Want a Notice of the Well solo? That'll be...
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-02-10 19:03 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I always believed that one intent of the WST was to reach the people on the sidelines: people who would be willing to team if encouraged, but reluctant to team because they aren't competent at running task forces or executing teamed tactics in general. I assumed the WST was intended to make them more comfortable with teaming, because they would be teaming with experienced players who, not to put too fine a point on it, didn't really need much from them. What I'm noticing is that not only is the WST encouraging players to team that clearly don't team often (given how many people I've seen that have never run any of these task forces before or even know what's in them) its also creating a generation of more experienced task force runners that are going from total ignorance to people who can actually explain the tactics of the TF to newer players after enough runs. What that does to teaming in the long run if it persists is something difficult to predict.
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Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Playing the WST ensures you're going to be playing at the same time as powergamers who know every trick for shortening these tasks.
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I didn't really think there was anything wrong with that assumption when I first read it, but I had to revisit it when I looked at my herostats statistics recently. Running tip missions at x8, I'm earning shards far faster than that: two to three an hour including downtime for travel and selling. Something is clearly wrong with the assumption that that represents a far upper limit on killing, and I believe its that it underestimates the contribution of LTs in a full mission, and fails to account for how "free" defeating minions (and LTs) can be in a full mission. Killing one boss per minute sounds like a difficult task, but killing three Lts in a minion sounds a lot easier, and they both generate the same shard drop rate. Moreover, many builds that can take on x8 can attack bosses and LTs at the same time, dropping the LTs (and minions) almost for free with AoEs while they are attacking the bosses.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
The 400 hour number for that number of shards is based on the measured probability for a boss to drop a shard, and assuming a player defeating one boss per minute, non-stop. Pretty clearly, that's probably a wildly optimistic rate compared to normal play.
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Incidentally, the problem isn't killing bosses in a minute, its really finding them. In a high density mission, that's less of a problem. To kill one boss in *thirty seconds* leaving thirty seconds to move to the next one only requires about 90 dps, not counting resistances. All damage dealing powerset combinations exceed that level of damage.
Not all players can run x8, or even x4, but Leandro's estimate is actually not a high-end estimate. Its actually probably a very moderate one for someone that solos below x4. My MA/SR is probably near the *floor* of damage output of all builds capable of running x8. So my 2 or 3 an hour is probably closer to the *lowest* (average) shard drop rate of anyone deliberately attempting to farm these at x8.
I still haven't fully analyzed my herostats numbers yet, but clearly I can generate over a thousand combined defeats in two hours in x8 tip missions. If we assume a 1:2:4 ratio of bosses to Lts to minions as a rough estimate, then 1000 critters is about 143 Bosses, 286 Lts, and 571 minions. That is a kill rate of about 72 bosses, 143 Lts, and 285 minions per hour combined. And that calculates to a drop rate of 2.68 shards per hour. It also equates to an anemic 120 dps including AoE damage generated by my scrapper on average across the entire time period. My peak single target damage on the build is about 160ish dps, and with Dragon's Tail hitting multiple targets it should be slightly higher than that, so there's a lot of travel time in that number (or my targets are averaging about 25% damage mitigation, which seems a bit high for a total average across all targets).
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I don't really disagree with much that you said. By and large, I feel I'm on the same side of the topics discussed in this thread as you seem to be. But there is a difference in making it easier and making it easy. I can see a lot of room for them to adjust the numbers seen during the "sneak peek" down without making the solo option easy to the extent that it undermines the WST.|
Originally Posted by TonyV
I also wish that folks here would get that if they make getting these rewards easy for soloers, it effectively undermines the whole principle of the weekly strike target.
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I mean, let's look at this. Assuming you've got a good boss thrashing character, the boss smashing route is probably your best option. Based on Leandro's estimates, it would take you four thousand hours of play smashing a boss a minute to craft all 10 incarnate slots with shards. If you play two hours a day, six days a week, that would take you 333 and change weeks to wrap up.
Let's compare that to the WST + TF approach. Crafting a Very Rare with nothing but TF-produced components requires running 16 TFs, plus four WSTs. Let's assume the worst case that you never manage to overlap a WST and a component-producing TF, so you have to run 18 TFs. Even though the actual calendar thresholds mean it can take less, let's call the elapsed time to get four WSTs four weeks. Let's say each TF takes your team 1 hour to complete (high, from what I've been seeing for the ones run so far), and 30 minutes to form. That's 27 hours spent forming or running TFs over the course of four weeks. You could fit that in if you play 2 hours a day six days a week and still have 21 hours of play left, so I don't think we need to call it more than four weeks total time on that basis. Now we have to repeat this 10 times, so 210 hours of time spent on TFs, over 40 weeks.
So 333 elapsed weeks of logging in for non-stop boss smashing, or 40 elapsed weeks where you spent about 1/2 your time running TFs.
Maybe it's just me, but that seems like there's a lot of room for them to add a little slack in there without undermining the WST.
Edit to account for Arcanaville's post, that came in while I was typing mine: Fudging Arcana's rate up to 3 Shards/hr gives us about 160 hours of running fairly normal content, which sounds a hell of a lot more appealing than 400 hours of (as noted, impossibly optimistic) boss smashing. That works out to 1600 hours for all 10 slots, or 133 elapsed weeks. That still sounds high, but it's less than half of the old estimate and also based much more realistic play activities. I'm a lot more comfortable with that.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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If you're not already, can you also run tests with x1 and x4 at least for time:shard comparisons. Not really sure how many people/small teams can handle x8 but before the enhanced difficulty settings, solo meant x1.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Not all players can run x8, or even x4, but Leandro's estimate is actually not a high-end estimate. Its actually probably a very moderate one for someone that solos below x4.
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My Elec/Shield Brute is only getting about 1 an hour. She runs on x8. Elec/Shield should, on paper, be far more capable of blowing through x8 mobs than MA/SR. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
So my 2 or 3 an hour is probably closer to the *lowest* (average) shard drop rate of anyone deliberately attempting to farm these at x8.
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Would this discrepancy be entire explained by my penchant for not cherry-picking enemies, and just fighting whatever comes along instead of specifically seeking out only Freakshow/Council/other "simple" enemy groups?
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Tyrant-style brianwahsing to make them docile enough to accept the endgame system? |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I always believed that one intent of the WST was to reach the people on the sidelines: people who would be willing to team if encouraged, but reluctant to team because they aren't competent at running task forces or executing teamed tactics in general. I assumed the WST was intended to make them more comfortable with teaming, because they would be teaming with experienced players who, not to put too fine a point on it, didn't really need much from them. What I'm noticing is that not only is the WST encouraging players to team that clearly don't team often (given how many people I've seen that have never run any of these task forces before or even know what's in them) its also creating a generation of more experienced task force runners that are going from total ignorance to people who can actually explain the tactics of the TF to newer players after enough runs. What that does to teaming in the long run if it persists is something difficult to predict.
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The WST is a good way of easing people into a teaming environment, and getting them used to AVs and team tactics.
@Golden Girl
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I don't know. El/Shield should smoke me left and right. I run tip missions specifically. I notice tip missions often generate a lot of bosses, perhaps more than newspaper/scanner missions.|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
My Elec/Shield Brute is only getting about 1 an hour. She runs on x8. Elec/Shield should, on paper, be far more capable of blowing through x8 mobs than MA/SR.
Would this discrepancy be entire explained by my penchant for not cherry-picking enemies, and just fighting whatever comes along instead of specifically seeking out only Freakshow/Council/other "simple" enemy groups? |
I also run heroside, so my tip missions are a mix of freakshow, carnies, arachnos, longbow, nemesis, Rikti, Malta, and DE for the most part. I often drop the DE on my SR scrapper (cheating bastards) but I usually try to plow through the Nemesis (cheating bastards). Malta, Carnies, Rikti, and Freakshow might as well be barrels of gasoline to my MA/SR: except for the MIs in Carnie missions, which I specifically save and burn insps for, they go down very fast. I haven't tried this redside yet: perhaps the mix of enemies red side might be harder on average: Arachnos and Longbow are a bit harder (at least for me) than average, and maybe they are overrepresented red side (just as they are in all red side content). There are whole days when I don't see either in blue side tip missions.
One other thing: my older stats are from having Alpha, but no level shift. My newer stats have level shift within them. I'm trying to see if I can tell what that did to my kill speed and earning rate. They fluctuate from day to day so its important to try to average that out. In *very* broad terms level shift didn't increase my kill speed dramatically enough to notice. But even if it increased my kill speed by 20%, I wouldn't necessarily notice that yet in the rough numbers I am looking at (it should increase damage on target by 11%).
I'm not saying the level shift is worthless, just that given the really big numbers we're talking about and the large error bars in my measurements, its probably not large enough to swing the numbers from "ok" to "unacceptable."
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My blaster solos at 0x2. I'm trying to get the stats for her earning and kill rates, but that's a bit trickier because she teams more than she solos (lately) so I don't have a lot of whole herostats files with pure solo stats. I'll have to do some surgery on them to get clean numbers without any teaming at all.|
Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
If you're not already, can you also run tests with x1 and x4 at least for time:shard comparisons. Not really sure how many people/small teams can handle x8 but before the enhanced difficulty settings, solo meant x1.
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I might just set up a test run and run a bunch of missions at 0x1 and 0x2, just to get a rough idea of kill rates separate from looking for average shard drop rates.
I'm not sure a blaster (datamined to be one of the lowest performing, primarily due to dropping dead a lot) running at 0x1, especially with bosses off, will be helpful in judging the drop rate, since that might be, essentially, "off the map" in terms of balancing performance. Technically, it will also be repudiatable given that I'm not the typical soloer. But it will be a datapoint, even if its an extreme floor in terms of character, and a high datapoint in terms of player.
One more thing: we are extrapolating player performance in earning shards given their current performance. We need to factor in that with every slot they open and craft, their performance goes up. My scrapper might only notice a small difference in net kill speed with level shift, but I do notice it get substantially easier to run x8. My blaster notices a *huge* difference using level shift. I'm actually thinking about cranking up to x3. And that is just Alpha. With each slot, the next one should be easier to get (while soloing), because the player will be all the more powerful. There's no reason not to assume that a player that just has commons for all four Incarnate slots (so far) and manages to snag just one rare in Alpha (which gets them level shift) won't be able to dramatically increase their shard earning rates if they weren't already high to begin with. I can't go any higher than 0x8 in a way that materially increases shard drop rates. But someone that is only able to play 0x1 or 0x2 has a lot of room to increase drop rates significantly.
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HA!|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
- but I usually try to plow through the Nemesis (cheating bastards).
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I have my proof. I'm not the only one :P
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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I would say that Longbow, Arachnos, and PPD (who have heals, defence debuffs, god-modes, and generally give me only slilghtly less trouble than Longbow) probably comprise almost 50% of what I face red-side.
Mid level PPD are the devil to fight. Equalizers and Ghosts are E-VIL! I hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them.
At higher levels the PPD are easy (All Kheldian and Robots which really aren't that troublesome) but by then the Bows have taken up the slack and pack every single flavour of cheaty-godmode Boss available, Officers, Nullifiers are no longer sergeants by another name and even the minions pack enough AoE damage to cause problems.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Maybe you could just turn aside from your life of villainy then? |
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Mid level PPD are the devil to fight. Equalizers and Ghosts are E-VIL! I hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them.
At higher levels the PPD are easy (All Kheldian and Robots which really aren't that troublesome) but by then the Bows have taken up the slack and pack every single flavour of cheaty-godmode Boss available, Officers, Nullifiers are no longer sergeants by another name and even the minions pack enough AoE damage to cause problems. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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The Kheldian Bosses can take forever to kill (they don't generally hurt me, they just refuse to die). When they pop into Dwarf or Nova form, my damage drops around 70-80%. |
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
(All Kheldian and Robots which really aren't that troublesome)
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They might make up for this a bit by virtue of their self-rezzes, which generally gives me a second shot at boss-level drops with far less difficulty the second time.
running kill most tfs prolly are even higher rates, from what ive noticed a "kill most" ITF takes me around 1-1.5 hours to run, and i average around 6-12 shards a run (i havent been keeping track of total kills)
so if i do a 1 hour ITF i could make around 6-12 shards depending on the RNG that day which would prolly mean an average of around 9 shards an hour
solo im getting maybe 1-2 shards an hour depending on how long the mish is and what my difficulty setting is at
has anyone suggested to make shards similar to vanguard merits? in the fact that you can get 2 vanguard merits from an LT and 3 from a boss or higher (vanguard merits obviously have a higher drop rate, but the current shard drop rate combined with the multidrop on tougher opponents might help for everyone)
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It doesn't even have to be a blaster if you prefer scrappers. I'm mostly curious if there's any time:shard differences between x8 (which is essentially equivalent to a TF capable team short of the componet end reward) and those that play on a theoretical "average intended use" meaning someone with average builds playing average difficulty with whatever radio/tip/contact mission they come across. Of course assuming farmers/min maxers aren't the majority of the current playerbase.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My blaster solos at 0x2. I'm trying to get the stats for her earning and kill rates, but that's a bit trickier because she teams more than she solos (lately) so I don't have a lot of whole herostats files with pure solo stats.
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And yes with accumulated incarnate boosts, it will get better. But seeing a baseline helps and we can always just take that baseline and assume we can shave off time because of increased capabilities.
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I know a couple players with Elec/Shield brutes and they can really be AOE beasts. I can't comment on your build, obviously, but I would think you could manage more than a shard an hour. I can generally do better than that on my MA/Inv (who I solo on +0x8, although I could probably do +1x8 without much problem other than going slower), and she has basically no AOE capability.|
Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
My Elec/Shield Brute is only getting about 1 an hour. She runs on x8. Elec/Shield should, on paper, be far more capable of blowing through x8 mobs than MA/SR.
Would this discrepancy be entire explained by my penchant for not cherry-picking enemies, and just fighting whatever comes along instead of specifically seeking out only Freakshow/Council/other "simple" enemy groups? |
That said, I have noticed that some characters seem to consistently get shards faster than others. I don't know if it's selection bias or a (reverse?) placebo effect on my part, but within the group of players that I team a lot with, there are a small handful who repeatedly will get 3, 4, 5 or more shards in the time it takes me to get 1 or 2. I have no empirical proof of this, but anecdotally it certainly seems repeatable.
Edit: As far as the whole balancing WTF vs conversion recipe thing goes, I think there's room to adjust the current conversion rate (although how you measure what an 'average' earning rate for shards would be is another matter) but I think that at a minimum it should take twice as long doing that than doing the WTFs. If it takes 4 weeks to get 4 Notices via the WTF (in order to craft a Very Rare), then it should take at least 8 weeks to craft 4 Notices via simply 'farming' shards.
IMO this disparity is needed for 2 reasons:
- The conversion recipe isn't supposed to be as fast as doing WTFs, by design
- It has to be slow enough that people who run a lot of TFs and can generate shards very quickly (or have hundreds saved up already) don't simply do the WTF and craft notices, getting around the WTF cooldown
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I think Snow Globe started getting much better drop rates ever since he started monitoring his drops with herostats. Which supports a long-standing theory of mine that herostats is one of the better buffs you can have running. In fact, I think while it was monitoring his shard rate his purple drop rate increased by a factor of a hundred as a side effect.|
Originally Posted by Atomic_Woman
That said, I have noticed that some characters seem to consistently get shards faster than others. I don't know if it's selection bias or a (reverse?) placebo effect on my part, but within the group of players that I team a lot with, there are a small handful who repeatedly will get 3, 4, 5 or more shards in the time it takes me to get 1 or 2. I have no empirical proof of this, but anecdotally it certainly seems repeatable.
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Actually, what I've been noticing is that when people get far lower than expected shards, or anything higher they tend to speak up. When someone gets slightly lower they almost never say anything. That tends to skew the psychology of reported numbers.
I was on a task force once where someone said "I got six." Three other players said they got six or seven. One said they got two. I said I got five. No one else said anything. That was not an isolated incident. I presume the other two likely had some number between five and three, but didn't say anything. Thus, the numbers people will tend to remember are six, and two. If I hadn't said anything, there would have been no reports of drops between two and six.
You on the other hand always know how much you yourself got, and it will statistically often be near the average. So you will tend to get the average, and hear about everyone that gets more than you or a lot less. You'll tend to think most people either somewhat luckier than you or very unlucky.
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I'm reminded of Evil Ryu's long ago TF Recipe Drop thread in the market forum.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I think Snow Globe started getting much better drop rates ever since he started monitoring his drops with herostats. Which supports a long-standing theory of mine that herostats is one of the better buffs you can have running. In fact, I think while it was monitoring his shard rate his purple drop rate increased by a factor of a hundred as a side effect.
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Pre thread he was positive he never got anything but Crap of the Hunter.
Once he started posting his drops (and the rest of us joined in) his results miraculously improved.
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All of that is true, but when the same players consistently claim to be getting more shards than me, over a several-week period when we're both playing the same characters, it makes one think. Unless they're exaggerating/lying, I suppose, but I don't see why they would need/want to.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
You on the other hand always know how much you yourself got, and it will statistically often be near the average. So you will tend to get the average, and hear about everyone that gets more than you or a lot less. You'll tend to think most people either somewhat luckier than you or very unlucky.
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In any case I wasn't claiming it to be fact, anyway. Like I said, nothing empirical, just anecdotal.
On thing I find amusing in the requests for an alternate path to solo shards ala a mission arc akin to the Remmiel arc is how people call that arc a good example.
Solo, it is a fine arc for difficulty. Some of my alts have breezed through it, and some have had to yell for help.
In no case have I ever had a whit of difficulty duoing it. As soon as I've added anyone to help me out, the enemies drop like tenpins.
Therefore unless the devs are willing to develop this new shard path as solo only mission content, balancing it is likely to be a bear.
Now this then brings up another concern, is it worth developer resources to bother to produce solo only content which will likely appeal to only a subset of customers? I imagine that's a question for management.
Oh, and on another issue at hand. People are trying to fine tune the amount of shards it should cost to get that very rare around the time it takes to do the WSTs.
That then begs a rather important question as who are you going to use as a yardstick? Do you base it on the soloists who clear maps of 0/x8 quickly or something weaker? By merely picking a measuring stick you will surely rile someone.
Too many alts to list.
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Agreed, the only way I could see to do it and have it be remotely balanced is to use the praetorian alignment mission tech so that you cannot bring any teammates with you and that would open up a whole other set of complaints.|
Originally Posted by docbuzzard
On thing I find amusing in the requests for an alternate path to solo shards ala a mission arc akin to the Remmiel arc is how people call that arc a good example.
Solo, it is a fine arc for difficulty. Some of my alts have breezed through it, and some have had to yell for help. In no case have I ever had a whit of difficulty duoing it. As soon as I've added anyone to help me out, they enemies drop like tenpins. Therefore unless the devs are willing to develop this new shard path as solo only mission content, balancing it is likely to be a bear. |
On the main topic:
Personally I think for the solo path they should have set the cost to a more reasonable level and simply made it so that you have to wait a long time between crafting them (i.e. one every 2 weeks or more). Admittedly this would increase the rate at which people who do the WST get them (since I suspect having it so that the two methods are mutually exclusive would be tricky) but it would also make the WST the better method for getting them without feeling like a huge "screw you" to soloers.
Just throwing it out there ...
Ship raids are a great source of shards. Typically, I've had 2 or 3 drop / raid, and rack up enough merits to buy 5 or 6 G'rai Matters over the coming week (there's a timer on how often you can buy them). From there, convert the G'rais to shards.
Yeah, it's not fast, but it's dead freaking easy to drop in on a raid.
But we need more people running ship raids.
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I had come up with an alternative reward mechanism to do that:|
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Agreed, the only way I could see to do it and have it be remotely balanced is to use the praetorian alignment mission tech so that you cannot bring any teammates with you and that would open up a whole other set of complaints.
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Is there such a way to create a reward that soloers could earn faster than teams, so that it could not be trivially exploited by teamed players? There is: make a drop that drops on mission complete that only one player can get. If you're solo, you'll get them all. If you're in a team of eight, you're only going to get one every eight missions on average. It won't matter, because the shards you earn will be so much better anyway. For psychological reasons, I suggested each mission drop sixteen of these. Why sixteen? Because in a team of one, you get all sixteen. In a team of two, rather than the RNG sometimes hating one player and having one player get three in a row while the other player gets none, you're far more likely to have each player getting *some* with each mission complete. By the time you get all the way up to eight players on the team, each player will average two, but some might get more and some might get less or none. For solo players, this would be a dependable reward. For teamed players, the bigger the team the more random and unpredictable that reward becomes. For people that both team and solo, the teamed drops become a "lucky/unlucky" lottery ticket, and the solo drops become the dependable path. |
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If it works for Congress, it ought to be just fine for an Internet forum.
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Originally Posted by Atomic_Woman
I find it interesting how one 'side' of this debate seems to rely on pre-emptively defending their position while at the same time trying to cast aspersions on the 'other side'.
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If they refused to change the game every time someone cried out, "That's a stick!", we wouldn't even have Issue 1 yet.
Second of all, the requirements are well within the realm of obtainable. Expensive? Yes. Time-consuming? Well, only if you define "obtainable" as "obtainable in a weekend." Over the course of a few weeks, it's well within reach. Within a few months at the most, even casual players can snag the reward.
At what point is enough enough? People cried out because there wasn't a solo option. They added a solo option. Then people cried out because the solo option was too expensive. I guarantee you that if they added, I dunno, a hard mission for soloers to gate the reward, people would cry out that the mission is too hard. If they lowered the shard count, people would cry out that the count is still an insult to solo players.
You have to understand that there will always be someone who is unsatisfied. Always. you cannot judge success based on no one complaining. You cannot hold up a new and exciting system until no one is crying out. You cannot appease everyone to the lowest common denominator, or that's all you'll have left playing. What you can do is design the game around the most people having the most fun, and I think it's working really well so far.
I also wish that folks here would get that if they make getting these rewards easy for soloers, it effectively undermines the whole principle of the weekly strike target. It has been shown over and over that given a choice of how to obtain stuff, people will generally flock to the easiest method, regardless of what the game designers intended or how it affects the long-term health of the game. The devs want to encourage teaming, and I think the requirements as they are are perfect towards that goal. They are obtainable, even by casual players in time, but they're not so easy that people will forgo doing the WST to go that path instead.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)