Rumored Scrapper "Rebalancing?"

I apologize for running with it when it was apparently all miscommunication. To celebrate, we should all agree maul lots of stuff with melee characters of some kind.

Indeed the sets with nice and early buildups like Street Justice perform better on Scrappers as they add to base damage (Fury doesn't count).

Sooooo... instead of a 10% chance to crit we get a 60% chance of checking to use our 10% chance?

Don't your scrappers know about Crit Panther?

Why would you want to put Scrappers below the sweet spot of sustained Fury, for damage?

I would think the sweet spot for Scrappers would to always be slightly above a maxed fury Brute who can keep it sustained.

Thus the trade off for less survival for more damage.

doh!

Because the context was low levels with no enhancements, where all ATs actually have very similar AT damage modifiers, and Brute with Fury therefore do more damage than everyone else. This benefit decays as the AT modifiers diverge towards their "final" values around level 25, and people start slotting enhancements.

I was curious enough to do some quick calcs earlier today. With just one TO slotted, it takes a Brute 32 fury to catch up to an equal-slotted scrapper versus a minion. With two PraeOs / two damage DOs and the DFB damage boost, the brute would now need 42 fury. It doesn't seem like much, but it does seem noticeable in practice.

And, well, Street Justice is just that good too.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

When did we last talk about this? Oh yes, that's right, at the end of Issue 6.

The math didn't work then and it doesn't work now; not in a mechanical sense (barring FF Defenders, move along) but in a Human sense. Specifically, there isn't a big enough string of integers between 1 and 45 to make +Defense buffs understandable to the average player. Jiggering the equations to make the scale 1-100 would certaintly be nice. (It would also make for a monstrous Set IO nerf without changing those numbers at all.)

If we still had overcapping we would have an advantage for +Defense-based sets... they have more +Defense than any IO set user could get together. As it is now, "more +Defense" is typically not useful. But that ship sailed long ago.

As a completely separate argument, where are the +Resist set bonuses? They seem a bit thin on the ground. That would be a good way to help +Defense armor sets.

That wouldn't help at all. It could make things worse, by actually implying defense numbers are percentages, when they are not really. It took years for people to stop asking in droves "what is 35% defense thirty five percent of?" Of nothing: its 35 points of defense which get subtracted from the critter's tohit of 50, except when its not 50 but higher or lower.

If you're actually still arguing against the Issue 7 critter accuracy changes, not only is that horse dead, but even when it was alive it was only mercy that prevented me from vaporizing it with nuclear weaponry, because the case for going back to unrestricted tohit scaling for critters is less than zero. It disappeared the day perma-elude disappeared, and even its memory was vaporized when SR was proliferated to Tankers, making the need to be able to tank higher ranks before level 32 cause the option to go back all but literally impossible.

No, I'm not arguing against it. It's a shame that all +Defense buffs needed to die so that SO-using SR Scrappers could level well from 1-40 again. But you gave (good) reasons for that, and done is done. Even worse than done; the Super Sidekick system now keeps people from fighting anything purple enough to make high Defense relevant.

Speaking of SR Scrappers... wait, aren't they suffering because they don't have layered defenses? Yes, they are. Hmm.

I'm sure a equation exists to convert +Defense into percentages. For example, 1% +Defense means a same-level Boss will hit you 99% of the time, and 95% +Defense means that same-level Boss would hit you 5% of the time. (Yes, I'm aware that there is an inherent miss chance now, that would change under such a scheme). It's not adequately clear to me why this is a bad idea. But hey, it would result in a Regeneration buff, which is always good in my book.

There are two unrelated problems: 1) +Defense goes from mildy helpful to reliable (as it can now get) in a 10% range, and 2) +Defense armors can't be more defensive than someone with another type of armor at the cap. Elusivity is a great answer for #2 but doesn't help power designers with #1.

There is no such equation, because tohit buffs would alter the relationship. And for that matter all Praetorians would act like they had +14% tohit, and also alter the equation.

25% defense is 50% average damage mitigation against any critter between the ranks of underling and AV from even con to +5, outside of tohit buffing powers. But its only 39% damage mitigation against a Praetorian class critter, like the ones that exist in the I22 Dark Astoria, and some of the critters in iTrials, and for some weird reason the DE in tip missions.


Interestingly, Elusivity was originally proposed by me to address #1, not #2. The short answer is that if all defense was Elusivity, your relationship equation thing above would hold true. 30% Elusivity means 30% damage mitigation. Always. However, there are some problems with that, in particular with the intent of tohit buffs in special circumstances. Elusivity eliminates the ability to ever declare a special circumstance. And if *all* defense was turned into Elu, there's enough of it to stack up high enough to make Defense aka Elusivity impenetrable.

So the solution, offered in the original article on Elusivity, was to *split* defense into some +Def and some +Elu. Doing so prevented *either* from reaching dangerously high levels, and in particular kept +Def away from the exponential side of the curve near the effective softcap (where ever it was).

The idea was to make Def and Elu like a diversified portfolio. Def was stronger against low tohit, Elu was stronger against higher tohit, Elu dampened the wild swings of Def and Def prevented Elu from becoming impenetrable. In a sense, Elu would be defense invulnerable to tohit buffs and Def would be defense vulnerable to tohit buffs and we could craft the precise amount of protection we wanted by mixing the two.

Really? That's too bad, it would make life easier for the many players that haven't read your posts.

Thanks for the description; it helps clear up some things I've read. So a way to make FF more relevant would be for bubbles to grant +Elusivity, not +Defense. Of course, the core problem would remain - people with existing defensiveness can't use more.

It would be good if there way to re-work the current scheme so that no one could self-cap against everything, but that's not really possible without wholesale changes. It's probably simpler to redesign +Defense buffs.

Actually, FF was a case study of the original article. The solution was for the *shields* to offer defense, and *dispersion bubble* to offer Elu.

The reason has to do with Dispersion Bubble itself. It stacks with the other two bubbles. That was seen as a constraint on its strength. It also stacks with power pool defense. Another constraint. Because of those constraints, Dispersion bubble is probably a bit weaker than it could be, because any higher and it runs into problems.

If it was Elu, it would not stack with the shields, and it would not stack with power pool defenses. The devs could then balance it based solely on one question: how much defense should dispersion bubble offer *the defender*. Which might be a little bit higher than what it is now.

What you would need to make sure about is a couple of FF defenders couldn't just overlap Elusivity bubbles and become impossible to hit, even by things with tohit buffs. I had a solution for that problem as well, but it is a feature that is not a part of the current implementation of Elusivity. Also, multiple FF defenders already make things unhittable anyway, so I'm not sure Elu makes this situation worse.