A Relook at DPS balancing

[DrRocket]

These are only observations, from data I collected. The data presented is not universally accurate, but is good enough to establish a trend.

 

Why is the data not truly accurate, is because within each class there are lots of varieties and build configurations, which will result with sightly different results. Yet my short sampling, I did, is indicative of a trend.

 

I also limited the data collection to hero side, but suspect that a similar trend could be expected. If any of you have the time to collect it and posted, I would be grateful.

 

How I collected the data: I went to Cimerora and hunted Generals (bosses) and counted how many hits it took to defeat him, I did not count missed shots.

 

The data:

                                         Hits  Mez Protect  Res Cap   Def Increase Opportunities   Res Increase Opportunities

Controller                          42        No                75%                  4                                         2

Tanker                                23       Yes                90%                   5                                         3                                         

Defender with Vigilance:   21        No                75%                   4                                         3

Defender no Vigilance:     24        No                 75%                  4                                         3

Blaster                              15        No                 75%                   3                                          3

Scrapper                           10        Yes                75%                   9                                          2

 

Do note that Scrappers have two routes to go, that is resistance or defensive based. I used my MA/Shield Scrapper for my test, which is in effect defensive based.

 

Long ago, in a time far away, during beta and live, Jack Emmet hat a development discussion over DPS vs protection, with the inclination if you are nearly invulnerable to all (tank) your DPS should be very little and contrasting with this if you were made out of glass (Blaster) your DPS would be very high to compensate for the weakness.

 

Of course, as the game evolved and players complained, some louder than others, the basics of DPS to protection balance, was lost.

 

The chart above, documents how much the deviation to this principle has evolved to.

 

Notice when it gets to protection be defense or resistance, it is generally how many opportunities you have to boost your base defense or resistance.

 

Any thoughts about perhaps giving some arch types a DPS boost?

 

As always, please make this a learning opportunity, if for example you use the line "they are support, why would they need DPS?" that is fine, but go into detail of why your assertion is balance honest, would prefer to avoid the "it is how it always has been done" because it is a pre-emptive statement with no room for discussion, because the contention that because it has always been done that way may not be so right after all, specially after examination.

 

Perhaps some may be adventurous and actually recommend in "how many hits" should an arch type defeat a boss?

 

Thank you

[Glacier Peak]

What is the suggestion?

[Ghost]

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, DrRocket said:

Any thoughts about perhaps giving some arch types a DPS boost?

 

Many, all of which can be summarized as "Unnecessary."  I say that as someone who built a Kin/Elec defender with only the default T1 ranged attack, eschewed the use of that attack in favor of Flurry, Air Superiority and Thunder Strike, slotted no damage enhancements in those melee attacks, and still soloed AVs and GMs.  I say it as someone who plays a Grav/TA/Earth controller that only uses one control, Wormhole, and beats enemies to death with Cross Punch, Fissure and Seismic Smash.  I say it as someone who has a 50+3 petless mastermind that wasn't farmed up, but played all the way.

 

The damage is there for every archetype.  If you want it handed to you, play a scrapper or blaster.  That's what those archetypes are there for.  If you want it on other archetypes, you have to build for it, and that's an integral part of the game.  This is an MMORPG, not a console game with no options.

 

1 hour ago, DrRocket said:

Perhaps some may be adventurous and actually recommend in "how many hits" should an arch type defeat a boss?

 

It doesn't work that way.  Even within an archetype, there's too much variation between primaries and secondaries to create a baseline of that nature.  Some combinations won't meet that bar because they lack something, like -Res, -Def or -Regen, others will exceed it because they have extra.  The only way to bring that kind of parity would be to replace all of the primaries, secondaries, pools, *PPs and temp powers with one primary, one secondary, no pools, no *PPs and no temp powers.  To homogenize the game to such a degree that the only differentiation between characters would be the colors they selected.

 

[Uun]

What kind of controller(s) and defender(s) did you test? Both primary and secondary matter significantly. Do they have -res, -def or -regen? Do they have damage buffs? Praefectus Castorum have defense against S/L/F/C/E/N attacks but none against Psi or Toxic attacks. They also have mezz protection, which impacts a controller's ability to establish containment. 

[golstat2003]

As others have noted DPS, is not something you can talk about in a vacuum. Also a lot of folks in game, and in the forums and in discord actually think the damage in this game is too high. Especially with Nukes (both archtype and judgement).

 

So I would bet money that the devs would actually look to DECREASE overall dps if they were pushed to look at it.

 

Personally I think dps in this game is just fine. No decrease needed at all on nukes or anything else. And sure as hell an increase is NOT needed.

[arcane]

Other than the Changeling exploit badly needing to be nuked from orbit, we’re in a good spot DPS-wise in this game.

[tidge]

16 minutes ago, arcane said:

Other than the Changeling exploit badly needing to be nuked from orbit, we’re in a good spot DPS-wise in this game.

 

Yes (setting aside the Changeling issue, because that's kinda complicated *1).

 

One thing that I don't think gets recognized enough: 99% of the rewards (and 99%+ of the ability to progress) in the game are explicitly tied to damaging enemies to defeat them (solo or in groups). This is natural, this is good. However: It is only fair for solo players because through straightforward power-slotting choices (ehem, %damage procs) can characters that otherwise would do minimal damage to enemies can now do damage that is roughly on par with poorly-slotted attacks from other ATs.

 

(*1) Kheldians that don't 'Changeling' are in my experience the slowest to solo content, compared to other ATs... and it hasn't been like I'm skimping on my Kheldian builds.

[arcane]

7 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

Yes (setting aside the Changeling issue, because that's kinda complicated *1).

 

One thing that I don't think gets recognized enough: 99% of the rewards (and 99%+ of the ability to progress) in the game are explicitly tied to damaging enemies to defeat them (solo or in groups). This is natural, this is good. However: It is only fair for solo players because through straightforward power-slotting choices (ehem, %damage procs) can characters that otherwise would do minimal damage to enemies can now do damage that is roughly on par with poorly-slotted attacks from other ATs.

 

(*1) Kheldians that don't 'Changeling' are in my experience the slowest to solo content, compared to other ATs... and it hasn't been like I'm skimping on my Kheldian builds.

The subpar state of non-Changeling Kheldians does not forgive leaving a major exploit in place. Whoever is driving the decision to leave the Changeling cheat codes in the game is one incompetent developer.

 

Personally, I won’t play the AT again until the egregious error is remedied.

Edited September 22 by arcane

[Lunar Ronin]

7 minutes ago, arcane said:

Personally, I won’t play the AT again until the egregious error is remedied.

 

Yeah.  I personally know at least three people that have been wanting to make and play Warshades for over two years, but won't until the Changeling exploit is remedied because they don't want to use an exploit but feel that they will be forced to do so on teams.  I pointed them to play Kheldians on the Rebirth server instead, although only one has done so.

Edited September 22 by Lunar Ronin

[tidge]

1 minute ago, arcane said:

The subpar state of non-Changeling Kheldians does not forgive leaving a major exploit in place. Whoever is driving the decision to leave the Changeling cheat codes in the game is one incompetent developer.

 

My point was more along the lines of how %proc damage is a pretty good equalizer across all ATs (and drives a sweet variety in build choices), and that some players see the corner-case of the Changeling exploit similarly. I personally don't use the Changeling trick because it 100% seems like cheat code, whereas we've had a decade of %proc and fun for everyone except possibly that one edgelord on some "speed leaderboard".

[FupDup]

My concern is less about the damage and more about the tradeoff or lack thereof involved with getting it. Building for max damage is basically the default for most veterans and there's not really many sacrifices being made in the process. They get to have their cake and eat it too. 

 

Somebody who builds for survival, on the other hand, will be making many very large sacrifices in the process, which is how it should be. How exactly to get to this point is up for debate, whether that means changing procs, set bonuses, power base values, IDK. All I know is that it's not really good game design for one path to get the best of all worlds with minimal drawbacks. 

[kelika2]

When you were doing those runs/tests were you using Invention Enhancements or Single Origin enhancements?

 

because this game is tested and built around SOs

[arcane]

23 minutes ago, FupDup said:

Building for max damage is basically the default for most veterans and there's not really many sacrifices being made in the process. They get to have their cake and eat it too. 

I don’t know… my characters that have zero resistance and maybe 5% defense certainly feel like they’ve made tradeoffs for extreme offense when they’re dead the second Barrier decays.

[Luminara]

6 hours ago, FupDup said:

My concern is less about the damage and more about the tradeoff or lack thereof involved with getting it. Building for max damage is basically the default for most veterans and there's not really many sacrifices being made in the process. They get to have their cake and eat it too.

 

The "cake" most people are eating is a shit sandwich.  The builds are extraordinarily convoluted, loaded with failure points (key not pressed at exactly the right time, power misses an enemy, one debuff cripples it, Incarnates not available, et cetera), bloated with procs typically slotted without regard to actual performance (or even functionality), and always designed to do one specific thing or are utterly reliant on having a pocket defender from one of their extra accounts to keep it upright.

 

Don't lose any sleep over them.  They're only impressive to noobs.

[Lunar Ronin]

4 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

The "cake" most people are eating is a shit sandwich.  The builds are extraordinarily convoluted, loaded with failure points (key not pressed at exactly the right time, power misses an enemy, one debuff cripples it, Incarnates not available, et cetera), bloated with procs typically slotted without regard to actual performance (or even functionality), and always designed to do one specific thing or are utterly reliant on having a pocket defender from one of their extra accounts to keep it upright.

 

Don't lose any sleep over them.  They're only impressive to noobs.

 

Your sentiment is correct, but your details are not.  The builds are actually quite easy.  They're basically your easy and boring pre-Enhancement Diversification build, where you slotted one accuracy SO enhancement and five damage SO enhancements in every attack and called it a day.  Except now you're slotting two Hami-O enhancements and four procs in every attack and calling it a day.  Essentially the same thing, 20 years later.

 

They're also not reliant on having a pocket Defender, (well, not most anyhoo).  They're reliant on either stacks of large or super inspirations in their in-game e-mail, or reliant on Barrier Core Destiny and a couple of Cold Domination Corruptors.

[tidge]

7 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

 The builds are actually quite easy.  They're basically your easy and boring pre-Enhancement Diversification build, where you slotted one accuracy SO enhancement and five damage SO enhancements in every attack and called it a day.  Except now you're slotting two Hami-O enhancements and four procs in every attack and calling it a day.  Essentially the same thing, 20 years later.

 

I dunno about this, at least in terms of practical performance when it comes to making choices about leveraging %damage. Setting aside likely sacrifices from eschewing set bonuses (when frankenslotting) there is the %proc rate and final ToHit enemy chances (for the actual attack, and then the %proc) that get considered when I frankenslot with %damage. At least for me, there are plenty of powers that can accept a lot of different %damage pieces, but in which I rarely slot any %proc outside of a set bonus because the net value (on a map) is quite low, for example single-target holds.

 

I'll also write that I put thought into %damage usage with respect to how I intend to play the specific character. I solo a LOT, so adding %damage to a low-DPS AT improves solo performance. I have a recent level 50 Blaster that would have been almost entirely Psi Damage (and sorry, I'm not taking power pool attacks on a Blaster unless there is something really special about the animation, or I absolutely need a pre-req) so I tried to augment the Psi attacks with enough non-Psi %damage for those fights against robots, etc. that would otherwise be incredibly slow.

 

From the outside, it may look like some of *my* builds might be lazily dropping in %damage with some frankenslots for attribute boosting (I usually try to enhance Accuracy and Endurance, at least on non-DPS ATs, occasionally Accuracy and Range for cones), but I assure you that there is some thought behind my %proc usage.

 

Now, having written all the above, I have seen some builds that looked to me like they did make choices about %damage that did not look well-considered. I'll occasionally point out what I consider to be sub-optimal choices, but it is impossible (at least for me) to know if the player is number-crunching/theory-crafting, or observing performance in game, or just strolling through a specific kind of content that makes it hard for them to evaluate potentially different slotting choices.  FWIW, I definitely think that it is worthwhile to use unslotters to try different combinations of enhancements in-game to test performance in situ. This is a lot less painful than a complete respec, and can inform potential future changes to the build.

[Luminara]

11 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Your sentiment is correct, but your details are not.  The builds are actually quite easy.  They're basically your easy and boring pre-Enhancement Diversification build, where you slotted one accuracy SO enhancement and five damage SO enhancements in every attack and called it a day.  Except now you're slotting two Hami-O enhancements and four procs in every attack and calling it a day.  Essentially the same thing, 20 years later.

 

These builds require significant amounts of global +Recharge, which they aren't getting from IO set bonuses and can't get from inspirations.  They're scrounging and scraping to find global +Recharge to compensate for the lack of slotted RchgRdx, and scrounging and scraping more to find +Recovery or +End, because those proc bombs have little or no EndRdx slotted.  And to make it all work, they're rotating between multiple clicks which are reliant on one another and barely within the tolerance required to keep the whole thing from imploding.

 

Instead of being built to be powerful, they're built to work around the flaws fundamental to that paradigm.  They're ten times as much work to maintain, and the results don't even justify the sacrifices it took to achieve them.  Sure, a power like Thunder Strike with 2 level 53 Nucleolus, the Armageddon proc and three rare procs can deal up to ~600 total damage, but slotting it with 5/6 Armageddon and one extra proc makes it available ~40% more frequently, constitutes only a 16% reduction in potential damage, and cuts the endurance cost by nearly a third so it's actually sustainable in a chain.

 

This build paradigm not only imposes unnecessary complexity to maintain it, it's not even better enough from a damage output over time perspective to justify the sacrifices or effort.  Those are the details I look at.

[tidge]

IIRC, Thunder Strike is a particularly poor choice to try for %damage, except on Tankers because of the extended range of splash/"excluding the main target" for Tankers.

[Luminara]

19 minutes ago, tidge said:

IIRC, Thunder Strike is a particularly poor choice to try for %damage, except on Tankers because of the extended range of splash/"excluding the main target" for Tankers.

 

It was an example, hence "a power like".  The proc rate isn't relevant because the example assumed every proc fired, as indicated by the damage totals for both slotting approaches.  The type of power, a power with a long recharge time that maximizes proc chances, and the slotting approaches compared, typical proc bomb slotting versus using an IO set and only slotting one extra proc, are relevant.

 

And I did use the tanker version.

 

Here's another example.

 

[PeregrineFalcon]

On 9/22/2024 at 4:52 AM, DrRocket said:

Any thoughts about perhaps giving some arch types a DPS boost?

Unnecessary.

 

Why? Because there are too many ways to increase DPS already in game. Don't like the fact that it takes so long to kill anything with a Controller? Play Fire/Kin Controller, or a Dominator. Don't like the fact that your Tank takes forever to kill bosses? Play a Shield/EM Tank, or an EM/Shield Scrapper. Or, if you must, add procs to all of your attacks. Use Incarnate powers to increase your damage.

 

Figuring out how to build your character for the result you want is part of the game.

[tidge]

5 hours ago, tidge said:

IIRC, Thunder Strike is a particularly poor choice to try for %damage, except on Tankers because of the extended range of splash/"excluding the main target" for Tankers.

 

4 hours ago, Luminara said:

It was an example, hence "a power like".  The proc rate isn't relevant because the example assumed every proc fired, as indicated by the damage totals for both slotting approaches.  The type of power, a power with a long recharge time that maximizes proc chances, and the slotting approaches compared, typical proc bomb slotting versus using an IO set and only slotting one extra proc, are relevant.

 

And I did use the tanker version.

 

In this Thunder Strike example, are you considering the inherently lower damage done to targets which aren't the main target of the attack?

 

EDIT: I want to be clear: I see folks post builds that misunderstand the importance of accuracy slotting in %damage attacks. I also don't think most players understand how RNG itself (as a flat pseudo-random generator) is going to make it extremely unlikely that a 4th proc would hit (even with a 90% ceiling and a 95% ToHit ceiling).

Edited September 24 by tidge

[speczero]

One thing I notice right off is that you are comparing range and melee classes together. Classes that have to fight in melee range benefit a lot more than classes that can hover above the enemy and not worry about melee attacks. Even not counting what I just mentioned, there are controllers, defender even mastermind builds that can get 45 or higher defense to everything pretty easy. This is also not counting defense things like holds and other things that stop all damage when applied. I have some problems with some of the individual AT's, but I don't think we need either a full defense overhaul or general damage increase to all AT's.

[Razor Cure]

On 9/22/2024 at 10:59 PM, Glacier Peak said:

What is the suggestion?

https://gyazo.com/8986113bedf6c3d8fddf3dec9b5cf16f

Suggestions AND Feedback.

[DrRocket]

On 9/22/2024 at 1:52 PM, kelika2 said:

When you were doing those runs/tests were you using Invention Enhancements or Single Origin enhancements?

 

because this game is tested and built around SOs

Nope, all were optimized IO sets and combos