Starsman

Do you want me to scream at you?

I remember sending you a PM back in the day that you proposed the multiplication I posted above, I mentioned that formula since I figured it may be easier to implement and I still sort of remember your answer: "But then what meaning the numbers in powers will have? If 20% resistance no longer is 20% resistance?"

Today I think there is no point in simplifying it, this would need a code change and once you dive into it you may as well do it "right".

Two things to keep in mind:

1) This also would apply to debuffs.
2) One trick pony Defender sets are just broken by design (but other than Force Fields, is there any other set that broken? Empath is the only set I can think of that has no debuffs at all, but it has regen, recovery, heals and Fortitude that I can remember off the top of my head.

FF is broken in many other ways and needs a fix. I have many ideas for them but Buff sets are not my forte and I don't like to toss numbers without understanding total relative performance.

But that aside, check my other post that I likely posted seconds before you hit submit. In my example, the FF would only lose the capability to stack Maneuver buffs on top of their shields.

With the approach I noted above, stacking limits are not that big of a deal (caps are there to keep that in check.) The stack caps are needed now because the system is not diminishing, so it must be quickly limited.

The big issue about this mechanic is that it would break complete game balance if it goes absolute. By absolute I mean: If my self powers start diminishing instead of adding up.

A potential solution would be to apply the diminishing by source groups.

Example:

Group1 = Buffs from my primary
Group2 = Buffs from my secondary
Group3 = Buffs from Pool1
Group4 = Buffs from Pool2
Group5 = Buffs from Pool3
Group6 = Buffs from Pool4
Group7 = Buffs from EpicPool
Group8 = Buffs from IO Set Bonuses

These all then get super-grouped by character source, so Group1 from Player1, Group1 from Player 2, etc.

This would at least retain current isolated balance, that means an invuln tank with no pool powers would be exactly as effective as he is now, but one with Tough and Weave would be slightly weaker than the same thing currently is.

First, let me declare the thread officially derailed!

Now: this is not true. Right now, if you get... lets say a sonic defender and a force field defender.

(Made up numbers ahead)

The Sonic Defender may give you 25% resistance.
The Force Field defender may give you 12.5 defense (equivalent to 25% resist)

To determine the effectiveness granted to a naked player (a blaster?) you would measure it this way (no won't go into explaining why now):


1 - (1-TotalRes) * (1-TotalDef/45)
1 - (1-0.25) * (1-0.25) = 43.75% (you avoid this amount of damage)

If you had 2 sonic defenders, though, you just sum them together: 25% + 25% = 50% less damage.

Right now, you are encouraged heavily to overstack a single stat.

The method for "Diminished returns" Arcanaville recommended back in the day, would simply mean buffs of the same type don't get added, instead they first get multiplied in the above fashion. Basically, it would now be measured this way:

1 - (1-ResBuff1) * (1-ResBuff2) * (1-ResBuffN) * (1-DefBuff1/45) * (1-DefBuff2/45) * (1-DefBuffN/45)

This would make two sonic defenders buffs stack the same way defense stacks on top of resist, meaning two sonic defenders will now yield 43.75%

With diminishing returns, in this fashion, you end up with a more "fair" stacking that removes bias towards stacking the same type of stat. Suddenly its the same to add defense or resistance or whatever new sat the devs come up with in the future.


I would not stop there, though. Healing still would be extremely powerful. I recall recommending to Castle another mechanic that many be considered rather draconian by many (in fact people flamed me for even mentioning it the time I did so openly):

Un-healable damage. Every bit of damage you suffer, a small percentage will never be healed back. Think of Marvel Vs Capcom. In that game, every time a character gets hurt, a chunk of HP goes red, and a chunk is lost. If you swap characters the hurt character can heal back but only the red chunk of health. In the case of Wolverine I think he had a move that also allowed him to regenerate on screen within the same rules.

The mechanic prevents immortality via healing or regeneration. It also allows the devs to design content that is not necessarily insanely hard hitting. They can make certain content that will eventually kill any tank. This does not mean all tanks become paper, but instead that the content can be designed to kill them slowly. The alternative (now) is to make content that one or two shots any non-melee character.

I been told "this would make healers useless" but you always will want to "heal back" that red bar, else you simply die faster.

And off course: the entire thing refills to full HP as soon as combat is entirely halted, so it's not like you must retain this lost HP all over the mission (unless you decide not to take breaks ever, and thats another part of the point.) Breaks don't have to be long either, just breaks.

My proposal of the mechanic, though, was not for PvE (although it would be great in PvE) but for PvP where healing and burst damage are kings (even after the funky resist based healing diminishing return they implemented.)

I am getting my feet wet in game development, have been doing small casual games to gain experience, but eventually I will pursue my true ambition and make an RPG. At that point I may be revisiting all these concepts and apply them there (should they be relevant, after all it's all about context.)

And your recomendation back in the day is exactly the one thing is also floating in my mind.

Mind you, I am not sure I would be opposed to the idea in general, but the game has crossed a point in time where I think changing that would be too disruptive.

The only extremely disruptive "nerf" I'd LOVE to see in the game at this point in time is change every single primary/secondary defense buff in the game for Elusivity, retaining IOs and Pool powers as defense granting powers, oh and also Parry and clones.

Arcanaville is making a valid point. Last time the devs caved into the preasure of anyone mentioning "reaching the caps" (mainly defenders about tankers not needing them) we got GDN and ED.

If anyone complains hard enough about it not being fair that another AT can perform this way at x capped cap, they wont be fixing it by giving you the ability to do the same, but instead very likely by doing an accross-the-board mechanic change that makes 100% certain there will be no one reaching caps without a leage worth of buffing. (bit of hyperbole to add flavor.)

Besides, increasing tanker damage caps wont help most builds, it will mostly help Super Strenght with high recharge buffs and perhaps other sets that live in constant buffing like Shields, Dual Blades, etc.

Where can I find said post? My Search-Fu failed me so am forced to ask.

No offense, Johnny, but this is part of the problem about attempting to discuss this with you. If I make any conession that tankers may need more damage, you automatically jump the gun and say they must match one of the best damage dealers in the game.

But I will give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it's past experience here clouding my view of this answer.

For balance sake, I think 85% of brute's damage works, but it must be uncompromising 85% in average. What do I mean by "uncompromising"? Well. truth be told, Bruise can boost your damage to about 80% of a Brute damage (running at 60% fury) in theory. It requires, though, for you to start offense with lower damage (since first attack is not buffed) and it forces you to use your worst attack constantly in an attack chain, effectively lowering your damage output for a slight net boost, that is only single target in nature.

Now there are many ways to boost damage, many that have never been thought off, some that have but never been implemented, etc etc. It may be possible to come up with a damage boost for tankers that is not consistent, one that makes Tankers better damage dealers during certain portion of a fight, but les effective in other parts of the fight. Not too unlike brutes (that, unless they are primary tank, start fights with low fury and slowly build it up.)

Look at corruptors, a potentially bad example but one none the less (they need work with damage too, in my opinion.) They have conditionally high damage later in a fight, not at the start of a fight, due to the way Scourge works. Imagine a tank with Scourge? Or potentially with nega-Scourge, a scourge mechanic that only triggers on enemies that are over 50% HP? This is flawed (for a few reasons) but it's an example of a way to bring an average of 85% brute damage that also grants the tanker special conditions to shine as damage dealers.

This is a heavy numeric game, but can be achieved.

For this to ever happen tanker survivability would need to be gutted down to Brute levels, keeping only the current HP advantage as the sole aspect that differentiates both AT's survivability. That's not going to happen, so it will remain a number choice.

Imagine taunting for Tankers was made stronger, so you can steal aggro from a brute? What would that achieve?

It would make you proud, perhaps.
It would actually discourage brutes from teaming up with tankers, because it will be hard to keep any aggro to feed fury.

What else will it do? It's as useful as allowing you to out-taunt another tank. There is no win in changing this, but there may be some loss. The tanker should have an easier way to grab aggro, not stronger aggro.

Increase drastically the radius of gauntlet effects, extend the taunt auras range, at least for taunting effects (example: invinciblity extends to 20ft but still you get only defense buffs from the enemies standing within 8ft.)

Make Tanker Taunt, The Power, hit 10 foes.

But allow brutes to easily steal aggro from the tank. If you need to save a brute from over-aggroing, then use Taunt The Power to do that. If the Brute is stubborn enough to taunt himself, then he dies by his own hand.

Many sets have issues, specially the old guard of sets (excluding fire that got a lot of love over the years.)


Reason I have not bothered much with the thread. Don't think this one will be much different but am a bit bored at the moment.

Not a dev myself but these are issues I see:

1st Brutes can tank, not because superior survivability but simply because they have the tools to do so. On top of it, they get a lot more damage, making the pick of Tankers for teams a bit of a no-brainer.

2nd Secondary tankers are dead weight. Outside of special iTrials, they bring next to nothing to the team because for one tanking is a one-man job, and for another:

3rd Damage is low (at 66% the scrapper/brute average damage) meaning you kill so much slower that enemies. Who is going to pick a tanker for anything but as a filler? Perhaps some AoE heavy builds can help the team but those are specific builds, not the AT.


This means you must give tankers a compeling reason to be picked as tanks. As I noted above, it's not about making stronger taunts, but making it easier for the tanker to gather aggro that may be the key there.

Then give the tanker more damage, enough to be desirable but not high enough to be unbalanced. I been thinking 80% or 85% of a Brute at 60% fury would cut it, this would mean a base damage modifier between 0.97 and 1.03. That is too high for up-front damage, though. This makes me think that modifier bumping is not an option. Bruise helps in a single target fashion, but it's not enough either.

Propose things that:
Make tankers competitive for tanking for the tanking position.
Improve their damage without ecoming the first pick for DPS.

I don't know who you had that conversation with, but those ae some wise words.

Anyone that thinks tankers have issues should focus on the tankers issues, not on how to adjust other ATs to make tankers look good.

For the record, Kheledian's Resist cap is 85%.

Depends how you go about to doing it. The reason Brutes can be nearly as survivable as tankers is that they can buff to relatively low resistance caps (relative to the resistance they get natively)

A single resist oriented defender/corruptor/mastermind/controller can achieve this.

Mind you, resistance is not all there is, the real reason Brutes can tank is not how high their caps are, a defense or healed Scrapper would be able to tank too, if he had the aggro management tools.

So the real problem is, with a single support AT behind him, the brute can tank very well. This means, to allow the tanker to do as much damage as brutes under the same conditions, it would mean the tanker would need to be buffed in damage by any support AT. Not all ATs can buff damage for one, unless you count Assault. For another, even if you only consider the few ATs that can directly buff damage, you would have to give so much base dmage to tankers for that to work, that suddenly they become as good or better than Scrappers and blasters at doing damage.

IF damage for tankers was buffed, it should never be in any way intending to match Brutes. A good question to ask may be: how much stronger is a Tanker than a brute at its caps? The answer is simple: compare their base HP. Brutes have 80% the HP of tankers, so in average perhaps tankers should be able to achieve 80% the damage of a brute.

Here things get complicated due to Fury, I'd say an average brute may be running about 60% average fury (with ups and downs all the time but this average) that interestingly makes them tie up with scrappers.

So, let's say we give tankers 80% brute damage... there is one thing to consider: by doing 80% of the damage, you are not killing at 80% the speed, you killing much lower than 80% that speed because enemies regenerate. It's not very visible in minions but with bosses and higher you will. By doing 20% you are giving enemies 20% more regeneration time, in turn meaning you must inflict more damage than the brute may have to inflict.

Things complicate a lot but my point is going to this: The maximum damage that should be allowed for tankers to achieve in average should be about 85% the damage of a brute at 60% fury.

It makes sense, you are absolutely right. Conceptually, from a storytelling perspective, it does perfect sense. However, there are many things that "make sense" that dont translate into a fun or enjoyable game.

Crashing nukes is one of them. Users hate them, left and right. So they are getting redesigned to be more fun. The numbers are irrelevant to you, and that's not a flaw in you, but it does exclude you from numerical discussions.

Touché

Lowering or randomizing the ammount it scourges for may be a requirement to make it kick in earlier.

I dont think Corruptors should be too up-front on damage dealing for various reasons. Most importantly, though, its that it's the only AT that isnt, and that makes it unique. Being a force multipier also should set some barriers on your performance, by lowering up-front damage output you set a higher bar to surpass, but as soon as that bar is surapssed (with friends or hard work) you become a much stronger force.

Properly balanced, Scourge would be able to kick in at 80% or 85% and perhaps max out at 100% at 20% (random number off thin air) with randomized bonus damage.

I do. You dont even get half that soloing.

I wish my tanker was able to do things like toss a Tar Patch

But seriously? I think Scourge itself can use a boost, perhaps to kick in and max out earlier. I'd have to run numbers again to sugest numbers for that, but it would be the ideal solution to keep the AT from doing too much front-loaded damage. I have always thought the AT should be comparable in damage to Dominators.

Unfortunateluy, right now tankers have my near full attention.

Yes, fixed.

Actually that line also may had been missleading. Soloing, the corruptor is not likely to be facing too many EBs or AVs, and I guess most will prefer to avoid bosses (although can see the people that know how to use their secondary deal with them.)

So for the most part, the corruptor will be facing Minnions and Lts, so thats about +7 or +11, meaning from .80 to .83.

This may be enough to ignite a damage boost discussion with the devs, but the insane power multiplying nature of Buff sets can't be easily ignored.

There are always small set dependent discrepancies, like Fire DOTs not being considered part of the attack so the Scourge segment only criticals based off the attack's base damage, etc.

Being on a team also changes things, since others are also attacking and reducing your window of opportunity.

Overal, though, I think the ballpoint mentioned here, about 20.5%, may be fair for cross-AT generalization.

You can round to say Doms end having between .80 and .90 damage output potential, not considering their potential for offensive from their buff set.

I was curious about this during the Dominator revamp* a couple or so years ago and was not able to come up with any good model because... well, it's heavily dependant on the attacks used and enemies fought.

I ended up doing a small simulation process, and posted my study here: Scourge Quantified

In the time between my departure and my return, a lot of melee sets have been introduced with extreme conditional damage, so I have been planning to expand on this idea for actual DPS analysis of all offensive sets... but its a garganthuan project and on my free time I rather sort of catch up with my gamings after nearly 2 years of not playing.

Anyways, hope that guide helps you with the question.

*I did this because I thought it was very important to have a true estimate of the AT damage output as it perhaps would had defined an acceptable maximum or minimum level of offensive performance for Doms

I think the biggest issue is the game's team scaling technology. There are some things that should just increase in power while in team. Thinking lazy and quick, If I was to implement a change today, I'd make all enemies in a mission get a 50% HP boost for every player past 2 in the mission, past level 40. I'm sure this logic has a lot of holes, but things should simply be harder to kill in a team.

Soloing I think the game stands I think is good as is. MAY want a choice of +5 once I hit Incarnate Shift +3, though.

Unusable for any tanking character that is not a heavy defense tanker. That's basically all but Shields, SR and Ice really. In fact, my Shields tanker is the only character I ever took that power on.

All tankers end up havving aggro directed their way due to Gauntlet, unless there happens to be a stronger aggro magnet tank in team that can gather absolutely all aggro.

Solo, everyone is an aggro magnet, you can choose to retreat and kill your DPS if you are not a def heavy build, but again most melee characters are not heavy defense.

Time it next time you playing and let me know if you do it more than every 45 seconds. Also, 90s recharge was a number of the top of my head simply because it's widely used in the game. 75s would also acomplish what I thought, especially assuming the animation didnt get shortened. (at this point we can asume any drastic change may be very drastic.)

This is one of those powers that even me and my love for spreadsheets say spredsheets can not accurately measure. It's not possible to get full advantage of the power in any scenario. I don't think the power is overpowered, never have. I actually see a change that lets me use it every 40 - 45 seconds without having to seek for cover a buff in effectiveness.

Closing though: This is irrelevant because the devs already set their path. Would be best to hold any hate or disapointment to the date they actually announce what they doing to that power pool.

There are a few reasons why they can break the cottage rule with this power. For one, I bet in their datamining they found zero active builds using the power.

Second: it takes no Purple or insanely rare and sought after IOs. A power that gets changed so that it can no longer be slotted for it's original intention, gets it's enhancements deleted uppon patch. Imagine if they changed Combat jumping so it no longer accepted defense enhancements and instead added resist? A lot of people may actually like it since it would give resist builds something more to stack resistance with, but it would delete a lot of LotG Recharge IOs. Not fun stuff.

That is a tactic that is entirely out of the book for tankers since they are the target of all aggro. Aggro will follow him, in melee and ranged form, no matter if they retreat. You likely have the power already slotted for interrupt. With 3 recharge SOs the power would be available every 45ish seconds. I would bet that would be more frequent than you can now jump out from combat without demolishing your DPS.

No use in arguing though, I am sure they are set on whatever they are doing to the powers.

My opinions about the power being a horrible power for anyone but a select set of builds has never died. I never discussed them publicly either, though.

Did they actually show video of the new powers? I am pondering, if they change the animation of Kick the T1 or T2 of Martial Arts, the power would be great. Boxing may alos benefit in similar form from an animation swap, not to mention if these powers are expected to be used... their animations are horrible looking now.

My impression is, and I may be wrong, the damage buff for punch is stand alone, with the increased chance to stun/knockdown being conditional on owning both.

Sort of agree with that. the iTFs i done are too scattered for it to be effetive, though. Would like to see more content at those levels that has more HP bags or AoE defense for the ST specialists.

As far as that goes, there is the entire rest of the game to consider. It's not like all other AoE becomes meaningless.

Because the interrupt means it can never be used in melee unless you are a heavy defense build and not tanking.