Arcanaville

Conversely, yellows become an interesting thing to pack.

Note: the typical snipe will end up with an Arcanatime adjusted DPA of about 1.74 DS/sec when accelerated. Psi Blast's snipe is going to be 2.32 DS/sec. AR's snipe is going to be a mind-boggling 2.99 DS/sec. For reference, Blaze's arcanatime adjusted DPA is 2.29 DS/sec.

All snipes are going to have single target DPA higher than almost any blaster ranged attack outside of Fire Blast - they'll even outdo Telekinetic Blast (1.65 DS/sec arcanatime adjusted).

+Regen will be half-enhanceable according to Arbiter Hawk. Absorb effects and +recovery buffs will be fully enhanceable.

TD + Kismet = perma awesome snipe.

Also, four even SOs in TD get you to 22.1%, also perma awesome snipe.

The number was actually chosen so targeting drone could get there without too much trouble, but most other blasters would have the effect non-perma with cycling BU and Aim, so that TD, and devices in general, got a boost relative to everyone else.

The click ones will be longer duration, and obviously impossible to suppress when up. Energize has a small frontloaded heal, so that also compensates for the case of being temporarily unable to use it, but we will need to test carefully to see how the other click sustain powers behave relative to the toggles.

Its also possible that click powers will benefit (to a point: Arbiter Hawk mentioned that effects won't stack) from recharge, where toggles don't. That may mean they have slightly better potential to grow relative to toggles. But I believe Arbiter Hawk's intent is for the variability of the strength of the powers to be constrained so no one gets the "bad" version.

Because Blasters tend to have more self tohit buffs than other ranged archetypes. And the +22% was carefully chosen as well: targeting drone slightly over slotted gets there perma all by itself, TD plus kismet gets there easily, but its very difficult to get perma without it in most other cases, so devices gets an edge relative to other sets at that number.

Actually, I believe he stated they have ideas for the three blaster primaries that don't have snipes, but he wasn't sure if they were ripe for discussion yet.

No change to mez or mez protection, but the intent is for sustain toggles to not suppress when mezzed. So in I24, when mezzed sustain protection stays up and you have two to three attacks you can use under Defiance.

Fair enough. There's nothing the devs could do that could possibly address all the problems everyone believes are the most important ones. But perhaps if the changes Arbiter Hawk announces are significant enough, it could suggest at least that the devs are willing to do significant things to fix problems they perceive exist: that would mean there's always hope that the problems you think are most important will be ones that attract their attention eventually, perhaps potentially even during the beta testing of the current changes.

Pthhth. I don't see why you have to wait that long. I do that all the time now.

Yes.

Actually, you're correct: I misspoke. Electric Armor had a heal added to Conserve power to make it energize: that doesn't violate the cottage rule which does not require numerical strength be preserved in all cases. But removing the heal from Energy Drain to allow Energy Aura's conserve power to be a duplicate of Electric Armor's Energize *is* a violation of the cottage rule's parameters. Which is to say, it changes the nature of a power by removing an effect completely. It would be the responsibility of the devs to state whether the need to normalize Energize between two sets or prevent the need to slot two different weaker heals was a strong enough balance reason to alter Energy Drain, or if they erred.

But as you say, you can switch. Psi/Mental is almost all psi (Tk blast does some smashing, but that's basically it). Against a high psionic resistance target you have an entire assault set that deals lethal and toxic. And you have a primary that can completely incapacitate an entire spawn outside of fighting AVs with tier 9s. Most psi/mental blasters would be stuck with a highly resisted damage type. Psionic damage in general is good to have for situations when its a weak spot in a tough target, but Psi Blast doesn't have a backup plan when its the exact opposite.

As far as I know, there is no upgrade path from any 32-bit Windows to any 64-bit Windows of any version. So I would never run Win7-32, because its a dead end. You can't even back it up and restore it to a newer Win7-64 system. I would stay XP until I had a system that could properly run Win7-64, and then make that one jump once and for all.

Well now. Unfortunately, that's not exactly the news. But don't give up hope. I have a feeling, and it may not happen all immediately, Santa Hawk might have something for you in his sleigh.

And I may have helped a tiny little bit.

We'll see. If so, let them whine for a while. I'm genuinely interested to see just how controversial, or non-controversial, Arbiter Hawk's changes are going to be. I'm going to use that to judge how insane our playerbase currently is.

The original 30% elusivity was never going to stand. It was practically a random shot in the dark: the devs said they would test with that value and then adjust it based on testing.

Did they listen to me? Well, I did say publicly that that value was too high, and it was too high, but if they listened to me every powerset would have had a different Elusivity strength. Also as I specified in my post on the public forums about this very subject they would have, you'd think actually used my system to calculate what that value should have been.

Since I'm only the inventor of Elusivity and not an actual dev, they didn't actually do what I specified was supposed to be done. So I don't think they actually listened to me.


But that's sort of your problem. You have an interpretation of the world that is not only stressful, but false. And that seems to be unnecessarily self-flagellating. Myself personally, when I get to the point where I would even consider posting something like the OP, I just take a break from the forums. The forums are not the game. The game is the game. The forums are a metagame, and not even a particularly profitable one. You should only play the metagame when it enhances your enjoyment of the actual game.

Yep, my history is eight long years of greedily demanding ridiculous and unjustified buffs without any basis, experimental data, quantitative analysis, or in-game experience-informed judgment.

At some point, you have to draw the line: you can't save everyone. I could work towards addressing defense issues in the game, and I could explain why the ultimate solution to those problems was fair. But at some point, I had to conclude the people saying it wasn't necessary, and I should learn to play with the game as it is, and if they don't see the problem I must be wrong, were not in the grand scheme of things necessary to convince. At some point, I simply had to let it go. The game is better off now: that's what matters.


I said, when I first decided to start talking about Blasters, that not everyone would agree there was a problem, and would probably never agree that any change made was necessary, or judicious, or even a good idea. And that was ok, because my goal was getting them fixed, not convincing the entire world they needed fixing. The devs have taken a step. Maybe its enough. Maybe its not. Maybe blasters will need even more. If so, my priority will be to convince the devs to do more. It will not be to convince everyone they need more.

The people who don't want these changes, or think they are excessive, will just have to learn to play the new blasters. And just like everyone could learn to play them the way they are and survive, everyone can also learn to create the appropriate level of challenge for themselves. Being unable to challenge ones self in this game is no different an intellectual failing as being unable to overcome those challenges when presented.

Dominators were broken enough to be revised. Stalkers were broken enough to be revised. Kheldians were broken enough to be revised. Gravity was broken enough to be revised. Electric Armor, Energy Aura, Force Fields. Tankers were revised. Brutes were revised.

By the standards of what has been revised in the past, Blasters have needed revision at least as much, if not in most cases vastly more than virtually everything that has ever been buffed in the history of the game.

Some people genuinely do not understand where the problems are. Everyone sees things differently, and some people either have the skill level to swamp the differences or simply happen to be people who like the quirks of blasters more than the other archetypes to the point where that counterbalances any objective difference. If so, an explanation may help, but historically speaking it generally doesn't.

Nevertheless, its obvious to the point of excess that when looking at blasters objectively, by reasonable design criteria, that blasters have always had a perception problem working in the opposite direction; that they were *supposed* to be fragile and *supposed* to be more challenging and *supposed* to have higher offense even though every developer design rule actually tells them to make blaster offense *lower* than melee archetypes - which is actually one of the biggest perpetual lies about the design of the game since its inception: that blasters are *designed* to have far higher damage than other archetypes. They in fact don't. If they do, its because of an amazing and mathematically inexplicable anomaly - or players just convince themselves they do because its a pleasant fiction.

How, exactly, they were "broken enough" to need "another tweak" is something I've spend hundreds of thousands of words over the last year or so explaining. It isn't any one thing. Its actually practically everything. Its the fact they historically have underperformed, and the odds Defiance 2.0 corrected that problem is low. Its the fact their damage is hampered by a lot of design rules that hurt them relative to other damage dealers, particularly melee damage dealers. Did you know there's an actual rule that states melee attacks are supposed to have higher DPA than ranged ones? Probably not, but it exists, and that's why they actually do: anyone with access to City of Data can check for themselves. Melee is given defenses to deal with "higher risk" and then even though they have a tool to mitigate that risk (defensive powersets) they are then rewarded again and again for assuming risk the devs designed them to ignore anyway.

Everything has benefited over the years from the devs' shift to a solo-friendly design principle that says "everything must have enough damage to solo effectively." Everyone's damage now falls within a wide but not excessively so range. But there's no rule that says "everyone should have similar damage mitigation." The range of (designed) offense in this game is measured in percent: the range of mitigation is measured in double-digit multiples.

The cottage rule prevents massive redesign of the manipulation sets, but every designer from Geko to Castle to Black Scorpion to Synapse to Arbiter Hawk has implied publicly or privately that those are not designed very well at all. And a critical design flaw exists in Blasters from 2003: every hero archetype (and villain one in CoV) was designed with at least one powerset that delivered damage, and one that offered a survivability benefit. Every archetype except blasters. That was not a problem when the devs were thinking that controllers, defenders and tanks would not be dealing very much damage due to trinity balancing, but in retrospect that was an enormous error. An error that years of post-launch balancing has continued to rub raw.

Blasters have the most problematic attacks with snipes and nukes, they are the only archetype given significant melee offense and no damage mitigation to leverage it (which the devs themselves have stated is a *prerequisite* for melee offense- its even the original justification for melee archetypes to have mez protection), their proscribed ranged advantage was mostly eliminated because the devs were uncomfortable with it after launch even though they were also advocating it at the time.

The problem with blasters is that they have so many problems. We can debate individual ones for years, but no archetype can be reasonably described has having so many problems that can be objectively tied to non-subjective design rules of the game. If only a third of them stick, and I think I can make all of them stick, they would qualify as the archetype with the most issues.


Is it realistic to expect that blasters will get some sort of damage buff and some sort of survivability buff? Well, as we actually are getting both, I would say it is in fact realistic to expect.

Since Pong? Yeah a little.


I don't think I'm going to regret gaming on my deathbed. I'm probably going to be regretting whatever put me on my deathbed more.

I believe it would be fair to say the goals were:

1. Blasters be dead less.

2. Blasters be shooting better.

3. Arcana doesn't go 0 and 2.

That's essentially a paraphrase of the cottage rule, and that's probably exactly why that won't ever happen.

But that doesn't mean you can't alter powersets in dramatic ways that nevertheless obey the cottage rule. It just requires the need to do so, and the will to do so. Look at Stalker primaries, for example, or sets like Energy Aura and Electric Armor. All significant changes, but within the limits of the cottage rule.