Starsman

I think some scrappers didnt had any critical attack powers, and the ones that did ony had one power that was able to critical. At the time, it was the way a 7.11 BI attack ended up doing similar to a tanker 9 BI attack without letting them do one shots left and right, they did it only to not allow the attacks to do too much front load damage. So with or without icon, you cant really say that was an inherent of the AT, it was an inherent aspect of the power itself (and these powers used to be only the very last ones so many scrappers never got far enough to even see it)


As for provoke, at first it WAS auto hit, it was nerfed in or bit before Issue 2 so it required a to hit roll.

The official strategy guide came out with the game and stated all attacks had a mag 4 taunt associated with them. I was also being a bit sarcastic on how "no wonder it works badly, it was part of the flawed initial design"


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Nope, Scrappers had Critical Hits from the beginning.

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Nop. That I am 100% sure is not so. Few (VERY few) powers had a chance to critical, but thats very far from being an hinherent ability of the AT. The inherent critical chance was added much later (at this time they just gave all powerst hat were already able to crit a higher chance to do so)

Wait, then this means the tanker is the only AT that actually had a true inherent from day one, and it just got bumped up a bit with issue 3? (was that issue 3?)!!

Like it or not, the test server IS part of their Q&A process, and everything must go trough the process to get to Live.

You dont have to Q&A for them, you can just log there and play arround unless you think its a waste of time to play there. Sometimes datamining there is all they trully need, aquiring data they will never be able to get from internal servers.

I can go and show how they damage benefit of fire/fire gets cant stand by the side of an ice/super strenght with rage (altough that may prove rage is overpowered).

If offensive was the balance metric for fire, though, why nerf the recharge on fiery embrace?

Burn is only useful in the right team with the right, very specific builds by you. Otherwise it actually destroys what you should do and the effect of that "great damage aura".

Also why is our "energy absorbtion" such a huge recharge AND has a to hit roll? I presume its due to the tiny ammount of damage it does and how "damage should not be auto hit", but id wellcome to see this power be rid off its damage component (thats not useful at all) and turned into an energy absorbtion (energy brute version, without def).

Im sorry, but all i look at it the damage potential of fire does not justifies it's lower survivability. HOWEVER, thank you. I will use this post as a redirection in all my testing and look into ways to include the damage potential of fire into this whole thing.


...

btw you aware a click self heal that is expected to be 3 sloted for recharge and animates at 1.5 seconds basicaly takes 3/60 of your maximun active (non-toggle) dps away right?

Note: sorry for all typos, have no Office on this computer.

There is a world of diference between 37 and 42. Imagine if all you had to do to get to the floor every single enemy was to turn on single sloted hover and combat jump?

And as it is now we do pay a penalty at less enemy count so we can have that "marvelous" defense while caped, meaning at AV fights, the time we need it most, we suffer penalties.

If that penalty gets removed we WILL see a nerf somewhere else to conpensate. I doubt the devs want tankers running arrond with 42 def (full invince plus tough hide and single sloted combat jump)

That reason for the debuff is stupid, but i think is actually the reason it got introduced. However I think today the debuff serves a purpose. Without it, invuln tankers will turn into monsters due to the high def plus resist in unyielding they will achieve while surrounded.

What I propose however is that the debuff gets eliminated, and they eliminate .5 def from each affected enemy in invincibility. This means, make invincibility grant a max of 15 unenhanced defense. Yes, this will technically end up being a nerf, since now you will have a max of 31.2 def while fully surrounded instead of the now possible 34 def, but with one enemy in melee range we end up better (17.16 def instead of the current 12.94 def)

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Why does it need to spend a week on test before it makes it live?

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Its bad idea to rush anything to live and make it skip testing just because. Remember updates in CoH go trough a queue, and unless its an emergency hot fix it wont skip ahead of anything. That being told there are other fixes on this patch that may require the extensive testing.

Also this is a power change, and each test release is basically a cumulative of changes done by the balance people, the art people, and the code people. Its not easy to have X thing go before some code that has to be tested troughly in such an environment.

You guys should think about giving that Frostfire a CoV named boss makeover. You know, those named bosses that look as if made with the character builder itself. Frostfire deserves to look distinctive.

Crowd control (mez effects and the such) "are beyond the scope of this guide"


Reason are a few:
1) Its hard to quantify
2) It actually would require me to get into the full Controller/Dominator balance world, and that’s a huge segment of the game on itself.
3) The only set that actually uses many of these status effect on their defensive set is Dark Armor, and they are very expensive on endurance (or even drain your own health), so i decided not to dedicate much time to them YET. As for burn "panic" effect, I call it more a penalty than a tool.

Someday i may get deep into this, but not until I’m done with pure front assault survival AND then defenders (I’m not much into them but how balanced is their influence on other ATs survival is vital to know)

Ah well, then i got to find a diferent nitche name for Step 3, or i can call it perpetually Step3!

At part 3 you end up with what many call the immortality line, this is how much % of your hp must be output in dps for you to die in that amount of time.

To compare ATs i do three things:

Step 1
Is to equate hp bars. The if the above holds true for a tanker, it cant hold true for a brute even if he had the same amount of mitigation, because their HP bar is different, for this I "weaken" it by multiplying it by the base HP. in the case of a brute that would mean multiplying it by .8

Step 2:
Run everything again with zero mitigation. No resist, no defense, no nothing. Once you get the result you will have in your hands how much a tanker that is naked can survive.

On my Part 4 post, (1+0.05/12*Seconds) / Seconds) is simply the shortened version of calculating a naked tanker without any sort of mitigation.

Step 3
Dividing the first number by the second will yield you the survivability score.

Darnit I cant edit this now...

The formula (as it is on my MS Word document) is be this:

(1+(HPRecovery*Time)) /Time/(1-Mitigation)


I dont know what part in the process of posting I ended copy/pasting the wrong formula there...

I actually like that last one you posted better, its more simplified than mine.

Part 4: Cross AT comparisons

We now know how much percentage of your health must be inflicted per second to kill you, but how can you compare how much more survivable are you than a tanker? Or how much more survivable is a specific tanker than a brute?

To compare your set against another you first have to equalize the health difference. You do this by multiplying the result of your whole formula by the appropriate value.

You can use this table:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Tanker 1.0000
Brute 0.8000
Scrapper 0.7143
Blaster 0.6429
Kheldian 0.5714
Corruptor 0.5714
Controller 0.5714
Defender 0.5429
Stalker 0.5429
Dominator 0.5429
Mastermind 0.4286</pre><hr />

Once you equalize the value now you want to get a relative score. To do this you need to do this you run the entire formula but with zero buffs. In short the true formula is always:

D * HPM / (1+0.05/12*Seconds) / Seconds)

Where H is your AT’s HP modifier according to the chart mentioned before.

This score will tell you how much better are you at surviving the specific damage type than a naked, unbuffed tanker.

Circeus helped me with the easiest way to describe this value:

If someone has a rating vs. a damage type of 15 it takes 15 times more damage of that type to bring down the character than a Pure-Meatbag (no powers) Tanker.

1.0 would mean you just got as good as a naked tanker.
0.8 means you are a naked brute.
For reliable tanking against only the specific type of damage you should get to the 9.0 to 10 mark, in my opinion.
15 is enough to tank for an average 8 man group without constant babysitting by a defender.

Anything under 7 should have trouble even tanking for 4 man teams without a babysitting on the part of a defender-type.

Part 3: Adding them up

Now that we know how much mitigation we have, and how much health we can heal back per second, how do these affect me together?

There is one rule: an enemy must inflict upon you the amount of not mitigated damage * your healing per second divided by the time available to kill you.

Mathematically:

D = 1 – Mitigation * HPRecovery / Time

Where D is the amount of damage per second needed to kill you in a given amount of time.

Part 2: Healing

For an enemy or group of enemies to kill you within a limited amount of time, he must do your entire HP worth of damage plus the entire HP that you can regenerate within the amount of time.

Example, if a hero has 100 points of hp, and he regenerates at the standard regeneration rate of 25% of his hp in a minute, and the enemy must be able to kill the hero in exactly one minute, he must do 125 points of damage during that time, or in other words, about 2.084 points of damage per second.

That is the reason why a long fight favors a build that is based on healing, because you have more HP that must be removed to successfully kill you. And that is the same reason too that alpha strikes almost ignore regeneration and self heals, the damage per second of such a wave of attacks is so high that you never get the chance to heal up. This is the why you got to keep time into the formula, because I bet in house, the devs actually balance all enemies around how long they should take to kill X or Y build.

While talking about self-preservation healing means just two things: self heals and regeneration.


Regeneration

Regeneration is simple; it’s a multiplication of your base regeneration factor. We regenerate at 5% every 12 seconds, having 100% regeneration rate means we cut those 12 seconds to 6.

We calculate our regeneration per second like this:

Regeneration = 0.05*(1+Regen/12)


Self Heals

First off all self heals must be calculated to acquire how much healing per second they can provide, then we sum all those self heals together (in the case of more than one)

To calculate the Heal Per Second of a power use this formula:

HPS = PercentageHealed / (Recharge + Activation )

Once you got the HPS of all your attacks summed up you have to apply the “resistance to healing” you acquired from any HP buffs:

FinalHPS = HPS * (1-1/(1+HPBuff))


Add it up all up:

To get our final maximum recovery per second we just sum them all.

HPRecovery = Regeneration + FinalHPS

Part 1: Mitigation

Mitigation is whatever reduces the amount of damage you receive from an enemy over a period of time. One thing to note about mitigation is that different types do not truly stack on top of each other; each type of mitigation actually reduces the impact of the next.

I will cover them in the order they actually mitigate damage.


Recharge

-Recharge slows down the recharge speed of enemies’ attacks effectively reducing the amount of hits you can suffer in any period of time. –Recharge suffers of three disadvantages:

<ul type="square">[*]The first wave of hits (the so famous Alpha Strike) is unaffected by it, as all attacks there are already charged up the moment you jump the enemy.
[*]As a debuff, it gets resisted by higher level enemies so it is of lower impact against higher level enemies.
[*]Although it increases the recharge time of an attack, it does not increase the activation time. This means that an attack that takes 2 seconds to hit, and 4 seconds to recharge will only have the 4 seconds increased, not the full 6 seconds, making the benefit a bit more random, yet most attacks have a recharge that is much longer than the animation time making this not extreme.[/list]
The formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:

RechargeBenefit = 1-1/(1+Debuff)


ToHit Debuffs and Defense

Defense increases your chance to entirely deflect or avoid an attack.

ToHit Debuffs lowers the chance of the enemy hitting you.

ToHit Debuffs and Defense both act together but they don’t stack. Against unbuffed enemies this

does not truly makes a difference and its as if they did stack. Since I7 they affect all enemies equally and 10 Defense really means 20%, since it will give the enemy 20% less chance to hit than normal, I wont get on the reason for this here, all you have to know is 1 = 2 once it comes to defense and ToHit debuffs.

Defense is not entirely reliable, not because it does not work, it does, but because you never know at what point your luck will run out. Its one of the few things in this game that is truthfully random.

The main differences between ToHit debuffs and Defense are:
<ul type="square">[*]ToHit Debuffs being debuff are less effective against higher level enemies[*]ToHit Debuffs affect all of the affected enemies' attacks while Def usually only help against specific types of damage or method of attack.[/list]
As noted on the introduction, this type of protection only works on the attacks that did go through the slow effects of –Recharge.

Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:

DefenseBenefit = (ToHitDebuff + Def) * 2 * (1- RechargeBenefit)


Damage Debuffs

Damage debuffs are rather simple: They reduce the damage an enemy can do by a percentage. If an enemy can do 100 and you debuffed his damage by 10% he will now hit for 90.

As all debuffs, this protection suffers a penalty the higher level the enemy is compared to you.

A second disadvantage is that an enemy that is resistant against a type of damage, will also resist that aspect of damage debuff. For example, if you fight a Hellion that is strong against fire, his offensive fire damage will not be lowered as much as his other attacks.

Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:

DmgDebuffBenefit = DmgDebuff * (1-(DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit))


Resistance

Very similar to –Damage, Resistance lowers the damage an enemy inflicts upon you. The difference is, it is lowering the already lower damage. So, using the above example, if the character has 10% resistance and is already doing 90 damage (since it went down on the example above,) he will now do 81 damage. As you can see, despite them doing the same thing, we cant just sum the two numbers.

A disadvantage of Resistance is that it tends to only cover up certain damage types, while Damage Debuff lowers all incoming attacks.

Formula to calculate the mitigated damage by this is:

ResistBenefit = Resist * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit +RechargeBenefit))


HP buffs

To understand the true benefit of HP you have to entirely forget about it as a number that changes with level and start to think about it in terms of percentages. All that truly matters is that the little progress bar that indicates health doesn’t go from 100% to 0%. Under this logic, having your hp doubled is as good as having a 50% mitigation, as an attack that takes exactly all your health will end doing just 50% of your health. Calculating the mitigation provided by HP buffs however is hard because its just not linear, even if the cap was high enough and there were enough sources to get them, it would take a lot of work to get 90% mitigation purely out of HP buffs. If you are curious, it takes a 900% hp buff to get the 90% mitigation mark.

The biggest advantage of HP buffs is its universal nature, not even un-typed damage can get around HP buffs.

The disadvantage? The mitigation applies not only to damage but also to self heals and outside heals.

The formula for this is:

HPBenefit = (1-1/(1+HPBuff)) * (1- (DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit + RechargeBenefit + ResistBenefit))


Add it up all up:

Now that all has been accounted for we want to see our total mitigation. This simply means summing it all up:

Mitigation = DmgDebuffBenefit + DefenseBenefit + RechargeBenefit + ResistBenefit + HPBenefit

Introduction:

There are 3 things that stand between death and you.

1) Crowd Control
2) Mitigation
3) Healing

Each of these are sub divided in different “methods”

Crowd Control
1) Hold
2) Sleep
3) Immobilization
4) Knock back/Vomit
5) Fear
6) Confusion

Mitigation
1) Self Buffs
--a. Resistance
--b. Defense
--c. HP Buffs

2) Enemy Debuffs
--a. Damage Debuff
--b. Accuracy Debuff
--c. Recharge Debuffs

Healing:
1)Regeneration
2)Self Heals
3)External Heals

In this guide I will discuss self-preservation of the melee sets. This means I wont be touching Crowd Control.

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Just added this patch note to PvP section:

Being defeated in a PvP zone will carry debt if any of the damage to you was caused by NPCs. The amount of debt is directly proportional to the amount of damage you took from NPCs vs. how much was done by opposing Player Characters. The more damage dealt to you by NPCs means more debt when you are defeated.

* This means that you can no longer “escape debt” by being defeated by a PC after taking massive damage from NPCs, nor will you be penalized with a massive amount of debt if you are defeated by an NPC after taking a huge amount of damage from a PC.

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It also means I will never again take part in Siren's Call with a non 50, and i have no lvl 50 toons. I was already getting @#$% with the ease of being held and killed by npcs already, now this on top seal the deal.

Positron, i think its a question of either:

Is the buff too low for the investment

or

Is the investment too high for the buff?


You clearely state that the buff is working as intended, then the obvious question is, dont you think its a bit too expensive to make such a worthless (unless stacked) buff?

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That was pretty much my reaction, too.

All the physics are client side only, and no information about them is passed from client to server -- so, it's strictly a visual on your machine. That means, there is no way for people to play volleyball, or kickball. We could put one in that only you, the player, would see, but I imagine that isn't what everyone would like.

Sorry, folks.

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How about adding a special NPC with infinite health but that gets knocked back by any single attack?

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I find the absence of Red Name comments on either the Elec Armor or the Elec melee to be quite sad at this point. We know they are reading the boards, but their lack of comment to me at this point is that both versions of Elec are " working as intended ".

Given the potential for this set - not really looking for uber, but was hoping for par - in its current form it will be most likely relegated to theme/concept builds only.

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Can't really comment yet, other than to say I've read the thread and am making recommendations based on the feedback here.

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I seriously hope you guys dont pull another Trick Arrow Fiasco (you know, we will go as is and tweak as we go... one year later)

BTW: I know its not your call in the end, Castle, but i am sure you know what I mean.

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So, if a Melee attack rated at 'High' does 100 damage, a 'High damage Ranged attack could be expected to do 66 damage before slotting.

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This is confusing. Why not just say the ranged attack does 'moderate damage?'

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What, you took seriously them wanting people to not be confused once they picked their permanent, non-respecable Patron Pool?

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We're testing this. We don't want to go overboard on it, then have to reduce its effectiveness later, which is a very real concern with this. This lead us to start off low, and build up from there. What you folks are testing currently is the 'second draft' of PvP Gauntlet.

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First time I read this I bought it. But then it took almost a year to fix Trick Arrow (and its still not fixed if you concider its not live yet). As long as it stays on test and changes there I will still buy it, but i do will take it as a war lost if it gets to live with these numbers or something too insignificant.

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For those of you remember the CoV End of Beta event with the signature heroes battling all the players, we found a very curious problem during that event: It quickly became completely impossible to know who/where your target was. There were so many characters taunting continuously, that it was not only not fun, but essentially not playable.
So, we are trying to make sure that Taunt Ping Pong doesn't become a major concern in PvP. We want Gauntlet to be a bonus which helps, but it is not meant to replace Taunt or related powers.

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Cant it be done so that once a taunt lands, you are imune to taunts of other enemies for a while? I mean, you may be retaunted by the same tanker, but no other tanker can land a taunt if you have taunt on you? Additionaly, can you change it so that taunt changes your targeting to the tanker that taunted you? (have not really seen if this happens now, have not been taunted to test it)