What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

Actually, you've got it wrong. The poster I was responding to was referring to this post by castle:

"That leads me to believe the discrepancy lies with the primary sets Fire Melee and Dark Melee. Fire is MEANT to have higher DPS overall, so that's 'fine.' Dark Melee, not so much. I'd have to look at specific builds and slotting to see what's going on there, but that's a project I don't have time for now."

So the poster was jokingly asking for a buff to fire melee.

I would say you can have your opinion and I can have mine.

In my opinion, it's bad business to drop massive nerfs, like cutting the damage a power does in half, on things that have been in the game for over a year, especially in a game that is as mature as coh is.

It's even worse when said power has recently been altered in an upward direction, and still nobody seemed to realize what is supposedly obvious, that shield charge is vastly overpowered and/or that some enormous mistake had been made in assigning damage to that power.

And finally, this thread makes me wonder if this quest for perfect balance is even good for the game. Players love the set shield defense in large part because it has a great power in shield charge. Why? Because the power IS exceptional. It's the same reason so many players used to love energy melee, the key words in that sentence being 'used to'. I think more sets could use an exceptional power, rather than trying to make all of the sets a bland mix of mediocre powers, balanced by some kind of ******** equation that couldn't possibly take into account all of the variables this game presents. This game needs more shield charges and less 'burn' powers. It needs more old school energy transfers and less barrages. It needs more new siphon lifes and less old siphon lifes - look what that did for dark melee as a set.

If you disagree with me that's fine, but don't phrase the situation as me being against any changes. I'm not. I'm simply against changes that I believe with turn city of heroes into city of mediocrity, and I'm opposed to changes that I believe will have a negative impact on player population, because that has a huge impact on this game as a whole, even if the majority of posters here seem to be primarily soloists.

Actually, purples have almost nothing to do with being suvivable. Purples are for recharge, recovery/regen, and accuracy. Being able to live through almost anything comes from slotting WP and getting help from your primary with sets like kinetic combat and touch of death, also the defense uniques.

As much ST DPS that is though. I the AoE department Dark Melee falls in behind all the others by a long shot which I believed was the downside of the set. If not the intended downside it is certainly the one that has hit my characters

Been done. I respeced. All is well.

In well-managed games, an overpowered fotm gets the nerf bat after a while, after which it stops being fotm. Fire/Kin next baby!

Fire armor still wont get a buff. I was hopeful and it has now faded.

When SC eventually gets nerfed, it will still be better than Burn. AAO will still be better than FE.

And then the next thing becomes FotM and the cycle repeats. Forever.

Though that's a poor excuse to say we should never balance things.

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

There's a number of people who gravitate around the perceived best, that's true ; but as things get more and more balanced the disparity between played powersets gets smaller.

Just consider Scrappers, before Shield it was a mix of SR/Regen/WP, with a few Inv, DA and FA here and there. Since Shield was introduced it feels like 1 every 2 scrappers is a Shielder - not claiming this is any accurate but casual glances at what people play ingame tend to be enough to tell trends when done 30, 50, 100 times over different hours/days even if you don't track the data.

So you're telling me Super Reflexes even let you sense an oncoming nerf, so you respec'd your character and dodged it?

Impressive. Very impressive Bill.

I'd like you to point to the specific single power in Fire Control or Kinetics that is performing at nearly twice the explicitly intended strength.

Smoke. It over powers all... nothing to see here.

1. You're overpaying for words. This costs only $5.95 and includes all of those words plus many more.

2. The only way to consistently buff the players without the PvE game becoming ludicrous is to compensate by buffing the critters proportionately. The net result is that rather than one thing being nerfed, everything else gets buffed and that thing still drops in relative performance, which should not impress many people. But if you are explicitly interested in impressing the people that could be impressed by such a numerical shell game, or are one of them yourself, then my original post isn't snark, because that's exactly the sort of numerical shenanigans (now on sale for only $0.15) that is AWESOME.

3. That's why the psychological shift is unsustainable, and probably also deleterious (SRP: $0.18) in the long term. You could get lucky and join the game just as a global buff cycle was going on, but very quickly you'd find yourself in an even larger nerf cycle to compensate, and because these changes affect more things than targeted nerfs they would affect a far larger number of players every time they occured.


About the only way that the "buff not nerf" philosophy has any chance of working is ironically to do most of it in secret, because this would leverage the simple fact that most players - even most forum posters - cannot tell if they are being buffed or nerfed unless they are explicitly told, or it affects a number they explicitly check. Implicit buffs and nerfs, which occur as a result of the situation changing rather than a big floating number changing, almost always slip detection for long periods of time, and are sometimes never detected except when a player happens to stumble over them while testing something.

In fact, I bet I could personally buff the players by 30% or more in a wide range of normally encountered situations, then several issues later nerf them by an even larger amount in the same situations, and no one would notice either change. The question is whether the devs would accept such a development philosophy just to manipulate the psychological state of the playerbase to their advantage. I suspect generally not, although I also suspect that every dev team does it to at least some slight degree in certain corner cases.

Oh, c'mon, A, even *I* have more faith in some of us than that.

It originally did, but was changed to its current form.


Worse. Originally the power did 1.0 damage at the center and 0.7 in an AoE. That meant the power did 1.7 at the center and 0.7 everywhere else. When it was changed, someone took the 1.7 at the center as the base damage and *stacked* the 0.7 bonus damage on top of that, turning it into a 2.4 scale damage power which now did that damage everywhere.

My memory on the precise order of events for Shields is a bit hazy, but this might have happened at the same time they were having issues with the mechanics of the power, and players were complaining the power's damage was ineffectual relative to the difficulty of getting the power to work. It might have been buffed when the mechanics were still being monkeyed with, which partially masked the in-game effect of the damage buff.

Its still a mistake that should never be made. Its basically a translation error: someone tried to mentally translate what the power did into simpler numbers for analysis incorrectly, then back-translated it to the power spreadsheets with that error. Its a mistake that is easier to make than people might think due to the nature of the powers database, but its still a mistake that should not be made.


Basically yes, although not quite so straight forward. But yes.


Close. If you assumed that the original power implicitly assumed 1.0 damage modifier (because that's what pets basically do) then scrappers were supposed to go up slightly, and tankers and brutes were supposed to go down moderately, from the original numbers (which is what the numbers Castle posted in this thread also imply).

Have you ever known me to place a bet on something about the game I didn't already know I would win? This has already happened once.

I just can't discuss it at the moment because it involves a potential exploit. Rest assured there's a really good game mechanical article coming one day about it. But to be honest, there are players out there sharp enough to have caught it in theory, so I am slightly surprised it has not been detected to this day. But you would have to have been looking right at the issue to have seen it, and ironically the very players most likely to spot the problem were also least likely to experience the problem often enough to notice. And if you tried to look for it now, I doubt there would be a way to detect it because nothing would appear to be wrong today. In terms of the issue, the game looks probably exactly the way most players assume should. It just never actually did until it was changed to fix the issue in question.

Aaaand now I'm going to be trying to figure out what this could possibly be for the rest of the day.

Thank goodness this is a video game. If it were an accouting firm or another business where calculations meant something the quoted poster would be out of a job.

And having forum posters catch these mistakes instead of double or triple checkin your work speaks bad about again quoted poster

Originally Posted by Shadow Ravenwolf My favorite combo is Faceplant/DebtCap with the TeamWipe Ancillary

Originally Posted by Dispari Yeah, I like Blasters too.

The "above poster" would be the one who found the error thanks to reports from "the clients", rather than the one who created the error. Or, are you saying it is accounting policy to fire the auditors for finding mistakes?

Take that, JMS. Haha!