Off the wall Photon Seekers idea

In the Tanky section is a thread that Aett Thorn heads. People have ideas. It doesn't matter what these ideas are. They get listed. No one can argue with them. Some of them I look at and completely disagree with but the idea is that its a nice consolidated place for a Dev to come look at and read through. I actually do trust the Devs. I basically look at the history of this game and think so much has been done right. So I would not hesitate to think that a Dev wouldn't be sensible with which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. I was a little disappointed with the -Range in Taunt in PvE, I knew what would happen before it was implicated but I am over that. There should be a chance for versus fliers imo and perhaps only Hurricanes -Range should work on AVs but I am digressing.

You do want to champion change. I don't care what ideas people have, throw them up for the Devs to see for them to pick and choose the most reasonable of them. Control that thread like Aett does in a unbiased fashion. You don't deny anyone from having their idea listed.

I think that would be what the Devs would want to see, plain and simple. None of these threads going over old ground.

We will stick to our guns. Lets just call it that.

I'm sorry, but this has to stop... Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love love love love LOVE my Peacebringer. He is an incandescent time-bomb just ready to get into the action and destroy things... But no matter what anyone tells me, Peacebringers just don't have it the same as a Warshade. The Warshade gets 85% resistance capped to EVERYTHING (no Psi hole), much better damage bonuses, better synergy between forms, and fantastic control-like powers. The Peacebringer has great survivability, fairly decent damage, not-so-great control powers, and a stinking Psi-hole along with a crash that eats up both health and endurance. I don't think it's even a viable concern to worry about Peacebringers becoming overpowered compared to Warshades.

Sure, one could argue that the Warshade needs a suitable fighting environment to obtain all these crazy stats. He or she could argue that without mobs, the Warshade is generally a weak AT. But that's the thing; with the ability to modify missions to meet your requested team size, (-1,0,1,2,3,4)x8 is the normal for a Warshade. MOST of the time, we have our "suitable fighting environment" to obtain our absurd stats that are just completely outlandish.

This also brings me to this; both AT's have strengths and weaknesses. My Peacebringer does magnificent single target damage, making him my choice for fighting anything such as Elite Boss rank and higher. But he lacks that "oomph!" that my Warshade has when it comes to mowing down thousands of mobs in little to no time.

In my honest opinion, it would take a hell of a lot of changes for Peacebringers to make them stronger than Warshades. The fact that Solar Flare won't be changed from KB to KD because of the threat of them becoming "overpowered" is thrown around by the Devs is completely absurd.

My list of Peacebringer needs could go on and on and on, but I'd rather not spend an hour sitting here typing it all out.

If it were up to New Dawn, Pulsar would be a Judgement power and every interface ability would probably have a chance for KB. Some people are so diluted by their characters of choice that they fail to see their downsides even when they are logically and reasonably explained time and time again. This is a recurring theme with this particular poster so I'd really like to just save you guys the trouble.

The claim that Peacebringers have comparable AOE to Warshades makes the assumption that Warshades don't have any pets up and don't have any Mire food. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but against multiple targets, ie, the only time how much AOE damage you do is important, why in the hell wouldn't a Warshade have pets up and Mire targets? I can think of only one reason: They're teaming with a Peacebringer who keeps griefing their AOE's by knocking things out of the target radius... Which brings me to my next point.

Even if Warshades didn't do better AOE damage than Peacebringers from a plain-old logical perspective, which they do, Peacebringers would still be worse off. The randomness of the KB in the PB's best AOE powers is so bad that after the alpha strike, it is extremely unlikely that they will hit their target cap with any of their other AOE powers. This isn't a matter of "lrn2play," it's a matter of common sense. When you have PBAOE knockback powers on a fast recharge like Solar Flare and Photon Seekers (not technically PBAOE, but close enough) it is not plausible that you will be able to hit your target cap after the alpha strike. Someone has claimed that "I'm not doing it right" when it comes to Solar Flare. Well, there is no way to do it right. Solar Flare itself is doing it wrong.

Even if this scatter issue wasn't the case, Peacebringers would still fall behind Warshades both damage output and survivability wise against large groups of enemies. Peacebringers honestly don't even have that much of a single target advantage against a good human form Warshade build, without Mire targets, and they get blown out of the water with just a few. There are really no numerical benefits whatsoever to playing a Peacebringer over a Warshade. The only thing Peacebringers can do that Warshades can't is heal allies, and with Aid Other or a temp power Warshades could do that too. In every other department, Warshades outperform Peacebringers by a very wide stretch. I'm not saying all of this for the sake of putting them down, I'm saying it because I want them to be worthwhile to play by people other than delusional types or "this r fun i iz peasbringur u gais1!1" people. (I love some of you.)

Every Archetype should have the potential to overperform and reach a certain standard of excellence at max investment and with the right build. Peacebringers, 20 billion influence later and with all the ideal Incarnate powers, will be outperformed by just about anything else with a DPS/AOE role on less than half the budget. They are not able to bring anything unique to the table. My Blaster could take aid other and Oppressive Gloom. He has melee and ranged attacks. He could even take provoke if he wanted to. Peacebringers aren't special. There is nothing they are capable of doing that just about any other AT can't do just as well or better, and there's absolutely no reason for the disparity in their performance.

Trick question.



An Extracted Essence (unbuffed by enhancements or effects) is able to output how much Damage Over Time, on average, just by cycling its attacks? Pick a time window ... doesn't really matter ... 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute ... whatever. Use an alternate build to test it against the Rikti Dummies in RWZ and record the results to get an "accurate" in-game set of numbers to work with.

Then find out how much Damage per casting do Photon Seekers (unbuffed by enhancements or effects) do when they explode.

Compare the steady DoT yield of Extracted Essence to the "bursty" Damage by Attack (ie. ONE, or three if you want to think of it that way) that Photon Seekers do. From that raw data, it should be relatively easy to determine an average DPS for Extracted Essence ... which can then be used to determine how fast the Recharge would have to be on Photon Seekers in order to yield an equivalent/equal damage throughput via their "1" burst attack. It would even be possible to take that sort of raw data and mine it for results concerning the difference between single target and multi-target saturation of attacks, so as to get a sliding scale of equivalence between the two Pets.

I'm willing to bet that the BASE Recharge on Photon Seekers would have to be somewhere down around 60 seconds (or less!) in order for them to even begin to hope to yield an equivalent damage output *per casting of the power* so as to at least pretend to normalize the damage throughput of the respective PB-v-WS Pets on a per use of power basis that also "roughly" matches/aligns with their damage throughput over time. If that means that the Duration on the Photon Seekers has to drop along with the Recharge, I for one am perfectly fine with that!



I believe Smiling Joe did a lot of the work necessary to determine the answer to this question already. Joe? Do you still have your old data lying around?

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

I remember back in the day with 3 fluffies out my alpha strike could 1 shot a row of romans on the Cimerora wall (If they all did their AoE at once, which wasn't often), not much else can do that even under optimised conditions.

Edit: When I do my maths on Monday I will exclude the fluffies, and I bet Warshades still win overall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

I am against changing the PB from what it is into something else individually preferred by this or that Kheldian driver.

Smiling Joe's old thread with his spreadsheets are here. I thought he updated them with the Peacebringer changes... I'm assuming the links at the start of the thread are still the old one before the Inner Light changes, since he lists "Build Up" in the powers list for Peacebringers. I distinctly remember him saying he updated it, but that must have gone somewhere else, perhaps a beta thread. If he can point it out (or someone else can find it with better search fu), that would be good.

I just skimmed a few old posts, but posts made since the changes, and it's clear from them that Warshades are still a ways ahead (I think Inner Light only marginally drew the DPS numbers together). The deciding factor in the DPS numbers are Extracted Essence... without those, the numbers are close. To be honest, I feel dubious that anything will happen with Photon Seekers to help narrow that gap, if we can't even make headway on the Solar Flare KB and Pulsar mag 3 issue, which aren't going to change DPS as much as Extracted Essence really does.

Maybe Hawk will prove me wrong and he's got something up my sleeve, but I'm feeling a little down about the possibility, to be honest. In the history of this game's design, a thing gets looked at and some changes go through, and that's it for at least a significant amount of issues. It sounds like Blasters are in the dev's eyes currently (and you can bet Arcanaville is going to help there... couldn't convince her to help immediately with PBs back around I21), and I don't know how many other power balancing things they are going to look at around whatever new sets they have in the works, along with new incarnate powers.

Last but not least, New Dawn, you have to stop just appealing to Excel. Excel is a program, not actual numbers. If you find something to quibble with in Smiling Joe's old (or newer, when we find them) sheets, you can go ahead. But you actually have to discuss data, not a program for looking at data.

I'll also point out that the disparities that Solar Flare and Pulsar face are easily viewable on CoD or Excel or any other tool you want to use, when you compare them to other equivalent powers. You can debate those comparisons if you want, but stop with the appealing to some program for looking at numbers.

I may put in a consolidated thread for Peacebringers soonish, but we've had plenty of topics on the subject that were fairly consolidated, and I know Arbiter Hawk has read a lot of our posts. I'm not sure we're all that disorganized on the subject. Still, I think the last comments of his via Redlynne make me wonder what he is reading... if I recall correctly what was said, anyway.

Darth, Princess is a returning player. She might not know about the Light Form changes, cut her some slack.