UberGuy

Argumentum ad populum

At least one of the two large servers is well known as a hive of ignorance. For reasons unknown, people there propagate some of the game's most pervasive biases and prejudices, based on out of date or sometimes flat out wrong information. I would advise people to never take anything they hear on that server at face value, no matter how many people they hear say the thing in question.

Stalkers have there faults, and I'd like to see them addressed somehow some day, but taking it to "lol stalkers" smacks of backwater ignorance.

When you say you want a "healer", the obvious interpretation is that your concern is that it provide heals. You are asking for a role, not a powerset, and you are indicating that your primary interest in that role is heals.

No, what you are describing is how nearly every team has someone who can heal. Even if they can heal very well, that healing is not their most effective primary role. It's something they can do, and yes, it can be important that they do it at times, but their greatest contribution is usually their non-heal powers.

Your logic breaks down when you throw Cold Domination in the discussion. Cold brings +defense shields, debuffs, and +recovery. It does not bring any form of healing. It is therefore not "a Healer". I contend that the +defense from a Cold's shields are their primary contribution to a team's progress through regular content, because they can allow the rest of the team to essentially ignore self-protection and go completely on the offensive, even against foes for which the Cold's debuffs would be largely wasted.

You have a character you're clearly proud of in that movie in your signature. He has PFF. PFF is a "shield", combining both +defense and +resistance. If someone ran your Portal challenge 100 times using just PFF but no heals, and then ran it 100 times with just self heals but no PFF, which batch of attempts do you think would have more successes? Why do you think that? Use examples or numbers if possible.

What's with the search criteria? If you want to put down money, it should be based on actual in-game performance. I know what works best for speed runs. I don't turn my nose up on Empaths because they bring useful things to the table, but given a strict choice in an Empath and a +defense buffer, and given the mandate to choose which one will lead to faster success, I'll choose the shields pretty much every time. The only time I wouldn't would be based on edge cases, like everyone else on the team is already at/near the softcap.

Referring to people who you want other things from as "healers" is retarded. If you want buffs and debuffs, you ask for buffers and debuffers. If you want heals, you ask for healers. Doing anything else is confusing the issue. Feel free to call them whatever you want, but you have no place to complain when other people have no idea what you actually mean when you refuse to use commonly accepted terminology.

Edit: Oh, and it's not about heals? Then why did you say this?

That sure looks a lot like it's about heals to me.

Any team who wants to run up to the AV and beat it down without bothering to use any better tactics, when said AV is, oh, +4 to you comes to mind. Any team who wants to run up to eight +3 AVs or four +4 AVs and stand right in the middle of them to maximize AoE powers and win the fight in record time.

No one needs to do those things, but if you want to succeed in the shortest possible time, you want to do those things, and you want +defense to be able to achieve it.

There are both numbers in my post and experience behind my play. I'm not new to this. I'm not new to things like soloing AVs. I play on teams that take singular, level 50 AVs down in sub-minute times. I spend time poking game mechanics myself to see what does what, and I'm particularly well informed on the well-vetted research and exploits (as in legendary activities, not hacks) of other players on these forums.

None of those things align with your claim. None of my experience says that "99% of teams" are doing what you claim they are.

I have Rads and Darks. No one I play with has me on a TF or AV-killing team for my heals. They have me on the team for -DR, -Regen, and in Rad's case, +Recharge and +damage. We don't invite Kins for their heal. We invite them for the +recharge and +damage. The fact that they can all also heal is frosting on the cake, nothing more.

FFers are known to be poor increasing the speed with which you defeat AVs. That is distinct and separate from the fact that they can often make the team nigh immune to the AV's damage.

I'll concede, though, that a team that wants to roll content is probably better served overall by a Cold Domination character on the team, since their +defense values can probably buff the team's core damage mitigation to a level close enough to what a FF can (especially since any other defense sources may ensure everyone is softcapped even with lower +defense values), while also bringing various other buffs and debuffs. However, this is an aside with respect to whether +defense shields are more effective than healing under high DPS stress levels. FF != Cold, but given a choice in someone who can heal the team, and anyone who can softcap the team, I would prefer the softcap every time because it provides a proactive, scaling average mitigation that will exceed what any practical "healer" can pump out in recovered HP/time.

Ah, that makes sense. I can see how I would misremember it as I have.

It's interesting, because while I can appreciate why so many people dislike them, I honestly shrug at Nemesis, and I play L50s on nothing less than +2/x5, which gets you 3-4 LTs per spawn. I think that my personal ability to accept them has to do with the fact that, other than the bubbles from Fakes, I have some say in how fast they get to stack their +defense. Most of my characters can largely ignore one Vengeance on a +2 foe, and two is mostly manageable, and I can usually time what I'm doing to keep more than two from being laid out at once.

If they just unloaded a Veng casting completely outside my ability to influence the timing, I'm sure I would have a much greater dislike of them.

You know what's wierd? I am pretty sure they were changed to be uniform Tanks in the level 45+ game. Maybe I am misremembering, but I believe that they used to have Agents, Scientists and that whole range of mobs all the way up to 50.

There are two points under discussion here. One is the highly subjective matter of what level of difficulty is enjoyable. This matter not only varies with player, it also varies with character level, because what our characters can survive is a function of level. You and I might enjoy wildly different stresses on our characters at level 10 and comparable stresses at level 50. We can all argue all day about what we individually enjoy, but ultimately we all have to hope that the devs pick something close to what we like.

There's another matter though, that I think is far less subjective. Arcanaville already mentioned this. Praetorea's difficulty doesn't really match either other starting "territory". If Praetorea's difficulty was internally self-consistent, and it was another fully self-contained option like CoH or CoV, that would be less meaningful. Because it's instead only offers 20 levels of content and then dumps you in one of the other two territories, I think that's a problem. For people who enjoy its difficulty, it's going to set the expectation for content that's harder and then the other territory won't deliver. For people who dislike its difficulty, they're going to prefer the other territories. To some extent, CoV has a different difficulty than CoH, especially in the 30-40 level range, but that's less important, because it doesn't have big discontinuities in its own, CoV-specific graph of difficulty vs. level. This discontinuity between L20 Praetorea and either L21 CoH or L21 CoV meshes poorly with the decision to funnel players who buy GR into Praetorea by default.

It varies somewhat from TF to TF. If you spend more time ghosting to glowies or boss-defeat-only spawns, you'll defeat less foes/time than you would on a "kill all" run. What you're defeating when you defeat stuff matters too - if you spend time ghosting objectives but then beat up on foes with high shard drop probabilities, it may break even or even come out ahead.

The ITF requires you to defeat lots of foes, so you lose a lot less time to running around doing other stuff that doesn't generate shards. The Apex and Tin Mage TFs are pretty combat centric, too.

I think that there should be some boundaries on the swing that a given group causes a character. Let's say you have a character that's got an intentional design target of being able to solo "normal" content. If you play that character at +0/x1, and you normally do fine doing so, I think it's reasonable that no "normal" content should strenuously compel you to lower your difficulty, no matter what your powersets. That does not mean that you might not find some opponents harder than others, but I think it does mean that you should be able to absorb that difficulty with some small changes in how you tackle them - maybe a bit more kiting, or an extra inspiration here and there. You might decide to lower your difficulty to deal with them, but I think the goal should be to avoid making that the most compelling way to proceed.

By saying "normal" content, I mean stuff that's meant to be available to a solo player and doesn't have some big label on it saying "go get help". I also consider anything that's pervasive, such as an entire mob faction that you meet consistently during a contact's story arcs or an entire level range, should qualify this way. I think it's poor form to make someone question the worth in experiencing a broad swath of content because of their powerset choices.

Now, if you design your content this way, allowing for some variation in challenge but trying to keep it within a certain band, then I think something mostly predictable happens when people scale up their difficulty. Multiplying how hard everything is by, say, a factor of 3 should (as a first order approximation) make the allowable band between things that are easy for someone and things that are hard 3x wider. Playing that way might force someone to lower an elevated difficulty to take on foes they just found a bit harder at +0/x1.

This simple analysis breaks down, though, when the reason mobs become harder grows too non-linearly with elevated difficulty. This was part of the old problem SR faced with over-level foes gaining +toHit. It becomes very hard to balance impacts across powersets when changing something by +X affects some powersets by a factor of (1+X) and others by a factor of, say, 1/(1-X).

That was one of the major benefits of normalizing most stuff on 50% base-toHit scaled by accuracy. It wasn't because it made Defense "better", it made Defense's average performance at least be remotely compareable to that of the game's other major damage blocking system: Resistance. That made it easier to ensure making something harder by making it better at hitting players didn't become harder for a character with strong reliance on Defense as mitigation wildly faster than for one who relies on Resistance. It simplifies managing the difficulty band I talked about before.

It doesn't mean there should never be exceptions, but if they become the rule, you're back to finding it difficult, if not impossible, to manage the size of the band.

You're definitely in trouble when I am the one being more concise than you.

Do you think it was a conscious decision on his part that it worked out to be quite so heinous in cases like this? Honestly, a lot of stuff he did seemed like it ended up the way it was because it was the result of multiple decisions for which no one had considered how (or perhaps if) they would combine into a net result.

As mentioned, you're skipping a step.

(1) Start with a qualitative description of how something should work conceptually.

"Defense is an attribute that causes enemies attacks to be more likely to miss when they attack you."

(2) Design an approach that implements that.

"Everything has a 50% chance to hit players, and defense modifies that chance directly down (or up for defense penalties)"

(3) Then programmers implement what was designed in step 2.

115. critter.finalHitChance = 0.5 - player.getDefense()

Arcanaville is talking about step 2.

Oh, apologies, I completely misread that then.

I agree, to my knowledge it's never been affected by the Stalker taking damage.

I promise you that is not true. Really, truly and very sincerely I promise you that. If you attack the target, it will attack you back immediately (assuming it has a recharged attack), whether you hit it or not. The only exception to this is AS, which does not notify the mob if it misses.

No. You don't design things to radically screw over something because it's strong elsewhere. "Tit for tat" is not a sensible way to design challenge. "You're strong everywhere else, but damn well stay away from this" is just dumb.

Edit: What I'm describing is not the same as providing something you're just weaker to. Giving DE universal +toHit as the Tip Mission versions have would be an example of making SR weaker against them. Giving them +100% toHit emanators is pretty damn close to telling an SR characters they don't get to have a secondary powerset.

You're missing the point (from the context in which I made that post). Maybe it wasn't clear. It does matter what a well-balanced team can do when you're talking about cranking up the content they're facing to 11. The higher you crank the content difficulty, the more important it is that they have all the bases covered. Getting good representation from all the strong tools in player toolboxes helps ensure that if any one tool fails, the others are there to take the slack. I focused on "well balanced" because I wanted specifically to differentiate that from teams that supercharge on one or two aspects alone. Some popular examples are capping defense, +damage (Kinetics), and/or -DR and -regen (Rad, Dark).

If you take the content that's passable for teams with that 1-2 horribly built characters and give it to people who know how to build characters to a "T" and the ins and outs of the game, the latter group could basically succeed at the content while facerolling on their keyboard. On the flip side, if you want to challenge those folks, you're going to make it hard on the folks who build weird, probably-not-so-effective characters.

Their having attached a badge for attending 50 WST runs that you didn't have to be on all but guarantees that this is not the case.

Back around the time of the BotZ nerf, I put in a 2B bid (as in 2 followed by 9 zeroes) and pulled it after I think five weeks. Someone I knew in game was willing to sell one to me off-market for the same 2B. Of course he got the full 2B instead of 1.8B after market fees.

Edit: At the time, one sold, on estimated average, probably about every two days. I haven't looked at it since.

They do take a whole lot longer than the other mobs, though. Also, note the one big spawn of "monster" EBs is loaded with under-level ones.

Stacking of buffs and debuffs is a topic that could (and has) spawned numerous hotly-debated threads, but there's actually a separate thing that I mentioned there. For example, you can layer separate buffs of +def, +DR, +regen, +damage, +recharge and combine them with -toHit, -DR, -recharge, holds and other mezzes, aggro control...

Addressing these layered capabilities alone, without even getting into the heights to which we can stack any one capability, means that we can pretty rapidly overwhelm +0s. Addressing ether on a broad scale represents what I see our devs as likely to implement as a ED/GDN-grade bloodbath. (ED/GDN was a long time ago, but what they did in I13 PvP doesn't inspire my confidence.) Just the risk of that makes me very adverse to seeing them go down that path, not (just) because I don't look forward to potential nerfs, but wide-scale ones make me nervous because of this game's age and seeming reliance on a long-term loyal subscribers.

If they don't reduce us down, they need to consider buffing the foes up. I agree that they could do that with things like more bosses or EBs instead of (just) foe level, but I also see setting some mission to only spawn bosses (for example) as no worse a "perversion" of the con rules than making stuff over level. At that point, it really seems to come down to personal perceptions of which violates the game's norms more.

I will say, though, that "rank inflation" rather than "level inflation" would be easier on MMs, and would allow for more dynamic range with the difficulty slider.