Make Lethal damage.... lethal?

[Chris24601]

Actually, given the more grounded real-world setting of the show Arrow, using arrows makes a lot of sense. Kevlar is great at stopping low mass high velocity projectiles (i.e. bullets). Its crap at stopping high mass low velocity attacks (i.e. knives and arrows).

 

Also, I'm speaking in terms of the proposed balance patch; an area where under-performing lethal damage could be made to shine is basically being the Armor Piercing damage type that is good against things with armored shells and more vulnerable innards (fleshy or circuitry) while not so good against targets that have no vulnerable innards to damage (zombies, ghosts, Primal clockwork, devouring earth constructs).

[Galaxy Brain]

I disagree with radically flopping what resists what in terms of bots suddenly being weak to as opposed to resisting lethal. 

 

To me, lethal is "sharp" damage where you can tear up fleshy or unarmored targets very easily, but then metallic / hard targets resist that. Honestly there should be a more even spread of resists and weaknesses to damage throughout the game so everyone gets to shine and be restricted depending on the content instead of just certain damage types being great / poo.

[Redlynne]

4 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

lethal is "sharp" damage where you can tear up fleshy or unarmored targets very easily, but then metallic / hard targets resist that.

Agreed.  Again, I would use the "Robots" distinction that is already encoded into the game as a partial answer to this problem.

 

I would envision groups such as Vahzilok (zombies) and Warriors/Outcasts/Tsoo/Family (unarmored humans) and Banished Pantheon (zombies again) and Carnies (Strongmen, etc.) that are essentially "fleshy" types where being weak to Lethal would make sense.  By contrast, groups that need "crushing" rather than "cutting" power (robots typify this) due to their armor/construction ought to be weak to Smashing.

 

Groups such as Malta and Knives of Artemis would wear hi tech "modern" body armors which presumably ought to offer a balance of protection versus Smashing AND Lethal both.

 

And so on ...

[Mystic_Cross]

This discussion just makes me feel like we just need some entirely new damage types added to the game. Lumping swords, arrows and bullets into the same category of "lethal" always felt weird to me. Perhaps removing lethal entirely and replacing it with Slash, Puncture and Piercing damage? Because really, Lethal damage technically applies to any type of damage that causes death... which could apply to literally any damage type in the game... except "lethal" 🤣

 

Edit to add: Of course "if" that were to happen, I do realize it would require reworks of pretty much every armor set and enemy group in the game... not to mention IO set bonuses and likely tons of other things that don't come immediately to mind.

 

End result: wishful thinking not likely to ever happen

Edited January 17, 2020 by Mystic_Cross

[Sakura Tenshi]

Yeah, an sorry, but trying to make four different physical types of damage is pretty out there. DnD has the extend of it with slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning (how do you even define puncture from pierce?) and I'm personally happy with Lethal and Smash. If you really wanted to get nitpicky about things, you could argue wall bullets should be lethal/smash damage since bullets expand on impact, or you simplify it further ala how City of Titans intends to with "physical" damage rolling smashing and lethal together and deliberately leave things vague for overlap for players to work it out.. (though I feel CoT should consider at 4th positional and 4th damage type just to give it a bit more diversity)

 

[Sailboat]

This is done differently in different games.

 

D&D: bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, normally assumed to be lethal but you can declare any attack to be nonlethal at the moment the foe runs out of hit points.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: melee, projectile.

Champions (tabletop): damage is divided into Physical and Energy...within either of those damages types a huge distinction is made between "normal" and "killing" attacks (against which only certain defenses work, and the damage goes to a separate pool of hit points that can kill you instead of knocking you out).  Subsets of those types (Energy/fire, Energy/lightning) are largely flavor, unless a target has a vulnerability.

Mutants & Masterminds: damage types are entirely flavor outside of vulnerabilities.

 

So Champions is unusually sensitive to the distinction between lethal and nonlethal, whereas Sentinels doesn't seem aware of the distinction (some of the art on the cards shows melee damage dealers punching, others show them thrusting a blade through the chest cavity of a foe...projectile damage is shown as hailstones, an assault rifle, or even a hurled tire iron).

 

I've generally felt COH did a good job with damage types.  I wouldn't be averse to adding "bleed damage" or something to Lethal, but let's recall that most lethal attacks debuff defense -- they'd have to give that up to get a new secondary effect, IMHO.

[Galaxy Brain]

11 hours ago, Sailboat said:

most lethal attacks debuff defense -- they'd have to give that up to get a new secondary effect, IMHO.

While true.... its not always the case and other damage types have had -Def as well. 

 

I think part of the problem really is that there is just an imbalance of enemies that are weak to and resistant to each damage type. Negative Energy is the least resisted type despite having a 26% chance to encounter a resistant enemy because there is also about a 20% chance to run into an enemy weak to Neg. The next smallest gap is Fire with a 25 / 13 split between the chances, and it gets wider from there. Lethal (and Smashing) by contrast has a spread of 48 / 5 (and 49 / 7 for Smash) which is just way out of whack when you look at these side by side. You are about 2x as likely to run into a resistant mob with lethal than negative, and 4x less likely to run into an enemy weak to your powers. In an ideal world, you would have roughly equal chances of Resist / Weak (rest being neutral) to encourage different team set ups and to have highs and lows with each powerset as you play instead of just lows with certain ones at higher level.

[Redlynne]

10 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

While true.... its not always the case and other damage types have had -Def as well. 

 

I think part of the problem really is that there is just an imbalance of enemies that are weak to and resistant to each damage type. Negative Energy is the least resisted type despite having a 26% chance to encounter a resistant enemy because there is also about a 20% chance to run into an enemy weak to Neg. The next smallest gap is Fire with a 25 / 13 split between the chances, and it gets wider from there. Lethal (and Smashing) by contrast has a spread of 48 / 5 (and 49 / 7 for Smash) which is just way out of whack when you look at these side by side. You are about 2x as likely to run into a resistant mob with lethal than negative, and 4x less likely to run into an enemy weak to your powers. In an ideal world, you would have roughly equal chances of Resist / Weak (rest being neutral) to encourage different team set ups and to have highs and lows with each powerset as you play instead of just lows with certain ones at higher level.

Side effect of the "make it up as you go" process that wound up accretion-ing new factions into the upper levels over time in a way where trying to balance the resistances of enemy groups just simply wasn't a consideration/factor as far as balance is concerned.  It was more a matter of finger in the wind/that's looks right essentially done in a vacuum, rather than reverse engineering everything from a balanced breakdown of counterweights (if that makes any sense).

[Sakura Tenshi]

So, what it all boils down to is that basically all factions that predate issue 18 probably need to be looked at for massive update in powers and such. It sounds utterly insane and impossible but holds so much potential!

 

I've always thought Rikti should get some version of Phalanx Fighting and mentalists and Priests should have leadership buffs since they're supposed to operate as a psychic network and thus read incoming attacks. Then steal the IDF's generic '30% resistance to all' since Rikti Battle Armor is supposed to be some of the most advanced on earth.

 

[Galaxy Brain]

13 hours ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

So, what it all boils down to is that basically all factions that predate issue 18 probably need to be looked at for massive update in powers and such. It sounds utterly insane and impossible but holds so much potential!

 

I've always thought Rikti should get some version of Phalanx Fighting and mentalists and Priests should have leadership buffs since they're supposed to operate as a psychic network and thus read incoming attacks. Then steal the IDF's generic '30% resistance to all' since Rikti Battle Armor is supposed to be some of the most advanced on earth.

 

That is a bit of a secondary convo for this thread :

 

 

 

Though it does factor in! Ideally, there should be a healthy spread where each damage type shines and is ineffective throughout the game, not just on the hard modes

[biostem]

15 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

In an ideal world, you would have roughly equal chances of Resist / Weak (rest being neutral) to encourage different team set ups and to have highs and lows with each powerset as you play instead of just lows with certain ones at higher level.

Well, this can be looked at from two angles;  Within the game world, knives, guns, and the like are probably the most common things that one would expect to encounter, (whether a hero or a villain), so protecting oneself against such threats seems logical.  From a meta-perspective - yes, no single damage type should be that much more advantaged, (without a hefty "cost" for that advantage), which is why I kind of lean toward a general "discount" for S/L attacks.  Perhaps they should also get their recharge times shaved down just a hair, too...

[Sakura Tenshi]

27 minutes ago, biostem said:

Perhaps they should also get their recharge times shaved down just a hair, too...

Sadly, i'm not sure if this is possible without either giving all lethal attacks something like Savage melee's bloodlust which is an external boost of +recharge or reducing their damage output. I remembered hearing from somewhere once damage and recharge rates are hard coded to be basically inversely proportional to eachother. Why the live devs thought that would be a great idea remains a mystery. Maybe a time saver on balancing?

[MTeague]

For all that I see Lethal damage panned, my Claws scrapper has never felt weak.

I mean, I won't turn down a buff... but I can't say i've felt like it was needed.

Edited January 19, 2020 by MTeague

[Mystic_Cross]

On 1/17/2020 at 11:48 AM, Sakura Tenshi said:

Yeah, an sorry, but trying to make four different physical types of damage is pretty out there. DnD has the extend of it with slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning (how do you even define puncture from pierce?) and I'm personally happy with Lethal and Smash.

 

I said as much at the end of my post: 

 

On 1/17/2020 at 10:19 AM, Mystic_Cross said:

End result: wishful thinking not likely to ever happen

As far as differentiating Puncture from Pierce... never really gave it a lot of thought, lol. Something someone said about bullets and arrows triggered the thought so I guess it would likely be something like that. Bullets, while not always strong enough to just go through armor, can still dent or puncture it, weakening the structure and eventually causing a lot of damage... so I guess something like a default -res effect? Whereas an Arrow would likely pierce straight through, causing immediate, but limited, damage... so maybe a chance to ignore resistance completely, coupled with lower damage then? Eh, something like that, lol.

[Mystic_Cross]

On 1/19/2020 at 4:28 PM, MTeague said:

For all that I see Lethal damage panned, my Claws scrapper has never felt weak.

I mean, I won't turn down a buff... but I can't say i've felt like it was needed.

Claws have always been an outlier, so I'm not sure what exactly the point is... make all lethal sets like Claws, with stupid low animation and recharge times maybe? Sure, sign me up 😉

[Frosticus]

lethal can defintely struggle a bit at times. It also struggles against some commonly desirable enemy types that most teams seem to seek out. Like council with their robits.

 

procs and epic attacks tend to resolve the issue for me, but that is generally late game stuff, so not a solution.

 

I'd consider a small amount of vitality damage. ie -hp debuff. Say 2-3% per attack, 5-10 sec duration, capped at 10%

[DrRocket]

Just remember that what is good for the goose is good for the gander

 

Your suggestion would really sock-it to the support archtypes as the mobs would naturally gain from your suggestion.

 

While your suggestion makes sense to an extent, it really has a very disproportionate effect on support classes, their life is tough enough without making them even more vulnerable.

 

Because of this, I can't suppor you concept as is, maybe work around it where it does not backfires on support classes.

 

V/R

 

 

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, DrRocket said:

Just remember that what is good for the goose is good for the gander

 

Your suggestion would really sock-it to the support archtypes as the mobs would naturally gain from your suggestion.

 

While your suggestion makes sense to an extent, it really has a very disproportionate effect on support classes, their life is tough enough without making them even more vulnerable.

 

Because of this, I can't suppor you concept as is, maybe work around it where it does not backfires on support classes.

 

V/R

 

 

Is this in regards to my OP or another comment?

[eknudson]

I'm glad that the damage resistance levels are going to be looked at eventually--I've really felt the widespread and often high levels of lethal resistance leveling my thermal/AR defender. Needing 6 shots to take out an even-con minion.... 

 

Did a 7-toon Synapse last week when it was the WST with my defender, an AR blaster, and a katana scrapper. None of us 3 were really doing a lot of damage, and the tank and controller weren't designed to do lots of damage at level 20... that was a very long TF.

 

I wouldn't even mind so many things resisting lethal if they just didn't resist it so MUCH. A lot of in-game enemies that do lethal damage do huge burst damage (e.g. Warrior bosses) but our s/l damage doesn't does if anything less some (trade-off for a usually useless -def debuff?) and so often that damage is reduced heavily by resistance.

[Latex]

I play Katana/Bio Scrapper, so obviously 95% Lethal Damage and I have never had any trouble with resists in any content. In ITF the other day I was critting for 1200+ damage on +4 NPCs

 

I can't yet recall a situation where the Lethal Damage of Katana was not bolstered by Soaring Dragon and Golden Dragonfly hitting like an absolute truck, reducing an NPC's Resistances would make those two skills (the bread and butter of Katana) hit even harder.

 

My Katana Scrapper has never at any point felt weak against any type of NPC.

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, Latex said:

. In ITF the other day I was critting for 1200+ damage on +4 NPCs

ITF enemies don't resist lethal, also Bio comes with tox damage and a -res aura... granted Tox is actually more resisted than lethal but rarely together lol. 

 

Katana and Claws are super good but are exceptions to the rule in terms of them being amazing powersets when used by Scrappers / Brutes. Otherwise, as mentioned above with the AR def... yeah