Mind Forever Burning

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poor TA is left out in the cold again except for oil slick wth?

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You've successfully challenged me! I'm going to get off my slacker, alt-loving butt and level my TA/A Defender to 50! I think an all TA team could do the STF in under 3 hours. Possibly much less than 3 hours with practice and co-ordination.


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I think you're both wrong.

TA is fine against AVs if you know how to slot. The main thing you want is -res. TA has better -res than any other primary except Sonic. I rolled a TA/sonic specifically for AV fights, and though I only got him through the Faultline AVs, he performed as expected - the AVs dropped like lieutenants.

However, TA does not have heals. I don't care how much debuff you bring, you're not going to be able to finish this without heals. TA support is fine, but an all-TA team would drown in creeped damage. (Well, I suppose the whole team could take the Medicine pool, but that seems perverse.)

- Protea

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I look forward to running this soon. But I fear that this will become a "specialized" TF, needing certain ATs and team compositions to run well, I hope it's not the case, only time will tell.

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The problem is, if that is *not* the case, then Villains will cry foul, because that is how the LRSF works today. The team build requirements are less restrictive than they used to be, but they are still there.

Having done the STF (unsuccessfully) twice, I think I have a pretty good grasp of what's required to complete it, and it's not dissimilar to what's required on the LRSF. In theory, that makes the STF "easier" because there are more combinations that can deliver that recipe heroside.

The one tangible benefit I see heroes getting at this point is that Heroes do not need anyone who can resurrect. The hospital ship is on-map which means you don't lose load time if someone drops. On the LRSF, you'd be foolish not to take anyone who can rez.

There are some smart forum posters who disagree with me, though, so I'm not claiming to have the final word. I just haven't done enough runs to do a fair comparison yet.

- Protea

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but I think your whole methodology is flawed.

If there is any way to equalize the value of SHOs against influence or infamy, that method compares the time required to acquire X infamy vs. the time required to obtain the SHO.

Assuming you can run one LRSF in an hour, and that the drops go according to your rarity table (which is actually good information), then you will have to play, on average, for 4 hours to earn one Nucleolus (give or take). So the question is, how much infamy can one earn in 4 hours of play? I suspect the answer is, a lot more than you list in your table.

For the rarest drops, which you might have to run the LRSF 25 or 50 times to have a good chance at, the comparable inf cost goes up immensely.

And that's a very generous analysis. In the worst case, you don't have LRSF teams to run with consistently, or it takes you much longer than an hour. These factors inflate the inf value of SHOs greatly.

Finally, remember that there's very little else anyone needs inf for. There's no reason not to throw it *all* at acquiring SHOs, because you don't need any more SOs at that level, so the only other useful thing to do with it is outfit your own alts - and that doesn't require much of an investment. I don't know exactly that factors into "inf"lation (get it? ha ha) - someone with more of an economics background than me would have to do more analysis.

I agree with the previous poster, any pricing that's not in the millions seems ludicrously low to me.

- Protea

Actually, I was a little disappointed to see so many familiar maps in the screenshots (and - and - and oranbega no less!)

Still, I'm really interested to see what the devs will throw at the hero ATs for a challenge. After our experiences with the LRSF, I don't think it can be a raw AV fight, even a raw many-on-many AV fight.

- Protea

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Arctic Sun is about to die...

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Arctic Sun, your art-force is running out!

Ah the days of wedging paper into the fire button while my elf was around the corner from a medium ghost generator, so I could go home and sleep and play more the next day.

*sniff*

- Protea

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Please leave Shivans alone. They are very useful to the squishier AT's in the game.

The simple thing to do is to make the rewards tie into the minimum team size. If the TF need 4 to start, you must have 4 to get rare drops. Make the missions scale to the TF minimum, instead of for a solo player. Leave it so that you can still complete the TF if under the minimum, just no rares will drop.

I think that would solve the problem.

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This strikes me as the most sensible option. TFs are not meant to be soloed even though many can be. Tie the rewards to a team being present for the last mission.

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I don't like this idea for 2 reasons:

1) Teammates might drop, or crash and not return; this seems unfair to the remaining teammates.

2) Based on my current understanding of how this will be implemented, I would *guess* this will be a pain to code.

But of course #2 is really just a supposition on my part; #1 is really my main objection.

- Protea

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Check: all hero epic hold powers vs the ones in sets.

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Epics are weaker than their primary counterparts, in general. The amount by which they are weaker has, in my estimation, been standardized.

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The other MAJOR example of this is the blaster melee attacks vs brute/tank/stalker melee attacks: examples:
Blaster Bone Smasher is a 14s recharge vs Tank/Brute/Stalker Bone Smasher at a 8s recharge


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If you look closer, you'll see that all those powers obey the same rules as far as damage per endurance and damage per cycle time. Those rules are consistent within an AT and also across ATs once you take into account the damage scale for the ATs you are comparing.

Again, in my estimation these powers are standardized.

Now, there are some powers that are not balanced by this system. Mostly, they involve non-attack powers where there are only indirect ways to compare them (is the damage component in Consume enough to justify its lengthy recharge relative to Power Sink?). There are a few exceptions, and IMHO, those powers are affecting game balance and people just haven't figured it out yet. When they do, I am guessing Castle will have to make another round of changes.

The people that make use of those powers will moan when it happens, but IMHO the changes will be justified and should have been done when the powers were first designed.

- Protea

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Wait, wait, let me get clear on this-so what you're saying is, even if I'm playing solo on a non-caped toon, that when I 'see' a toon with a cape on my screen, I'm potentially at risk for a client crash (as my comp tries to cope with the goofy geometry stuff)?

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Exactly.

- Protea

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Thanks for the update, but would the cape crash cause non cape wearers to crash?

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Absolutely. I believe I verified a recipe that would cause *my teammates* to crash, which involved my costume plus one of my toggle armors.

I was somewhat reluctant to post the exact recipe on the forums because (a) it could lead to griefing and (b) there were clearly more recipes than just the one I identified. (Also, I only really figured out the last piece of that particular puzzle this past weekend.) If you look through my posts you can see me digging for this info among people who crashed.

That specific bug appears to have been fixed in the latest patch (thanks, Cryptic!) but there may be other combinations of costume and powerset that cause these problems.

Please don't write off the capes/trenchcoat problem by saying "I have a cape/trenchcoat and I never crash". You may not have the pair power that causes the problem, or you may actually be causing those near you to crash without realizing it.

- Protea

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My wife has problems with the Ranged shot issue. It happens when targeting drone is on. Causes the draw animation to happen 2x, there by slowing the attack and wasting some of her Aim.

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This should be fixed on the Training Room server currently. Give it a shot and let me know if it's still a problem.

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Ha ha ha! *snort* *chuckle* Good one, Castle.

... Oh wait, you weren't joking?

- Protea

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I can solo an AV with my energy blaster, a tray full of inspirations, and the biological nuke; and correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the bio nuke buffed after its initial release?

So either energy blasters are overpowered, inspirations are overpowered, or I am.

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Wow, really? I'm honestly surprised you could overcome the AV regen rate with only one blaster, even at the damage cap.

- Protea

PS - you forgot, "or bio nukes are overpowered".

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Or we could reduce the effectiveness of a suite of Temp Powers. Shivans and the Nuke's are pretty dang good.

And before more people jump on Optimus, we've known those powers were over the top since they were created.

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Is this as close as I'll ever get to a developer admission that they were put in as the sekrit trick to completing the pre-i8 LRSF?

I knew it. I just knew it.

- Protea

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How is that going to work with Twilight Grasp, I wonder?

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I assume that enemy debuffs will always root, overriding the 3 rules given. So Twilight Grasp, Transfusion, Siphon Power, and Fulcrum Shift will continue to root, since they all have enemy debuff properties in addition to the AoE heal or self-buff properties.

- Protea

Castle, your efforts to keep the playerbase informed are much, much appreciated. Keep up the good work

- Protea

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I submit that any strategy which can be consistently used to increase your rate of xp gain isn't really worth a reward, no matter how complex. What I consider worthy of increased xp gain is playing on the edge and using your abilities to the limit.

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I understand your point, but I still believe that "playing on the edge" (which equates very closely with "risk" in the risk vs. reward system) is only one kind of complexity. Another kind of complexity is managing teams, and I believe the devs back-handedly supported my premise when they made team XP scale in a nonlinear fashion.

I would also submit that anything you can do repetitively on autopilot becomes non-complex. There are skills in the game that require memorizing patterns, and those are arguably more complex the more complex the pattern, but the complexity I'm really talking about requires reacting to the environment and your team build in a dynamic fashion. In short, I think we agree.

Bringing this back to the original topic, I would like to examine the following hypothetical model for blasters:

- New player starts blaster, decides to ignore Defiance because of all the other new things to learn; achieves XP rate W
- Player gets better at staying alive by managing aggro etc, and achieves XP rate X
- Player decides (s)he is comfortable with the other mechanics and begins to actively manage Defiance, achieving XP rate Y
- Player undergoes new learning curve w.r.t. Defiance and finally tops out at XP rate Z

In examining the "complexity/reward rate" balance of this particular Blaster, we should ask, what is the relationship between W, X, Y, and Z?

If the set is balanced, then ideally:

W < X < Y < Z <== yay, balanced

But given that Defiance leads to easy deaths, I suspect the curve *actually* looks like this:

Y < W < X ~= Z <== boo, unbalanced

In other words, Blasters who actively manage Defiance well achieve only slightly better performance than those who do not manage it at all - the increased damage is offset by increased debt. This already looks bad, but in addition, those who are starting to dabble with Defiance, managing it actively but poorly, actually do *worse* than those who don't manage Defiance at all.

This, in my opinion, is a broken mechanic. In Arcanaville's wording, it *punishes* skill rather than rewarding it, at least for a non-negligible portion of the learning curve.

This, of course, is a hypothetical - I don't have hard numbers to punch in for W, X, Y, Z. But I think it is a very reasonable argument for Blasters to make, and given that most other inherents have very obvious benefits with no such glaring downsides, Blasters can make a very strong case for improving their inherent.

Incidentally, I believe a very similar case can be made for Vigilance.

- Protea

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Arcanaville, you are getting very close to my Complexity vs Reward Rate balance paradigm.

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Actually, its as simple as (within certain limits) I'm in favor of rewarding skill.

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Wow. You stated in one sentence something I took around 3 pages of verbiage to express...

I've been pwnt.

- Protea

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My solution to this problem is to do what a lot of mobs already do: every mob aggroed after #17 refuses to enter melee range, and fires at range from some random distance greater than five feet. That way, aggro is partially self-regulating. Tankers can grab all the aggro they want, but beyond a certain point, the benefit is all defensive (they stop shooting at your team mates) and not offensive (they do not all stand on a bullseye and say "shoot me").

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I have always thought that the herding phenomenon was fixed the wrong way, but then I've always thought taunt seemed like a meta-game AI exploit enshrined as a power.

- Protea

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The question, though, is how much better. For the cost of having to have three brain cells wired together in the right way to click a button, regen gets about twice the performance under ordinary conditions. For most players, those three brain cells are probably not a very high cost relative to the return, provided the average player doesn't play extremely intoxicated.


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Arcanaville, you are getting very close to my Complexity vs Reward Rate balance paradigm. I think I would state this as saying "Strategies that give above-average reward rates should necessarily be above-average in complexity". This is a balance metric that applies not only to balancing across sets, but also evaluating a single set in isolation.

In other words, if some set provides tools that require tricky strategies to use, but using those tools with those complex strategies does not provide better payoffs than just "carpal clicking" and brute-force type strategies, then that set is broken - it provides a negative return on investment, to use one metaphor, or offers false advertising, to use another.

- Protea

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This brings up a good point: Math is great for creating and maintaining balance in a static atmosphere. I get to hear about the shortcomings of our mathematic models pretty much daily from various sources, much of which I agree with. A solid mathematical base should be the basis of every game system (regrettably, it's rare that a developer actually has the amount of time they really need to create an elegant system.)


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This ties in to my somewhat soapboxy "Complexity vs. Reward Rate" post, which I separately PM'd to Positron because I feel so strongly about it.

The crux of that post is that a successfully balanced game should allow player to achieve higher reward rates by using increasingly complex strategies. Since not all strategies should be predictable in advance, this means that emergent strategies should be evaluated not only in terms of how high a reward rate they achieve, but also how complex they are.

If developers see players outperforming the devs' predictive models based on repetitive, assemblyline behaviors, then I agree that needs rebalancing. If on the other hand players outperform devs' predictive models based on complex, difficult to implement or timing-critical strategies, then the devs have successfully created a complex and challenging game, and that behavior should be rewarded and folded into the game-world for future content consideration.

The recent change disallowing auto-turret teleport is, in my opinion, an instance of balance failure. Players discovered a novel, complex way to make their powers work together, and that avenue should have been allowed to continue to reward them, rather than being shut off.

As an aside, I am honestly curious whether Cryptic considered Warburg temp powers and Shivans when designing the LRSF. I don't really expect an answer on this, but one can always hope...

- Protea

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This means that, if we wanted to, we could have an Invention that gave out XP.

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Wow. Please don't do that.

- Protea

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Hmm, on second thought, I hope Hamidon gets changed after the Statesman TF comes out. Something not so much a raid encounter .

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I hope it doesn't. I hope that they simply let villains into The Hive to team up with heroes to defeat him. My Dominator would be a valuable member of that team, rather than life support for a Shivan in the LRSF final mission.

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Well, I suspect that if the Statesman TF drops HOs, Hamidon raids will dry up on their own. Hamidon raids are pretty boring for many people (myself included) and with something else to draw the crowds away it may not be feasible to get the requisite numbers.

- Protea

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you don't need shivans or nukes

you do need
1-2 kins
1-2 rads
1-2 therms
1 /SA brute

anything else is gravy ( /cold, /sonic corrs; others like poison MM)

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Just keep on perpetrating the ignorance.

If you REALLY think you NEED those things, I don't know what to tell you. You far from NEED a stoner anymore, in fact you never NEEDED a stoner. You sure don't NEED a thermal, never did. A case can be made for needing a /kin and a /rad, that's about it. And with this nerfage you might not even NEED them anymore nearly as much as you used to.

The only thing any of us NEED is OXYGEN!!! (and a couple of other things too)

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It's my honest opinion that a team that has no resistance debuff in its power sets needs nukes. Period. The combined average damage output of 8 villains is simply less than Statesman's ability to regenerate. Others are welcome to disagree, but I'd be really impressed if a team of 8 doms were able to complete this with no temp powers.

But yes, sticking strictly to these formulaic team builds is not required. A good /dark, /poison, or even (gasp) /traps can bring pretty good debuffs to the table and make the last encounter doable.

- Protea

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I kinda think it was not needed. I enjoy the power I have playing my Dom (ATAX lvl 45atm Freedom) and I rarely "needed" to hit domination to be effective, even in Boss and AV fights.

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*mind boggles*

What difficulty are you set to, and what are your primary and secondary powersets?

- Protea

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Issue:
Malta (Sappers at least, then the rest once hit) seem to be seeing through Super Speed and Stealth on Peregrine Safeguard. This occured multiple times to multiple individuals with varying degrees of stealth running.


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This is true for the street groups in all the safeguard missions.

Although I enjoy the missions, it annoys me that concealment powers don't provide any benefit. As soon as you get in an enemy group's activation range, they aggro on you (as well as nearby objects). I don't mind the enemies attacking objects when you activate them, but they still shouldn't see you until you're in their concealment-adjusted aggro range.

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Even with no stealth, the enemy's aggro range seems absurdly large. My friend and I, who "have been playing this game for years" (tm), both agreed that something was just not right.

Neither of us used stealth powers, but having just come from a more normal police-band mission, the enemies on the safeguard map just noticed us from way farther away.

I really think there is just a flat-out bug here. The enemies in safeguard missions aren't obeying perception rules.

- Protea

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I guess this must be just me, but the Police Band missions are regularly generating mobs at +1-2 instead of +0-1 for me on heroic. Happened all three times last night, and in the SG mish the vilain was Orange (although still a lt) instead of yellow.

Is this by design? I don't remember Newspaper/Mayhem missions working like this, although it's been a while since I did lowbie newsies (the PB mishes were on my lvl 5 PeaceBringer).

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Personally, I think there is a bug there. I believe that bug was introduced with the lieutenant change, not with issue 8; I have noticed the same thing villain-side with my low-level characters. I posted about it here.

Oddly, by around level 16 or so the problem seems to clear up.

- Protea