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Energy Stats and How I Fail to Come Up With a Controversial Title.
meeoeoowie
Posts: 78 Arc User
I would love if your reply-posts could avoid being imposing or fiercely stating one way or another; I don't think harsh agreement or likewise disagreement spurs much in terms of productive thinking, so kind of putting myself out there by asking for a somewhat civil suggestion/discussion dealio around the topic? Try to consider why it could or couldn't work, I'm sure everyone has their own ideas around this!
...Yes, I use "dealio" sometimes. Be kind, please.
This isn't so much a doom-saying or crusading statement to be made on saving the game, or averting the dying of the game, or really anything, I guess? (wow, good going, me)
I had an idea that I figured was sort of neat, and maybe interesting to discuss now that the development team has shown and expressed interest in balancing the game and finding a game-mechanical formula, or something.
And having said that,
We've got these stats, those Endurance bits and Recovery bobbits, and a lot of sets being worked into requiring some fairly steep pricing and rotation in the energy and performance department, sometimes separately.
I was having a chit-chat with some friends about how the game could be if... let's say Endurance, wasn't so much a "Increase your max energy"-Stat as a primary function, or even a function at all! Wouldn't it be kind of cool if the knock resistance on Strength (and Hold resistance on Ego) was tuned down a little within those stats, and Endurance as the name implies, gave your character a more noticeable ability to shrug off those kinds of effects?
It goes without saying that energy numbers, and to a lesser extent certain damage and scaling numbers, would need a number-squish to compensate for a change so drastic. You wouldn't have this sort of forced relationship to energy stats, and energy would be solved through a different, less intrusive means. We could have interesting stats that felt not only more rich on flavor (Like creating a Superman-like that could really fend off knocks because you went for that), but stats that felt more like a choice you made, like back in PnP games where you maybe improved your ability to convince or intimidate others through Charisma-like stats.
What I'm sort of saying, if I can shorten it for ya:
Wouldn't it be cool if you had three stats and chose them, and they sort of felt like passive boons you scaled up, without them being so aggressively tied into your power build? Energy in this game can get placed fiercely in the forefront, and I don't think running out of energy is an experience that anyone enjoys combating. (though tell me otherwise!)
I sort of just had an idea with this, and I felt like it was an idea that could stick with people, to make all stats feel more like Constitution, Ego, Dexterity, and Strength. Right now other stats don't compete for that level of usage and gain, but if stats were more leveled with obvious benefits, stat-picking would potentially feel far more rich.
Lastly, I am likely to add to the thread with ideas, should it become a topic in any way, where I could try and share some ideas, draft, and enjoy replying to neat ideas of your own!
...Yes, I use "dealio" sometimes. Be kind, please.
This isn't so much a doom-saying or crusading statement to be made on saving the game, or averting the dying of the game, or really anything, I guess? (wow, good going, me)
I had an idea that I figured was sort of neat, and maybe interesting to discuss now that the development team has shown and expressed interest in balancing the game and finding a game-mechanical formula, or something.
And having said that,
We've got these stats, those Endurance bits and Recovery bobbits, and a lot of sets being worked into requiring some fairly steep pricing and rotation in the energy and performance department, sometimes separately.
I was having a chit-chat with some friends about how the game could be if... let's say Endurance, wasn't so much a "Increase your max energy"-Stat as a primary function, or even a function at all! Wouldn't it be kind of cool if the knock resistance on Strength (and Hold resistance on Ego) was tuned down a little within those stats, and Endurance as the name implies, gave your character a more noticeable ability to shrug off those kinds of effects?
It goes without saying that energy numbers, and to a lesser extent certain damage and scaling numbers, would need a number-squish to compensate for a change so drastic. You wouldn't have this sort of forced relationship to energy stats, and energy would be solved through a different, less intrusive means. We could have interesting stats that felt not only more rich on flavor (Like creating a Superman-like that could really fend off knocks because you went for that), but stats that felt more like a choice you made, like back in PnP games where you maybe improved your ability to convince or intimidate others through Charisma-like stats.
What I'm sort of saying, if I can shorten it for ya:
Wouldn't it be cool if you had three stats and chose them, and they sort of felt like passive boons you scaled up, without them being so aggressively tied into your power build? Energy in this game can get placed fiercely in the forefront, and I don't think running out of energy is an experience that anyone enjoys combating. (though tell me otherwise!)
I sort of just had an idea with this, and I felt like it was an idea that could stick with people, to make all stats feel more like Constitution, Ego, Dexterity, and Strength. Right now other stats don't compete for that level of usage and gain, but if stats were more leveled with obvious benefits, stat-picking would potentially feel far more rich.
Lastly, I am likely to add to the thread with ideas, should it become a topic in any way, where I could try and share some ideas, draft, and enjoy replying to neat ideas of your own!
[A Place to Post Power Concepts] - I don't update this thing as often as I want to, but it is not abandoned!
[Daily Login Rewards] - They sure would spice things up a bit!
[Monthly Rewards and Silver Players] - Surely there should be some way to get them, no matter how difficult!
[Discussion Concerning Event Powers] - Feel like you're missing out on Holy Water? Uh, probably shouldn't.
[Discussion Concerning Energy Stats] - More or less what it says on the tin, there.
[Analysis of Sorcery Copy-Powers] - I showcase some visual chopjobs, and such.
[Analysis of a Poison Spread Bug] - The different interactions Virulent Propagation and Bite has with all poisons.
[Daily Login Rewards] - They sure would spice things up a bit!
[Monthly Rewards and Silver Players] - Surely there should be some way to get them, no matter how difficult!
[Discussion Concerning Event Powers] - Feel like you're missing out on Holy Water? Uh, probably shouldn't.
[Discussion Concerning Energy Stats] - More or less what it says on the tin, there.
[Analysis of Sorcery Copy-Powers] - I showcase some visual chopjobs, and such.
[Analysis of a Poison Spread Bug] - The different interactions Virulent Propagation and Bite has with all poisons.
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Give END and REC different uses, and let in set synergies manage your energy without having to use specific energy management stats.
That was more or less my opening statement-thing, but any ideas revolving around those kinds of stats are interesting as far as I'm concerned!
[Daily Login Rewards] - They sure would spice things up a bit!
[Monthly Rewards and Silver Players] - Surely there should be some way to get them, no matter how difficult!
[Discussion Concerning Event Powers] - Feel like you're missing out on Holy Water? Uh, probably shouldn't.
[Discussion Concerning Energy Stats] - More or less what it says on the tin, there.
[Analysis of Sorcery Copy-Powers] - I showcase some visual chopjobs, and such.
[Analysis of a Poison Spread Bug] - The different interactions Virulent Propagation and Bite has with all poisons.
Member of Paragon Dawn: Because some people like friendly helpful communities.
Yeah some things are broken... no I don't use/abuse them.. where would be the fun in that?
PS - I enjoy figuring out how to fulfill my character's energy needs ^_^
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
The argument of enjoying the struggle and payoff of sorting out things such as energy sits well, since I've tackled it a lot, but then I find excitement in a new prospect of sort of being selective of your character's strengths, as opposed to making sure your stats cover the strengths and the requirements they set (mouthful there, sorry).
The main "issue" I based this thread on is how your decision-making in the stat department is heavily influenced by requirement, as opposed to synergy. Working for the requirement of a power is brilliant, even though I think powers should have more power-based potential available to unlock strengths, such as powers like Rimefire, which has a distinct "proc" when you should use it, creating an artificial rotation in your build.
A part of me probably just wants to see a more interesting reason to pick things like Primary Stat - Recovery, so that the superstat value is balanced better. You sort of want to go one way or another with this? You either want powers that genuinely pay off for not even being able to go heavy into a damage stat, because it either has a "deals damage based on max energy", or has some baked in "energy=potential". You either want powers to reach for energy stats, or improve things like the Endurance and Recovery spectrees, where choosing a primary energy stat doesn't make you an energy fountain who will never run out of energy and maintain a 50% of the norm performance. Having a bunch of energy feels redundant if that energy doesn't translate into something impressive, surely!
Again, just opinionated, silly rambling, and when put on a thread, people can take their time to partake and respond thoughtfully, which is pretty coooooool
... I really need to work on keeping things brief...
[Daily Login Rewards] - They sure would spice things up a bit!
[Monthly Rewards and Silver Players] - Surely there should be some way to get them, no matter how difficult!
[Discussion Concerning Event Powers] - Feel like you're missing out on Holy Water? Uh, probably shouldn't.
[Discussion Concerning Energy Stats] - More or less what it says on the tin, there.
[Analysis of Sorcery Copy-Powers] - I showcase some visual chopjobs, and such.
[Analysis of a Poison Spread Bug] - The different interactions Virulent Propagation and Bite has with all poisons.
As for strength being all damage, personally, I see zero reason for splitting damage across multiple stats as it is now. It makes far more sense to be a singular stat, and strength fits that best out of the two. Why whould a ranged character take strength you ask? Simple, for the same reason they currently take ego, it doesnt matter what name is on the stat, people take stats for their benefit, and its makes more sense to merge the benefits of some stats, like ego/str and rec/end. But, even with merging benefits, those extra stats can still be made usefull, like ego becomming a dedicated cc stat, after all it is a mentalist themed stat and the mentalist sets are strong in the cc department.
Also, redistributing bonuses like that doesnt encourwge single statting, it actually encourages diversifying stats. The stats that do multiple things are the most desired, the only single benefit stat that most people wqnt is Con, which leaves End and Rec ignored a lot, Ego is seen as inferior to everything as it currently is, and Str is only taken for its knock resistance and primary tree. My suggestion would e courage people to evaluate what they need in their build and build towards those bonuses. Need better energy management? Add some Recovery. Not dealing enough damage? Add some Strength. Building for CCs or having trouble with CCs? Add some Ego. Attacking to slow or waiting on CDs to much? Add some Intelligence.
Currently you can grab strength, int, and con and be pretty much set on everything. Heck, there are quite a few ranged builds out there with Str PSS simply because its the better choice even if they dont actually slot any strength gear. There is too much overlap between different stats currently, they need to be diversified more to make them more interesting and meaningful choices,
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The way I see it, one of this game's major failings statwise is the fact that you're generally encouraged to focus on stacking your chosen superstats, maybe throwing a bone or two toward an energy stat just to make sure you aren't constantly dealing with energy starvation. This means your space wizard may have a towering intellect, a raging ego, and be faster than the speed of sound, but his strength of 10 means he barely pick up his travel bags and his constitution of 10 means he has trouble going up and down more than one flight of stairs.
Point: Stat distribution is too extreme in this game.
Let's contrast with World of Warcraft, another MMO with stats on gear, roles, etc. First, let me explain how stats in WoW work today:
- Constitution: This affects your HP and is on literally every piece of gear. This means your HP pool goes up as you progress through content and upgrade your gear. It also means tanks don't have colossally-larger HP pools than everyone else. This is good because it means content can challenge tanks without posing a 1-shot threat to everyone else.
- Strength/Agility/Intelligence: This is basically the "damage stat" which goes by different names based on your chosen class, but does the same thing. Much like CO's Strength and Ego, these were originally split and you could make strong wizards or smart warriors just like you can make strong ranged or egotistical melee characters here in CO. After the devs realized how stupid (not to mention misleading and confusing to new players) that was, the stats were effectively merged and streamlined in such a way that, if you're a warrior, your gear is always going to have strength on it. If you're a mage, it's always going to have Intelligence. If you're a rogue, it's always going to have Agility.
- (Energy Stats): This is arguably the most important takeaway here. Long ago, Intelligence also affected mana pool size (much like Endurance and energy in CO) and a now-obsolete stat called Spirit affected mana regeneration in a way that's similar to Recovery. They did away with these things after many years of fiddling with how to balance them properly, but failing every time. See, the problem is that, when you have stats that govern resource pool size and generation, you create a paradigm where having low-tier stats and gear means you're going to be struggling with resource management, but having higher-level stats and gear means you're absolutely swimming in it. True to form, the beginning of an expansion was always rife with mana starvation, but by the end of that same expansion, mana management didn't even exist.
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How all this relates to CO:
- Strength and Ego may as well be the same stat. WoW merged their versions long ago as they learned from their mistakes, so maybe it's time CO did this as well. The end result would be that you could finally mix ranged and melee powers without gimping yourself. Ranged and Melee tanks would be just as viable and you'd get better hold and knock resistance as you got better stats. Kinda makes sense really.
- Endurance and Recovery should probably just go away and energy should probably get normalized. Queue the freakout!
*waits*
All right, with that out of your system, normalized energy pools and generation allows the developers to balance the cost of every ability in such a way that every power is as usable and fun for a lowbie as it is for a maxed character in all the biggest epeen gear. "But if I have the best gear, I deserve to have better energy!" What's more important, maxed players having easier gameplay or new players actually sticking around because of gameplay that's actually fun at low levels?
- Constitution: This is an important stat for not just tanks, but DPS and Support as well. As long as certain groups are encouraged to eschew it in favor of other stats to maximize their performance (usually DPS output) the devs will likely have to wrestle with "how do I make this challenging for tanks and their 20k HP pools without it one-shotting all the squishy glass cannons?
- Dexterity and Intelligence: These are outliers. Intelligence tries to be yet another energy management stat by reducing costs, but can also boost DPS and survivability slightly by reducing cooldown lengths. Dexterity tries to be a secondary damage dealing stat by boosting the critical hit rate, as well as tanking stat for those crazy enough to chose it over more solid damage reduction options (Str + Juggernaut, Con for high HP, etc). Truthfully, I don't even know how I'd go about dealing with these two stats at this point.
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Summary: CO's stat system is a huge mess. There's no "easy" way to properly balance its stats out without a complete overhaul--something well beyond the scope of what this current dev team has the resources to deal with. If it were up to me though, I'd probably just combine End and Rec as well as Str and Ego, tone them both down a bit, and then call it a day knowing that my game's stat system was still a massive trainwreck.
And even that would likely take a huge amount of work.
If you look at a Strength of 10 as it sits beside a Constitution or Dexterity stacked into the hundreds, I shouldn't even need to say why that's ridiculous.
2 FF can have both ego and str as SS
3 you forgot presence
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3: I didn't forget it. Presence if anything is actually fine on its own since it allows healers to be better at healing than a tank or dps character who took the same abilities. It doesn't matter for a game like WoW, but with CO's FF system, it ensures support-based characters are better at healing than other characters--unless those characters want to give up something else for Presence.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
On the topic of single statting: people single stat in large part because you can get the secondary bonuses of stats without actually taking the stat. Delete crit chance from gear and people would take Dex. Delete cost reduction and cooldown reduction and people would take Int. Delete energy unlocks not based on Rec/End and energy gain from toggles and people would take Rec/End. Delete bonus hp on mods and people would take (even more) Con.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
While I concur some of the stats could add a little bit of something such as REC could affect self-heals slightly or has a small "regen" effect even in combat, END could reduce DoT/add a little to equilibrium, PRE could affect buffs other than heals , INT could affect debuff times/effects of DoTs, DEX to have a small built-in dodge chance, EGO could resist debuffs like fear/disorient, CON could resist certain debuffs like stun/stagger, STR could reduce Knock distance. Moreover, some of the specialization effects need to be amped a little to make them equally worth taking as the others in each tree.
The only part in CO's energy management that makes an actual ingame difference and gives sets their own identities, are (some of the) the inset synergies for energy management.
The only defense for the current (IMO stupid and unnecessary) ranged vs melee segregation is... that it is the way it is, and it would take too much energy to fix it. But, it still is dumb, and generally sucks for making superheroes.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Now in CO we have defense and the cast times between melee and ranged abilities are for the most part the same, for every instant cast melee ability there is an equivilant instant cast ranged ability and for every long cast ranged ability there is also a long cast melee ability. Additionally melee offensive passives have stronger defensive bonuses than ranged offensive passives, immediately reducing the risk factor.
Melee: More mobile, faster ability execution times
Ranged: Less mobile, slower cast times
Melee doesn't need to hit harder, have aoe in everything, or any of that crap. Especially in a game like this, if someone wants to make a barbarian who wields a giant axe, they're going to take melee powers to make that vision come to life.
That's more than likely yet again design decision this game lifted from WoW, as WoW divides DPS classes into ranged and melee. It may work for something like WoW, but in a build-your-own superhero game, the distinction really doesn't need to be there. It shouldn't have been there in the first place. Is Lex Luthor supposed to scoff at Superman with something like, "Dude, just stop. Your eye beams are doing like no damage because you're a melee guy with high Str. Your form stacks are barely helping and you're going go run yourself out of energy soon unless you use a melee power to trigger your energy unlock."
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Keeping them separate, and pretty much duplicate, but with one buffing only ranged and the other buffing only melee looks pointless to me.
I don't think a melee-specific role is necessarily a terrible idea. Maybe a role that combines melee damage and healing? Don't see many melee focused supports around. I dunno... I just think roles should enable builds, not needlessly limit them.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
You're arguing against it as if it would have a major impact on power, when in fact it would have such a tiny impact that next to NO ONE is going to notice it at all.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Or more likely, removing the hard split between ranged and melee dps stats/forms/etc would let players design their character to fit their vision and play it however they want. Boss strategies that called for everyone to stack would still call for everyone to stack. People who wanted to play melee-focused characters would still play melee. People who wanted to play ranged would still play ranged. Minmaxers would figure out whatever was most effective and use that, just like they did with power armor clones or with diminishing-return-abusing ATs.
The sun would still rise every day, people would still play the game and arguably enjoy it more since there was less restricting how they could build their characters. Everything would be fine.
Personally though, I like to think my character themes come from their abilities, not what a bunch of numbers on a character screen say.
Let's say you pick "Strego" as a primary superstat because rawr full dpslord mode go! But wait, you envision this character as a big, burly musclebound meathead who fell in a radioactive vat of steroids, growth hormones, and Redbull. Mind of a child, body of a greek god, the guy can juggle cars filled with trucks because he's strong enough to be able to compress those trucks into little balls first.
Next, you pick your Innate Talent. So you pick "The Behemoth" which results in "Strego" showing up as "Strength" on your character stat screen. No immersion broken.
Later, you make another character. This one's envisioned as a 80 pound nerd with wimpy noodle arms who can barely bench press his glasses, but his mental prowess is massive. He's also a dps character, so you pick "Strego" again, followed by "The Mind" as the Innate Talent. "Ego" shows up on his character screen and all is well. No immersion broken.
The thing is, you can't truly merge the roles without also merging the stats. Even if the "ranged damage" and "melee damage" roles were combined into just "damage," and even if you normalized all forms and energy unlocks to work equally with ranged and melee powers, there'd still be a split. As long as Strength makes melee better, and Ego makes ranged better, there's going to be a split.
This is why WoW merged and normalized their damage stats. It got pretty silly to have hackish workarounds to allow, say, a Retribution Paladin (melee dps) to use the handful of holy-based, spell-like ranged attacks they get at the same strength as their sword-swinging melee attacks. The "hackish workaround" in this case was some passive ability that boosted spellpower by an amount equal to attack power. Good stuff.
The only "issue" I can even think of is having a damage stat that also conveys (nonsensical) resistance bonuses to both knockback and stun instead of just one or the other. However, the real question here is "why is a damage stat conveying such a bonus in the first place?"
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Let's see how long this lasts.
Oh, I don't think merging the damage stats is a bad idea or anything. It is just that it is more of a "Jenga" issue. It is a block towards the bottom, and a ton of other blocks are supported by it. Gear, mods, specializations, attacks, toggles.... just a big change. Merging the roles seems like an easy step in the right direction.
Formerly @Seschat pre PWEmerger. @Seschat on the Titan boards.
Supporter of the Titan Project.
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