Arcanaville

That's actually my main, and she's Energy/Energy/Force. Laz provided a costume file to allow me to insert him into the action, but I don't actually know what that character's powers are: I just made a random controller and gave it teleport (after PLing it to four) so I could get the teleport effect.

Iron Man is interesting I think, because there seems to be two kinds of readers and viewers of Iron Man. The first kind says "I wish I could have that suit." The second kind says "I wish I could build that suit."

I was the latter. Still am.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't supremacy equalize pet levels in incarnate trials now? If so, they should all be the same level as the player, and thus if they were affected by all the lights as the devs intended (but not quite as they are working now) if the player was +3 the pets (and the player) should have been +9 - even-con to Tyrant.

That means that at least some of the problems masterminds have with pets can in fact be partially related to the shift bug, because their pets are having to face Tyrant at -3 rather than at even.

On the other hand, if the player is not +3 shifted to start, I would expect them to be on the ground a lot regardless of archetype.

The red names can't post about unannounced changes to the game or things they are working on and haven't completed yet except under special circumstances, so its unlikely a red name will be able to post about blasters until they are actually posting about things they are officially announcing they are doing.

However, while I cannot say anything specific about the discussions I've had with the devs over the past several months about blasters, I can say that I have every confidence that the devs are thinking about blasters, and that they have every intent of officially revisiting the archetype on a timescale of a lot less than two years.

However, I'm not discouraging anyone from continuing to discuss Blasters. I don't subscribe to the theory that the squeaky wheel gets the grease all the time, but I do think its important for all players to recognize that Blaster problems are far more widely acknowledged than it sometimes seems because we just don't talk about them as often as any other archetype, and they have existed for quite some time (forever, in many cases). And brainstorming ideas is never a bad thing, even if those ideas aren't used directly.

Based on my discussions with the devs, I believe there exists a possibility that a "whoa" is coming for blasters. Not the one I might have made, and not one everyone would agree is a whoa, and only a medium sized whoa and not a mega whoa, and not in the immediate future, but a whoa nevertheless.

Of course, as a complete nobody with no authority to make forward-looking statements, no one should presume anything I say accurately represents future dev plans nor a guarantee that any prediction will come to pass in any reasonable timeframe. The secretary has disavowed me. Its also possible I have a serious head injury and hackers have taken over my account and this is improperly translated from its original Minoan Linear A. Offer void in Delaware.




The devs have been paying attention, though, and they haven't forgotten about us. Of that I can say with certainty.

Now (TM).

I couldn't think of a good way to capture the terms of the bet in a screencapture, so with Lazarillo's consent the terms have been extended to allow for a video submission. Here she is.

I'm afraid there are glitches here and there, and its not my best scripting work. I started this on Monday but when I realized it would not work without my Nemesis there, I scrubbed all that work and asked Laz for some assistance which he kindly (err, I assume kindly) provided in the form of a costume file I could use.

I set a limit of one day to do this (tuesday evening, actually), which is why its rough in some places: it didn't seem right to go off for weeks and aim for perfection while delaying Laz's trophy. But to be honest, all I can think about is how much better it would be if I just did X or Y. And I can't believe I accidentally merged the wrong file and a mouse cursor shows up.

Thanks to Laz for being a good sport (which is fairly easy when you win, but still); this was actually rather fun.

And to officially satisfy the terms of the bet, here's an image of Laz getting his pound of flesh:

You say that like its a bad thing.

Depends on your point of view. Scourge costs a lot of resources, as does the SR scaling resistances. Powers like Tactics are relatively expensive as well. Its a question of degree, and its worth at least the mental exercise of determining the most efficient way to implement such an effect before dismissing it. It wasn't the main aspect of my suggestion, but I thought it was a good addition if it was feasible. A two-for-one that my suggestion creates with concentrated damage is a better balance between single target and AoE attacks, and that's been a long-standing thorn in my side.

On the general question of whether the devs were aware of the possibility, I'm sure they were. I'm sure its deliberate that because they knew the trial was intended to be harder, that failures would be more common, and so they frontloaded Hybrid XP so that even if players failed they would still make significant progress on Hybrid.

The combination of the two unfortunately encourages farming, which I'm sure the devs were aware of but decided was an acceptable problem considering the alternative was backloading the trial and causing failures to produce almost nothing.

As to the issue of people *obviously* bailing on full runs that are specifically announced to be full runs, I'm sorry to hear about that; that's a jerkwad move and I would probably just one-star them all. If you're not going to attempt the full run, you shouldn't join a league attempting the full run. Unfortunately, dealing with the stupid and the callous is part of the price of admission for doing anything involving the internet and other people. There's no way to waive that fee.

That's right: people don't know. So how could anyone claim to *see* it happening?

To be fair, superhero stories like most science fiction juxtapose the fantastic and the mundane, to provide touchstones for the readers/viewers/players to connect with the stories, characters, and settings. Invulnerability is a stated feature of Ms. Marvel, so readers accept that. Extreme flexibility and body structure isn't, so artwork that suggests it isn't as easily dismissed, for non-trivial reasons.

*Some* artistic discretion should be afforded to comic book artists, just like we currently allow symphonic sound tracks in movies without asking where the sound comes from, nor do we question why black specters are moving the environment around in stage plays, nor do we ask why an entire high school has the personality disorder of breaking out into song repeatedly in the television show Glee. We have to balance accepting the conventions of the media while being free to question whether there are opportunities to evolve or improve it.

Unfortunately, balanced positions are not common in these types of discussions.

Just today, I made mention of an oddity with the artwork for the game. I'm not flipping out about it, but on the other hand even within the context of comic book art I think its a valid observation that should lead to a correction of some kind. I think its fair to point out when I think something is odd in a way that serves no direct benefit for being odd.


As to the general comment about sexualizing women in comic books, are women oversexualized? Of course they are. Just like they are in movies, television commercials, and also most of the advertisements in women's magazines whose primary audience is overwhelmingly women. In my opinion, women are exposed to far more oversexualized depictions of women than men are, most of it promoted by or created by other women, and in a far more deleterious fashion. Comic books are a pale reflection of that issue. Comic books don't create the bulk of body image problems for young girls. Comic books aren't the source of most eating disorders in women. Comic books aren't teaching girls what is acceptable - and I don't even think they are teaching boys that either. Comic books are escapist fantasy: the real problem is the exact same fiction presented as reality in mainstream media. We know comic books are fake. But those same female depictions could have been traced right out of the pages of Glamour magazine, except people think that's actually reality.

That would make it possible to do, but how would you see it happening?

People have been writing bad works so there's no such thing as a bad wordprocessor?


Such works have no critical stake in ensuring that the information presented be communicated correctly, which is 99% of what Powerpoint is ostensibly used for.

The web, specifically HTML, was originally designed explicitly to support non-linear information organization, via the use of hyperlinks. Your statement is false on its face. And conversely, the critical problem with Powerpoint is that it explicitly encourages non-linear organization of linear information and pseudo-linear organization of non-linear information through the over-encouragement of the outline format.


You can blame the speaker and not the tool if you like, but this is a serious enough problem that many people have taken to beating the speaker to death *with* the tool, killing two birds with one stone.

I would argue its currently worse. If the design intent of the trials was to design them so that it was mathematically possible to complete, then any one league completing it would prove the design was successful. But if the intent of the design is to be reasonably accessible then randomly penalizing different leagues in different ways without indicator, in ways that could cause some leagues to find the trial easier and others significantly harder, then the bug actually is worse than if the trial could not be completed at all. Because an impossible trial is fair - it treats all players equally. A bugged trial that allows some leagues large unintended advantages and others large unintended disadvantages isn't fair. If fairness is a major goal, randomly broken can be worse than completely broken.

If we all knew it was broken and impossible to complete, we'd all just avoid it until the devs fix it. But knowing its possible, we're going to run it. And some leagues will fail through no direct fault of their own because of a bug, and that creates unnecessary frustration among the players.

As I said elsewhere but I'm not going to make the mistake of not stating continuously, I myself don't have a major problem with the trial's design. I actually like it more than Underground, say, which I almost despise. And I don't think its much more difficult than Keyes or MoM in terms of gameplay complexity - although it does require more firepower than both of those *on top* of that gameplay complexity. But its simply not true that just because a trial is completable, that its mostly fine. Its not true that the objective is to make the possible, and see how many players achieve the theoretical. A certain amount of accessibility is a partial goal of the design of all of the game content. Not necessarily universal accessibility, but significant accessibility depending on the content.

If the goal was just to make things difficult but theoretically possible, and the basis for judging a content's difficulty and appropriateness was if someone could do it, the devs could add cryptographic puzzles to the end of trials the player would have to complete to claim their component. I'd still get my components.

I wish I could tell all of this story, but there was a time when a UI element was added that didn't quite match what the game was supposed to do, but rather than change the UI the game behavior was changed to match the UI. It didn't ultimately harm the functionality of that part of the game, but it was still bizarre to me.

While I'm at it, now that I'm looking at it every day, something's been bothering me about Penny's appearance, and it finally hit me that her chest is wrong. I'm not sure how to best explain this, but her cleavage shouldn't extend all the way up to her neck in a top like that. It should stop half way and the top "flatten out" near her neck. It looks like she's wearing inflatable breasts around her neck, if that makes sense.

And:

Actually, in that quote Zombie Man clearly seems to be stating that the dev intent was for the power to affect the entire league, so *if* it was not doing that it could not be working as intended.

In the past it has happened that a red name has misstated the intent of a power or effect, but in virtually all of those cases that involved a red name commenting on a part of the game they were not directly involved with designing, and were commenting based on their best judgment and not direct knowledge. If Arbiter Hawk was involved with the design of the trial, his statement of intent, short of clumsy wording or typos, should be considered authoritative.

The goal is to be more effective. The most critical element of that is increased survivability. I believe that is something that can be objectively, quantifiably supported.

But I believe the other deficit blasters have is that because the archetype hasn't been "protected" by the devs like the other archetypes have, Blasters haven't even been given the preeminent spot in getting the best, most interesting, and unambiguously highest levels of damage. We can't solve their survivability problems with straight damage buffs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make blaster damage as strong as balance will allow, more interesting than it is now, and more effective overall.

I've said it many times, but no matter how many times I say it its still an amazing fact to me. Blasters do not have the highest melee damage modifier, they don't unambiguously have the highest ranged damage modifier, they don't have the most self damage buffs or the strongest self damage buffs, they arguably have only the second highest damage buffing inherent. Blaster ranged DPA is also not the highest (in fact, its embarrassing compared to melee offensive sets). People talk about how blasters have the best AoE, but that's a subjective statement. Objectively, the average blaster primary has less AoEs than the average melee offfensive set. And arguments that the ranged AoEs are "better" usually fail to account for the fact that melee archetypes engage targets in melee range and thus the way they leverage AoEs is different, invalidating much of those arguments.

It shouldn't be this hard to demonstrate Blaster offensive superiority: with no other powersets besides attack sets, their offensive superiority should be blatantly obvious. But instead, by every metric that can be examined directly, Blasters are *not* designed to be obviously superior. Not in damage modifiers, not in DPA, not in AoE, not in self buffs. It would be an *amazing* situation if the devs designed blasters to have less AoE attacks, lower DPA, lower damage self buffs, and lower damage modifiers and yet have them consistently end up dealing *significantly* more damage than all other archetypes. That would be a neat trick.

Regardless of whether Blasters *deal* more damage, they should blatantly obviously *appear* to be designed to deal more damage, and they don't. Its obvious they don't have control sets or buff/debuff sets or personal defense sets. It should be obvious that what's left is significantly superior to everyone else's offensive options. And they are not.

I don't need to have blasters deal massively more points of damage. But they should have far more interesting damage dealing tools than they do now. And if some of them increase blaster damage in the process, I don't think that's a problem if its only a moderate amount. When Dominators have 0.95 ranged and 1.05 melee modifiers, and Scrappers have a 1.125 modifier that they use for both melee and ranged attacks and have criticals on top of that, I don't think its mathematically possible that the current Blaster damage levels at 1.125 ranged modifier and 1.0 melee modifier could be at or near the maximum allowable.


Another way of putting this is this: I think Blasters deserve more whoa. When people roll controllers there's lots of opportunity to go "whoa, that's a lot of control." The same thing happens for scrappers, tankers, brutes, masterminds, dominators, and now even stalkers. But Blasters don't really do anything other archetypes can't: they don't have specifically unique offense, and all the get is offense. They need more offense that makes players go "whoa: I didn't know blasters could do that." In my opinion, other archetypes have more whoa.

Whatever happens to them, I told the devs that one of the things I'm going to be judging blaster improvements on is this metric: the change should make me go "whoa." If its just behind the scenes numerical tweaks and some nifty but unimpressive even if useful gizmos, I will consider the changes incomplete. I think this is as much of the problem as anything else. Its not just a matter of making the numbers work out. That is a necessary but not sufficient requirement. Blasters also need to be fun to play, and part of that is making sure they have enough whoa.

Basically, blaster changes need to do this:



When the rest of the team looks like that when you're on your blaster, that's a success.

The effects would be customized to the set, but with rules governing the basic strength and magnitudes of effects so there would be no massive amount of individual balancing involved. A system like this should be designed with a set of implementation rules first, and then applied to the powersets so things don't end up being haphazard.

There was some discussion a few months ago about what the effects could be. Knockup for Energy, Sleep for Electric, etc. I also mentioned there were opportunities here to look at new ways to use debuffs as pseudo-mez. For example, drain has all sorts of problems in this game: its a bit too binary and the way critters use endurance make it often problematic. But an effect that isn't used in the game much is -MaxEnd. Debuffing the maxend of critters would mean that not only would their recovery drop, but they would burn up their endurance much quicker while attacking. In effect, we can limit the number of attacks they can use before they are incapable of attacking. Consider what a 10 second -80% maxend debuff would do to an Lt. They'd be down to only 30 end for 10 seconds, which means they would be able to attack maybe a couple of times and then be done. And that's *before* stacking other drain on them. Electric Blasters could make extremely good use of -maxend: it could be tailored to be their "pseudomez" particularly in combination with their intrinsic drains.

Or how about going the other way around. Suppose we (de)buff EndDiscount. All the critter's powers would then cost more endurance. If we triple end costs with a +200% endurance discount that would mean light attacks that had low costs to begin with could still be used, but while that effect was up its possible we could basically *shut off* all higher attacks on that critter for a short time. That could also be interesting.

There are a lot of opportunities here to make this work better than it has worked in the past.

Lots of different threads that purport to ask different questions, but they all tend to lead to the same basic places: mez protection for blasters, buffs for snipers and nukes, changes to the way blasters play, discussions about whether blasters need any help at all, blasters within the context of the modern city of heroes game.

I've been thinking of ways to do this efficiently: pseudopets might be one way, and dealing the damage and then using a scaling healback would eliminate the need for target messaging or grantpowers. It ultimately might take some new tech to do this in the most efficient way possible.

They were up last night so I started working on it, but this morning something seems to be squirrelly with test: I can log in but I never get my character list.

I'm working on something I little different from just a simple screencapture, and I needed Lazarillo's help with one piece of it. Hopefully it'll be done tonight assuming test or bet are working correctly after work.

Following those breadcrumbs led me to my splash/concentration idea:

1. Add a splash counter-mez effect to all blaster single target attacks (at least the ranged attacks) similar to Impact. Effects would be designed to only affect the target for a very short amount of time, i.e. on a timescale of about 4 seconds at most, and generally affect targets a short radius away (about 8 feet or so). The effect would be customized to be thematically appropriate to the powerset. The concept is that Blaster single target attacks are powerful enough to "splash" effects on nearby targets which will interfere with their ability to return fire.

2. Add a second effect to those same attacks such that if there are no enemies nearby the target of the attack, the target of the attack is hit by bonus damage. The concept is that when a blaster is literally attacking only one target, they can focus their attack on that target, concentrating its effects and generating more damage.

In effect all blaster attacks become AoEs, its just that some of them will be AoE damage attacks, and some will be AoE mitigation attacks that deal damage only to the central target.


Propel provides some guidance here. It still takes single target ranged sets. Also, you don't really want short duration counter-mez effects to be slottable anyway: they are going to be designed to have a particular duration for balance purposes.

(Also, I have a sneaking suspicion the devs stole my splash idea for propel in the first place).


In my case, every powerset would be getting more control, and every powerset would be getting more single target damage. No set would be getting worse in any way, and no set would have an AoE advantage. Since AoEs do not get splash/concentrate, sets with more AoEs get less of this mitigation effect. Sets with less get more. Single target attacks become more competitive with AoEs because they have stronger mitigation and deal more damage in the single target case. Its more likely the chance would compress the range of blaster performance, and not exaggerate deficiencies.

Yes and no. In extremely rough terms, you could say Dominators went down the same path as Blasters, but in a better way.

But there are significant differences to gameplay, and its illustrative to look at Controllers to see the difference. Although both Controllers and Dominators on the surface have the same control set, they don't actually because of a critical difference: containment. Controllers and Dominators both have control sets, but Controllers use theirs as their primary means of dealing damage. Dominators have assault sets that are generally more efficient at dealing damage. So from a gameplay perspective, Controllers deal control and get offense automatically, and buff/debuff when they need to. Dominators deal control and get some offense from that, but have a separate offensive option in the assault sets.

Blasters would be like Dominators in that they would have two offensive sets, one ranged focused and one melee focused with some utility powers. Dominators would have two offensive sets, one control focused and one melee/ranged attack focused. But Blasters would also be like Controllers in that while Controllers primarily deal control and get damage for free, Blasters would always be dealing damage and get control for free.

And distinct from both of them, while both Controllers and Dominators would possess long-duration control which means they would have the means to control some targets while attacking others, Blasters would only have the means to control targets they were actually attacking, and only while attacking them. In that sense, their gameplay would be very much like old school blappers, but with a ranged option.

I mentioned counter-mez, but the proposed addition to blasters in the other thread was more sophisticated than just adding counter-mez. It added it in a specific way:

1. It would only be added to single target attacks
2. The effect would center on the target, and affect up to a small number of targets nearby in an AoE, similar to gauntlet
3. If no such targets exist, the effect would trigger additional damage on the target.

The idea here is that Blasters have AoE as an option, and this idea doesn't change Blaster AoE at all. But it improves single target attacks in two ways: it makes single target attacks have AoE mitigation (to a degree) and it also makes single target attacks deal more damage when that AoE mitigation is unnecessary (because there are no targets to affect). And because this is bonus damage within an inherent effect, its a way to increase Blaster single target damage without tampering with any blaster attack's endurance costs or recharge. It would be like containment, only in this case the concept would be concentrated fire. If you shoot a single target attack at three targets, you'll damage one and splash counter-mez on the group. But if there's only one target, the full force of the attack "concentrates" on the lone target dealing more damage to it.

That, combined with D2.0's ability to shoot two single target ranged attacks while mezzed, would make Blasters distinct from Dominators. Dominator persistent control would give them advantages, Blaster higher ranged AoE modifiers and concentrated strikes would give them an different advantage. Ultimately, high magnitude and duration mez would still make Dominators more survivable at the high end, but Blasters would have significant advantages and a unique playstyle over Dominators in a not insignificant range of performance below that.