Arcanaville

I've never been clear on the reason why anyone would want on their side the people that are most easily swayed in this manner.

The TPBs are certainly the best way to read Planetary, particularly knowing the series is now complete.

Its clearly not as simple as that, for the people who say that.

But the point I was making was not that the continuity history is too complicated, but rather that the comic book companies wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to claim rich histories, because that appealed to the readers that were deep fans and continuity nuts. But they didn't want to compel their authors to be beholden to that history, and they wanted to attract new readers with the claim that the very same deep history that the established fans discussed constantly were things they didn't need to know to make the books approachable.

But the truth is that its extremely difficult to simultaneously appeal to the continuity fans and the casual readers constantly over decades, especially when you are also doing stunt cross-over events every year on top of that. That's why they keep rebooting things, and then just dragging the old continuity right back into the reboot, and then rebooting again.


I believe the comic book property movies tend to have such wide appeal specifically because they combine iconic characters for which there is a touchstone to the audience, presented from scratch with no direct connection to the comic book history they are pulled from. You don't need to have read every Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story to enjoy the movies or the Sherlock series; you don't need to have read every Ian Fleming novel to enjoy the James Bond movies. They take iconic characters and re-present them cleanly to the audiences. There's a sense that the audience is seeing all there is to see, that they aren't seeing only an "incomplete" version of the story. I think that the recent superhero movies do the same thing, in a different medium where its expected and thus not generally frowned upon (and the ones that do complain the translation is not "faithful" are usually a tiny minority of the target movie going audience). The person watching the Avengers who is not a comic book fan is on roughly the same footing as the person that has read the Avengers comic since 1968.

But reboots and restarts within the same medium have a much greater difficulty in shaking the past. Its just too easy and too tempting to return to that rich playground of material. So they end up constantly bouncing between trying to start fresh and trying to build legacies. And that's basically the last twenty five years of the Marvel and DC Universes in a nutshell.

Add powdery wigs and I can roll an electric brute called Jug Fury, Electrocutioner.





I'm sorry.

Oh dear, now we have to add pointy hat to the gender acronym. GLBTQIPh?

True: even if my recollection was correct, I would only be recalling what I was told by someone else who was told. I wasn't there for the big ding myself of course, and for all anyone knows it could have been an anonymous player that didn't announce the fact and none of us really knows. Its not like it was when CoV launched and most fast levelers were at least aware of each other (enough for me to be reasonably certain I was between #6 and #9 to the level cap in head start on Triumph).

Weird is relative in this game. Guys wearing princess hats wouldn't even reach a 4 on my weird costume-o-meter. I'm not sure it would make it to the top ten weird things I've seen in the past month.

Now, if someone was asking for the princess hat to be usable with the think tank, that might reach a 9.2.

Oh fine then.

Every archetype is supposed to do damage. By explicit dev decree, and by obvious dev actions.


I actually hate rules like this.


On the other hand, I actually like arguments like this IF roughly the same number of players are on either side of it (and I'm not necessarily saying the one expressed above qualifies). If some large percentage of the players thinks a set sucks because it has Y instead of X and another large percentage of the players thinks a set is great because it has Y instead of X, I think that's actually exactly what you want in a diverse set of powersets.

There seems to be this notion that the goal should be to make things everyone likes. But I don't agree, because the things everyone likes are by definition the least objectionable things, the least controversial things, the least interesting things. They exist in the bland homogenized center of all possibilities. The moment you try to make something interesting, someone will think its interesting in a good way, and someone else will think its interesting in a bad way. Good. Rather than have everything sitting in the boring middle, make different options that exist out at the more interesting periphery, but in different directions. So some people will like this but not that, and other people vice versa. And have some things in the middle to cover that specific option, but specifically for people who like the middle ground, not as a compromise to everyone to avoid everything even a tiny subset of the players dislikes.

Subjective and qualitative arguments are good: they are a sign of a healthy powerset ecosystem. The problem is that its very difficult here on the forums to gauge whether a powerset is disliked by a vocal minority or by enough people to make it flawed. And the "conventional wisdom" of a powerset can change dramatically over time. Kinetic Melee would be a good example.

Not to mention the fact that there's just way too much inadequate quantitative analysis being used to jump to all sorts of flawed conclusions about the state of individual powersets. It almost makes me wish I didn't make quantitative analysis respectable.

In discussions about aggro, it seems one thing not everyone fully appreciates is that in a sense tankers don't just "get aggro." There are actually three "classes" of aggro that a tanker can acquire. The first are "strongly aggroed" targets. These are targets that are taunted and damaged by the tanker - targets the tanker is directly attacking. These targets are extremely difficult to yank aggro away from; virtually impossible with someone that doesn't have taunt themselves. However, there is a second class of targets that a tanker can have aggroed, "loosely aggroed" targets. These are targets that the tanker has taunted but has not directly attacked with significant damage. Because taunt is a multiplier on hate generated by damage (and other effects) even though these things are taunted it is possible to yank aggro away from them, although its still not easy.

And there is actually a third class of critter besides these two: targets that happen to be aggred on the tanker because the tanker just happens to be nearby, but are otherwise not affected by any effect that deliberately locks aggro to the tanker. If a tanker jumps into the middle of a wide spawn and attacks something, they will aggro the spawn itself: an alarm will go off and everything will want to attack the group. Most of them will attack the tanker because the tanker just happens to be the closest target (up to the aggro cap). Some of them will be taunted, but not damaged by the tanker. And some will be taunted and damaged by the tanker.

Yanking aggro from that last group will be essentially impossible. Yanking aggro from the second group will be almost impossible, but possible for things with taunt (like brutes or other tankers). Yanking aggro from the first group will be trivially easy, and involve basically shooting at them in any way.

Because of this, its entirely possible to see a critter shooting at a tanker, and then switch to another player when that player shoots at the critter. But whether this is correctly described as "stealing aggro" or not is a questionable matter. Its more correct to say that just because you see it shooting at the tanker, doesn't mean the tanker has established a lock on aggro on that critter yet.

Quite the opposite, actually. Blasters are exactly what they were intended to be when the original game came out. Its the rest of the game that turned into something that was not intended when the original game came out.

Just french-toastingly avoid it, because its granite-countertoppingly prohibited.

As Miladys is describing it, "mez defense" in her post is effectively a mez saving throw. If an attack hits, you roll against this new mez defense to see if the mez actually takes effect.

Its a way to gain mez avoidance without automatically getting damage avoidance simultaneously, presumably to allow for granting significant amounts of it to squishies without having to automatically add significant amounts of damage avoidance (i.e. conventional defense).

The main problem I have with this suggestion is that it seems to be making the concession that blasters shouldn't really have mez protection, and so the penalty is intended to try to balance the scales by making the blaster pay for it.

But there's only two possibilities: Blasters need it, and should therefore have it, or they don't, in which case they don't. Paying for it by paying a damage penalty would present this question: what if the penalty caused blasters to underperform?

You have an archetype that is strongly suspected of underperforming. So you give it something, and penalize it in another way. What's the rationale of penalizing an underperforming archetype?

The secondary problem I have is that the damage debuff cost works in the opposite way I would want it to work in terms of who it affects. Lower level players, and players that do not build strongly, will tend to eat that penalty more than aggressive, experienced players, higher level players, and players that build strongly because that linear debuff is diluted by damage strength enhancement and buffs. The more damage strength you have, the less proportionately that -15% will mean. But its the lowest and weakest blasters that I think need the most help. They will get the least net benefit (by virtue of having the higher proportional cost). Its not a fatal problem, and any meritocratic solution that rewards skill will suffer from it to some degree, but taken with the first problem it exacerbates it.


On a personal opinion level, I would prefer a more attack-centric buff to blasters: this seems more like a workaround power, and not something that emphasizes Blasters as attackers and offensive specialists. Stacking mez resistance that builds with attacking, so it shortens mez, was an idea I liked better (and it is fully compatible with both D2.0 and my separate idea of counter-mez).

There were people fully capable of getting Dark Armor scrappers to the level cap, and enjoying themselves doing it, before the Dark Armors stacked, Cloak of Fear caused targets to run to the horizon, and Dark Regeneration cost 50 end per use. And it had no end drain protection.

If they could do it, everyone could do it. So every change made to Dark Armor from release was just unnecessary, by the standard you seem to be expressing. Why don't we all just learn to play Dark Armor that way, or play Super Reflexes with 30% defense while turrets and pets have 105% tohit? Why was it necessary to remove the root in Unyielding? Why was it necessary to increase Blaster health from its original value, which was Defender health?

The reason is that for a sufficiently harsh definition of "necessary" no change is necessary. If the goal is to make archetypes that are *possible* to play and *possible* to enjoy playing, you could eliminate half the powers randomly from every powerset and stop modifier progression at level 10 and eliminate all enhancement slots, and it would still be possible to play them to 50 and possible to enjoy playing them that way.

But that's not the goal. The goal of the archetypes' design is to make them approachable and playable and enjoyable to a wide subset of the current players of the game. We don't need to make everyone happy, but when datamining shows that for the average player blasters are more fragile than any other archetype, and level massively slower, that's a problem no matter how many other players claim to have not experienced those problems. And that's why those other changes were also necessary.

Its really no different than someone complaining about the game crashing and someone else saying they've never seen it crash. What matters is what most people see. If 50% of the playerbase is seeing the game crash often, the fact that there are still thousands of other players that have never seen a crash before is completely irrelevant. If its like five players, they might just be the rare exception. But when its most of them, or a very large minority of them, it doesn't matter how many other people don't experience the problem, because the goal is not to make a game that is *theoretically* playable, but rather is playable for the widest possible cross-section of players. You can't achieve perfection, and someone will always be complaining about crashes, but you can still try to reduce that to as small a level as possible.

In this case, I do not believe its just a tiny minority of players that have or are noting problems with blasters. The devs' data says the problems are experienced by a lot of players. And even among forumites that play and are good at blasters, many note the problematic nature of their design or the impression that the tools granted to the archetype are less powerful than for other archetypes.

Alone, no one observation proves anything. But when you take the devs analysis, combined with historical data and the rates of archetype creation and playthrough and abandonment, combined with the range of expressed player observations out there, it becomes clear that *enough* players believe there's a problem to warrant the devs examining blasters carefully.

And they don't need much convincing, because they already convinced themselves that they had enough reason to look at blasters when they implemented Defiance 2.0. All that's really necessary is to demonstrate that D2.0 wasn't enough, and the problem was wider than the devs appreciated at the time. We don't have to convince them that there exists a problem worth investigating, because they already did that once themselves. We just have to convince them to make it a priority to extend the process and expand it more aggressively than they originally did.

And why should we and they be suspicious that D2.0 didn't do the job completely? Because of something called Defiance 1.0, which was designed to resolve the exact same problem and obviously failed to do so or Defiance 2.0 would not have been necessary.

That alone should convince everybody, players and devs, that we should be extra cautious about improving blasters, because two separate rounds of just trying to make them functional for most players have yet to conclusively solve the problem, and at least one of them provably failed to do so. And that means you don't just implement D2.0 and declare victory and walk away. You assume that the same confidence you have now the previous team had then, and if they were dead wrong you could be also. You revisit, and reexamine, and you make sure that your solution doesn't just work, but works well enough to be obvious. Because the last time you attemptd subtle and measured, the whole thing became a complete waste of time.


Also, one other thing. Power creep aside, blasters have always had the "minimally necessary" treatment. Do only what was absolutely necessary to make them functional. I believe the devs were afraid of buffing blasters, in a way they never were with tankers or controllers or any other archetype. They had "tank-mage" poltergeists whispering in their ears.

But this game is not the game it was when Blasters - and all the other hero side archetypes - were designed. Blasters were designed around a trinity ne quaterny concept of Blaster is DPS, Tanker is Tank, Defender is healer/buffer. But the modern game, which dates back to 2005 and is fully expressed in the *villain* archetypes, is that trinity balancing is for the birds. Every villain archetype can and is designed to solo. Well.

Controllers were "overhauled" to solo: they were given containment to give them a major jump in damage prior to 32. Tanker damage has been increased by over 25% since release. Even Scrappers have been buffed: health is higher, damage modifier is higher, pervasive criticals were added after release, and all of the secondaries have had improvements made, setting aside GDN and ED rebalancing (SR is arguably better than it was at release even factoring in the GDN, ED, and the elimination of perma-elude - which itself was introduced in I2).

And recently, even *villain* archetypes, designed to solo, have been significantly overhauled. Dominators were completely overhauled. Stalkers were recently overhauled. These were major changes and improvements made to archetypes that almost certainly already outperformed blasters.

Whether a player notices it or not, or cares or not, it takes a lot more effort to make Blasters work than any other archetype. And there's less return on that effort than for most other archetypes. That's not what the devs say: that's what the playerbase says through the numbers they rack up on the servers. That doesn't mean they can't be made to work, but as I said that's not the goal. The goal is to make Blasters an equal archetype representative in the current City of Heroes game.

And at the moment, it doesn't. That *necessitates* changes. They are necessary, if Blasters are to be the equal of every other archetype. And to a first order degree, that's the goal.

One area of ... disagreement I guess you can call it between myself and the dev team - I should say, every iteration of the powers team - has been the fact that the devs have rarely spent significant time exploring the notion of normalization without homogenization.

One area in particular is the fact the devs are perfectly fine using a damage/recharge/endurance formula that we all now know is almost completely worthless and doesn't really do what the original designers intended, but have been extremely reluctant to examine DPA-based balancing that doesn't involve just setting everything to be identical - blaster tier1/2 attacks and PvP specifically. In both cases there were better ways to do that, but I don't think the devs are comfortable with non-linear balancing.


Here's what I would have done - and I proposed this to the devs several times (a hint of such a system Castle tried to experiment with shows up in Claws and Widows, albeit not exactly the same).

You start with the cast time and the recharge time of the attack. Then the standard formula asserts what the damage of the attack should be: (Recharge * 0.16 + 0.36) in scale units. So a 4s attack has damage 1.0, and an 8s attack has damage 1.64.

Then you calculate the DPA of the attack as Damage/Cast (or Arcanatime, if you like). Now, the balancing part. We pick a "standard DPA" for each archetype, based on that archetype's focus on damage. On the low end, it might be 0.8 for defenders and controllers. It might be 1.2 on the high end for blasters. These numbers are subject to debate. We then perform a DPA-compression step whereby attacks are "compressed" towards that standard DPA in the following way:

AdjustedDamage = SQRT[(Damage/Cast)/Standard] * Cast

In other words, we find the DPA of the attack (dmg/cast), and then we divide that by the standard dpa for that archetype. Suppose that's 1.0 for simplicity purposes: then the term drops out. We then take the square root of that normalized DPA, and then multiply by the cast time.

What we're doing is calculating a DPA, and then "squeezing it" by taking its square root. High DPAs get lower, low DPA's get higher. But if A's DPA is higher than B's, its still higher after this step. This compresses the range of DPA, but it retains the order. Things get closer together, but advantages and disadvantages remain.

That adjusted DPA is then multiplied by the cast time, to come up with a new adjusted damage. That becomes the damage of the power.

Assuming a standard DPA of 1.0 for the moment, this means attacks whose recharge and thus damage imply higher than 1.0 DPA get that DPA lowered a bit. If its greater than 1.0, it will still be greater than 1.0. But its DPE will drop a bit relative to normal, because its endurance is being calculated based on a slightly higher damage level. Higher DPA pays for itself with lower DPE (or higher endurance burn). Lower DPA (then 1.0) gets the benefit of higher than normal DPE. Also, the very very high and the very very low get closer to the standard. There are less excessively good or bad attacks in a DPA sense. But there are still good and bad ones, and you can still make blockbuster attacks while obeying this formula. You just have to pay for it with DPE.

What should "standard DPA" be? My suggestion: mostly, take the square root of the archetype's relative damage modifier times 1.1 as standard DPA, with some adjustments for special cases (brutes in particular).

For reference, this is what that would mean for a few representative archetypes:

Defenders: 0.65 ranged modifier, 0.89 standard DPA
Blasters: 1.125 ranged modifier, 1.17 standard DPA
Tankers: 0.8 melee modifier, 0.98 standard DPA
Dominator: 1.05 melee modifier, 1.13 standard DPA


This is a global, massive rebalancing of attacks the devs would never do on this scale, but it would have partially addressed how Blasters could have an additional edge in offense: they would have higher standard DPA modifiers, and that would tend to automatically, without the devs having to decide anything, make their attacks deal better effective DPS overall.

The question specifically addressed to me was:

My summarized answer was: in terms of the specific *degree* that blasters are so affected, no one, because there's no reason to believe the purpose to mez is to have that large of an effect on survivability.

Your immediate response was to state that that was not a logical conclusion to draw from the devs own analysis of blaster survivability, because D2.0 could have encouraged blasters to die at a higher than normal rate. Which would have been true had that been the only thing we knew, but we also know blasters underperformed before D1.0 was implemented. That is significant, because that nullifies that specific objection.

Your other objection is that the mere coincidental correlation between higher incidence of mez and higher death rates doesn't *prove* that mez is the blaster problem. Which I agreed with: it does not. However, the case I made didn't state that mez was a singular problem of blasters, but only a contributing one. And while that would be extremely difficult to prove by absolute deduction, I believe most people would agree that being mezzed is a contributing factor to lower survival: that's just obvious. Neglecting that obvious fact just to satisfy your own sense of logical validity does no good service to blasters.

Its worth mentioning that blasters were analyzed to be mezzed more often and died more often not to prove causality, but to serve as supporting evidence that the natural inductive conclusion that mez does in fact hurt survivability is supported by the facts. That doesn't mean protecting blasters from mez solves their problem, but it strongly suggests anything that doesn't address mez will likely miss a large component of the problem.

All of this *should* be relatively obvious, and definitely should be factored into whatever changes happen to blasters. And I have reasonable trust that neutral observers will agree, including the most important of those neutral observers.

They couldn't have made it slower if they had defeat all missions within the shared zones.

That's what happens when you take extended breaks. Although its not really the same when someone just keeps making up stuff completely out of thin air. Its like arguing with a schizophrenic about the color of the sky and constantly being told its crumpled and I'm obviously wrong for constantly saying its peach-flavored. I find myself sometimes missing Mieux.

Nor should they. Every time a blaster takes an incarnate power because they think it will "fix" something that's broken, they are just falling behind every other archetype that takes an incarnate power just because its awesome.

When my blaster takes clarion to prevent getting mezzed, that is not remotely balanced against my scrapper taking rebirth and becoming virtually indestructible.

For the incarnate powers to be fair in the first place, every archetype has to be able to approach them on a roughly even footing, so every archetype can then attempt to benefit them to the best extent possible. To the extent that something is wrong with blasters, blasters must get a fix to that problem over and above what anything else gets.

To put it another way, if Blasters have a problem because they are the only achetype in debt, then allowing every archetype to win the lottery doesn't fix their problem. What it does is allow them to eliminate their debt while everyone else gets rich. It just changes the problem from being behind everyone else by being in debt, to being behind everyone else by being just broke.

Unless they changed it at the last minute to be earnable at level 2, this would be impossible.

Actually, Another_Fan saying its possible I'm not wrong is like Venture saying its possible someone isn't retarded. Its an incredibly strong endorsement if you parse it in context.

Because what I want is on very general terms what Another_Fan wants, his main criticism when it comes to blasters focuses on the notion that all of my analysis is wrong, except for the rare moments when it agrees with him in which case I only got there by coincidence, because my flawed methodology could not possibly have generated the correct response.

I'm not so much arguing as reminding Another_Fan that in this particular instance, when I'm not specifically inviting debate for its sake but doing so because it parallels a game change I'm actually serious about effecting, his swipes are basically immaterial to me. I would gladly tolerate them if it got me closer to my goal, and I would also gladly eviscerate them if it got me closer to my goal. However, neither does anything beneficial so I'm just responding for the sake of replying to someone that either thinks they can take free shots at me or enjoys being made a fool of by me. It doesn't matter much which.

Actually, I've been responding to this sort of thing for as long as Freedom's existence has been publicly acknowledged.

In fact, we're coming up on another anniversary for this game's death soon. We have about sixteen or seventeen of those a year, because this game has died quite a few times already.