Samuel_Tow

Here's the thing, though - a specific chain with a specific DPA gives me a number on how efficient it is, but gives me no concept on how long it takes to activate. Could be the big-numbers chain I picked is actually too long to fit in-between Blaze repetitions. But I guess I can see why that might be very important if you lower your powers' recharge so much that it becomes comparable to their animation times. Personally, I stick to DPS and EPS because while powers can be slotted for recharge, they can be slotted equally, and slots work on a percentage basis, which will keep correlations intact given equal slotting. Besides, damage can be slotted, as well, so won't that throw off DPA calculations?

That said:

Given that Assassin's Strike exists as a game design concept, I don't see why a power with the ability to take a variety of threats out without retaliation would be out of place. The question, I think, isn't if Snipes can do that (they can't, not enough damage), but whether the range they fire at is enough of a benefit to justify such restrictions to the powers as a basic design. Snipes don't actually do a lot of damage. They don't do more damage than things that most melee ATs have access to, even. So why is a power on a Blaster that has comparable strength to that on a Scrapper (who can hit five targets with it, no less) penalised so much with such lousy animation times AND interruptibility on top of that? Is range worth that?

To my opinion, such extreme range that you can use no other power than the same snipe again as soon as it recharges is meaningless, especially on a Blaster, since Snipes have such terrible damage over time and don't make for a good attack chain on their own. The safety of such range is also questionable, given that many enemies can outrange Blaster Snipes, but even if we concede that safety exists in range, the point of a Blaster, as it were, is to deal damage, which a Blaster plain and simple CANNOT do at Snipe range. Put it this way - Sniper Blast's DPS is 10.574. Brawl's DPS is 4.613. So sitting outside of enemy retaliation range and Sniping is about as good as two Blasters Brawling. Yeah, I can see why hover-sniping is dead.

Simply speaking, Snipes aren't powerful enough to take out the truly meaningful threats (within reason), which would be lieutenants, and the range they provide isn't really good for much other than pulling. Worst of all, what contribution they add to the fight is overshadowed by other powers which can make a BETTER contribution for LESS time. I'm not sure what the point of Snipes is, but aside from pulling, I can't honestly really see one. And trust me, I tried. I use my Snipes whenever I can, but I do better when I DON'T.

To me, Snipes should be the kind of powers that you need reasons NOT to use, not the kind of powers you need to invent reasons to justify even taking, let alone using.

What I mean is I don't get how you can actually use DPA as a statistic to come up with a meaningful solution. DPA is a comparison of ultimately incomparable things, because a high DPA attack may be fast, or it may be slow, or it may be somewhere in-between, and there's no way to tell that from DPA. It's like asking if 10 metres per second is more than 10 kilometres per hour (it is, 10 mps is 36 kph).

If I'm going to try and figure out how to pump the most damage in a limited time slot, I may as well go by damage and recharge separately, because just DPE doesn't tell me over how long this damage is taking place. I could grab three powers, add up their DPE together (say, Assassin's Strike, Total Focus and Energy Transfer, to make a point) and get some large number, but without any concept of how long that's actually going to take.

DPS is a lot like that, admittedly, but DPS takes part over a much longer period of time, over which it's easier to calculate things in fraction without running afoul of the limitations of the discrete nature of damage contribution too much.

When I look at DPA, I'm seeing efficiency, but I'm not seeing a good way to draw a broader conclusion off that. I can look at a power's DPA, see it's more than normal and say "Hmm... Using this power saves me endurance" or "Hey, if I hit three people with this power, I'm actually saving endurance." All high DPA tells me, however, is how time-efficient a power is on single application, but it doesn't tell me how LONG it actually takes to animate. And since the only use I can think of for this is to try and calculate short-duration burst damage and it doesn't include duration in it, it seems to be not as much worth it as one would think.

The thing is, how much damage you can dish out depends on a lot of things. It depends on power recharge, it depends on power animation speed, it depends on power damage. You may do great DPS by alternating many powers, you may do so by repeating one power over and over. It comes down to how much time cycling a power takes off your total, really. The problem with that, however, is that even if calculations suggest you should be able to fit all powers in your available time, that isn't always possible. In fact, it's fairly easy to prove that, but taking a power with an uptime of 1/2 and a power with an uptime of 1/3. There is no way to cycle those without having one wait at some point over and over, which then distorts DPS.

Let me put it this way - how can you use just DPA to demonstrate that just Blazing Bolt does more damage than Blaze or Flares, but Blaze and Flares do more damage in less time and, more importantly, can you do it in such a way as to give me some concept of the relative difference? Because here's what I'm seeing:

Blazing Bolt has a DPA of 37.831, Blaze has 132.630 and Flares has 63.190. Together, Blaze and Flares have a combined DPA of 195.820, while Blazing Bolt has only 37.831, or just under 20% of that of Blaze and Flares. So... What does that mean? Blazing Bolt is five times less efficient per second than the total duration of two powers, but for how long a duration are we talking about? Is that for Blazing Bolt's full duration, or do Blaze and Flares take longer to execute? Is that a more efficient use of Build Up? I don't know. Looking at the actual power numbers, both Blaze and Flares have a one-second activation, while Blazing Bolt has over four and a half, so they don't even take up half of its duration, meaning I can stick in more stuff, like, say, Fire Blast, and have even more DPA for the same time that Blazing Bolt winds up. But again, if I'll be looking at recharge and damage numbers, why not look at recharge and damage numbers themselves? Why bother with DPA? What does it bring that just looking at the numbers doesn't?

Honest question.

Sadly, that was the only thing I liked in Champions Online. Here's to hoping we get a muscle relief slider for skin textures here, or at least a selection of base skins other than just "stock human" in the future. At least male models get to be ripped or smooth.

Really, though, I'm glad we have reptile skin options that actually use the skin colour, but can we have at least one fur option that's not just a hairy chest? Seriously, the Monstrous "Fur" option reminds me of this pic.

I have personally witnessed the villain Respec Trial play with a mid-range leader, but scale to 33 for an exemplared 50 and display the 50's level 5 difficulty, spawning enemies +2 to +3 to him, despite the rest of us, specifically the leader, all being on Villainous level 1 difficulty. That was a couple of years back, of course, before veteran respecs made the need to put myself through that mess eased things up, so I haven't seen this since.

Now, since it's the MISSION that sets the level, it's the mission owner's difficulty which counts, anyway. Or so I've been seeing.

It appears I misunderstood the term, then. It seems the game treats it the same, as well - damage per activation time, whereas what I was looking at was damage per activation CYCLE, which the game calls "cast cycle." Oh, well.

Let me ask this, then - what use is DPA if that's all it measures? A high DPA doesn't really mean much, because it could be an extremely powerful attack, an extremely fast attack or somewhere in-between. And, more importantly, it doesn't give you a good example of the power's uptime cost, or how much of your time spamming it requires. For instance, Power bolt has a 1 second animation and a 5 second cycle, so spamming it takes exactly 20% of your time (give or take time lost to ping delay). Sniper Blast, on the other hand, has 4.33 second animation (even with interrupt reducers) and a cycle of 16.33 seconds, meaning it takes around 26.52% of your time, which is actually comparable over time, only Sniper Blast does a LOT less damage for an actually higher uptime.

I guess if you're looking for shock damage that would matter, but even then certain powers get into their cycles before Aim and Build Up have expired. Though, I guess, in the VERY short-term cycles don't really matter and only DPA counts, but I'm not sure I see how that goes. I'll have to think about it.

*edit*
After contemplating some grade-school mathematics, I was able to prove to my satisfaction that that there is no situation where the sum of two fractions was greater than a third fraction and yet the third fraction can still somehow end up being greater. What this means in practical terms is that the sum of powers with the greatest DPA is the best approach to shock damage, and that slow, powerful attacks can be matched up to small, quick attacks using elementary addition. With that in mind, let me have a look at Fire Blast as that's an easy example:

Ignoring additional damage components (because it gets worse) and using scale damage, Fire Blast's Blazing Bolt has a DPA of 0.591. By comparison, Blaze has a DPA of 2.12 Hmm... I thought I had that understood, but here's the problem - Blaze has a significantly higher DPA than Blazing Bolt because it's just under five times faster, but JUST Blaze doesn't do more damage than Sniper Blast, because it has lower damage. You'd think using just Blaze instead of just Blazing Bolt would be better... Four times better, in fact. But the fact of the matter is you can't make that assessment based on DPA numbers, because that only gives you time-efficiency, not actual delivery. And you're never comparing JUST using one attack to using JUST one other attack when dealing with shock damage. You're comparing one attack string to another attack string, often trying to fit as much damage as possible in the 9 seconds that Aim and Build Up are active. And you can't just extrapolate damage per second of animation into a full 8-9-second block because attack animations are monolithic and non-dividable and non-repeatable (you can't get an attack to recharge instantly).

Just DPA gives me time-efficiency on a VERY small scale, but I can't seem to make use of it in the only situation where such small scale is relevant - shock damage. I know Blaze + Fire Blast deals more damage than Sniper Blast in less time, but NEITHER of the two deals more damage than Sniper Blast, period, even if their DPA may suggest they do. On the larger scale, DPA becomes irrelevant in the face of DPS. So what can I do to make use of this metric? What, specifically, that uptime won't do better?

Why do people always treat those like they're two separate things? Adding more and more accurate animal parts IS going in that direction, and I don't see why prejudice against it has to restrict otherwise useful costume pieces. More animal heads is a definite must. Something more than unidentifiable pig-like monster or really cool dragon head would be dandy. Cat, dog, eagle, bull head and more. It makes sense.

And we already have Monstrous legs. Can we get some more options in them? Like mammal legs that don't have horribly overgrown claws, but are more like paws, or, hell, why not webbed feet? Better tails would be really cool. I can deal with the stiff tails, sort of (even though I LOVE the animated ones in Champions), but come on, now. Can we get some more variety? We don't even have a dog tail.

I'm not talking about animations looking silly, just wondering what they would look like. Would, say, Kick put Stone Fists on your legs? It works if you're already Stone Armour and have rocks all over your body, but without that you'd need some kind of alternate effect which would need to be created.

But that's actually something that's true for all pool powers, when you think about it. Fire powers only need to have sprites that look like Fire, but something like Boxing might need to look like fire, ice, lightning, radiation and so on and so forth. If we really want this (and I do), that sounds like quite a bit of work.

The point is, that looks SILLY. If we want to compare to Spider-Man, his jumps and flips are directional and intended to dodge incoming attacks. Unless you can actually implement dodging of incoming attacks, all you get is a pogo stick effect. Bouncy bouncy bouncy...

Combat Jumping has a MINIMAL level of defence addition. The bulk of its contribution is jump height and jump speed, which makes getting around the world a lot easier than if you were just using regular movement. The regular jump is about the height of a shipping container, and Combat Jumping is rather above that.

Just like Hover's defence is almost meaningless and the bulk of its usefulness comes from the mobility and distance it gives you, so Combat Jumping's utility comes from being able to jump better, not dodge better. If we're looking at a power that's about dodging, I'd look to Dodge.

Really, to me making Combat Jumping require constant jumping is kind of like having the ability to shoot enemies in the back - it's a good idea, but just very unworkable in the current environment. Actually, it's a lot like blocking - more annoying than it's worth.

Damn it, man! Now I want to hear you speak

Speaking of which, listening to recordings of my own voice speaking English, I have to say I sound almost exactly like the most stereotypical Russian guy in movies you can imagine, but with proper grammar and sentence structure.

Are you KIDDING ME? Why would anyone run away from that?

...

Why not make it easier is because they can't stop it entirely, and that's the next best thing. This is an unintended functionality, and while you CAN do it, you're not going to see amenities made for it until it is officially declared an intended tactic. Which I just don't see.

BABs also mentioned that they haven't decided if they even WANT Epic ATs to have customizable powers. They are already highly specific in terms of backstory, plot and look, and I wouldn't hold it as a guarantee that that will change. Not saying it won't, but I don't see it as an eventual certainty.

I don't think you can go past team of eight, so three Masterminds wouldn't be counted as a team of 24, but rather still as a team of eight, which would have made it roughly three times as easy as facing spawns for a team of eight solo.

Here's the bad part, though - making a power "bigger" actually reduces its DPA if it's balanced with "average" in mind. That's why, say, Head Splitter has worse DPA than Slash (though not by too much). The problem with Blaster Snipes, however, is that they are balanced without their incredibly long animation time in mind, and balanced only on base animation time (which is animation - interrupt). Three seconds of wind-up on a power that's barely 14 seconds in recharge is actually quite a bit, and that drives their overall numbers quite low.

The other problem is that Snipes aren't something you can reasonably want DPA out of. It's like trying to calculate the DPA of Nova. I mean, you could, but what would that tell you? DPA tends to distort very badly when a power isn't used a lot and spends a lot of time recharged and waiting, which snipes do simply because not every opportunity is applicable to using one. Sniper Blast, for instance, has an unenhanced DPA at 50 of 10.574, which isn't actually TOO bad, but good luck getting THAT kind of performance out of it. You'd need to snipe every 14 seconds. On the other hand, Power Bolt's unenhanced DPA at 50 is around 12.512, which is actually higher AND easier to achieve.

Here's the big thing - Snipers, as they are currently designed, are best used as openers and single big hitters when the situation permits. They aren't very appropriate to be repeated hitters because of how slow they are and because of how easy they are to break. They are, however, balanced as a medium-size, medium-speed attack, instead of the big hitter they seem to be. This both misleads people into thinking a Snipe will hit hard (a misconception, since you can hit HARDER in the time it takes to snipe) and that sniping often is a good strategy, when a lot of the time it wastes time and energy more than it actually helps.

I could live with Snipes being relegated to big-hitter openers. Nukes are the same, and I've never complained. However, I want them to be an opener that will do MORE damage in time it takes to activate than I could replicate with any of my other powers (short of Nuking), such that I don't feel like a big idiot when I hit Aim + Build Up + Snipe and realise I'm cheating myself and that I could have done more damage with a couple of other powers. Their range just isn't benefit enough to justify that, specifically since your snipe is the ONLY thing you can use at that range and most things outrange snipes anyway.