Arcanaville

Hmm, that does seem to be a loophole in the question.

How would you visually depict a female pile of animated granite?

How would you depict a female pile of animated granite?

Personally, I think trading AoE for the heal and control in Dark Melee is a pretty fair trade. The set has enough mitigation to almost make an entire scrapper secondary.

Shadow Maul is something I tend to appreciate more while leveling up. If you can line up more than one target in its arc its DPE is very good and its DPS is not bad, and that makes it a highly efficient power to use early on. I actually prefer it to things like breath of fire and jacob's ladder. Its telling that for me most of my melee characters take and use sands of mu while leveling up, which is just a weaker version of shadow maul.

Which is not to say there aren't better powers, but there always are. And seven years of eagle's claw has probably made me more tolerant of long cast times than the average player.

Photons are said to have a mass-energy due to the equivalence of mass and energy, but no rest mass. However, gravitational lensing is due to the general relativistic principle that all massless objects move in geodesics (essentially: straight lines) at the speed of light and gravity curves space-time and bends those geodesics, forcing light to take essentially a curved path.

You shouldn't have to pay for a powerset that should be free. However, not all powersets should be free. Not all powersets were free in the past either.

Which is a conversion of potential nuclear energy to waste heat that generally (eventually) runs a steam turbine. The average person would not say "nuclear energy is kinetic energy." The average person would tend to say "nuclear energy is energy stored in atoms." The important distinction: most people think of nuclear energy as an energy source not an energy transfer.


So far, your efforts to prove I'm lying have been completely ineffective. I believe that should affect your credibility in making your other accusations.

This is a complicated question to answer. To really answer it properly, I have to take a step back and discuss a major difference between City of Heroes and most MMOs. In most MMOs, the amount of damage you can do and your net survivability are very predictable, particularly damage. Powers have DPS ratings that specify just exactly how much damage you can expect to get out of them. And they usually have power couplings or global cooldowns to ensure that when using X you cannot try to sneak in Y to get a lot more damage than intended. In many MMOs, when you're *intended* to do damage X, you do damage X. Not X+1 or X-1, X.

So when another MMO *intends* to make one class do higher damage and have lower survivability, and another class do less damage and have higher survivability, that is what they do. They cannot do anything else. Things like gear and other modifiers can change the situation slightly, perhaps somewhat, but the fundamental relationship remains intact, particularly with comparable expenditure on the characters.

City of Heroes is not like that. Our offense and defense are build up from non-exclusive powers that interact in much more complex ways. Every archetype has an extremely wide range of possible damage output and survivability. Furthermore, *how we play* can dramatically influence our offense. Use the right chain, and you could be doing 40% more damage than someone that uses a suboptimal chain. Have enough speed, and a low damage set can become a high damage one (Fire Blast, with the ridiculously long Flares animation, used to be sort of like this). When we target an archetype to have X offense and Y defense, actual characters in that archetype are going to have a wide range of performance centered approximately around X and Y, often far higher or lower than the targets. And that means City of Heroes archetypes overlap a lot.

This all gets to Fury. Brutes are balanced around Fury. The *presumption* is that the *average player* is going to bounce up and down with Fury, sometimes having high Fury and sometimes having low Fury. They are not presumed to have saturated Fury all the time. But what is the average amount of Fury possessed by the average player, when you count all the ramp ups and ramp downs, and what is the qualitative (not quantitative) penalty of having to ramp up and down, separate from average damage?

Brutes are balanced around these concerns. Unfortunately, that means players that can reach and then sustain high Fury will have more average damage than the archetype is intended to be balanced around, and won't suffer from as much ramp up time as intended on average. They will thus have higher damage than the target.

Does this mean Brutes deserve to be nerfed? Well, not necessarily. The game is balanced around the average player, not the forum readers. If the average player playing the average Brute averages slightly less damage than Scrappers, its probably all good. If the average Brute averages the same or higher damage, that's probably not intended, but if the qualitative penalty of ramping fury up and down is such that many people tend to like the stable damage of Scrappers better, that qualitative edge may be factored in to make the balance between the two "close enough" so long as the numerical advantage is not too high.

So: are Brutes balanced intended to do less damage? I think its more correct to say Brutes are balanced intended to make it harder to deal more damage than Scrappers, but the level of difficulty may be so low most experienced players fail to notice. That might suggest the devs aimed wrong, but that was the intent.

Just be thankful the thread didn't turn to "centrifugal force."

That's not a lie, its the truth and your reaction to it betrays a very trivial error. In physics, there is a presumption that potential energy can't really be directly used, it has to be converted into a kinetic form, because typically we use energy to produce work, and work in the specific physics sense requires motion. By definition, this means potential energy while doing work is being converted into kinetic energy.

However, to state that nuclear energy is kinetic is like saying nuclear energy is steam energy. Nuclear energy - the energy in atomic nucleii - is potential energy. At least the energy that is typically harnessed. It is potential energy just like the energy harnessed by a dam is also potential energy: potential gravitational energy due to water being elevated in a gravity well. Of course the water moves but no one would say that the energy harnessed by a dam was kinetic energy. The dam stores potential energy, and it is that energy that is harnessed.

Similarly, nuclear energy is energy *stored* in atoms. Let me repeat: nuclear energy is energy STORED in atoms. I would ask all non-physicists to read that statement and ask if it seems colloquially reasonable. If it does, then QED it is potential energy. By definition stored energy is potential energy in physics. That is a black and white statement.


Now you're in real physics territory, and no physicist or even competent physics student would say that. All nuclear energy is refers to interactions that at least nominally occur within atomic nuclei, and definitely interactions between subatomic particles. That's what makes them "nuclear." They can also occur outside of atomic nuclei, but that doesn't seem relevant to the issue.

More directly, the notion of potential binding energy being converted into radiant or kinetic energy is text book stuff. Its been textbook stuff for almost a century now. If you haven't learned it or haven't been exposed to it, your opinion on this matter isn't informed.


My example of beta decay is wrong? How?

Shows clear illiteracy. The quote is:

Now why would I say that? Because in context, I was replying to your statement that "nuclear energy is kinetic energy" with:

In other words, first, I did not say that radiation is not kinetic. I said radiation contains a component of kinetic energy, i.e. not all of radiation's energy is necessarily kinetic. Nuclear radiation is not all photons, by the way: nuclear radiation includes things like alpha radiation (helium nuclei) and beta radiation (high energy electrons). There are also other things a nit picker might pick on, like mesons which rapidly decay to daughter radiation - which means some nuclear radiation has potential energy again.

Second, I was trying to highlight the fact that while the products of nuclear energy - radiation, for one example - might contain kinetic energy, that was in contrast to nuclear energy itself which, all together now, is energy stored in atomic nuclei. Stored.


Well, let me help you out there. We'll start with what I'm assuming is your educational wellspring, Google, and its top source, wikipedia:

Lucky hit. #9 on google's hit list:

The terminology still seems to be in general use in schools:

at least two schools:

Actually, probably a lot more than three schools:

Not to mention the fact that you dissed Ionic Man.

And using the term in basically the same context I did:


Only one of us is trying to look like an intellect, and not succeeding.

The first mention of the phrase "strong and weak" was in my post where I said "nuclear energy as the term is generally used is potential strong and weak energy" which is true. However, the first mention of "strong and weak forces comes from Durakken, who promptly stated that no one but me was talking about strong and weak forces.

It has a reputation for actually debating issues rather than taking them at face value. No one's opinion goes unchallenged including, and even especially mine. But *all* the forums are supposed to contain the presumption that if you say X, someone else might say Y instead. You should in fact expect it. If you think the purpose of the forums is to have a place to express ideas without being contradicted, no forum section is safe refuge. These are discussion forums, not therapy sessions. I expect people who disagree to express disagreement, hopefully in an informatively useful way, but express it all the same.

Well, given the colloquial definitions we're using, sure. Magneto can, and demonstrated the difference between high force and high kinetic energy in First Class as well. While imparting almost zero kinetic energy to Shaw's forehead he could still inexorably burrow a coin through his skull. The Magneto in the comic books could theoretically do that as well.

Kinetic energy generally involves motion of some kind, but force doesn't always have to move an object and create kinetic energy. Force can crush without generating very much kinetic energy. In a physics textbook sense you're likely to generate *some* kinetic energy with all applications of force on real world objects, even if all you do is heat them. But in the comic books we generally have two different kinds of "force" wielders. We have characters like Sue Storm that wield force projections and they usually apply force through a delivery mechanism that usually has momentum. The force "strikes" the target. And then we have characters like Magneto that seem able to generate "force fields" which don't seem to exactly emanate from himself or interact with their targets through the transfer of momentum. The force fields just seem to magically appear, like gravity.

In fact, Magneto's magnetic powers have always been depicted as so strong that the canonical explanation has often been that while Magneto can project magnetic fields from his own body, his greater power comes from somehow tapping into and controlling the magnetic field of the entire earth. This is what exempts him from having to deal with things like trying to lift a submarine while standing in a plane without instead drawing the plane down into the water. You could make the case that in First Class, what Charles did in settling Erik's mind was allowed him to have the zen-like focus to just make things happen instead of trying to force them to happen, and perhaps the difference between the two is the difference between Erik trying to project magnetic energy from his own body, and tapping into the surrounding magnetic field of the earth.

Keeping in mind, of course, that in reality the earth's magnetic field isn't strong enough to really do that. But it explains why the first time he tried to stop Shaw's sub not only was he unable to do it but the sub towed him behind, whereas the second time Erik not only was able to lift the sub clean out of the water, it was obvious Erik wasn't being simultaneously drawn to the sub at the same time (or the plane would have crashed).

Jeez my timezone makes me miss all the fun stuff.

I haven't seen that before. Generally, it just gets slower for me if I have detail set too high and try to multibox.

With Ultra off, I can get about six instances running at the same time before things start to get too jerky. Since you can really only actively play one at the time, minimizing the other sessions can greatly improve performance I've found, even with lots of instances running. The critical bottleneck in that case is memory: if you have enough memory, you can run almost any number of instances so long as no more than a couple of them is really shooting graphics to the screen.

I was closing and reopening the launcher for a while until I discovered that.

My main character was mind controlled by an extra-dimensional being into crossing sides to get the villain side badges. By me. Without that explanation my character would have eaten her own power bolt rather than complete that tip sequence.

Yes, lets pay attention shall we:

I quoted this bit and responded:

I said: that's a new one on me. Nuclear energy is not kinetic energy, nuclear energy is typically potential energy.

You then said:

That's when I said:

Bizarrely, you decided to follow up with:

One post after saying "force is not energy... there are strong and weak nuclear forces" you then say "no one is talking about weak and strong forces other than you." You do that a lot, by the way.

Once again: nuclear energy is potential energy, not kinetic energy. The by products of nuclear energy are typically kinetic energy, and its a truism that you can't really "use" potential energy: potential energy is stored energy, while kinetic energy is energy due to motion, so using energy is almost by definition a kinetic process. But once it becomes kinetic energy, its not really nuclear any more.

You need to take a chill pill and go lie down.

Look on the bright side: your Shadow Meld is at least as good as mine is.

I think they mean the Shadow Meld that buffs 20% defense for 15 seconds with 90 second recharge and is not interruptible and costs 5.2 endurance.

The cast time is a rather ugly 3.0 seconds though.

Gee, I was making this same joke 25 years ago. "Has Justice arrived?" "No, there is no Justice." "Very well, but this lack of Justice is disturbing."

Nice to see that twenty five years later, its still just as sad.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.



Of course, I generally ask for neither, which is even easier yet.

Nuclear energy is not force. Nuclear energy is the potential energy connected to the binding strength of the strong force in the nucleus of the atom, and the potential energy connected to the mass differential of nucleon arrangement due to the weak force. Its no different than the potential energy stored in a mass suspended in a gravitational field. The field exerts a force on the object, but the object contains potential energy due to the field potential radiating from the gravitational field surrounding the object.

In beta decay (specifically beta plus decay) a proton spontaneously converts into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. Since the rest mass of a neutron is higher than that of a proton, this form of decay ordinarily cannot happen spontaneously. It does in atomic nuclei when the binding energy of the original nucleus is higher than the binding energy of the daughter nucleus. This potential energy feeds the reaction: the parent nucleus "rolls down the potential curve" surrendering energy to the proton, which can then convert into a neutron and positron (and a neutrino). Potential binding energy is converted into both kinetic energy *and* more potential energy in the form of mass: the reaction products have more mass than the original proton, because it takes some of the potential energy from the original nucleus and converts it into mass to produce the three daughter particles.

I would objectively assume the devs had gone insane. There are only so many ways to make something "look female" and most of them are not applicable to the Granite armor appearance. It basically leaves putting breasts on a rubble pile. Asking why Granite Armor wasn't made to look female is like asking why there are no female Fungoids.


In general, the visible large-scale gender distinctions between men and women for humans is shape for women and size for men. Women have visibly larger breasts and wider hips, while men on average tend to be overall taller and larger, with a slightly less obvious increase in upper body size. So androgynous shapes tend to read "male" and female shapes tend to exaggerate breasts and hips to disambiguate. The only obvious visible male shape distinction generally cannot be depicted in a T for teen game.


To put it more directly, the default stick figure is male, not because it has male characteristics but because it lacks female ones. That's just the way gender characterization seems to work for people.