All enemies have global chance to proc +to-hit

[aethereal]

11 minutes ago, HelenCarnate said:

Then do the same for higher level boss mobs, many of which also have defense debuffs. 

If you have defense debuffs (and do not have strong ddr), you're already experiencing a much stronger effect than this anyways.  Cimerorans, Arachnos, Banished Pantheon and others already hit you much more extensively than this concept would.  And, by the way, they are far from unbeatable, which is another reason why all the railing and gnashing of teeth here is seriously overblown.

[Sakura Tenshi]

For not a terribly serious suggestion you certainly seem pretty defensive about it.

Edited July 28, 2020 by Sakura Tenshi

[HelenCarnate]

5 hours ago, aethereal said:

If you have defense debuffs (and do not have strong ddr), you're already experiencing a much stronger effect than this anyways.  Cimerorans, Arachnos, Banished Pantheon and others already hit you much more extensively than this concept would.  And, by the way, they are far from unbeatable, which is another reason why all the railing and gnashing of teeth here is seriously overblown.

Gotta love irony. Literally no one else like this idea. Be like Elsa. Let it go.

[aethereal]

4 hours ago, Sakura Tenshi said:

For not a terribly serious suggestion you certainly seem pretty defensive about it.

It's worthwhile trying to get people in the suggestions forum to understand the mechanics of the game.  This idea will certainly never be implemented, but if someone comes out of the discussion with a better understanding of how all these factors interrelate, that's a win. 

[aethereal]

So, in that spirit, let me expand a little:

 

The basic problem with defense is the increasing returns curve from about 35->45.  At low levels of defense, you barely notice it.  Only once you're in your 20s do you even start to say, "Huh, I guess maybe I'm a little more durable?"  Then in your 30s you start to get all, "Wow, I didn't think I would survive that fight, but I did!" (albeit with some other times when you get unlucky and don't), and then in the late 30's and 40's you run up this rapid curve into extreme durability in which you turn up your notoriety settings again and again.

 

And the curve is equally fast and sharp on the way back down.  Get your defense debuffed just a little and you're screwed.  Enemies with +to-hit do multiples of your damage.

 

Soft-capped characters are, via our stylized look at even-conn minions, 2x as durable as resistance-capped Tanks and Brutes, 3x as durable as resistance-capped Kheldians, and 5x as durable as any other resistance-capped character (and also they get protection from rider effects that have to-hit checks).  And yes, it's not actually that bad, because we don't actually fight even-conn minions at these levels, but it's still pretty bad.  Challenging soft-capped characters via just piling on more attacks and more damage is doable, but it enforces a defense strategy, because piling on that much additional damage will completely destroy resist-oriented characters -- it sharpens the meta on reaching the softcap.

 

However, our strategies so far that disincent defense have been:  defense debuffing, auto-hit attacks, attacks that hit common holes in defense (such as non-positional psi), and of course always-on to-hit bonuses in incarnate content.  All of these strategies have a problem: they rapidly walk down that same sharp curve as soft-cap is approached.  Your soft-capped character is invincible, a tank, until they hit a defense debuffer, at which point they're taking 5x, 10x the damage they were and they die instantly.

 

My point is that this is dysfunctional.  Better game design would have a diminishing rewards curve at the end, not an increasing rewards curve.  If we were talking a game that was intended to be CoH-like but started from a completely blank slate, mechanics-design, you'd have a situation where a defense-oriented character would get meaningful durability immediately, upon their first investment in defense, and then as they walked up towards the end-game, they'd get less and less from each additional investment (but not nothing -- ideally, you'd always be getting something out of having a Forcefields character on the team).

 

But we aren't starting from a blank slate mechanics-wise.  My idea -- which again was never made with the idea that it would just be accepted and put into the game -- was to point out that you can in fact approximate some of that attack on the sharp curve of defense within the current mechanical framework, without the blunt hammer of just making every defense-based character very squishy.  We just need to step beyond "defense debuffs, auto-hits, always on +to-hit."  You can do this because high-end play in CoH involves a lot of attacks coming at you, and there are ways that you can make a subset of those attacks be more effective against defense characters without making ALL of those attacks more effective.  (You could also have like one out of four attacks that an enemy makes have +5% to-hit.  There are other ways).

 

People react defensively because they've had it drilled into them that anything that bypasses a little defense walks them down that sharp curve to many multiples of incoming damage.  That's not true of my proposal, and while my proposal will never be applied, it's useful to contemplate how we can mitigate extremely high defense without rendering defense characters useless.

Edited July 28, 2020 by aethereal

[Doomguide2005]

Maybe because my main is/was SR but I see a To Hit proc as having basically 2 outcomes.  1) I occasionally get hit because of the proc.  It happens infrequently enough that I ignore it as far as builds or what I take on or when it happens.  No significant change to gameplay.  In large part that's because of SR 's high levels of DDR.  2) Or it happens often enough to endanger my character therefore changes how I do things.  Probable buff my defense a bit in my builds.  But if that's happening I suspect it is going to utterly shred defense builds without significant DDR and require they reach higher levels of defense in their builds (or find other solutions).  Which is to say just about every other defense build existing and a fairly fundamental shift in game play.  Maybe a proc rate/value can found between the two "extremes" for none DDR based defenses but ... .  The attack Mechanics are very sensitive to changes in To Hit and it's doubtful this would work without introducing significant, probably drastic, changes to gameplay and builds. Or it has no significant outcome which just renders it pointless largely.  So unless that's the intended goal I don't  see it working or desirable.

Edited July 28, 2020 by Doomguide2005
Afterthoughts

[aethereal]

You're misunderstanding DDR, it doesn't affect to-hit buffs.  It affects defense debuffs.

[Doomguide2005]

4 minutes ago, aethereal said:

You're misunderstanding DDR, it doesn't affect to-hit buffs.  It affects defense debuffs.

Yes I am very aware how it works.  A to hit proc won't directly effect DDR.  But most of the defdebuffs are carried by attacks.  So for an SR the effect of the proc is much more likely to result in a single heavily debuff resisted attack.  Result is basically just a bit of damage without any serious change in the defense i.e. I would still be basically capped.  Same event against a none DDR build and they're looking at not only the damage but a more significant debuff to their defense and potentially initiating cascade failure.  So my point was if you start proc'cing often enough to hurt my SR scrapper to the point I would need to change things the result on a none DDR defense is a much greater likelihood of starting cascade failure to the point where probably such builds need to radically change whether that's more defense or higher resists or some other mitigation. 

[Doomguide2005]

Of course could just say fine with just a slight random damage increase vs SR and any set with large values of DDR.  And aim the proc chance amount/value to vs defense with small to non-existent DDR.  But in my thinking that has to include the effects of defdebuffs or you risk setting up cascade failure very frequently because as I stated previously the equation is very sensitive to changes to To Hit particularly at or near the caps and the resulting damage increases.

[aethereal]

8 minutes ago, Doomguide2005 said:

Of course could just say fine with just a slight random damage increase vs SR and any set with large values of DDR.  And aim the proc chance amount/value to vs defense with small to non-existent DDR.  But in my thinking that has to include the effects of defdebuffs or you risk setting up cascade failure very frequently because as I stated previously the equation is very sensitive to changes to To Hit particularly at or near the caps and the resulting damage increases.

That's legit and sorry for misunderstanding you originally.  You're saying that this kind of change would set up cascading defense failure in circumstances where normally it would not occur.  That may be true.  I guess I'm not clear how many enemy groups have minor defense debuffs that don't normally cross into cascading.

 

Obviously the opponents that are super serious defense debuffers already provoke cascading failure on essentially any set besides SR.  But there may be a new category of debuffers to worry about with a change like this.

[SwitchFade]

Oh, uh, just for the record, no vote. Twice.

 

Sorry, I know you like this idea, but it's cringe inducing.

 

Just, no.

[Doomguide2005]

No worries.  In trying to not write a novel I wasn't clear why DDR was important to my thinking when reading it over.

 

Part of the concern is for mobs like Council.  There's a lot of defdebuff in their attacks.  So maybe one procs, hits, and in addition to damage lands its defdebuff.  Okay no biggie at that point.  But now the rest of the mob is looking at an attack that is 2 or 3 times as likely to hit even without the proc buff and the next attack hits ... more defdebuff and now were staring down the barrel of cascading.  And only one mob actually had the proc occur.  Obviously the risk of setting off cascade is based on the frequency and value of the proc.  But in a no DDR situation there's not much range between trivial occurrence and "oh my" in triggering bad stuff.  A 'squishy' running at +1/×4 with no appreciable defense is prepared for it.  The same 'squishy' built to cap defense and run at +2/×8 (or higher) isn't necessarily unprepared for getting debuffed but with the proc it introduces another significant risk of it happening and doing so quite rapidly to the mix.

 

Randomness whether it's a table top game or CoX rarely favors the player.  Mob deals with it once, players do so again and again.  It's one reason some folks shy away from a set like SR it feels 'luck' based and prefer resistance sets and there steadier outcomes.

[aethereal]

I mean, I think that's a valid point.  Seems like it would be very sensitive to a number of factors, and kind of hard to say without extensive testing how big a deal it would be -- and that obviously won't happen.

[ShardWarrior]

23 hours ago, aethereal said:

My point is that this is dysfunctional.  Better game design would have a diminishing rewards curve at the end, not an increasing rewards curve.

Why?  What incentive is there to progress then if you are getting worse instead of better?

[aethereal]

2 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

Why?  What incentive is there to progress then if you are getting worse instead of better?

Not getting worse, getting better more slowly.

[ShardWarrior]

5 minutes ago, aethereal said:

Not getting worse, getting better more slowly.

Well, that is kind of the point of what I was getting at.  Getting better and more powerful is something to look forward to and strive for as you progress.

[aethereal]

Just now, ShardWarrior said:

Well, that is kind of the point of what I was getting at.  Getting better and more powerful is something to look forward to and strive for as you progress.

Sure, and you should get better.  But when we're on an increasing rewards curve like happens right now, we see, well, the dysfunction that happens right now.

 

And, in fairness, they did try to approximate this to some degree.  Each point of defense that you get as you go along is more valuable than the one before, but in general it gets harder to get defense as you go along.  You get your big meaty powers and then you're scrabbling for little pools or set bonuses.

 

But a better design would be to have it be the case that there was lots of space between the very best mitigation and the second best and the third best, and that those things could gracefully degrade into each other, instead of having everyone crammed up at the same softcap and then any degradation in defense rapidly exposes you to multiples of damage.  People can make reasonable choices about when they have "enough" mitigation instead of everyone just obviously shooting for softcap or within a point or two of it, and you can make defense debuffers that expose you to 20% more damage instead of 200% more damage.

[ShardWarrior]

17 minutes ago, aethereal said:

Sure, and you should get better.  But when we're on an increasing rewards curve like happens right now, we see, well, the dysfunction that happens right now.

I do not see it as dysfunctional at all.  Climbing the mountain to overcome obstacles is part of the journey and reaching the peak is the reward. 

 

18 minutes ago, aethereal said:

People can make reasonable choices about when they have "enough" mitigation instead of everyone just obviously shooting for softcap or within a point or two of it, and you can make defense debuffers that expose you to 20% more damage instead of 200% more damage.

People are already making reasonable choices with how they build their character. 

[aethereal]

10 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I do not see it as dysfunctional at all.  Climbing the mountain to overcome obstacles is part of the journey and reaching the peak is the reward. 

 

People are already making reasonable choices with how they build their character. 

 

So do you hate all the places in the game where we do have diminishing returns?  Do you want to turn damage bonuses and recharge bonuses into increased returns?  Or do you only like climbing the mountain for defense and resistance?

[ShardWarrior]

I just do not see a need for any kind of change to how defense works, sorry.  As they say, this reads to me like a solution looking for a problem.

[Nyghtmaire]

4 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I just do not see a need for any kind of change to how defense works, sorry.  As they say, this reads to me like a solution looking for a problem.

Perfectly encapsulates this proposal. Issue spotting and definition was skipped.

[aethereal]

5 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I just do not see a need for any kind of change to how defense works, sorry.  As they say, this reads to me like a solution looking for a problem.

Uh huh.  So I take that to mean that you do not in fact stand by your sweeping condemnation of diminishing returns?

 

Look, there's nothing wrong with principled conservatism.  The game is mature.  I certainly don't endorse ripping out fundamental systems at this late date, even if those systems are pretty flawed.  But it's kinda dumb to make a bunch of posts saying that it's actively desireable to have short, sharp increasing returns curves, that it's the only way to feel progress in the game, and then quietly ignore the question when asked about all the places that the game does have diminishing returns (which is to say almost every mechanic in the game besides defense and resistance).

[ShardWarrior]

15 minutes ago, aethereal said:

Uh huh.  So I take that to mean that you do not in fact stand by your sweeping condemnation of diminishing returns?

To be quite honest, I have no idea what you are talking about here.  I never mentioned anything specific diminishing returns in any post I have made here.  Calling me or my opinions "dumb" is certainly not going to accomplish anything. 

[aethereal]

2 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

To be quite honest, I have no idea what you are talking about here.  I never mentioned anything specific diminishing returns in any post I have made here.  Calling me or my opinions "dumb" is certainly not going to accomplish anything. 

You did, in fact.  You explicitly quoted me about diminishing returns and said, "What incentive is there to progress if you're getting worse instead of better?"

 

I pointed out that this was a misunderstanding of what "diminishing returns" means and explained what diminishing returns are, at which point you said, that that was what you were getting at (which, you know, I'm not sure was true -- I think you just didn't understand the phrase), and that you wanted to get more powerful.  At which point I said yes, get more powerful, just get more powerful more slowly, and you continued to argue against the idea in several posts.  Not in a narrow way explicit to defense, in broad sweeping language about the general concept of progression and of attaining mountains and so forth.

 

So, let me lay it all out for you again, hopefully avoiding phrases you don't understand:

 

It is my view that in general, we should be aiming for a design in which characters rapidly feel "super" -- it is a superhero game -- and they feel meaningful impact of each new power they get and even each enhancement they slot.  However, as you chase more and more specialization in terms of getting a specific number higher and higher, you have to invest more and more in order to gain the same amount.

 

This is how most of the game works.  When you slot your first SO-style damage enhancement, your power increases its damage by about 30%.  Your second SO-style damage enhancement in that power increases the damage of the power about 23% over and above what the first enhancement gave you.  The third enhancement would do about 19%, but actually it's even less than that because of ED.  Build-up on a power that's not slotted for damage increases your damage by 80%.  Build-up on a power that is slotted for 90% damage increase impoves its damage by about 42%.

 

This is also how mez duration bonuses work, and healing bonuses, and mez resistance (not mag-style protection), and a ton of other things, but just to drive the point home, let's look at recharge.

 

Let's say you have a power that has a 2 minute base cooldown time.  The first 100% recharge you get towards it -- from any source, whether global or local -- decreases the cooldown time from 2 minutes to 1 minute, so it reduces the cooldown by 60 seconds.  The next 100% recharge you get towards the power reduces the cooldown by only 20 more seconds, to 40 seconds.  The 100% after that reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds, to 30 seconds.

 

This is called "diminishing returns."  Each investment made in the same place gives you lower rewards.  Still rewards!  But lower rewards.

 

The opposite is increasing returns.  Let's say that instead of damage bonuses adding to each other, they multiplied by each other.  So if you had damage power that did 100 base damage, and you added a 30% damage enhancement IO, you increase the damage to 130.  But then if you added another 30% damage enhancement, instead of increasing the damage to 160, you increased the damage by another 1.3x, so 169.  And if you added a third 30% damage enhancement, you went to 220.  And if you then did an 80% build-up on top of that, you went to 395 damage.  (Instead of the 270 damage or so that those would add up to in the game as it exists).

 

Defense and resistance are increasing-returns functions.  The more defense and resistance you get, the greater a percentage of your damage is mitigated.

 

Why does increasing returns not generally make for great game design:  Because it devalues all investment that doesn't get you towards the highest levels possible.  An Elec-Armor character who gets Weave and has no other investment in defense has wasted a power choice.  It will be difficult to tell from in-game results whether they even have that power.  A Super Reflexes character who's sitting at around 40% defense-all and does not yet have Weave can make no more valuable power choice than Weave.  He will approximately half the incoming damage he takes with one power choice.  This diminishes meaningful choice in the how we build our characters -- if you chase defense at all, you need to chase a LOT of defense, and doing otherwise isn't just suboptimal, it's massively suboptimal.  It creates great gulfs of power between people who fight their way up to the increasing rewards curves over those who do not, such that a level 50 character who is heavily invested in but attacks the wrong increasing rewards curves is just gigantically less powerful than one who chose the right curves to attack (for example: if I have a Scrapper at level 30 who's resistance based and another who's defense-based, they're probably relatively equal.  If I try to take that resistance scrapper to the endgame, his defense peer is able to handle literally 4x more damage than he does).  And it reduces viable options at any given power level.

 

Now, these are statements of taste.  There is someone out there who is like, "In my ideal game, a character who is carefully built to the exact optimal meta can be literally hundreds of times more effective than one who is max level and lavishly invested in but does not find the one-true-build."  I personally doubt that that taste is very widespread, but I'm sure it exists somewhere.  I'm not here to argue matters of taste.  If you love increasing returns, or someone out there in the world loves increasing returns, then my tastes are different than that person and that's fine.

 

However, if someone really, really, really likes increasing rewards curves, they are frustrated by almost every mechanic in City of Heroes besides defense and resistance, because almost all mechanics in CoH are on diminishing returns.  I don't expect that hypothetical increasing-returns-fanguy is very happy with CoH.

 

A totally different person can say, "Look, yes, it was probably a bad decision to have an increasing returns on defense and resistance back in 2004, but that was 16 years ago and the game is on the whole fun despite some stuff you have to learn about it, and overturning the entire balance of the game is a bad idea."  And I agree with that person!  I am not proposing to switch defense and resistance to diminishing returns.  I am proposing to slightly mellow out the steepness of the increasing returns to defense, in particular, as an alternative to doing what the actual devs did back in the day and proliferating defense debuffs or give entire areas of the game massive to-hit bonuses.

[ShardWarrior]

51 minutes ago, aethereal said:

You did, in fact.  You explicitly quoted me about diminishing returns and said, "What incentive is there to progress if you're getting worse instead of better?"

You will note the words "diminishing returns" do not appear anywhere in that.