Arcanaville

For most players kill speed is ultimately constrained by endurance recovery. Every point of damage costs a certain amount of endurance. That means every kill costs a certain amount of endurance. And factoring out CaBs, which everyone gets in similar amounts, everyone is essentially bound to a maximum kill speed related to their recovery rate, which is basically the same for every player without endurance recovery powers.

That kill speed limit is much lower for Defenders than the average of all archetypes combined. Its sufficiently lower that it almost certainly causes the average solo performance of Defenders to be much lower than average. The question is to what degree that is intentional. Since Defenders are stated to not solo efficiently, we can't compare them to the theoretical soloing performance of, say, scrappers. But we can compare them to Tankers. Tankers are also not intended to solo efficiently, and there is reason to believe the Tanker endurance limit is not far from the devs' intended target for slower archetypes: tanker offense was increased specifically to address soloing speed.

If we assume that Defenders might not be intended to possess the same damage as Tankers, but should not be held to a limit significantly more severe, that suggests that Defender endurance efficiency should increase to be comparable to Tankers while holding their damage modifier constant. And that suggests Defender offensive powers should get discounted to about 80% of their current costs.

You could argue, as it seems you are implying, that Defenders can solo slower because they solo safer. But its unlikely you could make the case that they solo significantly safer than Tankers overall, especially in the hands of average players. So there's no safety justification for having endurance limits lower than Tankers.

You could also argue that Defenders can buff their own damage more than Tankers can on average. But *solo* it turns out that isn't very efficient for Defenders: you are often burning more endurance than you are saving in higher buffed damage, until you get to very high slotting levels or inventions.

My guess is that the endurance limit is strong enough to show up in the devs datamining, but because defenders solo far less often than other archetypes, that penalty ends up being a very low percentage of their overall performance. In effect, it gets diluted to the point where the devs don't consider it a problem any more. But I would.

They are. But they aren't unfair to Defense.

The resistance cap can't be unfair to Resistance. It could be unfair to a set that uses it, like say Fiery Aura. Except there are alternatives to buffing the performance of FA other than ramming it up against the resistance caps, assuming it was anywhere near them. The devs could, say, increase the strength of the heal, which they did.

In the specific case of Power Surge, the resistance cap *does* seem to act in a way that isn't quite fair, in the sense that the proliferation rules tell the devs to port the power and assume that if the archetype modifiers make it work differently, that's intentional for that archetype. But I find it difficult to believe that Power Surge is intended to be about two and a half times as strong for Brutes as Scrappers, when that sort of capitation doesn't occur anywhere else. So in this one specific case, there is a problem with the res cap, which will probably have to be worked around in some way.

But to say that an Invuln can get to 90% mitigation with Invincibility, but only 75% mitigation with unstoppable is somehow unfair to Resistance is weird, because what matters is Invuln's strength, not where it gets it.** Resistance doesn't have feelings to hurt.



** The one exception would be if resistance was so weak it wasn't capable of simulating the gameplay effect it was intended to achieve. But there's no specific requirement for scrappers to "feel" 90% resistance. Even at 75% resistance the mechanic is delivering a genuine "resistive" feel. And contrary to every player that believes so, Invuln is not a resistance set. It has never, in its entire history from launch to now, been anything other than a balanced set between resistance and defense. And that is because both the resistance and the defense in the set (and the +health for that matter) are intended to simulate the same basic thing: damage attenuation. Resistance simulates attacks being reduced in effect. Defense simulates some attacks being reduced so low that they have no effect at all. That's why Invuln has both, relies on both, and is designed to have strong percentages of both.

If you have a better case, make your better case. Its not like I haven't looked at the situation myself. I've made the case myself that solo Defender endurance consumption is higher than it should be. I've just done a much better job than you have trying to make the case that the Defender damage mod is too low, by picking examples that are *typical*, not corner case invalid oddities.

The bug was that it stacked with itself, so Ninjitsu critters were always at the damage cap. But the current version still buffs, just not quite that high. it also correctly suppresses, which I think the original version was not set correctly to do.

Still, with rage and hide a custom LT would be at 280% total damage instead of 400%. That's still kinda high. Picture a level 50 mission full of invisible rage-buffed Lts that will do ... 449.76 damage with a scale 1.0 attack like Punch. That's at even con, not +2. If you are unlucky enough for them to open with KO Blow, that's 1601.16 damage heading your way.

1. There are no "resistance sets" that are unfairly penalized by lower resistance caps except for one: Electric Armor ported to Scrappers. The lower cap almost certainly alters the intended effect of Power surge. However, in all other cases where the cap comes into play, it seems to be doing so specifically *for* game balance reasons, not contrary to them.

2. Resistance and Defense are not competitors, they are not sides, they are not teams. Saying something is fair or unfair to Defense or Resistance as game mechanics is practically nonsensical. Only powersets can be disadvantaged. A game mechanic itself cannot be.

Back in the old days, there was a need for the +Def mechanic to have certain specific balance properties because there were two sets bound to it specifically: Force Fields and Super Reflexes (Ice was to a lesser extent). But there was no pure resistance set that placed singular balance requirements on the mechanics of resistance.


Hey, how about the +health mechanic? Who's defending that? 75% mitigation is huge compared to what you can get with +health. Even the archetype with the best +health max caps can't even reach 50% mitigation. Where's my 75% mitigation with +health (i.e. 4x max health)? Where are my +health power pool powers? Where are my +health inspirations? The devs hate +health, even though the bar is green and not red.


Waitaminute. Technically speaking, the +health mechanic *is* a resistive one. There's two resistive mechanics and only one defensive one. That's not fair. Until Elusivity is ported to PvE, defense has only half the options that resistance has.


If I haven't made my point yet, just let me know. This is not unfamiliar territory. Saying Resistance or Defense as mechanics have unfair advantages is like saying certain Setmodes are underutilized and need to be better represented. If you have a specific gameplay complaint that the resistance caps create a provably unfair skew, its important to be specific. Specific problems are possible (like Power Surge mentioned above). But the general principle is rubbish.

I can say that about anything I want also, because its theoretically true for at least one customer.

Since I know no set of game design criteria can please everyone, I am still left with no good reason to specifically honor that design rule as a given.

Also: the entire AE is implicitly marked with such a flag. The entire area is a play at your own risk environment, since the devs cannot control - and do not *want* to control - the maximum difficulty that players can generate (they only want to exercise some control over the minimum difficulty within the context of controlling exploitability).

I should point out that until right about two weeks before go-live, the devs were on a trajectory to release the AE perfectly content with custom critters being forced to use all powers at full strength. There are *LTs* that would be non-trivial to solo for all players under those circumstances.**

The devs did basically state during I14 beta that if your fellow players want to kill you, they are not going to stop them. They might even award style points. You'll need to find non-AE missions to make your case.



** A mission full of Extreme SS/Ninjitsu LTs would probably turn a lot of less experienced players into smears on the wall before the end of the mission.

Its your definition, not the devs definition. The escape hatch has traditionally been that some content is not "core content" intended to be soloable, but *can* appear to solo players that want to attempt it. An example in the past has been Maria's arc, which originally spawned AVs regardless of whether you were solo or not. It was then downscaled to spawn EBs on heroic as a compromise to soloability, but without removing the fact that that arc was explicitly intended to be very difficult and include opponents not necessarily soloable by everyone.

You're entitled to your opinion that such a situation should *never* occur, but the devs disagree and I see no reason why such exceptions shouldn't occur in a well-designed game.

In any event at best you have a case for asking the devs to prevent that content from appearing in solo missions, not increasing the damage of defenders to ensure it is soloable. And given the devs have just handed to the players a large set of difficulty settings designed to allow players to downscale content until it is soloable specifically to address these types of issues your chances for success are extremely low even in that direction.

Until you can say that the content is not soloable even at the lowest possible difficulty settings you don't even have a case to present. And Cat's comment suggests to me you aren't running at the lowest possible settings yet. The "no bosses" setting is a slight misnomer, as its functionality incorporates the Boss->EB downgrade the devs were messing with a few issues ago. The setting seems to downgrade bosses to LTs and EBs to Bosses: it doesn't literally drop everything above LTs down to the LT rank. It should probably be called "downgrade Bosses" rather than "no Bosses."

Well, no one in CoX has the strength of the Hulk, SS or not. But an example of a comic book character with Super Strength more or less as CoX defines is, without commensurate Invulnerability (making him impossible to be classified as a Tanker) would be Sunspot (or at least the original version of Sunspot) in the Marvel Universe. His lack of general invulnerability, plus his clear use of feats of super strength in combat, suggests its possible to have a brute-force scrapper in the genre. Its just unusual, not concept-busting.

Its really the AoE of Claws that is too high, relative to what balance dictates, due to a glitch in the way the Claws adjustment was applied to AoE attacks.

Good luck with that. This game makes only two performance promises to players. One: you should be able to solo standard PvE content at base difficulty. Two: you should be able to contribute a specific set of strengths to teams.

Defenders' team contribution nowhere includes significant damage. So the only way** you could prove the defender damage modifier itself was too low (as opposed to the damage of an individual set) would be to show that on average, defenders playing most or all of the defender secondaries solo too slowly or with too much difficulty when attempting standard content at base difficulty. That's not likely.

Ultimo's line of argument tends to be "the game should not put me in a position where my expectations won't be met." You have a better chance of winning the lottery, buying Paragon Studios, installing yourself as lead designer, and ordering Castle to change the defender damage mod than you have getting an argument pursuing that line of thought from working.

Of course, finding out upon actually taking the time to test that his assertions about the difficulty of the situation are not factual doesn't help either. Credibility is important when making game balance assertions.



** Technically, there are other much more esoteric ways to prove it, but most of them probably cannot be pulled off by a player, given the information available to most players.

I just entered this mission, killed the Lt, spawned Catburgler, and he spawned as a boss when my mission settings were set to +0x0, not an EB. A defender designed to solo with reasonable offense will probably be able to defeat him, even with his defense and heal. I'm reasonably sure my TA/A could do it without difficulty and not all her enhancement slots are even populated (I don't have time to try now, but I will tomorrrow just for giggles).

Furthermore, the devs explicitly allow players to create custom critters that are stronger than the standard PvE critters, which means if you make a critter you can't solo, that's your fault. The devs will not accept that as proof an archetype or powerset is underpowered under any circumstances. I specifically asked Castle about this and relayed that answer in I14 beta.

To reiterate: custom critters can be stronger than the devs would allow in a normal standard difficulty mission. If you have a problem with that, you are supposed to take it up with the author.

Sure, with all detail settings at maximum, I get this:



Here's the thing, though. That's not a cutout. That's the entire screen capture. And even at the ridiculous resolution of 333x20 pixels I *still* can't get 224 frames per second.

(That small dark spot at the bottom center of the image is the top of my character's head.)

Of course, I'm slightly constrained by that 4350 that shipped with my system. And the fish and game commission has set the legal kill limit on 5850s to just two per month.

I'm not jealous. Pyro's going to use up all his frames in just a couple of days, while my computer still has billions of frames left.

I'm *never* going to forget standing at the train, wondering why it wasn't letting me run onto the train when the doors opened. Possibly until the day I die.

Your new rig is running the CoH client at 224 frames per second. My guess is that you'll probably consider that a good thing.

Its a very safe assumption that the majority of CoX players do worry about survival in situations most forum posters dismiss. I think the situation with blasters was so radically divergent that its safe to assume that the average player is nowhere remotely near the level of capability typically assumed to exist by the average forum poster.

The game is easy for many of us, but its easy for the average person probably in the same sense cracking Positron's unbreakable cipher was a straight forward exercise.

That's true: the +health on HPT does increase regen (or reduce the heal). When I did a more detailed calculation in I11 beta that factored in the amount of time it took to move from spawn to spawn, plus the time to move the targets within the radius of RTTC, I ended up with needed to be *fighting* an average of 4 critters, or engaging spawns of about 8-9 critters in size with rapid movement between groups. The "4" stuck in my head so I forgot to account for HPT this time.

Its worth noting that when I tried to measure the average number of foes in RTTC during I11 beta, unless I herded them I measured an average of less than three foes in melee range, averaged from the moment combat started to the moment the last foe in the mission was defeated (without attempting to search beyond obviously visible foes), in even difficulty missions (2x in todays settings), at my maximum speed. I could only get higher density averages by deliberately herding, using nothing but AoEs (which improves the average per second density significantly), or running missions with two or more melee players.


Just for completeness sake, I also ignored the fact that a player might prefer Recon over RTTC because they have or build for a lot of Recharge. While its not kosher to compare RTTC to Recon in highly buffed recharge situations (Hasten, invention bonuses, etc) from a balance perspective, its fair game to consider those when it comes to player preferences. Someone with slotted Hasten would gain about 0.43 average speed and recon would increase to the normalized equivalent of about 3.2 foes.

Just for giggles, you'd need a total applied recharge of 4.55 to Recon for Recon to equal slotted RTTC saturated with 10 foes. That's 1.95 slotting plus +2.6 global recharge (+260%). That's higher than the net global recharge for perma-hasten (+180%: +110% global recharge and +70% for hasten). With "just" perma hasten, the break even point (factoring in HPT) would be about 7.5 foes.

Me? I'd rather have RTTC on scrappers. I don't mind Recon on stalkers, though.

For me, its not what does the most work. Somehow, the "origins" have mutated somewhat into "functions." When someone says they are "tech" it sounds like they *have* tech, but the game doesn't have a representation for "what thing emits your power effects." It has Origins.

Batman has a natural Origin. He trained himself to physical and mental peaks. The toys were incorporated into his training. But the *Origin* of Batman's abilities are training-related, and therefore Natural Origin.

Iron Man has a tech origin. He build the Iron Man armor and then used it to be a superhero. Even if Tony Stark was a kung fu master before building the Iron Man armor, the *origin* of his superhero identity comes from inventing the technology behind the iron man suit. So he's tech origin.

If Batman builds himself an exoskeleton, his origin will still be natural. If Tony Stark learns Kung Fu, his origin will still be tech. Our wedding anniversary doesn't change our birthday.

City of Heroes doesn't allow for multiple origins, or different origins for different aspects of our superpowers, and those limitations (combined with the fact that origin doesn't mean much anyway) can make it difficult to shoehorn in all the different aspects of "origin" in the comic books. But Origin in CoX has always been referred to as the original source of your abilities, and to me that means even if you add so much technology to your hero that 99.9% of his or her abilities come from high tech gadgetry, you will still be Natural Origin if your actual literal origin is a natural one.


If CoX had a more fully fleshed out "origin" system, CoX might have allowed for each individual ability of our characters to be tagged with a "mechanics" tag that specified whether the power was due to a mechanical device, a supernatural power, a (possibly fictional) scientific process, or an innate ability of the character. And that "origin" might have made the powers subject to slightly different rules, or circumstantial effectiveness. It might have allowed us to have hybrid origins: our offense was a Natural origin martial arts, but our defense was a Supernatural (magical) regeneration. But the game never went that route. In CoX, you are what you were born as (or created as, or changed into, or whatever). We have no way to change what kind of enhancements we can slot after we create our characters, so in the world of CoX, origin is fixed and final.

I'm not sure why anyone would think Claws would be too powerful on Brutes. Of course, Claws is technically overpowered for everyone but just in a way that Castle doesn't feel like addressing at the moment.

The break-even point between fully slotted reconstruction and fully slotted RTTC, setting aside the -tohit debuff, is about four foes in range of RTTC. Fully slotted reconstruction returns about 50% health in 30 seconds, which is about the equivalent of the health recovery increase of a +400% regeneration buff. RTTC gets to +200% with four foes unslotted, and about +400% slotted.

Not everyone plays a scrapper in such a way that they average four foes surrounding them averaged across their entire time in combat. In fact, that's not easy to do for any player, especially when running conventional mission content. Four sounds like a small number, except to average four you have to start off fights with a lot more (perhaps double that or more), just to average out the decrease you'll tend to see due to actually defeating targets, plus moving from spawn to spawn.

RTTC has a better maximum possible performance for experienced players, but I wouldn't be surprised if Recon had similar or better average performance for the average player.

The Hulk gets both offensively stronger and defensively stronger as he gets angrier. Brutes don't. That makes it a bit ambiguous if he's half a brute, or a special case of Snaptooth that can increase in rank under certain circumstances. But I wouldn't argue with someone who thought the Hulk was more Brute than Scrapper. The point is more that the Hulk doesn't seem to be more focused on defense than offense. Something like the Blob is more of a CoH Tanker, but such examples seem very rare to me.

It would be interesting if critters had taunt and Brutes got stronger when taunted.

Sorry to say, teaming isn't likely to improve City of Heroes performance. It might even hurt it by a microscopic amount.

Your fundamental bottleneck is going to be your internet feed itself, which is probably a lot slower than 100mbit/sec unless you live in NCSoft's data center. Teaming won't provide a bandwidth improvement because the 200mb/s will get reduced to your internet max one hop later.

Moreover, most teaming implementations suffer from one of two problems. First, some implementations keep all the packets from the same connection (or in the case of UDP the same src/dst ip/port tuple) on the same card. So you might find all your CoX traffic using only one card anyway. The reason why is because the alternative is to balance the packets between cards, and you could get out of order delivery of your packets (where packet 45 arrives before packet 44). In a game like CoX, that could actually create odd problems or occasional studder. Between that and the link management protocol, its possible it could be worse (although, in any reasonable implementation, not noticably worse).

Teaming is more of a server thing than a workstation thing, unless you have a workstation that is doing a lot of different things at high bandwidth on the network.

Probably more trouble than its worth for a workstation. Besides, if you want faster connectivity within your own house, buy a gigabit switch. I'm assuming the new mega-rig has gig ports, and not 100 meg ports. One gig port should be plenty (and far higher than any internet connection you could have).

Not an especially well-designed one.


Because the devs intend people to continue playing 50s. That's why they have Flashback, level 50 task forces, and don't retire characters automatically. Experiment over.


Sometimes, I hate myself for giving people the benefit of the doubt. This is one of those times.

I'm not sure if its the worst. It simply flows from a very incorrect premise:

If the OP and all his friends are in the minority that gets consistently "let down" by the gameplay that exists at level 50, and have no connection to their characters beyond leveling to 50, then this suggestion only tosses aside something they find valueless: level 50s that are never played again.

The problem is the oft-repeated error of assuming that if you believe it, and 100% of your immediate circle of acquaintances believes it, it must be true for most everyone. This incorrect assumption causes lots of players no end of forum problems.