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[Gameplay Design] Power Balance Dynamic

bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
Playing CoH got me thinking: the way its power frameworks are set up is that each attack ends up being used fairly regularly while fighting. Most of that is due to a pretty rigid framework of course: all characters are archtypes where essentially taking just about entirely powers within your core two choices are guaranteed to usually grant you the strongest, most synergistic abilities for your character. Also the fact that each of those attacks and abilities are required to fill in dead-space that would otherwise be spent waiting to have certain attacks come off cooldown.

However the consequences of this design made me realize a few things:
  • Combat in CoH is so much easier to read than CO, since usually it's fighting at a pace slow enough to see each attack animation connect properly. Part of this is legitimately due to the game just being slower, but as a benefit it's enabled the game to allow the player to react better to actually-tactical enemy gimmicks rather than what most factions in CO boil down to in order to be difficult, which is almost entirely denial-of-action via requiring the user to block constantly due to giant burst damage or overwhelming sources of overlapping knock/hold applications.
  • The animations that result in combat end up looking much more lively in CoH. A SJ Scrapper will be throwing a variety of jabs, knee slams, spinning kicks and haymakers at their enemies regularly during a fight. Meanwhile an MA DPS is usually throwing the exact same right-arm Burning Chi-Fist repeatedly at the knee of a giant bone chicken that does not even flinch in reaction, only stopping for a few seconds to either throw a single trip-kick to refresh demolish or (very unoptimally) use their energy builder to be able to punch more.
  • While challenge and management of enemies in CO is about knowing when to react with blocks, most of CoH is about carefully tracking your input across the keyboard/power bar to throw your abilities out with the correct timing. I'm going to be honest, it keeps me more engaged overall. I'm serious, there's times I've been doing DPS during an event or cosmic where I've nearly fallen asleep because it's just pressing the same key over and over again.

While some of that above is still very pertinent to the state of CO's gameplay (especially the denial of control parts), that's a can-of-worms I'll touch on later or in some different place. This discussion is about:
Power Balance Dynamic: How to Make The Player Use More of Their Power Choices More Equally

There's a number of different ways to approach this, but for the sake of CO's appeal of its core gameplay, I'm going to be avoiding the most obvious answers - that is, no, having all attacks have cooldown would be terrible, that's not what I'm asking for. Rather, I think there's ways to make the build-up and payoff of attack powers be a bit less 'linear' than it is now.

The core issue that caused us to get here is that, across just about every single powerset (and especially the ones that got power reviews) they essentially boil down to this pattern:

Combo/Blast utility power to place debuff on enemy (T0) -> AoE damage ability to defeat enemies that might contribute to applying or refreshing debuffs (T1) -> Higher-power utility ability that usually is responsible for refreshing debuff (T2) -> Single-target nuke (T3)

There's slight variations on this depending, but the issues it creates includes:
  • Massive variance between sets in how long they take to get 'online'. Some sets such as Muni (burst shot) have a fairly good T0 for various functions of interruption, utility, damage, etc. Others like Might (beatdown) and Telekinesis (tk ranged combo i forget the name) have their functions entirely eclipsed by later choices that often do what they attempt to do faster or while doing more damage or affecting more enemies...
  • The above point then means that in some cases the user is forced at some point to respec into a different build at a later time once they have their proper final attacks in place. That's an unintuitive point that can cause newer players, who might have some interest in freeforming, to become discouraged when they discover they haven't saved up resources for that change or realize they now have way too many attacks they just don't use anymore.
  • The core attack cycle that it enforces is: how little of my other attacks can I get away with using? DPS in this game is all about just how much of your T3 you can spend doing while still maintaining the other debuffs that help support it. This pattern shows up a lot in advantages, where the T3 ends up doing 30%+ damage when the target's affected by Debuff XYZ.
  • More often than not there's also a large number of various utility abilities that players can choose that exist out of this purview, and so similar to above there's also the question of how few attack powers a build needs to achieve optimal DPS? Because if you do that, that opens you up to more slots you can devote to being able to keep an AD up, or to be able to heal allies, or summon rings to achieve greater defense, energy, etc... Power slots are a rare commodity, and when you have the entire choice of all Freeform powers to pick from, selecting the absolute best is sometimes the only option.

My suggested approach boils down to this:
  • Power to the EB - The Energy Builder should become all the more integral to operations of a powerset. Not by advantages, by default. And it should be made in some way to deal sizable damage, perhaps not off the get-go but maybe through some in-set synergy or later advantages. What if ranking up an EB contributed significant damage boosts to the power? That would make it a more appealing choice or alternative to using those advantage points on just R3ing a T3. What if EBs did more damage if you were lower on energy?
  • The main damage dealers are T0 - For a couple of reasons. First is that, by far, almost all the T0 attacks benefit from having the most animation effort put into them from a dev standpoint. Combos require the developers to create a chaining set of 3+ attacks that activate in order. Blasts often have emination points to be accounted for. Why waste all that existing effort on attacks that we won't be using in the end? This is similar to how CoH does it in a way: almost globally your very first attack power in your tree ends up being the one that puts out the highest Damage per Activation Cycle (accounting for the attack's cooldown) and so it statistically ends up being the attack you see the most of, and get the most damage from. And for the few exceptions to that, this highest DPS choice is still very early on in your attack choice tree, and every other attack serves as augments or situational alternatives to that attack (sniping, AoE coverage, debuff, situational burst damage). Sounds kind of similar to TGM and old Munitions huh? But walking into the next part we get a strong key:
  • Attacks from one set globally obey consistent energy costs dependent on range and AoE - This is partly because Energy Unlocks, as a mechanic, are trampling all over the concept of Energy Cost VS DPS being a valid tool by which to balance attacks anymore. Given the choice between an attack that has low energy cost and high DPS, and an attack with high energy cost and HIGHER DPS, which do you choose? Well, usually the latter if you can manage the power. Problem is, in cases where that's usually the issue the playerbase complains about said power being impossible to use and then the devs buff the energy-generation abilities of the associated set to now make it an accessible power. Good, now that lower-cost attack is never used because everybody's now got EU's to manage dealing higher DPS. So, just kind of get that baggage out of the way and make the balance of energy-usage more strongly based around whether a set's made to utilize END or REC heavily or not.
  • Less significant differences in DPS between tiers of attack. - If you give a player a toolset of attacks to work with, the best way to ensure they'll use all of them is to make each one already a decent choice to begin with. And that's a huge point to actually realize, because when it comes down to it that still can produce a pretty wide variety of gameplay moods when the attacks get executed: Haymaker and Lightning Arc could theoretically do the exact same core DPS, but for a huge number of reasons they would still feel fundamentally different as attacks. Same could be said for whether you throw out a Dragon Kick or a set of Thundering Kicks: Both belong in the same set, but based on metrics other than energy and DPS, they can still achieve different results, AoE coverage, debuff effects... And that brings us to what caps off the different sets to bring things into perspective:
  • T1-T3 serve as alternative tools to T0. Your core moveset of EB and T0 now becomes the fundamentals upon which you can move forward with an intended role. Optimally now your T0 is your main DPS dealer for most situations: it provides the most consistent, most efficient, purest DPS you can put out to an enemy. Now your other attacks then develop into whether you want to serve as a tank, a DPS, a healer, whatever, on top of that fundamental core that basically says: I am competent at building energy and dealing with enemies.

As a hypothetical example, let's look at how a Might DPS would play out under this hypothetical situation: Most attacks would retain their usual functionality and old properties under the model, but the big callouts here would be the following:
  • Beatdown now provides high single-target DPS, which escalates further if the target it's hitting is affected by Demolish. Each second hit applies Retaliation to the user, which means that Beatdown can also trail into a different might attack if the user feels like ending their setup with some powerful Spike Damage.
  • Haymaker's charge-damage model is now a bit more drastic: to get the most DPS from the attack you need to full-charge, making it much more risky than just using Beatdown. If you do unleash a full-charge, however, you demolish your target and deal high damage. Performing the attack while under the effect of Retaliation (either from blocking or setting up with Beatdown) speeds up the charge to make it less risky, and automatically causes the Haymaker to stun regardless of charge levels, giving it some dual-functionality... Provided you took some lower-rank abilities to provide for it of course. This effect also has a small internal cooldown.
  • Following a Haymaker from a full Uppercut generates a powerful healing burst. If this is done in context of the Beatdown setup, this means that the Uppercut will use up Retaliation, but then you won't get the fastest possible Damage Spike from Haymaker. Otherwise, pretty good choice for quick interruptions still. Just, not as much core DPS synergy as Beatdown but there are situations where just spamming a ton of Uppercuts might be good for keeping a single target from fighting back.
  • Landing a Roomsweeper while under the effects of Retaliation provides a movement speed buff, and increases the range of your lunges. Reiterating: attacks like this all do DPS roughly analogous to attacks like Haymaker now, with AoE being a bit less energy optimal due to, obviously, the number of targets affected. the point is that combat in these situations is now much more based off of whether it's appropriate or useful to execute the given attack for the fight, rather than just trying to get the highest DPS.

The end result is:
- Less consequences for executing the wrong attacks
- More focus on tactical advantages and organic synergy between powers
- More possible visible/animation flavor for different player characters
- Builds come online faster and are more competent at fighting even at lower levels
- Necessitate less unintuitive rebuilding in the middle of leveling a freeform, and more incentive to experiment
- Simplify balancing by removing the need to keep track of a varied DPS/Energy curve
- Allow more focus on combat to be about applying punctuated control, damage, etc. Rather than just trying to maintain a baseline of optimal DPS

next up someday: CoH inspiration from enemy factions and their tactics
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Comments

  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited May 2019
    This right here has actually been a long-standing complaint I've had about CO's gameplay, one that unfortunately the power set updates have only been partially able to remedy. Specifically, in a situation where I am fighting a large number of things who are dealing threatening damage and denial-of-action the combat works great as the variety of powers I've taken can be meaningfully used to win the fight. Where it falls extremely flat is fighting bosses since (a) most my denial-of-action powers don't do anything to the boss, and (b) creating a comblicated rotation of powers is just going to lower my dps in comparison to spamming one attack over and over.

    Your idea here addresses that, so overall I like it. Now for some specifics.


    Power to the EB - Right now we have some things like this. That power in Vindicator that makes your EB apply a resistence debuff, some stuff in Protector. There's that one spec that makes your EB snare things, and the snare stacks with other snares. So the game already has some things like what you're talking about, it just needs to be expanded on and in some cases buffed. I know that what you want is default functionality, but I think having it be based on your specializations gives it the opportunity to both be more interesting and add some meaningful choices to the building process. Of course, "why not both?" applies. Just as a general idea though, it makes sense to try to bring EBs back into the gamplay loop since every powerset has one and some of them look really cool if you rank them up.

    The main damage dealers are T0 - Mmmmm, you make some very good points about dev effort. However, I'm wary of combos being main damage dealers because I think about my poor fingers and my family's history with arthiritis. As for all that dev effort being wasted, another way to solve that is to just swap the powers where that applies up to a higher tier, swap a higher tier back down to T0, and swap their mechanics.

    Attacks from one set globally obey consisten energy costs dependent on range and aoe - This sounds interesting, and energy gameplay is certainly something that needs to make a meaningful comeback. However, I think this section needs to be elaborated on a bit more because I'm not sure what exactly you're suggesting, like in specific "this should cost this and that should cost that" terms. I'm especially interested what specifically you mean by making the energy-usage of a set based around end or rec.

    Less Significant differences in DPS between tiers of an attack - I'm not convinced this will have any real progress towards what you're trying to achieve. Still just leaves us spamming one attack in the situations where we spam one attack now, which is bosses. Only effect it would have is there would be a large number of attacks we could be uniletarally spamming. Also if single target and aoe attacks have the same core dps we risk single target attacks being pointless. Of course this is all in a vacuum; if there's something else going on here to keep these attacks useful then there's no need to worry about that.

    T1-T3 serve as alternative tools to T0 - This sounds pretty interesting as well. Not sure I like the idea of specific attacks being devoted to specific roles however. What if there's a tank attack that I think would look really cool on my dps? I greatly prefer how it works right now with Advantages making a given power better for one role or another. I'd rather expand on that.


    So on to the hypothetical example. I like it! It kind of sounds like the old laser sword dynamic, but with the dumb rng thrown out and a lot more utility packed in - or a bit like Telepathy with the Mind Break changes. Not sure why uppercutting would ever heal you but I'm sure someone can think up a good comic book explanation for it ( something something adrenaline ). What I like is that this has the potential to create a flow chart of decisions starting from one power and creating a tree of potential interactions, and from this example it seems like it's not overly rigid which is another plus. Granted I imagine this example is a bit limited in scope because you didn't want to add several paragraphs to an already long post, so the only real suggestion I have with this is that it doesn't add enough interactions!

    On the other hand my only real criticizm of your example is that it doesn't do a good job of explaining the things I was hoping for some elaboration on above. In fact your example doesn't actually use some of the things you mentioned above, and wouldn't require them. It seems like primarily what your example demonstrates is that having powers apply buffs/debuffs which other effects can then benefit of is a good pathway towards getting people to no longer just spam 1 power repeatedly. It's something the game does in a few limited situations, and something I agree it should do a lot more. The other suggestions you made may or may not be required to get this to happen - the damage normalization seems like it would likely help a lot, even if not as extreme as "every power does the same dps".


    End result:
    - It actually seems like this does the opposite, making actual consequences for executing a wrong attack. i.e. I needed the heal, but didn't use Uppercut, and now I'm done for. I mean, I like that and don't consider it a negative. Or did you mean "elimenated the consequence of not spamming the 1 primary nuke a powerset has"?
    - tactical damage and organic synergy would definitely be an outcome of this
    - certainly more visible flavor during boss fights. during fights against groups I imagine it would largely remain the same, but it's pretty good there already so not an issue.
    - it would make builds more interesting at lower levels. in fact, this would probably make me enjoy leveling up new toons again
    - I'm already experimenting in my head with the example build you gave, so yeah. also it's GAMEPLAY experimentation, which is literally the thing that makes me like the games I like
    - it might simplify balance in that way, but would complicate it a lot cause of all the possible interactions
    - so basically more of what's in my qwz vidoes. I'm liking the bullet points on the back of this box!
    ​​
  • deadman20deadman20 Posts: 1,529 Arc User
    bluhman wrote: »
    Power to the EB - The Energy Builder should become all the more integral to operations of a powerset. Not by advantages, by default. And it should be made in some way to deal sizable damage, perhaps not off the get-go but maybe through some in-set synergy or later advantages. What if ranking up an EB contributed significant damage boosts to the power? That would make it a more appealing choice or alternative to using those advantage points on just R3ing a T3. What if EBs did more damage if you were lower on energy?

    Things like energy builders should certainly be more relevant to a rotation, as their current state always makes me feel that they're ineffective as an actual power, only really useful to get the powers needed for the build earlier than if you picked from a different set. Using the energy builder always felt out of place, as it has very low output and little in the way of building synergy even within their own sets. The way I see it, Energy Builders should perform more reliably as a synergy-building tool, applying whatever relevant buffs or debuffs are in the set they exist in. Essentially, taking the place of the current dynamic most T0 Combos and Blasts perform right now. And they need to do this innately. I'm not saying we should have Hawk's Talons apply something as strong as Shredded, but doing something like having Throw Fire apply Fiery Escalation or Eldritch Bolts applying Mystified is more along the lines of what I believe these powers should do.

    With how fast most Energy Builders are though, slowing them down a bit to allow for 100% procs on whatever effects they'll apply is probably necessary, perhaps with a boost to damage per hit. Think of them akin to auto-attacks from MOBA games like League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm, where they'll be a reliable method of stacking things up to improve that powerset's functionality and be a starting point for synergies rather than just being a pick to open up the later powers in the set.​​
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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Oh one thing that this reminded me of was the one time Aesica asked me to justify why it was okay that all melee stuns are basically the same power with different visuals, and responded by saying that's not okay it sucks and melee stuns need something to make them different from one another. Your suggestion is actually a good way to do that, as each stun could be given something that other powers could interact with, and then these stuns would be useful even in situations where you can't stun anything. That example thingy actually is the solution to a number of issues.​​
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    deadman20 wrote: »
    bluhman wrote: »
    Power to the EB - The Energy Builder should become all the more integral to operations of a powerset. Not by advantages, by default. And it should be made in some way to deal sizable damage, perhaps not off the get-go but maybe through some in-set synergy or later advantages. What if ranking up an EB contributed significant damage boosts to the power? That would make it a more appealing choice or alternative to using those advantage points on just R3ing a T3. What if EBs did more damage if you were lower on energy?

    Things like energy builders should certainly be more relevant to a rotation, as their current state always makes me feel that they're ineffective as an actual power, only really useful to get the powers needed for the build earlier than if you picked from a different set. Using the energy builder always felt out of place, as it has very low output and little in the way of building synergy even within their own sets. The way I see it, Energy Builders should perform more reliably as a synergy-building tool, applying whatever relevant buffs or debuffs are in the set they exist in. Essentially, taking the place of the current dynamic most T0 Combos and Blasts perform right now. And they need to do this innately. I'm not saying we should have Hawk's Talons apply something as strong as Shredded, but doing something like having Throw Fire apply Fiery Escalation or Eldritch Bolts applying Mystified is more along the lines of what I believe these powers should do.

    With how fast most Energy Builders are though, slowing them down a bit to allow for 100% procs on whatever effects they'll apply is probably necessary, perhaps with a boost to damage per hit. Think of them akin to auto-attacks from MOBA games like League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm, where they'll be a reliable method of stacking things up to improve that powerset's functionality and be a starting point for synergies rather than just being a pick to open up the later powers in the set.​​

    It's a challenge since not every set so far has a buff/debuff that fits that mold just yet, even after the redos. Having them potentially be refreshes for those effects, though, that might be an idea.

    Slower EBs tend to be much less popular since they typically feel more clunky than faster ones (see: Steady Shot), part of that though is that those slower EBs also become a much longer period of time spent... You guessed it, not performing powers with optimal DPS, so the impact of accidentally performing a single burst of Gunslinger is much lower than performing a single burst of Steady Shot, because it's only half as long for that small bit of energy you might need. Under a more equalized DPS model having them be slower probably wouldn't be that big of a deal.


    Another reason I feel like a change like this should go into place is input variation. Even considering the possibility of extreme cooldown reduction in CoX builds still rely on a minimum of 2-3 attack powers, but more importantly, used in a more even proportion. Compare the inputs required to play a Street-Justice Scrapper in CoX, with inputs used to play Martial Arts DPS in CO:

    Button presses to execute combo into Spinning Strike, then another into Sweeping Cross:
    1->2->3->5->1->3->2->4->1->2->3->5->...

    Energy Builder activate into Thundering Kicks combo, to Burning Chi Fists + Inexorable Tides for refresh:
    1->2->2->2->3->3->3->3->4->3->3->3->...

    There's a lot more variance in what the top does, and in a much more equal number. Even if it's skimmed down to only using two attacks, those two options would be used in a cycle - that's just what cooldowns force you to do in CoX because cooldown's don't even start proccing until your attack animation has completed. You are guaranteed to only be able to get maximal DPS if you have more than one attack.

    CO doesn't have that limitation, and so keeping up a proper max-DPS flow usually boils down to once again focusing almost entirely on using that max-damage option as often as possible. Even besides animation-variety that's still a lot of single-button inputs.

    Ultimately I think it's a bit futile to compare between the two though since the heart of the suggestion isn't even really to take influence directly from CoX. Having low-tier options be foundations that then later options provide situational alternatives to, or as would be in the case of DPS, buffs, setups, or payoffs for the early-tier options, would provide a lot in at least closing some of the build performance gap that exists between the different role styles.
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