Starsman

Thats a playstyle that can be equally executed by either AT.

That approach gets you an actual boost of 13% more damage, the brute now would be 34.2% ahead.

It would be unlikely you will see such a huge boost from only 50% but I would like to see two separate builds to even make sure you can indeed pursue that much more recharge, also how that recharge affects the specific build. Issue with just recharge, though, is that you also increase your endurance consumption.

As I mentioned: its complex but not impossible if you are willing to go very deep (the answer may be meaningless without doing the same for every single build combination though.)


Defintively not easy, and the results extremely specific to one particular question out of thousands. Thats just one reason why it's best to just stick to SO builds.

BTW, I do would argue tankers deserve more damage only so they are more desirable fillers in teams and to make up for the fact a brute may be a better tank option in nearly every situation.

What I don't think is that tankers should match brute damage. My magic number is 85%

There is a significant camp of people that will always insist regen of any kind is never going to keep you alive.

For balancing purposes: no.

If you just playing, sure you can see it that way.

The thing is, if you want to see how well an Invuln would do with a third party that can heal him for 100% every 2 minutes, then you need to just add that to the formula. If you are not sure if the heal will ever return, then you consider that a one time heal and average it over the course of the simulation.

But again, if you just playing, you can consider it "reset", but even then its a very limited way. No matter how much you are healed for, the fight was not reset, unless you also go about healing to full and resurrecting any hurt enemies. It is just an event going on inside an ongoing battle.

Also, as Garent states, there are other variables. If, during the fight, the tanker had to use Dull Pain, healing you to full will not reset the timer on Dull Pain. It still is recharging as part of the ongoing fight.

That is usually an entirely separate discussion, but the proper way to quantify that would be to measure the healing capabilities of the third party and add them to the survivability of the set you are evaluating.

... Are you saying you made up your extremely long SR nerf list?

BTW... didnt the last patch break Accuracy again, for the billionth consecutive time since game launch? (However did THOSE threads stop coming up?)

K just wanted to double check. My first attempt (the one that Castle copied when he implemented Willpower) compressed healing in time but never showed Invuln (or ice, or stone, or regen) outside dull pain.

Sooo.... well... that at 45 seconds made willpower actually look sane... That may fill in a few blanks there.

Edit:
The goal of my version then was not to pick a specific timer, though, but to draw a graph based on time (1s, 2s, etc) to display the zig-zaggy nature of click heals.

Although what he says is not too "relevant" balance wise, it actually pours some light into a more interesting point: IOs.

You can get a lot of defense from IOs, not so much regeneration. By the set having so much Def buffing room, you can build a Willpower Tanker beast that soft-caps S/L, runs Tough and ends up rivaling the survivability of Granite tankers.

I am saying the gap between S/L heavy content and non S/L content is extreme. I tend to solo +2x8 against Knives and Tsoo in Dark Astoria, but anything "magic" (that is usually very lite in S/L) forces me to swap. How low I have to swap may be a test I should do, but after a while I just decided it's not worth the trouble of maximizing AoE so i just go x1 and rush those missions.

The last mission in DA (if you done it) is sort of fixed at x8 almost all the way through. I need to eat candy a lot and go to the hospital a few times during that one (cant even tank for my NPC allies without insps.)

Thats the topic of the thread. The Willpower in that video, that out-survived Invuln, was a scrapper.

You are right to a limited extent. The main reason many (that have looked right at the numbers) state a Regen Tanker would suck is that for Tankers, it is expected that a set can take high bursts of damage, beyond what the base HP allows.

Burst survivability is part of the tanking schema, but it's not everything. Sustainability is also an important piece.

He is right, in a 20 second window, Invuln will stay standing if the challenge is designed precisely to kill Willpower Scrappers in 20 seconds. What kills a Willpower Scrapper in 20 seconds may take 36 seconds to kill an Invuln, thats without using Dull Pain (and if you talk about spawn to spawn tanking, given dull pain cant be perma without insane recharge, you cant expect it to always be available to do the job.)

Without healing support, though, spawn to spawn is the same as a very very long fight unless you are taking naps in between fights.

But sure, I do grant you: Invuln can take an alpha better than a WP scrapper. I would call the game broken if this was not true.

The immortality line also is about immortality. What I did in this test was break that line.

Not only this, but there is little value for a solo tanker to take an alpha if he will have to stop and recover his health in between fights because he was unable to sustain that damage intake.

Sorry dont mean you, in particular. Even the devs seem to use the term.

I did it with my S/L soft capped (with one foe) Invuln. Tsoo and Knives of Arthemis can kill me, but it takes a LOT. I had to lower difficulty every time I faced Banished Pantheon, CoT and Talons.

I popped inspirations like crazy during that last mission of the final arc.


And the reason Invuln is considered extremely good against Smash/Lethal is precisely the existence of Tough. I skipped it for a long time, but I was underperforming compared to other players. Finally felt forced to respec into it when I returned to the game.

We will see how it goes but my prediction:

In very bursty fights, WP will die faster IF Invuln has Dull Pain ready to click.
If dull pain is recharging, Willpower will do better.

Will see how that goes!


The video was to demonstrate how weak the Invuln is on the element/energies side. I can’t tank Banished pantheon for myself with my Invuln. And yes that’s a big chunk of what triggered me to revisit this opinion.

Mind you: I used to be on the other side of this argument. I used to say it was acceptable as it is, mainly because SL was literally everywhere. This was before GR launched. Now I have played through GR 1-20 content and Dark Astoria and I'm seeing this is, with every issue, less of a reality. And I didn’t come out and say this just now because I had my rear handed to me last week. I started crunching numbers for a few months now, and brainstorming tests that may let me see if my own numbers are flawed.


I personally think inspirations should not be part of any serious balance discussion. They are too random and you just may never have them at hand when you need them.


What utilities would you say Invuln has? It has some resistances to some debuffs but that’s not utility. Things like Burn or Quick Recovery are not only useful if you happen to face a specific enemy type.

I have a bit of an issue with the term "exotic". There are some enemy groups you can safely face with little else but S/L (at the moment) but there are plenty of foes that can mix things up heavily. Every day we seem to get a few more groups doing it.

If you level up villain side, you will also see a lot more fire and cold than blue side.

Oh I have a lvl 40. I meant to run a SR test.

Based purely off numbers (and something I'll try to test tonight)

Willpower is better against S/L without pools, and pure SOs.
Invuln is WAY better against S/L with Poools, and pure SOs.
Willpower becomes so much better with Pools and IOs (S/L softcapped) that he challenges Granite.

Thanks.

This ^^^


Sorry for the redundancy, but just to make sure: I picked fire because:

1) Was easier to find critters in the wild that had heavy fire
2) Cold was also easy but debuffs Dull Pain recharge (may be meaningless, didnt have time to use it twice anyways.)
3) I did not want to create AE enemies because I would be accused even further of "fakeness".
4) AE enemies are also usually way stronger than the regular critters
5) Both sets (WP and Invuln) have identical mitigation against Fire, Cold, Energy and Negative. So testing one is almost the same as testing all (you may make the case that Cold survivability should be either stronger in sets with clicks or come with equally strong -Recharge resistance)



This is another Issue I have with Invuln, but not one I'm going in deep right now. But going over it quick: Invuln has to take 8 powers to have it's survivability. Willpower has to take 6. You would expect a power with no utilities would either be simply stronger or just needs to be given such utilities. This applies also to SR, but I leave it to Arcanaville to get that one set buffed. If I had the time to level limitless characters in the Beta server, I would test them all. Even with farms, it's time consuming to get to level 33 to test this stuff. And I can't just copy my live characters because accolades mess up with performance testing.

A tanker to tanker vid is coming and I think will be very interesting. But I would not have declared him un-killable, I would just have upped the challenge until he was killable and then push the Invuln through the same challenge. That’s coming once I pit no-pool Invuln Tanker against No pool willpower Tamker vs. Smashing damage.

The only fake aspect of this test is that there are no fire only groups out there. But today, Invuln can be eaten alive by the new banished pantheon due to its near complete lack of smash/lethal.

Do I think Invuln needs buffing? Hard to say. There are some issues in play. My next video will explain better but Invuln on its own is not that strong against Smashing/Lethal. The thing is, Invuln can take the best advantage out of Tough. It's not Invuln that's too strong, it’s Tough.

That gets compounded with too much content being Smash/Lethal heavy, but that’s a content issue that may be changing (Pretoria is rather well mixed in damage types, and so is the new Dark Astoria.) Have to see how far they take this in the future. But that’s a reason to ponder if Invuln "deserves a buff".

Big question: Invuln tanks are meant to tank. How are they meant to do so with so low elemental/energy performance?


Invuln is similar, a lot of its survivability insane lot, is based off Invincibility and powered by enemies. I actually had to herd enemies in the AE with invulnerable mode turned on because the casters were killing my Invuln while herding them with their flares.

These are the attacks used by the Fire Thorn Casters:
Fire Sword (37.8% Lethal and used very often not counting the bonus Fire DoT)
Char (no damage)
Fire Ball (22% Smashing not counting the bonus Fire DoT)
Consume (bit of fire damage)
Flares (pure fire damage)

In retrospect: I wish the test had been even more pure Fire damage. This actually means Invuln would have performed even worse against a real pure fire test.

I tested various combinations. Higher levels, higher count, etc. In all tests Invuln died faster. I settled for this version simply because neither died too fast but both died. (lower and willpower would not die.)

This case is not "non-real", not in the way you imply. A more common group that is light Smash/Lethal will have also had heavy use of Energy and Negative. I decided to stick to the same critter repeated so that no randomness in the AI was brought into question "oh the energy guy was attacking less, etc etc" and avoided cold due to its -recharge that further hurts Invuln.

I would never say the scrapper has tanker level performance. I said the opposite: Invuln tankers have scrapper level performance against non-S/L.


I don't think Invuln will be buffing without a properly built case. Even with a case, it may not happen just due to the abuse of Smash/Lethal in the content plus the existence of Tough. If I was a dev I would also keep in mind Invuln can cap S/L thanks to that one pool power.

If I had full control of the game, there is two things I would do: one, Tough would be heavily "altered". It would provide minimal S/L resistance and make up for it with granting an HP bonus. For most people this would be a buff, for all but Invuln.

Then I would review every single enemy group and make sure every group has a significant amount of elemental or energy damage.

At this point, Invuln would be tweakable in a fair way.

This, though, is likely too much work. Won’t stop me from making this case.

Given today's mechanics, I think if Invuln was designed today it would use very fast refreshing Absorption instead if Def in Invincibility.

If damage thresholds existed in the game that would be ideal for the set's apparent intention, but I think Absorption would offer a similar yet easier to pierce mechanic than Damage Threshold would.

Problem is, every set that was designed with that same mentality may be better served with fast pulsing Abs, but this would even if numeric balance was struck properly it would be the equivalent of riding a bulldozer at 100 MPH over that cottage rule.

+Elu can, in many aspects, leave the cottage rule intact.

But I agree with you, it's not as simple as I stated. FF for one is a set that perhaps would work even better if SR and Invuln used +Elu, as suddenly the defense granted by FF would be more useful, but at the same time giving at least one power in FF Elu may also fix or alleviate some of the issues.

They did many horrible things to PvP in that one patch.

Diminishing healing was horribly done.
DPS normalization made no sense at all in PvP. If anything, PvP as it stands in this game (due to movement powers) should never have damage normalization, hard hitting attacks should recharge slow, no matter the cast time.

Finally Elu... as you say, it was just used as a magic wand, and apparently without understanding it well to booth. Too much Elu and tohit would not pierce armor and people whine that they are not hitting at all in PvP. Too little and you do nothing. Elu may had help alleviate extreme ToHit piercing in PvP, but the problems with PvP in this game is mainly one of travel powers. I don't think PvP will ever work well in this game.

Well... I have that permanent damage idea thing that everyone would hate...

I still wish all primary/secondary sets that grant defense were simply swapped to grant Elusivety.

At that point, all defense can safely be pierced and negated with tohit without unfairly hurting sets that solely or heavily depend on evasion.

Unfortunately, due to the horrible way it was implemented in PvP, it's deployment was, from my understanding, extremely disappointing. Now they fear even looking at the stat.

It's been poping up regularly in the Bio thread in test (yes that thread has been all over the place.)

The video shows the difference is rather drastic, though.

We are not talking about one damge type, though, but 6 out of 8.

If you get this way: it makes no sense your shield will protect you from attacks that come from your back.