Am I the Only One Who Has Mixed Feelings About Inherent Stamina?
By
Adept,
Posted on: 2010-09-11 08:32 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Levels 1-20 are like an uphill trudge. They are the proverbial watched pot from which you cannot look away until it comes to a boil. Getting Stamina early will help, but it will still be a bt of an annoying trudge to climb 20 levels to reach a level of power that seems more fitting for a level 1 superhero. Perception is a key ingredient of grind.
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*My* perception is that levels 1-20 are, by far, the shortest in the game.
Getting a shiny new power almost every mission seems far more rewarding (less grindy) than having to fight hordes of +2's to move the XP bar a bubble, no matter how many shiny powers I have to fight those hordes of +2's.
Heck, if L1-20's too 'grindy', you can find a L50 and get multiple levels per mission; can't do that at L40...
If I quote #'s, they're from City of Data.
Global: @Kazari
It was either Taunt or Purple Triangles of Doom. I stand by my decision!
-BackAlleyBrawler
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The second party understands the mechanics of the game better. There are numerous powers which are very useful additions with only one-two slots, particularly powers which do not increase in very large intervals with additional slotting. Keep in mind that these powers are no longer at the sacrifice of anything else, and this is undeniably a case of power creep. |
Originally Posted by Lord_Thanatos
That last statement is what i don't get about all of this arguing, we have people saying that the extra powers aren't going to do anything because we don't have slots for them and then we have people saying that those 3 powers without slots are going to completely unbalance the game with more power creep.
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For Example:
The third slot of a power is not nearly as powerful as the first two
A Brute with Tough at variable IO's of Resistance;
Tough: 11.3% Resistance with no slots.
14.1% Resistance with 1 Slot; A 2.8% Increase
16.8% Resistance with 2 Slots; A 2.7% Increase
17.8% Resistance with 3 Slots; A 1% Increase
If I had, for example, a Willpower Brute who was sitting at 32% S/L Resistance before this change, and I take Tough after, I will now have 46.1% S/L Resistance with just the base slot in Tough... And that's it. My survivability simply goes up, and the only thing I'm losing in this change is the endurance it costs to run the new toggle.
The Fitness pool has always been a textbook example of how NOT to design a modular character building system. The purpose of giving players a choice of powers is to help differentiate characters so that each player can build a unique play experience that fits their personal needs and sense of fun. Getting a new power should be fun and should give you a new tactical option that changes the way your character plays. Most powers achieve this, fitness does not.
Fitness is a pool full of nothing but static bonuses to base mechanics. They are not fun, they are simply enablers. They don't make the play experience more fun, they make it less tedious. This is an important difference. A designer's goal is to make a fun experience for the player, tedium is never a fun experience. Only a minority of players find resource management to be fun on its own, most people only pay as much attention to such issues as is required to enable the play experience that they enjoy. Running out of endurance basically grinds your play to a halt for as long as it takes for the blue bar to recharge. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of players do not enjoy standing around waiting for a bar to refill so that they can continue playing.
In many ways, it's rather like getting a faster internet connection to stream video. Nobody likes their videos to pause every few minutes to buffer, they prefer a fast connection so they can watch their movie uninterrupted. Running out of stamina is essentially the same thing, it forces you to stop doing what you enjoy and wait.
So, not only is the power itself not fun, the effect of the power doesn't really make playing more fun either, it just allows you to play consistently without having to wait all the time.
I, personally, am glad that the devs have finally realized this mistake and are willing to make a change for the good of the game. No longer will I have to pause my game and stare at a blue bar that seems to read, "Please be patient while your fun is loading."
Definitely going to make most of the content in the game significantly easier.
Also a little worried about how it will affect the relative balance of the ATs. It has the potential to take already over performing ATs deeper into over perform territory, on the other hand it may help to close the gap that had been opening up over the past 6 issues.
Just for example of how this is a powershift, here are some of the changes that can be done.
Softcapped blasters now with Acrobatics , A Pet, holds, and an AOE immobilize. (combination of extra power picks and changes to the epic pools)
Leadership on capped defenders also with pets and mez protection.
Melee in general, making the recharge numbers just got much easier, expect to see more of the deeper picks in the epic pools
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I think that you and I have different opinions of what "grind" means. They certainly were a grind for me, and for many others. That's why so many people were so into powerleveling and farming, to try to get past those levels. For a long time I was sick of creating new characters because they were not fun at all. Having to sprint all over the place and not having any endurance....they were a grind. For a long time all people wanted to do was farm at lvl 50 so I didn't play my high level toons much, and the low level ones were a pain, so I wasn't playing much at all for over a year and if I wasn't so lazy I would have shut off my account. After Ninja Run was available, I finally started playing new toons again and the grind wasn't such a grind. Although, the not having any stamina was still a pain.
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Originally Posted by HacknSlash
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
L1-20 are, by far, the shortest in the game. |
@Joshua.
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fantastic post, kudos.
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Originally Posted by The_Cheeseman
The Fitness pool has always been a textbook example of how NOT to design a modular character building system. The purpose of giving players a choice of powers is to help differentiate characters so that each player can build a unique play experience that fits their personal needs and sense of fun. Getting a new power should be fun and should give you a new tactical option that changes the way your character plays. Most powers achieve this, fitness does not.
Fitness is a pool full of nothing but static bonuses to base mechanics. They are not fun, they are simply enablers. They don't make the play experience more fun, they make it less tedious. This is an important difference. A designer's goal is to make a fun experience for the player, tedium is never a fun experience. Only a minority of players find resource management to be fun on its own, most people only pay as much attention to such issues as is required to enable the play experience that they enjoy. Running out of endurance basically grinds your play to a halt for as long as it takes for the blue bar to recharge. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of players do not enjoy standing around waiting for a bar to refill so that they can continue playing. In many ways, it's rather like getting a faster internet connection to stream video. Nobody likes their videos to pause every few minutes to buffer, they prefer a fast connection so they can watch their movie uninterrupted. Running out of stamina is essentially the same thing, it forces you to stop doing what you enjoy and wait. So, not only is the power itself not fun, the effect of the power doesn't really make playing more fun either, it just allows you to play consistently without having to wait all the time. I, personally, am glad that the devs have finally realized this mistake and are willing to make a change for the good of the game. No longer will I have to pause my game and stare at a blue bar that seems to read, "Please be patient while your fun is loading." |
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Snipped for ultimate truth.
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Originally Posted by The_Cheeseman
I, personally, am glad that the devs have finally realized this mistake and are willing to make a change for the good of the game. No longer will I have to pause my game and stare at a blue bar that seems to read, "Please be patient while your fun is loading."
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I like the idea of having Fitness as an inherent, but I never found felt that the current method isn't fun. At the early levels, even with little slotting, enemies drop quickly. You don't need to max out the damage to be very effective, so slotting some endurance enhancements on endurance-heavy powers make a difference. Most of my characters don't wind up getting to Stamina until their 30's, and then it's only because I have the powers I want.
To me, part of the fun of MMORPGs, and CoH in particular, is tweaking your character so that he's as optimal as can be with your current powers and slots. I don't mind if damage or debuffs or whatever aren't capped until late 20's or early 30's because I enjoy seeing my character get gradually better.
The only thing that concerns me about getting Fitness as an inherent is that to take advantage of it on a good portion of my characters, I'll have to respec them, which is arduous and boring.
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Until you three-slot Stamina with SO-level enhancements, Stamina doesn't solve all your endurance issues. Even when it's three-slotted, you still can't attack indefinitely with most characters unless you have some sort of end reduction enhancements slotted in your attacks, plus some kind of Recover/Endurance bonuses from IO sets, or the Accolade powers that grant endurance.|
Originally Posted by Jibikao
So we get Stamina at lvl 2 or something? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of being a "low-bie"?
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That means the impact of having Stamina at low levels will definitely be felt, but characters are still going to run out of endurance, especially if they don't slot end red in their attacks.
Upshot: Stamina at level 2 will make the lower levels bearable for players used to how their 50s play, but they will still be significantly less powerful.
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I even disagree with the 'lower end' argument. Since you mentioned frankenslotting, let's look at that.|
Originally Posted by firespray
I didn't think about this. I suppose tweaked out high-end builds can surpass what people could do in the days before ED and GDN. However, someone who still plays with SOs or uses frankenslotting, or uses a mix of SOs and IOs, or even people who just use cheap set IOs for the enhancement values and not the set bonuses is significantly less powerful.
That's not exactly power creep. It's just widening the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. |
Pre-ED a player could slot a power with 6 SO's. Assuming an attack power slotted with 6 +3 SO's, that'd be a total enhancement value of about 230% in that one power.
Frankenslotting with set IO's would give the same player a total enhancement value for that 6 slotted power of anywhere from 260% to over 350% depending on mixture of double, triple & quad aspect IO's used.
Granted, the pre-ED player with 1 ACC, 5 DMG is going to hit harder. He's also going to miss more, use more endurance per attack, and attack much slower. Overall, less effective.
In any event, I'm not sure comparing pre-ED and post-ED performance levels really has much relevance to the current concern of power creep that I mentioned. The game has changed. Game mechanics are different. We have new powersets, new AT's, new devs. The overall design 'philosophy' seems to be much different than what it was originally.
I'm certainly not suggesting that this change is going to "unbalance the game" as one poster mentioned, or anything of the sort. Heck, I'm not even opposed to the change. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with my characters with the build flexibility this is going to allow. I'm just concerned about the direction we seem to be moving in. Inherent fitness is not going to be any kind of tipping point for game balance, but I think it does move us further along that road.
At what point does the game become 'too easy'? I think that's a legitimate question to ask, when we have players that can solo Giant Monsters, solo AV's, or solo entire TF's that are designed around a team of 8 players. Heck, a player recently completed the RSF solo, which is arguably just about the hardest end-game content we have.
I recently convinced my sister, who is a vet of several other MMO's including the big one, to come over and check out CoH. I was explaining to her some of the differences about CoH's game mechanics and how the right buffs & debuffs could turn a team into a steamroller, how powerful individual characters could be, and how much fun I thought our game was. Her response? "Well that sounds dumb. What's the point in playing a multiplayer game that is that easy?" She played for a couple weeks, got bored and left. To some extent, I can see her point...
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To me, it's no different than ammo management in your typical FPS, or spell/mana points in your typical RPG. |
Originally Posted by The_Cheeseman
Fitness is a pool full of nothing but static bonuses to base mechanics. They are not fun, they are simply enablers. They don't make the play experience more fun, they make it less tedious. This is an important difference. A designer's goal is to make a fun experience for the player, tedium is never a fun experience. Only a minority of players find resource management to be fun on its own, most people only pay as much attention to such issues as is required to enable the play experience that they enjoy. Running out of endurance basically grinds your play to a halt for as long as it takes for the blue bar to recharge. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of players do not enjoy standing around waiting for a bar to refill so that they can continue playing.
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Sure, it's fun unloading rockets into grunts... but you might want to save some for the boss. Oops, you ran out? <Load last save>
IMO, there should be some penalty for going all-out all the time, and there currently isn't.
If I quote #'s, they're from City of Data.
Global: @Kazari
It was either Taunt or Purple Triangles of Doom. I stand by my decision!
-BackAlleyBrawler
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Actually the penalty currently is you have to build the character specifically to be able to do that, which limits your options in terms of other build choices you could make. In other words, you have to take Stamina, slot for end reduction, possibly throw in some procs on the really end-hungry characters....|
Originally Posted by HacknSlash
To me, it's no different than ammo management in your typical FPS, or spell/mana points in your typical RPG.
Sure, it's fun unloading rockets into grunts... but you might want to save some for the boss. Oops, you ran out? <Load last save> IMO, there should be some penalty for going all-out all the time, and there currently isn't. |
The fact that so many people build their characters to be able to go non-stop speaks volumes for what people think of running dry on endurance. They hate it, and will do whatever they can to build around having to worry about it.
Yes, having Fitness as an inherent will give more flexibility. But people will still have to devote slots and possibly IO's to get that coveted "endless endurance." There's your penalty right there.
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Actually they aren't the same, what you are talking about is long term resource management, most builds in this game AREN'T sustainable endurance wise by themselves while going full out, over the long term. If they were, people wouldn't be building for recovery after getting stamina (lets not get started on the people that have quick recovery that still get stamina). What they are changing is the short term endurance hole people experience from 1-20 due enhancements being crap, and no stamina. Also letting people suffer from 1 - 20 before many builds become workable is not going to help with the new player population.|
Originally Posted by HacknSlash
To me, it's no different than ammo management in your typical FPS, or spell/mana points in your typical RPG.
Sure, it's fun unloading rockets into grunts... but you might want to save some for the boss. Oops, you ran out? <Load last save> IMO, there should be some penalty for going all-out all the time, and there currently isn't. |
People need to stop exaggerating and claiming that the devs giving us stamina is going to remove endurance management from the game. Besides on toons that dont have stamina, I doubt many peoples builds are going to gain any endurance recovery, Hell I expect alot of people to gain some consumption due to taking toggles from leadership.
"An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of BS." -General George Patton
-Lord Azazel
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I can see your point here, but I disagree. First of all, because I have never found resource management on a tactical level to be very fun (this is opposed to strategic-level resource management, like in a game like Civilization or similar), but mostly because resource limitations in FPS and RPG games are designed specifically for the environment and duration of the game. FPS games and RPGs (the non-MMO variety) are designed with a definite beginning and end. The player starts with a certain amount of a given resource, and the designers ration out additional resources according to their intended level of scarcity. If the devs don't want the players to use rockets all the time, they will only place a few rockets in their levels, or make rocket spawns more rare than simple bullets. If a designer wants you to save your Mega-elixers for emergencies, they will only place a few of them in hard to reach treasure chests or as drops from unique bosses.|
Originally Posted by HacknSlash
To me, it's no different than ammo management in your typical FPS, or spell/mana points in your typical RPG.
Sure, it's fun unloading rockets into grunts... but you might want to save some for the boss. Oops, you ran out? <Load last save> IMO, there should be some penalty for going all-out all the time, and there currently isn't. |
This method works because the designer knows exactly what challenges the player will face, and therefore exactly how many of the resources they want the players to obtain in order to succeed at those challenges. The developer can place only 5 mega-elixers in the entire game, and that's okay because the player will probably only need a couple of them, anyway. However, MMOs like City of Heroes do not have a definite ending. Players can play the same characters for months and even years. They may repeat the same limited selection of content over and over, or they may try to consume all the content in the game without ever doing the same thing twice. The players do not have a predictable, finite set of challenges that the designers can reference when portioning-out their resources.
Because of this, limited resources are almost impossible to balance properly. You want every player to have the same experience consuming your content. You don't want one player to breeze through it by expending some sort of unique resource, while another player continuously loses until they give up in frustration because they don't have the same resource. Since it is impossible to predict what resources a player will have going into the encounter, it's impossible to determine how much of said resources the encounter should expend. Unless you want every mission to include a shopping list, this is how it has to be.
Therefore, resources in an MMO are necessarily either specific to the individual challenge (such as a mission where you are given a temporary power that you are meant to use for that specific mission) or are meant solely as an aid, not a requirement (such as inspirations--they are useful, but a sufficiently well-designed character in the hands of a skilled player doesn't usually need them).
The Endurance bar in CoH is not a terribly effective means of limiting character power in most situations. A character will usually not find running out of endurance mid-fight to be a significant issue in the vast majority of encounters. Instead, the endurance bar acts more as an artificial throttle on how quickly a character can transition from one encounter to the next. Since there is no real penalty in CoH for moving slowly through missions, the effect of the endurance bar really doesn't significantly impact a character's effectiveness in most aspects of play. Instead, it just makes the player have to spend more time between encounters, which is neither challenging nor fun. It's just waiting and wasting the player's time.
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Well, there certainly is a benefit to moving quickly through missions, so therefore I would say there is, in fact, a penalty to moving slowly through missions as well. The faster a player can move through content, the greater their rate of reward gain, whether it be XP, inf, merits, drops, whatever.
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Originally Posted by The_Cheeseman
Since there is no real penalty in CoH for moving slowly through missions, the effect of the endurance bar really doesn't significantly impact a character's effectiveness in most aspects of play.
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And yet, somehow, people will still manage to fail at the high end's available tasks, then proceed to cry about it being too hard.
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Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
Only mixed feeling I have about the change, is concern over introducing yet more power creep into a game that already leans toward imbalance at the high end.
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Blue: ~Knockback Squad on Guardian~
Red: ~Undoing of Virtue on [3 guesses]~
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Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
Well, there certainly is a benefit to moving quickly through missions, so therefore I would say there is, in fact, a penalty to moving slowly through missions as well. The faster a player can move through content, the greater their rate of reward gain, whether it be XP, inf, merits, drops, whatever.
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Why not just make every loading screen take five times as long, since thats is basically the same thing.
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No, it's not. Apples & oranges...|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Why not just make every loading screen take five times as long, since thats is basically the same thing.
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Two can play at this game!
Why not remove any travel times from the game completely? We should all just be able to stand in one place and click to instantly enter the mission instance. And there should be a market interface there, and vendors for anything a player might want to buy, and crafting tables too!
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Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Why not just make every loading screen take five times as long, since thats is basically the same thing.
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How about making rest instant recharging instead ? That eliminates the "I'm standing around doing nothing" and the "It doesn't feel super" complaints without actually increasing the power level of characters.
and a pony!
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Rate of reward gain is not really the purpose of playing an MMO, however. If it were, then simply making a game that involved pressing a button to earn points would be a major success. Rewards are meaningless if the challenges faced to earn them are not engaging. There is no reason to even seek rewards in CoH unless your goal is to improve your character to overcome more difficult obstacles.|
Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
Well, there certainly is a benefit to moving quickly through missions, so therefore I would say there is, in fact, a penalty to moving slowly through missions as well. The faster a player can move through content, the greater their rate of reward gain, whether it be XP, inf, merits, drops, whatever.
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In a perfect world, the rate at which you can earn rewards would be directly proportionate to the challenge-level of the content your are consuming. If you face trivial content, you earn trivial rewards. If you face extreme content, you earn extreme rewards. If you are no longer even considering the challenge level of the content, and merely examining the rate of rewards earned in a given amount of time, I suggest that the very point of seeking those rewards has been lost.
Anybody can simply repeat trivial content enough times to accumulate trivial rewards until they equal something significant. However, I would suggest that this sort of play is counter to the intent of the game, and probably an aberrant behavior that only a minority of players actually practice regularly. Sure, there will always be people who farm easy missions to make loads of cash, and if they enjoy doing so, then more power to them! However, is not the purpose of a super-hero MMO to build a super-heroic character, engage in simulated combat with evil foes, and eventually emerge victorious with your hard-won spoils?
What I was referring to when I said, "there is no penalty to moving slowly through missions" was that completing a mission does not become more difficult because you stopped to rest between every encounter. Therefore, your ability to overcome the challenges in the mission does not degrade because you decided to take a 5min AFK to make a fresh cup of coffee. Because of this, the actual challenge level of most content in CoH is not significantly impacted by your endurance recovery rate, because only very rare encounters actually last long enough that running out of endurance is a factor. That vast majority of the time, your recovery rate has little to no bearing on what content you can complete--and therefore what quality of rewards you can earn--it merely imposes an artificial restriction on the speed at which you are able to complete that content. Basically, the only thing it challenges is your patience.
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Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
No, it's not. Apples & oranges...
Two can play at this game! Why not remove any travel times from the game completely? We should all just be able to stand in one place and click to instantly enter the mission instance. And there should be a market interface there, and vendors for anything a player might want to buy, and crafting tables too! |
If those things constrained the game as much as Stamina did? Yes.
Maybe if they wanted to make the game more challenging they should give the bad guys inspirations.
----Example .....
-Archon Rossi
"what this blaster is softcapped?!"
*eats 3 yellows and 3 reds*
"Muhahaa! eat bullet death, squishy!"
I have to say when I read stuff about the game being "too easy" I wonder if I'm not the worst player this game has ever seen. I have never solo'ed an AV, die regularly, and except for one character have never managed to regularly solo anything at settings higher than +0x5, and that is a serious struggle. Rikti Mentalists give me absolute fits. Carnies can rip apart just about any character I have. Malta are an absolute no-go for any but one or two characters. None of my characters solo with bosses turned on. All it takes is two enemies that can chain a sleep or hold and it's "inspirations or death" time. You can only carry so many inspirations so the incentive to continue fighting at such difficult settings quickly evaporates.
Some of that may come down to the ATs I play. I don't have any "flavor of the month" characters. I only have one Scrapper. I have to say though that when people talk about everyone in this game being so overpowered and able to solo this or that I think it's an example of extreme hyperbole.
[EDIT: Although part of this might come down to what the term "solo" really means. I have a character or two who can wipe out a map of carefully selected enemies. I guess this is a kind of soloing, but if this is what we mean by it, of course the game is boring, you're only encountering 3% of it.]
I have exactly one character who uses the pool - my super reflex with leadership pool scrapper. The stamina helps, and the swift and hurdle combined with my quickness allow me to Sprint at 45 MPH normally and over 70 MPH when Elude is kicked in; which is plenty fast for me - I slam into a lot of bus stop booths trying to manuver. Health, however is not my friend, since my defenses inprove the redder I get.
You want to make the game easier for me to play, I guess I shouldn't complain. But I will bring up a few thoughts.
The only feature I ever liked about the pool is that all powers are auto powers. And thanks to diminishing returns - once you three slot, you're pretty much done. So these powers give me minor boosts and allow me to focus slotting elsewhere. Now the plan is to hand me 4 extra powers for free so I can buy 3 clicky powers instead. Clicky powers aren't so good when 2-slotted, plus I have to weigh the benefits of assigning some of my variable enhancement slots to these 'inherent' powers. Make no mistake, this is about stretching your slotting, making powers with 6-slotted IO's all that much more special.
And for everybody asking about extra slots, you already know the answer - you earn 2 or 3 when you level up, there's no mention of changing that rule. If these 4 inherent powers give you one free starter slot, then you get 4 extra slots, but the 64 assignable slots will not change, and there's no game machanic to earn more.
My only real question about this change is will the sleep protection offered by Health be removed, or have the Dev's decided that all sleep powers in the game could stand a little debuffing?
Just call me "The Pool Guy" - cause I believe that power pools are the ultimate in powerset proliferation. Fewer powers to develop and available to all.
"ADVERBS - we define action!"
"ADVERSE - we are action!"