How would you change the Stone Armor set?

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Probably add more Defense were it counts on Rock Armor, seeing as people still use it after 32. Increase stone skins numbers just a bit and allow Minerals to be ran on Granite. Everything else can pretty much be "dealt" with.

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I doubt we'd be able to run Minerals on Granite without there being a penalty of some sort as Minerals would close one of the major holes in Granites "armor".

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

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The only change (and one I have suggested but it was ignored) would be to take the slow effect out of rooted and tack it on to granite. Also allow super speed to be run while you have rooted on but not when you have granite on.

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As someone else mentioned I doubt that most folks run rooted/granite at the same time. I use it as more of fall back when the mobs are making a dent in health. Having all the -run speed on Granite would be "ugly"....

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

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Huge Bodies on Tank-type characters = Suck. There's a specific reason my Tanks are diminutive characters.

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I made a toon that was as tall and as large as you can make in the character creator. After taking him through the caves a few times I've made the rest of my toons average to short in height. Huge Bodies through the caves suck.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

I can see your point with it being ugly and as I have said it was more of a comprimise suggestion to get it removed from rooted. I feel the early penality to rooted is the primary reason many people are not fond of the set. The penalties to granite are quite easy to overlook because your nearly unkillable.

As to your suggestions that my need to run both granite and rooted stem from my being a brute I disagree. I only need granite in extreme situations, like the freedom phalanx for example. The majority of other missions I run the other toggles with rooted. Typically I only have to run two or at most 3 because you rarely have to deal with all the damage types.

Another suggestion would be to make the combined endurance costs of the other shields less than granite. I have hesitated to make that suggestion because there are those that would argue that granites end cost should be increased. Something I would not support.

Also in the past I have heard someone ( I forget the name ) suggest shifting some/all of the mez protection from rooted to minerals and then reordering the set so that could be taken earlier. Simply switching the order of brimstone armor and minerals would mean tanks would get it at 12 and Brutes at 18. That would be early enough to not be too painful and you would not have to sacrafice your movment for the majority of your mez protecton. Knockback would still remain in rooted though.

The only problem I see with that is many people (especially tanks) might begin to see rooted as a skippable power since you could easily build knockback resistance into your build.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

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Since I know I will not agree to your ideas, I'm not going to bother responding after this, it'd just be wasted effort.

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You're saying and believing that the Stone Armor set is fine the way it is, is as valid as anyone's opinion. This isn't about shoving changes down peoples throats, this is about finding ideas/ways to make the set better if there is a way. You're voice should be apart of that whether some or no changes are made.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

(QR)

Was playing a bit with mids and refreshing my memory in game with my stoner, plus compared with willpower to get an idea of how far behind non-granite is and I came up with this potential list of things that can (together) result in quite an interesting buff:


Brimstone: Extend the resistances to all damage types but toxic and psi.
Crystal: Extend the defenses to fire and cold. Add 5% defense to lethal.
Stone Skin: Extend the resistances to all damage types but psi.
Minerals: turn the power from a self buff to a team buff (including self, off course)

Lower the end cost of all toggles from .13 to .104 (just as the one only other set that relies on so many toggles, dark armor)

On top of this the ones noted before:
Remove -speed from rooted
Lower Mud Pots end cost to 1.04


The results of this buff:

If this was implemented, the stone tanker that took every primary power:

A total of 55% smash/lethal/cold/fire/neg/eng resistance
A total of 25% smash/cold/fire/neg/eng defense
A total of 33% lethal defense

If you pondering why more lethal defense than smashing: because stone is harder to cut than to smash. It's a thematic addition.

Now, when you cumulate these stats with the formula I wont explain over but you can hunt Arcanaville's posts about it:

Mitigation = 1 - (1-resist) * (1-def*2) * (1-(1-1/(1+HPBuff)))

With Earth Embrace up stone will get:
Mitigation = 1 - (1-.55) * (1-.25*2) * (1-(1-1/(1+.59)))
=1 - .45 * .5 * .63
=86% mitigation

With no EE, it will get: 77% (leave the math to you guys to play with there)


For lethal damage, though, you get:

90% W/EE
84% W/O EE


Now, mitigation has a way of increasing the power of regeneration by a bunch of stuff that basically end up in the division of heal/mitigation. This means that the base stone build ends up with: Regen/(1-Mitigation)

Enhanced Rooted plus base healing = 295% regen so the result is:

W/O EE
Smash/Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative: 1297%
Lethal: 1885%

W/EE
Smash/Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative: 2063%
Lethal: 2996%



Now, do those look high? Well... lets compare to Willpower, shall we?

With just one foe in range, willpower gets 498% regeneration and it's smash/lethal mitigation ends up being 52% (if damage is pure, the fire/cold/neg/eng defs catch a lot of the mixed damage but I'll stay simple here) and it's f/c/n/e mitigation is of 48%

Divide the way I noted above and you get that WP's effective regeneration is:
S/L: 2244%
All Else: 2041%


Considering that willpower is using less endurance, less slotting and can get even more regen with more foes, I'd say Stone is still not reaching the full potential of a WP tanker, only keeping an advantage on higher mitigation that helps much more with alphas and stacking pools (should the stoner find any room to take those pools, that is)


On top of balance there is more these changes accomplish. For one, the set becomes much more fun to develop. Every power you get (other than Rock Armor) happens to make you slightly stronger to most attacks. Facing foes with gaping holes to your defense during your development is one of the biggest reasons why certain sets are just not fun to tank with until the high levels. This buffs the set and also makes it so that you never have huge holes.

From level one you would get a power that stands between True Grit and High Pain Tolerance in effectiveness.

<ul type="square">[*]At level 8 you get rooted to help against all damage types.[*]At level 12 you gain resistances to all types that are more reliable at these low levels than low defenses.[*]At level 18 you patch any remaining holes that were left by rock armor and show your new superiority against lethal.[*]At level 26 you gain a team buff that will protect them against confusion and grant them perception to fight off those blinding effects, plus, off course, you give them psi defense: this, in a way, returns to Stone it's original crown, best psi tanker. With the introduction of willpower, proliferation of granite and introduction of psi resist IOs, Stone has sort of lost this desirability. Now it would regain it by protecting the team against psi. It also makes perfect sense as certain minerals and crystals are already used by the CoT to heal, and the DE to buff.[/list]
And off course, endurance costs being lower are also going to make the set much more fun to develop than the insane endurance cost it goes through now.

At this point, if Granite was not changed into a timed toggle, instead I'd make it's debuff unavoidable by making them damage, speed and recharge cap debuffs that force you to stay at the intended debuff and never go over them. Such a version of granite would keep everything people note here they like about granite (mode switching to low damage) without allowing the low damage penalties from being circumvented.

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The team buff makes this an interesting addition, but I don't see keeping 40% defense to Psi while tacking on a team buff.

I don't know why I'm so against this other than I put a lot into the stoner I currently have and I really like the set. I'm usually not against most ideas on the basis of change, but I just can't imagine playing a stoner and then getting angry because you realize there were drawbacks. Most people complain about Stone for 2 reasons - 1 it's so powerful but 2 "there's so many debuffs".

And as I said, I really like the set as is, so I mgiht be a little biased. But I just don't see these changes as necessary. Most of the end issues on a stoner is coming from Mudpots, so you would have to lower it's end concerns a lot before I would consider running all the toggles at once, as well as mudpots. Even with Mudpots at 1. whatever you said earlier that would still be a lot to run and spam attacks faster without having a recovery tool.

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"Be a beacon?"

Blue Mourning: lvl. 50 Katana/DA
Bree the Barricade: lvl 50 Stone/Axe
Last Chance for Eden: lvl 50 Fire/Kin
Myra the Grey: lvl 50 Bots/Traps
1 Minute to Midnight lvl 50 Spines/DA

Some interesting ideas Starsman but I think the numbers are too strong and would radically change play style for the traditional granite player. Tone the numbers down a bit and it might work.

Granite needs to be king in the set imo. The more I have thought about my suggestion of moving the slow from rooted to granite the more I realize how many people that would make unhappy. So I would like to see the - speed of rooted gone, however for theamatic reasons I believe that you should still not be able to jump, you wouldnt be rooted if you were not touching the ground.

Also (and sorry if this comes off rude I dont mean it to be) I put very little stock in spreadsheets and charts. To me the real experiance means more to me. You can tell me that willpower is the greatest till your blue in the face with spreadsheet numbers and I will never agree. I will concede that against a steady flow of damage they are great. Burst damage not so much. I have seen many a willpower character get smashed flat with an alpha strike. Regen only helps if you can stay alive long enough to use it.

So thats why I would disagree with your suggestions to beef up the low level armors to those levels. The current levels are fine. Stoners may not be the most durable characters in those early levels but I do not think they should be. Leave something for the other sets.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

Something else I have always felt would have been a nice touch would be to have attackers take some damage when they attack you if your running brimstone armor.

However from the shield set topics awhile back I seem to remember that they could not do reflected damage for some reason.

Darn so many good ideas that can not be done just because they wont work.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

Vicar, Granite would remain the king with my last sugestion.

Slotted, Granite yields 79.2% resistance to all (but psi) and 32% defense to all (but psi)

With rooted this nets a 3875% effective regeneration. It blows away the recomendation I posted above by a lot, and thats without using Earth Embrace. Click that and you get an effective 6161% regeneration.

Compared to granite, what I recommend is miles behind.

So whatever you experience now in granite, stone with my suggestions would still be about 1/3rd of that if not less.

As for trusting numbers or spreadsheets, the game is one giant spreadsheet, castle does his balancing on a spreadsheet and everything is based off how much damage can be taken. Off course pure regeneration will be much more susceptible to alpha, I noted that in my post. I am going simplistic here as I'm not going to set up a full website graphically displaying where each type fall.

However, there comes a point where the mitigation is high enough for you to take the alpha and keep going. Most WP i have seen die in such situations are just poorly build to be pure regenerative and ignore defense and resistance slotting. A decently built WP needs insane challenges to be killed.

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Something else I have always felt would have been a nice touch would be to have attackers take some damage when they attack you if your running brimstone armor.

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Not possible in the current game but if it was, this would be a toy reserved for fiery armor not for stone.

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Vicar, Granite would remain the king with my last sugestion.

Slotted, Granite yields 79.2% resistance to all (but psi) and 32% defense to all (but psi)

With rooted this nets a 3875% effective regeneration. It blows away the recomendation I posted above by a lot, and thats without using Earth Embrace. Click that and you get an effective 6161% regeneration.

Compared to granite, what I recommend is miles behind.

So whatever you experience now in granite, stone with my suggestions would still be about 1/3rd of that if not less.

As for trusting numbers or spreadsheets, the game is one giant spreadsheet, castle does his balancing on a spreadsheet and everything is based off how much damage can be taken. Off course pure regeneration will be much more susceptible to alpha, I noted that in my post. I am going simplistic here as I'm not going to set up a full website graphically displaying where each type fall.

However, there comes a point where the mitigation is high enough for you to take the alpha and keep going. Most WP i have seen die in such situations are just poorly build to be pure regenerative and ignore defense and resistance slotting. A decently built WP needs insane challenges to be killed.

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Very good points.

However I believe the changes you suggest would close the gap between the other armors and granite so much that very few people would bother with granite.

Old school granite types would have people saying stuff to them like " Why are you running granite its completely unessesary and you would do way more damage without it".

As to Castle using spreadsheets to balance this game. . . . . . . . take a look at pvp. No offense intended to Castle but that is exactly what causes game inbalances. Lots of things that look great on paper are absolutely terrible in "real life" or in this case in the game.

For this type of application spreadsheets are a good place to start but you can not finish with them.

Text book smarts can only take you so far before common sense must kick in.

Common sense can only take you so far before text book smarts are needed.

Elusivity for example. Looked great on paper but once in the game it was grossly overpowered, so they nerfed it. IMO they over nerfed it but that is my opinion.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

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Something else I have always felt would have been a nice touch would be to have attackers take some damage when they attack you if your running brimstone armor.

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Not possible in the current game but if it was, this would be a toy reserved for fiery armor not for stone.

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Lol please quote the next paragraph where I say that I recall them saying it was not possible. I really do not need any more help to sound like an idiot, I have that covered on my own.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

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As to Castle using spreadsheets to balance this game. . . . . . . . take a look at pvp.

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PvP and PvE are two different beasts and as such they are balanced in entirely different ways. His PvP changes were precisely an attempt at doing that, giving PvP it's own rule sets and take it away from the spreadsheet balancing mechanics PvE are tied up to.

Even then the biggest issue with PvP is precisely that he has been overcompensating or under compensating numeric calculations based around those precise points. You can actually say the issue with his work on PvP is ignoring spreadsheets in favor of instincts.

Elusivity actually is perfect. The problem was how it got used. He, instinctively, added it to sets and let it run beta and live for a while to get a feel of it.

Proper way to handle Elusivity would had been to replace native defense with Elusivity while leaving pool, external buffs, and IO granted defense as plain defense. I can just pull spreadsheets showing how the values of Elusivity were over used and then under used, but I truthfully don't care about PvP* and any research I do on Elusivity options would be as means to bring it into PvE properly.

*The reason I actually don't care for PvP is not the PvP itself but the nature of kiting and jousting that goes on in this game's PvP where the chicken that jumps and occasionally hits hard is the one that wins. If there were ring-out rules where a chicken got penalized I may actually be more into it.

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Something else I have always felt would have been a nice touch would be to have attackers take some damage when they attack you if your running brimstone armor.

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Not possible in the current game but if it was, this would be a toy reserved for fiery armor not for stone.

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Lol please quote the next paragraph where I say that I recall them saying it was not possible. I really do not need any more help to sound like an idiot, I have that covered on my own.

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My intention was not to correct you, but to note the second line about if it existed it being used as Fiery Aura's main toy.

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Post deleted by Moderator 08

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Post Deleted by Moderator_08

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So much for a polite discourse on the stone armor set and the possible merits, or lacking thereof, to possible changes to it. I find it disappointing that you've chosen to basically call everyone who thinks changes to the set might be a good thing "idiots", especially considering this comment you made over in the Dom forums:

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It's the nature of the beast - nobody in this thread, by and large, is interested in discussing things with anyone, and nobody is really willing to grip the notion that someone else might be better informed or reasoned than themselves.

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Oh well. Back to the subject at hand. "Us idiots" have things to discuss. Chuckle.

(edited for clarity)

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

Not sure where you're getting your end cost numbers from. I'm currently seeing in the game endurance costs of 0.26/s un-enhanced for the armors with mudpots at 0.78/s.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

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2) Scaling Granite, not to say I haven't always wanted it...

I. Want. My. Smaller. Footprint.

Huge Bodies on Tank-type characters = Suck. There's a specific reason my Tanks are diminutive characters.

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Well, so far it seems that there hasn't been any great adverse reaction to my comments on Granite scaling to character size. I know it's a tiny cosmetic change, but is there anyone who is opposed to such a change?

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

Well, I don't mind, but I guarantee you that someone in this game finds it epic and would curse you forever if it changed.

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"Be a beacon?"

Blue Mourning: lvl. 50 Katana/DA
Bree the Barricade: lvl 50 Stone/Axe
Last Chance for Eden: lvl 50 Fire/Kin
Myra the Grey: lvl 50 Bots/Traps
1 Minute to Midnight lvl 50 Spines/DA

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Not sure where you're getting your end cost numbers from. I'm currently seeing in the game endurance costs of 0.26/s un-enhanced for the armors with mudpots at 0.78/s.

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Toggles don't actually use endurance per second, they use endurance per pulse. Most damage auras pulse every 2 seconds therefore the end they cost per pulse is actually double of their endurance per second.

Personal shields, though, tend to pulse every half a second so their endurance cost will look as if it was half of the endurance per second the game tells you.

The numbers I quoted were from the actual endurance per cycle.

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Not sure where you're getting your end cost numbers from. I'm currently seeing in the game endurance costs of 0.26/s un-enhanced for the armors with mudpots at 0.78/s.

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Toggles don't actually use endurance per second, they use endurance per pulse. Most damage auras pulse every 2 seconds therefore the end they cost per pulse is actually double of their endurance per second.

Personal shields, though, tend to pulse every half a second so their endurance cost will look as if it was half of the endurance per second the game tells you.

The numbers I quoted were from the actual endurance per cycle.

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Interesting. Learn something new everyday.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

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Well, I don't mind, but I guarantee you that someone in this game finds it epic and would curse you forever if it changed.

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I hear you. The truth of the matter is even if we asked for this cosmetic change, I'm not sure the dev's would find it worth while to implement. In the end it might just be a moot point.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

As far as the scaling to character size for granite, well to me it would simply make sense.

However I am relatively indifferent too that as a change *shrug*.

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*readies fire extinguisher*

Of all things that would be the biggest one on my list. I run a teen female stone tank, she is very small and with very small proportions, every time I turn on the armor the thing is taller than her.

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