Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

I actually like this from a replayability standpoint. I had different experiences playing my Ice/MM than I did my Fire/Fire. I'm looking forward to my AR/Dev being completely different from those two.

I actually disagree that this is a bad thing.

Four sets that play similar to eachother: Katana, Broadsword, Axe, Mace. They have pretty much all the same attack mechanics, except Kat and BS have the parry abilities. But even those sets are different enough that they can even qualify as being different sets. Now take a vastly different melee set like Electric Melee or Dark Melee, and you can see how much sets can vary from one another.

Making all sets "standardized" means that in the end you're just going to have 10 sets where the only real difference is the damage type they do*. We already got some standardization of blast sets for the sake of Defiance. Standardizing all the sets so they do basically the same thing all around so that all Blasters "play alike" would make having different options for sets kind of pointless. A standardization like "all sets have 3 ranged attacks, 1 cone, one ranged AoE, one nuke, Aim, and one ST mez" would sound nice from a perspective where Blaster playstyle should be an obvious thing, but it actually just makes things pretty boring.

And from a balance standpoint I think this is actually a worse situation than what we have now. If the only difference between Archery and Energy was that Energy got to do a less resisted damage type*, there'd be pretty much no arguing that Energy is better and Archery sucks (except in very rare situations where enemies are weak to lethal). However, when you get complicated sets where the powers all vary, it's really hard to say whether Archery or Energy is "better" because there are too many variables to stack them side-by-side and reach a final conclusion. In our complicated mish-mash environment all you get for complaints is when a set vastly outperforms or underperforms on average compared to other sets. If one set is 5% weaker than another set, it's virtually impossible to quantify that or even notice.

* = Or whatever stat they vary on that players deem significant, such as secondary effect. Archery has pretty weak secondary effects, so standardizing all the sets to be very similar so playstyle doesn't vary much would make it underperform, while sets like Fire and Sonic would likely overperform.

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

That's a very good question.

Since low level Blasters (prior to 10th level or so) have too few single target attacks to become 'animation-capped', one would suspect that cutting their cast times would increase their damage: especially in the case of Snipes. However, once you get animation-capped, the advantage would utterly vanish. It would also vanish once you got enough AoEs to sub in for ST attacks.

Obviously, the more targets, the more you want AoEs, regardless of the number of targets. However, most Blasters are just fine with a spawn of 9 even level minions. A spawn of 3 LTs might be death depending on powersets, but it's the spawn of 2 Bosses you really have to watch out for. Having a faster attack chain really breaks down at that point (unless they like to just Hold you and then pink at you with small attacks, in which case Defiance ftw), because regardless of how fast your chain is, you might die in the return alpha strike (beta strike? counter strike?)...

However, having more ST damage would act to even out (very slightly, it would seem) damage between ST builds and AoE builds at the (very low) levels. It would buff ST Blasters without hurting AoE Blasters, which is a good thing.

However, it does not seem it would help Blasters as a whole much:
- Most low level players are Blasters already, I believe.
- Overall offensive mitigation would not increase much.
- Team viability would not change.

Thus my worry:
If you buff ST damage enough to make an all ST Blaster almost as viable as an AoE Blaster...well, how much damage is that? At a certain point, you are "3 targets, 3 power activations" and more damage beyond that doesn't help, while simultaneously being too little to keep you alive. Worse though, is that at that point, combat is arguably no longer fun. You might hit an 'uncanny valley' where any spawn you can defeat is no challenge, and any spawn that is a challenge makes you dead.

It basically comes down to these questions:
- How many attacks should it take a Blaster to defeat an even level spawn of Arachnos containing one Boss, one Lt, one minion?
- Is the Blaster survivable enough to succeed at all without faceplanting or candy?
- How should that compare to the number of attacks a Scrapper would have to make?
- How much damage should the Blaster and Scrapper take in the process.

Once you can pick a 'typical' Blaster and Scrapper build and get the numbers, it seems like you could extrapolate from there where everyone else (all ATs, all Builds) should fall on the scale.

For instance, we could pick a fire/fire Blaster and a fire/fire Scrapper at level 25 and go from there.

Yes, this is one of the strengths of this system.

I think the standardization between sets can almost be broken down to a very simple concept:

- Solo, regardless of build or AT, the number of power activations it takes me to defeat an even-level spawn of Arachnos should vary between (made up numbers) 3 and 9. The number of attacks they get in that time should remove between 20% and 80% of my hit points. After 3 such spawns, I should need to rest.

Performance will vary from this standard based on playstyle and circumstances, and extreme builds that 'sacrifice' something should be able to exceed these numbers slightly.

Whether you control-lock the spawn and then whittle them down or or single shot fry them should not matter (although there is a whole thread in there about how much damage a Controller-type should take in PvE, but that's not this thread).

I am using CoX concepts here, but really the principle should apply to nearly any MMO.

Which is quite annoying. There seems to be three and a half good examples of actually rewarding stealth in the game. The most blatant is PvP which does one thing the game tends not in that it revolves around perception as opposed to just ignoring stealth. There's the infamous Vanguard mission that can fail if you kill the wrong things. Also, there's the Mayhem side missions where you have to break into the pawn shop without tripping the alarms. This is leads to the "half" which is the CoT maps with the red crystals. In theory it's good because it's the evil dungeon filled with traps. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way since the crystals are randomized and tend to be smack dab in the middle of a path as opposed to strategic placement to encourage their avoidance.

That sort of highlights another problem with stealth is map design. Either it's an indoor map that is rather linear so tactically avoiding things is hard or it's some ridiculously huge outdoor instance where any travel power can avoid mobs anyways. Mission Architect has sort of revealed a number of strengths and weaknesses to the current map availability, though that an argument for another time.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

Picking this because it's easier to quite.

On the subject of Blaster standardization, I kind of expected I'd see a lot of exactly that kind of response, and I can't really fault people for feeling this way. However, it produces problems when things are this inconsistent. It's fairly easy to hit upon a combo that is either a PITA to play, or plays well but is SO SLOW it's not worth it, only to bring it up and be told that another combo is badly overpowered. You have a choice at this point - play what you have and pay the price for someone else's power, or play what's overpowered even if that's not the combo you actually wanted. Neither is good, in my opinion, and there are definitely Blaster combos that are not very good.

Additionally, the sets really ARE very hard to balance with AoEs this big, because power varies so much. As it was back in the day, my AR/Dev Blaster sucked horribly, because the combo I'd picked favoured AoE combat, but the old difficulty settings would often only spawn a single lieutenant, or a lieutenant and a minion, causing me to waste much of my potential while solo. I couldn't force more enemies to show up, therefore I was weak, yet I was paying the price for someone else's fun, because the build was apparently very powerful on a team with Tankers and support and such. By comparison, my Energy/Energy Blaster was fairly proficient solo, because her powersets simply gave her a lot of strong single-target attacks which could melt hard targets fast, but weren't as good against large groups of minions. And I just KNOW someone was paying for my fun by having their many team-mates ***** at them about AoE knockback and demanding they use only single-target attacks, which in a fight with 15 people are practically all but useless.

I don't want homogeny, or indeed even similar playstyles. But I DO want a standard to which I can hold my Blaster and say "Look! He can't do this! He's underpowered! Fix him!" Currently, there isn't one, and all trying to discus this does is cause people to explain how they are doing just fine playing completely different Blasters and/or in completely different situations. When you lack any real standard, trying to discuss what is good and what is bad can be very problematic.

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.

There is one, and it was fixed.

IIRC, the Devs have mandated that the minimum acceptable performance level for any AT in this game, regardless of build is:

Should be able to solo a spawn consisting of 3 even level minions without inspirations the vast majority of the time, but it should require a 'non-sleeping' amount of effort. Should therefore be able to solo 80% of their own missions on the minimum difficulty level without faceplanting or getting help.

Over and above this, when the datamining showed that Blasters (even though presumably they could do the above) were suffering defeat much more often than other Archetypes, they modified the archetype with the rebalancing and redo of Defiance.

Twice.

I believe your problem is that you want Blasters (and by extension all Archetypes) to be able to solo something more difficult than the standard even-level spawn.

This leads into a problem, because then you have to redefine 'average even-level spawn' to be more difficult, and the whole thing spirals.

Wat you may want is for the 'average even-level spawn' to be something along the lines of "1 Boss, 2 Lts, and 3 minions" and then go from there.

Or 8 minions or something

Actually, what I ultimately want is equality. I'm not shooting for anything higher than the arbitrary norm, I'm shooting for something about what other ATs can handle, which right now is nowhere near the case.

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.

Regardless of whether specific attack chain arithmetic accurately represents your damage in practice, its still the case that you are primarily DPA-limited if, regardless of how you activate your attacks, you generally have a choice - you have two or more attacks recharged and ready to be used. Whenever you have a choice, it means you are bottlenecked by definition (a blaster whose attacks all took zero seconds to cast would essentially never have a choice on which attack to use except at the very start of the fight).


Actually, I'm not a fan of over-standarization. I believe there should be a systematic way of doing things, but I tend to believe that the devs (for a variety of reasons, not all of which are purely under their voluntary control) over-homogenize things.

Although Mastermind primaries do have a lot more structure than Blaster primaries, that's because a lot of their differentiation is in the pets themselves. Some are melee, some are ranged. And its difficult to say that the Protector Bots are "standardized" against the Grave Knights.

Some powersets have similar or greater differentiation. Defender primaries, for example, tend to be more distinct than Blaster primaries. Its rare that you hear Defenders complain that they need the primaries to work more similarly in structure.


In answer to your direct question, my Energy/Energy blaster plays a lot like I personally visualized blasters functioning. In fact, personal bias aside, my guess is that Energy/Energy blasters may be the closest in intent to the target performance of blasters, at least when played efficiently. They have enough AoE to deal reasonable AoE damage (but not when compared to peers), but not enough to alpha strike kill a large spawn trivially. They have a lot of soft control. Their ranged secondary effect promotes attacking at range, and their melee secondary effect mostly assists in attacking in melee (the one exception: power thrust). They have access to burst endurance management and range boosting. I'm not saying its the best blaster combination, but my guess is that its properties come the closest to what the devs would want to target on paper.

There is one; at least there was one prior to the difficulty slider changes. Those changes may have modified the standard somewhat; I'm not certain. But the original intent is almost certainly still in force.

That standard is:

Must be able to solo the standard mission content on heroic difficulty scaled for one at a reasonable pace.

All archetypes, including blasters, must meet this criteria. Solo performance *above* that level is considered something not all archetypes will be equally well equipped to perform.

What is a "reasonable pace?" I'm not precisely certain, because the devs have never said. But I do know what it is in theory, because there is a relative performance rule:

The average performance of all players playing a particular powerset combination, for all powerset combinations, should be within a maximum limit around the average performance of all players for all powerset combinations.

In other words, I don't know what "reasonable pace" is, but I do know that the average performance of all players is generally fairly close to it. And I know that if the average of all players playing a particular powerset combination falls significantly below that number, the powerset combination is considered underperforming. If *all* powerset combinations for an archetype (or, I would imagine, the vast majority of them) are underperforming, then the archetype as a whole is considered underperforming, as Blasters were back before I11.

It may not be your intent, but one way of translating this would be to say that you want all high performance builds to be brought closer to the minimum acceptable level of performance.

Right now, all(?) builds are far above the dev-defined arbitrary norm.

If you are saying that all sets need to perform very close to <insert build here>, then by all means define that and we can work from there.

You're ultimately unlikely to get it. We're returning to an earlier point regarding differentiation. I don't think you can make a game where you have multiple classes and each class is equally good at soloing and equally good at teaming, and have sufficiently meaningful classes. You're likely to have a classless system, like CO. And CO shows the danger in that: when people are allowed to choose what to be, they basically tend to choose to be ranged scrappers with a team toggle. CO looks like it is classless with a lot of options, but its actually a game with one class: ranged scrappers. There isn't a melee class, there are only players that decide to voluntarily give up range - and get nothing back for that conceptual choice. There are players that decide to voluntarily give up personal defense - and get back nearly nothing for that you can't get through other means. And then there are players that decide to never take team assist powers, even in the end game where they are overflowing with power choices. But they are all ranged scrappers as a class: they can voluntarily be less than that, but not more than that in any respect. You can't be a significantly better tank than a ranged scrapper. You can't be a significantly better offensive specialist than a ranged scrapper. The limitations on team buffs mean you can't have very many more of them than a ranged scrapper can. Eventually, and this is my opinion, all roads lead to a ranged scrapper with a couple team buffs.

Yeah, I'm aware of that conundrum, and I'm aware that class differentiation needs to occur somewhere. When you give people the ability to be anything they want, they'll all pretty much choose to be the same thing. I'm finding that out the hard way every time I venture into Champions Online. I guess I'm not clamouring against class balance, just class balance in a slightly different architecture. Frankly, I'm not terribly upset at whatever difference there is between, say, a Brite and a Mastermind in terms of solo performance output. Or a Brute and a Scrapper or a Scrapper and a Stalker, or, to be honest, even a Scrapper and a Blaster. I'm a bit miffed that a Blaster is so much more STRESSFUL than a Scrapper, but having taken two Blasters to 50 with a third within spitting distance, and three Scrappers to 50, I can't say I'd drop one for the other.

On the flip side, support-heavy ATs and team-centric ATs I plain cannot play, as I feel like I'm paying a price in the form of a solo performance hit for a benefit I neither need nor want - team-only utility, or design that expects other people. And I'm unlikely to change those, either, as people just love those designs for reason I'll never be able to see. I mean, I understand it, I just don't see it, personally.

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.

The reverse, actually.

Initially, the reduction would have a very minimal effect on damage: it would decrease the cycle times of the attacks, which would increase damage. Take the first two energy blast attacks (which have typical cast and recharge). The low attack has cast 1s and recharge 4s. Cutting cast time by 33% would reduce the cast time to 0.67s. That means instead of cycling every 5 seconds you'd be cycling every 4.67 seconds (I'm ignoring ArcanaTime for simplicity sake here). That's an increase in damage of about 7%. On the high attack you'd cut cast time from 1.67s to 1.12s, and cycle time from 9.67s to 9.12s (8s recharge). That's an increase of only 6%.

However, the DPA of both attacks increased by 49%. If you can make a full attack chain, increasing the DPA of all attacks by 49% is liable to increase your overall damage by a similar number. It will require more recharge to actually make that full chain, but your maximum possible damage goes up.

Lets consider Energy Blast. Its *best* DPA attack, with ArcanaTime, is Power Burst, at 0.945 DS/sec. Its worst DPA single target attack is Power Blast, at 0.887 DS/sec. At level 50, with +0.95 slotting, these numbers translate to 115.28 dps and 108.21 dps. A full attack chain, with energy torrent tossed in there (whose DPA is actually comparable) is going to fall between those two numbers, obviously.

With the 33% cast time reduction, Power Burst increases to 1.338 DS/sec and Power Blast increases to 1.242 DS/sec. Those numbers translate to 163.225 dps and 151.514 dps. If we guestimate that the full attack chain is about the average of those two numbers, then damage increased from about 111.745 dps to 157.370, an increase of 40.8%.

Basically, reducing cast times of single target attacks provides a path to higher damage with higher recharge. It allows blasters to continue to increase their damage through higher slotting in the end game, whereas now once your attack chain fills up higher recharge provides rapidly decreasing returns on single target attacks (it does continue to improve AoE damage, as expected).

There's actually a surprising amount of headroom to buff single target attacks in ways that aren't too balance-disrupting to at least close the gap between single target and AoE. Conversely, there's a lot of room to *debuff* AoE attacks by *increasing* their cast times in ways that won't hurt lower level characters by much, but would put a stronger softcap on the ability for people to continue to buff their net output indefinitely. Or rather, it would put single target attacks and AoEs on somewhat more level ground when it came to enhancing their strength through recharge.

It would cause the people who believe its their god given right to alpha strike large spawns with both impunity and speed aneurysms, but I'm actually okay with that in general.


Lets take Energy Blast again, mostly because AoEs are not very high and have any sort of chance to be moderated in the first place. Explosive Blast does 0.9 damage with 1.67s cast time, 1.848s ArcanaTime. In DPA terms it does 0.487 DS/sec (AT). If we cut the cast time of Power Burst by 33%, its cast time drops to 1.34s, 1.584s AT. Its DPA becomes
1.338 DS/sec. For Explosive Blast to break even in DPA terms with Power Burst, it has to hit 2.76 targets on average, which is not a lot. But we have a lot more room to buff Power Burst, because its a pretty slow attack. Suppose we go all the way down to 1.0s cast time, 1.188s AT. Its DPA now increases to 1.79 DS/sec, and break even for Explosive Blast becomes 3.7 targets on average. At the very least, we have significantly closed the gap between single target and AoE, and we've done it without massively overpowering single target and without debuffing AoE. If we allow for debuffing AoE, we could increase the cast time of EB to 2.5s, 2.64s AT, reducing its DPA to 0.341 DS/sec, and increasing breakeven to 5.25 targets, which is now getting respectable even in teams.

Before you say this is totally crazy, I should point out that the release numbers for Fire Blast were almost the exact *opposite* of this. It had the practically anemic Flares (with a cast time of I believe 2.67s, 2.9s AT) but the hyperfast 1.0s cast time Fire Ball (which it still has). If my numbers are crazy, Fire Blast's numbers were originally bordering on the totally ludicrous.

Increasing the DPA of Blaster attacks is not as dangerous as most damage buffs, because Blasters still have to worry about the return strike. Even one-shotting four minions one after the other is more dangerous that two-shotting the entire group with two AoEs, because you are more exposed to return fire in the first case. *And* its not scalable. If you can two-shot 4 critters with AoEs, you can two-shot 8. But if you can one-shot one minion at a time, you might get three before they figure out what's happening, but you're not going to get eight before they start shooting holes where you don't want holes. Its more power than the devs probably want us to have, but its much less dangerous than allowing us to keep the AoEs we already have, something they are essentially grandfathered into maintaining.


That's actually a very good question. I tried to take a stab at that with my archetype offense/defense ratio posting back in I11-I12ish, but that was extremely rough-cut.

Its very difficult to try to take into account all the variations in powersets and powerset combinations, much less builds and tactics, but it *is* possible to look at the archetype numbers themselves and ask what they suggest, separate from the variations due to powerset. We can look at scrapper and blaster numbers, for example, make *very* conservative estimates for scrapper survivability, and ask how much better scrappers are than blasters at soloing. This is a surprisingly interesting exercise, because it has to take into account three things: damage, survivability, and endurance.

I look at it this way: we have two bars we have to manage: the blue bar and the green bar. You maximum ability to solo is equal to the fastest you can fight and defeat foes without running out of either bar.

Blasters, as a first cut approximation, have no control over the green bar. They convert the blue bar into kills, and the faster they do that, the more of the green bar they lose to incoming damage. Their maximum sustainable rate is the rate at which they lose green as fast as they regain it in regeneration.

If things worked correctly, in teams someone would be looking over the Blaster green bar, leaving them free to convert the blue bar into kills as fast as possible, and the Blaster ability to convert the blue bar into kills would be better than everyone elses. That's how Blasters are supposed to work in teams.

Scrappers have control over both bars. They can spend the blue bar making kills, and they can spend the blue bar restoring the green bar. Because of this, they can optimize their absolute best theoretical performance into one where they balance burning the blue bar and the green bar at the same relative rate. Its that control that ultimately gives them the better soloing speed than Blasters.

This is highly imprecise to be sure: Blasters can use attacks that are less damaging but more damage mitigating (they can burn some blue to restore some green as well) but in terms of archetype design, that's really the low level difference.

In this perspective, Tankers have the same control, but they have to burn less blue to restore green, and more blue to kill. The net result is that their optimum point occurs at a lower kill speed.

I keep meaning to complete this analysis, but I keep getting distracted by other things. Also, its sufficiently abstract that it might entertain the game theoreticians and cause general confusion elsewhere. I get enough flack from the people who think my mitigation spreadsheet is proof I don't understand there are other things besides resistance and regeneration.

I think so, if the specialization tracks actually meant something. Personally, I think somewhere between VEATs and Champions Online is the correct way to do this. No one starts off as a Defender. Everyone starts off as either a Melee Scrapper with a ranged attack (even Batman has batarangs) and a can of bandaids, a Ranged Blaster with a can of Bactine, or a Controller with a six-pack of Red Bull. You learn the basics of self-sufficiency and some team assistance in the tutorial, and then at level 5, 10, whatever, you get to start specializing. That's by my definition of specialization, which means the more effort to put into X, the better you get at X.

If your personality is balanced self-sufficiency, you'll balance personal protection and offense. If your personality is "kill them all and let god sort them out" you'll focus on offense. If you want to be Superman and have bullets bounce off your chest, you'll focus on personal protection. If you want to make sure they don't bounce off your chest and into the forehead of your teammate, you'll focus some attention on ally protection.

My belief is that the game should allow you to be anything you want**, but not necessarily everything you want.


** That the game will allow at all.

Strangely, this is exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time.

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.

Don't go agreeing with me too quickly. In my world, if you focus all your attention on the optimal balance of offense and personal defense, you will solo better and probably faster than someone that diverts any attention elsewhere. And the difference could be sizable.

It is that specific point that the disagreement seems to be rooted in. I don't believe "soloing" is a specific "ability" that everyone should have the same basic amount of. I believe soloing is an activity that people can choose to build towards. Everyone should have some baseline *minimum* amount of it, but past that point there could be a wide spread in soloing effectiveness depending on the choices players make.

And some choices are likely to open some doors while closing others. That is a critical difference between what I'm thinking of in my head and what Champions Online implements. You cannot pick both branches in the VEATs simultaneously. That makes the choice significant. No choice is very significant in CO, because every option (after a small prerequisite hurdle is achieved) stays on the table indefinitely. That's what I meant when I said "somewhere between VEATs and CO" and its I think another point of disagreement we have in terms of what we see as the next step in evolving something like CoX.

I'd like to see it. Pfft I say upon the flack-givers. They are just people who aren't going to benefit from the info.

I suspect that this game, and possibly many games can be broken down very simply into 'shots until dead'.

If you have an energy/energy Blaster (with any specific build) facing an minimum difficulty instanced spawn of CoT at level 25, you can more or less figure out how many shots she has to fire off (accounting for likely misses)in order to defeat that spawn. You can also calculate how many shots the spawn is going to need to drop her. This will give you two numbers that say who wins.

If you are facing a boss, and it's going to take you 20 shots to defeat it, and he only needs 8 shots to faceplant you, at that point you know you have to pull some tactics, candy, or friends out or lose.

Maybe putting your analysis in these terms would help. In any case, it leads me to the interesting thought of an in-game 'con system' (and possibly xp point system) based upon such calculations.

If I were a professional game designer designing a game from scratch, I'd probably focus a lot of my attention on core balancing concepts like this.

Suppose I have two attacks: one does 100 points of damage per shot, and the other does 10 points of damage per shot but also stops the target from shooting back for 4 seconds. And lets say recharge is out of the picture: both attacks have no cooldown or recharge to worry about. All attacks take 2 seconds to cast.

If I have 1000 points of health and attack a critter with 100 health and fires 10 points of damage per shot back at me per shot (also 2s per shot, no recharge) then I'm going to kill it in the first shot. It makes no sense to use attack #2, because there's no reason not to use maximum firepower in this case.

But if I attack a critter with 2000 points of health and also has a 100 point per shot attack, now I'm going to lose if I use maximum firepower. I can only trade shots with the critter if I have more health than it does, because we are both firing with the same strength attack. So one way for me to defeat this critter is to use attack #2 over and over again until the critter reaches 990 health (which will take 110 shots and 220 seconds, by the way) and then blast away. Trading shots I can now defeat the critter before he defeats me, but it'll take about 120 shots and 240 seconds (4 minutes). That's not the best strategy solo, though. A better strategy is to fire attack 2, then fire attack 1, then repeat. This keeps the critter idle but with an average damage output of 27.5 dps. After ten cycles of this (40 seconds) the critter will be left with 900 health, and we can now unload, taking nine more shots to defeat him (18s). Total time: 58s. That's only 18s longer than the optimal time.

In effect, when I'm soloing I might have to forgo my maximum damage output (50dps) in favor of a lower output (about 35dps) to stay alive. In a team, I could drop the utility attacks for the max damage ones. So my baseline is X, and my teaming peak is about 45% higher. Perhaps that could form the basis of the definition of a blaster: has the best damage, but isn't the best soloer and has to sacrifice some of it to solo without dying. A scrapper might work out to be 42 dps all the time, because their passive defenses don't require an offensive sacrifice. But conversely, they don't gain much from having those defenses become redundant.

As ultra-simplistic as this exercise appears, its a workable foundation for designing something like a blaster powerset that has quantifiable balances between offensive damage and offensive damage mitigation. If they were designed this way, I could tell you something like: Blasters are designed to have a particular soloing speed, but be able to unleash 200% of their soloing damage output when teaming, if their team can keep them alive and eliminate the need for the blaster to use its own mitigation tools. Scrappers always solo at 125% of the damage that Blasters are calibrated to deliver, but can only increase to 150% of that level of damage in teams. Thus, Scrappers are better soloers, but Blasters are the ultimate offensive specialists given sufficient support to reach that potential.

This sort of thing isn't impossible, but it requires the game implementation bend to the game design philosophy, not the other way around. If I were Castle, I would try to do this but be ultimately limited in how much of it I could really do. If I was Positron, I would make it the long term goal of the design of the game, but there would be practical limitations on how fast I could get there.

If I were Jack, we'd have launched that way if I had to set Geko on fire to do it.


And by the way, since I hate homogenization so much you might wonder why I would design a game which was so precisely defined by numbers in this way. And the reason is that I actually *want* some powersets to do a little more damage, and some to have a little more mitigation, for variety sake. But to my way of thinking, that's impossible to do unless you actually *know* how much of each your powerset designs possess. Its fine to believe this is a magic art that cannot be quantified, but I'd rather *know* that Fire Blast has 125% of normal blaster damage and only 40% of average blaster offensive mitigation than to just guess. It would be even better if that was my intent. You can't quantify everything, but you can at least try to make sure you quantify what your players can quantify. If something is truly unquantifiable, by definition you can't possibly be blamed for unbalancing it. So that which can be quantified gets balanced quantitatively, and that which cannot be distributed qualitatively and we call it a day.

You can kinda do that now. You can pick on greys and level at 10% of the speed of the rest of us non-tree sloths in nearly perfect safety. A -3 would have to be a Ring Mistress to be a threat.


Not nearly to the degree I think would be a good idea.

Well, I've just failed to explain it, but again, I still agree with you. Even in a class-segregated design, giving each class the ability to pick fighting skills at the expense of their specialisation would fulfil my wish. In an ideal world, I'd like everyone to be a fighter AND have a speciality in addition to that, but as a workable solution in a game that's more likely to be made at some point, just giving everyone the ability to satisfy basic solo needs in a non-roundabout way is a design that satisfies me.

Note, I don't mean a design that simply lets me pick from classes that can fight when solo and classes that can't. I mean a design that lets me pick ANY class, and still build it with at least some ability to fight solo, even if that has to come out of that class's speciality. And I'm fine with this closing some doors and opening others. Provided I can open the door to solo performance and pick which one to close, I do not mind this at all.

Also something of note: I hate "points buy" systems like those in Champions Online and Diablo 2 (not that they're alike in the slightest). Generally, such a points buy system lumps the points required for taking new skills into the same pool as the points required for upgrading old skills, often increasing the cost of upgrades as the level goes up. This creates choices I'd rather wish I didn't have, because their solutions are not fun. Choices like "do I want more powers or stronger powers?" or "Do I want three more powers or one more level in this one?"

If anything, how the villain Epic ATs do it is a good call, on top of how City of Heroes does it to begin with. You pick a power tree. Not half of one, half of the other, not cherrypicking from them all. One tree, with all of the powers that come with it. You have a static number of powers you can have. You can't have more, you can't have fewer, you have to make do with the number you are given. You then have a static number of enhancements slots to distribute between them. You can't increase or decrease that. It's limiting in a lot of ways, but it forces both variety and structure that, frankly, is what makes things fun.

In fact, if every AT could pick between specialization trees like this, maybe we could have what I meant, too. It's unlikely to happen, as that's the Soldiers of Arachnos "thing," but short of dual ATs, it's the closest I can think of that's actually doable.

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.