Arcanaville

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Thunder Kick appears to have been "adjusted" from the CoH MA version. It now does less damage than air superiority, takes longer to recharge than air superiority, and its secondary effect triggers much less often than air superiority. Supposedly, this sort of inversion (a power pool attack being in all ways superior to a primary attack) shouldn't actually happen.


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When I was working with geko to get CAK to a better balance point, we noticed that Thunder Kick was doing damage based on it having a one second longer recharge time than it actually had. We corrected it at that time, despite it being a "nerf." We were pretty sure the other improvements in the set more than made up for us correcting what was essentially a bug.
Now, comparing it to Air Superiority is interesting. AS is a favorite power of mine, precisely because it is so effective. If it is true that it is 'better' than Thunder Kick, I'll talk to geko about getting TK's animation time shortened (if possible) or returning TK's damage, but increase its recharge time. In other words, I'll look into it.


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I compared it to AS because before CAK was tweaked, AS was the next viable attack for my MA/nin to take (in beta), offering both good damage and good mitigation. When TK was adjusted, it was the natural power to compare it to: I could tell what they were doing because both were in my attack chain at the time, and to see bigger numbers for AS, and AS coming back up in my tray faster, were both suddenly very noticable, as was the fact that AS was almost always putting people down, while TK was only disorienting villains once in a while. If the disorient was a long disorient, then that would make up for it, but in actual fact, it seems the disorient only lasts approximately the same amount of time it takes for a knocked down NPC to fall down and get back up again, plus or minus a second or two.

I don't use boxing a lot, but boxing also has chance to disorient. Can you look into how TK compares to boxing, since boxing and TK might actually be more directly comparable: similar damage, similar activation, similar recharge, similar secondary effect?

I think, instead of fiddling with the damage and recharge, an alternative would be to look at a suggestion MA's have been making for nearly a year: return TK to a 100% mag 1 disorient, instead of a 20% mag 2, like it started off as. Alternatively, consider keeping it a mag 2 stun, but increasing the percentage slightly to maybe 33% so it has a better chance of going off, and has a better chance of occasionally self-stacking to stun higher things.

It goes without saying that it would be really nice when percentage effects like disorient displayed a message in the combat chat so we know they are going off, even if the mez is too low in magnitude to actually take hold. Alternatively, a mini-disorient orbiting icon, like a debuff icon, to indicate that the effect is landing at all, even if its insufficiently strong to disorient.

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Defense is also slightly better than resists because of multi typed attacks.

25% defense versus a smashing type attack is equivalent to 50% resist to the same type of attack but if you split the damage type to be smashing AND energy the resist's damage mitigation is halved while the defense's remains the same. At least I'm pretty sure that's how it works

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This is a valid point: incomplete defense is better than incomplete resistance, because typed resistance is only effective against the specific damage types its typed for, but typed defense is good against all attacks with any component of that type of damage at all.

Hidden in here is a subtle problem with low level SR scrappers: a typed defense character could focus on smash/lethal defense, and immediately cover at least 75% of all attacks in the game (in the lower levels, and in melee range, that percentage is even higher). But SR has to cover melee and ranged defenses to get similar coverage. SR focusing on melee only is getting less mitigation overall than Ice or FF focusing on smash/lethal only (an interesting advantage energy stalkers have over SR stalkers).

But once you get to high levels, SR does have a slight qualitative edge over damage-typed defensive sets: toxic defense doesn't exist.

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I also absolutely don't understand why in game mechanics +def is considered numerically to be worth double +res for balance purposes, yet the bonuses from the relevant inspirations are totally wrong. Each level of +res inspiration should be worth twice as much +res as the same level +def inspiration. Why on earth they did it backwards is beyond me.


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That's a good question. Its obvious why smaller values of Defense are considered equivalent to higher values of Resistance: because Defense and Resistance are scale balanced against even level minions which have base 50% chance to hit.

Why then are lucks much stronger than resistance insps? There is no real good numerical answer to that question. Therefore, it has to reflect a prejudice or a preference on the part of the devs. Its most likely the case that its one of these four reasons:

1. Lucks are unbalanced against Resistance insps, and the devs know this, but they don't want to change luck insps for whatever reason, possibly because they've been in use for so long. They might also simply not want to take a good insp away because they don't consider "balance" to be a sufficiently strong reason to nullify something a lot of players like to have.

2. Lucks are unbalanced against Resistance inspirations, and the devs know this, but they were never meant to be balanced: the devs want each deliberately to function differently, and to provide not just qualitatively different benefits, but also quantitatively different benefits. For example, they might really want lucks to be so strong that you can pop them in an emergency or just prior to a sticky situation, to temporarily make you extremely unlikely to get hit by anything, but they expect res insps to be used more steadily as a minor damage mitigator.

3. The devs figure that since all resistance in the game has inherent resistance to debuffing, but defense does not, they needed to make defense insps stronger than resistance insps, regardless of what that did to the balance between mitigation sets.

4. They actually think its balanced, for some reason they haven't shared. If so, they're almost certainly wrong, as they often have been in the past when dealing with Defense and Resistance: the devs seem to be just as easily caught up in errant Defense and Resistance pseudological balancing as everyone else is.


You have to keep in mind that the devs do not actually consider balance itself to be a priority: they've implied as much. They consider "balance" within the game to only be important insofar as it somehow directly impacts the experience they are attempting to create with the game. One of the responses I got to a PM asking about a particular imbalance (it wasn't an SR vs invuln issue per se) was that so long as both sets of people could still solo heroic missions, that imbalance wasn't a real issue.

Resistance insps are set to the value they are set to, because thats the value the devs think they ought to be *now*. Lucks are set to the value they are set to, because thats the value the devs thought they ought to be *then*. They aren't balanced with each other, most likely because unless that lack of balance hurts some specific vision they have for the game, its not a priority to do so.

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KK but if SR had 30% RES and 40% DEF it would be alot closer to that mark....since I beleive RES to be more powerful I would have to give around 60% def and 30% res....But I was trying to compensate for the lowest common denominator....even con minions with no buffs.


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As much as I think SR needs a buff, 60% def and 30% res would be massively overpowered relative to the other sets. Most people seem to have innate prejudices either that Defense is superior to Resistance, and thus Defense numbers should lag Resistance numbers to balance them, or vice versa Resistance is inherently superior to Defense, so Defense numbers should be much higher than Resistance numbers to compensate. The truth is that for reasonable levels of both, Defense and Resistance have reasonably balanced pros and cons to where such tweaking isn't really necessary to balance their net mitigation benefit. At least, its sufficiently balanced that I think anyone who wants to grant Defense or Resistance higher values than the other has a high burden of proof to overcome.

If you were attempting to balance with even level minions, then about 40% defense and no resistance at all gets pretty close: with 30% resistances on top, we'd need slightly less defense (about 37% or so). See my sig for some I5 calibrated comparisons between SR and the other scrapper mitigation sets, particularly against even level minions.

The mitigation gap, in I5 terms, between SR and invuln and regen is on the order of 5-10% defense. In I6 terms, I don't exactly know yet. It might be closer numerically, but it might also be much harder to acquire the additional defense, in effect widening the gap overall.

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I would like to see around 30% resists enhanced. Meaning around 15% base...to complement the a value of around 40% defense...IF you took every defense power and slotted it out.


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To get 30% resists, you'd need a base of about 19%, not 15%. No more 6-slotting, remember? Similarly, no 40% defense either.

Best SR (melee/ranged) defense in I6: 27.5% 3-slot even SOs, 28% 6-slot even SOs.

40% is, as low as that number is, now only a fond memory. FF+dodge+hover+weave all 3-slot for defense is still only 36.5% In mitigation terms, thats about equal to 73% resistances.

Here's invuln, 3-slotting just UNY, RPD, TI, and tough: 67.3% res (smash/lethal). Mitigation during dull pain windows: 76.6%, and there's a self heal in there, and it only requires taking one (really two) power pool powers, compared to the two (really, *four*) power pool powers in the SR build above.

Still looking at SR vs Invuln vs Regen in the New World Order, but so far, my informal look-see doesn't lead me to believe that SR is getting a net boost relative to the other scrapper sets due to ED (but it is getting one - a difficult to account for one - with the passive resists).

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I think it would be a better idea to add a PBAOE -recharge -slow debuff in there somewhere

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I think they essentially tried to apply the bullet time power - Quickness. The slow is in there as well with the +speed. In fact, Quickness is like bullet time ..to everyone on the map.

The PBAoE effect I think was already done with Ice's Chilling Embrace. I think Quickness is actually better...it's also got anti-slow...so it it's like bullet time against teammates as well.

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Quickness would be a true SR jewel if it reduced activation time. As it is, its overall effect is much lower than the tohit buffs from invincibility, the endurance recovery of QR, and the everything of DA.

The *concept* of quickness is a good one. The implementation limitation is what borks it.

CE's PBAoE slow is a much more powerful effect overall, although it does have the disadvantage of being degraded by the purple patch, something quickness is inherently unaffected by.

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The 25% luck inspiration was 4.5 times as valuable to the SR scrapper then it was to the non-def using character. That's quite a bit more then SR adding a small benefit to a luck inspiration.


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Let say for the sake of argument I buy into this line of reasoning. Then, the true comparison is this:

SR can get more benefit out of a luck than a non-defense set can, i.e. invuln.

But invuln, with high resistance, gets more benefit out of resistance insps than SR does, also.

And here's the catch: invuln, with two lucks, can floor even minions. SR, no matter how many lucks its stacks on top of its defenses, cannot actually improve on that performance. Invuln can always *equal* SRs mitigation. In fact, with three of the smallest lucks that exist, invuln can equal SRs defensive mitigation against AVs, and SR cannot do better defensively.

On the other hand, its virtually impossible for SR to equal invuln's resistance mitigation numbers. Its difficult even to reach the ~20% resistance to non-smash/lethal that invuln has, much less the 60%+ smash/lethal defense that invuln has. The situation is not symmetric.


But in fact, I don't really buy into the train of thought, for this reason: its precisely because we get such a large benefit, on a relative basis, from lucks, that minimizes the overall benefits of the set.

At low levels, I am very often fighting without SR toggles at all - they are simply too low: they aren't worth the endurance cost. If I get into trouble, its actually better for an SR scrapper to pop a luck than attempt to turn on her toggles. The luck is faster, offers immediate base defense to all attacks, and until you get into the mid 20s, its essentially guaranteed to be better and stronger than all the SR defenses you can possibly possess *combined*.

That's wrong, wrong, wrong.

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i'm sure this has probably been said before, but i am not about to search through 24 pages of posts on this :P.

but why in blazes would you give SR a boost in resistance ONLY when they get hit an lose health? isn't this set suppsoed to be based on us NOT getting hit? o.O

it's like saying 'i'm gonna give a resistance based set more defense if they start dodgeing alot of attacks' o.O

Z.

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There is an actual benefit, although its a psychological one moreso than a true mathematical benefit. SR scrappers, because they deal in "bursty" damage, have a different "run" psychology. They cannot watch their health bar slowly decay, and run in the red, like invuln can. Each time they get hit, their bar jumps closer to the end, and they can't be sure that they wont get a burst of damage that finishes them off. Its a little more tense for SR - in the old days playing perma-elude with your health bar blinking deep in the red was a lot different than playing an invuln scrapper with max resists deep in the red.

With the damage resistance working the way it does, SR now has a little more of that invulnerability feel to it, in my opinion. Damage "slows down" as you get hit, and you're much more likely to survive a "close encounter" if you press your luck. This wouldn't be true, necessarily, if the resistance was flat resistance instead.

However, actually, thats precisely *why* I don't like it: from a pure play and feeling perspective, it "taints" SR with an invuln flavor, something I would rather not do: invuln has that flavor already, we don't need another secondary with it.

Furthermore, it does nothing for SRs higher downtime, both in CoV and in CoH. As I mentioned before, in CoH, every scrapper secondary has an ability to self-heal except for SR. In CoV, every stalker secondary has an ability to either self-heal or restore endurance, except SR. SR, in both worlds, has the worst downtime mitigation. To place on top of that deficiency a mitigation ability that only really kicks in when SR is knocked to low health, something SR cannot easily get out of, seems wrong to me.

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Dunno if this has been suggested, but here's something that's been kinda jumping around my brain for a few days. (I need to let it out, it's lonely in there)

Why not tie this to the endurance bar, and reverse it. The more endurance you have, the greater the chances of partially avoiding an attack. Basically 100% end = full passive damres, and as you hit benchmarks, 50%, 33%, 20%, whatever they are, you lose that little edge as you get tired and start getting sloppy in your evasive maneuvers. Makes sense, no?

You then have a choice in the matter (more choices are good right?), mount an all out assault and drain your end faster in an attempt to overcome your foe(s) with brute strength in a speedy fashion and thereby endangering yourself by removing your ability to partially dodge the attacks you can't quite get out of the way of OR conserving your energy, ducking and weaving, feinting and flowing with the battle and await those opportunities to ram in there with a quick one-two punch.

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It makes sense conceptually, but unfortunately its going to run into a problem: until you get into the 20s, its really basically impossible to keep a full end bar, which means the effect will be pretty low quite often for low level SR scrappers. And unless the resistance delivered is extremely high, it wont be enough to really ofset the inherent loss of health associated with not attacking and keeping too many things around for too long. Although, there is an actual SR scrapper that can approximate this exact behavior: katana/SR scrappers can switch from attacking, to spamming divine avalanche, and in effect drop offense very low, and keep defense very high.

Its interesting to me that only katana/SR really has that choice, and not all SR scrappers in general. As much as people think invincibility ought to be in the SR set, I think a form of parry/DA ought to be in SR even more.

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Take invincibility... Please... Ill gift wrap the focker for you and send you a framed picture of me on my bed in my skimpies with "XOXO love you lots Arcanaville" written on it in black marker.

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Much like passive resistance, this is yet another buff I was not asking for.

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HEY!!!!

Where is the TANKER LOVE????????

We should have this power built into our passives as well. Especially the INV tanker. Then there would be a reason to take the passives and even slot them!

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Tell ya what, when the Devs strip Invul of dull pain, leave the base dam-res where it's at now, AND strip all defense from Invincibilty, THEN, and ONLY then, can you come into this thread and cry for more goodies with Invul.

Many SR users have been screaming for more types of damage mitigation like Invul, DA and Regen have, since Issue 1. We're finally getting some. It'll turn out to be useless just like defiance, but at least they're doing SOMETHING now.

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To be honest, based on the "feel" of the passive resistance, I think SR and invuln would both be better off if we got invincibility, and they got the passive resists. The passive resists "feel" very invuln-like, although that's difficult to explain to someone that hasn't played both a lot.

When SR had actual defense, I4 numbers or better, SR scrappers could and would get into serious trouble where they were deep in the red, and still fighting. The high defense meant that the play experience was such that *most* of the time SR got away with that, and *occasionally* it did not - the "luck factor" people talk about. SR scrappers didn't have to go all the way to death, necessarily; they could back off and re-engage, but that simply meant there was an artificial invisible line drawn on their health bar that they were treating as if it was the zero line - and they too experienced the probabilistic nature of SR as usually beating that line, and occasionally crossing it and forcing a retreat (or hospital).

Invuln doesn't quite play that way. At high resists, being in the red doesn't mean the next shot will kill you: with invuln, you aren't thinking "please be lucky, please be lucky" - you're tending to think "must go faster, must go faster." In essence, you're thinking if only you could attack fast enough, nothing could kill you no matter what your health bar reads.

In actual fact, the mathematics of the sets aren't quite that harsh in terms of their actual behavior, but the effect is strong enough in certain circumstances to affect the psychology of the sets - their "feel."

Separate from the possible benefit we might get from this, the damage resistance being added to SR feels "wrong" to me because it feels to me like invuln's end-game flavor is being added to it. Flat (and enhanceable) resistance would be more palatable: it wouldn't be backloaded so much, and therefore wouldn't quite so significantly dominate the low health "feel" of the set.

There's also this: we are still the lowest health regeneration mitigation set, by very wide margin. Every time we see this damage resistance, it will be because we have gotten hit low enough to force downtime. The best power for SR to slot in I6 might actually be rest.

The devs really just need to give us back the proper amount of defense: its still very obvious to me that SR is balanced against the other sets *without healing taken into account*. Its as if SR and invuln were balanced without dull pain, and then the devs tacked on dull pain as an extra little invuln "bonus" that they figured wouldn't matter all that much.

In case anyone cares, I took a look at the SR resistance of agile in CoV, just to get an idea of what kind of numbers Statesman and the gang were thinking of. Its very likely that whats in CoV now is not what its going to be permanently: for example, it doesn't work the way Statesman describes.

Statesman says its a tiered resistance that starts at 60% health, and "dramatically" increases at 40% and 20%.

At the moment, the resistance kicks in at about 55%-60% health (remaining) and then *steadily* increases from zero to about 22% resistance as your health drops to zero. I don't see any sort of quantum jumps in the resistance level, although keep in mind this is a tricky thing to measure: if the health bar isn't 100% in sync and updating for health regeneration quickly (and in the past its been horribly off) then my computations can be a bit off. But the floor, about 22%, is unlikely to be far off, because I tested rundowns all the way to zero (dead) and I have measurements where remaining health was far under 1% remaining.

In broad terms, a resistance power that kicks in at 60% health and rises uniformly from zero to 22% or so, is acting as very roughly the same as 6.5% flat resistance.

And no, you can't slot it.

A couple unanswered questions:

Positron implied the res would go up with level: I haven't tested for that effect yet (the numbers I have are for level 10, the first level you can get an SR passive at all in CoV). I'm going to test again at level 14 when I hit that to see if its gone up.

Also, I don't know how this stacks: I have agile, but in CoV, SR stalkers don't open dodge until 20 (yes, they've replaced the lucky/evasion sequence goof with agile ten levels before dodge - for a melee character). So I can't test stacking yet (sue me, I've been testing other interesting things, like my mastermind, and my ninja, and I accidentally left my SR too low to get level bumped, sigh).

Another interesting factoid: SR scrappers have three passives that can/will have damage resistance (dodge, agile, lucky) but SR stalkers only have two (stalkers do not have lucky).

Also, the power description says res to all, but I haven't tested it against the more pesky damage types yet (i.e. psi, toxic).

Is the damage resistance actually worth anything? Well, I'm composing my MA/SR stalker review in my head as I type this; hopefully I'll post that here (CoH) and there (CoV) in a day or so: I think I now have enough time with MA/SR stalkers (about 20 hours or so) to have a basic idea of where its going to end up.

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Only in the movies is it possible to dodge the effects of an explosion.


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On the contrary, one can dive for cover. This is a reflexive reaction.
Dropping down and over your ears can dramatically minimize the damage compared with someone who stands erect.


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Again, only in the movies. No matter how fast you are, if you are in the blast radius of an actual explosion, its *gravity* thats unable to get you to the ground faster than the supersonic shock wave hits you. It takes about half a second to hit the ground from a dead drop, and in that time a supersonic shock wave - or supersonic projectiles - can move about 500 feet, and this presumes reaction time is zero. And unless you have suction cups for feet, no amount of strength or reflexes can cause you to hit the ground any faster than gravity will get you there.

Only for nuclear weapons can you see the blast with significant warning time to attempt to "duck and cover."


And studies have shown that the instinctive reaction of people is not to drop to the ground, but to freeze and sometimes turn into the direction of the blast.


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In truth, resistance by dodging is the special case, not the general case. It seems like the general case because of the familiarity of some examples (i.e. boxing), and general misconceptions, most of them presented in the movies.


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Obviously you've never actually played any contact sports where avoiding full on collisions can be the difference between minor bruising and broken bones.


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Can't say I have. The closest I've come to is Karate, and the various other martial arts friends have attempted to teach me (at least, I think they were trying to teach me), and as a rule, running towards each other at high speed is generally frowned upon.

But all of these fall within the original exception I specifically stated in my original post: smashing damage, at least as its envisioned conceptually. And none of them simulate actual combat very well. In football, the tacklers stop hitting you when the whistle blows (well, unless we are talking about old school Raiders). Most "full contact" sports aren't truly full contact: the most dangerous and damaging contact possible - and the ones most difficult to "roll with" are made illegal. In effect, full contact sports are explicitly designed around the exception: contact explicitly allowing for trained mitigating response. Contact that can't be mitigated is disallowed.

On the other hand, the mechanisms in real life are extremely ineffective for real combat situations, like sword play, or high speed projectiles, or detonations which is why there aren't any full contact hand grenade competitions.


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But I agree with something you alluded to earlier. These are mechanism and should be thought of as such. That's not to say some mechanisms or worse than others given the specifics. And like others have said, the mechanics of how the power is implemented will determine whether the passives in /SR are equal to all the things a set like /Ninji has in place of them.


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And as a mechanism, damage resistance isn't dodging, weaving, rolling, or getting lucky. Its just proportional reduction in damage intake. This broke the SR concept - not just mine, but Cryptic's concept for the set, as articulated by them many times - which is not that SR is dodging, weaving, or getting luck, but SR as simply "all or nothing damage" which by definition contradicts the resistance mechanism. However, that concept is untenable in an environment where its unclear how debuff resistance is going to work (I still have no response from my posted question or my PM regarding stacking), when and if they are going to address tohit buffs, and now, what to do with a one-dimensional set if you aren't allowed to slot the one dimension.

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With all due respect, a bullet is the worse case scenario for conceptually grasping a rwtp idea. By contrast, it's hard to imagine ever completely dodging an explosion and much more likely you will just minimize the damage you take by moving farther from the blast radius.


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Only in the movies is it possible to dodge the effects of an explosion. Injury and death come from high velocity shrapnel,which is as easy/difficult to dodge as bullets, and the high pressure shock wave, which expands uniformly radially and is impossible to dodge altogether.


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Damage mitigation from a reflex is a given and not even debatable in a real world setting. Sometimes you may not mitigate, like when being fired on by a short pulse laser, but many more times you will, like being fired on by an extended burn laser (you move out of the beam).


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In truth, resistance by dodging is the special case, not the general case. It seems like the general case because of the familiarity of some examples (i.e. boxing), and general misconceptions, most of them presented in the movies.

I suppose technically since CoH models comic books and movies, it is irrelevant if it happens in real life, but only if it happens in fiction. But its *especially* in fiction that dodging *lethal* attacks tends to be all or nothing. In any movie with any hero of any kind, in comic books with almost any hero with dodging ability, is not only bullets that they dodge all or nothing. It tends to be sword attacks, disintegrator rays, explosives, poisoned weapons, and the like.

Spiderman will dodge all the bullets from the minions - because they can kill - and then get hit by one of the tentacles of Dr. Octopus, which is probably moving at one tenth the speed - because it can be portrayed as non-lethal.

Narrativium, again.

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As a side note, I have never understood why Hasten is not in the SR line. I'm not talking the glowy hands--I'm talking about a click power to increase recharge time. Quickness is nice, yes, but that's something I'd expect to find in a pool power, not a secondary line. Isn't being fast all what SR is about? If Hasten is such a big deal, switch it around with Quickness. People won't have to spend slots on a pool power then, it'll be on all the time, and the only ones you have to worry about it being "perma" on is the SR scrappes, and there are few of us left already.


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I seem to recall someone making that suggestion a long time ago, but I cannot remember the circumstances of it. It seemed like a good idea to me at the time, and it still seems like a good idea now.

A click-speed power like hasten could match up well with (the now clickified) instant healing or invincibility, especially if it was more powerful than what everyone else could get from the power pools. It might even make sense to combine that with other people's suggestions to add a small amount of healing to quickness, giving us two things to slot for in the power.

A click heal/speed "feels" like it would be balanced against invincibility, instant healing, and cloak of fear, and would be a nice tier 7 SR power (swap it with lucky), and it would be the equivalent SR "ooh, cool" power at level 28.

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Tisk, tisk. It's not nice to start a flame war just because you got made a fool in another thread.


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Once again, your distorted perception of reality defies imagination. Just out of curiousity, what color is the sky in your world?


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Enjoy your childish insults


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Find one. I'll spot you "childish" and let you just find an actual insult in my post. Your perception of anyone who points out that you don't make sense as being insulting is a defense mechanism that must get highly overworked. You can continue to present this dubious display of unjustified superiority, but it does not in any way bolster any of your supposed claims to significant understanding of SR game balance issues.

And if you are shooting for enfant terrible of the SR community, really, you are going to have to escalate beyond simply being prosaically annoying.

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Let's play the if/then game...

IF:

Statesman said, "We've decided to increase all of SR's DEF numbers to a new amount. Toggles will be a base 100% increase to your defense and passives will be a base 50% increase to your defense,"

THEN:

The replies would be, "But that doesn't stop the chance of being one-shotted! We need some resistance in the set!"

IF:

Statesman said, "We've granted you 50% resistance to all dmg except Psi as long as you take your passives ebcause, in the theory that you have superior reflexes, you would not get smacked full-brunt with that alpha strike,"

THEN:

The replies would be, "That doesn't make any sense with the set! Increase my defense, not my resistance!"

IF:

I were Statesman, I would probably say, "You'd complain if they hung you with a new rope."

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IF:

This concept was monotonic resistance, and not defiance-like scaling resistance

THEN:

You might have a point


IF:

The devs ever considered increasing SR defenses to make them properly balanced with the other scrapper sets

THEN:

Your post wouldn't be a nonsensical strawman.


IF:

SR was actually materially balanced with the other scrapper mitigation sets

THEN:

There'd be a lot less people complaining about changes they perceive to make less sense than other alternatives


IF:

this was relevant to the discussion

THEN:

I'd be forced to craft a more detailed rebuttal.

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I dont get it . How resisting blows is related to Super Reflexes ? While that solution could make the powerset better , i really dont see how that is making sense .

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Easy: dodge and get mostly out of the way, getting grazed by the bullet. Roll with the punches. Leap and make it most of the way out of the explosion.

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Its easy if you want it to be easy. Its not so easy if you actually think about it impartially. Take a bullet. You can *imagine* "mostly dodging" a bullet, but in actuality, given the side of a bullet, the side of the target (you), and the number of different options involved in either getting, or not getting hit, it is vastly more likely that you'll either get hit, or dodge completely.

You can imagine getting hit for less. But its hard to imagine someone *just fast enough to get hit for less* that doesn't just cause the attack to miss altogether.

Having said that, the devs are treating Def and Res as pure numbers, not as conceptual entities. Their many changes to the game - including ED - clearly demonstrate that their grasp of the fundamental differences among how the different attributes in the game interact is, if not faulty, then severely different from mine. So long as thats true, its just not worth it to advocate keeping SR conceptually pure, when the devs are unwilling to protect the concept. "Just don't slot it, or slot it but get very little benefit" does not come from the voice of someone intent on protecting SR's singular concept.

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This means that every Defense buff WILL stack to some degree with a player’s defenses, regardless of his power set.


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Been thinking about the right way to phrase my question as simply as possible:

If its true that all buffs will stack with all defensive sets, is it also true that all buffs will stack with each other?

Because if they don't, it'll still be a problem if buff A stacks with my defenses in one way, and buff B stacks with my defenses in a different way, and the net result is that I don't get to actually benefit from both - in effect, I don't get one of them.

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6) Again on numbers, if the "lucky" aspect of the set is to be preserved, you could make the resistance variable a la <omitted> so that it has a % chance to kick in after X hit points. And subsequently, it could a very high lvl of damage mitigation without being overpowered.


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Technically, its currently based on luck. The more unlucky you are, the more you will get.

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I've alluded to this in a couple of places, but I wanted to describe something we'll be doing for Super Reflexes quite soon...

Super Reflexes Auto powers (Agile, Dodge, and Lucky) now add some minor damage resistance. This Damage resistance starts at 0%, but improves as the caster loses HP. The Resistance kicks in at 60% HP (when HP bar first changes color) and markedly increases at 40% and 20% (again, when the bar changes color). We have not yet determined the exact values.

This change is in addition to the recent modification that gave most Defense Primary and Secondary powers resistance to Defense Debuffs (self Defense powers).

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Well, its not what I wanted, but I appreciate you continuing to look at and attempt to help out SR scrappers, who I've been saying for a while now needed some sort of helping hand.

Now, a question: is it really appropriate to be giving the only scrapper with no way to boost health and no self heal the only power that requires you get seriously hurt before it offers any benefit? When you added defiance to blasters, you added more health to them so they wouldn't immediately drop dead trying to benefit from it. Shouldn't SR scrappers get some sort of consideration of the fact that now a significant amount of their damage mitigation might come from a power that only engages while at low health? Maybe something like slottable regeneration in practiced brawler or something to take the edge off of constantly taking more damage and no way to heal it back would be appropriate.

Also, have you guys put any more thought into the fact that, as I've pointed out in a lot of places, SR appears to be the only defensive set that cannot in any way slot diversify in accordance with ED? I posted an interesting (I think) perspective on slot efficiency and ED here.

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There have been a lot of posts about which Defense powers stack with other Defense powers; some of this has been accurate, but some of it hasn’t.

Seemingly, we lost sight of a basic principle of Design: players shouldn’t make uninformed choices. Namely, some buffs had no effect on a player if he had certain Defense powers active.

Intuitively, a buff such as a Force Field should provide protection to a player – whether he is a Super Reflexes Scrapper, an Ice Tanker or an Invulnerability Scrapper/Tanker.

As a result, we went through ALL of the Defense buffs in the game and ensured that they provide a benefit to players, regardless of build.

This means that every Defense buff WILL stack to some degree with a player’s defenses, regardless of his power set.

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In principle, this is a good thing. However, the players are understandably skeptical as to whether this was done correctly, and even if it was, to what degree - apparently there is a lot of interpretation possible with regard to "will stack to some degree." And in fact, its almost impossible to actually meet that goal given the way defenses are currently typed, so the precise details would be nice to have, so we know how *you* interpreted "will stack to some degree."

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(pops Zoloft like a pez junky)

I don't know. None of this bothers me much. Anyone got some valium?

(holds bottle of pills out)

Anyone want some?

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No thanks. I already know how this party ends, and I now have a rule about waking up in the same county as my underwear.


Well, its more of a guideline than a rule, but its still good advice.

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Yeah, it's almost as if something else is going on with powers that is distracting him.

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I wonder what that might be?

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what good are those numbers without knowing the base?


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They still don't want people knowing the base values of powers, but because they have now changed how, and almost if, enhancements actually benefit you when they are slotted, they are giving you the enhancement numbers before and after slotting a new enhancement, or replacing one enhancement with another, so you know what the incremental benefit or deficit is, so people cannot claim they are not making an informed decision when slotting.

It is, of course, a very dubious distinction that there's no way for a player to know whether they can benefit from a *slot* before they add it, but the devs are walking a fine line: in a deep, fundamental sense, the devs have two incompatible requirements on their game design: they don't want people to be able to precompute what things will do before they actually do them, but they do want people to know in advance if they will do something beneficial.

On the surface, you might think that those two have some chance of being compatible, but once you start thinking about how to define the word "beneficial" you begin to see there isn't likely to be one.