Arcanaville
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Posts
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Quote:More insidiously, it was because the devs felt Blasters should not be able to neutralize bosses. Scrappers are designed to fight them, Tankers are designed to survive them, and Controllers are designed to control them. Blasters are designed to run from them.Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
There is precedent for objection. Energy Manipulation's Total Focus used to be mag 4. It was nerfed to mag 3 because the devs felt blasters shouldnt have burst mezzing that is stronger than that of controllers. -
Quote:Apparently the odds were not ever in my favor.Originally Posted by Rajani Isa
"People"
As in the old saying "A person is smart, a people are stupid" -
Quote:The SS/Willpower Brute was pulling aggro from the Electric Armor/EM tanker? After the Electric Tanker went in first?Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
Without crucial additional information, such as who had IOs and who was operating on old SOs and six slotted Brawl, I'll take a stab and say the SS Brute was probably pulling aggro from your EM Tanker, who was also using Power Sink heavily. The Brute's toggles likely dropped from both the Carnies end drain and from any Dark Ring Mistresses slapping Mask of Cheapmechanization on them.
Also the fact that Static Shield is brokenly good in this instance doesn't hurt.
In short, the reason your Tanker had it so easy was probably because you were being carried and your power set had an inherent advantage.
But that's what happens when comparing four very different power sets.
Very interesting theory, Mr. Charleston. However, leave out one important point... -
Quote:Originally Posted by Venture
Falsifiability is a principle from philosophy of science used to evaluate scientific hypotheses. It has no applicability to literary criticism. Arguing over whether (e.g.) the statement "in Shakespeare's Hamlet the titular character feigns madness to deceive his uncle" is falsifiable is gibberish. Arguing that statements must be falsifiable to have validity is the essence of logical positivism, a school of philosophy that is Deader Than Disco.
Falsifiability is a word, a word that means "cannot be proven false by example." Its applicable to any discussion that requires a way of saying "cannot be proven false by example." -
Quote:It specifically means the person making the assertion has made one that cannot be disproved. The notion that this is because its actually true as you imply is falsifiable.Originally Posted by Venture
No, it just means the statement isn't a scientific one. The statement could be an axiom, or a tautology, or a theorem derived through valid rules of inference, etc. This isn't a discussion about science; falsifiability is not a useful metric.
More specifically, since there exists no counter-example to a statement that is falsifiable, individual supporting examples cannot be given significant weight. -
Quote:Actually, my recollection is that the Hulk often said "Hulk is the strongest one there is" or words to that effect not to punctuate his offensive prowess, but rather during or after surviving an attack to punctuate his belief that nothing could defeat him.Originally Posted by Vox Populi
"The angrier Hulk gets, the stronger he gets" is the character's core concept. "Hulk smash!", "Hulk is the strongest one there is!", etc. Hulk is pure, unbridled offense.
In fact, I believe that "Hulk is the strongest one there is" most often referred more directly to the assertion that nothing could defeat the Hulk, not that the Hulk could defeat anything.
Of course, its the Hulk. I think the two concepts are largely inseparable most of the time to him. But there are lots of things that for a variety of reasons the Hulk could not actually defeat, but he still believed could not defeat him either.
And if you buy into the Peter David run's assertion that the Hulk is actually a fragment of Banner's psyche that was created when he was abused as a child, such personalities can lash out but are designed primarily to protect the person. "Hulk is strongest there is" is the assertion of a protective personality saying nothing can hurt me. -
Quote:I know what a Nova is.Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
Do you actually know what a taser is?
When I fail to get the ability to mitigate damage by making everything immediately dead, I will move on to other tools.Quote:Dead enemies cannot fight back
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blasters already have the tools they need -
Quote:The fact that a statement is true does not make it not falsifiable. The fact that a statement is not falsifiable implies there exists no test that can confirm the statement is true or false, and by extension the claim that the statement is true is generally of limited or no value.Originally Posted by Venture
Well, that's because it's true, and therefore cannot be false.
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Quote:Because in the Hulk fury acts far more to make him indestructible than offensively powerful, while Brute fury does the reverse.Originally Posted by Darth_Khasei
TBH, this has become a bit wacky at this point. How is it that the the fury effect in Brutes and how the Hulk becomes stronger the more he rages not considered the central point in all of this?
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Quote:He would be, if Rage buffed resistance. SS/WP Brute is probably the closest mechanical player-available analog, though.Originally Posted by houtex
He's a SS/WP Brute, hands down.
My only hedge on that is that Brutes have more offense than defense, and Tankers have more defense than offense, and when I compare the Hulk's own offense to his own defense when enraged, I believe the Hulk is usually depicted to be tougher than he is strong: The Hulk can't knock out the Hulk, the Hulk can survive the Hulk, basically. That makes him more of a Tanker. -
Quote:Significantly useful, which is why of the four other archetypes specifically designated to be damage dealers (Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators), all four are rarely if ever unable to use any of their powers due to mez. Blasters get to use three, which is a lot better than zero, and somewhat worse than all.Originally Posted by Vanden
Being able to blast while held isn't useful?
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Quote:Were fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.Originally Posted by Ghost Falcon
I monitor some threads, but not all threads. I respond to PMs when I can. I also get pointed to certain threads via PMs. I respond openly when I can. The post I made the other day was made at ~2:00 in the morning Pacific.... My takeaways were:
1) never respond to a thread at 2 in the morning
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2) never respond to a thread at 2 in the morning on an iPad that doesn't have a bluetooth keyboard
, and
3) typos by tablet stink
(...and can you please cut me some slack on the post since obviously I was paying attention at 2 in the morning during the middle of the week? I could have just ignored the whole thread, but then if I had, then players would have missed out on using me as a punching bag for a couple of days, and where would the fun have been in that?
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Quote:When ED went in I made the point of saying that while most people were incorrectly focused on erroneous effects of ED (like the notion that it radically reduced damage output) its real negative impact was in taking away certain slotting options that made certain powers make sense. One of them was the fact that for nukes and snipes there is an intrinsic penalty to giving up damage for recharge, because those are burst tools.Originally Posted by Airhammer
Im coming very late to this party.. but I remember back in the day when my Snipe could be slotted Pre-Ed with one Acc and Five damage.. then it was worth the time to fire and the end cost because with BU and AIM I was going to definitely take out at least ONE LT.. That made me very valuable on teams with Airhammer. Sapper.. got him.. Avalance Shaman.. got him.. annoying minion or LT.. done... I could also put a pretty big hurt on a boss.. usually enough to take him out in 3-6 attacks if all worked out well..
And Nukes were actually devastating...
What's interesting about snipes is that even if they were not interruptible, no blaster snipe would be a good option for a normal attack chain because their collective DPA is so horrendously bad. So forcing them to be slotted like any other attack basically reduced them to pulling tools. -
Quote:Blasters are on the devs' radar. I blipped it there personally. When specifically they will get looked at is a question of development resources and time, but I've been told they will consider a pass on Blasters after they've have concluded their publicly stated intent to review the QoL list for Tankers.Originally Posted by Hopeling
I'd be a lot more confident in letting the devs handle it if they didn't have 7+ years of not handling it under their belts so far. We have no indication that it's even on their radar.
Also, Blasters have been looked at in the past, but I believe that what was done was not sufficient to soften Blaster weaknesses while conversely lots of other things have been commensurately buffed in ways which further neutralize Blaster advantages.
In other words, its true Blasters haven't been buffed as much as they should be, but a large element of their problem is not that they weren't buffed, but everything else was in ways that intrude on Blasters as focused damage dealers. -
Quote:You are correct: the fact that powers might be considered "annoying" or "not worth it" do not drive the devs to change things unless that annoyance or valuelessness is extreme.Originally Posted by Darth_Khasei
See this is where there could be a misunderstanding of what I am saying or not saying so let me try to clear this up right now before it goes any further down this kind of path.
I am not here to defend this or that position per se which if you read up thread, my comments about the pulling out and letting the devs handle this signify this clearly.
I don't see annoying and not worth it as driving forces that will have the "devs" say oh we agree that tier 9 powers are annoying and not worth it and therefore they need to be changed. That is what I am saying nothing more nothing less. There is no need for me to state facts beyond that point because that is the only point that "I" was making period.
However, those features would be considered if it could be demonstrated that Blasters needed a buff, and the devs were considering where to focus their attention. I think the case can be made that Blasters deserve *both* a quantitative balance pass *and* a QoL pass, and in that respect both snipes and crashing nukes should be on the table as two of the least practical, and yet most design-significant elements of blaster primaries. It was for similar reasons that the devs paid particular attention to Domination, and Assassin's Strikes, and how Containment functioned in iTrials. These are signature elements of their respective archetypes, and deficiencies in those areas are therefore particularly problematic. -
Quote:There's two. We don't have a globally unique character naming system, and no universally acceptable method of generating one. That hurdle would need to be resolved before a merge occurred, either by picking one or by punting and forcing everyone from one server to transfer to another.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Nah, there's no technical hurdles there.
Then there's supergroups and bases.
Its not a *limitation* because they are theoretically surmountable, but they are hurdles and not low hurdles either. -
Something to consider. A while back I noted that the fact that we have fast and effective travel powers contributes to this game's casual teaming. The fact that we can log in any character and travel to almost any destination quickly means PUGs are easier to assemble. Take away travel powers, and both alting and casual teaming would suffer as side effects.
Right now, only the leader reads mission dialog. If it was very involved and actually fun to run through the dialog trees, mission owners would face a devil's choice: run them solo so you can take in the dialog at your own pace and never invite other people to play with you when running those missions, run them teamed and skip most of the dialog so people don't have to stand around and wait for you, or run them teamed and make your team suffer while you spend minutes running through the dialog. Or run them with teams skipping the dialog and them running the entire thing again solo in Ouroboros so you eventually get to see the dialog.
There's no question this would detract from casual teaming, because in essence there's a cost to teaming, whereas now that cost is minimal. Even at that, some people complain about the cost in terms of not being able to see the minimal dialog that occurs unless they are the mission owner. How many people have *ever* seen the opening dialog to Lambda, or Keyes? I'll bet most of the people who have run Minds of Mayhem don't know you can get the story at the end by talking to the contacts after completion and before exiting - where there is the branching dialog you mention to a degree.
A certain recently released MMO addresses this by making a dialog system in which every member of the team sees and can participate in the dialog - random rolls affect which person's decision affects the group as a whole, but individual players can get certain dialog-related rewards for their own choices even if their choice doesn't direct the conversation. In this way, everyone gets to see, everyone gets to participate, and there's even a small reward system for participating in teams so players are encouraged to participate in dialog with other team members instead of exclusively alone.
This is probably one of those game features that can't be arbitrarily changed in isolation without the wings of the butterfly changing the weather somewhere. So while I like the idea of more involved dialog personally, I don't think its as simple as just adding in pervasively without changing the dialog system or the game play of the game to adjust. -
Quote:They're employing the alternate strategy of not paying him enough to be able to drive out of the county.Originally Posted by TonyV
That having been said, will someone at NCsoft/Paragon Studios PLEASE give Andy a ****load more money before he starts getting any bright ideas?
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At the very least, since the rewards use the email interface there's an entire email body that is mostly wasted except for the item count. They could put the entire text description of the item in there, or alternatively they could put a Real Numbers hyperlink for the item in there.
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Quote:I didn't say you were handwaving, I said it would require a lot of handwaving for Prometheus' description of the Well of the Furies to resolve the problem with Origin of Power.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
I wasn't handwaving, what I said is basically how Prometheus explains the well, or at least what I understand his explanation to mean.
The fundamental problem is that Origin of Power claims there used to be one origin for all power that the five current origins desend from. But without defining science and magic in very specific ways, that is illogical. Furthermore, Origin of Power also claims there was a time before magic as we know it, but that magic itself descends from the gods. That seems to elevate magic to have a root source that is still magical in nature, but simply unwieldable by humans until the war of the gods.
I'm specifically ignoring statements like this, by the way:
There's all kinds of wrong there.Quote:Here's an interesting fact. Did you know that there were no mutants as we call them before 1938? Now can you tell me why?
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The correct answer was that it was the same year that the atom was split. Many believe that this had a profound effect on every living thing. That somehow this basic division rippled throughout every atom, causing the split from what we once considered normal to something else. -
Quote:But if all of the narrators are unreliable, what's the point of having an Origin of Power story arc in the first place. The arc is almost nothing but exposition. An arc that is nothing but unreliable exposition about a subject the players themselves rarely agree upon and the devs then proceed to do nothing with is basically saying that the reason Origin of Power is not nonsensical is because its pointless instead.Originally Posted by Codewalker
I always consider Percy Winkley to be an unreliable narrator.
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Quote:I believe that someone with no knowledge about the participation system but full knowledge of everything publicly known about how the game's reward systems work could come to the conclusion that most straight forward ways for the participation system to function *could* swing the odds of the highest tier rewards more than you might otherwise naively think it would based on varying participation inputs.Originally Posted by UberGuy
For what it's worth, there is a kind of streak breaker inherent in the existence of Empyrean Merits. However, I'll still agree that there's something that feels wrong to me about the ability for people to have better luck, and then to be free to spend those Empyreans on something else besides iProgress. I've never needed to spend Empyreans on components, for example.
There's also something that feels wrong about the weighting based on league "performance". Snow Globe and I have both posted our long-term reward rates, divided up by date. My sample set is larger than SG's, but by odds of Rare and Very Rare rewards over the long term seem noticeably higher than his. That could be "luck", but I suspect it also has something to do with the difference in the measured "performance" of leagues available to us on our respective servers. If that were really the case, it would strike me as particularly sucky that access to stronger leagues would have an additional dimension of influence over progress rates beyond the fairly obvious ones of running more trials and finishing them more quickly.
I seriously doubt it's going anywhere, but I'm not very satisfied with the broad nature of the iTrial reward scheme. (Unlike some others, I'm think I'm reasonably happy with the trials themselves.)
Consider how often this game's documentation, functionality, design, and implementation conflates percentages and percentage points. -
Quote:Its an ability.Originally Posted by BrandX
Wouldn't all that fall in line with the whims of the writer more than some ability? Like the complaints people have with Batman.
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Quote:Technically, the Well hasn't been explicitly and directly linked to Origin of Power (as far as I know), so I can concede that**. But Origin of Power arc itself unambiguously stipulates that *something* is the source of the super-abilities of the five origins, and for it to be able to explain both magic and technology and be the wellspring of both, it essentially has to be magic, given the expansive definition of magic that is promoted by the game.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
My point is that the nature of the Well doesn't make it magical, necessarily. It probably has more in common with cosmic entities than it does with Doctor Strange. That viewing it as another order of magic strikes me as sticking with a rigid framework where there never has been and probably never will be a rigid framework - which is to say, CoH's origin setup.
Say all the Well really does is raise the ceiling on human potential, but doesn't really define how people can reach that potential. When people do reach the limits of that potential, they can access the Well directly and transcend those limitations.
But that still doesn't strike me as inherently magical. The existence of the Well may simply be one of the consequences of sapience.
The corner the devs have painted themselves into is fundamental, and has nothinig to do with semantics or dictionaries. It has to do with the fact that the devs *want* all five origins in combination to be able to explain *any* origin - if they don't, the players can come up with a conceptual origin that can't be created. But then they want to make a sixth origin that is a higher origin and is substantively different from the other five. That is a logical contradiction.
We don't get to pick *power level* upon origin, so if the higher origin was an advanced version of one of the five, say science or magic, there would be no logical contradiction. But by claiming its different and beyond the five, the devs are saying here are five things which collectively cover everything, and here's a sixth thing that is different from the five.
** I should say not only do I concede that, its essentially how I would personally explain the Well in the absence of Origin of Power. I would say that the Well is orthogonal to the five origins: the origins are paths to power and the Well is the thing that defines the *potential* of those paths to power. But to interpret the Well's story and Origin of Power in that way requires a lot of hand waving. You basically have to interpret the contacts in Origin as being highly unreliable narrators. -
Quote:You would be surprised. Just how they give those weights out can give away a ton of information to someone like me. You have to understand I've been playinig twenty questions with the devs for a long time, and its at the point now when sometimes the specific way they say "I can't talk about that" answers my question.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Come on, give me a break. Giving out the reward table weights would hardly qualify as "accidentally giving away the store".
This is not theoretical. How Zwillinger posted the weights for the superpacks told me something it didn't likely tell anyone else, albeit something I can't/won't comment on.