Powersets that need review

Or: "Oh look, I've lost the argument, so I'm going to pretend it was always about something else."

You claimed that you could STATISTICALLY PROVE that a drastic rebalancing of the game would INCREASE SUBSCRIPTIONS, flying in the face of every bit of experience and common sense of everyone else here.

NO ONE says CoH is perfectly balanced.

It's just that everyone else can see that trying to make it balanced would do far far more harm than good.

Thank you for going away.

Awwww...and I was just about to invite him to my party! Drat!

Agreed. At this late in the game, that ship has already sailed.

Rakeeb "could" do a 20 page Excel report that's set to the 14th decimal place, accompanied by a 6 hour Power Point presentation showing just how unbalanced the game is. That wouldn't necessarily mean it was a great, much less a good idea to "fix it", as they define it, at this point.

Originally Posted by PapaSlade Rangle's right....this is fun.

I'll just quote this part here, take a step back, and let everyone else judge whether the correct response is to laugh, to sigh, or to roll their eyes.


You're the only one willing to destroy the game to save it. You've explicitly stated that you don't care what the devs think, and you don't care about what the players think, and yet you want people to care about what you think. Good luck with that.

To be fair, GDN/ED was a blow to the game only because they didn't have IOs waiting in the wings for the next issue.

If they did GDN/ED and said "We know this hurts now, but next issue we'll have Invention Origin Enhancements" and then showed those IOs off, I think those upset with GDN/ED would of been (for the most part anyways) a lot less upset.

Ironically*, you could do exactly the same thing about Power Point...


*Note to pedants: Use of this term is not guaranteed 100% correct.

Just don't attempt all three at once. it's like an ice cream headache.

What exactly do you mean by balance?

If you mean the powersets balanced within their own grouping. For the most part yes.

There's going to be a ranking of what one considers best of course. And sometimes a sets trade offs are going to feel less than spectacular, whether it's because secondary effects are worthless or because it takes extra effort on the players part to make them not worthless.

A couple examples to prove the point...

Regen is generally considered inferior now to many other sets now (truthfully, I hear people say it's still popular, but I find less and less people playing it myself), but those who lay it well it's considered an awesome set. Basically, can you keep on the ball? Leverage those clickies and click them at the right times?

Spines is considered poor on ST damage. But 160+ ST DPS isn't bad. Sadly, most people don't like that the animations are long and don't think to use AOE attacks on that one target "What?! Use Throw Spines on a Single Target?!"

Admittedly, it's not the BEST on ST, but when I hear people say "It takes forever to kill tough single targets." and I watch them use Lunge or even Barb Swipe, I tell them "Well stop using Lunge and/or Barb Swipe."

Mind you, when I say this, this doesn't mean some sets couldn't use a few tweaks in the upward position. Force Field and Sonic Resonance comes to mind in the case of Debuff/Buff Power Sets.

I find for the most part, powerset combos tend to be quite balanced amongst each other, however it's a few outliers that make it appear to be not the case.

Super Strength by itself doesn't make one OMGUBER.

In fact, last I recall, Brutes didn't do more damage than Scrappers untill certain factors where brought into play.

Like Fire Armor! It just plays to a Brutes strength. Damage aura that increases in damage with more Fury but isn't effected by Scrappers Crits. Fiery Embrace that gives Fire Damage based on your +DMG. And of course Burn. Lovely Burn! Again not effected by Crits, but loves that +DMG from Fury.

Then there's Gloom. How it helps a Brute out so well. Helping push Brutes past Scrappers in terms of ST DPS. Mind you, all weapon sets seem to still favor the Scrapper because Gloom causes redraw to use.

Now amongst balance of ATs. That's always going to be tricky. And personally for a lot of it, I find most of the ATs that people say "This AT isnt as good as this one" are focusing on the Solo aspect of the AT.

Yup. Scrapper tends to be a better solo artist than that Defender or Troller.

But go on a team, and that Defender or Troller tends to outshine that Scrapper.

A Blaster player who knows what they're doing can outshine a lot of melee's on a team as well.

This isn't to say some things shouldn't be changed on some of these ATs mind you.

Blasters as they are now, imo, lack in the damage compartment, but this is likely because when I make a Blaster, my goal is ranged damage and not throwing in melee attacks everywhere.

Melee attacks either cause my blasters to redraw which ruins the damage or requires them to be in melee more than I want them to be (note, with my Dual Pistols I tend to stay in melee...but then it suffers from the redraw).

Hopefully in i24 Blasters damage concerns are addressed. So far I'm thinking they will be.

Scrapper vs Brutes vs Tanks and Defenders vs Corruptors. Some tweaks could likely be used in place for sure, but they're small tweaks, but even the smallest tweak can send people into "OMG HATE MODE"

Basically balance in a MMO is never going to be easy, likely never be in play, and really only be possible in a game without classes and where the only difference in abilities amongst the players is graphics (not animation times).

Not necessarily. It does require incredibly amounts of work, but it's doable.

You have to build mathematical models that take into account an extremely wide variety of variables, but you could balance even something as complex as CoH.

For instance, when balancing powersets within a category, such as ranged damage, you'd need to consider:

1.) ST damage capability, as well as the value of ST damage
2.) AoE damage capability, as well as the value of AoE damage
3.) Animation times, and how they translate into DPS
4.) Endurance costs, and how easily they can be circumvented through slotting or additional powers
5.) Damage types, and how they relate to the prevalence of resistance among enemy groups
6.) Secondary effects, and their effect on mitigation and DPS

And that's just a start.

It's a whole lot of work, and it requires well-built models as well as designers capable of thinking of design tools that can be easily expressed mathematically. But it can be done.

If there is a singular problem that posters like Rakeeb amplify, its the artificial tension between game balance and game entertainment value. A lot of people, even sometimes the devs, believe these are mutually exclusive objectives and in wrongly promoting their preferences as objective balance they just make this fallacy harder to dismiss.

Game balance has nothing to do with entertainment value, because game balance should be judged within the context of the entertainment value you're trying to deliver. Saying its harder to make balanced games entertaining or vice versa is like saying its hard to make blue cars fast, because the faster you make them the more red they have to be.

This game has a certain feel, it delivers a certain gameplay and has a certain entertainment value. Anything that purports to "balance" the game while destroying those things isn't meaningful balance. That's the difference between game design and arithmetic.

Can we balance this game, with ugly mechanics and quirky classes? Yes, we can in theory, and in practice we can keep improving even if we never actually get there. In our game, balance is not about the scale damage of blazing bolt. Its about core content, progressional opportunity, and reward earning. If every archetype/powerset combination choice had approximately the same ability to deal with core content, if they all had a similar if not identical opportunity to use the progressional systems of the game (i.e. inventions, incarnate powers), if they all had a similar ability to earn rewards, then it doesn't matter if someone has 21.6% more AoE damage and someone else takes down pylons 18 seconds quicker. That's arithmetic. Meaningful balance is about the experience the game delivers. Sometimes that involves numerical balancing of specific game effects. But always with an eye to the overall big picture of the gameplay we deliver.

Its ok if we all can only take on three things. Its also ok if we all can take on twelve. Three is not a magic number. Ok, it is a magic number, but not for game balance. What matters is what the game intent is. If we intend players to be far more powerful here than in other MMOs, that's fine. Blasters are not in competition with Jedi Knights or Blood Elfs. They are only in competition with Tankers and Stalkers and Dominators and Masterminds. We decide what is "balanced" for this game in terms of our relative capabilities. And then math takes over and tries to deliver on that decision.

But what we care about most here, what we've always cared about most, is not trivial number crunching. That's just a tool to help with the real game design, which is to offer the players fair choices in archetype and powersets. And fair in this case is what I mentioned above: similar ability to run core content, similar ability to use optional progression systems, similar ability to earn rewards.

Are we there yet? Of course not. We don't need posters like Rakeeb to lecture us on that. But we also don't need posters like Rakeeb to tell us the entire game we play is wrong, and we're all wrong for liking it, and if we weren't so wrong we'd see why we should discard eight years of City of Heroes to make City of Rakeeb.

I like City of Heroes. I like it even though its imperfect and I spend a lot of time trying to improve it. I don't want to trade City of Heroes for City of Rakeeb. I don't think I would like City of Rakeeb, even though in many ways it might implement many of the mechanical changes I've advocated for years. Because City of Rakeeb doesn't care about players, it cares about Rakeeb mechanics. It cares about arithmetic more than gameplay. And as surprising as it might be to some people when I say this, it should not be surprising to people who have read my stuff since 2004. I don't care about arithmetic. Numbers to me are just language. They aren't the game any more than English is the game. Often, number are extremely important to defining and describing the game, but numbers don't *decide* the game.

We do that. We the devs and we the players (moreso the former of course, but we have more input here than anywhere else). So anyone that says they don't care what the players think and what the devs think doesn't care about this game. They care about this other thing in their heads that they wish could replace this game.

The problem is those are not fixed.

players will find content that maximizes ST value, or AoE value. They will then use the sets that favor that type.

you could only balance AT's if you also balanced all encounters so that they were essentially identical.

you can balance all AT's for soloing Trolls. You cannot balance all AT's for soloing and teaming Trolls, Malta, Carnies, and Nemesis

You're very likely correct on that assessment but consider that what Rakeeb wants is a global nerf on a scope more far reaching that ED/GDN but with nothing "waiting in the wings" to make up for it. His idea is simply to reduce power.

Why not just go all the way. If your definition of balance is "every player must have exactly the same experience under all conditions" then the only way to do that is to restrict your game to having only one player. And they can only play the game once, because their experience on Tuesday won't be balanced with their experience on Wednesday. And they can only play the game at noon or their morning experience won't be balanced against their evening balance.

Any balance goal that requires all elements of a purportedly heterogeneous game to be identical is best dealt with by eliminating that goal. Such goals aren't about balance, they are a perversion of balance.

But "enough scenarios" depends on game content design, rather than powerset design.

For example, one of the issues raised with tankers is there are not enough situations in the game when you actually need that much survivability.

Precisely. If every powerset is equally viable across the entire game, then you've achieved balance, or as close as is necessary. Powersets don't need to be exactly equal in every situation, but if Powerset A is better than Powerset B in more situations than vice versa, or B isn't better enough than A in those situations, then you have a problem.

Homogeny isn't necessary for balance, only for lazy design.

You can't design powersets without taking into account content design. They're inexorably linked.

If I create a powerset that functions identically to Archery - the exact same powers, damage numbers, endurance costs, everything - but make it do untyped damage, is it balanced?

Of course not. It will outperform Archery in nearly every situation, because it will never be resisted the way Archery's lethal damage is.

When balancing powersets, the environment in which they are going to be used is just as important as the internal variables that shape their creation.

In a crowd where everyone has their own definition of the word, yeah. But I don't have a communication problem with the devs when we discuss balance, even if my definition isn't precisely the same as theirs, because I acknowledge what they mean and they understand what I mean. Which is how all two-way communication works.

But on the boards, no one acknowledges what each other means. Look at the previous 3 pages of everyone arguing that their definition is right and the other gal/guys definition shows them to be dishonest, mentally deficient, or both. Hence these discussions are meaningless.

The devs take feedback from a lot of people. I acknowledge and agree that the devs should give your feedback more weight than the standard joe because you have the educational and professional background to make learned opinions on game balance. But at the end of the day, they do whatever the heck they want to do anyway and so long as they think it meets their goals, it's 'balanced'.

So for me, I just ask for what I want, explain why and hope for the best. It usually works out.

What is the entire game?

solo arcs?
street sweeping hellions in PP or BP in DA echo?
soloing pylons?
incarnate trials?
pvp?

And how do you determine balance of that? Is street sweeping in PP as important as soloing arcs?

The way the game works is simple. If you solo mostly, you probably pick an AT that is good for soloing - brute, scrapper, stalker, or MM. Or you pick a powerset combo for soloing life fire/rad controller.

If you want to hunt GM's you get a powerset with -regen

There is a ton of content to choose from, and you can choose a character that does that content best

Yes. If I'm looking to achieve extremely precise balance, I look at all of that. I know what will spawn in missions based on team size or difficulty, I know what will spawn outdoors, I know what will spawn in any given part of the game, and I take that into effect.

I start by setting a baseline that I want all powersets to achieve, based on what content I want them to be able to accomplish. Then, I design powersets around that baseline, taking into account the variety in content, and, if I've done all my math correctly, I end up with balanced powers.

If I find that players are not adhering to my initial content decision, I reevaluate. If it's possible for our two choices to coincide, I find that happy medium and rework powers so that they fit into the new design constraints. If our goals are too different, I decide whether my design goals are more important than the playerbase's desires (usually, that answer is no), and I rework my design again.

Absolutely. The job of a designer is to make sure that all of those choices are equally weighted. No choice should be obviously better than the others.