A Relook at DPS balancing

[DrRocket]

17 hours ago, speczero said:

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.

You have a point there, and I think, correct me if I am wrong melee does more damage than ranged, correct? So truly there is a bit of apples to oranges 

[DrRocket]

A good comment was about the support using other abilities such debuffs, etc. For my count number, I did not do that, which does makes an unfair comparison. I need to re-run them using their side powers, which can and do make a difference

[Ultimo]

I've spent a good deal of time considering this question from the other direction, the survivability of characters and NPC damage (as some here well know).

 

Something I've come to understand, both by way of testing and discussion here, is that there's just SO MUCH variety, and that's just in the plain vanilla builds, using SOs, which is what I usually tested with (since that's supposedly the baseline), that it's nearly impossible to make everything balanced for everyone.  The fact is, there's a LOT more adding into both damage and survivabilty now, between IO sets, and Incarnates, and god knows what else, that it's almost impossible to decide on a baseline for performance.  My thinking was usually to adjust the enemies, to make them more a more even match for everyone, since they don't have nearly the variety of abilities and combinations of abilities... but that doesn't work because changing the enemies to suit one class might unbalance them for another... or even for another build/power combination within the same class.

For instance, if you change the way Controllers do damage, you might find one or another set or combination of sets, outperforming or underperforming.

 

One other thing I usually preface my efforts to discuss this stuff with is the recognition that the game has existed this way for nearly 20 years... it's very unlikely there would be sweeping changes at this point.

 

But then... they DID revamp Masterminds.  Maybe something CAN happen.

[tidge]

13 hours ago, Ultimo said:

IOne other thing I usually preface my efforts to discuss this stuff with is the recognition that the game has existed this way for nearly 20 years... it's very unlikely there would be sweeping changes at this point.

 

But then... they DID revamp Masterminds.  Maybe something CAN happen.

 

This is where I am. I think the game is in a really good place with respect to how balanced rewards can be reaped for different ATs, with one exception*(1). Even for the 1% of content that cannot be "solo-ed" by every AT, my personal experience is that some fraction of that can be "handled" by changing tactics, even if it is painful for a player to alter their mental model of "how my character should play (in all content)." Performance from individual primary/secondary powers choices should vary of course!

 

(*1) The one exception is, I think Kheldians... but I think the issue with them is very subtle. Kheldians can survive pretty much all content (typically by leveraging Dwarf form), but aside from a game exploit, Kheldians can't quite sustain damage at higher levels... and the floor for what I consider to be a "higher level" is around level 30. An even level Kheldian simply playing their arcs can run into con-red Council bosses that may not be able to survive or defeat without leveraging extreme tricks.