City of Heroes is the World Wrestling Federation of Superhero MMOs
By
3dent,
Posted on: 2011-10-26 18:24 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Given the assumptions that seem to be at play here, it is simply impossible that options A and B reduced diversity. In the absolute worst case, they are a wash. If the majority of characters had Health/Stamina, and then Fitness became inherent and the majority of characters took exactly the same powers to replace Fitness, then their degree of diversity is unchanged, not lower.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
That left four choices:
A. Take powers from the primary and secondary that didn't need slots. B. Take powers from power pools that don't need slots (Combat jumping, or Assault->Tactics->Vengeance). C. Take some powers and never use them. D. Take multiple travel powers. Between my various characters I did all of those options except D. I may also have redesigned a character or two to juggle some slots and make the new powers useful, especially for those that could benefit from Kicking->Toughness->Weave. But the basic truth is the same: Diversity was lost with inherent stamina. Option C does nothing to improve character builds but at least it didn't standardize them. Option A and B both reduce character diversity. |
The only way in which diversity could be reduced is if everyone who did not have Health/Stamina had already chosen all the same powers you did when you gained power picks due to inherent Fitness. But this is an extremely weak assumption, because anyone who was running without Fitness was, with very few exceptions due to certain powersets' facilities, already severely bucking the trend in "accepted" ways to build characters.
Moreover, I can't see how you can post a list of four disparate options and seriously defend the contention that diversity decreased, especially when it's possible to combine those four options. I have characters that took a extra pool and an extra travel power in a pool they already had. I have characters that took an Epic Pool they previously lacked and an new Power Pool.
There absolutely are common pools and common powers that people would pick as choices that need no or few slots. Any of the four Leadership powers. Combat Jumping. An extra travel power. Because of this, yes, without a major rejiggering of a character, the new options are limited. Despite that, the set of choices is larger than being the same Fitness powers that most people were taking. A larger set of choices cannot lead be less diversisty than everyone taking Health and Stamina.
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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Yes, you're right. I need more options. That's my point.
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
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Since both the playerbase and the devs imply that most players took fitness, giving everyone fitness and then allowing them to pick other powers is likely to have had a neutral effect on diversity overall. You're replacing powers most players had: to reduce diversity players would have had to be driven into the same set of powers to an even greater degree than which they took fitness. In other words, suppose 75% of all players took fitness. For diversity to have dropped, for each powerset combination, say energy/energy, more than 75% of all players that had fitness must take the exact same three powers (assuming they drew three from fitness in the first place) to replace them, and this must be true on average across all powerset combinations. That seems unlikely to me.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
More diversity since launch? Sure, I'll go along with that. But we had a peak of diversity sometime after the release of IOs. (Issue 11?) Since then characters have been given various free power slots, and that has decimated diversity in the game. Where we are now is better than at launch but worse off than we were a few years ago.
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It does beg the interesting question: not counting slotting and inventions, how many different possible powerset choice combinations exist, starting from a given primary and secondary choice, and is it more likely that the players are dispersed more evenly among all possibilities now than before. That is a computationally lengthy question.
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It sounds like you just want more gimmicks - they add diversity.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Yes, you're right. I need more options. That's my point.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Wrong, because of the sacrifice necessary for Stamina. People could sacrifice offense, defense, support or travel powers, or they could sacrifice slots to end rdx and build the character so that Stamina wasn't necessary. When characters had fewer power-slots than powers available, the powers they chose to take and the ones they chose to sacrifice defined their characters. Now there are no sacrifices and diversity is lessened.|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
Given the assumptions that seem to be at play here, it is simply impossible that options A and B reduced diversity. In the absolute worst case, they are a wash. If the majority of characters had Health/Stamina, and then Fitness became inherent and the majority of characters took exactly the same powers to replace Fitness, then their degree of diversity is unchanged, not lower.
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Consider the options after inherent stamina:
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A. Take powers from the primary and secondary that didn't need slots. B. Take powers from power pools that don't need slots (Combat jumping, or Assault->Tactics->Vengeance). C. Take some powers and never use them. D. Take multiple travel powers. |
Consider the options before inherent stamina:
A. Build your character around not having stamina.
B. Take stamina, sacrificing pool powers that you would otherwise have gotten.
C. Take stamina, sacrificing primary and secondary powers.
Same number of options, except the 'after' case includes 'do nothing'.
Don't get me wrong, I like having inherent stamina. But they needed to give us more power pool options at the same time.
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I have characters that took a extra pool and an extra travel power in a pool they already had. I have characters that took an Epic Pool they previously lacked and an new Power Pool. There absolutely are common pools and common powers that people would pick as choices that need no or few slots. Any of the four Leadership powers. Combat Jumping. An extra travel power. |
This game loves choices without consequence. It's reflected in everything from being forced to choose useless powers to the easy death penalties to the accelerating profusion of costume pieces. Flash without substance -- gimmick content. If that's what people want then there's nothing I can do. I just don't think it makes for a healthy game.
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If you'd just said that at the start, we could have saved 11 pages |
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
But maybe I'm out of whack compared to the rest of the playerbase.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Interestingly, none of your options include the two options most commonly recommended when inherent fitness came out, including the only two I offered at the time:|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
When inherent fitness came along I was presented with the option of either taking powers from my primary and secondary that I skipped, or taking a new power pool or some combination of pool powers. The problem was slots. The new powers I took would not receive any slotting, unless I stripped slots from the powers that I had already designed the character to have.
That left four choices: A. Take powers from the primary and secondary that didn't need slots. B. Take powers from power pools that don't need slots (Combat jumping, or Assault->Tactics->Vengeance). C. Take some powers and never use them. D. Take multiple travel powers. |
E. Rethink the build from scratch factoring in inherent stamina.
or, if you really don't care:
F. Do nothing.
Perhaps you're just unlucky and the alternatives just happened to not exist given your build requirements, or perhaps they did exist and you didn't consider them carefully enough, but there are often powers in a build that are six slotted that could be five slotted without a critical loss of function, or five slotted powers that could be four slotted such that the benefit from shifting that slot to another power is higher. My Ill/Rad used to six-slot flash and blind, because I could. But when I respeced around inherent fitness, I slotted fitness. As part of the slot-shuffling, I five slotted both powers. I could have gone even lower on Flash, but I wanted to slot it with Unbreakable for the recharge bonus. If I wasn't slotting purples, I would have probably been willing to drop another slot.
Its virtually never the case that there exists only one slotting for a power that will work. If you have power A, you might decide to put six slots in it, because there's nowhere better to put those slots. But if you suddenly get power B for free, you might decide to slot A with four and B with three (that's the same five discretionary slots), because a four-slotted A combined with a three-slotted B is overall better than a six-slotted A and a one-slotted B. It happens all the time, *particularly* when you are slotting inventions and set bonuses come into play.
My MA/SR has aid self. If inherent fitness did not exist, she would not have physical perfection, and those slots would be in Aid self. However, with physical perfection in the build it makes sense to split the slots up between them. Instead of a three-slot aid-other and a six-slot Aid Self, I have a two-slot Aid other and a four-slot Aid Self and a four-slot PP. That's essentially what adding inherent fitness, which in my build allowed for PP, did to my build: it shuffled slots. With no other choice, the logical place for the slots is in Aid self, for maximum aid self strength. Or perhaps in weave, to add more buffer above the soft-cap. But with PP in the game, adding slots to PP not only adds additional regeneration to my build through direct slotting, it also adds additional regeneration and MaxHealth bonuses via Numinas. That additional passive regeneration and increased health can reduce the need for aid self, and all other things being equal I would prefer aid self to be a less necessary power. In terms of total maximum health recovery, that was a loss. But in terms of improving the overall ability for the build to play without resorting to aid self, which roots and stops offense for a significant amount of time with each use, its an overall improvement.
I mention this as a conceptual preference that drove a specific slotting change that ultimately took slots away from one power while giving them to another power available due to inherent fitness. Which means its a form of example of my option E that is not listed in one of your four options. If such options don't exist for you, they certainly exist for other people.
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I've been advocating choice with consequence - using those exact words - since 2004. However, I think this goes too far. For example, I think its an entirely valid choice to decide to decouple appearance from function: its actually a novel and innovative choice on the part of the original designers that I believe makes City of Heroes interesting. 99% of the time, appearance does not dictate ability (excluding actual animating weapons in weapon sets), and that allows for a level of character customization that I think is a good thing. Which is not to say appearance driven ability is a bad thing: its just two different ways to address the issue, and I think the way we do it is more applicable to the genre in the general case. In the case of character appearance customization, flash *is* substance.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
This game loves choices without consequence. It's reflected in everything from being forced to choose useless powers to the easy death penalties to the accelerating profusion of costume pieces. Flash without substance -- gimmick content. If that's what people want then there's nothing I can do. I just don't think it makes for a healthy game.
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But being forced to choose useless powers? I've *never* been forced to choose useless powers, across literally over a hundred builds and virtually every powerset option. Let me put it this way: there exists no power in any character build I've ever played that I have not used dozens if not hundreds of times. I've probably used boxing hundreds of times, and its among the powers I take most often primarily as a prereq. Even then, I've eventually used it when slowed. But inherent fitness did not increase this need to take prereqs. I could post dozens of builds and ask where the useless powers are, but that would be besides the point I think. If you are a more focused builder that only needs X number of powers to realize a build, then the more of those powers the devs give you for free, the more likely you'll complete the build with options to spare. But that's not something you can blame the game on, because its specific to you. The vast majority of the players don't build that way, and its not necessarily because they are ignorant or inexperienced. Its just a matter of preference. I'm a pretty advanced builder when I want to be, but I don't have that limitation. Its not something I will one day in some way outgrow, nor is it something you can account for as me somehow wanting less. I certainly want more complexity, provided it doesn't abandon the entire rest of the player base in the process, but this area is not one where I find the game lacking in complexity.
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Well, let's use an energy/energy blaster as a concrete example.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
In other words, suppose 75% of all players took fitness. For diversity to have dropped, for each powerset combination, say energy/energy, more than 75% of all players that had fitness must take the exact same three powers (assuming they drew three from fitness in the first place) to replace them, and this must be true on average across all powerset combinations. That seems unlikely to me.
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Before, the blaster would have to get a travel prerequisite, a travel power, and the three powers in Fitness. They had room for for 20 powers up to level 38, after which we can assume are filled with epics. Minus 5, that's 15 powers and 3 powers less than they have available in their powersets. Let's assume at least at first they all drop Boost Range, since it's probably the worst power in the AT.
The blaster can choose to drop utility powers (Aim, Stun), or drop offense that doesn't fit into an attack chain (Sniper bolt, Nova), or decide not to use melee attacks much (Energy Punch, Power Thrust). They might decide that they didn't like to use self-buffs (Aim, Build Up) or status effects (Power Push, Stun). There's many different options they could have gone with. Numerically, there are exactly 8*7 = 56 options for what powers they could skip. 8*8 = 64 if you allow the possibility for taking Boost Range.
Now we get inherent stamina, and we get travel powers without prerequities. The blaster has four new slots. The blaster now takes...every power. They have to. Including Boost Range. With one slot still open, we're forced to take a single pool power with no slotting. I'll be generous and say that there are 21 possible picks from the nine power pools, including three secondary travel powers, although to be realistic some of the pool powers should never be taken alone and unslotted. Our 64 options possible before have now been condensed to 21. About a third as many character design options as there were before.
In *both* cases the blaster could choose to sacrifice more powers from their primary and secondary and take power pools instead. Nothing has changed in that respect, and there are no advantages to pre- or post- Stamina from that. The number of possible combinations is still very large because you can choose to sacrifice AT powers to take pool powers. But those combinations were multiplicative with the basic combinations and they haven't changed. The basic options have been reduced to about a third of what they were, and so that reduces all options by the same amount. Character design diversity is a third of what it was.
Adding a fifth power in the travel pools helps a little. Allowing epic powers to be taken at 35 helps a little. (I haven't respecced to take advantage of that yet.) But the essential fact is that meaningful choices require a sacrifice of the non-selected options. We were given the ability to make fewer sacrifices, and that reduced our options. They needed to give us more options -- more power pools -- to compensate.
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I am not arguing that we should couple appearance and function. I am arguing that the devs have been obsessed with appearances, and for a few years they have given us very little in the way of functional gameplay. GR was an exception. Incarnate content is another exception, but it's been badly implemented. I am also arguing that with Freedom and microtransactions, the trend towards appearance over function seems to be accelerating.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I've been advocating choice with consequence - using those exact words - since 2004. However, I think this goes too far. For example, I think its an entirely valid choice to decide to decouple appearance from function: its actually a novel and innovative choice on the part of the original designers that I believe makes City of Heroes interesting.
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| But being forced to choose useless powers? I've *never* been forced to choose useless powers, across literally over a hundred builds and virtually every powerset option. Let me put it this way: there exists no power in any character build I've ever played that I have not used dozens if not hundreds of times. I've probably used boxing hundreds of times, and its among the powers I take most often primarily as a prereq. |
People don't take useless powers, Arcanaville. They do anything to avoid them, including taking the same powers that everyone else takes. That's my point.
Yes, you could replan your character to slot out your pool powers and make them useful. But you could have done that before. Nothing has been gained. Only lost.
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You are substituting "diversity" for presence or sacrifice and the absence of sacrifice as "loss of diversity". You are, quite simply, using that word incorrectly.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Wrong, because of the sacrifice necessary for Stamina. People could sacrifice offense, defense, support or travel powers, or they could sacrifice slots to end rdx and build the character so that Stamina wasn't necessary. When characters had fewer power-slots than powers available, the powers they chose to take and the ones they chose to sacrifice defined their characters. Now there are no sacrifices and diversity is lessened.
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Here's what the on-line Miriam-Webster dictionary has to say about that word.
1: the condition of having or being composed of differing elements
2: an instance of being composed of differing elements or qualities
"Build diversity" means that builds contain different elements and have different qualities. Your complaint, very clearly, is that a specific tradeoff in elements has been removed from builds. This is not a net loss of "diversity" as the definition of that word is accepted.
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| Maybe I'm wrong, then. Maybe I don't understand character design in this game. Because I don't see the point in having multiple travel powers (except maybe in PvP), or running powers that are useless unslotted. (I already mentioned Assault and Tactics as viable without slots. Maneuvers is generally not.) |
- PvE stealth which can stack with either other PvE stealth or a Stealth IO
- Fast ground-based travel speed, useful when "speeding" through indoor maps or traversing steep vertical climbs. (Super Jump is very poor at traveling up steep tunnels that it cannot simply leap over, for example)
- A place to "mule" Universal Travel IOs for either ranged defense, KB protection, or recharge/speed debuff resistance
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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The sacrifice made each build less unique, prior to Issue 19. Before, (most) everyone had Fitness. Now, most everyone has Fitness and three extra powers. Whether you personally believe those three extra powers offer a substantial benefit is irrelevant; they're there now and they weren't before.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Wrong, because of the sacrifice necessary for Stamina. People could sacrifice offense, defense, support or travel powers, or they could sacrifice slots to end rdx and build the character so that Stamina wasn't necessary. When characters had fewer power-slots than powers available, the powers they chose to take and the ones they chose to sacrifice defined their characters. Now there are no sacrifices and diversity is lessened.
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If you think the former option to be a special snowflake by skipping Fitness is that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, then I don't know what to tell you. Seems to me that the issue is settled almost by definition: if datamining had shown that a significant proportion of the playerbase was skipping Fitness prior to Issue 19, then the devs wouldn't have given us Inherent Fitness.
The bottom line is that everyone has more leeway to build in different, sometimes even off-the-wall ways. FWIW, I can assure you that there's a very good reason for every power I pick in my builds. Some are more important than others, it's true, but they all have a purpose, even if that purpose is just to give me OMG-super-speed Flight (Afterburner, which also happens to be an albeit situational +DEF boost for escape, and a mule for Luck of the Gambler). And while we're on the subject of Afterburner, it happens that my Dominator had to give up her combat self-rez (Rise of the Phoenix) to pick up Afterburner. Is that an optimal choice? Maybe not in isolation, but that's irrelevant: what matters here is that the build's capabilities shifted noticeably with that one power adjustment.
Frankly, I'm a bit at a loss as to how you can argue with a straight face that there are so few useful/significant powers from which to choose. Nine Primary powers. Nine Secondary Powers. Potentially four pools, each of which offers 4-5 powers. A fifth, Ancillary/Patron pool that offers five more.
We only have 24 power choices. Those numbers simply do not support your premise that everyone's running around with several powers that are flat-out useless. No offense, but I think that if you can't find a use for all of your power picks, you're not trying hard enough. Case in point:
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| Because I don't see the point in having multiple travel powers (except maybe in PvP), or running powers that are useless unslotted. (I already mentioned Assault and Tactics as viable without slots. Maneuvers is generally not.) |
As far as Maneuvers goes:
- It can be useful even with one slot, endurance permitting;
- If all else fails it's a Luck of the Gambler mule that helps you qualify for Vengeance (another LoTG mule that carries a very powerful situational team effect to boot);
- A second slot can make a world of difference, and it just isn't that hard to come up with a second slot, because ...
- finally, and most obviously, if you don't feel you can slot the power and don't feel it's useful without extra slots, then you don't take it. Contrary to your apparent belief, there are plenty of other options available.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Got there before me. That's exactly what I did.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
E. Rethink the build from scratch factoring in inherent stamina.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Before, the blaster would have to get a travel prerequisite, a travel power, and the three powers in Fitness. They had room for for 20 powers up to level 38, after which we can assume are filled with epics. Minus 5, that's 15 powers and 3 powers less than they have available in their powersets. Let's assume at least at first they all drop Boost Range, since it's probably the worst power in the AT.
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Well, first let me dissagree about boost range. Far from the worst power in the AT, and my Archery/engergy blaster, Tess Trueshot knows it when she is sniping from beyond the draw distance of the game.
And as for the rest of what you wrote, show just how blinkered you are with builds. I didn't suddenly gain 3/4 new power pick with no slots to put in them, I gained the ability to take the powers I would have loved to have fitted in the build but couldn't and than move slots from powers that were just put there for somewhere to go in the original build.
And as for cotume options being a useless gimmick. You do realise that the "robust character creator" was, and has been since launch, a major selling feature. The ability to have a completly unique looking character is a huge plus for this game, and thematically apropriate. It also adds hugly to the diversity in the game. Just because you dislike it that is no reason to remove it when the vast majority love it.
So, you are playing a game, where you care so little about your characters individuality (you hate the continually growning costume creator), and complain got their stories feature their (Paragon studio') characters. Please, name me an MMO, remotely on par with CoH that doesn't feature that worls major figures? Would you play LOTR:O and complain that there is too much of The Fellowship featured in the mission? Or how about that direct competition who's IP is bassed on a comic book universe rather tat a PnP RPG. Would you complain that Batbloke, Super Dude and Green Lamp are featured too much? oh, and btw, I would recomend that game as I've heard their character creator is severely limited as you obviously aren't happy here.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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-Knock knock.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Before, the blaster would have to get a travel prerequisite, a travel power, and the three powers in Fitness. They had room for for 20 powers up to level 38, after which we can assume are filled with epics. Minus 5, that's 15 powers and 3 powers less than they have available in their powersets. Let's assume at least at first they all drop Boost Range, since it's probably the worst power in the AT.
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-Who's there?
-70-freaking-foot Blaze
(Boost Range is a really good power, man.)
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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OK, now I understand better why you're describing this as "loss of diversity".|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Before, the blaster would have to get a travel prerequisite, a travel power, and the three powers in Fitness. They had room for for 20 powers up to level 38, after which we can assume are filled with epics. Minus 5, that's 15 powers and 3 powers less than they have available in their powersets. Let's assume at least at first they all drop Boost Range, since it's probably the worst power in the AT.
The blaster can choose to drop utility powers (Aim, Stun), or drop offense that doesn't fit into an attack chain (Sniper bolt, Nova), or decide not to use melee attacks much (Energy Punch, Power Thrust). They might decide that they didn't like to use self-buffs (Aim, Build Up) or status effects (Power Push, Stun). There's many different options they could have gone with. Numerically, there are exactly 8*7 = 56 options for what powers they could skip. 8*8 = 64 if you allow the possibility for taking Boost Range. Now we get inherent stamina, and we get travel powers without prerequities. The blaster has four new slots. The blaster now takes...every power. They have to. Including Boost Range. With one slot still open, we're forced to take a single pool power with no slotting. I'll be generous and say that there are 21 possible picks from the nine power pools, including three secondary travel powers, although to be realistic some of the pool powers should never be taken alone and unslotted. Our 64 options possible before have now been condensed to 21. About a third as many character design options as there were before. |
Here's the problem. I am convinced this is an edge case. Your example is not realistically representative of how I think most people would build that character to start with. I believe most of them are already much more "non diverse" than you seem to be assuming. In practical terms defined as which powers they have included in their builds (and not including how they have slotted those powers), I think that most characters either explicitly followed the same templates or independently concluded that the same core powers are generally important enough to have on a particular AT/powerset combo that your assumed 64 options would not have meaningful representation As a result, the practical effect of replacing Fitness with a choice of 3 new powers, even if they are unslotted, is to increase the differences in those otherwise very similar builds.
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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I posted my Energy blaster build already. Here's my MA/SR:|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I'm not worried about prereqs. I'm worried about being forced to take powers but not having slots for them. That doesn't mean you have to take useless powers. Combat Jumping is an excellent power unslotted, and Assault is adequate. But that leaves fewer options. You can choose to take Maneuvers or...I dunno, anything from the Presence pool. Then you're taking useless powers. The diversity -- the choice -- is an illusion. In reality the only choices are few: CJ, Assault, maybe grant invisibility, Recall, or another travel power.
People don't take useless powers, Arcanaville. They do anything to avoid them, including taking the same powers that everyone else takes. That's my point. |
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To me, there aren't "useful" and "useless" powers: its not a binary thing. There are the powers I want the most, and the powers I want the least, but rarely are there powers I literally would rather not have or take but then don't use. And there's no rule that states powers are only useful when slotted a particular way, and there's no compromise that exists.
And here's a build for my Kat/Invuln that dates all the way back to I9. In fact, the empty slots in the build are empty because they are empty in the actual build: I never finished it. It still has standard fitness: it hasn't been respeced, so it doesn't have inherent fitness.
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Incidentally, I mentioned earlier that in some ways the incarnate system made my scrapper "scrappier" and you challenged me to ask why that doesn't imply homogeneity? Well, that the incarnate system did to this build is I slotted Alpha and put in cardiac. That allowed me to run at full power with all toggles up for a much longer period of time: almost indefinitely in many cases. Before, I used weave and maneuvers mostly as burst temporary protection, but I couldn't run them permanently or risk running out of endurance. With them up now all the time, I'm definitely "scrappier." Am I identical to all other Kat/invulns? On the surface, probably: we all have most of the Invuln set and divine avalanche. I doubt, though, any of them are actually just like this.
(Ah memories: this build has kinetic combats slotted in Soaring Dragon because at the time they cost practically nothing. This was designed specifically to be an economy build.)
I keep coming back to the fact that your knowledge of how people build seems limited mostly to how you build, and you seem to think everyone else must have the problems you have, or face the same limitations you face. Technically, we all have the exact same choices, but clearly we aren't all evaluating those choices in the same way. The problem you keep saying is totally unavoidable to you is a problem I don't even see the tiniest hint of at all. Not even a hint of a whisper.
The question is, at least in this context, do the vast overwhelming majority of people see what I see, or see what you see. I'm willing to bet real money its the former, and not the latter. There is also the separate point that the position that diversity options don't exist requires only one counterexample to prove false, while the position that diversity options do exist require only one example to prove true.
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So very much this. While I rarely sit down and explicitly prioritize them this way, the powers available to me when I build a character exist in a "value spectrum", and depending on where they fall in the spectrum they are more or less desirable to me for that build. If I wrote these powers in a list, at the top would be the most desirable powers in the build. Powers listed below that are powers that I still want, but with decreasing fervency as you go down the list.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
To me, there aren't "useful" and "useless" powers: its not a binary thing. There are the powers I want the most, and the powers I want the least, but rarely are there powers I literally would rather not have or take but then don't use. And there's no rule that states powers are only useful when slotted a particular way, and there's no compromise that exists.
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Now, I can only take the top 24 powers on that list , but that doesn't mean that power 24 was something I only grudgingly accept in my build, even or that power 25 was one that I would not like to have. Powers at slots 25 and below were voted out because slots 24 and up were deemed more desirable. That's a subtle but important difference.
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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I'm going to explain this simply and in kindergarten terms.|
Originally Posted by Obitus
The sacrifice made each build less unique, prior to Issue 19. Before, (most) everyone had Fitness. Now, most everyone has Fitness and three extra powers. Whether you personally believe those three extra powers offer a substantial benefit is irrelevant; they're there now and they weren't before.
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Sally, Joe, and Betty all have baskets that can hold three fruit. They can each take one of apples, oranges, pears, and bananas.
Sally takes everything but the oranges, Joe takes everything but the pears, and Betty takes everything but the bananas. They all have different baskets.
Now someone gives them all baskets that can hold more. They all take an apple, an orange, a pear and a banana.
Each of their baskets are more diverse. But the baskets as a whole are uniformly the same.
Diversity arises both because of what you can take and because of what you have sacrificed. We lost more than we gained. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that.
I am, however, very sorry for everything I said about Boost Range. Thankfully, the fact that it's useful doesn't change my point at all.
...
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Then I refer you once again to the build's both Arcarnaville and I posted for our Engry/Energy/Force Blasters and and ask you to tell everyone here how me and Arvana were forced into identical buils with inherant Stamina.
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Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I'm going to explain this simply and in kindergarten terms.
Sally, Joe, and Betty all have baskets that can hold three fruit. They can each take one of apples, oranges, pears, and bananas. Sally takes everything but the oranges, Joe takes everything but the pears, and Betty takes everything but the bananas. They all have different baskets. Now someone gives them all baskets that can hold more. They all take an apple, an orange, a pear and a banana. Each of their baskets are more diverse. But the baskets as a whole are uniformly the same. Diversity arises both because of what you can take and because of what you have sacrificed. We lost more than we gained. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. I am, however, very sorry for everything I said about Boost Range. Thankfully, the fact that it's useful doesn't change my point at all. |
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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Except that bad analogy remains bad. You specifically constructed a scenario there which does not match either what we can do with power choices or what people do in practice.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Sally, Joe, and Betty all have baskets that can hold three fruit. They can each take one of apples, oranges, pears, and bananas.
Sally takes everything but the oranges, Joe takes everything but the pears, and Betty takes everything but the bananas. They all have different baskets. Now someone gives them all baskets that can hold more. They all take an apple, an orange, a pear and a banana. Each of their baskets are more diverse. But the baskets as a whole are uniformly the same. Diversity arises both because of what you can take and because of what you have sacrificed. We lost more than we gained. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. |
Here's a better analogy.
Sally, Joe, and Betty all have baskets that can hold 24 fruit. There are some complicated rules about what fruits they can pick in combination, but the most basic is that you cannot chose the same fruit more than once. There are four types of strawberries available. Sally, Joe and Betty all three like strawberries very much, and all take at least three different types of them. However, some of the fruits are not very popular ones, so no one takes any of them. Additionally, Sally dislikes citrus and Joe is allergic to pears, so they don't take fruits of those types.
Now all three people are given a basket that comes with all four strawberries but still holds 24 more fruit. Within the other complex rules of fruit picking, and without re-picking more strawberries, Sally, Joe and Betty can now pick four more fruit. Joe remains allergic to pears, but he likes graps decently, so he takes four types of grapes, which he hadn't had any room for before. Sally still dislikes citrus, but she takes a bananas, two mangos and a type of apple she had not tried before. Betty doesn't really see much difference in the fruits, so she takes four more citrus fruits and calls it a day.
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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Your math is in error. For one thing, you're assuming that all possible power pool choices that exist now also existed before. That's obviously false: you're limited to four power pools total. So options that exist now didn't exist when fitness wasn't inherent. Second, you're assuming that all possible combinations of power pool choices are equally viable with and without inherent stamina. Take my posted energy/energy build. Technically, that basic possibility existed before without inherent stamina, but only by eliminating several powers. The logical ones to remove are flight, power boost, and boost range. However, that eliminates several options that exist to me now: they are not trivial eliminations. It eliminates flight, which to me is a deal-breaker on my blaster. Swapping flight and jettisoning superspeed eliminates stealth stacking, which I got used to back in my blapper days (before I9, it was stealth+SS; now its proc+SS). Power boost boost defense, and I can have it up more than half the time. And boost range gives me a significant advantage when it comes to using torrent+EB: torrent is the only ranged attack I have that isn't 80 feet range. Boost range can be up perma, and it boosts torrent from 40 to 64 feet of range (and a correspondingly wider arc to hit more targets).|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Well, let's use an energy/energy blaster as a concrete example.
Before, the blaster would have to get a travel prerequisite, a travel power, and the three powers in Fitness. They had room for for 20 powers up to level 38, after which we can assume are filled with epics. Minus 5, that's 15 powers and 3 powers less than they have available in their powersets. Let's assume at least at first they all drop Boost Range, since it's probably the worst power in the AT. The blaster can choose to drop utility powers (Aim, Stun), or drop offense that doesn't fit into an attack chain (Sniper bolt, Nova), or decide not to use melee attacks much (Energy Punch, Power Thrust). They might decide that they didn't like to use self-buffs (Aim, Build Up) or status effects (Power Push, Stun). There's many different options they could have gone with. Numerically, there are exactly 8*7 = 56 options for what powers they could skip. 8*8 = 64 if you allow the possibility for taking Boost Range. Now we get inherent stamina, and we get travel powers without prerequities. The blaster has four new slots. The blaster now takes...every power. They have to. Including Boost Range. With one slot still open, we're forced to take a single pool power with no slotting. I'll be generous and say that there are 21 possible picks from the nine power pools, including three secondary travel powers, although to be realistic some of the pool powers should never be taken alone and unslotted. Our 64 options possible before have now been condensed to 21. About a third as many character design options as there were before. In *both* cases the blaster could choose to sacrifice more powers from their primary and secondary and take power pools instead. Nothing has changed in that respect, and there are no advantages to pre- or post- Stamina from that. The number of possible combinations is still very large because you can choose to sacrifice AT powers to take pool powers. But those combinations were multiplicative with the basic combinations and they haven't changed. The basic options have been reduced to about a third of what they were, and so that reduces all options by the same amount. Character design diversity is a third of what it was. Adding a fifth power in the travel pools helps a little. Allowing epic powers to be taken at 35 helps a little. (I haven't respecced to take advantage of that yet.) But the essential fact is that meaningful choices require a sacrifice of the non-selected options. We were given the ability to make fewer sacrifices, and that reduced our options. They needed to give us more options -- more power pools -- to compensate. |
The bottom line is my energy/energy build is an option that exists today and didn't really exist pre-inherent fitness. The question is how many such builds does your math overlook.
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Just checking up on this thread to see if the crazy is still alive...
Seems like RemusShepherd is trying to tell that "Less is More." What's next, "War is Peace"? "Ignorance is Strength"?
How Double-Plus Good.
Carry on!
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It actually seems to be rather important to your point, since your overall point hinges on what choices people are presented with. If you can be wrong about how players value Boost Range, you can be wrong about lots of other choices players are presented with. You argument hinges on the notion that of the choices we're presented with today, more of them are trivial than used to be. You can't argue we have numerically less actual choices, because that's not true enough to a high enough magnitude to be interesting. Its certainly not the "1/3rd" number you mentioned before, because your approach to counting options fails to account for the fact that many options that exist today didn't exist before. Did inherent fitness reduce the amount of choices available to players in a meaningful way is I think the more important question, and I can say with reasonable certainty it so far has not.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I'm going to explain this simply and in kindergarten terms.
Sally, Joe, and Betty all have baskets that can hold three fruit. They can each take one of apples, oranges, pears, and bananas. Sally takes everything but the oranges, Joe takes everything but the pears, and Betty takes everything but the bananas. They all have different baskets. Now someone gives them all baskets that can hold more. They all take an apple, an orange, a pear and a banana. Each of their baskets are more diverse. But the baskets as a whole are uniformly the same. Diversity arises both because of what you can take and because of what you have sacrificed. We lost more than we gained. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. I am, however, very sorry for everything I said about Boost Range. Thankfully, the fact that it's useful doesn't change my point at all. |
If your argument was true that removing fitness as an option automatically reduced the number of choices available to us, and therefore diversity went down as a consequence, then what to make of the devs plans to give us three more slots? That is *adding* choices, so adding slots should automatically increase the diversity in the game, according to your argument as you've presented it.
Does it, as you see it?
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That's classy, thanks.|
Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
I'm going to explain this simply and in kindergarten terms.
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| Diversity arises both because of what you can take and because of what you have sacrificed. We lost more than we gained. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. |
According to the developers themselves, who gave us inherent Stamina in part because so many people took it anyway, pre-I19 Stamina was anti-diverse. Prior to Issue 19, if you had three level 20 characters in a team -- regardless of Archetype, powersets, pools -- chances are they all had used 2 or 3 of their 12 power picks on Fitneess. Nowadays, those three characters would still have Fitness in common, but they would also have three extra powers marking them as distinct from one another.
But that was all covered previously. I won't talk to you like you're a kindergartner because I know you to be an intelligent adult.
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| I am, however, very sorry for everything I said about Boost Range. Thankfully, the fact that it's useful doesn't change my point at all. |
The fact that Boost Range is useful doesn't refute your argument in full, but it's one less useless, do-nothing power. That said, my little post on the subject wasn't meant to be condescending; it was just meant to be pithy, because I'd already written a novel in the previous post.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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