Stone Armor: What I'd Do

This thread is full of win. Someone throw up the Castle-Signal!

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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic. Well done.

On a side note: regardless of how he feels about it, Castle probably doesn't have much time to spare on Stone Armor for the foreseeable future. Here are some other things he might be prioritizing:

- Going Rogue. Just... Going Rogue.
- Shield Charge is doing about twice as much damage as intended.
- The LGTF green mitos now have the hold resistance they were designed to have - which makes them virtually indestructible. This is causing some concern.

I expect that if he hasn't started working on Stone Armor already (which is not inconceivable), he probably won't get to it for a while yet.

Well, I suppose I can take my comfort with the current state of Rooted as a glowing testimonial to my patience.

As for Granite: Do me a favor. Humor me. Talk to me like I'm stupid.

What, precisely, makes damage mitigation above a certain level broken?

Or in other words, what is the floor on risk? Because I am almost positive that it is not a Stone Armor character's risk/reward ratio that is out of proportion in the vast majority of situations. Outside of certain extreme encounters, I have several characters who will survive as well as a Stone Armor character and do significantly more damage. Is the fact that a Stone Armor character is rarely at risk of dying, in and of itself, unbalanced? The answer to this question has implications that go well beyond Stone Armor.

I've never played Stone Armour, specifically because of the trade-offs in Rooted.

Being unable to jump and move slowly because you're using a god-mode toggle is fine. It introduces gameplay tension - "can I jump that lip and run up there under sustained fire, or stay turtled up and go the long way round?" is an intersting and viable choice to have to make in combat.

Being unable to jump and move because you're avoiding being one-shot mezzed is a pretty unacceptable trade-off for a tank. "Should I stay here behind this kerb or get stunned and killed?" is not a fun decision.

So, yeah, I'm behind these suggestions.

Too many people to respond to, so let's see if I can't make a general statement.

First of all, allow me to join the people who feel Rooted sucks. I have to admit that the notion of being rooted to the ground and therefore immovable is entertaining in a concept-specific sense, but in actual practice, it's probably the WORST power in the whole game when it comes to frustration. I've shouted more obscenities at that power than any other in the game, and I've used Dimension Shift, Group Fly and most Sniper powers. Rooted SUCKS!

I say go for broke with it. Kill the run speed debuff entirely (or leave a token 5-10%), kill the jump restriction almost entirely or outright in full. Let it still detoggle if you turn on a travel power, though. In fact, make Rooted RESIST slow effects. It kind of already does that, what with it putting you at the run speed floor. Sure, it doesn't reduce their effectiveness. You just can't run any slower. Look at it in terms of continental drift - it's kind of slow, but there's really nothing anyone can do to slow it down or stop it.

On Granite Armour, SOMETHING needs to be done, and I could go about it two different ways. One way is Umbral's - retain a similar level of survivability but force the toggle off after a time, simultaneously killing the penalties. I would VASTLY prefer this over what we have right now.

An alternative that I can see would be to heighten the drawbacks. A Rage-style damage debuff, a PFF-style only affecting self or something of that magnitude would be required, on top of the existing penalties. And BAN TELEPORT. Let's see how much people like their "tradeoff toggle" when they can't avoid the tradeoffs. I highly suspect opinions would be VASTLY different if the penalties for Granite Armour were real, rather than negligible. Again, that IS a fix, but it's one that will simply necessitate another fix very soon thereafter.

My personal favourite is, actually, to allow Granite Armour to stack with existing armours and be allowed to run at all times, with a comparable drop in survivability contribution. I'd like to see Stone Tanks and Brutes have more infinitely-sustainable survivability than all other defence sets. Even with a cost reduction, it would still cost more than any other defence set, what with running Rock Armour, Brimstone Armour, Crystal Armour, Minerals, Rooted, Mud Pots AND Granite Armour. Plus, again, I have no problem with this set breaking the mould and offering higher survivability in general.

Finally, Umbral - please understand that I say this with the utmot respect, but you really should consider acting with more tact. Insulting people and introducing snark really doesn't help any factual discussion, it just detracts from people's objectivity and causes them to not want to bother. If you're truly after an objective discussion, then I'd advise you to stick to the facts and avoid the attitude. I honestly don't think it's helping anything, especially if you want to convince people, rather than browbeat them into submission.

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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 can cope with Rooted, but I'd also have to say that it isn't a lot of fun. At the very least, I'd say to bring the speed debuff to about the same level as Increase Density. And rather than completely disabling jump, it'd be better if it just lowered your ability to jump a great deal, leaving you able to make short hops over annoying curbs and such. Cutting off Superspeed and Sprint (and Ninja Run) seems pretty silly, too, when you can achieve similar running speeds with an outside buff or three.

And really, someone with that much influence over earth and stone should be able to propel themselves at a pretty good clip on the ground rather than necessarily being slowed.

Okay, so you're positing that Granite Armor is broken because it allows you to reduce your risk to near zero while still gaining rewards. There are two problems with that definition of broken.

First, I will agree and in fact have already outright stated as a given that Stone Armor provides the best mitigation on SOs (and IOs, for that matter) available to any AT that can take it. However, that does not make it the only set that can reduce risk to near zero in the great majority of commonly occurring scenarios, nor does it make it the set with the best risk/reward ratio under these scenarios. Basically, for most of the game, that extra survivability simply cannot be leveraged to any useful purpose, and you end up paying a cost in offense - and, once again, I need to point out that just because you can accrue benefits that offset that cost does not mean you're not paying it - for an advantage you don't need. A Stone Armor tank or brute is neither the most effective solo farmer on SOs (or IOs), nor is it the best force multiplier for teams.

The only place where I can see a Stone Armor character having an unfair advantage is in allowing a team with relatively little support to overcome certain high-value challenges by being able to absorb the damage from an extremely dangerous enemy without outside buffs. Or to put it more plainly, Stone Armor survives AVs. This is pretty much the only scenario I can think of where that extra survivability is actually leveraged to provide better than usual results. And even here, it's not an optimal choice - a team of heavily support oriented characters will destroy an encounter that a Stone Armor character will merely survive.

In short, if earning rewards while at near-zero risk is the problem with Granite Armor, then there are many, many far more egregious violators of that rule in the wild.

Now let me propose a metric under which Granite Armor might actually be considered broken. If you take as a design principle that there must be encounters such that the character bearing the brunt of the threat from the encounter must be at risk of death without support from allies, then Granite Armor has such a significantly lower need for outside support to survive incoming damage that once you've elevated the encounter threat level to the point where a Stone Armor character would need outside support merely to survive, any other character would need an unreasonable level of outside support to do the same. I would argue that the STF and the RSF come up to the verge of this point.

Umbral, the point I'm trying to make is that high survivability per se is not that valuable. But let's take this out of philosophy land. You challenged me to find an SO build that can outsurvive Granite and I conceded that there is none. Now, if you want to continue using risk/reward as the balancing metric, then I challenge you to show me a scenario that leverages that survivability to obtain higher rewards than any other scenario that does not involve Stone Armor, whether alone or as part of a team.

You keep bringing up risk/reward ratio, but I really don't think that's the argument you actually want to make, when everything else you say points to the existence of a risk floor as a separate design rule: the idea that at a certain level of safety you should not be allowed to earn any rewards at all. And that is a concept that I will readily agree is part of the game - the developers have consistently acted against any repeatable cycle of activity that allows you to earn any rewards without being exposed to combat at some point. I think the argument you want to make is that being in combat with Granite Armor up is essentially equivalent to not being in combat at all. I don't happen to think that's actually true, and I also think that if it's true for Granite Armor then it's true for a number of other things as well, but it would be a more reasonable argument to pursue than risk/reward ratios.