Wonderslug

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There's also a FAQ up on the Cryptic Studios site.

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Is it possible for an attack to have more than one damage type? It's been a while since I've come across a specific example, but I've seen it said many times that for an attack with multiple damage components the highest defense value is used. So in the Fireball example if I had 10% smashing defense and 5% fire defense, supposedly the 10% number would be used. If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, anything other than fire defense (or positional defense) would be ignored.

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Your understanding is correct. Defense cares only about attack typing; the actual damage dealt is irrelevant. Attack type and damage type are related in a generally predictable fashion, but that is not necessarily the case. Levitate, for example, is typed Psionic Attack but deals smashing damage.

However, lots of attacks do have multiple typings. Bitter Ice Blast, for example, is typed Ranged Attack, Smashing Attack, Cold Attack. If you had smashing and cold defense, you would use whichever is higher. Corner cases like Fireball and Levitate are the exceptions, not the rule, but they do exist.

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So if that is not true....is there any source for how various attacks are typed? Or maybe I should ask if there's any *published* source. ;P

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City of Data. Unless you mean, like, officially published on paper. In which case, no (and it would probably be at least 17% wrong in any case, going by the oh-so-stellar record of most strategy guides). Parts of it are gradually becoming outdated, but CoD is about the closest thing to official as you're going to find.

There's no such thing as an attack that deals pure Nictus damage, and unless I'm blanking on something there are only two attacks that have it, period: Quantum Rifle and the Void melee attack whose name escapes me. Both of those also deal negative energy damage, and given that purples work on them they must be typed negative, ranged/melee, or both.

Ah, sneaky. That suggests more foresight than I would have anticipated.

Mmm, updates.

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So that there is no confusion, here are some examples:

* Fireball does fire damage and smashing damage. Its typed Fire_Attack/AoE_attack. Smashing defenses do not protect against it.

* Ice Arrow is typed Cold_Attack/Ranged_Attack. It does not do cold damage. It does no damage at all.

* Dominate is typed Psionic_Attack. Notice it isn't typed with any "positional" type at all. So none of Super Reflexes defense powers work against it.

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Another good example: Levitate deals smashing damage, but is typed Psionic_Attack only. This is the only example I can think of where damage type and attack type are in complete disagreement.

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The power Power Boost (both the blaster energy manipulation version, and the epic power pool version) boosts defense powers while power boost is active.

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For the sake of completeness you may want to mention Dominators and Power Build Up here too.

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All mez protection powers in melee defense sets scale up with level, with tankers getting maximum protection at level 35, and scrappers at level 45.

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I know a dev tossed this out at some point, but I don't think it's actually correct, or isn't correct anymore. Per iakona's formulas from the second power standardization thread, it appears to be a straight 1-50 progression.

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Specifically: benumb debuffs mez strength, and therefore also debuffs mez protection. The 55.9% benumb debuff would also reduce your mez protection, from say 10.38 for a level 50 scrapper, down to 10.38 * (1 - 0.559) = 4.58. Like: two holds.

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It may also be worth mentioning Weaken, which if CoD is correct is even more powerful at 74.5%. I think those are the only two mez debuffs in the game, correct?

Power Boost should also buff mez protection, which I think is really only relevant to Dominators if used prior to Domination. FF or Sonic controllers or defenders with the ancillary PB/PBU would also be affected, but since their mez protection is a toggle and PB is short duration the uses for that are probably limited.

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Supposedly, everything obeys AT modifiers, including all defense powers, whether in primary or secondary sets, or in power pools. An interesting exception is the Unyielding Debuff: its -5% for both scrappers and tankers.

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The debuff for brutes and scrappers was reduced to -3.75 in the 8/1/06 patch.

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The problem I have with numbers is, to quote someone, "Lies, damned lies and statistics"

Statistics NEVER tell the real story.

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Which is a pity, because the devs are just as reliant upon them as we are, if not more so.

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There might, potentially, be scores of players who are getting incredible amounts of mitigation out of frozen aura, using a tactic that none of us has seen used before.


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I can understand the desire to play devil's advocate, but please give us a little credit here. CoH came out three years, five months, and one day ago. Do you really, truly, deeply, honestly, in your heart of hearts, think that if it were possible to get "incredible amounts of mitigation" out of Frozen Aura, someone would not have found out how by now?

Wait, I take that back. Tundara *did* find a way to get incredible amounts of mitigation out of Frozen Aura. Too bad it relied on slotting it with the unbelievably bugged chance to heal IO, a bug that was quickly squashed.

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Maybe there's a trick with greater ice sword that turns it into an incredibly destructive 'insta-kill' power, and we haven't seen it.

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Unless you are suggesting there's a hidden GIS-only instant death proc out there somewhere, I'd be very interested in hearing some theories as to how this would even be possible. GIS is a bog-standard 1.96 DS attack that behaves like every other 1.96 DS attack in the game, except for three things:

1) It has an inherent 1.2 accuracy rating, as do Seismic Smash, Total Focus, Energy Transfer, Knockout Blow, and Greater Fire Sword.
2) It inflicts a 16% slow and -recharge penalty for 10 seconds. It is Ice Melee's most potent and long-lasting slow, and it is matched or exceeded by every power in Ice Blast that possesses a slow. (Technically it is exceeded by all of them, as blasters have a higher slow modifier than tanks, but the base values are the same.)
3) It is saddled with an interminable 2.87 second animation otherwise used only in weapon sets--and, I might add, only for 10-foot, 20-degree cone attacks--and therefore stuck with the weapon draw buffer, despite the fact that GIS does not have to be drawn. I should note this problem was previously shared with the more damaging Greater Fire Sword, which was shaved down to a still not sprightly but considerably faster 2.03 seconds in I7, which went live on June 6, 2006, nearly sixteen months ago.

Those are not statistics. Those are statements of fact. You may challenge the presentation as biased, which it is, but it remains fact nonetheless.

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Someone suggested in this thread that a possible reason for datamining showing that Ice Melee tankers underperform less than expected is because many Ice Melee players don't even take all the Ice Melee attacks, supplanting them with power pool attacks (aka air superiority, boxing).

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Speaking of which, has it struck anyone else that the period of worst performance for /ice ends at 45? That is, I suspect not coincidentally, the earliest you can possibly take and slot any of the three single-target APP blasts.

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That's precisely the point. If Stone must, why can't Ice Melee?

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That presupposes that stone must. How many people actually slot Seismic for hold at all, barring HOs? Permahold SS is a neat party trick, but so what? Stone can kill or maim a boss in the default hold duration, plus follow up with Fault or Tremor or Stone Mallet or Heavy Mallet for KD if additional control is needed.

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As for Fault, I'd really like to know exactly how much of a threat a [EDIT]group of[/edit] minion[edit]s[/edit] is to a Tank. If it's "not that much", then that's undoubtedly factored into the Developer mindset.

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In a sufficiently large spawn, minions can account for a very large portion of the incoming damage. And if we're not talking large spawns: who cares? When has a small number of minions ever been a threat to a tank, unless it's Vanguard or something with substantial end drain?

The question is how much relative value do those powers bring in a team environment? Which one stops more AoE? Which one is better at keeping those 45-second stun grenades off the blasters? Do you know how much knockdown Fault provides? Tremor? The ST attacks? Stone is not hurting for KD, either. And do you know what happens to Ice Patch if you're teamed with so much as one person who gets giddy over knockback powers?

Interesting point: the larger the spawn gets, the more powerful /stone's control gets relative to /ice. If you really want the details, I again refer you to earlier threads as we've been over it multiple times in great detail.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. I have nothing new to add, and I, and others, have answered the exact same objections, multiple times, in prior threads, and I no longer care about trying to convince other players. At this point people are convinced or they aren't, and frankly Castle's the only one that really matters.

I'll be brief, since I've already been over this in previous incarnations of this thread

Ice Patch is powerful, yes, but in no way does it equate to permanently removing things from the fight. Based on empirical testing I did around the time I9 came out, Ice Patch prevents, on average, about 60% of the attacks from "normal" sized enemies and about 70% of attacks from big lumbery things that take forever to stand up (Freak Tanks and Warhulks being good examples). If you want to see my preliminary results and methodology, they're reposted on page 3 of the Fixing Ice Melee 2.0 thread, and the subsequent tests I did more or less confirmed what's there.

To put that 60% in context, during the testing I found that two +1 Cor Leonis Adjutants would kill me before the ice patch tests were complete unless I used Dull Pain and a few greens.

Fault, incidentally, can easily be slotted to stun minions permamently, using no Hasten and only SOs. Lieutenants can theoretically also be permanently stunned, although it's only 50/50 odds to hit mag 3 with Fault.

As for Freezing Touch, the "if given a chance to stack" bit is not trivial. At level 50 it has a base duration of 11.92 seconds. It recharges in 16. Slotting 1 hold/1 recharge Freezing Touch will allow it to stack...for under four seconds...against even cons. A 2 rech or 2 hold slotting will allow even less overlap. In order to make FT nearly perma (again, against even cons only) requires four slots devoted to some combination of hold and recharge. Even then, it will take at least 9 seconds to stack on a boss, compared to the 1.5 second animation time of Seismic.

Four slots is a lot, given that Freezing Touch is the second most powerful attack in the set. Sacrificing that much damage is not a trivial decision.

Is there any chance you can at least give us an update on the Greater Ice Sword animation? Last we heard it had been referred to an animator to look at, and that was several months ago.

I know animation time is at a premium, especially with new sets coming out, but Greater Fire Sword had the exact same animation and received the same fix GIS needs long, long ago--shortly after I7, I believe. And we're on the cusp of I11 now edit: It's hard not to feel like there's preferential treatment there, even though I'm sure there's not--especially given that Fire Sword Circle was also tweaked at the same time, whereas Ice Sword Circle was left out in the cold (ha) for considerably longer.

Thanks! It was a sudden bolt of inspiration. I agree about the metal; not that it doesn't work, but it's just done so much. I've got a few other ideas floating around, so we'll see if anything comes of them.

Also, I've added a YouTube version for the lazy or bandwidth-starved. Link's in my sig.

This is my first serious stab at video editing: a couple of my blasters expound upon some basic physical laws, with the musical assistance of Flanders and Swann.

It has been tested on animals and small children and found not to cause tumors, mostly!

Sendspace link (18.5 MB):
Clicky!

Rooting through my screenshots folder I found I took a fair number of cool ones--most of them apparently by accident, since a buch more were ruined artistically by having the UI switched on Hopefully Photobucket won't mangle these too badly.

Scenery:
LORD RECLUSE IS SUBTLE!
We're going to need more Roundup.
Vertiginous
Striga: Space-Nazi HQ or Chinese Landscape Painting?
Fi, fi, fo, fum

Characters:
Postmortem:
Houston, we have a problem...
Lanaru blows up real good

Amon from Marketing:
You call that lightning?
Plunge into the abyss

Monogotari:
Family portrait

Iris Long:
Contemplating at the moon

Foxtrot Kilo:
Pondering Amanda's offer

Oddities:
The Lips of Horror
Forewarned is four armed
Longbow lowers its hiring standards

GARRIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTT! /shatner

Well...

...well...

...poo.

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Reference for Corruptors...

Dark Embrace
* Self +RES (S/L, N. Energy, Tox)
* END: 1 unit/sec
* Recharge: 4 secs

[/color]

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Dark Embrace costs 1 End/sec!

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How do you arrive at that conclusion? Has anyone actually tested that yet? 'cuz all that quote says to me is that one "unit" of endurance, whatever that may be, is taken away every second, and that they really need to try harder on this "hard numbers" thing. The endurance/second numbers we're used to seeing on the forums mostly have little relation to how the devs probably think of toggles because lots of toggles don't tick once per second. They tick anywhere from several times per second to, in the case of Cloak of Fear, about once every five seconds.

I suspect that in devspeak CoF would be represented as 1 "unit"/5 seconds. This is as misleading as it is unhelpful.

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Funny tidbit -

When we first got these on internal for testing the 5th were bugged.

Link to Screeny of what the 5th looked like before it was fixed:


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Aw. After you said that I was expecting to see a couple of Mek Men.

Vyvyane was promoted to QA lead for Lineage 2, as I recall. Or something important and techy for Lineage 2, anyway.

(Also: Lineage is a promotion? 0_o)

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Add Weaver_one to that list as well...though I haven't seen him post since CoV Beta.

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Yeah, but Weaver's an art guy. He's probably shackled to a 3d rendering program or something. Either that or he's busy playing with the Orbital Doom Laser.

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5th Column Mek Man

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That would be awesome! He is after all the most beloved glitch in the game.

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Poor little Mek Men. Vandal comes up with a new model and suddenly they're relegated to filing papers and gesturing at the Warburg helicopter.

I want a Raserai Ubermenschen Unteroffizier. Just because it always amused me to see all that crammed into the target window.

I haven't seen this question asked, and it might be more of a Manticore issue, but it's been bugging me for a long time: what the heck is up with the history badge plaques for Talos and Dark Astoria?

What I mean is, many of the plaques on Talos reference various things Spanky Rabinowitz did on that spot--get born, hold an election party, etc. Problem is Spanky was born in 1878 and was mayor in the early 20th century, but as per the Talos security chief mission and this page Talos Island didn't even exist until Talos snuffed it in the 1960s, and wasn't being developed until the 80s. Which is right? There's also one that has Vambrace giving a speach there in 1953.

Similar question for Dark Astoria--the plaques there suggest it's been "Dark" since at least 1953, but other history badges strongly imply that the cemetary was in active use at least as recently as the aftermath of the Rikti war. It seems like a bad idea to deliberately bury your loved ones an area with a history of zombie uprisings and soul-devouring cultists...

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Hmmm. I don't know about you, but from what I've heard (back when CoH had just been released) was that "Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls" was actually a part of a mission description back in the CoH Beta?

Maybe I'm mistaken though.

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Don't think so.

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Nope. Behold the (partial, truncated) origins of that ubiquitous phrase.

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Y'know what I don't want to see? The Babbage buffed to the point where a Synapse team can't be expected to beat him, leaving him to rampage through Skyway at will.

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The smart thing to do would be to change ambush-Babbage, ambush-Kronos, and the two Quarries in the Eden trial into regular AV-style non-giant Monsters (like portal Adamastor or Numina's Jurrasik--unless they've changed since the last time I fought them; it's been a while). Then the single teams they're intended for could still beat them, but the zone event monsters could get the buffing most of them (not Lusca) sorely need. Seriously, I've beaten Adamastor in DA with four random strangers, with no deaths or even serious injuries. That's just sad. Two full teams literally vaporize the poor shlub.

That was kinda my point. I think. It's late. Plenty of people said masterminds got weak in the higher levels, but no one, as far as I saw, specifically pinpointed the issue as being tied to enhancements not working right until very late. Certainly the devs don't seem to have known about it until WierdBeard reported it fixed internally, so their balance analysis was done using faulty data.

Personally I expect, at most, a downward adjustment on the base damage of some of the granted abilities. I think we'll still end up doing noticeably better damage than currently in the late game.

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It now has been stated. Positrons post makes it clearly a bug.

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My frustration isn't directed at you, per se, but at the fact that fixing bugs should be pretty black & white: if it's a known bug, fix it. But there seems to be some stalling here. They are concerned that MM's would be too powerful if the enh's affected the upgraded powers. This seems intentional. Why test the fix at all if it's a genuine bug in the game?

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You know that "beta" thing? Up until the last week or so the assumption from everybody was that enahancements were affecting upgraded powers. That means all the mastermind balancing and analysis up until the last week of October was done using faulty information. I think that's a good reason to test it first, don't you?

Either your GM was attempting to say "SGs are supposed to get the bonus but currently, due to a bug, they are not," or your GM doesn't know what he's talking about. See here.