Compiling CoH Community Slotting Choices

[Excidium]

When faced with slotting an uncommon power, it's often a bit hard to know what to go for. Searching the forums can help, and what guides you can find are often useful too, but it would be handy to have some idea of community consensus on slotting choices for a power. Any sensible person would just spend 5 minutes doing a search, but I thought it'd be interesting to solve the problem more thoroughly by compiling all available data from offline copies of both the old and new community forums. (The Paragon forums have many more builds, but are older and thus missing both newer powersets and newer set IOs. Homecoming has all these and the benefits of new approaches to slotting, but is a much smaller corpus to work from.) This approach also generates data not just on what set IOs people put in powers, but also on how many slots are typically assigned to each power.

 

The result is something like this:

Blaster Primaries > Assault Rifle > Flamethrower > Homecoming Forums
Found 41 times. 5.46 mean slots, 5 median slots.

Most common slot layouts (top 25%):
10: Rgn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg, Rgn-Acc/Rchg, Rgn-Dmg, Rgn-Dmg/EndRdx, Rgn-Dmg/Rchg
8: Artl-Acc/Dam, Artl-Acc/Dam/Rech, Artl-Acc/Rech/Rng, Artl-Dam/End, Artl-Dam/Rech, Artl-End/Rech/Rng
5: SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Dmg/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Rchg/Dmg%

Most common individual IOs:
14: Rgn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg
14: Rgn-Dmg/EndRdx
14: Rgn-Dmg/Rchg
13: Rgn-Acc/Rchg
11: Rgn-Dmg
10: PstBls-Dmg/EndRdx

 

Some caveats: obviously, this doesn't catch all builds. When Mids exports to the forums, it can be in any of three formats - long, short, or data chunk form. This code only recognizes short form, and imperfectly at that. Doing all three would be nice, but long form needs more fiddly/slower parsing than I've played with so far (and uses different IO names to boot), and I have no idea how to extract data from a data chunk. Fortunately, some quick checking shows short form exports are 3-4 times more common than long form on the forums, so it's a decent starting point.

 

Secondly, this just finds the most common community slottings for each power in each archetype's subforum. Nobody is claiming these are the best, just the ones most often seen on the forums when people share their builds. Also note that it's not uncommon for related classes to post builds on each other's forums. So you'll sometimes see defender and corruptor builds on each other's forums. Same with tanks/brutes/scrappers. This doesn't seem a major problem to me because it's fairly uncommon, and the slotting is usually pretty similar so it shouldn't throw things off too much. There's also a few repeated IOs where Mids tweaked IO set names or fixed misspellings over time, like EndRd vs EndRdx.

 

Anyway, the upshot of all this is the attached .zip file, which contains HTML pages for each class compiling slotting choices for every primary and secondary skill in the game. Pool sets aren't included, because I figured there's no real need, but can be added if people want. (Update: the data set now contains pool and epic/patron powers.) Otherwise, I hope this can be useful as a general guide to anyone wondering how a power is usually slotted.

 

Edit: Updated zip file with compiled Pools power data.

 

Edit 2: Updated with epic/patron power pools. One problem was that there are multiple different epic/patron pools with the same names, each with slightly different skills. (For example, there are 8 or 9 different Ice/Flame/Soul Mastery pools, each for different classes.) To make it easier to find powers, I've merged all powers that share a pool name together into that pool, instead of splitting them up by class or something. This looks a bit odd - Soul Mastery ends up with 18 powers - but makes it much easier to find the power you're after.

 

 

CoH Collated Community Power Slotting v1.2.zip

Edited October 13, 2020 by Excidium

[EmmySky]

Cool idea...I think pools are important considering the overwhelming use of hasten, tough and weave, leadership pool, also travel powers and travel support powers that can mule global recharge or boost defense/resist.  Also health amd stamina, I still run into people who 6 slot stamina for a set bonus as well as those who single or double proc it and call it a day.

[Lines]

Wow, good work!

 

I can see this being really useful getting started with unfamiliar sets.

[Excidium]

As requested, here's a new file detailing community slotting for all pool powers and the inherent fitness pool. Unlike the other power summaries, which were only collected from each class's subforums, these pool powers were collated from all posts on the old and the new forums respectively. The main file in the first post has also been updated with pools powers data.

 

I also rewrote part of the code dealing with IO names, so there should be fewer collisions between names like 'Heal-I', 'Heal-', and 'Heal.' The other primary and secondary power lists have been recompiled accordingly, so some numbers may have changed slightly.

 

It also occurs to me that this collected data could be handy for Mids itself. It could offer something like 'show top 5 community slottings' for a power to help people who were looking for slotting suggestions.

CoH-Pool Powers-All Sets-All Forums.htm

[Destruye Arepas YV]

Is this project still ongoing? I find it fascinating! 😄

[Without_Pause]

They haven't logged on in a year.

[Destruye Arepas YV]

Aww thought it might be ongoing.

 

Would be great if someone else took the reins of this project, quite a good set of data!

[Ukase]

I think one of the best things about "necro-posting" is a case like this. I had missed this post the first time around. 

[Snarky]

I think a lot (too much) about statistical weighting.  Where did the data come from?  what type of builds posted for what reason?  

 

For instance you could do this with Brutes.  But the data would be very skewed if all the posts were farm builds. 

 

It would be very different if you had a group of very good builders and all requested them to build with a single goal in mind.  Quite differen t to grab some random group of data and call the results something useful.

 

While I know this is not a homework assignment it is impossible to determine the usefulness of the data output without knowing what the input was.  Tastes great, by the way, what went in the sausages again?

[Without_Pause]

It says what was used, but not why. A Def based build is going to look for different bonuses versus a Res one. If the most popular armor is of one type, then odds are that will show up in the most likely to be slotted even though it doesn't help the other. What happens if someone sees there's all these purples in a build when you can't actually replicate said build or it leaves the build overall lacking?

 

There is a listing of what powersets get used. There was one stickied for what powers where picked. It would be nice if both were posted once a year. 

Edited January 7, 2022 by Without_Pause

[Without_Pause]

To add, something similar to what Path of Exile uses as a web app where you can look at your character and link to it for others to view would be understandably awesome. 

[Doomguide2005]

On 1/7/2022 at 9:12 AM, Without_Pause said:

It says what was used, but not why. <more stuff>

     Very much and possible the biggest skewing factor is why the build was posted.  Big difference between a help my build post and the likely respose(s) typically.