Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

I spot checked some damage auras, and they seem to have valid alpha values as they should:

Death Shroud: 36
Blazing Aura: 39
Mud Pots: 35
Icicles: 36
Lightning Field: 36

Do you have a specific example?


By a factor of ten, definitely.


They should, but in some cases do not. I'll look into it. Mez protection "toggles" should be about 0.100/3, but in some cases they are 0.067/3.

This is tricky in the case of sets which spread their protection across multiple powers, though, like Fiery Aura. Can't give every single one of the powers with partial mez protection a high score for obvious reasons.


By design. The current system has to give a specific value that is the same regardless of the rank of the critter. This is one of the reasons defensive powers tend to be underweighted: they are valued based on their worst case scenario which is when they are given to minions. Tier 9s have a dual problem: not only are they not that strong most of the time when given to minions, they also sometimes aren't triggered at all because tier 9 powers are normally triggered by a critter when they reach 25% health or lower. For a minion, or often even an Lt, by the time they get that low, they die before they decide to use the tier 9. So the system is acting conservatively in those cases. If the system improves one day to allow for better rank-based scoring, those powers' scores could improve. I don't think anyone will mind much if that patched is ever added into the game.


Stacked up, endurance drain can be very devastating, and it can also be situationally devastating at lower player combat levels. But in a one v one fight, critters don't use it smartly and can't slot it, which makes those powers much weaker than in the hands of players. Endurance drain should probably be worth more than it is now, but its unclear how much more, given its situationality. In your opinion, what should a power like Power Sink be worth in principle: a whole attack (circa 100 points, or the alpha/beta equivalent)? Half an attack? Somewhere in between?


I'm not sure if Dark Regeneration should really be given a much higher score. Soul Transfer is also problematic because its trivially easy to bypass: just get out of range (or attack from range). Soul Transfer, by the way, is I think worth Alpha=55, which is more than half of one standard attack (100). Dark Regen is worth about 30, which is high for a defensive power (and it gets that score partially because it does damage: if the power doesn't do damage, it isn't allowed to have a pure alpha score at all by rule).


The system attempts to partially parallel the current design rules for normal standard critters, which obey a comparable rule. In general, adding defenses to a critter does not make it worth more. In fact, defenses are generally under the full discretion of the critter designer, within certain limits. Making a critter *weaker* generally reduces its XP, but making it defensives stronger does not generally increase its XP.

*Should* defenses count more? In my opinion, only under three conditions:

1. System factors rank into values so defensive values can scale with rank

2. System calculates true difficulty from collection of defensive powers, and doesn't have to simply sum the values.

3. System gives value based on weakest aspect of critter.

Rule 3 is the one most applicable to exploitability. Consider what would happen if you were to make critters with all of the SR set except for lucky and evasion. They would be AoE farm-fodder in spite of having very strong (for critters) melee and ranged protection. But an exploit-aware system would have to value those critters as essentially defenseless, or near so. The current system compromises here: you can make such a critter and you will get credit for those defenses, but defense itself cannot make a critter especially valuable on its own so while defenses are sometimes worth more than they should be, they are never (hopefully) worth enough to be worth exploiting.

In my example above, I maxed out the alpha values with attacks. It would not let me add more by adding more attacks. I understand the reasoning behind it - a critter can only use one attack at a time - but since damage auras do not factor into an attack chain, they should be treated separately.

Again, this comes down to "what are you playing?" If you're a Scrapper, mez protection is in many cases completely irrelevant. If you're a Dominator, not so irrelevant. Due to the nature of enemy mez protection powers however, in that they offer very high mez protection against nearly ALL mezzes, which AFAIK no dev-created critter shy of an AV has except in Tier 9s, they may need to be rethought.

Fire Aura has its own problems, due to the ridiculously high Fire protection it gives. Again, that's dependent on your powerset.

That's the big problem isn't it? Everything is balanced around "what does this power do on a minion," which gimps the reward values for higher-rank critters.

Again, it is a situational thing. Power Sink does nothing to a ranged Blaster, but for a Scrapper it can be an instant toggle drop > dead. There is a reason everybody gangs up on the Sapper, and Power Sink is autohit so it can't be mitigated except by a few power sets. Is it worse than getting hit in the dead with a tier 1 attack? Yes, by far.

As for slotting it, even unslotted in the hands of a boss Power Sink can drain half your blue bar. Unless you are heavily IOd so as to be running at full end all the time, it is nasty.

I base my complaints about Dark Regen based on the fact that it makes a fight go on longer. Looking back over the numbers, that extends to stuff like Dull Pain and Reconstruction too; they have low values but make a fight last far longer, for any character regardless of damage type. Again, tweaking these values is problematic due to the fact that they are near-useless on Minions.

Dark Regeneration might have been given an artificially low score in my examples simply because I had maxed out the attacks as well.

I am thinking more and more that this is the problem. It's trivially easy to make a minion and even a lieutenant that gives full XP even with a weak defensive secondary (regen with only the passives for example). Bosses on the other hand, are extremely difficult to balance, especially if you are looking to create a Melee/Defense boss, because you can only get so much out of the primary and the secondary doesn't add much.

There is precedent for this, as critters without ranged attacks max out at 40% XP.

Ah, I see the problem now. The rule of five is negating the damage aura if you put a lot of melee attacks into the system. Hmm. The two ways I would have addressed this problem can't be done with the current system. But there might be a way around this problem using the existing system properties. Let me think about it and get back to you.

The rule of five? What's that?

I also think that defense sets should count for more on Bosses and higher ranks, that would make things more fair.

One way to potentially exploit the system would be to make a critter with two different attack sets, and pick a huge amount of weak attacks that collectively add up to a large score, but don't actually make the critter more dangerous because even if they live long enough, a critter can't make use of more than a certain number of attacks (because their attack chain, including the time the AI takes to make decisions, gets full). So the system places a limit on the number of powers that count towards your overall score: only the top five highest value powers with *Alpha only* scores count (there's no limit on the number of Alpha/Beta powers that count).

For example, in the Hickman guest author arc, one mission has Lts that continually drain end. At +1 diff +6 team, there were 4-6 of them per group. I had to back out of battles repeatedly to regain end, which I almost never have to do on my brute. Ended up completing the objective and moving on, since it was too annoying.

End drain is a bit too harsh on melee players.

Not the first time I've been responsible for something...er, sucking...

I'm convinced: I'm going to see if I can do something to improve this situation. My best guess is that melee attacks need to increase *slightly* in score (somewhere in the vicinity of 10%) and damage auras should bypass the rule of five.

I thought of just changing the rule of five to the rule of six, but that's not especially helpful because to take advantage of that generally requires using some of the most extreme attacks in the melee sets which are nevertheless not extremely high in value.

The two changes above still won't *guarantee* that a melee/defense boss (or higher) will get to 100% consistently, but it will make it more likely they will get close, which is I think a reasonable compromise that doesn't hurt mission XP too much (bosses and higher ranked critters are not efficient sources of XP regardless, unless you're defeating them under exploit conditions, so players shouldn't shun a mission arc because the AV at the end might be worth 5% less than a normal AV).

By the way, one of the things the system does is weight AoEs generally low, because the system assumes AoEs hit only one target. So melee sets with a lot of AoEs will tend to lag sets more focused on single target damage. Keep that in mind when selecting attack powers: its one of the things that reduces the score you can achieve with Katana.


I have another wild hair idea that might fly, but I need to discuss it with the devs first.

I noticed this pretty early on when making some guys. I was noticing that my custom group was far too ST heavy. They had almost no AoEs at all, and it was making it extremely difficult for soloers but laughably simple for teams.

I tried mixing it up. Remove a power or two here to add an AoE. Add in Empty Clips or Ball Lightning where possible. But these powers were adding almost no experience. In most cases I couldn't remove any number of powers to add any number of AoEs. I had to simply add on top of my already 100% exp, making my enemies strictly harder, not situationally harder.

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

I recently built a custom group for the 45-50 range that used some melee/defense set combinations and I also had trouble getting the bosses to 100%. The minions and lieutenants were not as much trouble, but it seems that for bosses to reach even 90%, Build Up is a required power.

Overall, I really don't like to use defense sets because it gimps customs. You only get two sets to choose and no pools. Using a defense set for a custom makes them one-dimensional, while there are standard AVs/Heroes in the game that are able to use powers from multiple sets. Getting to choose a couple powers from a third set would be neat, and help give customs, especially bosses and AVs/Heroes more flavor, especially the ones using defense sets. I was talking to Fred about this in game and he had a good idea also. He suggested some kind of power pool for customs with generic powers like Revolver, Shotgun, Brawl, Baseball bat, and so on that you could give to any custom. Something like this would be good for minions and lieutenants.

There's a couple problems with this idea. I actually proposed this (or rather something close to this) in I14 beta but as it turns out the custom critter powers were specifically intended, I was told, to parallel player powersets and not just wide-open randomly customizable critters. There were conceptual and design reasons which were not fully explained to me at the time, but which I know now but can't articulate.

Separately, its important to recognize what can be changed quickly and what takes longer. I think people know that its far easier for Castle to change the damage of a power than it is for BaB to shorten the animation of a power when it comes to power adjustments. Here, it would be not too difficult at all to add a third power set in theory, but it would take user interface programmer time to make it visible to the players and that's harder to acquire and takes longer to do. Such changes are also subject to more checks and balances having to do with art direction, look and feel, etc. Its also a part of the game development that I've had much less success bending to my will. I mean, successfully registering suggestions for.

So if you want it in this lifetime, frankly the change should be something that only impacts the data of the game, has minimal or no changes required to the user interface, and doesn't radically change functionality in a way that would require a committee to discuss. So I'm thinking about a change that would get part of the way there without tripping over those resource limits, so there's a better chance it can be doable relatively quickly ("relatively quickly" might be weeks or months, though, as opposed to a year or more, given the resources being devoted to I18/GR and beyond).


On the subject of fully customizable critters, I have this idea for a wide-open customizable critter system (at least in terms of powers) that would leverage and extend the existing XP weight system into something that would allow for very fine control over the difficulty and value of the critters. Something where you design the critter cafeteria style and the game computes a score and gives it a reward value. Basically the Champions system in reverse. Or rather, the HERO system in reverse: the CO system basically tossed that out entirely. I personally think it would be cool, and an interesting design challenge**. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that one.



** And, I have to admit, it would be amusing as all hell if CoX eventually had a points-purchase power system, albeit for NPCs, that is closer in spirit to Champions than Champions Online itself is. I have no animosity towards Cryptic per se, but I'm evil and can't help it.

You could also cut the recharge of the ranged attack in half (roughly) and double its score (roughly) to reflect the fact that the attack can be used to deliver twice as much damage by firing twice as fast. But the problem with that is you can't turn that *off* if you really don't want that level of ranged output.

Adding two powers that are "the same" is not literally possible, but as you suggest you can always add two identical powers that have different names. In that case, the critter will use them both no different than if it just had two ranged attacks. The critters don't actually really "know" what their attacks are called so whether the critter has two power blasts or one power blast and one power bolt really means nothing to them.

Yeah, that's why I suggest just adding a second attack. More customization and all. Since a character with a melee primary must take the ranged attack if they don't have an offensive secondary, and not all secondaries are created equal, sometimes you don't need the added difficulty, or XP increase, not to mention what a more frequent ranged attack would do to lower-level critters.

Except that one power blast and one power bolt looks cooler, and more like "I shoot energy blasts 'cause I'm an energy guy" than "I have to shoot this so you don't exploit me." At least I think so.

I couldn't get Television to add a coolness factor into the critter AI. He said it caused MA critters to just cycle Eagle's Claw over and over again and everything else to commit suicide out of jealousy.

You can make everything else Dual Pistols/Katana and give them black trenchcoats and sunglasses so they at least THINK they're cool.

Besides, everybody knows that Eagle's Claw isn't really cool unless you put a Kinetic Combat proc in it. Do the math and you'll see I'm right, there's a coolness factor equation on the Scrapper Forum somewhere.

Hey, my Martial Arts critters each have both Eagle's Claw AND guns.

Not in the current system, unfortunately.


Out of curiosity, why? The system shouldn't encourage people to deliberately try to game it. It's supposed to tell you what value the critter you made is, and allow you to make adjustments if desired.

However, if you really need to know, it's not hard to calculate the score based on the numbers provided in the real numbers displays for the powers.

If I have a critter that is worth 90% and I add a power it will tell me 100%, but the critter might actually be up to 120% or even more. If a critter is way above 100% it's might actually be much more difficult than I had intended, since (usually) I want my custom enemies to be as close to standard difficulty as possible. If I'm not careful and check the actual value of the power I just added I might think that this is ok and end up with a critter that will be lamented by players everywhere (ok, by the two people who might find and play my arc) and giving me 1-star ratings all over the place. What harm could it do to show the actual value? People who want to "game the system" will find a way to do so anyway while the rest of us mathematically and mentally challenged plebes will click around at random and never figure out why our 250% critters murder everything - they're only worth 100% after all. (Exaggerated for humor and effect.)

Ah but it doesn't tell me what the value of the critter is. It only tells me if I have reached 100, it doesn't actually show the real value, unless it's below 100.

So you say. Too bad that my brain didn't come with a pre-installed "figure out what the alpha and beta numbers really mean"-loop, and there is precious little documentation on it too. I mean, is there any? Any at all? That you didn't have to make yourself?