Arcanaville

Fortunately, I didn't oversimplify it, demonstrating that Nova's endurance cost is too high, and its recharge too long, even by the devs own rules for normal conventional attacks. Assuming those aren't supposed to be just normal attacks but special attacks that are intended to be better than normal attacks, the crash and recharge they are set to has no defensible justification in today's game.


While your post might meet some definition of objective, it does not meet the criteria for actually making a case. "Blaster make big boom, use up all power. Exhausted, need rest" is the very exemplar of matter-of-fact statement: it is because its supposed to be.

Except its not supposed to be. The devs cannot simply apply a penalty to an attack with no reason. The historical excuse was that they didn't know what they were doing, which they did not, an excuse the current dev team has no right to assert. The numbers say nukes are broken. "Big boom now blaster fall down" may be a reasonable argument for you, but it does not meet the minimum requirements for a suitable justification from a game developer over the age of six.

As I went to the trouble of actually calculating, rather than simply describing, what the damage and recharge of the nukes directly imply their cost structure should be, I believe a reasonable challenge to those calculations would be something that actually refutes them, rather than forgets they exist.

Given the limits of your statement, I don't think so, but its close. Arc of Destruction does about 108.27 base damage at level 50, and with 1.95 slotting and +160% fury that would be 384.36 damage, only about 89% of the health of an even con minion (430.8). To get there, AoD would need a total of about 3.98 damage buff. Assuming 1.95 slotting, that is about 2.03 more. With 85% fury and +170% damage, a slightly higher buff than I assumed above, you'd be about 33% damage strength shot of the one-shot.

This question is level-dependent, though, so I suspect its possible that at lower levels the one-shot might be more possible.

I think you're going to want to refamiliarize yourself with how much damage Rain of Arrows does. And I'm going to want you to not compare base damage to damage capped damage.

Blizzard does more damage than any other tier 9 by design, because it delivers that damage over time. Inferno does bonus damage above the base due to Fire's ubiquitous DoT. But Inferno doesn't have a longer recharge than Nova or Thunderous Blast for having that DoT, just as no other fire attack pays for its DoT damage.

A better comparison would be to Nova, which has no bonus DoT. Nova does 4.875 base damage on average, given the chance for each wave to trigger. Rain of Arrows does 3.6 on a normalized damage scale. On average, therefore, RoA does 74% of the damage of Nova, while recharging six times faster.


Now, you think Nova is *supposed* to have the crash, because of its awesome damage? Well lets test that theory. If Nova was just any attack it would have an AoE factor of 4.75, and deal 4.875 average base damage. That implies it should cost about 120 points of endurance according to the damage/recharge/endurance formula.

Nova actually costs 20.8 end to activate it, then crashes to zero, then suppresses recovery for 20 seconds. Since you can't activate it if you have less than 20.8 end, the average amount of end you could have upon activation is (100+20.8)/2 = 60.4. The average endurance burn of the power is thus about 60.4 endurance. Then, the cost of suppressing recovery for 20 seconds is the same as normal recovery for 20 seconds. Since stamina is now inherent, we'll presume 3-slot stamina on average, and normal recovery for 20 seconds is 100/60 * (1 + 0.25 * 1.95) * 20 = 49.6 endurance.

Therefore, the net total endurance cost on average for Nova is 60.4 + 49.6 = 110.

This assumes *none* of the damage Nova does is in any way bonus damage that doesn't count under the formula. Such as the boosted criticals of many Scrapper tier 9 attacks. And this is for the power that is probably most analogous to defensive set tier 9 powers, all of which are designed to be *better* than normal powers, not worse.

What's more, normal powers' endurance costs can be slotted for endurance reduction. If Nova's calculated end cost is 120, then it ought to be possible to at least single-slot that cost down to 90 end. But its not. At best you can slot for end reduction and shift the initial cost downward, reducing the total cost by about 2.6 end to about 107.4. By the rules the game launched under, Nova's endurance cost is about 17.4 endurance too high. Another way of putting that is that the crash is about 1/3rd too long: it should be no more than 13 seconds long, not 20.

And lets see what happens when you look at recharge. What should Nova's recharge be, if it followed the formula? Also easy to calculate: (4.875 * 4.75 - 0.36)/0.16 = 142.5.

In other words, just for Nova to follow the formula - and it should do better than that - its crash should be cut by a third and its recharge should be cut *to* about a third its current value. That's just to break even with the rules the devs are supposed to follow.


So the rationale for why the crashing nukes crash is apparently that Blasters are such dangerous high-performing characters that the devs had to take their most powerful attack and triple its recharge and increase its endurance cost, and do so in a way that made the most vulnerable archetype even more vulnerable for an extended period of time.

I would like to see someone attempt to make this case objectively, as opposed to just matter-of-factly.

You could also tamper with the alert signalling code that generates an alert signal when a critter dies, that acts to put any critter that receives that alert into altered mode (basically, looking for and engaging players). You could have attacks also generate alerts, with bigger and stronger attacks generating higher alerts. Explosions could generate large scale alerts separate from dying critters and cause all the critters in the area to start looking for the players (without being directly aggroed upon them).

This is my understanding of how critters respond to a player. They start with a certain low perception radius. If you are outside that radius they just don't notice you at all. However, if you attack a critter by default that critter aggros upon you. It also sends out an alert signal to all nearby critters within the same spawn. Those critters get alerted, and go into an alert state. In that state their perception radius increases significantly, and they can detect the players even if they did not do so originally. They then start aggroing on whatever players are nearby, until something causes them to change their focus.

I didn't propose it as a specific fix to blasters but as a comment on whether numerical balancing has to be homogenizing, but having said that the last time the devs adjusted Blasters they added a stacking damage buff that realistically speaking stacks to in the range of +50%, and they also increased the blaster base ranged damage modifier by 12.5% from 1.0 to 1.125.

Also, whether that type of game design rule would actually increase the damage of blasters overall depends on the archetype tuning parameter, which can be set to whatever value the devs want, based on the relative DPA edge they want each archetype to have relative to each other, and the absolute DPA values they want to see in the game.

Its also worth noting that the devs experimented with similar systems twice already and the results still exist: VEAT Widows have a different balancing rule in some attacks, and Claws also implements a different balancing rule (and the misapplication of that rule is what accidentally granted Claws blockbuster AoE - and that change was never reverted). So there is precedent for implementing changes like this, precedent for their results being preserved, and precedent for them being applied in only limited environments to address specific problems or to implement new design intentions.

I don't see that correlation at all. For one thing, just because WoW contains high end raids doesn't mean most of their player population participates in them. For another thing, for basically its entire history both WoW insiders and outside observers have claimed that compared to the industry as a whole, particularly when it first arrived, it was far more friendly to solo players, and that friendliness has generally been increased monotonically upward over time. There's evidence to suggest that most MMO players solo at least some of the time and the most casual of players are the ones most likely to solo more often. I've also seen discussion revolving on the fine point that casual players may solo more often not because they want to solo, but because they aren't attracted to the teaming opportunities that happen to exist, and would rather go their own way. Outside of subjective discussion, the only quantitative analyses I've seen over the years support the notion that solo play is far more prevalent than generally presumed, and often demonstrated to be more than half of all playing time.

And while WoW seems to increase support for the solo experience over time, conversely there's every reason to believe that had City of Heroes not catered to the more casual, more likely to solo playerbase that its early structural problems would have doomed it. It seems perverse to say that the solo content in CoH hurts it, when it might be the only reason its still alive at all.

WoW is a social MMO, but I think the vast majority of its social aspect is an out-of-band phenomenon: WoW reached a critical mass quickly, and began to amass players not because of its gameplay, but because of its players: people played WoW because they knew people who played WoW. But even among them, teaming was not necessarily the dominant mode of play.

I suspect Mr. T is responsible for more WoW subscribers than high end raids are.

It doesn't take 23 such league members to radically reduce the probability of success.

I think anyone who thinks melee has it harder than ranged in the iTrials in general should do exactly that.

And he's been proven to be, if not absolutely false, false enough to be irrelevant.

How they deal with mez suggests *why* its not impossible to blaster problems to be addressed without the need to give them mez protection directly. How they deal with mez is not relevant to the question of whether its possible, because neither Controllers nor Masterminds deal with mez in a way that is absolutely impossible for Blasters to leverage, Controllers more obviously so than Masterminds.

You're going to have to explain why this isn't a complete non-sequitor, since this has exactly nothing to do with the post you quoted.

I'm not sure what would amaze me more: the amount of stupid required to believe this, or the amount of stupid required to believe one could convince other people of this.

There exist other options to modify the blaster role that have no game integration, balance problems, or cottage rule issues whatsoever.

The problem isn't latency either, at least not network latency. What you're measuring with netgraph is the response time of the server, and I believe when this mission (or any instanced mission) goes berserk the server stops responding to you or only responds slowly, because the mission itself is running slowly. This happens even if network latency is very low intrinsically.

I have an i870 with 16 gigs of RAM running Win7 x64 and my network latency to the servers averages about 60ms, and this mission dies on me every time I use AoEs (I haven't tried to single target my way through it yet). I think there's either some mission scripting going on to handle all the critters and its that scripting that is going bonkers, or its just the fact that there's a lot of critters densely packed in an open space with lots of clear line of sight overloading the combat engine, or both.

I gave Television a bunch of ideas here back around I19 but then he ran away. They were similar to the ideas I gave to pohsyb, before he ran away. I was going to discuss them with Black Scorpion at some point, but he ran away.

Actually, I'm beginning to sense a pattern here. Now that I think about it, shortly after emailing me for the first time Positron stepped down as design lead. Hmm...

So AW, about critter AI? Lets chat about that. I'm sure its just all just a big coincidence.

Except I don't think that's true. I think both Controllers and Masterminds prove that you can lack mez protection in general, and not be a second-class archetype. Controllers in particular more than make up for that lack by having powerful control, and powerful buff/debuff, and of course they also get reasonably strong offense. While your example proves lots of archetypes can benefit from mez protection, I contend that Controller prove you can excel without it.

I think I'm doing pretty good on predicting trial execution on Triumph, and I believe eventually Magi will end up somewhere around Keyes, with a comparable level of perceived execution complexity (and duration), but with a much higher level of required firepower.

In my mind, there's a "firepower" track of trials where the primary requirement for completion seems to be offensive and defensive firepower: Lambda, Underground, MoM. And a "finesse" track of trials: BAF, Keyes, DD, TPN: trials that rely more on specific tactics than massive offense or defense. Magisterium moreso than any other seems to be both a firepower trial and a finesse trial. On Triumph, requiring a league full of people/characters that can simultaneously satisfy both is going to make it unattractive once the demand for Hybrid unlock wanes. But I suspect that once the level of firepower required becomes common, it will be run more often than Underground and MoM. It doesn't seem to be as pointlessly and artificially long like Underground, its not as sensitive to a single player doing something suboptimal.

Even given my current success/fail ratio with Magisterium, I still don't hate it like I do Underground.

Every archetype both has and fulfills this role, without exception.

I'm not sure what that means, but the question of redrafting the blaster role into modern terms is something that the devs have to be compelled to do somehow, probably by proving to them beyond all reasonable doubt that operating within the current one ensures their future attempts at both balancing the archetype and making it more attractive will tend to fail.


No. No, this is not nostalgia, no this is not about past game-breaking performance, no the vast majority of blaster combinations didn't have that performance at any time anyway, no their damage dealing role was usurped by the devs explicitly when they said in no uncertain terms that all archetypes have to deal damage to solo effectively.

No, I will not accept how blasters are. I will discuss blaster changes because I think its worth of discussion, but no amount of discussion will convince me to accept that the known structural problems with blasters are not worth eliminating. I know, probably better than anyone, that blasters have been sacrificial lambs to game balance over the years: I won't be a party to preserving game balance at that expense any longer. Every archetype must pay equally, and blasters are long overdue for a refund.

Someone only just told me about this thread today. Sigh. Laz, you won fair and square. I will work on your trophy this weekend.

The stupid fashion that Prezi is riding is the stupid fashion that a lot of people (myself included) has believed for a very long time that the almost universal application of Powerpoint to make presentations of information has led to a whole bunch of people not qualified to make information presentations doing so anyway with a tool that is easy to use but extremely difficult to use correctly, which often encourages people to obfuscate information, produce misleading structure, and occasionally kill astronauts.

The important thing to note is that Stalkers were never broken: they worked just fine. The problem was that a significant portion of the stalker community didn't like *the way* they worked, similar to the issues with the mechanics of domination for dominators. Dominators worked fine, but many dominators didn't like the specific way they worked vis-a-vis domination, and the devs upon consideration agreed. The devs upon consideration also agreed that there were things about the way stalkers worked that were not the best option or were problematic, and so they were adjusted. Those adjustments didn't really take much if anything away from stalker capability that already existed, it just improved other capabilities so that stalkers had other valid combat options, including especially valid options for leveraging assassin's strikes.

But with blasters, its not just a case that we have problematic powers - we do: sniper blasts and some of the nukes, among others. But that's not the core problem.


The core problem is that blasters have been left behind. Blasters were originally supposed to be the damage specialists - its what they were supposed to be by virtue of getting no other powerset types - and yet they don't even have the highest unequivocal damage modifiers. Scrapper melee modifiers are higher than Blaster melee modifiers and tie Blaster ranged modifiers - assuming you don't count criticals, which are base damage increases. Dominators also have higher melee damage modifiers than Blasters and they get an entire control powerset which means Dominators prove you can have high damage modifiers without giving up anything.

Blasters don't have the best damage buffs. Fiery Embrace? Nope. Rage? Nope. Power Siphon? Nope. It was only recently that Blasters got Soul Drain, and that requires being in melee range (which is not a problem for melee classes, but an extra burden for most blasters).

Blasters do get the Defiance damage buff, but *every* hero archetype has an inherent damage buff now. Tankers have bruising, Defenders have a (de)scaling one in Vigilance, Scrappers have pervasive crits, and Controllers have containment. And of the five, Blasters don't have the strongest one: that's containment. At best, Defiance is probably roughly tied for second with bruising, depending on how you count bruising.

So the presumptive damage specialist does not have the highest damage modifiers, does not have the best damage self buffs, and doesn't even uniquely have the best damage-buffing inherent. Not because Blasters were nerfed, but because everything else was allowed to pass them by.

Meanwhile, Tankers, Controllers, and Defenders were supposed to lack damage, but all of them have had their damage buffed over time. And that was easy because every one of them has a damage-dealing set to buff in the first place: even Controllers do by virtue of Control sets being defacto damage sets. But since Blasters don't actually *possess* defense, control, or buff/debuff sets, they couldn't actually *get* defense, control, or buff/debuff buffs to their capabilities as easily as the other archetypes could get damage buffs. So they just didn't get buffs directed in those areas (increased health scalers being the primary exception).


You can't fix this with a buff to snipes, or any other single power. And even if you could, blasters would just fall behind again in a year, or two, or three. To really "fix" blasters you have to put them on a path where they get what everyone else gets over time. The giant stone tablet that says "thou shalt only give blasters damage, and not too much" has to have C4 strapped to it and turned into a Mythbusters segment. *That* is the Blaster problem, and fixing it means destroying that which has held it back.

A new Blaster bible has to be written, one that says "Blasters are people too: they deserve to kill, and they deserve to not die, and they deserve the tools to do both just like everyone else."

*How* they get those tools is Chapter 2. That's how you fix blasters.


Also, a tangent on power creep. Someone asked me yesterday if buffing Blasters just makes power creep worse. Upon further consideration, I believe just the opposite. Its blasters being in the state they are in that make power creep worse. Here's why.

We all know players have been buffed over the years, probably higher than they really should be. But there's only two ways to deal with that: nerf the players or buff the critters. And we all know that nerfing (nearly) all the players ain't happening. But we can slowly elevate the critters over time to match the players.

Except that's not going to happen either, and the reason why is that when you elevate the critters, you have to be cognizant of the lower performing players. You can't just orphan them or make the game unplayable for them. Remember when the boss buff happened? That had to be unwound quickly, because while it was fine for many players who saw it as a challenge, many others saw it as making the game unplayable. And the devs can't do that that strongly to existing players that dramatically.

So the limits of how we can address power creep with environmental buffs comes down basically to the lowest performing, lowest survivable characters. And that's blasters. If blasters were not a survivability-outlier, the devs would have more flexibility to address power creep with environmental buffs. I can't say they would use that flexibility: they could just ignore the problem. But right now, they have *zero* flexibility to do much about it, and its almost certainly a large, possibly singular reason, is blaster performance.

The reason why I'm not currently advocating a rebalance of blaster secondaries specifically to address their current issues is because the secondaries are all dissimilar from each other and clearly aren't just missing some singular obvious thing that would help the entire archetype. Addressing the secondaries would require individually adjusting each powerset separately which would take a lot of time.

If you're going to add a global anything to the archetype, you could add it to either the primary or the secondary (or both) but a simply addition won't fix the problems the secondaries have intrinsically. And if global additions can go anywhere, it makes more sense to add them to the primaries, because blasters tend to have more primary than secondary powers on average, and they unlock earlier in level progression.

(Nothing about my counter-mez idea bars it from being added to single target secondary attacks as well as primary attacks, but adding any such effect globally wouldn't act to better balance the secondaries against each other or improve some of their more glaring flaws: you'd still have to eventually revisit secondaries anyway).

This is not to say that I don't think a review of secondaries isn't waranted, just that its neither necessary nor sufficient to address blaster global issues, and would delay any change to blasters for an indefinite amount of time.