The Buff Manifesto

[nihilii]

I must not nerf.
Nerfs are the alt-killer. 
Nerfs are the number death that brings powerset consolidation.

I will ask for buffs.

I will permit for balance to pass over me and through me.

And when balance has gone, I will turn my altitis towards the path of buffs.

Where the buffs have come there will be plenty.

So I will ask for even more.

 

The Kinetic Melee topic got me thinking.

(Well, the first thought I had was even though I may have had a point there, I behaved like an ass, even if I didn't quote the poster because I didn't want to make it about them. But still an ass. Don't want to make this a thing, but if you're reading this, I'm sorry for my tone.)

Mostly it got me thinking about power creep. Yomo made a point most of the problems I attributed to KM were wrapped in buffs to other sets; rather than KM mechanics/playability. This opens up the question: can performance, mechanics, playability, ever be absolute?

 

Perhaps it can be argued it should only ever be relative to other enemies and not characters. So, if you can beat content on normal difficulty settings, then you perform.

 

I have a couple of issues with that view. First, the game is so easy you can beat normal difficulty content on absolutely every powerset. So, might as well pack up any mechanic talk and never consider any change either. We can set the bar this low for playability and call it a day, but at least for me there are powersets that are distinctively more fun to play and powersets distinctively less fun to play.

We could switch the difficulty level to any theoretically unreasonable yet reasonable practically level of difficulty, for example soloing +4/x8 missions, which I'm confident every powerset can do (provided you put the work, are willing to optimize, and so on). And yet that relationship between more fun powersets and less fun powersets would still hold for me.

Is it just X defeats stuff faster than Y? I don't know. I'm tempted to say there *are* a couple absolute traits, in a vacuum, that can make sets more or less playable, mechanically enjoyable, regardless of performance.

 

For me it's definitely animation length. I don't think I can ever find a case where a power with a 2s animation doing 100 damage does not feel better than a power with a 3s animation doing 150 damage. Fast animations feel more reactive, especially when the "impact" (the damage on your enemy, or whatever the effect is for a nondamaging power) hits. It's about tickling that "player input to visual feedback" conduit in the brain. Much like 60 FPS feels better than 30 FPS, and now apparently 144 FPS feels better than 60 FPS even though it feels like yesterday big parts of the entire industry argued the human eye could not see above 24 FPS. Latency is key.

 

But, I've had a recent experience that proved, at least in my case, it's not just about mechanics in a vacuum. Plain number tweaks with near identical gameplay otherwise can radically improve my enjoyment of a character. I *also* believe it's not an endless treadmill towards feeding yourself with more and more performance to keep up with the Joneses. Instead, I believe there are sweet spots, coupled with constant but small global increases in performance. Let's try to illustrate.

Enter the Night Widow. I've had a couple for many years - first on Live, again on here. Always an enjoyable character, never my favorite character. Why is that? Night Widows are well-rounded and easy to play, melee characters with an effortless buffer over softcapped defense, good melee damage, team buffs. On the flipside they have (they had*) no frontloaded resistances, low HP, no healing, no endurance management, no aggro ability, low defense debuff resistance. At the higher end they fall off compared to Scrappers and Stalkers; at least in a solo manner, as you can always argue the team buffs make them more valuable to teams.

This last update, I27p7, saw a whole lot of buffs to Night Widows. Taken on their own the list of changes can seem subtle. NWs now have a passive giving a bit of resistances and +maxHP. Placate recharges faster, and Placate in general was buffed to always give you a chance to crit even if you get hit. Crit chance was cranked from 67% to 100%. The native stealth makes you stealthier. Psychic Scream was significantly improved - to be honest I still don't even pick the power, but I can attest it is now *playable*, compared to its godawful original state.

So I grab an old Night Widow I had shelved for a couple years. The idea being to respec into a build keeping the core style I like while getting the most out of these changes. That core style here being, all Claws attack, Build Up rather than Follow Up, Gloom and Dark Obliteration, Elude-based play. Throwing in the new Placate on top, that was the one mechanic change I made.

 

Turns out I had a vampire costume on that character. Which I liked well enough back then, and I think the concept works well with widow powers. Fast claw attacks, psionic powers, good movement speed, stealth, it all can fit with the idea you have of a vampire. Color Elude with a bright tint, and when you run it gives you that supernatural blur of a being moving too fast for the human eye...

 

But I shelved the character. It didn't work well enough, it wasn't compelling enough for me to play her regularly. Anyone who likes to solo hard stuff, experienced with defense sets like SR and the like, can likely guess my pain points. When you take on AVs with pure defense characters, you tend to be awesome most of the time; then they get two or three lucky hits in a row and you faceplant. Or, well, I do.

In truth there's hardly any "pure" defense character anymore (thanks to buffs!). SR gets scaling resistances for example. So do Night Widows! These help a lot already, especially combined with IOs. When your resistances crank up to 60-70% while low HP, it's essentially as if you expanded your full healthbar a couple times.

 

I find the dynamic interesting here in more ways than one. You can intuit the goal is to stack as many resistances as possible. If your scaling resistances give you up to +50%, starting at 0% gives you 50% which is nice, a reduction of half the damage you take. Now if you managed to have 25% resistances, the same point in your healthbar would result in 75% res, which means you only take a quarter of the damage. Twice as good as the previous scenario.

 

NWs get to make great use of stacking resistances as their cap is 85%, slightly lower than Tankers and Brutes at 90% but a good increase from the standard 75% even Scrappers and Stalkers cap at.

On top of that you also want to have enough maxHP to take a hit. Say you have 1400hp. If you take a 1400 hit that brings you to 1hp thanks to the anti oneshot code, it's well and good if you end up at 85% resistances, but a second lucky hit in a row will take you down all the same. On the other hand, if you were at 1800hp to begin with, now that 1400 hit leaves you at 400hp, and a next hit of the same power would hit you for maybe 200-250 damage - letting you live, and hopefully regenerate.

 

So this new +maxHP/res passive with seemingly small-to-medium values is actually a massive buff to Night Widows. It changed the dynamic considerably. I find myself fighting lvl 54 AVs and surviving 3 hits in a row, in bright red health mind you, but also remembering the good old days of always getting "unlucky" - and of course it wasn't lack of luck, it was a statistical guarantee over time defeat would happen. We've moved the performance just enough to switch the binary from death to life. And so the vampire gets out of the coffin.

 

That's another thing. I'm having a grand ol' time roleplaying this character, if only in my head. There's often this idea if you are a roleplayer you must clearly reject any form of performance and carve your identity as someone who does everything suboptimally, because concept is king. Now if that's anyone's thing, more power to them. But I think there's implied subtext anyone who cares about performance is some kind of power-obsessed munchkin who only sees the game as a spreadsheet and cannot possibly identify with their characters on a deeper level. I can tell you, I look down on my taskbar right now and see 3 CoH spreadsheets open + Mids on top, and just before this post I still spent a full hour standing still in a mission instance, lovingly rewriting the bio for that Night Widow of mine.

We can enjoy performance and concept, and even derive more enjoyment out of the very same concept thanks to an increase in performance!

What about the sweet spots of performance I mentioned earlier? Well, I think Night Widows are right there right now for example. I don't need MORE performance. There are still some weaknesses, some tradeoffs to make, and they are acceptable.

 

It is fun for the power curve to trend up over time, regardless. Slowly. I think the Homecoming devs have done a great job with this. Think of it like inflation (which, uh, I guess might be a loaded topic these days, but bear with me). If you increase *all* the numbers slowly, relative result is the same but you get to feel good psychologically about having a higher salary / taking on bigger challenges. Our characters keep getting stronger but we also get Hard Mode TFs, we get Incarnate story arcs, we get new story arcs that tend to feature harder enemies like those midrange Vahziloks, we get the weakest enemy groups beefed up like Council and CoT.

 

My name is nihilii and I'm a buffoholic. I love meaty numbers, I am a creep for power, IT IS NOT A DISEASE IT IS A LIFESTYLE! Give me your failed builds, your dormant alts. Your neglected rerolls yearning to breathe the Favor of the Well. I hope you too get to enjoy the plentiful bounty of developer love.

[Blastit]

Depends on the quantity of work that buffing other things would make for, don't it? It does feel bad for your character to get weaker but there are definitely players who are deeply silly about it and have an irrational fear of [ominous booming] The Nerf [echo]. If one powerset or class or whatever is a lot stronger than other things then it makes sense to bump them down a little. It's just less work. You also have to ask yourself why the things you're buffing are weaker and if you can actually improve them in a way that is relevant for the play environment they're weak in. If, say, incarnate powers and IO set bonuses can be pushed to the point that they devalue the buff support sets then there's maybe not much you can do there. If, say, a particular set just has too much stamina cost or too long animation times to feel good to play then there's probably some easy work to be done there.

 

Ultimately a developer should just use the tools that are necessary to reach the intended goal. What those tools are will depend hugely on what the intended goal is! Homecoming, for example, doesn't have quite the same goals as a commercial MMO has. I don't personally care if this means increasing or decreasing the power of things as long as the play environment is fun and lets all AT playstyles perform nicely in at least most stuff.

[Ukase]

I think playstyle has more of an impact on a player's perception of a sets performance than the actual numbers. 
I'm currently playing an ill/cold controller, level 42 atm. It's an odd duck the controller, particularly leveling it more solo than not. 

I have no idea how anyone ever had fun with this character before set bonuses were a thing, but I digress. 

It's fairly common for players to pursue a "perma-PA" with the illusion primary, and for good reason. Except for the Crystal Titan and Hamidon, they are pretty much unstoppable, as far as I know. So, what can I safely do when they go away? There's the AoE hold, and the spectral terror, and the phantasm has its own illusionary pet. This takes a lot of attention, and a fair amount of clicking during the 10-20 second downtime, as I await the perma PA solution. Much of that solution are purple sets, so I have to wait until 50. In a game where more than half the action is pre-50, I don't reach my peak until 50. Well, why should the controller be any different from any other AT, right? It is what it is. 

My point is, it would be easy to hope for 1) the ambrosia from Eden Trial to work for my pets - but it doesn't. It would be easy to hope for the PA to be a toggle, that simply turns off based on the recharge, and turns back on when the recharge is up; (but can be turned off by the player if desired - there are occasions where we don't want the pets out)

I can say the set is weak in damage (it is) but ultimately, it's not the set - it's my playstyle. I'm not playing a blaster, or a brute with burn and foot stomp. Of course the damage is weak. It's all relative. 

Do I think powers and powersets that are under-performing should be buffed to where they are on par with other powersets, as opposed to nerfing the over-performing ones? 

This is a complex question. I fail to grasp how one or more people can reach this conclusion of, for example: "Rune of Protection is OP. We need to adjust it so it's in line with XYZ". 
I would argue that the people considering if something is OP or not may not be doing an actual examination, just using anecdotal evidence. 
There are players in this game that have super fast reflexes, know binds and macros inside and out, and have a definitive, clear understanding of the game mechanics, the powers of the npcs they are facing, and can build characters with IOs that will make the average player look slow, clumsy and stupid. I would submit the premise that the players that have this kind of clear understanding are more likely to be volunteering their time and effort in brainstorm and may be skewing the results of their conclusions without taking into account the average player. And I could certainly be wrong about that. Won't be the first time. 
I just know as a player, I still have at least half a dozen characters that have been idle since that change to Rune of Protection. I haven't taken the mystic pool since. Now, that's just me, and I'm just one player. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've no idea how many or few folks even sweat changes to various powers. It could be argued that if I build my character around a power, then clearly the power needs some downward regulation. 
Do we say that about Domination? Dull Pain? Hasten? It's not a great argument for the change, in my opinion. 

I like to remind myself this is a game. The game, in order to stay alive, it must continue to be interesting/amusing to those that play it. So, just one player's opinion doesn't mean that much, if anything. 
But, my thoughts are to not change powers. If a set is under-performing from some set of metrics, understand the set is not played in a vacuum. It may be played solo, or a on a team. And some teams will help that powerset to shine. Others, perhaps not so much. But so what? Do we worry that everyone stops playing a controller because of the comparatively weak damage? Not when they see it shine at level 50, literally controlling the flow of battle. 
So, I'm not worried about these under-performing sets. Sooner or later, we play them, and try to make them shine, such as they are. Isn't that where the real fun is? Making something work, even when it doesn't? 

[Sovera]

4 hours ago, nihilii said:

(...) But, I've had a recent experience that proved, at least in my case, it's not just about mechanics in a vacuum. Plain number tweaks with near identical gameplay otherwise can radically improve my enjoyment of a character. (...)

 

This is me and Fire Melee. Specifically for Tankers. Now we can argue the new numbers made it much stronger and ah ah you're gravitating to the FOTM, but, it's actually one big thing:

 

- Two PbAoEs. Only Radiation Melee (Irradiated Ground as pseudo PbAoE), Savage Melee (but the pounce has a big recharge) and Axe (Pendulum is a pseudo PbAoE) can mimic this but have their own problems. But Fiery Melee (for Tankers) throws two big PbAoEs which completely change the pleasure of being neck deep in enemies.

[Random Axis]

18 hours ago, Ukase said:

It would be easy to hope for the PA to be a toggle, that simply turns off based on the recharge,

I have wished for this so many times, or alternately to be able to ctrl-click as many powers to autofire as I want would be a game changing QoL improvement. I could play the character instead of having to keep all the plates spinning.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 3/24/2024 at 8:45 AM, nihilii said:

My name is nihilii and I'm a buffoholic. I love meaty numbers, I am a creep for power, IT IS NOT A DISEASE IT IS A LIFESTYLE! Give me your failed builds, your dormant alts. Your neglected rerolls yearning to breathe the Favor of the Well. I hope you too get to enjoy the plentiful bounty of developer love.

 

I enjoyed reading this entire polemic!  Some of it I agreed with strongly; and some I disagreed with vehemently.  But this is your manifesto, and so I will keep my comments limited.

 

You may be Buff Miser, and although I'm not exactly Nerf Miser I do consider myself Meisterbalance Balancemeister.  I also realize that in a not-for-pay model, there is less incentive for the powers-that-be to emphasize balance and plenty of incentive for them to buff the hell out of whatever they themselves like playing.

 

I very much enjoyed your description of the "new" Night Widow, and I think your write-up was great.  It sounds like you like tweaks and corrections, as opposed to the dolts who daily lament, "YOUR BLASTER DOES MORE DAMAGE THAN MY CONTROLLER!!! I WANT STRONGER PETS AND MORE DPS!"  So that's a pleasant change!

 

On 3/24/2024 at 8:45 AM, nihilii said:

It is fun for the power curve to trend up over time, regardless. Slowly. I think the Homecoming devs have done a great job with this. Think of it like inflation (which, uh, I guess might be a loaded topic these days, but bear with me). If you increase *all* the numbers slowly, relative result is the same but you get to feel good psychologically about having a higher salary / taking on bigger challenges. Our characters keep getting stronger but we also get Hard Mode TFs, we get Incarnate story arcs, we get new story arcs that tend to feature harder enemies like those midrange Vahziloks, we get the weakest enemy groups beefed up like Council and CoT.

 

I don't particularly agree with this sentiment, but the analogy is a good one.  The problem with inflation, whether it be monetary or power creep, is that it does hurt specific groups that do not benefit from earning power from the inflation.  Buff tanks and high end CoT for example, but then scrappers suffer against the new enemy groups, and the old enemy groups suffer against the newly buffed tanks.  And in an environment where everyone feels their opinion (and their playstyle) is the most important one, then powers-that-be seem to have some incentive to buff everyone, if only to shut up the whiners.  And then you get real haves and have nots and you bump up against the math of the system.  That is, in my most important opinion.