Stone Armor: What I'd Do

Thats not entirely true. Tell me, what happens if you die in this game? You are forced to go back to the hospital (unless you have a recharged self-rez or an awaken and are not surrounded by foes) and suffer some xp debt. XP debt means that for a while you will be slowed in your xp gain.

So, "risk" in this game means "you slow down" (walk time from hospital + time to clear debt)

What does Granite does? It slows you down. You may still argue that even with all the build options the granite tank still is slower than an equally IOd non-granite tanker. So, solo, you wont be earning rewards any faster or even anywhere near as fast as an equivalently built tanker, ever. This technically means you are walking dead!!! All your reward earning is slowed down just for being stronger.

The true problem comes in teams and while designing elite raid content, as I noted in a previous post a few minutes ago.

Everyday tanking for teams may also be an issue to an extreme, but mobility is way more important in every day team tanking than many players realize. At that point Granite pay it's penalty, or at least his team might.

Oh well...okay you're right. I was coping Phase Shift, but think you could perma it, I have no idea why I thought that.

Yeah, but I came into the thread late.

Obvious, but not necessarily correct. Increasing the number of enemies you're fighting increases reward in a strictly proportional way, especially when leveraging the extremely generous AoE balancing equations. Increasing their threat level, on the other hand, does not, because in addition to being more dangerous, +2 enemies take more time to kill, and the lower your damage is the worse this effect becomes. I'll grant you I've never farmed with a Stone Armor combo specifically designed for it, so I can't say one way or the other whether damage output can be increased enough to beat the time-reward curve. I might throw some math at it. But my off the cuff guess is that it's still pretty dismal when compared to some other strategies I could think of.

Granite Armor is not the only way to get enough mitigation that you cannot possibly be killed while earning rewards. The threshold for infinite AFK survivability is rather lower.

Actually this is exactly the question. I want to point out that there actually is no way to make yourself perfectly unkillable for an indefinite amount of time. You can be killed through PFF, and you can be killed through Granite. Of course the requirements for either to happen are quite extraordinary. On the other hand, it is not at all difficult to create a situation where you are not going to die no matter what you do, yet you can still earn rewards. If Granite is broken for this specific reason, then so is every other scenario where you can receive rewards with zero practical risk.

I already gave you this one, so I'm not sure why you keep asking. Yes, Granite Armor has no equal. It is by no means the only power that has no equal. This is not in and of itself a very compelling argument. "Precedent" is a poor choice of words anyway - all Issue 0 powers were "unprecedented".

If you were to twist my arm, though, I would say that PFF is the closest single power analogue. There are three major differences between PFF and Granite, of course. First, PFF is numerically superior to Granite, at least in terms of what it does by itself - Rooted, Stone Skin, and Earth's Embrace probably put Granite up a bit, but then Aid Self + PFF probably bring it almost back to neck and neck. Second, PFF is a tier 1 power, while Granite is a tier 9 power. And third, PFF has OAS.

Well, the real threat here is not so much Stone/Stone Tankers as, perhaps, Fire/Stone or SS/Stone Brutes leveraging Fury and high damage AoEs. But the larger point, that risk is balanced against reward/time and not reward per se, is valid (to the point where I assumed it was what Umbral meant in the first place).

I thought of Hybernate (and Quantum Flight and Phase Shift) when I made that statement, but I didn't think it worthwhile to bring up. Powers like Personal Forcefield and Hybernate exist as toggles, but their balancing mechanics basically FORCE their users to turn them off, either because it's pointless to turtle with no outgoing action, or because the game shuts down your toggle for you. As such, they are still uptime-bound.

What you are proposing (and what Granite Armour actually is) is a power that's is not uptime-bound. A power with that level of protection requires crippling penalties to balance it, but by instituting these penalties, you effectively DO make it uptime-bound, because you're forcing people to turn it off if they want to participate.

You stated that, as long as it allows you to tank/taunt, you have no problem with an offence-crippling mechanic. The problem is that tanking/taunting IS an offensive action, and as such breaks your own rule of removing offence entirely. You could argue that it does no damage and so should be permitted, but a variety of status effects deal no (or negligible) damage, and yet they are clearly classed as attacks. And, to be completely honest, causing enemies to attack an unkillable target while ignoring other, less unkillable players is functionally identical to control in all but a few corner cases (large-scale undirected AoE, basically).

The point of a tanking Tanker is to redirect enemy attacks onto himself and take on damage that could have otherwise been going into his team-mates, all the while ensuring not to die. The ability to force enemies to redirect their fire IS an offensive action as much as a hold is. In fact, oftentimes it's BETTER, because almost nothing has protection from Taunt effects and Tanker and Brute Taunt powers cost no endurance and are auto-hit against enemies, as well as recharging easily fast enough for them to be stacked a number of times.

In a single sentence: If you want to allow a Tanker to live literally indefinitely, you will have to trade away his ability to not just deal damage, but also to actually tank.

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.

As has already been mentioned, increasing the number of enemies you fight increases your rate of reward gain significantly simply because of how AoEs operate. The number of enemies does indeed go up, but the time needed to kill them all goes up rather a LOT more slowly. If you can survive large numbers of enemies, then your AoE (any amount of AoE, really) will keep your kill speed almost consistent. In fact, Stone/Stone is a bad example, but practically anything else, such as Electric Melee, Battle Axe, Fiery Melee and so forth will have a much easier time thanks to better AoE damage.

Additionally, with better survivability, you are facing less need for resting and recuperation in more hostile conditions. A Fire Tanker may be able to handle as much as a Stone Tanker, but he'll be getting hurt, possibly KILLED a lot more, slowing him down. The Stone Tanker, by comparison, will just keep marching on. Fighting more enemies as he does and killing them not noticeably slower than he would fewer (with the right Primary choice) would and in fact DOES result in better gains.

What's more, the purported "speed decrease" isn't as much as people try to claim it is. Again, this can be made up in a variety of ways with not too much thought or build space given to it, meaning a Granite Tanker's actual speed isn't that much lower than any other Tanker can achieve.

Again, my complaint with Granite Armour is not that it performs poorly. If anything, it performs far too well. No, my complaint is that it SUCKS. I HATE having to use this power, not because my efficiencies drop, but because it irritates the hell out of me how it's designed.

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.

Elude is problematic largely because of its history, at this point. When Elude was turned from a PFF clone into a defence-granting God mode, enemy base to-hit was 75% and +anything enemies got more to-hit than even that. Of course, I'm not sure how easy it was to soft-cap defence back in the day when SR toggles gave (off memory) around 30% defence, but back then we were basically trying to overbuff defence to such an extent that enemy to-hit additions couldn't punch through the softcap. This is no longer the case, as JUST elude is capable of capping your defences, to the point I have to wonder why my SR Scrapper still has his 3-slotted for defence.

This is more of a legacy problem, though. It's similar to Unstoppable in this regard, in that an Invulnerability character (Scrapper or Brute, actually) is capable of capping his own resistance to physical damage, making Unstoppable's physical protection unneeded. I'm still not sure why Elude comes with only an endurance penalty when Unstoppable has both that AND a hit points penalty, but that's neither here nor there.

[qutoe]So let's suppose there's another risk floor out there: the sustained participation floor. We don't know what it is, yet, but we'll assume it's somewhat higher than PFF, which means it's probably somewhat higher than Granite as well. So, given that Granite is "too good", what I'd like to do is try to work out how good it can be and remain a toggle. Because, to repeat myself ad nauseum, I rather do like being able to turn on Granite and become as tough as the game will allow me to be and still participate in fights. I like that Stone Armor does not have a timer on its peak performance. That is a draw for me, and it would be the one thing I would most deeply regret seeing disappear.[/QUOTE]

This is where I have to tap out. I tend to do numbers for fun from time to time, but I'm not one of the smartest guys that do comprehensive, build-by-build survivability and damage statistics. At the very least, I haven't done my homework on this one.

At this point, I don't think we have a clear answer as to what an acceptable level of infinitely sustainable protection is for the ability to participate without doing damage. At this point, I can't give you a good level of survivability, but I suspect we could start by formulating the problem systemically.

Given a Rage-style 9999% damage debuff for as long as the toggle is up, how high can we push the numbers of infinitely sustainable protection?

Me, I'm not sure. I know the Rage debuff isn't nearly as bad as it looks, for one because temporary powers ignore damage buffs (and debuffs) and for another because the Super Strength user is more than capable of abusing status effects and tank. The ability to tank was actually why the Rage crash went from an Only Affecting Self effect to a damage debuff. However, that's a minor crash on a relatively more minor power intended to be a nuisance, not a severe penalty. I'm not sure how much protection this effect in itself would buy.

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.

Phantom Army surely is another headache but has just one "saving grace", it's not controllable. Unless you dealing with just one target, it's not reliable at keeping aggro.

Also it's easier to create encounters that defeat Phantom Army, all they have to do is create special encounters that can go through Phase Shift and defeat the ghosts easily. Given how they are meant to be illusions, its even very conceptually realistic for extremely strong enemies to not be fooled by their existence and be able to dismiss them all together.

There actually is no such rule. That's why Granite Armor is allowed to exist at all. However, powers generally have conceptual reasons for existing as well as numerical/performance reasons for existing. They are not necessarily etched in stone (har har), but they are independent reasons. In other words, no numerical argument can directly overturn a conceptual decision, and no conceptual argument can directly overturn a numerical decision.

Elude's conceptual design states that its a temporary, emergency use overdrive. Making it perma with any numbers would therefore be a violation of its conceptual intent. And you can't give a numerical reason for overturning its conceptual intent. You would have to give a conceptual reason for overturning its conceptual intent that was convincing to the devs. That aint easy.

Right now the conceptual intent of Granite Armor is to be a power you *could* use all the time but has sufficient downsides to make that decision non-trivial. In other words, its *supposed* to be something that players will choose to sometimes use, and sometimes not use. Some players could choose to use it all the time and others almost never, but across the range of players it should be used some percentage of the time that isn't 100% and isn't 0%. Traditionally, of course, the devs have not had a lot of success crafting powers that generate that situation (cf: Instant Healing, Rage, every version of Elude, Unstoppable, and MoG prior to I4, Granite Armor).


My own opinion on Granite Armor itself and Stone Armor in general is that I like conceptual diversity in principle. I don't think there is anything wrong with a powerset that has a tier 9 that can be toggled on all the time as long as its balanced appropriately. So I don't think its true that just because Granite can be made perma it is intrinsicly flawed. But I do think the penalty for running Granite is too easy to trivialize. However, changing Granite to have a penalty that *isn't* too easy to trivialize is likely to anger players used to the way the power works now. To be blunt: based on the kinds of suggestions I've read over the years, not just for Granite Armor but for other powers like Rage, I believe that most players (who have any opinion at all) believe that an "appropriate penalty" for anything is something that looks like enough of a penalty on paper to pretend to be a penalty without actually being something they personally couldn't completely negate in actual play.


Everyone has a gripe, and this is mine. Choices are supposed to have consequences, or they aren't really choices. While some players feel that consequences (ne penalties) aren't fun, the lack of them is the largest lost opportunity for fun for me personally. Had Champions Online managed to incorporate that one singular thing about the original Champions power system, instead of setting the entire thing ablaze and then claiming they had always intended on making a fire-walking game, I might have ended up spending at least as much time there as here.

Again: that is my personal preference opinion. Its not necessarily what I would recommend to the devs given the current state of this game and its playerbase.

Curious, what builds that are not def based on their root can soft cap every defense type? Last time I checked even the most drastic IO defense builds end up with huge holes somewhere.

As for rouge estimates, I did some stuff a while back, little has changed since then so lets see, without any pool powers applied this is how my calculations displayed tanker primaries:

For the purpose of this test, those numbers don't include pool powers and assume that all damage types in the game are equally prominent. Things change drastically when you do a proper weighting of damage types but I always get questioned on the validity of my weighting.

Anyways for simplicity I named the two scores Dash and Alpha. Alpha means how much damage you actually reduce without resorting to healing and denotes how good are you at taking an alpha strike. The higher the better.

Dash is more meaningful for most as it means how much you can regenarate and heal coupled with how much you mitigate to give a better idea of how much steady DPS you can sustain and how little downtime you will endure. This later number actually is more significant when it comes to measuring leveling speed and reward earning.

I sorted the lists by the Dash but you can see Granite wins in both, by a huge margin.

This accounts for 5 foes in melee range for those set that care.

Back in I2 when Elude was changed to the defense click, it was perma-able with perma-hasten and 2-slot recharge (and quickness). I want to say it was 300s recharge and 120s duration. Back then, base tohit scaled with rank:

Minions: 50%
Lts: 62.5%
Bosses: 75%
AVs/Monsters: 90%
Pets/Turrets: 105%

Elude itself gave about 45% defense**, which could be four-slotted to about 81% defense. Passives were giving about 7.5% defense, so if you detoggled yourself (or respeced out of them except FF) you could have 6-slot passives and 4-slot Elude for about 16.5 + 81 = 97.5% defense.

Sounds like a lot, but remember: pets and turrets had 105% base tohit. Also: back in I2 we were running invincible full team missions that could spawn +5s. Each level higher added +5% tohit to the critters, so a +5 mission would be spawning:

Minions: 75%
Lts: 87.5%
Bosses: 100%
AVs/Monsters: 115%
Pets/Turrets: 130%

Even passives + Elude wouldn't soft cap you against +5 AVs or pets, pseudo-pets, or turrets (i.e. don't dance in front of the Malta Engineer). But you could be floored against practically anything else, and you could, if you were really serious about it, stack power pools like combat jump. Or you could go the extra mile and keep all the toggles, driving you to 127.5% defense (assuming the toggles were slotted for endred).

Which would be fine except in things like the Eden trial, or anything else with a lot of DE in it. Those annoying +100% tohit buffing crystals really used to tick me off. I actually tested once and discovered back then (before Real Numbers or even accurate measurements of tohit) that a minus twelve DE could hit right through normal SR toggles almost as if they were not there when buffed by one of those.


** There is some room for error here. At one point we were told Elude was granting 60% defense, which would imply Scale 8 with the scrapper 0.75 modifier. But its also possible it was Scale 6 and misreported without the modifier taken into account. There is conflicting information about it, and it was a long time ago. However, the 45% defense number better matches my observations of the time, particularly as perma-Elude went up against things even higher than +5.

This is the explicit reason why I have been saying, from the very beginning, that, if Granite Armor were to ever be rebalanced, one of two things would happen: either it wouldn't be perma and it wouldn't have any particular crippling weaknesses except for a crash or a crash analogue (taken care of with loss of nearly all mobility in my version) or it would be perma capable but have penalties so severe that it would be largely unplayable. No penalty to a god mode that provides survivability as high as classic god modes like Unstoppable is supposed to not have a drawback that you just can't get around: the classic hp and endurance crashes are something that kill you quite often, and the fact that you're likely to die when it drops is one of the mitigating factors to its use (rather than prevent death, Unstoppable and others like it tend to simply delay death). Because you can't enforce a crash on a toggle without making it a temporary toggle, the only reasonable penalty for it (which would, by the very necessity of it being up all the time be worse on average than the penalty of a power that is only up part of the time; it's for this reason that defense is weighted less heavily in balance calculations than resistance and for good reason) is going to be something extreme that would force players to have significant reason to not do so.

I'm not advocating it specifically, but an example of a progressive penalty that would encourage players to bail out of Granite eventually without forcing them to do it explicitly, and could be balanced around offense vs defense, would be for Granite - after some set amount of time - to apply a progressive, asymptotic debuff to player recovery. So the longer Granite was toggled on, the closer player recovery approached zero. The lower recovery got, the slower your activity rate would have to get for any power that burns endurance (like attacks).

Interestingly, that means it doesn't impair the power at all as a weird form of out of combat costume option. But it applies a debuff very hard to escape from: only respites and endurance recovery (true recovery that actually adds endurance points like transference, not things that buff recovery rate like stamina or speed boost) would allow you to function indefinitely under Granite.

I'm not sure if this is "extreme" or not, but its not the only way to get creative with mechanical balancers. Its just an example. And there is another "advantage" of sorts to this kind of balancing mechanic: its extremely difficult to trivially min/max around. You could argue about whether that sort of penalty is better or worse than Elude's, but in general it would be very hard to prove, because the qualitative differences swamp the quantitative ones (or rather can be made to do so with the right selection of numbers).

That's a dangerous game to play, though, because you never want to deploy something you yourself can't figure out. I have an idea of how to quantitatively balance such an effect, but I wouldn't want to do so by simple trial and error like was done with Instant Healing.

My comments come from playing my Super Strength/Shield Defense Brute. He is built for capped defense to all positions, as well as some resistance (Potential numbers similar to the proposed change). He is very susceptible to one-two punches from Heroes, and spike damage from multiple bosses. That is just not something I want my Stone Armor to have to deal with. Earth's Embrace will help in this area, however spike damage is still a real threat without large amounts of resistance

You're right. In this case I am pointing to resistance and saying, "I like how Stone Armor plays currently, with its ability to gain high levels of resistance. Don't get rid of that, because that is what I prefer. Get rid of something else."

While a good example, I believe this situation is too different. With perma Domination there was a specific goal to meet that changed game play significantly. Gain enough recharge and you get this bonus.
Stone Armor can be improved in many different ways, there is no (to use a PvP term) flavor of the month in terms of a build with set bonuses.
I think a closer analogy to domination would be getting perma Eclipse on a Warshade. There is a specific goal to reach using recharge reduction set bonuses.

I'm with you with this point.


I'm afraid this is one area where I believe we won't see eye to eye on. Yes I agree that if there was an exploit or loophole that allowed a build to vastly outperform another it should be closed, but in my opinion getting IO's into your character is not a loophole.

Could you give an example of a situation of a situation from above?

I guess I took it the way I did because in the beginning of the thread there were several comments about 'Shield Defense can reach these levels of defense and has huge offense!'

Also he said "...protection levels shields can generate;" which to me says that he is looking what an IOed build can reach.

Sorry, what I meant to say what that at their peak sustainable survivability (In this case the Stone Armor would be in Granite debuffing its own damage) Willpower will do more damage, and Stone Armor will be more survivable. The point I was trying to get across is that to acquire that higher survivability, Stone Armor does have its drawbacks.

All other sets would would fall into the same boat. When all the sets are looked at from a peak sustained survivability standpoint, Stone Armor is number one. While in the state of peak sustained survivability, Stone armor also comes in with the least amount of damage. That to me shows a level of balance, though obviously not enough.

After reading Umbral's post I believe I understand where the disconnect between us is coming from.

Tier nine to me = Power in the ninth tier of a power set
Tier nine to you = God Mode

In that case I completely agree with you. Having Stone Armor's lesser armors and Granite Armor with its levels of defense and resistance still intact would be way overdoing it.

In my initial paragraph I said "That was obviously deemed overpowered, so instead of reducing the defense you got from PFF, they reduced the offensive capabilities of the power." I was showing that concessions were made to the offensive nature of the power rather than the defensive. I admit that I was thinking to myself reduced=nullified, but I didn't think I had to make that clear in the paragraph because that wasn't the point. Sorry for the confusion!

If we are looking at it from a Brute's perspective, than yes it’s pretty easy to overcome the -run speed as well as the -damage. I just wanted to point out that while Hasten will counteract Granite Armor's -recharge, it will only do that for 120 seconds. At which point Granite Armor gets its -recharge back hindering Hasten's recharge as well. Though if you consider buying things like Luck of the Gambler's easy, then the point is moot since all three can be IOed away.
I guess I can’t reasonably gauge the balance factor that -jump inflicts because teleport has always been my favorite travel power.

While I don’t agree entirely, I would understand if the drawbacks were intensified.



While I haven’t been annoyed by Stone Armor (most probably because of my personal play style) I do agree that annoyance should not be a large factor in balance.

P.S. Sorry for the long post delay, I have been tied up with things the past few days!

I did not say that you were altering the focus of the set. I am saying you are changing the set so now it only has defense to fall back on (with slight resists with Granite Armor on).

Nor, if I may point out, is it a defense based set. Stone Armor has mitigation in many areas including defense, resistance, and regeneration.

I am afraid I do not understand what you are talking about.

This...
...is your only mention of increased resistance. Even if we look at it from the standpoint of being relative to defense increases, it still is not increased more.

Yes, I do understand this part.

Why? If the defensive numbers were lowered than I would need to shunt more set bonuses in to make up for the lost survivability, which is something that can be accomplished versus making up for lost resistance numbers. That in turn would mean I have less resources for set bonuses in other areas such as recharge reduction and damage.


Where have I mentioned that I play my Stone Armor tanks in perma Granite Armor? I haven't, and in fact I don't. Nor are you able to comment about my skill because you disagree with me.

Are you sure? No where that I can find does he even mention Shields level of protection except for my excerpt, which says nothing about it being too high (just the opposite in fact).

I'm afraid I personally cannot do that however I will ask someone else who I believe has an application to do so. I will get back to you with the results.

Obviously not, however we differ in opinions about just how many apples and dollars we have.

This:
This is why I have been referring to things being transferred. In the end you want to user to be able to be able to reach the same amount of defense, with a less powerful version of Granite Armor.

Alright, I will try not to refer to things as being transferred.

Sorry, but I am more used to using the God Mode when referring to a god mode. It did not 'click' with me that you were not using tier nine the same way that I do.


Moment of Glory is Regeneration's tier nine. It falls in the ninth slot of the power's power set. This classification is not arbitrary; it is designed in-game.

In terms of if it is a God Mode or not is interesting. The strength of the set is spread around the powers quite substantially meaning the tier nine power could be designed weaker because the rest of the set is already very powerful. Personally I still think of Moment of Glory as the God Mode, however it's apparent that out opinions here differ as well.

What do you mean by this? It would seem to me that the God Modes of recent sets (Strength of Will and One with the Shield if you agree that they are God Modes) have been designed around the fact that they will be used more often.

Unstoppable's up time = 33% (Slotted)
Strength of Will's up time = 40%

An effective endeavor, however I must point out a point that I made eairler in this post. The limiting attributes of Granite Armor can be compensated for, however options for set bonuses must be used up in order to do so. After the limitations have been erased, the player can then build for what they want in any area.

A build that does not have drawbacks can build upon what they already have. They do not have to use resources to even the scores. An example of this, is the fact that build that does not have to make up for Granite Armor can achieve perma Hasten (Whether or not they want to is beside the point for this argument). In order to do the same in Granite Armor, you would need approximately 260% +recharge (With 6 slotted Hasten) which is unattainable (or in the case of the Force Feedback proc, unsustainable) by IOs alone.

In this case it comes down to: Does Granite Armor give up enough for what it gets? To which you answer, No.

This is irrelevant to the point I was trying to get across.

So am I to believe that they are all designed to do the same amount of damage? Obviously not. Fire Imps do more than Singularity in terms of damage; however, the Imps can't hold a candle to the levels of control the Singularity puts out.

The point is, they are all different and function in different ways. The different God Modes of different sets can be created the same way, by making them different and functioning in different ways.

So if some players are not detoggling Granite Armor when it is unneeded then they are only handicapping themselves.

Why should I leave Granite Armor on when I am facing a group of weaklings that cannot take me down if I use just Rock Armor itself? Without Granite Armor I will be able to take them down much faster due to not having the -65% recharge, -30% damage, and -30% runspeed.

If someone leaves Granite Armor on in that situation, why should we care? Had I been teamimng with them, my Stone Armor tank would have wiped the floor with them, before the he was finished walking over to them. The change should not be a forced downtime.

If someone is leaving Granite Armor on in that situation because turning it off would not net a meaningful pace decrease, then we have a problem. (Assuming this change is not due to teammates.) I personally don't see this happening.

In my opinion, it is a problem of semantics, and:
For the sake of argument, I will concede that the -damage is easy to nullify.

I think you are overlooking a major issue with +recharge. The person who wants to live in Granite Armor won't care that over time Hasten + 45% recharge will even out the recharge penalty. They want to completely get rid of it, meaning at least 65% +recharge from other sources (at which point we are assuming they are alright without perma Hasten).

If we look at it from the perspective of someone who does not want to live in Granite Armor, they are still faced with times where they will find themselves in Granite Armor, and not have the bonus of Hasten to even it out (unless they choose to never be in Granite Armor without Hasten active).

I don't think that averaged +recharge bonuses are applicable to this situation.

I can agree if they take Teleport.

Due to unavailability (or game mechanics, whichever way you look at it), IOs cannot undo Unstoppable's drawbacks (as I am sure you already know).

As someone who has built-roleplaying characters around the idea of maintaining perma Granite Armor, I do understand how hard it is to nullify it's effects.

I believe this is one issue we will not see eye to eye on.

Really? Because my first Stone Tanker was because I saw someone in Granite Armor decided "Must Have!!!"

I would rather keep:

• The ability to keep Granite Armor toggled.
• The ability to maintain the same peak survivability (even if it means evening mitigation out across the board and having all the armors able to be on at the same time).
• Lose offense to make up for the defense.

However, in my opinion, the loss of offense should put us closer to the level of offense we have now rather than the complete nullification of it as in the case of PFF.

P.S. I realize, Umbral, that I might not have been explaining things clearly enough; however, I would appreciate it if you would lose some of the snarkyness. I also care about what happens to my Stone Armor users considering I have five and am planning to make more.

I would say it is beyond snarky and into the downright rude category. Some comments, IMO, border on outright personal attack. However, others saying as much in many other threads hasn't stopped him, I doubt your kindly worded PS will do so either.

Which is where the set has always been without Granite Armor. Seriously, the set does not exist entirely on the basis of Granite Armor.

Yet, if you actually look at each of the powers of the set, you'll realize that there are more defense based powers than resistance based powers and that, other than Granite Armor, the defense powers are more powerful. Granite Armor does not follow the standard design of the set. It is not the foundation that the set is built around. You're imagining that the set is based around resistance more than defense because Granite Armor is. It isn't. Look at the actual powers.

Which pretty much proves my point.

Okay, let me do some math for you. The change to Stone Skin increased the resistance from 10%(s/l) to 11.25%(all). That's granting 11.25% +res(f/c/e/n/t/p) and 1.25% +res(s/l). The +def changes amount to 4% +def(all but psi). Using the simple exchange of 2% res = 1% def, the resistance is still increased more overall. Please. Learn what you're talking about. Please.

And how is that problematic from a balance perspective? Your entire problem here is that you want the devs to make it easier for you to be stronger while in IOs regardless of whether it makes sense for the set to do so. For the set to have resistances that would make you happy, the powers that grant +def exclusively would need to have +res added to them, which generates some very amusing complications with having too many different attributes of numerous powers competing for a very small number of enhancement slots. Try imagining this if you can: every power in the set requires both defense enhancement, resistance enhancement, and end redux in order to be both effective and playable. Unless you want to force players to frankenslot to be effective, you're going to have a horribly designed set.

I can comment on your inability to actually look at the set without operating under the pretense that Granite Armor is the entire set.

The point of the thread was less that Shield was too hard to kill but rather than Shield was doing too much damage for the decreased level of survivability the set manages.

Just use the survivability charts that I linked in the very first post. They're right there so that you can even do it yourself and possibly learn something.

Where does anything in that state or even infer that anything is being transferred out of Granite Armor? What you quoting is me stating that the level of survivability as a whole (not the levels of defense and resistance independently) was remaining roughly the same. You can have the same level of survivability amongst two different sets without having to transfer anything around at all. Hell, even if you just did some basic math and compared the reductions to Granite and increases to the other powers you'd be able to see that it didn't work that way.

Yet anyone that has actually done any respectable degree of analysis concerning survivability would disagree with you completely. If you have ever played a */Regen, you'd realize that MoG is simply another click power that contributes to your survivability while IH is the actual God Mode. Simply compare the use of any of the other God Modes to the use of each independently and it's rather patently obvious.

Do you honestly believe that Unstoppable only ever receives +rech from the standard slotting? Even with SOs, you get Hasten. Yes, SoW has better uptime than Unstoppable (which actually has an uptime of 35% rather than 33%) however the uptime of SoW can never have better uptime than 40%. Unstoppable, with only Hasten (using averaged +rech contribution), manages 43.2% uptime. The changes to disallow the reduction of recharge time was done to enforce a low maximum uptime ratio than is possible with the traditional god modes.

Why? */Regen is naturally allergic to -rech and -regen debuffs (along with being painfully allergic to -def thanks mostly to not having any substantial native mitigation and complete reliance on damage recovery). There isn't a way to work around those weaknesses so why should there be any reason that any weakness of a set should be able to be worked around with IOs? If anything, there is less reason because otherwise, as I have said before, the weakness is pointless.

Actually, it's entirely relevant. Your point was using a flawed metaphor in an attempt to describe the relationship between the different god mode powers. The relationship that you are suggesting (insofar that the difference between Fire Imps summoning 3 pets and the others summoning a single pet) is not appropriate if you're attempting to use it to describe how Granite Armor should be allowed to be permanent while all other god mode powers are forced to be temporary.

Just as all pets deal a different amount of damage and provide different degrees of additional functionality, so do the various god modes provide different degrees of additional survivability along with different extraneous benefits (greater mobility, mez effects, greater recovery, etc). Damage that pets provide would be a commensurate comparison to the survivability contributes that the god modes provide, and the control and debuff functions that the pets provide would be commensurate to the secondary attributes of the god modes.

However, the biggest problem with your comparison is that you're attempting to draw similarities between a power that summons 3 weaker pets compared to those that summon 1 pet and a power that provides a level of survivability all the time compared to those powers that provide that same level of survivability part of the time. Your metaphor is fundamentally flawed because it's assuming that 3 pets that deal roughly 1/3rd of the damage all of the time is supposed to be fundamentally different from 1 pet that deals full damage all of the time. A comparison that would have actually been appropriate would be attempting to find a power that deals triple damage part one third of the time so that you could compare it to a power that has the same fundamental average contribution but operates on a different uptime and use ratio.

If some players allow themselves to find themselves in situations when it is unneeded to detoggle Granite Armor they are similarly handicapping themselves because, unlike every other set, they're fully capable of ensuring that they're unkillable against specific groups because they have a reliable and constant grade of survivability that doesn't vary substantially. You're honestly assuming that players have no control over what enemies they face. This is fundamentally untrue.

Why wouldn't you simply make sure that you are facing large numbers of enemies that would allow you to leverage your increased survivability and the incredible efficiency of AoEs? We've got the capability to control spawn sizes and levels as we see fit. Hell, this is the exact reason why Scrappers solo so well compared to Blasters. If survivability had no effect upon the ability to generate rewards, the only thing that people would increase would be damage.

You honestly think they won't care that, while Hasten is active, they get to ignore the -rech of Granite completely? If you honestly believe that the only reason people take Hasten is because they want to have it up all the time, try looking at 99% of the builds out there. A vast majority of them don't really care about getting them permanent. In fact, most builds can't even manage it without completely screwing up the build. Most builds care about getting a decent uptime on Hasten and that's what would matter. In the case I stated, the Granite Armor tank would be running with 20% -rech 44% of the time and 50% +rech 56% of the time. Even with the 56% uptime, the degree of "penalty" suffered by 20% -rech at worst is minimal, especially since you spend more time with a net total +rech benefit rather a penalty.

Also something to remember is that the 20% -rech isn't applied at the end: it's applied at the same time as all other +rech or -rech values. Assuming decent IO grade enhancement (~70%), the 20% -rech penalty is only increasing the recharge on a power by ~12%. On an attack with a recharge of 4 seconds (a standard tier 1 attack), you're talking about the difference between the power recharging in 2.35 seconds and 2.66 seconds.

I'm going to bring this up again because it's important to me. Why do you believe that any problem with a power or set should be able to be completely mitigated with IOs and even then not having the entire build focused on mitigating those problems. You just admitted that it's impossible to build around the limitations of the god mode power. Why should Granite Armor be any different?

Ask anyone and they will tell you, right now, that the reduction in offensive capability now is largely token. By your own admission, the reduction in damage is virtually negligible. The recharge penalty is similar easy to get around, especially if you're willing to go with a suboptimal attack string rather than the best one. It's not like that -rech is going to stop you from saturating your attack string if you have more than 3 attacks.

If Granite Armor is allowed to remain permanent, it is not going to remain the same penalties. The penalties are laughably low right now compared to the increased survivability the power provides. You can survive through the situations that are only possible otherwise with PFF or Phase Shift and yet unlike them, you can actually attack and deal damage. You're not going to get to be unkillable (i.e. maintain the same level of peak mitigation) while being able to attack and keep the power perma. Pick two of those because you're simply not getting all three.

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P.S. I realize, Umbral, that I might not have been explaining things clearly enough; however, I would appreciate it if you would lose some of the snarkyness.

I will lose the snarkyness when you start actually becoming knowledgeable enough in the topic of discussion that I'm not having to constantly explain things to you that you are either unwilling or incapable of understanding. I have no problem treating people with respect when they are actually deserving of it, and I don't have to speak down on their level just so that they'll understand.

If you want me to stop treating you like you're an idiot, stop acting like one. Unlike some people, I don't suffer fools.

The point of bringing up Permadom is to demonstrate how FOTM builds are handled. Dominators, as originally designed, were not intended to have high outgoing damage, hence why they were given a low damage mod. However, Domination till offered a significant damage buff, and when people found out they could make that permanent, they did. This, then, became baseline, to the point where non-perma-Domination Dominators started getting odd looks. The response from the development team was basically "That's how you want to play it? Fine, that's how you'll play it. Let's just let in all the other folks who can't go after that specific Inventions build." In the process, they managed to burn those with perma-double-stacked Domination, but that was an "oh, well" moment. They also managed to burn Psychic Shockwave by culling its power and redistributing it among the rest of Psychic Assault.

Granite Armour is in much the same situation. Granite Armour IS Stone Armour, and my Stone Brute can't go through two teams without someone gasping that I'm not Perma-Granite, or indeed asking me to be. It's come to the point where, penalties or no penalties, design or no design, Granite Armour is what Stone Armour is. This has become the baseline. At this point we can either go the Domination Route by instituting higher-than-normal but lower-than-granite protection to the whole set, sustainable all the time, constantly, we we can go the Elude/Unstoppable path and make the armour's drawbacks crippling or the armour itself temporary. Personally, I'd vote for the former, but I'd lie if I said I wasn't biassed.

Example: Poison Gas Trap from Traps used to spam-spawn pseudo-pets, one for each person in range of the trap at the time the trap was activated. Getting, say, a dozen enemies to walk over the trap at one time created a LOT of pseudo-pets. Putting damage procs in Poison Gas Trap would, therefore, put a damage proc on EACH pseudo-pet, resulting in a LOT of damage for a power that wasn't actually designed to deal damage to begin with. When this was fixed, people immediately cried out that this was the only thing holding the set together and that now, without it, the set was DEAD. This on a power that, on its own, is just about "good" but not spectacular, not in my opinion.

This is what Granite Armour with set-negligible drawbacks is. It's a power that's supposed to bring one kind of functionality that players are perverting into bringing a very different kind of functionality. Even though the power CAN be run all the time, set design makes it pretty clear that it really wasn't supposed to be, much in the same way as Instant Healing. In this case it's not just sets that are the problem, but the mere fact that players can negate the drawbacks distorts what Granite Armour actually is. Look at it this way - playing with JUST your set and not reaching outward, Perma-Granite SUCKS, and a set-restricted character would represent your average casual player, one who plays by the seat of his pants and does not do build plans and calculations. As such, you are creating a higher-than-intended baseline that people aren't actually going to achieve if they play naturally. Hence, the Domination conundrum.

In fact, I've long maintained that any single set that ends up hinging on one power to the point where, if this power were changed or removed, the set would become "broken" in people's eyes... That is a set that is badly designed. I mean, sure, there are key powers in every set, like status protection and so forth, but no set should be MADE by a single power. Whenever a set entirely revolves around a single power, that's a red flag for balance problems. Either the set is so weak that's its one saving grace, or that one power is so strong that it overshadows the rest of the set. Neither of those is good.

The key problem with this is that AoE damage gets magnified the more targets you have to inflict it on. Something like Tremor does damage per target. It would do ten times the overall damage when used on ten targets as it would do when used on one. Higher levels of survivability allow one to take on more enemies, thus allowing one to more easily multiply one's AoE damage, thereby increasing one's overall damage beyond the levels of lower-survivability sets. Furthermore, sets with lower survivability face more downtime and more of their uptime is taken up with non-offensive actions like self-healing and control.

All of that is to say that SURVIVABILITY ITSELF increases damage outpit, hence making up some of the difference that its own debuffs are trying to make. In other words, Granite Armour counters the very debuffs that are meant to counter it.

And there is also the other point - damage is not the only offensive capability a Tanker or Brute has. Control effects count as offence, as do Taint effects. Clearly, they are slowed down by the recharge debuff, but they still operate at full power. The ability to tank while in Granite Armour is itself something I view as bordering on an exploit. The limiting factor to a Tanker's ability to tank is his own survivability. It is unreasonable and impractical to expect to remove survivability out of the equation and still be able to perform as a tanking Tanker. Granite Armour pretty much removes survivability out of the equation, hence why a proper penalty would take your ability to deal damage, control and tank right along with it.

But that would result in a pretty crappy power, now wouldn't it?

Simply opening up Granite Armour to stack on top of existing shields is insane just on its face. The power is designed to function on its own and itself provide superior survivability to all the rest of the set combined. It's built on the expectation that you CAN'T run the other shields along with it. It's only natural to lower its stats if you let it stack. That's not the question.

The question is, how low do you make them? You can make them pretty low, but if, upon stacking with existing armours, you still get up to the level of old-style Granite Armour numbers, then you have effectively accomplished nothing. You are still seeing Granite Armour levels of survivability, it's still permanently sustainable. Nothing has changed but semantics. Whether it's one toggle or six, that level of survivability maintained constantly is the problem.

If you want Granite Armour perma with negligible drawbacks, you need to give up survivability. If you want Granite Armour perma with its current survivability, you need to accept more crippling drawbacks. If you want Granite Armour with its current survivability and negligible drawbacks, you need to give up its ability to be up all the time. You just can't have all three like it is now. And I assume that's a major reason why this hasn't been touched in ages. It's a hornet's nest of GUARANTEED player unhappiness.

Designing sets for one AT and then porting them to another without accounting for how that AT plays is probably the WORST practice of game balance that I can cite in this game. If I had a penny for every time I've been told that "Yeah, well it's great on my <other AT>!" when I complained about a power, I'd probably be swimming in coins like Scrooge McDuck. And this happens with practically every new powerset they make. Just recently, people kept telling me how great Dual Pistols debuffs were on a Defender and how well they stacked with Defender primaries, so OBVIOUSLY they were worth the balancing costs, all the while me asking why my Blaster should care how much her inferior debuffs could stack with powersets she didn't have. This is bad design all around.

As such, I'm citing Brutes, because for them, Granite Armour is just a bad power choice. Granted, some people try to tank with their Brutes, but really, that's not what they're designed for. You can try going with a Petless Mastermind or an offensive Defender, but you can't expect game design to promote this. This is my major beef with this. I can see why Granite Armour would be popular for Tankers, but every time a team-mate tries to tell me to just stay in Granite and tank, I want to dropkick him in the mouth.

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Basically, I feel Granite Armour is the Instant Healing of recent years. Nothing has been done to it partially because it's a controversial matter and partly because touching Granite would necessitate retouching the entire set, and that just takes a lot of development time.

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.