_mr3_

yeaah baby. that's the v-day present i want. tell em, taze.

devs, don't break my heart. make with the returning of 5th!

by the 14th!

fo real!

[ QUOTE ]

7) Sublime -- Hong Kong Phooey


[/ QUOTE ]
hey, speak o the devil. on mine, from the same comp--face to face: popeye the sailor man

9 more--
1) desmond dekker: this woman
2) mod: party animal
3) helmet: born annoying '93
4) the allstonians: can't say
5) the meatmen: men, meat, and fire
6) the aquabats: ska robot army
7) killdozer: never gave me a kiss
8) don drummond: eastern standard time
9) gbh: knife's edge

you just pulled a honkin' thorn out of melee's paw. that wins you a new pal for life. wait, no make that two. thanks wb.

i was just telling someone about a little run-in i had with a new toon a couple of weeks back. she was level 11 then and i was trying to get a feel for her primary/secondary, so i was looking to find her limit. i'll just say the stars aligned right and i saw a good chance to go up against 2 even-level bosses (orange) and an lt (yellow) with a chance at surviving. i gave it a go. no inspirations. she took them out before dropping below 2/3 health. that surprised me a little . oh btw, as far as secondary goes...it wasn't regen.

only a fraction of people realize and/or admit it, but it's true--a good # of the uber regen stories (from the past up through the present) are really just seasoned player stories. and the role that regen played in those stories was swappable with any number of other at/primary/secondaries. no, really, i'm not kidding, that's no smokescreen. heck, it's still that way now. that's where a lot of the frustration comes from--none of those little factoids ever seem to erase the target on greeny's back.

this is going to sound like covered ground here, but believe me it's not. what is it that you think is broken, exactly? is it just stalkers because a.s. lets them 1-shot you? or is it that there are situations the game lets you get into where you can be killed without a chance to respond? if you don't like stalkers 1-shotting you then i can understand where you're coming from, but you know we can be 1-shotted by a lot of things, not just stalkers. and i get the feeling it isn't really 1-shotting that's got you concerned...it's really situations where you can be killed with no warning or ability to respond.

i sympathize there, but again there's no reasonable way to prevent this from happening in pvp. for example, we could cut stalker a.s. damage in half and stalkers will just find another way to kill us without allowing us a chance to respond. if you don't believe me just ask for examples, a lot of folks can likely rattle out a list of tactics that can be used to kill unprepared squishies without allowing for response time. and if the devs put in a safeguard so we as targets couldn't go from near-full-health to 0 from one attack, then someone could just tweak their attack chain and still kill us. without allowing for a response. if the devs tried to go even further and add on a period of "response time" there where your last hp can't be taken by someone after an otherwise-1-shot...then that person can just open their attack sequence with an attack that would prevent you from responding for an extended period of time (ex. knockdown/knockback, which prevents *any response at all*) and then follow up with other attacks to finish the job. i really don't think you can have a reasonable pvp combat system with effective guards built into the system to prevent this.

if you're really trying to single out stalkers, and you're saying that assassin strike is too powerful, i just don't think you can. the entire at is built around the idea of letting them kill quickly without much warning. what do you want? do you want a.s. to allow the target--say--a half second of guaranteed response time? i really don't think it'll help...believe me they'll find a way to catch you by surprise still. and giving a target much more response time than that would kill the utility of stalkers. it really doesn't take much "help" from the at's powers to allow someone to kill without warning or the provision of response time...because stalkers are just one example of an a.t. that's capable of this. and with stalkers alone, i guarantee that if any of us wanted to, we could get around any reasonable dev attempt to prevent stalkers from being able to kill someone without warning or response time. sure, they could design in a grace period where you cannot die, and stalkers could just simply use strategy and an attack sequence to minimize or completely remove your ability to actually respond during that time (reasonably at least).

so the deal is, people are going to be able to gank squishies without much warning, a.s. or no a.s. at all. it's inherent in pvp with toon types that are different enough through hitpoints to make things interesting. it's a whole different ballgame though if you want to start talking about playing in a way that *minimizes the ability* of someone to kill you without warning. you can do this with any a.t., squishies included. sure, you won't always be able to prevent getting ganked without warning. but it's like home or network security: you can make yourself a really hard target, and stalkers looking for easy prey may just look elsewhere . and that gives you more time to...say...hunt stalkers for revenge.

ps. to the people here going on the offensive: what's with all the nastiness? i mean, really?

good deal w/the sticky-action, thx dinah! here are all of the me's running around these days:

coh:
wave of terra - stone/stone tank
hsu yin fung - ma/regen scrap
gale glen - inv/ss tank
the bell's toll - dark/dark scrap
deerfly - fire/ice blaster
chai xianghua - bs/sr scrap

cov:
captain arrlene - inv/em brute
lost dog - fire/fire brute
eternal darkness - necro/dark mm
lament configuration (just for you mb!) - dark/dark brute

...and 8 teenage alts on liberty and 1 on freedom.

i'm usually running someone near the top of either list. arrlene probably needs a villain sg soon too, i'll hafta see who's up for bringing on 4'6" of disgruntled pirate.

[ QUOTE ]

In CoH Beta, players were able to push NPCs rather than the other way around. Quite reliably, players would then herd the NPCs all into a small area, causing AI issues and horrible server lag.

I hate being pushed around, too, but I don't believe it will change any time soon. (NOTE: I could be wrong!)


[/ QUOTE ]
too funny. in *cov* beta there were so many npcs in the bank mishs...that i bugged it. i could never figure out why the folks that put the spawns in there put in so many dang npcs. heck, half as many would be too much. and they all run around waving their hands like they came out of a bathroom with one of those hand-blow-dryer thingies. that animation alone deserves a /smack. i don't think i've ever wanted to take out an npc that bad.

states, i'd really like to see someone pointedly address e.d. w/r/t passives. although posi said that you can always add more enhancers to eek out a little extra benefit if you really want, throwing more than 4 slots on any passive just doesn't make any sense. and since we're not prevented by the enhancement system from doing that...it sort of illustrates how the system seems broken w/passives. couple that with some of the passives now having a base so small to begin with that it's questionable what benefit they give at all (ex. invuln's non-rpd passives), and it just seems flat-out broken. sure, this doesn't apply nearly as much to some passives (ex. stamina, now that power end-burn has been adjusted). but when an entire block of powers in a primary are passed over by a large group of us because they're not viewed to be worth taking at all...that's a sign that things need to be addressed and looked at.

something else i think a few folks are forgetting: an attack with low base chance-to-hit shouldn't be omitted from chains just because it has a lower chance-to-hit. the only thing it affects is the chance to land that attack and the chance of having the streakbreaker kick in and help you...if you're on a miss streak and need it. it's not like the power's going to drop the accuracy of other attacks. if i miss with brawl and then bu+aim i've still got the benefit of bu+aim by itself...and that's no slouch, streak breaker or no.

thx wierdbeard, you rock. here's the kicker though: regardless of the streak breaker logic, i still personally see many more streaks than i think i should. before the streak breaker logic should even kick in it's looking like there are a lot more streaks than there should be. i see runs (both hits and misses) of 3 and 4 in a row often (way more often than the probabilities suggest) in engagements on a single white minion. looking at say just 50% final chance-to-hit attacks, the chance of getting noticeable streaks should still be pretty low (a streak of 3--0.125, 4--0.0625, 5--0.03125). but i see streaks like this happen a lot more than those probabilities say they should. is there a dev free to take a closer look with some testing and collect some streak stats? i know i know, there's a good chance (harhar) that a lot of this is perception, and there shouldn't be anything explicitly *creating* streaks, but...ya never know

[ QUOTE ]

Streak Breaker (I just talked to Poz about it
If you miss three times in a row, then your next attack will always hit.


[/ QUOTE ]
bingo. thanks for asking about that. here's the problem: that's definitely not happening. since i5 hit live i've seen numerous 4- and 5-miss streaks. i just had a 4-miss streak the other night. and the problem i'm seeing isn't necessarily the streakbreaker kicking in or not kicking in: it's the fact that streaks of hits or misses happen so often and for so long. i see streaks of 3 all the time. way too often. bad news: the problem could easily be spread across more than one feature in the game: the streakbreaker logic, power chance-to-hit logic, power type for the powers involved (melee vs pbaoe vs cone vs ranged), accuracy modifications (ex. enhancers, powers that buff/debuff, etc)...we could be looking at more than one issue.

if we could run another long test or two like the one you did the other day and take a look at the streak stats, that could help a lot. some folks have mentioned situations where the streaking might even be worse than other places. i think a deeper look would show that there's something fishy going on with the streaking.

thanks for the look castle, but i think someone still needs to look at the streaking. i routinely see streaks of 3, 4 and every now and then even 5 misses in a row. it happens on just about every melee set i run (em, ss, stone). like nozy says: it's been going on for months now. it's kind of funny because we were joking about the rng's being streaky and a little off just a few months ago (i5 going live). if the long-term averages are right-on then that's cool, but the scale of scrums being much smaller are much more sensitive to things like streaks. we really need a closer look at this.

you know what? it just dawned on me. remember the patrol bug last issue where you'd zone into a map and patrol mobs would zip around like they were late for a meeting? it didn't seem like a big deal, the problem was probably something minor like the server starting its patrol mobs on their patrol scripts when your client started the map load...so then when you finished zoning in you'd see the patrols playing 'catch-up' on your machine (when they were really already caught-up on the server). the mish script on the client must have been saying 'these patrol guys start here'...but when you finish zoning the server was saying 'nahnah they're way way over here now 10 seconds into their patrol'.

the movement of those patrol mobs was just like the movement of disoriented mobs: the animation of disorient like the animation of patrol creeping doesn't match the move speed/direction we see onscreen. because the mapserver was doing something a little different than our clients.

so here's a guess: the client's got this rule that disoriented foes get -speed and -fly (you can tell since foes that come at you fast on the ground while disoriented are using that slow walk animation). the server doesn't...or doesn't in all cases of running and flying.

i'm hoping what always looked like the dev intent is what we get: running disoriented mobs look goofy. like they were intented to only creep along, fly ability or no.

i'm gonna second screwloose on this. we've been seeing this problem in coh with all 'critters' since...the dawn of paragon. are we going to fix just flying enemies or are we going to fix them all? because everything exibits this behavior to some extent. if i'm running a toon and i get disoriented my movement ability is all but cut off. if i disorient a non-flying critter though (and flight ability doesn't make a real difference here) it will almost always glide away from me at a nice clip while under disorient (and it even looks wierd, like it's a bug). btw, up until recently that was the only thing that made cak worth taking from ma .

[ QUOTE ]

Police Bot or Arbiter Drone now give a medium radius +Perception buff to Players only who are standing near them. Once a player leaves that radius, the +Perception falls off very quickly. This was done to prevent a pretty nasty exploit.


[/ QUOTE ]

ahahah i've got a good guess about what that pretty nasty exploit was

ah ok. thx for the clarify

wait a minute. didn't someone confirm a known bug with (certain?) aoe powers missing more against moving targets? i could have sworn someone was talking about this in the last day or 2, and it came out of some scrapper talk about shadowmaul. it's a cone not a sphere and all, but they're both still aoe.

whoaaah, hold on a second. i think my monitor's broken. and my eyes. da sfx are *really* going to get tuned down? like for real and stuff? holy cats sleeping with dogs. after all of these months of suspecting the sound guy stabbing at anyone with a pen that came close to his loops? this isn't some kinda evil practical joke is it? i mean, this tweak will make it to da scrappers too, not just brutes?...

welcome to champion, wildstar! seems like everyone's taken the plunge, and i sorta dodged the bullet last time, so here goes...i hail outta orlando fl, where most of my family is. i grew up in tampa but i've lived in miami too. i just turned 34 (man that's crazy to put down on paper and actually look at). i'm a recovering game developer and work on simulations for da man these days. i'll probably relapse, just a matter of time. i started coh last july because deagol and pfister (rl friends and two great guys) told me "first one's free!", but before that i swore off online games altogether. i just couldn't see myself getting into them. and here i am, still hooked. i can thank my great champion family for that one . you can see my goofy mug on cohfaces with my old main, hsu. ah, memories of regeneration. i'm always up for help and good times, you can get me at the mr3 (underscores turn into spaces in global ids). rock on!

[ QUOTE ]

Still angry! San Jose is not close to Tampa.


[/ QUOTE ]
heheh! make that 2 votes for tampa. livin in orlando now, but that's where i grew up, and heck it's only 1 1/2 hrs drive. it def beats the drive to cali.

wanna know the first thing i thought of when i saw the thread title? "top secret". remember that one? it was one of my favs. of course i was 10, so it might have sucked and i didn't know it, but the idea of a p&p spy world stoked me to no end.

y'all notice anything funny about this snippet of posi's post on 'enhancement diversification' from friday?:

(bolding by me for emphasis)
[ QUOTE ]

All the Issue 4 and 5 balance adjustments were done with this system in place internally here at Cryptic. All playtests, QA checks, difficulty adjustments and balances have been done with Enhancement Diversification in mind since March 2005.


[/ QUOTE ]

...when you look back to geko's explanation of i4 changes to regen on 3/24?:

(bolding by me for emphasis)
[ QUOTE ]

That is, with Fast Healing and no Enhancements, you now Regenerate 35% of your HP in 1 minute. Now lets put in 6 SO Enhancements. 6 may seem extreme, but this is for example only. In any event, it is something we must always consider. SO Regen Enh boost Regen powers by 33%...

0.25 x (1 + (0.4 x (1 + (6 x 0.33)))) =
0.25 x (1 + (0.4 x (1 + 1.98))) =
0.25 x (1 + (0.4 x 2.98)) =
0.25 x (1 + 1.192) =
0.25 x (2.192) = 0.548

That is, with Fast Healing with 6 SO Enhancements, you now Regenerate 54.8% of your HP in 1 minute.


[/ QUOTE ]
(...and then he went on to talk about the changes to integration and ih, using 6-so examples for each.)

so, if i've got this right, they set the i4 levels for regen where they did based on a max 6-so setup at the then-current 0.33 heal enhancement benefit. but wait, didn't posi say they've been testing changes to the game since mid-march using the new 'diminishing returns' values for enhancements? it's sort of confusing what happened then. did they change regen in i4 to match a 0.33*6 max or 0.33*6(scaled down for diminishing returns)?

that made me wonder about the internal scrapper test results that came a month later. what did they balance to then? if they balanced to the new lower enh-benefit #s the whole time then i guess we'd be relatively okay going into this enhancement change. but that's hard to believe (it means we've been relatively overpowered since i4, up until this enh change goes in). now if they didn't--if they balanced to the old values instead--then wouldn't they have had to reduce our potency even more? and if that's the case, then introducing the new benefit #s would mean we'll be balanced to higher benefit than we can actually achieve...unless they go back and change power potency again.

i'm not trying to raise a panic here, i'm just honestly confused. and i'm not really just talking about regen here of course, it applies to all of the changes since march.

and that makes me wonder about the i5 changes and what they were based on.

it'd be nice for them to come out and tell us a little more about how they've been testing.

first, welcome to artic s...oops, welcome to arctic sun! you'll love it here.

[ QUOTE ]

:::Change of Command:::

Give him a BIG WELCOME! Please take it easy on him...for the first couple of weeks anyway.

And remember, I'll be dropping in from time to time to see that y'all are minding your manners.

Arctic_Sun... good luck! You are in for an adventure!

-Gil


[/ QUOTE ]

i didn't get a chance to say this yesterday, so here goes...happiest of trails gil! you are the original realtime-on-the-fly redname poster...that isn't cj. you started a trend. and if you don't keep playing and dropping back by enough then i'm afraid you'll have to start watching your back--the forum non-cartel have a way of making non-refusable offers. see ya in-game ole hoss!

ps. thank god there's no such thing as hyphen-splicing...'cause that way i can't ever be guilty of it

i know. every time you took the brunt of the bat, i took it too. every time. we've got 2 choices--throw in the towel or keep scrapping. it's been anything but easy, but you already know what my choice is. for a scrapper, there is only one real choice.

i don't think i have to tell you that your suspicions are well-founded my friend . but i'll give you some positive reassurance if you want it. i honestly don't think qr is out of balance. i just think that some of our old favorite uses of it have disappeared. the loss of those uses counters our new-found endurance in my eyes. i see that as balanced. if they make a move at this point to reduce qr then they'll be effectively doing a number of things in my eyes:

1) if they reduce qr but not also all scrapper primary and secondary power endurance costs then they'll effectively be saying that they left part of their regen adjustments on the table in i5. at this point they'd have to come out with some good explanations and admit to error there i think.
2) they'll be going against the spirit of the set to some extent. after all, they created the spirit of low downtime in regen. if it wasn't on purpose then it was one honking big accident.
3) if endurance is reduced across the board then i could see a justifiable reduction in qr...as long as when the dust settles we net the same relative amount of endurance (compared to power cost) as we do now.
4) i don't think qr's buff # was originally intended primarily for ih as a toggle. even though ih now being a click leaves us with surplus endurance. i think that the new ih is making us feel guilty for having extra endurance. but on the other hand, we lost not only potency in the set in i5 (understandable) but also flexibility with ih being in a more static form now (not as understandable, to me at least). i think we are paying for our qr just fine.
5) there are much bigger balance fish to fry at this point than powers in regen. sr's effectiveness is still very much questionable, at least in our eyes. they have to address this fully. they are, slowly. in the midst of large balance issues like that, if they somehow justify a reduction in qr but don't at the same time make some of the other adjustments that we know they really do need to make to buff other secondaries then it'll at least make for a strange set of priorities.

when the devs signed the dotted line on regen in i5, i heard in my ears that they considered the overall potency of the set--including qr--as balanced. unless they do something at this point to drastically change the endurance game and so then force a qr change...then they will have some explaining to do.

heheh, it's funny. i know what you're thinking. this kind of reasoning could have been used in every other issue before. but what's different now...states came out and said they acknowledge the regen situation they've created, and they are now actively engaged in minimizing changes spread out over time.