steel:I could care less what your reg date is, and I'm willing to take your word for the claimed speed run times......but(come on you had to see that but coming)
You came into the tanker forums, poo pooed someones accomplishments and called out everyone that plays tanks.
You then tried to "prove" your point with a poor excuse for logic and worse math.
If you want anyone to listen get your facts straight, or at the very least lrn2rgu.
While you do that, I'll go back to completely dominating this game with my tanks, with or without a team.
Taking It On the Chin I-16 Tanker Guide
Repeat Offenders
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Well, the last line was perhaps uncalled for. My apologies. |
Originally Posted by slainsteel
Why thanks.
Err, even despite the last line, it's good to see someone stand up against the 'oh I am a vet, I know better' argument. That argument is thoroughly irritating, considering the number of 7 year vets I know who still don't quite understand the soft-cap. |
My personal stance on this is that if I was putting together a dream team, in all likelihood a Tanker wouldn't be on it. But that would be purely theoretical. In reality, when I form a team, speed or otherwise, I tell people to bring whatever they want.
I've been on a lot of speed runs. My experience is that it matters less what people bring and more that people know what they're doing and are good at moving fast. Pretty much any high level team is going to have some buffing and debuffing on it, with enough brute force to destroy spawns. The difference between bringing a Scrapper and a Tanker just isn't that large.
I'm no great fan of Tankers myself. Hell, I still get regular hatemail from Tankers about the jokes I crack in my guides. I just think its silly to exclude a given AT because with skill and good builds, it doesn't matter what people bring because you'll still destroy TFs.
Support Guides for all Corruptor secondaries and Fortunatas
The Melee Teaming Guide for Melee Mans
The Melee Teaming Guide for Melee Mans
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LOL!|
Originally Posted by Silas
Well, the last line was perhaps uncalled for. My apologies.
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Dude, never apologize for being truthful.
Slainsteel is behaving poorly, because he seems to think that 'speed' or 'efficiency' is a common goal IN A GAME.
And who knows, maybe it is in his circles, thus why I want to avoid him like the plague.
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| My personal stance on this is that if I was putting together a dream team, in all likelihood a Tanker wouldn't be on it. |
Ok, we all know that unlimited debuff stacking is by FAR the most broken thing in the game.
Duh, we've known that for years. The Devs, for whatever reasons, seem like they're gonna leave it that way. Yay for the debuffers, you get the 'I Win' button. I mean, there's a reason why the inf farmers use teams of eight controllers.
However, this is no 'revelation'.
And to diss an entire fun AT because you think you've found this magical key (three colds FTW!) is foolish indeed.Quote:
| But that would be purely theoretical. In reality, when I form a team, speed or otherwise, I tell people to bring whatever they want. |
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I've been on a lot of speed runs. My experience is that it matters less what people bring and more that people know what they're doing and are good at moving fast. Pretty much any high level team is going to have some buffing and debuffing on it, with enough brute force to destroy spawns. The difference between bringing a Scrapper and a Tanker just isn't that large. I'm no great fan of Tankers myself. Hell, I still get regular hatemail from Tankers about the jokes I crack in my guides. I just think its silly to exclude a given AT because with skill and good builds, it doesn't matter what people bring because you'll still destroy TFs. |
YMMV.
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I never attacked the forum reg date, just the vet badge time. I really have a hard time believing that a 6 month player will know more about the game, and game mechanics then a 66 month (or 7 year) player. Heck, i still learn something new everyday i play. |
Originally Posted by Silas
No, it doesn't. Vet time arguments I really object to. One of the best players I know has like a year and a bit of vet time. How long someone has played for has very little relation to how well they play. Hell, lots of vets play like complete crap and are convinced they know what they're doing precisely because they've been playing so long.
The game and its mechanics have changed dramatically since launch. The result of this is that playing since way back then doesn't really mean you know more about the game. It means you know more fun anecdotes about how things used to be. The only thing that makes a real difference to how much someone knows about the game is how willing they are to learn. In addition to that, someones forum reg date only shows when they registered on the forums. Mine is about 6 months after I started playing. It means nothing. If you want to make a point, attack the arguments, not the man. |
Even if Slainsteel has more level 50s, and enough inf to supply himself with top end builds, hes not going to discover anything new that hasn't already been done.
His 'speed' times are within the margin of error of normal runs (+ or - 2 minutes is the margin of error, and if hes doing it in 20 mins, and normal is 22.. well, hes not really speeding very fast) And hes stacking debuffs to the point of neutering anything that comes in his way. Neither one of those things are anything new, and he's trying to make it seem like he is the only one that runs that way.
And that noone else can come even close. The fastest ITF i ran was an all archer team, and it was 17 minutes. No debuff, no tank, just pure AoE damage. Does that make me better then Slainsteel? No, that just means hes way isn't always the true way and trying to preach it to the vets is like a middle schooler trying to tell a collage grad that he knows more math. Its just not true. That is my only 'vet' argument.
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Ah, but it is a common goal in games. In some form or another, there has been a tendency towards efficiency in every MMO I've played.|
Originally Posted by mauk2
Slainsteel is behaving poorly, because he seems to think that 'speed' or 'efficiency' is a common goal IN A GAME.
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Back in DAOC (Albion side at least), there were classes that were frequently left out of groups unless they had to (Infiltrator / Scout). Some specs were shunned (Smite Cleric) because they didn't provide their needed role (healing).
Similarly, WoW players try to make things as efficient as they can by desiring people with the highest "gearscore" possible.
Don't think that CoX is any exception. Why do people bemoan bad PUGs? Slow? Inefficient? Frustrating? Why did people forming STFs require Stone Tanks (even though they weren't necessary)? They wanted to win, not fail.
Etc, etc. Yes, speed and efficiency are common goals in games. That is not debatable. What is debatable is what level of efficiency is desired; and that varies from person to person.
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Play with PEOPLE, not BUILDS. See, gaming is a social activity, and slainsteel is Doing It Wrong.
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(Note: I'm speaking in general here and trying to stay out of the argument at hand.)
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I have a lot of good friends who run speed teams that way; great players actually. I recognize that's what makes the teams fun for them, and they recognize that I find a different way fun.|
Originally Posted by Silas
Well, the last line was perhaps uncalled for. My apologies.
My personal stance on this is that if I was putting together a dream team, in all likelihood a Tanker wouldn't be on it. But that would be purely theoretical. In reality, when I form a team, speed or otherwise, I tell people to bring whatever they want. I've been on a lot of speed runs. My experience is that it matters less what people bring and more that people know what they're doing and are good at moving fast. Pretty much any high level team is going to have some buffing and debuffing on it, with enough brute force to destroy spawns. The difference between bringing a Scrapper and a Tanker just isn't that large. I'm no great fan of Tankers myself. Hell, I still get regular hatemail from Tankers about the jokes I crack in my guides. I just think its silly to exclude a given AT because with skill and good builds, it doesn't matter what people bring because you'll still destroy TFs. |
I don't claim that my way of teaming is the 'right' way of playing the game, in fact, I stressed that this is how *I* run it, if others don't, it doesn't say anything negative or positive about them; theirs is just a different way.
I find it fun to cherry pick teams and get the most optimal teams together and do not think less of anyone else who doesn't.
What gets me is silly arguments like, "how long have you even been playing" or "you don't know anything" that I end up giving caustic replies to.
For example, a particularly irritating type of post is, "Oh, I would never team with you" - really? Was I asking for that person to team with me? I run it my way, you like to run it another way, hey, to each his own?
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
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Assigning people a value and including or excluding them based on that value is what human society is built on.|
Originally Posted by mauk2
Play with PEOPLE, not BUILDS. See, gaming is a social activity, and slainsteel is Doing It Wrong.
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Originally Posted by slainsteel
Was I asking for that person to team with me? I run it my way, you like to run it another way, hey, to each his own?
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My question in all this, based on this, is... Then why are you spending so much time and energy arguing with them?
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Yes, it's silly to dismiss the point of view of someone who's got a recent registration date. Some of the best players I know are newish. Some of the most long-time vets I know haven't registered on the forums. Hell, I don't even claim to be a great player; I spend a lot of time and effort tweaking builds so I don't have to be a great player to carry a team. |
Originally Posted by abnormal_joe
steel:I could care less what your reg date is, and I'm willing to take your word for the claimed speed run times......but(come on you had to see that but coming)
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That said, it is also silly to assume that people with old registration dates are incompetent, which is essentially what slainsteel did. He comes into the Tanker forum, seven years after the game's launch, and announces, as if to proclaim a new and great discovery, that force multipliers are the key to the team game.
Well, no sheet sherlock.
What he fails to understand (or at the least, acknowledge) is that after a certain point, a team's force multiplication capability makes the rest of the team's composition almost irrelevant. Even if it's true in theory that a Tanker is less effective than a Scrapper on a given high-end team, the difference in practical terms is miniscule, potentially less important than a player's disk speed, certainly less important than the particular builds in question, and the individual players' skill (and/or familiarity with the content).
slainsteel all but acknowledged that, but still he soldiered on with his transparent bid for controversy. Contrary to his recent martyr act, it was he who opened up with the first attacks on other people's competence.
FWIW, I don't care how slainsteel plays. I'm sure his teams work quite well -- never questioned that they do, in fact. I am, however, forced to question the depth of his expertise, if he truly believes that there's one true way to build a high-end team. You don't need Illusion Controllers; in fact, if you don't have a Controller with Illusion as a primary, one of the more obvious substitutions to make, even at the bleeding edge, is a Tanker instead of a generic DPSer. (That can actually work to your net favor too, if the Controller in question has a higher-damage primary, like Fire, or if you replace the Controller entirely with, say, a Cold/Sonic Defender).
There are, in short, many ways to skin a cat. The mark of skill and experience generally isn't to repeat by rote one tried-and-true method; on the contrary, what skill and experience give you is the ability to adjust. For a lot of veteran players, I suspect the adjustment is more fun than simply running roughshod over easy content again and again with approximately the same team composition.
So there may well be a disconnect between a lot of forum posters and slainsteel, with respect to his preferred playstyle. That doesn't mean that those posters don't understand the mechanics, though, or that they don't know how to play. In my experience, the people who understand the mechanics best are actually people who don't run in cherry-picked teams as a rule, people who like to solo or PuG, and therefore desire to make builds that can handle as many situations as possible. Achieving that goal requires lots of build tweaking, lots of calculation, lots of insight. Throwing together half a dozen buff/debuff builds and a coupla token DPS toons really doesn't.
As far as in-game accomplishments go, I'll take Nihilii's 57-minute solo MoITF over slainsteel's [insert time here] 8-man MoITF any day of the week. But wait, Nihilii is a total n00b, amirite?
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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The funny thing is if your bleeding edge playstyle uses illusion as a cornerstone you are actually relying on THREE tanks. Particularly bad tanks that get distracted, go after the wrong stuff, aggro side spawns, debuff nothing, and disappear at the worst possible moment.
FWIW I am a big fan of de/buff monster teams. A quick peek at my signature will reveal that I am a forum mod/SG leader for one of the groups that first broke that ground in game.
After 4-5 de/buffers adding more is of very little use. And if you run outside of a very limited content list you will find your kryptonite. Then you may not "need" a tank but he would damn sure be handy.
In these days of incarnate powers it could be argued that a tank is a premier de/buffer since he can afford to hang out where those powers are needed most.
Taking It On the Chin I-16 Tanker Guide
Repeat Offenders
I'm a big fan of data and calculations, so this is what I've done.
I wrote a program some time ago to try to brute force the ideal team composition for the maximum dps run (of course, assuming team survivability not being an issue). I never implemented the brute force algo since, well, I was lazy but I modified it to include calculations for a tank (ignoring the purple patch for bruising of course).
So these are the findings,
With 2 kins, on a only scrappers or brutes for dps team (for the purposes of my program, I took only one type at a time), assuming you have 60% resistance debuffers (/colds, /sonics and some toons with sonic attack can all manage that), the ideal number of debuffers seems to be 3.
At that point, running the team with a tank (assuming a top dps tank), the loss in dps seems to be about 2% for scrapper dps teams and 5% or so for brute dps teams.
I can't seem to figure out how to attach a zip file to a post, not sure if it's even possible, so I'm pasting the data for the short output; if you're interested in seeing the verbose output and/or the code itself, let me know via PM.
This data is for a +4 enemy (with no resistance) with all team members at 50+1. Other assumptions are that the debuffers will do about 60% of the base damage of the dps toons and the kins will do about 40% base of the dps toons. Damage caps are set to 300% for the kins and debuffers (even if they're corr's, I am assuming lower numbers for them since they won't necessarily be in range for every single FS). Of course as I mentioned earlier, the assumption for debuff would be a stacked of -60% per debuffer.
I've placed the tank's base dps a bit higher than the brute's but lower than the scrapper's.
This is the data for all dps'ers being scrappers; this is the final DPS done to the enemy by the whole team, after accounting for buffs.
Without a tank and with 0 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1562
With a tank and with 0 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1746
Without a tank and with 1 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1942
With a tank and with 1 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2050
Without a tank and with 2 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2192
With a tank and with 2 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2225
Without a tank and with 3 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2315
With a tank and with 3 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2272
Without a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2310
With a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2191
Without a tank and with 5 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2175
With a tank and with 5 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1976
The same data for the DPS'ers being brutes,
Without a tank and with 0 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1808
With a tank and with 0 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1991
Without a tank and with 1 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2227
With a tank and with 1 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2310
Without a tank and with 2 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2484
With a tank and with 2 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2468
Without a tank and with 3 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2582
With a tank and with 3 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2464
Without a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2518
With a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2303
Without a tank and with 5 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2294
With a tank and with 5 debuffer(s), total DPS is 1976
The clear trend seems that having a tank is only useful when you are not at the optimal number of debuffers. Once you are at an optimal number of debuffers, having a tank starts to hurt more and more as the debuff on the team increases. This is assuming 2 kins who can stack FS enough to get up to 400% +damage on their own each (in the scrappers case, of course, the kins can be a lot more inefficient ).
I've tried this with various inefficiency factors, but the 'trend' is still the same. At optimal team composition, a tank always hurts overall DPS, it just depends by how much.
P.S. :- I realize this data would be suspect till you can see all the calculations, the simple solution to that would be to PM me asking me to send over the full output, and if you're proficient in C++, the code that I wrote to obtain the so you can verify the veracity of the calculations.
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
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Originally Posted by slainsteel
I wrote a program some time ago to try to brute force the ideal team composition for the maximum dps run (of course, assuming team survivability not being an issue). I never implemented the brute force algo since, well, I was lazy
but I modified it to include calculations for a tank (ignoring the purple patch for bruising of course).[snip] So these are the findings, With 2 kins, on a only scrappers or brutes for dps team (for the purposes of my program, I took only one type at a time), assuming you have 60% resistance debuffers (/colds, /sonics and some toons with sonic attack can all manage that), the ideal number of debuffers seems to be 3. [snip] This data is for a +4 enemy (with no resistance) with all team members at 50+1. Other assumptions are that the debuffers will do about 60% of the base damage of the dps toons and the kins will do about 40% base of the dps toons. Damage caps are set to 300% for the kins and debuffers (even if they're corr's, I am assuming lower numbers for them since they won't necessarily be in range for every single FS). Of course as I mentioned earlier, the assumption for debuff would be a stacked of -60% per debuffer. I've placed the tank's base dps a bit higher than the brute's but lower than the scrapper's. |
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Without a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2310 With a tank and with 4 debuffer(s), total DPS is 2191 |
The specific DPS numbers aren't important. The relationships are all that matter.
DPS toon (Scrapper) = 100 base DPS (capped at 500, 500% of original)
Kinetics toon = 40 base DPS (capped at 120, 300% of original)
Generic debuff = 60 base DPS (capped at 180, 300% of original)
Tanker = 66.6 base DPS (capped at 266.4, 400% of original)
(A Tanker's base damage is 2/3rds of a Scrapper's, by slainsteel's own acknowledgement here in this very thread. Regardless of how you weight crits, that's a fair approximation.)
Opponent is +3 relative to player characters, so all offensive powers except for Bruising are 65% effective. With all of that out of the way, let's try to work out the above-quoted comparison:
4 de/buffers (2 of them Kins) and 4 Scrappers: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (4 * 500)) * 0.65 = 1690 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.
1690 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch)) = 3008.2 DPS
4 de/buffers (2 of them kins), 3 Scrappers, and 1 Tanker: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (3 * 500) + (266.4)) * 0.65 = 1538.16 DPS w/o resistance debuffs
1538.16 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch) + 0.2 Bruising) = 3045.55 DPS
So using the same apparent methodology that landed you at a 5.4% advantage for the non-Tanker team (2310 / 2191 = 1.054), I've ended up with a 1.2% advantage for the Tanker team (3045.55 / 3008.2 = 1.012).
Strange.
Anyway, your numbers are only data to the extent that the assumptions are valid, which isn't a given. Personally, i think your assumptions are good enough for an on-paper analysis like this one, but analyses like this one are implicitly over-simplified. The bottom line in this case is that even if your numbers are right, they only tend to demonstrate just how miniscule the differences we're discussing are even in the abstract.
I don't believe that was the conclusion you set out to prove. In practice, it's hard to imagine that such low margins of disparity would be noticeable, much less materially relevant to most any team's (whether low-end or high-end) performance.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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First off your making a lot of assumptions I am not so sure should be assumptions.
Key among them being....."assuming team survivability is not an issue."
You can probably brute force a fair amount of the content the way you describe. It seems like you pretty much limit yourself to late game TFs so...Rikti, Cimerorans, Arachnos, maybe Council. All pretty vanilla mobs. Run at the same difficulties versus other foes and that base assumption needs some work. For instance Ruluaruu, Devouring earth, Carnies all have nastier tricks.
The second thing that is not taken into account (and I believe this is what Archana was trying to point out to you) is you have not calculated a threshold for how much is "enough".
A perfect team may do 2600 dps versus a non optimal's 2000 (numbers made up for the sake of discussion) but if the threshold for defeating a spawn in your target time is 1600, what do you gain from the additional 1000 dps? I would argue that you would be better off building in tools for more difficult encounters than building in more, and wasted, dps.
This is the problem RO's classic steamroller teams encountered. You ended up doing a lot of corpse blasting, and at most you used your de/buffs, your travel powers, and one aoe.
If you ran into the wrong mob type though that steamroller turned into a train wreck because they didn't have a suitable tool for a particular mob.
Finally I want to point out something in your own math...
The first debuffer boosts dps 380, the second 250, the third 120ish, the fourth you start to lose output.up until the third debuffer adding a tank still boosts the overall output. After that adding another debuffer would not help you anyway. But taking a tank instead means that buffers could spend time shooting instead of bubbling, debuffers could cast disruption, fulcrum, and freezing rain without fear of retaliation, you could drop the scrappers and brutes in favor of well build blasters who can use all their powers for damage instead of worrying about survivability. All bound to improve your chase after the almighty dps. Again this assumes I accept all assumptions and calculations, which I don't.
tl/dr version. We pretty much agree your team works, but you need to get out more and learn that there are many ways to achieve the same if not better results. This game's key strength is its variety. Try and take advantage of that.
Taking It On the Chin I-16 Tanker Guide
Repeat Offenders
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I am not arguing how I should or shouldn't play the game. How I play it is really my choice and let me reiterate, I do not force anyone to play the same way.|
Originally Posted by abnormal_joe
First off your making a lot of assumptions I am not so sure should be assumptions.
Key among them being....."assuming team survivability is not an issue." You can probably brute force a fair amount of the content the way you describe. It seems like you pretty much limit yourself to late game TFs so...Rikti, Cimerorans, Arachnos, maybe Council. All pretty vanilla mobs. Run at the same difficulties versus other foes and that base assumption needs some work. For instance Ruluaruu, Devouring earth, Carnies all have nastier tricks. The second thing that is not taken into account (and I believe this is what Archana was trying to point out to you) is you have not calculated a threshold for how much is "enough". A perfect team may do 2600 dps versus a non optimal's 2000 (numbers made up for the sake of discussion) but if the threshold for defeating a spawn in your target time is 1600, what do you gain from the additional 1000 dps? I would argue that you would be better off building in tools for more difficult encounters than building in more, and wasted, dps. This is the problem RO's classic steamroller teams encountered. You ended up doing a lot of corpse blasting, and at most you used your de/buffs, your travel powers, and one aoe. If you ran into the wrong mob type though that steamroller turned into a train wreck because they didn't have a suitable tool for a particular mob. Finally I want to point out something in your own math... The first debuffer boosts dps 380, the second 250, the third 120ish, the fourth you start to lose output.up until the third debuffer adding a tank still boosts the overall output. After that adding another debuffer would not help you anyway. But taking a tank instead means that buffers could spend time shooting instead of bubbling, debuffers could cast disruption, fulcrum, and freezing rain without fear of retaliation, you could drop the scrappers and brutes in favor of well build blasters who can use all their powers for damage instead of worrying about survivability. All bound to improve your chase after the almighty dps. Again this assumes I accept all assumptions and calculations, which I don't. tl/dr version. We pretty much agree your team works, but you need to get out more and learn that there are many ways to achieve the same if not better results. This game's key strength is its variety. Try and take advantage of that. |
The entire point of the 2 hours of coding I put in was to get real data of can tanks actually be more helpful on a team versus DPS'ers, or not.
The answer is not; though I admit, by a very small margin.
BTW, this is mostly in response to Archana's post, in which she mentioned that the AV fights were the bottlenecks; this is simply to prove that on optimal teams, even for AV fights, tanks hurt, even if by a very small amount. They don't actually 'help'.
Completely survivable teams has been an assumption from the start. If we challenge that, then we're no longer in the realm of 'dream teams'.
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
"Completely survivable teams has been an assumption from the start. If we challenge that, then we're no longer in the realm of 'dream teams'."
Starting to get the feeling I'm explaining something to a brick wall here......
We are talking TEAM survivability, not individual. Your choosing to build a team where survivability is based on massively stacking buffs and debuffs keeps folks alive....fine. We get it. We got it 10 posts back. In your extremely narrow definition of a high end team a tank is neither a significant positive nor a significant negative.
The issue is that there at least a dozen high end team compositions just as effective that use totally different load outs. And in many of these a tank is a valuable contribution.
In many ways this discussion of "high end teams" mirrors the one earlier on "soloing".
After 3000 non pled levels in this game, over 500 of them on tanks I find it amusing to see someone claim to be informed while espousing such a narrow view of high level play.
Taking It On the Chin I-16 Tanker Guide
Repeat Offenders
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Originally Posted by slainsteel
The entire point of the 2 hours of coding I put in was to get real data of can tanks actually be more helpful on a team versus DPS'ers, or not.
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| BTW, this is mostly in response to Archana's post, in which she mentioned that the AV fights were the bottlenecks; this is simply to prove that on optimal teams, even for AV fights, tanks hurt, even if by a very small amount. They don't actually 'help'. |
Either way, you ought to be able to articulate what you did without resorting to the lame excuse that your code is too complex to share on the forum. Your two hours spent coding a program from scratch don't even appear to be justified by the rigor of the calculations; your stated assumptions lead to grade-school math that could more easily be done in a spreadsheet or even by hand. Like it or not, your insistence that your numbers are somehow simultaneously inexplicable and unassailable only reinforces the impression that you're an albeit competent person with a vastly inflated sense of the difficulty of the tasks he performs.
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| Completely survivable teams has been an assumption from the start. If we challenge that, then we're no longer in the realm of 'dream teams'. |
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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I'll be taking speed teams more seriously. In the speed group I am in I got in playing my Scrapper, I happen to think that I could of easily been playing my Tanker when I played my Scrapper, but I shall be playing the characters that effect other peoples performances through debuffs and buffs (speed run favourite combos) more so than ever now, for an even better picture on what I can do for them as a Tanker. If you know everyones powersets then you can get an idea of how they can stack together, and create the dynamic in which the stacks are thick and fast when they otherwise wouldn't be as well as spot when someone else could be performing better.
The player is what counts as well as AT. Sometimes people are counterproductive from what they do/don't rather than what they are playing. Tarnishing everyone from a few brushes and giving no one a chance to grow with their favourite AT in a speed team is wrong to me as someone is putting their own selfish needs above fun and community. The type of person that I would omit from future trials is simply the type of person who plays their toon with disregard to the teams needs and quite frankly that person could be playing anything including an Ill/Cold.
He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
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They were hedging their bets on a better chance of completion given the average amount of knowledge about. Right now all speed teams could be hedging their bets on a better chance of a fastest time by doing something similar.
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Originally Posted by Sarrate
Why did people forming STFs require Stone Tanks (even though they weren't necessary)? They wanted to win, not fail.
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He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
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Your calculations are right, but for the wrong case. I should've made it more clear. The optimal case is for 3 debuffers, that means 3 debuffers, 2 kins, 3 dps'ers/2 dps'ers and 1 tank.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
Since you haven't shown your work, all I can do is try to verify your calcs by using your own assumptions (bolded above for reference). Unless you've misstated those assumptions, or unless I'm misreading them, something doesn't add up right. So let me take the above example using your assumptions as I understand them and try to work it out long-hand.
The specific DPS numbers aren't important. The relationships are all that matter. DPS toon (Scrapper) = 100 base DPS (capped at 500, 500% of original) Kinetics toon = 40 base DPS (capped at 120, 300% of original) Generic debuff = 60 base DPS (capped at 180, 300% of original) Tanker = 66.6 base DPS (capped at 266.4, 400% of original) (A Tanker's base damage is 2/3rds of a Scrapper's, by slainsteel's own acknowledgement here in this very thread. Regardless of how you weight crits, that's a fair approximation.) Opponent is +3 relative to player characters, so all offensive powers except for Bruising are 65% effective. With all of that out of the way, let's try to work out the above-quoted comparison: 4 de/buffers (2 of them Kins) and 4 Scrappers: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (4 * 500)) * 0.65 = 1690 DPS w/o resistance debuffs. 1690 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch)) = 3008.2 DPS 4 de/buffers (2 of them kins), 3 Scrappers, and 1 Tanker: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (3 * 500) + (266.4)) * 0.65 = 1538.16 DPS w/o resistance debuffs 1538.16 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch) + 0.2 Bruising) = 3045.55 DPS So using the same apparent methodology that landed you at a 5.4% advantage for the non-Tanker team (2310 / 2191 = 1.054), I've ended up with a 1.2% advantage for the Tanker team (3045.55 / 3008.2 = 1.012). Strange. Anyway, your numbers are only data to the extent that the assumptions are valid, which isn't a given. Personally, i think your assumptions are good enough for an on-paper analysis like this one, but analyses like this one are implicitly over-simplified. The bottom line in this case is that even if your numbers are right, they only tend to demonstrate just how miniscule the differences we're discussing are even in the abstract. I don't believe that was the conclusion you set out to prove. In practice, it's hard to imagine that such low margins of disparity would be noticeable, much less materially relevant to most any team's (whether low-end or high-end) performance. |
What you calculated was the 2 debuffers case, which the data already shows, is inclined towards having a tank, but is not the best possible dps you can go to.
So using your data,
DPS toon (Scrapper) = 100 base DPS (capped at 500, 500% of original)
Kinetics toon = 40 base DPS (capped at 120, 300% of original)
Generic debuff = 60 base DPS (capped at 180, 300% of original)
Tanker = 66.6 base DPS (capped at 266.4, 400% of original)
3 debuffers, 2 of them Kins and 3 Scrappers: ((3 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (3 * 500)) * 0.65 = 1443 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.
1443 * (1 + (1.8 debuff * 0.65 purple patch)) = 3131.31 DPS
Now with a tank,
3 debuffers, 2 of them Kins and 2 Scrappers and a tank: ((3 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (2 * 500) + 266.4) * 0.65 = 1291.16 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.
1443 * (1 + (1.8 debuff * 0.65 purple patch) + 0.2 bruising) = 3060.04 DPS
As you can see, having 3 debuffers along yeilds more DPS, and having a tank along reduces that DPS, despite bruising. Again, I admit, by a small margin.
The whole point for writing this code was to find the optimal point and then throw in a tank; the data already shows with 2 debuffers or lower, having a tank along increases the team's DPS.
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
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I am pretty certain I didn't get a PM from you asking me for my code?|
Originally Posted by Obitus
Your calculations are not real data, or proof of anything, unless you have something far more behind them than the rather simple assumptions you described. If your assumptions are as presented, then your math is not only arbitrary; it appears to be incorrect, as noted in my previous post.
Either way, you ought to be able to articulate what you did without resorting to the lame excuse that your code is too complex to share on the forum. Your two hours spent coding a program from scratch don't even appear to be justified by the rigor of the calculations; your stated assumptions lead to grade-school math that could more easily be done in a spreadsheet or even by hand. Like it or not, your insistence that your numbers are somehow simultaneously inexplicable and unassailable only reinforces the impression that you're an albeit competent person with a vastly inflated sense of the difficulty of the tasks he performs. From the beginning, you've been assuming your own conclusion. The only reason people have been willing to entertain your tautological premise that Tankers' greatest strengths (aggro control, survivability) are necessarily undesirable on high-end teams is that even if we accept that DPS is all that matters, your case still isn't strong. |
I spent 2 hours on it because it's been written to be extendable to my final algorithm for it, which automatically tries out every type of toon in all numbers to brute force an optimal team composition. I am not completely sure if you get this part though, considering your insistence that because I didn't post 2 pages of data, my data cannot be correct (my previous posts shows, using your calculations, that my data is correct - you just read it wrong, albeit probably because I didn't clarify that I wasn't counting kins as debuffers).
And this is why it is complex, so I don't have to do the calculations you just did, over and over by hand to find the maximum DPS; the fact that we should have 2 kins and 3 brutes and 3 debuffers for the optimal team didn't require me to calculate everyone's damage, final resistance, total dps, over and over and over again. And I can't run a NP-complete algorithm in a spread sheet macro, it would take hours to get through just one run.
I think you are having a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that teams can run without having to worry about 'anyone's' survivability. Maybe you haven't been on such teams?
So I've admitted clearly that I was wrong about how much DPS we lose with a tank, but I was correct about the fact that on debuffer heavy teams, we do still always lose it, so yes, the margin is indeed small.
But I am not sure what it is with you; first you attacked me for poor maths, then poor logic, now you're attacking the premise I started with? I don't get it, are you just desperate to prove me wrong?
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
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You're stating that your teams are doing overlapping contradictory things, so its difficult to say what this scenario is supposed to be: they are steamrolling with concentrated buffs and debuffs, but they are also splitting up a lot, for example. If we assume both are at their respective damage caps we have to assume we're in the scenario where everyone isn't all split up. In that case, the difference would be the difference between 1.125 * 1.1 * 5 = 6.1875 vs 0.8 * 4 * 1.2 = 3.84. The difference would be between 10 hits and 16 hits, which would be about 8-9 seconds on average.|
Originally Posted by slainsteel
It simply comes down to this; a scrapper can take down a cyst in let's say 10 hits, a tank would take 20 - that's about a 20-30 second slowdown, depending on animation time and lag.
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Except that is the case where both are buffed to the damage cap, which implies they are not targeting those alone. The difference in damage would be diluted by the rest of the team being there also shooting at the same target. If even just one other person shoots at each Cyst, things change dramatically. The first one I'm going to assume both players deal the same amount of damage: 6.1875 * 2 = 12.375. In the second, I'm assuming that the other player deals the same amount of damage as the scrapper: (6.1875 + 3.2) * 1.2 = 11.265. Assuming that the two scrapper case drops from 10 attacks to 5, the scrapper + tanker case drops to 5 * 12.375/11.265 = 5.49, or less than one attack.
Why am I comparing two scrappers to one scrapper and one tank? Because the question as posed was why take a tanker over a scrapper. Thus, I substituted one tank for one scrapper. Why assume the *other* player was a scrapper? Mostly because its irrelevant: whatever it is, assuming it deals the same amount of damage as a scrapper the numbers would come out basically the same.
And there is still the question of how everyone is managing to stay simultaneously pegged to the damage cap *and* separated so they aren't all fighting the same things. The problem is that the Tanker is having *all* of its situational disadvantaged summed up simultaneously when they cannot possibly be simultaneously experienced. In situations where its damage cap is lower than scrappers, you're also in highly damage buffed steamroll situations where kill-speed is so high *everyone's* damage is devalued by sheer overkill. When you are doing more than enough damage to defeat things, its impossible to notice a small drop in damage: you are supersaturated. Conversely in situations where kill speed drops to levels where the gap between tankers and scrappers would magnify over longer periods of time, you cannot possibly be, in the general case, permanently in the damage capped situation. These two things don't happen simultaneously except in very weird corner cases.
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Do consider one more thing; even on ST damage, we don't usually replace a tank with a scrapper, we replace him with a debuffer. Ideally we go with 3 DPS'ers, 1 kin, 4 debuffers. If a tank is replacing the DPS'er (particularly if it's a lower damage brute versus a high damage tank), the impact is lower, but if you're replacing one of the debuffers or the kin with the tank, your team will experience a much more measurable impact. Lastly, looking at all the factors, *why* would I want to bring a tank on a high end team? We definitely don't need one on our teams. At best, it won't be a noticeable negative impact. I have yet to see a reason to actually bring a tank on a team which has no issues with survivability (particularly post i20); which is the basic logic behind my original statement, "I still wouldn't take a tank on my teams". |
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I'd be interested in seeing how those calculations were derived.
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Originally Posted by slainsteel
I can't seem to figure out how to attach a zip file to a post, not sure if it's even possible, so I'm pasting the data for the short output; if you're interested in seeing the verbose output and/or the code itself, let me know via PM.
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I am startled: He CAN learn! |
Originally Posted by slainsteel
So I've admitted clearly that I was wrong about how much DPS we lose with a tank,
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Tanks are not 'crutches' for 'weak' teams. Indeed, in many of your own scenarios, tanks improve team DPS.
We are all shocked and amazed at learning something we all knew already.
BTW: TY Devs! Bruising is awesome!
Quote:
I love contextless quoting. Quote the line you like, leave out the one you don't, even though they were meant to be said as a set.|
Originally Posted by mauk2
I am startled: He CAN learn!
Tanks are not 'crutches' for 'weak' teams. Indeed, in many of your own scenarios, tanks improve team DPS. We are all shocked and amazed at learning something we all knew already. BTW: TY Devs! Bruising is awesome! |
Oh geez, I forgot; you're not interested in either what I meant or whether I am right, all you need is a snippet showing you're right! How silly of me.
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense
The game and its mechanics have changed dramatically since launch. The result of this is that playing since way back then doesn't really mean you know more about the game. It means you know more fun anecdotes about how things used to be.
The only thing that makes a real difference to how much someone knows about the game is how willing they are to learn.
In addition to that, someones forum reg date only shows when they registered on the forums. Mine is about 6 months after I started playing. It means nothing. If you want to attack slainsteel, don't use vet time. It's completely stupid and lord knows he's given everyone here enough proof of his foolishness.
Err, even despite the last line, it's good to see someone stand up against the 'oh I am a vet, I know better' argument. That argument is thoroughly irritating, considering the number of 7 year vets I know who still don't quite understand the soft-cap.
Virtue Speed Junkie
A Simplified Guide to Attack and Defense