Samuel_Tow

That I can get behind. I'm sure the current ones are more realistic in terms of the kind of visuals actual energy would have (or rather not have), but they just look very understated to me. If I could, I'd pick red forcefields any day.

I wanted to say a bunch of things, but I'll stick with that. Well said, Leo, and thank you for giving me that phrasing I'd put that in my sig, if I were the kind of person to alter a signature I've had for the past six years...

All the more reason for me not to put in a lot of "work" into my game. I'm looking to delete and reroll a 50 Scrapper as soon as a specific new option opens up, and even if the option for a set respec existed, I wouldn't use it. The point is to PLAY the character, not HAVE the character.

Sorry to dig this out of the Aether (I don't check my subscribed threads as often as I should), but what's wrong with asking for someone to choose for me? Maybe I'm not the kind of great and talented writer as I pretend to be and I can't make a good decision. Certainly if flipping a coin is good, "because Leo said so" would be even better, would it not?

As long as it doesn't involve anything which really bugs me, I've no problem with taking other people's ideas and running with them. Hell, I robbed no less than three intellectual properties just to give the character life.

I don't know how to spell his name, and it seems it just never sticks with me.

You're welcome. You got a free extra that you're not happy about. Cry me a river. It's a pet that you can look at. If that's not enough for you, too bad. I fail to see where you were promised anything more. In fact, you could have seen what you'd get by checking out future veteran rewards.

Cut the passive-aggressive woe-is-me attitude.

I don't have a lot of information on a lot of situations, but isn't that kind of how powersets are ideally already balanced? I'm sure there are outliers, but pulling a random sample out of the grid to test because that's what I'm playing now, Battle Axe seems to fix that design specification to a T. From Beheader to Chop to Gash to Swoop to Cleave, DPA just keeps going up and up and DPS drops ever so slightly. In fact, not counting Whirling Axe, animation times still go 1.33, 1.33, 1.5, 1.83, 2.33, respectively, so despite powers slowing down as they go up in Tier, their DPA still steadily increases, and without any specific serious problems of absurd damage that I've been able to see. Granted, Battle Axe went through a revision when it was proliferated to Brutes, but still.

Or are we looking for large-scale differences here? Where low-Tier powers have markedly better DPS than high-Tier attacks, but high-Tier ones have markedly better DPA? Because looking at Battle Axe, the change is there, it's just on the matter of smaller steps. Off memory, 40 to 60 to 80 to 90 to 110 or some such. And DPS is fairly the same, with minor drops between the Tiers.

I know not all sets are designed like this, and I know few have such a clear hierarchy of attacks, but it seems like setting up attacks to both slow down AND increase in DPA isn't so out of the question, provided the increase isn't too profound.

See, that's kind of a problem question to ask. A lot of ATs wouldn't be allowed to have the kind of performance they can reach by gaming their inherent if the inherent were replaced by a straight stat boost. Brutes would most definitely lose a LOT of their damage potential if they lost Fury and their damage were just upped, but it goes beyond that. Let's look at just Masterminds - their Henchmen are designed to be weak, but strengthened when the Mastermind isn't around specifically to mandate presence and susceptibility to return fire. Remove that need for presence and you're limiting how high you can buff henchmen, if at all.

Gimmicky inherents allow ATs to reach performance levels that flat stats just wouldn't permit, but at the cost of an increased workload to play to the gimmick. It's true, under certain circumstances, Brutes can outdamage Scrappers. However, this requires a lot more effort than it does for a Scrapper, who can do his full level of damage just rolling out of bed. It's a tradeoff - performance for cost of participation. That's why I'm saying that such an AT as I propose CAN be allowed to attain both good damage AND good protection (possibly alternately) via gimmicky inherent, yet still not pose to outclass other ATs which find their performance through less complicated gimmicks.

If it worked for Fury, it ought to work for other concepts.

To be honest, very little on a Mastermind does. I don't know whether it's because the AT is more complicated and less direct, whether direct feedback is harder to process or just because there's so much going on, but it's really hard to judge what your Mastermind is doing by just looking at it play. Hell, it's even hard to judge if your henchmen are missing much because you don't get Miss messages and there's so much fire coming down. As such, alterations in their performance aren't directly evident in the sense that "HOLY CRAP! I'M DOING TRIPLE DAMAGE!" Supremacy Adds a bit of extra damage and accuracy. The accuracy you can't tell because it's hard to follow and the damage is hard to feel unless you're specifically looking for it. It's not like on a Scrapper where things suddenly die in one hit instead of three. Here the whole fight ends up being over in 23 seconds instead of 26, and it's just hard to spot. Trust me, I've looked.

I wouldn't be worried. Brute playstile requires a spaz approach, which not everyone can do. I can't, for instance, which is why I don't worry about maintaining Fury between fights. Scrappers, on the other hand, deal their damage full on at all times with no maintenance required from the player. That just works for me.

Agreed on Assault sets. They're pure attack sets, which is why they get added to Assault/Defence ATs so much. I used to add them, myself, but having played a Dominator, I can clearly see that Assault without some form of self-protection just doesn't work. Even with Dominators' high damage mods, there isn't enough outgoing damage to survive on it like a Blaster would. Specifically, there isn't enough AoE, which REALLY hurts on larger spawns. As well, many Assault sets lack Build Up, which is even more problematic, and many also contain Snipes, which honestly don't help with anything. I do think an Assault/Defence character could work, but it would need a LOT of defence. At least approaching Stalker levels, and I know that's unlikely to happen. The only way to get away with less defence is to give it more damage, and there just isn't room in Assault sets for this.

And, yes, Manipulation sets are just awkward. To this day I can't pin down exactly what the thinking behind them was. Some look like tweaked melee sets, some look like esoteric messes and some look like they were put together from whatever powers were left over for that element. I'm honestly not sure WHAT they're supposed to help with, but I just find it best to try and NOT use them on any more ATs.

OK, here's what I had:

Assuming by some magical stroke of technology that we could buff melee attacks (the specific melee attacks in the set, not just "melee" attacks in general) and ranged attacks (redux) separately, then I propose an inherent that consists of two components.

One component rewards situational awareness, giving you greater melee damage in melee and greater ranged damage at range. This will basically work as Invincibility does, granting a buff damage to melee attacks and debuff damage to ranged attacks for each enemy in melee, possibly weighted so bosses grant more. This would induce these characters to emphasise their melee attacks when they're in melee, not just fire whatever's available, and also to have a reason to pull back at range and do that.

The other component would be an "opposite" component, which rewards you with a buff to the opposite kind of damage to the powers you are currently using. This would mean that using melee attacks in melee would buff you ranged attacks, making it a good idea to switch ranges and pull back to range to shoot some. Once you're at range, shooting those ranged attacks would "consume" your ranged damage buff and instead grant you a melee damage buff, making it a good idea to go back to melee and fight there.

Ideally, if the two systems are used together, they could provide a LOT of additional damage, but at the cost of having to be aware of them and having to move around a lot. This would also make the AT different from all others in that it wouldn't have an "ideal" range that it will want to stick to and only deviate from under special circumstances. Scrappers with ranged attacks will fight in melee and fire their ranged attacks point-blank. Blasters with melee attacks will fight at range and close in only for a few quick attacks before pulling back. This AT would stand and fight in both melee and range combat and switch between dynamically. This is both a defining gimmick AND an inherent that could provide some serious perfomance.

It's not an IDEAL gimmick, granted, but at least it sounds good

The who of the what now?

I think I see what you mean. When you said "slower," I immediately thought of something on the order of Bitter Freeze Ray to Total Focus as slow, and that sort of thing as a bread and butter attack is just crazy. But the numbers you're giving do actually sound interesting.

Incidentally, wouldn't it be counter-intuitive to have attacks that are weaker AND slower than later attacks once you get a full attack chain? I understand that bigger attacks need to have better DPA because that's what people would expect (hence why it's odd that Energy Punch has better DPA than Bone Smasher), but it just seems backwards to have the smallest attacks also be the slowest. It would feel, at least to me, like compounding insult upon injury.

How would you feel about the following: All attacks have more or less the same DPA, but later attacks have a slightly higher DPA the same way they tend to have a slightly lower DPS? Yes, the numbers on damage might be absurd (although animation times could go down instead of damage scaling up), but high DPA also comes with a very high EPA, which makes it more costly to do more damage right away. Wouldn't that in itself be a decent balancing factor?

To a large extent, you have a point. Melee ATs have basically "just attacks," with some of them trading off a slight bit of efficiency for secondary effects. However, most melee sets still have at least one pure utility attack like Cobra Strike or Touch of Fear or Fault, plus Taunt, plus Build Up, plus at least one very inefficient AoE, but that still leaves them with five redundant attacks to make an attack chain out of.

Blasters and Blast sets in general, on the other hand, give up one power for a nuke, one for aim, one for a Snipe, one for utility and typically have two AoR attacks which just doesn't leave much room for other things. I honestly don't see what you could do to make room for more, outside of canibalising existing powers. Nukes are out, Aim is out, the AoEs don't count, so the only thing you can really think about canibalising is either Snipe or the Utility power. I wouldn't mind seeing serious damage on, say, Beanbag in addition to the stun, but I don't expect to see it.

Snipes are... Odd powers, and I've taken enough heat over them to last me for a while. Basically, they have the WORST DPA of any power in a Blast, they have indecent DPS AND they're interruptible. This makes them bad in a pinch, bad during Build Up, bad in the middle of a fight and basically only really good as openers, which you'd think would make them recharge a little slower and hit a little harder. They're something I'd look to canibalise into a decent attack, but I'll just get trodden on for suggesting it.

Other than hurt feelings, there's no reason to stop playing Energy Melee, as it's still probably one of the highest, if not THE highest, damage sets out there. The Energy Transfer change did little to affect that.

I see. I've actually had Arcana correct me on that point no less than three times in the past, and eventually I got the message. I've long since lost my original survivability comparison formulas, but I agree - the "value" of defensive numbers increases as the base you add them over grows.

But what way is there around that? In City of Heroes, we add them together as percent points, seemingly simply because that doesn't give one source of, say, defence priority over another. How would that work on a multiplicative basis? Percent calculations require a base to work off of, but the only way I can conceive of is to have this rigged as percentage off percentage off percentage, instead of percentage plus percentage and so on.

Let's use your example of a Tanker and a Blaster. I assume you mean the Tanker would go up by 15% of 75% and the Blaster would go up 15% of... What? Can't be 15% of zero because that's zero, but what, then? 15% of 1? Just add 15%? And suppose the Tanker got this 75% from two powers. What would the powers look like? Two 50% resistance increases? Because that would end up at 0.5*(1+0.5) = 0.75, which would then end up as 0.75*(1+0.15), for a total of 0.5*(1+0.5)*(1+0.15). Is that what we're looking for?

Assuming that it's something like this, wouldn't that then become a bit confusing? You'd think taking two 50% increases would mean you go to 100% and should take no damage, but what you get instead is half and a half of half. And if you grab a fair bit of these, then instinctive prediction goes out the window. Your total protection is about half and a third and a quarter of a third of half, or 0.5 + (0.33 + 0.4*0.33)*0.5.

That's not to say that "5% resistance over 0% resistance only makes you 1/20 harder to kill but that same 5% resistance over 90% resistance makes you 2/3 harder to kill" is any less confusing or more intuitive. I guess it's still harder to balance, though.

Hardy har har.

Considering Tankers go without Taunt and swear by Gauntlet, I question your assessment.

Other Controller players would seem to disagree with you, from all the praises people have been singing about Controller damage, Controller farming, Controller soloing and so forth.

A Blaster without Defiance damage buffs is weak at best. Too weak to survive his own aggro, at any rate. A Blaster without the ability to shoot out of a status effect is gimped and useless solo. The Defiance changes are the only reason Blasters are at all playable to me, so I'd appreciate not trying to dismiss what utterly makes the AT.

Except unlike Scrappers, Corrupter damage sucks BIG time, and unlike Scrappers, their criticals are predictable and very high percentage towards the end of a critter's life bar. Scourge is what gives Corruptors their damage. Without it, they're just gimped Defenders.

As someone with multiple Masterminds, I question the validity of your observation. Supremacy is there to ensure the Mastermind stays WITH his minions and isn't hiding around a corner or inside a personal forcefield. Simply making the henchmen stronger is NOT the same thing.

Considering how STRONG of a buff it can be, I really have to call you out on that one.

First of all, if the power is in the attacks, then so what? Half the inherents are written into the attacks and no-one bats an eye. You're arguing low-level mechanics that don't actually have any relevance on high-level design. Secondly, the Stalker Inherent is NOT in the powers, it's in the Stalker. Hide is a state attainable only by Stalkers, and it's what his powers check against.

And again, that's like saying "Well, only a quarter of the existing regular ATs are defined by their inherents, so clearly pretty much none are." Even just ONE AT defined by its inherent is enough to set up precedent, and the one AT you can't argue against in any way is the Brute. If we have one AT that does this, there is no reason we can't have more.

Let me turn this question on you, instead. Describe the Brute AT in such a way that covers your criteria. Then we'll talk. Because Brutes have the potential to consistently deal more damage than Scrappers AND have significantly more hit points AND Tanker caps for their protection abilities. Yet they are allowed to exist, and pretty soon coexist with Scrappers.

That's interesting... You fail to mention Devices and the count of attacks in manipulation sets seems to be off somehow. Let's have a look:

Energy Manipulation has Power Thrust, Energy Punch, Bone Smasher and Total Focus. That's four powers out of 9, hardly "most," and Power Thrust shouldn't even count as an attack much more than Power Push, as both its DPS and EPS are crap. But I'll give you four, anyway.

Electrical Manipulation has a whole truckfull. I concede on that and I won't even bother.

Fire Manipulation has Fire Sword, Fire Sword Circle and Combustion. Burn REALLY doesn't count, but if you really want to push it, I can count Blazing Aura and Maybe Hot Feet. That's still not the whole set.

Ice Manipulation has Ice Fists, Ice Sword and... What else, actually? Freezing Touch, maybe? That has really bad damage to cost ratio, but let's count it anyway.

Mental Manipulation is... Odd. It does have a decent number of attacks, with both Mind Probe and Telekinetic Thrust as melee and Psychic Scream and Psychic Shockwave doing decent damage, but I DO NOT count World of Confusion as a damage aura any more than I'd count Beanbag as a damage-dealing power. So that's still four out of nine.

You'll note I skipped all the immobilize powers. I do this for a reason. While they do damage in the most technical sense of the word, the damage they do is horribly imbalanced with their cost and recharge that they are NOT damage-dealing powers. Yes, you can use them as such if and when you get around to dumping any number of slots into them, but for most people I've spoken with, that doesn't happen until the later 40s, and even then you waste immobilization potential AND you have plenty of other attacks to slot for damage.

The whole idea that Manipulation sets are just quasi-melee sets is something that never sat well with me. Note how all the melee attacks are concentrated in the first 10 levels of the powerset, as if to help you out when your Blast powers are few and underpowered, but then the set switches over to direct support. Energy Manipulation switches to many self-buffs, just as a random example

Assault/Manipulation in general is a very poor idea, since Assault sets already draw probably half of their attacks from their respective manipulations sets anyway. I don't see Assault as presented to Dominators as being enough as a SOLE damage set, specifically because it lacks AoE in any capacity. The closest analogue to this is the Stalker, but Stalkers have a whole powerset devoted to self-defence AND an assassination inherent, which would make this AT require solid defences AND a significant damage boost, which just can't be balanced in a static way. I firmly believe it can be balanced in a DYNAMIC way, by giving the AT higher sustained damage, but at the cost of having to jump through hoops to maintain it. However, if you deny it AT, that damage buff needs to be significantly stronger, or its defences much tougher.

The problem is one of aesthetics and things that make sense. An option to remove the physical effects of a physical set is no more justified than removing the shield in Shield Defence because you didn't like the look of a character using a shield. If you want to play a powerset without visual effects, the game provides you with plenty of those.

If you can't keep your own attitude in check, then go to hell.

You made me recall a writeup from memory after I specifically said I didn't remember much of it or my thinking behind it, only for you to turn around and hate it. Call me weird, but this just doesn't seem fair. I don't remember what I had back then, and this is as close as I could get to.

As far as excising AoE into the secondary, that was a conscious choice. Even dropping the snipe and the nuke, I just can't fit enough powers in the same set to handle all of melee, range and AoE damage. JUST an Assault set simply doesn't work for a damage dealer without solid defences, because it doesn't deal damage quickly enough, especially on a bigger team. And if I'd butted AoE into the actual set, I'd have had to but melee or range out of it, in turn. I decided to put exclusively single-target attacks in the primary and retain AoE in the secondary in a way not too dissimilar from a Psi/Psi Blaster.

Personally, I prefer it that way.

I've been meaning to drop that name, but I wondered if it was acceptable to boast about other people's names. Good choice of name, and I love that costume

The damage here is not the question. It's the fact that it takes you over 5 seconds to deliver it, whereas most other Blast sets can do that in around 3.

See, this I don't get. Why would you suggest early attacks be slower than later attacks? If this were purely based on DPA, why not just balance DPA to be better on the later attacks, but still make them slower? And while the idea behind finishers is good, the finishers we have are all crap. Total Focus has rather low DPA and things like snipes are just atrocious. I actually think that making low-level attacks have crappy DPA compared to the higher level ones only serves to make them much less useful, and potentially utterly redundant.

As far as the concept of building the sets around a few key attacks and making the rest into "extras," I don't actually dislike this approach. The game currently works because MOST sets have enough "just attacks" to form an attack chain without recharge reduction. In a sense, because these attacks are close to interchangeable, they just pad each other up.

That is, until you look at Blast sets. Unlike Melee sets that have a large collection of generally samey attacks, Blast sets have a grab bag of attacks all with different purposes. They have a snipe power, which I'm not sure even HAS a purpose, they have a nuke which is useful only occasionally and they have, on average, two AoE attacks that aren't very useful against hard targets, accompanied by three single-target attacks with questionable usefulness against large groups of enemies. In a sense, the tools within a Blast set's tool kit have functions that don't overlap much, and as such leave you with too few powers to cycle. Certain Blast sets are kind enough to let us cycle our first two attacks like Archery and Fire do, for which I am eternally grateful, but certain sets not only don't let us do that (like Dual Pistols), but actually don't feature a third single-target attack (like Assault Rifle and Electrical Blast). This is problematic, because these sets deprive you of your "bread and butter" attacks and instead bog you down with "exotic" attacks, making performance... Questionable. Suffice it to say that it takes some acrobatics to make an Electrical Blaster deal damage.

While I don't mind the concept of bread and butter attacks, I DO mind the way most other MMOs do it, which is basically to give you ONE AND ONLY ONE auto-attack then then at most two or three other powers to use until you're mid-way through the game. And even them, most of those extra attacks are redundant anyway. Champions Online was terrible like that, with a never-ending auto-attack and no recharge on my basic attacks, such that I never really needed more than one anyway.

There's also one interesting point to City of Heroes that most other MMOs don't really touch on too much, and that's massive overkill. Other MMOs tend to have stronger, longer-lasting enemies taken out with attacks that deliver their damage in smaller chunks. As such, you can just fire on your enemy until it drops dead and not worry about wasting firepower. In City of Heroes, a damage dealer who is often capable of one-shotting things WILL waste a lot of effort overkilling enemies with little health left. As such, having small attacks to hit enemies with little health left is actually a valid tactical challenge. Yes, you could hit a quarter-health Rikti Monkey with Energy Transfer, but... Why would you when you can even Brawl it to death? When powers cost both energy and recharge, when you use them becomes more of a tactical choice.

***

As an idle point of curiosity, why is linear maths inherently worse for games? I've been hearing this a lot over the years, and I have so ideas, but I'd really like to hear a more founded answer, if possible.

We don't have Legacy Autos because the Dual Pistols handguns are mostly new. These ones have moving slides on every shot, where the old ones didn't. BABs tends to leave Legacy options behind as grandfathered choices, but he does not retrofit them into new designs, hence why Dual Blades don't have Legacy options.

As for the set's actual performance, it's probably not the worst, but "Hey, it's not the worst thing ever!" is not a very convincing selling point. The set's DPA is NOT GOOD, thanks in large part to over-long animations. Empty Clips, Bullet Rain, Executioner's Shot and Piercing Rounds are all 2.5+ seconds long, and that just kills burst damage. Utility is kind of there, but neither the slows nor the damage debuffs are strong enough on a Blaster to make TOO much of a difference, and in the end Lethal's knockback just ends up being better mitigation anyway.

Damage swapping IS a decent benefit (I can admit it when I'm wrong), potentially improving damage output against specific targets by upwards of 20%. However, that alone is not as much a benefit as the numbers suggest, because few enemy factions have consistent resistances, and some even have contradictory ones. And even when you do find a consistent one, not everyone knows enough about enemy resistances for this to matter. There's a spreadsheet of enemy resistances in the Guides section, but that's both a lot of work and I'm not sure if it's still being updated.

I'd love to see at LEAST one of the set's AoEs sped up and I'd love to see Executioner's Shot sped up, as well. That ought to give it some more meaningful DPA.