Arcanaville

I did this on Triumph in the dead of the very early morning. The only player that spotted me that I'm aware of recognized me and decided to help me out with them.

There were actually several players that spotted me in RV during the times I was testing strategies that decided not to engage for one reason or another, in at least a couple cases it was because they recognized me, but in other cases it might have simply been common courtesy. It is a PvP zone, though, so I was prepared to be shot at, which the other players had every right to do if they chose to.

The problem is essentially everyone's port scan signatures censors out replies to valid connections, or they would be going off constantly. The replies have to be to connections that were closed, after they were closed. That can only happen if something has gone awry in some way, but the thing that went awry happens commonly on the internet in general.

I was pretty clear about this at the top of my first post: Positron specifically states his operational position as being willing to break backstory canon that hasn't made it into the story yet, but cautions writers not to break canon that is already within the game. By "operational position" that seems to be how he actually manages the dev team. That I agree with, and that's fine.

But then Positron goes farther in his blog, expanding on the *reasons* for his position, and his foundational reasons for that position don't stop there, they go all the way to stating that good story should trump canon: that canon should not "stifle" writers.

That's where I disagree with Positron. That's what canon is *supposed* to do: its *supposed* to stifle writers so they don't go flying off and writing whatever they want. If you don't want to stifle writers, you don't have continuity, you have an anthology.

The cottage rule doesn't say things can never change. It only says such changes should only be taken on as a last resort, and only to implement changes that are important enough to game balance. To fix things that are essentially broken, in other words.

I think canon can be respected in the same way: you don't change canon just because you think it will be cool to change canon. You change canon when you have to fix something that turns out to be broken, and that's the last resort to fixing it.

Say you have painted yourself into a corner with the established story line. Two very long established storylines now reveal themselves to be contradictory in some unexpected fashion. Lets say it was long established that Blue Steel learned his fighting skills as a teenager in his neighborhood streets of Kings Row, but then you discover in another long established storyline that the Rikti blew that neighborhood up at that specific time.

Before you retcon Blue Steel into being an alien being from the planet of ultimate fighting, you're supposed to consider:

1. Maintaining canon and expanding it to be consistent. Blue Steel grew up as a street urchin in that bombed out neighborhood, and there's no contradiction.

2. When that fails, tweak canon the minimum amount to be consistent. Blue Steel grew up in a nearby neighborhood but volunteered to help evacuate civilians from that neighborhood. In the process the military response forces took Blue Steel under their wing and taught him how to defend himself.

3. When *that* fails, change canon the minimum amount necessary to be consistent. Blue Steel learned his fighting skills elsewhere, but first put them to use in that neighborhood fighting the Rikti.

4. *Then* when all that fails, you make him an alien from the planet of ultimate fighting.

You *don't* say:

1. Hmm, it looks like Blue Steel's proving grounds were actually destroyed by the Rikti during the war. Hey, that gives me an idea: since we have to change Blue Steel's background anyway, wouldn't it be cool if he was an alien? And maybe its a planet where everyone is born with awesome martial arts abilities. It can be the planet of ultimate fighting! Blue Steel: strange visitor from the planet of ultimate fighting. That would be so awesome.


No, I'm afraid that's not awesome. That's failing your responsibilities as stewards of canon.

It would then quickly become perma or nearly so, and its average damage over time benefit would actually then exceed Build Up. There's no question it would help blasters, but I don't know if it would help them in the right targeted way. I don't think it helps the nukes much, the subject of the thread, and I don't think it directly addresses the issue of blasters dropping dead more often than other archetypes because I don't think a common cause of that is being unable to hit a target. It does increase their damage, but not all blaster primaries have Aim. Assault Rifle and Dual Pistols don't have Aim, so if you put a very large buff into Aim you'd have to figure out what to do with those two sets to compensate, because I don't think those two sets so outperform the others that you could justify buffing every other set but those two.

The question you seemed to be asking is why did darkness manipulation have so many non-ranged powers. And its been established that the manipulation sets are not intended to have anything but a tiny fraction of its abilities usable from range at most. Energy Manipulation has zero ranged attacks, although it does have boost range as you mention. Devices has always been the odd one out for a lot of reasons, but its unlikely to become the template for future manipulation sets. Especially because its also problematic in several ways.

If you asked why did darkness manipulation have so many attacks relative to support powers, the answer is I don't know, but it is not out of the range of other manipulation sets.

I assume Brainstorm is technically still canon since origin of power is still canon. I think. Before *that* mess of a storyline could go any farther, Incarnates came along and ran it over with a tank.

Not really. In this game all power effects are tagged to be "magnitude" effects or "duration" effects. Most mezzes, for example, are duration effects. Things like damage or defense buffs are magnitude effects.

When you "boost" an effect you are buffing something called "Strength." Strength increases the effect based on what kind of effect it is. If its a mag effect the magnitude increases, if its a dur effect the duration increases. That's why damage slotting increases damage, but hold slotting increases the duration of the hold, not the magnitude of the hold.

Resistances do the opposite of strength: they reduce the effect, and like strength it depends on the effect type. Damage resistances reduce the points of damage because attack damage is tagged magnitude, while Hold resistance reduces the duration of the hold because that hold effect is tagged a duration effect.

We could give regeneration resistances that would affect different debuffs, but we could not control whether they affected the magnitude or duration of those debuffs. That is baked into the effect. In particular, some regeneration debuffs are magnitude effects, and some are duration effects. Regen resistance reduces the mag of some, and the duration of others. Similarly, we can give Regen defense debuff resistance, but that would affect the magnitude and not the duration in most cases because defense debuffs tend to be mag effects.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any way to arbitrarily point to a critter and say "all effects last for a shorter period of time on that thing." I don't even think the devs have a way to do that without the programmers adding in some very funky tech to make that happen.

Actually, I think I called it the love child of Trick Arrow, Rad, and Pain. And the reason TA is in there is partially because of how it plays, but partially because I see parallels to TA in terms of perception. It was originally seen as a set that, like you say above, tries to do too many things but none of them well. And then over time people started to realize it actually did a lot of things well, when you used it properly. It just required a slightly different mindset to extract the most from the set. And there are special synergies that aren't obvious to start. But today, you aren't laughed at for playing an Ill/TA, say: that's considered a very powerful combination.

I think TM will chart a similar course. One day, someone is going to say they play Ill/TM, and people will ask why they paired Illusion with TM, not the other way around.

Caution: soapbox ahead.

I'm going to preface this by saying I recognize that Positon is making a general case here, and that his specific stance is reasonable, as expressed here:

"I let them 'retcon' certain aspects if it made for a more dynamic and fun experience. The only thing I asked was that they avoid doing so when it directly contradicted something that was already in the game. If it was buried in a background doc it could totally be changed, though."

However, the general case he makes beyond that is something that I have a strong opinion about, and what follows keys off of that, not his specific position above, which is probably how the game at least tries to operate under and I think is reasonable, as I said. Nevertheless, be warned a strong opinion follows.

I'm going to have to disagree with Positron's general stance here. He's the lead designer, so its ultimately his decision how to treat continuity, but I have always believed that so long as you decide to operate *within* continuity you have an obligation to be a steward of continuity to the best extent possible. Positron seems to think that a good enough story should trump continuity in the general case. I think that while that might be true in theory, in practice the story would have to be not just good on a relative scale, but good beyond anything the game currently contains to be good enough to cavalierly discard continuity.

Positron says: "After you’ve played through the game on a character, you know most of the stories of the game. You can now make a new character that has a background that meshes perfectly with the game world… but where is the creativity in that? CoH characters are specifically generic so that your imagination can run wild with them. You have the creative license to introduce your own background into the CoH world at this point. You would probably take care to make sure it didn’t contradict any established lore, but if you did have a great idea that you absolutely wanted to run with you wouldn’t let that lore get in your way."

True for some. But for many others, the fun *is* to write yourself into the story, to leverage what exists and make something interesting that integrates with that. My main character's origin has evolved in that way, from a relatively generic concept to one that is mostly unchanged from the original concept but is anchored within the game reality. Its tightly interwoven with known continuity in certain specific ways. To me, that's the fun of participating in a shared universe.

Overturn too much continuity, and you mess with that. There's a "cottage rule" for powers that recognizes that players have a right to see their expectations when it comes to gameplay tampered with as little as possible. Values and specifics may change but players can rely on the fact that Fly causes them to fly, and Build Up doesn't summon a cottage. We do this because it makes good common sense: if we have to change things because the game is broken if we don't, then we change them. But we don't just change things because we want to or because we think it will be cooler if we do. We assume many players have made an invested in how their character plays, and we try to preserve that when we can.

Why should it be any different with continuity? Why should we decide that the people who rely on Build Up doing the same thing tomorrow that it does today deserve to have that expectation protected, but the people who rely on NPCs being a certain way or the basic storyline of the game being a certain way do not deserve the same protection?

I can think of so many ways for Energy Blast to be better, for Fiery Aura to be better, for Force Fields to be better. I'm sure Black Scorpion, Synapse, and Arbiter Hawk do too. But they can't just remake Force Fields just because they have a cool idea. Why stifle their creativity? Why not let them express themselves in the powers system the way the writers do in the mission arcs?

Because there's a double standard, of course. The powers people aren't creative people with ideas and a vision. They are number crunchers. The writers, they are creative people and creative people need more than number crunchers do. We just tell the numbers people what to do, and they punch some buttons in a calculator and out comes a powerset. But a mission, with dialog, and clues, and souvenirs, that's different.

No its not. The powers people deserve the same latitude, and should obey the same rules, as all the other people on the dev team. If the writers can't figure out how to tell good stories without breaking continuity, so continuity has to be set aside, then we should give the same latitude to the powers people. If they can think of a cooler way to make Dark Armor, they should be allowed to do so. And keep in mind I'm not just talking about the Excel jockeys here. I'm also talking about the animators, the FX artists, the sound effects artists. There's a lot of creative work that goes into something like a powerset.

Conversely, if the players that expect powersets to work the same way every day are important enough to protect with the cottage rule, then the players that expect continuity to not shift under their feet every day are just as important.

Its almost inexcusable to radically alter continuity in City of Heroes anyway: we have time travel, dimensional travel, magic, and the Ouroboros. We can theoretically visit all possible dimensions, all possible timelines, all possible ways for every possible thing to occur, and for every possible combination of things to occur. What *possible* story could you tell that would *require* changing the reality of Primal Earth?


No rule is absolute, and I don't object unilaterally to retcons. But I expect that they are always done with steely eyed seriousness, the same steely eyed seriousness with which the cottage rule is adhered to. And if its not, then I ask you to look at the writing staff, and look at the powers staff, and explain how the decision is made that one of these groups of people deserves to have their creative vision freed from the shackles of past restraint, and the other one doesn't. And then look at we the players, and ask the same question.

It all right. Nothing to see here.



He means me you twit.




Whatever. Works for us either way.

Nothing wrong with that. But this game isn't balanced for the top at the expense of everything before. At least, it hasn't been in the past, and that goes against the expressed intent of the devs. If they want to explicitly state their priority switch to balancing for the end game at the expense of the leveling game, then that would be a different situation.

But then Regen would have to stand in line. A whole bunch of things from Stalkers to Masterminds to Blasters as entire archetypes would have a greater claim for attention before the Regeneration set itself did. There's currently a wild west presumption in the end game where everyone should be able to participate, but not everyone will achieve the exact same performance levels under the highest levels of progress. That's how it always tends to be with top level performance and min/maxing: usually we presume min/maxers can take care of themselves, and its the average players playing conventional builds leveling in the core game we have to worry about.

Well, he initiates doomsday, although he's mostly following orders. He's a little too cheery about it, though. Rogue?

Perhaps, but that's not a knock against the intro arc itself, because the intro arc can't address any of that on its own. It does create the *opening* to do that, which is why I don't mind that specific aspect of Graves.

Hmm, so they do. Makes me wonder, now, what a tanker could do by triple stacking Fury of the Gladiator, Achilles Heel, and Bruising. You can't stack more than one of each, and the procs have only a 20% chance of going off themselves, but it looks like you could average having bruising and at least one of those procs up at any one time. That's potentially a lot of damage boost if you're amplifying pet damage, and a tanker could be build to tank two RV AVs even without insps, I believe.

It probably would be, but I was speaking within the context of set balance.

Time Manipulation, like Willpower before it, had its performance questioned in beta (although not to the same degree as Willpower), the devs seem to think its perfectly fine, and I think within six months to a year tops people will just play it and only occasionally wonder what possessed the devs to give it to us, just like Willpower. The notion that it is anything other than one of the best buff/debuff sets we have, even when compared to dark, rad, and kin, will simply evaporate.

Regen *vastly* outperforms SR until you start stacking the tons of power pool defenses and invention bonuses that exist on top. If you don't, particularly when leveling, anyone who says SR outperforms Regen is literally insane.


I would be more sympathetic to this line of thought if it wasn't the latest in a long line of arguments that have been put forth to argue that Regen has *always* been somehow disadvantaged. When SR had non-existent defenses and Dark Armor didn't stack, Regen was somehow the disadvantaged scrapper set. When you consider that SR has actually been nerfed more times than Regen Regen still is the unjustified target of the devs balancing. And now apparently the fact it has to click more often when operating at maximum efficiency is a priori evidence that its underpowered, and things like having far more endurance than most other sets is not mentioned as a material factor.

It particularly galls me because in fact that Regen *isn't* the set that spends the most time rooted in defensive clicks, which makes that argument an heir to the throne of those kinds of arguments. The privilege of being tied up in clicks the most goes to a virtual tie between Fiery Aura and Dark Armor. And Fiery Aura is *supposed* to be an offensive set. FA has a much more solid complaint about rooted time than Regen does.

I have some compassion over the fact that Willpower in many ways trumps Regen itself in healing, and the fact that the debuff-happy endgame has a significantly harsher effect on Regen than many other melee sets. Both of those are problematic and both I tried to speak against, particularly Willpower. But as soon as someone tells me that the fact that Regen has to click more often hurts it from level 1 to level 50 I'll be honest they lost me. I shot that argument down the moment it first reared its head about year or so ago, and the fact it hasn't actually realized its dead yet and still shambles around does the people looking for Regen attention no favors.

That specific part of it I actually don't mind too much. It makes me hate the Arbiters, and hate Arachnos, and set me up for the eventual moment when I hand Recluse his helmet and tell him to make a move, punk, or leave me the hell alone.

Almost certainly because they wanted the heals to have fixed benefit in absolute points of heal, and not be scaled upward with +health, because then that would mean all +health powers would have to be balanced around whether that buff to heals would be appropriate.

Keep in mind we players view heals as percentage heals, because that's the way the math comes out the simplest, to be honest almost certainly because that's how I originally did it. But that view of judging the effectiveness of heals is not absolute, and almost certainly not the way heals were viewed when the game was designed. When it was designed, heals were seen in terms of a 500 point heal has a certain benefit, absolutely.

In fact, defender ally heals used to be Cur if I remember correctly, and used to heal a percentage of the target's health, and were switched to Abs after launch to make them absolute. The devs clearly originally viewed heals in terms of points healed, and not percentage of health healed, as being the "proper" frame of reference.

99.999% this is a false positive. It happens all the time. The log says that the host in question is port scanning your system *from* port 443 (the SSL port) *to* a *small* number of consecutive high ports on your system around 16288.

More likely your own computer was making connections *to* NCsoft from those source ports to port 443 (basically, an HTTPS connection) and for some reason NCSoft's website didn't process those connections correctly or quickly enough. After your workstation closed those ports and opened new ones, at some point NCSoft's web server responded to your computer on those ports not realizing your computer had already closed them. Your firewall saw your computer close those ports so it no longer tracked connections on them. Then it saw packets coming from the web server heading for those ports, those packets were not, as far as it knew, part of existing connections, and it saw a bunch of them heading to a range of consecutive ports in a short time window. So it triggered its port scan IDS signature.

However, the odds of NCSoft sending a port scan *from* port 443 is fairly low, and more significantly no one who port scans would only scan a few ports in the 16000's - that's a worthless scan: nothing runs there generally.

You see this most often when the target server (in this case the web server) is highly loaded or overloaded, or the network connections between client and server are lossy and dropping or misrouting packets, also due to network congestion. You will see, as you mention, bursts of activity like this and it will often trip port scan signatures in many firewalls.

My posts do speak for themselves. They say I've spent too much tine refuting your particular brand of stupid, and now leave it to others to decide if you're worth spending that kind of time on.

Does it? If AoE is the advantage that blasters are supposed to have to compensate for the other issues we're discussing, wouldn't it then be the case that any blaster primary that doesn't have that AoE would be defective on its face? If blasters, as is my thesis, were defined as "something that deploys a lot of AoE" then that would mean all blaster powerset combinations which lacked that AoE would be defective.

But do they all have a lot of AoE? My energy blaster only has decent AoE because she has almost as much recharge as god. Ice's AoE is questionable. Psychic blast's AoE is also not high. When you're talking AoE you're talking about only half the Blaster primaries having substantial AoE: AR, Fire, Rad, and Sonic. Archery and Dual Pistols maybe.

If we're talking about archetype-defining properties that represent the archetype as a whole, then either all the powersets have to have it, or the ones that don't have to be considered broken.

Getting back to the topic, the topic isn't centered on what we all think about the archetypes, but what the devs are willing to do to them given their view of the archetypes. If the devs are withholding buffs to the archetype as a whole because of the performance of just a few of the blaster primaries, that's wrong. Once you say "blasters" get this or don't get that because "blasters" have this or that, then *all* blasters must have those things in at least sufficient quantity to make those statements valid.

And remember this game's core powerset balance rules aren't targeted at the maximum performance players and builds. They are targeted first at average players playing average builds. Those players are not hitting fifteen targets with their AoEs. When solo, they are hitting about three, what they face in a heroic mission or something close to it. In teams they are hitting more, but in teams everyone is earning the same amount of XP: blaster kill rates in teams do not affect their leveling rates relative to everyone else by a large amount. In teams we already allow very high damage levels due to the presence of very high team buffs, which are considered reasonable in teams.

There are balance rules that apply to the higher levels of performance, but they tend to be limiting rules and not proportional performance type rules.

I think because people who actually like villains don't write story arcs. I'll be honest: I can barely *read* the side switching arcs going towards the villain side anymore. It actually detracts from my fun just how strongly most (not all) of them specifically set out to state categorically just how much I'm "falling" and just how absolutely disgusted I should be with myself.

You know, that's all fine and good, but you shouldn't sell a game called "City of Villains," make most of the story arcs tell the player they should be disgusted with themselves for not slitting their wrists right there at the key board, and then *wonder* why the red side seems less popular than the blue side.

Either they think their playerbase is full of masochists, or illiterates.

I once told Positron I would like to play villains that run the gamut between Magneto and the Joker, not Eric Cartman and the Human Centipede.

They don't even do kicking puppies and eating babies correctly. They don't write (player) villains that eat babies and lick their fingers afterwards. They write villains that eat babies and then have an attack of conscience about it. If I'm going to be a villain, I want to be this villain:



or at least this villain:



or at least, jeez, let me be at least as happy as this one:




Anything but this:

Then it would be too weak to help Regen when debuffed.

That's not supposed to factor into core archetypal balancing. If that were the case no one could justify the need for any buff on anything after I9 released.