I finally managed to reconstruct this from my notes, and some captures of some of the text. Its almost exactly what I posted the first time, and hopefully this time it'll stick around. I'm posting it in the Guides section, even though its not exactly a guide. Well, its a guide to fixing defense, so there. Also, when the forum grues ate the first version, it apparently broke like a thousand other people's signature files that linked to it, so this is also a community service. Plus, I have a ton of people asking why my own link is broken, and wondering when I'm going to get off my lazy behind and put this thing back up there. So here it is.


Here's how you fix defense in PvP and PvE, in three moves.


Step One: Convince Positron that its worth spending time and resources to fix the problem.

This is the hard one. Either its worth solving or its not, and if its not, nothing else matters. As I see it, solving the problems that defense has addresses a lot of issues, in high end PvE, in balanced PvP, in a lot of areas that the devs specifically want to improve.

The way I would sell this to Positron:

1. The solution is not a bandaid, it solves all aspects of the problem that should be solved, in a balanced way.

2. The solution does not have any unauthorized side effects. No part of the game changes unless its explicitly approved.

From the perspective of a project manager, a solution doesn't get any better than that.

Update: With the NCSoft acquisition, you'd probably have to convince both Positron, and Brian Clayton, the executive producer. Good luck reaching him.


Step Two: Convince the developers its worth adding specific changes to the tohit mechanics to solve the problem.

This is a problem with two faces. First, we have to convince the developers its worth doing *anything* no matter what it actually accomplishes. This is non-trivial: changing the base code is never something to be undertaken lightly. The only way I can think of to do this is to present the change itself, and demonstrate its merits.


The change is this: add a new type of power attribute that is typed like defense, but acts differently from defense: instead of acting the way defense works, it works like anti-accuracy.

What does that mean? Well, the way defense works is like this: the attacker has 50% chance to hit you, you have 30% defense, so the attacker has a net chance to hit you of 50% - 30% = 20%. Defense is subtractive.

Accuracy is multiplicative. If you have a 50% chance to hit something, and you add +33% accuracy, your net chance is (1.33) * 50% = 66.5%. Attackers get to *increase* their accuracy with slotting. But defenders/targets have no way to *reduce* accuracy (they can in effect reduce tohit with defense, but that's not the same thing). What I'm basically asking for is a type of defense that works like accuracy that reduces the chance to hit instead of increasing it: fractional accuracy or negative accuracy.

Negative accuracy would basically work just like accuracy, but with different sign. If the attacker has +33% accuracy, and you the target has -33% anti-accuracy, the net chance to hit would be: (1+0.33) * (1-0.33) * 50% = 1.33 * 0.67 * 50% = 44.56%.

This change leverages the fact that accuracy already exists in the game; the mechanics to deal with accuracy already exist. A new kind of defense that behaves just like accuracy (only less than one) shouldn't be difficult to add. It shouldn't be that much more difficult than, say, the I7 critter accuracy change. Making sure its typed like defense is typed might be the sticky part. Lets hope that part isn't intractible: if it is, it might doom *all* suggestions like this, even ones that purport not to change defense, but just change the "equations."

Update: "The Developers" used to be basically Poz. Now, not sure. Pohsyb is definitely in the mix there, but he's up to his eyeballs in "Numbers" related development, and of course future Issue development. But he knows as much about how the game mechanics work as anyone I know. Ghost Widow is also a developer and seems knowledgeable of the game mechanics, given her involvement with Castle in tracing the detailed mechanics of taunt. But I've not spoken to her about game mechanics, and she's undead besides.


Why is this worth doing? Lets move to step three:


Step Three: Convince Castle to rebalance defense sets, one at a time, based on now having two tools to do so: Defense, and Anti-accuracy.

The best way to understand how this works is to look at examples. Lets rebalance Super Reflexes.

SR can currently get about 30% defense slotted with passives and toggles. We want SR to have the same level of protection, but we want to make sure that SR cannot be easily negated by tohit buffs. The way we do that is we shift SR's protection to Anti-accuracy (I used to call this Elusivity a long, long time ago, for those who might remember).

30% defense reduces tohit from 50% to 20%: its equivalent to 60% damage mitigation. For SR to get the same level of protection, we need its total level of protection in Anti-accuracy to be 0.60. This way, SR tohit now looks like this:

Old SR: 50% - 30% = 20%
New SR: (1-0.60) * 50% = 0.4 * 50% = 20%

What's changed? SR now resists tohit buffs. Lets see what happens when the attacker has +15% tohit buffs:

Old SR: 50% + 15% - 30% = 35%
New SR: (1-0.60) * (50% + 15%) = 0.4 * (65%) = 26%

Notice, New SR is more resistant to the effects of tohit buffs. How much more? Well, against someone with no defense at all, tohit is increased from 50% to 65% a total damage increase of 65/50 = 1.3, or 30%. For SR, total damage increase is 26/20 = 1.3, or 30%.

Win #1: For "conventional" SR, tohit buffs are no more dangerous than they are for anyone else.

There's a problem with that, though. What happens when SR stacks more defense on top of itself? If tohit buffs cannot penetrate defense protections, defense becomes much stronger than resistance or regeneration. 60% mitigation is fine: 90% (from Elude) is almost indestructible.

Ah, but that's the catch: Elude doesn't have to be based on Anti-accuracy. Elude is as strong as it is because its partially balanced around defending against tohit buffs. That makes it ridiculously strong when you don't have tohit buffs, and still weak when you have enough: there's really no middle ground.

There is now: have Elude grant 0.50 Anti-accuracy, and 25% defense.

Here's what Elude now looks like, stacked on top of SR protection:

(1 - 0.6) * (1 - 0.5) * (50% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (25%) = 5%. Elude floors the attacker, like it always has. *But*, tohit buffs have *some* effectiveness, but not set-destroying effectiveness. A +20% tohit buff does this:

0.4 * 0.5 * (50% +20% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (45%) = 9%.

A 20% tohit buff has almost doubled the damage you can do to an eluded scrapper: +80%. But that's about all it can do: here's +50%:

0.4 * 0.5 * (50% + 50% - 25%) = 0.4 * 0.5 * (75%) = 15%.

Not much more: the tohit buffs are being resisted by the base SR anti-accuracy defenses and the part of Elude that is also based on anti-accuracy. 25 more points of tohit are only translating to 6 points more net tohit. In the absence of anti-accuracy, under similar conditions going from 25% to 31% defense would have done roughly the same thing. Tohit buffs have a stronger effect on Elude than normal SR defenses, because they are designed to: SR scrappers are not designed to have Elude-strength defenses no matter what: Elude is counterable. But the act of countering Elude doesn't counter the rest of the set: anti-accuracy kicks in to stop total collapse.

The numbers are negotiable: these are offered as examples.

Win #2: Elude works, but not *too* well.

This is a win-win in PvP. SR scrappers get to keep their defenses in the presence of high-order tohit buffs, but they cannot make tohit irrelevant by stacking tons of defense over the tohit ceiling. Defense always works, tohit always works as a counter in the cases of highly stacked defense.

There's a PvE win also. SR powers are split into toggles and passives. The passives are very weak: they have to be because they stack with the toggles, and making them too strong makes stacked SR powers potentially too strong: it can push SR too close to the magic 45% defense mark.

But if conventional SR defenses are intended to be "intrinsic" and therefore resistant to tohit buffs, both toggles and passives will be 100% anti-accuracy. This means toggles and passives can *both* be stronger by themselves, and still combine to get the same net result.

I'll skip past the math: anti-accuracy passives of 0.125 and toggles of 0.320 look like this:

Passive: 0.125 unslotted, 0.195 slotted, 19.5% damage mitigation by itself (slotted current SR passive damage mitigation: 17.6%)

Toggle: 0.320 unslotted, 0.499 slotted, 49.9% damage mitigation by itself (slotted current SR toggle damage mitigation: 43.3%).

Combined damage mitigation: 1 - (1 - 0.195) * (1 - 0.499) = 0.597, or 59.7% (about the same as current: 30.4%, or 60.8%).

So people who just take the passive will be better off than before, people who just take the toggle will be better off than before, and people who take both will have the same protection as now.

Win #3: Passive defense powers don't have to suck.

This directly translates to Force Field defenders. Their buffing bubbles are external buffs (to their targets): that's arguably meant to be conventional defense (its vulnerable to tohit). The Dispersion bubble is buffing defense, but its also the FF defenders primary self protection: it should be Anti-accuracy, to be less vulnerable to tohit buffs (its "balanced" at its current strength). The correct balance point is where the players inside the FF bubbles and under the dispersion bubble have the same protective strength as they do now, and to do that, the dispersion bubble will have to be stronger than it is now, to net to the same strength. Net effect: FF defender effectiveness as a team buffer is the same, FF buffs are slightly less vulnerable to tohit buffs (not as much as SR scrappers, but better than now), and their own personal protection is both higher than now, and equally resistant to tohit buffs as SR scrappers. Win, win, win.

What happens when FF defenders bubble SR scrappers? SR scrappers keep their intrinsic tohit buff resistance, but the two small bubbles will be negatable with tohit buffs: outside defensive buffs countered by attacker tohit buffs. So buffs do not become more important than intrinsic defense: attackers in PvP are not overwhelmed by defense. Their tohit buffs do what they are supposed to do: counter defense buffs. Buff counters buff, without negating power set capability to protect self.

Win #4: Force field defenders get better self protection, but their team benefit remains the same, or slightly better. But they cannot overstack defense in a way attackers in PvP cannot penetrate.


One more win: power pool defense powers. Right now, those are weak, because they cannot be made any stronger: they would stack too strongly with things that have high order defenses, like SR scrappers, Ice tankers, etc. But after this change is made, those high order defensive sets will have most or all of their protection in Anti-Accuracy. And Anti-Accuracy does not stack with conventional defense. This means powers designers can boost the strength of powers like combat jumping, so that they are effective for low defense things like blasters and defenders, without having to worry about them making things like SR scrappers and Ice tankers indestructible. The power pool stacking problem goes away, and squishies get to have better power pool protection, without breaking other things. Another PvE win, and a PvP win. This is just a plain win, period.

Win #5: Power pool defenses don't have to suck. They won't be ultra powerful for defense sets either


Summary: Convince Positron to devote resources to the problem, convince the developers to add Anti-Accuracy to solve the problem, and convince Castle to use it to rebalance the defense sets in the right way: by breaking up all defense protections into intrinsic protection which are not balanced for, and should therefore be resistant to, tohit buffs, and extrinsic protection buffs which are meant to be directly countered by tohit buffs, as a buff-counterbuff situation, in both PvP and PvE.

Do that, and defense functions correctly by my definition of "functions correctly" which is: it does what its designed to do, for things given it, and it doesn't break everyone else when its heavily stacked, because there are direct countermeasures to it when its heavily stacked. By making two "defenses" - one that is resistant to tohit buffs, and one that is not, you can give everyone what they should have: resistent protection where appropriate, and non-resistant protection where not appropriate.

Why this solution is better than all other solutions.

1. It doesn't change PvE, unless you want it to.

For me, this is all-important. When this "feature" is added to the game, the next day nothing changes, anywhere. Until Castle, or another powers designer, actually *gives* someone or something Anti-Accuracy, nothing will change anywhere. The *only* things that change are things that get Anti-Accuracy deliberately. If we want to, we can give it to players only for PvP balance, better protection in PvE, but withhold it from critters, which means *our* tohit buffs will still knock MoGed Paragon Protectors on their butts. You do not need to nerf PvE to fix PvP with this solution, period.


2. Its Controllable

This solution doesn't change anything until you deliberately change it. This means it can be phased in over time: adding the tech does not mandatorially require that the powers designers use it immediately. You do not need to make more changes than you are comfortable making and testing at any one time.


3. Its Tweakable.

By keeping both types of defense around, you can tune how much of each everybody gets: Ice tankers, Granite tankers, etc. If you give too much of one and not enough of the other, its easy to adjust the numbers around so the *protection* is exactly the same, but the only thing that changes is the resistance to tohit buffs. This decision doesn't require you agree with *me* what those levels should be: they can be anything the powers designers want them to be. Most other solutions are highly dependent on fixed mechanics that lock the behavior in, and are not easily tweakable without changing the actual algorithmic code. Mine is tweakable by changing powers, not code.


4. Its fair to attackers and defenders

Defense works correctly in the presence of tohit buffs. But it doesn't encourage defense sets to go crazy and stack even more defense buffs on top of their highly resistant protection: that doesn't work in this system. External buffs are "weak" relative to intrinsic protection, and are explicitly designed to allow attackers to strip them away without being able to strip intrinsic protection away. Its kind of like "undebuffable defense" but more mathematically sound.


5. Mathematically sane

It would take too long, and be wholely uninteresting, for me to state all the ways this makes more mathematical sense. So let me put it this way, it makes me happy, and if it makes me happy, I won't complain as much when Cryptic finally implements this solution. That's worth a lot, actually, especially to Cryptic.

In all seriousness: this is an abstract benefit, and its difficult to prove. So don't trust me on this one: rely on the concrete advantages of the solution to make up your mind. This is just an extra bonus: this will prevent problems in the future, but you don't have to believe that.


That's it. Its the best solution I have at the moment, that is theoretically doable, balanced, addresses all the major defense and tohit problems I'm aware of, fixes defense stacking problems for free, helps practically everyone, hurts practically no one, and doesn't require a complete overhaul of current powers balance.

If someone can actually specifically claim those specific benefits, and specifically how they accomplish them without dancing around them or hand-waving them away, I'll listen. Until then, this is what I'm advocating.


Update: At the moment, Castle is The Powers Guy. There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that its probably a hundred times easier to convince Castle that this is a good idea than Geko before him. The bad news is that if we were to somehow figure out a way to accomplish this herculean task, and placed the balancing workload for this on Castle's desk, he's going to kill me. It's probably still worth it, though.