Arcanaville

If you believe that, then you believe the "if I can you can" argument is invalid which is my actual point. If you believe the "if I can you can" argument is valid, you've offered no reason why it shouldn't apply to all badges, and the argument itself specifies no exceptions or objective criteria for exceptions.

How a badge is awarded is irrelevant to the assertion that "if I can get it you can get it" because the actual words say the fact that I can get it by itself proves anyone else can. If I actually believed that, I wouldn't comment on whether the mechanics of a particular badge that people have already been awarded are reasonable. I don't. But if the fact that other players have been awarded the badge is both necessary and sufficient to prove a badge's requirements are perfectly fine, then it would be hypocritical to invent ad hoc exceptions to that rule that favor dismissing other people's objections while preserving one's own.

The day I'm universally considered a detriment for using knockback on teams is probably the day I go looking for a game with a saner playerbase. However, on a scale from one to a hundred, where one represents minimal complaint and a hundred represents universal complaints about knockback, I am currently safely experiencing a zero.

These changes do come along right as I've started leveling a Grav/Time controller (because gravity/time, just gotta). It'll be interesting to see how these changes affect my ability to deploy everything in my arsenal, because I always try to.

I've seen things that can only be described as the NPCs going zombie. I was on an outdoor map with Council, and I killed a bunch of council in roughly the same spot. One of them fell down onto the other bodies twitching, and then a few seconds later flipped onto his stomach and swam away down the street before then diving head first into the ground and disappearing over thirty feet away.

I was so shocked it didn't occur to be to record it in any way. Which is a shame, because I haven't been able to reproduce that occurrence in quite as dramatic a fashion, although I've seen simpler renditions of it, generally involving critters with weapons.

Any thought to my suggestion from a while back to make dimension shift debuff regeneration to zero if and only if it shifts the target. That way if you shift a target so that you can't attack it, at least it doesn't regenerate while shifted. Allowing the critters inside the power to regenerate while shifted is in effect a win for them. If the power stopped regen at the same time it prevented us from damaging the targets then it would be a form of combat "pause" rather than an actual shelter for the targets.

Targets that resist the shift should also be unaffected by the -regen for the duration of the power.

Except true memory leaks have been uncommon, and platform-specific. That implies they aren't in the core game code, and more likely in areas like the graphics subsystem. Also, I've never seen the game runaway leak and crash by exhausting heap on a system with more than 2 gigabytes of RAM in all the years I've observed it.

I don't think the game has ever had a lot of true allocation leaks, at least not straight-forward ones. I have a feeling many of the "out of memory" problems were actually more subtle heap management issues. I should also point out that when the game client was having "out of memory" crashes more often I observed two things. One: /unloadgfx periodically would forestall the crash indefinitely. A true memory leak related to unfreed handles is unlikely to be addressed in that way. Two: CoH would sometimes crash in a manner that suggested it was out of memory when my system still had lots of physical memory free. That suggested the problem was an allocator problem and not a literal out of memory problem.

As far as I know, the FF proc still currently works in exactly the same way it has always worked from the day it arrived on beta until the last time I checked it on live which was a couple months ago. It has ALWAYS worked the exact same way when I tested it in beta, when I tested it when it went live, a while later when I tested it again when I was pointed to the paragonwiki article that talked about "suppression" and some time after that when someone thought it had been changed.

It has always worked like this: when the proc fires, it grants you a passive power for 5 seconds that buffs your recharge. While you have this power, you cannot get another one, so a second trigger does nothing. When it expires, you are free to get the power again. There is no stacking. There is no refreshing. There is no suppression.

If its not working exactly like this today, it was stealth changed in a patch that I didn't notice, very recently.

There have been very persistent myths about this proc that it either works differently or did work differently in the past. However, I believe that is due to the simple fact that this proc was and is difficult to test accurately given its mechanics. The proc has never behaved in any other way than I describe above at any time on live that I've tested it.

Actually, that's true, I could just drop a single power to take Hasten in that particular build. Take a bow: I goofed on that statement (and apparently still living in the past at times).

On the other hand, so many powers are prereqs for the actual powers I need: trading Hasten for Super Jump (my travel), CJ, Aid Self, or Weave is problematic. Trading it for Boxing, Tough, or Aid Other is impossible without knocking out one of the previous powers (and basically the entire pool).

At best I could trade Hasten for LBE, which would knock out my one ranged attack (outside of veteran powers) or physical perfection. And this build is *very* carefully balanced around its endurance consumption when running at full power: trading Hasten for PP would likely drop me below the point where I could run at full power indefinitely between the loss of PP and the crash of Hasten itself. Those trades are still not obviously good trades.

I would be more than happy to trade Aid Other for Hasten, but that's not possible.

Almost every build could benefit from Hasten if you could magically add it at no cost. I don't think its true that every build benefits enough from Hasten to justify replacing a power with it.

So here's my MA/SR build:

Now, since I have Leaping, Fighting, Medicine, and Body Mastery, adding Hasten is not just a question of finding a single power and swapping: to add Hasten I would have to eliminate one of those pools entirely. I don't think you can make the case that its obvious Hasten is worth losing any one of those power pools. That's more of a preference choice than an obvious case of the build being better with Hasten.

This is assuming your own conclusion. The question is why is that more acceptable. The only reason given appears to be because you don't care as much.

I don't think they are dynamic in the way being discussed. They are dynamic calculations tracked relative to the proc: the proc goes off X times per second maximum. It does not reverse calculate by what percentage it should go off, if its slotted in a power with A recharge and B cast time, assuming C recharge strength buffs, adjusted every second.

Why is making up a region of Washington between Seattle and Tacoma ok, but not making up a region of Seattle itself? That line appears purely abitrary.

I think Widdershins has 20% resistance to smashing, lethal, and energy, and 50% resistance to toxic. Also 500% total regen.

At level 40, an Elite Boss has 4858 health. Base regen on an EB is 0.13, so Widdershins should have about 53h/s of regeneration. Using smashing, lethal, or energy damage (or a combination of those three) you thus need a minimum of 66 dps to overcome regeneration. Assuming you're trying to kill him in less than three minutes (using a lot of lucks to keep the damage off, and saving spots for other insps like cabs or damage) you need to generate 93 dps to do that.

At level 40, that's within the range of most damage dealers. On an electric/Pain corruptor, not mathematically impossible but non-trivial on an SO build. The Voltaic Sentinel is probably key to this being within the realm of possibility.

The bigger problem is you can't really "experiment" with stuff like that because you can't trivially yank it from players who have it if it doesn't work out.

Everyone does damage. Blasters only do damage. If you want to be wise, play a controller. Blasters have purity of purpose. What happens if an ambush arrives? Shoot it. What happens if one of your team mates has low health? Shoot around him. What happens if you get mezzed? Keep shooting. About to die? Keep shooting. Dead? Take a break from shooting. Rezzed? Break over, start shooting.

Most other games do not allow you to increase recharge rate on almost every power in an almost unlimited fashion. Doing the above would involve a lot of dynamic calculations on the fly for the procs to work out correctly.

Also, most other games start recharging their powers when they activate, not when they complete casting. That throws the above calculations for a loop: they basically wouldn't work in our game as described without extra complicating modifications.

Its extremely unlikely there will ever be another successful Superhero MMO like this one ever again. You could spend a lot of money trying to make one, but your success rate would not be promising.

You're not going to reinvent this game, and you're not going to just supersede it. If you're going to make a successful Superhero game, you'll have to do something unique, and by definition you'll have no reference point for whether it will work or not until you actually try to launch it.

TOR is making a huge gamble: its basically an MMO Sierra adventure game with lightsabers. There's no way to know if that will be successful long-term, because there's nothing to compare it to. The next successful superhero game, if one comes, will almost certainly be like that: something that takes a totally different spin on it, even if some elements are recognizable.

I guess not everyone revels:


POWERS

General

• Selecting the Vanguard Bow for Trick Arrow should no longer cause Beam Rifle or Assault Rifle effects to emit from the player's knee.

Actually, strangely enough there is such a place, or rather there is a place that meets the requirements I believe you are paraphrasing:



About where that arrow points is a potential spot where theoretically speaking since US territorial waters curve around, there is a place about 20 miles off the east coast where its possible for Nerva to be at the edge of US waters but the rest of the isles to be fractionally outside of them (another candidate spot is to the right of that spot around the W70.30 marker).

I'm not sure if it fits all of the descriptive text of the Rogue Isles, because frankly I don't remember all of the descriptive text surrounding the location of the Rogue Isles. But it does come nominally close to fitting the features in question.

If he replaced TV, I would imagine he's basically the lead technical implementation manager.

Since he worked on Eve, the single burning question I have is a question I would have to figure out how to ask in person, because I doubt he'd answer it publicly.

Rob, if you're out there, poke Zwillinger for my email address. Some stuff I wouldn't mind discussing with you that I was discussing with Television (Matt) before he ran away.

Depends on what specifically you want to do. If you just want to *look* like you're picking up and throwing objects, you could just use VFX to simulate that. Hurl does that already, you'd just synchronize that with interactive objects. But if you want you integrate our physics engine with that, things get more complicated fast.

The more important question is: to what end? What does it mean to pick up an object? What does it mean to throw it? What effects should that have? How do we balance that against pre-existing effects?

In CO you have a strength attribute that determines how large an object you can pick up. We don't have that here. Do we add it, or fake it with something else, or what?

In a sense, picking up an object and throwing it either going to be a power which everyone either has or doesn't have, or its going to be a skill that people can make better or worse. And if you decide to start adding things that aren't powers into the game of this nature, you'll have to add a skills system or an attribute system to drive it.

In this context, there are three specific situations worth looking at.

First, every powerset should be able to solo at +0x1. I suspect *in general* every blaster set can do that, but the question is at what rate, when piloted by the average player? If they have to slow down to make sure they have BU and Aim often, or are resting because they always win the fight but they get big chunks of health knocked out when they do, that may fall below the minimum rate of acceptable soloing in some missions or with some critter types.

I suspect all blaster powerset combinations can do this to at least some degree: it would be debatable if they were able to do so as well as we'd like, but this is not the most critical problem area.


Second, Blasters should, on average, perform at least about average. In the past, they've consistently performed far below average. And here, +0x1 is meaningless. What matters is what average players do because that's what's being datamined and compared. So this is average performance across solo missions, team missions, task forces, and the like. Whatever the average content mix is, we're looking at blaster performance in that content vs everyone else's, whatever that content is.

I suspect things are better than they were before, but I have my doubts D2.0 completely fixed the problem given how bad it was originally.


Third, Blasters should, just like every other archetype, have a focus, a specialty, a role that their design explicitly grants the tools to excel at, relative to the other archetypes. The devs are and have been looking at this a lot recently: what should Dominators be, what should Kheldians be, what should Stalkers be, what should Tankers be. This concern is separate from any performance issues: it deals with whether players feel they are getting a good deal from the bag of tools each archetype provides.

The problem here is that the Blaster role has always been damage, and damage has continued to rise for every other archetype. Tankers overlap Blaster damage. Dominators have been promoted to explicit damage dealers, and with that they actually get better melee damage modifiers than Blasters. Scrappers have always been damage dealers and Stalkers have been stated to have the burst damage specialty role. Specializing in "just damage" has become about as interesting as specializing in sprinting. Everyone does damage. What makes Blaster damage specifically interesting, and worth giving up every other tool in the game to get.

More than anything else, I want an answer to that question.


Specifically how Blasters branch out from soloing +0x1 to teamed content, higher difficulty content, and the like is not relevant to the +0x1 minimum powerset design rule. But that's a bare minimum rule. Everyone has to be able to do that, but that's necessary not sufficient. How blasters function beyond that is at least as important. If its not, then there's no justification for boosting Regen in iTrials or boosting Dominator damage or looking at Stalkers or Tankers either. None of them have problems in the +0x1 realm. Its an important realm, but its only a necessary prerequisite, not the definition of being completely balanced against all the things Blasters should be balanced against.

If its a question of picking the best alternative, unresistable scale 4 damage has my vote.