Arcanaville

The best way to answer that question is to test it. Run x6 or x7 missions (x8 might spawn things above trip mine's target cap) and see a) how difficult it is to make the tactic work and b) when it works, is it really significantly faster and/or safer than engaging the spawn directly.

A video would be helpful in analyzing exactly how much damage mitigation and DPS that tactic generates across many consecutive spawns.

Its more pernicious than that. You could easily ridicule that. What actually happens is that if a set is one of the best single target sets, people complain its AoE lags and AoE is the only important thing. If a set is one of the best AoE sets, people complain about its single target optimal chain being subpar. If a set is both one of the best single target sets and one of the best AoE sets, they would complain about its endurance burn rate, or its lack of special powers, or the fact that its the only set that has a power whose brother's sister's cousin has a below average target cap. If you dice up a set enough, you can always find something that someone else is better at and that means you're not the best at it, which means its easy to manufacture numerical problems.

There is no set for which you cannot manufacture a numerical problem. However, complaining about a set with decent single target and couples high AoE with built in recharge and endurance reduction still seems to set a new standard.

We could also make it a complex number, and have some of scrapper damage leak into other games and kill things there.

Apparently, average is the new worthless. Its as if the reason the devs are here is to learn new ways to make more powerful sets, and every one that isn't provably better than the rest is an error. And that's assuming that Staff is only average for single target, and I'm not sure that's been correctly established.

If the devs wanted to make each set absolutely more powerful than the last one, there's something called the decimal point that was invented a thousand years ago that makes that ridiculously easy.

I didn't think you could replicate the level of crazy involved with the original hate on Willpower, but clearly I underestimated crazy.

Slacker.

That's just listing all of the strengths and unique features of devices while completely ignoring all of its deficits. Offense is normally judged by damage over time, not "per application." And while the mechanics of trip mines allows you to set them and run away, it also *requires* you to set them in particular ways which offer no guarantee they will in fact detonate as you intend.

If we're going to talk about "potential" then your competition is the potential damage buff of Soul Drain, which when saturated is +150% damage that is up about half the time with SO slotting. That net damage increase is far more damage than Trip Mines itself can put out.

/Fire, meanwhile, is not just using one power to compete with Trip Mines: its using Burn, Fire Sword Circle, Blazing Aura, and Combustion, plus Build Up, to compete with the entirety of /Devices on offensive output.


My reasoning compared /Devices to other sets. Yours doesn't. Under ideal conditions, /devices can do what you describe. But that's with cherry picked situations. The targets you don't kill, like say bosses, have only a 50% chance of being knocked. And after that, your mitigation drops to zero for that minefield and it comes down to the defensive strength of the other powers in the set. /Ice can perma Ice patch and get good mitigation against minions, LTs, *and* Bosses. And if we're talking about best case potential, then the best case potential for Drain Psyche by itself is +1500% regen. That's on top of the incremental mitigation of WoC and Psychic Shockwave. And once again, Drain Psyche's regeneration works as mitigation against bosses.

So unless you think its just self-evident, I don't see you making a case that /Devices actually has more total offense than Fire or Dark, or more mitigation than Ice or Mental. You're just listing the best case scenario for /Devices. That best case scenario is pretty good, but everyone's best case scenario is pretty good. The best case scenario for Energy is keeping three to four bosses almost permanently inert with stuns and the KB from power thrust. I've done it before myself.

Because then Scrappers will have the only damage modifier not divisible by 0.05?

I assumed the smiley meant the question was rhetorical. It isn't often I see someone anywhere within a hundred miles of the comic book genre that isn't familiar with it.

To me, there will probably never be a cover cooler than the very first DKR cover:



I remember just staring at it when it first came out, not even opening it for a while, and deliberately setting it aside to read separately from everything else, just because of that cover. I wasn't as thrilled as the next two, but the last one:



Oh yeah.

In terms of damage mitigation, I would place Devices behind Dark, Mental, and Ice. In terms of offense, I would place Devices behind at least Fire and Dark (counting the offensive effect of Soul Drain). Unless you're going to use minefields on everything, I wouldn't classify devices as a high offense secondary, even with gun drone. Its burst damage can be quite high, but averaged over the set up time its not exceptionally high.

Opinions differ on secondaries, but I don't think its a prevalent opinion that devices is a high offense high defense easy mode secondary.

Technically, its an idea.

I don't know. In retrospect, a lot of things make more sense now. Like why ELO was chosen to do the soundtrack for Xanadu.

I would like to point out the recharge and cast time, and ask what you are going to do during the 7 seconds you have to wait for snipe to recharge, when you attempt to shoot something from that range. Because no other attack is going to be able to follow up with that shot, which means Build Up is being wasted boosting snipe and then nothing else. Unless you tend to follow up Zapp with teleport foe.

Range is only useful when you actually use it, and engaging from outside the range of all but one of your attacks has limited usefulness unless you are the designated puller.

Also, that damage is three whole quarters of an LT at level 50.

In the time it takes you to just to fire Zapp, I can fire Power Bolt, Power Blast, and Power Bolt again and deal 32% more damage with no chance of being interrupted. And I can do that from 136 feet away, within the range of all of my long-ranged attacks: bolt, blast, explosive blast. Explosive blast, actually, hits from 148 feet, essentially base sniper range.

This is already outside normal perceptual aggro range, so engaging from even farther away than 130 feet has no significant advantage.


One other thing: the game tends not to render or allow you to directly target things more than about 200-250 feet away. So there's no way to use that range unless you target through another player to the target.

Almost like they planned it that way.

Well, its sort of my problem with it also: I was just pointing out the facts there.


Well, there's unfair and then there's poor. I don't think its fair. But I don't think its harsh enough to turn any scrapper or brute into a poor performer. They may fall behind their peers, but without inventions and incarnate powers they were going to fall behind their peers in Dark Astoria and other incarnate content either way.

It basically means just don't go crazy on taking on too much, because you just lost half your defense. But the archetypes that lack mez protection are also struggling to recapture the high ground in Dark Astoria also, because DA critters also seem to have thrown away the book on mez moderation.

Also, lucks are your friend, and you don't need many to stack enough defense to regain high defensive leverage. Unfair or not, its a reasonable and reasonably easy to execute tactic to use to keep them around and keep your net defense high.

One of the reasons its so useful is that being in space (i.e. off the Earth) is such a strong automatic short hand for being in the future, so its less common for futuristic settings to occur in other environments. The largest other major futuristic short hand setting is the world radically altered, and the most common of those is post-apocalyptic settings.

Once you start getting to settings like technological cyberpunk and such, it becomes a lot more difficult for the setting to be completely incidental to the story.

I estimated once the worst case scenario if you died just often enough to stay in perma-debt, but no more often than that. It ended up being, estimating an average of two minutes of hospital time to hospital, travel back, zone, and re-enter the fight, about five times slower for 0x1 missions for blasters (kill speed when you're alive matters, so this is different for different archetypes).

You have to consider that first, being in debt cuts your leveling speed in half until debt is paid. Then you have to consider that while you're traveling you're not earning XP. If you, say, died once every two minutes and took two minutes to reenter the fight from the hospital, you're only actually earning XP at half the rate. Half the earning rate plus half going to debt service is already leveling at only one fourth speed. The worst case scenario that isn't just dying constantly I estimated to be slightly worse than that. That estimate did not include time between missions, which would dilute that substantially.

I doubt very many players experience this for any long stretch of time though, because I doubt very many players would continue to play a character that experienced this continuously.

To test that theory I jumped onto a bunch of pugs this weekend. It took only ten minutes for me to wish granite was available at 12, and twenty minutes for me to wish tylenol was a flavor of coca cola.

Wow, you've been working on a staff fighting powerset? How did you manage to keep that a secret for so long?

The thing is that those effects probably do just about the right thing to non-defensive characters that have build up high defenses outside their primaries and secondaries. Its the things that primarily have high defense intrinsically that get the short end of that stick, but the devs do not appear to believe that is a serious enough problem to expend special effort to avoid.

Not a lot of special synergy, but energy manipulation is an above average blaster set unto itself. Early build up, power boost, boost range, and a lot of solid blapping attacks. Archery is a below average primary in my opinion, until you get to the non-crashing tier 9 with the recharge that looks like a typo.

Dumping Rain of Arrows onto a spawn that isn't in the same zip code as you are must be interesting.

Tangent: Burnout has some interesting tradeoffs to consider. It costs a ton of endurance and also cuts your max endurance by 25%. That's a pretty hefty endurance cost, but there are certain powers that can wipe it out completely. Drain Psyche, for example, as so much recovery buff that it doesn't take many targets to completely neutralize the endurance cost of Burnout.

Its trickier for powers like Dark Consumption. You'll use Dark Consumption, then promptly lose half your end to Burnout and have lowered recovery. DC will be instantly back up, but can another use of DC make up for losing half your endurance and cutting recovery by 25% for 60 seconds? That's a net cost of about 75 end. If you can get 75 end back with DC, you can break even, but its going to be hard to do much more than break even; even if you wait to the last second and use DC when you only have a sliver of end left, you'll make at most net 25 end.

So far, the three powers I can think of that have this property that you might as well recharge them with Burnout, because they can completely neutralize the cost of Burnout, are Drain Psyche, Energize, and Recovery Aura. Back to back Drain Psyche gets you 60 seconds of enormous recovery, and back to back energize gets you 60 seconds of high endurance discount: you'd be getting the heal for free with energize. Recovery aura is pretty obvious. Some borderline ones are things like Accelerate Metabolism and Chrono Shift.

Rarely does that happen in a way where the futuristic or scientific setting is literally irrelevant and deemphasized, but when it does happen its usually not considered science fiction except by people who throw the label around willy-nilly. An example would be Angels and Demons - there's some futuristic speculative science in terms of the antimatter generation process, but its handled so badly and in such a disconnected way that I don't think very many people would consider Angels and Demons to be science fiction.

But its often the case that the whole point to science fiction is to ask "what if?" Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind introduces just one small science fiction element: erasure. From there, the entire rest of the story isn't about science or technology, but rather the "what if" surrounding how that one little thing affects the characters in the story. For that reason, I think Eternal Sunshine is definitely a science fiction story.

Its interesting to compare those two stories, which on paper seem to have the same amount of science fiction elements, but which then depart from them in very different ways. Eternal Sunshine makes you think "what if" whereas Angels and Demons doesn't, at least it doesn't strongly encourage it.

But I think a really great example of a story that is dropped into a science fiction setting is Battle Beyond the Stars. Its Seven Samurai in space. Is it best described as science fiction or fantasy, even considering its setting? I think it exists within the DMZ between both, and strong cases can be made both ways.

I'm finding your observations difficult to reconcile. Supa Trolls are Lts: its simply not possible to take the same amount of attacks to defeat them and minions at any level. And its unrealistic to believe you can consistently one-shot even -5 minions, because -5 combat modifier leverage is only 1.55x normal damage. Based on the health of LTs at level 15 (about 262) and the damage of blasters at level 20 (about 31.94 for ranged damage)

Soul Drain actually has above average accuracy: 1.2x normal. And its buffs are huge: its +60% for the first target and +10% damage for each additional. Given that the damage buff lasts for 30 seconds compared to Build Up's 10 seconds, Soul Drain breaks even with Build Up on the very first target (Soul Drain's base uptime is 25% compared to Build Up's 11%).

Of all the issues with Darkness Manipulation, including the PBAoE mechanics of Soul Drain itself, Soul Drain's buff strength is not one of them.

One of the problems with the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres is that a lot of people just make up their own definitions for those two terms, which is fine except when the intent is to use them for communication. Then, its useful if they have a generally agreed upon set of definitions.

The term speculative fiction is often promoted as a term which encompasses fiction beyond conventional bounds: science fiction, fantasy, horror, and counter-factual fiction (fiction set in alternate timelines and histories). But that doesn't mean there exists no distinction between fantasy and science fiction. We know where the extremes are: Lord of the Rings sits deep in Fantasy land, and 2001 sits pretty far out in Science Fiction land. Although there's a lot of debate over the margins, I believe the best way to describe the overall difference is that Science Fiction deals with the consequences of the scientific details of the story as a major element of the plot or context in which the plot exists. Basically, Science Fiction is fiction that incorporates science critically and not tangentially.

To say that science fiction is a subset of fantasy is to say that all science fiction stories must be fantasy stories. But that's not true by even very expansive definitions of "fantasy" unless you believe all fiction is fantasy. I doubt anyone would call Robocop a fantasy genre story, or the novel Contact. The Stephen Baxter novel Evolution is definitely Science Fiction, but I don't see how you could classify it as a Fantasy novel. In fact, I don't see how you could classify it as anything other than pure science fiction without qualifiers.

The devs are in fact thinking that in the end game specifically, defense has an edge because its so easy to build for high defense and the level of debuffing is higher - an area defense intrinsically has an edge over other damage mitigation.

I "fixed" my SR by giving her a nose-bleed expensive build (which ironically would be cheaper today due to the effects of converters).

I should also point out that level shifts grant tohit leverage. Although post-I7 higher level critters gain accuracy bonuses from even to +5, the devs never altered the scaling behavior of critters *lower* than you are. If you are +1 to the critters, they have -5% base tohit on you. So every little bit helps there.