Pippy

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I'm curious as to why people are allowed to rate before spending, say, 5-10 minutes on a mission.

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Let's say i enter a mission. The very first thing I see in front of me is that every single foe in the mission is an Elite Boss (AV downgraded to EB, won't ever be less than EB even in heroic.)

Should I be forced to wait 5-10 minutes to rate that thing 1 star?

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Yes.

Better that than the alternatives.

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I'm curious as to why people are allowed to rate before spending, say, 5-10 minutes on a mission.

If you're not willing to invest at least that much time to provide a fair evaluation, your assessment isn't really worth recording.

This looks like it must've been a lot of work! A couple of questions, though:

(1) In terms of how long it takes to kill stuff, you want to look at the quantity 1/(1-R), with R being resistance. The damage admitted is proportional to 1-R, and the time to defeat is inversely proportional to the damage you do. (Basically, having 1/(1-R)=1.10 would imply that you have to spend ~10% longer than you would if there were no resistance.) This becomes importance because just averaging the resistances doesn't sufficiently account for the effect of high resistances.

Can you run numbers on that?

(2) Have you given any thought to the best way to weight the mobs? As difficult as this step is, I think it's necessary if you're going to be able to use the results to look at balance changes -- i.e., the (alleged) S/L disadvantage, etc.

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The original post did specify something about soloing. 3+ people on a team, I don't find endurance to be a problem, period.

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This I can certainly agree with. My experience with low level teams is that they manage to keep moving most of the time. There's still a good bit of resting but the team as a whole tends to keep moving. Quite different from soloing at those same levels in my experience.

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This also squares with my experience, even on end-hogs like stormies.

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I don't like the idea.

It's so easy to keep in the blue. Let's not add penalties that kick in sooner than they do now.

I MIGHT be willing to go for your idea IF:

The penalties don't kick in til you hit ZERO end, just like now

AND

the penalties only effect powers currently being used, not powers used prior and still in effect, and not base values.

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As I said, making it kick in at 5 and then implementing an endurance cost reduction is mathematically equivalent -- you could do just as much before you get to 5 as you used to be able to do before you'd get to zero. It's basically just rescaling. The problem with having it kick in at zero and then go to negative endurance is, well, the negative endurance. I'm not sure how easy it would be to add this to the code.

As to "invisible" debuffs -- I think a having "Fatigued" over in the corner where your status effects are -- and possibly the little text, just like you now see with "Out of power" should make it pretty clear when you're not at full strength.

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However, if you're below some value -- I'm thinking 5 or 10 -- you would be in a fatigued state, and all your powers would be reduced in effectiveness by some significant amount

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What would happen with powers that cost less than that threshold to activate? Would they lose effectiveness despite having more than enough end to use them normally?

(Powers like Consume/Dark Consumption and One with the Shield/Unstoppable which only use 0.52-2.6end to activate anyhow.)

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Yep.

The idea is your endurance could never go below zero, and you'd choose the fatigue threshold so as to enforce the amount of recovery time that you'd want after hitting that floor. That means, in principle, that you have less endurance to burn before you start running into penalties; the flip side is that those penalties would be less severe than they currently are. If it were a big problem for people, though, you could offset this with an endurance cut: if the threshold were set at 5, for example, then you'd only have 95 endurance before penalties are imposed. But if you reduce all endurance costs by 5%, then that 95 endurance would go as far as 100 endurance did previously.

I'm not sure that this would be necessary, but it's an option.

Good points, Serrate, and I certainly agree with you about the implementation. In principle, if you were going to go with the debuff option, a sliding scale as you level up would be pretty reasonable. Particularly since it's easier to avoid running out of endurance at higher level. It's a bit of a kludge, but I think you could overall end up with the right effect. I'd suggest starting at something like -40% dmg/duration, -40% rech, -30% spd, at level 1 and increasing up to double those values by level 32, after which it would remain constant. Def and res are a bit tougher to address -- starting at something like -10 to -15% def and -20 to -30% res, (resistable), and again doubling by level 32 might be appropriate. It would probably be good to add a sizable -regen component as well; I'm not sure that whether or not it would need to scale with level. You could just throw out something like -20000% regen, which basically means nobody gets any HP back when they're fatigued.

If you were going to go with the debuff route, it might be better to leave def and res alone, which would address the toggle/click disparity you mention. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is much of an issue: the current system already penalizes toggle users more heavily than clickers. As soon as you run out of power, your toggles start dropping entirely, and your survivability crashes. Worse, once you have endurance again, you have to spend time retoggling, whereas the click user retains the same survivability the entire time, and doesn't have to retoggle.

In the proposed system, the retoggling downtime is eliminated and the survivability drop is mitigated. And, of course, the controller has to slow down the rate at which he's throwing out holds in order to stay above the fatigue threshold, thereby reducing his survivability and/or effectiveness.

Of course, in the debuff version, this really wouldn't be much of an issue: everyone gets the same penalties when they're fatigued.

Regarding implementation: I wonder if you could use a purple-patch type construct to reduce the powers' effectiveness? It'd probably be a lot easier than adding a "if (Fatigued==1)..." flag to every power, although that would certainly be an option.

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I rather like this idea, honestly. I'm not sure how it would balance out for electricity or end draining abilities, however.

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That's a good point. I can think offhand of two options: #1, increase the strength of -end powers, or #2, keep NPCs working the same way as currently, so that they just sit there when they're out of juice.

I suspect #1 would be somewhat more balanced overall, but #2 would avoid upsetting the "sapper"-type characters.

Okay, I'm sorry for starting yet another thread about endurance. But this idea seems sufficiently new as to be worth its own post. And I promise I won't even mention that one power that everyone always argues about. Anyways, almost verbatim from the other thread:

One of the problems (as I see it) is the binary nature of endurance. Either you have endurance and can do anything you want with no problem, or you don't have endurance and you're helpless: no attacks, no defense, no nothin' until your endurance comes back. (With attacks, this just slows your attack rate. Defense is more problematic, as your toggles all drop.)

My suggestion would be to make it possible to execute powers -- and keep toggles running -- regardless of whether or not you're out of endurance. However, if you're below some value -- I'm thinking 5 or 10 -- you would be in a fatigued state, and all your powers would be reduced in effectiveness by some significant amount -- here I'm thinking a 50% reduction in effectiveness. So, a 10-second hold would become a 5-second hold, a 200-point attack would only do 100 points of damage, Mag-10 mez protection would only give 5 points of protection, etc.

Alternatively, it might be easier to implement to make Fatigued into a status effect, involving large debuffs to movement speed, damage, control durations, etc. I think the other way would be preferable, but I have no idea how easy it'd be to implement.

This would eliminate the complete helplessness that comes with running out of endurance, and is consistent with other MMOs. Thematically, it makes sense -- if you go until you're exhausted, you can still run, just slower. You can still punch someone, just not as hard. There's still a substantial penalty for not managing your endurance, but it introduces more choice into the matter -- do I keep fighting even though I'm really tired and not going at full capacity? Or do I regroup until I can hit harder again. And it would eliminate that gosh-awful, "You Suck!" "Out-of-Power" thing, which I really, really hate.

Okay, as bad as I feel about starting another endurance thread with this one still on the front page, I might go ahead and put this idea in its own thread. I think that's pretty legit.

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Well, it's not that the problem isn't insurmountable, it's that to execute it properly would require major overhauling of the endurance system, and that type of work may not be acceptable to the devs.

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I'd be curious to see what you thought of my suggestion for an endurance-system overhaul a few posts back. On its face, it doesn't seem like what I'm proposing would be a huge project, but Standard Code Rant, etc.

Okay, another idea I've been kicking around, which may end up with its own thread at some point. This would be separate from any other possible adjustments like changing the recharge on rest.

One of the problems (as I see it) is the binary nature of endurance. Either you have endurance and can do anything you want with no problem, or you don't have endurance and you're helpless: no attacks, no defense, no nothin' until your endurance comes back. (With attacks, this just slows your attack rate. Defense is more problematic, as your toggles all drop.)

My suggestion would be to make it possible to execute powers -- and keep toggles running -- regardless of whether or not you're out of endurance. However, if you're below some value -- I'm thinking 5 or 10 -- you would be in a fatigued state, and all your powers would be reduced in effectiveness by some significant amount -- here I'm thinking a 50% reduction in effectiveness. So, a 10-second hold would become a 5-second hold, a 200-point attack would only do 100 points of damage, Mag-10 mez protection would only give 5 points of protection, etc.

Alternatively, it might be easier to implement to make Fatigued into a status effect, involving large debuffs to movement speed, damage, control durations, etc. I think the other way would be preferable, but I have no idea how easy it'd be to implement.

This would eliminate the complete helplessness that comes with running out of endurance, and is consistent with other MMOs. Thematically, it makes sense -- if you go until you're exhausted, you can still run, just slower. You can still punch someone, just not as hard. There's still a substantial penalty for not managing your endurance, but it introduces more choice into the matter -- do I keep fighting even though I'm really tired and not going at full capacity? Or do I regroup until I can hit harder again. And it would eliminate that gosh-awful, "You Suck!" "Out-of-Power" thing, which I really, really hate.

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It does not seem self-evident to me. That might make me blind, but I do not think so. Having enough endurance so that I do not need to Rest comes with the cost of taking powers that manage endurance, sacrificing powers that help kill faster or survive better, although Stamina comes bundled with Swift/Hurdle/Health, all of which have a big impact on speed through missions.

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After you posted this, I thought it might be worthwhile to run through the math... I think I ended up using approximate numbers, but taking 15 seconds as the time to go from zero to full endurance under rest, it works out that to have Rest provide an average endurance benefit equal to (slotted) Stamina, you'd need to be spending about 1/6 of your time resting. Solo, that's a pretty substantial slow-down. As you point out, the situation on teams is a little more complicated, but at first glance, I'd guess that your time investment for each rest goes up by at least a few seconds, since you also have to make sure you've shed any aggro and are parked someplace where you're not likely to pick any more up.

As you point out, for characters with long-duration click buffs -- FF, for example -- taking the time off to rest isn't as big a deal as it would be for a blaster or a scrapper who has to stop dealing damage. I'd argue that endurance use for such characters is generally not as much of an issue in the first place, and therefore making it easier for them to manage their endurance would be a bit like handing Bill Gates a twenty.

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The Fitness pool is pretty amazing, but it is not Stamina alone that makes it that way.

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No argument here. It's not all that rare for me to take, and slot, all four powers.

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Of course we do not need to Rest currently in the higher levels, we take Stamina, QR, Energy Absorption, Transference, etc. If I could rest every 30 seconds (even though I would probably only need it every minute), skipping some of those powers is much more feasible.

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I don't see why that's a bad thing. If a large proportion of players take power X, then adding alternatives to power X seems like a perfectly reasonably course of action. (Not of course, that I'm saying power X is "required" or should be made inherent or anything like that.)

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Rest also comes bundled with that nice heal aspect, which means blasters could go all out for three or four spawns and then take a knee for 18 seconds.

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And would they go faster or slower than if they played a little smarter and didn't need to rest? I don't consider myself a blaster expert by any means, but my experience thus far with my fire/fire has been that adding fireball and/or firebreath into my attack chains doesn't do anything to increase my single target dps. In fact, it probably hurts it, although I haven't worked it out. And if you're hitting multiple foes, the AoEs are more endurance efficient than the ST attacks. (I forget if the break-even point is 2 enemies or 3, but it's not that big.)

As far as the heal aspect is concerned -- all of the arguments I've made about endurance-related downtime being unfun apply equally to health-related downtime. Sitting around doing nothing between fights waiting for either bar to come back is boring, and to enforce such downtime is poor design. (Furthermore, it's entirely possible to design a successful MMO where out-of-combat recovery is rapid without introducing balance problems. I didn't like much about WoW, but this was one thing they got right, IMO. At least in the early part of the game, which was about as far as I could make it.)

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If my blue bar is perpetually capped, I am wasting a resource that could have been spent on more damage, control, or survivability.

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The only real resource in this game is time. And using Rest involves a substantial time cost. (A cost which is much less than just sitting around waiting for stuff to come back -- hence my desire for a lower recharge despite Rest's sizable disadvantages relative to other means of managing health and endurance.)

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As for reducing the recharge of rest that you mention..... I find no problem with that suggestion. If that would help people, then I'd happily go along with it. Personally, I don't think Rest should even have a recharge at all. I think the long delay for it to kick in is "punishment" enough for using it.


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^This. I concur.

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I'll third this.

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However, there's the fact that at lower levels, you're NOT supposed to be able to attack like a madman, and a continuous pace, throughout a mission. It's good training for end management that should serve you well later in in the game when your enhancements allow for a bit more leeway.

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How is having endurance management suck early in the game good training for anything in the late game, where endurance management is dramatically easier because you have so many more options, all of which are more effective?

Endurance management in the lowbie game isn't good for anything except making me not want to play my lowbie alts.

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It's not that endurance is supposed to be really bad in the early levels, just that when you create a character, you should start out relatively normal. That's one of the defining traits of MMORPGs, that you start out more or less as a normal person, but gradually gain experience and abilities and become stronger and stronger. The devs have implied a couple times over the years that they wish they had handled endurance differently, but it was too finely ingrained into the game mechanics to just do away with it. They've done a lot to address many of the issues, but those early levels are still left.

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I'm not sure if the "starting out relatively normal" is appropriate to the genre. I didn't spend all that time flailing around in the vat of toxic waste to wait 20 levels before I could use my new superpowers without sucking wind, thank you very much.

FWIW, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about a gradually-disappearing endurance discount, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, if it were phased out by level 20, then it would be diminishing in the very levels where it's most necessary. It also runs counter to the idea of progression as you level up -- you spend the first 20 levels becoming less accurate and less endurance-efficient. (I dislike Beginner's Luck for much the same reason. They could've had exactly the same mathematical effect on accuracy without the conceptual problems by imposing a defense debuff on NPCs prior to level 20.)

I think my first choice would be reduce the recharge on rest. I've yet to hear a convincing reason for it to be longer than 60 seconds.

I kind of missed this earlier. Not sure if StratoNexus is still following the thread, but here goes anyways.



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I've simply said that a character who's sole means of endurance management is Rest is, because of Rest's inherent downtime and other drawbacks, will take longer to get through a mission than one who also has other means of endurance management.

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Your statement is irrelevant. Will someone who has Rest on a three minute timer and uses other means of endurance management take longer to get through a mission (several missions) than someone who has Rest whenever they want?

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Yes, obviously, because if you have enough endurance that you don't need to rest then you can spend the time that you would spend resting killing stuff and earning xp. This seems sufficiently self-evident as to be axiomatic.

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Perhaps I team more than you and have a different perspective. I can see using Rest almost all the time with nothing but benefit. Tanker runs in, Blaster / Scrappers unleash hell, repeat.

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This is how high-level teams already run, at least in my experience. Except the scrappers don't generally wait for the tankers to jump in to unleash hell. And sometimes the blasters have killed everything before the tankers or the scrappers even get there. Generally not too much need or opportunity for resting.

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When attackers are low on end, they can Rest while Tanker gathers spawn. If Tanker gets low on health, he can pull out and let the team take remaining aggro (since all AoEs are usable at whim because endurance is a non-issue, taking aggro from a lowbie tanker is even easier than normal, and with enemies dying faster less of a problem) and Rest while the team finishes that spawn. You can also choose to cease Rest early without any real penalty when needed. "Hey, I am up to half end and the Tanker got an extra spawn he didn't count on, I'll get in there now." There are more concerns like these that should be taken into consideration, IMO, before simply declaring that Rest with low to zero recharge is not over the top and would be lower performing than other end management techniques.

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First, I think you have an overly optimistic appraisal of how easy it would be to use rest in the middle of combat during the low levels -- it just takes one or two stray hits to send you to the ER if you're resting.

However, even if we concede that you're right and it becomes possible to rest literally whenever you want, a group that needs to rest on average once per spawn will be going slower than a group which can defeat an entire spawn and be starting in on the next spawn with close to full health/end in less time than it takes to rest -- which is the normal situation for nearly every high-level team I've been on.

Rest would speed the game up for lowbies, and for sub-optimal teams and sub-optimal builds. In a more optimal situation, it wouldn't really make much of a difference.

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I use Rest pretty frequently right now on almost every character I play, even in the higher levels. I can use it and have no one notice in many, many cases (my teammates can occasionally handle the last 10 seconds of a spawn and the first 5 or 6 of the next spawn while I am kneeling) . If you give it to me with zero recharge, you better believe I can and will use it to much greater effect than you seem to believe is possible.

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Not to belabor the point, but every time you rest, you are spending 10+ seconds not doing anything to contribute to your team. I'm sure that you would be able to find a way to get a great deal of benefit from insta-rest. But you'd still be going slower than a team that's built not to need rest except in exceptional circumstances.

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I don't understand this discussion at all.

Before stamina, end management is a pain in the backside unless you use regen. Or a tank with WP.

It sucks. It makes the game dull and annoying. I've fully fallen into the camp that powerlevels to 22.

I am Jack's disgust towards downtime.

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I don't disagree with any of this, and I'm a bit mystified that there seem to be so many people who do. Different strokes for different folks and all that, I guess. I just wish that the "everything is fine" crowd would be less hostile to making (relatively minor) changes that would make the early game more palatable for the "everything is not fine" crowd.

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However, there's the fact that at lower levels, you're NOT supposed to be able to attack like a madman, and a continuous pace, throughout a mission. It's good training for end management that should serve you well later in in the game when your enhancements allow for a bit more leeway.

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How is having endurance management suck early in the game good training for anything in the late game, where endurance management is dramatically easier because you have so many more options, all of which are more effective?

Endurance management in the lowbie game isn't good for anything except making me not want to play my lowbie alts.

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However, it's not really relevant to the key concern, which is that low level end management might be driving away new players, because it's unlikely that a new player knows to rush straight to the AE building and write himself a farm (and, indeed, this would be a terrible way to experience the game's content for the first time).

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I wouldn't necessarily underestimate how quickly people can find out the most advantageous possible situation: witness how quickly FotM builds spread, or how thoroughly so many new players have been convinced that stamina/hasten/<insert power here> is "required" without actually understanding the arguments.

But it's not that hard to imagine a fairly robust response to widespread broadcast in AP along the lines of "MA team forming, 1-20 in only 2 hours!" Doesn't take that long for newbies to find out about sewer teams, and I don't see why it would take any longer in this case.

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Because while a damage AT can build a support ally to cover their weaknesses, adding a damage ally to a support AT will rob you of XP.

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Haven't tested this, but isn't it like the Confuse code, where the damage they do is weighted less? I.e., if they do 50% of the damage, they only steal (making numbers up) 25% of the xp?

If so, it could be advantageous to use an Elite Boss ally for damage as well.

The MA buff-bot brings up an interesting question: since it's trivially possible to use the MA for endurance management, wouldn't it be reasonable to add quickly recharging rest to encourage people to go through the non-MA early-game content?

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You know Pippy, I was thinking about this today amidst all of the X spots left for AE farm team broadcasts and it suddenly dawned upon me that the devs HAVE given us unlimited health and endurance just now in I14.

All it costs is a tad of debt (nothing prior to level 10) that is elliminated after killing a mob or 2. Just play in the AE from 1-20. The hospital is right next to the mission entrance no matter what kind of mission you are running.

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You're a genius!

I'd still like to have a quicker recharge on Rest. But I think this will do just fine.

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Rest, for instance. I personally think it shouldn't even have a timer. If a person wants to rest every 10 seconds, that's fine with me. I also wouldn't mind if the preliminary wait before it kicked in was shortened too.

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Okay, I'm not sure why I've been arguing with you then.

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Maybe because I haven't advocated some of the recommendations people had where they wanted Stamina to be inherent. I'm all for decreasing downtime, but I just like it when I see my character progress from one that's rather weak and clumsy to a wonderful powerhouse.

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Okay, yeah, it sounds like we're pretty much on the same page. I'm not entirely happy with the way endurance management is implemented in general, but inherent Stamina is overkill.

I see character progression from needing to rest every couple of spawns to being able to cut through whole missions without taking a knee as pretty legit.

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You keep saying that you are better off not using Rest due to its drawbacks. You also guarantee that a playstyle where Rest is always available and used often is going to take longer to get through a mission than one that does not rely on Rest.

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I've said no such thing.

I've said that you're better off not using rest more often than is absolutely necessary. If your health is at some fraction X of its maximum and your endurance is at some fraction Y, then you are better off jumping into the next spawn than you are resting, unless X or Y are low enough that you would not be able to defeat that next spawn before being defeated yourself. (The actual determination of what X and Y are, of course, varies from one build to the next, and is also made a bit fuzzy by the wiles of the RNG.)

I've said that about six times now. It's completely different from saying "you're better off not using Rest at all," which I've never said, and is obviously not a position I take seeing as I'm asking for Rest to made available more often.

As to what I've "guaranteed," I've simply said that a character who's sole means of endurance management is Rest is, because of Rest's inherent downtime and other drawbacks, will take longer to get through a mission than one who also has other means of endurance management. (Actually, what I've said is that such a character will experience more downtime, which is a bit different from saying that he'll complete missions more slowly.)

Neither of these contentions strikes me as particularly controversial, nor are they in any way contradictory. The only reason that you can claim that my argument isn't self-consistent is that you're ascribing to me two contradictory positions, neither of which actually bears more than a passing resemblance to the things I've said.

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Rest, for instance. I personally think it shouldn't even have a timer. If a person wants to rest every 10 seconds, that's fine with me. I also wouldn't mind if the preliminary wait before it kicked in was shortened too.

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Okay, I'm not sure why I've been arguing with you then.

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If you spend one minute to kill each spawn, that means even without enhancements, you can use Rest every 3 spawns. Is end management truly so onerous in your experience that you drain your end in one or two fights regularly?

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Depends on powersets, I suppose. My two current lowbie alts are Storm/Sonic and Fire/Dark (scrapper), who don't seem to be particularly easy on the blue bar. Using half a bar in a fight isn't uncommon. I run on Tenacious so I can fight actual bosses, and so if it's one of the big even-con spawns, then using more than half a bar isn't uncommon either. Of course, these fights also take a bit longer.

Also note that if you spend less than a minute per spawn and still rest after every spawn, then the fraction of your time spent resting goes up.

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It is not clear in the least. It might take me an extra 20 seconds to Rest, but it could take the guy using end management tools and equips an extra 20 seconds to fight (stressing their green bar more as well then).

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My experience has been that the most efficient use of slots and powers, long term, is one in which you need to rest as rarely as possible. YMMV, but the opportunity cost to endurance slotting is very low, particularly with IO sets. It's not all that uncommon for a power to have >90% damage, >90% recharge (just from slotting), more than enough acc and still have >60% endrx. So no, I don't believe that ignoring endurance management options in the late game is sufficient to negate the slowdown that comes with having to rest after every fight.

And if it is that way in the lowbie game, I don't necessarily see it being a problem, as long as one style doesn't have a huge advantage over the other. Ideally, there would be some situations where it's advantageous to blow through the endurance bar -- maybe a fight with a dangerous boss -- and others where the slow-but-steady approach is better. That is the case now, I'd just argue that the penalties attached to the high-endurance-use situation are too high.

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You seem to be talking out of both sides of your mouth. "I want Rest to recharge faster, so I can use it more often, in order to be active more often, but rest recharging faster will actually increase my downtime, so there is no benefit to Rest recharging faster."

Pick a side.

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Again with the straw man. Seem to be a lot of those running around this thread. I didn't say rest recharging faster would increase downtime. (Or, using more precise language, that using rest more often would increase my downtime.) I said that excessive use of rest, i.e. using all of your endurance on every single fight without using the endurance management tools that become available as the game progresses, increases downtime.

It seems pretty self-evident that having rest up when you need it will lead to less downtime than having to wait for it to recharge or for your bars to recover naturally. It also seems evident, although maybe less so, that it will minimize downtime if you build your character in such a way that you end up having to rest as rarely as possible, since Rest itself is downtime.

As to overall killing speed, well, it's a lot harder in the heat of battle to say "oh, that fight took 40% longer than it would if..." than it is to say "oh, look, I'm spending a third of my time standing around." So I'd argue that most players are more sensitive to downtime than they are to non-optimized long-term damage output. That may well account for the tendency to use end-heavy powers in situations that don't call for them: "Why am I standing around when I have attacks ready to use? FIREBALL!!!"