Samuel_Tow

The thing is, though, I've yet to see such a system. I've tried games touted as being very versatile and customizable, only to drown in stats and not know which way to go. How much defence is enough defence so I can start building for damage? Should I slot for fire protection heavily? Will I meet many fire-using enemies? Experience has taught me that when people set out to make an "open-ended" system, they just toss out a list of options and number of points and let the player sort it out, often with no way to know what he's getting into until he's sunk 20 points into the thing.

The Diablo 2 system was once touted as being very versatile since it allowed for many ways to build what is essentially the same character. That may have been so, but there were FAR more ways to build "a character" than there were ways to build even a half-way decent character. For instance I went through two complete playthroughs before the game just NOW decided to let me know I should probably have been building for elemental damage 20 levels ago, because all of a sudden half my enemies were IMMUNE to physical damage. How do you fight an enemy that's immune to physical damage with a sword? Hell if I know, because I could never figure that out. And that game didn't have respecs, I remind you.

Basically what I'm saying is the more complex a system is, the more responsibility falls to me to know what I'm doing, as opposed to on the system to prevent me from hurting myself. And the more it's my responsibility to build right, the more likely I am to build wrong because Ooh! I can jump good! Gotta' have that! Ohh! I can run fast! Gotta' have that, too! What do you mean dual-wielding two-handed swords is worse than dual-wielding one-handed ones? They look cooler! The more responsibility you put on my shoulders, the more room there is to fail and the more of those touted options end up being big mistakes. Right now in City of Heroes, there is no powerset combo that's "wrong." You can still gimp a character if you set out to do it - say, Toggle Man, the Determinator, etc. - but if you just stick to what you're given, you're pretty much guaranteed to do at least well enough.

I know you can say the same for a skill-based type of game like Darksiders, but at least there you can figure out what you're doing wrong by trial and error just in the process of playing the game. For instance, I figured out I can't do a scythe charge attack against swarms of spiders even though it seems like that should be the best tactic, just because the charge attack is slow and I keep getting interrupted. OK, fair enough, I'll use something faster. That's not the case for even the City of Heroes system, where stats decide whether you win or lose a lot of the time.

I can, for instance, tell that my SJ/SR Scrapper is using up more endurance than she should be, but figuring out WHY that is isn't as simple. I did figure it out... By plotting all of her powers on an Excel spreadsheet and charting DPE, EPS and EPA, eventually discovering Shin Breaker was costing WAY more endurance than it should (that's been fixed) and that Spinning Strike is balanced as an AoE, thus using it on single targets is a mistake. But I know this because I ran the numbers. Figuring this out in general play would have been impossible, because by level 38 or so, I still had no idea why she sucked wind. And when it comes to Inventions, I haven't the foggiest. Should I shoot for more defence? Which sets offer that for what powers? How much is it? How much do I need? What else do I need? I'm not picky here, I just don't want to feel like a wimp.

Arcana, you describe a system that... I want to say "intuitive." If that can be done, I'd go for it, definitely. But I'll believe it CAN be done when I see it. I've seen far too many games bragging about their customization that I just never understood what to do in.

So? I'm not obligated to stick to whatever sub-thread you've chosen to restrict yourself to. If it doesn't pertain to what you were saying, all that means is what I said doesn't pertain to what you were saying. If I quoted you (and I don't remember either way) and yet went off in a different direction, all that means is I used your post as a starting point. I'm not obligated to stick to your topic of conversation, nor are you obligated to reply to me if what I'm saying isn't what you were talking about, if all you'll say is that what I was saying isn't what you were talking about.

There's a reason systems like PunkBuster and Valve Anit-Cheat systems exist - to ensure it's the player playing the game, rather than the computer. Play any action game and you'll find the computer can always do it better than you because it controls the environment and has direct access to all of its variables, plus a much faster calculating processor that's much more suited to that particular task. And this ignores the fact that "numbers" are even less human than that, because all you need to beat numbers is bigger numbers, and MMO critters typically get away with cheating on a truly shameless scale.

If you're suggesting that other players, on an even keel, will be better and balancing their numbers better than I can balance mine, then you're probably right. The reason for this is half that I'm not very good at balancing numbers and half that I honestly don't give a toss about being better than other people. My constant call to arms is "enough," in the sense that I want numbers that are "good enough" to get through the game, irrespective of whether they're great or better than anybody else's.

And at the end of the day, those are two different sorts of skillsets that you're comparing, as well as two different types of gaming experiences. One is pretty much entirely based around preparing for any situation and "winning" a fight long before you show up while the other is entirely built around having the player react to a situation as it develops and making decisions in real time. Complexity can creep over both, yes, and there's a reason I don't play any of the Devil May Cry games despite their being entirely skill-based - I'm just not good enough. But there's nothing more or less human about relying on the skills of hand-eye coordination as opposed to relying on university mathematics.

So? What Arcana alluded to is also not a three-headed monkey... I assume, but I don't see how that's any more relevant to anything I've said so far.

Yes, that's exactly what it means. I don't see why it's a problem. Piling 90% resistance on top of 5% final to-hit reduces that 5% by 90% points of itself, down to 0.5%, exactly as you explain below. I don't see why that would be as confusing as I infer you're presenting it as. That's how defence as a probability and resistance as a percentage decrease work. To me, THAT'S intuitive.

Here's what I don't get - why is it supposed to mean anything more than what it already means?

I think your example is missing a crucial element - what happens if you're not measuring that resistance from 0% all the way up to 90%, and instead measure what would happen if you piled 40% resistance on top of 50% resistance? What if you piled 60% on top of 30%? What if all players who enter Dark Astoria suddenly took a resistance debuff of 28% that ignores buffs and enhancements?

I guess what I'm missing here is a definition of what you mean by "mitigation." I've seen the formula, but I don't quite follow why you're using the numbers you are.

In trying to understand what you mean by reading and re-reading your previous post, I keep coming back to:

I don't get what this is saying. How are you counting misses, when you're calculating with percent and what you're getting is, by definition, also a percentage? How do you transfer probability into misses without going through some specific example, like say "this many misses out of 100 attacks?" Because, again - you seem to be trying to work towards some kind of general "mitigation" metric without taking all stats into account, but you CAN'T include regeneration into this without taking a specific situation. I say this because regeneration is additive to damage, rather than being multiplicative, so how effective regeneration is as opposed to resistance and defence should take into account how many attacks are made, how much damage they do and how much hit points the character has both as a basis for regeneration and as a pool for it to work off of.

What I'm saying is, if you want general mitigation, then you can't afford to compare "misses" one time and DPS another. To me, in order for this to be truly generic, it must all go through the same basic stat, which is how well a given level of protection protects a given health pool from being depleted. Because, ultimately, that's where the rubber meets the road, isn't it? It's why I don't get this counting of hits and misses and comparing them to each other.

I guess what I don't get above all else is this:

Why would you ever, under any circumstances, multiply accuracy by JUST defence when no formula would ever allow this? Every example of accuracy always includes base to-hit in brackets so I genuinely can't see how it would slip out of there. Are you saying that's (Accuracy*(Base - (Base - Defence))/(Accuracy*Base)? Because this genuinely makes no sense to me.

Why makes no sense, if I want to be specific, is why we're counting misses when that's not what probability gives us. If we want to compare base to base and defence, wouldn't it make more sense to divide the former by the latter and get a ratio? Because that way, I can say that going from 40% defence to 45% defence cut my chance to be hit in half, thus it very likely doubled the time I can survive. JUST comparing misses and going with the above formula would suggest I have mitigation levels of 80 vs. 90, suggesting I went up only "10 mitigation," which... Doesn't ring true to me.

I guess if your point is to only ever compare protection against the base to-hit I could maybe see that working, but I've honestly never been in a position where this has come up, which is to say I've never been in a situation where I've gone from base to high levels of defence and had to consider the difference. Maybe it would be useful for comparing sets to each other, that I can't support or deny, but what it doesn't help me with is exactly what I brought up to begin with - what happens to my survivability as my final defence numbers fluctuate. What happens to me when my defence levels shoot up via Inventions? What happens if I drop to Premium and have to give them up? How does this relate to a varying base to-hit?

Basically what you're doing is taking the interval between "base to-hit" and 1.0 and stretching it into the interval of 0 to 1.0, which I just don't see being as meaningful. As you stretch the interval, you smooth over the sharp increase in survivability as both defence and resistance shoot up. You've said it yourself, and argued with me on this point, no less, that 5% defence can mean the world or it can mean nothing depending on what level of defence you pile it on top of. The way you've re-stretched the interval, that 5% defence adds up to 5% mitigation regardless, and that doesn't ring true to me. You've basically taken defence and stretched it to always represent what chunk it has of the base-to-cap interval and presented it as a linear progression.

Let me be scientific for a moment. In the formula of defence/to-hit, to-hit is a constant, or at the very least a parameter. Your variable here is defence, and what you've constructed is a linear function, with "to-hit" serving as nothing more than to modulate or translate the value of defence into something which corresponds to the chunk it covers from the "base-to-cap" interval. You may have equalised the numbers, but in so doing I believe you've obscured their actual impact. Why? Simple example:

A 1000 hit point character running at base to-hit and taking a 100 point attack every second will survive for 20 seconds. The same character with another 5% defence will, instead, survive ~22.22 seconds, or a little over 2 seconds more. A character with 40% defence will survive for 100 seconds, whereas a character with 45% defence will survive for 200 - an increase of 100 seconds. Both additively and multiplicatively, the difference is not linear. That's the source of my problem.

I guess I don't get exactly what, physically speaking, is it that "mitigation" is measuring and how can I use it to predict my own survivability in a practical situation? Because from what I can see, we're comparing stats, rather than their actual impact on performance. I'm probably wrong and not seeing something, but that's what I'm seeing. The difference between 40% defence and 45% defence should not be "10 mitigation," or else the difference between 0% defence and 5% defence should be something different than "10 mitigation," because the jump in actual survival isn't equal between the two.

*edit*
This, I think, is where I disagree. I don't believe you need to judge all stats the same way, because all stats don't work the same way. What we should be judging stats by is their impact in practice, or at least in some kind of "clean" theoretical testing environment. I know that the game's environment is a bit too complex and varied to really predict, but at the very least, we can say that "you can survive a long time if you meet about this much DPS." Just something which grounds the math in reality, is all.

Hmm... That could work. It's less restricting than rooting, but it does have the problem of I don't think it can work on ice or in the presence of knockback, since I think those still count as movement. I know for a fact that you can almost never use an interruptible power while standing on, say, the ice in Frostfire's building or the oil slicks in, um... Oil Slick, Port Oakes.

Yeah, that's part of what I refer to as "click and kill." That doesn't mean they have to be, of course - even we have the Vorpal Judgement Incarnate power that fires in a forward come without needing a target. As well, "action MMOs" have been showing up of late. Stuff like Spiral Knights, Tera, Vindictus and so on tend to play more like action games with stats than the "stat duel" that we have here, and in some of them, mobility does come into play. I'd say it's less that MMOs are like this and more that traditional MMOs tend to follow this model.

But suppose we're stuck with it. CAN we have a power armour minigun guy when the game essentially takes movement and aiming almost entirely out of the equation?

Personally, I have to play the hypocrite here. I understand some people's frustration and feel for them because I have been in their shoes... But at the same time, I unashamedly WANT the fixed Celestial pieces because they'll have such broader use it's amazing! If I had a choice (and I don't think I do, but if I did), I don't think I'd want to retain the old look at the expense of the new. And I'm not entirely sure how to rationalise that other than admitting to hypocrisy.

I think the biggest problem is the players themselves. More complexity and more versatility are not always good, and I recall players on these very forums praising City of Heroes for being "MMO lite" many years ago. As Arcana proves, no matter how complex, arcane and obfuscated you make a system, people will always figure it out, but the farther along the line you go, the more limited your audience becomes just because you exceed players' "couldn't be arsed" threshold. I have, for instance, spoken with Nuclear Toast on a few occasions, and his reasons for not bothering with Inventions or Incarnates much mirror my own - too much of a bother to be fun. I guess that's he and I get along.

My point here is that what you two are describing is a system of character building I not only WOULDN'T use, but also COULDN'T use. Even if I could figure it out, it's just no fun. If you're coming from the position that planning and making builds is "the game," then I can see how my position might seem absurd, but to me, "the game" is everything that happens AFTER the build is done - it's the beating stuff up, running missions, exploring the world and actually USING the character. The process of building said character is never fun or entertaining to me. It's a cost I have to pay in order to enjoy what I see as "the game." To be quite honest, if I could just pick what my powers looked like and let the game figure out how to make them work best, I would. I might still want to know what's being done behind the scenes, but I wouldn't bother with numbers if I didn't feel like I had to.

Hell, I wouldn't bother with Inventions if I didn't feel like I had to, but it's the "average player" that sets the bar, and the "average player" apparently CAN be arsed to bother.

Well, I don't know about RIFTS, but the "Devastators" in Space Marine are actually kind of SOL in big groups. You have a choice between three weapons, and all of them have serious drawbacks. A Heavy Bolter requires you to brace, which takes time, prevents you from moving and stops you from turning faster so if you get swarmed, you need to hope someone helps you, or else you just keep running. A Lascannon is a precision weapon that deals incredible damage, but it's also a long-range weapon that lacks a crosshair unless you zoom in, making it VERY inadequate for shooting enemies close by spread all around. A Plasma Cannon is a heavy AoE weapon that kills enemies in hordes but also deals significant splash damage TO YOU if you shoot at anything even remotely in melee. The leading cause of Plasma Cannon Devastator deaths is - at least in my experience - self-inflicted.

What I mean to say this is that each of the "power armour heavy weapon guys" has a crippling weakness to being swarmed because while the heavy weapons are great at killing at range, they perform very poorly in melee. Their heavy armour is typically useful either when fighting ranged enemies at range, in which case the Devastator almost always wins, or when ignoring melee enemies for your team-mates to pull off your back while the Devastator snipe at something at range. The problem is I'm not sure this can really work in City of Heroes since a lot of how these characters operate in at least the games I've seen them in relies on finding good gunning positions and lots and lots of dodging and precise aiming, which our game relegates to stats as opposed to gameplay. And these also tend to work best when you're told to hold a position with many enemies coming to you, as opposed to moving forward and pressing through enemy positions.

That's kind of the problem I have with Devices, actually. If you're protecting a position with limited access paths, then mines, bombs, auto cannons and so forth are a great asset because it turns into tower defence. On your average fast-moving team for anything, however, all of those turn into liabilities since you're going to the enemies as opposed to the enemies coming to you. It makes the set, and indeed a Devastator Marine very situational, which is why I'm not actually that big a fan of my own idea... Bizarre as that might seem

Well, Controllers and other characters who possess control abilities are a lot easier to keep stuff out of melee with. For my Blasters, it was as simple as taking Hover, though ghosts were always a problem. The thing, though, is that even I'm not as ambitious to argue for a character with strong ranged damage, strong melee defence AND strong control abilities. That would be just waaay too much.

I know I made it sound like this, but I really wouldn't want to make literally a Tank with Blaster damage. That would be crazy and, again, make Blasters pointless. I'm fine with having stats somewhere in-between, I just don't want this to be essentially a Defender with Stalker survivability, which is about the opposite end of the spectrum. Basically, I just want a ranged character who feels "heavy," which aside from Spiders (which I haven't played) we don't really have. That's one big problem I have with the standard MMO balancing, in that you can never be heavy AND ranged, just one or the other. More specifically, that if you ARE ranged, you have to be squishy and play nimble.

We call them "tanks," but our Tankers really don't act like their namesake. Consider that the heaviest of actual tanks tend to have both the thickest armour AND the biggest guns, and are typically brought down by mobility issues of terrain, bridges, speed and manoeuvrability. Right now, we can sacrifice damage for protection or protection for damage, but at no point can we sacrificie mobility for anything which isn't Stone Armour. And again - I wouldn't mind Stone Armour's Rooted or Granite Armour slowing me to all the speed of continental drift if the attack set it came with didn't require me to move around to stay in melee range. The truth of the matter is that a very slow, very unmanoeuvrable character is still workable provided that character has a decent reach, whereupon "movement" becomes a question of location and positioning and not a question of range.

As you say, I myself am not convinced such a concept is really workable, or if it's not too narrow enough. I want a "heavy," yes, but I don't know if this isn't too limiting a concept good for, say, one set (Stone Armour already does this) rather than an AT gimmick. What I'm saying, though, is if such an AT is to exist, I don't want it to be the WORST of melee and ranged characters. I can't ask for it to be the best, that'd be ludicrous, but I want for it to be decent, through the use of a gimmick. While range as a form of defence is, and has always been, a lie, the truth is ranged damage will always be better than melee damage for the simple matter of the convenience of range, so a Blast/Defence character will need to have lower stats than a Melee/Defence character just for the sake of logic. But what I'm saying is I don't think it needs to have MUCH lower stats, and would rather have a gimmick involved than just a downward balancing in play.

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This doesn't change the main question of the thread, though I think it narrows it down a bit:

How cam we make the power armour gatling gun guy work, without just jamming all his stats to the lowest possible settings to offset the benefit of his range and defences?

I think this is the part where our definitions sort of part ways and where I'm not entirely certain what you're doing. To me, basic probability would imply that if your chance to be hit, i.e. the statistically average but implausible amount of times you'll be hit, is Accuracy*(BaseToHit - Defence), then the chance to be missed will be 1 - (Accuracy*(BaseToHit - Defence)), or basically the chance that anything BUT the former will happen. We're certain that the chance to be hit will never exceed 1 (100%) because final to-hit is bound between 0.05 and 0.95 in every case. I guess if you're trying to nullify the impact of enemies having a base to-hit of 50%, meaning they'll miss even completely unprotected characters I could maybe see it, but I just don't follow the WHY of the formula.

Personally, I have no problem accepting that every character, by virtue of existing, already has 50% defence, with defence sets adding more to it. It makes defence much easier to interpret when you consider it together with base to-hit, because how its impact changes is much easier to track, at least to me. I recall us actually having a similar discussion once upon a time, and I also recall insisting on using a "variant" of mitigation that basically measured survival time, after taking account of regeneration, resistance, defence and max hit points. I even had a formula for calculating this, but my subscription to Mathematica ran out since the university doesn't see it as necessary. What I'm saying is I don't mean to "disprove" your formula, I just don't "get" it. Maybe it's just me, but a formula which tries to be more intuitive by obfuscating how it actually works is actually less intuitive to me because I'm always much more comfortable if I "get" the basic workings of a system without needing them to be translated for me. And City of Heroes isn't so complex as to be impossible to "get."

That's probably my own personal kinks, but "mathematically correct" is what I usually shoot for and I tend to not draw wider comparisons or quote numbers unless I have the research to back it up. I actually considered running a few basic calculations to see how much extra resistance one would need to attain starting from nothing to go back to where you were in the regular game, vs. the 14% defence SR has lopped off its stats. I wanted to say double that, but it's not actually true off a base of 64%, and I also know that how much a change in defence helps depends on what you change from and what you change to. Trouble is, though I used to have a very good grasp of this just in terms of mental math, I haven't worked with the numbers in so long I've forgotten and would have to spend some time re-familiarising myself with those.

That said, I'd still rather work with the raw numbers than with representations of them, and I'm just more comfortable comparing statistics that represent something actually measurable in-game, as opposed to a representative comparison stat. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, just that what's instinctively more comfortable for me may just be weird.

Not to complain, to ask for proliferation. I WANT the new Celestial stuff and I really don't want anything to do with the current implementation. However, I've been on the receiving end of getting "better" versions of old costumes, and I still can't use Tech Sleek for just about anything because of that horrible overbright reflection shader. What's better for one isn't necessarily better for all, which is why I've always been in favour of retaining legacy options. Hide them, if need be, but let people keep using them.

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All of that said, I feel I've forgotten to thank Dink for the change. For as much I feel for others... I still LOVE the new Celestial costume a lot more than the old one. The old was decent, but it only ever worked in white, which was disappointing and a damn waste of a good set. Now, though? Now it ought to work with all colours, which means I can actually use the set without feeling awkward

Again, thank you for hearing our calls. I, too, am sorry for the people this hurts, but it really WAS bugged. That amount of pre-tinting was just horrid. Don't be disheartened, Dink. We may react with caution to your change, but I can assure you we'll be praising it unconditionally soon as it hits Live. And I also suspect people who liked the chrome look will be able to retain it with some colour-jiggling.

I believe I've mentioned this before, but I find your consistent line of thinking across threads on this subject somewhat... I want to say "puzzling," but let's go with "interesting." That line I'm referring to is the notion that in order for a game to be better, its underlying subsystems have to be obfuscated from players, who must instead make decisions partially or entirely uninformed, shaped by other factors. I can see why you'd want to hide a game's "numbers" if they're easily gamable and how you'd want to make them impenetrable to prevent having only one "best" solution to any real problem, but...

To me, this is kind of a "last-generation" problem mostly true for games that revolve heavily around stats and numbers and much less so around their actual gameplay. It's very telling, for instance, that in City of Heroes, travel powers are often seen as unnecessary if you have some other means of rapid transport, because a travel power doesn't really contribute to a game's numbers. There are no high places you can only reach via flight, there are no shortcuts you can take with teleportation, there are no fast enemies you can chase down with super speed. That sort of thing.

What I'm saying is that it seems to me like you can balance a game around asking players to pick from a pool of actual abilities that alter how their character behaves, not just what stats it has and can apply. The ability to climb certain surfaces, the block and/or counter-attack, the ability to drive certain vehicles, the ability to fly. The ability to use certain weapons vs. other weapons and so forth. Of course, numbers will always come into play, but when your "meta-game" doesn't involve around modifying those numbers but rather on what you do via your keyboard and mouse - timing, precision, aiming, etc. - seems like it would need a lot less intentional obfuscation since it create a game that's less about crunching numbers and more about the muscle memory needed to pull off the gameplay it's based around.

I may be biassed, because even though I often drop out of the habit, I'm still an action gamer at heart. I like being able to the precision of my mouse hand, the speed of my judgement and my knowledge of which enemies will act in what way allowing me to win where just trading blows would have killed me ten times over. It's one reason I keep mentioning Space Marines so often. It just seems to me that the more we focus on balancing the books, as it were, the more we end up with a very flat, basic type of gameplay where actual real-time involvement is very low and most time is spent watching cooldowns and following attack chains, with most of the actual "fighting" being done via Excel and external build planners. Something as simple as a dodge move and a block move can turn a game upside down in such a way that you'd need coupious amounts of numbers changes to achieve.

This is something I personally don't get, and I don't mean this as a criticism. Very often, I'll hear people comment on how the class structure is restrictive and they want to "liberate" themselves from it and go with something freeform and... To be honest, that's scary to me. It's not that I can't make decisions of my own, even if that's part of it. It's more that... Classes are designed by people I'd at least assume to be professionals, who know balance and have worked to ensure not only that I can't be too strong, but also that I can't be too weak. A lot of the work is done for me, so I can, to a large extent, just follow the plotted line and still be sure to have a workable character.

To me, a free-form character creation system is kind of the same as a character creator that asked you to design your own character mesh in 3DS Max or something similar. Sure, it would make for a LOT more freedom, but it would also require a lot more work and a lot more talent to pull off even something half-way decent, while at the same time running a big chance of creating a complete disaster. The alternative, then, becomes for me to just go ahead and use other people's designs as my own, which kind of defeats the purpose of customizability. A friend of mine plays League of Legends with a Firefox window open to MOBAfire at all times, basically following the character guides posted there step by step, level by level, item by item. And if you're gonna' do that, what's the point of being given a choice in the first place.

More choice doesn't actually give more choice, not always at least. More choice means more responsibility on the shoulders of the chooser and for someone who can't min/max well enough to figure out what the better builds are or, like me, couldn't be arsed to, this doesn't offer more options. It offers far less. Right now, I can pick any powerset combo from one of four ATs and be sure that I'll have a perfectly serviceable character all the way through. It may not be great, but it also won't be crap. Toss me into a pool of unsorted options, though, and nine times out of ten I'll make something that simply doesn't work, because I'm simply not that good at figuring these things out, and because figuring these things out simply isn't fun for me.

This is exactly what I see as the biggest problem with the base builder. Sure, item positioning is so versatile that you can create almost anything just out of square blocks, but it takes so much work fine-tuning and so much artistry which I don't have that I did it once (with mediocre results) and I don't intend to try again. It's a major pain in the *** for not a lot of return, comparatively. Or, for another example, take Alex Dai's pic in my sig. It's AWESOME and easily the best Xanta's ever looked by a MILE. It's better than anything any pre-fab costume creator could ever have created because an actual artist - and a very talented one at that - worked on this. But I can't draw for crap, so I could never have been able to do this. The game, however, let me do it because it didn't ask me to be a great artist to make a decent costume. In much the same way, it doesn't ask me to be a great player to figure out how to make a character not die repeatedly (turns out the answer was "don't play anything without status protection").

Basically, "liberating" myself from the confines of a game system that professionals have designed has, historically, brought me more ill than good. It's a lot more work for a lot less fun.

I realise that's probably the case and my terminology was inconsistent, but I was under the impression you got what I was referring to - that the final critter to-hit before accuracy remains the same between having 30% defence against common enemies and 16% defence vs. Incarnate enemies. I'm honestly not sure what your "normalised" mitigation approach is. I remember asking for a specific formula and an explanation of why it was chosen a few times over the years, but for the life of me I can't remember one or an explanation in general.

So I think you misread the question. Could you explain to me how you reached your "mitigation" number step by step so I can see what I'm missing and where our terminology differs?

OK, I could work with that. In what cases is that not true, and can it be true when considering just one character's own mitigation independent of any others?

Um... What? What are you referring to by "now?" And how is my SR Scrapper as effective against Incarnate critters as a SO SR Scrapper is against non-Incarnate critters? My SR Scrapper IS using Singe Origin enhancements, or at most Common Inventions (I'd have to look). Sticking to just that simpler way of building was something I held very dearly, but it's clear to me now that the game is balanced around the "average" player, and SOs and Commons are apparently significantly below average.

I don't follow what you're saying.

Dink, I'm one of the biggest proponents for a non-chormey version of Celestial Armour, but even I have to say that just replacing the textures is probably not a good idea. I mean, yes, I HATE the current ones and seeing your proposed pic makes me incredibly happy that Lighteater will get a much better costume, but I just can't condone pulling a costume piece out from under people's existing costumes. One of the reasons you don't get many people commenting on how much they liked the original Celestial Armour is they're typically happy and thus not motivated to come and complain about it. You're very likely to hear from those people, however, when and if you actually make it their problem.

I don't want to come off like the jerk here, especially since you pretty much did exactly what I and others asked, but I'd honestly feel bad knowing my satisfaction cost people theirs. Stealing from Jack to pay Jill, essentially, does make some people happy, but it happens at the cost of making others unhappy. Please, speak with your Lead and see about adding duplicate pieces for the set. The new look is MUCH better than the old, but the old look will certainly have its fans. It just feels wrong to upset them just because I have a different sense of aesthetics than they do.

That's kind of what my problem is, as well. What you're describing is kind of an in-between character, which isn't a BAD thing in itself, but also kind of isn't what I'm referring to. I know JUST giving this character great ranged damage AND great defence isn't going to happen, but I don't really think the right solution is to give it weak damage and weak defence. Sure, statistically that might make it "even," but that's why I'm trying to come up with a gimmick that lets the set be both tougher and more deadly than basic balance would suggest, which is offset by the opportunity cost of getting to that point, so to speak.

Consider Titan Weapons, for example. I realise some people don't like how slow the set is, but at the same time it's easily one of the game's strongest melee sets, both in single target damage and in AoE, and yet this is possible because of Momentum - the set only performs as well as it does if the user manages the set's gimmick right. To me, that's always been what gimmicks should be about - allowing something to be stronger than it should, but at the cost being harder to achieve. What gimmicks SHOULDN'T be - and Dual Pistols demonstrates this to abundant evidence - is a reason to make something WEAKER with the belief that the gimmick will then bring it up to par. That just doesn't work.

I'm trying to figure out how we can make something that's tough to kill yet isn't great at tanking, and which has solid damage at range, yet isn't obviously better than all other ranged classes. It would have to be something very drastic to permit this, and self-rooting is that kind of "drastic" I'm talking about. It's probably not a good idea, but it's sort of what I'd consider the balance point of "annoyance vs. utility."

Again, I wouldn't mind a ranged/defence hybrid that's mid-range in terms of numbers, but I don't think that'd really work as the "power armour gatling gun guy" since neither the power armour will be that great nor the gatling gun that powerful.

That actually IS a factor in Space Marine, which is my source of inspiration. A "braced" heavy weapons guy has a firing arc of about 45 degrees. Trying to shoot past this causes the character to start turning around veeery slowly. A full turn takes around 2 or 3 seconds of shuffling in place. It's not a big deal when you've picked a decent spot to "hole up" and either enemies are only coming from one direction or you have someone to cover your back, but when you start getting swarmed, you're pretty much SOL. About the only thing that makes sense is to uproot, stomp in place, run away, toss a stun grenade and brace again farther away from the enemies who mobbed you, so that now they're all relatively within 45 degrees of where you are.

I'm not sure this can work in City of Heroes, though, not if we want to reuse our existing powersets. The reason for this is most action games give you trash critters that you can usually shred in a couple of shots of auto fire, meaning you can mow them down in groups. Unless your set is all AoE, that's really not going to happen in this game, just because our attacks are slower and most of our critters don't go down in a single shot outside of corner cases. I'm actually starting to see flaws in this design in general, since critters in City of Heroes will basically swarm you and you'll end up fighting most of your fights in melee anyway.

That's kind of why I say my idea probably won't work, just because this isn't the kind of game where you can reasonably expect to knock out most enemies before they reach you as you really should expect with a character like this. Or maybe it's just late and I'm sleeping. It's possible.

It's not the position of their hands, it's the position of their faces that does it for me. While he may be scowling, you can see the Statesman look longingly into the robot's cold eyes, while it's expressionless face appears to be lost in the hero's gaze.

I don't know, maybe that's just me. But consider what people's head do right before they kiss, at least in the big "fireworks and applause" end of a romantic comedy.

You're kind of not arguing the point you're presenting, though. Superman is kind of a bad example, since Kryptonians tend to not manifest their powers unless they're in the light of Earth's yellow sun and a lot of it comes to experience with those powers, but that's the clincher: Equal super powers don't cancel each other out like they do in Dragonball Z. If you have two characters of the same "power level," it doesn't just come down to who has better martial arts. Let me explain, and use Inna as an example:

Even were Inna's entire race not extinct (long story, involving the end of all created things, not relevant), were she to square off against another of her kind, the outcome would not come down to brawling any more so than two powerful wizards squaring off would come down to a grapple. Were Inna to fight another of her kind, what would decide victory is skill AT USING HER POWERS. What I'm getting at is that "fighting" in the sense of the power pool doesn't even enter into it, since what decides battles is the super powers.

I realise you can just as easily say "but that's just your concept," but my concept is informed by what the game presents me with. Let's ignore the Incarnate game for the sake of argument, as that's tied to nebulous canon and just stick to the basic level 50 game. At level 50, you fight power armour energy weapon space aliens, giant robots, platoons of heavily-armed soldiers, sorcerers of immense power and so on and so forth. This is typically the point where, in a Fantasy setting, a basic non-magical warrior kind of starts falling behind wizards who throw fireballs and kill people with a single power word. Basically, once you get past level 40, common human fitness just doesn't matter as much because you're never put in a position to really use it. Unlike in old arcade fighting games, you're NOT swarmed with club-wielding goons to beat up. Even basic enemy grunts have super powers and heavy weapons.

What I'm saying is this asks you to choose between a genuine super power and something that's not a super power, and that's just not a choice I find is appropriate in a game that's predicated on super heroes. I'd lump brawling as not-a-super-power in the same category as swimming very well or running without tiring or the ability to use any computer console that exists in the world. If it HAS to be a choice, it should be a choice made within its own context, which is the context of non-super skills that the game really could benefit from, if it weren't just a combat game.

Generally speaking, I've always had a problem when genuine super powers, like say Touch of Fear causing people to become terrorised, are mixed in with faux powers representing common effects, such as Spinning Strike causing people to be terrorise because... It's shocking? One is the power of the netherworld creating spectral fear that doesn't even take bravery into account. The other is just "you were startled" and yet robots and creatures made of rock will tremble in fear of your spin kick. It's why I have a BIG problem with Taunt in this game, as well - because taunting things and having them attack you for no reason should only work on intelligent but stupid creatures and expressly NOT work on mindless storm clouds, robots or highly-trained soldiers. I don't like when common powers are mixed in with super powers and given even a roughly even footing. It just makes the actual super powers come off that much less convincing.

And yes, I'm aware of the ******* Batman, but the ******* Batman plays it smart. He doesn't defeat giant robots by karate-chopping them in the back of the head 150 times and dodging bullets while he's doing it.

My own ideological differences aside, this should be enough. A power doesn't have to do much for me, just so long as it does SOMETHING. I have, for instance, taken Challenge (the single-target Presence taunt) on Brutes who already had and used their own in-set proper auto-hit Taunt, and I didn't feel like a fool for taking it. Sure, it's next to useless in the face of my much superior version of it, but it's good for single-pulling so I get at least SOME use out of the thing, and I get that use for no slot cost. That in itself makes me feel better about the power, and it will make me feel better still when it auto-swaps for a placate power that my Brutes don't have an alternative of.

Yes, I too remember being invited to a team and told to stay at the door while other people played the game for me. It's what inspired me to start my business of going to rich people's houses to eat their food for them. I was SO doing them a favour, no matter what the judge says!

I do spend quite a bit of time fawning over my costumes, actually. Why I say this is the City of Heroes costume creator, for as broad as it is, will always be limited. You'll always run into clipping, inappropriate textures, item theme mismatch, inexact colours and so forth. I've discarded more than a few costumes over minor details like this, but at some point you just have to let it go and work with what you have. It's either that or don't make the characters, which isn't an easy choice, I admit.

Again - all of that isn't to discourage you from requesting these pieces. Far from it - keep pushing. People will support you. Just be aware that our development team moves VERY slowly on most costume requests that need actual art time and haven't been massively popular at a player meet. You may end up having to "fake" it until the right costumes come about, or just keep the characters on hold. I'm just trying to offer alternatives, but I know what you're going through, believe me.

Basically, my point with the self-rooting system was to give a character perhaps more power than he really should have, but at the cost of sacrificing a very basic strength in this game, which is the ability to reposition both to avoid danger and to line up your shots better. I get that it's not everyone's thing, but it was the only one I could come up with that's not just stat-jiggling.

Honestly, that pic makes me thin the Statesman is about to make out with the ACU. It's probably just the way they're positioned, but that's the vibe I'm getting.

As for Marauder's loading screen, I actually like it. Well, I like everything about it but Marauder's ridiculous grin. It's not as bad as Penny's trollface, but it's close. Frankly, I don't see why this was considered a good idea. OK, I get it - Rob Leifeld perpetual scowling on a loading screen wouldn't be a good idea on a loading screen, but there has to be a middle ground between boiling rage and pyrovision.

Honestly, I'd have just had the man use a neutral face, just slightly angry and irritable, but calm enough to not be threatening. This cheesy grin seems like the face of a completely different character.

Mostly because it comes down to stats. I can say for a fact that I will never see a point to playing a Blaster if I got an AT with the same numbers for its Blast primary but also a secondary that doesn't suck across the board. Yes, I know Blaster secondaries were strengthened recently, but they're still one of the weakest, least useful powersets in the entire game. If I can have Blasters but with even Scrapper sets (and Scrapper survival numbers), then I'd never even look at Blasters again. I'd still play Scrappers because "Sword Blast" isn't as cool as Sword Melee, but that's just why a sort of balance must be maintained.

That balance, I assume, will seek to lower the stats on everything, and I hope a "gimmick" of some sort will allow fewer numbers to go less low down.

The run cycle does speed up with Super Speed, but up to a point. It's about as fast as Spring + Swift + Quickness and nowhere near enough to match the lateral speed of Super Speed. Moreover, our "running" animation is actually a jogging animation useful for running long distances at a fairly slow pace. It holds up more or less at Sprint speeds, yes, but at Super Speed, there really should be a running animation which feels more energetic. It feels as out of place as Hovering forward at the Afterburner speed cap - you may be able to do it (I think?) but it just looks goofy.

That's kind of why I use Prestige Power Slide. It looks even harder to believe, but the slide's slow, fluent movements actually enhance the feeling of sliding. If you want a decent "super speed" run, I wouldn't go to any of our competitors, but instead check out Saints Row the Third. That has a much, much better feeling of actually moving quickly both by sound and visual effects and with a much more energetic sprinting animation.

Spoilers: The ending of Mass Effect asks you to make choices on who to send on which task

Actually, you bring up a very good point here. If I insist that everyone might as well have fitness, shouldn't I have a problem with Super Reflexes having Quickness in there? And the truth is that... No, I don't, not really. I don't generally interpret my super reflexes characters as better sprinters, not in the "Flash" sense, but it does make sense that a character with SUPER REFLEXES would be faster than most. I'd actually have to ponder this particular point, because this really does bring up an example where my logic conflicts with itself, and I don't know how I feel about it yet.

If I may offer a cop-out: I don't consider Quickness (or Lightning Reflexes, there's an out-of-place power for you) themselves to be character-defining so much as I consider that just part of the broader concept of what Super Reflexes (and Electric Armour, respectively) bring. That's kind of like picking up Stone Armour and finding out my character is slower. I wouldn't make the slowness a separate character trait so much as just an aspect of using Stone Armour. This - and here's a revelation I hadn't spotted before - is actually a result of the rather... Un-diverse way in which specific powersets in this game are built. While I personally like having about as many power choices as I can reasonably take (18 powerset, plus 2 "travel," plus 4 "epic" out of 24), but I never really saw there being much of a choice in how I interpret that powerset to behave.

Let me give you an example: People often request a version of Fiery Melee that doesn't have swords or that's all sword or all breath or some such. When this is brought up, I see it, but because of how the game is designed... I never really consider that an option. If I actually could pick what to build SR for - whether it be expert dodging or extreme precision or precognition or what have you - then I might be more inclined to see those options, but as the game is... I guess I've trained myself to not see them.

Again - you make a very good point with your example.

Well... Consider other posts in this thread interpreting Stamina as something besides just basic human fitness. Zaloopa, for instance, makes a pretty astute re-interpretation of Stamina for the Steel Rook, as basically the representation of the power armour's greater staying power, which is a very fair point. But if we can interpret Stamina loosely enough to claim that, I'm sure it's simple enough to explain away how an old man who uses psionics is better at "fighting in close quarters" with special psychic techniques, as well as how a girl who uses gadgets can use those gadgets in close combat. It's not always necessary, but if it became so, it's easy to explain. Now, if you're very particular about "boxing" in general... Well, Super Strength's alternate animations are already kind of half-way there. In fact, they do a much better job of depicting boxing than the "Boxing" power.

What I'm saying is that, to me, that kind of "minor" aspect of a character is best done through visual customization of what your powers resembled without necessarily having "yet another attack" that's just named something else. That's actually my BIGGEST problem with a lot of pools - they're so boring to look at. A lot of them are pretty much just stats, and I can claim I have any stats I want. I can't claim I can fly unless I visibly and physically detach from the ground and stay airborne for long periods of time. That's why I value travel pools so much different than others - because they allow me to DO something a normal character couldn't. Throwing a punch or flailing a kick really isn't that special. I get that there's a broader idea behind it, but that set... And Leadership, kind of... Just doesn't let characters do anything remarkable. Again - if I want to see my character engage in fisticuffs, I can fire up Brawl. Hell, make that power worth using for anything but a Fury builder and I will never need Kick or Boxing again.

Yes, seriously.

That actually brings up another problem I have with the Fighting and Fitness pools in particular - they're built around a human character. I have a BIG problem with power suppression fields as a general concept, but the way they're used is more player restrictions than in-character concepts, because a power suppression field is not a power suppression field, it's a "humanising field" that forces all characters to behave like humans. Ghost whose normal stat is intangible? Tough, you're visible and you have to walk. Avatar of a lost goddess made of space matter and held together by nothing more than her power and her will? You don't fall apart, you just walk. That's be like walking into Studio B and having my robotic arm fall off and a human arm regrow in its place while I'm there, because having an arm with hydraulic pistons in it is kind of a super power.

Why I bring this up is to challenge the basic situation of "depowerment," for the simple fact that it just doesn't make sense for certain characters and how their powers work. If, for instance, your character is a Batman and is just usually tough and fast and smart and HIS powers are taken away... Does he get dumber? Does he get winded? Or are those not "super" powers? Because I bring up Inna again - her being able to fly and channel energy through her body is not a "super" power. It's part of what her species is able to do. It is, as I'm fond of saying about that particular character, "hers by right of blood." A focal point of her entire character is that her nemesis cannot use the power she wields while Inna still lives, basically. There are no circumstances that I can imagine where she would lose her power... And yet still be alive. Thus, for her, to take down opponents in a physical confrontation is achieved via energy-channelling punches.

I don't dispute what you're saying, not in spirit. But it's really only true for a subset of characters. And considering the dev team graciously re-wrote the Natural Origin description to include "or maybe you're not human at all," I do believe that's an aspect of the game that needs to be kept in mind. Do new powersets and/or power pools make sense for non-humans. And you don't even have to go wildly out of line to think of weird examples. Just consider - would it work for a robot? Would it work for zombie? Would it work for a wizard? More or less. You can throw in "ninja" and "pirates" for good measure, but it's not necessary. And I really don't think either Fighting or Fitness really work. Leadership, I'm kind of up in the air on.

Deus ex machina In my fictional world, people don't get transported to the dimension of non-death. If they get shot in the head, cut in half or shoulder-tackled at the speed of sound, they die. Hospitals are a great asset for an MMO where permadeath for the player means permadeath for the developing company, but they take much of the dramatic tension out of pretty much any story with the possible exception of Soul Reaver. That one had Raziel remark how he succeeds through an embarrassing series of death and failure, though I may be paraphrasing. That's good for some characters, but in general, it's best to keep the stakes high.

As I said, I'm on the fence about Leadership. On the one hand, it's kind of just stats, but you do make a good point - "leadership" IS something remarkable. That was kind of why I made the point - I have a number of characters that would specifically NOT make sense to have Leadership. I can't say the same about fighting. Maybe if I made non-combatants, but that ship sailed when the game stopped trying to make "team-only" ATs and let everyone have a slice of the Scrapper pie. Yeah, you CAN make the argument that maybe a character is an expert archer but is crap in a fight and will just get grabbed by the upper arm and dragged off to a dungeon, but... To me, "fighting" just isn't a super power.

Unless it IS a super power, in which case there's Street Justice and Martial Arts and Martial Fighting and - if I had my way - an Epic to do with this for every AT that doesn't already have one. Like I said before, if Fighting were an Epic pool and came with more than just "back alley brawling," then I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it, since it would serve a point for ATs that don't have access to this, but ATs that already have "fighting" powersets would get a version of it that would be considerably more appropriate to their AT.

At the end of the day... I just don't want the game to ask us to choose between super powers and common powers. Common powers should, as far as I'm concerned, be implied. We don't need a power pool to be able to swim. We don't need a power pool to be able to use complex computers. We don't need a power pool to be able to run a marathon at sprint speed and never be winded. That sort of thing comes with the territory, and when "tired breathing" sound effects were added to running, people reacted so negatively it never made it off Test.

That's not to say I don't think "common" powers can ever have a place in this game. Hacking, detective skills, persuasion, being able to defuse bombs and so forth aren't native to all super heroes. But this is not something I'd cross together with a super power pick. The old abandoned SSOCwhatever - the skill system - was something I'd have supported because it made a very clear point to segregate the super powers and the common powers into separate systems. Because let's face it - right now, Fighting asks us to be good at brawling INSTEAD of shooting energy out of our hands or flying. That shouldn't be a choice in a super hero game. NOT being fit just isn't necessary for this type of game.