Arcanaville
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:IOP balancing appears to be less disentangled from memory overcommitment for virtual desktop resource sizing than has been the general assertion.Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I have no intention of a debate surrounding the claim you disputed so I brought up another. -
Quote:Well, that's why I said they could figure out how to do it, not that they could actually do it.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
You know better than me, but is that feasible with the troubles the game had giving all characters only 3 extra slots?
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Quote:1. Peacebringers need to be fixed by having all their powers replaced with their Warshade counterparts.
So what is left to fix?
2. Tankers need to be fixed by removing them from Johnny_Butane's character creator.
3. PvP needs to be fixed by allocating a server to PvP that is never patched again, ever.
4. The solo incarnate path needs to be fixed by adding a hallucinogenic cut scene at the end of every story arc that causes the player to be put into a fugue state whereupon they forget having played it.
5. The gender imbalances in the costume system need to be fixed by declaring that all Primal Earth humans are actually asexual and reproduce by fission.
6. The Architect needs to be fixed by allowing AE missions to grant any rewards desired, as long as they come from the mission author.
7. The Shadow Shard needs to be fixed by thermonuclear weapons.
8. The LFG queue needs to be fixed by not allowing people to quit out of it. If the player doesn't accept the trial the game server zones the player into the trial anyway and their character becomes a mastermind pet of the league leader. During the trial the player cannot log in any other characters until it completes.
9. Death From Below needs to be fixed by making it the tutorial.
10. And then there's the forums. -
Quote:Clearly, the Well decided before doing the Coming Storm task force that it needed a tanker.Originally Posted by _Synchrotron_
While I might concur that a Defender would be optimal (especially given the upcoming changes to snipes in i24), I think that the choice of a Corruptor wouldn't be altogether suicidal....
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Quote:I don't like moving goalposts.Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
What can be evidenced is the redundancy of multiple tankers, except for herding extreme mobs.
If you refer to the discussion of caps by the majority statement, even cap performance is relevant and can be addressed relatively independently of non cap performance. -
Quote:This is actually a thing?Originally Posted by Nihilii
A video. No plain text announcement.
"Fix everything issue"... Right. Fix your stupid marketing, Paragon Studios. Not everyone is fluent in english, not everyone wants to hear you blabble for minutes when only seconds would be needed to convey the actual information. -
Quote:When the producers decide to allocate an issue to do all things not horrible, I would not oppose buffing the tanker damage cap as being one of them.Originally Posted by RevolverMike
Hopefully no one berates me over this but is it really so horrible if tanks got a higher damage cap?
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Quote:This presumes the assertion that the defensive strength of tankers is redundant is self-evident. However, the exact opposite is true: it is trivially demonstrable that they are not, for the vast overwhelming majority of players of the game.Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I think the fact he has been widely ridiculed while, really, being right the entire duration is an indictment of the community.
Johnny has been correct. It simply makes no sense that the largely redundant defensive abilities of a tank are paired with a very significant offensive penalty. -
Quote:The one thing you can say about Lucifer in the Carey series is that he does the one thing that is presumptively impossible in a universe with an omnipotent and omniscient God: he gains his freedom.Originally Posted by Biowraith
I'm inclined to include intellect and craftiness when considering how powerful a character is though, even if that does push us all closer to that debate Blood Red Arachnid is leaving aside for now.
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Quote:That's irrelevant. I didn't say prove Poison Ivy uses a plant based power. I said to prove she was a City of Heroes controller.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
Name another AT that gets Plant Control and Poison.
What's the buff cap in comic books?Quote:As I've explained numerous times, 0.8 is fine with me. I can even find thematic justification for it. It's the 400% that I take issue with. -
Quote:Or they could figure out how to grant enhancement slots that only work in forms powers so that slotting one form doesn't create a huge opportunity cost by depleting slots for other forms, and conversely they don't just give human-only kheldians a blizzard of slots.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
I agree, but that seems to suggest that the forms should simply be buffs and all powers should be usable in the forms. So instead of getting four blasts only usable in Nova, the human form blasts would have different effects based on if you're in Nova or Dwarf form. But I can see there being an uproar if that was suggested by the devs.
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Quote:I'm 53 now. An Ultimate inspiration will take me to 54. Omega will probably take me to 54, or 55 with an Ultimate. I doubt we'll get more shifts that work the way the incarnate shifts work. Its possible we'll *see* more shifts, but more likely in things like the Lights of the Well in the Magisterium trial than shifts we can take with us permanently (even permanently in the sense of incarnate shifts that only work in trials and DA).Originally Posted by Ultimus
So you are saying we won't go past 53?
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Quote:That's noted in the conclusion above. The analysis focuses on what we're giving up for losing the crash and being able to use it more than twice as often. And the answer is lower than anyone has been guestimating so far. Single digit percents. And there are actual very common situations where I24 Nova is going to actually be better than I23 Nova per use.Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
There's also the fact that, in a 360 second period, you'll have the ability to fire off your Nuke at least twice as often as a similarly slotted/enhanced i23 Nuke.
Sitting at Recharge cap, you're capable of firing off nearly ten i24 nukes in the same time it takes to fire off four similar i23 nukes.
With no crash.
DoT Nirvana! -
Quote:Except normal recovery boosted by slotted stamina is 2.48 eps, not 5.0 eps.Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
If your highest DPS attack chain costs 4.0 end/second, your toggles cost 1.2/second, and you can generate an effective 5.0/second, you have 550 seconds in which to win a fight with an endurance of 110 and no blues. Assuming your slotting is damage and recharge saturated, reducing your toggles' costs by .2, .4, or 1.2 isn't really going to meaningfully impact your offensive ability.
The important ratio is attack burn rate relative to toggle burn rate. Base burn rate of a 1.0 DS/sec attack chain is 5.2 eps. The base burn rate of, say, a three toggle defensive set like SR is about 0.78 eps. That means toggles are costing about 15% of what attacks are costing and 13% of the total base endurance expense. That's the percentage offensive cost of those defensive toggles assuming you turn them off in between spawns and you're not attacking. In other words, that's the best case scenario. -
Quote:Depends on what you mean by buffs. I don't think their overall performance is unreasonably low. I mostly think there are mechanical issues that could be solved with things that could improve their performance, and I don't think their performance is unreasonably high to eliminate those things from consideration. In particular, I think the presumptive diversity Kheldians have with form shifting is significantly hampered by the way slotting works. The cost for diversity is too high relative to, say, how costs are allocated to things with mode shifting, such as Bio armor. If Bio Armor is the state of the art in dev thinking when it comes to the opportunity cost of mode shifting, then I think a quantitative case can be made the costs intrinsic to Kheldians is too high on principle.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Assuming we're trying to maintain the basic theme of Kheldians, are any further buffs justified? I don't mean to presuppose an answer from that. It really seems like at this point that Kheldians are what they are. They can be made to be decent off-tank/damage/mild support. There is far too much disagreement about what else to do (except maybe toggle suppression) it seems to me.
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Quote:Compared to trying to prove that Poison Ivy is a CoH controller its infinitesimal.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
You think (as an example) 486.84 versus 784.5 (or 737) is a "very small" numerical difference?
No wonder you flip when I've asked for 'very small' changes.
But I think I'm using much less dramatic license calling that difference small, than your characterization that 0.8 is trivial while 1.125 is awesome. -
Quote:What they should do is create two versions of the lore guide. The internal one that has all the information that has been developed internally for internal backstory, and an external one that contains all of the lore established by the game and confirmed true by explicit usage. The former could be mined for story ideas and it could also be revised. The latter would be canonical, and no writer would be allowed to violate it under penalty of death.Originally Posted by Dark_Respite
I have long since been lobbying for the devs to make this info available to the playerbase (supposedly it's a word document, but now they have an internal wiki - or at least that's what Joe Morrissey told me at one of the HeroCons).
If it's no longer being used because it's outdated/irrelevant/whatever, let us see it as an example of how a game's canon lore was initially conceived. How much did THEY flesh out certain groups? Why were certain things changed (names, origins, whatever)? Why were certain things brainstormed but NOT developed?
However, I *SUSPECT* that the reason why they don't do it is because a) IF they ever go back and mine it for ideas, there's a major potential for spoilers, b) if they don't do it exactly as they detailed it (especially if the idea was a good one), the players will howl about it/bait and switch/we were lied to/not what was promised/insert other player rant here, or c) the players will immediately point out why they SHOULDN'T have used said idea because of how it breaks SOMETHING (canon lore/their own personal history/whatever).
Still wish they'd release it, though.
I've said it before, but its worth repeating now. The powers designers have the cottage rule. Thou shalt not alter fundamental elements of powers in use by the players without a critical balance reason for doing so. I'm certain the programmers have an analogous rule: don't touch the fracking physics code it'll break everything, stupid. They can't just say "hey, I know we have all this code but my code is better and if it breaks the older code, mine's more important.
Everyone has to honor the principle that what they do today must respect and integrate with what's been created in the past. Except apparently the writers whose directive is "try not to contradict prior canon, UNLESS YOU HAVE A REALLY COOL IDEA! Then its ok.
The lore of the game should be forced to be just as self-consistent as the code of the game. Lore can crash just like servers can crash, and its no less detrimental. Unless you don't care about story, in which case it would be more cost effective to not spend money writing any.
There's a special test London cab drivers have to take to become licensed to drive a taxi. One element of the test involves being able to recite, from memory, the precise route from one location to another location without the use of maps which obeys the traffic requirements, including honoring one way roads. This must be done from memory and its pass-fail. I have often thought that writers whose job involves writing stories within an established canon should be required to take such a test. -
Quote:You haven't explained why this is a remotely reasonable assumption, while I've stated specifically why its unreasonable. That's pretty easy to do. Watch:Originally Posted by Dr_Darkspeed
Because he doesn't know the coming storm is coming, and the well doesn't either so it doesn't choose a champion, then he doesn't know he needs to do anything right now.
Actually, he does know.
QED -
Quote:I can tell you exactly why. Positron said it himself: he feels its better to give the writers the freedom to alter, revoke, or disregard prior lore or the story bible if it will generate better stories as he defines better stories. Releasing the story bible would only bind them tighter to something they want the freedom to ignore as needed.Originally Posted by Olantern
I'm not sure it actually does, but I can think of two logical reasons it might do so.
There's no need to search for reasons beyond that one. -
Quote:Poison Ivy is a Controller? You're quibbling over very small numerical differences between Tankers and Scrappers relative to comic book characters, but you think you can make the case that Poison Ivy is a City of Heroes controller?Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
Poison Ivy, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm.
Be my guest. -
In I24 Nova is going to become a crashless, scale 4.0 damage attack that recharges in 145 seconds (2 minutes 25 seconds compared to the current 360s or 6 minute recharge). It gets much faster, it loses the crash (actual end costs for activation go up slightly) but it deals less damage than now. But the question is how much less damage. I'm going to look at the Blaster version for this post, since this analysis is going to hinge on archetype-specific numbers for the most part. I'll deal a little with other archetypes at the end.
First of all, how much damage does Nova deal now? Answer: it deals a guaranteed scale 3.0, with a 75% chance for an additional scale 1.5, and a 50% chance for an additional 1.5 on top of that. On average, it deals scale 4.875 damage. So you could say I24 Nova is going to deal about 18% less damage than I23 Nova does now.
But actually, that's not the whole story. In actuality, I24 Nova is going to do a lot better than that. And the reason has to do with the fact that you cannot just average doing scale 3 damage sometimes and doing scale 6 damage other times. At these damage levels, Nova is capable of outright killing targets sometimes. And once its dead, its not really the case that dealing more damage is meaningful. So lets look at how much damage Nova really does to different critter ranks.
At level 50 (the ratios are a bit different at different levels so I'm selecting level 50 for now: the principles will be similar at different levels to a large degree) Nova deals 187.68 damage base, with a 50% chance of dealing 281.52 damage and a 37.5% chance of dealing 375.36. A minion has 430.8 health, so in all cases that damage will count against a minion. The average damage will be about 304.98. I24 Nova will deal 250.24 all the time (when it hits), so I24 Nova will deal 82% of the damage of I23 Nova, which is 18% less. That's what the average predicts above.
But what about slotted Nova? Slotted for +95% damage, now Nova is dealing 365.98/548.96/731.95 damage. But minions only have 430.8 health. So in reality, slotted Nova can do no better than 365.98/430.8/430.8. The actual average isn't 594.71 like you'd expect, but really 422.7. I24 Nova is always going to do 487.97, but really it can do no better than 430.8 also.
Notice something amazing. I24 Nova averages 430.8 against minions - basically a guaranteed kill. I23 Nova averages 422.7. That's because it almost always kills minions, but sometimes (12.5% of the time) it only deals 365.98 to them. I24 Nova is dealing *more* damage than I23 against minions in this case.
Against Lts and Bosses its still dealing 82% of I23 Nova, because neither I23 Nova nor I24 Nova are capable of defeating Lts or Bosses at all without help. So lets look at the case of slotted Nova + Build Up.
Now we have I23 Nova dealing 553.66/830.48/1107.31 and I24 Nova dealing 738.21. At this point both Novas are killing minions guaranteed: I23 and I24 Nova are indistinguishable when it comes to minions. But now I23 Nova is capable of defeating Lts at its highest possible damage. And that means its actual damage against Lts is 553.66/830.48/857.5 and its average damage is really 806.01. That means I24 Nova will be dealing 91.6% of the damage I23 Nova deals against Lts when buffed by Build Up. Nova is only 8.4% lower. It will still be 18% lower against Bosses.
There's a couple ways to look at this. We can ask what the average damage of both powers will be when used against spawns where the spawning ratio is consistent with how the game spawns critters. My experience suggests that for sufficiently large spawns, the game spawns critters in approximately the ratio of two bosses to five Lts to ten minions. That's seventeen targets. Nova has a 16 target limit. I'm going to assume Nova hits an average of two bosses to five Lts to nine minions. I could actually just use the previous ratio because the target cap is not relevant to averages, but I'd rather not spend five paragraphs proving it: 2:5:9 is close enough for these purposes.
Against a 2:5:9 spawn, slotted and with Build Up I23 Nova will, factoring in kills, deal about 9706.64 damage. I24 Nova will deal 9044.656. That's 93.2%. In other words, I24 Nova will only deal 6.8% less damage than I23 Nova does now.
And if you use BU+Aim? The figure drops to 2.7% with these ratios. And with BU and Aim I24 Nova will be *better* than I23 Nova against Lts, dealing 2.8% more damage to them.
And in terms of blasters that solo with bosses turned off, I24 Nova will be a bit less than 1% better than I23 Nova when BU and Aim are used with it (assuming a ratio of 1 Lt to 2 minions on average). Its a more reliable spawn-wiper outside of bosses.
Conclusion: I24 Nova will recharge more than twice as fast and won't crash. It will deal less damage, usually. How much less damage. Worst case: 18% less. In actuality? Between 2.7% less and 8.5% less. And for solo blasters with bosses turned off, I24 Nova will actually deal *more* damage when you buff it with BU and Aim consistently. The difference is surprisingly low, because I24 Nova will be a much more efficient attack.
Of course, this analysis doesn't work for other archetypes. For example, Defenders don't get Build Up and they have lower damage modifiers. They also sometimes have other damage buffs or critter debuffs that complicate matters more than most Blasters do on average. So this effect will be less pronounced for them because overkill will tend to happen less often. But a simple check of slotted Nova with Aim suggests that I24 Nova will deal about 13.7% less damage for Defenders on average rather than the 18% the base numbers suggest. Without Bosses its closer to 12.7%. -
Quote:If you're attempting to get technical, then prove "this statement is ¬true" has meaning. If its a meaningless statement, it says nothing about the story its contained within. Its therefore a contradiction without implication. It can be dismissed because its of no consequence. The story itself continues to have no contradiction.Originally Posted by Mazey
I was using "false" to mean "¬true".
You're about to dive into a few decades of logical set theory. I hope you packed a lunch. -
Quote:No, its true. Since most powerset combinations are endurance-limited, decreasing endurance burn rates increases damage potential. But the difference is not unmanageable.Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
I certainly hope she would, as except for a very few cases it's definitely not true, and their pancakes aren't really good enough to make the low cost that appealing anyway.
Also, to clarify a point: the point wasn't to say "if I were designing the game I would make all defensive toggles cost zero." The point was to illustrate that the current costs are arbitrary, and any value from their current value all the way down to zero still work. The question, then, is what should they cost given *real* balance concerns, and not whether temp invuln should cost endurance because its numerically higher than RPD. That's an invalid concern, or would be if the defensive sets were designed as they should have been, with base strength and optional enhanced strength in powers that could actually be turned off, rather than base strength in the powers that could be turned off and the optional enhanced strength in the powers that cannot be turned off. That's illogical. -
Quote:The game has evolved over time without this kind of system, so changing it would require rebalancing around them. But these two changes change everything: detoggling would not have the dramatic effect it has now, detoggling would be more controlled, detoggling could be made more frequent but less devastating like any other mez, detoggling resistance could become an archetype-balancing feature (say, tankers are far harder to detoggle, just as they are theoretically but less practically harder to mez).Originally Posted by Starsman
My point is more about blasters always having all their endurance pool dedicated to damage, while melee are forced to dedicate some of their endurance budget to toggles. Would you denny that removing endurance from toggles would also result in increased damage potential?
Again, I agree with the core of the idea, I have thought of making a case for it many times. But these two points always stop me because I have no answers that would explain why those are not problems.
There would be lots of side effects, including tampering with endurance burn rates, but those are trivial to rebalance around, and they can be rebalanced at will without any set in stone design rules to overcome. The only ones that exist are the ones I just eliminated by hypothesizing that these changes could occur in the first place. -
Quote:In that series, Michael is depicted as more powerful, because he is the equal of Lucifer but also possesses the power of creation. Lucifer is the smarter and craftier one, though.Originally Posted by Biowraith
I'd give Mike Carey's depiction of Lucifer a nod because in addition to being at or near the top in terms of raw power, he's also demonstrated that he's capable of taking down gods and godlike beings when he himself has been de-powered.
(assuming we don't just award it to God; in that series, God has basically all of Lucifer's skillset and then some - if you defeat him it's because he wanted you to)
Basically, Lucifer is depicted as having angelic power and Batman's brain.