The unaddressed problem with new Electric powers

[Draeth Darkstar]

There's currently some lively discussion going on in the Focused Feedback thread for the new Electric support set, most of which is about the set being underpowered. There are a lot of reasons for that being discussed, but one that keeps coming up over and over again is Endurance Drain.

 

It's perfectly thematic for an Electric set in this game to have its offensive power focused on Endurance Drain. Every single one of them does... except for Electric Melee. They're also all widely considered to be the very bottom tier of power... except for Electric Melee.

 

This is not an accident. Endurance Drain has, never in the entire history of this game, ever, ever been good. It takes longer to drain the Endurance bar of most enemies than their Health bar, and before it's totally depleted the bar, Endurance Drain does nothing. This is compounded by the fact that any enemy that'd actually be worth Draining - AVs, GMs, raid bosses - is so resistant to the effect and has so much Recovery and such trivial Endurance costs for their powers relative to how much they have, that it becomes functionally impossible for it to do anything against them.

 

In order to make a new Electric set that's actually good and fits the mechanical theme of the other Electric sets, that mechanical theme needs to be systemically updated to contribute some tangible value to the sets that have it. Or, forget about balancing the set around Endurance Drain the same way that Electric Melee did and give us some new powers with the impact of Lightning Rod.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Draeth Darkstar

[SeraphimKensai]

My first character after beta was an elec/elec blaster, and it made it to lvl 14 over the course of a couple months of playing at launch before I shelved it for an Empath defender and an Invuln Tank (back when we had to take to as Invuln but that's besides the point).

 

Since then I've had all at 50 rad/Elec, kin/Elec, Elec/SD, Elec/Cold, Elec/Psi. So I have a bit of experience with Electric Blasts, Manipulation, Melee, Assault. I really like the concept of using electricity but since the game has come out it's almost universally agreed on that electric based powers are usually power tier because of how sapping works.

 

When we get sapped, we can't do anything except brawl or pop cabs, as our abilities cost a decent amount of endurance to to use.

 

NPC's attacks on the other hand typically only need 1 endurance to attack. Which causes issue in sapping. Pair that with what seems like lower overall damage and you have a fairly substandard character.

 

But what if....we changed how electric based characters worked so that as our target loses endurance, we gain bonus damage?

 

That would help alleviate the notion that electric based powers do less damage while still preserving the vision of draining our enemies of their endurance. It makes sense that they would take more damage in that they'd be weary after losing their energy.

 

So what about the following:

Target Endurance @ 25-50%, electric powers do 5% bonus damage that scales to 10% when the Target's endurance is @ 1-24%, and another 2.5% if it's at 0%?

 

The numbers can be played around as these are place holders, but would significantly help electric characters out while preserving the vision to sap a target.

[Galaxy Brain]

Sapping endurance is sort of a minigame in itself, but the payoff is often no better than if you just applied a more standard mez.

 

I think if there were some cool effect for actually sapping an enemy to 0 or below 0, it would at least be something fun and unique. 

 

Hell, even a pseudo-scourge where you get an effect when hitting enemies with electric attacks that scales in chance as end % goes down (Chain Lightning?) would be fun where you get 100% chance when theyre at 0%

[Bopper]

38 minutes ago, SeraphimKensai said:

NPC's attacks on the other hand typically only need 1 endurance to attack. Which causes issue in sapping. Pair that with what seems like lower overall damage and you have a fairly substandard character.

 

But what if....we changed how electric based characters worked so that as our target loses endurance, we gain bonus damage?

I was thinking, why not change how NPCs use endurance? I agree, an endurance of 1 for their attacks is practically unfair (unless they have 0 recovery, I suppose). If the cost of endurance matched the ability of their powers, or even if it was standardized to 7.5 endurance per attack, then maybe endurance drain could have more use

[SeraphimKensai]

If mobs attacks did cost more than 1 endurance then yes, endurance drain would be more useful. The issue being there is that they would have to alter the cost of every NPC power cost in the game. Which would seem to be a lot of work.

 

I'm willing to bet that the live devs thought it would be more efficient to just leave the power costs for NPC at a default of 1 across the board in order to save time.

[Leogunner]

23 minutes ago, SeraphimKensai said:

If mobs attacks did cost more than 1 endurance then yes, endurance drain would be more useful. The issue being there is that they would have to alter the cost of every NPC power cost in the game. Which would seem to be a lot of work.

 

I'm willing to bet that the live devs thought it would be more efficient to just leave the power costs for NPC at a default of 1 across the board in order to save time.

Not necessarily. 

 

I made a suggestion on one of the beta forums and no one mentioned if it was possible or not, but if there is a value labeled to give a reduction in endurance costs (endurance redux enhancements) there could be a negative version of that modifier that acts as an endurance tax to increase the cost of a power. 

 

 

[Draeth Darkstar]

I do expect altering the behavior of every NPC in the game's powers to be way too much of a major change and too much work to do. I'm also not convinced that the AI is smart enough to deal with Endurance management.

 

I think the idea of a scaling Scourge-like effect would be quite cool conceptually, but in execution I have my concerns about how well it would actually work with the breakneck speed of the PVE game. Most enemies die with near-full Endurance in my experience.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Draeth Darkstar

[Replacement]

1 hour ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I think if there were some cool effect for actually sapping an enemy to 0 or below 0, it would at least be something fun and unique. 

My suggestion:

If there's any plans to make a pass on individual enemies in the game, I would take the opportunity to strip out most passive benefits (e.g. inherent Resist values or damage bonuses) and add them instead as toggles that drop on Endurance 0.

 

This would turn Sapping into a sort of universal dispeller.

 

And I should add: I do think the game needs a pass of individual enemies.

Edited February 27, 2020 by Replacement

[SeraphimKensai]

29 minutes ago, Draeth Darkstar said:

the idea of a scaling Scourge-like effect would be quite cool conceptually, but in execution I have my concerns about how well it would actually work with the breakneck speed of the PVE game. Most enemies die with near-full Endurance in my experience.

If the there's say a team of 8 Incarnates fully IO'd you're right for regular content anyways, but there's ample opportunity to team with non- optimized heroes that might be leveling up through content, or using SO's since that's what the game is meant to be balanced around in which this could help immensely.

[Jaguaratron]

End drain doesnt stop the mobs from attacking, once its gone it will just build back up so that drain is effectively a attack slowdown

 

Its end drain in conjunction with -recovery which is what causes the complete lockdown of mobs and electric blast has this in short circuit which when used correctly is insanely powerful because when under the effects mobs cannot recover endurance and if bottomed out cannot attack.

 

Slotted power sink (drain) + short circuit (drain AND -recovery) is possibly one of the most brokenly overpowered things in the game,

[Trickshooter]

6 hours ago, SeraphimKensai said:

NPC's attacks on the other hand typically only need 1 endurance to attack.

I spot checked some NPC powers, and the lowest endurance costs for any of their attacks was around 4-7 endurance. It looks like the newer NPC groups end costs are very similar to players, so like scale 1 damage is about 5.2 endurance, but the legacy NPC groups use older values, so typically the lowest for them is 7 endurance for scale 1 damage. But again, that's just spot checking. I think what's more likely is that NPC AI makes them attack more conservatively, rather than us as players who try to maintain attack chains. So like they run out of endurance, but without -Recovery as well, they usually only lose about 1-2 attacks they would have done before they have enough endurance back to continue attacking. 

[Call Me Awesome]

I completely agree that as a mechanic end drain needs some attention because it's mostly ineffective against mobs as a mitigation.  It's utterly worthless until the mob bottoms out on end... which typically takes as long or longer than simply killing it with decent damage attacks.  One tic of recovery and the mob's smacking you again.

 

Even when you get the mob to zero and eliminate it's recovery you still have to kill the thing.  For some reason the Dev's originally decided that end drain was such a useful effect that any set that had it needed to have bottom tier damage to compensate.  When I read the description of the new Defender set my first thought was that it was going to be another underpowered and overly complex set.  Of course that description didn't include any numbers so I'm guessing but I've yet to see a useful set built around end drain.  They're all way at the bottom of the useful sets.

[Redlynne]

Can you imagine what the game would be like if you could DEFEAT a $Target by draining its Green Bar -OR- its Blue Bar to zero ... not just the Green Bar to zero?

[Haijinx]

3 minutes ago, Redlynne said:

Can you imagine what the game would be like if you could DEFEAT a $Target by draining its Green Bar -OR- its Blue Bar to zero ... not just the Green Bar to zero?

So ... tired .. hell with this ... I give up.

 

 

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, Redlynne said:

Can you imagine what the game would be like if you could DEFEAT a $Target by draining its Green Bar -OR- its Blue Bar to zero ... not just the Green Bar to zero?

I think that would have to be done on a limited basis. It would, for instance, make sense with robotic type enemies (or Freakshow) - after all, their batteries are their "life."

[Novacat]

13 hours ago, Jaguaratron said:

Slotted power sink (drain) + short circuit (drain AND -recovery) is possibly one of the most brokenly overpowered things in the game,

Or, against targets that actually shuts down, you could've killed them in that 5.03s with something else - something you're still going to have to do now that they're out of juice. And against GMs, AVs and the like, well it simply doesn't work unfortunately. And unless you DO SC+PS (or at least SC+Thunderous or +ESDArrow) the end drain leaving them half full from all your other attacks is doing basically nothing.

 

I want to like End Drain, but it does need a bit more.

What if as SeraphimKensai suggests losing endurance bar meant a very slight gradual erosion of resistances? Or maybe of the target's damage: they can still throw out all those punches at 1End each, but at half a bar that's X% less damage, and now your basic elec attacks can *sustain* the debuff you've built to?

[Menelruin]

I like the idea of giving all Electrical powers a debuff, "Power Bleed," where you add a negative-multiplier to a Conserve Power effect on the mobs.

 

You know, now that I type out "Power Bleed".....what if it's a debuff that makes every ability the mobs use, ALSO cost them some HP?  That way they either have to slow down their attack rate, OR you're killing them faster....win-win!

[krj12]

Instead of sapping endurance, make it sap defense and resistance (maybe slightly higher effect on energy defense and resist),  suddenly it becomes very useful solo and in teams.

[Coyote]

1: To clear up the 1 end point misconception, NPC attacks cost more than 1 Endurance. However, what is happening is that when NPCs regain Endurance, like characters, they don't get it back in 1 EP chunks, but in larger chunks. So their minimum regain chunk is large enough to throw out an attack.

2: We can't really set up NPCs to run toggles instead of base resist values, because it would put too much strain on the engine to calculate toggles for all hostile mobs in the game all the time. Instead, they're auto. Only the few debuffers run toggles.

3: Given this, it may be reasonable to simulate End Drain as detoggling defenses, by giving a "Exhausted" debuff for mobs for 5-10 seconds after being at 0 End, which gives a -20% Resistance to all damage and to Regeneration. This would give an advantage to zeroing out mobs even if you can't keep them there, and would simulate the effects of having to retoggle defensive powers.

[SeraphimKensai]

I like the third option there @Coyote, but wonder about NPC resistances to debuffs. Since Electric characters already have a ToHit Check on their attacks, then have to overcome the NPC's endurance, recovery, and potential resistance to end drain, before we get to the simulated exhaust of applying a resistance debuff or any debuff for that matter. Then the NPC resists that debuff further based on their own resistances or purple patch esque abilities.

 

It sounds like awfully a lot of hurdles to jump over.

 

Maybe the potential Exhausted effect would have a debuff to recovery as well, to help keep the enemy drained?

Edited February 28, 2020 by SeraphimKensai

[Coyote]

Well, two things:

1: it is possible to flag debuffs as unresistable. So it could be an unresistable debuff.

2: even AVs don't actually have resistance to -Resist debuffs. That, and -Damage, are the two main debuffs that work upon them at full strength. Oh, and -Special, I think. In fact, I updated my suggestion in the Shock Therapy thread, to change the debuffs to a trifecta of -Special/-Damage/-Resistance, which basically ignores the usual resistance to debuffing except for special situations like some attacks that may be specifically flagged to ignore modifiers.

[Trickshooter]

38 minutes ago, Coyote said:

2: We can't really set up NPCs to run toggles instead of base resist values, because it would put too much strain on the engine to calculate toggles for all hostile mobs in the game all the time. Instead, they're auto. Only the few debuffers run toggles.

Not to mention NPCs don't really know to run toggles until they encounter players, so you could easily exploit this and kill enemies very easily and very quickly with certain builds that can do a large amount of AoE damage before enemies get a chance to turn on these toggles.

[Steampunkette]

Electric's secondary is already strong enough.

 

As an Electric/Electric Dominator I don't even -bother- taking control-centric powers, often. Outside of Jolting Chain and Static Field I don't need them. I throw on Conductive Aura, have my Gremlins follow me and me Voltaic Sentinel into combat, and sap enemies dry in seconds. Who needs a Hold when the enemy stands there, gormlessly, unable to do anything?

 

Endurance drain is Percentage Based rather than Static Values. Lightning bolt saps 10% of the enemy's endurance in a shot. Doesn't matter whether the enemy's max end is 50 or 200, 10% is gone in a flash. Meanwhile Static Field is ticking away another 21% over 4 seconds while Conductive Aura is doing 14%/tick. And Havoc Punch and Thunderstrike ensure they won't be recovering any endurance. So do Charged Bolts and Lightning Bolt and Static Discharge for AoE. (Ball Lightning, too, in Mu Mastery). And that's not even -slotting- for End Mod. Do that and/or use the Agility Incarnate and it's even more disgusting.

 

Generally speaking I drop my Static Field on a group, temporarily shutting down the LTs and Minions, then focus my melee and ranged on the Boss(es), though Jolting chain runs through the other targets, too. By the time Static Field has ended, all the LTs and Minions have no endurance thanks to Conductive Aura and with a Static Discharge or a Ball Lightning they can't -get- endurance and by that point the Boss(es) have no end, either.

 

So I mop up the mob and move on.

 

Does it work great on a big team of steamrollers? No. But not every powerset needs to make steamrolling easier or faster. Some stuff is just flatly better in small groups or solo play. Electric is one of those things.

 

 I can't -wait- to make an Electric/Shock Controller once Page 5 goes live! I'm going to sap so hard it's not even funny!

[Trickshooter]

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

even AVs don't actually have resistance to -Resist debuffs. That, and -Damage, are the two main debuffs that work upon them at full strength. Oh, and -Special, I think. In fact, I updated my suggestion in the Shock Therapy thread, to change the debuffs to a trifecta of -Special/-Damage/-Resistance, which basically ignores the usual resistance to debuffing except for special situations like some attacks that may be specifically flagged to ignore modifiers.

Well... kind of. Resistance and Damage debuffs can both be resisted, not just by level differences, but also by Damage Resistance the target has. If they have 30% Smashing/Lethal Damage Resistance, they will resist 30% of a Resistance or Damage debuff, but in that instance only for Smashing and Lethal damage.

 

Say for example an enemy had 30% Resistance(Smashing), and you hit them with a 100 damage Smashing attack. That gets reduced to 70 damage by their resistances.

 

Now, if you hit them with a -10% Resistance debuff first, that doesn't turn their 30% Resistance in to 20% Resistance the way a -10% ToHit debuff would reduce an enemies chance to hit from 50% down to 40%. The 30% Resistance resists 30% of the debuff, so that 10% -Resistance goes down to -7%, bringing their 30% Resistance(Smashing) down to 23%. Your 100 damage Smashing attack is now reduced to only 77 damage, which is still an increase in damage of 10% from the 70 damage it would have been without the debuff.

 

Similarly with Damage debuffs, if an enemy had a 100 damage Smashing attack, and you hit them with a -10% Damage debuff first, that would reduce their damage down to 90 damage (assuming this is an NPC with no damage buffs). However, if they have 30% Resistance(Smashing), that reduces the Damage debuff for just Smashing damage down to -7%, reducing the damage of their attack down to only 93 damage.

 

Because of this, Damage debuffs are least effective against enemies that heavily resist the damage type that makes up most of their attacks (so like... every Archvillain lol), and most effective against enemies that don't heavily resist the damage they cause (I dunno, maybe... Clockwork?).

 

You're right that -Special isn't resisted, but only because -Special isn't a true debuff. It's more like you're giving your target enhancements with negative values. The only way for a target to resist that effect is if their powers are specifically flagged to ignore outside buffs/debuffs or if any effects in their powers are flagged to ignore enhancements, which neither of those is impossible to happen, and I'm not home to verify, but it's probably unlikely that many NPC powers are set up that way.

 

EDIT: I guess I should've also mentioned that yes, I like the idea of an "Exhausted" effect from draining endurance. Just got distracted by a "The more you know..." moment!

Edited February 28, 2020 by Trickshooter

[Trickshooter]

29 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

Electric's secondary is already strong enough.

 

As an Electric/Electric Dominator...

But you're kind of highlighting a sub issue here. Elec powersets can be potent... when you play them with a complimentary set. Would you be skipping Controls on your Elec Dominator if their secondary was Martial or Fire?