Stone Armor: What I'd Do

As I see it, the ability to alter the root times of powers on the fly is the holy grail of balancing a lot of stuff in CoX. I would love a mechanic that forcibly lengthened Granite Armor's root times because that's a reduction in damage capability (and reaction speed) that you just can't get around: you're reducing the DPA by simply increasing the amount that any damage they deal is being divided by in a proportionate manner.

I will, however, agree that it would probably send BABs into conniptions and open up an entirely new can of worms concerning the malleability of root times, though I would probably make the root time penalty slightly larger (33-50% longer), though it would be largely dependent on whatever survivability numbers Granite was given: higher survivability would necessitate a greater increase to root time.

Considering all of the flak that has been thrown around simply because I proposed reducing the resistance and defense values on Granite Armor even though the end survivability was higher, I'm pretty sure that would piss people off even more than

I was purposefully vague with defining potential downtimes. There are too many variables that affect the useful uptime of the enamators such that it's difficult to simply say "between 0 and 90 seconds" (which isn't even necessarily true since the SO grade cycle time is 105 seconds, which was more to the point).

If you would like a definition to what I deem a "god mode", the easiest way to define it is to take Arcanaville's survivability worksheet and look at the Overdrives. If you're looking for a definition, those are the powers that I generally consider to be "god modes".

The survivability capabilities of support based characters are known to completely blow everything else out of the water (especially when you consider that the support ATs get better use out of powers that should, logically, be within the purview of the melee ATs). An FF defender can softcap his entire team with an SO build while maintaining SR grade defenses. A Traps Corr can stack a billion and a half different mechanisms for obscene effect. An Ill/Rad troller can have his/her unkillable tauntbot pets out at all times along with providing hefty buffs and debuffs to everything around it. Don't get me started on some of the sheer "wtf-ery" of the capabilities of buff/debuff sets: they don't set anything even remotely close to a balanced precedent for anything else in the game.

I'm being as generous as people have been to me.

The problem I have with your arguments here is that you continually try to look for example powers that provide a basis for a design that you insist is necessary and then get annoyed when I point out that those examples are flawed. I'm not attempting to win any debate (though, considering some of the names that have found their way into this thread, I doubt it will be inconsequential), I'm simply attempting to spread my viewpoint and defend it against those that poke holes in it so that I can make sure that it can hold water.

You and I arrived at an impasse long ago: you stalwartly refuse to accept any design for the power that does not allow it to be able to be used at all times, regardless of the reductions that need to be made to balance that out; I have a gross dislike of turning the capstone of the set into little more than just another armor toggle. This difference in opinion is probably why we haven't been able to agree on virtually anything about this. We could throw numbers at each other until we're blue in the face, but it won't change the fundamental fact that we have specific design points that are completely at odds. I respect your viewpoint, though not necessarily your arguments. For some people, the entire set is made by being able to have Granite Armor up at all times. For others, the fact that you can have the entire set made for someone by the ability to keep Granite Armor up at all times is a fundamental flaw that should be changed.

I honestly can't agree with you here. Trying to make both in and out of Granite Armour viable is what led us to the current state of Granite Armour - a toggle which is highly useful and highly annoying. I'd much sooner balance it via uptime than via drawbacks that sit somewhere between annoying me and making me skip the power altogether. To be honest, I generally HATE powers balanced by providing drawbacks. It's a design principle that never sits well with me, not in a "friendly" game like this one.

If I'm going to balance something, I'll balance it based on how much benefit it provides and how much it doesn't provide, but outside of absolute necessity, I'd never design something via instituting a PENALTY, especially such a penalty that can't just be waited out. Common T9 powers' penalty isn't the debuffs, it's that you shouldn't be fighting when they drop. Fair enough, eight finish up before they drop or RUN. Let them drop, Rest, wait for the debuff to time out and rejoin the fight. The powers are really not designed to force you to fight with the penalty. In fact, the penalty is designed to force you to not fight.

Any power that imparts a penalty that you HAVE to fight with (or lose out on the power's benefit) instantly becomes a power I'm going to look REALLY unfavourably at. If anything happens to Granite Armour, I hope to see its design move away from "fighting with debuffs" and move more into just fighting, but being limited in where or how often you can do it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It is not about coming up with new conceptual reasons of why it makes sense, its about re-conceptualizing. As far as the devs care, the cottage rule seems to apply to re-conceptualizing too.

It is only a theory, but i suspect the game to allow the modification of cast time just as it can modify interupt. The animation may still be the same, but a cast time debuff could force a wait time between power activations. Would require way less work and the only practical diference is that the granite tank would be able to walk wile he waits for the "recast penalty".

A side subject, there may not be hooks for it in the spreadsheets or whatever but the game engine surely supports dynamic animation slowdown/speedups. We can see this in action all the time with running animations while in super speeding or speed debuffed. Would be cool if somehow castle was able to force animation speedup/down via hasten like buffs or special enhancements.

For the time being thoug, i bet increasing cast time power attribute must be viable.

Nailed it.

As for my arguments, in my defense the set of powers that have survivability benefits balanced by something other than endurance costs or limited uptime is a poorly explored set in terms of powers currently available, which is why I've had to venture far afield. Granite is weird, and really what I'm most interested in is preserving some of that weirdness rather than making it a conventional limited-duration survivability spike. More precedent does not a better power make. Safer, from a design perspective, to be sure. But not better. And it's not good for a game design team to always be making safe choices over interesting ones.

I think RevokePower existed at release, if I'm not wrong it's the way the Vahzilok Disease would be removed from launch. However, anyone that was around may know that it either was buggy or the devs didnt understand it well, as there were plenty of bugs with that debuff not removing properly.

I theorize that all powers can be revoked.

I disagree about aggro, if the Granite power is otherwise balanced.

If as I beleive, Granite can be set up to act as a 'Godmode Panic Button' when activated, then have its' effect reduce itself to 'merely the strongest armor in the game, with drawbacks' similar to other Tier 9s, then it can retain its aggro abilities.

I think it would draw unnecessary aggro from Granite players if Granite was changed from a tanking tool so a 'solo survivability' tool. I can forsee people dreading Stone Tankers going into Granite mode. This would be hilarious, but not productive.

Damage I agree about, since Granite is effectively a defensive stance, trading offense (and movement) for defense.

That's a matter of personal preference, and moreover a matter of psychological perspective as well. In I2, Elude's crash was not an out-of-combat crash for perma-elude scrappers: it occured generally during combat and they had to figure out ways to deal with it. And contrary to some people's recollections, not everyone went perma-Elude: some SR scrappers simply found the continuous crashing unpalatable and remained in toggle builds. And they were not the vanishingly small minority: at the time maybe 25% of the SR scrappers I ran into were running toggle builds and not perma-elude. A sizable minority. But while we would be perfectly happy with getting rid of the crash, most of us felt the crash was entirely fair for the performance (as long as we didn't look too closely at Regen scrappers) and an entirely reasonable cost for running Elude perma. It did not make the power or the game any less friendly in any sense of the word.

Regen was overpowered for about 16 months tops. SR has had the ability to trivially hit the softcap for three years. And SR wasn't exactly hurting in the Perma-Elude days, even if Instant Healing was the bees-knees.

To the best of my knowledge, every time you think you're seeing the game engine speeding up or slowing down an animation, the animators actually made a faster or slower version and instructed the game to play it in that situation. Sort of.

The game engine can speed up or slow down an animation. It just has to be told to do so by the animation sequence entry that calls it. But its those sequences themselves that cannot change dynamically as far as I know. So if the animators want to play a faster version of an existing animation, they can do so by creating a different animation sequence that just happens to call that existing animation, but at a different speed. But there's no way to actually speed up the animation "on the fly" as it were. This has to be hard coded into the game by hand for each individual situation you want it to occur in.

I'm not sure how this jibes with my perception that the animation cycles for running seem to scale with the character model height slider and movement speed. Also, all the dance emote cycles scale to character height, but only after the first cycle...

Back in I2 the period I was referencing, Regen scrappers could almost pretend to be perma-Elude scrappers with MoG but *without* the endurance penalty, just for giggles, on top of bailing out of MoG and simply running IH and perma-DP and getting virtually the same performance in a completely different way (if you happened to take recon as well, then you'd exceed perma-elude performance back then). But more to the point the relevance here is that Regen had tier 9 performance without having a crash: definitely in the case of IH/DP, and sort of in the case of perma-MoG. Both SR and Invuln had to suffer crashes to get their top level I2 performance.

The post I7 softcap is actually only half the performance of the Big Three from I2/I3 so its an incomparable performance regime. And because there's so many sources of defense and SR is no longer the sole possessor of high defense, softcapping with inventions and pools is no longer unique to SR. SR was probably in the driver's seat in melee defense from about I9 to about I11 when Willpower came out.

Perma-Elude did have certain advantages: for one thing at one time it had base defense and thus did not have the non-positional hole SR has now. But in I2 its peers were perma-unstoppable that *also* had massive defense in invincibility (not as good, but almost) and regen that could flip between almost as strong defense and almost unlimited health recovery. Of the three, perma-elude had the most reasonable cost/benefit ratio. Only perma-elude and perma-MoG had *any* legitimate discussion over whether their costs outweighted their benefits. There really wasn't any serious discussion about whether IH/DP or perma-unstopppable+invincibility was anything other than ideal.

Animations can be scaled spacially. But I'm not sure that changes the timing or playback speed of the animations. I'll have to look more carefully at that.

Obviously, it's a subjective stance, I don't claim otherwise. But I don't believe your Elude example points to what you're bringing it up to illustrate. Yes, certain people did see Elude as the one true way to play, and to them the crash, along with building for that, was just the acceptable cost to pay. For a range of others, the cost IN ITSELF was too high, so they didn't bother. Not just with Elude, they didn't bother with Super Reflexes at all. It's actually a similar situation - when Perma-Elude became the status quo, people were forced to decide if they wanted "sub par" performance at a reasonable cost or "baseline" performance at a very high cost. Many took the third option: none of the above. They merely dropped their SR Scrappers and played something else. I didn't, but I know of a few people who did.

Additionally, while I'm always vouching for examining worth in general, rather than cost or value independently, there comes a time when a cost is just too high, no matter the value. Just as a random inappropriate example, suppose every day someone offered to pay me a million dollars if I'd let him beat the snot out of me and put me in a hospital. A million dollars is a lot of money and the injuries from a severe beating eventually heal, so it's "worth" the pain... But it isn't, really. Because while it may be worth it in theory, NOTHING is worth that.

Levels of tolerance differ between the different people who play these games, and mine are fairly low. I simply prefer a game that's not balanced by penalising me, but rather balanced in the things that it gives me. Just in the same way as dying doesn't take experience away and set me back (thereby locking me in a back-and-forth that could last forever), but rather slows down my future gains, so balancing my powers by penalties, rather than by the strength and availability of their benefits is NOT a system I prefer. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that, whenever possible, I want to see power penalties enforced to be effective during combat need to be avoided. Where absolutely necessary, then I concede. But I still feel there's no need to balance Granite Armour, in particular, with severe penalties when there are other restrictions that don't feel like a double-edged sword. Or not as much, at the very least.

I do not like this, and that's not a position that I'm going to be convinced away from, because it IS personal opinion.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind. I'm just pointing out that there's no way for the devs to honor your preference in this area in a consistent fashion, without either targeting the game design literally right at you personally, or honoring a whole range of other thiings that you might not personally advocate, but have no objective separation from your stated preference.

Consider that there are a lot people who consider even endurance cost itself to be too high of a penalty for a "casual" game.


One game design rule that I believe as an axiom is "something for everyone, not everything for everyone." By that I mean its more important to have diversity of experience than for everything to be equally accessible and equally inoffensive. So I think a well designed CoH would have some powersets that have relatively constant out of the box performance that required little work to optimize but also allowed very little head room to improve, some that start slow but can be improved to high degrees with sufficient effort, some that are balanced around opportunity costs, some that are balanced around explicit tradeoffs, etc.

There are examples of different balancing schemes now. Dark Armor is very much an opportunity-cost balanced powerset in multiple (and probably historically accidental) ways. Some people see Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear as being "contradictory" but I see them as the perfect dual mez togggles for DA. Each one separately has a particular strength, but the combination is not the sum of its parts. Using one has opportunity costs in that it will interfere with using the other, and vice versa. But there are still advantages to running both in extreme circumstances. Dark Regen is a significant opportunity cost power in that its high endurance costs require very careful offensive throttling - it essentially costs you future offense to use.

Some people find these properties annoying. I don't. I think they are a legitimate option for players to choose.

Similarly, Regen matures quickly, and mostly without compromise. SR matures slowly, and with significant compromises along the way. But Elude's peak performance, when it becomes available, outperforms Regen's peak performance in most ways. Its arguable if the numbers themselves are correct, but the qualitative distinction between the sets is entirely valid. I don't look at those two sets and say that the problem is SR doesn't have quick recovery and Regen doesn't have Elude. I've never advocated erasing or even minimizing the qualitative differences between the scrapper secondaries, just equalizing their value proposition.

I think there is a place for sets like Dark Armor, Willpower, SR, Regen, and Stone, all of which are designed to deliver completely different tradeoffs during play. So much so that I consider it a failure in design when such options don't exist. It is that very lack of significant tradeoff options that I think is the fundamental error in design in the Champions Online powers system, in fact.


But again, I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind. I'm only saying that while I would not try to erase the particular style of powerset you enjoy, I would specifically attempt to prevent anyone from making it the standard of design.

Member of the Stoned Templars

{|-|} Easy Kills {|-|} A&TC {|-|}

The point is not to make granite break aggro. The point is that if you spend too long in granite you may loose aggro as you litterally stop generating any (it still would take for others to double the aggro you had at that point for you to loose aggro.)

It also would mean that a granite tanker could jump in first, be the only one aggroed and therefore absorb safely an alpha, but as soon as anyone else jumped in he would loose aggro unless he switched out of granite.

So Granite would:

Slowly can loose existing aggro (not suddenly.)
Can take an alpha but not build up aggro.
Barely do damage.

Uses?

You still can turn it on if you have all aggro on you and you are being overwhelmed by the incoming damage. At this point it saves your life and you may have enough aggro to keep going the rest of the fight in granite mode.

It would have obvious solo uses too. You would not fear that your team-mate turns on Granite, unless the guy just does not know how to play and expected to build aggro inside of granite.

I think this is a subtle contradiction of the conceptual intent of Granite. I don't think Granite is intended to be a way for Tankers to escape damage (I know its also a Brute set, but its conceptual foundation is as a Tanker set), but to sustain damage. And that implies that Granite will not explicitly make it difficult for the Tanker to draw damage.

That's specifically to contrast against Hibernation, which *is* a power explicitly designed to allow a Tanker to temporarily escape damage.


Mechanically, its difficult to critique an aggro idea without very explicit specifics. For example, the mechanics of taunt and hate may not allow the gentle expiration of aggro you're specifying.

From what I understand, you dont loose aggro unless some one surpasses twice as much threat as you hold.

A huge debuff in the form of a global taunt enhancement and a threat base decrease from 4 to 2, could result in many fights where you are right, the tanker would not loose aggro once in granite. But there may be situations where the tanker may loose aggro.

My biggest issue with Granite, as I mentioned before during the thread, is how it trivializes many encounters that are designed to be extremely tough. I think I even recall Castle (not sure) making a quick observation at how Granite can trivialize Master of Lord Recluse and Statesman task force badges, for instance.

This is why I think, for balance purposes, Granite aggro management needs to be the priority nerf point. Heck, I may even leave damage untouched if such a change happened, as the granite tanker already can lower damage by (based on a quick test i posted earlier on this tread) nearly 20%, thats like having debt 40% of the time, therefore almost dying without dying.

It is these special encounters that make me worried about Granite's existance.

Hate decays. If it didn't, a Tanker could taunt a critter, brawl it once, and for the rest of the day all the blasters on the server could attack it without drawing aggro. In-game testing seemed to suggest that while a tanker had a target taunted it was very difficult for anything without a taunt to grab aggro, but the moment the target wasn't either directly taunted or taunted by gauntlet, all bets were off.

So as long as the tanker is actually generating hate, I believe you need to overpower that hate by 100% to grab aggro away. But the moment the tanker stops generating hate, and especially if the tanker stops generating taunt or stops generating damage-based hate even with taunt up, I believe aggro can be lost very quickly.