Arcanaville

My understanding is that its player tohit of net +22% or higher. So debuffs count. Perhaps they should not count conceptually. Something to keep in mind when this becomes available for testing.

That seems to be a binary description of a situation with no binary dividing line. And it seems to run afoul of the rule of invariance. We can think of players as starting at zero defense and the critters at base 50% tohit, or we can think of the players as starting at 50% defense and the critters at base 100% chance tohit. In the latter case, which is mathematically identical but with a different perspective, players start off with 50% damage mitigation.

Why isn't that damage mitigation enough to allow regeneration to work, if the rule is you need mitigation to stop bursts. Relative to 100% tohit we all do have such protection. What's magical about 50% tohit, that if our mitigation when judged from that perspective is zero regen doesn't work, but if we have non-zero mitigation relative to that perspective regen works.

These are just numerical games that don't impact how the game works or what the players see. So they should not, and cannot affect the game. But the assertion "regen needs mitigation to make it effective" is an absolute statement in a game with lots of ways to judge mitigation that are all equally numerically valid (if not all conceptually valid or functionally efficient to use).

Depending on the blaster, I sometimes slot more or less into BU and Aim, but if I was trying to leverage my sniper blast, which delivers almost twice the DPA of most of my other attacks, I would be inclined to focus there a lot more.

Particularly during leveling when slots and powers are constrained, the BU/Snipe Aim/Snipe combos look increasingly attractive. You're not going to be running a marathon build in the 20s anyway, so burst is the way to go.

If you can't or won't buy Kismet, then yes BU is going to be less of a factor if you don't have tactics. But if you're going to do it at all, I don't think its unlikely you'll have tactics by 30 or so, which is still less than halfway through leveling on a time basis.

I wish I had access to the data that would let me analyze how often blasters die from full health in ten seconds or less. I would bet that its only a single digit percent, but I don't think we should start another bet until the current one reaches its conclusion.

I can say that a rough analysis of the logs I have suggests that happens to me less than 10% of the time, except in one situation: incarnate trials. In most other instances, the fight that kills me is not the fight that kills me, but the fight before. At some point, I decide to proceed while at lower health than advisable, push my luck, and then die. For me, I'm pushing my luck because I *know* what the survival odds are if I approach a spawn with less than full health. But for most players, that's not true and they have little idea how much more dangerous it is to fight a spawn at 60% health than full. I'll bet they even think to themselves if the first spawn knocked me from 100 to 60, I should be ok because the next one will knock me down to 20, and then I can rest.

One thing that I believe suggests that most deaths take longer than that are that mez was determined to be a factor in blaster deaths. But that's not really logical if blasters were dying very fast to very high damage. If blasters are being killed in seconds from full health, being mezzed wouldn't hurt that much: you'd be dead either way. Mez hurts because it makes time work against you rather than for you: its time the critters get to shoot at you while you're ability to react is limited, it gives critters time to move into melee range, it gives critters longer to kill you. But that doesn't matter when there's not enough time to matter.

400% regen (about) is a lot of health. Its comparable to popping one small green every fifteen seconds constantly. I guarantee if all blasters got a shoulder kitty that did that for them automatically without them having to have the insps or spend time popping them, that would help a lot of blasters.

Why would you say that? Both the snipe and BU are generally available relatively early. In most of my blaster builds I took BU (when it existed) generally as soon as it became available or soon afterward, specifically for its burst damage benefit. I'm not sure why that combination wouldn't be used relatively early.

Both. If you read the analysis in the link, it assumes BU and Aim will be firing close to as often as possible, but staggered with the recharge of snipe, after the initial alpha. Its only a proof of concept, but it demonstrates conclusively that the coverage percentage of the snipes is not dependent on the simplified uptime calculations of BU and Aim.


If you are doing that with AoEs, your play may be less focused on single target output anyway, and any improvements in single target attacks of any kind would be highly diluted. I'd stick to it if that's your thing. But the option will be there to start with the snipe, and then to follow up with the snipe in later combat at very high single target damage output.

Fair enough. The sniper change wasn't meant to "fix" blasters so no one should be compelled to take them either. It was meant to make them more attractive, but that doesn't mean they will be attractive to everyone.

I'm going to be hearing this phrase for months now, aren't I?

Does your /elec have the clap? Mine doesn't have the clap. I decided to go to Ms Liberty and get the clap. Do you have the clap? I just got the clap. What do you do with yours? I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

I don't consider Arbiter Hawk cautious at all. If I told the forums two years ago that I was going to ask Castle to give all blasters a 400% regen buff, you'd all think I was nuts. And the intent is for us to have that sort of benefit all the time. So its not like Arbiter Hawk was remotely cautious there.

I don't get the impression that making the insta-snipe non-perma is due to Arbiter Hawk being concerned about players making it perma, because at least two blaster secondaries have a path to make it perma. I think its more the case that he wanted to differentiate /Dev from the other secondaries, and this was his way of doing that in a way he thought was conceptually interesting.

As to whether its worth it or not, my back of the envelope calculations suggest that with just BU and Aim and SO slotting, with or without Hasten you can probably have about 80% of all sniper blast opportunities be insta-snipes. In other words, about as fast as snipe recharges, 80% of the time it will be in an insta-mode. 80% doesn't seem to be all that unusually situational to me, and that's for very low end builds.

I think the paper calculations won't convince most people, though, and people will just need to test drive it on beta to see how often sniper attacks are and are not in the insta mode.

It would be more proper to say that blaster primaries and secondaries are improving in ways that will likely alter the priorities of the players building characters with those sets by creating better options that didn't exist before. Its not a direct buff to existing characters, except by coincidence.

That one ultimately stymies everyone. I don't envy the devs basically always failing that criteria.

Great idea in theory, but since you mentioned them what alternative do stalkers have if they choose not to take assassin's strike? What's their alternative?

To be frank, if it was me I would have made all blaster sniper attacks interruptible but critical hit when the blaster was unaggroed (i.e. the alpha at the start of a fight) and uninterruptible and fast-firing when the blaster was on any critter's aggro list (i.e. basically in combat). But that might have required more tech than Arbiter Hawk's change, and it wouldn't address the problem of sniper blasts being sucky for anyone else.

But I'm not Arbiter Hawk and I'm not in charge and I can see where Arbiter Hawk is going with this, so I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and see how it plays out on beta.

What buff would you give /Devices that

a) made sense for the set

b) buffed it enough to matter

c) would be something no one else would think other sets didn't equally deserve

and

d) no one would complain about

There were stalkers that did not take Assassin's strike, because they did not like the playstyle that power compelled. And not all stalkers had a +health power. So not every stalker improved with those changes.

You refuse to take the snipe and you refuse to take the sustain power. That's your choice, and you should be entitled to it. But just like a stalker that refuses to take assassin's strike, those choices may not be optimal.

One thing I mentioned to Arbiter Hawk was that by giving more offensive options with one hand, and adding survivability with the other, the net result overall won't be an increase in offense and defense identical to the strength of those effects in isolation, because its almost certainly true that blasters will have to give back something else to get them to fit into their builds. Those things might even be inferior to what we're getting new, but it would still reduce the net incremental benefit of those things. I'm jettisoning tough and weave also, and getting energize. That's a net plus assuming blaster energize isn't nerfed into oblivion. But my survival won't be me + energize, it will be me + energize - tough/weave. Ditto for offense.

Its something to watch carefully as the changes are tested when they are released for beta. There's no question its a net benefit, but how much it will displace to provide that benefit is something that I think can't really be fully answered in a short period of time, except anecdotally in very limited circumstances.

There's a couple of things I'm thinking about to improve upon what Arbiter Hawk has presented so far, and I don't think Arbiter Hawk has shown his entire I24 hand yet. There's room for improvement, but I also think we don't yet know what the full context of these changes are yet. I have a suspicion on top of the options that snipes and secondary sustain powers offer, there will be a couple more tossed our way that will complicate these decisions further, perhaps not specific to blasters but still.

That sorcery power pool is still lurking out there, for example.

I did not say you were hoping that would happen. I'm saying it will happen whether you intend it to or not, and its inevitable.

In the general case, effect that affect an entire power like the power redirects can only "see" the caster, because in effect until the power is activated the power is unaware of its target. But once the power is activated, its too late to change anything about the power except its effects. Effects can key off the state of the target (i.e. if target sleeping then hit for X damage). But power execution (cast time, animation sequence, endurance cost, interrupt window, range, etc) can at best be altered by the state of the caster.

And some things are literally unalterable, like cast time, which is why the power-redirect mechanic had to be invented in the first place. Power-redirect happens "early" upon power invocation, before any data from the power definition is referenced for anything. So it can change anything, by changing what power is actually activated. That's a kludge, but it works.

Fair enough, but an alternate perspective is that the sniper mechanics can be easily leveraged to at least some extent by almost any build, builds that focus on leveraging it will do better, and the highest invention builds will tend to do even better. This feature is, speaking generally, a laudable feature for archetype features to tend to have.

The source of frustration in this situation tends to be when a player knows what the best possible outcome is, but either cannot, or doesn't not want to, satisfy the prerequisites to realize it. But not everyone sees it that way. This same source of frustration is a source of entertainment for many other players, including those that never achieve the highest possible performance.

Since the devs aren't going to nerf all of the other secondaries, the only way /Devices is going to be buffed to parity is that at some point it will get a buff everyone else doesn't get at all, or they get a buff that everyone gets less off. If its not this it will be something else. That will make you happy at the expense of making someone else unhappy, who prioritizes the something else higher than you do.

By all means advocate your case to the devs; I'm just pointing out the decision they have to make is not whether to make you happy or not, but to decide who they are going to pick to take your place. Its not a trivial decision.

That would seem to be impossible, since inherents post-date launch by a significant amount, and even then the first bunch were not really logical to slot: gauntlet, criticals, defiance, and containment.

Its there because the devs wanted to make the fact that /Devices has a tohit toggle an advantage relative to the other secondaries. So they designed the sniper buff in such a way that /devices could get that buff all the time, while other secondaries would tend to get it only some of the time.

You can't really do anything but concentrate the buff or spread it out, unless you want to start talking about lockouts and stack-prevention. And those have even worse public relations issues.

Every single person complaining they have to respec into a power they didn't take now, will *really* be complaining if that one power is now two. And its unclear this really creates any options, because if more buffs are really needed, what happens to the players who choose to take only one of the two survival powers.

In fact, if one is health recovery based and the other is preventative mitigation, those multiply. Two will be stronger than the sum of the parts. You will drift into an area where players start to complain about being penalized for not taking the two powers, because the synergy between the two mitigation factors becomes too compelling.

It probably will have a somewhat larger impact on teams than solo in many cases, but I don't think the sniper changes were explicitly targeted at Blasters. They were intended to help snipes themselves. That the changes help blasters was an intended side effect. Its the secondary powerset changes that were explicitly targeted at blasters and only blasters.

While they were thinking about blasters carefully within the context of the change, I don't think this is a case where the devs had lots of options and picked snipes to help blasters. I think this was a case where snipes themselves came up to the plate and the devs tried to integrate the change to sniper blasts with the blaster archetype.

I can't say how everyone uses BU and Aim, but I can say I don't personally stack them, nor do I recommend such. Its just not a good idea in general, even factoring in the alpha boost. I've gone both ways on this, and in my experience alternating them generates a much better net return, not just in offense, but in total performance.

Sniper shots have 12 second recharge base. I'm not precisely sure how the insta-fire code affects recharge, but I'm assuming that insta-fire snipes begin recharging as soon as activation is complete like any other attack which means sniper attacks will have a base cycle time of around 13 seconds. If you can get that cycle time comfortably under ten seconds, you can get two sniper shots off in a single BU or Aim window. And that's not hard: 50% slotted recharge would do it with no other global recharge.

If you can get two shots off, that means one use of BU or Aim will actually cover about 18 seconds of sniper attacks, assuming a safe 9 second cycle time. And that means BU and Aim can cover 36 seconds of sniper attacks. With nothing but SOs that's not bad: about 36 out of 45 seconds of BU and Aim cycle time would be covered, which is about 80% of the time.

If we throw in Hasten, things get a bit more lengthy to pace out. While Hasten is up everything will have +70% recharge. In a Hasten build, you'd need less recharge in Snipe: lets assume one SO's worth here, or about 33%. In that case, snipe attacks will have their recharge reduced to about 6 seconds, and will cycel in about 7-8 seconds. That means one BU or Aim window can only cover about 16 seconds of sniper attacks, or 32 seconds total. But BU and Aim's cycle time will be reduced to about 35 seconds. You'd have very close to 100% coverage while Hasten was up.

During Hasten's downtime, you'll have oscillating up and down effects but they will average out to what happens with one unhastened cycle. And with a lower 33% recharge in snipe, snipe's cycle time increases to about 10 seconds. Now, BU and Aim can only cover one snipe attack each, and only 20 seconds out of 45 or about 44%.

But that's during Hasten's downtime, which will be about 68 seconds out of 188 seconds. That means averaged out you'll be covering over 80% of all sniper attack opportunities. And that is with just SO slotting.


People still get confused by the soft cap, but that's life. I wouldn't want to revert to the days when it didn't exist in its current form because its harder to explain than "tohit-defense" is.

For one thing I run virtual machines. For another thing I sometimes multibox task forces. I also run scripts that process very large data sets. My big problem is that I'm sometimes doing all three simultaneously.