Blasters and mez - Are we going about it wrong?

I'm really hoping this post wasnt skipped over because of how late i posted it... please a take a look at it. I feel like it would hit 2 birds with one stone.

As far as my recollection goes, that's been true since launch.

Resilience's prior life as the Resist Disorientation toggle I think did not survive beta.

I never asked for correlation, I never would except as a lead to explore.

Really ? Have a group of blasters run a variety of missions with clarion on autofire, have the same blasters run the same missions without clarion.

Good experiments produce results that you don't need to go crazy sifting the data.

You state the near axiomatic. Blasters have the worst tools to avoid mez in the first place and no protection from it when it finds them. It would be truly astonishing if they weren't mezed more.

So far we have had attempts to fix blasters by the equivalent of banging on the television set to fix the picture, seeing as the next attempt is likely to be the last bite at the apple, it would be nice if it were done correctly.

As snide as the comment was likely intended, its also likely true for the foreseeable future. Which is why as entertaining as academic quibbling with you might be, its really just a sideshow to the main effort of getting things done correctly. I'm unaware of any way you can help that effort, or hurt it, so on a purely practical level there's nothing to be gained by convincing you of anything, nor at risk in failing to do so.

You have the most entertaining ways of admitting you are wrong.

Hehe.

I don't see why would need to build around those choices, to play your blaster efficiently, or 'properly enjoy the AT.

Actually, Another_Fan saying its possible I'm not wrong is like Venture saying its possible someone isn't retarded. Its an incredibly strong endorsement if you parse it in context.

Because what I want is on very general terms what Another_Fan wants, his main criticism when it comes to blasters focuses on the notion that all of my analysis is wrong, except for the rare moments when it agrees with him in which case I only got there by coincidence, because my flawed methodology could not possibly have generated the correct response.

I'm not so much arguing as reminding Another_Fan that in this particular instance, when I'm not specifically inviting debate for its sake but doing so because it parallels a game change I'm actually serious about effecting, his swipes are basically immaterial to me. I would gladly tolerate them if it got me closer to my goal, and I would also gladly eviscerate them if it got me closer to my goal. However, neither does anything beneficial so I'm just responding for the sake of replying to someone that either thinks they can take free shots at me or enjoys being made a fool of by me. It doesn't matter much which.

What I was pointing out was the methodology Arcanavile was using to reach conclusions was deeply flawed.

Arcanavile knows this and that's why there was all the name calling.


Oh please the whole discussion of blaster problems is a counterexample. I have deliberately stayed away pointing out your prior errors and let you reverse your position.

Except in this case, where we are in agreement about the conclusion, just not how it was reached or the degree of the problem.

Seems to be contradictory how could that be ?


LOL Narcissism its not just for breakfast.

So what other choices are there?

*sigh* Understood...at least you're having fun with it. I just think that it's weird when a person debates but refuses to look at both sides of an discussion...or maybe they are incapable of doing so due to their experience from their environment being somehow the absolute general standard for everyone else, stubbornness or pride.

Oops just saw your post Another_Fan...

Ugh, lol. I need to deviate from agreeing or disagreeing with you two before I get hit with a stray Fireball lol. Shame on me for attempting to get in the middle of you two lol.

Can we get back on topic at least?

Alkehine, how should one enjoy their blasters?

Maybe we should play on the lowest setting possible and just do DIB's and DFB until we get to 50? Then we can IO out, take like 5 power pools and slot up for mad defense? That's going to be tough for a lot of people to do...especially if they are use to playing Controller, Defenders and Scrappers those AT's can handle big mobs very nicely

That's what happens when you take extended breaks. Although its not really the same when someone just keeps making up stuff completely out of thin air. Its like arguing with a schizophrenic about the color of the sky and constantly being told its crumpled and I'm obviously wrong for constantly saying its peach-flavored. I find myself sometimes missing Mieux.

ROFL

When Arcanavile decided to name call it was as much an admission from Arcanavile as anyone will ever get. What does that make it for you ?

Be nice and stay on topic, please.

Can we get back on topic Another fan lol. You're not going to get what you want out or Arcana and she's not going to get it out of you. Let us all just get back to discussing how a blaster currently should play in order to perform on the same levels as the other ATs...or is it even possible without having to go out of ones way to make it work.

Never really been away from it. The question is how much does lack of status protection hurt blasters vs how much lack of X* hurts blasters vs how much does improperly designed powersets hurt blasters.

It's really important to get this right because having it wrong will mean all that happens is the Devs get a good laugh out of it.

*X = lack of secondary effects , controls, heals, hitpoints any of the other theories that aren't "THE ONLY THEORY THAT EXPLAINS IT ALL"

The question specifically addressed to me was:

My summarized answer was: in terms of the specific *degree* that blasters are so affected, no one, because there's no reason to believe the purpose to mez is to have that large of an effect on survivability.

Your immediate response was to state that that was not a logical conclusion to draw from the devs own analysis of blaster survivability, because D2.0 could have encouraged blasters to die at a higher than normal rate. Which would have been true had that been the only thing we knew, but we also know blasters underperformed before D1.0 was implemented. That is significant, because that nullifies that specific objection.

Your other objection is that the mere coincidental correlation between higher incidence of mez and higher death rates doesn't *prove* that mez is the blaster problem. Which I agreed with: it does not. However, the case I made didn't state that mez was a singular problem of blasters, but only a contributing one. And while that would be extremely difficult to prove by absolute deduction, I believe most people would agree that being mezzed is a contributing factor to lower survival: that's just obvious. Neglecting that obvious fact just to satisfy your own sense of logical validity does no good service to blasters.

Its worth mentioning that blasters were analyzed to be mezzed more often and died more often not to prove causality, but to serve as supporting evidence that the natural inductive conclusion that mez does in fact hurt survivability is supported by the facts. That doesn't mean protecting blasters from mez solves their problem, but it strongly suggests anything that doesn't address mez will likely miss a large component of the problem.

All of this *should* be relatively obvious, and definitely should be factored into whatever changes happen to blasters. And I have reasonable trust that neutral observers will agree, including the most important of those neutral observers.

About what other choices there are. I can just say not one of my blasters has all of the pool powers you suggested. As matter of fact, of what you listed, my blasters probably have two of them.

I can't tell anyone 'how' to enjoy their blasters. That is a matter of personal preference, and style of play. What I can say is this, I do not experience this 'too much dying' phenomenon. My blaster does not feel 'weak' or unable to survive. That feeling is not from laying back, and letting others do all the 'work'. This is from years of playing, solo, teams, trials, task forces, and iTrials.

I'll admit, there could be some tweaks made to the AT. But, some of what I read on this forum are ideas for a complete AT overhaul. A complete revamp of the AT, is just unnecessary.

Reading your last statement, I hope that is full of sarcasm. I have never had a problem in getting a blaster to 50. There were and still are plenty of ways to survive long before the incarnate system. Hmm, and slot up for mad defense? I guess that is popular. But, I can tell you my favorite blaster has negligible defensive numbers. Hop and pop, move and groove! Positioning goes a long way. If you want to be stationary and slug it out, perhaps blaster is the wrong AT choice.

There were people fully capable of getting Dark Armor scrappers to the level cap, and enjoying themselves doing it, before the Dark Armors stacked, Cloak of Fear caused targets to run to the horizon, and Dark Regeneration cost 50 end per use. And it had no end drain protection.

If they could do it, everyone could do it. So every change made to Dark Armor from release was just unnecessary, by the standard you seem to be expressing. Why don't we all just learn to play Dark Armor that way, or play Super Reflexes with 30% defense while turrets and pets have 105% tohit? Why was it necessary to remove the root in Unyielding? Why was it necessary to increase Blaster health from its original value, which was Defender health?

The reason is that for a sufficiently harsh definition of "necessary" no change is necessary. If the goal is to make archetypes that are *possible* to play and *possible* to enjoy playing, you could eliminate half the powers randomly from every powerset and stop modifier progression at level 10 and eliminate all enhancement slots, and it would still be possible to play them to 50 and possible to enjoy playing them that way.

But that's not the goal. The goal of the archetypes' design is to make them approachable and playable and enjoyable to a wide subset of the current players of the game. We don't need to make everyone happy, but when datamining shows that for the average player blasters are more fragile than any other archetype, and level massively slower, that's a problem no matter how many other players claim to have not experienced those problems. And that's why those other changes were also necessary.

Its really no different than someone complaining about the game crashing and someone else saying they've never seen it crash. What matters is what most people see. If 50% of the playerbase is seeing the game crash often, the fact that there are still thousands of other players that have never seen a crash before is completely irrelevant. If its like five players, they might just be the rare exception. But when its most of them, or a very large minority of them, it doesn't matter how many other people don't experience the problem, because the goal is not to make a game that is *theoretically* playable, but rather is playable for the widest possible cross-section of players. You can't achieve perfection, and someone will always be complaining about crashes, but you can still try to reduce that to as small a level as possible.

In this case, I do not believe its just a tiny minority of players that have or are noting problems with blasters. The devs' data says the problems are experienced by a lot of players. And even among forumites that play and are good at blasters, many note the problematic nature of their design or the impression that the tools granted to the archetype are less powerful than for other archetypes.

Alone, no one observation proves anything. But when you take the devs analysis, combined with historical data and the rates of archetype creation and playthrough and abandonment, combined with the range of expressed player observations out there, it becomes clear that *enough* players believe there's a problem to warrant the devs examining blasters carefully.

And they don't need much convincing, because they already convinced themselves that they had enough reason to look at blasters when they implemented Defiance 2.0. All that's really necessary is to demonstrate that D2.0 wasn't enough, and the problem was wider than the devs appreciated at the time. We don't have to convince them that there exists a problem worth investigating, because they already did that once themselves. We just have to convince them to make it a priority to extend the process and expand it more aggressively than they originally did.

And why should we and they be suspicious that D2.0 didn't do the job completely? Because of something called Defiance 1.0, which was designed to resolve the exact same problem and obviously failed to do so or Defiance 2.0 would not have been necessary.

That alone should convince everybody, players and devs, that we should be extra cautious about improving blasters, because two separate rounds of just trying to make them functional for most players have yet to conclusively solve the problem, and at least one of them provably failed to do so. And that means you don't just implement D2.0 and declare victory and walk away. You assume that the same confidence you have now the previous team had then, and if they were dead wrong you could be also. You revisit, and reexamine, and you make sure that your solution doesn't just work, but works well enough to be obvious. Because the last time you attemptd subtle and measured, the whole thing became a complete waste of time.


Also, one other thing. Power creep aside, blasters have always had the "minimally necessary" treatment. Do only what was absolutely necessary to make them functional. I believe the devs were afraid of buffing blasters, in a way they never were with tankers or controllers or any other archetype. They had "tank-mage" poltergeists whispering in their ears.

But this game is not the game it was when Blasters - and all the other hero side archetypes - were designed. Blasters were designed around a trinity ne quaterny concept of Blaster is DPS, Tanker is Tank, Defender is healer/buffer. But the modern game, which dates back to 2005 and is fully expressed in the *villain* archetypes, is that trinity balancing is for the birds. Every villain archetype can and is designed to solo. Well.

Controllers were "overhauled" to solo: they were given containment to give them a major jump in damage prior to 32. Tanker damage has been increased by over 25% since release. Even Scrappers have been buffed: health is higher, damage modifier is higher, pervasive criticals were added after release, and all of the secondaries have had improvements made, setting aside GDN and ED rebalancing (SR is arguably better than it was at release even factoring in the GDN, ED, and the elimination of perma-elude - which itself was introduced in I2).

And recently, even *villain* archetypes, designed to solo, have been significantly overhauled. Dominators were completely overhauled. Stalkers were recently overhauled. These were major changes and improvements made to archetypes that almost certainly already outperformed blasters.

Whether a player notices it or not, or cares or not, it takes a lot more effort to make Blasters work than any other archetype. And there's less return on that effort than for most other archetypes. That's not what the devs say: that's what the playerbase says through the numbers they rack up on the servers. That doesn't mean they can't be made to work, but as I said that's not the goal. The goal is to make Blasters an equal archetype representative in the current City of Heroes game.

And at the moment, it doesn't. That *necessitates* changes. They are necessary, if Blasters are to be the equal of every other archetype. And to a first order degree, that's the goal.

I would reply with a long post but judging from your response you seem to know what you're talking about! BUT I think that you have a primary/secondary that is very synergetic...For instance my Beam/Devices Blaster is very safe and very deadly compared to my Elec/Dark Blaster who lives in melee. Also my Elec/Dark Blaster cannot handle huge mobs solo like my doms, defenders and corrs can.

I just think that it's weird that a Blaster can't perform on the same level as the other ATs solo.

You mentioned synergy, that your beam/devices is very safe and deadly. And, you have others that play a bit differently. The question is, are those others still fun for you to play? Or are the shortcomings too much to make them fun?

I can tell you this without a doubt, I don't want every AT or even powerset to be vanilla across the board. Some things should 'work' better, some should be more survivable.

Like I said, I probably agree with you on some of the tweaks that could be made. But, a complete overhaul on what a blaster currently has both primary and secondary. I could never be in favor of that. Just because, there are already options, other ATs, that can give you more of what you may be looking for.

I was thinking some about this. I don't think I like your proposed idea much and it goes against the devs response that any thing that only exists in x state is seen as a nerf in all other states. The blaster all ready gives up too much to get mediocre.

I do want to address the binary mez issue though. Why is it so binary? Why don't we work on fixing that? Damage isn't binary. Its quite spread out by the mechanics of the game. So why not do that for mez?

Against damage we have defense and damage resistance. Defense has a maximum effective level , no matter how much defense you have 5% of all attacks launched at you will hit.

So lets come up with a mechanism like that for mez and have it apply to ALL ATs. The devs can determine how much they want each particular AT to get mezzed and how long they should be mezzed for.

Instead of mez protection ALL ATS would get some amount of mez defense and mez reistance as part of the AT's inherent powers and current mez protection toggles (or clicks) would be able to slot both defense enhancements and resistance enhancements.

As an example, Lets say the devs decide that tanks should have 30% mez defense and 300% mez resistance for their inherent mez mitigation and that the tanker overflow value for mez defense would be 95%. They also decide that the tanker mez protection toggle would give 44% mez defense and another 300% mez resistance. Slotting 3, even level, resistance SOs and 3, even level, defense SOs in the toggle would yield (after ED) a total mez defense of 95.52% and mez resistance of 768%.

The .52% that exceeds the overflow value is not lost, instead it is carried into the overflow pool. Other sources of mez defense such as break frees, clear mind, dispersion bubble, etc would contribute to the mez defense value but anything that exceeded the overflow value would go into the over flow pool which would use a hyperbolic function of some sort so that the last few % points of mez defense could never reach a total of 100% no matter how much extra mez defense was added but at the same time the first few percentage points over 95% would not be hard to come by.

So lets say the tank in the above example is targeted by an AoE stun power with a 30 second duration that has a damage component. He has 10% defense to AoE attacks. The attacker rolls a hit for the grenade and the damage value is then modified by the tank's damage resistance. Now that we have a physical hit we check against mez defense to see if the attack mezzes the target. Any value less than 95% (plus what ever the pool over flow value turns out to be) means that the mez portion of the attack has no effect at all. If it is effective then it is checked against mez resistance value and modified from there. In this case the 30 second mez would last 3.45 seconds.

Additional mezzes of that type, that hit, would simply add mez duration after being modified by resistance values.

The devs could then add mez defense and resistance to all armor toggles for all ATs making adjustments for desired values based on AT. If that were to be done I would recommend that "epic power pools" be made AT power pools and unlock in the same way and levels that all other pools unlock but the devs could still reserve PPPs that would be better than the AT pools for later levels (and they could add a set of hero PPPs that would be different from the villain ones).

The main problem I have with this suggestion is that it seems to be making the concession that blasters shouldn't really have mez protection, and so the penalty is intended to try to balance the scales by making the blaster pay for it.

But there's only two possibilities: Blasters need it, and should therefore have it, or they don't, in which case they don't. Paying for it by paying a damage penalty would present this question: what if the penalty caused blasters to underperform?

You have an archetype that is strongly suspected of underperforming. So you give it something, and penalize it in another way. What's the rationale of penalizing an underperforming archetype?

The secondary problem I have is that the damage debuff cost works in the opposite way I would want it to work in terms of who it affects. Lower level players, and players that do not build strongly, will tend to eat that penalty more than aggressive, experienced players, higher level players, and players that build strongly because that linear debuff is diluted by damage strength enhancement and buffs. The more damage strength you have, the less proportionately that -15% will mean. But its the lowest and weakest blasters that I think need the most help. They will get the least net benefit (by virtue of having the higher proportional cost). Its not a fatal problem, and any meritocratic solution that rewards skill will suffer from it to some degree, but taken with the first problem it exacerbates it.


On a personal opinion level, I would prefer a more attack-centric buff to blasters: this seems more like a workaround power, and not something that emphasizes Blasters as attackers and offensive specialists. Stacking mez resistance that builds with attacking, so it shortens mez, was an idea I liked better (and it is fully compatible with both D2.0 and my separate idea of counter-mez).