Arcanaville

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Well, looks like my post on 03/07/06 matches up exactly with Statesman's post today regarding accuracy/tohit. On Live servers, the first CombatMod table is multiplied by AttribBase for ToHit to find the BaseToHit by relative level and class. The second CombatMod table is multiplied by the power effect to find the effectiveness by relative level (for things like debuffs, damage, mezzes, etc.).

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Hold that thought.

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Ok I am going to say it and I am going to be flamed.

IT IS EACH AND EVERY SINGLE STALKERS FAULT THIS HAPPENED.

I have been saying from beta if the stalker comunity sits back and let the people spewing propaganda about this AT with no voice of reason they would win. So you all set back and flamed me every time I said it and now its going to happen so thanks for letting uninformed BS spewing toolboxs distroy our AT because you were too busy flaming me when i told you this would happen.

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To be honest, I never thought Placate should strongly affect anything but the target, since it autohits in the first place. Because of the way the mechanism is designed, it has to allow the stalker to crit anything, it can't make the target itself vulnerable to crits. But Placating one target and becoming untargettable by everything everywhere (short of overpowering +perception which would nullify hide itself anyway) seemed conceptually wrong to me anyway.

And because of the way perception and aggro affect NPC critters, stalkers never really had the ability to disappear from other targets in this sense in PvE anyway: its essentially a PvP change.


Changing Placate to require a tohit roll shuffles the problem around a bit: if you are surrounded by several targets, you could simply target the one with the lowest defense, and still get the full stealth behavior against all of them, and still crit any of them (of course, only the targetted one would have the placate status effect on them). That seems odd behavior to me.

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You really haven't messed with other ATs, then, have you?

When you start throwing control powers or multi-AT teams, you *have* to get a universalized value, or you'll really get fudgered when you toss enemies into the simulation.

Looking at things in a proportional method is great in scaled samples like the excellent work by yourself, DrRock, or Starsman, but I've tried it for group simulations, and if there's a way, it's even more complex than what I'm doing.

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Its precisely when comparing things of different health levels, in different circumstances, that I normalize. I would rather eat my own eyeballs than do them denormalized.

Discrete iterative simulations are a completely different thing entirely. For one thing, I'm not doing any of the work anymore. Simulations and closed form equations have different requirements. We're talking about modelling perspective, not a difference in actual numbers.

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Actually, I would consider Tankers to benefit more from 50% resistance than a Blaster.

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I prefer to look at things in the way in which the greatest number of variables becomes scale-invariant. If tankers benefit from 50% resistance more than blasters, then level 50 tanks benefit from 50% resistance more than level 49 tanks. With each level you get more health, and thus getting a +health benefit. I would much rather call that benefit a singular benefit (-ScaledDamage), than calling it a +HealthCap +Regen +HealFactor +EffectiveResSurvival +EffectiveDefSurvival benefit. Its possible, but no thanks.

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10% is 10%, no matter the AT.

100 health vs 140 health is defintely not the same, especially considering in most cases that 140 health is being applied to someone with a good deal of damage resistance. It means that the tanker with the same scale of heal will almost certainly survive longer than a blaster with a 100 point heal.

Surely, you agree with that?

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Yes, but that isn't quite the point I was making.

Colloquially, we tend to say that 30% resistance is 30% resistance no matter your health level. We don't tend to say "30% resistance helps you more if you have higher health." If we really did that consistently, we'd say that your resistance gets stronger as you go up in level, and your health rises. We don't *tend* to say that: our perspective is that 30% resistance helps someone with high health the same amount as someone with low health, because we assume that we've already counted high health as a separate benefit already.

You bring up resistance: regeneration is a bit sticky because of how it interacts with defense and resistance. In survival terms, defense and resistance act to magnify the effect of regeneration (including heals) on a relative basis. So theoretically, Healing Flames helps a fire tanker more than it would a blaster, even if the blaster had tanker health. But thats a separate issue from scaling heals to tanker health.

How we view the heals depends on how we view the benefit of having higher health. We *could* look at +health in absolute terms: we could say that +health added X health points, plus boosted natural regeneration by Y points per second. If we did, we could also say that +health boosted the effects of heals. But then, how do you compare the benefit of +health to quantities people have a firmer intuitive grasp on, like resistance and defense? It takes seconds to explain resistance to someone in a way they'll grasp. It takes days to explain defense to someone in a way they'll claim to grasp. You'll *never* explain to the average person what the accumulated effects of higher health cap and enhanced regeneration are in terms of survival in a way they'll ever get a clean grasp of.

But you can describe +health in terms of resistance: its non-stackable resistance of value 1 - (1/healthboost). I.e a +40% health boost means you only take 1/1.4 = 71.4% of the incoming damage, and therefore you act as if you have 28.6% resistance. But this intuitive grasp of +health only works if you then normalize all heals and regeneration in percentage of health bar terms: a 10% heal is a 10% heal regardless of max health.

Break that by claiming +10% heal is stronger for someone with higher health, and now you have no way to explain the net effect of +health itself, except in very messy mathematical terms.

So it comes down to this: if you think +10% heal is really 140 points of heal for a 1400 health tanker, and thus "better" than a 100 point heal for a 1000 health blaster, then what's the precise benefit of having the higher health itself: how would you describe it in a way that doesn't double count any benefits?

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Arcanaville, that's really stretching it. I mean, excluding how your example only works when you don't think about how Player A's power only buys him 5 seconds, while Player B's power buys him 10 seconds.

_Castle_ only said that the power works more for a Tanker rather than a Blaster even with an identical base scalar.

You may consider that a "duh", but given the mess with Slows, it's nice to have official confirmation (even if it's stuff that Iakona gave out a few weeks ago).

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I don't consider it a stretch, and more importantly, not a nit-pick on wording, for this reason:

If Castle's perspective is shared with the designers of the power - a heal of scaler X is implicitly stronger for tankers than other ATs because of higher health - its logical to assume that tanker heals are "supposed" to be stronger: that that was the designer's intent.

However, how we define "stronger" is a bit subjective, and therefore there isn't an obvious way to calculate whether something is or isn't "stronger."

But we can make some extrapolations. Would you say that 50% resistance was "stronger" for tankers than blasters? I wouldn't. But 50% resistance acts to increase survivability between the two in a proportional way, not a linear way. Resistance doesn't buy everyone a fixed amount of time, everyone reacts to resistance in a percentage way; incoming damage drops by the same fraction, survivability goes up by a different fraction.

Two heals should be judged on the same basis: if a tank has twice the survivability of a blaster because of higher health (or whatever the number is), then if the heals preserve that ratio, they are neutral - they have the same effect on both. If two heals widen the gap between them, then we'd colloquially say that one heal was stronger than the other.

Two heals with the same scaler do not widen the survivability gap, *if* we fairly look at heals in the same way we look at Defense or Resistance, therefore they have the same value.

Why this is important is that *if* the designers believed that tanker base health was increasing the net benefit of the heal they were creating, then:

1. Heals are being treated completely differently from Defense and Regen in terms of comparing one to another and thats deliberate (but it also means calling one heal "stronger" than another is less meaningful)

or

2. Tanker heals have accidentally been designed too weak.


You could say that, in fact, you do believe 30% resistance is stronger for tankers than other ATs. Which would be fine, except that perspective makes it very tedious to ask the question "when do these two powers have equal benefit to tankers and other ATs?"

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Ok, here's the scoop.

Heal Self is not affected by AT Mods directly any longer. I'm not certain when this changed, but it was before 9/21/2004. The Heal Self Table is now a straight 10% of the AT's base (unbuffed) Health. So, Tankers still see a greater effect from a Heal Self of even scale than a Blaster or Defender because their base health is higher.

So, these values ARE correct.

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A level 30 Tanker using an unenhanced Healing Flames gets 178.5 health. With 2 SO's, that would increase to 296.31. 178.5 is 17.5% of a Tankers health at that level. 296.31 is 29% of a Tankers health at that level.

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Er... anyone see a problem here?

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Well, the problem I see is probably not the one everyone else sees. I'm hoping Castle will understand what I'm saying, though:

"So, Tankers still see a greater effect from a Heal Self of even scale than a Blaster or Defender because their base health is higher."


There's a problem with this statement right here. Its technically true, but it contains a very subtle but significant mathematical flaw. If tankers are supposed to have higher health than squishies, and that health is supposed to act in essence to lower the effect of incoming attacks (they do less of your health bar per hit, because your health bar is bigger) then you cannot simultaneously assert that a 10% heal helps a fire tank more than a 10% heal helps, say, a blaster. Doing so double-counts the benefit of having higher health.


What do I mean? Well, let me show a very simple (and non-existent in CoH) example. Lets look at one player with 1000 health, and another with 2000 health, and both have a 10% heal. Lets make life simple and ignore natural regeneration for now.

I could say that Player Two, having twice the health, in essence takes only half the effective damage per hit than Player One: it takes twice as many hits to take out Player Two as Player One. I can also say that Player Two has a twice as strong heal as Player One. But notice what happens if I attempt to assert both at the same time: Suppose Player One and Player Two get hit with 200 point damage attacks every second. Player One is dead in 5 seconds, Player Two in 10 seconds. Now, Player One uses his heal ten times (always at times when he gets the full benefit of the heal) and Player Two does likewise. Now, Player One is dead in 10 seconds, and Player Two is dead in 20 seconds - still twice as long. Player Two's extra health is making it take twice the amount of damage to kill Player Two as it takes to kill Player One. And that's still true when both use their heals. If Player Two's heal was "stronger" than Player One's heal, it should buy more time on a relative basis, but it doesn't: that's because its heal is scaled to the higher health.

If the benefit of having higher health in this case is "you are twice as tough" notice that heals don't change that: ergo, the heals affect each player in the same way, as far as survival is concerned.

If you say Player Two has a "I'm tougher" benefit from having higher health, you can't also say "And he gets more benefit from his heals." There's only one benefit here: claiming two separate benefits double counts the one.

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I'm confused, and that's a good indication I'm wrong about something.... so to clarify

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Bottom line: If you factor base tohit into only Defense, then you can't compare Defense and Resistance. If you factor them into both, you can't combine them. The only time this is generally a good idea is when you are calculating net damage, and aren't going to compare the mitigation numbers directly at all.

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So, if I get you right, you are saying that if I say 25% defense is like 75% mitigation, I can't compare that with 50% resistance, unless I include the tohit, which makes that 75% as well, but if I do that, I can't obviously say .25 * .25 = my combined number.

If I got you right, I don't think I was doing that, I was puting the tohit into just my defense, then combining it with the resistance through multiplication to get my overall mitigation. (i.e. (.5 - .25) * .5 = new number)).

But I'm not sure if you were address me, or star, or just in general. You quoted me, so I'm not sure if there was a mistake I was making that you were addressing or what. My mention of squishies having 50% mitigation was in relation to my other numbers that had tohit figured in too, but I dunno.

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Basically, that's fine: if you equate 25% defense with "75% mitigation" relative to damage sent instead of damage taken by defenseless players, and its simply a shortcut for calculating damage, that's basically fine. In fact, that's essentially what I do when scribbling damage calculations on paper myself, or roughly estimating them in my head.

But I tend not to echo it in writing, because there are a lot of people reading the forums that will misinterpret that calculation badly.

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Especially since come i7 everyone is going to have that 50% no matter what, why not have it in the equation? It's basically a constant, a modifer on your mitigation so to speak. It's easy enough to change in the equation should the 50% change. And if the devs change the number, it does have an effect on your overall survivability, so doing so would also show that the tank's effectiveness/damage taken over time has changed.

I prefer not to think of it as my mitigation and enemies's accuracy. I prefer to think of it as %of damage taken over time with X set. Yes this means that all squishes automatically have 50% damage taken over time, but it's true.


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Well, sorta.

Its actually mathematically sound to look at damage mitigation in either way; factoring in the base 50% tohit or not. But its not valid for mitigation ratios because then the effects of two powers become tricky to compare.

When we say a power with 20% defense has a "mitigation ratio" of 40%, we are saying that that power reduces damage by 40%. But what we tend to forget to say is "reduces from what?" If your standard is "someone without the power" then you are claiming an incremental benefit of the power. If your standard is "relative to the situation where every single attack hits" you aren't claiming a benefit of the power, but the total "benefit" of the power, and the inherent benefit everyone gets (20% + 50% = 70%).

When we look at a 40% resistance power, we have to be careful to be consistent: its 40% mitigation relative to the standard of someone that doesn't have the power. On the other hand, compared to the standard of every single attack hitting, the 40% resistance power actually offers a (100% - 50% * (1 - 0.4) ) = 70% benefit - because someone with only that power would, in fact, only see that much damage. There's no way to separate the inherent critter accuracy benefit from the resistance power. Doing so invalidates comparisons.

If we are going to say Defense X has net benefit of PowerBenefit + InherentPlayerBenefit, then we have to say the same thing for Resistance powers, or we can't compare apples to apples. But then, if we try to combine them, to see what the benefit of having both is, we end up double counting the InherentPlayerBenefit. This basic error has fouled up many a calculation in the past.

Bottom line: If you factor base tohit into only Defense, then you can't compare Defense and Resistance. If you factor them into both, you can't combine them. The only time this is generally a good idea is when you are calculating net damage, and aren't going to compare the mitigation numbers directly at all.

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Wow.

I guess the sheer size of one's balls involves chuckling over a handful of cheetos as you hammer the attack button on your keyboard, heh.


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I'm guessing that would depend on whether or not both hands were full of cheetos at the time.

A lot of people asked to have the "sit" emote for women in skirts fixed.

I specifically suggested swapping rank and level tohit increases for accuracy increases, and leaving tohit buff/debuff mechanics alone (as opposed to eliminating all tohit buffs altogether) to benefit Defense sets, but its hard to say if that was in progress before I suggested it or not, since it might have taken a long time to implement, or not (I suggested other related things long before, but that was before I had a clear idea of the precise mechanics of accuracy).

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...the number one problem with stalkers is that they can't be discussed rationally on the forums 99 times out of 100.

[/ QUOTE ] To have a rationale discussion, both sides must agree to basic truths.


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Yes it does:

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When you claimed that Stalkers would be "worthless" if Placate required a to-hit check, it precludes any rationale discussion.


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Good thing for me I didn't claim that: I claimed that requiring Placate to require a tohit check made Placate itself borderline useless given its usage. Since stalker offense is balanced taking criticals into account, and since critical chance is at least partially balanced against how often stalkers can use Placate, then requiring a tohit check on Placate would seriously undermine its offensive usefulness, especially in PvP. Furthermore, stalker mitigation is also balanced against Placate: Placate is specifically claimed to have a defensive component to its total net benefit. That would also be seriously undermined by requiring a tohit check.


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I didn't even suggest that it not work, you know..like how Gauntlet doesn't work in PvP? I just suggested that Placate require a to-hit. But your response was a blanket statement, made with limited PvP experience, and showing a complete unwillingness to understand any position but your own. You don't even want Assault to work against Placate.


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This would be the fifth time you've suggested that my PvP experience is limited, and by extension yours is somehow superior, in spite of no evidence to support it. You've also suggested that my experience in Warburg was strictly limited to "farming Warburg missions" in spite of the fact that when requested, I was willing to initially spend significant time testing things with you, a willingness that it took no time at all for you to make me regret.

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When Castle states that any ranged check on AS makes it "virtually impossible" to use in PvP...ignoring the constant holds/immobilizes/slows, etcs accessible to villains, it pre-cludes any rationale discussion. My /regen was repeatedly and consistently held by a Plant dom today in Warburg. Brawl...and I'm held. A MM had Tar Patch 3 slotted with Slows. 3 out of 4 times...I never made it off that patch. I've been AS'd using Shadow Maul a TON. A stalker drops in right as I go to attack and AS hits me before I can move away.

A rationale discussion requires a baseline integrity and honesty on both sides. I have no problem with Stalkers being fun to play. It seems the pro-stalkers have an issue with Stalkers being fun to play against.

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Yes Mieux, the problem is with everyone else. With me, with Castle, with everyone else. Someplace somewhere, I'm sure there are people much more like-minded as you. Please go away and go find them.


You would be insufferably annoying if you weren't also very sad.

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For the record, none of this affects me in real life, so no apology needed. Likewise, if the existance of Stalkers hurts you in some way in real life, then... Well, then the Developers owe you an apology... Good luck with that.


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I am working on _Castle_ giving him my suggestions on how to fix this. I like to think I am doing my part in making PVP a good experience for all

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I have to say, this is the biggest problem with stalkers. Not their stealth, not their alpha strike, not their defense, not anything having anything to do with how their built at all. Rather, the number one problem with stalkers is that they can't be discussed rationally on the forums 99 times out of 100. I was treated with ten times more respect by hardcore SR fans when I suggested that power pool defenses not stack with SR defenses, then essentially any suggestion I've ever made to balance damage and perception for stalkers, and I'm probably treated better than average, for a variety of reasons. I've honestly taken to PMing suggestions myself, although I still occasionally stick my neck out and make a public suggestion. I suspect that secretly, the devs would rather we hash this stuff out publicly just to see what the general reaction to various ideas is likely to engender, because they can't, as a rule, easily float hypothetical ideas themselves.

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my defender and my scrapper were repeatedly AS'd in Warburg despite employing crack bunny tecqnique.


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Maybe you suck.

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On Triumph, it is the blappers that outnumber everything else... I'd guess 3 to 1 easily.

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I'm definitely not one of the hard core on Triumph, so I couldn't contradict that, but what I see seems to be highly variable based on zone, time of day, full moon, etc. There are times it seems there's nothing but tanks and defenders. Other times, its controllers and blasters.

I think, also, blappers seem to show up more in organized arena fights than PvP zones, and in Sirens especially. One thing thats difficult to separate is how many PvPing blasters (and scrappers, and...) there are, and how much actual time each of those toons spends actually PvPing, which might be two different things.

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resist buffs resist resist debuff and defense buffs resist defense debuffs

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Whoa! Say that five times fast

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All resist buffs resist resistance debuffs, but not all defense buffs resist defense debuffs. Some defense buffs have defense debuff resistance, but some defense buffs do not. All defense buffs avoid defense debuffs. But it seems defense buffs' defense debuff defense/resistance is inferior to resistance buffs' resistance debuff resistance.

Also, defense buff defense debuff defense can be inherently debuffed. Resistance buff resistance debuff resistance debuffs don't seem to exist. (The ability inherent in resistance buffs to resist external resistance debuffs cannot itself be debuffed).

Although defender resistance debuffs avoid resistance buff resistance debuff resistance by being unresistable in PvP.

I've resisted the temptation to talk about defense buff defense debuff resistance debuffing.

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It's a safe bet that the majority of PvP'ers on the hero side are scrappers.


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Not safe.


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I wouldnt say there is there are more scrappers than everything else...
but
I would say there are more scrapper than anything else...

so.. I'd say
"It's a safe bet that the plurality of PvP'ers on the hero side are scrappers."

...if you're able to make the distinction.
Otherwise I have to put it in a much less purty way like...
the scrappers are generally present in higher proportions than other ATs individually... ie more scrappers than tankers, mroe scrappers than blasters, etc

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If I had to guess, I would say excluding people who PvP once and then never show up again, maybe a third of all regular PvP heroes are scrappers. I would be highly surprised if the number was higher than 40%, and would not be surprised if it was as low as 25%.

Its possible that the percentages are higher among the most hardcore PvPers, but not much more.

I think its probably more the case that PvP regen scrappers are a higher skewed percentage of all PvP scrappers, than all PvP scrappers are a percentage of all PvPers.

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I dont even open with AS on squishies!

[/ QUOTE ]Right..right...and you constitute the tactics used by the vast majority of stalkers? No...no you don't.


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Actually a lot of stalkers do not use AS first on squishies, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because squishies don't often stand still to get ASed, especially BU+ASed. Its often the case that the first attack from hide is an easier to connect with attack, something that might set up an easy(er) AS (i.e. bonesmasher, CAK). Sometimes my opening attack on a squishy from hide is actually air superiority because if it knocks down, there's often insufficient time to escape before a placate->AS.


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The vast majorityof stalkers open with AS. EM's use ET or Bone Smasher for the disorient on squishies...but on scrappers and tanks...AS.


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The original statement was "...on squishies." On scrappers and tanks, AS is used more often on the opening strike, but usually because they are (usually) less mobile, and more easy to connect with. That's nothing specific to scrappers and tanks, less mobile anything tends to get ASed more.


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It's a safe bet that the majority of PvP'ers on the hero side are scrappers.


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Not safe.


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If you want to argue that AS gets "activated" the fewest number of times...or actually "hits" the fewest number of times...then I'll chalk it up to typical pro-stalker logic arguing nonsense: arguing something completely immaterial to the issue.

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Most unintentionally ironic statement of the year, as tallied by online voting at cohtroll dot com.

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Well, I understand why people don't want to 4 slot their powers however for SR, I think its almost necessary. Call me crazy however when I respec'd in January, I had 1 reduce end and 3 def buffs. Ever since then, I was wiped out on a REGULAR basis goign against 50 Bosses. Even 52s were almost impossible to fight. I know my build is screwed up but I have no respecs anymore so I have to wait for the Devs to give one out whenever that is. Going against a 52 Lt would dominate me, however before I respec'd into my stupid build, I was tearing through them. I added a cytoskeleton in my reduce end slot and my defenses wetn back up. Not as good as initially but way better than my messed up build. My main problem was jumping in a mob, without that 4th def buff, I would basically die within a few hits literally. With that extra slot, I'm not longer taken out by initial hits, I last way longer. I don't know the math behind this because i'm too lazy to figure it out. So from personal experience, 4 slots on your toggles are a must if you want to be a non-squishy.

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I'm afraid to say that the phenomenon behind this effect is more commonly known as the "placebo effect." There's essentially no way for that fourth defense slot to have that dramatic of an effect on your performance. In fact, prior to ED it still wasn't possible for a 4th defense slot to have that dramatic of an effect on SR's performance.

I have some difficulty understanding how a single level 52 LT can kill you, also. A single level 52 LT (assuming you are level 50) doesn't have the damage potential to kill you quickly even with no defenses (my guess is the average solo +2 LT should take almost a minute to kill you even if you don't fight back and turn your toggles off).


Most SR scrappers are likely to have either combat jumping or hover. Adding a fourth slot to each toggle adds about 0.375% defense to all (0.675% to AoE until I7). Adding those three defense slots to CJ or hover would add about 1.4% defense to all (assuming they were originally 1-slotted with end reduce). If you really want more defense, throw slots into your power pool defenses instead of slotting past the ED cut-off in your toggles or passives.

Although to be honest I would sooner add end reduce into my toggles than either 4-slot for defense or slot power pools for defense, unless I had an incredible amount of spare slots.

No apology necessary: it happens to us all.

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The addittion of RES to the passives was so significant I felt it best to create a new section just to discuss this aspect.

When CoV launched the Passives were changed to add Resistance to all damage types except Toxic and Psionic, but this RES scales as your health drops lower and lower, because of this change, taking all of your passives is much more effective than they ever were before. It is hard to describe how big a benefit it is when you have all three passives! The RES won't do much against attacks from AVs or Elite Bosses but attacks from minions and lt's will be lowered so much you can effectively ignore them until more dangerous targets are taken out first.


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This is not a correction to your guide, Amauros, but I thought for the insanely curious, I would amplify on this just a bit.

Statesman first mentioned that SR passives would get a scaling resistance long before they were added to either the SR scrapper or SR stalker sets. The way Statesman described them was very defiance-like: the passive resistances would start off at a low level, and then jump upward in stages as health crossed certain critical levels. The original post is here.

Back when CoV was still in beta, the passive resistances were added to the SR stalker passive defense powers. When the passive resistances were first introduced in the stalker set, they were actually more powerful than they are now. They were scaled to max out at 25% resistance per passive (which would mean all three in the scrapper set would max out at the scrapper 75% resistance cap), and they were Res(All), not Res(All -toxic -psi). Also, then as now, they didn't jump in stages, they changed in a relatively smooth way from zero to 25% (it wasn't easy to test its behavior at those extremely low levels either).

Right at CoV launch, SR scrappers got the resistances added to their passive powers as well, and at that time, they were adjusted in both sets to max out at +20% RES per passive, and were changed to be resistance to all except toxic/psi, instead of resistance to all. Neither changes was ever, to my knowledge, acknowledged in any patch notes.

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Why then have textual tables? Simple, ease of update. If you program (hard code) all those tables by hand, then any changes will require a recompile of your code. Keep your tables in text files, and there's no need for that.


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Or, you could come from old school Unix, where its almost genetically imprinted on you to store values in text form, and convert them into more appropriate forms at runtime. There's a reason why SMTP, HTTP, IMAP, and all the old school protocols are human-readable, and it has nothing to do with updating per se, and everything to do with making things look transparent to human eyeballs.

If it was just about keeping the values in a direct binary form, you could always do the equivalent of storing them in external flatfile databases (i.e. dbms) or numeric literals, neither of which would be directly human readable. I notice this being one of the major differences in style between programmers, and there is no middle ground.

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this is just a game and an enjoyable one at that, one of my friends has a stalker that is spines/regen, he doesnt have stealth or invis, he doesnt have any +perception and still managed without cheating or teaming to get 400 rep in warburg alone.

now i ask you people that are complaining to tell me this, is how is it possible someone could accomplish this in a few days?

answer : he is just better at killing 12 year olds that cry on forums all day and dont know how to play their heros past pve. he told me his hardest fight was against a ice/em tank but still killed him on the 3rd try.


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Or, possibly it was because he was regen stalker.

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blasters and scrappers both have higher damage base and caps than stalkers.

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Scrappers don't have energy melee. Of the four with either energy melee or energy manipulation, blasters and stalkers have the higher base, brutes and tankers have the lower base.

And I've already been corrected on the damage cap: blasters, scrappers, and stalkers all have +400% (500% total) damage caps (and I tested that to be sure).

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So there's no reason to believe that player tohit and critter tohit are necessarily coupled.

[/ QUOTE ]Except that they both have identical combatmod tables. Yes, they MIGHT operate differently, or use some other hidden, server-side tables, or any number of other explanations; however, the existence of the identical tables is sufficient for me to believe that they may be coupled. Also, the spreadsheet lists player and critter values as identical, rather than following pohsyb's numbers for player to-hit from +1 to +4.

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Now that I think about it, my recollection of Circeus' spreadsheets (don't have them handy at the moment) was that they only showed villain tohit, not player tohit at all, because they were damage comparison sheets (there was no need to know player tohit for those calculations at all). They scaled villain tohit for even con to +4 villains to show the effects of higher tohit against defense. Are we thinking of the same spreadsheets?