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death of 1000 cuts vs ten ton hammer

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Radiac
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death of 1000 cuts vs ten ton hammer

The thought had occurred to me, thinking about another post, that some experts claimed in CoX that the best DPS powers were the short-recharge time, quick hits, not the big flashy tier 9 Nukes and such. They argument was that if your attack chain in combat against a hard target like a Giant Monster, Archvillain, or something was to include a Nuke, it generally meant you were doing LESS average damage over time then if you didn't include the Nuke.

I don't even know if that was really true in CoX, but it got me thinking about damage resistance as a thing and the way different powers work.

There are a couple of ways to handle damage resistance that come to mind, which have different effects on attacks.

1. One method would be for the resistance effect to negate some set percentage of incoming damage from each attack. In that scheme, it doesn't matter how much damage any one power deals over time if spammed repeatedly, because all damage is resisted on a percentage basis. This means that the powers themselves having different DPS rates when spammed are the only real question. If I can bust 5 jabs in the time it takes me to do 1 nuke, and the jabs combine for more actual damage to the one target I care about, then the jabs are just better, period. I THINK this is how CoX did it and if it is, then that explains why the short, light damage powers were actually the best.

2. Now, if resistance instead were to just negate a specific amount of damage from each incoming attack, not a percentage, then your light attacks would be very weak and your stronger, longer recharge attacks would be comparatively better. If resistance means "subtract 1 point per attack from all incoming damage" then the Nuke would do a lot better then the repeated application of quick jabs.

3. Whatever the damage resistance is or however it works, there could be certain specific attacks that have a "penetration" ability that ignores some or all of the target's resistance. There can also be resistance-lowering debuffs that come in the form of attacks or even environmental effects.

4. You can have both types of resistance in the same game. You could even make one more prevalent among low-level targets and the other more prevalent among higher-level or higher rank targets. Maybe you can bop minions to death with lots of jabs efficiently, but you need the harder-hitting, longer recharge attacks to affect the bosses, especially was you achieve higher levels.

What this COULD cause to happen, is players feeling like they need both the jabs and the nukes, even if they're not going to be used in the attack chain in all cases ad nauseam. You might end up attacking the bosses and AVs differently than the minions, LTs, and pets, etc. Which is to say, you'd want a bunch of attacks for different situations and difffernet types of targets, not just "this is my attack chain that I always use, I'm not taking any attacks that don't fit into it."

Of course, AoE versus Single-target factors in there too. As does Momentum. It's all a big complex weave.

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I can't think of anything

I can't think of anything other than a world-eater that can stand unaffected by the jabs of even an average person, let alone a super-powered one. So I would expect that even with a constant damage reduction (#2 above) there would still be pushback, interruption and the overall nuisance associated with a thousand jabs. How to make this nuisance a part of gameplay is the hard part.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Quote:
Quote:

The thought had occurred to me, thinking about another post, that some experts claimed in CoX that the best DPS powers were the short-recharge time, quick hits, not the big flashy tier 9 Nukes and such. They argument was that if your attack chain in combat against a hard target like a Giant Monster, Archvillain, or something was to include a Nuke, it generally meant you were doing LESS average damage over time then if you didn't include the Nuke.

I took a quick look in Mid's and it seems that they looked at the DPS value of the activation time and for some power sets it is actually higher for the level 1 abilities than it is for the level 32 one.

As for your suggestions. Damage resistance should always be a percentage value. The fixed value you talk about would be damage negation, and yes both can be used at the same time though personally I don't think that would really be needed for CoT. Of course one should be able to lower a targets resistance/negation, at least through debuffs like how Sonic attacks worked CoH.

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City of Heroes used a %

City of Heroes used a % reduction to incoming damage system for its resistances. Where it fell down on the job was that those same resistances "resisted debuffing" at the same time, so a -10% resistance debuff delivered to someone who was 90% resistant to that attack had their resistances dropped to only 89% instead of down to 80%. This made resistances extremely "durable" against debuffing, thanks to a quirk in how the math got calculated.

The terms that I've always used for the different effects you're talking about (going all the way back to Diablo II) are:

Resistance
This negates a specified % of incoming damage.

Reduction
This subtracts a specified amount of incoming damage.

In Diablo II, the original formula involved applying the Resistance FIRST and then the Reduction AFTER. This then made possible the "Brickadin" build, which combined high Resistances and high Reduction to completely negate a substantial amount of incoming damage ... to the point where a Brickadin could act as a "mobile wall" soaking up the area hazard damage of a Multishot Lightning Enchanted Boss (MSLEB) which would ordinarily "flood" anyone else with lethal amounts of damage in short order, but which the Brickadin could stand in/bathe in and barely get scratched. Needless to say, anyone playing a Brickadin effectively became an Uber Pimp with a harem of Bowazons and Sorceresses who followed them around EVERYWHERE, because the Brickadin build was the ultimate "brick" build for frontline fighting who could soak damage like nobody's business and keep everyone behind them safe.

Then Blizzard noticed and (STUPIDLY!) changed the damage formula so as to make Reduction happen FIRST and then Resistances AFTER ... but at the same time declined to increase the amount of Damage Reduction being offered by the items that could be equipped. So you went from a situation in which you could get 90% Resistance and -17 Damage Reduction, which could turn hits of 170 damage incoming into 0 damage taken ... to having 90% Resistance and -17 Damage Reduction and you'd take 15.3 damage from each hit instead of 0 (like before) or 17 damage from each hit if you had no Reduction at all. This effectively "murdered" the Brickadin builds, since they were no longer "proofed" against taking damage from MSLEBs and the build fell out of favor (because it didn't work anymore) and it effectively rendered Damage Reduction "worthless" because Resistances applied AFTER rather than BEFORE the subtraction of Reduction.

Which brings up an interesting notion for City of Titans with respect to City of Heroes.

In City of Heroes, Tankers could get up to 90% Resistances (hard cap) and Scrappers could get up to 85% Resistances (hard cap) and everyone else could get up to 75% Resistances (hard cap). But the math behind how to get there was kind of stupid. It was all just +% stuff straight up, with no diminishing returns until hitting the hard cap.

In City of Titans, it would be smarter to go with an inherent Diminishing Returns formula, where things like Defense and Resistances will tend to "top out" in a sort of variable way depending on dedication of investment(s) by the Player, rather than because there is a specific hard cap (or soft cap) to reach and then stay stuck at. Use of a combined Resistance First/Reduction After system could then quite naturally and organically make possible "Tanker" like builds which simply are "allowed" to generate higher Resistances and Reductions than other Archetypes, thereby augmenting their capacity to "soak" incoming damage and attacks better than other options. You could then use the exact same Powers for doing this under the hood, and then apply a simple multiplier to the "effectiveness" of the Augments and Refinements of these Powers. This then makes it possible to generate re-usable code from the very beginning and to differentiate how effective Powers are in Primary/Secondary/Tertiary Powersets in a logical (even to a computer!) fashion which is both predictable and easily understood and modified as needed.

Note that such a structure would then make different FLAVORS of damage soaking schemes possible, depending on the build being used. Some could go heavy Resistance/light Reduction ... while others go light Resistance/heavy Reduction ... and the entire spectrum of combinations in between ... including heavy Resistance/heavy Reduction for the Main Tanks and light Resistance/light Reduction for the "Squishies" as a balancing point.

Note also that such a structure could just as easily be applied to Mez Effects as it could be to Damage(!!), as far as principles and mathematical formulae are concerned.

Throw in Defense as outright Attack MISS! and you've basically got the foundational shape of how things ought to work. Heck, I can even imagine applying the same mathematical principles to the whole Accuracy/Defense system as well(!) ... such that there could be "two flavors" of Defense that effectively function the same as Resistance and Reduction, and using the same Resistance FIRST/Reduction AFTER structure. It could even be used to create a game where Hitting ALL THE TIME like we got accustomed to in City of Heroes isn't the default baseline assumption.


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It seems to me that the main

It seems to me that the main advantage of "Resist first, Reduce after" is that it can effectively turn a finite amount of incoming damage from a single attack into ZERO damage taken from that attack, if the attack is weak enough and the resistance/reduction numbers are high enough. I'm not sure total invulnerability like that is a good idea for a toon in a game though. If your Tanker is taking hits, their HP should probably be getting reduced over time, albeit a lot slower than a squishy toon's would. Tankers should probably require some healing, maybe fewer and farther between, but some nonetheless. That way you could have world bosses that require multiple tankers to effectively tank, if that's even possible.

Of course, realistically, some things are resistant to damage in the absolute sense. No amount of punches and kicks from a normal human would damage a tank. Even shooting a 9mm pistol at a tank would do nothing, really. In those cases, the tank should take zero damage from the pistol, so maybe it should have some kind of reduction or resitance that causes that to be possible. I don't think having that for player-made builds is necessarily required though.

Edit: To clarify the reasoning for the above, consider a Tanker who has 100 Hit Points being hit with an attack that does 10 hp of damage. Our Tanker has 80% damage resistance and -2 Damage Reduction. This means that the Tanker in question only ever takes 20% of incoming damage and all attacks that hit him lose 2 points, regardless of how much they would normally deal.

If we apply the reduction first, we get 10-2 = 8, then 8*(0.2) = 1.6 damage actually taken.

If we apply resistance first, we get 10*(0.2) = 2, 2-2 = 0 damage taken.

Having to take 1.6 damage out of the 10 that would be considered "full damage" is 16% and still very little, in my opinion, plus it can be further reduced by getting more resistance or more reduction, but it will never go to zero in that scheme unless the reduction is -10. If your Damage Management strategy requires you to be totally invulnerable, even to constant, rapid, repeated attacks of large damage value per attack, I think you're asking too much, or if the devs wrote it such that total invulnerability like that is even possible, they're giving you too much. Despite the fantastic superpowers we can all imagine for our toons, I don't think allowing toons to stand neck-deep in hot lava without getting any damage at all is really a good thing to have. If you did make a toon that was that invulnerable, for balance purposes, that toon would have to be very weak on the attack, making fights take longer, etc when soloing. For the sake of letting everyone be DPS-ish enough when solo, you probably want to back off the "living wall" build, or whatever code is allowing it to exist as a real possibility for player characters.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

It seems to me that the main advantage of "Resist first, Reduce after" is that it can effectively turn a finite amount of incoming damage from a single attack into ZERO damage taken from that attack, if the attack is weak enough and the resistance/reduction numbers are high enough. I'm not sure total invulnerability like that is a good idea for a toon in a game though. If your Tanker is taking hits, their HP should probably be getting reduced over time, albeit a lot slower than a squishy toon's would. Tankers should probably require some healing, maybe fewer and farther between, but some nonetheless. That way you could have world bosses that require multiple tankers to effectively tank, if that's even possible.

I agree - even if it's a paltry bit of damage, a "tank" should still be taking SOME hurt. They should not be completely invulnerable. It would make for a very boring game, personally, as well as reduce the desire or need for other characters on the team save the ones that can put out high DPS.

Of course, you also have to factor in the characters hit point total and regeneration rate during combat. Sure, that grey-conning punk just shot me with a Saturday Night Special, and it inflicted a few points of HP damage, but my natural HP regen will offset it - maybe even negate it - and that could simulate a certain degree of invulnerability as well. A red-conning platoon of spec ops with bursts of AP or super-science rounds on the other hand....

Quote:

Of course, realistically, some things are resistant to damage in the absolute sense. No amount of punches and kicks from a normal human would damage a tank. Even shooting a 9mm pistol at a tank would do nothing, really. In those cases, the tank should take zero damage from the pistol, so maybe it should have some kind of reduction or resitance that causes that to be possible. I don't think having that for player-made builds is necessarily required though.

Realistically, yes, and immunity or imperviousness to certain types of damage is present in the genre (both in the comics, and in RPG tabletop games). I'm just not sure this would work so well in a video game format for a variety of reasons.

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The idea of minor damage over

The idea of minor damage over time is another concern. If I have "-3 damage reduction" should that necessarily eliminate all of the minor DoT I would take from things like Burning attacks, the radiation in the reactor core room in the Terra Volta TF, or any other such things? You could probably make those sorts of things "penetrating" types damage in the sense that they ignore damage reduction, but not resistance, amybe that's the way to go there, I don't know.

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Also, to maybe echo something

Also, to maybe echo something Red pointed out, you probably need to make things like "Damage Resistance Debuff Resistance" totally separate from "Damage Resistance" itself. That is, having 80% damage resists shouldnlt necessarily make you 80% resistant to getting your resistance debuffed by default. I can see a need for resistance debuff resistance, I just think it ought to be treated separately.

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I don't mind the idea of

I don't mind the idea of invulnerability. I think it really empowers a tank player and adds to the enjoyment to think that he can be the bastion upon which enemies allide and die. So, the idea of some damage always making it through no matter what is a bad idea to me. On the other hand, there should always be a chance for something happening that tank should be wary of. I can think of three things that should make reduction+resist tanks sweat:

1. Enemy mix. Any time you are going up agains a mob of opponents who can't damage you, one of them will get smart and grab an elephant gun. In a city full of superpowered heroes and villians, there will always be one or two guys in every gang who has the responsibility to take out the tank. These guys would be able to do extremely large hits to bypass damage reduction and still be felt through resistances, but not very often. The role of the DPS in the group will be to find these guys and take them down... or do they go after the healers first? decisions, decisions...

2. Critical Hits bypass reduction. A critical hit finds the chink in the armor, the place where Achilles' mother held his heels when she dipped him in the river. So faced with a mob of twenty thugs with baseball bats, the tank can stand there and take hits all day, but every once in a while, one of them will hit a vulnerable spot, like the funny bone, that really hurts. This keeps tanks on their toes and their support group active. Note, I did not say that critical hits bypass resistance. Damage resistance would probably still apply, because in my opinion that is the character's absolute resistance to a type of damage, regardless of the armor they have. Like a fire-based player being resistant to fire. (I know that due to aesthetic decoupling there will be no such thing as fire or cold or any other kind of specific resistance any more, but one can dream)

3. Debuffers. Similar to tank-busters above, debuffers should also be available to debuff all sorts of superpowers. But in this case, it would be a learned ability on the part of the opposing organization. It would be nifty if an instance chose which powers to debuff based on the first one or two fights.
For instance:
a. f the tank can't get hurt, maybe the debuffer reduces the Tank's reduction or resistance. Maybe they bring in mind melters instead to completely bypass it.
b. If in the first battle, the Ranger of the party destroyed groups with an AoE nuke so that the debuffer plants nuke suppressors in the room for subsequent groups? In order to get the full effect of the nuke again, you would have to take out the suppressors.
c. Maybe the tank is healed so well during the first battles that subsequent battles see a prevelance of snipers gunning for the healer.

This mechanic could account for the 'stupid mobs don't run' issue by alluding to the mobs getting smarter without players having to actually deal with runners, and all the headaches that would entail.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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To clarify ... I'm actually

To clarify ... I'm actually in favor of "You Must Do This Much Damage To Tickle Me" kinds of threshold mechanics. That literally is the definition of Invulnerability, which I seem to remember being one of the bog standard Powersets we're all expecting to show up.

"I'm Invulnerable, But Everything Still Hurts Me A Little Bit" doesn't actually match up with the dictionary definition of Invulnerable. You know ... THIS ...

Quote:

1. incapable of being wounded, hurt, or damaged.
2. proof against or immune to attack.

Which basically devolves down to this point ...

Quote:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Now ... I will freely grant that a Player Character that is Invulnerable to EVERYTHING IN THE GAME would make for rather boring gameplay (except for, y'know, Munchkins) ...

Quote:

The most annoying roleplayers you'll ever have to deal with, who characteristicly max out their stats, mostly without repercussions, play to mindlessly kill anything in their paths and boss the rest of your players around, and get as many dots or levels as possible. Most don't really develop their characters' personalities.

... so having a Powerset that literally CAN'T BE DAMAGED, under ANY circumstances, would be a mistake. But, setting things up such that Protection Primary Powers enable a Reduce Incoming Damage To Zero mechanic to be possible depending on the circumstances would seem to be a smart play from a game design standpoint. That way, you can have "meatshield" Brickadin style Tankers whose "job" is to be the one to "soak" incoming damage and minimize its effects. Now, just as obviously, you'd want to set things up such that doing that kind of thing is going to COST the Player in order to achieve it, but theoretically it ought to be possible.

Depending on how tangled and convoluted to you wanted to be, you could even set things up such that the Protection Primary Powersets use a Resist First, Reduce After function, while everything else uses a Reduce First, Resist After function ... and the Tertiary Powersets merely add to Resistance or Reduction (but not both at the same time) with individual Powers. Thus, the Reduce to Zero possibility is something that only exists (with sufficient investment!) in the Protection Primary Powersets, but not in the Protection Secondary Powersets, simply by virtue of how the math formula gets (re)arranged in each case. Note that I'm talking theoretical structuring here where all the specifics are nebulous in a vacuum, so the basic "shape" of things. Getting all of that to balance right would be a matter of lots of iterations and "tuning" to get things to settle properly into where they need to be, but the basic idea is that discrete damage output needs to rise to a certain threshold in order to have any effect aside from negligible.

As mentioned previously, you don't use a pistol to blow up a tank ... you use something appropriately heavier than that, like an anti-materiel rifle or an anti-tank missile, instead of a slingshot and a river worn smooth rock or a wooden baseball bat.

To extend the notion even further into some specifics, think of it this way ...

What if City of Titan's had "Tankers" that couldn't be damaged by (basic) Brawl attacks?
No matter how much Damage Enhancement you put into Brawl, you aren't going to be able to do enough Damage per Brawl attack to actually do any meaningful damage to the "Tanker" ... because, Brawl is just too weak of an attack. But other attacks like Boxing and Kick and Snipe and so on and so forth? Yeah, those kinds of attacks could "get damage past the threshold" such that the Tanker will take (some) damage and be effective, and the heavier the damage "spike" then the more damage that will get past the Resistances and Reduction. Heck, depending on how you set things up, it would even be possible to "tune" the math in such a way that ONLY a "Tanker" would be able to "soak" the amount of incoming damage in a survivable way, since for pretty much everyone else, it would be One Hit Knock Out (OHKO) type incoming fire (has the right of way). I'm thinking Final Boss/Raid Boss type situations here on this point, stuff like needing to aggro magnet Lord Recluse or Hamidon or Tyrant ... that kind of thing.


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I think we all agree here

I think we all agree here that total invulnerability to all possible attacks is bad game design, at least for players to have at will. Sometimes an NPC has to be invulnerable, like the Police Drones in CoX, and that's different. You could even have a power like Moment of Glory that makes you darn-near invulnerable for a short period of time, with a long recharge time.

That said, depending on the actual amount of Damage Reduction, you can have "Reduce First, then Resist" and still come out with zero damage taken, namely when the Reduction amount equals or exceeds the base damage dealt. I think we all know that, and we've already assumed that nobody in their right mind is ever going to give us Damage Reduction of that kind of magnitude. As such, the only truly relevant question is not the order of application, but the results you get and under what circumstances you get them. If you want to allow total invulnerability in some cases, then make it happen in those cases and not in others. What cases are they? Can you accomplish that by affecting changes to the order of operations in the math? Can you simply put in some powers that ignore or debuff Resistance/Reduction and do it that way? Given the rate of regeneration of hit points, does it even matter if something tickles enough to do 1point of damage instead of zero, when your total HP is like 1000 and you regen at more than 1hp per clock tick?

A Tanker needs to be able to absorb an alpha strike and keep fighting, I think we all agree on that. I don't personally think it matters whether that Tanker ever has the ability to take exactly zero damage from any one specific incoming attack (which is to say "ignorably small, but not exactly zero" is as good as zero as it needs to be, to me) and I assume that in cases where that does happen, for all intents and purposes, those are pretty weak attacks already.

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I'll know if the system is

I'll know if the system is working well when i can enhance my tank to take Almost* 0 damage when fighting Con level minions, for 2 to 3 minutes, just standing there and Taunting.

in CoH, The way i tested a few of my Scrappers/Brutes/Tanks is to aggro Adamastor

and sit there for a number of minutes. If my toon lived without attacking it, maybe jab or just taunt, then I had a decent build. ;)

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The other thing about this,

The other thing about this, which I hesitate to even mention, because I think I'm be preaching to the converted, is that for every character concept that describes the character as "invulnerable" there is a character concept that describes the character as "able to damage invulnerable things" so you can't really ever "win" that fight, in the concepts of the designs. You can drill down to the level of different damage types, or different delivery systems (AoE vs direct targeted attacks, etc) but ultimately your "Captain Invulnerable Resistance" toon is probably still going to take damage from your "Professor Penetration Damage" toon anyway. For the sake of combat, I'm not sure it matters if the tanky guy ends up taking 1% of incoming damage from the minions or not. If he does, it probably places a cap on the number of minions he can effectively tank, so that's good, if he's able to reduce their DPS on him to zero, that allows him to effectively tank infinite minions, which is something that will never actually happen, but I'm still not sure it's a good idea to allow it. Maybe the larger more full maps should force teams to have more than one tanker to herd and burn minions with, or maybe they'll put in code to make them harder to herd, which should probably be in there anyway, I don't know.

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I don't have a problem with

I don't have a problem with weak repeat attacks doing some damage after a while, in fact I much prefer it. You could consider it the effect of developing haematoma and inflammations due to repeat physical trauma. I think this is absolutely compatible with the concept of tanking, in fact it reinforces it in a relatable manner. For the same kinds of wounds we ordinary folk develop after just a single well-aimed hit, they take dozens or hundreds of hits. It's freaking overpowered without being too much of a Mary Sue. This way I can take the concept much more seriously.

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I don't think a character

I don't think a character should be invulnerable to all attacks below some threshold all the time. (unless that threshold is relatively low, like standard attacks from a -3 underling) But I would be all for powers that temporarily boost damage resistance/reduction to extremely high levels. If every once in awhile a tank can go toe to toe with the biggest of of big bads that is epic. But it's not nearly as epic if they can do it all the time. You must know lows to know how high you are.

I'd also say that while a tank might take damage from any standard minion attack, compared against the deep reservoirs of HP and/or torrent of HP regeneration these attacks should be as nothing, not nothing, but as nothing. A single minion would never bring a great tank down but a sea of them would present a worthy challenge.

I'm not sure COH had straight damage reduction. I think they only had resistance. I think that was one of the great complaints about the difference between a defense tank and a DR tank is that a defense tank could avoid the damage altogether and only suffer 1 in 100 attacks while a DR tank would still take 1pt of damage for every attack no matter how obscenely high their DR. Which if the attacks were always 100pts in both cases over 100 attacks both would end up on par. However, that was never the case. In those same circumstances with even 1pt of damage reduction the DR tank would be comparatively immortal vs the def tank. And maybe that wasn't exactly so at the end of the game but I remember that specific example coming up on the forums. IIRC in relation to the RWZ challenge and how it favored def over DR.

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Good point, Grimfox. I think

Good point, Grimfox. I think that really high Defense (i.e. "NoGetHitsu") is not really what Tankers ought to have as a class. If you think of Defense as "ability to make the opponent miss" then that ought to be the purview of the Scrappers and other "less tanky, more dodgy" classes. The Tanker type class ought to be somehow attracting and absorbing attacks, not stealthily avoiding them and using agility to dodge them. The Defense-based toon will get caught occasionally by a lucky hit, and quite possibly lose massive hp due to damage they're not able to resist so well, whereas the Tanker ought to be getting hit constantly and using their toughness to take it all and remain standing.

I'm okay with the idea of having both Damage Resistance and Damage Reduction for tanky classes. They might need both of those in various different amounts at different times in different ways, so it's not off the table, in any amount or in any order you might try to implement it in. But the tanky toons ought not be primarily driven by high defense as their main claim to fame, I think.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Good point, Grimfox. I think that really high Defense (i.e. "NoGetHitsu") is not really what Tankers ought to have as a class. If you think of Defense as "ability to make the opponent miss" then that ought to be the purview of the Scrappers and other "less tanky, more dodgy" classes. The Tanker type class ought to be somehow attracting and absorbing attacks, not stealthily avoiding them and using agility to dodge them. The Defense-based toon will get caught occasionally by a lucky hit, and quite possibly lose massive hp due to damage they're not able to resist so well, whereas the Tanker ought to be getting hit constantly and using their toughness to take it all and remain standing.
I'm okay with the idea of having both Damage Resistance and Damage Reduction for tanky classes. They might need both of those in various different amounts at different times in different ways, so it's not off the table, in any amount or in any order you might try to implement it in. But the tanky toons ought not be primarily driven by high defense as their main claim to fame, I think.

Some good points... if you want to rely more on team mechanics, with others De/Buffing as support.

Only issue might be, if you don't Team so often. And run mostly SOLO, or with a spouse, that doesn't play that often.
In that case, you do need your Defense to be fairly high if you plan on running SOLO TF's and other types of content that's meant to be more difficult that gives drops you kinda need to advance your toon(s). :p

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Good point, Grimfox. I think that really high Defense (i.e. "NoGetHitsu") is not really what Tankers ought to have as a class. If you think of Defense as "ability to make the opponent miss" then that ought to be the purview of the Scrappers and other "less tanky, more dodgy" classes. The Tanker type class ought to be somehow attracting and absorbing attacks, not stealthily avoiding them and using agility to dodge them. The Defense-based toon will get caught occasionally by a lucky hit, and quite possibly lose massive hp due to damage they're not able to resist so well, whereas the Tanker ought to be getting hit constantly and using their toughness to take it all and remain standing.
I'm okay with the idea of having both Damage Resistance and Damage Reduction for tanky classes. They might need both of those in various different amounts at different times in different ways, so it's not off the table, in any amount or in any order you might try to implement it in. But the tanky toons ought not be primarily driven by high defense as their main claim to fame, I think.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there, Radiac. I do not agree that a tank's job is to get hit. A tanker's job is to get the attention of, and keep the attention of, all the threats that exist to the rest of the party. If they can do that without getting hit, all the better. No one should want to take damage, not even a resist tank. They'd have to be crazy, or masochistic, or both. But suitablility to that purpose is another issue. Here is where I lay out a scenario that tells you nothing you didn't already know but illustrates the point anyway:

Lets compare a defense tank versus a resist tank who both get hit for 100 points per minute fighting a control group of enemies. When you parse the data you see the resist tank got hit 50 times for 2 hp each while the defense tank got hit 2 times for 50hp each. If each tank started the battle with 100hp, the natural regen of the resist tank over that minute would have kept him alive, but the defense tank might be dead, depending on the time between the two hits.

So the conclusion is that the spike damage associated with the defense tank is far more problematic than the constant drain of the resist tank.

But so long as the defense tank can survive the spikes and heal up before the next one lands, they can both do their job equally well.

I really enjoyed playing a warrior tank in TERA before they gave warriors a block ability. (I still don't use the block, by the way, because I feel like I'm cheating when I do) In TERA warriors are evasion tanks, so they make life a little less secure for their teammates. Healers have to be on their toes and all the warrior's movement causes enemies to change direction every once in a while as well.

One way to make defense tanks work better in a game that isn't Action-Combat like TERA is to allow defense tanks to build a resource that lets them roll-with-the-punch when they do eventually get hit. Imagine a kung-fu fighter who is dodging so well that when he is finally hit with what would be considered a killing blow, he just takes it in a roll and pops up, wipes the blood off his lip and gets back to juking as if he had planned it. Now imagine this resource is called something like "momentum." ...


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I think that really high Defense (i.e. "NoGetHitsu") is not really what Tankers ought to have as a class.

There's a difference between NoGetHitsu!! (Super Reflexes) and NoGetHurtsu!! (Invulnerability).

Both are what I consider "Protection Schemes" where the name of the game is to minimize the amount of incoming Damage you have to deal with. They go about doing this in different ways (whiff vs tickle) but the ultimate objective is the same.


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I've inspired some thinking,

I've inspired some thinking, YAY!

Correction though. I don't propose that melee damage and melee defense (scrapper and tank) classes get separate defense styles. You could easily make a story for a tank that is able to deflect attacks using a glowing shield array as you could for a tank that has a stone skin. And you could do the same for a scrapper you could be a brawler that just takes it on the chin or a martial artists that dodges and weaves.

I'd also like to say that "NoGetHitsu" and "NoGetHurtsu" are perfectly acceptable powers to have for either class so long as they are not permanently active. They should either be such a drain on energy that using them for prolonged periods (over a minute) would result in complete exhaustion of energy (even with energy/recovery boosting powers), and that fighting or using other powers during that time would decrease it's longevity. It'd be a trade off. Or they ought to be purely timer based powers with longer recharges.

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Let me clarify some stuff: I

Let me clarify some stuff: I expect EVERY class to have some amount of defense and some amount of damage resistance/reduction in varying amounts across classes, with different builds being optimal for different toons. That said, I tend to think of things that increase defense numbers as being stuff like Invisibility, stealth, smoke bombs, camoflage, heightened reflexes, spider sense, etc, in other words, stuff that makes you either harder to detect, or harder to actually lay a hand on in combat. When those types of things come to mind, they do not elicit imagery of a nigh-invulnerable toon saying "Bring it on!" and then proceeding to take a beating that would kill most mere mortals, only to be the last person standing when the dust settles.

So I would expect that tanky classes do get some defense, as I expect everyone will get some. I just would personally try to design them such that no tanker type class would have to rely on that as their main/only Damage Management plan. I think the Spider-Man type toons that are dodgy and agile are better served with more defense and less resistance, whereas the Hulks and Things of the world are better represented by higher resistance and reduction as their main thing. This is not to say that I expect or would design Spider Man to have zero resistance or The Thing to have zero defense, just that I would try to balance it more one way for one type of class and the other way for the other, as a general rule, and without making any glaring exceptions or 180-degree opposite builds necessary.

Clearly any tank is going to want to have their Resistance, Reduction AND Defense numbers as high as possible in most cases, regardless of what their defense cap is or what powers give them added defense. I would just make them more "all about the resistance and reduction" in terms of how they play and how you would want to optimally build them while making the dodgier scrappers and such have to resort using their higher defense cap to their advantage to make up for the lower resistance cap they've got. Or something like that. You could also make the tankers have to devote a lot more of their build resources to defense if they want to get that up while making the resistance easier to maximize using fewer build resources to do it, thus making the resistance/reduction route more efficient, for them. Then give the scrappers the easier route to defense and the harder route to resistance.

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You seem to be talking about

You seem to be talking about different character concepts rather than different character classes. In the concepts case I agree. Spider man is more prone to dodge a hit than he is to take it on the chin but he could do either to a certain degree. But is he a melee defense class or a melee damage class character? Given his mouth you could argue he's a tank, constantly taunting his enemies while drawing fire and avoiding it. In that example he is a defense tank. He can still take a hit but not in the same way that the Hulk could take a hit. That's why I say that you could have a tank class that is defense biased and also one that is Resistance biased. And you can just as easily do the same for scrappers. Lets not limit certain character concepts to certain classes.

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I think we'll have to agree

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this point, Grimfox. I personally would design it such that the hallmark of any "tanky class" (whatever we call it) is that it uses more Resistance/Reduction than Defense, whereas the hallmark of a "dodgy class" (be it Scrappers, Stalkers, or what have you) would be that the resistance is less and the dependency on defense, and to some extent stealth, is more prominent.

Of course, CoX, which is the game we all remember and loved, had stuff that was all over the map. You had the general Tanker-Brute-Kheldian-Scrapper-Stalker spectrum of melee toons, and within that there were different power sets and builds that were all over the pace in terms of how much defense and/or resistance they got or used. Maybe it's too restrictive to expect that the tankier classes will work one way and the dodgier classes will work differently, but if there's to be any real difference in how those classes really play as compared to each other, that distinction might be a good one to make. One thing I'd try to avoid though is the result you might get where you end up with certain specific Scrapper builds ending up being better tanks than some of the less tanky tanker builds (given the same amount of IGC spent in making them, best possible "gear", etc). I feel like that much crossover is probably best avoided, if possible, so that the classes have some identity of their own and can be expected to play differently from each other.

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While certain games to create

While certain games to create strict mechanical opporative differences in function between classes, many of those games have often created "hybrid classes" which cross those certain lines. One of the things I certainly enjoyed about the old game was that those lines are largely blurred between certain groups of archetypes. And even when there were those lines, certain archetypes themselves could cause other archetypes to function yet line another archetype. It allows for a great diversity of play. Something which we intend to replicate for City of Titans.

Yet, there should be (and is in our case) certain ways each classification should remain distinctly different from others. One of the simpler ways (which creates the most blurriness) is having a Primary Power Set and a Secondary Power Set. While one class may have a Secondary based on another's Primary, each will not equitably function exactly the same numerically (given base value or similar levels of improvement). The other way which creates the true distinctions comes from our Mastery System. Even if you had two different Classes using the exact same powers, at the same level, with the same exact build (as improved similarly), the Mastery powers of each classification or so distinct they result in very different functions of play even if the style of play may be similar. One may have the "go, go, go " mentality of attacking constantly in order to do more damage, while another may have the exact same mentality of play but do so with an entirely different purpose.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

...The other way which creates the true distinctions comes from our Mastery System. Even if you had two different Classes using the exact same powers, at the same level, with the same exact build (as improved similarly), the Mastery powers of each classification or so distinct they result in very different functions of play even if the style of play may be similar. One may have the "go, go, go " mentality of attacking constantly in order to do more damage, while another may have the exact same mentality of play but do so with an entirely different purpose.

Heavenly. If the Mastery System works as described, then even replaying the same material with two characters that have identical skill sets will result in a different gaming experience (although it might be too slight to notice for most people while also being greatly annoying to others).

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Regarding the issue of Damage

Regarding the issue of Damage Resistance, a decent (though obviously imperfect) example to look at is Eve Online and how they handle layered/stacked damage resistance, which works on a couple of levels, and probably in ways I'm not remembering perfectly.

1) Resistance is multiplicative, not additive. This means that no matter how many damage resistance modules you have active on your ship, you could never reduce incoming damage to literally 0. EG: I have 3 shield resistance modules that each present 50% resistance. The total incoming damage is reduced to 12.5% because [(1-.5)x(1-.5)x(1-.5)]= .125

2) Stacking multiple modules for resistance penalized subsequent units, with the most individually powerful units always taking precedence, therefore players were incentivized to have a few powerful modules (powers) and add a bit more variety to their fits (I've got 75% resistances, it's time to add some flat shield HP). EG: If I were to equip 50%, 40%, and 30% resistance modules, the total incoming damage would not be [(1-.5)x(1-.4)x(1-.3)]= .21, it would be [(1-.5)x(1-.35)x(1-.20)]= .26

I think 1) is the more immediately relevant factor, but 2) could be a useful way to soft-cap resistances lower than what straight multiplication would produce.

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Personaly I would want

Personaly I would want "option 1" there since it's easier to make an informed decision, and somewhat easier to implement.

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Average the two?

Average the two?

So from the angle of resistance and reduction, could the two be averaged? It seems that in some cases applying resistance first may yield undesired results, but in other cases applying reduction first may yield undesired results.

DamFinal = (((DamRaw -ReductionPoints) -ResistancePercent) + ((DamRaw -ResistancePercent) -ReductionPoints))/2 *with Minimum of 1

Or maybe after a smidgen of algebra:

DamFinal = .5 * ((DamRaw -ReductionPoints) -ResistancePercent) + .5 * ((DamRaw -ResistancePercent) -ReductionPoints) *with Minimum of 1

With a formula like that a character may have significant resistance and reduction, but would still have to think twice before wading into a hundred enemies.

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However, that's Not how CoH

However, that's Not how CoH did it. In CoH damage resistance percentage WAS 'additive'. You had one resistance pool and you could add as many points as you could fit into your build, but it was still capped at 90%. An Invulnerability Tanker was better at taking the Hammer, but a Willpower Tanker, who survived via damage Recovery, could better deal with the 1000 cuts.

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Personally I like having some

Personally I like having some form of diminishing returns instead of just having a hard "no more resistance for you" type of cutoff. The diminishing return curve still allows you to overpay for that last 1-2% of resistance if you want to, and means that no amount of bonus resistance would technically be going to waste.

In GW2, the stat numbers that get tracked in your "Equipment" tab are all expressed as positive numbers with no apparent upper limit. Clearly, things that affect incoming damage are capped somewhere, but that hard/soft cap is not apparent to me looking at the numbers. I have a "Toughness" stat which affects the amount of damage I take from incoming attacks, and that number started at some low value when I was level 1 and went up as I leveled up, then it gets increased further by the bonuses I might get from gear, plus any ongoing buffs I get from my own spells and those of others.

Maybe we want to have some number that we track called "Resistance Factor" which will always be a positive real number with no theoretical upper limit, and which will then map to different ultimate resistance percentages for different classes, based on some table of corresponding values or some calculable function with parameters set for different classes. Like a log or arctangent curve or something.

Edit: To clarify, what I mean is, instead of advertising different powers and Augments/Refinements as "This gives you +10% Resistance" and then having to explain in the fine print that the "10%" as quoted doesn't actually equate to 10 less damage taken out of every 100 points in all cases, because of diminishing returns, etc, what you would do is say "This power gives you +X Resistance Factor points" and what that actually does for you is dependent on your class, where each class has a different curve which represents the functional dependence that your actual Resistance Percentage has on your Resistance Factor points. So like if R(x) is your actual Damage Resistance (where the rubber meets the road) then x is your "Resistance Factor" expressed in "Resistance Points" which will always be a number greater than 0 but has no upper limit, while the R(x) number is capped at some upper limit value that it asymptotically approaches as the x approaches infinity. So for example, the arctangent of infinity is essentially one half pi. You could define R(x) = k*arctan(x) where k is some scaling factor, which will be different for different classes and sets the upper limit toward which the function approaches as x increases. If you want to make 95% resistance the theoretical upper limit, you make k = .95/(pi/2), etc.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Maybe we want to have some number that we track called "Resistance Factor" which will always be a positive real number with no theoretical upper limit, and which will then map to different ultimate resistance percentages for different classes, based on some table of corresponding values or some calculable function with parameters set for different classes. Like a log or arctangent curve or something.
Edit: To clarify, what I mean is, instead of advertising different powers and Augments/Refinements as "This gives you +10% Resistance" and then having to explain in the fine print that the "10%" as quoted doesn't actually equate to 10 less damage taken out of every 100 points in all cases, because of diminishing returns, etc, what you would do is say "This power gives you +X Resistance Factor points" and what that actually does for you is dependent on your class, where each class has a different curve which represents the functional dependence that your actual Resistance Percentage has on your Resistance Factor points. So like if R(x) is your actual Damage Resistance (where the rubber meets the road) then x is your "Resistance Factor" expressed in "Resistance Points" which will always be a number greater than 0 but has no upper limit, while the R(x) number is capped at some upper limit value that it asymptotically approaches as the x approaches infinity. So for example, the arctangent of infinity is essentially one half pi. You could define R(x) = k*arctan(x) where k is some scaling factor, which will be different for different classes and sets the upper limit toward which the function approaches as x increases. If you want to make 95% resistance the theoretical upper limit, you make k = .95/(pi/2), etc.

I like this. It makes sense. And using arctan as your function is a good choice because it starts off on a slope of 1 and then diminishes off.

But rather than doing it by class, do it by primary vs secondary vs tertiary. So If it is applied to a primary powerset, it levels off at 95%, but if it is applied to a secondary powerset, it levels off at 75%, and then 50% for a tertiary powerset.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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I've never really been a fan

I've never really been a fan of stat ratings (what you call "resistance factor" there) but that's most likely due to how they have been used before so I'll try to be neutral on this. If there is going to be such ratings in the game then please please don't make them level dependent, though considering there won't be a stat-based progression that would be fairly simple to do.

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I admit that this is nothing

I admit that this is nothing new and that I'm basing it on what I assume is going on in GW2, to some extent. The only real advantage is that you're not labeling each and every power or Augment with "+X% Damage Resist" in it's name or description, then somewhere else having to explain how the math works and that the nominal percentages aren't REALLY what you get when you slot the thing in the power or whatever. So like, your "+X% Damage Resist" SO would now be called a "+X Damage Resistance Factor" SO and it would give every toon +X to their Damage Resistance Factor whne slotted, which would be a stat that the game tracks and bases your actual Damage Resistance off of, in a way you might even be able to understand. That conversion from DR Factor to DR Percentage might depend on class, powers, Augments, Refinements, Primary/secondary/tertiary/mastery, Momentum you have built up at that moment, Reserves spent, etc. It doesn't really add a new layer of complexity to the problem, it just codifies the complexity that's already there in a way that's more obvious to people. And by "more obvious" I don't mean that your ACTUAL DR Percentage will be more apparent to you, I mean simply that the false advertising of yesteryear by will be gone and the complicatedness of the system will be more apparent up-front.

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I would also add that you can

I would also add that you can much with the shape of the arctan curve in at least 2 ways. First, the scaling factor I already mentioned, and second, you could scale it laterally if you want (and I would assume you need to do this, as we're most likely not measuring Damage Resistance Factor points in radians, or even degrees).

So you'd probably have:

R(x) = k*arctan(ax)

Where k is the vertical scaling factor which raises and lowers the maximum resistance number (either as a percent or as a number from 0 to 1). And "a" is the horizontal stretch factor, which will either stretch or crunch the curve in the horizontal direction. The "a" number will basically allow you to set what you want the Resistance Factor Points to be "worth". Do we expect that a well-equipped toon will have a Resistance Factor in the neighborhood of 10,000 RF points? If so, we can scale the "a" constant such that this represents the part of the DR curve that we want that toon to be on. Both the "k" and "a" factors represent parameters that can be changed for different reasons, as I mentioned above.

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One nice thing about this

One nice thing about this approach is that it takes a number that has an upper limit and computes it using inputs that are essentially unlimited. So you can give people all kids of +DR items, powers, stacks of buffs, etc and at the end they never go above the cap threshold, even though it still looks and sounds like you're getting something useful out of all that stuff. And technically, you're still getting SOMEthing, just not a lot. Maybe that last buff you got gave you +0.01% DR, it was arguably negligible, but it wasn't zero.

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Well we are using Resistance

Well we are using Resistance as percentage reduction off of incoming damage. Which places the upper bound at 100% (in theory of possible max scaling). We do plan on providing a means of knowing what each power provides, and a place for cumulative power effects, like having multiple resistance powers,

I wish I could get into exactly how the formulas work, but at this time such info is not approved for open discussion. I can say that what is going on under the hood is a bit more complex than what even Radiac described. Felix, our coding lead, has been amazing in taking our production design docs and iterating the heck out of them to get the multitude of formulas to work cohesively.


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The interesting bit, for me,

The interesting bit, for me, is the concept that you could become immune to nearly all, say, fast Mook attacks, but the Bosses are going to clean your clock. The problem is that the marginal utility for such a power varies so wildly. Once you get over a "most Mook attacks do less damage than this", increasing it won't help much until you get significantly higher.

However, when you look at it from a statistical perspective, something else creeps in. Variance. If you get hit, say 50% less often, versus taking 50% less damage per hit, the damage taken over time averages the same, but the guy who gets hit less often will die more, simply because more of the time his health is at full, and he isn't healing, whereas the guy (who gets hit all the time for less damage)'s regeneration is more often working in his favor. This was the classic "Defense Set" versus "Resistance Set" question. Personally, I found layering the two was the best way to go.

Just my $0.02

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Felix wrote:
Felix wrote:

The interesting bit, for me, is the concept that you could become immune to nearly all, say, fast Mook attacks, but the Bosses are going to clean your clock. The problem is that the marginal utility for such a power varies so wildly. Once you get over a "most Mook attacks do less damage than this", increasing it won't help much until you get significantly higher.
However, when you look at it from a statistical perspective, something else creeps in. Variance. If you get hit, say 50% less often, versus taking 50% less damage per hit, the damage taken over time averages the same, but the guy who gets hit less often will die more, simply because more of the time his health is at full, and he isn't healing, whereas the guy (who gets hit all the time for less damage)'s regeneration is more often working in his favor. This was the classic "Defense Set" versus "Resistance Set" question. Personally, I found layering the two was the best way to go.
Just my $0.02
Felix

Would you consider, then, that a "Defense Set" would generate resistance with momentum? In game it would be played as a roll-with-the-punch so that the full effect of the blow doesn't actually do damage. Likewise, would you consider a "Resistance Set" generates dodge ability with momentum? I could see this as learning the enemy's attacks so that when a big one comes, you can spend momentum to dodge it to avoid the big spike damage.

So in effect, it would be like having a layered tank build. And with masteries and enhancements, one could go deeper into one layer or the other.


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It is possible to create

It is possible to create powers or even entire sets that leverage momentum that way. In general, though, you won't find much evasion in "go ahead and hit me" sets, but you may find forms of resistance in evasive sets.

What I've done for every set I've designed is to use at least 2-4 damage mitigation mechanics. Thise with less possible "layers" get some extra tricks to do things, those with more layers may rely more on specific playnstyles to get the most out of their set.


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*wonders how many set require

*wonders how many sets require the liberal use of a crowbar to deflect attacks*

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

*wonders how many sets require the liberal use of a crowbar to deflect attacks*

Only one. Eyes shiny red metallic object resting next to his seat...


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

I wish I could get into exactly how the formulas work, but at this time such info is not approved for open discussion.

That approval for open discussion NEEDS TO HAPPEN. Maybe not "right now" ... but it had better get opened up for Open Source Analysis to make sure there aren't any hidden edge cases left over in those formulas somewhere. You need to let us "kitbash" the hell out of those formulas at some point before they get set in stone so as to proof and validate them before putting them into production.


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I agree that once the numbers

I agree that once the numbers and formulae are pretty well decided upon, it would be a good idea to crowd-source the "stress testing" of them (like to the alpha or beta testers) so that the community at large can show you where the cracks and loopholes are, so as to avoid something like Enhancement Diversification after the fact by the devs datamining the powers and Enhancers used.

At some point, the people in charge of tweaking or not tweaking these numbers will say "It's fine, we can just leave it alone. Despite the fact that there's a glaring hole in the mechanics that allows people to have better results out of their Hamios than the Hamio itself is was really designed to give you, due to arcane artifacts in how the formula works, we can just leave it alone, because to fix it is a lot of work, and nobody really knows about it or is abusing it right now." The argument that it's not a problem because nobody's currently exploiting it is not valid. If you can show, based on the formulas and the order of operations, etc that something is assumed to be doing one thing and is actually doing something else then it would be better, in my opinion, to have more eyes looking at that rather than fewer eyes. You're better off handing that system off to the beta testers and saying "here, just try to break this or make something OP, we dare you" and then watch them actually succeed so you can find and fix that stuff than just assuming that the one guy double checked the other guy's code and that everything will be fine.

Now, WHEN that should happen is entirely upto the devs, but I think it should be some time pre-release.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

At some point, the people in charge of tweaking or not tweaking these numbers will say "It's fine, we can just leave it alone. Despite the fact that there's a glaring hole in the mechanics that allows people to have better results out of their Hamios than the Hamio itself is was really designed to give you, due to arcane artifacts in how the formula works, we can just leave it alone, because to fix it is a lot of work, and nobody really knows about it or is abusing it right now."

I'm reminded of a couple of scenes in a play I saw this weekend, "Billy and Ray". Ray Chandler tells Billy Wilder that a certain scene won't work, apartment doors open in, so the character can't hide in the hall behind the open door. Billy says, "Don't worry. You notice because Raymond Chandler is a genius, most moviegoers are stupid like Billy Wilder." And in the last scene, Billy describes an encounter with a fan: "Didn't anyone tell you? Apartment doors open in."

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That type of technical detail

That type of technical detail is often overlooked in story telling, and really, if you have to defy modern apartment fire code rules in your fake apartment scene to tell the story, I think that's okay, even if a small percentage of the audience does nitpick it. In a game, there have to be rules and mechanics that govern the range, speed, accuracy, damage, etc that powers do. If those rules are out of balance, you may end up with a game where everyone who wants to have a relevant amount of DPS needs to exploit the same exploit as everyone else and thus you get everyone making the same toon because all other toons are really weak by comparison.

In any audience, there will be a few Ray Chandlers that notices the plot holes, there just aren't enough of them to make it a problem, and they're not really talking to the other audience members during the play. In a game, the gamers all talk to each other and post their ideas for others to see and copy. As such, the Ray Chandlers of the player base will effectively guide the Billy Wilders to the broken mechanics very quickly and the game goes haywire.

If that's going to happen, it would be best to make it happen in alpha and beta testing and get it fixed then and there, not just bury our heads in the sand and hope nobody notices.

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A simple test platform to

A simple test platform to test the mechanics is already in development. In fact I think it's almost ready as a tiny mini-game. There is already intent to open up the formula when other bugs and issues resolved. At the moment there are elements still being decided on that are being discussed yet and therefore blocking public release. As a matter of fact the mechanics may be the part of the project furthest along.

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Nice.

Nice.

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And going back to the

And going back to the original question about fast, low damage per hit vs slow, high damage per hit, it is useful to think about "over damage" as a concept. For Giant monsters it will generally not matter, but if a guy has 10 HP, it doesn't matter if you hit him with 10 or 1000, he's dead either way. However, I would assume that the 10 HP power would cost a lot less and take less time to cast and recharge, making it much more efficient. So even if the 1000 HP power had 10 times the DPS, much of it would be wasted, resulting in a much lower "effective DPS". However, against the giant monster it would rock to use the 1000 HP damage.

So we have to balance DPS and effective DPS and their less well known cousins DPA and effective DPA. (DPS = damage / (cast + recharge) and DPA = damage / cast) DPA matters much more once you have a chain going. I apologize if these are not the standard terms for this, I was not one of the scapper attack chain optimizers, I liked Tankers.

Just my $0.02

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Damage per (elapsed) Second

Damage per (elapsed) Second and Damage per Activation are both metrics I'm familiar with. Balancing those two, leads to effective attack-chains. Of course, then there's those times when damage, per se, is less significant than other effects.

There's also the elusive DPE - Damage per Endurance (or whatever we call the pool we draw our power-efforts from).

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Towards the end of COH there

Towards the end of COH there was a guy working on an attack chain optimizer that also included things like recharge rates, server time coefficients and the really deep mechanics that Her Majesty of Math (brain farting her name starts with an "A") had figured out. Because your recharge and activation times were not just the seconds listed they also included a lag due to the sever tick cycle that was doing the math. This resulted in some differences between measured dps and calculated DPS when using the advertised rates.

Back to the topic. 1000DPA is great against the boss if it's sustainable. My Fire scrapper could unleash about 3k (iirc) in about 4 seconds but wouldn't be able to do it again for like 20 seconds. Which is great against a boss with 3 to 4k of HP. Not so great against the one with 20k. Or one with substantial damage resistance or a high defense. The defense in this case was more of a problem, because if one attack missed that could drop my damage by half. So the overall DPS was very finicky and relied heavily on being able to land hits repeatedly against the target. A similar character with a lower DPA could come up with a higher steadier DPS because if they miss a couple of attacks the DPA is low enough that it doesn't effect the average as much. Pros and Cons.

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Ideally, I would want the

Ideally, I would want the game to include some attacks that are just goo all around, some that are better versus bosses than minions, some that are better against minions than bosses, etc. That will probably include some that aren't good enough to make it into the attack chain, like ever, UNTIL they add in content where it's actually better now against the new end boss or in the new final room of the dungeon, etc.

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

that Her Majesty of Math (brain farting her name starts with an "A")

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OathboundOne wrote:
OathboundOne wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

that Her Majesty of Math (brain farting her name starts with an "A")

Arcanaville

Now appearing as simply 'Arcana' on the Titan forums.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Ideally, I would want the game to include some attacks..., some that are better versus bosses than minions, some that are better against minions than bosses, etc.

I like that.

A Tier 9 power should very very seldom miss an AV... were as, it can miss a minion slightly more. :)
I HATE when my most damaging attack continually misses, and i'm taking 3 hours to take down an AV because of that.
That's not a fun game, staring at your Endurance meter, no new Inspirations dropping to enhance your Accuracy.
and it gets worse if it's an AV that has -ToHit DeBuffs. etc...

Point being, AV fights should take no more than 10 -/+ minutes max. on a decent team.

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You could just even have a

You could just even have a power that's highly accurate, so it hits bosses and AVs more often than other powers do (but also hits minions more often as well), and maybe has some sort of resistance penetration factor, or something, for damaging tougher targets, but does less damage overall than a comparable attack and doesn't do any AoE, DoT, splash damage to other targets, and has no mez, immob, -regen, or other effects that those targets would likely be immune or highly resistant to anyway.

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Or, you know, you could slot

Or, you know, you could slot more Acc.

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The powers themselves always

The powers themselves always had some inherent accuracy nthat they started with though. A power that doesn't NEED as many accuracy Enhs in it to be able ot hit bosses would be better than one that needs more, right? But the less accurate power might still be decent to use against minions, especially if it were an AoE that did other effects which minions aren't generally immune to.

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Ah, thank you OathboundOne

Ah, thank you OathboundOne for reminding me of her name, Arcana, I'm sorry.

There were classes that were designed to chase after the harder targets and were provided buffs vs Lt's and Bosses. However, when compared with the damage bonuses provided by enhancements these buffs were minor in the extreme. Simply slotting a single damage IO in every power made the buffs only a small fraction of total strength. I do think ACC was a bit of a gimmie in COH as only the bosses or higher ever seemed to have any level of defense worth noting. Therefore it wasn't useful to slot specifically for enhanced ACC. Very rarely was anyone doing the CBA for how many times you'd actually hit a target as it related to your DPA.

I don't see that changing much because if you whiff against a minion it's like Izzy said, "That's not a fun game" that's not heroic or villainous.

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AoE powers can and should be

AoE powers can and should be liable to miss some of the minions in the AoE, I feel, especially if there are a lot of them. You want your single-target attacks to USUALLY hit the minions, with a very low miss rate, and you tend to accept that there may be Archvillains that you might be missing more often than you hit them. I still contend that one might use a different attack chain against AVs than against mobs of minions. Perhaps even different attack chains against different AVs and so forth. I don't think that's a controversial statement. I think most people would have assumed that to be true. Am I right?

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I've had Aim, Build-Up, Snipe

I've had Aim, Build-Up, Snipe miss the target - because there's always that 5% chance.

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As far as missing goes, what

As far as missing goes, what could help is if the game called it something else. Instead of "miss" popping up over a target's head "evaded", "dodged", or even "deflected". The end result is the same, but it is not described as a failure on the player's part.

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Our system does recognize

Our system does recognize distinctions between an attack missing and another evading. They are the results of different effects affecting the hit roll of the attack. Deflecting carries a different connotation.


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And as a player, I would

And as a player, I would rather know that I missed when I missed, so that I can add more augments/buffs/whatever to increase the chance of hitting, instead of being told that my target evaded or dodged, which would imply it was his skill/power/technique, not my lack of skill/power/technique.

It might be nice to know when my chance of missing cannot be reduced, but that might not ever be the case if the returns just keep diminishing. ^_^

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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

And as a player, I would rather know that I missed when I missed, so that I can add more augments/buffs/whatever to increase the chance of hitting, instead of being told that my target evaded or dodged, which would imply it was his skill/power/technique, not my lack of skill/power/technique.
It might be nice to know when my chance of missing cannot be reduced, but that might not ever be the case if the returns just keep diminishing. ^_^

Missing an attack and an attack being evaded are the results of different things occurring. If you want to know when an attack didn't hit so you can adjust the result by socketing your power to have a more favorable result, you'll want to know when your target evaded ;).


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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

And as a player, I would rather know that I missed when I missed, so that I can add more augments/buffs/whatever to increase the chance of hitting, instead of being told that my target evaded or dodged, which would imply it was his skill/power/technique, not my lack of skill/power/technique.
It might be nice to know when my chance of missing cannot be reduced, but that might not ever be the case if the returns just keep diminishing. ^_^

Missing an attack and an attack being evaded are the results of different things occurring. If you want to know when an attack didn't hit so you can adjust the result by socketing your power to have a more favorable result, you'll want to know when your target evaded ;).


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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

And as a player, I would rather know that I missed when I missed, so that I can add more augments/buffs/whatever to increase the chance of hitting, instead of being told that my target evaded or dodged, which would imply it was his skill/power/technique, not my lack of skill/power/technique.

That is actually the whole point of it, implying that it isn't your fault. Of course if it is happening all the time you would still know to enhance your attacks. I can't remember which CoH dev said it, but I remember reading they wished they had done something like this. Ultimately, it's a moot point given that there is a distinction in the mechanics for CoT, but its amazing how just the phrasing of mechanics can do with peoples perceptions.

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In CoX you could between (

In CoX you could between (*sigh* memories are getting old) the Real Numbers and the combat log pretty much figure out why you were missing or conversely getting nailed. It's how I pieced together how/why my soft capped SR scrapper kept getting nailed by certain boss Arachnos bosses when they nuked or knew how little anything ever managed to actually debuff my defense. Never mind the wonders of Mids' which pretty much would tell you if you had enough Acc and or To Hit to do the job, i.e. get to that 95% chance cap. I know my SR scrapper would see Dodged and Evaded pop up over her head occasionally as well (near as my foggy old memories recall anymore). Some power sets as well as individual powers varied from the standard accuracy as well. Archery coming to mind as a set and Dark Pit and many of the Nukes coming to mind as examples that varied off the standard base accuracy. I can still recall looking at the lovely, reported in blue type by the real numbers, my hard capped To Hit on my Cold/Ice defender when he had Tactics running then hit Aim and Power Build Up ... and hence could care less that Mako (or whoever) just hit Elude or more commonly the Paragon Protector who just hit MoG.

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All of the 'use a tool

All of the 'use a tool/implement' powersets had enhanced accuracy.

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