UberGuy

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The only thing I can say is the mobs must be doing an aggro check of every player in range and the AI is splitting the aggro among the whole team so one player is not the main focus of the whole spawns aggression.

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That's correct. It has been this way since release, I believe -- I remember being aggro'd while running Invisibility back in beta. In a nutshell, the entire team is put on the awareness/aggro list, not just the person who initiated the combat. It's not quite that simple, since there are a number of extenuating circumstances that can happen, but in general it is correct.

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I always wondered if this wasn't the case, being in situations like a hidden Stalker who hadn't attacked and being pegged (ruining hide).

It'd sure be nice if they only split aggro among people who didn't have stealth powers going. I imagine that's a non-trivial change though.

Don't assume that because I chose herding as an example, I wanted it nerfed. I chose it as an example of something the devs wanted.

Here's some simple reasons that changing AoE limits early (like at release) would have been the most effective way to prevent herding at the scale it existed (which was what the devs really seemed to object to). Not th emost effective way possible, but the most effective way based on available time and possibly inventiveness.

*) AI changes are hard relative to quantitative power changes. It was over a year before AI would not pile in one spot.
*) Changing AI response to one player's character still leaves enterprising teams able to do things such as "multi pull" to get large numbers of foes in one place (performing an end-run around aggro limits).

Of course, presumably because only overall performance is reviewed, we get wonderful things like what we have today: compound, multi-pass changes that swing the balance massively in the other direction. Today we have all of the brute-force solutions mentioned above (aggro limits, AoE limits, AI bounding) and some additional ones, like reduced durability of the tough ATs. Of course all of those weren't neccessarily done to reduce herding, but certainly the perception that they compounded to do so massively is much alive among our players.

Consider herding. Herding was possible to the extent that it was because:

a) You could aggro an unlimited number of foes
b) You could hit any number of in-range foes with an AoE
c) Foes had no collision bounding, meaning a limitless number of them could be fit into a given area

Now, realistically, the devs not only should have seen that coming, I think they did see it happening in Beta.

Regardless, it seems likely that the ability could have been nipped in the bud by someone looking at any one of the above lettered items and saying "that's a potential for players to do more at once than we want." Of those, the most effective at "hard limiting" the behavior is the cap on AoE targets. I really loved that there was no such cap, because it was more realistic, but if they'd gone in with a cap on it, herding would never have reached the heights it did.

I think that's an example of balancing around potential. By setting bounds on what's maximally achievable you limit your chances that players will exceed that level of performance.

It's always possible to forget to bound something, but if you stick to bounding the fundamental attributes, you know that you've at least cut down on a huge set of possible combinations players might try.

When CoH first came out, there weren't many limits that mattered.

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This is a game where, (I hear- wasn't there), Tanks started out able to reach 100% damage resistance and they didn't realize it would be a problem.

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Heh. I was around for that. It was indeed the case.

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Arcana, if I am reading between your lines correctly are you saying that much of the game engine is/was designed primarily by trial and error and not by creating/using a mathematical model to represent some particular plan or behavior?

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I rather think you've read that correctly.

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For the amount of money invested in the game, and relying more on art than science seems very risky to me. Especialy when you have so many cooks in the kitchen......

You may finaly end up with a great dish, but folks may have lost their taste for it if it comes too late....

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If the above discussion about the game's balance and design is all true, what it comes down to is that the game's core vision and playability saved it. I hated (and basically still hate) all other mainstream MMOs. CoH had no PvP, and it was basically a beautiful, 3-dimensional version of Diablo with comic-book inspired events, characters and environments.

That combination of elements, plus some other seemingly happy accidents (the combination of the character creator and the "Description" box) created a game with enough enjoyable gameplay, character investment, and unique MMO feel that it attracted and kept a meaningful subscriber base.

I feel rather sure that if CoH had not been as pretty, if the characters hadn't been as customizable, and the combat had not had as much FPS feel as it does, the balance issues (and the associated corrections) would have likey been harder on subscriptions. Indeed, the balance issues might have been enough to damage subscriptions before the nerfs even hit if they game hadn't had a strong appeal outside its balance mechanics.

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Its not possible to balance exactly with whole numbers. But because even the definition of "balance exactly" is vague, its possible to get close enough with reasonable numbers.

Ever since the concept of the AT scalers was made generally known, I've tended to make balancing suggestions that take that into account, suggesting numbers that are relatively "simple" when expressing their base values.

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Agreed, and I often do the same things.

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There are other reasons for me thinking that the balancing mathematics, such as they exist, are totally borked. Castle gets an earful at least monthly.

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Oh, I know very much that you aren't basing your findings off anything so overly simple and coarse. I was just pointing it out as something I had an immediate intuition about almost 3 years ago now.

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3. Lacking mathematical models, there's also no mathematical guidence as to what changes to make if there *is* a perceived problem.

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While all three points are important, this one has always stood out in my perceptions of this game.

It may seem odd, but my reason for believing CoH was never numerically balanced, since the very earliest times at which I knew any of the numbers for the powers, was rooted in a seemingly innocuous fact.

Everything in CoH is nice, round numbers.

Oh, they're not all round in the sense of being even or even whole numbers. But they're all related to whole numbers and rational numbers. 1/10. 1/2. 1/3. Think about all the things based on these. AT modifiers are all some multiple of 1/10th off of 1.0. Enhancers are all 1/3 or 1/5, or 1/2 or 1/4 of those numbers.

While it is possible to build and design a game whose balance is based on such even multiples and fractions, it has never seemed remotely likely that CoH actually was. The performance discrepancies in things like DR vs Defense vs. Regen scream for less "whole" numbers to crop up somewhere. Real mathematical modeling and its attendant balancing would, in a system as complex as CoH, produce a "fudge factor" that wasn't a nice number like "2"

Those "nice" numbers always struck me as picked out of thin air, tested, tweaked, and then tossed into the wild. And really, the comments about the dev approach to datamining (and Arcana's comments) support that notion.

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Both seem to penalize good play. A blaster that protects himself well cannot get much of a boost from defiance. A defender that protects her team well cannot get much of a boost from vigilence.

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They can also reward aggressive and risky play, where a team is trying to push just slightly beyond their normal boundries.

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Unfortunately, there are a wide range of defender primary and secondary combinations that Vigilance does virtually nothing to improve. If a Force Field or Dark Miasma Defender is a member of a team taking signficant damage, giving them an endurance discount has extremely little affect on their performance. Because of this, I consider Vigilance to actually not even meet the "bumper" goal for these example powersets.

I have always felt that Vigilance was conceived by someone who suffered from the Defender's favorite misconception: that all Defenders are Empaths (and "heal0r" ones at that). Vigilance rewards highly reactive play, and not all Defender powersets work reactively to any meaningful degree.

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A comment on datamining. While I can't tell you exactly how and what we look at in datamining, I can say that we don't usually look at 'Defiance' in and of itself. Overall performance matters much more than any single aspect of a character.

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Doesn't that make it terribly difficult to understand what contribution any given power or aspect provides to overall performance?

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I have a thought about that, something related to vigilence. I can't quite express it fully yet, but when the thought finally settles I'll post it here.

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I would really look forward to an analysis of this sort for Vigilance.

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You may think it "an abuse of data mining" to use it to determine actual performance, but I think you'd be fighting an uphill battle on that front with the Developers. We know from _Castle_'s posts that the Developers use datamining to determine quite a bit.

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Do note that datamining is not somehow inherently incomplete or prone to produce an inappropriately averaged number. It really depends on the data that's stored, and then the types of views of that data that are constructed. For example, a histogram of how often bands of defiance bonus occur would be a reasonable (though certainly not complete) thing for the devs to inspect, as opposed to a bulk average damage bonus. A more complete picture would include how often a Blaster died in a certain time interval after each defiance boost, or how often they rested. Duration views of defiance boosts would also be useful.

We don't really know what the devs' data or the massaging they do to it looks like. Now, I'll certainly agree with the notion that the it doesn't seem like they use very sophisticated data analysis, and they definitely seem to have had some problems in the past with their math, so I do tend to suspect them of oversimplifying the data.

I suspect the lower recharge is because of Fire's overall lack of mitigation tools.

Edit: nevermind me, you already said that.

My guess is that changes in the mob AI in Safeguard missions now cause them to "suffer" from the same behavior that ambushes have for a long time. They are told they should attack nearby heroes instead of the destructable objects, and this gives them omnicient awareness of the character's location. It's probably not +perception, but "AI fiat".

Consider it similar to the way mobs in the same spawn would come for you when you attacked their buddies, even before stealth powers ever had any suppression. The mobs didn't "see" you. They just suddenly psychically knew where you were.

Another thing to consider - this was a choice of favorite things. A limited one at that - probably three of four of my favorite things about this game weren't options. Thus it's difficult to draw conclusions about what low percentage votes mean. Bases are getting really poor showing, but that's just means they aren't many people's favorite thing. Not that they are unimportant or that we dislike what features they do have at this time.

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For those of you who don't know already, up-to-date and exact power data can be found at The City of Data. This page replaces the old page at RedTomax's site that I linked to in my original post in this thread, as this new link is much more complete and accurate.

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Iakona, I'm not sure if you are actually able to influence this, but... while the displays of calculated AT-specific values are great, they obscure the mechanics behind the powers. Something I really liked about the info you were posting for a while in the AT&P forum was that it explicitly stated what the modifiers were. Certainly that's not ideal for folks who don't want to do the math, but I loved it.

Any idea if the raw variables will ever be visible on CoD?

(By the way, the info there rocks. Just in case that wasn't clear. )

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btw, I'd LOVE to understand why scrappers get damage is at 1.125, while tanks are stuck at .8, yet for defenses, they are .8 to our 1.

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This is OT, but it's at least partially because Tanker damage delivered relative to Scrappers is more than just the ratio of their base damage scales. Many tanker attack sets have damage scale (BI) that allows them to do rather well on a Scrapper comparison. A 6.333 BI attack (Swoop, Incinerate, Heavy Mallet, Shatter) compares to a Scrapper attack with a 4.50 BI (Soaring Dragon, Crippling Axe Kick, Focus all are around this). Scrapper sets except Broasdword cap out at 6.333 BI, where Tanker sets cap out at a Scrapper equivalent of 7.03. Except EM, which caps out at the equivalent of 9.0. Broadsword caps out at 7.333.

Now, I don't mean to say that Tankers get some sort of free lunch here, because those big hitter powers are expensive, and have long recharges. Of course most of them come with devastating status effects (in PvE at least). But Scrappers get Criticals, muddying direct comparisons even further.

My point is that someone correctly took a look at more than the base damge scale. Tankers have access to much bigger attacks relative to their base damage than Scrappers do. Base damage isn't the whole picture.

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Then why are we constantly being assaulted by Tankers constantly screaming about how they don't need it?

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Let's be fair here. "Need" is a very flexible word. But before this patch you could build a "scranker" who's decent at holding localized aggro through AoE gauntlet and that character could AV aggro with the same concept. Jump in AVs face with an aura power, lay into him a few times and your teammates are good to go.

No one sane is going to claim that such a character is the best meatshield he can be. Taunt works at range and is autohit. My scranker is, largely, SOL if he needs to taunt a flier off of someone in the back of a party. But you could do a pretty good job and cover a lot of bases even without Taunt.

For typical CoH missions teams don't have to have a Tanker. Some fairly extreme posters hereabouts will claim it's never worth bringing a Tanker on a normal mission. But AV missions are something that lots and lots of people think a Tanker brings something noticably useful to the table. What better place for a single, tough, aggro-grabbing character than in the face of a single high-damage foe who spends most of the time shrugging off controllers.

So back to "need". We've got an AT-defining scenario, and only one tool that allows the AT to actually fulfill the defintion with any reasonable degree of success. To me, if they don't want to look like a chump in the face of an AV they need to have Taunt. When no one told them the needed it. When every other scenario in the game tells them "yeah, you're definitley better with it, but you don't need taunt to be a passable team meatshield."

Saying that this most role-defining scenario now needs taunt for the Tankers to actually succeed at their job is a serious slap in the face. The secretive nature of the change makes the slap come with a barbed palm. "Here, you can do your thing decently (if not greatly) in the rest of the game, but we're just going to confuse the crap out of you by making it not work in this key situation. Enjoy!"

I'm sorry, but that this was done and done this way says to me that someone really does have their head in a dark moist place.

I'm sorry. I don't run a Tanker as a primary - I only have one out of about 13 active characters.

But this sucks.

The devs need their design of AVs reworked from the ground up. Resistant to damn near every debuff except a few blessed powers magically flagged unresistable, virtually immune to holds 2/3 of the time and now known to be flat out immune to the Tanker inherent.

As others have said, Gauntlet was given to Tankers so they didn't have to take Taunt to do their job. And now we learn that in the situation where you really, truly and honestly want a meatshield that inherent power is fully worthless and you absolutely must have Taunt to do that job at all.

Learning things like this about this game's design makes me really wish I was stupidly rich for no other reason that I could try to buy Cryptic and call people into my office to ask them what the living hell they were thinking.

Stop trying so desperately to make these big, boring bags of HPs hard to kill and manage. That does not make them more "challenging". I makes them more frustrating because they are beyond our ability to control with any semblance to the rest of the game.

(I'd do other more relevant things if I was stupidly rich. This one would just feel good ).

Looking back at this when I linked someone here, it occurs to me that I didn't post an example.

Lets go with damage. I'll take what happens if you slot four damages in a power. Damages are Schedule A enhancements, so they're +33.3% each. That means four is +133.2%

Lets compare that to my four tax brackets. Since we exceeded 100%, we have crossed all four brackets.

B1 amount = 70% (we filled this bracket)
B2 amount = 20% (we filled this bracket)
B3 amount = 10% (we filled this bracket)
B4 amount = 33.2% (133.2% - 100%)

So, now we figure out the tax on each part.

B1: 0% (No tax here)
B2: 2% (20% * 10% tax)
B3: 3% (10% * 30% tax)
B4: 28.22% (33.2% * 85% tax)

So our total tax is 2%+3%+28.22% = 33.22%

Subtracting that out of our 133.2% leaves us with a final value of: 99.98%.

Next I'll post tables of the values for each bracket for each schedule. This has been done before, but I think it was entirely experimental, based on the enhancement display screen.

I do not believe so.

ATs have a "weight" that the AI uses to decide who it wants to attack first, in the absence of other input (such as who damaged them the most, who mezzed them, who debuffed them, etc.). Tankers and pets rank rather highly on this weigthing scale, and other ATs such as Defenders and Stalkers rank low, for example.

AVs now ignore this weigthing, and simple attack whoever has done the most annoying thing, or (given no other input) they presumably pick someone at random, considering all targets equal.

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Hasten's worked that way at least since I-1, maybe longer.

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Hasten has always had an endurance drop on the version that went live post-Beta.

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I have a stone/stone brute. having SB (3 end mod) and my stamina (3 end mod), my endurance drops really fast. we have noticed this recently. I think Stone melee is having issue because the moment i stop my endurance comes back really quick.

BTW I have noticed this change around LvL40-41 and my toon is at lvl44

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I have always been able to drain my endurance using Stone melee under Speed Boost. When you get to chain those big, expensive attacks that much faster (SB is +50% attack rate) I'm not sure we can say that's indicative of the bug. Now, the speed at which you drain it can be indicative, because it used to take me a little while.

I duoed the Ghost of Scrapyard with the help of a /Kin Corruptor about 3 days before the buffed GM regen rates, so I remember the battle to stay in endurance distinctly.

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the fact is that "Toon" is a very specific term outside of games that, while derived from "cartoon", carries the connotations of the "Looney Tunes" set of characters and the later "Tiny Toons".

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Sorry, it doesn't have those limited connotations to me. To me it means animated character.

I use the term rarely, preferring character, alt, etc. But I do use it from time to time. I also occasionally use the term "avatar", but that usually connotates a representation of the user, and I don't at all think of my characters here as "me".

In reference to someone else's post, I was exclusively an FPS player before I found CoH. I don't think I had a name for my representation in those games. That was "me".

Well, I now truly understand Castle's inability to find or document this.

I copied myself to test, ran some combat, believe I saw big end drops. Sadly, test is very laggy currently, so it's possible that polluted the way my bar was behaving.

I tried removing Life Insurance, played some, seemed fine.

I deleted my copied character, went to live, played some, determined I was still seeing large drops. I recopied to test, no longer could spot the issue (didn't do anything to my temp powers).

Went back to live, played for three hours. No apparent problems.

What a pain in the [censored]. I'll take it, assuming it stays away. But what the hell...

Just in case people wonder, I lost that temp power a while back. Level 38 or so.