Arcanaville

In this specific circumstance, that would not be relevant. Its also inaccurate: although he sold Scrappers team role as being the "boss killer" he never specifically sold Blasters as minion killers to a higher degree than anything else. If you're not the boss killer, obviously you're a minion and LT killer. That goes for everything.

If he had tried to sell blasters specifically as the non-boss killers, two things would have come up. First: not all blasters had appreciable AoE at the time (Ice and Electric in particular, Ice Storm notwithstanding). Second, you actually need more passive mitigation to take on large numbers of minions rather than a single boss, because a single target can be neutralized by single target soft control and single target mez, which blasters had access to to a far higher degree than AoE controls. In fact, the entire existence of Blappers is predicated on this fact: that while Bosses in general are more dangerous than a significant number of minions, a blapper can neutralize a single boss easier than a conventional blaster can neutralize a lot of minions.

It is more precise to say that Statesmen felt that Blasters were not designed to take on Bosses** which means their job was to find something else to kill. However, Scrappers, Tankers, and Controllers were all designed *explicitly* to take on Bosses: Tankers were always designed to tank them (and there's no question they always had enough damage to defeat them), Scrappers were given criticals that scaled with rank specifically to give them an advantage against Bosses, and Controllers were always designed to be able to control bosses. Only Blasters and Defenders (of the original archetypes) were explicitly designed not to take on bosses themselves.

The notion that Blasters were intended to have a lot of AoE and be minion-mowers was an invention of the playerbase, based on very shaky logic, never to my knowledge confirmed by any dev. If it was, I and many other blaster players would have been demanding the AoE necessary to make that a reality.


** Vis a vis the "Boss buff" circa I5

Actually, I expressed this concern when scrapper criticals were added and when scrapper damage modifiers were increased. In fact, I specifically challenged Statesman to explain how he could increase Scrapper damage *modifiers* and Blaster damage *caps* and claim both were similar increases in damage. Particularly when Blaster damage caps were only being increased to *equal* Scrappers, while Scrapper damage modifiers were being increased to *exceed* Blasters.

And anyone who so much as mentions the Scrapper ranged damage modifier as if it actually exists is getting Tommy Lee Jonesed.


In fact, if there's one thing Tankers, Controllers, Dominators, Stalkers, Masterminds, Defenders, Scrappers, Brutes, Corruptors, Peacebringers, Warshades, Widows, and Soldiers of Arachnos all agree on, its that all of them should do a lot of damage even though doing damage is the only thing Blasters are specifically designed to do. Blasters actually do not have the highest ranged damage modifer (Scrappers do because they use their melee modifier and have crits), they do not have the highest melee modifier (third behind Scrappers and Dominators), do not have the widest set of self damage buff powers (most of them Blasters don't get, including the most powerful of them: Fiery Embrace, Rage, Power Siphon, Follow Up), do not average more AoEs, do not average higher DPA - and they are the damage archetype.


Most blasters stopped bothering to complain about this years ago, but mostly out of a sense of futility, not because this hasn't been a perennial issue.

Given his past cinematic record, what I'm confident about is that there is an extremely high probability I'll like it, a whole lot of other people will like it, and I won't have difficulty recommending it. Not everyone will, but that's not an achievable goal.

The term "inherent" as an archetype property has never actually mapped to anything in particular. Its a made-up concept that the devs can do whatever they want with, that doesn't have any particular restrictions or limitations.

Worth noting that the concept of archetype inherents postdates the first actual one: tankers got punchvoke, later gauntlet, before the notion of inherents even existed. The concept was added specifically when things like scrapper archetype-intrinsic criticals were added, and the devs it was worth documenting these new archetype-specific abilities, and decided to put an icon in the buff bar that explained them. This buff bar icon required adding a passive power to all the appropriate characters that would do nothing except put an icon in the buff bar with the help text. The way the devs did this was to add an Inherent Power: the Inherent set is a powerset all characters get (power prerequisites ensure only the right characters get the right powers). And its for that reason (mainly) these archetype-wide buffs became "archetype inherents."

But its important to note that of the first three "inherent powers" - Gauntlet, Criticals, and Defiance - two did absolutely nothing (except display help text). Only Defiance actually did anything mechanically.

I'd make a snappy reply, if I had any idea what this was supposed to mean.

It is intentional, because its a natural consequence of having a veteran rewards system that grants permanent rewards that do not require continuing to keep veteran status.

Or, to put it another way, we expect and think nothing strange of the fact that if you are a VIP, and for whatever reason choose to drop down to premium, the longer you've been a vet the more stuff you'll be able to keep when you do drop down. We expect longer veteran status to have some benefit, even for players that revert to premium.

But if a vet gets to keep more things when they drop to premium, they have to get back less things when they resubscribe. That's only logical. The only way to make it *more* valuable for VIPs to stay subscribed than new players to subscribe in the first place would be to take more stuff away from longer VIPs than shorter ones, which is somewhat nonsensical.

More to lose is more to gain, and vice versa. So what's important is that the value of remaining subscribed is enough because its not likely to rise, at least not in the sense being described here. It goes down because it has to, to prevent the opposite and possibly more perverse problem of long term vets losing more than short term ones when they drop to premium.

Any player can choose to attempt to fulfill any role they want on any team they want. The developers are not required to provide you with the tools necessary to accomplish that.

Like it or not, every archetype and for that matter every powerset has an intended role or function. The players can choose to ignore that and forge their own as best they can, and the game won't stop them. But there's no way to know if you've given something the right set of tools without having an intent for what those tools are supposed to be able to do. There's no such thing as "intent-less" design.

Every sale that occurs before I buy is a smart move. Every sale that occurs after I buy is a dick move. True for everything from Cheetos to the Louisiana Purchase.

We are now at the point where people feel comfortable saying that selling a snowball power is Paragon Studios explicitly catering to griefers and withdrawing support for RPers.

A power with no combat effect whatsoever and cannot in any way affect gameplay is being used to prove that the developers don't care about roleplay, and trying to nickle and dime players.


And here all I thought it was evidence for was that Paragon Studios was being lobbied by the American Association for the Advancement of Crystalline Precipitation.

As a tier 9 VIP, I get 550 paragon points a month, worth approximately $6.88. I renew annually, so I pay $11.95 a month. I pay $5.07 to maintain VIP status above the point stipend I get, which I would almost certainly be buying as a premium if I did not get them as part of my subscription. For $5 a month, I get transfers, slots, the incarnate system, signature story content, reward tokens, and a bunch of other stuff I barely keep track of anymore.

I'm honestly not even sure by how much the value I get from continuing to subscribe is higher than the incremental cost of actually subscribing. Its just pretty clear that at least for me, given that I actually use most of the extras that VIP subs get, the extra value is more than worth it.

The logic may seem perverse to you because you don't see the same value in the benefits VIPs get, but that's a personal preference on your part. Judging the system perverse because it doesn't exactly align with your personal preferences simply means you don't recognize that a lot of VIPs - probably the majority of them** - don't have that problem.


** Because its so easy to unsub, and so easy to reverse that decision and resub, there's no reason to subscribe if you genuinely do not believe the value is worth it. So I doubt many players do when they don't think its worth it.

You say that like its a bad thing.

If *no one* ever went premium, that would imply the whole premium option was a false option: that no one would or could possibly find it to be a valid choice to play the game. Granted: Paragon probably doesn't want a mass-exodus to premium status, because they still believe the subscription system is their core model. But for the premium option to not be meaningless, someone has to think its worth taking. If you don't like the extras that VIP status confers, but you do still like playing the game *and* are willing to spend money on the extras beyond the base premium game you do want, then premium is a reasonable choice. That's who Premium was made for.

The whole point of having the tiered access, and the ala carte store, was to provide *options* for players. Sometimes I think a lot of players aren't treating them as options: that if there's something there they don't like, obviously that's a problem with the game that demands a remedy. But it might not be there for you. It might be there for someone else who's perfectly happy with it. In making something for everyone, they by necessity cannot make everything for everyone.

But ... but the direct word from a redname said its ok to accept second hand reports of what the rednames say because they can always step in and correct misstatements. If you prefer the direct word from the redname, and the direct word of the redname supports listening to the indirect word from the redname...

Actually, not really. Two bottlenecks make that basically moot. First, there's no rez fast enough to matter. Second, there's a PvP drop suppression timer: you can't get drops from the same target more than once in a set interval.

As to being able to stop PvP farming, I'll just say there are a lot of loopholes, and I haven't seen all of them discussed publicly before.

"Full" fury is practically impossible for Brutes to sustain with the new Fury mechanics. 80% fury (+160%) is closer to about the best you can sustain. You can burst above that briefly, but its very difficult to hold it for any length of time.

Some additional potential problems with this mechanics as devised:

1. It heavily skews towards sets with powers like Shield Charge and Lightning Rod, sets that don't really need help relative to the others. See also: Spring attack.

2. It strangely makes Placate and Confuse a Tanker offensive weapon. In particular, it might interact unpredictably with Cognitive Interface.

3. Its unclear if Afraid breaks or suppresses aggro, or just overrides it with a flee. If it breaks or suppresses aggro, see Burn.

I suggested a very similar mechanic for Stalkers, on the premise (that the devs acknowledged) that Stalkers are supposed to be burst damage specialists. If you make Tankers burst damage specialists, where does that leave Stalkers (and Blasters for that matter).

Also, if the buff starts at +200%, that means with no aggro Tankers will outdamage both Scrappers and Brutes at any level of team damage buff.

Doesn't bug me in the least. These are Nolan's stories, and his version of the Batman. I think that while the movies respect the source material, they also go their own way and tell their own story, and that story is not just Another Batman Story: it is a self-contained complete story about a different Bruce Wayne and a different Batman from the comics, just like the current Batman is not really the same Bruce Wayne and Batman from 1939. I think Nolan really has passion for this iteration of the Batman story because its his story, and I think that personal passion, that sense of ownership, is what drives Nolan to tell a really good story.

Knowing its a complete story, knowing its intended to have an actual ending, makes me anticipate the last movie all the more. Someone else might try to extend it, Nolan himself might change his mind, but knowing it was conceived to have a beginning, middle, and ending makes it all the more interesting.

Story tellers have been doing this for as long as the stories themselves have existed. All of the Greek mythological and heroic stories have evolved over time, probably from original stories we don't even actually completely know. Somehow, we give a pass to everyone from antiquity who embellished and otherwise bastardized folklore and mythology (see: Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Arthurian mythology), and then we expect everyone from the present day to respect one randomly selected version of those stories as "authoritative" without further embellishment, adaptation, or bastardization.

The most humorous and recent example being the people who believe that the current Sherlock Holmes movies does a disservice to the character not as written but as portrayed in earlier movies.

It does, because those two are the same thing. For a given damage type, there is only one number, called (for example) Smashing Res. Its used to reduce the damage an attacker does to you, and also used to reduce the strength of Smashing debuffs an attacker inflicts upon you.

As an absolute principle, there is no such thing as "debuff resistance" anywhere in the game. There is only "resistance" for a particular attribute. That resistance reduces attempts to increase that attribute, decrease that attribute, alter the resistance of that attribute, alter the strength of that attribute, affect the maximum cap of that attribute. The one number - Resistance - affects any attempt to change any aspect of that attribute.

That single number, the Resistance aspect, has a single cap. There aren't separate caps for separate usages of that single number.

And as previously mentioned, caps are always applied "last" which is to say just before you use the number. If you have enough powers to apply a 120% resistance buff to smashing, you actually have 120% resistance *buffs* on you. But the cap means the game will only "use" 90% of it. When you are hit by a resistance debuff, that debuff is resisted. But again, only 90% of your resistance is used, and the debuff is resisted by 90%. That debuff, after being resisted, is added on top of your 120% resistance buffs - the game has no idea that effect is a "debuff" or a "buff" - its just an effect, and it can't tell the difference between a defender buffing you and an attacker debuffing you. It all goes into the same big pile of buffs. 120% + the debuff. If the debuff was, say, -100% resistance debuff then 90% of it was resisted, and the net is -10%. Your total buff is now 120% + (-10%) = 110%. You'd still effectively be at the 90% cap.


There are special rules for handling unresistable debuffs, but that's another story.

If your roommate's a 9ers fan, he's had a pretty rough decade.

Heck, at one point both Oakland and San Francisco were at the top of their respective divisions, and I thought the Mayan Apocalypse had come one year early.

Its potentially fixable, if the devs wanted to fix it. Some (not all) immobilizes also apply KB protection and resistance to the target so they cannot be knocked away from that spot. But giving them knockback immunity also automatically gives them immunity from knockDOWN which is just low magnitude knockback.

The potential solution is to eliminate the KB protection, and change the KB resistance from 100% to 99.9%. That would then make almost all knockback convert into knockdown on that target.

Whether the devs want to do that or not is a separate question of course.

If the internet won't go to Timecube, Timecube will come to the internet.

Castle accidentally added Heal Over Time to Indominable Will during Issue 12 beta, when VEATs were being created. He did it by accidentally buffing player psionic Absolute value instead of Resistance. Because that effect affected Absolute value instead of Resistance, it basically healed the player. Because it had a duration, it healed over time. And because it had zero pulse period, it healed very very very fast.

That particular ability has been in the game engine since at least Going Rogue, and possibly earlier. It was used in a couple of instances, including specifically alignment affirmation.


And a general reminder for the benefit of people not used to Paragon Studios' lingo: the Cryptic/Paragon Studios technical term for adding a capability or feature to the game engine itself is "tech." "Mechanics" are specific power effects comprised of those tech components.

Heal Over Time is a game mechanic. It uses Heal, Effect Over Time, and in the case of Time Manipulation "Requires Target OwnPower" to determine which heal effect gets applied: a standard one or a stronger one. "Requires Target OwnPower" - the ability for a power effect to require its target to have a particular power - is tech, although its unclear precisely when that tech was added to the game engine.

Pthh. 20 shots and you'd still kill her. 99.9999999% resistance on the other hand...


Unfortunately, the game engine doesn't keep that level of precision.

Not possible without altering the mechanics of how tohit works.