Fix Defense in Three moves: Version 2.0
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2008-02-20 18:43 in Player Guides
Interesting, but it would not e my personal preference.
I like the mechanic of missing/being missed, with all the attendant frustration. I would like it if it were cosmetically altered to eliminate missing in favor of the target dodging.
Nor would I have a problem with a system based around starting from a 95% chance to hit. But I'd prefer the option to build a character around being completely missed by attacks greater than 50% of the time. And that goes both ways: I wouldn't mind it if opponents did so, so long as Defense was still balanced with Resistance and the like.
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How would you implement that in a game that also had randomized damage
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I would not have randomized damage in my game, not directly anyways. However, if forced, I would keep things in two layers. First randomize damage (usually these games have a max and minimun damage they inflict, at least WoW does) to see how much damage will be inflicted, then, i use the defense to see how much this will be lowered.
Going back to the "not directly" bit, I would make players have imperfect accuracy in my game, this accuracy imperfection, perhaps similar to CoH base 75%, would randomize your damage, but you can become more precise with more accuracy, giving a true importance to get more accuracy over getting more damage. Defense would be a separate layer, not stacking on top of this accuracy.
I would complicate things a lot too, by adding two types of defense: armor base and evasion base. Armor based defense can be pierced by certain type of piercing modifiers, while evasion based would be pierced by something similar to to hit buffs. Either of these buffs/modifiers would not be given left and right, though.
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Interesting, but it would not e my personal preference.
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There is nothing that will make everyone happy, I accept that 
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I like the mechanic of missing/being missed, with all the attendant frustration. I would like it if it were cosmetically altered to eliminate missing in favor of the target dodging.
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Avoiding damage works on a EvP game (the enviroment attacking you) but it sucks in PvE and PvP. One of the most frustrating experiences in my gaming experience has been playing against high evasion foes in FFXI, it litterally was miss miss miss miss miss miss *some one in the team hits* miss miss miss miss
Repeat, a few hits later foe is dead. Even if fighting hard defense (resistance in the game) foes may in occasions be harder, i would rather do that any day because it was simply fun.
However note that what I propose may rarely roll zero damage, that can be displayed as "avoided" with a corresponding animation.
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Nor would I have a problem with a system based around starting from a 95% chance to hit. But I'd prefer the option to build a character around being completely missed by attacks greater than 50% of the time.
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Again, if the game is exclusively PvE, and no mob is designed to be missed by the attacker too much, it can work, but that automatically destroys the posibilities of PvP that is fun for everyone.
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And that goes both ways: I wouldn't mind it if opponents did so, so long as Defense was still balanced with Resistance and the like.
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If you would find fighting foes with 75% evasion as fun as fighting foes with 75% resistance, then you are in a rare minority. Most players would hate it.
I've said this before, in the epic missing thread in the General Powers forum:
The frustration caused by missing isn't a function of your hit rate, it's a function of how long you go without hitting your target. If you have an attack that fires every 0.2 seconds (think FR or burn), it's not a big deal if you only hit 20% of the time, because you're still landing something every second, on average.
If, however, all of your attacks are in the 2-3 second animation time range, then landing 4 hits a minute can be irritating, to say the least.
Not that there's much that can be done about it at this stage -- the animations are already done. About the only thing would be to have a separate to-hit check on each tick of a DoT, which would make a lot of sense for powers like flurry, shadow maul, the DB attacks, etc.
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If you would find fighting foes with 75% evasion as fun as fighting foes with 75% resistance, then you are in a rare minority. Most players would hate it.
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This brings up an interesting point that came up in my "anti-criticals" thread. If you are going to allow for mitigation values as high as 75% or even higher, then an "evasion" mechanic where attackers don't actually miss, but rather usually hit for less, is not trivial to make in a way that doesn't totally trivialize the mechanic.
Picture character A with 75% (constant) resistance. In your "everyone always hits by default" game he gets hit by every single swing, but for only 25% damage.
Character B, who is 75% evasive, also gets hit at least most of the time, but for less. How do you propose to deliver damage to Character B such that he gets the same 25% total overall damage, without looking very much like Character A. What does the damage formula look like for the 75% evasive character in this case? How much variance can you really have? And what about 80% mitigation, or 90%?
And lets say that however you engineer the damage formula, you engineer the secondary effects formula in a comparable way. That means on average, both the resistance character and the defensive character get hit by the exact same amount of damage, and the exact same amount of secondary effects. Sounds good, except that when literally *everything* is balanced that way, the only thing left is the fact that the defensive character experiences higher variability in damage, and that is a survival penalty. Basically, under this system, all of evasion's qualitative advantages (especially higher econdary effect avoidance) are eliminated, but its remaining qualitative disadvantages remain in force. How would you propose to deal with that, if at all?
It seems that the Evasion mechanic is being asked to sacrifice a lot just for the sake of allowing people to hit all the time. Enough to make me wonder, in all seriousness, what its purpose for existence would even be in such a game. It could never be a featured defensive mitigation mechanism due to its relative underperformance, and an entire class of character concepts would automatically be barred from existing in such a game.
Can you make a superhero game and say, by fiat, that you've decided to side with the people who always want to hit, therefore anyone who wants to be missed, this is not your game?
Before I went there, I would go to almost *any* lengths to alter the game mechanics to allow true evasion. I'd make the act of dodging an attack interrupt offense; I'd make the act of avoiding an attack cost extra endurance or power for that moment; I'd make the attack root the defender that has to dodge it. Anything before eliminating evasion as a game mechanic.
For me, saying that evasion is too troublesome for the people it annoys is like saying ranged attacks are too troublesome for the people it annoys. It is really that fundamentally jarring to me to consider a game based on superpowers that doesn't intrinsicly have a way to avoid getting hit by an attack.
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Okay, Arcana, I have an idea. I don't know if you've already addressed this, but here it is.
Give any self +ToHit an equal an opposite -Dmg effect to caster. This would still allow for superteaming- after all, 8 players running Tactics would be buffed 8 times and debuffed once. This also means that people would have to use ToHit buffs strategically- running fully-slotted FA would strip an SO off your damage, and the utterly cracked "LOLdefense" combo of PB+BU+AIM would absolutely fry your damage output.
What do you think?
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Okay, Arcana, I have an idea. I don't know if you've already addressed this, but here it is.
Give any self +ToHit an equal an opposite -Dmg effect to caster. This would still allow for superteaming- after all, 8 players running Tactics would be buffed 8 times and debuffed once. This also means that people would have to use ToHit buffs strategically- running fully-slotted FA would strip an SO off your damage, and the utterly cracked "LOLdefense" combo of PB+BU+AIM would absolutely fry your damage output.
What do you think?
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I would have done it at the beginning of time: I think its a good idea. Today, however, there'd be a lot of opposition to that sort of nerf.
There's also the problem that the devs often coupled tohit with damage intentionally, like Build Up, or Fortitude, and applying a damage debuff wouldn't just be applying a debuff, you'd have to reverse out the buff also for the sort of thing to be effective, which would be a dramatic change.
I don't think it was a good idea for the devs to make a lot of ways to simultaneously boost tohit and damage: under those circumstances, its *always* a good idea to just keep buying more tohit, since its always packaged with something else that's also good (tactics, which doesn't buff damage, buffs perception instead, which is a double-whammy on stalkers in PvP, since perception and tohit buff are packaged together, its an especially valuable, and thus common, power to have).
In PvE, tohit/dmg powers are great toys. But they are not so good in PvP. And by coupling those two, in both PvE and PvP, it eliminates the requirement to make a choice: be more accurate, or hit harder. Often, you get both simultaneously. Reducing the number of choices that players have to make isn't a good thing in the powers system of CoH, when those choices are one of the few choices players actually get to make.
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Basically, under this system, all of evasion's qualitative advantages (especially higher econdary effect avoidance) are eliminated, but its remaining qualitative disadvantages remain in force. How would you propose to deal with that, if at all?
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I have thought about that, one thing that has crossed my mind is that the defense would also apply to "secondary effects" either in partial or binary form. Example, your hitroll made you avoid 40% of a punch that disorients you, you also resist 40% of the duration of this disorient, if i was to go for non-binary form.
A binary version could split the chances into certain 50/50 threshold, where if your roll means you lower your damage by 50% you entirely avoid the secondary effect. This, off course, is an assumption that attacks would actually have such a thing as secondary effects on such a system.
Also, I would not use toggle systems that can get de-toggled by status effects. I really dislike the total shutdown caused by the infliction of status effects or endurance drain.
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Give any self +ToHit an equal an opposite -Dmg effect to caster.
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That makes certain sense for melee characters, in that, if you're swinging harder, you've got less control over whatever it is you're swinging with.
However, for ranged characters, I don't see how taking a moment to improve your aim will reduce your damage. It makes sense for +to hit to be coupled with +damage. If your am has improved then you're more likely to do more damage with the attacks you use.
Thematically, it would make more sense for +to-hit to be coupled with either something that increased the amount of time it took a power to activate (which would be a hell of a bother to program) or increased the amount of time the power takes to recharge.
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Basically, under this system, all of evasion's qualitative advantages (especially higher econdary effect avoidance) are eliminated, but its remaining qualitative disadvantages remain in force. How would you propose to deal with that, if at all?
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I have thought about that, one thing that has crossed my mind is that the defense would also apply to "secondary effects" either in partial or binary form. Example, your hitroll made you avoid 40% of a punch that disorients you, you also resist 40% of the duration of this disorient, if i was to go for non-binary form.
A binary version could split the chances into certain 50/50 threshold, where if your roll means you lower your damage by 50% you entirely avoid the secondary effect. This, off course, is an assumption that attacks would actually have such a thing as secondary effects on such a system.
Also, I would not use toggle systems that can get de-toggled by status effects. I really dislike the total shutdown caused by the infliction of status effects or endurance drain.
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Its certainly interesting: basically damage resistance would resist damage, and not secondary effects. Defense would variably resist damage, and also resist secondary effects. What I find interesting about this approach is that its equivalent (or looking like its converging rapidly) to a game system in which damage is random (i.e. "Xd6-style" damage, albeit more complex), and the only things that exist are damage resistance (possibly of a more complex nature), and effects resistance. There is no actual concept of evasion as actual avoidance.
There's no reason why it wouldn't work, but while it solves the problem of not frustrating people with missing too often, it essentially does so by eliminating the ability to make actual things that can avoid getting hit (which logically is the only real way to do that, when you come right down to it).
Don't even get me started on unbreakable (short of expiration) binary status effects. Possibly *the* single worst design decision in all of CoH.
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Here is the thing: if I wanted to make room for PvP, or allow the tool to be used by the AI controlled Mobs, I would not allow for real evasion. If I was decided that i would never make an mob that used the tool, or not allow PvP ever ever, then I would allow true evasion (and the random damage evasion that I noted would also exists)
Now, here is a thing I dont like to think: just as its balance breaking to allow players to make Superman (that never feels pain) it would also be broken to make the Batman that never gets hit because of his uber reflexes. Specially, I think that something like invincibility (that arguably is used to emulate a different "feel") should do the oposite: the most foes some one has on him, the most likely they all will hit reliably because they are encumbering your ability to dodge.
All in all, if I allowed for true evasion in my game, I likely would give it a very low cap just tossing numbers to the air, I perhaps would never allow anyone to "always" avoid more than 20% of all attacks.
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What I find interesting about this approach is that its equivalent (or looking like its converging rapidly) to a game system in which damage is random (i.e. "Xd6-style" damage, albeit more complex), and the only things that exist are damage resistance (possibly of a more complex nature), and effects resistance.
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I'm not sure, I would not really eliminate everything else, just the current flavor of evasion. Slowing down the enemy, damage debuffs, HP buffs, there is no reason to eliminate these tools. I also find interesting the idea of treshholds that you mentioned in another thread is part of the Pen and Paper Champions, if it is what i think it is, i have not researched it (I'm guessing all attacks have certain strength attribute driving them behind their actual damage number, if this strength does not matches your protection threshold, you get no damage, I would do this typed)
As for "unbreakable" in CoH, the engine and powers provide for the ability to add powers that break status effects. If Castle wanted, Practiced Brawler could be activated while under status, same with any toggle. The thing he cant do is make status not detogle powers. But as it is, if I had loose reigns on CoH, I would make all self buff toggles passives. Only clicks would remain being clicks. That alone would entirely eliminate the "mess deactivates all your defenses" deal, admittedly it would also remove the "you have to choose how to manage your endurance, defensively or offensively" aspect of the game. I would do something to keep that, to a point, I do like that, even if I would not have it in my own game.
It's as great an idea as ever, I truly hope it gets implemented.
Also, I'm very curious as to how they are handling Defense in Champions Online. Are they going down the same flawed road as CoX, or have they come up with something akin to anti-accuracy? Here's hoping!
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What I find interesting about this approach is that its equivalent (or looking like its converging rapidly) to a game system in which damage is random (i.e. "Xd6-style" damage, albeit more complex), and the only things that exist are damage resistance (possibly of a more complex nature), and effects resistance. There is no actual concept of evasion as actual avoidance.
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I've personally been playing around with an idea that removes hit points and applies damage as an effect. Which definately puts me in a category similar to pippy. I believe a mechanic should sing for it's supper or be ruthlessly culled. And as mentioned, typed damage is practically operatic.
As also mentioned however, in a running game fundamental change is a fundamentally bad idea.
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Now, here is a thing I dont like to think: just as its balance breaking to allow players to make Superman (that never feels pain) it would also be broken to make the Batman that never gets hit because of his uber reflexes. Specially, I think that something like invincibility (that arguably is used to emulate a different "feel") should do the oposite: the most foes some one has on him, the most likely they all will hit reliably because they are encumbering your ability to dodge.
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I remind you that there is no explicit "balance" reason for disallowing defense (as specifically defined as attack avoidance) to have the same net damage mitigation strength as any other damage mitigation mechanism, provided that secondary effect avoidance is properly counterbalanced situationally. The only reason for specifically singling out defense is psychological.
Also, invincibility is not conceptualized as "defense as in evasion" but rather "defense as in deflection." Attacks bounce off, having zero effect. It was supposed to be, in effect, a form of "Defensive Rage."
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As for "unbreakable" in CoH, the engine and powers provide for the ability to add powers that break status effects. If Castle wanted, Practiced Brawler could be activated while under status, same with any toggle. The thing he cant do is make status not detogle powers.
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There's no actual mechanism for "breaking" a status effect in CoH. The only way to "break" a status effect is to temporarily override its magnitude. If you do, you'll be freed from its effects so long as that situation lasts.
However, there is no way I'm aware of to actively break a hold that's on you now, without also making you immune to any additional holds (separate from stacking). If you are under a mag 3 hold, and you apply a mag 4 protection to holds to yourself, you are freed from the hold. But the actual hold remains on you: if the protection fades, the hold is reinstated (I'm ignoring suppression for simplicity here).
The game actually does have a theoretical way to "break" all mezzes that are on you at this instant, without also conferring protection to additional mezzes simultaneously, but it is prevented from working in practice. Theoretically speaking, the devs could create a power that granted you 100,000,000% resistance to holds, for one half second. That would instantly reduce the duration of any hold you were under to zero (well, any hold whose duration was less than a day and a half, anyway) and "break" those holds. You'd still be vulnerable to additional holds immediately afterwards (again, ignoring suppression).
This wouldn't work because the game enforces mez resistance caps that would make such a power not do what it was designed to do. But I think theoretically without those caps it would work.
With regard to toggles. Its literally true Castle cannot make toggles immune to mez detoggling. But if he were crazy or an insomniac, there are other things he could do for most toggles. He could make them decay, rather than switch off, for example.
(How? Take Temporary Invulnerability. It currently provides 30% s/l resistance. As a toggle, it "ticks" every 0.5 seconds, which is also the tick interval for its endurance costs. The buff that it provides lasts 0.75 seconds and is set to replace/overwrite itself. If it instead self-buffed 10% resistance with duration 7 seconds, 10% resistance with duration 5 seconds, and 10% resistance with 1 second duration, then when the toggle was either turned off or detoggled, the resistance would decay in stages rather than suddenly switch off. But multiply that by every defensive toggle that exists, and that's a lot of spreadsheet work)
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I remind you that there is no explicit "balance" reason for disallowing defense (as specifically defined as attack avoidance) to have the same net damage mitigation strength as any other damage mitigation mechanism, provided that secondary effect avoidance is properly counterbalanced situationally. The only reason for specifically singling out defense is psychological.
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My point on "not allowing anyone to avoid everything" comes from the perspective that, if both are supposed to be balanced, how comes everyone can reach 45 def (that equates 90% resistance) but non tanker/brutes can only achieve 75% resistance? Should they not also be capped at 37.5 final defense (after all tohit buffs and debuffs are calculated)? I'm thinking back to a point you mentioned in another thread about "allowing players to build a character around the concept of never getting hit." Currently, this game gives you that ability, I don't think you should ever have that ability.
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Also, invincibility is not conceptualized as "defense as in evasion" but rather "defense as in deflection." Attacks bounce off, having zero effect. It was supposed to be, in effect, a form of "Defensive Rage."
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That is what i meant by saying "Specially, I think that something like invincibility (that arguably is used to emulate a different "feel")"
The "degradation" thing for toggles I have thought off but may be problematic. powers like invincibility just could not use it at all. I actually had been thinking that it would be much more useful for Rage, giving rage multiple buffs with variating durations that will give the Rage buff a degradation effect instead of a full fledge crash, but that is topic for another thread.
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I remind you that there is no explicit "balance" reason for disallowing defense (as specifically defined as attack avoidance) to have the same net damage mitigation strength as any other damage mitigation mechanism, provided that secondary effect avoidance is properly counterbalanced situationally. The only reason for specifically singling out defense is psychological.
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My point on "not allowing anyone to avoid everything" comes from the perspective that, if both are supposed to be balanced, how comes everyone can reach 45 def (that equates 90% resistance) but non tanker/brutes can only achieve 75% resistance? Should they not also be capped at 37.5 final defense (after all tohit buffs and debuffs are calculated)? I'm thinking back to a point you mentioned in another thread about "allowing players to build a character around the concept of never getting hit." Currently, this game gives you that ability, I don't think you should ever have that ability.
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That's a separate issue (and more complicated in CoH than it necessarily needs to be): you mentioned preferential limits closer to 20% avoidance, which is very far away from this problem.
In CoH, there's actually two kinds of resistance, its just that most people don't see it that way. There's +RES, and there's +Health. And very often, sets that are designed to be "intrinsicly tough to damage" have both. An Invuln scrapper, for example, doesn't cap out at 75% resistive damage mitigation. They cap out at 75% resistance but their archetypal caps actually limit them to a total resistive damage mitigation of 86% (75% maximum resistance, 1.80 maximum +health). Its *harder* to consistently get to 86% for invuln than it is for SR to get to 90%, but that's not a cap issue.
If there were, oh, say two kinds of defense, just like there were two kinds of resistance, then this would be a more blatant problem. But with defense sets having only one option for defense, but resistance sets not only having two options for resistance but often getting them both as well, this is a much more complex issue in CoH.
I'm suprised this isn't discussed more: there are two kinds of (self buff) effects that equate to "damage resilience" in CoH (+RES, +Health), and there are two kinds of effects that equate to "health recovery" (+regen, heal), and there are even two kinds of effects that equate to "becoming more accurate (+Tohit, +Acc), but only one kind of attack evasion (+DEF). I find that interesting.
(This epiphany of sorts occured while I was writing the simulator I used for my latest scrapper comparisons, back in I6, and actually is what prompted me to revisit this mechanical suggestion).
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That's a separate issue (and more complicated in CoH than it necessarily needs to be): you mentioned preferential limits closer to 20% avoidance, which is very far away from this problem.
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True, but two things: I said "posibly tossing a number to the air" and also, its very likely i would have a similar "resistance" cap (this caps may be higher for tanklike players, if i was to pursue such an AT based structure)
As for the "two kinds of..." thing, although I myself compare HP buffs to resistance constantly, I dont really categorize them in the same pool. Actually, as far as "feeling" and concept goes, it feels more green (heal based) to me. I guess it comes from HP buffs consisging really of:
A HP per second boost
Modification of your HP bar
Additional HPs "healing you" (as you know you do get an heal that is as large as the hp buff in percentage of your remaining health)
Sure, this all just ends up stretching your hp, and as noted, I treat it by as resistance but only because of it's simplicity, analyzing it any other way is a nightmare.
That out of the way, nothing stops a defense sets from getting other tools other than intended design. For me, +HP would be perfectly thematic for a batman type character, who may get hit way harder than Wonder Woman each time he gets hit, but is naturally tougher than, say, Aquaman, just because he has been roughened up tough over the years. Ninjitsu has a self heal for instance. I think it would be perfectly balanced for SR to get a HP buff added in Practiced Brawler.
I'm not saying that adding the anti-accuracy (or elusivety or whatever it gets called) would be bad, it would be good, but I just don't like how Defense feels in PvP when it actually works. This is specially complicated by the excess of travel power jousting in PvP, witch is the main reason I just don't bother with PvP at all. I like my PvP Street Fighter Alpha 3 style (close, fast paced and long fights if both players are skilled)
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As for the "two kinds of..." thing, although I myself compare HP buffs to resistance constantly, I dont really categorize them in the same pool. Actually, as far as "feeling" and concept goes, it feels more green (heal based) to me. I guess it comes from HP buffs consisging really of:
A HP per second boost
Modification of your HP bar
Additional HPs "healing you" (as you know you do get an heal that is as large as the hp buff in percentage of your remaining health)
Sure, this all just ends up stretching your hp, and as noted, I treat it by as resistance but only because of it's simplicity, analyzing it any other way is a nightmare.
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Actually, that's not what +health does. +health increases MaxHealth, which automatically scales remaining health to be the same percentage. It doesn't have any health per second boost, because regeneration is actually computed relative to MaxHealth in the first place.
Also, while powers like Dull Pain are temporary in duration, +health bonuses from inventions, accolades, and passive powers like HPT are all effectively permanent in nature: there is no "stretching and healing" aspect of them in any practical sense.
+Health is a form of damage resistance simply because for a given value of resistance and +health (I always make the disclaimer, and then someone always fails to read it and bring up issues that ignore it) +Res and +Health are indistinguishable unless you read the combat chat numbers. The game itself is mathematically invariant to them.
Or to put it another way, I could redesign the game in such a way as to eliminate the +health mechanic completely, and replace it with a non-stacking resistance one that worked exactly like resistance does now. I'd have to get creative with stacking mechanics, but such a game would be indistinguishable in terms of performance: absolutely no combat situation would change in any way.
Whenever such a mathematical invariance occurs, I feel free to consider the two mechanisms identical within the context boundaries specified. Basically, +health is the same thing as resistance because both can be used to get the same effect: increased resilience to damage. The primary differences between them are situational, and not mechanical (for example, +health can't be typed). In terms of damage mitigation, both deliver the same end goal.
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+Health has the unique property of analogueing to Heal Resistance, in addition to Damage Resistance, a property that damage resistance doesn't posess. This is probably a part of why it "feels" different.
Any amount of "Simulated Damage resistance" that a given amount of +Health represents results in an identical amount of "Simulated Heal Resistance". If it takes twice as much damage to kill you due to +health, it also takes twice as many fixed-amount-heal points to fully heal you from that damage.
A character with 50% resistance does not suffer this penalty: He can be fixed-amount-healed as rapidly as ever, but still requires twice the damage to be killed.
And of course, +Regen, which is scaled to MaxHealth (unlike heals), continues to benefit both players identically.
In your hypothetical "redesign" to eliminate +health, the secondary resistance type that replaced it could easily just come packaged with an identical amount of heal resistance, maintaining the "COH status quo".
Another part of the reason it feels so much different than the other mitigation mechanisms is the fact that +Health adds to your survival time linearly as you add more of it, rather than in an accelerating fashion (Like resist, regen, defense, fixed-amount-heals). One of the things that surprises me is that +Health probably has the most restrictive caps of all the mitigation methods, while it probably needs it the least. 45% defense or 90% resist is roughly equivalent to a health buff that puts you at 1000% of your base MaxHealth. But instead, the cap of +83% for tankers puts you somewhere in the range of being at 45.4 resistance, or 22.52 defense. Curious, regrettable, but here we are.
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Actually, that's not what +health does. +health increases MaxHealth, which automatically scales remaining health to be the same percentage. It doesn't have any health per second boost, because regeneration is actually computed relative to MaxHealth in the first place.
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I'm not sure how the engine manages + hp, all i know is that my background playing other MMOs makes me percieve it as many players do: it increases HP and heals a bit, although this bit is just enough to keep you in the same percentage of health. The reason I feel that way is because almost all other games, when you add HP buffs, your HP does not goes up. We know [?] that the engine actually treats hp as a point scale, not as a percentage scale, so somewhere in the entire pipeline of processing +HP something is increasing two values, the max hp and the current hp as two distinct actions.
Regen does is setup to give a % of hp back, but if you are already looking at it as most players do, they just see "I'm getting these amounts of hp per second" I actually think thats how they coded the regen stat tracking too.
It's a bit inconsequential, the result is the same, its just an argument of semantics and I myself tend to use the resist side for all balancing purposes, as noted before, due to simplicity, but at the same time, I feel it's closer to Health as a mechanic than to resist. It's really a perception thing I cant change myself even knowing how alike to recharge it is, and it's a perception I think the devs also share or shared until recently, since they were afraid of using +HP because they felt it "increased regeneration rate".
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Also, while powers like Dull Pain are temporary in duration, +health bonuses from inventions, accolades, and passive powers like HPT are all effectively permanent in nature: there is no "stretching and healing" aspect of them in any practical sense.
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You escaped half my reply with that last statement, but we still have the "increased regeneration" (that i know remains a steady percentage but the game shows me an increased HP per second value instead.
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+Health is a form of damage resistance simply because for a given value of resistance and +health (I always make the disclaimer, and then someone always fails to read it and bring up issues that ignore it) +Res and +Health are indistinguishable unless you read the combat chat numbers. The game itself is mathematically invariant to them.
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I know this, and you know i know this, but that is the point, the game, once you read the numbers it gives you, starts to make you feel its a distinct thing HP related thing. I admit, I'm afraid my post here may be read by people that would get confused (if anyone other than arcana reads this: she is right, HP IS A FORM RESISTANCE.)
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Or to put it another way, I could redesign the game in such a way as to eliminate the +health mechanic completely, and replace it with a non-stacking resistance one that worked exactly like resistance does now. I'd have to get creative with stacking mechanics, but such a game would be indistinguishable in terms of performance: absolutely no combat situation would change in any way.
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You may come into a bit of trouble attempting to implement irresistible damage in such a system while keeping the equivalent powers resisting the irresistible, but I see your point.
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The primary differences between them are situational, and not mechanical (for example, +health can't be typed). In terms of damage mitigation, both deliver the same end goal.
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In my view, the only end goal is keeping you alive, witch defense also does.
The true difference of these is in feel. +HP can keep you alive as much as resistance. At the end of the day I do see numbers float over my head and this is how I percieve them:
Resist: Makes the numbers smaller
Defense: makes the numbers not show at all sometimes
+HP: Keeps the numbers the same but make me feel I'm ignoring the damage because somehow I still keep going.
Its true that if you eliminate the numbers (or replace them by percentages) then they are the same thing, but right now, as the game stands, resist and +HP do result in distinct game play feels. I personally feel its closer to Heal due to it being HP based than resist based because, on top of all I said before, it never truly reduces that big number over my head every time get hit.
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Also, while powers like Dull Pain are temporary in duration, +health bonuses from inventions, accolades, and passive powers like HPT are all effectively permanent in nature: there is no "stretching and healing" aspect of them in any practical sense.
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You escaped half my reply with that last statement, but we still have the "increased regeneration" (that i know remains a steady percentage but the game shows me an increased HP per second value instead.
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I'm curious to know if you perceive the same thing to be true when blasters were given a health increase circa I5? Do you perceive them as being under a persistent regeneration buff since then, or is the perception tied primarily to the effects of powers.
For that matter, do you see the act of levelling to convey a health increase and a regeneration increase as well, or is there something about "normal" max health that is perceptually different from "buffed" max health, even if the buff never changes.
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I'm curious to know if you perceive the same thing to be true when blasters were given a health increase circa I5? Do you perceive them as being under a persistent regeneration buff since then, or is the perception tied primarily to the effects of powers.
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I tend to treat base HP as just another modifier and only find it something I have to take account off while I analyze the effect of external heals. However I can easily dodge this one by saying: i started analyzing all this with Issue 6, so for me, blasters have always been the way they are now But seriously, if it happened tomorrow again my previous statement would still be in place.
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For that matter, do you see the act of levelling to convey a health increase and a regeneration increase as well, or is there something about "normal" max health that is perceptually different from "buffed" max health, even if the buff never changes.
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Leveling for me is YET another modifier, however there is something that makes both things (hp gained from leveling and hp gained from buffing) very different: your self heals always work off that base HP, not of that buffed hp.
Now I ponder though, you say there are 2 flavors of buffs in your grouping:
heal/regen
res/+hp
but def sits alone. Why don't you count -tohit as a pair to it? the only difference I see in that grouping is that both stack, but they do are two different mechanics, one involves making you elusive, the other to make the attacker elusive. Off course, then we have -damage, that would couple with resistance. What about -recharge, that in a sense is its own mechanic without pairs.
Or is it that you are only accounting for self buffs for simplicity? Usually ATs with self buffs may have access to -tohit, so simplicity or it's stack ability are the only reasons I see right now to exclude it.
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Now I ponder though, you say there are 2 flavors of buffs in your grouping:
heal/regen
res/+hp
but def sits alone. Why don't you count -tohit as a pair to it? the only difference I see in that grouping is that both stack, but they do are two different mechanics, one involves making you elusive, the other to make the attacker elusive. Off course, then we have -damage, that would couple with resistance. What about -recharge, that in a sense is its own mechanic without pairs.
Or is it that you are only accounting for self buffs for simplicity? Usually ATs with self buffs may have access to -tohit, so simplicity or it's stack ability are the only reasons I see right now to exclude it.
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Its not just a question of simplicity: foe debuffs are tricky for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that you actually have to hit your attacker with them. If I have defense, resistance, or regeneration, I can presume that those protection mechanisms work against all attackers they are designed to work against mechanically. However, foe debuffs require application, and cannot always be said to be in force against all attackers.
Foe debuffs are also subject to effect scalers, like the purple patch, and actual resistances to the effects. There's no way to "resist" my defense or my resistance in that sense.
Moreover, there are the specifics to tohit buffs themselves. If you count -tohit as a form of defense, you have to count +tohit as a form of anti-defense that doesn't exist in the same form for any other effect: unresistable resistance debuffs are comparable to unresistable defense debuffs are comparable to unresistable regeneration debuffs are comparable to unresistable health debuffs (although you're extremely unlikely to encounter such a thing normally: it exists in only a few very rare places). +Tohit stands separate from them, and in addition to them. So opening the door to counting -tohit forces you to take into account +tohit in some form.
And then there is the question of opening the door to all "offensive" damage mitigation: (recharge) slows, holds, knockdowns and similar effects, all of which alters damage in a different way.
While -tohit can be handled mathematically as a form of defense given a very specific set of circumstances, I normally consider "defensive" and "offensive" mitigation separately. Occasionally I will consider "offensive" damage mitigation when I think I can constrain the situation enough for that to be practical (for example, considering Ice Tanker slows to be essentially a form of defensive mitigation, albeit a more complex one than resistance or defense).
In this case, though, the specific observation is a design one, not a mathematical one. There were two different ways the original game designers created to make a target intrinsicly more resilient to incoming damage: Resistance and +Health. They function differently in a lot of respects, but not in the core respect of damage resilience. The same thing is true of health recovery: both heals and regeneration ultimately serve that purpose: they do so in somewhat different ways, but ultimately serve the same purpose.
I do not believe its reasonable to say that the devs explicitly created -tohit to be a form of personal defense. Its obvious that -tohit only exists because the attribute "ToHit" exists, and -tohit is nothing more than the way to describe debuffing it. I don't think you can say that they specifically wanted a second form of defense, invented -tohit, and then invented the attribute (tohit) it would be applied to. Resistance, Defense, Regeneration were all purposeful inventions.
Even +Health is a purposeful invention. You might think that its just like +tohit or -tohit: its just a way to buff health. Except +Health doesn't buff Health, it actually buffs MaxHealth which is rather unique. There are not very many instances of a power buffing or debuffing a Cap. It would be as if a scrapper power buffed the scrapper resistance cap from 75% to 80%. Sounds weird even saying it, but that's how "weird" +Health powers are: the devs actually had to make a very explicit decision to make powers like Dull Pain.
And actually, the semantics of "Dull Pain" also suggest a root concept of +Health being a form of damage resilience, and therefore (whether the mathematics were clearly understood or not) +health and +res have a conceptual connection in terms of the original intent of the powers. They do seem to be different ways to achieve a similar conceptual result (but with some mechanical variety).
In other words, Resistance and +(Max)Health are cousins. Defense and -ToHit are lookalikes that are not related.
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If i was to make a game from scratch there would be no missing at all. "Defense" or superreflexibility or whatever would be based not around avoiding being hit but avoiding taking full damage randomly, in other words: in my game defense/avoidance would be a random resistance mechanic that could be countered by higher accuracy.
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How would you implement that in a game that also had randomized damage (which CoH does not)? I've always felt that making attacks always do a specific, fixed amount of damage (rather than a randomized level of damage, ala "3d6") was too much of an oversimplification: it actually encourages paper min/maxing of damage, because damage becomes trivially predictable.
I can think of several ways to do it, I'm just asking which way you would.
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