Starsman

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The reason I mentioned the time difference is because that's what he's going to use to show his Defender is broken.

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Im not implying the time should not be questioned, just that even if it was reanalyzed and adjusted it still would be irrelevant to an efficiency discussion. Even if he said 4 hours or 30 minutes, the amount of time was not meaningful and tossed out of the court room.

While judging one should not even taint his future opinions by looking at invalid evidence. That's why I personally avoided it in my post.

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IF he was aiming to compare ATs the use of those powers would be a huge foul that would compromise everything.

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And you're the mind reader now? You know he's not using them on his scrapper?

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I also think I noted another option about simply IF he wanted to play defensively. I just state IFs, all though, do question the final tactics used.

Let me put it in even shorter words as my pervious one again seem to have been too verbose:

He used the wrong powers for the situation. Test is inaccurate and irrelevant.

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Okay, there you guys go, updated spreadsheet with level range limiters in groups of 10. Should be sufficient enough.

(And also I'm a chick)

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Out of curiosity, how did you handle critters with multiple sources of resistance and/or toggles (Toggles being notorious for only one critter in a spawn being allowed to use a toggle at once, and then, only for 15 seconds at a time...)

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Castle, if this is the case, then the Possessed Scientists are either broken or just not obeying the rules. I fought a group of Earth Melee/FF Possessed Scientists in the Portal Corp parking lot yesterday, and despite having 2 level 30 Acc IOs in my attacks, I ended up with less than 9% chance to-hit, apparently due to their overlapping dispersion bubbles.

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Sure you didn't aggro two overlapping spawns? A group is a spawn, if you got 2 groups, each can have one toggle up.

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First, putting it on a "poor DPA attack" won't matter. Builds would become catered to reaching the magical recharge number required to turn their melee character into a "PermaBreaker". You'd have to set the debuff period so short to compensate that it would become a useless attribute for this purpose, which leads into my next issue...

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Actually, PermaBreaker is not what I attempt to avoid, instead I aim for it. Bad DPA attacks already are in very low recharge. Spamming them all the time just lowers your DPS, they tend to have bad damage/cast time ratios. Adding them to your attack chain lowers your dps, spamming them, in some cases, destroys it. This means that going into "armor breaker" mode would still result in lesser DPS than doing your normal attack chain against a regular foe. If the resist was low enough, like 5%, you may even be lowering your output relative than just sucking in the lower damage and keep going normally.



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Stacking Breakers. Or more specifically, stacking a damage type that a breaker... breaks. You run your melee in, hit your breaker, and the rest of the team spams the appropriate attack. If this doesn't concern you, then perhaps the next will...

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As noted: breaker is meant to be perma. Setting the Resist Cap to zero can't be taken any lower. 5 Armor Breakers on to of each-other would still keep the resist cap at zero.

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completely rip AVs a new one without trying.

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This is like saying that fighting an AV that does not has resist to my damage type would be as easy as not trying. However, I actually would make the Armor Breaker behave different with AVs, where it perhaps only sets the cap to 20% against AVs.

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Except I could have done the very same thing he did, and beat the mission only half as quickly as his Scrapper did (around 30-35 minutes).

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Ah the time is one point I did not even bother going into because the tactic itself was so flawed that I figured it was entirely irrelevant.

I have no in game experience with FF or Energy Blast (in any set, few attacks in my lowbie dom though) So I can't say by experience how long that would take. I have not taken the time to crunch numbers either. So I can't comment on the time other than what I stated in my first sentence: the tactic was so flawed it became irrelevant to a discussion of endurance efficiency.

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Ultimo just doesn't play the game very well and he wants the game to change so he can continue to play it badly, except he wants his bad play to suddenly become good play. I do not support this.

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I can't talk for him but I do think the endurance disparity exists and is a subtle issue that is hard to notice but subliminally strong to the point where some things will feel more fun than other without obvious conscious reasoning. I didn't always used to think about this until I started looking into the possibility that the people mentioning it may be right. Knowing that Arcanaville actually thinks there is merit to the issue reassures me I'm not crazy.

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Starsman, the fact that you're even attempting to defend a build/player that states it took him over 3 hours to get through a mission on heroic with ANYTHING makes me sad.

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I'm not defending him. I'm trying to accuse him of the right crime. We know nothing of his build so far, so we can't judge his build.

We know his tactic, though. And I agree that it was the wrong tactic to follow for the given threat and desired defeat rate.

Perhaps I went too verbose going into the details making you miss my point: in summary I said he used too much endurance heavy control against low threat foes.

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For a player that's been around long enough to have sands of mu and the wand or staff?

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IF he was aiming to compare ATs the use of those powers would be a huge foul that would compromise everything. I don't know if that's why he didnt use the powers though. He may be magic origin using the wand. Since his mind was set on self preservation mode opted to use powers with knockback, entirely discarding the use of the wand. Never mind that killing would had been a more effective option even for survival (due to faster kills) he assumed (admitedly wrong assumption) that knock back would do a better job at keeping him healthy.

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There's so much BS in that statement that he's going to need a landmover the size of a small stadium to dig himself out of it.

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I would use different words but yes, he dig himself a big hole there. Unfortunately, as soon as a rabid dog sees a wounded prey they decide to jump him like... rabid dogs and shred him apart. I rather point at him and tell him what he did wrong so next time he runs the same path he does not fall in the same hole and perhaps come out with more accurate comparisons.

This may help me champion the "Armor Breaker" system.

The idea is a single target attack on every melee set (yes only melee sets) that will "break" resistances on a single target for a limited amount of time. The method:

Detoggle + Resist Cap set to zero to a specific damage type. If you are MA, you set the resist cap to Smashing to zero. If you are katana, you set the resist cap to lethal to zero, etc etc.

This makes sure no one does more damage than base against foes without resistance but helps break the resistance disadvantage in a single target fashion.

The effect should be added to the worst DPA ST attack in the set. Intentionally, it should not be optimal to do this on a power you would normally use in an optimized attack chain.

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It took my Defender (FF/EB) 3 and a half hours to do this mission.

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Your defender is poorly built.

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You read minds? Not to be offensive but we know his defender was played way too defensively, we don't know if he had more attacks but choose these to play it safe. Based on the last time I played my defender (way too long ago) i would say such tactic was overkill against minions but would had been required against bosses (certain bosses even if they went down to lt as I had big issues with certain power selection more than the rank damage itself.)

I'm afraid I have to agree that the endurance management on Ultimo's character was just bad. Force bolt does .2 damage and uses 5.2 end, it's a waste of 80% endurance. Given this accounted for half his chain it was burning endurance 66% faster than it should. I'm not saying he may not had been forced to this defensive oriented tactics to survive (nor am I saying he was required) but the endurance budget was mostly used for self preservation than for offensive.

His end issues, though had NOTHING to do with the use of Power Bolt, although the power is bad DPS, bad DPS does nothing for your endurance efficiency, as a matter of fact, bad dps chains actually are the equivalent of slowing down, as proposed earlier by BillZ, witch still makes you kill slower than your damage modifier dictates, but gives you slightly more time to recover endurance. I don't think at this level with limited attack selection that makes much difference, thought. At such a level Power Bolt may even be the best attack to use, when no full attack chain is available it's better to relly on attacks that offer better damage over time than ones that offer better damage per second as their quick recharge makes them net in faster killing, but again, only if you don't have a full attack chain.

Whether the Power Bolt itself is too expensive for what it does is an entirely different topic, though. Although it relates to end issues it's not exactly specific to the AT and much more specific to the power.

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Controllers specifically were designed to not be able to solo very SLOOOOOW, they had next to no attacks.

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Fixed that statement for you. I solo'd a Controller in Issue 1. Did so quite well.

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Once he got his pets and loaded up in hasten to summon herds of pets, which was not intended and eventually nerfed. That was, though, one of the points where the devs decided no AT should really be that slow at soloing and doubled the damage the AT did from level 1 thanks to containment while nerfing the pets they found overpowered.

The full intention to this was to make the Controller a solo AT, not just a team one. It was from that patch that the Controller was considered redesigned to solo.

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Okay, there you guys go, updated spreadsheet with level range limiters in groups of 10. Should be sufficient enough.

(And also I'm a chick)

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Out of curiosity, how did you handle critters with multiple sources of resistance and/or toggles (Toggles being notorious for only one critter in a spawn being allowed to use a toggle at once, and then, only for 15 seconds at a time...)

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Castle, the chart she posts seem to list a raw resist and if you hover over the critter it then shows how low high resistance goes with the toggles up. Carnie Strongmen, for instance, show 1.2 lethal damage (denoting weakness) and if you hover the value it notes .7 with Temp Invulnerability.

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I think you're right on an AoE hold, but as for the rest... I mean I can post all those powers if you like.
Some of them you of course get from Epic, but they're there.
Ice has 2 ranged holds alone.


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We are talking about any primary. Ice is a very specific one. Although some do, quite a few blaster primaries don't get such tools, and the ones that do are in 20 second timers.

All doms, at minimum, get their one st hold at 8 seconds recharge.

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Slow and steady wins the race?

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The tanker by default is already moving slowly at 64% the speed, you also want him to stop every few steps to catch a breath on top of moving slow? The final speed is 38% the speed. That's drastically slower and definitively not steady if you have to pause.

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From what I understand. ALL the ATs were designed to be played solo all the way to 50.

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At first this was not true.

<ul type="square">[*]Controllers specifically were designed to not be able to solo, they had next to no attacks.
[*]Defenders were meant to be originally horrendously inefficient to solo due to extremely low damage.
[*]Blasters were meant to be dangerous to solo but, with smarts and perhaps the right power set, soloable. The devs actually feared kiting would become the norm and certain critter xp was specifically nerfed due to blaster hunting them exclusively.
[*]Scrappers were the best well rounded soloist, with enough survivability to stand toe to toe with the foe and enough damage to kill fast.
[*]The tanker was meant to last against the same foes as the scrapper but kill them at a slower speed with increased safety. The fact that tanker damage has already been boosted in the past is testament to damage being one of the tanker's main roles even if it's not their dedicated team role.[/list]
After design intention, though, the devs found the greatest virtue of the game was soloability and decided everyone should be able to solo at comparable speeds, although certain ATs should have advantages the advantages should not be extreme. I dare bet the devs don't expect scrappers to have a +160% advantage over tankers. My endurance bottleneck suggestion still gives scrapper +56.5% advantage, due to pure superior damage.

The fact that endurance cost does not change with damage modifiers, if I recall correctly, was an artifact that was not designed upon, it was something that actually happened on it's own. Arcanaville posted her full load of evidence on the matter a while back on a thread on the same topic at the tanker forums.

That's why I note "if the devs sustain", it was tossed about in a time that they themselves didnt understand the game mechanics. The first time they said that they also said scrappers should be 75% as survivable, but ironically that would indeed be broken because making scrappers take only 25% more damage than tankers would allow them to be full tanks.

The same does not hold true with damage, though. Either way, I'm staying away from asking more damage.

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tankers shouldn't be more efficient with toggles just as scrappers shouldn't be more efficient with attacks.

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Just out of curiosity though, why do scrapper gets stronger -tohit than tankers? RTTC is stronger for scrappers than tankers, for one, as are all -tohit and -damage debuffs (that would be noticed when Ice Armor gets proliferated)

Out of curiosity: how can some one that agrees dominators that can lock down everything do as much damage as they are going to do now be so against a simple endurance boost?

If castle came out tomorrow and said tankers go their damage boosted to .95, would your next post be how broken it is or how you are going to now play a fun tank? I'm seriously curious if you would be upset with him stating such a buff was in.

If one thing that change shows is that the devs don't intend to balance survivability vs damage output anywhere near as low as I propose here.

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I understand that you believe tanker damage should be raised because of this.


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I actually don't.

Asking for a damage buff would actually help, but I actually agree with you partially on being able to use our longevity at surviving without counter-intuitive slow downs.

For the record: if the devs were to sustain the "75% scrapper of damage" that has been tossed around, the tanker damage should actually be .9. But again, I personally would just rather ask for the endurance efficiency required to sustain the tanker slower killing speed.

Herding is only effective if the set has heavy AoE therefore very powerset based. It's a mid to high level phenomena that only certain builds can do. At those levels scrapper survivability is also robust enough to herd, by witch point the scrapper shows an even higher disparity against the tanker.

If you don't have one of the select sets at the proper level ranges you are forced to do loads of St damage and may be better off just going from one foe to the next.

Super Strength is pure ST all the way to 38! 39 if you consider the thing is unslotted until that level.

Now, they could modify all tanker secondaries to be AoE heavy from an early level, thing I also have suggested in the past but would require too much redesign and likely the addition of new powers into the set, something that is very unlikely to happen.

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This is a discussion forum. If all you have to contribute is "shut up" in not so many words, then you're not contributing anything.

We'd be delighted to hear your actual thoughts on the subject of discussion. If you have none, don't waste everyone's time telling us to shut up. We're enjoying the discussion. If you're not, don't read it. No one if forcing you to.

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Isn't this quote just a bit hypocritical?

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Only slightly. "Shut up if all you going to say is Shut Up" may sound hypocritical but is rather valid. It's like "never say never."

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You're still completely ignoring that the tank has the mitigation to allow him to slow his attacks down, thus allowing more time for his recovery to do its thing.

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Fair enough. Foes also regenerate though, I dont necesarely agree but It's a worthwhile test:

The tanker would have to slow down to 63% of his normal killing speed for recovery do do enough for him to kill the same challenge the target can kill. This is equivalent of gutting the tanker damage to .504. The net tanker damage ends up being 42% of the scrapper damage and that's against minnions. Against anyting else it's at 40.7%

That's not noting that even end heavier armor sets (I'm testing with the end lightest armors here) would be forced to slow even more. These sets are not necessarily more survivable.

Despite what others may say: the tanker WAS designed to solo, soloing was just not their main thing. When the game came out tankers and scrappers both were listed as solo ATs, but the tanker was noted to do so slower. Dev hearsay back in the day was that the intention was for the tanker to perform at 75% of the scrapper speed (witch btw, it does not, base tanker damage is at 67.7% of the scrapper damage vs minions, 64.6% vs everything else)

Do you actually agree the Tanker should kill at 40% the scrapper speed?

Edit:
Correction: against anything other than minions the tanker has to actually go down to 60% of the speed to achieve the same, taking the tanker all the way down to 38.7%. not 40%. I forgot to take into account the higher regen rate of non-minions.

For time perspectives: this means the tanker would be forced to take 85.74 seconds to defeat what the scrapper defeats in 32.47 seconds. That's 53.27 extra seconds, almost an extra minute to kill what the scrapper killed in nearly half a minute, not because the tanker lower damage but because his endurance became a bottleneck.

Assuming the same dps bottleneck: Defenders manage to kill
1.70 Bosses

I think from now on I'll just use the minion and lt examples since everyone is so focused on the EB data point. I wont include those again in the results.

For comparison:

Minnions Defeated:
Blaster 14.35
Scrapper 9.97
Tanker 6.74
Defender 7.32

Lts Defeated
Blaster 7.14
Scrapper: 5.19
Tanker: 3.33
Defender 3.61


Why the defender kills more with that end than tanks? Because he is not running shields. Also that's not accounting for the primary, certain defender primaries boost endurance and/or damage or may debuff foe resistance, etc etc.

Umbral, I'm not really interested in convincing you specifically about the merits of such a change. At this time all I care to dissmiss is the false statement that the tanker can kill the same things that the scraper can given enough time.

I'm replying to Bill because he appeared to care for my evidence.

The only thing I do have to say to your post right now, though is that yes, I have played blasters. Fire Fire to be precise, arguably the most dangerous to play solo. I used to dismiss "ranged as a form of defense" until I played that guy. In certain situations, range made this blaster more survivable than my tanker, and no, that's no hyperbole. Staying at range (via hover or smart immobs) can keep you at arms reach from some devastating attacks to witch your specific tanker may have holes.

Whoever denies that range can be an effective defense either does not play blasters AND melee ATs regularly, or simply happens to always play in teams.

Side note: relying on range as a form of defense happens to be endurance free. When 100% of your end can go to damage, you end up killing much more than you can with a scrapper. I admit that was a shocking discovery.

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Then I'm not following your math. As long as the tank's damage output exceeds the enemy's regen rate, and his mitigation is greater than the incoming damage, he could let himself regain endurance with base recovery and use nothing but brawl.

It's like you're ignoring that base recovery and mitigation exist.

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OK BillZBubba, here we go:

First of all a disclaimer: While typing this i found a minor accuracy error in my calculations. Nothing huge but something that will make certain numbers look different.

First of all, we have to determine how fast we are attacking. If we are on a .92 damage per second bottleneck, thats as fast as we can go.

This means we burn 4.78 end per second.
With stamina 3 slotted, everyone recovers 2.48 endurance per second.

For now, I'll ignore toggle usage, so this is a net loss of 2.30 endurance per second.

Now we simply divide to find that with such an end consumption endurance is exhausted after exactly 43.48 seconds.

Now, things fluctuate by level but relatively speaking they remain the same. Still we need an HP table for critters to fight. For now, I'll stick to EBs, not due to goals but because it's easier to deal with a single foe instead of the 14 minions the scrapper can kill with the end the tanker only kills 9.

We already know how much DS per second we can toss out: .92.

For the scrapper, accounting for average crit rate, this means 76.22 damage per second.
For the tanker, it means 49.27 damage per second.

Keep in note, both are going to last the same amount of time dealing those different levels of DPS.


Now, things are different across levels so we got to pick a specific level. Let's pick a level where stamina is fully slotted but is still low level enough: 25.

At this level the EB has 2112.80 HP. He regenerates 13% of this per minute, or 4.58 hp per second. This means the net damage dealt is:

Scrapper: 71.64
Tanker: 44.69

Over a period of 43.48 seconds, the respective ATs can deal a net total (dealt - regenerated) of:
Scrapper: 3114.84
Tanker: 1943.27

If you divide this by the EB base HP it means that the scrapper killed one EB and was 47% done with the next. The tanker only got to 92% before it was forced to seek endurance from some external source.

I can recalculate everything again with toggles running, for the consistency of previous examples, .78 end per second.

Cutting to the chase, this ends in the scrapper killing 1.1 EBs and the tanker only going 69% through one.

This does not stick at EBs, other ranks are also yielding a much longer race for the scrapper in much shorter time the tanker can't match even in a slower race (with .78 from toggles

Scrapper/Tank
Minnions Defeated: 9.97/6.74
Lts Defeated: 5.19/3.33
Bosses Defeated: 2.49/1.58
EBs Defeated: 1.10/0.69
AVs Defeated(chipped really): 18%/8%

The change I propose would simply give the tanker the time he needs to do the same killing, he still would have to do it as slowly as he would had before. Even with such a change the tanker would be done when the scrapper is half way done with his next round of combat.

If you are interested in playing with the calculator, I can set it up in Google Docs for you to mess with, can't really make it fully public because I can't restrict people to only specific cell changes and I had already been forced to deal with hourly rollbacks due to users deleting everything.

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Then I'm not following your math. As long as the tank's damage output exceeds the enemy's regen rate, and his mitigation is greater than the incoming damage, he could let himself regain endurance with base recovery and use nothing but brawl.

It's like you're ignoring that base recovery and mitigation exist.

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Once I sit back on my laptop where I have all the code I'll post you the full methodology.

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Then shouldn't Scrappers and everyone else get an increase in their regeneration and resistance to allow them to survive fights that are going to last longer?

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No but ironically most ATs do get the tools needed to survive, too. From holds to "team" buffs and debuffs that affect self. If so desired, defenders get just as much resist and defense from pools as tankers do!

The only AT that gets next to no tools is the blaster yet he is given two tools:

Range, that allows him to be exposed to less damage (all critters have less ranged attacks and these are always weaker than their melee attacks)

Damage: enough damage to make sure the fight does not last longer.

Soloing the AT, though, was intended to be hard from the start and require a lot of skill. It holds true.

Tankers, though where from day one described as an AT that would solo effectively but slowly, and I don't ask for a change on the slow part, only on the effectively part.

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As to the metaphorical couch potato to marathon runner analogy, it's hyperbole.

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Off course it's hyperbole. The right analogy would be a body builder racing a marathon versus a marathon runner. It would had been a perfect analogy that way. The couch potato would not even get to the race before getting tired.

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The other thing that you're doing is paying attention exclusively to solo considerations. On a team (which should be the primary location of comparison anyway),

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Because in teams, endurance efficiency means nothing, only the ability to kill fast means something and it's something the tanker does not aquire from improved endurance efficiency.

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You're also ignoring inspiration contribution

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There is where any argument ends. Inspirations are not part of any balancing and are not available on demand. This argument is a dead end.

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You keep coming up with situations in which you can discount the advantages of the Tanker to make the offensive deficit seem out of proportion with the vast increase to personal survivability

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Witch means next to nothing solo. You said it yourself, its all wasted. Heck using your own logic: the scrapper gets enough survival bonus to survive any solo challenge in the game, in solo play, his secondary is just as effective as his primary. I am not even asking for the tanker secondary to be as effective as the scrappers, the notion of endurance efficiency does not even land in that realm, it just allows the tanker to keep going until he does what the scrapper finished 50% faster.

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For someone who likes to think of themselves as considering everything within their calculations and concepts, you're continually ignoring the contributions of the higher hp and superior damage mitigation capabilities that work in a multiplicative manner that are designed as the offset to their lower endurance efficiency in attacks.

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You mean those things that bring nothing to solo play because they are only useful in teams? Precisely the teams where endurance efficiency will mean nothing?

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Well, with build options

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It is not a build option for a dom to have a st immob, a hold and an aoe mez. Every single primary has those.

If you consider primaries you just consider what they all have. Blasters: full ranged attack chains, doms: mez.

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The tank will finish. He just takes longer.

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Im not guessing. Without additional endurance sources the tanker will run out of endurance or be stuck fighting weaker foes.

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Why does the tank have to fight at the same pace as the scrapper when he has the mitigation to let him take longer to finish the race?

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The question is not about fighting at the same pace, I am not asking for them to fight any faster only the endurance to be able to fight longer to finish the same encounters. Again, not guesses this is pure math accounting for boss/eb regeneration.