Game Balance & The Endgame

[Haijinx]

1 minute ago, Mezmera said:

That's why I'd like to get us to those 10 powers and then activate some limitation set where you can only have active 6 of those 10 powers.  They'll all have quite a range of choices within each power so you'd likely be hard pressed to find a team full of all the same incarnates.  

Limiting the number you can have slotted sounds like a great idea.  That would possibly solve some of these issues.   6 might be a bit much though.  

 

At least you'd have some sort of variety with a plan like that. 

 

 

[carroto]

6 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

some limitation set where you can only have active 6 of those 10 powers. 

meh.  People would just figure out the "best" 6 and you'd mostly see those.

[Troo]

dang peeps. always figuring it out..

[Mezmera]

13 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Limiting the number you can have slotted sounds like a great idea.  That would possibly solve some of these issues.   6 might be a bit much though.  

 

At least you'd have some sort of variety with a plan like that. 

 

 

Sure 5.  Half is fine.  BUT I'd still like there to be a Hami like last mission where you and your team can have all 10 powers active and will need every bit of power you can from those.  

[Haijinx]

10 minutes ago, carroto said:

meh.  People would just figure out the "best" 6 and you'd mostly see those.

That's true. But maybe you make the number smaller than the number of "Best" abilities.  

 

You'd also need it not to be super easy to swap them out.  Otherwise you'd just slot the ones most advantageous for the task at hand. 

 

Probably can't win.   Oh well. 

[Phoenix']

39 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

No they don't...

Check what other people who agree with me have said and they are right.

 

38 minutes ago, carroto said:

I tend to avoid powers with that kind of penalty.  If it's going to take me 15 seconds or more to be able to be active again, any speed-up that I gained from using the power will almost always be more than offset by the enforced downtime.  If I remember correctly those powers didn't just drain all your end, they also prevented recovery for a period of time.  It's easy to blow through a small blue's worth of end before that.  Sure if I have enough blues I can use the power, but that requirement makes it situational enough that I'd probably never think of it.  That seemed to be the case for most players, which is why those powers were changed.

 

If it had to go back I'd want to at least retain enough end to avoid having to retoggle everything.  That's enough of a QoL hit to be a barrier in itself.

Once again its not fun for everyone to have blasters nuking every mob in the map

Also what I was suggesting is to buff nukes' dmg in order to wipe out a full mob but give them a penalty maybe a res/def debuff that will make yourself vulnerable for a few secs. 

The no endurance /recovery penalty was annoying and I have to agree being left out from action in order to rest/toggle/pop insps was too much. 

[Haijinx]

This is kind of the problem with game systems that tack on their High Level abilities onto their systems never intended for them.  

 

And COH did it twice.   They tacked on IOs.  And they Tacked on Incarnates.  

 

Without either of those systems the game difficulty would probably be in the "Low to Medium difficulty" range with a well balanced team and "Medium to High" solo depending on what you were trying to do.  

[ScarySai]

1 minute ago, Phoenix' said:

Once again its not fun for everyone to have blasters nuking every mob in the map

For you perhaps, I personally have no issue with it, and know others that also have no issue with it. Blasters are supposed to be damage gods.

 

2 minutes ago, Phoenix' said:

Also what I was suggesting is to buff nukes' dmg in order to wipe out a full mob but give them a penalty maybe a res/def debuff

No.

[Wavicle]

2 hours ago, Phoenix' said:

Nukes need to return to where they were tbh. 

I'd rather see them having a good damage buff than recharging every 25 secs with no end penalty. 

I remember people were having second thoughts on using them and that was fine

No.

[Leogunner]

1 minute ago, ScarySai said:

For you perhaps, I personally have no issue with it, and know others that also have no issue with it. Blasters are supposed to be damage gods.

I don't mind being carried every now and then but it is NOT entertaining which is why I avoid it.

[DrunkFlux]

Nerfing high power sets in general would simply drive many players away as they like that power, and when you nerf something, the feelings players get is twice as bad as those feelings when something they like is buffed.  This is the general rule of losses vs gains; losses always feel twice as bad as gains.  I mean CO tried nerfing all the high performing powers and lost over 90% of it's player base in about a year or two.  It lost another half of that when it nerfed overpowered vehicles when people felt it was baiting and switching.

 

So here are a few thoughts on what could happen if some things I often use were nerfed.

 

First, ancillerys and power boost/power build up.

 

I wouldn't necessarily change it much, in fact, I would not touch it without also looking at scorpion shield and many armor powers in the ancillery pools.  Many people only take scorpion shield because of its high defense vs smash/lethal and energy.  Energy being very common in the 50s.  And smash/lethal defense also works against many powers that are elemental based because they have smash and lethal components.  This pushes scorpion shield and many defense based ancillery armor powers way ahead of the other ancillery powers.

 

Power boost/build up allow energy mastery/power mastery to be an alternative to taking mace mastery.  To nerf it heavily would remove power and energy mastery from being choices to a majority of players.  Players don't often take underperformers.

 

 

So now I want to go over tier 9 nukes.  They were crap.

 

Litterally crap, and were the most skippable powers in there sets. Tier 9 nukes before the change were crap even before judgement powers.  Sure you wipe out 'one' mob with one shot, but then your completely useless for 20 seconds or more and even adrenaline boost does little to help until the first 10 pass.  All the while the team at higher end skill levels will completely wipe at LEAST 2-3 more mobs in that same time frame.  In effect, your SLOWING your team down and lowering your DPS overall.  I always skipped the tier 9s even before judgement showed up in incarnate powers, because I'd always find many teams wiping at least a few mobs in the time it took me to get my end back, even with rest active.

 

Tier 9 nukes were what you call "Awesome but impractical".  The penalties back then FAR outweighed the benefits.  Archery, assault rifle, psionic blasting and water blast ALL had far, far stronger tier 9s which could contribute far higher DPS.  I understand people liked them, but they were useless in the meta even before issue 24.

 

Fire blast with a blaster could one-volley most mobs with rain of fire + fire breath + fireball in that order while under build up and aim most people would use for an inferno.  They'd die fast enough that it was  more than enough lethal to get the job done and you'd never have that massive 20 second downtime.  Many other sets also could do more in that same time span overall.  Corruptors and defenders, due to the reduced damage no longer doing enough, would do even less.  The 20%-25% damage drop for no end penalty and faster cooldowns made them useful enough to compete and be a worthwhile power pick.

 

Incarnate powers I always felt were the closest things to equalizers for underperforming AT's/power set combinations.  While they were end game power creep, yes, they still had to be earned and on live they were much harder to gain.  But they aren't the be-all-end-all behind many top performing builds.  It is the combination of powerset combination + IO bonuses/procs stacking on top of having those incarnate powers.  It's easier to max defense stats with barrier, yes, but you still get a lot of defense from stacking IO bonuses.  But they were end-game and most content is still lower than level 45.  I'm honestly not bothered by incarnate powers much.  If any incarnate set was OP, I'd argue destiny is.  It's easy to make it's benefits perma, and even then some destiny powers didn't even need to be to truely be effective(ageless comes to mind).

 

Also, I don't find the game boring being overpowered on a character.  Especially when I IO'd the heck out of that character and loaded them with the best incarnate powers for that character.  I earned it.  I earned the right to be overpowered.  It's when your overpowered WITHOUT earning that is when it gets very, very boring.  Like champions online and solo you become invincible at level 8 even on elite difficulty, that killed its replayability and it was boring fast. 

 

If your bored of the character thats max level with IO's/incarnates ect, you can always roll a new one and homecoming gives plenty of character slots.  Can even delete a 50 and start over if you want.  Just pick different powersets/archtypes and the experience changes a lot.  THAT is what I do to keep this game fresh for me.

Edited September 24, 2020 by LaughingAlex

[Phoenix']

3 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

For you perhaps, I personally have no issue with it, and know others that also have no issue with it. Blasters are supposed to be damage gods.

 

No.

I play blaster 24/7 so dont think there is any hate for the AT. 

I agree with you they should be damage gods which is why I want their dmg to be buffed but remove every sustain ability such as their auras

[ScarySai]

3 minutes ago, Phoenix' said:

I agree with you they should be damage gods which is why I want their dmg to be buffed but remove every sustain ability such as their auras

With respect, Paragon added those for a reason and I don't think it should be removed because you don't like that min/maxers are able to do crazy things with the extra resources.

Edited September 24, 2020 by ScarySai

[Phoenix']

2 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

With respect, Paragon added those for a reason and I don't think it should be removed because you don't like that min/maxers are able to do crazy things with the extra resources.

Fair enough. Its just blaster became a universal class with this extra survivabilty

[ScarySai]

Yeah, instead of being professional floor lickers, they can blow things up and do everything in the game, like pretty much every other AT.

 

What horror.

[Mezmera]

2 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

With respect, Paragon added those for a reason and I don't think it should be removed because you don't like that min/maxers are able to do crazy things with the extra resources.

I'm more in the mindset that lets just let things be and buff underperforming power sets like they did the dom revamp.  

 

With how trans-formative blasters have become and how they are currently it's clearly this group of devs baby.  So I'm using them more as a hostage to justify what they want to do to everyone else and maybe to put the knife down and we can set their baby down.  

[Wavicle]

10 minutes ago, Phoenix' said:

I play blaster 24/7 so dont think there is any hate for the AT. 

I agree with you they should be damage gods which is why I want their dmg to be buffed but remove every sustain ability such as their auras

So you want them to suck like they did before. No.

[Mezmera]

1 minute ago, Wavicle said:

So you want them to suck like they did before. No.

Blasters never sucked

[Galaxy Brain]

16 hours ago, Leogunner said:

Is it though?  I can assume that Fire Blast has a prominent gap between it and the next up and coming blast set, but is that gap "as wide" or are you just saying that?  When @Galaxy Brain posted a comprehensive comparison of the melee sets using controlled elements, I'm convinced it does perform quite a bit better than other melee sets but it also takes into account death and needing to return to the map which seems more fair than just assuming a build is IO'ed and needs no effects except damage.  I'm actually asking, is there any testing done with a similar approach for blast sets?

Yes, there is:

 

 

 

Looking at JUST the average run time, Fire is at a comparable gap to other blast sets as TW is to Melee sets. However, it is not "best across the board" like TW is. Fire was the 2nd most dangerous set (only behind Radiation Blast where I died 9 times yikes), and had poor Standard Deviation run to run. All aspects weighed in and:

 

 

At the "Base" level, Water I feel is better for general use., and you can argue that Water/Fire/Ice are all sort of equally good given their strengths and weaknesses. Its when you eliminate the weaknesses inherit to Fire Blast is where it pulls far ahead.

 

Now, compare this to TW at a base level (Including Knockdown IO's for Claws and Kinetic):

 

 

TW is a big gap above the set that got an altered T9, just on SO's! If I were to post the numbers without the KD IO's, the gap would be even larger as TW has it all: Bonus Damage, incredible DPA, impeccable safety (in a separate test I pit it against War mace in a n SO only 3v1 boss fight and it could continuously juggle the bosses / let alone boost its own defense and make easy work of multiple bosses at once while War Mace struggled to stay alive).  Its not only that it was clearing maps so much faster, but it was doing that on top of the plethora of natural advantages TW has besides raw damage.

 

[Leogunner]

13 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

[snip]

 

Why is Dark Melee so high?

 

...but it's pretty much as I assumed with respect to blast and melee.  I can see the general deviation in performance shifting further when you take into consideration the ATs that use them vary much more than Scrapper does to Tanker/Brute/Stalker.  You'll have Sent able to overcome a lot of the mitigation downfalls of fire/ while Defender gets minute advantage and things like Corruptor capitalizing off the Dot or the -res from Sonic.  Even talking about just Blaster balance, you'll see a huge shift by merely changing the secondary to something with more offense or more defensive/control options.

 

All in all, saying TW needs adjustments and countering that by pointing to Fire Blast is still pretty apples-to-oranges rationality.

[ScarySai]

Fire performs exceptionally well, but ice, beam, and water can get close and/or match its performance. Sets other than those, like rad, dp, psy and Ar are overdue for a buff, hence why I believe buffing the under performers is long overdue 

 

In terms of melee sets, nothing gets close to TW, claws excels at AoE but not quite ST. War mace gets crazy but even still cant touch TW's numbers.

 

Edit: Dark melee is high in GB's test because it can self damage cap.

Edited September 24, 2020 by ScarySai

[Phoenix']

41 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

So you want them to suck like they did before. No.

Im sorry but if you think they sucked you propably didn't play a blaster properly 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Phoenix'

[ScarySai]

If you say so.

[Leogunner]

1 minute ago, Phoenix' said:

Im sorry but if you think they sucked you propably struggled using them

There has been a strong shift to solo performance parameters thus a shift in the window of acceptable performance.

 

With a more team-oriented gameplay, being "shut down" because you used your nuke just means your other teammates get to catch the slack.  If that is unacceptable to some players, your bias is likely to push for more solo-oriented play rather than team co-op and combination adaptation.  Considering the game has fewer players than it did before split among different private servers, I can follow the perspective of solo-oriented content, however.  

[BitCook]

3 hours ago, KeepDistance said:

I don't have a dog in this race, but this example doesn't prove your point; the steamroll team will take out 3 mobs in 27 seconds rather than 3 mobs in 30 seconds.

Force multipliers work because they make your team more effective.  So a buff that raises team kill speed by 10% is more valuable on a team that takes longer to wipe out a mob than one that doesn't.

 

In the example I game, the first buff was a three second reduction to the time to kill.  However, if the team took 1/3 of the time to kill the mob, the benefit to the buff is a much less impressive 1 second.  My contention is that the old live environment was like the 30 second team and our current environment is more like the 10 second team.  Changes have been made and power creep has happened.  How much is up to you to believe 

 

It was an illustration for people wondering why there are some of us disparaging support and controls in today's endgame.  It's why some of us feel the way we do.

 

The faster teams get and the more damage they do, the less it matters if you buff/Debuff.  Most buffs/debuffs work as a % of damage/resistance/speed etc.  However all of them can be boiled down to the effect on clear speed.  When clear speed starts getting to the time it takes to cast a buff, there is no point in casting it.  I have played Rad a bit and my example was that I can't usually get more than RI out before the mob is dead.  I don't have time for another buff... So the value of my RI is what?  A tenth of a second?  One second faster clear time?

 

If you agree with that, and my anecdotal evidence supports it for me at least, then there is no purpose to play one of those ATs other than you enjoy it... Or exemp a lot, or some other reason than you want to be effective.

Edited September 24, 2020 by BitCook