Arcanaville

Ah, this topic.


Not really. First of all, its important to eliminate some ambiguity here. "Defense" and "Resistance" are game mechanics. To ask if there is an issue with the effectiveness of each is not asking a quantitative question, like are sturdies weaker than lucks. Its asking if the very mechanics of defense predispose it to be stronger or weaker than resistance. And I don't think it does in a way that is problematic.

Defense is probabilistic. Resistance is deterministic. Defense increases avoidance, which nullifies all effects of attacks. (Damage) Resistance attenuates damage, which ignores non-damaging effects of attacks. What we want from these two game mechanics is not equivalence but orthogonality. In other words, we want them to be different, to work different, to provide differences in experience.

Its interesting how no one (or almost no one) asks "is Regeneration weaker than Defense?" Regeneration is so radically different in mechanics from Defense that I think the question tends to get pre-empted. Of course Regeneration isn't stronger or weaker, its just different. Really high regeneration is going to be stronger than low Defense, and really high Defense is going to be stronger than low Regeneration. In the middle, its situational. But at least most of us knows that its not about Defense or Regen, its about how much of each you have.

But I think people get suckered into thinking that doesn't apply to Defense and Resistance, because they *seem* to work kind of the same. So people think Defense and Resistance are just two variations of a single thing. But that's not true. Defense and Resistance are as different as Resistance and Regeneration: they only look the same when you use average algebra to quantify them, focusing solely on damage.

So no, I don't think there is an issue between Resistance, the game mechanic, and Defense, the game mechanic.


No, for similar reasons as above. There are mitigation limits to defense related to the tohit floors and ceilings. That mitigation limit is 90%, the same as the maximum resistance ceiling for player archetypes (i.e. tankers). Now, its true that other archetypes, like say blasters, can achieve 90% mitigation with defense but only 75% mitigation with resistance, but I don't see that as a problem. Game mechanics have no right to fairness. "Resistance" has no lobby with a right to complain in that situation. Its players that have a right to fairness, and by extension, gameplay choices themselves have to be presented fairly. So archetypes need to be fair. Mechanics do not.

One more thing: while resistance ceilings vary by archetype, defense mitigation ceilings vary by situation. Assuming no tohit buffs, the defense mitigation ceiling is 90% until attacker accuracy exceeds 90% When attacker accuracy exceeds 90%, your best case defensive mitigation drops below 90%. An example will best illustrate the point.

Suppose something with +90% accuracy were to attack you. Without any defense, he would have a 95% chance to hit (50 * 1.9). With 45% defense or better ("soft capped defense") he'd be reduced to 5 * 1.9 = 9.5% chance, or one tenth his chances without those defenses. That's what it means to say your defenses are reducing his chance to hit by 90%, or that your defenses have 90% damage mitigation.

But what if its a Gunslinger, and he has +100% accuracy. Well, without defenses his tohit would be 50% * 2.0 = 100%, but he is bound by the 95% tohit ceiling, so its still 95%. With your soft capped defenses, he's reduced to 5% * 2.0 = 10%. But now, you aren't reducing his chances by 90%: you're reducing them by 89.5%. Your effective mitigation is slightly lower. And that's a hypothetical Gunslinger minion, which don't normally exist. A Gunslinger boss would have 1.3 rank accuracy on top of +100% gunslinger accuracy, or 1.3 * 2.0 = 2.6 accuracy total (+160%). Now, the best you can do is 5% * 2.6 = 13%, which is 86.3% damage mitigation (1 - 13/95). Against a +3 Gunslinger Boss, the best you can do is 82.2% damage mitigation. That's blasters, scrappers, tankers, everybody.

This is a consequence of the I7 changes to critter accuracy intended to better normalize defense. Prior to I7, the *opposite* situation would occur. Against even minions, the best that defense could do was 90% mitigation. But against a +5 Boss, the best you could do is still reduce tohit to 5%, against a critter that would have had a 95% chance to hit you, which is 94.7% mitigation - better than 90%. That's why perma-elude was all that back then: the mechanics allowed Perma-Elude to exceed 90% mitigation against the higher level stuff Scrappers used to fight back in the day.


No. See above.


Maybe. There is so much defensive possibilities that its at the point where the ultra-high end of building (relative to the average player) can trivialize defensive sets, by nearly replicating their strength or even their best case outcomes on non-defensive sets. And as I said above, game mechanics have no right to fairness, but powersets and archetypes do, because they are presented as fair choices to the players. I actually advocated dialing back defense bonuses in the invention system as a result. But keep in mind: I don't care if players can buy a lot of defense: I only care they can buy enough to trivialize defense sets. You cannot do that with resistance or regeneration (although you can come close with regen). Increasing the amount of resistance in things like the invention system would not make things "more fair" in my eyes, it would add another problem.

Converting the defense in the invention system to Elusivity, which doesn't stack with conventional defense, would partially address this problem, by the way.


Yes. But see above. Creating that opportunity creates a separate design problem.


No.


Neither, which is the reason I answered no. The point to having defense and resistance is that they are different game mechanics. There's no point in having two mitigation mechanics that work the same way. That's a waste of design space.


Sometimes. As was mentioned elsewhere, some situations specifically negate or mute the benefits of defense, such as Lord Recluse in the STF. Defense has weaknesses Resistance doesn't, such as cascade failure under debuffing (if you do not have sizeable defense debuff resistance) or high tohit buffs (which have no defense against them except ultra-high defense that is almost impossible to achieve without defender buffing or Elude) such as what you find in DE eminators (quartz). And unless you have extremely high levels of defense, even small tohit buffs like what you find in tactics (Bank guard LTs have tactics, for example) or Build Up (more on the red side than blue side, but critters have it) can significantly reduce the effectiveness of moderate amounts of defense or bring you right off the soft floor. And there are things that have higher than 50% base tohit and are explicitly intended to be problematic to defense users: pets and turrets have 75% base tohit, which is like having +25% tohit all the time. And certain newer critters being introduced into the game have a special 64% base tohit, usually but not always related to Praetorians. Against these attackers, defense of a given value would be weaker than normal, relative to resistance of a given value.


Yeah. I'd look for gaps in performance between powersets and try to address them, either in intrinsic strength or in general development opportunity. But I would leave the mechanics of Defense and Resistance alone in general (I proposed Elusivity not to address strength concerns in defense sets, but stacking concerns, which is a separate issue).


Technically, the logical question is what is special about Defense and Resistance that is deserving of a balance pass between those two mechanics. There are five standard defensive mitigation mechanisms: Defense, Resistance, Regeneration, Healing, +Health. Six if you count positional and typed defense as separate mechanisms. So what makes Defense and Resistance special that they need to be equalized between each other, but not Regeneration, or +Health? Why can't I buy 75% damage mitigation with +Health, if I can with Resistance? If we have to be "fair" to "Resistance" why shouldn't we be fair to +Health?

The answer, of course, is that its much more obvious that +Health is intended to be different, that Regeneration is intended to be different, that Healing is intended to be different. Well, Defense and Resistance are intended to be different, and what matters is not how they work, but how much of each you are given or decide to buy. That needs to be quantitatively balanced when possible, and qualitatively balanced when necessary. But not be made equivalent. You actually want each mechanism to work as differently as possible. If that makes them harder to balance quantitatively, so be it. That's the game designer's job.

That would not be a safe bet. It presumes those are the only two options.

I actually do know what BaB is doing now, and I'm glad he's landed on his feet. He was always very helpful to me, and the community in general. A lot of what we know about the animation system of the game comes from discussions I had with BaB (for example, how power rooting works). Heck, some things we know about the animation system (or at least I know) were not known *until* I asked the question and we stopped to figure it out. And we have mostly BaB to thank for things like weapon redraw trimming, melee attack speed ups, and large elements of power customization.

However, that doesn't mean I'm not above yanking on his chain a little, since I know he still reads the forums occasionally.

Not really. All PnP systems are pretty broken numerically. The thing is, that's not really a bad knock on them. It's only a problem if they become unworkable, and Champions wasn't unworkable. What you want from a good PnP system is flexibility and reasonableness. The GM has to exercise good judgment beyond that. My only gripe with HERO is how it's often held up as an example of how "it should be" like by CoH players in the past or CO players past and present (it was my biggest gripe in CO beta that people who thought the HERO system could form the basis for that game's mechanics were basically retarded). PnP systems are never, ever, EVER good models for computer MMO combat or mechanical systems. Show me an MMO that implements a PnP system, and I guarantee you that either the MMO sucks, or the PnP game it's based on sucks, or possibly both. The requirements for both are almost incompatible.

Gee, that's odd, because I heard BaB was auditioning to replace Buster on Mythbusters. But I guess Cryptic is good too, and also in the Bay area. Unfortunately BaB is an animator, not a modeller so I can't hope that "Stretch Armstrong left in the sun too long" look gets addressed any time soon. On the other hand, I can now abuse him on a whole new set of forums now, so there's that.

Well, I leveled a blaster at release, so influence was less of a problem for me. Back then, one of the ways to make sure you had enough influence to buy your enhancements was to solo a blaster and wear debt-bars like they were epaulets.

I recall it being a little bit tighter with my MA/SR. Probably because of the not being dead very often factor. And my Ill/Rad was even more so, probably because of the not being dead ever factor.

Most people, in my experience, recognize that marketing information cannot include information from the future. And a statement about the present is not a promise to preserve the status quo in the future.


Suppose I were to ask NCSoft if there was any disadvantage to subscribing for a year instead of monthly for a year, given the annual subscription rate is cheaper. Should they be forced to say:

At the moment there is no material advantage to subscribing for twelve individual months as opposed to a year at once given the rate savings, but that presumes subscription rates don't change in the future, you use all twelve months of the subscription, and some future opportunity doesn't arise which could place you at a disadvantage relative to someone who isn't locked into a longer subscription term, of which we may or may not currently forsee but which may involve advantages other than simple rate changes and encompass qualitative and quantitative differences in value proposition within that timespan, which should not be taken to presume that any such changes are currently foreseen or being pursued, nor should it be assumed that such changes are not currently being pursued, as it would be against policy to discuss such possibilities before they are finalized and we reserve the right to announce any such change in a manner which would imply that such changes were being contemplated at any time up to and including when this answer was drafted, as a result deferring the requisite decision to your best judgment given the information that is currently available, and with the full knowledge that such information may be necessarily incomplete.

or, alternatively, the answer most people would consider to be the reasonable one, which is:

No.

If that answer changes tomorrow, it changes. That's not deception, that's life. "There are no benefits to preordering" was true when the statement was made. It therefore cannot be deceptive by definition. Even if you think it was deceptive, there was no possible remedy, because it was impossible to mention a buying option that didn't exist at the time.

The problem is that some people assumed it was a promise not just a statement of fact. And that's an unreasonable expectation.

Hmm, well. For the record, that's very very false. Its also easy to demonstrate mathematically, but that's a bit off topic. I will say that that statement was only true for maybe a few weeks after Issue 1 was released. Before that, no level 50s. After that and before I2, XP and Inf adjustments were made that made the statement false.

Also, the problem was *never* really level 50. It was level 25 (technically, 22), and the mid levels up to about 40. At that point, the influence earning rate outstripped the SO replacement costs per level range. Today, its just about possible to earn enough influence from direct earning and basic selling (without even using the market) to buy a complete set of level 50 SOs just from leveling from level 46 to level 47 (when you can first slot level 50 SOs). Or, if you are in SG mode all the time, leveling from 44 to 47 should also do it with plenty of margin to spare.

The problem with your thesis is that its provably false. Even with the massive edge in DPE that Blasters possess over Defenders, Defenders are never at higher risk of defeat on average over Blasters, and Defenders are never leveling slower than Blasters. This was all but stated during Issue 11 when Blaster defiance was revamped, and I believe I can make the case that in retrospect, evidence has suggested this statement to have been true for essentially the entire existence of the game.

Of all the archetypes, it has *only* been Blasters that have consistently been looked at because of performance issues which we now know is code for essentially "leveling speed." Only Blasters gained an inherent because of specific lack of performance (neither Scrappers, Tankers, nor Defenders gained their inherents over a perceived performance problem directly, and Controllers gained Containment to *even out* performance between high and low levels). We can place two data points with almost 100% certainty: Blasters were never outperforming Defenders on or around Issue 11, and Blasters were never outperforming Defenders on or around Issue 5.

In fact, its very likely that one of the very first posts I ever made on the forums exposed this problem inadvertently. During the "City of Blasters" period I conducted an analysis of server populations over a period of time that caused me to conclude that Blasters were never 50% or higher of the population of characters at any combat level, which was the assertion at the time. Moreover, the data suggested that Blasters started off at their most popular (about 40% of all characters logged in) and quickly dropped off to less than 20% of all characters logged in at high levels (40+). I suggested at the time that the reason was because Blasters were simultaneously the most commonly created archetype, but also the hardest to level. As it turns out, both conclusions agreed with the Issue 11 information regarding Blasters and defiance, and the population statistics released around Issue 12 regarding created and played archetypes. Which means there is extremely strong circumstantial evidence that Blasters have never been able to leverage that DPE advantage over Defenders from release to Issue 11, and possibly to today.

This is probably why the devs have consistently suggested that Defenders were one of the most "balanced" archetypes in the game. Their internal datamining, I would now guess, places them the closest to the average statistical leveling of the playerbase as a whole, and has the fewest primary/secondary combinations that either significantly overperform or significantly underperform, at all levels and under all teaming conditions.

About the only DPE problem Defenders have - or had - was probably at lower levels while solo prior to Vigilence, and certainly before inherent fitness. But relative to Blasters? Defenders have never had a DPE problem relative to Blasters.


Which brings me to:

The above is an example of why this statement is false. Different archetypes are designed to overcome *different* challenges, either qualitatively or quantitatively. For example, Blasters are *not* designed to overcome DPE issues. In fact, given both the design of the archetypes and the statistical information we have on both, relative to Defenders Blaster DPE is actually too low, not the other way around.

In fact, I'd say that on a normalized basis, Blaster DPE is too low relative to Defenders and Corruptors (their comparable analogs from a DPE perspective), and relative to Scrappers Tanker DPE is too low, Brute DPE is a bit too high, and Stalker DPE is too low. Blasters are not designed to manage endurance relative to survival. They are actually designed to basically drop dead when they run out of endurance, because they are designed primarily with offensive mitigation only. Defenders, on the other hand, *are* designed to manage endurance between powering offense (which generates progress) and using defenses (which keeps them alive). Defensive powers are in effect conversion powers: they convert the blue bar into the green bar. On the other hand, Offensive powers are *pacing-balanced* - they ask the Blaster to balance time against the green bar while generating the maximum amount of offense within that time. Adding endurance management on top of that equation is actually asking for trouble, which is why Blasters have been perpetually in trouble.

This is a critical design issue that I don't think even the devs fully acknowledge, because, ironically, they have a similar view you do towards endurance: that its intended to be treated as an across the board balancing mechanic that can be allocated "fairly." But actually, it can't: at least, not with a quantitative measure of fairness. Instead, the best you can do is use quantitative measures to predict which archetypes need to have completely different approaches to incorporating endurance management into their design. The equations for determining Blaster endurance balance are actually totally different from the ones for Defender balance, or Scrapper balance, say.


To be honest, for me personally most of what you tend to propose is uncontroversial at a high level, but tends to be objectionable on its details. And details matter. If details didn't matter, I could probably take credit for every change to the game except for the ones involving bases and male costumes.


PS: the HERO system is not quantitatively balanced. Its not even close. Its qualitatively balanced in a manner that good human GMs can manage. I was almost hoping that Cryptic would foolishly implement a variant of the HERO system in CO like so many people wanted, just so I could prove how absolutely broken that system is. Its a great PnP system, don't get me wrong. But if a computer has to run it, its broken beyond repair. In its defense, the HERO system *knows* this, and warns GMs where most of the dragons are in the system. This is what makes it so hard to translate "open" PnP game systems into computer games, especially MMOs where balance is more critical than in single player games.

Wait, what?

Seriously, did I miss a really weird discussion somewhere? That can't be right; I can't believe someone would assert that except out of context.


Also, I'm pretty sure off-market trades for influence exchanges above the inf cap are not considered "abuse". An undesirable side effect of the influence cap, perhaps, but not abuse. If there is a quote out there, I'd like to see it, because it contradicts my understanding of the situation.


As to the whole free to play discussion. I think if NC is thinking of heading that way, they should think it through very carefully. There's no one single free to play model, and each has advantages and risks. However, most of them do have the property that it's an all-in bet. If it fails, it's all over. You would do irreparable damage to the existing playerbase that wasn't recoverable if the model didn't infuse the game with a sufficient number of new players to create a sustainable environment.

My guess is that *eventually* some new financial model is likely to take over from the current one, but when that might happen or what that new model would look like exactly is an open question.

Not in the way I'm thinking of shield projection:




The mechanic I'm thinking of is closer to a hybrid of CO's block and PFF mechanism, but with a touch of CoX's Dancing Infernal Swords.

Honestly, I think Lost itself used up most of the good will people have to being teased about where a series was going to go. By the time people figured out that Lost really wasn't going anywhere the viewers had at least become attached to the characters. But frankly, as much as lots of people loved Lost, I think Lost itself made the statement that if you're watching to find out where this goes, don't trust the writers to ever deliver. Most of the Lost mythology was never resolved by the series, and if Lost wasn't going to do it, why should anyone assume that shows like The Event, say, won't play the same game with the audience.

Caprica very obviously was trying to milk the Cylon storyline to get people hooked on the character drama, and the character drama wasn't strong enough on its own. People rather justifiably in my opinion gave up on Caprica very quickly as a result as being a tease that would never be resolved. The Cylons were always going to be a carrot dangled in front of the audience until maybe the very end of the series if at all, because obviously Caprica wasn't going to transition to the Cylon war.

The great irony is that Battlestar Galactica itself presented itself honestly as a straight up drama with only some actual action for punctuation. Although it got thick at times, I think everyone immediately knew where BSG was going after watching 33. That single episode hooked me onto the show, and the show more or less delivered on 33's promise, at least for the first couple of seasons.

You add up all of your buffs from enhancements (SOs, IOs, etc) including the non-exempted part from the Alpha buffs, and then get a total, then apply ED. Then all other buffs - invention set bonuses, actual power buffs, defender buffs, inspirations, all of that - including the *exempted* part of the Alpha buffs get applied on top of that at the end.


The only IOs that can grant defense directly are the "proc-like" ones such as Steadfast Res/+Def. So far as I'm aware, no such effects exist in the Alpha abilities. All of the effects in the Alpha powers (so far as I'm aware at the moment) are enhancements, or "strength buffs." Meaning: they buff the strength of other powers. If you don't actually have defense powers, there's nothing for the defense-buffing Alphas to buff. They don't grant defense, they just boost the strength of defense powers (and ditto for all other effects).

My understanding from I18 beta is that new tech was added specifically for the Incarnate Alpha buffs which, to get specifically technical, allows them to be designed so that named strength buffs will only affect powers designated to be enhanceable by that specific type of buff by name specifically.

In other words, if the power isn't slottable by damage, damage buffs from the Alpha slot will not affect it. If it isn't slottable with recharge, recharge buffs from the Alpha slot will not affect it. Basically, powers can only "inherit" buffs from the Alpha slot that they are coded to be slottable for.

The new tech is specific enough that if your power is slottable for defense buff and not defense debuff, then an Alpha ability that is explicitly coded to offer "defense debuff strength buff" will not affect that power.

And it works effect by effect, so an Alpha ability that buffs multiple things will have each buff "find" the appropriate powers separately and independently. Meaning: a power doesn't have to be slottable for both endred *and* resistance to receive the buffs from Cardiac Radial. If you have Cardiac Radial, all powers slottable with endred will receive the endred buff, and separately all powers slottable with resistance will receive the resistance buff.


*However* there is a really big catch to all of that. Suppose a hypothetical power were slottable with both defense buff and defense debuff. An Alpha ability that enhanced defense debuff would increase *both* the defense buffing and the defense debuffing of that power. Why? Because the defense debuff strength would pass to the power, because the power is slottable for it. But "defense debuff strength" is really no different quantitatively as defense buff strength: the same buff boosts both things. Defense debuff strength/enhancement and defense buff strength/enhancement are really the same thing with two different names. It is because the Alpha slot buffs follow *names* that "defense debuff strength" will buff powers slottable for defense debuff but not defense buff. But once that buff lands on the power, it will buff everything that power does that has anything to do with defense - buffing and debuffing (assuming those effects can be increased with strength buffs at all).

I hope that makes sense. That's my recollection of how the Alphas worked in beta. Also: the tech to do the above isn't hard coded into the Incarnate system, so the devs are free to make the Alpha abilities work that way, or not, and also its possible for the devs to make a mistake and not code them to work that way, so testing *can* show powers inheriting buffs they should not, like Domination getting recharge-buffed by an Alpha. It would just mean that most likely a typo got into the powers database, and it should be reported as a bug whenever a power is buffed by Alpha, when it is not specifically slottable for that kind of buff explicitly, unless the devs state otherwise.

To the best of my knowledge, the change you reference, what I've generally called the intermediate to hit floor, was put in on or just after I4 release. It was put in specifically because of the noticable effect of ultrahigh defense in PvP, but the change addressed this problem everywhere in the game, including things like MoGed PPs which created similar problems.

It is, as far as I know, the only algorithmic change to to hit calculations as players normally understand them. Technically, Issue 7 introduced a new set of accuracy factors for rank and level, but the mechanics of differing accuracy factors remained the same - namely that different accuracy factors multiply against net to hit after to hit buffs, debuffs, and the effects of defense. The only other change was the bug fix that properly implemented the "best factor" rule for defense (i.e. the defense type stacking bug).

For the record, though, the to hit formula obeys a 5%/95% bound both before and after accuracy factors. The reason is that even if the intermediate floor is enforced and that can get no lower than 5%, it's still possible for the final calculation to end up below 5% after accuracy because there are accuracy factors less than 1.0 - for example, some AoE mez powers have less than 1.0 intrinsic accuracy. So the bounds weren't moved, a new bounds before accuracy was added to the original bounds that was enforced after accuracy.

We're getting inherent fitness because Christmas came early this year. Otherwise, replace every instance of "need" in my post with the phrase "requires within reasonably conventional builds when played by players of median skill levels to satisfy the balancing requirements of gameplay performance within the design-significant regions of datamined performance metrics within the limits of tolerance specified by the design team."

In other words, if you can't solo without tough, and your skill level is average or better, or if you can demonstrate your ability to earn rewards is substantially less than the average player for a significant region of gameplay without it, then you have a case that your defensive powerset is probably lacking in smash/lethal resistance. Otherwise, nope. You can ask. You just won't get.

Well, if you start asking now, maybe in 2016 the devs will add inherent fighting. It still doesn't get you non-s/l resistances in tough, though, it just gets you tough for free.


The short answer is: the devs decided it was too much work to figure out a solution to the fundamental problem of critter vs player design differences. In particular, player defense is designed to deal with an average of all the critters out there, and the critters are slanted towards smash/lethal damage overall. Players, on the other hand, are not. So player defenses are designed to work against critters in the PvE game, but aren't designed to be fairly balanced against other players in PvP. For that matter, PvE is balanced around averages and PvP definitely is not.

In fact, you can pretty much open the dictionary and put random words into the Mad Libs sentence Player [X] is balanced around critter [Y] on average but not against player [Y] and it'll probably be true. That's a highly involved discussion in and of itself.

Now, as to your point about non-smash/lethal "spikes" showing up in new critters, that's true, but its still overwhelmingly true that the game is designed around smash/lethal damage being the most prevalent and "conventional" damage around which other damage types are balanced around. No one is weak to smash/lethal. Anything that is resistively or defensively strong against anything is either specifically strong against smash/lethal, or specifically strong against something else with smash/lethal a close second. Because being specifically weak against smash/lethal is basically fundamentally broken in this game for players.

Note: critters can be weak to smashing or lethal damage, and some are.

So basically tough lets any character buy some protection against the most common forms of damage in the game. But the more exotic resistances have to be acquired from your primary or secondary powers (or epics, when you get that far, and even then smash/lethal shows up more often than any other).


I don't consider it a case at all. I consider it a request. I've made plenty of requests purely on the basis of want not need myself. But I recognize that makes it about as low a priority item as priority gets. The last time I got a want to have but not need to have, CAK got a token defense debuff - and its not even slottable for invention sets. The last time before that was... uh... let me think... no, that was a need to have for balance... and that was more of a mechanical requirement... ah, I remember now: Gift of the Ancient: +Run Speed became non-unique three and a half years ago during I9 beta. Yay?



PS: the fact that these days the forums seem to have the memory of Leonard Shelby is starting to get annoying. Seriously, the "remember me" checkbox is becoming a sad joke.

Just one:

That does raise the question of how the equipotential eigenstates of the various ranks resolved to intra-archetypal admittance Hamiltonian metrics hyperbolically related under Lorentzian normalization.

It actually doesn't really sound like either one.

Although, since I can't currently think of what the story might be, I'll instead plug a, well I guess technically its a comic book, called Meanwhile. It takes the concept to a very interesting place.


I happened to stumble onto that book after being pointed to the authors prior work: Fleep. Its ... unique.

Sorry, but "why not" is not a justification for adding anything to the game.

The general justification is that power pools were never intended to offer everything, but only a limited set of things. That's why there are no ranged attacks (unless you count teleport foe as a ranged attack). No resistance to non-physical damage. No +Health. No ally speed buffs. No AoEs. No holds. The *only* argument for suggesting that its even reasonable for the power pools to have resistance to all types, and by extension Tough should, are the power pool defense powers, which as I said don't have defense to all types explicitly by intent, but as a consequence of fixing stacking problems.

And the stacking problems were not a question of some types being more or less represented, or some things benefiting more or less than others. Neither of those were or are problems. The specific problem was that because defense came in two non-stacking flavors (positional and typed) it was possible for some things to get basically no benefit from the power pool powers at all. Except for corner cases, literally zero. FF got nothing from Weave, for example, because Weave was melee/ranged, and FF was all (damage) typed. And moreover, the devs actually *tried* to fix this problem without giving all the powers everything, but they gave up when they decided there were too many corner cases to deal with (in my opinion, incorrectly: there were several ways to fix those that were simple at the time).

Nevertheless, the defense powers set no precedent that breaks the fundamental principle of the power pools, which is that they offer some stuff, but not everything, and supplement but do not replace primary and secondary powers in general. They are, except perhaps for travel powers, all "nice to have" and not "need to have." By definition, if you think you need something, you should ask for it to be added to your primary or secondary power set. If you think you need it, by definition it *shouldn't* be in the power pools.

On my first play through I played as a blaster, and I didn't even *know* the emanators did anything. Buffing tohit meant nothing to me, and I didn't play in dense enough maps to see multiple cairns: they would fall to AoE usually fast enough so I didn't notice they were making the other DE harder to kill. Plus, knockback and stun (Energy/Energy) tended to dilute the effects of the emanators.

Then on my second character, which was MA/SR, it was as if I had never seen these things before that made my defense disappear and made it ten times harder to kill anything. I actually thought they were a completely different version of the DE until I figured out what was going on.

Depends on what you mean by "make up for this." A critter under one instance of this buff (its possible to have more than one in theory, but it would have to come from a critter from an adjacent spawn not the same spawn) would be at 150% tohit before accuracy. Regular soft-capped defense (+45) means nothing: you're still at 105% tohit. Soft-cap plus Elude (45%) would be 90% defense, and the critter would be at 60% tohit before accuracy. Not the ceiling, but kinda high. Maximally slotted Elude (~70% defense) would be 125% total defense and drop the critter to 25% tohit before accuracy. You'd notice that helping, but you'd also notice not being at the floor also.

It was nasty when emanators could buff their own kind. Two quartz and two cairns in a dense overlapping spawn and unless you were really lucky or really quick thinking you could kiss your perma-eluded butt goodbye.

(The quartz would be hard to kill because they would be double-buffed by the cairns, and the cairns would be hard to kill because they would be resistance buffing each other, so there would be no quick path to eliminating them, *and* in a dense spawn as soon as you killed one of them another LT would probably drop a replacement somewhere random. Fun fun.)

+100% tohit buff, emanated in a 50 foot radius, which buffs all Devouring Earth critters.

Weave gives defense to all due to a desire to simplify the stacking situation when positional and typed defense was realigned. Weave serves no precedent to Tough until the devs add positional resistances to the game.

And I hope you aren't making an argument based on an interpretation of the name of the power.

I try not to.


Quartz eminators are too powerful. They'd be questionable if they only showed up at level 50 against the top level characters. Showing up in the 30s and 40s is a legacy error.

I'd give Ice Tankers PvE Elusivity** to soften that and other tohit effects (you could adjust eminators, but it would be better to attack the root problem head on and there are other lesser tohit problems out there), but using Elusivity in PvE is something the devs and I seem to have philosophical disagreement on (ironic, because I intended Elu originally for PvE and only secondarily for PvP).



** To be more specific, I would reapportion Ice tanker protection to be a balance of +DEF and Elu, in a way that didn't significantly buff overall protection but would make those protections less vulnerable to extreme tohit buffs.

I kinda like this build, actually. Its not what I was originally aiming for, but I was thinking about Mu (because of the high DPA ball lightning) and just never got back to revisiting it. I think I'm going to play around with this one and see how it works, and what its options are. Using bolts as a ranged mule is also a nice feature of the build, and its also a decent ranged attack in its own right. And its not wedded to AoE or a truncated single target chain.