Concerned about Scrappers.

I get all of this. I don't want them to be better, but I do want them to have something that is their own that they don't have to share.

Out of all of what you named it still seems like a buff to their end total would have the least imbalance in the game.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I have never been so glad in my life that players have so little control over the game. I have been told for years (by very good friends) that letting a scrapper on a Master run of anything was a pity spot, and I was the only person they would do it for. They never said that about tanks or brutes.

Tanks have a role, it is just not the role you like.

Also I agree, Brutes are still OP. their resistance cap should have been lowered to 85% when the fury chances were made. I say that with all but 3 of my 15 lvl 50 toons being scrappers and brutes.

With a little disrespect as possible meant to your friends, I think they are downright weird.

If there's anyone my friends worry about on a "master" spot (and for the most part, there's not, as long as we know the player is competent), it would be a Blaster or Stalker.

It only supports if you ignore everything else I brought up, like AoEs and having to maintenance bruising by taking away from the attack chain.

Scrappers opening with a critical is irrelevant, since their damage is averaged out over time to get those numbers. Because of this, a scrapper is always performing at their peak regardless of whether or not any particular attack lands a critical. A tank isn't suddenly doing more because they have the option to open with a bruising attack. Opening with a bruising attack isn't itself always optimal, since you may need to open with a taunt /+ an AoE in order to draw aggro before the enemies run off and pwn the blaster.

The scrapper ATO doesn't discriminate: it applies its effects to all scrappers that slot it. It is readily available as low as level 7 to free players and provides a global bonus applied to all all relevant attacks. The only reason why someone would not slot this enhancement given the resources to own it is by some personal ideology that would stand firmly against ATOs. It must be taken into account because at any point in which we are comparing ATs we must compare them when they are being set towards optimum performance and not when being purposefully gimped. Doing otherwise creates a problem where we can arbitrarily limit the performance of any AT based on chosen slotting. For example, I have seen many tankers that work specifically around AoE attacks and do not slot their first attack or use it regularly in an attack chain. Because of this, you can assume arbitrarily that bruising does not apply to all tanks due to player actions, much like the ATO.

The ATO bonus takes special mention because it is a unique buff to the AT; the critical hit increase exists outside the regularly available methods of increasing damage output and is unique to that particular AT. It is not restrained by recharge rate or damage caps, and it costs no endurance. It is not an additional damage proc. It is because of this uniqueness and ease of usage that it has to be a factor when comparing Scrappers to anything else. Though you can neglect the SATO version since undoubtedly not every scrapper is level 50 with a catalyst.

Agree completely with this.

There are very few "game-killer" actions that could be taken. Taking away the favorite characters of thousands of players because one person doesn't LIKE them would be such a move.

I don't like Masterminds, but I would NEVER advocate removing them from the game. I can just not play them.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Yeah, and Blasters and Scrappers also have very comparable survival potential.

How much they actually have is vastly more important than how much they can theoretically get on paper. The average tanker is far more survivable than the average brute and that survival margin is not immaterial to survival. So long as that is true, the potential survivability will be not very relevant. Controllers and Defenders have the same buff and debuff potential, because the strength caps and floors for allies and enemies are identical regardless of the identity of the buffer and debuffer.

If you're always running around with damage capped and resistance capped Brutes, then you should a) always play brutes and b) recognize that your experience is sufficiently far outside the norm for it to be irrelevant to game balance. If you're always capped, you're exactly the type of player that doesn't need help of any kind. Game balance is for the normal players to get normally balanced gameplay propositions in normal gameplay situations.

Basically, if you're always damage capped, then even your Tankers are doing more damage than 90% of all the damage dealing characters in the game, from Scrappers to Stalkers to Blasters to Brutes to Dominators. Asking for even more in that situation is ridiculous.

If you're not always damage and resistance capped, stop mentioning the situation like its relevant.

Except that's actually a net damage nerf.

Is what it is. Stalkers were not even on the radar, and blasters offered safer damage because they could do it from range. Note earlier where I exceeded the ranged soft cap on my one and only blaster. With that said, Triumph can be a weird place at times, which is why I moved to the much more normal and sane Virtue.

Let me again petition for a way for scrapes to be able to increase their max end. Shoot, get rid of conserve power, and give scrappers the more reliable Superior Conditioning in their EPP.

Out side of this argument. I would like to show that I am sane by stating that I think Scrappers have a snow ball's chance in hell of getting any kind of buff. As many have said, they just work. I would still like to see them get something that is their own, but I don't think it is likely to happen. As many say "Don't fix what's not broken" I get that, I really do. However I also love Scrappers and would love to see them get something unique.

As this point I would be satisfied if some of the more requested sets were proliferated to scrappers. I am pretty sure that will have to satisfy me, because it is the best I am likely to get.

I still say that a scaling end total buff would be cool, and not game breaking. At most it would allow scrappers to maybe change up their slotting, or not pick a power.

You seem to have missed or disregarded where I mentioned that everything I was calculating was with the assumption that both ATs were solo.

And I didn't mention it, but probably should have, but I was also assuming both ATs were slotted with SOs, since that is what the majority of the game is balanced around. And as far as I'm aware that has not changed (with the possible exception of Incarnate content).

IOs break balance between ATs. They broke balance between them the day they were introduced, when people discovered they can get a crap ton of defense on an AT that was never meant to have it.

It is fairly safe to assume that any balance point between ATs is not taking things like 90% global recharge and soft-capped defenses on resist-based sets into account.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Says the one who ignored the argument about Bruising not being the same as a flat 20% damage boost for Tankers. And the one who ignored the point about Brutes having the same survivability potential as Tankers, but far superior damage potential. And how the Incarnate system and continuing power creep make it ever more relevant that Scrappers and Brutes are becoming functionally immortal in an ever greater percentage of the game's content, but Tankers lag behind just as much for damage, and will do more so, hitting their low damage cap. Or how the developers leverage Tanker damage against increased survivability, but have no problem circumventing that survivability with unresisted damage and cheating mechanics or rendering it superfluous by handing out more survivability to every AT.


This is why you're a hypocrite.
Your entire argument boils down to: "Let Brutes have their way. They don't have to pay as much for their survivability; screw Tankers, they do."

Not to mention, you started this whole thread because Stalkers got a small, much needed fix that you felt threatened Scrappers (cause Scrappers are totally an endangered AT).
Honestly people, let that sink in for a second.

So you've got no business questioning anyone else's motives or reasoning for wanting AT changes.

In my opinion, only two balancing points are particularly relevant to overall average game balance. First, there's the general case of general mission scaling. For sufficiently large teams or high difficulty sliders, the proportion of bosses, Lts, and minions tends to be about one boss to three Lts to six minions. In smaller spawning and at settings where bosses are blocked, the ratio tends to be closer to one LT to four or five minions.

At sufficiently high levels, the ratio of health between minions, Lts, and Bosses is about 1:2:6. So in effect, in terms of the total damage you have to generate, you end up with the equivalent of six minions, 6 minion-equivalents of Lts, and 6 minion-equivalents of bosses. Which is actually probably not a coincidence: its probably embedded deep in the spawning code to generate these weighted results.**

So in terms of balancing things like critical chance, the most appropriate thing is to balance on the assumption that the critical chance is equally weighted between minions, LTs, and Bosses, in the large scale case. In the small scale case, its four to five minions to two minion-equivalents of Lts, a ratio of about 2:1 to 2.5:1.

That means for most Scrapper attacks that follow the 5%/10% rule, the average critical rate should be about 8.3% in the large case and 6.4% - 6.7% in the small case. Which is one of the reasons why for years now I've generally split the difference and assumed its about 7% for balancing purposes.



** And for long, long, *long* time forum readers those numbers should look familiar because they came up during Ice Tanker balancing: those rough numbers were used in Circeus' calculations based on Havok's spreadsheets and conversations with the devs on refining his target-mix calculations

And I have also since admitted that any buff to scrappers is unnecessary and would be unbalancing. I rescinded my suggestions for improving them within the last page or two. After running through the numbers myself, I saw that I actually was wrong about scrappers being threatened by stalkers. (which led to this argument being started, which wasn't my intention at all)

I can admit when I was wrong about something. Can you?

Not that I'm expecting you to, you never have that I'm aware of.

(Yes, Claws admitted he was wrong about something. It doesn't happen often, but I can't argue with the numbers)

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

It is precisely because its unique and easy to compute around that you have to be extra careful in including it, and not other comparable options, when discussing game balance. You cannot simply include the critical chance ATIO and not damage proc ATIOs just because the damage proc ATIOs are more difficult to calculate the effect of. That's not kosher.

Because Claws has gone out of his way in the past to troll me constantly, and he gets away with it. He's fired far worse personal insults at me than calling someone foolish. He can't shoot my arguments down, so he ignores them. And quite frankly, I'm getting tired of him and the few others I presume are his buddies that show up to crap on anything I have to say.


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I've actually always been a fan of the character who has nothing about him that's special, he's just that damn good. If I may blow my macho status for a moment, it's a lot like the PowerPuff Girls. You have Blossom who's super strong and has ice breath, you have Bubbles who's super strong and has a host of weird abilities like speaking with squirls and "cute," and you have Buttercup who's super strong, only she's extra super strong to compensate.

PowerPuff Girls aside, that's where I see Scrappers - their thing is just stats. They don't have the special abilities the other ATs use to raise their stats under certain conditions, they just have decent stats all the time irrespective of anything. Considering all other ATs in the game have something to monitor, that seems like a sufficiently unique "thing" that only Scrappers have.

Yeah, that's the kind of stat boost I was talking about, and I wouldn't be opposed to it, but my question is how you justify it in terms of what the AT represents. We can say, for instance, that a Blaster is all about damage, so it makes sense for said Blaster to have more damage. It's his "thing." We can say a Defender tries to take care of his team-mates first, so his offensive prowess decreases as there are more people to take care of, with the expectation that they'll pick up the slack.

But what makes a Scrapper more fit than a Brute, who actually needs the fitness more thanks to the nature of the Fury mechanic? I'm not saying this to challenge you, by the way. I'm genuinely interested in an explanation.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Not sure if serious....

With both AT's solo, Scrappers will still have more of an advantage because enemies always appear in groups of 2 and 3. They apply their superior base damage to all of those enemies at the same time, where as a tanker has to play whack-a-mole with their tier 1 attack to get an even damage output. This also assumes that the difficulty hasn't been altered to that of more than x1, which is a very real possibility, even on SOs.

Now, there is a much bigger case as to why you don't want to balance around IOs, and that is because IOs require real life money. Either from VIP subscriptions to just buying the license. The ATO bonus does not require this. There are those other petty differences between them, such as how IOs need sets to be of any use while the ATO doesn't, how IOs require certain levels to be achieved while the ATO needs only level 7 to be at peak effectiveness, how IO sets require dedicated sloting for them while the ATO bonus doesn't. The only thing the ATO has in common with the IO is that it has bonuses as a set and it isn't a SO enhancement.

The devs do look at the IO sets still. I remember awhile ago Blessing of the Zephyr received a nerf because it was too powerful. IOs aren't an instant "screw balance" button the devs put into the game and continue to ignore. However I digress: your assessment is flawed because not every tanker uses bruising. I didn't even know bruising existed until I went to the forums, let alone did I build and slot to take bruising into consideration and construct an attack chain to maintain the resistance debuff.

But when Mario only has a top speed 5mph slower than Donkey Kong and way better acceleration than him, that's a problem.

Especially when even though Toad has better acceleration than Mario, his handling is so poor he crashes constantly and faceplants despite Defiance.



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Even when handled with a self granting debuff like Bruising?


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This is cool info to have. There is something I would like to comment on, though. When dealing with an assortment of minions, Lts, and bosses, the total scaled HP of that spawn needs to take into consideration that by spreading out amongst multiple "nodes" it provides a means to multiply the damage done by cones, auras, and AoE attacks to this HP base. For this reason, if we have a regular spawn of 1 boss, 3 Lts, and 6 minions, then an AoE will do up to 6 times the damage to minions than on bosses, and twice the damage to minions than Lts. Though many cones have a 5 target maximum, so this becomes 5 times bosses and 66% more than LTs.

This is a far greater difference than the changes in critical hit rates applied to different classes of enemies. As far as the overall damage output goes, I am unsure of exactly how much threat each boss and minion poses through their damage and accuracy and other abilities. My *perception* has always been that the bosses do more damage than the minions that surround them, though this may be mistaken. Regardless, the ease of which minions are killed or overall disabled means they are not as much of an overall threat as the stronger but fewer bosses and LTs that occupy the spawn. Exceptions do apply.

Should the situation arise where we are comparing an AT with a damage ATO proc, I will include it. Though more difficult, I don't believe it would be that hard to figure it out, since the procs have their activation number per minute listed. If you find their damage and their activation rate, it should be easy enough to calculate their additional damage output for any amount of recharge.