Arcanaville

As snide as the comment was likely intended, its also likely true for the foreseeable future. Which is why as entertaining as academic quibbling with you might be, its really just a sideshow to the main effort of getting things done correctly. I'm unaware of any way you can help that effort, or hurt it, so on a purely practical level there's nothing to be gained by convincing you of anything, nor at risk in failing to do so.

Acknowledging the fact you can't really pigeonhole most NPCs into the standard player archetypes, my instinct is to say that's a pseudo-dominator, resist shield notwithstanding. Lots of critters across the board have resistances to make them tougher, even things patterned after squishies, so just the mere presence of shields doesn't automatically make something a melee-like archetype to me. But the presence of a balance between range, melee, control, and a pet, is much more strongly suggestive of a dominator.

I thought a fire tank was the first to 40.

In either case, Fulmens referred to 2005. Scrappers had issues right at release, in the sense that SR was non-functional and Dark Armor didn't stack at release. But in 2005 you're talking about a time between Issue 3 and Issue 6, and scrappers were not having issues during that period, ED and GDN notwithstanding.

I mentioned this in a bunch of the other threads, but to me the blaster "role" should be: Offensive Specialist.

Its obvious that Blasters are designed to be essentially all offense, but the problem is that the offensive tools they have aren't sufficient to do the *two* things all archetypes have to do: kill, and stay alive.

Controllers are Control specialists with a secondary focus on buff/debuff. Look at what's missing from that description. Damage. Controllers "role" doesn't include damage. And yet they do it. Why? Because all archetypes must be able to kill, and must be able to stay alive. That's why all control sets also do damage. That's not a violation of their description, that's just a recognition of the practical reality that all archetypes must deal damage.

So it seems entirely obvious that even though Blasters got a "ranged damage" set and a "melee damage/utility" set that survivability still has to be in there somewhere.

So when I say that the Blaster role should be "offense" that does not in any way mean, nor should anyone presume, that means "all damage." Controllers are not all control and buff/debuff: that's why many control powers deal damage and the actual controller inherent includes a double damage effect. Controllers deal damage and controllers essentially have critical hits. If that is perfectly normal, then saying Blasters role is "Offense" shouldn't in any way limit their specialty to just generating points of damage.

Once the concept of "Offense" is broadened to the same degree that "Control" is, I think how to best improve blasters very smoothly follows the Blaster role as "Offensive Specialist." They should be good at killing, so their offense should be damage heavy. But they also need to stay alive, and that means dealing with incoming damage and mez. They just need to be given "offensive" tools to do that, no different in a broad sense than controllers are.

To me personally, "offense" translates into "attacks" and that to me implies that Blasters should kill and stay alive by constant application of attacks, which is different in nature from controllers that can incapacitate a target and leave them incapacitated while they deal with other things (in theory). Controllers control, and while controlling they also deal damage. Blasters should attack, and while attacking somehow mitigate incoming counterattack.

And to me personally, that should happen, to the greatest degree possible, by the blaster affecting the attackers, not buffing themselves to be more survivable. They should in some way neutralize attackers by shooting them, and balance dictates they can't do that by one-shotting everything in sight: they need a way to neutralize a target without necessarily killing it instantly.

From there, my "counter-mez" idea follows. But it starts, as I mentioned a few months ago, not by being enamored of counter-mez, but by asking myself what should blasters be good at? And fundamentally, I think what blasters should be good at is attacking things, and in the act of attacking things they should kill fast, and they should gain survivability through the act of attacking - the two things all archetypes must be able to do: kill and survive.

I shoot it, and it either dies or has some difficulty shooting back temporarily, while I'm shooting it. To me, that's a concept that works for blasters. Which I generalize to describe as "Offensive Specialist." Because "shoot in the face and hobble things specialist" is more evocative, but less flexible.

Eh, its the new paradigm. Pre-Freedom, people threatened to quit because the devs didn't add anything new recently. Post-Freedom, people now threaten to quit because the devs added something recently they don't like.

Also, quitting has been redefined to mean "switch to premium and continue playing" which means the innovation in protestation is that players elect to cease being one of the players NCSoft is trying to retain and become one of the players NCSoft is trying to attract. I'm certain this confounds NCSoft statisticians to no end.

As far as my recollection goes, that's been true since launch.

Resilience's prior life as the Resist Disorientation toggle I think did not survive beta.

Correlation is linkage, which is what you originally asked for.

Causation is impossible to prove, because mez doesn't cause death. Only damage causes death. However, I don't feel compelled to actually attempt to prove absolutely that mez contributes to death, because that's a sufficiently obvious fact.

Since mez contributes to death in terms of increasing the likelihood of either death or being weakened to the point of being more vulnerable to death, and blasters were datamined to be mezzed more often, and were datamined to be killed while mezzed more often, those are sufficient to induce that mez contributes to blaster underperformance. Neither I nor the devs ever stated or even implied that it was the sole cause of blaster underperformance, and in fact I disavowed that idea many times, including in every recent thread about blaster mez protection. In fact, I've gone out of my way to state several times that one of the reasons why I'm not generally supportive of granting direct mez protection to blasters is explicitly because I don't think its the sole or overwhelmingly concentrated cause of blaster underperformance, but focusing on granting mez protection could lead the devs to fail to address the more general problem of survivability and offensive capability balance.

Of course, I should point out you aren't in Seattle, so there's a bit of a loophole there.

Why do Brutes get an inherent damage buff power. No other archetype gets to have such a huge damage buff without having to take a power.

Blasters can shoot with limited attacks while mezzed. No other archetype can do that. Why are they allowed to do that if no one else is? Because they needed something, and the devs wanted to give them something unique.

Let me repeat: the devs wanted to give them something unique. Why does anything get to do something no one else does? That's usually the reason why. Whatever we do to Blasters, being something unique to them is very high on the list of things that should happen. If its something anyone else can do, or everyone else can do, its probably not worth doing for Blasters.

And yet Cosmic Balance which I mention and you conveniently clip from you quote doesn't have to be "taken" and thus is "free."

The other powers contradict your other statement:

And I'm assuming practically everyone who read your post assumed that's what you meant by "free" in the first place. But regardless what you meant, there are mez protection powers that do not need to be activated as a click or toggle, and there are mez protection powers that are free as in do not need to be explicitly taken by the player.

This would be a meaningful objection if the devs hadn't datamined blasters as being underperforming before Defiance 1.0 was introduced. That was why we *got* Defiance 1.0 in the first place, along with increased health.

I would agree. Anything we do to blasters has to help them both teamed and solo. The best possible options would be ones that worked in both arenas. In a distant second would be having mechanics that worked well teamed and a second set of independent ones that worked solo.


Three problems. First, it scales oddly. Being mezzed to mag 2 is no worse than being mezzed to mag 3 - you're still mezzed. Far more deleterious to blasters is mez duration rather than mez magnitude, because most blasters don't have any mez protection so any level of mez magnitude is equally bad.

Second, the three powers that Defiance 2.0 allows the usage of were carefully considered. Opening that up beyond that starts to create both balance issues within the archetype and outside the archetype. There's a huge difference, for example, betweeen unlocking Energy Torrent at tier 3 and Telekinetic Blast at tier 3 and Irradiate at tier 3. Blaster primaries aren't balanced around primaries being structurally identical at every single tier.

Third, given their previous experience with D1.0, the devs are unlikely to want to experiment with a blaster change that in any way encourages building threat against the blaster.


In general, I'm not keen on team-scaling buffs for blasters because I think their problems don't get substantively worse on teams. They are just a little different. In general, I'm not opposed to adding damage to blasters: I think too many archetypes already encroach on blaster damage. However, I believe the additional damage should be mainly a token gesture: adding more damage should be what we do because blasters are supposed to be the unequivocal damage masters, and right now they aren't the unequivocal damage masters: that's debatable. It shouldn't be debatable. But I think adding damage should only be done to address that specific issue: its just not possible in my opinion to resolve blaster survivability issues with increased damage, so there's no point in increasing blaster damage past the point where their offense becomes preeminent. In fact, increasing it too high could hamper efforts to increase their survivability (because while damage alone can't resolve their survivability issues, too much increased damage *combined with* some increased survivability could cause them to overperform).

Not true. Foresight has mez resistance in a passive. Wolf Spider Armor, Crab Spider Armor Upgrade, and Bane Spider Armor Upgrade have mez protection in passive powers.

And in terms of whole archetypes, Kheldians have Cosmic Balance has mez protection scaling with team members.

Also, Resilience has both mez resistance and mez protection in a passive and it has existed in that state for almost as long as the game has existed, which means the devs "broke" that rule practically from the beginning of time.

I have asked that same question myself many times over the years, so I'm well qualified to now answer it. This is actually a very easy question to answer given the current state of the art of City of Heroes game balance. The answer is that whoever is affected by mez, the archetype designed to have the absolute least amount of protection should not be it, because doing so makes them too vulnerable to being defeated compared to other archetypes which have either vastly superior protection, vastly superior countermez, or vastly superior buff/debuff.

That's not a conjecture, that's a proven theory. Since its the only theory that explains the facts, which are that prior to D2.0 Blaster performance was lower than any other archetype, and that major underperformance correlated with higher than average mezzed, higher than average deaths and debt, and higher than average death while in the mezzed state, that proves unambiguously that the net strength of the tools provided to blasters provides far less survivability than any other archetype, and that the lack of survivability is not compensated for by an increase in offensive prowess that translates into higher kill speed and higher reward earning speed.

Those are facts. Those facts allow us to reject speculation, guesswork, and anecdotes that fail to match the facts. Are defenders more vulnerable to mez than blasters? Answer: unambiguously not. Does controller mez do a better job of countering both mez and damage than blaster damage and secondary effects? Answer: yes, unambiguously.

We know - not guess, but know - that for the players of this game on average, having some offense and either lots of control or lots of defense or lots of buff/debuff is vastly superior to having some offense and some more offense, and we know why: being dead neutralizes all other advantages.

So when the archetype that gets no defense, and no control, and no buff/debuff, also has no mez protection, we know what happens: it underperforms. And we also know that even taking the dramatic step of allowing that archetype to shoot three powers when mezzed doesn't overpower the archetype: in fact it doesn't appear to do enough to balance it against its peers. Because being mezzed is just a secondary issue: the real issue is that it makes the blaster more vulnerable to being defeated by actual damage, for which the blaster has the least amount of ability to respond.

Other archetypes are protected from mez, or they act to prevent mezzers from acting, or they react to the deleterious effects of mez by impairing the ability for attackers to kill them, or they recover from the deleterious effects of mez by healing. Blasters can only try to reengage offense after mez wears off. And we know that's not enough, so we can discard that as being a valid option.

That's how easy it is to reason the answer to this question from the facts, rather than from guessing what does and doesn't work. Put simply, the answer to the question "who should be vulnerable to mez" is "no one except blasters are as critically vulnerable to mez, and NO ONE should be so critically vulnerable to mez." Eliminating that critical vulnerability does not eliminate the threat of mez, it simply softens it to the point of not being game-breaking for just one archetype.

And the underperformance datamined prior to the D2.0 changes was literally game-breaking. As in "high enough to violate the limits of the game design." As I stated at the time and as Castle communicated to me, Blaster underperformance was datamined to be so high, the devs were essentially compelled to address it, because it lay outside the tolerable range of performance.


And incidentally, that thing you bolded? Meaningless to this game's design. Meaningless in the on-paper sense of happening too late to matter, and meaningless in the in-game sense of even at the levels where it is accessible blasters still underperformed everyone else. Reality trumps theory. If blasters *actually* underperform I frankly don't care if they *could* avoid underperforming. That they underperform is reason enough to reexamine them: its the canary in the cage that says that even people who have no problem with them are likely being penalized, just not in a way they can detect because their playing skill masks that underperformance. Even I thought that at least solo not-debuffing defenders would underperform blasters on average. They did not, which means my skill at playing blasters masked the fact that on average blasters perform so poorly they can't outdo empathy defenders crawling along with unbuffed defender ranged attacks.

That is *nightmarishly* bad performance. And all because in all probability empathy defenders have a heal, and that alone means they live when most blasters die.


The only reason I don't support mez protection for blasters is because its too binary, and because its too passive in terms of simply nullifying mez. Rather than existing near melee archetypes in terms of protection, I believe blasters should exist out past where controllers and defenders exist: where Defenders have tools to deal with mez and damage with buff/debuff and Controllers with less buff/debuff and more offensive control, Blasters should go all the way and deal with mez and damage by neutralizing the attackers with offense. Its just that that offense cannot be all damage, because the only way to nullify targets with damage is to kill them. Offensive effects that can neutralize attackers without killing them are easier to balance, while retaining a unique gameplay option encapsulated within blasters. But its not because I think mez protection for blasters is game breaking, and the notion that if blasters aren't vulnerable to mez to the degree they currently are then mez becomes a worthless game mechanic is not supported by the facts or an objective analysis of the design of the archetypes of this game, and neglects to factor in the information we now have about how the archetypes perform, or at least performed, relative to each other.

I cannot speak for NCSoft's legal team. However, lets take a step back and discuss what actually happened here.

1. A Marvel artist *sees* your character, and reproduces *its look* in a Marvel comic book.

All of the art assets within this game are owned by NCSoft. So that's a direct violation of the intellectual property of NCSoft, to the extent that they can assert copyright on those assets. They can't copyright a white number 3 on someone's chest, but the specific design of tops, pants, sleeves, and other geometry and textures are individually copy protectable. If those are infringed upon individually, NCSoft can sue for copyright violation on that basis.

2. A Marvel artist sees your character and copies your specific combination of those art assets into a single visual character design.

That's a bit of a grey area. To the extent that your work in using those items in a unique design are copyrightable, *you* have a separate distinct right to sue Marvel independent of NCSoft. NCSoft does not own your creations. This keeps coming up. The EULA asserts a non-exclusive, unlimited license to use your creations. In effect your creations are collages under copyright law: assemblages of other works. That assemblage is copyrightable. NCSoft gave you permission to use those works within the game so you haven't violated their rights. You *would* violate their rights if you used those art materials *outside* the game. While you are extending them a license to use your character work any way they want, they aren't extending the same license to you. You own the work, but not its parts, and that limits what you can do with it.

Either way, you could sue Marvel. Your legal position would be somewhat weaker than NCSoft's, but the letter of the law supports your rights here.


3. Suppose the Marvel artist on top of that copied your character's backstory, ala Cende above.

Two part violation. Again: NCSoft doesn't own your characters, they only have a non-exclusive right to use them. You own what you type as a creator under US copyright law (I'm assuming US law for the purposes of this discussion, as I'm more familiar with that). You would have the right to sue Marvel if that work was infringed.

On top of that, your backstory *might* mention copyrighted content owned by NCSoft. If your backstory says you were experimented upon by Crey Corporation, for example, NCSoft owns that piece of intellectual property. If Marvel were to lift that without changing the names, NCSoft would have a separate right to sue (they'd combine the two infringements - the artwork and the backstory - to make an even stronger single case for the Marvel character infringing on NCSoft intellectual property).


Now, NCSoft would have a pretty good case here. You would have a very weak one under #2 but a stronger one hypothetically under #3. The reason is that it would be hard to prove damages under #2. NCSoft can, but you would have a harder time because you couldn't really use that character design with the specific visual look anywhere but in this game - because NCSoft hasn't given you the right to use it anywhere else. But if we extend the infringement to include #3, you'd have a stronger case because you don't need NCSoft's permission to take a backstory you wrote, and sanitize it of all references to NCSoft property, and reuse it elsewhere.


One more thing:

Specifically inside NCSoft's servers not much. Remember: your acceptances of the EULA grants to NCSoft the right to use your creations in any way they wish. That means if another player makes a character exactly like yours its entirely up to NCSoft whether to allow that to happen or not. You've given them the right to use your character, that right includes the right to allow other players to emulate it. I don't know what NCSoft's policy is on players directly copying other players, but I suspect its not barred conduct.

I've never had my sarcasm, spurious, and schizophrenia alarms all go off simultaneously that strongly before.

When you find something you out-range on a blaster, you don't pass up the chance to shoot it.

Based on the feedback recently, you can probably dispense with the power balancing and speed up the process a bit.

Plus, there's nothing like the non-stop kaboom of an energy blaster gone berserk.

It generally has to work at least 95% of the time for that to be a viable tactic, even if Return to Battle is considered a reasonable backup plan.

To prevent dying at least once per mission, your tactics generally have to work at least 97% of the time per spawn.

How do you take a screenshot of manipulating other players into laughing?

Keep in mind I didn't take Power Burst in part because I can shoot almost continuously without it, as I have a very high recharge build (~ +160% recharge). In builds that don't focus on recharge, it might make sense to take the attack if it will fit in the build.