Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?
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I'm very confused by whatever metric you use to judge "combat prowess" Samy.
You say it's not damage but everything not damage seems to be unimportant to you.
First of all...there are NO damage centric ATs.
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.
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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.
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Dominators are damage-dealers, but they are not damage-centric. This isn't a criticism of the AT, and it's hardly the reason I stopped playing them, but insomuch as it concerns the concept, it's the clincher. Dominators are control-centric, with the ability to deal decent damage, but unlike Blasters, they cannot survive on their damage alone. For one, a lot of them lack Build Up, and ALL of them lack Aim + Build Up.
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In other words, the average of every single Blaster combination - that means Fire/Energy, Ice/Ice, Sonic/Energy, all of them - were underperforming the average. Not only that, all of them underperformed the average at all combat levels. Not only that, all of them underperformed solo or teamed. That's an incredible statement, and one that if I had made it before the datamining done pre-I11 I would have been laughed off the forums. And while I cannot say by how much, I can say if it was by something like only ten or twenty percent, the devs probably wouldn't have done anything about it. It was *much* more than that.**
Blasters can survive on damage alone for some players but not for the majority of players.
There really should be an estoppel rule that covers Blaster performance.
Also: BU and Aim are burst damage tools. They don't really increase damage by all that much. Assault is actually competitive with Aim, and not that far behind BU. The problem with both is that they have significant activation time (significant relative to their damage buff). Its this activation time - during which you cannot attack - that actually allows powers like Follow Up to provide similar (sometimes superior) return even though its numbers seem much lower.
(I always found it interesting that back in the old days when people would argue over which one was better that one objection made against Follow Up was that it was an attack that did relatively low damage, which "hurt" Claws attack chains. No one tended to point out that BU was essentially an attack that did zero damage and hurt a lot more.)
Burst damage can be important if that's all you have in terms of damage mitigation (it allows a Blaster confronted with a three on one situation to immediately reduce it to a two on one situation, which is what a lot of soloing blasters tend to do with BU and snipes that aren't blappers). But the difference is so low and the break in action so high that I often find myself forgetting I even have BU on things like Scrappers and Brutes (Brutes especially).
They fall farther behind when you consider that they have far fewer direct attacks than Blasters, and that the bulk of them are single-target or small AoE. Blasters, by comparison, tend to have one, two and sometimes even more AoEs, all with gigantic areas of coverage and all with decent damage, to the point where most Blasters can insta-wipe minion spawns with them. |
And he would be right to do so. I'm sure there are lots of people who will say I'm missing the point and not seeing all the fun to be had in a superhero game where you can vaporize a city block, but I'm sure lots of people thought the broken smoke grenade was fun and the 100% resistance cap was just a really good imitation of Superman.
** Castle never told me explicitly by how much overall for all cases (he wasn't allowed to at the time), but he gave me enough of a nudge in the right direction that I can say it was pretty bad.
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This also goes down to speed of progress. Yes, sometimes you need to thin the herd, which takes bloody ages. If you end up having to think the herd too often when a Scrapper never has to AND does the same damage as you BUT is several times more survivable, you start, or at least I started, asking myself the simplest of questions - why bother playing a Blaster when Scrappers were faster, hit harder and survived longer? The answer to that question was Defiance 2.0, but prior to that, the answer was a shrug.
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I don't believe everyone subscribes to that particular formula exclusively. I know I don't. If everyone did, then yes, one would wonder why bother even including controllers or defs or tanks in the game, right? City of Scrappers. Simple.
But, not everyone likes playing scrappers. Or, playing them exclusively (my Claw/SR is fun as hell). Some players will enjoy a more lockdown-centric build, or buff build, or tank build or artillery build.
This is also assuming that everyone solos. This is NOT the case - most of us enjoy teaming to some degree, and it's the synergy of powers and tactics that makes teams rock and roll.
I'm not getting the impression that you view this as a tactical game as much as a brawler or shooter. I'm not saying either way is the right way (the nice thing about MMO's is how we all adapt our playstyles and still enjoy the underlying game) but at the same time, I'm finding it difficult to buy into the premise that since Damage is the only real way to defeat foes, that everyone really SHOULD do a lot of damage first, and other stuff second.
And, I'd like to refer you to many many many mission arcs where my Stalker snuck past most (sometimes all!) of the mobs on the map, and took care of the objective and nothing else, completing the missions in a fraction of the expected timeframe. Was that fun? Oh hell yes.
"City of Heroes. April 27, 2004 - August 31, 2012. Obliterated not with a weapon of mass destruction, not by an all-powerful supervillain... but by a cold-hearted and cowardly corporate suck-up."
I disagree that Doms aren't damage-centric. Castle even said he was worried about suggesting the Dom change because the numbers he was suggesting would basically mean that Doms have two primaries. Secondaries are usually built to be weaker and to augment the primary, but in the case of Dominators, they have the highest base damage of any toon you can make redside. If that makes them "not damage dealers," I don't what to say.
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Scrappers were intended to be the balanced soloers. In their case, and their case specifically, the archetype was designed to have a balance of offense and defense. Offense was made "primary" simply because something had to be, and Tankers were going to be taking up the alternative ordering.
Its extremely difficult to make the "archetype is focused on the primary" argument in the case of Scrappers, Corruptors, and Dominators. Its also not easy to make it in the case of Blasters: I asked Castle this question directly in the case of Blasters:
Are Blasters intended to be Ranged Offensive archetypes that happen to have Melee support attacks, or are they intended to be Offensive archetypes that have both Ranged and Melee options?
The answer, which I confirmed *twice*, was: Blasters are offensive specialists, who have ranged and melee options. Both ranged and melee options are intended to be valid and roughly equal options. In fact, the ranged modifier boost was *not* intended to create a preference for ranged damage. I asked him that question as well. The boost was actually intended to compensate for the perceived belief that the melee options were better than the ranged options - i.e. the Blapper mentality.
Castle believed that the perception that the melee options were so much better in the case of hard targets (they do tend to have better DPA and control, although they tend to have less AoE potential) meant blasters were putting themselves at greater risk more often than intended. The ranged damage modifier boost was intended to balance the ranged and melee options better so that Blasters felt firing away on a boss with ranged attacks was just as valid of an option as whacking away with total focus and bonesmasher. This was all part of the "stop blasters from commiting suicide" objective for the I11-ish changes to Blasters.
The primary difference between primary powersets and secondary powersets is not strength, its developmental: you get access to primary powerset options earlier than secondary powerset options. So in CoH, archetypes tend to get access to their team role-focused powerset first. But in CoV, where team roles are much more jumbled, in almost every case each archetype gets access to damage first: Stalkers, Brutes, Masterminds, Corruptors. Only in the case of Dominators is that not exactly true, and its telling that in their case the powersets they *do* get access to first is what Controllers call "damage." In a very real sense, Dominators are the archetype that are like Blasters in having two damage sets. If they don't have two damage sets, then Controllers have no damage sets. As Controllers end up maturing into one of the higher damage archetypes on the Blue side, that would be a weird statement to make (and no: I'm not forgetting or ignoring containment).
Given the decision to make the damage powerset the primary in just about every case in CoV, its clear you cannot easily make arguments about which one was supposed to be "the focus" or "most important" because its clear they were not thinking that way at all: they were thinking that damage was important to soloing, damage was conceptually consistent with villains, so all the primary sets will be the ones that allow the villains to kill/defeat stuff. But I don't think they ever explicitly thought "damage is more important than defense for brutes, so the primary will be the melee offense sets." It seems pretty clear that in terms of "focus" the CoV archetypes are far more balanced than they are weighted. All CoV archetypes are a lot more like Scrappers than they are like any of the other four CoH archetypes in this regard.
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Only in the vaguest and ambiguous sort of sense are secondary powers deliberately designed to be weaker and augment the primary. The canonical example is Scrappers. Its impossible to argue that their secondary is "weaker" than their primary, except to invoke the damage bias. And if you do, its impossible to argue that Defender secondaries are weaker than their Primary.
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But I recall Castle saying things about Dominators being now designed so that they essentially have "two primaries," in the sense that the strength of both their primary and their secondary are high enough that they could warrant being the primary (and therefore, the intended role/goal/purpose) of any given AT. Doms have the highest base damage on redside, which is unusual for someone who has attacks in their secondary. Normally having attacks in your secondary would mean your attacks do pretty low damage (Tankers, Defenders) because your AT does other things, and considers damage less important.
But from what Castle said about wanting to take away the up and down feeling of Doms, beefing up their damage to that level was the best way to go about it. After all, high-end players were already playing that way, having a Dom that could mez as well as do great damage.
Another way to take it would be that Castle may have been worried that the okay guys would think Doms too powerful if their numbers were so high in damage AND in mez at the same time. But it seems to have been something that worked out.
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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And, I'd like to refer you to many many many mission arcs where my Stalker snuck past most (sometimes all!) of the mobs on the map, and took care of the objective and nothing else, completing the missions in a fraction of the expected timeframe. Was that fun? Oh hell yes.
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That's nothing! I did that with my mastermind, while having no pets out and nothing more than a stealth proc in my teleport! While blindfolded!
*Leans back smugly in chair*
But I recall Castle saying things about Dominators being now designed so that they essentially have "two primaries," in the sense that the strength of both their primary and their secondary are high enough that they could warrant being the primary (and therefore, the intended role/goal/purpose) of any given AT.
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He did have some private reservations, but I can't comment on those specifically. Those reservations did not stop Dominators from basically getting more or less what Castle originally cooked up anyway.
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Blasters cannot survive on their damage alone either. The biggest complaint about the fire primary and the fire secondary has been that it lacks mitigation. Furthermore, until Defiance added the ability to shoot while mezzed, Blasters on average were faceplanting at rates so much higher than everyone else that Blasters - All Powerset Combinations, All Levels, All Team Situations - were individually averaging lower performance than the average of all players in the same situation by sizable amounts *and* this was so unusual that *only* for the Blaster archetype could this be said.
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Also: BU and Aim are burst damage tools. They don't really increase damage by all that much. Assault is actually competitive with Aim, and not that far behind BU. The problem with both is that they have significant activation time (significant relative to their damage buff). Its this activation time - during which you cannot attack - that actually allows powers like Follow Up to provide similar (sometimes superior) return even though its numbers seem much lower. |
The reason I've been bringing up burst damage over the years is that, yes, it doesn't really help all that much over time, but for Blasters more than for anyone else, "over time" metrics are comparatively a lot less meaningful. Especially for powers on a 90 second timer. As far as I've seen, if a solo Blaster allows a battle to last too much longer than 10-20 seconds, he's already in deep trouble before these metrics are even considered, because for it to have gone so far, something must have gone wrong. A Blaster who's on the ball can end a fight without suffering more than one attack from most enemies, which Blaster hit points can generally absorb with a good degree of comfort.
And even if you don't feel like just cycling your AoEs every time, Aim and Build Up with the proper power choice can still pot-shot quite a few enemies before they run out. For instance, with a Fire/Fire Blaster, I can take down at least three enemies in 10 seconds, leaving at least three more within an inch of their life, to be one-hit-finished thereafter anyway. It comes down to proper application of firepower, and while it is NOT safe and NOT easy, it's not exactly rocket science to replicate fight after fight. And even basic slotting can give you Aim and Build Up back every other fight.
Burst damage matters, especially in the hands of Blasters, and in their hands, it is a force of nature. I will say that, without a shadow of a doubt, NO ONE possesses as much burst damage as a Blaster at full tilt. Not even remotely in the same principality. THAT is a big ace up the sleeve.
This is true, but its also true - since we were originally talking about how MMOs should be designed in the future - that you'll never see that again. The absolutely wild amounts of AoE that the game has, and the trivially miniscule compensating costs to using them, are one of the biggest offensive-side design errors the original team made. Its an error that I can say with 99% certainty will never be repeated again. Such massive AoE was never revisited by Cryptic in CoV, avoided to a large extent in CO, and along with superstacking buffs, accelerating survival curves, and AoE ally effects are probably on Castle's list of things to erase from Geko's spreadsheets if he ever finds himself in possession of a time machine. |
Frankly, Blasters wouldn't be the "kings of damage" without this. At best they'd be able to slightly out-match Scrappers in damage output, and at worst they would be (and were) just Scrappers but without the defences. Even today, with all the buffs, Blaster single-target damage isn't all that, and their single-target burst is still not that impressive compared to Scrappers. Yes, yes, they do more, but the difference isn't as big as the difference in survivability. What Blasters have is the ability to make spawns disappear under the right conditions, and that Scrappers CANNOT do. If you remove large-scale AoEs from the equation, you remove the point to having Blasters to begin with. I guess that might lead to something cooler, like an Assault/Defence powerset, but the raw power of Blaster destruction is one serious draw to the game, at least for me.
In fact, it is this single-minded focus on large-scale destruction that keeps getting me to put up with all the niggling problems, all the annoying deaths, all the close calls and all the trudge and toil that come with playing a Blaster and just stubbornly keep playing them. Yes, it makes me want to tare the hair out of my nose a lot of the time, but one well-executed devastation and it all goes away in the face of self-satisfaction.
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.
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Fun doesn't have to equal efficiency, but fun very often equal progress, and some characters played alone will NOT give you much progress.
This is also assuming that everyone solos. This is NOT the case - most of us enjoy teaming to some degree, and it's the synergy of powers and tactics that makes teams rock and roll. |
I'm not getting the impression that you view this as a tactical game as much as a brawler or shooter. I'm not saying either way is the right way (the nice thing about MMO's is how we all adapt our playstyles and still enjoy the underlying game) but at the same time, I'm finding it difficult to buy into the premise that since Damage is the only real way to defeat foes, that everyone really SHOULD do a lot of damage first, and other stuff second. |
Furthermore, I don't define as "tactics" any of the approaches that are, essentially, "let's take 10 minutes per enemy group because it's safer that way." Constant pulls, constant minefields, constant waiting for this, setting up of that, preparing this other thing... If I'm going to be sitting on my hands while someone else "prepares," then I might as well go have lunch, and if I go have lunch I'm not exactly making much of my play time, am I? This is the big problem with both a lot of teams these days, as well as with a lot of "advice" people tend to give out. It always involves taking bloody ages to do even the simplest of things, and when you get to that point, you've already lost before the fight even started.
And, I'd like to refer you to many many many mission arcs where my Stalker snuck past most (sometimes all!) of the mobs on the map, and took care of the objective and nothing else, completing the missions in a fraction of the expected timeframe. Was that fun? Oh hell yes. |
There is one and only one way to advance in City of Heroes - kill stuff, either directly or by teaming with someone who does. Everything else, even things that reward, is secondary to this. OK, caveat - Inventions. So let's rephrase it like this: two ways to progress - gain experience or garner drops. The only actually reliable way to gain experience is to kill stuff, by far and wide. A variety of things grant experience rewards, but none of them are as potent as killing stuff, not by a long shot. Not unless you find a specifically exploitable mission. Drops you get, once again, from killing things, or from completing specific tasks which, once again, require killing stuff for the most part.
You can make your own fun, but as long as we're looking at an actual in-game system with its own balance, then the we HAVE to fallback on either the trite "risk vs. reward," or on the much more realistic "time vs. reward." You don't have to play for the rewards if you don't want to, but the game HAS to be balanced for them, or it creates a variety of unpleasant problems.
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.
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You know, Arcana, I've followed your numbers from the old days, and while I tend to unconditionally agree with them for the most part, I continually feel like you constantly neglect the benefit of pure, large-scale burst damage. Your description of it (which I lost track of to quote) sounds kind of out of scale with what I've been doing... Pretty much all day today. Yes, you can use Aim and Build Up to quickly reduce three enemies into two. If that's what you choose to do with them. I tend to use them to reduce 8 enemies to... Maybe 2. And I know I'll be kicked in the balls for saying this, but every Blaster combo should be able to do this, with the possible exception of Psychic Blast not paired up with Mental Manipulation thanks to a bizarre design choice to migrate the Psi cone from primary to secondary.
The reason I've been bringing up burst damage over the years is that, yes, it doesn't really help all that much over time, but for Blasters more than for anyone else, "over time" metrics are comparatively a lot less meaningful. Especially for powers on a 90 second timer. |
You say Dominators are "not offensively focused" and one of the reasons why is because of their lack of BU and Aim. But here you're saying that Blasters gain survival benefits from BU and Aim, which is not an offensive benefit, and its one that Dominators won't get much benefit from.
It should only count against Dominators that they do not have BU and Aim if BU and Aim would have actually helped them offensively in the first place. Since Dominators do not actually *need* burst damage to gain full benefit of their intrinsic average damage (i.e.: they don't tend to drop dead) you're penalizing them for lacking an offensive tool that only marginally increases offense. That would be comparable to me saying that Blasters aren't offensively focused because they don't get the same benefit from Assault that Defenders do.
And being able to cut eight down to two is a function of AoEs, not BU and Aim. Penalizing something for lacking BU because they are lacking a tool that can buff AoEs and also penalizing the same something for lacking AoEs is a very weird form of double-counting.
In any case, I don't discount the benefits of burst damage for blasters. I just don't count it as an offensive benefit unless it also increases kill speed. Frontloading (borrowing damage from tomorrow and using it today) is a defensive benefit. BU has a high defensive benefit and a low offensive one in general. This can be influenced to some degree by playstyle, but so can most things.
In any case, that's why, if I had to choose between +100% damage 10% of the time or +12% damage all of the time, my blasters will probably take the former and my scrappers will take the latter. My blasters can make better use of the damage now than later. My scrappers, who aren't going to die, would rather just have more, period.
As far as I've seen, if a solo Blaster allows a battle to last too much longer than 10-20 seconds, he's already in deep trouble before these metrics are even considered, because for it to have gone so far, something must have gone wrong. A Blaster who's on the ball can end a fight without suffering more than one attack from most enemies, which Blaster hit points can generally absorb with a good degree of comfort. |
Outside of control, to be able to end the fight after one volley requires being able to defeat the enemy basically in a single volley of your own, which is something only some blasters can do (usually Fire, and not all of them). The reason why this is totally broken as a design decision is that when you decide to give a class the defensive ability called "kill everything before it can shoot back" it will have this surprising tendency to level a gazillion times faster than everything else. The only reason why Fire blasters *don't* level a gazillion times faster than everyone else is because most players aren't experienced enough to avoid dropping dead while attempting this. But you do create the problem for yourself that AoE recharge is largely irrelevant in teams (recharge buffs, more than one attacker) and AoE steamrolling means all that work you spent designing attacks for minions gets flushed down the toilet (since they never get to use them).
Frankly, Blasters wouldn't be the "kings of damage" without this. |
(For example, they should gain more for self-damage buffs and have higher damage caps, but AoEs make that too dangerous. AoEs come up so often in balance discussions that if I could simultaneously make the playerbase forget that they ever existed and thus never miss them, I *would* snap my fingers and make them go away in their current form, without further discussion or reservation. I don't say that lightly.)
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Er... Are you saying that since killing things more quickly reduces the amount of incoming damage, Build Up is a defensive power? It may very well increase survivability per activation for that reason, but in no way shape or form is gaining the ability to blast bigger holes in your enemy's face to be considered defensive.
Er... Are you saying that since killing things more quickly reduces the amount of incoming damage, Build Up is a defensive power? It may very well increase survivability per activation for that reason, but in no way shape or form is gaining the ability to blast bigger holes in your enemy's face to be considered defensive.
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Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Er... Are you saying that since killing things more quickly reduces the amount of incoming damage, Build Up is a defensive power? It may very well increase survivability per activation for that reason, but in no way shape or form is gaining the ability to blast bigger holes in your enemy's face to be considered defensive.
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I'm not going to redo the BU calculations because they aren't really relevant. Lets just picture two blasters, one with BU and one without, and lets temporarily make them invulnerable just to measure their kill speed. After we measure the one with BU, we then add a constant damage buffing power to the second one (something like assault) that makes the second one's kill speed basically the same. At this point they are both generating the same amount of damage, because they are killing things at the same rate (for our purposes, critters do not usually regenerate fast enough to matter in this comparison). *Whatever* the value of Assault we had to give to the second blaster, we can say that BU and that damage buff provide the same overall offensive benefit (by definition: both are killing at the same speed).
Now lets shut off the invulnerability. Will both blasters be equally well off? Probably not, because now the second one is taking more damage than the first one, because the first one frontloads its kills at least some of the time. Killing faster initially and slower later on is better than killing at a constant speed that is the average of the two, because the former eliminates incoming damage faster.
What this means is that Build Up provides two real benefits to blasters. First, it provides an offensive benefit that on average will allow the blaster to kill a few more things, which translates to some average offensive damage buff. Second, it provides the means to eliminate damage earlier rather than later, and as a consequence mitigate damage. It provides offensive damage mitigation.
So yes: BU offers both an offensive benefit and a defensive one for blasters. If you don't believe that, then you believe replacing BU with something that provides its average benefit over time without the frontloading is just as good, because your kill speed will still be the same.
Assuming, of course, you're alive long enough for the situation to actually average out.
Its not a question of blasting bigger holes. Its a question of blasting bigger holes now and smaller holes later compared to blasting a slightly larger sized hole all the time.
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Hmm... Let's see...
And being able to cut eight down to two is a function of AoEs, not BU and Aim. Penalizing something for lacking BU because they are lacking a tool that can buff AoEs and also penalizing the same something for lacking AoEs is a very weird form of double-counting.
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Basically, Dominators lack decent AoEs, which prevents them from effectively dealing with large groups of enemies in a timely manner (e.i. before my AoE controls run out), and they lack a Build Up + Aim combo which would allow them to deliver enough burst damage to turn the tide of battle. Of course, the final and most important argument here is also subjective. Dominators deal damage. A lot of it. But in terms of playstyle, the first thing a solo Dominator wants to do is NOT to deal damage, but rather to control. Hold things first, THEN start killing them, and whenever it comes down to that order of business, that is not something I can accept as damage-centric.
In any case, I don't discount the benefits of burst damage for blasters. I just don't count it as an offensive benefit unless it also increases kill speed. Frontloading (borrowing damage from tomorrow and using it today) is a defensive benefit. BU has a high defensive benefit and a low offensive one in general. This can be influenced to some degree by playstyle, but so can most things. In any case, that's why, if I had to choose between +100% damage 10% of the time or +12% damage all of the time, my blasters will probably take the former and my scrappers will take the latter. My blasters can make better use of the damage now than later. My scrappers, who aren't going to die, would rather just have more, period. |
In actual fact, I AM taking damage from one place to pile it up in another, but where I'm taking damage is a place where it isn't useful anyway. If damage were a tangible resource like, say, gold, then I trust you will agree with the following assessment: as long as there are times it's going to go to waste anyway, it makes sense to take it away from those times and use it at other times when it WILL make a difference.
Here's how things go, for me at least - I say Build Up and Aim are up every couple of battles, but that assumes I go from battle to battle to battle. I do not. At the end of each battle, I typically spend some time sitting on my hands, appraising the situation, some time exploring the fog of war, some time travelling, some time scanning through the enemy ranks, some time thinking, and possibly some time resting. By the time I'm done, Build Up and Aim are up and ready to be used again. Purely numerically, mine recharge in around 50 seconds (I think), which would give them an uptime of 1 in 5 (less, in fact, since they take some time to animate, but not by much). In actual practice, however, Build Up and Aim are up for over half the time I'm actually in battle and doing damage. To me and how I play, they are a MASSIVE boost to outgoing damage.
Just today, I have been able to afford to start over 3/4 of my fights with Build Up and Aim going, and I have been able to finish at least half of my fights before they have expired. It may be aberrant, it may be a bit wasteful, but for what I see them do for me, they are a SERIOUS boost to my damage, far greater than a small, consistent buff would be. Yes, a consistent buff is consistently buffing, but since I'm not consistently fighting, a lot of that goes to waste. Build Up and Aim almost never go to waste unless I do something remarkably stupid and end up held with no break frees while they time out in neutral gear.
Only true for Fire blasters. Not true for all the rest, because all the rest have mitigating controls. For example, sometimes on my sonic blaster I like just putting the entire group to sleep and then bashing them to death one at a time while their friends are snoring all around them. And Ice Patch is practically cheating. |
Outside of control, to be able to end the fight after one volley requires being able to defeat the enemy basically in a single volley of your own, which is something only some blasters can do (usually Fire, and not all of them). The reason why this is totally broken as a design decision is that when you decide to give a class the defensive ability called "kill everything before it can shoot back" it will have this surprising tendency to level a gazillion times faster than everything else. The only reason why Fire blasters *don't* level a gazillion times faster than everyone else is because most players aren't experienced enough to avoid dropping dead while attempting this. But you do create the problem for yourself that AoE recharge is largely irrelevant in teams (recharge buffs, more than one attacker) and AoE steamrolling means all that work you spent designing attacks for minions gets flushed down the toilet (since they never get to use them). |
Secondly, yes, I fully realise that such massive AoEs are problematic if you want to give the AT a little more survivability. But it's a self-sustaining problem. Blasters lack survivability in a BIG way, so they NEED those AoEs to compensate. If they had survivability, they wouldn't be as reliant on AoE and I, at least, wouldn't be THAT heartbroken to have them tightened up. Not removed, mind you, just tightened up. And going from Fire Breath to Breath of Fire IS removal. That's why, whenever I re-suggest my Ranger AT, I always go for Assault/Defence. Without the massive AoEs, what the hell is such an AT going to do that a Scrapper isn't already doing?
The problem, if I may say that, is that Blasters were built as "glass cannons" in a game where they ended up being the only ones made out of glass. As such, they had to carry the biggest cannons, or their whole AT design was pointless. Which it was, until the Defiance changes, and its point is at best mediocre even today. And I say this as an avid player of Blasters.
Incidentally, how do you feel about what I like to refer to as the "garbage filler" in Blaster secondaries? Things like Burn or Smoke Grenade, just to pull two names out of a hat. I have no provable reason to feel that way, but to me it just feels like they ended up with too few powers and jammed in whatever fit the theme, leaving a lot of Blasters with a lot of powers that don't do much to help them, yet with the need of some extra help.
Yes, they would. They'd just get there with tools that would get them there without creating balance problems, but are too dangerous to give them so long as they *do* have those AoEs.
(For example, they should gain more for self-damage buffs and have higher damage caps, but AoEs make that too dangerous. AoEs come up so often in balance discussions that if I could simultaneously make the playerbase forget that they ever existed and thus never miss them, I *would* snap my fingers and make them go away in their current form, without further discussion or reservation. I don't say that lightly.)[/QUOTE]
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.
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I believe that dominators don't get access to AoE damage because this would actually interfere with their AoE control powers (mass sleeps, at the very least).
These AoE crowd control abilities are also why they don't NEED AoE damage - you have time to pick things off one by one, because the rest of the spawn is, in a word, helpless.
"City of Heroes. April 27, 2004 - August 31, 2012. Obliterated not with a weapon of mass destruction, not by an all-powerful supervillain... but by a cold-hearted and cowardly corporate suck-up."
I believe that dominators don't get access to AoE damage because this would actually interfere with their AoE control powers (mass sleeps, at the very least).
These AoE crowd control abilities are also why they don't NEED AoE damage - you have time to pick things off one by one, because the rest of the spawn is, in a word, helpless. |
What this means is that Build Up provides two real benefits to blasters. First, it provides an offensive benefit that on average will allow the blaster to kill a few more things, which translates to some average offensive damage buff. Second, it provides the means to eliminate damage earlier rather than later, and as a consequence mitigate damage. It provides offensive damage mitigation.
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Look at the following list and identify which ones you deem to be "defensive" in nature:
- Increasing one's damage resistance
- Putting the enemy to sleep
- Healing damage dealt to oneself
- Phasing the enemy
- Increasing one's hit points
- Debuffing enemy ToHit
Your definition of "defensive" seems to be "higher percent HP retained over time," in which case defeating enemies more quickly certainly fits the bill along with a hodepodge of other two-fold strategies and maneuvers.
Your assertion is that that defeating enemies more quickly (thusly sustaining less damage during an encounter) qualifies as defensive activity. While I agree that deader enemies results in greater survivability than not-as-dead enemies, I do not regard a boost in damage to be defensive because it's aggressive and affects the enemy; not protective and affects self or allies. You said it yourself: it's offensive damage mitigation... that is to say, NOT defensive damage mitigation.
You remind me of those statisticians who draw the strangest conclusions by defining terms in careless ways, like the ones that say the bedroom is the deadliest room in the house (deaths per room) or that airplane travel is safer than car travel (deaths per year). It's easy to define a term, run some numbers, then draw the wrong conclusion or express the wrong idea.
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![Confused](images/smilies/confused.gif)
According to my understanding of defensiveness (meaning to protect, as noted in any dictionary), you can define "defensive" in this game as "protects from enemy attack." |
![Embarrassment](images/smilies/redface.gif)
Is holding an enemy a defensive behavior? According to you, no. Either way, they aren't attacking you or doing any damage. Their damage output is 0 whether they're asleep, stunned, held, or dead. People say all the time that the best defense is a good offense. If your enemies are dead, they aren't going to hurt you much.
On the other hand, controlling enemies with mez does not do this. Debuffing enemy recharge does not do this. Preventing enemies from attacking--including defeating them before they can fight back--does not do this. These are all offensive tactics, as they aggressively affect the enemy and not oneself. |
Your definition of "defensive" seems to be "higher percent HP retained over time," in which case defeating enemies more quickly certainly fits the bill along with a hodepodge of other two-fold strategies and maneuvers. |
Your definition, you claim, is "protecting from enemy attacks," but it's actually "protecting from enemy attacks, but only if you don't affect the enemies to do it." This isn't actually based on anything solid. It's arbitrary. You just "feel" that it's right.
Your assertion is that that defeating enemies more quickly (thusly sustaining less damage during an encounter) qualifies as defensive activity. While I agree that deader enemies results in greater survivability than not-as-dead enemies, I do not regard a boost in damage to be defensive because it's aggressive and affects the enemy; not protective and affects self or allies. You said it yourself: it's offensive damage mitigation... that is to say, NOT defensive damage mitigation. |
Unless you're just nitpicking semantics for the sake of nitpicking. Since you admit that it's damage mitigation, but not damage mitigation that would qualify as "defensive" to you... which would imply it mitigates damage in some way that somehow doesn't contribute to your survival. But that's not even true. Or possible.
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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You can't out-control the enemies, only slow them down. Sooner or later they WILL overwhelm you, and the only way to beat them is to kill them fast.
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Its an AoE (Cone).
It has a 10 target cap.
Its mag 3 (it affects minions and LTs).
It isn't a percentage chance effect (the sleep has 100% chance of taking effect)
Its duration is perma out of the box at all levels (its recharge is 20s, and its duration is 28 seconds at level 18 when you can first get it, increasing to about 36 seconds at level 50).
Technically, it isn't autohit so you could miss something, but as a practical matter a Sonic blaster that slots this power reasonably well has a first-strike spawn eliminator when solo (sleeps are of course problematic in teams, but Blasters are supposed to have help on teams). Its good enough that most people thought it was bugged when Sonic blast first came out.
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As it usually comes down in these cases, Arcana is right. This time around, in a purely technical sense, and via specific definitions. As an offensive benefit, as defined as a a benefit to offence over time, Build Up's contribution isn't great. Just going off base numbers and forgetfully ignoring animation times so I don't have to break out the calculator, it has a 10 second buff at a 90 second recharge, which gives you a coverage of 1/9 of the time. A 100% damage buff 1/9 of the time is equivalent, perfect conditions present, to a 100/9 ~ 11.11% constant damage buff. Red Tomax lists Assault at 10.5% damage buff, and being a toggle, it is constant, hence Arcana's comparison of Build Up to Assault. I'm likely missing something, as recharge would boost that percentage significantly, but even so, that's where the "not much of an offensive benefit" argument comes in.
As for the "defensive benefit" argument, this depends on context. When I exposited that even though Build Up's over-time benefit may be low, its true benefit is burst damage, allowing me to kill things before they killed me. On a purely technical level, that IS a defensive benefit, as it helps keep me from dying. This particular aspect is also not an offensive benefit, as perfect conditions permitting, clumping damage in bursts is equivalent to spreading it over a longer period of time, hence it does not benefit offence for damage to be focused over damage being spread over time. Build Up IS an offensive benefit, but within the context I provided and within which Arcana commented, it is effect of burst damage IS defensive.
That's all well and good in theory and in numbers, and to this extent I completely agree. However, as you may have noticed, I requested perfect conditions several time. By this I mean conditions where attacks follow a certain pattern where momentary damage can be expanded over time and over-time damage can be calculated as burst without loss of generality. In actual practice, this is never the case, which is why statistics in general and CoH numbers in particular should always be regarded more as a guideline than as a natural law. Specifically, "over time" metrics assume constant action, as gaps in the timeline skew many things. For instance, having to go to the loo cuts your damage output, reducing your expected DPS over a longer period of time, but it does not prevent your regeneration, recovery and, most importantly, recharge, which plays havoc on "over time" metrics.
As a general rule of thumb, the longer the period you try to forecast over, the more likely it is for chaotic, unpredictable events to skew numbers so much that expected calculations lose any and all meaning. Such is the case with Build Up, at least as far as my own experience goes, as my gameplay is designed to capitalise on that. Anything I need to do, I put off until AFTER I've used Aim and Build Up and have finished the fight, such that any events which would otherwise delay me affect their delay while Aim and Build Up are recharging, effectively giving them a shorter practical recharge, in that they take less of the time which actually matters to recharge. It's like watching a movie where something is said to take 10 years, but then we cut to "Ten years later..." It WAS ten years, but since only interesting events matter, for us it was a few minutes.
It's a bit difficult to explain, really, but while I believe Arcana is technically right, I don't believe that stance reflects practical reality with enough accuracy.
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.
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![Smile](images/smilies/smile.gif)
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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[/quote]I disagree that Doms aren't damage-centric. Castle even said he was worried about suggesting the Dom change because the numbers he was suggesting would basically mean that Doms have two primaries. Secondaries are usually built to be weaker and to augment the primary, but in the case of Dominators, they have the highest base damage of any toon you can make redside. If that makes them "not damage dealers," I don't what to say.[/quote]
Dominators are damage-dealers, but they are not damage-centric. This isn't a criticism of the AT, and it's hardly the reason I stopped playing them, but insomuch as it concerns the concept, it's the clincher. Dominators are control-centric, with the ability to deal decent damage, but unlike Blasters, they cannot survive on their damage alone. For one, a lot of them lack Build Up, and ALL of them lack Aim + Build Up. they have a lower damage mod than Blasters, especially on Ranged attacks, and lower by a not-insignificant amount. They have lower damage still by lacking Defiance, which I've found can contribute quite a bit if try to use it. They fall farther behind when you consider that they have far fewer direct attacks than Blasters, and that the bulk of them are single-target or small AoE. Blasters, by comparison, tend to have one, two and sometimes even more AoEs, all with gigantic areas of coverage and all with decent damage, to the point where most Blasters can insta-wipe minion spawns with them.
Dominators also suffer from Defender hit points, which makes reckless abandon and direct offence a LOT more dangerous, to a degree that I was AMAZED at. You wouldn't think something so simple would make such a difference, but it does. Dominators can be survivable, but as I examined mine and asked for help with it, the recurring feedback was that I should focus less on my attacks and more on my controls, and possibly even leave attacks for later in the levels. Let me put it this way - having to pull slots out of already underslotted attacks just so that I can survive is not something I will do, and any AT which requires me to do so is not an AT I want to play. That, and being continually advised to tweak my difficulty so I was fighting fewer enemies but higher in level, which I consider a massive step DOWN in terms of visual appeal, is what caused me to delete my Dominator when I ended up needing the slot, though what I needed it for I don't remember. Another Mastermind, most likely.
The one biggest regret I have about not being able to jive with Dominators is that Control sets are the last thing in the game that I have never, in five years, had access to, courtesy of lacking an AT I could play that had them. Everything else I can get on the cheap. Melee, defence, blast, manipulation and summon are obvious, and I get support via Masterminds, but I just can't get a control set, as both control ATs play in a way I do not enjoy. Of course, I also lack access to Ice Melee and Ice Armour due to my dislike of Tankers, but that's one powerset combo, so it's not THAT big a deal, even though my first and favourite Brute started out as Ice/Ice in Beta.
I think the only AT I haven't even tried playing seriously was Controllers, the prospect of which I just detest. Everything else I've played to some level, with Defenders and Corrupters not holding me for too long once I realise how many powers they have that I can't use on myself. I'm still trying to make peace with Mastermind resurrection powers. On the one hand, I don't want them, but on the other hand, needing one on the off chance I team and not having it both sucks and kind of puts me in an awkward position.