Arcanaville

I finally managed to reconstruct this from my notes, and some captures of some of the text. Its almost exactly what I posted the first time, and hopefully this time it'll stick around. I'm posting it in the Guides section, even though its not exactly a guide. Well, its a guide to fixing defense, so there. Also, when the forum grues ate the first version, it apparently broke like a thousand other people's signature files that linked to it, so this is also a community service. Plus, I have a ton of people asking why my own link is broken, and wondering when I'm going to get off my lazy behind and put this thing back up there. So here it is.


Here's how you fix defense in PvP and PvE, in three moves.


Step One: Convince Positron that its worth spending time and resources to fix the problem.

This is the hard one. Either its worth solving or its not, and if its not, nothing else matters. As I see it, solving the problems that defense has addresses a lot of issues, in high end PvE, in balanced PvP, in a lot of areas that the devs specifically want to improve.

The way I would sell this to Positron:

1. The solution is not a bandaid, it solves all aspects of the problem that should be solved, in a balanced way.

2. The solution does not have any unauthorized side effects. No part of the game changes unless its explicitly approved.

From the perspective of a project manager, a solution doesn't get any better than that.

Update: With the NCSoft acquisition, you'd probably have to convince both Positron, and Brian Clayton, the executive producer. Good luck reaching him.


Step Two: Convince the developers its worth adding specific changes to the tohit mechanics to solve the problem.

This is a problem with two faces. First, we have to convince the developers its worth doing *anything* no matter what it actually accomplishes. This is non-trivial: changing the base code is never something to be undertaken lightly. The only way I can think of to do this is to present the change itself, and demonstrate its merits.


The change is this: add a new type of power attribute that is typed like defense, but acts differently from defense: instead of acting the way defense works, it works like anti-accuracy.

What does that mean? Well, the way defense works is like this: the attacker has 50% chance to hit you, you have 30% defense, so the attacker has a net chance to hit you of 50% - 30% = 20%. Defense is subtractive.

Accuracy is multiplicative. If you have a 50% chance to hit something, and you add +33% accuracy, your net chance is (1.33) * 50% = 66.5%. Attackers get to *increase* their accuracy with slotting. But defenders/targets have no way to *reduce* accuracy (they can in effect reduce tohit with defense, but that's not the same thing). What I'm basically asking for is a type of defense that works like accuracy that reduces the chance to hit instead of increasing it: fractional accuracy or negative accuracy.

Negative accuracy would basically work just like accuracy, but with different sign. If the attacker has +33% accuracy, and you the target has -33% anti-accuracy, the net chance to hit would be: (1+0.33) * (1-0.33) * 50% = 1.33 * 0.67 * 50% = 44.56%.

This change leverages the fact that accuracy already exists in the game; the mechanics to deal with accuracy already exist. A new kind of defense that behaves just like accuracy (only less than one) shouldn't be difficult to add. It shouldn't be that much more difficult than, say, the I7 critter accuracy change. Making sure its typed like defense is typed might be the sticky part. Lets hope that part isn't intractible: if it is, it might doom *all* suggestions like this, even ones that purport not to change defense, but just change the "equations."

Update: "The Developers" used to be basically Poz. Now, not sure. Pohsyb is definitely in the mix there, but he's up to his eyeballs in "Numbers" related development, and of course future Issue development. But he knows as much about how the game mechanics work as anyone I know. Ghost Widow is also a developer and seems knowledgeable of the game mechanics, given her involvement with Castle in tracing the detailed mechanics of taunt. But I've not spoken to her about game mechanics, and she's undead besides.


Why is this worth doing? Lets move to step three:


Step Three: Convince Castle to rebalance defense sets, one at a time, based on now having two tools to do so: Defense, and Anti-accuracy.

The best way to understand how this works is to look at examples. Lets rebalance Super Reflexes.

SR can currently get about 30% defense slotted with passives and toggles. We want SR to have the same level of protection, but we want to make sure that SR cannot be easily negated by tohit buffs. The way we do that is we shift SR's protection to Anti-accuracy (I used to call this Elusivity a long, long time ago, for those who might remember).

30% defense reduces tohit from 50% to 20%: its equivalent to 60% damage mitigation. For SR to get the same level of protection, we need its total level of protection in Anti-accuracy to be 0.60. This way, SR tohit now looks like this:

Old SR: 50% - 30% = 20%
New SR: (1-0.60) * 50% = 0.4 * 50% = 20%

What's changed? SR now resists tohit buffs. Lets see what happens when the attacker has +15% tohit buffs:

Old SR: 50% + 15% - 30% = 35%
New SR: (1-0.60) * (50% + 15%) = 0.4 * (65%) = 26%

Notice, New SR is more resistant to the effects of tohit buffs. How much more? Well, against someone with no defense at all, tohit is increased from 50% to 65% a total damage increase of 65/50 = 1.3, or 30%. For SR, total damage increase is 26/20 = 1.3, or 30%.

Win #1: For "conventional" SR, tohit buffs are no more dangerous than they are for anyone else.

There's a problem with that, though. What happens when SR stacks more defense on top of itself? If tohit buffs cannot penetrate defense protections, defense becomes much stronger than resistance or regeneration. 60% mitigation is fine: 90% (from Elude) is almost indestructible.

Ah, but that's the catch: Elude doesn't have to be based on Anti-accuracy. Elude is as strong as it is because its partially balanced around defending against tohit buffs. That makes it ridiculously strong when you don't have tohit buffs, and still weak when you have enough: there's really no middle ground.

There is now: have Elude grant 0.50 Anti-accuracy, and 25% defense.

Here's what Elude now looks like, stacked on top of SR protection:

(1 - 0.6) * (1 - 0.5) * (50% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (25%) = 5%. Elude floors the attacker, like it always has. *But*, tohit buffs have *some* effectiveness, but not set-destroying effectiveness. A +20% tohit buff does this:

0.4 * 0.5 * (50% +20% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (45%) = 9%.

A 20% tohit buff has almost doubled the damage you can do to an eluded scrapper: +80%. But that's about all it can do: here's +50%:

0.4 * 0.5 * (50% + 50% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (75%) = 15%.

Not much more: the tohit buffs are being resisted by the base SR anti-accuracy defenses and the part of Elude that is also based on anti-accuracy. 25 more points of tohit are only translating to 6 points more net tohit. In the absence of anti-accuracy, under similar conditions going from 25% to 31% defense would have done roughly the same thing. Tohit buffs have a stronger effect on Elude than normal SR defenses, because they are designed to: SR scrappers are not designed to have Elude-strength defenses no matter what: Elude is counterable. But the act of countering Elude doesn't counter the rest of the set: anti-accuracy kicks in to stop total collapse.

The numbers are negotiable: these are offered as examples.

Win #2: Elude works, but not *too* well.

This is a win-win in PvP. SR scrappers get to keep their defenses in the presence of high-order tohit buffs, but they cannot make tohit irrelevant by stacking tons of defense over the tohit ceiling. Defense always works, tohit always works as a counter in the cases of highly stacked defense.

There's a PvE win also. SR powers are split into toggles and passives. The passives are very weak: they have to be because they stack with the toggles, and making them too strong makes stacked SR powers potentially too strong: it can push SR too close to the magic 45% defense mark.

But if conventional SR defenses are intended to be "intrinsic" and therefore resistant to tohit buffs, both toggles and passives will be 100% anti-accuracy. This means toggles and passives can *both* be stronger by themselves, and still combine to get the same net result.

I'll skip past the math: anti-accuracy passives of 0.125 and toggles of 0.320 look like this:

Passive: 0.125 unslotted, 0.195 slotted, 19.5% damage mitigation by itself (slotted current SR passive damage mitigation: 17.6%)

Toggle: 0.320 unslotted, 0.499 slotted, 49.9% damage mitigation by itself (slotted current SR toggle damage mitigation: 43.3%).

Combined damage mitigation: 1 - (1 - 0.195) * (1 - 0.499) = 0.597, or 59.7% (about the same as current: 30.4%, or 60.8%).

So people who just take the passive will be better off than before, people who just take the toggle will be better off than before, and people who take both will have the same protection as now.

Win #3: Passive defense powers don't have to suck.

This directly translates to Force Field defenders. Their buffing bubbles are external buffs (to their targets): that's arguably meant to be conventional defense (its vulnerable to tohit). The Dispersion bubble is buffing defense, but its also the FF defenders primary self protection: it should be Anti-accuracy, to be less vulnerable to tohit buffs (its "balanced" at its current strength). The correct balance point is where the players inside the FF bubbles and under the dispersion bubble have the same protective strength as they do now, and to do that, the dispersion bubble will have to be stronger than it is now, to net to the same strength. Net effect: FF defender effectiveness as a team buffer is the same, FF buffs are slightly less vulnerable to tohit buffs (not as much as SR scrappers, but better than now), and their own personal protection is both higher than now, and equally resistant to tohit buffs as SR scrappers. Win, win, win.

What happens when FF defenders bubble SR scrappers? SR scrappers keep their intrinsic tohit buff resistance, but the two small bubbles will be negatable with tohit buffs: outside defensive buffs countered by attacker tohit buffs. So buffs do not become more important than intrinsic defense: attackers in PvP are not overwhelmed by defense. Their tohit buffs do what they are supposed to do: counter defense buffs. Buff counters buff, without negating power set capability to protect self.

Win #4: Force field defenders get better self protection, but their team benefit remains the same, or slightly better. But they cannot overstack defense in a way attackers in PvP cannot penetrate.


One more win: power pool defense powers. Right now, those are weak, because they cannot be made any stronger: they would stack too strongly with things that have high order defenses, like SR scrappers, Ice tankers, etc. But after this change is made, those high order defensive sets will have most or all of their protection in Anti-Accuracy. And Anti-Accuracy does not stack with conventional defense. This means powers designers can boost the strength of powers like combat jumping, so that they are effective for low defense things like blasters and defenders, without having to worry about them making things like SR scrappers and Ice tankers indestructible. The power pool stacking problem goes away, and squishies get to have better power pool protection, without breaking other things. Another PvE win, and a PvP win. This is just a plain win, period.

Win #5: Power pool defenses don't have to suck. They won't be ultra powerful for defense sets either


Summary: Convince Positron to devote resources to the problem, convince the developers to add Anti-Accuracy to solve the problem, and convince Castle to use it to rebalance the defense sets in the right way: by breaking up all defense protections into intrinsic protection which are not balanced for, and should therefore be resistant to, tohit buffs, and extrinsic protection buffs which are meant to be directly countered by tohit buffs, as a buff-counterbuff situation, in both PvP and PvE.

Do that, and defense functions correctly by my definition of "functions correctly" which is: it does what its designed to do, for things given it, and it doesn't break everyone else when its heavily stacked, because there are direct countermeasures to it when its heavily stacked. By making two "defenses" - one that is resistant to tohit buffs, and one that is not, you can give everyone what they should have: resistent protection where appropriate, and non-resistant protection where not appropriate.


Why this solution is better than all other solutions.

1. It doesn't change PvE, unless you want it to.

For me, this is all-important. When this "feature" is added to the game, the next day nothing changes, anywhere. Until Castle, or another powers designer, actually *gives* someone or something Anti-Accuracy, nothing will change anywhere. The *only* things that change are things that get Anti-Accuracy deliberately. If we want to, we can give it to players only for PvP balance, better protection in PvE, but withhold it from critters, which means *our* tohit buffs will still knock MoGed Paragon Protectors on their butts. You do not need to nerf PvE to fix PvP with this solution, period.


2. Its Controllable

This solution doesn't change anything until you deliberately change it. This means it can be phased in over time: adding the tech does not mandatorially require that the powers designers use it immediately. You do not need to make more changes than you are comfortable making and testing at any one time.


3. Its Tweakable.

By keeping both types of defense around, you can tune how much of each everybody gets: Ice tankers, Granite tankers, etc. If you give too much of one and not enough of the other, its easy to adjust the numbers around so the *protection* is exactly the same, but the only thing that changes is the resistance to tohit buffs. This decision doesn't require you agree with *me* what those levels should be: they can be anything the powers designers want them to be. Most other solutions are highly dependent on fixed mechanics that lock the behavior in, and are not easily tweakable without changing the actual algorithmic code. Mine is tweakable by changing powers, not code.


4. Its fair to attackers and defenders

Defense works correctly in the presence of tohit buffs. But it doesn't encourage defense sets to go crazy and stack even more defense buffs on top of their highly resistant protection: that doesn't work in this system. External buffs are "weak" relative to intrinsic protection, and are explicitly designed to allow attackers to strip them away without being able to strip intrinsic protection away. Its kind of like "undebuffable defense" but more mathematically sound.


5. Mathematically sane

It would take too long, and be wholely uninteresting, for me to state all the ways this makes more mathematical sense. So let me put it this way, it makes me happy, and if it makes me happy, I won't complain as much when Cryptic finally implements this solution. That's worth a lot, actually, especially to Cryptic.

In all seriousness: this is an abstract benefit, and its difficult to prove. So don't trust me on this one: rely on the concrete advantages of the solution to make up your mind. This is just an extra bonus: this will prevent problems in the future, but you don't have to believe that.


That's it. Its the best solution I have at the moment, that is theoretically doable, balanced, addresses all the major defense and tohit problems I'm aware of, fixes defense stacking problems for free, helps practically everyone, hurts practically no one, and doesn't require a complete overhaul of current powers balance.

If someone can actually specifically claim those specific benefits, and specifically how they accomplish them without dancing around them or hand-waving them away, I'll listen. Until then, this is what I'm advocating.


Update: At the moment, Castle is The Powers Guy. There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that its probably a hundred times easier to convince Castle that this is a good idea than Geko before him. The bad news is that if we were to somehow figure out a way to accomplish this herculean task, and placed the balancing workload for this on Castle's desk, he's going to kill me. It's probably still worth it, though.

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wait, wait, wait, wait, wait....

the guide isn't sarcasm?

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I'm afraid not.

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An example of how to analyze this sort of thing is in Arcanaville's comparative surivivability comparisons.

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Lost in the final guide is the fact that the linked guide is the final iteration of an analysis piece I wrote for I3, I4, I5, and I7. Dark Armor only shows up at all in the late I5 version, and only completely in the I7 version, because I specifically stated I would not cover dark armor until I had played it to sufficiently high level to be able to verify my calculations against actual in-game experiences and test conditions both. That didn't happen until I6. A similar self-imposed restriction occured for Regeneration until the I5 version, for comparable reasons (I played regen, but not high enough to be able to comment confidently on its strength against the end of the level curve until around I5).

There's a reason those guides have lasted this long, and five issues of continuous peer scruitiny are responsible for most of it. It was not, as some people think, simply overwhelming people with numbers. It was *hammered* in every version, and every version incorporates the comments of the previous one. All of Part Two is specifically to address the continuous long-running critique "averages don't represent the actual game."

The example it should set is not in its length, or even necessarily in its methodology per se. Its in its long-running systematic and logical answering of the questions posed to it by lots of players over lots of time.

And no, I'm not currently contemplating updating it for inventions.

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If she thinks Freakshow are funny, she's going to love this fan video: Thank You. (Looks good at full screen size.)

Totally kid safe. She'll probably torment you by making you play it again and again.

Then she'll want to know how to do all those emotes.

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This is probably my second favorite fan video, after the "I Need a City of Heroes" one from long ago. Its cute, its a simple concept, executed well, and has a sense of humor.


(By the way, given that it was made without benefit of PvP setups, sophisticated demo editing, and at a time when most players did not even have a lot of high level characters yet, I Need a City of Heroes seems all the more amazing to me now than when I first saw it. Heck, when I first saw it, I recall not even knowing what the flaming monkeys were yet. Also, Bonnie Tyler is the only proper version of that song)

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"How come the Clockworks don't attack cars or make nasty cars to attack people?"

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Its almost heartbreaking to think I will never get to play a game that is quite as good as the one your daughter currently plays.

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However, our highest priority is to ensure that the quality of all new content being brought to the game meets and exceeds your expectations.

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If I knew I was going to be addressing forum readers, I don't think I would make that one of my priorities. If Issue 12 introduced level 60 PvP raid content on the moon soloable by villains with epic archetypes that unlocked customizable power effects while dropping respecifications inventions that allowed you to change your power sets while simultaneously reversed the nipple nerf, forum readers would wonder why there was no big red ball in the first mission, why the evil moon aliens have cooler assault rifles than the players, and why there's no body scaler that allows you to select the number of nipples your body has, all while PLing themselves to 60 and running all the content in one weekend, and then wondering what's holding up Issue 13.

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Where's Arcanaville when you need these calculations?

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Currently heading to dinner. I told pohsyb that I'd be answering accuracy questions for a year after he finished this thing.

Don't know about the negative accuracy total: that sounds like a bug in the enhancement calculation.

All accuracy bonuses from invention set bonuses should be additive, and increase player accuracy from 1.0 to higher numbers. There are no *player* accuracy debuffs that I'm aware of, so that number should never be lower than 1.0.

I'm currently picturing Sam the Eagle popping his head in this thread saying "You are all ... Weirdos!"

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Personally, I hope very few people buy the Wedding Pack so NCSoft gets the message that this is not a viable income stream for them.

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Oh yes, and a great message it would be:

"Dear NCSoft, don't go out of your way for us. Don't spend extra time or money on developing or designing anything for us unless you are willing to accept no compensation for your efforts. Don't expect us to support you. We don't want anything more then what our subscription fees already cover."



Its one thing to charge for everything left and right, like some other companies have, its another to offer a little something extra here and there for a small price.

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I'd write a check to Jay and BaB for custom animations and costumes right now, if that's the way it worked. But I have a feeling that the art department didn't burn the midnight oil and get a bonus for these extras: they would have worked just as hard - but on something else everyone would have gotten access to - if they didn't work on these.

I wouldn't mind if these things were, say, veteran rewards that someone could buy to get early, and sufficiently long veterans would get unlocked eventually, so the purchase price was just for the impatient. And I don't mind supporting the dev team in general. And the completist in me is likely to buy the pack anyway, eventually, and the $10 means exactly nothing to me. But I'm still uncomfortable with a ten dollar costume and emote pack on principle.


This does not appear to be a case of "we can't justify the cost of making these items, but maybe we can make them retail items to help defray the cost." This appears to be a case of "hey, since you're making those things anyway, lets see if we can sell them rather than give them away, to gauge the interest of the player population in retail option packs."

I know its Monday because I was wondering when we got an official rooster.

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I believe that the Developers care enough about us to grace us with at least an acknowledgment.

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They care enough about their sanity not to simply drop into a thread and say "we're looking at it" when they can give no estimate for when anything might be done about it, even broadly.

Lots of different elements of PvP balance have been discussed and addressed by the devs, at different times. But the overall response is "this is a non-trivial problem, and there are other things of equal or higher priority that exist that can actually be done in a reasonable amount of time."

Think about the time Castle has spent on looking at Rage. On Assassin's Strike. On Defiance. Three individual powers and abilities. Now multiply by about a hundred, and that's the scope of the problem of balancing powers for PvP.

That doesn't count the effort required to balance mechanics, which is all by itself probably more work than the powers problem. There are no easy solutions to either of those problem spaces.

I'm not a dev, so I'm not the response you're looking for. Unfortunately, this might be as close as you get for quite some time, at least with regard to the general issue of PvP balance. You're more likely to get a response to a specific PvP-related problem than the holistic one, if its a problem for which a reasonable consensus about the parameters of the solution can be found. Which is, as always, easier said than done.

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SG Mode should not be a total 'no brainer'. There should be some advantage to NOT being in SG mode, otherwise you are penalizing toons who don't have an SG membership above and beyond all the SG goodies they are missing out on.

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I'm not certain I agree. What concerns me is the opposite situation, which is this: should there exist a penalty for being in SG mode for people in an SG?

Anyone above level ten can make an SG, and although you can't go berserk, anyone can make a personal base with at least limited functionality. Therefore, the only people who aren't a member of an SG, even an SG of one, are the people explicitly choosing not to be in one, or can't level beyond level 10.

My problem with the original system was that it wasn't designed to be some grand balance between the SG-haves and havenots. It was designed to be an influence sink, period. And the problem was that it squeezed an inappropriate segment of the player population, in my opinion. Large SGs that could pretty much tolerate any cost, were fine. Solo players that didn't bother with SGs at all were fine. It was the players who were, in effect, "starting up" SGs that were hit the hardest. And those players seemed to be the *most* inappropriate players to penalize: the ones actually *trying* to start something.

I'm not sure what to think about the 50% limit. My guess is that its better, and my guess is that CH selling has weakened the influence limits anyway. But it still concerns me a little.

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Given that there are mobs above 50, and invention recipes up to 53 in the database that aren't actually awarded, why not have some way to rise above 50?

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The recipe thing is an anomaly, due to the fact that the top of the enhancement table is 53.

No matter what the maximum level of players ends up being, there will always exist enhancements up to Player+3, and Critters up to Player+5, to allow for the existence of +3 enhancements, and +5 critters to fight. So the existence of things higher than 50 isn't really a good reason to increase the player level cap, since that would force those things to go up higher as well.

They'll always be higher than we are, because there always must exist things higher than our security level, both in terms of things for us to use, and in terms of things for us to fight.

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Nice post... interesting stuff on Weave and how it calculates into nothing for regens and DA's.

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It doesn't so much do nothing, as it only makes the risky slightly less risky. And that isn't because weave is intrinsicly weak, its rather that regens and DAs are sufficiently strong, that when they push themselves to the point where they *need* extra help, that extra help has to work in environments where every hit is taking a big bite out of their health. And its specifically in those areas where defense is not as strong as a survival tool as resistance is, all other things being equal.

However, if defense is all you've got, more is always better. Stack weave on an SR scrapper, and you get a big return on investment there. And also, if you are pretty squishy to begin with, it can help at those levels of damage: if blasters got to run weave for free, they would notice a slight but material improvement (its the cost of running a toggle while needing endurance to constantly power high-cost offense, and its power choice cost, that makes weave often dubious for blasters).

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Yet, since Weave must obviously block some incoming damage, it must also shift the center of the bell curve to the right. So how is it possible to shift the center of the bell curve to the right while not changing the % of the bell curve above 0? I would guess that for some reason, the bell curve has gotten wider with the addition of Weave. The net effect would be no increase in survivability. This seems perfectly consistent with your findings, as well as with the intuition that Weave should help in some way. It helps keep health higher on average, but doesn't help prevent death.

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You are correct in that for riskier situations, eventually the curves will cross and weave will look better than tough. However, that generally happens so far to the left, that it happens in unreasonable regimes of play. I believe that if the crossover point happens further away than about 80% chance of survival, it represents an area that scrappers are not going to play, in the general case. They might enter such an arena for an AV fight, say, but they are simply not going to throw themselves into a mission where *every spawn* has a 20% chance of killing them. So tough seems much stronger than weave for most "normal" modes of play.

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I'd love to see a new system of advancement above 50 that doesn't use XP, but rather tracks advancement based on completion of certain tasks. As rewards, give out some special non-slot powers, costumes, badges, invention rewards, SG rewards, etc.

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For instance, to get L51, you'd have to complete all of the storylines from all prior contacts, excluding TFs. For 52, you must complete all normal zone TFs. For 53, complete all the oddball TFs like Hollows, Croatoa, Strigga, RWZ, etc. CoV would need more content for this to work for them, as well, but then CoV needs more content compared to CoH anyway.

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Why would you need to "get to 51" at all? The function of levels in the game is to gate content and powers advancement. If you are not going to get any more primary or secondary powers, and you're inventing an alternate way to gate content by accomplishment, there's no actual need for a level 51. You would advance by doing what was necessary to unlock the next set of challenges in the game.

The Ouroboros is a form of this type of advancement, albeit in extremely simplified form. You have to do something (satisfy the requirement to get Seeker and the Ouroboros portal) to unlock an entirely new part of the game (flashback, Ouroboros arcs). The only reason why its not considered "advancement" is that its open to all levels (above 25). If it was something only level 50s could do, it would effectively *be* level 51, even if no actual level 51 existed.


I've always thought that was a good thing to do in general, because it prevents level escalation problems while still giving people things to do. I've liked the concept of unlockable content since before unlockable content (besides levelling) even existed in the game, except in trivial form (i.e. level 30 stores).

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Cool guide.

One nitpick:

When you discuss Power Boost's effect on Hover you hypothesize a fully defense slotted, Power Boosted Hover.

Hover's base def is 2.5%. PB doubles that (approx) to 5%.

However, Defense is a schedule B enhancement, so slotting does not get you another 2.5%. Slotting will only get you an additional 1.5% (approx), for a total of about 6.5% when Power Boosted.

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Eight posts upward, there is a second draft of the guide that corrects that error, and a bunch of other errors from the original draft that started the thread, as well as some improved formatting. I'm working to finalize this so I can post it as the latest version of the guide, but I've been holding back a bit just until the attribute modifier and the new combat spam get a chance to be shaken down, so I can add information about those into the guide.

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For example, malta turrets do not obey the general rule of "everything has base 50% tohit." They actually have base 75% chance to hit, over and above their 1.2 accuracy. They are not especially dangerous, but I've always noticed them hitting me a lot more often than I thought they should under SR defenses, and decided to test them. They are *much* more accurate because they actually retain their higher base tohit numbers from pre-I7.

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Is that maybe because they just summon the same pet the players do, which has that 1.5 accuracy scale and thus a 75% effective hit chance against even-level foes?

If that's the case, is it possible all summoned pets who are just player powers act like this? For example, it always seemed to me that the Summoned Stone pets whipped up by the Legacy Chain bosses were exceptionally accurate.

Edit: re-reading your post you seem to be saying they truly have a 75% chance to hit, base, then 1.2 accuracy on top. If that's really the case that's definitely interesting and odd.

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As a matter of fact, it appears that player pets do in fact have the same base 75% chance to hit that players themselves do (at least in PvE). And actually, it appears that Malta turrets are spawning with the same "tag" that tells the game what sort of modifier tables to use for it: in effect, its spawning as a player pet-kind of thing.

And yes, this might be true for *a lot* of NPC spawned pet entities. Which is a potential cause for concern.


Turrets have 75% base chance to hit (against even con), and 1.2 accuracy, because in effect the Turret has 75% base chance tohit, and then the turret's "powers" have intrinsic 1.2 accuracy when they are fired. The turret doesn't seem to have "intrinsic accuracy" which a normal critter (that has some form of rank bonus) would have.

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So your chance to hit is affected by the mob level difference (expected) - is it not affected by the mob rank? i.e. are bosses harder to hit than minions?

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Rank (or any other such property of a critter) has no impact on your base chance to hit a critter. The only two intrinsic properties of a target that affect your base chance to hit it is the critter's level difference relative to you, and any defense the critter has (there are, of course, dynamic things that change the net chance to hit a target, including tohit buffs, tohit debuffs, defense debuffs, etc).

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I drew the Zodiac characters to show my skill to Hero Games, but they didn't want anything to do with them unless there was a module written to go with the art... so I wrote them a module.

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You can never have too many people who think like this, in my opinion.

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Two things:

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Low level villains attacking a higher level player are not affected by the purple patch.

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I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Obviously, lower level villains attacking higher level heroes experience some decrement in damage and accuracy; that's why you can take a level 50 into Perez Park, and the Skuls will hit you 5% of the time, for 0.01 damage.

Do you just mean that this decrement is not as severe as it is for players; i.e., it's the same table that was used for players prior to the original purple patch going in?

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I mean they are not affected by the purple patch. There is a "normal" scaler that affects critters hitting higher level players. Or rather, there used to be just one scaler that affected anything hitting anything else: its what we see when we attack something lower than us. The "purple patch" as its called was specifically added to the game to override that scaler and place an exponential reduction in powers effectiveness for the specific case of players attacking higher level critters.


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The second point is one of those arcane numerical things that nobody but me will probably find interesting. Still, showing the ToHit rolls on Test makes it a lot easier to test these things.

It turns out that base to-hit drops below 5% for much higher-level mobs. Here's the table:


<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>+4 39%
+5 30%
+6 20%
+7 8%
+8 -10%
+9 -17%
+10 -20%
+11 -21%
+12 -22%
+13 -23%
+14 and up -24%
</pre><hr />

(I didn't test +1 through +3; I assume it's the same as what's currently in the table.)

This pretty much only has ramifications if you're trying to calculate chance to hit against very purple foes when you've got a large ToHit buff, i.e. Aim, FA, etc.

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I'm looking at the numbers on test myself, and I'm compiling data to include in the guide, as well as questions for the devs. For example, malta turrets do not obey the general rule of "everything has base 50% tohit." They actually have base 75% chance to hit, over and above their 1.2 accuracy. They are not especially dangerous, but I've always noticed them hitting me a lot more often than I thought they should under SR defenses, and decided to test them. They are *much* more accurate because they actually retain their higher base tohit numbers from pre-I7.

Don't know if that is an error, or intentional, yet.

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If Defenders are supposed do 65% of the damage a Blaster does, that 65% should be based upon the true amount of damage a blaster does, not simply the base damage.

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The problem is that that presumes the archetype damage modifiers are "right." We can work the other way around: when blasters were 1.0 and defenders were 0.65, the devs discovered that blasters were broken, because their levelling was much slower than defenders (and everyone else). So they gave blasters more damage. The original 1/0.65 ratio was in effect proven to be incorrect, which prompted the change in the first place.

However, the 0.65 number itself hasn't been "proven wrong" yet because the devs haven't seen numbers which suggest the number is too low for defenders to function. It may or may not be but what they see so far suggests its not.

I consider the 1/0.65 number to be a first guess at what the blaster/defender ratio should be, not a conceptual decision on what they ought to be. Moreover, its not specifically saying what the ratio of total damage should be, but rather what the ratio in damage should be when given identical powers.

You say "not all defenders get damage buffs" and that's true. But you can't argue for a damage modifier increase based on the defender primary with the *lowest* damage buffs available, without simultaneously implying that the ones with the very high damage buffs need to have them taken away. Because if the damage ratio argument is valid, its valid in both directions. If FF defenders can use it to compare themselves to blasters, for example, the blasters and turn around and use the identical balance argument on rads, darks, and kins. That makes it a very dangerous argument to employ, because it ultimately creates a lot of collateral damage.


I happen to consider the damage boosting (and other) effects of rads and kins to be, in not balanced with the defensive benefit of FF, then presumed to be balanced for the sake of inter-archetype balancing. Meaning, when I compare "defenders" to "blasters" I assume FF defenders and Kin defenders should be considered equal representatives. Because if they are not, then there is an intra-archetype balance problem to solve that has nothing to do with blasters.

Having made that assumption, I then realize its really hard to compare an FF defender to a blaster, because the blaster has nothing to compare even remotely to an FF defender. But its at least not crazy to compare the offensive power of a kin or a rad to a blaster, so I compare them so see how the archetypes compare, using Blaster-ish criteria.

I then use Kins and Rads as a form of "pivot point" around which both archetypes are balanced. If the "offensive" defenders can be balanced against blasters (which is itself a subject of massive debate), then they can go back to defenders as "representatives" of the archetype balance model, and then the defenders can be balanced among themselves using more Defender-ish criteria.

Doing anything else is probably going to stall. You really can't compare a Fire blaster to an FF defender in a meaningful way directly, because there isn't a convenient way to normalize the benefits of the two around something you can quantitatively compare. Basically, you can't compare apples and oranges, but sometimes you can compare apples to apple juice and oranges to orange juice, and then you're left with the simpler problem of comparing apple juice to orange juice.

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So while Blasters are doing, on average, 120% damage and Corruptors are doing 85% damage, Defenders are still stuck at 65%. And I'll tell ya, just play a Defender and you know the damage is absolutely pathetic, even compared to a Corruptor who is supposed to be only 10% more. There is something very wrong here.

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Given that defenders have very strong ally buffs, how much damage do you think defenders should do, relative to blasters? Some of those buffs are very high: Enervating field is a -30% resistance debuff on the targets, which is effectively 30% more damage. 30% true increase, not +30% damage buff. So if a blaster is 1.125, and slotted to 1.125 * 1.95 = 2.19, or defiance buffed to a constant +50% damage (the high end) of 1.125 * (1.95 + 0.5) = 2.76, then defender damage is 0.65 * 1.95 = 1.27, or with something like an EF debuff 0.65 * 1.95 * 1.3 = 1.65. If we stop right there, and do not factor in other damage buffs like AM, we end up with average blaster damage being in the range of 2.76/1.65 = 1.67; the blaster is doing 67% more damage.

Is that already too high when comparing an archetype that specializes in dealing damage with the archetype that does not specialize in doing damage, but does specialize in ally buffs? Defenders are also, in the general case, a lot less squishy than blasters are: even with lower health, they have a lot of damage mitigation relative to the average blaster. How does that factor in?

Actually, I made this spreadsheet of exactly these types of numbers back in I11 beta. It seemed to show that if you compare blaster damage and damage mitigation to everyone else, the blaster ratio was lower than everyone else if you make the simplifying assumption that blasters as an archetype have no more offensive damage mitigation (damage mitigation effects intrinsic in their offensive damage powersets) than any other archetype. This included defenders.

That doesn't mean there isn't anything wrong with defenders, just that comparing them to blasters is probably the worst possible comparison to make. Datamining showed that when placed in the hands of average players, blasters levelled much slower than everyone else, including defenders. That combined with the damage/mitigation archetypal ratios suggest that blasters do not have a special advantage in combined damage/defense capability over defenders.

Blasters certainly kill a whole lot faster. But they seem to pay for that in the general case by being a whole lot more fragile.

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I'm still working on an updated and cleaned up version of this guide. .... But hopefully, sometime before Issue 11 rolls around, I should have it done. It might even fit in one post: that would be the first time in several versions.

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I'm just wondering if a new version has been posted.

And thanks for the detailed work! I'll confess that I still have trouble understanding this entire guide; but it helps to have a "history" of the discussions behind this.

Within the context of the recent "State of the Game 2008" address, I'm hoping we are able to easily verify more of these numbers in-game ... either directly or indirectly.

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I have posted a working version of an update to the guide in this thread. The first post in the thread is my first cleanup version, and near the bottom is a second draft incorporating feedback. I'm debating whether to take up the offer to HTML-ize the guide, and submit it for posting that way. I haven't had the time to really dedicate to finalizing it, and I'm still thinking about formatting issues, which is why there isn't a final, latest update quite yet.

The "Numbers" that NCNC is planning on adding to the game are the quantities of the game: how much defense does combat jump have, how much defense you currently have total, what's the accuracy of sniper blast, that sort of thing. It is not likely initially to include information on the equations, or algorithms, of the game mechanics. It is also probably going to be limited to player attributes, and not the critters, so you could know how much defense you have, but not how much defense every single NPC out there has.

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I've stated before that Forcefield is handily outperformed by multiple other competing sets, regardless of AT

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Put together a video of a Sonic soloing 3 groups of Nemesis at once in a 7 man unyielding mish and surviving for over 7 minutes without using anything but Sonic, power pools, no attacks, and an Epic shield and then I'll believe that some other primary can possibly _equal_ what FF can do.

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I believe within the scope of this sort of challenge, a radiation defender could stand in the middle of overlapping spawns with RI and EF locked onto one of the targets, slotted CC holding most things below bosses, LR slowing things down dramatically, and RA healing whatever gets through, with EMP as the emergency panic button. I don't believe you'd even need any epic powers to replicate this level of performance in broad levels. The main difference is that while FF is getting a lot of its damage mitigation via critter scatter and knock, rad would be doing so via maximum clustering of the critters so all effects have their maximum effect.

I'm a little less certain about dark, although weirdly dark does have one bit of trickery up its sleve it can use to beat the letter of the challenge, if not perhaps the spirit of the challenge, and that is that I'm pretty sure Black Hole can be made perma. It would be very hard to kill a dark defender that was deliberately making as many targets intangible as possible as continuously as possible, over and above the rest of the debuffing capability of the set (and the fear).

I wouldn't want to try this with Empathy or Kinetics, though. TA and Storm, I think could go either way: I'm just not certain. I think a sufficiently skilled player could probably do it with TA and Storm, especially with the medicine pool and epic powers.