Regarding Recent Changes to Architect

I would assume that you'd know if the critter was more or less difficult by the powers you give it, not the score you give it. The score doesn't explicitly judge the difficulty of the critter, but only if the critter meets the requirements for full XP. In other words, there is no guarantee that a 160% critter is actually harder than a 120% critter. In fact, there are times when the reverse is true. That's one of the reasons why numbers above 100% aren't shown: numbers above 100% are less meaningful.

It would be difficult to explain in detail, but the system is designed to try to implement a threshold, not a precise difficulty value.


Here's how the values basically work.

There are two kinds of powers: powers with Alpha scores and powers with Alpha and Beta scores. The Alpha powers are pretty straight forward: you just add them up. However, due to the rule of five you actually take the five highest and add them up. The rest don't count.

The Alpha/Beta powers are a little bit different. They have a value and a count. You take the count and find the top X alpha powers, add them up, and then multiply by the value. That's the net score of that power, and you add that to the total.

This may seem weird, so let me describe what its original intent was for. Suppose we have a power like Build Up that doesn't do any damage on its own, but double's the damage of your other attacks while its up. If we have one attack worth 100 and another attack worth 110, the total score is 210. But if the critter has build up and uses it, those two powers could hit for twice as much damage, and be worth (about) twice as much points. So *if* the critter has build up, we want Build Up not to be worth a fixed amount of points, but rather a multiplier against the other actual attacks you have.

So if Build Up was worth, say, an extra 0.8x your attacks (80%), then your total score would be (100 + 110) + (100 + 110) * 0.8 = 210 + 168 = 378.

But Build Up isn't up all the time. It could buff one attack, maybe two. Three is iffy. Not four or five. So we place a limit on the number of attacks BU can multiply. If BU is 2/0.8, then it multiplies up to two powers. So if you have attacks worth 100, 110, and 120, then the score without BU would be 330. With a 2/0.8 power, it would be (100 + 110 + 120) + (120 + 110) * 0.8 = 330 + 184 = 514. Only the top two powers are being buffed extra.

That should be fairly straight forward, but what about other powers that don't do damage but aren't damage buffs either? Well, the system uses a trick. Suppose I want Focused Fighting to be worth 20 points, but *only* if the critter has at least three attacks. If it has zero attacks I want it to be worth nothing (a critter with defenses and no offense is worth nothing). If its something between one and three I want Focused Fighting to scale up to its full strength. What I could do is take the score I want, divide by 300, and turn it into a 3/0.067 power where its a multiplier just like damage buffs are. By dividing by 300, the power only gets its score back if the critter has at least three attacks with a score of about 100, which is a standard attack. If the critter has less attacks or the attacks are worth less, Focused Fighting will be worth less. Otherwise, it will be worth a little more. So basically, defenses are worth more if the critter itself has more damage. Its one way to try to "adjust" defenses to be worth more on more dangerous critters. In effect, both damage buff powers and defensive powers (or attacks that do no damage) have the same requirement: we want them to be worth something if the critter has attacks, and be worth nothing if the critter has no attacks. This scheme lets us do that.

So we add up the top five alphas, then for each alpha/beta we do the multiplier and come up with a score for each and then add on top. That's the total score. We divide by the threshold of the critter to get the final XP ratio.

The thresholds are based on rank: for minions/Lts/Bosses/AVs they are 250/340/430/450. The thresholds are also based on level: they have that value at level 20, drop to half that value at "level zero" and increase to 1.2 times that value at level 50, in nice straight lines (the "level zero" just means at level 10 it drops to 75%, and if you drew a straight line it would drop to 50% at level zero, but of course there is no level zero: its just a quirk of the math).

Last two things: if the critter has a score higher than 100% its capped to 100%. And if the critter has no ranged attacks at all, its capped to 40%.


Some rules of thumb for quickie calculations.

Defensive secondaries tend to be worth between 60 and 120 points total, assuming you have enough attacks (as in, the entire secondary, not one power in it). And adding a 100 point attack to a critter can only change its value by somewhere in the range of 40% for a minion, 30% for an LT, and 20% for a Boss or AV. There's no way to change just one power on a boss and have it jump from 90% to 160% or anything like that *except* powers like Build Up.

When you are staring at those weird decimal numbers, any power that is 3/X is going to be worth *about* this much:

0.033 -> 10
0.067 -> 20
0.083 -> 25
0.100 -> 30
0.167 -> 50

That's if you're sticking them on a ranged attacker with at least three attacks. On a melee attacker with at least one ranged attack, it'll be about 3/4s those values: 7/14/18/21/35. If you want to just assume all of those defensive and non-damaging offensive powers are worth 20 or 25, you'd be in the general ballpark for quickie estimates, especially in terms of how dramatically one power can change the score.


At the moment, there is no documentation that I didn't make up myself, although another player did analyze and document the basic properties of the system during I17 beta. The open beta threads still seem to be around and the second post in this thread has Coulomb2's write up, which is basically accurate.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Check the power stats on the right hand side. It will tell you useful stuff like "KO Blow does 1200 damage at level 50." Then check your character's HP and cringe.

I honestly don't know what else to tell you. My experimentation with the XP slider has shown that its gauge of "difficulty" is not always accurate anyway, at least not by my gauge of what is "difficult" (Why do the first attacks from Energy Blast give more Xp than the first attacks from Electric Blast?), and it in no way accounts for power synergy across multiple critters (if you're making a whole group).

I do this.

You don't have to tell me anything.

I just don't know why nobody else can see that the xp percentage value is an indication, a hint, a clue to how powerful a critter is and that it can be useful to see the value of various powers even after the critter is at 100% already.

What I want to know is the value. The value will tell me the value.

If this can get past the 'similar to player character powersets' design concept, I beleive this is the best mechanical suggestion to fix the problem.

Of course, the fact that this problem exists at all might point to an issue with the powersets themselves, at least in PvP. Or with PvE depending on whether the player is smarter than the game AI...

They shouldn't be. Charged Bolts, Lightning Bolt, Power Bolt, and Power Blast should all be worth 100 points.

Fire Blast's first attacks are worth more: lots more. Flares is worth 145 and Fire Blast is worth 150. The reason is that while DoT is given to players "for free" the system counts DoT as if it were part of the base damage of the power. And the logic behind that is that when a player lands an attack on a critter, damage that happens right now is worth more to the player than damage that lands much later, because if you're attacking continuously the presumption is that you'll eventually win and defeat the critter, and that DoT could have reduced the number of attacks you needed to defeat the critter had it happened sooner rather than later. Of course, players can play games with that, but that's usually the case.

But when a critter attacks a player, whether their power does all of its damage now or some now and some later is less important: assuming the player survives at all the player will need to mitigate all of that damage regardless. So from an overall danger perspective, whether a critter hits you for 100 now and 50 later or 150 now you still ultimately have to mitigate 150 damage. So Fire DoT for critters makes those attacks a lot more lethal to players overall. And testing seems to suggest that is true: fill a mission with fire minions with flares and fire blast you have to plow through, and you will notice your health dropping much faster than if they had power bolt and power blast.

I admit I am going from memory here, and it may be memory from i17 open beta, so that may have been fixed.

However it brings up another point: not all secondary effects are created equal. Today I fought a few Rad blast bosses. My defense? What defense? Eat two purples....what defense? Granted, a minion would have dropped before he got the second shot off, but a boss...Rad blast =/= Energy blast, which again doesn't equal Electric blast.

I'm with you one this Fred, especially since one of my recent research projects was a application to automate a large number of equations so that the user won't get hung up on repetitive calculations every time they change the inputs in order to get the results that they desire.

What I take the XP percentage as is an indication of "is it really going to be worth the player's time to fight an enemy with this much power to devastate them?" I've trashed quite a few enemy concepts because the critters were simply too overpowering and/or flat-out annoying if you tried to make them worth the same XP as a standard enemy of that level range.

Secondary effects in attacks are worth nothing at all unless they are a hard (attack-stopping) mez. If the power doesn't deal damage, its judged by some rules of thumb for how much to value foe debuffs and other effects.


There wasn't really enough time to hand-evaluate all 955 custom critter powers individually, and that would also inject a lot of subjective weighting that could be different from power to power. So the weights were calculated somewhat automatically by formula(s), and then several passes through the powers were done to make sure the powers weights came out "sane." When a power *didn't* come out sane, one of two things was done: the formulas themselves were tweaked to generate new numbers which were better (the preferred solution) or an exception rule was made that tried to catch not just the errant power but all powers in its class, trying to make that "class" as large as possible to make the number of rules as short as possible.


Trivia: There are about ten rules that govern the weights of the powers, and only about 72 exceptions to those rules out of 955 (more or less) powers, governed by 24 exception guidelines.

I can't list all of the exceptions, but I can give you the ten power weight rules:

1. Powers that do damage get a score based on the damage they do divided by the damage the recharge formula says they should do, times 100. A "normal" single target attack should thus be worth 100 points.

2. If it deals more than Scale 2.0 damage, 20 point bonus.

3. If the power does damage and is melee ranged or is a low radius PBAoE, its score is reduced to 60% of its damage-calculated value.

4. If the power deals attack-neutralizing mez (sleep, stun, hold, fear, confuse) multiply the mez magnitude and the scale duration and add as a bonus. If the power deals multiple mez, pick the one with the highest magnitude. Knockback and knockup don't currently count in the system (they probably should eventually, they just don't count in this first version of the system).

5. Pets such as controller tier 9 pets and mastermind pets get a score of 100 by default. Pets like Phantom Army that behave like these pets but are not up all the time get 100 * uptime ratio.

6. Powers that simulate player defensive passives generally get a score of 10, powers that simulate player defensive toggles generally get a score of 20, and Powers that simulate player defensive clicks generally get a score of 25 unless they already have a score as above.

7. If the power does no damage, convert its Alpha score to an Alpha/Beta pair where Alpha = score/300 and Beta = 3. Powers that do not do damage are *not* allowed to have pure Alpha scores as a rule.

8. If the power is a damage buff or a recharge buff, grant it an Alpha score equal to the scale magnitude of the buff, and a Beta score of Duration/5, rounded up. If its up all the time, Beta = 5.

9. Other powers are given scores between 5 and 50. There are exception rules of thumb to cover these. Rule 7 applies here.

10. Alpha is capped to 150. Beta is capped to 5.


These "rules" are subject to change at any time by the devs. They are not rules in the sense of the Damage/Recharge equation. Testing or judgment can change the value of a power from its computed score to a different one to fulfill the intent of the system. Don't quote me if the devs diverge from the rules I've listed (but if you do find a power that seems to not follow those rules, let me know).

The explicit intent of the system, as long as I'm on the subject, is to allow architect authors the most flexibility in designing custom critters while valuing them as fairly as possible, with the overriding requirement to make sure its impossible to make exploitable critters that are worth more than standard critters while being significantly less dangerous.

Talk me through this process. I'm not trying to be obtuse: I genuinely want to know step by specific step how you construct these critters, and at each stage what information would be useful to you and in what way. Try not to gloss over anything, because tiny details might be important to me.

See, when I make a critter, I have an idea of how powerful its going to be just by the power selection. I know if its going to be more difficult than the standard critters in the game. If the critter is more difficult than a standard critter, it can't be made to be "worth" its difficulty because the AE itself is capped to 100% maximum.

Now, if you're saying you *don't* know whether a critter will be overpowered or not, and the XP slider could give you a hint by saying the critter is worth "150%" or "220%" then that's something else, but that's a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Suppose I made a Fire Blast / Ice Blast Boss that took basically everything. We both know that a critter with twelve attacks is literally no more dangerous than one with ten, because you can't make proper use of that many attacks: your attack chain would be full long before then. So knowing the critter was "450%" wouldn't really tell you anything. To make that number not misleading we would have to apply a different set of rules that tried to make that number actually meaningful. Otherwise, while it might be useful to you, it would be dangerous or misleading to others. And sometimes its more important to not mislead than to maximally inform.

But as I said, take me through the process. Maybe its an issue that is addressable, but perhaps not in a way we're currently discussing.

That is not even remotely what I said at all. You may be confusing me with Fred.

What I said is that I use the XP percentage as part of a way determine if a custom foe is worth using in an AE mission. I can damn well see if it is overpowered or not just by looking at the powers, but that is because I have a pretty clear understanding of nearly every damn power in the game and have more insight than a player who doesn't and is only looking at those numbers. Plus that damn level slider will not stay put, it frequently resets when going from screen to screen or even changing powersets, so it's easy to not notice that the powerset you are looking at is reporting numbers for a level 1 foe, not a level 30 or 50 foe, until you're in the mission and wondering why you're getting your clock cleaned in seconds.

However if I have a critter who is already becoming overpowered considering the level range I intend to use them in and seeing the powers that they will actually use when being spawned inside that range, I sure as hell will be looking at the XP. If this critter can already mop the floor with every AT except a Brute or Tanker and is only giving 60-70% XP, that critter is NOT going to get used at all. It's scrapped and I have to find a different build.

That is the big issue. It's very, very easy to make rather weak minions who give 100% XP, it's very easy to make decent LTs who give 100% XP, it's a damn PITA to make a decent boss who gives 100% XP.

You may know that, but there is nothing written on that editor screen to tell the player that the critter AI is only going to use up to 10 of the 12 powers that you are giving him.

I'm not Fred, but I think I understand what he means: here's my process (which of course I erroneously beleive to be the most common one).

1: Why do I want to make a custom group/boss? In this case, let's say I decide to do a story about a group of beings that are data incarnate. Each one's powers indicate and derive from utter understanding of an individual aspect of existence.

The AV/Hero class being behind them is the one who knows all about the unknowable; a being that embodies the sentient city-dimension from which they hail: a being known as Arcanaville.

Thus, I want to create a Boss or higher class critter that has powers that feel magical and mathematically derived.

2: We'll skip over costume creation except to say that a snazzy costume can 'cry out' for a certain powerset.

3: Let's say I want to make a Boss.

4: I want this Boss to be fairly formidable, so let's make her Ranged and Flying.

5: We decide we want this Boss to be worth at least 100% xp at level 50.

6: This character is both a being and a place, so I will choose Gravity Control for its' space-warping attributes. We start off with the powers Propel, Wormhole and Dimension Shift (all powers that to me indicate manipulating her extradimensional nature); this gets us to 27%.

7: We hop over to secondary sets to give it some defensive powers so that she doesn't get downed like a free lunch. We decide to go with Kinetics, to model the way in which Arcanaville can leverage data to her advantage, using an opponent's strengths against them. Picking up everything but Speed Boost here gets us to 40%.

8: Back to Primaries to beef up her thematic powers with some actual damage. We add Singularity (lol) which gets us to 74%. This puts us at the brink: adding either Crush or Gravity Distortion at this point will put us over 100%.

I think this is the point that Fred is talking about: which would he want to add at this point to hug close to 100%? Or maybe he wants to go with Lift and stay at 96%?

Backing up a step, I can see that adding Crush instead of Singularity gets us up to 86% (+46%). Adding Gravity Distortion instead gets us to a mere 76% (+36%). This seems to indicate that it is safer to add Gravity Distortion along with Singularity if I want to get above 100%, and that would presumably put us at 110%?

Thus for those who haven't been keeping track, she ends up with:

Prefers Range
Flying
Propel, Wormhole, Dimension Shift, Singularity, Gravity Distortion
Transfusion, Siphon Power, Siphon Speed, Transference, Fulcrum Shift

Hope that helps.

For my own part, I havent actually redone any of the critters in any of my missions under the new system yet; been testing other stuff.

Also, I would be VERY hesitant to use the above Boss in anything: she looks like she'd be very annoying to fight against.

Hmmm...

I read exactly what you said. If you're just going to keep saying its a problem and not actually fulfill my request to explain in detail, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm really only interested in working on solvable problems at this moment.


This is not an AI problem. An exaggeration will better illustrate the issue. A critter with ten thousand attacks is not more powerful than one with nine thousand attacks. Once the critter is attacking all the time, adding more attacks of equal strength stop helping. This is important to recognizing why the number can be misleading in many cases.

Separately, cap or no cap a critter worth "150%" would *never* under any circumstances give 150% of normal XP. That's simply not how the reward systems in this game are designed. So saying that would lead people to mistakenly believe that if not for the cap, the critter *should* be worth 150%, when the system is not saying that at all.

The system says a 430 point boss is worth full XP at level 20. It does not say that an 860 point boss is twice as dangerous as a 430 point boss. That's a corruption of the system. Because of that, I'm disinclined to recommend that the system display numbers like "200%." I'm looking to see if there is a compromise that is workable, which is why I'm looking for very specific, down to brass tacks details.

In this example, wouldn't the correct choice be whichever power had the lower value, assuming both reached 100%? You did say you wanted to get to 100%.

If you *didn't* necessarily want to get to 100%, then I could maybe see how you might want to make a judgment call between making a 96% critter and a 108% critter. Maybe you might decide that 96% is "close enough" given that 110% is so much higher.

But see, that's my problem right there. The system isn't designed to accurately portray difficulty above 100%. If you're looking at those numbers and saying well, if the critter is 10% higher than full XP, it must be much more difficult: I should stick with 96% because its only 4% less difficult than full and is "closer" to normal than the 110% critter, the system might lead you astray. It wasn't designed with that thought process in mind. In fact, it explicitly hand-waves that situation away.

The incremental situation is interesting: if I add this power what will it do, without actually having to go back and forth and try it out. But especially given how the multipliers work, even the pre-capped number won't tell you that without doing a lot of math in your head.

Suppose in real-time each power told you how much, in percentages it would change the current number based on the current power selections if you toggled it on or off. And as you changed power selections those numbers changed on the fly. That would seem to be actually more useful than the pre-capped total would be, because it would tell you how much each power was worth at that moment relative to the threshold you are looking at.

That could be very difficult to add, but perhaps not. It does sound like it matches both the intent of the system and the desired ability to guestimate changes far better than the pre-capped number does.

People who don't understand the concept of "no matter how many powers you have, you can only use one power at a time" should be kept away from AE, and possibly sharp objects.

The "rule of 5" should probably be explained somewhere though, since it isn't immediately obvious. A player might be justified in thinking "well I love power X and power Y, but they have a really long recharge, so I have five more powers to fill out my attack chain, and this eighth power is situational so I have it just in case...every single of those powers make my character more powerful, why don't they do the same for critters?"

I wouldn't want the system to default to showing any number above 100% either. You know some idiot will look at that and think, "hey, this critter will give teh uber XPeeez!" no matter how that 200% is presented. You could paint it bright red, you could phrase it as "100% (capped from 200%)," you could put the 200% in tiny letters in the bottom right hand corner of the description screen, and it would still result in maps full of face-splittingly difficult foes placed there by someone who thought they give greater rewards.

I agree. Working on it.


One improvement that came bundled with the new custom critter system is that critters actually *use* their powers more than they did before. They used to sometimes (often) get into funny states where they had five attacks but only used two, stuff like that. Their brains have been upgraded**, and now if you give them a power they will use it, so long as they aren't too busy using others, and barring some AI flag that tells them not to (for example, powers like Nova are set to only trigger when the critter gets low in health, and some buffs and debuffs are set to only fire under certain situations).

If you give a critter ten attacks, they *should* eventually use them all by picking from their available attacks randomly. But what they can't do is use more than one attack at a time, which means while a critter with two attacks can attack twice as fast as a critter with only one, a critter with twelve can't attack faster than one with ten.

Why five? Because the average "busy time" for the average attack for critters is somewhere around 15%, which means they can't really use more than six attacks efficiently. Factoring AI delays (which can add half a second to the lag between attacks) five is about the saturation limit. Adding more attacks will add more *variety* to critters, because they will try to use them randomly, but it won't add very much more *offense* to those critters, because the powers will get in each other's way.

It was either going to be the Rule of Five or the Rule of Six for that basic reason, and without any further numerical guidance the system picked conservatively.


** Actually, they were made more effective by ironically making them stupider. They think about less things when selecting attacks, and that makes them much less likely to get confused or do something weird or dumb. The AI is now also much, much more difficult to game.

And yet your statement gave the distinct impression that you didn't. Anyhow, I've already told you what I meant, take it or leave it. I'm not going to write you a free research paper on the topic.

Fair enough. I'm leaving it.

Ok. Its a little more complicated than that. Basically, there are two kinds of powers. The first class of powers has just alpha scores, and beta is zero. These are powers that are basically "worth" their alpha score. The second kind have alpha and beta scores: these are worth different values dependent on both the number of and value of your first class of powers.

Lets say you take a 100 point ranged attack, and then a 60 point melee attack. And lets say this is for a minion at level 4 where the threshold is 150 points. So you have 160 points, and the XP meter would be pegged at 100%.

So you remove the melee attack, dropping you to 100 points and try to add a defensive power. Lets say you add a 3/0.067 power of some kind. That will be worth 6.7 points when you try to add it.

Ah, but suppose the XP meter actually went above 100%, and you had added the secondary power *first*. In that case, that secondary power would have been worth 10.72 (100 * 0.067 + 60 * 0.067), not 6.7. And perhaps not intuitively for some, if you then removed the melee power, the score would drop from 170.72 (or 115%) to 106.7 (or 71%) which is a drop of 64.02, not 60 points like the power is "worth." And that's because the type 2 powers are multipliers. So judging what will happen when you add and remove powers based solely on looking at the score can be confusing and misleading.

Now, in terms of actual non-damaging defensive powers, you're not likely to see a *big* difference here, because their values are inevitably low. They won't shift your score by more than about 50 points unless you are *loaded* with ultra-high value attacks (like fire blast attacks). And on a minion, a power that increases your score by 50 points is, even at level 4, only worth about a 17% swing in minion value (and for any other rank, and any other level, its going to be even lower than that).

Only two kinds of powers have the ability to really move your score by more than 20 percentage points or so: single attacks, and damage buffs. Only attacks generally have values above 50 points and can move an XP score by more than 20 percentage points. And only damage buffs have beta multipliers high enough (more than 0.2) to generate total multipler scores high enough to swing XP scores by levels comparable to (or sometimes exceeding) attack power scores.


I should also warn you that some powers are highly problematic to give to critters, but have relatively low scores. A low score is no guarantee that the power is of minimal importance to you as a critter designer. Endurance drain powers, for example, can be very dangerous to give to a custom minion, if you then intend to fill an entire mission with those minions. But the system doesn't - and can't - factor that in. It values those powers as if a single minion walked up to you and hit you with the power. And a single burst of endurance drain just isn't powerful enough to be worth much in this system. Similarly, rezzes are worth practically nothing, even though at the moment they can be highly problematic to use. They aren't worth anything because when a critter rezzes, it can be killed again for more rewards. In effect, the rez contains its own reward: it can't also make the critter itself more valuable.

The score is not there to help players learn which powers are "dangerous" and which are not: they are there to protect the system from exploit. If the best way to do that mathematically was to make all of the most dangerous attacks have zero score and all the trivial powers have high scores, that's what the system would have done.


That's something I'm thinking about, but as I mentioned in an earlier post and implied in this one, the big complication to that some powers are multipliers against the scores of other powers. So no power has an unchanging "intrinsic" value relative to the total. A 100 point attack will increase the value of a critter by 100 points if it has no alpha/beta powers. But if that critter has build up, that power can increase the value of the critter by 180 points, because BU will in effect amplify the value of that attack. But even if the critter has BU, BU is only allowed to multiple against the top two attacks. So if you have a 120 point attack and a 110 point attack, adding a third 100 point attack will add 100 points to your total, not 180, because BU is already buffing the 120 and the 110 attack.

That's what makes it tricky to state simply what the value of a power is, and why the uncapped number can be misleading. It might be multiple powers multiplying together that are responsible for the high score, and losing either could drop the score substantially. Or not. And unfortunately, while I recognize that this makes the system less transparent than a system that just adds up numbers, such a system would simply not work correctly to do what the system's primary purpose is to do: prevent the creation of exploitable critters while still giving critter authors reasonable XP for their creations if they are at least close to or higher than the difficulty of standard critters.


I will, however, think about better ways to show the incremental "what if" information for the powers. Let me mention one more example, though, of how the system sometimes has to choose between giving a power a high score because its dangerous, and giving it a low score to prevent exploitability, and how those two objectives can be at odds.

Take Nova. Now *that's* a dangerous power. But its value is actually rather low. Why? Because Nova has two catches that make it potentially exploitable. First, its AI-dependent. Critters don't just pop off Nova whenever they want. The power is designed so critters never use it until they reach low health. For a boss or AV, that's usually not a problem. But for a minion or LT, its possible that the critter actually dies before it can trigger the power. Very possible, in fact. So while the power would be dangerous to most players, you'd probably barely see it in a farming situation because the team would steamroll everything before anything could get a Nova off.

Second, its a PBAoE on a very long recharge, which means if you can recognize when the critter might use it and simply get out of or stay out of its radius, you won't be affected by it. And once its used, its basically gone for the rest of the fight.

So Nova is dangerous, but potentially exploitable, so it gets a lower score than it might otherwise have if it a) could be used at any time, and b) used often enough to be impossible to game. And that's why you shouldn't rely on the score to suggest dangerousness. According to the system, Power Bolt is three times more valuable than Nova. But I don't think you believe Power Bolt is three times more dangerous to add to a critter than Nova. So you have to be careful using the numbers for any other purpose than their intended one.

Alright, I get your point but here's my (new) point: I'm not stupid, and if I could make the mistake to think that the value of a power somehow correlates to how "dangerous" it is then I'm sure I'm not the only one. That's not exactly what I thought the value meant but I'm simplifying. The numbers need to be explained better or explicitly explained to not actually mean what I and I bet 80% of the players out there think they mean. You have explained it quite well here but this information is not in the game and especially not in the critter customization section, where we could use it.