Powersets that need review

I'd honestly go with that, swap out some of the +Def for +Res. The diversity would do the IO system good.

I'd still want to turn down the numbers, though.

I prefer focusing my attention on the possible. An invention system GDN is not going to happen at this point. The time to fight that battle was several years ago, and it was fought and lost.

I agree with you.

(A second thing I would consider, instead of just buffing ToHit across the board, is making the Accuracy of individual powers vary more. If hard hitting powers had lower Accuracy and softer hitting powers had high Accuracy, I think it might smooth out the edges of the soft cap. But I haven't tested that idea with charts to see if it works like I think it would. The intent would be to make the jump from 40% defense to 45% not be as extreme because you already soft capped to a few attacks at 20% or 30% and so on.)

Accuracy doesn't work in a way that allows that to happen in the way you describe.

You could play some weird games with Elusivity though, but I don't think the devs want to go there.

The problem I see with that is that it also has a strong negative impact for non-IO builds, especially for ATs that lack any base levels of Defense.

Well technically you could do it by varying the To Hit chance for individual powers, I know a few powers in game already do that although mostly to make a power effect that normally auto-hits not auto-hit for some things (i.e. Smoke Grenade). Although doing it for all NPCs would be a major PITA.

I had no idea, was oblivious to that at the time. Probably wasn't subscribed. I find it completely believeable that there was an argument over it.

More evidence that the devs are bad, I guess. The idea that you'd write off a game system change because it's been set in stone for years is one of the core issues afflicting the dev community.

Fear of nerfing to bring your game into balance because of player response? Says a lot about the dev community.

Yep, but not what you seem to think. It shows that the devs are rational thinkers who realize that attempting to "balance" the game the way you want would probably drive away more subscribers than it gains. People here ENJOY being ludicrously overpowered and for the most part it isn't hurting anyone. The main argument I see against it is that it makes the game "boring" but given the player retention rate in CoX that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Maybe the devs have learned a thing or two from SWG.

If this were a new game then yeah you're absolutely right about bringing a lot of this stuff in line. In fact, it happened several times over the first couple of years:

GDN
ED
Regen Nerfs
Aggro caps
Non-perma T9s

All of this stuff happened between i1 and i6 I believe (I started playing during i4). And there have been several nerfs along the way. For them to do something similar to that now would absolutely wreck their playerbase. People who spend dozens upon dozens of hours building their characters would get pissed and leave (using myself as an example). You keep insisting that their unwillingness to do this makes them "bad devs" but I suggest that they are GOOD devs for not shooting themselves in the foot and driving away a big chunk of their dedicated playerbase.

There comes a time in an MMOs life where things tend to settle in. I agree that the IO system can make certain AT/Build combos ridiculously powerful, but it can't change at this point. The long-timers such as myself have gotten comfortable with the way things are. I'd wager that the long-timers are the ones buttering PS's bread by now.


Like I said before, I think the "fix" is simply expanding our options although changing def sets to res sets is not the answer. They really dug themselves a nice hole when they decided to greatly favor +def as a set bonus.

You have this weird attitude that since the devs aren't changing the game to your specifications, that somehow means they are bad.

It says they are not idiots. And also they have a different perspective on game balance than you do.

Balance is not a thing. Balance is a description of a relationship. Balance is a relationship between two or more things. Games aren't balanced by adding more balance: games are balanced by adjusting a myriad number of individual and completely distinct balance relationships. The most important thing people need to understand about balance is that its not a matter of numerical quantification. Its a measure of realizing an end-state design goal.

No one, and I mean no one has argued the case for quantitative balance more than me. No fifty players combined can make that statement. But if that quantitative balance aims for an abstract numerical target that no player cares about, its wasted effort.

It would have been nice if Geko and company built the mechanical and power framework on more solid ground. But the time to do that is when you're designing a game. The goal for supporting a game is to evolve it in the directions that would most benefit its players.

Sometimes the game needs to change in ways that are opposed by the players for their own good; sometimes the players don't fully appreciate the long-term effects of changing a game in one way or the other. But ultimately, the purpose to changing a game is to benefit its players. If the players hate the changes, and will always hate the changes, its a pointless change.

I won't speak for the devs on this account, but I will speak for myself. I'm not a coward, or an idiot. I'm an engineer, and a designer, and a quantitative analyst, and I understand game design as well as anyone. There's a lot I think the devs do wrong and when they do I say so. But I think there's a lot the devs over time have done right, sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally, that I think make this game someething that I like more than other games that are in many ways far more quantitatively well-structured. There are lots of things I would do differently if I was the design lead, but ignoring the preferences of the playerbase that has grown comfortable with the particular kind of gameplay this game offers would not be one of them.

I'm not a coward, or an idiot, and I wouldn't do many if not most of the things you've suggested. I know you're not directly accusing me of being either (I presume) but I'm compelled to point out that resistance to your ideas doesn't show anything except disagreement. The fact that you continue to infer far more than that is disturbing.

I still wish all primary/secondary sets that grant defense were simply swapped to grant Elusivety.

At that point, all defense can safely be pierced and negated with tohit without unfairly hurting sets that solely or heavily depend on evasion.

Unfortunately, due to the horrible way it was implemented in PvP, it's deployment was, from my understanding, extremely disappointing. Now they fear even looking at the stat.

The game is too old to fix these issues. A lot of the things you're talking about have been stated consistently for 8 years. There will be tweaks along the way, but the major global changes necessary to establish some fairness in the system just aren't happening. Nor should they.

I covered this in my Elusivity article, but it kind of depends on the intent of the defense powers. Some defense powers seem to be designed to be stable, independent of critter action. SR defenses, for example. On the other hand, its unclear if that's categorically extensible to all other primary and secondary defenses. For example, its entirely possible that the (correct) intent of invincibility is to be more "piercable" than SR defenses. And then you have FF, where an analysis of stacking suggests that Dispersion Bubble should probably be +Elu and Deflection and Insulation shield should probably be +Def.

The problem with PvP is that the devs attempted to use Elu as a magic wand, and it absolutely doesn't work in the way they tried to make it work, as a "close enough" magic wand application. However, I could not convince the devs to use it as its design intended.

"Fairness" is not the same thing as "balance" and there's lots of things you can do to improve archetype and powerset fairness without total game upheaval. Those things are a lot easier to do, particularly as its very hard to make wholesale changes to an MMO if you destroy the revenue stream paying for development.

Given today's mechanics, I think if Invuln was designed today it would use very fast refreshing Absorption instead if Def in Invincibility.

If damage thresholds existed in the game that would be ideal for the set's apparent intention, but I think Absorption would offer a similar yet easier to pierce mechanic than Damage Threshold would.

Problem is, every set that was designed with that same mentality may be better served with fast pulsing Abs, but this would even if numeric balance was struck properly it would be the equivalent of riding a bulldozer at 100 MPH over that cottage rule.

+Elu can, in many aspects, leave the cottage rule intact.

But I agree with you, it's not as simple as I stated. FF for one is a set that perhaps would work even better if SR and Invuln used +Elu, as suddenly the defense granted by FF would be more useful, but at the same time giving at least one power in FF Elu may also fix or alleviate some of the issues.

They did many horrible things to PvP in that one patch.

Diminishing healing was horribly done.
DPS normalization made no sense at all in PvP. If anything, PvP as it stands in this game (due to movement powers) should never have damage normalization, hard hitting attacks should recharge slow, no matter the cast time.

Finally Elu... as you say, it was just used as a magic wand, and apparently without understanding it well to booth. Too much Elu and tohit would not pierce armor and people whine that they are not hitting at all in PvP. Too little and you do nothing. Elu may had help alleviate extreme ToHit piercing in PvP, but the problems with PvP in this game is mainly one of travel powers. I don't think PvP will ever work well in this game.

Well... I have that permanent damage idea thing that everyone would hate...

Ah. The problem was actually thinking about it in those terms. Its not a question of too much or too little. The way I would do it is that I would presume first that outside of strong tohit buffs Defense was basically fine in PvP: players were mostly used to the performance already. What I would have done is taken a fraction of the defensive strength of each defensive set and converted it into Elu such that the net result was a defensive set that had exactly the same strength. So outside of tohit buffs, everything was exactly the same. But in situations with tohit buffs, those tohit buffs would be reduced in strength. Reduced, but not nullified.

The cosmic level mistake the devs made was introducing DR for tohit and defense *and then* introducing Elusivity on top when DR seemed to be not working as intended. That's illogical: Elusivity doesn't work in the presence of tohit and defensive DR. DR changes the relationship between the two in a way that makes Elusivity pouring gasoline on a campfire.

Elusivity is designed to address a problem in PvP that DR makes unrecognizable. Although technically speaking, Elu was designed to address a problem in PvE that also had the side effect of being useful in PvP. In fact, Elu is explicitly designed to deal with the twin problems of squishy use of defensive pools and the stacking issue of dispersion bubble in FF. Dealing with SR was actually a variation of the FF issue and PvP was a special case of the power pool stacking issue.

They are to me. I don't think of 'balance' as equality, but equity or in other words fairness. I don't care if one set or one AT is numerically superior to another, but I do care that it doesn't seem like a sucker bet to pick one set over another.

I probably would look to make part of the change at the core combat mechanic level rather than an individual power level. Adjust ToHit (not Accuracy like I wrote) down in relation to total damage, with powers capable of doing less than 100-300ish HP base retaining their current ToHit and powers that do more trailing off. I'm just spitballing numbers though. The main idea would be to adjust the damage curve so that characters with modest defense started dodging heavy hits sooner than lighter hits. If my basic assumptions are right (they often aren't ) this would blur the edge off of the soft cap. People currently at the cap wouldn't feel much of a change unless they got hit with -Defense or an enemy with a lot of +ToHit.

This would be a critter-only change, by the way.

I doubt it would happen and the numbers involved would need policing (by you, I hope) but outside of infinite code rant, it seems do-able from a mechanical sense without rewriting a bunch of powers.

What the devs do when they are doing the things most people including the devs call "balancing" is not the same set of things they do when they do the things they ordinarily describe as improving "fairness."

In either case, I don't think "fairness" requires a complete overhaul of the game and can be achieved to a high enough degree to enter the debatable range** through incremental evolution.


** "Ideal fairness" is a difficult goal to achieve, but there is a more reasonable target where the game fairness becomes close enough that the players cannot generally agree upon where the imbalances are. Analogous to the uncertainty principle, its impossible to achieve any better level of fairness than that which the players will also agree is fair.

So now because true balance is "impossible", ie folks don't want to work that hard, we're trying to compromise with "fair"?

I didn't realize that Arbiter Hawk and Synapse were actually Castle.

No compromises. Fix the game. It's not hard; it simply requires commitment.

You can step off that little soapbox any time.

True balance isn't impossible, but it also isn't necessarily fun.

Why bother laying a new foundation if it requires demolishing the house above it?

Prepare to be perpetually disappointed.

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