Too much Alpha?
By
AnElfCalledMack,
Posted on: 2010-12-02 14:47 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
Thank you all for excellent and thought-provoking replies. Especially the ones with some number-crunching to show the actual effect.
What I had in mind was along the lines of the "farming the TF in 15 minutes vs. 4 hours reply". Along with the various 'law of unintended consequences' formulations.
In past games I've noted how absolutely ingenious a portion of the playerbase will be in milking absolute advantage out of anything that comes along. Something along the lines of "If I can fill X% of my defense needs with this one Alpha slot, then I can move these 4 slots here, IO for more global recharge and accuracy (since I need less defense), skip Weave and add Y".
Then me and my 4 SG mates who've all done the same can now run this TF in half the time, get mondo merits and rewards, market them fast, and become BILLIONAIRES!!!
(singing "Well I'll tell you all a story 'bout a Hero named Jed...")
Well, ok, so lots of players do that already. 
Mostly I was getting at unintended trivialization of existing content, distorting the marketplace even further than it already is, and setting up conditions where people might say "We want 3 more for TF, Alpha's only".
Those kind of things. I think that the replies here show that even with more slots to come, the system is well thought out and maybe not as powerful as it seems at first glance.
Much appreciated, carry on with the ubernosity!
Too many alts to list
Every server but Pinnacle
Black Belt in Altoholism, Master of Indeterminancy
(although how it got in nancy I've no idea...)
In response to your comment about speeding through to get merits and then sell the stuff, and the state of the market, I think the market should be stabalizing and fixing itself soon. People are now adopting a "kill through" attitude for TFs so they can get shards. With a huge number of players killing instead of speeding, we'll get a lot more items on the market.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Depends on which one:|
Originally Posted by AnElfCalledMack
Katie, I crunched the numbers above. A Musculature Boost (the common version) is about a 9.5% damage buff - slightly worse than Scrapper Assault. A Core/Radial Musculature Boost (uncommon) is a 14% buff, while the Very Rare damage boost is 24% - a permanent small red inspiration. Substantial, but not game-breaking by any standard.
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The Musculature Core Paragon is (.45*.667)+(.45*.333).15=32.25% to damage. You're correct about the Musculature Radial Paragon (.33*.66)+(.33*.33).15=23.65
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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Sorry, a permanent medium red inspiration if you take Musculature Core. Still not all that crazy - one medium red doesn't make you unstoppable, though it is a nice boost.
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Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Depends on which one:
The Musculature Core Paragon is (.45*.667)+(.45*.333).15=32.25% to damage. You're correct about the Musculature Radial Paragon (.33*.66)+(.33*.33).15=23.65 |
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While this will happen to a small extent, I was doing some of the math for a /SR Scrapper last night. IIRC, the +Accuracy/+Defense Ultra-Rare which gives +20% Defense would give an additional 2.2% Defense to any of the three Toggle defensive powers (Focused Fighting, etc) assuming they are 3 slotted with Luck of the Gambler Def/+Recharge, Def/End and the Defense IOs which puts the powers right in the middle band of ED. That's certainly a nice boost but far from game breaking.
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Originally Posted by Bittovan_Odduck
Something along the lines of "If I can fill X% of my defense needs with this one Alpha slot, then I can move these 4 slots here, IO for more global recharge and accuracy (since I need less defense), skip Weave and add Y".
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Beowulf -
Too many Alts, not enough 50's. Story of my life...
If there is a real risk of upper tier players pulling away from the pack and content being scaled up to accommodate them, it comes from inflation making the invention sets less and less practical for casual players.
The incarnate system so far appears to be very casual, and if anything it mitigates the effects of the invention system. As far as I can tell, it's a powerful equalizer.
That being said, the upcoming AoE power (check the going rogue site) and the possible pet and other such abilities might have a multiplicative effect with IO bonuses, so maybe that will shift the balance back to the marketeers/hoarders...
When it comes down to it though, the only purples I have in my current character are confuse/sleep (well, I have a damage proc too) and I don't think even a purpled character has me beat by any significant margin on overall power, not to mention purples push you so far into ED territory that a power with a full purple set will get very little out of the non-ED part of the alpha slot, and those purple sets tend to round out enhancement so the benefits of boosting a neglected aspect of a power isn't as relevant.
Then there's the fact that the Alpha Slot's effects go away when you exemp under level 45. Since, you know, the Alpha Slot is treated like a level 50 power. So it won't have any effect on the majority of the content in the game.
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You don't think IO'd characters go through content faster? Much Faster in my experience.|
Originally Posted by Nihilii
And again, IOs play a small if not insignificant part in speed. There's many more efficient ways to optimize/exploit (pick a word based on your perspective) the game mechanics, i.e. picking specific powersets, using better tactics, using inspirations/temps, upgrading hardware, the list goes on.
If anything, the IOed AV soloers are *helping* you as they probably spend much more time in an arc than the usual average, that is if you believe that the devs blindly datamine, use the obtained data without taking in consideration outliers and make changes based on that and that alone (I somehow doubt that is how it really goes in their office). |
My IOd characters can race through story arcs/O missions way faster than my generic IO's characters.
One Heavily Io'd character on a team makes a noticeable difference on most pugs.
Eight well IO'd characters can spilt and take on 8 person mobs by themselves, and not die anywhere near as much as an average pug might.
Not sure why you moved from 'any content' to AV soloers. But yes, AV soloers would be slower than most teams, and if thier times were counted, they are affecting the game in general.
"Does anything anyone do in their mission affect the game at all ? ". That includes people who are IO'd, well organised, have nukes, are hopeless but not hopeless enough to fail the task, etc etc.
Do I think the Devs don't take into consideration the outliers, No, not well enough. I don't think they ignore to the extreme you're projector, but its not based on the mythical causal player times either. That failed taskforces/story arcs arent included in data, the little reward the Redside taskforce return, the already mentioned eden TF giving 7 merits show that to me.
I don't suffer from altitis, I enjoy every minute of it.
Thank you Devs & Community people for a great game.
So sad to be ending ):
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Nothing you are referencing here has much to do with IO's. Your talking about strategies that people use to manipulate the mechanics of the TF. Prime example; Katie Hannon TF, Run this TF with a dark/* def and an cold/ice def. The ability to A. know the exact spawn point of the witch mob B. drop a tarpatch +sleet +any rain power and the apply tohit debuff -def -res and -regen to Mary and this tf goes from 30-45 min down to 15-20. Add in melee AOE, 1 stealth character with ATT and it just gets faster. No IO's or fancy builds or anything. People were doing speed runs of katie, eden and the sewers long before IO's and now the tactics learned LONG ago are just reapplied. Don't blame IO's for players who expose weaknesses in the games design.
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Originally Posted by Mega_Jamie
Your missunderstanding what your quoting...
What they are saying is that if the Devs datamine specific things their results will get squiffed by min/maxers. For example they datamine TF/Arc times to determine merits rewards. If 1000 teams complete a specific TF 4 hours. but 100 teams complete it in 15 minutes. Then the results arnt too squiffed, average runtime is about 3.65 hours. But if those 100 teams each decide to farm the TF 10 times because its soo easy. then your average runtime for that TF drops considerably. to 2 hours. Now all they have to do is heavily farm that TF at a rate of 15 minutes a go more readily than casual players who know it will take them 4 hours to run it will do it in. And you've got a steadily decreasing time in the TF. Look at the Crystal Titan (Eden) TF. 4 hours time limit and then it fails, do the Devs count failed attempts in their calculations? possible when it is timed, but also likely not. Why? well the whole TF gives a lousy 7 reward merits. Why because you can do it in under 25 minutes with a half decent team that knows what they are doing. This can and will also be applied to how tough enemies should be. if a large enough (while still being minority) proportion of the playerbase trivialise enemies (softcap at 45% on squishies, perma PA etc etc) then you will find more enemies with defence debuffs, or massive tohit. Or recharge Debuffs, or taunt resistance. |
"If a system can be exploited, it will be exploited. And if a developer thinks their system cannot be exploited, it'll be exploited like a new actress in her first porn movie." Sanya Weather MMORPG Examiner
Or, you know, the Dev's could just look at median time to complete a TF, rather than average.
"Men strunt �r strunt och snus �r snus
om ock i gyllne dosor.
Och rosor i ett sprucket krus
�r st�ndigt alltid rosor."
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That would be a disaster, groups that can farm them do them much more than casual players, so the median could be silly.|
Originally Posted by Arilou
Or, you know, the Dev's could just look at median time to complete a TF, rather than average.
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Consider a set of numbers like you'd have got for the eden trial:
7 8 8 8 9 9 10 30 60 70 90
Median 9, average 28
I'd rather it was balanced off about 60 which I'd consider a "normal" playtime but that's not going to happen. Balancing it off 9 minutes would mean the only people who did it more than once were the speed teams, so it would never get rebalanced.
Close the exploits. If you want to, shut off some of the speed opportunities, but balance off a compromise between speed and casual, so that both camps will still do the TF.
New posi is a much better TF than the old one, but I do it exactly once per toon as it's stupidly under rewarded. I used to do old posi much more often as it had sensible rewards (and I actually enjoyed it).
To get back to the original subject, yes IO builds can make a huge difference to competion time for TFs. A defence softcapped blaster or permadom can chew through stuff relatively safely at a stupid rate, so as said earlier, the team can split up and do kill alls faster.
Alpha slot is much less of a problem as it can only be used on level 50 TFs.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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And those same people, with IOs, do those same speed runs significantly faster as a team with just SOs would.|
Originally Posted by James_Donner
Nothing you are referencing here has much to do with IO's. Your talking about strategies that people use to manipulate the mechanics of the TF. Prime example; Katie Hannon TF, Run this TF with a dark/* def and an cold/ice def. The ability to A. know the exact spawn point of the witch mob B. drop a tarpatch +sleet +any rain power and the apply tohit debuff -def -res and -regen to Mary and this tf goes from 30-45 min down to 15-20. Add in melee AOE, 1 stealth character with ATT and it just gets faster. No IO's or fancy builds or anything. People were doing speed runs of katie, eden and the sewers long before IO's and now the tactics learned LONG ago are just reapplied. Don't blame IO's for players who expose weaknesses in the games design.
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I am not sure why you guys are arguing so heavily against this. No one is saying tactics don't matter, just that IOs do too.
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What's "significantly faster"? 20%? 10%? Because I doubt you can get a 100% improvement, like, say, doing an Eden in 3 minutes - and yet 6 minutes Edens have been done on SOs.| And those same people, with IOs, do those same speed runs significantly faster as a team with just SOs would. |
On the other hand, your average PuG running through Eden takes, or used to anyway, about 2 hours or so. 6 minutes compared to 120 minutes - do I need to spell out the math here?
There's really no big argument to have. IOs can be a crutch helping players who don't know/abuse (again, pick your word based on perception) the game mechanics perform better, but for those of us who already did, the difference is ridiculously small. Most of what you can get from IOs, you can get from insps/buffs/debuffs, and insps/buffs/debuffs also offer more than what you can get from IOs.
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BTW, KHTF was nerfed in i19. |
Originally Posted by James_Donner
Nothing you are referencing here has much to do with IO's. Your talking about strategies that people use to manipulate the mechanics of the TF. Prime example; Katie Hannon TF, Run this TF with a dark/* def and an cold/ice def. The ability to A. know the exact spawn point of the witch mob B. drop a tarpatch +sleet +any rain power and the apply tohit debuff -def -res and -regen to Mary and this tf goes from 30-45 min down to 15-20. Add in melee AOE, 1 stealth character with ATT and it just gets faster. No IO's or fancy builds or anything. People were doing speed runs of katie, eden and the sewers long before IO's and now the tactics learned LONG ago are just reapplied. Don't blame IO's for players who expose weaknesses in the games design.
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Second mission requires escorting Ami to the exit now.
Seems to me that most people are missing the real balancing act the Developers are trying to walk.
Short version:
Comparing the incarnate powers and levels to level 50 characters is missing the point. You need to compare them to theoretical level 52s 55s, and all the way up to a theoretical level 70.
Long Version:
In most MMOs the level cap goes up. From what we've seen the Incarnate slots carry temporary level adjustments, making us act as if 51, 52 etc. Think about the difference between a level 45 Malta Gunslinger and a level 50 Malta Gunslinger. Think about the effects on a player leveling up from 45 to 50, getting 2 new powers and 9 slots and the extra HP, higher damage numbers, longer Mez powers, etc.
Does slotting the top end damage in the alpha slot equal the same increase in damage output of going from 45 to 50? Not even close. From 50 to 55? No, but the two pseudo levels help a ton in that category.
If we assume that all of the incarnate slots will have +2 level shifts then the pseudo level cap is eventually 70 +whatever you can do with those super inspirations.
Do 10 buffs and powers with no extra slots to modify those powers equal the power of following the existing progression of moving players from 50 to 70? Based on the alpha slot, I don't think so. Getting an extra 6 or 7 powers plus 30+ more slots would be vastly more powerful than anything I have seen from the plans for the incarnates. So, it looks like they are keeping the power low while giving us increases. And they can create threats all the way up to an equivalent of level 70.
The risk they are against, is what happens to the existing level 50 content when someone brings their incarnate onto a team doing the Arachnos Patron arc, or the ITF, or a mothership raid.
The difficulty slider only goes down to -1 but up to +4 because -2 enemies are getting really weak, -3, -4, -5 not worth anything. but making all content -20 (or -16 if you run at +4) is going to have some serious impact on gameplay.
At the least I'll be curious to see if when you run with the top boosts slotted it impacts your experience. And is there an "exemplar" effect if you run normal content with a "pseudo-70" incarnate in a team of non-incarnates. I'll be interested to see how it all plays out.
"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
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From my experience with old posi which I used to farm, 50% faster maybe, although with inherent stamina that will reduce.
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Originally Posted by Nihilii
What's "significantly faster"? 20%? 10%? Because I doubt you can get a 100% improvement, like, say, doing an Eden in 3 minutes - and yet 6 minutes Edens have been done on SOs.
On the other hand, your average PuG running through Eden takes, or used to anyway, about 2 hours or so. 6 minutes compared to 120 minutes - do I need to spell out the math here? There's really no big argument to have. IOs can be a crutch helping players who don't know/abuse (again, pick your word based on perception) the game mechanics perform better, but for those of us who already did, the difference is ridiculously small. Most of what you can get from IOs, you can get from insps/buffs/debuffs, and insps/buffs/debuffs also offer more than what you can get from IOs. |
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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... Why would we assume that they give a +2 level shift? I haven't heard of anything but a +1 shift, given by the Rare and Very Rare boosts... |
Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade
If we assume that all of the incarnate slots will have +2 level shifts then the pseudo level cap is eventually 70 +whatever you can do with those super inspirations.
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Originally Posted by Nethergoat
it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!
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Hmm, when I read it I'd swar the rares were +1 and very rares were +2. But I'm often confused due to sleep deprivation. So I'm never confident of anything I say. =)
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Originally Posted by Chad Gulzow-Man
... Why would we assume that they give a +2 level shift? I haven't heard of anything but a +1 shift, given by the Rare and Very Rare boosts...
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"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
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I think what he means if since they're adding a level shift to the Alpha they MIGHT (key word being MIGHT) add level shifts to the other slots.|
Originally Posted by Chad Gulzow-Man
... Why would we assume that they give a +2 level shift? I haven't heard of anything but a +1 shift, given by the Rare and Very Rare boosts...
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They might not, but we have no idea yet.
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Actually I thought a dev had mentioned that each incarnate slot would add 1 level.
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Originally Posted by DoctorWhat
I think what he means if since they're adding a level shift to the Alpha they MIGHT (key word being MIGHT) add level shifts to the other slots.
They might not, but we have no idea yet. |
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War Witch, I believe, said that in a interview we would be theoretically level 60.
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Originally Posted by Mjolnir875
Actually I thought a dev had mentioned that each incarnate slot would add 1 level.
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Which doesn't necessarily mean we'll get a level shift in each power. It could just refer to the continuing gaining of new abilities.
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Originally Posted by Bringer_NA
War Witch, I believe, said that in a interview we would be theoretically level 60.
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Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
And again, IOs play a small if not insignificant part in speed. There's many more efficient ways to optimize/exploit (pick a word based on your perspective) the game mechanics, i.e. picking specific powersets, using better tactics, using inspirations/temps, upgrading hardware, the list goes on.
If anything, the IOed AV soloers are *helping* you as they probably spend much more time in an arc than the usual average, that is if you believe that the devs blindly datamine, use the obtained data without taking in consideration outliers and make changes based on that and that alone (I somehow doubt that is how it really goes in their office).