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fulcrum shift, speed boost, and siphon speed are identical for both ATs
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Missed this earlier on the thread.
Fulkrum Shift is not identical on both ATs, the corruptor debuffs 20% dmg and buffs 40% damage while the defender is 25%/50%, mind you, either can easily take anyone to the damage caps with enough foes.
Speed boost and siphon speed, yea those two are basically the same, defender version of siphon speed has a stronger -speed debuff but it's not like anyone cares about that debuff anyways.
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the difference between a Defender Fulcrum Shift and corruptor fulcrum shift is only a 10% buff.
Defender radiates one +50% from themselves and +25% per foe up to 10.
Corruptor radiates one +40% from themselves and +25% per foe up to 10.
When the numbers scale up to be a max of 300% and 290%, that 10% difference might as well not even exist.
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The difference may be small (they also debuff for different amounts) the point is they are not identical
Fulcrum is a glaring example of where they did not make a meaningful difference in the power between AT's. That isn't the fault of defenders though and it isn't evidence that defs need a increase to their base modifier.
Increasing their base modifier wouldn't correct the issue with corrs/trollers buffing to basically the same values with fulcrum. It wouldn't fix speedboost being the same, or all the other kin powers that are too close for comfort.
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A base damage increase is where you would need to start to even begin balancing the support sets. Otherwise you're going to be force to scale the lacking support powers too high to compensate.
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Maybe. I've never really been opposed to increasing defender or corrupter damage myself.
To apply a crappy analogy:
Poorly balanced powers = wheels
Damage mod = engine
I might decide it was more important to ensure that my wheels worked correctly before I start boosting the power on the engine.
I think that is consistent to how Castle went about when he overhauled defiance and more recently the dom changes.
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Maybe. I've never really been opposed to increasing defender or corrupter damage myself.
To apply a crappy analogy:
Poorly balanced powers = wheels
Damage mod = engine
I might decide it was more important to ensure that my wheels worked correctly before I start boosting the power on the engine.
I think that is consistent to how Castle went about when he overhauled defiance and more recently the dom changes.
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Support sets are unique though and will require more work than altering from one perspective (inherent). Damage is a common problem across the board for defenders so get that as close to balance as you can first and then start on individual sets.
EDIT: Think of it how Castle is handling Kheldians. There are still a lot of powers that need tweaking but he fixed the overall problems first.
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The best you can actually get from scourge is about 20.7% bonus damage and thats while fighting the biggest of the biggest HP bags in the game: GMs. And this assumes you are soloing them, too, so also an inflated number.
The link to my experiment can be found here.
Depending what you are fighting, the bonus is minimal, against even level minions its just about 7%, note this may be better against higher level minions but it requires a lot of level jump for a minion to equate the Lt, who gets about 11% out of scourge.
The flaw with a simple formulaic analysis of scourge (as I attempted to describe in my guide) is that although you may get 21.25%, in practice, even the weakest of attacks will make your target jump from something like 40% to dead or 25% to dead, this makes the optimal scenario impossible to achieve against anything but GMs, or perhaps the new Reinchsman encounter, or extremely resistant foes.
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I'll concede to the burst killing factor of minions and lts.
However even without scourge factored in, corruptor still ends up being 4% to 16% higher damage when using the same sets. Toss in your 7% for scourge and we're talking a minimum of 11% to 23% that is including the +dmg/-Res debuffs factored in for both ATs. If the idea was that defender +Dmg/-Res is supposed to fill the gap some between corruptors and defenders in damage, it fails heavily.
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The only place it fails (if at all) is when solo and it is generally only by a few percentage points. The idea was never that stronger buff/debuff of defs would close the gap until they are producing equitable damage. The idea is that as a whole the stronger buff/debuff puts them into a similar degree of risk and reward. Defs tend to be slower, but more survivable.
Whatever balance gap may exist (very debatable) on teams those few percentage points evaporate when you have 7 other teammates benefiting from an additional 7.5% -res (EF) and an additional 5% +dam each, or being 10% less likely to hit due to stronger RI.
(7.5% x 7 people x 100 damage each = extra 52.5 damage that the corr has to make up for with scourge, this cuts into w/e gap may or may not exist in a straight up comparison).
We know forcemultiplication closes any gaps extremely quickly when the stronger values are applied, just look at how easy "support" classes catch up and exceed the "damage AT"s when they cross buff/debuff.
The problem is pretty much limited to where the devs have done a crappy job and haven't made a meaningful difference in the strength of defender powers vs corr/troller/mm shared powers.
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Except that much of the extra damage from the better buffs/debuffs are frequently lost in over kill. This is why in many situations lower % buffs/debuffs are just as effective as the higher defender values.
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I'd argue that if (and I agree sometimes it does) the stronger buff/debuff is resulting in overkill then it is just as likely that scourge is as well.
If we can dismiss stronger buff/debuff as creating unnecessary damage, then it seems only logical that actual extra damage could just as easily be unnecessary. Especially given the back loaded nature of scourge inherently leading to overkill.
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I would disagree with your use of sometimes. I believe frequently is more accurate. In most actual play situations the differences between controller, corruptor, and defender buffs/debuffs is so small that most teams aren't aware that there's a difference.
I'd venture to say that for teams overkill is the norm rather than the exception. Players are very much aware when they "corpse blast" or when a team mate "kill steals" by defeating targets first. This is one reason that people dislike animations over 2 seconds and many people want the devs to base damage not only on end costs and recharge times but by factoring animation times in as well.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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I'd argue that if (and I agree sometimes it does) the stronger buff/debuff is resulting in overkill then it is just as likely that scourge is as well.
If we can dismiss stronger buff/debuff as creating unnecessary damage, then it seems only logical that actual extra damage could just as easily be unnecessary. Especially given the back loaded nature of scourge inherently leading to overkill.
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I would disagree with your use of sometimes. I believe frequently is more accurate. In most actual play situations the differences between controller, corruptor, and defender buffs/debuffs is so small that most teams aren't aware that there's a difference.
I'd venture to say that for teams overkill is the norm rather than the exception. Players are very much aware when they "corpse blast" or when a team mate "kill steals" by defeating targets first. This is one reason that people dislike animations over 2 seconds and many people want the devs to base damage not only on end costs and recharge times but by factoring animation times in as well.
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Well sure, most people have no idea what the buffs and debuffs are doing, they just feel stronger and kill faster. If you look at the most popular AT's in the game (blaster, scrap, brute, MM) it is pretty obvious that many/most players have no idea about the finer side of the battle.
That doesn't equate to the difference being absent though.
"Corpse blasting" as a result of long animations is imo an entirely different discussion than w/e value is assigned to potential overkill as a result of too much buff/debuff. It is almost entirely attributable to long cast times on some powers. IME when you can corpse blast yourself is when overkill is a factor. That isn't all that common though.
ie Fire breath miraculously scourges all targets and they fall over during the animation of fireball. (actually this can happen fairly often with Rain of fire going hehe, but that attack is one of a kind).
Honestly, I'm not sure what to even say. I've played on steam-rolling defender teams and steam-rolling corr teams. Saying they both go through all content like a hot knife through butter is an understatement. Whatever difference exists at that level is virtually indiscernible short of fraps reviewing the material.
Their team performance is not lacking in the least. Some sets need to solo better, some solo fine. I'm still hearing more specifics warranting individual set revision than an entire AT wide adjustment (not that I'm opposed to the latter).
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My personal biggest gripe is not time to kill, but endurance to kill. Increasing damage will help my end to kill issue, but I'd rather them keep the slower pace, just with less downtime.
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This reminded me of something from a while back. I don't have a link but some time in the past a Red Name mentioned that Blasters have a built in endurance reduction baked into their blasts. This makes me wonder if Corrupter Blasts were based from Blaster Blast sets and scaled to the correct damage levels only. It feels from play that the Corrupter Blasts are more endurance efficent than Defender which leaves the Defender huffing after a fight while a Corrupter can take a moment and then move on. Well except for the Defenders with End buffs.
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This was actually addressed way back in Issue 1 or 2, I forget which. Defenders got an across-the-board end reduction on their blast powers, a significant one, too. It used to be a whole lot worse.
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My personal biggest gripe is not time to kill, but endurance to kill. Increasing damage will help my end to kill issue, but I'd rather them keep the slower pace, just with less downtime.
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This reminded me of something from a while back. I don't have a link but some time in the past a Red Name mentioned that Blasters have a built in endurance reduction baked into their blasts. This makes me wonder if Corrupter Blasts were based from Blaster Blast sets and scaled to the correct damage levels only. It feels from play that the Corrupter Blasts are more endurance efficent than Defender which leaves the Defender huffing after a fight while a Corrupter can take a moment and then move on. Well except for the Defenders with End buffs.
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This was actually addressed way back in Issue 1 or 2, I forget which. Defenders got an across-the-board end reduction on their blast powers, a significant one, too. It used to be a whole lot worse.
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That's probably where our current inherit spawns from. Instead of being just the flames on the candle on the icing of the cake, it was probably the cake itself.
*shrugs*
50s: Bla- Arch/Mental Cont- Mind/FF, Earth/Cold, Ill/Therm, Earth/Rad Dominator- Plant/Psi, Elec/Earth Corr- Fire/Storm, Arch/Sonic, Rad/Kin, Beam/Sonic, Psi/Time Stalker- Elec/SR Def- Storm/Dark, Emp/Psi, Dark/Elec, FF/Arch, TA/Ice, TA/Elec, Kin/AR, Cold/DP, Traps/Psi Scrap- Fire/Shield Tanker- Dark/Mace, Ice/Kin Brute- Claws/WP, SS/Energy, BS/Elec
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This was actually addressed way back in Issue 1 or 2, I forget which. Defenders got an across-the-board end reduction on their blast powers, a significant one, too. It used to be a whole lot worse.
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The Global Defense Nerf came with an across the board decrease in End costs to all ATs that had not previously gotten one. Thus, now all Blast powers have the same End cost no matter what AT is using them. This should be confirmable with City of Data.
To be precise, any attack that does 1 scale damage, and takes 4 sec to recharge should cost 5.2 Endurance. Defense and Buff/Debuff powers are a bit harder to compare, but any particular power should cost the same no matter which AT uses it. The exception is Masterminds, who get an End penalty to all of their powers because their pets are able to draw on their own End pools to attack and use their powers.
Likely the reason Defenders seem to use more Endurance is the same reason Tankers seem to use more Endurance, they are doing less damage for the same End costs. In fact, it's the End cost over time that is constant, but the fight takes longer. Scourge also saves Endurance because it means a Corruptor does the most damage when he is lowest on Endurance.
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Raising the defender base damage modifier from 0.65 to 0.70 would at least help out the other blast sets and close the gap a bit better without trumping corruptor damage for the most part.
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I am not entirely opposed to buffing defender damage. I even stated back before I11 that the only reason I could see increasing blaster ranged damage was that it gave room to buff dominator, defender, and corruptor ranged damage without infringing. Doms got their buff, it would be nice to see the others improved as well.
Would a 7.7% increase help? How many fewer attacks will I need to kill various +1 enemies with a defender at level 25, 35, and 45 using Energy Blast?
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it would be 7.7% less attacks needed overall regardless of +dmg/-res factors. Of course I'm not factoring in overkill on higher damage attacks like Bitter Ice Blast of course as Star is for scourge crits.
I honestly would rather see a 10% buff, but a 0.70 modifier feels like a more safer value, especially if they don't tone down sonic blast some for defenders and corruptors.