_Story_

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I want your deviant art link I like to +watch all the coher's on DA :P

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I wonder if I have it already? PM me the linky too.

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The colors on that are fantastic!! Excellent light source-work!!

... I still need to upload those blanks for people!

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Indeed.

4 more days left. No requests for any extensions. Eh, whatever. This is what it is.

Happy Birthday Gill. I hope you enjoy every moment of it.

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I have a thought about that, something related to vigilence. I can't quite express it fully yet, but when the thought finally settles I'll post it here.

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I would really look forward to an analysis of this sort for Vigilance.

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Vigilence is a little trickier to analyze because of its group dynamic. But what I was thinking about was more of a perspective on defiance and vigilence rather than their actual strength (although that is part of it).

One interesting complaint that is shared to a degree between both inherents is that in effect, they reward bad play. You can only get the damage boost from defiance if you get punched in the face a lot, you can only get a lot of it if you put yourself at significant risk of death (intentionally or not). The same is somewhat true for vigilence: you can only get a boost from it if, in effect, you let your team get beat up.

Both seem to penalize good play. A blaster that protects himself well cannot get much of a boost from defiance. A defender that protects her team well cannot get much of a boost from vigilence.

But I was thinking about how the SR passive resistances work in relation to this. A lot of people don't fully appreciate that those resistances are a lot stronger than they appear, specifically because they (often, not always) get stronger as they are needed most: that acts to skew their net effect higher, because they only apply power where necessary, and not anywhere else.

In a sense, defiance and vigilence can act in a manner similar to those resistances: as "bumpers" that tend to kick players back into normal realms of play. A blaster might *attempt* to play without getting damaged a lot, but defiance acts as a partial safety net for when they fail: and in degrees, the more they fail, the stronger it acts to kick them back, by increasing their kill speed and presumably reducing their incoming damage. Vigilence has a similar negative feedback effect: if you don't protect your team well enough that they start to take damage, your endurance goes up to give you more options to be profligate with your powers to keep them alive.

In effect, both defiance and vigilence are not buffs in the conventional sense, they are really gap reducers for the AT. They reduce the difference between perfect play and imperfect play: they reduce the penalty of errors.

Seen that way, both inherents are actually casual player tools of a sort. Training wheels for the AT, to reduce their difficulty: you can get the same benefit with less skill, and you cannot easily get lots more benefit with more skill.

This doesn't mean skilled players can't figure out ways to leverage both, but their overall intent might not be to boost those ATs, but rather to reduce the *spread* in their performance. And that *is* something that would show up in the datamining the devs probably do.


This says two things to me if true:

1. Defiance isn't actually comparable to something like criticals, and it never was. Criticals are a set-wide boost to scrappers: they make all scrappers better. Defiance and Vigilence aren't: they are learning-curve softeners. They reduce the gap between the best and worst blasters and defenders.

2. This reopens the question of whether or not blasters really do enough damage, because defiance isn't specifically a damage-boosting tool. That's secondary to its actual purpose. An interesting question would be to find out if the introduction of defiance, independent of other factors, improved the net average performance of all blasters, or if it primarily reduced the spread of performance around a similar average, or if the top performance stayed basically the same, the bottom moved up, and the average therefore moved up - but only by moving the worse performers upward, not because the blaster AT itself moved upward in performance overall.

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This is basically what I've always understood about these Inherants. I've not been able to communicate that accurately though, so I thank you for being able to put my thoughts into words in the way that I couldn't.

So, is this getting inked? I was just thinking about all of those little scales again. Each and every little one. Again. In ink. So, is it? Is it?

Give me a bit to think about it then.

I'm out. Anyone else want to take over The World?

I can't seem to be able to register an account with WarCry. Something on their website keeps screwing up when I submit my registration info and then I'm not getting the email sent to me with the validation code. It looks like I'm not going to be able to ask any questions.

I had thought this was an intentional effect. Whenever I ran these missions (and I ran a lot of them) whenever anyone entered the cave the graphics would change. When Snaptooth was killed and the baby rescued the graphics would change back.

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I think I said I wouldn't post any more updates but I lied!

some closeups

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Reptilectric is still missing color on his cheast scales!

Not that anyone will notice.

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Gahh! Almost don't want to post this as it looks pretty crappy now. Hopefully things will start looking better with the shading.

Big ole monochromatic color blocks

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Love it! <^_^> Good job!

<^_^> I can't believe I didn't check this thread sooner <,< Rawr!

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You mean you don't read every little new thing in this forum section like I do?

I know my current version of Adobe Photoshop Elements that came with my tablet comes with limited GIF animation functionality.

Edit - I went back and checked, and it's version 3.0

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Poor lil nips, what did they ever do to you guys anyways?

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The nips were over-powered. They had to be reduced to restore character balance.

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Really? I thought they could have used some buffing. If you do decide to buff the nips then I can offer you my expert services.

I'll have to write out some long biographies and get him to condense them for me.

Well, she's currently the only model in development. A prototype with a few bugs that still need to be worked out. I'd tell you to talk to her designers, but she killed them all. You could ask her if you could claim ownership of her for a fee, but she'd likely just kill you. At the same time she will still perform her equisite services for a minimum fee of $2000 per hour. Well, and then she'd kill you.

Or you could purchase one of the older 6.9 models for about 2.5 million new. It seems like a steep price, but they start paying for themselves right out of the box and they take care of all their own maintenance. Anything that they can't self-repair and you can bring it back to the manufacturers and they will fix it for free if it's still under warranty. You can contact Metro SinTech at 1-800-555-MSTI. They'd really appreciate your business as they are desperately trying to restaff their engineering department and could use the extra influx of cash.

Oh, and if you run into the 7.0 model, please do not engage in any way and call the Metro SinTech number and report her location. Their internal security team will be sent out to shut down her systems and reaquire her. Then she will be taken back for immediate analysis and repairs.

I'm guessing it's one of those effects that are rendered by Photoshop itself if you have the right plug-ins.

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Excellent work so far, Aero, I love the details you're adding with the backgrounds! (Speedy's is great, I love that lady waving at him ! )

I can't wait to see what you'll do with the colors. And yeah, craptastic days have a way of sending karma points your way.

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If you believe in that kind of karma. One view is that all karma is punishment for our wrongdoings and all the good things we have to work for.

*adds wood to the fire*

<^o^>

Thanks!

I'm still trying to figure out what race she belongs too. Those horns are all her.

Well, since my thread is being ignored, maybe if I re-post this here people might acknowledge it's existence.

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Global : @Personamorpher

Server : Champion

Heroes :

Phoenix Strike

Painslave

Ms. Glacier

Mortuarti Ohmba

Midnight Cobalt

Equilibrius

Villains :

Scourge of Gaia

Nymphbot 7.0

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Global : @Personamorpher

Server : Champion

Heroes :

Phoenix Strike

Painslave

Ms. Glacier

Mortuarti Ohmba

Midnight Cobalt

Equilibrius

Villains :

Scourge of Gaia

Nymphbot 7.0

So I'm the only one who uses Windows Live Messenger?