blasters, especially when their range was originally 20 feet rather than their current 40 feet. Blappers engage at close range and thus don't care as much, but blasters that engage at range are generally doing so from ranges higher than 40 feet. Even when they do engage at ranges closer than 40 feet ranged-preferred mezzers will often retreat to about 50 feet - 60 feet, out of range of those attacks.

That's one of the reasons I respeced out of Power Burst in I19. When I tried to switch from a blapper playstyle to a more ranged attacker for a while in preparation for that respec (a while = several months) I discovered that I simply wasn't using the power anymore: it was out of range as often as not. In some sets, that equivalent power at least has a sizable DPA advantage for situational usage, but power burst doesn't. Without that advantage, and with the significant range penalty, it tended to sit in my tray unused. I was very often using *explosive blast* as a single target attack over power burst.


That also doesn't seem to match actual gameplay. In actual gameplay, when you're mezzed you aren't thinking about AoE potential generally, but about either defeating the mezzer, or alternatively defeating the highest threat to you at the time you're mezzed. You're often in a situation with a ranged-preferred mezzer that stands off while other members of the spawn charge you while you're mezzed. Being able to deal with the mezzer, or if it happens the higher threat targets even while mezzed represents far more than 15% of the total number of high priority options a blaster will want to have in that situation.

If you're thinking that while mezzed a blaster can't simply ignore the mez and continue doing what they were doing before, then technically speaking their options can be greatly reduced while mezzed. But if you're thinking that the blaster's primary objective is to remove the highest threat to themselves while they are mezzed, because its often while mezzed that blasters are defeated, their options never drop that low if they have two primary and one secondary attack available. That's just not a proper evaluation of the situation as a blaster, except a blaster that explicitly wants to die.

To take it to an extreme, if the only power a blaster could use while mezzed was a travel power that would just be one power. You could make the same numerical argument that it is just one option out of many. But in terms of dealing with mez, that would never be a 15% solution: that would be a 95% solution. If you can run away from mez and break off combat, that solves almost *all* immediate problems blasters have with mez. Its not as good as standing and fighting while ignoring mez like things with mez protection can do, but it virtually eliminates the chances of being inevitably defeated by mez (you could voluntarily be defeated if you choose not to run away and break off the fight temporarily).

I understand what you're saying completely. You're saying even though HERO is a well balanced system, its not well balanced enough for MMOs. I'm telling you HERO is not a well-balanced system period. And its years of success have nothing to do with it being a well-balanced system in spite of many of its supporters making that claim. This isn't just true relative to the requirements of MMOs, this is true within the scope of PnP games: its success has never been reliant on its numerical balance, of which it doesn't have much.

Yes: -DMG on the target does not do anything to -RES on the target. -DMG reduces the damage (type) strength(s) of the target, which will affect anything *they* try to do. It will not affect anything done to them by someone else. The theoretical exception is Tanker Bruising: that actually works by granting the target a power whereby they debuff themselves. However, that power is unaffected by strength (buffs or debuffs) so its immune to any -DMG debuffs the target might have at the time.

-RES on the target does affect -DMG on the target because -RES on the target affects all effects that land on that target that affect the same attributes. -RES is technically a resistance debuff of all damage types, and -DMG is a strength debuff on all damage types, so if the target has lower resistance for those damage types (attributes) the -DMG debuff will be stronger, as long as it is not unresistable. If an effect is unresistable, note that it is not affected by resistances *including* resistance debuffs.

Just to complete the circle of life, -DMG on you could theoretically reduce *your* -RES effects on your targets except -RES debuffs are essentially always tagged to ignore strength. Otherwise damage *buffs* would make your -RES debuffs stronger, which the devs don't want to have happen. And -RES on you would have no theoretical effect on -DMG debuffs on your targets because that would only affect effects on you, not what you do to other things.

The bottom line is that if a target has -RES, it becomes more vulnerable to effects that land on it. If a target has -DMG, it becomes weaker when it tries to land effects on other things. Both -RES and -DMG tend to be flagged to ignore strength buffing, so no debuff on the *attacker* is likely to mess with those. But since both effects are usually not unresistable, resistance effects on the target can affect them (and in fact straight up damage resistance can reduce the effects of -DMG unless it is unresistable).

There are a lot more people capable of looking over my shoulder so to speak, if I was restricted to only doing remixes. Still, suppose I were to give myself all of Singularities attacks in a new powerset called pseudo-gravity. How many people would know I was doing that because all those attacks are untyped?

Just giving me the ability to make my own powersets from existing powers - provided I could use powers from anywhere in the power database - would not be a good idea. I could give myself a broken brawl from somewhere with an interruptable attack animation, or a pair of powers that would leave me unrooted when used in sequence, or a power that is supposed to do smashing damage but actually does psionic damage. I could ask for powers with decimal point errors or improper combat modifier flags or all kinds of stuff. It would probably be safer to let Castle come back as a regular player and make his own powersets.

There are still dragons in the power databases, even among just player accessible powers. Far less than in the past, but still things that should be fixed, will eventually be fixed, but until then could cause all kinds of joy for someone who could leverage them.

And that doesn't count the fact that I, and probably other players even better than I, could use Mids to craft ingenious invention builds that require just the right set of powers, and then craft powersets with those. Without the rosetta stone of that build, you might never know why those powers were assembled in that specific fashion, and it might take a while to figure out. If I was going to do that, I wouldn't just submit one powerset suggestion: I would submit twenty, and nineteen would be innocuous. The twentieth would be the blockbuster, and it would be hidden in plain sight.

I have no idea what you are talking about. The devs never balanced any archetype specifically based on popularity, nor did I or anyone else I can think of claim they did.