Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

It's nothing official. It's just something Arcanaville mentioned. I think I have heard her speak about it before. Basically, she is saying that much of the balance problems in the game are made more of a headache because of AoEs. Also she mentioned that she thinks that Castle would remove them if he could because of this. Obviously that will probably not happen. It was more along the lines of a 'if we could do this over this is what we would do'.

I was just curious to hear how a change like that would make blasters better. Aracanaville seems to be saying that if the AoE problem wasn't present, then blasters would have better tools to do their jobs. I'm slightly skeptical...but I'm willing to hear how that would work.

That's just in - as I've been finding out lately, constant, grating bosses are the BIGGEST problem for Scrappers, much bigger than most any elite boss, in fact. This isn't because a boss is harder than an elite boss, merely because a boss is... "Harder than he is rare," to put it like this. Certain bosses, especially, are a pain in the ***, and they can spawn literally every spawn if the RNG decides it hates you today.

As a caveat, TURNING OFF bosses makes pretty much the entire damn game soloable by any Blaster. In fact, it makes much of the game soloable with a greater certainty of success than by melee ATs, but that's because there are certain rare points which are harder for melee. Melee ATs still have a MUCH easier time soloing everything ELSE. Back when I had bosses turned on, every damn Zeus Class Titan or Master Illusionist I met had to be treated like an elite boss, and when a mission can span 15 of them, preparing for them is simply out of the question. Now that I'm all but guaranteed to not meet more than one in a long while, there really is nothing too terrible to solo through. Yes, including Maria Jenkins' missions. Most of them are in Portal Corp, so taking a trip back to her to restock on purples for the second elite boss in most missions is a small price to pay. Doing it once I can live with. Doing it 15 times... Not so much.

At this point, the only things that really annoy me are high-level Crey, due to the stupid durability of the Tanks, and Rogue Vanguard in areas with a low ceiling. Not even Malta scares me that much any more, as while they ARE dangerous, they're also manageable.

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.

In a lot of ways, this feels more like a team problem than a powerset problem. It's one of the biggest headaches with playing a Stalker where that mob that you could have taken out or at least softened will run rampant because the team won't pause for 3 or so seconds.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

In a lot of ways it's a human nature problem. People don't like to feel like they aren't doing something and let someone else be the 'hero'. So giving the time for a blaster, of all things, to setup the total destruction of a spawn isn't something they want to do.

This is isn't just in random PUGs, but even in teams consisting of folks I've known for year in the game. Someone will always step forward and throw that attack before I'm done dropping a couple mines or a Time Bomb. A scrapper or tank will run in etc.

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but unless the team is very small and we know the game plan, I just play like a normal blaster most of the time these days.

In this game Defense, by definition, is a type of attribmod. I assure you playing semantic games with me with the game terminology is going to be unprofitable.

I'm not redefining "Defense" as a proper noun. Its obvious to everyone else that I'm using the term colloquially to refer to damage mitigation in general, and most of the time I used the phrase "damage mitigation" just to be clear.

Moreover, I never said damage was identical to defense just because it reduces damage. What I said was Frontloading of damage which is not damage itself is defensive in nature.

Build Up *looks* like an offensive power, but that's 90% illusion. If all you see is +100% damage you'll probably assume it radically increases your damage output over time. It does not. The actual buff averages out much lower, its diluted by slotting, and then it is further reduced by its activation time costs.

It looks like I will have to do the math after all. Assume standard SO slotting, and thus +0.95 damage and +0.95 recharge on BU. It will therefore be up about every 46.2 seconds. Its cast time is 1.17 seconds. With server buffering enforced, 1.32s. It will last about 10 seconds.

It thus has a cycle time of 47.52s, with 10 seconds of buff and 1.32 seconds of idle time. A complete BU cycle, on average, will look like this:

(BaseDamage * 2.95 * 10 + BaseDamage * 1.95 * 36.2)/47.52
BaseDamage * 2.11

In other words, BU averages out to 2.11-1.95 = 0.16 or +16% damage. That's +16% damage strength. It increases kill speed on average by 8.2%. As a damage output increaser, its not very strong: 1.5x the strength of Assault for blasters.

Now, you can play games with BU, try to shift your stronger attacks into its window or try to eliminate the cast time penalty by only using it during chain gaps or in between spawns, but doing so will tend to make it more efficient at the cost of firing it less often, and thus weaker overall. So except for AoEs which I made note of earlier, BU's actual average offensive benefit is low. Its value to blasters comes mostly from its frontloading aspect, which does not in any way improve kill speed at all. Something that doesn't actually improve kill speed isn't a damage buff, and isn't "offensive" within the context of this discussion.

So when I'm perma-knocking a Rikti Magus in a mothership raid with air superiority, I'm not defending myself from his attacks, he's just being a good sport.

This reminds me of the religious semantic wars of 2005 where some people were saying Regeneration wasn't damage mitigation, because it didn't "mitigate" damage it restored health, and Defense wasn't even damage mitigation because it didn't reduce the damage of attacks, it only occasionally caused you to avoid them. Technically, the attacks still had their full strength of damage, so you didn't mitigate any of it: it just didn't hit you. Only Resistance was "true damage mitigation" and I guess we were supposed to come up with new terminology to describe everything else.

Fortunately, history is on my side here. All of those worthless perspectives eventually die out when their proponents grow weary of exposing them because no one else will accept them, because they are, in fact, worthless.

I think some sets appear to be conceptually more AoE focused simply because they are implemented that way in CoH.

There are three alternate AoE mechanisms that don't suffer from the same damage balancing issues that the AoE damage mechanism in CoH suffers from that I'd add to replace the way AoE works in CoH in most areas:

1. Line of sight limited AoEs

Some AoEs would operate like cones, but would only be able to hit a target if you had direct line of sight to it, including occlusion by other targets. So if some targets masked others, they would not get hit.

2. Damage distributed AoEs.

Some AoEs would affect all targets in an area, but distribute their damage among all the targets. So the more targets, the less damage per target. The most severe form is the damage-constant version where each target gets D/T where T is the number of targets. It means each AoE can only deliver a certain maximum damage. I would favor a more complex implementation that had a maximum per target, a minimum per target, and a non-linear scaling function. So lets say you use Fireball on three targets. It would deliver 100 points per target, and that would be the max so hitting less than three would still deliver 100 points per target. But hitting 4 would deliver, say, 85 per target. You'd be generating 340 total damage hitting 4 and 300 damage hitting three, so there is an advantage to hitting more. But at some point this dilutes to the point where its not practical, and you're losing significant alpha-strike ability with this dilution.

3. Exotic AoEs.

A catch-all for AoEs that aren't really AoEs, but affect multiple targets through some other means. For example, some Fire-based attacks could grant temporary damage auras to their targets, simulating them being immolated. They would damage allies that stood too close to them. Chain Induction is another example of a power that affects multiple targets in an area but isn't a true AoE.


I'd keep the current AoE mechanism for only three specific cases, maybe:

1. Tier 9 crashing AoEs. Nova, Inferno, etc.
2. Low damage location AoEs. Caltrops, (some) Rains.
3. Presumptively challenging critters.


Keep in mind, while I would be in favor of *adding* mechanisms like the above to CoH, I would be very cautious about *removing* the current AoE mechanics from the existing game, because players are already used to them. But I would never allow the current AoE mechanic to exist in an unrestricted form in any new game, if I had any say.

Having soloed an Energy/Kin corr that made regular use of Air Sup, Sniper Blast, and knockback; and a Fire blaster that frequently opened with Blazing Bolt then Rain of Fire, I'm on-board with the "offensive powers as defense" idea.

Actually I've found it interesting in the past that some of the folks that argued against the usefulness of snipes also bemoaned the frailty of Blasters. I always regarded my Fire blaster as being pretty safe.

I don't know if "better" is the right word: anyone leveraging AoEs efficiently can't be made much better. But they would probably have better alpha strike tools balanced for the average player - somewhere around three to five targets. They would probably have significantly better damage cap and self damage tools (I would argue that BU is far too weak as a Blaster offensive tool *except* for the AoE exception that makes buffing it too dangerous to balance).

We'd probably be able to get rid of the aggro cap with a better moderated AoE system. We'd basically force the devs to give blasters better offensive tools than we have now, either single target ones or moderated AoE ones.

Probably most significantly, though, is that we'd force the devs to actually come up with an operational definition of Blasters that actually defines what they are supposed to do. Right now they get to get away with "they are the damage specialists" but *except for AoE* that title is highly dubious. They are not going to hand out Fire and AR levels of AoE to all Blasters, but if Blasters are defined to be pure damage specialists and AoE is really the key to that, and all Blasters have a wide range of AoE, then in fact all Blasters have a wide range of actually being Blasters, which is logically ludicrous.

I have often believed that Blasters should be defined more generally to be attack specialists with a broader definition of "attack" that allows for more attack-based damage mitigation. These are areas currently occupied by Defenders (foe debuff) and Controllers (foe control) so Blasters are limited in the levels of this they can get. But if the Blaster archetype definition *required* it, that would soften that restriction. The devs would have to get creative to give Blasters tools that Defenders and Controllers should really have primary control over, but overall it would improve Blasters by actually including - as part of the archetype definition - that they are supposed to have at least *some* tools intended to keep them alive (besides overwhelming damage, which they aren't actually going to get).

Since as far back as I can remember, going back to 2004, my one consistent observation about Blasters is that they are the only archetype that is actually *defined* in terms of dying. Its strongly implied that if Blasters have the tools to keep themselves alive, they are overpowered. That's not true for any other archetype, and I did mention back in I11 that it should really come as no surprise to the devs that Blasters were dying at higher than normal levels - they are supposed to implicitly. It would be nice to have an explicit definition of the archetype that overrides that implicit statement, because the I11 changes clearly indicate its undesirable.


I have wondered, for almost as long as I've played the game, if the general assumption about AoE is exactly reversed. It makes a lot more sense for Blasters to be the *single-target* specialists and everyone else to be the AoE specialists. After all, if you have nothing but very strong single target attacks, no single target (below Bosses) is going to be a threat to you, because you'll be able to take them out immediately. Its only if you face too much that you'll be in trouble. Isn't that how the Blaster archetype is intended to play? Conversely, Defenders, Controllers, and Tankers are intended primarily to provide a team role. Isn't it more obvious that they should have more AoE that is weaker per target, but able to affect more targets?

Thinking out loud perhaps Blasters should be the single target masters of *everything* - single target damage, single target debuff, single target mez. Defenders would be AoE debuffers and Controllers would be AoE controllers, and would also be better able to affect higher ranks (Bosses and higher).

In this environment, the Blasters that happen to have more AoE, like Fire Blasters, have more AoE as an extra powerset advantage, not as a critical archetype-defining aspect. The Blasters that don't have that level of AoE are not lesser Blasters for lacking it.

Well, most of the people that I talk to agree that regeneration and heals aren't actually a form of damage mitigation and are instead forms of damage recovery, using damage mitigation to refer to effects that prevent damage (such as mez, def, res) rather than allow you to recover from the effects. The semantic differences are functionally summed up in the difference between reactive survivability contribution and proactive or preventative survivability contribution.

Either way, semantic debate is only useful when people are actually attempting to remove any ambiguity from a term in the first place rather than insisting that your position is wrong because they're using a different definition of the term. Arguing that something isn't defensive when the real advantage of taking such an action is an increase in survivability is simply ignorant.

The problem with this perspective is that it implies that the classic mitigators - resistance and defense - are intended to operate in isolation from regeneration. They usually aren't: in CoX everyone has a base level of regeneration in or out of combat, and CoX is less defined around pure burst damage and more in terms of survivable damage.

In some games, regeneration and heals are not common or pervasive, and your survivability is based mostly on your health bar and your ability to reduce incoming damage (to be less than your health bar), for one fight. Typically, such games have high out of combat recovery so in effect each separate fight doesn't affect the next one (unless you die and incur some form of death penalty). In such environments, it can be useful to analyze damage reduction separate from damage recovery, because the game is balanced primarily around reduction and not around recovery.

But in CoX reduction is much more of an amplifier of recovery rather than an amplifier of your health bar (I'd colloquially say its 2/3rds the former and 1/3rd the latter) and the game is balanced more around sustainable activity than burst activity (burst activity tends to fall closer to the outside margins of performance the game acknowledges as balanced). In that sort of environment, heals and regeneration are just another form of recovery amplifier.

Of course, some people tend to like to focus on the 1/3rd of the game that leans in the opposite direction, mostly because that is where the high-performance environment exists, so a set with a huge amount of regeneration and thus a high amount of sustainable activity can still be "underperforming" if it cannot survive huge bursts of damage indefinitely. It matters when burst activity specifically matters, like in Tanking (which is probably part of the reason why we don't have Regen tankers yet).

That's the big problem with the whole thing, really - no-one seems to know, or at least has ever cared to share, exactly what Blasters are supposed to do. They "kill things" is about as close as we've gotten, which can just as easily describe... Pretty much everyone. They're supposed to be the damage specialists, but they aren't. Not even now, actually. And before the Defiance changes, this very premise was so untrue as to be both laughable and insulting at the same time. But they aren't damage specialists, because their "damage" is so wildly inconsistent between powersets, and especially between powerset combos. An Energy/Energy Blaster will be well-equiped for single-target damage, but an AR/Dev Blaster will really only be good against large masses of enemies.

Compare Blasters to Scrappers. Each Scrapper primary is guaranteed at least one big hitter, an at least a few smaller ones. All a Blaster primary is guaranteed is a Snipe. Everything else varies. Some sets have a big hitter, some don't. Some sets have a lot of AoE, some don't. Some sets have a true nuke, some don't. Some sets have a lot of melee attacks, some don't. Some have a lot of AoE attacks, some don't. We all know what Blasters are supposed to do - kill. There is, however, not a single clear definition as to HOW they are supposed to do this. The whole Archetype is a grab bag of a whole slew of tools and abilities, none of which, honestly speaking, really fit in one overriding category that can be described as "Blaster powers," and let's be frank here - a lot of them seem to have been tacked on for lack of anything else to put in there, and serve little to no use for the actual archetype and how it plays.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the proposed alternate AoE systems, but I CAN see just how hideously powerful certain larger AoEs can be, especially with Aim and Build Up, and especially when you need to clear a room in a hurry. I can't say I'm objective here, not after having played the game for five years and growing used to what we have now, but if Arcana feels that this would be grounds for giving the AT a little more... Purpose, then I can't say I'm against it entirely. I guess getting rid of their "crutch" might necessitate they get some actual protection to do what they do.

To a large extent, I do agree that Blasters ought to be single-target specialists, as being offensive characters, there really should be "no villain a Blaster can't take down." By comparison, something like a Defender, who isn't a killing specialist, should be good at dealing with lots of less threatening villains. It makes sense, really, though again - it' feels like it's a bit too late in the game for something like this. I wonder if we'll get any new ATs with Going Rogue.

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.

It is very late in the day to be changing the operational definitions of CoH archetypes. The only reason why I think there's even a 1% chance of it ever happening to Blasters is because they don't really have one, insofar as the only one they supposedly have is based significantly on a game mechanic the devs probably wish wasn't so prevalent.

A similar problem occured with Stealth. Nice idea in theory, but in practice Stealth is a highly problematic effect as currently implemented in CoX. Stalker stealth isn't even balanced around the actual strength of stealth, but mostly on stealth caps, which is analogous to balancing defensive sets based on giving them all 100% defense and then adjusting the tohit floor for each of them.

Even if I can't change the Blaster definition overnight (or even in a single decade) it might be possible to chip at it. Hypothetical question: if all the AoEs except Oil Slick Arrow were changed to single target powers, why wouldn't Blasters be able to get Trick Arrow?

This is kind of how Stalkers worked out in the end. There's only one primary that didn't lose a damage AoE. A couple sets lost 2 AoEs or suffered even more. Some sets have zero AoEs and can never hit more than one target. As a result, they're pretty much focused on single target damage output.

Single target specialist is a sort of strange thing though. I can't quite figure out if it's just never needed or if Stalkers just aren't good enough at it. If either one of those were true, Stalkers would be in a lot higher demand. As it is, the role that a Stalker fills as someone who can quickly dispatch a couple targets just isn't something people seek out.

Considering that Stalkers have very poor AoE potential (outside of Elec), I feel as though they should be capable of doing far more ST damage than they do now. I feel that they should flat out outdamage Scrappers in ALL situations, not just when teamed -- in fact, that creates a problem in my head because the only time a Stalker does more damage than a Scrapper is in a situation where the Scrapper pulls ahead anyway because he has more AoEs.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

There's a lot of truth to that, and I've mentioned the Stealth problem many times. There's no real purpose to adding in sneak objectives if "sneaking" in the game consists of turning on one power and hoping you're not fighting a faction that can see you anyway. There's no actual hiding or sneaking involved, and even if there were, the game isn't built to allow it, or indeed reward it. You're always going to get more reward for the time spent just killing things than you will for not killing things, hence "sneaking" is not a viable option for anything other than pure convenience.

Blasters are kind of in the same boat - they're given the ability to spawn-wipe enemies as their "thing," but they can't be given too much of that ability or they're overpowerd. Give them little enough for them to not be overpowered and they're underpowered, just scraping by. I actually have to agree with you on the single-target aspect - if they didn't have the ability to do such massive spawn-wipe and had to pop things one by one, would they not have been balanced to be stronger overall as a result?

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.

Actually, the reason Stalkers lag behind in teams is simple - it's all down to how AoE is balanced. Having run the numbers on a LOT of powersets, I can give you what I've perceived to be a general rule of thumb. Cone efficiency is balanced to break even with single-target attacks at somewhere between two and three targets, and AoE efficiency breaks even at around 4-5 targets. Mini-nukes tend to break even at a little more than ONE target. That's overall efficiency, too - DPE, DPS. After you go five targets or more, AoEs will ALWAYS outperform single-target attacks, sometimes even in burst damage chains. And a decent-sized team will guarantee you 10 enemies or more. At this point, single-target attacks are POINTLESS when you have Fireball and Fire Breath, because at 15 people, you're dealing more damage and spending less endurance than if you were pot-shotting them all one at a time.

That, I believe, is the big problem Arcana has with them - AoEs as they are currently implemented are hard to impossible to balance to a neutral state, and are currently unbalanced in our favour. The biggest limit to them is effective area size, which tends to limit melee most of all, but the size of Blaster AoEs just means they're catching lots of enemies all the time. That's what necessitated target caps, because before, a Blaster could be AoE-ing 20-30 people, and that's without any aberrant behaviour. That's just sick. In essence, their large AoEs give them the POTENTIAL to break the game, and for that potential, they lose the chance to shine practically anywhere else, including single-target damage aside from a select few sets.

I don't dislike them as they are, but, quite frankly, I like massive AoE for the simple fact that I NEED massive AoE to survive lacking very much everything else. I'm not sure I would protest too loudly about giving up some of that AoE for some of the tools needed for not needing it. It's unlikely to happen to an AT set in stone for years, but a new AT in a similar vein COULD benefit from lessons learned.

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.

Actually, most cones "break even" at just under two targets, and most spherical AoEs** break even at around 3 targets.

And then there's Claws.


There's that, and there's also the recharge conundrum. I should probably explain that one.

Single target attacks were originally balanced based on a formula most of the players with knowledge of the numbers are familiar with. In terms of damage and recharge, its basically Recharge = (Damage - 0.36)/0.16 where Recharge is in seconds and Damage is in damage scale units. An attack with damage scale 1.0 has recharge of 4.0 seconds, a "standard attack" if ever there was a standard attack.

The notion behind the formula is that the more damage an attack does, the less often it should be available to use, to balance out. If you look at damage over time, the general rule is the more damage the attack does per use, the less damage over time it does. So the formula says, basically, "you trade alpha strike for sustained damage." Frontloading is considered a benefit, and you pay for it with lower overall damage according to the formula.

The ginormous error in the formula is that it basically assumes you'll always be recharge-limited: you're always waiting for an attack to recharge, so the longer the wait the lower your damage. This is true if you happen to have one attack. But at some point, cast time comes into play: because every attack takes a finite amount of time to execute, eventually you're spending all of your time executing attacks and you cannot execute more, no matter how many are recharged and ready to go. This is the DPA limit on damage, and its why DPA is so much more important than DPS or DPC, depending on what you call it (I call it "damage per cycle-second.") Everyone doing "ArcanaTime" attack chain calculations is intimately aware of the issues here.

However, its important to note that damage per cycle-second *is* still the overriding factor when you *are* recharge bound: when you are always waiting for attacks to recharge. And that is still the case for the separate case of AoEs: no one really has so many AoEs that they can make a complete attack chain with no waiting that involves nothing but AoEs, at conventional levels of recharge. And that means cumulative DPC for AoEs has a *huge* impact on total damage output, if you can leverage that damage properly (i.e. hit a lot of targets, not get dead).

And that means almost *nothing* about the AoEs actually matter (if they are balanced at least roughly around the same formula - Claws is a big big exception here). The variance in DPC between AoEs is relatively small. What does matter is how many AoEs you have. In Blasterland, two AoEs beats three. Three beats four. Period. You simply can't make a two-AoE blaster that has any chance at all of equaling the damage output of a three-AoE blaster if those AoEs are actually used against a reasonable number of targets. Ironically, the balancing formula that ties recharge to damage makes it impossible to avoid this issue, because it was actually designed to force this situation.

The "recharge" conundrum I refer to above is that recharge exists in sufficient quantity to make single target attacks DPA-critical for balance, but conversely there isn't enough of it to make AoEs anything but DPC-critical. And the only real way to significantly increase AoE DPC is to get more of them. Basically, the problem is that in CoX, you cannot balance AoEs and single target attacks with the same methodology, because they aren't bound by the same bottlenecks in practice (or even in theory, for that matter).

(An Energy Blaster with four copies of explosive blast - arguably one of the crappiest AoEs around - compares very favorably to the best possible Fire Blaster attack chains. Even with the free DoT in Fire, its extremely difficult for the Fire Blaster to keep up, and this is about the best possible off-by-one comparison you can make: probably the best set of three vs the probably worst possible four.)

So if being a Blaster means pure damage output, including AoE potential, then everyone has to have the same exact number of AoEs; no more and no less. Off by one is a huge penalty in damage output, except in degenerate cases (i.e. three pencil-thin cones will probably be beat by two 25 foot AoEs, but only because the tiny cones won't actually hit multiple targets often enough). You can play some games with things like scatter (explosive blast has some built-in disadvantages to being spammed in terms of damage concentration), but you'll probably run out of games before you run out of blaster primaries.


** There's really only two kinds of AoEs in CoX: Cones and Spheres (all Location AoEs are spherical, and all PBAoEs are spherical centered on the caster as the target). This means Dragon's Tail is actually spherical, and can hit a target floating eight feet above the attacker. I've always found that moderately amusing, even though I know the game mechanical limitation involved.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

I will preface this by saying any or all of what I'm about to say is very likely to run counter to what the devs would do, and therefore counter to what I would ordinarily work towards getting done as well (there's a difference between what I want, and what I want of what the devs are likely to give). I also should point out that I'm assuming I could get the tech implemented to do these things, most of which can't be done without either significant tech or creating significant headaches for the powers team (but if I were in charge, they'd be my headaches anyway).

Given the limitations on stealth, what I would have done is the following:

1. The first stalker attack on a target crits, no matter what.
2. An attack on a critter that isn't aggroed on the stalker crits 30% of the time, separate from any other chances to crit (but no double-crits).
3. The first stalker attack/crit on a target invokes a mag 3, 5 sec confuse in a radius of 15 feet. The chance scales upward with team size: 20% per team member to a maximum of 90%.

That would make them extremely effective first-strike weapons, mainly because it would eliminate the retributive strike that ordinarily occurs when stalkers attempt to be the alpha strike. Actually, the basis of this idea comes from my very first experience with stalkers**, back in CoV beta (stalkers were my first beta characters - one MA/SR, one MA/Nin). The numbers themselves are negotiable to a point.

This probably doesn't solve the "problem" of stalkers being perceived as not contributing enough AoE damage, but that's part of the AoE problem itself: once you give AoE to anyone, everyone else is judged relative to not having it, and every offensive fix is judged based on its ability to match it. AoE is a virus that eventually infects everything you design, because its just a tiny bit too obvious that hitting eight things is nearly always better than hitting one, when there's no penalty for hitting eight (and in teams with any semblence of aggro control, there's no penalty for hitting eight rather than one).



** I'm sure CoV beta stalkers will remember attempting to "figure out" what the heck stalkers were supposed to do in teams, and trying to understand just what the devs meant when they said they were supposed to alpha with assassin's strikes. 'Cause that was a really quick way to commit suicide unless your timing was perfect. The biggest facepalm moment I personally have ever experienced in all my time playing CoX was reading that little piece of documentation in CoV beta that Stalkers were supposed to be "hard to solo, but one of the easiest archetypes to team with." I still find that galactically mind-boggling.

I'll restate to say that I think taking away Stalker AoEs was a mistake and part of the reason they're unpopular. Probably if I was to work on Stalkers I'd work on improving their ST potential so that it's the undisputed champ.

Really, considering Stalkers are the squishiest of the melees, I feel they should just be the highest damage dealers, period. As it is they tend to compete with Scrappers and Brutes, in addition to be being weak at AoE. In order to leverage that, I'd make them exceptionally good at ST damage (including DPS, outside of the initial hide crits and AS). I would want Stalkers to be able to sustain their damage advantage even past the first bursts. I don't think it would be something that would be unbalancing considering their lack of AoE, except...

It would have to be something that only applies to ST, and not AoE, somehow. The lower rate crit is a good start. But if they were balanced poorly, the whole ST-oriented aspect would be totally lost when people just started playing exclusively Elec/, which is already the most popular Stalker primary that I've seen.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Let me answer that question by asking a question. Suppose I were to cut the cast times for all blaster single target attacks by 33%. What would that do to Low level Blaster damage? Mid-level Blaster damage? High level Blaster damage? What would that do to Blasters attacking three things? Six things? Nine things? Bosses? Elite Bosses?

Those are real questions. Now a rhetorical one: why is Fireball faster than Power Burst?

Cause cast time was apparently never a balance concern when they originally made powers, and as a result they're 100% arbitrary. It's the biggest problem I have with the PvP rules, because basing them on activation time makes every set totally random on damage, fire being one really ridiculous example.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Yeah, I cited that off memory, and apparently my memory was wrong. I keep thinking Blaster large-scale cones were balanced at two and a half targets while smaller Scrapper cones were balanced at something like 1.8, and that AoEs were balanced at around 3.5 or some such, which caused me to call it four. I don't know why I made it up to be 5. Might have been looking at an exception recently, I don't remember. I'll go with your numbers, though.

If you limit yourself to using only as many attacks as can get you an continuous attack chain, but not so many that you have attacks waiting to be used a lot, then DPS actually plays a decent role. The problem is that DPS is a measure of performance based on the expectations that powers will play out their intended cycles and their intended cycles only, which they typically don't, ESPECIALLY on a blaster with eleventy billion attacks anyway. While I AM a fan of DPA as a useful metric, I've never been able to create a specific repeatable chain with a specific repeatable damage that I can just cycle over and over, primarily because I tend to match attacks to the opportunity, rather to the schedule, so DPA doesn't give me a good measure of performance over time. I'm still trying to get a good grasp of that.

You can't always get an infinitely repeatable single-target attack chain with all Blasters either, though. That's actually the problem with too much AoE sometimes. Assault Rifle, for instance, has so many AoE attacks that it only has two real single-target attacks. And no, I don't count Sniper Rifle. And not only that, but both are very slow to recharge, owing to the fact that they hit pretty hard. As such, Assault Rifle may be closer to having an AoE attack chain, especially if paired up with something like Mental Manipulation, than it is to having a smooth single-target attack chain. A lot of recharge might solve that, but it would have to be a LOT of that to make a dent with just two attacks. That's kind of the problem with Blasters - their powers are spread so thin over so many fronts. AoEs are massive if you have masses to kill, but against a single, hard target, they are next to useless, costing huge and doing dick. On the flip side, even strong single-target attacks, lethal against hard targets, fall really short when fighting large groups of enemies, as they tend to overwhelm you before you can pot-shot them all.

Now, I will admit, I've come close to one-offing a large group of minions. Aim + Build Up let me do that, with Blaze taking out one, Fire Sword taking out another and Fire Blast + Flares taking out another still, but beyond that, I run out of steam, so I have to hover up and bunch up together so I can Fireball them to death.

Scrappers tend to lack much AoE, not all sets really having more than one AoE, and a lot having cones balanced like single-target attacks. By and large, a Scrapper will tend to have four or five single-target attacks usable in any lazy attack chain. A Blaster would be happy with three, and would often have to make do with just two. That's... Really awkward for a single-target specialist. And, yeah, melee attacks CAN sort of make up for that, but they are both dangerous and, more importantly, NOT ALL SETS HAVE THEM.

But that's kind of the problem as I see it, which feeds into what you're saying. Give a Blaster too much AoE and he's overpowered most of the time, SOL against elite bosses solo because of how AoEs are balanced. Give a Blaster too much single-target and he's a glorified Scrapper with about half the survivability. If I could have decent AoEs usable against fewer targets that could still make a dent in large groups, then that might help, but with the current balance, that's not going to happen. AoEs usable against single targets are MURDER on large groups, and AoEs balanced against large groups suck against single targets. And, worst of all, Blaster single-target damage is not actually all that impressive, especially on some combos, which more or less drives them into AoE to have a point on a team, and to survive solo.

I know I'm going to take a LOT of heat for this for the usual reasons - wanting to make everything the same - but I do believe Blaster primaries, and indeed secondaries, would have benefited from the same level of standardization that Mastermind primaries see. Masterminds have three summons, three attacks, two upgrades and "something else," always in the same order, always in this framework. Blaster primaries, generally, look like they were intended to follow a model, themselves, with Energy Blast being pretty much the mould - three single-target attacks, a cone, an AoE, a nuke, Aim, a snipe and a utility power. But then Assault Rifle trades its nuke for a mini-nuke, as well as its third attack and Aim for a second cone and ranged Burn patch. And then Ice Blast traded its snipe for some kind of ******* child of a snipe, an attack and a hold, as well as its AoE for a rain. And Psi Blast traded... I don't even know where to start. And there are more and more eccentricities like that, and power order is jumbled between them all like the sets came out of a tumble dryer. And secondaries are practically all over the place, with some offering control, some offering buffs, some offering attacks, some offering debuffs and some offering just more AoE.

There is simply no standardization to Blasters, such that the whole AT feels like a mish-mash of different ATs without any coherent structure to define their intent, abilities and framework. Some Blasters play a lot like Controllers, some play a lot like Defenders and some pretty much have to play like Scrappers. What Blaster plays like a Blaster, though, aside from Fire/Fire? How the hell does a "Blaster" even play?

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.