Arcanaville

I did find a patent filing which may have additional useful information. Patent filings are required to do some homework to determine other potentially related inventions, and this one notes the following:

Well, in terms of a tandem shaped charge warhead, that's easy: the RPG-29 is supposed to have one of those.

Precursor + Penetrator, that's much more difficult to find information on. I did find The Taurus KEPD 350 which is said to have, quoting from the article:

Four. The fourth type of round is the tandem round, or the tandem warhead, which typically features a precursor explosive charge designed to defeat various forms of reactive armor. Some use twin shaped charges, but some designs I've seen use an initial shaped charge followed by a penetrator.

I think so, if the specialization tracks actually meant something. Personally, I think somewhere between VEATs and Champions Online is the correct way to do this. No one starts off as a Defender. Everyone starts off as either a Melee Scrapper with a ranged attack (even Batman has batarangs) and a can of bandaids, a Ranged Blaster with a can of Bactine, or a Controller with a six-pack of Red Bull. You learn the basics of self-sufficiency and some team assistance in the tutorial, and then at level 5, 10, whatever, you get to start specializing. That's by my definition of specialization, which means the more effort to put into X, the better you get at X.

If your personality is balanced self-sufficiency, you'll balance personal protection and offense. If your personality is "kill them all and let god sort them out" you'll focus on offense. If you want to be Superman and have bullets bounce off your chest, you'll focus on personal protection. If you want to make sure they don't bounce off your chest and into the forehead of your teammate, you'll focus some attention on ally protection.

My belief is that the game should allow you to be anything you want**, but not necessarily everything you want.


** That the game will allow at all.

The reverse, actually.

Initially, the reduction would have a very minimal effect on damage: it would decrease the cycle times of the attacks, which would increase damage. Take the first two energy blast attacks (which have typical cast and recharge). The low attack has cast 1s and recharge 4s. Cutting cast time by 33% would reduce the cast time to 0.67s. That means instead of cycling every 5 seconds you'd be cycling every 4.67 seconds (I'm ignoring ArcanaTime for simplicity sake here). That's an increase in damage of about 7%. On the high attack you'd cut cast time from 1.67s to 1.12s, and cycle time from 9.67s to 9.12s (8s recharge). That's an increase of only 6%.

However, the DPA of both attacks increased by 49%. If you can make a full attack chain, increasing the DPA of all attacks by 49% is liable to increase your overall damage by a similar number. It will require more recharge to actually make that full chain, but your maximum possible damage goes up.

Lets consider Energy Blast. Its *best* DPA attack, with ArcanaTime, is Power Burst, at 0.945 DS/sec. Its worst DPA single target attack is Power Blast, at 0.887 DS/sec. At level 50, with +0.95 slotting, these numbers translate to 115.28 dps and 108.21 dps. A full attack chain, with energy torrent tossed in there (whose DPA is actually comparable) is going to fall between those two numbers, obviously.

With the 33% cast time reduction, Power Burst increases to 1.338 DS/sec and Power Blast increases to 1.242 DS/sec. Those numbers translate to 163.225 dps and 151.514 dps. If we guestimate that the full attack chain is about the average of those two numbers, then damage increased from about 111.745 dps to 157.370, an increase of 40.8%.

Basically, reducing cast times of single target attacks provides a path to higher damage with higher recharge. It allows blasters to continue to increase their damage through higher slotting in the end game, whereas now once your attack chain fills up higher recharge provides rapidly decreasing returns on single target attacks (it does continue to improve AoE damage, as expected).

There's actually a surprising amount of headroom to buff single target attacks in ways that aren't too balance-disrupting to at least close the gap between single target and AoE. Conversely, there's a lot of room to *debuff* AoE attacks by *increasing* their cast times in ways that won't hurt lower level characters by much, but would put a stronger softcap on the ability for people to continue to buff their net output indefinitely. Or rather, it would put single target attacks and AoEs on somewhat more level ground when it came to enhancing their strength through recharge.

It would cause the people who believe its their god given right to alpha strike large spawns with both impunity and speed aneurysms, but I'm actually okay with that in general.


Lets take Energy Blast again, mostly because AoEs are not very high and have any sort of chance to be moderated in the first place. Explosive Blast does 0.9 damage with 1.67s cast time, 1.848s ArcanaTime. In DPA terms it does 0.487 DS/sec (AT). If we cut the cast time of Power Burst by 33%, its cast time drops to 1.34s, 1.584s AT. Its DPA becomes
1.338 DS/sec. For Explosive Blast to break even in DPA terms with Power Burst, it has to hit 2.76 targets on average, which is not a lot. But we have a lot more room to buff Power Burst, because its a pretty slow attack. Suppose we go all the way down to 1.0s cast time, 1.188s AT. Its DPA now increases to 1.79 DS/sec, and break even for Explosive Blast becomes 3.7 targets on average. At the very least, we have significantly closed the gap between single target and AoE, and we've done it without massively overpowering single target and without debuffing AoE. If we allow for debuffing AoE, we could increase the cast time of EB to 2.5s, 2.64s AT, reducing its DPA to 0.341 DS/sec, and increasing breakeven to 5.25 targets, which is now getting respectable even in teams.

Before you say this is totally crazy, I should point out that the release numbers for Fire Blast were almost the exact *opposite* of this. It had the practically anemic Flares (with a cast time of I believe 2.67s, 2.9s AT) but the hyperfast 1.0s cast time Fire Ball (which it still has). If my numbers are crazy, Fire Blast's numbers were originally bordering on the totally ludicrous.

Increasing the DPA of Blaster attacks is not as dangerous as most damage buffs, because Blasters still have to worry about the return strike. Even one-shotting four minions one after the other is more dangerous that two-shotting the entire group with two AoEs, because you are more exposed to return fire in the first case. *And* its not scalable. If you can two-shot 4 critters with AoEs, you can two-shot 8. But if you can one-shot one minion at a time, you might get three before they figure out what's happening, but you're not going to get eight before they start shooting holes where you don't want holes. Its more power than the devs probably want us to have, but its much less dangerous than allowing us to keep the AoEs we already have, something they are essentially grandfathered into maintaining.


That's actually a very good question. I tried to take a stab at that with my archetype offense/defense ratio posting back in I11-I12ish, but that was extremely rough-cut.

Its very difficult to try to take into account all the variations in powersets and powerset combinations, much less builds and tactics, but it *is* possible to look at the archetype numbers themselves and ask what they suggest, separate from the variations due to powerset. We can look at scrapper and blaster numbers, for example, make *very* conservative estimates for scrapper survivability, and ask how much better scrappers are than blasters at soloing. This is a surprisingly interesting exercise, because it has to take into account three things: damage, survivability, and endurance.

I look at it this way: we have two bars we have to manage: the blue bar and the green bar. You maximum ability to solo is equal to the fastest you can fight and defeat foes without running out of either bar.

Blasters, as a first cut approximation, have no control over the green bar. They convert the blue bar into kills, and the faster they do that, the more of the green bar they lose to incoming damage. Their maximum sustainable rate is the rate at which they lose green as fast as they regain it in regeneration.

If things worked correctly, in teams someone would be looking over the Blaster green bar, leaving them free to convert the blue bar into kills as fast as possible, and the Blaster ability to convert the blue bar into kills would be better than everyone elses. That's how Blasters are supposed to work in teams.

Scrappers have control over both bars. They can spend the blue bar making kills, and they can spend the blue bar restoring the green bar. Because of this, they can optimize their absolute best theoretical performance into one where they balance burning the blue bar and the green bar at the same relative rate. Its that control that ultimately gives them the better soloing speed than Blasters.

This is highly imprecise to be sure: Blasters can use attacks that are less damaging but more damage mitigating (they can burn some blue to restore some green as well) but in terms of archetype design, that's really the low level difference.

In this perspective, Tankers have the same control, but they have to burn less blue to restore green, and more blue to kill. The net result is that their optimum point occurs at a lower kill speed.

I keep meaning to complete this analysis, but I keep getting distracted by other things. Also, its sufficiently abstract that it might entertain the game theoreticians and cause general confusion elsewhere. I get enough flack from the people who think my mitigation spreadsheet is proof I don't understand there are other things besides resistance and regeneration.

Concussive ammunition is a term typically reserved for explosive rounds. Armor-piercing concussive ammunition sounds like an anti-tank projectile design adapted to making a mess of slightly softer targets.

Some anti-tank rounds use a high explosive charge combined with an armor-piercing penetrator. A scaled down version of that type of ammunition could conceivably be called an armor-piercing concussive round I suppose.

A .90 caliber bullet is something a little smaller than a C battery coming at you. Magazines must weigh a ton. And be a little dangerous to carry around.

You're ultimately unlikely to get it. We're returning to an earlier point regarding differentiation. I don't think you can make a game where you have multiple classes and each class is equally good at soloing and equally good at teaming, and have sufficiently meaningful classes. You're likely to have a classless system, like CO. And CO shows the danger in that: when people are allowed to choose what to be, they basically tend to choose to be ranged scrappers with a team toggle. CO looks like it is classless with a lot of options, but its actually a game with one class: ranged scrappers. There isn't a melee class, there are only players that decide to voluntarily give up range - and get nothing back for that conceptual choice. There are players that decide to voluntarily give up personal defense - and get back nearly nothing for that you can't get through other means. And then there are players that decide to never take team assist powers, even in the end game where they are overflowing with power choices. But they are all ranged scrappers as a class: they can voluntarily be less than that, but not more than that in any respect. You can't be a significantly better tank than a ranged scrapper. You can't be a significantly better offensive specialist than a ranged scrapper. The limitations on team buffs mean you can't have very many more of them than a ranged scrapper can. Eventually, and this is my opinion, all roads lead to a ranged scrapper with a couple team buffs.

There is one; at least there was one prior to the difficulty slider changes. Those changes may have modified the standard somewhat; I'm not certain. But the original intent is almost certainly still in force.

That standard is:

Must be able to solo the standard mission content on heroic difficulty scaled for one at a reasonable pace.

All archetypes, including blasters, must meet this criteria. Solo performance *above* that level is considered something not all archetypes will be equally well equipped to perform.

What is a "reasonable pace?" I'm not precisely certain, because the devs have never said. But I do know what it is in theory, because there is a relative performance rule:

The average performance of all players playing a particular powerset combination, for all powerset combinations, should be within a maximum limit around the average performance of all players for all powerset combinations.

In other words, I don't know what "reasonable pace" is, but I do know that the average performance of all players is generally fairly close to it. And I know that if the average of all players playing a particular powerset combination falls significantly below that number, the powerset combination is considered underperforming. If *all* powerset combinations for an archetype (or, I would imagine, the vast majority of them) are underperforming, then the archetype as a whole is considered underperforming, as Blasters were back before I11.

Regardless of whether specific attack chain arithmetic accurately represents your damage in practice, its still the case that you are primarily DPA-limited if, regardless of how you activate your attacks, you generally have a choice - you have two or more attacks recharged and ready to be used. Whenever you have a choice, it means you are bottlenecked by definition (a blaster whose attacks all took zero seconds to cast would essentially never have a choice on which attack to use except at the very start of the fight).


Actually, I'm not a fan of over-standarization. I believe there should be a systematic way of doing things, but I tend to believe that the devs (for a variety of reasons, not all of which are purely under their voluntary control) over-homogenize things.

Although Mastermind primaries do have a lot more structure than Blaster primaries, that's because a lot of their differentiation is in the pets themselves. Some are melee, some are ranged. And its difficult to say that the Protector Bots are "standardized" against the Grave Knights.

Some powersets have similar or greater differentiation. Defender primaries, for example, tend to be more distinct than Blaster primaries. Its rare that you hear Defenders complain that they need the primaries to work more similarly in structure.


In answer to your direct question, my Energy/Energy blaster plays a lot like I personally visualized blasters functioning. In fact, personal bias aside, my guess is that Energy/Energy blasters may be the closest in intent to the target performance of blasters, at least when played efficiently. They have enough AoE to deal reasonable AoE damage (but not when compared to peers), but not enough to alpha strike kill a large spawn trivially. They have a lot of soft control. Their ranged secondary effect promotes attacking at range, and their melee secondary effect mostly assists in attacking in melee (the one exception: power thrust). They have access to burst endurance management and range boosting. I'm not saying its the best blaster combination, but my guess is that its properties come the closest to what the devs would want to target on paper.

I appreciate the effort, but the graphics technology isn't where the gap in my knowledge exists, its really in the way the game client rendering engine is designed which is outside of my software design experience. Its the primary source of "gibberish" between me and Bab whenever I'm talking turkey with him: I understand the atoms, but not the molecules of what he does. Actually, I'm two layers removed in this case: I don't have very much experience with how OpenGL programmers actually use the primitives in all cases to make actual OpenGL programs (my OpenGL experience is exactly one program, in 1998), and I have exactly zero experience designing MMO game clients. So I understand the atoms, but I have limited experience with using molecules or making bricks out of them. That's why I decided to downshift my question to something that doesn't reference specific terminology at all: most likely I'm not using it right relative to what Bab does.

I believe CoH is targeted at OpenGL 1.2, based on the minimum graphics card requirement. I'm pretty sure the CoH devs *presume* that your OpenGL drivers are essentially processing the opengl state engine basically in hardware: an all software renderer would be very, very, very slow (wanna see an all software renderer? load CoH into VMware Workstation version 7). I think you are confusing software emulation and backward compatibility. The presumption is that CoH targets a certain feature set to guarantee hardware acceleration, because if they target a higher feature set some players will have video cards that either don't work at all or work with some software emulation of certain OpenGL features, or simply omit those rendering steps altogether, all of which would be bad in most cases (but not all: eliminate fog, and the game is still playable).


My suspicion is that Babs is thinking a light-refracting wormhole would require something like a vertex shader, and thus at a minimum OpenGL 2.0. That might orphan some existing player's video setups: their particular drivers (assuming the game worked at all) wouldn't execute the vertex shaders. My question is probably a gibberish question in context, but I don't have the background to know why: why, if Ultra Mode is likely to have two different rendering paths (the current one and the enhanced ultra path) and ultra mode is likely to be using OpenGL 2.0 or higher, is it problematic to have a power create an object that is rendered as a refractive object in ultra mode and just a fixed swirly thing in non-ultra mode.

There are several possibilities:

1. Its highly unconventional to spawn an object like that rather than the effects that powers normally invoke, and it would thus be a weird exception for a singular effect.

2. There's a problem in the tools that make creating such an object non-trivial, even if ultra mode could render them correctly, making it again a weird exception to how they typically design things.

3. The act of making it only look good in ultra mode but not in conventional mode defies BaB's sense of aesthetics.

4. My understanding of what ultra mode is likely to be able to render is inaccurate.

5. All of the above.

6. None of the above.

The number of times Bab has surprised me with #6 being the answer is large enough that I don't make too many assumptions there, even if I think I understand the basics, thus my caution. Bab specifically stated that visual effects require enough work that making multiple versions of them would be too time consuming in the general case. What I'm wondering is whether in this specific case it would be possible to make an object with a distortion shader effect in ultra mode and a fixed texture map swirl in non-ultra mode. My strong suspicion is that this is going to fall into the category of "not impossible, but more effort than its worth."

Let me answer that question by asking a question. Suppose I were to cut the cast times for all blaster single target attacks by 33%. What would that do to Low level Blaster damage? Mid-level Blaster damage? High level Blaster damage? What would that do to Blasters attacking three things? Six things? Nine things? Bosses? Elite Bosses?

Those are real questions. Now a rhetorical one: why is Fireball faster than Power Burst?

Going to have to agree with you there.

Actually, "pot odds" is a valid approach to betting strategy. It presumes that all bets to that point are sunk and cannot be recovered, and attempts to determine if the incremental cost of calling a bet is worth it given the odds of winning the hand.

The problem comes when you bet on a hand that is much less likely to win than the cost of calling: when you call an effectively worthless hand just because you have a lot of money on the table already.

The problem at 3DR wasn't throwing good money after bad. The problem was the more subtle problem of throwing money without knowing if it was good or bad money. It seems not one penny they spent had any assurances of being spent towards a deliverable product.

To be more specific, it seems that Broussard had two separate and incompatible goals. He wanted to use other people's technology to accelerate development, and he wanted to deliver a product better than anyone else could make. That only works if you are incredibly fast, because if you are using someone else's engine, the one thing that's guaranteed is someone else will release something of comparable capability relatively soon.

Ironic, because of this passage:

People were making money using the engine they wrote but didn't want to use. They were spending money licensing other people's engines to make a game better than those people could make. This could have been the plot to Brewster's Millions.

I will preface this by saying any or all of what I'm about to say is very likely to run counter to what the devs would do, and therefore counter to what I would ordinarily work towards getting done as well (there's a difference between what I want, and what I want of what the devs are likely to give). I also should point out that I'm assuming I could get the tech implemented to do these things, most of which can't be done without either significant tech or creating significant headaches for the powers team (but if I were in charge, they'd be my headaches anyway).

Given the limitations on stealth, what I would have done is the following:

1. The first stalker attack on a target crits, no matter what.
2. An attack on a critter that isn't aggroed on the stalker crits 30% of the time, separate from any other chances to crit (but no double-crits).
3. The first stalker attack/crit on a target invokes a mag 3, 5 sec confuse in a radius of 15 feet. The chance scales upward with team size: 20% per team member to a maximum of 90%.

That would make them extremely effective first-strike weapons, mainly because it would eliminate the retributive strike that ordinarily occurs when stalkers attempt to be the alpha strike. Actually, the basis of this idea comes from my very first experience with stalkers**, back in CoV beta (stalkers were my first beta characters - one MA/SR, one MA/Nin). The numbers themselves are negotiable to a point.

This probably doesn't solve the "problem" of stalkers being perceived as not contributing enough AoE damage, but that's part of the AoE problem itself: once you give AoE to anyone, everyone else is judged relative to not having it, and every offensive fix is judged based on its ability to match it. AoE is a virus that eventually infects everything you design, because its just a tiny bit too obvious that hitting eight things is nearly always better than hitting one, when there's no penalty for hitting eight (and in teams with any semblence of aggro control, there's no penalty for hitting eight rather than one).



** I'm sure CoV beta stalkers will remember attempting to "figure out" what the heck stalkers were supposed to do in teams, and trying to understand just what the devs meant when they said they were supposed to alpha with assassin's strikes. 'Cause that was a really quick way to commit suicide unless your timing was perfect. The biggest facepalm moment I personally have ever experienced in all my time playing CoX was reading that little piece of documentation in CoV beta that Stalkers were supposed to be "hard to solo, but one of the easiest archetypes to team with." I still find that galactically mind-boggling.

Maybe this is more of a terminology thing. Could you spawn a critter at the wormhole site that had a Basic and Ultra rendering path, assuming critter 3D models themselves had two rendering paths in the Ultra codebase?

Even that might be getting me into hazardous territory. I should more properly ask: is there *any* way to render a wormhole-like effect anywhere in the game, by any means, even if its just a static object sitting somewhere? And if so, is there any means of placing such an effect at some location on-demand by the powers system?


By the way, its hard to be sure what a wormhole would look like, because it depends on the method of stabilizing the wormhole, but a wormhole probably would look more like this:



with a distorted image of the exit point, and extreme smearing around the edges, and in a three-dimensional sense it would look less like a hole and more like a sphere surrounded by distortions. But of course, that might be counter-intuitive to many players, and an effect that is physically correct but intuition-defying might not be a good thing.

(From the Art of the Wormhole).

Actually, most cones "break even" at just under two targets, and most spherical AoEs** break even at around 3 targets.

And then there's Claws.


There's that, and there's also the recharge conundrum. I should probably explain that one.

Single target attacks were originally balanced based on a formula most of the players with knowledge of the numbers are familiar with. In terms of damage and recharge, its basically Recharge = (Damage - 0.36)/0.16 where Recharge is in seconds and Damage is in damage scale units. An attack with damage scale 1.0 has recharge of 4.0 seconds, a "standard attack" if ever there was a standard attack.

The notion behind the formula is that the more damage an attack does, the less often it should be available to use, to balance out. If you look at damage over time, the general rule is the more damage the attack does per use, the less damage over time it does. So the formula says, basically, "you trade alpha strike for sustained damage." Frontloading is considered a benefit, and you pay for it with lower overall damage according to the formula.

The ginormous error in the formula is that it basically assumes you'll always be recharge-limited: you're always waiting for an attack to recharge, so the longer the wait the lower your damage. This is true if you happen to have one attack. But at some point, cast time comes into play: because every attack takes a finite amount of time to execute, eventually you're spending all of your time executing attacks and you cannot execute more, no matter how many are recharged and ready to go. This is the DPA limit on damage, and its why DPA is so much more important than DPS or DPC, depending on what you call it (I call it "damage per cycle-second.") Everyone doing "ArcanaTime" attack chain calculations is intimately aware of the issues here.

However, its important to note that damage per cycle-second *is* still the overriding factor when you *are* recharge bound: when you are always waiting for attacks to recharge. And that is still the case for the separate case of AoEs: no one really has so many AoEs that they can make a complete attack chain with no waiting that involves nothing but AoEs, at conventional levels of recharge. And that means cumulative DPC for AoEs has a *huge* impact on total damage output, if you can leverage that damage properly (i.e. hit a lot of targets, not get dead).

And that means almost *nothing* about the AoEs actually matter (if they are balanced at least roughly around the same formula - Claws is a big big exception here). The variance in DPC between AoEs is relatively small. What does matter is how many AoEs you have. In Blasterland, two AoEs beats three. Three beats four. Period. You simply can't make a two-AoE blaster that has any chance at all of equaling the damage output of a three-AoE blaster if those AoEs are actually used against a reasonable number of targets. Ironically, the balancing formula that ties recharge to damage makes it impossible to avoid this issue, because it was actually designed to force this situation.

The "recharge" conundrum I refer to above is that recharge exists in sufficient quantity to make single target attacks DPA-critical for balance, but conversely there isn't enough of it to make AoEs anything but DPC-critical. And the only real way to significantly increase AoE DPC is to get more of them. Basically, the problem is that in CoX, you cannot balance AoEs and single target attacks with the same methodology, because they aren't bound by the same bottlenecks in practice (or even in theory, for that matter).

(An Energy Blaster with four copies of explosive blast - arguably one of the crappiest AoEs around - compares very favorably to the best possible Fire Blaster attack chains. Even with the free DoT in Fire, its extremely difficult for the Fire Blaster to keep up, and this is about the best possible off-by-one comparison you can make: probably the best set of three vs the probably worst possible four.)

So if being a Blaster means pure damage output, including AoE potential, then everyone has to have the same exact number of AoEs; no more and no less. Off by one is a huge penalty in damage output, except in degenerate cases (i.e. three pencil-thin cones will probably be beat by two 25 foot AoEs, but only because the tiny cones won't actually hit multiple targets often enough). You can play some games with things like scatter (explosive blast has some built-in disadvantages to being spammed in terms of damage concentration), but you'll probably run out of games before you run out of blaster primaries.


** There's really only two kinds of AoEs in CoX: Cones and Spheres (all Location AoEs are spherical, and all PBAoEs are spherical centered on the caster as the target). This means Dragon's Tail is actually spherical, and can hit a target floating eight feet above the attacker. I've always found that moderately amusing, even though I know the game mechanical limitation involved.

But you could do something that looked better on higher rendering systems and degraded gracefully to something that showed some effect on lower systems. I'm assuming the entire basis of Ultra Mode is based on that assumption. Unless VFX components have restrictions on that sort of thing the general environment doesn't, I would think you could spawn a swirly vortex that rendered "correctly" on higher cards and rendered a simpler static effect on lower end cards.

Is there a design directive that essentially states things like Ultra Mode can improve environmental rendering, but all power effects and similar graphics must be designed to reasonably render on the lowest supported video card? In other words, no "Ultra Mode" power effects?

It is very late in the day to be changing the operational definitions of CoH archetypes. The only reason why I think there's even a 1% chance of it ever happening to Blasters is because they don't really have one, insofar as the only one they supposedly have is based significantly on a game mechanic the devs probably wish wasn't so prevalent.

A similar problem occured with Stealth. Nice idea in theory, but in practice Stealth is a highly problematic effect as currently implemented in CoX. Stalker stealth isn't even balanced around the actual strength of stealth, but mostly on stealth caps, which is analogous to balancing defensive sets based on giving them all 100% defense and then adjusting the tohit floor for each of them.

Even if I can't change the Blaster definition overnight (or even in a single decade) it might be possible to chip at it. Hypothetical question: if all the AoEs except Oil Slick Arrow were changed to single target powers, why wouldn't Blasters be able to get Trick Arrow?

The problem with this perspective is that it implies that the classic mitigators - resistance and defense - are intended to operate in isolation from regeneration. They usually aren't: in CoX everyone has a base level of regeneration in or out of combat, and CoX is less defined around pure burst damage and more in terms of survivable damage.

In some games, regeneration and heals are not common or pervasive, and your survivability is based mostly on your health bar and your ability to reduce incoming damage (to be less than your health bar), for one fight. Typically, such games have high out of combat recovery so in effect each separate fight doesn't affect the next one (unless you die and incur some form of death penalty). In such environments, it can be useful to analyze damage reduction separate from damage recovery, because the game is balanced primarily around reduction and not around recovery.

But in CoX reduction is much more of an amplifier of recovery rather than an amplifier of your health bar (I'd colloquially say its 2/3rds the former and 1/3rd the latter) and the game is balanced more around sustainable activity than burst activity (burst activity tends to fall closer to the outside margins of performance the game acknowledges as balanced). In that sort of environment, heals and regeneration are just another form of recovery amplifier.

Of course, some people tend to like to focus on the 1/3rd of the game that leans in the opposite direction, mostly because that is where the high-performance environment exists, so a set with a huge amount of regeneration and thus a high amount of sustainable activity can still be "underperforming" if it cannot survive huge bursts of damage indefinitely. It matters when burst activity specifically matters, like in Tanking (which is probably part of the reason why we don't have Regen tankers yet).

I don't know if "better" is the right word: anyone leveraging AoEs efficiently can't be made much better. But they would probably have better alpha strike tools balanced for the average player - somewhere around three to five targets. They would probably have significantly better damage cap and self damage tools (I would argue that BU is far too weak as a Blaster offensive tool *except* for the AoE exception that makes buffing it too dangerous to balance).

We'd probably be able to get rid of the aggro cap with a better moderated AoE system. We'd basically force the devs to give blasters better offensive tools than we have now, either single target ones or moderated AoE ones.

Probably most significantly, though, is that we'd force the devs to actually come up with an operational definition of Blasters that actually defines what they are supposed to do. Right now they get to get away with "they are the damage specialists" but *except for AoE* that title is highly dubious. They are not going to hand out Fire and AR levels of AoE to all Blasters, but if Blasters are defined to be pure damage specialists and AoE is really the key to that, and all Blasters have a wide range of AoE, then in fact all Blasters have a wide range of actually being Blasters, which is logically ludicrous.

I have often believed that Blasters should be defined more generally to be attack specialists with a broader definition of "attack" that allows for more attack-based damage mitigation. These are areas currently occupied by Defenders (foe debuff) and Controllers (foe control) so Blasters are limited in the levels of this they can get. But if the Blaster archetype definition *required* it, that would soften that restriction. The devs would have to get creative to give Blasters tools that Defenders and Controllers should really have primary control over, but overall it would improve Blasters by actually including - as part of the archetype definition - that they are supposed to have at least *some* tools intended to keep them alive (besides overwhelming damage, which they aren't actually going to get).

Since as far back as I can remember, going back to 2004, my one consistent observation about Blasters is that they are the only archetype that is actually *defined* in terms of dying. Its strongly implied that if Blasters have the tools to keep themselves alive, they are overpowered. That's not true for any other archetype, and I did mention back in I11 that it should really come as no surprise to the devs that Blasters were dying at higher than normal levels - they are supposed to implicitly. It would be nice to have an explicit definition of the archetype that overrides that implicit statement, because the I11 changes clearly indicate its undesirable.


I have wondered, for almost as long as I've played the game, if the general assumption about AoE is exactly reversed. It makes a lot more sense for Blasters to be the *single-target* specialists and everyone else to be the AoE specialists. After all, if you have nothing but very strong single target attacks, no single target (below Bosses) is going to be a threat to you, because you'll be able to take them out immediately. Its only if you face too much that you'll be in trouble. Isn't that how the Blaster archetype is intended to play? Conversely, Defenders, Controllers, and Tankers are intended primarily to provide a team role. Isn't it more obvious that they should have more AoE that is weaker per target, but able to affect more targets?

Thinking out loud perhaps Blasters should be the single target masters of *everything* - single target damage, single target debuff, single target mez. Defenders would be AoE debuffers and Controllers would be AoE controllers, and would also be better able to affect higher ranks (Bosses and higher).

In this environment, the Blasters that happen to have more AoE, like Fire Blasters, have more AoE as an extra powerset advantage, not as a critical archetype-defining aspect. The Blasters that don't have that level of AoE are not lesser Blasters for lacking it.

They can be pricey if you are not selling aggressively or using the markets. If you are selling aggressively or using the markets, TOs cost so little that you might as well get them. And actually, unless you are using Ninja Run or some other temporary travel power, they might be worth slotting into Sprint. The boost is small (and I wouldn't add slots to Sprint just to do this) but if you really are getting around with just Sprint, you're going to be Sprinting a lot: any speed increase would be a good thing. I've slotted a Run TO into Sprint in every character I've ever made. Even when it was just to get me to level 5-ish and get the travel temps red side.

I think some sets appear to be conceptually more AoE focused simply because they are implemented that way in CoH.

There are three alternate AoE mechanisms that don't suffer from the same damage balancing issues that the AoE damage mechanism in CoH suffers from that I'd add to replace the way AoE works in CoH in most areas:

1. Line of sight limited AoEs

Some AoEs would operate like cones, but would only be able to hit a target if you had direct line of sight to it, including occlusion by other targets. So if some targets masked others, they would not get hit.

2. Damage distributed AoEs.

Some AoEs would affect all targets in an area, but distribute their damage among all the targets. So the more targets, the less damage per target. The most severe form is the damage-constant version where each target gets D/T where T is the number of targets. It means each AoE can only deliver a certain maximum damage. I would favor a more complex implementation that had a maximum per target, a minimum per target, and a non-linear scaling function. So lets say you use Fireball on three targets. It would deliver 100 points per target, and that would be the max so hitting less than three would still deliver 100 points per target. But hitting 4 would deliver, say, 85 per target. You'd be generating 340 total damage hitting 4 and 300 damage hitting three, so there is an advantage to hitting more. But at some point this dilutes to the point where its not practical, and you're losing significant alpha-strike ability with this dilution.

3. Exotic AoEs.

A catch-all for AoEs that aren't really AoEs, but affect multiple targets through some other means. For example, some Fire-based attacks could grant temporary damage auras to their targets, simulating them being immolated. They would damage allies that stood too close to them. Chain Induction is another example of a power that affects multiple targets in an area but isn't a true AoE.


I'd keep the current AoE mechanism for only three specific cases, maybe:

1. Tier 9 crashing AoEs. Nova, Inferno, etc.
2. Low damage location AoEs. Caltrops, (some) Rains.
3. Presumptively challenging critters.


Keep in mind, while I would be in favor of *adding* mechanisms like the above to CoH, I would be very cautious about *removing* the current AoE mechanics from the existing game, because players are already used to them. But I would never allow the current AoE mechanic to exist in an unrestricted form in any new game, if I had any say.

So when I'm perma-knocking a Rikti Magus in a mothership raid with air superiority, I'm not defending myself from his attacks, he's just being a good sport.

This reminds me of the religious semantic wars of 2005 where some people were saying Regeneration wasn't damage mitigation, because it didn't "mitigate" damage it restored health, and Defense wasn't even damage mitigation because it didn't reduce the damage of attacks, it only occasionally caused you to avoid them. Technically, the attacks still had their full strength of damage, so you didn't mitigate any of it: it just didn't hit you. Only Resistance was "true damage mitigation" and I guess we were supposed to come up with new terminology to describe everything else.

Fortunately, history is on my side here. All of those worthless perspectives eventually die out when their proponents grow weary of exposing them because no one else will accept them, because they are, in fact, worthless.

In this game Defense, by definition, is a type of attribmod. I assure you playing semantic games with me with the game terminology is going to be unprofitable.

I'm not redefining "Defense" as a proper noun. Its obvious to everyone else that I'm using the term colloquially to refer to damage mitigation in general, and most of the time I used the phrase "damage mitigation" just to be clear.

Moreover, I never said damage was identical to defense just because it reduces damage. What I said was Frontloading of damage which is not damage itself is defensive in nature.

Build Up *looks* like an offensive power, but that's 90% illusion. If all you see is +100% damage you'll probably assume it radically increases your damage output over time. It does not. The actual buff averages out much lower, its diluted by slotting, and then it is further reduced by its activation time costs.

It looks like I will have to do the math after all. Assume standard SO slotting, and thus +0.95 damage and +0.95 recharge on BU. It will therefore be up about every 46.2 seconds. Its cast time is 1.17 seconds. With server buffering enforced, 1.32s. It will last about 10 seconds.

It thus has a cycle time of 47.52s, with 10 seconds of buff and 1.32 seconds of idle time. A complete BU cycle, on average, will look like this:

(BaseDamage * 2.95 * 10 + BaseDamage * 1.95 * 36.2)/47.52
BaseDamage * 2.11

In other words, BU averages out to 2.11-1.95 = 0.16 or +16% damage. That's +16% damage strength. It increases kill speed on average by 8.2%. As a damage output increaser, its not very strong: 1.5x the strength of Assault for blasters.

Now, you can play games with BU, try to shift your stronger attacks into its window or try to eliminate the cast time penalty by only using it during chain gaps or in between spawns, but doing so will tend to make it more efficient at the cost of firing it less often, and thus weaker overall. So except for AoEs which I made note of earlier, BU's actual average offensive benefit is low. Its value to blasters comes mostly from its frontloading aspect, which does not in any way improve kill speed at all. Something that doesn't actually improve kill speed isn't a damage buff, and isn't "offensive" within the context of this discussion.