William Valence
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Posts posted by William Valence
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6 minutes ago, Rathulfr said:
Why would it be a bad thing?
You're giving people three instances of power increase for free.
- They now have an extra power pick
- They now likely have an extra pool selection (if it was one of the common dip for hasten situations)
- They now have 20% faster recharge for free just for existing
For as ubiquitously strong as Hasten is, it does come at a cost. Whereas this will, admittedly, make people have to change up their builds a bit to accomplish the same things, 90%+ of things that people can do now, will be able to be done, and will gain more power picks. Yes hasten is strong, not saying it isn't, but so much of it's strength comes from the fact that powers that grant recharge are fairly rare. It seems like people are overestimating the hurt that would come from this, and underestimating the strengths that would come from this.
I feel this is a bit shortsighted and would make characters much stronger in the long run for no reason other than not wanting to have to spend a power pick and a pool to get hasten's effect.
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Hasten may be a Min/Max tax, but I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.
I do think it would be a bad thing to give inherent quickness to everyone with no power or opportunity cost. It would probably be best to just leave it as it is.
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17 hours ago, burk314 said:
Just to add my two cents as someone who doesn't play masterminds, but does play illusion. Phantasm has exactly 5 powers: Resistance and Fly which are not relevant, Power Bolt a 70ft single target attack, Energy Torrent a 40ft cone attack, and DecoyPhantasm a 60ft summon "attack". There is no melee at all. Just messing around with testing right now, a freshly summoned Phantasm summoned his decoy, used Power Bolt and then ran into melee before using Energy Torrent. He didn't wait until he had no powers to use. In fact, it doesn't seem like he cares what part of his attack chain he is in and just randomly decides to run closer. The decoy acts the same way, though it's harder to see since he gets summoned in melee and it really doesn't matter where he is.
Just noticed this.
So when I was looking at Illusion to see what it was doing I made an Ill/Dark on Pineapple. The behavior that I saw with consistency was that two Decoys stay ranged, one goes in, Dark Servant goes in, and Phantasm/Phantasm Decoy go in. The Phantasm will use whatever powers it wants, because it has no ranged preference setting so it just uses what it has.
To sound out my working theory at the moment, and give some examples explaining why, is that I believe the team role assignment functions that decides how many mobs in a group attack you at ranged vs melee is applying to MM pets. What one of the ones that I found does, pools the health of the AI team, and splits it up assigning a percentage of team health that has to be melee or ranged. With a reduction of Melee requirements by the number of onlyassignranged pets. However a reduced requirement doesn't seem to be an eliminated requirement, and you can't just modify that willy-nilly because it's important to NPC enemy behavior.
- Example #1 -> The previously Described Ill/Dark. With no pets that are onlyassignranged, there is 1 pet (dark servant) that is onlyassignmelee and 4 pets that are basic config with no ranged preference (3 Decoys 1 Phantasm). A percentage of the required health assignment to melee is the DS, with Phantasm and a Decoy taking the rest of the assignment as none have a onlyassignrange flag. This leaves 2 decoys to stay at ranged, which from my observation they do. <- this is something that can be observed now by building your own Ill/Dark on pineapple and going to the RWZ dummies.
- Example #2 -> When configs are swapped the proper ones on Thugs (Bruiser given the correct Pet_Melee, and Arsonist given the correct Pet_Ranged though less important) the Bruiser stops rotating hurl on occasion, and the arsonist behaves more like enforcers/thugs staying back and creeping forward only during breaks in its attack rotation. Which is likely the power selection saying hey I have nothing to do I should try my melee attack, oh ranged attack is back up use it.
This is why my next test is to summon a melee pet with the "Pure range" MM sets and seeing if that fixes stuff. If it does then it's reasonable to try and adjust that for controllable pets. Or just get scared, chicken out, and say that Mercs now has a shotgunner henchman and bots gets a blade drone and there's no such thing as a pure ranged MM set anymore.
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1 hour ago, DR_Mechano said:
Have you thought about putting the melee attacks for pets on a massive long recharge or would that basically be like 'removing their melee attacks' and completely pointless?
So I don't believe a henchman having a melee attack affects anything other than, eventually there may be enough gap in it's ranged attack chain that it decides to use it and run in. I don't see it affecting the henchman in the "Let me run in and love you" behavior that's seen with say the Medic, Battle drone, or sometimes the Arsonist.
So hopeful end result stuff would have ranged henchman each selecting it's proper team role, with no mandated melee role assignments. Should that happen, there shouldn't be a need for ranged henchman to even have Melee attacks.
You also gave me an idea for something else to test though, I should flip the configs for Necromancy and see what happens. Lich has no melee attacks, and it'll refresh my nightmares of Zombies and Grave Knights hanging back at range. It would be interesting to see what happens.
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They can't, he's transmitting it live.
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So I got some testing done over the weekend. Specifically stuff I wanted to test with the Oni. Not as much as I was hoping, though, because a previously cancelled D&D session got un-cancelled. My next step in testing is to replace a pet in the "Pure" Ranged sets, with a melee pet, and see what happens. If this causes the non-melee pets to behave as it seems to with Zombies, and sometimes thugs/ninjas then I can soft-confirm a theory.
As to simply saying where the stuff that controls things is:
It's everywhere. Multiple times. I've found three different functions all doing the thing I think is the problem. In three different sections. Each written, it appears, by different people. It's so messy that it's easier for me to first see if these have any influence on the pets by trying to manipulate the AI with purpose made pets than to try and manipulate the pets first with changes to the AI.
I don't plan to test any pet immobilization stuff.
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4 minutes ago, Leogunner said:
Not making an argument against you, but 500% of what? If you're effectively taking 0% damage when taking into account sustain from regen and a debuff now increases that into 3.4% damage for the duration of the debuff, wouldn't you need to take these factors into account when comparing it to something who starts off taking 4% damage and 6.2% damage with the debuff?
Short answer: Healing is ***** yo
Long answer:
500% of incoming damage. At softcap, with no resistance, you are effectively taking 5% of the damage that's being thrown at you. It's proportional and doesn't care how much damage is coming it, or your healing, it works out and it remains consistent as damage changes. With the -20% debuff you go from getting hit 5% of the time to 25% of the time. 5x as often. Or if 1000 dps is coming at you, 50dps taken becomes 250.
Healing is not proportional, it cares about how much damage is coming in, so you really can't use that in estimates, because your effective 0% is only effective 0% as long as damage that makes it through mitigation is less than the regen. And you have to know the incoming damage to come up with a percentage taken.
CO for example has an issue with it's Damage reduction stat as it wasn't proportionate either, so you had to determine incoming damage to figure out % damage mitigated. Healing can be self contained a bit by using your mitigation stats as a multiplier to get an effective HPS, which tells you your Immortality line, and can give you an idea of time to die vs different incoming damage values. But that again just shows you can focus on the mitigation stats primarily.
So in general when dealing with damage taken, mitigation affects incoming damage and healing output proportionally, so it's often easier and not too terribly imprecise to focus on it.
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4 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:
So making you take 300% more damage in the crash in ALL powersets is considered an improvement to rage? I cannot comprehend this logic.
Well if it were put back to -20% defense, as you originally recommended, it would cause soft-cap defense to take 500% more damage, and resist sets would just get to effectively ignore it.
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3 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:
If it was -10% resist and -10% defense it would be.
Not quite, remember base tohit is 50% if I take the defense debuff I'm at 60% chance to be hit I've increased damage taken 20%
If I was softcapped and I take the defense debuff I'm at 15% chance to be hit, I've increased damage taken 300%
If I'm at no resist and I take a -20% resist debuff I increase the damage I take 20%
If I'm at 90% resist and I take a -20% debuff I increase the damage I take 300%
Again, it may not be the most intuitive to understand, but it's a well thought out change that does what it intends.
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18 minutes ago, ZeeHero said:
Revert the - resist change to rage and keep it -20% defense. this made rage not terrible if you used it with a resist based set.
This would make it so that resist sets could effectively ignore the mitigation crash again and defense sets got the diamond-hard shaft. No Bueno.
While I'm not the biggest fan of the implementation, it's because I'm a massive fan of consistency. It's why I don't play brutes. But the implementation of the mitigation crash is fair to both types of mitigation, and manages to be kinder to players that have fewer mitigation stats while scaling up in effect as more mitigation stats are added.
It's an absolutely reasonable change.
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4 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:
... and Battle Drones absolutely DO run up to melee enemies. So it's not just the Configuration that causes the problem.
It just so happens that I don't think it's the config that's the primary issue. 😉
Obviously things like changing the Bruiser to not have a ranged preference or giving a ranged preference to a pet that has no melee attacks is a good start, but it's interesting that the set with Mary Poppins tier behavior for it's ranged pet also has lots of melee pets.
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I have a few things that I plan on dicking with this weekend. None of what I posted was really unexpected though.
And when I say phantasm has no range preference, for perspective, all the ones I named right before it have a ranged preference, and so does Grav/ singularity. So one of the things to find out is if you give it a ranged preference, does it start behaving.
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Lich, Assaultbot, Battle Drones, Ghosts, Oni, Soldiers, Commando, Thugs, Bruiser, and Demonlings all have the same Configuration.
Phantasm has default configuration so it has no range preference.
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7 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:
If I may be so bold as to ask you, what is the difference in config between say Protector Bots and Assault Bots? As mentioned Protector bots don't have any melee attacks and don't randomly run in to melee, they sit at max range all the time so could you, in theory, give the rest of the bots the AI config for Protector Bots or does it not work that way?
The only difference I remember off the top of my head is settings for the Protector bot to establish valid targets for buffs. I can check that too when I get home.
3 minutes ago, Weylin said:Where can I find the source code related to henchmen? I'm combing through it right now but keep getting pestered, so I'll dig in later.
One thing to keep in mind, is that the homecoming team is really trying to work to get everything official, so that's why I'm being purposefully vague and "hypothetical". Actual snippits or links to code are as far as I've been told, a no-no.
My hope is to get a setup that is functional for both ranged and melee, and translatable to future sets that I can just hand over, because it's really a mess and the team is doing a lot. And this is not something they can really split focus on.
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4 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:
Ok having a look at the pet powers list, Battle Bots and Assault bots all have a specific melee power called 'Smash'. What if we just removed that option from them during testing to see if it reverted them back to their original selves.
In the instance that I tried, like I said, it didn't work. For "Pure Ranged" sets at least, I got thugs going nicer, but there is still a bit of progress and decision making that needs to be done to get the other set's to behave.
One thing I'll do when I get home is see if Phantasm is using the correct config, because I saw a few pets that are not. If it's using the melee config that may be a simple enough fix for it at least, I can't remember anything I saw that would have caused a solo ranged pet with no melee to run in, especially when the other pets it could be teamed with are melee.
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8 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:
Honestly at this point, I'm sorry for the melee sets, but I'd like to have things back the way they were before Castle
screwed everything upfixed things.Ranged sets are no where near as bad as melee was. Melee sets were practically unplayable, and Castle's fix made them playable.
And Bots is still top tier, so /jranger
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Being vague while still trying to be helpful.
There is not AI baked into pets or powers, there is a bunch of behaviors, spread about in the spaghetti of the entity code, and a Pet "Brain" which controls pet specific behaviors and takes inputs from configuration files that inform preferences and parameters of the pet. Pets themselves point to the configuration which is supposed to determine it's behaviors.
Removing brawl would not work on it's own nor would adding a "Ranged Brawl", definitely not in sets with only ranged pets. All you get is a pet that thinks it's supposed to melee, runs in, and use a ranged attack every 4s. There may be potential to side-step this issue, but it will take effort, time, and testing.
Fun facts: the Bruiser, Oni, and Lich all have the same behavioral configuration. The Arsonist and Medic have the same behavioral configuration. In fact I'm convinced thugs were copy/pasted from Mercs initially and then modified from there.
Questions that the Mastermind community may want to ask themselves, and that could be useful to the developers that could be working on this one day, is:
- Could they live without "Pure" Ranged set? I.E Replacing a pet in Mercs and robotics with a melee pet (I main Necro so Ha!)
- Could they live with "Hybrid" Pets such as the Oni being refocused into ranged or melee?
- Could you handle the potential toning down of some sets that may perform a tremendous deal better after any possible behavioral changes
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6 minutes ago, Captain Powerhouse said:
Increase the aggro cap?
Even if it became technically possible to do this, it only makes secondary tanks even more meaningless.
Question:
If there was a variable AT aggro cap, and a damage proc for tankers that was variable depending on the number of targets attacking them, would that fit your goals of off-tank team utility?
Example:
Tankers given 24 aggro cap. When 24 enemies are attacking them they do .8 scale damage. With no targets attacking them they do, say, the .95 scale damage you've tested to be within 90% of brute damage.
This would very likely test the versatility of the lua integration, but would it fit with what you are trying to implement?
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5 hours ago, Frosticus said:
I remember it scales based on which tier pet you put it on though which is why the bruiser is a good pairing.
Kinda/sorta yeah
It gives the same power to whatever henchmen you use it on, however bosses have a 1.25 modifier for their debuff strengths, Lts. have a 1 modifier, and Minions have a .75 modifier, and since it grants a power, it uses their stats.
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3 hours ago, Lazarillo said:
What is the uptime on Noxious Gas, anyway? There aren't any numbers for it at all.
I believe it's 45s duration with a 5min recharge.
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13 minutes ago, Haijinx said:
I thought they were dropping to 575%
You're right. So 94% not 98% of Brute damage. That's not an unreasonable push if the goal is to not push the melee support identity and close a gap that would have had Tankers at 69% Brute damage at saturation with a likely 10% health difference.
But monkey wrench, 94% of the damage vs 10-16 targets vs 100% damage vs 5-10. <-*kvetching intensifies*
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The 600% cap and .95 melee damage mod puts Tanker damage, when buff saturated, to about 98% of brute's damage. Brutes will have about 10% less health than the tanker when buff saturated to bring resistances to the same level.
Basically the Damage cap change normalizes the difference between Tankers and brutes at the extreme end where the difference in mitigation was being eliminated, but the damage gap couldn't be.
The part that really ups the tanker's damage output, and the part I've been kvetching about to everyone's annoyance is the target cap increase. It's effectively a scale damage increase, and it's one where the condition to access it is controllable by the player to a strong degree, or simply occurs due to the game's response to teams. The game scales more toward AoE, especially in team and incarnate content, and the removal of the gap between Tankers and Brutes in buff saturated situations is lost. The gap being flipped in favor of Tankers because now there's a new variable that isn't accounted for and allows one to provide more than the other without response.
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Good lord, all I asked is why you thought the system was set up in a way where the AI and models were somehow "Baked" into a henchman, and therefore things couldn't be redirected.
I regret bumping this nonsense, it may be time to have a mod shotgun blast this.
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DELETE Hasten, SLIGHTLY ALTER all enemies, SLIGHTY ALTER all player powers
in Suggestions & Feedback
Posted
It would be more likely to increase power than reduce it.
If the things you can do with perma-hasten can be done with inherant hasten replacement, and you get additional pool/power options on top of that, you're making a change for the sole purpose of allowing for hasten level results without having to spent the power/pool picks to get them.