nzer
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Posts posted by nzer
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I'm coming back to the game after a few years, and I wanted to reuse an aura I had on one of my characters on another character but wasn't sure which one it was. But when I opened the original character to check, I got a message saying the costume had invalid parts.
Can someone help me figure out what aura this is?
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1 hour ago, Mystic Fortune said:
Well, you're wrong.
No, they're not. Even if you accept that a premium power set should be more powerful than a free power set, which you shouldn't, those power sets aren't premium anymore. It's not part of the "integrity of their original design" to be overturned relative to all the non-premium power sets. Quite the contrary, that's an affront to the integrity of their original design.
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Having thought about this some more, I think the solution is actually really straightforward: we need something that can multiplicatively modulate an attribute's resistance without also modulating its value.
I can see two possible options:
- Change strength to not affect resistance, and add a second strength modifier that only affects resistance
- Add flags that can be applied to sources of strength that restrict them to affecting either the attribute's value or the attribute's resistance
Either solution would allow the team to handle these problematic interactions directly rather than with kludges like "ignores external buffs." For example, if damage inspirations were flagged to only affect attribute value and not attribute resistance powers with enhanceable resistance wouldn't have to be flagged to ignore external buffs in order to prevent those inspirations from boosting their resistance values. This would allow for abilities that both have enhanceable resistance and are affected by power boost.
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11 hours ago, Vooded said:
The suggestion by @nzer seems relatively elegant and simple. Easy to code, too. But it leaves us with the strange scenario of maximizing global recharge and minimizing enhanced recharge.
Not if the scale factors are set appropriately, as increasing enhanced recharge also increases the effective PPM of the proc. Eliminating the behavior you're referring to is actually the primary goal of the change.
11 hours ago, Alouu said:@nzer Do you have a suggested pair of values for L and E? I tried basing my comparison table around the ones you had set to default, but since proc rate caps at 90% they barely do anything, just increasing the base recharge needed to cap rate from 14.5 seconds to 17.
I'm not sure what PPM you're using, but there's really not any reasonable way to stop long recharge powers from capping proc chance when PPMs are as high as they are on the high end (meaning >4). You could do it, but it wouldn't really be a PPM system any more.
Ideally PPM values would be lowered across the board, and L and E would be set such that fast recharge abilities get enough of a boost to counteract that. The values I used actually aren't too far off what you'd want, as they nearly double effective PPM for very fast recharge abilities and nearly halve it for very long recharge abilities.
In the absence of lowering PPMs across the board, you could get the same effect by leaving L at or near 1. That would leave effective PPM nearly the same for fast recharges and heavily nerf it for long recharges. I don't recommend that though, as it makes the listed PPMs misleading.
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Since a couple people have mentioned my "solution" I'll explain it in a bit more detail. The gist is to add a couple scale factors to the proc chance formula such that powers below a certain level of recharge proc more often than the listed PPM and powers above that level proc less often than the listed PPM.
Here's the current proc chance forumla for a click power:
ProcChance = PPM * (ModifiedRechargeTime + CastTime) / (60 * AreaMod)
And here's the modified formula:
ProcChance = PPM * (L * ModifiedRechargeTimeE + CastTime) / (60 * AreaMod)
ModifiedRechargeTime is the power's recharge time after enhancements and alpha, but before global recharge, and the additions are obviously L and E, where L is a constant value greater than 1 and E is a constant value less than 1. What the values are set to controls at what recharge time the actual PPM is equal to the listed PPM and how strong the deviation is above and below that recharge time.
Here's a graph to illustrate. In this example L is 2.51, E is 0.6, CastTime is 1 second, and PPM is 2 procs per minute. The green line is the current formula, the red line is the modified formula.
Spoiler
As you can see, the modified formula boosts proc chance below a 10 second recharge time and lowers proc chance above a 10 second recharge time. The current formula hits the maximum proc chance around 26 seconds for this PPM, but the modified formula doesn't hit it until after 47.
Here's a graph with all the same values except PPM, which is at 3.5:
Spoiler
The primary thing to see here is that the curves still intersect at a 10 second recharge; this is the point at which the actual PPM and the listed PPM are equal. This consistent intersect makes the formula both easy to tune relative to the current formula and easy to explain to less mathy players; abilities with a ten second recharge get the listed PPM, abilities with a shorter recharge get more than the listed PPM, abilities with a longer recharge get less than the listed PPM.
Here's a link to an interactive version of the formula so people can fiddle with the values. I'm not suggesting the above values for L and E, or even these specific modifications to the formula, are what we would actually want to go forward with; this is just a proof of concept to demonstrate that if the goal is to lessen the effectiveness of procs on abilities with long recharges and increase their effectiveness on abilities with short recharges we probably don't need to do anything more involved than modifying the proc chance formula. I don't think there's a need for a fundamental redesign of the proc system like other posters have suggested.
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1 minute ago, Solarverse said:
I would surely noticed if they used their AoE Knock Down, it's a very distinct sound.
All I'm saying is that I don't find "I don't see it much" particularly compelling when the available data clearly demonstrates that it's tremendously popular.
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Just now, Solarverse said:
I don't doubt that, I just personally hardly ever see anyone play it...at least on Excelsior.
Would you notice if someone was using it? It's not a particularly flashy set.
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37 minutes ago, Solarverse said:
nobody hardly plays that set from what I can see
It's the most popular Scrapper set at level 50 by a huge margin...
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On 3/9/2020 at 6:32 PM, Saebeas said:
Thugs, beasts, Necro are a few I've tried.
The secondary is just as important, if not moreso. Thugs, Bots, and Demons to a lesser extent have enough survivability to work with almost any secondary, but the rest don't, and will need to be paired with a secondary that plays to their strengths.
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2 hours ago, Obus Form said:
AND guaranteeing the player use from scaling-resist by losing HP over 4 seconds
I'm going to be very bold and propose that scaling resists should always take full effect no matter how large the hit is. The way they work now defeats the primary advantage resists have over defense.
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Just now, Bopper said:
I actually like your use of exponential scaling as opposed to linear. I'll have to play around with things and see if there's a right balance in there. Are the L and E currently arbitrary, or are you having something in mind?
They're basically arbitrary, I just wanted something that looked mostly sane at a wide range of PPMs. Definitely play around with it, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts.
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@Bopper, here's a better explanation of what I'm suggesting. It's a graph of a modified version of the proc chance formula for a single target click power where y is proc chance, x is modified recharge time, TA is the power's activation time, P is procs per minute, L and E are scale factors I've added, and the green line is the current formula. I'm not saying we should go back to flat percentages, just skewing slightly in favor of faster recharging powers.
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Just now, Bopper said:
You pretty much described the original method, flat percentages. Which disproportionately favored fast attacks and AoEs. The math isn't hard, but it just brings back an old problem.
No, I'm suggesting something in between the original method and what we have now, where how far in between it is can be tuned by adjusting the weighting. PPM would decrease as recharge time increases, but not to the degree that the proc chance is constant.
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40 minutes ago, Sarrate said:
I'm not an expert wrt to procs (your guide was fantastic, Bopper), and what it really sounds like we're trying to solve multiple, competing problems at the same time.
1) When using a flat rate, fast recharging powers were disproportionately powerful (eg: Neutrino Bolt) while slower powers were left out.
2) Using PPM and being affected by recharge (enhancements, set bonuses, etc, or some combination of the two) leads to fast recharging powers being overly penalized. It also leads to really weird build behavior where people might avoid recharge to maximize procs. It "feels" wrong.
3) Long recharge powers basically guarantee procs and thus can be transformed into mini nukes.
We can solve all three of these at the same time, I think, by applying a weighting to recharge time in the PPM formula to skew the proc chance more in favor of short recharge powers. This will make it harder to turn long recharge powers into nukes, compensate for the cost of animation time in short recharge powers @oedipus_tex mentioned, and lower the damage loss of additional recharge so people aren't avoiding slotting recharge because it will hurt their proc damage.
The downsides are that it turns procs into even more of math problem than they already are, and renders the actual PPM text meaningless, as the number of procs per minute would depend on the recharge time on the power.
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50 minutes ago, aethereal said:
I don't feel like I understand the design goal for procs.
What are they supposed to do? Is the idea to allow people to improve average performance at the cost of unreliability? Is that... actually something that anyone wants? Certainly, in practice people seem pretty dedicated to maximizing reliability. Is it just supposed to be a complicated system that allows people who have additional systems mastery to improve their performance by demonstrating mastery over fairly complicated game mechanics? Is it supposed to make powers more diverse (if so, we have too many damage procs), and the unreliability is beside the point?
I don't really get it.
Presumably the second option, but I don't see it as rewarding mastery over obtuse systems as much as providing build tension for minmaxers to chew on. In that I think it's pretty successful, while having the side benefit of allowing support ATs to build for some damage if they want to. The problem is that offers so much benefit to abilities that aren't meant to be relied on for damage that they can end up superceding abilities that are.
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1 minute ago, Wavicle said:
No, let’s not ignore that, because that does not help your case, given all the Other tools Time has and FF does not.
I've never argued FF competes with Time in practical scenarios...
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2 hours ago, Frosticus said:
Let's look at vs +3's
Or we could look at +4s, which is what people actually run. Or we could look at +4 incarnates, which is the closest this game comes to actual difficulty, and where FF's def is twice as effective as Time's. But both of those are bad for the argument you're making, so sure, +3s are fine. And let's certainly ignore that in a real team either set will likely put everyone well above 80% def to everything.
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39 minutes ago, Frosticus said:
it kind of is. It's like if you combined the entirety of FF with the entirety of Radiation, leaving out only the powerful -regen of lingering rad. Ya you lose the mez protection bubble, but instead get to cast the FF shields on yourself too.
It is pretty powerful.
Now, a lot of that power may be considered overkill and unneeded in today's game, but it is there no matter how much handwaving people do.
I'm over here playing the heck out of poison to 50 again heh, so don't mind me.
Time gets significantly less defense than FF, significantly less -def and -tohit than Rad, no mez protection, and very little -regen. I'm not going to argue it's not better than both (though that's not a terribly high bar, especially for FF), but it's nowhere near the entirety of both. Maybe if you just look at buff/debuff types and ignore the amounts.
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1 hour ago, oedipus_tex said:
they would never, ever, ever, ever ever be allowed (ever ever) to show up in an Armor set. Ever.
Good thing we're not talking about armor sets then.
Again, Force Field provides 53% defense to the entire team without IO sets or incarnates. Are we pretending that would be allowed in an armor set?
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1 minute ago, Blackfeather said:
I'm pretty sure resistance to -Res effects is baked in - the higher the resistance, the higher the resistance to -Res.
Yeah, that actually sounds right now that I think about it, and it does seem generally correct from a balance perspective; defense provides resilience to def debuffs by making them less likely to hit, res should also provide some kind of innate resilience to res debuffs.
But it's still icky. The better way to handle that would be for all sources of resistance to also provide resistance to -res, that way if the team wants a particular source of resist to not do that, they have a way to make that change.
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1 hour ago, Trickshooter said:
Oh hahaha, you're right, I somehow forgot (even I wrote that guide) that Damage Enhancements and Resist Damage Enhancements are the same Strength effects. 😅
Yup. Ultimately, damage resistance and damage should just be separate attributes. It really, really doesn't make sense for damage resistance to be implemented as res(damage) if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
This isn't even the only problem it creates. How would resistance to -res be implemented under the current system? Can it be?
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1 hour ago, Trickshooter said:
I'm not a developer or a programmer, so this might not actually work, and even if it could, it might still be a lot of work and there might be a lot of exceptions and rebalancing of powers needed, but...
There is a field for powers called something like "Strengths Disallowed". This is the field that prevents most Melee attacks from being affected by +/-Range and Pet powers from being affected by +/-Recharge. This is a different field from the one that prevents all outside buffs/debuffs, which is called something like "Ignore Strength" (with a value of "true" causing the "Not affected by outside buffs/debuffs." message you see on City of Data).
Would it be possible for some of these powers, with effects that would otherwise be "Power-Boost-able" if not for their enhanceable +Resistance, to instead have Strength(Lethal Damage, Smashing Damage, etc.) added to the Strengths Disallowed field? Would this prevent +/-Damage from affecting the power at all and prevent the interaction between Damage buffs and Damage Resistance?
Assuming I understand the system correctly, this would also prevent those powers from having their damage/damage resistance increased by enhancements, which defeats the point.
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4 minutes ago, Wavicle said:
True enough, but changing that is a Huge ask.
Oh for sure, the cat's out of the bag now
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5 minutes ago, Bopper said:
Hmm. It seems to me like the real problem here is that damage resistance is implemented as Res(DamageType) rather than as its own attribute.
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What aura is this?
in Help & Support
Posted
I figured it out, it's the rainbow path aura