Explain redraw for me?

All powersets are balanced based on the actual performance of those sets when played by actual players, not based on on-paper theorycraft. For a powerset to be changed for performance-based balance-specific reasons, it has to be datamined that the average in-game performance of all players that use it fall below the average of all players by more than a minimum amount. Melee powerset combinations in general tends not to underperform in that manner, which is why its so difficult to get buffs for any of them singularly.

If you want to debate the merits of the weapon sets, that's a completely different subject. But if you think weapon redraw is so bad its obvious its hurting the performance of the sets in a noticable way that would force the devs to "fix" it, all the information I have says that is not true. They may or may not at some point revisit it, but it would be for aesthetic reasons, not performance ones.

I actually enjoy the various "activation time" we have here instead of global cool down time because with activation time, we actually have very cool looking attacks rather than everything coming out in 1s. You can't create cool looking animations if you are tied with just 1s. Some attacks just look cooler with longer animation (IE: 1K Cuts).

Redraw penalty has different degree. Like I said, on a melee toon, you mostly won't be using your secondary powers much so once the weapon is drawn, you are not going to notice much of the delay.

However, the degree of penalty goes up if you are Corr/Defender who switch between primary/secondary often. And it gets even more worse if you have a weapon primary and a weapon secondary (trick arrow).

We do know that they made specific animations to bypass redraw for stone, fiery and ice swords. I wonder if they can do the same for Trick Arrow at least? So at most, you are only going to suffer one type of redraw from either primary/secondary.

And of course there are more redraw from Patron/Epic but that will just be too much to fix.

Those don't "bypass" redraw animations, and what I will say now may be drastically wrong so I may need Arcanaville to correct me:

Technically every power can have a "draw" animation. Like when you first activate a melee attack out of melee and you see your character take a new pose and ignite his hands in fire or something like that. These are insanely short animations though and am not even sure if they actually root, but it's the most visible in Fire Sword attacks, where due to the size you can see how the elemental sword grows out of your hand (it does not just pops there.)

That being said, the only way you would be able to get such a treatment for Bow would be if they made Trick Arrow a sort of energy bow that would be able to easily grow out of your hands without much animation work, or if they made a high-tech mechanical bow that extended from a small hand-sized device but using a lot of animation resources.

Given that either approach would require drastic changes to the existing aesthetics of the set, it will just never happen.

You will have to simply convince the devs to either ignore aesthetics and allow weapons to litterally flash out of nowhere (and remember, they dont even do it for elemental weapons,) or convince them to make faster versions of the Bow Draw animation.

Note: It is my understanding that elemental weapons never got any pass through the draw/cast animation splitting process. Even if the elemental draw animation takes .1 second, its' not a 0.1 second you save when it's already out. You will not save any ticks by chaining together elemental weapon attacks. They simply work as all other weapon draw animations used to work. It's irrelevant, though, due to the insanely short time it takes.

Unless anything changed (and a lot has) in the way of thinking from the design team, you are more likely to convince them to accept art clipping with capes and always keep your weapon visible in the character's back than you will be of just making a weapon simply appear out of thin air without any action in the part of the character.

Note that even elemental weapons have a insanely short draw time (that I understand does not benefit from chaining like weaponsets do) where the weapon grows out of your hand.

First note I dont think the devs percieve this big enough of an issue to actually bother doing any elaborate solutions that may take much time, even if just from the power team. However, if done, you can set a fixed damage per second it can allow, and enable it only if this cast forced a redraw in the last .5 seconds.

Let's assume a .9 DS per second, then a 1 second redraw would just result in .9 bonus damage.

Mind you, damage is not the only option. You can add other bonuses tied up to the redraw so it does not feel like a penalty. In fact, the main cases where you are actually forced to redraw are where you must use your defensive set to self heal, so when you are in defensive need and you opted to lower dps to begin with. Like a broadsword/regen scrapper having to heal himself as part of his survival ritual. By picking a weaponset, a regen scrapper suddenly penalizes himself to be survivable.

That kind of situation are the ones that bother me about the "redraw penalty." I dont feel the need to defend a case of min-maxing offense by combining outside attacks like epics, vet rewrds and pool attacks (unless you are talking about blasters attempting to use their secondaries.)

So, for those situations you can in theory tie up all melee weapon set redraws to add a non stackable resistance or hp boost for about 5 to 10 seconds after a redraw. Ranged weapon sets can have a 5 - 10 second hasten effect.

Just examples, point is, the "penalty" of being forced into redraw does not need to (and perhaps should not) necesarely be compensated with replacement damage.

1. Then you cannot say that weapon sets are buffed by the change to redraw. If they are balanced by actual performance, then the fact that this real performance is better than the "always same cast time" implementation isn't really true, because it has been balanced on it's own. The final result should be a power level that is comparable to what it was before once all the balancing is said and done.

2. Similarly, if they did something to take away the redraw it would not require the effect of nerfing the set, because, as you say, they are balanced by the actual performance of the set.

So, as long as actual performance is being used to balance, you don't effectively nerf or buff a set (on average) by playing with how the redraw animations work. The average should be balanced the same, but the only final effect you end up having is to pull high performance (chain set powers) and low performance (click happy secondary) outliers closer to the center.

Why should the overall performance of a set have to suffer for a fix to be needed? The problem is not with the average performance of the sets, it is with the difference in performance that arises when combined with certain other powersets. An imbalance within a set is just as bad as an imbalance between sets.

Actually, BABs didn't seem to need convincing when he wrote back in Dec 2009:

"I've actually looked at getting rid of weapon draw entirely, but even that is problematic. The system is very inflexible as far as different combat modes goes."


Then came this:

"Good news everyone, I think I have figured out a way to bypass weapon redraw in combat. I've tested it with with various non-weapon powers or weapon powers from completely different sets, and it seems to work out. This means that you will be able to use any power in a chain with a weapon power, and not have to redraw the weapon...even completely different weapon powers. It will just instantly appear in your hand and play the attack animation. If you're not in combat, out of range, or have no target selected...then it will play a non-rooted, interruptible version of the weapon draw animations."


And finally, unfortunately, this:

"Unfortunately, I'm going to have to retract yesterday's statement. I've run into a roadblock with Shields that's going to prevent this method from working. At this point I'm going to have to explore a code solution to the problem, but I can't say when or if that will happen."


And that was that. But in any case for a period of about 20 hours some of us believed that weapons would appear in character's hands just as suddenly as they currently disappear.


Original thread here for context: http://coh103.gtm.cityofheroes.com/s...d.php?t=200797

I recall that thread and mentioned it. Also keep in mind, although for us BABs is the most recognizable name working with animation and art in this game, he was never the only one nor the job position he had when he left since the start.

He was not always in a position to even look at this, and, there is also an apparent rare dinamic between BAB and Castle where they would work very tightly together for balancing. His views were exceptionally biased towards balance due to this dynamic.

I am not sure if the current team has such a close dynamic.

Also BABs was also a perfectionist, he refused to do many things just because they did not "transition" as smoothly as he would like them to. Example in hand: Ninja Run stance. From my perspective, It looks perfectly fine for you to attack while in Ninja Run. There is nothing that looks odd.

I personally requested him if it was possible to get a Ninja Stance power that cost no end and would let us keep the stance during combat without any movement bonuses, and he said no because attack animations are not designed to blend properly from such stance. It seems, for him, allowing you to attack at all from the stance was a "necesary evil" and he likely thought the same about eliminating draw animations.

I am dare put money in saying that he did need convincing consider it a problem he should pursue a solution for. That convincing just may had happened inside the company.

That's what we used to have.

But, what I've been trying to say is, they put it in because we asked for it. And many players applauded it as an improvement.

I dont think Arcanaville's point is the one you took. Perhaps that deserves a rephracing, though: powers are REbalanced based off datamined player perrformance.

If after a unspecified period of datamining, a set is only seen to "underperform" by ~1% to ~5%, then it may be considered "OK". If they see a huge 20% performance disparity, then they may look deeper and try to find the root of the issue but small discrepancies are expeted.

Note that devs dont balance sets based only on damage, when doing this. They look at many things. We dont know the full list but it's understood that they look heavily at things like speed of reward aquisition (xp/inf/drops,) something that is heavily affected not just by damage output but also by survivability.

A set like Fire may be extremely damage inducing, but also more likely to die often due to no active mitigation. Weapon sets, loaded with knockbacks and knockdowns may do less damage (depending on sets, katana was doing amazingly well last time I checked) but lie way less and suffer no XP Debt slowdowns or hospital travel time. Etc etc.

As far as direct power balancing goes, powers are actually balanced in isolation on how they perform with themselves. The devs dont go out and say "ok so how does a broadsword/regen compare to a martial arts/fire using dark epic pool?". They just say, "lets look at how this set performs relative to this other set".

When you balance powers this way, you do not consider redraw time simply because it's not part of the equation. If redraw time actually hurts performance drastically, it will [not may] be visible in the datamining balance test (I understand they do look at set combinations when datamining.)

The main reason I think it will not need a rebalancing of any set is because redraw time, as annoing as it may be to the min-maxing in this game, it really does not add all that much penalty and removing it wont add that big of a performance boost. It will, at the highest degree of impact, allow sets like Broadsword to leverage epic pools like Gloom more effectively, though.

My understanding is the last time they looked at weaponsets it was that datamined numbers proved the sets were indeed underperforming heavily, due to their insanely slow attacks. Not only was weapon draw removed from intra-set chaining, but many powers also had their animations swaped and recharge times adjusted to balance DPS properly, without breaking the cottage rule. Weapon redraw removal was attempted at the time, since hands were already in the project, but not possible. Since subsequent datamining has not proven drastic issues with the sets, it never got revisited.

If you approach redraw from a balance perspective, you will need to be extremely lucky and find the devs with some free time (wont happen) or really do a comprehensive thesis backed up with heavy numbers displaying a precise point of failure in the balance mechanic, and then the devs will look at their collected data, focus a report on that direction and, should your information match an issue that was not obvious at first, then they may consider looking again at redraw. Mind you, you will need some one to have enough time to look at that.

If you complain, though, about how you feel your character is dong nothing and the game slows down or almost pauses for 2 seconds while redrawing a weapon... thats an easier path. It is not guaranteed to get the devs to do something, but its more likely than any min-maxing arguments. It's also a real issue.