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How to Structure so as to get away from Boolean Gameplay for Mez

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Redlynne
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How to Structure so as to get away from Boolean Gameplay for Mez

As has been discussed more than once on these forums already, one of the oversimplifications that City of Heroes indulged in was its Boolean based Mez System. This led to a condition in which Mez was either extremely effective or extremely INeffective, with very little wiggle room in between. There were no degrees of impairment involved except for things like Slow (which was actually the Odd One Out in City of Heroes).

That these conditions came about was purely driven by how the Mez System in City of Heroes was structured, both mathematically and practically. The behaviors that it engendered (and thus rewarded) essentially lent themselves towards LOCKDOWN in which it was possible to permanently Mez an opponent, with no real chance of reprieve. Needless to say, Players loved it when they could use such methods against NPCs with impunity ... and deplored it when NPCs (or other PCs) could use such things against them! This then led to the whole "brick vs squishy" divide that the structure of the ATs reinforced, and so on.

Now, one of the things that I thought was actually clever when it was put into Diablo III (of all things) was their "answer" to the boolean nature of Mez effects in that game. Diablo III "suffered" from the same problem(s) as City of Heroes did when it came to Mez effect, particularly in relation to Bosses. If your build allowed you to "perma" a Mez of some kind, you could then use it to trivialize what ought to be a challenging and dynamic encounter with a tough Boss. Except, they didn't resort to the Purple Triangles of Doom "solution" that City of Heroes used.

Instead, what Diablo III did was somewhat clever. They set things up such that if a $Target is already affected by a Boolean Mez (think Hold or Stun if it helps) then every additional Mez effect applied to that target will have a progressive penalty applied to its duration. The progression was defined as a simple -10% duration per application of the Mez effect in the stack. Those of you who can do the math in your heads can easily see what kind of behavior that will produce in gameplay. For everyone else, it worked out like this:

Against a "tough" Boss that required multiple castings of a Mez effect to build up enough of a Mez Stack for the Mez to actually take (Y/N?) effect, every single casting of that effect got its full 100% duration. Notably, this was caster/source "agnostic" in that the mechanic didn't care WHO was casting what against the $Target. This then allowed for effects to be repeatedly cast, from either a single or multiple sources, until the Mez Stack got "deep enough" to cross a specified threshold and then the Mez Effect actually got applied. So far, all of this is pretty much exactly like how City of Heroes ran things with its Boolean Mez system.

What changed though was that once a $Target actually had a Mez effect actually go into effect, additional castings of the same Mez type, from any source, would have the duration of that additional casting reduced ... by -10% per additional cast added onto the stack. So if you were casting a 10 second Stun power and actually managed to build a deep enough stack of concurrent casts to achieve a Stun Effect on the $Target, the next Stun cast at the target would only last for 9 seconds ... and the one after that would last for 8 seconds ... then 7 seconds for the next ... and so on, all the way up to a theoretical min/max of 0 seconds duration.

They then "rigged" the Mez Resistance system to in effect decay or bleed off this reduction to Mez Duration at a rate of +10% per 1 second, so that after 10 seconds it would be completely cleared and Mez Durations would go back to be 100% again.

The net result was a system that "under the hood" was still in effect a Boolean Mez Mechanic ... you were either Mezzed or you weren't ... but which in actual gameplay became something of an Intermittent Mez rather than a Perma Mez when played. That's because the interaction between the Repeat Mez Duration Penalty and the Repeating Attack Speed meant that if you Mezzed a $Target "long enough" then the Mez Durations would get shortened enough to no longer be a permanent effect. You'd have "gaps" appearing within the Mez Durations where they didn't manage to overlap sufficiently while moving forwards in time. The result was as sort of dynamic "stutter stepping" as $Targets (and Players) would be intermittently Mezzed, as opposed to being permanently Mezzed. One nice side benefit of the structure of this mechanic is that using Mez to "suppress" a $Target on a NEAR permanent basis required dedicated attention (and ideally "spamming" the Mez attack continuously) for as long as the Beat Down required.

The benefit of this Duration Resistance and Decay method was that it allowed Mez to be EFFECTIVE without making it (permanently) TOO EFFECTIVE. I personally developed a tactic/strategy of using Stun Grenades on my Demon Hunter against the final boss, Diablo himself, that could keep him intermittently suppressed without resorting to use of Purple Triangles of Doom. Of course, it didn't hurt that I had an Attacks Per Second (APS) in excess of 3.25 at that point ... meaning that it took a LOT of Duration Resistance to give Diablo a chance to do anything through my Stun Grenade spamming. And he was a big enough mob that if I positioned myself right, I could hit him with all three grenades I was throwing every time I clicked the skill. This meant I'd be hitting Diablo with almost 100 Stun Grenades every 10 seconds or so, making for a VERY DEEP stack of Stun Mez!

So although I could put (some) Bosses into Stun Lockdown in a way that City of Heroes would have considered to be "perma" ... where the duration of the effect exceeded the recharge + animation time ... that Lockdown wouldn't stay perma forever ... which meant the battles still remained dynamic to some degree, and there was always that "edge of the seat" feeling whenever a boss managed to get "loose" from a Lockdown and start doing things. I say that because sometimes what got done during those intermittent failures of Lockdown would disrupt your own attack spam ... and the Mez Stack would collapse! And then you'd have to "work" to get it re-established (and so on). So even if you were fighting a "statue" of a Boss, you could never be quite sure when they might get a chance to retaliate and turn the tables on you!

So that's one idea I'd like to toss onto the bonfire.

The other idea is one that might be considered something akin to Blaster Defiance distributed more broadly for everyone.

The way Blaster Defiance ended up working was that for Blasters they could use their Tier 1 and Tier 2 Powers even while Mezzed.

What I'm wondering is if it might be wise/reasonable/cool to structure Mez Powers such that they progressively block access to Powers so that instead of turning everything off all at once, instead they would start shutting things off for you in a predictable way ... which could then become a consideration when designing Character Builds.

Now, there are two ways I can imagine going about implementing what I'm talking about here.

One way would be that when you get Mezzed (and I'm talking stuff that prevents actions here), the Powers that get disabled FIRST are the most recent Powers that have been Acquired. In a City of Heroes context, this would mean that at Level 33, the Power you chose at Level 32 would be the first to become "unavailable" to you, then the Level 28 Power, then the Level 26 Power ... and so on and so forth. Basically you "unwind" the Powers that the character has acquired in the order in which they were acquired. The net effect of this structuring would be that the Powers you acquire FIRST (ie. Levels 1-8) would be the LAST Powers that you would lose access to as you get Mezzed. If the Mez Stack gets "deep enough" then you'll lose access to ALL of your Active (ie. click/toggle) Powers and you go into Lockdown.

Or another way to think of it would be that Mez would (in effect) involuntarily "exemplar" your character towards a lower Level in terms of which Powers you can use (right now). The net effect of such a structure would thus be broadly similar to the goals of the way that Blaster Defiance ended up working although with some important differences in details.

However, if Mez were defined in this way, it would make choices of WHICH Power Taken WHEN a much more consequential choice in Build Strategies, and would become intertwined with the Meta of the game. For one thing, EVERY build would need to be designed to be able to "continue to fight" while partially Mezzed, and how the build gets structured would determine how "gracefully" it degrades when subjected to Mez Effects.

The other way to structure a progressive denial of action through stacking of Mez, so that you don't wind up with a Boolean (Y/N?) sort of All Or Nothing gameplay dynamic, would be to have Mez start suppressing Powers in order of Tiers, rather than when they were taken during the Level Up process. So when a Mez Stack is "shallow" it'll only shut off the Tier 9 Powers in your build ... then the Tier 8 ... then the Tier 7 ... then the Tier 6 ... and so on. And, of course, if the Mez Stack is "deep" enough it could potentially shut off all of your Active (ie. click/toggle) Powers and you're put into Lockdown.

Obviously, such a structure would simply begin the progressive suppression starting at whatever the highest Tier of Power(s) your character has taken so far ... meaning that if you've only chosen Tier 1-4 Powers, you don't get to "lose" Tiers 5-9 to Mez "for free" at no penalty (thereby using those Powers Not Taken Yet as a "buffer" or resistance to Mez Effects). Again, the objective here is to create a structure in which the earliest/oldest Powers in a character's "career" are the ones that are the most "resistant" to being lost to Mez Effects. So, in effect, Tier 1 Powers are the most Mez resistant, while Tier 9 Powers are the least Mez resistant.

The basic notion here is that the higher Tier Powers are more complex/difficult to do while impaired, so they're the first to be lost to Power suppression by Mez.

The important thing I want to bring notice to is that all three of these ideas use at their base the assumption of continuing to run the game mechanics of a Mez System on (Y/N?) Booleans ... while at the same time opening up the Mez System to working in such a way that it doesn't necessarily have to be a GLOBAL Boolean and that it can be structured in such a way so as to produce DEGREES OF IMPAIRMENT, rather than just Lockdown (Y/N?).


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Ah, it's been a while since I

Ah, it's been a while since I've seen a patented Redlynne Wall Of Text. :)

Some interesting stuff there. The Diablo III-esque staged duration bleedoff sounds like it could engender some fun situations where the controllers are straining to keep enough mez effects layered on the opponent to keep them immobile while their target keeps breaking free of prior layers faster and faster.

"Icemaid, keep the Warbot sealed in ice!" "I'm trying, but he's melting through faster than I can build up more ice!" Good for both tactical and RP entertainment.

Now, the stage-by-stage lockdown of powers could be cool. You propose a couple of methods, 'last bought' and 'highest tiered'. I have an additional possibility that I'd like to submit for consideration. Block access to powers in decreasing amount of endurance required to use them. So, the powers that require the most effort on the part of the character would be suppressed first, using the logic that the more expensive powers take more effort/are more complex to do and thus would be more easily impaired by a mez attack.

Whereas the last bought and higher tier methods would create more consequential choices in the order in which you purchase powers, this one would mean that how those powers are modified would now have to take into consideration mez results. Do you modify the power to use less endurance, so that it can be used for a longer period of time when mezzed, although it may be less accurate and/or damaging? This would also help keep toggle powers (which tend to use less endurance) as the last powers to be suppressed.

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Yeah, well, I wasn't exactly

Yeah, well, I wasn't exactly intending to do yet another Wall Of Text ... but when describing ideas like these it often helps to explain things more clearly the first time.

Interesting counter-proposal, and one I hadn't even considered. Well done! I can imagine some peculiar edge cases with an Endurance Cost type requirement, and balancing out between Clicks and Toggles could get ... odd ... depending on the gearing of the equivalency ratios and how they're calculated. So perhaps a bit more challenging to implement, but an interesting alternative notion all the same.


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A dev commented on steering

A dev commented on steering clear of all or nothing effects in a thread of mine so I hope it all be less binary than CoH. That said, I think your 1st idea is nearly the same as CoH, just exchanging the triangles with an invisible timer not to mention it sounds like it'd be easier lock down hard targets.

The second idea is a good thought. Making it so foes can still use some powers under mez would be cool and gives a new dynamic to building characters, like you said. But what if, instead of levels, it's the type of power that determines if it can be used. For example:

Sleep: after using attacks, you freeze for a moment; unable to use toggle powers.
Immobilized: locks target in place; unable to use lunge or movement powers.
Confuse: target can also hit friendly targets; ranged attacks only hit allies.
Hold: When struck your attack is interrupted and you freeze in place for a moment; aoe or friendly effecting powers fail.
Stun: skills are randomly put on recharge and you are unable to move straight. Pets stop acting and return to the master while it or the master is stunned.

Kind of just a brainstorm there. The idea being you won't be able to turn everything into helpless statues with a single control effect. Multiple controls however (which was another minor issue with CoH) can stack and more fully shut down targets.

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Leo_G wrote:
Leo_G wrote:

Kind of just a brainstorm there. The idea being you won't be able to turn everything into helpless statues with a single control effect. Multiple controls however (which was another minor issue with CoH) can stack and more fully shut down targets.

I was a little disapointed with CoH/V for not allowing me to SLOW enemies with multiple stacks so when they try to run, they would look like my Stone tank with Granite and Rooted On. ;)

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Leo, that starts sounding a

Leo, that starts sounding a bit more complicated than I would ever want to be responsible for coding. It's also starting to sound a bit too much like micromanaging Mez in ways that would be neither fun to make (as a developer) or to have to keep track of in order to play.

And yes, I always despised the Purple Triangles of Doom for being the Dirty Ugly Hack that they really were. The nice thing about the Mez Duration Decay system is that it allows the game to have "perma" Mez effects that have a duration above their recharge+animation time, and thus can be stacked, without letting that combination become an automatic "IWIN!" button that is always effective in every situation for all time. And the very nature of the "intermittent" behavior that it produces is something that keeps the Player engaged rather than letting them become complacent (see: City of Statues). Thus you get the best of both worlds ... Mez that can actually MEZ while still keeping a necessary measure of Threat Level in the encounters.

As for Slow ... City of Heroes capped Slow at 75%. At 75% Slow, it would take 4x as long to travel any given distance or for a Power to recharge. I remember getting caught in the overlapping auras of multiple Circle of Thorns Frost Mages one time ... and staring in shock at my screen when I ran out of clickable Powers (as a Scrapper!) and couldn't do anything! Even worse, my Practiced Brawler had expired and not recharged yet so I was getting Mezzed as a Scrapper on top of everything else. Fortunately someone else was tanking at the time and I was able to "slog feet" around a corner and out of range of the Slow Aura stacks, turn my Powers back on, finish recharging Practiced Brawler, and dive right back in to take out the Frost Mages as Priority #1 $Targets.

After that experience, I had a bit more respect for Slow, but unfortunately it just never felt like it amounted to much until you got it stacked to over 50-60% (and preferably to 70% or more). My Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker was built with this in mind as a "flypaper" build that would (as I said on many occasions) "inhale aggro like a wind tunnel" and then once hostiles were in close would debuff them with Slow to the point where they just couldn't hurt me or get away from me all that effectively. In a lot of cases, NPCs would dump their attacks at me and then just stand there ... waiting ... for one of their Powers to recharge so they could use it. It was actually pretty powerful to combine Slow with Defense on an Ice/Ice Tanker ... until you met a Giant Monster or an Arch-villain, both of which essentially "ignored" the debuff from Slow and used by Defense as a kleenex. But against trash mobs, Slow, when stacked, could get mighty effective.


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

After that experience, I had a bit more respect for Slow, but unfortunately it just never felt like it amounted to much until you got it stacked to over 50-60% (and preferably to 70% or more). My Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker was built with this in mind as a "flypaper" build that would (as I said on many occasions) "inhale aggro like a wind tunnel" and then once hostiles were in close would debuff them with Slow to the point where they just couldn't hurt me or get away from me all that effectively. In a lot of cases, NPCs would dump their attacks at me and then just stand there ... waiting ... for one of their Powers to recharge so they could use it. It was actually pretty powerful to combine Slow with Defense on an Ice/Ice Tanker ... until you met a Giant Monster or an Arch-villain, both of which essentially "ignored" the debuff from Slow and used by Defense as a kleenex. But against trash mobs, Slow, when stacked, could get mighty effective.

Darn.. I tried playing an Ice tank for the 1st 18 levels, but it wasnt satisfactory for me. Maybe if the Defense based Shields were Frontloaded for the lower levels, and most of the Slows based toggle Effects were added to later Tiers, I might have stuck through it more. :/ I used Synapse as a Trial By Fire (my measure) to see if a Build (when Exemp'ed down) can play decently before i IO'ed that build, since I could be spending allot of time on that toon. :/

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Leo, that starts sounding a bit more complicated than I would ever want to be responsible for coding. It's also starting to sound a bit too much like micromanaging Mez in ways that would be neither fun to make (as a developer) or to have to keep track of in order to play.

The same could be said for blocking out use of skills by tier or endurance. I mentioned them blocking types of skills as an example, really, but it's more comprehensive of a suggestion for the reason I started at the beginning of the post. The devs aren't fans of binary Mez. If Mez is "get mags = stuck" then it's too binary, I'm skeptical that blocking the last handful of your powers could be gamed rather easy and might be rather inconsequential for NPCs.

But anyway, you could be right that my idea is too complicated, but that could be said about anything new. I trod to rationalize them logically, such as sleepy interfering with constant passive effects, confuse being easier to hit through in close range but hard at long range and immobilized stopping travel or the new lunge type attacks.

My thought is, you should always be able to do *something* while Mezzed and locking someone out of some of their skills might be too little, which is why I think there should be more to it than just that.

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Warning: thread derail to

Warning: thread derail to discuss Slow in City of Heroes (specifically Ice/Ice Tankers).

Ice/Ice on a Tanker was a lot like playing MA/SR on Scrapper (in my experience). You spent an awful long time being terribly ineffective and wondering if this was ever going to amount to much of anything. An Ice/Ice Tanker was yet another moderately late maturing powerset combo, although it at least did have some bright spots along the way if you knew they were there and were ready to take advantage of them.

Ice Armor had your main Smash/Lethal Defense Toggle at Level 1 and Chilling Embrace, your Slow Toggle at Level 2. Chilling Embrace was one of the main reasons why Ice/* Tankers made one of the best aggro magnets among Tankers. It was essentially a Punch-voke Aura and due to its configuration as a Debuff it was a very efficient Threat generator. And you could slot it for Slow (and Slow Set IOs) to crank up its ability to prevent runaways. Exactly what you wanted as an aggro magnet. Chilling Embrace, slotted for Slow, got you most of the way to the Slow Cap (although you needed to be Level 22+ in order to really know/notice that because of SO vs DO). Glacial Armor was your Energy/Negative Defense Toggle and it arrived at Level 18, but again, you needed a few more levels to make the most of it, and with Stamina showing up at 20 you didn't always have the slots for it available immediately. And again, the Level 22+ breakpoint of switching from DOs to SOs was key. Icicles was a Damage Aura and arguably the most Endurance efficient means at your disposal to inflict damage, even against a single opponent ... although it didn't do so all that quickly. The combination of Chilling Embrace and Icicles however meant that you'd be generating more Threat just by EXISTING near a Foe than almost anyone else (including other Tankers!). Energy Absorption finally arrived at Level 26 and was essentially what started turning you into a decidedly "brute-ish" Tanker that just steamrolled everything.

Ice Melee as a powerset had some distinctly odd factors going on in it ... things like Greater Ice Sword (Level 35) being one of the WEAKER attacks available to the set. I wound up taking everything BUT the two Sword Powers in my build for Shirayukihime, mainly because they were Lethal/Cold and thus typically more strongly resisted than the "pure" Cold attacks done by pretty much everything else, meaning they had lousy throughput. Another odd thing about Ice Melee was Ice Patch at Level 20. When you could first get and use Ice Patch, it was absolutely game changing. Now you could "toe bomb" a group of Foes with a deployable KnockDOWN patch! Turned content that had been something of a nail biter into a cakewalk. And with the Chilling Embrace and Icicles running, all you had to do was stand there and stuff around you would "Exist Themselves To Death" and crumple at your feet. But then as you got higher in Levels, and got more Powers (and more Enhancements) the need to deploy Ice Patch all the time became less and less, until eventually at Level 50 you'd only be using it occasionally when the situation warranted it.

All of which to say is that if you were using a Synapse TF as your benchmark testing ground, you'd probably picked one of the more brutal and punishing ways to test your build. Without Glacial Armor (Level 18) you had no Defense against Energy, and the Clockworks were throwing Energy attacks around like it was going out of style. You also didn't have Energy Absorption (Level 26) which you needed to "top up" your Defenses so as to get close(r) to the Defense Softcap and to keep your Endurance refueled. And Clockworks were vulnerable to Knockback, meaning the Ice Patch (Level 20) would kick them out of its AoE, rather than keeping them in perma knockdown within its confines. There were some other factors that I won't belabor, but if you were on your way up to 20 when you did your Synapse benchmarking you were effectively fighting with both hands tied behind your back while hobbling around on crutches. An Ice/Ice Tanker didn't really start to mature until the mid- to late-30s, and really didn't even reach "full power" until getting everything slotted in by Level 50 because of the need to use Set Bonuses to fill in all the gaps in the Defenses. So Ice/Ice/Arctic was a very slow (no pun intended) maturing combination that needed a lot of patience and stick-to-it-iveness (much like a MA/SR Scrapper) in order to fully realize its potential.

And yes, I took Shirayukihime out on Tanker Tuesdays on Virtue and stole ALL THE AGGRO from 7 other Tankers on ITF runs, such that other Tankers on the team (the Invulnerable/* Tankers especially) were left crying that they couldn't get any aggro! They also couldn't believe how aggressively I was playing. I was just rolling like a Brute ... because of Energy Absorption (rather than Fury) and because it was safer (for me) to have hostiles clumped up around me, in my auras, than it was for them to be more than 10 yards away and taking potshots at me, un-Debuffed. In close, I could drain away their recharge and "burn" them down with my cold and Icicles and Ice Storm (from */*/Arctic) and "slurp" them to refuel my Defense and Endurance using Energy Absorption. KnockBACK though was the bane of my existence!

So yeah ... if you only got to Level 18, then you hadn't yet gotten to where Ice Armor and Ice Melee started really synergizing well together and started to become an awesome combo.

Anyway, enough thread derailment. ^_~


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Leo_G wrote:
Leo_G wrote:

The same could be said for blocking out use of skills by tier or endurance.

Yeah, either of those methods would no doubt have edge cases that could potentially make them rather "untidy" from either a coding perspective or from an understanding how it works perspective. This is a large part of the reason why I'm personally leaning towards the "involuntary exemplar" method as a superior design choice, because it's something that can be explained easily and you don't get into problems of deciding by what criteria the "sequencing" of what gets lost is decided. In other words, you're never in a position where two possibilities are "tied" for which one has to be suppressed/disabled first.

Leo_G wrote:

I mentioned them blocking types of skills as an example, really, but it's more comprehensive of a suggestion for the reason I started at the beginning of the post.

It is ... but at the same time it's the sort of thing that could potentially be dramatically "unfair" to certain kinds of builds and powersets. I'm thinking specifically of toggle heavy powersets such as Dark Armor, which could be "uniquely vulnerable" to Mez of specific flavors with your system that discriminates on effects the way it does, in contrast to extremely click heavy powersets such a Kinetics. I have the sinking suspicion that the kinds of "this Mez blocks those Powers" arrangement you were setting up could be exploited in an imbalancing and unfair fashion against certain powersets.

Think of it as being the Mez equivalent of the Smash/Lethal vs every other Damage Type debates that people used to have in the City of Heroes forums. Even if the Damage numbers were exactly the same, Smash/Lethal was the most frequently/heavily/reliably resisted form of Damage in City of Heroes, and thus tended to deliver a lower throughput onto most Foe Groups (with only a few notable exceptions). Your proposal would instill something similar into the underlying framework of how Mez "shuts things down" ... and I am not convinced that doing so in the way you've proposed would necessarily be wise.

Leo_G wrote:

The devs aren't fans of binary Mez.

Well I should certainly hope not!
It's also pretty fair (and quite obvious at this point) that I'm not a fan of GLOBAL Boolean Mez either. Hence why I keep trying to look for ways to achieve degrees of impairment rather than just going for an All Or Nothing approach like City of Heroes used.

Leo_G wrote:

If Mez is "get mags = stuck" then it's too binary, I'm skeptical that blocking the last handful of your powers could be gamed rather easy and might be rather inconsequential for NPCs.

Well the basic notion is that the "deeper" the Mag Stack the more of your Powers that'll be suppressed. Lockdown would thus mean losing access to ALL of your click+toggle Powers, as opposed to just some of them.

As for NPCs ... consider this. If the NPCs have a "nuke" Power of any kind (that you'll want to avoid), it'll probably be either a "Tier 9" or something which is chosen "late" in their build plan (ie. just like with PC builds). Under my system, even having a "minor" Mez Power could potentially "protect" you from having that NPC being "allowed" to make use of that "nuke" Power. That's because you wouldn't need to have an incredibly deep Mag Stack in order to "reach" that particular "nuke" Power and disable/suppress it.

You follow me?

Leo_G wrote:

But anyway, you could be right that my idea is too complicated, but that could be said about anything new.

Don't worry, it happens to all of us (even me). The important thing though is recognizing when an idea is beyond the boundaries of complexity and then using that to firm up the limits of where you WANT to be. Which is another way of saying the effort you've put in on this topic has not been wasted.

Leo_G wrote:

My thought is, you should always be able to do *something* while Mezzed and locking someone out of some of their skills might be too little, which is why I think there should be more to it than just that.

Again, my proposed system depends on how deep/strong the Mag Stack is. If it's "shallow" then the impairment is limited. If it's "deep" then the impairment can become crippling and possibly even global. But the basic operating principle is that Mez ought to operate along degrees of impairment lines such that you give yourself (as a Designer) a fair bit of room for a variety of interactions and behaviors to develop at the game mechanical level. The Boolean Mez behaviors of City of Heroes didn't allow for that, so I'm trying to find constructs that can ... rather than just simply demanding that they happen and then expecting someone else to be come up with something that will satisfy my expectations.


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The powers design team is

The powers design team is definitely in favor of non boolean systems this includes our control schema. Details are not ready for public digestion yet. And we won't need to use duration decay nor rely on purple triangles. Not thatduration decay is a bad idea, but once details are provided i think you will be pleasantly surprized.


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+1 to the Ice/Ice comment. I

+1 to Redlynne's Ice/Ice comment. Very spot-on. I detailed some observations in another thread about just how much debuff and control you could muster with an Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker. It was incredible, but as Redlynne said, somewhat late-blooming. I never got mine to max level, but he was far enough along to get in the groove with good defense, slows, and controls.

Anyways, this is a bit off-topic. Sorry. I couldn't help but chime in on this.

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

The powers design team is definitely in favor of non boolean systems this includes our control schema. Details are not ready for public digestion yet. And we won't need to use duration decay nor rely on purple triangles. Not thatduration decay is a bad idea, but once details are provided i think you will be pleasantly surprized.

"And so, once again, the day is saved by Tannim!"

An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".

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[quote=Redlynne
Redlynne wrote:

Leo_G wrote:
I mentioned them blocking types of skills as an example, really, but it's more comprehensive of a suggestion for the reason I started at the beginning of the post.
It is ... but at the same time it's the sort of thing that could potentially be dramatically "unfair" to certain kinds of builds and powersets. I'm thinking specifically of toggle heavy powersets such as Dark Armor, which could be "uniquely vulnerable" to Mez of specific flavors with your system that discriminates on effects the way it does, in contrast to extremely click heavy powersets such a Kinetics. I have the sinking suspicion that the kinds of "this Mez blocks those Powers" arrangement you were setting up could be exploited in an imbalancing and unfair fashion against certain powersets.
Think of it as being the Mez equivalent of the Smash/Lethal vs every other Damage Type debates that people used to have in the City of Heroes forums. Even if the Damage numbers were exactly the same, Smash/Lethal was the most frequently/heavily/reliably resisted form of Damage in City of Heroes, and thus tended to deliver a lower throughput onto most Foe Groups (with only a few notable exceptions). Your proposal would instill something similar into the underlying framework of how Mez "shuts things down" ... and I am not convinced that doing so in the way you've proposed would necessarily be wise.

That's actually sort of the intent. There would be Mez that is particularly dangerous to certain sets or playstyles. Your example of dark armor plus any other toggle heavy set would find sleep (from my example) dangerous because toggles wouldn't work if you were sleepy; immobilized would be tough for melee types especially ones that have more than one lunge attack in their rotation; confusion would be a problem if you use lots of range and buffs but can be countered by using melee; Stun would be very disruptive for pet/summon type, ect ect.

The way my half thought out idea would work is no one is immune to Mez but then it doesnt stack Mag. Instead, it stacks the effects of other unique mezzes. It requires a stack of everything to completely lock something down but a control set likely wouldn't get all those effects in a set.

Also, read the rest of your post about stacking mag. Not going to say it's not a functional approach but it does come with the issues (some might not care about those though) the old system came with. Oh, and your perspective seems to be focused on hold effects. What about other effects like confusion or sleep?

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I like Red's ideas with a few

I like Red's ideas with a few alterations: Character will become immune to levels of Mez (that is to say they will be able to act even when Held) based on level. At level 1-10 they will always have their first power available (not recharged, just not locked out). Level 11-20 will be the first 2 (where most Blasters were in CoH) and so on. This means that at lvl 50 a character will have only 5 powers available and they might be th 5 weakest powers but they will have some choices.

Another option: Increased End cost. Like the RP example above (the cold powers versus the heated robot), how about an enemy you can Mez but KEEPING them Mezzed will require progressively more End? Players could build for more End Redux in order to maintain Mez longer but at a lower intensity (for sub-Boss foes) or they could build for more Mez with shorter duration/higher End cost.

This could make multiple characters with Mez more valuable (since they can share the End load) as well as making the +End and +Recovery powers more useful for a single Mezzer laying out heavy End to keep the enemy locked down.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Comicsluvr wrote:
Comicsluvr wrote:

I like Red's ideas with a few alterations: Character will become immune to levels of Mez (that is to say they will be able to act even when Held) based on level. At level 1-10 they will always have their first power available (not recharged, just not locked out). Level 11-20 will be the first 2 (where most Blasters were in CoH) and so on. This means that at lvl 50 a character will have only 5 powers available and they might be th 5 weakest powers but they will have some choices.

For the record ... I absolutely DESPISE any sort of "Immunity" game mechanics in reference to Damage or Mez. They're effectively the lazy way out. It's why I hated Purple Triangles in City of Heroes. It's why I hated Damage Immunity By Type in both Tabula Rasa and in Diablo II and III. And this is a "both ways" kind of dislike on my part. Put it on NPCs and the Devs are just "cheating" in order to fabricate a "challenge" to the PCs. Put it on a PC and you're essentially inviting an exploitation of the game mechanics.

In other words, if you have to resort to an Immunity Clause in your game mechanics ... it means that you've failed to design something else PROPERLY and are just using the Immunity Excuse to sweep that failure under the rug (and pretending that it's a "Feature" not a Bug in the design).


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Comicsluvr wrote:
I like Red's ideas with a few alterations: Character will become immune to levels of Mez (that is to say they will be able to act even when Held) based on level. At level 1-10 they will always have their first power available (not recharged, just not locked out). Level 11-20 will be the first 2 (where most Blasters were in CoH) and so on. This means that at lvl 50 a character will have only 5 powers available and they might be th 5 weakest powers but they will have some choices.

For the record ... I absolutely DESPISE any sort of "Immunity" game mechanics in reference to Damage or Mez. They're effectively the lazy way out. It's why I hated Purple Triangles in City of Heroes. It's why I hated Damage Immunity By Type in both Tabula Rasa and in Diablo II and III. And this is a "both ways" kind of dislike on my part. Put it on NPCs and the Devs are just "cheating" in order to fabricate a "challenge" to the PCs. Put it on a PC and you're essentially inviting an exploitation of the game mechanics.
In other words, if you have to resort to an Immunity Clause in your game mechanics ... it means that you've failed to design something else PROPERLY and are just using the Immunity Excuse to sweep that failure under the rug (and pretending that it's a "Feature" not a Bug in the design).

Fair enough. What about the increased End idea I mentioned in the same post?

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Comicsluvr wrote:
Comicsluvr wrote:

Another option: Increased End cost. Like the RP example above (the cold powers versus the heated robot), how about an enemy you can Mez but KEEPING them Mezzed will require progressively more End? Players could build for more End Redux in order to maintain Mez longer but at a lower intensity (for sub-Boss foes) or they could build for more Mez with shorter duration/higher End cost.
This could make multiple characters with Mez more valuable (since they can share the End load) as well as making the +End and +Recovery powers more useful for a single Mezzer laying out heavy End to keep the enemy locked down.

To be honest, I'm trying to wrap my head around why this would be perceived as a Positive rather than a Negative for use of Mez Powers. Don't get me wrong, it rather neatly "disposes" of the problem of Perma Mez by making sustained Mez increasingly unsustainable. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

The thing I don't get is ... why "penalizing" Mez in this fashion ought to be considered in any way FAIR. I mean, it's not like Damage dealing powers become increasingly expensive to use the more you've used them on a particular target. In other words, although this method achieves the goal of limiting use of Mez, it does so in a way that bakes a "Self Gimp" into the very heart of the system which I personally find rather ... unattractive.

Also, I'd prefer to reserve Endurance Manipulation (buffing and debuffing) for specific powersets in which it is appropriate (ala Electricity, etc.) rather than turning such into a global ... self gimping ... "Feature" common to all powers with a Mez Effect. So in that respect I'd argue that an Endurance Penalty for use of Mez is too ... penalizing ... to apply.

Does that make sense?

In isolation, this isn't all that bad of an idea. Big Picture™ though, it's not something I'd want to see happening.


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I can see where you're coming

I can see where you're coming from and perhaps big picture it's not the best way to handle thing. It may be TOO genre for what it's meant to do.

One of the issues with Mez, as has been noted, is the binary form we're all familiar with. A foe is Held or not...there has been no third option until now. The reason why this (and the increasing End option) came to mind is that, unlike most 'damage' powers, Mez stops the opponent from attacking without defeating them. My Blaster can fire off an attack taking 2 seconds, costing 10 End with a range of 80' and the opponent will be wounded but angry. Or I can us a Hold with exactly the same stats, less damage but the target is Held and CANNOT fight back. Yes, it will take more Holds to defeat the enemy but while he's standing there I', much safer than if I were a Blaster just doing damage.

In other words, all else being equal, a Mez power is more likely to diminish (or eliminate) the enemy's ability to hurt me than if I were just doing damage. This is normally balanced by the fact that using straight Mez (many of which come with a damage component) takes longer to defeat the enemy that raw damage. So the Blaster will likely get through the mission at the same time as the Controller but will have to pause and rest or heal along the way. If the powers and mechanics are balanced well then this is as it should be.

Now we come back to Bosses and other types that are not as vulnerable to Mez as we know it. When a straight damage-dealer comes up against a tougher opponent they can often throw a heftier attack. Most Mezzers will top out at Mag 3 (again, we're using CoH terms here) and that's what they have. So what if, instead of stacking effects from several powers, the caster had the option to use their Mag 3 power at a higher End cost to achieve a greater effect?

As I said, it may be TOO genre for the other mechanics of the game but I wanted to throw it out there. Mezzing is one of those things that we can either get right or get very wrong.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Mez has its own class in this

In a game like Champions Online or DC Universe online.. this was not possible because Mez was considered a secondary mechanic to DPS. CoT is specifically putting Mez on the same PRIMARY level as DPS and for good reason.

Mez does not need to be inherently weak or in-effective when separated into its own rules. In this game it will be balanced as a gamplay style not as clunky addition to other powers as it is in other superhero MMOs.

That's like saying you should be able to kill a tank easier the longer you fight them. Or saying that damage should get weaker th longer a DPS person fights.. it's just counter intuitive to nerf an entire class just because it is crowd control. In the same way a DPS person loves being able to burn through enemies.. I enjoy holding them in place and keeping their targeting to their own teammates.

- -

A True mez master is like a temporary defeat of an opponent. I understand people not wanting to be held but in ANY game if you don't want to experience negative effects (damage, mez, debuffs) then you should gear/train your character to have a resistance to that negative effect. There will be a mez resistance factor available but it will come at the cost of other resistances.

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JayBezz wrote:
JayBezz wrote:

That's like saying you should be able to kill a tank easier the longer you fight them.

Ahhh... Statesman TF. Good ol' Ghost Widow.. repeatedly took my Stone Tank out. Where was Clear Mind when I need it!? :<

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Comicsluvr wrote:
Comicsluvr wrote:

One of the issues with Mez, as has been noted, is the binary form we're all familiar with. A foe is Held or not...there has been no third option until now. The reason why this (and the increasing End option) came to mind is that, unlike most 'damage' powers, Mez stops the opponent from attacking without defeating them.

One of the (*ahem*) ... problems ... (*ahem*) of the City of Heroes engine was that certain factors HAD TO remain absolutely fixed, with no real option for sliding scale. You couldn't, for example, have animation times vary in response to externally imposed conditions applied by Mez. Thus it wasn't possible to have a 2 second animation time normally and then as the Mez stacks up have that animation time get lengthened to 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 (or more) seconds. Plus, with a lot of the animations, if you slow them down too much they just look silly, and their sound wouldn't synchronize correctly with the animation ... and on and on and on.

So in City of Heroes you could do a slow RUN animation, but you couldn't impose a slow ATTACK animation, for example. As a result, you were kinda sorta stuck with the Boolean State legacy that we remember being the state of the (meta)game in City of Heroes.

I don't know if City of Titans is being programmed in such a way as to make this kind of thing possible, such that attack animation speeds can vary within a predefined range, as opposed to being "pegged" to specific (pre)set values that cannot be altered in play. Obviously, if City of Titans has a way to Debuff Attack Animation Speeds in addition to the Usual Suspects™ for Debuffing in terms of Endurance Cost and Recharge Time then you'd have additional tools at your disposal for letting Mez work on a sliding scale of increasing Impairment rather than just being a boolean (Y/N?) kind of conditional state.


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What I find interesting is

What I find interesting is that the discussion seems primarily focused on holds. Is CoT only going to have holds as CC? Besides the on/off nature of mez in CoH, do people actually *like* how the various controls functioned and interacted? Because if you look into not only the on/off nature of CoH mez but also the issues forced upon the system because of it, you might be able to craft more and mailable suggestions.

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There are several reasons to

There are several reasons to have static* animation times. These reasons came about through analysis and discussions through which we determined how to set up attack animations. At one point having power effects alter animation speeds (faster and slower) and even ways to slot for increasing a power's animation speed was a consideration, post analysis an discussion it was decided against.

Variable animation speeds in every power results in affecting minimum and maximum performance potential in every aspect of an encounter for both pvp and pve. That is the offensive potential, sustainability potential, defeat potential, and resources used (energy / health.

Between slowing moving, reducing rwcharge, and how some of our control schema is set up to work, slowing animation times as effect could potentially be detrimental to how we want gameplay to feel. The psychological impact it can have on play can not be discounted.

*We do plan to have an effect for certain sets to utilize increased animation speeds as part of their maximum potential in performance - within limited use we can adequately tune performance of a set vs all the sets (by tune I mean the initial design, power team testing, QA, and beta test prior to live play availability).


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The reason for the "hold

The reason for the "hold focus" is simply because that particular effect is the most obvious and dramatic (and extreme). It was also the most clearly boolean driven Mez effect, although there were of course others.

Slow, however, was not a boolean driven Mez effect, since it worked on a sliding scale. Slow would reduce movement speeds and recharge times by a percentage, which was of course capped (at -75% in City of Heroes). Pushing a $Target to the Slow cap meant it took them 4x longer to travel a given distance and their Powers took 4x longer to recharge, at -75% Slow, because of how the formulas for computing these things worked. So the Slow effect had a "degrees of impairment" effect built into it ... unlike Confuse, Fear, Hold, Immobilize, Sleep, Stun and Taunt.

Ironically enough, Knockback (of all things) also worked on something akin to a sliding scale, in terms of delivering "hang time" when "punting" (or "golfing" if you prefer) a Foe. So although Knockback was in many ways also somewhat boolean driven, the MAGnitude of the Knockback "mattered" in terms of what actually happened in gameplay.

The important thing to remember here is that Knockback and Slow were both very much in the minority of Mez effects, and were often viewed as "poor man's holds" with respect to their capacities for Lockdown. In City of Heroes, whenever we talked about Crowd Control or Mez, we were almost always talking about either Holds or combinations of Powers that effectively amounted to delivering a Hold-like functionality. Stun+Immobilize=Hold for example. Thus, the Hold functionality was the benchmark by which everything else got judged ... so it's no surprise to see the mentality reflected here in discussions like this one.


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@Redlynne:

@Redlynne:
Right. Not sure if you're describing this for others not in the know, but if you're replying to me you're stating things I already know (or perhaps used to know, it's been a while but I know where to look this info up to refresh myself on CoH mechanics).

No, the purpose I mentioned other mez is because the solutions being discussed seem to focus on "Holds" and neglects other types of mez or at least doesn't take them into account. For example: how do your suggestions interact if you exchange holds for confuse or sleep or immobilize. And how would each interact within the mez system. If you're trying to combat binary mez status, why not do what CoH didn't do?

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You know, as I continue to

You know, as I continue to play other MMOs, one of the things I find annoying, is the enemies stun works on, I don't generally need stuns for.

Though, as I do play them, I can see why. What I'm curious of, is there any real way to really make it that effective? If mezzers could keep enemies permanently held, there'd be no risk.

For PvP there likely wouldn't be any way for others to have a chance out of them, not with something as simple as a MMO system is likely to be, since I don't think it would have something akin to a PnP game way of dealing with such things.

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Leo:

Leo:
Your comment simply gave me the opportunity to clarify for anyone who hadn't played City of Heroes, since not all of us in these forums have or did. Indeed, it's gratifying to learn that you already knew "all that" and didn't need a refresher course.

re: Confuse, Sleep, Immobilize, etc. vs Holds
Again, this gets down into issues of Structure and how you organize the game mechanical underpinnings ... and as always there's more than one way to play the meta-game.

Ideally, you'd want to go with some sort of Variations On A Theme for how to handle these particular Mez effects so as to produce degrees of impairment rather than a pure boolean On/Off condition.

City of Heroes Mez Types: Confuse, Fear, Hold, Immobilize, Knockback, Placate, Sleep, Slow, Stun and Taunt

I'd argue that Confuse and Taunt are kind of flipsides of the same coin, with Placate being something of a hanger on. Confuse is a "attack anyone of your former Allies" while Taunt is a "attack anyone who IS ME" kind of effect with Placate being the opposite in a "attack anyone who ISN'T ME" kind of aggro wipe. Both of these Mez effects are, fundamentally, about manipulating what is a "legal" $Target for you to attack.

In these cases, I'd want a partial (as opposed to a complete) Mez effect to interfere with Target Selection ... either by forcing a reacquisition or limiting what can be chosen as a $Target or how long something can remain Target Locked. So for something like a Taunt, you might be able to (manually!) select a target other than the Taunt caster, but that target selection will only last for a few scant seconds before automagically reverting back onto the Taunt caster. The behavior you'd want to produce for a Taunt is that target selection is "sticky" to the Taunt caster and prone to reverting back onto the Taunt caster, and the stronger the Taunt is the faster this return to targeting the Taunt caster happens. Stack the Taunt effect up high enough and you can't target anything BUT the Taunt caster for any meaningful length of time.

Confuse would do something similar in a partial configuration, giving random chances (on a sliding scale) to harm Allies and aid Enemies. Confuse would be a "loyalty" switcher type of Mez, and if you try to use the wrong kind of Power your Target Lock will drop. So lets say you're trying to cast a Buff on your Allies, and you have an Ally selected as your $Target, but your random chance to be Confused switches your loyalties (temporarily). If the Power you use does not require a $Target (such as a PBAoE Heal or similar) then you wind up aiding your Enemies rather than your Allies, but your $Target Lock remains in place. If the Power you use does require a $Target, then the Target Lock drops because you can't buff/aid "Enemies" and your Target Lock jumps to another $Target (because ... you're Confused).

Placate is a little bit trickier, since it's a "you're not allowed to attack me" kind of Power. For a partial Placate, I'd just set it up as being a random chance to completely MISS the Placate caster ... sort of like an extra layer of Hit/Miss Defense ... and on a MISS result the Target Lock on the Placate caster gets dropped for a short time (I'm thinking a couple seconds).

Ideally, I'd want to put Fear and Slow into the same category of affecting Recharge Debuffing. Slow would also debuff Movement speeds, while Fear would debuff Endurance Costs for actually using Powers, making them more expensive to use than normal. Both of these effects would be oriented around "exhausting" Foes in ways that make them increasingly powerless.

Knockback is sort of the odd man out, but has a relatively obvious degree of impairment built into it ... Hang Time. The greater the Knock, the longer it takes to recover from it.

Immobilize is essentially Slow without the Recharge Debuff. It's all about prevention of escape through movement. So obviously a partial Immobilize would involve Movement Speed debuffing, and could potentially involve adding an Endurance Cost debuff onto Movement Powers, making them more expensive (ie. exhausting) to use. If you "stay put" and don't fight the Immobilization then it doesn't "cost" you anything extra.

That then leaves Hold, Sleep and Stun. Sleep is essentially a Fragile Hold (broken by damage) and Stun is a Hold that permits limited random movement for staggering about. All of these Powers are oriented around taking away command control of the character. If it isn't possible to change animation speeds for attacks, it ought to be possible to add a "response delay" to animations such that they don't begin instantly. So when you command your character to Kick, instead of that Kick happening "immediately" when possible, instead there's a delay of a second or few (that looks a lot like LAG!) and then the character executes that animation. In other words, in a partial configuration, I'd want these effects to mess up the TIMING of attack chains so that they don't "flow" in their normal fashion, making them get slower and slower to execute ... until the character becomes "unresponsive" with a total Mez of these types. For Powers that use a Charge mechanic (hold down the key and wait for a bar to fill up), the Charge Bar will fill more slowly, meaning it will take longer to reach the desired Charge Level to execute an attack. So instead of taking 3 seconds to fill up to Level III, it now takes 6 seconds to fill up to Level III (for example).

With Sleep, I'd love to see it remain something that can be broken by damage, but that when broken it takes a little bit to "bleed off" and thereby leaves a residual state of vulnerability as the character transitions from "asleep" to being fully "awake" and unimpaired. So I'm thinking a decay mechanic on breaking Sleep would be in order. And now that I've though of such a thing, I'm thinking that doing something similar for Fear would be appropriate, so that Fear doesn't just "drop" in an instant fashion.

At any rate, those are the broad brushstrokes of what I'd like to see the game mechanics accomplish with regards to degrees of impairment for Mez.


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Your portrayal of confuse and

Your portrayal of confuse and placate both make me extremely happy.

Didn't read the rest of the WoT

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My main reason for focusing

My main reason for focusing on Holds is that they represent (to me) the clearest dichotomy between Damage with little to no residual effect (like KB) and a Hold which has (usually) damage as the residual effect.

I hate to harp on Blasters (especially since CoT won't really have them) but they represent the clearest line between Damage versus Status Effect. As I mentioned in my comment above, in my mind HOW a character defeats their foes needs to be balanced by how fast they defeat their foes as well as the level of risk. Blasters tended to take down their targets quickly but they also tended to get shot at...a LOT. High speed, high risk, higher reward IF you succeed. On the flip side a typical Controller of the same level could defeat the same number of opponents but it would take more time with greatly reduced risk. I sometimes think of Controllers as a form of ranged Tank for this reason. A tank usually is very safe (because of their defenses) but does less damage, therefore it would take longer to complete a mission. Less risk, less reward.

As Red explained (thanks for that btw), Hold is sort of the extreme end of the Status scale. Once you get to that point the enemy cannot attack you. Just below that is Sleep (they can't attack but hitting them wakes them), Confuse (they MIGHT attack you anyhow but not likely), Stun (they can't attack but they can move a bit) and then Slows, Immobilizes and KB.

I suppose one of the main reasons for Hold being so important is that the players don't like it on them. Nobody likes a game where they can do NOTHING. Even being debuffed to the floor leaves to free to run away or try something else. Held, and worse Perma-Held, is about the opposite of fun. If we can figure out a good alternative for it to be used on the enemies then maybe the same mechanic can work then they Hold US.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Comicsluvr wrote:
Comicsluvr wrote:

. If we can figure out a good alternative for it to be used on the enemies then maybe the same mechanic can work then they Hold US.

I believe we have this covered, barring any major changes during testing of course, but so far, it seems to work out. Here is what we're looking at:

For NPCs: attacking a mezzed NPC builds the NPC's momentum - set threshold (if needed for the NPC class) will allow the NPC to break free.

For PCs: PCs have Reserves. As Momentum naturally decays it feeds into Reserves. When an mezzed PC is attacked the Momentum can be set to feed into the Reserve to Break Free and used up. There isn't a "wait and see if the BF drops" situation here, only a breek free enough situation. If a PC is mezzed and left alone - either any gained Momentum will bleed into the Reserve to Break Free and be used up or the PC is left alone in which case the duration of the mez will expire. Also, everyone will have access to mez resistance in one or more forms, be it from certain Buff sets, or from access through the Tertiary Sets.

And in case anyone wonders - NPCs use momentum built up while being attacked under mez with a threshold set to break free because they don't use Reserves. It may be that the NPC version of the Break Free uses all or a portion of their Momentum so that they don't become immune to various mezzes after a certain point or that NPC attrition rate of Momentum increases with the amount of Momentum gained to force a bleed off - the exact method requires testing / fine tuning for each type of NPC. This also does not count any NPCs that may have powers with mez resistance.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Comicsluvr wrote:
. If we can figure out a good alternative for it to be used on the enemies then maybe the same mechanic can work then they Hold US.
I believe we have this covered, barring any major changes during testing of course, but so far, it seems to work out. Here is what we're looking at:
For NPCs: attacking a mezzed NPC builds the NPC's momentum - set threshold (if needed for the NPC class) will allow the NPC to break free.
For PCs: PCs have Reserves. As Momentum naturally decays it feeds into Reserves. When an mezzed PC is attacked the Momentum can be set to feed into the Reserve to Break Free and used up. There isn't a "wait and see if the BF drops" situation here, only a breek free enough situation. If a PC is mezzed and left alone - either any gained Momentum will bleed into the Reserve to Break Free and be used up or the PC is left alone in which case the duration of the mez will expire. Also, everyone will have access to mez resistance in one or more forms, be it from certain Buff sets, or from access through the Tertiary Sets.
And in case anyone wonders - NPCs use momentum built up while being attacked under mez with a threshold set to break free because they don't use Reserves. It may be that the NPC version of the Break Free uses all or a portion of their Momentum so that they don't become immune to various mezzes after a certain point or that NPC attrition rate of Momentum increases with the amount of Momentum gained to force a bleed off - the exact method requires testing / fine tuning for each type of NPC. This also does not count any NPCs that may have powers with mez resistance.

Just to be on the safe side, some NPC might need Reserves as well. :{

Might be a poor Example:
Team thats fighting an AV has ALLOT of DeBuffers that drain the Endurance. AV knows he will fall very soon, so AV decides to use the Reserves meant for Dishing out Damage, etc... in the fight.. and instead uses the Reserves to Restore its own Endurance. :/ Smarty AV. :{ Fight drags out longer now. Might take just as long as it might for a team that didnt have as many Endurance DeBuffers. Oh well. >:}D

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Tannim, I'd need more

Tannim, I'd need more information than that in order to model how such a system would work, what its "failure modes" might be, how prone that system is to edge cases, and if the system is able to "degrade gracefully" when things don't go quite as planned.

On its face though, I'm not automatically convinced that this is necessarily an awesome setup you've devised. It potentially could be ... but that's a matter of Demon Summoning among the Details.


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Tannim, I'd need more information than that in order to model how such a system would work, what its "failure modes" might be, how prone that system is to edge cases, and if the system is able to "degrade gracefully" when things don't go quite as planned.
On its face though, I'm not automatically convinced that this is necessarily an awesome setup you've devised. It potentially could be ... but that's a matter of Demon Summoning among the Details.

It sounds like that was exactly Tannim's point- that they don't have a finalized system yet but do have a theoretical method/model that is workable and potentially awesome, and next step is hashing out those Demons.

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Sorry, I can't go into

Sorry, I can't go into details since I get divulge info on how our mez schema will work yet (we know how it works, just can't talk about the details yet). I know the devil is in those details yet and since you don't have them you can't grasp the wholeness of it.

And it isn't a system I came up with, it is the system the team developed over time. We have spent over a year literally the entirety of last year working out how the entire system is going to work. I can say that the in particulary, the mez/momentum-bleed-to-reserves/mez resistance/PC break free/NPC break free system is able to be tuned in multiple ways and I have faith in our math guru to work his number magic on this as well as he has with our other systems. Of course I don't expect the initial set up to hit the sweet spots, but I do suspect that we won't be seeing any major changes to this either. When you do get your hands on those details I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.


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One of the things I

One of the things I particularly disliked about City of Heroes was that it seemed/felt/was so insanely difficult to "Tune" things in the ways that the game needed. Everything was so "locked in" on a one size fits all framework that (of course) did not fit everything. Some things fit really well, while other things fit really poorly ... and some thing only fit because of ugly ugly dirty hacks (like Ouroboros zones). Building the game systems of City of Titans with what amount to "Trim Tabs" so that you can "Tune" different parts of the game locally without "overtuning" the rest of the game globally would seem to be a MUST HAVE back end feature to me.

Even if the multipliers/modifiers are almost always set to be x1 (and thus, "invisible") it's still useful to put them in so that you can "Tune" things specifically without needing to change the rules on EVERYTHING in order to accommodate a single edge case.


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What Tannim said excites me

What Tannim said excites me and sounds good. What Red just said makes sense too. I still believe that our Devs, having experienced much of what the players groaned about in CoH, will try to build in tooks that will improve CoT in the future.

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I find what Tannim said very

I find what Tannim said very exciting also.

It sounds like the devs have put a lot of thought, time, and effort into setting up an immanently ADJUSTABLE system.

With such a system in place, all that should be left is tweaking and dialing till the desired game-play feel is accomplished. And of course it'll be adaptable as the game grows and changes.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Leo:
Your comment simply gave me the opportunity to clarify for anyone who hadn't played City of Heroes, since not all of us in these forums have or did. Indeed, it's gratifying to learn that you already knew "all that" and didn't need a refresher course.
re: Confuse, Sleep, Immobilize, etc. vs Holds
Again, this gets down into issues of Structure and how you organize the game mechanical underpinnings ... and as always there's more than one way to play the meta-game.
[~snip~]

Sounds very clunky.

Regarding the taunt/placate part, it is what it is. I don't particularly mind what it'll be changed to since it wasn't that bad in CoX (don't think 'partial taunt' is even necessary since taunt is linked to threat as well and threat can overcome taunt...placate could be changed to not break with DoT or getting hit by the placated target but it's already a decently strong and self-limiting mez).

Confuse, I always felt, was too powerful and what you suggest does help mitigate that but kind of in a round-about way. I got no problem with how you decided to 'group' confuse with taunt although I don't particularly agree.

I don't like how you link mez and debuffs with fear, slow and immobilize. In this game, it's not needed since you have classes dedicated to each or are capable of both at the same time. If you want to go such a route, personally I think it should go in the other direction, making it so if you debuff a target to a certain threshold, there's the chance a specific mez will occur for a short time.

Which comes to the last three of sleep, stun and hold. Again, can't say I oppose your suggestions but I don't agree with them either. Personally, I don't think sleep and stun should be kept as they were in function because they are either redundant or of limited use. Varied degrees of impairment just muddles them further while your suggested aim of degrees of impairment itself seems too focused on holds. One could easily bleed off some of the effectiveness of holds onto sleeps and stuns to not only reign in the effectiveness of holds themselves but also strengthen and diversify the other mezzes (if they even will exist at all).

Tannim222 wrote:

Comicsluvr wrote:
. If we can figure out a good alternative for it to be used on the enemies then maybe the same mechanic can work then they Hold US.
I believe we have this covered, barring any major changes during testing of course, but so far, it seems to work out. Here is what we're looking at:
For NPCs: attacking a mezzed NPC builds the NPC's momentum - set threshold (if needed for the NPC class) will allow the NPC to break free.
For PCs: PCs have Reserves. As Momentum naturally decays it feeds into Reserves. When an mezzed PC is attacked the Momentum can be set to feed into the Reserve to Break Free and used up. There isn't a "wait and see if the BF drops" situation here, only a breek free enough situation. If a PC is mezzed and left alone - either any gained Momentum will bleed into the Reserve to Break Free and be used up or the PC is left alone in which case the duration of the mez will expire. Also, everyone will have access to mez resistance in one or more forms, be it from certain Buff sets, or from access through the Tertiary Sets.
And in case anyone wonders - NPCs use momentum built up while being attacked under mez with a threshold set to break free because they don't use Reserves. It may be that the NPC version of the Break Free uses all or a portion of their Momentum so that they don't become immune to various mezzes after a certain point or that NPC attrition rate of Momentum increases with the amount of Momentum gained to force a bleed off - the exact method requires testing / fine tuning for each type of NPC. This also does not count any NPCs that may have powers with mez resistance.

Looks like I'm playing devil's advocate again.

Reading more about momentum, I have two issues with how I'm imagining the mechanic:

1. Just how many avenues of use will this mechanic have? It feels like there is so many things involved with momentum, from mez to super-moves...will there be anything else tied to this mechanic? For NPCs, I thought this was their 'mode shift' where they use it to change their battle style occasionally in a fight to make fights varied. So it's also linked to mez resistance/break? Anything else will go beyond saturating the feature.

2. Uhg, Fury. I didn't mind Brute and Dominator was my 2nd favorite archetype, but momentum is starting to sound like Fury/Domination for everyone and I'm sure there are others who didn't like those archetypes because of those mechanics. When I initially heard of momentum, it sounded like an extra feature that you can just blow or utilize to maximize your role's performance. But if it's the primary mez counter, well...

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Every PC and NPC uses

Every PC and NPC uses Momentum regardless of classification. Some Masteries will utilize Momentum, some power sets will use it, but it will also have something to do with every character. Its base use for PCs is the natural degradation to bleed off into Reserves.

For NPCs some may use it for special moves or trigger for change in operation. This doesnt prevent it being used (when necessary) to provide a method for breaking free of mez prior to the expiration of duration.


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Leo_G wrote:
Leo_G wrote:

2. Uhg, Fury. I didn't mind Brute and Dominator was my 2nd favorite archetype, but momentum is starting to sound like Fury/Domination for everyone and I'm sure there are others who didn't like those archetypes because of those mechanics. When I initially heard of momentum, it sounded like an extra feature that you can just blow or utilize to maximize your role's performance. But if it's the primary mez counter, well...

One of the ... anti-social ... aspects of Fury was the fact that it decayed when it wasn't fueled. I experienced something similar with my Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker (Energy Absorption) as well as my Warshade (Eclipse) where the game mechanics favored, rewarded, encouraged and effectively demanded a mentality of GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO!!!!! that just never stopped. It was a Steamroller that broke if it ever stopped rolling.

Which meant that when playing a character with these sorts of powers and dynamics that there was always a pressure to just Scrapperlock RUSH everything. This isn't necessarily bad in and of itself ... but it does mean that a more casual playstyle, involving lots of chatting and socializing, is going to be at odds with the "demands" of these kinds of powers and the playstyle they encourage and support most effectively.

Getting on a "roll" could be rather fun, but it was also somewhat painful to have to "hop off the merry-go-round" whenever a pause was called for. So I'd like to second Leo's concern here about creating something that effectively functions like Fury For Everyone. The danger here is that you'll wind up with a system the discourages casual/friendly play in favor of DPS rush monsters. I for one would prefer to avoid such an outcome.


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Personally I think the whole

Personally I think the whole "problem" of getting on and then off of a "roll" as painlessly as can be expected is part of the fun of learning and adapting to that type of toon/build. I like my characters to have quirks and stuff you have to know how to deal with. Hell, in the first year or so of CoX everybody thought Radiation defenders were sub-par, then later I started getting random private messages begging me to come debuff Infernal for the umpteenth time. I used to love teaming up and doing TFs a lot and when I did, in the early days the chatter I used to have to read in team chat sounded like this:

Them: HEALER HEAL! MORE!
me: I only have one heal, and it's an aura, and its not going to keep everyone alive all by itself, even if I spam it a lot. Also, people aren't grouping up for Accelerate Metabolism like they should when that's ready, which would help. I do have some good AoE debuffs on the badguys though, and...
Them: SHUT UP! Your toon is useless. In a totally unrelated story, this boss is going down a lot faster now than he did when he was party-wiping us before we let you join. It must be that SO I just put in Brawl, so keep _ME_ healed-up, or we're toast ok? (Seriously, why do I always get stuck with the noob healer?)

Then with my Kinetics I used to get lauded by the scrappers and tankers for the awesome amount of healing I did and the blasters would be like "You can heal? Why are you not healing ME?!?" I like the awkwardness and complication of that. It makes the game better to have it, I think, despite the complaints of the uninformed.

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Leo_G wrote:
2. Uhg, Fury. I didn't mind Brute and Dominator was my 2nd favorite archetype, but momentum is starting to sound like Fury/Domination for everyone and I'm sure there are others who didn't like those archetypes because of those mechanics. When I initially heard of momentum, it sounded like an extra feature that you can just blow or utilize to maximize your role's performance. But if it's the primary mez counter, well...
One of the ... anti-social ... aspects of Fury was the fact that it decayed when it wasn't fueled. I experienced something similar with my Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker (Energy Absorption) as well as my Warshade (Eclipse) where the game mechanics favored, rewarded, encouraged and effectively demanded a mentality of GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO!!!!! that just never stopped. It was a Steamroller that broke if it ever stopped rolling.
Which meant that when playing a character with these sorts of powers and dynamics that there was always a pressure to just Scrapperlock RUSH everything. This isn't necessarily bad in and of itself ... but it does mean that a more casual playstyle, involving lots of chatting and socializing, is going to be at odds with the "demands" of these kinds of powers and the playstyle they encourage and support most effectively.
Getting on a "roll" could be rather fun, but it was also somewhat painful to have to "hop off the merry-go-round" whenever a pause was called for. So I'd like to second Leo's concern here about creating something that effectively functions like Fury For Everyone. The danger here is that you'll wind up with a system the discourages casual/friendly play in favor of DPS rush monsters. I for one would prefer to avoid such an outcome.

There is a psychoogical factor that Fury played into when it was used, the player knew getting more Fury made their character "better". And we will have Masteries that work like this and power sets that use Momentum gain (like creating stacks of...) or at thresholds of effect. But not every Mastery or Power Set will use it. Again, its baseline effect is that any built up momentum decays and creates reserves. As players use any powers - be they buffs or any form of attack (debuffs and controls included) they gain momentum. But if they do not have a Mastery or Power Set that uses Momentum nothing changes for the character as it builds.

What does happen during the down time between fights is Momentum will decay and refill the character's Reserves. Now downtime is the thing that provides the capability for improved performance later when action is happening because you have Reserves to call upon during action to improve damage, break free from mez, heal your self, and so on. Another way to look at it is combat sets up the reward for downtime, downtime is rewarded which can improve combat. The system feeds into itself.

Masteries and Power Sets that don't rely on Momentum will enjoy benefits of being able to take breaks from action from gaining reserves. While the Masteries and Power Sets that do rely on Momentum want that gogogo mentality but this means they could have less breaks from action.

And adjusting momentum gain and attrition rates is one of the thigs that are tunable on a per mastery / power set situation it's not fixed for all PCs for example so we aren't boxed in on what we can do with it.


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Well I'm sort of confused.

Well I'm sort of confused. When you started describing momentum reserves, I started thinking of like 4 'baubles' next to/under the momentum bar that light up as momentum decays. Perhaps I should see it more like a 'tray' that sort of replaces inspirations? The way you describe it, I'm rationalizing it like "If you take a break to let momentum decay, you get free 'inspirations' to pop".

Tannim222 wrote:

Masteries and Power Sets that don't rely on Momentum will enjoy benefits of being able to take breaks from action from gaining reserves. While the Masteries and Power Sets that do rely on Momentum want that gogogo mentality but this means they could have less breaks from action.
And adjusting momentum gain and attrition rates is one of the thigs that are tunable on a per mastery / power set situation it's not fixed for all PCs for example so we aren't boxed in on what we can do with it.

Do you think that might pit some players or sets at odds with each other? I'm sure if people are looking at it from the perspective of CoH, such a split of play styles would be seen as a detriment. From the perspective of CoT, however, I'd imagine there would be factors that break up the combat? But maybe not necessarily just breaks, like maybe the map has points to interact with and those that don't mind breaks can tend to those while the 'fury junkies' clean up the mobs?

I dunno. I'm just thinking of the ramifications with the limited viewpoint I'm using. I remain skeptical.

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like this?

like this?

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Indeed, Reserves are the CoT

Indeed, Reserves are the CoT version of the old game's inspirations. Instead of getting an insp drop chance on defeat of a mob, PCs gain momentum by using powers, when momentum decays naturally it fills Reserves which can do different things like inspirations.

As for players pitting against one another based on play style on build type, the expectation is that it won't amount to much difference than the old game in that some players can and will rush ahead and some will require more downtime to get back into action. At some point those who rush on will need to stop and those who don't rush on will push their limits to keep going. We do view all for a so travel time, including travel time between spawns as down time. And again the use of any power including buffs from Support sets can gain momentum so even those set up before combat or buff during g combat aid in gaining momentum it isn't solely reliant upon "attack a thing" though certainly the majority of powers are more on the side of attack a thing in some way.

The important thing for us is to provide the option for multiple play styles and then it's up to players to figure out how to gel with one another. Typical pick up groups will of course require the most effort on gelling, while super groups and familiar players will figure out ways to work with one another easier).

We may place 'boundaries' of expected pace of combat by tuning momentum gain and decay rates, energy management, and expected range of performance over time index, but players being who they are will certainly break those modes to a degree. Even in this we view as ok - encourage even, so long as the minimum bounds of expected performance don't get broken (which we know it won't as combat sims have been and will continue to be done) we have an eye on what the possible upper bounds of performance looks like.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Indeed, Reserves are the CoT version of the old game's inspirations. Instead of getting an insp drop chance on defeat of a mob, PCs gain momentum by using powers, when momentum decays naturally it fills Reserves which can do different things like inspirations.
As for players pitting against one another based on play style on build type, the expectation is that it won't amount to much difference than the old game in that some players can and will rush ahead and some will require more downtime to get back into action. At some point those who rush on will need to stop and those who don't rush on will push their limits to keep going. We do view all for a so travel time, including travel time between spawns as down time. And again the use of any power including buffs from Support sets can gain momentum so even those set up before combat or buff during g combat aid in gaining momentum it isn't solely reliant upon "attack a thing" though certainly the majority of powers are more on the side of attack a thing in some way.
The important thing for us is to provide the option for multiple play styles and then it's up to players to figure out how to gel with one another. Typical pick up groups will of course require the most effort on gelling, while super groups and familiar players will figure out ways to work with one another easier).
We may place 'boundaries' of expected pace of combat by tuning momentum gain and decay rates, energy management, and expected range of performance over time index, but players being who they are will certainly break those modes to a degree. Even in this we view as ok - encourage even, so long as the minimum bounds of expected performance don't get broken (which we know it won't as combat sims have been and will continue to be done) we have an eye on what the possible upper bounds of performance looks like.

Interesting. :)

Sounds like Speed Runs might not be a thing anymore?

For a Min Max'er ( like myself, or just say a Mad Max'er. hmmmm.. maybe that will be my SG's name ), how close will I be able to simulate this play-style:
- Speed run an ITF with moderate to High difficulty set.
- On a toon that doesnt really have high Defense / Resistance, like a Fire / Kin Corruptor maybe. (Mids)
- Who was able to Plow through foes, while converting Other Inspiration drops into Purples (Defense) with a keybind. Was Instant.
- When defeated, took 9 seconds to run to the Inspirations vendor and stock up on Purples (defense) and head back into the mission.
Side Note:
When Tanking an ITF on my Fire/Kin Corruptor, Just like on my Fire/Kin 'Troller...
- Pop one Purple Defense to average my Defense around 60+.
- Pop AIM to Boost To Hit + Damage.
- Stun the clumped group 1st with Spring Attack.
- As most are knocked to the ground:
- Follow up with Fulcrum Shift to DeBuff foes,
- Siphon Power the Boss (and repeat every so often (3 stacked), to keep the boss from dealing any meaning-full Damage),
- then Rain of Fire to slow everyone,
- etc etc etc
- before the last foe goes down, Siphon Speed or Transference to refill Stanina so no down time till next group.

Finish ITF in 28 minutes. ;D
Can I still do that? :)

Can I use a vendor to Refill my Reserves?
Can I specify which Reserves should Refill More often? Defense being 80%.
Is there a Reserve for Awakens? How to Self 'Wake?
Does a particular Reserve get Flushed down the drain when Defeated?
Is there a way to force Momentum into a particular Reserve at the Expense of Heath (or other)? (Press and HOLD F1 for more than 2 seconds starts to refill that Reserve? Stops refill on Releasing F1)
Ex:
if a tank, Might also apply a SLOW effect, other AT's might be different,
... or ...
just base it of the type of Reserve being Refilled?
ex:
if forcing a Damage Reserve to refill, apply a defense based DeBuff for a short while, depending on the Refilled amount...
if forcing a Defense based Reserve to refill, apply a Damage DeBuff for a short while, etc..
etc..

This way, you're not taking them Out of the fight, just Slowing them down a bit. ;)

Downtime could be a Buzz-Kill for my types. :<

Also, is there away to Increase a Reserves capacity from 10 Inspirations to say 15? In-Game Store item?
'Cause, I might just want all Defense inspirations. :D

edit: if no Momentum, press and HOLD F1 for more than 5 seconds and existing reserves are siphoned to fill one other (whatever F1 might be). Might refill slower, but still possible. Might be done out of battle. :{

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You will hVe to wait for the

You will hVe to wait for the official info for mode details on Reserves. For. Ow though simply think of them as inspirations.


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I have to say I like what I

I have to say I like what I've heard of the Momentum/Reserve system, on the face of it, even better than the CoH Inspiration system.

Aside from it being extremely flexible tool for the Devs to direct the ebb and flow and feel of battle in the game, I like it better thematically for a Superhero game too--a Superhero digging deeper into their inner reserves when needed is just spot-on for comic books and movies.

Excited!

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

You will hVe to wait for the official info for mode details on Reserves. For. Ow though simply think of them as inspirations.

I guess we will hVe to WaT. ;D
Thanks Tannim. ;)