Wonderslug

But 25 levels later she's a child in the LGTF!

WWD has pretty much shattered what little semblance of logical chronological progression existed in this game. They could hardly have been more pants-on-head about it if they'd tried; the past few issues, storywise, have mostly succeeded in making the overarching "plot" needlessly opaque to new players and borderline nonsense to old ones. So, uh, good job striking that balance, I guess?

He's implying that Calibrated Accuracy's stupid, unusably huge overabundance of accuracy, for powers that already have boosted accuracy, continues to be stupid and has, in fact, found a new and exciting way to fail to be any use whatsoever.

So I think he understands that fine.

That's because Mids deals with powers like caltrops by summing up the maximum possible damage over the complete duration and treating it as a lump sum. That's not how they actually behave in game. For patch-type powers, every tick of damage occurs at a specified interval (the Activate Period, if you look at City of Data), and every tick is resolved as a completely separate, independent attack. That means the only buffs that apply to a given tick are the buffs active at the time that specific tick occurs.

Patch powers also work by creating pets to deal the damage. Most (but by no means all) such powers inherit some or all of the buffs active on the caster at the time they are created. Buffs applied after the pet has been created do not transfer, and inherited buffs on the pet expire at the same time they expire on the caster.

So using Aim and then Caltrops, for example, will boost at best 7, maybe 8 ticks of Caltrops, accounting for the animation time of both powers. (I'm assuming Caltrops does actually inherit damage buffs in the first place; my memory's not 100% on that.) Using Caltrops and then Aim will accomplish nothing.

I don't understand how you're getting these numbers. Caltrops ticks once per second. It deals 2.78 base damage per tick. By definition that means it deals 2.78 base DPS. Full ED slotting and a tier 4 Musculature will bring that up to ~6.4.

In order for a single stack to deal 12.09 DPS to anything without resistance debuffs it would need to be doing 434% damage. No AT/set with access to caltrops has access to that kind of long-lasting high-magnitude damage buff (outside of hunting by a contact for infinite red skittles), which is necessary because buffs will only affect damage if applied before the patch is cast, and only for the duration of the buff. Aside from that, pet damage buff cap is only 400%.

Yes. You have correctly identified the crux of the joke.

Believe me, that is COMPLETELY FINE. Please feel free to keep them that way! Add me to the list of folks who think the normal-mapped faces we have look freakishly out of place compared to, well, nearly every other existing texture in the game.

From what little I've heard, the (a?) major problem is that leveling and associated bits of code include all kinds of no failsafes at all because no one ever thought it would change, and the extra slots opened the door to potential exploits and, I believe Synapse said, problems potentially as severe as corrupting character data.

In any case, moot point; on last week's Ustream Positron said there were so many issues with it that it was off the table indefinitely.

Calling it now, next costume pack will be Hobo Furrier Pirates of Clan MacFroufrou.

Also, Dink, I applaud your initiative in addressing these concerns, and shall hope for similar bursts of gumption as time and resources allow.

...Oh, did you mean intentionally?

Sweep is available by 8, but it is still going to be terrible, and it will continue being terrible as long as it's shackled to a power with a 90 second recharge that's required for two combos.

If anything is going to be done to increase Stalker AoE potential, which I'm not holding my breath for, I'd rather see a conditional AoE added to one ST attack per set if it directly follows Placate, since Placate is now looking kind of lackluster for most sets.

9,999 inf at a time, thirty-six mouse clicks per transfer. God, it's all coming back to me.

I immediately thought "tiniest Warhulk."