Arcanaville

A few errors in here:

180% vs 1680: unslotted Health is +40% regen and DP does +75% unslotted per target.


Its 90%, not 95%: and thus 1200 not 2400.

1740%: 140% + 1600%. Although as mentioned before, that should be closer to 1780% = 180% + 1600.

I think with those corrections the rest of the numbers follow, except for:

Its not really kosher to compare two things at a damage level where both die, except in extraordinary circumstances, at least not without some context. Players don't generally play the game at a level where every spawn kills them, they tend to play at the highest difficulty level where they can still survive to the end of the mission. That's why it tends to be more accurate to compare at the point where they both sustain the damage indefinitely.

My rough estimate calculation goes like this:

Blaster with slotted health ~ 200% regen (178% with 1.95 slotting and no other bonuses). DP saturates at about +1500% regen (+1463 with 1.95 slotting).

All other things being equal, the DP saturated blaster can take 8.5x more damage over time (1700/200).

On top of that, the soft capped blaster is getting hit 8 times less often than the blaster with only 10% defense (50-10 / 50 - 45). That means the soft-capped DP saturated blaster can sustain about 68 times more damage than the one with slotted health and about 10% defense, or about 70x.

Doing the more accurate calculation instead of the estimate in my head, I get 73.75x more survivable.

Edit: Incidentally, for reference my estimate for how much more dangerous a +4x8 spawn is relative to a +0x1 spawn is 60-80x more dangerous just in terms of damage output alone.

Well, I'm not planning to stop bugging the devs about blasters until I'm convinced the archetype's set of tools is fair. Of course, I don't promise to continue to do so until everyone is convinced.

Once I recall they went on sale 10 for $6 and I filled my freezer with them, literally. Something about that crunchy crust and those pepperoni cubes.

The players that decide not to study build craft, not memorize paragonwiki, not fall asleep to my guides, they should not expect to have the same performance as the players that do.

BUT, they should get the performance promised to them by a game that states unequivocally that such things are not necessary to achieve the minimum performance the game intends playing the core content. The notion that such people should be educated on how to gain higher performance presumes that no one deserves *any* level of performance without a significant level of effort. This game does not say that. This game, and every dev team that has developed it, has stated the opposite. Its also for the most part been implemented to allow such players to achieve good things without all that effort. When that's not possible, that is the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

Until the devs say that blasters are hard mode, they do not get extended the latitude that "some" things just require more effort. The playstyle itself may be harder, or not as approachable, and that's fine: the game specifically intends to support different playstyles, and by definition playstyles can't be balanced. But factoring that out, the *tools* given to players to execute their playstyles should not be judged based on what the best players can do with them, i.e. their potential, but rather on what the average player actually does with them, which is their intrinsic value to the game.

Fulmens: the difference in survival between the two points specified is about 70 times higher.

There's only one thing that can stop me once my mind locks onto those:



Incidentally, food industry, stop telling me my food has 100% real cheese: it just reminds me that the food industry believes there's an actual alternative to 100% real food.

When I was in college, these would sometimes go on sale for like a buck:



I am embarrassed to say I still occasionally crave them. And that I was in college back when these could be purchased for a buck.

I didn't have anything more to say about the rest: I was just commenting on the implication that I might be opposed to general disagreement. In the future, I will try to quote you in a manner that places me in the worst possible light.

I don't mind disagreement at all. Its been polite, and its been thought provoking, even if it may not seem that way.

Actually, what boggles my mind more than anything is that the writer in question publicly admits that

a) he actually didn't know anything about Felicia Day before going off on her

b) he was drunk and thus tweeting wildly


I have no idea why the writer thought either statement would make his actions seem anything but *worse*. Both admissions make his acts even more reprehensible.

Actually, its a pet peeve of mine that there seems to be a growing subculture of the internet that believes "sorry I was drunk" is an excuse for anything. As far as I'm concerned its an admission that you're aware you're a harmful person when intoxicated, but you do it anyway because you could give a damn about anyone else.

More specifically all laws regarding gambling that I'm aware of require the prizes to have specific and explicit monetary value. As none of the virtual goods sold for City of Heroes has sanctioned monetary value and as selling them outside the game is forbidden by the EULA, legally there is no money involved, so there is no gambling happening in the legal sense.

Incidentally, within this context what you pay for an item is not legally its worth. What its worth legally in this context is what you can sell it for. So just because the items in the store cost points, which cost money, doesn't mean legally that can be used to state their monetary value.

Well, I have two responses to that. The first is that I don't find it sad that I generally find myself siding with the casual players over the min/maxers. The min/maxers don't need my help; the casual players do. The game would survive without us: it would not survive without them.

The vast majority of min/maxers stand on others shoulders: they don't do anything alone. I don't know how much of this game's information you could reproduce from scratch on your own, but most min/maxers would be living in the dark ages without Mids, paragonwiki, the game's mechanical equations - nearly all of which were discovered or reverse engineered by players, not just handed to them by the devs. Most min/maxers, probably yourself included, were helped by lots of other players you probably will never know the names of.

To look down upon any other player because they haven't taken as much advantage of those gifts as you have strikes me as ingracious.


The alternate response is that I'm not asking you to be ok with anything. If you genuinely believe in meritocracies, then simply advocate to get what you want in the game. I do, everyone else does, and so should you. The players with the best capability to do that will get what they want, which is exactly how it should be: skill should be rewarded.

I've invested eight years building credibility with both the players and the devs; I've spent more time analyzing the game and its systems than even the dev team has, and I've played every aspect of the game from every direction extensively. Should not that time, effort, and skill be rewarded? What reward I specifically choose is entirely my business.


I also have a third response that will sound offensive, but its not intended to be so, at least not directly. Its this: everyone has a point of pain when it comes to complexity and difficulty. Long before mine is reached, I can assure you yours will be. The day I turn to the dark side, I won't be agreeing with you, I'll be advocating a level of difficulty that excludes you.

When we were first attempting this on Triumph, I suggested (after a few failures) to the league leader that we just park everyone in the hospital and I and a few other players good at Oblit dodging would take out AM. We got it on the second or third try with five players.

I can't imagine the devs thought that anyone would use that tactic. I was a bit worried that players would not want to go along with that, but everyone gets the badge whether they are actually at risk of being targeted by Oblit or not, and it seemed most people would rather get it quickly in one go than be the one to accidentally fail it and have to go again.

Someone was trying: the beam always targets a player and it never misses (short of an instance bug). So while the league might not have been trying, you probably got lucky and the beam kept targeting isolated players that individually decided to get out of the way.

There was one Keyes where I was targeted literally half the time. If the RNG was targeting players good at avoiding the patches, that was bad luck for them but good luck for everyone else.

I think its simply the case that the devs consistently underestimate the probability that the player community will farm the hell out of something when given half a chance. And in the specific case of the iTrials and the incarnate slots, I don't think they really considered that by linking the two together they would create a feedback loop that encouraged momentum play. Which is to say that everyone wanted to get in on the trials while everyone was getting in on the trials to unlock the slots that they could use in the trials. On many servers, if you were not doing them when they first come out, the ability to do them dropped over time as the core group of higher content players moves on to something else. Even on high population servers there were shifts in popularity for the trials: on lower population servers those shifts could mean the difference between finding a trial in a few minutes and waiting hours or not seeing one start during your playtime window.

Giving us all the slots at once and hoping we play through slowly is like going on a month long vacation and leaving all your dog food poured out onto the kitchen floor for your dog to eat whenever he's hungry.

Now that they know that, they'll probably be more cautious about handing them out too quickly. And I think they have no schedule for them at all: they will hand them out as high end rewards for doing special high end content, as that high end content arrives. If it does, we get the slot. If it doesn't, we don't until it does.

Honestly, most geeks and gamers I know are not socially inept victims of Alpha Beta house.


Ok, there was that one class I almost failed because I was playing Ultima IV and didn't show up for a test, but I wouldn't call that socially inept. But I wasn't a social outcast, and my geek resume would fill a book.

I don't think everything should be *equally* accessible, but I believe there is a general acceptable range for most things, and /Mental is a core powerset, not a special case like, say, the entire set of Kheldian archetypes which are *stated* to be exceptions.

However, its also moot because its the general philosophy of the dev team, which isn't going to change short of all the powers people and positron getting hit by an asteroid.

I say that as someone with more experience as a blapper than all other blaster configurations combined. The switch from D1.0 to D2.0 cut my damage output by about 10-15%. That's not a calculated guestimate: that's a measured value from when D2.0 was being tested. Its still the case that I agree that D1.0 was more suicidal than beneficial for the vast majority of all players.

I honestly didn't give it much thought before Arbiter Hawk mentioned it (technically, before another player mentioned it before AH). I'm simply stating the fact that when Arbiter Hawk says its broken, it has nothing to do with a vague notion of whether the effect is too powerful, and simply the fact that its flagged in a way no power should be flagged according to their design rules. That's usually what the devs mean when they say something is "broken" - broken is not synonymous with "overpowered." Broken means it broke a rule in an unambiguous way.

If that was *all* that was wrong with the power, AH would flip the flag and call it a day. The cottage rule doesn't protect that change. But it is one among many noteworthy oddities about the power that AH decided to mention off the top of his head.


The double-stacking invincibility bug was a bug that was discovered after release: invincibility's defense buff pulses were almost twice as long as they should have been. And that meant the defense from the previous pulse was actually stacking with the current pulse: you always had two pulses stacked on you, and the power was therefore about twice as strong as intended. You could floor incoming attacks with like four or five targets in range.

The controversy surrounding this bug was exacerbated by the fact that there had been long-running discussions about invulnerability and whether it was genuinely a "resistance" set - players who tested it demonstrated conclusively that invincibility and nothing else was vastly superior to everything else minus invincibility.

It didn't help that invincibility was changed a couple times during, and that Invuln was ground zero for many of the early game balance discussions at a time when no one knew for certain how everything worked and the devs were extremely bad at communicating that information.

Both Soul Drain and Eclipse are generally available for archetypes designed to function within melee range of many targets. While its true that even for those archetypes, there is or can be a point where the player cannot sustain the damage necessary to saturate the power, that limit is generally much more gentle when encountered than it is on something not designed to have such defenses. If you jump into a group of three today on a Dark Melee character, you might try five tomorrow; you might try seven the next day. At some point you may decide the risk isn't worth the reward, but you're likely to have some time to figure that out. That's not true for Blasters.

In fact, even Soul Drain for Blasters has issues: its a nice blapper tool, if you happen to have the skill to be a blapper, but the statistics say most players don't. It can't be used as a way to boost alpha strikes and thus mitigate damage, because its mechanical use essentially nullifies the ability to mitigate the alpha.

It would be like giving AAO to blasters. It would be nice, for those of us that can convert to blappers. But to most blasters, it would just be a temptation to commit suicide comparable to Defiance 1.0.

That's true. However, as my judgment is informed by a level of in-game experience that is unlikely to be inferior to yours, my previous statement stands.

That would make your opinion of my perspective generally worthless.

In the same way that saying double stacking invincibility was broken omits the case of only having two things in its radius.

That's true. As I was asked to look at this, here's my analysis of card valuation.

Alone, the percentage of each card type that is delivered to players says nothing, because there's no reason why the card values can't and aren't likely weighted. In fact, this suggests that card value is normalized by type which would be obviously false in the case of rare and very rare cards.

But we can *try* to see where logic takes us. Lets assume that very roughly all cards of the same rarity are worth approximately the same amount. In that case, we can make some deductions about value:

If we go by the value of merits, then if we assign the value of common cards as 1, the value of uncommon, rare, and very rare cards would be 2, 3, and 4, due to the number of merits in each card type that awards merits (25, 50, 75, and 100).

The same would be true if we look at the Experienced power and Enhancement Unslotters for common, uncommon, and rare.

For Windfall and XP Booster, rare would be twice as valuable as uncommon.

For Boosters, the ratio would be 1:2.5:4 for common, uncommon, and rare.

All told, the relative value of the cards seems to be between 1:2:3:4 and 1:2:4:6. I'm going to use 1:2:4:6 for the rest of the analysis.

Lets take the 44.20% Common, 20.00% Uncommon, 20.00% Rare, 15.80% Very Rare numbers and round off very slightly (to make life and ratios a little simpler), to get to 44:20:20:16 as the approximate distribution of the cards in the packs. In that case, the actual value of the cards in a pack on average to maintain the above ratios would be 44:40:80:96, and using 80 PP as the base point value of the average pack, the value of the cards in the pack would be approximately:

Common: 6.15 PP
Uncommon: 12.3 PP
Rare: 24.6 PP
Very Rare: 36.9 PP

The Elemental set had two common, three uncommon, three rare, and three very rare components for a total of 11 items. In actuality the devs probably don't consider shoulders to be six times more valuable than sleeves; if they sold the set they would make each item cost about the same amount. But if we consider the rarity distribution to roughly reflect the set's value in aggregate, then we get an estimated value of the Elemental set as reflected in the card scarcity distributions as approximately 233.7 PP.

But that's not really a genuinely precise estimate of those items value in a number of ways: the costume pieces were known obvious chase elements, and the devs weighted the cards to actually cause them to drop faster than the normal scarcity would suggest. Its more what I would call a projection of the potential value of the elemental set and the cards in general. I would consider 233.7 to be more akin to a lower bound on the value of the set than an estimate for its target value. I would believe the set was intrinsically worth more for three reasons: they were (individually) unique chase cards designed to improve the value of the super packs: that implies they added value to the super packs and thus were worth more than their card designations implied; bundles generally cost less than the individual items do separately; the common and uncommon costume parts are probably artificially devalued in the interests of card distribution.


Incidentally, the superpack type with the highest intrinsic value based on card values is also the most common: its the pack with 2 commons, 1 uncommon, 1 rare, and 1 very rare. All other pack types have less value, and that's true no matter what the cards are worth, so long as higher rarity cards are worth more the lower ones in any way. Based on my calculations above that pack contains about 86.1 PP worth of cards. The worst pack, which occurs about one in two hundred, has 55.35 PP worth of cards (common, common, common, uncommon, rare).

Given that light form doesn't cap all types, and barely caps the ones that do, its not a power that has the same properties I mentioned Drain Psyche has that are considered problematic from a design perspective.

Whether Light form is a better power than Drain Psyche is a matter of opinion, not a matter of design fidelity.

There's also the question of intent, which Arbiter Hawk's comments do not address but would be relevant to a more general discussion between the powers. There's no question Light Form does what it was intended to do as a defensive power. There's no question that neither the players that have difficulty making it work at all as a PBAoE, nor the players that min/max the power to be perma-saturated, are generating the nominal intended result. That makes it doubly broken, as the power contains no credible moderate middle for average players to leverage.

The problem with Drain Psyche is not simply that its overpowered. Its really that its overpowered in its optimal use case and overburdened in its mechanical use requirements. Its mechanics strongly discourage moderate usage. You have people claiming both that its very weak and that its very strong and both are situationally correct. That is a fundamental flaw in the power's design.

He didn't say the drain itself was overpowered, the problem with the drain in DP is that its enhanceable. As far as I know, its the only power that has drain that obeys strength modifiers, and as far as I know that's not supposed to happen. In other words, that particular effect is broken because its not flagged properly.

The power is overpowered in the sense that its a power that can be cycled continuously that comes close to capping out regeneration and massively caps out recovery, and those caps are there for a reason: smashing into them at warp speed is often a sign that someone made a mistake with a power implementation.

Debating whether a single power that caps out regen and recovery simultaneously is too strong is a debate best left to people with too much free time.