Arcanaville

And that reason was that they had no way to balance this, and no easy way to warn players they were doing something dumb.

Not to get anyone's hope up, but I thought about this problem about two years ago, in a serious (and not just musing) fashion. I came to the conclusion it was possible to do, but would require a significant amount of restructuring of how the powers system worked to really do it right.

It would take me about six months to set the system up properly, which translates into about eighteen months of total development time. Maybe more including playtesting. But I believe every technical and balance barrier has a solution that would work in practice. You'd probably start with the easy stuff, and allow the construction of melee and ranged offensive sets, then dominator assault sets, manipulation sets, and defensive sets. The hard ones would be the buff/debuff sets, the control sets to some degree, and the mastermind primaries would be a nightmare.

Theoretically speaking, by the way, mitigation sets would actually be one of the easier ones to balance (easier, not easy), because for most power mechanics we have ways to calculate mitigation strength to within a high degree of accuracy. Its not as simple as allowing players to mix and match powers from different sets indiscriminantly, but its calculable. And if its calculable, its balanceable.

Pure offense is actually even easier to value. The AE custom critter system has an extremely primitive system for doing so, and it gets surprisingly close to doing it well enough for custom powerset construction.

Valuing buff and foe debuff powers and sets, now that's the really hard one.

In general, the rule for Praetoria has always been that rather than be a mirror of our world where everything is there but opposite, most elements of Praetoria are mash ups, where different forces that combined in one way on Primal Earth recombined in a completely different way on Praetoria.

Probably not, but that is difficult to reconcile with the desire not to homogenize the survival of all the archetypes, particularly blasters. I've seen what happens when you turn the glass cannon into the ranged scrapper, and its not worth it.


I've found that blasters work well for experienced players in the trials, particularly with good inspiration management. I'm usually chomping a lot more candy in Lambda, and from a purely numerical balance perspective there's an argument to be made that I shouldn't have to (to that degree) but when I want to be indestructible I play a scrapper or tank in there.

Also, one additional advantage fairly unique to blasters in BAF: sequestration can have minimal impact on damage output, particularly if you have a lot of global recharge (and in a rare moment when energy blast is a strong option, slotting force feedback procs make that sequestered damage output even better).


Honestly, I've had more fun playing my main (energy/energy blaster) in the trials than in recent memory. Its a unique experience, and at the end of the day that's what the archetypes are primarily there for.

That isn't the only thing I'm concerned about. There's a large spectrum of differences between playing a defense-focused set and any other set that most people don't even think about. For example, if I really get into trouble with my Regen scrapper, I pop lucks. Leaving aside the issue of whether that is balanced or not, its an option available to me. When my SR scrapper gets into trouble, which admittedly is not often, the options are not symmetrically valuable. I can pop respites or sturdies but both are generally far weaker as protection tools than lucks.

In fact, I think a Regen tanker without modifications would be in even more trouble than an SR tanker without modification (a lot more) but in at least one respect the regen tanker would have a small advantage. A regen tanker that pops four small lucks gets to be soft-capped with regen's healing ability for one minute. It takes a whole heck of a lot more respites than four to equal regen's healing capability for one minute.

With no insps at all, I'm guessing an SR tanker is going to be much stronger defensively than a Fire tanker. It won't even be close. But the Fire tanker will have a small edge in alpha strike resilience, and there will be a break even point where above a certain amount of inspiration usage the fire tanker will be capable of overtaking the SR tanker.

And that's separate from the fact that defense buffs are among the most common team ally buffs and the SR tanker will, most of the time, benefit exactly zero from them.

All of these little things are going to add up.

To who?

dis only LOOK beeg and hehvy. it really convertible.
it Vanguard weapon: if look close, got Vanguard logos stuck in front grill. also glasses and maybe some hair.

Except for the cats, I do all of that and more and it took six years for the devs to adjust Martial Arts, and they managed to actually nerf it first. So unless cats are worth a couple years a piece, you might want to consider kicking in a couple of goldfish or something. Unless you want to see them replace invincibility with swift to counteract the movement slow in Unyielding, before buffing Dull Pain in 2014.

Also, Castle knew you'd like the changes to Invuln, but to his credit he did them anyway.

Historically speaking my time estimates have never to my knowledge been materially wrong. Even when I've publicly disagreed with the red names my record is still intact on that one. So I'm going to go with that for now.

Last I checked, the devs felt that changing foe intangibles would negatively affect the segment of the player population that leverages those effects specifically because those effects are unique and less well defended as opposed to other mezzes. The very fact that they are situational and unique makes the devs loathe to arbitrarily tamper with them because the players that like them would then have nowhere to go: they would be eliminating essentially an entire unique effect in the game. So they are reserving the right to take another look at those when they have the time to spend a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of altering them.

Whether that is an example of the cottage rule in effect or not is mostly a matter of semantics.

Within the context of this discussion, standard difficulty content is designed on the presumption that everyone slots SOs, so players that slot SOs can actually do that content. In that sense, all of the archetypes are "balanced" around SO slotting, in the sense that they are balanced against the content as if they slotted SOs.

However, archetypes are also balanced against each other and for that the devs datamine actual player performance in-game. So in that sense, when balanced against other archetypes the devs implicitly assume the average slotting of the playerbase. In other words, if the average player at level 50 has common IOs, then the archetypes are being implicitly compared as if they do, because they are being compared based on their actual performance when played by actual players, and built and slotted by actual players. At least at level 50. If they have SOs at level 40, and SOs at level 20 on average, then that is how they are compared at those level ranges.


One thing I find interesting is when players use the word "balance" they often use it singularly: some *thing* is "balanced." But balances tend to have two sides, and balance usually describes a relationship between at least two things. When someone says an archetype, for example, is "balanced" they rarely state what they think its being balanced against. Which implies they think "balance" is an abstract target, as opposed to an actual relationship between two things. Or that there can be multiple balance targets based on multiple relationships between different things: archetypes against each other archetypes against standard content, archetypes against the overall average of all archetypes, etc. The last time I counted, there were about two dozen different "balance" relationships each with their own individual metrics and targets that I was aware of.

Because nearly all designers of anything, not just MMOs, need a good reason *to do* something, not a good reason *not to do* something.

That's why no one has ever won the "why not" argument. Its completely valueless.

I was just conveying the fact that I actually know what's involved in either creating or altering the design of a powerset, so I can say with certainty that non-cosmetic changes to powersets are usually more expensive in resources than players tend to guess.

Interestingly, Tankers have 20% more base health than Brutes, but the exact same max health cap ("Max Max Health"). That one always struck me as a little strange. Its very obvious that the design intent of Brutes is to have lower base numbers than Tankers but essentially identical maximum (mitigation) numbers across the board, so they could be *buffed* into being as strong as Tankers. That reliance on buffs was supposed to propagate into the offensive side of the ledger but they didn't balance Fury correctly at the beginning of time, and have been very reluctant at this late stage to do more than tweak it. Even small tweaks to Fury were met with howls, and even small (downward) proposed reductions in resistance caps were met with a lot of opposition (which, to be honest, I felt was completely unjustified - the complaints, not the changes).

Brutes are actually a much bigger on-paper threat to Scrappers than Tankers, insofar as Fury is demonstrably almost impossible to sustain at levels below the break even point on offense for scrappers even solo. But really there isn't a mass exodus away from Scrappers towards Brutes (or from Tankers towards Brutes either) and really, archetypes have no right to complain about fairness. Archetypes are just numbers in a spreadsheet. The important two considerations for archetypes are: do they meet the minimum requirements for reasonable gameplay, and do they offer a materially different set of gameplay options. Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers tend to. The fact that one or another might be seen as a universally superior option by a player is an indication they should play that one. So long as most players don't believe that, and it isn't obviously true in most of the normal gameplay situations actual players find themselves in, there's no actual problem with the archetypes that needs redress.

In other words, Tankers are there for players that want to play Tankers. The players convinced Brutes are better than Tankers in all respects should play Brutes. The people who think Brutes are better than Scrappers in all respects should also play Brutes. Scrappers and Tankers are there for the players who view them as having advantages over Brutes and each other., and there's no compelling reason to take that option away from them.

If we're playing for money and its the winning hand, sure.

I should point out that force feedback suppression was, to the best of my knowledge, never a feature of the power. When I first saw the article on Paragonwiki, it did not match my experience or my testing of the proc. So I retested *and* examined the design of the proc specifically, then discussed the proc with Castle. To the best of my knowledge, that proc does not have suppression, never had suppression, and never had any mechanism remotely related to suppression. What it does have is the specific feature that it cannot stack with itself and cannot refresh itself. So when its triggered, you cannot get the benefit of another proc until it expires.

But I slot this proc in my energy blaster, which is to say I slot it in *everything* on my energy blaster: power bolt, power blast, energy torrent, and explosive blast. I also have global recharge in my combat attribute monitor so I can see global recharge constantly. When I'm in a position to be using AoEs a lot, the proc is up more than half the time.

Mechanically, the way it works is this: the IO grants a 10% chance per target hit of granting you a passive power that buffs your global recharge by +100% for five seconds. However, this power has a limit of one, which means you can only have one copy of the power active at a time. If the FF proc fires while you still have this passive power active, that next proc will simply be wasted: you won't get any benefit at all.

Theoretically speaking its possible to have the proc up almost perma, but in practice it won't happen. At some point the proc will fire and grant you 5 seconds of +100% recharge. While that is up you cannot get any additional benefit from the proc. The moment it expires 5 seconds later, you can benefit from the proc again. If, at that moment, you fire an attack and the proc fires, you can be buffed again. So nothing prevents you from getting the buff over and over again, one after the other, continuously. But random chance and your attack chain will likely conspire to make that unlikely most of the time: the proc has to go off at just the right time for you to get the buffs back to back to back.

But high-speed energy blasters that cycle torrent and explosive blast can see *very* high uptimes in high density maps: since the proc has a chance to go off per target, the odds of the proc going off when you use torrent or explosive blast will be much higher than 10% if you are hitting lots of targets.

In one sense yes, but in the more important sense that most players would see that as a tweak to old sets rather than a genuinely new powerset, no.


Cosmetic changes don't require significant powers team time.

When I first started playing, with no specific preference I picked the server at the top of the list. Also, ever since the EU/NA merge Virtue and Freedom are now actually below the bottom of the visible list on my screen and I have to scroll to see them. I suspect a sizable percentage of new players will end up on the lower population servers initially simply because they aren't going to look carefully at the server list at all, and will just pick one either at random or near the top.

The only problem there is that as I understand it when you lose that game your opponent cuts of your head.

Sucks, doesn't it? Unfortunately, you ended up in the one where people think you're crazy and the devs don't listen to you. Although, statistically speaking I think you could pick a random universe and that would still likely be true.

You'd be stealing time away from making new powersets. Assembling a powerset is not just a matter of pulling powers from different places together into a list of nine. Even if you completely eliminate the time it takes to construct the individual powers and animations, you're left with significant design, balance and testing reviews of the sets which would significantly reduce the number of new powersets we'd get over time. Not just player powersets, but also critter powersets which is tantamount to saying we'd get less new critter types as well.

Once you open the floodgates to making optional powers in existing powersets, you'd probably be losing a lot of new powersets and new critters goodbye or at least delaying them by a lot. Its trivially easy to do in the sense that the work is very straight forward. But you'd be kissing lots of other stuff goodbye when you did it.

There are things with hold protection but not intangible protection.

The incarnate trials *are* adding diversity of content to the game, insofar as there weren't any until recently and still aren't very many compared to all other forms of content.

Since they are still making lots of the other content, and more of it than the trials even since I19, your conjecture about their narrow focus would be foundationless.

If the primary thing that mattered was maximally buffed numbers then blasters would be just a fraction under scrappers in offense and survivability, but with generally more AoE. However, the truth is that when actually played by our actual subscriber base, the difference in performance between the two is so far apart in practice they aren't even in the same zip code.

The vast overwhelming majority of the playerbase, i.e. the people the devs primarily make the game for, are not playing in saturated buff conditions. In those conditions, blasters die, healing helps, and there's a huge difference between brutes and tankers.

Its possible. You'd have to either be able to play blasters ten times better than I can after seven years of playing blasters, or play stalkers ten times worse than I can after being blindfolded, but its theoretically possible.