Arcanaville

Think about Stone Armor/Robotics, and more importantly *why* it might not be a kosher combination.

You buy the code for $1.99. You have to sign up for a subscription plan, but you can then turn around and immediately cancel it. You won't get billed until the free month is over, so as long as you cancel before that time you won't pay more than the $1.99.

And even $2 is significant when it comes to RMT and other petitionable activity, because that means there's a cost to doing something that gets them banned. As soon as someone petitions them, that $2 account can be terminated. So we can cost them $2 per petition. Its the same theory behind only allowing Premium players and not free players access to things like global channels. Even if the cost is only something like $5, it means banning has teeth when used against repeat offenders. Perhaps its not enough to completely deter some people, but its something.

I understand many people have a lot of enthusiasm for this sort of thing, but I'll just say as someone who has studied the problem a lot, and not all just hypothetically, what you're describing would be so complex to implement its unlikely you'd ever see it implemented during the lifetime of this game. Where the difficulty lies is in the "obviously it needs to be tested to be balanced" part. Put it this way: I believe I could quicker implement such a system if I threw away the powers spreadsheets and started completely from scratch than if I was forced to attempt it using the existing powersets, even if I was given the option to eliminate options I could prove were problematic. It would take so long to check and verify the suitability of the various powersets that making new powersets would probably be faster.

I think its possible to do something like this, but not like you describe, and I don't think the devs would want to expend resources on this sort of project.

Keep in mind that "balancing" in the sense of culling overpowered options is actually the least of our problems in attempting something like this. We have to make sure we don't damage or destroy critical elements of why City of Heroes has been successful for seven years. Replayability is an often underappreciated aspect of City of Heroes that is due to the very non-open powers system many advocate eliminating the restrictions on. The other game you're familiar with, in my opinion, suffers this very problem.

I recently had issues with Caleb in terms of just plain not being able to find the thing, so what I did was:

1. Wait for the next server reset.

2. Go to Nerva.

3. Wait for the day cycle.

4. Kill the crap out of the spectrals.

5. At nightfall, pop a bunch of yellows and then start making circles around the island, at about the 100 - 200 foot levels.

6. Caleb seems to do orbits of some kind, if you spot him in a particular spot, he will eventually leave but also eventually return. Rather than constantly follow him around, I found a decent spot where I knew he lingered, dropped a waypoint on my map, and then asked for help on global channels. So long as I had +perception going, I could wait there and he kept coming back every five to ten minutes. However, there are reports he doesn't always do this, I just know he did it when I went after him.

He's hard to spot, but not that hard to kill. Three or four good damage dealers with some debuffs in there will be able to take him out.

Also, when in doubt, cheat. Wait for server reset, spawn him by killing spectrals, and then use demorecord to find him.

Even soft-capped SR gets hit; enough to where soft-cap alone isn't actually all *that* strong relatively speaking.

I tend to build for +health and +regen once I get above about 47% defense or thereabouts. I'm within one small luck of the Praetorian soft-cap (59%) and in the meantime +regen and +health will tend to help in more situations than ones where the difference between 47% and 59% are significant.

Also, you need something to moderate the damage spikes no matter how much defense you have, and because its not easy to build for a lot of resistance, +health is the second best alternative there.

When it comes to maximizing survivability, you're likely to have aid self in an SR build anyway, so I tend to be a proponent of balanced builds. Building for the most recharge you can without cutting corners on the build will not only tend to improve offense, it will also improve aid self, albeit not proportionately (because of its huge cast time). A balance between quick recharge on aid self plus getting reasonably close to the health cap plus having reasonably high passive regen will, I think, tend in the long run to generate the best overall survivability under the widest circumstances.

You need to update to the NCSoft Launcher; the old updater is EOL as of a few weeks ago in preparation for Issue 21 and City of Heroes Freedom, which includes a new streaming installer system.

NCsoft Launcher

For the record, I am never offended when people guess gender for simplicity sake in a post. "Arcana" is fine. Heck, I don't even really correct all the various interesting misspellings of "Arcanaville" and if I had known then what I know now my forum handle would probably be "Arc."

My forum handle used to be "Lady Arcana" which was my main character to start (and now). When global handles were being introduced and the default was going to be forum handle, and forum handles could be one-time changed because of this, I changed to "Arcanaville" because I didn't want my global to be identical to one of my character names. And I had just come back from a trip to Florida where I had dined at my first Margaritaville. It was better than Arcana Country Safari.

But if someone refers to me as "he" or "she" I'm assuming since neither is an insult, and they aren't sitting directly across from me and can verify, its no biggie either way.

Correct, it does not. That screen predates Arcanatime or I would have tried to sneak it in there. Arcanatime is also sort of unofficial: it tends to work, and there is a good theory to explain why it works, but its not a 100% perfect description of reality, which would require further delving into the game systems to untangle.

It is possible that they want some time between shutting down the NCSoft store and bringing up the Freedom store. That may not be a simple matter.

It seems far too late for an end of August launch to me because this isn't just an issue release: its essentially a relaunch of the title. My guess is Paragon Studios and NCSoft will want to announce a date at least two or three weeks ahead of launch, and I don't think any announcement is likely this week. Which for me means the current best case launch date is between September 5th and September 12th. The target date I've had in mind for a while now (which, I am forced to emphasize, is not based on any insider information but is just my best judgment) is end of September to early October.

I got it: all I need is a blaster that could be permanently at the damage cap (500%), constantly apply enough debuff to put the target at the resistance floor (-300%), and cycle energy punch continuously without pauses (103.2 base damage per second). Bingo: 2064 dps.

Again: as discussed in the thread and as mentioned several times in the OP, the rewards listed above are what non-subscribers get unlocked automatically for no additional charge even if they are not subscribing and therefore not paying monthly to play the game.

The level 53 AV? Eh, it'll only take a build that can put out about 2000 dps. I'll get Iggy working on one for us.

Its actually a meta-gaming puzzle. Those guys are there to make sure a team cannot simply tank the reinforcements and ignore them while focusing exclusively on other objectives. If you keep them around too long, they will eventually burn through almost any protection you can throw up against them in terms of defense short of saturation bombing healing.

As is often the case, defense sets get caught in the cross-fire when the devs first add a lot of ancillary defense into the game, then add counters to that defense.


Which is actually something to keep in mind before clamoring for too much -regen and other debuff protection. Someone's job is to make critters that are a threat, and if he sees that -regen doesn't do anything to regen scrappers, he'll just up the ante. Same with -recharge and other debuffs. There was no problem adding DDR, because the huge amount of -DEF in the game wasn't there specifically to kill SR scrappers, it was to hit everyone with moderate levels of -DEF. The devs have other ways of killing SR scrappers so they do not need to ever put in -100000000% defense debuffs just to work around DDR.

But there are only so many ways to kill a regen, and if you ask for too much protection against all of them, you might not like the arms race you will trigger.

I never said you did: I said that mainly for completeness, and I did quote your post in my reply. The point was that even though -Def is less common in much of the end game than it is in the standard game, the devs have more than picked up the slack by adding tohit buffs which are essentially unresistable autohitting unavoidable universal defense debuffs.

While leveling, where the assumption is the vast majority of players are playing mostly or all SOs, blasters were dropping dead a lot more often than scrappers were, before Defiance 2.0 was introduced. I'm assuming D2.0 helped some, but I suspect it did not completely reverse that situation.

So I'm still of the opinion that its very likely that on average, when played by the statistically average player, any blaster powerset combination slotted with SOs will underperform any scrapper powerset combination slotted with SOs. On paper, a blaster combo might deal more damage but in the real world for most players it will also be dead more often.

When played by experts, sure things change. But the reason why we don't spend a lot of resources balancing for experts is not because their performance is completely irrelevant, but because experts don't need our balancing help nearly as much as the other 90%+ of players do. If an expert says he's offended he can only get ten times average performance out of his blaster build while his friend can get thirty times average performance out of his scrapper build, that just isn't as much of a problem as the average player that says he has trouble getting more than 70% of average on *any* blaster build.

Powersets are balanced around their SO performance with regard to whether or not they are consistent with standard difficulty missions. That is not the *only* balancing criteria placed upon them, but it is one of the foundational ones.

Its pretty obvious this rule had to be true back when there was no other real slotting option (above a certain level) and the devs did say that they used hypothetical SO slotting back then to compare powerset performance. Since then, with the advent of ever more powerful slotting options, the devs have disavowed altering their base balancing criteria to factor in more powerful slotting: from HOs to inventions.

That doesn't mean those things are ignored: it means they are looked at separately. In deciding if a powerset can meet the minimum requirements set for it, obviously the devs look at SO slotting because to look at invention slotting would be contradictory to their statement that inventions are optional for standard gameplay. They also look at SO slotting for powerset intrinsic design strength. But they do look at inventions and HOs when it comes to things like maximum credible strength to make sure its not too easy to get to ridiculous levels of power, and they do game-wide balancing based on player average performance in-game which obviously factors in the average slotting of the playerbase, which includes some (probably small on average) amount of HOs and inventions.

"Powersets are balanced around SOs" is an oversimplification because "balancing" is not a single step process involving a single metric. I once posted that to my knowledge, there were at least fourteen separate individual metrics that go into powerset balancing during design and implementation that I was aware of, and Castle posted in reply that his list was somewhat longer than that. "Powersets are balanced around SOs" is one of the bigger ones, though.

You say that like its a bad thing.

No, you're not, but I cannot account for your 33 tokens based on the description in the OP. Based on what Positron said, you should have 25 tokens for five years (four for each three months plus a bonus token for a full year's sub), 3 tokens for at least nine months, at most 1 token for owning at least one boxed edition, and one more token that Zombie Man pointed out you get for tier 1. So that's 30. Either Positron's description is incomplete, or Beta's calculations are different than what Positron is describing. Given how much this has been in flux, its 50/50 either way.

There's no question that there is more -regen in the trials than in the standard game. However, -Def isn't absent, and besides the Vickies the more serious threat comes from something missing from the paragonwiki page: the 9CUs. For those unfamiliar with their mechanics, they self buff their own tohit with every attack they use, like a perma-follow up. Those tohit buffs last for ten minutes, so they effectively stack indefinitely (unless you deliberately leave them alone for at least that long and "reset" them).

I don't need to tell you: its written in Excel.

Well, I never addressed the question of whether blasters are "superfluous" because I think they aren't really to any significantly higher degree than any other archetype in this game. My main is a blaster and I've got literally thousands of hours of fun on blasters, so that's not a specific problem for me.

The only area I addressed after being referenced was the fact, and it is an objective fact, that by the metrics the devs balance this game, very specifically the metrics tied to the average progressional rates of the various archetypes and powerset combinations across the entire playerbase, blasters have always been measured to underperform. There are lots of possible contributing factors to them, and this has sometimes been attempted to be explained away by suggesting either that the statistic is flawed (due to unusual shifts in how players play different archetypes or even that maybe people who play blasters deliberately play them slowly**) or that the devs can't be measuring correctly because the data doesn't match their experience (which is possible, but not only extremely unlikely in this case but also far more likely to be correct than any one player's anecdotal experience) but the bottom line is that none of those factors is likely to override the most logical explanation that fits all the facts, which is simply that blasters are far harder to play, for the people who play City of Heroes, than all other archetypes and all other powerset combinations within those archetypes.

That makes them unbalanced by the devs' own definitions. Beyond that, whether blasters are playable depends on player skill and playstyle preference. I've been playing them since day one, so I don't know any better. To me, that's just the way it is.

As to what the best build is, I care in a for-fun hypothetical sense, but I rarely play such builds. In fact, my money-is-no-object blaster build that cost umpteen billions to put together isn't even a ranged-capped build. Its an energy blaster build for recharge. The min/maxers out there know how silly that actually is given energy's DPA distribution, but I didn't build it for performance reasons. I built it because I ran the infinite freem mission, and fell in love with cycling power bolt and power blast really really fast. The build attempts to replicate that experience, even if it means my damage mitigation is still wet tissue paper. Its *fun*. The Force Feedback procs in every single energy blast attack is just piling on extra freem. To me, that's worth a few billion inf. Of course, my SR scrapper build is a multibillion build that focuses on performance, but that's only because that's what I wanted to get out of that character: flip out scrapper blitzkrieg. If I was concerned about performance, I would have rerolled out of MA. But MA's just too cool looking. And outside of four builds, most of what I play is running on SOs or very cheap frankenbuilds constructed from whatever fortune drops my way. And not because I lack the billions to optimize them.

People should play what they enjoy playing. The devs can screw up many things, and sometimes do, but they can't make me play something unfun. If I'm playing, its only because I'm having fun, whether its a blaster, controller, or scrapper I'm playing.



** The notion that maybe blasters look slower because, for some weird reason, players actually *deliberately* play them slower is contradicted by the fact that the devs datamined blasters to be in debt far more often, and dying far more often.

Hmm. Now that's a problem. I only did a quickie search for the debuffs, so I missed the Herc because I was looking for magnitude debuffs. The Herc debuff is not a magnitude debuff, its a duration effect. It is a Mag -100 debuff with scale 10 (10 second) duration.

Now that's very interesting. Many regen debuffs are magnitude based debuffs, which means resistance will lower their strength. But these beasties are duration effects which means regen resistance will lower their *duration*. And actually, given their enormous strength, that's probably the better thing to do.

As to Death Mages, they actually deal about -402.5% debuff. If you're looking at CoD, the important thing to remember is when it comes to critter powers, its actually the *PvP* numbers that matter if there are both, because the critters are attacking players. So the magnitude of the debuff is 11.5 times ranged_res_bool which at level 50 is 0.35 for Bosses (and Lts for that matter). That's -402.5%. *This* debuff is definitely a magnitude debuff, so regen resistance will cut it in half but not affect its duration.

Its actually probably for the best if all regen debuffs under -500% are magnitude and all debuffs over that amount are duration effects. Once you get to ultrahigh debuffs, cutting them in half might not matter as much as getting rid of them quicker. So one of the interesting things we're going to have to do is start paying closer attention to regen debuffs and make sure that the resistance actually matters. If there's a critter out there that does -10000% regen debuff and its a magnitude effect, resistance will have no real effect. Unless its intended to be unresistable, that sort of thing (if it exists) is probably actually as of I21 a bug.

I applied to an existing trial account. I didn't attempt to make a new one. If I feel like becoming Yet Another City of Heroes Subscriber I might try to go through the process of making a brand new account. Although even for me these two dollars are starting to add up. I don't want to find myself having to deal with NCSoft collections:

There's an expression: (building) codes are written in blood. Most of the rules encoded in our building codes aren't there to prevent people from dying, they are to prevent *more* people from dying. Someone had to die to prove we should do that differently. And usually, it takes a lot more than one.

True, although that's a pretty big if from a ranged perspective. It probably says more about /Mental blasters than /psi dominators though: they ended up with the lower damage melee attacks and not the standard 1/1.96/2.6 attacks most manipulation sets (that focus on melee attacks) have.

The psionic assault attacks are sometimes higher in intrinsic DPA than psi/mental blaster attacks, but they are nothing special compared to most blaster combinations with melee-attack secondaries, at least in terms of base damage.