Feedback: Testing Melee Set Performance

[Infinitum]

1 minute ago, Haijinx said:

Tbh i still don't get what you mean by screwed up.  

You pop momentum and the mob gets scattered to the 4 corners of the map and you take out 1 minion.  Or you hit the wrong key.  Lots of things happen that are a lot more unforgiving on TW than the rest of the game.

 

It's a lot more like playing a controller than a melee.

[Haijinx]

1 minute ago, Infinitum said:

You pop momentum and the mob gets scattered to the 4 corners of the map and you take out 1 minion.  Or you hit the wrong key.  Lots of things happen that are a lot more unforgiving on TW than the rest of the game.

 

It's a lot more like playing a controller than a melee.

You can't balance around that stuff.  

 

You can't even quantify it.

 

 

 

 

[Steampunkette]

You're never gonna change Infinitum's mind, @Hopeling

 

He has no interest in an honest discussion. He has decided that his experience is universal and anything which contradicts that viewpoint is either:

 

A) Irrelevant 'cause it doesn't mesh with what he considers to be the 'Real World'

B) Coming from someone who doesn't have 'enough' experience with the set.

C) Specifically engineered to ruin people's lives. WON'T YOU THINK OF THE TW PLAYERS?!

 

He'll happily resort to ad hominem attacks, appeals to emotion, strawman arguments, slippery slopes, and appeal to popularity to try and squash dissent because what he 'feels' is far more important than any information or data that can be gathered.

 

In short: His cognitive bias towards TW being either perfect or underpowered (Depending on the evidence he's refuting) is an unshakeable mountain.

[Hopeling]

2 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

But again none of that represents actual gameplay, the pylon tests come closer than that does honestly.  You are only painting the set as OP by raw numbers with no in game setbacks, or variables you frequently encounter.  Those variables affect TW more than any other set.  It becomes a pumpkin really fast when your chain or timing gets screwed up.

 

Not saying the pylon tests are optimal either.

What would constitute data from actual gameplay? I'm honestly not sure what you're looking for here.

Just now, Infinitum said:

You really want to make the game as not fun as possible right?  Who cares if the formulas are broken, it's fun, and challenging.  Nothing is out of balance in reality in game.  Just on a spreadsheet.

I realize that your past experiences with EM have made you fear nerfs in general, but no, I don't want to make the game less fun. I want the game to be balanced, and I want that because I think balanced games are more fun than unbalanced games.

 

Performance doesn't exist in a vacuum. We can't help but compare sets against each other, because we all play in a shared world, and we play multiple characters. Your own experience with EM is actually an example of this: if there were no other power sets and it had always been nerfed, you wouldn't know it was "bad", you'd just think killing stuff was supposed to be hard. But because you have points of comparison, it is bad. Similarly, Titan Weapons sucked the fun out of multiple other melee characters for me, because TW is so overwhelmingly superior that Broadsword just doesn't feel good to play anymore by comparison. I really do feel like TW has plenty of room to come down and still feel good to play, yet not be strictly superior across the board to almost all other sets.

[MunkiLord]

In all fairness Broadsword has been a mediocre set for a long time. 

[Hopeling]

Absolutely, and Broadsword really should get buffs. Seeing TW get a version of Headsplitter with 6x the arc and a faster cast was just LOL though.

[Ananke]

If you're gonna balance something because of its pylon times you'd best remember that most of the content in the game is not level cap and you'd be making something unplayable.

 

Tweak and give quality of life treatment to the other sets instead of trying to pinata something with a blindfold on.

Edited September 12, 2019 by Ananke

[Galaxy Brain]

10 minutes ago, Ananke said:

If you're gonna balance something because of its pylon times you'd best remember that most of the content in the game is not level cap and you'd be making something unplayable.

 

Tweak and give quality of life treatment to the other sets instead of trying to pinata something with a blindfold on.

We are not talking Pylon times. On page 3, @Hopelingposted raw numbers showing that each power in TW goes above what damage it should do even in it's slow form, on top of the other bonuses TW gets.

 

Speaking of, did you ever get the activation times for the powers with/without momentum Hopeling?

Edited September 12, 2019 by Galaxy Brain

[nihilii]

28 minutes ago, Ananke said:

If you're gonna balance something because of its pylon time

This is starting to be the universal argument from defensive people all over the forums, and at this point it's hard not to see it as low-effort trolling, when other participants go through the effort of posting detailed number breakdowns like Hopeling did.

Perhaps there should be one simple rule for balance changes: the second someone says "if you're going to balance it based on pylon times", nerf the damn thing. Even if it's ice melee.

 

Edit: and for people who mean the argument earnestly, take a moment to consider the following: how many "nerf Storm" topics have you seen? Storm tops the Pylon charts.

Edit 2: also apparently it has to be specified I'm not seriously advocating for game balance to be done flippantly based on forum posts. Jesus Christ, people, take a chill pill about your beloved overpowered toons.

Edited September 12, 2019 by nihilii

[Ananke]

Just now, Galaxy Brain said:

We are not talking Pylon times. On page 3, @Hopelingposted raw numbers showing that each power in TW goes above what damage it should do even in it's slow form, on top of the other bonuses TW gets.

Hadn't seen that through the slog of nonsense in this thread, thanks for pointing it out! Removing the DoTs would work. Frankly, I do think a lot of other powersets just need help (please tweak Traps in accordance with the Devices changes, by God).

[Galaxy Brain]

Omg I'd love for traps to just get gun drone as a T9. Time bomb *and* trip mine are just weird from design real estate to me.

 

Anywho, the main point we are arguing in circles is that others as well as myself feel that TW is an outlier in that it performs just above where it seems the high end should be. In certain circumstances, well above that mark. Taking it down a peg at the high end without impacting the basic feel or low end performance would bring it more in line with other top tier sets. On top of this, lower end sets would have less of a benchmark to compete with in a round about way lol.

[Haijinx]

3 minutes ago, nihilii said:

This is starting to be the universal argument from defensive people all over the forums, and at this point it's hard not to see it as low-effort trolling, when other participants go through the effort of posting detailed number breakdowns like Hopeling did.

Perhaps there should be one simple rule for balance changes: the second someone says "if you're going to balance it based on pylon times", nerf the damn thing. Even if it's ice melee.

Except the disparities are often brought up from pylon times.  

 

The OP didn't include that stuff.  

 

There have been a huge amount of strawmen thrown about though.

[Ananke]

3 minutes ago, nihilii said:

Perhaps there should be one simple rule for balance changes: the second someone says "if you're going to balance it based on pylon times", nerf the damn thing. Even if it's ice melee.

 

Glad you're not a dev. The Wildstar devs were like this and their game imploded, partially as a result of their behavior regarding balance and revamping their content once it was cleared because they wanted to pat themselves on the back. I swear they were just trying to out bastard eachother as some kind of recurring office joke in which the playerbase suffered.

[Infinitum]

7 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

We are not talking Pylon times. On page 3, @Hopelingposted raw numbers showing that each power in TW goes above what damage it should do even in it's slow form, on top of the other bonuses TW gets.

 

Speaking of, did you ever get the activation times for the powers with/without momentum Hopeling?

It keeps going back to pylon times and i guarantee you that pylon times has come up more than any other data point on this topic.

 

why do you keep ignoring the drawbacks to TW like they dont exist?  Sorry but its straight up BS to say TW performs well at low levels.  Im never going to buy that line.

[Galaxy Brain]

You keep ignoring our asks for attack chains, and I even offered you the chance to provide us with alternative tests on SOs that we could run.

 

TW has drawbacks, that has never been ignored. However, the drawbacks are easily mitigated and it has more strengths than it has downsides especially when the big downside is not seen as often as the uptime.

[Morgrum]

You know what you guys are right lets just nerf every attack set down to Energy Melee regardless of what penalties the sets have because of IO's which break the game and untested set combos throwing the game off that way every ones miserable.

 

I know how the set plays I have been playing it for quite awhile it is no where near what you guys are saying it is.

And there is obviously no way of getting you to understand that because you keep pointing at Spreedsheets, Pylon test, broken combos apex runs, and Mid's and going SEE SEE!

It is good mind you but not omg I cannot play anything else.

I run routinely with 3 other tankers 2 SS/Invuln and a EM/Shields and I look at them enviously for what they are capable of doing.

Beyond this post I am out because there is no talking reason of how things work in game to folks who play math-hammer and I am at work having spent to much time on these forums already when I should be working.

[Infinitum]

EM BU+ET+TF +ET

 

I posted that somewhere in here i thought

 

TW BM RA AoD WS RA AoD WS

 

I didnt ignore you, it was hard to see the request through all the Doctoral thesis you guys are throwing out there which really dont say a whole lot honestly.

Edited September 12, 2019 by Infinitum

[Infinitum]

3 minutes ago, Morgrum said:

You know what you guys are right lets just nerf every attack set down to Energy Melee regardless of what penalties the sets have because of IO's which break the game and untested set combos throwing the game off that way every ones miserable.

 

I know how the set plays I have been playing it for quite awhile it is no where near what you guys are saying it is.

And there is obviously no way of getting you to understand that because you keep pointing at Spreedsheets, Pylon test, broken combos apex runs, and Mid's and going SEE SEE!

It is good mind you but not omg I cannot play anything else.

I run routinely with 3 other tankers 2 SS/Invuln and a EM/Shields and I look at them enviously for what they are capable of doing.

Beyond this post I am out because there is no talking reason of how things work in game to folks who play math-hammer and I am at work having spent to much time on these forums already when I should be working.

Yeah I really dont know what else there is to say, they arent approaching this from an objective game players perspective at all, just what the numbers look like on paper.

 

My experience mirrors yours with it, its not even my main, so i ultimately dont care, but i hate nerfs from spreadsheet warriors, because of what happened to EM.

[Infinitum]

49 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

You're never gonna change Infinitum's mind, @Hopeling

 

He has no interest in an honest discussion. He has decided that his experience is universal and anything which contradicts that viewpoint is either:

 

A) Irrelevant 'cause it doesn't mesh with what he considers to be the 'Real World'

B) Coming from someone who doesn't have 'enough' experience with the set.

C) Specifically engineered to ruin people's lives. WON'T YOU THINK OF THE TW PLAYERS?!

 

He'll happily resort to ad hominem attacks, appeals to emotion, strawman arguments, slippery slopes, and appeal to popularity to try and squash dissent because what he 'feels' is far more important than any information or data that can be gathered.

 

In short: His cognitive bias towards TW being either perfect or underpowered (Depending on the evidence he's refuting) is an unshakeable mountain.

You... dont even have a TW to lvl 50, so you have no in game viewpoint thats valid.  So toodaloo my friend.

 

I am not doing any of that on purpose, because honestly i dont know what it means.  lol  you are obviously way more educated than me, so I guess you MUST be correct.

[Haijinx]

Could argue your subjective experiences on brutes and tankers is also not seeing the full range of the set.  

 

Since slow attacks do not favor brutes due to fury, and tankers have a low scale.

 

 

[Galaxy Brain]

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/search/?&q=Pylon&type=forums_topic&page=2&item=10006&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest 

 

Out of 266 posts, 43 contained the word "Pylon" (16%), and searching through that it seems to be all mentions of "This is due to pylon times" or "can we not use pylon times?" with only 1 or 2 posts actually bringing up the data from Pylons, and even mentioning how it is unreliable due to Regen Tick Rates.

 

 

As for objectivity, "Game Feel" is the opposite of objective. This game runs on numbers and those are objective data points that can be measured and compared. Nobody is asking to "EM" Titan Weapons, just to make it comparable to other top tier sets. You do seem to care about this due to how much you are fighting against it, and you have been uncooperative when asked how we could better present findings / tests in real examples to help your points.

[Infinitum]

Just now, Haijinx said:

Could argue your subjective experiences on brutes and tankers is also not seeing the full range of the set.  

 

Since slow attacks do not favor brutes due to fury, and tankers have a low scale.

 

 

No and i agree with that, i said that somewhere in fact.  Im not completely un objective here, but if it were nerfed to hammer the outliers what would it do to people like me?

[Ananke]

17 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Omg I'd love for traps to just get gun drone as a T9. Time bomb *and* trip mine are just weird from design real estate to me.

Lol, I never use either of those even though I have them specced. They're there purely to hold my sets at this point.

[Infinitum]

2 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/search/?&q=Pylon&type=forums_topic&page=2&item=10006&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest 

 

Out of 266 posts, 43 contained the word "Pylon" (16%), and searching through that it seems to be all mentions of "This is due to pylon times" or "can we not use pylon times?" with only 1 or 2 posts actually bringing up the data from Pylons, and even mentioning how it is unreliable due to Regen Tick Rates.

 

 

As for objectivity, "Game Feel" is the opposite of objective. This game runs on numbers and those are objective data points that can be measured and compared. Nobody is asking to "EM" Titan Weapons, just to make it comparable to other top tier sets. You do seem to care about this due to how much you are fighting against it, and you have been uncooperative when asked how we could better present findings / tests in real examples to help your points.

Sacraficing how the game plays for the sake of making the numbers meet some arbitrary Formula that is disconnected from the actual player is stupid.

 

I just posted my attack chains, did you not catch that?

Edited September 12, 2019 by Infinitum

[Galaxy Brain]

Just now, Infinitum said:

Sacraficing how the game plays for the sake of making the numbers meet some arbitrary Formula that is disconnected from the actual player is stupid.

This is a video game that is made of formulas.