Arcanaville

I theorized these would be important to any attempt on this badge. A note on these for those unfamiliar with the mechanics involved. You'll be 50+3 facing a 54+5 Tyrant, or -6 to Tyrant. The purple patch knocks all your effects including damage to 15% of their normal effect. At +5, its 30%.

So if everyone is Ultimate buffed, the net impact of the league on Tyrant is basically *doubled* just in damage, plus all debuffs also double in strength. The difference at the deep end of the purple patch is huge. The difference between +6 and +5 is 2/3rds as much as the difference from +5 all the way up to even con.

Any chicklet you can chomp that doubles your strength against a hard target like Tyrant is going to make a gargantuan difference.

Who eats Chicken McNuggets while reading Twilight with Coldplay on a continuous loop is no one's business but their own.

I try to build them to leverage their strengths, and every blaster combination is different. For example, my main is Energy/Energy, and I've built and rebuilt it over the years in different ways to capture different strengths. I played it as a blapper - using energy manipulation's strong melee attacks and stuns to fight in melee range - and I now play it as a ranged high-recharge blaster that spams knock to keep enemies off their feet.

Archery doesn't have as much offensive damage mitigation as a primary ranged set, so I would be leaning on my secondary to keep me alive. Archery/Mental would be looking to leverage Mental's offensive mitigators - fear, knock, recharge debuff - and trying to get as much out of drain psyche as possible.

Not all players can level that way driving into melee range to fire off Drain Psyche, but eventually it becomes a very potent power (when you have enough recharge to keep it up most or all the time). Going Archery/Ice might be a simpler combination to work. Your best mitigator is probably Ice Patch. You can use it by running into a spawn and casting it, so everything starts falling down while you shoot at it, or you can cast it so its between the critters and you and shoot them from range while they can't get to you directly.

If you are really having issues staying alive with Blasters, I would suggest giving Sonic/Energy a try. The power you're looking for is Siren's Song which unlocks at level 18 in Sonic Attack. Its a Cone Sleep, and the sleep lasts for approximately a billion years. You hit the group with that, and then you pick off the enemy at your leisure.

This is me screwing around with Sonic/Energy just for giggles, quite a while ago. But nothing about that combination has really changed since then.

Also, Power Boost in Energy Manipulation boosts the duration of sleeps. By almost 80%.

Not really, no. There's no point in making assertions that will be quoted without being read.

Would you accept the fact that this suggests one of two possibilities: the difference doesn't exist, or you aren't able to detect it?

If so, would you concede that a reasonable test of your ability to detect significant archetype problems would be to ask if you ever detected a massive difference in reasonable ability for Blasters at any time between I5 and I11? Because blasters were buffed twice in that period, both times having been datamined to be underperforming. The last time, in the period before the I11 Defiance 2.0 buffs, the level of performance lag was considered high enough for *all* blaster powerset combinations that action was essentially mandatory for the devs.

Did you detect that problem in I6-I11 for blasters, and did you judge it to be as bad as the actual performance of the playerbase measured it to be?

I would agree with that: the fact that different archetypes have different situational capabilities is the only reason we have different archetypes. Because we happen to have an awful lot of melee archetypes that fact gets blurry sometimes.

But within a certain margin - and its unclear what that margin should be in the modern game: it used to be three even minions, then at one point it was revised upwards to three +3 minions or equivalent above level 25 - Blasters should be able to kill and survive the same threat as all other archetypes, even if they do it in a completely different way.

This game concedes the outer limits of gameplay: its part of the appeal of this game which is about superheroes that every archetype can in theory be built to vastly exceed its original design intentions (even Blasters with enough effort). So the fact that Blasters can't herd +4x8 as well as Brutes can is not a design failure to me. No one is supposed to be able to do that anyway: the fact that some can is a marginal issue the devs do not want to be forced to curtail and I appreciate the fact they don't (I play Brutes also).

But within some narrower range of performance, say +2x4 or +1x5 (given a high enough level of character), something in the general area, I believe it is fair to say that if the average Blaster folds and the average everything else succeeds, it does suggest a problem.

Lots of things do that. The "ignore combat modifiers" flag also does that. Sidekicking also does that. Exemplar also does that. Are those all examples of progressional leveling?

Keep in mind that if you read everything I said about the subject, I said that while level shifting had some analogous properties to leveling in terms of combat modifiers, it has none in terms of leveling as character progress of which combat modifiers is only a small part, and other game mechanics affects independently. Its obvious that there is "leveling" as in "altering combat level" and "leveling" as character progress, and level shifts only have some similarities to the former and not the later. But when talking about the incarnate system as "leveling" its obvious, or should be obvious, that what is meant is leveling in the second sense: as progress, not incrementing a combat modifier table index.

If you think pointing this out is trolling, you're not talking about the same thing I am, or you are simply not understanding what I'm saying. I'm not attempting to instigate any sort of reaction: the above assertion is a matter of fact statement about the game design. There is no controversial aspect of it that is not manufactured.

Ah. Here's the current state of the art in thinking about attacks. You get the best results when you use your best attacks as often as possible, and when those attacks are buffed as much as possible.

You have a certain number of single target attacks and a certain number of AoEs. When in the presence of lots of targets, all other things being equal your best damage output will occur when you hit them with AoEs. When you are facing just a single target, your best result will occur when you use your best single target attacks as often as possible. The definition of "best single target attack" is the attack that does the most damage in the least amount of time, essentially the attack with the highest DPA: Damage / Activationtime.**

So recharge can help damage output in two ways: it can recharge AoEs quicker for when you want to spawn AoEs on lots of targets, and you generally need significant amounts of recharge to use AoEs a lot (and a lot of recovery). And it can recharge your highest DPA single target attacks quicker so you can use them more often. Very high recharge, in the modern game where the invention system can grant giant piles of recharge - often increases damage by more than damage buffs, which are harder to get.

Good builds try to squeeze the most they can get out of damage buffs, damage procs (enhancements that act a bit like critical hits, and generate bonus damage sometimes at some rate), and recharge buffs. That's without getting into the complexity of doing things like trying to slip in Achilles Heel -Resistance enhancements and things like that into your attacks. If you've been gone since about I5/I6, there are a lot more toys to play with in the game now. The good news is you don't need to do so to be effective, but they'll be there when you decide to go deeper into build-crafting.


** Modification: the amount of time it takes to fire an attack is slightly higher than the documented cast time of the power due to an effect commonly called arcanatime lag. You may see players post about the "Arcanatime" of a power, which is calculated to be (ROUNDUP(CastTime / 0.132) + 1) * 0.132. Damage/Arcanatime represents a much more precise estimate of DPA, and seems to match in-game testing of damage output with a high degree of precision.

I agree with Brin in that Bradbury had a truly original voice among the greats of science fiction, and its doubly sad to note he was the last of a legendary group of people who can be said not just to have been among the best of the genre, but essentially invented the modern version of it as we know it.

If I had to pick a favorite work or works of Bradbury, I would have to go back to the classics: Fahrenheit 451, and the Illustrated Man.

I would consider the fact that the system architecture makes this statement true a separate independent technical problem that should be resolved.

I lucked out there: Lazarillo looks *exactly* like someone that needs a "kneel before Zod" emote.

Although in this case its possible Arbiter Warrant is just following me around to see if I've made any other ill-advised bets recently.

True on one level, but iffy on another. Stalkers were updated in part because the devs agreed with the sentiment that they didn't bring a sufficiently unique set of tactical options to the table. That's a comparison judgment. If the archetypes were not judged against each other, I would say that 90% of all archetype-wide changes since release would not have occurred.

There is a similar statement that there is no competition between powersets as well, which is also true to a degree and false to another degree. And 90% of all powerset changes would not have occurred as well if powersets were not in part judged on a relative basis.

There is no absolute standard for "normal" in this game that the devs use, or even accept. Normal is judged relative to everyone else for all but a few very high level global metrics. A powerset performs well and is well designed if it performs similar to its peers and is favored by the players to very roughly the same degree, within very wide but still well-defined margins. When the devs determined that Blasters underperformed, it wasn't because their performance was lower than some minimum mark, it was because they performed slower than everyone else by more than a critical margin. Blasters can actually underperform in two ways: they can be slow, or everyone else can be fast. In both cases, according to the design rules of this game, Blasters will be judged underperforming.

The only absolute anchor to all of this is the absolute leveling curve. If the set of all players blows that out of the water or drops below it a lot, then it can be said that everyone is overperforming or underperforming. But when that happens, we find out when the devs adjust the global leveling curves.

And what does a change in level do, according to the players? What does it mean when Giant Monsters "ignore level?" What does it mean when you are sidekicked "up a level?" What does it mean when you are exemplared "down a level?"

Is there a difference between being sidekicked up to level 35, and earning enough experience to achieve level 35, or does the word "level" mean the same thing in all cases? Because what the devs were talking about, in language clear enough to be semantically unambiguous, was progress not combat modifiers.

I'm aware of that, but the numerical difference between intrinsic 48 and intrinsic 50 is trivial, within the context of this discussion. For reference, a level 50 minion has 430.8 health. A level 48 minion has 428.3 health. That's 99.42% of the health of a level 50. Another way of looking at it is that in relative terms the level 48 takes about 0.58% more relative damage. A little more than half of one percent. Their outgoing damage is reduced by about 1% relative to if they were intrinsic level 50s. There is no scaling resistance to mez for critters, so they would be mezzed by the same length of time as an intrinsic 50. But if you meant the pets' ability to mez other things, that's also reduced by similarly trivial values. And there isn't all that much for the pets to mez in the Tyrant fight.


One other thing, if you have three level shifts, then you'll have one in Maria fighting a level 51 and be even to it (because Alpha's shift works so long as incarnate powers are available). You'll be -1 to a level 54 in an incarnate trial or DA. That would be why you can down 51s in non-incarnate zones faster than 54s in incarnate zones: the critters have gotten +3 higher, but you've only gotten +2 higher.

If parachuting was worth doing everyone would do it, and if its not then no one would do it.

I was a blapper for six years. I know how melee works for blasters. I've been converted to a ranged blaster for almost two years. I still have melee attacks. I don't deliberately close into melee, but I still use them, because critters often have feet. While I'm shooting at them from range, some often manage to walk right up to me and punch me in the head. When that happens I bonesmasher or total focus them, and then power thrust them back out to range for good measure. I would rather retain the ability to do that without having people tell me that it doesn't work.

There was never a "City of Blappers" - Blappers were once more popular, but never the majority. In any case, whatever your feelings about blappers, we shouldn't be making changes that destroy their game completely. That's why the cottage rule is there: to ensure the devs protect them from you.

No dev camps anywhere.

The reason why dev-initiated threads appear elsewhere is the simple fact that the devs place their threads into the most specifically appropriate forum, which is what every other player should do, by the way. Suggestions and Ideas was originally meant to be a catch-all: a place to discuss general ideas for improving the game that might be more general than what would be appropriate to any other specific forum. Players come up with ideas like that all the time: general QoL ideas don't always fit into any other forum. Proposing a new archetype doesn't obviously fit into any of the archetype forums.

However, the devs essentially Never ask the players for discussion on such broad, non-specific brainstorming ideas. The devs tend to ask the players for suggestions or feedback on specifically targeted areas, and those areas tend to fall into one of the other forums more specifically.

That doesn't mean the devs don't *read* Suggestions and Ideas, but because of the nature of the kinds of ideas often discussed in S&I, they are far less likely to comment in that forum. Getting entangled into general wide-ranging discussions about far-flung areas of the game simultaneously can only do bad things for the devs. Aside from the occasional community participation thread, the devs tend to, and are internally encouraged to, be focused when engaging the player community on specific matters involving the future development of the game.

If we measured the worth of a forum by how often the devs started threads there, we wouldn't have had a Blaster archetype forum past 2005. But its important to note that the primary purpose of the forums is to allow players to discuss the game with other players. Its secondary purpose is to interact with the devs. But except for when making official statements about future releases or when engaged in beta testing or debugging, no dev is *obligated* to read forum posts or respond to them. That's not their job. If you're posting because you want to discuss your ideas with the rest of the playerbase, great. If you're posting because you think you deserve the attention of the devs, that's not an efficient way to go about doing it. I would PM them if you actually desire a direct response to anything.

Here's a fact about dev responses. No dev ever responded to any of the posts I made about Elusivity. You know, the game mechanic that's in the game now. And there's absolutely no question its in the game as a direct result of my suggestion and my suggestion alone. But they never actually discussed it with me or anyone else on the public forums. You can't gauge interest or attention by whether a red name responds or not.

(Curiously, Elusivity is not listed on the Paragonwiki list of player suggested features. Actually, I don't see any of mine there at all, except for Martial Arts which wasn't unique to me.)

Pthhthh. My mistake this time was betting on something before I was certain I would win. I ain't making that mistake twice.

I'm berating Null the Gull. I'm bowing to Lazarillo. And its all your fault, Official Red Name Paragon Studios Representative.




Hmm, I think I have a script idea if I decide to do another video.

Soliciting feedback would, in this specific instance, likely serve no purpose. You're still asserting that shifts are levels even when they are not, which means soliciting feedback would only demonstrate that some people are committed to not viewing the system in the intended way regardless of information to the contrary. Knowing that does not help a designer in any way.

Only in a completely inappropriate sense. When you team with someone higher than you, do you think of yourself as having temporarily "leveling" many levels?

Leveling is about progress, and it is in that sense the devs refer to incarnate slots as pseudo-levels: they are tiers of character progress beyond base level 50.

Conning a higher combat level differential is a function of the purple patch, and it has nothing directly to do with character progress. Giant Monsters ignore combat modifiers and thus the purple patch, and thus also ignore your level: no matter how many combat levels you gain, you gain no leverage on them at all.

Except in one area, which level shifts don't provide. As you increase in combat and security level, your attribute modifiers increase for those that scale with combat level. Level shifts do not affect those in any way.

Level shifts are just a specific kind of buff, and it would be a shame if they had to be implemented in such a way so as to eliminate their direct connection to the purple patch just because people continue to incorrectly perceive them. But its mathematically possible to do so, just with a lot of extra work.

The fact that level shifts can be manipulated - a fact known when they were first released; Castle stated that such manipulation would very likely eventually occur in trials - is the definitive tip off. If level shift was a "level" and not just a buff, it wouldn't be buffable or revokable. That's not how progress works in this game.