no, you can still do controled comparisons, you just need to consider more than Endurance, Resistance and Defence in the comparison. you dont need specific numbers on the those, just make an assumption and say it takes X seconds between mobs. Assume an average mob is defeated in X seconds. so long as the only variables are the secondary sets you can easily make a comparison in a 'Vacuum'
But you CAN'T just compare them in a vacuum. It doesn't make any sense, and I only did it as an exercise in shutting someone up.
I mean, it's like this. fire armor is kind of a meh set for brutes, realistically. War mace, war axe, and energy melee don't get a great deal from fire as a secondary.
But when you add in ss with both it's footstomp mitigation, rage damage boost for fire's damage shield, and the ability to drop burn on footstomped opponents (if you like that combo) fire armor takes OFF, and turns into a devastating machine of total destruction.
electric armor isn't a very good set... but when you add in dark melee with it's long-duration buildup and self heal, it becomes an exceptional set. But few people would consider energy melee/electric armor a 'good' setup.
war mace and dark armor's oppressive gloom can combine to make for some truly incredible damage mitigation in the form of stuns. (A combo I have played with extensively but a lot of people can't stomach)
the thing is that these comparisons are not in a vacuum. I have an elec/ea brute, level 36, with some cute procs and a build specialised for sapping. She can drain out an entire group of 17 minions/luts/bosses in a little less than 5 seconds, and kill them all in about 20 seconds. But the fact of the matter is, That is exactly what I designed her to do.. That doesn't mean elec/ea is the best combination on the planet, but if you look at either /ea or electric melee by themselves you wouldn't immediately assume that they are designed for turning a herd into a bunch of brawling nimrods or that a little simple synergy can drag your damage mitigation up to nearly 100%... and yet that's not something that electric and any other set (save electric armor) can do.
to be fair, Fiery Embrace and Consume can do worlds of good for those other three sets.
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sure it would. And rest's actual recharge would have to be factored in as well, as would travel time between spawns. But that wasn't the point of the comparison. The point of comparison was actual mitigation of continuous incoming damage, and left such factors as travel time between spawns, rest time, lulls in activity, and such out of the argument.
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Any mention of downtime without mentioning Rest isn't an approximation: its a violation of the game balance intent of the power. It would be comparable to eliminating natural recovery.
At best, you could factor Rest out of a comparison where the intent was continuous activity at some balanced, slower level. But that's not the comparison you performed: you assigned significant amounts of idle downtime (60 seconds) when that was never the best option available.
My calculations show best strength mitigation, on the assumption that such defensive measures are always achievable at some level of offense, even if the endurance factors alter the offensive output available. They are explicitly stated to be defensive mitigation comparisons, not offensive contribution comparisons. But attempting to introduce offensive contributions due to endurance must factor in Rest, or they are not incomplete, but rather invalid.
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THE ONLY WAY to really see how a set performs when adding in such random calculations as mob# dependent mitigation, endurance modification, stealth is to take a random sampling of players with a broad variety of primaries and a broad variety of slotting options, say 100 people, and see how they perform at various levels as far as xp/minute and drops/minute.
Any other attempt to 'compare' secondary sets is more or less pointless, since, as another poster commented, 'numbers cannot show the whole picture'. Knowing how many railroad ties are on a railroad track, the stress points of steel, the average weight, speed, and frequency of trains that pass on the tracks and the local weather conditions will NOT allow you to calculate where and when the track is going to break... there are too many other factors involved to even give you a reliable ballpark figure.
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I don't agree. My analysis of Willpower from I11 appears to be dead on, and my analysis of Invuln appears, after a very long time, to be ultimately borne out. I am pretty comfortable with my overall perspective of fiery aura, dark armor, regen, SR, Ice, Stone, and all the other melee defensive sets. With special attention to endurance drain, I'm also comfortable with my differential analysis between energy and electric. I do not know of a defensive set that performs wildly contrary to what my analysis of its numbers imply, given sufficiently rigorous analysis, especially in conventional PvE combat.
Datamining is a good way to comfirm results, and prove that the models used for analysis are looking at the right things. And endurance *is* a factor in levelling speed, especially solo levelling speed (its actually my current long-term project). But even there, I'm not seeing major surprises in how endurance ultimately affects solo levelling performance for any archetype or powerset combination.
My numbers-don't-give-the-whole-picture analysis of melee defensive sets says the priority for balancing based on performance are: Energy Aura, Electric Armor, and Invulnerability, in that order. Worth making a note of, for future reference (Castle has already admitted looking at EA, and making changes to Invuln, in prior public posts). While its easy to incorrectly analyze the performance of the secondaries, that doesn't mean its impossible to do so correctly.
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there are just somethings that are acts of futility. and Arguing numbers with Arcanaville is one of them.
and now we can add "sugjesting ideas for a better EA" to that list. I'm just waiting for Castles post on the PvE/PvP balance feature of i13.
and since ya'll have been talking about it. My favorite way of compairing Defensive sets and how they preform compaird to one another is to have that set sit in front of a spawn of a givin mob and just use the powers from the defensive set to mitigate damage. and just for the record My EM/EA build (which has several IO sets now, but is not quite complete) does fairly well against most mob types in relentless solo missions with 2 or 3 spawns pulled together.
and I can't wait to see what Castle has to say about changes to EA, and Invuln
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But you CAN'T just compare them in a vacuum. It doesn't make any sense, and I only did it as an exercise in shutting someone up.
I mean, it's like this. fire armor is kind of a meh set for brutes, realistically. War mace, war axe, and energy melee don't get a great deal from fire as a secondary.
But when you add in ss with both it's footstomp mitigation, rage damage boost for fire's damage shield, and the ability to drop burn on footstomped opponents (if you like that combo) fire armor takes OFF, and turns into a devastating machine of total destruction.
electric armor isn't a very good set... but when you add in dark melee with it's long-duration buildup and self heal, it becomes an exceptional set. But few people would consider energy melee/electric armor a 'good' setup.
war mace and dark armor's oppressive gloom can combine to make for some truly incredible damage mitigation in the form of stuns. (A combo I have played with extensively but a lot of people can't stomach)
the thing is that these comparisons are not in a vacuum. I have an elec/ea brute, level 36, with some cute procs and a build specialised for sapping. She can drain out an entire group of 17 minions/luts/bosses in a little less than 5 seconds, and kill them all in about 20 seconds. But the fact of the matter is, That is exactly what I designed her to do.. That doesn't mean elec/ea is the best combination on the planet, but if you look at either /ea or electric melee by themselves you wouldn't immediately assume that they are designed for turning a herd into a bunch of brawling nimrods or that a little simple synergy can drag your damage mitigation up to nearly 100%... and yet that's not something that electric and any other set (save electric armor) can do.
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You CAN if you take into account that the only variable is the armours themselves. FA is meh for brutes, im sorry did i miss something? Here i thought the whole point of a Brutes existance was to lay slaughter to everything in sight, something a FA Brute can do well. Pair FA with Elec and you have a killer amount of End sapping and AoEs being boosted by FA in the form of a deathly Damage aura, Consume and fiery embrace. That sort of build would have killing mobs fast as a form of migitation.
in your posts your saying EA is great with IOs; yea well Invulerability is fantasitc with IOs as is damn near every other Armour. IOs are not what sets are balanced around Frost, dont ever bring them up in comparisons because it complicates them needlessly.
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in your posts your saying EA is great with IOs; yea well Invulerability is fantasitc with IOs as is damn near every other Armour. IOs are not what sets are balanced around Frost, dont ever bring them up in comparisons because it complicates them needlessly.
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On the other hand, we can't totally discount them. The reality of what SR has become is almost totally due to IOs (well, that and the defence resistance change). Talking about SR without a few cheap ones doesn't really seem fair now... does it?
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
I was talking about IO's in that post you quoted? weird, I don't see a single mention of an IO throughout the entire text.
If you had actually read what I said that you quoted, I was talking about /ea in combination with primaries. It had nothing to do with IO's.
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in your posts your saying EA is great with IOs; yea well Invulerability is fantasitc with IOs as is damn near every other Armour. IOs are not what sets are balanced around Frost, dont ever bring them up in comparisons because it complicates them needlessly.
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I will accept your apology if you are mature enough to give it.
You did mention your elec/ea had some "cute" procs, and that they could drain a spawn of 17 in 5 seconds. Whether the drain part is due to IO's is speculation, but the procs certainly are.
"the reason there are so many sarcastic pvpers is we already had a better version of pvp taken away from us to appease bad players. Back then we chuckled at how bad players came here and whined. If we knew that was the actual voice devs would listen to instead of informed, educated players we probably would have been bigger dicks back then." -ConFlict
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in your posts your saying EA is great with IOs; yea well Invulerability is fantasitc with IOs as is damn near every other Armour. IOs are not what sets are balanced around Frost, dont ever bring them up in comparisons because it complicates them needlessly.
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On the other hand, we can't totally discount them. The reality of what SR has become is almost totally due to IOs (well, that and the defence resistance change). Talking about SR without a few cheap ones doesn't really seem fair now... does it?
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It depends on what your goal is. My goal in balancing powersets would be to make sure each powerset itself gave to every player that chose it approximately the same total value of tools to succeed as all of its peer powersets (the other choices). Powerset synergy and Invention synergy would be secondary to the primary goal of making sure each powerset had approximately the same chance to succeed at the game. Factoring in inventions and powerset synergy is dangerous for two reasons: first, inventions are still defined as optional parts of the game, and even if they were not, factoring in inventions and powerset synergy would quickly devolve into judging build decisions, which is attempting to balance out - meaning factor out - player build decisions. All build decisions can't be equally good, because if they were, all build decisions would also be equally meaningless: decisions have no effect.
I judge defensive powersets based on their performance if you take and run everything, not because I believe players do take and run everything or *should* take and run everything. I don't actually care what the "real" performance of players is, because most of that performance is based on player *choices*: build choices, playstyle choices, etc. Players should have to live with their choices, because that's the only thing that makes those choices meaningful. I judge powersets based on the value of the tools in the bag, not on whether you use all the tools in the bag. In my opinion, the only promise a powerset should be able to make to a player is this one: the value of all my powers is comparable to the value of all the powers in the other powersets you have to choose from. What you choose to do with that value is entirely up to you: I don't promise *you* will do just as well as everyone else.
It is nice, but not essential, that a powerset be able to say "I will synergize with everything else in the game just as well as everything else will" because that is a difficult thing to judge, and because even if it was a simple thing to judge, the effort it takes to make this statement true for all powersets under all conditions would have so strong of a homogenizing effect on the game as to be inherently detrimental long before it had any benefit. This is something for which the main issue is ensuring things remain within an acceptable range, not strive to become perfectly identical in. In fact, qualitative differences that are extremely difficult or impossible to numerically compare are probably the best thing a game designer can do in this regard, because its fine for people to argue about which things are better, as long as none of them can actually prove it.
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I agree that it's important to look first at what's possible IN SET, but I think synergies, particularly very powerful ones need to be considered. I'm sure that at least for extreem monster barring, they are, but I have no Idea about other cases. I think that to some degree they should be. If one set has something very easy, some very potent synergy that permits it to do something very powerful (but not brokenly powerful), then that thing needs to be considered. Weighed evenly with what can be done in set? of course not, but I can't imagine that it's without value.
It's probably acounted for to a large degree by datamining. If people ARE taking cj + fighting and steadfast + gaussians on SR, then SR performance should be notably high...
The cake is a lie! The cake is a lie!
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I agree that it's important to look first at what's possible IN SET, but I think synergies, particularly very powerful ones need to be considered. I'm sure that at least for extreem monster barring, they are, but I have no Idea about other cases. I think that to some degree they should be. If one set has something very easy, some very potent synergy that permits it to do something very powerful (but not brokenly powerful), then that thing needs to be considered. Weighed evenly with what can be done in set? of course not, but I can't imagine that it's without value.
It's probably acounted for to a large degree by datamining. If people ARE taking cj + fighting and steadfast + gaussians on SR, then SR performance should be notably high...
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Oddly, if average players are taking CJ + Weave, their performance should be notably low. "Performance" isn't datamined by the strongest thing you defeat in a week, but by how many bars of XP you earned. For *most* players, unless you have also build in massive amounts of endurance extras, you're probably lowering your levelling speed by running those extra toggles, unless you never solo at all. And if you never solo, your own personal performance tends to get swamped out by the average performance of all the teams you join. You'll be safer, but slower.
That's the funny thing about defining "performance" as "the rate at which you earn rewards in the game." Its almost completely blind to total defensive performance above a certain level. Only when defensive performance becomes so high that something becomes a herder does it start to affect datamined performance. Passive defensive strength *does* show up, because it never steals endurance away from someone trying to output offense and level. Or when it gets so low that the thing being looked at actually starts to die or have to stop fighting until they Rest or recover health. In between "dies a lot" and "can start to herd spawns together and leverage AoEs more" the devs performance statistics become partially blind to defensive performance in general. Not totally blind, because higher defenses are *sometimes* useful in terms of speeding up a fight, especially when fighting bosses at the end of the mission. But they do not generally allow you to kill faster during a solo mission, except as previously mentioned when you need some minimum amount of it just to survive the spawns.
That doesn't mean topline defensive performance isn't important. It just means its not easy for the devs to directly datamine. At least, it doesn't appear to be, based on what they've said they datamine. One of the reasons why its important to have good numerical models to judge the powersets on: datamining itself might be absolute in its final judgement of the performance of a set, but datamining can't look everywhere. If you don't have a numerical model, you cannot connect the dots that datamining gives you to assemble a complete picture of powerset performance.
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/EA is getting a buff.
Go here and read.
http://boards.cityofvillains.com/showfla...=0#Post12104503
Here's better:
http://eu.cityofheroes.com/game-guide/fe...d_castle_grubb/
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I was talking about IO's in that post you quoted? weird, I don't see a single mention of an IO throughout the entire text.
If you had actually read what I said that you quoted, I was talking about /ea in combination with primaries. It had nothing to do with IO's.
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in your posts your saying EA is great with IOs; yea well Invulerability is fantasitc with IOs as is damn near every other Armour. IOs are not what sets are balanced around Frost, dont ever bring them up in comparisons because it complicates them needlessly.
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I will accept your apology if you are mature enough to give it.
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But you CAN'T just compare them in a vacuum. It doesn't make any sense, and I only did it as an exercise in shutting someone up.
I mean, it's like this. fire armor is kind of a meh set for brutes, realistically. War mace, war axe, and energy melee don't get a great deal from fire as a secondary.
But when you add in ss with both it's footstomp mitigation, rage damage boost for fire's damage shield, and the ability to drop burn on footstomped opponents (if you like that combo) fire armor takes OFF, and turns into a devastating machine of total destruction.
electric armor isn't a very good set... but when you add in dark melee with it's long-duration buildup and self heal, it becomes an exceptional set. But few people would consider energy melee/electric armor a 'good' setup.
war mace and dark armor's oppressive gloom can combine to make for some truly incredible damage mitigation in the form of stuns. (A combo I have played with extensively but a lot of people can't stomach)
the thing is that these comparisons are not in a vacuum. I have an elec/ea brute, level 36, with some cute procs and a build specialised for sapping. She can drain out an entire group of 17 minions/luts/bosses in a little less than 5 seconds, and kill them all in about 20 seconds. But the fact of the matter is, That is exactly what I designed her to do.. That doesn't mean elec/ea is the best combination on the planet, but if you look at either /ea or electric melee by themselves you wouldn't immediately assume that they are designed for turning a herd into a bunch of brawling nimrods or that a little simple synergy can drag your damage mitigation up to nearly 100%... and yet that's not something that electric and any other set (save electric armor) can do.
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Highlighted, also i said post' S , Pural. not to mention i do have a habit of rattling off thoughts from reading the thread between my posts in one lump, but in this case you did mention a commonly used IO term in the context of them being IO Procs so you can see its easy to talk about IOs.
Look im not having a dig at you Frost but EA dose need work to be a brute set, let alone if they plan to port it over for scrappers and tanks. Like i said i love EA on my Stalker, it gives me the defence i need to kill a few things in a mob and sap their end before i start Scrapping. But for a brute set it lacks survivability.
meh. /ea is turning into willpower*. The bright side is that at least brutes aren't expected to hold aggro like a tanker. Get in, take the alpha so that the mastermind doesn't wet himself, and get out.
*basically a tough set that can't hold aggro without help.
I think this thread should be un-stickied the second I13 goes live. Can lighthouse do that?
I think these 2 changes should pretty much balance EA in PvE. It cuts down the toxic hole, leave psy as the common hole. Then gives a potential 40% heal with a sacrifice to end recovery or recharge.
Dirges
I still think Energy Cloak should give +perception. Currently it's not that different from the Stealth pool power.
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I think these 2 changes should pretty much balance EA in PvE. It cuts down the toxic hole, leave psy as the common hole. Then gives a potential 40% heal with a sacrifice to end recovery or recharge.
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Not for me it won't. The toxic resistance isn't much, and I won't get anywhere near that "potential" 40% heal. But any little buff is nice, even if it doesn't balance the set sufficiently.
actually, with proper IO slotting, you hardly sacrifice anything except a couple of slots you have to add.
level 50 IO's:
1 heal+end (26.5% both)
1 heal+rech (26.5% both)
1 heal+end+rech (21.2% all three)
1 heal+end+rech (21.2% all three)
1 endmod (42.5%)
1 endmod (42.5%)
for a total of 95.4% heal ed-capped at around 93%, 85% end mod just brushing under the ED cap (anything more would give you pennies on the dollar return) and 69.9% end reduction and recharge... or you could just skip the end reduction and go whole hog for close to 95% recharge, heal, and end mod at the same time.
I am willing to give up a little recharge for being able to run it at lower end levels, but that's just me.
what say you guys about making ED available at a lower level since its so important to defense now?
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Sure. Swap it with energy cloak.
Be well, people of CoH.
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Sure. Swap it with energy cloak.
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Which btw should grant perception like cloak of darkness
a cried a single tear when i read castles post...
the thing that makes me the most happiest is...I don't have to make any drastic changes to my current build. just gotta figure out how to add a little extra healing to ED and i'm set =D
and the auto toxic resistance makes V very happy =D
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To Build a Better Hero #53098 [Newly edited and looking for Feedback] - Renegade Robots: V-Tron's Task Force # - A Summer Song and A Winters Tail #104106
Nobody except dev have the statistics to do a thorough analysis, unless a person uses herostat to collect statistics over a long period of time. Most analysis that can be done by players is something like dps for example, neglecting secondary effects and utilities offered by the power set. Such analysis only provides an indication of the problem of a power set, and I believe most people who do such kind of analysis are aware of it.
There is a huge diversity in the character's build and playing style. Some are brutal brute, some are stealthy, some solo a lot, while others are team oriented. Each will have a different opinion on energy aura; and very often, players will have conflicting experience and opinions. I think it is good enough for everybody to express their own experience of energy aura and suggestions.