Arcanaville

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I agree. A better way to determine perception and stealth would be great. Make it a to-hit roll of sorts.

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I suggested that in beta: make -perception defense, and +perception a form of tohit bonus, and calibrate the scale so that at regular intervals, a target gets a tohit roll to break stealth.

Because this would be happening in ticks, the actual chances of breaking stealth would have to be low, otherwise it would be broken while you were still approaching the target. Below a certain threshold, stealth can't be broken at all, and above a certain threshold, you break it automatically, but within reasonable bounds, there's always a chance to break stealth.

The mechanics of such a thing are tricky to set up to be fair to the stalkers. My guess is that the way for it to work that makes the most sense is for there to be a chance to break it based on the distance from the stalker, and at ticks, perhaps every five seconds. So as the stalker approaches, you get one chance to break stealth as he gets within certain radii, and separate from that, you get a chance to break stealth every five seconds if he just stands there.

However, separate from that, even if you break stealth, you still have to continue to "hit" through stealth to maintain visibility: if you fail a perception test, the stalker drops out of perception again.


The main problem with this idea is that it might cause a lot of processor burn and lag: the mere presence of stalkers would suddenly jump the lag in the zone. In fact, that might even tip you off to the fact that a stalker was tracking you.


There is another issue, and that is the issue of the mechanics of hide. If we get to a point where *anyone* has a chance to break hide, then I think the ten second window to rehide is too long: it seems to be predicated on the notion that since being hidden is such an advantage, it has a high cost to establish. If people can break hide much easier, stalkers ought to be able to establish hide much easier as well.


This is not a simple thread to untangle.

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Wow! Excellent Guide! I especially appreciate the distinction between Base Accuracy and Base ToHit.
One nit: the "0.75 * 0.60 " example near the beginning should be "0.75 + 0.60 ".

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Thanks for the catch: its a typo arising from the earlier version of the guide using examples that assumed tohit buffs were multiplicative instead of additive. It should be a plus sign instead of a multiplication sign. I thought I caught all of those: oh well, I can already get started on version 1.2

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I think you are mixing up what defence does. Defence is only checked at the time of the attack to determine hit or miss (I believe, and I could very well be wrong), and I have noticed that defence seems to help a TON more as you advance into higher level PvP zones. The miss rate of MY AS on similar build characters increses substantially from SC to war. I'm sure that there are other factors like my actual level, that help to determine this, but even then I know I have a higher chance to miss the same exact toon in war, than I do in SC.

I could AS a PFF all day and never hit in war. I have 1 shot many controllers standing around thinking they where god in SC.


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The devs have stated that there is a defense cap (as in a true maximum amount of defense you can have) that increases with level. Its entirely possible that the amount of defense PFF provides to a level 25 or 30 is substantially lower than the amount of defense PFF provides to a level 38, even slotted identically, because PFFs defense is being capped at level 25 or 30 to a much lower number than it is theoretically capable of providing.

Its interesting: when I tested defense in CoV during beta, I found there was almost nothing you could do to change the hit rate of minions in Breakout to anything other than 50/50 - almost as if the defense cap at level 1 was effectively zero. Hide should have been providing at least 5% defense when hidden, but even when hidden, villains hit about the same 50/50 (and I tested long enough to distinguish 50% and 45% hit rate).

It might have been just a Breakout-thing, but within a couple levels, however (say, level 6), all my stalker defenses appeared to be working just fine under test conditions.

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You're wasting your time. Reason, fairness, and other silly things like that are foreign concepts to developers. Remember, such foes are the equivalents their characters, and they're not going to gimp their characters vs. the Enemy (players).

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I trust you'll be happy to learn that I changed Ballista based on feedback in this thread.

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Changed how? Made him an AV, gave him 120% Resistance, gave him build up?

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Don't be silly. Castle is the stalker rep. If I were him, I would have given Ballista placate, and assassin's strike.

Here's version 1.1 of the Guide to Defense. I finally got around to incorporating all my notes on defense changes, although so much has changed its possible I missed a thing or two here and there. Specifically, the following additions have been made:

* Enhancement Diversification
* Power Pool defense changes
* PvP changes
* CoV defense sets and powers
* Lots of minor fix up and confirmation changes, plus some new questions

Of course, additional suggestions always welcome.

Defense in CoH


Defense, and its relationship to the basic tohit equations, is one of the least understood mechanisms in City of Heroes. This guide will try to explain Defense, how it functions, how it relates to tohit probabilities, and how it interacts with the other elements related to Defense in the game.


DEFINITIONS AND THE BASIC TOHIT EQUATIONS

The basic tohit formula

Net tohit = BaseToHit - Defense

where:

Net tohit: the probability that one thing will hit another thing with an attack. If net tohit is 45%, then 45% of the time when A attacks B, A will hit B.

Base tohit: the probability, associated with the attacker that represents the base probability that attacker has of hitting any target in general, before buffs, debuffs, and defense are taken into acount.

Defense: the ability, or power, to reduce the chances of an attacker from hitting you. Defense is normally expressed in percentage points, and is the number of percentage points that the defensive ability will reduce your chances of being hit by an attacker.


The advanced tohit formula

The advanced tohit formula (my terminology - there isn't really a term for it) takes into account accuracy enhancements, tohit buffs, tohit debuffs, and defense debuffs. It is:

Net tohit = (Base Accuracy + accuracy enhancements) * [ base tohit + tohit buffs - tohit debuffs - (defense - defense debuffs) ]


Tohit buffs and defense debuffs

One way to improve your tohit chance is to use, or have cast upon you, tohit buffs. Tohit buffs are, according to the devs, additive:

base tohit + tohit buffs

So if your base tohit is 75%, and you use or receive a 60% tohit buff, your modified tohit becomes:

0.75 * 0.60 = 1.35 = 135%

Note that this is higher than 100%: see tohit floors and tohit ceilings below. Tohit buffs and tohit debuffs are subtractive from each other, as the advanced formula shows.

[Revision from previous version: several tests have confirmed the additive nature of at least some tohit buffs. This guide will presume additive buffs unless direct testing proves otherwise]

Defense debuffs are subtractive from defense: if you have 40% defense, and you are hit with a 10% defense debuff, your effective defense becomes: 40% - 10% = 30%.


Base Accuracy and Accuracy enhancements

Both inherent Accuracy bonuses and Accuracy enhancements work differently than tohit buffs. As shown in the formula, accuracy enhancements take effect after defense, while tohit buffs take effect before defense. The difference is that tohit buffs are much more effective than accuracy enhancements when defense is high. If your tohit on a target is 30%, a 33% accuracy enhancement SO will boost that percentage to 40% (30% * 1.33) regardless of what the defense of the target was (as long as the net effect of base tohit and defense was 30%).

All attacks have what is referred to as "Base Accuracy" or sometimes just "accuracy." As defined by the devs, Base Accuracy is the "inherent accuracy" of an attack power. A "normal" attack has base accuracy of 1.0, or 100%. Attacks that are less accurate than normal have base accuracy values less than 1.0, and attacks that are more accurate than normal have base accuracy values more than 1.0. Although this contradicts actual examples that they have issued in the past, the current statement by the devs, in several postings and PMs, is that individual attacks that have any sort of inherent bonus or penalty to accuracy in fact have higher or lower Base Accuracy.

Note on accuracy buffs and tohit buffs: as far as anyone can tell, only accuracy enhancements and inherent accuracy bonuses/penalties to individual attacks provide accuracy buffs for players, while all other "accuracy boosting" powers and effects are in fact tohit buffs.

"Base Accuracy" and "Base ToHit" is very frequently confused. Base ToHit represents the intrinsic accuracy of an attacker: its the chance that he or she will hit a target, in general, assuming all other factors are absent (defense, buffs, debuffs, etc). Base Accuracy represents the intrinsic accuracy of an attack relative to other attacks, and is scaled to 1.0: "normal" attacks have Base Accuracy of 1.0, which means they have no effect on the overall accuracy of the player. Attacks inherently more or less accurate have Base Accuracy values of more or less than 1.0, which increase or lower the overall accuracy of any attacker using them.

The best analogy to distinguish Base Accuracy and Base ToHit is to consider two people shooting firearms. One of those individuals might be inherently a better shot: he will have higher Base ToHit than the other. Separate from that, both of them will have different accuracies when firing snug nose revolvers and sniper rifles: the actual weapons have an intrinsic relative accuracy separate from the shooter, and thus the sniper rifle would have a higher Base Accuracy than the pistol.


Floors, ceilings, and caps

There is a maximum net tohit value and a minimum tohit value honored by the CoH game engine. No power or set of powers can drive your net tohit higher than 95% or lower than 5%. In other words, there is always at least a 5% chance of hitting anything, and always at least a 5% chance of missing something.

The 5% minimum chance to hit something is referred to as the tohit floor.
The 5% minimum chance to miss something, or alternatively the 95% maximum chance to hit something, is referred to as the tohit ceiling.

It used to be thought that there was no cap on the amount of defense that a hero could achieve. It turns out there is, but it is very high and not normally applicable to most reasonable combat situations: its in the range of 300% defense at high levels (it scales upward with increasing combat level of your hero).

*** Special Note ***

Geko has posted that the intermediate term - (base tohit - defense) - is bound by the 5%/95% floors and ceilings before accuracy enhancements are factored in (and then presumably, the final number is once again bracketted by the 5%/95% floor and ceiling). This directly contradicts extensive arena testing by myself and others. Either geko is mistaken, PvE works differently from the arena and geko was speaking of PvE, or arena combat is bugged.


DEFENSE MECHANICS

Typed Defense and Defense Stacking

Every attack power is classified based on how the attack is delivered, and based on the type of damage it delivers, and every defense power has an associated type or types that represents what types of attacks that defense power is effective against. There are two basic classes of attack types, and many subclasses.

Positional, or attack vector classes

Every attack is classified as either a melee attack, a ranged attack, or an AoE (area of effect) attack. In general, melee attacks are attacks that are limited to melee range (typically 5 to 10 feet maximum). Ranged attacks are attacks that will work to larger ranges. AoE attacks are defined as attacks that affect multiple targets (AoE attacks are typically defined as either cones or (general)AoEs, but that is not generally important to the issue of defense). All attacks in CoH are classified as exactly one of these types: no more and no less (although there is a special case that muddies this a bit: autohitting attacks - see below).

There is a special case issue that comes up with these basic definitions: melee cones and PBAoEs (point-blank area of effect attacks). It seems that in general, melee cones and many PBAoEs are generally considered melee attacks, but other PBAoEs (i.e. PBAoEs of giant monsters) are considered AoE attacks. There is apparently no sure-fire rule guaranteed to predict what a melee-ranged AoE will be classified as, although if its net range is less than 10 feet, it is very likely to be classified as a melee attack for the purposes of defense.

Damage-type classes

Every attack has one or more (usually no more than two) components of damage: each component has a particular type of damage associated with it. The damage types in CoH are:

smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative energy, toxic, psionic, and untyped

An attack can be all of one type: electric attacks are generally all energy damage. An attack can have multiple damage components: most energy blast attacks have smashing damage and energy damage.

Damage-types are often thought of as coming in pairs: smash/lethal (physical damage), fire/cold (elemental damage), and energy/negative (energy damage), because damage resistances are often organized that way. Toxic and psi are both considered special cases (see the special note on toxic defense below).

*** SPECIAL NOTE ON TOXIC DEFENSE ***

If a power is listed as defense to All but psi, then (as of this writing) that does not include toxic. The explanation is long and historical, but there is no toxic-specific defense in CoH. This does not mean that no power provides such defense, but rather that no such defense can exist due to a complication in how defense was originally designed. If a power is listed as "melee defense" this implicitly works against all melee attacks, even ones with toxic damage, but a power listed as "all damage types" does not include toxic.

Untyped is another special case: there used to be a significant amount of "untyped" damage in City of Heroes, most of which eventually became toxic damage. The main source of untyped damage left in CoH is the damage dealt by Hamidon, and the Hamidon Mitochondria. Its unclear precisely how untyped damage works, and its still heavily debated - the debate is mostly moot given the fact that it now mainly exists only as a singular special case that makes it difficult to generalize. We'll ignore untyped damage in this guide unless specifically mentioned.

Defense types

Just as every attack is classified as melee, ranged, or AoE, and also, smashing, lethal, etc, each defense power is classified based on what type(s) of attacks the defense power is effective against. In City of Heroes, nearly all defense powers are either attack-vector typed (also referred to as positionally typed, or ranged-typed), or damage-typed, but not both. Thus, a particular defense power might be effective against melee, or melee and ranged, but not melee and fire, for example. The one exception appears to be Force Field bubbles, and these were recently changed to provide multiply-typed defense (damage typed and also vector typed).

For more information on the specifics of defense within particular power sets, see the section DEFENSE IN POWER SETS below.

Defense Stacking Rules

If you have multiple defenses running (either your own powers or defense buffs cast on you by other players), certain defenses stack. Defense in CoH stacks additively, which is to say, if you have Defense A, and Defense B, and they stack, your net defense is A+B.

Which defenses stack and which do not is slightly tricky. Fundamentally, the following is true:

* All defenses of exactly the same class stack (melee stacks with melee, fire with fire, etc).
* A single defense that protects against multiple classes of attack functions like multiple defenses, each of which protects against a single one.
* You are only allowed to use the best defense you have against an attack with multiple classes.

For example, if you are attacked with a power bolt (from the energy blast set), that attack is ranged, and has smashing and energy damage associated with it. You are only allowed to use the best of your net ranged defense, your net smashing defense, or your net energy defense.

There was an issue a while ago in which the game engine was considering, say, someone with smashing defense and energy defense to get smash+energy defense against energy attacks with both smashing and energy components. This was considered a bug by the devs and corrected.

Defense enhancements

Each defensive power can be enhanced using defense enhancements. Defense enhancements (along with resistance enhancements) are one of the few enhancements that do not follow the general 8.33%/16.7%/33.3% TO/DO/SO (training, dual origin, single origin) enhancement progression. Defense enhancements are worth 5% for training, 10% for dual origin, and 20% for single origin enhancements.

The way enhancements work in defense powers (and in powers in general) is that the power has a base defensive value. Enhancements increase that value by a percentage amount equal to their value. To be precise: if a defense power's base value is +5% defense, and an (even level) defense SO is slotted into it, the defense power's new enhanced value is 5% * (1 + 0.2) = 6%: the power is increased in value by 20% (and not 20 percentage points, which would be 5% + 20% = 25%).

Defense enhancements themselves vary in strength based on your hero's level relative to the enhancement: enhancements are 10% weaker than their base value for every level lower than your combat level they are, up to three levels lower, where they are 70% of effective strength (they are worthless if you are more than three levels higher). Conversely, they are 5% stronger for each level higher than your level they are, up to 15% stronger when they are three levels higher than you are (enhancements more than three levels higher than your character's level cannot be slotted). For example, a -2 defense SO (normally +20%) is +16% (20% * 0.8) while a +3 defense SO is +23% (20% * 1.15).


***Enhancement Diversification***

New to I6 is a change in how enhancements work called "enhancement diversification." Basically, it works like this for defense SOs: however you slot, and whatever you slot, you get the first 40% benefit (i.e. 2 even level SOs) at full strength, any benefit above 40% and below 60% at 0.85 (85%) of their value, and any benefit above 60% at only 0.15 (15%) of their value.

This is tricky, so an example should help illustrate what's going on. You slot (presume even level SOs) one defense SO. Defense SOs provide 20% benefit, so you get 20% bonus to the defense power you slotted it in. The second SO adds 20%: you now have 40%. The next SO provides benefit above 40% (and below 60%), and so you get 85% of its value. 85% of 20% is 17% (0.85 * 20%). So SO #3 adds 17%, not 20%, and your net benefit is now 57%, not 60%. The fourth SO you slot is providing benefit above 60% (note, this is calculated based on the raw values of the SOs, not the reduced value). So you only get 0.15 (15%) of its value. 15% of 20% is 3%. So you now have 60% total benefit, instead of 80%. The fifth and sixth SOs would similarly provide 15% of the SO strength, so SO #5 brings you to 63%, and #6 brings you to 66%.

Notice the extremely sharp cut off in benefit after enhancement #3. The basic rule on ED is: do not slot more than three SOs *worth* of enhancements. Its based on *benefit* and not on the little round thing you slot. So if you slot three SOs, and then one DO, the DO gets hit by ED. If you slot 3 HOs (Hamidon enhancements) of */*/defense and then an SO of defense, the SO gets hit by ED, even though "I didn't slot more than three of anything."

What matters is *benefit* - you simply aren't going to get much more than 3 SOs *worth* of benefit on anything, no matter what crazy combination of enhancements you try to use to dodge it.

Other enhancements, such as accuracy and damage, follow a different, but proportional scale (i.e. 3 SOs worth is where ED kicks in, even though 3 SOs of damage is about +100%, and not +60%).

I6 introduces something else: you can now tell *exactly* how much benefit your powers are getting from enhancements, by hovering your mouse cursor over the blue bar of the power in the enhancement screen. Also, you can "hover" (without dropping) an enhancement over a slot, and see in a popup window what the net overall change to the attributes will be if you chose to slot there.

One final note on I6 change to enhancements: tohit buff enhancements were originally schedule A enhancements (i.e. one even SO was worth +33% buff). They are now schedule B enhancements (i.e. one even SO is worth +20% buff) just like defense enhancements are.


Resistance to defense debuffs

As of the writing of this guide, supposedly resistance to defense debuffs have been added to hero and villain sets. The powers themselves now state that they include such resistance in the in-game power descriptions. Castle posted that to the best of his knowledge, the debuff resistance is in. However, careful testing has not demonstrated conclusively that they are working properly, and several tests appear to suggest that it isn't working correctly, or is working at a much lower level than originally specified. The thread where the concept of resistance to defense debuffs was originally put forth by Statesman is here. I believe the jury is still out on whether or not this effect is really working properly.


THINGS RELATED TO DEFENSE

What is mez defense?

"Mez defense" is the generic term sometimes used to refer to powers that protect against mez. (Using terminology originally used by geko when explaining mez) there are two types of mez "defense" :mez protection and mez resistance. Neither of these is directly related to Defense in terms of damage mitigation, but its worth reviewing.

The basics of mez are: everyone has a threshold that mez effects must break through in order for the mez effect to take hold. Without any mez defense, everyone has a base mez level of -1. All mez powers have a mez magnitude. When a mez power lands, it adds its magnitude to your mez level. A hero with mez level of -1 that gets hit by a magnitude 3 hold has mez level of 2 (-1 + 3). Any mez level higher than zero means the target is mezzed. Mez protection continuously subtracts its associated defense magnitude from your mez level while the power is running. Someone running a mez defense power with mez protection magnitude 10 has a mez level of -11 (-1 - 10). If hit with a mag 3 hold, mez level increases to -8 (-11 + 3). It would take 3 more such holds for the mez level to reach +1.

Mez effects last for a certain period of time, then expire. Mez resistance allows a target to shake off mez effects faster. So instead of a mez effect lasting ten seconds, it might last eight.

Mez protection and mez resistance are not true Defense or Resistance, but its useful to understand and is often confused with true Defense and Resistance.

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.

*** Note: in I6 mez protection powers were reduced from their previous levels. Maximum protection for tanks and scrappers used to be about magnitude 15, which in effect means controllers needed 6 holds to break protection. In I6, this has been tested to happen at 3 or 4 holds, which implies mez protection has been roughly cut in half.


How do Luck (defense) inspirations work

Luck inspirations appear to be +Defense to all, and additively stack with any other defense powers you might be running. This has not, to my knowledge, been conclusively tested, but appears to be either explicitly true, or very near true.


ENVIRONMENT, VILLAINS, AND OTHER RELATED FACTORS

Defense doesn't exist in a vaccuum; its intimately related to the various buffs, debuffs, and adjustments inherent in the game engine. This section highlights the important ones.

Base tohit of villains

The base tohit of villains is as follows:

minions: 50%
LTs: 57.5%
Bosses, Snipers: 65%
Monsters, Giant Monsters, AVs, Controller Pets: 75%

These numbers are for even level villains: villains equal to your own combat level.

This increase in tohit based on the type of villain is sometimes referred to as the rank bonus or more colloquially "higher ranked villains have better tohit."

Base tohit of heroes (players)

The base tohit of heroes in PvE is 75%. In PvP (arena combat and player vs player fights in PvP zones) base player tohit was recently reduced (in I6) to 50%. This improves the performance of defense sets in PvP combat substantially, although tohit buffs (being additive) are still a significant issue. Tohit buffs maybe also have been affected or reduced in I6, but this has not been confirmed. The devs have stated that high tohit buffs severely impacting defense sets is a problem they are working on a solution for.

Question: is this a "nerf?" Answer: no, its a proper balancing of defense sets. Defense sets performance were balanced against even level minions, which have a base 50% chance to hit. Furthermore, it is just as reasonable to view this as a +25% buff to player defense across the board, instead of a base -25% tohit chance.

[Note: as of 11/16/05 a patch note was added which specifically stated this exact thing.]

Tohit based on level

Villains of higher level than you gain tohit bonuses and become more accurate. Villains of lower level than you become less accurate. I'm unaware of 100% definitive testing to demonstrate precisely what the level effect is, but there are two mainstream guesses that seems to be close:

* for each level higher than you, villains base tohit increases by 7.5 percentage points
* for each level higher than you, villains base tohit increases by 10%

The first one says that if an even level boss has base tohit of 65%, then a +1 boss has a base tohit of 72.5% (65% + 7.5%). The second one says that if an even level boss has base tohit of 65%, then a +1 boss has a base tohit of 71.5% (65% * 1.1). More definitive testing should be able to decide this easily [note: planning to test this myself at next opportunity, just to be able to be more definitive myself]

(Player) Inherent Accuracy modifiers

Player attacks can have inherent accuracy-related modifiers, which potentially affect Defense sets in PvP.

Certain player attacks have certain inherent accuracy bonuses or deficits. All attacks within an offensive set that require a weapon draw (i.e. katana, assault rifle) are supposed to have an inherent tohit bonus, said to be about 5%. In addition, all snipe attacks also have a tohit bonus, in a similar range. AoE control based attacks have an accuracy penalty, but a recent post by geko stated that normal AoE attacks do not have an inherent accuracy penalty by default. The devs have stated that the archery attacks have an inherent tohit bonus higher than the standard weapon-draw bonus, but the precise bonus has not (to my knowledge) been determined.

At one time, attacks launched while flying had a significant tohit penalty (said to be about -50%). This penalty was replaced by travel power suppression when suppression was added to all travel powers.


DEFENSE, ACCURACY, AND VILLAINS

Some villains possess tohit buffs (either inherent ones, like those attributed to rank and level, or power-based ones, like Behemoths that use invincibility), and some behave like their attacks are slotted with accuracy enhancements. Rularuu Watchers appear to have significantly higher than normal base tohit (the precise value is unknown to me). Malta gunslingers have an accuracy buff instead of a tohit buff on their pistol's cone attack. Its been approximately measured as about +65% - comparable to two accuracy SOs of accuracy boost.

Also interesting: Paragon Protectors that use MoG have *massively* higher defense than the ones that (apparently) use Elude. Its unclear precisely why the large difference exists.


DEFENSE IN POWER SETS

Its important to note that the information related to Defense in the printed manuals is, as with all things, both dated and often inaccurate. Again: this guide is not focused on the numbers, but as this information appears to be difficult to find, power set-specific Defense issues (especially what stacks with what) are listed here. Note: just as the manual is out of date, so to this guide might be out of date at the time its read. Force Fields, for example, had positional defense added literally a few weeks before this guide was finalized. For specific details, numbers, and other set information, consult the links provided at the end of this guide.

Super Reflexes defenses (scrapper and stalker) are all positional or ranged-typed. Every SR defense power is effective against one attack vector only: melee (Focused Fighting, Dodge), ranged (Focused Senses, agile), or AoE (lucky, Evasion). The exception is Elude, which is effective against all vectors. Because SR defenses are typed with positional types, SR defenses do not stack with any defense claiming to defend against a particular damage type or types. However, SR defenses do work against attacks that do toxic damage, because positional defenses work against all attacks within their range band, irrespective of damage type. SR defenses also stack with all power pool defenses, because all power pool defenses are melee/ranged (and therefore positional). However, SR defenses do not appear to stack with defense buffs such as fortitude (which appears to be damage-typed), and until recently they did not stack with force field bubbles (FF was recently changed to add positional typing on top of damage-typing to address this).

Ice Defenses are all damage-typed. Ice defense powers are generally typed against two damage types (as is generally true for many damage-typed resistances). Ice Defenses do not stack with power pool defenses, because all power pool defenses are positional, and not damage-typed. However, Ice defenses do work on any attack that has a component of damage within the defensive scope. For example, Frozen Armor provides smashing/lethal defense. Glacial Armor provides energy/negative defense. If attacked with an energy blast attack that does smash/energy, both defenses potentially apply. As with all damage-typed defenses that overlap, Ice tanks will always use the greater of the two - they do not stack together. Ice has one of only two "scalable" defenses in the game: energy absorption is a click power that boosts Ice tanker defenses based on the number of villains it hits with a PBAoE "attack." For more information, consult the links at the bottom of this guide.

Granite Armor has a power that functions differently from the printed manual. Rock Armor provides Defense, not Resistance. Granite Armor has four defense powers. Three are stackable defenses (in the sense that they can be run simultaneously - they do not stack defensively with each other): Rock Armor (smash/lethal), Crystal Armor (energy/negative), and Mineral Armor (psionic). One cannot be used with the others: Granite Armor, which has defense to all but psi (as well as resistance to all but psi). Granite Armors, like Ice Armors, do not stack with power pools (which are melee/ranged).

Force Fields used to be damage-typed. They are now both damage-typed and positional typed. Specifically, Deflection Field provides both smash/lethal defense, and melee defense. Insulation Field provides both fire/cold/energy/negative (energy/elemental) and ranged defense. Dispersion Bubble provides both defense to all damage types except psi (and of course, toxic - toxic-typed specific defense does not exist) and AoE defense. This means Force Fields will stack with anything (specifically, the right bubble will stack with any conceivable defense). It also means - although I have not specifically tested this - that Force Fields now implicitly protect against toxic attacks (since Deflection Field *should* protect against melee-based toxic, Insulation Field should protect against ranged toxic, and Dispersion Bubble should protect against AoE toxic attacks - which are essentially all of them).

Of particular interest to Force Field defenders and controllers is the fact that there are unusal side-effects due to the (new) way the various bubbles' defenses stack. In particular, dispersion bubble stacks with deflection shield by smash/lethal typing only and dispersion bubble stacks with insulation shield by energy/elemental only. This means if the FF defender or controller takes another defense buffing aura power - specifically maneuvers - that stacks positionally, instead of damage-typed, dispersion bubble and maneuvers won't stack with each other, even though each will stack with the smaller bubbles.

The net result is that because dispersion bubble is likely to be stronger than maneuvers, the net effect is for maneuvers to have no effect on team mates within the range of dispersion bubble (except for toxic/psi attacks, since dispersion bubble does not offer either toxic or psi defense specifically by type).

Invulnerability has two defense powers: invincibility and tough hide. It now appears (as of this writing) that invincibility (and tough hide) both provide defense to all (damage types) but psi (and not melee/ranged). At one time invincibility was thought to provide melee/ranged defense (and its possible it did, and that was changed recently). Invincibility is the other scalable defense that exists in CoH (the other being energy absorption). Invincibility, unlike EA, is a PBAoE aura that continuously surrounds the hero while its on, and buffs the defense of the hero using it based on the number of attackers that are in melee range. Its actual internal workings are quite complex and still subject to active discussion. Tough Hide is also defense to all but psi. Interestingly, Invulnerability also has a self defense debuff. Unyielding (the power originally called Unyielding Stance) originally rooted you to the ground when activated. It now has a self defense debuff, of about -5%. This defense debuff appears to be a -DEF to all attacks, but I do not know if this has been carefully tested.


Stalkers

All stalkers have a power called hide. Hide appears to offer defense to melee/ranged/AoE. The defense appears to be about 5% to melee/ranged, and 37.5% to AoE (that's not a misprint: thirty seven point five percent) when hidden, and about 2.5% to melee/ranged/AoE when hide is suppressed (the 5%/2.5% number is one of the numbers I've seen: there have been lots of other numbers quoted, from 5%/2.5% up to 7.5%/3.75%. I cannot say with certainty what the precise value is. The 37.5% AoE defense, however, has been red name confirmed directly). Hide also provides the highest -perception (i.e. stealth) of any power, and while hidden stalker attacks critical (double damage) and assassin's strike powers do six times bonus critical damage.

The Ninjitsu stalker set has positional defenses similar to SR. Ninja Reflexes is similar to Focused Fighting (melee), and Danger Sense is similar to Focused Senses, but it has both ranged and AoE defense.

The Energy Aura stalker set has damage-typed defenses. Supposedly, the energy aura version of hide offers defense to all but psi, instead of the positional hide everyone else has, but I haven't confirmed that yet (if energy aura has the same hide as everyone else does, it wouldn't stack with its own defenses because hide would be positional, and energy's defenses would be damage-typed). Kinetic Shield offers defense to smashing, lethal, and (to a lesser extent) energy. Power Shield offers defense to fire, cold, energy, and negative. Overload offers defense to all damage types except psi (remember, "all but psi" excludes toxic) [note: Overload also has a dull pain component].



*** New from previous version ***
Power Pool defenses are now supposed to offer defense to all, to guarantee that they stack appropriately with any defense that might be possessed by a hero/villain from their primary and secondary sets. This change was made to ensure that power pool defenses did not discriminate for or against any particular defense sets. Originally, most power pool defenses offered melee/ranged defense, and for a short while power pools offered melee/ranged and smash/lethal to try to address some stacking issues. They were changed to defense to all when it became clear that limited typing was not going to fully address the stacking issues, and was going to make stacking highly complex.

Power pool powers with defense components:

Concealment/Stealth
Concealment/Grant Invisibility
Concealment/Invisibility
Fighting/Weave
Flight/Hover
Leadership/Maneuvers
Leadership/Vengeance
Leaping/Combat Jumping



What other powers provide defense?

The following additional powers provide defense:

Devices/Cloaking Device (melee/ranged)
Illusion Control/Superior Invisibility (melee/ranged)
Illusion Control/Group Invisbility (melee/ranged)
Dark Miasma/Shadow Fall (melee/ranged)
Empathy/Fortitude (apparently all damage types)
Storm Summoning/Steamy Mist (melee/ranged)
Dark Armor/Cloak of Darkness (melee/ranged)
Regeneration/MoG (all but psi)
Cold Mastery/Frozen Armor (smash/lethal) [note: this power also has cold resistance]
Force Mastery/Personal Force Field (base defense)
Warshade/Shadow Cloak (melee/ranged ?)
Katana/Divine Avalanche (melee/lethal)
Broadsword/Parry (melee/lethal)

Note: Hasten used to have defense; it was removed in I5


Special Note on Stealth

Stealth powers generally break their concealment component when you either attack or are attacked. When the stealth is broken, most stealth powers that have a defense buff component will have about half their defense also suppressed while the stealth component is broken.

The following stealth powers appear to suppress a portion of their defense when the stealth is broken:

Devices/Targetting Drone
Illusion Control/Superior Invisibility
Illusion Control/Group Invisbility
Ice Control/Arctic Air
Concealment/Stealth
Concealment/Grant Invisibility
Concealment/Invisibility


According to Statesman, stealth powers in "Primary Defensive Sets" do not suppress their stealth when concealment is broken. The following stealth powers appear to not suppress any of their defense even if concealment is broken.

Dark Miasma/Shadow Fall
Storm Summoning/Steamy Mist
Dark Armor/Cloak of Darkness
Warshade/Shadow Cloak


Special Note on Power Boost

The power Power Boost (both the blaster energy manipulation version, and the epic power pool version) boosts defense powers while power boost is active. The boost is equal to the base value of the defense power being boosted. For example, if you have hover running (2.5% defense) and you trigger power boost, hover gains 2.5% additional defense. If hover was 5-slotted with defense SOs (net 5% defense) the boost would still be 2.5% (to 7.5% total defense).


What is the Streak Breaker?

The streak breaker is a bit of code within the tohit calculator that is designed to prevent very long strings of misses. There is a lot of misunderstanding about how the streak breaker works, so I'm going to be very specific in terms of detailing how I know what I know about the streak breaker.

First, the streak breaker only breaks streaks of misses, not hits. Confirmed by my own testing, dev postings, and red name PMs.

Second, the streak breaker affects both heroes and villains. Confirmed by my own testing, dev postings, and red name PMs.

Third, the streak breaker "decides" to break a string of misses when the string of misses exceeds a particular value. That value is dependent on the tohit probability between the attacker and the target. At about 50% net tohit, the streak breaker breaks streaks of more than four misses in length. That increases in a seemingly exponential fashion, until its only breaking streaks of 10 at 26%, and at 10% the streak breaker will allow miss streaks of more than 63 before breaking them (I do not know the correct value for this: I just know its more than 63). What does it mean for the streak breaker to "break" a string of misses? If the streak breaker detects a string of misses that reach a critical value, it forces the next swing to be a hit, regardless of the tohit "roll." These numbers come from my own testing of the streak breaker: no dev (to my knoweldge) has ever specifically outlined the exact levels the streak breaker is triggered at.


DEFENSE ISSUES

These are some of the issues related to how defense and tohit works in City of Heroes


Autohitting attacks

There are attacks that automatically hit, bypassing the tohit floors and ceilings. Typically, these things are damage auras, such as the aura emitted by Circle of Thorns Death Mages, or patches, such as the damage due to caltrops. No amount of defense reduces the damage of autohitting attacks. Note: some people used to think burn (firey aura) was autohit, but in actual fact it simply has a very high accuracy.

Special Note on defense debuffs

Although defense debuffs were covered earlier, its important to note that the subtractive nature of defense debuffs makes them extremely dangerous. Up to the writing of this guide, defense sets did not have any resistance to defense debuffs (such resistance is currently being added in some form). Their only means of defending against them was defense itself. This creates a problem whereby any defense debuff that manages to land decreases defense and makes the hero both more vulnerable to damage, and more vulnerable to more defense debuffs - a spiralling downward situation.

This is significant because resistance does not work that way. All resistance powers have an inherent resistance to resistance debuffs. When someone with 40% defense is hit with a 10% defense debuff, defense is reduced to 30%. When someone with 40% resistance is hit with a 10% resistance debuff, 40% of the debuff is resisted, and actual damage resistance drops to 34%, not 30%. Furthermore, the resistance to debuffs remains 40%. If hit with another 10% resistance debuff, resistance drops to 28%, not 20% (like defense would be) and not 27.4%, which would be the case if resistance was truely dropped to 34%.

Quartz eminators, quicksand patches

Quicksand patches are autohitting slow and defense debuff patches. These were highly lethal to defense sets, because their defense debuffs couldn't be defended against or otherwise avoided, and once hit, the slow made it difficult to escape (Super Reflexes has a resistance to slow, but it didn't fully mitigate the -fly -jump which could trap a scrapper between villains and friends alike, and it didn't necessarily allow for quick escapes from the patch). Quicksand was also spammed by Earth thorn casters - a CoT minion - in CoT missions from levels 35 to 39. Although this was supposedly fixed (by lessening the frequency of earth thorn casters as well as reducing their propensity to cast quicksand) its still an example of a highly powerful defense-unfriendly power that has few analogs for resistance or regeneration.

Quartz eminators - the eminators dropped by DE LTs - is even more exceptional. Quartz eminators emit a tohit buff to all DE within its buff radius. The tohit buff eminated from quartz eminators is extremely large - by some estimates several hundred percent. To put Quartz eminators into perspective, I3 SR scrappers running perma-elude and the toggles combines were running with more than 150% defense - and still being easily hit by Quartz-eminator buffed DE minions. Once again, there is no analog to the quartz eminator for any other form of damage mitigation, such as resistance and regeneration.

Team scalers and difficulty sliders

Important to note for defense sets: the difficulty slider (also known as the reputation slider) increases the level of villains within your missions, and therefore increases the base tohit of those villains (it doesn't generally increase the ranks of villains, except for the fact that heroic suppresses bosses). The team scaler increases the difficulty of missions based on the number of heroes on the team, and it increases rank and level and numbers of villains. With much lower defenses in I5 than earlier issues of CoH, high level missions can be less than friendly to defense-oriented sets, moreso than other damage mitigation sets.

Is Defense really inferior to Resistance?

Not especially. Defense and Resistance both have pros and cons in terms of their inherent effects. Defense's main problems are three-fold:

1. There are sets that rely heavily on Defense, but most other protection sets do not singularly rely on a single mitigation effect.

This is not a critical issue, but it amplifies the others.

2. Defense is - in the opinion of many - scaled too low.

The argument goes that because Defense avoids status effects, Defense has an inherent advantage that more than balances the fact that the damage mitigation of sets that rely on Defense is significantly lower than other sets. Most testing, analysis, and review of a transparent nature (i.e. open to review) suggests this is false. The devs, who do not generally reveal their own analysis, testing, or reviews, disagree.

3. What Defense is most vulnerable to, is plentiful in the CoH environment.

The most common secondary effect in CoH besides DoT (damage over time) is defense debuff. Defense debuffs are more common than resistance debuffs and regeneration debuffs combined. And Defense debuffs are undoubtably more dangerous to Defense sets than resistance debuffs and regeneration debuffs are to resistance and regeneration sets, respectively (regeneration debuffs would be significantly more dangerous to regeneration sets if they prevented things such as reconstruction and dull pain from functioning). Defense is also vulnerable to tohit buffs, and every single villain of higher rank than minion, and every single villain higher in level than even con, has an effective tohit buff.

To say that Defense is inferior to Resistance, given the large environmental disadvantages that Defense faces in CoH, would be comparable to changing all the damage dealth by villains to toxic and psi, and then claiming that Resistance was inferior to Defense.

What's up with tohit buffs?

Good question. Very high tohit buffs are, at least, uncommon in PvE. They are very common in PvP, because high order tohit buffs are extremely common in player power sets.

The two most common tohit buffs are build up and Aim, and both are high order tohit buff (Build Up is a 60% tohit buff, and Aim is a 100% tohit buff). Virtually all blasters, most defenders, almost all scrappers, and most tankers have access to either Build Up or Aim, and many blasters have access to both. Only controllers as a class lack BU or Aim (and pets have a tohit bonus).

If you are relying on defense in the arena, here's the score. If you have SR or Ice, and a couple stacked bubbles, someone who elected to 6-slot Aim with tohit buff enhancements to kill defense sets will hit you no matter what defense level you think you have. Realistically, that one power, and 5 extra enhancement slots, can effectively nullify an entire team's worth of defense buffs (7 stacked bubbles will beat Aim, of course, but all reasonable levels of defense and most unreasonable ones are going to be beat by 6-slot Aim). Without significant buffs, anyone with either build up or Aim will hit you.

It is unclear why Defense was lowered as part of the Global Defense reductions in I5, but tohit buffs were (apparently) not. If they were, this fact was not reported, nor has it shown up yet in anyone's testing.

*** New for I6 ***

One change made to tohit buffs in relation to balancing them with defense is that tohit buff enhancements are now schedule B (like defense: +20% for even SO) instead of schedule A (like damage: +33% for even SO). This at least places tohit buff enhancement and defense enhancement on a relatively even footing, although for high tohit buff powers, the net benefit of even an equal strength SO will be higher than a similar enhancement in a lower numerical strength defense power.


UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT DEFENSE

(At least, I don't know the answers)

1. When a click defense is triggered, does the defense stack immediately, or only after the activation is completed, or something in-between?

Although I never fully tested this (and now its almost impossible to do so) I (and many other SR scrappers) experienced an alarming sense that we were being hit in mid-backflip while cycling elude more often than chance would suggest, even though the protection of elude should have been fairly continuous. It was conjectured that when elude was cycled, the original cast of elude was momentarily dropped, and the new cast of elude was significantly (by a second or two) delayed. This would have made elude comparable to powers like grant invisibility, which if you refresh it, causes the targetted player to become momentarily visible again.

Whether this is true, and how this affects other defense powers, like parry/DA, is unclear.

2. Just exactly how does invincibility work?

Much more industrious people than me are continuing to investigate invincibility, most recently Stargazer. Invincibility was originally thought to have a base defense, plus an additional amount of melee and ranged defense per villain in melee range. Havok concluded that the original belief that invincibility had a base defense was false, and attempted to correct that mistaken belief. Much more recently, Stargazer seems to have done fairly convincing tests that lead one to believe that invincibility is not offering melee/ranged defense, but rather damage-typed all except psi defense. Whether invincibility was always like this, or changed to be this, is not clear to me, given the complex history of invincibility testing.

Additionally, further testing by others have hinted that invincibility might be offering twice the defense the developers quote for it because (like all auras) it "pulses" to generate its effect, and the pulses might be coming twice as fast as the actual pulse duration, in effect causes invincibility to stack with itself.

Testing of invincibility might be the longest running attempt to define how a power works in CoH by the player community.

3. Are hits and misses "streaky?" Is the random number generator in City of Heroes "broken?"

Its possible the random number generator has some sort of flaw, but in my opinion, whatever flaws it has, they are unlikely to be causing major problems in the game. However, its possible there are other systematic errors in the game related to how random numbers are actually used. There are some instances where it is blatantly obvious that the tohit calculators are doing something weird, but across a wide range of other cases, the randomness of hits and misses appears to be fairly random. Its important to note that "random" does not mean "not streaky." True random numbers are inherently streaky to a degree: the question is whether or not the hits and misses in CoH obey statistical norms of streakiness. This is still an open question, because its such a difficult thing to test for and because few people are able to test it precisely.


THE CANONICAL LIST OF DEFENSE-RELATED COMPLAINTS REGULARLY DISCUSSED ON THE FORUMS

In no particular order (and without commenting on validity):

* SR underperforms other scrapper sets
* SR is a "one trick pony" that has only defense
* Ice tanks uderperform other tanker sets
* Ice tanks performance is too similar to SR scrappers for a tanker
* High defense is too frustrating in the arena
* Low defense is too frustrating in the arena
* There are too many defense debuffs in the game
* Defense debuffs are too strong
* Tohit buffs in the arena are too strong
* Defense requires you to be lucky
* Defense is inferior to Resistance in all respects
* The SR set is too reliant on power pool defenses
* The Force Fields set is insufficiently strong as a buff set
* Resistance buffs are more appreciated than Defense buffs
* The SR (and to a lesser degree Ice) set can be too easily simulated with a few luck inspirations
* Lucky and Evasion are in the wrong order in the SR set
* Invincibility is too powerful a defense power for Invulnerability given that it can outperform the supposedly "defense-oriented sets"
* The -DEF in Unyielding should be removed given the overall reductions to the invuln set
* SR passive defenses are too inefficient to slot
* There are too many autohitting attacks
* There shouldn't exist autohitting defense debuffs
* Quartz eminators
* Defense stacking is too complicated, unfair to some sets, and creates problems in improperly selecting and slotting certain defense powers

Be forewarned: this stuff has been debated to death. Also, while I strongly encourage people to post their ideas, observations, comments, and suggestions on defense-related issues, bear in mind that if you post a message stating, essentially "I have the answer to everything" one of two things is extremely likely to happen: the message will be ignored, or the suggestion in the message will be heavily critiqued. Be prepared for both.


THE PURPLE PATCH

Get asked about this all the time. Here is what happens when you try to attack something much higher than you are, in terms of your powers effectiveness going down, and in terms of your base tohit going down also. Note: this affects players attacking higher leveled foes. Low level villains attacking a higher level player are not affected by the purple patch. These numbers come from a Geko post from the distant past.

[ QUOTE ]

Foes your level have not changed. You have a 75% chance to hit and your powers are 100% effective.
Foes 1 level above you - No Change. You have a 68% chance to hit and your powers are 90% effective.
Foes 2 levels above you - No Change. You have a 61% chance to hit and your powers are 80% effective.
Foes 3 levels above you - You have a 55% chance to hit and your powers are 65% effective.
Foes 4 levels above you - You have a 48% chance to hit and your powers are 48% effective.
Foes 5 levels above you - You have a 41% chance to hit and your powers are 30% effective.
Foes 6 levels above you - You have a 34% chance to hit and your powers are 15% effective.
Foes 7 levels above you - You have a 25% chance to hit and your powers are 8% effective.
Foes 8 levels above you - You have an 11% chance to hit and your powers are 5% effective.
Foes 9 levels above you - You have a 6% chance to hit and your powers are 4% effective.
Foes 10 levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 3% effective.
Foes 11 levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 2% effective.
Foes 12+ levels above you - You have a 5% chance to hit and your powers are 1% effective.


[/ QUOTE ]


*** New for version 1.1 ***
Testing seems to indicate that the base tohit of players might not follow this progression precisely. Its unclear why this is the case, and no red name has addressed the issue. The numbers being tested are relatively close, so the effect is not large, but appears to be statistically significant. More testing may shed more light on this issue.


Things on the horizon

* Statesman has suggested that high tohit buffs are being looked at, but no solution has been put forth by the devs.

* CoV related and ED/I6 information hinted at in the 1.0 version of this guide has been fully integrated in this version



SOURCES OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

I kept the numbers out of this. If you want them, here they are:

Buffy's Scrapper Guide and Tanker Guide is an excellent source of defense (and resistance and regeneration) numbers.

An additional source of numbers, that include power pool values and tohit bases, is The Scrapper Defense Values Site. Note that power pools for tankers are higher than for scrappers (scrappers generally have 75% of the value of tanker numbers).

RedTomax is working on a web-based guide to all of CoH: it contains Defense information including defense types and values in tabular form here.


Use of this Guide

Anyone compiling information for use by players of City of Heroes and City of Villains has permission to reproduce this guide whole or in part, so long as some form of attribution is maintained. But if you make a ton of money off of it, and I find out about it, I'm going to come looking for my cut.

[ QUOTE ]
The resistance buffs are decent, but like a boxer already leaning on the ropes, it is often too late. SR needs some personality, as it is Ninjitsu and and Energy Aura provide comparable protection with much more utility and flair.

Personally, I'd fix SR by removing the passives (Dodge and Agile) and upping the toggle defenses to make up the difference. This would free up two powers to add some utility or a "reactive" defense.

My suggestions:
1) Make Agile on a 2 minute timer and when the power is activated the next 5-10 attacks (randomly generated) will miss you.
2) Make Dodge on a 2 minute time and when the power is activated it will heal the damage from last attack that hit you, as if it never occured. Example, boss hits you for 70% of HP; if you are quick enough you can hit Dodge and act as if the dmg never hit you (since it will heal back the exact amount of dmg taken, from the last attack). If you're too slow, you might only get back a minion's dmg.

Cheers,

SUN

[/ QUOTE ]

Since you are talking about energy aura and only two passives (dodge/agile), I'm assuming you are referring to the SR stalker set, and not the SR scrapper set. The two do not play identically.

The SR scrapper set can take all three passives, including lucky. Because of the way the passive resistances stack, the mitigation they provide gets amplified non-linearly. As a result, three is way stronger than two, and the SR scrapper set gets a much larger benefit from the passive resists (when they take all three) than you might expect if you've only seen the effect with one or two. The SR scrapper set has way more net mitigation than the ninjitsu or energy aura stalker sets.

The SR stalker set has much more mitigation potential than the ninjitsu or energy aura sets. The passives are not trivial defense for stalkers, especially with ED preventing the use of more than 3 defense slots in the toggles. And the specific advantage of SR over energy is that hide stacks with SR defenses, but since energy is damage-typed, hide doesn't stack with energy defenses. The combination of passives and hide give SR stalkers a significant edge in pure defensive mitigation over ninjitsu or energy.

One thing that some people are overlooking in the SR stalker set is that hide - even in its suppressed state - is more slot-efficient than the SR passives, and its defense is non-trivial (its defense is lower in base value when suppressed, but hide is defense to melee/ranged/aoe). And when SR gets evasion, the combination of evasion and hide means that when SR is in the hidden state, its for all intents and purposes immune to AoE splash damage - important for stalkers.

Ninjitsu and energy get other toys to compensate, but SR's defenses are nevertheless significantly higher overall.

I used to believe that SR lagged tremendously behind the other sets, but I don't believe SR stalker lags the other stalker sets by a large margin (its hard to say yet with any precision, but if anything is lagging its probably energy - until it gets overload). The SR scrapper set with the passive resists is probably at least in the same ballpark as the other scrapper sets at the moment - I doubt anyone would say the four scrapper sets were dead even, but the ridiculous imbalances of the past seem to be strongly suppressed.

If there is a problem with the SR scrapper set, its that the resistance component of its defense is so high on a relative basis, SR is not the "don't get hit" set anymore: its mitigation is roughly split 50/50 between defense and resistance, and that breaks the "feel" of the set, as a separate issue from its overall performance.

This is in PvE. In PvP, the passive resistances are much less of a factor. Regen and DA probably both still outperform SR on average in PvP, without elude. Within the elude window, SR does at least as good if not better than the other scrappers: sometimes better and sometimes worse, but possibly better overall.

[ QUOTE ]

People want to turn this into a "whine" or a nerf call...none of which are true


[/ QUOTE ]

If this was really true, then a simple post asking Castle if the devs see stalkers as basically balanced would have been enough. A PM to Castle would have been even better if you really didn't care what other players thought. Or you could have played one and followed the discussions in the beta boards up to now. Or you might consider actually listening to real stalkers instead of dismissing them all as "just not getting it."


But attempting to play "I'm neutral, I just have a question" when your questions and observations are:


[ QUOTE ]

What is interesting is that the Stalker AT is predicated on ganking.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

I am unaware of any AT power that doesn't have some counter in another AT without resorting to power pools...And yet, nothing resists Placate.


[/ QUOTE ]

Which is false, btw.

[ QUOTE ]

No solo AT can achieve the invisilibty of Stalkers, so should Stalkers be the only set that doesn't have to constantly be looking over its shoulder for fear of some hero?


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

in absolutely none of those situations could I have defeated the Stalker if they had decided to check out early. And ...I was defeated far more times by Stalkers that stuck around than I defeated.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

but posters on these boards are overly protective of any advantage they do have or and aggressive againsts any posts that seeks to portrary it as unjustified.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

I'll pose as a rhetorical question to Castle that as the rep for Stalkers, allowing them to be overpowered would seem just as detrimental as allowing them to be underpowered.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

I can see what is written on paper and like the huge endurance drain from old toggle IH, I see that savvy players have already figured out how to beat it.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

think a lot of those who play Stalker victims in this game would benefit from the devs giving us a much clearer picture of what kind of effect stalkers are supposed to have.


[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]

Are solo toons expected to have to keep moving constantly or find teams in PvP Zones? Do you really expect Scrappers to take both Assault and Tactics if they want to solo?


[/ QUOTE ]


But of course, it wouldn't be a Mieux post if it didn't call everyone who either disagreed with him or didn't fully agree with his point an idiot:

[ QUOTE ]

I've read through the player responses and of course none of them are surprising. Most, if not nearly all, fail to understand the motivation of the questions or the point of the examples


[/ QUOTE ]

I understood the point perfectly. I think a lot of other people got it too, which is why the responses are what they are.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Or does your -valueless- post indicate acceptance with everything aforementioned, excepting of course that most trivial sentence?

[/ QUOTE ]

Not really, i just didnt think it was worth commenting on because Castle has already stated that they are changing the coding in game so that any PvP attack that would kill a player in one hit will instead leave them with 1hp. With that in mind almost the entirety of your post was better off ignored.

[/ QUOTE ]

Correction here. The 1hp threshhold is only one of the ideas being considered. We've still not determined exactly how we are going to deal with 'One Shot Kills' (and the final decision will almost certainly apply to both PVE and PVP -- so no more AV insta-kills.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow, that's obscene. I would swear in Beta it was clearly stated this would be a PvP change only.

[/ QUOTE ]

He means that whatever change is made to prevent stalkers from one-shotting a player, it would likely be extended to prevent AVs and other *NPCs* from also one-shotting players. It was specifically stated elsewhere that whatever was done wouldn't prevent *players* from one-shotting *non-players* in PvE; i.e. if you can one-shot a minion now, the change wouldn't prevent you from doing so when it went in.

[ QUOTE ]

1) When the Arena first came out, Positron said he wasn't overly concerned with the 1v1 battles because it was too much of a rock/papers/scissors affair. How do we reconcile the dev philosophy that 1v1 can't be balanced and yet make sense of a toon that is designed for 1v1 combat? How does one side-step 1v1 balance on one hand and then appropriately balance an entire AT for it on another?


[/ QUOTE ]

Stalkers were not explicitly designed for 1v1 combat. In fact, they are *most* effective in teams, where something else can distract the target long enough for the stalker to strike. They are *good* 1v1 fighters, but there is no evidence to support the contention they were "designed" for 1v1 combat, any more than scrappers were.

Brute/stalker is a perfect counterexample to the "stalkers are designed for 1v1 combat" contention.


[ QUOTE ]

2) The Arena is a situation where neither toon can leave the battle. Players, blasters in particular, were using Phase Shift to effectively gank and escape and the devs put a stop to it. Clearly ganking was not to be tolerated. What is interesting is that the Stalker AT is predicated on ganking. Its speciality is the 1v1 battle with the escape. Why take that ability away from blasters in consensual battles but promote and endorse it in another AT in non-consensual battles?


[/ QUOTE ]

Escape works both ways: stalkers can escape, and their targets can escape.

Also, I'm not sure in what sense you are using the word "gank." You seem to use it to refer to the act of attacking and then retreating, but that is a highly non-standard use of the word. The most common MMO-usage is to refer to the act of killing an unsuspecting (and with no reason to suspect) target, or killing a target where the target was so inferior to you there was literally no hope for the target at all. A blaster killing a target and phase shifting isn't ganking: it was considered a cheap tactic by some, but it isn't ganking.


[ QUOTE ]

3) It seems that the AT's in CoH have their foils in CoV. And vice versa. Who is the foil for a Stalker? Who can consistently solo defeat Stalkers who do not want to be defeated to the same extent that they can defeat any solo AT that doesn't want to be defeated? ...I'm reading that Stalkers can one-shot tanks in BB and Siren's with enough Rages. No solo AT can achieve the invisilibty of Stalkers, so should Stalkers be the only set that doesn't have to constantly be looking over its shoulder for fear of some hero?


[/ QUOTE ]

Go back to this statement in section one:

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When the Arena first came out, Positron said he wasn't overly concerned with the 1v1 battles because it was too much of a rock/papers/scissors affair.


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Lots of powers see through hide. Tactics, and especially overlapping tactics, sees through stacked stealth. Stalkers have a foil: high perception players, and especially high perception teams.

And stalkers need inspirations to one-shot, which is a limited quantity resource. Balanced against the fact that stealth can be penetrated by IR goggles, another limited quantity resource.


Stalker balancers:

1. Lower health

One balancer against the fact that stalkers do high alpha strike damage is that they themselves have relatively low health, meaning while they can one-shot and two-shot a lot of things, a lot of things can one-shot and two-shot them.


2. Lower damage output

Outside of AS, and hide/criticals, stalkers do much less damage than a lot of things. Outside of the alpha strike, stalkers have a difficult time keeping up damage against a target.


3. Lower defenses

Of all the melee classes, stalkers have the lowest net mitigation. They are, for all intents and purposes, borderline squishies. Scrappers, tank, and brutes all have higher mitigation. In fact, a lot of defenders probably have much higher net damage mitigation than stalkers.


4. Hide suppression

In teams hide suppression is a major problem, because after the alpha strike, the stalker, with low health and low mitigation, becomes a target for all surviving members of the opposing team, assuming for the sake of argument that the stalker optimally alpha-strike killed his target.

Can a stalker hit and run, to allow rehide and re-strike? Yes. But that option is available to other classes as well, such as blasters.


5. Assassin's strike has internal balancers

AS has long activation time, and its interruptible, and it only crits from hide. This means already that AS has some significant restrictions:

a. It is extremely difficult to use against fliers.

b. It is extremely difficult to use against jousters.

c. It is moderately tricky to use around AoE.

d. It is difficult to use around damage auras.

e. It is impossible to use around auto-hitting auras

f. It requires setup time outside of the intial alpha strike to establish hidden status: rehide or placate


6. Not all stalkers are the same, and each has weaknesses.

For example, ninjitsu has no KB protection. "Hit and run" is good on paper, but against anything wielding knockback, running might not be an option. Energy has no AoE defense to stack with hide, which means it is less protected against (non-autohitting) AoE auras, and AoE attacks.

Because of this, blanket statements about the class as a whole, as to what their preferred targets are, what advantages they have, and what tactics they are going to employ specifically, aren't likely to be true across all stalkers.


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In absolutely none of those situations could I have defeated the Stalker if they had decided to check out early. And ...I was defeated far more times by Stalkers that stuck around than I defeated.


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Those two statements are not proper reverses. The proper reverse statements for each are:

"In absolutely none of those situations could I have defeated the Stalker if they had decided to check out early."

Question: in any of those cases could they have defeated you if *you* elected to "check out early?"


"I was defeated far more times by Stalkers that stuck around than I defeated."

Question: does this mean that the advantage of stalkers has nothing to do with escape, hit-and-run, alpha strike, perception, or "ganking" as such?



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But each and every defeat of a stalker was only a result:

1) they simply chose not to use enough Rages to one shot me.

2) They stuck around for the fight.


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For every defeat, its possible to state that the only reason my opponent didn't defeat me is because they stayed to fight, and didn't use enough insps to overpower me. If I use more inspirations than you, and no one disengages, I kill you, regardless of what I play and what you play. Thats why they don't sell them in the PvP zones.

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Smoke Flash is a "Get me outta here!" power, not a setup for another crit power.

[/ QUOTE ]Ok, so why does it have a (from what I hear) 4 second cast time? That's not something you can use when the chips are down.

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I couldn't agree more. I would suggest cutting the animation time in half at least for it be a true "Oh S***" power.

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It could be better, but my experience tells me that for stalkers, there is no such thing as an "oh sh*t" power anyway: almost everything we do has to be almost preventative in nature, not reactionary. If the villains turn to shoot at you, even if smoke flash had instantaneous activation time, if you didn't run and don't have a heal, you'd still be just as dead. Smoke flash normally doesn't prevent the villains from attacking, it prevents them from attacking *twice*. I've used it (on even level villains) to actually smoke a group, and if it hits them all, just stand there and rehide. Sometimes they stay unaggroed that long, sometimes not - better chances if I stand behind them.

More useful is to stand in the middle of three, AS one, and then *immediately* smoke flash. That "resets" aggro on them, allowing me to take a couple seconds to let things recharge, and then continue the fight.

It seems best useful in combination with blinding powder: blind some, smoke the others, and you end up with a high order probability that *nothing* is shooting at you in any significant fashion.

One more thing: in teams, smoke flash doesn't eliminate aggro, it just takes you off the aggro list, so if your timing is good, you can use it to in essence divert their aggro to mastermind pets or something. It isn't perfect, but smoke seems to be the perfect counter to the ridiculous level of aggro that AS is set to generate.

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Super Reflexes resistance to Defense Debuffs does not seem to be working.


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It should be. Looking at the data, there are three powers for Stalkers that add Resistance to Debuff. These all stack with one another, and increase in effectiveness as you go up in level, ranging from 18% at level 1 (if you could have all three powers at level 1) to 36.7% at level 40. At level 50, once that is open, it's about 42%.


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What I know is that when the powers began announcing in the description that the debuff resistance was in, I tested with super reflexes in CoH (not CoV) and at level 50, with all SR powers, and the debuff theoretically being better than 90%, it didn't seem to be working. Its a difficult thing to tell if its working, so I set up a test where I got a rularuu watcher to fire at me, and set up my defenses so that he was just on the edge of being able to tag me very infrequently. And yet, every time he did, it caused a cascade of hits after every successful hit. If my defense lowered him to the point where he could only hit every so often, and my debuff resistance was well above 90%, a successful hit shouldn't have done much at all, since most of the debuff would be resisted. Instead, I see the same exact behavior of cascade defense failure.

Its a much more difficult thing to test in CoV, so its entirely possible its working in CoV, but broken in CoH. But since the patch notes themselves seem to be silent on the issue, I'm assuming that if its broken on one side, its very likely to be broken on the other side.

This is one of those many things where because we can't *see* whats going on, if its broken (and many things have been broken in the past despite statements to the contrary) it can take players months or longer to amass enough information to prove it. Shouldn't there be a way to *unambiguously* tell if something is working or not, at least for the red names? Some sort of /debug 1 "show me the numbers" mode? Think enervating field.

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But... he DID say that they were working on yet another boost (not the debuff resist, we already have that) for SR.

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hmmmmmmmmm

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Hmmmmmmmmm indeed.

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We've reduced base To Hit from 75% to 50% for PvP purposes. This change was made to give Defense sets more effectiveness. With the ED changes, coupled with the prevalence of +To Hit buffs it was necessary.

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Defensive sets stink (along with every passive now, thanks to ED) and instead of actually doing something to improve them and bring them up to par, we'll just nerf everyone else to compensate! Brilliant!

You've all no clue what to do or how to "balance" this game. Wouldn't a %defense against ToHits (similar to EA in CoV offering some defense against defense debuffs) been a better idea?

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It is just as proper to look at it as everyone in PvP zones gets a 25% defense buff - and since defense stacks on pre-existing defense, the buff is a bigger buff for defensive sets than non-defensive sets.

The two ways of looking at it are entirely symmetric.

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There's no way I'm zerging mobs that have 0% chance of killing me just to make more money. The Statesman I know would never encourage that.

Risk v. Reward. Green mobs or blue Lts. are no risk... why should the reward be better?

I vote they just fix the darn reward system.

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The Statesman you know doesn't think its broken that you can't afford everything you want, whenever you want. If you could, there'd be no real point in forcing you to go through the hassle of actually running to the store to buy them. He *wants* it to be hard, and expensive, to force you to decide what to enhance, and how, and he absolutely *doesn't* want you to be able to fully outfit with all SOs everywhere for an extended period of time.

Whether thats a good thing or not is debatable, but I doubt the devs see it as "broken."

The problem isn't necessarily with the reward system, the problem is with enhancement expiration. If enhancements didn't expire, they simply got lower and lower in effectiveness, then making them scarce would be more palatable: the pressing "need" to suddenly enhance everything because all your enhancements went dark would be lessened.

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You don't start giving up Inf. for Prestige until level 24.

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More like don't start giving up Influency/Infamy for Prestige until level 51! HECK!! Who is this character who earned 1 Million Influence at level 24 anyway that is the minimun amount you are allowed to convert to Prestige?! I would Like to know there secret.

Lets see, for 1,000,000 Influence/Infamy I can get a whole lot of Single Origins to outfit my character with OR exchange it for enough Prestige to by two realy nice light fixtures to decorate my Entrance Room with. I mean they really make that little 3x3 room look so nice. Maybe I will splurge and get a wall painting to go with it.

I think I will stick with keeping the Influence/Infamy, Thank You. If the conversion rate was bumped up a decimal placement then I'll actually think about it, but as now its a very bad joke and no one is laughing at it on this side.

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I think Positron is referring to the fact that if you are in SG mode, starting at level 24 and increasing with level, you start to earn less and less infamy, and more prestige. Eventually (assuming you are in SG mode), you'll be earning not much infamy at higher levels: most of it will come from selling drops.

My first encounter with the big guy, he was actually literally standing outside my mission door when I exited. That was the most sound I ever heard while in the process of zoning out of a mission.

In Paragon, we hunt the monsters. In the Rogue Isles, they apparently come looking for you.

This is becoming much less a discussion of the technical issues of tohit, and more of a PvP balancing discussion, but here goes:

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This doesn't take into account the actual dynamics of PvP. Having to hit someone many times before actually getting a successful hit allows for healback (which happens rapidly with spectral wounds, for instance) as well as inability to constantly plug away at the SR long enough to do damage in significant quantity. I'm failing to see how this is a genuinely fair comparison, overall.


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Missing, or hitting for less, is from a damage perspective an identical situation. Missing 80% of the time, and hitting someone (base 50% tohit) with 60% resists, it will take exactly the same number of swings to do the same effective damage. I'm not sure why its a difficult concept to convey, but people seem to think there is an inherent penalty to missing - from a damage perspective - and there isn't. Healback happens in ticks and is unaffected by damage per se: if it takes X number of swings to do Y amount of damage, whether all X swings record a small amount of damage, or most miss and some do a lot of damage, the average result is the same.

Spectral Wounds heals back fast enough that realistically, there's no way to "stack" SW and kill before the healback occurs, except at significantly low health levels. That is a marginal issue at best.

What I think you're missing is that if I say X defense is equal to Y resistance, what that means is that it'll take the same number of swings, on average, to strike for the same amount of effective damage. The same. That's the very definition behind computing what defense is equal to what resistance. If I put a character with X defense and one with Y resistance in front of you, and ask you to swing away until you kill them both, statistically, on average, it will take exactly the same amount of time, or I simply haven't done the math correctly. If you think I haven't done the math correctly, then let me know what error you think I've made.


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Defense doesn't kill anyone, offense does. If breakfrees are a legitimate response to holds, then there are also counters to the SR scrappers *primary*. No SR power does damage, no SR power boosts damage, no SR power improves accuracy, and no SR power mezzes, so (except for quickness) there is nothing in the SR set to "counter."


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You brought up holds as being something Controllers have in their favour. I mentioned that it is _easily_ mitigated by break frees, allowing the ice/energy blaster, for instance, to defeat me without much trouble.

SR itself isn't offensive, but, it of course does increase the SR Scrapper's offensive strength against me. Being unable to land hits means I am essentially defenseless as, at least in my experience in PvP, offense and defense are pretty entagled with eachother. With Kinetics, especially, it becomes even more of a problem since it is so reliant on landing hits, including for my heal. As a result, missing 4/5 times makes SR inordinately dangerous to me, with the exception of maybe DA in some cases. In essence, I can't damage quickly enough to be a threat, I can't detoggle, either (since all I have is brawl or multiple applications of transference for that; both of which miss routinely), and I can't protect myself (as MA, at least, cuts right through my defenses and I can't heal myself). These factors also contribute to why I'm having trouble understanding why your calculations for mitigation are particularly representative of real-world conditions in terms of mitigating threat. They may work against pure damage opponents such as blasters, but, they don't seem to represent well for opponents like many controller builds and, I imagine, Defender builds as well.


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The calculations are just a reference point for discussion. In actual play, in the arena, and in PvP zones, in order, the highest threats to my MA/SR are in order (in broad rough terms):

Blasters (if they play smart)
Illusion Controllers (if they have all the pets, especially ST)
Anything else with fear
All other controllers
Broadsword Scrappers
All other scrappers
Defense Debuffing Defenders (solo: any team with one is the defacto highest threat)
Tanks


Controllers have always been among the highest threats, and therefore are the first thing targetted. You might be getting taken out in PvP quickly and often precisely because of that fact.


Now, there will always be exceptions. You mention kinetics. Any set that relies heavily on hitting for secondary effects is going to do worse against SR than other sets. But to attempt to nullify that is to attempt to negate SR's inherent advantages over resistance. Would my blaster have a valid complaint that she needs slow resistance to deal with all kinetics sets?

Kinetics specifically might do worse than other sets. The implication seems to be that if a set needs to hit to work well, it should be allowed to do so. But my SR needs to avoid getting hit to do its job well, and its job is to defend against you. Part of the built in balancing that goes on is that my defense is *supposed* to prevent you from landing your self heal. Other sets have non-targetted self heals, which is their built-in advantage. Radiation toggle debuffs are autohit: SR cannot defend against them at all. Thats an advantage of radiation relative to kinetics, that requires a hit.

Balanced against kinetics, which SR defends well against, there's still tar patch, caltrops, and quicksand, all of which autohit for effect. There's still Aim, which all blasters and a sizeable proportion of defenders have, that cuts through everything including elude. Focused accuracy cuts through everything but elude by itself. Build Up and Rage cuts through SR defenses, even with the lowered PvP base tohit. Pets still have higher accuracy.

If some things are allowed to be much more effective against SR, and everything else is required to be at least equal, then SR will be a worthless set. If not getting hit is SR's purported advantage, then not being able to hit has to be someone's disadvantage.

If *all* tohit buffs were taken away, and *all* defense debuffs were taken away, and *all* pets had player accuracy, so that SR's defenses were in effect equally effective everywhere, then I'd have no problem with saying that no set should be inordinately *penalized* against SR. But as long as rock/paper/scissors is the balance rule, then some sets have to be paper to SR's scissors.


Having said all of that, now that they have made the change that essentially *all* defense advocates have been asking for since practically the dawn of PvP, I'm willing to admit that many sets, like kinetics, might need tweaking to equalize them across the full spectrum of possible opponents.

But you have to remember: there are ATs out there that your kinetics can dominate. Proper balance dictates that either there has to be some that will give you inordinate trouble, like SR, or you yourself have to be reduced relative to those people you give inordinate trouble to.

You can't ask to be sometimes great, and everywhere else even. You can only be sometimes great, and sometimes sad, or even everywhere. And even everywhere is not an easy thing to accomplish.

Right now, SR seems to be in a position where some things have an easier time defeating it, and some things a harder time. Are the two sets roughly even? I'm not sure yet, but even when they are, some people will be in one group, and some people will be in the other group, even though no one wants to be in the second group.

Who is in the second group for kinetics?

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Defense sets are balanced against even level minions: i.e. villains with base 50% tohit. Reducing players to a similar level makes sense given that: I've been basically asking for precisely that change for quite a while.


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I don't quite understand how it "makes sense"; are we all supposed to just be minions?


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When base player accuracy was 75%, that was the base tohit of an Archvillain. The original question was, should all players appear to be archvillains to defense sets only.

In actual fact, the answer is yes, you are supposed to be minions for the purposes of accuracy. Having higher than 50% base tohit is, in a sense, walking around with an automatic tohit buff on constantly. Imagine if all attacks by players did 65% psi damage - all attacks. No one would care much until PvP, when suddenly, resistance sets would be screaming bloody murder.

Precisely the same thing is true for accuracy: when SR scrappers can only get 28% defense *maximum* (without elude), everyone having 75% base tohit didn't make any sense.


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Whenever someone suggests that defense is "working too well" my standard question is, and no vague answers please: just how much can they be allowed to make you miss before its working "too good?"


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I find if I'm missing more than 80% of the time, especially considering how low my damage output is and the recycle times on pretty much all of my powers, that that is, at the very least, rather unenjoyable. Although, it does seem to be giving defense sets inordinate amounts of protection compared to others (such as resist sets). Also, the effect of 50% toHit seems to be one sided for me. Everyone and their mother can hit through SI + Hover + Maneuvers on me even with 3 slotted defense, yet, I miss even Blasters routinely. I don't know if it's just something on me is bugged, but, nearly perma-whiffing on defense sets and missing routinely on people who have no defense at all seems pretty screwy.


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My experience is different than yours in terms of how many people can hit through SR defenses. But lets start with miss rate. It gets a little tricky looking at what a "reasonable" miss rate is, because we are talking about two different situations: the original one with base tohit at 75%, and the new one with base tohit at 50%.

When base tohit was 75%, SR scrappers were looking to roughly equal the mitigation of the other scrapper sets. With ED and I6, the discussion gets very complex (complex enough that I haven't redone all my scrapper mitigation analyses yet: too much time in CoV honestly). But on broad strokes, invuln scrappers can still get smash/lethal resistances around 50%, plus (non-perma) dull pain, plus they can stack power pools. In the case of invuln, you can't simply dismiss power pools outright because tough is easier to get than weave, and stacks more strongly (higher relative value adjusted for defense/resistance stacking). But lets just start with 50% resists and periodic dull pain.

When dull pain is up, it adds effective mitigation of about 28% non-stacking to resistances: net invuln smash/lethal mitigation is about 63%.

For SR to get roughly to that level, with 75% base tohit, requires 47% defense. We have 28%. Granted, this does not take into account non-s/l damage, but contrawise it does not take into account dull pain's periodic self heal. Its not meant to prove anything, just meant to show at least in broad strokes where the numbers were.

At base tohit of 50%, SR defenses now offer 56% mitigation, which is in the same zip code as invuln's. It might be higher, it might be lower, when taking into account all other factors, but at least its in the same ballpark.


Now here's an interesting thing. When they reduced player base tohit, in effect they reduced *everyone's* base damage output from player to player. That's important for looking at just how "bad" missing 80% of the time really is. With no buffs, the average player is already going to miss the average player 50% of the time. How much real mitigation is a defense set offering if you are missing it 80% of the time? Basically, damage is reduced from 50% chance to hit, to 20% chance to hit. That's 60% mitigation ( (50-20)/50 ). Put it this way: out of ten swings, normally you'd hit five. Now, you'd hit two. Defense is protecting the target from 3 out of 5 hits: 60%.

In effect, at base 50% tohit, if you are only hitting one time in five, you are doing the exact same damage over time as if you were attacking someone with zero defense but 60% resistances. Again, this is rough numbers, designed to offer context. They can be argued around the margins, but now we are talking mitigation details, not the broad concept.


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Most people, if they miss three in a row and then are killed by an SR scrapper, conclude defense is overpowered. Its not: that's defense working correctly. When my blaster gets held, cannot fight back, and is killed by a controller, the conclusion is not that holds are too powerful, and need to be taken away. Or is it?


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Holds can be mitigated by Break Frees. Insights appear to modify percentage of final toHit (like an Acc enhancement) rather than the base. So while the blaster can essentially shrug off my holds and then pile drive me in seconds, I'm completely helpless against the SR scrapper.


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Defense doesn't kill anyone, offense does. If breakfrees are a legitimate response to holds, then there are also counters to the SR scrappers *primary*. No SR power does damage, no SR power boosts damage, no SR power improves accuracy, and no SR power mezzes, so (except for quickness) there is nothing in the SR set to "counter."

Meanwhile, as I said, my experience in Warburg isn't exactly the same as yours. There are in fact players in Warburg that can't kill me, because they simply don't possess sufficient tohit buffs. But then again, controller pets still possess pet accuracy, not the player base accuracy: I was feared by the spectral terror right through elude, and PB offers no fear protection. As a melee-only fighter, hurricane makes it all but impossible to defeat some controllers and defenders, unless they are literally asleep at the keyboard. 80% of my MA/SR's defeats were to blasters, including one that was very effective in hover sniping me while simultaneously spamming web grenade to prevent me from getting into the air to counter attack (I only lasted as long as I did by using overpasses as cover). Keep in mind, for me to be -flyed, web grenade has to hit.


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Maybe toHit should be addressed on a set-by-set or AT-by-AT basis. I don't know. Or, have insights work differently. It's not that I want defense sets to be useless in PvP. It's just that it doesn't seem particularly balanced as it is, especially considering that my toHit has already taken a dive from ED's effect on tactics.


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We come back to the original question: picture in your mind defense working correctly, in your estimation. Now ask yourself what you would do to "counter" defense, when its working correctly in your estimation. Now, as honestly as you can, evaluate how effective your response would be. If it gives you a win more than 50% of the time, that's saying something.

Classic game-balance trick: cut and choose. Take your toon, and my toon (MA/SR). Now, here's the game: you decide how defense and tohit will work. Then I decide which one I will play, and you have to play the other one. Now, come up with a suggestion for defense and tohit you'd be happy with under those conditions.

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We've reduced base To Hit from 75% to 50% for PvP purposes. This change was made to give Defense sets more effectiveness. With the ED changes, coupled with the prevalence of +To Hit buffs it was necessary.

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I think it's nice that you're trying to help defense sets, but, I also think this is a bit overkill. I now have a totally binary relationship with Scrappers in PvP. I can hit resist sets with my Controller and I miss constantly against defense sets. I also miss constantly against defense sets in other ATs. This is despite having 3 slotted tactics PLUS 2 Acc SOs PLUS Insights. That, to me, does not seem balanced in the slightest. It means I literally cannot defend myself against defense-based foes since all I do is perma-whiff on them. I realise they need their defense to work, but, I find its simply working too well.

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Defense sets are balanced against even level minions: i.e. villains with base 50% tohit. Reducing players to a similar level makes sense given that: I've been basically asking for precisely that change for quite a while.

Whenever someone suggests that defense is "working too well" my standard question is, and no vague answers please: just how much can they be allowed to make you miss before its working "too good?"

I ask because I'm generally amazed at the typical responses, when I get a response at all: in the past, people have generally suggested that missing much more than half the time was intolerable: certainly missing 3 times in 4 was horribly broken. Except thats a level of mitigation far under what all other scrapper sets can achieve.

Super reflexes can only get about 28% defense maximum, without resorting to elude or inspirations. If you are permanently missing against SR, its either because they popped lucks (in which case that's working as intended - anyone can do that to you), or they are running under elude (in which case that too is working as intended, if elude wasn't making you miss pretty much constantly without heavy tohit buffing, it would be totally worthless).

Most people, if they miss three in a row and then are killed by an SR scrapper, conclude defense is overpowered. Its not: that's defense working correctly. When my blaster gets held, cannot fight back, and is killed by a controller, the conclusion is not that holds are too powerful, and need to be taken away. Or is it?

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Same with the reduction in status protection. Isn't this the kind of thing that should go to the Testserver first? There are not many Controllers out there in PvP zones that *can't* stack three holds on a Scrapper. Even in PvE it's noticable. I find this kind of 'change', whether accidently forgotten or not, to be despicable. When will you guys *finally* stop nerfing the hell out of all my toons?

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Scrappers and tankers being completely immune to mezzing in PVP was probably negating in large part controller purpose. Now, whether they should be able to easily break it is another matter. That it's supposed to be a defense should make it more difficult than against other enemies.

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The balance of power issue that I think is a concern is that controller mez is generally ranged, and its being used to break the mez protection of scrappers, tanks, stalkers, and brutes that are primarily melee-oriented. If mez protection can be broken with just three holds, then any controller with three ranged holds can mez a melee toon in the opening volley before the melee can even get into range to counterattack.


Suggestion: at the same time you are lowering the mez protection (magnitude) of melee based mez protection powers, how about giving all melee inherent mez *resistance* so that mez wears off faster - so that at least if a controller only needs three holds to break mez protection, the controller has to land them fast(er), or have them significantly slotted for duration (since the inherent mez resistance will stack with the active mez resistance) and even if mezzed, melee will at least shake it off faster (since the inherent mez resistance won't be vulnerable to detoggle).

Melee shouldn't be 100% immune to mez, but they should have meaningful mez defense relative to non-melee, and mez resistance might be the best way to balance that.

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Jitsu/Jutsu = No difference

Trust me. This discussion go's back 20+ years. The Japenese don't use the Arabic alphabet. Anything in English is subject to a translators interpretation.

Jutsu is more commonly used today, but Jitsu is acceptable, and understood to mean the same thing. Like Vampire and Vampyre, Demon and Daemon. Anyone who claims otherwise is nittpicking over nothing.


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Well, speaking as someone who's Japanese, native Japanese words typically have unambiguous phonetics (unlike imported words). Japanese borrows Chinese characters for Kanji writing, but usually (because even while stealing Chinese writing we realize that learning Chinese hurts your head too much ) notates Kanji characters with furigana - essentially a pronounciation guide (because Japanese speakers can recognize words when spoken even if they cannot automatically recognize every single Kanji character for them, so a "sound-out" in effect is an aid to the reader). Furigana uses hiragana characters, the Japanese phonetic alphabet, and the characters essentially always have unambiguous pronounciations.

Nin(ji/ju)tsu has to have a written form, and whatever the written form is, it ought to specify precisely how it ought to be pronounced, even if colloquialisms (even Japanese ones) blur the pronounciations. As it turns out, Jutsu and Jitsu as word fragments have actual meanings that can allow you to deduce which way it ought to go. Jutsu = art, Jutsu has a variety of meanings, none of them seemingly applicable to the compound word "ninjitsu."

Here's someone who goes through the process for "jujutsu".

I'm certainly not an expert, and years of Japanese school have long since worn off, but one thing I am sure about is that setting aside colloquial shifts in pronounciation, either "ninjutsu" is right, or "ninjitsu" is right, but they cannot both be right, because Japanese doesn't often have such similar alternate pronounciations for the same character for the same meaning tied to its vocabulary (it can have completely dissimilar pronounciations for the same character for the same approximate meaning, but one is essentially always considered standard in any compound word it appears in).

"Vampire" and "Vampyre," "Demon" and "Daemon" are alternate spelling for the same word, with the same basic pronounciation and meaning. "Ninjutsu" and "Ninjitsu" are romanized versions of two different words in Japanese in terms of how they are pronounced, and therefore how they are written, and therefore what they mean. If "Ninjitsu" means the same thing as "Ninjutsu" its essentially because both terms have passed into becoming proper nouns: as such, neither actually has any meaning whatsoever except as a label.

But even if we call all print copying machines "Xerox" machines, we can still trace the lineage of that word to its original meaning. And if a hundred years from now, people are calling them "Zerox" machines, we can still say that technically, "Zerox" with a "Z" is wrong, and "Xerox" with an "X" is technically correct, because "Xerox" machines are originally named for the machines produced by the Xerox company, who in turn named them for the "xerography" process.

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So... the sequence everyone seems to be talking about is you placate someone, so that's #5. Someone else attacks you. That seems it would invoke #2, so you are not longer hidden. Because of #4, you don't get special treatment with the foe that was placated. Yet, you want to be able to do #1.


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You'll notice that the sequence I posted above does not require an additional mob to break placate: it specifically involves the villain you are placating himself breaking the placate when he attacks at roughly the same time as you placate him. There's something about that specific behavior that seems wrong to me.

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You know the interesting thing is they are saying we're lying by saying that it never had Psi Defense aren't they? I mean I've yet to see a regenner post anything but that it most certainly did have Psi defense and yet here they are saying it never did. Interesting.

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Just popping in to clear up a misconception. This bit is really a semantic issue. We have an Attribute that applies +Defense to Psionic. We usually refer to this as "Psionic Defense" and do not consider other forms of +Defense that MAY cover Psionics. Turning on The Way Back Machine (thanks to Mr. Peabody and Sherman for allowing its use!) to the very first Live version of the data, I see that Moment of Glory did, in fact, offer +Defense to EVERYTHING because it modified Base Defense. Smashing, Lethal, Ranged, Hamidon -- everything. That was TOO effective. So, at some point (I'm not going through hundreds of revisions to fin out when) MoG was changed so that it only covered the bits desired.

So, if we were lying to you, it was an error of omission, rather than an act of malice. When we get a PM saying "Why did you remove Psionic Defense from MoG?" we check specifically for +Psi Def. Sometimes we have the time to do more in depth reseach into changes, but most often we do not.

Whether or not the 'Hole' in Psionic protection makes the power 'gimped' isn't a discussion I am going to get into, however.

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Because the "internals" of the game design are deliberately kept as opaque as possible to the player base, this sort of misunderstanding happens again and again. Its the classic joke: "does your dog bite" over and over.

What is "Base Accuracy?" What is "Inherent Accuracy?" What is "base defense," "stacking," "mez protection," or even "mez?" All these terms have very specific definitions to Cryptic, separate from any colloquial meanings we sometimes attach, and it can take years to figure out what those literal meanings are. How many people reading this post right now know what the exact, precise meanings of those terms are, and how many *think* they know and are wrong?

Then, apparently "change to powers" doesn't include "change to the way enhancements work in them," "change to the way opposing powers counteract them," "change in base values that alter their absolute numerical strength without altering their specific settings," or "change to how villains react to them."

I don't subscribe to the "the devs are out to get us" theories that are tossed around, but I do think that if the devs do not share information with the players except grudgingly, then misunderstandings due to errors in context or deeper game mechanical understanding are both inevitable, and ultimately the responsibility of the devs.

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Finally, Martial Arts has nothting close, only Eagle's Claw (BI 5.556 - with a 5 second activation time).


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I haven't tested this at high levels in CoV yet, but I'm pretty sure CoV EC was boosted (to 6+) same time CoH EC was, and at no time did it have a 5 second activation time: it was about 3.8 last time I checked.

Moving crane kick into tier 8 was a bit harsh (for stalkers), but the recent damage boost to CAK mostly mitigates that: MA is on the whole fine for damage (both hero and villain versions) it seems. The main issue is whether TK is a bit too low, CAK is a bit too ugly, and disorient is a bit too unreliable.

And dammit, even if it only did cobra strike damage, I want my dragon's tail back

Also, continuing to think about thunder kick, and its 20% disorient: maybe 20% chance for very short duration mag 2 stun is reasonable if storm kick had the same effect.

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Other mobs can break my placate on another target. Or that a mob can attack while placate is animating, still be placated and I lose my chance for a crit.


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Any more detail on this so I can get QA to try and replicate it for me? Are there certain critters that do this, or is it a general case? Do any special circumstances need to be met?


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What generally seems to happen is that, while you're going through the placate animation, the enemy hits you. They're placated, but I'm not hidden any more. It's hard to describe, but it definitely does happen.


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Try this sequence, it seems to generate the "missed placate" situation quite often: I think its the timing of the sequence that is just right.

Find two minions. Get into melee range of both. While hidden, assassin's strike one (presuming that one-shots him). Now, immediately fire buildup, placate the other, and then attack (I use CAK). CAK won't crit about 30-40% of the time, it seems, although it appears to be somewhat villain-type variable (some villains seem to notice you and attack you quicker than others, which might throw the timing off). Shivans, Lost, Clocks, all seem to exhibit this behavior.

I think the activation time of build up (1.4 seconds) puts the start of placate right in the middle of the second enemy's attack activation, which increases the probability of a simultaneous placate/counterattack, and that is what causes that enemy counterattack to "spoil" placate immediately after it activates.

There are many other situations where I've seen the placate misfire, including ones not involving assassin's strike anywhere near the sequence, but this one seems to consistently generate a high frequency of misses.