Normalizing Control Attack Power Animation Times

[oedipus_tex]

I think it's known by many players that the OG development team based the damage formulas for attacks on the Recharge of the powers without considering the Animation time. This has led some powers that were intended to do identical damage to each other doing more or less damage based mostly on luck.

 

One place this is very evident is the Control sets. Most Control sets feature a single target Immobilize, a single target Hold, and an AoE immobilize. The raw damage of each of these powers is meant to be identical:

• Using Dominator numbers, the single target Hold and single target Immobilize were each meant to deal 52.8 damage at level 50 
  • (Note the single target Immobilize recharges in 4 sec versus 😎
• The single target Immobilize is meant to deal about 33% as much damage as the single target powers (15.85 damage on a level 50 Dominator)

 

For the sake of making this conversation simpler I am going to focus on Dominator numbers and not Controller. Containment makes it slightly harder to talk about Controller damage output. If you want to extrapolate those numbers though, on balance its fairly safe to assume Dominators and Controllers do about as much damage as each other when you consider that Contained attacks slightly outdamage the Dominator but it takes a click or two to set that up. 

 

Here's how the single target powers play out on Dominators in real life:

 

 

 

Basically, the fastest animating powers animate in 1.32 seconds, and the slowest in 2.11 or 2.24. The difference is a nearly 30% drop in DPA before considering procs. 

 

I realize just posting the DPA of a power on its own isnt easy to comprehend without some context, so here are Defender and Blaster Energy Blast to give a sense of upper and lower bounds. I've also included some averageish Dominator Assault powers for comparison. They may or may not be perfect comparisons but at least may give some sense of scale.

 

 

 

Finally, here is a chart of what the DPA of each single target power (except Fire) would be with a different animation time:

 

 

 

Putting all this together, it seems to me that the best option is to use 1.32 second animations for all of these powers. That would give all of these powers a 40.0 DPA on either 4 second (a bit worse than a T1 Assault set blast) or 8 second recharge.

 

HOWEVER this decision doesn't take place in a vacuum. With a ~40 DPA single target attack on 4 second recharge, Controllers would outpace some (many? I haven't looked closely enough) Defenders. I'll leave it to hard core number crunchers what the "right" final DPA should be. 

 

On the subject of where to get these animations, here are some powers that currently have a 1.32 second anim. Some of these are probably duplicates, I didn't look into them too closely.

• Fire > Char
• Mind > Dominate
• Ice > Chillblain
• Elec > Electric Fences
• Icey Assault > Bitter Ice Blast
• Cold Domination > Ice Shield
• Fire Control > Cinders
• Gravity Control >Dimension Shift
• Plant > Carrion Creepers

 

 

Next we have the AoE Immobilize. Have you ever played an Ice Control character and felt like you were doing way, way less damage than Fire or Plant? Here's why:

 

 

 

Ice Control's AoE deals about half as much DPA as Fire (7 vs 14) and less than half as much as Plant (7 vs 17). You'll notice that Plant has one of the longer animations, but because it deals x2 the base damage of any other immob AoE it still comes in first place. (Why does it deal x2 the damage of any other aoe immob? This is a mystery that has never been solved, but most people assume it's a bug from when the OG devs created Plant Control for Dominators by cloning a Controller set and accidentally included the Containment damage, then doubled it again when proliferating Plant Control to Controllers a few issues later).

 

 

The animations here range from 1.18 sec to 2.24 sec. I'm less certain what the right move is here. These powers don't fit an easy profile to compare them to. They mostly recharge in 8 seconds with a huge 30ft radius. Few ranged AoE attacks recharge that fast or have such a large radius.

 

Here's their standardized DPA for each animation time if we briefly don't consider the outliers in Fire, Plant, or Dark.

 

 

 

For a comparison point, the fairly standard Defender Explosive Blast recharges in 16 seconds and has a DPA around 25, radius 15. Since AoE immobilizes recharge x2 as fast as Explosive Blast I think we may want to be careful here. But you'll note that currently because of Containment Plant Controllers outperform the AoE damage of Energy Blast except for the nuke. 

 

I don't have a final answer on the AoE immobilize. My instinct says at a minimum to have Plant use a faster animation but lower its raw damage. It probably should land with a DPA identical to Fire. Ice Control almost certainly needs an animation fast enough to give it a DPA better than 7. The 12 DPA of Electric and Earth is nothing to write home about, but it's still a major improvement. 

Edited December 25, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[EmperorSteele]

3 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

One place this is very evident is the Control sets. Most Control sets feature a single target Immobilize, a single target Hold, and an AoE immobilize. The raw damage of each of these powers is meant to be identical:

• Using Dominator numbers, the single target Hold and single target Immobilize were each meant to deal 52.8 damage at level 50 
  • (Note the single target Immobilize recharges in 4 sec versus 😎
• The single target Immobilize is meant to deal about 33% as much damage as the single target powers (15.85 damage on a level 50 Dominator)

 

 

I know what you MEANT here, but, I think this blurb needs an editing pass 😃

That aside, I think we can all agree that some equalization needs to occur. However, I don't know if that means just equalizing the Animation times. I'd be okay with one primary doing more damage over another if animation, recharge, and/or endurance costs were increased to compensate.

Of course, there's also the issue of stacking secondary effects. What keeps you and your team safer and more able to defeat enemies? -7.5% tohit, -20% defense, -100% recovery, a few ticks of damage, nothing, -25% recharge, just being asleep an unable to act until hit, or again -nothing? (That was all the primaries except illusion in Alphabetical order: Dark, Earth, Elec, Fire, Gravity, Ice, Mind, and Plant). If one of these has a more detrimental effect on a bad guy, and helps your team more, then that power should probably have a higher animation time, or recharge time, or endurance cost, or something of the sort to go with it. Since Grav and Plant have ST immobs with no secondary effect, they should probably have the fastest animation times, or have some other cost lowered. I'd argue that Dark and Earth have the effects that are most detrimental to foes, especially when stacked, so maybe they should have the higher animation times, so it's not so easy to stack those effects. And, I know we don't want to balance around IOs, but let's be real, the ability to load up more damage procs or other debuff procs into certain powers makes them much more formidable than the same power in a different set (as an aside, can the Earth control powers not be slotted for -Def or with defense debuff procs? Or is Mids being silly with me right now?)

Muddying the waters, though, is that these debuff numbers are lower on Dominators, but still significant enough when enhanced or stacked.

Perhaps some of these debuffs need an adjustment? If we convert these numbers to a D20 roll, -20% defense is like, a +4 to hit your foe. The -7.5 doesn't math out as well, but it's essentially just between a -1 or -2 for the opponent to hit you. That doesn't seem very equal. How much does the -25% recharge affect enemy combat efficiency? Like, have fights only been won because a bad guy could only get one rotation of attacks off, or has it not really deterred them from attacking?

Or, do we not worry about the secondary effects at all, and just treat it like a small bonus for those who get it, and poo poo to those who don't? Should secondary efffects be added to those powers which don't have them?

Of course, if we're doing that, then we need to look at the sets as a whole. Gravity gets more damage from its Impact mechanic, and Plant is already like, the best straight control set in the game (Illu beats is IMO, but it's such a different set that I think we can disclude it from this discussion), so as complete sets, they already make up for their lack of secondary effect in their immobs anyway, right?

Ugh, I'm getting a headache thinking about all this. Or maybe that's an eggnog hangover, idk.

[oedipus_tex]

1 hour ago, EmperorSteele said:

Or, do we not worry about the secondary effects at all, and just treat it like a small bonus for those who get it, and poo poo to those who don't? Should secondary efffects be added to those powers which don't have them?

 

IMO the secondary effect of these powers is best balanced against the control capability of the set and not the damage. What I mean is the -Endurance in Electric Fences is a feature balanced by the value of Static Field and Synaptic Overload more than it is by how much damage it deals. The developers didn't actually mean for Electric Fences to do better damage than Frostbite, it just happened that way.

 

The exception is Fire Control, which does base damage + extra DoT. Fire Control happened to get fast animations mostly by accident. I think they intended it to do a little more damage than Ice Control though, not 50% more.

[...]

@oedipus_tex I agree that this is a problem, and I agree that standardizing single target hold animation time should be done. Much like it has been done for single target immobs in the blaster secondaries. 

 

For mind, I'd frame the discussion around dominate, not the single target sleep. 

 

Regarding secondary effects, I'd take @oedipus_tex approach and not attempt to balance animation times on a power-for-power basis considering the secondary effects. Secondary effects are best understood in the context of the entire set. Most are basically useless against a held enemy, anyway, -def and fire's +dmg being the exceptions. 

 

While we're at it, I'd probably make Jolt in Electric Control a 1.32 second animation, too. Something about chain mechanics has me wanting them to cast quickly. 

 

Regarding AoE immobs, yes, same thing. Please.

[Razor Cure]

On 12/26/2020 at 5:41 AM, oedipus_tex said:

Ice Control's AoE deals about half as much DPA as Fire (7 vs 14) and less than half as much as Plant (7 vs 17). You'll notice that Plant has one of the longer animations, but because it deals x2 the base damage of any other immob AoE it still comes in first place. (Why does it deal x2 the damage of any other aoe immob? This is a mystery that has never been solved, but most people assume it's a bug from when the OG devs created Plant Control for Dominators by cloning a Controller set and accidentally included the Containment damage, then doubled it again when proliferating Plant Control to Controllers a few issues later).

Maybe due to the secondary effects? Ice immbo does slows (at least..I assume so. And if not, Why not?). ALso plant is just smashing damage, so sorta justified? And fire..well..fire always does more damage (mostly).

 

Another thing I have noticed about some control (and dom) sets is a travel time for the power. Well..it 'seems' like a travel time. Perhaps it could be the effect coming right at the very end of the animation?

I notice this quite a bit with Char, as you can literally see it cross the space and hit the enemy, whereas things like Dominate are basically click and wham, it lands right away.