Arcanaville

Disappointing players has been this game's specialty since Issue 1. Its just that the devs have become so much better at it. They used to disappoint players by taking things away. They improved significantly a few years ago by disappointing players by doing nothing. Now they do it by giving things away. That's impressive.

Unless they have massive amounts of invention-powered recharge, its unlikely you have builds like that that aren't severely penalized for being at range. Most blaster primaries cannot make full attack chains at 80 feet of range. Most cannot even get remotely close.

Archery has three single target attacks with that range and one AoE. Energy Blast has only two single target attacks and one AoE with that range, not counting sniper attacks. Only one Blaster primary has more than three single target attacks with 80 feet of range or more - Psychic Blast - and only two Blaster primaries have five or more offensive attacks with 80 feet of range or more of any kind, single target or AoE - Psychic Blast and Beam Rifle.

To say all powers are situational masks a huge quantitative difference in situationality. All my scrappers have at least four, often five attacks. *All* are usable in melee range, which I have to be to have effective offense as a Scrapper. They may be situational, but they are all situational in the same way in large sense: they are all useful only in melee range (most of them anyway: some have actual range). So its easy to satisfy that one primary situation: just be in melee range.

Blaster ranged offense is not singularly situational in that sense. The range of blaster primary attacks is not consistent: some attacks are good from 80 feet, some from 60 feet, some from 40 feet. To use them all you generally have to be within 40 feet of the target. Critter base movement speed is 21 feet per second, which means the range at which most blasters have the full use of their primaries is 1.6 seconds of distance (melee range is generally 7 feet). That's on the order of the average cast time for blaster primary attacks. In effect, when I'm in range of Power Burst, the critter is essentially in melee range, because unless I knock them out of it they will be in melee range and able to attack with melee attacks before I finish activating Power Burst. Its even worse for Shout. And even if you get something like a guaranteed stun in the attack like Cosmic Burst, the odds of having only a single target in that range when you engage is not high, but that's only a single target attack.

No, I'm saying what I explicitly said, which was that offering an example of making something work does not say anything about whether or not its designed appropriately. That should have been obvious, since I said that explicitly.


My model for issues and ideas lists is the Scrapper one, and the Scrapper one is explicitly for fairness only moderated by exempting the genuinely ridiculous and limiting debate to allow ideas to be expressed fairly.

I'm not quite there yet.

Tina, Maria, and Unai are specifically the legacy contacts with missions with a high concentration of AVs in them (which get downscaled to EBs) back when the devs felt that level of difficulty was appropriate for the high level game. They are in fact the primary reason AV->EB downscaling was invented in the first place: they were, in effect, unsoloable (by the difficulty standards of this game) story arcs within the core content of the game.

I don't think that line of thought is valid. There has never been an unplayable set in the history of this game. Back in the day we used to street sweep SR scrappers in racetrack paths around contacts so we could keep buying lucks from them, because our defenses at release were almost zero. They were so bad the devs *doubled* them after release to fix the problem and that was still not enough.

But I did it, and so did lots of other players, not all in the same way, but we did. So if the devs basically removed all the defense from SR, would you say that part of the problem was the devs reducing those defenses, and part of the problem was the players not adapting to not having any defense anymore? Because I'm not kidding about the zero defense thing. We used to have about 30% slotted defense at a time when even con Bosses had 75% base chance to hit. In todays terms that would be like having 5% defense against that boss, and zero against the +1 bosses that used to spawn at the end of some missions which you could not turn off.


Right now I'm more interested in the discussion than just listing ideas. If someone else wants to do that they're welcome to do so, but I am keeping track of all of the ideas presented and they'll eventually find their way into a large analysis post of mine regardless. But actually prompting the devs to do anything about it is probably at least a few months away, and not every problem has been completely hashed out yet in my opinion. I would currently rather promote discussion than terminate it.

Its more like eating at a restaurant and finding a hair in your food. If you hadn't, you would have never known the difference. But once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you can't rationalize the notion that you probably missed it at least a few times in the past and it didn't impact your enjoyment of the food.

And the probability that you're going to convince someone else to forget they saw it is exactly zero.

Well, since you asked: its actually a myth that the phrase "quantum leap" refers to the smallest measurable increment. It actually refers to a jump from one state to another state with without passing through intermediate states, or a show about Scott Bakula cross dressing. An electron jumping from 1s to 4s as it absorbs the appropriate photon is making a quantum leap even though that is not the smallest possible energy shift in that situation. A "quantum leap" is a bastardized way of saying "a quantized leap" which is a discontinuous jump from one energy state to another in an integral number of quantum units.

Its because electron energy in an atom is quantized that atoms can only absorb or emit certain specific kinds of photon with very specific energy. Photons with different energy not a whole multiple of any of the band gap differences in that atom cannot be absorbed by any electrons in that atom nor can such a photon be emitted by any electron as it moves from one orbital to another. That's why atoms have unique spectral lines: different atoms have different energy configurations for its electron shells, and therefore different acceptable quantized energy levels. Quantization, and thus specific quantum leaps, determine the spectral lines of each atom and that's why spectrum lines are unique fingerprints for different atoms.

Relative to someone that knew only engineering or only game design, someone good at both would generate game mechanical design results suddenly and discontinuously higher than people possessing either of the two alone. There would be no overlap or smooth transition to that new level of design. That would be a quantum leap in quality. It is less likely to cause Scott Bakula to cross-dress, but that would be genre-specific.

The ratio of time mezzed to total time the character has been logged in is not a meaningful statistic. The question is what percentage of time spent actually in combat was spent mezzed. I would bet that neither character has spent more than ten or twenty percent of that total time actually being shot at in combat. Statistically speaking, less than half the time spent actually running missions is spent either attacking or being attacked. Travel to missions and within missions accounts for the rest. If the actual in-combat mez percentage was between two and four percent, and the defender was averaging half the time spent mez, that is in fact already significant, and probably below the average case on top of that.

I'm not sure I would agree that DA is always easier than standard content, exempting the EB->AV conversion. I think it can be when a character is allowed the full leverage of all three level shifts, something you don't get to do anywhere else except on trials, but standard content even in the 45-50 range doesn't actually have even EBs all that often. And it can be a lot more mez-happy against squishies.

But setting that aside, its also both possible and even likely that either DA will eventually get higher scaled foes in isolated areas or in future story content, and that future content will introduce more incarnate-class zones and instances. Having planted a flag at the high end with the trials, and at the lower end with the solo DA path, the devs will, if they remain true to form, start filling in the middle over time.

The Coming Storm, for example, almost certainly will have a lower level set of story arcs, and then a higher level set of story arcs and content explicitly designed for Incarnates. If I had to guess, I would guess the trial side would be comparable to the higher trials, and the non-trial side of the incarnate content will be a step up from DA - basically to give people who "graduate" from DA a next step to progress to.

If DA is the start of the non-trial incarnate path, its explicitly intended to be targeted at even non-incarnates who have made zero progress in incarnate paths, and there's also no presumption of any strong invention building. It should be accessible to someone who hit level 50 two minutes ago. The difficulty of DA is almost certainly a reflection of the large number of complaints they received that Ramiel was far above the minimum difficulty level it should have been. DA is designed to circumvent that complaint. Future content can build upon that base, however, because future content can presume the player passed through DA and has at least some incarnate advancement, and probably some additional build strength.

The corresponding powers to the intermediate range single target blast for AR, Dark, and Electric are probably Flamethrower, Life Drain, and Short Circuit. I doubt any of those sets would be willing to trade those powers for tier 3 single target attacks, buffed or otherwise.

I make it a point never to argue with Arcanaville.

If its something you love, its not nit-picking because you're *always* thinking about it. Its second nature. You don't have to look for it deliberately, you just see it. And even if you do go looking for it deliberately, its because you want to.

If someone said something like "City of Heroes is an MMO, just like all other MMOs, make character, push buttons, get levels, the end" pointing out all the differences between this game and other games, or between all MMOs in general, would not be nit picking if you like MMOs and play MMOs and know these things intrinsically. Its information at your fingertips, its like noticing the sun rose in the morning and the sky is blue.

But to someone who doesn't know, and doesn't care about those details, it could seem like nitpicking to say our character creator is better because of a bunch of costume details, and we have X chat channels and other games have only Y chat channels, where X and Y are both integers the other person could care less about. Is any of that remotely significant, interesting, or noteworthy?

To some people, yes.

Most importantly, the same exact impulse that gets people to "nit pick" also gets them to ask questions in general, to discuss topics within and beyond the source material. And without that desire, there would be no Star Trek franchise, or Star Wars franchise, and really no Avengers movie. Fanbases are built almost entirely by nitpickers, just nitpickers to different degrees. Someone who says "hey, lets see if Hawkeye's archery skill actually looks right" is making a connection to the material that no one who looks at it and says "eh, whatever" will ever make. Whether you make a connection to the archery, or the cool Stark tech, or the characters of Banner and Fury, the connection is important. And that connection will eventually get most people asking questions in an attempt to enhance that connection. And some of those question won't have positive answers. But its all part of the process.

Its sometimes amusing when someone else notices things we don't care as much about, and puts more thought into than we care to; then its nitpicking. But eventually it will be something we do care about, and then we'll have a ready-made reason to explain why our nitpicking isn't nitpicking. Which no one else will care about also, while they smirk at our attention to insignificant details.

Historically, DM/SR has been seen as one of the few really interesting synergistic scrapper combinations. You have defense in SR, and then your offense in Dark Melee is going to be stacking tohit debuffs on everything you hit. That alone could have you basically soft-capped against many targets before you slot a single invention. And then you have an attack that heals you in Siphon Life, which adds a heal to SR which doesn't have a heal.

So you have defense + tohit debuffs + heal. That's already a great defensive combination.

On the offensive side, you have a set that has a lot of pretty high DPA single target attacks, but that high DPA comes from fast cast times and that means it can be hard to generate a full attack chain without recharge buffs. Which SR can help you out with, because it has six separate powers that can take LotG procs (and you can only benefit from five). Defensive sets tend to be a little easier to use to build recharge, and DM loves recharge.

The main issue with DM/SR is that you don't have much in the way of AoE. But you will be a single target monster and very hard to kill, and you'll achieve that strength relatively quickly.

Siphon Life has the third best DPA in Dark Melee, behind Smite and Midnight Grasp (even without the DoT, it still edges out Siphon Life slightly factoring in arcanatime). And I'm aware of the optimal chain for DM, but that optimal chain is build-specific. I personally would almost always take it, but I don't consider the power to be an absolutely mandatory take.

Edit: but I should point out that's just my opinion, and there are lots of dissenting ones.

There was no reality in Transformers to notice flaws in.

You're exactly correct: endurance drain and recovery debuff have been generally seen by the devs as a pseudo mez of sorts: its all or nothing. In dev-speak, its almost like a boolean effect where the endurance bar is the boolean as opposed to the boolean attribute. When we hold something, we "buff" their hold attribute until its greater than zero. When its greater than zero, its on. When its zero (or less) its off. In a sense, when the endurance bar is greater than zero, the critter can act, when its zero, the critter is stopped.

It *doesn't* actually work like that, although ironically the playerbase itself keep encouraging the devs to think like that. Even your description of drain seems to suggest that the only way in which its not binary is if it doesn't have full effect on the target, and not that actual drain itself could be non-binary in effect. That has to change.

If you look at blast sets, almost all of the mez effects not in an actual mez power are probabilistic (don't occur all the time) and all debuffs generally occur all the time. That's because mez is binary, debuffs are not. So mez becomes intermittent to prevent it from being an absolute always on.

The best way to address that in the long run is to convince everyone that endurance drain is *not* all or nothing. I don't know how to do that for the devs, but I suspect the way to do that for the players is to alter the mechanics of drain so that its more obvious that its not all or nothing. That's one of the reasons I've been a long-time advocate for adding -MaxEnd to drain effects, in addition to or in place of -recovery. -MaxEnd would, I believe, make endurance drain more obviously not all or nothing because of the way it would interact with recovery ticks. If the players start believing drain is not all or nothing, maybe the devs will too, and drain can be designed to be more effective on shorter time scales.

Preferential reasons, as I mentioned earlier, are not necessarily rationally founded. Preferences are not something people logically conclude they have, they simply have.

But if you want a psychological foundation for why people could believe the above, its well known through experiments that human beings are far more loss averse than they are gain-sensitive. Humans make a distinction between the *appearance* of losing something rather than gaining something. For example, experiments have shown that people statistically make fundamentally different decisions if you give them a way to win $20, and alternatively you give them $20 and then force them to choose a course of action that could cost them that $20, even though the two situations are numerically identical.

The satisfaction people gain from a situation where they are told "this is as good as it gets" is fundamentally different from one in which they are told "there are two options, pick the one you want" in non-trivial ways. And these ways do not follow rational lines of thought. They are unconscious and unavoidable compulsions.

I strongly disagree there. I believe the vast overwhelming majority of MMO players are casual teamers. They solo most of the time, but they want to socialize and/or team at least occasionally. What they don't want is to be part of rigid guild structures or playing schedules. They want to play when they want to play, not play when they don't want to play, and return whenever they want and find the game still there. Forcing people to team costs you a lot of those players. Making it hard to team *also* costs you a lot of those players. That's why the way I judge teaming in any MMO is on that basis. Most MMOs allow groups of people to organize themselves into groups that can synchronize their play and team. But whether an MMO allows someone to take a break for a day, a week, or a month, come back, log in, and *occasionally* find a team and actually mechanically team with random people is the benchmark for me as to the degree to which teaming has barriers.

I think the fact that most players solo most of the time in most MMOs has led some people to think that teaming is mostly irrelevant to those players. But that's like saying since most players in this game spend most of their time running alts that are less than level 50, the devs can stop developing level 50 content and it wouldn't matter to this game, or that most people wouldn't mind if the game just abruptly stopped at level 46. Just because people do it less, doesn't mean its absence wouldn't be noticed.

I think most MMO players are casual players in the sense that they want everything to be approachable. Which is to say, from the moment they decide to do something, they want to be doing it in a short period of time and with a minimum amount of prerequisite effort. That of course has to be balanced against the need for content and progressional gating, but in all areas of the game where those two are not concerns, I think the less approachable in the above sense any element of the game is, the more likely it is to turn off large sections of your potential audience and that explicitly includes teaming.

For *all* technical issues? There's no such thing as laypersons in general. There are people not involved in any one particular area of expertise, but people who literally are not knowledgeable in *anything* are not laypeople, they are idiots. Applying this rule to all possible errors, we end up with movies that are allowed to make medical errors, legal errors, piloting errors, nautical errors, typing errors, plumbing errors, retail errors, architectural errors, psychological errors, mechanical errors, military errors - basically, each error only detectable only by people directly familiar with the topic, and yet eventually all but the most vacant vegetables in the audience would be noticing at least some of them.

Based on the analysis of the wired author, two of the things Hawkeye does right and everyone else does wrong is a) he doesn't use the full power of his bow and b) he injures himself when he fires.

"Injures himself when he fires" is serious competition for worst superpower ever.

I think its a matter of degree. Some people nitpick anything, but I don't think the wired articles qualify. Especially because as the writer points out, the act of doing it wrong was probably causing injury to the actor.


Movies make technical errors all the time, but the question shouldn't be "does this error make the movie bad" the real question should be "shouldn't we strive to do better next time?"

Neither did the wired article author believe that. But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the movie does something correctly that would have cost virtually nothing to get right, and helps nothing by being wrong.

As I said: two-handed dual pistol shooters? Totally unrealistic, but cool. So fine by me. But if you use air soft pistols in that same movie with the red stripe still on the barrel, I'm going to think that's stupid no matter how much people point out its fictional anyway.

Amusingly, DM/SR and MA/DA might be more interesting combinations. DM/SR has long been considered an excellent combination because as I mentioned you get a heal and tohit debuffs stacked on defense.

But DM/DA can work and MA/SR certainly can work. MA/SR is the more straight forward of the two. Basically, you'll want to take everything in SR. The three toggles plus the three defense passives have all of your defense to melee, ranged, and AoE, and you probably don't want to skimp. Practiced Brawler is your mez protection, that's a given. The only two really optional powers are Quickness and Elude. I happen to think Quickness, while technically optional, is not a power to skip. It not only has recharge buff (+20%) it also has movement buff and slow resistance (40%). In fact, I slot Winter's Gift on SR to end up with 60% total recharge and movement speed resistance. Not only are you really hard to recharge debuff, which is always annoying when it happens, but the movement resistance means you just walk right off of caltrop patches. For a set that relies on defense, being able to walk away from autohitting patches is a good thing.

Elude is the 50/50 power. Its a great power, but it crashes and can't be made perma. And it only really offers more defense. Which is good when you don't have enough defense, but less useful if you eventually build to soft-cap. Elude can have a benefit against tohit buffs and incarnate content with 64% base tohit, but I usually pack lucks instead. But really, you can't go wrong building for the soft cap and skipping it, and you can't go wrong taking it.

MA is a little more interesting. You have two big decisions with MA. The first is whether to take either Crane Kick or Cobra Strike, or both. They both do the same amount of damage and activate in almost the same amount of time, so they are practically interchangeable as attacks. But one does knockback and the other does stun. You could take Cobra if you don't want knockback, or you could take Crane if you like knockback and would rather have it than stun. Or you could take both, but powers will start to get tight if you take everything, because you will be taking almost everything with SR.

Which leaves Eagle's Claw. As an attack, it frankly sucks. Its DPA is not good as scrapper attacks go. I love it because I've played MA so long I can't live without the backflip animation. Its primary advantage in modern MA is that its critical boosting effect (it boosts the critical chance of your next attack by a whopping 33 percentage points - so like from 5% to 38%) works on all MA attacks including Dragon's tail. If you precede DT with EC, you will boost your AoE output in a significant way, which is noteworthy because the set has only one AoE.

But the catch is that unless you queue the next attack while EC is still animating, the critical boosting window is so short it will expire before you have a chance to trigger another attack. And even that big crit boost is not enough to prevent EC from lowering your single target offense if you're not using DT. Its big enough to make the loss tiny, but its there. If there is a skippable MA attack, its Eagle's Claw, unless you want it for style points.

DM/DA is a much more interesting thing to build around. You've got a lot of options here. Some people hate Shadow Maul and skip that power. I like it myself, but unless you like constantly positioning yourself to catch multiple things in Maul's arc, it will underperform as a single target attack. And a lot of people do not like the fact that no matter how good it is, it roots for a long time. A lot of people don't like to be rooted for 3 whole seconds.

You could skip Touch of Fear, but I wouldn't. Its one of the best melee mezzes in the game. Although its "only" a fear, it fears a really long time and its easy to stack, so you can fear bosses with it. You'll basically be able to shut down one, and then later with enough recharge and fear slotting at least two bosses with it.

Given your secondary is Dark Armor, and you will want to have as much endurance as possible to power Dark Regen, I would take Dark Consumption.

Midnight Grasp used to suck, now it doesn't. I'd take it unless you run out of power choices.

Siphon Life is one of the best powers out there, but you're playing one of the few combinations where its really an optional power. You have the most powerful heal in the game in Dark Armor, Siphon Life might be superfluous. I'd take it anyway unless you run out of power choices, but its droppable in DM/DA. In sets without a big heal like SR and Invuln, Siphon Life is great, and its effects are multiplied by the mitigation in those sets.

Dark Armor is basically take the top half and then think about the bottom four powers: Cloak of Darkness, Cloak of Fear, Oppressive Gloom, and Soul Transfer. Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom are PBAoE toggles. Most people like OG, most people have issues with CoF, but both have issues. CoF has an accuracy penalty and a lot of people don't like fear. OG costs almost no endurance but has a small health drain when in use, and it also stuns and stunned targets often wander away - out of range of Dark Regeneration and OG itself. Ordinarily, most people would probably recommend taking OG if anything, and skip CoF. But in DM/DA if you take Touch of Fear I would recommend taking CoF because now you can stack fears. Mag 3 from ToF + Mag 2 from CoF means an immediate terrorize on bosses, and now you can start thinking about really fearing lots of targets if you want by combining CoF and ToF. I'd go that route, and I'd consider OG skippable.

If you believe Scrappers never die, skip Soul Transfer. If you believe Scrappers are supposed to fight harder and harder things *until* they die, take Soul Transfer if you can fit it. Its possibly the best self rez in the game. It transfers health from targets in the area to heal you, so the more stuff around the more health you get back and its easy to rez right back to full. Normally, the problem is that you'd then get shot to pieces by those same targets before you could even get your toggles back up, but Soul Transfer comes with a ludicrous mag 30 stun on all targets in its huge 25 foot radius. They are not going to be shooting back at you. Even EBs will be stunned. The only thing this won't bring down are AVs with purple triangles up and things immune to stun.

As to Cloak of Darkness, I don't think its defense is strong enough to automatically take it. Its a completely optional power in that you can take it or leave it, and that choice is pretty neutral. The biggest reason I could see taking it normally is to be a set mule for LotG +recharge. DM/DA is always going to want more recharge. Unless you're crazy and are going to build a DM/DA for the soft cap at 50, in which case you'll probably want to take all the defensive powers you can get.

But you'll probably be taking acrobatics because DA doesn't have KB protection (unless you are going to try to get away with just using inventions to cover that) and so you will probably want to make room for the power choices you'll have to burn to get that. Cloak of Darkness would be high on my list of powers worth dropping to make room for other stuff.

I would also recommend Spiritual Core, but I think the best way to craft Alpha powers is to run WSTs myself, since that's the easiest way to get essentially a rare component (i.e. the Notice of the Well). Unless you're in a big hurry to craft more than one Alpha.

I wouldn't call any Scrapper secondary bad, but in terms of pairing with MA there are a couple of options that stand out to me:

1. MA/SR, the obvious conceptual pairing, particularly for people wanting to focus on "natural" origin character.

2. MA/DA gives you the opportunity to stack stuns with TK and Cobra in MA, and Oppressive Gloom in Dark Armor. Dragon's Tail also helps keep things nearby for PBAoE toggles and Dark Regeneration.

3. MA/Will is another potential possibility for natural characters although RTTC is slightly conceptually iffy. It can mature into a stronger combination than MA/SR, although in my opinion MA/SR starts off stronger when you're still in SOs. Willpower also has quick recovery, and even with stamina endurance can still be an issue until you get slotted up with inventions.

Besides MA/DA, though, MA doesn't have a lot of very strong synergies with any other secondary, but I see that as having no penalties associated with picking whatever secondary you want. You're basically free to pick the secondary you think you'll like independent from MA, and the combination will probably play just fine.

Unless you're aiming for a special concept for the character, and except for a few particularly strong synergies such as Electric/Electric (drain) or DM/SR (heal for the secondary without healing and tohit debuff stacking on defense), every Scrapper powerset combination is going to have pros and cons. They'll all be at least pretty good. I would tend to pick the primary I want in terms of the offense I want, and then pick a complimentary secondary based on the kind of defense I want, and secondarily on the kinds of extra utility powers I want. I.e. I might want Shield Charge, or Fiery Embrace, or Invincibility. I don't usually worry about picking "wrong" or even "not right." And in particular, I think MA is probably the most "neutral" Scrapper primary in terms of working well with everything, but not synergizing especially well with any one thing.