Fix Defense in Three moves: Version 2.0
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2008-02-20 18:43 in Player Guides
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Maybe, thematically, there is still something to be improved. The to-hit buff is related to the attacker only. The mutiplicative anti-accuracy implies that the target somehow can reduce the to-hit buff of the attacker through defense.
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Thats not how I see it defense represents awareness of an attack while to hit buffs are a way of making your attack harder to be known off, effectively negating defense. Anti-accuracy (or elusivety) would represent your skill at actually avoiding any attack by subconscious reflex, even if an attack was properly cloaked you would still be able to avoid it, although the chances of it hitting still increase, you are still proportionally likely to avoid it.
Now one thing going back to the OP, the formula Arcana proposes is:
(1+ ACC) * (1- AAC) * 50%
There is one inherent flaw on this, and its that its as prone to overstacking as everything but HP buffs. If we are going out and making an all new mechanic, why not go ahead and make sure its not as prone to overstacking? I bet there are many more ways of making different types of curves, but why not instead doing something like:
(1+ ACC) * (1- (1/(1+AAC))) * 50%
The numerics for this would be different, and actually more like HP buffs in their nature, where each extra percentage of HP you add equates to less than the previous percentage.
In this formula, 100% AAC would equate something like 50% resistance, and exactly the same as 100% extra HP. It would take 900% AAC to achieve the equivalent of 90% resistance, and, if it was possible to achieve, this would be equal to 900% hp buff.
Actually, this is a good point. If we accept Aracana's view that Res and HP buffs are correlated, then we would want the correlative brother to defense to stack just as HP buffs do, no?
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There is one inherent flaw on this, and its that its as prone to overstacking as everything but HP buffs. If we are going out and making an all new mechanic, why not go ahead and make sure its not as prone to overstacking? I bet there are many more ways of making different types of curves, but why not instead doing something like:
(1+ ACC) * (1- (1/(1+AAC))) * 50%
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Its prone to overstacking if you convert all defense powers into it. If all the "big ones" in the primary and secondary sets are explicitly balanced based on their maximum possible values, and all the "little ones" in power pools and invention bonuses remain conventional defense, as a practical matter it will be impossible to overstack conventional defense, because the powers will be too small, and it will be impossible to overstack AA/Elude, because there won't exist any to overstack with.
If the plan was in fact to transition all defense powers to AA/E, something I'm not sure is a good idea (insights and lucks have issues with balancing against each other in a move-countermove manner in PvP, and that would mean critters would have AA/E as well, which sort of defeats the purpose of adding AA/E in the manner I describe), you'd want to address the stacking issue in one of two ways. One way is essentially what you describe: that equation has diminishing returns. The other way is to use multiplicative stacking (1 - AAE1) * (1 - AAE2), which has constant returns.
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In real life, if you ask me what is the difference between to-hit and accuracy, I probably don't know.
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"In real life" I think the concept of "Accuracy" (as the game defines it) and Elusivity (as I define it) make contact with reality. Its not difficult to imagine something that improves the accuracy of an attack by 50% regardless of its original accuracy (which is how accuracy works) and it contrawise isn't difficult to imagine something that reduces the accuracy of an attack by 50%, regardless of its original accuracy (which is how Elusivity works). Its actually Defense and Tohit(buffs) that don't make contact with reality.
Making tohit and defense mechanics that "do the right thing" is not quite as simple as it sounds, because in "reality" the "effort" required to do certain things doesn't obey simple linear math. We all intuitively know this: we know that in many situations bounded by limits, its often impossible to actually reach the limits: we can only approach them. Hitting or missing a target is one of those kinds of situations: we intuitively know that its easy to alter the chances to hit or miss something when the odds are near 50/50, but as we get close to 100% or close to 0%, it takes increasingly higher amounts of effort (usually) to approach those limits without ever exactly hitting them.
We even know that how hard it gets, and how fast it gets that hard, depends on situation. It takes a certain amount of effort to get increasingly accurate hitting a golf ball towards a flag, in a much different way than it takes to get increasingly more accurate hitting hitting the ball with the club at all. Deriving game mechanics that reflect that intuitive view of "hitting" is not easy in the general case.
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Apologies Arcanaville for posting this here, since I know this thread is about your thoughts on fixing defense, but I had a question that I really couldn't find an answer to and didn't really think it merited starting its own thread. Plus I figured this would be the best place to find the answer.
The question is: Has using the ED calculations, or ED like calculations, ever been considered in trying to solve the whole defense issue?
For example:
The tohit equation: NetToHit = (InherentAttackAccuracy) * (1 + AccuracyEnhancement) * [ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - (Defense - DefenseDebuffs) ]
Suppose you take the [ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs ] part of the equation (Assuming ToHits are what's skewing things) and run it through an ED calculation and then re-insert it. It seems to me that you should be able to come up with a decent ED formula that would allow for a more gradual scaling then what currently is used.
Anyway, I was just curious and this seemed like the best place to ask since my searching proved fruitless.
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Apologies Arcanaville for posting this here, since I know this thread is about your thoughts on fixing defense, but I had a question that I really couldn't find an answer to and didn't really think it merited starting its own thread. Plus I figured this would be the best place to find the answer.
The question is: Has using the ED calculations, or ED like calculations, ever been considered in trying to solve the whole defense issue?
For example:
The tohit equation: NetToHit = (InherentAttackAccuracy) * (1 + AccuracyEnhancement) * [ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - (Defense - DefenseDebuffs) ]
Suppose you take the [ BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs ] part of the equation (Assuming ToHits are what's skewing things) and run it through an ED calculation and then re-insert it. It seems to me that you should be able to come up with a decent ED formula that would allow for a more gradual scaling then what currently is used.
Anyway, I was just curious and this seemed like the best place to ask since my searching proved fruitless.
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In the general case, the issue is that it suggests the problem is simply that tohit buffs are too strong, and the problem would be solved by simply making them weaker (at least in PvP, and perhaps in other situations as well). But its a more complex problem than that, in that the effects of tohit buffs are different for people with different levels of defense. This gets to the root of the problem, which is the intent of having defense, or tohit buffs. The intent does not seem to be for tohit buffs to have such strong effects on defense, and in the way it does across the different levels of defense you can have, in all cases (probably in most cases). But its not easy to make up equations where tohit buffs automagically scale themselves to reasonable values for all levels of defense, and in all situations (some of which may suggest doing nothing at all).
The proposed solution, in effect, attempts to do just that, but in a much simpler way than modifying the strength of tohit buffs themselves in a complex and situational way. Instead, the change is on defense, and how it interacts with tohit buffs, so the tohit buffs can continue to behave in the same way, except for cases where the target is given versions of defense that interact differently.
In a way, its a way of handing out "tohit buff resistance" in a way the game will actually support. Its more complicated than that (because there are problems it solves that have nothing to do with tohit buffs at all), but that's one way to look at the tohit buff aspect of what the proposal does.
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In the general case, the issue is that it suggests the problem is simply that tohit buffs are too strong, and the problem would be solved by simply making them weaker (at least in PvP, and perhaps in other situations as well). But its a more complex problem than that, in that the effects of tohit buffs are different for people with different levels of defense. This gets to the root of the problem, which is the intent of having defense, or tohit buffs. The intent does not seem to be for tohit buffs to have such strong effects on defense, and in the way it does across the different levels of defense you can have, in all cases (probably in most cases). But its not easy to make up equations where tohit buffs automagically scale themselves to reasonable values for all levels of defense, and in all situations (some of which may suggest doing nothing at all).
The proposed solution, in effect, attempts to do just that, but in a much simpler way than modifying the strength of tohit buffs themselves in a complex and situational way. Instead, the change is on defense, and how it interacts with tohit buffs, so the tohit buffs can continue to behave in the same way, except for cases where the target is given versions of defense that interact differently.
In a way, its a way of handing out "tohit buff resistance" in a way the game will actually support. Its more complicated than that (because there are problems it solves that have nothing to do with tohit buffs at all), but that's one way to look at the tohit buff aspect of what the proposal does.
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Okay. Thanks!
Synergy Lvl 50 Def FF/Electric/Psy - Protector
Cimarron - Protector Mascot
My DA Page
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In the general case, the issue is that it suggests the problem is simply that tohit buffs are too strong, and the problem would be solved by simply making them weaker (at least in PvP, and perhaps in other situations as well). But its a more complex problem than that, in that the effects of tohit buffs are different for people with different levels of defense. This gets to the root of the problem, which is the intent of having defense, or tohit buffs. The intent does not seem to be for tohit buffs to have such strong effects on defense, and in the way it does across the different levels of defense you can have, in all cases (probably in most cases). But its not easy to make up equations where tohit buffs automagically scale themselves to reasonable values for all levels of defense, and in all situations (some of which may suggest doing nothing at all).
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From the current ingame formula, defense and to-hit buff are on the same footing. So, at least in terms of formula, there is no bias against defense or to-hit. In this game, buffs(in particular buffs from another person) are intended to be strong, so as to enhance teaming. In principle, if your opponent gets to-hit buffs, it's supposed that you should get defense buffs from outside to counter it. If a person has low defense, it should be overwhelmed.
So, on paper, the current implementation of defense ingame is ok. I think it is the game content that has an overall bias against defense. As you mentioned, to-hit buffs are higher in numbers and there are more to-hit buffs around. I also want to mention that people feel that resistance is better off because there are less resistance debuff in pve(we're getting more, for example in CoV). Unresistable damage is not really in pve, I think, and unresistable damage is the to-hit counterpart for resistance. All these make people feel that defense is worse off, but you can see that these things are not intrinsic to the defense-to-hit formula itself.
In my opinion, a "true" fix is to fix the ingame content itself(for pve). I admit that it will be a daunting task to tweak the whole game. Your proposed fix is a bit ad-hoc in my opinion, but I guess it doesn't really matter how it is fixed as long as it is fixed. Since your fix is to reduce the effect of to-hit, you're indirectly letting the game content and powers to continue the design imbalance.
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In my opinion, a "true" fix is to fix the ingame content itself(for pve).
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A "true fix" of that nature would allow players to keep a lot of tohit in PvE, but take a lot of it away in PvP. There exists no way to do that, because there exists no way to tell a self buff how to behave based on what you shoot at.
Since there's too much tohit for PvP, but there's no good reason to eliminate it in PvE, there's no way to mess with tohit itself to fix that problem. You have to change the targets, not the attackers.
And as previously mentioned, this is just one aspect of the issues surrounding tohit and defense mechanics. Another one is stacking. It would be nice to be able to make combat jump offer, say, 10% defense to squishies, which is only 20% damage mitigation (about 30% if its slotted). But you can't do that when SR scrappers and Ice tankers can use it to go perma-elude with no effort. The problem is, rather like the previous problem, there's no way to "tell" the power pool powers to do different things to different characters based on their pre-existing defense.
The posted suggestion is designed to solve all of these kinds of problems. Not perfectly, but sufficient to make it worthwhile.
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Congratulations Arcanaville.
*standing ovation*
Some patches just can't download fast enough. I've been waiting for defense to work for years now.. Aaaahgha.
And congratulations.
Arcanaville, what are you going to fix next?
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Congratulations Arcanaville.
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"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
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Arcanaville, what are you going to fix next?
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I was thinking America, but I should really give Obama a shot at it first.
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Arcanaville, what are you going to fix next?
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I was thinking America, but I should really give Obama a shot at it first.
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This is why you rule, Arcanaville. 
*continues to pray at--
Wait. None of you saw that.
I apologize for being so crass and insulting your defense idea, Arcanaville, you rock and have my respect. I was wrong, it's not the first time I've been wrong, and probably won't be the last.
..Defense still isn't working right. But eh.
Congratulations on fixing Defense Arcanaville!
I should say congrats to the devs too, they probably had something to do with it as well.
They really have hired more hard-core *programmers* who can make stuff like this happen through coding. And they're advertising for *more*.
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Psst, guys, defense isn't fixed.
What's the deal on defence currently, Capt?
SR is unhittable, Ninjutsu is still kind of weak, and squishies are way too hard to hit. But it can be fixed.
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But it can be fixed.
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And that is the most important part. We just have to pray that it gets done.
Here's how defense can be balanced.
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The new scheme looks nice and probably can solve the problem.
Maybe, thematically, there is still something to be improved. The to-hit buff is related to the attacker only. The mutiplicative anti-accuracy implies that the target somehow can reduce the to-hit buff of the attacker through defense. Since defense is not an offensive action, it might be a bit strange that it can "resist" to-hit buff of the attacker. For example, it is more natural for the target to resist defense debuff, because the defense debuff is applied to the target.
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Thats not how I see it defense represents awareness of an attack while to hit buffs are a way of making your attack harder to be known off, effectively negating defense. Anti-accuracy (or elusivety) would represent your skill at actually avoiding any attack by subconscious reflex, even if an attack was properly cloaked you would still be able to avoid it, although the chances of it hitting still increase, you are still proportionally likely to avoid it.
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In real life, if you ask me what is the difference between to-hit and accuracy, I probably don't know.
The concept of elusivity sounds good for SR, but may not fit quite well for ice armors for example, cause they are just a big chunk of ice. And maybe energy aura and bubbles as well, as they just deflect the attacks away.