Wonderslug

Castle came in around the I4-I5ish time, I think. Geko was around until I6ish and then quietly shuffled over to the MUO team, then worked on CO powers when that fell through. I think he was lead dev on CO for a bit before moving to STO. I gather both display signs of that signature Cryptic "dartboard" approach to numerical balance. I'm not implying anything, but yes I totally am.

Anyway, back in my day there was no such thing as "exemplaring," so if you outleveled a task force you were plumb out of luck! We didn't care so much though because we didn't have no fancy "badges" or "accolades" or any of that malarkey.

Then when they did introduce exemplaring it wasn't automatic for TFs! You had to be exemplared to someone on the team, both ways uphill in the snow, and if they got disconnected you got kicked from the TF! And we liked it that okay no that really sucked.

Oh, and Infernal's portal used to have Archvillain-level HP! And it kept summoning demons so long as it was aggroed, scads of the little buggers, not the paltry pittance you get today, if it even works! So if you were on a team, say, where the defender and the blaster thought it was a good idea to hang back at the far end of the hall and kill it exclusively with snipes, by the time it finally dropped, whoa Nelly.* There weren't no aggro cap back then, neither.


*True PuG Story. To this day "Snipe the portal!" is shorthand in my SG for "That is an unbelievably stupid and ill-advised idea and you should definitely do it."

Electric Manipulation Thunderstrike and Electric Melee Thunderstrike are not the same animal. Melee Thunderstrike does knockdown, not knockback, and deals nearly half its damage as AoE (specifically, a 1:0.96 ratio).

As for Shatter and Cleave, one thing to remember is that the AoE is free. Both are treated as single-target powers for purposes of the damage/endurance/recharge formula.

Nope!

Difficulty settings came in with I3, I believe. Team scaling didn't go away until the GDN/ED combo was complete in I5/I6. Between I3 and I6 it was possible to get 55s in regular missions, if you were on a full team on Invincible (50 +2/+3 for Invincible +2 for full team = 54/55).

I have vivid memories of +5 Carnies, and a fight with a level 55 Nightstar that took approximately forever.

I read the book after seeing the movie, and I was, uh, retroactively disappointed? Is that a thing? The film works up until the end, when it just completely falls apart if you think about it very hard, but it's especially glaring if you've read the book.

Some of the changes are logical compromises moving between book and film. But somehow in the midst of combining characters to save screen time and rejiggering the plot so he could make an anvilicious antiwar statement and feature lots of flying machines wheeeeeeee he completely failed to notice that the stitched-together amalgam he set up as a substitute for the book's villain...doesn't make a lick of sense. Her motivations are murky at best and are only explicable by extremely circular logic, and then when her plans fail...for...some reason, she just kind of shrugs and gives up. ("I'm perpetuating this war so I can force Howl to join me in fighting this war I'm perpetuating to force Howl to join me in fighting this--oh, you fell in luuuuurrve and really won't join me? OH WELL, WAR'S OVER I GUESS gee darn shucks.")

That seems to be Miazaki's biggest weakness: sometimes, he just flat forgets to make sense. When he dodges that bullet he's golden, but when he doesn't it's really messy.

Which is moot in this case, since it's Miazaki Jr. and apparently it sucks anyway.

You've only been here a month. Give it time.

(I wish I had saved Arcanaville's angry rant about how I11 didn't allow her to realize her dreams of a dual-archery scrapper. I swear three or four people took it at face value on the first page alone.)

SP has oversold his point slightly. While stealthing objectives is of dubious utility in most cases, stealth itself still has tactical value, especially if you stack it to the point of invisibility. You can do that with any two of: Stealth IO, toggle stealth power (note that with the sole exception of stalker Hide, these are all mutually exclusive), Superspeed (not actually stealth, but functionally identical for most purposes).

This is most obvious in the case of "toe bombing," which is to say leaving some variety of usually explosive present at the feet of an unsuspecting spawn. I know you have /devices blasters; this is probably the most common way of using Trip Mine to good effect (at least without making the rest of a team wait on you to build an inefficient trap nest). It's also a good way to use Poison Trap, although in that case you need to watch out for the FFG drawing aggro.

Toe bombing is a specific application of the general benefit of stealth, namely getting to pick exactly how, when, and from what angle a fight starts. That's most evident when solo, obviously, although it can have applications while teaming as well. As Shadowfall and Steamy Mist are PBAoE, they also have the benefit of helping teams avoid unwanted aggro from adjacent spawns.

As you become familiar with the standard map layouts, you will come to recognize most tilesets have some rooms and intersections that are pure Schmuck Bait designed to murder the unobservant, the incautious, and the slow to learn. There are at least three particularly infamous ones in tech lab and office tilesets (I refer to them as the Doom Room, the Corner of Woe, and the Hall of Dismemberment, but parlance varies). Team stealth can be very helpful in saving such people from themselves, and more to the point saving you from the consequences of their failure to account for the seventeen spawns hiding behind the one they have just charged.

However, despite that, I'd also say that viewing stealth as the major benefit of Shadowfall is backwards. It's a nice, occasionally useful effect, but I think the buffs are more significant.

On its own 5% defense is worthless, but as a quirk of how defense works, the more you have, the more valuable every additional scrap is. As a D3 you're packing a ton of tohit debuffs, which essentially function as a kind of selective defense you have to hit people to get. And especially in the late game, 30% (slotted) resistance to psionic and energy damage is nothing to sneeze at, especially given that many defensive sets have psionic damage as their designated Achilles heel.

All that said, still easily put off to the 20s or 30 if you have more compelling things to take. Very useful, but not drop-everything essential.

At the risk of nitpicking, Recovery ticks are actually 6.67%.

Vanguard are the prime example of what he's talking about. Every single critter says this:

Every one. From Rangers up to the HVAS.

A lot of the "smaller" groups with only one type of critter per rank are similarly lazy, but Vanguard are easily the worst offenders.

Which is actually the only version of Ice Patch. Ice Slick is a different beast entirely.

(On the subject of powers with similar names: Fire Breath and Breath of Fire: also not the same power.)

If your heavy hitters are up that frequently, it sounds like a safe bet. Slotting the heaviest powers first also provides a more obvious benefit in the short term.

To be fair, I've been thinking in terms of damage scale for so long that I can pretty much spot a 1 DS attack regardless of AT mod almost by instinct. If you're used to thinking in terms of, y'know, actual damage it's not so obvious when the end cost is off.

Heresy! Madness! Dogs and cats lying down together!

Well, I did say they looked pretty. If it helps you understand what's going on, more power to you, but it's an additional step of calculation that's not strictly necessary.

Right. It still might be a relevant statistic if you're not dealing with a full attack chain, or--and I did neglect to mention this--if you really are using it as chain filler every time it recharges. However, you probably don't really need to go to the trouble of calculating EPS to spot the real outliers, because they're probably the ones that aren't balanced as attacks, as you point out.

As I say if it helps you visualize the relationships between powers more easily, more power to you, but yes, that was essentially my point: it's basically the same information you already have in a different form.

Maybe, maybe not!

That doesn't help, so here's an example with some rather extreme outliers to show how that strategy could play out over various lengths of time.

Seismic Smash is one of the highest DPA attacks in the game: 3.56 DS / 1.5 seconds = 2.373 DS/sec. It recharges in 20 seconds and costs 18.512 endurance, for an EPA of 12.341.

Heavy Mallet is also pretty good, although not as good as it once was: 2.28 DS/1.67 seconds = 1.365 DS/sec. It recharges in 12 seconds and costs 11.856 endurance, for an EPA of 7.099. That's a lot lower, right?

Now, you mentioned 20- to 30- second fights, so let's start with 20 seconds. That gives you time to use Seismic Smash once and Heavy Mallet twice. You end up spending 18.512 endurance on SS and 23.712 on HM. The power with the lower EPA ends up being the one costing you the most.

Okay, but let's see what happens if the fight drags on for 30 seconds: that's enough time to use SS twice and HM three times: 37.024 end on SS, 35.568 on HM. Okay, SS is costing the most now, but it's oddly close for powers with such different EPA values...

Oh, oops, you got tangled up in a patrol, and now the encounter's dragged on for 60 seconds: you use SS three times for a total cost of 55.536 endurance, and HM five times for 59.28 endurance. HM's edged ahead again, despite having much lower EPA! In fact, in 60 seconds you could also have used Stone Fist (a mere 5.2 EPA) 11 times for 57.2 endurance--still more than SS, with over double the EPA.

This is basically an illustration of what I said earlier: over time, the attacks you use the most frequently tend towards using the most endurance. The exact amount is going to change constantly as you play around with different time spans (and recharge values, and endurance slottings...) and powers leapfrog over one another for the top spot. High EPA attacks are probably going to rack up costs slightly faster simply because they got to be high EPA attacks by having low activation times relative to their damage, and low activation times mean they're available to use slightly more frequently.

You can see a similar pattern with, say, Power Bolt and Power Blast: 7 Bolts cost a bit more than 4 Blasts, 8 Bolts cost less than 5 Blasts, 9 Bolts cost more than 5 Blasts, 10 Bolts cost more than 6 Blasts, etc., etc., etc...

So if your goal is to pinpoint the powers that cost you the most, figuring out which ones you use the most is a good place to start. I haven't used Hero Stats since, like, 2005, but I'm pretty sure the number of times you use your powers is one of the things it tracks. Failing that, you could just keep track of how many times you use Power A in a series of fights, then Power B, then...

However, what I would really take from this example is that the longer you fight--either in terms of single encounters or in terms of multiple encounters before "hitting the reset button" by using Rest or Power Sink or what have you--the more the cost of ALL your attacks (that are balanced as attacks, anyway) tends cluster around similar values, suggesting you cram as much end reduction as feasible into everything. (Which is, incidentally, what I do when I plan a Staminaless build).