Power Myths!
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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.
[/ QUOTE ]That used to be a myth. It isn't any more, though. It was never a myth for Dual Blades.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.
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To be fair, this one is no longer simple. Once, weapon draw did not affect DPS, but now it does. When people found out that all weapon activation times had draw times baked in, they complained fairly bitterly, and it was changed so that they no longer do. So nowr edraw now adds in time that isn't otherwise there, thus lowering DPS if you have to do it often.
Also, not all sets lost their redraw time. Spines still has it baked in.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.
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Nice one, I still hear people saying stuff like "Lol@ broadsword, redraw kills your dps"
Crime of Fashion Level 50 Rad/Rad Corrupter
My Toons
My Rad/Rad Corrupters Guide
Mindscape - Reworking
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When people found out that all weapon activation times had draw times baked in, they complained fairly bitterly
[/ QUOTE ]I don't recall that. I do recall people realizing how nice it was to fight without pauses in the animations when Dual Blades came out (which was always that way)
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
FS originally buffed around the target only at a rate of 25% per mob hit, with no target cap. You could easily buff up to the 400% cap off one good pull.
This was changed, the target cap was put in place. The mob and mobs around were given the reduced buff of 15% per. In the same swing, a new buff originated around the caster of 25%. The caster buff was given so that blasters and other people at range could benefit from the buffage instead of just melee chars.
You have to jump in your "I remember 5 years ago" machine to get this.
I miss old FS and 3 sings.....
Wassabi Grav/Kin 50 (before badges/accolades were in game) Pinnacle
Miss Command Bots/Traps 50 Justice
*others left off due to space issues
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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.
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Claimed myth by BaB, multiple times, followed by admission that redraw was not consistently implemented in the way he thought it was, and it wasn't a simple matter of "yes it's a myth/no it's not" after all.
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I don't recall that. I do recall people realizing how nice it was to fight without pauses in the animations when Dual Blades came out (which was always that way)
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I think that really popularized the distaste for the baked in pauses, as it made more folks aware of the difference by "feel" if nothing else. Also, people seem to have keenly honed senses of "that's not fair, I want it too!"
The complaining I'm recalling was from the Scrapper forums in particular. It was short-lived, as the real confirmation about the baked-in times was not that long before they started changing it.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.
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Claimed myth by BaB, multiple times, followed by admission that redraw was not consistently implemented in the way he thought it was, and it wasn't a simple matter of "yes it's a myth/no it's not" after all.
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Its more complicated than that, partially because people paraphrased the assertion in ways they thought preserved the meaning, but often did not.
"Weapon draw causes the attack to take longer to animate." This one is true. If you play a weapon draw animation, that does *not* generally shorten the actual attack animation. So draw + attack takes longer to play than just "attack."
However: "weapon draw slows down your attacks." Ah, this one was *false*. While it took longer to animate the attack, generally speaking all attacks in weapon-based powersets had cast times set so that the total cast time of the attack was set to approximately the draw time + the attack animation time. Therefore, *if* you drew the weapon, the cast time was equal to the total animation time of draw + attack. However if your weapon was already drawn, you'd oly play the attack animation but the cast time would still be the same. You'd therefore get no attack chain speed advantage to not drawing the weapon. What would happen is the animation would play, and then there would be a noticable pause at the end of the attack animation where the player still couldn't attack yet (cast time still enforced) but the player wasn't animating anything.
"Weapon draw reduces your damage." This one was false, for the reason above.
Now we get to this one: "weapon draw doesn't affect your attacks." This one is ambiguous: its half true and half false. But discussions surrounding this very statement caused problems because some people would observe the attack animations and *see* it did affect the attacks, and other players would observe chains of attacks and *see* that it didn't. Thus the controversy.
As it turns out, virtually all of the older powersets were designed with weapon draw included in cast time, as BaB suggests. However, some newer powersets were not designed in that way (Dual Blades in particular) and thus weapon draw did slow them down.
However its also important to note that when people talk about weapon draw "slowing them down" they used to state that like it was a disadvantage. In fact, the sets for which weapon draw slowed them down were intrinsicly faster than the ones for which it did not: in other words, its better to have a set that weapon draw hurts rather than one in which it doesn't, which *further* confuses the issue. The issue is that all sets that aren't affected by weapon draw (that use weapns) are essentially unaffected because they behave as if they are always drawing: in other words, they are under the weapon draw penalty all the time.
Phrased this way: "some weapon sets are affected by weapon draw when they actually draw the weapon, the rest are affected by weapon draw delay all of the time regardless of whether they are actually drawing a weapon" it becomes a bit more clear what's going on.
Bottom line: "Weapon Draw Slows Down Your Attacks" was essentially a myth pre-I11. You were more likely to be slowed down by being a female (character) than by weapon draw prior to I11.
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I <3 Arcanaville.
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I <3 Arcanaville.
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I think most people here do. She's awesome. Even if she won't talk to me. Probably has something to do with deoderant or something...
There I was between a rock and a hard place. Then I thought, "What am I doing on this side of the rock?"
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FS originally buffed around the target only at a rate of 25% per mob hit, with no target cap. You could easily buff up to the 400% cap off one good pull.
This was changed, the target cap was put in place. The mob and mobs around were given the reduced buff of 15% per. In the same swing, a new buff originated around the caster of 25%. The caster buff was given so that blasters and other people at range could benefit from the buffage instead of just melee chars.
You have to jump in your "I remember 5 years ago" machine to get this.
I miss old FS and 3 sings.....
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Eh? This is not how Fulcrum Shift was changed.
Fulcrum Shift used to hit, with no target cap, a group of enemies for -25% each and each enemy hit would also buff allies nearby for +25%.
In addition to that, it would also give +25% damage for each enemy hit, but this buff happened around the caster.
It was set up this way originally to, ideally, buff melee and ranged characters equally.
But people didn't use it that way (and still don't). People using Fulcrum Shift often ran in to melee to use it, to soak up every buff.
So in Issue 2, in order to tone this down, they left the melee-buffs alone, and instead of a buff coming from the Defender for each enemy hit, they made the buff around the caster be a single +50% damage buff.
The target cap wasn't added until Issue 5.
The buff values for Defenders still are +25% for each foe, and +50% automatically around the caster. For Controllers and Corruptors it is +20% for each foe and +40% around the caster.
Weapon set redraw. Confirmed myth by BaBs and yet still the subject of so many player balance debates.