So Blasters never got fixed?

Peak performance needed to be considerably more difficult to achieve than it was in this game. It was far too easy to get to the top and once you were there what could you do with it ?

I agree about balancing sets so there were no FOTM or at least so the difference between a fotm and a non fotm was small.

Could you elaborate ?

What I see here are

1. People who didn't think blasters needed buffing and didn't want a buff.
2. People who didn't think blasters needed buffing but were happy to get one.
3. People who thought blasters needed buffing but didn't like the nature of the buffs.
4. People who thought blasters needed buffing and were happy with the buffs.

Given that it should really come as no surprise they can't hold onto their players.

The problem is when the difference between what the average player can achieve and what the best player can achieve is negligible.

The difficulty involved in building bots to play the game is a good measure of the amount skill it takes a human to play the game, the obvious exception is reflex speed.

I know it might sound like semantics but there really is a difference between any of these and what I've been saying. The Blaster archetype to me wasn't in need of a buff, many of the sets available to Blasters were just in need of re-balancing. Comparable to what I was saying before, I think it was the best idea to balance around the best possible sets; Sort of what we saw for Blaster secondaries being revamped with +regen via Mental. The nuke and snipe buffs were nice too but those weren't Blaster buffs, they were blast set buffs, shared between 3 AT's.

Waaaay too much to post and cite I'm afraid. I don't even have the time or resources to pull threads from the deep dark bowels of the Dominator Forum....BUT

History is pretty much repeating itself. There were continuous arguments about whether or not Dominators or Stalkers needed any buffs.

I'm not saying that a healthy discussion is something you should avoid but a lot of posters are going a little overboard.

Why are we doubting the fact that the Devs have solid information about Blaster Performance? Clearly they needed something if the Devs were willing to give them buffs in the first place.

At one point "Hard Mode" AT wise was anything that wasn't a Brute, Tanker, Scrapper or Controller. Now that's not the case.

Before the buffs I would see only a handful of Dominators or Stalkers and teaming up one that was near level 50 was even more uncommon or rare (unless someone was PL'ing their Fire/Psi.)

Now you can't even throw a Rikti Monkey without hitting a Stalker or Dominator which means that more players are playing and STICKING with that AT and I think that's a good thing.

Blasters and a few other ATs and sets were due for some love. I mean before the Blasters buff pretty much every AT can out Damage them...and lets not even talk about survival.

Correlation is not causation. Also, one of the MMOs I was thinking of when I said that was World of Warcraft, which had a fairly long growth cycle before it started shrinking.

The more you post, the less understandable I find the position you're arguing from, and that even counts your attempts to argue a point with me that had nothing to do with what I posted.

This is a slippery slope.

That would be true except that there is a very clear mechanism at work. If you don't have depths to the game you burn out quicker.

No that was a reality in our game. Very simple computer programs could accomplish tasks at levels comparable to the best the best players could. From what I saw people doing the most complex part of what they had to deal with was navigation. Personally I was able to get my keyboard to run my characters when I was AFK.

No, "correlation is not causation" is always a true statement. You're essentially picking two separate bits of information and claiming that one caused the other, but you really don't know. It's always easy to claim one's personal peeves causes games to burn out, but it's not a very logical or factual argument. If you want to establish true causation, you need to go beyond "these two things happened in the same place and possibly at the same time" because that is not an argument.

No, I've seen real players with significant performance gaps for whatever reason. The ability to design bots that can achieve some things in-game does not reflect a lack of real performance gaps due to skill.

Got trapped in the excluded middle there. You are right, there were people that thought some blaster sets needed improvement but overall the AT was fine.

I personally didn't feel the other ATs needed the blast set buffs. Did anyone really feel Widows were underpowered, corruptors or defenders ? The snipe changes just struck me as poorly thought out. The range boost effect as an attempt to fix looked like it would be horribly overpowering. I was looking at archery and you wound up with a ridiculous combo of rain of arrows, snipe, fistful of arrows, explosive arrow just covering everything.

You are actually claiming lack of depth to a game doesn't cause burnout/loss of interest. ?


Most likely they don't have an IO build. Skill in gaining IOs does not equal skill in playing the character.

Maybe we were talking past each other.

It's fine to target so the average person or average person can play the game but where we have been aiming for, is downright easy for the average player to do everything.

The closest we have to hard things are the MO badges/RHW badge. These are all team accomplishments and really don't reflect so much on individual skill in game play but on external factors.

Actually, I am claiming that what you have identified as a lack of depth may not be a lack of depth. Also, rather frequently, what appears to be "depth" in some games turns out to mostly be a maze of twisty passages, many of which lead to DOOM and a few of which lead to good character builds. So you either design a game where people have enough options to hang themselves or you try to make the options balanced enough so that players have a harder time hanging themselves. The latter? Better game.

I don't know about you, but I've always felt that reality > theory. In the real world, with IOs and without IOs, before IOs, I've seen players perform at different levels even when they're on what should be equivalent characters because some people are better at playing the game than others. Things like IOs and incarnate powers can shrink the gap, but the gap still exists. Everyone doesn't perform to exactly the same level, even if you give two players identical characters.

Do you have any examples ?

In ours it seemed the devs recently were trying to obfuscate what would constitute a good build.

I am an electronics engineer by training.

I see endless streams of accidental master runs these days ( I have the habit of always setting challenges when possible). Matter of fact ever since inherent fitness I have seen a marked rise in low end performance.

Examples such as WoW's early years, City of Heroes' original design, Champions Online after the day one patch, Star Wars: The Old Republic as it exists now - in this case, you can make choices for some characters at 10th level that will lock those characters out of endgame raiding, or at least make them extremely subpar for that purpose, or force a specific spec that may not fit your intended role (tanking or healing instead of DPS being a common one).

You're arguing a theoretical position with little more than circumstantial data.

A marked rise in low end performance is not a bad thing. This doesn't mean that everyone can reach high end performance with little effort.

Well that is certainly doom if you make a mistake. I doubt anyone would describe COH's original design as a maze of dark twisty passages.

5 damages and an acc
6 slot hasten for recharge
6 slot health, and stam

Edit: I realized you are speaking about something different than what I was in general and I have been addressing your points but not communicating mine.

You are talking about the selection process as opposed to execution. An example difference would be games that have charging mechanics where you have an optimal charging points for attacks. So you have not only selection but also execution coming into play.


I am observing a trend and I have a theory yes. I am open to contradictory data.

Is tic tac toe a thrilling game for you ? It does mean you have cut the difference between low end and high end by definition.

I don't think anyone can honestly claim that IOs, Incarnate powers, and various other buffs and general power creep haven't raised high-end performance dramatically as well. Whether the gap between low and high has gotten wider or narrower... well, I'd say wider, but that's hard to actually measure. Still, when some characters/players struggle at very low difficulties and others can thrive at maximum difficulty (in a game where the difference between minimum and maximum difficulty is very wide), it's pretty clear that the gap has at least not narrowed excessively.

Thank you.

The enemies haven't gotten any harder, there is no such thing as more survivable than unkillable or more dead than dead for the enemies.

Edit and I have allowed you to do it again.: You are speaking of low end build vs high end build. I am talking about the skill level needed to make a given build perform.

I get the feeling people here think they have some magical ability to extract performance from their characters by doing exactly the same things everyone else does.

For corruptors and defenders, yes, I did. VEATs are the most overpowered thing in the game and I opposed the nuke changes on them for that reason, but defenders and corruptor damage is inferior to controllers at many level ranges (especially max level) when you compare the same buff/debuff set and a similar 'tier' of blast set to control set.

I would have preferred controllers getting nerfed, but that's an unrealistic expectation.

Now I am seriously questioning whether you've actually played the game or if you're just trying to be contrary. Or if, despite game experience, you really believe this.

I've personally had moments where I've done things that people would probably think are highly unlikely if not mathematically impossible, such as soloing an 8-person Malta spawn on my DM/DA scrapper after the rest of the team wiped, and this was before stacking armor and end drain resists were added, so /DA was fairly weak. Again, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, my Peacebringer rarely died to void hunters or quantum gunners, and this was in 2005, when they were new and both mobs were literal kryptonite to them. And this was when people were saying on the Kheldian forum that it was impossible to get through a mission without being killed, but players came up with strategies to survive and kill the kryptonite mobs first.

There was also that time I managed to rez myself with howling twilight.

I am not claiming to be uniquely awesome. If anything, I consider my performance with some ATs to be about average. I remember one night I could not defeat two Malta sappers on my DM/DA (again, pre-stacking, etc) no matter how hard I tried. The next day, in the same mission, with two Malta Sappers, I was able to stun and kill them both before they sapped me. Strategy was the same, my reflexes and perception were impaired the night before due to fatigue, due to playing too long, and due to sensory issues because of playing too long. I made a point of Malta hunting, something which was not actually all that difficult even with two sapper spawns and ridiculously long mezzing. I knew other people who simply refused to solo against Malta with characters who were better suited for it than mine was. Or at least people who would just die over and over again because they didn't know how to deal with the problems that Malta presented. Or, yes, because their characters lacked tools that would make the whole thing fairly easy.

But you're making decisions every moment when playing that impact your success or failure. These decisions can be based on any number of factors, and can dramatically impact how well you perform. You can tell the difference between a good and a mediocre Fire/Kin controller pretty easily, for example. Yes, it is a powerful build, but it requires keeping track of a lot of buttons, and if you lose track of some of them it can have a rather detrimental impact on your performance.

And that's because everyone does not do the same thing when they play. They do a lot of similar things, but some people have faster reaction time, perceive potential problems more quickly and thus before they become actual problems, are able to manage situations so they remain under control. Others do not. Everyone isn't performing on the same level if all else is equal.

I'll freely admit in advance to it being something of a nit-pick, but they have gotten slightly harder, usually in indirect ways involving their AI, spawn rules or via fixing missing/broken powers.

As an example, Rikti Mentalists and Mezmerists did not always have Fear protection. They silently gained it at some point, I think around I11. I very much noticed this particular example because it significantly affected my ability to solo them on my Dark/Dark Defender - being unable to terrorize the mezzers caused a dramatic increase in how often they mezzed me.

An example of AI-based changes are the ones that "fixed" the ranged combat AI of Malta robots, who went from something I could casually save for last in Malta spawns to something I almost always want to defeat ASAP. They not only started dealing vastly more damage at range, they gained significant mezzing capabilities as well. (Something I hardly felt Malta needed, but that's an aside.)

Trolls with Integration used to never get any mez protection from it, and now they do.

I'm positive there are more examples like this, where critters got at least indirect powers upgrades, though I think I've forgotten some of them over the years. Many of them were probably like the Malta case, where broken AI or powers definitions meant something the critter was always supposed to do was missing for years.

Another indirect difficulty increase came from the fix to spawn rank randomization, which corrected the fact that LTs used to not spawn for small teams (including solo). It didn't get a huge amount of attention, but I thought was a really big deal when it was fixed. I forget when it was exactly, but I know it was after CoV (I6) and before Inventions (I9).

Finally, critter AI has evolved some over the years. Critters used to pile around corners as efficiently as their bounding boxes allowed (once they actually got bounding boxes), but this changed eventually so that some would swing wide around the corners and pelt you from afar with ranged attacks. Spawns used to sit statically in nice clumps, but were changed so that at least some of them would wander around as if on patrol. Even the static ones started spawning such that they were often less well-clumped for AoE beatdown.

I'm certainly not going to claim that critter powers kept pace with characters equipped with high-end IO builds or especially Incarnates. But they did grow somewhat, and that's not counting some of the factions which seemed designed explicitly to be harder than usual, such as Arachnos and Longbow.

Thank you for answering the implied question.

That is exactly what you just did.


It takes about 50 lines of code to play a character in this game. Admittedly that is stacked on top of libraries. Just how much decision making do you think that encapsulates ?

Really ?

Well you can also toss in the Circle of Thorns getting KB ability for their crossbows. But the problem is those are all old hat. I think just about everything you mention is pre I14.

After i14 that You have what superstunners being added to the freaks, and Black Scorpion getting taunt ? If there is more it hasn't been particularly noticeable. That is of course the point.

That really sums it up.