UberGuy

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However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.

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This suggests that given two choices, one with a higher reward earning rate, only a small percentage of players will willingly choose the lower earning rate activity, and even then only temporarily. However, that situation does not appear to be the case with regard to radio missions. Both activities attract a significant number of players.

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KeepDistance addressed this. At one point this was not the case. It only became the case that the player focus normalized after changes were made that lessened the reward difference between the two activities.

Game populations are not difference engines. They do not act like fluids and automatically univerally seek the lowest ground. [Edit: I point this out not because I believe you think players are this mechanical, but to make clear that I don't think they are like this.] Social interactions combined with individual preferances and moral compasses create various counter forces or potential barriers to players always seeking the optimal path to the "end goal", whatever that is. We see mass migration to a particular behavior when that behavior is so rewarding that it overcomes all those other forces. This likely has some degree of cascading effect - for example, social interactions that might keep some people away from greater exploration of exploits now become an attractor for for people who might not normally have gotten involved.

Because of this "fuzzy" nature to how the aggregate population behaves, all that is needed to limit egreggious use of most exploits is to make changes that put them close to other behaviors in terms of reward, whether that be by striking down the "exploit" or improving the alternatives. This appears to have been the case with paper and scanner missions. They remain a very optimal way to level, and some people choose to to use them nearly exclusively because of that. However, they are not so much better, or perhaps more importantly, so much more perceivably better that the general population does not give them special focus.

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In theory I think that is laudable, but I think in practice this methodology has only two possibly outcomes: balance perfection, and exploit-city. I don't think the reward systems or frankly the critters themselves are sophisticated enough to reach balance perfection.

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I agree that we can't get perfection, but I do not think that perfection is required, because I disagree that the only alternative is exploit city. I need only point to our existing PvE mob groups, some of whom offer increased rewards on the basis of (presumably) greater "challenge" or at least time to defeat. If those can exist, in theory so can MA critters. The challenge is in limiting how easy they are to "game" under player placement control.

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Consider the case of a critter that can be manipulated into using mostly mezzes. Very dangerous to most players, but it actually makes them weaker against the mez-protected. That's one of those weird ironies of melee characters: they aren't just immune to mez, they often make a complete mockery of mezzers because the mezzers spend too much time trying to use useless mezzes rather than actually attacking. More generally, it seems to still be possible to give a critter a boatload of powers and then trick them into using only a few of them. The system appears to be not just too easy to game, but gameable in ways not everyone can take advantage of equally. That's double-trouble when it comes to detecting balance problems.

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Again, I have to appeal to the existing PvE game. Is it imbalanced to the level of requiring action that some factions use fire or smash/lethal damage almost exclusively, yet some characters can be nearly immune to such attacks?

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Even when the situation appears obvious, its not always quite so obvious after reflection. Build Up is one of the most lethal powers you can give a critter, and yet it doesn't always actually increase the difficulty of the critter in actual fact. Controllers can nullify the advantage of BU simply due to mez (even something like immobilizes can significantly reduce the impact of BU for primarily melee oriented critters). Is stealth always problematic? Or confuse? Some powers have such radically different effects on different players that they are sometimes incredibly problematic, and sometimes virtually worthless. When that happens, how do you decide how much to modify the XP of that critter by? And regardless, how do you prevent players from rolling just the right character to nullify all of those advantages and yet still reap the increased rewards?

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Which is why I oppose (fully) piecemeal creation of custom critters. It would be the responsibility of the devs to create well-rounded powersets for the critters, much as they presumably do with their own mobs. The primary restriction placed on the MA would relate to the fact that every mob must have self-contained threat capabilities to guard against placing only that mob on a map, where the devs can design mobs that are weak on their own, but will reliably spawn as part of a larger group.

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What would be the difference between what we have now and a system that was designed ground up for PvP? Would some ATs not exist? Would it be twitch based? Would there be mezz resistance or protection? Is Loot necessary?

For instance, WAR or WOW. What would you take from our(old or new) PvP to add to theirs; what would would you take from them to add to ours?

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I agree with Arcanaville's post. It's not so much what features the game would have (though I do feel our PvP is feature-poor). It's the fundamental assumptions about how powers interact with targets, about the relative strengths and weaknesses of ATs if you have to consider them as opponents.... things of that nature.

We mostly all know at this point that the original devs intended someday to add PvP, but it seems very clear in retrospect (and I was around back then) that at release, they had come up with how the game would work only from the perspective of player vs. mob, and maybe specifically players on teams vs. mobs. The original ATs were designed to act as interlocking pieces. With the exception of Scrappers, each AT was lacking something that would compel them to seek the company of others who could make up for it - a variation on the old "holy trinity", though less entrenched than that classic example.

Later in I4, they took this system and tried to implement PvP on top of it, and at this point we got to see how the original team/PvE assumptions didn't work out so well for this purpose. Look at the original implementation of toggle dropping, which was almost certainly a response to the nigh-invulnerability of things like the Tanker AT.

If they had considered how PvP would work in time for release (and gotten some playtime/testing in on it) they could have seen these problems coming and deisgned the PvE game differently, based on the different requirements that (successful) PvP environments call for.

Very nice, congratulations.

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I'm not sure that view of critter rewards is really completely valid. Outside of the MA, *most* standard PvE critters of the same rank have the same XP value regardless of difficulty: its only highly exceptional critters that have different value, or entire classes of critter that collectively have XP bonuses. Not even for standard PvE critters is XP "hand-tweaked" to match difficulty.

Consider what you'd consider to be, on paper, a reasonable differential in XP between a Master Illusionist and a Freak Tank Swiper. Now compare to what they are actually set to.

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I think there is plenty of evidence of mobs that are "hand tweaked". All we need do is review Culex's guide on the matter.

It's presumable that the only reason to tweak the rewards of a mob (up or down) is because of some feature of that mob which suggests to the devs or QA team or someone that that mob should not be worth it's rank's standard XP.

Freaks are a great example, because in my own testing of what "factions" I could earn inf the fastest against, Freaks actually came in on the low end of things, even though they are worth extra. My conclusion is that Dull Pain is a significant factor - if you cannot defeat them before they use it (or prevent them from using it) they take a lot longer to beat down. Apparently, someone internal noted that, or a designer surmised it, and the XP rewards for some freaks was set higher.

Whether the reward tweaking has been applied in a reasonable fashion in the rest of PvE is a completely different question. The evidence is in that they do consider it, whether or not they then choose wisely. I would be one of the people cheering loudly if they bumped the reward of MIs. I consider their current reward absolutely brutal.

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I also don't think the underlying premise is entirely valid either. Radio missions have a higher level of continuous reward than the majority of story arcs, so under this theory radio missions themselves should be diverting the majority of players away from story arcs already. I'm not sure that is true.

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I'm not sure what part of my premise that counters. That's almost an example of the opposite of what I was describing. Consider the bonus difficulty settings on Ouroboros missions or TFs. The only time I see people use them is when they are trying to earn badges, to see what their character performance limits are, or to get bragging rights.

I consider "hard" and "extreme" MA mobs to be a variation on this. People may poke them just for the sake of the challenge now and then, but I think that letting them ride with standard rewards is going to mean that most people will avoid them, because the lesson seems to be that a lot if not most people are playing it for the end, not the means.

I think that if the MA could be both harder and appropriately more rewarding it would be vastly superior product for consumers of arcs, and a lot superior for authors interested in aspects in aspects beyond strong storytelling/creativity.

Only the best defense applies. This also is how the game resolves multiple damage type defenses. For example, some attacks are both energy and smashing damage. The higher defense value determines how much defense you get against such attacks.

While I think that story tellers are going to love that, I really do think it's unfortunate for story players, because I consider it really unlikely that they can create a systematic way to give better reward for scarier critters under that design. Without a systematic approach, I think that means custom critters will default to baseline mob rewards, no matter how challenging they really are.

I think that's very unfortunate, because I think that increased challenge with appropriately increased reward really does attract a noticable part of the playerbase. However, increased challenge at no particular increase in reward only attracts a smaller component of the playerbase, and usually only for a limited engagement before they return to "regular" play for it's better reward/time.

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A blaster is a blaster because he is more efficient at turning energy into damage than a defender is.

A scrapper is more efficient at turning energy into damage than a tank is.

A tank is more efficient at using his energy to mitigate damage than a scrapper is.

This is why we have AT modifiers.

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I'm not disagreeing with the above, but I want to point out that it's only one way of looking at this.

We could just as easily have a system where the characters are equally effortefficient at producing an effect, but bit equally time efficient.

As an example, imagine that a Blaster can put forth the energy to blast through a 1' concrete block, but a Defender can only get through 8" of it in one shot. In order to get through the whole foot of conrete, the Defender has to use two blasts, because he just can't summon as much power for one shot.

Relating it back closer to your race analogy, both racers can run two miles, but one guy has to run slower. Yes, your analogy for miles/calorie is much better at relating your example to endurance, but I'm saying we could instead fix max calorie/sec. The slower runner could be less efficient at burning calories and turning them into speed, but if he was more efficient, he'd be faster.

It's a common claim, but I disagree with it strongly on anything with at least a Tanker's damage output. Anything below that and it starts to feel pretty painful. One of the last things you want to be is a lethal/smashing dealer on Defender or Dominator (out of Domination). It's viable, but I don't enjoy it very much.

ToF is an excellent power for unusual situations. For example, I use it to gain the upper hand when surrounded by multiple targets who should all be getting very high defeat priority. Examples: faced with multiple high-level mezzing or debuffing LTs, one can basically be removed from action for a significant period of time while I defeat another, which might mean the difference in being mezzed due to stacking or crippled due to excessive debuffs.

I understand that folks here tend to have very focused builds, and sometimes these situations would just not threaten them anyway. For example if you have softcapped ranged defense, only Psi mezzes are going to offer the risk I mention above. However, such builds are an edge case so fine we could probably cut ourselves on it. For everyone else, ToF is a great power both for the mez and the Parry-like effect it can have on non-AV foes.

All that said, I agree that ToF really doesn't have much place in an AV sololing build. I would very much want it for "regular" PvE, but if I were building just for AVs (perhaps on a 2nd build) I would skip it.

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Since we will soon be able to pick individual powers above the minimum for each difficulty

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While I know they are planning to allow this to some extent, I did not read into what was said that it would be that granular.

I am primarily expecting them to isolate "problem" powers out, with Aim, Build Up and their cousins being frequent examples. I'm sure there will be more, but I am still expecting bulk settings.

While the near-totally dynamc version is going to be best for authors interested in making interesting NPCs, it will make any sort of reward standardization very hard if not impossible. I think it's important that harder things give better reward, and I believe that losing some flexibility is worth being able to quantify that.

What we have right now is too restrictive, but because of the above I think that going to the other extreme is also poor.

I would like to see something along the lines of the following.

1) Make sure that mobs on "standard" aren't so noticably more challenging than standard mobs outside the MA. I'm not sure the minions are ridiculously more challenging now, but they are noticably so, and the damage scale on the ranged attacks given to melee mobs is a big part of it.
2) Make sure that mobs on "hard" and "extreme" really are that much scarier. This is harder to do well, and would likely might require "hard" versions of some powersets to have greater deviation from player character versions. This would be to ensure all powersets offered something effective to the user to keep the mob from being weaker than normal if equipped with team-oriented powersets and then fought solo, for example.
3) Use existing examples of mobs with +XP rewards to buff the XP of the "hard" and "extreme" mobs.

Not that under the current system, higher difficulty settings don't do anything to some mobs. I haven't tried all powersets, but from what I've seen there's no such thing as an "extreme" minion. This should be standardized in the critter editor interface (such as greying out that option for minions) and the XP rules, and documented.

I've seen this idea suggested before, but in the discussion I saw, the line of thinking was that this would require variation in XP by powerset and powerset combo, as well as rank and difficulty. I don't think that's sensible. I think a standard reward level should be set for each rank and difficulty, and the powersets tuned to approach that target. Yes, some combinations may swing high or low on the risk/reward for their difficulty, but some focus on these situations should allow the devs to keep them from being extreme. Player feedback would likley have to be part of the guidance to point them to possible outliers.

I have no idea how techinically feasible variable XP rewards for MA mobs would be. I know that tuning the powersets is time-consuming. In days of old I would have been loathe to suggest time-consuming things, but the devs seem to have a lot better staffing these days. Only they, of course, know what else is competing for those man-hours.

Yes, you are. I'm not sure what though.

Are you looking at a specific pair of powers? Total +def with everything slotted?

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So, who's hoping Going Rogue will make a 'real' endgame for CoH?

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What's a "real endgame"?

After a month or so, wouldn't it just be added to the list of Peregrine, the RWZ, Cimmerora, and the Shadow Shard? Won't we then be complaining how there's no where else to go all over again?

I'm being totally serious. I don't get what's being asked for.

Edit: By the way, I spend probably 90% of my time playing existing level 50 characters. I used to be more altified, but since I9 I've been about IOing out existing high-level characters, because I use that as a form of post-50 progression.

I got a Celerity +Stealth off of a Cimeroran boss on the ITF and a Mako's Bite proc off of something in the Hami mission in the LGTF. It looked like it was off of a weakened Mito, but I have to wonder if a Rikti boss didn't bite it somewhere on the map.

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If there's a bug, it would show under the solo/farming conditions. Someone around here has logs of everything they do going back a long time... I don't remember who, though.

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Probably me.

I haven't noticed anything unusual on the Cim wall, which is the only farming I've done lately.

They don't really play alike at all, IMO. Not, at least, if you play to their strengths. Domination on the one side and having buff/debuff sets on the other mean the two feel very different.

Controllers and Dominators are the only two ATs that specialize in crowd control, so I think they're what you want to focus on.

That does seem a little odd, since, if my sense of this is up to date, Jack "Statesman" is now working on the Star Trek MMO.

Maybe it's not meant to be biased, but it at least makes it feel suspect.

Tangential, not-especially helpful response follows.

I avoid this problem by simply never having a character concept before I create a character. I start with what I want to play, then create a concept that fits it. I get the idea that I end up with a far higher percentage of characters I am satisfied with as a result.

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Isn't Energy Melee's stun slower animating though ?

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Yes, but it has two of them at very high damage scales, and every attack it has offers a chance to stun.

In other words, a straight port of EM to Scrappers (not something I consider likely) would have huge burst damage, extremely high single-target DPS, and free stuns on the side.

That's part of the perspective that leads to the observation that MA's stun-only power isn't worth having.

It's not a perspective without flaws. Tanker powersets, in general, are better at delivering mezzes or soft control than Scrappers are.

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I have a problem with this. cobra strike is useful. I can stun any lt that comes my way and when stacked with EC it'll put a boss out long enough for me to beat down something else that is bothering me.

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The perspective that it's not useful originates in the fact that MA is one of the only melee powersets with a stun that basically does nothing else. See: Energy Melee.

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I disagree on your guys points about tankers. You seem to be leaving out the point that most tankers I see can walk into a spawn and stand there holding agro with the taunt in thier aura and never die. I saw an Invuln sitting there with 5 master illusionists and only need a heal once every maybe 5 minutes.

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I'm with Fulmens. This is either massive hyperbole or you were missing something critical, like the fact that those MIs were -3 to the Tanker or something. The only mitigation an Invuln has to MI attacks is Dull Pain, and an Invul who went and sat in 5 even-level (or higher) MIs would not be sitting there long.

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A Defender's Energy Blast does far less damage than the Blater's identical power, yet costs the same endurance. To me, that's unbalanced. The Defender's power should cost less endurance.

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This on its own might not be a bad idea. I think it's been suggested in the past, and I'm not really sure what harm could come of it, as long as it was as much a "rule" as the current endurance rules are. That's to say, the devs sometimes "break" the current rules intentionally as part of the features of a power or powerset (and Claws is an example of that).

For what it's worth, it actually used to be worse. Tankers and Defenders not only did less damage than Scrappers and Blasters for equivalent attacks, they also payed more endurance.

Some of us sometimes joke that the devs come up with three ways to attack a perceived balance problem, and then implement them all. This seems to have been a case of that at design time. Thankfully they backed off of it.

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I think I stand by my suggestion. Personally, I think a degree of standardization would be good for the game. There seems to be a lot of arbitrariness.

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The following is not an attack. I really, really dislike the way you think. Your posts consistently seem to me to contain suggestions that I think are extremely myopic and, as a result, extremely poor for the game.

Allow me to try to explain why I think this about your latest suggestion.

Damage is not the only metric by which powersets or, indeed, ATs, are measured. Your post above makes it clear that you may think it is, and indeed there are plenty of players who agree with you. That does not make them, or you, correct.

Some powersets have secondary effects. Some have less damage in some powers and more in others. Some ATs bring other things to the table, like buffs and debuffs. Some ATs are balanced around being unlockable.

Finally, the DPS of one power as listed in Mids' is not a valid metric of how much damage that powerset deals. What matters is DPA (damage per activation) divided by activation time, because of how activation times are the limiting factor in how quickly you can deliver damage once you have enough attacks (or enough recharge, or both) to sustain a continuous attack chain.

In other words, even if you were right about how things should be balanced (and I very much believe you are not), you've gone about analyzing that balance wrong.

Edited per Umbral's suggestion. I think of DPA as the abbreviation for what he's talking about, but that wouldn't be clear to readers.

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I wonder if some kind of 'forced teaming' code would have been better?

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I13 had more freedom of movement and better buffing, but it had it's share of downsides, IIRC. There were a lot of people complaining about people not sticking around to fight, and other people complaining that that they felt forced into coordinated spiking and that the roles were too restrictive.

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Maybe it's just me, but those two observations seem to have a significant incompatability going on.

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A lot of old schoolers would come back, but a lot of people who prefer the current style would leave.

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Which is the smaller group?

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No harm in calling for what you want, but be sure it's a move forward, and not back to square one.

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That is very dependant on whether or not you feel the previous move was already a move backwards.

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I haven't seen anyone playing a MA Scrapper?

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I have to wonder if you play on a low-population server, or at low-access times of day, or just haven't been looking for very long. It seems a little odd to me that you've never seen an MA Scrapper.

It's actually never been a wildly popular set. It doesn't offer very strong damage mitigation or any fancy tricks, and it doesn't have very much AoE. It's single-target damage is pretty competitive.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's perfectly functional, and you'll be able to flip out and kill things about as well as any other scrapper you're likely to meet. It just doesn't do anything special.