Arcanaville

While I don't participate on the Mission Architect forum itself very often, I'm actually a big supporter of the Mission Architect in general. The MA is also on Dr. Aeon's plate, and his influence rivals even my own at times.

If it will help, I'll be sure to specifically mention your request to have additional publishing slots theoretically purchasable to the devs at the next appropriate opportunity, although I suspect Zwillinger has already made a note of that request since he dropped into the thread.

You think you don't know, because you think one power must be better than the other, and that fact is obscured by details difficult to decipher. You think *someone* knows the correct answer. In my game, the answer would be: if you want to be fast, fear or poison something, or get more health, you would pick the first power. If you want special ability vs undead, you would get the second power. If you have no preference, you would flip a coin.

Properly designed, if the intent was to eliminate a quantitative way of judging, there wouldn't just be a very difficult one you couldn't do, there would simply be no way to do it at all. That's not impossible. Its not even especially difficult, engineering-wise. The differences would be provably qualitative only.

If players were not currently using the LFG tool in that manner, there would be no problem. The problem is that some players are.


Impromptu teaming is also not a foreign concept in MMOs in general. CoH didn't invent the concept.


At this point, if I were the devs I would simply restructure the trials to make it unambiguous what the intent was in a way the players could not impose alternate meaning. I would basically make them zone events. Lambda and BAF would be visually situated as a "permanent zone" just like the Hive, and people would have to enter it just like the Hive. Everyone within the zone would automatically be added to an invisible zone-wide league, but players would be free to make whatever teams they wanted. Attempting to enter the zone would queue you until the minimum team size was queued. Attempting to enter the zone once a trial started would spawn a new instance of the zone.

It would be in all respects a Hive with a minimum occupancy requirement. Asking for a private Lambda would be like asking for a private Rikti invasion, which would be for the most part nonsensical. That would be the end of it for me. At that point anyone who wanted to argue that zone events should be private would be free to do so, and I would be free to work on making animated hair.

The real mistake the devs clearly made was in making the LFG queue abstract, and allowing people to believe that Lambda and BAF are not "real" places.

I should point out there are actually family-style restaurants that work very similar to how you suggest, where there are no small tables that small parties can request, where you are expected to share the table with other groups, and while you could theoretically attempt to move to another table or specifically request to not be seated with a specific set of other people except for corner cases that would be considered exceptionally rude. I've seen them and dined in them first hand.

That's actually the thing I most dislike about many CoH mechanics: they are "paper-simple" but "intuitively complex."

Defense and tohit are paper simple: Acc * (Base - Def). Doesn't get any simpler than that on paper. But that leads us to: 5% defense: good or bad? On a blaster with no defense, it reduces incoming damage by ten percent. On an SR scrapper with 40% defense it reduces incoming damage by half. That's kind of a big situational difference you have to intuitively understand the math to appreciate. And notice that in neither case does "five percent defense" do five percent of anything the player intuitively grasps. Its actually five percentage points of defensive bonus not "five percent defense."

If you are earning one percent interest in a savings account and the bank said the interest rate was going up fifty percent, I doubt you'd think it was going to be fifty one percent. It would be going to one point five percent (this is why in these situations financial and economics-minded people use the term "basis points" when there is the strong potential for confusion). But in the more abstract world of City of Heroes, there have always been and always will be people who wonder if "33% defense enhancement" means Focused Fighting increases from 13.875% defense to 46.875% defense. Because there's no obvious intuitive cue (fortunately, the real numbers displays now at least do the math for you).

Anyway: Acc * (Base - Def) is paper simple. This is paper complex: Acc * Base * [1 - (1 - Def1/Base) * (1 - Def2/Base) * (1 - Def3/Base) ...]

On the other hand, it has an intuitive way to describe 5% defense: for standard critters, it reduces the chances to be hit by 10%.

Always. Is it worth the power pick and the endurance costs and whatever to reduce incoming damage by 10%? That's a judgment call. But the power will always do that, for blasters with zero defense, for scrappers with 30% defense: everywhere. This means you don't need to know the math, because the text description provides an unambiguous description of what the power will do, in terms easy to intuitively grasp.

In my game, that wouldn't even be *called* "five percent defense." It would be called "five points of defense." What does five points of defense do? Against standard critters with "base fifty points of accuracy" it would reduce their chances of hitting you by ten percent, five from fifty.

Interesting to note that in a system like this, it is easy to know what a power will do *incrementally* but harder to know what a group of powers will do in sum. Three five percent defense powers stacked together in CoH is fifteen percent defense. Three five point defense powers stacked together in the system above is an effective 13.55 point defense cumulative. Its not designed to make it easy for people to calculate final totals. Its designed to make it easier for players to make incremental decisions. Is this power worth taking now? Should I take that power instead. If I don't take this power now, what happens if I take it later. That's actually not entirely unintentional.

I think people assume that because I know the math, and describe game design in terms of math, I want an intrinsicly mathy game. Actually, I don't. I want the math to work right, but I would rather players spend more time in the game and less making spreadsheets of the game. And in fact, I would make every effort to ensure that the decisions the game presents would be qualitative and not quantitative. So many decisions this game presents have strong quantitative advantages that the qualitative ones are lost. I would eliminate that. The "Arcana" of the game I would design would have their work cut out for them, because I can theoretically make a game design that is arbitrarily difficult to min/max, even for me. Consider how difficult it is for *anyone* even me to make an unambiguous convincing argument for just exactly what the value of the SR passive scaling resistances are. And on a complexity scale of one to ten, those things are a two.

Which would you rather have: a power that absorbs 30% of all incoming damage, or a power that *reflects* 15% back at the attacker? Which would you rather have: a power that deals 100 points of damage to a single target, or one that only deals 50 but will increase chances of the next attack doing double damage by 15%? If your accuracy dropped by 10% for every 20 feet away the target was, is it better to enhance accuracy or damage? If an attack modification increased *both* damage *and* endurance costs proportionately, is it still as valuable to boost damage? If every critter had attacks with different ranges, would it be advantageous to attempt to boost your range? I can ensure the math is complex enough that the min/maxers can't help you. And when I eliminate the ability for the min/maxers to dictate what is the "best" and "worst" build, I free players to decide purely on the basis of preference, at least to a very large extent. If you take no attacks at all, you're still gimp. But if I build for range and you build for speed, I won't be the idiot and you won't be the genius: both would work, because the game would be designed to ensure that both work. Just differently.

This game's original designers added something called a "range enhancement" and never once, it seems, actually asked themselves "why should anyone use it?" Or rather, if they did they only got as far as "to increase their range of course, silly." They didn't ask "but did we design the content and the mechanics so that was worth anything?" Because if they did, someone would have said "actually, we can't let the players outrange the critters because that would be cheating, so we're going to make sure slotting for range is always mostly worthless."

Even if my job at the company was just answering the phones, over my dead body would a design team implement an MMO with that degree of stupid.

You'd think the lesson of making sure you think carefully about how your game works, and what everything is there for, and whether its a good idea to make capabilities and then let the designers ignore them and the players trivially exploit them would be an easy lesson to learn, and then put into practice. To that, I have just one thing to say: gigabolt -> gigabolt -> gigabolt -> gigabolt -> gigabolt.

Honestly Sam, I think any game I would have a hand in designing would be a game incompatible with many of your sensibilities. You can actually be presented with a choice in which you believe both options are worse than the other. That's a situation I can't avoid, because I really don't fundamentally agree with. I understand *that* some people think this way, but not really *how*. And since I would specifically present choices designed to challenge people to prioritize rather than giving them easy ways to have everything, I think eventually I would trip over this problem for the people who feel similarly. But I wouldn't change anything to avoid it.

Except I would specifically design the powers to make the choices more logical. The current passives and toggles don't do that in all powersets, like the example you're describing in Invuln.

However, I will say that the very thing that agonizes you about the system is explicitly intended by me. Not the agony part, but the part where given a group of players, some will feel that the toggles are not worth the endurance and choose to run an all passive build saving the endurance for other things, and some will decide that the endurance is worth it and run everything. That's what I meant by saying this makes an all passive build a legitimate choice.


But there's another aspect to this you might be overlooking, and its also significant. I wouldn't exactly do it this way in a game I was designing from the ground up, but lets use CoH mechanics because we're all familiar with them. Lets look at something simple: SR toggles and passives.

Right now, the toggles are 13.875% defense, and the passives 5.625% defense. Unslotted, they are 19.5% defense total.

Right now, you can have just the passives, just the toggles, or both. Slotted, the passive is about 8.8% defense, just the toggle is about 21.6% defense, and the total is 30.4% defense.

The logical progression is to take the toggle first, then the passive. So your defense starts at 21.6%, and rises to 30.4%. Damage mitigation starts at 43.2% and rises to 60.8%. Another way of looking at it is that damage admittance (the damage that leaks through your defenses) starts at 56.8% and drops to 39.2%. Incoming damage drops to 69% of the original value. That's pretty good, and why its worth taking the passive (ignoring its resistances).

Notice, though, that the same thing would be true if the toggles and passives were reversed. If the numbers were switched, it would be the passives that gave the initial 43.2% mitigation and the toggle that was increasing the total to 60.8% mitigation. It would be the toggle that was, in effect, reducing incoming damage by about a third. That's attractive regardless of the superficial numbers on paper.

I would never reproduce CoH's broken stacking mechanics per se, but there are better ways to introduce synergy in a way where the passives would still be very strong, and the toggles would be weaker *on their own* but the combination would be stronger than the sum of their parts.

Except its irrelevant to the point being discussed. Nothing stops the devs from allowing a Hamidon raid leader from locking the Hive. Doing so wouldn't prevent people from casually entering the Hive or doing other activities within it as WW suggests: the game would just spawn another Hive that didn't have the raid participants in it when someone tried to enter it.

And that's because, as was discussed earlier, all zones are really instances. Nothing stops the game from allowing a player to in effect lock a zone and force anyone else attempting to enter it from spawning a new copy of it. That is exactly what already happens when a zone reaches its occupancy limit.

We're not talking about locking a zone so no one else can enter it at all. We're talking about locking a zone in the same way someone would theoretically lock a trial league: prevent anyone else from entering their instance and joining them. That is possible with the Hive, and moreover causes no problems that locking trials wouldn't. It doesn't prevent anyone from doing anything except joining that team/league. The fact that the zone could have other things going on in it is not relevant, because those things could still happen with a zone lock in another instance of the zone.

Some servers actually manipulate the game servers to achieve the reverse of this result: they stack people into a zone like the RWZ so the game servers are forced to spawn a second copy of the zone, then people split up and run two simultaneous mothership raids. And in fact this is one of the proscribed remedies for dealing with a failed speed Hami raid that leaves behind mito blooms: stack players into the Hive until it spawns a new instance, then go raid the second instance. In effect, the players are demanding their own "version" of the Hive and the game gives it to them. You can ask for another copy of the Hive. You just can't exclude anyone from entering it short of filling it precisely to its capacity.

The same is currently true of the trials. You can theoretically fill the trial to capacity by loading a maximal league into the queue, but you cannot exclude people from running the trial. Its not "your" trial. Its an instance of the trial that at the moment it spawns is open to anyone in the queue. Its no different than if the Hive had a time lock.

You can argue the devs' intent here is contrary to your preference, but there is no ambiguity about the intent itself. The trials are specifically structured to be open trial zones with the turnstile as the gatekeeper.

Conspiracy to commit a crime generally carries the same penalty as the actual act of committing that crime.

However, I should be specific here: I don't believe that to be an actionable offense by the players that the game operators would either acknowledge or punish. I don't believe it to be literally a crime. I just think its sad.

There may not be deliberate malice but there is certainly non-premeditated malice: the league leader has to know kicking the player isn't a positive experience and is explicitly deciding that negative experience is not important relative to their own playing experience. Its not an act that has an unintended consequence that is out of sight or difficult to predict by the league leader, whereupon they could argue they did not foresee the consequences of their actions.

And that is the choice players have to make. You have two options: sacrifice your own control over who you team with and allow another player to join, or preserve your control over who you team with and prevent a player from running the trial with your league, forcing them to return to the queue. The game forces you to choose, but it does not force a specific choice upon you. To change my mind, someone would have to prove the game presented this choice in a manner that the player did not have the free will to voluntarily choose either choice.

The only people saying this is no choice are people who are essentially implying that it is a given the player must always get what they want. In that event, the only choice available is to kick the player. I simply don't subscribe to that axiom, and because I don't I see choices where other people don't see choices. I can choose to compromise to sometimes get what I want, and sometimes not get what I want but allow someone else to get what they want. That philosophy also lies at the core of everything you could claim is a contribution to the game of mine, so that's probably a good thing in general.


Developer intent *shouldn't* persuade a player that just because something was intended to be a particular way, it must be that way. The developers are wrong all the time objectively, and subjectively make lots of odd decisions that aren't wrong, but weird nonetheless. But proper interpretation of developer intend can, and should override any arguments that attempt to build on the foundation of one element of the game being "better" if it is consistent with other elements of the game. Frequently, such arguments fail to properly comprehend why things are the way they are in the first place. The argument that since normal missions which are "instanced" block unwanted people from joining so the trials should follow the same rule, for example, fails to account for the fact that the trials are *not* instanced content in the same way, specifically *because* of the turnstile, which unambiguously signals "this content is not the same as standard content, because here we have a turnstile to autogroup people into it." That makes comparisons to the standard instanced mission content immediately inapplicable.

Saying you want the trials to be just like the standard instanced content is one thing. Saying it *should be* because the trials *are just like* the standard instanced content is something else. The former is an expression of personal preference. No argument there except that I disagree. The latter is an objective comparison subject to the proper interpretation of the game design and the developer intent behind that design. And I'm quite certain a false statement.

Its both.


That's an error. Someone joining your league through the turnstile is not an error. The player has the legitimate and justified expectation they will be joining an existing league, because the game specifically *says* that's the intent of the turnstile. Their right to join a trial being launched supercedes your right to privacy because the game specifically states what the intent of the turnstile is. Its no different than trying to drive someone out of the Hive because you want to run a private raid. Attempting to do so would be construed as griefing by the devs, because your right to privacy is superceded by they player's right to enter the Hive, because the Hive is *defined* to be a zone where they are allowed to enter.

The trials are *defined* to be content where players can join a queue and join a group of players attempting to start the trial. They did not join because of an honest error. They joined because the game gives them the right to join. Kicking them is a voluntary act that elects to value your right to control over their right to experience the game in the way the game was designed to be experienced.

At the end of the day, we can dance around what rights players have to privacy and control, but we will ultimately come back to the simple fact that the player who joins the turnstile is playing the game as designed and intended. The trials are intended to aggregate all players that want to experience the trials and toss them into the trials. People who want to control the experience beyond that purpose are free to do so, but must take responsibility for their actions. If they believe their personal right to private trials supercedes another player's right to play the trials as intended, I can't and won't try to convince them otherwise, because that's a hopeless exercise anyway. I can't and won't try to stop them, because I have no ability to do so anyway. But I reserve the right to judge that act in a manner consistent with my own ethics, and not theirs. The same right you claim you have to choose who to team with is the same right I'm exercising in deciding how I judge the acts of other players.

That's a distinction without a difference. If I were to convince the devs to keep an instance of BAF running at all times, empty or not, and to fork copies as needed, would that change anything in your mind?

The reason the Hive is there even when there's no one in it is for efficiency. And you don't actually know the BAF instance doesn't exist if no one is running the trials.

If you want me to concede this quibble, fine, I concede the Hive is not instanced by your definition of instanced and not the game's definition while the trials are instanced. What does that buy you exactly, since the entire side track was started based on the assumption that the trials should operate based on the game's rules for instances. However, if we abandon the game's definition of instances and go with yours, the game has no obligation to operate the trials by your definition of instances. You've just vaporized any value the instance argument might have had.

Incidentally, you don't actually know for certain BAF and Lambda don't exist when no trial is running. Its entirely possible the game has an instance of BAF and Lambda ready to go prior to a trial starting for efficiency purposes, and a new one is forked whenever the existing one is being used to be ready for the next turnstile group, even if that is not likely. If that were true, would that mean anything to you? Because if it wouldn't, your argument would be void.

I don't have a problem with that intrinsicly. Where I have a problem is when a player decides to take their disagreement over the design of the system out on another player. If you don't like adds, complain to the devs. But those players are playing the game as intended, joining the turnstile to be added to a league that is entering the trials exactly as intended, exactly as the game is both encouraging and enforcing. They've done nothing to deserve being kicked except being a minor inconvenience to a player that wants to control their trial experience to a higher degree than the game currently allows. And if a player decides that absolute control is worth hurting another player's experience, that crosses a line I don't agree should be crossed.

That's actually semantics. The technical truth is that BAF and Lambda aren't specifically created for one team or league to operate in either. One league operates in them only because that's what the turnstile allows, and no other reason. But you cannot say the turnstile only allows a single league to enter so the zones are intended for only one league, then turn around and say the turnstile allows adds to the league but the turnstile is wrong because the zone was never intended for that.

The truth is that every single instanced map will allow anyone and everyone into it, up to the occupancy limit, so long as there's a path for the character to get there and so long as the character doesn't violate a map constraint. Your "instanced" missions aren't protected against unwanted players, it just doesn't have a means for them to enter them. If that is seen as proof instanced missions are specifically *intended* to be private, then the fact that the turnstile allows players to enter the trials individually has to be seen as proof that is the intent as well: the trial maps are not intended to be private.

Anything else *is* semantics, because the intent is clear. *Everyone* has to enter the trials through the turnstile. The turnstile collects all the players that want to enter, and throws them into the trial, adding them all to one league. That is its expressed intent, and the reason why you aren't allowed to lock the trial is because that's contrary to intent. And that is the only reason you aren't allowed to lock Skyway or the Hive as well: contrary to intent. There is no other reason for either situation. There certainly isn't a technical one.

You can't lock the hive because the devs won't give you that ability. I'm pretty sure the ability exists, though, so if you're saying the reason we can't lock the Hive is because its not lockable by technical limitation, that's a false assumption. In other words, its a UI limitation, not a server limitation.

To amplify what SnowGlobe said, when the Hive reaches its designated character limit, the server spawns a new instance of the Hive. The second instance is not in any way different from "Hive prime" - both are just instances of the map. Heck: the only reason why I can't enter your missions while you are in them is because no contact or door leads to them for me, not because they are "locked." And the game has many bugs that often drop people into other player's missions, proving that nothing about those missions is truly "locked."


Its idiotic to you only because you don't like it. In many games, this is not just promoted, its the law. Its not just impossible to prevent, its impossible to avoid completely. There isn't even a way to "kicK' unwanted players. You just have to deal with it. They aren't all idiotic games for having that feature. They are just games you wouldn't like.

And just like with all other parts of the game, people are free to blame the devs for their actions, claiming the game "forces" them to do things that are frowned upon by many other players. However, just as its your right to view the game in that way, its the right of every other player to decide if they will accept that reasoning, or instead focus their attention on the player doing things they don't like rather than blaming the environment for "forcing" them to do it. My stated choice is to say that the devs can present a bad environment, for some definition of bad, but every player is responsible for their own conduct as it applies to how they treat other players. I hold no one responsible for one player negatively impacting another player's gameplay but the player themselves.

I don't judge anyone for their opinions. I have no problem with a player thinking the situation itself is stupid. But I would judge a player for taking the specific action of kicking another player out of the trials, and being "forced" to because the game deigned to add the player to their league without their permission is not sufficient justification for that action in my opinion.

Actually, there was a better way to deal with this. Toggle dropping actually would have been not just a nuisance, but a good thing if toggles were just balanced correctly (speaking about personal protection toggles).

Toggles are balanced based on the principle that if it burns endurance, it should be stronger than passives which don't. But although that sounds like a reasonable rule, its actually a completely meaningless one in terms of individual primary and secondary powersets. When you choose a powerset, you have the option to take any or all of the powers in that set (eventually). All other powers in the other competing sets become impossible to take. So, for example, there is no specific reason why temporary invulnerability's strength from Invulnerability has to have any specific relationship to Agile from Super Reflexes. You never have the option to pick from those two.

You *do* have the option to pick RPD or TI. So of course TI, which burns endurance, has to be stronger, right? Because... because what, exactly?

1. Because if RPD was stronger and burned less endurance, players would take it instead of TI.

If they only wanted part of the s/l strength of the set, yes. If they want the full strength, they would need to take both either way. They would certainly take RPD first. Which is exactly what you want lower level players to do: take options that don't burn endurance, when they have less endurance management ability anyway.

2. Because if RPD was stronger and burned less endurance, TI would be nonsensical: you'd be paying for less benefit than RPD.

That's true if you look at the powers in isolation. But we've established that if RPD was stronger than TI, no one would take TI first. There would be only two possibilities: the player takes RPD, or the player takes RPD and TI. In the first case you get performance A for cost zero. In the second case you get performance B for some non-zero cost. If you want the baseline, its free. If you want more, its going to cost you. That actually makes perfect sense.

Its actually the reverse that's nonsensical. Take TI first, and you pay endurance for performance X. Then you add RPD and you get higher performance for no additional endurance cost. In terms of making endurance make sense, it actually makes less sense the way the game does it now. The baseline costs endurance. The higher performance level costs no more endurance. That's actually backwards when seen holistically rather than discretely.


Lets simplify. Suppose I want to give a powerset 60% resistance. I could make a 40% toggle and a 20% passive, which basically mimics what the game does now. Or I could make a 50% passive and a 10% toggle. Why would the latter be better than the former?

1. Lower level characters take the passive and don't have to pay the endurance of the toggle. Higher level characters take both when they can afford to pay for the toggle.

2. Detoggling reduces you from 60% resistance to 50% resistance, which makes detoggling hurt, but not kill. Doing it the "normal" way, detoggling reduces you from 60% resistance to 20% resistance - stripping nearly all your protection away. That's what makes detoggling so dangerous, and then by extension something the devs had to prevent, making detoggling itself practically worthless as a combat event.

3. The conceptual choice to go all passive is valid. You can get most of the benefit of the set without any toggles, eliminating the endurance drain and the toggle management. But players willing to manage toggles and perform endurance management will still get the advantage of having better performance.

4. Combat rez works better. You don't get insta-killed while trying to bring up your toggles.


What's the downside?

1. Nothing. Seriously: I haven't been able to think of one in six years. Except, of course, retrofitting the current game around this principle is an overhaul the devs would never undertake, because it rewrites the rulebook of how powers work in a potentially very disruptive way for the existing players.

And I'll point out its a request that is regularly ignored.

The same reason you aren't allowed to instance your own Skyway. Some parts of the game are instanced and theoretically private. Some are not. Its that way because that's the world the game chooses to be, because that's the world the devs want to create. I can't speak for the devs on this point, but I will say that there are two competing definitions of what it means for a game to have "options." One definition holds that the game should have different situations that generate different outcomes. The other holds that every outcome should have as many possible ways to achieve it as possible. That philosophical difference fundamentally colors every decision everyone, players and devs, make about whether the game is presenting as many "options" as possible. To my way of thinking, presenting some content that is private and instanced, and some content that is public and shared, is offering two options, the most you can have in this circumstance. To other people's way of thinking, that's two instances with no options, and having all content have the option to be chosen to be private or public offers two possible options for everything, the highest possible number of options. To my way of thinking, that's one type of content across the entire game: the type where players can choose to run private or not private with no consequences either way, and represents the least possible number of gameplay options. That difference is, in most cases, intractable.

Whether they acknowledge it as such or not, I suspect, but cannot say, that the devs at least sometimes believe as I do in this regard. At other times not. In this case, the game design is consistent with the belief that making the trials dependent on the turnstile is adding another option to gameplay, which from my point of view does the playerbase a service. the players who do not see that as an option but rather as a lack of options will disagree and find that line of thought unconvincing. Regardless, since I'm unlikely to give up my fundamental perspective on options trivially, I have to assume the devs won't either. If the devs have a similar fundamental perspective then the answer to your question is, unfortunately this: they see it provide a service you will never see as an actual service, but some others would.

If you had the same opinions as me all the time, that would be just too much awesome for one forum to contain.

Between March 2005 and June 2005, maybe. That was the period of time in which it was possible to have a build full of (level 50) HOs and before the HO nerf. With 50/50 Nucs, I think you could make the case that fully HOed builds had damage hard to reproduce now. But 33/33 Nucs are much easier to approach today with high end invention builds, especially given the huge amounts of recharge now achievable which better optimize attack chains.

On the defensive side, I believe there are few pre-I9 builds of any kind that can approach the best defensive ones today. Perma-unstoppable with double stacking invincibility would be one. Perma-Elude with the faster aid self would be another. Fire tankers might be borderline because pre-ED and pre-GDN they had significantly higher smash/lethal resistance, but today you can stack a lot of defense on a fire tanker that simply didn't exist back then, and pre-I7 anything short of very high defense was trivially shredded.

Also, check out these I4ish vs modern cast times for War Mace:

Bash: 1.37 / 1.33
Pulverize: 1.83 / 1.5
Jawbreaker: 2.87 / 1.83
Clobber: 1.83 / 1.23
Whirling Mace: 2.87 / 2.87
Shatter: 2.87 / 2.33
Crowd Control: 2.27 / 2.0

On average the set is over 20% faster. My guess (and I haven't computed the optimal chain by hand to be sure) is that modern War Mace in a high end invention build probably equals, if not exceeds, the damage output of pre-ED but post HO-nerf builds when the faster cast times, the higher global recharge, damage procs, and bruising are all factored in.

Or in any month where the number two is even.


Over in the Scrapper forums, we've had these philosophical debates for almost as long as the game has been around. Over the years, we've come down to the basic conclusion that:

a. If you're doing it with the powers available to a single character, its soloing by definition.

b. If you can do it excluding certain powers, that's a qualifier.

c. Anyone who makes a big deal about trying to push their own definition of soloing upon another player is a weenie.


What I see in the video is Sylph Knight soloing a GM. If Sylph Knight did it without Lore pets that would be called "soloing a GM without incarnate pets." If Sylph Knight soloed one of the GMs on Monster Island, that would be called "soloing an intrinsic level 50 GM." All interesting accomplishments.

The scrapper forums kill and eat people who denigrate other players' accomplishments and wear their skins as trenchcoats. The guy that can take down a pylon in 90 seconds doesn't poo-poo the guy who just figured out how to take down a 54 spawn in RWZ. The tanker forums should do no less.


I will say this:

Deus_Otiosus:
Technically, inventions have the same property: they aren't things you deal with operationally like powers, they are just things that grant potentially huge amounts of power and make your powers work far better than they were originally designed to. The distinction between incarnate abilities and inventions is very hazy. For example, should things like Reactive, which also have no actual build costs, count? I consider these all matters of degree, not binary distinction.

The same reason you cannot lock the Hive. The trials are specifically designed for the turnstile. "Private leagues" are an invention of the playerbase that bypasses the turnstile by assembling teams outside of the turnstile. A league can't even start the trial "privately" - they *must* enter the turnstile to do so. The fact that a league cannot simply start the trial without joining the turnstile is an unequivocal sign the intent is for the trials to bring together everyone that wants to run the trial at that time.

BAF and Lambda are instanced Hives, not instanced task forces. You can be exclusive if you work at it, but the game's not currently going to help you do it. The person playing the game as intended is the player that joined the turnstile. The team leader who kicked them was frankly playing the game as a dick. I cannot imagine what was so important that the leader felt compelled to kick a single player just trying to enjoy the trials. One more person more or less is not going to change the dynamic of the trial at all if they were not being specifically abusive. I definitely would not stand for it on any trial run I was on.

I don't think the posts exist anymore, however, I can tell you that I discussed the matter with Castle at the time thoroughly to the best extent he was able to reveal information about what they datamined. He specifically told me that blasters were performing in the manner I describe above and gave me permission to repeat that level of information on the forums, which I did at the time. So even if posts still existed, the person I would be quoting would be me. I do still have the PMs, though, and this is not something I'm likely to misremember, since I've been saying the above consistently and repeatedly since the time Defiance was changed.

What he did say publicly separate from that was that one specific datamined source of blaster deaths was mez: its specifically why Defiance 2.0 allows blasters to shoot while mezzed.


Nevertheless, while this can happen, on average it does not happen. Its just simple reality.

Scrappers and Brutes are among the fastest solo levelers. However, its not because they are a "damage class." Its because they have the best balance between offense and defense in a solo setting. However, in unbalanced situations the numbers show unequivocally that its better to have not enough offense than not enough defense. Theory is one thing, the rate at which the actual players level is something else.

The point, though, was that it wasn't "damage classes" that had a huge advantage over the other classes. The "damage classes" include some of the fastest levelers, and the slowest.

The devs have explicitly stated that datamining proved blasters solo slower, and likely have always soloed slower, than all other archetypes. Prior to the Defiance 2.0 changes Castle stated in no uncertain terms that datamining showed that *all* blaster powerset combinations soloed slower than the overall average by a significant margin, and this was true at all level ranges and whether solo, small teamed, or large teamed. It was also the only archetype that could make that assertion.

What you and probably most people are overlooking is that the average City of Heroes player is self-selected to be a person that finds the game somewhat challenging, but not extremely so. Most people who think the game is too trivially easy have likely moved on, as well as the people who think the game is too difficult. The average player probably finds the game to have moderate difficulty.

For players who find the game very easy, blasters are not hard to play. If they are not hard to play, their good damage output makes them good soloers, to a point. However, for a player that finds the game somewhat challenging, blasters are not necessarily easy to play. They do not have very good passive damage mitigation and their offensive mitigation largely vanishes if they are mezzed. Essentially, and the devs datamined this as well, blasters die often: more often than other archetypes. Forumites tend to be better than average players, and don't often see this layer of difficulty. But the average player does, and it acts as a constant penalty on their performance. That's how blasters can level slower than everyone else even when teamed: that shouldn't be possible since all players (of equal level) on the same team earn XP at the same rate. It would be possible, however, if the blasters tended to carry more debt.

For many of us, the difference between soloing a blaster and soloing a scrapper is that the blaster has range. But for most of this game's playerbase, the difference is that blasters die and scrappers are immortal at standard difficulty. Ditto controllers: there isn't a controller build seriously threatened by anything in standard difficulty content besides certain tough bosses: the amount of mez a controller can bring to bear on standard difficulty spawns is overwhelming, and a sizeable fraction of them have self mitigation buffs or self heals or both.

This would be extremely high on my list, although not necessarily in quite that way. What you are suggesting would make too many powers in my opinion. I would use combos to do that: a Leap-To power and a Foot Stomp power could be used together to create that attack. That way you could also have Leap-To + Overhand Smash, and even Teleport-To + Foot Stomp. A couple of modifier powers and a couple of attacks makes a huge number of possibilities, but with fewer actual discrete powers.

In terms of actual trees, I like the notion of a points-based system connected to progression trees. Players get points which they can spend on going for either breadth (getting more powers) or depth (improving existing powers). You'd in effect have two layers of trees: power selection trees, and power improvement trees. Because different powers could be combined in different ways, it won't be necessarily true that getting an additional power is worse than improving the existing ones. It would be like if CoH gave you the choice of adding a damage slot to your attacks or getting Build Up. There's pros and cons there but both improve damage.

Designing such a system would be a significant balance challenge, but I believe its doable. I sketched one out as a thought experiment a couple years ago, just to see how it would all work. I think it would work very well if done correctly. The power synergies are the tricky part, and would require the game mechanics to be explicitly designed around that feature to ensure certain properties existed which made this both interesting and balanceable.

You realize the slowest soloer is a damage AT (blasters), right? And one of the faster ones is a theoretical support AT (controllers).