Arcanaville

I can do such calculations by hand for a given methodology that factors in offense in a particular way (itself a matter of some debate) but the spreadsheet I'm using comes from my I13-ish work on comparing sets for proliferation purposes: its designed to show the performance of all defensive sets relative to all others hypothetically proliferated to all four melee archetypes, with some others thrown in for comparison (i.e. kheldians, soldiers).

Given its intended purpose, the number of variables and conditionals its designed to deal with is rather high: trying to add in offensive pyramiding or other means to show spawn by spawn offense plus defense would probably be a bit too much for the format. 'Cause right now it looks like this:



See the box in the far upper right corner? The last two rows are your build, along with the two columns to the right of the orange and red columns. Lets just say this is *not* the starting place I would pick for a defensive comparison that factors in offense. This is a cap and modifier-aware what-if analyzer for defensive sets that happens to be reasonably ok for looking at defensive numbers in general. If I add any more rows or columns I'm going to have to start using photo-lithography to store the spreadsheet.

Based on my current spreadsheet, which I will admit I'm still catching up from I13 on, the closest analog I can find to comparable performance to your mental build would be a hypothetical Ninjitsu ported to Brutes, while under Kuji-in Retsu (Elude), with tough and hasten (for Kuji-in Sha). I get survivability scores of 5.10/4.09/.327/2.81 for Nin vs 5.44/3.93.2.71/2.02 for your build. Those are calculated survivability scores for sustained damage, 180s survival, 60s survival, and 30s survival, normalized to Invuln with SO slotting, tough, weave, CJ, Hasten, and 3 targets in invincibility range (meaning: 5.10 times stronger than an SO Invuln with those pool powers taken and slotted).

That's assuming you take the numbers of the build as-is, not factoring in reaching the soft cap with luck inspirations. Lucks would improve your build's numbers substantially, but also everyone else's as well.

If you want more absolute numbers, the spreadsheet says the sustainable smash/lethal damage level of the soft-capped version of the build is about 2200 dps, or about 200 times the damage potential of a level 50 minion (plus or minus, critters have variable offensive output). That sounds like a lot, but its actually a bit less than the average damage of a +4x8 spawn. Which implies that while you might be able to take one out, you couldn't tank one for very long if you didn't open fire on them offensively, even with soft-capped defenses and that level of regeneration.

I was tossing out examples, not asking questions myself. For the highest levels of build, none of those would obviously be capable of illustrating any survival difference because they would all be easily survivable by any high end build, which would make it impossible to judge who was doing so "better." You'd probably have to look much higher: +3x5 to +4x8.

I've just finished my first pass on my survival spreadsheet to allow me to add Bio Armor: I'm just waiting for Synapse's latest changes to hit beta. I can plug in your Mental numbers as a benchmark column if I have a build for them.

But I would imagine most such players do not build strongly either, and SO builds actually do tend to have survival levels that make +0x1 deliver a genuine threat relative to their defenses and their play mode.

On the surface, sure. I made the joke myself. But actually, Water Blast doing Fire damage should be translated as "this water blast does the sort of damage normally associated with fire." Not "this water blast somehow has fire in it."

I can convince them they should explode.

Although technically speaking I don't know what it means to terrorize an immobile object with no discretionary powers.


If people are going to complain about something small like "fire" damage really being "heat" damage, then they should really ask themselves what exactly a "cold" attack type is. And for that matter, what is "AoE defense" that it doesn't work on melee or ranged attacks.

They are, as J_B says, abstractions designed to evoke, but not simulate. Otherwise, the whole thing unravels fast. Energy attacks do only partial energy damage. Electric attacks generally do all energy damage. Fire is as much a form of energy as kinetic energy. Lethal isn't particularly lethal. And my long time favorite: Blind is described as a painful flash of light, and it deals psionic damage. Its not an illusion of a flash of light because it can affect nearby foes. Damage and attack types are intended to be reasonable, but that reasonableness is judged based on many factors besides pseudo-physics.

I wouldn't say either question is intrinsically an abstract question, although only you can say if your approach has an abstract perspective.

There are two basic question one can ask when it comes to survivability. The first is "how much can I survive?" The second question is "how long can I tank this?" The first question is generally much more important to powerset balance, because it sets the constraints on how far a player can push a set while leveling or playing through content. The latter question is a special case question generally useful when talking about very specific circumstances, and when avoiding death is not assumed. You might be trying to determine the average lifetime of something trying to tank a giant monster, or Lord Recluse in the LRSF, or something like that. You may even be looking at alpha strike burst survivability of a tanker that you presume will eventually get healed before the next spawn.

The danger of the second question is that you can't pick damage levels arbitrarily. For any two powersets in which A has more health recovery and B has more def/res mitigation, its *always* possible to pick a level of damage such that A looks better than B, and another where B looks better than A, even in ridiculously extreme situations. For example, even where A has 1000% regeneration and B has only 10% defense in the case where incoming damage is 4.0%/sec or lower A will look better than B, and in the case where incoming damage is 19%/sec or higher B will look better than A. I think most people would say that 1000% regen is generally better than 10% defense, and the reason why is because almost no one plays at difficulty levels where incoming damage is 19%/sec or higher, and the few that do have a lot more than 10% defense.

I think the best questions to ask in these situations tend to be connected to real in-game situations. Who best survives +0x1? Who best tanks +0x6? Who has better survival numbers at +3x1? That sort of thing. This particular approach doesn't have to be abstract, and in fact works better when its not abstract.

As Hopeling says, your memory is in error in this case: you may take your first power pool power at any time after level four when power pools open up. It used to be level six, but there was never a "use it or lose it" requirement to actually take a pool.

Also, power pool requirements have changed on the travel pools specifically. You can now take the travel power in the travel pool without taking an earlier prerequisite power. In other words, in the old days if you wanted Fly you had to take either Hover or Air Superiority first. Now, you can just take Fly directly. Also, the Fitness Pool is now inherent: everyone gets it automatically. If you have older characters that took fitness, you need to respec to get inherent fitness. If you have older characters that never took any fitness powers, the next time you log those characters in you should get all four fitness powers automatically.

For more information about pool powers and pool sets, you could refer to paragonwiki's page on them: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Power_Pools

I'm afraid that is the reason, although it may not be a satisfactory one to the OP. Even among the pet classes, not all pets are permanent or perma-capable. Controller tier 9 pets are perma, but the phantom army, say, requires enormous recharge to make perma, and even at that trying to make them up perma has an unavoidable problem: the first set despawns as the second set spawns (making using them to hold aggro permanently almost impossible by themselves in the general case). Mastermind Gang War isn't perma or perma-capable even though Masterminds are a pet class. The fact is that some pets are intended to be up all the time or available all the time, but that's limited to Controller and Dominator tier 9 pets, mastermind standard pets, and only some others. The Blaster pets aren't included among those pets intended to be up all the time.

Its actually intentional, albeit indirectly so.

4. Irony continues to be an art practiced by the people who least understand it:

You assume that any change to an archetype must combine numerical performance fixes and "pizzazz" in the same effect, but I believe that's actually the wrong way to do it. Flashy things that are *also* based on strong numerical performance changes tend to be unable to get too flashy, because their flash is constrained by the limits of the numbers the devs are willing to hand out. Conversely, numerical changes that have to also be flashy tend to be too difficult to balance.

Separating the flash from the quantitative leaves more options open to make things that are flashy and gameplay significant without being directly tied to pure numerical benefits, while numerical benefits can be balanced to the needs of the archetype without them having to bear the full burden of being perceived as being flashy. That's why, in the post where I addressed the question of what I would do, I mentioned several independent ideas, one of which was the quantitative element I could prove, namely the issue of DPE, and the other which was intended solely to proxy as an example for the general principle of granting an effect that was gameplay-flashy.

And yet you ask for things like damage cap increases which the vast majority of all tankers would rarely see any material benefit from.

I wouldn't say the assumptions behind maximum average sustainable damage are abstract. As I've mentioned previously, and its in my old timey scrapper comparison posts linked in my sig so this goes way back, I believe most people tend to gravitate towards a level of difficulty that is somewhat near the maximum they can sustain without dying, but not much higher than that (because then by definition they would die often). How close people get to the line is somewhat variable, but I don't think its common for people to make billion inf builds and then solo them at +0x1, nor do I think its common for people to take builds with low survivability and then vaporize themselves in +4x8 over and over again either. If a build *can* sustain 174.26 dps of damage on average, its likely that, with some small modification factors, the content they face will tend to either generate that level of damage or cover a range of damage where that value exists at the upper end of the scale.

Its definitely a *constraint* on survivability. If your build is calculated to be able to sustain 421.789 dps, then *averaged across your in-combat play time* you won't exceed that. You can't because if you do you'll eventually die, where "eventually" is measured by the size of your health bar, and for most situations is relatively fast.

If its an announced badge run, I don't think there exists a badge hunter worth the name that wouldn't trade a component for ten threads and an easy shot at ATGS.

It started that way, and "die and stay in the hospital" is an instruction that's easy to communicate, easy to follow, and easy to see if anyone has failed to notice the instruction (the instruction was/is given before the final terminal in the final reactor is completed, so there's lots of time to ensure everyone hears and follows the instruction, even in a league where people have little to no experience with Keyes, trials, or even reading English).

That depends on what you mean by bottlenecked. Click for click, button for button, a Tanker doesn't burn more endurance than a Brute. But particularly while leveling, Tankers have to click a lot more buttons. The difference is high enough to be noticable even comparing Brutes and Scrappers, much less Brutes and Tankers.

Deliberately so. The fact that end issues can be solved in the end game ignores the fact that you have to get through the early game before reaching the end game. And just because you *can* solve them doesn't mean they vanish. It means you get to spend opportunities to solve them instead of doing other things.

For example, you keep saying that there's no opportunity to increase damage like there is to increase defense. That ignores the fact that the singular change that has increased damage output across the board for everyone with higher end invention builds has been the proliferation of recharge bonuses. No tanker with a high end recharge build today underperforms a pre-invention blaster's damage output no matter how many HOs it was slotted with. High recharge builds of every archetype today outperform the best we did prior to those becoming available - even with perma-Hasten in the pre-ED days.

There is a lot less +DMG than +DEF in the invention system, but there's more +RECH than anything, and its recharge that turned 150 dps builds into 400 dps monsters.

Which you can only take advantage of if you are not endurance constrained.

I think the second paragraph contradicts the first one somewhat, at least by the definitions of power creep employed by the video. A critical symptom of power creep is not just added power, if that were the case then every time the devs add anything of value power-wise that would automatically be power creep. Its that the added power moots prior power. Level shifts are powerful, and they can be essential to complete high difficulty trials, but they don't invalidate older builds because the incarnate system is orthogonal to the invention system. You might have to *stack* incarnate powers onto your ultra expensive high-powered build, but you don't generally *throw away* your ultra expensive high-powered build in lieu of incarnate power.

That acts to reduce the negative effects of adding hierarchical power on top of the invention system. The incarnate system may have other issues separate from that, but one issue it does not have is that it does not make older builds obsolete.

The notion that my super expensive invention build that could take on the world no longer than cruise through everything with the introduction of incarnate class difficulty isn't really a power creep issue: its the more general issue of the MMO treadmill: no matter what you have, the devs will always add more, and you'll never have it all or be able to do it all without continuing to accumulate more power to deal with advancing threats.

In some MMOs, the two issues are inextricably linked, because there is no "more" you can get: you can only get better, by replacing what you have with something else. In City of Heroes, we have four largely independent ways to improve power: with actual powers, with slotting, with different kinds of enhancements particularly inventions, and with incarnate powers. Since each adds to the previous ones without replacing them, it gives us a hedge against the treadmill amplifying power creep. That's almost certainly why the incarnate system was created in the first place, and why I conjectured it was created. To extend without replacing.

That doesn't mean we've been immune to power creep. The invention system itself was a form of power creep, at least when it was introduced. It mooted older slotting, and even heavily devalued the previously best gear in the game: Hamidon enhancements. Introducing purples was also a form of power creep of sorts, as are the ATIOs and the store-bought attuned inventions. Fortunately, the level of power creep we've had in the game since launch has been fairly low in my opinion, or at least its impact has been relatively low, relative to other games. A person with a non-ED compliant SO build from launch could still play most of the content in this game without an overwhelming penalty, and actually most players still level up alts in this game with a level of power comparable to what we had in Issue 1, all the way up to the level cap. That suggests power creep's deleterious effects have been fairly low.

What you say above is mathematically impossible. Without powerful endurance management powers that most powersets don't have, no one can not be endurance constrained while leveling up. By mathematical necessity, those with the lowest DPE will have that constraint reduce their kill speed the most. Its about as boring and safe as inherent fitness, in the sense that it is in fact non-dramatic, and on the other hand likely to be an enormously beneficial quality of life benefit for most players that actually level tankers.

*That's* why I suggest it. That your specific issue with Tankers doesn't encompass any of those issues is not something I consider a problem of mine.

That would of course be wrong, because it would only be accounting for the passive mitigation. Also because it would not be a precise accounting for the fact that damage varies over time, staring high and ending low. Its also a determinable issue that while averages are actually very good proxies for mitigation performance, the things averages overlook tend to begin having impossible to overlook impact around 30 second survival times or levels of mitigation much higher than about 15x base survivability, plus or minus.

But whether its a poor question depends on the context the information is going to be used for. To judge two things in isolation that its justified to judge in isolation, its a fair question. For example, when we judge defensive secondaries for reasonable balance or strength, its fair to discount any primary mitigation or synergy because we assume every secondary can be legitimately paired with any primary. Primaries can't help secondaries when judging if a secondary is reasonable compared to peer powersets. But it is dangerous to judge an entire archetype's survivability based solely on its defensive secondary, because the archetype as a whole is protected by more than that.

Comparing one defensive power against another in a different set is usually an invalid comparison because there's no reason why any one power must have the same strength as any other: we don't get to choose powers at random: they come in sets, and its the sets that have to be judged as a whole. However, that doesn't mean we can't consider special cases that are just wildly egregious.

The context of Fulmens question was how much benefit should players get for making good decisions, relative to the level of effort necessary to formulate those decisions. So its valid for him to ask what's the return on investment between someone that doesn't build for defense and only has the regen from inherent fitness vs someone that builds for the soft cap and can maximize drain psyche. You can take up the subject with Fulmens as to how to judge the relative level of effort between the two cases, but its fair to ask what the return is, and in this case its something that a reasonable calculation estimates is a 70x survivability increase.

I agree that number has a significant margin for error, and I assume people realize that number is not a precise calculation for various reasons having to do with how that survivability strength is really valued and leveraged. However, saying its a "crapton" would not be as useful as saying its about 70x, and leaving it to others to decide to what degree to value that estimation. Everyone knows what I mean when I say "about 70x" and given that knowledge, they can decide for themselves how to translate that into their own estimation of the actual gain.


Honestly, in many ways is a lot more than 70x. Because a soft-capped blaster will avoid more debuffs and more mez. They will not only take less damage but they will take less debuffs that would amplify damage. They would be less impaired offensively on average.

They would be more brittle, in the sense of being more vulnerable to defense debuffs and tohit buffs, and the odd mez that actually lands, but its also true they would be more brittle because there would actually be something to break in the first place. A blaster with no protection can't have its defenses fail.

Mine's kind of more like this:



Oh look: apparently I'm hungry. I guess I should start thinking about lunch.

I don't think this is a case where the devs are saying blasters are at the bottom, lets make sure we buff them enough so they are no longer on the bottom. I think this is a case where the devs are saying that blasters are on the bottom, and they've been there for some time, and that suggests neglect, so now is a good time to give them significant attention.

I told both Synapse and Arbiter Hawk that while blasters had numerical issues that deserved quantitative solutions, I felt the task would be incomplete if it was not true that at least one blaster change, after being actually *tested* by the players, didn't make a significant number of them go:



I'm not convinced the announced changes do that, even though I think they are fine in general. But we'll see, and there might be other stuff coming. But until Blasters get their whoa, I'm going to keep asking for whoa. That's not so much a numerical thing, as it is a gameplay thing.

(I actually thought counter-mez could have both quantiative benefits and deliver some of the whoa if implemented correctly, because it could be both strong and flashy. That's one of the reasons I championed the effect.)

Those are acknowledged issues with *all* calculations. But when someone asks what the soft cap is, I say 45% outside of tohit buffs and defense debuffs, except for the 59% for praetorians. I don't usually give a lecture on all the ways tohit can be changed, unless that's actually the subject being discussed, whereupon I do mention all the problems with oversimplifying defense that way.

The question was: "where is the line of immortality for a S/L capped fully-Drain Psyche'd Blaster? Where is it for a blaster with 10% Defense and slotted health?" If you have a problem with the question, you should take it up with the person asking the question.