Sorciere
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:I didn't say that it wouldn't be fun. My very narrowly tailored statement that you keep missing was that "more mobs" doesn't necessarily equal "more superheroic".Originally Posted by Kruunch
It might not be your cup of tea, but there are A LOT of people who appreciate and desire that kind of game play. This game used to offer that. It should again.
For what it's worth, and separate from what I wrote above, my personal preference would be for generally smaller spawns with individually more dangerous mobs. That's because I suspect that the reaction you are seeing is mostly that you're introducing an element of danger that normally isn't there, and is only tangentially related to the number of mobs; adding more mobs is not the only way to add an element of danger, though, and fighting army-sized crowds has the disadvantage of not being a good fit for the genre. -
Quote:Then it's a good thing that I didn't do that.Originally Posted by Kruunch
Just don't say that my wanting to tank 100 mobs is silly and not heroic. You're not me.
To recall, what I was responding to was your general claim that:
You were telling other people whether what they feel is and isn't super-heroic. I was explaining why this is a non-sequitur. I don't care what you do or don't find heroic. I was simply pointing out how your conclusion didn't follow from the premise, and how in particular it didn't match my personal preferences.Quote:Originally Posted by Kruunch
If seven mobs makes you feel heroic, wouldn't it stand to reason 30 mobs would make you feel SUPER-heroic? -
Quote:Not really. Just as 200 zombies aren't necessarily more frightening than a single zombie. Or, as the saying goes, one death is a tragedy; a thousand deaths are a statistic.Originally Posted by Kruunch
If seven mobs makes you feel heroic, wouldn't it stand to reason 30 mobs would make you feel SUPER-heroic?
When you deal with really large numbers of something, this something loses individuality and significance.
As a matter of fact, I'd actually prefer for spawns in the game to be smaller: this whole "defeating critters by the dozen" is something I associate more with Tolkienesque fantasy and less with superheroes: superheroes tend to be superheroes because they deal with superhuman threats, not because they can dispatch masses of nameless minions with ease. -
Another reason for the aggro cap is probably also server performance. I expect that the execution time of several things increases worse than linearly with the number of critters present.
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Quote:I would consider that a feature, not a bug.Originally Posted by Durien
My ONLY problem with the aggro cap is that it can be broken through normal play. If I'm playing on an 8 man team, and 2 spawns are a little to close together it can mean death to the team if we don't have an off tank.
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Quote:This is a frequently stated, but not really practical philosophy. You cannot just fix problems via buffs; sometimes nerfs are the correct solution. If you just keep buffing, then you eventually have classes that grossly overmatch any reasonable challenge that you can throw at them (and CoH is really already pretty far down that path).Originally Posted by MunkiLord
If there is a problem with tankers, then fix tankers, don't hurt other ATs(especially if the AT is one of the two most popular in the game).
Just to be clear, I don't see any need for scrapper nerfs. I'm simply stating that the general approach to use buffs exclusively and never nerf anything does not work. -
Quote:You seem to be identifying a problem with IO builds, not one with the aggro cap.Originally Posted by Kruunch
When considering the current game, the agro cap is a relic and is actually debilitating the role of the Tanker. IO builds allow Scrappers to easily reach the point where they can replace a tank for a group of 17 mobs or less. In the past two weeks, I've built three Scrappers, two of which could replace a Tanker in the STF and the other which (a farming toon no less) could replace a Tanker for virtually any other content.
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Quote:What I would really like to see is to have the taunt duration of Gauntlet extended to half the duration of Taunt (the power). Not because it is necessary for holding aggro, but more for logical reasons: So that there is actually a reason to use it when you already have a taunt aura running.Originally Posted by _Starbird_
Anyone another idea to make gauntlet evolve in some way ?
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Quote:I had stated myself before that endurance works as an effective cap on your soloing speed; however, the point that you are not addressing is that it is an extremely poor solution. Certain powersets/ATs can fairly easily bypass it, and on most teams it just disappears because there are so many +recovery powers in popular powersets (e.g., Speed Boost, Transference, Recovery Aura, Accelerate Metabolism, Heat Loss). In short, endurance it is a limiter on effectiveness that does its job poorly (because it can be bypassed so easily on teams) and is a poor fit for the genre (how often do superheroes really get too tired to fight while at full health)?Originally Posted by ThePackage
But endurance is -good- for the game. It sets limits on what you can accomplish in a given time frame, and forces the player to make strategic and tactical choices within the resources they have.
There is not much to learn about "tackling the problem of endurance". In your build, you grab Stamina and/or Quick Recovery, and you slot for endurance reduction where applicable. It's not rocket surgery.Quote:Learning how to tackle the problem of endurance is a part of learning the game itself. When you have endurance 'problems' you learn how to manage your resources effectively, making you a more effective player than if you simply learn 'faceroll to win game.' -
Quote:Well, consider that CoH has difficulty settings. Just because everybody is currently running on Invincible or Unyielding -- largely because those settings have become "more XP" rather than actual "increased difficulty" settings doesn't mean it will always have to be the case. The basic idea is that a defensively oriented team can reap comparative rewards despite less offense because they can handle the more rewarding higher difficulty settings better.Originally Posted by Sarrate
Another way to look at it is buff/debuff stacking and mitigation scaling. Very moderate buffing can effectively make a single Tank immortal. Even 'lowly' Fire Tanks can be extremely durable when paired with, say, Sonic Resonance (perma res cap).
I can't help but wonder how content could be made difficult enough to make two Tanks desirable (or 'necessary') without completely crushing anything that wasn't a Tank. From a video I saw from SDCC, it sounds like they're putting a lot of dev time into character advancement / harder content, so we'll have to see where that leads.
Nor does content that keeps more than one tanker busy have to be soul-crushingly hard: scattered spawns, fast-paced ambushes, or mechanics that manipulate aggro can make a fight more complex to manage without disproportionately ramping up the damage output of critters.
I am not talking about an alternate mechanic. What I mean here is to dump the endurance mechanic without replacement. Endurance-style resource management mechanics are a staple of MMORPGs, and seem to largely exist because "everybody does it". Obviously, this is not going to happen that late in the game (because a number of things would have to be rebalanced in a way that a large part of the playerbase would resent). But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been a better design originally. (I'm not blaming the original developers here; they had to create a huge powers system from scratch, so they didn't have the luxury of debating for months over how to perfect every aspect of the game mechanics, so they obviously had to cut some corners to put out a playable product.)Quote:Originally Posted by Sarrate
I could be convinced of a lot of what you wrote here. I'd love to hear what kind of alternative mechanic you would have used instead of endurance. Yes, I know it would never be implemented at this stage of the game, but I like to keep my mind open. -
Quote:I would need more convincing to agree with those two claims. Personally, I think they are mostly just symptoms of bigger issues.Originally Posted by Sarrate
As the title suggests, I see two main problems with Tankers:
1) Their endurance efficiency
2) They don't stack well on teams
Let's start with team stacking. Two tankers do stack just fine on a team. Splitting aggro significantly increases the team's survivability. The bigger issue is that defensive contributions appear to be undervalued because content isn't sufficiently challenging.
You could probably make an argument that more than three tankers do not stack well; however, I'm not sure if making a large number of tankers stacking on a team is a high-priority issue.
As to endurance efficiency, I would argue that the game would have been better if endurance had never been introduced in its current form. The endurance mechanic is a poor fit for the genre (superheroes generally only get fatigued only in extreme situations or where there particular kryptonite is concerned, not as a matter of course); it is poorly calibrated, meaning that normal use of powers will make you run out of endurance easily unless you take extra steps to prevent that.
As far as I can tell from reverse engineering its effects, the main purpose of the endurance mechanic is to put a simple cap on solo efficiency. It does not exist in order to make players consider trade-offs between powers (because the endurance cost/effect is generally normalized), nor for any other game-mechanically interesting purpose that I can see.
The endurance mechanic was, by all accounts, a quick-and-dirty solution to the problem of how to put a cap on a player's performance. And it doesn't even solve that problem well (if at all), because there are numerous buffs in the game that allow you to pretty much ignore it.
I'm not sure if the whole endurance mess can be fixed, as the mechanic is currently too ingrained in the game. But I doubt that generating a single solution for tankers is the best way to start. -
Quote:And that would be bad why?Originally Posted by Steelclaw
* The Swedes start demanding a copyright fee for every version of Thor or the other Norse gods running around Paragon.
* When fighting breaks out between the other Forumites the Swedes take a strict stance of neutrality and refuse to comment.
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Quote:You aren't familiar with the streak breaker, I take it?Originally Posted by GibberingLunatic
75% accuracy doesn't mean nothing when the hits still come down to a roll of the dice.
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Quote:These claims are simply not credible, I'm afraid (aside from not running out of endurance on a Willpower tanker).Originally Posted by GibberingLunatic
I run with a WP/SS Tank on freedom, I barely have any issues and so far I was able to take about 10 direct blasts from the Ritki ships that showed up in SC yesterday on Freedom and get a couple good hits in before it ended up moving faster than I could catch up with it. I rarely run out of endurance and if I do start I just use my jab over and over till my end builds back up then go all out again.
But yeah, we have GARBAGE for accuracy...
I'm currently level 26 right now, and was able to hit (every time with no inspirations) a level 33 lieu over and over till he was dead (the xp gain... 114xp wtf?) but yet when I attack something my level I have about a 60-70% miss rate (thank you herostats) and its just pathetic, even with 3 slots a piece of just SO Accuracy I still miss like crazy. -
Quote:And you do realize that it's still a 1.5 MB download?Originally Posted by Toony
Photobucket. And the forums always auto-size my avatars for me. I may have an avatar thats 300x300 but if I link it to here, it automatically scales to the 100x100.
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Quote:If you do that by accident, there's a "View First Unread" link to the top left (just underneath the big red "New Reply" button). It will take you to the first unread post, even if you accidentally clicked on the thread title or a page number.Originally Posted by Steele_Magnolia
Clicking on a thread that has new posts no longer takes you to the new posts, it takes you to the first post on the thread. You lose your place in the thread.
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To address some legibility issues with the forum, I have written a small style file to be used with the Stylish Firefox extension (it can probably be adapted for other browsers that allow user-defined CSS styles, such as Opera).
The style file does the following:
1. Remove underlining from title and date links in thread lists, and author links next to posts. Underlining is a form of emphasis, when you emphasize everything, nothing is emphasized. Excessive underlining hurts legibility because it obscures descenders.
2. Thread titles and dates have been recolored in a light yellow. This color choice attempts a compromise between good contrast and reduction of halation (halation is the effect of white letters "glowing" against a dark background, which is often assumed to reduce legibility). The author names (except rednames) and titles of individual posts are similarly colored for visual uniformity.
3. Author names in thread lists are colored a dark gold. I chose a muted color to make it easier for the reader who is scanning the thread list for a specific thread title to skip over superfluous information.
4. Gradient backgrounds were largely replaced with uniformly colored background. Gradients may be pretty, but they don't provide the eye with a visually stable backdrop. The background color was chosen to both be an approximation of the gradient colors and to contrast well with the font colors.
5. The default font is Arial, which was designed for printed matter. The style file substitutes Verdana, which was specifically designed for high on-screen legibility. (Note to the designers: The fallback option in the default font-family CSS entry has a superfluous space, "sans- serif" instead of "sans-serif").
6. An extra separator has been inserted between the forum title and forum description so that they aren't smushed together.
Note: I do not intend to maintain this style file. It is primarily intended as feedback for the forum designers (and my own use), and while others are welcome to use it, too, it is very unlikely that I will publish updates if changes to the forum break it. -
Quote:No, she hasn't. Until you add up enough damage enhancements, the effect of endurance reduction or damage increase (of the same magnitude) on endurance efficiency is roughly the same. In either case, you get about the same sustained DPS. The difference is purely psychological. Obviously, it's annoying enough so that people do it anyway, but from a mathematical perspective it doesn't create optimal performance.Originally Posted by ThePackage
I do not see a single drop of Endurance Reduction in your attacks. Those are the main cause of endurance problems. You have, in fact, neglected your endurance reduction.
I'm afraid that is not the case. The stronger attacks cost proportionately more endurance, so it doesn't really matter how big they are. In fact, the bigger attacks tend to generate less DPS than the smaller attacks (because damage doesn't increase proportionately with recharge time).Quote:Do you slot damage into your weak attacks, or your strong attacks? Obviously, the strong, because that's how you get more bang out of them. -
Quote:Mathematically, this claim doesn't seem to work out for me.Originally Posted by Talen_Lee
One handy mantra I learned from smurphy: A single, even-level TO of end redux in each attack works out as more endurance efficient than having stamina with three SOs in it.
An even level TO reduces endurance cost by 1/(1+.0835)= ~7.7%. A single target attack, constantly cycled, costs about 1 EPS (amortized). With three attacks, you're saving roughly .23 EPS from slotting them with one endurance reduction TO each (may be slightly less or more in practice, typically a bit less).
Three-slotted Stamina gives you .8125 extra EPS. That's a bit of a difference.
On top of that, rather than slotting for one endurance reduction enhancement TO, you can also slot a damage enhancement TO. This will improve the DPE of the attack by the exact same amount and give you the potential for a bit higher burst damage (which can be useful in many situation). This assumes, of course, that you have enough accuracy enhancements to be at least relatively close to the hit cap (if you aren't, then that's a better investment than either endurance reduction or damage). -
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Yup, it's not like the weaker one that Willpower has. It's got a normal, 10-target limit, auto-hit, 13.5 second (at level 50) Taunt aura.
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Actually, like Invincibility, it has a 16.875 second duration Taunt aura at level 50 (of course, against +4 mobs this is reduced to 8.1 seconds). -
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Using the MA to play user-created story arcs as an alternative to dev-created story arcs is the stated purpose of the AE. So, really, you're the first person I met that used the AE as the devs intended.
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There are quite a few who do that, actually. You just don't see them in Atlas Park broadcast. -
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I think you are misremembering, but maybe I am. As far as I am aware, Invincibility never interrupted the summons. RttC and AaO work for sure. I believe Chilling Embrace and Mud Pots will also work, but anytime I ran with those type of Tankers, we also had another Toggle debuff, so I am unsure. The power seems to require a Debuff component in addition to the auto-hit nature in order to interrupt (and I think the tick rate has to be faster than two seconds, as I have seen him spawn inside Hot Feet, but I do not have conclusive evidence on Hot Feet's failure to stop him).
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The really interesting part is his summoning powers do not even appear to be interruptible. A wild guess would be that the summons are controlled by the AI to occur if he hasn't been attacked for X seconds (attacks including pulsing debuffs/damage ticks from toggles). -
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I don't even agree with their main topic, but you've got me seriously considering jumping to their side just to argue against you.
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I'd prefer reasoned disagreement, actually.
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You may be interested to learn that the lead class designer of WoW recently mentioned that he found the downtime for warriors to be a problem (most WoW classes have abilities to manage and reduce downtime, such as Spirit Tap for priests, and many classes do not have significant downtime at all if they play smart, such as hunters, death knights, or rogues). You may also be interested to learn, for example, that retribution paladin mana recovery in WotLK was specifically calibrated so that unless they used wasteful abilities or bit off more than they could chew, their mana recovery was meant to match their normal attack chains (and did).
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Lets see some actual statements from the lead designers. Proof, evidence, something that doesn't make me think that you just pulled that out of your smock. But if indeed this was the released statement, their not going to change the downtime for Warriors when mitigation in the form of bandages exist. I.e. the catch a breath in this game.
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You will find it in the official warrior Q&A (search for "downtime" in the post). Given his followup post (search for "health potions"), I think he's aware of bandages and health potions and considers them inadequate.
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Useit.com is the website of Jacob Nielsen, one of the pioneers of usability research. It is simply a commonly cited online resource. If you wish, I can probably find you peer-reviewed papers that cover the same topic.
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Let it be known that just because you can "google it" does not make said subject accurate or trustworthy.
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I'm not sure what the context is here, since I hadn't googled anything in the quoted paragraph. Are you just trying to pick a fight? -
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Sorciere: Are you sure about auras having auto-hit on the taunt effect? I could have sworn they used to have a toHit check.
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Positive. The auras that I described are auto-hit against everything except AV/GM-class critters. See Invincibility, for example.