Arcanaville

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All four sets have capabilities beyond the damage mitigation that I looked at. Dark Armor has a damage aura (and I didn't even quantitatively look at CoF or OG either, although I do mention them). Invuln has the tohit buff from invincibility. Regen has quick recovery. SR has quickness. Each of these can be parlayed into defeating the enemy quicker, which improves survivability.

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You could also make the argument that avoiding debuffs that require a tohit also improves either the ability to defeat foes faster or provides a ghetto resistance to these effects. I am not saying that it fully balances the sets but SR and Invulnerability would stand to gain from this idea.

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This is true, and its also a very long-standing debate point as to just how important this factor actually is. I did a significant amount of testing regarding this effect in I5, and felt the results were reasonably definitive, but since its *still* a debated point, its on my list to re-examine more thoroughly.

Its worth noting, though, that secondary effect avoidance wasn't a critical balance issue even in I3, when SRs were perma-eluded and avoided practically everything, while Regens had zero defense and were getting hit by practically everything (scrappers were fighting +5s and up back then, and therefore anything without defense like Regens were consistently right at the tohit ceiling).

I'm not saying Regens and DAs didn't notice, just that it wasn't a critical balance issue relative to the differences in damage mitigation mechanics and strength.

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As for Electric, I'm of the belief that when the Dev's try to consider balance they have to factor in what a full team of (insert powerset here) would look like. Imagine 8 Electric blasters if Short Circuit did 100% drain, or if every attack drained 25% End (these numbers are just to make a point). They would be un-killable even on Invincible.

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They don't really balance secondary effects that way. They don't really balance secondary effects *any* way: they tweak them essentially by intuition.

More to the point: why balance secondary effects like endurance drain like that, when the more important effect - damage - isn't. Eight electric blasters can short-circuit everyone to zero endurance, but eight fire blasters can kill them all just as fast.

The devs *rarely* take into account what will happen when two, three, or four players stack together: they mainly care what one of them can do. The problem with endurance drain is that given a major flaw in critter design - they just don't use all that much endurance, and they don't have full attack chains - endurance drain is almost as "binary" as holds are: either you've drained them to zero AND stopped their recovery completely, in which case they cannot attack you at all, or they don't notice at all. Blasters, having low long-term survivability, cannot rely on what endurance drain will do *later*, only what it will do now. So you have a situation where if they give blasters strong enough endurance drain to help them immediately, they can incapacitate their foes totally, and attack from complete safety, which the devs don't want. But outside of that, what endurance drain *does* do isn't ordinarily helpful most of the time for blasters.

And unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this purely by simple tweaking powers on the blaster-side. The real problem is that critters don't need a lot of end. So the difference between "don't care" and "can't fight" is very slim. What they need to do is somehow modify the endurance usage of critters so that being drained hurts them more, so they don't need to be totally zeroed out before you notice any effect at all.

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I want blasters to be BLASTERS. We shoot and we punch and we spin and things die.

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Hmm, a Claws/Ice Manipulation blaster would be pretty interesting.

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I think there's some misinterpretation here - or my speech wasn't clear.

Let's take a look at costume creation. It's been embraced beyond belief by players...we have in game costume contests and events organized by you the players...Some say it's the best part of the game. The single most requested item in CoH is to make the costume creator standalone...

Intestingly, costumes have no gameplay value. They don't boost damage. They don't boost resistance. They don't boost defense. They're only for show.

Now, let's take a look at bases. Take away the teleporters, take away anything game related.

As just a resource for expressing something unique, base creation is on par tech wise with costume creation. Admittedly, there's not quite the same amount of textures, colors, etc., but there's still a lot of versatility. And the layout possibilities are endless.

But what's clear from this thread - and from many, many posts - is that bases are "too expensive". To me, that's interesting (as it is to the Serious Games crowd). Costume changes come with a minimal cost that no one really complains about, but we complain about the costs of bases. Evidently, the costs exceed the perceived value of creating one's own HQ (btw, I confess that many other games have the notion of personal property, but aside from Second Life, I don't think they offer as much customizability as our bases).

Let's turn to the idea of an architect. We foresaw that some people would feel alienated if they weren't the architect. That's why some things (Personal Items) can be "crafted" by individuals and placed in the base. But even if there's an architect: many super groups have a member who designed a single costume which all then use. In other words, they're more than willing to accept someone else's opinion in the group identity for their avatar appearance. Again, the primary difference is cost (I think).

That's what the point of the talk was. I completely agree with many of the suggestions raised in the Base Construction forum, as well as one's mentioned here, would improve Bases to some degree or another. Posi and I go through them at length; really, it's just a question of time & resources. Some things would take astronomically long to do - or perhaps there's something else even more requested or popular.

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I have to disagree on two major points: one, that the issue with bases is a cost/benefit issue, and two, that bases are even remotely as customizable as character costumes.

Second one first: bases are *not* as customizable as character costumes are. As Lady_Sadako says, we wear costumes, but bases are hidden. But I would go farther: even if bases were publicly accessible, there are additional problems:

* The average person cannot as easily "admire" the design of a building from the inside. When you talk about "architecture" the average person can much more easily admire the external structure of a building from the outside, when they can take the structure in. Admiring the "layout" of a base from the inside is actually not quite as visceral an experience. Its really like roaming through a museum: you can admire the pretty things in it, but its not quite as easy to admire the layout of the building itself, unless you actually have a mind for architectural layout.

In the absence of being able to "take a layout in" layout is really much less distinct of a thing than the functional description of the base. Teleporters on the right, med bay on the left. Change the number of squares to the right or left, and you still have the same base, even if its architecturally distinct. More technically: people are much less interested in the explicit structure of a base in general, and more interested in its general topology.

* When people admire our costumes, generally, we're actually there. Even if people could view our bases, we aren't likely to be there to discuss it with them. We're likely to be actually out playing the game. Costumes are something that can come up in casual converation. Base architecture, not so much. So there are much fewer social opportunities to engage in meaningful base architecture dialog. What customization that exist doesn't propagate well to social interaction.


More critically, there is the issue of cost/benefit. The idea that the problem is a cost/benefit issue implies there are two ways to solve the problem: reduce the costs, or increase the benefit. I contend that the root of the problem is *not* solvable by increasing the benefit of the bases by any reasonable means, and therefore even if the cost/benefit ratio was significantly reduced by massive increases in benefit, there would still be approximately the same resentment to the costs.

The reason is one of threshold. Question: if I give you a choice between a guaranteed chance at one dollar, or a fifty-fifty chance at ten dollars, which would you take? The average person would probably take the fifty-fifty. And that makes sense: the expected benefit is five dollars, much more than the one dollar sure thing.

But if I offer you a guaranteed chance at ten million dollars, or a fifty-fifty chance at one hundred million dollars, this is a different story. Probability-wise, its the same game, but the numbers don't in fact have the same actual value. Ten million dollars is life altering. One hundred million dollars is life-altering just with more Ferraris. Many people - perhaps most - would take the ten million, and pass on the chance at a hundred million. That's because the ten million crosses a critical threshold where the net value is so high, it cannot be passed up.

In reverse: the cost for bases is, for some, extraordinarily high. Its extraordinarily high not for any numerical reason, but for a more subjective one: earning prestige - at high enough levels - steals influence. The cost of earning prestige isn't a numerical one, its a critical playstyle one: try to earn prestige, and you can find yourself unable to buy that enhancement you need. That cost crosses a critical threshold where the cost impacts normal play. Once it does that, there's no amount of carrots you can dangle that will make people not resent the cost. They may *incur* the cost, but they will always resent it.

The problem is not the cost/benefit ratio. The problem is the intrinsic trade between influence and prestige. Costumes do not have quite the same problem for three reasons. First, you don't have to decide what you are going to spend your influence on while you are earning it: you can choose to spend on costumes or not, without altering your playstyle either way. Not true for prestige, where you have to commit to earning one or the other, at least for stretches at a time. Second, beyond a certain point, the cost for costumes becomes exceedingly small, as the amount of influence you can earn becomes increasingly large. So the problem with costumes gets better over time, not worse. Bases, though, as they evolve and become larger and more complex, become increasingly more expensive relative to the amount of prestige you can earn. And third, costumes don't cost anything beyond the initial outlay. Bases do: bases have rent. The first time someone couldn't change costumes because they don't have enough influence, you would see a firestorm of complaints that make the base complaints look like cheerleading by comparison.


There is even something fundamental about how we view costumes and bases that I think override all of this. We identify with our costumes, they are a part of who we are. Bases are much less so. I think the average person will recognize the (in general) stronger identification with their clothing over their homes. Psychological experiments have demonstrated that there are certain situations where we will strongly self-identify with inanimate objects: for example, when driving cars. Much of road rage seems to be linked to the fact that we don't separate what other people's cars do to our car, and what the drivers of those cars do to *us*. Our language hints at a deeper connection: people cut *me* off, not my car; they hit *me*, not my car. This even happens in supermarkets with people and shopping carts. We identify with what we control, and our CoH avatars are no exception. That leads to identifying with what those avatars wear, because its what *I* am wearing, not *my character*. Bases do not have that fundamental psychological linkage, and so they are treated much more functionally. They simply do not have the same psychological "cover" to be non-functionally valuable.

In effect, on top of being much less expensive, much less restrictive in special costs, and much more customizable in actual fact, costumes are, when you get right down to it, not rational purchases, because they have value far beyond any material accounting. But you cannot "create" that psychological attachment where it doesn't exist, and it doesn't exist to that degree for bases. So bases will be viewed much more analytically by the player base, as a question of what it costs, and what its benefits are. But as previously mentioned, the costs are not just weighed numerically, they are also weighed against more intangible issues that are no less important to the playerbase, and even though they are subjective, still factor into a "rational" decision making process.

I think if you are attempting to generalize some sort of lesson between bases and costumes, seeing them both as just examples of "customization" you're going to end up with faulty conclusions. There are large unresolvable differences in how they are treated and work, that numerical tweaking alone cannot reconcile. The real lesson that bases and costumes teach is that you cannot dictate what people will find important, and what they are willing to pay for it. That level of social engineering is simply beyond what you should expect to be reasonable.


One note regarding "architects." We accept SG leaders setting the SG costume because we don't *pay* for the SG costume, and because we aren't required to wear it continuously, and because its really just a variant of our costume(s). That is not even *remotely* in the same category as players who believe that since they *pay* for base construction, they should have some *say* in its design. But Cryptic chose to make bases require 75 payors but only one designer. And even if you could design collaboratively, 75 people trying to design one base is ludicrous to expect would work in general. If bases had small customizable "apartment" rooms that players could have sole discretion on design for, separate from the base as a whole, *most* of the "architect" problems would probably go away. Because not many people really care where the teleporters are, they care that some part of the base reflect their personality, fully under their control, in exchange for actually funding the base itself.

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Arcanaville: I do understand what did and didn't change in i7 (due in no small part to your own clear guide on the subject!); I didn't mean to suggest that the i7 changes somehow directly imply a change in CC.

What I had in mind, rather, was that it would be unsurprising if the conclusions that people reached a year and a half ago regarding CC turned out to be inconsistent with the new data, since there are at least two plausible ways this could have happened:

1) The players' more limited understanding of the to-hit calculation may have introduced errors in the inferential chain between their empirical measurements (i.e. % of foes held per tick) and their conclusions about the underlying mechanic of CC.

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Unlikely, since player observations would be virtually all due to players using CC, and not mobs. And players work the same way now as they did then; at least the I7 changes didn't affect player accuracy (that I'm aware of). Any player test of a power's accuracy should produce the same results now as they did then, and should have resulted in the same basic conclusions now as then. Of course, people do make mistakes, but the I7 changes aren't likely to be the source of any of them. Separate from the I7 changes, the only other major change in our understanding of accuracy between the I4/I5 period and now is the understanding that accuracy is multiplicative, and not additive. But I don't see how that would throw off player understanding of CC's accuracy, since there isn't really any significant stacked accuracy to be worried about in that case.


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2) Given that CC seemed to be "anomalous" in its scaling against target level, it's possible that this was an unintended behavior that was subsequently discovered and fixed. The fact that the devs were paying attention to to-hit scaling in the months before i7 would explain why they might have caught a bug in that neighborhood around that time, even if it had nothing to do with the specific mechanism that they eventually settled on for recalibrating critter-vs-player scaling.

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Possible, but if true it should have been noted as a fixed bug in the patch notes. They might have forgotten to do so, of course.



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Oh, and while I've got you here ... did you ever see this response to your ruminations on Taunt?
Re: So you want to know about Taunt...

That discussion seems to have petered out, but I'm curious whether the definition I proposed would fit with the behavior you were observing ...

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I did, and I'm not sure. Honestly I haven't followed those experiments up with more detailed ones to be certain. I do think that the taunt mechanics have the potential to be a bit more complex than specified, not necessarily deliberately so, but simply because they interact with critter AI, which is known to be a bit weird at times. There is a difference between what taunt does, and what critters under the influence of taunt do.

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Of course, this was before we had official confirmation on the to-hit calculation; it was also before the recalibration of defense scaling, so it's even possible that the system itself may have changed since then.

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Not directly relevant to the question, but I should point out that neither defense nor what we would call the tohit mechanics changed in I7. What changed was the base tohit and base accuracy of the critters. What we think of as how tohit "works" wasn't changed at all. The devs call it a change to tohit mechanics by terminology: its a change in the process of determing when something hits something, which *starts* with lookups on the base values of the attacker, which is now different for critters (also, technically they had to add the code to factor in the new accuracy term, but that accuracy term works like all the others, so its just an extension of the way accuracy works now).

The important thing is that given a certain base tohit, and given the same level of accuracy, I6 and I7 work the same. The only difference is that higher rank and level critters don't have the same starting values in I7 that they do in I6.


Its called a defense-scaling change because relative to changing tohit, defense scales differently than resistance, and that was an issue the devs wanted to address. But defense's scaling wasn't changed, critters just stopped getting different tohit. If base tohit is always the same (50%), then obviously there's no scaling problem.

On its own, I7's changes could not have affected how any player power hits or doesn't hit a target. Its a critter change only.

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I8 Test Server Notes:
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• Many objects in the game which were meant to be immune to Teleportation have been made so. This affects several powers in the Traps Secondary and Gadgets secondary for players.

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Emphasis added.

Last time I checked, there is no Gadgets secondary. There is, however, one called Devices. Freudian slips like this and folks wonder why some hold the belief that the devs don't seem to know the Blaster AT all that much.

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Although, I was wandering around in the university this morning, and it took a *long* time for me to remember just exactly what a "snare" enhancement was.


Lots of things are called lots of things in different places. Even experienced players will sometimes refer to the actual set they are playing as the Trick Archery set, or the Energy Armor set. I still occasionally hear about this set called "Storm Control."

For that matter, and I understand the precident, it still drives me a little nuts when someone asks me about Super Reflexes' "shields."

Noob moments from history:

I got into this game on strong recommendation from my brother, who's very first character (created right at release) was named "Patient Zero."

So I'm running my missions, and suddenly I get a mission that tells me to "Defeat Patient Zero." And, seriously, I'm actually wondering for quite a while if I'm supposed to go kill my brother, who was actually logged in at the time, before I realize the unlikelihood of that particular scenario.

But what an interesting game it would have been, if "patient zero" for the Vahz disease was some unsuspecting player picked at random every time that mission was drawn. No debt, no penalty, just some hero randomly stomping you, putting you in a body bag, and sending you off for analysis.

Heck, I would award special XP to the inconvenienced player, just to make them think they won a weird lottery.

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Okay...my turn!

I remember turning on the Targeting Drone and going "Hey, what's that sound?"

I remember running around as a Rikti during the invasion. Except I wasn't running around (can we say chain held?) I think we had ka-zillion hit points. We also spoke fUnNyee lIKe ThIs. You heroes couldn’t stop laughing at us.

I remember when I was checking on the Hamidon to see if it spawned correctly. We had to keep an eye for spawning errors at the time. Sadly, I forgot to hide. It couldn't kill me, so my screen was COVERED with de-buff icons....probably about 30 full rows of them. It wouldn't let me go. I had to log.

I remember a blaster who didn't realize I was talking to him in tells about a problem he reported. I followed him (while visible) down the streets of Steel Canyon trying to get his attention. Finally he pivoted and said "Why is this police bot following me?” (Sorry...I didn't mean to spook ya)

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Everything is so much funnier when you have god-like powers.

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Its not easy being Cricket Almighty.

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Katana has...Dragon, Dragonfly, Wolf, Wasp, and...wait, does Gambler count as an animal? Let's say no. And a lotus is a damn plant. 4.

MA has Crane, Dragon, Cobra, and Eagle. And a Warrior might just be counted as a human animal like the gambler, but let's just ignore that for the time being. So, 4 too.

I'd say they're about even.

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Typo: I should have said Katana has less, instead of more, which is why it needed the buff. It has the same number of animal names, but less asian sounding names. And only if you count dragons as animals, instead of mythological creatures.

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Wait, Katana and Martial Arts both have animal AND asian names.

YOU ARE CONFUSING

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Katana has more.

More > Less.

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I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you're joining in on the joke, even though you sound serious. Otherwise, I'm ok with replacing cobra strike with the Cone of a Thousand Disorients right now.

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MA is already 1337.

MA has 1000 cool points. While Spines and BS are ugly and plain respectively.

In Geko's world:

COOL POINTS > effectiveness

Hence why Fly must forever be gimpier than SJ and why War Mace, the plainest and weakest looking Tanker weapon should have the mega move. One of these days Arcana, you're going to understand something about balance. You've shown no evidence of it as yet.

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If you truly possessed the wisdom of the gods, you'd know that the buff coming for War Mace is to add swooping sounds to the swings and big flashes of light when it strikes a target, all the while reducing the damage of Bash.

Because Gaudy > Cool > Effective, and Gaudy costs damage or its overpowered.

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Hear you nothing that I say...

I left out Gaudy because its irrelevant but you ignored that

Asian sounding names > Gaudy > Cool > Effective

And since MA has both Asian sounding names + Cool it's clearly better than Spines or BS and is justifiably gimp on the effectiveness scale. Your petulance is unsettling.

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Its actually:

Asian Names > Gaudy > Cool > Effective > Animal Names > Dark Names

That's why Dark Melee had to get high dps to compensate, and Katana needed Divine Avalanche to balance out.

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Spines has impale and nothing else? It has the highest AoE output of any scrapper set. Its competitive with the AoE output of the fire blast set.

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If you're going to make an argument, use the right AT. Stalkers aren't Scrappers.


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Lets see: ripper sucks compared to those "MA high end attacks" like I suppose Eagle's Claw. Well lets see here: ripper does 75% of the damage of Eagles Claw even if none of the toxic DoT lands and it does it to multiple targets.

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Valid... for a scrapper. Ripper won't guarantee a crit, and Eagles Claw will. For a stalker, that makes all the difference. Stalker damage is balanced around the ability to control criticals (read: stalker damage sucks without crits). Spines for stalkers really does revolve around Impale because it has *no* other serious (non-AS) attacks that will guarantee a crit from hide. The AoE potential of the set means very little to an AT designed around controlled criticals and *single* target threat elimination.

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I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that anyone who says spines has impale and nothing else is taking about scrappers and not stalkers. If they are talking about stalkers, then that comment ceases to be a numerical error, and is just plain wrong.

In the case of AoE not being useful to a stalker: you have at least an arguable point when it comes to AoE damage but not when it comes to AoE slow, which is tactically significant to stalkers. Slow is an excellent debuff for a class that can utilize hide to enable criticals.

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I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you're joining in on the joke, even though you sound serious. Otherwise, I'm ok with replacing cobra strike with the Cone of a Thousand Disorients right now.

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MA is already 1337.

MA has 1000 cool points. While Spines and BS are ugly and plain respectively.

In Geko's world:

COOL POINTS > effectiveness

Hence why Fly must forever be gimpier than SJ and why War Mace, the plainest and weakest looking Tanker weapon should have the mega move. One of these days Arcana, you're going to understand something about balance. You've shown no evidence of it as yet.

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If you truly possessed the wisdom of the gods, you'd know that the buff coming for War Mace is to add swooping sounds to the swings and big flashes of light when it strikes a target, all the while reducing the damage of Bash.

Because Gaudy > Cool > Effective, and Gaudy costs damage or its overpowered.

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Is this seriously aiming the nerf bat on impale? Holy [censored].... If impale is nerfed I want a 10 BI attack like our NRG homies. Seriously. Impale is what evens out Spines.... Ok and BIB is fine too.... You realize this game is balanced around PvE and not PvP right? Spines is unique do ue to having 1 long range attack and NOTHING else. Ripper is ridiculously pathetic compared to NRGs or even MAs high end attacks. So before you say NERF IMPALE ZOMG IT POWNZ ME IN PVP, realize this is a PVE game.

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You're kidding.

Spines has impale and nothing else? It has the highest AoE output of any scrapper set. Its competitive with the AoE output of the fire blast set.

Lets see: ripper sucks compared to those "MA high end attacks" like I suppose Eagle's Claw. Well lets see here: ripper does 75% of the damage of Eagles Claw even if none of the toxic DoT lands and it does it to multiple targets. Oh, and it does it faster: ripper's dpa is actually 3% higher than Eagle's Claw's is, even if none of the toxic damage lands, and even if it only hits one thing.

Before you say spines is a crap set with impale, realize there are people who actually know better. Compared to MA, spines has better AoE damage, an actual damage mitigating secondary effect in slows which MA lacks, and on top of that impale is a ranged form of CAK that does the same damage plus a DoT, and it gets a high damage high dpa cone that's stronger in many ways than MA's highest damage attack.

As to seriously suggesting that spines should get comparable attacks to total focus, well lets see. Total focus exists in two hero sets: energy manipulation, and energy melee. The scrapper damage modifier is about 40% higher than the tanker one, so a 9.89 BI tanker attack is equivalent in damage to a 7.06 BI scrapper attack. And gee, ripper, an AoE by the way, is a 6.1 BI attack with DoT. Its most of the way there and its an AoE attack.

As to the energy manipulation version of total focus, that one is wielded by blasters. You get to have that one when you get the same protection in melee combat as blasters.


You want a PvE perspective, here's the PvE perspective: when you can get a set that does AoE damage, combined with AoE damage mitigation, to better attack multiple targets, that's going to tend to be pretty useful in PvE. Where you are actually fighting more than one thing occasionally.


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EDIT: And EG is my hero..... His logic is perfect. I vote for the 37.5 BI attack for War Mace. Set defining abilities make it more difficult to unbalance the game if everone has one and the rest are generic.

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I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you're joining in on the joke, even though you sound serious. Otherwise, I'm ok with replacing cobra strike with the Cone of a Thousand Disorients right now.

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Can you imagine how powerful the pocket d temp power would be for pvp if it had a reasonable activation time. It would make all escape powers pale in comparison.

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And that is why it has a long, interruptable activation time.

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I knew this to be the case. It's just annoying that the multitudes who either don't PvP or wouldn't care if people could do this in PvP have to be inconvenienced. *Sigh*

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I don't think Castle is saying "it would be too powerful in PvP if it had a quick activation time" I think he is saying "it would be too powerful of an escape power if it had a quick activation time" PvP or PvE.

If it was just a PvP issue, they could have simply inhibited it in the PvP zones.

As a means to zone to Pocket D, or even to use Pocket D as a short cut to other zones, the activation time is trivial. The activation time is only really non-trivial if you are attempting to use it in combat, and its explicitly not meant to be used as a reliable means to escape combat.

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i dont know i just kinda find snipes... useless now because of ED. when you could kill a red con minion in 1 hit with a snipe compared now where you cant kill an even with a snipe.

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BU + 3-slot snipe defeats non-resistant minions.

With all the perez nostalgia, I'm surprised no one has mentioned what might have been my first real w-t-f moment in the game, when I saw what I eventually learned was a rad defender herding the entire zone to the Atlas gate, and broadcasting "free XP at the Atlas gate!"

And of course, everyone familiar with rad goes charging into the neutered crowd, and everyone not familiar with rad runs screaming for their lives, and I'm flying overhead going "what the hell have I spent my 40 bucks on?"

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Arcana, you of all people understand that DPA is not explicitly balanced for. Honestly, this observation of focus v. power burst really isn't that suprising given what we know. Maybe novel considering that it might not have been looked at previously, but suprising? Naw.

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That's what I said: impale is no more surprising to me than focus is. And both impale and focus are prime examples of why *nothing* really surprises me much, or for that matter why few things should surprise anybody.

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Unbelievably, Impale is 80' range.

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Well, its no more unbelievable than that focus has twice the range and 14% higher dpa than power burst, the best dpa attack in energy blast (and that's not counting criticals)

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Well... power burst is energy damage, and stalkers had damn better get higher damaging attacks than a corruper!!! And the comment about criticals is rediculous; that is how stalkers are balanced: low health, fast kills

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Actually, I should have compared the stalker version of focus, and I accidentally used the scrapper number. In fact, the stalker version of focus has only 9% less dpa than the blaster version of power burst, which is substantially higher than the corruptor version.

Funny you should bring up criticals, though. Because you're right: stalkers *are* balanced around the alpha strike potential of criticals. Which makes the fact that focus is good enough that the stalker version even without criticals is more than a match for the nearest blaster analog at least a little eyebrow raising.

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Unbelievably, Impale is 80' range.

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Well, its no more unbelievable than that focus has twice the range and 14% higher dpa than power burst, the best dpa attack in energy blast (and that's not counting criticals)

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This is an incredible job - kudos for working it out in such detail. Hopefully people will pay attention to it. I have one thought. It doesn't seem like you factored SR's Quickness into the numbers. While the recharge effect shouldn't effect the raw survivability (after all, Hasten does not), it nevertheless does have an in-game effect by allowing the SR scrapper to defeat enemies faster.

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This issue was discussed in the original thread, and in two threads I started discussing quickness. In brief, the notion is this:

All four sets have capabilities beyond the damage mitigation that I looked at. Dark Armor has a damage aura (and I didn't even quantitatively look at CoF or OG either, although I do mention them). Invuln has the tohit buff from invincibility. Regen has quick recovery. SR has quickness. Each of these can be parlayed into defeating the enemy quicker, which improves survivability. Its debatable which one is stronger: quickness' speed boost is limited by the activation time penalty (a 0.2 speed boost doesn't boost attacks by 0.2, only their recharge *after* activation) and the limitations of full attack chains (it helps some sets more than others because of that). Quick recovery doesn't direct translate into damage, but if the regen can skip one endurance slot for recharge in their attacks relative to SR, QR can effectively "buy" quickness and then some. Invuln's tohit buff is relatively slight, but it scales upward with more targets. And that means Invuln is most accurate when attacking the most things: useful if you have PBAoEs (Claws, Katana, Broadsword).

Overall, I elected to deliberately consider all of these factors roughly equal. However, if I were to judge them based on their ability to kill faster, I would have to say that death shroud probably is first, quick recovery is close second, then quickness is third with a significant gap, and invincibility is a close fourth.

Which is, coincidentally, just about how the sets actually ranked, and so wouldn't have thrown them off relative to each other.

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Also, you still have the old numbers for the Unyielding debuff for invul.

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Yep, that too was changed after this was originally written (back in April) and after the last revisions I made on this repost (back in June). Invincibility is also off by about a percent or so, another revelation that occured after this was first written. Coincidentally, the UNY change and the new invincibility numbers largely cancel each other out.

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Regen's toxic analysis is off. Recon has a 15% toxic resist buff and resilience is 7.5%.

Good job BTW.

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I had the wrong number for resilience, which I think was corrected in the threads this first appeared in, but I didn't correct it for the repost of the original pieces - a little bit lazy, and a little bit it didn't seem to alter the basic conclusions much. I assumed the resistance was the same for everything, so didn't specifically test toxic damage - oops. I specifically didn't include the resistance in reconstruction, because then I would have a weird catch-22: I presume you get the full benefit of reconstruction, which is calculated as firing as often as possible, but in reality is firing at the best moment, but that can make the total toxic resistance for reconstruction not constant. So to be honest I punted that one. If regen was near the bottom, instead of near the top, I would have attempted to count it to give regen a more realistic minimum toxic protection number. As it is, its pretty good against toxic either way.

The one *major* correction from the original posting is the SR numbers, which were discovered after I originally calculated everything. That was a significant enough change (it raises SRs scores relative to everyone else, and SR was at the bottom originally) that it was important to factor that in to be fair.


Actually, there is one other significant uncorrected deviation from reality in here: I still have the old numbers for luck inspirations; obviously, because this stuff was done many months before I looked at luck inspiration strength.

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Airhammer still lives amd is still practicing the Art of Snipe Fu. Now he has mastered the art of the Damage Range Hami-O which allows him to with Boost Range to snipe from REALLY far away.

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Actually, back when HOs were still pretty powerful, I just kept getting those, and no one wanted them so I just kept slotting them into my main (en/en) until I finally had like 2 in snipe, 2 in torrent, and another 3 in burst. I think power blast has one also (I don't have all that many more, just a couple dmg/acc and travel). Ironic, that those are the ones I would least like to give up now.

With boost range, snipe has a range of about three zip codes. When they finally put windows in SG bases, I'll be able to fight crime without getting off the couch.