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The solo counter-example is obvious: an energy blaster that is getting mitigation from knockback is virtually guaranteed to have better performance than one that doesn't, because we already know that the average blaster was skating at the edge of survivability when last datamined. My own personal experience backs that up, but even if I'm an anomaly, the data implies this is true on average.

The most obvious teamed counter-example is the case of one melee character and one ranged character. Lets assume the melee character possesses the knockback. Crane Kick is a good example: it has about a mag 6 KB at level 50: I once measured that to throw a target about 20 feet or so at even con. Lets assume the more floaty physics engine throws the target 30 feet. At level 50, with swift slotted with one run SO, player run speed is 30.8 feet/sec. That means the worst case scenario is a one second gap in offense. However, that's the worst case scenario. The ranged attacks could defeat the target leaving the melee to switch to another target. The target could be knocked in the general direction of travel in which case much of the distance the melee character moves is distance the character would have to run anyway: it costs zero net time.

Lets assume the average offensive penalty is about half of the time to cover that knock distance: about half a second. That compares to about five or more seconds of damage mitigation. That's a ratio of ten to one, and that's probably being conservative.

But, you might object, the melee might not need the mitigation. Fair enough but we can't simply handwave it away: doing that says damage mitigation itself is always worthless, so only offensive benefits count. There's no point in discussing KB in that environment, and for that matter there's no point in discussing most whole archetypes in that environment. There has to be *some* conversion of offense to defense. And a ten to one ratio makes it difficult to state that the mitigation is not worth at least as much as the offensive penalty.

Lets flip this around and give the knockback to the ranged attacker. The ranged attacker could conceivably knock a target that was in range of the melee character out of range. That won't happen all the time, but at least sometimes. The question is whether the incremental benefit of having or not having the knockback is better. Leaving the knockback in, the target is knocked which affords five or more seconds of damage mitigation to one or the other player. If this is the ranged attacker, we're presuming for argument's sake that's noteworthy. If this is the melee attacker we're presuming this is less noteworthy, but still significant if the ratio of mitigation to offense is high enough.

Why would the ranged attacker shoot at a target the melee character was engaging? There are lots of reasons, but the most intelligent one is that there isn't anything else to engage. If that's the case, the knockback is inducing a small penalty.

But this is the case of KB's effects once the fight is fully engaged. What happens at the beginning of the fight? In this case, with one ranged and one melee attacker its a foregone conclusion that the ranged attacker will be able to engage first, in theory. In practice, the ranged attacker may not want to. Doing so will mean he or she gets the initial aggro, and the ranged attacker may not be able to withstand that initial aggro. The ranged attacker may decide to let the melee attacker attack first, and only engage targets whose aggro is already occupied. That creates another variant of the situation above.

But if the ranged attacker can attack with attacks with significant mitigation, that equation changes. In that case, the ranged attacker can attack first, using their ranged advantage, and that increases the amount of damage the team can deal overall. Removing that knockback entirely means you reduce those pulses of offensive penalty at the end of the fight, but you also reduce the opportunity for the ranged attacker to leverage range at the start of the fight. Those are purely offensive counter-balances, completely separate from the actual benefits of having more mitigation during the fight. Without doing a quantitative analysis, it seems likely to me that the net difference between the offensive advantage of frontloaded mitigation and the offensive advantage of lack of knockback disruption roughly cancel out: enough to make the mitigation component itself preeminent.


The general principle is that solo, there are far more ways for knockback to work in your favor than against you. In a team, there are far more ways for knockback to work against you than when you were solo, but there are also far more escape hatches for other players to nullify that disadvantage. That's one of the reasons why herding is not as popular now as it was in the past. Although the lower aggro cap plays a role, another factor is that the perception became increasingly obvious that AoE wiping out one spawn at a time was faster than the time to combine them. That amount of AoE also tends to saturate the environment to the point where a couple knocked targets do not have a big difference in offensive kill speed. In the same environments where the damage mitigation effect can become unnoticable, the scattering penalty can become equally unnoticable. That's not a coincidence, because the value of damage mitigation in a team with a lot of buffs is inversely related to kill speed (the phrase "a lot of buffs" is there because that statement is time-scale sensitive: its false for situations with longer time scales).

No no no, see, you misread that. I didn't say knockdown, I said knockin. Rather than enemies going away from the attack, they come towards it. Clearly it's the perfect solution that everyone is waiting for. Though, it will likely have to wait until after reverse-butt capes, hair physics for bald characters, and the City of Dogs expansion.

In seriousness, it's not a big deal. If you're on a team where someone is getting disgruntled because your powers knock enemies away and OH GOD THEY HAVE TO RUN AN EXTRA 10 FEET OR OH NO MY AOE ATTACK DOESN'T HIT HIM AND MY PERFORMANCE IS SUFFERING BY 3.87% OUR TEAM IS DOOOOOOMED!!! then you should probably not team with that person. If you are that person, well congrats, there will be ever so slightly less knockback in your life. There aren't going to be security checkpoints set up at every mission door with the Knockback Protection Agency standing outside verifying that you have a single enhancement that works in a single power either way, so it matters very little.

hand clap wont be able to take the set because it is a universal dmg set and will prolly only be able to go into powers which can take dmg enhances

hurricane is another one that prolly wont be able to take this either

I never said anything about what the IO did or didn't do. If you like it and are going to use it, great. I'm not begrudging any player that wants them and intends to use them. I can see some powers where it makes a lot of sense in fact.


However, if you're going to attempt to justify its existence with statements like "its completely optional" I'm free to challenge that statement, for instance by asking if the fact that its optional should have any bearing on whether its a good idea. Are all optional things, or even most of them, good for the game? Conversely, why are bad ideas better if they are made optional?

Lots of options would not be: in particular things that break the design or balance rules of the game, but were made optional for players to follow. That's the sort of thing that would kill the game remarkably fast: fast enough for me to bet real cash on.

There are lots of reasons why this IO is not good for the game in the long term. Probably the most significant reason is that its existence is tacit acknowledgement that the players expect and can continue to expect the game to present conditions where its true that KD is generally better than KB, and those are situations where moving the target is almost never better than leaving the target to move as it wills, because its almost always going to move in an idiot manner that always benefits the player.

The devs may be conceding the point, or they may be ignoring the point, but either way they won't tell us. Either they'll change it one day or they won't, and if they do they'll argue they never said otherwise and the players will say that they signalled it would never change by designing the game around the notion that critters will always move in best manner possible for players most of the time. And they'll both be right, but in a much more important way they'll both be very wrong.

Thanks! Too right. The approach is not limited to steamrolling.
Thanks for the kind response. So, yeah, there's just the simple aspect of wanting things to go without more of a fuss than what you'd consider ideal.
I can understand that.
I tend to enjoy it most when things don't go according to plan, haha, but I can certainly understand what you're saying.

(And I certainly understand about your example of Oil Slick!)

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I think it's because almost everyone remembers their one or multiple bad experiences with a KB heavy person...compared to their good experiences with a person that used it wisely. We all know that humans tend to only remember and dwell on the bad.

I complimented a player this week because she was amazing...she REALLY knew how to use her Gravity/Kin well! Reckless KB players used to anger me but I learned how to deal...*run* lol. Several times I would run from a mob until the team or KB person had things under control and when I'm asked why I'm not participating I just tell them and they understand.

An example of why I would like a -KB enhancement/Global -KB is the Storm set. I personally cannot deal with trying to blast Foes When my Tornado, Hurricane and Lightning Storm is pushing them everywhere. It's one reason why I only play Controller Stormies. Storm can be great with certain combos though like a Beam/Storm Corr but I find myself clawing at my face because I want to use LS and Tornado ALL the time...not just *sometimes*

Sorry Tangent

M30 Grenade is like most other KB powers and always knocks away from the player. You misremember.

This is likely simply due to a perception error but it also may be willful ignorance. I have seen and been on both ends of an Ice blaster "messing crap up" just as bad as KB ever could. When that Ice Storm and Frost Breath hit a whole spawn while they are still spread out, the scatter doesn't go away quick. I still say AoE immobs are worse and more often a detriment than I have seen KB be used poorly. Hell, I have seen KD do the exact same thing. Gotta put that Ice Slick or Earthquake out right away, don't you? Why let the spawn collapse first?

But that doesn't change your point. KB can have drawbacks. What you seem to not be willing to accept is that sometimes powers with drawbacks are good design (especially if they have some counterbalancing benefit). Parry lowers your damage output. Maybe its damage should be increased? A Parry with higher damage would always be better than a Parry with lower damage. In all my years of reading the forums, no one has ever been able to prove that Parry with lower damage is more effective than Parry with higher damage. KB can cause scatter, it should all be KD. That way we can control the spawns and still do full AoE damage. The fact that KB is control, mitigation, and spawn positioning should not be balanced by potentially lowering our damage output (and armored toons should not have to press movement keys too much either! ).

And this IO addition has me curious about the following:

Yeah, given the way KB works, wouldn't a power have to summon a Pseudopet in order to do radial KB rather than KB from the character?

Like putting down an Ice Slick on low level enemies, for instance. (Incidentally, KD being low mag KB rarely makes sense to me due to situations where it becomes KB. It generally seems to me like it would make more sense to be low Mag KU instead.)

I cannot agree with you enough about kd/ku. One particular offensive power in this respect is Jolting Chain. When used on lower conning enemies (which happens frequently after you've be granted a level shift via the Alpha slot) it scatters enemies like crazy because that knockdown is becoming knockback. I've suggested a few times that it should be knock up instead.

Lies!!


And you'll never have to.

Or should have to, that is...

How little do you understand this game. If somebody handclaps so that my already fired rain of arrows hits 1 targets instead of 10, that's a very significant drop in my efficiency, it also means that my subsequent AoEs will hit 2 targets instead of 5-10 if the badguys don't close back to melee.

Nobody is going to complain about a 3% drop in efficiency, but when you're reducing 2 or 3 characters by 60%+ surely the KB user should realise this, but they very rarely do. It doesn't help that often the powers with the huge radial KB don't do much damage, I've less complaint when they do.

Arcanaville's argument about KD being better than KB being similar to hold is better than immob is fallacious, hold/immob are different effects. Doing 20 damage is rarely better than doing 200, mag 0.7 KB is usually better than mag 7, that's the difference. I've always thought that KB and KD should be different (low mag KB can still be KD) but this would allow some attacks to have high mag KD meaning they can't be prevented by low mag protection but will never knock back.

Arcanaville already has this under control but I'll go where she won't: you want the game to be pointless easy mode. You argue for easy mode in any thread where it comes up. Every time the "simplify, simplify, simplify" crew gets its way the game becomes that much worse.

LOL

The game is already pointless easy mode. When Incarnates came out and I was arguing for it to be difficult and interesting everyone said I was arguing for "the hardcore". You guys are funny. You'll say anything.

So you like KB and therefore it's advantages to you outweigh its disadvantages. OK, I've never argued about people's personal preferences. But you've never seemed to fall back on that. But I'm never going to argue with personal preference.

EDIT: By the way, I acknowledge I misspoke.

EDIT2: Although I'm far from the only person who argued for this enhancer, I was always in the battle, so I'm putting this in my WIN column. I'm fast running out of even minor things I want.

Slow can mess things up. Saying that it could mess things up worse than KB ever could is hyperbole IMO.

Parry has no drawback. It doesn't lower your damage output. When you cast Parry it causes damage. It also provides a defense buff. The tradeoff, to use Arcanaville's language, is that you get less damage than that power would normally provide based on its recharge/end for a defense buff.

That's a very reasonable tradeoff.

What does KB give you?


EDIT: I'm done. The KB lovers can pout, but I'm ecstatic that this IO is being added. You all should be happy. You can keep your beloved effect and have a ready answer when people state they don't want it in a power.

It is a good thing I never said that. I said AoE Immobs messed things up worse and more often. At least with KB the enemies can get back up and recollapse, an AoE immob makes sure they stay spread out.

Adding Parry to your attack selection is lower damage than using one of your other attacks. It lowers your damage output and you know it (at least I hope you do).

All the stuff you admit it gives and no more. In many, if not most, cases, KD would be better, I am not denying that. But if you admit KD provides something, well KB provides all the same but one and can provide one thing KD doesn't (which can be good or bad depending).

This is called "opportunity cost", and is my favorite form of "drawback" in game design. It isn't an actual built-in effect in the power that can be detrimental in certain circumstances. Parry doesn't provide any effect that can be considered detrimental that every other melee attack in the game doesn't already provide.

This is correct.

Which raises the issue of just how this proc works? Does it cap magnitude (in which case it would fail on very weak mobs)? Does it change the direction entirely? Does it slap a KB protection effect on the target?

What happens if you slot it in a KU power?