Arcanaville

It makes the Brute look impressive to the Brute. The Kins aren't going to notice the Brute while they are watching their own damage capped floating numbers vaporize everything in front of them.

It wouldn't play like a Scrapper normally? I think the confusing part about Martial Combat is that the obvious comparison point is to Martial Arts. Try comparing Martial Combat to Dark Melee.

Teams with enough support find everyone redundant. Once support gets strong enough to support ... support, the rest of us look like packing peanuts.

Its not clear which goal is *better* in the general case, and high defense has secondary effect avoidance benefits that are separate from damage mitigation, but the thing to note, and the thing to specifically test for when this all goes beta, is this. Absorb is going to be a relatively fast ticking shield, about once every three seconds. Blasters with Absorb shields are going to get a lot of Absorb (almost twice the regen that the regen sustain blasters are getting) but Absorb is a use-it-or-lose-it effect that refreshes on each and every tick. The base tick will be about 5% health (subject to change during beta of course) enhanceable to 10%. So if you take less than 10% damage in three seconds, the extra absorb disappears and is refreshed back to full. Use it or lose it.

So think about what defense and resistance will do to your /Ice Blaster. Very high defense will make you get hit less often, but when you do get hit it will be for full damage. Resistance won't reduce how often you are hit, but will make every hit land for less. Spreading out the damage over time will make it hit more absorb ticks and use more of your absorb. Using more absorb is another way of saying you're taking less damage.

But that's comparing soft capped defense to a similar level of resistance, and you can't get a similar level of resistance usually. So whether soft-capped defense will still be ahead, or resistance plus absorb will equal or surpass soft-capped defense in at least some situations will require some field testing to determine with certainty (and this might be different for different players as well, who play differently and thus find themselves in different situations).

Technically only if you change the existing Martial Arts. Not if you add Martial Combat.

Usually, although sometimes substantially less than that:



For example, here's a sign worth less words than actually depicted on the sign.

I would need a non-verbose Sam to compare to in order to judge that for myself, but I've never encountered one in the wild.

Technically, Burnout should recharge Burst of Speed but not terminate the lockout. So to get the full benefit, you would need to refrain from reusing Burst until ten seconds after the first Burst of Speed use. So yeah, you'd need to stick some other attacks in there to pace it out.

What if I told you Reach for the Limit stacked by extending its buff duration?

Rookie! Om nom nom nom...

If memory serves, Arbiter Hawk mentioned taking the damage the power would do by formula, splitting it into three parts, and then adding 33%. So if you hit with it on all three jumps it will do 33% more than a comparable AoE. That factors in usage variations and the fact there's triple the cast time required to get that damage.

I'm still struggling with what to roll with MC, and I've been thinking about it longer than most. Eventually I'm rolling DP/MC, just because. But out of the gate, I'm leaning towards Sonic/MC and Water/MC, both strong mitigation combinations and both supporting a more active playstyle.

As to epics, I should point out that MC is another Absorb sustain, and Absorb synergizes much more strongly with resistance than defense due to its bursty vulnerability. That might not be enough to overcome the advantages of soft-capping, but its worth thinking about.

It didn't take long at all after the devs preempted the primary damage dealer role from blasters and handed it to dominators, for people to think the devs don't care about dominators.

The fact that the addition of a new powerset prompts complaints of inattention strongly suggests there's no point to delving into that line of thought at all.

To the best of my knowledge, I've never posted one of those as the only thing in the post, although I have used all of them in longer posts.

I have posted one word posts on rare occasions, but I don't think any of them were one of those.

I'm going after GoldenGirl's smile production next. I'm thinking of booking Christina Hendricks on a topless tour of the nation's boy's junior high schools to catch up.

Every MMO runs into challenges there, but I what I intended to highlight is that CoH has the extra problem of actually wanting to surrender a lot of conceptual freedom to the players that most MMOs don't. WoW doesn't allow players to have their own conceptual definitions of the races or classes. They get to declare those, and then provide as much freedom within them as they feel appropriate. We have archetypes, but even there the devs have tended to let the players "bend" the archetype definitions to a high degree. Our archetypes today are far more the devs deciding what the players were ultimately doing with them, as opposed to being what they were originally intended to be.

In fact what I don't think players fully appreciate is that Arbiter Hawk may be tweaking Blasters in the sense of the powers changes being made, but he's also completely redefined what Blasters even are in City of Heroes in one stroke. It happens in other MMOs to be sure, but not frequently and not with the same latitude it has happened here over time.

The feature set for AV 1.1 are still being decided. There have been many requests made over the years and while I can't promise they will all be implemented, they are still an important starting point.

My focus will probably be in the two most commonly requested areas:

1. Customization

Many players have asked for their Arcanaville posts to be customizable. Some would prefer calculations to be suppressible. Others have asked for the posts to have alternate languages, such as Rikti, Swedish Chef, or English.


2. Reward Smoothing

Its clear the payoff for reading an Arcanaville post needs to be reexamined. Many players have resorted to farming Arcanaville posts hoping to find a Very Rare information drop. Others have been dupin those rares and handing them out to other players, eliminating the need to read the content. I'm looking at a number of options here. A diminishing returns system where I begin the day sober and get increasingly inebriated and incoherent as the day progresses would frontload most of the information rewards into the first few posts, while the hardcore readers could still read everything and have a chance at me leaking the next Controller primary or Arbiter Hawk's phone number.

Nothing wrong with that either. There's lots of things I'm not sure about also. Anyone who can't say that just doesn't understand the scope of the issues.


Probably the largest single tension point in the design of this game is that it attempts to compromise between structure and conceptual freedom. Unlimited freedom would make this the ultimate superhero Sims, but the reward-based gameplay would fall apart completely. But overly strict structure would remove one of the unique attractions of the game itself. Within that compromise most people are not going to be completely happy with the decisions the devs make one way or the other. But that's not because the devs are foolish or incompetent, its because no decision option exists would make everyone happy. Almost everyone wants some structure and some freedom but no two people will want the exact same structure and freedom in the exact same places.

Few MMOs run into this problem face-first like City of Heroes (and its spiritual cousin Champions Online) does.

My understanding is that the entire seven volume Harry Potter series contains slightly more than one million words.

My average post, based on some review, seems to be something like this: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=211. About 170ish words. Sometimes shorter, sometimes mega-longer.

On the older forums, on two separate occasions I can remember, not even counting things like posting offline-written guides, I typed out a post that hit the post size limit for those boards (that limit was close to the size of the first part of the four-part scrapper mitigation analysis post linked in my sig, which was broken about there to accommodate that limit). The first one was a post comparing the damage output of Illusion control including the pets vs energy blast for blasters. The second was an analysis of ED.

What you see today is my gradually editing downward from those days.


Although I outdo Rowling at least five to one, Rowling's per-word profit margin appears to be significantly higher than mine. Rowling has made almost a thousand dollars a word. I've made... lets see here... according to my calculations: less.

All I meant was that the word isn't meaningless to me or the devs. But I am willing to defer to your expertise in declaring my feedback more important than anyone else's.


"I acknowledge and agree that the devs should give your feedback more weight than the standard joe" - EvilGeko

I'm Arcanaville, and I approve this message.

I assumed it was a typo.

I'm fairly certain you're correct when you assert you don't like it.