So how do blasters feel about nukes going from scale 6.0 dmg to scale 4.0?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2012-07-12 12:34 in Blasters
I'm fine with it. It's still a big damage attack and it means I'll be able to fit it into my attack rotation as a standard use attack instead of a panic button or having to prep to crash and recover asap to take advantage of the moment of safety.
Like, Electric Blast now becomes completely capable of being a good sapping set now that it will be able to utilize thunderous blast against groups.
It means my nuke now becomes an every spawn or every other spawn attack instead of 'saving it for the boss mob at the end' or 'the panic button' etc.
Personally I think the new recharge values are too small and would probably be happy with an extra 30 seconds (15 after slotting) recharge if it meant more "Oomph."
But regardless, I'm happy and ok with this direction.
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Cautious optimism.
I still don't think they have the stones to fix what needs fixing and to do it right, and I won't believe it until I see implemented fixes on the beta server.
What scale are the current crashless ones on now? Like roa, overload, hob.
I just hope it wont make the BIG nukes (which I guess is mostly for blasters anyway) become what I compare the Melee Tier9-Lites (one with the shield and sow) that are basically the same as popping an inspiration.
I like the change. The lower damage is more than made up for by the removal of the crash AND the much faster recharge. If they had kept the recharge longer (or even shortened it to just 4 minutes instead of 6), then I would be dismayed. The 2:25 and 3 minute recharges are such a massive improvement over 6 minutes, that I am thrilled they went in this direction, rather than maintaining the longer recharges with the higher damage.
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Full Auto avergaes 2.9 (2.75 with a 10% chance for an additional 1)|
Originally Posted by MisterD
What scale are the current crashless ones on now? Like roa, overload, hob.
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RoA is 3 ticks of 1.2 for 3.6 total (it is actually 1.35, but uses the pet scale, so I adjusted it to blaster scale for ease of reference)
Overcharge is 3.5
HoB averages 3.3
Geyser is 3.5
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
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What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
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With looking into nukes, Electric was the first blaster set I looked at last night (dunno why, I don't even have one), and I thought wow...that's pretty nice.
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Originally Posted by Agent White
Like, Electric Blast now becomes completely capable of being a good sapping set now that it will be able to utilize thunderous blast against groups.
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Repeat Offenders
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My Defender already uses Thunderous Blast against groups pretty much whenever it's up (TB + Small Blue + Power Sink = I have a full End bar, they don't) but now I won't have to re-toggle every time so I'm very, very happy.|
Originally Posted by Agent White
Like, Electric Blast now becomes completely capable of being a good sapping set now that it will be able to utilize thunderous blast against groups.
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My Beam/Dev Blaster and my Cold/Ice Defender are also looking forward to the changes.
Overall I think the change to Crashless Nukes will do a LOT to help restore Blasters as the kings (and queens) of AoE damage.
I feel like I should get the rest of the Overwhelming Force set and slam it into Nova as soon as possible.
Unless that wouldn't be good for some reason.
You know, just to throw this out there - I had a whole mess of crepes this morning. They're just like pancakes, maybe even better.
to be clear, you are not losing damage to make the nuke not crash
they are removing the chance of extra damage and making it flat damage so it is consistent
they are reducing the recharge time so you can use it more frequently
it is doing the damage it should for its new recharge time
removing the crash is just a bonus
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Why? If it's for the knockback-to-knockdown proc, seems to me like I wouldn't want to, for two reasons. Procs are more useful on fast-recharging attacks, which the new nukes won't be, and a lower-damage Nova might leave stuff alive, which you'd prefer to have knocked back and ragdolled, because that puts them out of action a lot longer than knockdown.
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Originally Posted by Cal_Naughton_Jr
I feel like I should get the rest of the Overwhelming Force set and slam it into Nova as soon as possible.
Unless that wouldn't be good for some reason. |
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
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I think it'd be a more like 'do I want them knocked back/ragdolled but possibly scattered, or do I want them only knocked down but all still in the same place?' Ragdolling them will provide mitigation for a longer period, but if they end up scattered and it takes longer to finish them off as a result it might be overall more advantageous to suppress the KB.
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Originally Posted by Sailboat
Why? If it's for the knockback-to-knockdown proc, seems to me like I wouldn't want to, for two reasons. Procs are more useful on fast-recharging attacks, which the new nukes won't be, and a lower-damage Nova might leave stuff alive, which you'd prefer to have knocked back and ragdolled, because that puts them out of action a lot longer than knockdown.
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@MuonNeutrino
Student, Gamer, Altaholic, and future Astronomer.
This is what it means to be a tank!
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No you are losing damage, about 20% so you do about 80%. If you factor bonus damage its about 33% you lose.
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Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
to be clear, you are not losing damage to make the nuke not crash
they are removing the chance of extra damage and making it flat damage so it is consistent they are reducing the recharge time so you can use it more frequently it is doing the damage it should for its new recharge time removing the crash is just a bonus |
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No, its 18%. Nova has an average damage of scale 4.875. The version demonstrated in the stream did 4.0. That is 82% of the damage of the average version of the current Nova. That's factoring in the contribution of all waves of Nova at their percentage chance to trigger.
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Originally Posted by Ultimus
No you are losing damage, about 20% so you do about 80%. If you factor bonus damage its about 33% you lose.
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I've liked what I heard about it. Going Boom has always been my favorite part of post-32 Blaster play, so now I get to do that more often.
With BU+Aim, it will still take out LTs, correct? I never, ever used my Nuke when both weren't up, so I think it will mean very little difference for me in that regard.
Thanks for eight fun years, Paragon.
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Yeah, I was thinking of a no KB Nova followed by an Explosive Blast for clean up. Should be easy to pick off the stragglers at that point with Energy Torrent and single target blasts.
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Originally Posted by Muon_Neutrino
I think it'd be a more like 'do I want them knocked back/ragdolled but possibly scattered, or do I want them only knocked down but all still in the same place?' Ragdolling them will provide mitigation for a longer period, but if they end up scattered and it takes longer to finish them off as a result it might be overall more advantageous to suppress the KB.
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You know, just to throw this out there - I had a whole mess of crepes this morning. They're just like pancakes, maybe even better.
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Probably should have just reposed to begin with:|
Originally Posted by ChrisMoses
I've liked what I heard about it. Going Boom has always been my favorite part of post-32 Blaster play, so now I get to do that more often.
With BU+Aim, it will still take out LTs, correct? I never, ever used my Nuke when both weren't up, so I think it will mean very little difference for me in that regard. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Nova has a 12.5% chance of doing scale 3.0 damage, 50% chance of doing 4.5 scale damage, and 37.5% chance of doing scale 6.0 damage.
Slotted to +95% damage and with +100% damage from build up, Nova does 553.66 damage at scale 3.0, 830.48 damage at scale 4.5, and 1107.31 at scale 6.0 with the current version at level 50. It will do 738.21 at scale 4.0 in the new (unconfirmed) version. Level 50 Lts have 857.5 health. With +10% defiance, the current Nova will kill even con Lts with no resistances 50% of the time. The unconfirmed I24 Nova wold need an additional +48% damage to kill Lts 100% of the time (assuming it hits). So: kill 50% of the Lts with minimal extra effort, or kill 100% of the Lts with moderate effort fairly reliably. Which would be better for blasters even factoring out the crash? What you think is an appropriate level of damage depends on what you think nukes should do. I think they could do a little more damage, but I don't think Scale 4.0 is disproportionately worse than what we have now. Its 18% less damage, but in terms of its kill factor its entirely reasonable that many players would consider that a guaranteed kill of all minions and Lts (that you hit) with BU and Aim is better than leaving half the Lts behind with just BU (and Aim can't improve that situation). |
So for you, stacking BU and Aim all the time, if you are using a nuke that deals the same damage as Nova, in I24 you will still kill all the minions, you will go from killing 7 out of 8 Lts to killing all the Lts, and you will deal about 18% less damage against Bosses than you do now.
The real actual damage loss for you could be in the single digit percentages, because most of the bonus damage Nova is doing now is being wasted on dead targets in the way you use it (for that matter, in the way most people probably use it).
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I don't think it follows the formula. Scale 4 damage with an area mod of 4.75 seems to be a 116.5 second recharge, unless I am mistaken.|
Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
it is doing the damage it should for its new recharge time
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When I plug 145 seconds and 4.75 into the damage formula I get:
(0.2*((RECH*0.8)+1.8)) / AREAMOD
(0.2*((145*0.8)+1.8)) / 4.75 = 4.96
So 4 seems like an arbitrary number they picked, rather than obeying a formula. I am not saying 4 is a wrong number, just that at these large recharges and radii, they sometimes use their judgement rather than blindly using the formula.
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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/this|
Originally Posted by Demobot
I'm just fine with reduced damage if it means there's no crash.
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ill gladly take a small dmg drop to be able to use it more often and crash free
currently i just been purposely skipping all nuke powers with crashes because i find the crash irritating
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If I recall correctly Synapse stated in the stream that for ultrahigh damage powers like the nukes, they couldn't use the standard formula because it generates unpalatable results, but they didn't want to just arbitrarily remove crashes, so they made a new formula that in net terms roughly increases recharge by some percentage relative to what the standard formula would predict for nuke-like powers, which I think is about 25% (he might have said offhandedly 50%, but the numbers suggest 25%).
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Originally Posted by StratoNexus
I don't think it follows the formula. Scale 4 damage with an area mod of 4.75 seems to be a 116.5 second recharge, unless I am mistaken.
When I plug 145 seconds and 4.75 into the damage formula I get: (0.2*((RECH*0.8)+1.8)) / AREAMOD (0.2*((145*0.8)+1.8)) / 4.75 = 4.96 So 4 seems like an arbitrary number they picked, rather than obeying a formula. I am not saying 4 is a wrong number, just that at these large recharges and radii, they sometimes use their judgement rather than blindly using the formula. |
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Indeed they do, 116.5* 1.25= 145.625.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
which I think is about 25% (he might have said offhandedly 50%, but the numbers suggest 25%.
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It is still arbitrary to decide to tack 25% onto the recharge, and I am not sure I agree that 4.96 at 145 second recharge is unpalatable, but I also do not find 4 at 145 seconds to be unreasonably low (although it is feels near the bottom of the range I do find reasonable).
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.
Quote:
The current formula arbitrarily normalizes damage above scale 0.36 (incidentally, the formula predicts brawl should have zero recharge) and arbitrarily picks 6.25 as the damage to recharge ratio.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Indeed they do, 116.5* 1.25= 145.625.
It is still arbitrary to decide to tack 25% onto the recharge, and I am not sure I agree that 4.96 at 145 second recharge is unpalatable, but I also do not find 4 at 145 seconds to be unreasonably low (although it is feels near the bottom of the range I do find reasonable). |
It may be arbitrary, but it might not be arbitraily arbitrary. 25% (and its -20% inverse) come up a lot when it comes to special case alternatives. Its comparable to the accuracy penalty for AoE mezzes, the (original) arbitrary bonus given to Claws. Many such adjustment factors live between 20% and 50%, and cluster around 25% and 50%.
There's also a curious coincidence to scale 4.0 damage that may be a coincidence, but it may also have some numerical hook to the devs thinking. Scale 4 is almost exactly what Nova should do *if* it expended all your endurance in one blast: its the *maximum* damage you should ever be able to do in effect. 100/5.2/4.75 = 4.05.
In actual fact I24 Nova was shown to cost 27.72 end in the stream. Assuming that's unslotted and not discounted, another odd coincidence is that the current cost of Nova, 20.8, is what a scale 4.0 single target attack would cost. 27.72 is almost exactly 33% higher than what a scale 4.0 single target attack would cost.
So one way to describe I24 Nova is that it does the maximum damage that endurance would allow, coincidentally also what Nova should do today if it was a single target attack obeying its non-crash endurance cost, but it now costs 33% more than what a single target attack would cost, and recharges 25% slower than a comparable AoE would cost.
The numbers may seem arbitrary, but there does seem to be a train of thought to it. And there is an inverse relationship to 33% and 25% whether its strictly numerically appropriate in this case (1/1.33 = 0.75 = 1-0.25: 33% and 25% are dual inverses of each other).
Four years ago I would have been sure this was a coincidence. Today I'm not so sure, particularly because feels like something Arbiter Hawk might have done if he was looking at it (Synapse is less chatty about how he thinks about numbers, although I know he thinks about them).
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I'm glad they plan to make this change, it was long overdue.
Blasters benefit from this change, but yet again, defenders and corruptors benefit more.
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
Yes the crash will be gone and so will some of the recharge but in that regard you give up some damage. In a lot of cases lieutenants won't be one shotted anymore.
Here are the full probability numbers of current nukes:
Nova has a 12.5% chance of doing scale 3.0 damage, 50% chance of doing 4.5 scale damage, and 37.5% chance of doing scale 6.0 damage.
Now nova will do consistent 4.0 damage if the changes go live.
To be honest I did use the nukes a lot on my Corruptor (Fire Blast's Inferno) so I am a bit disappointed that I am losing quite a bit of damage. I never felt the crash was that bad but I also had a support secondary or blues on hand.
Thoughts?