issue 27 Focused Feedback: Attack Typing Adjustments

[Omega-202]

24 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

 

This effects everyone, as I said.

Not everyone chases those bonuses.  Plenty of builds have more than enough innate defense, alternative opportunities for generic defense, or chase positional.  Honestly, I've got one characters out of my current main 6 in rotation that will even be impacted on paper, and probably wouldn't notice in practice.  The rest literally won't be impacted at all.  

[KaizenSoze]

41 minutes ago, TalonBlue said:

If someone can tell me how to measure, qualify/quantify those tests, I’m all ears.

American Angel has good advice.

 

You can copy your character to the beta server:
https://forums.homecomingservers.com/beta/

 

I would start with things you normally solo at your normal difficultly on live. Then try the same thing on beta.

[ivanhedgehog]

On 7/12/2022 at 3:20 PM, KaizenSoze said:

I tested this with various ATs. Blasters, tanks, defenders, corrupters, doms.

 

It does not make it significantly harder.

did you test it on toons with so's only?

 

[KaizenSoze]

5 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

did you test it on toons with so's only?

 

Yes, I made an SO only, cannot remember the AT at the moment.

 

It was fine as the difficulty I would normal would have played with only SOs.

[Sovera]

15 hours ago, TalonBlue said:

If someone can tell me how to measure, qualify/quantify those tests, I’m all ears.

 

Grab a character of yours and do a radio mission against a certain type of enemies of your choice. Then copy the same character to the Beta (it's just a few clicks, no need to level or slot it again or anything) and run the same mission against the same type of enemies. Compare results.

 

Those who have done it report a small bump in difficulty, and I, for one, am pleased at the gentle balancing nudge from the current devs coming from other games where a dev's nerf hammer can ruin a certain class or type of game sometimes for years on end. Cross reference with old devs and Regen and how it never recovered.

[kingsmidgens]

I have tested it and I don't like it and I feel like in my posts I've made it clear why:

This is a fundamental part of the game, it's been balanced to take this into account from day one.  If this isn't sacred then what is?

It's a slippery slope, and why?  What does it accomplish?  It seems it's specifically targeting a few powers and will have far-reaching implications, perhaps a "slight" bump in difficulty but again, why?

People will always do what's most efficient, it doesn't matter if it's stacking S/L or probably now changing to Positional.  Something is going to give you the best bang for your buck or what's right given the circumstances of a certain build.  I feel like if this goes through, what's going to be next?

It also feels like it's antagonistic towards the player-base specifically.  Increase non-S/L damage to justify the removal of the S/L tag... attacks that were previously primarily S/L, the most common damage type in the game, that's too common apparently - converted to something else entirely because the opposite and more sensible change in this vein would have been to remove the non-S/L tag to an attack that did primarily S/L damage.

Add new content, make it as hard as you want, leave existing content alone, that will always be my opinion when it comes to nerfs.  This change is likely going to prompt a buff to more armor sets (look at what they're doing to Invuln) and it'll ripple to everything else, too, because Invuln is now almost as good as Willpower which is .. not right.

tl;dr
If it's not broken, don't fix it.

[Parabola]

I think this change makes a lot of sense. It doesn't feel right to me that an attack that does 99% psi but 1% lethal (hypothetical numbers obviously) is blocked entirely by s/l defence. Also the changes to zombie vomit are very welcome from someone who enjoys wading knee deep in sewer water in the early levels.

 

One thing does occur to me, when this change does make it to player attacks psi melee might become the set I had always hoped it would be. Although as psi/tox defence and resistance are being added to tier 9's it won't cut through those in quite the satisfying way I'd like it to.

[America's Angel]

17 minutes ago, Parabola said:

One thing does occur to me, when this change does make it to player attacks psi melee might become the set I had always hoped it would be. Although as psi/tox defence and resistance are being added to tier 9's it won't cut through those in quite the satisfying way I'd like it to.

 

Already does, per the patch notes;

• All Player Attack powers now use two attack types. All attacks will have up to one Positional defense and one Damage Type defense it will check against.

Psy Melee seems to balance well vs Invuln, EA, and Regen right now. (Still need to test more to be sure.)

 

Haven't tested vs Granite yet. That's the main one I'm worried about.

[Sovera]

19 minutes ago, America's Angel said:

 

Already does, per the patch notes;

• All Player Attack powers now use two attack types. All attacks will have up to one Positional defense and one Damage Type defense it will check against.

Psy Melee seems to balance well vs Invuln, EA, and Regen right now. (Still need to test more to be sure.)

 

Haven't tested vs Granite yet. That's the main one I'm worried about.

 

Still not sure what's the point of this change. We slot to have 95% accuracy when possible. What type it goes against makes what difference if we are slotted for 95%?

[Marshal_General]

2 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

Still not sure what's the point of this change. We slot to have 95% accuracy when possible. What type it goes against makes what difference if we are slotted for 95%?

Leveling up before your build is complete?

[InvaderStych]

Brief background:

 

I basically "main" two of my toons these days: A Fire/Martial blaster that runs a Scorp Shield S/L/E soft-capped build and a Psi/SD scrapper which I used to test the player side of the attack type changes.

 

My personal testing was not even remotely comprehensive. If anyone has done low-level testing, particularly in Praetoria where many people solo, or on DFB where there is a lot of Fire and Toxic at very low levels please do post your thoughts.  I only ask as I am not certain I will have any more testing time between now and when the page goes live.

 

First the blaster: (Mob attack type changes impact on players)

 

I would like to encourage anyone who feels that their Scorp Shield build is being directly targeted by this change to actually do some comparative mission runs between Live and Brainstorm.  Having done so with my blaster I can say the following about the difficulty levels (between +1 to +3 at x8 unless it's something like Shadow Shard where the mob count has to come down to survive) to which that toon is accustomed to soloing:

 

1. For the most part: Groups that were a snooze-fest (Council, etc) have been given a slight bump in strength that is easily countered by changing up target priorities.  Fire/Cold wielding opponents in these groups seem to have the strongest bump, which makes sense given the build being run. (can post if others would like to import it to Brainstorm and give it a test)

 

2. Coincidentally, because high level CoT include a great deal of fire and cold wielding Demons that group sees more of a bump than other groups.  This is fine. If some of the more difficult CoT mobs that don't spawn between levels 45 and 50 (Succubi for example) are added to those levels then this group could be very interesting indeed.

 

3. Common groups that were already "more difficult" (Malta, Carnies, etc) are seeing about the same differential as the easier groups listed in comment 1.

 

4. While many attacks are being changed, the overwhelming majority are still S, L, or E, with many that included Smashing now typed to Energy.  SS still covers the three most common attack types.  Ranged defense will go up in value as a way to cover holes and as a result of changes to Aggro also included in this page.  Not a big deal.  The meta changes and we adapt as required. 

 

I'd like to echo @Sovera's "gentle nudge" comments that in the grand scheme of gaming this is an infintesimally small change.  Compare to the old "Rotating Meta" of Planetside 1, where it was basically a constantly rotating "This faction's unique weapon is superior to the other two this week. Next week your faction gets a turn at supremacy" approach that was a total mess.  Wide swings in balance are rarely effective or well received.  Changes to attack types are not a wild swing, they are a minor technical adjustment.

 

In brief: The change can be felt, but not so much that I feel a dire need to alter my build.  Altering tactics seemed to be enough for most situations.

 

On a toon that exclusively solos I might be more inclined to rebuild, but given the mix of solo/team play in which I engage I don't think I need to alter the blaster's main build. 

 

Now, on to the Scrapper: (Player attack type changes impact on mobs)

 

2 hours ago, Parabola said:

One thing does occur to me, when this change does make it to player attacks psi melee might become the set I had always hoped it would be.

 

At first I thought this as well, but in PvE at this time there is negligible impact because ...

 

2 hours ago, Sovera said:

We slot to have 95% accuracy when possible. What type it goes against makes what difference if we are slotted for 95%?

 

... even before we build there is very little impact to the change.  Most mobs in the game have defense that is equal against (All), it is exceedingly rare outside of buffs/T9s that mobs get more or less defense depending on damage type.  It is resistance where they vary.  It is my understanding that the addition of tox/psi defense to player T9 powers is NOT being ported to the NPC versions of the same powers.  For example: Cim EBs who drop Unstoppable are unchanged, meaning that Psi Melee still cuts through as it has in the past.  Testing in Sis Valeria's arc (very early on) seemed to bear this out (unless there was a change that I've missed and not tested).

 

Further. Psi Melee has a positional component, and going to be subject to mobs melee defense even if they lack Psi defense.  But again, most of them have just base defense that is equal to all types/positions.  Overwhelmingly that value is 0 anyway.  Even further: Mass Levitate is all Smashing, and only has Psi damage (as a cancel on miss DoT) when Insight is up. 😉

 

With that in mind, this feels like the first step in making the system more robust with future changes.

 

I cannot speak to PvP nor the impact of the player-side changes in that environment.

 

As to why do it?  This feels like a change that lays the ground-work for fleshing out the "Typed Damage" system to become more granular in the future.  I'm all for it.

[TheZag]

People have been soloing +4x8 for too long and its got them in the mindset that its normal.  1 person can literally carry a max difficulty team most of the time.  Its turned alot of teams into a few people teaming and the rest soloing with a team somewhere behind them.  There are 47 other lower difficulty settings without including bosses and AV off,  im fine with difficulty being tuned so that the upper half of them become difficult or impossible to solo.

 

[Parabola]

25 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:

As to why do it?  This feels like a change that lays the ground-work for fleshing out the "Typed Damage" system to become more granular in the future.  I'm all for it.

Indeed.

 

7 minutes ago, TheZag said:

People have been soloing +4x8 for too long and its got them in the mindset that its normal.  1 person can literally carry a max difficulty team most of the time.  Its turned alot of teams into a few people teaming and the rest soloing with a team somewhere behind them.  There are 47 other lower difficulty settings without including bosses and AV off,  im fine with difficulty being tuned so that the upper half of them become difficult or impossible to solo.

 

Also indeed. This is a drum I have banged before but people tended to get quite upset with the concept that the ability to run maximum team settings solo might not be the healthiest thing, in what is supposed to be an mmo. I'm actually not really a fan of the hardmode options, I would have preferred a more general rebalance, but I accept that there are many who see things otherwise!

[Luminara]

7 hours ago, kingsmidgens said:

This is a fundamental part of the game, it's been balanced to take this into account from day one.

 

Not true.  At launch, Defense functioned very differently from the way it does now.  Typed Defense forced a hit check for each type, essentially "double-dipping" when attacks with multiple damage tags were being checked.  Defense used an overwrite mechanic at that time, so it didn't stack in any other way, only the highest value from all sources was applicable.  And Defense buffs, click or toggle, only buffed Defense to position or type, not both.  Pool powers had zero typed Defense at that time.

 

After toggle mutual exclusivity was removed, Cryptic modified the overwrite mechanic, allowing stacking from different sources, but only to permit both positional and typed Defense to apply, not to allow multiple values to stack the way they do now.  The highest value of any position or type was still the only one used when a hit roll was performed.  Defense calculation was changed to prevent typed Defense from "double-dipping".  Pool powers and some stealth/invisibility powers were modified to include Smashing/Lethal typed Defense in addition to their positional Defense (none of which offered AoE Defense) but only Smashing/Lethal.  Most powers still only offered Defense to positions or types, not both.

 

GDN was implemented concurrent with the release of CoV.

 

Interspersed with these Defense changes were adjustments to critter hit chances, which is a lateral Defense adjustment.  For instance, when GDN went live, it was accompanied by a reduction in base critter hit chance, from 75% to 50%, equating to a 25% increase in base Defense for all characters, all archetypes.

 

When metrics indicated that Defense was under-performing, the overwrite mechanic was removed entirely and Defense was allowed to stack the way it does now.  Numerous powers which only offered Defense to types or positions were adjusted to include both a position and one or two types, and pool powers were revised to provide Defense to all positions and types (except Toxic, which was only recently added).

 

It was only after all of those changes, comprising the period between launch and the release of Issue 6, that Defense became what it is now.

[flakoff]

It's a free game we all thought had gone, roll with the punches. The game will still be fun.

[Omega-202]

1 hour ago, Night said:

11 pages of disagreements and discourse and weeks in and we're still yet to get an actual comprehensive reasoning behind these changes from the devs. I'd like to hear the actual comments and reasons from the devs who pushed for these changes, responses from other ones, what was considered before and how it lead to the current iteration and why.

No "reasoning" will satisfy the people complaining about these changes.  By engaging the populace on "reasons", it shifts the conversation even further from testing the changes and even more towards arguing over something that they feel is needed for the health of the game.

 

But also, anyone with 2 brain cells can fighre out the reasons.  Building almost exclusively for S/L defense had a disproportionate benefit over any other defensive strategy due to the fact that so many attacks are partially tagged as smashing or lethal.  This resulted in "squishy" ATs being overly durable with minimal investment.  It also stifled build creativity because the default APP/PPP recommendation on most builds ended up being a 1 power dip into Scorpion Shield.  

 

Now, if someone on the dev team came in and stated the above as the reasoning, would you accept that statement and move on to testing, or would you just move the goal posts and attack the reasoning?

[Vanden]

On 8/2/2022 at 10:50 PM, kingsmidgens said:

It's a slippery slope, and why?  What does it accomplish?  It seems it's specifically targeting a few powers and will have far-reaching implications, perhaps a "slight" bump in difficulty but again, why?

 

To be clear, this isn't a change intended to nerf the effectiveness of S/L/E defense. The goal is to add more potential flexibility to future game design. Suppose a dev wants to add an attack that targets an exotic defense type, like Negative Energy. They want this attack to be difficult to avoid. But they don't want the attack's damage to be as difficult to resist when it lands, so the attack should do Negative Energy and Smashing damage. Under the current rules, this attack has to check against Negative Energy AND Smashing Defense, so the attempt to target an exotic defense type is nullified. The only way to make it so Negative Energy defense is the only defense type that can avoid this attack is to make the damage of the attack 100% Negative Energy, which means it's more punishing to actually get hit by this attack than the dev actually wants.

 

Now, yes, the powers system is flexible enough that it's technically possible to make an attack that does Negative Energy and Smashing damage, but only checks Negative Energy defense. It could be any arbitrary combination of damage dealt and defense types checked. But then this attack would be breaking the rules. The rules on HC Live are that attacks check against the defense of every damage type they do. If the devs are allowed to just disregard that, suddenly there are no rules, and players will just have to guess (or find the exact power info for every attack) what defense they need to protect against certain attacks. This is no bueno. Players have to be able to understand what the game expects of them.

 

This change does have the side effect of slightly devaluing S/L/E defense in existing content. But given that those defense types have been proven to be massively, disproportionately effective against the majority of content, and even then this change only impacts a fraction of enemies, it's ultimately a very minor side effect.

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by Vanden

[ptee]

I thought that damage was tested against each type separately, then against the position. 

 

What I thought the super simplified damage calculation was:

types = [cold,smashing]

for type in types :

     if roll > type_def :

           if roll > pos_def :

                   type_damage = type_attack_value * ( 1.0 - type_res )

 

Now with the changes, it appears I was mistaken ( I guess I could have looked up the math ), which makes sense why people were chasing S/L so much.

 

If I'm understanding correctly, it's something like:

types = [cold,smashing]

attack_percent = [cold,smashing]

if roll > max[attack_percent] :

     if roll > pos_def :

           for type in types :

                   type_damage = type_attack_value * ( 1.0 - type_res )

 

I'm curious why have multiple types if we're only checking against one of them? Is it so we have a broad range to send to resistance? Why not separate the damage into multiple checks vs. the highest wins? Or am I mistaken how it works again? I could see how an armor could protect against smashing, but let cold get through. If I'm wearing a helmet and someone launches an ice ball at me, the impact might be loud, I'm not hurt, but the cold with cut through ( talking from experience ). Or if I'm wearing a puffy coat, the impact/smashing will hit me ( 0 def ), will be reduced ( medium res ), but the cold won't bother me ( high def, high res ).
 

I've tested the changes and it doesn't appear to have too much of an impact since most of my squishier characters went for ranged def ( the chase for S/L never made sense to me as I was wrong about the damage formula ). Making exotic types have a bigger impact makes sense. I'm just wondering why not break them into separate damage paths rather than conflate them. Too big of a change?

 

edit: typos

Edited August 4, 2022 by ptee

[KaizenSoze]

5 hours ago, ptee said:

I'm curious why have multiple types if we're only checking against one of them? Is it so we have a broad range to send to resistance? Why not separate the damage into multiple checks vs. the highest wins? Or am I mistaken how it works again? I could see how an armor could protect against smashing, but let cold get through. If I'm wearing a helmet and someone launches an ice ball at me, the impact might be loud, I'm not hurt, but the cold with cut through ( talking from experience ). Or if I'm wearing a puffy coat, the impact/smashing will hit me ( 0 def ), will be reduced ( medium res ), but the cold won't bother me ( high def, high res ).

Read Luminara's post a few up. He details some of the history of defense in the game.

[Sovera]

The problem really comes from the evolution of the game making attacks have two damage types.

 

We have specific defenses against fire, cold, energy, negative, etc. This would not have not have grown into a problem if the old devs had stuck to making those attacks purely their element.

 

If the players then had looked at it and said 'S/L attacks are a majority with punches, bullets, swords, kicks and etc, then working S/L defense up means we will, statistically, take less % damage at the end of a mission' that would have been fine. Not 90% of the damage averted but 20% (random numbers, don't quote me). Still statistically significant and allowing to focus on certain S/L factions for their farming or favorite enemies.

 

But as it is electrical attacks ALSO have S/L, radiation attacks ALSO have S/L, some psi attacks ALSO have S/L. The list goes on, and protecting against S/L made S/L defense OP as heck. It's not a case of blocking just punches and swords and kicks but also protecting against fire and ice and electrical and radiation.

 

As it is S/L defense would have statistically have an impact on a player's HP but they would still at the mercy or all the elemental and negative/energy attacks. Instead it became the OP thing allowing squishies to tank side by side with Scrappers and made Sentinels the joke they are now where their damage was alleviated because of their sturdiness, but their sturdiness is nothing special in an end game IOed build.

 

 

Does this have an easy solution? Not easy, no, we can see the loudness of the con party on how their squishies no longer being able to solo at maximum difficulty would make them uninstall. But not stop to think 'is it -normal- for a squishy to solo missions meant for EIGHT players?'. No, this part does not matter because they could do it before and that's all that matters.

 

Heck, in WoW only a select few classes (and players because piloting the build matters nearly 50%) can even solo normal dungeons, not even heroic dungeons, not mythical dungeons, and it is newsworthy and fame worthy to the point their names are known to see a single digit number of players able to solo certain raids.

[ivanhedgehog]

The problem comes to why are is the game we were so excited to see come back being changed into a completely different game? a number of the changes we are seeing here should have been added as a difficulty toggle. Let people continue to play as they always have, but give them new options. We were told that agro was hard coded in, evidently that was not the case after all. how will these changes effect low level non io builds in the game? I will be trying that this evening after I get back

[Wavicle]

2 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

The problem comes to why are is the game we were so excited to see come back being changed into a completely different game?

It's not.

 

2 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

how will these changes effect low level non io builds in the game?

 

Barely at all. Non-Physical Defense (for those sets that have it) may be slightly more valuable than before. Very slightly.

[WindDemon21]

On 8/3/2022 at 3:23 AM, Parabola said:

I think this change makes a lot of sense. It doesn't feel right to me that an attack that does 99% psi but 1% lethal (hypothetical numbers obviously) is blocked entirely by s/l defence. Also the changes to zombie vomit are very welcome from someone who enjoys wading knee deep in sewer water in the early levels.

 

One thing does occur to me, when this change does make it to player attacks psi melee might become the set I had always hoped it would be. Although as psi/tox defence and resistance are being added to tier 9's it won't cut through those in quite the satisfying way I'd like it to.

Except thats still just defense. If it does manage to get through, you still have to worry about the resistances you have, slow resistance or mez protection, and your hp/healing to recover from it. Just because smash and lethal is the most common combined type, doesnt mean that it's the only factor.

 

Again, leave the current game that many people have enjoyed for literal decades now un-nerfed, and make new content that's harder expecting these things. It's not a hard concept.

[WindDemon21]

There is also an innate problem with how IOs were/are structured to go for positional defense. Most of those values are lower that the typed ones, and lots of them require the full 6 slotting of a set to get there.

 

With that the only viable way to cap them outside of shield/sr/nin is capping ranged/aoe. You cant do it also with melee, and meleers still have to worry about ranged attacks as well, there is no "kiting" ranged attacks like you can with melee.

 

There is also no positional equivalent defense shield in the epics for squishies as well to work off of.

[Sovera]

45 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

The problem comes to why are is the game we were so excited to see come back being changed into a completely different game? a number of the changes we are seeing here should have been added as a difficulty toggle. Let people continue to play as they always have, but give them new options. We were told that agro was hard coded in, evidently that was not the case after all. how will these changes effect low level non io builds in the game? I will be trying that this evening after I get back

 

I rest my case.