tat distribution for 70 most active march (in General)

here it is!

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AhqtN8y13_DadEliSE9QWEpGS0VJZ2pDNzdjckl2M2c&hl=en

LRoBF FTW?

I'm coming for you guys at the top!

Quite telling.

Can you please start posting %EXP trained into GA every time you post these too.

So that we can show the direct relationship of RoBF to GA users.

your post button seems to work fine! ; )

I can comment on this now, not using a RoBF any more. :P

^ perhaps the next tally will be when an ice familiar makes its appearance!

Aurora's Finale lvl 10,714,174 ($194,286,758) I'm willing to test any numbers for anyone that's curious with this tat. You have to cough up the tat type you want to see numbers for, and the an EF to change it back at the end of the day ^^.

And how has your score, challenge bonus and fightlist changed as a result?

For the better, worse or no change?

A Tiny bit better. But I'm still adjusting.

If it hadn't, I would have taken the free inking back to the RoBF. ;)

Which I might still do.

But for the moment, I'm not a RoBF user, and guess what, my opinion hasn't changed. ;)

gl, are you okay with the robf becoming the de facto tat for cb and it coming down to a "the biggest robf wins" game?

From what I can tell based on pulling various things out of the database, the RBF is popular because there are a lot of teams that are vulnerable to it. This is the ebb and flow of CB, or as Yogi Bera put it, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

What I'm seeing, as a reference, is that a typical RBF team is dead on arrival when confronted with teams with high HP or teams that focus on ranged. Since the RBF damage is low and melee only, it has its weakness there.

What will most likely happen, barring any other changes in CB, is that as more teams adopt the RBF, more teams will surface that are strong against the RBF (and likewise, against which the RBF is weak).

I think what's hard to grasp for a lot of people these days in CB is that there is a lot more than just tank-blender and mage-blender. IT wasn't too long ago that your team was either focused on a MH or on FB. Anything else, and you didn't grow. Now, there are a lot of different strategies that are strong against some and weak against others. What results is not a simple paper-rock-scissors triangle, but instead a big web of different strategies. I like this. A lot.

while i like the move from a triangle to some kind of multi-pointed star, if it is easier and cheaper to go robf what will drive people to seek out other options as opposed to just joining robf frenzy?

we have always trended to the most bang for the least amount of buck. a tattoo based strategy that is this strong will only be replaced by one that is equally cheap and accessible. in short, the two best counters for the robf are ac and a larger robf.

i myself am working at getting higher ac. at 246 on my front minion though and the reduced reward structure we function under now i can hope to get 300 ac in a year or change to an robf now.

Well, if everyone is an RBF team, and you are a team that can eat RBF's for breakfast, you'll turn the tide nicely. If you just join the fray, you'll be stuck in your RBF pecking order.

What teams eat the RBF for lunch?

Very high NW ones, duh.

EF? I have yet to see that in action.

thank you for your replies! i respectfully disagree and i guess since you hold all the cards only time will tell. i will await eagerly the ranged strat that can eat robf's for breakfast as they should do very well with almost 3 times equal tat distribution and twice as many as the next popular. i will also continue to track these numbers to see what happens.

I personally think a Melee tank based team will have the easiest time beating an RoBF team. In particular a MoD based one backed with some VA. But no one seems to run any teams like that...

Yes, you know why?

Because they will get eaten up by every other character out there, even those with 1/2 the MPR.

While the RBF has little problems preventing them from being farmed by lower MPR characters.

Which has been proven in the earlier post. In addition of the RBF being able to fight up much easier than most strats including Joels heavy NW one.

If you must know I am slowly making my way to a melee based tank team. But at the top levels without USD it takes a while to get it done. Also with an exbow you can compete against other tanks. With enough defense you can last against mage teams as ranged magic damage is rather low. Also GA is handled a lot easier in melee as well.

Doesnt work

they just strap on a Exbow and that strat fails.

Certainly ranged DD damage is low.

But melee DD damage is quite high esp if you have a lot of AC.

Compared to CoC and SG, melee damage is very low.

And considering one has to deal with GA in addition, I just have a hard time figuring out how to successfully run a melee tank.

The exbow can help vs archers, but CoC and SG should eat a melee tank up easily. Esp with the NSC to nerf millions of levels of AMF.

They do and it does

Its extremely hard to run a melee

Exactly.

Strong against A, weak against B... strong against B, weak against C... strong against D, weak against E..... etc.

Only not so linear.

Another big factor here is that not all teams that use an RBF are "RBF teams". Teams are starting to really combine a lot of different ideas into one. So these days, it's more like "I'm an ABC team, strong against BD, weak against ACE", or something like that.

NS,

I think you miss the point.

RBF is weak vs A and B.

Melee is weak against A-X

Missile is weak vs A,B,C,D,E,F

DD is weak vs A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H

Yes, everything has a weakness, but the RBF has the fewest with no drawback of not being able to fight up. It certainly can.

i really wasn't addressing the team strategies with this thread but more item balance. we have 11 tats. we have the tat usage of the 70 most active which likely represents the other 110 (actually much less than that as we have several that forge or lurk here) active users.

an even distribution of tats would be 6.36 of each tat. we now have one tat that is used predominantly. regardless of the reasons i see this as an issue.

addressing this issue in a clever manner is what i would expect from the previous history in carnage blender. i do get what ns is saying but i also know that many of the best strategical minds in cb have been trying to fight it and many have given up and moved over to using one.

if you cannot beat them, or beat them for equal or lesser net worth / mpr / pr then you might as well join them.

What many more things is missle weaker versus than the RBF (in general)....

Why is the RBF weak to two things, and ELbows weak to 6?

What basis is there for that sort of skew?

As alluded to in other threads, what most hinders fighting up?

T50 should be a big give away.

HP coupled with GA. More specifically AS on 4/5 minions (the most HP you can get for your expenditure), with a RoS backed GA.

Wha is best able to fight versus this?

The RoBF.

Any guesses why people are using the RBF to make it easier to fight up versus HP/GA teams set up to be near impossible for lower teams to beat them?

and just to be clear, i am not a proponent of making major changes to items in the game at this time. i would like to see robf damage added to the soc or a similar item created that can be used as a tool to help others with robf mitigation.

we have one item that is overused and another that is underused. the solution seems pretty obvious...

Nerf GA...

You make something reduce RoBF damage, you need to then add a way to boost it.

Have the SoC absorb GA damage.

;)

Why does the RoBF need evasion?

Why does AS need to give extra HP to 3,4,5 minion size teams?

Yup nerf GA

i have seen only anecdotal links between ga and robf usage. as most know i like to stick to my safe realm of obvious data which is why i suggested what i suggested.

GL, b/c without it, AS would be almost useless. 8M level RoBF don't *NEED* 800k levels of evasion. Why should they get 15M CBD worth of evasion (compared to an SoD); when they already get protection from AMF, decent sized GA proof damage, and magic defense.

It wouldn't be useless Titan.

Far form it.

It would still provide HP to the wohle team, that can be boosted on the caster by Gear, and boosted at the receiveing end by AoF.

There's no need for it to provide extra HP above what 'normal' use of HP can grant, just becuase you're using 4 minions over 2.

Especially with PL, to make distribution of HP largely irrelevant.

The RBF has evasion becuase it was originally designed, and still is, to be anti Melee.

It's a 'cloak' of fire wrapped aorund you that burns attackers and makes it hardr for them to hit you.

While this effects Ranged, we have to remember it doesn't benefit from the Ranged bonuses to Evasion. That's not it's primary goal.

Maybe a better question would be to ask why the AMF backlash reduction was moved onto it. That's always sems an arbitrary result of the ToE change (But agian we need to remember it doesn't have an Aura like the ToE).

Why aren't RBF allowed in T50?

how is that hard data of a link between ga usage and robf prevalence exactly, regardless of ranger's reasoning?

A little maths on the AS thing. ;)

With one minion on a single minion team training 'x' amount of HP, you get 100% HP.

With one minion on a 4 minion team training x/4 into AS (with 3/4 of the total XP left to spend elsewhere) you gain 9.0625% * 4 = 36.25%

On a 4 minion team, using 1 Minion for GA, and three for AS, training 3/4 'x' into AS you gain 27.1875 * 4 = 108.75%

8.75% more HP overall with 75% of the XP cost, to training HP naturally. Which can then be boosted by items, unlike natural HP.

This will leave you with the ability to utilise GA as well.

While each individual Minion will have a lower overall total, this is marginalised by PL.

Why not reduce AS casting to be equal to HP useage, no matter what the minion count is? It would then be a strategic trade off (You can boost it, it's subject to DM reduction), rather than a defacto, as it provides so much more bang for your buck. (And if anyone has doubts about As's defacto nature, just check the trained XP pages!)

That or stop PL working with AS granted HP. ;)

( I should add I know you can't GA off of PLed damage. ;) )

I suggested this in CM to NS over 3 months ago. I still believe this is a great solution.

I prefer not to give the players an "easy" button for this tourney. IMO, it is too easy to put on a RBF, regardless of NW and fight up.

There possibly will be a tourney soon with a RBF vs non-RBF type of structure. If I can get another admin to run it, of course.

AS can be dispelled. And with the prevalence of DM, it frequently is.

The should make AS, if it works, a bit more powerful than just native HP.

It can conversley be boosted, by Corns, BoE, AoF, spellboosters, etc.

HP cannot.

It can be protected (and boosted more) from DM by the RoS.

It should be a strategic choice. Do I use AS, which potentially can leave me worse off (by being vulnerable to dispelling, or taking x2 damage from a MoD), or can give me a great advantage over natural HP.

At the moment it's not. It's defacto. Especially when combined with 4 minions. Which is also the defacto minion count.

AS has more (IIRC, they're very close) XP trained into it then natural HP. It's the largest and most thing trained in CB.

It's not a strategic choice.

i chose to use the weekly clan most active stat to actually find what is being used with the active player base. in my opinion any stat based on all of the minions in the game now is way skewed.

if you think as is a problem, or ga, or minion count for that matter, i would suggest tracking it in a similar manner and posting your results in another thread where we can discuss it.

Dude, I don't think there's a need to track it. The maths shows everything. ;)

But if you'd like a seperate thread listing all the un-strategic inequality single minions face in CB, I'm more than game to create it. ;)

that would be awesome as i have wanted a single minion boost for ages. ; )

LoL! There goes my afternoon. ;)

as an alternative to adding robf damage to the soc, i also think that adding some special robf-only affect to the lesser tats would be a way to encourage their use as well.

Lesser Tattoo's aren't needed for Tournaments now, with the Store.

We could get rid of them entirely, if we made reinking more accessible.

doh, i meant to say lesser used tats according to the tables above, not to be confused with lesser tats! ; )