Ask Anything: Ranged Blast and Blaster Manipulation Changes

Lets see I can shoot the little guy standing in the corner with a laser rifle or the 7-foot tall heavily-armed robotic killing machine. Which do I choose?

Heck in character even if you know the little guy is the leader you don't know what sort of AI programming and/or dead-man-switch the giant robot has. Sure in game terms it shuts down but the NPCs don't know that.

If I wanted PVP I'd hit Warburg, dang it!


=P

Sniper Rifle is one of my most favorite powers in the game. I have been awaiting this revamp a long, long time to make Snipes part of the game flow again.

But, this will require a lot of testing for various reasons. Sniper Rifle makes the biggest impact to AR single target DPS with these proposed changes. How do you avoid not taking advantage of an instant snipe? That is like trying to avoid using Ignite against a hard single target?

Then there are obstacles of facing off against -tohit enemies, and how most players with SO's will not really see the benefit of instant snipe frequently enough.

Basically, this is the first proposed power change where the difference between SO players and IO players will be huge based on how a power works.

How do you balance that?

And as I already mentioned will Assault Rifle be nerfed (AoE) for its new found Single target DPS? AR is already near the top as a master of cones and AoE, but throw in the instant Snipe and its single target damage shoots to the top. Throw in that I already see how much more potent Ignite is for AR Corruptor (my main) and it is easy to see this change will propel AR Corruptors to the very top.

Yes my main gains the most from these changes, but I rather see a balanced game, more specifically this boost aimed more at blasters.

A while ago, I tried to figure out how to best use build up and aim.
The result was that if i use them while hitting a hard target such as an av, my dps drops if I use either, build up can help a bit before defiance kicks into full gear, but aim is only worth it if used before attacking. This applies to a fairly tricked out fire/fire blaster.

If you want me to, I can explain why or even share my calculations that got me that result - but that would be a huge wall of text.

Well, when *I* RP, I'd like to face foes (at least some of the times) that aren't idiots. In a tactical strike raid, one usually is briefed on their mission with objectives prioritized. If they know enough to shout the name of your character as they're rushing you, you'd think they prioritize you as the highest threat among a group that follows you. It isn't about stopping the leader to shut down the rest, it's purely about stopping *you* at all costs. You are the target that is leading the charge, you are the one with the plan therefore you are the one that must be stopped because stopping your plan is more important than just winning a brawl.

But this could go beyond that logic really. Would you actually try to engage a tall armored killing machine directly? That's just dumb. What about the smaller guy with a gun that's obviously working with the robot? Slightly less dumb but not smart either.

That sort of stems from some of the arguments I recall people having with Tankers and the whole idea of aggro being more a tool to bypass the limitations on AI but it still requires the point of logic: Why is this Tanker the priority target? Looking 'threatening' is pointless and superfluous with our costume creator (you can just as soon make a max-sized mastermind with big bright auras of power pluming from your head to make you look more menacing than your pets) and being 'threatening' relies on context. If the giant robot hasn't done anything to be presumed as a priority threat, why should someone just assume so? In this instance, it's because the attacker is told so. Unless you expect the enemies to presume that your robot really is more powerful and threatening than the mastermind itself...but that just flies in the face of the concept of the AT...the mastermind is called the mastermind because they have, know or appear to be more than the minions they command...and technically that is true visa vi how the AT functions.

AR is almost entirely sm/l damage, the most highly resisted damage type in the game. I'm sure they'll do some tweaking- a change this substantial almost guarantees it- but IMO they could drop this change in exactly as proposed without making the set overpowered in any way.

what about when that smaller guy with a gun is functionally invisible, but you just somehow know exactly where he is anyway?

There's no need to overthink this- it's a stupid game mechanic, probably due to some limitation in the code that would be a giant PITA to fix which is why they haven't fixed it.

It depends on how you slot it, and what your secondary is. LRM slotted with three Dmg/Rng HOs, two level-50 Acc IOs, and a level-50 Rech IO, with Boost Range slapped on top, is amazing. "See that dot?"

That seems unnecessary, with just Boost Range and one Dam/Rech IO, I find that LRM's range exceeds my draw distance.

I've always felt that Regeneration had a fundamental flaw that made it difficult or impossible to balance well against the other defensive sets. Both Defense and Resistance work by keeping you from taking a percentage of the incoming damage -- Defense by reducing how often you get hit, and Resistance by reducing how much damage you take after getting hit. Each of these works once against each incoming hit. Regeneration, on the other hand, works again and again on the damage you took until it's all gone. And 'Instant Healing' being just another big boost to regeneration doesn't feel as if it lives up to its name. It seems to me that a better way for Instant Healing to work would be to turn it back into a toggle that made all incoming damage work like Spectral Wounds -- you take all the damage, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals back. Because it only happens once for every block of damage you take, it becomes a power that is comparable to, and balanceable against, the other defense types.

I've used it with several of my characters to make the laughable mantra "Range is a Blaster's defense" more true, although even with the additional separation Boost Range gives you, you still can't get out of range of many mobs and still be able to hit them.

Being visible or not wasn't in the context of my reply. Invisibility wasn't mentioned in the post I quoted.

But limitations themselves aren't dumb just because it's not what you'd prefer. The mechanic behind perception is what it is and the devs would change it if they knew how.

Personally, I think the mechanic of needing to breath and/or being unable to breath underwater and being unable to fly is stupid too. Why can't we just fly when we want to or not need to breath like we can in the game?

Thing is, that hasn't been my experience. Despite having melee attacks, my Robotics henchmen don't do that. Sure, one Drone will usually rush off ahead, I admit, but I've never seen all of them do that.

That's actually not Mastermind-specific. There's something with the game's pathing algorithms that hampers Henchmen and NPCs alike. The only way I can figure it, based on having observed this behaviour for years, is NPCs don't actually navigate in real time or have any real grasp of terrain. Rather, they use a waypoints system, just with computer setting waypoints for them in real time. However, because of how momentum works in this game, the computer will set up a waypoint for them lower down the slope, the NPC will shoot past it and land long. The computer will then be confused since it went forward, didn't pass the waypoint but it's not in front of it again. It'll play a slow animation, think about it, back up to the waypoint and try again.

That, I believe, is also why NPCs get hung up on railings so much. To an NPC, there's no such thing as "jump over." They move from waypoint to waypoint with no regard about what's in-between. Usually these are positioned such that the NPC doesn't run into anything, but if the NPC thinks its next waypoint is on the other side of the railing, it'll just keep on running forward, back and around trying to navigate the obstacle.

NPCs only ever seem to jump in "non-physics" ways, by which I mean they pick a waypoint to jump to, then play a jumping animation that ALWAYS lands them there, with the trajectory being only cosmetic. Doing this, they can jump through walls and land on places that collision wouldn't normally allow. As I said, NPCs don't "jump over" things. They simply decide that they need to jump ON things, and then run over off of them following that. You'll notice an NPC will never leap over a railing, but instead always leap ON it, then keep running forward.

This IS a problem, I admit, but it's a problem of pathfinding that's been with the game for as long as I have.

That's actually not an AI issue at all. As near as I can tell, it's an "ownership" issue. It's what used to cause pets to turn hostile on their masters when they zoned and why pets didn't zone for so long. See, when you zone, you don't actually carry anything with you - not your costume, not your toggles, not your buffs. When you zone, a new model is created for you and all character aspects imported into it.

Well, "pet ownership" looks to work a lot like this. When an entity spawns, an "ownership" is attributed to it. Back in the day when NPCs could only ever be allied pets or "enemies" owned by the world, if a pet spawned before its master, it spawned hostile to players. I've actually seen this happen: A hero-only team starts a War Zone arc and frees Fusionette. A villain zones in and notices that Fusionette cons hostile to them, whereupon they proceed to attack and kill her. What we figured happened was Fusionette spawned as specifically hero-allied as opposed to player-allied, and villains see hero-allied critters con enemy.

We don't get pets turn hostile so much these days, but they DO occasionally spawn before you, and thus get "owned" by the game world. They're not hostile since they're tagged as friendly, but they also don't "belong" to you so they won't respond to your commands. This is sililar to the desync bug, in the sense that I don't think it's even possible to solve. It has something to do with how you and your henchmen zone and in what order, but I could be wrong.

On this count I agree wholeheartedly. Player-targetd ambushes in generally are garbage, and they're bugged, too. They seem to have sort of a "hive mind," in the sense that the spawn acts like a spawn for as long as it's controlled by the "Find player!" hive mind, but this stops working as soon as the player has been found and engaged. What this means is if an ambush stretches out as some critters run ahead, as soon as ANY of them attack you, the others go inert and start walking around. I infer it's because the specific AI override disappears and the critters drop back to their idle stance. The ones near you, the ones that aggroed, keep doing what they were doing. The ones that hadn't aggoed just turn into a patrol. And when the ambush is required to finish the mission, that means I have to go look for them after the fact.

Oh, and they're crap because they eliminate some of the chief benefits to playing a Stalker or a Mastermind, lest we forget.

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

The mechanics are dumb because they're dumb- it's poor game design and it makes no thematic sense. You can ignore the problem of the invisible MM, but it exists regardless- they don't target the player because it's smart, but because it's baked into the game.

That I would prefer they be otherwise is beside the point- it's an irritating, wrongheaded mechanism by any measure.

This question can go back to left field where it came from.

The problem has nothing to do with Masterminds, it's a problem with perception ranges which is linked to aggro.

That you'd imply there was a line of code that enable anything to target anything because of its intelligence level is laugh-worthy though

This I agree with.
I thought you were trying to justify the silliness of the behavior.

The post you were first responding to was RP related.

Oopsie, my bad!