Arcanaville

Actually, this thread says that Shields takes billions of influence to become the greatest secondary available to scrappers. It is "lackluster" without expensive IOs in the same sense that Invuln, SR, DA, and Fire are lackluster without expensive IOs. Even Willpower is not pylon-soloing fantastic with just SOs and limited power pool stacking.


Wait: you're saying by your own estimation its fine now but reading the forums makes you afraid it will fall apart? Personally, I would recommend you stop reading the forums. If the forums can make you bitter about a powerset that is "doing wonderful" for you in actual play, the forums are doing far more harm than they could ever do good for you.

No, I don't think that's a good idea at the moment either. I don't think very many people will like where that ends up either.

At the present time, I wouldn't recommend it. Just AAO alone opens a can of worms best left till after GR at least. And we all know what happened with SC.

Issue 20: The Bug Free Issue

Features:

* New Enemy Group: The Ephemerals

The Ephemerals are a villain group that come from a dimension with physical laws that are radically different from those of our dimension. As a result, they are invisible, silent, intangible, untargetable, impossible to detect, cannot be affected, and cannot affect players or NPCs. They spawn underground in all zones.


* New Zone: The Pocket Universe

The pocket universe is a special interdimensional region similar to the shadow shard, but unlike the shard it is only about 0.25 cubic feet in total volume (about the size of a large pocket). Within the pocket universe, powers are suppressed and teleport does not function. Its entrance is located just above the Storm Palace. The only things that can enter or leave the Pocket Universe are objects smaller than the size of the universe itself. Objects larger than this will fail to pass through the gateway to the pocket universe.


* New Epic Power Pool: Mimicry

Mimicry allows a player to replicate the powers of superpowered beings. It has four powers:

- Absorb primary power: when used, this replaces your tier 1 primary power with the first power of the primary set of the target for 30 seconds
- Absorb secondary power: when used, this replaces your tier 1 secondary power with the first power of the secondary set of the target for 30 seconds
- Replicate primary powerset: when used, this replaces your entire primary powerset with the primary powers of the target for 60 seconds
- Mimic target: when used, this replaces all of your powers with the powers of the target for 180 seconds.

(Note: due to current game engine limitations these powers will be limited in Issue 20 to targeting Self)


* New Task Force: Rise of the Ephemerals

The Ephemerals are attempting to invade our dimension! Ghost Falcon seeks your help to drive this scourge back to their own universe. Spanning several interdimensional zones including the new Pocket Universe, players will find the key to stopping this new alien menace.

Note: Rise of the Ephemerals is a task force for players Level 51 and higher, and due to its high difficulty requires a minimum of nine players to begin the task force.


* Villain content

We hear you villains! To address concerns that villains experience less content per issue than heroes, the new task force specifically requires villains to side switch in order to reach its starting contact. This guarantees that villains will experience more content in Issue 20 than heroes. Future expansions will likely continue to expand on villain content in new and innovative ways, including the ability to respec to hero powersets *and* reset yourself to level one, opening even more avenues to experiencing more content as a villain.

I can understand the dilemma that customer support is in: the fact that such a standard response exists at all is almost certainly because they get tons of "this AV is too hard it must be bugged" problem reports. Most people who report things to them really don't know what working as intended actually is for most things in the game.

Having said that, I don't believe there exists a person in customer support capable of reading, interpreting, or resolving a bug more complex than the train stations changing color. You should /bug such things anyway, because repeated /bugs can get escalated to the devs and because the devs can use the /bug database to datamine for bug patterns. But you should always then report such bugs to the forums, where they are more likely to draw the attention of people capable of actually doing something about them.

I personally have a four sentence rule on /bug. If I can theoretically describe the bug to someone that has never played the game before, ever in four sentences or less, I /bug it. If not, I usually don't and PM it to the devs instead.

So, like, Positron Part One says to board the train to Atlas, and sends you to a building entrance instead that seems to open to Atlas like an Iconian portal? /buggable. Power seems to be buffing some, but not all attribute strength modifiers its intended to? /not likely.

The generic answer to this question is almost always "yes" because making powers unresistable in PvE means the devs cannot use resistances to make encounters stronger with reliable consequences. Against a target with 90% resistances the bonus damage would be, in effect, ten times stronger than normal.

Devs also sometimes give something 100% resistances to either temporarily or permanently make it impossible to destroy in some circumstances and unresistable damage would bypass such situations, forcing the devs to change all of those circumstances in some way to make them work as intended (cf: oil slick arrow).

In general, unresistable PvE damage for normal conventional player powers is an off-the-table option.

For just an instant I thought to myself that was actually possible, but I there are three catches that make it not so simple.

1. Target resistances. Just because the target has 20 health left, doesn't mean 20 points more damage will defeat it. The math would have to factor that in, which would be non-trivial.

2. Abs calculations. Executioner's shot doesn't actually "know" how much damage it deals. Powers are defined in scale units. But it could be used by a level 50 Blaster or a level 3 Corruptor. The power would have to factor its own user's damage modifiers into the calculations.

3. Combat modifiers. Things like the purple patch would attenuate the damage delivered to the target, which would further complicate calculations.

Not to mention funny edge cases like what if the target is phase shifted or cannot be affected by the damage: the message might be delivered at times when the bonus damage is triggered but can't actually kill the target.


This is sufficiently complicated that the best way to do such a thing, if you were to ever want to try, might be to make a power that:

1. Delivered its base damage.
2. Delivered its bonus damage.
3. Delivered a zero damage effect that only delivered its effect if the target was at zero health, and whose sole effect was to deliver the "Executed" message.
4. Delivered a heal which immediately healed back its bonus damage.

In that exact order.

But there's enough voodoo in the combat timing of events to make this very twitchy to pull off correctly. I'm not sure if anyone alive currently knows with certainty the minimum event interval the combat engine will honor both the ordinality and the dependency of (which is a sufficiently complex question it would take a couple of pages of text just to explain what the question means).

I'm wondering if requiring the target not be held would even work under these circumstances in combination with replace-stacking, and if it would be better if the attribmod was tagged to be suppressible when held instead.

While these concerns are valid in the general case, they aren't in this specific case. For one thing, the game engine supports zero cast time powers already: they already exist. Objects that go boom often have zero cast time detonation powers, and many critters have zero cast time powers.

For another thing, the game engine has never really cared about cast time matching animation time, because animation time itself is actually something of a colloquial fiction - it doesn't actually exist as far as the game engine is concerned. What we call "animation time" is actually the amount of time that the animations that the power executes are flagged to be "rooted" which prevents us from taking any other actions. Activating a power triggers an animation sequence, and that sequence points to another animation, which points to another animation, which points to another animation, until you are pointing at the "stand around and do nothing" animation. Technically, if you fire a power and then do absolutely nothing else (and nothing else attacks you) that power could trigger a five minute long sequence of animations.

But what's important to players is the rooted time, because the other animations can be interrupted by another power activation. The thing is: the game engine doesn't care about this at all. The game engine doesn't even *know* if the rooted part of the animation happens to match the enforced cast time of the power or not.

In fact, until just a few years ago, it was probably 50/50 on whether a player power's cast time and rooted time agreed or not. I know I've sent in probably close to a hundred cast/animation discrepancies to BaB, and he's addressed lots of others besides. Perfect alignment was probably just not a high priority during the days of the gang of 15.

So: setting a power's cast time to zero is unlikely to cause weird problems, because there are lots of them already. Setting a power's cast time to be different from its animation time is unlikely to cause weird problems because there really isn't any such thing as "animation time" that the game engine recognizes, and because until recently it was a minor miracle if they matched in the first place.

The only problems that are likely to crop up are the very predictable non-weird ones: specifically those involving power recharge and animation errors (a power with zero cast time has no double-check on the animators: if they accidentally forget to flag the animation as rooted or remove the flag by mistake, or if a special set of flags, states, and modes causes a different animation to play that is not rooted, then that power will probably have an effective 0.132 execution time - one "ArcanaTime" tick; that would probably make the power just a little too good.)

Actually, I've let my Secret Weapons arc get pecked apart by MA patches. But actually, with I17 now live I can theoretically revert it to the *exact* state it was in when I originally designed it in I14 beta - the file size restriction and custom critter restrictions are now basically gone, and the maps I needed are all back (the Crey Lab map, in particular) so I'm now actually interested in updating that one back to its original form. I'd wait on that one: I hope to have it updated within a week or so, time permitting (although nothing stops you from playing it now and comparing ). But technically I will still need whatever they are cooking up with the ally patch for one of the missions or it will tank the XP at the end.

Plus, I like to think that when I had the full complement of them in there it was a good example of using custom critters to supplement the existing ones.

Bug Hunt was something I wrote a little out of frustration back in I14 beta and ported to live: I decided to write an arc that couldn't possibly be broken by MA patches (of course, it was broken twice) and I felt the need to jab the devs with a stick a little. Its what passes for humor with me at 3:00 am.

The Scrapper Challenge isn't really a story arc. I wrote that one just because I hate you all and you must die die die. But I'm a bit sad that they removed the ability to use the yellow mito as the contact for that mission. It doesn't quite have the same impact when a wisp is delivering the dialog.

I should point out the animation team always forces attack animations to root us, because as far as I know cast time only enforces power activation lockout - meaning, if the attack animation didn't root, we couldn't cast powers during the cast time, but we could move around.


Also: this "trick" of making cast time and animation time deliberately different has a lot of potential uses, but this is the first time its actually ever been explicitly used for this purpose by the devs to the best of my knowledge.

They are working on it.

I hate to break it to you, but we can now have many times more unbalanced eyesores than that: it seems pohsyb (or another programmer) has begun storing custom critter data in memory with more reasonable encoding rather than the written-out english form they've been using before (which is almost, but not quite, identical to the form it exists on local disk). This means a custom critter that takes up 7k on disk might be taking up only 2k in memory or less (I haven't measured explicitly yet, but others have noted the size discrepancy and I know it was on the list of things to do eventually).

Hopefully, the new custom settings will make those unbalanced eyesores a little less unbalanced, or at least allow for people to theoretically make less unbalanced eyesores. Unfortunately, Ultra Mode is likely to make those eyesores now High Definition eyesores. You might want to consider investing in some customized polarizing sunglasses for use during arc reviews.

Let me suggest trying the new XP system, avoiding the Standard, Hard, and Extreme settings altogether. Hopefully, the new system will be, if not perfect, a closer match to difficulty and XP than before. Just to clarify something not everyone seems to know, the new system does *not* alter the XP rewards for Standard, Hard, and Extreme settings: those are still arbitrarily low. To get the benefit of the new system, you must set both primary and secondary set to Custom, and pick a custom set of powers. In fact, if you want to make a "Hard" critter, and want the benefits of the new system, you have to make a note of which powers are turned on under Hard for both sets, switch to custom and then deliberately turn those powers back on (while turning any others off).

I would be curious to know if you feel the current custom system is still generating critters way too hard for the XP they give, and in what way. Perhaps its a problem that can be addressed in some fashion in a future update of the system (although the system is designed to err on the side of caution, to try to prevent exploitability).

To the best extent possible, it kinda does.


I should point out though that even in the standard PvE game, critters are not given XP proportional to their difficulty. There is a certain difficulty threshold that a critter tends to have to meet: i.e. you must be at least as tall as this sign to become a level 35 critter. But past that point, some critters can be a lot stronger without an XP bonus. In fact, XP bonuses above the standard rate tend to be uncommon in general, and tend to reflect as much the circumstances under which you encounter the critters as it does their difficulty.

True, but my magic pony only claims to solve one problem, and it comes with specific numbers.


But even by your own admission, there is another factor: people do not like to miss. Elusivity is designed to change the game so that what is numerically optimal and what is necessary to achieve the best possible to hit are not the same thing. That's significant, because now you can't assert both that people will just do whatever it takes to hit as often as necessary, which sounds like the tohit ceiling (see below) and will do whatever is necessary to get the maximum possible performance in PvP.


I don't understand this statement. The only real way to build enough accuracy to hit me at essentially the same frequency with or without Elusivity is to drive tohit to the 95% ceiling with enough accuracy that tohit stays at the ceiling with or without Elusivity. I think you should explain this statement: I provided example numbers for SR that you could use: 15% defense, 43% Elusivity.

Actually, now that I read further I think the problem may be a mathematical misunderstanding on your part:

That's not how the math of Elusivity works. Accuracy and Elusivity take effect separately, not additively:

Without any accuracy, net tohit with 43% Elusivity is:
(1 - 0.43) * 0.5 = 0.285

With 200% accuracy, meaning +100% accuracy, net tohit is:
(1 + 1) * (1 - 0.43) * 0.5 = 0.57

At least, that is how I described it to work and how I tested it to work when it was first implemented. I haven't specifically looked at the implementation recently, but if its doing what you're implying in your math that is a horrendous bug that crept into the implementation. The 200% accuracy person gets to hit the Elusivity character twice as often, which is about what his 200% accuracy allows him to do to everyone else, which is the basic intent of Elusivity. Its not intended to neutralize the advantage of high accuracy, its just intended to reduce the impact of high accuracy (actually, specifically high tohit in combination with high accuracy) to have a similar impact on avoidance sets as non-avoidance sets. 200% accuracy is still allowed to be better than 0% accuracy vs all targets regardless of mitigation types, which is also intended.


One part of the magic pony that I think a lot of people overlooked the first time around when the Elusivity idea was discussed, so it was amplified in all future discussions, is that it wasn't a defense "buff." That implies defense was just made stronger. It didn't do that explicitly. Defense might have gotten better under certain conditions, but it didn't get universally stronger. More importantly, under the right selection of numbers tohit *also* becomes more effective. Under the original mechanics, high avoidance could be generated in only one way: with high defense. Tohit could only be countered with even more stacked defense but because there is a tohit floor, high defense designed to counter high tohit would also completely neutralize low tohit. So it wasn't just Defense that was broken under the original mechanics, it was tohit as well. More precisely, both moderate defense *and* moderate tohit could be simply made to have literally zero effect.

Under Elusivity, the intent is that low avoidance has a low effect, high avoidance has a high effect. Low tohit has a low effect, high tohit has a high effect. Elusivity doesn't judge which numbers are fair, and which are unfair. It just makes sure the numbers always have an effect. The specific question of whether a defense set has too much or too little avoidance is a question for the powerset designers to address by setting the numbers to the desired values.

But with +DEF and the old mechanics, that was easy. With Elusivity and the new mechanics, it can be made really really hard. Separate from the Elusivity calculations above, we could place a shallow DR curve on Accuracy strength that didn't kick in until about 180% Accuracy (+80%) and made it difficult to get much higher than about 250-300% accuracy.

200% accuracy (+100%) is not a problem, because that's still about in the range where accuracy affects both avoidance and non-avoidance sets (since everyone starts at base 50% tohit, everyone can be hit at least about twice as often). Its accuracy above that level that is the problem, because it ceases to have an effect on anything other than avoidance sets, no matter how small. With invention set counterbalancing, we can creep that up to about 250% accuracy or so, but then we need to start diminishing the return on investment for ultrahigh accuracy. But only at those stratospherically high values, and not with as sharp a curve as most of the DR parameters specify.

Its not a problem for people to try to build to hit as often as they want to. The game only needs to make the costs reflect the benefits and the limits of the game. I think the biggest problem with DR is that the devs tried to use it to keep everyone in the "average" range, when they should have used it to make getting out of the average range expensive. That's a subtle, but important distinction. By making hyperaccuracy expensive instead of impossible, it could be balanced against the opportunity costs of buying other things, like more damage, rather than focusing strictly on the issue of whether it is absolutely fair to acquire such accuracy against an avoidance set.

Short version: Elu + the right DR means *some* people will do as you describe, and buy accuracy to hit at all costs, but many others will do the cost/benefit analysis and decide its not worth it. If the game presents that choice in a way that people choose both ways, rather than everyone thinking that one of those choices is obviously the best one, that would act to help balance the PvP environment.

Usually, when it comes to PvP, the trickier but more important thing to balance is not the effects of things, but rather the choices presented to the players. That makes the "arms race" a diversity race, and not a magnitude race. Its ok to buy an edge against something if it also costs you a vulnerability (or less of an edge) to something else, as long as those strengths and weaknesses are moderate and within the ability for the game environment to counterbalance reasonably well. Its not necessary, and usually not desirable, to force everything to be exactly equal.

Neither tohit buffs nor accuracy make Elusivity "not matter" either, short of supersaturation. Its not nit-picking: Elusivity is specifically designed to be, at least in terms of damage mitigation, as immune to tohit buffs and accuracy as resistance is, again up to the saturation limit of +90% accuracy or equivalant in accuracy and tohit. From that point forward Elusivity is still far better than nothing and still better vs tohit buffs in any case, up to very high saturation limits.

To make Elusivity really not matter would technically require numbers approaching 400% accuracy.


There is no such value. But that request does not have to be satisfied to generate a balanced game. For one thing, there's no requirement that someone with more than twice the accuracy must be no more effective than someone with half the accuracy. The only requirement for good game design is that the advantage isn't magnified to absurd degrees, like tohit buffs were originally. For another thing, you're suggesting that the game should be balanced on the assumption that the only thing available to players in the invention system is accuracy. It also has defense. If you're going to assume that players can get +80% accuracy from inventions, that should come with a comparable assumption about the amount of +DEF they can also get, because +DEF will benefit Defense sets more than non-Defense sets. Suppose I were to guestimate that a Defensive player - lets pick SR for simplicity - can get at least +10% defense from the invention system for about the same effort as +80% accuracy.

We start with an SR scrapper with about 30% defense. I'm going to round off just to make the numbers simpler. That's about 60% damage mitigation, equal to about 60% resistance in terms of damage mitigation only (this does not count foe debuff protection). For SR to be roughly balanced against its own intrinsic damage mitigation (or if you prefer, a hypothetical 60% resistance character) it should be true that the SR scrapper with +10% defense should take about the same damage as a 60% resistance target when attacked by an attacker with +180% (2.8) accuracy.

The resistance character is supersaturated, so a solution that will work for all attackers can't be formulated that also extends to this example, but we'll assume that this example *must* be balanced for (that's a premise I don't agree with completely, but I will accept for the purposes of discussion). We'll solve for this situation first, then see where the offsets are.

The resistance set is basically being hit by 38% of the damage output from the attacker (0.95 * (1 - 0.6) = 0.38). That's our target for SR

If we converted the entire SR set into 60% elusivity, then the net tohit would be 44.8% ((1-0.6) * (0.5 - 0.1)) * 2.8 = 0.448. That's slightly too weak. Better would be 43% Elusivity and 15% defense. That generates a net tohit of ( (1-0.43) * (0.5 - 0.1 - 0.15) * 2.8 = 0.399. That's close enough, and 43% elusivity and 15% defense vs an attacker with *no* enhanced accuracy generates a net tohit of (1-0.43) * (0.5-0.15) = 0.1995 or 19.95% - almost exactly the number we want, which is 20% net to hit for something with 30% defense vs zero tohit or accuracy.

So, specifically for your example, 43% Elusivity and 15% defense. However, I should point out that were I to balance the sets, I would not focus on that one extreme case only. I would average out a number of them. But actually, the numbers above do come very close to the numbers I originally proposed for SR long ago (or rather, one alternative version of them), which were 12.5% defense, 45% elusivity (I deliberately picked round numbers to make life simple, and they were reasonably close to the values my calculations required).

This makes Avoidance *fair* relative to Resistance, for even the extreme case of someone walking around with 280% accuracy. That's all the math I'm prepared to do. It does not make someone with 280% accuracy no better than someone with 80% accuracy. I have no idea how to do that, or why you would want to do that, so I'm not prepared to even try to figure out the math for that. But that has no bearing at all on whether its possible to balance avoidance with Elusivity in PvP. There is no "new minimum barrier to entry" with these numbers. Someone with no accuracy at all would hit this Elusivity-enhanced SR scrapper at exactly the same rate (20%) that they would hit an SR scrapper with just SOs, no power pools, and no invention bonuses. That is how often they are *supposed* to hit SR when they have no accuracy.


The math to make this work actually specifically only works when DR (at least, the current DR with the current values) *isn't* in force, at least to the degree it is now. Elusivity and DR are actually incompatible on a very deep level unless the DR parameters are set in a very specific way, which currently they are not.


And I have very much countered something you said; specifically this:

It does not. It is specifically engineered to prevent such things. In the case of tohit and defense, with the original mechanics even small amounts of tohit and defense could have huge consequences, so it was imperative to ensure that someone couldn't stack just a little amount of either and significantly negate a large percentage of the value of the other. In other words, if you build up to 45% defense, someone packing just 15% tohit can negate the vast majority of the value of the entire pile of 45% defense: 15% tohit causes them to hit you four times as often. From there, there is only another factor of 2.5 before you reach zero defense again.

*That* was the primary motivator for the tohit/defense arms race: that and people just didn't like to miss. Elusivity defuses most of that in two separate ways. First, you can't buy more to stack with it. There *is* no fuel for that end of the arms race. You can still buy more defense, but with no one anywhere near 30 or 40% defense anymore, its not as attractive to buy "that last 5% defense" to reach the soft cap. The soft cap becomes very far away, even for avoidance sets.

Conversely, tohit isn't as binary as it used to be. Back when people "deep floored" their builds, if your target was at 55% defense, the first +10% tohit did *nothing*. But every point after that did huge proportional damage to the soft-capped defense. So it was to your advantage to use as much of it as possible, because anything less might be worthless. But everything else was devastating. Under high Elusivity/low Defense situations, you don't get that effect anymore. When you take deep-flooring away, tohit always works. But it never works very much better than accuracy does, and neither ever gets any stronger the more you buy. There is no special incentive to target a specific amount of accuracy, like there is targeting a specific value of defense (45). More is always better, but a little more is always only a little better.

People can still go crazy building for every high accuracy if they want to. But the arms race has no accelerator: it has no prize at the end of the race. Building for high accuracy (or high tohit) has not much better return than building for more damage. And that was the point: the arms race would be moot.

Why does the arms race still exist? Mostly because PvP has Elusivity in the same sense that ACE Hardware has a fashion department. Its too weak, too untargeted, and too unfocused to have the benefits it was designed to have. But that's a problem with the numbers, not with Elusivity itself.


Your turn:

Now you've seen values. Find something that, by any reasonable definition you care to choose, can "erase the elusivity value." Clearly, 280% accuracy does not make Elusivity "not matter" in this case. So how many builds are there that can basically make these numbers all but worthless? I can imagine some that would be a little stronger against these numbers than a non-defense set, but to get anywhere near "worthless" you'd have to do a lot better than that.

I'm trying to figure out why your questions might not have been addressed. If you're not going to actually post the questions as phrased, I can only go by what you say. And in terms of "overthinking things to make a point" my only point is this: I don't have any problems asking the devs questions and getting answers. So much so that I never seriously participate in Q&As, either in-game, on the forums, or in any other venue, because it would be unfair. I'm willing to help you try to get your questions answered, if you actually have legitmate questions that can be answered. If that is of no benefit to you, that's fine. I have no other point to prove there.

Many of those sound more like suggestions than questions. For example: "unlocking faction-centric storylines with the appropriate defeat badge(s)?" is more of a suggestion than a question.

As a question, the question would be either:

Are you currently working on creating faction-centric storylines that are unlocked with the appropriate defeat badge(s)?

or

Are you currently considering creating faction-centric storylines that are unlocked with the appropriate defeat badge(s)?

or

Would you consider creating faction-centric storylines that are unlocked with the appropriate defeat badge(s)?

or

Is there a reason why creating faction-centric storylines that are unlocked with the appropriate defeat badge(s) is something unlikely to happen?


Just the phrasing itself makes it a difficult "question" to answer. Its less of a question, and more of a topic. Unless you phrased the questions more explicitly in the Q&A, and are only summarizing them here, I'm not sure how the devs could reasonably respond within the constraints of the Q&A which seems to prevent clarifying questions. Each of the four questions above could have completely different answers.


Even I am not sure what you mean by "updating slotting for IO sets?" The best guess I have is something of the form "are the devs planning on allowing people to unslot invention enhancements without penalty and either sell them, give them away, or reslot them into other characters?" The devs have consistently said "no" to that one.

The related question some people answer is "what do the devs intend to do about the problem of being unable to unslot inventions when I want to change invention slotting." The blunt answer to that question has traditionally been "that's not a problem: that is by design."

The other related question is "why can't I unslot my inventions without penalty" and that is the starting gun of an argument that can't be resolved in a Q&A session.


Perhaps what is needed in cases like this is a translation layer between the questions and the devs, and the answers and the players. That would at least give the questions a fighting chance of being answerable, and give the answers a reasonable chance of being comprehensible. I wonder if that would work.

Its impossible to "erase" Elusivity. If you have two characters, one with 60% resistance to damage and one with 60% elusivity, then any increase in tohit or accuracy will affect both the same way - to a limit. Technically speaking higher accuracy means you get hit more often and you could consider that "erasing" Elusivity but then the same thing is true for Resistance: higher accuracy causes you to take more damage, which is "erasing" resistance as well.

This works to the limit of about +90% accuracy. At that point a zero defense/zero elusivity character is being hit 95% of the time (50% * 1.9 = 95%) which is the tohit ceiling. More accuracy can't hurt the resistance character, but it can continue to hurt the avoidance character. Under that limit, though, Elusivity reacts "smoothly" to increased accuracy and tohit.**

The real question is how to value debuff avoidance relative to damage stability and burst damage resilience against each other. If they are worth exactly the same qualitatively, then X% resistance is balanced against X% elusivity. If they are not, then one of the two would need to be adjusted. For example, if foe debuff avoidance is considered highly valuable in PvP (which it is) then 60% Elusivity is probably "more valuable" than 60% Resistance, even though the numerical damage mitigation is the same. In that case, you could decide that 60% Resistance should be balanced against 50% Elusivity, but that's less than ideal for a lot of reasons. A better option is some combination of Elusivity and Defense that has the same mitigation as 60% Resistance, but is more vulnerable to tohit buffs could be generated that balanced against 60% resistance (i.e. 20% defense/33% Elusivity has about the same 60% damage mitigation as 60% resistance). That way, the resistance character is vulnerable to all debuffs, while the avoidance character is less vulnerable to all debuffs, but more vulnerable specifically to defense debuffs and tohit buffs.

So if you compare to an attacker without very high tohit or accuracy, they will deal about the same amount of effective damage to both the 60% resistance character and the 20%def/33%elu character. If they have stacking debuffs, those would be more effective against the 60% resistance character. If they have tohit those would be a little more effective against the 20%/33% character. But usually, those advantages would be proportional, not runaway. Most PvPers would have at least a little of both, which would offset to a high degree. But avoidance characters would be stronger against some things and weaker against others, without being impossible to hit or trivially easy to tag in most situations.

Overall that's very possible to balance correctly, given a specific valuation target. Its not generally possible to balance this in a way that everyone will agree with because everyone has their own ideas of what different things are worth in PvP. But that's not a numerical problem: that's a "people can't agree where to go for lunch, much less what's important in PvP" problem.



** Above the +90% accuracy limit its a bit trickier to balance things. DR could be engineered to specifically moderate those extreme possibilities, or a hyperaccuracy critical system could be implemented in PvP that would eliminate the disadvantage completely.

What would be an example of a question you wished the devs were able to answer in the Q&A?

This is the best you can come up with, and you're wondering why the devs don't come to the forums and personally discuss game design with you?

The only responses I can think of involve yanking my hand back and making rude noises.

However, endurance costs were never really "balanced" in any numerical sense. They were, over time, "normalized" but never actually balanced for.

Here's an interesting question. If we are *all* supposed to run out of endurance at maximum speed (short of extreme acts of endurance build management) and especially so prior to I9 when inventions came out, then consider a thought-experiment comparison between Blasters and Scrappers.

Blasters and Scrappers at one time had the same damage modifier tables, which means they had the same DPE. In other words, it cost a Blaster (to a first order approximation) about the same amount of endurance to kill something as a Scrapper burned. But Scrappers have defensive toggles which burn endurance. If both have the same amount of endurance and recovery, and the Scrapper is running toggles, and they are both endurance-constrained then the Blaster will have to kill faster, or die often. Essentially, both are converting endurance points into XP, and the Scrapper is "wasting" some endurance running toggles.**

The only way the Blaster isn't *designed* to go faster than the Scrapper is either if the Scrapper runs out, but the Blaster doesn't (because the Blaster takes so much damage they are forced to rest or forced to fight slower and more carefully, even if they have lots of endurance available), or the Scrapper runs out first, the Blaster runs out second, but then dies to compensate for the extra kills per unit time.

So actually, it cannot be true that everything is designed to run out of endurance. Either Blasters are designed to not be endurance-constrained all the time, or they are designed to die and need more activity to cover the same leveling ground.

This is just one of the many oddities to the endurance system that exist because endurance was not really balanced for in global terms in any numerical sense.



** The simplified way to look at defensive toggles is that they trade the Blue bar for the Green bar: they allow you to convert blue into green by burning endurance and preserving (gaining) green. If Scrappers are supposed to be able to trade Blue for Green, they should be able to, if played correctly, end up Resting when their Blue *and* Green bars are about empty: as they lose green they burn blue, and as they burn blue they stop making green, and it should balance up in the end. They should, if played efficiently, not waste either blue or green by running out of one while still having plenty of the other. If that's true, Blasters should run out of green before they run out of blue, if they are balanced correctly. And that means Blasters are designed to be health constrained, not endurance constrained. At least in this one instance. This is contradicted by other design decisions, though, which is the core of the problem with endurance management in CoH: its not just annoying to some players, its more directly provably inconsistently implemented.