Arcanaville

I doubt it, but then again I can't explain why they are even in the tip missions. If its for datamining purposes, I could have trivially predicted what that would do.

If I just wanted DE to hit more often, I would make them grant +100% accuracy. They will then hit everyone twice as often, up to the tohit ceiling, including soft-capped characters. Twice as often is like buffing their damage by 100%: its not a trifle.

If I wanted DE to be specifically targeted at defense sets for some reason, but still obey the limits of standard content, I would give them a +5% tohit buff and something between +50% and +150% accuracy depending on how much trouble I wanted them to make.

Something to keep in mind. Some people look at +100% accuracy and say that a soft-capped character is only going to be hit 10% of the time. That's trivial, they say, and completely worthless to making content more challenging. However, an SR scrapper with nothing but an SO build is not considered an especially strong defensive character, and it only gets hit 19.5% of the time. In effect, when a critter has +100% accuracy, the *floor* becomes 10%: that's the best you can do. The best that you can do against such a critter with more defense is only about twice as good as an SR scrapper gets with straight SOs and no power pools or invention bonuses.

Twice as good as only so-so is a huge limitation.

Because I do see the forest for the trees and realize its part of a problematic pattern.

Single point problems don't bother me as much as systematic ones. I know that the DE tohit thing is simultaneously one more thing for defense sets to handle, any one of which I would think was not just tolerable but actually desirable but in combination excessive, and also a sign the devs have forgotten the I7 lesson and are using tohit bufffs to balance things accuracy was meant to balance.

You hand out kryptonite to selected foes intended to provide heightened risk. You don't hand it out to everything everywhere. Giving every single DE in those tip missions +14% tohit is no different a bad design decision than giving every single Malta in tip missions sapper guns.

If the guardians had heightened tohit, they'd be defensive kryptonite in DE missions. Everything has kryptonite and one thing buffs everyone into having quadruple kryptonite. If Cairns made all DE damage unresistable, the devs would be forced to change that. Its no different. The fact that they apparently - or anyone else for that matter - thinks its different is solely due to a lack of understanding of how defense, or the very game, works.

When the devs start making whole enemy groups that debuff regen to zero and also have an ally buff that disables click heals while its up, I'll start thinking of this as just the devs trying to escalate difficulty across the board. When its apparently targeted at one type of thing because of a pattern of design errors, I don't accept the content should be difficult arguement.


Incidentally, math is just a language that allows for precision. Since I speak it, I use it. However, I never complain about the math of a situation without testing it, even though at this point my numerical judgment is pretty close to observational judgment. I could just say the DE sucks because they are too hard, but that's subject to complaints about anecdotal ambiguity. Numbers are the only way to eliminate that ambiguity. Anyone can *see* what the DE do to defense sets. The numbers just quantify what everyone can see. Its not like there's people out there with any observational fidelity that disagrees DE shred defense like its not there. No one argues with the conclusions my numbers make in terms of what happens. The only question is whether it *should* happen.

Also, we don't actually know if defense sets are penalized enough to affect people's perceptions and play percentages. We *do* know that when the SR scaling resistances went in, *something* was datamined to be wrong with SR. Jack told me that directly. Is that still true now? Maybe not. But is that because SR has no problem, or because people learn, by the time they get to 40, to avoid the problems? That's unclear to me.

The attack that kills me most often in Nemesis missions is not Warhulk swipes, or Fake blasts, or gas. Its Dragon's Tail. I get impatient, I use DT, and I effectively commit suicide.

Edit: actually, the part I *like* about those missions is that they encourage AoE restraint, in a game that is stupidly saturated with AoE. My problem is that the mission doesn't say "don't spam AoEs or we'll hurt you" it says "if you spam AoEs we'll kill all your SR scrappers so there."

My Katana/Invuln also has much less issues with DE tips than MA/SR. One reason is that Invuln has a lot to fall back on when defense goes away. The other is that DA/Parry is one of the few ways to get enough defense to beat the quartz (triple stacking it plus TH + Invincibility +Weave actually causes the DE to occasionally miss me).

They are, and I keep meaning to update them because I have better ideas, and because the AE now allows more ambushes and other elements to make it more interesting.


The important thing about that challenge mission, by the way, was that its easy to make a mission that *no one* can do. Its not easy to make a mission that *only the highest performance can do*. Its the ultra high end example of how tricky it is to make content that is properly scaled to the intended target. My estimate is that about one in eight attempts by people who took a serious swing at it with a viably strong build succeeded back in I14 and I15 based on feedback. What I got out of it was some good practice designing custom critters and a much more precise understanding of what the best of the best can do in theory.


The original version of it, by the way, would make Tin Mage look like tin foil. The original beta version, or rather the Ultra2 version of it, is here being attempted by pohsyb on a dev controller that has all of the controller powersets combined. Although that setting was explicitly intended to kill anyone that thought they couldn't be killed. That mission had three possible settings which you could choose to run by clicking on computers in the mission: Medium, High, and Ultra(2). The current scrapper challenge mission on live is roughly between Medium and High on that scale.

The RWZ challenge wouldn't make Medium on that scale.

I never complain about something being hard for me personally. Nothing is likely to be a serious impediment to me, and honestly, if I just don't *like* a tip mission, then ironically at 0x8 I earn so many tips that I can just drop the ones I don't like and as long as I have at least one I do like I'll earn more in the act of running that one. I don't even really have to *drop* tips I don't like.

If I say something is unbalanced, its because I believe its objectively unbalanced for the average player unless I say otherwise. If I find something that is "too hard" my instinct is to go beat on it until I pound it into the ground.

I was on an ITF where the team gave up and quit on the last mission and I tried for two days to figure out a way to solo complete it. On an energy blaster.** If you think I'm complaining about personal difficulty ever, you're misunderstanding. I would continue to play this game at difficulty levels that would make EvilGeko wince.


** You can range snipe the Nictus without drawing aggro from them or Romulus, and with enough damage you can kill them from range. Having them all gone would help someone solo Romulus, although my energy blaster isn't one of those things that can do that in any reasonable amount of time. Apparently.

Its tantamount to what you said. The problem is that while those that need an orderly universe believe that proper game design strictly limits what all players can do under all circumstances to a narrow window of performance, this game is not that game. It makes life easier on the devs if the system forced them to do that, but there's no reason a reasonable game cannot have significant performance variations among player characters and commensurate optional ways to scale difficulty to those levels.

I am not someone who believes proper game balance requires, as an axiom, performance homogeneity. It can have that axiom, or lack it, without automatically suffering from it.

It makes life more tricky when you lack it, but it makes life more boring when you have it.

Well, I saw their second attempt first hand. Experience doesn't seem to help any.

Quick: what game am I describing at release:

Defense doesn't work, except in a few corner cases where it works very well, so its paradoxically nerfed on that basis.

Invulnerability is way stronger than the devs think, because it works differently than they think it does. Players figure this out before the devs do.

Regeneration is set so ridiculously high, they have to nerf it twice.

There's an exotic protection set that would work great, if all its powers were allowed to work at the same time.


That's right: I'm describing every game Cryptic has ever launched.

Yes and no. I never talked to Geko directly about this, but I did talk to Jack. I don't think they set out to screw defense, but I do think their attitude towards defense made them deliberately do things that made no sense, but they didn't fully appreciate.

Here's an example. When I told Statesman that it was not really fair that higher ranks get tohit increases, and higher levels get tohit increases, and half the attacks debuff defense, he told me, and I'm only paraphrasing slightly here, that "that's how defense works: sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't." Statesman thought that when defense "worked" the target misses completely, so it has to "not work" sometimes, by being negated. It didn't occur to him until much much later that even when defense "works" sometimes you get hit and sometimes you don't, so there's no need to actually turn it off all the time.

If that reflected the same attitude Geko had, and it may have given a lot of things that happened, that explains a lot.

Not exactly, but close. I believe they were designed by people whose experience was primarily in designing late game content, and didn't fully appreciate that there are scaling rules for lower critters separate from the modifier tables.

No one's designed a Hellion in a long, long time.

There was (and probably still is) a specific bug regarding Placate if you attacked a target [i]while it was in the middle of executing an attack. The act of the target attacking broke its own placate effect.

I assure you I am not mistaking anything for anything, from first hand experience.

That's just the DE. Here's my description of the Master Illusionist: A boss level critter that has 50% of its attacks bypass all my defenses, that casts three pets that have 50% of their attacks bypass all my defenses, all of which can attack while phase shifted.

When you really stop and think about it, geko really really hated defense. In exchange for being able to avoid getting hit, he made sure you were never actually going to avoid getting hit.

I never claimed precision is necessary. In fact, I've stated many times in the past that its theoretically possible to make games that are successful while being wildly unbalanced. In fact, I commented most recently that Star Trek Online's reward system intrinsicly grants the developers wide latitude in powers balance, because (good or bad) rewards are usually backloaded in time consuming missions. Even if you manage to make a starship ten times more powerful than mine, you aren't going to earn even 20% more rewards, because as long as I can defeat stuff and get to the end, your engines won't get you to the finish line ten times faster than me either way. And if you kill ten times more stuff, the stuff is worth only a tiny fraction of mission complete.

However I do say that to the extent that a value must hit a target its always possible to hit the target on the first try in theory, provided only that you're given a good description of the target. You never have to guess, and you never have to datamine a value. Datamining should only be used to determine the incalculable, like the skill level of your players.


You proceed from a false assumption. "Balance" isn't about something trivial like numerical equality. Balance is about making sure all elements of your game align with the requirements of your design. When its said that the PvE content is balanced around a particular skill level, that doesn't mean someone somewhere computed the skill level of the players to be X, the PvE content to be Y, and proved X = Y. The PvE content is balanced around the skill levels of the players in the sense that dozens of different requirements are met, from the rate at which players defeat things, to the rate at which they die, to the degree of difficulty they tend to gravitate to, to the spread in performance across one standard deviation of player population, to the minimum worst case performance for a minimal player, to the computed performance of a typical build, to the playtested performance of a hypothetical typical player. Its juggling lots of different parameters you care about, given that you explicitly care about them.

What do you do if one powerset is played a lot and one is not? If one of your parameters in your design is to ensure that the difference between the most popular and least popular powersets is less than a factor of three, you change something given the datamined preferences of your players, something which has to be measured because its not computable. But if your design doesn't have that requirement - if it explicitly states that its ok if some powersets are more challenging than others, and recognizes that only a minority of players want that challenge but they are worth giving some options to address that desire then that imbalance is intended by design, and you do nothing.


No, never. Because good mechanical design is all about delivering on the goals of the creative design. Its never about numerical awesomeness for numerical awesomeness sake. If I'm told to make a powerset that will make EvilGeko giggle his *** off when he plays it, either I deliver on my requirements or I don't. I come up with a target that I think will deliver on that requirement and then I implement it correctly or I don't. You can fault my creative attempt at satisfying that requirement but I'm never going to blame the fact that "game design is hard" if I fail to hit *my own* target. The powerset will do what I set out to make it do. If it doesn't make you laugh, its because my design is a creative failure, not because "math isn't fun." That's a cop out.

Here's what you'll hear me say: "oh, I thought you'd like it if that attack simultaneously fired a toxic cone out of your butt directly behind you for headsplitter damage. I didn't realize you tend to take point on teams."

Here's what you'll never hear me say: "I'm sorry but I when I gave you Butt Splitter six months ago I didn't realize it would synergize too strongly with Pelvic Thrust. I'm afraid I'm going to have to nerf Spinning Halitosis and datamine your damage for a while to make sure you aren't still outdamaging Boomerang Fish for corruptors. " Because that is no way to live.

Math is a tool. Engineering is a tool. To say that sometimes you have to abandon it is like saying the game is programmed in C, but fun cannot be programmed, so sometimes you just have to abandon your programming skill and just bang your face against the keyboard while listening to Mozart until the game servers start to sparkle with the goodness.

Coders code. Designers design. Analysts analyze. Their methodologies adapt to the field, whether that field is game design or pizza design. And in the real world everywhere but in game design**, there's no excuses for not having a methodology that purports to generate a good design the first time. People make mistakes, and fields evolve. The start of the art constantly improves. Good design principles are a moving target. But even if you don't possess the state of the art, you should possess the art itself.


** Actually, its a failing of the software development industry itself. On behalf of the industry, I apologize to planet Earth.

If you attack the target with an attack that "notifies target" you will break your own placate. But the quote I was responding to said if you *take* damage your placated target will be able to attack you, and I don't believe that has ever been true.

I almost forgot. Unless they changed something recently and I didn't notice, that's not quite correct. Placate does three things: it puts you in the hidden state, it stealths you, and it applies the placate mez effect on the target. Note that stealth doesn't break aggro: whether a critter can "see" you or not, if they are already aggroed on you they will attack you.

Furthermore, damage breaks the hidden state (which they should just call the critical state, because that is what it really is) but it does not break the placate mez effect. The specific target you placated cannot target you while they are placated until the placate wears off.

Virtually everything about the game you play except the visual artwork is math. Everything you are allowed to do, and everything that is allowed to happen in this game is dictated by math, and only math. All of the critters, powers, and effects in this game are in a single set of Excel spreadsheets.

The only question is whether the devs control the math, or the math controls them.

True story. When Claws was revisited the first time, the devs - both Castle and BaB - claimed their changes would only affect Claws by maybe 5 to 15%. I did some back of the envelope calculations and concluded the changes would increase Claws damage by a whopping 40%. BaB in particular thought I was nuts until BillZBubba invented pylon soloing - that's where the idea of testing damage by soloing a pylon really started: Bill took a test Claws scrapper and proceeded to rip the pylon apart, proving Claws had been buffed astronomically. If anything, I had underestimated slightly.

The problem was that the effects of activation time on attack chains was still poorly understood. Moreover, at the time Powers and Animation were not tightly coupled in making or changing powersets. BaB could make an animation that looked good, but he didn't fully appreciate the fact that adding or deleting just a few frames here and there could seriously buff or nerf an entire powerset, due to the huge leverage he sometimes had on the cast times of certain powers.

Moreover, many powers had rooted animations longer than the cast time of the power. Meaning: Castle thought it was this fast, but Bab had made it actually slower in practice. This means even people who knew how to analyze attack chains correctly had totally wrong data. Including Castle.

After discussing the situation with BaB many times, and not just with Claws, Bab had a much better understanding of the mathematics of the effects of rooted times on power efficiency, due to DPA calculations. What was the "fun" effect of understanding the math correctly? BaB decided to speed up most of the melee attacks, particularly the slow ones, keeping the animations more or less visually similar but now seeking to spare frames whenever he could.

Knowing the math helped BaB influence the way our powers work to be more efficient and powerful while still allowing him to make them visually appealing (as he saw it). And prior to that, sixty player powers ran slower than their listed cast times in at least some circumstances, sometimes by as much as twice the amount. All those became important bugs to fix, rather than just curiosities.

So is math important to fun? You tell me. How many people liked the melee speed ups, and thought they made those sets more fun? Credit the devs learning the math and then putting it to use.

Now just think how much time would have been spared and how much better and funner the powersets might be today if the design bible had forced Powers and Animation to work together on DPA balance specifically starting from the beginning of time. Think how much funner Energy Transfer might be now if there had been a proper balancing rule in place to handle that power when it was adjusted back then.

Like this:

Its a bit of a common strawman to claim that "fun" cannot be reduced to math, because no one claims it can. That has nothing to do with it.

Consider a more concrete example: rollercoasters. Rollercoasters are supposed to be all sorts of things not reducible to equations: scary, thrilling, wild, fun. It takes skill, art, and creativity to come up with a conceptual design for a successful rollercoaster.

Now, who do you want to build it if you or your child is going to ride it? Someone who wings it and will keep building it and tearing it down until it sort of feels right? Or a structural and mechanical engineer? Its a false dichotomy to believe that there exists a creative design process used exclusively for creative things, and a mechanical one for boring things. There's only two kinds of design: the kind that works, and the kind that doesn't. If you find your kind has a tendency to not work, you're practicing the latter kind. Its not because games design is the most complex endeavor on Earth.

A game can fail to be fun for lack of creativity. But the devs don't balance things like the strength of Willpower's powers or the number of Vahzilok's attacks based on testing to see which number is the fun number. There is no such thing as a fun number. They balance those things around performance metrics. Those performance metrics can be hard-codified and then targeted with precision. They just aren't. You don't actually believe that the devs think 13.875% is a "fun number" for SR toggles, or that they playtested a variety of different values and asked Q&A to tell them which one was "the funnest" value, do you?

The devs decide fun far further upstream. They decide that this game's idea of fun is that the average scrapper can take on about this much stuff. You tell me what that is, and I'll tell you what the SR toggles have to be, what the recharge of reconstruction has to be, what the terrorize duration of Cloak of Fear has to be. You tell me what scrappers are supposed to be able to do, and I will tell you what their numbers are supposed to be in their entirety, to the fourth decimal place. The guy that decided fun is taking on four +3 minions might be wrong. I won't be.

I don't think they do it deliberately, which is great for most players because it means it can be fixed. For me specifically, let's just say doing it accidentally AGAIN is just an epic face-palm moment. I respect our devs a great deal as professionals who love this game, but I seriously would not trust Paragon Studios to make change for a quarter.

Most people criticize the devs without a full appreciation for how complex and time consuming designing and implementing an MMO is: how many competing interests and varying skill sets have to be carefully coordinated and managed to produce a final product that is the sum of a large number of different people's judgement. I *do* know and appreciate all that and so I'm very moderate in my criticisms over issues that I know are complex issues.

This ain't complex. This is extremely basic math that has no excuse for "iterative design" to figure out. There's this school of thought among many game designers, including many of ours actually, that says math is not trustworthy, because it can lead to wrong answers. Iterative design is the right way to do things, because it allows you to take a reasonable guess, test it and see how close you were, and then adjust.

Math never leads to the wrong answers unless the people you hire to do the math suck at it. Game design - specifically the underlying mechanics of games - are just an engineering problem. They are solvable by the same mathematics and analytical design methodologies all other engineering problems on earth are solved with. Games are not magic in that respect that they can resist numerical analysis.

The creative parts of the game are a different story: they are an art not a science. But how much damage power bolt should do or how much XP a 43 minion should grant or how fast sprint should be are not creative decisions. The creativity element is in deciding what goals you have for what those things should do. Then creativity steps aside and engineering dictates how to satisfy those goals with precision.

For some reason, this seems to be an inexplicably controversial idea. I could probably duel Positron's blog for years talking about this subject, except I'm not really a professional game designer so no one actually cares what I think about the subject. As they probably should not. Without a resume, I have no credibility on that score except my experience as a player.

Its supposed to be designed to not work on that version of Reichsman.

In I1 the SR's could essentially go Elude against minions. Bosses would rip our heads off unless we popped lucks: they had 75% base tohit back then. Even con.

And those turrets that Malta engineers were spawning back then? 115% tohit. SR didn't become "unhittable" until I2 and perma-elude started getting us to circa 100% defense with passives. And the reason why we didn't care about sappers or Carnie drain is because a) we couldn't be detoggled and b) Elude crashed us to zero so often who'd even notice getting hit by a sapper.


If it was just one or two, that would be great. But whenever people talk about how great SR is soft-capped, I can still recite by rote that soft-capping is basically worthless against:

1. Spawned turrets (75% base tohit)
2. Spawned pets and pseudo pets (75% base tohit)
3. Praetorian critters (base 64% tohit)
4. Quartz eminators (ally buff: +100% tohit)
5. Rularuu sentries (+100% tohit)
6. Non-positional psi (particularly anything with blind, dominate, or mesmerize - Tsoo, Rikti, Lost, Carnies, Arachnos...)
7. Anything with tactics
8. Anything with vengeance (particularly Nemesis)
9. Anything that autohits (there's still stuff out there, like caltrops)

On top of that, anything that generates an unadjusted net tohit greater than 95% will hit a defense set harder than a non-defense set, because there's no way to generate net tohit higher than 95%. So a gunslinger Boss essentially drives a non-defensive set to the 95% ceiling: damage goes up by 90% relative to base accuracy. However, a Gunslinger boss with +100% accuracy and 1.3 rank accuracy will have a net tohit of 5 * 1.3 * 2.0 = 13% against a soft-capped SR scrapper: 160% higher net damage from base accuracy. A +4 gunslinger can't hit anyone else any more often than 95% of the time, but can still hit a defensive set character 40% more often over and above all other accuracy bonuses.

When I settled for seeing base 50% critter tohit for standard critters, I didn't "win." I conceded that was good enough for playability purposes. It did not in fact make defensive sets even with other sets. Just close enough. There is no pendulum to swing back. I have plenty of latitude to demand it swing several times farther towards defense sets. Adding more tohit just gave me a reason to press the issue, implying things had gone too far the other way for defensive sets reminds me that some people think SR won a lottery of some kind when no such thing happened. Ironically, the huge amount of defense floating around doesn't help defense sets. When even blasters can range-cap, it completely devalues defense sets.

Not really, no. I warned the devs not to add too much defense in the first place, and I double warned them that if they did, adding tohit back to counter it would be stupid. If they want to basically give every single Praetorian critter in Incarnate content tactics, they can at least justify that by claiming its intended to be teamed content, and more difficult content.

But DE eminators have always been a problematic entity: they are game-breakingly (and I use the phrase in its literal sense) bad**. Adding 14% tohit to all Praetorian DE on top exceeds my tolerance for numerical error.

If the devs come out and specifically state that the purpose of those missions is to assassinate defense-based characters in a way that no other type of character is remotely challenged in the game, because they decided that they have a hard-on for torturing defense-based characters, then its not game-breaking, although it would be a bit jerky. Otherwise, the design is broken in a way that was settled years ago and should not need to be rehashed again.

It took years to get it fixed the first time around, and I gave the dev team the benefit of the doubt that they had to get it out of their system to not trust the math and just mess around with silly stuff (like randomly tweaking with rank tohit levels and buffing evasion of all things). But they've seen that it doesn't work already once before, and they've seen that the math does work, with 100% precision, every single time, so this time around if they try screwing around with the numbers in ways that just don't work, I'm less inclined not to call them out on it.

I don't actually mind the game getting harder in certain areas, but that doesn't mean I have to approve of every set of random numbers put into the archetype tables. 64% is a kind of weird number, unless you've been through this once before and you realize some people continue to think linearly about non-linear effects. Geko wanted SR's power cut in half, and cut the defense values in half just before release. That cut their strength by 75% against minions and also made them completely worthless against release bosses. Incorrect linear thinking. Someone thought people were taking circa 31% SR defenses and soft-capping them with about 14% more defense: 64% defense would, with linear thinking, put them back where they started. What does it do to people who don't soft-cap? Eh, who cares. What about people who have *only* high defense, and aren't soft cap-wrapping around very sizable mitigation besides? Eh, corner case.

Sometimes its more than a little exasperating, because this is seventh grade math. But in any case, that's between me, Black Scorpion, and his maker. I'm not saying he did it in the first place, but he's the one that's going to fix it.


** PS: I never said being game breaking was not a problem. What I say is that *not* being game-breaking is not in and of itself good reason to do something.

But the existence of the Notice recipe means if you're running task forces that offer components, there's now a reason to take the component rather than merits: you can use them to craft Notices. The Notices *are* the new thing to craft.


Remember back when I was saying doing things quick and dirty was problematic, and things were not as simple as people were suggesting, and a number of people suggested I was just making things look more difficult than they were to make excuses for the devs? I was thinking about four very specific problems. This one, functional overload, was number 2. Number 1 was cost-ratcheting. Number 3 was content coupling. Number 4 was long-term crafting gating.

I couldn't be specific because there is a closed beta going on. At the time I said this, we had no knowledge of what the solution would be, but I could not be in the middle of a discussion speculating on the specifics of what the solution would likely entail when a preliminary solution appeared. Hypothetically speaking, if I was in the closed beta, which of course I can't technically say if I am, I would have to abruptly stop talking about that subject without warning.

1. Quartz summons are not interruptable.

2. Quartz summons have a +100% tohit buff.

3. Quartz summons are not exclusive of Cairns, which have a 50% resistance buff.

4. In a multiple Guardian spawn, the guardians will cast quartz eminators one after the other if the first is defeated

5. The DE in those tip missions have base 64% tohit to start even without the enimators.

6. Devouring Earth bosses don't downscale to LTs in these missions.

7. Devoured are also immune to knock and have mez protection to sleep, stun, fear, and immobilize. They have resistance to hold.

8. Devoured also have a lot of toxic damage.

Unless you decide to pull every spawn with a guardian, if you're relying on defense like SR, FF, Ice, or EA, you're going to die. If you have a way to consistently survive such spawns that doesn't involve pulling rapidly and continuously away from the enimators, your tactical genius exceeds mine. Pulling is not supposed to be a continuous-use melee tactic.

Furthermore if you're SR specifically there exists no standard content mission of any kind at any difficulty setting that matches the difficulty of this mission for any other kind of melee character. A regen running into a 0x8 mission full of nothing but Malta Hercs running tactics would not come close.

Lets ignore the quartz for a moment and examine two cases: SR with CJ, and soft-capped SR. SR with CJ running just SOs is about 33.3% defense. Normally, that is 66.6% damage mitigation. Against Praetorian DE, that drops to 52% damage mitigation. Doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that means you are now taking 84% more damage. For everyone else without defense the heightened tohit amounts to increasing damage from those critters by 28%.

28% more damage is what happens when you increase your difficulty scaler to +1. 84% more damage is what happens when you increase your difficulty scaler to +3 and decide to debuff your own resistance by 6% just for fun. This is what the casual players see.

Take a soft-capped SR in there, and damage increases by about 280%. That's what happens when you set your difficulty slider all the way up to +5, break the handle off, and fight naked and soaked in gasoline. That's what *I* see.

And that is before something gets the bright idea to drop a quartz. That assumes you never see a quartz eminator ever. The moment one of those pops into existence:

1. SR with CJ's damage jumps to 469% higher. The equivalent of fighting something between +8 and +9 factoring in the fact that above +5 critters start to get tohit buffs again.

2. Soft-capped SR jumps to between 1462% of normal and 1900% of normal. Every minion in the mission now has twice the damage potential of a giant monster.

At this point trying to do anything but run for your life is different from trying to solo Hamidon only in that Hamidon can't chase you.


I solo everything. The only thing I haven't tried to solo yet that I know is mathematically soloable is Lusca. I even solo these missions. We got rid of excessive tohit buffs in the standard content for a specific game design reason: it makes me angry.