Breakdown of Blaster i24 Performance

He didn't say the drain itself was overpowered, the problem with the drain in DP is that its enhanceable. As far as I know, its the only power that has drain that obeys strength modifiers, and as far as I know that's not supposed to happen. In other words, that particular effect is broken because its not flagged properly.

The power is overpowered in the sense that its a power that can be cycled continuously that comes close to capping out regeneration and massively caps out recovery, and those caps are there for a reason: smashing into them at warp speed is often a sign that someone made a mistake with a power implementation.

Debating whether a single power that caps out regen and recovery simultaneously is too strong is a debate best left to people with too much free time.

True enough it would be best to look at all the /mental blasters running around breaking the game, farming and power leveling with drain psyche.

They're only smashing into those caps at the target cap (at least regen wise,) and perma builds that can survive being at the target cap (melee range) in the first place are very expensive. Light Form is way more OP in that sense since it's an instant click that caps resistance with a much longer uptime.

Given that light form doesn't cap all types, and barely caps the ones that do, its not a power that has the same properties I mentioned Drain Psyche has that are considered problematic from a design perspective.

Whether Light form is a better power than Drain Psyche is a matter of opinion, not a matter of design fidelity.

There's also the question of intent, which Arbiter Hawk's comments do not address but would be relevant to a more general discussion between the powers. There's no question Light Form does what it was intended to do as a defensive power. There's no question that neither the players that have difficulty making it work at all as a PBAoE, nor the players that min/max the power to be perma-saturated, are generating the nominal intended result. That makes it doubly broken, as the power contains no credible moderate middle for average players to leverage.

The problem with Drain Psyche is not simply that its overpowered. Its really that its overpowered in its optimal use case and overburdened in its mechanical use requirements. Its mechanics strongly discourage moderate usage. You have people claiming both that its very weak and that its very strong and both are situationally correct. That is a fundamental flaw in the power's design.

That omits the cases where the average player finds 3 or 4 minions attacking them, or can use an endurance pick me up every so often. Drain psyche provides a level of benefit that scales against the number of foes you face.

In the same way that saying double stacking invincibility was broken omits the case of only having two things in its radius.

The point is that instant click hardcapped resistance to everything but psi is way more of an OP survivability click than hardcapped regen and recovery at a high target cap. Barely capped doesn't matter so I'm not really sure what you're saying. Hardcapped is hardcapped.
I agree, I wasn't saying one was better than the other- Just giving an example of a power that is clearly WAI that is able to hardcap in a way that's way more helpful to survivability than DP for the average player in the average situation.
I think it's weird that you think Drain Psyche is broken. I feel like you speak more from mathematical rhetoric based on over-analyzing spreadsheets and very seldom speak from in game experience. I use Drain Psyche often. I have 2 level 50 Mental Blasters. My Fire Blaster was much less expensive and therefore does not benefit very much from Drain Psyche compared to my Archery Blaster. DP is only OP if you can afford to make it perma and build for layered defense/resistance. Otherwise, you'll die most of the times you try to optimally leverage it. I'm speaking from experience here.
How is that a flaw? It's an awesome power if you can afford to take advantage of it. I think the game needs more designs like that- It doesn't enable a lack of commitment to a build. If you want an awesome /Mental Blaster, you need to be willing to invest enough time/inf into refining the technique and making a viable build to properly leverage the set. If your position is that every set should be like Willpower, essentially layman's gaming for the casual, I can't agree with you. I think that sets that are difficult to master should produce better results once mastered and invested in on principle.

That would make your opinion of my perspective generally worthless.

I think it's important to understand mechanics and all that, but a lot of things are much different in practice than they seem in theory.

That's true. However, as my judgment is informed by a level of in-game experience that is unlikely to be inferior to yours, my previous statement stands.

I'm sorry if I came across as insulting, that wasn't my intention.. Based on your assessment of Drain Psyche though, I'm just getting the impression that you don't have much in game experience with the power. It's like Soul Drain and Eclipse, and it's totally balanced with those powers even if you consider the presumed overpowered factor (the enhancable -regen.) Eclipse is a much better survivability buff with the same assumed conditions, it would fall perfectly under your "great on perma builds, not so good on non-perma builds" theory. I have yet to hear anyone complain about Eclipse and I would probably cry if they did. Soul Drain and Sunless Mire are also based on the same conditions as Drain Psyche, but no one complains about them either. Yeah, Drain Psyche has enhancable -regen, which is pretty OP, but it's also a much harder power to leverage than other powers that work in the same fashion. It also requires a tohit check which is a balancing factor in and of itself.

Sorry not familiar with the double stacking invincibility issue.

But clarifying this, You are saying drain psyche is a lousy power when not used by power gamers that have maxed it out and then found situations where its faults can be maximally exploited.

Well in context of the powers that blasters have had up to now, it's pretty nice for anyone. The power was the only blaster heal power available and it provided recovery. You may wan't something instead of these moderate benefits but that hardly makes them bad or undesirable. Personally I always found the power a no brainer pick compared to scare. Even on SOs.

In context of the new powers that we don't have the stats on yet it may be pretty bad.

I'd be considerably more worried about things hitting the caps if they weren't so poorly implemented to begin with. You really don't want a resistance/defense/regeneration cap so much as you want a total mitigation cap. The recovery cap seems both strange and pointless. The movement caps were just expressions of the limits of the engine.

Worrying about the -regen on that power is once again worrying about the tiniest and least important detail you could imagine. Blasters are a long long way from encroaching into defender space

Both Soul Drain and Eclipse are generally available for archetypes designed to function within melee range of many targets. While its true that even for those archetypes, there is or can be a point where the player cannot sustain the damage necessary to saturate the power, that limit is generally much more gentle when encountered than it is on something not designed to have such defenses. If you jump into a group of three today on a Dark Melee character, you might try five tomorrow; you might try seven the next day. At some point you may decide the risk isn't worth the reward, but you're likely to have some time to figure that out. That's not true for Blasters.

In fact, even Soul Drain for Blasters has issues: its a nice blapper tool, if you happen to have the skill to be a blapper, but the statistics say most players don't. It can't be used as a way to boost alpha strikes and thus mitigate damage, because its mechanical use essentially nullifies the ability to mitigate the alpha.

It would be like giving AAO to blasters. It would be nice, for those of us that can convert to blappers. But to most blasters, it would just be a temptation to commit suicide comparable to Defiance 1.0.

I honestly didn't give it much thought before Arbiter Hawk mentioned it (technically, before another player mentioned it before AH). I'm simply stating the fact that when Arbiter Hawk says its broken, it has nothing to do with a vague notion of whether the effect is too powerful, and simply the fact that its flagged in a way no power should be flagged according to their design rules. That's usually what the devs mean when they say something is "broken" - broken is not synonymous with "overpowered." Broken means it broke a rule in an unambiguous way.

If that was *all* that was wrong with the power, AH would flip the flag and call it a day. The cottage rule doesn't protect that change. But it is one among many noteworthy oddities about the power that AH decided to mention off the top of his head.


The double-stacking invincibility bug was a bug that was discovered after release: invincibility's defense buff pulses were almost twice as long as they should have been. And that meant the defense from the previous pulse was actually stacking with the current pulse: you always had two pulses stacked on you, and the power was therefore about twice as strong as intended. You could floor incoming attacks with like four or five targets in range.

The controversy surrounding this bug was exacerbated by the fact that there had been long-running discussions about invulnerability and whether it was genuinely a "resistance" set - players who tested it demonstrated conclusively that invincibility and nothing else was vastly superior to everything else minus invincibility.

It didn't help that invincibility was changed a couple times during, and that Invuln was ground zero for many of the early game balance discussions at a time when no one knew for certain how everything worked and the devs were extremely bad at communicating that information.

I'm only responding to this because I feel like it really cuts to the heart of the matter for me. Your perspective seems to be overall that everything in the game should be equally accessible for casuals, and players with lower skill and investment levels should be able to attain the same or comparable results. This is a philosophy that I 100% disagree with- I think the game should have its starter sets, like Willpower, that are accessible and usable for the average joe, but I also think the game should continue to have advanced skill level powersets that pay more dividends and reward player skill and build investment. If it weren't for the fact that high risk powers existed, I would have no interest in this game at all.

I don't think everything should be *equally* accessible, but I believe there is a general acceptable range for most things, and /Mental is a core powerset, not a special case like, say, the entire set of Kheldian archetypes which are *stated* to be exceptions.

However, its also moot because its the general philosophy of the dev team, which isn't going to change short of all the powers people and positron getting hit by an asteroid.

I say that as someone with more experience as a blapper than all other blaster configurations combined. The switch from D1.0 to D2.0 cut my damage output by about 10-15%. That's not a calculated guestimate: that's a measured value from when D2.0 was being tested. Its still the case that I agree that D1.0 was more suicidal than beneficial for the vast majority of all players.

There's something very sad in terms of what you consider acceptable... Defense and resistance aren't very hard concepts to grasp. Building a durable/high recharge Blaster is expensive, yes, but in the case of /Mental the payoff is absolutely worth the investment. After all my posts that alienated me from the community showing off my Blaster, a lot of people didn't like my attitude, but no one who knew what they were talking about denied that my Blaster was very impressive. It's really not even that difficult of a concept- You build to survive enough to take advantage of Drain Psyche. Drain Psyche adds an extra layer of durability on top of everything else and lets you do ridiculous things. It's not like *all* Blasters are inherently advanced- Most folks who play Blasters sit back and click attacks. They're still contributing, just not as much- But they're also placing themselves at lower risk, so logically speaking, they SHOULDN'T be contributing as much.
So the general philosophy is that everything should be really easy and require less intelligent build planning and investment in order to achieve high end or comparable results? Basically what you seem to be saying is that the Dev's philosophy by default should be trivializing high end builds, and those of us who have earned those exceptional results (god mode mental Blasters in this instance) are dispensable, because not very many people are as good as we are anyways, so it's no big deal..
And because you've suffered from this in the past, and you were ok with it because you don't mind having your characters nerfed for the sake of less skilled players, that means that everyone should, by default, also be ok with that?

Well, I have two responses to that. The first is that I don't find it sad that I generally find myself siding with the casual players over the min/maxers. The min/maxers don't need my help; the casual players do. The game would survive without us: it would not survive without them.

The vast majority of min/maxers stand on others shoulders: they don't do anything alone. I don't know how much of this game's information you could reproduce from scratch on your own, but most min/maxers would be living in the dark ages without Mids, paragonwiki, the game's mechanical equations - nearly all of which were discovered or reverse engineered by players, not just handed to them by the devs. Most min/maxers, probably yourself included, were helped by lots of other players you probably will never know the names of.

To look down upon any other player because they haven't taken as much advantage of those gifts as you have strikes me as ingracious.


The alternate response is that I'm not asking you to be ok with anything. If you genuinely believe in meritocracies, then simply advocate to get what you want in the game. I do, everyone else does, and so should you. The players with the best capability to do that will get what they want, which is exactly how it should be: skill should be rewarded.

I've invested eight years building credibility with both the players and the devs; I've spent more time analyzing the game and its systems than even the dev team has, and I've played every aspect of the game from every direction extensively. Should not that time, effort, and skill be rewarded? What reward I specifically choose is entirely my business.


I also have a third response that will sound offensive, but its not intended to be so, at least not directly. Its this: everyone has a point of pain when it comes to complexity and difficulty. Long before mine is reached, I can assure you yours will be. The day I turn to the dark side, I won't be agreeing with you, I'll be advocating a level of difficulty that excludes you.

You look at the game in terms of what you think will be best for the game as a whole at all times. Maybe that's what you enjoy about COH, but what I enjoy about COH is how much fun I personally have while playing it. I enjoy the characters I put a crapload of time and effort into maximizing. I think "min/max" gets written off a lot as if it's some alien portion of the community, but the fact is that it's easy to do everything that I've done. I've laid out how I've done it and why I've done it. I don't think it's fair to nerf something like Drain Psyche because some people are able to use the power to its full potential while others aren't- From my perspective, the reason why some people can't use the power to its full potential is that they choose not to. I don't think I should have to suffer because of that.
That's all well and good. I know you didn't presume to directly refer to yourself here, but that's ultimately what you did. I know what you've done for the game. I appreciate what you've done for the game. I acknowledge that you know way more about the game's mechanics than I do, and you've invested way more of yourself into it, but I don't think that means I can't disagree with you about things.
I disagree. I would agree with you if the information wasn't made public, but I've never taken advantage of any tool or source of information that every other player didn't have access to. I don't think my characters should be nerfed because they committed the injustice of utilizing resources.
I'm more concerned with the things I like in the game being left alone, and new things not ruining what's already been established. I don't have any desire to force a personal agenda on the Dev's or the community, I just want what I enjoy, what I've proven to myself and others to be functional and productive, to be left alone.

I don't mind disagreement at all. Its been polite, and its been thought provoking, even if it may not seem that way.

Your implication seemed to be that I was ingracious, so I just wanted to take a second to assure you that that wasn't the case.

(edit) Also, way to quote the part of my post where I was deliberately paying you your dues and not the parts that elaborated upon my points. I hate to say this, so keep in mind the respect that I already established having for you, but that was pretty Golden Girl of you. Obligatory face. ()

I didn't have anything more to say about the rest: I was just commenting on the implication that I might be opposed to general disagreement. In the future, I will try to quote you in a manner that places me in the worst possible light.

I was just busting on you a little bit. Humility check, and all that.

I don't know what HER perspective is. MY perspective is that no two people playing the same AT, played by people who have avoided the obvious pitfalls, should be more than, say, a factor of 5 apart in performance.

YOUR perspective, and maybe you don't realize this, is that a moderately skilled player with a sufficiently expensive build and the right powersets should be 20 times tougher than someone who did not make that choice. Maybe more- Arcanaville, where is the line of immortality for a S/L capped fully-Drain Psyche'd Blaster? Where is it for a blaster with 10% Defense and slotted health?

I was here, as you were not, in the Good Old Days before ED. Back when an Invuln tank was at least ten times tougher than an Ice tank, back when someone who took a Dark Armor scrapper to 50 was considered the most hardcore human in the room. It is not an exaggeration to say that an INV tank could go AFK forever under a pile of a hundred and fifty purple-con enemies.

There were two games, really: the tough guys and the not-so-tough guys. And the devs could either build something that would challenge the tough guys and slaughter everyone else faster than they could hit a green insp [literally] or build something that was trivial to the tough guys and balanced for everyone else.

It's a great game if you're the pretty pretty princess. But it's a great game BECAUSE it sucks for everyone who's not you.

That's what you're asking for. If that's what you actually want? A factor of 20? The hell with that and the hell with you.