Fulmens

((I'm starting another thread to discuss Psi resists. I don't want to further threadjack this one.))

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There aren't many ranged smashing or lethal AoEs.

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Top of MY head: every Council jerk with a chaingun and DE thornsprays [though they may have a Tox component] are Lethal cones. Grenades and Explosions are Smashing/Fire.

Ed. to say: I don't have a good feel for how much work it would be to change the Defense code. . . but I think continuing to kludge it will end up taking more time than you expect, will deliver complex, nonintuitive ("wrong") results, and will probably end up having to be taken out anyway-three different weird cases will come up where the results are bad and unpatchable.

I'm new to this discussion, so pardon me if this is a dead horse:

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Balance: There is only one villian group which has vulnerabilities to psi damage and it's only in the early game when the set is weakest. By the time the set can actually do damage, most villian groups (nemesis, praetorians, Council, Carnies, Malta just to list a few) are not only not vulnerable, but have a high precentage of members with either sizable resists or defense to the entire set, save telekinetic blast, making the set feel underpowered throughout the game. (LadyMage)


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It's always been my theory that you notice the resistances that affect you. In the case of Lethal, for instance, that's "Armored and robots" at 50% and "Partially armored" around 25%. That's a LOT of enemies. [Crey armor, Rikti armor, Malta Titans, Nem Jaegers, off the top of my head.] Also some other specific cases- carnie Strongmen, stone Devo's, and I think some Banished bosses.

I know a few of the Energy and Cold resists as well. . . I believe that Damage Resistance is pretty much a wash for everyone.

I actually looked into how much money you can make off a pen and paper RPG if everything goes right.

I would like to second the BWA HA HA above.

Are there any plans for a "reorganization" of the Numina task force?

I had the impression that, after the three thousandth extremely personal "Geko killed my plants/Geko should be killed and fed to my dogs" post, Geko got kinda. . .quiet. Don't blame him.

"Note that a Scrapper will NEVER be killed by a yellow and a white". . .
if the white is a Sapper, and the yellow is a Malta lieut that stuns, yeah, I could see them dropping my toggles and chainstunning me to death.

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Not only that, but there wasn't any 40+ game, much less content, and the purple patch wasn't out yet.


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um, the purple patch came in a LONG time before it stopped being City of Blasters.

CoB [sic] was caused by:

1. "Everyone" still being level 30 or less.

2. Smoke grenade, smoke grenade, smoke grenade. I teamed with a SG Blaster once and . . . it wasn't fair to the bad guys. It was a freakin' slaughterhouse: they stood there, we chopped them down.

3. Much less villain ranged damage in the lower levels. Outcasts had fewer powers, Trolls had weenie pistols, Warriors had weenie pistols, the Family had much lower-rate-of-fire machine guns, Warwolves didn't throw stuff . . . twelve feet of Hover and range WAS your defense.

I tried Range slotting.

Doesn't work.

It's an approach to being a Defender. As valid as, say, being a Scrapper and slotting Pool power attacks*. But saying "I took four Leadership powers and slotted them, and now I don't have slots for anything else" isn't quite the trump card you seem to think it is.

*I made a "nothing BUT pool attacks" scrapper once to make a point. Worked pretty well, at least for the first 10 levels.

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The real problem with FF isn't the amount of holes. There ought to be holes in the team defence provided by a mere three powers. The problem is that none of the other powers in the set allow an FF Defender to do anything significant against opponents who negate the "big three". The entire rest of the FF set is not sufficent to support a team against anything they cannot handle without support. When a Dark runs into Fear-resistant foes he still has plenty of tools at his disposal. Nothing ever negates the entire Dark, Empathy, or Rad bag of tricks - for example. There are plenty of late-game foes - including a fair number of the endgame AVs - which negate everything in the FF primary save PFF (useless for team assistance) and Detention Field (useless for actually helping to defeat said AV). *That* is a problem. No other Defender set has to face being so completely invalidated.


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/em opens mouth. . .starts thinking. . . closes mouth.

hmm.

I think that FF is "balanced"- its main trick is so great when it works that everything else the set does has to be weak to compensate- but that's a different thing from "enjoyable to play."

If FF got more "secondary utility" (Say a power called Net Force that makes party attacks hit harder? ) I would think it would have to lose some of the primary utility. That might not be a bad thing. . . FF's are very "all or nothing" right now.

I fully expect that the last 25 levels of my FF'er will be as a "FF Blaster" , with the idea that 2/3 of the best damage in the game is still pretty good. Whether that will turn out to be enough incentive to get S-Orbital through, that I don't know.

I said:
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Force Fields have a lot of holes- all the Super Reflexes ones and all the Invincibility ones. . .

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Jesterman replied:
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I know you think that psi is the only hole that FFs have, but it's not.

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Sigh.

There were at least three factors making "City of Blasters":

1. Smoke Grenade.
2. Enemy ranged damage was a shoddy joke in most cases- at least through level 30.
3. Blasters are still very strong through level 30- and 90% of the people in the game were below level 30 in the first few months. (I recently found an old guide to Broadsword/Invuln which STOPPED at level 20- as opposed to now, when people assume that the interesting stuff STARTS at level 20, or 22, or after your first respec, or 38. . .)

As far as "FF's should have a psi shield": no, they shouldn't. Force Fields have a lot of holes- all the Super Reflexes ones and all the Invincibility ones- but they can make seven squishies into near-tanks EXCEPT against those holes.

And if you plug one or the other of those holes, you've made SR or INV +FF into a truly unstoppable duo.

LadyMage said about FF defenders: [ QUOTE ]
On top of all that the primary role, the only thing that people are happy to have in their team, has two rather massive holes in it, sleep and psi. Of these two, I'd have to say that Psi is the bigger problem, as sleep can be easily mitigated, but in a fight against a psi using enemy, the FFer feels useless.

Possible solution: replace one of the lesser used powers (I would humbly suggest repulsion bomb) with a third targetted field specifically for Psi. Sure, it would be situational, and wouldn't protect the caster, but at least it would keep the FFer from feeling like they should throw in the towel when some baddie procs pink bubbles.

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That's a GREAT idea! While we're at it, could you put Psi protection into Invulnerability?

Holes exist in powersets on purpose. Nothing is perfect, everyone needs help with something. Maybe it's funny that two INVs used a Blaster with PFF to tank the Psychic Clockwork King. . . the Blaster thought it was, anyway.

I was one of the Scrappers who answered the "Can you tell the difference?" thread.

I can tell. . . for some of them.

I also said "I pick Defenders first."

Controllers _might_ have a chance on my teams. .. if "/em kick the pet out of the way" actually did anything.

So. . .let's see if I've got this straight. Blasters suck because they actually benefit from your Force Fielder doing your JOB?

Huh.

I like making Blasters into Tankmages. (I was teamed with two Fire Blasters and a Kin Defender, sk'd up to 42, last week. . . it was glorious. We had to slow down for corners, we were moving so fast.)

The worst I could think of to say about Defenders is, "They get underestimated by idiots, and sometimes it makes them bitter."

I pick a Defender primary over a Controller secondary every time. . .though I am a math geek and so I notice the difference in power.

Cheers.

Feel free to come back and visit.

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They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high.

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It's 100% to one guy. If there are four guys, it's 25%.

If there are twenty. . .that's a problem.

But there are interesting ideas in the rest of the post.

BS/Katana has a Parry (Divine Avalanche, I think they renamed it to) power which is essentially defensive- it does a little damage, but gives +20% melee defense for the next 10 seconds.

Something like that, but with RANGED defense? Would be cool. I don't know how you fit it in with the world. . ."Covering fire" maybe? Would be a problem with aggro, but if it could be buffed up to 44% ranged +DEF, aggro ceases to trouble one.

20% is way high, I think. . . the Katana attack is slow and END-hungry, that's how it is balanced.

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They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high.

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It's 100% to one guy. If there are four guys, it's 25%.

If there are twenty. . .that's a problem.

But there are interesting ideas in the rest of the post.

BS/Katana has a Parry (Divine Avalanche, I think they renamed it to) power which is essentially defensive- it does a little damage, but gives +20% melee defense for the next 10 seconds.

Something like that, but with RANGED defense? Would be cool. I don't know how you fit it in with the world. . ."Covering fire" maybe? Would be a problem with aggro, but if it could be buffed up to 44% ranged +DEF, aggro ceases to trouble one.

20% is way high, I think. . . the Katana attack is slow and END-hungry, that's how it is balanced.

See, I hadn't considered taking a single purple insp... to me they come in pairs or more, because when I need them I need to NOT GET HIT NO NEVER NO MORE.

It'd work - it'd probably work REAL well.

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I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.


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Blasters have nothing to stack directly on top of tough. See, what makes Resistance juicy [aside from the Regen advantage] is that it works with Tough. Tough alone allows you to take 50% more S/L damage: Resistance and Tough allow you to take 100% more S/L damage. 66% resistance would allow 200% more S/L damage.

Right now, Blasters [correctly] judge that they can't get enough damage mitigation to be worth the colossal investment in powers, power pools, and slots it takes. You can try to build a "pool power Scrapper defense" but it really, really just doesn't work.

However, due to the cumulative nature of +DEF, if you had a power that gave just a LITTLE more defense- 7.5% unslotted, in that range- you could then choose to build a Blaster that would have 50% +DEF - yes, it would have large holes [Area of Effect, probably toxic/psi, possibly more] and cost a lot of powers, but it would be an option for Blasters who want to be less Black Widow and more Thor. (spoilered gawdawful pun follows) [yeah yeah, you're plenty thor now.]

Tactics are great. I'd like to see an environment that rewards this even more- more places to snipe from concealment, more "I can shoot you off tall places and then you have to run and get me" situations, pits full of angry crocodiles, whatever.

But requiring people to push the bleeding edge of tactics just to survive, that's. . .well, it's expecting an awful lot from your players.

And I don't think "Blasters Shall Never Have Defenses, No Never" is a core of the Dev philosophy- look at the Epic pools . Level 45 is just too late for Temp Invuln to help.

A *small* defensive in the secondaries can have a distinctly useful effect: there's a Regen power that gives 7.5% S/L damage resistance. It adds up, with Tough and lots of slots, to about 50%. Doesn't suck. 10% Defense, it could add up.

If that's too "ranged Scrapper" for ya (I don't see it as such) . . . maybe something more active, the equivalent of Smoke Grenade. 30% Acc Debuff isn't dogchow. (Drops 75% to hit down to, like, 52%. Don't know how it scales with enemy level, though.)

Great_Scott: You did actually use post-multiplier Whirling Sword BI in your original post, vs. pre-multiplier BI's for everything else. . . but wouldn't it be cool if I _did_ have a PBAoE that did 9.2 brawls before slotting?