Scaling of power for power gamers and casuals (with graphs!)

[ReaperAlexEU]

the aim of this update is to be commended, trying to make melee in EE's viable for more players outside of our best players who create the FOTM builds so many attempt to follow. we all know the gulf between someone who had ground out all their lives and gear and someone who is following in their footsteps with a fraction of the time to devote to achieving perfection.

this gives us an inherent problem, making melee viable for the bulk of the player base will make things too easy for those that are already viable in EE. if you double everyone's damage and half their incoming damage then things will get way too easy for the power gamers. sure it will help the average player a ton, but it is at the expense of breaking the game for the power gamers.

so, we need a system that will make viability achievable for the average game, whilst still preserving the optimal for the power gamers to tinker with and push the limits with.

enter exponents, you can pull and push these things about to get a curve that makes getting to a viable DPS/defence place achievable and makes getting to an optimal DPS/defence place difficult.

Increasing PRR/MRR along the bottom, increasing damage mitigated up the side:

Link to graph if pic doesn't load


Increasing MP along the bottom, increasing damage up the side:

Link to graph if pic doesn't load

As you can see there is lots of scope for balancing the curve. you can pinch it or stretch it, you can move it left and right, up and down. you can zoom in to any part of the curve you want, hence why 2 lines flatten out completely, you'd probably want to zoom in on a section of those. you can define 2 points you want, one for viability and one for optimal then crunch the maths to get the perfect curve for balance.

we can have our cake and eat it, we can build a system that is both good for the average player without being game breaking for the power gamer.

i know it's late in the day, but all the overpowered underpowered threads for these changes have just made it clearer and clearer to me that a straight scaling system is not the answer. to perfectly balance the new changes for the power gamer would quite literally mean capping MP and MRR at zero and leaving PRR where it is today. to help the average player with the new MP and MRR means breaking the game for the power gamers. we cannot possibly balance such a system for both players.

as for lag when crunching numbers the server would need to calculate something akin to X^-y. i know multiplication and division is fast for computers, i expect powers are quite fast too. you can click on the graphs to see how i pushed and pulled them about with some numbers, though please note any numbers were just to draw a line on the screen, not to use any actual DDO numbers.

[Rull]

I like the way you are thinking, but I dislike the idea.

Increasing 'diminishing returns' on every aspect of the game not only leads to narrowing the gap between new and experienced players, it also leads to less build diversity.
Because it is a false assumption experienced players always have 'more DPS' than new players; an experienced true tank willl DPS less than a noob glass cannon.
This may sound very obvious and a classic failure to recognize a trend by highlighting a counterexample (like 'smoking isn't bad for you because I know someone who smoked and got older than someone who didn't smoke'), but I assure you this isn't the same fallacy.

Because: strong diminishing returns directly leads to less specialized builds for the experienced players. This is not always a good thing.

I am talking about increasing diminishing return, because diminishing returns itself is inherent to PRR.

If you took at the curve for incoming damage dependant of your PRR in the current situation:

http://graphsketch.com/?eqn1_color=1...50&image_h=525

you can see it is curved likewise already.