Underrated Powersets

[P51mus]

I always thought FF was underrepresented as a support power. It had some decent powers in there (Force Bolt alone was enough to allow me to solo safely till I got my dispersion bubble). The team shields gave decent def to LOTS of things (including positional), just not psi or Toxic, BUT one gave unslottable res to Toxic and the other gave protection from -End/-recov attacks.

Well, thanks to the positional (melee/ranged/aoe) defense, it still protected against most toxic/psychic attacks anyway.

Very strong defensive support set, just didn't do much outside of that.  No offensive buffs or debuffs.

[Power Arc X]

I had a Ice/Fire tank that was pure fun to play even before IO's. I solo'd him from 35 or was it 39-45 in the Rikti Crash Site. People would always be surprised by the combo for some odd reason. That was Jan 2006 when I first started playing.  I had heard that it was more popular when the game first launched but then it seemed to not be used much by the time I started playing.
I had a Fire/Elec Dom or was it Elec/Fire (the power set with fire imps).I don't remember seeing anyone with that combo.
I also had a Ice/Ice /Fire blaster which became very fun around 25 and a WP/SM , SM/WP tank and brute.
I always made my toons with a theme in mind. One of my favorites was my PB/WS. They were twin brothers but one brother actually joined up to become a WS by accident. He wasn't the brightest of the two but ended up being the stronger of the two.
Sorry starting to ramble.

[Kelltick]

Well, thanks to the positional (melee/ranged/aoe) defense, it still protected against most toxic/psychic attacks anyway.

Very strong defensive support set, just didn't do much outside of that.  No offensive buffs or debuffs.

This, but with a caveat - very strong defensive support set from 1-49 (and freshly dinged 50) - after that, assuming most people had decent IO slotting, the +def FF gave was damn near redundant.  Otherwise, you had the mez protection Dispersion gave, and....Force Bolt?

On a team of well-built 50's, FF was damn near a waste.  My 1st 50 was a FF/Rad Def, and I found myself playing it less and less as IO sets became more prevalent throughout the endgame.  I simply was not bringing enough to the table to warrant bringing that toon.  Nearly any other Defender was a better addition to the team.  But as said, while leveling or pre-IO's, FF was very, very handy to have along.

Definitely a set that could have used a Dev revisiting post-IO's and widespread self soft-capping.  Someone earlier mentioned something interesting - maybe removing all the repulsion powers save Force Bolt and change them to slows?  Something else?  Anything, really.  After the +def, FF didn't bring anything useful to a team - the toons that could use the +def and/or +mez protection generally didn't need it as the mobs were either dead or busy attacking someone built to have mobs attacking them (or well off on their own that the +def wasn't necessarily needed).

[Clave Dark 5]

I'm probably coming late to this realization or perhaps I've just forgotten, but I don't recall reading much of Arcana's stuff on the old forums* and now I'm being blown away by her insight into all the sets and how they did or didn't work.  I'm tempted to scroll through everything she's posting now about powersets and to take notes - you know, just in case the game does come back.  We should add an "Aracana Notes" section to all the wiki pages that cover something she'd posted about...



*Except the guide to Ill/Rad Controllers, that guide talked me into making one.

[ryuplaneswalker]

Trick Arrow was a big one, Robots/Trick arrow MM was a monster to see in action if played right.

In terms of Earth Control, it had upsides and downsides, I made an Earth/Empathy Controller build around support that could do sickening things...soloing was slow with her but she was never ever in danger..and she could Mez Avs on her own.

Also I had a merc/storm mastermind...she was also much  more than I thought she would be ((-KB gernades + Tornado was evil))

[brothermutant]

I always thought Earth control was overlooked because of the annoying large rocks around everything. Couldn't you almost get pinned as a melee character in the middle of the group?

[blacksly]

I always thought Earth control was overlooked because of the annoying large rocks around everything. Couldn't you almost get pinned as a melee character in the middle of the group?

No, the rocks didn't block movement. What they COULD do, though, is block vision. With a lot of them, you were attacking random stones.

[brothermutant]

Oh that makes sense. I always went with Grav or Illusion or Mind Controller. They all were extremely clean looking.

[brothermutant]

Well, thanks to the positional (melee/ranged/aoe) defense, it still protected against most toxic/psychic attacks anyway.

Very strong defensive support set, just didn't do much outside of that.  No offensive buffs or debuffs.

That's right, I forgot. But why some and not all? Were there some that didn't register as positional?

Personally, I NEVER liked the Enemy bubble that locked down one baddie for a decent clip of time. But one teammate used to use it when our tank was less than impressive to lock down the boss/AV until we cleared the room. It did make those team-ups so much easier.

And I swear Force Bolt was so much fun to use. Everyone used to whine about KB, but there was a really good forum post about KB and using it to your team's advantage. Kinda like playing pool, shoot the straggler back into the AoEs or near the melee toons. Or juggle a boss until you are ready to murder (er...arrest) him.

[HEATSTROKE]

 Underrated...

  Blasters and Dominators... period..

[Teikiatsu]

Underrated...

  Blasters and Dominators... period..

Don't tell my wife... she played the Blapper style so much that when CoV went live and Doms first came out they were a cakewalk...

[ryuplaneswalker]

Underrated...

  Blasters and Dominators... period..

Well if we are talking whole ATs..

Dominators and Stalkers, especially post Inherent modifications the boosted damage out of Domination and the new Assassin Strike mechanics were so good.

Blasters were that way in I-24, oh it is a shame we can't get an I-24 server..blasters were soo much better with the sustainability buffs and the short cast snipes.

[P51mus]

That's right, I forgot. But why some and not all? Were there some that didn't register as positional?

There's a handful of psychic and toxic attacks that are pure psychic/toxic, no positional.  I can't remember all of them, but I think most of the psychic ones are mind control powers (which malaise happens to use, and a few other enemies).

[Arcana]

There's a handful of psychic and toxic attacks that are pure psychic/toxic, no positional.  I can't remember all of them, but I think most of the psychic ones are mind control powers (which malaise happens to use, and a few other enemies).

The Yellow Ink Men, Lost and the Rikti are the critter groups that come to mind as doing decent non-positional psi damage.  Yes, nearly all of them were based on Mind Control-like powers.  The most common non-mind control non-positional psi attack (that did damage) that comes to mind are variations of Blind.  Master Illusionists were particularly adept at slinging an aweful lot of non-positional psi for that reason.  Also, most confuse-like powers tended to be typed non-positional psi.

Most players thought if an attack was not positionally typed, it was going to be either psionic or toxic (although toxic attack typing itself wasn't introduced until very late in the game and rarely used).  An interesting trivia question I would occasionally pose on the forums was to ask if anyone could name a reasonably common attack that was not positionally typed, but was not psionically typed either (but was not completely untyped either).  It did not have to deal damage.

[Phaetan]

Taunt?

[Arcana]

Taunt?

Taunt wasn't generally untyped, and it was rare to experience outside of PvP.

[brothermutant]

That would explain why I lost my togs every time I was attacked with a  sleep move, was probably a Psi only attack without a positional tag to it. Way to make FF LAME. That had to be the dumbest idea they had.

[Arcana]

That would explain why I lost my togs every time I was attacked with a  sleep move, was probably a Psi only attack without a positional tag to it. Way to make FF LAME. That had to be the dumbest idea they had.

More a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand.  Its obvious the different devs that originally worked on the different character and critter powers were not in sync.  At launch the description for SR was that it avoided everything, that SR's mental discipline could even avoid psionic attacks.  The dev who made SR gave it melee, ranged, and AoE defense because that's obviously everything.  But then the guy who made the mental attacks made them typed psionic only because he decided that attack obviously isn't protected against by melee specific defenses, ranged specific defenses, and if it only affected one thing it wasn't an AoE.  It was a mind to mind attack that didn't have a positional aspect.  The combination of those two decisions demonstrates that the conceptual framework for attack typing didn't exist at launch - in other words, what exactly does it mean for something to be a melee attack or defend against ranged attacks.

That's why I always used to preach that you have to know what your numbers mean: if you only spreadsheet them around with formulas without understanding the practical reality of the numbers you'll always get in trouble.  To be honest, even after the devs started multi-typing defenses they *still* were doing that for purely ad hoc reasons.  There was never, from launch to shutdown, a clear definition of what the types actually meant, beyond the purely mathematical.

[ryuplaneswalker]

More a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand.  Its obvious the different devs that originally worked on the different character and critter powers were not in sync.  At launch the description for SR was that it avoided everything, that SR's mental discipline could even avoid psionic attacks.  The dev who made SR gave it melee, ranged, and AoE defense because that's obviously everything.  But then the guy who made the mental attacks made them typed psionic only because he decided that attack obviously isn't protected against by melee specific defenses, ranged specific defenses, and if it only affected one thing it wasn't an AoE.  It was a mind to mind attack that didn't have a positional aspect.  The combination of those two decisions demonstrates that the conceptual framework for attack typing didn't exist at launch - in other words, what exactly does it mean for something to be a melee attack or defend against ranged attacks.

That's why I always used to preach that you have to know what your numbers mean: if you only spreadsheet them around with formulas without understanding the practical reality of the numbers you'll always get in trouble.  To be honest, even after the devs started multi-typing defenses they *still* were doing that for purely ad hoc reasons.  There was never, from launch to shutdown, a clear definition of what the types actually meant, beyond the purely mathematical.

Can you slap the WoW development team with that? they got the moronic idea in their brains lately that "Too much information is bad and confuses players"

[Arcana]

Can you slap the WoW development team with that? they got the moronic idea in their brains lately that "Too much information is bad and confuses players"

Too much information can sometimes confuse players, or make them focus on the numbers to the detriment of enjoying the game.  However, I've always been of the opinion that if knowledge of your game systems confuses your players, you designed them wrong.

If I were engineering the game systems for an MMO today, I would start by asking myself this question: "how do I want to explain how this works?" and then I would design the game systems to match that description.  All it takes is good command of math and an engineering perspective to make the machine fit the human rather than vice versa, and game mechanics are really just a machine that can be designed to fit the brain of the players.

Game mechanics should be like the SR passive resistances.  Trivially easy to explain (the lower your health, the higher the resistance), straight-forward math ( [60-H]/60 * 25 ), and yet fiendishly complicated to min/max (to date, no one - not even me - has come up with a precise way to value those powers under all game conditions, because the survivability calculations are easy to average, difficult to precisely quantify, and subtly non-linear).  Its easy to get an intuitive feel for what they do, but very difficult to calculate what they are worth.

That's a mark of good game design.  Players with no math skills can still get the basic idea, while min/max smart-alecs get tossed into the very deep end of the pool.  Imagine if most of the game worked like that.

Of course, the main problem with this design ethic is that you have to be smarter than the majority of your players.  Otherwise, the min/max smart-alecs will smack you silly.  For example, that's what the CoH players did with the devs when it came to optimal attack chains (due in some measure to my hating the DPS calculations on the forums and trying to replace them with a DPA-centric view of attacks), because we were collectively way ahead of them there.  As a general rule, Monte Carlo Markov analysis comes in handy here.

If there is a problem I've seen in all the MMOs I've played, its that the math seems to have been created for its own sake, by Excel jockeys with no sense of systems engineering, and with no intention of being explainable.