Starsman

OK... I am not 100% where the confusion is here, I see two lines of thought being cross referenced but cant track it back to the origin... this been a long conversation.

The "offending" logic here seems to be this bit by Arcanaville:

If this is not it, then ignore this post. But here goes:

Defense causes enemies to miss. But enemies also can miss on their own. You may not consider there is a difference, but the game has one.

Look closely at enemies attacks, and you will see sometimes they pop a MISS, sometimes they pop a DEFLECTED or AVOIDED, sometimes ABSORBED will pop up (and that will become very confusing once Bio goes live.)

When you measure defense, you are not trying to see how many attacks didn't land, you are trying to measure how many will be Deflected or Avoided compared to how many will Hit.

We dont tend to care, miss is miss after all. But the stat is just adding deflections and avoidance.

Counting misses as "mitigation" is as seeing some one trip 100 meters away and take credit for knocking him down.

Mind you, the chat log only says MISS or HIT, so it's hard to count Deflections and avoidances (they just flavor text, all are just deflection.)

Also, one other bit, I hate adding a percentage sign to defence rating, mainly because defense is not a percentage of nothing. Defence is a rating that gets evaluated against a critter rating to then determine how many attacks are you likely to deflect. It has a potential of swinging up or down, but thanksfully most of the enemies in the game only have 50 defense plus varying accuracy rating.

If your foe has 50 base ToHit, then 25 def is equivalent to 50% damage avoidance (or deflection, or mitigation, whatever you rather call it.)

If the foe has 64 base ToHit, then 25 def is only 39% damage avoidance.

As for regeneration and how everything else adds up... maybe later. Don't want to complicate this further, but I personally dont consider healing or regeneration to be "mitigation".

I split survivability between mitigation and restoration.

City of Data seems to only list the suppressing chunk. Mids, though lists both chunks.

In this context I'm defining "extreme inferiority" as the discrepancy between Ice Melee and other melee sets.

It still seems it's one of the sets that's getting more bang out of the snipe changes, though. I am not sure where blast sets stand so cant vouch much right now.


I don't care about ranking that much either. In fact, the chart I posted earlier is intentionally rounded. I really got annoyed that my numbers were used only to claim who was Number One just due to some decimal points.

I rounded things to make discrepancies between sets actually obvious. Dark Melee, War Mace and SS (without external powers) dish about 30% more damage than Ice. Stone, Fire and Energy are at about 38.6% more than Ice.

Dual Blades is the closest rank wise and it still has about 15% more DPS. In my eyes, that's a bit extreme.*

*Remember there is rounding involved, the numbers are not 100% accurate, they are just pointing at the address of their appropiate ballparks.

Stop messing with my hyperbole, you know what I meant!

Besides, Melee sets dont get Nukes.

Now, if the devs rahter fix Ice Melee by turning Frozen Aura into a Nuke... I may be fine with it!!

On the other hand, if memory does not fail me, basically all blast sets get nukes. This would mean that even insanely high AoE compared to other ATs would still not justify extreme ST inferiority among it's peers... do you agree with that?

Now i just HAVE to roll a Dual Blade character... thanks for making that set interesting!!! GRRRR....


PS: I dont care how, but I want to see an enemy group that uses post-apocaliptic costume pieces!!! Perhaps a revamp of the Lost...

It crossed my mind, but the game has an ERSB rating to maintain

Oh lord I remember that... I was such a retarded idiot back then. I think I actually owe you an apology still...

PS: I miss Circeus.

I think most complains come from constantly looping sounds. If the sound goes off with a particular action, people are less likely to complain.

Wait... you did not say it was a technologicall issue... Can we have two versions, one that buzzzes when I hit and one that does not.

Let the player decide if his attacks buzz or dont!

First off, re-read my post:

I never said "there's no such thing as 95% mitigation"

I suspected his point was similar to yours, but I wanted to make sure before explaining full mechanics.

Also, for all definitions of this game, 95% is simply wrong, though. Sure, you can claim that against a match that only contains minions and no enemies with to-hit or accuracy buffs. But you can’t ever say 95% is true against the average encounter in this game.

Note: Weakest average encounter in this game is:

A minion (50% chance) and a Lt (57.5% chance)
3 minions.

That’s what you will always face if you play solo, against standard enemies, with bosses turned off and +0x1.

That adds up to an average encounter ToHit of 51.87%.

This means, in average, with that approach at defining mitigation, softcapped defenses are giving you at best 94.81% "mitigation", and only at the lowest level of performance. (sorry but we cant round when talking this stuff)

It's extremely important to keep in mind in this game an "encounter" is not "an enemy" but a "spawn" that almost always contains multiple enemies with varying stats.

So NOW you can say I said there is no such a thing as 95% mitigation in this game.

Disclaimer: truth is in game you actually face an average of evens and +1 foes, meaning it's actually less than 94.81% while playing solo, but I made this post complicated enough. Bah since I edited, the actual average is 94.55%

It would had been false.

Would be epic if it made sound but only when you hit an enemy.

You are now starting to understand, then

There is not such a thing as "Resist Debuf Resistance". Resistance, off itself, resists resistance debuffs. It's just the nature of the beast.

The only way you can make a resistance ignore Resistance is by flagging the debuff irressistible.

So, up to now we have:

Resistance cant be debuffed as Defense can.
Resistance also happens to resist Damage debuffs.
Everyone has access to pools they can use to quickly build their Smash/Lethal resistances.

I fear I dont type fast enough to finish this post before Arcanaville strangles you.

Most foes have 50 ToHit.

Defense goes counter to this, but you cant get it lower than 45.

Then the critter has Accuracy. Accuracy multiplies somewhat like
(ToHit-Def) * Accuracy.

A minion (for example) has 100% accuracy. An AV may have 150% accuracy.

So, a minion has a minimum chance to hit you, if you "soft cap" of:

(50-45)* 1 = 5%

A AV:

(50-45) * 1.5 = 7.5%

The minion had a 50% final chance to hit, now he has 5% chance to hit. That's 10% the damage he was able to land before, result of 90% attack avoidance (for the encounter.)

The AV had a 75% final chance to hit, now he has 7.5% chance to hit.
That's 10% the damage he was able to land before, result of 90% attack avoidance (for the encounter.)

Edit:
Seems I managed to get this out before Aracanaville posted, she may still be typing her long disemboweling numeric attack, apologize before she finishes and she may forgive you!!!

This is true.

Before we go anywhere, where are you getting that 95% from?

45 Defense at best gets you 90% mitigation.

As for the rest, if you want to pick a single number out and single the entire game around it, then I think you don't fully understand how the combat mechanics in this game work.

Those sets get defense debuff resistance.

MajorDecoy's post had the rest of the information that you should need. My post was more of an expansion to his, didnt realize I also had to copy paste his to make the message complete.

If YOU dont care about resist, thats fine. But IO granted def bonuses are extremely volatile. One spark comes from the wrong direction and it ignites a cascading failure that will result in you eating paviment within seconds.

Resistance may have a lower cap (for most ATs) but it does not suffer of that extreme volativity.

Note: Almost every AT has the capability to build on it. Every AT that has no armors gets to pick an Ancillary/Patron pool that gives resistance in addition to Tough.

Here are Smash/Lethal numbers that can be easily reached by ATs without even using native powers (so defenders are ignoring potential self buffs from their primaries)

Blaster: 46.4%
Controller: 66.3%
Defender: 66.3%
Corruptor: 49.7%
Dominator: 56.4%
Mastermind: 66.3%

So no one really can say they can't leverage the advantages of this change if they want to.

Don't make plans just yet unless you doing it just for fun. This is just the first wave of beta. Thigs are extremely likely to change. In fact, Synapse already mentione he will look at x2 and x3 bonuses.

To be fair, and I have been attempting to argue this for a while:

Invuln does not have a huge advantage in SL, not directly. Invulns "advantage" is how much more powerful Fighting > Tough is for them, and this in turn, of course, makes them so powerful against SL.

It was also an advantage that was not fully inherited by the Brute and Scrapper versions of the set.

At first I thought this would be a bad thing, but now I realize it may be a good thing.

Invuln has kept what I would consider to be damage type holes for every damage type but Smashing and Lethal due to how insanely strong Invuln Tankers can be, once they take Tough. Now that this advantage is not so big (since most other tankers will be able to do similar) we can finally get tanker's weak spots looked at, at least I know I will do my best... as soon as I'm done looking at this huge IO list of changes.


And Willpower. *glup*


Hmmm, I got to admit I am not sure I agree. We have, for most purposes, a darn well balanced offensive game system. Most offensive sets are, thanks to heavy rebalancing and the work of players like you, been improved to be within a few percentage points of each other in sustained DPS.

Survival sets, though, are all over the place, some with holes to things entire groups the game forces you to fight [if you do story content]. As long as the delivery (HP/Res/Def/Abs/etc), and build paths are different, you will retain distinction.

I don't want homogenization, but I would like some standardization on survivability performance. The IO change may help in that direction.

Yea. I am so used to saying softcap due to how def works that I am actually having a hard time accepting plainly hard-capping SL resist is going to be a common thing to say...

If we keep going at the average speed, we shoud get there by 2020

Not really. You still can grant the team 54.6% resistance to all damage types but Psi.

With this, people are likely to either specialize in SL or work out a boost in their average non-sl resists. You will either be patching big holes, or stacking on top of slightly stronger resist bases. Technically, that amplifies the strength of a Sonic defender.

Thats not to mention you still have a lot of tricks besides +Res, mainly -Res.

Side note: delicious comob I was doing yesterday with my level 2 Water/Martial Combat:

Use Aqua Bolt
Ki Push. Make sure to queue Storm Kick.
As soon as Crane Kick starts going on, queue Aqua Bolt again (by now recharged)
If nothing gets in between your line of view, you can land all 4 attacks "safely" (first Aqua Bolt will be exposed to attack.)

I was having some fun knocking back Hellion Lts in Atlas to the lake. I would be shuffling through a few hellions as they attempted to run back to me to range.

Efficient? Not at all.
Fun? Oh Yea!

Side note: Storm Kick's knockback was annoying. Not far enough to make a big impact, but far enough to force me to waste time walking to then Ki Push. Better to never use Storm Kick before Ki Push.