Oedipus_Tex
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Posts
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Joined
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I've rarely seen people kicked. What I see more often are people making up excuses to get off of teams that aren't working.
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Is there a significant benefit to perma-Heat Loss versus close-to-perma? When I built my /Cold I didn't both shooting for perma Heat Loss because it seems to me it just gives you a small amount of extra Endurance. Just wondering why you would build for it, or whether this is just an idle question.
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Quote:In the end I want the same thing you do: a set that functions well. Not interested in ripping people apart.
If the set were balanced around having lower damage, the set wouldn't follow the standard dam/rech/end formula. If you actually look at the numbers rather than what you want to believe about them, you'd see that.
The damage on Hail of Bullets is probably too low. I have "looked at the numbers," seen that 2 is more minutes than 1, and concluded that the power does less damage than some others. The probable reason is that the developers feel the ability to change damage types gives Dual Pistols some utility. -
Quote:No. You're also paying for it with lowered damage. You would like to pay for it with weaker effects only, but that isn't how the powers are currently balanced. I'm not against upping the damage Dual Pistols does, but that decision has to be accompanied by a reevaluation of how much utility being able to switch damage type, secondary effects, and mezz types brings. That decision is entirely subjective, however much you would like it to be decided by a table.Originally Posted by Umbral
You're paying for the ability to choose by having to choose between 4 weaker effects.
But we've already had this discussion, during the beta test. I think you have some good observations but are too quick to dismiss the set's utility. I also think you are trying too hard to create an "Archery 2" rather than a powerset that stands on its own. And finally that your approach, which basically consists of telling people "I'm uniquely able to see how this set doesn't work and anyone who disagrees is just mesmerized by the newness and the graphics" is not going to win people over--in particular, game developers, who are the ones who really matter if you really want change and not just kudos from fellow posters. -
Quote:Meanwhile add optional knockback to Energy Blast, Fire Blast, Ice Blast, and Sonic that they can turn on when they want it and off when they don't.Originally Posted by Windenergy21
Why does this even need to be said. Hail of Bullets does less damage than Full Auto and Rain of Arrows, maybe the same with Incindiary bullets on, why on earth does it need to be said that it should have the same 1 minute recharge timer. 2 minutes? Come on devs you're being seriously disappointing in your logic right now especially on a set that does not get aim.
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The beauty of Mind/Storm or Mind/Cold is that you can combine the mist powers they get with Super Speed for PvE invisibility. You can then, if you want, slot a Stealth IO to help with things that see past that (like those floating Rikti robots).
An invisible Mind Controller is just plain scary in PvE. I pretty much only team, so that's where most of my experience comes from with that. In the late game you basically can turn any team into a winner because of your unmatched ability to pepper enemies with mezzes before pulling aggro. And if you're ever worried that they'll defeat each other before the team arrives to beat them up, you can even sleep them all without pulling aggro either. Storm probably uses too much endurance to stay perpetually in Super Speed, but my Mind/Cold is easily able to stay hidden because of Heat Loss. -
I wasnt under the impression a decision had been made one way or another, but maybe I missed where they show a screenshot where you select Hero/Praetorian/Villian?
I have always thought the Hero/Villian AT split is kind of silly. As if there are never any bad people who are Blasters or Controllers. It's a game contrivance derived from when the games were split, maintained these days more because it's how the character creation UI works than because it makes sense. -
Don't rule out Mind/Cold either. It is possibly more team orientated than Storm and won't deal as much damage early, but is still pretty solid.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Honestly, I think they *should* have designed the attack sets that way. The problem is they designed the initial attacks to be recharge-bound so until you get a bunch of attacks you're waiting for powers to recharge a lot. That waiting means the "neat quirky" attacks get immediately put to work in your attack chain as soon as you get them, which puts people into the mindset that every power should be usable as often as possible, which then causes a lot of friction when it comes to endurance balancing. If power X costs more endurance than power Y because it power X does more, players often won't see it that way. Instead, they'll see it as "I need to click power X as fast as possible because its often the only thing available."
They should have instituted short global cool downs and rapidly recharging "bread and butter" attacks so that players would be trained to understand that the "bread and butter" attacks are intended to be cycled quickly, but if you use these other special powers you will have to manage their endurance costs.
Because of the way recharge was used in the design of powers, powersets don't have "bread and butter" attacks. They just have attacks, and often not enough of them.
Ironically, the early attacks tend to be fast and the later attacks tend to be slower - they have longer cast times and animations. But that's kind of backwards. The early attacks should have had longer animations and the later attacks should have had faster ones, and then a few special powers could have longer cast times separate from that. Because while the animation times make sense when you look at individual powers, they don't make sense when you look at whole sets. You want a powerset to progress from the powers that are weaker but you can use all the time, to the powers that are stronger and you can use only some of the time. Longer cast times means DPA and DPE are lower for those early attacks, and the percentage of the time you're using them is higher. Think original Flares. You can quickly make full attack chains when you have the higher cast time powers up front. Then, as you level you get access to the faster, higher DPA higher DPE powers that are fast enough you can insert them into your normal attack chain with very little cost but with a lot of gain. Think Blaze. The progression makes a lot more sense this way. Then you can still have "finishers" that have longer animation times but are powerful enough that even with longish cast times they are still powerful enough to use, and look impressive also: think Nova and Total Focus.
We aren't in an open system where people can take whatever powers they want from any random powerset, but the powers are still designed like we can. Recharge is based on what the power "wants" not based on what the powerset that power is in "needs."
Trick question: why does Power Blast have to have a longer recharge than Power Bolt? Hint: there's actually no *holistic* game balance reason why it must. There are, of course, design rules that mandate it. But the question is what purpose are those design rules serving? That's not so simple of a question to answer in this specific case.
This is something I've thought about a lot over the past few years and I'm not sure what my opinion is anymore. Balancing 8 or 9 attacks is pretty tricky, and I can see why someone creating a new game could struggle with it.
Classically, most computer RPGs prior to the 2000s ignored both casting time and recharge time, and animation time was mostly an after thought. The only limiting factor was how much mana/endurance you had. To create incentives to use more than one attack spell, developers fiddled with things like reagents, and negative side effects of casting. One particularly common theme was AoE powers that could hit your own team; this is now less popular because of how easy it makes griefing, but deciding which shaped AoE to use meant more when you had to both hit the enemy and avoid your friends.
Recharge time as a limiting factor may seem like an obvious game addition, but I didn't see much of it until the 2000s. Powers prior that we didn't want folks using too often got the treatment nukes get in this game. I think that when it first came into use developers thought it was enough to balance around. And it would have been, if this game was WoW, where recharge rates are static, power shapes are fairly uniform, and everything boils down easily to DPS calculations.
DPA is an interesting case because there IS at least one early game where it had a significant impact: Diablo II. There were actually enhancements that could increase your animation speeds, but because that game is frame based it quickly led to people min/maxing to calculate how much %Haste you needed to net a whole number of dropped frames.
Looked at another way, DPA even has an impact in games as old as Asteroids and Donkey Kong, but I don't know if they were ever thought of that way. I think to draw those assumptions in the early 2000s would have been unlikely. And, indeed, the powers were eventually. I will say though that if I ever launch my own MMO Arcanna, I want you beta testing my work.
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Quote:In the defense of the Devs, remember that until the mid-2000s the focus on power/spell design in many RPGs was still largely on "a few bread and butter attacks and some, neat quirky things players can do." It was only as the focus of MMOs pushed harder and harder toward raid/steamroller goals that many developers changed their focus. I've been playing RPGs for about 18 years and I think the first time I heard the expression "DPS" stated as such was in 2004. People always min/max'ed, of course, but there have been genre-wide changes in how that's evaluated since the old days.Originally Posted by UberGuy
One flaw that probably doesn't squarely fit on Emmert's shoulders but which he is possibly "responsible" for in the sense of being in charge of the game's direction, is that it was so terribly imbalanced at release.
Having said that, let me clarify that I loved the game for being so broken, and it's highly likely that its brokenness is why I am still here today. However, that brokenness required painful adjustments that were inevitably resented by many affected players.
Strictly speaking, I believe most of these pains really lay at the feet of Geko, because that man (and presumably any subordinates he had) was positively atrocious at understanding how powers worked in real practice, what their play implications were, and how people might use them in practice. I don't even mean exploitative edge cases, I mean he didn't seem to understand how people would use them normally. That's not cool for the powers guy. Castle gets a bit of flak in this regard, but generally speaking I think he's in touch with how a lot of people are using a lot of powers, at least in PvE.
In retrospect, it felt as if they whole lack of "real numbers" thing infected the devs. It's one thing to hide the numbers from the players and hope that reduces min/maxing. It's another for the devs themselves to appear ignorant of how powers work and thus unable to actually balance the player/environment interaction around those powers, or, at times, powersets with one another within an AT. -
Quote:This made me LOL in a friendly way.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
So, professional game designers were just paralyzed by the (completely predictable) forum hysteria surrounding a gargantuan global nerf, rendered powerless to change it in any way by a bunch of enraged nerds using intemperate language?
Huh.
Being a game developer is a surreal experience. It's fun, stressful, and potentially rewarding. So is being a commercial loan officer, a waiter, or--perhaps most similar--a policy person for a government program (don't ask how I know).
It might seem like players screeching about something won't affect you, but it does. It's no different than working at a bank and having customers yell at you. And then send an email to your manager with your name and a list of the ways you made their experience more awful. And the fact that game developers can spy on every conversation you have in game (you DID know that right?) means they overhear a lot of negative things you may not be aware of, and may even be aware of some of the hypocritical things you post about deleting certain characters or "never using xyz powerset again."
Game development is a job. You get email, go out for drinks with coworkers, have office conflicts, and yes, evaluate how customers are reacting to your product. If anyone reading thinks the comments we make on these boards don't end up on internal power point slides and pasted to the wall of people's cubicles, let me assure you that not only does that probably happen, but the developers also probably go home to their spouses and complain/make fun of some of us by name. Every work environment is different but being a game developer isn't significantly different than other kinds of jobs.
Of course, you go into this line of work with expectations about dealing with complaints; actually coping with them is a skill in itself. One of the most eye opening experiences for me was the first time I got a meeting request from a coworker that was simply titled Protection from Danger spell (spell name changed to protect identities). I had no idea what the meeting was about; imagine my surprise when it turned out to be an angry diatribe about how this spell was horribly overpowered and this person had a graph to "prove" it!
All of this said, I've never met Jack E. My instinct (frequently wrong) tells me that he is an extremely strong willed person who is able to fight the fight necessary to build a game, but is not particularly good at evolving his concepts to what players want to play, or, especially, explaining why changes are being made.
Players put a lot of trust in you as a developer; it doesn't mean you should always go along with what they say, but you have to develop an understanding of why they are saying it. Sometimes game developers get lost in charts and tables and "balance" and lose sight of the fun that keeps people coming back. Game developers are also notoriously bad at evaluating how powerful an enemy or power is because they encounter the game in an entirely different context, where they are able to instantly access powers, skills, and areas, making the game seem much easier than it actually is. I'm not saying that's what happened to Statesman for sure, but it does sound like a lot of players felt that way about his approach. -
Having briefly been a game developer myself I have to take the negative things said about Mr Emmert with a grain of salt.
There is clearly, to me at least, some genius game design going on in City of Heroes. The decision to base combat values directly off character level, and then to allow that level to fluctuate based on whether you've been "sidekicked" was absolutely inspired. We didn't see the full value of that design element until recently, but what CoH accomplished there is something many developers have strived for and failed to deliver. I remember reading about it long before I played CoH and thinking it was sure to be a disaster, for many reasons. It turned out the CoH developers' wisdom was better than mine in that instance.
The only lesson I can offer Mr Emmert is one I learned early: it's a good idea for game masters to maintain multiple identities, because eventually you will have to make a decision that makes someone angry. The flip side of this is if you are making them so angry that you feel you have to hide, you need to look deeper at the issues and consider alertnative action. -
Quote:How disappointed must these people be when they realize 5 of the 9 powers in Empathy have no effect unless someone takes damage. Is Empathy a "buff set"? Sure, but it's definitely a "healing set" too, however much angst it brings to elitists (not you, btwOriginally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
There is some truth in that. I think th reason it upsets people on the defender boards is that we've all encountered people for whom healing is the ONLY focus, often to the point of neglecting the buffs. ).
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Quote:Weird.Originally Posted by ketch
City of Data reports Flash Arrow as Unresistable. Smoke, however, isn't flagged the same. This could be an error or not. I haven't used either power extensively to be sure.
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Does anyone have a video of brilliantly played knockback in a team? I hear about it on the boards a lot, but can't say I've ever seen it.
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I haven't used Smoke a lot, but I was under the impression that because it is uncontested the -ToHit doesn't scale. I thought that if your base -ToHit was 5% or whatever that it was -5% regardless of the level or any resistances the enemy might have. I'm pretty sure it works that way with AV resistances at least. Maybe the Purple Patch/level based resistance is different?
EDIT: Nevermind. I see someone already addressed this. Maybe next time I should read all the posts before commenting.
RE-EDIT: Nevermind again. I don't think the linked material addresses the special mechanics of uncontested powers. Someone more resourceful than me want to search for the mechanics of Smoke's sister power Flash Arrow. Someone explained how that worked a while back. -
In the age of Ninja Run I feel less and less that a travel power is necessary, especially for Kinetics, so I agree with your decision to skip it. I've found that, overall, a team-heavy character that wants to increase travel speed benefits more from Recall Friend than any of the personal travel powers, because the team only moves as quickly as it's slower members. The exception power is Super Speed, not because it lets you move quickly, but because of the visibility and threat reduction. Super Speed is a useful power for farming, though.
One weird thing about Fire/Kinetics to look out for is the decreasing recharge rate of Fulcrum Shift. Fulcrum Shift on a pack of enemies increases your damage so much that any damage slotting you've got goes over the cap. Very high recharge farming builds eliminate damage slotting from all powers and replace them with procs, extra accuracy, etc. This isn't possible until after Fulcrum Shift is able to recharge very quickly. -
The endurance use on Fire/Sonic is absolutely brutal. It's really shame, because the powers work well together. I would advise going for Fire/Thermal or Fire/Force Field instead of /Sonic. If you decide to do Fire/Sonic anyway and find a way to make it work, let me know. My Fire/Sonic is level 38 but can't take 3 steps without passing out.
EDIT: Fire/Cold is a really good team shielder as well, and has a great endurance recovery power plus a power (Sleet) that debuffs resistance a la Sonic. The imps will die a lot but it would be good on a team. -
I pretty much abandoned my Energy Blaster. I rerolled him from Energy Manipulation to Mental Manipulation and still didn't like him.
I only play to PUG, and I found it very frustrating to deal with the knockback. I thought I was going to be able to just use hover and shoot down or shoot stuff into corners. The reality was rather different. I know exactly what you mean about people faking disconnects. I've never had a character I've struggled with so much (EDIT: Wrong. My Fire/Sonic troller is the most frustrating, because of the endurance use.)
Energy Blast DOES solo well, but on a PUG it's way too much hassle for very little return, at least for me. I don't want to tell you to delete the character, but I felt a lot better when I just mothballed mine and went with something that could damage things without irritating the heck out of people. -
I used to hate Hasten too. No longer.
Slot it with 3 Recharges, turn it on auto, and forget about it. Even without perma-hasten you will see a large reduction in recharge times. And with Earth/Thermal you have a lot of powers you want popping up faster. -
It's also only Mag 2. It will never hit anything stronger than a Minion.
Quite a bad power except for its ability to accept the Confusion proc. -
Mind Control has a hidden feature that allows it to bypass positional defense. As far as I'm aware, it is the only power set that does this consistently. While the set loses some effectiveness to mental resistant enemies, it cuts straight through annoying powers robots sometimes try to use like Force Fields, so it balances to some degree.
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I have a minor addendum. The Radiation toggles are neutral if the enemy lacks defense debuff resistance, but will slow enemy kill speed if the enemy resists -defense. It would speed up enemy kill speed if they resist -tohit, but I'm not sure that kind of resistance exists.
Also, since -defense and -tohit are capped, I think you'd see a shift if you passed the caps on one debuff but not the other. That's unlikely with Plant/Rad but I can see an Earth/Rad hitting the floor on defense, which might result in slower kill speed when you applied more -ToHit. Not that it matters because this is a discussion about confusing mobs, which Earth can't do, but it might be a factor in teams.
One way or another though, I'm in the camp whose happy with Seeds just keeping things from attacking me and never really cared about how it affects enemies hitting each other.
EDIT: I should add that I'm assuming all of the enemies in a group are the same type. This is actually pretty rare in practice. It would be likely that enemies with -defense resistance would appear in a group with other enemies who don't resist it. Also, if there is an AV in the mix, the toggles will have very little effect on the AV but a large one on the enemies around it. Since we can assume the AV won't be getting confused, what this means is the toggles effectively make any enemies in the AVs group less likely to hurt the AV if they take a swing at it (since their -ToHit is lowered significantly but the AVs Defense is not). If we could somehow manage to confuse the AV, the AV would do massive damage to his or her own allies. -
How about an Illusion secondary? A few suggested powers would be:
- Spectral Wounds - A superior version of the Controller attack power. Like the Controller power, wounds inflicted heal back over time unless the enemy dies.
- Phantom Ally - A singular version of the Phantom Army power. This power lasts for a much shorter duration than the comparable Controller power, but can be used to absorb an alpha.
- Cataclysm - Unique power. Enemies within 12 feet envision a horrific event and take Illusionary damage. This power may also cause them to fall.
- Impede Visibility - A partial stealth toggle.
- Confound - An "anti-taunt aura". Lowers your threat rating for a while, making you less likely to pull aggro.
- Substantiate - Temporarily makes any Illusionary damage you do real and unable to heal back. -
Actually the Ice Secondary's version of Shiver outperforms Glue Arrow and just about every other slow power out there. It debuffs somewhat less than Controller Shiver but recharges in 12 seconds where the Controller version recharges in 30. The exact reasons for this are unknown to me but you may as well take advantage of it.