Arcanaville
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Posts
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Quote:I'm still trying to figure out how anyone would think that sonic fences that only exist above ground would work against creatures that often inhabit tunnels. I've seen some supposedly really smart people do really dumb things in my time, but if I lived on Praetorian Earth, I'd already be a little nervous about the ability for our crack defense force to protect me from acid indigestion much less Hamidon.Originally Posted by CaptainMoodswing
Not that he is still alive. That the only reason the people are still alive is because he felt like not killing them during the truce. And now it is over. And that sonic fences have, by the way, been tried before and failed. I might be a little nervous. -
Quote:A defensive penalty would do that. A -5% Elu penalty would mean you got hit 5% more often regardless of your defenses in PvE, since no one has Elu buffs in PvE.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
An Elusivity penalty of say, 5% might warrant fairly huge bonuses, since it effectively doubles the amount of damage a very high Defense build takes while it is up...while penalizing lower Defense builds proportionately less.
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Quote:Mass Hysteria about what? That Hamidon is still alive? I don't think that would cause panic: the sonic fences are still up for a reason, and I don't see people running around in the streets: there's nowhere to go.Originally Posted by CaptainMoodswing
Wait, so the plan is to take the information about Hamidon, and broadcast it to the public?! Won't this cause mass hysteria and significant civilian casualties?
Not to mention the enriche-pickled brains of the populace are in general going to have their reactions dampened a bit. More likely the revelation of Cole's specific actions during the Hamidon war would cause anger and mistrust of Cole's regime, and that would start creating cracks in his control moreso than shattering it completely. There would still be a lot of people who would say "and?" -
Quote:They could be remixes. Damage/Range for blasters, say, or Resistance/Heal, or Endurance/Recharge.Originally Posted by EU_Damz
Trying to think of what bonuses a new alpha slot would give and so far . . . not much comes to mind that would keep it in line with the other four.
Also, I would be cautious about getting too excited about "become even more powerful and ascend even higher" because while the incarnate powers might get significantly stronger, they might also get only nominally so and that phrase is subject to a lot of interpretation. -
Quote:No, but they did start working on a badge for having all the Lore pets.Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Black Scorpion and Arbiter Hawk got together and fast-tracked that when I PM'd them that I had finished all 36 Alpha abilities on live, huh?
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Quote:Personally, I'm not crazy about -defense self debuffs because they are usually too radically disproportionate in their effects on defensive and non-defensive mitigation sets. A -20% defense debuff would be enormous vs SR or EA, and far less so against Dark Armor or Regen, say.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
If Broadsword Build Up imposed say, a -20% Debuff to Defense while it was running, would there be any amount of +% Recharge, Damage and Accuracy that would make the power acceptable?
Just curious.
I'd be more open to negotiation on a negative Elusivity debuff (which would affect everyone proportionately the same) but the devs seem reluctant to employ that feature. I think they want to compartmentalize Elusivity for PvP, which is ironic given its primary intended purpose was to solve PvE issues. -
Quote:Originally Posted by ObiWan
Looks like i'll finally start that double D blaster i've been contemplating.
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Quote:Its accessed through the LFG queue, so you could just jump into the queue: I'm guessing this mission's difficulty level is closer to standard difficulty, so teaming up with a random group won't be problematic.Originally Posted by McCharraigin
if it took a minimum of two to start this I could fire up his account and leave his toon at the door and go off and enjoy myself...but it takes 4...
But if you actually want to solo it, the alternative is to make two Freemium accounts under your master account, roll one alt each in them, and level them to 15, which shouldn't be hard. SK them to your main and run a bunch of missions or just play them to 15. Once you have two level 15s, one in each freebee account, you can then solo the mission (if you are actually capable of soloing it) by making a team of you, your significant other, your two freebees, make a closed league, and enter the queue.
Having the ability to make free filler accounts is one of those opportunities Freedom offers to people who want or need to solo content that can't be started solo. Its not optimal, but its an option. -
The way I look at it, its not unfair that Spiritual's +recharge doesn't affect the other Incarnate powers, for the simple reason that making a power be unaffected by recharge is not unfair in general to recharge buffs. We don't say, for example, that Strength of Will is unfair to Hasten. I look at it holistically and when I do, there are a number of powers that Spiritual's recharge buff don't affect, including the Incarnate powers, but overall its a very good benefit which makes Spiritual Alpha a good choice in general. That makes the choice to take or not take Spiritual at least fair: probably more than fair relative to the other choices.
Beyond making that choice itself fair to players, I see no specific reason why the game has to be fair to spiritual's recharge buff itself. Spiritual's recharge buff is not an entity that we need to be fair towards.
I don't think the devs were primarily thinking about making the Incarnate powers immune to recharge to make sure Spiritual was not too powerful: I think they explicitly wanted those powers to have very specific uptimes, period. And that's why you can't muck with their recharge at all, Spiritual or otherwise. -
Quote:For me, the great revelation occurred when I realized that, at least at the early levels, the best way to use Dark Regeneration was as an alpha strike attack against spawns. I was leaving spawns damaged, and using dark regen to heal to full at the start of fights. Doing so meant I was always attacking the maximum number of targets with it, and I could usually ensure a maximal heal on every use, which allowed me to slot it with endurance DOs and later SOs, and not worry about recharge, healing, or even too much accuracy. That was the moment I unlearned everything I knew about playing melee, and began playing the entire set with fresh eyes.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
DA requires a bit more forethought while playing. Timing it to get the most benefit out of Dark Regeneration is one of the tricky parts. There will be a lot of faceplanting while you're trying to get that down (wait until you're almost dead to fire it).
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Quote:All powersets are balanced based on the actual performance of those sets when played by actual players, not based on on-paper theorycraft. For a powerset to be changed for performance-based balance-specific reasons, it has to be datamined that the average in-game performance of all players that use it fall below the average of all players by more than a minimum amount. Melee powerset combinations in general tends not to underperform in that manner, which is why its so difficult to get buffs for any of them singularly.Originally Posted by rsclark
And the sets have not sat in some unalterable state since the most recent version of redraw was implemented. Many sets have been adjusted up and down in power.
The difference is that with non-weapon sets those adjustments are based on the actual performance of the sets.
If you want to debate the merits of the weapon sets, that's a completely different subject. But if you think weapon redraw is so bad its obvious its hurting the performance of the sets in a noticable way that would force the devs to "fix" it, all the information I have says that is not true. They may or may not at some point revisit it, but it would be for aesthetic reasons, not performance ones. -
Quote:My build takes the route of using almost no normal defense bonuses:Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
But....if you softcap without having to use Mako's Bite and Touch of Death, it means you can 5 slot your attack powers with Crushing Impact instead, getting the same recharge bonus as Red Fortune without wasting slots in a defense power that doesn't benefit much from having 6 slots in it. That saves you a slot in every attack power that isn't 6 slotted for defense bonuses.
I go for the "steadfast + glad + gaussian" method of getting to the soft cap, because that seems to provide the maximum flexibility everywhere else. And I focus on recharge, +regen, and +health for speed and additional survivability when I can. In fact, given a choice between going crushing on CAK or Mako, I went Mako for the extra +health and +damage. The extra +5% recharge didn't seem to have a significant difference in altering my attack chain for the better.Code:| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1577;719;1438;HEX;| |78DA65935B53525114C7F7E11C44511442454504AFDC04A1CB4C53565399A689A2A| |86F0D1D61ABD40918C0197DEC2BD48C3653BD95D54B2F7DAE2E9F205A9CF517CF0C| |6786F9ADFDDFEBB6376B674E96FA7EACBC792094FEC7865EAFE773859A5EADCA9A6| |3436F1CD77443D0E7DA2B550CD9086D1FBFDE37A48314FFA55B3E230D299319BDD6| |28E946FE61AD510FB6F796E4812CD7653277DC5A6DCB03439EC8BA67B57C246BB2D| |C485E1A7DD94AC548AE4BBD5A2A1FBACCC572E9F0A8D15E6564B1542895A5D35CE5| |AA52163D4FAAA542F251A5789ACFE8F586AC9D8E505F09FA9DB51A34BFA626E66C4| |2A435618B8031A61605E3CC4C2B4641CCB26A6A5D6B4CF70A73789539F28C79EE40| |08C5282F04C71499DDFB6081E994CC0D8A51B98EAAA28E13F947907F0C75DF93AF9| |DF3DBED9FB9CFBE2FE005B3FF2BF88DE9FECEDCA45807D7B1396C64843531D31426| |E7FE31B3E4D3C3F9454F9CFB1B26AD97E394DE5B044D1513438AB9A7D09E0BFEAE4| |5DEDB226D007506BAB9CE9C0622EE03F978700ECF01D7B9F6123C620EBE029F1203| |ADBB66AA14EBC57D798715538B2DF0FDC47C585FE7F536F90EB1AF184A703E8D341| |FE27DE86BCCCD7D8D77F17A1C7D7E24DF51FC9FA377F91E276E837798938BCC997B| |CC1CC5F8717EFF20E79941BE30EAF8C827807B0BF8B9D74FA405512B88D90961664| |2989910666912B3B343315338CB14724F7B41D49E46ED00F9CE727E657617FDE498| |41DA8BF09E1AC1DEBC9F6BCCEF600DDF1CB51B47EF71CCC82E6949C42717F81E169| |2600A9C675ED0C0A4D0730AB5D2C89DDE02CFD9775C6BBF5B21305FEB560DFF6956| |6BBF3BA1A0A7A0D67EBFCDACD3F436EDE7165BB7D8FB16BBC74D6F12F62FD215CC9| |0827ABFAD5A84B53F579A5D59E5398AE25C519C33719FE733B1C6FB893DD6FF5EC5| |AACA19E60A77107EC78CBE65A6ACE76FD227621D4ABA43B9D9A1DCE85036BD54003| |7F6D3622F0D5ED9618BFD1FE2DCE4C9| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
I really think SR scrappers should try to find space for Winter's Gift in higher end builds whenever possible: the difference between 40% resistance to slow and recharge debuffs and 60% seems very noticable to me. -
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Quote:I did refer to that, but there is a more fundamental logical argument proving global consistency is impossible given basic assumptions about how MMO story arcs have to work and the limitations of City of Heroes in particular.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
Arcanaville is referring to teaming. A level 1 teaming with a level 50 is going to be seeing things that "haven't happened yet", while the 50 is seeing things they might have already done.
Personally, I don't see a problem with that, but that is technically 'imperfect consistency'.
1. Our characters progress in both level and time in a monotonically ascending direction. Basically, early levels happen before later ones chronologically for the player.
2. If a future event changes parts of the game experienced at lower progressional levels after a character has progressed out of them, the character's own past will change to be inconsistent with past experience.
3. If a future event changes parts of the game experienced at lower progressional levels before a character has progressed out of them, the character will perceive cause and effect in reverse order.
4. Both #2 and #3 unavoidably create global storyline inconsistencies.
5. Therefore, any MMO that allows future events to change lower level content necessarily introduces global storyline inconsistencies.
6. The only way to add content without creating global inconsistencies is therefore to either a) add content with no connection to prior content or b) always add future content at higher levels than any previously experienced by any player. In other words, the devs would be forced to add no content lower than level 50 now. And later, level 60, then level 70, then level 80, preserving cause and effect to be consistent with content gating. Since that is not an option for City of Heroes, City of Heroes cannot have global storyline consistency in the temporal sense. QED. -
Quote:They are complaining about redraw penalty. There used to be no redraw penalty to complain about.Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
People aren't complaining about the buff part, they are complaining about the part that is annoying to them.
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Quote:Global cooldown is not what we have or anything remotely close to what we have. Its so fundamentally different, most other dev teams probably consider our system not just different, but totally broken. And compared to the intended design parameters of most other MMOs combat systems, our cast time bound system is, in fact, totally broken.Originally Posted by MTS
Well, we kind of already have it -- in the form of activation time. In wow at least, most melee abilities are instant (and I mean instant). Any animation can be interrupted by movement, and abilities that are off the GCD can be spammed as fast as you can mash the keys.
Animations that root you and lock you out of your other powers do effectively the same thing as a global cooldown, just with a variable duration.
The fundamental difference is that global cooldown systems have linearly predictable DPS while ours could be the subject of a masters thesis in variations of the weighted knapsack problem. -
Quote:The "resist based sets" most people consider to be based largely on resistances are Fiery Aura, Electric Armor, Dark Armor, and Invulnerability. Two cap a damage type: FA and Ela. Two don't: Dark and Invuln. Dark is not an unusual exception.Originally Posted by Mr. DJ
I always wondered about that...every other resist based set is capped to certain things...hell, Ice Armor is defense based and has capped resists to cold o_O
Ice has capped cold resistances, but that's because as a "defense based set" it has very little actual cold defense. Both Ice and Stone (outside of Granite) are not pure defense sets: they have high defenses to most types, but mostly resistance to the rest. -
Let me guess. Next season Darth Maul creates a giant robotic spider to destroy the Jedi. Because spiders are the fiercest creatures in the galaxy.
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Quote:I ask again: did you actually read the post of mine you quoted? The one where I say that the design of the obliteration patch is in my opinion in error because of visibility issues?Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
Fine then, how do you suggest people treat design flaws of this nature, if said people are hoping the flaws are fixed rather than repeated?
You quoted the part of my post where I specifically said "As to the OP" which asked the fundamental question of how it is possible to fail to get the badge when no one claims to have been hit by the beam. I said I would only consider the mechanics themselves bugged if people saw the beam elsewhere and still got hit, not if they got hit and didn't see the beam, because they still could have been hit by the beam. That would explain the specific situation the OP was asking about. Because that was a response to the OP, and not the post I quoted, I went out of my way to say "As to the OP." My response to the person that I quoted, which specifically addressed the question of whether the Obliteration patch was designed properly from a visibility standpoint, was to say in my opinion it is not. I offer no specific comment on what anyone else should or should not do to express a similar sentiment. -
Quote:I'm directly responding to posts, not to the original title of the thread. I expect people likewise to respond to what I say in the context of when I said it. In this case, consider that the post you were referencing was a post I made to the OP of the thread, asking me explicitly and directly about the idea of adding confuse mez to the set.Originally Posted by Vauluur
The thread title is "It's time to improve Broadsword" not "It's time to make Broadsword different".
That's a discussion I try not to commingle with objective design discussions. Why people like things or not like things is highly subjective, and when the discussion goes there, all other lines of thought tend to get sacrificed.Quote:What I don't see is how that improves Broadsword enough to justify choosing it over Katana, or say, Titan Weapons. -
Quote:In this game, for sufficient recharge higher DPA is higher DPS, and any change that deals with the levels when that is not true will probably draw a lot of crap from people saying those levels don't matter.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
Well, let's back up a moment, and ask that question:
How would you balance Katana and Broadsword numerically, without adding/swapping mechanics, if the mandate was that Katana should continue to be faster with higher DPS, and that broadsword should have higher burst and/or higher DPA?
There's really only one genuinely problematic Broadsword attack, and that is Slash. Its DPA is, factoring in arcanatime, 0.63 DS/sec (not counting crits). That's rather low. Its comparable power in Katana is Gambler, and its DPA is 0.91. That's actually higher than average. So the Broadsword attack is below average and the Katana comparable attack is above average. That alone accounts for a significant amount of the single target DPS differential for the two sets. I'd either speed up Slash somewhat, or alternatively and more likely increase its damage from 1.0 to 1.32 (recharge would increase from 4 to 6 seconds).
Beyond that, I would probably make some mechanical change that added some frontloading on damage and see where I was at. -
Quote:Preferably in alphabetical order.Originally Posted by ArwenDarkblade
I'm starting to think that people will only be happy when you come to each of our homes personally, sit at our kitchen tables, and tell us what you're going to do with the game.
- Aaarcanaville -
Quote:In all those games, weapon draw delay would be meaningless anyway, because only City of Heroes specifically allows we players to leverage activation time as thoroughly: not even CO allows it to the same degree.Originally Posted by Jibikao
I've played other games like Guild Wars, Champions, WAR, Rift, Allods and WoW and as far as I know, they don't have weapon draw delay.
But if you want to ask the devs for global cooldown to replace weapon redraw, I'm curious to know how far that would go. -
Quote:I tossed in the idea a ten percent chance for this effect to occur. The 5% is the minimum chance for you to miss, even if you are at the tohit cap, and therefore the minimum opportunity for this effect to go off even under the circumstances EG alluded to where Broadsword made missing itself unlikely.Originally Posted by Vauluur
That's true, but I don't believe that a 5% chance of something happening is the change Broadsword needs. It needs more. An interesting idea, but it needs something else with it.
We were talking about ways to differentiate Broadsword from Katana. Differentiation is not really a quantity thing, its a qualitative thing. More different than having unique mechanics that exist nowhere else in the game doesn't really exist: there is nothing more differentiating than that. Whether Broadsword quantitatively underperforms Katana is a separate issue, and one that can be addressed separately and numerically. -
Quote:That's the intent. I tossed in the sleep because that's what I thought of first, and it works, but the crux of the suggestion is not "add sleep" but rather "add glancing blow mechanics." The effect itself is negotiable. It could have been knockdown, or disorient, or anything else consistent with a glancing blow. I picked something reasonable that would not be too overpowered given the fact the mechanic itself allows Broadsword to hit things that normally it would have missed: a specifically unique and potentially very valuable mechanic.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
The sleep effect is a 'saving throw': you never want to see it, but if you do, it's because you needed it and the alternative was having no effect at all.