Pyro afterburn discussion

From the Jumpyfac discussion:

quote: The Pyro afterburn effect only has a 10% chance to proc per projectile and its total damage is also random (150 - 225). It's somewhat frustrating to have a high-power low-chance random-based ability at low weight - getting a Glaive or a Bandit poked by a Pyro who then jumps away is a lottery whether it starts burning or not and then whether the total damage is enough to kill it or not

I'd like to have this remedied by removing the randomness. I attempted to make a patch but didn't realize that Pyro balance is very delicate. My proposed changes were:

quote: Afterburn: Chance: 10% -> 100% Duration: (random 10.5 - 15) -> 15 DPS: 15 -> 5 Weapon DPS: 50 -> 60 (to compensate for afterburn)

Reasoning: duration randomness removed in favor of maximum duration because it's needed to keep cloaked units burning (fire is a softcounter to cloak) and DPS change is to make the total damage not finish off any affected light raiders: current 150-225 is quite damaging for a low-chance ability (Bandits who happen to catch fire are left at 10-40% health, while for Glaives it's either they burn to death, or survive and autoregen back to full - leaving it to the randomness is bad). New total damage would be 75. Weapon DPS change is to keep total DPS the same against targets being actively shot at.

Problems pointed out were that Afterburn DPS needs to be consistent among fire units because the mechanic would be unintuitive if some fire was less fiery than others.

With 15 DPS (unless Kodachi and Phoenix are also changed) and 100% chance it comes down to tweaking duration, but it might be hard to keep the duration long enough to be good at maintaining decloak and the total damage low enough to be impactful but not guaranteed-death for lighter units - personally I'd go for somewhere between 50 and 100 total damage, so 3-7 seconds duration; 5s for 75.
That'd make the current proposal:

quote: Afterburn: Chance 10% -> 100% Duration (10.5 - 15) -> 5

Values could be then fine-tuned of course, the main point is to remove the double randomness of chance and duration. Discuss!

Edit: the change might have some influence on Pyro's role:
Better as raider: the additional DPS always kicks in immediately and poked Solars are guaranteed to get increased downtime, reliably helping harrass.
Worse as riot: Pyros often kill Glaives/Bandits post-mortem or due to a poke because of the large potential afterburn damage (sometimes more than Glaive total HP). With decreased total damage this will no longer happen.
Afterburn is also soft counter to cloak; no idea whether this is a net loss or gain as the change would make it less powerful (through less duration), but more reliable.

I don't even know that this thing has existed until now.

I'd be more fine with the randomness if it was documented, things like this and how puppies need 75 metal to grey goo need to be noted down somewhere other than just the unit files. I doubt that a lot of people who are newer or haven't read all the changelogs even knew about this, you have to pay attention to notice the duration and fire is released so fast that most things catch fire anyway. We need these things in the unit descriptions or somewhere at least.

hmmm good idea, I agree with you! :)

To me the obvious solution is as Google says, to add yet-another healthbar. Either a healthbar of "how much more damage until I ignite" or a healthbar of "how long will I burn" if fire damage moves over to some burn-time-accumulation system where there's a 100% chance to ignite but the burn time builds up over repeated ignitions.

But that means yet-another-healthbar.

one time I heard that damage was not and could not feasibly be randomized or else run the risk of desyncing with each shot. lol I didn't know there was a unit that used RNG for that

if it depends on other circumstances there's a possibility of getting a different number. if it happens on the owner of the unit's pc and then gets shared as part of a scene graph of sorts, then it should be ok assuming no one else tries to come up with a number if they miss the packet with the correct number(in that case trying to compensate by making their own would isolate them from the rest of the players unless the server sends a packet with every unit's positions- but I'm not sure it does or if it does something about it still lets some users obtain a different state)

I'm pretty sure that the engine synchronizes the random seed before the match, then has it's own RNG that isn't used by other programs, so as long as the seed is the same, the algorithm is the same, and the number of calls are the same, it will always give the same number.

From my uninformed perspective, Sprung's ideas sound perfect.

I was surprised by the differences in fire behavior he described. As a player it would be nice if all particles that looked the same behaved the same. Alternatively, exposing these stats in the unit details would be great, so at least they'd be discoverable in-game by interested parties.

Yay now my dreams of having 9001 hp bars will see fruition! Huzzah.

HP
Shield
EMP
Disarm
Fire
Capture Progress
Slow
Reload

All at once! You will all bow in awe in the face of the supreme HEFty CD-R'ss bar!

Edit: Forgot reload.