Arcanaville

1. Sleep means they cannot attack.

2. Unlike terrorize, sleep detoggles.

3. Broadsword has AoEs.

No matter what, there's always a chance to miss. This effect, whatever it was, would happen during some of those occasions. And I should point out that no amount of -defense or accuracy can reduce that chance to miss lower than 5%.

I should point out that while P4 hyperthreading used mostly superpipelining tricks to enable SMT, Nehalem-based hyperthreading dispensed with the ultradeep pipeline and went more scaler: the Nehalem core has three microcores, two integer and one floating point. While they do share resources, a Nehalem core can execute two integer or one integer and one floating point instruction simultaneously. So Intel already had multiple integer microcores per CPU core before Bulldozer.

Old school P4 HT could easily find itself only offering 30% more performance over a single thread, and I had workloads where I turned it off because it was actually slower than going single thread, but that hasn't happened in my experience with Nehalem and Westmere CPUs. Eight integer threads on my i7 is not a problem. Eight floating point threads on my i7 runs into problems, but that doesn't happen often.

I had the Nehalem core architecture explained to me at some IBM/Intel thingy so when I finally got my i7 I tested that: putting two integer threads on one CPU does not result in each running at only about half speed each. They tend to run at something like 70-80% speed each unless they are incredibly i/o bound or accessing crazy randomized heap, and its far less likely to see catastrophic reductions in performance due to contention. I believe the Bulldozer architecture uses a not too dissimilar block design.

There are times I think you just like quoting my posts, whether you intend to actually respond to anything I say in them or not.

You could stack it at least once, which would mean Broadsword could perma-confuse a boss. That *and* Parry seems like an awful lot of mitigation.

Stackable confuse is a very dangerous thing to give to things that aren't generally considered to be primary mezzers.

But I did have a weird thought. Sufficiently weird that I don't know if its a really ingenious idea or a really stupid one. Suppose all broadsword attacks had a chance to sleep the target: in this case the sleep would be a stun variant you could be knocked out of.

Now, just adding a sleep would be a weird ad hoc addition, but suppose the attacks only had a chance to sleep if they missed. In other words, sometimes the blow lands and you take damage. Sometimes the blow glances off the target and instead of being chopped they are struck and stunned. And sometimes the attack just plain misses.

You could do that in theory: make the attack autohit, then for all normal (i.e. current) effects make the effect require that the standard tohit roll pass. Then for the sleep effect require that the standard tohit roll plus ten passes but the standard tohit roll fails.

That's sufficiently odd that I doubt the devs would go for it, but it would be a way to add an effect unique to broadsword that actually has a significant but not overpowering benefit. Sleep is a relatively "soft" effect, and it would mainly benefit broadsword when it misses, not when it hits. But it would mean tohit rolls that normally would have caused broadsword to have no effect would now have some mitigating effect without radically increasing offensive output. And it has some moderate logical basis for distinguishing broadsword from katana: we can presume katana weapons by design and by usage don't generally strike their targets in a way to create this effect. Katana is more all or nothing, while broadsword would have a "full on hit" and a "glancing or sideways hit." I stuck the sleep in there, but the idea isn't reliant on the glancing effect always being sleep, or even always being a mez in general.

The solution to the problem of having less consistency than is possible is to have more consistency than currently exists. The solution to the problem of not having global consistency doesn't exist. The solution to the problem of asking for the impossible is to ask for the possible.

Did his combat chat say he was hit by Obliteration?

It is possible to know that at the moment you'd either have the old slow system, or the current system, and there were no other practical possibilities. You would not have had something different today under any circumstance, because addressing this issue in the manner some players feel is appropriate has never been a priority. The changes BaB made weren't even done under the specific rationale of altering weapon redraw mechanics itself. They were done as part of a more general multi-purpose pass through the weapon sets (and some non-weapon sets). Without the impetus of killing multiple birds with one stone, just changing weapon redraw to satisfy min/maxers is highly unlikely to get on anyone's priority list, and the odds of that happening have actually gone downward, not upward, since the changes were actually made.


What's more, the changes were a major buff across the board for all weapon sets affected, and people still complain about them. When the players complain about a buff, that does not encourage the devs to reexamine the situation as a priority.

Honestly? I think its because while Dark Armor can be a very strong secondary, that strength comes with a lot of caveats in terms of both build and playstyle. And there is a lot of debate about the effectiveness of the toggle auras. And the bottom line is anyone actually asking about strong scrapper secondaries without a strong working knowledge of how they all work is probably better off being steered away from Dark Armor.

Dark Armor comes up more when people ask for suggestions on sets to try that are off the beaten path, or when knowledgeable people toss ideas around within the context of people with a lot of experience playing melee. Dark Armor tankers, for example, are monsters when built and played right. But just managing the endurance burn of Dark Regeneration is something that takes some getting used to, and is a kind of skill most powersets don't demand.

What Venture is saying in effect is you can't change older content at lower levels and still have a level/story progress trajectory. What you're saying is to essentially lock the changes behind progression gates. In effect, to use phasing to enforce progression trajectories. When you start the game, Galaxy is there. And then eventually in your timeline its destroyed, and then and only then do you actually see it destroyed. Something like that.

The problem with that notion is that its impossible to maintain this veneer in a multiplayer game where different players can be essentially in different points in the timeline but still team together. Perfect temporal consistency is something you can really only have in either a single player game, or an MMO with no backtracking content. And even that second possibility requires an enormous development staff because the only way to revise older content is to simultaneously revise all dependencies every time it happens, which is an enormous undertaking.


You're actually supposed to be able to compromise on this in an MMO. Timeline consistency can be at best locally consistent, but not globally consistent. If you can't compromise on this type of thing, you need to play MMOs that do not have actual story arcs in them that ever change. the devs could do a much better job with local consistency, but nothing they do, given the current structure of the PvE game, will allow them perfect global consistency. Its not just impractical, its basically logically impossible.

1. The job of animators is to make the best looking animations they can. You can fault them for not honoring your min/max priorities better if you want, but that would be immaterial to their jobs.

2. The actual weapon redraw effect is normally relatively small: no larger in magnitude than lots of other effects in the game that aren't optimal.

3. Since the weapon sets got *huge* speed ups as part of BaB's streamlining of weapon redraw, the net overall effect of the existence of weapon redraw existing within those sets was a net overall dramatic increase in performance.

4. Anyone who wants to go back to the way things were before, when there was no penalty for weapon redraw, weapon sets were just slow - and acceptably slow for years - is free to ask for things to be reverted. However, I would ask that they ask for things to be reverted only for themselves, and not for everyone else.

If the attack misses, none of its effects trigger. You can think of attacks like big if...thens:

If attack hits, then:
do effect1
do effect2
...

If the attack misses, then the game engine doesn't even bother looking at the effects of the power. So in your case, if the attack hits, the state flag would get applied and the secondary effect would also happen, and if the attack missed neither would happen. That's regardless of the state flag stuff. Moreover, the state flag stuff could actually cause a power like this to malfunction: changing the state of a target (including self) performs a database operation which is not instantaneous, and you could cause a race condition where the power applies the state flag, then checks the state flag, finds the state flag isn't actually there yet, fails to do the second thing, and then the flag appears later.

Either way, though, I don't think that is the behavior that EG is asking about.

Sort of yes. More the reverse. You can make an attack autohit, and then make one or more secondary effects require a special tohit roll.

Brute Fury does not work using this mechanism. It uses a special mechanism that actually keeps track of whether the player has activated an attack recently, regardless of whether it actually hit the target or not.

One power that works with this mechanism is Tanker taunt. Its autohit in PvE, but requires a tohit roll in PvP. The way that works is Tanker taunt is an autohitting power with two effects: a taunt that only works on non-players (critters), and another one that works on players. But the player taunt effect requires a special tohit roll to happen.

I've been pretty fortunate that customer service hasn't explicitly done that to me or tried to correct my math. No, wait. Customer service has been pretty fortunate that customer service hasn't explicitly done that to me or tried to correct my math.

I will say that in the last month, I've received exactly *one* in-game tell from another player asking a defense question. I've received *seven* in-game tells from other players asking questions about calculating reward tokens. I think at the point where players are asking me more questions about calculating reward tokens than calculating game mechanics, something has gone awry.

You should not, under any circumstances, have any suppressible travel turned on during the fight with Antimatter on a badge run. Sprint is plenty fast to get out of the circle. Some players think having travel can help because speed makes it easier to get out of the patch. It hurts more than it helps. It takes less than one second to sprint out of the patch, and you have more than two to safely get out of dodge.

Sprint is so predictably fast enough, I wouldn't even recommend using teleport to get out of the patch because the teleport activation time is a bigger risk than just running out of the patch.

The reason why I specifically recommended no flying at all for any reason and no hopping off the ground for any reason during a badge run, even to the point where if you can't target antimatter tough tapoica, is because I noticed early on that the obliteration effect is two-dimensional. As far as I can tell with the exception of some minor swirling fx at the edge the obliteration patch has zero height. So if it spawns anywhere near eye level, its basically invisible from that vantage point. There are no graphics settings you can set that will make the patch visible if it spawns in the air at approximately eye level, unless you yourself are above it, and if you are above it you'd be part of the problem.

Yes, I believe that to be a design bug. And I say that as someone that can avoid Obliteration virtually 100% of the time if I have to.


As to the OP, I don't know if I've ever been in a situation where someone explicitly claimed to be hit by Obliteration for literally no possible reason. In my opinion, its not enough to think you aren't at the beam: if I can't see it, I assume I'm in it. I would only bug a situation where I clearly saw the beam over there, and yet I got hit over here. I haven't heard of someone reporting that. I only hear reports of players getting hit and not seeing the beam. That wouldn't necessarily mean they were not actually in its path.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The largest global difficulty change made to the game in the last four years went totally unnoticed. What people perceive and not perceive is something very difficult to predict. They claim to notice things that didn't happen, and would have been too small to notice if they did happen, then fail to notice things apparently so obvious if you said people wouldn't notice you'd get laughed at.

That's not specifically a comment on the diminishing suggestion itself, just a comment on what the playerbase actually notices and doesn't notice.

In this game, the notion of being "armored" or otherwise "invulnerable" is emulated by separating that into two different effects: being able to withstand a lot of damage taken, and being so tough that many attacks simply don't do any damage at all: they "bounce off." The former is implemented with resistances, and the latter with defense. This is how the Invulnerability set itself is conceptually constructed.

Defense is not uniquely tied to evasion in City of Heroes. Its tied to (at least) three separate conceptual effects: evasion (dodging), deflection (attacks bouncing off or otherwise striking and having the damage redirected away from the target), and absorption (attacks having their damage completely nullified in some manner).

In this game, if you were trying to emulate the effect of attacks hitting and reducing the ability for armor to deflect future attacks, that would be a defense debuff.

Basically, what I was trying to say in that passage above is, all other things being equal, you'd have to figure out a way to sustain about -70% resistance to match the damage modifier and damage cap difference, because that's how a resistance debuff would be able to amplify damage by 1.73. All other things aren't equal, because we aren't always comparing identical sets of attacks because of Fire Imps, but Fire Imps alone won't have a huge contribution to damage compared to a scrapper at the recharge and damage cap. How much they reduce the amount of -res you need to pass scrapper damage is the thing I would need to calculate more accurately.

In theory yes. In a practical sense, probably not. The problem is that this is not just a question of numbers: its a question of qualitative judgment. There have to be advantages to both melee and ranged offense. Allow both access to similar self protection, and the ability to make that distinction becomes extremely blurry. And in this game, we have an almost unparalleled ability to push the limits of the archetypes through power selection and enhancement. If the archetypes aren't just distinct, but very far apart in key areas, you eventually cross the threshold to tempting too many people to make the quantum leap of taking one thing, and adding enough enhancement to fill in the gaps.

While its currently possible to make actual blasters have far more self protection than even conventional scrappers do, few players in total bother to do so. Its extremely expensive, and for significantly less you can make the scrappers themselves even more indestructible. There is still significant appeal to playing both. A ranged scrapper, something with significant ranged offense and significant personal protection, even if its nominally balanced numerically it would increase the temptation to replace both blasters and scrappers with sufficient effort put into enhancement.

I've seen it happen once, so I know this is not a hypothetical problem.

You're going to need to be a bit more specific than that.


But you didn't explain why those things actually make sense. As I said, for example mentioning that you personally think broadsword attacks in the real world make you more vulnerable to more damage which is simulated by resistance debuffs implies that's obvious. I not only think its not obvious, I don't think its even true.

In many cases for very good game design reasons powers in-game don't work in a way perfectly consistent with real world physics, or even close analogs to real world physics. But if your concept is for broadsword to gain inspiration from actual broadswords in real life, then -resistance is almost certainly not a justifiable effect. Broadsword attacks do not, in general, increase the vulnerability of the target to take more damage from an attack that lands than they otherwise would.

Few things really actually do that, so relying on real world effects to justify that kind of game mechanical effect is hazardous. In the real world, cold doesn't always slow. But cold doesn't rely on real world physics to connect to that effect. Rather, the game specifically makes the cold/slow metaphor connection by fiat.

That's the sort of thing that's much better when done generally, and globally, rather than in an ad hoc manner.

All MMOs generate more rewards for killing X number of weaker things rather than one stronger thing, for sufficiently large X. That doesn't mean the game is supposed to let you do it all the time.

Technically, controller tier 9 pets only last for one day, three hours, forty six minutes, 39 seconds.

Given the Ops rules of being pegged to the damage cap, it looks difficult. On the Scrapper side you have a 1.125 damage modifier, 500% damage cap, at least a 5% critical rate, and an FE that is up more than half the time. This all translates, in extremely rough terms, into the equivalent of having something like an effective 1.73 damage modifier relative to something with a 400% damage cap. In other words, the dominator would have to come up with a way to climb out of a 70% hole to pass Scrapper damage. I would need to do some calculations to estimate the fire imp damage contribution, but it seems to be a tough thing to do.