Stone Armor: What I'd Do

I realise that what I'm suggesting is a pretty sever breaking of the cottage rule, and probably general redesign as well. However, it's probably the one solution I like the most, because it's a case of eating your cake and having it, too. It should allow Granite Armour to still be usable for any needed period of time and usable without its annoying penalties AT ALL, so in this case, it's actually getting better. However, it keeps the power balanced in the way I perceive it was originally intended to be, in that you need to turn the armour off in order to be mobile, and nothing says immobility like an immovable anchor that provides your armour only in a certain radius around it.

I'm more than positive people are going to cry foul because you're essentially FORCING them to fight outside of Granite Armour, or at least wait exuberant amounts of time between advancing to the next spawn. The problem is that pretty much any change you make to Granite Armour will have to come either with a serious slash at the power's effectiveness, which will piss people off, or with some kind of mandatory or heavily-enforced mechanic to get the power to shut off.

In essence, anything you do to Granite Armour WILL break current playstyles. I'm trying to devise a roundabout way to retain as much of them as I can, meaning the armour's full strength and it's ability to be kept up as long as necessary. If SOMETHING has to give, then I'd rather it were mobility issues, as that's the only thing that doesn't take away from the sheer unkillability of Granite Armour as it is right now.

Quote:

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 disagree, Umbral. I think the max end reduction would be a great way to enforce the paradigm (since players will pretty much self detoggle to either fight or because they were fighting) without either A) Forcing them to or B) Making the power less powerful while it's on.

-Rachel-

Actually I kind of agree with Umbral, but at the same time he may be missing the point.

It's true that no matter what changes you make to any power/set in this game, including pure buffs, people will complain (see the changes to Psi Dominators). So making changes with an eye to minimizing complaints is pointless.

On the other hand, if a power needs to be changed, one should take the opportunity to improve the power overall as much as possible.

By 'improve' I mean 'bring in line with current design philosophy and taking advantage of current knowledge and tech...preferably without breaking the Cottage Rule'.

I'd like to see the man patient enough to permanently run a toggle that prevents flight, jumping, and teleportation, and caps run speed at 5 feet per second.

I just ran a quick numeric expeirment that ran through my mind. Taking into account that the devs naively expected everyone to slot all attacks with 3 damage, 1 acc, 1 rch and 1 end redux, and if we assume the devs knew what they were doing, how big was the intended penalty?


Well, rechage wise, all attacks under granite would had ended at 68% recharge and 168% damage, while the regular non-granite attack would had 195% damage and 133% recharge.

With a simplistic analysis that omits many points the devs didnt think off back in the day, this means that the granite build was expected to have twice the recharge (195%, meaning about 49% less damage) as the non-granite build and 15% less damage for a theoretical total of 49%+15% = 64% less damage than the regular build, or just 36% the damage of a non-granite.

Keep in mind the numbers I posted earlier, there, Willpower permanently surrounded by 5 foes only can take 21% the DPS a granite tanker can take before it starts dying. Keep in mind WP is a beast and it came in way later under higher survivability standards.

May sound OK, until we change that build just a tad. A single extra recharge SO in every power instead of the end redux would turn change everything drastically. The Granite tanker suddenly can do 45% the damage of a SOd tanker of any other type. I guess that's not too bad, though.

At this point we can certainly say the set can trivially become 33% more offensive than the devs intended. Keep in mind, if rooted was turned on the granite tanker was expected to not be able to move at all, rooted was a self immob back then.

Now we jump into the world of IOs, without doing any recharge intensive builds and just basic frankenslotting, we get the granite to be 51% of what the non-granite with identical slotting would be. Not that overpowered at first.

But this all falls apart the minute the granite build picks more powers. You see, the standard build may just use 3-4 attacks consistently, the recharge penalties for offense only apply as long as there are no more powers available. Add more powers and things change and now are only constrained by the DPAS of all powers combined in an optimal attack chain, cant just do simple calculation here, I'd have to jump into my attack chain calculations to see what happens and every melee set would behave differently but in any case the penalty would be way less than I hinted above.

Since right now i'm a bit idle, I'll go ahead and input those numbers through my calculator!!!

For this test I'll look at Battle Axe, just because!

My calc says that with a 66.6% recharge, battle Axe has a ST 1.6 score. That accounts for buildup spamming.

Lets add Granite's Debuff and the score goes down to 1.3.

The use of more attacks took it up to 81% of an equivalent offensive tanker but having about five times the sustained immortality of a willpower tank with 5 foes around.

With SOs and just by using more attacks than the WP would have. Lets not even get how much stronger than the other tanker sets this is.



Edit: Forgot to put the damage debuff in my calculator. Changed.

Stars: did you throw IOs at the WP survivability numbers, or does that not have as much of an effect? I know that attacks get more of a benefit from frankenslotting with four aspects to enhance, as opposed to most defensive toggles' two (and Granite's 3).

Also, I'm still not seeing how a massive uncircumventable movement penalty won't prevent people from living in Granite. Add an unmodifiable 2 or 3 minute recharge time on the power, and it ends up being tactically equivalent to, say, Triage Beacon: a great power to use if you expect to be fighting in one spot for a good long time, and one that you can keep active in a given spot for as long as necessary, but not something you use just because it's up. At that point you can give it whatever buff numbers you need to get it between "useful" and "breaks encounters". The advantage over click powers is that you can run it for as long as you need it within a given encounter; the disadvantage is that you can't carry over the remainder of the duration into another encounter.

Not everyone would want to take such a power. It's pretty situational. Not everyone takes the other tier 9s, either, so no problem there.

Edited to add: The Huge body type Walk animation would be great for the movement animation while in Granite - it'd prevent the Baywatch Run effect when your movement speed is low. Just saying.
Edit 2: It's also worth noting that, for whatever benefit it may give, the WP can drop some attacks for Tough, Weave, Aid Self, Physical Perfection, Darkest Night (well, come GR...) etcetera. I'm not sure how a WP with additional survival powers compares to a Stone with additional attacks, either. Probably still unfavorably, but that'd be an interesting idea for a tradeoff target.

That's good, and you might be able to simplify it even more by having the power be exactly like current Granite upon activation, then instead of applying a gradual debuff, just apply a larger self debuff after x amount of time.

Then you have your 'panic button god mode' and you know that you have exactly, say 3 minutes to defeat the AV before you drop down to a level of mitigation slightly better than running the other toggles.

It's still a power you want up all the time (since it's as good as the rest of the set put together) but at the same time you only want to activate it when you really need it.

May still want to play with the recharge on it, though.