da5id

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Would you say that 50% resistance was "stronger" for tankers than blasters? I wouldn't. But 50% resistance acts to increase survivability between the two in a proportional way, not a linear way. Resistance doesn't buy everyone a fixed amount of time, everyone reacts to resistance in a percentage way; incoming damage drops by the same fraction, survivability goes up by a different fraction.

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Actually, I would consider Tankers to benefit more from 50% resistance than a Blaster...


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Actually, that's exactly Arcana's point! Yes, the tanker's survivability is proportionately larger, but the saying that the resistance itself is stronger is a misuse of terminology, and just tends to confuse the unwary.

Imprecise definitions of "stronger", "survivability", "offense/defense" etc do more to confuse the comparisons between the ATs than they do to help it.

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10% is 10%, no matter the AT.

100 health vs 140 health is defintely not the same, especially considering in most cases that 140 health is being applied to someone with a good deal of damage resistance. It means that the tanker with the same scale of heal will almost certainly survive longer than a blaster with a 100 point heal.

Surely, you agree with that?

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The issue is that there are two mutually exclusive ways of looking at the effect of base health.

In the first case, you're looking at the total HP that the person has. Let's say that the tank has 1400 HP, and the blaster has 1000. Let's say that disregarding resistances, each is hit for 100 damage per attack.

The tank will fall in 14 attacks without healing, and 15.4 attacks with a 140hp heal.

The blaster will fall in 10 attacks without healing, and 11 attacks with a 100hp heal.

The second way to look at it is from the perspective of % health. The 100 damage hit does 10% damage to the blaster but ~7.14% damage to the tanker.

The 10% heal simplisitcally allows a total 110% of base health to be depleted before death, therefore

the blaster will fall in 10 hits without the heal, and 11 hits with the 10% heal

the tanker, 14 hits without the heal, and 15.4 hits with the 10% heal.

Thus you see from both perspectives the answer is the same.

The mistake that Arcana is warning against comes when you try to apply the effect of the extra base HP twice, once to the survivability and once to the heal.

Ie it would be a misleading to say "A tanker has 140% of base survivability of the blaster, and in addition his heal is 140% the effectiveness of the blaster." This is effectively double counting the base hit point ratio. This implies for someone who doesn't know what they are doing:

blaster survival = (1000hp * (100% + 10% heal)/(100hp/hit) = 10 hits
tanker survival = (1400hp *(100% + 14% heal)/(100hp/hit) = 15.96 hits
which is incorrect.

Not many people actually performing such a calculation would make this error, however it can be easy while in looking at it in a qualitative fashion to fall prey the mental shorthand and make the double-counting mistake.

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More base health is exactly equivalent to an increase in Res,

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Exactly but there is more. Increased base HP equals increased natural resistance, or basicaly, its the same as having the same hp as everyone else but inherent resistance, only its a second layer of resistance that does not stack with the resistance we know now.

Additionaly, higher base HP does not only resists incoming damage, it also resists incoming external heals.

HP buffs in a similar maner also make you more resistant to both, damage and external heals, PLUS they make you resistant to self heals.

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Yes, it's not a linear mapping, but that's fairly obvious. The point is that Arcana is right on the money with her post.

No, Aracana's analysis is exactly right. This is precisely how you have to set up the finite state machine equivalent to calculate Time To Live models.

More base health is exactly equivalent to an increase in Res, the effect of self healing in such a calculation is not changed. (In fact the major change when looking at such models is the effect of EXTERNAL heals on the Character.. those with more base health gain less from external heals than those with an equivalent res)

Split damage type is occured at the sime server tick, so it's gotta be ok.

How long such a tick is, is unclear. So at what threshold would it kick in for two/few-shots

I'm going to have to agree with most of the others on this thread plasma. I don't see the numbers as supporting your case.

Now being forced to take ANY Of the first tier attacks is something legitimate that we can complain about. As very few of them have any use outside of a brute attack chain.

I'm wondering if this is going to lead to an eventual migration of all toHit type buffs to be Acc multipliers instead. That way they would affect Def and Res types, on average, in exactly the same way...

Giving us something like
Avg %Dam = (Acc buffs)*(0.5-Defbuffs+Defdebuffs)*(1-RESbuffs+RESdebuffs)

Of course doing this would require a new DEF cap similar to the RES cap.

We haven't had a butt joke thread for ages! Huzzah! All we need now is Ivy popping in and giving us the tongue!

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I'm not a sissy! I'm just afraid of Iron Vixen!

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What's the worst that could happen? She might REAR END you.

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She'd AssAssinate me for sure. It'd be the end of me.

I'm not a sissy! I'm just afraid of Iron Vixen!

Thanks oh bearded one! It's very good to know. May any sparrows that inhabit your beard never develop irritable bowel syndrome.

I had always assumed that it wasn't present in PvP, but I never got around to testing it. (As a charter member of the IVFbC I can't be seen doing PvP, even for testing!)

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It's fixed internally. Should arrive on the test server "Soon" (aka hopefully the patch after next).

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If I may ask, how have you fixed it? Is this a change in the nature of gauntlet as a zero-radius AoE? or is it a change in the order in which things get activated (so that activation occurs at the same moment as the aoe is targeted and the opponent has less of a chance to move away..)? or is it some other change?

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You know I've actually never recognized this bug before, maybe it doesn't work with Battle Axe.

Funny thing though, just today a Blaster challenged my Tank to an arena match, and I decided to, thing was I missed him about 90% of the time, in all seriousness. Even with build up (slotted with ToHit SOs), my attacks all have about 2 Acc SO's on average, I was even running Invincibility (slotted with a ToHit SO) and I missed him that many times! I checked his info, he had NO defense powers at all, not even combat jumping or anything from the pools. He never stopped moving, seeing as he was a Super Speeder.

He was also 3 levels ahead've me.. so either something is up with Axe (just like the other Tanker primaries) or a 3 level gap really makes a huge difference in defense.

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I ran a test last night with ChillGiant, my level 15 Ice/Axe tank. I hunted in atlas with out Chill Embrace on. I would arrest one member of a group, and set Gash to auto. After they failed to hit me, they would run. I would chase and bump into their back (so as to not over shoot them), Gash would activate, but no hit or miss message. {So much for the Streak Breaker} It would use End, though. The longest streak I had was 6, after that the mob would forget about me and stop running. ---S P L A T--- This went on for about a half hour.

Then I turned on Chilling Embrace, and I hit every mob I bumped. I think this is because the mob wasn't out of range when the attack went off???


Thank You, WeirdBeard !!! The sooner the better!!!
And thanx to you, Ravenlute , for all the testing you did! Five stars for YOU!

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It definately is buggged for axe. Here's a demo I recorded a while back of an Axe test when we were first characterizing the bug.

CE doesn't have the same bug because it is a PbAOE with a non-zero radius. Even if things move, their speed would have to exceed the amount necessary to put them outside that radius before the power fired in order for the same "bug" to occur.

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Wait, that's not my mom. That's our French-Canadian cleaning lady! What have you been doing?

Dear lord, man, she's 78!

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Zut alors! Tabernac!

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And here I was thinking I was being all clever with this AoE theory. Here you guys have apparently already been discussing such a theory. How do I miss this stuff? Are there some super secret Tanker meetings I can get invited to?

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The zero-radius AOE idea was discussed way back when Gauntlet (punchvoke then) was first introduced. (In fact I do believe I was the first to discover both the stacking (long ago) and the moving target (more recently) bugs, as well as formulate the zero-radius AoE explanation)

Also yes, the meetings are held in Foo's mom's basement. The secret password is "Aggro".

It shouldn't matter Circ, since any movement takes it out of a zero-radius aoe. Only no net movement should matter (either no actual movement, or movement back and forth in the time between power activation and hit calculation).

*eeep I broke my new year's resolution about not posting during work hours!*

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a massive spawn of bad guys

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Thats the main kicker so many people are having a problem with. The number of bad guys Tanks can take on has changed dramatically from I4 to now.


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No, really it's not. It is for some, but for a lot of vets it's not really about a comparison to what we could do in I4. We all knew it was too much.

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The question is, do the players need to redefine their perception of what a Tanker can now do and let go of the past?


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The question is, when will people stop throwing around this strawman.

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Or, is it that other ATs (at a similar level to given established Tank) can take on the same number of villians **with the same style of tactics** and out tank a Tanker? - This has yet to be proven true. Plenty of opinion and speculation, but no proof.


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There is certainly proof for specific cases of this, but across the large spectrum of all cases of teams and situations assembling such proof would be onerous. However I think you are missing the true crux of the matter.

Really the problem is twofold:

First now it is often not advantageous to use a meatsheild (especially in low buffing situations). Yes Tanks would be slightly more effective in these situations than other ATs, but costs of using a meatshield centric strategy outweighs the benefits much of the time now, because of the lowering of overall defenses. (And again, I can only offer playtesting "evidence" of certain cases, since it is nigh impossible to experience all cases, however we fairly good at analyzing play in this game)

Second is that when the balance has tilted enough in the team and situational configuration, I, and many others, find that the buffing needed to make Tankers worthwhile tanks, is the same in magnitude to the buffing that makes scrappers or sometimes even squishies, able to tank sufficiently as well (what you are addressing essentially). Clearly in the limiting cases these situations where a tank is not useful exist. The question is do they overlap in the majority of cases or not?

I could go on with the specifics we've hashed out again and again over the last few weeks, but my point is that MANY of the concerns we've discussed on the forum have NOTHING to do with a comparison to the past performance.

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They should get something like this:

The more tanks become injured, the more resilient they become.

A useful PvP inherent power too IMO.

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I've already posted on this before, but while I agree that something like this would be great, I would prefer that it be an active measure, rather than a reactive measure as you suggest.

The performance of the type of power you are talking about would be hard limited at the survivability based on a large number of infinitesimal strikes. Whereas it's actual performance will fall below that and depend only on the hit sizes, a property of the mob rather than a property of the playstyle.

I would prefer an active measure (a la the oft suggested defensive Fury bar or something along those lines) that depends on the playstyle/tactics for the bonus such that our abilities can be improved through good play, rather than by the size of the hits we encounter.

To me the the fundamental difficulty in the AT design (completely aside from the entire balance issue right now) is the passive nature of the primary.

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I'm just gonna get out an old tool of mine to respond to my buddy Circeus here:
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The goal of the game is to make sure there isn't an ideal team composition. So, yes, a Scrapper, with buffs, can tank, but not as well as a Tanker. Why? Because 1) a Tanker starts with higher resistances/defenses and 2) he has Punchvoke and thus can manage the aggro better.

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Re (1): doesn't matter, Defender and Controller buffs are so strong, and the differnece between Scrappers and Tankers defenses is so narrow that when viewed in terms of buffs that can be applied, the difference becomes a non-issue. When it takes just as much buffing and/or healing to keep a Scrapper alive to accomplish the same task, which is where the game is right now, the difference in initial values and caps become meaningless. So the Scrapper becomes the better choice because they can contribute more damage.

Re (2): But the question isn't does he manage agro better, it becomes does the fact that the Tanker can manage agro better matter. And the answer again is the fact that he can becomes meaningless.

It is true that pre-I5 a Tanker may have overshadowed both Controllers and Defenders too much. But now Controllers and Defenders overshadow Tankers too much, and are also capable of making other ATs overshadow Tankers too much.

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Quoted for emphasis.

Jack/Statesman, please pay attention to what's being said here. This isn't a "we used to be super" complaint, it's "our role is probably unnecessary because we can't do it better than others to a degree that is meaningful".

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QFdoubleE

I don't have much time to respond at work today, but I think it's important that you understand where we are coming from on this States. Circeus nails it pretty much dead on. The defensive changes of I5 and I6 were considered necessary by many of us, however I think that in your efforts to make sure we were not able to do certain things, not enough attention was paid to ensure that were still able to BE something worthwhile.

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So has the new Dull Pain and similar powers 'fixed' Tankers somewhat? Is more hp better than Resist most forms of damage?

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On heroic, Tanks seem to be well-balanced versus the other sets in teams--in other words, a team with a tank in it does no better or worse than a team with other ATs.

However, we're still lacking a clearly-defined role in the game that is unique to our AT.

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Aye, though i'd point out that rolling continuous damage was more important than anything else. At no point was defense really even tested.

You've been informed that raspberriies are nerfed. Continue to use them at your own peril.

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From Statesman on the Euro forums:

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I've responded to the tanker issue - I've played builds myself, described my tactics. I'll gladly try different builds and circumstances...but all in all, I feel a tanker can still Tank.

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And I still call BS. His one posted test involved using the broken version of Invincibility. He also completely glosses over the fact that when buffed, any AT can Tank, so what then is so special about Tanks?

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This really shows how much we need a Tanker rep more than anything else.

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I believe this is why your equation says that 75% will lead to 75.29% and the simulations show that it's more like 75.27%.

I just don't have the math background to point this out more eligantly.

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Also your simulations would need to run through 18.7 million iterations before you can say claim an sample uncertainty of 0.01% in your mean.

(0.75*0.25)/(0.0001)^2 = N samples.

I'm going to go ahead and trust the analytic solution that Pippy and I got two seperate ways.

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1) Unless ALL lvl 48 minions have signifigant (More than 34.5%)(124.5 -34.5 still puts me at the 90% to-hit range which dictates a maximum streak of 1 miss) defense bonuses or accuracy debuffs, It holds true. Maybe it's just me, but I think this is a somewhat reasonable assumption to start from.


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34.5% DEF would actually give a net toHit (with your two ACC SOs) of
1.66*(0.75-0.345) = 67.23%.

In fact it takes a 17.7% Def value to drop you to 95% net ToHit. After that point it is a quick decrease of at a rate of -1.66% to hit for each % of Def.