Punchy

Castle's mostly saying that stacking vengeance is an exploit.

Wasn't dull pain's +hp non-enhanceable pre-ED?

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For the PvE folks reading this, no, Vengeance is not meant to stack in PvE, either and the change, when it happens, will apply in those encounters as well.

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A note on this point. In PVE, heroes don't NEED to stack vengeance, not with power boost/power build up. The +dam is probably the least interesting aspect of the power, especially if there's a kin on the team. The +def and +tohit, though, are absolutely ridiculous -- CoD lists PBU at 149% buff. That's like being able to double-stack veng all on your own. (And I say this as someone who constantly veng + pbus, and loves doing it.)

Villains don't get power boost or power build up, so single-stacked veng is just nice.

If stacked veng is 'too good', maybe PB'd veng is too?

Actually, didn't the devs first correct the problem by introducing -tohit, switching to suppression only after player outcry?

So it doesn't seem likely that Statesman would introduce the problem of 'jousting in PVP' with 'suppression' as the solution.

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As far as I can remember the PvP community has been holding events and tournaments on test for 2 1/2 years. As a group the PvP community is the most organized group in the game because in addition to running sgs and participating on their own server, they also have to seek each other out on test.


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Not quite. How many PVP leagues have started and then failed? The last one seems to have worked, which is great.

There is Test PVP night, true... but I don't know how much of a 'community' effort that is, and not just an attempt by the half-dozen people who actually give a damn and have the initiative to actually run it. Without those people, the PVP 'community' seems to be happy whinging and not really doing a damned thing.

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I will freely admit that some of the PvP crowd is a little rough around the edges but they all seem to get along and get the job done.


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They do? As I recall:

Ex Libris: Hey, test this out, it's for PVP.
Forum PVP stars: 'Why should we? The arena is still brokeeeen! Base raids, [censored]!'

This doesn't even address the fallacy underlying the 'PVP is for PVPers!' complaint about the committee; that PVP as 'hardcore PVPers' do it is what is best for PVP in general.

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Do you realize that it was Arcanaville who brought that terminology to the forums?


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Yes, yes I do. That's why I said time and time again that they know all this.

Arcanaville tends to get tunnel-vision when it comes to certain topics that are near and dear to them. Topics involving MA and SR are the most visible of these.

In this sense, EvilGeko is a lot more honest: they'll lobby for MoG to be fixed while admitting that regen ain't hurting.

I'm not saying that this idea is bad: it certainly has its merits. I do also think there are issues to it that are being overlooked. One of them is that not all mitigation systems can be made equivalent in terms of performance, or at least not trivially.

Another is how this would affect team makeup. With stacked buffs never reaching the stratosphere, would you now need tankers? Would squishies never safely be able to take aggro?

What about damage buffs: stacking additively hurts them, would this be in fact strengthening them? Or in fact, would they implement diminishing returns, as the OP suggests (in terms of what to what? each FS bub in relation to the next?)?

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I don't think you understand the suggestion. The suggestion doesn't change the relationship between defense, resistance, and regeneration at all. It only changes how they stack. Whatever the relationship is between something with 30% defense, 50% resistance, and 400% regeneration today is, under the suggested stacking change, that relationship would be exactly, precisely the same. It has to be: the change doesn't change the definition of "30% defense" or "50% resistance" or "400% regeneration:" those are all exactly, precisely as strong today as under the proposed change.



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I'm sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant in terms of stacking. Right now, +res and +def stack multiplicatively. If this change goes through, in terms of stacking, +def and +res will be equivalent (in terms of damage mitigation, obviously). If I'm taking 50% of damage thanks to FF buffs, whether I bring in a sonic or FF doesn't really matter.


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No. This always comes up eventually when talking about balance. The notion is, if you want balance, everything has to behave identically, or identically except for minor exceptions. That's pointless: it would be simpler to get rid of two and only use one. The whole point of having three different damage mitigation mechanisms is to have three different damage mitigation mechanisms. Its up to designers to use the proper mathematical techniques to ensure that sets constructed out of heterogenous components are nevertheless balanced according to a particular set of average metrics. It trivializes the design to make the different components transparently identical in performance.


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Again, you're misreading me. I mean equivalent performance. The ideal situation is one where there's no difference in survivability between bringing a healer, +res'er or a +def'er. Healing does NOT offer the same performance. Sometimes it's far above, and sometimes it's far below. And you know this.

For one, healing reacts poorly to differences in hp. If a healer can double the survivability (read: time to die) of a defender, they won't be doubling the survivability of a tanker. The amount of damage mitigated via healing is exactly the same, of course. But +res or +def have no such restriction.

Let's suppose this change went through, and at the same time the game were made a lot more difficult, at least in terms of damage dealt. If all you cared about was, essentially, 'time to die', and assuming you can always pick and choose. You wouldn't choose an emp at first, because they just won't add the survivability of an FFer or Sonic. Likewise, once you have a couple of those, you probably wouldn't choose another one, since an emp will do a better job of mitigating what damage does get through, and reducing your downtime. There's an obvious difference in performance between the sets.


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We compare what different damage mitigation powers do relative to a standard: the standard being something with no protective powers at all. Relative to this standard, we can say that X% defense mitigates a certain percentage of incoming attacks relative to having no defense, or Y% resistance mitgates a certain amount of incoming damage.

The base regeneration of such the standard isn't zero: its base regen: 100%/240 seconds. When you say something with no regen will die eventually even at high levels of defense, that's irrelevant to a discussion of the strength of defense, resistance, and regeneration. We compare +Def to something with zero defense, but we don't comare +Regen to something with zero regen, we compare to something with base regen. Regeneration powers amplify that base regen, they don't add regeneration to something without it.

Comparing X% defense and zero regeneration to something with Y% regeneration is subtly flawed: its using the wrong standard for comparison. In effect, not taking into account base regeneration is like not taking into account the base tohit of the attackers when looking at defense.

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I'm sorry, but you do realize you were the first one to use impossible values, right? Here:

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If it wasn't for the archetype caps, defense and resistance could do that: 50% defense and 100% resistance would both be perfect indestructibility. There's no level of regeneration that does that: it would take an effectively unlimited amount of regeneration to get the same approximate behavior.


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I was pointing out that under a very specific lens, healing can also provide functional immortality when it's high enough. In my case, I discounted all player regen. In your case, you assumed 50% def and 100% res to achieve actual immortality. Neither is possible.

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I said brought in line because depending on how the numbers worked out, heals could be too powerful or not powerful enough. Given the general difficulty level, I would guess heals would be pretty much OK and only need to be tweaked.


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That's what I mean. Heals don't work the way res and def do. We all know this when we talk about regen's downtime, or how it's great up to x many mobs, but vs x+1 it fails horribly. That doesn't happen to +def/+res.

You're overlooking something you (and everyone, really) already know. Heals and regen have an immortality line. If players were unable to regen in combat, unless you were achieving 100% resistance or 50% defense, you'd eventually die, no matter what sort of damage you were facing. Not so with regen/heals. (Call it the low-downtime factor.)

In the suggested fix, res and def are made almost equivalent (barring specific weaknesses, like psi/effects for grantable res and +tohit for def). Healing/regen isn't. Sometimes it's worse, sometimes it's better.

If you don't want to cause problems you should make all types of mitigation equal, barring their specific weaknesses. Especially when you have sets that specialize in each of the different mitigation-types.

Keep in mind that it's not just +res and +def. Heals would have to be treated in the same fashion, for this to be fair. Heals would always heal x% of the damage you've taken, otherwise you will have a problem.

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I wish peopel would understand this this isn't an end-all strategy. There's a HUEG amount of room to iron out details, and still then a potentially HUEG amount of room to change things up.


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That's exactly it, though. There IS a working strategy, though it's not terribly viable, and we should be MORE forceful in pointing that out. It was more a proof of concept than anything else. (Yes, hami can be killed.)

It's a brute-force approach that is either EoE-heavy or wipe-heavy, both of which are time-intensive (and I personally doubt that farming EoEs for the entire raid takes half an hour).

Only a very very select group of people (if any!) can wrangle up 50 people with the right distribution of ATs for the current raid to happen in 2.5 hours, if it's even possible, since it lies in the realm of theorycraft right now.

I'm rather sure that most people won't manage the current brute-force strategy at all. Not only that, but this slow brute-force method is competing directly with the STF, which not only has much laxer AT requirements and is easier, but also gives one more recipe than hami does.

So I think we should put more emphasis on: there is a working strategy BUT it's brute force and not what the devs intended. Much like how the hami strategy folks came up with for current hami was far more brute-force than the devs expected. When Zombie-Man says 'no raid has been attempted, raids would go faster', or Marut says 'the raid can be done in 2 hours' it seems to me like they're exagerating on the viability of this strategy. Sure it works. But if we're going to be wipe 3 times to kill hami, then it's the stupidest thing ever, too.

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ZM is dead right. The raid that lasted so long and eventually worked suffered terribly from lack of raider preparation AND working with then-still unknown factors. With those out of the way, a prepared raid group should be able to take down Hamidon in no more than 2 hours, and probably quite a bit less if they're coordinated well.

-M

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Under the best possible circumstances, maybe 2 hours.

Does that 2 hours include EoE collecting, though? The first day of the hami takedown, there were teams farming GMs several hours before the event, plus BaB's gift, and EoEs still ran out by the first respawn. (Though probably folks weren't as economical as they could have been.)

Meanwhile, the no-EoE solution (though pretty disorganized) we tried for the first respawn led to many many wipes. With the oil slick trick wipes are far less of a setback, it begs to be seen if the devs will continue to allow the trick.

Buffs. I did this only with a squishy with acro, but apparently they can also pierce your average KB protection. So ID was very important.

The first takedown was over the course of two days (he got to 25% on the first night), with one of the 3 mito spawns mostly cleared by BaB (that's when he showed that leaving one mito alive wasn't the answer). Not that a real raid would take that long, but the current brute-force strategy is pretty time intensive.

Even if the data does say that, if it's not what the devs want I highly doubt they won't change it.

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Too bad the devs only seem to use mass statistics to measure performance. Having the dummy killer AT marked as best performing is very discouraging.

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Honestly, though. What percentage of players aren't dummies? Not good (there's probably not even 100 of those) but the type who know just enough not to get ganked by stalkers. In my experience (granted, Virtue, but it's still a 'high-pop' server) it's about 10%. So though there are certainly powerset/AT combos that are far deadlier than stalkers in the right hands, it hardly matters when 9 out of every 10 villains in SC is a stalker and they're getting easy kills off most everybody.

Using actual play is the only way to balance high-end pvp... but how many high-end pvpers are there? So I'd say using statistics to measure comparative AT performance isn't such a terrible idea. It gives an idea of what's happening down there. Yeah, rad/psys in RV can 3-shot or 4-shot squishies (and there's almost nothing you can do about it) and /rad trollers are just vicious solo PVP toons at higher levels, and depending on the corr they can be vicious solo or teamed... but how common are they compared to stalkers and scrappers and blasters in average pvp? Heck, in average PVP most people don't even team.

I apologize if this has been mentioned before, but:

'mesh' pattern on gloves/bare hands doesn't match the 'mesh' pattern for the upper body. The glove pattern is much 'heavier'.

Do the modifiers for rank and level scale additively or multiplicatively?

Actually, EA has holes in its mitigation, too. It has no psi defense that I know of, outside of energy cloak, and toxic defense is an issue with all typed defense sets. But it does have +hp (but not a heal) in overload.

Not entirely true. Containment works off immobs, and those recharge very very fast. Dom immobs are rather worthless.

Containment also is antithetical to how the devs supposedly balance pvp... it seems like an addition meant to make controllers more powerful in 1v1 (and controllers are VERY powerful in 1v1), since in teams it isn't quite as valuable. Supposedly PVP is balanced for teams. A controller's buffs and mezzes should be sufficient. Controllers are full support toons; at no point is 'damage' part of what they do, and while damage is necessary in PvE, it's not in team pvp.

Also... the excuse for containment is the difficulty for controllers to solo pre-pets. Which doesn't explain:
1) Why containment remains when a controller is teamed (or rather, while they're on large teams).
2) Why they keep it after they get pets.
3) Why epic blasts get containment bonus.
4) Why it was even included (and boosted!) in pvp.

I'm not necessarily saying that the above points should be addressed regarding containment, but if its supposed purpose is to help them solo pre-pets, then the above are out of place.

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Corruptors don't have more HP than Defenders....

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They do, albeit by a small margin (defenders/controllers/stalkers/doms have 692 hp in SC, while corruptors have 729). Ironically, they're the CoV AT with the 2nd highest amount of HP.

I wonder who's ahead: doms or defenders.

_Castle_'s post also doesn't establish a timeframe. He may be 100% accurate, in fact, since he doesn't define 'damage', and very well may be saying damage over time. Which may be entirely irrelevant for PVP, if the point where scrapper damage starts to surpass blaster damage happens well after the scrapper is dead.

Whoops, already posted here.