Boost orange inspirations

I'm sort of new here, so sorry if this is an issue that is taboo or there's some formal response somewhere that I haven't found.


Something I've noticed is how disproportionately powerful purple inspirations are to orange. Defense soft caps at 45 (unless I misunderstand), which is easily achieved by 4 small purples, 2 medium purples, or 1 large and 1 small purple. Resistance has no soft cap, and the hard cap requires anywhere from 3 large oranges and a med, to 4 large oranges and a small.

Looking over defender primaries and troller/mm secondaries, I see a reoccurring trend that it is easier to boost defense than it is to boost resistances:

*Cold domination: Boosts all positional defenses and smashing, lethal, energy, and N.E., mostly boosts cold resistance, then fire resistance, and some energy/toxic resistance
*Dark Miasma: Boosts all defenses, gives resistance to energy, N.E., and psionics
*Empahty: Boosts all defenses, no resists. Only fortitude does this, though
*Force Field: Boosts positional defenses and gives delivery defenses to seemingly all but psionic and toxic, only gives resistances to toxic
*Kinetics: Boosts smashing and energy defense
*Pain Domination: Boosts all resistance
*Poison: Boosts toxic resistance and some cold
*Radiation Emission: Boosts neither
*Sonic: Boosts all resistances but psionic
*Storm summoning: Boosts all defenses, boosts fire, cold, and energy resistance
*Thermal Radiation: Boosts all resistance other than psionic and toxic
*Traps: Boosts all defenses
*Trick Arrow: Boosts neither

Now, I know that the defensive powers that scrapprs/tankers/stalkers/brutes get focus more on resistance than defense, but when combined with the easy access to things like the leadership pool, combat jumping, stealth, weave, and VEATs on both sides, defense dominates over resistance as the primary source for personal damage mitigation, and even mezz mitigation. The only advantage that resist boosting sets get is that, since defense is so easy to boost, you can have boosted resistances alongside of soft-capped defenses to aid in protection.


With all of that, I say that the resistance inspirations need a boost. Currently they provided 10%, 15%, and 20% resistance to everything but special damage. I would suggest nearly doubling those boosts to 15%, 25%, and 35% respectively. While 4 small purples can soft-cap defenses from nothing and remove 95% of incoming damage, 5 small oranges can cap resists from nothing on everything but Tankers and Kheldians and remove 75% of incoming damage.

I am not aware of any unbalancing this will cause. My only concern is that PVP fights will be too long; all AT's could cap their resists with just a large orange, making fights sometimes take twice as long as they would normally. If this is a problem, then orange inspirations can have a reduced effect in PVP zones and the arena.

In conclusion, I apologize again if this is taboo somehow.

my friend, you propose a dangerous game. We all know the devs have a stance against easily gained resistances being available to the masses for fear of players being able to stack it with the easily obtained defenses.

but seriously, i'll /sign this. what's the worst that could happen?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

That's what new guys are for. I haven't been tainted by institutional dogma yet, so my out of the box ideas can flow freely while completely unaware that a dev just pulled into my driveway with a shotgun.

I had another "solution" to this problem. Just make purple inspirations weaker. I didn't suggest this for fear of CoX flash mobs, and that weakening purple inspirations wouldn't resolve any sort of problem.

So I figure, I can either pack a med or large purple and greatly reduce the damage I'll get, or I can pack a med or large orange and reduce the incoming damage by less.

Arcana had a recent post that I think might be pertinent to this topic:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

^Very informative.

I am not certain if enhancing the resistance buffs for oranges would actually pose a problem, though. If you look at inspirations and damage mitigation in a manner of efficiency (inspiration space vs. overall outcome), then the three mitigating inspirations can be seen as the following:

Purple: Most efficient mitigation, capping at 95% avoidance of all incoming damage. More unstable and subject to possible cascading failure. Provides indirect mezz protection.
Orange (after my update): Less efficient mitigation, requiring more space to reach capped resistances of 75%, letting in five times more damage than purples for all ATs except Kheldians (three times) and Tankers (twice).
Greens: Least efficient mitigation. Removes finite amounts of damage in chunks directly proportional to your maximum HP.

With IO sets and ambient powers it is definitely understandable why it is that they avoid resistance, and why it is that all resistance sets have holes in them that provide weaknesses to certain deliveries.

But with inspirations, they are subject to both efficiency, and AT applicability. Something like a blaster wouldn't benefit much from oranges since they have little resistance and would need a lot of inspiration space to hold enough to stack toward meaningful reductions. Whereas an Electric Armor Brute would jump at the chance to get better oranges, so they don't have to use power surge to cap their resistance.


On a side note, I wonder if the Devs are experimenting with unresistable damage. Battle Maiden's nanite damage was half unresistable, half not. I imagine that were damage resistance to be out of control somehow (though they've done their part to prevent his, but just humor the idea for the moment), then it could be put in that higher level enemy groups have small sections of their damage as unresistable.

An alternative would be adding some more to what oranges do. For example, +HP, slow resists, mez resists.