How would you "fix" Kheldians?

Yeah but the double mire'd Nova Blasts are what makes tri form so good at AOE, it's the best AOE available to Warshades. Quasar helps too, and obviously fluffies if you can keep them alive. That's pretty hard to do on a farm map though like Stone said, and to be fair, also like Stone has already said, any type of pet is going to struggle to survive on a farm map, Lore pets included.

There's no contesting the potency of double mired nova blasts, the only advantage id have is not having to position for nova emanation while throwing aoes. If they eever make quasar crash less then Ill try to fit that in to supplement unchain and judgement. I miss having 3 nukes.

Just so you know, just because farmers are asked to be watched, doesn't mean someone is looking to do something with farmers in mind.

You are silly, you keep coming up with silly analogies to something you just do not get. You have no idea of what possible outcomes can be had by watching different various players solo similar instances other than perhaps what you already think you know, which to me is silly.

I don't recall Dechs talk about farming with his Warshade or AIB. I'd only ask those of whom I would recall talking about it. Builds are one thing, being practised is another.

Stone uses Logic.

It has no effect!

New Dawn uses False Premise.

Stone ignores the attack!

Stone uses Examples and Reasoning.

New Dawn has dodged the attack!

New Dawn uses You Don't Know What You're Talking About Silly Silly Person.

Stone falls asleep.

Maybe there's a language barrier or something, but I don't even understand what ND is talking about at this point, and I'm not even saying this to be mean. I feel like she is simply unable to make herself understood, because everything you've said has made perfect sense to me.

ND, would you be willing to calmly, politely (and preferably concisely) restate exactly what it is you are talking about? Here are some questions to help you along the way:

1.) Do you believe that fluffies are underperforming because they can't withstand a 54x8 onslaught, even though no pets (except Phantom Army) could do so reliably?

2.) Do you believe that because of this extreme example, fluffies are automatically irrelevant as a valid means of AOE damage?

3.) Do you think it's unreasonable that low HP pets with no real defense or resistance are apt to die when their owner is past the aggro cap at max difficulty settings?


Anything else you'd like to add to make exactly what you're talking about clearly understood would also be appreciated.


AIB farms on his Warshade all the time. I'm sure Dechs could too if he felt so inclined and someone asked him to, his Warshade is built for spawn melting.

I read your response on my lunch break and spent the rest of the afternoon LOL'ing.

I think this about sums up everything:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Somewhere in there is a general conflation between what a set of tools is designed to do and what a set of tools is theoretically capable of doing. But translation beyond that would require information currently unavailable to the universal translator.

Wow. I really have to search to find your post to respond to!

From what I have read (and bear in mind my reading comprehension needs slots) the absorb mechanic effectively operates like ablative armor. In other words, it gives you extra hit points like Dull Pain.

Unlike Dull Pain (and other +hit point powers) these extra hit points do not count towards your hit point cap (at least I don't think they do) and they definitely do not add to your regen the way +hp do.

While you have an absorb mechanic active, any damage you take (after resistance is taken into effect) affects those absorption hit points first before they start whittling away at your actual hit points.

Kind of like the Enterprise's shields.

...did I get that right?

Pretty much. It's a "Third Shield". Defense > Resistance > Absorb, and after all three of those have been passed through, remaining damage finally hits your HP. It's easier if you think of it like "Null Damage" kind of resistance, despite it working out of an imaginary HP pool.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Kind of sums up my opinion on the back and forth with New Dawn. Maybe it's just me, but I can't seem to wrap my head around the idea that she wants to run repeated tests with different people playing Kheldians in a farming environment - an environment most seem to agree they are not made for - and then use this information to gauge their overall performance.

Or perhaps that's exactly what she's saying, provided we replace "similar instances" with "farms." Now I can't claim to know New Dawn well enough to say whether she can actually extrapolate overall performance from such an ill-suited situation, but it seems to me that rather then an AE farm it would make much more sense to use something like the repeatable missions in the Rikti War Zone.


Also, just because these few things kinda stuck out for me:

So we start off with New Dawn's statement that some PB's may have endurance problems.

This is followed with her opinion that their endurance efficiency depends on their build and their slots.

I believe the third quote finishes things. Between Conserve Power, Light Form and it's recovery buff, and the general slotting of powers, PB's have all the tools needed to manage their endurance. If they are not using these tools then the endurance problems are their own fault, not the fault of the Peacebringer itself.

-------------


For my own thoughts, Peacebringers play like someone messed up the switches on a fireworks display and everything went off at once. They can open up with pretty substantial bang with their heavy AoE's and/or ST attacks. The problem I have is what happens after all the big explosions go off. Which is - from what I can tell - nothing. After the heavy AoE's go off (of which I'm primarily thinking of Photon Seekers, Dawn Strike, and Solar flare, there's not much to follow it up with and those big ones are on a pretty long recharge. Likewise, you can hit a single target pretty hard with Incandescent and Radiant, but after you fire off those two you're left only with Bolt and Blast. Neither of them have a lot of damage behind them but because there are no other options while the two melee attacks are recharging and it is their lack in damage that brings down the sustained DPS.

Maybe this is intentional though? Maybe they're supposed to hit the enemy hard just once and be done after that...? If so, they I have to admit it does feel like Peacebringers are more of a collectors item; something nice to look at but not anything you really want to take out of the box.

It feels to me that the pace of City of Heroes has picked up from what it used to be years back and Peacebringers have just gotten left behind. Literally. I can imagine a time (whether real or not?) when the Peacebringer ran into a group, annihilated it, then had to skip the next group and let the other seven people on the team handle it while the powers came back up.

Honestly I kind of like that idea, but as teams and individuals have grown able to clear groups faster and faster and faster, Peacebringers now only have a chance to shine maybe every third group. Or fourth. Or fifth. To make matters worse, when the PB does get its chance to try for the spotlight it can't just step forward like it (might?) have used to, it has to compete with the rest of the team and their quicker pace.

Instead of being this somewhat awe-inspiring force that needs rest between displays of power, it's now only able to match the pace of the rest of the team one out of every 3 or so groups.

Maybe it's a little over-reaching to imagine the Peacebringer as equal to the rest of an entire group (especially in an age where now almost any AT can solo AV's - anyone else remember when it was only the Ill/Rad controllers who could manage that?) but it's called an Epic AT, darnit. If the idea behind the Peacebringer is indeed that it should hit really hard right away and then flicker out for a time, I just don't see a way of making that fit into today's City of. Speed it up and/or increase the damage and it becomes too scrappery/blastery, is what most of the people who are against those ideas seem to fear.

(/sarcasm disclaimer: In case it wasn't caught, I was using epic jokingly.)

In my view, the question Peacebringers don't have an answer for is "how does the AT take down a hard target in an extended fight?"

Warshades find a lot of minions to pull Mire's from and beat face.

Scrappers, Brutes, Blasters, Stalkers..? Well, they were made to beat face. I suppose Soldiers of Arachnos fit in here too.

Controllers, and Corruptors rely on debuffing the target and then bringing it down.

Masterminds either buff their pets and/or debuff the enemy, then let the pets take the enemy down.

Defenders tend to buff themselves and/or debuff the target until they're putting out high enough damage.

Dominators hold the target to protect themselves and then tear the enemy down at leisure.

... I'm unsure about Tanks, honestly, never played one. But they were given gauntlet to improve ST damage, so... maybe they have something?

But Tanks aside, how does the Peacebringer take down a hard target in sustained combat? From the DPS numbers people put out...? They don't. At least not yet.

(On the topic of DPS, I do need to offer an apology to John. Had I known asking him to look at my PB build to see if DPS could be improved would end up with him sticking his head into the pit of dispa- I mean, the Peacebringer forums...?)

First, absorb sounds neat, but in my opinion if we took your idea of +absorb and combined it with my earlier idea, it'd serve the AT's best; I originally proposed +def instead, but I can see how that'd be pretty OP, and absorb is probably a better mechanic to use. Still though, if we look at what the +absorb totals would be if it functioned the same way as our +resist does currently and took maybe, 50% of that total and gave it to the Kheld, and 25% of it to the team mates, that would be better. Maybe this would be best only for Peacebringers from a thematic perspective, but I'm proposing that it work the same way on Warshades for simplicity. Obviously which AT's gave +res and +dmg would still be different per each AT.
I absolutely like your proc idea in lieu of +dmg though.

That's true in a general sense, but the performance gap between an unmired Warshade and a Peacebringer vs. a mire'd Warshade and a Peacebringer is not the same. Let me pull up my Kheld builds to illustrate my point- I'm going to do this simply and assume max buff for inner light at all times, so if anything these numbers will be weighted towards the PB.

With one mire target, my Warshade's current build will do 1168.8/8.052 for 145.16+57.23/2 (OD) for a total of 173.77 DPS (without fluffies.)

At maxed inner light, an equal budget PB will do 800.9/4.356 for 183.86 DPS.


So the PB beats the single target Mire'd Warshade (without any pets) by 10.09 DPS. Again, that's assuming max +dmg from IL the whole time, which is not how it actually works.

Now, my Warshade with a saturated Mire (again, still not counting pets) will do 1533.9/8.052 for 190.50+65.37/2 (OD) for a total of 223.185 DPS.

Where the PB beats out a single Mire targeted Warshade by ~10 DPS, a fuully Mired Warshade beats out a PB by 39.325 DPS. I'm sure you can see the disparity, and once again, these rough calcs heavily favored the PB.


Note: None of these calcs take -res procs into account, but my WS has a FOTG in OD and my PB has an achilles in all his ST attacks- They add *roughly* the same to each build, maybe slightly more for the PB, but not enough imo to close the gap. And if we can ignore fluffies, we can certainly ignore -res procs.

Second edit- Neither of the builds I used for this use Assault, Musculature or Hybrid. It stands to reason that if we add in all of the above for both builds though, the results would be the same, comparison wise.

Just want to say I think this is a phenomenally good idea.

You're also selfish.

I love Joe's idea too- I would just like to look at the assumed values of our current self survivability (resistance/absorb/whatever it is) and take 25% away from it, in order to give 25% of the original inherent buff (again, survivability side only) to all of our teammates and 50% of the original value to ourselves, because, let's face it- Khelds aren't exactly hurting for survivability. We are hurting in team contribution though, at least on the PB side, and on the side of people like Microcosm who use their Warshades for nothing but damage.

Glad someone had that ready, I didn't have a Warshade build handy to pull the numbers for that explanation.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Psst.. you might be playing the wrong variety of Kheld.

The results here do depend on the builds. The Peacebringer used for this might of skipped an AoE which will have a maximum amount of targets and a frequency of use.

THB gave me two top end builds months ago the likes of which I have to say are actually fantastic human form builds. I said no one else will see them and no one else has from me anyway. I did put these builds into excel. Included pets, included buffs, included everything needed basically. I also did one for pure Warshades and Peacebringers on simple SOs.

I ordered the attacks in order of ST DPA, I then multiplied them by maximum number of targets, reordered them again. Attack chained them between either every second Sunless Mire or Photon Seeker deployment so not some simple straight attack chain but one using the best attack when it came up. I also got the average damage buff of Innerlight bang on.

Between Photon Seekers only 5 attacks needed to be used. Between Every Sunless Mire 5 attacks were used, Dark Extraction and Unchained Essence were used once between 2 Sunless Mires.

It assumed that Dark Extractions hit with their single target attacks and their cone attacks as often as possible. The idea of me watching people farm was to see on average what people achieve in reality, to calm the average DPS figure of Dark Extraction down. The PB in reality won't achieve the DPS figures it has shown on my Excel due to displacing mobs out of line of fire of it's other attacks once a KB is used, it won't also because of the number of non attacking clicks used to self sustain itself.

Within the right team and with the right team dynamics ie with a controller with immobs that do -KB the PB looks like it could be made to perform better but team make ups are not always a given or players will not always capitalize on the best team dynamic.

All calcs are always going to be rough. The game is going to be updated based upon Devs datamining (basing things upon what the players actually achieve) and so the playing field changes making the goal posts move in ways people may or may not agree with, with concept design in mind that players may or may not truly see.

To cut out long story nonsense, I will state the obvious, performance is different per person. All those with problems with PBs will highlight them, all those without will be silent. The Devs to my mind are going to look at things like leveling speed etc.

In my view things are arguably okay, new IO sets could tone down AoE KB and AoE damage output for PBs and PBs will still be okay. People can change their build through choice.

No. I neither think they under perform or overperform, I was worried that they can be helped to over perform by too much. In working out potential average dps between two builds that did take their aoes as opposed to using a pb biased st in mind. The ws fell behind the PB if you remove the damage to dps a PBs kb can create but given solid use of dark extractions the ws pulled forward once again. The Dark Extractions as they are, are necessary

Fluffies are relevant to a WS performance and necessary. Getting them to cone as much as possible is also necessary to compete with a PB without KB taken into account. If you take the KB into account, displacing mobs, then the DE don't need to cone attack every time it could.


No as I have farmed and kept them alive myself.

Looking at AIBs build which I like he might farm in Dwarf in which case that's the easiest way to keep the DE alive but I do not feel that sitting in Dwarf form is the way to get the best DPS out of a WS.

Unlike you, they don't appear to brag about things. If they wanted me to see them farm and take data, I don't feel confident if I would be getting anything better than I already have got.