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I wish I had access to the data that would let me analyze how often blasters die from full health in ten seconds or less. I would bet that its only a single digit percent, but I don't think we should start another bet until the current one reaches its conclusion.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
But in the current level 40+ meta-game, you can get massively more mitigation from defense than regen and even small additions of defense mean a lot due to what they are likely stacking with. The regen (and other +HP mechanisms) on top of defense builds will be excellent, but how will they play out on minimally IOd builds? It is not so much that regen is not beneficial, but I don't see how it will help the average player when the most likely cause of death is blundering into things, stripping aggro off the tanker (due to any number of mistakes by either party), or unexpected adds and in most of those cases getting killed quickly. Monitoring the war of attrition on HPs is an advanced player skill, I think.
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I can say that a rough analysis of the logs I have suggests that happens to me less than 10% of the time, except in one situation: incarnate trials. In most other instances, the fight that kills me is not the fight that kills me, but the fight before. At some point, I decide to proceed while at lower health than advisable, push my luck, and then die. For me, I'm pushing my luck because I *know* what the survival odds are if I approach a spawn with less than full health. But for most players, that's not true and they have little idea how much more dangerous it is to fight a spawn at 60% health than full. I'll bet they even think to themselves if the first spawn knocked me from 100 to 60, I should be ok because the next one will knock me down to 20, and then I can rest.
One thing that I believe suggests that most deaths take longer than that are that mez was determined to be a factor in blaster deaths. But that's not really logical if blasters were dying very fast to very high damage. If blasters are being killed in seconds from full health, being mezzed wouldn't hurt that much: you'd be dead either way. Mez hurts because it makes time work against you rather than for you: its time the critters get to shoot at you while you're ability to react is limited, it gives critters time to move into melee range, it gives critters longer to kill you. But that doesn't matter when there's not enough time to matter.
400% regen (about) is a lot of health. Its comparable to popping one small green every fifteen seconds constantly. I guarantee if all blasters got a shoulder kitty that did that for them automatically without them having to have the insps or spend time popping them, that would help a lot of blasters.
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Originally Posted by StratoNexus
It is simply wrong that /Mental did not get a change as well. Heck, this is the perfect opportunity to fix Drain Psyche!
Give it an upfront regen/recovery amount that doesn't require any targets. 100% regen enhanceable and 50% recovery enhanceable. Then have it give 50% unenhancebale regen and recovery per target hit. And make Scare and WoC adequate instead of poor. |
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Speaking of shoulder kitties. That costume part needs to get ported to males. I have a mage who needs a familiar.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
400% regen (about) is a lot of health. Its comparable to popping one small green every fifteen seconds constantly. I guarantee if all blasters got a shoulder kitty that did that for them automatically without them having to have the insps or spend time popping them, that would help a lot of blasters.
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So what do we know about sorcery? Since Arcanaville hinted at it, how will it help blasters?
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I am not sure I needed it to be under 10 seconds to be quick, although I wouldn't be thinking much longer than 10. I definitely wasn't necessarily thinking from full to dead. There are a lot of reasons a blaster could feel safe at below full, overconfidence and risk taking are just two. I was thinking of scenarios similar to: for whatever reason most of the spawn was aggroed on a tanker and things were happy, even if the blaster had taken some minor wounds (maybe at 75% health). Blaster unleashes AoEs. The wrong three enemies were not aggro locked. The blaster will survive one volley, but now may be at 20 to 30% and are at real risk. In this scenario, regen is just not gonna help.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I wish I had access to the data that would let me analyze how often blasters die from full health in ten seconds or less.
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Am I thinking that type of damage shift happens more often than it really does? How about that spawn all mezzed suddenly breaking loose and targeting the blaster who threw out the AoEs? Maybe they stick out in my mind because that is when bad things happen, but I think when bad things happen is a more serious problem for blasters than a single digit percentage. I could be wrong.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I can say that a rough analysis of the logs I have suggests that happens to me less than 10% of the time, except in one situation: incarnate trials. In most other instances, the fight that kills me is not the fight that kills me, but the fight before. At some point, I decide to proceed while at lower health than advisable, push my luck, and then die. For me, I'm pushing my luck because I *know* what the survival odds are if I approach a spawn with less than full health. But for most players, that's not true and they have little idea how much more dangerous it is to fight a spawn at 60% health than full. I'll bet they even think to themselves if the first spawn knocked me from 100 to 60, I should be ok because the next one will knock me down to 20, and then I can rest.
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Your scenario is a perfect example. Once you get to 30% health, random events become much more important. From 100 to 60 could have been 100 to 30 if you got unlucky, but either way you lived. 60 to 20 becomes death when you get unlucky (which I figure was your point). While I admit high regen will mitigate that because there will be less fights started at 60, your own argument about how people play applies. People will still push the envelope and when they do, regen will not help when they get unlucky (OK, of course it will help sometimes, but there will be plenty of times where it doesn't). And, of course, once they get to 30, now they get afraid. Hey, I might die. Then they do wrong things (I am suggesting this is because they don't have a lot of regular options outside of inspires).
Regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts. Dull Pain, Reconstruction, MoG, Mind over Body, Heightened Senses, HPT, SoW, IO defenses, high resistance. Otherwise, it only encourages us to move faster and still die often.
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
We don't know anything about sorcery, and if we do, then we aren't allowed to tell anyone about it since it means that we found out about it through means that violate the EULA.
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Just remember: the truth is out there.
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Originally Posted by Garent
We don't know anything about sorcery, and if we do, then we aren't allowed to tell anyone about it since it means that we found out about it through means that violate the EULA.
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I am pretty sure that the fact that I read about it is not a violation of the EULA. Whoever wrote what I read may have been in violation.|
Originally Posted by Garent
We don't know anything about sorcery, and if we do, then we aren't allowed to tell anyone about it since it means that we found out about it through means that violate the EULA.
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Short story, Sorcery may have some form of mez protection.
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
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I can somewhat agree, having the extra regen certainly helps buffer those instances when initiating (or forced to initiate) battle early and before recovering enough. I mentioned before (I can't remember which thread but no one made a comment about the post so who knows where it is) that the regen by itself wouldn't quite aid the blaster mid-combat, but I also don't think just passive mitigation such as defense or resistance is the only way.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Possibly. I know that mirrors my personal experience, but I have learned what most players never do. Running often kills you. I see blasters die in 15 seconds to enemies they could have just killed in 9 seconds had they not been running around.
Your scenario is a perfect example. Once you get to 30% health, random events become much more important. From 100 to 60 could have been 100 to 30 if you got unlucky, but either way you lived. 60 to 20 becomes death when you get unlucky (which I figure was your point). While I admit high regen will mitigate that because there will be less fights started at 60, your own argument about how people play applies. People will still push the envelope and when they do, regen will not help when they get unlucky (OK, of course it will help sometimes, but there will be plenty of times where it doesn't). And, of course, once they get to 30, now they get afraid. Hey, I might die. Then they do wrong things (I am suggesting this is because they don't have a lot of regular options outside of inspires). Regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts. Dull Pain, Reconstruction, MoG, Mind over Body, Heightened Senses, HPT, SoW, IO defenses, high resistance. Otherwise, it only encourages us to move faster and still die often. |
I'm *still* advocating for a boost to Blaster mez powers just for this case. Being able to break apart alphas or slow incoming dmg using mez *will* amplify the effects of these new changes. I know because I pretty much always build my Blasters to exploit it now, either with mass mez or with hard quick focused mez.
But not only that, many of the defensive debuffs will also help. -ToHit, -rech, -dmg spread out over the foes will add up but you really need that mez for the hard hitters.
Yeah, I'm really believing in the Regen approach for Blasters.
After some of the Blaster discussions, I had gotten it in my (usually ignoring numbers, for the most part) mind that Health was somehow the bigger answer. For whatever reason, I just didn't make the leap to Regen (after I looked and saw the Health numbers for each AT).
From my experiences... Just having little greens keeps me alive. Mez does not tend to be my major issues. And, with higher difficulties, leaving each fight with lowered Health was the big factor. I think Regen is a great approach to giving the Blasters greater survivability without taking away their nature for all these years.
We'll get hit. We just hope to hit you harder and be standing at the end of it.
Let me leave a fight wounded... but give me the ability to heal it up without using Rest so I don't start the next fight at a greater disadvantage.
I am very optimistic about the Regen approaches Hawk seems to be aiming for.
And, who knows what else may be coming (if necessary).
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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Amen
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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Speaking of shoulder kitties. That costume part needs to get ported to males. I have a mage who needs a familiar.
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So I've decided that I have two big problems with the buff to secondaries. The first is that I feel this is just continuing the trend of "fixing" blasters by standardizing them and is leading to more homogenization. The second is that they've chosen to improve the secondaries by giving them one overpowered power. I was just talking to Diellan about it, and I think he put it best with "It's like deciding that every armor set should be like stone armor". The secondaries will still be full of a lot of useless powers and this is putting the design team in a corner because they won't be able to address that without doing something about the overpowered thing they did before. And you know how allergic the design team is to nerfing things.
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I can understand where you're coming from, but... How else would you go about fixing the powersets without outright revamping what has existed all this time?|
Originally Posted by Garent
So I've decided that I have two big problems with the buff to secondaries. The first is that I feel this is just continuing the trend of "fixing" blasters by standardizing them and is leading to more homogenization. The second is that they've chosen to improve the secondaries by giving them one overpowered power. I was just talking to Diellan about it, and I think he put it best with "It's like deciding that every armor set should be like stone armor". The secondaries will still be full of a lot of useless powers and this is putting the design team in a corner because they won't be able to address that without doing something about the overpowered thing they did before. And you know how allergic the design team is to nerfing things.
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If you're saying this from the perspective of someone that does not like the current Blaster secondaries and/or is in favor of completely redoing, scratching, revamping, greatly altering existing powers, then that would be the big problem here. They're not going to do that.
Honestly and sincerely, do you see another way of adding these bonuses without drastically revamping or removing existing powers?
I, personally, see this as a pretty good job of fitting improvements into long-existing powersets of an 8+ year old game.
And I say that as a diehard E3 Blaster that had no desire or intention of taking Lightning Clap...
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
Quote:
With regards to homogenization, consider other ATs:|
Originally Posted by Garent
So I've decided that I have two big problems with the buff to secondaries. The first is that I feel this is just continuing the trend of "fixing" blasters by standardizing them and is leading to more homogenization. The second is that they've chosen to improve the secondaries by giving them one overpowered power. I was just talking to Diellan about it, and I think he put it best with "It's like deciding that every armor set should be like stone armor". The secondaries will still be full of a lot of useless powers and this is putting the design team in a corner because they won't be able to address that without doing something about the overpowered thing they did before. And you know how allergic the design team is to nerfing things.
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-What do Doms do different? They all use controls and have melee and blast attacks.
-What about Scrappers? They all have click or passive mitigation + melee attacks.
The way I see it, we're building Blasters into a direction similar to how Dominators are built in their own direction. Dominators have a secondary built with a variety of attacks with different ranges, focuses and vectors but their primaries are all rather similar (immobilize, hold, sleep/stun/confuse, soft control and possibly pet). Blasters can be the same (primary = quick blast, medium blast, hard blast, snipe/mez/utility, self buff, nuke) while their secondary could be built toward mitigation + melee. The mitigation can be a mix of mez, debuff and self buff. This is a step to fulfill that.
Now we just need better mez!
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Short answer? Small changes to a variety of powers in each set, with the ultimate goal of every power having value and with the set as a whole having a unique method of mitigation/supporting offense compared to other secondaries. The long answer is way too big to go in to without its own topic.|
Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
I can understand where you're coming from, but... How else would you go about fixing the powersets without outright revamping what has existed all this time?
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Originally Posted by Leo_G
With regards to homogenization, consider other ATs:
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I don't disagree with you on this (other than it necessarily being "bad" design. It may just not be the way you or I would have dreamed it).|
Originally Posted by Garent
This definitely pops up in other archetypes as well. This is unavoidable in many situations, like mez protection in defense sets, but some sets manage to do it in a unique way, like how fiery aura's status protection is spread among its shields instead of being in one specific power. It's far from the greatest of evils, but I think it's one worth avoiding when possible, and I think it's possible here. Every secondary having a designated "this is your overpowered regen/absorption power" is what I consider to be bad design. I feel that the secondaries should specialize in control, or self healing, or debuffing, to give examples.
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Regardless, I do always love how different powersets can achieve the same performance levels through completely different approaches. It's always been one of my favorite aspects of this game.
I see this a bit more like how almost every Defender primary has a heal. I can certainly live with it.
Plus, we don't know that we won't be seeing additional improvements that may stem from varying approaches for each powerset.
This may just be a good baseline for each within the AT, that differing benefits can be added to.
(I know... I know... we may not see any of that... but we might!)
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
I'm curious. Will the snipe change affect the blaster APP power, LRM Rocket?
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Sadly not.
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Originally Posted by Haetron
I'm curious. Will the snipe change affect the blaster APP power, LRM Rocket?
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Jem - Ill/Rad Controller Lv 50+3 Nic - Mind/Psi Dominator Lv 50+3 Lady Liberation - Invuln/SS Tanker Lv 50+1 Invicitx - Demon/Pain Mastermind Lv 50+1 Celeste - Emp/Arch Defender Lv 50+1 Nightsilver - DB/WP Scrapper Lv 34 Dusk Howl - StJ/Regen Brute Lv 32 Kyriani - Time/Energy Defender Lv 41Psifire - FF/Psi Defender Lv 50
Star Lighter - LB/LA Peacebringer Lv 30
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It's a time/resource thing.|
Originally Posted by Garent
So I've decided that I have two big problems with the buff to secondaries. The first is that I feel this is just continuing the trend of "fixing" blasters by standardizing them and is leading to more homogenization. The second is that they've chosen to improve the secondaries by giving them one overpowered power. I was just talking to Diellan about it, and I think he put it best with "It's like deciding that every armor set should be like stone armor". The secondaries will still be full of a lot of useless powers and this is putting the design team in a corner because they won't be able to address that without doing something about the overpowered thing they did before. And you know how allergic the design team is to nerfing things.
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What was really needed was for every power in every secondary to be re-evaluated. But they didn't have the time for that to they just looked at one power in each set.
I'm beginning to think the kindest thing would have been to let Blasters die through neglect and introduce a new AT with Blast/Defense sets.
I really should do something about this signature.
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That seems to be a binary description of a situation with no binary dividing line. And it seems to run afoul of the rule of invariance. We can think of players as starting at zero defense and the critters at base 50% tohit, or we can think of the players as starting at 50% defense and the critters at base 100% chance tohit. In the latter case, which is mathematically identical but with a different perspective, players start off with 50% damage mitigation.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts. Dull Pain, Reconstruction, MoG, Mind over Body, Heightened Senses, HPT, SoW, IO defenses, high resistance. Otherwise, it only encourages us to move faster and still die often.
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Why isn't that damage mitigation enough to allow regeneration to work, if the rule is you need mitigation to stop bursts. Relative to 100% tohit we all do have such protection. What's magical about 50% tohit, that if our mitigation when judged from that perspective is zero regen doesn't work, but if we have non-zero mitigation relative to that perspective regen works.
These are just numerical games that don't impact how the game works or what the players see. So they should not, and cannot affect the game. But the assertion "regen needs mitigation to make it effective" is an absolute statement in a game with lots of ways to judge mitigation that are all equally numerically valid (if not all conceptually valid or functionally efficient to use).
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Sad indeed. I've never seen the power used at all, outside of one friend taking it to goof off with it on test. |
Originally Posted by Kyriani
Sadly not.
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Does this mean the Stalker snipes in their PPP pools are also not going to get this benefit? I've heard mixed answers on this.
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You could say that about everything the devs have changed over time. But I would rather play improved blasters than eliminate the archetype or wait ten years for a completely redesigned one.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
It's a time/resource thing.
What was really needed was for every power in every secondary to be re-evaluated. But they didn't have the time for that to they just looked at one power in each set. I'm beginning to think the kindest thing would have been to let Blasters die through neglect and introduce a new AT with Blast/Defense sets. |
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Hmmmm, Loving the snipe changes, and I almost always take the snipes, unless I'm built to blap (only 1 toon so far, fire/mental/flame), And yes, looking at my builds, it does seem problematic making it perma-instant on most of them, with my corrs and fenders coming out ahead.
I was a proposed change to the gate upthread somewhere, about making defiance changes and activation via stacks of defiance. Not so keen on that idea, but have an alternate yet similar sugestion.
How about simply adding a small(ish maybe, I'll let someone else run the numbers) tohit buff to the damage buff to defiance. Maybe make it higher on sets that don't have Aim. If done right defiance stacks alone won't trigger the insta snipe, but with Tactics at it's current scale for blasters + Kismet IO, the more shots a blaster fires the more chance the insta snipe activates.
That way, blaster have an easier time getting the insta-snipe up more, sets without aim and/or build up in their secondary get more of a chance to get there and sets without snipes get a benefit too.
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Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Then it's time for them to get off the cross, use the wood to build a bridge, and get over it.
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My gut feeling is to be extremely dissapointed. I felt my WP scrapper needed more defence to stay alive so adding a bit of regen to a blaster isn't going to help a great deal imho once you get off really low difficulties (And if you can't get off really low difficulties then blasters are still bottom of the pile).
The snipe changes are uninspiring because they still won't let the snipe become a proper part of the attack chain, and I don't really think starting a fight with a single target power is the way to go unless you need to pick of that one dangerman (Which a snipe won't do anyway).
Nothing has been done about what I consider to be poor overall damage.
And the changes that were made are them admitting the it is ok to have a set balanced entirely around 1 power (Which I won't say is overpowered unless we are talking Instant Healing levels of regen), which makes me sad in a lot of different ways.
I hope I am missing something.
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Originally Posted by Aggelakis
PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"
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Give it an upfront regen/recovery amount that doesn't require any targets. 100% regen enhanceable and 50% recovery enhanceable. Then have it give 50% unenhancebale regen and recovery per target hit.
And make Scare and WoC adequate instead of poor.
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.