Arcanaville

It was never intended to do that. It was intended to prove the opposite, that even the most trivial of standards for female roles was surprisingly difficult to meet.

You're looking at it wrong. The powerful difference between tohit and accuracy is mostly due to the fact that defense subtracts from base tohit first, and then accuracy is applied to the final number.

So if you have a critter with 50% base tohit and you have 45% defense, final chance to hit is 5%. Adding 5% tohit increases that to 10%, doubling your chance to get hit. A whopping 40% accuracy bonus only increases final chance tohit from 5% to 5% * 1.4 = 7%, an increase of - not coincidentally - 40%.

Here's an illustration of the difference. You have three players, one with 45% defense, one with 25% defense, and one with zero defense. If the attacker gains a 14% tohit buff, then the first player goes from being hit 5% of the time to 19% of the time. His damage increases by 280%. The second goes from getting hit 25% of the time to 39% of the time; his damage goes up by only 56%. The last player goes from getting hit 50% of the time to 64% of the time, an increase of only 28%.

But if the attacker gained an accuracy bonus of +28%, then the first player goes from getting hit 5% of the time to 6.4% of the time, the second from 25% to 32% of the time, and the third from 50% of the time to 64% of the time, and in all cases the player experiences an increase in incoming damage of 28% more damage.

That's the difference between handing out tohit buffs and handing out accuracy buffs to NPCs.

At the moment I am sitting, and only my chair is supporting me.

I assume that's what you are referring to, because it is customary when one accuses someone of not telling the truth to be able to produce an attributed statement which is factually incorrect.

And please stop guessing. We've already established you're not that amazing at it.

I'm not sure if I should be insulted or impressed with the fact that he's trying to convince people that "critters used to factor in how much time it would take for an attack to become available which had a range comparable to how far the critter was from your location" is obvious to him. That's something you say when you have never seen source code, or for that matter a computer, before.

Its like if someone wanted to convince people he was the bestest pilot in the world by telling people he's one of the only people American Airlines trusts with their Miami to Saturn route.

At triple the numbers, there would be almost no reason to play any other tanker.

As to the scaling passives, you can lobby for them to be larger, but they are not bugged. They are explicitly functioning as intended, and there is no rule that mandates they scale upward with tanker modifiers. Those resistances don't even use scrapper or tanker modifiers in the first place: they are hardcoded to generate the same result regardless of archetype.

That's just one of those things, like how Hurl is a ranged attack that uses the melee modifier, so tankers, scrappers, and brutes don't have to actually pay the range penalty built into their damage modifiers. Its like that.

Eventually, maybe, but there is a time limit. You will need the PA and the Decoys focused on Marauder, and that means clearing first to prevent distraction. That will burn up time even if you deploy the acids fast. And while Ill/Cold like most debuffing Illusion controllers is tough against one hard target, trying to solo clear the initial adds around Marauder is a different situation entirely. Sometimes five bosses can be more dangerous to Illusion than two Giant Monsters.

Then you have to wear down Marauder, while dealing with the fact that even though Phantasm is an all ranged critter he likes to commit suicide by rushing the target, Marauder has a PBAoE kill-all button, and likes to jump around forcing the fight to reset several times.

Even after all that, if there was no time limit I would not have any doubts an Illusion controller could ultimately be made that could do it, because it becomes a divide and conquer fight. But with a time limit, the tactical situation changes, and I'm less inclined to see how its likely a player could do it all in one go.

Are your eyes in the same room as your fingers when you type, or do they sometimes bang out things your brain never gets a chance to audit?

The issue, for those that are curious, is that critters used to factor in how much time it would take for an attack to become available which had a range comparable to how far the critter was from your location, as a factor in whether to attack, move, or wait. Buffing recharge would change the way the critters made decisions which would not necessarily show up in QA testing, and furthermore many issues would only turn up in specific dynamic situations where players and critters were moving around in particular ways.

The fact that there was code that told the critters to take range into consideration when deciding what to do included an algorithm that upon careful analysis was not stable. You could therefore not rely on a critter using the powers you gave it just by looking at the power definitions and checking to see if the powers recharged in a way that allowed them all to be useful. And dynamically changing recharge made things even worse, because critters could get confused by the changing values of time to recharge on their attacks.

Although the bug was often triggered by recharge buffs, its source was the range factoring component of critter AI, something that was changed during I18 development.

To say this was non-obvious would be an understatement. It took weeks of careful testing under a very systematic set of conditions to uncover the range-specific component of the bug, and weeks more testing to confirm that neutralizing it would greatly improve critter functionality if the code were changed, and weeks more testing to determine that a particular algorithmic replacement would be in all cases better or identical to the original if it was changed.


This is not by any stretch an isolated incident. When I discovered that some female characters attacked slower than male characters under certain circumstances even though they had the same power definitions, that would have been opaque to anyone not intimately familiar with how the game engine and game client worked. Why adding some new totally unrelated animations caused Elude to trigger the whirlwind animation when you were falling during activation is not something you can just guess at. The Oil Slick ignition problem was extremely non-trivial to locate. Why we can sometimes with some element of reproducibility unroot ourselves is a subtle flaw in the way the animation system works. Race conditions have created strange bugs. To this day I've never found out what the source of the immortal critter bug was: there was a bug where sometimes a critter would spawn that you could not kill. You could pound on it all you wanted but its health would not move. I actually had Castle yank the logs of me doing that to one of those critters to analyze, and he came up empty. The problem eventually went away, but I never heard what was causing that. Keep in mind the critters were targetable, damageable, but their health didn't move (anyone playing TOR now is having a twitching fit).

I wish there were lots of people capable of being expert black box debuggers. Then the game would be better and I wouldn't have to do it. I love City of Heroes, but one thing I like about playing other MMOs is that I'm an ignorant anonymous nobody.

The only time I believe you can say they rebooted Bond was the 2006 Casino Royale, and there was a four year gap between Die Another Day and Casino Royale. Longer, but not excessively so. The biggest gap was the six year gap between the last Timothy Dalton Bond (License to Kill, 1989) and the first Pierce Brosnan Bond (Goldeneye, 1995).

Reboots are less about the time between incarnations, and more about whether the reboot is strong enough on its own to compete favorably with people's recollections of the previous incarnation. People have had to do that often with Bond anyway, so when Casino Royale said "lets start over, and lets introduce a new Bond while we're at it" movie audiences were already used to changing faces: restarting continuity was almost a relief than a struggle.

I think honestly Spiderman left such a weak final impression that the Amazing Spiderman will not have to compete much. Its going to live or die based on whether its a good movie, not based on living up to any expectations from the previous trilogy.

The correct answer was me, when it was me saying me. Now that its you saying me, the correct answer is no longer me.

Television is also a programmer, and even when working on this game had no real input into the way powers and powersets were designed. I'm simply saying your assertion that most of the epics don't have mitigation powers isn't true. If you believe they are not strong enough, that's a different discussion that won't get addressed here.

I've heard of people duoing Lambda, but the problem with attempting a single player multibox attempt is that you can only really control one character at a time. Two players controlling two characters tends to be far stronger than one player controlling two or even three characters. So my guess is that the final fight will likely require fillers that can speed up the fight with Marauder without needing much babysitting. I don't think one Ill/Cold will be enough, and I'm not convinced one Ill/Cold can take out the crates and vessels fast enough to interleave. I don't think the pets engage fast enough and I don't think you'd be fast enough on just your own attacks.

Perfectly willing to be proven wrong on that score, though.

Nowhere in this thread did I lie about anything. Nowhere in this thread did I specifically say anything about the game or its functionality that wasn't the unobfuscated truth either.

And the ultimate impossible to fake method of proving you're a cracker-jack code debugger that doesn't need to see the code to find and fix bugs is to find and fix some bugs in a program you are not allowed to see the code in, such as this game. There's lots of them to find, and the task isn't impossible because I've done it about a half dozen times. For someone that is awesome at it, this should present no problem at all.

The problem which everyone else recognizes in this circumstance, is that its easy to make claims on the internet until you just happen to run into the one person out of a thousand that can challenge them directly and unequivocally. And then you go all in thinking everyone's bluffing, and lose your shirt to aces over kings.

Its always a good thing when its me, and never a good thing when its somebody else.

I was buying them cheap but slowly because I didn't know Unicron was going to come along and inhale the entire market so now I'm just happy to be rich enough to slot what I want and make a couple bucks on the side while everyone else engages the market like Target has Elmo on sale Christmas Eve

Since I7 critters get accuracy bonuses for being higher level, up to +5. They only gain increased tohit starting at +6.

There are a set of new critter types that are identical to the normal minion/LT/Boss/EB/AV classes but have 64% base tohit instead of 50%, generally referred to as the Praetorian class critters. These critters act like they have +14% tohit on them all the time. The spawns in DA appear to be of this class, not the normal class of critters. Outside of DA, the only place you see this class of critters are *some* of the critters in Incarnate trials, and the DE that spawn in tip missions for some unknown reason.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.

Television has actually moved on to a new project at Paragon Studios. However, I can say that most of the epic power pools for Corruptors and Defenders have resistance or defense toggles. Scorpion Shield in particular has smash/lethal/energy defense. Mu, Soul, and Leviathan have resistance toggles. Dark, Electric, and Power, and Psychic mastery also have res toggles.

Actually, it wouldn't be technically hard, and it wouldn't require a ton of resources to create. The real problem is doing this sort of thing cuts to some foundational assumptions about how archetypes and powersets work, something a lot of different devs have different and strong opinions about.

In other words, this is the classic example of a change that would get stuck in committee.

I think its a little too low period, but I wouldn't scale them up for tanks. Applying the logic that they should increase commensurate with the tanker mods would mean they would scale up to 80% resistance, which is too high. I think the fact that SR tankers can soft-cap right out of the box itself is higher than you'd normally expect a tanker to get, and I think that allowing the defense to scale normally and the resistance to not scale is a compromise to prevent the set from getting too powerful in non-exotic damage mitigation.

Interesting thing about the scaling passives: their behavior has different properties depending on how numerically strong they are. For example, on SR scrappers no matter how low in health you go, the SR passives *slow down* damage, but don't reverse it. In other words, you don't ever actually get stronger as your health drops: the resistances don't "overtake" your drop in health.

Stacking slotted tough (tanker) on passives that scaled from 0-80% (60% to zero as they work now) would actually make SR tankers *stronger* as they lost health. Sounds counter-intuitive, but its true. At 60% health it would take a burst of damage equal to about 78% of max health to kill the tanker instantly from that level. But at 20% health, it would take 86%. At 10% health it would take 100%. It would actually be harder to one-shot an SR tanker with smash lethal damage when the tanker was at 10% health than at 70% health.

I don't think the devs want to go there.

Good karma is useless unless there is something to spend it on.

I do not believe this to be mathematically impossible. I've thought about it myself, actually. I think it starts with a bunch of bots/sonic mastermind fillers getting rebirth powers and triple level shift. That would get expensive because you can't do that with free fillers.

Add in teamwide insps and nukes for everyone, focus on the grenades in the collection phase, and try to focus fire on Marauder. Add some FF in there and toggle in a bunch of repulsion toggles to keep adds away. Team teleport to pull the constellation to Marauder when he leaps.




Oh wait, this isn't the scrapper forum.

Built like him, maybe: his proportions aren't too out of whack. But the article writer goes on to say that *if* you were built like that, you would go out of your way to dress like the two costumes shown, metallic speedos and Liberace's version of Dracula, because no amount of silly is too much to show off your perfect body. Every man's dream is not just to be built like Namor, its to be a color blind Venice Beach exhibitionist.

Hopefully, the process is an extension of the "slot one power at a time" methodology. 90% of it above focuses on just improving the slotting of one specific power at a time, and the set bonuses are just gravy. The Crushing Impacts, for example, are mostly looking for a nice melee set that provides good slotting. The fact that their set bonuses look good on the surface is a plus, but no thought was put into their actual numbers: the list itself just looks good. Also, your defense comes almost entirely from defense powers, and your attacks are free to be slotted any way you want. The process doesn't try to use attack set bonuses to build defense. That isn't always optimal, but it is simpler: defense for defense, offense for offense, extra bonuses when you can get them, and the only real exception is Gaussian, because its just such a good option everyone eventually learns its out there.