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Quote:If you're saying that LBE makes a decent mule assuming you're already taking Energy Mastery anyway, then sure -- but that seems like an unnecessary qualification. On the other hand, if all you want is a set mule, you can take any number of APP ranged attacks that are superior in their own right to LBE, and come packaged with AoE attacks that are (far far far) superior to Energy Torrent.Or you take it so you can slot LBE up as a nice set mule on top of everything else.
The DEF debuff sets aren't that spectacular in comparison with the normal ranged-damage sets. They're not even particularly good, depending on what your build's goals are (Apocalypse, Decimation, Devastation, and Thunderstrike offer bonuses that are at least as attractive to Tankers in the general case, probably much more attractive overall.)
Which leads me back to the original statement: Energy Mastery is worth taking if you want the endurance management or are taking it for concept (usually Laser Beam Eyes). As far as supplementary attacks go, Energy Mastery's terrible, and that's probably (and appropriately) by design. -
Quote:Please do excuse me if I come off as critical here. That isn't my intention; I'm just giving you feedback on your build.Already have the reactive total radial and am working towards the flawless radial. I may give up fly just so that I can reach that ultimate mix of damage and recharge.
Do you need Stealth for your character concept? I ask because it seems counter-productive to skip out on Hasten for the sake of an extra couple of Luck of the Gambler mules. If you just want stealth's mechanical benefit, then you can get that from Super Speed + Stealth Proc IO.
There's really no reason that you couldn't fit Fly and Hasten into your build, in other words, unless there are other hard-and-fast conceptual constraints.
It also seems like you're stretching a little too much for +damage bonuses; personally I wouldn't pursue global damage as an end in itself, but I'm not questioning the over-arching idea of the build, here; I'm questioning some of the specific slotting options. For instance, five slots each in Aim/Build Up for the 2.5% damage bonus in Gaussian's seems a little excessive when you can get a 2% damage bonus from Adjusted Targeting for two slots in each power. Likewise, Drain Psyche's main benefit is its huge regen buff/debuff, so it seems a shame not to slot it for healing -- and as it happens, there's a nice +3% damage bonus available for five slots of Theft of Essence (Accurate Heal set).
Also, you have the Snipe (Blazing Bolt) slotted with Devastation for the 3% damage boost, which is fine -- but if you're gonna take the Snipe, then you might as well use Sting of the Manticore (5 slots), which will give you the same 3% damage bonus and a +7.5% recharge bonus.
Just some idle thoughts. -
What's amazing to me is that a seller is so easily accused of greed for deciding the price of an item he owns, but a buyer who desires to set the price of an item someone else owns is so often considered pure as the driven snow.
Seems to me we need a new definition of greed to reconcile that disparity. -
Quote:Let's be honest: Laser Beam Eyes is a pretty crappy attack as far as APP powers go. The ability to slot the -RES proc is a decent consolation prize, but the proc alone is not worth saddling yourself with such a low DPA attack unless you're taking it for concept. (Which is fine.)It comes down to LBE being very quick, no restrictions being used while flying and doesn't cause knockback. And it's a ranged power. The -def, while nice, isn't an OMG! kind of thing. I'd much rather take a minor -def than any power that does knockback as a tanker or scrapper.
Now I hear tell that Energy Torrent in Energy Mastery does Knockdown and is a cone. I may have to go with this instead.
Hurl is at least as bad, though it does give you a mildly useful situational -Fly debuff. I was surprised to find, just now, that Hurl actually has a marginally higher DPA than LBE (27ish versus 24, at base damage levels), but even so Hurl animates almost 1 second slower. Whatever on-paper DPA advantage Hurl has is, in other words, more than absorbed by the practical disadvantage (opportunity cost) of leveraging the power regularly.
You can make an argument either way; it just strikes me as bizarre to see such a long debate over what are both, objectively, mediocre attack powers. If you have to take one or the other, then sure, but do it with the understanding that the choice itself is heavily sub-optimal. The bottom line is that you take Energy Mastery for the endurance management and a smidge of extra +regen. Or you take it for concept. -
Eh, I think the apparent double standard has more to do with the exposure of each character. I haven't made an effort read comic books in about 20 years, so correct me if I'm wrong, but there generally aren't widely read and long-standing comic-book series based on fantasy characters, are there?
Even if there are, does their exposure even come close to, say, Batman's? Whatever other factors might be at play, Batman's writers have had more opportunities to fall into cliche-ish behavior. The character has an 80 year history to pick apart.
Hell, if anything, from what I've read on the internet, there are way more eyerolls about Drizzt than there are about Batman -- certainly more per storyline. Drizzt has had what? 10 books to develop his dubious reputation? -
A more extreme defensive example, just for illustration purposes. 45% Smash/Lethal/Energy and Ranged DEF. Only ~56% global recharge this time, but as this is more of a melee-focused build, you're meant to take Spiritual Alpha largely for its effect on Drain Psyche:
(Edit: T4 Spiritual Core gives you a minimum equivalent of ~32% in global recharge.)
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
http://www.cohplanner.com/
Click this DataLink to open the build!
Code:This build is a slight variation of one I drew up months ago -- my attempt to counter all of the copious mez effects that get thrown at you when you're soloing at high difficulty levels (a large number of which are Smash/Lethal-typed AoE grenades). With sufficiently large spawn sizes, even a momentary lapse of your toggle protections can spell death. What ultimately kept me from playing something like this was:| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1448;703;1406;HEX;| |78DA65935D4F1341148667BB5B6B692B052CA502D2523E8B2C14502F55C0261A6A0| |A45AFC4BAC2A66C52DBA66C13BDF32788F1234611F0171851FC2FC01F307E5EEB45| |3DFB9E696DD206E6997DCF7B66CE99D94D3F5AF40BF1E48A50020B05636B2B374FA| |36D563CB70CBB5A310AFE55F361D9AC4453D5BC657B84101169C8AD18C5BCB9A1A7| |AC8AC949F17A245B2D974B155B4F9B45DB28E4D246D12A570B866D958A1D378A9B6| |68574BD3E69CB944A053D5B36CD0D1FA6A98295DFB4033C77A65631EFC7D3926994| |E92172BD6CADEBF5CDD2C6BA4983337FDC43F525E8FF9AA8FF6A6EB143E817DDEF1| |8BB40CF1E706E9FF11ED86ECD3AE3449222B80774EE037DCE52A3A26F1798A751E1| |2C4D99713906D72C630E387B917109B84A46556EA2F2261A97A6716941DEB2932B1| |CE70A176874CB4DDC07904E7D627C064E1F32BE008B347AA4DD7388F5DA128C0F80| |FF80F1118893D7CB76E18D411A24C987B66A2EDF04A421C608C3478600E72881131| |70EEB1878415ABB8CB4BF25A94B4CBE0152A475C8DE3BB8F728F71EE5DE63DC748C| |9B8EF1B55C174E2EAFD7C5EB4DED002EAA21C411359481796A993028922B8C2CA09| |22F2C57088715BC0033AAD3854691886C331242E4FC657AD24483DD64E9658BD2CB| |96718454E1A550BFCCEE97D9C7B8E5C4118EE2258506F076D4DC03CB30446F03A32| |B8C2C631598BA03BC728AE665DD8377B15E7C8D718F910386EE330CE035F987B949| |D7F0576C3FF28DF11DF81314624C9ED6D853C5C9197F0E5CD806269F017FC93721B| |B9A08B1419E459D616A5C9707AA1F61FBE409D04391694E16D3FC2AF5698DCF4A15| |195C48826F29C1B734C9B7B4F4DF477FF41319ADF16909054A4CAB7F6DB55AA6CDD| |99EE76B4DF3074D736FB0F1B5D57E90AEC8D294384AFBD92C8D41FAD52CDDC47DFC| |6E96A2704DB7D49A6851922DCA5C8B32DBA22CD3AB9E94D51B4D9DFC0358EFF088| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
- that I just don't like Mace Mastery very much, on any character. Web Envelope is probably the best pure AoE immobilize available to Blasters (important given the scatter that you tend to run up against), but it has an absolutely terrible activation time, complete with redraw penalty;
- that I found a better (and thematically analogous) option in my Mind/Fire Dominator.
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A response in reverse order.
Quote:You can use offense as a defense, but as before, there's a fairly low practical ceiling on how well you can mitigate damage through sheer killing power. On a Blaster, the vast bulk of your ability to leverage your offense as defense comes just from being a Blaster.Now, the Strategy is what I am really asking about here. (I play chess a lot, and strategy is very fun for me) So, the merits of just building for damage/recharge are fascinating. Can you actually use offense as a defense? I have only been blasting a while, but it seems you might be able to.
The average Blaster is, perhaps perversely, somewhat less well-suited to derive offensive benefit from IOs than other ATs, both because Blasters deliver more damage to begin with (and thus, static damage boosts like procs give them less proportional benefit), and because Blasters have access to high-order damage boosts as a matter of course (Defiance, Build Up, Aim -- which again diminish the net benefit of straight global +damage).
In other words, and I think most of the respondents in this thread have skirted this issue, the amount of offensive benefit you can wring from IOs is generally much less significant than the benefit you can wring from defensive IO bonuses. There are exceptional cases: Archery, for instance, is unusually well-suited to deliver a devastating alpha strike; if you can get Rain of Arrows and Aim/BU to recharge fast enough that they're available for every spawn, then you will be indirectly increasing your survivability as well as your offense. But even then you have to consider that opponent sturdiness scales up rather dramatically; even the best AoE Blaster is going to have a hard time dropping two or more bosses clumped together before they can direct several attacks your way.
Quote:Can you post a build like what you are talking about? May not be for me, I am very character concept driven. Still I would like to see what a Top notch defense build that scratches at ED cap on its attacks and has significant recharge looks like.
It's hideously expensive, but then it's just an example. 45% Ranged DEF, 90% global recharge (before Hasten), +20% global damage. Depending on how much you plan to rely on Drain Psyche, you could run with any number of Incarnate options with this one.
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
http://www.cohplanner.com/
Click this DataLink to open the build!
Code:| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1422;670;1340;HEX;| |78DA6593DB4E13511486F74CA794B61468A10222420F5828EDD00A4A3C45E594686| |882805E8975844999A4B4935222DCF90A5EA8F1C2E3957AEDE9418C1AF5093CBF41| |5DB3FE5D6C3293767FBBFF5AEBDF7BAFCE2EECCD770871E7BC504273656367A7384| |B63DDAC790B46C9DA685B33B76DB3E613420CC84071C5A894CC4D7DD1AA99484E34| |23ABBBB65DADD5F58259A91BE562C1A858F66ED9A85BD54AF85265CBAC91AE37278| |1E56AB5ACAFDAA6B919E4E962D92A6DD543983B53AB52EAE25F4BA6B169D676B62C| |3BB2605B1B94696C9B64EF2CBADF4F7B1BA7EF05D17C1A5EF1889017EA6386F6047| |8CA687B063C67DC75576550954555165559544DA2EA228D8AAC5250D58EAA765475| |A0AA13559DA89AA5D1832ACD33A53A52F734708271E824A37F8611A7AE7B799586E| |A9D60877E600498A7D127FD7CAF598ABD01DE02EF1889F70C3FE5FAE1A7F9A38A23| |05BEF04A81AF8C8E04E7E567089A47CC1182D23E08FB04EC13B04FC23E09FB20D98| |790AE84E09BFEC6B8475A1722A20B5B5FA4312C1B18CE725644072619BD39208FC6| |4C634B0B841EE9D4032795968D4252A3B755273EB907EC333C94D0276BFA8E7BF84| |D2069407676009D382C0FDD6498520665CA20528EC850930F0843F20C43D7799F47| |D7811B40913172133018F7297F985F9E8677F80A1B275718A955608D91BE0A5C634| |4683B716C47C4637CF087348ECABF67F4147B1F3B0D9C01CE3252E7182FE8E46348| |F78C7D509DAD8F7F063E029F182F296F421E7CA24F71A44C9290129914E31525E8B| |2E1FA77AEC9FF007E327A69AF39D9F09C6C9D7670CBE8438F8869CD2BD468A45DD1| |9C4BC9BB94299732ED52965CCAB276707385C28ABFFBE056367E0528AAB446FFB42| |A97B901BF5D497FFF2B8A3282D712580E381ACCD75BE646CBFC56CBFC1F7A51F2E0| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
A ranged DEF build (with a +RES shield), provided your playstyle favors ranged combat, will tend to be more survivable than an S/L DEF build, too. -
Quote:Any comments that could improve my strategy is appreciated. I am very new to blasting. The general point of the post of course is why spend all the effort/money/limited enhancer bonuses to get any defense when just getting more damage bonuses and smarter killing strategy seems to work like a charm?
- There's a limit to how much practical performance gain you can wring out of "smarter killing strategy" as opposed to numerical defensive superiority. This game does reward higher levels of skill, particularly for Blasters, but it's still overwhelmingly a numbers' game. A great player with a terrible build will tend to be no more effective in a generic combat situation than a terrible player with a great build.
- Your question makes superficial sense, but only if we take it as given that offensive bonuses don't cost resources, or don't cost as many resources, as defensive bonuses. Generally, high-order offensive builds are, if anything, more expensive than high-order defensive builds. At worst it's a tie, with the defensive build getting more proportional benefit out of stacked IO bonuses than the offensive build (it's hard to compete with ~90% damage mitigation to a favored position/type).
- Defensive builds can generally incorporate the bulk of the practical offensive bonuses available to any build. By that I mean that it's possible to have soft-capped DEF to a given position/type and still have high amounts of global recharge and incidental amounts of global damage (say ~10% or so). An offensive build can achieve noticeably higher damage output by selling out for global recharge/damage, but not by a margin to match the defensive build's significantly higher survivability.
- As Fan points out, at the end of the day performance standards are subjective. And as Strato points out (very eloquently) there's more to determining practical offensive output than simply measuring your on-paper DPS. DEF can actually give you higher situational damage output if it allows you more fully to concentrate on dealing damage.
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Quote:There were a number of players who earned a ton influence by accident because they spent endless time PLing people in Portal Corporation. Those players were in a position to dump that influence on the market when Issue 9 released, and they did have a large footprint at the market's birth. I doubt that was a high percentage of the player base though, and I doubt that we're still seeing any notable effect from that period in the game's lifespan.I suspect this is quite simply, inaccurate. While it's true that there was
little (or nothing, depending on perspective) to spend inf on back in the
day, it's also true that the only way to make tons of inf was to grind it
out through kills over long periods of time.
Most everyone else earned what was necessary to buy all the SOs they'd ever need, and then they either moved on (to alts), or gave away their influence to other people's lowbies. It's been a long time now, but I don't think I ever had more than about 5 million on any one character during that time frame. It's also worth noting that there was a period of time, prior to the market's introduction, when the cost for bases/upkeep was significantly higher than it is now, and when anyone over about level 30 didn't earn any influence from kills when in SG mode.
The game has obviously changed an awful lot since then. Suffice to say that the vast bulk of the influence flowing through the market was earned on purpose.
Quote:No contest between the two cases. Earning inf these days is easier by an order of magnitude than it was back then. -
Quote:I don't mean to sound flippant, but all of those acronyms you list measure rate, not time. You don't measure the benefits of extra regeneration or recovery based on how much time it takes to fill your health/end bar. You don't say that damage gives you diminished returns because the time to defeat a given foe can never reach zero. (You can argue that damage/regen/recovery/whatever bonuses give you a proportional benefit that isn't worthwhile, given the trade offs, but that's a slightly different thing.)I need a formula for calculating ED values, including Incarnate powers, which already exists on ParagonWiki from a couple of places. I take all of my powers, assign the number and type of enhancements they're supposed to take, then calculate that back into their raw values: enhanced damage, enhanced recharge, enhanced cost. From those, I calculate enhanced DPE, EPS, DPS, DPA and EPA, plus "uptime," which is calculated as animation time divided by cycle.
All I'm doing is measuring the benefit of recharge in terms of rate, as opposed to time. Actually, I'm not personally evaluating anything; I'm describing the benefit of recharge enhancement as it was originally intended to be evaluated by the developers. When I craft builds, I obviously consider far more than that rate, or the time shaved per unit of recharge enhancement. For example, recently I got involved in a rather detailed build discussion in the Dominator forum. There we ran into a choice: do you put the IO set with the higher recharge enhancement into Fire Ball or Rain of Fire?
Superficially, and using your methodology, the answer is Rain of Fire because it has a longer recharge timer (60 seconds versus 32), but I advocated Fireball. Why? Because Fireball has almost no situational caveats. Shaving ~2 seconds off Fireball (cutting recharge from about 10 seconds to 8ish seconds) gives you a tangible practical benefit in almost any encounter. Shaving 3 or 4 seconds from Rain of Fire's recharge doesn't suddenly make the power worth casting (as a rule) on more than a once-per-spawn basis, a threshold which we had already passed with the inferior recharge slotting.
And with that I probably should end this line of discussion here, not out of any spiteful desire to show you up, but out of a (belated) respect for the topic of the thread, which is only very tenuously related to what we've been hashing out. -
Quote:Yes, builds present complex choices -- even more complex than your example would indicate. A 1,000 second power isn't automatically more useful just because it's on a long recharge timer. If, for instance, I had a soft-capped SR Scrapper, I probably wouldn't bother putting more than the base slot into Elude. You can't conclusively say anything about the worthiness of a given slot investment based purely on the time you shave from a given power's cooldown. You have to evaluate each decision on an invididual basis -- and yes, time is a factor, but it's far from the only factor.Then we define the "benefit" in different ways. You seem to define it as a percentage off the original, which I disagree with. I would, in fact, define the benefit of recharge as "BaseRecharge - FinalRecharge," or "how many seconds did I gain? This, in fact, tells me where my slots are best placed.
Suppose I have a power with a 1000 second recharge and one with a 10 second recharge. I slot them both with a 33% recharge enhancement. The former drops to ~750 while the latter drops to ~7.5 seconds. The former is now 250 seconds faster, that's over 4 minutes faster. If this were an important power, I would be waiting FOUR MINUTES less. The latter, on the other hand, gained less than three seconds. Suffice it to say that I won't be bothering slotting that one unless it's very important.
I think you're over-reaching if you think any formula is going to sum up all of those choices in a neat little package. All I'm saying is that the system was designed to provide a linear benefit, one that you can quantify immediately just by reading the number on the enhancement's tooltip.
Quote:Rage is a power which recharges in 240 seconds and with an effect that lasts for 120 seconds. If you stack a second Rage buff on top of the previous one, then when the previous buff expires, it won't slap you with a severe defence debuff. Therefore, the objective here is to get Rage's recharge under 2 minutes. Not to 50%, not to half, not to 1/(1/240), but to two minutes.
Regardless, knowing the proportional values helps you determine at a glance whether your goals are feasible, or even possible. In Rage's case, all you need is about +100% recharge, which is possible with three level 50 IOs and nothing else. If, on the other hand, we had a goal for a power that required more than 500% recharge enhancement, we'd know that that goal is impossible. (Because 500% is the cap.)
Quote:Say you take Quickness from Super Reflexes and you have no other buffs or enhancements slotted. This power provides a 20% recharge reduction buff to your character as a whole. Well, then every single one of your powers will be able to be used 120% more often, and I can say this for all powers across the board, aside from those that aren't affected by recharge. But this is not a meaningful statistic.
Quote:"We are done," you say. Have it your way. I'm not arguing to prove you wrong or to make myself appear smart. I enjoy the maths of it, and I'd prefer to stick to that and not resort to bickering.
The only reason I replied to this most recent post of yours was that you introduced a new and potentially more interesting wrinkle: Practical build decisions, for which I agree recharge isn't purely a matter of evaluating the proportional benefit to usage rate. Then again, it isn't purely a matter of evaluating time saved, either. -
You're probably right about Stealth, Doc. I don't have your build in front of me right now, but that sounds like an oversight I'd make.
If you're relying on the unsuppressable portion of Stealth, though, I have to suggest, again, that you take Combat Jumping instead. It provides the same amount of DEF for less than 1/4th of the end cost, and gives you a lot of extra combat maneuverability -- which is even more significant here, because Stealth actually costs you maneuverability. The swing is huge.
Then, if you so desire, you can use the extra two power picks on Leadership. You'll lose one LoTG mule, but I think it's more than worth the trade off. YMMV.
Quote:Oh, you're absolutely right. Don't get me wrong: S/L DEF is clearly the first choice if you wanna mix it up in melee. All I'm saying is that using Barrier to grab the last 5% is better in your case than it might be for others, because even at 45%, S/L DEF still leaves enough holes in your defenses that the burst mitigation from Barrier will be very helpful.Also, I think S/L defense build is more effective on a Fire^3 than a ranged defense build because of Incinerate and Hot Feet goodness. By having a capped build rather than a 32.5% build I can keep my inspiration tray filled with reds for even more goodness.
Appreciate your comments, and the thread you started -
Quote:I'm not defending the formula itself. I'm defending the idea that recharge enhancements provide a linear benefit in principle. The formula you keep pounding into the ground simply determines a power's cooldown. The formula does not, in any obvious way, attempt to evaluate the benefit of the bonuses in question, which are inherently proportional.You're essentially saying that the benefit is not linear because you chose to evaluate the benefit using a non-linear formula. [Edit: Just as you could, but wouldn't, evaluate the benefit of increased speed using the inverse formula to determine the decrease in time.]The formula in question, the one you're defending, is a fractional function. It has a discontinuity within 100% negative of its base, it tends towards infinity and it does not, crucially, provide a linear result for a linear output, specifically since its output is meaningful data.
To which I say, obvious. Oh, and see the post directly above yours. I think we're finished here. -
Quote:Ok, I admit the above-quoted passage is unfair. I also have to give you due credit for your edit, Sam; I'm not trying to pick a fight here, either. It just gets annoying to be told over and over again that I'm giving you a circular calculation as if I'm unaware of that.If you think I'm just being difficult, wait til Arcanaville gets back to your alleged response to her mitigation system, which presumes at its base a linear increase in lifespan. You hand-waved that premise with your talk of fractional formulas, without even pausing to consider what benefit the formula is designed to provide.
The calculation is circular because it's unnecessary. I only gave you the calcs because they use your numbers to demonstrate that the enhancements in question give you their stated value in terms of usage rate. That may not be a metric you appreciate, but it's the metric by which the enhancements were designed to be evaluated, for good or ill.
Likewise, a lifespan model like Arcanaville's gives a linear benefit to what may be, to you, a less useful or less intuitive attribute. But it is linear by design. You're right in the sense that debuffs have to be handled with care, but the fact that you might have to make an exception for (or enforce some sort of cap on) debuffs isn't a compelling indictment against the entirety of the system. -
Quote:Oh, so first the recharge formula is totally unintuitive, but now suddenly it's so simple you don't need a formula at all. The number the recharge enhancement provides is sufficient on its face? Fascinating. In other words, you've admitted that recharge enhancements provide a linear benefit to usage rate.The formula you're using does nothing more than to reiterate your power's enhancement. If you've slotted a power for 50% recharge, then it will be useful 150% more often. I don't need a formula to tell you that, because all you do is add 100% to your enhancement value, a calculation that's easy enough to do by eye that one can extrapolate the result straight of of a power's stated enhancement values.
Quote:Here it is in simple terms - when I ask how often I can use a power, I don't want to be told "Five times more often than before." I want to be told something on the order of "Once per 10 minutes" or "Five times a minute." Original recharge features nowhere in this.
You're splitting hairs here, Sam. If you think I'm just being difficult, wait til Arcanaville gets back to your alleged response to her mitigation system, which presumes at its base a linear increase in lifespan. You hand-waved that premise with your talk of fractional formulas, without even pausing to consider what benefit the formula is designed to provide.
Whether we're talking Recovery, Regeneration, Recharge in CoH -- or resistance as it's used in other games and in Arcana's proposal -- the benefit is linear. CoH Recharge is only exceptional because of the activation time bottleneck, which -- for the last time -- we have to ignore in principle because the developers themselves ignored it. -
Quote:Heh, don't take my math as gospel. Upon reflection, if you only have one Rech enhancement currently in the power, then you probably don't have an 18 second cycle time.Thank you for the math on Rain of Fire. That makes a lot of sense - .45 EPS, heh!
So, going by rough Mids numbers, I've got .45 EPS of burn that will go away when I slot Ragnarok, and roughly .3 EPS in recovery that will come in when I get my accolades. I also will get some level of recovery when I finish slotting Enzymes. Only had one handy, needed four.
I suspect, but haven't done the math, that the build will be very playable, even more so when I get Ageless slotted. Good times.
Still, if you are casting Rain of Fire as often as it's available, then adding end reduction will be a big help. (And if you have Reactive, my god is it worthwhile to cast Rain as often as possible!) -
@Rad_Avenger:
Glad you're enjoying your new build
Quote:End burn is very difficult to eliminate entirely (short of taking Cardiac these days, or Ageless Destiny -- and even then it's entirely possible to run yourself dry if you work at it). Even on the Scrapper forum, where infinitely sustainable endurance is almost an assumed goal of every high-end build, what they're usually talking about is sustainable endurance for a given single-target attack chain. Endurance burn is almost always implicitly non-sustainable if you're going nuts with AoEs.(3) Endurance burn. Wow. I burned through endurance like nobody's business! Why?
That's why I spent so much time rambling (more-or-less aimlessly) about how to evaluate your endurance drain. With Silas' build discussion, we had it easy; he'd already stipulated that his end drain was fine for him at a given level, so all we had to do was meet that same equilibrium in subsequent build suggestions. Ultimately these things are subjective. You may even find that your endurance burn is tolerable after you get the end-boosting Accolades. Or you may decide to take Ageless Destiny. Or you may decide to retool your build again. If you do decide to retool your build, at least we'll have another data point.
Dominators have an advantage in the form of their Inherent, which turns sustainable endurance over a 70-80 second period into infinite sustainability. But Doms also have a lot of high-cost powers; controls aren't cheap, and unlike Controllers, Doms have lots of attack powers to spam in between controls. (None of which is to say that there aren't end-heavy Controllers -- just ask my Ice/Storm -- but I'd say that Doms are pretty clearly more end-heavy as a whole AT.)
Quote:- Hadn't slotted Ragnarok yet, was running Rain of Fire with Acc/3xDam/Rech IOs. heh. Need to go strip my Claws/ Brute ... The +4% recovery and Dam/End IO will help a bit.
Quote:Anyway, THANK YOU to Obitus, Silas, Lifewind and Dr. Dismemberment. This thread was like a master class in builds. -
Quote:No, I'm measuring the usage rate of the power with the new recharge timer. When we talk about speed, we divide distance by time. This is exactly the same thing. Power with a 10 second recharge timer:Question: 2 and 3 what? What you've done is essentially eliminated a fraction. Allow me to demonstrate:
1 / (1+1) = 0.5; 1 / 0.5 = 1/(1 / (1+1)) = 1+1
That whole division accomplishes nothing. You take a number, put it as the denominator of a fraction, then divided one by the fraction, doing nothing more than flipping that number right back to numerator and back to itself. That's like saying a square root function is linear because sqrt(10)^2 = 10 and sqrt(11)^2 = 11. Or, even more fun, that a Sine function is linear because ArcSin(Sin(10)) = 10 and ArcSin(Sin(11)) = 11. You can't take a function then wrap the reverse function around it and call it linear. All you're doing is cancelling the functions out and leaving a basic parameter that equals itself.
With 100% recharge enhancement: 10 / (1+1)= 5. 10 / 5 = 2 uses of the power over 10 seconds, or a 200% usage rate.
With 200% recharge enhancement: 10 / (1+2)=3.33. 10 / 3.33 = 3 uses of the power over 10 seconds, or a 300% usage rate.
The recharge enhancements provide the benefit that they tell you they do, numerically (and ignoring Activation time, which the Devs for good or ill treated as irrelevant when they designed the game). That's why it's valid, in your words, to flip the numerator back on itself.
You're making this whole thing more complicated than it has to be. As noted previously, there is a practical bottleneck in the activation time, which may enforce a meaningfully diminished return at high levels of recharge. But in principle, the numerical benefit recharge enhancements say they provide is accurate and non-diminishing.
Quote:Back to recharge, let's examine a few examples. A power normally recharges in 1000 seconds, say Elude. We shall try this power with 10% recharge, 20% recharge and 30% recharge.
10: 1000/(1+0.1) ~ 909 seconds
20: 1000/(1+0.2) ~ 833 seconds
30: 1000/(1+0.3) ~ 769 seconds
1000 / 833 = 1.20, or 120% uses of the power over its base cooldown period.
1000 / 796 = 1.30, or 130% uses of the power over its base cooldown period.
No diminished returns. Again, are you saying that cars have diminished returns because they can't ever achieve an instantaneous travel time (infinite speed)? Or how about Recovery? Regeneration? Your math is sound as far as it goes, but it describes a meaningless standard. -
Quote:It is absolutely linear. You're just measuring the wrong attribute. A 100% buff to recharge reduction means you can use the power 200% as often. A 200% buff to recharge means you can use the power 300% as often.The problem with that is that the recharge system is not actually intuitive. I've had to explain to people on numerous occasions that reducing your recharge by 100% does not, in fact, make the power recharge instantly, but rather makes it recharge in half the time. To this day I don't know how to explain this in simple terms without simply giving people the "FinalRecharge = BaseRecharge/(1 + RechargeBuff)" It is not intuitive if you have to resort to a formula to grasp it.
Furthermore, this is not a linear formula. Again, it is a fractional formula, just explored in the other direction. With BaseRecharge as a constant and RechargeBuff as the variable, you have a discontinuity point around -1 (around 100% recharge debuff) and the return is diminishing because you're basically drawing up a concave decline. As a point of fact, even for values of RechargeBuff approaching infinity, FinalRecharge will still tend towards 0.
1 / (1+1) = 0.5; 1 / 0.5 = 2
1 / (1+2) = 0.333; 1 / 0.333 = 3.
And so on and so forth. The only reason there really are diminished returns on recharge in this game is that you eventually run up against the bottleneck of the power's activation time. And from a practical standpoint, obviously, there's a limit to how much true performance increase a human player with dozens of powers competing for his attention can wring out of, say, a 0.5 second cooldown reduction. (That is, if the power's not part of a by-rote attack chain.)
It's sorta like Endurance Recovery or Regeneration. For a long time, people got hung up on the superficially diminished returns with respect to the time it takes to fill an End/Health bar. IOW, base recovery puts you at 60 seconds to refill your Endurance bar. +100% recovery puts you at 30 seconds. +200% recovery puts you at 20 seconds. But that's the wrong measurement; what really matters is the rate of recovery, not the time, if for no other reason than that the time will vary wildly with different rates of opposing endurance drain.
When we talk about a car raising its speed from 60 to 120 MPH, we're measuring the rate of travel; we don't worry about the diminished return over the time of the trip. (A 30 mile trip takes 1 hour @ 30 MPH, 30 minutes @ 60 MPH, 15 minutes @ 120 MPH.)
So given my extraordinarily inattentive reading of this topic, I'd say that what Fulmens suggests is basically what a certain studio with a name that rhymes with Triptych has done in its most recent games. They give you a linear increase not to proportional damage mitigation; instead, they give you a linear increase in lifespan, or if you prefer, they give you a linear increase to your virtual hitpoints through mitigation. +50 "resistance", to them, means that it takes 50% more damage to kill you (or ~33.3% proportional mitigation; 1 / (1-0.333) = 1.5). +100 "resistance" gives you a diminished return on proportional mitigation (50%, which is less than double 33.3%), but it gives you a linear increase to lifespan (1 / (1-0.5) = 2).
There's nothing wrong with that sort of system except that it can be counter-intuitive if it's not labeled well. The Dev team that rhymes with Triptych even acknowledged that their labeling of percentile Resistance is misleading, the last time I checked. In CoH, Recharge reduction enhancements fall victim to that problem; their name tells you to measure the reduction in the recharge timer, rather than the rate at which you can use the power. They probably should be called "Recharge Rate Boosts," or something like that. -
Quote:I'm saying Blasters pay a disproportionately high price for whatever damage advantage they do have. I'm saying that that damage advantage isn't as high as people (understandably) assume it is. To use your words, Blaster damage ain't as "uniquely potent" as it's made out to be. If you're okay with the idea that your Blaster -- which has very little going for it apart from damage -- is only passable at single-target damage, then more power to you. AoE is fun and very helpful for leveling, but the ability to clear a spawn two seconds faster than the next guy generally isn't as important as the ability to pour ST DPS at hard targets.Well the aoe's amazing, thanks for asking. Single target is passable, enough to take down a boss before it causes trouble, but that's not really what I'm after from a blaster, personally. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument but it sounds like you're saying blasters should both do the best damage and also not have weaknesses? I completely agree that teaming is about helping cover one another's deficiencies, so why do you not give blasters the benefit of the doubt on getting some team support to allow them to make full use of their uniquely potent powers?
You'd think that your Blaster would be good at both ST and AoE damage, is all. Talk about a razor-narrow specialty -- "Hi, my name's Dave; I'm only good at one particular kind of damage. Oh, and please pass the buffs my way, cuz I have a glass jaw."
I'd rather play something that has a more equitable distribution of strengths for its weaknesses. Or something with very few weaknesses at all. YMMV. Enjoy your Blaster. -
Quote:And it seems to me that some people oversell the value of AoE damage, especially in a high-level context (Edit: Or more precisely, the value of having AoE damage as a specialty). When's the last time you were on a high-level team that had considerable issue dropping trash mobs? Virtually everyone has access to at least two decent AoE attacks by that level. These days, given the (comparatively) new difficulty settings most people take, slot and use those AoEs.Finally, it seems to me that some people undersell the value of aoe damage on purpose. You won't hear me complain about a permadom on my team, yet are most dominator combos really going to be running with aoe blasters? I guess they added sleet to the epics at some point and I haven't seen the impact of that, but the last time I checked most of the secondaries have, at best, mid-range-damage-for-a-blaster aoes on timers that are all several seconds longer than any equivalent blaster version. Obviously a dom brings additional value to a team on top of that, and as you say can be made to rarely have any issues with mez, but in my experience at least I don't think you can compare them for spawn vaporization efficacy.
They don't have to be uber AoE powers; you multiply them by eight teammates and even the uberest of uber-AoE Blasters begins to look irrelevant. Hell, in terms of AoE damage, a Tanker with a taunt aura can have a practical advantage over a Blaster, because anything that doesn't die in the first salvo for the Blaster will tend to scatter.
Moreover, what about single-target damage? Why is a Blaster forced to use melee attacks to compete with the best DPS in the game? How's your Dual Pistols' single-target ranged DPS, hm? For that matter, is great AoE damage even universally available to Blasters? Last I checked, all Blaster sets weren't tearing up the chart in every damage category. Some, like your Dual Pistols, are skewed towards AoE. Some are skewed towards single-target damage, like Ice Blast.
In any case, of all the ATs in the game, Blasters are almost certainly the clearest example of a drastic mechanical trade off: they do (presumably) the best damage, and in return for that strength, they're given virtually nothing else. Just about everyone else is more self-reliant and/or has a more obvious and important role in teams. With that in mind, I'd certainly hope that Blasters clearly out-damage everyone else. Not most everyone else.
That isn't the case.
I think Blasters' damage advantage is largely over-estimated on the forums and in the game. Depending on the comparison you want to draw, that advantage doesn't even necessarily exist, much less by a practically noticeable margin. You're welcome to disagree. -
Quote:I'm not having a bad time with my Blasters. That is an irrelevant and vaguely insulting distortion of any game-balance complaint, whether valid or not.Are you guys really having such a bad time with your blasters in i20? For me it has been a riot. My only post-alpha characters right now are my dp/em and my db/inv and while it's true that judgement and destiny push the scrapper into the stratosphere, my blaster feels even more improved by the new stuff and that's without destiny unlocked yet. Between hail of bullets and ion radial I can clear ITF, KTF, et cetera spawns faster than teams can keep up. Who cares whether my character is as durable as melees when everything dies instantly anyway? By comparison, my scrapper is untouchable to almost any AV in the game anymore thanks to rebirth, yet takes far longer to do the basic spawn clearing that still makes up 80% of the high level game even on speed teams.
As for the destiny I'm choosing on my blaster, that's easy, rebirth. Mez isn't a big deal in most situations and when it is, well, there's insps. Barrier is just overkill. I don't need to be that invincible for ten seconds when I could be generally sturdy permanently and still essentially invincible for the first ten seconds. Ageless... maybe on a blaster that has endurance issues, but that's part of the magic of dp/em.
All I'm saying is that the Blaster was, in my view, significantly behind the curve prior to I-20 -- and that the Blaster doesn't benefit as much from some of the I-20 goodies as other ATs. Yes, a fully Incarnate Blaster is very strong relative to generic game content, but he's still mechanically disadvantaged relative to other high-end builds. It isn't a question of deciding whether the Blaster can be fun or even effective; it's a question of deciding whether it's worth the effort to kit a Blaster out when you'd get superior overall performance from something else.
Your Blaster can vaporize a spawn. Congrats: so can mine. My Dominator can vaporize that same spawn, hold another spawn, confuse a third spawn, sleep a fourth spawn, and fear a fifth spawn. My Dominator already has mez protection, so even the allegedly minor inconvenience of popping Break Frees is virtually irrelevant to her. The heal + burst regen from Rebirth Destiny is pure gravy for the Dominator, a significant boost to layered mitigation when taken with her considerable RES and soft-capped ranged DEF -- even despite her low max HP.
My Blaster, by contrast, is basically forced to take Clarion, because it addresses the most obvious area of weakness. My complaint here, if you like, isn't even a per-se argument for balance adjustments. It's a commentary on personal build decisions. In this case, it's also a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the silly way mez effects and protection have been handled in this game from day one: you either have mez protection or you don't; if you do have mez protection, then you're functionally immune -- and thus the copious mez effects that the content designers toss around like rice at a wedding serve no purpose but to penalize an ever-shrinking segment of the player base.
Say what you will about Break Frees. They're nice, but the Blaster is already the most Inspiration-reliant AT in the game as a rule. When I'm in the mood to play Inspiration Tetris, I'll play my Blaster. When I'm in the mood to play a superhero, I'll play something else. YMMV. -
Quote:Yes. To the extent there's a problem here, it's not with Earth Assault specifically. The problem is that the inevitable dictates of the game's design tend to make the very concept of a melee squishy squirrelly at best.I like Icy Assault! It has at least one very good range attack in Bitter Ice Blast and most of the attacks are pretty fast. Ice Swords are kinda slow but it has dual damage in Ice and Smashing.
My problem with Earth Assault is mostly when controls don't matter. My build is 90% melee and any serious aoe from an AV, I am almost dead. I do have decent S/L resistance but Dominator's health is still low. I question Earth's damage VS Fiery Assault. Maybe Fiery's dps is just too high after the buffs.
Sure, it's fun to get up-close-and-personal in generic content. It can even work against larger threats, provided you have enough support. But as the game moves more and more towards an end-game slant, more and more of the encounters that players feel are important (or build-definitive) heavily discourage people from getting in melee range without significant self-contained defenses.
None of that means that you shouldn't take and enjoy whatever melee powers you want; I just think that every set should offer a competitive ranged-attack posture for when the chips are down. That goes for Dominators; that goes for Blasters. What Earth has going for it is very good; it's just not always practically useful.
As far as Fire goes, you do give up utility to take Fire. Relative to Earth, Fire loses out on a lot of extra (albeit point-blank) control and Power Boost. It's not Fire's fault that Earth's ranged attacks suck, or that there aren't enough of them to make a decent ranged attack chain. -
Yeah, from where I'm sitting, the only thing Domination doesn't do is my laundry. It's true that Domination does more for some sets than others, but that's not intrinsically a problem; it's the classic MMO player's fallacy, wherein the lack of a bonus equates to an active penalty.
Don't get me wrong; I fall into that same trap all the time, and there is something to be said for build paralysis vis-a-vis Domination. For example, I might be tempted to decide not to play an Ice or Elec Dominator because I feel that Domination is "wasted" on them. I might decide that I need to have soft-capped DEF to take advantage of Domination's mez protection, or I might decide that I need to play an endurance-heavier set to take advantage of the extra End Domination gives us.
All of those things speak to the strength of the Inherent, not its weaknesses. It offers something to almost everyone; the fact that not all sets or all players can take full advantage of (or can fully appreciate) all of its various bonuses isn't important. What's important is that Domination would be a huge boost even if all you had were single-target mezzes. What's important is that any squishy, even one that doesn't have any mezzes at all, would give its eyeteeth for Domination.
Take the aforementioned Ice Dominator. Superficially, she loses out relative to other Doms because she doesn't have an every-spawn AoE control that gets boosted magnitude via Domination, but that superficial weakness hides a strength too; because Ice relies in large part on an offensive toggle power, the mez protection in Domination is even more valuable to Ice than it might be to someone else. -