Arcanaville

I was talking about my experience leveling the set up: from level 1 to level 49 I leveled Dark Armor with nothing but DOs and SOs.

I'm not, but a lot of times when I say "there's a way to work around X" someone will come along and say "so are you saying the devs are perfect and everything is fine and blah blah blah" and then I have to waste time finding something shiny for them to play with.

Its not the future yet.

I think I'm extremely generous when it comes to tolerating content and content difficulty. I will, in fact, create nightmares entirely on my own (I tried to solo Barracuda the other day, which of course didn't work out so well against Reichsman). Having said that, I will jump onto random Lambdas, random BAFs, and even random Keyes (at least when they were being run more often). If I don't recognize the leader as someone capable of running a Master Underground, I won't join at all anymore. I've given up trying to figure out if a random assemblage of people can run it. A random assemblage of people can't run it. An inexperienced leader can't control it. And it'll be an hour or more before you even realize it.

There's a lot to like about the Underground Trial. For one thing, it corrects an error in Keyes where people are supposed to more or less stick together, rather than randomly scattering in Keyes. There's no point in the Underground where having less people would be better, except for having less stupid people during the bomb phase, and even that is only problematic on badge runs. But unless you have a supersaturated league of massive damage and debuffs, the tactics involved with the twin warwalkers and the avatar at the end are so precise relative to how most content in the game works - even Keyes - I'm sorry, but to put it bluntly we're just not up to it.

If it was possible to solo the Underground trial, but it would take twenty four straight hours to do it, and the odds of getting the badges in it were only 10% per try, I would start now. I'm not balking about difficulty: I'm balking at futility. For me, the Underground trial passes the horizon of content that exceeds the difficulty level any designer could reasonably expect was tolerable from the current playerbase. And I'm sure there are people who love it and skate through it, just like I personally have no problem with fighting Antimatter with Keyes, or running Lambda on a squishy blaster, or tanking in BAF. I don't claim to represent anyone but myself, but I think given my normal stance on difficulty, complexity, and developer discretion when it comes to designing high end content, when I have a fundamental problem with something I think you've crossed a threshold you shouldn't be anywhere near.

I'll run Underground if you're running them, or a few other players, but otherwise at this point I would rather attempt to solo a Master of STF. To me, that's actually a better risk/reward activity than a random Underground. I mean that literally: that's next on my list after I figure out the right set of freemium filler/helpers for Barracuda. The ten hours I spent figuring out how to solo (more or less) a Master of ITF run was more entertaining than any Underground run I've been on so far, including the successful ones.

To put it bluntly, the Underground trial is the *only* content that I wouldn't run if it didn't have badges in it. I can't even say that about the shard task forces. I can't even say that about the original Positron's task force.

To put it even more bluntly, I've thought about hacking the game servers to give myself level 9 permissions so I can just miracle myself the Underground badges I'm missing, because I think that would be easier, especially with my timezone limitations.


Remember what I said about Lambda; remember what I said about BAF. I said people were exaggerating the difficulty, and one day we'd be doing them with our eyes closed. Remember what I said about Keyes: its hard, but with time we'll eventually get to the point of Keyes being no more difficult than the LRSF. Frame my comments about the Underground in that light.

Glad I could help. I still think SnowGlobe is basically correct about most of his complaints about Obliteration's mechanics, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to help players work around those difficulties in the meantime.

I wouldn't mind higher CoF accuracy, but I do want to point out a weird occasional benefit to CoF's low base accuracy. Suppose you're fighting more than ten things in roughly melee range. If you turn on OG to stun them, OG will hit its target cap of ten targets. At high accuracy, they will be the ten closest targets to you most of the time. If you also turn of CoF, if CoF had the same accuracy it would also tend to hit the same targets, more or less. But at lower accuracy CoF tends to miss many of the first targets it sees.

This is important, because the target cap enforced on all AoEs is number of targets *hit* not number of targets rolled against. So if CoF misses a few, it will keep looking for targets until it finds ten, or runs out of targets in range. The difference in accuracy tends to cause the two auras to hit a somewhat different set of targets (with some overlap) if both auras are on, which can have some benefit in high density environments.

The deficits to players only running one at a time outweigh this situational advantage, but it is there: I've exploited this mechanical difference myself on occasion.

I'm not exactly sure it fixes a lot, but it does have the advantage of focusing any damage increase benefit into larger visible numbers. Psychologically, that sort of buff will look even better than it is to most people.

For example, if I say "increase crit damage to 150%" that's going to look *huge*. Its not. Its equivalent to about a three percent increase in damage across the board. But its occasional burst damage will increase dramatically.

Ok. And then how would you solve the problem of Nerve Core Paragon not buffing my Rebirth Destiny.

Why would anyone do content they don't like over and over again for virtually no benefit? There's no requirement to do that.

TI + RPD equals 62.4% resistance to smash/lethal (on tankers).

Dark Embrace + Murky Cloud is also equal to 62.4% resistance to negative energy. And 46.8% resistance to smash/lethal. And 46.8% resistance to fire/cold. And 46.8% resistance to toxic and energy.

Periodically, Invulns have expressed concern about the opposite situation you're noting: that sets like Dark Armor get to have substantial resistances to a wide range of types, while Invuln is heavily focused on smash/lethal.


Today, going to have to go with MA. Between being able to stack stuns with OG and with the defense bonus in SK and with a PBAoE knockdown to keep things in range of the auras and Dark Regen, its probably one of the better matches for Dark Armor. MADA has always been considered good synergy for Scrappers, I think its an even better combination for tankers.

That's because your idea of respecting the genre is unique.

No, but I have been thinking about a max mitigation build for my Energy/Energy to complement her ultra-fast speed build. So far, this is what I've doodled into Mids:

It does use Nerve to get over 45% ranged defense, but even without that its a fairly sturdy build. It essentially soft-caps range, has a bunch of defense besides, has about 47% s/l resistance, and 33% energy resistance. It nets 2.17 eps with toggles so it should be fairly sustainable, and for more end if you swap nerve for cardiac the ranged defense is still above 44%. It also has aid self. Interestingly, although it does use the Shield Wall proc, and the Gladiator Armor proc, and steadfast, it only slots one purple set (Ragnanok) that is there mainly for the recharge: it has almost no bearing on the survivability of the build.

AoE defense is only 29.7%, so you're short of the cap even with a small luck, but its a work in progress. Stick tier 4 Rebirth on this build, and I think you'd be way beyond standard scrapper survivability except for mez protection.

The stealth procs don't work? Odd: I never noticed that. I stealth around with a stealth proc stacked on superspeed in Keyes all the time and I seemed to be invisible, at least when running into bunkers. If the stealth proc was off and all I had was SS, I think they would spot me at that range.

Its certainly harder for blasters in general, but everything is harder for blasters in general as long as anything is shooting back. Which is actually why blasters tend to like BAF: not as much shooting back, and when it happens its usually when the league is in tight clusters of buffs and heals. But its not impossible for blasters to succeed in Keyes without special builds or powers. My blaster's only self heal is Destiny, and I don't have Electric Armor, and I'm not soft capped to anything, and I do fine.

They added plenty of content for pre-50s and small groups.

Are you saying you believe the store and reward systems were coded by Walker E. Richardson, Suuuuuuuuuupppperrrrr Geeeeeeeeennniuuuuusssss?

Parry is still Melee/Lethal, right?

Shadow Meld would work better except for the long cast time. If we're talking about an effect that would only last ten seconds, both the buff and the debuff, then I might consider going Shield Defense but not specifically to attempt to beat the debuff with more defense. Every time I used Build Up, I would immediately follow with Shield Charge. Bang: ultrahigh buffed SC, and an immediate knockdown to mitigate much of the defense debuff for about half the debuff time total (from SC activation to the critters rising from the knockdown).

That's not hard. A soft-capped scrapper will avoid 90% of the damage they would have taken if they did not have any defenses. That's usually considered to be the definition of "90% mitigation" comparable to 90% resistance.

To calculate the best case damage mitigation you divide the heal / (1 - resistance) / (1 - defensive mitigation). Or alternatively, Heal / (1 - Resistance) / ((0.5 - Defense)*2). Note that the value will be different for different damage types, because Dark Armor will have different resistances for different damage types. For softcap, Defense is 0.45 (45%) so that becomes Heal / (1 - Resistance) / 0.1 = Heal * 10 / (1 - Resistance).

Keep in mind that real world performance is bursty and variable, and the averages mask that. You would be looking at just about the most extreme case of averages not matching reality, because there's no way to consistently get down to 1 point of health and fire the heal, and there's no way 90% defense ends up consistently being equal to exactly 90% damage mitigation second by second: it will only average to that over long periods of time. A teeny tiny burst of damage will kill you under these attempted circumstances.

But if the calculation is just for estimation purposes, and you are aware they represent the upper bound of the best you could do, not what you will always do, then that's the way to calculate that.

You can also click on the link in my sig for "Scrapper Secondaries Comparison" which has out of date numbers (from Issue 7) but is there primarily to explain exactly how defense, resistance, +health, heals, and regeneration work mathematically, and how you can account for them numerically. The advantage of that is that you'll see how all the effects work and can be calculated for, not just defense and resistance. The disadvantage of that is that your eyes will bleed for a week to ten days.

I've been around the block so many times I've worn a groove in the sidewalk. Every system I've ever written has audited everything. I do it even when I'm told not to do it unless there is a security, privacy, or regulatory reason not to, and even then I log everything I'm allowed to log. I log the fact that the system is logging.

I've not commented on the store implementation and the related reward tracking systems too much, but that's because what more you can say but that those systems suck. When I think about what you're supposed to do instead of what's actually happening, as a professional I'm half embarrassed, half furious. So I try not to think about it too much.

I still think I could do a better job in PHP in a weekend. And I'm not just talking about the in-game store, either.

The entire powers team is pretty busy with this and that, but I would recommend hitting up Arbiter Hawk with your questions if you're having trouble getting a response from Black Scorpion.

My definition of "win" is a little more specific than yours is. Also, I tend to ask for things that can go horribly wrong if the parameters aren't very carefully adhered to, so I tend to be much more specific. Even when I'm specific and I explain why veering off is a bad idea, sometimes a variant of a suggestion shows up that deals more harm than good, which makes me even more cautious than most.

FF/Energy defender comes to mind. It benefits a little, like all things benefit at least a little, but not all that much really.

Endurance penalties are extremely difficult to balance in City of Heroes, because the game allows players to easily manipulate how much endurance they have, how much recovery they have, how much their powers cost to use, and they can carry large numbers of endurance supplements.

Its so difficult to balance, that arguably *none* of the endurance crashes in the game are anywhere near being correctly balanced against reasonable design requirements. They are either far too strong or far too easy to ignore, and given the ability to manipulate I mention above, sometimes its actually both simultaneously.

Like I said, I might not be a good example. I spotted the appropriate details instantly because I know what to look for, and I can do it dynamically under higher density conditions than that. I'm just pointing out what they are for the benefit of those that don't have as much experience observing them as we do.

The question isn't whether its easy or hard to spot the patch, but rather how hard is too hard. I tend to be very conservative when it comes to that sort of thing because I know that what I can process visually in real time isn't representative of the median person. That's why I think it should be made somewhat easier regardless of whether I can spot it or not.

However, there are two aspects to this issue and one of them is, given the current way the system works, what are the elements of it that should not be as problematic as they are, that the devs should fix. The other is, given how it is now, what advice could be given to players to assist them in the meantime.

Thinking back to when I was first running Keyes and learning to avoid these patches, one strategy I employed before getting more practice was to realize that the goal wasn't to avoid the patch, it was to go where the patch wasn't. Too many people, I think, are paralyzed by an inability to locate the patch fast enough. But you do not need to locate the patch to avoid it. Rather, you only need to locate a spot of ground where its *not*.

So the strategy I used in the early going was to zoom out when the timer approached the next Oblit, and locate an open spot of ground that was not obscured by players, effects, anything. When the timer ran to zero, I only had to make one decision:

A. I see Obliteration, I run in the opposite direction.

B. I don't see Obliteration, I run to daylight (the spot I mention above).

This guarantees you are always moving towards a spot Obliteration is not. It does not guarantee you are always moving in the opposite direction from where Obliteration is, but that's not the objective.

Either way, unless you are absolutely dead certain you are not in the patch (and the only way I'm certain is if I see it far away), you move. You assume you're in it, and you move to somewhere its definitely not. No amount of players, special effects, or ground effects can prevent you from doing that.

Instinctively, players don't want to disengage and run unless they are certain they have to. But if you move only when you think you have to, instead of running unless you're certain you don't, mistakes happen.

Actually, I'm not sure what you mean by "nearly center" but the center of the oblit in that image is actually right of center and low: the person standing just below the three 10s is actually standing almost at the center of the oblit patch. Perhaps I'm not a good example, but my eyes key off of some key elements of the oblit patch which I noticed when we were running master runs initially:

I've highlighted some features on your cap: the double concentric circles and a line characteristic of the crosshair in the middle, and the outer edge of the oblit patch:



These features are easier to observe unobscured. I have a couple pics of the same patch at different moments firing and just after firing (which looks like just before firing) that are fairly unobscured:

Just after firing = just before firing. Note the crosshair and the hazy edge of the patch itself:



Firing. Firing obscures the ordinarily more prominent crosshair, but of course if its firing its too late anyway: