Arcanaville

I reject your reality and substituted my own.

Mine's the one that is useful within the context of balancing combat systems.

Moreover, you missed the point I tried to draw a big flaming arrow towards:

(emphasis identical to the original)

Build Up is not just a damage boosting power. In general, we don't consider straight damage alone to be a form of damage mitigation in the general case, because that is not a useful perspective to have. But we *do* consider frontloading of damage to be a damage mitigation mechanism, because it *is* a useful perspective to have. If we take the simplistic view that Assault is damage and BU is just damage, then for some value of Assault BU and Assault would have an identical value. There's no *offensive* benefit to SHIFTING damage from ten seconds from now to now. The benefit is purely damage mitigative in nature (the largest exception: high regeneration situations).


Yeah, yeah, like I haven't heard this form of intellectually vacuous bravado a million times before. It might have been beneficial to actually read the thread before replying to the thread, because the big hint that you were missing the point is that just a few posts upstream from the one you responded to was the post that contained the critical context of Sam and my discussion where we were discussing the benefits of Build Up to allow greater survivability of Blasters.

Sam, meet Sirens Song.

Its an AoE (Cone).
It has a 10 target cap.
Its mag 3 (it affects minions and LTs).
It isn't a percentage chance effect (the sleep has 100% chance of taking effect)
Its duration is perma out of the box at all levels (its recharge is 20s, and its duration is 28 seconds at level 18 when you can first get it, increasing to about 36 seconds at level 50).

Technically, it isn't autohit so you could miss something, but as a practical matter a Sonic blaster that slots this power reasonably well has a first-strike spawn eliminator when solo (sleeps are of course problematic in teams, but Blasters are supposed to have help on teams). Its good enough that most people thought it was bugged when Sonic blast first came out.

Having won the argument to add a heal to EA, we'd subsequently lose the argument that EA is sufficiently focused on DEF to mandate significantly higher DDR. EA is currently designed around defense, endurance drain, and heals, and has both stealth and endurance management as non-mitigation utility.

Although my own target for the heal was 4%-4.5% per target, 3% per target is not insignificant. At about three targets hit per use its 36% of the strength of reconstruction. In relative survival terms, given that EA blocks about half of all incoming damage (more or less) its actually closer to three quarters of the total survival benefit that reconstruction provides to Regeneration.

(In fact, my 4% recommendation came from the fact that it would make it comparable to reconstruction with three targets hit combined with the fact that it would also make the set a better mitigation match for SR and Invuln-at-the-time on average damage mitigation numbers. That seemed to be a happy convergence of numbers.)

Yes, but there's a logical reason for that. To put it simply, the devs decided how much defense debuff resistance, if any, every powerset should get. That was their verdict on how easy or hard it should be to make that powerset "easier to hit" when affected by something that made them easier to hit. As a result, if EA has the correct level of defense debuff resistance, then Rage would affect it correctly with a resistable defense debuff. Conversely, if you say Rage hits EA too hard, you're saying EA's defense debuff resistance is too low. I'm basically putting the devs' defense debuff resistance decisions to work, nothing more, by suggesting resistable defense debuffs.

(Its a bit more complicated than that, but that's the simplified version)

Actually, it is.

I'm not going to redo the BU calculations because they aren't really relevant. Lets just picture two blasters, one with BU and one without, and lets temporarily make them invulnerable just to measure their kill speed. After we measure the one with BU, we then add a constant damage buffing power to the second one (something like assault) that makes the second one's kill speed basically the same. At this point they are both generating the same amount of damage, because they are killing things at the same rate (for our purposes, critters do not usually regenerate fast enough to matter in this comparison). *Whatever* the value of Assault we had to give to the second blaster, we can say that BU and that damage buff provide the same overall offensive benefit (by definition: both are killing at the same speed).

Now lets shut off the invulnerability. Will both blasters be equally well off? Probably not, because now the second one is taking more damage than the first one, because the first one frontloads its kills at least some of the time. Killing faster initially and slower later on is better than killing at a constant speed that is the average of the two, because the former eliminates incoming damage faster.

What this means is that Build Up provides two real benefits to blasters. First, it provides an offensive benefit that on average will allow the blaster to kill a few more things, which translates to some average offensive damage buff. Second, it provides the means to eliminate damage earlier rather than later, and as a consequence mitigate damage. It provides offensive damage mitigation.

So yes: BU offers both an offensive benefit and a defensive one for blasters. If you don't believe that, then you believe replacing BU with something that provides its average benefit over time without the frontloading is just as good, because your kill speed will still be the same.

Assuming, of course, you're alive long enough for the situation to actually average out.

Its not a question of blasting bigger holes. Its a question of blasting bigger holes now and smaller holes later compared to blasting a slightly larger sized hole all the time.

"You're going to have to live with those pants for quite a while, you might want to think about that costume before entering the tutorial."


Don't read the forums if you're enjoying the game. Wait until you've played a while and are hardened, jaded burnouts like the rest of us and we can't spoil your fun anymore no matter how much we tell you you're doing it wrong.

And you're going to have to live with those pants for a while, you might want to think about that costume before entering the tutorial.

The main problem seems to be that you're saying you're leveling to fast, and you want to solve that problem by creating a mechanism by which you can get more powerful. That's a bit quixotic.

Oops, you're right (actually, my guide got it right: I should have probably read that). Ah well, I did say I was rushed. Fortunately, it only changes the computed required recharge by about two percentage points (from 71.3% to 69.4%) and given the wiggle room required by cast times I'd still recommend aiming for about 75% recharge bonus just to be sure.

But the point is that what you are talking about is non-offensive utility of burst damage, not increased kill speed. And while Blasters *do* benefit from that things that won't die anyway won't. So the problem here is not that you're giving credit to BU for Blasters but that you are penalizing archetypes like Dominators for not having it when it wouldn't matter as much.

You say Dominators are "not offensively focused" and one of the reasons why is because of their lack of BU and Aim. But here you're saying that Blasters gain survival benefits from BU and Aim, which is not an offensive benefit, and its one that Dominators won't get much benefit from.

It should only count against Dominators that they do not have BU and Aim if BU and Aim would have actually helped them offensively in the first place. Since Dominators do not actually *need* burst damage to gain full benefit of their intrinsic average damage (i.e.: they don't tend to drop dead) you're penalizing them for lacking an offensive tool that only marginally increases offense. That would be comparable to me saying that Blasters aren't offensively focused because they don't get the same benefit from Assault that Defenders do.

And being able to cut eight down to two is a function of AoEs, not BU and Aim. Penalizing something for lacking BU because they are lacking a tool that can buff AoEs and also penalizing the same something for lacking AoEs is a very weird form of double-counting.


In any case, I don't discount the benefits of burst damage for blasters. I just don't count it as an offensive benefit unless it also increases kill speed. Frontloading (borrowing damage from tomorrow and using it today) is a defensive benefit. BU has a high defensive benefit and a low offensive one in general. This can be influenced to some degree by playstyle, but so can most things.

In any case, that's why, if I had to choose between +100% damage 10% of the time or +12% damage all of the time, my blasters will probably take the former and my scrappers will take the latter. My blasters can make better use of the damage now than later. My scrappers, who aren't going to die, would rather just have more, period.


Only true for Fire blasters. Not true for all the rest, because all the rest have mitigating controls. For example, sometimes on my sonic blaster I like just putting the entire group to sleep and then bashing them to death one at a time while their friends are snoring all around them. And Ice Patch is practically cheating.

Outside of control, to be able to end the fight after one volley requires being able to defeat the enemy basically in a single volley of your own, which is something only some blasters can do (usually Fire, and not all of them). The reason why this is totally broken as a design decision is that when you decide to give a class the defensive ability called "kill everything before it can shoot back" it will have this surprising tendency to level a gazillion times faster than everything else. The only reason why Fire blasters *don't* level a gazillion times faster than everyone else is because most players aren't experienced enough to avoid dropping dead while attempting this. But you do create the problem for yourself that AoE recharge is largely irrelevant in teams (recharge buffs, more than one attacker) and AoE steamrolling means all that work you spent designing attacks for minions gets flushed down the toilet (since they never get to use them).


Yes, they would. They'd just get there with tools that would get them there without creating balance problems, but are too dangerous to give them so long as they *do* have those AoEs.

(For example, they should gain more for self-damage buffs and have higher damage caps, but AoEs make that too dangerous. AoEs come up so often in balance discussions that if I could simultaneously make the playerbase forget that they ever existed and thus never miss them, I *would* snap my fingers and make them go away in their current form, without further discussion or reservation. I don't say that lightly.)

With that level of recharge assuming you cycle Hasten as fast as it recharges AM will be up "most of the time."

One possibility is that we might get enhancements that have special abilities that exist only in endgame content, similar in concept to the PvP enhancements. They would be slightly better than regular IOs in conventional content, but provide special stronger or more unique boosts in endgame content.

An example of something the devs could do that would be both big and unique in terms of enhancement for the endgame, without being ridiculously unbalancing, would be a unique special enhancement that could only be slotted in reasonably "conventional" (probably single target) attacks which would reduce that power's recharge to zero (or if you don't want to add a lot of tech, boosted that power's recharge to the recharge ceiling with a ridiculous level of recharge). This would allow players to pick their favorite attack and then spam it in endgame content. Its a powerful ability, but not game-breaking *in the endgame* (it is potentially unbalancing in the conventional game, especially at lower levels).

You could also slot attacks with special abilities that made them affect shifted targets, temporarily disabled a target's powers, or other strange effects designed to add elements of chaotic power to endgame content.

I have no idea what the devs are cooking up for GR in terms of endgame content or level 50 advancement, but if it was me I would be thinking up ways to create end game content in which the critters use novel tactics and abilities (some might call this "cheating") and then give the players ways to counter those tactics as level 50 advancement. The idea would be to make sure the cheating was interesting, and not cheap, although that is partially in the eye of the beholder.

This is true, but I don't think Castle specifically ever said he was "worried" about it, as if it was a paradigm-breaking change. He did, if I recall, publicly describe the change in terms that suggested this might be a special situation, but I think Castle was thinking less in terms of the "two primaries" aspect as being unique (Blasters and Scrappers are basically already there) and more in terms of having two different primaries that are targeted towards two different design purposes: control and damage (the two blaster "primaries" are both directed at damage, and the two scrapper "primaries" are both directed towards soloing prowess). And I think he was thinking more about selling the change than describing a radical change in design philosophy.


He did have some private reservations, but I can't comment on those specifically. Those reservations did not stop Dominators from basically getting more or less what Castle originally cooked up anyway.

Christmas at Ground Zero?

Only in the vaguest and ambiguous sort of sense are secondary powers deliberately designed to be weaker and augment the primary. The canonical example is Scrappers. Its impossible to argue that their secondary is "weaker" than their primary, except to invoke the damage bias. And if you do, its impossible to argue that Defender secondaries are weaker than their Primary.

Scrappers were intended to be the balanced soloers. In their case, and their case specifically, the archetype was designed to have a balance of offense and defense. Offense was made "primary" simply because something had to be, and Tankers were going to be taking up the alternative ordering.

Its extremely difficult to make the "archetype is focused on the primary" argument in the case of Scrappers, Corruptors, and Dominators. Its also not easy to make it in the case of Blasters: I asked Castle this question directly in the case of Blasters:

Are Blasters intended to be Ranged Offensive archetypes that happen to have Melee support attacks, or are they intended to be Offensive archetypes that have both Ranged and Melee options?

The answer, which I confirmed *twice*, was: Blasters are offensive specialists, who have ranged and melee options. Both ranged and melee options are intended to be valid and roughly equal options. In fact, the ranged modifier boost was *not* intended to create a preference for ranged damage. I asked him that question as well. The boost was actually intended to compensate for the perceived belief that the melee options were better than the ranged options - i.e. the Blapper mentality.

Castle believed that the perception that the melee options were so much better in the case of hard targets (they do tend to have better DPA and control, although they tend to have less AoE potential) meant blasters were putting themselves at greater risk more often than intended. The ranged damage modifier boost was intended to balance the ranged and melee options better so that Blasters felt firing away on a boss with ranged attacks was just as valid of an option as whacking away with total focus and bonesmasher. This was all part of the "stop blasters from commiting suicide" objective for the I11-ish changes to Blasters.


The primary difference between primary powersets and secondary powersets is not strength, its developmental: you get access to primary powerset options earlier than secondary powerset options. So in CoH, archetypes tend to get access to their team role-focused powerset first. But in CoV, where team roles are much more jumbled, in almost every case each archetype gets access to damage first: Stalkers, Brutes, Masterminds, Corruptors. Only in the case of Dominators is that not exactly true, and its telling that in their case the powersets they *do* get access to first is what Controllers call "damage." In a very real sense, Dominators are the archetype that are like Blasters in having two damage sets. If they don't have two damage sets, then Controllers have no damage sets. As Controllers end up maturing into one of the higher damage archetypes on the Blue side, that would be a weird statement to make (and no: I'm not forgetting or ignoring containment).

Given the decision to make the damage powerset the primary in just about every case in CoV, its clear you cannot easily make arguments about which one was supposed to be "the focus" or "most important" because its clear they were not thinking that way at all: they were thinking that damage was important to soloing, damage was conceptually consistent with villains, so all the primary sets will be the ones that allow the villains to kill/defeat stuff. But I don't think they ever explicitly thought "damage is more important than defense for brutes, so the primary will be the melee offense sets." It seems pretty clear that in terms of "focus" the CoV archetypes are far more balanced than they are weighted. All CoV archetypes are a lot more like Scrappers than they are like any of the other four CoH archetypes in this regard.

Blasters cannot survive on their damage alone either. The biggest complaint about the fire primary and the fire secondary has been that it lacks mitigation. Furthermore, until Defiance added the ability to shoot while mezzed, Blasters on average were faceplanting at rates so much higher than everyone else that Blasters - All Powerset Combinations, All Levels, All Team Situations - were individually averaging lower performance than the average of all players in the same situation by sizable amounts *and* this was so unusual that *only* for the Blaster archetype could this be said.

In other words, the average of every single Blaster combination - that means Fire/Energy, Ice/Ice, Sonic/Energy, all of them - were underperforming the average. Not only that, all of them underperformed the average at all combat levels. Not only that, all of them underperformed solo or teamed. That's an incredible statement, and one that if I had made it before the datamining done pre-I11 I would have been laughed off the forums. And while I cannot say by how much, I can say if it was by something like only ten or twenty percent, the devs probably wouldn't have done anything about it. It was *much* more than that.**

Blasters can survive on damage alone for some players but not for the majority of players.

There really should be an estoppel rule that covers Blaster performance.


Also: BU and Aim are burst damage tools. They don't really increase damage by all that much. Assault is actually competitive with Aim, and not that far behind BU. The problem with both is that they have significant activation time (significant relative to their damage buff). Its this activation time - during which you cannot attack - that actually allows powers like Follow Up to provide similar (sometimes superior) return even though its numbers seem much lower.

(I always found it interesting that back in the old days when people would argue over which one was better that one objection made against Follow Up was that it was an attack that did relatively low damage, which "hurt" Claws attack chains. No one tended to point out that BU was essentially an attack that did zero damage and hurt a lot more.)

Burst damage can be important if that's all you have in terms of damage mitigation (it allows a Blaster confronted with a three on one situation to immediately reduce it to a two on one situation, which is what a lot of soloing blasters tend to do with BU and snipes that aren't blappers). But the difference is so low and the break in action so high that I often find myself forgetting I even have BU on things like Scrappers and Brutes (Brutes especially).


This is true, but its also true - since we were originally talking about how MMOs should be designed in the future - that you'll never see that again. The absolutely wild amounts of AoE that the game has, and the trivially miniscule compensating costs to using them, are one of the biggest offensive-side design errors the original team made. Its an error that I can say with 99% certainty will never be repeated again. Such massive AoE was never revisited by Cryptic in CoV, avoided to a large extent in CO, and along with superstacking buffs, accelerating survival curves, and AoE ally effects are probably on Castle's list of things to erase from Geko's spreadsheets if he ever finds himself in possession of a time machine.

And he would be right to do so. I'm sure there are lots of people who will say I'm missing the point and not seeing all the fun to be had in a superhero game where you can vaporize a city block, but I'm sure lots of people thought the broken smoke grenade was fun and the 100% resistance cap was just a really good imitation of Superman.



** Castle never told me explicitly by how much overall for all cases (he wasn't allowed to at the time), but he gave me enough of a nudge in the right direction that I can say it was pretty bad.

Rage has a bug in its design. The -DMG part of the crash is set to stack, but the -DEF part of the crash is set to not stack. The problem with having the penalty not stack is that its on a delay timer - it takes effect 120 seconds after the power is activated (which is when the damage buff expires). If you activate Rage again before the 120 seconds have elapsed, the -DEF crash is Replaced with a new crash that has a 120 second timer starting from that point. The original crash effect disappears. In effect, you can delay the crash indefinitely by making sure you keep cycling Rage before it expires. So "perma-Rage" is also effectively crashless (in terms of the -DEF: the -DMG is set to stack and so cannot be avoided in this way).

I believe this bug is there because the trivial solution - making the -DEF stack - would overpenalize Defense sets (even more than they are now). So rather than overpenalize defense sets, everyone gets to dodge the penalty.

I'm still honestly not sure why this isn't simply changed to either a resistable -RES debuff and made stackable, or (although the argument for why this makes sense is much more complex) a resistable Defense debuff and made it stackable. Either way it would be fair and impossible to exploit, and take all of a minute to change. Either there's some additional issue I'm unaware of, or the problem's been put back to the bottom of the TODO pile and the light from my previous posts hasn't reached it yet.

That wasn't a deliberate solution. That was a problem they decided to leave behind when it became clear they wouldn't be able to solve the crash balance problem in the time alloted.

This is a known problem, and related suggestions have already been made to the devs. Its something that appears to be currently a low-priority item for them to address. Honestly, I'm not sure why myself, as the solution would not be difficult to implement. I think it was just a case of Castle running out of time while he was experimenting with other solutions.


The correct solution is to make Rage apply a resistable resistance debuff. That would affect everyone proportionately the same.

This is a rather complex question you're asking. I'll try to break it down in pieces.

First: AM has recharge of 422s and a duration of 120s. So it requires 422/120 = 3.52 total recharge to be perma. That part is easy (technically, as previously mentioned, you need to factor in activation, but I won't because this is going to get pretty complicated as it is).

If you slot it to the ED soft cap (+0.95), then the combination of slotting plus AM's buff (+0.2) gives a total recharge of 1 + 0.95 + 0.2 = 2.15. You'd need 3.52 - 2.15 = 1.37 more recharge, or +137% recharge.

You say you have Hasten which helps: it offers +0.7 (+70%) recharge. In that case you'd only need +67% recharge more.

But Hasten isn't perma either. In this case, you have a problem. Specifically an algebra problem. I will refer you to my Guide to Recharge, specifically the section on "Multiple Recharge Boosting Powers."

But in summary, working backward we assume that AM goes perma before Hasten, and thus assume that you are always under a +0.2 recharge buff but might not be under the Hasten buff all the time. We then have to solve this equation pair:

1.37 = h + b (average hasten buff plus outside buff equals the buff necessary to make AM perma)
h = 0.7 * 120 * (1.95 + 0.2 + h + b) / 450 (average hasten buff equals hasten's buff times its uptime percentage)

h = 0.7 * 120 * (1.95 + 0.2 + 1.37) / 450
h = 0.657
b = 0.713

In other words, slot both AM and Hasten with +95% recharge, and somehow get +71.3% recharge in invention bonuses (or some other source), and AM will be basically perma. Hasten will, incidentally, be close to perma:

120 * (1.95 + 0.7 + 0.2 + 0.713) = 427.56
450 - 427.56 = 22.44
22.44 / (1.95 + 0.2 + 0.713) = 7.8

Hasten will be up 120s and down about 8s, plus activation time. Just as a double check, hasten's average buff will be about 0.657, so AM's recharge will be:

120 * (1.95 + 0.657 + 0.2 + 0.713) = 422.4
422 < 422.4

So AM is perma under these circumstances. Although technically speaking, this is only on average. The *worst* case Hasten cycling would be the case where Hasten aligns such that all of its downtime occurs in a single AM cycle. In that case, Hasten's average benefit during that one cycle would be 0.7 * (112/120) = 0.653. That is so close to the average (0.657) that its basically a roundoff error. To be safe, and to include activation times, I would say that +75% recharge would make AM perma (and Hasten just about perma) when you are cycling both continuously.

I wish there was an easier way to compute this, but there it is. I hope I got the math right: I'm a bit rushed at the moment, which is why I performed the doublecheck calculation. If I made a boo-boo, the doublecheck says it wasn't a big one.

Just an observation: I think some people saw this and thought "cool case." Some people thought "hawt chix!"

The two words that popped into my head were "Practiced Brawler." Apparently I've played SR long enough to wear a groove into my brain.

That's sidestepping the question a bit, because the question really comes down to, if you had to choose between increasing the blaster damage modifier by a potentially very large amount, or adding the gimmick of shooting while mezzed and follow up in all the attacks, plus a small increase in the damage modifier, why would you pick the gimmicky solution in this case? You've suggested that Blasters are a more or less "straight up" archetype in its design that's free of "gimmicks" but it has one of the most gimmicky inherent abilities in the entire game *and* one of the most heavily *required* inherents in the game. Take Fury away from a Brute, and you end up with a slow-levelling Brute. Take away Defiance from a Blaster, and datamining says you often end up with a dead Blaster. That's the ultimate in reliance.

What I'm confused about is the archetype you've described as the most straight-forward and least intertwined with its inherent is the archetype that unambiguously relies on its inherent the most of any archetype on average, has one of the most gimmicky inherents of any archetype in its mechanics, and historically is one of the most problematic archetypes to balance. That seems to be a contradiction to me.

Prior to the addition of the heal its protections were just much lower than SR, and not everyone compares with tricked-out invention builds.

Even now, though, EA is slightly squeezed between SR and Electric. If you want the end drain and endurance manangement, Electric synergizes slightly better with Electric Melee in that regard (mostly due to LF). If you want straight defense SR tends to be stronger (overload can't be up all the time). Personally, I think with the change to Energy Drain its a perfectly acceptable set (although I think the heal should have been *slightly* higher), and has its own set of strengths and weaknesses that make it unique. But everyone has an opinion, and not all of them are favorable to the set.

I don't think you'll ever get a completely satisfactory answer to the question "why do people dislike X?"

Part of the problem, at least given your preferences, is that there actually isn't a non-gimmicky archetype, just ones that you are willing to accept the gimmicks for. And the reason why is because all archetypes have a conceptual basis, and all concepts are intrinsicly gimmicky. No game designer is going to make an archetype whose conceptual basis is "has nothing special about it."

They will make powersets like that, though: witness Martial Arts (sorry Castle, I had the shot, and I took it).

Blasters don't have to jump through twelve hoops to see their damage: they only have to jump through one. They have to be alive. And prior to I11, that was not a given (and it might still not be a given). A Blaster without the gimmicky tricks of having follow up in every attack and being able to shoot their low order attacks while mezzed is on the edge of being unplayable as the devs define substandard performance, as they were significantly underperforming prior to the Defiance buff.

If you were in charge of powers design, given your opposition to gimmicks, are you saying that rather than add the gimmicks Castle added, you would have just continued to increase the Blaster damage modifiers to keep the "straight-forwardness" of the archetype until the problem was solved?