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What if we add DPA to the damage formula?


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On 5/6/2020 at 1:49 PM, Replacement said:

It seems like the first step would be finding the average activation time of all attack actions.  I would probably exclude blast nukes and controls (since they tend to have damage more as a rider effect than as their selling point) from that initial search for a benchmark.

 

Even if HC doesn't really agree, I think there could be value in doing this as a community... sort of finding that mean activation time, and showing which powers radically vary from that time without noticeable compensation.

I actually do have the average activation time of all melee attack powers in Tankers handy.

 

The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set attack powers is 1.76 seconds.

The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set single-target attack powers is 1.51 seconds.

The mean raw activation time of all Tanker melee set multi-target attack powers is 2.19 seconds.

 

Note that this counts Titan Weapons powers at their base, un-Momentum-boosted activation times.

I don't have blast set stuff handy, but this probably provides a decent starting point.

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On 5/7/2020 at 2:13 AM, Zepp said:

Just to clarify, cooldowns start after the animation concludes. So you can never spam a single attack uninterrupted. Also, this means that a 3s attack with 3s recharge is up every 6s, while a 1s attack with a 3s recharge is up every 4s, so the actual time between uses is also significantly different for long-animation abilities.

The standard damage formula is:
0.2*(0.8*Recharge+1.8)

While recharge should be taken into consideration, DPA is a much more important balance factor for most attacks.

As such, animation time ought to be considered when calculating damage. In addition, damage type (possibility of resistance) might also need better weighting. This is complicated, but the damage of S/L may need a slight reduction in PvE and a significant increase in PvP. On the other hand, Psi damage could use a significant increase in PvE and a slight reduction in PvP.

The goal is balance, and the recharge-focused formula sounds good before the explosion of global recharge in IOs (that was necessary because control and support powers still have excessively long cooldowns). Unfortunately, that would mean an overall shift in all damaging abilities which would mean a major overhaul of the game.

So with this in mind, that animation time is also a hard, linear addition to total recharge, that portion still isn't baked into the damage formula?

 

That's messed up, if I'm understanding that correctly. Using your example, if a 3 second recharge attack has a 3 second animation, it should at the very least be calculated as a 6-second recharge, since that's the TRUE recharge.

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2 hours ago, Replacement said:

So with this in mind, that animation time is also a hard, linear addition to total recharge, that portion still isn't baked into the damage formula?

 

That's messed up, if I'm understanding that correctly. Using your example, if a 3 second recharge attack has a 3 second animation, it should at the very least be calculated as a 6-second recharge, since that's the TRUE recharge.

I cannot confirm nor deny whether this is recharge time or true recharge time (but it is my impression that it is the prior - which explains another reason why long animation attacks tend to have lower DpA.

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Huge shout out to @Bopper for compiling the data, but I have an initial run through of Animation Times:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ChnjKXOp68FGzLK2MDi5u_wtYMX0mQFwN9IFxVr9a28/edit?usp=sharing

 

Bopper was able to pull data from 4242 individual powers that players have access to for this, and I was able to do some filtering to sort it down to a much more bite size.... 1056!

 

From that count, we have 85 unique animation times. Its worth noting there are far more than 85 animations, but very interesting that there are so few timings.

 

  Value Count
Total Avg 1.82 1056
Avg Below 1.23 551
Avg Above 2.47 505
     
Mode 1.67 106

 

Copied from that link, we see the average animation time of all unique (non temp, non incarnate, non auto) powers is 1.82s. There are more powers that are "Faster than Average" than are "Slower", and slower powers are slower than fast powers are fast (compared to the average). The most common timing is 1.67 sec, with ~10% of all powers using that timing. Top ten is below:

 

Time Count
1.67 106
1.17 89
2.03 82
1 61
1.5 50
0.73 45
2 43
3 39
1.07 35
2.5 33

 

 

As I parse this some more, we can get more accurate data.

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