Arcanaville

Setting aside what you define to be challenging, +4x8 praetorians at level 12 would assassinate more than 90% of all teams in this game.

And honestly, I'd like to see you cruise through +1/x6 solo in Praetoria below level 20. I'm not saying you can't do it; its certainly not impossible. But not many things could do that consistently, and its certainly non-trivial. To me that sounds significantly more difficult than being able to solo +4x8 at higher levels.

As far as I know, the only place you see the enhanced Praetorian 64% base tohit critters is in the end game trials, and DE tip missions. There might be the odd one floating around somewhere, but the rank and file stuff you run into in Praetoria have base 50% tohit as far as I've seen.

I think its been 4 stacks of resistance and 2 stacks of DoT for a while. I know in beta at one point the DoTs stacked like crazy, but I thought that was reduced either in beta or soon after release.

So in answer to Linea's question, it might in fact be better to go the other way, and take 75% chance for the debuff and 25% chance for the DoT, since that better reflects their stacking potential. With a 75% chance to trigger the DoT and it only stacking twice, most DoT triggers are being wasted, but you are far under the limit for the resistance stack. My gut instinct says Core is the better way to go, but I'd want to run analyze the two a little more carefully before making that pronouncement.

Mentally reviewing my calculations, I'm pretty sure I did in fact use the same follow up for both, so the Scrapper version is off by fifteen percentage points of damage buff. My spreadsheet is not in front of me now, but my mental estimate is that would increase Scrapper damage by about 20dps in this case, and close the gap between the two substantially, probably to a wash.


Theoretically speaking, this build condition should at least come close to satisfying Deus' challenge, although as specified on a pylon the critical rate should be 10% constantly, which would help the Scrapper numbers (by something like 8 dps, I think: I'll have to check my numbers later). Its pretty close either way, which is what I would expect in a situation where the damage buffs being considered are in the range of +100% - and especially when the Scrapper ones are slightly higher (about 78% vs 93%) - and criticals are factored in at 10%.

Actually, this seems to be a case of some errant testing creating a myth. When the proc first came out, I tested it and confirmed it performed as it does now. I mentioned it on the forums, and promptly forgot about it.

It was only much later that I happened to read a forum post about the "cooldown" and then I read the paragonwiki article that described the cooldown. I checked the power implementation, and the power wasn't implemented to do that. So I retested the power, and it was still performing without a cooldown. So I went to Castle and asked him to confirm my testing and my interpretation of the power design, and he confirmed it did not have a cooldown nor to the best of his knowledge did it ever have a cooldown. That's when I started telling people the paragonwiki article was wrong.

Its a tricky proc to test, so I can only assume that some early tests suggested there was a cooldown, and everyone simply interpreted their future tests on the assumption that there was a cooldown. But I can say I've never seen such a cooldown in my testing, starting with when the proc was first released, and it definitely does not have a cooldown or is intended by design to have a cooldown. It is only intended to not stack, and not extend (meaning you cannot refresh it while its up). There will always be some downtime, but if you're lucky that downtime can be arbitrarily low.

If it ever actually had such a suppression, Castle was unaware of it and I have no direct evidence of it. I have to believe this one was a testing glitch that wasn't discovered until much later.

Let me know when you find someone making that argument.

Actually, Energy Punch was also 14% faster in arcanatime terms. People tend to focus on the ET change so much I think almost everyone's forgotten that energy punch was also better originally.

It *wasn't* specifically changed to adjust Energy Melee. It was changed automatically when *all* attacks that used the high speed punch animation were slowed down slightly from 20 frame to 25 frames of animation. And yes, that did cause about a 14% reduction in speed: that's not a typo.

Katana and Broadsword have the same 5% accuracy bonus. However, at low levels (really: at all levels) that accuracy bonus has relatively small benefit. What has larger benefit are things like the pervasive defense debuffs in Katana and Broadsword, which are intrinsically stronger.

That benefit usually gets diluted to the point of being impossible to notice at higher levels when players normally have lots of slotted accuracy.

I'm very certain the good will they are getting from giving the players more options and more choices without reducing their value is more than making up for the damage done to players who are either inventing motives that don't exist or claiming a loss of value that doesn't match reality.

Their free to play business model is so bad, they went out of their way to say they were not converting to a free to play business model and executed plan that had no chance of looking like a free to play business model.

I mean, its pretty clear their failure is fundamental: they didn't even try to shift the game to a free to play model, and as a result almost nothing they do looks like a successful free to play model.



I'm not sure how much longer I can do this without resorting to hand puppets. Possibly unicorn hand puppets.

We can, and we should. But I don't think it should be starter zones. I think that was the one major problem with all of Praetoria: it was intended to be a fresh start area, and yet it was a fresh start area I could not in good conscience recommend, because its difficulty was so much higher than elsewhere.

Think of how much harder everyone thinks the Vahz are compared to comparable content. Quantitatively speaking, all of Praetoria is significantly harder than that due to the way the critters are designed. In some cases, Praetorian critters are twice as offensively powerful. Its hard to guestimate what difficulty scaler is equivalent to Praetoria since Praetorians are not necessarily more difficult to kill, just more dangerous, but my estimate is that its like starting the game at between +1 and +2 right from the tutorial. For some squishies, its like being permanently stuck at +3.

If anything, I would have thought the wilds of First Ward would have been the perfect place to use Praetorian-level difficulty, as you'd think First Ward would be a survival of only the fittest area.

In the meantime, you can always start on the red side. Quantitatively speaking, in my judgment the red side starts fractionally higher than the blue side: its like being somewhere between even con and +1 on average, primarily because Arachnos are a more difficult critter group than average and you fight them an awful lot.

Hmm, I get different numbers. I downloaded your sheet, but because the actual damage numbers per attack seem to be entered in by hand, I cannot determine where the discrepancy is.

First I did a sanity check calculation on Granite Agent's build. I'm going to write out most of the calculation numbers here just so any errors might be spotted. I do calculations a little different than most I think, so bear with me.

First, I calculate the damage per attack for the brute counting slotting, damage buffs, and fury, but no procs. For follow up, that is 0.8 * 0.75 * (1.967 + 1.7 + 0.3*2 + 0.185) = 148.546. That is: 0.8 damage scale times 0.75 brute modifier times the total damage buff which is 1.967 the slotting, plus 1.7 for fury (170% estimated), plus stacked followup 0.3 times two, plus the global damage bonus of the build 18.5%. Doing that for Focus (1.51 scale) gets me 280.5002 and for Slash (1.48 scale) 274.2113. That is a total of 703.2574 damage in 3.96 seconds (my Arcanatime calculations match yours, so I'm assuming no problems there). That alone would be 177.59 dps.

Then I add in all the procs. The Hecatomb proc and the Apocalypse proc, which are both 107.1 damage with 33% chance per cycle, or 107.1 * 0.33 / 3.96 = 8.925 dps. The Mako and Explosive Strike procs, which are both 71.75 * 0.2 /3.96 = 3.62 dps.

Then the DoT. Since the Dot can only stack up to two times and Reactive Radial has a 75% chance of procing the Dot, I just assumed it was always stacked twice, which is a pretty reasonable assumption. That's five ticks of 13.39 damage, or 66.95 damage over ten seconds, or 6.695 dps per, or 13.39 dps for two DoTs simultaneously.

177.59 + 8.925 * 2 + 3.624 * 2 + 13.39 = 216.078 dps.

Now the two resistance debuffs. Achilles Heel is a 20% chance for 20% debuff for ten seconds. But you can't stack it. That means its going to have some downtime: after it fires once, nothing matters until it wears off. When it does, at that point you have to fire it to get it back. It'll take, from that moment, on average five firings to get it back (20%), but the first time you roll the dice will be just about as the previous one was wearing off. So it'll actually take on average four attack cycles to get it back (i.e. "fenceposting"). That's about 16 seconds. Its up for ten, and then on average going to be down for 16, more or less. That is 38.5% uptime. We can thus estimate the debuff as being 0.2 * 0.385 = 0.077, or about a 7.7% debuff continuously.

The reactive debuff we can handle in a simpler way because it can stack - up to four times in theory. In practice, with a 25% chance of going off, and an attack chain that averages 0.76 attacks per second or about 6.3 attacks in 8.3 seconds (the length of the debuff), that we'll get on average about 0.25 * 6.3 = 1.575 stacks. Since this is far below four, we'll estimate the stack at 1.575 (the stacking limit will lower this slightly, because random chance will mean sometimes there's no stacks, and sometimes there's four, and if there's four you can't get another). So I'll estimate the Reactive debuff as being 0.025 * 1.575 = 0.0394, or about 3.94%.

The total concurrent average debuff is thus about 11.64%. That means the DPS rises to 216.078 * (1 + 0.1245) = 241.2 dps.

Now, the build has to use Practiced Brawler and Hasten, and they have cast times. So we can calculate the arcanatime delay involved in using both powers: its 1.716 for PB and 0.924 for Hasten. That means, on average, you're losing 1.716/120 = 0.0143 = 1.43% of your time casting PB and 0.924/120 = 0.0077 = 0.77% of your time casting Hasten, if you do this more or less optimally. So in actuality, your net damage has to drop by about those percentage levels. So its actually closers to 241.2 * (1 - 0.022) = 235.9 dps.

That's pretty close to the reported 244, so I think I'm on the right track there. The thing is, if I repeat these calculations, changing only the base damage (from 0.75 to 1.125 * 1.05 for criticals) and eliminate Fury (170% damage buff), I end up with a lower number: 221.6 dps. Which is what I would expect, actually. Since the total damage buff in this situation, outside of slotting and Fury, is close to +80%, its under the break even point where Scrapper damage overtakes Brute damage for otherwise identical numbers, and in this case the Scrapper claws numbers aren't identical either: they are lower than the Brute numbers in terms of damage scale.

In any case, I can't quite reproduce your Brute calculations, although its close, but I really can't reproduce your Scrapper variant calculations, unless the Scrapper variant is using a completely different build or something. Its otherwise seemingly impossible for a Scrapper do deal that much more damage - or any higher damage - than a Brute when the damage buffs involved are lower than +100% (outside of slotting and Fury) which they seem to be in this case.

The opinions expressed here are not the opinions of Paragon Studios, NCSoft, or the vast overwhelming majority of the players of City of Heroes. Offer void in Delaware.

The biggest long term impact the App Store might ultimately have, and its something some of us in the industry have been thinking about for a while, is how Windows works. It goes like this: AppStore for iPhone logically leads to AppStore for Mac. OSX is based on Next, and its easy to update OSX apps because of that Next-like application structure: applications tend to be self-contained packages, just like on the iPhone. That's not true for Windows: Windows apps have a lot more scattered moving parts: registry settings, DLLs in different directories, lots of dependencies.

But the AppStore on the Mac is likely to be successful, and one reason will be not just the impulse shopping aspect of it, but also the fact that its so much easier to patch software through something like an AppStore. The apps are self-contained packages, and they can be modularly updated, and that can happen automatically in the background with little chance of messing up your other apps or your OS. Microsoft is going to have to follow suit: they are going to have to make a Windows App store eventually, and they will have to be able to compete with a platform that can security patch all its apps unattended overnight in relative safety. And that means restructuring apps to work that way in the long run: apps that can't work that way on the Windows platform will be at a significant disadvantage.

The long-term strategy, or error depending on your point of view, of tightly coupling apps to the OS under Windows will have to change to resemble the smartphone/OSX model of much lighter coupled, modular, independent apps. And you can already see hints of that in Win8.

A Windows OS that updates and patches like a smartphone without people worrying about the whole thing breaking, may be one of the largest legacies of Steve Jobs. That's how far his vision may ultimately reach. Microsoft would not have gone there without Apple changing the rules of the game, and the result of that competition will probably be better computers for everyone.

There is a special case, and its why its slotted in Power Bolt and Power Blast on my energy blaster. Blasters get to use their top two tier primary attacks even when mezzed. If I'm mezzed I'm going to be forced to cycle just those two powers until I use a break or the mez wears off. By having the proc slotted into both powers, that extra +100% recharge when it procs can be very useful in getting a burst of damage to help out in that situation.

This may be a special case of #3, where situations may arise when I'm basically *forced* to spam it.

People love to say that, but if that is true Apple has supernatural marketing skills. There was no reason for people to believe the marketing surrounding the iMacs, and the Powerbooks, and the level of marketing required to get people to first by iPods and then use iTunes if it was just about the marketing would have been nothing short of astronomical.

If there's a hype machine today, it was build on a series of successes that cannot possibly be attributed to just marketing hype.

If *nothing* else, almost all of Apple's competitors owe Steve Jobs more than they can ever repay for convincing people to pay for the kinds of things they ultimately sell. There would be no Android tablets if not for Jobs. Its questionable what the droid smartphone market would be if not for Jobs. And separate from that there would be no Toy Story if not for Jobs.

Its easy to get caught up in taking sides in technology, but the man is gone and he's no longer on any side. Whether he did things you liked, or things you didn't like, there's no question he did things that had a greater impact than almost anyone else in the technology industry over the last fifty years. His historical legacy is unassailable; today almost everyone I know, pro or anti Apple, is recognizing the loss of one of our industries largest players. Like Microsoft before it, Apple didn't just contribute to our industry, it *created* large segments of it in a very short period of time. And there's no question that Jobs was the singular driving force at Apple responsible for most of that creation.

Our industry is going to be a markedly less interesting place without him. You can't say that about most of us in it.

Its harder to do that in the caves than in the outdoor maps, at least for me. In the outdoor maps they were a lot easier to scatter. Still not easy especially with the ambushes and healers around but easier. I couldn't really do that effectively in the caves reliably.

The Cims' fatal flaw is that they are heavily weighted towards offense. They hit so hard, they can trivially easily kill each other. Which one mind dom can make them do very easily.

All the best pylon times use primaries or secondaries or both with the ability to generate high order damage buffs. At high levels of damage buff Scrappers will tend to outdamage Brutes.

But if you compare a primary/secondary combo common to both and that doesn't sustain, say, +100% damage buff constantly, you'll probably find the Brute competitive or superior. Its right around +100% that the numerical break even point happens between Scrappers and Brutes with otherwise identical attack chains (with identical damage scale normalized attacks). Lower than about +100% damage (over and above the standard +95% slotting and a brute fury level of about +170% damage) and the Brute will probably win. Above +100% damage and the Scrapper will probably win.

For identical attack sets, which Claws is not, the difference is going to be about plus or minus 18% total damage: at best the Brute will outdamage the Scrapper by about 18%, and best the Scrapper will outdamage the Brute by about 17%, for situations with similar numbers.

Why you dislike the set is your own business: you can dislike it for any subjective reason or for no specific reason at all.

However, why you want a refund is a separate issue. Sure, in a restaurant you can say "I don't like it" and probably get a refund or a replacement, and sure you can shop at Zappos, but there are many businesses that will not give a refund for a purchase except under certain very specific circumstances, such as product defect or damage during delivery. Many if not most businesses require you to give a reason for requesting a refund, and that reason must fall within their parameters for offering refunds.

Why should NCSoft specifically be bound to the "refund whenever you want it no questions asked" policy. Its only one example of a wide range of successful business solutions to this issue. The notion that its "good business" to offer refunds at will implies this is a widespread and generally accepted business practice. Its not. Its one of many options, and not the most popular one.

Whether you like it or not, you cannot convince me I'm spending cash I'm not spending. Whether I'm spending more or less money for more or less content is not a matter of opinion or conjecture. I'm not spending more money because as of yet I haven't spent *any* actual cash. Trying to convince me I *have to* spend cash when I'm not spending cash is something between sad and hilarious.

No, I said, and its sufficiently self explanatory I can simply requote:

Its perfectly acceptable to disclose the details of the powerset in the same manner the numbers are disclosed for all sets. Going farther than that is going too far.


Given the specific words "more information", the answer is no, I don't agree. I agree the disclosure should be timely. I disagree there's any special requirement on the release of the numbers beyond that.

Moreover, the implication of being "more accountable" suggests that players can assume they are buying those numbers, and therefore they have a right to insist that what they buy actually *be* those numbers. Its meaningless to say that the numbers will be that upon sale, but may change five seconds after that. The numbers are there, and should be there, solely as an optional information source that describes the set without promising performance of a set. If you make a buying decision based solely on those numbers, the devs are free to change then two seconds after you buy the set, or for that matter while you're buying the set. The devs are not financially guaranteeing any of those numbers. There is therefore no logic to purchasing a powerset based primarily *on* those numbers.

The devs are only accountable to the powerset numbers for purchased powersets as they are for all other powersets. Players should not be given the false impression that because they are purchasing unlocks for those powersets, they are in some way special when it comes to how powersets are managed in the future. I'm saying to the players don't presume that, and I'm saying to the developers if you can't follow this rule, then you're in effect selling improper power through the store by granting exemptions to the normal powerset management process, and you should stop selling powersets altogether.

You're supposed to sell your work, not your design soul. You don't get to buy it back.

You are quick to accuse me of misquoting you, so I'll give you an opportunity to reread what I said in its entirety and reconsider. If upon doing so you still want to stick with this statement, I will be compelled to demonstrate this has absolutely no basis in fact.

If you're talking about the most recent change to Fury, it would be difficult to argue that it did that except under the most extreme circumstances. In lots of other situations it actually *increased* Brute damage.

And what "yet another Brute Nerf" are you talking about specifically? There have been exactly none to my recollection but even if you count the Fury change as a nerf, what was the other one?