UberGuy
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Posts
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Quote:I have. Given what I said, I think it's a fair question. Here's why. If playing solo or on higher difficulties really does magnify quantitative performance differences in AT performance, then the larger the difference in difficulty that two ATs can operate at, the larger the performance difference in those ATs at more "normal" difficulty. Some folks asking that question may not be looking at that question so analytically, but if the question has merit from an analytical perspective (and I believe it does), then it remains a reasonable question to ask.Originally Posted by Alekhine
I'm not sure if you have read the entire thread. But, in this very thread there have been direct comparisons saying, "if I can solo my scrapper/brute on +x/x6 or x8, why can't I do that on my blaster." -
Quote:Originally Posted by Stupid_Fanboy
The formula for the area factor is exactly what they use to adjust the damage of powers that aren't single target.
I'm saying it's not used dynamically in attack damage scales. The values for attack damage scale are supposed to match this formula, but the game is not calculating the damage scale of attacks on the fly using this formula - that's done "by hand" and then those resulting numbers are stored in the AT look-up tables.This is in contrast to the the PPM system and Assault Radial, which both dynamically adjust proc rate (and damage for Assault) based on the actual AreaFactor of a power, be that stored "on" the power or calculated on the fly from its relevant AoE stats. -
Quote:Do I ever. I think it took months for people to figure out why they couldn't solo Prisoner doors in the BAF once that changed.Originally Posted by MisterD
I think thats what I meant Uber. Maybe. I remember when Interface was broken as hell in rain powers etc, then tweaked?
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Quote:Agreed, those discussions are a foundation of most of the current discussion about Blasters on the forums. Those discussions made absolutely clear that the devs take exception to ATs which underperform their peers too much across the whole AT and across situations. They stated in clear terms that Blasters were too far behind other ATs, and that this was a core reason they undertook Defiance 2.0.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Conversely, if you're not, you're wrong, period. That rule was even basically publicly conceded by Castle, who provided me with permission to repeat it during the Defiance 2.0 discussions.
Only the devs can tell us authoritatively if Blasters are still behind their peer ATs. However, they have already told us that being behind, at least by some threshold amount, is a reason for change. ATs are not allowed to lag one another by too much.
This isn't particularly relevant. The examples in this thread are not attempting specifically to balance for soloing at +2/x6. What they are attempting to do is use relative performance at those difficulties, which are very high, to reveal and/or explain what happens to Blasters relative to other ATs, and why. Soloing is a simulation of what can happen if you take too much aggro on a team or league. Playing without ally buffs is instructive for understanding what happens when allies cannot or do not provide buffs. When Defiance 2.0 was discussed, Blasters underperformed even when teamed.Quote:Originally Posted by Alekhine
A bedrock design in the game revolves around teaming. Not soloing +2x6. -
Quote:Unfortunately, one of the key mechanics in the trial is broken, and that makes it far, far harder than it's supposed to be. So the reward is significantly front-loaded and it's harder than intended. People who are farming the first fight are just being practical.Originally Posted by Lazarillo
If they have to force people to run it, they must have designed it poorly anyway.
And given the most common reaction seems to be not to bother to complete it...
Once they fix the trial mechanics, I think skipping getting the reward at the end will be silly, because I think we'll be kicking Tyrant around like a soccer ball. -
Quote:Sadly, I can't answer your question, but the above is not how damage procs and interface work currently. They can and do hit multiple targets. What is limited is whether they apply on any given activation of a power, but when they do apply, they can theoretically hit all targets hit by the power. They are not limited to one target per "tick".Originally Posted by MisterD
How does hybrid WORK with them? Is it like damage procs/interface, which only have a single change of hitting ONE foe per pulse interval?
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I never used to slot the things in the SO days, so I was fuzzy on what they did and thus what changed. But that sounds totally familiar now that you describe it. Thanks for that reminder/refresher.
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Quote:Oh, duh. Yeah, and actually, the old cone "range" enhancers used to make them wider, didn't they? (That was ages ago.)Originally Posted by Hopeling
Ranged cone attacks could have their areafactor change, if the calculation uses enhanced/buffed radius rather than base radius (I don't know if it actually does).
Given how the PPM system uses enhanced recharge, I'll be surprised if a dynamic area factor at least couldn't use enhanced range. If so, that saddens me a bit, since I have lots of characters with Cardiac and fairly large (10%) incidental range bonuses from Superior ATEs.
(Such modifiers really ought to account for max targets. A really large AoE is more likely to hit is max targets, but an 80' cone with, say, 16 target cap is probably not highly likely to hit more targets than a 60' cone with the same cap, but it is penalized for the full increase in area.) -
Cool to know. Given that area factor doesn't change (as far as I know?), it's interesting that it's dynamic. Who knows, though, maybe someday we'll get something like Titan Weapons that substitutes a wholly different power with different AoE factors dynamically.
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I solo by large preference when I play anything that doesn't require a team. I don't resent having to have a team for some things, but if I don't need a team, I rarely join or form one.
And when I do team, I always prefer it being with people I "know" from global channels. That's one of the cool things about this game - you can solo and still be socially active. I don't ignore other players (I'm actually fairly chatty - shocking I know given my post count). I just don't always team with them. -
Quote:What I am saying is that the forumla is not simply the guidance which is then turned into a fixed number. It's actually how it arrives at the number.Originally Posted by Stupid_Fanboy
It's funny that you said it isn't a 'design formula' when it actually contains the real design formula for determining the damage a power does.
That looks to be because "areafactor" is an attribute of the powers themselves, and it may not be set properly on each power. Note that areafactor is not used in damage calculations of the powers themselves. If it really is a power attribute, it has to be specifically for reference in things like PPM calculations.Quote:I'm not so sure it's calculating this stuff on the fly, either. Well, calculating all of it, anyway. There's a lot of wonky stuff going on with the AoE modifier as it relates to that formula. Some modifiers are rounded down, others are ignored, others are perfectly fine. Some powersets exhibit all of these behaviors at once. The way that the AoE mod is "behaving" makes it feel like an inaccurate lookup table.
There is absolutely no question that the recharge factor is being calculated dynamically. It's using the PPM system, and that's what the PPM system does. In I24, they were planning on having it respond dynamically to global buffs like Speed Boost. There is no conceivable way for that to happen based on a table lookup. (Edit: They changed this plan, so it will only respond to enhanced recharge, but that remains dynamic. It just will change in practice less often.) -
Quote:That's because it's not really a cut and paste job. It looks at the defined recharge time of the powers, and directly, dynamically calculates damage based on that.Originally Posted by Stupid_Fanboy
Claws in general is completely wrong. The cut/paste job they did doesn't account at all for the recharge discount that Claws has. The proc on almost every power, barring Follow Up and Shockwave, is doing much less damage than it should.
The damage formula linked in the beginning if this thread isn't a design formula. It's the function that describes the actual "run-time" behavior of the "global proc" that Assault Core adds to every power. Given that run-time nature, it has no way to ever know about the recharge discount Claws powers have. It just calculates its damage on what the recharge actually is. -
Quote:Do we know this? Because I don't see what about how Assault Radial works that would have made sense for a script to do. That sounds more like how they would manage Fiery Embrace. There's only one damage calulation defined for each variation of Assault Radial Embodiment in the Assault slot power tree, so I don't see where a script to modify powers would come into the picture. Well, not unless that script actually just modifed those Assault powers themselves, but that wouldn't allow per-attack tweaking.Originally Posted by StratoNexus
I think they simply ran out of time to make it work perfectly as intended. A script was just run to add the damage based on recharge and area factor (thus why tanker attacks are mussed up thanks to gauntlet).
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Quote:I think it's an implementation detail. I suspect they wanted something that dealt a fixed fraction of the attack's base damage, but that the code that calculates the bonus damage probably has no way to determine, programatically what that base damage number actually is. After all, there actually doesn't seems to be such thing in attack powers as a single number for an attack's "base damage" - it would need a way to query the power definition and sum up all its damage affects.Originally Posted by Stupid_Fanboy
I'm not sure how intended that is, that a low damage power gets a heavy dmg bonus like this.
If Assault Radial worked like Fiery Embrace, its damage could be tailored on a per-power basis. However, this has to be time intensive to maintain - Fiery Embrace's bonus damage is "hard-coded" in every power on every AT that can possibly use Fiery Embrace. Assault Radial isn't like that - it's defined as an Alpha Slot-like power that dynamically adds a proc-like effect to all damage-dealing powers on a character, without any foreknowledge of what damage those powers do.
So how to come up with a fraction of base damage with no foreknowledge? Well, for most powers there's a formula for that. Unfortunately, not all powers adhere to it, by accident or design. (Epic Pool versions of powerset attacks have longer recharge than the "core" power by design.) And it's those cases where this approximation breaks down.
Is that a problem worthy of hoping for eventual code fix/enhancement? I really don't know. -
I'm pretty sure that's in contrast with data from City of Data. I'm not totally sure which to trust, but for most of this trial stuff, the info from CoD has been solid. The only usual issues with CoD are being up to date. The issues with data in the game usually relate to problems with Real Numbers being able to represent stuff correctly. I know it usually handles irresistible effects correctly, so I'm just not sure.
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I think your numbers for the individual attack damage are fine. You and I used different sources and came up with excellent agreement there. I'm not sure why our totals for the chain you listed are different, but our conclusions are the same.
I prefer Spin to Scream because it animates faster, deals more damage per target, and is a PBAoE. (To optimally leverage a cone, you have to back out of melee range.) But I realize that's very much a playstyle preference thing, and not clearly objectively better. Since I like Spin, I'll probably stick with Core. For your build and preferences, it sounds like Radial is the right bet. -
Quote:This should work, but due to AV scaling in the iTrials, it won't work out quite as nicely as it usually does, at least in relative terms. He'll be getting buffs from the league size and debuffs from Degenerative. Most AVs have no HP buffs barring the occasional odd-ball who has Dull Pain or High Pain Tolerance or such, so any MaxHP usually just comes right off the top. But Tyrant gains about 4,600 HP per player in the league, so maxed out Degenerative stacking only shaves off about one player's worth of MaxHP. (Against AV-class entities, Degenerative reduces max HP by 1000 HP, and can stack five times.)Originally Posted by TopDoc
Tyrant had 136,513.34 HP in a trial with 23 players and was a 54+5 AV. He had 100% Regen resistance, which means HE IS COMPLETELY IMMUNE TO REGEN DEBUFFS for the entire final scene. Ditto for Recovery, Recharge Time, and Defense. His base Regen is 0.07% HP/sec or 102 HP/sec. According to Makerian, Degenerative Interface does reduce his max HP and thus his Regen, but no one was using it in the screenhots I got so I can't verify that.
As a result, DR debuffs are going to have a stronger proportional effect.
Edit: As an aside on resistance buffs for players, note that most of Tyrant's attacks (defintely all of the ones that are unique to him and/or Statesman, as opposed to basic Super Strength ones) deal irresistible damage. Hammer of Justice? Irresistible. Eye Beam Sweep? Irresistible. So don't count on DR to protect you from Tyrant. It should help with Olympians, though. -
Quote:I've experienced the second form, but generally when it's stayed on, it's stayed on fully. I can see my monitored stats vary in combat in the expected with Assault and Melee, and I can see expected control effects with Control.Originally Posted by Virusman
Are you experiencing it perma, truly, or does it just LOOK like you're experiencing it perma?
There's a very common bug where it keeps running but doesn't actually provide you any benefit until you manually toggle it off, and wait 2 more mins to start it up again.
Trust me, on the characters I'm using them on and the way I'm playing them, I can tell the difference when it's not working and when it is, particularly for Melee and Control. (Assault I'm sure I could fail to notice without checking my monitor.)
Actually, you're disagreeing with me. At its current levels, using T4 at least, I think I do see why we can't use it full time.Quote:Originally Posted by Virusman
But either way, I agree. The current statistics don't scream "T9 SURVIVAL SKILL RAAAAA" it seems completely reasonable to me that you'd be able to run it at all times at the current strength, which is why I was so disappointed to finally use it.
Here's an anecdotal example. I have a +3 Stone Melee / Fiery Aura Brute that I run in DA on +4/x8. I normally rely quite a bit on Barrier when piling into large numbers of Ancestral Sorcerers, because they have a fairly nasty defense debuff power. A couple of days ago, using T4 Melee Core, I was able to stay in the middle of a fresh spawn while debuffed by that power (Curse of Weariness) and Katana attacks, which together were dropping my L/S defense to around 12%. Twice during that my HP were pushed down to the 30-50% range in time for me to bounce back with Healing Flames before I cleared enough of the spawn that I was no longer in any real danger. I play DA repeatables a lot looking for Catalysts, and I've been in that situation before - without Melee Core I would have needed to pop Barrier to survive that level of debuff while standing in the middle of a fresh spawn.
It's not as dramatic a change as popping Barrier, but it was very, very noticeable. -
OK, you have lots of epic pool powers. I'm not sure what your chain for them looks like, but since Epics have higher recharge than their damage would indicate, Radial ends up huge for them compared to the base damage, even in AoEs.
One thing: your Spin is listed with 0 radius, which has its Radial damage much higher than it should be.
Edit: Hm, I get really different numbers. For that chain I got 1402.6 for I23 Core and 1050.1 for I23 Radial.
Edit2: I think I see why. I'm using Mids and it's including the Toxic DoT in the base damage display, and it's much too large.
Edit3: OK, I don't know what Mids is showing me. I took the numbers from RedTomax, and they're much lower, even on Follow Up, which has no DoT. (Oddly, Spin is correct in Mids, but not the ST stuff.) Anyway I now have the same per-attack damage you do to within 0.01 points. I still got really different numbers for the chain you listed, though. With the corrected damage numbers, I get 899.24 for Core and 1050.11 for Radial. Radial's lead is all in Follow Up - the Radial version is ahead by sixty points using I23 calculations, and nearly 50 using I23s. That wildly dominates the deltas between Core and Radial in the rest of the attacks in the chain.
Now, my own build heavily leverages Spin, and Core seriously dominates on that power. So if I chose Radial to maximize single-target DPS, I would cut fairly deeply into the AoE damage cycle I could have with Core.
If anything, this analysis shows that it's not cut and dried which is better. Powers which do significantly less damage than their recharge would suggest, such as some mezzes, many Epic Pool powers, and powers like Follow Up, can have really dramatic impact on how Radial compares to Core for a given build and play style. -
I think the original bug was inconsistent like that. But I also don't think it would explain Whirling Smash. Well, unless there were subtleties that either weren't mentioned or that I just didn't grok.
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Quote:There were some previous issues identified with cones that were somehow being treated as single-target attacks for PPM purposes. I thought it was fixed. I wonder if the same bug has crept into the DoubleHit code.Originally Posted by Hopeling
So, one cone works as expected, another cone thinks it's a single-target attack, and a radial AoE deals very slightly too much damage, but single-target attacks seem to work as expected. I can't test with other powersets myself, because I only have the one character with Hybrid so far; more data and/or more eyes on the problem would be helpful to figure this out.
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I can't see your spreadsheets. Are they visible to the general public?
I'm curious about them, because that result seems non-intuitive to me.
Is your attack chain heavily composed of the longer-recharge attacks?
Edit: Using my local spreadsheet, I added the attacks for my melee Widow and the only melee attack for which Radial added more damage was Follow Up, which makes sense, as its damage is low for its recharge. That's for I23 settings. -
Having used it, I actually wouldn't be fine with it being roughly half as weak, which is what I presume it would be changed to, ballpark, if it was up 100%. Naturally, I wish I could keep the benefit full time, but I can see why the devs might not want that. After all, given its current bugs, I've actually experienced it perma.
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I'm also expecting Tyrant to have complete immunity to -regen. I'm not sure if that was intended, but it might be.
Even if his two resistances were compounded instead of added together, he would be reducing all -regen effects to around 3% of their base value, and that would be for even-level effects.
Edit: By the way, Tyrant definitely does scale with league size. Tyrant grows in +MaxHP and +Damage with larger leagues. He also suffers a regen debuff that increases in a stepwise fashion at 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24 players. (That's right, the more players there are, the less he regens. This Regen debuff cannot be resisted, so his 100% resistance is irrelevant.) These scaling effects are standard for iTrial AVs in all trials, but there are different values used in different trials for how high the scaling is. -
It's probably worth PMing that to either Synapse or Arbiter Hawk. I don't want to assume they don't know their own game, but sadly, Taunt has a history of being poorly understood due to a legacy of bad/absent documentation.