Arcanaville

[ QUOTE ]
But that assumes that the performance is itself balanced against other examples of power sets within the same archetype.

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't say anything about the set's performance. I didn't even say whether I thought it needed fixes or not. What I said is that given a set of abilities, from a performance perspective it is always better to get them in three powers rather than six. That's true if that set of abilities is great, or they suck. Three is still better than six. Three is always better than six.


[ QUOTE ]
Again, that's valid, IF you assume that the Big Three provide as much protection overall than all nine powers of some other Primary.

[/ QUOTE ]

As I said: I don't have to assume that at all. In fact, I'll state it again for precision: I am not, and am not required to assume, any performance level of FF in order to assert that having its strength concentrated into three powers is better than having that same strength dispersed into more than three powers. That is logically unassailable.

As a separate issue of whether in fact FF's big three bubbles are the equal of other sets, thats a very tough debate. Radiation infection is theoretically stronger than all three powers combined - but its much more situational in its coverage, and affected by the purple patch since it is a debuff. Once you get to about +2, the FF bubbles start to become very strong compared to the debuffs that are out there, and its a lot easier for FF buffs to affect all attackers, relative to defensive powers that act as foe debuffs.

Once you stack maneuvers onto the three powers, though, I think the discussion is much less viable. Few things can deliver unambiguous 90% damage mitigation, plus mez protection, consistently against the vast majority of (PvE) attackers. The only thing that I think is competitive, and only situationally, is dark. Dark is looked upon as stronger than FF in this regard only because its protections all benefit self equally as the entire team. FF is skewed strongly towards the team relative to the defender. But that protection is stronger for the team in a lot of situations where Dark breaks down in being able to protect an entire team (I say "breaks down" in the relative sense of no longer consistently providing Elude-class protection for the entire team, not necessarily as dark completely breaking down in the sense of being unable to provide protection for the team).

That doesn't mean I don't think there's room for improvement in the set. But I do think its defensive strength is often highly underestimated.

[ QUOTE ]
There's two complicating factors involved with this:

1) The FF Defender cannot bubble himself with two of the "Big Three". So in your example above, the SR scrapper would get a 10% melee/ranged/AoE power, and then another 20% Defense power he could only put on someone else. So essentially he's got 7 "crap powers", not 6... to him, anyway.

2) Scrappers also don't have a penalty to their damage due to the majority of them having an offense boost in their Secondary. So for instance if a Scrapper only had 80% damage, (30% less than 112.5) but all Scrappers but Super Reflexes got a 30% damage boost, then that SR Scrapper would have 80% damage and 10% Defense... not quite enough to solo, I don't think.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I don't really consider those two issues complicating factors to my point, because they are largely orthogonal to my points. In the first case, my point is that having most of your utility concentrated into fewer powers rather than dispersed is actually a performance advantage, even if its a design oddity. That's true regardless of what those powers actually do, and comparisons to the soloing performance of SR scrappers is not relevant here.

In the second case, you're saying that a complicating factor in my suggesting that the set design might allow for more offense than generally credited is that FF has an offensive penalty. That's assuming the exact opposite of the point I was trying to make, and suggesting that I didn't acknowledge it.

I'm obviously not going to acknowledge it, if my whole point is specifically that I think it might not be entirely accurate. I think its partially accurate, but I don't think the entire picture is being given full credit, for reasons I specifically outlined. In effect, one design error (strength concentration) is partially offsetting another (lack of offensive options) by creating options relatively unique to the set (seeking offensive options outside the primary without serious loss in effectiveness).

[ QUOTE ]
Our knockback is useless in AV or GM fights; +acc powers can shred defence....

[/ QUOTE ]

Only tohit buffs, not heightened accuracy, can really do that. That's an important PvP issue, but a much more situational PvE issue.

[ QUOTE ]
But that's not really the point. The /real/ point of this thread is that precious few people see much value in FF past The Big Three and, depending on taste and awareness of the set, one or two other powers.

[/ QUOTE ]

The irony is that the big three are so Big (i.e. capable) that it ought to leave lots of room for power pools and especially secondary powers, and yet FF is considered an offensive penalty. The FF set itself doesn't have a lot of offense, but you'd think a defender that only took three powers in the primary (and they are all good powers), had nothing but 4 minute cycling clicks, and very low endurance burn rate when operating at full efficiency would have a lot of room for offense.

If Super Reflexes were changed to a set that had one toggle with 30% defense to melee/ranged (slotted), one with 30% AoE defense, practiced brawler, and a bunch of crap powers, super reflexes scrappers would complain about having a lot of crap powers but not very loudly. Its a design flaw in FF, but many people would probably love to have that sort of design flaw.


I'm reminded of a peculiarity with defenders, and that is that their defense modifier is the same as tankers, which is significantly higher than other archetypes. Here's an FF defender attempting to build personal protection:

Dispersion Bubble: 10% defense
Weave: 5% defense
Maneuvers: 3.5% defense
Combat Jump: 2.5% defense

Total: 4 toggles, 21% base defense, 0.65 eps unslotted


And here is a Super Reflexes scrapper:

Focused Fighting: 13.875% defense melee
Focused Senses: 13.875% defense ranged
Evasion: 13.875% defense AoE
Dodge: 5.625% defense melee
Agile: 5.625% defense ranged
Lucky: 5.625% defense AoE
Combat Jump: 1.875% defense all

Total: 4 toggles (3 passives), 21.375% defense, 0.42 eps unslotted.


Basically, running the same number of toggles, and less powers overall, an FF defender can amass personal defense within about half a percentage point of slotted defense to an SR scrapper (33.3% for SR, 32.8% for FF), running the same number of toggles, and with a 0.23eps additional endurance cost unslotted; 0.17 eps with just one slot of endurance slotting.

FF can do that without too much trouble, specifically because its primary benefits are so concentrated into just a few powers. This is not intended specifically to claim that FF defenders can be SR scrappers, but rather to note just how high FF can shoot for, comparing it to the benchmark self-defense specialist (if the benchmark self-defense specialist was a blaster or a dominator, I'd compare to that instead: its not a scrapper/defender comparison specifically).

Should FF have to go to power pools to outfit itself? Probably not. But its a powerful option nonetheless.

Also, with maneuvers, the FF defender is applying a combined 28.5% base defense, or 44.5% defense to the team with bubbles and auras - essentially the tohit soft floor: everyone within the range of maneuvers and dispersion bubble is Eluded. That's an enormous amount of buffing in just four powers.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Imagine a team that can complete missions without suffering deaths on Invincible. I see them from level 22 onwards, so it shouldn't be too hard to conceptualize. Now present an argument for why that team should consider a FF defender equal in worth to ANY OTHER HERO THAT CAN BE BUILT.

[/ QUOTE ]

Poor argument. If they can already complete missions on Invincible without suffering any defeats, it doesn't matter WHAT they add; they will still do just fine.

Don't read into this that I think FF is fine as is; just that particular line of reasoning always bugs me.

[/ QUOTE ]

The classic version of this argument is idiotic. However, there is a variant that has an interesting aspect to it.

The variant argument is that at some point, most "steamroller" teams acquire so much offense that it doesn't take very much defense to make them immortal, because outside of an AV fight, everything is dropping dead in seconds anyway. Now, under those circumstances, there is probably a lot more offense *and* a lot more defense than you need: both are in serious overkill territory. Some people presume that more offense is always better, without acknowledging that offense can saturate just as easily as defense in strong teams.

But there is a strong psychological slant towards offense. Its a form of "firing squad" situation in reverse. There are eight guys shooting, but you hardly need more than three or four to kill every target in the spawn most of the time. But no one is entirely sure *which* three are killing any particular target, so everyone can choose to believe their damage is specifically valuable. Its the opposite of the situation where a firing squad is given some live rounds and some blank rounds, so everyone can choose to believe they were unlikely to be the one that fired the lethal shot.

However, once people stop taking damage, you can't really convince yourself that your bubbles stacked on top of the other bubbles, fortitudes, maneuvers, and radiation debuffs were especially important. That annoys some people who want to believe their team contribution is critical to the team's success (and furthermore, that believe what they see as their specific strength should be the most value aspect of their contribution in every single case).

Basically, redundant damage is easier on the ego than redundant defense. That's evident when the exception proves the rule. When a team acquires so much AoE damage that carpetbombing AoE is wiping everything out, the players with nothing but single target attacks, slow attacks, or situational attacks are the first to complain, because its much more difficult for them to convince themselves that their one shot made any difference when fired into a maelstrom of mushroom clouds.

I'm not saying I would bend over backwards to placate this psychological effect, but its probably worth acknowledging when game balance and design diversity is not otherwise an issue.

[ QUOTE ]
Very nice post, Brad. Thanks a ton!

I've played a ton of MMOs. I've yet to play one I couldn't take some ideas from. I think you short change the concept of street sweeping in other games a bit -- if all you do is instance missions, an MMO can begin to feel awfully empty and lonely! I like seeing other player wander by doing whatever it is they are doing while I'm gathering the whatsits for my collection quest. I even like competing for resource nodes despite the fact that it often makes me want to slap my fellow players. I definitely get where you are coming from; but I do think there is room for this style of play.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm less familiar with street sweeping-like activities in other MMOs, but street sweeping in CoH is a bit borked. The street sweeping expert teams knew that there were "good" places to do it, and bad places to do it. Certain loops in Bricks were good. Most places in Steel were not so good. Some places in Sky were good. Some places in Sky sucked. The docks in PI were good. The Portal loops were good. The middle of the zone was bad.

There are just a lot of weird oddities that are either long standing bugs, odd design, or artifacts of a game that didn't always have a purple patch. Like the level 15 LT in the middle of the level 11 minions in Steel. What sort of team is supposed to street sweep that? Or the blocks in Kings that have level 6 spawns around the corner from level 11 spawns. Realistically, the streets of Paragon City aren't "smooth" when it comes to critter levels, and that means it doesn't pay to be "adventurous." Knowledgeable players know how and where to street sweep. Its actually almost dumb for anyone else to do it, because you're either going to be fighting a lot of greys while moving around, or running into deep purples when you turn the corner.

I've never been on a street-sweeping team, ever, with more than three players that did not have a leader that knew *exactly*, *precisely* where they were going, and exactly, precisely what spawns we'd run into on every single lap, by heart. Not even back in mid '04.

Instanced missions used to suck because the rewards for doing them were pathetic (says the player who mostly soloed instanced missions from level 1 to 30+ on an energy blaster in the old days) but you always get a map full of level-appropriate targets. Once the instanced mission rewards were fixed, players switched from street sweeping to instanced mission running in almost a blink of the eye. If the streets had better level distributions, I think you'd find more street sweeping teams than you currently do now. As it stands, I'm guessing that street sweeping is uncommon outside of the sewers, Bricks, and a few other limited places.

I would love to fight every spawn between me and my next mission. 99% of the time, that's either impossible, suicidal, pointless. I think its a clash of two incompatible design goals that sounded good on paper, but ... actually, they don't even sound good on paper if you write them on the same piece of paper. I think the original design goal was to have the street spawns be something to do between instanced missions (for those that wanted to do them), and I thik it was an original design goal to intermix the different levels of players, so low levels would see high levels and vice-versa (why else keep sending level 30s back to Kings Row over and over and over and over and over and over again). But you can't have both with the current combat system: if a level 30 is going to be sent into a level 12 area, there's not going to be anything for him to do in it. Heck, just sending a 12 from the green part of the zone to the red part of the same zone will leave them with nothing to do on the streets.

If you want level Xs to have something to do on the street, you have to keep them in the level X part of town. Conversely, if you want level Xs and level X+20s to be seeing each other, they will have to be doing that in a part of town that's going to be either dangerous or boring for at least one of them: there's no such thing as neutral ground for players of widely disparate levels. This seems to be one area where the game attempted to do two good but incompatible things, and ended up not quite achieving either.

Guide to Defense, Version 1.10.beta2

I've finally gotten around to incorporating many of the suggestions offered in this thread and in PMs. Its possible I've overlooked one or two, and I'm still thinking about how its all organized. I've shuffled some things around, and added better section headers, but I'm still open to suggestions in that area.


Updates from 1.7:

* Inventions (see near the end of the guide)
* There are no versions from 1.4 to 1.9. Version number synced with Issue 10 (point releases: v1.10.1, 1.10.2, etc)
* Complete rewrite of the tohit algorithm explanations
* Rewritten examples
* More general discussion of Defense, Accuracy and Tohit mechanics
* Deleted a lot of older historical information about tohit preI6
* Added reference to the tohit and defense cap tables


Defense and the Tohit system in CoH

Defense, ToHit, and Accuracy, and how they function in the tohit algorithm, are collectively among the least understood mechanisms in City of Heroes. This guide will try to explain how Defense, Tohit, Accuracy, and all elements that affect how often one thing hits another thing function, how tohit probabilities are calculated, and how the different elements in the game use these attributes.

Although specific powers numbers are mentioned throughout the Guide, this is not a Guide to specific powers values. For information on the strength of powers, consult City of Data: Powerset Quantification which is the largest and most accurate repository for powers information that I'm aware of. If your planner currently disagrees with City of Data, your planner is wrong. Note: City of Data is only guaranteed to be accurate as of the release of Issue 7. There have been changes to powers since then, but none too drastic relative to tohit mechanics.


[u]Section One: DEFINITIONS AND THE BASIC TOHIT EQUATIONS[u]

The basic tohit formula

NetToHit = Accuracy * (BaseToHit - Defense)

Terms:

NetToHit: the probability that one thing will hit another thing with an attack. If net tohit is 45%, then 45% of the time when A attacks B, A will hit B.

BaseToHit: the probability, associated with the attacker that represents the base probability that attacker has of hitting any target in general, before buffs, debuffs, and defense are taken into acount.

Defense: the ability, or power, to reduce the chances of an attacker from hitting you. Defense is normally expressed in percentage points, and is the number of percentage points that the defensive ability will reduce your chances of being hit by an attacker.

Accuracy: the effect of any buff that specifically affects the ability for a single power to hit its target. This includes accuracy enhancements, and things like inherent attack bonuses (i.e. weapon draw bonuses). Accuracy is a bit complicated: see the advanced tohit formula below.


The advanced tohit formula

The advanced tohit formula (my terminology - there isn't really a term for it) takes into account accuracy enhancements, tohit buffs, tohit debuffs, and defense debuffs. It is:

NetToHit = (InherentAttackAccuracy) * (1 + AccuracyEnhancement) * [ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - (Defense - DefenseDebuffs) ]

Terms:

Tohit buff/debuff: a power that increases or decreases your base tohit value. Certain powers (like tactics) offer tohit buffs, while others reduce the tohit of their target (i.e. radiation infection).

Defense buff/debuff: a power that increases or decreases your defense. While all attackers (players and NPCs) have a non-zero base tohit, all targets (players and NPCs) start off with zero base defense. Their net defense is the sum total of all defense buffs and defense debuffs.

InherentAttackAccuracy: the intrinsic accuracy of a specific attack. All attacks have an accuracy rating, which determines if the attack hits more often, or less often, than normal. Archery attacks have a 1.155 accuracy rating, sometimes referred to as "+15.5% accuracy" while some AoE mez attacks, like Flash, have a 0.8 accuracy rating, sometimes referred to as "-20% accuracy" (in both cases, the alternate description of the accuracy of the power is being expressed in percentages relative to 100% or 1.0).

AccuracyEnhancement: the amount of accuracy enhancement slotted into an attack. This number is only affected by accuracy enhancements. If you have +33.3% accuracy slotted, the AccuracyEnhancement is 0.333.


Common misconception about accuracy:

Some people think two different accuracy factors are additive: this is compounded by the fact that some posts by devs in the past have suggested that they are. They are not. The intrinsic accuracy of a power and accuracy enhancement slotting are *not* additive. One accuracy SO (+33.3%) and the weapon accuracy bonus of katana (+5%) do not add up to 38.3%. They multiply: 1.05 * 1.333 = 1.400. In fact, the "+XX%" notation is so misleading, that I do not generally use it, and this guide will always refer to accuracy factors using their multiplicative expression (1.333) and not their additive one (+33.3%) in mathematical calculations to avoid confusion.



As the equation above shows, tohit buffs and debuffs, and defense buffs and debuffs, are all additive. So if your base tohit is 50%, and you use or receive a 60% tohit buff, your modified tohit becomes:

0.50 + 0.60 = 1.10 = 110%
Note that this is higher than 100%: see tohit floors and tohit ceilings below.

If you have base tohit if 50%, your target has 30% defense, you have a 15% tohit buff, and you also apply a 10% defense debuff to the target, then your net tohit is:

0.50 + 0.15 - (0.30 - 0.10) = 0.65 - (0.20) = 0.45 = 45%

If you had 2-slotted accuracy (1.667 accuracy, or "+66.7%" accuracy) and you used an attack with a 1.05 accuracy rating, your overall net tohit would be:

(1.05) * (1.667) * (0.50 + 0.15 - (0.30 - 0.10)) = (1.05) * (1.667) * (0.65 - (0.20)) = 1.05 * 1.667 * 0.45 = 0.7877 = 78.77%


Floors, ceilings, and caps

There is a maximum net tohit value and a minimum tohit value honored by the CoH game engine. No power or set of powers can drive your net tohit higher than 95% or lower than 5%. In other words, there is always at least a 5% chance of hitting anything, and always at least a 5% chance of missing something.

The 5% minimum chance to hit something is referred to as the tohit floor.
The 5% minimum chance to miss something, or alternatively the 95% maximum chance to hit something, is referred to as the tohit ceiling.

It used to be thought that there was no cap on the amount of defense that a hero could achieve. It turns out there is, but it is very high and not normally applicable to most reasonable combat situations: its in the range of 200% defense at high levels (it scales upward with increasing combat level of your hero).

The full tohit formula

Taking into account accuracy, defense, buffs, debuffs, and floors and ceilings, its this:

NetToHit = Bounded[ (InherentAttackAccuracy) * (1 + AccuracyEnhancement) * Bounded[ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - (Defense - DefenseDebuffs) ] ]

Where Bounded[x] is the result of setting x to be 5% if x is lower than 5%, and 95% if x is higher than 95%. Notice that bounds checking is done twice: first after tohit and defense are combined (cf: the simplified tohit formula) and then again after accuracy buffs and debuffs are factored in.

(In excel terminology, Bounded(x) is MIN( MAX(x,0.05), 0.95) )


Rank and Level scaling, and the I7 Defense Scaling Update

Base tohit of villains

In I7, all critters have base tohit of 50%, and have intrinsic accuracy bonuses based on rank:

minions: 1.0 (i.e. no bonus)
LTs: 1.15
Bosses, Snipers: 1.3
Monsters, Giant Monsters, AVs: 1.5


In I7, critters get accuracy buffs from +1 to +5, and then tohit buffs from +6 higher.

The level scaler in I7 for even to +10 is:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>lev acc tohit
+0 1.0 0
+1 1.1 0
+2 1.2 0
+3 1.3 0
+4 1.4 0
+5 1.5 0
+6 1.5 +5%
+7 1.5 +10%
+8 1.5 +15%
+9 1.5 +20%
+10 1.5 +40%</pre><hr />

(If you're attacking things higher than +10, you don't need my help.)

This is a change from I6 and all previous Issues back to release, when higher rank and higher level critters had increased Base Tohit, which was effectively a tohit buff. This was removed in I7 to more properly reflect the intention to make such critters hit more often, but not at the expense of disproportionately hurting defense sets.

Because there is now a Rank Accuracy Buff, and a Level Accuracy Buff, this is how the I7 tohit mechanics will work specifically for critters:

Bounded[ (InherentAttackAccuracy) * (RankBuff) * (LevelBuff) * Bounded[ (BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs + Defense - DefenseDebuffs) ] ]


Its important to note that I7 the defense scaler does not affect how tohit buffs work in any way (directly). Tohit buffs are just as dangerous for defense sets as before. What the change does is remove the tohit increases from higher rank and higher level foes: anything that nevertheless still possesses high tohit buffs is still a major threat to defense.

Its also important to note that because it changes villain tohit/accuracy, the defense scaler does not affect player's ability to hit critters or other players, in any way.

For more information about the I7 change to critter accuracy, please see my FAQ on the subject.


Base tohit of heroes (players)

The base tohit of heroes in PvE is 75%. In PvP (arena combat and player vs player fights in PvP zones) base player tohit was reduced (in I6) to 50%. This improves the performance of defense sets in PvP combat substantially, although tohit buffs (being additive) are still a significant issue.

Question: is this a "nerf?" Answer: no, its a proper balancing of defense sets. Defense sets performance were balanced against even level minions, which have a base 50% chance to hit. Furthermore, it is just as reasonable to view this as a +25% buff to player defense across the board, instead of a base -25% tohit chance.

[Note: as of 11/16/05 a patch note was added which specifically stated this exact thing.]



[ QUOTE ]
Example Calculations

To help people trying to make sense of this formula, I have two examples that show where all the numbers are supposed to go.

Example #1: Player attacking even level minion with thunder kick slotted with 1 acc SO; minion has 5% defense.

Net tohit = Bounded[ 1.05 * (1 + 0.333) * Bounded[ 0.75 - 0.05 ] ] = Bounded[ 1.05 * (1 + 0.333) * 0.70 ] ] = Bounded[ 0.9798 ] = 0.95 (capped) = 95%

1.05 = Martial Arts inherent accuracy bonus on all attacks
0.333 = Value of slotted accuracy enhancements
0.75 = Base tohit of player verses even level critter
0.05 = Defense of critter

Example #2: Player attacking player with thunder kick slotted with 2 acc SOs, attacker has +8% tohit buff from tactics, target has 55% defense.

Bounded[ 1.05 * (1 + 0.666) * Bounded[ 0.5 + 0.08 - 0.55 ] ] = Bounded[ 1.05 * (1 + 0.66) * Bounded[ 0.03 ] ] = Bounded[ 1.05 * (1 + 0.666) * 0.05 ] = 0.0875 = 8.75%

1.05 = Martial Arts inherent accuracy bonus on all attacks
0.666 = Value of slotted accuracy enhancements
0.08 = Tohit buffs on the attacker
0.5 = Base tohit of player verses player
0.55 = Defense of target

[/ QUOTE ]


There is an interesting quirk to how this works now. In I7, the "floor" will no longer be 5% for all villains. In fact, 5% has never been the absolute tohit floor (since circa I4); its only been the floor before accuracy is factored in. In other words, even in I6, there were villains that are IMPOSSIBLE to floor to 5% (i.e. Gunslingers) because they had/have attacks with inherent accuracy bonuses (Gunslingers: 2.0 accuracy, or "+100%" acc). Post I7, this effect is more prevalent as higher level and higher rank critters lose tohit and gain accuracy. This means "normal" defenses will become more effective against higher level and higher ranked foes, but ultra-high defense like elude and MoG will actually become somewhat less effective.



[u]Section Two: DEFENSE MECHANICS[u]

Everything you wanted to know about how defense works, and will henceforth be afraid to ask about.


Attack and Defense Typing

Every attack power is typed with one or more Attack Types which specify the kind of attack the power is, and what types of defense work to avoid it. There are ten attack types:

Melee_Attack, Ranged_Attack, AoE_Attack, Smashing_Attack, Lethal_Attack, Fire_Attack, Cold_Attack, Energy_Attack, Negative_Energy_Attack, Psionic_Attack

Melee_Attack, Ranged_Attack, and AoE_Attack are usually referred to as the Positional Types. The rest are usually called the Damage Types. But its important to note something very important.

Attack Types have nothing to do with actual damage.

"Fire attacks" are *not* attacks that do fire damage. "Fire attacks" are attacks that are typed "Fire_Attack" and that Fire defenses work on. They do not necessary do Fire damage.

There are eight damage types: smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative_energy, toxic, and psionic. Whether an attack does any of these, or none of these, has nothing directly to do with its damage type.

So that there is no confusion, here are some examples:

* Fireball does fire damage and smashing damage. Its typed Fire_Attack/AoE_attack. Smashing defenses do not protect against it.

* Ice Arrow is typed Cold_Attack/Ranged_Attack. It does not do cold damage. It does no damage at all.

* Dominate is typed Psionic_Attack. Notice it isn't typed with any "positional" type at all. So none of Super Reflexes defense powers work against it.

None of these are bugs: all of these are intentional by the devs.


One of the most frequently asked questions about defense is "why is there no toxic defense?" And the short answer is: because there is no toxic_attack type. Even if there was a toxic defense, it wouldn't protect against anything. The real question is, of course, why there is no toxic_attack type. That's a much more difficult question (see the end of the guide).


Defense Stacking Rules

If you have multiple defenses running (either your own powers or defense buffs cast on you by other players), defenses of the same type stack. Defense in CoH stacks additively, which is to say, if you have Defense A, and Defense B, and they stack, your net defense is A+B.

Its important to note that defense powers don't stack: defense types stack. So if you have a power with 10% defense to smashing, lethal, and energy, and another power with 10% defense to energy and negative, then if both are on you have 10% defense to smashing, lethal, and negative, and 20% defense to energy. Its that simple.

There was (and is) a special type of defense called "base defense" or "defense defense" which was basically a defense against all attacks, regardless of type. This form of defense would, of course, stack with everything. Its no longer generally used by the devs in powers definitions, and any powers that have base defense are likely, over time, to have that changed to typed defenses of some kind (defense to all types, most likely, like all power pool defenses have).

There was an issue a while ago in which the game engine was considering, say, someone with smashing defense and energy defense to get smash+energy defense against energy attacks with both smashing and energy components. This was considered a bug by the devs and corrected.


[ QUOTE ]
The Bottom Line

If you want to know how much defense you have against an attack, the game does this:

The game figures out how much defense you have to each attack type: melee, ranged, aoe, smashing, lethal, and so on.
Then it looks at the incoming attack, to see how its typed.
Then it looks at the defense values you have against each of the types the attack is typed to be.
Then it picks the highest one.
That's your defense against that attack.

So if you are attacked by a melee/lethal attack (say, headsplitter), and you have 20% melee defense and 15% lethal defense, you have 20% defense against that attack.

[/ QUOTE ]


Enhancements

Defensive and Tohit powers can be enhanced using the appropriate enhancements. Defense buff/debuff, and Tohit buff/debuff enhancements (along with resistance enhancements) do not follow the general 8.33%/16.7%/33.3% TO/DO/SO (training, dual origin, single origin) enhancement progression that damage enhancements follow (this is usually referred to as "Schedule A" enhancements). Defense enhancements are worth 5% for training, 10% for dual origin, and 20% for single origin enhancements (usually called "Schedule B" enhancements).

The way enhancements work in defense powers (and in powers in general) is that the power has a base defensive value, and enhancements increase that value by a percentage amount equal to their value. To be precise: if a defense power's base value is +5% defense, and an (even level) defense SO is slotted into it, the defense power's new enhanced value is 5% * (1 + 0.2) = 6%: the power is increased in value by 20% (and not 20 percentage points, which would be 5% + 20% = 25%).

The way the game presents enhancement values is a cause for confusion. If you slot two even defense SOs into a power, the enhancement screen will show "+40% defense." The problem is that defense is measured in percentage points, and its confusing as to what this means. It does *not* mean "40 more points of defense." It actually means "1.4x the value of the power." So if the power was offering 5% defense, the enhanced value would be 5% * 1.4 = 7% defense.

As of the writing of this guide, I've *strongly* suggested to the devs that the in-game enhancement screen be changed from "+40%" to "x1.4" specifically for this reason.

Defense enhancements themselves vary in strength based on your hero's level relative to the enhancement: enhancements are 10% weaker than their base value for every level lower than your combat level they are, up to three levels lower, where they are 70% of effective strength (they are worthless if you are more than three levels higher). Conversely, they are 5% stronger for each level higher than your level they are, up to 15% stronger when they are three levels higher than you are (enhancements more than three levels higher than your character's level cannot be slotted). For example, a -2 defense SO (normally +20%) is +16% (20% * 0.8) while a +3 defense SO is +23% (20% * 1.15).


***Enhancement Diversification***

Introduced in I6 is a change in how enhancements work called "enhancement diversification." Basically, it works like this for defense SOs: however you slot, and whatever you slot, you get the first 40% benefit (i.e. 2 even level SOs) at full strength, any benefit above 40% and below 50% at 0.90 (90%) of their value, and benefit above 50% and below 60% at 70% of their value, and any benefit above 60% at only 0.15 (15%) of their value.

This is tricky, so an example should help illustrate what's going on. You slot (presume even level SOs) one defense SO. Defense SOs provide 20% benefit, so you get 20% bonus to the defense power you slotted it in. The second SO adds 20%: you now have 40%. The next SO provides benefit above 40% (and below 60%), and so you get 90% of its value from 40% to 50%, and 70% of its value from 50% to 60%. So the third enhancement adds 0.9 * 10% + 0.7 * 10% = 0.16. So SO #3 adds 16%, not 20%, and your net benefit is now 56%, not 60%. The fourth SO you slot is providing benefit above 60% (note, this is calculated based on the raw values of the SOs, not the reduced value). So you only get 0.15 (15%) of its value. 15% of 20% is 3%. So you now have 59% total benefit, instead of 80%. The fifth and sixth SOs would similarly provide 15% of the SO strength, so SO #5 brings you to 62%, and #6 brings you to 65%.

Notice the extremely sharp cut off in benefit after enhancement #3. The basic rule on ED is: do not slot more than three SOs *worth* of enhancements. Its based on *benefit* and not on the little round thing you slot. So if you slot three SOs, and then one DO, the DO gets hit by ED. If you slot 3 HOs (Hamidon enhancements) of */*/defense and then an SO of defense, the SO gets hit by ED, even though "I didn't slot more than three of anything."

What matters is *benefit* - you simply aren't going to get much more than 3 SOs *worth* of benefit on anything, no matter what crazy combination of enhancements you try to use to dodge it.

Other enhancements, such as accuracy and damage, follow a different, but proportional scale (i.e. 3 SOs worth is where ED kicks in, even though 3 SOs of damage is about +100%, and not +60%).

I6 introduces something else: you can now tell *exactly* how much benefit your powers are getting from enhancements, by hovering your mouse cursor over the blue bar of the power in the enhancement screen. Also, you can "hover" (without dropping) an enhancement over a slot, and see in a popup window what the net overall change to the attributes will be if you chose to slot there.

For more information on Enhancement Diversification, see this article on ParagonWiki.com.


NEW: Invention Enhancements

The invention system, added in Issue 9, introduces a new kind of enhancement. All invention enhancements have the property that they have a fixed enhancement strength regardless of the level of the player's character. So if you slot a level 40 defense enhancement invention, that will have a +23.2% enhancement strength. That enhancement will always provide that same level of enhancement strength regardless of your level. Inventions do not "expire." See Invention Origin Enhancement Scaling on paragonwiki.com for tables on the strengths of invention enhancements.

It would be impossible in this guide to give anything but a brief overview of the Invention System. Here are some of the highlights, relevant to questions of tohit and defense.

Q1: What does Kismet +Acc do?

The Kismet +Acc IO grants +6% tohit buff to the player while the IO is active. The Kismet IO grants its buff for 120 seconds after the power its slotted into is activated. If its slotted into a passive or toggle power, those powers have "activation periods" where the power pulses to refresh its buff on the player (yes, even passive powers "do something" continuously). This means that for all intents and purposes, if Kismet is slotted into a passive or toggle power, its on as long as the power is on (which for a passive means "always").

Q2: When an invention set like, say, Crushing Impact claims to be giving me a 7% accuracy bonus if I slot 4 of them into a power, what does that actually do?

Invention set accuracy bonuses are actual accuracy bonuses, not tohit bonuses (they originally were tohit, but were changed during beta: the patch that implemented the change did not propagate to the live servers until after Issue 9 went live, however). The way they work is that they act like additional accuracy slotting. So if you have two attacks, one of which is slotted with one accuracy SO (+0.333 acc) and one of which is slotted with two accuracy SOs (+0.666), then if you have a +7% set accuracy bonus, those two powers will end up with 1.403 accuracy (1.333 + 0.07) and 1.736 accuracy (1.666 + 0.07). Note that even though it looks like they act like enhancements, they are not actually enhancements, and are unaffected by ED.



Inspirations

Luck inspirations appear to be +Defense to all types (i.e.: defense to melee, ranged, AoE, smash, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative, psi), and additively stack with any other defense powers you might be running.

Insights, it has been confirmed, work like tohit buffs: they are exactly the opposite of lucks in effect.

Lucks and Insights are mislabeled. According to the devs, lucks and insights are REALLY these values:

DEF
S - 12.5%
M - 25%
L - 33%

ACC
S - 7.5%
M - 18.75%
L - 37.5%

This is considered a bug that is being worked on. What's unclear is whether the values are wrong and the labels are right, or the labels are wrong and the values are right, or if *neither* are what the values of the inspirations really *ought* to be


Resistance to defense debuffs

As of I6, resistance to defense debuffs have been added to some hero and villain sets. Not all sets with defense have had resistance to defense debuffs added: specifically Super Reflexes, Stone, Ice, and Energy Aura have had it added.

There is some confusion surrounding why resistance to defense debuffs was added in the first place. A common theory is that it was added because resistance resists resistance debuffs, but defense does not resist defense debuffs, so there was a disparity. That's actually not true: resistance resists resistance debuffs, while defense avoids defense debuffs.

The asymmetry comes because resistance to resistance debuffs doesn't go down when resistance itself is debuffed: the ability to resist resistance debuffs is itself not debuffable. It never gets weaker. But the ability to avoid a defense debuff obviously goes down as defense itself is debuffed. Defense is vulnerable to what is referred to as "cascade failure" where a defense debuff will reduce defense, making more defense debuffs land, which lowers defense even more, which allows even more defense debuffs to land.

This cascade failure, which occurs for defense sets but not for resistance sets, is the actual reason for the addition of defense debuff resistance, and it was specifically added to sets that rely on defense for a significant part of their protection. Its not an intrinsic property of defense, but a specific resistance added to specific power sets.

For more information on the strength of the debuff resistance, see City of Data listings for various defense powers.


Is there a defense cap? What is it?

This a tricky question. First of all, given the tohit formula, since (Tohit - Defense) obeys the 5%/95% floor and ceiling, that sum can never go lower than 5%. That means no value of defense higher than 5 points less than the attacker's tohit helps: if the attacker has 50% tohit, then nothing higher than 45% defense does anything. If the attacker has tohit buffs, then the attacker's tohit can be higher than 50%, and values higher than 45% can help offset that.

But outside of tohit buffs, critters (and players attacking other players) have 50% tohit, and therefore anything higher than 45% defense is normally of no benefit. This value (45%) is sometimes referred to as the defense soft cap or sometimes just the "defense cap." Its actually the point where defense overpowers tohit and reaches the intermediate floor (before accuracy). You can't do any better than that outside of the attacker having tohit buffs.

However, defense itself is allowed to go higher than that. There is a defense cap, and also a tohit cap, and its archetype-specific, and also scales with level. See this post and this post in Iakona's original numbers thread for the tohit and defense cap tables by level and by archetype. These are true caps, meaning no matter how many defenders buff you, you cannot exceed these values. Keep in mind that these values are often much higher than is necessary to cap out or floor out the tohit system anyway. These tables represent the limits of the game, even though you might not see any actual benefit from numbers that high.


[u]Section Three: THINGS RELATED TO DEFENSE[u]

What is mez defense?

"Mez defense" is the generic term sometimes used to refer to powers that protect against mez. (Using terminology originally used by geko when explaining mez) there are two types of mez "defense" :mez protection and mez resistance. Neither of these is directly related to Defense in terms of damage mitigation, but its worth reviewing.

The basics of mez are: everyone has a threshold that mez effects must break through in order for the mez effect to take hold. Without any mez defense, everyone has a base mez level of -1. All mez powers have a mez magnitude. When a mez power lands, it adds its magnitude to your mez level. A hero with mez level of -1 that gets hit by a magnitude 3 hold has mez level of 2 (-1 + 3). Any mez level higher than zero means the target is mezzed. Mez protection continuously subtracts its associated defense magnitude from your mez level while the power is running. Someone running a mez defense power with mez protection magnitude 10 has a mez level of -11 (-1 - 10). If hit with a mag 3 hold, mez level increases to -8 (-11 + 3). It would take 3 more such holds for the mez level to reach +1.

Mez effects last for a certain period of time, then expire. Mez resistance allows a target to shake off mez effects faster. So instead of a mez effect lasting ten seconds, it might last eight.

Unlike damage resistance, mez resistance works on a different formula: NetDuration = OriginalDuration / (1 + MezResistance). For players, the mez resistance cap is 100%, which means the absolute best that mez resistance can reduce a mez duration on you is half: Duration / (1 + 1.0) = Duration / 2.

Mez protection and mez resistance are not true Defense or Resistance, but its useful to understand and is often confused with true Defense and Resistance.

All mez protection powers in melee defense sets scale up with level: at lower levels, mez protection powers do not offer as much protection as at higher levels. This can surprise people who are used to mez protection at level 50 and are unexpectedly mezzed when they exemplar down to lower levels or fight in lower PvP zones.

*** Note: in I6 mez protection powers were reduced from their previous levels. Maximum protection for tanks and scrappers used to be about magnitude 15, which in effect means controllers needed 6 holds to break protection. Currently, scrapper mez protection powers offer about (negative) mag 10, and tankers approximately mag 13 protection.

What you probably don't know about mez protection.

Mez protection can actually be debuffed. Any power that debuffs a target's ability to *use* mez, will also as a natural consequence debuff their mez protection (that "strength" is the same number under the hood). For example: benumb debuffs mez strength, and therefore also debuffs mez protection. The 55.9% benumb debuff would also reduce your mez protection, from say 10.38 for a level 50 scrapper, down to 10.38 * (1 - 0.559) = 4.58. Like: two holds. Weaken has a similar (and even stronger) effect.

Power boost (and its variants) has the opposite effect: it can buff mez protection magnitude.


What does Power Boost do?

The power Power Boost (both the blaster energy manipulation version, and the epic power pool version) boosts defense powers while power boost is active. The boost is about equal to the base value of the defense power being boosted (its variable based on what archetype is using the power: see City of Data for specifics). For example, if you have hover running (2.5% defense) and you trigger power boost, hover gains 2.5% additional defense. If hover was 3-slotted with defense SOs (net 3.9% defense) the boost would still be 2.5% (to 6.4% total defense). The power "Power Build Up" does similar things (and also boosts damage: its a Power Boost/Build Up hybrid).



What is the Streak Breaker?

The streak breaker is a bit of code within the tohit calculator that is designed to prevent very long strings of misses. There is a lot of misunderstanding about how the streak breaker works, so I'm going to be very specific in terms of detailing how I know what I know about the streak breaker.

First, the streak breaker only breaks streaks of misses, not hits. Confirmed by my own testing, dev postings, and red name PMs.

Second, the streak breaker affects both heroes and villains. Confirmed by my own testing, dev postings, and red name PMs.

Third, the streak breaker "decides" to break a string of misses when the string of misses exceeds a particular value. That value is dependent on the tohit probability between the attacker and the target. Here is Weirdbeard's specific statements on how the streakbreaker works:

[ QUOTE ]

Final to-hit : misses allowed
&gt;.9 : 1
.8-.9 : 2
.6-.8 : 3
.4-.6 : 4
.3-.4 : 6
.2-.3 : 8
0 -.2 : 100

Auto-hit powers are not included in the system.

Critters get the benefits of the system as well.

The system does not track each power individually; instead it tracks every miss you make in a row, regardless of power (or target). Otherwise you could have nine different powers, each with a 0.95 to-hit, and if you executed them all in a row you could miss each attack (note a caveat at the bottom of the post regarding this).

AE attacks are considered distinct sequential attacks on indivudual targets for the purpose of the system (so if you AEd two targets and had 0.95 to-hit for both, you be guaranteed to hit one of them).

To determine the to-hit used in the table above, you take either the current to-hit, or the worst to-hit in your current miss series, whichever is lower.


[/ QUOTE ]

This basically matches all the testing I've done to measure the streakbreaker, correcting for some errors in my testing methodology that Weirdbeard was able to detect in my discussions with him.


[u]Section Four: DEFENSE, ACCURACY, AND VILLAINS[u]

Some villains are really nasty when it comes to hitting you. For example, all Malta attacks have an intrinsic 1.2 accuracy - as if they were slotted with a +20% accuracy enhancement. Malta Gunslingers are special: their attacks all have 2.0 accuracy: as if they were slotted with 3 accuracy SOs. Rularuu Watchers (the big eyeballs) have very high strength defense debuffs, and high accuracy (their defense debuffs range from -15% to -30% based on rank).

Certain CoV villains now use build up, with the associated tohit buff.

On the defensive side: Paragon Protectors that use MoG appear to have *massively* higher defense than the ones that (apparently) use Elude. Its unclear precisely why the large difference exists. And Behemoths definitely look to be getting more than the standard 5% defense for having a player in the invincibility field.

Villains seem, over time, to be acquiring defense powers and abilities. That could be a large source of people believing that "accuracy" has been reduced, when accuracy is unchanged, but the defensive capabilities of the villains has improved.


[u]Section Five: OVERVIEW OF DEFENSE IN POWER SETS[u]

Note: much of this section has been trimmed: for more information on defense powers, see City of Data.


Positional Defenses

Few sets have exclusively or primarily positional defenses. The only two defensive sets with significant positional defenses are Super Reflexes (scrapper and stalker) and Ninjitsu. Almost all other self protection sets have damage-typed defensive powers.

All power pool defenses are typed Defense(All types). This means they have the same amount of defense to all attack types, including positional defense and damage-typed defenses.

Force Field bubbles have both damage-typed defense attributes, and positional-typed defense attributes. Each defensive bubble has protection to some types, but collectively they have protection to all types.


Invincibility

It took a long time for players to figure out what invincibility does, exactly, and what it does has changed several times from release to now. Invincibility offers Base 5% defense for tankers (3.75% defense for scrappers) so long as there is at least one thing in range. It then offers +1.5% defense per target in invincibility's aura range (1.125% for scrappers), to a maximum of ten. So, with nothing in range, invincibility offers zero defense. With one thing, its 6.5% defense (for tankers). With two things, its 8%. With 10 things, its 20% defense. Invincibility also has a tohit buff: its +2% per target in range, for a maximum buff of +20% (unslotted) tohit.


Stalker Hide

All stalkers have a power called hide. Hide offers defense to melee/ranged/AoE/smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative. The defense appears to be about 3.75% to all listed types except AoE, and 37.5% to AoE (that's not a misprint: thirty seven point five percent) when hidden, and 1.875% to all listed types when hide is suppressed. Hide also provides the highest -perception (i.e. stealth) of any power, and while hidden stalker attacks critical (double damage) and assassin's strike powers do six times bonus critical damage. Note: in Issue 11, the endurance cost of Hide was removed from the power: its still a defensive toggle, but it no longer costs any endurance to run.


Special Note on Stealth

Stealth powers generally break their concealment component when you either attack or are attacked. When the stealth is broken, most stealth powers that have a defense buff component will have about half their defense also suppressed while the stealth component is broken.

For information on which powers suppress their defense when stealth is suppressed, consult City of Data.



[u]Section Six: DEFENSE ISSUES[u]

These are some of the issues related to how defense and tohit works in City of Heroes


Autohitting attacks

There are attacks that automatically hit, bypassing the tohit floors and ceilings. Very few attacks currently autohit. Among them are things like the damage aura from the Envoy of Shadows, and the damage from caltrops.

According to the devs, the intent is to remove all autohitting damage with two exceptions: special case damage (like special AV powers, ala the Envoy of Shadows), and "trivial" damage that occurs as part of autohitting debuffs (ala Caltrops). For the most part, they seem to have done this, but there appear to be exceptions to this rule.


Quartz eminators

Quartz eminators are a +100% tohit buff to all affected DE. 'Nuff said.


Geas of the Kind Ones / Force of Nature

These accolades (hero/villain) offer a +200% tohit buff (!) and a -200% defense debuff to the player. Which means anyone using it can basically hit anything no matter how much defense the target has, and anyone with defense that uses it will suddenly find themselves without any. Yes, in fact, the devs really do hate defense that much. Or it might just be me.
(Actually, this has been acknowledged to be a decimal point error, however as its primary effect is in PvP (no critter possesses that power - thank god) no change is currently contemplated.


What's up with tohit buffs in general?

Good question. Very high tohit buffs are, at least, uncommon in PvE. They are very common in PvP, because high order tohit buffs are extremely common in player power sets.

The two most common tohit buffs are build up and Aim, and both are high order tohit buff (for blasters, Aim: +37.5% tohit, BU: 15%; the tohit buff is affected by archetype modifiers: see City of Data for the exact buff for each archetype). Virtually all blasters, most defenders, almost all scrappers, and most tankers have access to either Build Up or Aim, and many blasters have access to both. Only controllers as a class lack BU or Aim (and pets have a tohit bonus).

If you are relying on defense in the arena, here's the score. Unless you are operating in triple-stacked bubbles, running maximally slotted Elude plus everything else SR, or hiding in a PFF, if someone wants to hit you, they are going to hit you. Even moderate tohit buffs are high enough to negate all of your defense and allow them to hit you about as often as they can hit a defenseless cardboard box. If you are operating under Elude, they will have to try harder to hit you. Very well-slotted BU+Aim can do it, as can defender/corruptor Aim with tactics. And there is an accolade (Geas of the Kind Ones) that offers a +200% tohit buff, which essentially can hit through anything.

Which is not to say this is impossible to address. (Note: link broken, working to fix that before guide is finalized)


Why is there no toxic defense?

Because there's no toxic attack type, so there's no toxic defense to protect against it. Why is there no toxic attack type? Short answer: too time-consuming to add to the game engine, for what the devs perceive to be insufficient benefit to the game as a whole. This means that "hole" is likely to be around for a very very long time.

Lots of people have suggested ways to work around this, or just add it back in, including me. These are unlikely to get very far with the devs.


Mind Control

Mind control attacks are all typed psionic_attack. They are *not* typed "ranged_attack" or any other positional type. This means that as far as those attacks are concerned, super reflex and ninjitsu defenses don't exist. SR and Ninjitsu no more affect these attacks than the lethal defense in Parry affects psionic blasts.

This is not a bug. This is by explicit design decision: mind control attacks were designed to specifically require psionic defense explicitly to protect against them. As a result, SR has no protection against mind control attacks in PvP or PvE (Lost, Tsoo, Rikti, Carnies, among other groups use mind control attacks). Its unclear if this is *balanced*, but its not bugged.


THE CANONICAL LIST OF DEFENSE-RELATED COMPLAINTS REGULARLY DISCUSSED ON THE FORUMS

Especially post I7, this list is very different from what it used to be:

* High defense is too frustrating in the arena
* Low defense is too frustrating in the arena
* There are too many defense debuffs in the game
* Defense debuffs are too strong
* Tohit buffs in the arena are too strong
* Defense requires you to be lucky
* Defense is inferior to Resistance in all respects
* Force Field defenders have insufficient self-protection
* Lucky and Evasion are in the wrong order in the SR set
* The -DEF in Unyielding should be removed given the overall reductions to the invuln set
* Geas of the Kind Ones supplants Quartz eminators as Most Stupidly High Tohit Buff
* Energy Aura appears to have way too many types of attacks for which it has no defensive protection
* Why is mind control not typed positionally?


Be forewarned: this stuff has been debated to death. Also, while I strongly encourage people to post their ideas, observations, comments, and suggestions on defense-related issues, bear in mind that if you post a message stating, essentially "I have the answer to everything" one of two things is extremely likely to happen: the message will be ignored, or the suggestion in the message will be heavily critiqued. Be prepared for both.



[u]Section Seven: Odds and Ends[u]

THE PURPLE PATCH

Get asked about this all the time. Here is what happens when you try to attack something much higher than you are, in terms of your powers effectiveness going down, and in terms of your base tohit going down also. Note: this affects players attacking higher leveled foes. Low level villains attacking a higher level player are not affected by the purple patch. These numbers come from a Geko post from the distant past.

[ QUOTE ]

Foes your level have not changed. You have a 75% chance to hit and your powers are 100% effective.
Foes 1 level above you - No Change. You have a 65% chance to hit and your powers are 90% effective.
Foes 2 levels above you - No Change. You have a 56% chance to hit and your powers are 80% effective.
Foes 3 levels above you - You have a 48% chance to hit and your powers are 65% effective.
Foes 4 levels above you - You have a 39% chance to hit and your powers are 48% effective.
Foes 5 levels above you - You have a 30% chance to hit and your powers are 30% effective.
Foes 6 levels above you - You have a 20% chance to hit and your powers are 15% effective.
Foes 7 levels above you - You have a 8% chance to hit and your powers are 8% effective.
Foes 8 levels above you - You have an 5% chance to hit and your powers are 5% effective.
Foes 9 levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 4% effective.
Foes 10 levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 3% effective.
Foes 11 levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 2% effective.
Foes 12+ levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 1% effective.


[/ QUOTE ]

Note: this includes the corrected tohit numbers that were discovered around I6.


A discussion on AT modifiers

All defense powers (in fact, all powers period) are designed with a scale value. Its the inherent strength of the power. However, the actual strength of the power depends on which AT has it. Each AT has a set of modifiers that "scale" the power's values to the proper strength.

This table is the AT defense modifier table (taken from Iakona's thread).

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Modifier Blast Contr Def Scrap Tank PeacB Warsh Brute Stalk MasM Dom Corrupt
M Buff Def 0.070 0.090 0.100 0.075 0.100 0.075 0.075 0.075 0.075 0.090 0.085 0.085
R Buff Def 0.065 0.075 0.100 0.065 0.065 0.075 0.075 0.065 0.065 0.075 0.075 0.075</pre><hr />

For example, these are the values for Super Reflexes:

SR Toggles: Scale 1.85
SR Passives: Scale 0.75

This means SR toggles are 1.85 * 0.075 = 0.13875 = 13.875% SR passives are 0.75 * 0.075 = 0.05625 = 5.625%

Note that there are two values, an "M" (melee) modifier, and an "R" (ranged) modifier. This has nothing to do with melee or ranged defense. M modifiers are used for powers that self buff, and R modifiers are used for powers that ally buff. So powers like combat jumping, hover, and stealth use the melee modifier. Maneuvers uses the ranged modifier. Grant Invisibility seems to be an exception to this rule: GI uses the melee modifier, not the ranged modifier, as you would expect given that its a buff.

Most Power pool defenses are 0.25 scale. Weave is an exception: its 0.50 scale. It seems stealth is also an exception: its 0.5 scale unsuppressed, and 0.25 scale suppressed. This is suggested in the Prima Guide.

Most things obeys AT modifiers, including most defense powers, whether in primary or secondary sets, or in power pools. An interesting exception is the Unyielding Debuff: it was -5% for both scrappers and tankers. Its now set to -3.75% for scrappers (and brutes) and -5% for tankers, but it was originally designed with an "absolute" value, and not one that obeyed archetype modifiers.

SR scrappers and SR stalkers have the same defense values, except SR stalkers have a higher scale value for Evasion, because they lack lucky. Ninjitsu stalkers have the same values for toggle defenses as SR scrappers and stalkers. This is because the toggles and passives for SR scrappers, SR stalkers, and Ninjitsu stalkers all have the same scale value, and scrappers and stalkers have the same AT defense modifier. Simple as that.

For additional information on archetype modifiers, see City of Data: Archetype Modifiers.



SOURCES OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

I kept the power set numbers out of this guide for the most part, except where they appear to be commonly discussed or questioned. If you want them, here they are:

City of Data is the best source of numbers around, period. Its based on I7 numbers, so as the game continues to change, it will slowly become dated, but its information is otherwise unparalleled.

Paragonwiki is an excellent source of collected background information about the game.

The Prima Update for I7 has a lot of numbers now published for all sorts of power values. Fair warning: if you are not knowledgeable about how the numbers actually *work* in CoH, this guide might lead you astray. For example, power pool defenses are listed for a theoretical AT with Defense buff modifier 0.100 - i.e. its good for tankers. Scrappers would actually benefit by only 75% of the listed values for defense and resistance.

If Iakona posts it, its probably correct. Check his posts on the forums. Unfortunately, at the moment Iakona is "on indefinite leave from the game."

Those of you who know me, know I've had a long hate-hate relationship with build planners. Mostly, because they tended to be wrong more times than they were right, even though many were useful overall. I've finally found one I can recommend: Mid's Hero Designer isn't perfect, doesn't always calculate things in the most transparent way, and occasionally has a numerical glitch or two. But it appears to be supported by the author quite well, updates often, isn't totally borked on tohit and accuracy calculations, and most importantly, its fun to use to play around with builds, especially builds with Inventions slotted. If you have a question of the form "if I build like this, what would my defense be" then Mids might be the tool for you, especially with regard to inventions and invention bonuses. I use it, and I can honestly say its the first one I've actually *wanted* to use.


Use of this Guide

Anyone compiling information for use by players of City of Heroes and City of Villains has permission to reproduce this guide whole or in part, so long as some form of attribution is maintained. But if you make a ton of money off of it, and I find out about it, I'm going to come looking for my cut.

[ QUOTE ]
Is that rate 80% of the potential max? 50%? 10%? I dunno.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know precisely either, which is why I said specifically:

[ QUOTE ]
That would set Empath at about 100 million points healed. I'm not saying that is what I would set Empath to, but it would be my point of reference for what I would consider "the ballpark" for an epic maximum heal badge. By my estimates, Empath is currently ten times higher than what I consider a reasonably high value, [u]far outside the margin for error.[u]

I would want to factor in actual player healing statistics, which the devs can generate but we won't have prior to the City Vault going on-line.

[/ QUOTE ]

What would give me a hint as to what a proper load factor would be are actual in-game healing statistics: not just the top healer, but the approximate shape of the healing stat curve; what percentage of players are near the top, and how sharp the falloff was.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

OK, so let's say it's broken. So what? Why should they do anything about it now? Why should they change the rules? What's the benefit of doing so?

[/ QUOTE ]

The same reason they should fix the broken Robo Surgery units, or missing badge graphics, or costume clipping or bad flight pose? Professionalism, pride in one's work, and credibility? Take your pick.

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That's not an unreasonable reason to change it, but don't we have to consider that in a game, changing the rules shouldn't be something done lightly?

Take balance changes. There the rules change because it's (we assume) hurting the game for a set or power to be too weak or too strong. In the case of Empath and the other epic badges however, does that same harm exist that justifies changing the rules mid-stream?

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I would only consider the harm done in "changing the rules" to be an important consideration if it was possible that the change undermined the effort someone placed into earning the badge that was as high as the badge was intended to require. If every single person that currently has or is working towards Empath was expended far less effort than the badge was intended to require, then no one would have a legitimate case for saying that their effort was trivialized if the requirements were lowered.

Far larger changes to the game have been made with much higher in-game consequences than that in the interests of improving the state of the reward system as a whole. The largest one was probably the massive increase in XP for completing missions that was instituted back in Issue 1, which probably sped up levelling via missions by a significant amount. Certainly, changing the amount of XP you earn has the potential to devalue the effort other players put into levelling, but that change was almost unanimously considered positive.

In any event, I believe this is a purely theoretical concern at least for Empath, because I find it difficult to believe that a significant percentage of the players that have it would object to its requirements being lowered (without being made trivially low), and they themselves are an incredibly small percentage of the player population to begin with.


Personally, I think the entire concept of "Epic" badges is incompatible with the game as a whole, not because they are set too high, but because they are awarded to characters. It therefore sets an extremely strong preference towards players that play a single character constantly, over people who are playing in the mode that is encouraged (but not mandated) within the design of the game: playing alts.

Its not unreasonable to have a reward in the game that might take thousands of hours to achieve, but its less reasonable to require one that takes thousands of hours on one character to achieve. Given the current badge system, its the only alternative for Epic badges.

But if I could make a change to the badge system as a whole (and this is part of my general notion of how the badge system should be organized, which I've mentioned previously), Epic badges should be awarded to players across all their characters, much like Supergroup badges are awarded to SGs across all their members. I think it makes a lot more sense for three reasons:

1. Some badges are easier to get with some characters than others: some are almost impossible to get with some characters. The current system penalizes people arbitrarily based on character creation. A system where Epic badges were awarded across characters would actually encourage people to play a diverse set of alts to get badges: badges would improve the replayability of the game via alts, without penalizing single-character players any more than the current system does.

2. Epic badge requirements could be arbitrarily high, because progress could be made on them indefinitely so long as the player continued to play the game, regardless of what characters they played.

3. Epic badges would be distinguished separate from normal character badges, and thus like SG badges they could be considered "not part of the set" for badge completists who attempt to get every possible "character badge" for a particular alt without being frustrated at being unable to get the Epic-class badges either immediately or with their preferred badge hunting character.

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Back up a second. If the average gamer plays 10 hours/week.

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You quoted my own pre-response to that comment:

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In my opinion, 500 would be too low for the last healing badge, unless you subscribe to the belief that at least for anyone for which it was achieveable at all, all badges should be achievable in reasonably short periods of time by casual players. I don't think I subscribe to that specific restriction on [u]all[u] badges

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Did you skip over *my* response to that theory?

Let me sum up what I said above in different terms:
If the average gamer plays 10 hours a week, and you think the badge should be achievable in some given time (you stated 2 years), then do you think the gamer should do nothing but chase the badge for that given time frame?

Do you want the gamer to do nothing but heal for 10 hours a week for 2 years? I don't think a gamer would keep their subscription that long just to log on an click heal. So if they're healing at 40% of that rate, because of inefficient teaming, exemping, playing alts, messing around with holiday content, etc., then we're back to seeing 5 years of "normal play" in order to get the badge.

They may put in 1100 hours of play, but the badge should not be for 1100 hours of healing if your goal is 2 years. That's irrational to ask someone to forgo the rest of the game for that length of time.

So in the 1100 hours of play, is 500 hours of that spent healing an OK number for you?

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"Do you think the gamer should do nothing but chase the badge for that given time frame?"

If they want it that fast, they'll have to. I thought I was clear, but since I wasn't, I'll be as precisely direct as I can.

1. I specifically stated that if you believe all (or a reasonable majority of) players are supposed to be able to get all badges, then the healing badges are broken at all levels since most powerset combinations do not have healing ability. The fact that everyone can get aid other is irrelevant: forcing a specific build onto players is significantly more restrictive than forcing specific play strategies on players to achieve any goal in the game: from a design perspective, anything you're willing to require specific builds to achieve, you can't construct good arguments for not requiring special play to achieve either (in fact, the first implies the second anyway).

2. Once you explicitly allow that the healing badges are acceptable, you've eliminated the argument that they should be achieveable by the majority of the playerbase. It is now a reasonable question to ask whether it should be easily attainable by all qualified characters, or if it is acceptable to be achievable only by the highest performing minority of them. This is taken completely for granted as obvious, but its not an obvious question anymore: you've already ruled out most players from ever getting the badges.

3. If you allow that the badge's intent is to reward extremely high performance healers, it *should* be calibrated to what's achievable by the best healers under *their* best performance. And there are players who predominantly heal during teamed play. If not 100% of the time, then a significant percentage of the time. Their performance is relevant to a discussion of a high performance badge.

4. If you don't believe Empath is intended to be a high performance badge for high performance healers, but rather a high healing target for all healers to achieve, then asking what the performance of the healers are is practically irrelevant. Its a question of pure preference: how much effort do you believe any player should "devote" to earning the badge. However, since that is a preference argument, its self-consistency numerically is not persuasive: it only suggests the position is not illogical. But while it advocates a change, it doesn't state why the current situation is wrong and needs changing.

5. I can construct an argument for why the current situation is wrong that isn't subjective: given any reasonable objective for the badge other than "make it so high its essentially unachievable short of exploiting game mechanics anomalies" I'm pretty sure I can argue its set far too high. So that's the argument I'm taking, since its says why the current setting is wrong, not just why I'd prefer it a different way.


I think even *this* is not hitting the point on the head hard enough, so I'll be even more direct:

If the badge is intended to reward the highest performance healers, everyone else will consider the effort required to get it unreasonable. So in fact, if its intended to be a genuine high performance reward, it *must* ultimately have unreasonable requirements, to at least some players. The only question is how many players will think so: it will always be non-zero.

And just to reiterate my position: if it was me, I would not have added *any* healing badges to the game, at least in the form they are currently in. But that's a completely different question than asking how I would address them, if I was in a position to alter them, now that they are already here.

Just to amplify, the tohit system works on attacks (this is a slight simplification, but close enough here). An "attack" is composed of one or more effects on the target, but the entire attack either hits or misses. So if you fire an attack against a target that does smashing damage, ice damage, slows the target, applies a hold, and debuffs their movement, the tohit system ignores all of that and just looks at the attack: the attack itself has typing (say, smashing/ranged/cold) and defense works against the entire attack. The game figures out if the attack lands. If it does, all those effects land on the target and affect it. If the attack misses, all those effects miss altogether.

(There are attacks that contain effects that themselves have a "chance to hit" separate from the attack as a whole, like the ticking DoT of fire attacks, but that's a separate thing: if the attack lands, then the DoT "lands" and then its own internal ticking % takes over to determine how many ticks actually do damage - but that has nothing to do with tohit or defense at that point)

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Back up a second. If the average gamer plays 10 hours/week.

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You quoted my own pre-response to that comment:

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In my opinion, 500 would be too low for the last healing badge, unless you subscribe to the belief that at least for anyone for which it was achieveable at all, all badges should be achievable in reasonably short periods of time by casual players. I don't think I subscribe to that specific restriction on [u]all[u] badges

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I believe if you believe that all badges should be achievable by all reasonable players, then *all* the healing badges are improper immediately. I'm assuming that healing badges are at all acceptable, in which case I believe you cannot solidly argue that the absolute highest possible earnable badge must be earnable by the average healer under average healing conditions. In a game you or I might write ourselves, we might select that criteria, but its not obvious that that is the only reasonable criteria. Any argument other than "these are the *limits* of what is reasonable for the badges" becomes a matter of subjective preference, not one of numerical game design.


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Missed the bit where MadScientist said that a group of characters could not achieve 100 million after 2 years? Then you want to set that so a single character needs to do that?

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Did you miss the part where I laid out my calculations for setting it as the upper limit? Then I would ask not to presume I miss anything in any thread I post in, thank you very much.

One thing that informs my judgement: my Ill/rad controller currently has Doctor - 2 million points of healing. She's teamed a lot, she's been in her share of ultra-high healing potential situations (Hamidon raids, RWZ ship raids, task forces, just plain old big teams), but she has *never* farmed one point of healing. All of those 2 million+ points of healing come from "normal" play (I'd have to check how close she is to specialist). 100 million points of healing is less than 50 times higher than what I've managed to do with a non-optimal healer without trying at all (I don't remember my progress towards Specialist, but it was not insubstantial). And that character has not that much more than 500 hours of play, altogether, including levelling to 50 (she certainly has less than 500 hours of level 50 play). How much healing credit can you get healing a Hamidon raid or a RWZ ship raid: a hundred thousand? A quarter million? I'm honestly not sure. Those are corner cases, but they might be the largest sources of healing credit by far even given their infrequency.


Here's one I would never have guessed: it isn't all that relevant to the discussion, but I thought I would mention it, since its something I happened to check. My brother stopped playing CoH back in 2004, and I occasionally use his account. He has a character that actually has medic, and is half way to surgeon (for those that aren't familiar: that's half way to 1 million, or 500,000 healing). What's surprising to me is that its a level 27 blaster with aid other.

How the heck you get half a million points of healing on a blaster with aid other in normal play from level 1 to 27 I actually can't fathom, but it suggests that the healing statistics that the devs look at might be more surprising than most people think (he quit before badges were even introduced, so there was no incentive to heal for any reason but to actually heal someone). The City Vault will certainly be an interesting set of data to sift, assuming its significantly more accurate than the current city terminals.


Last thing:

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The goal here is not to promote unhealthy game play.

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This is a nice thought, but its a trivially impossible goal in the general case. In the general case, you always have a heterogenous playerbase that will have a different set of tolerances for playing effort, and a different set of skills. By definition, there are only two possibilities: make goals that are achievable by the lowest capability player out of the entire playerbase, or by definition make goals that are out of reach of at least some percentage of the players. For all such non-degenerate situations, there will exist goals that are vastly out of reach, and some that are theoretically achievable but only via "unhealthy" effort. That is inescapable. *No* value you set the healing badges to can prevent that, so its a goal that provides no guidence.

At some point, you have to target reasonable effort for some hypothetical player situation, and realize that some percentage of players will expend unhealthy levels of effort to obtain those goals given their situation.


My objection to the high-order healing badges is not that they promote "unhealthy" game play, but rather because it promotes non-play. At the moment, there is very little chance of achieving Empath via any game play that involves actually being at the keyboard. Not only the most efficient ways, but practically the *only* ways involve not being at the keyboard.

Far from being "unhealthy" as EvilGeko suggested, Empath promotes very healthy player behavior: it promotes taking a break from the game for a couple of days while racking up healing credit. Its the only badge whose pursuit encourages getting a tan. But it doesn't encourage actual gameplay which is its real problem. Leader whether its too high or too low is at least a badge whose only real ways of achieving it are to actually play the game. There will always be some moron who attempts to get it in a 400 hour marathon gaming session and dies of cardiac arrest, but that is not an intrinsic flaw in its design.

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This is why I wanted to wait until the CoH Vault opened, so I could get an approximate value of healing an hour by various means.

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Well, before we do that, how about a theoretical argument?

How many hours should one be expected to play a healer before the game recognizes that, indeed, you are a great healer?

That is, if I was to just do what I do, and heal a WHOLE LOT, at some point I should be naturally rewarded with this badge. Right? That's the entire point of keeping this non-farmed.
If I mentor a lot, I eventually get recognized for it with the highest badge. If I spend all my hours PVPing, I eventually get a badge for that. and so on.

So how much time should I spend healing? 14000 hours? 140 hours? Somewhere in between?

We need that piece of the equation anyways, no matter if the healing rate is produced by theory (some ideal setup with teammates taking max possible damage without dying) or by experimentation (on the Vault).


IMHO, the number should be 500 hours. If I set out and "be a healer" for 500 hours, I should expect that's enough to convince the game that I'm dedicated enough to deserve the last badge. Obviously, weaker healers (ie: Storm, Aid Other) may take longer, and stronger healers (those who average larger teams, or defender primaries instead of controller/corruptor secondaries) may be a little faster. But for an "average" Corr or Controller on an "average" team of 5, it should be 500 hours of gameplay.

What do other people think the badge's timeframe is supposed to be? since 5 years on a single alt is pretty darn silly, especially once they released COV.

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In my opinion, 500 would be too low for the last healing badge, unless you subscribe to the belief that at least for anyone for which it was achieveable at all, all badges should be achievable in reasonably short periods of time by casual players. I don't think I subscribe to that specific restriction on all badges (although I've described my opinion on how badges should be designed in general).

If it was my decision to make, and assuming I could close all loopholes on achieving the badge inordinately faster, I would calibrate the final healing badge to peak reasonable healing performance of a dedicated healer for one year at level 50. My rough rule of thumb calculation in that case would be a minimum of three hours of teaming per day, seven days a week, 1100 total hours of healing, averaging a maximum heal generation of about 200 points of healing per target, averaging eight targets, at least every sixty seconds.

That would set Empath at about 100 million points healed. I'm not saying that is what I would set Empath to, but it would be my point of reference for what I would consider "the ballpark" for an epic maximum heal badge. By my estimates, Empath is currently ten times higher than what I consider a reasonably high value, far outside the margin for error.

I would want to factor in actual player healing statistics, which the devs can generate but we won't have prior to the City Vault going on-line.

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No Attribute Points: In hindsight, I don't know how I failed to notice they were missing. But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices. Attribute points are a hold-over from the earliest primitive editions of D&amp;D, where every character had more or less the same armor and weapons and where your attribute points were the only customization there were. Where you got the guts to drop them completely from this design, and how you stuck to your guns when NCsoft management almost has to have leaned on you to put them in? I have no idea. But thank you for the courage. You removed some highly unnecessary complexity.

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In a sense, they didn't so much remove them, as hid them away. "Attributes" exist in two forms in the game. First, there are the generic archetype modifiers, which play a role similar to general attributes in other game designs, but the players don't have direct control of them. They are frozen in the archetype modifiers, when you choose an archetype.

Then there are the more dynamic attributes, like tohit, and damage strength, and regeneration. These "attributes" we do have control over, but not by directly manipulating numbers on a screen, but via powers. That abstraction, where the intrinsic ability of your character is improved by the use of powers, is an especially interesting one to me. It was the one place where the devs' original "hide the numbers" philosophy generated a win. Its much more interesting to create a character as a set of powers, than it is to create a character as a set of numbers, even though ultimately both play mechanically the same way.

After all, what is RPD but a way to "+1" your damage resistance? What is tactics but a way to "+1" your dexterity? They might have totally messed up the math, but the concept is very sound. Give people powers to use, instead of points to allocate, and let the game engine figure it all out.

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There's no way to absolutely prove that the devs didn't intend Empath to require the level of effort it does, short of them actually saying so.

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They did. Specifically, as I said in an earlier post, Positron said he estimated it would take five years to earn Empath.

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I'm aware. And that is just shy of proving the badge is broken unequivocally.

It isn't quite 100% proof because there's no way to know just exactly how much "effort" Positron believed could be applied to the badge in five years. However, I consider it a reasonable extrapolation that he wasn't thinking of any of the ways that it *would* be possible to get it in five years.

(Theoretically, one way to get it in five years would be to be a dedicated healer in Hamidon raid after Hamidon raid. However, I doubt that is what Positron was thinking at the time.)

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If it took 50 years, so what?

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Every reward in the game should have been designed around a certain level of effort intrinsicly required to achieve it. If the devs actually explicitly decided to make a reward that would take fifty years to achieve by their estimates, then its designed correctly. If they designed it to be achievable in a much shorter period of time, then its broken.

Its a different level of question to ask "should the devs be adding rewards to the game that will take longer to achieve than the likely lifetime of the game." But its very likely that is a moot question, because I do not believe the badge was designed in that manner, which makes it broken relative to its design intent, not just "longer than people would like."

Although many people think the requirements of Empath are too long simply for personal reasons, there are strong reasons for believing the badge is intrinsicly broken that have nothing to do with the subjective level of effort necessary for any one player to achieve it.


There's no way to absolutely prove that the devs didn't intend Empath to require the level of effort it does, short of them actually saying so. But common sense can suggest it. If the devs added a reward that required a billion vanguard merits to buy, its possible they could have intended that, but I think if I were to say that sounds very likely to be an error, I would consider it a silly counter-argument for someone to assert there's no way I could possible know that the devs didn't intend to create a reward that might require centuries of merit collection to achieve.

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Epic Badge Recipies get added to the Market. Their cost to buy the recipie is at a Fixed price like that Teleporter to the Market is, but you need:

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There is a certain logic to doing this when the badge unlocks the reward: in essence, the badge becomes a placeholder that means "earned the reward in some way." There's no specific reason for requiring only one way.

But when the badge exists solely to mark a particular accomplishment, I don't think it makes sense to buy your way out of the accomplishment. Because while I think its perfectly acceptable for the Fusion Generator badge to mean "healed a bunch of stuff, or spend a lot of money, to gain access to this doohicky" I don't think it makes any sense for Empath to mean "healed one billion points of damage, or healed 50 million points of damage and spent some influence."

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No, you can't. While people can and do take more damage, it is just more likely to be fatal.

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I was mostly kidding, but you cannot argue that people are dying more post ED than before. That would cause a massive drop in player performance, deducible from the issues that blasters were datamined to have. In fact, I believe the devs did say at one time that the one thing ED didn't affect too much was levelling speed. People just downshifted a bit.

Even so, the sweet spot - ED or no ED - for levelling is fighting +3s (mathematically somewhere between +3s and +4s actually, but there's no such thing as a +3.5). Fight anything higher than that, and you are generally taking longer to kill them than the increased XP per kill accounts for. So when the steamroller teams dropped down from +5s and +6s down to +3s, they didn't lose all that much XP/hour ground.

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They have that already: Enhancement Diversification. This alone cut all heals across the board in half. It doubled the anticipated timeframe to get all healing badges and the damage taken badges as well.

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Theoretically, you could argue that ED radically increased the amount of damage people take, reducing the time it takes to get Empath by conventional means from centuries to only decades.

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You have to enable comments before it qualifies as discussion. I thought the post on validation was good, although I wanted to ask - how do all those points or changes to your character really validate your time, when you consider that some day, they will atrophy to irrelevance? Like I have a bunch of level 50s, and billions upon billions of influence worth of goodies. Will it matter 5, 10, or 20 years from now? Clearly not.

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The fact that it matters to me now, will still matter to me then, even if the servers themselves no longer exist.

Even in a pickup game of basketball, most people keep score, even though the score might not be especially meaningful once the game is over.

Besides, I believe "the score" is the immediate short term validation for playing right now. The validation you'll have twenty years from now, if you have any, is likely to be that you have fond memories of playing. You won't, by definition, need short-term incentive-style validation like XP for a game you can't play anymore because it doesn't exist, just like most people can't kill that Outcast over there for the potential validation of one day having a fond memory of it. Validation is somewhat relative to context in this regard.


Interesting hypothetical question about validation within the context of what Positron discusses in his blog. Suppose the game were ending tomorrow, and with that, the devs offered all players an option: for some nominal price, they would sell you a DVD with your character (or characters). Everything they ever did, everything they ever earned, all of their current statistics: all the data they possess about your character, in some readable fashion. Would you buy it? Is the data meaningful if the game no longer exists? If you would, does that say something about whether or not the things you earn in the game have some validation-oriented meaning with or without the game's actual existence. In other words, influence definitely has no worth outside the confines of the game. But does earning influence have some value outside the game? I tend to think it does, to at least some degree.

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We have lots of room to grow, check out our Jobs listing

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Yeah, I heard about the powers designer opening. I don't meet two of the requirements:

At least 1 shipped AAA title
Refrain from calling other forum posters "blithering idiots."

Also, Mountain View is too long of a work commute from Honolulu. And I hear Castle has a clause in his contract that allows him to call any powers designer hired after him "Igor."

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You made an inference.

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Name it.

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You compared loot and these damnable badges. Specifically, you compared the obsessive behaviors that both game mechanics have been known to cause. Here is the relevant definition of analogy:

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resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike : similarity b: comparison based on such resemblance

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You mentioned some particulars of both loot and badges, the behaviors they generate, and that some people find loot as uninteresting as badges. Here's what you said:

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because there is no question whatsoever that it generates even more obsessive and unhealthy behavior, and there are at least as many people who find it uninteresting to the game as badges

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So you mentioned the resemblance in some particulars between mechanics that are otherwise unlike to the goal of making a comparison based on said resemblance.

And then for some unknown reason, you argued the nonsensical point that you did not make an analogy, because you are unable to admit error.

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A comparison is not an inference.

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because there is no question whatsoever that it generates even more obsessive and unhealthy behavior, and there are at least as many people who find it uninteresting to the game as badges

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If I say "4 is an even bigger number than 3" that is not an analogy between 3 and 4. An inference specificially refers to drawing a conclusion based on facts that are not logically conclusive, but suggestive. My statement can be trivially paraphrased to the logical syllogism: if the requirements that the game design item generate significant obsessive or otherwise perceived to be unhealthy behavior and are seen as of very low importance to the game by any significant percentage of the player population is sufficient to eliminate them, then loot satisfies the set of requirements and should be removed.

That statement contains no comparison between loot and anything else, yet properly encompasses the principle encapsulated colloquially in the original post, which only mentions badges for reference, not specifically to draw analogous conclusions from. It cannot be an analogy because it unequivocally contains no comparisons, and comtains no inferences.


The only reason why it seems like I have difficulty admitting I'm wrong to you is only because you aren't ever right when you are contradicting me. But hey, you can't win if you don't keep trying.

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Who wants to bet that it's Positron?

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Its not Positron.


Is there a badge for these scavenger hunts, Positron? Mind you, I'm not specifically asking for one, just inquiring if one exists.

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You made an inference.

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Name it.

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Poor analogy Arcana.

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I wasn't analogizing.

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Yes, you were.

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You made a specific statement about badges, and how in your opinion because their value is so low (to you), and it potentially encourages obsessive and otherwise unhealthy behavior, you'd have no problem with eliminating them. The exact same thing can be said about loot, only moreso, because there is no question whatsoever that it generates even more obsessive and unhealthy behavior, and there are at least as many people who find it uninteresting to the game as badges. Whether loot is useful or not, or easier to obtain or not, is irrelevant to that perspective.

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That's an analogy.

Merriam-Webster wrote:

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analogy



Main Entry: anal·o·gy
Pronunciation: \&amp;#601;-&amp;#712;na-l&amp;#601;-j&amp;#275;\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural anal·o·gies
Date: 15th century
1: inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will probably agree in others
2 a: resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike : similarity b: comparison based on such resemblance
3: correspondence between the members of pairs or sets of linguistic forms that serves as a basis for the creation of another form
4: correspondence in function between anatomical parts of different structure and origin &amp;#8212; compare homology

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Except I wasn't drawing an inference. If I said "badges are like loot in that they are both pursuit items, and therefore they are both likely to encourage similar obsessive behavior" that would be analogizing.

What I said was that if you want to present the argument that its fine to eliminate badges because they encourage obsessive behavior, I feel others are justified in making the same argument for loot. That's not an analogy, that is a judgement of the logical consistency of the arguments. Its no more of an analogy than if I were to say "if you are going to quote the dictionary, then so will I" that would be an analogy about dictionary quotes.