Arcanaville

My specific worry is that it alone requires the use of a targeted power to gain sustain.


I don't think the range increase in the primaries specifically benefits /energy. You could even argue that it partially reduces the benefit of boost range, as /energy could always get decent range on that attack. The additional benefits it gets for being able to boost range beyond that have to be considered diluted relative to the current status quo.

The ability to boost an additional attack for the case of ranged (currently) crashing nukes is not one I would ordinarily consider an additional benefit for /energy beyond what it gets now. That would imply that if the devs were to add a tenth attack, /energy should be considered to gain more because it has one more attack to range boost. You could also argue that /energy's range boost benefit only improves some of the crashing nukes and not all of them. Situationally speaking, PBAoE nukes would benefit more from more PBAoE-centric secondaries in either offense or defense, such as /Fire or /Ice. Dark's Soul Drain would be a potentially strong beneficiary of having more PBAoE offense.


There is a larger question when it comes to which secondary benefits more, and that's which ones are currently the most problematic. /Energy works fine now, and has always worked fine. Its always been, at least in my opinion, the most well rounded secondary. But that means when looking at which secondary benefits more, other secondaries have far more room for improvement. For example /Fire has vastly more damage potential than /Energy, without question. Its also, without question, far more problematic due to its PBAoE nature. Suppose sustain is strong enough in I24 to make /Fire blapping an accessible blaster strategy. In that case, I would say it would be difficult to say that /Fire didn't benefit at least as much as /Energy, in that an enormous amount of locked potential was released by I24. It isn't so much that its strength was directly improved, its that its strength became usable.

That's not so much a question of comparing /Fire's sustain to /Energy's sustain, and more a question of asking if /Fire's sustain is high enough to put more of its tools in play that currently are far less often leveraged. Nobody takes bonesmasher or boost range and then sits on it. But /Fire is often too dangerous to use more than sparingly for many blasters. If that changes, its *incremental* I24 benefit should be judged to be huge.

"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.

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.

On our Earth, yes. But on Primal Earth, where mutant creatures roam our public parks and supposedly secret mercenary groups shoot missiles from giant robots in the streets and residential areas still have alien invaders attacking passers-by while sharp-shooters snipe jetpack-wearing low-level fliers and evil sorcerers unleash demons within walking distance of interdimensional portals that tend to open to alternate dimensions full of assassins, killer robots, cosmic invaders, and the undead, I don't think the US military gets out of bed for anything less than an extinction-level event anymore.

An incursion of Primal United States by Arachnos is like an incursion of Bartertown by the Girl Scouts.

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.

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.

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.

1. Its difficult to compare the sustain powers without complete numbers. But it is true that we know /Ice gets two things which are a bit difficult to directly compare to /Energy. Its getting a much wider Chilling Embrace, and its getting a completely different effect: Absorb. Its entirely possible that Frigid Embrace and Energize will end up reasonably close in net overall damage mitigation benefit.

2. Power Boost has the additional offensive benefit of adding a method for enabling fast snipe, but that's not a binary benefit. There's a cast time cost to use power boost (unless you're using it already as fast as possible, but that shouldn't be assumed) that partially offsets its fast snipe benefit. Furthermore, the benefit should be compared in context: other secondaries will get *some* fast snipe benefit, and the only incremental benefit power boost offers for fast snipe is increasing /energy's fast snipe availability from what other sets have to what energy has. A secondary other than /devices will still have some non-zero fast snipe availability. If we assume that its something like 2/3rds of the time for non-energy (and non-devices) and 100% of the time for /energy with power boost, that's something like a 33% additional benefit of 20% more damage, or about 6.6% more overall damage (very roughly of course). Using power boost every 35 seconds or so to get there is about a 3.8% net rooted penalty to offense. So the net overall benefit is about 0.964 * 1.066 = 2.8%.

So very roughly, the fast snipe offensive benefit of powerboost is, at least in this estimate, about a 3% increase in net offense. Its unlikely to get much higher because in recharge domains where it can get you perma sets with BU and Aim should not fall too much lower than 2/3rds. But in any environment where you can get more availability than that the fast snipe advantage of power boost should drop.

Factoring in other variables, like using power boost during interstitial combat time, I would say power boosts net offensive benefit is probably between in the general neighborhood of 5% net increase in single target offense, and somewhat less than that in a mixed single/aoe offensive situation.

Noteworthy, but not dramatic, and small enough that other factors could swamp that benefit across the playerbase in general. For example, its far easier to get perma fast snipe with /devices, and for many players that offensive benefit will deliver a much larger practical benefit. For min/maxers, until I know more about the other powers I believe /energy and /ice have the advantage. But I don't think we know enough to choose a winner between those two.

The secondary that worries me the most is /Dark.

Its ironic that the best way I can see to adjust for the proliferation of defense bonuses in a way that makes defense sets more balanced in performance across higher end builds is to slowly escalate critter defense debuffing.

Praetorian tohit, by comparison, is the worst possible way to do that in the general case.

Actually, the point of Godwin's Law is that once you start drawing sides in an internet argument, the natural tendency to escalate the evil of one side over the other eventually leads to Hitler and Nazis as the top of the food chain.

There used to be a corollary to Godwin that stated that when either Hitler or Nazis is mentioned correctly in the context of discussions surrounding European history or fascism in general, that the first person to accuse that reference of being an instance of Godwin was itself an instance of Godwin.

I get that way sometimes. Like when I said the devs would normalize defense, or when I said there was an easy path to animation customization, or when I gibbered about adding new defense mechanics to the game. You should ignore me when I get into one of those fugues.

The fact that you're conceding any advantage at all implies that blapping will still have a place. We don't generally stop doing things that are better because they become less better.


But that's not analogous, because the ranged option didn't become better at immediate nullification of impossible to quick-kill targets (i.e. mezzing bosses). Nothing in the ranged buffs does that. In fact you could argue that the D2.0 change of shooting while mezzed and increasing the ranged modifier to 1.125 did more to shift the balance from melee to ranged, and it didn't really do all that much in that regard.

In Batman Begins its suggested that Wayne Enterprises was being steered into military weapons development by Mr. Earle because it's other businesses were becoming less profitable. Bruce seemed opposed to that and I assume when he regained control of Wayne Enterprises he put a stop to it. That may have put a significant dent in WE's future. And a lot of money probably disappeared down "applied sciences."

And then there was the financial crisis. Wayne Enterprises was still solvent even after all that, even able to fund an expensive fusion project and then sit on it, but it may have simply no longer been able to fund as much charities as it used to.

The validity of that stance depends on the existence, and likelihood of implementation, of Y.

I think countermez was a better idea than sustain. But better enough to stand on the tracks? Not really. And sustain doesn't just buff blasters: it's numbers buff blasters but it's concept remakes blasters at the design level into something significantly different. Arguing for a completely different buff requires two separate hurdles to be overcome simultaneously. You have to first convince the devs your conceptual framework for blasters is superior, and then within that framework your buff suggestion fits that framework and generates overall better results.

And you have to prove to the devs your idea works better than the results they are seeing which you can't see. And you have probably a couple of weeks, maybe, in which to do that, before it hits beta and effectively moots the objection. Ready, set, go.

Those modifiers were sensible, they encapsulated the fact that melee archetypes were not even supposed to get ranged attacks, and when an exception occurred they were supposed to do a lot less damage.

Setting it that way, and then ignoring it, was one of the original sins that melee perpetrated on ranged archetypes, and one they might still one day regret.

The difference is simply too dramatic to be justifiable. 13 self-sufficient archetypes and one dramatically dependent one just to stay alive at all doesnt make any game design sense.


Since the melee attacks haven't been altered in any significant way, it's not possible they have less benefit now. And the primary blapper benefit was not damage, but rather countermez: they were really good at taking out tough targets like mezzing bosses. If anything, the circumstances under which blappers would excel have only increased.

The problem is that you want blapping to work by making ranged offense not work.


There was never a moment during the glory days of blappers that they were not, even by self-identification, called marginal. I think it's fair to call them that because even when my main was configured for blapping (from about issue 1 to issue 19), I was calling blapping that on the forums with virtually no challenge, a time scale that includes essentially the entire range of time when blapping was popular.


The same reasons to do it before will still exist in I24. And the option will work better in I24. I will still have bonesmasher and total focus in I24, and I will still likely use them about as much as I do now, and for similar reasons (to deal with the critter that manages to get into melee, and to take on a tough mezzer).

They did not use shards for the other incarnate slots for the simple reason that shards were a kludge in the first place designed to create a relatively easy path to generating alpha slot powers prior to the introduction of actual incarnate content which was delayed and decoupled from the introduction of the alpha slot. The method, frequency, and value of shards for Alpha relative to the same for threads for the other slots were completely different, which made them not directly interchangeable.

The fact that we can convert shards to threads but not threads to shards is a function of that difference: alpha components cost far less to create in shards than threads.

Players have been asking for the devs to merge the two, but I don't think most of them fully understand what they are asking for, because unless the devs decide to go Monte Haul on the incarnate system, there's no way to merge the two currencies that doesn't end up generally forcing players to do more work for the same result.

But then again, how else will people learn.

Does it give blasters a purpose beyond what they can do now? That depends. What do you think blasters were designed to do before? You might say they already had that capability, but the game engine disagrees: they dropped dead often enough to put enough of a hamper on that purpose that it actually made a significant dent in their ability to level. More than the dent defenders get for having about half the damage modifier.

Sustainable ranged offense means when we give blasters higher DPA attacks, like fast snipes, they *must* have extra recovery to allow that higher offense to be sustained. What would be your justification for getting more recovery if you tested I24 blasters and discovered the fast snipe burned up all your endurance? That its illogical to give blasters a high DPA attack and not give them the endurance to power it? That argument would fail: endurance limits are *supposed* to limit how often you can use your best attacks. That's working as intended.

The actual justification in I24 will be that the ranged changes must come with enough recovery to nominally power them through combat. Except that reason is a complete a**-pull of mine *unless* its actually part of the blaster concept. Which I believe it now is.

Sustainability justifies Blasters getting as much regen as regen scrappers, and more absorb than most tankers have health - *if* its not allocated in a way that allows for tanking alphas. It justifies giving Blasters more net recovery than stamina and quick recovery combined. We're getting those things because we're now intended to. Nine months ago we couldn't get those things, because they would be considered design breaking buffs.

The definition isn't precise, but blasters don't need a precise definition. Because we've had eight years of having a definition that precisely says what we are not allowed to be. We don't need one now. We need an expansive one that tells us what we are allowed to be, and what the game is required to give us. Developers can give us *more*, but they cannot give us *less*. That's the sort of definition blasters need now - because its the same kind of definition all other archetypes have. The list of things archetypes are not allowed to be is generally short: they have freedom beyond that list. Blasters used to very precisely be hemmed in by being not allowed to have alpha strike mitigation, sustainable mitigation, mez protection, ally buffing, strong control, or too much damage.

That's a much more precise definition of blasters, which has the unfortunate property of also leaving nothing left for blasters to be.

Our purpose used to be to die. That's not a joke. We were meant to be protected by the other archetypes, and death was just what happened when they occasionally failed. And we couldn't need protecting if we were self sufficient, so we were not, by intentional design.

Every other purpose you think Blasters had is a thought unsupported by the game engine and the game data. It simply wasn't.


They were always marginalized and always will be marginalized because blasters lack intrinsic mez protection. But melee attacks aren't getting more marginalized in I24 than they are now, ranged attacks are just getting as effective as they were always supposed to be. Blapping was a way to make the less effective work more effectively. It'll be a partial casualty of the fact that Blasters will actually become the effective ranged attackers they were always supposed to be.

But the melee option will still be there, and due to the radically higher survivability it will be a better option in I24 than it is now. If you wanted to make and play a blapper, I'm guessing +400% regen is something that would be of some use to you.

You could argue I24 opens the door to more blapper options. Realistically, any secondary could be a blapper but the two best blappers by lightyears were electric and energy, both with very strong melee attacks with mez. But while Ice Manipulation doesn't have those same powerful melee attacks, it might become the strongest melee ranged blaster by stacking ice patch, the improved frigid's debuffs, and frigid's massive absorb shield. Stack tough, weave, and temporary invuln on the absorb shield and you could have an extremely hard to kill blapper.

In fact, now that /Fire is actually getting real survivability, someone might put all that damage to some actual use. Electric/Fire has enormous blapper potential that is marred by the fact its also suicidal. But above some critical level of survivability Elec/Fire should become a PBAoE powerhouse. The only question is whether 2-3x better than we normally can get now is enough.

I'll pass your feedback along to my minions.

Fortunately, Arbiter Hawk is not adding out of combat-specific regeneration to Blasters.

Blasters need to be better. Enhanced endurance recovery makes them better. Suggesting it doesn't "fix" the archetype is not a meaningful criticism because a) no one thing will, but all solutions are composed of individual things, and b) "fixing" the archetype is an ill-defined problem because no singular specification exists as to state the problem. I don't even think there is a singular problem.

The ranged set improvements, the sustain changes, they are designed to work together to improve blasters. If you have a specific problem in mind that you believe blasters singularly suffer from, none of these changes might explicitly address that problem. But they do specifically address the fundamental problem blasters had, which is that they had no grounded design goal. Arbiter Hawk has created one with the sustain and ranged set changes: sustained ranged combat with burst damage vulnerability. Are the changes perfect to implement it? Probably not. But all other suggestions for blasters were chipping around the edges of the basic problem that none of those suggestions could be evaluated under the one and only important criteria for judging the balance-appropriateness of them: do they deliver the specific performance the archetype is intended to have.

Because the archetype *had* no intended performance target. Until Arbiter Hawk's announced changes, every problem blasters had could be legitimately argued to be intentional. Now we have at least a vague idea of what blasters are supposed to be. More or less very early on (certainly by 20 when sustain kicks in) they are supposed to be sustained ranged attackers. Some people figured out how to spend time and influence building towards that goal, but people figure out how to tank with controllers also. The point is that the archetype is supposed to give you reasonable tools to do that *before* you then try to enhance its performance *above* that.

Do the changes announced by Arbiter Hawk "fix" blasters? Wrong question. They *change* blasters into something else, and the only reason this doesn't violate the cottage rule is because in a real sense they were nothing else before. Arbiter Hawk isn't replacing what they were supposed to be good at with something else: there wasn't anything penciled into that blank to begin with. Now there is.

I'd say that doesn't so much solve a problem of the blaster archetype, it solves the problem of the blaster archetype.

I've heard many people say that they ordinarily don't play MMOs but something about this one was different. And I'm sure there are people who say that about other MMOs as well.

And to be honest, I wasn't a hardcore MMO player until this game came around, and even though I've played most of the major western MMOs to come out since this one (including WoW) I find I still spend more time in this one than all others combined. I don't know what's shocking about that. I'm not an MMO player or an FPS player or an RPG player. I don't play anything just because I'm a fan of the genre. Either the game holds longer term appeal for me or it does not, and the fact that most don't is not, I think, a quality unique to me.

A lot of people play WoW that play no other MMO. A lot of people play Eve Online that play no other MMO. I don't think its at all weird that a lot of people play City of Heroes that have no interest in playing any other MMO, at least not of any MMO that is currently out there.

Which is basically saying you wish the devs wrote an MMO to your specifications. I think that's what most people who claim to want a CoH2 actually want: a game written to their specifications. The probability is virtually zero that a CoH2 would actually do most of the things people expect it to do.

Transfer to Triumph and play after midnight eastern.