Author Topic: And the mask comes off.  (Read 1712735 times)

Scendera

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2420 on: September 17, 2014, 01:34:22 PM »
Ironwolf: You know you need to post pics when it's done, yeah?

Fridgy Daiere

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2421 on: September 17, 2014, 01:34:36 PM »
I can't have mundane things on my barn :)

Quote of the day...

ivanhedgehog

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2422 on: September 17, 2014, 01:47:54 PM »
why are a couple people changing the topic from every thread to blasters being underpowered and needing a buff?  You've said you two cents on many threads, not everyone agrees that blasters were underpowered and needed a buff.  Move on.

who elected you hallway monitor? Its an interesting discussion on the games inner workings while we await news, go back under your rock.

DragonLord

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2423 on: September 17, 2014, 01:59:10 PM »
This waiting for any news is killing me and my friends . Not having a place to interact to relieve tension from work every day makes coming home very hard .  I've a few games out there and they are just not the same.  Getting that news a few weeks back just fueled the passion of playing again.  I've been even playing with the Icon download thank you for that as well.

Surelle

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2424 on: September 17, 2014, 02:06:15 PM »
This waiting for any news is killing me and my friends . Not having a place to interact to relieve tension from work every day makes coming home very hard .  I've a few games out there and they are just not the same.  Getting that news a few weeks back just fueled the passion of playing again.  I've been even playing with the Icon download thank you for that as well.

Well....  It may not be until next year until we hear anything more either way.  Nate & The Hail Mary team have been working on contacting NCSoft for the better part of a year, and they were just finally able to get the first offer onto the table for NC to look over this past July.  It will be cool if something eventually comes of it all, but not all that surprising if it doesn't.  We are really devoted to our old game, but I don't expect NC to care nearly as much as they're the ones who shuttered it and refused to sell it to Paragon Studios two years ago so it could continue on uninterrupted.

Cross your fingers, but don't hold your breath.  There, that was the daily CoX exercise of the day.   :D

thunderforce

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2425 on: September 17, 2014, 02:53:44 PM »
Personally, I liked old Defiance, but I wasn't so fussed about effectiveness and even before debt was nerfed in the early issues I regarded the occasional faceplant as part of the fun. It's not that Defiance would save me reliably, but that now and again I'd pop a Bone Smasher or Power Burst (short-ranged, as God intended) at the critical moment and obliterate the last enemy, which was very satisfying.

(Conversely, new Defiance... all very well, but with good inspo management, doesn't really do much.)

I read with interest the discussion about ranged vs. melee damage modifiers on Scrappers and Blasters. Is there any compensating effect in terms of the base damage/cast-time value in the powersets?

Codewalker

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2426 on: September 17, 2014, 04:14:00 PM »
The problem with old defiance is that it violated one of the cardinal rules of multiplayer game design. It made it so that a buff from a teammate (i.e. force field bubbles, maneuvers, etc) could actually reduce your effectiveness.

When your design encourages people to ask to be excluded from team buffs, you have a problem.

thunderforce

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2427 on: September 17, 2014, 04:19:27 PM »
The problem with old defiance is that it violated one of the cardinal rules of multiplayer game design. It made it so that a buff from a teammate (i.e. force field bubbles, maneuvers, etc) could actually reduce your effectiveness. When your design encourages people to ask to be excluded from team buffs, you have a problem.

Notwithstanding the notorious States suggestion, I never saw that actually happen [1]. If Defiance doesn't kick in, great! We had enough buffs. If we don't, well, at least Defiance might save the day.

But this is consistent with my view of liking old-Defiance because it was occasionally amazing, not because it was particularly effective overall. It made for good stories, not big numbers.

[1] Conversely, for all that Speed Boost was superb, one got this request often from people too malco to manage the extra movement speed...

Ankhammon

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2428 on: September 17, 2014, 05:08:30 PM »
The problem with old defiance is that it violated one of the cardinal rules of multiplayer game design. It made it so that a buff from a teammate (i.e. force field bubbles, maneuvers, etc) could actually reduce your effectiveness.

When your design encourages people to ask to be excluded from team buffs, you have a problem.

Reminds me of one of the least talked about advantages of the Sonic Resonance set for defenders, free endurance... well, basically.
The big trick that Sonic/ added for team buffing was a significant amount of res and some status protection. this could sustain a team, but not at 100% health. Mostly it kept teams at 80-90% just given the general flow of gameplay.
At those percentages Vigilance gave a huge end discount that meant you could run just about any and every toggle you could get your hands on and still blast away.

With other defenders, Vigilance worked against their powers. The more efficient you were at healing, flooring tohit, adding defense and just about anything else, the worse your endurance discount was while teaming.

Yes, vigilance was semi-broke... more broke than not.
So, I guess that since I24 was the fix blasters (I mean fix everything) issue, I25 was going to be... "and defenders too". :)
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2429 on: September 17, 2014, 06:27:06 PM »
I read with interest the discussion about ranged vs. melee damage modifiers on Scrappers and Blasters. Is there any compensating effect in terms of the base damage/cast-time value in the powersets?

Nope.  Not that I blame him because it greatly improved the flow of many of those sets and made them more fun to play (always one of the objectives of the game designers) but the melee sets started off slightly better than the ranged sets in terms of relative cast time and base damage (specifically, in DPA), and then got massively better when BaB revamped their animations.  That's when sets like War Mace and Battle Axe, known for a long time as being hideously slow, became almost lightning fast relative to their damage.  In fact if you didn't actually play some of those melee sets and were not regular forum participants in the appropriate discussion threads, you might not have even realized just how fast they got because its not something that was generally discussed.

To put it into perspective, if Defenders - and only Defenders - somehow got the same kind of average animation improvements that the melee sets got on average, they would have essentially found themselves with a higher damage modifier than Corruptors.

Something I think most players did not know.  There was a formula that dictated exactly what the recharge of an attack would be.  Simplifying a bit, attacks were designed to deal a certain Scale damage.  That scale was multiplied by the archetype damage modifier to get the actual damage the attack dealt.  So if you give Power Bolt, which does Scale 1.0 damage to a level 50 Blaster, that attack does 55.61 points of damage.  The exact same attack when given to a level 50 Defender does 36.15 damage.  That's 65% of the Blaster number, and without getting into the math that's part of the basis for saying that Blaster (ranged) damage modifier was 1.0, and Defender was 0.65.

Power Bolt's recharge was 4s.  All attacks (there were a few exceptions but they were always special cases) that dealt Scale 1.0 damage had 4 second recharge.  They had to, because recharge was dictated by a formula: Recharge = (Damage - 0.36)/0.16.  For Scale 1.0, its (1-0.36)/0.16 = 4.  For Scale 1.64 (Power Blast), its (1.64-0.36)/0.16 = 1.28/.16 = 8.  And so on.  Except for secondary effects (including, remarkably, damage over time) pretty much all attacks that dealt the same damage looked alike in this regard (there was a modified version of this formula for AoEs).  There was another formula for endurance cost (Scale * 5.2) **(see below).

Here's the kicker: there was no formula for cast time.  There was just the general rule of thumb that attacks that deal more damage should take longer to cast.  Beyond that, there was no other *numerical* rule to guide the devs.  And because of that, I am pretty certain I know what happened next.  Psychology guided designers' intuition to visualize melee attacks as tending to be faster, and ranged attacks as tending to be slower.  Its natural: we tend to visualize punches, swings, stabs, and kicks as being fast because they have to be: we also visualize an opponent trying to avoid them.  But we tend to visualize shots, throws, and blasts as a slightly more mechanical point-aim-fire process that lasts slightly longer.

This bias was not strong, but it didn't need to be because all it takes in City of Heroes is for one set of attacks to activate a quarter of a second faster on average to be dealing almost 20% more damage (when average cast times are about a second and a half).  And for complex math reasons, sometimes a whole lot more than that.

Allowing designers to have some intuitive input into how a power looks has some potentially important game balance ramifications, but in City of Heroes specifically (and Champions Online to some respect, with a combat system obviously influenced by CoH and Cryptic's prior experience) allowing designers to have any sort of artistic or intuitive input into how an attack looks is extremely dangerous.  That's because in City of Heroes the amount of damage a character can deal starts off limited by cycle time, but past the 20s and SO-level enhancements it shifts to being limited by cast time.

("Cycle time" is cast time plus recharge, the total amount of time it takes between when you activate a power and when you can activate the same power again).

Why?  Because at low levels and at low recharge, you're always waiting for attacks to recharge.  It doesn't ultimately matter what they do, what matters is how long it take for the next one to be ready to shoot.  When you are waiting for powers to recharge, recharge is the most important thing.  But once you have four or five attacks and start slotting for recharge, you tend to always have attacks ready to fire.  What matters is not how long it takes to wait for an attack to be available, what matters is how quickly you can get an attack off and move on to the next attack.  The faster your attacks are, the more damage you can squeeze in per second.  In fact, a simple heuristic that tended to generate something close to the mathematically optimal attack chain was simply to always use the attack that dealt the most damage per unit time (DPA).  You fire that, then of the remaining available attacks you use the one with the highest DPA again, and repeat.

In other words, how much damage a given offensive set could ultimately deal for high level players wasn't originally dictated by the power designers.  It was dictated by the animators who did not know that they were responsible for that.  I'm pretty sure even BaB did not know that until I essentially told him.  He originally thought the animation times could at best only weakly influence damage, and recharge was far more important.  But when I showed him my DPA-based damage calculations and he saw how they fairly accurately predicted the effects of faster cast time on Claws, he very quickly realized how much power the animation time wielded.

There were some attempts to rectify this problem towards the end, but none of them really got traction.  The VEATs in particular used a cast time vs damage scale formula that was different than all the other archetypes when they were introduced that I think was flawed in some respects but a step in the right direction, but that experiment did not spread beyond the VEATs.


** This fundamental rule of endurance meant that pre-I9 inventions, I could tell that pretty much all of the players that claimed to be able to "fight continuously without running out of endurance" without needing stamina were lying, unless they were one of the few builds that had endurance management powers or were doing something crazy with slotting.  Attack DPA generally ranged between 0.5 and 1.5 and averaged between 0.7 and 1.0 within a set.  At the low end a player had to burn at least 3.64 eps unslotted, or about 1.82 eps with three SO equivalents of endurance slotting.  That's higher than player endurance recovery without stamina: 1.67 eps.  And it presumes you are not using any other powers besides attacks.

Moonlighter

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2430 on: September 17, 2014, 06:44:51 PM »
Why?  Because at low levels and at low recharge, you're always waiting for attacks to recharge.  It doesn't ultimately matter what they do, what matters is how long it take for the next one to be ready to shoot.  When you are waiting for powers to recharge, recharge is the most important thing.  But once you have four or five attacks and start slotting for recharge, you tend to always have attacks ready to fire.  What matters is not how long it takes to wait for an attack to be available, what matters is how quickly you can get an attack off and move on to the next attack.  The faster your attacks are, the more damage you can squeeze in per second.  In fact, a simple heuristic that tended to generate something close to the mathematically optimal attack chain was simply to always use the attack that dealt the most damage per unit time (DPA).  You fire that, then of the remaining available attacks you use the one with the highest DPA again, and repeat.

In other words, how much damage a given offensive set could ultimately deal for high level players wasn't originally dictated by the power designers.  It was dictated by the animators who did not know that they were responsible for that.  I'm pretty sure even BaB did not know that until I essentially told him.  He originally thought the animation times could at best only weakly influence damage, and recharge was far more important.  But when I showed him my DPA-based damage calculations and he saw how they fairly accurately predicted the effects of faster cast time on Claws, he very quickly realized how much power the animation time wielded.

I can't tell you how often I had a frustrating discussion trying to explain this on a non-scrapper board.

Moonlighter~

Nightmarer

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2431 on: September 17, 2014, 06:52:07 PM »
If you grew up playing blapper

Oh sorry, was there any other way to play blasters? must have missed that memo  :P

Having said that, for non blapper types, I understand why people say that Defiance 1.0 was useless most of the time and I am sure it made no sense numerically since it only worked what? 1 time on over 100 attempts? However, THAT time it worked, whoah, it was glorious.-

Arcana

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2432 on: September 17, 2014, 07:28:44 PM »
Oh sorry, was there any other way to play blasters? must have missed that memo  :P

I knew someone that went through a phase where the way he played his energy blaster was to run right into the next spawn and Nova it, then yell "Help!" and die on the spot.  Then wait for the team to clean up the spawn and rez him, and then use nothing but his ranged attacks from a distance until Nova was recharged again.  And this was pre-Leeroy Jenkins.

That was when I began to realize I was doing it all wrong.  Because he only did that on teams he knew he could get away with it.  On lesser teams, he played more conservatively.  And that's when I realized that all this power the devs were dumb enough to give us was wasted on just killing things faster.  What it could do was allow us to play City of Heroes like no other players would ever be allowed to play anything, and get away with it.  Leeroy Jenkins wiped his team with him.  But before that ever happened, CoH players were pulling stunts far stupider, and often surviving to pull even stupider stunts next (or at least, not killing everyone else around them).

In City of Heroes, power was opportunity.  Opportunity to see if a team of scrappers could brawl the Envoy of Shadows to death (if they were high enough level, they could).  Opportunity to see how many times you can use Soul Transfer in a single room (my record: fifteen in the LRSF trying to solo an entire room of Longbow).  Opportunity to see what would happen if eight blasters set off their nukes simultaneously fighting Nightstar (she'll kill all of you: might want to avoid that one).

If you were a veteran player and you spent all your time and energy trying to do what everyone else was doing, just faster, you were not seeing all the game had to offer.  Sometimes you had to stop and nuke the roses.

BadWolf

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2433 on: September 17, 2014, 07:35:07 PM »
Every single one of Arcana's posts should be framed and put up in a museum. :)

LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2434 on: September 17, 2014, 07:39:31 PM »
The problem with old defiance is that it violated one of the cardinal rules of multiplayer game design. It made it so that a buff from a teammate (i.e. force field bubbles, maneuvers, etc) could actually reduce your effectiveness.

When your design encourages people to ask to be excluded from team buffs, you have a problem.

Old defiance also encouraged very bad and very stupid play on the behalf of blasters.  I played blasters in the time of defiance 1.0 and I can say, about 80% of my kills were when I was at full health.  I NEVER allowed my enemies to hit me, because I knew even just 2 shots could kill me if there was a boss there.  So my strategy was to shock and awe, to alpha strike, myself, rather than let them alpha strike me.  Bad blasters always let their enemies do what they wanted to do; pound them.  They missed the definition of the word "blast" in blaster.  Your supposed to hit them especially hard whenever possible, and not give them a chance to react.  Edit: Which meant not letting them hurt you so you weren't going to benefit from defiance 1.0.

Edit: Defiance 1.0 didn't really allow you to keep the initiative to.

The same problem could be said of vigilance.  Which was never changed.  It encouraged very bad play from defenders.  Good defenders didn't let anyone take damage in the first place, only healing after damage finally did get through the buffs.  But if you let enough damage through to teammates to benefit from vigilance, about 99% of the time the entire team would be wiped out seconds later.  I cannot count how many teams repeatedly wiped due to bad empaths who never did anything but heal simply cause the damage far out-damaged the healing they put out and the sheer lack of fortitude being cast on anyone.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2014, 07:48:06 PM by LaughingAlex »
Currently; Not doing any streaming, found myself with less time available recently.  Still playing starbound periodically, though I am thinking of trying other games.  Don't tell me to play mmohtg's though please :).  Getting back into participating in VO and the successors again to.

LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2435 on: September 17, 2014, 07:42:21 PM »
Reminds me of one of the least talked about advantages of the Sonic Resonance set for defenders, free endurance... well, basically.
The big trick that Sonic/ added for team buffing was a significant amount of res and some status protection. this could sustain a team, but not at 100% health. Mostly it kept teams at 80-90% just given the general flow of gameplay.
At those percentages Vigilance gave a huge end discount that meant you could run just about any and every toggle you could get your hands on and still blast away.

With other defenders, Vigilance worked against their powers. The more efficient you were at healing, flooring tohit, adding defense and just about anything else, the worse your endurance discount was while teaming.

Yes, vigilance was semi-broke... more broke than not.
So, I guess that since I24 was the fix blasters (I mean fix everything) issue, I25 was going to be... "and defenders too". :)

In that case it would have been a second buff for defenders, since they got a damage buff built into vigilance when they soloed.  I do agree vigilance needed a change though, as it just didn't do much.  At least the game was very very blunt in saying not to rely on vigilance due to the high damage enemies did.
Currently; Not doing any streaming, found myself with less time available recently.  Still playing starbound periodically, though I am thinking of trying other games.  Don't tell me to play mmohtg's though please :).  Getting back into participating in VO and the successors again to.

Power Arc X

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2436 on: September 17, 2014, 07:50:06 PM »
I love when Arcana post a wall of text. It's full a facts, number's and even a story or two.  Great reading.

blacksly

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2437 on: September 17, 2014, 07:50:43 PM »
How does the archetype that on average have better numbers in all respects somehow end up dealing less damage?

I agree that in general Blasters were not good enough in being damage specialist and got penalized on defense unfairly for it, but Blaster AoEs were both larger in area, usually larger in maximum targets, and more easily placed where necessary. You could target the mob in the center of a spawn easily, but it was sometimes harder to jump into the center of a spawn if there were already too many mobs there, even if the PBAoE attacks of most Scrappers had the same radius of usual Blaster AoEs.

I think that in general, Blasters did more AoE damage than Scrappers, not numerically in a chain (unless the calculation makes adjustments for area covered and/or maximum targets), but in normal gameplay.

ivanhedgehog

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2438 on: September 17, 2014, 08:02:12 PM »
I agree that in general Blasters were not good enough in being damage specialist and got penalized on defense unfairly for it, but Blaster AoEs were both larger in area, usually larger in maximum targets, and more easily placed where necessary. You could target the mob in the center of a spawn easily, but it was sometimes harder to jump into the center of a spawn if there were already too many mobs there, even if the PBAoE attacks of most Scrappers had the same radius of usual Blaster AoEs.

I think that in general, Blasters did more AoE damage than Scrappers, not numerically in a chain (unless the calculation makes adjustments for area covered and/or maximum targets), but in normal gameplay.
so blasters hit more, did less damage, got agro from more enemies, and died because of no defense....not a good plan.

LaughingAlex

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Re: And the mask comes off.
« Reply #2439 on: September 17, 2014, 08:05:54 PM »
I agree that in general Blasters were not good enough in being damage specialist and got penalized on defense unfairly for it, but Blaster AoEs were both larger in area, usually larger in maximum targets, and more easily placed where necessary. You could target the mob in the center of a spawn easily, but it was sometimes harder to jump into the center of a spawn if there were already too many mobs there, even if the PBAoE attacks of most Scrappers had the same radius of usual Blaster AoEs.

I think that in general, Blasters did more AoE damage than Scrappers, not numerically in a chain (unless the calculation makes adjustments for area covered and/or maximum targets), but in normal gameplay.

When you have two builds, one that is 100% offense with no survivability, and another that retains about 80% offense and has a huge increase in survivability, the later will out-damage the former simply because it has the staying power.  Thats why glass cannons often suck.  I'd also say though that bad play from blasters contributed to, though I think the fact that scrappers had better staying power made the difference.

Edit: To clarify, many blasters didn't try to do AoE damage correctly.  In fact, a huge majority didn't.  OR they targetted very poorly and missed a larger percentage of the group they were targetting.  They didn't know how to adjust fire, basically.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2014, 08:13:24 PM by LaughingAlex »
Currently; Not doing any streaming, found myself with less time available recently.  Still playing starbound periodically, though I am thinking of trying other games.  Don't tell me to play mmohtg's though please :).  Getting back into participating in VO and the successors again to.