Arcanaville

Next on my list to think about after we see what happens to Blasters. Its a non-trivial problem to just make go away, because its left an enormous footprint on a huge number of powers that can't just all be changed now, and a lot of things have been subsequently balanced around a world where that happens to be true.

How about turning off hardware accelerated video in the flash player?

The minimum baseline performance level is "must be able to reasonably solo standard difficulty core content missions." That's dev-confirmed.

However, that's just the lower rail of performance. Blasters were not adjusted in I11 because they breached that rail. Rather, they failed a second test, the actual criteria for balanced performance. Every powerset combination for blasters was datamined to determine its average performance, as the devs define performance (the rate at which a player can earn rewards such as XP and drops), for all teaming conditions (including solo) and at all combat level ranges. The data showed that *every* blaster powerset combination underperformed the average of all players combined by more than a critical threshold. That critical threshold represents the size of the bullseye with regard to performance. Any powerset combination that falls outside that range either underperforms or overperforms. Individual achievement is irrelevant to that metric: what any one player can do means nothing. What matters is what all players do on average.

Based on the devs definitions of performance, if Blasters have lower performance than everyone else by a large enough factor, they underperform by definition and must be addressed by design rule. However, its equally true that if all other archetypes improve by enough of an amount except blasters, that will move the average point enough to where once again Blasters will fall outside the acceptable range, and again will be by definition underperforming and require review.

Its the average performance of all players playing all powerset combinations in all archetypes that is the definition of "average performance." Every powerset combination in every archetype must land within a certain distance of that average. NO archetype and NO powerset combination is deliberately designed to be far above average. Many of them appear to be particularly good for players to min/max, but what individual players can do when min/maxing is a side balancing issue, not a core balancing constraint.

The devs basic philosophy is design around the average, and use limits to hem-in the extraordinary.

Under current conditions, maybe.

If I said Scrappers have a higher melee damage modifier than Blasters, cheat and use it for their primary and secondary ranged attacks where its equal to the Blaster ranged modifier, and have even higher average base damage due to crits, have the same damage strength cap, have a higher number of AoEs on average, have stronger self damage buffing powers on average, *and* have higher DPA on average by design** on top of having vastly superior damage mitigation on average, would you say its more likely they might encroach on Blaster offense?


** That's actually a design rule involving melee and ranged attacks. And unfortunately, that's not a guess either. It is what I always mean when I say "its not a guess."

Nemesis is a special case because of his phase shifting ability. Werner is also a special case because that fight would have driven any normal human being crazy.

Theoretically, yes they can. Not sure they would want to do that in Build Up, though, for a variety of reasons.

What would you do with Devices? And would you add it to Soul Drain, which actually has to hit a target to get any benefit? And would you add it to Concentration over and above Drain Psyche?

I've made a few more errors than that, but fortunately I do tend not to repeat them (except for a weird twitch involving Defiance 2.0 and what issue it was released in: I keep typing I13 for some reason).

Actually, because correcting my errors is a cottage sport, while I can be wrong I can't be wrong for long. Either I'm right, or the person correcting me soon after is right.

We know that blasters had trouble soloing at *any* difficulty level when played by the average player prior to the I11 Defiance changes. That was in spite of the fact that the majority vocal opinion on the forums saying they couldn't see any problems with Blasters. That means those player perceptions were wrong. The end.

Now, if you can't see any problems with Blasters *now*, historical precedent says that anecdote is meaningless. It simply means you can't see them. *If* you have a reasonably comparable level of skill with multiple archetypes, you could *attempt* to observe a variant of the problem by playing at higher difficulty levels. This might help *you* see a problem *you* may have difficulty detecting that affects the playerbase as a whole. Failure to succeed at those higher difficulty levels does not mean Blasters should be buffed until all players are capable of playing at that level. It *suggests* that Blasters might need to be buffed until *you* can play Blasters at comparable difficulty levels to other archetypes, at least up to some limit.

I know that limit isn't +4x8. I know its definitely higher than +1x2. I suggested the range of valid testing was from +0x1 to +2x6 because that was a reasonable limit on the upper bound of TESTING. That does not mean I'm declaring that all Blasters must be able to solo at +2x6 by all players. It means the converse: I don't think any tests higher than +2x6 are meaningful to the standard balancing criteria for the game, even when conducted by expert players. If you can play your scrapper at +3x7 and not your blaster, that difficulty level is outside what I consider to be a meaningful extrapolation point. But I do think if you can play your controller easily at +2x5 and not your blasters, it says *something* about the relative balance between the two, assuming you have comparable skill at both. That's a valid data point, albeit only one and not statistically significant on its own.

What I said was:

This is not false, this is not mostly false, this is not any false. This was stated by Castle when he was the powers lead, and in the context of knowing this is an operational design rule there is evidence to support the fact that it was one going all the way back to the inception of the game: hints that these things form the basis of the game's balancing appear in the dev diaires written by the dev team in 2002 before launch.


As to teaming, at launch there were far stronger teaming based constraints on balancing, but when the devs declared "everyone must be able to solo within certain limits" those mostly vanished. CoV, which was designed based on the evolved design criteria, wasn't designed around teaming in the classical sense: it was *explicitly* designed around every archetype having equal soloing prowess (this was explicitly stated in CoV beta) and having properties that were intended to make each valuable to teams but not necessary to them. And yes: the problems with stalkers and teams was pointed out and discussed with the devs from almost the first day of beta.

Teaming is now a situational design issue. Archetypes are designed to contribute to teams, but the devs no longer care about making anything particularly necessary to teams - exactly the opposite. And while some content is explicitly designed for teams, the vast majority is designed specifically to be soloed, and team scaling is the secondary design issue. In fact, core content intended to be soloed that can't be soloed by all powersets with reasonable builds is broken by the devs definition. They are compelled to address that. Core content that can be teamed that doesn't scale well to teams is not broken: the devs place a lower priority on addressing that, leaving it up to the players to use difficulty sliders to address that.


No, because the devs aren't perfect, and because no one said the powersets had to be "equal" but rather:

If you still have issues with how the game is designed, I would recommend taking them up with the devs.

Let me suggest that if you were going to add something like Absorb to Blasters, adding it to long-recharge powers is something the devs would likely avoid. The problem is that for the absorb to be meaningful when it can only be recharged every 90s (or however long based on slotting) requires it be very high. But then its acting like a huge health bar reserve that allows Blasters to take much larger alpha strikes than they could before. That's likely to be unpalatable to the devs.

Its very likely the devs would want to improve general survivability without adding tanking ability, of which absorbing large alpha strikes is a significant component. Something more ... sustainable without being burst-resistant would probably be more likely to meet with the devs' general approval.

Have you tried:

1. Reinstalling Windows

2. Switching internet providers

3. Stealing a neighbor's computer and using that

4. Moving physically closer to twitch.tv's main data center

5. Having some children and asking them look at the problem when they reach the age of five

6. Standing outside Zwillinger's window and viewing the broadcast live


If none of these work, I believe you should consider escalating to level 2 tech support.

So you cannot be tricked by Superman into returning to your own dimension.

There is no difference significant enough between the Scrapper and Brute versions of that powerset combination worth not playing what you want to play, particularly if you are new to the game. There's lots of time for min/maxing down the road.

I will say that Brutes tend to have a small leveling advantage over Scrappers due to Fury (which you say you aren't fond of). Once you are fully slotted with damage enhancements, the advantage of Fury dilutes, but in the early game when most players don't have significant slotting the Fury damage bonus is much higher.

But what people are probably thinking is that Shield has a power called Against All Odds which is also a damage booster. It works better for Scrappers than Brutes for mathy reasons not important here. In this case there are pros and cons for both Brutes and Scrappers. If you like Scrappers in general, and would rather play Scrappers, and don't mind rerolling your Brute, Electric/Shield will make a fine Scrapper.

But ultimately, you can't really go wrong with any Scrapper or Brute, so long as you like playing melee in general. Play what you like, and if you're concerned about performance at all, be concerned less about doing the absolute best thing, and more about just making sure you avoid any serious mistakes that will cause critical problems down the road. I don't think Electric/Shield really has any of those.

On a tangent, whether Blasters still underperform like they did in I10, the devs may not be thinking about correcting a material quantitative problem with Blasters in I24. As Synapse alluded to, the current powers team is less driven by seeing quantitative problems and finding fun solutions to them, and more driven by attempting to see if archetypes intuitively have impediments to their enjoyment that can be corrected without creating numerical problems.

Oversimplifying a lot - because every dev team has factored in all sorts of things into their decisions - I'd say that my impression of Synapse and Arbiter Hawk is that they are looking to review the archetypes in terms of making them provide interesting options and then looking for ways to numerically constrain them to ensure they don't break anything. I believe that is fundamentally the design foundation behind Water Blast's lockout effect. Its there as a safety net to allow them to experiment with new mechanics in a relatively safe way, because the experimentation they do tends to be less quantitatively constrained in the first place.

In other words, lockout is the price we pay to have intrinsically more aggressive and experimental devs (it also helps that I think the current powers team has more resources to get new mechanics implemented than any other in the past, at least as far as I've seen). And I think for an eight year old game, that's a good thing in general.

If you're actually a dev's non-red account, feel free to PM me the circumstances under which the performance balancing metrics were revoked, which can be covered under blanket non-disclosure. I will then concede the point publicly.

Conversely, if you're not, you're wrong, period. That rule was even basically publicly conceded by Castle, who provided me with permission to repeat it during the Defiance 2.0 discussions.

I never stated what Zog meant either.

The various archetypes are intended to have roughly the same ability to succeed in earning XP and rewards at the reasonable levels of difficulty played by the average player. This is a bedrock design rule of the game. That is not a guess.

I doubt the average player believes the game explicitly makes some archetypes intrinsically better than others either. That's more of a guess, but one I'm comfortable making.

Sorry, yes, I erred in stating that was the original. I should have remembered it was a remake in the first place, but got stuck on the fact that it was loosely remade again.

Some ranks have colloquial, or even tangential meaning. In particular: Commander, Major, and General.

There's also another kind of rank of a related type: professional. For example, Doctor (Strange, Doom, Mordo, Detroit), Master, and the like.

One other heavily used comic book naming trope is to prefix materials or other things. Iron Man. Beta Ray Bill. Firestar.


"Lady" and "Lord" also have colloquial meanings detached from the ceremonial. At least, I wasn't thinking nobility when I named my main "Lady Arcana."

Even before inventions themselves came out, the biggest hurdle for a well-built melee to solo an AV back in the day was often running out of endurance during the attempt. A couple of lucks and a bunch of blues and it was well within the reach of many melee characters prior to I9.

I'm pretty neutral on those pairings. Nothing wrong with them, but I think there's no special synergy or problem with those three and SR, so I would just pick whichever of those three primaries you like the best.

In terms of strong synergy, the sets I would say have some strong synergistic element with SR are Dark Melee: can stack -tohit with SR's defenses, has a self heal which SR lacks, and Staff: has +regen which is much weaker than Dark Melee's heal, but better than nothing, and has +enddiscount to power full power Staff AoE with all three SR toggles even when solo and even while leveling before strong invention builds.

Besides that there are strong conceptual pairings with MA and Street Justice for "natural" themed characters. But other than that, SR plays relatively nice with all primaries.

Zog.

Perhaps you could help me out and try to brainstorm what a man could be doing with a computer that required the left hand on a mouse, the right hand out of sight, and that doesn't require a keyboard.

Actually, cone range boosted the range of cones as normal ranged enhancements boosted the range of everything else. Technically, cones with higher radius are "wider" at the base, but cone range didn't make the cones wider in the literal sense.

They also used to have a funny bug where they would increase the targeting range of the power but not the actual range of the power. So if you cone-slotted a 40' radius cone to 50', say, the game would let you target an enemy 50 feet away, activate the attack, and have it do nothing to the target because it was outside the cone's base 40' range. That was an annoying bug.

The devs finally decided that there was no good reason to have two different range enhancers that basically did the same thing and collapsed them into a single enhancer, much like endurance drain and endurance recovery enhancers.