Official Thread for Defense Scaling Changes
By
Alexio_DeAmore,
Posted on: 2006-05-01 13:40 in Developers' Corner
Played a little on my EM/SR stalker. Wehn elude was down I was a bit more surviable then live - it was nice. When elude was up I was DRAMATICALLY less surviable then live... but this is because on live with elude running I could tank a full 8-person mission spawn. With elude I could only tank a +3 boss, +3 lt, and a couple +3 minions, oh nos! Any more and I'd die!
All in all good smoothing out of gameplay.
Lucks however are now dramatically overpowered (instead of just moderately overpowered). Anyone can use two and floor all foes - SR can use one and floor all foes.
Furthermore, if things are left as they are I'm going to drop evasion from my build. If hide is unsuppressed or elude is running its useless, and the end cost of the power is still frustrating.
I've tried to organize most of the common questions/comments about the I7 Defe - ahem, the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler in a FAQ, posted here. Its not meant to deliberately divert people away from the official thread, but more to allow me to point people to a more organized place where the questions are answered in order, instead of a long thread. Discussion *about* the change should stay here in the Official Thread; I'm maintaining the FAQ specifically as an information resource to help support the thread. Any discussion of the merits of the change, testing to verify the change, apparent bugs regarding the change, lodged opposition to the change, or possible non-mechanical ramifications of the change (should I slot my passives now?) that show up in the FAQ thread will be redirected back to this one.
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yeah, I see a lot of folks complaining but I was running against rularuu, my bubbled imps actually got missed a fair # of times. Normally with Rulrauu, they ignored the bubbles. These were only +1 but the bubbles kinda worked now.
I saw little difference vs other things of similar level though facing a -5 that they were actually able to hit as often as some even con posessed scientists I fought which I though was interesting. I did no actual TEST's though, it's all observation.
On a side note, they seem to have added sleeping (tranq) darts to malta bosses, that do a 100% toggle drop, though no actual sleep (yay another unresistable toggle dropper!).
I for one have noticed a completely terrible change to my SS/EA brute. It seems I can no longer stand toe to toe with much of anything anymore without getting constantly ganked. On live, I was just fine and can take on +3 with no problem but now, it seems out of the question. I thought it was supposed to be "fixed", not get worse.
Lucky & Evasion
While you're fixing DEF-based issues, wouldn't now be a good time to reverse the order of Lucky and Evasion in SR? The melee & ranged defenses offer the strong toggle before the weak passive, and level 35 is a little late to be getting decent AoE defense. Heck, 28 is late to be getting AoE defense.
This is especially true when you compare Scrappers to Stalkers, who get a massive AoE +DEF in their first, mandatory Secondary power. And /Nin Stalkers then get AoE +DEF with their equivalent to Focused Senses. So the /SR Scrapper is the only one that has to cower from AoE-using mobs until late game.
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This change does not affect PvP.
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Just out of curiousity, are there any plans to address Defense in PvP on a future date? I'd really like to see a solution that isn't an across the board accuracy nerf.
Probably going to reiterate things that have already been said, but oh well. Anyway, I played around with my BS/Regen and EM/EA brute. My observations are as follows:
1. For my brute, I noticed a substantial difference when fighting +2's: it really seemed like they were only hitting me 2/3 as much as they normally did. I didn't notice nearly as much a change on +3's, though. While there might have been some reduction, it wasn't particularly noticible. Which, in looking at the math, is probably what SHOULD have happened. Bosses were also noticibly easier.
In contrast, Epic Bosses seemed to have gotten much harder - I solo'ed a couple of these folks previous to I7, and it wasn't THAT hard. Now, it took me 5 deaths to kill a Balista EB. Which, again, looking at the math, it probably what SHOULD be the case.
2. On the other hand, my BS/Regen scrapper is now neigh-unstoppable, with the use of parry. Assuming I mix parry into my attack chain, my health didn't drop below 80% at any given time. In particular, I noticed a SUBSTANTIAL change against +2's, and a modest change against +3's. Whenever I had parry double-stacked against a +3, it was extremely noticible.
3. Lucks are now really overpowered now - I learned this when soloing a +3 Balistta Epic Boss (which, admitadly, took me 5 attempts), and it was essentially "always keep 2 lucks running and ignore my toggle defenses". This is probably an unbalanced thing.
In general, I found that this change was nice, but didn't really help out my Brute or Scrapper all that much - I've been soloing on +2/+3 ever since the late teens, and this just made it easier. Bosses are a bit easier, but anything more than that got tougher. However, I'm guessing that I can probably team with either of them now with less chance of face-planting, so that's a plus. I probably should test that out as well...
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I for one have noticed a completely terrible change to my SS/EA brute. It seems I can no longer stand toe to toe with much of anything anymore without getting constantly ganked. On live, I was just fine and can take on +3 with no problem but now, it seems out of the question. I thought it was supposed to be "fixed", not get worse.
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I experienced the opposite. I have a very very tough time on live with +3s. On test I took on 9 (2 lts, 7 min) + 3 and killed 7 of them before I fell.
GF
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This change does not affect PvP.
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Just out of curiousity, are there any plans to address Defense in PvP on a future date? I'd really like to see a solution that isn't an across the board accuracy nerf.
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In a sense, Defense works fine in PvP: ever since they changed the base tohit in PvP from 75% to 50%, Defense has been scaled right.
The problem is really that tohit buffs are too strong. But balancing *them* seems to be a sticky problem. Its more complex than it first looks, and on top of that the devs seem to be reluctant to mess with them.
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I can imagine what a sticky problem it is. The biggest reason that pops in my mind is how incredily useful and important they are in PvE.
PvE foes have long had fairly ubiquitous access to toHit debuffs and defense, usually through Dark Blast / Dark Miasma type powers and Force Field powers. Every mob certainly doesn't have these powers, but you do encounter it in almost every spawn when facing certain factions.
In my experience, toHit buffs are crucial in countering these powers on mobs, because the mobs have them at higher levels of functionality than players can have in the modern game. That, and at higher character levels, we tend to face higher-level foes more often. The debuffs of higher level foes are stronger and our base toHit is lower against them.
I suspect that serious tuning of the balance of toHit bonuses in PvP would require a rework of the toHit calculation system. I'm not suggesting that can't be done, but we know based on previous dev comments that it would be very difficult, and it would require a review of the defense, accuracy/toHit and related debuffs for every power and mob in the game.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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I for one have noticed a completely terrible change to my SS/EA brute. It seems I can no longer stand toe to toe with much of anything anymore without getting constantly ganked. On live, I was just fine and can take on +3 with no problem but now, it seems out of the question. I thought it was supposed to be "fixed", not get worse.
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Could you do any sort of measurements on this?
"On live, I got to 50% health in 10 seconds standing there in front of six +3 mobs, on test I got killed in the same time" or something?
Or "On test, I fought four +3 minions and an lt of [type x] and died; on live, same spawn, I lived"?
Also include the level of brute, and maybe what powers you had running.
The goal of the bug report is to have something people can replicate.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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I suspect that serious tuning of the balance of toHit bonuses in PvP would require a rework of the toHit calculation system. I'm not suggesting that can't be done, but we know based on previous dev comments that it would be very difficult, and it would require a review of the defense, accuracy/toHit and related debuffs for every power and mob in the game.
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Another possibility is leveraging pieces of what already exist. A long time ago, I suggested creating a form of Defense called Elusivity that would in essence work like negative accuracy. As it turns out, theoretically Elusivity could exist: it could exist as an accuracy debuff, which the game engine theoretically supports, but doesn't actually ever do (there are powers with inherent accuracy penalties, like AoE mezzes, but nothing actually debuffs accuracy).
I mention this because if Defense itself was broken up into true Defense and AccDebuff-style Elusivity-like Defense, it would open the door for high tohit buffs to be broken down into +tohit and +acc components, in a way that would better prevent one from tearing down the other. And it wouldn't (to the best of my knowledge) require severe modifications to the game engine, but only an add-on piece of tech to properly implement (essentially) the dangling hooks of -acc. Maybe: I can only extrapolate based on what I've been told, since I haven't seen the source code myself.
It would require significant power value tweaking once it was added, but it would minimize the changes to the actual engine, which seem to be the most difficult of all changes to make.
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Not sure how that could work against ranged attacks, though. In melee it's nature is fairly obvious, however. And yes, splitting "hit chance" buffs into toHit and Accuracy components (subtly different but similar to what you're describing) did occur to me.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Not sure how that could work against ranged attacks, though. In melee it's nature is fairly obvious, however. And yes, splitting "hit chance" buffs into toHit and Accuracy components (subtly different but similar to what you're describing) did occur to me.
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You're thinking about an Elusivity defense as being a PBAoE debuff, like Cloak of Fear. Actually, I wasn't thinking of that:that would be *really* easy to do. The new tech I was thinking of would allow the devs to tag a defense power itself with -ACC, so that when attacked, during tohit/defense resolution, the presence of the power didn't just apply a +DEF to the tohit accumulator, it also applied an ACC factor less than zero to the attack, which would be an ACC debuff, but calculated at attack time when defense was resolved. It would require a new additional step in the tohit algorithm, but it would hijack a pre-existing mechanism (Accuracy Calculations) to perform the math, so the net change would be (relatively) minor. Again, based on what I know about how tohit works, which is more than most, but nothing about the actual source.
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I see.
I don't know. Given the scope of the power review and the need to chage the central algorithm to add that step, it might be worth reviewing the whole process.
After all, if you need to refit that pipe and then check the water pressure in all the rooms, you might just as well consider installing a new pump. 
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Just some quick and dirty numbers; wondering if someone with better number-crunch foo could check these out, to make sure that they jive, please.
Me: Halley's Comet, L45 ice/ss tanker
Frozen Armor: +56.6% over base defense (S/L)
Glacial Armor: +56.4% over base defense (E/N)
Wet Ice: base defense (All but Psi)
Opponent: L45 Jaeger minion (white conn)
Attack: Jaeger Mace, smashing damage (117/98 damage, with/without chilling embrace)
With FA, GA, WI, CE running:
100 attacks, 26 hits.
With FA, WI, CE running:
100 attacks, 24 hits.
With FA, CE running:
100 attacks, 28 hits.
With FA running:
100 attacks, 32 hits.
With no armor:
100 attacks, 51 hits.
FA is the only thing there that matters here for the mace hitting you.
Best I recall, FA is 17% base S/L defense. So, your slotting should put you at roughly 26.6% defense to the Mace. Expected hit rate for a white minion is 50% (which jives with your no defenses 51/100). Expected hit rate when FA is on is about 24%. All your numbers jive pretty well with this given the fairly low quantity of attacks counted.
Looks pretty much as expected to me.
What are these new paragon protector elites you speak of?
Bump and Grind Bane/SoA
Kenja No Ishi Earth/Empathy Controller
Legendary Sannin Ninja/Pain Mastermind
Entoxicated Ninja/PSN Mastermind
Ninja Ryukenden Kat/WP Scrapper
Hellish Thoughts Fire/PSI Dominator
Thank You Devs for Merits!!!!
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hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.
i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.
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But that's not the reason it won't change Hami all that much. It's because this change only affects critters' accuracies, not our defense. It has no bearing on how hard it will be to hit a critter, regardless of whether it has defense or not. I'll second Arcana's petition - the name is going to be very misleading for a lot of people who don't obsessively post about (Arcana) or read about (me) these changes.
Though, one thing that might be interesting is depending on Hami's acc numbers, defense based sets may be able to make Hami miss once in a while now. That is, if they even changed his numbers, he may just have insanely high to-hit and acc regardless.
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Nope. Hamidon's attacks are untyped - meaning, no "smash/lethal etc" and ALSO no "melee, ranged, AoE" typing. This means no typed defense of *any* kind works against it, including super reflexes defenses, which are "typed" in terms of m/r/aoe.
Theoretically speaking, only "base defense" would work against Hamidon (the almost legendary "defense to all" defense) but I have no idea if any powers at the moment possess base defense (at one time, it was rumored that Elude did, as well as PFF, and Fortitude. I have no idea if any of that is true).
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To put in my 2 cents worth... Dispersion bubble is a +DEF(All) and Personal Force field is a +DEF....
Deflectin shield, and insulation shield are both typed def.
so in theory anyhow, both DB and PFF should "defend" against even hamidon's attacks. Multiple, stacked Dispersion bubbles may even do some damage mitigation through superior DEF. the "castables" though will still be for naught against His Royal Jelloness.
Since the odds of getting a Hamidon raid together on test, are almost non-exsistant Just to test Dispersion Bubble effectiveness are lower than a Contaminated's chance of surviving in atlas park.....We'll have to wait till it goes live, to test :-(
Addendum...
I feel NO sympathy for you MOG guys and gals...
though i too have a regenn scrapper, from the way you all talk, it sounds as if most of you are I3 or earlier regenners. I know you've taken more than your fair share of nerfs in the past, but FINALLY, this update lets me, as a FF defender, take on mobs more than 1, yes ONE, level above me. I can actually stand against a purple buss, and survive long enough to attack back(aka without PFF). haven't felt this powerful since ED kicked me in the tush. Start doing like the Paragon Protectors... run all your powers, hitIH when you get a little nervous... at the last moment, Throw out MoG and hope you and or your team can finish off the last few standing enemies. or use that 30 seconds to RUN like the rest of us :-)
/endrant about how everyone else is better defended/does more damage/controls better/survives longer/fights tougher enemies/etc. than me.
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To put in my 2 cents worth... Dispersion bubble is a +DEF(All) and Personal Force field is a +DEF....
Deflectin shield, and insulation shield are both typed def.
so in theory anyhow, both DB and PFF should "defend" against even hamidon's attacks. Multiple, stacked Dispersion bubbles may even do some damage mitigation through superior DEF. the "castables" though will still be for naught against His Royal Jelloness.
Since the odds of getting a Hamidon raid together on test, are almost non-exsistant Just to test Dispersion Bubble effectiveness are lower than a Contaminated's chance of surviving in atlas park.....We'll have to wait till it goes live, to test :-(
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Def(All) is often used as a synonym for "Def(All types)" which is synonymous with "Def(melee/ranged/aoe/smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative/psi)". This is, in fact, the typing of power pool defenses, which were changed to this sort of typing to ensure they always stacked with whatever defense you might have.
I specifically discussed this with the devs. Base defense would work against Hamidon, typed defenses of any kind, including implicitly typed defenses (defense to all [types]) won't work, because in essence none of the "types" protected by the defense power "match" Hamidon (no type). Base defense is, in a sense, "untyped" defense, and because it literally works against everything, without regard to type at all, it would work against Hamidon.
All you have to do now is find something with Base Defense.
You don't need to organize a raid to test this. Just go to test, go to the Hive, and slowly approach the goo until you are in range of exactly one Mito, and let it shoot at you. Hamidon Mito attacks and Hamidon Nucleus attacks are both pure untyped damage, and if the Mitos blast through you, the Hamidon Nucleus will also.
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I feel NO sympathy for you MOG guys and gals...
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MoG has real problems: its just that many regen scrappers are lashing out at the wrong thing this time.
MoG was broken in two ways in I6: its damage mitigation properties didn't make sense, in that they were too low, and it took advantage of the broken way Critter Accuracy scaled, which improved its performance somewhat.
One of the ways MoG was broken is being fixed in I7: it just happens to be the one that improved the power. Which to my way of thinking is better for Regen in the long run: without that covering up MoG's inherent problems, Regen scrappers have a much better case to be made now for fixing MoG. In I6, the one thing MoG *did* do was strongly scale upward in protection with higher level critters, something regeneration itself doesn't do (you might have been better off fighting +4s and +5s under MoG than IH, for at least a little while). The argument could be made that MoG delivered a capability otherwise lacking in the regen set as a whole.
Now that it doesn't do that anymore, the case for fixing MoG becomes much stronger, at least in my eyes.
Edit: fixed typo
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I feel NO sympathy for you MOG guys and gals...
though i too have a regenn scrapper, from the way you all talk, it sounds as if most of you are I3 or earlier regenners. I know you've taken more than your fair share of nerfs in the past, but FINALLY, this update lets me, as a FF defender, take on mobs more than 1, yes ONE, level above me. I can actually stand against a purple buss, and survive long enough to attack back(aka without PFF).
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I'm pretty sure this harshness is unwarranted. What people are asking for is for the power to make sense. It's not like we're asking for the Critter Accuracy change to be repealed because it makes MoG a bit worse. If the power provides a net decrease in survivability, then it's just dumb.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
On the whole this change is good. My /EA brute gets hit less on test than on live and it's great.
Where this becomes a problem is with higher accuracy mobs (AVs and such) that can no longer be floored to 5%.
To use a worst case scenario, Infernal. It takes slightly over one hit from him to kill my /EA brute. My main defense was to use overload so he couldn't hit me (unlike other sets this gives a +HP).
Now on test he'll get an AV and lvl acc bonus (the negatives of this are most evident in MoG). This will at least double the hits I'll take during the fight.
I propose one of the following to allow the tier 9 defense powers to operate at the 5% limit still.
1) No longer bound the to hit calculation at 5% before multiplying accuracy
2) Allow the tier 9 powers to get applied after the accuracy calculation (making them better than lucks and toggles which can't floor all oponents)
3) Have extra defense act as an acc debuff to allow asymptotic approach of 5%.
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Love the new 'deflected' instead of 'miss'.
Actual onscreen evidence of FF buffs etc having an effect.
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Maybe now other methods of damage mitigation than TEH HEALZ will be recognised, eh?
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Yes, probably the biggest QoL upgrade for non-healers. Forcefield, Radiation and Dark will all be "appreciated" for what they do.
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Oddly, this buff will result in me not playing my FF Defenders. More than one is now overkill, after all.
In other news, I've failed to notice the whole "Empath Bias". Maybe playing in solely pickup groups caused me to miss it? 
Currently playing:
Infaerna Who knew Fire/Fire Brutes were fun to play?
Well, I guess it depends on what the devs are after.
Most "long-term" toHit debuffs have larger bases than "long-term" toHit buffs. That means that slapping, say, Radiation Infection on someone will more than cancel their, say, Focused Accuracy.
This may be intentional. There's no clear indication that the devs want us to cripple other players with debuffs the way we cripple mobs. If the opponents lack toHit buffs we can cripple them, and if they have toHit buffs we can (potentially, I'm ignoring the other mechanics of some of the debuffs, here), we can leave them a bit worse off than they started. If such characters then face off against defense sets such as Ice or SR, they will have serious problems.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening in practice. For one thing, the more powerful toHit debuffs tend to be hard to apply in a variety of environments. More importantly, being hit is, in general, less important than simply mitigation the effects of being hit - at least for most armored ATs. Thus defense and DR buffs and healing are preferred to debuffs. At least that's how it seems currently.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA