Arcanaville

Spinach does not, as is commonly believed, have high amounts of iron.

I was pointed to this thread but can't find the best build. I tried to use PleaseRecycle's build, but when I import it I end up with four Brawls and Superspeed is slotted with stun enhancements. Do I need to upgrade Mids?

Joss Whedon is not known for directing anonymous characters with no personality. Even the trailer seems to suggest there are lots of dialog-heavy parts to the movie designed to showcase the characters.

As you say, we already have the prequels, we already know these characters. In fact I believe they recognized that an Avengers movie *couldn't* be made without all these prequels, specifically because we needed to get over the "origin of" parts of all the characters because it would slow things down too much.

The trailer alone shows a confrontation between Loki and Stark, and Loki and Fury, and I think its going to be Loki that becomes the linchpin for the plot: it will ultimately be each of those characters having to face Loki, not just a big shootout.

"How desperate you are that you that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?" That suggests to me that Loki has by then become familiar in some way with all of the Avengers. Fury is the one that brings them together, Loki will be the one that tries to rip them apart. That dynamic seems exactly up Whedon's alley.

Not stretched and not painted on for that design might be a wardrobe malfunction.

I think there was a time and a place to introduce harder content for experienced players who wanted a change from the older critters. I don't think it was in the starting zone being marketed to brand new players.

I'm not even sure the devs realized what they did. I think the devs have over time been focused on making ever more "interesting" and harder critters: City of Villains is much harder to solo through than City of Heroes, and Praetoria is harder still. How hard a critter is depends more on when it was created than what level it was created for.

But that assumes we're all in the same boat and have done it all and seen it all. I don't think the devs did themselves a service by making the starting levels for brand new players in Praetoria harder (on a relative basis) than most of the content experienced players had to deal with outside of Praetoria at any almost level.

Especially if you were playing anything besides a melee archetype.

I did an analysis once that attempted - extremely crudely - to create a "score" for each archetype that combined an offensive and a defensive metric, adding up all the offense and all the things that mitigate damage, including not just mitigation powers but debuffs and control. The margin for error was huge. But even so, it suggested something strange: that Defenders should solo a lot better than Blasters. How much more the analysis wasn't good enough to say, but while everyone including Defenders clustered their combined score around the same spot, Blasters were way off by themselves at a much lower score.

I concluded at that time that this was likely the result of me overcounting Defender properties, because there was no way Defenders could score lower than Blasters in a fair metric. This was about a year and a half before the devs announced that Blasters soloed slower than everything else.

Its not 100% clear to me why Defenders are often perceived to solo slower, but I believe a large part of it is that the numbers and properties people tend to focus on seem to slant in the direction of Blasters while the other more subtle things all favor the Defender but go unnoticed. And those little things add up. I think that is what that calculation I referenced above was trying to tell me, but even I didn't fully believe it (but I continued to think about it, and the longer I couldn't refute it, the more suspicious I got: I was actually talking to Castle about Blasters just a couple months before the Defiance 2.0 changes kicked off).

In my case, the answer is clearly observer bias. Its hard to push a solo Defender to go any faster than its intrinsic normal soloing speed. You can push Blasters to go faster and take extra risk. So I'm probably thinking that Defenders are slow and Blasters are fast and every time they slow down its really my fault and not the archetype's fault. Blasters don't have to die, I just screwed up there. I was tired then, I forgot to use an insp then, I was distracted, I know better. I suspect a lot of other people do likewise: Blasters are fast and powerful, if only I did exactly the right thing at the right time. I just don't want to spend that much time thinking about it normally, but I could.

Psychologically speaking, that's an enormous perceptual skew to have to factor out of anyone's observations.

You yourself said you were only commenting on your own personal perceptions of Blasters. So if I'm commenting on problems globally with Blasters, they would likely be outside your personal experience.

What's more, there's a way to objectively decide one way or the other. If your personal evaluation of Blasters prior to Defiance 2.0 was that they were fine, that contradicts the objective evidence we have. This would prove that the problems the majority of other players were having were happening outside your experience, so you would not have knowledge of them.

The fact of the matter is for everyone there are certain areas their intuition reasonably represents reality, and other areas where it does not. To imply that yours does not in this area is neither a compliment nor an insult. Its simply a conjecture which explains the evidence.

I'm actually honestly not sure what "fine awareness" exists that could deduce what other people see from one's own personal gameplay. I have no such fine awareness myself. I don't even think it can actually exist. My ability to judge what other people likely see comes not directly from my own gameplay, but from observing other people play and comparing that judgment to the performance information we have. When my judgment fails to align with the facts, I conclude that's an area where I either underestimate or overestimate the likely performance of other players. I then adjust accordingly. For example, the performance information we have from the devs on Blasters prior to Defiance 2.0 is such that my assessment of Blasters was adjusted down radically, because had you asked me how well Blasters soloed, I would have said they soloed second-worst after Defenders. And I was wrong - Defenders soloed better. That caused me to bump Defenders upwards a bit relative to my own inclinations, and bump Blasters radically downward relative to my own inclinations. Because that's the only way to improve one's judgment.

Its actually the same process I use as a once and former trainer. Its extremely difficult to know what your students will think is easy or hard. You have to make guesses, then actually observe real students, and then be honest with yourself as to which of your guesses was right and which were wrong, and try to adjust your own judgment accordingly. I have never met anyone who just instinctively knew, right from the start. Except for people who turn out to be wrong.


The only thing "fine awareness" can extrapolate from personal experience, in my judgment, is to judge potential. But it cannot directly judge the degree to which other people will extract that potential. Even there, I can and often do disagree with people as to the potential of a situation. But I don't doubt that the ability to judge potential exists from normal gameplay. But I don't think anyone has the ability to judge what the average person will do intrinsically, without some way to educate that judgment with real data. Without that feedback, anecdotes have proven to be extremely vulnerable to skew.

The question is, were your perceptions radically different before Defiance 2.0. That is the way to judge your perceptions. If you perceived blasters to be very problematic before D2.0, and then fine afterwards, you *may* be right. If you've always perceived blasters to be fine, the numbers say that your perceptions must be skewed for some reason, because Defenders soloed better than Blasters prior to D2.0. Blasters cannot solo better, and somehow end up earning less stuff slower while solo. The devs don't even need the ability to add correctly to interpret that statistic correctly: there's no room for directional error.

If anything, the datamining that the devs do *understates* all balance problems, because its possible to be overpowered or underpowered only some of the time. Problems tend to average out, which means a problem they see is the tip of a much larger iceberg that has to be there creating enough bulk to let that small problem rise to the surface. If anything, their datamining overstates how often a player is "in combat" which is the only time they can really earn significant rewards. Everyone standing around chatting would tend to dilute any difference between any two things.

When the devs say there's no problem, there might be. When the devs say there is a problem, there has to be. When the devs say there's a very large problem that requires their immediate attention its likely to be an enormous problem that cannot possibly be misinterpreted as anything else. But its clearly something casual observers are not going to detect. That's not an insult: that is the objective truth. The objective truth is the problem was there, and the objective truth is that virtually no observers - myself included - saw it to the enormous extent that it must actually exist, or have existed at the time. Even I only thought the problems were significant, but not catastrophic. But they had to be, or the devs wouldn't have seen them as badly as they did. There is no other possibility besides deliberate fraud. That means everyone should calibrate their perceptions upward, or downward as the case may be. If you didn't see it then, you cannot rely on your perceptions to see the problems now. You have to analyze the situation more carefully. Gut instinct failed Blasters once before, it should not be given an opportunity to do so a second time.

The bottom line is if you cannot explain without an ad hoc explanation why Blasters so severely underperformed prior to D2, you cannot believe your perceptions about Blasters today is reliable. If you just don't believe they underperformed in spite of dev data to the contrary, that's your prerogative. However, I suspect that operating under the assumption the devs did not defraud the players in that regard will give me a significant advantage over people making that assumption when it comes to arguing whether Blasters deserve another look. That's an advantage I'm perfectly willing to accept.

That's an odd display bug, I will look into it.

Actually, that would be Murder by Death.

The players have long understood that City of Heroes is not "trinity balanced." But the question is whether the devs tried to do so, and were they making changes to push the game in that direction.

I would say from release to about Issue 5 was the Trinity Age (although technically we had four of those). Basically from release to the GDN and ED. You can see strong evidence that the devs were still thinking trinity throughout this age, although over time that softened (obviously, the devs didn't abruptly change they way they did things overnight).

From Issue 5 to about Issue 11 was the Solo Age. From GDN and City of Villains to the NCSoft buyout. City of Villains itself is remarkable evidence of the abandonment of the trinity philosophy: every archetype is designed to solo, almost as well as Scrappers themselves. But this period is also the "Fab 15" period, when development resources were low (Paragon Studios has admitted that at one point Cryptic had only about fifteen developers working to support City of Heroes for an extended period of time). The devs were highly constrained in what they could and could not do, and so even though their philosophy had shifted towards a more expansive concept of archetypes, they couldn't make too many radical changes. They had to be very targeted with their fixes and adjustments.

Issue 11 to the present has been the modern age. You not only see players getting better at building invention builds, you see the developers start an arms race with them designing increasingly more powerful critters. But beyond the numbers you start to see the developers change their view again, from "do what's necessary to allow everyone to solo at a minimum level" to "lets see what we can do to improve the gameplay of the archetypes." This is a dramatic shift made possible by having more resources. You can start to ask questions like "maybe we should consider redesigning Domination." Kheldians have been looked at from that perspective, as has been Tankers, Stalkers, Dominators - even Brutes, albeit gingerly. And the things that haven't been had been looked at in that way in the past because of rare necessity - Controllers, for example.

The most recent change has been Castle leaving and Black Scorpion taking over powers design. I liked Castle, I like Black Scorpion, but to me they are very different designers. I think Castle was more conservative than Black Scorpion, and Castle was more inclined to limit the discretion of his designers. I think Black Scorpion is more expansive, and willing to extend more latitude. I think that's neither good nor bad: its just my impression of the way they work. And I think many other players have seen the increased "aggressiveness" of the design team - for good and sometimes bad - in post I18ish stuff.

The combination of the general trend towards redefining archetypes in terms of desirable unique gameplay rather than "numerically possible to solo" or "fits team role" combined with the more experimental nature of the dev team today makes "the modern game" a fundamentally different place than it was at any other time, and its a recent thing.


I have three operational definitions of "broken." The first is "unplayable." But nothing is unplayable to me. You could cut my damage in half and force me to play without enhancements and Blasters wouldn't be unplayable. This definition of broken isn't useful for judging the design of the game, because its subjective, manipulatable (people love to say things are broken just to get a buff, then say they are awesome just to support them), and almost impossible to objectively satisfy.

Then there is "broken by the devs design criteria." If the devs say something should be X, and its actually Y, then its wrong. It doesn't matter if Y is just as good, it doesn't even matter if people prefer Y. If the devs aim for X and miss, then they missed. And its certainly true that if the devs say every archetype should have similar performance, then if one archetype fails that criteria by a large amount, its broken. And prior to the D2.0 changes, Blasters were broken. It doesn't matter how many anecdotes show up about how awesome Blasters are if the devs determine that most people fail to achieve anything close to the same performance with them as other things.

What's amazing is that the devs have never said that Blasters should be much harder to play and as a consequence they might progress slower for less experienced players, but they *have* said that about another archetype: Kheldians. And prior to I13, Blasters underperformed Kheldians.

But the modern game, the game really of the last two years or so, isn't even aiming at those simple targets. The Domination changes and other similar changes are showing that the devs are aiming for "every archetype should have a unique and desirable gameplay experience that does not impair their performance." I think there's no question Blasters fail to achieve that for the average player. They are "broken" in that regard because they lack a compass to guide the devs in what to give to blasters. Blasters only have a list of what not to give. In the modern game, being something with a list of DO-NOTs hanging around your neck and no list of DO is an enormous design penalty, and perhaps you need to have years of experience dealing with the devs to fully appreciate that.

What I don't need to guess is that the devs have admitted in the past that the Blaster tradeoff was never "right" to them, but that in the past they never had the resources to fully examine that problem. But that was the old game. They have the resources in the modern game, or they would not be tinkering with Stalkers, whose problems are less quantitative and more perceptual. If the devs have the time to address the problem that stalkers are perceived to have gameplay issues (dependence on stealth is a gameplay problem, not a quantitative problem, just as oscillating performance around Domination is a gameplay problem, not a quantitative problem) then they certainly have time to look at blasters that have *both* quantitative issues and gameplay problems.


And its not that I have problems playing Blasters and you don't, so I see a problem you do not. I've been playing Blasters since release, and I do fine. Statistically, probably better than 99.9% of all players given the underperformance data of I13. I see the problems in spite of my ability to play Blasters well. I play everything well. I played MA/SR at release and made it work. If making it work meant there was no problems, MA/SR would still be what it was at release - which today would be hopelessly underperforming.

This is probably massive overgeneralization, and there's certainly a lot of overlap, and no matter what else all of them are very good combat soldiers, but I tend to see Delta as the urban assault and hostage rescue people: the Army's version of SWAT. The Special Forces Green Berets I tend to see as the counter-insurgency people: the guys that go "in-country" so to speak and work with the locals. And I see the SEALs as the combat insertion specialists. If you need a small force there, and they have to start here, and there's no taxi service between the two, the SEALs are the ones you go to.

One other thing worth mentioning: in a colloquial if not military technical sense, the entire US Marine Corp is a form of special operations group, but not in the same way as the SEALs or Green Berets. They are explicitly defined to be the US expeditionary and reactionary readiness force. In other words, explicitly built into their reason for existence is the notion that they have a specific mission: be ready to deploy to anywhere in a large enough force to perform conventional warfare with limited assistance. And they have noteworthy specialties as well: they have a renowned sniper school, for example.

The US Marine Corp also has unique properties relative to other US military services. In the Marines, all enlisted personnel regardless of position or specialty is trained to be a combat infantry soldier, and all officers are trained to be combat infantry commanders (at least, so I've heard). That means technically speaking even the dude in the tent that operates the radios can pick up a rifle and take command of a Marine combat force if the situation called for it. You could say the Marine Corp is unconventional in their extreme focus on the conventional combat soldier.

Not if its actually on the calendar.

You'd be wrong, because Blaster DPS is not radically higher now than preI13 and preI13 Blasters were harder to solo for the average player, as evidenced by the fact the average player died more often playing Blasters than any other archetype by a wide margin. That is likely to be improved now with D2.0, but highly unlikely to be reversed completely.

But then again, even before the I13 changes and especially during them lots of people were saying the same thing: that blasters were fine, that they were among the better soloers, I don't have any problems and neither does anyone else I know, etc. All of those anecdotes and judgments turned out to be 100% false, so their credibility today is entirely suspect.

The same population numbers show that Blaster popularity drops with level, suggesting that with each level less and less people are playing Blasters, which can only happen if either the same number of people continue to play them but their leveling speed is very slow, or people are abandoning them at much higher rates than any other archetype.

It is an impressive build but its actually not softcapped to energy/negative in combat. The numbers shown are with unsuppressed stealth according to real numbers (two stealth buffs of 1.96% defense each are shown) which means that build actually has 43.32% defense to energy/negative on the back half of Barrier when stealth is suppressed in combat. Its also sitting at 45.82% defense to smash/lethal, which makes it particularly cascade vulnerable to defense debuffers.

For a blaster, its very strong (and expensive in multiple ways: tier 4 Destiny, both defense procs), but I still do not believe it is categorically stronger than a comparable scrapper build.

Up to 50% harder from level 1 to 20. The critters have more attacks than City of Heroes or Villains characters, and they acquire mez and debuff far earlier (as in: right from the start).

People keep saying this, but I do not believe it to be true. An ultrahigh end softcapped /mental blaster is going to be stronger than the *average* scrapper, but that's irrelevant. I don't think such a blaster would be stronger than a scrapper that put a similar amount of effort into mitigation. However, I'm willing to be proven wrong. Perhaps you can specifically test this Fire/Mental build against +2x8, +3x8, and +4x8 spawns of different high level critters - Carnies, Malta, Cimerorans, Arachnos, Longbow, and Rularuu, say. At what point does the build fail, if ever.

A video would be even better, so the exact tactics used to obtain that performance can be studied.

They probably don't have a tentative year set yet.

My testing tells me that on a system with minimal lag, you must have the next attack queued before the impact of the kick for the next attack to be boosted. Remember that what we see and what the server thinks is happening at one instant in time is slightly different due to network lag, and queuing an attack on the client doesn't queue it on the server instantly either.

Since no attack takes less than 0.6 seconds to cast and no less than 0.79 seconds to execute, the buff window can safely extend at least 0.75 seconds beyond the end of Eagle's Claw with essentially *zero* chance of a double buff, and as a practical matter it can extend at least 1.05 seconds beyond the end of Eagle's Claw's cast time because EC only buffs MA attacks and the fastest one has a 0.83 cast time (1.056 arcanatime).

It actually isn't in the sweet spot in my testing, which makes me wonder what the devs were seeing in their own testing. Its possible they tested it in a zero lag environment and ended up with at least a quarter second bigger buff window than any actual player has a chance of seeing.

I've mentioned it several times now, including to Castle before he left, but it keeps getting shelved for some reason.

Depends on which special forces you mean. In the United States, that term refers to two different things. The United States Army Special Forces which are also known as the Green Berets, and the Special Operations Command units, which are comprised of all the "special" units from the different military branches of service.

Because the different members of different special forces units come from different branches, they of course have different rank names (although they are all congruent to the E and O designations across services).

The units most identified with "special forces" by most people outside the military are the Army special forces operational detachment delta ("Delta Force"), the US Navy SEALs, and the US Army Special Forces (Green Berets). Less well known but still recognizable are the Force Recon units of the Marines, and the Airborne Rangers of the Army.

They are not all interchangeable and do not all do precisely the same things, although all of them can mess up anyone's day under almost any circumstances. My guess is that the best match for small unit strike teams would be the SEALs. A SEAL team has about 150 combat personnel and is commanded by a Commander, and is organized around platoons of about 20 men each, commanded by a lieutenant. They in turn can be organized into fire teams of about five men each, commanded by the highest ranking man in each unit, often an NCO.

As far as I know, all of the members of all of the special operations units are recruited from within their own branches of service, and as a rule are never "drafted" into those units directly. SEALs must serve in the Navy in some capacity before they can apply to be SEALs. Airborne Rangers must already be in the army to apply to Ranger school. There isn't any such thing as a "candidate" as such actually in the units, since any such person would be in a training facility, not in an actual operational unit.

When the game first launched, there was an actual explicit mindset to at least attempt to balance the different archetypes under the premise that four of them would explicitly need each other - need, not want - and the fifth, Scrappers, would be the solo specialist. Under that model of MMO design lots of things make sense. Very low tanker damage makes sense, for example, and Tanker damage mods were 0.6 at release (25% lower than the 0.8 modifier they have now, not counting the Bruising resistance debuff Tankers also got). Vulnerable blasters make sense, low damage high control controllers make sense. The devs didn't always succeed they way they wanted to, but that was the plan.

That plan changed over time. The devs decided that a lot of the things that were totally broken in this game were perhaps better broken. Defender and Tankers could actually solo fairly easily for the most part - somewhat slowly, but easily. When they changed their mindset, a new rule emerged: everyone should be able to solo at a reasonable rate.

That last part, "at a reasonable rate" meant offense. Defense doesn't earn XP, offense does. So for anything to solo at a reasonable rate, it must have a reasonable amount of offense, and at all levels.

If an archetype was focused on anything else besides damage, this was a guaranteed plus. You got defense, or control, or buff/debuff because that's what your archetype definition required you to have, and then the devs were going to give you damage for free on top of that. That's *the* singular source of the Tanker mod increase and containment, for example. That one reason, and that one reason alone.

But if an archetype was focused *on* damage, this new rule meant nothing. If you already had enough offense to solo, there was no mandate to have more. And a distinguishing differentiator for Blasters, that they were supposed to be the damage specialist - not the ranged specialist, but the damage specialist - suddenly became diluted.

And it is damage that blasters are supposed to be the best at, not ranged damage. From the instant the archetype was originally invented as the Melee Damage/Ranged Damage archetype, to when it was released and the devs placed limits on the ability for blasters to leverage being only ranged, to direct questions posed to the devs which they publicly answered, the official mission statement of blasters is to be the best at damage, period. Anyone who says otherwise is just making it up.

If launch was the era of trinity balancing, and the years after were the age of solo balancing, then the most recent moves by the devs suggest that they are continuing that trajectory and no longer adjusting archetypes based solely on what they absolutely need to function at a minimal level, but on the basis of attempting to translate the archetype's conceptual vision into actual gameplay to the best extent possible. In the "modern game" its not enough to survive and its not enough to not be worthless: the devs want each archetype to actually be good at something, to be noteworthy for something, or at least to appear to have been designed with a set of tools intended to create a unique gameplay experience. That's explicitly true with regard to the changes made recently to Dominators, where there was no quantitative reason to alter the mechanics of domination. The issue was whether the devs felt the gameplay experience of having highly variable performance based on domination was actually desirable. And as they put it, the "jekyll and hyde" character of Dominators was not desirable, at least to many players and ultimately to the devs themselves.

Blasters have no modern game definition. They are still operating under the old trinity based definition of not having mez protection and mitigation because they are supposed to need someone else. Its not because they are too powerful to have it. Its because of an old principle that no longer applies to this game. And even though the devs explicitly stated that Blasters should be the damage dealing specialists in melee and range they somehow let Blaster melee damage modifiers fall to third place. Even the out of date definition they have is not followed.


And even the devs have acknowledged that things are different now. Specifically in the context of defense and debuffs they have stated that while things were different in the past, they believe the defense metagame has become much stronger due to the proliferation of debuffing and invention accessible defense. The devs know the myth is no myth, because they act like the game is different now. If they design differently, its not a myth by definition because the game is different if the devs are making it so. QED.

I suggested it once to Castle, and once to Black Scorpion, and once to Synapse. And in all three cases I also reminded them that the playerbase would go, well, ballistic is what I will say here. Its not what I said to them.

If you increase the damage of sniper blasts, the only thing you're supposed to do is increase endurance and recharge according to the formulas. No power pays for doing more or less damage than any other.

However, for single target attacks the critical parameter for a cycling attack - one intended to be used in an attack chain - is DPA. And all snipes have extremely bad DPA.

If they did not have extra long range and were not interruptible, they would be objectively underpowered by virtue of having horrendous DPA. And the extra range is of limited usefulness when other blaster attacks can't reach that range and interruptibility is a penalty and not an advantage.

Buffing sniper shots would be a burst damage problem if sniper blasts did more damage than can be considered reasonable in one shot. But that's obviously false because lots of things do more. Blaster snipes do only 2.76 DS. Total focus and its analogs do 3.56, along with Dominator snipes. Energy Transfer does 4.56. Assassin's strike attacks, the closest analog to blaster snipes that exist, do between 5.0 and 7.0 when they crit.

Unless you are a corner case, and the numbers say snipes are not, single target attacks should be judged primarily on the basis of DPA. The typical blaster snipe that deals 2.76 DS with 4.33 cast time has a DPA of 0.64, 0.61 at 4.488 arcanatime. In terms of blaster single target DPA, that is near the bottom of all blaster single target damaging attacks. In fact, one of the few single target ranged attacks that has worse DPA than that is Bitter Freeze Ray, which most people don't consider a genuine damaging attack (DPA: 0.53, 0.5 under arcanatime).


No one I'm aware of is asking for being able to one-shot AVs, but its worth noting that if sniper blasts were somehow scaled up to be able to do that, with their current DPA such an attack would root the player for over six minutes. That's still good but not great, and its a testimony to the extremely high cost that sniper shots extract from their users that it can make the amazing seem almost undesirable.

I often wonder if Paragon Studios reversed the labels for Brutes and Tankers on J_B's game client specifically, if that would solve his problem. He'd be playing something called a Tanker that he claims has enough mitigation to be tankers, and has the offensive mechanic he claims tankers were supposed to have, which would then seem to eliminate all problems.