Arcanaville

Perma-PA is nice control on a single target, but you can't control significantly more than two or three things with it. Even trying to control three bosses will get three of the PA sometimes attacking one boss and the other two stomping on your head.

Also, as any illusion controller that uses "perma PA" knows perma PA is a colloquialism: there is no perma PA. Phantom army critters are designed to despawn when new ones are summoned: that means the previous set despawns while the new set spawns: you cannot consistently maintain solid aggro even on a single target with "perma PA" because they will not stack. You either need two Illusionists staggering PA, or there's a trick experienced Illusionists learn staggering decoys with the PA to maintain a lock on aggro. Again, generally for a single target.

Also, people have called for the PA to be nerfed, but the devs have stated it works as intended. That hasn't stopped the devs from adding special cases over the years that can kill the supposedly invulnerable PA, such as Hamidon, but those are generally very special cases.


This isn't even an issue of being intended. Its entirely possible this behavior was actually intended by the enhancement designer. I'm quite sure that won't prevent some future design review overturning that intent. Sometimes the devs just don't believe players will abuse something to the degree it can be abused. I don't know why, because this is one bet the devs nearly always lose.

That's irrelevant, because as I've said repeatedly now, while some players' definition of game-breaking seems to include the mandatory requirement of directly earning lots of rewards, that definition would only be relevant to any game they might choose to release in the future. It has no bearing on what is or is not game-breaking by both historical dev assertions and historical dev actions. In this game, earning massive amounts of rewards is a sufficient, but not necessary requirement for something to be considered game breaking. Its game breaking if it breaks some design rule of the game that is deemed unbreakable by choice.

So if the next game patch changes phase shift so we can shoot while phased, that would be game breaking. We don't all have to sit around and do calculations to figure out if that somehow aids the best farmer to earn more rewards. Anyone who wants to do those calculations is welcome to do so, but that would be of no consequence.

Everyone is free to make up their own definitions and perspectives on whether this combination is "game-breaking" or not. However, anyone making up their own definitions and concluding its not has no right to act surprised when its ultimately changed because the devs decide this behavior exceeds the limits of what the game design acceptably allows. They could change it tomorrow, or next week, or next year. And as always, my sympathy for the players who act surprised when it happens will be minimal.

Can anything change that fact?

I've never actually seen a problem with it, but every server community seems to be different in this regard.


On an early Keyes that was not even a badge run specifically, I was targeted by the Green over half the time and it *never* targeted the melee cluster near AM. Just luck of the draw. As I was very far away from AM most of the time and not very close to any other player (Boost Range) that run could have theoretically gotten the green stuff badge had just a few players been paying attention and were able to successfully avoid Oblit (I got hit once: it was a very early Keyes). So I know its possible to have a run where the RNG creates the circumstances for a league to get the badge with less than a quarter of the league actually having to pay attention. Its just rare. But I would expect it to happen on the order of at least one every thousand Keyes run somewhere.

It actually does something much more insidious. It disguises harsh criticism in pretend back and forth discussion.

Comic book movies suck. Just kidding. No I'm not. Really, I am. But they do.

Contrary to Scott's assertion, I have no need to feel perpetually beleaguered and disenfranchised. But I do feel compelled to point out phoney intellectualism, even when it doesn't rise to the level of competency necessary to beleaguer.

Never attacking you is better than usually missing you.

Game-breaking != Farm really really fast. If the IO made the character untargetable by critters, they could still theoretically be killed by untargeted AoEs, it would not help them kill any faster, but it would still be game-breaking.

The proc in bonfire appears to be better than the original bugged version of smoke grenade that debuffed tohit -100%. If the IO in bonfire is not broken then neither would a -100% autohitting tohit debuff in smoke grenade be broken. At least that would obey the purple patch.

The devs take feedback into account. That doesn't mean they obey individual players. Would it be fair for others to judge whether you listen to them based on how often you did what they told you to do?

The devs get feedback from lots of directions: from lots of different players, all of whom have different ideas (consensus among the players is usually an illusion). From their QA team. From their peers. All of that gets fed into the decision making engine that is a brain. They get paid to do what *they* think is best, *based* on all the information available, including player feedback. But listening to player feedback is not the same thing as taking a poll and doing whatever gets the most votes. That's not being responsive, that's being an idiot.

Here's the problem I'm facing:

You yourself are not obeying your own rules. Are we looking at who deals the most damage, who kills the fastest, or who earns the most rewards the fastest? Those three questions are not identical.

Keep in mind this started with a discussion on whether /Mental's damage mitigation was high compared to peers, and has randomly shifted to looking at damage without actually acknowledging that /Mental's damage mitigation isn't actually extremely high compared to peers, because apparently that question requires a considerable amount of effort to decide what a valid peer actually is, which started with the question of whether an archetype does enough damage relative to blasters, whether that comparison should be at the averages or at the highest levels of damage, and whether that damage should generate the same level of rewards.

The problem you face of attempting to prove your assertions is a problem you're supposed to have. Its not a problem you can legitimately dismiss for yourself while simultaneously imposing it on others. Very few, actually probably no one would or for that matter should allow you to make this sort of assertion:

without demanding some sort of evidence to support it. I leave it to the readers to judge which is more theoretical: my assertion that dominators are more survivable than comparably built blasters because their resistance and defense mods are higher and they have a control set or your assertion that all of that is trivialized by blasters with break frees and Clarions. What you're calling theoretical and irrelevant describes 99.9% of all blasters and 100% of all dominators. What you're calling more practical conceivably describes a single digit number of players.

The problem is that that is impossible to do fairly. What's the equivalent to a Fire/Psi Dominator. Fire/Mental Blaster? One is going to have imps. So you can't just do a straight up simple calculation: you have to do an in-depth analysis.

But if you believe its possible to easily prove Blasters always or generally come out on top, the most logical way to prove it is proof by example. Simply produce a proof that they always do, and you will simultaneously prove that such a proof exists. Conversely, if you can't, while that doesn't prove no such proof exists, it does prove its not trivial to produce.

Actually, something I suggested to another player was that max anything might not be the best high end analysis target. The best high end analysis target might in fact be a simulacrum of a high end spawn. Theoretically speaking, the actual amount of time it takes to defeat a spawn of, say, two bosses, five Lts, and ten minions would be a way to normalize single target and AoE damage - you would not get credit for more AoE than necessary, or for that matter more single target than necessary. Likewise, how long you can tank that spawn or how high in level you could still tank such a spawn indefinitely would also be more interesting metrics than pure dps ones.

But that would be involved to say the least.

It would be simpler to ask: one thing I'm not known for is being particularly secretive with my opinions when prompted. Or when not prompted. Or when you don't really care at all. Or if you're even still alive.

Whether Dominators are more versatile, or equally damaging, are valid discussions in their own right (1 - they are, 2 - at least on average I believe they are close) they are not essential to the more salient point that if you're going to compare blaster survivability - average survivability, peak survivability - with its damage dealing peers, then dominators have to be factored in as one of those peers.

And Dominators are a very serious fly in the ointment, because they push the discussion into a corner. You can claim Blasters have an unambiguous ranged advantage over Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers. You can claim they have at least numerical advantages over Corruptors. But when you get to Dominators, you run into an archetype that has a legitimate level of melee offense, a legitimate level of ranged offense, equal or superior access to defensive build opportunities, similar offensive modifier numbers, and massive offensive control. You lose the ability to point to obvious disqualifiers: Dominators take the fight right up to Blasters' front door. That makes the balance discussion very interesting: all the easy outs disappear.

What's interesting to me is that every obvious advantage Dominators have is so obvious it doesn't take a calculator to prove the advantage exists. They have mez protection. They have high control. They get endurance with domination cycles. These are all things blasters straight up don't have in any comparable sense. But to prove blasters have a *strong* material advantage over them in any compensating area *does* require massive calculations and detailed arguments that are not unambiguous, and readily debatable.

Its easy to prove Dominators beat Blasters in at least some areas. No one has yet proved Blasters beat Dominators *unequivocally* at anything of major consequence. Even if they ultimately do, that still seems to be wrong to me. It shouldn't be that hard to prove Blasters have something they are the best at.

I believe that not only should every archetype be the best at something, but it should be obviously the best at something, even if its debatable that the something is something a particular player finds interesting personally. I think its definitely true that regardless of whether blasters are the best at anything, they aren't obviously so.

That seems a bit specific: I wouldn't claim one thing Dominators can do that Blasters can't is use Domination. I do claim they have access to a significant amount of mez protection, which is a more general benefit that Blasters theoretically have a shot at equaling (Scrappers can do better without Domination itself, for example).

We need to carefully define what the nukes actually do. In the case of Nova, you could claim it kills most of a spawn composed of minions and Lts if its buffed enough in about three seconds. But that's not a fair assessment, because it crashes. It actually kills those things in three seconds out of the twenty three seconds the power imposes on you. And I think dominators are capable of killing a similar sized spawn in a similar amount of time, just with more button pushes.

Or you could claim that the nuke allows a blaster to burn a bunch of inspirations to blast a large group of targets and then recover relatively quickly with those inspirations. But then that has to be compared to what a dominator could do with those same inspirations and its own set of tools.

Some people believe "game breaking" means "I can farm way better than anyone else." Which is fine, if we're going by their definitions, which we will as soon as they release a game we can play.

But while some claims about the synergy are hyperbolic, by this game's definitions its possible Bonfire + KB2KD is game breaking because of its peculiar properties of 2 second cycle, autohit, and 100% effect. Although I haven't tested this myself (but I plan to) Bonfire seems to be capable of incapacitating anything not KB resistant. It could neutralize +20s, because it doesn't need to roll tohit against them and KB is not materially affected by the purple patch.

It doesn't matter if that doesn't translate into the best farming build in the world. Its still very likely game-breaking in the literal sense of the term. Even non-alerting high accuracy confusion is at least degraded by the purple patch. KD isn't, because the duration of KD is not affected by magnitude changes due to the purple patch.

No, I was discussing the qualifications for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all, and in that post I'm discussing my discussion on the qualification for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all. Which means I am now discussing my discussion about my discussion on the qualifications for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all.

I hate absolute statements like that. But there are peculiarities that are noteworthy in Dominators. They have stronger snipes than Blasters, not just in scale terms but also in pure damage point terms, even accounting for the higher blaster damage scale. Powers like total focus seem oddly harder hitting and possess higher DPA than Blaster versions (even with the associated increase in recharge, this is a significant advantage).

Conversely, I can think of no serious example of a case where a Dominator power was made weaker, or a blaster power made stronger, to make blasters deliberately superior to dominators in any way. The presumption historically seems to have been that dominators need help to be effective damage dealers, and by definition they cannot encroach upon blasters because both lay equal claim to the same territory: ranged and melee offense.

Its just that Dominators just happen to also have a second career.

That doesn't mean all Dominators out damage all Blasters: that's highly unlikely even for competent builds on both sides. But its almost certainly true that all Dominators are vastly more survivable than all Blasters piloted by any mammal that's awake, and average Dominator damage is probably very close to average Blaster damage just because the numbers make it almost impossible for anything else to be true.

Actually, given the fact that Dominators are declared damage dealers by the devs, have comparable damage modifiers, and can choose the best offense from two different powersets without most of the problems blasters do in generating hybrid melee/ranged offense, the burden of proof is on the people who want to claim Dominators *aren't* damage dealers for the purposes of game balance, and given devs statements that declare them to be such the burden of proof is very high.

Moreover, my own Energy blaster with close to 200% recharge cannot reach the maximum damage potential of the top end Archery Blaster, but I don't think that means I'm not a game-designated damage dealer.

In either case, you seem to be jumping between topics. I never said blasters mandatorilly needed to fight in melee. I said, in response to your questioning whether dominators are a valid damage dealing class or not, that dominators are explicitly designed to be effective damage dealers in melee and ranged combat, something blasters cannot claim. Which means its a bit nonsensical to question Dominator damage dealer credentials when they are, from a game design and dev position perspective, superior to Blaster credentials.

If I say birds are more qualified fliers than primates, one man on a jetpack doesn't contradict that statement.

Dominators are explicitly designated by the devs as damage dealers. That was the explicitly stated justification for the Dominator changes that changes the up and down domination-based damage design to constant always available modifier-based damage design. In fact, Dominators have a higher melee damage modifier than Blasters do (1.05 for Dominators, 1.0 for Blasters).

And in fact Dominators have a lot in common with Blasters in the broad strokes. First, they have both melee and ranged attacks. Second, they have *two* powersets designed to deliver damage - remember, control sets are Controllers *only* means of offense. Third, they have relatively high damage modifiers: Blasters have 1.125 ranged and 1.0 melee; Dominators have 0.95 ranged and 1.05 melee.

Beyond that, however, Dominators actually go farther than Blasters in terms of being designed as effective damage dealers in one specific way. The devs have stated categorically in the past that the design reason why melee archetypes have mez protection and defenses is to allow them to fight effectively in melee range. Those are considered design prereqs for fighting effectively in melee range. Blasters don't have those tools intrinsically, so while they are designed to fight in melee range they aren't - by dev decree - designed to be effective at it (skill can overcome that design flaw, thus blappers). Dominators are given mez protection in Domination, and they get high levels of control in lieu of defense. In fact, under domination Dominators have one-shot disable ability on bosses and elite bosses, something even Controllers don't have, much less Blasters in general.

You can argue the degree to which this affects actual gameplay (I argue it does a great deal) but there's no arguing with the fact that the devs have said being an effective melee damage dealer means having X, Y, and Z, and Blasters have Z (strong melee attacks) and Dominators have all three (mez protection, high damage mitigation, and strong melee attacks - stronger point for point than Blasters).

Given that most of the interesting set-wide mechanics have gone into melee offensive sets recently, I'm perfectly fine with a ranged one getting in on the action. Yes, most of the new sets have been leveraging the more complex mechanics options that the devs now have available to them, but that means nothing to people who play ranged sets and who should not be prevented from getting such sets just because the players who play all sets are bored with the newer mechanics.


Also, anyone purporting to understand the game mechanics should be satisfied with this statement: Steel Canyon fires are vulnerable to cold damage of which Water Blast obviously contains, and there's no such thing as an ice-based attack to the game engine in terms of vulnerability to damage.

If I recall correctly, this power was one of the examples actually brought up as being extremely dangerous when it came to contemplating a way to convert KB to KD years ago. A guaranteed, autohitting, rapid activating knockdown patch.


Edit: Incidentally, anyone falling in love with this behavior and thinking it will remain unchanged indefinitely is brain dead.

I've seen it happen through sheer stupidity lots and lots of times. But I would react poorly to someone I knew for a fact did it deliberately.

That's one of the reasons I don't volunteer to lead leagues. Anymore.

The amount of effort required to make this "trivial" change is enormous, because every single attack that deals fire damage would have to have its combat chat changed to refer to "heat" instead of "fire" and a mass search and replace would replace instances of the word "fire" that should remain even after the change. You'd also have to change their text descriptions, and alter the text of powers that buff fire damage, offer fire resistance, or display fire statistics, including the Real Numbers system.

Its days of work at least, followed by years of players asking what heat damage is and where fire went. And all to address an issue that is far less problematic than asking what "lethal" actually damage is, or what a "cold_attack" actually is.

Its called the mpemba effect, and its not a high school physics effect: at the present time the physics behind the effect is still actually unknown.

In either case, I don't think that effect helps someone encased in Ice being sprayed with boiling water.

It is in fact BaB, or one of his life model decoys has gone off the reservation.

Well, logically the thing to compare mental manipulation blasters to are psionic assault dominators. Dominators have a stronger drain psyche, higher resistance modifier and higher defense modifier. A comparable /psi dominator build to a /mental blaster build should be significantly stronger even factoring in the lower health, and it will have a control set stacked on top of that.