Wonderslug

Frankly, Sam, those numbers are telling you something between jack and squat. They look pretty but they don't mean much.

EPS, as you are defining it in terms of Endurance per Cycle Time, becomes increasingly meaningless as your attack chain approaches full for exactly the same reason that Damage per Cycle Time does: you cannot activate two attacks simultaneously. The instant you have more than one recharged attack in your tray, it flies straight out the window.

Look at it this way: you're calculating EPS by taking the endurance cost and dividing it by the total cycle time (activation + recharge). Here's the thing, though: that is making the assumption that you are using that power as soon as it recharges, every time it recharges. In point of fact you are almost certainly not doing that, not for every attack you possess; if you have manged to construct a build that lets you use every power exactly as it recharges you could probably also solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded with your feet. The instant you let a recharged power go unused you are altering its effective cycle time, which means you are altering its effective EPS (as you're defining it). In other words, the EPS of a given power is almost never going to remain stable. So that's kind of worthless as a metric.

EPA is a little closer to useful, but honestly it's telling you something you already know, in a slightly different form. If you graphed the DPA of all your attacks and superimposed it on a graph of the EPA of all your attacks (accounting for the AoE factor for AoEs)...they would follow suspiciously similar curves. Baldly put, within a given archetype, Higher DPA Equals Higher EPA. Can you find exceptions? Yeah, probably, but isolated data points are not going to change that basic truth. That's simply an unavoidable result of the rules of power design in this game, which SpittingTrashcan obliquely alluded to earlier: damage has a set cost in endurance, and that cost is 5.2 Endurance Per Point of Scale Damage. Of course DPA and EPA are going to look similar, because they are the exact same thing expressed in different units.

It's like looking at something going 50 miles per hour and something going 80 kilometers per hour: different numbers, same speed.

Yes, yes: exceptions, Snap Shot, blah blah blah. Thing is, those exceptions? They're exceptions. Isolated data points. In the grand scheme of things they aren't going to make that much difference to any single, specific character, since within a given powerset the damage/endurance ratio is going to be pretty stable. Some things are going to throw it off slightly, like free DoT on fire attacks, setwide discounts for Claws, or the odd bug (which would include Snap Shot and Aimed Shot, by the way: I'm pretty sure I've brought this up before, but that's very obviously a case of Castle forgetting to change the end cost when he changed the damage and recharge of the blaster version only in I11; sooner or later somebody on the powers team is going to look at that and go "Hey, that's funny...").

So EPA is also pretty useless for your purposes: like SP said, the attacks that conserve the most endurance are, generally, the ones with the worst DPA.

So what do you do? Well, here's the good news: because recharge increases at a faster rate than damage (and consequently endurance cost), I can give you the Grand Unified Rule of Thumb of Endurance Usage:

Over Time, the Endurance Cost of a Given Power is Directly Proportional to How Often You Use That Power (Assuming You're Not Using AoEs on Single Targets or Something Silly Like That).

What attack do you use most often? That attack is costing you the most endurance! It really is that simple.

Now, that's endurance use over an extended period. When it comes to "burst" end use, the situation is a little different, but still relatively simple. Any time you can begin and end a fight in a short enough time span that the recharge of your attacks is mostly irrelevant, you'll get the most bang for your endurance buck by slotting the powers that use the most endurance in a single use. An example: You walk up to three dudes, Blaze, Fire Blast, Bonesmasher, Total Focus, THE END. In the case of short, discrete bursts of activity like this, with recovery periods in between, your biggest end burners are the ones with the highest endurance cost per individual use, because you are only using each power once, maybe twice.

Unfortunately, at some point on the continuum between short-duration curbstomping and protracted firefights, things get really messy and confused; however, unless you regularly find yourself ending fights really, really, really fast you will be hard pressed to go wrong with the extended activity model.

I'm sorry, but I do not understand why figuring out that the ARACHNOS RAID being conducted by ARACHNOS is probably being led by the sole NAMED ARACHNOS BOSS amongst all the Freakshow is at all confusing.

And as for "unrequired" objectives I am never going to apologize for attempting to make missions more dynamic than an orc and a pie in a 10 x 10 room. It's just not going to happen. There are tweaks I'd probably make to the arc now if I could edit it, but this isn't one of them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this since you evidently can't tell the difference between an Ascendant and a Peacebringer or the Council and the Column, but there is nothing vague at all about "The Center." That's his name. He crops up rather a lot in the backstory of the game. He's kind of a big deal. He's mentioned a fair bit. I'm trying hard not to just assume you've leveled almost entirely off AE content, but he's not exactly a secret.

32/sec sounds about right...without Dull Pain. Regeneration works off max HP, not base HP, so a fully slotted DP at 50 will boost your individual regen ticks from ~65 HP to ~105 while it's up.

Since you appear to be asking the question seriously: Issue releases have historically tended to be on Tuesdays. Most likely this is because it leaves Monday to run any final checks and Wednesday-Friday to run around screaming and putting out any fires that result from the patch before the weekend.

Issue 2, IIRC, launched on a Thursday, which turned out to be a mistake they have never, ever repeated.

Good things. Bad things. Mysterious things.

Occasionally, Lovecraftian things man was not meant to ken, although that may just be due to driver conflicts.

Nearly always, in fact.

Things tend to happen on Tuesdays, so if I had to bet I'd put my money on open next Tuesday and live on 4/27.

It probably means open beta is getting close, but prepatching has in the past preceded live launch by a up to a month or more. Since the vast bulk of any given issue patch is generally bulky art and geometry assets that are unlikely to change significantly during beta it's not really a good predictor.

He's cracked the code!

Ready the Submission Bludgeon.

More to the point, since the graphical update is not simply a matter of adding a "Shiny!" button, but also requires major changes to the entire game, there are very few sane reasons to gate it and a great number of excellent ones not to.

Not least of which is that trying to gate it would probably cause the programming team to go on a murderous rampage.

When City of Heroes came out, how many levels did it have?

What happened the next issue?

When City of Villains came out, how many levels did it have?

What happened the next issue?

When Going Rogue comes out...

There's a pattern here, I just know it.

My GW experiences are blissfully moron-free, since I unchecked the local channel and have never looked back.

Likewise, one of the first things I do here on a new character is quarantine Broadcast in its own special idiot-hole.

Issue 2.

And it was done because the original mission complete bonus was so minuscule that many teams did street sweeping exclusively, because missions were literally not worth the time, XP-wise, given the constant stream of targets available outdoors. In fact, sometimes street sweeping was your only real option, period: aside from TFs there was no repeatable content, and less content in general, and mobs were in general worth a lot less XP--defeat XP has been boosted multiple times across various level ranges in the past five years. It was extremely common at the time, if you soloed any significant amount, to do every mission available to you and still be two levels shy of your next contact giving you stuff. You had to hunt to get over that hump. Everybody thought that was bad.

This. Any power that applies x ticks of damage over y period with only a single hit check cannot be "overwritten," or halted in any way short of the target dying.

Now, it is fairly easy to overwhelm the game's ability to pop up little orange numbers. If you hit something standing under someone else's Freezing Rain, for instance, you may not see some, or any, of your damage floating up there all nice and bright against the sea of gray, but that's purely a display issue. The damage is still applied and tracked, which you can verify in the combat log.

Damage actually doesn't settle down to its final progression until 20, so unless you're a Blaster, Scrapper, Stalker, or VEAT your damage increase per level is declining while mob HP gain per level is increasing. And in I13 (or was it 12?) they introduced a so-called "beginner's luck" (I don't think it's ever been officially named) that applies the same system to to-hit, so you need more slotted accuracy as you level to maintain the status quo.

The mid-teens-to-22 area just sucks.