Laser Beam Eyes

Because Cryptic was completely ignorant of the fact that animation times were actually a mechanical balancing point rather than just fluff. It's for the same reason that some powers have ridiculously fast animation times when balance would dictate they need to be longer (Blaze, BIB, Seismic Smash, pre-rebalance Energy Transfer) and others have ridiculously long animation times when balance would dictate they need to be faster (Total Focus, Shout, etc).

Interestingly enough, even though Castle knows about the problems of animation time and how it affects the balance of sets, the new sets he's put out have shown similar flaws in balancing the damage/rech/end formula with the practical limitations of DPA and long animation times. Dual Pistols is a great example of this: the numbers would actually be quite nice if the animation times weren't godawful long. The animations make the set, from a numbers standpoint, painfully mediocre. Dual Blades has a similar, but slightly less disadvantageous, problem in Vengeful Slice and One Thousand Cuts which makes using those powers outside of their combos tactically unintelligent.

I'm still amazed everytime a patch comes out and blaze has not been touched.

I found the DP numbers to be very disappointing, too. I can find no mathmatical reason to play the set. It reminds me of the thorns dominator secondary. I want to play it... but I just can't find an angle to leverage.

Yeah... The biggest problem that I can see is that the set is so pretty that people will play it without even realizing that the numbers are on the "meh" side of things. What made it worse, in my opinion, was that Cryo and Chem ammo are actually lower damage than either incendiary or standard ammo because you're losing out on the -res in Piercing Rounds and the debuff durations don't really last long enough to stack significant numbers so there isn't much reason to use them in the first place. Of course, this also ignores the fact that DP has to use incendiary ammo just to get into the middle of the pack on ST damage for SO grade slotting, so it's sacrificing any debuff capability just to be even with every other set's normal damage dealing capacity.

In my opinion, Dual Pistols needs a fair amount more work before it becomes a well balanced set (notice I did not say "powerful" or "top tier"). The only thing going for it is the pretty, and I'm very sad that Castle and Synapse seem happy with the set as it is now even though it underperforms as it currently stands.

But Umbral...I would never want the animation to Vengeful Slice touched! It's one of my favorite attacks!

It's a Shōryū-ken attack with blades!

And that's the kind of thinking that drives me crazy.

"I don't care if it takes 3 minutes to animate! It's pretty!"

Laser Beam Eyes is among the most powerful debuffs available to a scrapper.

It does decent damage AT RANGE, AND a -15 percent defense debuff AT RANGE. On top of that goodness, it lets you set mule debuff and acc debuff sets. Which don't suck.

That's why.

You have to look at all aspects of a power, not just the shiny bits.

LOL!

I played DP on closed beta for about an hour, and said, "Yep, it's the MA of blaster sets. Meh, but gorgeous."

And you know, that's plenty. I sure as hell am gonna play one. DP and trenchcoats? Geddouttahere!

I wouldn't really call it "decent damage" since damage is rather worthless without a timetable.

The fact that it's got a decent debuff doesn't really carry much truck with me because I'm already running at 95% chance to hit not to mention that, if I'm going Body Mastery, I've got the endurance to run Tactics, which is going to give me 13+% tohit buff which is better than a defense debuff because the purple patch and debuff resists aren't going to eat it all up.

Acting as if turning it into a set mule is some kind of incredible advantage, recall that this is a discussion of the power if it were going to be used. A set mule is pretty much, by definition, a power you don't ever plan on using. It wouldn't matter if it had a .5 second animation time if you're planning on slotting 6 piece Shield Breaker into it.

As an attack, LBE sucks, mostly thanks to the long animation. As a set mule, it's decent, but, honestly, there are better set mules out there in my opinion (Confront).

Nothing that it gets really explains why the attack takes so long to animate other than Cryptic not friggin' caring about animation times when they were designing the power. It's got a 1.67 sec base animation time because that's how long the animation was designed to be. I don't really expect this to be addressed much because there has to be some reason not to take Body Mastery if you're not an AoE farmer (at which point you take Fireball).

If I had any influence over the devs, I'd just tell 'em to either remove the ranged attacks because they're so weak they're not even worth taking and replace them with support powers or to buff them up so that taking the APP attack actually amounts to an increase in damage dealing ability. As it stands, they just kind of sit there waiting until the melee AT they belong to can't get into melee with something they need to kill.

I promise you that is not why.

You might make the argument that it's a reason to keep it that way, though I would disagree on the general offensive weakness of -Def as a debuff in general when most players fight most things at their hit chance cap of 95%. However, it was most assuredly not given its animation time because of that balance consideration. It was given it because, as Umbral said, animation time was entirely arbitrary with respect to game balance at the time the power was created. This is not supposition. We have been told it was the case.

So everything has to be all about the numbers and not about the fun?

That's a false dilemma. Your implication is that pursuit of "fun" should dismiss the numbers completely. There's no reason for that to be the approach any more than it is for proper balance to obviate any attempt at "fun".

It's possible to create beautiful, long animations and then adjust the mechanics of the attacks to account for them. Systems for this already exist in the game and have examples in use today for melee ATs. In order to be better balanced, the attacks should deal more damage the longer their animation is. (If this results in an obscene level of damage, common sense may suggest that the animation is too long and should be sped up or trimmed for balance reasons.)

To some people, yes. Some people aren't having fun if they are not playing the absolute best thing they can play of anything. Those are the people who refuse to take Shadow Maul because it's DPA is low, and wouldn't take Flurry at gunpoint.

Personally, if I'm having fun with something I could give a crap less if it's not the absolute best performance I could get out of something.

I slot my regens for lots of passive regen, even though I'm constantly told I'm wrong for doing it....but I don't care because I like being able to mow through minions all day without ever clicking a heal.

I took WHIRLWIND on a character, and enjoyed using it. I slotted Brawl once, and completed an entire story arc using nothing BUT Brawl. I play what I find fun, and if the numbers happen to turn out good on it, I consider it a win-win.

And for the record, Laser Beam Eyes is absolutely identical to both X Ray Beam and whatever the Peacebringer attack is. It also happens to be the exact same length as a blaster's tier 2 attack. So I would say the other attacks in scrapper epics are actually too fast, and LBE is where they probably should be.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

This may be shocking, but I understand both sides.

I would never want Vengeful Slice's animation altered in any way.

However, I like the *IDEA* of the claws cast time based damage tweak. Not necessarily its current implementation, though.

I think it should be much more widespread.

Balance a set based on the old rules of recharge to damage to end, then slap any animation you want on the power, then tweak damage (but not end or recharge) based on cast time.

Yea, it'd take some work, and I wouldn't use the current claws tweak equation to do it, but I'd like to see a set like DP tweaked in that way.

You're doing it wrong! And I did it wrong too. I'm with you on wanting to be able to mow through basic content without thinking about my heals. Sometimes I just want to relax and kill things. Though at this point, I play Werner so rarely that if I respec'd, I'd probably go for less regeneration and more recharge. I would just play Werner when I WANTED to have the sort of focus that's required for that. I'd play some other character when I wanted to relax, like Sergei, who's kind of mind-numbingly simple. But at the time I put Werner's build together, he was pretty much all I wanted to play.

I did roughly the same thing on Alexei, though. Built in quite a bit of passive regeneration (22 HP/sec) even though it is completely dwarfed by Dark Regeneration. But I don't want to have to use Dark Regeneration for basic content. Wish I had more passive regeneration, but there was only so much I was willing to trade for it, because, well, numbers. A lot of my fun is in the numbers, too, and in what pursuit of those numbers allow in the game.

I understand both sides as well. It just really bothers me when people dismiss balance and good game design because of the cosmetics of the set.

Personally, I believe that cosmetics and balance should be completely separate. This is one reason why I like CoX's costumes: in virtually every other MMO, what you look like is a very strong indicator of how strong you are and you can often find incredibly ugly items that are incredibly powerful (or vice versa). I'd much rather just have the two be separate.

The fact that animation times are so fundamentally tied into the effects of a power grates on me a bit, especially when you're dealing with powers with very long animation times (Total Focus). The current damage formula heavily penalizes long animation time attacks because you have such a proportionately longer recharge time after them. I'd actually be satisfied if there were some kind of standardized activation time, which, while a bit boring, would be much more balanced.

I have no problem with a set being both pretty and powerful. I just really don't think that either of those should be sacrificed for the other for any reason.

Yeah....they did something like that a while back.

The blaster boards are just now cooling off from the flaming that resulted.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.