What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

Let me see if I can get my point across this way.


"Even if you DID originally catch the error, using the ORIGINAL pwer nombers and nut the reworked numbers what did you accomplish? You made a fix on something that again is faulty because you didnt check to make sure your doin it right the first time?" etc etc

Did I do a better job fixing my original post?
No I didnt, and neither did Castle when he said he went back to look at the power and used the original wrong numbers.

Honestly, I do expect more from the lead developer than this.

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

Originally Posted by Dispari Yeah, I like Blasters too.

I don't think anyone is saying what you think they are saying. Have you read the thread?

I'm getting a strong feeling a lot of people posting haven't actually read what they are posting about.

If you have read this thread in its entirety you wouldn't be posting this. This thread is an example of the exact opposite of what you are saying.

Um, not that I'm unsympathetic to frustration with moving cheese...

BUT...

I don't know if I'm going to count creating purpled-out FOTM builds as either "making something superior" or as "skill in playing the game."

Strike two. That would neither buff nor nerf player performance in the game by any significant amount.


Microscopically warmer. But probably observer error, unless your definition of "few" has double-digits.

Castle can nerf powers, powersets, ATs, IOs, etc. He cannot nerf "skill." When I say "skill," I mean the player's ability to play the game and their knowledge of game mechanics. A player who is skilled will still be able to leverage a power more than those that do not possess "skill." A skilled player willl still know how to react in situations where an unskilled player will not.

If Castle nerfs a power, like Shield Charge, a "skilled" player will be able to adjust and adapt to that change. They may not be able to reach the same peak that they did before, but their skill remains the same. Even if a set, like Shield, was nerfed to "uselessness," a skilled player would be able to identify the next best build and utilize that instead.


I absolutely cannot accept the notion that "skill" simply equates to utilizing a very powerful ability. That is not "skill," that is a crutch.


Side note: The more specialize and fine tuned your build is, the more susceptible it is to being disrupted. A build with perfectly 45% def, just enough recharge for the best attack chain, and just enough end to sustain it will be upset if any of those factors are disrupted (via nerfs, buffs, new enemies, IO changes, etc), then build breaks. I've seen this happen in just about every MMO out there. In any MMO, you have to expect that things will change on you, for better or for worse.

The thing that's annoying to me isn't that things change, but what it takes to adjust a build after something changes - which is a different subject entirely.

Lots of people are asking me if there was or is a problem with the streakbreaker. To the best of my knowledge, it was and is still working fine.

A bug in the streakbreaker wouldn't be something that would lend itself to be particularly exploitable either (any more than it already is, which is not really), and if it wasn't exploitable I would have written an article about the change to inform players.

I read most of it, yes, so I'm aware there are a few different controversies flying here at once. There's the Shield Charge errors which Castle acknowledged (the only point I commented on), there's the question of balance of Fiery Melee versus Dark Melee (which I'm not qualified to comment on), and of course, there's the concerns about Fiery Aura being underpowered as well (which I think has merit).

It's also fair to say that the people crying about it are a minority in this thread, if an extremely vocal one. The argument goes back further, though; people made the same argument about the Blessing of the Zephyr nerf, and whatever you or anyone else thought about that one, I stick to the belief that how long something has been in a flawed state is not an argument in favor of leaving it flawed.

When something's broken, you fix it. And ultimately, there are very few of us on these forums who are objectively qualified to identify something as "broken" or "not broken". To be fair, I wouldn't consider myself qualified to make that judgment; I pretty much reserve that for the people who actually have access to the code. What we are qualified to identify is whether or not we "like" or "dislike" something.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the developers to make a good faith effort to ensure that player power remains within the range for which they have designed the game, or at least reasonably close, and when outliers are discovered (either way), to rein them in by correcting those outliers to more normalized values. It is entirely possible (and in the case of something like Blessing of the Zephyr or Shield Charge, likely) that there will be people who "dislike" the change, but if the expected power curve around which the core of the game is designed is being thrown out of whack, it needs to be corrected, period.

That all said, I do agree with the other posters that it's fairly disturbing that something this massive slipped under the radar, and wonder if perhaps it wouldn't be in the powers team's interest to do a once-over of all the player powersets to make sure they are in fact performing where the documents say they're supposed to, across the board, because if one error like this can get through, I would be highly surprised if there weren't more.

I take that to mean that the potential exploit isn't fixable by its nature. I've no idea what it might be, but either way, if that's the case, it's probably in the game's best interest that we not try and dig this one up. :P

This was something I PMed Castle about in CB. He said pretty much what he said here; that they only fixed something that was broken. He didn't seem too concerned with the Engineers. So, I second that the Engineers get looked at.


.

By "the devs" you do mean, of course, all of the MMO devs in the industry combined and not just Paragon Studios devs. Because no dev team I'm aware of could or would give Werner the guarantee he's referring to, and every dev team I'm aware of would, if they were being honest, give the converse guarantee that everything that exists at the very highest levels of performance would eventually be reviewed, and possibly altered in some way.

Min/maxing in MMOs is a blood sport. If you are good at it, but don't treat it as one, you'll burn out eventually, because no MMO is going to let you consistently do it with immunity.

Could it be a lot more stable? Sure: its well within the realm of human ability to get five, perhaps ten times more stable by much more numerically careful design. I'm not giving the devs a pass for making what are clearly avoidable errors**. But no MMO designed by human beings will ever be able to grant min/maxers guaranteed performance stability at the high end of the game. Its not going to happen here, or anywhere else.



** Fundamentally, the problem is that the design tools aren't designed for transparency or auditability, nor do they have a trivial way of performing validation checks on anything. As I've said before, if I could add anything to the game by snapping my fingers, it would not be new zones or powersets or task forces: it would be better design tools.

All mine certainly took a hit...
Not so much on defense but rather on the endurance usage since I seem to have a habit on just having enough endurance.
Now I'm not even sure if I should go through the trouble of rebuilding those builds

It might be fixed now: I'm not sure. If I become absolutely certain it is fixed, I will write up something for the forums**. Until I'm certain, however, its always possible someone will be able to read what I write and figure out alternate ways to exploit the issue other than the ones I know about (even after that, someone could still outsmart me and figure out a way, but that's always a possibility you can't eliminate with absolute certainty no matter how much testing you do).

This is not intended to be a tease: if I thought the chances were low I would ever be able to mention this ever, I wouldn't refer to it now. I *think* the day will come when I will be able to describe this in detail, which is why I'm willing to refer to it now. Whenever I *can* describe something to the players, I generally try to, and the devs generally give me enormously wide latitude to do so.


** This is a case where I need to be certain its unexploitable myself, independent from whatever the devs think, because I'm the only person that has tested it to an insane degree.

Since you've said that, I'm now feeling the urge to make a public guess.

My WAG is something to do with A.I. behavior. Castle once joked about AV Ghost Widow being easy for him to solo by using patterns of emergent behavior from the AI routines. Others pointed out that as he's a lead designer, that's not "easy" and it could possibly be considered exploitive.

AI behavior is something obscure enough that the average player wouldn't notice but Arcana might. Depending on how you tweaked it, it could definitely alter the effectiveness of critters without being readily apparent what was going on.

Personally, I wish we could influence the "intelligence" of the AI as part of the difficulty. At the very least, I wish somebody would tell the Cabal and Warwolves that running around in circles isn't a battle tactic...

I've read most of it. I mostly see castle saying "Maybe I'll check it out" (time permitting.) Community relations is part of castle's job, so this is exactly the response that people should expect, but functionally it doesn't mean much.

Which is the point I made originally. They're going to make decisions based on observation of player behavior, not based on what the forum says. Except in rare cases the forum doesn't have access to the data to make a persuasive case about the relative strength of power sets. The forum can bring anecdotal evidence to the attention of the devs, but they aren't going to make decisions based on that (and if I read into the tone of his posts, castle was aware of the issues with /shield anyway.)

Re: The design tools: That's sad if so, especially for things like powerset evaluation. They have all the data.

In this case, it really doesn't seem the case you would need the tools.

As to stability, that is completely under their control just a matter of desire.

They can't take away the intrinsic skill, they can minimize its benefits.

Yeah, I really like Castle and co. I think they're great, personally, and hate it when people attack them. I do think it's odd how mistakes like these seem to slip in game (or go unnoticed even though players point them out), but I'm not going to be mean about it. Hopefully some good things will get adjusted to how powers are changed from all this.

I really do hope something happens with Fiery Aura though all this. I love the set, and have had MANY discussions about improving it (I even thought I PM'd Castle with some ideas over a year or so ago), but if it takes this thread for something to happen rather than the others I've engaged in since the "buff War Mace" thread, I'll take.

For what it's worth, the best ideas I've heard were:

1. Make Fiery Embrace last 20 seconds for all damage, so you are not punished for picking a non-Fire attack set.
2. Make Burn work. Either make it a one time AOE cast that hits mobs in its radius (either with a DoT or whatever Castle thinks is proper), or take out the fear component and up the recharge level to a point that Castle is okay with Burn doing what it does. Don't leave the power as it is, where it doesn't help a tanker, brute, or scrapper tank, or do real offensive damage with far too much setup. It doesn't have to be just like Shield Charge (though an explosion like power would be cool), just similarly useful. And after seeing this thread... well balanced, heh.
3. Adjust Rise of the Phoenix so it can be of some use while alive as well. I'm less attached to this one, as I think it's an okay power now, if kind of a not so fun power to have at the tier 9 level.

I'd like to have KB protection and Immobilize protection as well (Fire doesn't do anything that is better than other sets that get those protections). But things I recall Castle saying about such protection leads me to believe that they aren't going to change that. I don't know why, since I can think of game fiction reasons that Fiery Aura can't be immobilized or KB'd, but that's what I remember. Of course, I might be remembering wrong.

So, using SC, how did the devs nerf skill?

Castle confirmed my description of the powers design tools in the last closed beta, as well as my description of its limitations: in particular, nothing happens in an automated fashion, and nothing ever has happened in an automated fashion to the actual powers definitions. Its all done literally by hand.

Well, you've got to bear in mind that when the player base is looking at a power's performance, it's a matter of "OMG! Look how awesome Shield Charge is!"

OTOH, when the devs are designing and implementing the powersets in the first place, it's "Now what value am I plugging into this cell on this spreadsheet?"

After the fact, it takes a certain, critical amount of feedback and data and an opportunity in terms of time to revisit the situation. Then more so to actually fix it, now that you're dealing with peoples' characters and game play.

Do I wish that the mistake hadn't been made? Sure. Do I think it reflects poorly on Castle that he can't intuitively translate a numeric value into the behavior of a computer simulation? Absolutely. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's the worst possible shortcoming to have or that it makes him bad at his job.

Yech. Hopefully, the tech they've employed in the MA for weighting power selections can be adapted into at least a primitive "checksum" value for development purposes.

That would be cool if we could. Perhaps one day. The critical issue is making "smarter" and "dumber" AI that were computationally inexpensive: AI burns limited server cycles. The trick is to make the AI seem smart without having to actually be smart, and I think that is theoretically possible. But probably a low priority for the devs, since "smarter critters" isn't something that improves the game in a visible way to most existing and prospective players.

There are catches, though. Whenever I've brought up the subject of making smarter critters, one immediate thing that comes to mind is making them scatter more so that they don't all bunch up in stupidly obvious AoE bullseyes. But there are always players that respond that they don't *want* smarter critters: they want bowling pins they can just mindlessly vaporize with AoEs, and lots of them. Making smarter AI optional within the difficulty settings allows players to opt-out of that behavior, but it creates a conundrum for the devs as to whether that actually means the improved AI creates a leveling penalty on players that opt-in.

If we were talking about a hypothetical sequel to this game, where there was no need to honor pre-established expectations, I know where I stand on this subject. Its a little more grey when we're talking about making changes to the game that will monkey with people's difficulty expectations without a balance-significant reason for doing so.

If this is all that you've gathered from the thread, then you haven't read it in it's entirety and you have missed a good bit of the point. Castle is going to nerf Shield Charge purely based upon the posts in this thread and what they have revealed about the damage values. It is a nerf that I feel is warranted, though I will miss what it currently does immensely just like I miss what the old /Regen used to be capable of. The nerf won't be for awhile, as he said that he can't addres it immeadiately, but make no mistake - it is coming and it is directly in response to forum posts.