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Other than jab, what power is inferior to boxing?|
Originally Posted by Fireheart
Air Superiority is a bit of an outlier, but in general, if Tier 2, 3, 4 powers are being out-performed by Pool powers, then perhaps there is something wrong with those powers.
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Punch, the Tier 2, has a .83 damage per activation second.
Boxing, the best of the two pool fighting attacks, has 0.75 damage per activation second.
I think Jab and Spines T1 were the only two powers with that issue, off the top of my head.
We know Spines is getting a buff. With SS there are issues. I would not buff Jab too much because part of what keeps SS in check is that it has a lot of low-dpas attacks and only one AoE attack.
Rule of thumb is that a set with only one AoE attack has poor AoE performance (*cough* Stone Melee, Energy Melee, Martial Arts *cough*)
Rage increases the Damage per activation second of these attacks to the point it balances them out. Buff Jab too much and that may become an issue. I would increase recharge to 3 seconds and damage to 0.84, that may make it a decent power without overbuffing the set. It also would set Jab at 0.79 ds, making it better than Boxing.
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| I would not argue that the whole Tanker AT needs to be revamped, in order to increase damage output - there are many upper-tier powers that are frankly awesome. However, being able to replace those early-tier powers with Pool attacks and actually Improve Performance... that's just not right. |
Clarifying a bit on my point:
As an invuln character (be it brute/tank or scrapper) you consume about 0.73 endurance per second (no end redux in toggles). With 3 sloted stamina you get 2.48 endurance per second. 1.75 endurance per second + your base endurance, are your entire budget to spend during a fight. Once a fight starts, you start eating through that endurance and eps allowance.
However my point is that non-melee has their entire 2.48 end per second + base endurance to dish out damage.
Interestingly, without stamina your budget was 1.67 endurance per second (so I see why Arcanaville says inherent fitness negated this "balance")
My point is not that there was a balance set for how much endurance melee were allowed to allocate into damage, but simply that toggles subtract from your offensive budget. You remove that endurance burden and you add to the offensive endurance budget.
It does fix the issue of running out of endurance killing your toggles, but introduces a damage increase to all melee that may or may not be acceptable (that is the point I WANT to be convinced off not being an issue for the devs.)
The other issue is that without endurance cost there is no reason to not have them as passives that happen to suppress while mezzed, and that in turn changes how toggles work. Not to mention the entire idea of having IO set endurance discount be redundant and meaningless for most powers now (always true for current passives but those where the minority.) Well... I guess visual FX may be a reason to keep them as toggles, but that’s a bit odd reason.
If the devs find these issues, then the only acceptable solution I can think of is for toggles simply not to drop if you run out of endurance. Instead that pulse of the toggle just grants no benefits.
Toggles pulse every half a second (most.) Today, during a pulse you have no enough endurance to pay for that pulse, the toggle drops. What if instead of dropping it decided "well, there was no endurance for me...? I won’t apply any of these effects, be them benefits or negatives, maybe next pulse I will find endurance to do this again"
This would work elegantly for buffs, taunt auras and damage auras.
This would justify keeping toggles as toggles (since they cost endurance) while removing the issue of a binary survivability shutdown in the case of running out of endurance.
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The game has evolved over time without this kind of system, so changing it would require rebalancing around them. But these two changes change everything: detoggling would not have the dramatic effect it has now, detoggling would be more controlled, detoggling could be made more frequent but less devastating like any other mez, detoggling resistance could become an archetype-balancing feature (say, tankers are far harder to detoggle, just as they are theoretically but less practically harder to mez). |
Originally Posted by Starsman
My point is more about blasters always having all their endurance pool dedicated to damage, while melee are forced to dedicate some of their endurance budget to toggles. Would you denny that removing endurance from toggles would also result in increased damage potential?
Again, I agree with the core of the idea, I have thought of making a case for it many times. But these two points always stop me because I have no answers that would explain why those are not problems. |
There would be lots of side effects, including tampering with endurance burn rates, but those are trivial to rebalance around, and they can be rebalanced at will without any set in stone design rules to overcome. The only ones that exist are the ones I just eliminated by hypothesizing that these changes could occur in the first place.
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No, its true. Since most powerset combinations are endurance-limited, decreasing endurance burn rates increases damage potential. But the difference is not unmanageable.|
Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
I certainly hope she would, as except for a very few cases it's definitely not true, and their pancakes aren't really good enough to make the low cost that appealing anyway.
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Also, to clarify a point: the point wasn't to say "if I were designing the game I would make all defensive toggles cost zero." The point was to illustrate that the current costs are arbitrary, and any value from their current value all the way down to zero still work. The question, then, is what should they cost given *real* balance concerns, and not whether temp invuln should cost endurance because its numerically higher than RPD. That's an invalid concern, or would be if the defensive sets were designed as they should have been, with base strength and optional enhanced strength in powers that could actually be turned off, rather than base strength in the powers that could be turned off and the optional enhanced strength in the powers that cannot be turned off. That's illogical.
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The following will sound too radical, but may point in an interesting direction. An old MMO, cant remember for sure but may had been DAoC, had a system where you had "toggles". These cost no endurance but you had a maximum amount of concentration to use up. Some toggles cost more concentration than others. Eventually you may be limited how many toggles you can have running at once.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
No, its true. Since most powerset combinations are endurance-limited, decreasing endurance burn rates increases damage potential. But the difference is not unmanageable.
Also, to clarify a point: the point wasn't to say "if I were designing the game I would make all defensive toggles cost zero." The point was to illustrate that the current costs are arbitrary, and any value from their current value all the way down to zero still work. The question, then, is what should they cost given *real* balance concerns, and not whether temp invuln should cost endurance because its numerically higher than RPD. That's an invalid concern, or would be if the defensive sets were designed as they should have been, with base strength and optional enhanced strength in powers that could actually be turned off, rather than base strength in the powers that could be turned off and the optional enhanced strength in the powers that cannot be turned off. That's illogical. |
In a way, this is true right now, but turns out this "concentration" is the same pool used by attacks to drain endurance, and relative to that game it's much more bigger pool.
There are some apparent rule of thumb already.
Almost all self-buff toggles cost 0.26 endurance per second.
Almost all damage auras cost 0.52 endurance per second.
Almost all scaling/taunt/debuff auras cost 0.208 endurance per second.
Standard Pool Travel powers costing 0.455 end per seconds.
Ancillary and Pool power versions of the above seem to cost 25% extra endurance.
There are a few exceptions. Some logical with a reason (Dark Armor gets a 20% discount on self-buff toggles.) and some entirely off the wall (Stone Armor's Mud Pots is 50% too expensive) and Chilling Embrace costing the same as self-buff toggles.
Other pool toggles seem to be all over the place.
Some self-buff toggles turned taunt auras like the ones in SR and Energy Armor are also exceptions, but those keep granting a benefit even if enemies are far away (my theory on why other scaling/taunt/debuff auras cost less than normal.)
Overall there seems to be a bit of consistency, though, one similar to the concentration system I mentioned. Toggles are not meant to cost based on their performance, but to take room in your endurance budget.
That brings me to this sudden idea: What if a toggle did not cost endurance, but instead shaved off your maximum endurance for it's duration? I'm sure we can come up with numbers that make things sort of match the current state of the game.
In the process toggles can be rebalanced to cost a more logical value. Toggles will never, ever, toggle drop due to endurance, but they still will in a new more thought out fashion limit your offensive endurance budget.
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Sure, it'll work. But just like inherent Fitness, it'll alter the metagame.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The point was to illustrate that the current costs are arbitrary, and any value from their current value all the way down to zero still work.
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Originally Posted by Starsman
My point is not that there was a balance set for how much endurance melee were allowed to allocate into damage, but simply that toggles subtract from your offensive budget. You remove that endurance burden and you add to the offensive endurance budget.
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Except normal recovery boosted by slotted stamina is 2.48 eps, not 5.0 eps.|
Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
If your highest DPS attack chain costs 4.0 end/second, your toggles cost 1.2/second, and you can generate an effective 5.0/second, you have 550 seconds in which to win a fight with an endurance of 110 and no blues. Assuming your slotting is damage and recharge saturated, reducing your toggles' costs by .2, .4, or 1.2 isn't really going to meaningfully impact your offensive ability.
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The important ratio is attack burn rate relative to toggle burn rate. Base burn rate of a 1.0 DS/sec attack chain is 5.2 eps. The base burn rate of, say, a three toggle defensive set like SR is about 0.78 eps. That means toggles are costing about 15% of what attacks are costing and 13% of the total base endurance expense. That's the percentage offensive cost of those defensive toggles assuming you turn them off in between spawns and you're not attacking. In other words, that's the best case scenario.
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I think the fact he has been widely ridiculed while, really, being right the entire duration is an indictment of the community.
Johnny has been correct. It simply makes no sense that the largely redundant defensive abilities of a tank are paired with a very significant offensive penalty.
I see this as similar to the redundancy of defenders and corruptors. The ATs are simply a lot too similar to be defending AT diversity. Defenders were buffed and equal corruptors minus scourge solo or at least are close to it. The trick is a straight offensive buff is not interesting, and while I support a straight offensive buff instead of none, a thematic ability is preferred.
Considering theme, a tank is a not so quick hulking character in the majority of fiction. What if they had a variation of build up, say, 'focus,' that requires animation time but greatly empowers them, say Colussus preparing a massive move? In a sense scrappers are to stalkers as brutes would be to the proposed tankers. It would be a no endurance instant recharge inherent but take a while to animate.
A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
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This presumes the assertion that the defensive strength of tankers is redundant is self-evident. However, the exact opposite is true: it is trivially demonstrable that they are not, for the vast overwhelming majority of players of the game.
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Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I think the fact he has been widely ridiculed while, really, being right the entire duration is an indictment of the community.
Johnny has been correct. It simply makes no sense that the largely redundant defensive abilities of a tank are paired with a very significant offensive penalty. |
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What can be evidenced is the redundancy of multiple tankers, except for herding extreme mobs.
If you refer to the discussion of caps by the majority statement, even cap performance is relevant and can be addressed relatively independently of non cap performance.
A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
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It is your opinion that Johnny is, and has been correct. That opinion isn't necessarily shared across the rest of the tanker community that posts on the forums.
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Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I think the fact he has been widely ridiculed while, really, being right the entire duration is an indictment of the community.
Johnny has been correct. It simply makes no sense that the largely redundant defensive abilities of a tank are paired with a very significant offensive penalty. I see this as similar to the redundancy of defenders and corruptors. The ATs are simply a lot too similar to be defending AT diversity. Defenders were buffed and equal corruptors minus scourge solo or at least are close to it. The trick is a straight offensive buff is not interesting, and while I support a straight offensive buff instead of none, a thematic ability is preferred. Considering theme, a tank is a not so quick hulking character in the majority of fiction. What if they had a variation of build up, say, 'focus,' that requires animation time but greatly empowers them, say Colussus preparing a massive move? In a sense scrappers are to stalkers as brutes would be to the proposed tankers. It would be a no endurance instant recharge inherent but take a while to animate. |
Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....
Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!
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Originally Posted by PapaSlade
Rangle's right....this is fun.
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I don't like moving goalposts.
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Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
What can be evidenced is the redundancy of multiple tankers, except for herding extreme mobs.
If you refer to the discussion of caps by the majority statement, even cap performance is relevant and can be addressed relatively independently of non cap performance. |
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I have no intention of a debate surrounding the claim you disputed so I brought up another.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I don't like moving goalposts.
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A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
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And as you point out, a three-toggle set costs under .8, not 1.2. The example I gave is roughly consistent with a number of builds, not the solo accolade-less SO-only inherent-only baseline. That character is a polite fiction, but they do not seem to be the target of most new content rollouts.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Except normal recovery boosted by slotted stamina is 2.48 eps, not 5.0 eps.
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Thank goodness, or we'd all be DM/SR or Staff/Dark. (Maybe a few edge /WP or SD builds, SD particularly for tanks, and fire/fire lunatics.) Which still beat those numbers. The only reason we're not in a constant state of "Don't Stop Believing"/"Freebird" is...
...lots of deletion later...
Okay, okay, you win. Immanetize the eschaton.
Edit : But I liked the prepocalypse. ;p
Edit 2 : And this is your fault.
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IOP balancing appears to be less disentangled from memory overcommitment for virtual desktop resource sizing than has been the general assertion.
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Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I have no intention of a debate surrounding the claim you disputed so I brought up another.
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Good point, but sacrifice bunting is clearly overrated.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
IOP balancing appears to be less disentangled from memory overcommitment for virtual desktop resource sizing than has been the general assertion.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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But they don't. Even ignoring pool powers a lot of non-melee characters have toggle powers that are linked to their survival. Admittedly they are more likely to be a debuff power than a self buff but they are still frequently linked to a character's overall survivability.|
Originally Posted by Starsman
However my point is that non-melee has their entire 2.48 end per second + base endurance to dish out damage.
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Doing a quick scan 4 out of 7 Blaster Secondaries have a survival oriented toggle (3 out of 7 if you discount World of Confusion, which is borderline). 8 out of 13 Buff/Debuff sets have a survival oriented toggle that will likely be run during combat (I'm not counting Kinetics since Repel is rarely actually used) and most of these have a End cost of 0.52 end/sec. 4 out of 9 Control sets have a survival focused toggle.
Not to mention that most non-melee characters have a defense or resistance toggle in their epic pool which have an end cost of 0.325 End/sec. Ok, those are Epic powers rather than primary/secondary but they are still pretty important to staying alive at high levels for a lot of squishies.
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Yeah, probably the most end-intensive character I've played for any length of time is an Ice/Storm Controller -- and I do manage her most expensive toggles situationally. (That is, Hurricane and Arctic Air needn't be on full-time, for example. Hurricane is barely used at all these days, in fact, but spamming Tornado/Freezing Rain/Lightning Storm gets pricey.)|
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
But they don't. Even ignoring pool powers a lot of non-melee characters have toggle powers that are linked to their survival. Admittedly they are more likely to be a debuff power than a self buff but they are still frequently linked to a character's overall survivability.
Doing a quick scan 4 out of 7 Blaster Secondaries have a survival oriented toggle (3 out of 7 if you discount World of Confusion, which is borderline). 8 out of 13 Buff/Debuff sets have a survival oriented toggle that will likely be run during combat (I'm not counting Kinetics since Repel is rarely actually used) and most of these have a End cost of 0.52 end/sec. 4 out of 9 Control sets have a survival focused toggle. Not to mention that most non-melee characters have a defense or resistance toggle in their epic pool which have an end cost of 0.325 End/sec. Ok, those are Epic powers rather than primary/secondary but they are still pretty important to staying alive at high levels for a lot of squishies. |
Still, we can agree with Starsman's point in principle without stipulating that his resulting conclusion is totally accurate. I think it's fair to say that melee characters can kneecap themselves at the low end by spending too much of their endurance on toggles -- which incidentally is why I always prioritize attack power picks over passives over toggles on a lower-level melee build. But I don't think it's necessarily true that as a matter of AT design, melee archetypes are intrinsically more endurance-limited than ranged ATs.
In any case, if toggle costs were to be reduced near to zero, various other costs would have to be adjusted to compensate.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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For... tankers?
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Originally Posted by Obitus
In any case, if toggle costs were to be reduced near to zero, various other costs would have to be adjusted to compensate.
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Are you suggesting that the endurance costs of those toggles are an equal constraint on offensive output, or are you attempting to contradict the original premise that endurance costs of defensive toggles are immaterial to offensive output by pointing out everyone has defensive toggle endurance costs?
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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
But they don't. Even ignoring pool powers a lot of non-melee characters have toggle powers that are linked to their survival. Admittedly they are more likely to be a debuff power than a self buff but they are still frequently linked to a character's overall survivability.
Doing a quick scan 4 out of 7 Blaster Secondaries have a survival oriented toggle (3 out of 7 if you discount World of Confusion, which is borderline). 8 out of 13 Buff/Debuff sets have a survival oriented toggle that will likely be run during combat (I'm not counting Kinetics since Repel is rarely actually used) and most of these have a End cost of 0.52 end/sec. 4 out of 9 Control sets have a survival focused toggle. Not to mention that most non-melee characters have a defense or resistance toggle in their epic pool which have an end cost of 0.325 End/sec. Ok, those are Epic powers rather than primary/secondary but they are still pretty important to staying alive at high levels for a lot of squishies. |
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For everyone, to a greater or lesser degree. The game is currently balanced around toggles costing endurance, so if (most) toggles were suddenly made free tomorrow, something else would have to give -- whether it's the cost of attacks or the magnitude of the recovery bonuses available. |
Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
For... tankers?
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Or to put it another way:
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
There would be lots of side effects, including tampering with endurance burn rates, but those are trivial to rebalance around, and they can be rebalanced at will without any set in stone design rules to overcome. The only ones that exist are the ones I just eliminated by hypothesizing that these changes could occur in the first place.
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Forgive me if this has already been suggested - I started reading the thread but after 8 pages my eyes were starting to glaze over.
I've always thought that Brutes' offense vs Scrappers' offense boils down to: Scrappers don't have to worry about Fury. They just do all their damage up front. Brutes have to work up to that level of damage, and then keep smashing in order to maintain that damage. This means Brutes *have* to be on the go, all the time; and that Scrappers can afford to take breaks. Brutes may even have to take different powers to Scrappers, just to ensure they're hitting more often.
(Mind you it may also be too easy to build Fury.)
Why not do something similar with Brutes' defenses vs Tankers' defenses? That is: Make Brutes' defenses start at scrapper levels, then increase as they take Fury. I don't know enough of the underlying numbers to say exactly how this would work.
Then, I don't know, make Fury a bit harder to maintain, to really hammer the point home: You're a Brute, you *need* Fury, and if you don't have Fury you're in trouble. Basically, play up the Brutes' gimmick - fury - a lot more, because that's an easy way to make it distinct from Scrappers and Tankers.
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Heh, well I'm sorry if this comes off as over-critical, but your idea sure would make Brutes distinct from Scrappers and Tankers -- and by "distinct," I mean substantially and unambiguously better. Brutes already have Scrapper-comparable defenses by default; to give them better defenses, without outside help, would be a massive buff to the AT as a whole animal.|
Originally Posted by Sukugaru
Why not do something similar with Brutes' defenses vs Tankers' defenses? That is: Make Brutes' defenses start at scrapper levels, then increase as they take Fury. I don't know enough of the underlying numbers to say exactly how this would work.
Then, I don't know, make Fury a bit harder to maintain, to really hammer the point home: You're a Brute, you *need* Fury, and if you don't have Fury you're in trouble. Basically, play up the Brutes' gimmick - fury - a lot more, because that's an easy way to make it distinct from Scrappers and Tankers. |
If the Tankers in this thread felt threatened by what a Brute can do with copious team support, then any straight-faced developer support for your idea would set the Tanker forum ablaze with frothing-at-the-mouth hatred.
And although I can understand where you're coming from, although I get that you're trying to moderate the buff by nerfing Fury generation, the fact is that Brutes build for sustainability; even if it takes twice as long for them to get up to the effective Fury cap, they would get there, and they would stay there for prolonged periods. Or you could make Fury so freaking hard to generate that even the best of the best Brute builds have no hope of maintaining it, in which case all you will have accomplished is to make everyone, including Brutes, angry.
Anyway, I hope the above criticism of your idea isn't too harsh. At least you came at the issue from a novel direction, and you should be encouraged to keep thinking that way. Hopefully my criticism will head off (or attenuate) what might have been a much sharper emotional response from others. (Yeah, I'm naive, but then again it's questionable that many people are even still reading the thread, at this point.)
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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Maybe my choice of wording - scrapper level defense to tanker level defense - was poorly thought out. Basically I'm wondering if the idea of defenses improving as Fury improves has any merit. I've never been at max level or incarnate levels, let alone high level teams, so I don't know exactly crazy things get or how viable this idea would be.
On Fury: If Brutes can get up to high levels of Fury, and then just stay there nonstop, then it makes you wonder what the point of Fury is.
And it sure is a good thing we have IOs.
But -- and I'm going to hedge in a second so you know, be prepared -- what you're talking about there sounds like bad development. (Although actually RttC really should be a toggle or a click, probably a toggle unless it was Dark Regen-ified which would actually be kind of an interesting power now that I think of it... anyway I agree with at least that. My statement about quality is predicated on the idea that Willpower was not redesigned to behave functionally differently as a toggle/passive set vs a passive-only mitigation set, which I do not actually know but I infer from your comment about the recovery bonus being added explicitly to offset the toggle cost.) And my hedge is that bad decisions happen, sometimes because of errors, sometimes because of weird priorities, and sometimes because they're simply the best of a lot of possible bad decisions. And we are...
...we are about to see something that kind of explodes this issue. And you've tested it and played with it; I haven't. This might be a conversation I have more interesting things to say about after it's been live for a bit.
But the short of it is, like, regardless of my own aesthetic or economic tastes, or you know like the existence of objectively better options insofar as number of goals met are concerned... highballing works. You're focused on an unquestionable mathematical reality but it's a subjective quality that's being promulgated here, and even though it is a subjective quality it has quantitatively measurable effects, like painting hospital rooms yellow instead of greenish black or giving a qwerty-user a dvorak keyboard.
I'm also still a little shell-shocked after playing some CO during a round of changes where they basically knocked over the mechanics and restacked them and are now rather frantically trying to keep the tower from toppling.