-Knockback IO!

On the contrary, what I said has everything to do with what you said. I was making a direct comparison to the additional damage mitigation provided by KB, over and above what KD offers, due to the extra time critters spend flying through the air and bouncing around in ragdoll mode, which is quite comparable to longer duration status effects versus shorter duration status effects.

KB offers more damage mitigation than KD. Ergo, the point you're attempting to make is that there's almost no situation in which more damage mitigation is preferable to less damage mitigation.

As I said, good luck with that.

The point I'm attempting to make has nothing in the slightest to do with that, as the "but that's neither here nor there" part should have signified. It's not important to the rest of the post, considering the rest of the post has notions which are self-contained and explained in their own descriptions.

I'm not asking for either the option to remove knockback or for the MANDATE to remove knockback from most melee attacks and ALL AoEs in melee powersets based on the mitigation properties of the effect. I'm asking for it because it's DISRUPTIVE to how a melee character operates. Single-target knockback is rarely much of a problem even for purely short-ranged sets like Martial Arts, and it's easier to, if not predict, then at least account for.

The scatter in AoE knockback, on the other hand, is just disruptive in the extreme. Hand Clap - something which could have made for an excellent power - is gimped specifically because of its scatter. Yes, people will tell you to use it as a cone, thereby using about a quarter of its total land area, yet paying for ALL of its reach even though actually using it as designed, which is to say when surrounded by enemies, HURTS you far more than it helps. A well-placed Foot Stomp can turn the tide of a battle, but when enemies are scattered to the four corners of a room, a Foot Stomp cannot be well placed. Similarly, trying to use Shockwave in an open field, such as pretty much every location in Croatoa, just makes Whirling Claw pointless from that point forward, to say nothing of making Eviscerate less useful by virtue of not being able to hit multiple spread-out targets with it.

Whether or not knockback has mitigation qualities is irrelevant in this aspect, because the presence of high-mag knockback on large-area powers is disruptive to the point of making those powers actually detrimental to use. When I use a power and I consistently hope a particular effect does NOT fire, then there is a problem. It's not too dissimilar from putting a chance for enemy heal on an attack.

That, of course, is not to say high-mag knockback in itself is not a useful tool, but much like Taunt, it's not useful for everybody and can actually get some people killed. There's a reason knockback haters exist, and it's not because they're all idiots.

How useful knockback in general is is not relevant here.

*edit*
I should try adding "Cake is better than Pie and PvP sucks, but that's besides the point." to the start of my posts and see how many people insist that discussions about pie and PvP have everything to do with a discussion on costume design.

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.

It's not ideal, as you have to devote a slot to it, but then I have a LOT dumber things I could be devoting slots to, like damage in Beanbag, endurance reduction in Combat Jumping and actual knockback distance INCREASES in practically any power which has knockback. Technically speaking, turning knockback into knockdown would be an improvement to some powers, so I can see spending the slot of that. Easily. Might actually make me feel less stupid for taking Hand Clap.

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.

Look, Sam. You don't like KB. Fine. That does NOT make INCREASING KB "dumb."

That's just as shortsighted of a statement as:
Or
Why use hand clap - WITH knockback? Oh, hit with a slow so your heal isn't coming up quite as fast. Or your T9 with a crash is about to crash, and you want to give yourself MORE time to recover - since KD leaves the mobs sitting right in melee, where their more damaging attacks tend to be. Just two quick uses that could use a *little more* time than KD can provide... which is given by the distance KB adds.

So how about getting off your "KB is useless and stupid" horse here, hmm?

See my Guides and Tutorials

Tthe magnitude M of a power's knockback is: PurplePatch(S * K * (1.0 + E)) * Clamp(1.0 - R).

Where:
PurplePatch(n) applies the Purple Patch to the value n.
Clamp(n) clamps the range of n to [0,1].

S: A scalar value defined by the power. This may be positive or negative.
K: The character's knockback attribute modifier. The value depends on the archetype, current combat level, and melee vs. ranged. In the current game, this value will range from 0.96 (Blaster/Mastermind/Corruptor level 1 at range) to 2.596 (Tanker/Brute level 50 at range or melee)
E: The sum of all enhancements (after ED) and buffs.
R: The target's knockback resistance

There are four possible results based on the value of M:
M < 0: Grant the target M knockback protection
M = 0: No effect
0 < M ≤ 0.75: Knockdown the target
M > 0.75: Knockback the target some distance based on M


This discussion is about moving a power which normally knocks back a target. For the purpose of this discussion, let's assume an even-con critter (PurplePatch(n) will return n) which has no knockback resistance (R = 0). The magnitude equation is now M = S * K * (1.0 + E).

If the power normally knocks back an enemy, S must be a positive number, and S * K > 0.75.

The question was 'why can we increase knockback with enhancement but not decrease it?'. Increasing KB is simple: simply add enhancement to the power as normal, E will increase, and thus M will increase.

The argument was 'why can't we simply have an enhancement which is negative?'. Look at the equation again. If the powers system supports negative enhancements (and I don't know that it even does), we could create an enhancement to make E negative. And so long as E > -1.0, that would even work, reducing the total magnitude of the power. The problem is that as soon as E = -1.0, M = 0 (and stops knocking things down or back entirely), and if E < -1.0, then the power begins giving knockback protection to the target.

There is no hard cap on enhancement values, nor any way to buff/debuff enhancements. There is no known cap to knockback (positive or negative), though there is certainly a practical positive limit that players can reach, and most critters which are meant to be immobile have -100 KB, and 10000% KB Resistance. (The resistance reduces the KB to 0 anyway, even if someone were to fashion together an attack in excess of 100 KB)

How about no? Moreover, how about you get off my case for playing the way I want to play and asking for more options, hm? Does it burn you so much that I don't want knockback in my melee attacks and that I feel it CRIPPLES the attacks and makes them completely useless for more than once every hour or so?

What, did I kick your puppy or something? How does me asking for an enhancement to reduce knockback to knockdown piss you off so much that you'd insult my intelligence over it?

*edit*
And how does my saying that I have dumber things to slot for, meaning they're dumber to ME do anything to you? My builds, my powers, my choices, my judgement.

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.

In essence, you're worried about a power getting more than -100% knockback enhancement causing problems? Wouldn't the solution be, then, to just give the enhancement a value of -99.99% or something of this sort? Or is there some floor above which knockback mag has to reach in order to have an effect?

If there is a problem with slotting both a knockback reducer AND a knockback increaser, then... Yeah, I can see how that might work wonky, but really - that'd have to be left to player sense to figure out. It seems pretty obvious that you either slot to increase an effect OR to reduce an effect, not both at the same time.

Oh, wait, you mean what if someone slots twice -99.99%? Yeah, that could be problematic, but wasn't there some code in Inventions that only let you slot one instance of a specific enhancement per power? Like if you couldn't slot the same one set enhancement in the same one power six times, but instead had to slot other things from the set? Wouldn't that be applicable to a -knockback enhancement?

Alternately, why not just make this part of a set?

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.

For -KB SO, you can make it offers -99.99% a piece, and a player can only use 1 -KB SO in a power. I believe some tricky things need to be done because I don't think there are any restrictions on how many SO a player can put into their powers currently. But I think it is doable if the dev choose to do so. Offering -99.99% in a certain piece of IO sets is not a bad idea.

The big question, though, is if that little knockback might not actually end up not functioning in too many situations. I don't know enough about how the system is set up, but it seems a little... Odd, to think that, say. 0.001 mag knockback would have the same knockdown effect as a 0.67 mag knockback effect. But again, I just don't know.

While it's true that we have no precedent for "one per power" SOs, I don't think it's actually impossible to have that. If Inventions enhancements can do it, SOs SHOULD be able to. In fact, one of the primary "kludges" with Inventions Sets was that no set could have two instances of the same TYPE of enhancement, so it seems that the system works on a more basic level than having to hand-restrict enhancements one against the other, and basically denies enhancements with the same types of effects.

---

Mostly, though, and this is what I'm getting the most heat: I don't think such an enhancement would be useless. That was my primary concern in years past when this was suggested before - would I really want to gimp a power by devoting an entire slot to nothing more than reducing knockback? And much as people may hate me for it, I HAVE slotted powers for worse things than reducing knockback, and I have furthermore seen powers which allowed me to slot them for things that made no sense at all. Not gonna' fall in the trap of providing examples again, but let's just agree that there are some very silly things we can slot certain powers for, and compared to them, slotting for knockback reduction is not the dumbest thing one could do.

This fills two check boxes: 1. Worse choices exist even today and I do not complain about them, and 2. There are situations when slotting for knockback reduction can be a benefit to a power. As long as both of those are true, then having the choice to do so is a good idea.

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.

There's a difference between "I don't like it" (which if you check the post you replied to I said was fine) and calling it, and slotting for it, stupid, or saying there's no situation where it's useful - both of which appear as general statements as to usefulness (or lack thereof) and judgements of those powers overall, not opinions. And those are what, quite frankly, you're irritating the hell out of me with.

As far as an enhancement that would reduce it? Yes, I *am* against it, as I don't want to put up with teams that insist I *have* to have it even though I play perfectly well - yes, in a team situation, and yes, even with the poor melee players that are SOOOOO disadvantaged by it (except, of course, they're not) - with knockback as it sits now.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Tacking a disclaimer to the end of a statement doesn't automatically make that statement unassailable or unavailable to be addressed in a response. If you don't want a point to be rebutted, don't include that point. It's that simple. And that's what I was responding to, Sam, that point. Had I been addressing your post in general, or any other specific point contained therein, I would have quoted the relevant material and responded appropriately, in line and in context.