Galaxy Brain
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Posts posted by Galaxy Brain
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3 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:
Look at what I written. It was not that Brutes were inferior damage dealers it was that Brutes are neither the top damage dealers nor the top survivors. The statement was that if role protection has prompted changes then what role is the Brute supposed to excel at.
I happily grant that Brutes are fun to play (to me at least). However I do not remember at any point there being a shortage of Tankers either.
Honestly, its a preference point for what feels more fun to you, much like how you could pick War Mace or Claws for similar overall performance, but one may feel better for you that day.
A few other ATs are like this too but don't have this battle. Why no Stalker vs Scrapper debate? Dominator vs Controller for CC? Corr vs Def? Multiple ATs have a lot of overlap with many being essentially the same with some dials tweaked back and forth. Its part of the fun!
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8 minutes ago, tan702 said:
Maybe this is an unfair comparison since FA/DM is really strong on a tanker..
Its more that DM is good and FM is..... not. Try a DM/FA brute instead!
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(Double post but w/e)
If you'd all like, I have some BS custom mobs that can make it into the "no really, it's brutal" mission sim 😄
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18 minutes ago, tan702 said:
Brutal mission simulator was a fun test. Ran it +4/x8 with my FA/DM tanker and got 6:46 on my first run. Full IO build, T3 Incarnates, no inspirations/temps. Goal now is to build a brute that can beat that time and I may change my mind about my OP. The wider AOE and higher aggro cap that my tanker had is giving me doubts though.
Main thing folks see is on the bosses and elite boss the brute pulls far ahead.
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Just now, Apparition said:
Then they have no role as most teams have a Tanker and Scrappers do more damage.Or they could have 2 brutes... or just F it and have controllers and blasters that cover both safety and damage
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1 minute ago, Erratic1 said:
The question is what unique role does the Brute serve on a team that is not eclipsed by other ATs.
They don't serve a unique role.
But, they provide a 2 for one special of something that CAN tank and CAN deal great damage.
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I think its normal to think linearly about that. I mean it makes sense, Brutes do more damage so they should be less tough, vice versa for Tanks. The issue is there is so, so much variety where you gotta think about a Earth/Stone Brute with tons of mitigation vs a Fire/Fire tank with lots of offense.... kind of gets real muddy real fast there.
I think these two AT's tho end up basically similar enough to where it is just a playstyle preference IMO. Do you want to be a wrecking ball with more damage potential? Brute. Do you wanna be a steamroller that hits everyone in the room? Tank. With the current meta overall, they're probably neck and neck enough to just be whatever you feel between the two outside specific power combos on each side.
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1 hour ago, Erratic1 said:
For general testing that does not sound unreasonable. Still, when facing Carnies, or Malta, or various other enemies, while they most assuredly have their smashing/lethal dealers, those are not the portion of the faction anyone ever complains. Wiping the spawn of Strongmen can be accomplished quickly but then there are all those women fading in and out dealing painful damage in abundance.
And certainly one can avoid various factions but in practice...well, maybe I am weird here, but the only faction I avoid are Hyrda--and that comes down primarily to not a lot in the game dragging you to them.
So, there is nuance here:
This is the damage-type spread for Council and Carnies with regard to proportional damage in your average 8-man spawn. Proportional in this case being the number of attacks, as well as the damage the attacks do per enemy/rank/etc. S/L are lumped together as they always are for all armors across the board. What's surprising is that proportionally, they're about equal in SL. Negative attacks are usually more defended against that Psy tho, so it often ends up with Carnies inflicting more from that... though overall its not that much of their output.
The phasing bit is annoying as hell tho and is a bad mechanic since it just makes you wait randomly.
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5 minutes ago, parabola said:
If you're taking barrier and melee then you are leaving a lot of damage on the table (both directly and in the form of recharge and endurance to use heavier attacks more often). Of course each individual build will need to see what it needs to supplement with incarnates for it's best performance. Which was my point in the first place - comparing mirrored builds is pointless, they should each be built to their individual strengths and weaknesses.
So, lets strip all that away then since the ATO's are what is really throwing things for a loop (also, Combat Jumping was turned on for one of them). The closer you build them in effectiveness (shoring up Defense or Damage shortcomings) they should perform about the same to where its more a fun-factor of Smashing vs AoEs
3 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:A simulation where all the opponents are dealing melee smashing/lethal damage would be the most favorable the Brute but not be honest about the situation of the game because there is a lot more out there than smash/lethal delivered by hand. But I have no idea what is in Galaxy Brain's simulation.
The "brutal" sim (named for this thread lol) has a balance of all damage types relative to how often you'd run into them in-game, well proportionally. It is mostly S/L damage, but so is most all content to begin with as about 50% of all attacks have a S or L component.
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@Replacement hit the nail on the head with testing as well. My mission sim is meant to test just that: your average mission clear.
It does not test raw ST output, so sets like EM fall behind there.
It does not test raw AoE effectiveness like a Farm map would, so even sets like Spines fell behind as the difficulty got turned up.
Theres an old addage I'm likely butchering, but you wouldn't test a goldfish on how well it climbs a tree or a monkey how well it swims. If youre looking at a test where you compare something highly optimized to pass the test against something that isn't, it should not be a shocker who wins.
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4 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:
To put it another way, an Energy tank shouldn't even be able to get a better pylon time than a Spines scrapper since no scrapper can ever reach tank mitigation values.
No, that is ok.
The #1 ST set should probably outperform the worst ST set even between ATs with different damage values. Much like how a spines tank will likely wipe a mission faster than an EM Stalker which would blow all the rest out of the water with ST pylon times which do not even matter in real gameplay.
If we wanna compare pylon times, why not only run stalkers or debuffers which ruin pylons?
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7 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:
A fun side note... found out my shield/em tank, with saturated AAO, has better single target damage than my claws/sr scrapper. Not by much, granted, bout 5 seconds faster than the scrapper's average, bet if I ran more tests they'd even out around 3 minutes on a pylon... but it amused me. A tank... taking down a pylon in the same time as a scrapper. With vastly more mitigation.
BALANCE!
Try it with an em/shield scrapper, fully saturated, as well. Comparing two way different power combos on different ATs, especially with one having a big X factor in AAO seems a little off...
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Just now, DougGraves said:
Yes on super reflexes. And Martial Arts sets that are melee and do not have shuriken.
But it is "Technology" not "Devices". A broadsword, battle axe, and katana are definitely technology. Unless you think humans naturally have broadswords somehow.
Technically... it is natural for us to use tools. Even little kids know how to pick stuff up and fling it around 😛
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Put in Warrior-Berserker bosses who's power is 1000 pushups a day and use SS or StJ
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1 hour ago, Luminara said:
A very long reply
I don't want to keep doing giga-quotes so I'll just respond as such.
Nothing should be equally useful to everyone. This is very true, but when it comes to the options available to make cool / fun builds (not even meta ones!) there is a balancing act for how many options + the quality of those options. This ties to the comment about the Dam/End sets (as well as the new just regular End set, and before that the added TAoE sets!) and how the HC team doesn't "own" the IO system... which fair, its not their baby but they have custody of it now and have shown to make solid additions to it following basically the same structure you outlined. If by following the same conventions as the OG devs did to add new options or tweak existing ones to be better is somehow a bad thing... then I'm confused?
In my eyes, more options can only be good, something like the End/Dam sets was mentioned as it broke the mold with the addition of +Dam, even if its not a *lot* of it, it is still there and recognizes that certain categories can intermingle as many attacks carry that effect. If a theoretical Dam/Stun set or two emerges, that would mean attacks with Stun can now slot even more options alongside the existing choices to lead to more player diversity. The mention of City of Statues here is odd as.... well you can do that if you slot these attacks for Stun currently? I don't appreciate the call for me to be grateful for the options currently available when I'm tossing out ideas for improvement either, especially when you follow it up with "I'm not opposed to getting more IO's". Me pointing out that X family of sets are lacking is not me taking an authoritative stance demanding X be done, but raising awareness and getting group discussion going of the matter is something any of us could do. Do I need to be on the HC team specifically to say "it'd be nice if we had more options"?
Yes, a proc bomb can miss, just like any other power. True, and there is a 10% chance of failure minimum, per proc. But, you can optimize yourself through global bonuses to minimize those chances and have enough recharge to roll the dice often enough for it to on average get the results you planned for. The question though is if that is a good thing or not. This relates to the comment about the purples as well, yeah you can do better with them but then is that the expectation? Everything you said is 100% true, but it also doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you're slotting purples + purple procs, you're also getting purple bonuses that often give Acc and Recharge which help proc powers in a sort of feedback loop, as do things like Force Feedback, etc. Yes, they can fail, but all powers can by missing / etc, and with a 90% proc rate odds are high that you can rely on proc powers to work if you set yourself up for it most of the time to where it is often way better to use procs than other options, in the meta sense *limiting* player options if they want to be effective. When it comes to Inf and Purples/Etc, that ties into the availablity / player expectation point as well that was part of the OP.
A build not having access to any proc or unique IO, or even any IO set, is a choice, not an inherent limitation. This is sort of 50/50. My earlier example of Battle Axe vs Broadsword showed that one has more slotting options than the other due to having -Def as a trait. These two sets predate IO's for sure, so there clearly was no intention of one having more opportunities than the other, but it's there. We have seen certain powers tweaked to allow/disallow certain set categories for slotting in HC patches, so it is something that is at least considered (Like EMP arrow getting +Res but specifically not allowing Res sets, or hell the mess about Combat Teleport not having +Def in it specifically). If you pick Battle Axe, or Energy Melee, etc, you'd know they inherently have less options than some other sets so yeah it is your choice, but then when we look into adding purples to the mix it opens the doors to slotting options.... at which point we gotta ask if lack of options *is* part of those set designs?
I'm curious though @Luminaraas most of your responses have been specifically aimed at me. What is your take on the subject as a whole? You say you'd be open to more IO sets, but at the same time seem set on them being the same as they are now in many way / opposed to changes to them. That seems a bit confusing to me in terms of what your stance is?
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On 2/15/2021 at 1:57 PM, tidge said:
I didn't ask. I try not to be critical of any player's play style, power choices, costumes, etc. so I sincerely just took them on face value.
Very true! Its just that *particular* AT and power combo has lets say.... connotations lol
On 2/15/2021 at 1:57 PM, tidge said:I don't want to reduce this little story to an ad hominem argument. I wanted to share only that I recently encountered a new (-ish?) player that was having an appropriate (IMHO, YMMV) level of frustration because of game content. I explained that the difficulty setting was almost certainly too high (just as I indicated in my post) but that is what he wanted to run with. The last several pages have had a whiff of 'the game is too easy' to them... but this player did not self-gimp, they simply didn't take full advantage of everything the game has to offer (as has been described by others, above). I don't think my PUGmate was a 'black swan'. I just wanted to share teh story of a player who would (likely) end up even further behind the curve if the game was 'rebalanced around IOs' (which I take to overlap significantly with 'made harder'... certainly not in all cases, but in a majority of them, I suspect)
It seems like they picked up on some things but not others, which is fine though a little odd that they knew about the difficulty settings at all for +1/x6, but not how to readjust? Anywho, I don't mean to pick on this guy through proxy but this goes to more just learning the game, which this person was clearly in the process of if they went with that particular build + was messing with Oro and their difficulty in the first place!
It seems like most of us are in agreement that post 50 content could use some more bite, and from some anecdotal evidence from other threads + testing by @Infinitum.... Incarnates probably have far more power than IO's do there but that is another can of worms. Heck, difficulty when it comes to content is a whole can of worms with the sort of "ecosystem" you deal with. We've beaten around ideas regarding risk vs rewards, why some enemies are more "frustrating" than difficult (carnies phasing is more just a time trial than difficult), and also how sometimes its a matter of even accessing the crunchy stuff (vanguard arcs, rularuu arcs, etc). On the whole though, I think we are all in agreement it should be more of an endgame thing anyways due to that being where you truly get power from being IO'd/etc when it comes to really meaty content.
As for the IO's themselves, I'm more curious on the IO System's balance between drops / creation / set-to-set balance / powerset balance with them in mind. The last bit especially when it comes to what can slot certain effects / how certain IO families are simply far worse than others.
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On the whole, if you were to compare each combo against each other (En/Ea, Claw/Ea, Claw/Regen, etc, etc) head to head, the Stalker will for sure have better ST on average due to Assassin's Focus + other tweaks, but as mentioned worse AoE on average too. They are also a *bit* squishier, but overall not by much.
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4 hours ago, golstat2003 said:
Would you still say it's an issue now that IOs allow Blasters to encroach on the "unkillable" area?
And yes crashless nukes really were needed (and still are--anyone saying make them have a crash again wasn't here when most folks simply didn't take nukes.).
In a grand-scheme sense, it is not as bad but what @ForeverLaxxsaid holds true in regards to all the blaster has to devote to in order to sort of just "match" what armored damage dealers can do. Melee primaries are also more.... I guess "solid" than Blast primaries in terms of design in my testing to isolate them. Granted, this means I did not use a blaster's secondary attacks but still they only exceeded Scrapper averages when I tested on x8 with invincibility turned on in the AE to focus on output. In that regard, yes they are great for team content but the melee's are not too far off without needing to sacrifice as much as the blasters do.
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7 hours ago, aethereal said:
I am told that CoH currently has no concept of "triggered" effects on getting attacked or hit. That is, there's nothing in code that examines a character that you just attacked to see if they should trigger some power of that character.
Obviously, it would not be impossible to add such a thing, but it'd be a big change.
There are conditionals such as Brute's Fury that check if attacked (not hit, just somebody swings at you) that you get X (fury meter)
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3 hours ago, Linea said:
The bigger problem you're going to run into here, is you're testing builds, players, and playstyles as much or more than you are sets. I wasn't even beginning to try to be fair about testing sets, I was just curious what my main stable would do. And I was hoping the empath would beat all the tanks /and/ survive to tell the tale so she could tease them all. Unfortunately runners are a pain and she came in last.
I'm personally curious how Dahlia will do. She's my only "Tank". I'm curious to see how much that difference costs her.
Well, tbqh its a bit of an unspoken rule to exclude Incarnates as they make everything kind of homogenized. All judgements hit the same AT to AT, etc.
The office map is made to be run multiple times and is one of the best in terms of being linear but "real" in terms of limiting herding the whole map and so on with elevators and blocked off segments (gentleman's rule to not herd through the doors you can open to not have tank n spank be as powerful). That said, with the same build and agreements the players should get *similar enough* results over time to be valid.
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19 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:
The funny thing about nukes is they aren't even the worst overperformers. I won't make any friends saying this, but Melee characters simply do too much damage with too much survivability. Everything kind of cascades from there. Blasters got crashless nukes to try forcibly catch them up to Melees.
Honestly, yeah.... I remember pointing this out in live back in the day with an analogy of like, a Blaster does say 20% more DPS than a Scrapper, but a Scrapper is 200% more survivable and that's an issue.
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1 hour ago, xl8 said:
Depends what you mean. Brutes and scrappers are good at what they do and have very few complaints from players.
The same cannot be said of sentinels.
For the sake of semantics I'll say sentinels have good def/res and good attacks but don't succeed in being anything that distinguishes them from the pack.
The balance between secondary and primary means they don't stand out in either respect. Personally, I don't have an issue with that. They are vanilla.
They would benefit from having a useful mechanic that's worth is reflected in limits on primary/secondary.
I understand what you mean by them not standing out, thats the same boat I'm in with them! I was more confused by the specialization between Offense and Defense, needing to pick either. That is where Brutes and Scrappers stand out as high-damage offensive ATs that are also armored to the point of being essentially immortal in many cases.
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On 2/12/2021 at 1:44 PM, Linea said:
The Empath didn't even chip a nail.
Runners Suck: Jil was however rather vexed at all the bosses running away like they'd been taking track lessons from Rommy. Without the Runners Cia (Blaster) would have beat them all, and Jil (Empath) would have beat all but Cia (Blaster) and Kate (Scrapper).
Here are my top 5 (favorite) characters:
(These are NOT mirror builds, so grain of salt, tongue in cheek. All are fully armored Tier 4 IO Incarnate Builds, built for standard Linea Armor instead of damage.)
Kate (Kat/Bio scrapper): 9:05
Cia (Water/Atomic Blaster): 9:42 ... Runners Suck!
Asja (Kat/Ena Brute): 9:45
Lucy (SD/Radm Tank): 9:45
Jil (Empathy/Fire Defender): 13:14 ... Runners Suck!
I'm very curious as well by your numbers given that BZB and Inf both got much much longer times. You mention being fully Incarnate, were you using all the Incarnate powers liberally?
@Bill Z Bubba, @Infinitum, could you perhaps slap on t4 powers and see if you match?
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@tidge, just curious due to the AT and powers... how did they get to 50?
"The Game is not Balanced around IO's"..... should it be?
in General Discussion
Posted
As I mentioned in the OP, we really do not know the ratio of people using IOs straight-up. If I had to guess, like many other posts I've made here, I would wager that many more players (not necessarily characters, but individual players) use the IO system to where it can be seen as the HC norm.
@Luminara, I'll bite but we need some parameters. Luckily, I have a suite of Scrappers with basic SO builds as a baseline that happen to have a ton of results. They also happen to be an AT that deals great damage and has decent survival out the gate, so both aspects can be tested like in the OG test on SOS.
I figure we can try going full-procs on one build, and then going more for set bonuses on another and see what gives better results. For the sake of results though, it'd probably be better to pick only a few sets out of the nearly 20 scrapper sets as many would likely have the same slotting options. Some of the sets should have less options, some more, to show the impact of certain options available.
We could also probably isolate some things like Battle Axe on SO's but with a spread of Force Feedback procs. Or a run with just Gaussian's in build up vs not, etc.