Arcanaville

Yes and no. There weren't specific polygons dedicated to nipples as I recall, but on the other hand textures were a completely different story. And last I checked (which was quite a while ago actually) there are a few texture "anomalies" here and there.

The one I haven't quite figured out yet is that sometimes my energy/energy blaster gets ring-locked by one or the other, even when there are lots of sources of taunt around. Of course, my energy blaster runs a very high recharge build, so triple ringing me is almost a complete waste of time for the AVs.

If Synapse is stealing my dual archery idea, it better be because he's implementing it.


Fine, new powerset: Inferior Reflexes.

Its a Defender primary that debuffs foe recharge, defense, and movement. It also has a power that periodically causes the target to induce a 0.67 mag unresistable knockback on self. It also has confuse to simulate the target occasionally accidentally shooting comrades.

On the one hand, the new forums make it very difficult to construct giant quote pyramids. On the other hand, there was a reason why we sometimes had giant quote pyramids.

You seemed to be saying the primary or sole purpose to the rewards were people who would have run the trials anyway. I don't think that is literally true. I think they are also equally there to encourage people who aren't running the trials to run them. But I make a distinction between people who *aren't* running the trials and people who specifically would rather *not* run the trials.

I actually haven't run very many trials in the past two weeks, and none in the last week. Is that because I suddenly decided I hate the trials? No, its just that I starting doing something else I wanted to do, and I'm focused on that now. If the devs made this weekend triple empyrean weekend would I start running them again? Hell yeah. Is that because the devs are bribing me to do something I don't want to do? No: its because I have no problem running trials and I would set aside what I am doing now temporarily.

There's a difference between "not doing" and "don't want to do." Sometimes, I just want to do something else *more*. And I think things like the costume rewards are also targeted at such people: people who aren't doing the trials, but would do them if they had things like costume rewards, because the reason they aren't doing the trials is not because they hate them, but because at the moment they would just rather do something else instead, possibly for *its* rewards.

The truth is somewhat in the middle actually. The devs are not attempting to bribe players who do not want to run the trials at all into doing them. The devs assume such an attempt would actually fail for most such players. However, the vast, overwhelming majority of players are perceived to be not just people who pick what they do completely reward-blind, or people who pick what they do based solely on the rewards offered, but on a value judgment that balances their preferences with their desire for certain rewards.

Every day when I log out a character, for *some* of them I specifically move them to a spot where they can earn a day job badge or accolade they don't yet have. Do I literally want to run around to pseudo-random locations in the game before logging off? Would I do that if there was no such reward? Of course not. I don't literally *want* to move to those specific spots before logging out. On the other hand, I don't think its all that big a deal to get those rewards. I don't *hate* moving to those spots to get those rewards.

I don't like doing it, I don't hate doing it. Its not something I would ordinarily do for no reason, but I am willing to do them for the reward. Does that mean I'm being "bribed" to do it? Not really, except insofar as rewarding any behavior is a bribe. I don't believe I'm being persuaded to do something I have a specific prohibition from doing. I'm simply being offered a choice: do X, get Y. Or not. And in this case, the decision is not one of being forced to do it, but choosing to do it.

I say I'm not forced to do it because I actually don't do this for every single character I play. I do it on my main (whose still working on the side switch day jobs) most of the time. I do it on most of my 50s. I sometimes do it on alts I'm leveling, but other times I don't bother. I make the choice not just per alt, but also per day, situationally, depending on whether I feel like it or not.

Nearly *all* the choices the devs offer in the game are choices intended to be evaluated in that way. Here's a reward, here's the activity that generates it, do it or not, do it frequently or infrequently, today or tomorrow, based on whether you think the activity is worth the effort and whether the activity is something you are willing or desire to do.

People saying that if the trials were any good the devs wouldn't have to offer rewards for them are being disingenuous. They wouldn't advocate removing *all* rewards for the game. That's not how these games work. But conversely saying the devs think the players are completely blind to rewards is also not accurate. The devs recognize that players do evaluate their choices based in part on what rewards are generated by each activity. That doesn't mean players always seek to optimize reward earning, but it does factor in and the devs know this. The devs target the middle, offering choices that players will be motivated to make, but aren't compelled to make. If most players said they didn't care about the rewards at all, that would indicate the rewards are probably too low. But if most players said they felt compelled to acquire the rewards because their value made it impossible to do otherwise, that would indicate the rewards are probably too high. What they are aiming for is "I'd like that reward, I'll put some effort into it, but I won't damage my own enjoyment of the game to pursue it."

And they aren't aiming for *everyone* to think that, because that's impossible. They are only aiming for the average player to think that. The extremes on both ends will think the rewards are either meaningless or too overtly compelling. That's unintended, but unavoidable. Thinking that the devs specifically did something to make one specific person feel the way they do is generally wrong.


In the specific case of the incarnate costume parts, they are certainly a reward for people who are already running a lot of trials and accumulating merits. But its also true that those rewards were added for people who were not necessarily doing that but would be willing to do so simply because the reward itself was something they were more inclined to pursue than the incarnate powers themselves. But the devs are not attempting to bribe someone who doesn't want to run the trials at all into suddenly running them constantly. The players who are doing that are outside the sphere of what the devs specifically intend.

I wasn't awake at five o-clock in the morning. And I'm assuming no one thinks a Facebook poll is statistically strong, its just a non-randomized opinion poll.

Also, RTTC specifically is not a good example for other reasons which I have suspicions about but are a bit murky because the devs won't discuss the design specifics of RTTC (but Tankers know what I'm talking about).

And personally, I always thought the scaling power SR should have gotten was invincibility. In fact, that made even more sense when I first suggested it, back when Invincibility primarily provided melee defense and there was no such thing as a soft cap.

Between that and the people who subscribe just to complain about the fact that the game isn't worth subscribing to, I'm extrapolating that my gaming is going to be subsidized well into the next decade.

Rest assured, I'm literally the last person to worry about in terms of figuring out a way to gain any capability the game theoretically supports.

However, the devs own design rules specify the minimum performance of a tanker, and they do not admit the scenario above as a mitigating circumstance. Therefore, were I to make the case to the devs that their own design rules suggest a potential problem with SR tankers and status protection, they would not likely use that argument and I would not accept it from them if they did.

You're assuming there's any rule or even guideline that says a power's intended primary purpose cannot change. There is no such design rule. The rule is that if a power has such an intent now, it must still be capable of functioning in that way in the future. It does not need to remain the most important use of the power. If you use Energize as a heal and that interferes with its optimal usage as an endurance discount power, that's your choice. But if your primary usage was as endurance discount, you can still do that with Energize.

The intent is to protect players that use a power in a particular way and want to continue to do so. It is not to ensure that when players start to leverage a new feature of the power they don't negatively impact the old usage. Once you make the decision to start using a power in a new way over the old way, you lose the right to expect the power will continue to function in the old way.

The problem is not taking a taunt aura is not an intrinsically stupid mistake, and if its embedded in a defense toggle its not a decision that can easily be avoided. You'd be equating not taking a taunt aura with not taking AoE defense.

If you really want the option to run with a taunt aura on anything, I would consider advocating that the devs add a power to the presence pool that you could take which actually does just that: grants a toggle with a PBAoE taunt. Give it no prereqs and let people take it right out of the gate. You'd give not just SR but all scrappers an optional taunt aura power without messing with existing players that don't want it. I'd say the chances of that happening are much, much, much better than giving taunt auras to everything.

Post count isn't mass, its momentum. If post count were mass Golden_Girl would have an event horizon by now.

I would have thought that Another_Fan directly arguing with Golden_Girl would have caused the thread to disappear in a flash of gamma rays by now.

Arguing that decisions should be made by the person with the best understanding of the game regardless of the beliefs of anyone else with a lesser understanding is a curious position to take against a stipulation of mine.

In any case, making a change that addresses no balance issue to existing powersets that has a decent chance of killing average skill players playing statistically average builds is something I wouldn't support, and adding a taunt aggro to SR for existing SR scrappers is sufficiently likely to do that based on my understanding of both the average skill player and the statistically likely average build. What min/maxers want always comes second to that. The day that the game changes that foundational principle, I'll advocate for what's most useful for high performance players. Not before.

There's always the ranged version of the set:

Swapping high order knockback for stun is a change in the power's mechanical purpose, requiring significant justification to allow.

To put it another way, were I to ask for Energy Torrent to be changed from knockback to disorient, I would trigger the "cottage rule's" requirements for a balance-significant justification.

Repulse's change is a "cottage rule violation" as most players use the phrase; I'm specifically pointing out that it isn't a true "violation" of the underlying design principle because the rule only says such changes must be justified by something stronger than just preference, not that such changes can never be made.

"Because they don't need it" was Castle's way of trying to point out that not all SR scrappers want to draw aggro every time they turn on AoE protection. Unlike, say, Invuln, their protection doesn't scale up with targets rushing up to attack them. So while Invuln's taunt aura helps invincibility, a taunt aura in Evasion just draws more incoming damage.

The same is true for Brutes of course, but with Brutes the devs made the decision early on to give Brutes a taunt aura, and so they could make that decision with a relatively clean slate without changing how lots of players with existing SR characters had to deal with a change to aggro.

This may come as a shock Bill, but not everyone considers drawing aggro on something other than than a tanker to be an actual advantage.

As to backporting continuous status protection to Brutes and Scrappers, its not high on my list of things to argue for, but I also wouldn't argue against it if it was contemplated.

Its actually not so much a violation as the rule in actual practice. The devs decided that the functionality of repulse was sufficiently antithetical to stalkers that there was a critical requirement to replace it. The power was changed when the devs collectively became convinced that there was no other way to address that issue, *and* the opportunity existed to expend enough resources to make that change within the general context of a holistic review of what the powerset required in total to function as it should.

That's exactly what the "cottage rule" mandates.

I did accidentally four slot those passives. But tossing weave into it nullifies much of the notion that SR will be easy to soft cap: if it does that it will be taking the fighting pool to do so.

It will also have more endurance drain issues because weave is a fairly expensive toggle. If we slot the 3 SR toggles and weave with 3def/1end SOs, we end up with 0.83 eps of endurance drain (vs 0.59 with just the three SR toggles and 0.63 with 3 SR toggles plus CJ). 3-slot stamina is 2.48 eps, so net endurance drops from about 1.85 to 1.65, a drop of about 11%. I've compared the difference between 3+weave and 3+CJ under so slotting and its pretty noticable to me. Its half the difference between unslotted and slotted stamina.

These things are correctable with slotting, but not likely in the 20s.

Because unlike Scrappers and even Brutes, Tankers are explicitly intended to take aggro pretty much continuously, and theoretically without significant assistance. A Brute or Scrapper with a status protection gap can disengage. You might not want to, but they are designed to. A Tanker is not designed to disengage from aggro periodically and continuously.

To put it another way, if a Scrapper or even a Brute said they couldn't consistently tank for a team of four at standard difficulty in any standard content against any standard critters at any level, the devs would say "so?" But if a Tanker says that for any legitimate reason, the devs are supposed to take notice because that's the historically stated design target for all Tankers. That problem is an actual balance-critical problem according to the last known statement of the Tanker design target.

(I don't have a link to the quote, but I know it was publicly stated on the forums a while ago).

Continuous mez protection in the earlier levels is a nice to have for Brutes and Scrappers, but I can make the case that the lack of it is actually a design-breaking error for Tankers.

1. Your SR scrapper might have more actual health than standard tanker health without invention bonuses and accolades, situations SR has to function within. My SR scrapper at level 50 has 1922 health. Tanker base health at level 50 is 1874.

2. Your SR scrapper probably has tough which not all SR tankers will have. I'm typically running around with about 20% resistance to smash/lethal total, about 17% of that from tough. Working backwards, my SR scrapper can take a smash/lethal alpha of up to 2402 damage before dying instantly. Compare to the standard SR tanker without tough and without invention bonuses that can take 1874. Check your own build, and see if you really are less alpha-capable than what the standard base SR tanker will be.

3. Your SR scrapper probably has much higher regeneration than non-endgame tankers and aid self. Which means you will be able to recover from an alpha far faster than the standard SR tanker will be able to.

Bill, our SR scrappers are probably *far better* than base SR tankers will be, and probably have been for quite some time. All they were going to get on us was 40% more health than scrappers, and I currently have 43.6% more than base health. You're thinking the best end game SR tankers will be stronger than us, but my worry is that the standard SR tanker will almost always be significantly worse than us.

I'm not worried about end game SR tankers. They will be us literally on steroids: far beefier and just as unhittable. But the situation is going to be a lot different at level 40, 35, and 30.


It'll be a little harder than that to soft cap. At level 22 you'll have 13 power choices and 20 discretionary slots. It takes 7 powers (six SR defenses and a power pool defense) 4-slotted (unless you plan on running out of endurance in ten seconds running four toggles) to get to the soft cap or near it. That's 7 powers and 21 discretionary slots.

Powering four toggles in those levels won't be easy, especially if you've devoted all your slots to defense and can't slot attacks for endurance reduction. In fact, if you slot stamina itself you won't really be able to effectively soft cap an SR tanker until level 25 or higher.

Hypothetically if I were to sell out an Invuln Tanker on mitigation in the same way I might consider RPD, TI, Uny, DP, Invinc, and Combat Jumping. By level 23 I could have RPD 3 slotted, TI, Uny, CJ, and Invinc 4-slotted (one end red), Dull Pain 6-slotted, and Stamina 3-slotted. With even SOs that gets me to 70% resistance s/l, 26% f/c/t, 16% e/n, and with five targets in Invinc about 20% defense. Plus the effects of Dull Pain which will be up 2/3rds of the time. That's actually competitive (stronger s/l, weaker everywhere else) with a soft-capped SR tanker which will likely not materialize before 25.

Where the SR tanker will excel is in high-order debuffing situations, where most of those debuffs won't stick. But outside of that I think there will be issues. I think most people think soft capping is strong because they usually see it in end game builds where it is supplemented by a ton of other mitigation.

I'm also a little concerned about SR tankers not actually having permanent status protection before SOs come around. Shield Tankers have a similar problem, but Shield Tankers have arguably better passive protection: they get to keep phalanx and true grit.

I notice people are still dancing with futility asking for the cottage rule to be revoked. Well, can't say I didn't try. But as to this specific example, two things. First, Energize was changed to address specific balance issues in Electric Armor that were not practically resolvable within its design limits without making significant changes to the set. It had a cottage rule exemption justification if it needed one. Second, it didn't need one because Energize is not actually significantly worse than Conserve Power used to be at endurance management.

Conserve Power's original recharge was 600s (the same as the version in Energy Aura now) which would be far too long for a heal power. So it was reduced to 120 seconds which is 1/5th the duration. That on its own would make the endurance discount five times more powerful, albeit in a way difficult to get full usage out of. So its duration was reduced by a third and its strength cut in half. Net, its uptime is now 1.7 times higher, and its strength is now half as strong. That's an overall reduction in numerical effect of about 15%. In other words, Energize has 85% the endurance reduction numerical strength of Conserve Power. That is a minimal reduction. What's more, its probably more *usable* as endurance management because endurance manangement is far more useful when its up more often than when its up less often but stronger.

Lets three slot both powers for recharge and ask players which would they rather have: about 100% endurance reduction for 90 seconds with about three and a half minutes of downtime, or 50% endurance reduction for 30 seconds with about 30 seconds of downtime. I'm not even talking about the heal in Energize either: I'm just talking about the endurance reduction.

Or lets add on 3-slotted hasten and ask, on average, would they rather have 100% end reduction for 90 seconds with two and a half minutes of downtime, or 50% end reduction for 30 seconds with about 20 seconds of downtime.

Or, lets go all the way and ask the min/maxers which would they rather have, the power that can be made perma (Energize requires +300% recharge to go perma) or the one that cannot be made perma by any means (at the recharge cap of +400% or 5.0 total recharge Conserve Power still has 30 seconds of downtime every two minutes.


So the reason why most people don't complain about Energize is not just that it got a heal, but it also, for most players, got *better* at endurance reduction. It certainly did not significantly damage the power for the vast majority of players using it for endurance management.

So Energize had a cottage rule justification, but it didn't even need to use it.

Against sustained damage the scaling resists will be better on tankers than Brutes. But they won't help much against actual alpha strikes, and they take a brief period of time to kick in. In other words, if ten things shoot at you all at about the same time, its not like the first hit reduces your health, and the second hit is resisted a little bit, and the third hit is resisted a little more, all the way up to ten. All ten hits will score while resistance is zero, and about a half second to a second later your resistance will jump up to the new value.

As to the scaling resistance numbers, I was just pointing out that they won't *automatically* scale to tanker archetype modifiers because they don't use them. So if they end up higher than scrapper or brute numbers, it will have to be because the devs deliberately changed them, and they don't usually do that by default for that sort of thing. So it would be safer to presume the numbers will be the same unless the devs state otherwise.


On the general subject of the ITF, that's one place I'm not too worried about SR tankers. So long as they actually slot their SR powers and then soft cap with inventions or power pools, they should be fine. Although you can get pretty close with just combat jump and weave is a bit overkill, I do think SR tankers should still consider going tough/weave for the s/l resistance. And with no heals at all aid self is probably a good idea for SR tankers. An SR tanker with no aid self and no tough is actually going to be weaker than my SR scrapper, and while she generally skates through the ITF, even she can get overwhelmed at times.

I'm going to guess that its like that because it was rendered with the outside elements of the blade emitting light and the interior elements translucent, or something similar that accounts for the way the blade is illuminated.


Edit: too slow