Arcanaville

The ability to actually give the pets orders is a significant advantage masterminds have over controllers in general. Illusion partially mitigates that by having two pets that can be cast into a fight, the PA and the Spooky. But its no substitute for having direct control over all your pets.

As to the decoy thing. The technique for maintaining aggro control over a single target like an AV with Illusion is both tricky and requires a pretty significant investment in build. You need to make sure that a Phantasm decoy has enough aggro to bridge the gap between PA casts. If the cycles aren't right the decoy could drop during the PA gap and dump all that aggro onto you. So you make absolutely certain the decoy is there and has done enough damage to be the higher threat. You do that by *recasting* the PA in a way to ensure its decoy overlaps the PA gap significantly, since the firs thing the Phantasm will tend to do is cast his own decoy this can be controlled to some extent.

It takes practice, and a build with enough recharge. Good thing to practice on is a pylon, because not only do you get to practice decoy control, you also get to practice dealing with the suicidal phantasm.

I think its more accurate to say that the number of players that do not self-identify as hardcore players vastly outweighs the number that do.

The problem is that we usually *define* hardcore implicitly in terms relative to the average player. I don't think most people would call using Mids "hardcore" in this game, because its not all that uncommon and the tool is relatively easy to use. However, doing the same thing pre-Mids would have been considered hard core due to the amount of work and calculations involved.

But if we define hardcore as people who do the stuff most people don't do, they'll always be the minority by definition.

I think he means if you already have a Numina's, such as the proc, then slotting the Regenerative Tissue proc in Health gains you +25% regen, but slotting a level 50 Numina's Heal into Health gains you 40% * 0.424 = +16.96% *and* the Numina's set bonus for having two which is +12% regen, for a total of +28.96% regen.

A lot of people probably aren't yet aware she even has a head.

Or, alternatively, I meant what I said and I said it for a specific reason you just don't want to put any significant time thinking about.

In this case, its not just the decision to log in that is significant, because even if you colloquially call it "plan to" join a WST, that's not a plan, that is a hopeful expectation. However, that's different from logging in and planning to join a WST in the explicit literal sense of making plans and executing them in terms of finding and joining forming WSTs: "see if I can get onto" is different from "plan" especially when you were the one to put "plan" in quotes, suggestinng that you don't consider that to be true planning. I was referring to actual planning, not "planning" that requires qualifications.

You have a habit of not extending any benefit of the doubt to posters, and swing regularly with fighting words while acting surprised when you get hit back. Eventually, I will assume that you do it because you enjoy initiating fights, and cease any further attempts to dampen them.

Decide how you wish to be treated, and act accordingly.

To say "they do this" or "they do that" suggests there is an explicit group of "casual players" and we're debating what they do. When in fact there is a continuum of players and we're trying to draw an arbitrary dividing line. To say that casual players don't plan to make Incarnate progress is to say all players you want to define as casual players don't actually think to themselves "I want to log in my level 50 blaster and see if I can get on a sister psyche task force today." This is what you're disqualifying from being a casual player.

I think at that point, eliminating all players that have ever acted on such a thought would eliminate virtually all players from contention, including many who would not admit it, because this is so difficult of a thought to completely avoid.

I would say casual players are less likely to play the game in a structured manner. That means less likely to plan out builds in Mids, less likely to direct their playing activities towards specific goals over a sustained length of time, and less likely to be focused on pure performance. They are more likely to play for short term gratification (in terms of content or rewards) and more likely to play for shorter periods of time. However, I doubt many if any casual players strike every casual indicator precisely.

That's a relative definition, by the way, and deliberately so. I can judge whether player A is more casual a game player than player B. I cannot usually judge whether player A or player B is a "casual player" except in extreme cases. By most metrics I'm the very definition of someone that is not a casual player. However, in the specific case of my solo play, I often play as if I am.


One more thing: in keeping with the theme that "casual" refers to lots of different things, I think that there is a difference between a casual player in terms of gameplay and a casual player in terms of attitude. Those two are not synonymous nor are they directly linked: players can be one and not the other. Someone could, for example, take their own gameplay very casually. They could build informally, they could wander from mission to mission without specific goals, and they could only team under completely impromptu circumstances. And they could drop team because someone has too much knockback, think defenders are supposed to be healers, and demand speed boost regularly. They could, and I'm certain there are players that play casually but do not treat their fellow players casually.

In fact, I think a disproportionate number of "hard core" players have a surprisingly casual attitude towards other players. Having mastered all elements of the game, they almost never require such mastery from their fellow players, and will play and team under almost any circumstances other than the deliberately annoying.

I've found that while masterminds tend to be highly versatile, they tend, on average and in the incarnations I've played, to have two significant vulnerabilities that my Ill/Rad does not have:

1. They tend to be vulnerable to AoE damage. In situations with a lot of AoE, you can easily find all your pets vaporizing faster than you can keep them alive unless you have a huge amount of AoE defense (Bots/FF, for example, tends to be less vulnerable, but not completely invulnerable). Two of the three sources of aggro control in Ill/Rad are totally indestructible: PA and Spooky.

2. They tend to be vulnerable to high order burst damage, such as from AVs. The little pets in particular are AV cannon fodder. That makes it tricky for most masterminds to control AV aggro without significant help.

Really strong MMs can cover for these weaknesses of course, but they tend to be pits in the armor Ill/Rad doesn't have. They have other strengths that Ill/Rad doesn't have, of course, but those two tend to hurt the overall versatility of MMs in my mind, even given their other advantages.

Which is not to say they aren't highly versatile archetypes in general. And Bots in particular, being essentially completely ranged, can in practice neutralize a lot of the issues with aggro and burst damage by staying at range. My experience with Mercs is much more limited, so I can't say with first hand experience what the top end performance of Merc MMs is.

Honestly, I always assumed it was -5% because it used to be +5% for higher levels, but I could be wrong there. I don't play against -1s often enough to be sufficiently familiar. It should be easy to check though, I'll do so tomorrow unless someone else does it first.

For a ranged Energy/Energy blaster, I'd say its going to be one of the following:

Musculature, working towards Partial Radial rare, then eventually pick one of the very rares. Partial Radial has damage and end mod, which are the best two buffs in Musculature for ranged Energy/Energy.

I would not recommend Nerve at all. If you had a ton of defense toggles and were close to, but just not quite at the soft cap, maybe. An SR or EA that was sitting at like 43% defense in their build, for example. Ranged En/En gets not much from this.

If you want a marathon build that almost never runs out of endurance (and no matter how much people think they have unlimited endurance, they usually don't) you could go Cardiac, and specifically head towards Total Core, then Core Paragon. Those get you 45% endurance reduction and 20% range, both useful to a ranged build.

Spiritual would make more sense for a blapper. You're more likely to need recharge to keep melee attacks flowing and you get stun duration increase out of this as well. The main reason for a ranged En/En to take this would be, separate from just wanting a ton of recharge, if you have Aid Self. This will make AS not just come up faster, but much more importantly boost its heal. AS costs a lot in inactivity time, and sometimes it can heal for less than the damage you actually take during its total cast time. Boosting the heal as high as possible makes it much more valuable. Again, more likely for a blapper to have than a ranged blaster, but you had it in your posted build and lots of blasters take Aid Self when they feel like they are getting hit too often. Which a high ranged defense energy blaster with knockback might not experience often, but occasionally.

In either case, the rare Alpha with level shift is what you want to work towards. Very rare is four times as expensive and mostly gravy. Level shift has a huge impact on blasters: it significantly impacts survivability. Also, you aren't soft capped but if you play at +0xAnything, all level 50s in your missions will be shifted downwards, which means their base tohit will be 45% and not 50%. So that's like having 5% more defense, bringing you even closer to the effective soft cap.

(Note: level 51% have base 50% chance to hit and an accuracy bonus, so level shift doesn't impact them nearly as much as it does level 50s relative to a level 50 with a level shifting Alpha; it will just eliminate their accuracy bonus for being +1).

Regen is a little bit of a corner case, in that given the way heals and regen work, you could say defense and resistance are force multipliers for heals and regen, or you could say they are an attempt to cover up the burst damage and debuffing weaknesses of the set. Intrinsicly, virtually the only ways to cover Regen's weaknesses *also* multiply the strength of the set almost inevitably. That's not a common occurrence.

I'm not sure I would agree that everyone is voting their favorites. Some people are, some are asserting other powerset combinations that might be their favorite utilitarian but might not be their favorite overall (and some posters have said that directly).

I don't think this is something easily reduced to an objective test, and even if it is that isn't what I'm most interested in at the moment. I'm most interested in knowing how people define versatility, and by that definition whether they value it, and to what degree. I did not, nor have I ever, set out to make the most versatile blaster. I doubt I ever will. I tend to look for versatility in support characters more, but even there sometimes yes, sometimes not as much. My fire/kin is far less versatile than my Ill/Rad for example. My Earth/Emp, somewhere in the middle. So sometimes something about a powerset combo seems to suggest to me that the direction that character is going in is less about doing a few things as well as possible, and more about doing as many different things as possible. Why that sometimes happens, and sometimes doesn't, is interesting to me.

Put it another way. This happens in other contexts. When people make scrappers or tankers (or brutes or stalkers), there often seems to be two separate distinct thought processes. One says to take your strengths and maximize them to the best extent possible. If you're Invuln, you make sure you are absolutely indestructible to smash/lethal. Then you do the best you can everywhere else. The other thought process says to fill in your holes. You're already pretty tough to smash/lethal, so you buy as much elemental and especially psionic protection as you can get your hands on from the invetnion system.

You can try to balance these two approaches in a single build, but they are usually ultimately exclusive: doing one tends to preclude doing the other to some degree. Why we sometimes go one way and sometimes the other is itself a variation on the versatility question.

Implicitly, that's how I myself personally define versatility. Given all the different situations the game can throw at us, combined with all the different situations our team mates can throw at us, how many different tools do we have to effectively deal with all of those different situations.

My Ill/Rad was the first of my alts that spent a significant percentage of her leveling on pugs. Versatility was not just useful, but practically mandatory back then. Its where I first grew to appreciate how many different ways she had to deal with often highly suboptimal situations.

My confusion stems from the fact you said "You can make Benumb permanent on a single target, without purples, using Spiritual. You can also do the same for Heatloss." I assumed you were talking about the foe effects on the target. Also, Benumb and Heat Loss were being compared to Rad's debuffs at the time, not its buffs. In terms of being good ally buffs separate from being good foe debuffs, they can be made perma. Although I'm still not sure I would call anything that needs 400% total recharge (+300%) "easy" since that's a mere 100% recharge from the recharge cap.

There were a few powersets that I thought had the highest chance of coming up in this thread, and Cold Domination was one of them. I certainly think its a very powerful set, and I've always liked it in general. When the LRSF first came out at +5 and people were suggesting that without temps or Shivans it was likely impossible I proposed an eight player team of four /rad corruptors and four /cold corruptors, bucking the initial trend of just proposing eight rads. In my opinion, four of each gives you a far stronger team than eight of either.

I'm not sure I'm convinced its more versatile than rad, although I think you can make the case both ways. It is making me want to go back and play my Ice/Cold corruptor, though.


I'm a little bit surprised, and also pleased, that controllers are not the overwhelming dominant proposed archetype. Dominators, Corruptors, VEATs, Khelds, Defenders, and Masterminds all seem to be making legitimate claims to high versatility. I'm not sure I would agree in all cases that they have the *highest* versatility, but I wouldn't argue with any of them being highly versatile in general.

It seems that the average definition of versatility tends to include at least three things:

1. A way to buff team mates in general
2. A way to improve the survivability of the team, either with foe debuffs, ally mitigation buffs, control, or all three
3. Something that supports multiple playstyles.

That's a good question, and I think the power that best illustrates the difference to me is confuse (confuses in general).

In one sense, confuse is a very versatile effect, because of what it does. If you're primarily interested in disabling a critter or killing it, confuse tends to work in a wide range of situations. You can use it to cause one critter to help kill another, and confused critters don't attack you. It is, in many ways, the ultimate mez, and the devs in their infinite wisdom allowed confuses to last for a month when well slotted.

Does that mean that anything with a confuse power is automatically a versatile character? In my opinion, no, it doesn't. Confuses add some measure of flexibility to the character, but its still one single effect that does one single thing. That one thing has a lot of uses in theory, but that when judging characters its one really useful mez. It covers a tiny spoke on the usefulness wheel that encompasses buffs, heals, debuffs, damage, mez, and so forth. When I judge the versatility of a power, I'm sort of judging on a curve, comparing that power to the kinds of multi-purpose utility I see in other powers. Few powers do more than a few things in a few circumstances, which means even the most versatile power in existence is not going to do everything. Versatility is relative. But when I compare characters, I'm comparing what fully powered and slotted characters can do with a lot of different individually versatile powers, and characters have, of course, a far higher level of versatility than individual powers. So a versatile power does not (necessarily) a versatile character make.

Howling Twilight is an extremely long recharge mag 2 stun and debuff that does a little bit of damage that can also rez an entire team simultaneously. If no one is dead, its a mediocre power really. But considering its possibly the best ally rez in the game, the fact that it *also* has this other effect you can use whenever makes it, to me, a weirdly powerful power. Its more powerful than you'd expect a rez to be, and more utilitarian than you'd expect a long recharge debuff to be. Taken in combination with the rest of dark, it adds to dark's overall power. But on its own, its ability to deal with situations that don't involve team wipes is limited.

Conversely, a power like Oil Slick Arrow is much more generally useful. Its a good alpha strike attack, it can incapacitate a wide range of targets as a knockdown patch, and it can be converted into a seriously strong damage patch. You can use it at the beginning of fights, in the middle of fights, you can use it to deal with ambushes and adds, and it synergizes well with lots of other location powers, like res debuffs, slows, and other damage effects.

As a single power, I would say Oil Slick Arrow is much more versatile a tool than Howling Twilight. However, Howling Twilight is much more likely to reverse a wipe or near wipe than OSA. It can be, in the right circumstances, a game changer in as way that powers like EMP can be, but OSA usually cannot be. That makes Howling Twilight exceptional in some specific ways, but OSA more generally utilitarian in more various ways.

That's perhaps more a matter of perspective than anything else, but that's jut how I tend to view the power.

The version of Cold Domination I'm directly familiar with is the corruptor version. I believe all the other versions are the same in this regard though. Benumb's effects last for 30 seconds and the power has 120s recharge. You can theoretically make that perma on a target, but only with +300% recharge. Essentially, you need 200% global recharge to do that, on top of slotting. Without purples, I suppose that's possible, but not easy. The best spiritual you can get gives +45% recharge, and hasten will give +70% recharge if you can perma that. That leaves +85% recharge to go, of which 37.5% could be LotGs. Leaving 47.5% global recharge to acquire through other set bonuses. Without purples, not a small amount of recharge to get.

Heat Loss also has 30s effects but 360s recharge. It cannot be made perma by a single player by any possible way in the game. At the recharge cap enforced by the game, even with a zone full of other players speed buffing you, you're limited to 500% total recharge (+400%) which would reduce Heat Loss recharge to 72 seconds.

"What are the technical challenges involved in revamping peacebringers?"

That depends entirely on what you want to change, or more specifically what you want to add that the game engine currently doesn't support. Peacebringers have no special considerations in that regard when it comes to powers design.

"How differently set up are they from regular archetypes, codewise?"

Codewise, in no way whatsoever. Even Cosmic Balance is just a power, no different fundamentally than any other in terms of how its constructed and implemented.


and


"By knowing what's not possible, it becomes simpler to pose suggestions that are possible without breaking the design or forcing a revamp that would utterly change the archetype."

Most of the design rules that the devs follow when altering or rebalancing powersets or archetypes are not technical in nature. In fact, almost none of them are. Most of them are a complex web of different overarching design rules and specific design intents that have little to do with what the game engine can do or what is theoretically possible. They have to do with design integrity and game balance.


Worth noting that the devs rarely answered such questions, not even Castle and certainly not BaB. The person that fielded such question the most often, by a 100 to 1 margin, was me. Because those questions were rarely not loaded questions, and the devs tend to steer clear of loaded questions. They are also open-ended questions, and the devs didn't have the time to answer open-ended questions.

Knowing what is and is not possible *at all* regardless of archetype or powerset can be useful. But the knowledge and experience necessary to really understand that fully represents years of accumulated knowledge. The players that are interested in that topic have acquired such knowledge over time. The devs do not have the time to give every player that wants it a crash course in such matters. If you really want to know such things, you're not going to learn from reading marketing interviews. You're going to learn by asking the playerbase, and collectively those of us that know will have to answer your questions one at a time.

I teach technical classes of a variety of complexity levels. If I were to teach a class on everything I know about how the game engine in general and the powers system in particular works, it would be a three to four day class. Of eight hour days.

We all make mistakes.

In any case, two sets tend to be accused of having bad accuracy at low levels: Dark Melee and (now) KM. The reason is that most other scrapper primaries have some boost in ability to hit the target built in: Martial Arts has intrinsic accuracy boost (although its tiny: +5% accuracy), the swords debuff defense which makes it easier to hit follow up attacks, Claws and Dual Blades has, well, follow up. KM and DM before it don't have such things, so they are stuck at base tohit.

But to be honest, with beginner's luck bonuses, its hard to really miss often at the low levels. What tends to happen is that any miss, given how few attacks you have, tend to get amplified psychologically. You just remember them more because you have to wait longer after a miss for an attack to become available again. You probably miss just as often at level 50, but you don't have to wait as long for another attack to become immediately available, and you tend to more quickly forget misses. Its easier to dwell on misses in the early levels when you have nothing to do after a miss than basically wait.

Plus too, even for me who still runs normal missions and reads the text if I haven't done the mission a gazillion times recently, it doesn't take long to level from 1 to 10. Heck: the last time I leveled from one to ten was actually my KM scrapper in Praetoria, and that went by pretty quick even considering it was Praetoria. So I'm not sure how to explain leveling one to ten being anything but fast, whether you are using KM or something else.

My Necro/Dark is the alt that comes the closest in general feel to my Ill/Rad controller, not so much in terms of the literal way the powers work, and moreso the variety in tools the character has available. And of the powers I think are the most interesting and/or strong (things like Fulcrum Shift, Carrion Creepers, Phantom Army) Necro/Dark has three: Soul Extraction, Howling Twilight, and Dark Servant.

However I'm not sure if I would call that combo highly versatile, or just weirdly powerful. Except for the things that are just nasty to masterminds in general, like massive AoE, I find it to be one of the tougher MM combos around. Bots certainly outdamages it, but it holds its own and with all the darkity dark dark stuff flying around in that combo it can be really hard to kill with anything short of an AV.

That hasn't been my experience in the past, but to be honest I haven't tried to max out a Peacebringer in Mids before: I've only thought about it in my head. I'll play around with it a bit and see what different options I can come up with before I decide whether I agree or not.

Out of line of fire.

A couple of questions:

1. One thing I haven't yet taken for a test drive is a chain confuse with contageous confusion slotted in it. Does the proc have a chance to mass confuse with every jump? I thought it would but I'm not 100% certain.

2. Do you find Conductive Aura and Hurricane counterproductive?

3. I noticed that O2 boost wasn't slotted at all. Was that an oversight, or do you really just not use often enough to matter?

4. What do you think are the biggest strengths of the build? To me, it looks designed for heavy control.

I think, if I understand what you're saying, that what I'm calling versatility and what you're calling "reach" are, if not identical things, very closely related things. I consider versatility to be ultimately the tools and the ability to react to a wide variety of new situations or opportunities. Whatever needs to be done, or however the situation changes, versatility lets you deal with that gracefully, or better yet from a position of strength.

I don't think synergy and "reach" are intrinsicly mutually exclusive, although the single minded pursuit of one can cause you to easily destroy the other.

Part of the reason for posing the question is to see what people think about this in general. I'm not fishing for alt ideas, so this is not a "who's best" sort of thing. I would really like to know, for different people, when you think about a character or alt or powerset combination that you personally think hands you the most options for dealing with the most kinds of situations credible, what sets do you think of, and specifically what powerset combination.

Its not so much about a checklist, as what those tools give you. Flash arrow has -tohit, but I don't think that's in the same category as radiation infection as a tool. But Flash Arrow can reduce accidental aggro, and that's a situationally useful tool. Most teams don't need it, some do. Some teams can make good use of having rezzes available, others not. Sometimes EMP is just for showing off, but sometimes it can be a lifesaver. I think of versatility in terms of both the number of tools and also their strength, but mostly in terms of the number of different kinds of good and bad situations for which I have a tool that can materially help.

Other people might have a totally different perspective; I want to hear what that might be.


This gets into the question I closed with: how many people actually build for versatility. In the case of my Ill/Rad, I do, and when I play it I have a totally different mentality than when I'm playing, say, a scrapper. I'm far more situationally aware, and for more likely to look to fill in gaps in the team's performance. If the team needs heals, I'll spam heals until they don't if I have to. If it needs control I will spam holds. I've been known to throw the phantom army over my shoulder at a spawn group that is causing one player some trouble, while I drop rad toggles on a completely different group in a completely different direction to help out a different pocket of players, all while spamming heals on a third player directly next to me. The combo seems to give me more tools to do more things in more different situations, especially in less than optimal teams.

You mentioned turning the tide. When things are really looking like the team is about to wipe, I pop an EMP. EMP will take out everything including bosses for a very long time in a huge area. Its a game-changing mez. I once used it long ago to save a sewer trial that was going south by literally paralyzing half the Rikti in the area while the entire rest of the team was wiped, and I had enough time to rez two players while Emp kept them mezzed, both Empathy defenders, who were able to kick start the team by rezzing the others and starting up a heal/buff bubble. However, that means nothing if you aren't carrying blues to mitigate its temporary end drain, or can't make good use of the time healing everyone to full or rezzing, or most importantly if you don't take the power. Some do, but I suspect most don't because its not a spammable power.

So the question should perhaps be, if a player wanted to make a build that was as versatile as possible, and intended to play it by situationally leveraging as many tools as possible in a wide range of different conditions, what would be a good starting point. My Ill/Rad takes every primary and secondary power except for Chocking Cloud and Fallout. In fact, my I19 build (which isn't complete yet, although its getting close) looks like this:

(Using the new Mids 1.92)

Yeah, it has a ton of purples and a ludicrous amount of recharge, but in this case recharge helps versatility. My RA cycle time is only about four seconds: that's a lot of healing power. I have a ton of recovery, which helps power a lot of my arsenal at maximum speed for a long time. I've even got a 75 second recharge on EMP: I could use that monster almost every other spawn. I've tried to make a good support character and a tide-turner when that's needed. Not everyone wants to or can go all out like this, but for those that do, and those that want to play like this, what are the better alternatives?

PS: even before I slotted my first IO, I always thought this was my best support character. I think the combo loves IOs, but it was pretty good when it was just SOs and the occasional HO. So I don't think its all just about billion inf inventions making everything equally good at everything.

I like my Peacebringer as well, and I think its kind of a swiss army knife of options while solo, but I've always thought there were two serious limitations on those options. One: they are spread out among lots of different powers, and you tend to run out of slots to make them all effective on a Peacebringer without sacrificing serious solo capability. Two: most of those options are primarily self or solo options, and have less team utility than having a genuine buff/debuff set.

I find myself doing a lot of different random things on my Peacebringer, but that's not quite the same thing as being versatile in my opinion. If you want a very diverse playing experience, Peacebringers might be the winner. But do you think that actually translates into a wide range of solo and team utility overall? Or does it tend to translate more to your own experience being varied rather than your net contribution to the team or solo being varied itself?