Does super reflexes have to be such a pain pre-30s?
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Another Space,
Posted on: 2010-10-09 22:43 in Suggestions and Ideas
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I wouldn't characterize it that way. I believe when it comes to the base powersets of the core archetypes, the devs have an obligation to make them work in the way the archetype intends when average players play them. That is fundamentally their job. Giving players like us extra game play options that won't work for the average player is a secondary goal, and usually one satisfied only by coincidence.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
So it's just another case of "well, this is why we blocked flight and tport pools from kheldians" all over again.
Ok. |
I don't believe, in this game, in the alternate viewpoint: that proliferation is about adding as many options as possible, and its up the players to figure out which ones they can actually make work. The ship sailed on that design decision back in beta, and its not coming back in this game.
But even setting that aside, how would you handle the complaints from players that they can't make SR work for themselves as a Tanker? Would you tell them that if they can't make SR work as a Tanking set, they just need to play and build better? Because there has to be a line drawn between what the devs can expect from their players, and what the devs have to accept as the capabilities of their players. Its how they judge if they've hit an acceptable performance target with any powerset. Without that line drawn, almost no powerset could be claimed to be underpowered or incorrectly designed.
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A, I don't believe that the complaints you expect would be as heavy as you think.
I can't make stone armor work for me due to the -speed and inability to get over small rocks in the road. Do I see the devs changing SA because of that? Nope.
I do not share your belief that a softcapped tank with capped DDR, tank level base HP and heightened scaling resists is going to under perform the other tank sets by any meaningful amount.
So my response to a player stating that they can't make it work would more than likely be, "you're doin it wrong."
Be well, people of CoH.
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The stone armor issue is not the same thing. That's not a question of performance.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
A, I don't believe that the complaints you expect would be as heavy as you think.
I can't make stone armor work for me due to the -speed and inability to get over small rocks in the road. Do I see the devs changing SA because of that? Nope. I do not share your belief that a softcapped tank with capped DDR, tank level base HP and heightened scaling resists is going to under perform the other tank sets by any meaningful amount. So my response to a player stating that they can't make it work would more than likely be, "you're doin it wrong." |
To calibrate your average player performance prediction skill, what percentage of the playerbase would you have guessed would be unable to play blasters correctly prior to I11, insofar as we judge correctly to be "able to level at a rate at least within tens of percentage points within the average which included them in it in the first place? 5%? 10%? 15%?
Keep going. 50%? Probably not close yet.
Players won't really have to complain about SR tanker performance. If there is a problem, it will show up in datamining. And the devs will be forced to address it. And I use the word "forced" deliberately. That's basically a no-choice situation as I understand it.
If you think the problem won't happen, well, I'm not 100% certain it will either. I believe, though, that there's a better than 50% chance of it (the problem is not the weakness, which I'm 100% certain exists, but rather the degree to which players can adjust to them), and I would thus slam the devs very very hard for proliferating SR and not having a backup plan for tweaking it to address such issues, when they were the most probable outcome. That would be stupid. And if I thought it was solvable by simple numerical tweaks, I'd write them up and send it to them. In fact, proliferation to tankers was one of the things on my mind when I reiterated my suggestion after I9 to add +health to Practiced Brawler.
By the way, one more thing about SR tankers. Unlike scrappers, they don't always get to pick their targets. They have to tank whatever the team and the mission throws at them, most or all of the time. So what happens when the SR tanker ends up having to tank something with a significant amount of non-positional psi? Even Invuln is not defenseless to non-positional psi: it has both the +Health and +Heal of Dull Pain. Its not much, but its something. No tanker has literally *zero* protection to an entire class of attacks. SR would: the scaling resistances don't protect against toxic or psi. Even if you could work around that problem, I consider that to be a serious design glitch for SR Tankers (less so for SR scrappers and brutes). Tankers can certainly have strengths and weaknesses, but I think "zero" is going a bit too far on the weakness scale.
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I consider it a serious design glitch for SR. Just as pets still having a 75% chance to hit us is a glitch. AT is irrelevant in my mind. I never understood why the scaling resists didn't work against toxic and psi in the first place. Hell, I still don't know why tough doesn't provide some level of dam-res to everything. It does in PvP, why not PvE?
Be well, people of CoH.
As far as SR within existing ATs goes, I'd rather that weren't messed with cardinally. Power order reshuffling I can see, but I don't really want the set to become any less about defence by virtue of added resistances or what have you. At most I can see the scaling resistances altered.
I'm not a fan of putting both ranged and AoE defence in the same power and turning Evasion into "something else. I've always considered that to be a compromise Ninjutsu had to undergo to accommodate its other powers. Not really sure what else to say.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Mmm
In general I agree SR is old school, and is suffering from it. I find that the protection effect by not being hit, while good in paper, is not nearly as good as it appeard in practice.
While I fight minions and lts, oh yes, SR is very nice; but get higher than that and stress cracks on the power set commence to become evident. Fight an AV and oh boy, you have no damage resistance to speak off, after all what for, you are not going to get hit. So when the AV hits, you feel it. But wait, some AVs have severe damaging powers that are "auto hit", how you like them crackers partner? And then you have the "super AVs or as I call them the "over the top" Avs whose abilities humiliate other so called Avs. For instance take on Ghost Widow one on one on the TF, and compare her to say Hopkins on the Manticore Tf, I bet you can tell Hopkins is a push over when compared to GW, yet they both are AVs and yield the same exp for their defeat, ironic huh?
But I notice the most, when I am feeling masochistic, and play my MA/SR Scrapper is during an ITF, my defense in the last mission is 100% pointless! Also Romans are good at debuffing defense, but why bother with damage resistance?
Frankly SR needs to be revamped, cottage rules or not, the universe around the power set changed.
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Stormy
SR seems to me to be in the same boat as Force Field. It's the best there it at what it does. Too bad it doesn't do much else.
In the era of IOs where having the ability to get to 20+% defense means the soft-cap is well within reach, Shield and Ninjitsu and other defense sets with other things going for them are just going to be considered better sets.
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Point of order: SR gets 95% defense debuff resistance when built correctly. There's absolutely nothing in the ITF that's a substantial threat to SR except the final Romulus autohit fluffy. Edit: If you're at 45.8% or higher defense to m/r/a.
| But I notice the most, when I am feeling masochistic, and play my MA/SR Scrapper is during an ITF, my defense in the last mission is 100% pointless! Also Romans are good at debuffing defense, but why bother with damage resistance? |
Be well, people of CoH.
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In a similar vein I'm curious of your opinion of Ice tankers when facing quartz eminators. I can't think of another situation where a tanker is so completely shut down from performing their duties than here, while Ice does retain some mitigation in the form of Chilling Embrace's -dmg and Hoarfrost's +hp and heal (and its 20% toxic res is noteworthy when facing DE) for the most part quartzes appear to hit this powerset much harder than could be justified. And its something any potential SR tanker would be forced to face as well. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
By the way, one more thing about SR tankers. Unlike scrappers, they don't always get to pick their targets. They have to tank whatever the team and the mission throws at them, most or all of the time. So what happens when the SR tanker ends up having to tank something with a significant amount of non-positional psi? Even Invuln is not defenseless to non-positional psi: it has both the +Health and +Heal of Dull Pain. Its not much, but its something. No tanker has literally *zero* protection to an entire class of attacks. SR would: the scaling resistances don't protect against toxic or psi. Even if you could work around that problem, I consider that to be a serious design glitch for SR Tankers (less so for SR scrappers and brutes). Tankers can certainly have strengths and weaknesses, but I think "zero" is going a bit too far on the weakness scale.
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Are quartzes too poweful an effect or are they indicative of weaknesses in powerset design?
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I'd say it's a mix of the two.|
Originally Posted by Umber
In a similar vein I'm curious of your opinion of Ice tankers when facing quartz eminators. I can't think of another situation where a tanker is so completely shut down from performing their duties than here, while Ice does retain some mitigation in the form of Chilling Embrace's -dmg and Hoarfrost's +hp and heal (and its 20% toxic res is noteworthy when facing DE) for the most part quartzes appear to hit this powerset much harder than could be justified. And its something any potential SR tanker would be forced to face as well.
Are quartzes too poweful an effect or are they indicative of weaknesses in powerset design? |
When a Sentry/Granite or Quartz lay down their emitters, the buff numbers to their allies seem unreal.
Cairns seem to send their resistances into near cap range and quartz seem to make attacks auto-hit.
But I also know that Ice Armor is an old set, and I believe the old power-set design philosophy was to discourage soloing by leaving holes that could sometimes seem gaping in sets, though in recent times, these holes might not seem as large thanks to IO sets, though the resistance bonus gap compared to defense bonuses leave defense reliant toons with only the option (once soft-capped) to go for recharge buffs and try to kill things quickly before someone rolls a good number.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
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I try not to.|
Originally Posted by Umber
In a similar vein I'm curious of your opinion of Ice tankers when facing quartz eminators.
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I can't think of another situation where a tanker is so completely shut down from performing their duties than here, while Ice does retain some mitigation in the form of Chilling Embrace's -dmg and Hoarfrost's +hp and heal (and its 20% toxic res is noteworthy when facing DE) for the most part quartzes appear to hit this powerset much harder than could be justified. And its something any potential SR tanker would be forced to face as well. Are quartzes too poweful an effect or are they indicative of weaknesses in powerset design? |
I'd give Ice Tankers PvE Elusivity** to soften that and other tohit effects (you could adjust eminators, but it would be better to attack the root problem head on and there are other lesser tohit problems out there), but using Elusivity in PvE is something the devs and I seem to have philosophical disagreement on (ironic, because I intended Elu originally for PvE and only secondarily for PvP).
** To be more specific, I would reapportion Ice tanker protection to be a balance of +DEF and Elu, in a way that didn't significantly buff overall protection but would make those protections less vulnerable to extreme tohit buffs.
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Slippery slope there. Not a good comparison unless you also want travel suppression, loss of base regen during combat, heal suppression and scaling resists and lower AOE damage in PVE.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Hell, I still don't know why tough doesn't provide some level of dam-res to everything. It does in PvP, why not PvE?
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We have travel suppression in pve already. If you're wasting a power pick to get punch/kick in order to be "tough" you should be "tough," not just tough to knives and hammers but weak to everything else. The precedent for the change sits there in the next power, weave, which gives defense to everything.
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Originally Posted by HelinCarnate
Slippery slope there. Not a good comparison unless you also want travel suppression, loss of base regen during combat, heal suppression and scaling resists and lower AOE damage in PVE.
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Be well, people of CoH.
What I would not mind seeing is the ability to slot resist sets to increase the amount of resistance added as you take more damage. This would also free up a couple powers for those that take tough just for the steadfast unique.
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If there's one thing I would describe as "cheap" in the entire game, it would have to be Quartz eminatos. They have, what, 100%-200% to-hit debuff? Why? All that does is render defence pointless, and they show up on a common-spawning lieutenant pretty early in the game. At least Soldiers of Rularuu Watchers have the excuse of being high-level boogie man enemies, but Sentries? Whether or not we solve the problems defence has with to-hit buffs, these have to be slashed, and hard.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Quartz eminators are too powerful. They'd be questionable if they only showed up at level 50 against the top level characters. Showing up in the 30s and 40s is a legacy error.
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| I'd give Ice Tankers PvE Elusivity** to soften that and other tohit effects (you could adjust eminators, but it would be better to attack the root problem head on and there are other lesser tohit problems out there), but using Elusivity in PvE is something the devs and I seem to have philosophical disagreement on (ironic, because I intended Elu originally for PvE and only secondarily for PvP). |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Weave gives defense to all due to a desire to simplify the stacking situation when positional and typed defense was realigned. Weave serves no precedent to Tough until the devs add positional resistances to the game.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
We have travel suppression in pve already. If you're wasting a power pick to get punch/kick in order to be "tough" you should be "tough," not just tough to knives and hammers but weak to everything else. The precedent for the change sits there in the next power, weave, which gives defense to everything.
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And I hope you aren't making an argument based on an interpretation of the name of the power.
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+100% tohit buff, emanated in a 50 foot radius, which buffs all Devouring Earth critters.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
They have, what, 100%-200% to-hit debuff?
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So that basically takes a defence-capped entity (assuming it's not too far above the cap) and essentially floors its defence entirely? Why is this not considered broken? I... Guess stacking Elude on top of everything else might make up for this, but... Will it? Because I haven't noticed it helping too much in the past.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
+100% tohit buff, emanated in a 50 foot radius, which buffs all Devouring Earth critters.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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One of the things I've noticed, leveling a recent Blaster, is that my defense on that character is essentially my offense. I survive mobs by killing them fast, before they can kill me. If I'm fighting DE, and one of them drops a Cairn, my primary means of not dying is negated - you can't kill fast through a Cairn. I have to kill the Cairn first, and then try to salvage the rest of the fight.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
So that basically takes a defence-capped entity (assuming it's not too far above the cap) and essentially floors its defence entirely? Why is this not considered broken? I... Guess stacking Elude on top of everything else might make up for this, but... Will it? Because I haven't noticed it helping too much in the past.
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Another thing I've noticed, when playing my Controllers, is that my defense on that character is essentially my mez. I survive mobs by mezzing them, so I can drop their killing ability down to nearly nothing while I mop them up. If I'm fighting DE, and one of them drops a Fungi, my primary means of not dying is negated - Fungi give mag 10 protection to Stun, Sleep, Immobilize, Hold, and Confuse to all DE in the radius. I have to kill the Fungi first, and then try to salvage the rest of the fight.
I guess Trees of Life aren't a big deal, but other than that, DE Emanators are ruinous. Those characters will get wrecked by their particular weak points as bad as a Quartz wrecks an SR. Not everybody gets to be strong against everything, and sometimes there are enemy groups that are bad matchups for specific characters.
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Depends on what you mean by "make up for this." A critter under one instance of this buff (its possible to have more than one in theory, but it would have to come from a critter from an adjacent spawn not the same spawn) would be at 150% tohit before accuracy. Regular soft-capped defense (+45) means nothing: you're still at 105% tohit. Soft-cap plus Elude (45%) would be 90% defense, and the critter would be at 60% tohit before accuracy. Not the ceiling, but kinda high. Maximally slotted Elude (~70% defense) would be 125% total defense and drop the critter to 25% tohit before accuracy. You'd notice that helping, but you'd also notice not being at the floor also.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
So that basically takes a defence-capped entity (assuming it's not too far above the cap) and essentially floors its defence entirely? Why is this not considered broken? I... Guess stacking Elude on top of everything else might make up for this, but... Will it? Because I haven't noticed it helping too much in the past.
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It was nasty when emanators could buff their own kind. Two quartz and two cairns in a dense overlapping spawn and unless you were really lucky or really quick thinking you could kiss your perma-eluded butt goodbye.
(The quartz would be hard to kill because they would be double-buffed by the cairns, and the cairns would be hard to kill because they would be resistance buffing each other, so there would be no quick path to eliminating them, *and* in a dense spawn as soon as you killed one of them another LT would probably drop a replacement somewhere random. Fun fun.)
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Punch isn't a punch? Kick isn't a kick?|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Weave gives defense to all due to a desire to simplify the stacking situation when positional and typed defense was realigned. Weave serves no precedent to Tough until the devs add positional resistances to the game.
And I hope you aren't making an argument based on an interpretation of the name of the power. |
let's go the other way, then, A: Why doesn't tough grant some level of dam-res to the other types? Why should S/L be the only type of DR we can get from pool powers? What's the rationale behind that? Is that rationale relevant in today's game?
Be well, people of CoH.
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On my first play through I played as a blaster, and I didn't even *know* the emanators did anything. Buffing tohit meant nothing to me, and I didn't play in dense enough maps to see multiple cairns: they would fall to AoE usually fast enough so I didn't notice they were making the other DE harder to kill. Plus, knockback and stun (Energy/Energy) tended to dilute the effects of the emanators.|
Originally Posted by MagicFlyingHippy
One of the things I've noticed, leveling a recent Blaster, is that my defense on that character is essentially my offense. I survive mobs by killing them fast, before they can kill me. If I'm fighting DE, and one of them drops a Cairn, my primary means of not dying is negated - you can't kill fast through a Cairn. I have to kill the Cairn first, and then try to salvage the rest of the fight.
Another thing I've noticed, when playing my Controllers, is that my defense on that character is essentially my mez. I survive mobs by mezzing them, so I can drop their killing ability down to nearly nothing while I mop them up. If I'm fighting DE, and one of them drops a Fungi, my primary means of not dying is negated - Fungi give mag 10 protection to Stun, Sleep, Immobilize, Hold, and Confuse to all DE in the radius. I have to kill the Fungi first, and then try to salvage the rest of the fight. I guess Trees of Life aren't a big deal, but other than that, DE Emanators are ruinous. Those characters will get wrecked by their particular weak points as bad as a Quartz wrecks an SR. Not everybody gets to be strong against everything, and sometimes there are enemy groups that are bad matchups for specific characters. |
Then on my second character, which was MA/SR, it was as if I had never seen these things before that made my defense disappear and made it ten times harder to kill anything. I actually thought they were a completely different version of the DE until I figured out what was going on.
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Sorry, but "why not" is not a justification for adding anything to the game.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Punch isn't a punch? Kick isn't a kick?
let's go the other way, then, A: Why doesn't tough grant some level of dam-res to the other types? Why should S/L be the only type of DR we can get from pool powers? What's the rationale behind that? Is that rationale relevant in today's game? |
The general justification is that power pools were never intended to offer everything, but only a limited set of things. That's why there are no ranged attacks (unless you count teleport foe as a ranged attack). No resistance to non-physical damage. No +Health. No ally speed buffs. No AoEs. No holds. The *only* argument for suggesting that its even reasonable for the power pools to have resistance to all types, and by extension Tough should, are the power pool defense powers, which as I said don't have defense to all types explicitly by intent, but as a consequence of fixing stacking problems.
And the stacking problems were not a question of some types being more or less represented, or some things benefiting more or less than others. Neither of those were or are problems. The specific problem was that because defense came in two non-stacking flavors (positional and typed) it was possible for some things to get basically no benefit from the power pool powers at all. Except for corner cases, literally zero. FF got nothing from Weave, for example, because Weave was melee/ranged, and FF was all (damage) typed. And moreover, the devs actually *tried* to fix this problem without giving all the powers everything, but they gave up when they decided there were too many corner cases to deal with (in my opinion, incorrectly: there were several ways to fix those that were simple at the time).
Nevertheless, the defense powers set no precedent that breaks the fundamental principle of the power pools, which is that they offer some stuff, but not everything, and supplement but do not replace primary and secondary powers in general. They are, except perhaps for travel powers, all "nice to have" and not "need to have." By definition, if you think you need something, you should ask for it to be added to your primary or secondary power set. If you think you need it, by definition it *shouldn't* be in the power pools.
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Interesting. We're getting inherent fitness because everyone apparently "needed" it enough to take it on the vast majority of characters made.
Every melee character I make has tough. I must need it, right? So your solution is that I ask for S/L dam-res to be added to every melee mitigation set, right?
Problem is that I wouldn't do so. Nor did I ever ask for fitness to be made inherent.
Now I will accept that you would prefer a better case to be made for the addition of f/c/e/n/t/p dam-res to tough than "I want it."
I want to know why it was added in PvP. As you state, changes don't occur without a reason, so what was the reason? What was the cause of the change? Is that change relevant to PvE? If so, why wasn't it changed there as well?
I'm not going to hand-wave away a change especially when I'm curious as to whether it should be more widespread.
Be well, people of CoH.
So it's just another case of "well, this is why we blocked flight and tport pools from kheldians" all over again.
Ok.
Be well, people of CoH.