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Math Modeling
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I see this and can't help but think,
'Oh, yeah, work it. Derive that function!'
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Project: N-way. Next on Bravo.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
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Blah.
I keep trying to reply, but I'm in our Writing Lab and my own students keep coming up with anxieties about their papers due tomorrow. (Pesky students. 
No, actually, I'm not complaining about them; I'm just explaining why this is so short.)
In any event, I think I've pretty much articulated what I think on the matter. It's good to know the equation. I'm not sure that much more can be made out of that without establishing one's own idiosyncratic, arbitrary standards.
40062: The World's Worst PUG
84008: Jenkins's Guide to Super-Villainy
230187: The Hero of Kings Row
No H8 - 08.04.10
@Circuit Boy - Moderator - Pride global chat channel
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Fusilier, we got a new member! Welcome to the Conspiracy club...*hands Circuit_Boy a T-shirt with "I am with the wierdo" printed on it*..Later we are going to prove that "magic bullets" made by the Illuminati are not flawed against undead zombies and are just as good as hollow point rounds.
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Yeah, okay...
I'll put this next to my copy of [u]The Homosexual Agenda[u].
40062: The World's Worst PUG
84008: Jenkins's Guide to Super-Villainy
230187: The Hero of Kings Row
No H8 - 08.04.10
@Circuit Boy - Moderator - Pride global chat channel
Ok...guess someone didn't see the humor in it. Its great that people like Arcana spend the time to prove something, but I just like to enjoy the game as it is. Have fun finding mathematics equations over a [censored] game, Circuit_Boy.
Outrider:
You're right. SOMEONE didn't see the humor there...
...but that someone wasn't me.
It's ironic to accuse someone else of being humorless when you missed the joke yourself.
40062: The World's Worst PUG
84008: Jenkins's Guide to Super-Villainy
230187: The Hero of Kings Row
No H8 - 08.04.10
@Circuit Boy - Moderator - Pride global chat channel
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Outrider:
You're right. SOMEONE didn't see the humor there...
...but that someone wasn't me.
It's ironic to accuse someone else of being humorless when you missed the joke yourself.
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Sorry Circuit Boy, I completely misunderstood what you were implying and retract what I said. I can make myself look like a [censored] without trying 
No problem.
40062: The World's Worst PUG
84008: Jenkins's Guide to Super-Villainy
230187: The Hero of Kings Row
No H8 - 08.04.10
@Circuit Boy - Moderator - Pride global chat channel
On the "Sliver of life" issue:
I did a bunch of calculations as to where the "Sliver of life" would occur, based on assumptions [an enemy is supposed to get taken down by three "2.777 brawl" attacks, times scaling, and ED changed the scaling for the latter 2/3 of the game] but I don't know if those assumptions hold.
One possibility on "sliver of life": People get used to certain patterns- if BU + Aim + Fireball + Fire Breath takes down +1s consistently, you tend to fight that way. If you do what normally works and it doesn't work, because of [for instance] 20% energy resistance on Malta, you end up with a "sliver of life" and you notice. Blasters notice "sliver of life" a lot more than nonblasters because it's so all-or-nothing.
This is similar to the "fight what you can barely beat" theory of Arcanaville's.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
Quick Reply:
Great thread!
A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.
I must be stalking you today, _Castle_. 
What would you guys think of a Defiance that had the same maximums and minimums that the current Defiance has, but ramps up a bit sooner and more smoothly? Like the 2nd equation Arcana posted later in the thread. Just curious to your thoughts on a modification like that.
Edit: And it still counts as a "First!" post even if it's on the following page. Just lie and tell me it is.
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I have a thought about that, something related to vigilence. I can't quite express it fully yet, but when the thought finally settles I'll post it here.
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I would really look forward to an analysis of this sort for Vigilance.
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Vigilence is a little trickier to analyze because of its group dynamic. But what I was thinking about was more of a perspective on defiance and vigilence rather than their actual strength (although that is part of it).
One interesting complaint that is shared to a degree between both inherents is that in effect, they reward bad play. You can only get the damage boost from defiance if you get punched in the face a lot, you can only get a lot of it if you put yourself at significant risk of death (intentionally or not). The same is somewhat true for vigilence: you can only get a boost from it if, in effect, you let your team get beat up.
Both seem to penalize good play. A blaster that protects himself well cannot get much of a boost from defiance. A defender that protects her team well cannot get much of a boost from vigilence.
But I was thinking about how the SR passive resistances work in relation to this. A lot of people don't fully appreciate that those resistances are a lot stronger than they appear, specifically because they (often, not always) get stronger as they are needed most: that acts to skew their net effect higher, because they only apply power where necessary, and not anywhere else.
In a sense, defiance and vigilence can act in a manner similar to those resistances: as "bumpers" that tend to kick players back into normal realms of play. A blaster might *attempt* to play without getting damaged a lot, but defiance acts as a partial safety net for when they fail: and in degrees, the more they fail, the stronger it acts to kick them back, by increasing their kill speed and presumably reducing their incoming damage. Vigilence has a similar negative feedback effect: if you don't protect your team well enough that they start to take damage, your endurance goes up to give you more options to be profligate with your powers to keep them alive.
In effect, both defiance and vigilence are not buffs in the conventional sense, they are really gap reducers for the AT. They reduce the difference between perfect play and imperfect play: they reduce the penalty of errors.
Seen that way, both inherents are actually casual player tools of a sort. Training wheels for the AT, to reduce their difficulty: you can get the same benefit with less skill, and you cannot easily get lots more benefit with more skill.
This doesn't mean skilled players can't figure out ways to leverage both, but their overall intent might not be to boost those ATs, but rather to reduce the *spread* in their performance. And that *is* something that would show up in the datamining the devs probably do.
This says two things to me if true:
1. Defiance isn't actually comparable to something like criticals, and it never was. Criticals are a set-wide boost to scrappers: they make all scrappers better. Defiance and Vigilence aren't: they are learning-curve softeners. They reduce the gap between the best and worst blasters and defenders.
2. This reopens the question of whether or not blasters really do enough damage, because defiance isn't specifically a damage-boosting tool. That's secondary to its actual purpose. An interesting question would be to find out if the introduction of defiance, independent of other factors, improved the net average performance of all blasters, or if it primarily reduced the spread of performance around a similar average, or if the top performance stayed basically the same, the bottom moved up, and the average therefore moved up - but only by moving the worse performers upward, not because the blaster AT itself moved upward in performance overall.
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Both seem to penalize good play. A blaster that protects himself well cannot get much of a boost from defiance. A defender that protects her team well cannot get much of a boost from vigilence.
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They can also reward aggressive and risky play, where a team is trying to push just slightly beyond their normal boundries.
The "bumper" concept is an interesting one, definitely something think about.
-- War
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I suspect it has something to do with the fact that damage numbers were designed around a particular "metric" of number of attacks necessary to defeat a minion, and were scaled from there. That might have left a statistical "footprint" in how damage interacts with targets' health bars: how much "wastage" damage is done to a target (the amount of damage over and above necessary to defeat the target, and subsequently the likelyhood that one less attack might leave the target with a small sliver of health) might not be remotely random at all.
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I haven't read the entire thread yet, so sorry if this was already suggested: can the "sliver of health" thing be ED's fault?
Let's say you had a minion that you could kill with exactly six hits (say, 600HP, with the hit doing 100HP damage). Pre-ED, slotting for 6x damage would have killed it in two hits (two 300HP+ hits with green SOs). After-ED, 3x +3 SOs are only a 97.2% boost, so three hits take 591HP -- leaving the target with 9HP, a "sliver of health".
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Thanks to @EnsonsDeath for the GVE code that made me VIP again!
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Quick Reply:
Great thread!
A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.
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So if an inherent isn't being used, this wont show up? I don't have many blasters, (just saw this in the Dev digest) but I do know that Defiance rarely gets used at all on the ones i do have, I've never had a full bar, I think I may have had half a bar on rare occasions, maybe, and then i run away if i want to not die.... It kicks in too late to get used. I've heard of people using it when they had a sliver of life to basically one shot whatever is beating on them, but it is VERY rare. now Defenders, I have a lot of them, many above level 35, Rad, Storm, Dark, Trick Arrow. Pre Stamina, occasionally useful. But If I want to be able to solo at all, and I do with all of them because I don't like being dependent on a team no matter what I play, I take Stamina on all but my Trick Arrow. I also slot end redux where appropriate, to keep me going solo. So then the inherent is not really used, I have my endurance managed already. I may have more endurance than I would solo, but I was never in any danger of running out, even without Vigilance. It probably helps some 100% team focused characters manage to go without Stamina, but it's still really weak for the vast majority of Defenders who want to be able to solo their own missions sometimes.
But i use Gauntlet, Scrapper Criticals, Assassination, Containment, Domination, Fury, Scourge, Supremacy/Bodyguard VERY frequently, they are an important part of my characters. Defender and Blaster inherents though are barely touched. It may be that they are effective without them, but it still feels like those characters got shafted, because everyone else gets something that helps them more noticably/frequently. If we can't have something to add to effectiveness if we don't need it, why not have something fun?
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A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.
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Doesn't that make it terribly difficult to understand what contribution any given power or aspect provides to overall performance?
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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Both seem to penalize good play. A blaster that protects himself well cannot get much of a boost from defiance. A defender that protects her team well cannot get much of a boost from vigilence.
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They can also reward aggressive and risky play, where a team is trying to push just slightly beyond their normal boundries.
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Unfortunately, there are a wide range of defender primary and secondary combinations that Vigilance does virtually nothing to improve. If a Force Field or Dark Miasma Defender is a member of a team taking signficant damage, giving them an endurance discount has extremely little affect on their performance. Because of this, I consider Vigilance to actually not even meet the "bumper" goal for these example powersets.
I have always felt that Vigilance was conceived by someone who suffered from the Defender's favorite misconception: that all Defenders are Empaths (and "heal0r" ones at that). Vigilance rewards highly reactive play, and not all Defender powersets work reactively to any meaningful degree.
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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A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.
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Doesn't that make it terribly difficult to understand what contribution any given power or aspect provides to overall performance?
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This is why powers that need fixing never get fixed. They don't know what powers are underperforming because they don't take the time to even look unless we (the community) keep repeating it over and over and over until someone looks at it.
It takes dedicated people, like Arcanaville, to actually test and discover what needs fixing otherwise their datamining only shows slight performance drops because we have found ways around the holes (like taking Acrobatics on a Fire Tank).
50 Fire/Kin Cont
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50 Spine/Inv Scrap
50 Eng/Dev Blast
50 Claw/SR Scrap
50 Emp/Dark Def
50 Eng/Elec Brute
50 Fire/MM Blast
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Quick Reply:
Great thread!
A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.
[/ QUOTE ]Then you are doing it wrong. Because "over all performance" is not what you should be looking at. Lots of players are good enough to make the blaster AT "look" like it is performing right. But it is often not. And while some builds are performing right others are not.
Defiance is plainly broken. Stop "looking at overall performance" and go play an elec/dev to 50. Then tell me defiance is working.
Well, in theory, if all blasters are seeming to underperform, then they'll likely take a look at Defiance as a global blaster buff. If it's just a small subset of blasters who are lagging (say, /Fire blasters), then they'll buff specific sets.
Arcanaville raised a really good point, though. Has anyone ever considered that Defiance isn't for us forum users? As a general rule of thumb, the forumites tend to be better players overall than the average population, with all the number crunching and strategy sharing and such. The stuff we complain about doesn't always get looked at because, frankly, we're the minority.
Given that the game is balanced with an eye towards casual gamers, it seems likely that Defiance is there as a crutch for the casual gamer, and not something advanced players are even expected to benefit from. It's an equalizer for the people who don't or can't go winging around the room, kiting bosses, Aid Selfing on the fly, and making a mockery of the Invincible setting.
That said, there's still an argument to be made that the Defiance mulligan doesn't help so much at the higher levels. Even casual players can eventually reach level 40+, since debt is just a speedbump, not an obstacle. The equalizer doesn't help so much when a blaster's life is considerably more binary at that range. Me, I can survive just fine, but I really do wonder about John Q. Average who might not know he needs to take his epic pool hold at 41 to deal with Sappers and Rikti Mentalists.
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Has anyone ever considered that Defiance isn't for us forum users? As a general rule of thumb, the forumites tend to be better players overall than the average population, with all the number crunching and strategy sharing and such. The stuff we complain about doesn't always get looked at because, frankly, we're the minority.
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This comes back to a thought I've had, that bascially the devs don't think there is anything truly wrong with Blasters. While they admit that things get tough in the post-40 world, they don't believe the set underpreforms.
My hat is off to you Arcanaville for the "Cushion" theory. It makes sense and maybe explains alot of attention or lack there of.
And this is why i think you will never see a boost to Vigilance:
Because the overall performance of defenders is not only where they want it, but perhaps even higher in many cases.
The only reason Vigilance was added was so that defenders were not able to say "we are the only ones without an inherent"
One thing to remember as alluded to by Castle defiance is just one system in a system of systems (SoS). Looking at the overall performance can tell you how well a Blaster AT is working in the SoS than looking at just a small portion.
Does Defiance do what is advertised in the perception of the gamer? From the discussions I think not. Maybe our perceptions and preconceptions should be handled better by NCSoft.
Does it do what the developers expect within the SoS? That appears to be so as Castle implies with his comments.
When CoH came out it was City of Blasters and that had to be adjusted. We don't want to see that skewed dynamic again. That Defiance helps reduce the difference between good play and bad play is probably true. And as such it is a tool to be used by the Developers to adjust the ATs and reduce the impact of powergamers on the system.
Defiance is just a small part of the game and should not be taken out of the concept of the game as a whole. Does the Blaster AT still work with or without Defiance? Definitely, they are still one of the most popular ATs. And as a popular AT, each Blaster is played by a unique individual and as such Defiance will help or not according to that individuals skills.
Oh and great work Arcana love the analysis. This allows players to decide what playstyle to adapt using some concrete knowledge. Thumbs way up! Love reading your stuff.
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Kevin Christian (MC/FF/Primal Controller)
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Y'ru Glowen (Rad/Rad/Psy Defender)
This is an amazing thread, Arcanaville your work on this is by far some of the most interesting reading I have done in quite some time. I bow to you and your ability to break these numbers down and explain them in somewhat laymens terms.
Even if some people can not follow all of the math, it is explained wonderfully.
While reading the "sliver of health" theory; 50+ levels of blasting flashed through my mind, and I slapped my forehead, WHY DIDN'T I EVER PUT THAT TOGETHER.
Again, great work, some of the best I have ever read on here. (Circeus's old break downs of the Ice Armour issues were up there too )
Thanks.
Please don't bring up the mythical "City of Blasters" as a line of evidence for a lack of development attention to Blasters. A bugged power in one secondary shouldn't be used to argue for or against the development looking into Blasters.
As many in Congress are fond of saying...I'd like an Up or Down vote on how the developers feel Blasters are preforming.
Up - They are happy with our performance and nothing else is need except quality of life tweaks.
Down - There are issues with the AT that still need to be addressed to bring the AT into line with how the development teams envisions them operating.
So which is it? Up or Down?
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I have a thought about that, something related to vigilence. I can't quite express it fully yet, but when the thought finally settles I'll post it here.
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I would really look forward to an analysis of this sort for Vigilance.
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