Smiling_Joe

We've talked about this before. Specifically, I addressed the exact same suggestion last time you brought it up in this post

For context, the first post in that thread had the following numbers for Peacebrigers single target dps (as always, check the spreadsheets if you want a reminder of the attack chains)

PEACEBRINGERS

Single Target:
Human damage potential (expressed in dps): 111.51
Nova damage potential (expressed in dps): 109.9
Dwarf damage potential (expressed in dps): 86.51

And Warshades:

WARSHADES

Single Target:
Human damage potential (expressed in dps): 189.08
Nova damage potential (expressed in dps): 212.08
Dwarf damage potential (expressed in dps): 198.08

To pull figures from the post I linked to above, a power siphon clone would change the Peacebringers' damage thus:

Single Target:
Human damage potential (expressed in dps): 166
Nova damage potential (expressed in dps): 182
Dwarf damage potential (expressed in dps): 125

So - as I said in that post already - replacing build up with power siphon WON'T bring Peacebringers up to par with Warshades, damage-wise.

But moreover, let me reiterate this part of the post:

You can go and check the spreadsheets yourself, but I'll post the damage numbers sans the pets right here:

Peacebringers:
Single Target

Human: 99
Nova: 101
Dwarf: 74


Warshades:
Single Target

Human: 66
Nova: 91
Dwarf: 77

So by replacing build up with a power siphon clone you'd be unbalancing the archetypes as they stand outside of the pets. Furthermore - and to reiterate with another quote from the same post:

I know it would be fun, it would be different and it would be flashy. But it would be a whole helluva lot of work for not enough return. As I said before, I'm not keen on this idea.

At all.

What if graphic settings were reduced in some way for EVERYONE who entered the mitochondrial ooze to fight him? I can't imagine you'd see too clearly inside a single celled organism, and performance might be improved as a result? Maybe?

I'm not talking about forcing everyone to minimum settings, but rather decreasing the distance a player can see fairly drastically and thereby reducing the number of objects processors are required to render. Keep the high settings on things that are close, but make farther away objects harder to see. Like Dark Astoria.

In other words, make Hamidon more opaque, to the extent that he's translucent, vise transparent as he is now.

Plus, it would make the shadowed bodies and debris you were proposing even MORE eerie.

I didn't take it into account - if you'll look at the spreadsheets in the first post of that thread, I've used "modernised" versions of Plasma's gold standard SO builds for the comparison because (a) the developers still continue to insist, for some strange reason, that the game is balanced around SO's. (I don't believe them, but there you are) and (b) those two builds are about even.

Throw in IO's for increased recharge and you can pretty much do whatever you want. I did do an IO'd comparison, and when I have time to search for it I'll link to it. Hell, if I get time I'll even do a double-stacked rage comparison.

However, keep in mind that a peacebringer build that can double-stack rage must be compared to a warshade build that has comparable recharge, and I'm betting that the fluffies that a high-recharge build can bring out (and with perma-hasten they will ALL be hasted) will obliterate a double-stacked rage dps chain.

This. Requiring those of us who want more challenge to solo kind of leaves me cold when new content is bound to the concept of enforced teaming. The removal of team size limits for tf's is one thing I've wanted for a very long time.

This has been suggested before, and I ran the numbers in this post.

The salient point from that post is as follows:

To put it in context, the thread to which that post belongs is here.

For comparison, the single target warshade numbers in human form - pet damage included - was 189 dps. So while changing build up into a rage clone will increase peacebringer damage, it won't come anywhere near to closing the gap between the two archetypes.

The real disparity is the pets. Buff photon seekers, buff the archetype.

Your suggestion regarding Light Form is intriguing, but a great many peacebringer drivers - myself included - like the costume switch. It's what made me choose a peacebringer in the first place.

But at this point I'd be open to pretty much anything.

See? You're one step ahead of me. This is a good suggestion. I'd be ALL about this.

Actually the incarnate mode sounds great to me, and if you have a link to the suggestion I'd appreciate it. What was suggested, specifically? I can imagine the Well of the Furies responding to the rise of the incarnates by granting temporary incarnateship to random bosses/elite bosses and a/v's in task forces (or any content) to stem the tide (given that the Well has apparently decided to favor Emperor Cole)

One way this could be done through the Kheldian code by spawning specific mobs like Quantums and Voids on any team that has incarnates, but I'd be leery of this, given the bugs in that system. Another way could be to give each incarnate slot a power that it grants to boss level opponents that add a little extra oomph to the attacks they already have, ala the Fiery Embrace and Bruising code.

But this is a discussion for another thread.

I'd be waiting a long time indeed if I broadcast that I was forming a tf to which incarnates need not apply. People want to play their incarnates, and why not? All I'm saying is that I hope there isn't a trend towards dead-easy content in what the developers are offering.

Someone asked this question when Time Manipulation was first announced - it was a typo then and it's a typo now - the devs (forget which one) confirmed that it will also be for controllers.

Now ask yourself whether or not the second omission is a Freudian Slip...

Perfect example: ITF Sybil caverns in the first mission. Incarnate with Tier 4 Ion Judgement runs to one side, Shield Scrapper runs to the other side. Ion Judgement goes off, killing THE ENTIRE ROOM before the shield scrapper can click on the ground to get the shield charge off. And we thought shield charge was overpowered.

By watching them play, I mean just that: you run in to make use of the character you've put hours into building, but whatever choices you've made are irrelevant because another player likes easy mode. I could run in completely unslotted and do just as well.

Unless I want to solo.

Well, when an incarnate player can pretty much power through everything in a mission with such speed that others don't have much opportunity to contribute, how is that NOT letting ONE person decide the difficulty of the encounter?

EDIT- and before this gets out of hand, let me reiterate - I don't believe we're at that point yet. I'm just voicing concerns in what I hope is a constructive manner about FUTURE content.

I already have SO builds, but that doesn't stop my teammates from steamrolling content for me.

But I've already said as much. You do give me an idea, however, for a new super team:

The SO Lounge. Come on in, sit down, deactivate your godly aspects and take your inventions off. Have a drink for now, but get ready: we're kickin' butt old school, tonight!

You know what? The idea has potential.

Only if I solo. If I'm on a team I'd have to convince EVERYONE to turn off their incarnate abilities, else I'm just watching them play.

And it's not THAT big of a problem. Yet.

I'd like it to stay that way, so I said something in a way that I hope isn't taken as complaining.

I was responding specifically to dual and team inspirations, which by themselves aren't that big of a deal, but in the larger context of inventions, level shifts and incarnate powers are indicative of a trend I'm beginning to find just the tiniest bit uncomfortable.

We're not at the ridiculously easy level yet, but best to give feedback now, right?

Good advice, if I want to solo. If I want to do the top level task forces or any level 50 team content nowadays, though, I'm along for the ride if I don't have an incarnate with a reactive interface and an ion judgement. It would be more correct IMHO to say that if you want a hard game, go incarnate and limit yourself to running trials and incarnate tf's.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not doomcrying or complaining (I loves my incarnates, really I do!), but I don't think I'm out of place by pointing out that many of these new additions that we (myself included) love and enjoy might just have the potential to trivialize the vast majority of teaming content. Incarnate powers are turned off when you exemplar, and I'm glad of it, but periodically I like to make my voice heard with regard to a preference for the preservation of some of the game's challenge, and when I see things like team and dual inspirations I can think of all kinds of ways to use them to abuse the current non-incarnate content. They won't be game-breaking, sure. But I do want to leave feedback.

It's like Nemesis' way of ribbing the Clockwork King:

"A brain in a jar? Just a BRAIN?! HAH!! I'll see your admittedly big brain and raise you one army of SKINNY LITTLE NERDS IN JARS! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"

Why yes, as soon as the forums remember my login information, I WILL take your money. Thank you.

This. Just how easy do we want this game to be, anyway? It's not Progress Quest yet by any stretch, but sometimes it feels that way.

Same here. Lord Nemesis is my hands-down favorite, and his whole group is gorgeous to look at (I suspect it's part of the reason why I have so much trouble with them sometimes: "oooh, shiny.... wait, I'm dead?")

But since Going Rogue came out I've wondered what Nemesis would look like with some of the Praetorian Clockworks' more intricate parts incorporated. Mainly I'm thinking of the torso like here:



But less tech sleek and more victorian fleur-de-lis, you know?

Others that leap out at me are Swan. I love the feathered wing-wrap, but can we please get some clothes on her? Otherwise to be fair Manticore has to wear a thong and I REALLY don't want to see that.

I love Jack-in-Irons and Echoai - hell, pretty much everything about Croatoa - but one GM that stands out as being... lacking.. is the Kraken:



Never mind the fact that this fits in no way shape or form with any image that springs to mind when one says "Kraken" (even this guy is horrified):



but can OUR kraken at least be a teeny bit larger? Feels like punching last week's garbage. Hardly an epic battle.

But we can't measure anecdote. That being said, we can weight the numbers, and I did.

Not getting a fully saturated eclipse or mire has been accounted for as best as I could, by (where the mires are concerned) assuming a conservative 3 enemies hit on the mires and by posting numbers for one enemy hit by eclipse side-by-side with the numbers for ten enemies hit by eclipse. Feel free to compare either to the Peacebringer numbers on survivability.

Believe it or not, I was worried that people would say I was being too conservative with the Warshade numbers, given that I wasn't so conservative with the Peacebringer numbers.

There especially the numbers will likely favor maximum potential over actual performance. For one example (in contrast of a warshade's mire), I weighted build up with the expectation that a player would notice that build up had recharged and would drop to human and hit it immediately.

I also assumed the same for Photon Seekers and Dawn Strike, and I highly doubt a player in dwarf form in the middle of combat is going to notice that these powers recharged and will think to use them right away.

So yeah, the numbers are actually a bit skewed in favor of maximum performance for Peacebringers while erring on the conservative side for Warshades, and Peacebringers still fell far short.

The problem with anecdote is that it relies on observation, and observations are more often than not skewed far more than any numbers will be. You may have seen warshades dying a lot in game, but you likely didn't see the circumstances of their death. For example, how many foes were they facing verses how many of the other team? Did they die by being stupid or were they surviving against the odds while the rest of the team took care of the stragglers? It might have seemed to you that everyone was contributing equally, but they might well have saved the team from a second spawn.

OR they may have just been stupid or fallen asleep at the keyboard. My point is that - unless you're somehow recording the game data to see what happened in retrospect, your point of view is restricted to what you see on your screen alone.

I suppose you could make the argument that gathering enough observations could point out trends and discrepancies in the numbers, but then that would bring us right back to depending on numbers on paper.

Several points:

Cosmic Balance *can* make a peacebringer far more survivable than a warshade if it buffs resistance to the cap, however, it takes far fewer of the correct teammates for dark sustenance to bring a warshade to the cap for ALL damage, due to the fact that eclipse alone can cap resistance to all forms of damage including psionic. By contrast, a Peacebringer cannot reach the cap for psionic damage even with seven damage dealers. May not sound like much of a difference, but given the prevalence of psionic damage in late game and incarnate content it can even the odds quite a bit.

When are you taking the most damage? Ninety-nine percent of the time it's when you're surrounded by enemies. Enemies who usually die fairly easily. In those situations, Stygian Circle >>>>>>>than Essence Boost and Restore Essence combined. Unless you're soloing an av, Stygian Circle absolutely must be taken into account when comparing survivability.

The post-incarnate game has given players the power to pretty much do without any other archetype completely and still ace most of the content available. Given all this newfound power, it's not all that unusual for a peacebringer to find itself on a team without any support characters at all, and hence will have little to no boost to resistance to increase survivability. A Warshade, by contrast, doesn't really care.

So even if Irresponsible was talking about the inherent-boosted peacebringer being more survivable than a warshade because of the heals, that's only true in certain circumstances, and those circumstances are becoming increasingly rare with every change to the game. To make the blanket statement that heals make a Peacebringer more survivable than a Warshade because they don't need bodies is, well, irresponsible.

Besides which, I posted more than just damage numbers. The survival comparisons I did (which were done using Dechs' mitigation worksheets) came out HEAVILY in favor of the warshade. If someone disagrees with those numbers, they can prove them wrong numerically. Statements like:

.....don't cut it.

Your mf'ing build thread? Yes, although I'll confess I haven't had time to read past the initial post.

BTW, I tend to read the entire post before clicking any links, so no - you didn't get me back.

You, sir, win the golden codpiece for that performance!

Brava! Well done!

But you do realize that for this reason alone I MUST DEMAND that the new CoT costumes stay in the game, right?



This whole thread has made my day!

........................O.o

And HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE??

Perhaps the ability to slot AS with interrupt reducers would do exactly this? Wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to ask for, IMHO.