Especially Controllers... Kill them, and then what?
You have a berserk, non-headshottable target that's determined to kill you no matter what. I actually find legendary UGVs easier to deal with when their controller is alive.
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Well, I can't speak for others, but I don't have special tactics for rushers, beyond "shoot them first."
What I do have sometimes is a choice between increasing damage to health, damage to armour or damage to out-of-cover, and so I need to consider the various advantages that each one gives me.
My priority is mainly below, weaving in-between both (Behind cover & Out of cover)
- 1st: Wireless Icon: A wireless operator who send out RC bomb, shoot the satchel to stop him. (Behind cover)
- 2nd: RC Vehicle Icon: If you spot this run, the soldier can deploy a bomb loaded RC vehicle that will explode near you. Shoot it to destroy. (Behind cover)
- 3rd: Corsair Icon: Sniper – Enemy with sniper rifle. Use flash bang and shoot the head. (Behind Cover)
- 4th: Wrench Icon: Controller – Stop him from deploying repair turret, shoot on the head. (Behind Cover)
- 5th: Turret Icon: A controller who can deploy a turret that will start shooting as soon as it tracks you. (Behind cover)
- 6th: Thrower: Grenade Icon – Equip with grenade, can throw variety of explosives based on faction. (Behind cover)
- 1st: Assault: Single up arrow icon – Shoot the head, weak enemies. (Out of cover)
- 2nd: Lightning Bolt Icon: Rusher who carries shotgun, shoot the satchel to release his gas. (Out of cover)
- 3rd: Medic Icon: Simple to identify it will revive the dead enemies. (Out of cover)
- 4th: Sticky icon: Enemy will be using a sticky substance to trap you, shoot the drum on their back. (Out of cover)
- 5th: Military Badge: A empty military badge icon with down arrow design means Tank, it is a strong enemy with shield. (Out of cover)
- 6th: Leader: Double up arrow icon – Tougher one deals, use explosives. (Out of cover)
- 7th: Bullet Head with two lines below Icon: Carrying LMG and equipped with armor. Shoot the expose parts of body. (Out of cover)
- 8th: Clenched First Icon: A machine gunner in your way, the enemy wears a helmet and use LMG. (Out of cover)
That is a perfect scenario.....quite rare but it works for me.....give or take.
Sure, it's just not that relevant imho as the damage done is just that and the number of rounds required is just that. Don't misunderstand me here as I have no arguments with the math side of things and I'm not so dull as to dismiss a few thousand years of knowledge, but you're are correct in that you and I go about this stuff quite differently. The results are what they are though, and I'm not arguing with those numbers either.
I don't agree here as it's not about a given situation or the build at that point but about how a player performs from moment to moment and the math can only guess at that too. Confining it to the same player doesn't help either as somoene else can copy that build and perform much worse simply because of experience and skill. It matters a lot imho and even though I accept that you can describe much with the math its value to a build is only made real once built and its effectiveness determined by the skill of the player. There is a nuanced perspective there and I think it's an important distinction to remember.
Some constraints you can work towards mitigating, sure, but not all of them. You can farm for a specific item, optimise, reroll, calibrate it etc etc; you can create strategies and tactics to plug holes in builds or abilities and on and on but all of that has to be done in game and at any given moment your proximity to some mathematical ideal will change. If you haven't dropped a decent shotty then a shotty might not be the best solution at that moment, so you farm for a better shotty and on and on. I can put a shotty in a player's hands but if they keep trying to kill things with it at 30m then I can gently point them toward the damage drop off curve and ask them to try within 10m but if they don't do that then the math behind the shotty is all but useless.
Shotguns are and always have been my solution to rushers and anything else within 10m of me. Didn't take much to think up either:) Big stick go boom boom. Jokes aside, I think they are just being used as an example. Some muggy purple rushing you isn't an issue but you can get rushed by an SMG dual weilding Elite too and that can be if you lack the burst damage to drop them before they drop you.
Nothing wrong with that opinion either; in fact, I'd wager that it's one of the main playstyles. It's common to hear the expression that it's a "good defence to have a good offence". I also hear "dead = zero dps" too but it's discribing the player not the enemy. You can optimise for TTK if you wish or not because they're your choices in a video game with many solutions to the same problem. What I'm personally looking to optimise is fun and there are lots of ways to solve for that too :)
It sounds like we're in agreement since, as you say above in your "other than" part, there is some form of "special attention" (or whatever you care to call it) they need. I'd put it more precisely as, "bad things happen if you don't kill them before they reach you." (Maybe not all that bad, but at the least an unnecessary distraction from the rest of the battlefield.) I don't know if that's the same thing you're saying or not, but I think we can all agree that it's more often worse to take a couple of extra seconds to kill a rusher than a even a few extra seconds to kill distant enemy in cover.
I suspect, though, that if you have two incoming rushers, you don't kill one and then turn to killing a distant controller before coming back to the other rusher. If you do both rushers first, that seems to me to be setting them at higher priority than controllers.
Are you sure that RC vehicles don't receive the DOOC bonus? At any rate, I'm not sure how much it matters for them, since they seem explode with one hit. Drones, however, are another matter; on Heroic they often take several shots to kill, so it would be nice to know if they receive DOOC damage or not.Quote:
RC Vehicle Icon: If you spot this run, the soldier can deploy a bomb loaded RC vehicle that will explode near you. Shoot it to destroy. (Behind cover)
Precisely.
I don't think that defensive builds are an issue in this conversation; we're talking about high- or all-red builds here, after all. It's simply the case that this is not an on or off issue; there is no build where without DOOC (or with DOOC, for that matter) you're guaranteed never to have a rusher reach you. You're simply trying to set that probability of that as low as reasonable when balanced against the cost of "I feel it's taking me too long to take out guys in cover," and increasing your DPS significantly against out-of-cover enemies at the cost of slightly lower DPS against in-cover enemies tends to be a good exchange for this, for many people at least.
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As an unrelated aside:
Those used to be my solution, too, until I discovered Unwavering. That basically removes the reload time problem that Shotguns give you and you also get a much longer effective range.
I don't understand what you're disagreeing with here. since "damage done" and "number of rounds" is precisely what I'm looking at here. I'm calculating those for different builds in the situations I envision as most common and/or important, and choosing the one that does the most damage. Are you proposing something different?
Right, but what doesn't guess at that? Do your experiments tell you how you're going to perform moment to moment in the future, so you know that even though you're using build A that does 10% less damage than build B, at 17:50 tomorrow build A will perform better than buld B, but at 15:32 the day after, build B will perform better than A?Quote:
I don't agree here as it's not about a given situation or the build at that point but about how a player performs from moment to moment and the math can only guess at that too.
Saying that there are some things the math can't predict accurately makes no difference if nothing else predicts them any more accurately. On the other hand, the math is distinctly better at predicting how much damage a bullet from a specific build is going to do when it hits an enemy. ("Better" in that it's both faster and more accurate than experimentation, once the model has been confirmed experimentally to match the game's model.)
Right. Neither the modelling I'm doing nor the testing you're doing help with that, so I'm not seeing the relevance of this at all.Quote:
Confining it to the same player doesn't help either as somoene else can copy that build and perform much worse simply because of experience and skill.
I think you may be operating under the mistaken assumption that I'm claiming that my model is the be-all and end-all of everything, or perhaps that if the model is not absolutely perfect, it's useless. Neither is true. The question is: under what circumstances is it better not to use the model to compare two builds? For any case where you're asking, "how much damage does this build do when a bullet hits an enemy?" the answer is "never." (Assuming that the relevant parts of the model have been verified. For those where you're unsure what the game is doing, the thing to do is figure out what the game is doing, not throw some experiments against the wall and ponder the resulting mess.)
I don't see what you mean here. There is nothing but math, either in my model or in the game. How is a computer adding and multiplying some numbers somehow more "real" than me adding and multiplying some numbers. (And in fact doing that with the very same computer, as it happens.)Quote:
It matters a lot imho and even though I accept that you can describe much with the math its value to a build is only made real once built....
I would not call this "nuanced"; I would call this "completely obvious." I think this is the source of our disagreement; you think that I'm trying to do some sort of magic that I'm not. All I'm saying is that I can determine the damage of a bullet hitting an enemy more quickly, more easily and more accurately than you.Quote:
...and its effectiveness determined by the skill of the player. There is a nuanced perspective there and I think it's an important distinction to remember.
All I'm really saying is that I'm not altering my build in any way to take rushers into consideration. Which means that my overall strategy and tactics surrounding that build also doesn't take rushers into account.
I actually have been waffling back and forth on using DTOOC on my weapons instead of CHD. Since CHD works vs everything in every situation. Even if it mathematically does less damage.
This way I do optimal damage in more situations. Such as when I have to switch targets away from something more dangerous to stop a rusher.
But that's just me. I like builds and equipment and tools that are useful in many different situations rather than specialized tools with limitations in other areas.
Trusting the math is precisely what I'm doing, and it produced that damage for each test. I'm not disagreeing with you at all; yep you can do the math for that stuff; yep it's useful info; yep it can help you improve a build etc etc but the results are what they are, so trusting the math means I should trust the result. The CHC and CHD are specified in the build anyway with only the latter altering between tests. Again, I'm not really disagreeing with how, or why, you're doing it. What's necessary to answer the simple question of which method kills an out of cover armoured target faster is given an answer by the tests shown in that video and that's described accurately by how many rounds it took and how long it took to do it.
So we both agree that paper performance doesn't necessarily translate to in-game performance. And we both seem to agree that it's tautological to say that a build with potential X run by a player with potential Y produces damage Z. We agree it's obvious. So what I'm trying to get at is that because of that we can't make overgeneralisations about a build e.g. "Best AR build ever! Melts NPCs.". Because the theory has a varying degree of value until you mirror it precisely at which point everything is in agreement. Doing that requires building it, and sure you can exploit some stuff and go from gear zero to mathematical hero in a few hours, but you're still bound by your own Z in the above so it would be an error to take the theory as anything more than a description of an ideal that you may or may not achieve.
I don't think we disagree on as much as you feel we do -- my god I've asked for it now :) Our approaches are different but I have no problems with your methods or with what your math is telling you. I just think it's way more complicated than the math alone. Way more than I could tackle on my own or for what my skill set would allow.
No, we disagree there. I say that paper performance translates exactly to in-game performance. If my calculation says that a bullet will do X damage when it hits an enemy, I'm very convinced that the game will produce exactly that result. If the paper calculation says that you will get Y damage overall if Z percent of your targets are out of cover when the bullet hits them, then the game will do exactly that.
The problem here seems to be that you think there are things on that paper that are simply not there, such as, "when you next play mission X, what percentage of your shots will miss?" That's neither in my calculations nor yours (though in mine that can be put in as an estimate, if you like, which you can't so easily do experimentally). So I don't see how it's relevant. Neither of us predict the exact future, nor, as far as I know, are either of us claiming to do so. (I certainly am not.)
No, of course not. But you can still get more useful information out of running the numbers, such as "X will do better than Y if more than Z% of your hits are to armour." If Z is 10%, or 90%, that's very useful information that won't be shown by just shooting health and armour and comparing the two values.Quote:
So what I'm trying to get at is that because of that we can't make overgeneralisations about a build e.g. "Best AR build ever! Melts NPCs.".
This is another source of confusion, I think. There are no ideals here (except what you keep trying to bring to this). I just say "this happens under these conditions." You're absolutely correct that, for this information to be applicable to all players you must separate that from the player's choice about what conditions to meet and the value judgements about whether "this happens" is desirable or not. So don't assign things like "player X."Quote:
...so it would be an error to take the theory as anything more than a description of an ideal that you may or may not achieve.
Let's sum that up again: I am never saying things like an unqualified, "a player will do this much damage." You should assume all the reasonable and obvious qualifications such as, "the damage will be this much from this bullet only if the player hits the target with it." You'll note that the game makes the exact same assumptions on the inventory screen when it shows you things such as the damage of a weapon.
It is when you're trying to answer questions that I never asked, yes. But from the very beginning I've left things like "what's your ratio of out-of-cover to in-cover hits" as blanks to be filled in by the user, not something my model supplies.Quote:
I just think it's way more complicated than the math alone.
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I mainly bring it up because I see a LOT of people extolling the virtues of all blue builds, or bulwark/liberty builds over on reddit. And of course people in game misunderstand or misuse it. Usually resulting in doing garbage damage and getting killed slowly, but repeatedly in groups.
This is off topic slightly, but by way of contrast makes sense: Division 2 does not reward defensive play or builds in an equitable manner. You CAN do it if you think it's fun. But players would be better served by using more damage-focused builds and getting better at cover and positioning to keep them alive.
what i take from this thread is that some people overthink stuff too much , and in trade play too litlle , and sometimes experience beats math , just saying.
It's true. I just did a 4 man heroic run of bank HQ. Literally did more damage and got more kills than the other 3 players combined with their silly Scorpio/Firewall shield builds. And they all had over 1000 SHD levels to my 200.
Using optimal builds and math is good. But knowing how to play those builds is better.
All players need to play this game is:
Decent build that synergizes well
Decent playstyle
Know the enemies
Know their spawn spots
Don't think maths plays a major part of the game due to most of it being quite obvious......over thinking might gain you a little bit more dps but that extra dps is hardly a game breaker.
I can't play the game when I'm at work or hanging with the family, but I can sneak in some analytics ;)
It's a silly proposition though, this isn't a myopic Math vs Experience battle. It's like saying you can only use Sabermetrics OR Scouting in baseball - you use both to come out ahead, instead of handicapping yourself for no good reason. The math is the math - how you use it is up to you, but the math doesn't lie [if correct], and in our case, it's how the game translates your play - so it's really all math in the end :p
Nobody is saying only use Math and don't consider gameplay. You also need to consider things like how often you land headshots, what type of enemies you have, which enemies give you the most trouble, what your goals are, how you approach sets, etc - but the Math helps you make better choices based on those things. If I can figure out a way to get 5-10% more damage on my lunch break, why wouldn't I? Not really going to make much difference in play, but I enjoy analytics and min/maxing, so I'll keep doing it and chime in here for others that do too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Right. But you said that in this game, "most of it being quite obvious." If it were so obvious, nobody would be putting status effect buffs on Ongoing Directive. (Ongoing Directive is clearly, though not at all obviously, a weapon damage gearset.)
How do you get a "decent build that synergizes well"? Well, in part you do the math. Or I suppose you could do a lot of tedious experimentation in the firing range to get the damage parts of it worked out.
Ain't that the best part of playing the game, experimenting with items, getting a feel of how it works in the outside world of the game, getting to know what fits our playstyle best.
I would rather have a build/skills that fits my playstyle rather than a build that is guaranteed to be the best one by 10% +
Experimenting is what makes this game so good rather than someone saying "Try this build, mathmatically it's the best you can get"
never said theory crafting is bad , only said it should not be the main thing you do in game , some people in this thread probably only play one hour for every 10 theorizing , i do the exact oposite and usualy fine tune the builds based off my experience playing and not because of numbers , works wonders for me, 16 fully functional maxed out builds ready go at any time with zero equations made , just some rough game knowledge of how things work and knowing what i want and need from playing with them.
I have never calculated mathematical calculation strategies and damage on paper before I do CP4 etc. and it has gone well so far.
That's one of the best parts, sure. But many people find it more fun to look at and think about the gear, how it can be combined and what the interactions woudl be, rather than just slapping random items into the slots and playing a bit. That's exactly what I'm doing here.
Um..."try this build" is a suggestion to experiment, dude.Quote:
Experimenting is what makes this game so good rather than someone saying "Try this build, mathmatically it's the best you can get"
And I've never used an SMG with a talent other than Unwavering, and it's gone well so far.
Nobody's said that it can't go well without this. Just that you can do better with it.
You can get across town in an old jalopy just fine, too. Some people enjoy doing it in a new car, though, for more speed, more safety, or just because they enjoy new cars. You shouldn't tell people not to buy a new car just because using an old car worked for you; what they enjoy is their decision, not yours.
Yeah, when someone says "X!" and someone else replies just "Y!", that often comes across as a disagreement. Maybe if you guys who don't disagree with the original point when you provide what can be read as an alternative, rather than a complement, you could say so, and that would help avoid coming across as if you disagree. E.g., "While X is is helpful, Y is also helpful and you should not use X as a reason not to do or take into account Y."
Who's to say players ain't looking at their gear and seeing what synergizes well, trial and error is part of the fun.
I myself would much rather mess around with gear and see what works well and learn the hard way rather than someone tell me "Look, this will work much better".....that's part of the fun process.
Out of the 2,531hrs played in TD2 i think i have spent 1hr max in total in the shooting range, i certainly did not need it to find what's best for me.
Maybe just step outside of the shooting range and enjoy the game....who knows, you might have fun too :D
Oh and look at the bright side "The Division 2 forum will go into read-only mode on June 29th"
;)
Err...so you agree with me on that then?
Me too. That's why I provide the mathematical model; so you can do exactly that.Quote:
I myself would much rather mess around with gear and see what works well and learn the hard way rather than someone tell me "Look, this will work much better".....that's part of the fun process.
I have spent a lot more than that, but I agree it's more fun to spend time shooting. That's why I prefer to do some quick additions and multiplications rather than slow experiements in the range.Quote:
Out of the 2,531hrs played in TD2 i think i have spent 1hr max in total in the shooting range, i certainly did not need it to find what's best for me.
Ah, there's your error. You somehow assumed that I don't do this, rather than realizing that the whole point of my method is to spend less time in the range and more time playing the game.Quote:
Maybe just step outside of the shooting range and enjoy the game....who knows, you might have fun too :D
I never said it wasn't. You see how that works? I say something that technically doesn't disagree with you at all, but it still sounds to you like disagreement and you feel compelled to post a correction.
base damage * (total weapon damage + weapon damage) * (Crit + HS) * amp1 * amp2 *DtoH *DtoA *DtOoC = per bullet damage.
Thus far, this is the only math that you have shown being used in your system of analysis. It does not model everything to do with the damage a target might take. I can show you with a video how changing one attribute in that build -- an attribute that alters none of the modifiers above, keeping them constant -- makes the difference between one-clipping a named elite at 20 metres using headshots only and not being able to do that ever. Ergo a difference in damage output not modelled by the math in the above equation; it is certainly being modelled by the game, but not by that math above. So if the above is the math you're using to determine damage and you want to say that it fully describes damage output then I'm still saying no, and I can film the proof if you want.
To the epistemological differences between theories that describe a thing and their proximity to the truth about that thing: The game runs code executing a series of instructions moment to moment. Assuming no coding errors it follows that the code describes the game world completely. Ergo, accepting zero error, the game world is internally consistent. If we are using the same laws to calculate our damage output as the code does then it follows from that that our equations are consistent too -- see above where this is already falling apart. So we make a build using these consistent laws and it follows that we can say with certainty that a bullet does x damage under y conditions in z build. So far I have no issues with the fundamentals of what is being claimed here.
The difference comes when I transfer that build to a different player, even when I alter the performance of the same player. It's still true that the game is internally consistent; it's still true that the build describes per bullet damage output, but what changes is the overall damage output, the change in damage output stems from the change in player performance. From that I say that it does not follow that a build describes performance. I'd have no issue with someone telling me that a paper-build describes its potential.
I'm not going down that road. I already try a fair amount to try and sugar coat my posts without also having to throw worrying about every time someone misinterprets what I was saying.
The context of what you quoted seemed pretty clear to me considering the post I replied to.
That's not quite correct: weapon damage is added to crit and HS, not to TWD.
That's not everything; I also use expected value (possibly the most valuable part of the analysis) for "Crit" above and other conditional events (whether probabilistic or not), and you can of course add anything else you need for specific talents and so on. If you see me not including everything that's because dropping addends you know to be 0 and multipliers you know to be 1 produces the same result. For example, I don't include any form of amp damage, DtA or DtH in the "Fox's vs. other kneepads analysis because it's not necessary for that particular analysis. If you need to take those things into account elsewhere, you do so.Quote:
Thus far, this is the only math that you have shown being used in your system of analysis. It does not model everything to do with the damage a target might take.
I'm curious to know what that is, but I'd be happier if you just told me, rather than making a video about it. At any rate, if that particular thing is relevant to the analysis, include it. I don't think it's rocket science to know to do that.Quote:
I can show you with a video how changing one attribute in that build -- an attribute that alters none of the modifiers above, keeping them constant -- makes the difference between one-clipping a named elite at 20 metres using headshots only and not being able to do that ever.
And if there are coding "errors" the code still describes the game world completely. They just make the game's model what it is; whether you consider them errors or not is your value judgement. Regardless of whether or not you consider something an "error," you can accurately model the game's model by simply including these things in your model.Quote:
To the epistemological differences between theories that describe a thing and their proximity to the truth about that thing: The game runs code executing a series of instructions moment to moment. Assuming no coding errors it follows that the code describes the game world completely.
There is no difference there; if you added up all the hits and misses a player made in a battle in the game and ran them through a good model of the game, you'd get the same damage result. The model can predict how much damage a hit will do; neither the model nor the game nor anything else can predict if the player will actually make a bullet hit (or even fire a bullet!), so the model, game and everything else "fail" equally there.Quote:
The difference comes when I transfer that build to a different player....
I suppose it's fair to warn people that the model can't predict whether a player will be able to hit enemies, but this seems pretty obvious to me. And you should equally warn that nothing you do (or anyone else does) predicts that either. While we're at it, let's warn that none of these change the chance that you'll be hit by a meteorite when walking to the shop tomorrow; that's about equally relevant to whether you use a model or an experiment to determine whether Fox's Prayer works better in a certain class of builds than other kneepads.
Right. For that definition of "performance," nothing describes it. But the build does perfectly predict performance given certain conditions; it is of course up to the player to determine what set of conditions he wants to use to generate his predictions.Quote:
From that I say that it does not follow that a build describes performance.
Pretty decently rolled contractor's gloves on sale at the theater settlement.
Ooh they're not bad at all. Mine have the other red thingy on them so a second pair will give me flexibility when building. Interestingly enough, if you just slap Contactor's into the build I've offered up they produce a loss too, and under certain configs, especially if you throw in Coyote's mask and drop the Ceska, they become a terrible choice to make in that slot for that build.