Knotty thought on recharge and animation

Okay, this is less a 'suggestion' in that I intend to mail it to Castle and crusade for it and as much an idea that I think I need to talk about with people who are better at math than myself and who understand the formulae that drive this game better. To provide the simple outline:

Would it be feasible to adjust the recharge of powers based on their animation times, normalising them for PVE?

I don't mean to make all DPA normalised. I also think that these changes should not adjust the endurance cost or damage scalars of the powers so affected. This is literally just about the recharge of the powers. What I was thinking was one of these two ideas:<ul type="square">[*]Powers with animations that deviate from a mean, ( for example, let's say 1.5 seconds) then have that deviation applied to the power's recharge, an outright subtraction.[*]Powers with long animations have a slight discount on their recharge time to, without recharge enhancements, give them the 'lost' time in animation back.[/list]The problem with the first idea is that I think it's not doable. I imagine it would look like this, and forgive my terrible formula attempt:

Recharge Time = ((the formula as it exists, handling global recharge and everything) - Animation Time-1.5), reducing the recharge time to a minimum of the power's animation time

That's probably more complex than the formula can handle. The alternative is a bit more of a problem - it would involve setting the power's recharge lower overall, giving its base recharge a discount, until its recharge was low enough that it started recharging 1.5 seconds into its animation. The main problem I see wth this idea is that global recharge then reduces a smaller value.

Right now, PVE's power-balancing rules seem to be completely agnostic to animation times. While animation can be a control factor - the Energy Transfer animation change, for example, indicates the developers using the animation of the power to throttle back the overall damage rampage of the set, for example. On the other hand, the rest of the set of Energy Melee has a significant number of slow animations, and that seems to bother people. Equal to that, other long-animating attacks and powers have a certain distaste to the number-crunchers because they eat into your mobility, eat into your time, etcetera. It'd be nice if there was an effect to adjust that. On the other hand, it might mean a technical nerf to alternative powers - with recharge changes, some powers can be quite a bit better, I imagine.

Once I set aside the math and the number crunching part of it, I think about, if my 1.5 standard was used, what it would mean?

Blaze would recharge .5 seconds slower.
Total Focus would recharge 1.63 seconds faster.

Which now that I look at it makes me wonder if this would be significant enough to improve the feel of the slower-animating powers and yet not so significant that it would harm those powers that already do animate quickly.

(This post was not made with FOE, but I did use colours to try and make Player happy.)

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Once upon a time, Geko balanced powers based on a formula that took into account damage, recharge and endurance cost, with animation times being assigned completely arbitrarily by whoever it was that was responsible for making the animations at the time (I'm pretty sure it wasn't BABs then). This has led to situations where an animation is far too long for what the power does, such as the old version of Barrage, and to situations where an animation is too short, such as the case for Energy Transfer. I mention those because they have been corrected, so I don't have to prove they're issues. If I'd mentioned Barb Swipe and Blaze, I'd have gotten into an argument, so let's stick to what has been developer-acknowledged.

As I said, certain things have been mended. It was either Castle or BABs (or maybe even both) that at least suggested that future powers will be made with animation times in mind. Though there has been no guarantee older powers will or will not be changed, certain outliers have still been altered, which would appear to mean that the developers have chosen this method for rebalancing powers.

To be a bit more scientific, our powers are balanced with a certain specific damage-to-endurance ratio (0.192 scale damage per endurance point, or 5.2 endurance points per scale damage for single-target attacks) and a specific damage-to-recharge ratio that I don't remember offhand. Damage-to-endurance tends to be fairly static, defined by a power's "nature." AoE powers are balanced to cost more for the endurance they do, if I remember correctly such that you have to hit three targets or more to offset the cost, while cones are balanced slightly more forgivingly, but still on the low side. Claws has an endurance discount, meaning its attacks are balanced to do more damage per unit of endurance than other sets, and Epic/Patron attacks are typically balanced to cost more for what they do.

The reason I mention this is because it feeds directly into any "per second" metric you're going to see. The more DPS a power has, the more EPS it costs to do so. That's because recharge is balanced to damage and slated to favour short-recharge powers. Cycling Jab continuously would do significantly more damage over time than cycling Knockout Blow, just to give you an example. Jab will also cost you more in the same amount of time, despite the power itself being so much cheaper.

You would think, based on the above DPS balance metric, that Jab would give you more damage in your attack chain than Knockout Blow, but there is another side to this coin - expected performance vs. actual performance. DPS metrics assume a power is cycled as soon as it is recharge, but in reality, that isn't possible. Powers spend time waiting while other powers animate, thus taking them away from their "ideal" DPS. People naturally favour big attacks to open with and big attacks when they are recharged, and depending on your AT, battles can last less time than it takes a big power to recharge. This gives a natural tendency for big attacks to end up closer to their ideal DPS, while smaller attacks, which spend a lot of time recharged and waiting to serve as filler, end up farther away from their ideal. This, for the most part, counteracts the DPS and EPS superiority they have. Essentially, for the DPS increase you get from smaller attacks, you pay with more rooting and less room in your attack chain.

The point, I suppose you could call it, is that shorter-recharge powers spend more time animating while longer-recharge powers spend less time animating. Giving longer-animation powers a shorter recharge is actually to the detriment of the player. DPS increases, yes, but so does EPS, and on big attacks that end up close to their ideal DPS and EPS, that can be significant. As well, because the shorter the recharge of the attack is, the more times it ends up being activated and, being that it's a long-animation attack, eats up a SIGNIFICANT amount of time that could have been used for other things, that is actually detrimental not just to damage, but to utility as well, because it removes the "gaps" that utility powers tend to be best suited for.

You have to look at it like this: a longer animation time on a short-recharge attack is a BAD thing, because it both swells up the attack AND eats up a lot of your biggest resource - opportunity. Long animation times are actually best suited for long-recharge, high-investment powers because the relative overhead is generally much cheaper compared to the power's overall opportunity cost.

Let me put it this way. Which do you think is better? Using a 4 second recharge, 3 second animation power lots of times, or a 20 second recharge, 3 second animation power as much as you can manage? I would answer the latter. The former takes up 3 out of every 7 seconds, which is a little over 42% of your time with just that one power. The latter takes up 3 out of every 20 seconds, which is only 15% of your time. Yes, technically the latter would do less damage, but it would also cost less, net, and it would give you the opportunity to do something MORE than cycle that power over an over.

The last thing you want is slow attacks recharging faster.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.