_Brev__NA

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...on my 50th I can EASILY earn about a million influence by selling at the right stores and not playing in SG mode in an evening/day, by not playing solo. Without even pushing myself.

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I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that infamy gained from selling enhancements etc. doesn't count towards those badges at all - only infamy gained from actual mob defeats / mission completion etc. does.

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Throwing that into the number cruncher it now looks more like it's a Damage Scale value of 0.7 + 5 ticks of 0.1 (1.2 overall).

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Well after getting Chum Spray on my MM and testing it out a bit in Port Oakes, it looks like the 0.7 + 5 x 0.1 is correct, even across AT's (meaning that in terms of base damage it is more damaging in the hands of MM's than Brutes, and Dom's should get more bang than either of them with their slightly higher ranged damage modifier - of course Brutes will be able to outdamage either of them after Fury is factored in).

I can't really bring myself to respec out of Water Spout on my Dom so I'll just have to assume it follows the same Damage Scale as MMs and Brutes for now. If any Mako Dom's have got Chum Spray then we can hopefully confirm the DS value for them too - ideally find some lowbie stuff (Port Oakes is where I got my MM numbers), note the level and type of the enemy and report what the Damage reported in the combat log - try to do it unenhanced if possible, so no damage enhancements and no other damage buffs (including IoP's if your test SG has them). Also be sure to say what level your character is.

My initial testing of my MM was revealing a Damage Scale of pretty much exactly 0.77 + 5 x 0.11, which I thought was a bit odd since MM's already have that higher ranged damage modifier than Brutes, and this would make the difference even more marked. However it then dawned on me that I had forgotten I was in SG mode and my test SG base has 5 fury monuments which add a total of 10% base damage - so factoring that in I of course ended up with the same 0.7 + 5 x 0.1 that I had been expecting.

This does raise some interesting questions about the damage numbers that are quoted on the in-game Plaques though. For all three AT's that can get it (Brute, MM, Dom), Chum Spray is listed as giving:

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Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 30 (Toxic, DoT)

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However this doesn't seem to reflect the in game values we are getting at all. Based on the Damage Scale values we have deduced, the plaques should instead be giving different damage amounts for the three AT's and they should read like this:

Brute Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 30.54 (Toxic, DoT)
Mastermind Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 33.60 (Toxic, DoT)
Dominator Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 39.71 (Toxic, DoT)

For reference, this is what brawl does at the same level:

Brute Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 13.75 (Smashing)
Mastermind Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 10.08 (Smashing)
Dominator Unenhanced damage @ lvl 40: 13.75 (Smashing)

Note how if you tried to apply the Brawl Index system you would get very different values across the AT's (varying from 2.22 for Brutes, to 3.33 for MMs), due to the fact that both Brutes and Doms have different ranged and melee damage modifiers - this is a good example of why the DS system is a far better measure! In terms of the actual powers, Chum Spray is actually 3.33 times as damaging as Brawl (a DS of 1.2 vs. 0.36), but because both Brutes and Dominators have inherently weaker ranged damage compared to their melee damage, Chum Spray ends up giving them less 'bang per buck' compared to brawl than it does for MM's.

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In the Test Ceremony on Red Widow - Utilize Soul Crystal, the Crystal cannot be interacted with at all.

Killed all the mobs in the map as well.


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i did as well. i also bugged the portal corp mish. if u die (and u will since there are lvl 46 & 53 bosses) u will go to the PI hero hospital that is outside the blue force field walls of the mish and will not be able to re-enter the mish. i got around this by going to the PI ferry and going through it. i ended up in mercy. from there i just went bk to grandville and mish entrance.

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By the way, you can just type /stuck and it usually pops you back on the right side of the blue forcefield

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***




Well I'm sure others have done the final Mako mission of his second arc now (where you are getting the Leviathan Essence) - and I'm sure I can't be the only one who thinks it is ridiculously difficult?

First of all - the fonts of power are extremely difficult, even on the lowest setting - and that's just the ones in the ante-rooms before the last one (I'll come onto that later). As the team gets bigger in size, each 'font' actually consists of more and more Elite Bosses (each with a Psionic Tornado attack that can near one-shot squishies, and is an AoE). Just one of these Elite Bosses is tricky enough (if you are solo), but dealing with 2 or 3 at once is nuts - even in a team, due to the AoE nature of all their attacks. At least make them all spaced out like they are in 2 of the rooms - expecting a team to take on 3 of them at once is nuts. In the end I had to kick the other 3 people in my team and reset the mission for one person before reinviting them, and even then they were rather difficult.

The other major thing of course is the Water Spouts - the ones that litter the tunnel on the way in are fun i suppose, however things begin to get ridiculous in a larger team when they appear as about a dozen at a time - anyone without TP or phase basically has very little chance of getting past them - they cannot be targetted and cannot be defeated. Oh and they apparently ignore acrobatics too according to one of my team-mates.

These are bad enough when there is nothing else to worry about, however in the final room, you have another font of power (consisting of up to 3 Elite Bosses right next to each other with the aforementioned AoE Psionic attacks remember), and an Elite Boss/AV not far from the Font of Power - oh and of course loads of Water Spouts too.

When I initially tried this mission I was in a team of about 6 or 7 - we had managed to deal with the first font as the three EB's were spaced out, however the next one we came to was the main Cavern with the Leviathan tooth - the Room was absolutely FULL of Water Spouts. It was impossible to get close to the Fonts without getting picked up and tossed around the cavern (quite easily into the AV) by them. We had to give up in the end as we had no chance whatsover of defeating the 3 fonts close to each other with the Water Spouts throwing us all over the place.

I tried again later with the 4 man team I mentioned earlier - we eventually managed to clear the room by having spawned it for just me (and then reinviting my team-mates back) and pulling the (EB) Calystix out first and defeating it, then dealing with the single Font afterwards. We simply couldn't have done it if it had spawned for 4 of us.

Oh and after that of course, we got the Captain Mako ambush - who proved utterly impossible for 4 people to defeat, despite being on the lowest difficulty setting. We eventually needed a full 8 people

This mission needs a serious rethink before going live.

The Waterspouts need to be scaled down in a major way. The number that spawn for a solo mission is plenty - and I don't see why they should negate acrobatics.

The Fonts of Power also need a bit of tweaking - that amount of AoE Psi damage is bad enough from one of them, but 3 is just crazy, especially considering the -rech it does on top. Either ensure the fonts always spawn a good distance from each other, or reduce the damage output of them considerably.

The AV code in general is just stupid at the moment - either don't spawn AV's on the lowest difficulty setting unless you have a full 8 people, or just restore them to their pre-I7 levels - at least a smaller team stood a chance against them.

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And Water Spout has Invis? wow..

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That might just refer to the fact that it isn't targetable.

Besides that though, great info as ever iakona - thanks for going to all the trouble of finding it and thanks to redtomax for hosting it all

One interesting thing I noted was how the Dominators' Blue Corolax seems to have a number of AoE attacks while the Corruptors' Red Corolax is exclusively single target - I guess that explains why they did it that way round.

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How did you get around the Grandville crashes?

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Well there was/is this 'Windows key' workaround which involves alternating pressing the Windows key and clicking in the CoV window while the mission is loading, but since yesterday's patch I don't crash zoning from Grandville anyway.

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I was at the Ace mission, and havent been able to log on since. It freezes loading Grandville.

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Is your character in the hospital by any chance? I gather the hospital in Grandville is hideously bugged and basically prevents you from logging back on with that character. Apparently logging on in safe mode sometimes lets you escape, and sending a petition from another character can allow the GM's to free the chracter too.

However - there are a number of threads dealing with this so I won't derail this any further

Back on topic ... have any Corruptors or Stalkers got to 44 yet and been able to try out Spirit Shark Jaws? It is the other Mako power that I'm *really* looking forward to seeing, but MM's need to get to at least 47 to get it.

Ah thanks for checking that out

Throwing that into the number cruncher it now looks more like it's a Damage Scale value of 0.7 + 5 ticks of 0.1 (1.2 overall).

Comparing predicted values with actual values you've reported, we now see a pretty close match (bar the first unslotted one, which I think must've had some fury which threw things a bit)...
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>level / target Predicted Reported
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@44 against 40s 27.09 29.78
(unenhanced) +5 x 3.87 +5 x 4.25

@47 against 49s 30.48 30.39
(3 L50 SO's) +5 x 4.35 +5 x 4.33

@47 against 50s 24.76 24.69
(3 L50 SO's) +5 x 3.54 +5 x 3.52

@48 against 25s 129.64 129.29
(3 L50 SO's) +5 x 18.52 +5 x 18.46</pre><hr />
It's still slightly out though, so it could be that we are still slightly off for whatever reason (perhaps the modifiers we are using aren't quite as accurate as the ones the game actually uses, or it could be that there are some rounding errors on the game's side). Hopefully things should become clearer once we have some MM and Dom numbers to play with anyway.

But the Tanker range modifier is 50% while for Dominators it is 65%... You want to nerf our ranged damage by 23%?!

If it was me, I would boost our ranged modifier to 70% (thus still giving melee an edge) and give us blaster level hp - I believe that would put us where we ought to be.

Ah - well I was hoping you weren't going to say that, as that means the predicted numbers are much further out

With 3 +3 Damage SO's, you get a 1.9775 overall enhancement, which gives us predicted damage of 27.24 + 5 ticks of 3.89 - which is considerably more than what you reported seeing. I'm guessing that perhaps one or both of your tests ended up having a small fury component which is skewing the numbers a bit - so the Damage Scale may well not be what I initially thought, either that or maybe one of the targets had toxic resistance.

Our best chance of getting an accurate number is if you can test against some much lower level mobs - all damage reported in the combat log is to 2 decimal places, so if you can test against lower level mobs to get higher reference damage (ideally 3 figures + 2 decimal places) then we end up with a more accurate starting figure for the rest of the calculations - Family in Port Oakes should be good targets as I'm sure they have no toxic resistance and they can be found close to the Cap au Diable Ferry.

It is also important that the Fury bar is definitely at zero to give us a nice clean reference damage - so a pre-emptive strike on extreme lowbies is ideal as they won't try to get a shot off at you first (it doesn't matter if they are defeated before all the DoT is delivered, or even if the initial hit takes them out completely - we know the relative strength of the ticks to the initial damage).

Sorry for being a pain - I just like finding out the clear cut numbers

Well from your earlier numbers, it is looking like Chum Spray's Damage Scale is 0.77 + (5 * 0.11), or 1.32 in total - the Brute version at least.

How did I get those numbers? Well it all goes back to iakona's thread, but basically:

Your unslotted, unfuried chum spray did 29.78 + 4.25 * 5 damage to a -4 target (which I will assume has no toxic resistance) at level 44. Dividing those by the -4 level modifier (1.44) and the Brute level 44 range modifier (-26.87), gives near enough 0.77 and 5 ticks of 0.11 (damage scale values are usually pretty exact numbers).

We can take those values and try to predict what the power does at level 47, to the +3 minion you tested against. This time you say the power was slotted with 3 damage - you didn't say what level the enhancements were, so for these purposes I will assume they are 3 level 45 damage SO's, which enhance the base damage by 1.785.

So we have our damage scale of 0.77 + 0.55, enhanced to 1.37 + 0.98. We apply the level 47 brute range modifier (-27.52) and the +3 level modifier (0.65), and we get a predicted damage of 24.59 + 5 ticks of 3.51. Those are pretty close to what you got and some minimal fury, or slightly different damage enhancements could explain the difference.

Ideally we could do with some tests against some *much* lower enemies, since the reference damage numbers will be that much higher and give us greater accuracy - confirmation on what level those enhancements are in your Chum Spray could help too.

Next thing to test will be whether the Chum Spray for the other AT's follows the same Damage Scale or not - if it does then we will expect those other AT's with Chum Spray (MM's and Dom's) to do relatively more damage than Brutes due to the higher ranged damage modifiers for those AT's. This would be at odds with the in-game plaque descriptions which give the same reference damage across the AT's, but if all the AT's do give the same end damage output, then Chum Spray for the other AT's must have a lower Damage Scale to allow for their higher damage modifiers. Apologies if I've lost you all

I hope to do a bit of levelling on my MM tonight and I will be grabbing Chum Spray for him at 41 (MM's get access to it a bit earlier) so I will post results when I have them, unless any MM's or Dom's already have it in which case please post some results in the format used already.

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From today's Issue 7 patch notes:

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* Increased Dominator Melee damage modifier to 0.75 -- this increases their melee damage by 6.7%

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Just so you know

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Wouldn't that be an increase of 7.14%? The old modifier was .7 right?

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Indeed it is - I hadn't checked when I posted it earlier.

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That's up from a melee modifier of 70% if you hadn't worked it out

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In fact upon reflection, they seem to be suffering from a bout of "Dev-Math"

Going from 0.70 to 0.75 is an increase of 7.1%, not 6.7% (they've done 0.05/0.75 instead of 0.05/0.70).

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Aren't the Coral Gaurdians you summon bosses? if so, then that equates to the Red Coralax-Hybrid since the Reds are bosses as well, but IMO, the one reason why the Dominators don't get the Red one is because they already have pets, maybe?

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Well two of the other Patron's give Dom's 'boss-level' pets (Scirocco gives them Mu Guardians, Black Scorpion gives them Toxic Tarantulas) so that theory doesn't quite work - not sure why Mako and Ghost Widow give Dom's a bit of a shaft with their pets - but I'll wait till I see how the various pets compare first before going completely mad

From today's Issue 7 patch notes:

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* Increased Dominator Melee damage modifier to 0.75 -- this increases their melee damage by 6.7%

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Just so you know

That's up from a melee modifier of 70% if you hadn't worked it out

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1. You can take down each obelisk in turn instead of trying to take them down simultaniously. (That'd make the first part trivially easy)

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Yup, that appears to be the case at the moment - I'd like to see the simultaneous element back as it does provide a nice challenge, however I'm not sure how close to each other they needed to be destroyed before - but I think 2 minutes would be a good number to aim for.

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2. You don't have to take down the shield on Ruladek (Aspect of Rularuu), that'd also make the second part fairly easy.

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Nope you still need to take down the shield - but when you first enter his lair, all the mobs (and the AV) seem to move to engage you (at least they did for both run-throughs I have done this time around). So if you can survive the onslaught of 3 groups of Rularuu plus the Aspect, and destroy those mobs to make the AV vulnerable, you can take him down pretty easily straight away - this is what we were able to do as a full-size party of Heroes when I did it.

However all those Rularuu can be a bit of a handful, and with floored framerates from all the MM's we had, our full-size party of villains were initially overwhelmed and we had to re-group. When we re-entered the lair the remaining mobs were back at their respective cubes and remained there, with the AV in the middle. A decent sized trial party (like ours was) can take out the mobs in his lair, cube-by-cube, quick enough so his shield drops and can defeat him before the cubes began to respawn.

I think the lair section isn't too bad at the moment - however he does go down very quickly with a full-sized trial party. I wouldn't want him to be buffed too much if it made taking him down too difficult for smaller sized trial parties though.

Yup, and remember that bonus domination build-up is only for PvP - and I think that change is pretty obviously the primary reason the timer was reduced too. The timer change really doesn't benefit PvE that much, but then I'm in the camp that thinks Dom's weren't that bad in PvE anyway.

The domination build-up change is a significant improvement in PvP though - although I still think an increase in HP to Blaster levels would be good - I'm still far too easily taken out by high damage AT's that I can't mez or slow fast enough.

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If you fail = you get the Leviathan arc and fight Mako himself
If you don't fail = after McKnight, he tells you to come back at 45

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Hmm well that's weird - coz I didn't fail the first mission (Agent Greer), and I just completed the initial arc (where you get the badger and unlock the Patron Pool by defeating McKnight) and he has just given me a new mission in Sharkhead to investigate the Leviathan - which sounds like this second arc you are talking about.

The only thing perhaps that may be different is that I had almost made it to 41 before I began his arc (only recently discovered the workaround for crashing in Grandville so I'd been doing Nerva missions I had left over) so I actually dinged 41 before I unlocked his Patron Pool - maybe it is like those Kheldian arcs which were a bit bugged and didn't give you the missions at quite the right levels. Were those who didn't get his second arc still 40 at the time? Maybe see if he will give you that second arc afterall once you are 41?

Well the Dom Mako pets are the 'Blue' Hybrids - which in their mob incarnations are only Lt-class. Corruptors get the full 'Red' Hybrids which are Boss-class as mobs. I'm guessing they all end up with similar hitpoints as the pet incarnations, but the 'boss-class' ones having a wider variety of powers.

I only just hit 41.1 on my Dom so I'm a fair way from testing it out I'm afraid.

Oh wow I love Water Spout! Just got it on my Dom

Just wish it wasn't such a long recharge :/

Hehe - nice!

Dare I ask what the sound effect for "TEH CHUM" is? I was really hoping for the nice 'sploshy' sound the Corolax Hybrids make with their water attack, but I s'pose a nice throaty puke is quite possible...

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Has anyone tried any of the Dominator powers yet? I'm particularly interested in water spout.

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I'll be trying them as soon as the Dev's fix the Grandville zoning problem so I can actually do the Patron Arc

In the meantime I am trying to level up a bit in Nerva where I still have a couple of contacts remaining so that when I can do the arc I can train into the Patron Pool ASAP.

Oh and thanks for the numbers iakona - any chance of the damage scales too?

Well I only had a few minutes in one before the server crashed again, but WOW! Great, GREAT job Devs

With the physics effects turned on they come alive so much, and was it my imagination or was debris actually being sucked towards my Singularity?

Psi mobs were cool and lifting pedestrians high into the air is just far too much fun

When I managed to get onto test initially I was looking at the Patron Pool info plaques in Grandville and I noticed that CHUM Spray (please Dev's, get rid of the Bile!) was listed as doing unenhanced damage of 30 (at level 40) across all the AT's that have access to it (Brutes, MMs, Dominators). This struck me as odd considering we know that ATs have differing damage modifiers - in terms of ranged damage: Brutes have 50%, MM's 55%, Domi's 65% (of Blaster damage).

Does this mean Brute Chum Spray is relatively more powerful in terms of Damage Scale than MM (and in turn Domi) Chum Spray and that the AT modifiers bring them all in line to make them all deal 30 unenhanced at level 40?

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And, unfortunately, Chum Spray has been renamed to Bile Spray. Our powers guys’ felt that Chum was just too campy.

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"too campy"?! Have these people actually played the game?

Seriously though - Bile Spray sounds really, really naff compared to Chum Spray - you'd rather power names that make players feel nauseous than fun names that fit perfectly with the overall feel of the game?

Stand your ground man! Whose in charge over there anyway?