Game Balance & The Endgame

[arcane]

39 minutes ago, FUBARczar said:

of course they became popular, they were they only blaster with a sustain ability at that time.  The same reason why /Psionic Assault Doms were and are popular.  

I didn’t ask him to verify that mental was popular. I asked him to verify that blasters were otherwise unpopular. Which they weren’t unless someone has data?

[golstat2003]

40 minutes ago, FUBARczar said:

of course they became popular, they were they only blaster with a sustain ability at that time.  The same reason why /Psionic Assault Doms were and are popular.  

Seeing as how I easily farm with mine /Psionic Assault Doms . . . er YEP! lol

[FUBARczar]

1 hour ago, Phoenix' said:

Not really. Energy and Fire Manipulation were more popular at that time.

thats because they we legacy, but what about new ones being rolled?

[arcane]

People claiming that certain AT’s/sets were/are somehow unplayable as a result of squishiness (not referring to this in particular - past convos ring a bell too) really does nothing but raise the eyebrows of those of us who have been playing them just fine all along. 

[macskull]

2 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

It's absolutely the case.  Debuffing sets are competitive to buffing during normal level ranges but as levels rise they are left behind.

This is a joke, right? Surely I'm being trolled?

Edited September 21, 2020 by macskull

[golstat2003]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

This is a joke, right? Surely I'm being trolled?

I think someone (not you) needs to play on teams with debuffing sets more.

[macskull]

Just now, golstat2003 said:

I think someone (not you) needs to play on teams with debuffing sets more.

It's like the players who insist Sentinels are fine because they like playing them.

[ScarySai]

13 minutes ago, arcaneholocaust said:

eople claiming that certain AT’s/sets were/are somehow unplayable as a result of squishiness (not referring to this in particular - past convos ring a bell too) really does nothing but raise the eyebrows of those of us who have been playing them just fine all along. 

Yeah, it's not like Arbiter Hawk outright said that statistically, Blasters spent more time eating floor than any other AT.

 

Blasters got squashed pretty easily before the buffs, it's really not up for debate.

[Ralathar44]

38 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

I think someone (not you) needs to play on teams with debuffing sets more.

You can see the diminishing returns pretty clearly with slows as your slows will go from flooring enemy movement speed to barely affecting enemy movement speed at +4/+5.  That same diminished of effect is happening with every single debuff, it's just all very abstracted so it's not as clearly visible.  And again as kill speed increases even having a significant amount of uptime on your debuffs becomes a challenge for many powers/sets.

Again, there is a good reason debuffer sets are far less played.   There is 1 debuffer anywhere near in the top half of the most played defender sets: Radiation.  Radiation with the loaded PBAOE buff AM, fast re-charging toggles, ~100% uptime coverage of basically every debuff imaginable, and significant amounts of -regen is able to keep constant uptime on debuffs avoiding one of the main limitations of debuffer sets...consistent uptime in fast kill teams.  It still has AM to fall back on even when scaling reduces it's debuffs significantly.  Next closest debuff set is dead halfway down in Dark Miasma.

Let's not pretend the entire playerbase is ignorant, they know what is good.  Folks gravitate in general towards what is easy and what is effective for that AT's role.  Defenders are the team support class and they gravitate towards the best team support sets.


Note that the problem isn't that debuffer sets are weak.  I personally think they are well balanced for the most part though polish could always happen ofc. The problem is the game simply was not designed for us to go against +4/+5 and things were balanced with that in mind.  Design changes were put in explicitly to try and enforce that design philosophy.  The reason +4/+5 are the things we face now is because of power creep and power creep did not gift all power sets or ATs equally.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Ralathar44

[macskull]

15 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

Let's not pretend the entire playerbase is ignorant, they know what is good.  Folks gravitate in general towards what is easy and what is effective for that classes role.  Defenders are the team support class and they gravitate towards the best team support sets.

Your argument of "more people play these sets so they're better" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when looking at the rest of the charts. Four of the ten most-common Scrapper builds are Regen and Regen is arguably the worst Scrapper secondary. Broadsword, Ninjitsu, and Ninja Blade all make appearances in the top Stalker builds but again, those are some of the worst sets on that AT. Regen is the most popular Sentinel secondary but it's still the worst secondary that AT gets. Some of the top Blaster powerset combinations are pretty bad too. Popularity does not necessarily mean a set is better than the other options, it just means more people play it. The most popular Tanker combination is Invuln/SS but that definitely isn't the best Tanker - it just thematic so of course more players are going to gravitate toward it. Claws/Regen was one of the most popular Scrapper combinations when the stats were first published last fall because, you guessed it, Wolverine. In the same vein, Empathy is the most popular Defender primary because people see "support AT = heals = Empathy."

 

The very fact that Force Fields is the 5th-most-popular Defender primary should tell you that people aren't necessarily playing sets for their effectiveness.

Edited September 21, 2020 by macskull

[summers]

I have to agree that debuffs aren't anywhere near as useful at +4/incarnate content as buffs, particularly against AVs. They have an opportunity cost to activate (3.3 seconds for Radiation Infection!) and are crippled by the purple patch. Buffs on the other hand tend to have next to no opportunity cost (they are cast between mobs) and are unaffected by the purple patch. In todays day and age of extreme damage that clears spawns in record pace that opportunity cost is probably the greatest offender, and is the same reason why controls have similarly limited value in +4/incarnate style runs.

 

From the Archvillain paragon wiki page:

 

So, for example, while it might seem as though a Defender's Radiation Infection should be valuable against Captain Mako's extremely high defense bonus in the Statesman Task Force, the Infection's debuffs are heavily resisted. Optimally enhanced, Radiation Infection applies a -61% Defense penalty, which should cripple Mako's defense rating, but as it's against a +4 enemy it is at half strength due to the Purple Patch (-61 * .5 = -30.5), and as it's against a level 54 Archvillain a further 87% of that is resisted (-30.5 * (1 - .87) = -3.965%), leaving the net effect approximately half as useful at counteracting Mako's high defense as using a single Insight inspiration for a +7.5% ToHit bonus. Similarly, even against an equal-level AV, a level 50 Defender's mighty Lingering Radiation Regen debuff will be dropped from its usual -500% to -75%.

 

TLDR: 61% becomes 4% against a +4 AV, worth less than a single yellow.

 

There are of course still some debuffs that are good, but IMO a great deal simply aren't worth your time.

[macskull]

I mean, have you been on a team full of debuffers? AVs absolutely melt. Yes, after factoring in the purple patch and AV resistance buffs are better than debuffs but the debuffs are still useful and some of the best support sets are the ones that offer a mix of both. There are both explicit and practical limits to buffing after which more buffing doesn't matter and the only way to increase team effectiveness is with debuffs.  Empathy's schtick at endgame (since we're talking about that apparently) is "cool, I can keep a small damage bonus on 3-4 teammates at a time." A Kin can effectively damage cap an entire team with one or two clicks and solve the endurance and recharge problems. Oh, and that Kin can also bring -regen, -rech, -spd, -dam, and -end to the fight.

Edited September 21, 2020 by macskull

[Doomrider]

Something else to note from that same Archvillain paragon wiki page...
"Archvillains are also noteworth for having strong debuff resistances that scale by level. As of Issue 9, this resistance applies to -RunSpeed, -Recharge, -Endurance, -ToHit, -Defense, -Perception, -Regeneration and -Recovery"

Notice something missing? 

It's -Resistance, which is incredibly valuable and it's performance in difficult content should not be downplayed. Much more valuable than +dmg buffs alone but obvious better when both are present.

Also, since many -regen powers come in such heavy helpings (-500% benumb, howling twilight, heat exhaustion, etc) a single application can often enough to shut down AV regen. Not something to sneeze at.

edit: Not to mention, damage caps can be hit relatively easily for many AT's in full teams, however hitting the -resistance cap is incredibly difficult. Basically, having 1 kin on a a team can be great, but more than often doesn't provide any tangible difference in clear speed where as more -res has no such limitation really.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Doomrider

[arcane]

1 hour ago, ScarySai said:

Yeah, it's not like Arbiter Hawk outright said that statistically, Blasters spent more time eating floor than any other AT.

 

Blasters got squashed pretty easily before the buffs, it's really not up for debate.

Not sure blasters statistically dying more often than, say, armored melee characters or hardly-attacking buffers proves much of anything. Do you think tankers should be dying more?

 

Anyway, being squishier than other AT’s still doesn’t make one particularly squishy in a game like this. Blasters were easy to play if you knew what you were doing.

[macskull]

So at face value +dam is more useful than -res because the purple patch exists. You'd think that all things being equal a 30% damage buff would be just as good as a 30% resistance debuff, right? Well... not exactly. Damage buffs only boost your base damage while -res effectively boosts your enhanced and buffed damage. If I had a power that did 100 base damage and I had it fully slotted for damage (call it 100% for easy math) with another 30% damage boost I'd be dealing 230 damage. If I had a 30% resistance debuff on a target and I was using that same attack with the same slotting, I'd do 260 damage. In this case -res is more valuable than equivalent +dam until the purple patch causes a break-even around +4 (where my debuff is reduced to 48% of its normal value).

Edited September 21, 2020 by macskull

[Monos King]

@Ralathar44 @summers

What are you two on about? It is exactly because of the DPS centric meta that the debuff sets are most valued at the end game. They make you do more damage. They mitigate damage. I can't even imagine how you think any of your points thus far would make empathy a better end game option than something like cold. End Game enemies can one shot the unprepared, or kill so fast it might as well be. Mitigation is king there. Heals are touch-ups.

 

Suggesting that the purple patch renders -res less useful is also just silly, I suggest picking up a power analyzer in temp permitted content or running Surveillance. You can literally see enormous -res, -def, and even -dmg values applied that directly disprove the idea that debuffs aren't important there.

[Ralathar44]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

Your argument of "more people play these sets so they're better" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when looking at the rest of the charts. Four of the ten most-common Scrapper builds are Regen and Regen is arguably the worst Scrapper secondary. Broadsword, Ninjitsu, and Ninja Blade all make appearances in the top Stalker builds but again, those are some of the worst sets on that AT. Regen is the most popular Sentinel secondary but it's still the worst secondary that AT gets. Some of the top Blaster powerset combinations are pretty bad too. Popularity does not necessarily mean a set is better than the other options, it just means more people play it. The most popular Tanker combination is Invuln/SS but that definitely isn't the best Tanker - it just thematic so of course more players are going to gravitate toward it. Claws/Regen was one of the most popular Scrapper combinations when the stats were first published last fall because, you guessed it, Wolverine. In the same vein, Empathy is the most popular Defender primary because people see "support AT = heals = Empathy."

"Best" for what?  The content most people face?  Incarnate Trials?  GMs?  Etc.  I think you're confusing "most effective at x/y specific situation" and "most effective at playing the most common player experience" and the hardest most players experience regularly and in most of each character's lifespan is the normal 0-50 content and then normal 30-50 teams and tfs after that.  Not bleeding edge stuff, not incarnate TFs, just generally facing normal +4/8 missions of +4/+5.

Regen Scrapper offers a pretty hands off experience with a self rez, self heals, and endurance management help and is powerful low to mid level while doing what you need high level.  Most people are not looking to tank as a scrapper, heck between half and 3/4 of brutes are not looking to tank either.  They just want to survive whatever aggro they happen to pull and mess things up while focusing on their primary set...which is the reason they picked scrapper or brute instead of tanker.  Regen covers the ability to do that extremely well and if you screw up then you just revive and get back to work.  It's also very slot efficient with 3 passives and then out of the box powers on top of that with MoG and Revive.  You don't need to survive a full pull, just the aggro you pulled from the boss and a few minions/lts and Regen is more than sufficient for that.  Especially with Tough/Weave and IO sets.

Regen Sentinel is actually even better since you get more spike protection.  The Instant Regeneration Absorb toggle gives you a constant buffer, your ranged nature means you take alot less damage just by virtue of avoiding melee more, and you typically get a reliable CC option in your primary.  I'm also not sure what people are expecting out of sentinels, there are plenty of sentinel builds that can basically tank so ofc they shouldn't have blaster level damage.  That defense comes at a cost.

Similarly ninjitsu gives a good balance of defense, self healing, endurance management, recharge, and gives the AOE placate.  If you want more protection than Regen but don't want the complete lack of self healing and utter under end drain madness of the pure defensive/resistance sets then ninjitsu is a good option.  Then you add on smoke flash..  It's basically a defense powerset for people who hate the panting and lack of hp heal of defense powersets + a get out of jail free card.  It gives the average player facing average content everything they want as a player.  Will it hold up to

Broadsword and Ninja Blade are mid tier popularity, so those feel like odd pulls.  If you're pointing to the 5th most powerful primary as an example of what "everyone plays" when it's half as played as even second and third (much less first) then it's a good sign your argument in that regard is prolly flawed.  Claws/Regen has always maintained a fair amount of popularity as a fast endo light set that also had some ranged attacks.  Most of it's benefits don't show up well on a DPS spreadsheet.  That's the problem with "intangible" powers and power creep as well.  It's well known that "given the chance players will optimize the fun out of a game" and power creep inevitably moves everything towards kill speed for optimized exp/$ farming in every MMORPG.  That's why it's so important to realize this progression as it is and keep things reigned in so that you can have a wide variety of playstyles remain powerful.  And sometmes that means unpopular major changes like ED even.  The game is once again on the cusp of choosing a street, are we ok with continued power creep and ever increasing focus on kill rates and pushing harder content faster?  Or do we want to re-focus again on what makes this game great with the huge variety of concepts, powers, and playstyles that are viable ENOUGH to be played on even semi-serious teams looking to push.  CC and MMs are in a fairly bad way and the supportive power sets are slowly seeing a larger division and effectiveness as the kill efficiency focus (since survival has become more or less passe at our current power levels) sharpens.

[Monos King]

1 minute ago, macskull said:

So at face value +dam is more useful than -res especially once you factor in the purple patch. You'd think that all things being equal a 30% damage buff would be just as good as a 30% resistance debuff, right? Well... not exactly. Damage buffs only boost your base damage while -res effectively boosts your enhanced and buffed damage. If I had a power that did 100 base damage and I had it fully slotted for damage (call it 100% for easy math) with another 30% damage boost I'd be dealing 230 damage. If I had a 30% resistance debuff on a target and I was using that same attack with the same slotting, I'd do 260 damage. In this case -res is more valuable than equivalent +dam until the purple patch causes a break-even around +4 (where my debuff is reduced to 48% of its normal value).

Don't forget -res also increases damage of unenhanceable abilities, like all procs and prestige powers.

[macskull]

3 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

Regen Scrapper offers a pretty hands off experience

Okay, now I know you're trolling me. That or you're being intentionally obtuse. I think I'm done here.

Edited September 21, 2020 by macskull

[modest]

3 hours ago, Ralathar44 said:

It's absolutely the case.  Debuffing sets are competitive to buffing during normal level ranges but as levels rise they are left behind.

 

- Buffing sets get full value while debuffing sets get 50%/30% of their original value vs +4/+5.  Vs the hardest targets this scales down even further to 15% vs AV/EB/GM.

- Buffs uptime is based only on duration/recharge considerations...if your buffs are up 100% of the time then they have ~100% uptime, perhaps as low as 95% due to application delay depending on recharges/team organization.  Debuffing set requires application every new mob so your recharge needs to be as fast as your clear speed for you to have 100% uptime.  A debuff with 30 second duration and 20 second recharge still does not have anything close to 100% uptime.

- Buffs are on before a fight starts, debuffs require time to apply at the start of a fight. 

- If the team splits your buffs are still helping everyone they are on 100%.  If the team splits your debuffs only affect those people near you.

- Targeted AOE debuffs respect the AOE cap, thus an AOE buff that hits your whole teams works on everyone but a targeted AOE that attacks an enemy mob often dos not effect the entire mob.   This is actually something Trick Arrow does not have to worry about and that's a noticeable advantage of the set, especially with large pulls, multiple pulls, or ambushes into the same area.  But it can be a significant concern for other debuffing sets.


Debuffs are competitive in +2/+3 level content because debuffing values are balanced much higher than buffing values and they affect the whole team targeting the debuffed enemy.  Acid Arrow for example gives a ludicrous -41% defense and -20% resistance to a single target and is spammable and when stacked with disruption arrow that's -40% res.  But you don't get that vs +4/+5.  You get 20.5%/10% -def/-res and 12.3%/6% -def/-res.  Vs AV/EB/GM its even worse at  6.15%/3% -def/-res.  Also because of the hardcap of 95% chance to hit it's never going to have 100% uptime and any accuracy targeted debuff will face that.

But lets take your example of Cold Domination stacking an absurd amount of -res.  You put -60% res before diminishing returns in AOE target with a theoretical 100% uptime on sleet and 50% uptime on Heat Loss.  Higher with recharge and hasten so for fun overkill let's just assume 1/3rd of the original recharge for a recharge of 20 seconds and 120 seconds.  Theoretically sleet should always have 100% uptime and Heat Loss should have 75% uptime.  But that's not how it works in practice.  In practice you apply those debuffs to a group and they die within 15 seconds, prolly less than 10 if you have blaster or sentinel nukes available.  And then you gotta let the someone go in first to engage/soak alpha so damage is often being done, sometimes entire nukes landing, before debuffs even land.  So realistic maximum uptime is closer to 60%-70% on sleet and like 10% on Heat Loss.  Sure on a well oiled team nukes will wait for your debuffs, but you described a version of the game in which most people take empathy as a healer set and ignore the buffs so we're already not assuming anything close to a well oiled team.  Also, your ideas of how defense scales and how people are built has some dissonance with your idea of how people play empathy even at high levels.  Remember, almost all of us on these servers are CoH veterans.  Either alot of the playerbase are derps who cannot expect to play well and build well (meaning healing also still has value) OR you're overblowing your comments about people playing empathy.  And again, a single incarnate on teams invalidates basically all impressions of how that team functions because incarnates can often force even bad teams to succeed for anything but the hardest content (since they can often solo or almost solo the entire mission themselves)....that hardest content being like 1% of the total content of the game lol.

 

On paper at face value debuffs are still good.  But realistically as kill rate increases debuffs get much worse (lower uptime) and as level scaling increases debuffs get much worse (lower values).  Both of these happen in very high level content.  Which is why my TA/A is dang near a paper weight in high level teams and my Empathy defender can still make a huge difference.  Oil Slick Arrow is a joke on high level teams while being amazing on mid level teams.  With a recharge of at least 60 seconds even at 1/3rd of base recharge it has a very low uptime when groups are dying in 20 seconds or less.  Even lower due to the application+lighting lag and the need to fire disruption arrow and acid arrow first to avoid sacrificing on their uptime.  And the damage/slow/knockdown vs +4/+5 is minor despite it being so strong against +2s.  Again, TA/A is a main of mine from sunset, I'm extremely well versed in it and it suffers severely from the problems I mention.

@Ralathar44 You possess a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of the game. I recommend that you take the time to read up on the mechanics of resistance, archvillain resistances, and the manner in which resistance serves to resist resistance debuffs. The information that you have written is incorrect, but you have displayed a sincere attempt to understand the mechanics, and I think that you might value debuffs more once you gain a greater understanding of the mechanics.

 

Sleet recharges in 13-16 seconds. Heat Loss recharges in ~81-82 seconds and is permanent. Some resistance debuffs recharge even quicker. For example, Envenom from Poison recharges in ~4 seconds.

 

In end game content such as incarnate trials, task forces, and strike forces, the only characters that provide a net contribution to a team when compared to a damage dealer are debuff support sets and a single Kinetics player. This has been thoroughly tested by trial and task force challengers.

 

In end game content, players gain little to no value from healing, Fortitude, Adrenaline Boost, or Recovery Aura. Players are able to meet their own defense and recovery needs through the use of IOs, and a single Kinetics character adds more damage, endurance, and recharge than an Empathy character. Empathy simply is not needed on an end game team. It offers little to no value, and is objectively worse than bringing an additional damage dealer to the team.

[Ralathar44]

40 minutes ago, macskull said:

I mean, have you been on a team full of debuffers? AVs absolutely melt. Yes, after factoring in the purple patch and AV resistance buffs are better than debuffs but the debuffs are still useful and some of the best support sets are the ones that offer a mix of both. There are both explicit and practical limits to buffing after which more buffing doesn't matter and the only way to increase team effectiveness is with debuffs.  Empathy's schtick at endgame (since we're talking about that apparently) is "cool, I can keep a small damage bonus on 3-4 teammates at a time." A Kin can effectively damage cap an entire team with one or two clicks and solve the endurance and recharge problems. Oh, and that Kin can also bring -regen, -rech, -spd, -dam, and -end to the fight.

Stacked force multipliers of any type unsurprisingly multiply effectiveness.  You could do this with even the 4 weakest defender offense increasing sets.  That's the nature of multiplicative support, not the power of individual powersets.  However, odds are you have 4+ stacked leadership on that team pulling alot of weight too and the power of leadership =/= the power of your primary buffer/debuffer set.  We already know stacked leadership alone is strong enough to break the game lol :P.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Ralathar44

[Monos King]

5 minutes ago, Ralathar44 said:

CC and MMs are in a fairly bad way and the supportive power sets are slowly seeing a larger division and effectiveness as the kill efficiency focus (since survival has become more or less passe at our current power levels) sharpens.

This is correct and I am quite anti-power creep, but simply declaring that the other sets like empathy are viable doesn't fix that problem. It's just...really clear it falls behind in relevance; I love it and it has its role but that role becomes unnecessary quite quickly. I'm not calling for changes to empathy either, I just needed to affirm that fact.

[Ralathar44]

4 minutes ago, modest said:

Sleet recharges in 13-16 seconds. Heat Loss recharges in ~81-82 seconds and is permanent. Some resistance debuffs recharge even quicker. For example, Envenom from Poison recharges in ~4 seconds.

Not unless you're recharged and hastened out they don't.  All of those times are even less than 1/3rd of their base recharge.  Considering that only happens when you're twinked out I think my shorthand of 1/3rd of the power recharge is much more fair as most people will never be fully twinked out and indeed most of your character's career will not be in that state.  Even serious players don't fully outfit every character they create or play to that level.  If you base all balance on the bleeding edge capability you will inevitably get skewed results when comparing it to the average experience.  Everyone gets extremely broken with end game with full IO sets and incarnates, we know that and that's part of why kill speed has become so fast.

Sleet and Heat Loss are both AOE debuffs, meaning you want to use them primarily on groups and you'll want to have them ready for the next group.  If they finish recharging 3-5 seconds into the next group then its effectively down for that group due to the level of damage teams do at your tricked out levels just plowing through groups.  Envenom has a shorter cooldown because it's primarily a single target debuff, the AOE portion of it is fairly small and does a lesser debuff than done to the main target.  Envenom's entire set is focused around a single target and even with the proc machine that is poison trap it's struggled for a long time largely because of that.  Because the reality is that most fights in this game are group fights and normal bosses go down plenty fast enough to all other power sets.  And AV/EB/GM only receive like 15% of your debuff.  So that massive -85% res poison defender can deal out is reduced down to -12.75% res.  Still enough to make a difference but not as crazy as it looks starting out.

[golstat2003]

Okay I'll come back when this thread gets serious. Saying empathy is more impactful than debuffs is a step too far even for me. And we all play a game where fantasy is key.

 

Enjoy all.

 

😆

[Ralathar44]

32 minutes ago, Monos King said:

This is correct and I am quite anti-power creep, but simply declaring that the other sets like empathy are viable doesn't fix that problem. It's just...really clear it falls behind in relevance; I love it and it has its role but that role becomes unnecessary quite quickly. I'm not calling for changes to empathy either, I just needed to affirm that fact.

Yup, empathy pretty much just becomes a buff bot end game and while I love that it's buffs are valuable it's heals basically ceasing to be part of the set is a sign of a deeper problem.  Fort the right 4 people, drop RAs when up, Throw the occasional adrenaline boost and blast.  Most people are so powerful end game that people more or less stop taking damage and even controllers and defenders can often take group aggro safely that would have destroyed them quickly at lower levels.  Even my baby stone/regen brute with just half his alpha slot can almost solo +4/8 carnies and he's not even properly optimized....not to mention he's regen and that's not ideal for dealing with that much aggro :P.

In a properly balanced end game we'd still get hit, people'd still get hurt, heals would still be useful, and fights with individual mobs would take longer than 10-15 seconds.  Not specifically because that's needed for empathy, but because that's needed for a wide variety of powersets to be useful.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Ralathar44