Arcanaville

I believe this bug has been around for as long as skirts have been around.

The fact that your parents would have had to be in their sixties when you were born was suspicious, but it did lead directly to your livejournal.

Eventually, but that's not what nailed me your entire biography in one shot.

If you want to remain anonymous on the internet, you have to be extremely careful. It took me exactly three minutes to verify all three of Aneko's assertions. I won't specify how publicly, but if you PM me I'll tell you exactly how it was probably done.

Be careful out there.

Actually, while some general principles of Lamarckian evolution have been accepted and even incorporated into the current theory of Darwinian evolution, the central distinguishing characteristic of Lamarckian evoution compared to Darwinian evolution is that Lamarck believed it was actual organisms that evolved to adapt to their environment and they could then pass those adaptations to their offspring. Darwin believed that biological features acquired by parents are not passed onto offspring: that offspring themselves contain natural variations which make those offspring either more or less able to succeed in passing those predetermined characteristics to future generations. Lamarck hasn't been seriously considered a viable theory of evolution since it was displaced by natural selection.

There has been evidence that a pseudo-Lamarckian inheritance can occur in some situations related to gene expression and inhibition, but that doesn't really qualify as resurrecting Lamarck.

Is this a trick question?

Its "i" before "e" and after the "c" along with the three "a"s.

I still think it should have been called the "critical state" because I said in CoV beta that calling it the hidden state when it doesn't actually have anything to do with stealth would be an indefinite source of confusion. It tended to promote the false belief that Hidden State = Placate or something else strange.

Being in the hidden state is very much like being in the right state to land a combo. In and of itself that's all it is: a flag that says your next attack will do something special. The confusion stems from the fact that the two primary ways to achieve that state is to either let Hide stealth you, or use the Placate power on a target.

In fact that's another endless source of confusion. The Placate power is not synonymous with the placate mez effect. The Placate power hits the target with the placate effect and simultaneously places the caster in the hidden state. The placate *effect* does not automatically place the stalker in the hidden state: using powers that have placate effects other than the actual Placate power does not put you into the hidden state.

So Placate placates and puts you into hidden, but the placate effect doesn't put you into hidden. The Placate power also does not Hide you when it puts you into the hidden state. Hide puts you into hidden and also stealths you, but doesn't placate anything. Overloading the words hide/hidden and placate was not the best idea.

Good question. At 80 feet, my energy/energy blaster has exactly three: Power Bolt, Power Blast, and Explosive Blast (which is an AoE). Is three the appropriate number for a blaster at range?

I say sacrifice the implementers and give the nubile virgins a shot at the UI.

20 feet, but it was indeed used more by blappers than anything else.


Back around I1ish, I think I once described Blasters as the game's worst Regen Scrappers.


I think its a real danger that with enough defense or mitigation Blasters could become overpowered, but the question is overpowered compared to what?

A scrapper standing in the middle of a lot of critters and killing them while not being threatened in return is not considered game-breaking. A controller standing far away from a lot of critters and holding them while pets kill them is not considered game-breaking. A defender standing far away from a lot of critters and debuffing their ability to fight back while they kill them from range is not considered game-breaking.

A blaster standing far away from a lot of critters and just plain killing them while not being threatened in return *is* considered game-breaking. I'm not saying there isn't a potential problem there, but what the fear does is prevent people from asking the important questions. *Why* is that game-breaking, or what is it specifically about that situation we need to defuse.

I had a suggestion to attempt to do an end-around this problem that I bounced off of Synapse before the devs went on holiday, and he offered to think about it, but I don't want to discuss it too much before the devs begin looking at Tankers as they've indicated they would. Its not my intent to derail that review, but rather set the foundation for the devs taking a look at Blasters next, within the context of what tools Blasters should have in the modern context of everything doing nominally high damage, everything having access to significant personal damage mitigation, and specifically Dominators, Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers *all* being explicitly classified as designed damage dealers.

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: in the City of Heroes paradigm, Scrappers and Brutes are already tank-mages by almost any other MMO's criteria. Nothing in the standard game's portfolio of difficulty can kill them, and conversely nothing in the standard game's portfolio of targets can survive them. That's everything a tank-mage is supposed to be able to do except do it from range. And in City of Heroes that's irrelevant because its not hard to get within range. That's why most of the map-farming builds are melee: because getting into melee range is not a penalty for killing everything in sight.

The problem is CoH is not that the game can't survive tank-mages, its that they can't survive having a better tank-mage. If blasters had scrapper survivability, that would make scrappers redundant. Again, on paper scrappers can't make blasters redundant no matter how much survivability and damage they have, because they cannot do it from range.

The problem is that in City of Heroes, range has no bearing on performance. Its only a playstyle variation. In fact, its not quite meaningless, but within this context of comparing damage dealers it might as well be weapon customization.

I invented the fastest three-box Empath farm to get that badge at its original level of one billion points of healing. While running that farm I studied critter AI and power activation. My power activation studies eventually led to the Arcanatime theory (which I confirmed while farming Immortal, actually). My critter AI investigations eventually led me to help the devs fix a long-standing critter AI attack bug.

When I look at my Empath badge, I see a uniquely invented farm, the method by which everyone calculates attack chains today, and the current way all standard critters attack in the game. That's what one of my badges "measures." I believe I've earned the right to have an opinion on whether a badge's requirements make reasonable sense or not that doesn't question my appreciation for dedication.

The original difficulty slider levels were heroic, tenacious, rugged, unyielding, and invincible. They very roughly corresponded to +0x1, +0x2, +1x1, +1x2, +2x1. However, *before* the slider came out difficulty scaled with team size. If I remember correctly, the critters scaled upward +1 with 4, +2 with 6, +3 with 8. When the slider came out, it *stacked* with this intrinsic difficulty and so if the leader was set to invincible and you were in a team of eight, you'd be facing +5s.

I think this dev team is sufficiently distant from the original one that they are more amenable to questioning and reevaluating past decisions. For example, why does power burst have shorter range than power bolt and power blast? What's the specific point to that? Its really a completely arbitrary decision that creates issues when it comes to actually using the powers in the current game - you can't chain powers with different ranges together without running into issues. I think this dev team is willing to ask questions like that and as time permits try to resolve them.

The problems with crashing nukes has already been aired, but I'll mention a related point. (Some) nukes crash and (some) tier 9 defense powers crash but the crash isn't the same for this simple reason. Question: what are you supposed to do after the power crashes? Simple question. In the case of Elude, it has a simple answer: we gave you three minutes of near invulnerability and unlimited endurance, when it runs out and crashes you're supposed to have killed everything already and be standing in a safe spot. If you're not, tough.

Nova? It goes boom and then crashes. If you haven't killed everything yet, you're supposed to - use insps or die I suppose, because Nova doesn't actually give you any time to do anything. Either it kills everything or it doesn't, and if it doesn't the explicit *intent* of the crash is to make you vulnerable to getting killed.

I mention this because it occurs to me that "use insps or die I suppose" is the most common tactical answer to most Blaster questions now that I think about it.


I think the real fear surrounding blasters is that they are Mages. And what I mean by that is that there is a legitimate but irrationally handled fear of Tank-Mages, and the mental picture of a tank-mage is a ranged attacker with high defense. So you need three components: range, high damage, high defense. Blasters actually have two out of three. On paper nothing else does. No matter how much damage we give Tankers, they won't be Tank-Mages because they won't have range. Brutes can be farming whole maps of critters without dying but that's not a tank-mage because the brute has to walk to the targets, rather than shooting them from a distance. Controllers don't even have a damage powerset: they only have control and buff. They are fortunate they at least have brawl. Stuff just magically dies all around them, but they can't be tank-mages because they don't have a damage set.

But Blasters? They are already 66% of the way to tank-magedom. If we're not careful one day they'll discover Combat Jumping and the world will end.

Ok that last part was hyperbolic. But I'm serious about the idea. City of Heroes revolves around melee damage, ranged damage, buff/debuff, control, and defense. Blasters have Ranged Damage and Melee Damage. All that's left is Control, Buff/Debuff, and Defense. Giving them Control makes them Controllers; can't do that. Giving them Buff/Debuff makes them Defenders; can't do that. Can't give them Defense, because that makes them tank-mages.

That's a bit oversimplified, but I believe there's more than a germ of truth to it. And that's not to say there aren't creative ways around the problem that could work, but that perception probably works strongly against Blasters and any suggestion to help Blasters.

And I think that's also why they are saddled with the funkiest powers in terms of usage and tradeoffs. Because they are the most dangerous archetype to balance, if my theory above is correct, and that means in all seriousness they have to be constantly put down by The Man, lest it achieve its full potential and go tank-magey on everyone.

Some content is explicitly not designed to the standard content limits. The Praetorian arc from Tina and Maria, for example, and the two "end game" task forces of LRSF and STF are not constructed to those limits, the two trials in particular were *explicitly* exempted by explicit decision and by public dev pronouncement.

CoV was designed to be slightly more difficult in general, specifically because the CoV archetypes were themselves designed to be somewhat more self-sufficient and a further departure from holy-trinity style design.


Also, everything in Praetoria was designed during a drinking binge in which the devs temporarily forgot the rules.

The issue is not that getting to 85% fury is impossible, the issue is to what degree the proc itself is getting you there. If an actual in-game test can conclusively show that the ATIO increases maximum sustainable fury from 80% to 85%, that would point to a serious bug in the way the game engine itself handles fury. Its numerically impossible for the ATIO to have that effect if the game engine did what the designed behavior of fury implies.

As I always say, reality trumps calculations, but are you certain this is an apples to apples comparison between the same situation with and without the ATIO?

Lets look at a table of how much fury you generate per attack, ignoring the minmax complexity for a second (its not important in this area of fury) for the case of Fury ranging from 75 to 90:

Suppose you are hovering around 80 Fury. Each of your attacks is generating 0.5 fury per attack. Keep in mind Fury decays by 0.75 per second while under attack (2/sec when not being attacked). Notice that if you manage to temporarily edge Fury to 81%, your generated fury per attack drops to about 0.45. A similar drop happens for fury generated by incoming attacks. Its that drop that brings you back down. If you drop below 80 your fury generated rises, and if you rise above it drops. This is true for any fury value: there's nothing special about 80, I just picked it because it starts to get close to the limit of what people tend to see.

So the question is what does the Fury boosting proc do? Answer: column two is the fury generated under the ATIO proc, and column three is the fury generated under the superior version. Notice that under the standard proc, your generated fury does rise. But the effect depends on how much fury you tend to generate by default. If you normally hover around 80, then the proc means you should rise a bit. But by the time you reach 81 fury, the fury you generate per attack has already dropped to lower than you used to generate before the proc. And that means the proc will, if the situation is identical, increase your maximum fury from 80 to something a bit less than 81 - keep in mind the fury you generate from incoming attacks will also drop, and the proc doesn't work on those.

The Superior version increases generated fury more, but still by the time you are a hair over 81 your generated fury drops to about what it was before the proc. So *if* you tend to hover around 80, the proc will increase you to something around 80 point something, and the superior proc to 81 point almost nothing.

Notice if you tend to hover lower than that, the proc will boost you more. Here's the table at lower fury levels:

It could be worth up to several points of Fury if you naturally sustain lower levels of fury. But since Fury generation diminishes as actual fury rises, boosting it by a percentage does less and less as your actual fury is higher.

It would be sort of like giving you a +5% damage strength buff that was subject to ED. If your attacks are not slotted to the ED soft cap, like say at lower levels, that boost is significant. But at higher levels with ED in play, that same boost is not as significant because its being diminished by ED. Its the same basic principle.


WARNING: these tables only reflect fury generated by attacking. They do not include the effects of fury generation by being attacked. As a result, and because the proc does not affect Fury generated by being attacked, the actual benefit of the ATIO will be less than these tables imply. They are only meant to be a point of reference.


Also, one other thing. There are people who claim to be able to sustain 90 fury. Short of a bug, that's unlikely. Suppose these people are able to sustain an attack chain of 1 attack per second (factoring in arcanatime, since the server does). That's pretty fast. That would generate about 0.125 fury per second. Since the decay rate is 0.75, such a brute would have to generate 0.625 fury from incoming attacks. Incoming attacks generate half the fury attacking does per attack. So that means the brute would have to be attacked 10 times per second constantly. That's kind of a lot, especially when you consider that if you're generating one attack per second, you'd be killing off your sources of incoming attacks very quickly, and that at level 50 ten attacks per second is over a thousand dps of incoming damage.

Its not impossible to *reach* 90 fury, its just that your generated fury when you get there should drop to the point where you come back down again. To reach it and stay there is the hard part, and to average 90 requires being able to sustain *higher* levels than 90 to counterbalance the times when you are under 90, even if you do not count the time spent out of combat.

I have no intent of defending the Paragon Store interface, which if they had any self-respect the implementation team would be credited as "Alan Smithee" (and then throw themselves into a river like Jean Valjean) but I am unaware of any MMO which doesn't essentially require checking with forums or other similar information outlets on a regular basis to find out what is happening in the game or in microtransaction stores. No one seems to have especially commendable in-game documentation when it comes to that stuff.

Another side effect of parking people in the hospital is that you have people in a safe place you can designate to watch the timers and give warning signals to the other players. Players tend to get tunnel vision and so giving them extra warning ahead of when the timer will expire seems to help, particularly because the player may not be checking chat or the timer window more than once every few seconds. A few seconds warning noticeably improved player performance.

I got MoK long before Incandescence arrived, so I can't vouch for its effectiveness in actual play. As with most tactics, its less about whether it will work on paper and more about whether the coordination required meshes with the players in the trial at the time. "Do you have the right people capable of using incandescence properly" is a similar tactical question to "do you have the right people to avoid the obliteration patches and attack Antimatter?"

The long-standing objective design criteria for standard content, which to the best of my knowledge is still the basic design rule, follows certain parameters the devs have either mentioned directly or hinted at in the past. I'm not even sure they are always thinking about all of these rules when they design the content, but in general they try to meet them. This is more my version of the design parameters than anything the devs explicitly have written down anywhere.


1. When set to standard difficulty, +0x1 and no bosses, every power set combination built to solo slotted with standard (non-invention) enhancements should be able to solo that mission. If that's not true, either the difficulty is too high or that powerset combination is broken.

2. When scaled to +0x4, a tanker designed specifically to tank should be able to hold aggro and defend themselves for a significant amount of time with limited or no support.

3. When scaled to +0x8, it should not exceed the limits of a reasonably well-diversified full team of eight.

4. It should be as difficult as possible without violating the above limits.

Something I expressed to the devs recently is the fact that among the problems Blasters have is a harsh meta problem unique to them. While the devs have some concerns about one archetype stepping on the toes of another, that *doesn't* include blasters. Uniquely, Blasters are defined in terms of what they are not allowed to be but not given *any* protection against other archetypes stepping on them.

Blasters are really only explicitly designed to do one thing: damage. That's it. Everything else is incidental to their design. So tell me: which archetype's damage has been restrained to make absolutely certain they don't infringe on blasters? Scrappers have consistently had a higher damage modifier, the same damage cap, and even with the recent increase in Blaster ranged modifier Scrappers still trump that with criticals, and still have higher melee modifiers. Even *dominators* have a higher melee modifier than Blasters.

Conversely, look at the long list of things Blasters have to avoid: they have to avoid doing too much burst damage and infringing on Stalkers; they can't have personal defenses which would infringe on the melee archetypes; they can have significant control; they can't have ally buffing; they can't have too much foe debuffing.

Some archetypes have the problem of too much overlap: Defenders and Controllers on buff/debuff, or Defenders and Corruptors just plain everywhere. But Blasters *uniquely* have the problem of being fenced in on all sides. They can't have *anything* except damage.

And the best part is, they can't have too much of that either.


So once Stalkers are looked at, and Tankers are looked at, after Dominators were looked at and Kheldians were looked at, after everything else has the damage players believe *everything* should have in the "current game" and after every game mechanic from mez to AoE effects to damage buffs to ally buffs are doled out to "fix" the other archetypes, what are the devs going to be able to do with Blasters?

Nothing. They will be painted into a corner with no options left that other archetypes haven't already laid claim to.

The honest truth is that blasters are the designated killer of things that don't matter, provided its not too many of them, and they take a lot of damage while they are doing it. And preferably, they should die periodically to prove they aren't too defensively strong while they are killing those things that don't matter.

On Triumph I had every Keyes badge except that one in just a couple runs, and then we started going after that badge specifically. After the third failure in a row, I foresaw exactly what you experienced, and suggested the strategy a lot of runs on Triumph now use. I suggested we park the league into the hospital and then send out the minimum strike team capable of taking out Antimatter. Doing so would basically be sending out the best goo-avoiders only, and would allow them to spread out so that their power effects did not obscure the ground making it easier for people to quickly spot the Obliteration patch. The first try we didn't have enough damage: we went a little too low (tried it with four). The second try failed. I believe the third try succeeded.

I realized that with a full league going after Antimatter, your chances of success are based on the probability that the worst dodger gets targeted, and the fact that the more players there are the more difficult it is for many of them to spot the Obliteration patch. So using less players is generally better, although there are leagues that succeed with full leagues in play.

Another thing I didn't fully appreciate until I mentioned it to other players is that players do the wrong thing when the Obliteration patch is triggered. They look for the patch, try to figure out if they are in the patch, and then decide to move if they decide they are in the patch. They are trying to move away from the patch. That's wrong. The goal should not be to find the patch and run away from it. The goal is to not get hit. And the best way to guarantee you don't get hit is not to find the patch and run if you think you are in it: that takes too long and you could be wrong. The best tactical maneuver is to find a clear spot on the ground and run towards it. It doesn't matter where the Obliteration patch is, it only matters you move to where you know for certain it is not.

I've been told by other players that this makes the task of avoiding the green stuff a lot easier, because it eliminates the burden of figuring out if you're in the patch or not. It doesn't matter. Just "run to daylight" and you're good. Important to note: it always targets a player. So unless people are running and jumping all over the place, the aiming spot will never appear on, in, or over an empty spot on the ground.

On one badge run attempt in the Underground, we had taken out all the bombs except the last cluster. We destroyed the first bomb in that cluster, and then someone jumped forward for no reason whatsoever and triggered the second bomb. In his defense, he did say "oops."

I had to take a break after that. A week long break.