Arcanaville

I would strongly recommend players going to the pummit intent on participating in this session to practice in front of a mirror, several times, without interruption, until they can make their case smoothly without having to stop to think about it for long periods of time.

The average person given three minutes to speak about any topic in front of an audience generally manages to think up twenty minutes of stuff to say beforehand, and manages to actually produce about twenty seconds worth of actual ideas verbally when put on the spot.

And you're being streamed for posterity.

That sort of clarity without justification must be nice to have, although its something I will never know.

That's true, but going to a session on making a case for which zone to revamp and asserting that the AE is the best option for that "zone" is either going to be a flash of brilliance if you're the best orator in history, or they may just serve you up as the afternoon break snack if you're not.

Oy. Let me try again.

So you're saying you're fine with people who don't know about echo zones to be constantly broadcasting Where is the Lost Kings Row?

As long as you're happy with it, speedy.

Not bad, although the AoE difference is noted. Also, with no conserve power this build nets 2.05 eps with Hasten and PB. The chain runs 4.17 eps. That's a rundown of about 47 seconds. With accolades you can push that up to 2.36 eps net and 55 seconds of offense. I'd probably want to run that with Ageless.

An interesting question is whether the incarnate soft cap is worth losing Rebirth. Rebirth Radial averages out to about +490% regen over its cycle time factoring in the regen boost and the heal. Unless your build also uses Rebirth and punts endurance, the MA/SR I'm currently toying with has about 3 times the net regeneration with rebirt, 13% more health, and can run tough without endurance issues for a net 23% s/l resistance. Not including Aid Self, that looks almost like a draw.

The champagne now goes in the jacuzzi, and the gold plated cars are washed with Perrier. Champagne apparently left marks on the gold plate.

Yeesh. You know that swift is slottable, right?

I was commenting on the fact that the exaggerations about Positron's game design acumen have expanded to the point where it seems almost quaint to only be accusing him of being directly responsible for torturing badge hunters. I mean, given the fact that he's also an emotional bully that single-handedly crushed the architect system, its clear he's come a long way from those days.

Fortunately, as the crash occurred in Kings Row, no one in Paragon City was significantly affected.

In other news, a threat of cosmic proportions is threatening Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Scientists are still baffled by the lack of interest cosmic entities have over the other 97.5% of the planet but research is on-going. This is the ninth such threat this month, the highest number of cosmic threats in April in five years, but two less than the record set in 2002. The threat is expected to peak on Friday and continue throughout the weekend, so citizens are cautioned to increase their sunscreen to SPF 4000 and travel the city in single file until further notice. The Department of Homeland Security is projecting a return to zombie apocalypse conditions and widespread superpowered criminal activity by Wednesday.

I'm hopeful that some of those will get a second glance when the devs convert them all to PPM. 10% chance for 5% heal in a single target power is a little low. 2% chance for disorient is just plain ridiculous.

Of course, the king of what the heck isn't a chance proc: its Gift of the Ancients Def/+7.5% run speed, each of which adds 1.07 mph to your running speed. Fortunately, I convinced Castle during I9 beta to change it from being Unique. You're welcome.

I always assumed that was the purpose behind twitter for the vast majority of twitter users. But for those that want a more focused communications channel, wouldn't something like tweetdeck or another twitter filter work? If OCR tagged all the important notifications with a special hashtag, couldn't a twitter filter be used to limit the amount of forwarded notifications?

So what you're saying is you'd be fine if we Lost Kings Row?

They grow up so fast.

Noted (the edit). But as you mention corruptors and masterminds, a word on City of Villains. I mentioned above that the CoV designers took the "everyone should be able to solo" idea and ran with it. I also said that at the beginning of time the City of Heroes designers (i.e. Jack) divided the world into four, or five depending on how you count, capabilities: (Ranged/Melee) Damage, Defense, Control, Support.

Take a look at the CoV archetypes. What's the primary for Brutes? Damage. What's the primary for Stalkers? Damage. What's the primary for Corruptors? Damage. What's the primary for Masterminds? Pets and Damage. The only CoV archetype for which offense is not obviously the primary are Dominators, and their primary - Control - is sufficiently damage-heavy it *is* what passes for offense on Controllers.

Every CoV archetype has Offense/Other, except Dominators which were/are ControlOffense/Offense. Because when you believe every archetype must be able to solo, you no longer see the world as Damage, Defense, Control, and Support. You see the world as Damage, EverythingElse.

Every CoV archetype has damage, every CoV archetype *specializes* in damage, and every CoV archetype has something else that helps keep them alive.

Four out of five hero archetypes have retroactively tried to approach this rule. One has not. And the reason why that keeps coming up is that any attempt to do so creates tankmages.

Which is why I say: to be a tankmage, you apparently have to be a blaster as a prerequisite. I *think* the devs realize this now, but whether they move to address this aggressively or cautiously is a separate question.

If it helps, I believe Zombie Man is badly indifferent.

This would be a credible theory, if the mechanics of such enhancements was procedural. They are not. In fact, Numina's Convalesence +Regen/+Recovery for example is what you might call a "broken enhancement." Its a power that is flagged as an enhancement, with effects that are flagged to affect the entire player.

It has a 100% chance for going off because by design *everything* has a 100% chance to go off by default. There's no such thing as an effect with no chance associated with it. Power Bolt deals 100% chance for smashing damage and 100% chance for energy damage. But we don't consider them procs.

Some people specifically build towards the defense soft cap as a deliberate goal, and technically speaking you could argue that for them, the "return" on investment for defense bonuses is linear, and not accelerating. But its a definition of "return" that is sufficiently disconnected from actual in-game value that its a difficult one to honor in the general case.

In your example with Hasten, I think the big motivation is the psychological desire to not have up and down performance. That's qualitatively judged to have a penalty associated with it that is not quantitative. Because actual performance is being ignored to optimize that qualitative situation, that would be an example of one of the corner cases I mentioned. But its also true that another factor comes into play. At the high levels of recharge necessary to get to perma-Hasten, its often the case that you already have enough to make a full attack chain. A meta-concern now factors in. Recharge may be continuing to improve each individual attack, but its no longer improving the chain. At that point, the *only* thing you're getting from that extra recharge is reducing that on-paper downtime of Hasten, and once that reaches a sufficiently low level for the up/down issue to no longer be a concern (the moment its low enough to "ride out") the motivation for improving recharge disappears, even if there are still quantitative benefits.

In other words, its often the case that "return on investment" becomes a non-issue in terms of the raw numbers, and what's being looked at are more holistic issues of build management. In that situation, its too complex to say what the actual "return on investment" is for different kinds of changes except when dealing with very specific changes to specific builds that can't always be extrapolated.

Many of them do approach or in some cases exceed Blaster levels of damage. But all of them are less than 0.01% Blaster, being 100% Controller, 100% Brute, and 100% Scrapper.

I thought the phrase "other archetypes lack being a blaster" would be sufficient red flag that I was being a bit facetious, but just to be more direct with the point, I believe Blasters are the last, and currently only archetype whose concept and balance parameters are still governed by "holy trinity" concerns, or in our game "holy quaternary" concerns. Life was broken up into offense, defense, control, and support at the beginning of time, and every City of Heroes primary and secondary specializes in one of them (notable grey area exception: Blaster Manipulation sets, which were originally Melee Damage sets). Post-launch, the only exception among conventional archetypes has been mastermind pet sets.

The original five archetypes were balanced by designing each archetype so that no archetype had more than two of the above deliberately - that's why we have two main powersets, the primary and secondary - and each would specialize in at most one. Scrappers didn't specialize at anything: they had balanced offense and defense and were designed to be the best soloers. Tankers specialized in defense but had low offense. Controllers specialized in control and had presumptively lower support than Defenders, who had higher support and low offense. Blasters had high offense and ... more high offense.

That was already a problem, but it was made a much bigger problem when the devs realized they didn't have a bunch of hard-core Evercrack players playing their game: they had casual players and a high percentage of soloers playing their game. So because of that and some other things going on the devs decreed that from now on, every archetype would have the minimum level of tools necessary to solo. And that was basically a code word for "everyone will have at least moderate damage."

When you have good offense and high defense, you're fine. When you have high control and moderate support and good offense, you're better than fine. When you already have high offense but nothing else, that decree doesn't really help you if the devs believe that offense is your defense.

The City of Villains archetypes went much farther: they took the concept and ran with it: all of them are designed to be independent, able to solo, and function in teams separately from being designed to function completely on their own.

The City of Villains archetypes were never trinity-balanced to begin with. Written into their DNA is the phrase "we can be awesome all by ourselves, its ok." The City of Heroes archetypes were trinity balanced except for Scrappers who were the original self-sufficient archetype. But what Tankers, Controllers, and Defenders were supposed to critically lack the most was Damage, and the new balancing rules entitled them to a lot more damage. What Blasters lacked was everything else, but the new design rules didn't give them any of it, because Blasters were still thought of as "offense only." Even things that had *low* offense at least had actual offense to buff. Blasters as an archetype didn't have low control to buff or low team support to buff in the general case. Adding it from scratch was a mental hurdle the devs were unwilling to leap over.

The net result is that Blasters are still living locked into a design envelope that treats them as if other things are supposed to give them support, defense, and control, but everything else can have damage. That makes them the Last Trinity Archetype.

Anything can have the power of a tankmage, but only Trinity Archetypes are thought about in that manner. A controller with a lot of damage is a high damage controller. A tanker with a lot of damage is a high damage controller. But a high defense blaster is seen as TankMage, because it breaks a trinity rule. The others don't break trinity rules, because long ago everyone stopped thinking about them as trinity archetypes.


Its a broken perspective, but one that is still locked into the minds of a lot of players and probably many developers as well.

It was about BaB smoothing out the animations called PUNCH_L and PUNCH_R, and that affected Energy Punch, Shadow Punch, and a bunch of other powers that used that animation and typically had 0.67 cast times. My understanding was that he thought that twenty frames was not enough animation frames to make a smooth animation with the proper transitions and wanted to standardize the minimum animation frame limit for moves a little higher (to 25 frames I believe).

This has been discussed many times in the past. There *is* a diminishing return for recharge, but its not because of this. This is actually an incorrect perspective on recharge.

The notion here is that the "return" on recharge is the actual literal reduction in recharge time, which is false. No one builds recharge to move that number any more than they build resistance to move that number. The "return" on resistance is survivability which is why we consider the jump from 20% to 30% to be less of a jump than from 80% to 90%. The first increases the amount of damage you can take by about 15% while the second doubles the amount of damage you can take. If you just count points, the return is the same: ten percentage points. Suvivability is the real return, so the latter is a bigger return.

The return on recharge is "able to use power more often" not the numerical representation of the recharge. Suppose we have a power that recharges in eight seconds, and we boost the recharge +100%. Its recharge drops to four seconds. Now we boost the recharge by an additional +100%. Now its recharge drops from four seconds to 2.7 seconds. It might *seem* like the return on that second boost was lower, just like the difference between 20 and 30 seems identical to the difference between 80 and 90. But actually, the difference is the same. A power with recharge 8 can be used once every 8 seconds (not exactly, but hold that thought). A power with 4s recharge can be used twice in 8 seconds. A power with 2.7s recharge can be used three times in 8 seconds. The first recharge boost increased the number of times you can use the power per eight seconds by one, and the second recharge boost did the same thing. If this was an attack the damage per time curve would be linear with recharge: recharge 1.0, damage X; recharge 2.0, damage 2X; recharge 3.0, damage 3X. That is the definition of equal return on investment.

What makes the return on investment for recharge actually have a diminishing return is cast time immutability. Recharge doesn't directly reduce cycle time, it reduces only recharge time, not cast time. So doubling recharge doesn't halve cycle time. Cast time cuts into that. The bigger cast time is compared to recharge, the higher the diminishing return effect. If you're talking about Elude with a 2s cast time and 1000s recharge, the effect is almost zero. You get almost full return on recharge. If you're talking about Fire Blast, with 1.67s cast time and 4s recharge, the effect is very pronounced. For Elude, going from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 recharge the number of times you can use the power per base cycle time (1002s) goes from 1.0 to 1.996 to 2.988. That's basically 1/2/3. But for Fire Blast, its 1.0 to 1.545 to 1.888. That's obviously a much harsher diminishing return on investment in recharge.

There are some corner cases where you could argue the actual intended "return" is something other than "increase the rate of use of the power" but as this is the general definition of the purpose of recharge, in the general case there is no diminishing return on recharge due to scaling. There's only due to the ratio of cast time to recharge time. Higher is worse, lower is better.

One thing Synapse hasn't mentioned yet (and he can correct me if I'm wrong here) but I think is operative here is that the devs don't usually make things like this 3.125. I believe its very likely that the devs will round upwards to the nearest 0.5, so that they don't have to make procs with a rating of 2.3184932764. That round upwards would be a separate net advantage to the players on at least some procs if it happens that way.

I can't think of how to improve it: getting to the soft cap without Agility is not easy, but the biggest problem I can see with the build is that it will be sucking wind on endurance. Even with CS up its net recovery is only 2.22 eps, and when its down its 1.48. That's worse than natural recovery without stamina. CS is going to be down about 73 seconds: that's long time to have that level of recovery and rebirth destiny isn't going to give you any extra recovery either. You might want to test this carefully on the test server before actually building it, because I think that level of recovery is going to be problematic.

In fact if I shut down maneuvers, weave, and tough, net recovery only increased to 2.52 eps while CS is down, which is not a lot really. My current MA/SR has 2.8 when CS is *down* and I find I can still run out occasionally, and I'm vulnerable to drain.

At the moment, I cannot think of a way to slot musculature, have enough recharge to run SK/CS/SK/CAK, slot double procs in all attacks, incarnate softcap, and have enough endurance. The best I can seem to do so far is double proc, have enough recharge with enhancement boosters to run SK/CS/SK/CAK, and have a lot of endurance, by fiddling with my latest MA/SR build.

As far as I'm concerned, its about the facts, and the misrepresentation of the facts. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that right ends where the facts begin.

If you actually read that thread, Arbiter Hawk was being asked how the PPM procs specifically worked at that time, he wasn't commenting on their design intent. In fact one poster explicitly asked him to state how they worked directly and not explain side issues beyond that.

In fact, Arbiter Hawk all but said he wasn't specifically involved in their design in the same thread, and thus his comments should only be taken to describe the procs, and not state their design intent:

He knew the basic idea, but not the precise details of the system or its design or implementation at the time he was speaking and admitted so. Under those circumstances, his opinion is no more relevant to the design intent of the procs than mine is.