Arcanaville

These days I tend to get scrapperlocked on my energy blaster a lot. Ever since I rebuilt for high recharge, if there's a lot of stuff, and a confined space, and I have a moderate amount of inspirations, there's a decent chance I'm going to try to figure out how long they will last. In many ways, its more satisfying than getting scrapperlocked on extremely strong scrapper builds.

This sounds like you are conflating mez protection and mez resistance. Mez protection prevents mez from taking effect. Mez resistance reduces the duration of mez. And duration-based resistance is different from magnitude-based resistance. 90% magnitude resistance means you only feel 10% of the effect. That's pretty good. 90% duration resistance means you feel the duration for 53% of the base duration (1/1.9), or about half. That's not so good. You'd have to be able to get mez resistance in the hundreds of percent to make me consider mez resistance building to be a legitimate option for most players to deal with mez.


A person who gets all A's is either one of the smartest people in the world, or only taking classes they know they can pass.

99.9% of all the people who play this game are neither and the game is designed primarily for them. Because the other 0.1% don't buy enough superpacks to sustain the title.

Malta stun grenades stun for like 25 to 30 seconds. That's often grave-diggingly annoying.

There's a certain irony here, in that this is exactly the sort of thread he would have avoided like the plague. Back then, part of the problem was just discussing market activity like flipping academically, rather than outside the charged atmosphere of whether using the markets for any purpose other than to buy items for crafting was socially acceptable.

You may recall market manipulation was actually being called "griefing" by some on the forums, and I and a few other players actually got word of god replies from the devs that the markets were explicitly intended to be, at least in part, a PvP metagame (to the extent that markets generally are) and that as a result no market activity could or would be categorized by the devs as actionable griefing.

It was actually that dev statement that caused me to back away from over-analyzing market chicanery. My recollection of that thread is fuzzy, but it was around the same time the markets were released in I9 that The_Gamemaster was at his most empirically analytical. Definitely a poster I miss having around.

There's only one kind of story: the kind with a beginning and an end.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of variations possible given that limitation.

Since that would mean average blaster players would be leveling two or three times faster than average anything else, that would be wrong, in the sense that the devs would not allow such a circumstance to occur detectably, period.

Most people do not consider any change to the markets to be "manipulation." Manipulation usually indicates a specific intent to cause a specific market reaction. Flippers actually often intend the opposite: they hope their impact on the market will be low enough for them to continue the activity indefinitely.

Since all trades affect the market, calling any effect manipulation makes the term meaningless. So I don't normally see people refer to anything but deliberate attempts to create a very specific market condition "manipulation."

Thunderous Blast, Blizzard, and Overcharge require completely different thinking because they are mechanically different. Overcharge doesn't crash. Blizzard crashes and summons a knockdown patch (which doesn't last as long as the blaster crash). Thunderous Blast crashes and drains, although that drain does not generally incapacitate its targets unless significantly slotted for. Focusing on crash mitigation doesn't help nukes that don't crash. Focusing on strengthening the damage output of the nukes requires different balancing for rains vs direct damage. And all three are different from Nova in that they have range, while PBAoE nukes like Nova have special concerns when it comes to activation and crashing.

Changing snipes and nukes can be part of the solution, but they can't be the focus of the solution for the simple reason that not all primaries have snipes, and the secondaries have different kinds of nukes. There's lots of room to improve Nova, but almost no room to improve Rain of Arrows. Thunderous Blast and Blizzard would require totally different thinking to revise, as would Overcharge.

To be fair, it was tankers that were the original punching bag dummy. Blasters were not designed to actually take a punch.

Its easy to forget how dramatically broken *everything* was at the beginning, and how Blasters still preserve a lot of legacy from those days. Controllers used to have very little damage until their level 32 pets. Half the scrapper secondaries were by today's standards non-functional (SR, DA). Factoring in melee set improvements, modifier changes, and bruising, tankers were dealing almost half the damage they do today and *they* had problems, like Fiery Aura having incomplete mez protection and both invuln and stone armor being basically immobile. Illusion was broken, gravity had no pet, confuse stole XP. In and among all that, Blasters having Defender health and no defenses didn't look so bad.

Today, there are no bad scrappers, no bad tankers, no non-functional controllers. But while Blasters have been tweaked over time their structural problems are exactly identical today that they were at release.

Also, Stephen Hawking has been on the show, continuing to promote the stereotype that smart people are too lazy to stand and have robotic voices.

Then lets remove mez protection from everyone, and let everyone use the solution you suggests to deal with mez, since with this solution mez with never be an issue.

I've always thought that, or at least for as long as I've fully grasped the game's offensive mechanics. Blaster ranged attacks tend to have lower than average DPA (single target), that DPA doesn't always improve significantly with tier (alternatively, they tend to lack high DPA ranged attacks that can be cycled), and they even collectively tend to lack actual range. Outside of 40 feet, my energy blaster has only three actual attacks usable in theory: power bolt, power blast, and explosive blast. That's a couple too few for non-invention builds with high recharge, in other words almost everyone else.

Its possible, but it might not be necessary. Blasters can already shoot while mezzed. If those attacks can incapacitate mezzers, that eliminates chain mez *and* it reduces the damage the blaster takes while mezzed. It sort of puts the blaster in a "defensive" mode of trying to use two or three attacks to keep the enemy off balance until the mez breaks, which I think is all by itself a reasonable thing to have happen. It would actually be a case of mez acting in a non-binary manner, something that has been suggested for the game for almost as long as the game has existed.

Saying giving blasters mez protection would unbalance the game is not a good way to get that point across, but I agree that just giving mez protection to blasters won't solve their problems, at least as I see them, because I don't see the blaster problem as "gets mezzed too often." I see it as "lost what little design integrity they had, long ago." At the moment blasters suffer from every penalty their original design concept contained, while losing most of the advantages their design penalty was intended to provide. That is untenable.

But part of the problem is the knee-jerk reaction to attempts to buff blaster survivability as "obviously broken." Its only as obviously broken as controllers AoE criting everything and tankers with 71% of the blaster mod and a resistance debuff and dominators with very similar damage modifiers and an entire control set. It is within the context of the modern game, where melee archetypes don't even use their ranged modifiers because its too low that we have to examine what is and is not realistic for blasters to have. I don't oppose blasters getting mez protection because its too much. I oppose blasters getting mez protection because its not enough. But it *appears* so powerful it would limit blasters' ability to get what they really need.


Why not? No specific reason. Why not in their primary powers, which they get more of sooner and can obviously use more often? Why not in their attacks, so that blasters retain their basic playstyle of focusing on offense and attacking, and getting the secondary benefit of extra survivability the better they leverage attacks? And why not in the ranged attacks, where blasters have a specific differentiator over the melee classes?

Why not is a slippery question.


That was another extremely difficult point to extract, since you explicitly stated that the lesson D&D offers is that high offense and high survivability should not be coupled, and that it had "mechanical" lessons to offer.

Insofar as archetypes should be distinct, that's a truism. However, that does not in any way limit the game mechanical features that blasters could receive without being unbalanced. It only serves as guidance when judging which options are more conceptually interesting from a gameplay partitioning perspective.

Its pretty clear at this point that every archetype has, as either its primary or secondary set of roles, the role of staying alive and dealing damage. Except for blasters, there is no archetype that can claim to have not been either originally designed or altered after release to fit that description except blasters. I think that says the "glass cannon" concept has already been critically damaged, because "cannon" is no longer a unique aspect of blasters. Take away cannon, and you're left with "glass."

I think the thing that has to be discarded is the notion that part of the blaster concept is that it dies. No other archetype is defined that way. I think what has to happen is that concept has to shift from "blasters have no survivability" to "blasters survive in a unique way." Tankers survive by just being highly resistant to attack. Controllers survive by incapacitating the enemy with long duration controls. Blasters have to carve out their own means of staying alive, which means their own way of dealing with damage, dealing with mez, and dealing with other threats to survival.

The *obvious* concept is "offense is defense." Except its not, not intrinsically, because this game's mechanics don't really allow for damage to do that in a way that's balanceable. But we can make that statement work if "offense" isn't just damage. In a sense, controllers implement "offense is defense" as well - their offense includes control.

That's why I suggested, in another thread, that the blaster "offense is defense" concept be extended to counter-mez. Add short duration mez pulses to blaster attacks so that blasters can partially neutralize targets they are shooting at but only while actively shooting at them. That carves a specific kind of mez away from Controllers, leaving controllers the kings of long-duration controls: basically the fire and forget controls.

That's not a reason. I'm aware of the full history of blaster design. This statement implies that the way blasters were designed explicitly requires a lack of mez protection in the first place, which it does not.

Also, there is no "the balance." As I'm often pointing out, balance is a relationship between two or more things. It is not a singular thing. If giving blasters mez protection "throws off the balance" it must damage the balance relationship between blasters and something else: blasters and the PvE environment, blasters and other archetypes. We know for a fact that the blaster relationship with the PvE environment and with other archetypes was already invalid when D2.0 was implemented, and D2.0 has mez deferral within it. As that did not significantly break balance in blasters' favor, that's basically tantamount to saying that at least some of the deleterious effects of mez for blasters were provably unnecessary to preserve game balance, and in fact were acting to damage it in the opposite direction.


And yet blasters have had their survival increased several times over the game's history and D2.0 implements a partial mez immunity and arguably that is *still* not enough - certainly no one can credibility make the case that blasters are overpowered and infringing upon other classes now.

This is a matter of degree. The principle you claim here doesn't exist. You can in fact give blasters all kinds of things if they are underperforming. And if they are for the average player, they are period, because that's who we balance the game for. Not you or I. The fact you have no problems with them is completely irrelevant to game balance. The question is what the tools do when put in the hands of the entire playerbase. And we know from datamining that the judgment of the playerbase as a whole is those tools are lesser tools, because blasters underperformed dramatically.

And being concerned about infringement is missing the point, because the other archetypes by dev fiat already infringe upon blasters in an almost fatal manner if you actually care about game balance in a game design sense. Being concerned about the "design of blasters" as it pertains to survivability is meaningless outside the context of the fact that blasters were designed to have by far the best offense. In no sense of those words is that true.

When you look at damage output at present and its evolution over time there is an unimpeachable trend towards damage increasing over time, far into the range that blasters were supposed to dominate in. The tanker damage mod was originally 0.6, its not 0.8 with bruising. That's 71% of the blaster mod. Controllers have double damage containment. The biggest indictment of blaster damage being credibly balanced against survivability is dominator damage mods: 1.05 and 0.95. Those are damage dealer modifiers for an archetype with significant control and significant ranged output.


And yet, adding damage is also problematic because of the sheer amount of damage you'd have to add relative to survivability, if the only concern was damage/survivability quantitative balancing. Its north of 50% higher damage. No, I'm not just making up a number. The problem is that this game was designed around relatively quick combat: minions are actually intentionally designed around being defeatable with about 3-4 "standard attacks" and that's already right at the limits of the point where discrete effects break the ability to balance with continuous averages. Increasing blaster damage by 50% or more would create massive AoE balancing problems.

The offensive window for balancing is extremely narrow, and offense itself doesn't directly balance or translate into survivability either which is why balancing survivability through offensive output has never worked in the history of the game.

You seem to be confused into thinking that because blaster survivability ought to be lower than things with less damage, it cannot be higher than it is now. But there's an entire range of "lower" and its not all correct. There is "lower but too high", "lower but way too low", and "lower, and at just the right value." If blasters are underperforming on average then its too low by definition. Because in this game, that's how balance is defined literally.

The general principles need to be applied to the specifics of the game, something you are not doing. When you say blaster survivability can't be buffed because its supposed to be lower than other archetypes, that says nothing. Because just because its supposed to be lower, that doesn't mean the level its currently at is the correct value just because its lower. Why not set it even lower then?

Mez protection doesn't actually make blasters significantly more survivable than any other archetype, so it doesn't change the survivability relationship order of the archetypes. To prove it would be unbalancing, you'd have to prove that adding it would then make blasters outperform on average most of the other archetypes, or that it would infringe upon a design rule to a worse degree than blaster damage is currently being infringed upon by everything else. You'd have to prove that in the face of the fact that prior to D2.0, Blasters *heavily* underperformed *everyone* else.

That would be an interesting hurdle to attempt to overcome.

It may be. The last time I tested this was about a year ago, and I had to "affect" them to get them to run; taunt was the obvious way to do that in a way that didn't otherwise damage them, and I didn't want to use debuffs because there are theories floating around about debuffs having special properties.

I'm looking at blasters based on the value of the tools and not on the ability for a small segment of the player population to overcome discrepancies in those tools.

That blasters singularly underperformed everyone else on average is a historical fact. Asking why is an interesting intellectual exercise that is neither necessary nor sufficient for improving them. Not being able to think up a reason does not call that fact into question.

Afraid basically increases the priority of the critter's AI to run. It does not force the critter to attempt to run when running is impossible, and when its impossible the critter then selects another action to perform.

Its possible to see the weird inverse to this in the AE: if you make a critter with no attacks and then taunt it, in a short period of time it will run away, even if you do not otherwise attack it. That's because taunting makes the critter want to attack, and when *that* is impossible it does the next thing on its TODO list, which is to high-tail it even though its under no real threat. It runs because it has nothing better to do.

The fact that you're almost always wrong and almost always looking for a fight highlights the pitfalls of generalizing a correlation from one data point.

The smart-a** failed to mention that Loki's "stupid" plan actually worked. Loki's deal with Thanos was he would get the tesseract, open a portal to the chitauri army, and have them take over the world, then he would give the tesseract to Thanos.

Loki successfully stole the tesseract, and then he successfully bought time for it to be converted into a portal by letting himself get captured, having already put his escape plan into action with Hawkeye. He successfully sowed dischord among the Avengers, successfully deployed the tesseract, and successfully opened a portal to the Chitauri army.

It was the Chitauri that heavily underestimated Earth and its capabilities and oversold themselves both to Loki *and* Thanos. And I'm not sure what sort of "backup plan" you can have for what to do if your cosmic army fails to defeat your enemies and you lose control over the most powerful object in the universe. That's a plan A that doesn't admit many plan Bs, and with Thanos' agent apparently watching him, that's also a plan A that doesn't allow for many opportunities to enact a plan B of any kind.