arcanaville

It is an okay effort, but I think this only reaches a four out of ten on the mastermind meltdown scale. I remember when Incarnate trials came out. Those were some good mastermind meltdowns.

I'll ask again. If you look in the latest patch notes thread in these Beta forums you'll see that in their detest of this nerf to their snipe dominators have caused the powers dev to want to give dominator secondaries a pass over to help enhance some performance peaks and valleys. Most dominator secondaries are hopefully getting a few light brushes which has got to mean those without snipes too I would assume. Details aren't in until they are further along but it seems the topic of your question will be getting some attention. The topic of my question was "what are the primary sets that don't have a snipe in them getting?" Didn't say a word about dominators. You know, like Water Blast and Pistols. What do they get? I may be way out of the loop with recent events but I can say that the reason why snipes were looked at in the first place before shutdown was that the feeling was that sets with snipes contained a soft penalty in having a power that was only situationally useful but was taking up an important early spot in the ranged attack set, particularly blaster primaries. Modifying snipes were an attempt to address this problem with snipes specifically, a problem non-snipe sets did not have. This was essentially an attempt to address a design glitch surrounding snipes, not an attempt to buff an entire archetype that accidentally missed half the sets. I may bear some small responsibility here as my focus in the game had shifted from defensive sets to offensive attack sets, in particular ways to look at and measure the damage output of various sets factoring in the reality of attack chain limitations. Snipes kept coming up again and again as being problematic when looking at how the meta of the game had transformed into one where teams were "steamrolling" much faster than originally intended. Also, and this would take a long time to rehash, there's the "four attack rule." It takes four attack powers you can cycle reasonably on average for a player to not be idle a lot. What we would call a "mostly full attack chain." Many ranged sets couldn't get there if sniper attacks were not somehow "normalized." Its more complicated than that, but that was a factor as I recall. That's all well and good, but even if there was some minor disparity, suddenly making that massive damage attack instant pulls them ahead in a major way. Ain't nobody saying dual pistols was overtuned before this buff to the other sets. I don't have numbers handy anymore, but the preliminary analysis I did in I24 beta suggested insta-snipes would not unbalance the blaster primaries overall. That's not to say that every set with a snipe was underperforming and every set without one was overperforming, but the net result of the changes made all blast sets closer together as a whole. If the result after the changes created new outliers, those were intended to be addressed separately.

I'll ask again. If you look in the latest patch notes thread in these Beta forums you'll see that in their detest of this nerf to their snipe dominators have caused the powers dev to want to give dominator secondaries a pass over to help enhance some performance peaks and valleys. Most dominator secondaries are hopefully getting a few light brushes which has got to mean those without snipes too I would assume. Details aren't in until they are further along but it seems the topic of your question will be getting some attention. The topic of my question was "what are the primary sets that don't have a snipe in them getting?" Didn't say a word about dominators. You know, like Water Blast and Pistols. What do they get? I may be way out of the loop with recent events but I can say that the reason why snipes were looked at in the first place before shutdown was that the feeling was that sets with snipes contained a soft penalty in having a power that was only situationally useful but was taking up an important early spot in the ranged attack set, particularly blaster primaries. Modifying snipes were an attempt to address this problem with snipes specifically, a problem non-snipe sets did not have. This was essentially an attempt to address a design glitch surrounding snipes, not an attempt to buff an entire archetype that accidentally missed half the sets. I may bear some small responsibility here as my focus in the game had shifted from defensive sets to offensive attack sets, in particular ways to look at and measure the damage output of various sets factoring in the reality of attack chain limitations. Snipes kept coming up again and again as being problematic when looking at how the meta of the game had transformed into one where teams were "steamrolling" much faster than originally intended. Also, and this would take a long time to rehash, there's the "four attack rule." It takes four attack powers you can cycle reasonably on average for a player to not be idle a lot. What we would call a "mostly full attack chain." Many ranged sets couldn't get there if sniper attacks were not somehow "normalized." Its more complicated than that, but that was a factor as I recall.

I did not play Asheron's Call, but from what I've been told Asheron didn't design for players to solo, it relaxed the rule on limiting what players could solo. Without this design imperative a lot of the game became soloable over time. But in CoH, the devs eventually made the conscious decision to *balance* around soloing at least in part. Meaning: if a particular archetype or even a particular powerset combination within an archetype could be demonstrated to be unable to solo the main story content of the game within a certain margin around the average player's performance, that combination would be considered "broken" and in need of rebalancing. We had hundreds of different powerset combinations in CoH. The idea that you could put together any two at random within the limits of an archetype, even what seemed to be "bad" combinations, and the devs official statement was "that should be able to solo all the main story content in the game at a reasonable pace" is to the best of my knowledge something novel at the time, and something hard to find now. True story. I spent literally years trying to get the devs to make adjustments to Martial Arts. However, prompted by a comment made by another player one day I made a TA/A defender and demonstrated that this combination could not reasonably solo many of the missions in the 20s, particularly ones dominated by lethal-resistant villains. The devs immediately told me they would look to make adjustments to address that as time permitted (they were balancing a lot of things at that time). That's literally all it took.

Near sunset someone (I believe it was Arcanaville?) made an extensive and well-thought out post supporting just that. CoH is a case of terrible game design and failed decisions, that somehow magically "worked great" in the end. Resulting a game that defies expectations, sets new precedent and will never be replicated again due to this. A good example off the top of my head to support this thesis; People praise this game for the lack of the "holy trifecta". When in fact, the devs originally intended for there to be such a thing. They just messed up balancing so badly that the holy trio was not needed for the bulk of content. Scrappers could do well enough on their own that they didn't need a tank. Tanks could do enough damage that they didn't need a Scrapper. Lengthy, binary holds are a nightmarish idea balance wise, same with overwhelming and stack-able buffs/debuffs. But somehow it all just "works" The single most important event in the history of the game was an event no player saw. The original design of the game included the notion of the holy trinity, which at its heart is the fundamental principle of MMO teaming: make every archetype "necessary." At some point, and even I don't know when it happened exactly, and maybe it happened unconsciously at first, the fundamental design principle of CoH became "everyone should be able to solo." The idea that everyone should be able to solo in an MMO was not just novel, it was downright heretical at the time, and is still a wild idea for most MMOs that aren't shooter-looter type games. But in City of Heroes it opened the door to everyone being "overpowered" in an MMO sense, which just happened to match the concept of the game being about superheroes. City of Heroes is a broken, twisted, cobbled together thing in which half the stuff doesn't really work and half of that can never really work. But what's left targets a very specific gameplay style no other MMO serves, and no other MMO can serve. Being super-powerful in a world of super-powerful things.

** POOF **