What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

You assume arrogance on the part of the developers rather than ignorance on the part of the player base?

Which is more likely; that the developers are being allowed to make potentially game changing decisions on a whim or that the player base just doesn't have the insight into the whole of the game system or the direction of the game to always be right about how changes should be implemented?


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I disagree with that strongly. Take the melee secondaries, especially the scrapper ones (including both versions of Invuln). They fiddled with them in basically every issue from release to Issue 5 by trial and error just to slowly converge on their Issue 5 values, and *then* they continued to fiddle with defense until I7.

However, knowing *only* what the numbers and mechanics were, the circa I7 performance of those sets could have been targeted computationally and generated that way right at launch. And in fact so much of what was done by trial and error in the past is now at least guided by computation, if not outright set by computation.

I personally cannot think of very many things that, were they to have been numerically analyzed for balance at the beginning of time with no prior experience in gameplay, the correct quantitative analysis wouldn't have generated far better results than the trial and error process did, and would have done it faster.


There seems to be a persistent, impossible to quash rumor that Castle employed some new balancing formula on EM. In fact, while I'm sure Castle had to consent to the changes, most of the EM changes were at least partially driven by BaB, because they were animation changes. In fact, the change to ET caused everyone to forget that literally days earlier we were discussing the change to Energy Punch that came about as a side effect of changing the punch animation itself, which many powers share (including the original target of the change: Dark Melee).

One of the things they were trying to do was eliminate the 0.67 cast time powers, because it was difficult to fit a variety of nice looking animations in such a short cast time. And energy punch's cast time increase had a similar impact on EM as the ET change did across a large range of recharge.

There is no formula that factors in cast time that affects EM. Only Claws and Widows have a formula that incorporates cast time, and its a very rough one that I wouldn't personally say incorporates the perfect set of balance requirements for such a formula.


In any case, to say that EM was "asymmetrically balanced" just because it did more single target damage and less AoE is missing the "balance" part of "asymmetrically balanced." That's just asymmetrical. The balance part would have ensured that its strength sufficiently counterbalanced its weakness relative to peer sets for the net overall value of the set to be the same to within the margin of error of the balancing system. There was (and is) no system that currently can make that statement about either version of EM.

Which is the problem in a nutshell.

They play a really big part: they set it back several years.

PS: the last major numerical change to FA was a buff: a significant increase to Healing Flames.

This is why people are getting frustrated with you. You completely ignore things that are being told to you. Let me recap what I said before. Fiery Aura wasn't nerfed into the state it was now. Burn was pretty much the only power in the set that was overly good, whereas other parts of the set made no sense at the start of the game (and still don't). Putting most of the mez protection into Burn was silly, and adjusted when the devs wisely moved those mez protection powers into toggles (so Fiery Aura wasn't the only set that suffered from this).

Also, other parts of the set have been improved over time, Healing Flames being the most notable one.

The other points of Fiery Aura that hold it back beside Burn (Consume's long recharge, lack of -kb and -immobilize, Fiery Aura's odd buffing capabilities) still exist from its original design. Yes, Fiery Embrace used to last even longer, but its not being as helpful to non-Fiery Melee users still existed. In a nutshell, it didn't benefit from the work of the current design team. Castle's ability is seen all over Shields and Willpower, as they are overall well-designed, balanced, and don't suffer from powers that no one would want to take (or make people wonder why they don't balance with other powers, like I do with Consume and Burn).

And that's my point. There is a balancing design behind the game with the current devs. I only wish all the sets had benefited from the same kind of setup at the start of the game. To bring it back around to Fiery Aura, it hasn't received any nerfs in years... it's just been slowly improving over the years, and I hope now Castle can finally put it where it needs to/should be.

Considering how and what they did to PvP and EM I'd say its arrogance on the developers part.

Seriously? I know I have the equation around somewhere, but I never actually sat down to realize how generous it actually was. When described like that... obscene...

Heh, indeed. It's funny that you say that, because recently a WoW dev was talking about how they're redoing stats in their next expansion. In particular, "haste" right now speeds up cast/melee time as well as the global cooldown (for spells only). They had talked about it effecting cooldowns, but decided it would make things too volitile.

There are other things the devs could do to try to temper AoEs, but it may be too late to do now.

Thanks for the explanation.

Okay, what about this:

Buffing something reduces the skill of building (and playing) a set. Take Invuln before the def set bonus change - it was hard, if not impossible to soft cap it. Now, post change, it can be with a bit of work. Same goes for playing a set, buffing it makes it easier to get better performance, ergo nerfing "skill."

On the other hand, nerfing increases skill required because it means a player has to build / play better for similar performance as before.

Consider, they've nerfed perma-god modes like Unstoppable / Elude so that they can't be permaed with 6 enhancements. (They can't be permaed at all.) Instead, players now have to create IO builds around maximizing +def while trying to maintain other important stats (such as acc, dmg, +rech, regen, recov, etc).

So, you're arguing that despite the fact they're adding content that is different / more challenging than prior content that they're trying to remove skill? Really?

Yes, the Khan TF is the easiest of the TFs they've added recently (haven't done the new Posi yet). It is a good dps check, though. Like I said, I four manned it, under master settings, in 53 minutes while full groups have taken that long just on Reichsman.

Learning to survive is fairly easy. Learning how to deal good dps is much harder. Why? When soloing, you can kill spawns fast enough even when using skills inefficiently. The game also doesn't provide good feedback when you're not doing as much damage as you could. If you don't survive well enough, you die. There is also the unique dpa mechanic where the hardest hitting power isn't always the best for dealing damage.

So, yeah, you can put a power on auto and walk away, but you're making it take far longer than it needs to.


How about Protean? Yet another boss that's more than a simple tank and spank. (Kinda like Ghost Widow's heal, but avoidable via skill rather than raw defense.)

That's one way to do it, but not required. The Halloween Event took coordination. Just having enough players isn't enough - you needed them to spread out to all the flags at once in order to make them vulnerable.

Likewise, Lord Winter doesn't require a plethora of people to down him, either. I think Lord WInter is one of the best designed encounters I've seen. Why?

First, the encounter isn't just a tank and spank. There are adds (summoned snow beasts and winter lights) as well as AV every 25% health. There is target switching and movement.

Second, there are a lot of powers / debuffs being thrown around, so it's likely to hit everyone with some form of kryptonite. Lord Winter deals Cold/Lethal/Smash damage, the cold being resisted far less than others. There is a lot of recharge debuffing, crowd control (hold/sleep), detoggles effects, and end drains. The northern lights he summon also debuff defense. The effects by themselves never felt oppressive, but were enough to keep me on my toes. My WP/Fire Tanker is very survivable, but there were enough effects being thrown around that I couldn't just idly sit by and not react to it.

To top it off, there is a time limit, so you can't just put an attack on auto and walk away.


That encounter is challenging, but also very fun. (I've done it in 8 man teams before, so you don't need a large population to do it.) I look forward to more like it.

You know, I'd never thought of it that way. But that totally makes sense.

The Standard Code rant does not apply to SC, but rather the Standard Not Doing Your Job rant does.

Unless some part of the "subtleties of programming" includes not checking your work before hitting submit? But if you guys have built that into your profession then I'm impressed and disappointed at the same time.

How ever many steps you want to say there are for programming something I'm 100% confident one of the last ones is to check it before going into production. Why am I so confident? because programming is not a unique snowflake in this regard, it is the same as every single industry on Earth. SC went live not working as designed, so that step was skipped. The reason(s) for it being skipped are irrelevant excuses and do nothing to change the fact that it was skipped.

When SC was buffed is when tunnel vision applies, but no one is blaming the programmer that listened to players and asked the boss if it would be ok to apply AT mods to the power. This does fall under the standard code rant. What doesn't in this situation is green lighting a power for a massive change (which the diff between brute and scrap AT mods is) without doing a least a cursory audit of the power against the original design notes and equally importantly without the person who cleared it for a massive change taking a look at the final result before again going in to production. Which again falls under the Not Doing Your Job rant and not the Standard Code rant.

If you want Not Doing Your Job to be covered under the Standard Code rant, or if it already is, then a lot of respect for the profession is going to disappear.

Now all that said, and before anyone gets too upset; we all make mistakes in every line of work. Luckily, most programming mistakes have less consequence than me forgetting to put my gas cap back on after filling up. Some do though, but not in this game so all's good.

Track-able and easily preventable mistakes are the best kind of mistakes because once they are made and documented they never need to happen again. Which is to say, a power never needs to go live again without it being checked against the design documents. It doesn't matter what's going on with any other aspect of the game because one of the last steps before production is checking the product.

I wouldn't be saying "my hope is that as we go forward this type of mistake occurs with far less frequency" if it wasn't something that could happen and should be a minimum expectation of acceptable performance.

I'm not mad at all, just that mistakes like this prevent resources being spent on more valid errors and from an end user perspective, prevent resources being devoted to improving underwhelming aspects of the game.

Confirmation bias, writ large.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I definitely listed target caps being added and specifically mentioned it affected Burn quite a bit.

While it is true that Ice Patch is less effective than before target caps, I do also find that since it ticks so fast it often actually effects more than 5 targets.

The Standard Code Rant doesn't apply to Shield Charge mostly because it wasn't a programming error.

(The Standard Code Rant is basically an assertion that without knowing all of the relevant facts, attempting to extrapolate how easy or hard it is to add or modify a segment of code is doomed to failure. It specifically applies to programming moreso than in general because code interdependencies can make otherwise easy things difficult, and implementation details can make otherwise hard things easy. It doesn't usually apply to straight changes to the data which lack those entanglements. )


Actually, it appears to have gone live working as designed. The problem was that the design changes themselves went significantly beyond what they should have.

Is it possible for Castle to check every single change made to the powers system? Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. It takes longer to check a change completely than it does to actually make it. If Castle had to check all of the design and implementation details of every single change made to the powers system, it would be more efficient to fire the entire powers team and simply make all of the changes himself. You hope that the checking that is done is good enough that combined with Q&A it catches design errors like this, but it doesn't always.

An automated powers checking system would have a better chance of catching things like this, but it would require designing an expert system capable of understanding all of the various powers design rules and guidelines. There are a lot of them that factor into a design decision like this. I could probably write down over a hundred design rules that affect the design of individual powers, most of them "soft" rules (meaning: they aren't absolute, but require specific reasons for being violated).

In this case, though, it appears that whoever made the change did so deliberately, because they thought that was a reasonable change. And the number-space the devs operate in requires experience to guide intuition. I see an AoE with higher than Scale 2.0 damage, I already know something is wrong. I don't need to do calculations: for me that is an at-a-glance red flag that jumps off the page**. For whoever made the change, they may not have been dealing with the powers system for a long enough period of time to know that intuitively, and didn't see their calculations were heading to a bad place. It happens all the time, and I'm not immune to those kinds of decimal place errors myself (although usually I err in the other direction: I sometimes don't catch errors where the Scale value is too small at a glance).



** So much so that "3.6" is a bigger red flag to me than "200" is. I actually did the mental manipulation to realize that 200 was about three and a half in pet scale, and the three and a half is what triggered alarm bells, not the 200.

that's my point.
Did SC actually go live with varying damage away from the epicenter? I never noticed it on my shielder. I could have missed it as 3ft is pretty small, but it seemed like it was just doing a flat 2.4 scale damage across the entire function.

According to what Castle said it should have been released doing 94.5 damage (1.7 scale) across the 20ft radius and the 133.33 (2.4 scale) over the 3ft radius. I just remember it doing 133.33 across the whole thing when it first hit live. More accurately, I remember it doing ~110 damage across the 20ft radius when I picked it up at level 35 and it was unslotted for damage. That said, I wasn't aggressively testing it so I can't say it with absolute confidence.

No one is asking for him to do that though. And thankfully it doesn't need to occur to resolve issues like this from popping up with significantly less frequency. Most powers are very simple and very straight forward and should be delegated to other people with little concern. A bunch of pseudo-pet powers do things that are more complex and have been massaged to perform in certain ways. Handing those off to someone that lacks extensive knowledge of the system is inviting trouble in. One need look no further than this thread.

Try hugging me and I'll fill ya full of lead.

I leveled a Shield Tank well before the buff. It was awesome then and I devastated a mob by leaping in with Shield Charge and following up with Foot Stomp. It's crazy sick now. However, as others like me have pointed out, even if it gets reduced to reasonable levels, it is STILL GOING TO BE POWERFUL. Just not broken powerful.

So level up a Shield character whenever you want. It's a fun set and works well all the way around.

I know you're bringing up Oil Slick just because, but it doesn't apply. There are many things Castle is doing, and he does have to prioritize. Hopefully Fiery Aura and Oil Slick are up there on his list, at least.

Fiery Aura may be on his list. Castle knows he wants to make Consume recharge in 60 seconds and deal scale 1.4 damage.

OSA has been passed on to programming. OSA seems to operate fine almost all the time now. I'd like to get that "almost" out of the sentence too, but since it is has been so hard to track down and the gain at this point would be minimal, I think I'd rather the programmers spend time on other stuff and only worry about OSA if they stumble across something that may be the problem.

It's a bug. In the damage multiplier of one power.

Seriously if that is going your benchmark of failure for an MMO developer good luck finding a game to play. I am all for promoting excellence but come on. If you do run across a game that has eliminated minor bugs like this from their development cycle and is still well designed and has compelling content then by all means please PM me!

Um, why are we even arguing about EM? It does *6* DPS less than Fire in Bill's thread, is has a typical AoE attack, and it stuns the $%^& out of anything it touches. Anyone who claims that Castle's adjustments on the set were out of line needs to look at the bigger picture.

)Edit: Looked at wrong thread for single target DPS)

You realize you are arguing against your case there ?

That is just in error and bad reasoning. The easiest counter example is movement suppression. A feature that required skill to use well. The ability to get more targets in shadow maul is another.

I haven't seen the content you are talking about.

New Posi is if anything less demanding than the old one. The only feature that could even be loosely called an increase in difficulty is the addition of many many more things to click. Stealthing is still the way the to go but its just not as big a benefit.

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If you find it challenging to compute a good DPS chain well and good. It takes me about 15 minutes and is usually something that requires all of about 5 neurons worth of processing power to run.


Can't speak to that when I did those for the badge didn't even notice difficulty with him.



That is being on a server that can gather 16-32 people into a zone at a time to do the event. The coordination is fairly trivial. The other choice is just to have a crafted team that could blitz through the banners. The same applies for WL

That quote isn't intended to imply that art and craft are two separate things you should have some of, its intended to imply that art and craft are two ways of describing the same thing.

In other words, all of the art in this game is crafted, and it can be judged on the basis of its craftsmanship. All of the craft in this game is directed towards its artistic expression, and all craftsmanship in this game can be judged on its ability to deliver its intended artistic expression. There is no art in the game devoid of craftsmanship, and nothing is crafted that isn't a part of the art of the game.

You can't add more craftsmanship to this game, You can only *improve* the craftsmanship that already exists in it. And that is *always* a good thing. Similarly you can't take away the artistry of the game, you can only improve it or degrade it. But this MMO has exactly the same mix of artistry and craftsmanship as all other games: 100% of both.

My memory says it did but my memory could be wrong. Let me check:

Looking back, in I13 when Shields went live Shield Charge was doing 1.7 Scale damage at its epicenter, and 0.7 damage across a 3 foot radius. Meaning, 2.4 Scale total at the center and 0.7 within three feet.


In I14 this was changed so that the power began doing 2.4 scale damage across its entire radius. This is actually when I believe the first "mistake" was introduced into the power. The power has a radius of 20 feet, but the two damage effects were constrained in the original power. The epicenter blast was obviously limited to just the center of the effect, but the 0.7 damage was *also* limited - to a 3 foot radius. It was doing 2.4 to the target, 0.7 splash damage to everything 3 feet away, and it was only doing *knockback* to everything else within its larger 20 foot radius. Now it was doing 2.4 damage across a huge radius.

But that could have been deliberate: I specifically recall players having issues hitting things with the power reliably because of the mechanics of the power. Someone may have deliberately removed the radius restriction to compensate. But if they did, in my opinion they went too high: they should have opened the radius up from 3 feet to something like 7 feet - because that's melee range, and the game seems able to allow melee to hit consistently from that range without problems.


In I16 SC was changed again, this time by giving each archetype its own pseudo-pet that dealt different damage (actually Scrappers always had their own version of the pet because their version didn't include taunt - but it did the same damage up to this point). The Brute version doing 2.4, the Tanker version doing 2.54, and the Scrapper version doing 3.6, which is I believe the version that exists today.


I could try to get the exact precise date of the changes, but I don't think that is necessary in this case. The history of Shield Charge, at least on live, seems to be:

December 2008 (I13): Shields Launches. SC does 2.4 at center, 0.7 within 3 feet, knockdown within 20 feet.

April 2009 (I14): SC changed to do 2.4 damage across entire 20 foot radius.

September 2009 (I16): SC changed to do variable AT damage: 2.4/2.54/3.6


To be honest, I had two completely separate independent chances to catch this issue myself, and now that I look carefully the reason I missed both times is because I was familiar with the power already and assumed the Brute version was representative of every version. In other words, had Brutes not come first in alphabetical order I would have caught this in October. Going to have to make a mental note never to make that mistake again.

Sets with long animations *are* worse in click heavy defensive sets. I agree with you on that. I have face-planted plenty, for example, during Shadow Maul on my DM/Regen and during Eagle's Claw on my MA/DA.

I wouldn't say that the inherent disadvantage of long animation times is so critical that the set is unplayable or even at a substantial disadvantage behind other melee sets. I believe EM in it's current incarnation is better than Martial Arts for example and despite my desire to see that get fixed up it is certainly playable.

Claiming that the current incarnation of EM is a critical design mistake on par with, say, the PvP changes is overstatement at best.

That I can certainly agree with.