Arcanaville

On Scrappers, there aren't any special strong synergies or conflicts between MA and those four secondaries. I would say pick the secondary that by itself you would feel most comfortable playing.

There are a lot of people who seem to think there was a golden age of commercial programming. There wasn't. The industry has never valued quality. There are few programmers and software engineers that are a) more than minimally competent, b) willing to draw a line in the sand to hold the line on quality, and c) still around.

We expect - demand, even - that certain professions have a code of ethics that includes minimum levels of quality We expect doctors, pilots, engineers, to say "either you let me do this correctly, or you fire me and find someone else because I won't do it incorrectly." When they don't, we feel justified in basically crucifying them. Even when lives are not at stake, we still believe accountants are supposed to do the books right or not at all. We have *never* as a profession even *pretended* that we aspired to that level of basic competency.

And it shows.

Knowing it was not intended for purchase at that time and playing the characters anyway is technically exploiting a bug in the store. However, its not an exploit that the devs felt required a preventative or punitive response against the Dashing Dodecaweaponeers. Not all exploits rise to that level of necessary response.

Yes. I'm certain every marketeer with a functioning copy of Excel is thinking about the impact of this.

The purple patch affects -Res debuffs. Bruising is a special case: bruising grants a passive power to the target that debuffs self. Because the target is debuffing itself, there is automatically no level difference between the caster and the target of the debuff. That's not true for most resistance debuffs.

Resistance itself resists resistance debuffs. By quirk of mathematics established long ago, when resistance resists the effects of a resistance debuff the net effect is to make a -X% resistance debuff act to increase the damage of the attacker by +X%. So a -40% resistance debuff acts to increase damage by 1.4x.

I just think this.

I actually think I've seen every theater release movie from the 80s and 90s mentioned so far. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

Also, while going back through the list, although some people mentioned "all the Lord of the Rings movies" I'm not sure if that was intended to include both the Bakshi Lord of the Rings animated movie, and the unrelated Return of the King animated movie. The latter, especially, is a must-see.

Hmm, its getting harder to avoid movies already mentioned:

It Came from Hollywood (the warm up movie: guaranteed to put you into an MST3k mood)
The Five Deadly Venoms (obligatory token Kung Fu movie: actually a 70s movie but I saw it in the 80s, so there)
Back to School (yes, that's Terry Farrell)
The Sword and the Sorcerer (rocket sword ftw)
Caveman (zug zug)
Fright Night (horror movie, sort of)
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (requires you be as stoned as the screenwriter and director were making it)
Toxic Avenger (because a grindhouse list without a troma film is inconceivable)

The playstyle categories aren't "definitions" as such. They are there only to provide general guidance for players with no knowledge at all about how the archetypes work. This was brought up during the I21 preview, and again in beta, and in both cases the devs stated that the playstyle selector was there only to provide casual recommendations for play to a beginner player.

Widows have a ranged damage score of 5, and are a ranged damage playstyle recommendation. Dominators have a score of 6 (and this was before they were buffed) and they are not. What the archetypes are judged capable of doing and which archetypes are recommended for a particular playstyle is highly subjective in the playstyle selector in the character creator.

And to the extent we can nit-pick it, the devs official response is that its not for us. I asked this question specifically, and directly. If you can nit-pick the playstyle screen's recommendations, you're not its target audience.


And frankly, if Defenders are listed under Ranged Damage as an archetype, Tankers should be listed under Melee Damage as an archetype. That's just a mathematically inconsistent decision. The fact that it would give J_B fits is only incidental.

In other words, a perfect 80s movie.

In other words, you prefer cyan-orange-magenta-green-silver-purple-pink-yellow-black. With sparkles.

I'm afraid if you really believe this, making the store-bought ones non-tradable is meaningless. The fact that they are identical to the ones earnable in-game means the ones earnable in-game still have the same real-life cash value as the store-bought ones, and therefore they can be farmed in-game and then sold for values comparable to their average cost in the store. The fact that the store-bought ones themselves specifically are not tradeable and therefore not sellable is actually irrelevant to the issue of price anchoring.

I doubt its really going to have a significant negative effect, though, because fundamentally the ATIOs aren't powerful enough to be directly worth those cash values. What it costs the average player to acquire is not the same thing as its intrinsic redemption value. I would think there would be a higher incentive to sell purples for cash whether the paragon store sold them or not, and that doesn't really happen because there aren't enough buyers to make the problem significant.

If you are thinking in terms of presenting a case to the developers, your initial problem will be with the assumption that tankers, brutes, peacebringers, and warshades are "tanking classes" that all should all have the same tanking potential under buffing. The Tanker is the singular "tanking class" as such, and on the red side the canonical role of tanking was split between brutes and masterminds. Both peacebringers and warshades were given the option to act as pseudo-tankers in their design, but not primary tankers. Their resistance caps are indicative of that, not errantly set too low for a genuine tanker class.

So why specifically peacebringers or brutes should be normalized as "tanking classes" and not, say, scrappers or VEATs, would likely appear arbitrary to the devs.

It does have a 5% chance of missing.

You intend to eliminate English by removing its roots?

I find it interesting that the American Heritage panel disagrees with you. The majority of them seemed to object less to the quantity of destruction, and more to whether the destruction was killing or not. According to the quote, 66% were willing to accept the usage when a far larger number other than 10% was killed, but only 26% were willing to accept the usage when it referred to non-human death, such as property damage.

I don't think I would agree with the panel, but it does seem that there are two foci to the term: whether it refers to some acceptable range of fraction, and whether it refers to people specifically.

One thing about energy blast that I think is a bit under-rated is that not only does it look cool, but it sounds powerful. That vroosh is something I find I miss when playing most other ranged sets.

I think that its not just a question of formulas, but where the numbers the formulas generate go; what uses them. For example, we now have a pretty good idea of what the hate generation formula is for damaging attacks, but all that means is that we know when a critter will "aggro" onto a target. What we call "aggro" and what the game actually does when something aggros is not necessarily the same thing. For example, some people think if you're aggroing the target, it will run up to you. That's not necessarily true. It may not even be automatically true that under all circumstances it will shoot at you. Its probably only true that the critter will target you, but its entirely possible the AI can sometimes choose to do something else besides shoot at anybody including you. That makes aggro experiments tricky.

I remember when aggro was being discussed a while back conducting an experiment. One tanker autotaunting a critter, and a scrapper punching the target from behind. After about a minute, the critter simply ran away, right through being taunted. And there was another experiment where I was taunting and terrorizing the same targets, and in one case the critter literally acted placated: it forgot I was there and just walked calmly away, both through the taunt and through the terrorize (probably a bug, but still). So I think a full accounting of aggro has to involve a full accounting of critter AI, and no one has fully deciphered critter AI yet or explained it to the players.

Still, I think the information we have is close enough for reasonable discussions about tankers, at least in terms of their rough aggro capacity and relative aggro generation capability.

Just a side note: when Castle posted about his aggro investigation with Ghost Widow, he mentioned that according to their investigation the double-hate rule was still valid. Specifically, in order for you to pull aggro away from someone else, you have to have twice the hate they do. My guess is that the original programmers put that in there because if all it took was to exceed hate by any amount, that would be exploitable (two attackers taking turns hitting a target would constantly flip aggro back and forth and confuse the AI).

I'm assuming that's still true, although when it comes to aggro I'm not 100% certain of anything.

Force Fields, Sonic, and Ice shields all last four minutes.


There are buffs that have durations and recharge so you can just autofire them in a similar manner: Fortitude, for example.

Actually, now that I think about it, I was thinking about the Scrapper threat level which is 3, not the Brute threat level which is 4, identical to Tankers. So ignore that calculation: the 1.33 factor is only relevant to Scrappers not Brutes.

Here you go. (Edit: scooped)

The only two attacks that really are significantly different animation-wise are those two: Storm Kick and Crane Kick. Storm Kick used to be a four second kick-flurry with a punctuated kick at the end, and Crane Kick had a pose before the kick. I don't really miss those animations too much. My guess is that if you wanted to you could add back the old Crane Kick animation: your Crane Kick would be slower than everyone elses but I think at least the damage can be synced up within the alternate PFX. Storm Kick is problematic because the attack itself used to be a DoT, kind of like Dual Blades' One Thousand Cuts. Storm Kick is no longer a Dot, and the animation wouldn't sync up with the damage effects.

Anyway, I've played MA so long that for me, the question of trading damage for style is practically meaningless. The real question is whether I would trade style for damage, and the answer is no. You normally don't have to, but in the case of MA you could make the set a whole lot better by replacing Eagle's Claw with an attack that animated in, say, 1.83 seconds. But you can't compress the backflip into that short a time, so that's just out of the question, period. You can make it better, but you can't really make it any faster than it is now (it is a bit faster than it was at release, but most people don't notice).

Bruising was implemented that way specifically to *ensure* it would not stack from multiple tankers. It could easily be made to stack, and it could easily be made to not stack from the same tanker, but stack from multiple tankers, but the mechanics of bruising grant the target a power that self-debuffs, and the devs could limit that power so no one could have more than one copy of it at a time. That is why it works that way. The fact that it avoids combat modifiers due to the quirk of its mechanics is actually a side effect, and not the primary reason bruising works the way it does.

If the devs wanted it to stack, they could simply allow the bruising power to have a higher limit on the number you can have. Some incarnate interface power effects work that way. But it was originally very explicitly designed to not stack. Changing it to stack in some fashion requires a dev decision, but there are no mechanical limitations that prevent it or make it difficult.