Arcanaville

Extremely few things, anyway, and most of them do funky things like deal untyped damage that soft capped defenses can't handle. A large group of strong things can do so, but the number of things that would honor the normal soft cap *and* dish out that much damage is pretty small. But not zero.


*If* you manage to soft cap to the appropriate types and *if* the attackers are conventional attackers that honor that soft cap and *if* you manage to saturate RTTC, then a very strong build scrapper Willpower build *can* reach a 1000 dps survivability line. But the notion that this is something you're likely to see, or that people can easily build, is false. In fact off the top of my head only soft-capped Willpower and Granite tankers fall into the 1000 dps club without resorting to external buffs, and maybe really strongly built Dark Armor tankers.

In fact, even though I believe its theoretically possible, I've never actually sat down and tried to figure out how hard it actually is to build a 1000 dps Willpower scrapper. I think, if I put my mind to it, I could build a 500 dps Regen scrapper not counting IH and MoG, although that would be pushing the limits of what I think I can build.

You ask me to list the most influential authors in Science Fiction and PKD is on my list. But this was about individual works except in a few cases (series like Xanth, related works like Manifold) and no one particular PKD work stands out enough as among the most important or best works on most people's lists, including mine.

Collectively, PKD has probably influenced science fiction as much as people like Asimov, and more than even people like Heinlein. But that was by being prolific, unique, and insane. Unlike most of the greats and even the pretty-goods, PKD doesn't have a signature work or set of works. He has a signature style. It also doesn't help that his most well known works tend to be his short stories and not his novels, and most contemporary exposure to PKD are either his movie translations or compilation works.

I think that's stretching things a bit. I don't have any problem with the way the CoV archetypes are differentiated, not even Stalkers in general, but I don't think you can characterize CoV as everyone having similar offense, personal defense, and support. And I think filling in the CoV archetypes to make that true would be extremely difficult in a way that wouldn't erase the archetypes entirely, and with them the whole point of starting with the CoV archetypes as a prototype of the system.


You're pretty close to what CO offers. Basically, there are offensive sets and more support-like sets, and everyone gets to choose a defensive passive plus a block. You need to run, or try to run, multiple characters through such a system before you really understand what that kind of system's appeals are, and what its deficits are.

The biggest problem for me is best explained this way. When I'm playing a blaster in CoH, I sometimes compare my experience with my blaster to my experience with my scrapper. The comparison stops at that point because there's no way to turn my blaster into a scrapper or vice versa: that pins the comparison down to comparing dissimilar play options. That can sometimes make me appreciate my scrapper more, and vice versa: playing my scrapper can make me appreciate playing my blaster more.

In CO, when I'm playing my melee-centric character, all I'm thinking is why was I stupid enough to make a melee-centric character. All the disadvantages of having to be in melee range with all the disadvantages not having range. There's no good side. But in CO, I can *fix* that. I can just respec out of melee and into range. Or if I'm leveling, I can just stop taking melee attacks and start taking more ranged attacks. Eventually, everything either becomes a ranged scrapper with a touch of support, or a mistake.

Its specifically because X cannot get the abilities of Y and Y cannot get the abilities of X that makes the different archetypes and powersets in CoH replay opportunities. In CO, you can just cherry pick whatever you want from where ever you want. And if you actually make a cherry picked build that has every feature you want, why would you ever play something different, something other than everything you want?

And some people like that, and others don't. Personally, I think it hurts the game a lot in terms of accelerating burnout. I can't prove it of course, but that's the conclusion I've drawn from their experiment in removing archetypal boundaries. And it is the boundaries that matter, not specifically the archetypes. The fact that choosing X means you don't get Y in CoH is something many find annoying, but for many of them that is because they haven't seen what happens when that's not true.


In any case, the only way I could see this working, for the people who don't already love CO's open style of building, is to do something you don't mention but is critical: you say what you would let people get, but you don't mention what limitations people would have. More specifically, what *different* limitations different characters would have. If everyone has the same options, and the same limitations, you're basically back to CO's model.

I would settle for the million, though.

I had ultimately voted for LotR, Hitchhikers, Ender's Game, 1984, Fahrenheit, Foundation, Brave New World, and American Gods. My other two votes were for World War Z and Watchmen.

I have to admit, my voting wasn't "clean." Its not what I think the absolute best top ten are, especially because I didn't have good criteria for that anyway. I felt that LotR, Hitchhikers, Ender's Game, and Foundation should be on there as among the most important, period. I felt 1984, Fahrenheit, and Brave New World were historically strong and influential. I then added American Gods and World War Z as contemporary representation and to represent some of my own personal preferences, and Watchmen as my strongest comic book medium work. It was a close call against the entire Sandman series in total, but I felt Gaiman was already represented in American Gods.

I've been a strong opponent of homogenization for a long time (and its my main gripe with the incarnate power system) but now that I've seen what that kind of homogenization does in an actual superhero based MMO, I've gone from strong opponent to "Oh Hell No" religious zealot.

I think not being able to start teams is less of a deficit than being subject to chat abuse that cannot be controlled.

Plus, the implementation of this keeps getting more complicated. If you allow free players to chat and invite to teams, but only with each other, that means that if any member of your circle of friends buys anything one day, they'll suddenly find themselves outside your circle: you won't be able to talk to them or invite them to teams. That's possibly worse than not having the ability to do it in the first place.

I'm not totally oppose to possible solutions to this problem. I suggested in the past a couple of potential solutions to different aspects of the problem. I suggested the possibility that anyone could send a tell to a free player, say to ask them if they wanted to team, and if you did they automatically had the right to respond to you for a fixed amount of time, say one hour. If you stopped talking to them that right eventually expired. So you could ignore someone that started getting abusive, and eventually they would be unable to send tells to you anyway, and couldn't create another account to get around the block.

I also suggested that free players be allowed to invite someone as a friend if they were in visible range of each other and once friended, they could then send tells to each other. I think these two ideas, both of which probably require some tech, open the door to chatting in a way that is least abusable. From there, its possible that some limited form of teaming could be allowed centered around these chatting abilities.

But I still think that the current limitations, given the current lack of technology to implement limited access contact like this, are still prudent. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to advanced solutions that provide some of those features but eliminate the problems I currently see plaguing any attempt to add them without those safeguards.

What it says is I saw a stupid example, and I shot it down. I'm not attempting to spin anything as anything else, and if you're going to get huffy about it, better start pointing out the specifics of the accusation you're attempting to make.

Just for reference, I play both and enjoy both. But no one is, or should be trying, to use math to prove a set is fun. A powerset can be the most powerful and easiest powerset to play and not be fun, because fun is totally arbitrary and subjective. There is no actual criteria for a fun set that works for everyone.


Not a good idea to harp psionics comparing Regen and SR. Non-positional psi makes up a sizable percentage of all psionic PvE damage and the scaling resistances do not include resistance to psionic or toxic.

10%. Defense can only reduce incoming damage by a maximum of 90% from conventional critters since I7. A soft-capped anything that takes 100 dps through their defenses is going to be very dead very fast unless it has a lot of resistances as well. A Granite tanker at the 90% res cap and with soft-capped defenses would reduce that incoming damage to 10 dps which is survivable.

You don't even get like a free account out of the gig: all the devs pay for their normal non-dev accounts. I think someone said once some devs, Ghost Falcon maybe, multibox out of their own pockets. Now that's standing behind your product.

Although, perhaps "standing behind" is not exactly how everyone would describe Ghost Falcon's playstyle, given I hear he's a marketeer as well.

We should probably get back to talking about Synapse, given this is his dev chat and all, but unfortunately I don't have all that much dirt on Synapse. Going to have to rectify that.

Let's just say Paragon Studios is well aware of my past and present view of their collective arithmetical deftness. I doubt they're going to let me post that particular critique for a mere million dollars.

In any case, if you're giving Paragon Studios a million bucks, that wouldn't be the most entertaining story you could ask them to let me tell. Heh, heh, heh.

They did suggest I apply for a powers team job once, but I'd have to move to California (probably along the same lines that they suggested to Doc Aeon to apply: no guarantee, but I suspect I would have had some nice recommendations if I did). They have good people on the powers team now anyway and I'm probably more useful to them on the outside.

And yeah, I can be a lot more critical, a lot more informative, and a lot more dissecting as an outsider than the devs can really be. Ghost Falcon and Positron can always disavow any knowledge of my actions.

Also, I cannot be a stealth Paragon employee because they have a policy that bars developers from commenting on the game anonymously. Technically, I believe I could comment on parts of the game I had nothing to do with anonymously although that is frowned upon, so given what I tend to comment on its possible I'm a Paragon employee, but only if I was the receptionist or the artist that makes the beep sound effect when you try to use a power that is recharging.

They could have, but that would eliminate the use of the free play option as a form of advertising for the game. Just because that option is not exactly all that Sam wants it to be, doesn't mean its logical to give it up when there's no benefit to Paragon Studios to giving it up.

To put it more bluntly, yes they could have done that, but they could also have done it the way they did, and that's the option they chose because it gave them the options they wanted.

I'm not even sure free players can use local friends and I'm pretty sure they can't use the friends channel. So even if you could figure out a friend was on, without chat your only option would be to blind invite them out of the blue: without chat you can't even send them tells. So again, to make free to play teaming work, it would seem the actual act of invitation is not enough to make this practical: it would only open the door to even more requests for even more features to make the feature palatable.


Since the logic behind barring free players from generating unsolicited tells is that they can indulge in bannable conduct without any penalty (losing a free account is theoretically no loss at all: you can just make them specifically for the purpose of performing bannable conduct) allowing free players to send tells to each other will mean someone could perform that kind of conduct, but it would be limited to just the free players. Is that wise?

If you're taking 1000 damage per second, soft-cap defenses aren't going to save you either unless you're a Granite tanker or something.

Well, I was already here. And I have said in the past, that relative to normal MMO conventions we should all be at least a little overpowered in a superhero game.

That doesn't mean game balance gets thrown out the window, but it does mean that we had a justification for easy soloing when the conventional MMO wisdom was that if you make it too easy to solo you'll make the game too boring. It means things like inspirations can be immensely powerful in this game relative to other games because it fits the narrative that our characters can temporarily gain transcendent power to deal with a particularly sticky situation. The same sticky situations that often force teaming in other MMOs, actually.

There is such a thing as too powerful even in City of Heroes, but this game tolerates otherwise "game-breaking" levels of power better than most MMOs, I think, because unlike most MMOs such ability is actually expected by the players that approach the game.


Possibly the most beneficial mistake the devs ever made was that they were so good at handing out game-breaking levels of power at launch (by misunderstanding, by improper judgment, and even by typo) and so bad at figuring out how to reign it in that by the time they figured it out and gotten their arms around the problem around I6ish, they had over a year and a half to observe how the City of Heroes playerbase dealt with such levels of power. And they discovered it wasn't as detrimental as they thought it would be. It did hurt the game in some areas to be sure, but it wasn't MMO poison like conventional wisdom said it would be.

Cassandra.

To be frank, my batting average on calling powersets since Archery currently stands at 100%. Among my calls which went against the grain of the majority opinion are Willpower, Kinetic Melee, Cold Domination, Ninjitsu, and Electric Armor, off the top of my head.

I believe I called Time Manipulation, when I first saw it in closed beta "an undeserved gift from the gaming gods." Its amazingly strong, but not quite game-breakingly strong, so I will feel very safe rolling one and enjoying its almost ludicrous strength knowing that once it goes live it will be relatively safe from the nerf bat.

It is definitely a strong competitor to Kinetics and Rad, but its primary advantage is that it seems a better solo and leveling set for most skill level players. It actually feels like the mutant love child of trick arrow, radiation, and pain.

There was some discussion about this in closed beta (and honestly, a little in the focus group preview) and the notion was that the "playstyle" classifications were not intended to specify what archetypes were *specific* to that playstyle, but rather, going in reverse, if you were a brand new player looking for an archetype and you had a particular kind of playstyle you wanted to exercise, which archetypes would be most likely to help you fulfill that role.

Almost by definition if you can argue against the classifications, the classification aren't for you. Its to inform people ignorant of what the archetypes do. So the "pet playstyle" doesn't list the archetypes that focus solely or predominantly on pets, it lists the archetypes most likely to allow you to play with pets in some fashion. The "support playstyle" listing doesn't list the "support archetypes" they list the archetypes that *can* offer support if that's the way you want to play.

To use a more lively example, theoretically speaking if a player wanted to play "a healer" the game would, if it supported that playstyle type, point the player to things like defenders, corruptors, controllers, and masterminds. Things with buff powersets. Is that because those things are "healers?" No, its because if you want to be a healer those are the best places to start. Of course, you'd also have to pick a powerset that actually *has* heals, but its the place to start.

That's all the playstyle section is. A place to start, for people who have no place to start. What do you want to do? Do you want to charge into melee? Do you want to have pets? Do you want to support allies on teams? Pick what you want to do, and the game will try to steer you into the choices that will best support that choice. That doesn't mean those things are exclusively the thing you're looking for. Only that what you are looking for is *one* of the things that archetype is considered good at in general.

Not exactly sure what you mean by that, but I should point out there was no soft cap in the same sense there is now in the pre-ED days. Back in those days, critters still packed tohit bonuses rather than accuracy bonuses. This meant that low levels of defense were much weaker than they are now, but conversely extremely high levels of defense were much stronger. In fact, no one who joined the game after I7 released has ever actually experienced, under any circumstances, how powerful perma-elude was back in I2 when the absolute floor was reachable more often than it is now (5%). Certain critters like gunslingers still packed huge accuracy bonuses and lifted the minimum floorto about 10%, but back in the day perma-elude (and ultra-high defense buffed characters) would tank +7s far more easily than you can do now.

Higher levels of power have been much more democratized now than in the past: its easier to get what used to be very difficult to get before. But the absolute all-out maximum performance hasn't gone up all that much from the I2 or the pre-ED days in most cases. No amount of inventions and incarnate powers is going to return my Ill/Rad to her glory days pre I5. Nothing is going to really replace the old school perma-Elude (and stronger Aid self) of my I2 MA/SR. I'm not even likely to see my centriole-packing blaster build hitting everything from sniper range with 300% attacks ever again in a live build.

My MA/SR is offensively stronger now against the aggro cap of +2s than my perma-elude build was. So its not all bad. But we haven't completely transcended the old days just yet.

The game is also balanced around endurance being a limiting factor, and outside of invention builds it generally is: you either slot a lot of endurance reduction in attacks, or you will run out of endurance. Its mathematically impossible for someone to be able to run an attack chain continuously without either very aggressive endurance slotting or some kind of endurance management over and above even slotted stamina. An "average" attack chain, of which most melee can either reach or exceed, is 1.0 damage scale per second in normalized terms. And this by the balancing rules will equal at least 5.2 endurance points per second of burn rate. Standard recovery with slotted stamina is only 2.48 endurance points per second. Unless you can either radically increase endurance recovery or cut your offensive endurance costs in half, or some combination of the two, endurance is an impossible bottleneck to escape**.

Regen gets quick recovery, which effectively adds about 39% more endurance recovery over and above slotted stamina. If you can't figure out how to convert 39% more recovery into more dps, something's wrong.

Also, the fact a mitigation set has clicks is double-edged. They have to pay cast time to use their powers, but on the other hand they benefit from things like hasten which does not improve passives or toggles.

If Dark Armor manages to get Dark Regen cycle times to 10 seconds or thereabouts, I guarantee you they don't consider it a "penalty." In fact, even though Dark Armor just has the one click, it probably spends more time than Regen casting clicks at its maximum performance level (i.e. using clicks as often as possible).

** It takes highly degenerate farming cases for inspirations to play a major factor here. Above a certain critical kill speed, inspirations fall so fast they can maintain a high kill speed, effectively turning the player into a ram jet. This requires build strength and performance levels off the charts of any balancing criteria for this game.

Based on SO slotting, Regen blows the doors off of most other powersets on mitigation. It even does well compared to Willpower. Its only in invention-slotted higher end builds that Regen's weaknesses start to become apparent.

I can't prove you're ugly.

I don't think any one power in the set could be considered, on its own, overpowered. I will say, however, that I had the same Cassandra problem with Time Manipulation that I did with Willpower, so I'm just going to do what I did with Willpower: roll one and enjoy it.

If your argument is "Regen has disadvantages compared to Willpower" that would be relevant. If your devil's advocate argument is that Regen is at the bottom of the barrel, its completely irrelevant.