I read with interest the discussion about ranged vs. melee damage modifiers on Scrappers and Blasters. Is there any compensating effect in terms of the base damage/cast-time value in the powersets?
Nope. Not that I blame him because it greatly improved the flow of many of those sets and made them more fun to play (always one of the objectives of the game designers) but the melee sets started off slightly better than the ranged sets in terms of relative cast time and base damage (specifically, in DPA), and then got massively better when BaB revamped their animations. That's when sets like War Mace and Battle Axe, known for a long time as being hideously slow, became almost lightning fast relative to their damage. In fact if you didn't actually play some of those melee sets and were not regular forum participants in the appropriate discussion threads, you might not have even realized just how fast they got because its not something that was generally discussed.
To put it into perspective, if Defenders - and only Defenders - somehow got the same kind of average animation improvements that the melee sets got on average, they would have essentially found themselves with a higher damage modifier than Corruptors.
Something I think most players did not know. There was a formula that dictated exactly what the recharge of an attack would be. Simplifying a bit, attacks were designed to deal a certain Scale damage. That scale was multiplied by the archetype damage modifier to get the actual damage the attack dealt. So if you give Power Bolt, which does Scale 1.0 damage to a level 50 Blaster, that attack does 55.61 points of damage. The exact same attack when given to a level 50 Defender does 36.15 damage. That's 65% of the Blaster number, and without getting into the math that's part of the basis for saying that Blaster (ranged) damage modifier was 1.0, and Defender was 0.65.
Power Bolt's recharge was 4s. All attacks (there were a few exceptions but they were always special cases) that dealt Scale 1.0 damage had 4 second recharge. They had to, because recharge was dictated by a formula: Recharge = (Damage - 0.36)/0.16. For Scale 1.0, its (1-0.36)/0.16 = 4. For Scale 1.64 (Power Blast), its (1.64-0.36)/0.16 = 1.28/.16 = 8. And so on. Except for secondary effects (including, remarkably, damage over time) pretty much all attacks that dealt the same damage looked alike in this regard (there was a modified version of this formula for AoEs). There was another formula for endurance cost (Scale * 5.2) **(see below).
Here's the kicker: there was no formula for cast time. There was just the general rule of thumb that attacks that deal more damage should take longer to cast. Beyond that, there was no other *numerical* rule to guide the devs. And because of that, I am pretty certain I know what happened next. Psychology guided designers' intuition to visualize melee attacks as tending to be faster, and ranged attacks as tending to be slower. Its natural: we tend to visualize punches, swings, stabs, and kicks as being fast because they have to be: we also visualize an opponent trying to avoid them. But we tend to visualize shots, throws, and blasts as a slightly more mechanical point-aim-fire process that lasts slightly longer.
This bias was not strong, but it didn't need to be because all it takes in City of Heroes is for one set of attacks to activate a quarter of a second faster on average to be dealing almost 20% more damage (when average cast times are about a second and a half). And for complex math reasons, sometimes a whole lot more than that.
Allowing designers to have some intuitive input into how a power looks has some potentially important game balance ramifications, but in City of Heroes specifically (and Champions Online to some respect, with a combat system obviously influenced by CoH and Cryptic's prior experience) allowing designers to have any sort of artistic or intuitive input into how an attack looks is extremely dangerous. That's because in City of Heroes the amount of damage a character can deal starts off limited by
cycle time, but past the 20s and SO-level enhancements it shifts to being limited by
cast time.
("Cycle time" is cast time plus recharge, the total amount of time it takes between when you activate a power and when you can activate the same power again).
Why? Because at low levels and at low recharge, you're always waiting for attacks to recharge. It doesn't ultimately matter what they do, what matters is how long it take for the next one to be ready to shoot. When you are waiting for powers to recharge, recharge is the most important thing. But once you have four or five attacks and start slotting for recharge, you tend to always have attacks ready to fire. What matters is not how long it takes to wait for an attack to be available, what matters is how quickly you can get an attack off and move on to the next attack. The faster your attacks are, the more damage you can squeeze in per second. In fact, a simple heuristic that tended to generate something close to the mathematically optimal attack chain was simply to always use the attack that dealt the most damage per unit time (DPA). You fire that, then of the remaining available attacks you use the one with the highest DPA again, and repeat.
In other words, how much damage a given offensive set could ultimately deal for high level players wasn't originally dictated by the power designers. It was dictated by the animators
who did not know that they were responsible for that. I'm pretty sure even BaB did not know that until I essentially told him. He originally thought the animation times could at best only weakly influence damage, and recharge was far more important. But when I showed him my DPA-based damage calculations and he saw how they fairly accurately predicted the effects of faster cast time on Claws, he very quickly realized how much power the animation time wielded.
There were some attempts to rectify this problem towards the end, but none of them really got traction. The VEATs in particular used a cast time vs damage scale formula that was different than all the other archetypes when they were introduced that I think was flawed in some respects but a step in the right direction, but that experiment did not spread beyond the VEATs.
** This fundamental rule of endurance meant that pre-I9 inventions, I could tell that pretty much all of the players that claimed to be able to "fight continuously without running out of endurance" without needing stamina were lying, unless they were one of the few builds that had endurance management powers or were doing something crazy with slotting. Attack DPA generally ranged between 0.5 and 1.5 and averaged between 0.7 and 1.0 within a set. At the low end a player had to burn at least 3.64 eps unslotted, or about 1.82 eps with three SO equivalents of endurance slotting. That's higher than player endurance recovery without stamina: 1.67 eps. And it presumes you are not using any other powers besides attacks.