The Impossible Mr. Trapdoor and Issue 19's New Theme

I know. I respect the devs to the point that they're willing to make sweeping changes for the game's betterment but I'm still extremely skeptical of a successful outcome from the process.

The bigger fear I have of such an alteration comes from thinking about the fact that the change could easily be a double-edged sword. If suddenly our debuffs received such an enhancement to their effectiveness, would it not justify a similar strike against multiple buffs placed on players? Though one could argue that the increased debuff potential would offset the loss of a DR-inflicted buff system but it's all hypothetical blegggggghhhh. Probably just being paranoid but still, the unmentioned drawbacks can be troublesome. I'm not saying a moderated, measured system would inherently be bad, just that the devs tend to like making a system they can easily copy-paste on the first implementation and then "patch as needed". Eh, an obvious consequence of the cost of development I suppose.

Conceptually, that 20% "partial dodge" is the difference between taking the full force of a punch versus rolling with it.

That said, no, you don't have a difference between rolling a "critical failure" and a regular defensive failure, so your complaint is wholly justified. Though it would require an entirely new mechanic to take into account how "badly" a defensive ToHit roll would have failed, while also comparing it against some sort of failure ratio (I would like to see that added as an in-game value) to apply a necessary amount of resistance to the attack. Would be curious as to how they would compare the ratios between a 25% defensive failure and a 5% defensive failure, though. While the percentages would be the same, the 25% defensive failure would have a greater margin for error due to the increased range, despite the 5% example being "better" at the defensive rolls. Perhaps a hard value comparison would be in order...though I don't think the devs would like giving players the potential of having a 5% chance to be hit...with a constant 90% resistance to back it up solely from the system's mechanics.

Why wouldn't you instead make all Tier 1 and Tier 2 mastermind minions +0 and reduce their stats to compensate? Personally, I think that making them -1 and -2 to reduce their power was a bad idea to begin with, as it makes them lose more power than other ATs when facing higher level enemies.

I recognize that the goal of lower level Tier 1 and 2 pets is to make sure that the difference in gain between getting your second tier 1 and third tier 1 is not so dramatic, but perhaps they could summon different, lower powered entities instead of deleveling the same entities, so that the purple patch doesn't affect Masterminds disproportionately.

Dammit man! Stop trying to be the "great big hero man" and just get used to the idea that MMO ATs need to be balanced around teaming. You want a solo RPG, and there are many such games already on the market that might suit your personal playstyle!

Just get the hell out of here already

Pot, meet Kettle. You're both black by the way

I can't recall any example of anyone ever being "openly jeered on global chat" on protector, its not that kind of a place. I can recall many many examples of people asking for specific power sets to fill out their task forces, and even more where people alt to what is needed after joining a TF.

I recall a few times where a player or two got overly specific about what they were looking for, which prompted a number of comments from others. It's probably not seen more often because almost nobody on the server is silly enough to start asking for specific builds or whether players have IO's before running a TF, and everyone pretty much knows that 8 competent players can handle anything.

There's a vast difference between asking for a debuffer, or 'support', or even specifically for a kin or rad, and "specific grouping" being required to have any chance of succeeding at the ITF, which is what my comment was in response to.

Worse than that, this is more like a case of the Pot calling the Tree black.

He's using a term the definition of which is a player who wants lots of power for no challenge to describe players that want challenge.

Johnny Butane is a munchkin and what he wants is a munchkin's paradise.

His idea of the tanker is the Hulk, the Thing and so on, which is all well and good except for the fact that such characters are in NO way balanced. Fictional characters are generally much more capable than equivalent roleplaying characters.

Actually, both those ATs would probably be more likely to take the direct approach and laugh in your face - things like Stalkers would do all that behind-the-back stuff

And why should we get more power and greater ability to defeat enemies if all we're going to do is defeat the same stuff?

With more power comes more challenge. It's a very simple concept. Which you seem to be failing to grasp.

Unless you think Incarnates should be able to treat the entire game like a level 1 Hellion.

Just in case you missed it: The more challenging stuff is OPTIONAL. There is no one twisting your arm saying you HAVE to run it. If you want to flatten things with your uberbuild, with no chance of actually being defeated, there is plenty of content for you to run.

You do NOT get to dictate that no one should get something, just because YOU don't want it. The entire game didn't get more challenging, some level capped end game stuff is harder, the rest of the game remained exactly the same.

This may come as a shock, but the developers' game design decisions do not revolve around your personal desires. And they shouldn't. I'm not expecting them to do everything the way I want them to, why do you think your opinion is so much more valuable than anyone else's?

The people who wanted end game content got it, after years of waiting for something fitting that description. The devs aren't going to take it away just because Johnny_Butane doesn't like it.

If you don't like the new content, you have the option of not doing it. Or, alternately, you can throw a hissy fit on the forums because the devs did something you don't like. One of those choices is a reasonable response to not liking something, the other just makes you look like a jacktard. You responded pretty much how I (and likely others) figured you would, by making the choice that makes you look like a jacktard.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Actually, the main game has gotten significantly easier than it once was, and only a portion has begun to catch back up.

Exactly.

Yes, you(JB) pay your fees to play the game. But so do I, and so do a few thousand other people. I pay just as much as you do, therefore my voice in wanting more challenge is worth the same as your voice who doesn't want challenge.

You're acting like the guy who says he should be able to talk all he wants in the movie theater because he paid his seven dollars.

Well, the rest of the people paid their seven dollars so they should be able to have quiet.

Its really the stacking mechanics, not the complexity of the mitigation system, that makes it challenging to balance mitigation across the entire game. With proportional multiplicative stacking, it would be almost trivial (regeneration would still need to be qualitatively balanced).

The system is actually too *simple* for its own good. Its easy for number crunchers to calculate what's going on, but its non-intuitive. I would have made it intuitive, even at the expense of making life more difficult for the number crunchers.


From a mathematical point of view, the mitigation balance issue in CoH can be summarized as being inevitable consequences of three things: attack rate, pace of combat, and linear defense/resistance stacking. You can play games working around the issue, but to actually solve it you would need to break one of those three elements of the current game design: make combat last longer, make attacks shoot faster, or change stacking.

The combination basically means bosses need a level of mitigation guaranteed to reach stacking problem levels, because they have to hit harder than the minions that are already designed to hit pretty hard per attack, because the minions must be able to generate a reasonable amount of damage per attack, because they are not intended to last very long because of the pace of combat. Thus, critters do enough damage to force the players to build enough protection to last against them, which forces the devs to provide those levels of protection, which then allows players to stack to unreasonable levels of protection.

By the way, people comment a lot about why there's so much defense in the game in terms of optional powers and features (power pools, inspirations, etc) and so little resistance, when oddly powersets are almost opposite: there's so much more resistance than defense in primary and secondary mitigation sets.

That's actually a reflection of the problem with stacking. Resistance is so much easier to control and balance for, because its less "bursty." That, combined with healing or regeneration (or a little defense) tends to make a stable, easy to balance powerset. Defensive sets are harder to balance for, because their bursty nature means they don't always behave as the average calculations suggest, and the devs had an initial reluctance to couple defense with healing or regeneration. So there's more resistance sets than defensive ones: they are easier to make.

But if that's the case, why lucks but not (originally) sturdies? Why are lucks stronger? Why so much defense in the invention sets? Answer: because defense has active counters, while resistance doesn't. Defense can be debuffed in a way resistance cannot, unless you make the debuffs unresistable (which the devs do not want to do). Defense can be neutralized by the attacker with tohit buffs that do not need to affect the target to work. Defense can be neutralized by giving the critters higher intrinsic base tohit. The devs can give away defense in the power pools and the invention system because defense is the easiest thing to take away if they need to. And the devs have to be able to counter those buffs, because the stacking rules mean that whenever they add a tiny resistance buff somewhere, they have to assume someone is going to stacking it up and head for the resistance cap, and the value of that tiny amount of resistance can be very high stacked on a high resistance character. Basically, they can let us soft cap, because they can knock us off of the cap easily. They cannot let us easily res cap, because its very hard to knock someone off the res cap without resorting to exotic mechanics.

Summary: defense sets are hard to balance for, because there are so many counters to defense and defense is bursty. So more sets rely on resistance than defense. But for the exact same reason, they don't mind optional powers having more defense than resistance, because those don't need to be explicitly balanced for, they need to be able to be neutralized when needed. This is oversimplifying, but its the main cause of the situation we're in.

People often ask the devs to add more resistance buffs to the invention system, because its "unfair" to "resistance sets." The great irony of that request is that if the devs ever acceded to it, it would probably be at the cost of adding unresistable resistance debuffs to the game to compensate, or worse unresistable damage, in much the same way the defense in the invention system is counterbalanced by the current level of defense counters. And not even that, since we now have the DE in tip missions with 64% base tohit. I don't think players want to start seeing DE in tip missions packing unresistable damage just yet.

And more responsibility?

This isn't Marvel, missy.

I think it was a bad idea also, but that's a separate issue from the issue of level shifting affecting pets.

Of course, it isn't just mastermind pets. There's also controller pets. There's interesting untouchable (and thus normally unbuffable) pets, such as the phantom army. There's pseudo pets, like rains, or fulcrum shift. All have solutions, but it'll be potentially a lot of little solutions rather than one holistic one.

But that's why I'm reasonably certain the devs have or are working on a solution to this issue. Because its not just masterminds: its a lot of things affected across the board.

Huh, I hadn't considered the impact on pseudo-pets, it makes sense though, they spawn at your level.

I'd forgotten about those too...but then I'm not under the hood like the devs....that's something that could get ugly

Turn off Granite?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

The same thing happened to me when I soloed him with my Widow, but he did get off the first Bifurcation. I thought maybe it was because of all the toxic DoT the Widow has, but maybe it's just a bug.

I've soloed Trapdoor with around 12 toons. Some have been much easier than expected (Widow, Crab Spider, Thorn Dom), and some have been more challenging. I tried and failed with my Bots/Traps MM last night, but I chalk that up to Pet AI and lack of planning on my part.

My post was in regards to the balance problems with using level 54s to provide "challenge" in the end game (or "leveraging the purple patch" as you put it). I'm not talking about the level shifting that player characters will be getting with the Incarnate system (though I recognize that there may be issues with that). I probably should have been more clear about that, sorry. I misunderstood that you were mostly talking about player character level shifts.

I'm glad to hear that you believe they're working on resolving the issues with player character level shifting, but I'm hoping they plan to work on resolving the balance issues caused by all the end game content using level 54s.

Just to illustrate to people who aren't aware, while all non-pet powers lose 26.2% tohit and damage when facing +4s vs +3s, Tier 2 Mastermind pets lose 37.5% tohit and damage, and Tier 1 pets lose 50%. When facing level 54s in Apex and Tin Mage, non-pet powers are at 48% of their base tohit and damage, while Tier 2 mastermind pets are at 30% of base and Tier 1 pets are at 15%. Enemies also hit them more often and deal more damage to them. Combine this with the movement requirements for the new content, and you might as well be a petless Mastermind in the end-game.

I'm not really a big mastermind player (I have two, one level 50 that I rarely play, and another level 30ish one that I haven't played in 2 years and plan to delete when I need the character slot), but this just seems like an obvious balance problem that needs to be resolved if they're going to continue to throw us up against level 54s.

That makes sense, the main problems I can see are player perception and NPC accuracy with increased pet resistance to debuffs being a minor issue. The power modifiers could take care of de-powering the pet's attacks and an unresistable to hit debuff would take care of their accuracy while a resistable resistance debuff would handle making NPCs deal more damage without hurting sets like Thermal Radiation which provide resistance buffs (at least if I've done my math right it would be the same).

Regarding NPC accuracy buffs against lower level pets the problem is that NPCs are getting an accuracy buff against them but not a to hit buff. Applying an unresistable defense debuff to pets would give NPCs the same to hit chance only in the absence of other buffs/debuff, MM secondaries like Force Field which buff a pet's defense would seem to be unfairly penalized by this change. The mechanical solution would seem to be to apply an Elusivity debuff to the pets which should simulate an accuracy buff on the attacker. The downside is it would be the only use of Elusivity in PvE.

That feeds into the other issue which is player perception. De-leveling the pets is a handy visual clue to players that the pet in question is weaker than it was before. Keeping the pets the same level and applying a debuff might be the same in terms of numbers but it doesn't provide the same visual clue. It's not a big deal for people who understand the numbers but for a more casual player this could be an issue.

I don't really know the under-the-covers mechanics for it, but there may be precedent for a way to deal with this. We have several examples of critters who do not con the color we think they should using other known rules. For example, Rikti Communication Officers con as if they were LTs, but have the "physical" stats of minions. Perhaps whatever is being used there could also be used to indicate shifted "false con" for MMs pets.

Alternatively, they could move away from the abrupt "step" change MMs experience currently at certain levels, and use the tables or debuffs to provide a more gradual flattening of pet power with level.