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May I ask why you feel so certain about this? |
Originally Posted by Starsman
I am 90% sure it gets evaluated after the delay.
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I'm not trying to be rude nor am I saying that you're wrong about it, I'd like to know if there is a power that works this way that I can test it with. I personally can't think of any powers with a delayed check to see if a line item should go through, only powers that would have a delay if the line item succeeded. If it's just a hunch, then I'll stand by my "I don't think it works that way" but I freely admit to ignorance of the underlying engine and am making assumptions based on what I've seen from City of Data.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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If the pet was doing the self-damage portion of ET to you (to prevent you from taking damage if it hit a corpse), you wouldn't care that it did a fixed amount of damage. It's supposed to anyway.
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Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
If the pet is the thing doing the damage, then it gets crippled by the pet damage rules (caps and such). Doubt you'll get much support for that.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Because I have a very strong feeling there is somewhere a power that has delay and some conditional behavior. Cant remember an example right now, though, I just have a very strong feeling there is one. I'm re-building a database I used to have, once I get that finished I may be able to find out where.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
May I ask why you feel so certain about this?
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This. Although every AT can have it's own pseudo-pet to have their own self-damage scale.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
If the pet was doing the self-damage portion of ET to you (to prevent you from taking damage if it hit a corpse), you wouldn't care that it did a fixed amount of damage. It's supposed to anyway.
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Yup, sorry, got confused to what we ware talking about. Nothing to see here. |
Originally Posted by Starsman
This. Although every AT can have it's own pseudo-pet to have their own self-damage scale.
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Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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Well... they could make a bugged psuedo pet for EM that did get affected by dead targets. But at this point we're already talking about a very elaborate system just to do ONE thing. Making it more elaborate sounds like a can of worms waiting to explode.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
It's thinking outside the box to try to make it work, though, and would have worked if they hadn't fixed Kinetics.
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@Rylas
Kill 'em all. Let XP sort 'em out.
As noted earlier, here is the list of AoE attacks (PBAoE or targeted, not cones) that break the damage formula.
- -0.18 Energy Melee > Whirling Hands
- -0.18 Battle Axe > Whirling Axe
- -0.18 Broad Sword > Whirling Sword
- -0.18 Katana > The Lotus Drops
- -0.10 Fiery Melee > Fire Sword Circle
- -0.06 War Mace > Whirling Mace
- +0.01 Electrical Blast > Short Circuit
- +0.10 Dual Blades > Typhoon's Edge
- +0.11 Radiation Blast > Irradiate
- +0.12 Electrical Blast > Ball Lightning
- +0.20 Stone Melee > Tremor
- +0.32 Super Strength > Foot Stomp
- +0.35 Titan Weapons > Whirling Smash
- +0.45 Fiery Melee (tank) > Combustion
- +0.71 Claws > Spin
- Broad Sword, Katana do less base damage than they should, but they have 100% chance for DOT. If those powers got altered in any way it would just be reducing the DOT and adding the damage up front, not a necesary change by any means.
- War Mace does slightly less damage than it should, but that set is already an AoE beast.
- Typhoon's Edge does not have much logic behind it. At all. Nearly seems as a bug. Endurance Cost is also too low.
- Irradiate does a tad too much damage, basically one tick too many, but it's doing it via a long DOT. Some extended DoT attacks tend to have such bonus damage, but mostly a thing only seen in old sets.
- Ball Lightning has some up-front damage but it has a similar issue as Radiation Blast.
- Tremor, Foot Stomp and Whirling Smash all have too big of a radius, Only Titan Weapons seem to have a set-wide reason for it. The other two may simply be legacy of an older formula predating CoH launch, or pure whim.
- Fire Melee (tank) > Combustion is doing bonus damage via DoT but it's hard to measure. The base damage is way too low, but the DOT is 100% chance without cancel on miss (like bonus Fire DoT tend to be) so I asume this power is just doing too much damage. The DoT may also be high due to the same logic seen in Irradiate and Ball Lightning.
- Claws > Spin, well, as I mentioned, uses a special formula for it's damage.
There's supposed to be a damage bonus for having a pure DoT, so I'm not sure that Irradiate would belong on that list. If I remember the bonus I was told correctly I think that both Gloom and Irradiate actually do less damage than they're supposed to.
We were actually discussing Combustion, which doesn't appear in the same form twice for any AT that has it.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Okay, I know that there was a list at some point, but I can't find it. There was a thread a while ago that sought to put the sets in order from highest to lowest based on ST-DPS and AoE DPS potential. Does anyone know where that got to? Would love to see where EM placed on that.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
I don't know if anything has been done in recent years but I have an old chart last updated pre-GR, I did a few versions. I'll try to hunt them down. I stopped paying for the page I was using to host them about half a year after I quit the game. I was paying almost as much as I pay for the game now to just host them 
Edit: found the Tanker version, but something is odd with Google docks, perhaps some changes broke the ability to share it. I'll have to screen grab it and host it...
Here it is:
At least among tankers, it has the worst AoE DPS.
BTW, that study took a lot of things into consideration. I made a special balancing formula that artificially penalized powers with short radius with a lower "realistic" target cap, precisely to be able to quantify the advantage of powers that may do the same damage and have the same recharge but have larger radius.
This was last updated June 15, 2010
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I know that it's old, but any chance I could pick your brain about how the ST DPS was calculated? What factors did you take into account? I'm assuming you gave the powers some recharge, but anything else?|
Originally Posted by Starsman
Here it is:
At least among tankers, it has the worst AoE DPS. BTW, that study took a lot of things into consideration. I made a special balancing formula that artificially penalized powers with short radius with a lower "realistic" target cap, precisely to be able to quantify the advantage of powers that may do the same damage and have the same recharge but have larger radius. This was last updated June 15, 2010 |
I'm surprised that EM is up there with Fire Melee, given Fire Melee's lack of secondary effect besides more damage.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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Just looking at how things are ranked I would make the assumption that it's under SO or common IO conditions with no pool powers. |
Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
I know that it's old, but any chance I could pick your brain about how the ST DPS was calculated? What factors did you take into account? I'm assuming you gave the powers some recharge, but anything else?
I'm surprised that EM is up there with Fire Melee, given Fire Melee's lack of secondary effect besides more damage. |
At low levels of recharge, having both Total Focus and Energy Transfer gives EM a boost over other sets because they aren't cycling their best attacks as often while EM can stagger them for more consistent performance through varying levels of recharge. In other words, it starts closer to its peak performance than the other sets do.
The problem is that "peak" is when you get animation-limited in your attack chain, and that happens fairly early with EM compared to other sets because its best DPA attacks are very long animations. So with IOs, EM is in the middle of the pack at best and falls even further when procs get counted because they favor fast animations (same damage, less animation = higher DPA boost).
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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The test in that chart is basically something very very similar to Arcanaville's Peak DR. It also incorporates Arcanaville. Other than Arcanatime, I designed this entirely independently and was actually a bit surprised the systems ended up being so similar.|
Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
I know that it's old, but any chance I could pick your brain about how the ST DPS was calculated? What factors did you take into account? I'm assuming you gave the powers some recharge, but anything else?
I'm surprised that EM is up there with Fire Melee, given Fire Melee's lack of secondary effect besides more damage. |
Do note the version of Fire Melee you see there is the Tanker version. That version has fewer single target attacks and they dont tend to be extremely speedy ones, at that.
All sets that have it here, have a bit of a priority. They will attempt to accomodate the best DPA attacks they can for the enemy count they can (with 1 for ST and 16 for AoE, relevant for the blast version.)
Bigger priority is given to powers that add self damage, like Rage and Build Up. The window of time that Rage forces near-no damage is accounted for there too.
As I noted earlier, I do some special formula that adds an artificial enemy spacing. The goal is to determine AoE potential without herding or corner pulling. Basically, I give every critter a 7ft diameter of space, no shoulder to shoulder cramping. If you corner pull and cramp foes, Stone and Energy Melee end up with basically the same AoE score. This was done to quantify the advantage of larger radius, the 7ft may be overkill for melee but its also designed to make blasters huge radius AoE display their AoE superiority.
Dark Melee in the list is an interesting case. It has a large AoE score, but it's not because of direct AoE damage, but because the magnitude of Soul Drain can reach in larger spawns. So you may say technically Dark Melee IS the ST king, but only while in AoE situations.
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Oh yea I assume all attacks have 95% damage enhancement, and 50% recharge (be it from slotting or IO bonuses is irrelevant.) Proper accuracy slotting for every attack to reach it's max 95% accuracy is expected but not explicitly quantified.|
Originally Posted by Siolfir
Just looking at how things are ranked I would make the assumption that it's under SO or common IO conditions with no pool powers.
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The goal of this chart was a "casual" build, not necesarely an SO only build.
I have another version with 250% recharge. Cant access it now to post a screengrab, since my workplace blocks Google Docs, but I am looking at it from my phone.
It stands at:
2.30 Stone Melee
2.10 Energy Melee
2.10 Fiery Melee
2.10 War Mace
2.00 Dark Melee
2.00 Super Strength
1.90 Battle Axe
1.70 Dual Blades
1.60 Ice Melee
Okay, so it looks like EM is doing good in terms of single-target damage, at least while solo. However, I think that its on teams that the long-animation times are a problem with potential corpse-blasting and such. So IF that is a problem with the set, I think that your idea might work, though I think I'd prefer less of a gimmick to the set.
But could the game, if ET or TF were determined to hit a dead enemy, turn the power into an AoE? Could it do a second check when the power would normally do damage, and if the target isn't alive anymore, the power becomes a weaker AoE? So if the target is still alive, you deal full damage to them, but if they're dead, your energy radiates out to those near him instead?
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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OK here are the issues as I see them:|
Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
Okay, so it looks like EM is doing good in terms of single-target damage, at least while solo. However, I think that its on teams that the long-animation times are a problem with potential corpse-blasting and such. So IF that is a problem with the set, I think that your idea might work, though I think I'd prefer less of a gimmick to the set.
But could the game, if ET or TF were determined to hit a dead enemy, turn the power into an AoE? Could it do a second check when the power would normally do damage, and if the target isn't alive anymore, the power becomes a weaker AoE? So if the target is still alive, you deal full damage to them, but if they're dead, your energy radiates out to those near him instead? |
AoE is extremely lacking. With tactics you may reach the potential damage of other low AoE damage sets like Stone Melee, but thats a bit of an issue: with work you can reach AoE capabilities of low performers? That's more than bit lame. AoE needs a direct solution.
Unfortunately, cottage rule prevents converting a power into AoE because it would force a change in IO slotting, something I think the devs are not willing to do (they may add slotting options, never change them.)
The other issue is more sublte. The cornerstone of the set's damage are two powers with extremely high damage and slow animations. You can easily waste 6 seconds in a no damage dump. Although the Streak Breaker will prevent you from missing both, Total Focus and Energy Transfer being used back to back with propper slotting, unless you are facing high defense foes.
The Streak Breaker is there to help such issues, but it's not that fair.
In a 6 second window, other sets are likely to land between 3 or 4 attacks. You need to have less than 60% tohit for that window of attacks to have no hits, otherwise the Streak Breaker makes sure at least one attack lands.
Only way the Streak Breaker will help the EM land some damage in such a window is if you have over 90% tohit chance on all attacks. Mind you, the attacks have very high inherent accuracy but I still feel this set rellies too muich on such slow attacks. During a single fight it can be much more disastrous for an EM. This may justify having an instant recharge where the attack can then, use a 1 second cast time.
The final issue is mostly just about frustration, with corpse blasting. Applying the above change to corpse blasting would also help with that frustration, others may also consider you more useful in the team.
The main reason not to tie up corpse blasting to the AoE buff is that it's extremely unlikely you will see corpse blasting solo, not unless there are some heavy hitting Ally NPCs or you running a damage aura and decide to queue one of these heavy hitters on an enemy that has a 1% health left.
Going back to the first issue, this means AoE has to be added to the set in some new mechanic. Since we can't just turn Stun in a cone or Targeted AoE, we may be able to use the Energy Load mechanic I mentioned earlier to conditionally turn it into an AoE. This would allow retaining Single Target Melee IO slotting.
Energy Load mechanic may also be usable for other interesting things like disabling Energy Transfer self damage or giving some other power also an energy burst capability, all of these consuming the energy load.
This would be a way to add AoE to the set without breaking cottage rules, and in a way it's usable solo or teamed.
I don't think that it would break the cottage rule, as the power would stay the same for the most part, retaining only the ST-damage set IO capability, but would gain some effects only IF the target dies between the first check and the second check.
And yes, you wouldn't see much difference soloing, where I think that EM is already doing fine, because you don't have the issues you have while teaming (i.e., you can't corpse-blast your own target, at least usually).
Also, remember that the Cottage Rule is a guideline, and I think you're taking it much more strictly than even the Devs do. The Cottage Rule basically says that without overwhelming balance issues, no power will have its basic effects changed. So, basically, you can't turn an attack into just a stun, but you can add a stun to the attack without breaking the cottage rule.
So, you can turn Stun into an AoE stun effect, or give it 4 times more damage, and you wouldn't be breaking the cottage rule, since you're not changing the basic function of the power. Conserve Power got changed to Energize without breaking the Cottage Rule, since it kept the End Discount feature of the power, and simply added other effects to it.
Adding conditional AoE to an attack would change the power, but wouldn't break the Cottage Rule. The cottage rule is there to prevent the Devs from arbitrarily changing an AoE stun into an AoE confuse for no reason. But it doesn't prevent them from adding effects, or changing values to powers.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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Another issue with these 6 seconds is that a lot can happen TO YOU during this time. And for armor sets that are more actively engaging, that could mean a death (such as Regen or Bio). Granted, this does require someone to use a little bit of thinking when playing, but you're asking people to not use their hard hitting powers as much and slowing down their kill speed.|
Originally Posted by Starsman
In a 6 second window, other sets are likely to land between 3 or 4 attacks.
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It may not be quite that common, but its an issue that is out there.
@Rylas
Kill 'em all. Let XP sort 'em out.
Aett_Thorn, I attempted to convince the devs about some changes that would retain the same level of power but change certain slotting options.
The idea was shut down mainly on this, it was seen as too drastic even if nothing was taken away from a player.
As you state, turning a ST stun into an AoE stun may be acceptable because that would not change the slotting options. If that attack also does dmage though... changing an attack also forces them to change it from accepting ST Melee Damage IOs to only accept AoE IOs.
I am actually gambling that adding the damage in a conditional may make them accept the idea that no slotting requirement changes may be necesary.
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Sort off. Both attacks may be seen as active mitigation themselves. At least Total Focus would. Another factor increasing the penalty for missing.
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Originally Posted by Rylas
Another issue with these 6 seconds is that a lot can happen TO YOU during this time. And for armor sets that are more actively engaging, that could mean a death (such as Regen or Bio). Granted, this does require someone to use a little bit of thinking when playing, but you're asking people to not use their hard hitting powers as much and slowing down their kill speed.
It may not be quite that common, but its an issue that is out there. |
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Well, you could change Stun to do an AoE stun effect while keeping it's ST damage, thereby keeping the IO set slotting options the same. So it would do an AoE stun, but only do damage to your target.
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Originally Posted by Starsman
Aett_Thorn, I attempted to convince the devs about some changes that would retain the same level of power but change certain slotting options.
The idea was shut down mainly on this, it was seen as too drastic even if nothing was taken away from a player. As you state, turning a ST stun into an AoE stun may be acceptable because that would not change the slotting options. If that attack also does dmage though... changing an attack also forces them to change it from accepting ST Melee Damage IOs to only accept AoE IOs. I am actually gambling that adding the damage in a conditional may make them accept the idea that no slotting requirement changes may be necesary. |
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
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Sure, that would work. Would not help this set in question but it sounds like something they may accept to be 100% cottage rule safe.
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Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
Well, you could change Stun to do an AoE stun effect while keeping it's ST damage, thereby keeping the IO set slotting options the same. So it would do an AoE stun, but only do damage to your target.
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Yeah, I mean, no idea if this would help the set or not. But it would allow you to stun a group, allowing you to use your longer-animating ST attacks in much more safety than you might have had otherwise.|
Originally Posted by Starsman
Sure, that would work. Would not help this set in question but it sounds like something they may accept to be 100% cottage rule safe.
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But similar things could be done to other powers without breaking the cottage rule, such as adding splash damage to TF or ET conditionally (or always), allowing each attack to have a chance for AoE stun, adding KD to Whirling Hands (adding an effect but not taking any away), etc.
I do think that Stun is the easiest way to fix the set if we can ignore the Cottage Rule to a certain extent. If the rest of the EM attacks did some other secondary effect, it wouldn't be so bad. But the fact that every attack can stun an enemy, having ANOTHER single-target stun in the set really isn't that necessary. It's stun overkill.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus