Focused Feedback: Rage

[Eiko-chan]

This isn't feedback, this is a bug report: I just tested in a very long (20+ minute) fight against an AV, and Rage is crashing regardless of whether I have it stacked or not. 

[Halae]

30 minutes ago, Eiko-chan said:

This isn't feedback, this is a bug report: I just tested in a very long (20+ minute) fight against an AV, and Rage is crashing regardless of whether I have it stacked or not. 

I believe that would make it, completely literally, a straight nerf.

[Vanden]

Just now, Halae said:

I believe that would make it, completely literally, a straight nerf.

No, that would make it pretty much exactly the same as it is on the live shards.

[Halae]

2 minutes ago, Vanden said:

No, that would make it pretty much exactly the same as it is on the live shards.

There's no resistance penalty during the crash on live.

[Vanden]

2 minutes ago, Halae said:

There's no resistance penalty during the crash on live.

But the defense penalty is twice as high.

[Halae]

7 minutes ago, Vanden said:

But the defense penalty is twice as high.

That doesn't really matter much when you're relying on your resistance to keep you alive in the interrim. I've got two SS brutes, one that's /Willpower and one that's /Invulnerability. These are, notably, the two powerset combos that are the most selected of all non-farming brutes.

 

For the Willpower one, she's mostly kept alive in most fights through a mixture of pushing 70% smashing/lethal damage (30% in basically everything else) and a high regeneration level. The crash change means that incoming attacks of the Smashing and Lethal variety will generally do about 80% more damage, and it takes away what little resistance I have in terms of the other damage types. This puts huge strain on her regeneration, since smashing/lethal damage are the most common damage types to come across. This is an absolutely enormous increase in incoming damage.

 

My invulnerability character? She depends on negating as much damage as possible through high resistances (90% in Smashing and Lethal, 50% or below in most other things) because she doesn't have the HP recovery to take more. This change would mean that a crash can and will kill her, because from S/L sources she'll take as much as three times as much damage, and other damage sources she's getting hit with +60% damage.

 

Yeah, the defense debuff applied by the live version of Rage sucks, but it's dealable if you have high resistances, which is what most people have built their SS characters for. This change just makes it so they both get hit AND can't take the hit.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Halae

[Vanden]

 

15 minutes ago, Halae said:

That doesn't really matter much when you're relying on your resistance to keep you alive in the interrim. I've got two SS brutes, one that's /Willpower and one that's /Invulnerability. These are, notably, the two powerset combos that are the most selected of all non-farming brutes.

That's the point of the change, if you have a resist armor set, you can pretty much ignore the crash. If you have a defense armor set, the crash gets you flattened. The change evens that out.

Edited September 11, 2019 by Vanden

[Haijinx]

Basically exactly the point.  Resist sets were barely affected, while defense sets were getting hammered.  

 

Is part of the problem myopia?  People having trouble seeing past their own characters?

[Halae]

11 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 

That's the point of the change, if you have a resist armor set, you can pretty much ignore the crash. If you have a defense armor set, the crash gets you flattened. The change evens that out.

Actually, it kills defense sets too. When you design a defense-based build, you try for the softcaps (which, i believe, is 51% in incarnate content) and leave only a 5% chance of getting hit. I believe the math is a bit awkward on the subject, but a 10% reduction to that defense number means that the defense character will get hit by about 30%-ish of incoming attacks. That's a massively increased chance to take a hit on a setup that depends on getting hit as little as possible. And, lo and behold, the resistance debuff destroys them too, because they're taking increased damage in a window which they're more likely to be hit in.

 

something that a lot of people don't seem to realize is that stacked defensive types are what make things survivable. Invulnerability isn't just resistances, it's also defense. Willpower is considered humongously powerful because it has all three types. And a lot of people don't particularly like Super Reflexes because it only happens to give you a single defensive layer, when you want two. Because of this, a debuff that applies penalties to more than a single defensive layer is incredibly damaging to a lot of builds, because it makes it so you simply cannot deal with the attacks coming at you. If it was just a resistance debuff, you could build for regeneration and defense to negate it. If it was just a defense debuff as it is now, you could build for resistance and regeneration, and negate it. You can negate regeneration debuffs by having high defense and resistance, to mitigate incoming attacks before they hit your HP bar.

 

More than one defensive type being lowered is way, way worse for building and for your level of ability to cope with said debuff than having it only strongly affect one defensive layer.

Edited September 12, 2019 by Halae

[Haijinx]

If i were to advocate fixing EM by making whirling hands a higher scale with a 15 foot radius.

 

Then suggest turning the build up into a toggle that gave +20 to hit and +80 damage.

 

Wouldn't a lot of people decide that was OP?

[Halae]

Depends on the base numbers for the attacks in question. Besides, I outright said in my suggestion on page 5 to turn Rage into a toggle that you'd want to lower the numbers on it first, and bring the sub-par numbers in SS up. Basically either that or have it cost extreme levels of endurance per second.

[Rylas]

On 9/10/2019 at 7:08 PM, DMW45 said:

If there was a way it didn't feel like you were punished for having too much recharge I'd be down, but as it is it doesn't seem like a good change to me.

 

23 hours ago, DMW45 said:

Welp.  Still, having to purposefully gimp yourself in some way--you can't build *too* well or you'll be punished for it--just seems wrong to me.

You'll have to explain these arguments for me. As I see it, if you stack Rage, it's going to be no different that if you stacked it now with all that recharge you're talking about. If you found all that recharge worth while now, you'll still find it worth while with these proposed changes because the only difference is the -def/-res change to the crash.

 

Exactly how is that punishment when it brings no change to what you're already doing?

[tellania]

tried out rage on an invul/ss tank in dark astoria.

Fully SO'd (man, the prices of IO's there on test ...).

all attacks 3 damage/2 rech, 1 end red.

 

I can go through 3-4 mobs, before running out of endurance (3 per mob, figure lt, and 2-3 minions).

 

No unexpect rage crashes (single application) or penalties.

 

I seem to wiff a lot, but I purposely didnt use accuracy.

 

rested, repeat, rested, repeat.   overall looks good.   The extra endurnace was helpful, but I still need to manage endurance usage.

[Myrmidon]

Honestly, to make this easier on all players and not have to slough through another 23-page argument, I would just go with the original idea the Captain proposed and monitor if Super Strength could use an overall damage buff instead of the stacking.

[csr]

Stacked Rage shows two overlapped Rage icons or one with the number '2' on it.  When the first expires it drops to one, but you get an identical debuff icon for the crash.  The latter needs new art work.

[csr]

1 hour ago, Eiko-chan said:

This isn't feedback, this is a bug report: I just tested in a very long (20+ minute) fight against an AV, and Rage is crashing regardless of whether I have it stacked or not. 

I'm getting the same results.  Rage always crashes, regardless of whether or not it's stacked.

[csr]

1 hour ago, Halae said:

Actually, it kills defense sets too. When you design a defense-based build, you try for the softcaps (which, i believe, is 51% in incarnate content) and leave only a 5% chance of getting hit. I believe the math is a bit awkward on the subject, but a 10% reduction to that defense number means that the defense character will get hit by about 30%-ish of incoming attacks. That's a massively increased chance to take a hit on a setup that depends on getting hit as little as possible. And, lo and behold, the resistance debuff destroys them too, because they're taking increased damage in a window which they're more likely to be hit in.

 

something that a lot of people don't seem to realize is that stacked defensive types are what make things survivable. Invulnerability isn't just resistances, it's also defense. Willpower is considered humongously powerful because it has all three types. And a lot of people don't particularly like Super Reflexes because it only happens to give you a single defensive layer, when you want two. Because of this, a debuff that applies penalties to more than a single defensive layer is incredibly damaging to a lot of builds, because it makes it so you simply cannot deal with the attacks coming at you. If it was just a resistance debuff, you could build for regeneration and defense to negate it. If it was just a defense debuff as it is now, you could build for resistance and regeneration, and negate it. You can negate regeneration debuffs by having high defense and resistance, to mitigate incoming attacks before they hit your HP bar.

 

More than one defensive type being lowered is way, way worse for building and for your level of ability to cope with said debuff than having it only strongly affect one defensive layer.

The change isn't balanced, because it also doesn't hit Absorption, Regen or Healing.  So some sets still do better than others.  It is more balanced than it was though.

 

For clarity on Defense being hurt worse.  Let's say you have 50% Def (most build for a bit over the cap to deal with debuffs) and 20% Res.  You take about 4% of all damage directed your way by even level foes with no Acc or ToHit bonuses (I've ignored streakbreaker for simplicity).  A build with 100% Res and 10% Def takes the same 4% or so.  With the old crash the first would take 16% and the latter 6%.  A 300% increase compared to just 50%.  With the new crash the Def build now takes 10% of incoming damage and the Res build 10%.  Both seeing a 150% increase in damage taken.

 

Just to throw out a less edge-case example, let's take a Brute with 50% Res and 25% Def.  This Brute would currently go from 12.5% of incoming damage to 22.5%.  With the change they'd go up to 24.5%.  If the latter Brute were making up for taking 3 times the damage as the previous two with 3 times the Regen/Healing, then she'd actually still be better off, as her Regen/Healing would still be working at full strength.  I use a mitigation index metric, which is basically just Regen divided by the percent of incoming that I calculated above.  So if we have two whose Regen factor is 1 divided by 4% they have indices of 25.  While this third example is at 24 because I stuck to round numbers (3 divided by 12.5%).  The three with the old crash drop to 6.25, 16.7 and 13.3 respectively.  Under the new crash the indices are 10, 10 and 12.2.

 

Anyway, those are just three quick cases.  The crash is more balanced.  It could be more balanced still if there is some clever way to essentially debuff HP/Regen/Heal/Absorb all based upon current HP.  But I think you'd end up having to debuff off base HP, which would require some balance tweaking to get the amount where you wanted it, and probably leave those with HP buffs ahead on points, so to speak.

Edited September 12, 2019 by csr
grammar and typos

[Myrmidon]

3 hours ago, Haijinx said:

 

Is part of the problem myopia?  People having trouble seeing past their own characters?

 

If they change it to the original idea, I’m going to remember that you said that.😁

[Haijinx]

16 minutes ago, Myrmidon said:

 

If they change it to the original idea, I’m going to remember that you said that.😁

Im okay with single rage only either a toggle or a no stack.

 

Im okay with single rage with jab and punch moved up to better rec/dam 

 

Im okay with this change as posted too.  

 

Was okay-ish with how it is on homecoming live, though my SS these days is a SR tanker... so this one is better.

 

Only thing really that would bother me is rage becoming build up.

 

[Vindicator]

28 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Im okay with single rage only either a toggle or a no stack.

 

Im okay with single rage with jab and punch moved up to better rec/dam 

Yes and yes.

[DR_Mechano]

I still think one of the best bets would be a poll to see which is prefered, no crash, no ability to stack, making it a simple set and forget, which is what I would much prefer, or this method where...it's can stack but it also still crashes.

 

Hell I would even vote with single rage, no crash and Jab and Punch moved up to have better damage.

[Myrmidon]

30 minutes ago, DR_Mechano said:

Hell I would even vote with single rage, no crash and Jab and Punch moved up to have better damage.

 

And monitor the entire set to see if damage tweaks are needed. I’m in.

[William Valence]

4 hours ago, Halae said:

Actually, it kills defense sets too. When you design a defense-based build, you try for the softcaps (which, i believe, is 51% in incarnate content) and leave only a 5% chance of getting hit. I believe the math is a bit awkward on the subject, but a 10% reduction to that defense number means that the defense character will get hit by about 30%-ish of incoming attacks. That's a massively increased chance to take a hit on a setup that depends on getting hit as little as possible. And, lo and behold, the resistance debuff destroys them too, because they're taking increased damage in a window which they're more likely to be hit in.

 

something that a lot of people don't seem to realize is that stacked defensive types are what make things survivable. Invulnerability isn't just resistances, it's also defense. Willpower is considered humongously powerful because it has all three types. And a lot of people don't particularly like Super Reflexes because it only happens to give you a single defensive layer, when you want two. Because of this, a debuff that applies penalties to more than a single defensive layer is incredibly damaging to a lot of builds, because it makes it so you simply cannot deal with the attacks coming at you. If it was just a resistance debuff, you could build for regeneration and defense to negate it. If it was just a defense debuff as it is now, you could build for resistance and regeneration, and negate it. You can negate regeneration debuffs by having high defense and resistance, to mitigate incoming attacks before they hit your HP bar.

 

More than one defensive type being lowered is way, way worse for building and for your level of ability to cope with said debuff than having it only strongly affect one defensive layer.

The mitigation crash proposed is actually pretty clever. It's nicer to defense than the old crash in every case except where there's also resistance. It ranges between causing 1.44x damage to 9x damage depending on how much mitigation you have.

 

The more mitigation stats you have the more damage you take proportionally.

[Megajoule]

On 9/10/2019 at 6:27 PM, johua said:

The set relies on rage being up to be middle of the road.

Then IMO, as I've said from the start, we should take the damn power/mechanic out entirely and rebalance the set so that it's not utterly dependent on one power.

(Ditto Granite, which renders the previous 8 powers moot and replaces your character with a generic DE, but that's a different powerset.)

 

Unfortunately, that is not the approach the devs here have chosen to take, and I suspect many of you are attached to the dumb mechanic; you just want it to have no drawbacks you can't mitigate. 😛

 

Anyway, that's my focused feedback on Rage:  get rid of it, it's keeping you from fixing this set to function properly without it.

Edited September 12, 2019 by Megajoule

[johua]

1 minute ago, Megajoule said:

Then IMO, as I've said from the start, we should take the damn power/mechanic out entirely and rebalance the set so that it's not utterly dependent on one power.

(Ditto Granite, which renders the previous 8 powers moot and replaces your character with a generic DE, but that's a different powerset.)

 

Unfortunately, that is not the approach the devs here have chosen to take, and I suspect many of you are attached to the dumb mechanic; you just want it to have no drawbacks you can't mitigate. 😛

I think that crashes in general are an unnecessary punishment indicative of poor game design choices by the live devs earlier in the game's life, and it was pretty evident that they were moving away from punishing mechanics such as crashes toward the end of live, given the blaster update.

So, yes. I think it should have no drawbacks that can't be mitigated. 

But if it absolutely has to have a crash, I would rather not have it at all. Just buff the other powers so the set isn't reliant on rage and swap it out for a buildup.