aethereal

Yeah, looking at the Afterburner power in Rubi's API thing, it looks to me like it only affects max flight speed, not current flight speed. Though I'm not sure I fully understand how flight coding happens. You just see a current flight speed increase with normal flight because normal flight already "would" take you past cap (which is now raised by AB).

So the math for this isn't so much hard as there's a lot of it. Let's go through some of it to see how daunting it is to get a really good grasp of what's going on. So first of all, chance to hit. HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) Let's plug in some numbers: +0 Minion fighting a character at 45 defense: Accmods: Power Accuracy * 1 * 1 BaseHitChance: 50 ToHitMods: presumptively 0 DefMods: -45 HitChance = 5% for a power with 1.0 accuracy (note that even minions may have higher-accuracy powers so even against even-conn minions, you may actually have a higher than 5% chance of being hit at softcap) +0 Minion fighting a character at 45 defense who has procced a +10% chance to hit, then, is all the same except ToHitMods is +10%, leading to 15% chance to hit. +4 Boss fighting a character at 45 defense: Accmods: Power Accuracy * 1.3 * 1.4 BaseHitChance: 50 ToHitMods: presumptively 0 DefMods: -45 HitChance = 9.1% With +10% chance to hit, that raises to 19.1% Okay, so one way to describe this change would be to say that the expected damage of an even-level minion, after the alpha strike, would be 15% higher (95% chance of 1x damage, 5% chance of 3x damage). If a minion gets 3 total attacks off, then we'd say that their total expected damage would rise by 10% (since the first attack has no chance of proccing). This is for a character right at softcap, exactly 45% defense. A character with say 43% defense would experience only about a 5% expected rise in damage in the same scenario (3 total attacks), and a character with 47% defense would similarly experience about a 5% expected rise in damage. A +4 Boss gets 2.12x damage against a character exactly at softcap from this change, and procs is 15% of the time, so about a 17% rise in expected damage after the first hit, and here we might reasonably say that a boss doesn't die after just a couple of attacks, so maybe we just ignore the first hit and say it's a 17% rise in expected damage altogether (for a character exactly at softcap. Again, someone a few points of defense higher or lower will experience decreased damage changes). But expected damage is maybe the wrong metric for defense calcs in general. We plausibly care much more about what we in the software industry would call P90 or even P95 or P99 damage -- that is to say, the damage that you experience at your 10% unluckiest sets of rolls, or your 5% unluckiest, or 1% unluckiest. That is to say, if you survive 9 spawns out of 10 fine, but the 10th spawn you run into kills you every time, my guess is probably players end up turning down difficulty there. Do they turn down the difficulty if they die to one spawn in 20? I'm not sure. One spawn in 100? Probably not, unless maybe it's a farming toon. How do you calculate P90 or P95 damage? Well, it's doable as a pure math calculation, sort of, but it's quite complex. The way I'd do it is write a monte carlo simulation and then just order the results of a 1000 or so runs by the total damage the player experiences and choose the 100th from the end or the 50th from the end. But what should we simulate? Well... shit. I mean, really what you want to do is simulate an entire spawn. Which isn't just generic minions or lts or bosses firing scale 1 attacks, it's... a lot of stuff. It's different mixes of enemy classes firing different attacks, and you also need to figure out how fast do they die. So there are a lot of variables here. A selection of them: What level difference between player and critter What mix of critter types What attacks do the critters have - Do these attacks debuff defense? - Do these attacks have inherent accuracy or to-hit? How long do critters of each class survive Exactly what defense level does the player have (to each of the attacks the enemies have) A really useful tool, I think, would be a simulator that allowed you to plug in even rough answers to these things. Like where you could say, "Okay, here's a stylized +4/x8 spawn of Council, and here's some metric of how fast they'll die to the player attacks, let's run a few thousand combats." It would be necessarily imperfect, but I think it would be a useful tool to try to attack the complexity here. However, it'd be a hard tool to write, and it involves data that's not right at my fingertips, at least, about the details of enemy attacks. Even if you had it, trying to really understand the spread of possible scenarios would be a big undertaking.

I do not feel that you "ought" to need the Body pool as a /bio Brute. It's got several endurance tools, and as a Spines brute, you'll be wanting more hard-hitting ST attacks unless you only care about AoE. As a result, I took Soul Mastery for Gloom with my spines/bio.

How about you try to state an affirmative point somewhere in here? Do you have anything to actually say on this subject? Because here's my assessment of your contribution to this thread so far: 1. You completely failed to understand the proposal and responded to something that nobody suggested. 2. When called on that, you did not acknowledge it and tried to claim that your point was valid. 3. When explained again, you made sweeping statements about progression that still did not actually address anyone's point. 4. When called on your bullshit you started claiming that you didn't say... uh... anything? 5. When things were painstakingly spelled out to you, you.... didn't address anything and went back to saying that you... didn't say anything. The only actual thing I've seen you say that doesn't appear to be based entirely on your own painful misreading is, "I don't see any need for a change to how defense works." Do you actually have anything to say besides that?

I think it's the only non-temp power that doesn't hit speed cap, but don't the jetpacks fly a bit slower than cap, or am I drunk?

You did, in fact. You explicitly quoted me about diminishing returns and said, "What incentive is there to progress if you're getting worse instead of better?" I pointed out that this was a misunderstanding of what "diminishing returns" means and explained what diminishing returns are, at which point you said, that that was what you were getting at (which, you know, I'm not sure was true -- I think you just didn't understand the phrase), and that you wanted to get more powerful. At which point I said yes, get more powerful, just get more powerful more slowly, and you continued to argue against the idea in several posts. Not in a narrow way explicit to defense, in broad sweeping language about the general concept of progression and of attaining mountains and so forth. So, let me lay it all out for you again, hopefully avoiding phrases you don't understand: It is my view that in general, we should be aiming for a design in which characters rapidly feel "super" -- it is a superhero game -- and they feel meaningful impact of each new power they get and even each enhancement they slot. However, as you chase more and more specialization in terms of getting a specific number higher and higher, you have to invest more and more in order to gain the same amount. This is how most of the game works. When you slot your first SO-style damage enhancement, your power increases its damage by about 30%. Your second SO-style damage enhancement in that power increases the damage of the power about 23% over and above what the first enhancement gave you. The third enhancement would do about 19%, but actually it's even less than that because of ED. Build-up on a power that's not slotted for damage increases your damage by 80%. Build-up on a power that is slotted for 90% damage increase impoves its damage by about 42%. This is also how mez duration bonuses work, and healing bonuses, and mez resistance (not mag-style protection), and a ton of other things, but just to drive the point home, let's look at recharge. Let's say you have a power that has a 2 minute base cooldown time. The first 100% recharge you get towards it -- from any source, whether global or local -- decreases the cooldown time from 2 minutes to 1 minute, so it reduces the cooldown by 60 seconds. The next 100% recharge you get towards the power reduces the cooldown by only 20 more seconds, to 40 seconds. The 100% after that reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds, to 30 seconds. This is called "diminishing returns." Each investment made in the same place gives you lower rewards. Still rewards! But lower rewards. The opposite is increasing returns. Let's say that instead of damage bonuses adding to each other, they multiplied by each other. So if you had damage power that did 100 base damage, and you added a 30% damage enhancement IO, you increase the damage to 130. But then if you added another 30% damage enhancement, instead of increasing the damage to 160, you increased the damage by another 1.3x, so 169. And if you added a third 30% damage enhancement, you went to 220. And if you then did an 80% build-up on top of that, you went to 395 damage. (Instead of the 270 damage or so that those would add up to in the game as it exists). Defense and resistance are increasing-returns functions. The more defense and resistance you get, the greater a percentage of your damage is mitigated. Why does increasing returns not generally make for great game design: Because it devalues all investment that doesn't get you towards the highest levels possible. An Elec-Armor character who gets Weave and has no other investment in defense has wasted a power choice. It will be difficult to tell from in-game results whether they even have that power. A Super Reflexes character who's sitting at around 40% defense-all and does not yet have Weave can make no more valuable power choice than Weave. He will approximately half the incoming damage he takes with one power choice. This diminishes meaningful choice in the how we build our characters -- if you chase defense at all, you need to chase a LOT of defense, and doing otherwise isn't just suboptimal, it's massively suboptimal. It creates great gulfs of power between people who fight their way up to the increasing rewards curves over those who do not, such that a level 50 character who is heavily invested in but attacks the wrong increasing rewards curves is just gigantically less powerful than one who chose the right curves to attack (for example: if I have a Scrapper at level 30 who's resistance based and another who's defense-based, they're probably relatively equal. If I try to take that resistance scrapper to the endgame, his defense peer is able to handle literally 4x more damage than he does). And it reduces viable options at any given power level. Now, these are statements of taste. There is someone out there who is like, "In my ideal game, a character who is carefully built to the exact optimal meta can be literally hundreds of times more effective than one who is max level and lavishly invested in but does not find the one-true-build." I personally doubt that that taste is very widespread, but I'm sure it exists somewhere. I'm not here to argue matters of taste. If you love increasing returns, or someone out there in the world loves increasing returns, then my tastes are different than that person and that's fine. However, if someone really, really, really likes increasing rewards curves, they are frustrated by almost every mechanic in City of Heroes besides defense and resistance, because almost all mechanics in CoH are on diminishing returns. I don't expect that hypothetical increasing-returns-fanguy is very happy with CoH. A totally different person can say, "Look, yes, it was probably a bad decision to have an increasing returns on defense and resistance back in 2004, but that was 16 years ago and the game is on the whole fun despite some stuff you have to learn about it, and overturning the entire balance of the game is a bad idea." And I agree with that person! I am not proposing to switch defense and resistance to diminishing returns. I am proposing to slightly mellow out the steepness of the increasing returns to defense, in particular, as an alternative to doing what the actual devs did back in the day and proliferating defense debuffs or give entire areas of the game massive to-hit bonuses.

Probably the main use would be in enhancing the speed of Hover, not jetpacks, flight, or mystic flight. I guess it would probably also mean that Flight + Afterburner + Sprint would be a little faster than Flight + Afterburner?

Uh huh. So I take that to mean that you do not in fact stand by your sweeping condemnation of diminishing returns? Look, there's nothing wrong with principled conservatism. The game is mature. I certainly don't endorse ripping out fundamental systems at this late date, even if those systems are pretty flawed. But it's kinda dumb to make a bunch of posts saying that it's actively desireable to have short, sharp increasing returns curves, that it's the only way to feel progress in the game, and then quietly ignore the question when asked about all the places that the game does have diminishing returns (which is to say almost every mechanic in the game besides defense and resistance).

So do you hate all the places in the game where we do have diminishing returns? Do you want to turn damage bonuses and recharge bonuses into increased returns? Or do you only like climbing the mountain for defense and resistance?

Sure, and you should get better. But when we're on an increasing rewards curve like happens right now, we see, well, the dysfunction that happens right now. And, in fairness, they did try to approximate this to some degree. Each point of defense that you get as you go along is more valuable than the one before, but in general it gets harder to get defense as you go along. You get your big meaty powers and then you're scrabbling for little pools or set bonuses. But a better design would be to have it be the case that there was lots of space between the very best mitigation and the second best and the third best, and that those things could gracefully degrade into each other, instead of having everyone crammed up at the same softcap and then any degradation in defense rapidly exposes you to multiples of damage. People can make reasonable choices about when they have "enough" mitigation instead of everyone just obviously shooting for softcap or within a point or two of it, and you can make defense debuffers that expose you to 20% more damage instead of 200% more damage.

Not getting worse, getting better more slowly.

I mean, I think that's a valid point. Seems like it would be very sensitive to a number of factors, and kind of hard to say without extensive testing how big a deal it would be -- and that obviously won't happen.

That's legit and sorry for misunderstanding you originally. You're saying that this kind of change would set up cascading defense failure in circumstances where normally it would not occur. That may be true. I guess I'm not clear how many enemy groups have minor defense debuffs that don't normally cross into cascading. Obviously the opponents that are super serious defense debuffers already provoke cascading failure on essentially any set besides SR. But there may be a new category of debuffers to worry about with a change like this.

You're misunderstanding DDR, it doesn't affect to-hit buffs. It affects defense debuffs.

So, in that spirit, let me expand a little: The basic problem with defense is the increasing returns curve from about 35->45. At low levels of defense, you barely notice it. Only once you're in your 20s do you even start to say, "Huh, I guess maybe I'm a little more durable?" Then in your 30s you start to get all, "Wow, I didn't think I would survive that fight, but I did!" (albeit with some other times when you get unlucky and don't), and then in the late 30's and 40's you run up this rapid curve into extreme durability in which you turn up your notoriety settings again and again. And the curve is equally fast and sharp on the way back down. Get your defense debuffed just a little and you're screwed. Enemies with +to-hit do multiples of your damage. Soft-capped characters are, via our stylized look at even-conn minions, 2x as durable as resistance-capped Tanks and Brutes, 3x as durable as resistance-capped Kheldians, and 5x as durable as any other resistance-capped character (and also they get protection from rider effects that have to-hit checks). And yes, it's not actually that bad, because we don't actually fight even-conn minions at these levels, but it's still pretty bad. Challenging soft-capped characters via just piling on more attacks and more damage is doable, but it enforces a defense strategy, because piling on that much additional damage will completely destroy resist-oriented characters -- it sharpens the meta on reaching the softcap. However, our strategies so far that disincent defense have been: defense debuffing, auto-hit attacks, attacks that hit common holes in defense (such as non-positional psi), and of course always-on to-hit bonuses in incarnate content. All of these strategies have a problem: they rapidly walk down that same sharp curve as soft-cap is approached. Your soft-capped character is invincible, a tank, until they hit a defense debuffer, at which point they're taking 5x, 10x the damage they were and they die instantly. My point is that this is dysfunctional. Better game design would have a diminishing rewards curve at the end, not an increasing rewards curve. If we were talking a game that was intended to be CoH-like but started from a completely blank slate, mechanics-design, you'd have a situation where a defense-oriented character would get meaningful durability immediately, upon their first investment in defense, and then as they walked up towards the end-game, they'd get less and less from each additional investment (but not nothing -- ideally, you'd always be getting something out of having a Forcefields character on the team). But we aren't starting from a blank slate mechanics-wise. My idea -- which again was never made with the idea that it would just be accepted and put into the game -- was to point out that you can in fact approximate some of that attack on the sharp curve of defense within the current mechanical framework, without the blunt hammer of just making every defense-based character very squishy. We just need to step beyond "defense debuffs, auto-hits, always on +to-hit." You can do this because high-end play in CoH involves a lot of attacks coming at you, and there are ways that you can make a subset of those attacks be more effective against defense characters without making ALL of those attacks more effective. (You could also have like one out of four attacks that an enemy makes have +5% to-hit. There are other ways). People react defensively because they've had it drilled into them that anything that bypasses a little defense walks them down that sharp curve to many multiples of incoming damage. That's not true of my proposal, and while my proposal will never be applied, it's useful to contemplate how we can mitigate extremely high defense without rendering defense characters useless.

It's worthwhile trying to get people in the suggestions forum to understand the mechanics of the game. This idea will certainly never be implemented, but if someone comes out of the discussion with a better understanding of how all these factors interrelate, that's a win.

If you have defense debuffs (and do not have strong ddr), you're already experiencing a much stronger effect than this anyways. Cimerorans, Arachnos, Banished Pantheon and others already hit you much more extensively than this concept would. And, by the way, they are far from unbeatable, which is another reason why all the railing and gnashing of teeth here is seriously overblown.

200% increase from damage taken from a single even-conn minion, sure. Which would change that minion from "not able to budge your green bar" to "not able to budge your green bar." Go have a softcapped character stand in a group of three white minions. That's the overwhelming power you'd be facing for ten seconds.

If you are softcapped and are fighting even-conn opponents, you have room to spare on your durability. You will not notice this difference. And if you aren't softcapped or near to it, you will see essentially no additional damage from this change.

Sure. But you can get to the point where you barely use ice sword, and the slower sword animation for assassinate still isn't bad, it's just not quite as good as other sets.

Ice melee is pretty good on a stalker. The deal with ice melee is normally, "Well, freezing touch is awesome, but one attack does not make an attack chain." Having assassin's strike as a second hard hitting ST attack gives the set a much more powerful attack chain, plus you can use the re-hide in assassin's strike into freezing touch to get your critical damage all up front, not as DoT. It has a cone and a pbaoe, you don't need to take frozen fists, you can take a snipe for a third hard hitting attack.

It's not really that much difference because that only applies to even-conn minions, and other enemies have a higher than 5% chance to hit you at soft-cap. But sure. The 5% of even-conn minions who procced this to-hit bonus would have triple the chance to hit you on their second and third and maybe fourth attacks, if they survived that long. If ten such minions attacked you four times each for 100 damage each, without this change you'd expect to take 200 damage (two hits). With this change, you'd expect to take about 250 damage. It's not totally insignificant, and if you were riding the ragged line of your challenge rating, you'd expect to have to lower your challenge rating. But it's a long way from giving everyone +5% to hit, especially when you consider that most minions and lieutenants do not survive long.

I mean, I explained that in the post you just quoted, in the part you didn't quote?

I think people aren't doing a very good job of understanding the level of additional challenge that this change would bring: not very much. A little, certainly. It might be that people would want to turn down their notoriety from +4/x8 to +3/x6 or so, depending on exactly how much they relied on exactly-at-softcap mitigation. But the effect of this change is that a few enemies would be mildly more likely to hit you at softcap, after the initial alpha. It's nothing like the level of additional power that a global +5% (or even +3%) to hit buff would bring. It's not intended to be primarily a rebalance or an additional challenge change. It's just supposed to make there be less of a sharp threshold from "increasing returns to def" as you go from like 35->45 to "almost no additional return to def" from 45 on. And in a world where this change was added, the primary threat to softcapped squishy characters wouldn't be whatever random minions procced the to-hit bonus, it would continue to be defense debuffers and cascading failure.

I'm not sure that the design goals of "similar sustained DPS to a scrapper, less durable than a stalker, better AoE and worse ST than a scrapper" are coherent ones. First of all: are scrappers bad at AoE now? This is kinda news to me. Stalkers, sure. But scrappers seem to me to have solidly good AoE, outside of maybe a couple of sets. Second: Is sustained AoE a thing? After a round or two of Scrapper-level AoE, aren't we down to targets that we might as well single-target? Third: If you do find yourself with a crowd that you can't burn down fast, isn't it going to suck having below-stalker durability and also (probably?) no way to get the enemies to group up? If you need to reposition and maintain range to survive, doesn't that tank your AoE DPS? I mean, I'm sure that people on the boards will design builds that can survive enemies getting close up, but going down that path leads back to "well, why not play a blaster," who will have way better AoE DPS and can be built pretty durable, too. I think Sentinel as a single-target specialist makes sense, and I think that's largely what they are today. Like a stalker, not in terms of stealth mechanics, but in terms of focusing damage on a single hard target and being durable enough to handle that single large target (but maybe not stand in a x8 spawn). Current opportunity mechanics certainly support that, both in terms of concentrating their excess damage on a single target, on that res debuff largely being wasted on anything that's not at the very least a boss, and in terms of defensive opportunity giving a sustain kind of thing. If I were interested in AoE, I certainly wouldn't play a current sentinel: tanks are great at AoE, brutes really are fine at it, scrappers are fine at it, and blasters are obviously great if you want something less durable. Obviously, any DPS niche in this game is crowded, but AoE specialists seem to me to be particularly so, while single-target specialism seems a little less crowded to me.