Wizards getting character choice feedback from CB

[ProfessorCirno]

Char-Ops are a pox on the game. Trying to find loopholes and create damage monkeys in a vaccuum is not exactly a group of people to base marketing /the game around. That people follow them is even sadder. There's a whole lot of cool AND usefulness that char-ops just ignore with their short-sighted goal of creating their "uber-solo-stars with DPS".

And if you ask nicely I may tell you how I really feel.

Yes, boo and a pox on people who examine the math in a math-driven game! How dare they pretend to be rainbow elves in a different hilariously nerdy fashion then I do!

Ironically, you're pretty much 100% wrong about everything here. CO isn't at all about "uber-solo-stars with DPS," which makes me think you've never actually been there. Hell, one of the most popular guides is one on how to make a cleric who literally never deals a single point of damage. So far, everything regarding Essentials has been viewed as how they contribute to a team, and why warlords are a really bad choice to go with Essentials classes. Go to most pages and you'll see questions asked on what a good leader for group x might be, or how to build a character based around a concept or different types of mechanics the person likes.

But hey, someone who's completely and utterly ignorant about something, trying to badmouth it, and just making himself look rather foolish? Never seen that on the 4e forums before ;p

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, boo and a pox on people who examine the math in a math-driven game! How dare they pretend to be rainbow elves in a different hilariously nerdy fashion then I do!

Ironically, you're pretty much 100% wrong about everything here. CO isn't at all about "uber-solo-stars with DPS," which makes me think you've never actually been there. Hell, one of the most popular guides is one on how to make a cleric who literally never deals a single point of damage. So far, everything regarding Essentials has been viewed as how they contribute to a team, and why warlords are a really bad choice to go with Essentials classes. Go to most pages and you'll see questions asked on what a good leader for group x might be, or how to build a character based around a concept or different types of mechanics the person likes.

But hey, someone who's completely and utterly ignorant about something, trying to badmouth it, and just making himself look rather foolish? Never seen that on the 4e forums before ;p

lol, yeah, it is the standard knee-jerk you get when charops is mentioned. As you say most of what is discussed and generated in charops is just general mechanical assessments of game elements and various ideas and concepts for using them. I'd actually highly recommend that anyone interested in building a PC of any kind check out the relevant guides and ask some questions there.

And I agree, the devs really should spend some time batting ideas for crunch around with some of the better charops posters. They tend to be a bit acerbic, but they do have a very good grasp of how things work and what will and won't cause mechanical problems.

 

[Aegeri]

I learned a lot of really interesting concepts from CharOp. I sometimes disagree with their conclusions, like LDBs impression of the Knight in the handbook thread. The Knight seems very specifically reliant on a very optimal kind of build that only sort of works, whichis very vulnerable to being a non-dwarf and on the encounter. In any event, I find their handbooks and similar advice useful for advising players who are struggling as to what they should do to improve their characters. I think about DnD and encounters a lot, so I make some pretty tricky and difficult situations to overcome. So it's nice to be able to know how to help PCs out when they need it or give advice. I spend all my time buried in monster books and making encounters: So I don't read all the options PCs can get. A resource like CharOp helps me keep knowledgeable about players options easily and without needing to spend a lot of time.

It is also unfair and patently not true that they focus only on DPR. It only seems like a focus because DPR is an easy metric to gauge one character to another (often a striker). I mean how do you measure control in a game like Dungeons and Dragons that has so much variations? What encounters are you going to use to measure this? How do you now assess the strength of daze and stun in a post-MM3 and MV world? But this isn't to say that there aren't other metrics or things outside of DPR that are important.

For example a defenders survivability can be determined not just by class features or defenses, but also by the number of healing surges. Battleminds for example are a constitution based defender, so by boosting con relentlessly while still having a solid off stat they get more surges. More surges per day actually gives you far greater overall survivability and resilience. You can in fact figure out how much punishment different defenders, or even front line characters, can absorb based on this. Good surges and good defenses = very solid defender who can take a very high amount of abuse.

There are also a lot of good builds dedicated to being extremely efficient buffers, making your allies virtually invincible through repositioning/extra attacks/healing/DR and such forth. So it is not a single minded focus on pure DPR. Many of the complaints about certain classes are perfectly valid as well, like the seekers low individual [w] value on most attacks and generally poor overall control compared with other controllers powers (not to say, a strikers DPR).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe it is partly a notion left over from the 3.x days when the system had so many holes in it that any kind of discussion of optimization or whatnot inevitably verged on Pun Pun. But I don't know, I stayed in my Two-Headed Troll cave during the 3.x days...

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Maybe it is partly a notion left over from the 3.x days when the system had so many holes in it that any kind of discussion of optimization or whatnot inevitably verged on Pun Pun. But I don't know, I stayed in my Two-Headed Troll cave during the 3.x days...

Well, it's more that, in 3.5, you had three options.

1) YOu are a caster. Your options are neigh limitless

2) You are not a caster. You choose to do damage.

3) You are not a caster. You focus entirely around a single "gimmick" such as tripping.

To put it another way, there were no leaders or defenders in 3.5 - there were "Do damage" non-classes and there were "Control the universe" casters.

So, in 3.5, CO generally aimed at doing damage, simply because that was your only real option in many cases. If you weren't a caster, it was either damage or a gimmick, and even most of the gimmicks weren't do-able after a certain point. Plus, they were gimmicks.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Well, they haven't ignored the CharOps boards for this edition; quite the opposite, in fact. They've looked at and specifically nerfed unbalanced CharOps combinations, although it has taken them some time.
E.g. Blood Mage forced movement damage, Orb Wizard stunlocks, Feychargers, infinite damage loops (Punisher of the Gods, IIRC), White Lotus Swordmage shenanigans, Sorcerer Daggermaster crit-fishers, Student of Caiphon radiant cheese, Windrise Ports multiclass abuse.

But they haven't nerfed infinite oregano yet.

I should have been more precise. They don't take advantage of CO before a book is published. I'm sure a lot of the problems would be caught by the CO folks in playtesting if this was done.

 

[Jhaelen]

I should have been more precise. They don't take advantage of CO before a book is published. I'm sure a lot of the problems would be caught by the CO folks in playtesting if this was done.

Except they do. Or at least they did in the past. E.g. several CO regulars have been involved in getting the Rules Compendium right.

 

[Dungeoneer]

One of the good things about this data though is it's raw data and not, for instance, data funneled through the lens of a CHAR OP player.

You can bet they're going to look at what the Char Ops people are saying compared to the data (if you honestly think they DON'T ever look at the char ops people well- you're wrong.)

Char ops though are just one test group to match the data against.

This. CharOps may claim that a class or a build is überbroken but if the CB data shows lots of people play it then it's probably not by any reasonable definition.

This is what CO people don't get and what the CB data could theoretically show - the fun of playing a class is not necessarily embedded in the numbers. And I think this is what the developers are interested in. They want to know which classes are (or are not) fun to play. I don't think they're very concerned about making all strikers have equivalent damage output.

One of the fun things about this sort of number crunching is that raw data will often contradict the received wisdom when looked at honestly. Of course, you do have to know what you're doing when analyzing the data. Let's hope Wizards does.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This. CharOps may claim that a class or a build is überbroken but if the CB data shows lots of people play it then it's probably not by any reasonable definition.

This is what CO people don't get and what the CB data could theoretically show - the fun of playing a class is not necessarily embedded in the numbers. And I think this is what the developers are interested in. They want to know which classes are (or are not) fun to play. I don't think they're very concerned about making all strikers have equivalent damage output.

One of the fun things about this sort of number crunching is that raw data will often contradict the received wisdom when looked at honestly. Of course, you do have to know what you're doing when analyzing the data. Let's hope Wizards does.

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure popularity of a class or whatnot is really an indication that it is OK. By that measure the old Rain of Blows was the greatest success in the game, lol. The fact that something gets CONSTANTLY picked may well be a good indication that it is OP and needs fixing.

I don't really agree that the CO people "don't get" various aspects of the game. I'd suggest reading some of the CO threads. A lot of the traffic there centers on "how do I do this theme and still have decent DPR/AC/NADS/etc." Obviously it is a forum ABOUT optimization, so you pretty much expect that the posts involve that in some fashion. 2 years ago you'd have pretty much seen endless threads detailing how to make a ranger that could do 300 DPR or whatever, but that phase pretty much ended long ago. Everyone knows the rules and basically what you can do and all the tricks. These days it is mostly "does feat X break things" or more general character building questions.

I don't disagree at all that math is not the point of the game or the only important thing, but I don't think any of the people on CO think it is either. They're just number-cruncher types and good tacticians who like to play around with things. Given that one of the MAJOR benefits of 4e is that its mechanics actually WORK it seems like testing the math behind stuff is actually a pretty good idea.

I don't know how much things have actually been run past CO people before they're finalized. One would hope the devs do that. OTOH they still keep popping out new stuff that has to be patched. It can be a bit of a head banger to see some new book or Dragon article with a feat or item in it that you don't even have to go crunch the numbers to immediately see causes serious problems either. That happens less now than it did back in the launch phase of 4e but now and then you still see something that obviously got no review by anyone with a clue on mechanics at all.

 

[Scribble]

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure popularity of a class or whatnot is really an indication that it is OK. By that measure the old Rain of Blows was the greatest success in the game, lol. The fact that something gets CONSTANTLY picked may well be a good indication that it is OP and needs fixing.

Well that's kind of the point.

They no longer JUST have the char op boards as a point of information.

For the first time they get to look at the game as it's being used, and not just as it's being proclaimed by the loudest group, whether or not that group is right, wrong, or somewhere in between.

Granted, this data IS filtered by those that have a DDI account- but it's closer to raw usage data then they've ever had.