What’s with the lack of love for Fiery Melee?

[Vanden]

3 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

By what metric though?

 

If you assume Activation Time is 0, it should be extremely simple. Just divide the damage scale of every attack by its recharge time and sum that figure up with every attack in the set. The only tricky part would be figuring out how to factor AoE size into that.

 

If nothing else it would give us a figure to shoot for in a revamp.

[Bill Z Bubba]

19 minutes ago, Vanden said:

If you assume Activation Time is 0, it should be extremely simple. Just divide the damage scale of every attack by its recharge time and sum that figure up with every attack in the set. The only tricky part would be figuring out how to factor AoE size into that.

 

If nothing else it would give us a figure to shoot for in a revamp.

 

Going back through this thread, if I were to do it, every single attack in the game would have to be fixed because the devs so often ignored their own rules at whim. THEN we'd have to find the middle ground and rebalance. Edit: And probably have to create new global rules.

 

 

Edited January 7, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[PeregrineFalcon]

24 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

By what metric though? Just tally up the best attacks that could be chained using 1acc/1end-red/1rec-red/3dam in each and then compare time per chain to get DPS?

I hope that this is the metric that the devs use to balance the power sets. Without the addition of Epic pool attacks of course.

[aethereal]

People's determination to demand balance around "stuff that is not remotely how the game is played" kind of baffles me.

[SomeGuy]

12 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

 

Plainly it's not terrible, it's not great, it just slid into mediocre obscurity. But the game is easy enough that it works and things die so it hasn't fallen into really-bad-why-god-looking-at-you-KM.

 

 

 

This. It's not over or undertuned. The set's "gimmick" is that it's FIRE. I'm sure that appeals to some?

 

Also, KM is actually good. Hard to figure out and use, but it's good.

[Sovera]

6 minutes ago, SomeGuy said:

 

This. It's not over or undertuned. The set's "gimmick" is that it's FIRE. I'm sure that appeals to some?

 

Also, KM is actually good. Hard to figure out and use, but it's good.

 

And we can't underline enough how pylon tests are not a good metric when so many enemies resist S/L so much.

[SomeGuy]

2 minutes ago, Sovera said:

 

And we can't underline enough how pylon tests are not a good metric when so many enemies resist S/L so much.

 

 

I'll always say KM is a good set, measured metrically and with it's secondary effects. Also, Conc Strike on a huge model who intentionally looks goofy is GREAT if you are imagining the character making the noises like a sugared out toddler.

[Bill Z Bubba]

2 hours ago, aethereal said:

People's determination to demand balance around "stuff that is not remotely how the game is played" kind of baffles me.

 

You talking about balancing around SOs? I agree that this isn't how the game is played but it's long been argued that this IS how the enemies are balanced for their damage output and mitigation.

 

This is why I'd prefer powers be balanced around central and ironclad equations. There's nothing wrong with the original design equations other than how they how left out cast times. (Which should always 100% be equal to activation times.) And how often they ignored their own rules.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Haijinx]

9 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

And that's the real problem. It should have the best damage output, ST and AoE, because it doesn't do anything else. But as it stands, it's barely middle of the road.

 

At least ST or AOE I guess.   It should definitely be the best at some damage catagory.  Or you know if that is too much to ask, at least second best.  Or you know, 3rd Best.  3rd Best would be an improvement over now.   

 

[Haijinx]

There is a good Fire Set though. 

 

Just make a Blaster.   It's first best. 

[aethereal]

1 hour ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

You talking about balancing around SOs? I agree that this isn't how the game is played but it's long been argued that this IS how the enemies are balanced for their damage output and mitigation.

 

This is why I'd prefer powers be balanced around central and ironclad equations. There's nothing wrong with the original design equations other than how they how left out cast times. (Which should always 100% be equal to activation times.) And how often they ignored their own rules.

 

Not just SO's, though that's part of it, yes.  Someone here wanted them to balance around SOs, with a specific slotting scheme, and no epics.

 

And, like, here's my question:  what is the good that people imagine will come from it?  Are these people actually advocating for unbalanced sets?  Like, do they appreciate the fact that in the game-as-it-is-actually-played, some sets are way better than others?  Is that a virtue in their mind?  Because that would be the result of balancing around arbitrary constraints that nobody actually plays under.

 

Balancing around equations is, you know, nice and all, except that you can't.  What equation tells you the value of, say, a self-heal versus a resistance debuff for your opponent versus a bonus to your own smashing and melee defense?  There isn't one, and if you did create some kind of equation around that, it would be garbage-in, garbage-out.  Sets also need to be balanced holistically -- a set with two very good attacks and three bad attacks is better than a set with five decent attacks.=

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, aethereal said:

Balancing around equations is, you know, nice and all, except that you can't.  What equation tells you the value of, say, a self-heal versus a resistance debuff for your opponent versus a bonus to your own smashing and melee defense?  There isn't one, and if you did create some kind of equation around that, it would be garbage-in, garbage-out.  Sets also need to be balanced holistically -- a set with two very good attacks and three bad attacks is better than a set with five decent attacks.=

 

Ugh. No. Let's not balance something that utilizes math as its foundation with feelings and impressions. That's how we end up with unbalanced garbage in the first place.

[Bill Z Bubba]

I have nothing against art. I love art. Art is 100% emotion-based and it elicits emotional reactions. I love the art in the animation of flares. And that art is and should be completely separate from how much damage it does for how much end it costs and what its base recharge should be.

 

Yes, we absolutely can determine how much a heal should be worth vs how much a damres debuff should be worth vs how much a defensive power should cost. And we should determine that and we should implement changes based on those determinations.

[leeowensoas]

12 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

Haha okay thank you! My very first character in City of Villains when I was about 14 was Fire just for the glory that is that sweet Fire scimitar!

 

I definitely get some of these criticisms as I play the character more. Idk, I just hate the piddly 8’ AoEs and find critical strikes proc leading into fireball and then FSC tends to wipe out spawns pretty dang well,, but beyond +1/2, the damage doesn’t take em down fast enough for him to not feel a bit fragile at times

[aethereal]

10 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Yes, we absolutely can determine how much a heal should be worth vs how much a damres debuff should be worth vs how much a defensive power should cost. And we should determine that and we should implement changes based on those determinations.

 

It is possible to make some kind of decision about what they are "worth" and then make things balance an equation there (so, like, we could say that a to-hit debuff is worth 5 damage per -1%, while healing is worth 0.5 damage per 1 hp healed, then convert everything to a damage equivalent, then make every power have the same damage-equivalent-per-combination-of-activation-time-and-recharge-time).  But, first: all that does is take the exact same judgments that people make now on an ad-hoc basis and codify them into the false rigor of a formula.  There is no way to determine how much a to-hit debuff is "really" worth compared to whatever else except human judgment.

 

And second, the formula still won't capture the complexity of the game, and two powers that, per the formula, are balanced, wouldn't actually be balanced.  Like, ignore multifaceted secondary effects for the moment.  Just think about the denominator of that formula.  Is it activation time or recharge time?  Well, activation time is probably more important than recharge time, but recharge time isn't meaningless!  If you can make an attack chain out of two powers because they have a really low recharge time, that's a big advantage to a powerset, giving you LOTS of room to skips powers/use them as mules/get situational powers.

 

And, again, any formula that someone might make couldn't just be a single-power formula, it'd have to be a powerset formula, because it's obviously true that a big part of the balance of CoH is about "holes" in a powerset.  But this just makes any implementation of a formula yet more multifactor and complex, and you're going to have to codify yet more human judgment into what this balance "means."  How valuable is it to have a self-heal somewhere in your attack powerset?  Your armor set?

 

Trying to create an inflexible equation to balance CoH would be a gigantic undertaking, probably months of effort, that would result, after all that work, in bad balance.

[Bill Z Bubba]

4 hours ago, aethereal said:

Trying to create an inflexible equation to balance CoH would be a gigantic undertaking, probably months of effort, that would result, after all that work, in bad balance.

 

The first part of the statement is true. It's too much work for this game. Just looking over claws last night made me wanna punch stuff.

 

The second part/assumption is gibberish. Balanced powers lead to balanced powersets. Flavor comes from secondary effects. We'd still end up with a situation vastly closer to balanced than we have now. Or do you assert that there's some measure showing that a fire/regen scrapper is somehow remotely balanced with an nrg/shield scrapper?

 

Edit: I'm done harping on this. The amount of work necessary would be calculated in years and it's just not worth the time and effort.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Cancrusher]

On 1/7/2022 at 1:30 PM, The_Warpact said:

Nope I love elemental weaponry, and wish the same. I love my ice melee swords.

 

It's subjective.  I'm sure there's a wide range of opinion.  I think the fire swords look really lame and the ice swords look even worse.  Botis the demon has a cool looking ice scimitar, though.  I wish the ice swords looked more like that.

[BrandX]

My issue with Fire Melee, is the swords.

 

I don't know why people mention Procs though.  It can still slot 3 damage procs in every melee attack, not including the purple, as only one could have it.   4 in Breath.  5 in FSC, which includes the purple as only one PBAOE attack.

[ninja surprise]

On 1/7/2022 at 12:25 PM, PeregrineFalcon said:

Am I the only one who likes the fire swords and wishes that all of my Fiery Melee attacks could have them?

 

I wish it were possible to make it all swords or all short-range fire blasts. But I think it's dumb how in Firery and Ice it's half swords and half burning fists.  They made alternates on the swords so you could have them all be the same size, but still can't have the same weapon for every attack.

 

On 1/7/2022 at 12:58 PM, lemming said:

One of my favorite characters is a Bio/fire tank.   Is it a high performer? Not really, but not bad.  A little squishier than a couple of my other tanks though iirc, I still have some sets to slot into it on the defense side, but normally if I pay attention, she's unkillable.

I do have Overwhelming Force & Avalanche slotted in attacks, so the occasional knockdown helps and with Bio, the regen is normally more than sufficient to mitigate incoming damage.

And yes, more fire swords would be nice.

 

Similar, one of my favorites is a Rad/Fiery Tank with all the colors matching across the armors and attacks.  It's durable enough to survive while the weak-ish Fiery attacks whittle down foes.

 

On 1/7/2022 at 9:13 AM, MoonSheep said:

fire melee is quite a good damage dealer from my experience over the years, cremate and incinerate are pretty good and dishing out FSC with the scrapper crit active does some decent damage

 

my main is a /fire dom and i’ve always liked having DoT, i find when i play non-DoT sets things always straggle around almost dead but not quite

 

The crap fact is that Fire is the/a top damage dealer in every AT except the melee classes.  On Scrappers especially Fiery Melee is a bottom-tier damage dealer. I really want to love it because Fire Breath is one of my favorite powers to use (especially for ninja-themed toons) but the lack of burst damage and slow, low-damage DoTs always end in frustration.

[hejtmane]

Take this from a guy who got Fire Melee/Shield in the top 10 of Pylons pre-incarntes on live then leveled a Fire/Rad scrapper all the way to 50 full top of the line IO build on homecoming (yes those1 billion influence style of pimpout) retired him soon after.

 

Some of the issues  I see currently

 

Fire Breath is an utter garbage of an attack one of the worse in the game from a scrapper side. This from a person who was able to line up the triangle in the old days with Shadow Maul and I could not make Firebreath worth using and I tried here on homecoming. The animation time is for ever the cone is so narrow even when you jump back you are lucky to hit two mobs and the damage is hot garbage.

 

To much of the damage is in dot form in the old days that was fine in today's coh yea it hurts. They need to reduce the amount of dots and put in more burst damage they could make them like Midnight grasp 3-5 ticks at most and move more damage up front

 

Next all you get from fire is damage is nothing  not even top damage

 

 Katana you get -def + defense and you can put a proc in to do -resistance ,

Martial Arts,Axe, Mace etc get things like Knockdown , Knock-up; disorient  etc etc so all these other sets have mitigation better or similar damage.

 

Whats the point of playing fire when other sets can out perform Fire plus give mitigation or be c lose enough in performance by giving you tools or mitigation. The question becomes  why play fire the only answer I have is it is still better than Kinetic melee

 

I would love to pull my Fire/Rad out of retirement but there is no point right now my Katana/Rad is so far above my Fire/Rad including damage.

 

Things that need to happen reduce make Fire Breath in line with Frost  on distance cone, range, activation times ;  up the damage and reduce the # of dots

 

Then boost the dps; reduced the amount of dots and clean up animations

[SaintD]

Fire Melee is weird, because I'm wondering what different game you're all playing every single time there's a thread like this.

 

For all the numbers and analysis people like to throw around, in actual gameplay FM always absolutely f**ks like a tiger on cocaine.

 

Fire Breath is garbage though. The activation time is absurd. It's a pause button to go make tea or a sandwich.

Edited January 12, 2022 by SaintD

[Sovera]

1 hour ago, SaintD said:

Fire Melee is weird, because I'm wondering what different game you're all playing every single time there's a thread like this.

 

For all the numbers and analysis people like to throw around, in actual gameplay FM always absolutely f**ks like a tiger on cocaine.

 

Fire Breath is garbage though. The activation time is absurd. It's a pause button to go make tea or a sandwich.

 

There's a Trapdoor test involving Fire Melee Scrappers. Their times seemed... average. Not bad times, just not great times either.

 

That's about as close to actual gameplay as it gets without hitting a pylon with its universal resists that ignore slash/smash being so blunted by end game mobs.

[Troo]

3 hours ago, SaintD said:

in actual gameplay FM always absolutely f**ks like a tiger on cocaine.

 

is this good or bad?

[Bill Z Bubba]

2 hours ago, Sovera said:

That's about as close to actual gameplay as it gets without hitting a pylon with its universal resists that ignore slash/smash being so blunted by end game mobs.

 

Bots certainly do but what else?

 

I'm staring at CoT right now, Behemoth Overlord is at 0% DR to SLENPT +20 to F and -20 to C. Death Mage is at 0% to all.

 

Carnie Strongmen, +20 to SP, -20 to L, 0 to the rest. Carnie Juggler, -20 to L, +20 to P, 0 to the rest.

 

Rikti Infantry, 0 to all. Rikti Gunman +30 to SLE, 0 to the rest.

 

And then I ran out of power analyzer.

 

Disregard, lookin through GB's work now.

My poor claws...

Edited January 12, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[SaintD]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

 

is this good or bad?

A lot of pain in a really short time.