Arcanaville
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Quote:I was implying that The Coming Storm might have been named after the event that triggers it, which might have been a coming storm: in this case a meteor storm. The newspaper article has a picture of a really big rock and talks about something passing close to Earth, but meteor showers are neither of those things. So a meteor shower was explicitly written into the article for a very specific reason.Originally Posted by Johnstone
The impression I got from Arcanaville's post was that the Coming Storm is just the meteor shower. That everyone has been blowing out of proportion or something. Or that it's not a signal of something to come, it is whatever is going to come. I kinda don't see the Coming Storm being as big a deal as it has been alluded to in-game though.
Some people are making the leap to say that the meteor shower might be a sign the Coming Storm is approaching; some are even thinking in terms of mechanics, that maybe the meteors are a repeat of the meteor in the Ouroboros mission. But I haven't seen anyone yet explicitly make the connection that maybe The Coming Storm is a giant sequence of events that is known as the Coming Storm because it was heralded by a literal coming storm. I specifically quoted Dollymistress because it seemed, at least to me, that she had brushed up against the idea without actually stating it directly.
Prophesies often work that way: with riddles and wordplay. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Neuronia
Clearly Paragon Studios has united with Jim Henson Studios (?) and we'll be seeing Oscar the Grouch laying mayhem in the quite low-level zone.
Well played, Paragon Studios!
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Quote:The strategy seems obvious. Its how I would do it. Its how I actually do it, in related areas. But the specific conclusions of the paper in detail may not be quite so obvious. Its not immediately obvious to me, for example, how behavior attractors can interlock 80 different achievements unless they were all trivially related. And its not immediately obvious how the existence of those attractors could predict future behavior more than 80% of the time, which is a very strong correlation. It implies player behavior doesn't follow a continuum of behavior, but rather tends to fall into specific pigeonholes.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
I'd prefer to see some truly counter-intuitive correlations - and the numbers and methodology to back them up.
One way to rephrase the statements in the article would be to state this: in terms of the activities you perform, 80% of all World of Warcraft players are either *exactly* like you, or *nothing* like you (motive is a completely separate and unmeasurable thing). That's not an intuitive statement to make. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Meteorgeddon.
Quote:Originally Posted by Zombie Man
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Quote:I'm really surprised given the usual engine of speculation that is the forums that apparently no one has just drawn the direct connection yet.Originally Posted by Dollymistress
another shower would signify the storm is upon us.
The Coming Storm! It's a Storm. And it's coming!
The Meteor Shower. It's a Storm. And it's coming. -
Quote:This is Arcana reasoning:Originally Posted by Vel_Overload
This is Deductive reasoning:
Meteor Shower = Space
Coming Storm = Shivans
Shivans = Meteors
coming Storm = Space
This is Abductive reasoning:
Coming Storm = Space
New Zone soon
Paper gives mysterious warning of Meteors
Paper + knowledge of Coming Storm + Knowledge of New Zone = high probability of new Zone being in Space or pertaining to space.
What's a very strong meteor shower called? -
Quote:Necessarily so.Originally Posted by Xzero45
That was a little unnecessary.
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Quote:One of them does. The other one lasts longer, the other one no one else has.Originally Posted by Leo_G
...with a set whose tier 9 last 15 seconds.
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So. I guess I should point out that meteor showers are usually a cluster of meteoroid fragments, usually accepted to be the remnants of a comet or asteroid that essentially breaks up and leaves behind a large cloud of rubble in its place as the pieces continue on its orbit. When the Earth passes through this cloud of debris, some of those particles strike the Earth's atmosphere and burn up: the incandescent trails are what we call meteors.
I say this because a meteor shower is only a meteor shower if the Earth physically passes through this cloud of debris. If the debris misses the Earth, there's no meteor shower. So when Paragon University says there's going to be a meteor shower, but also that the meteors will pass five million miles away from Earth, someone seems to have clearly gotten something garbled. "Shower" means "strike" not "near miss." Of course, most meteors don't reach the ground: they tend to be the size of a marble or grain of sand and vaporize in the atmosphere. Meteor showers in particular tend to be basically dust clouds.
I suspect that once again a reporter messed up like they tend to do. A Paragon University astronomer probably told them that an asteroid or comet was going to pass within five million miles of Earth, and that this particular meteroid cluster is known to be trailing a rubble cloud behind it or in front of it, and the Earth was going to pass directly through this cloud. The large objects will pass harmlessly by, while the rubble will light up the sky as a meteor shower.
Since all meteor showers happen close to our planet by definition, the astronomers probably told the reporter that it was the meteroid cluster or comet itself that they were going to be studying, probably because of its unusual configuration. In fact, comets are theorized to jettison debris that form the basis of meteor showers all the time: perhaps this one was a relatively recent breakup observed by astronomers on the ground. If so, that suggests the debris field might be extremely dense in relative terms, and produce a very exciting shower: perhaps in the hundreds of streaks per minute. You might even get objects the size of baseballs or basketballs generating extremely bright trails in the sky. Its actually been a long time since I've seen such a shower in person: the last few decades have been pretty disappointing. Would be nice if the programmers managed to create an actual visual meteor shower in the sky: I'd be pretty disappointed if I didn't look up in the sky and see something happen.
Can't trust reporters. Especially science reporters. They are always screwing things up. -
Quote:The problem is that you're comparing to two sets that have a rez in place of a tier 9 defensive power and one that has a tier 9 with permanently fixed uptime.Originally Posted by Leo_G
Well, looking at the numbers (Scrapper):
Soul Transfer = 20% HP per target (I think), 30% END per target returned and a *MAG 30* 12sec stun on top of 15 sec of untouchability. You can probably enhance that to a 20sec stun if you want.
Rise of the Phoenix = 50% HP and 50% END returned, a mag 4 15 sec stun, mag 8 KB, 15 sec of untouchability and 333 fire dmg! Base! For reference, Lightning Rod/SC do 290 dmg base....and RotP has a bigger radius.
Resurgence = 80% HP and 50% END returned as well as a 28% dmg buff, +21% ToHit, +200% recovery and +100% rech for 90sec.
The thing about self-rezzes are, they usually have a bit of overpoweredness to them because they require you to die. But they fulfill the set's theme very well. Even with just untouchability added to Revive, I'd still find it underpowered compared to the others. If I died on my Regen, it's most likely because I didn't have any clicks left so 10-15sec of untouchability would basically amount to 'Toggle Ninja Run > Get out of there!' which I guess is much better than what we have but it still sux compared to Rise of the Phoenix or even Resurgence. -
Quote:The good news is that at least according to the daily numbers First Class seems to have significantly better legs than either Last Stand or Wolverine. In fact its already doing better than Wolverine did in week two. That suggests word of mouth on the movie is decent and it might do a little better than opening weekend initially projected. That still projects out to only about $140 million, but that's not bad for an X-Men relaunch without Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, or Hugh Jackman (more or less).Originally Posted by Residentx10
I'm curious to see what this weekend looks like: does the trend to having better staying power continue, or does it start to wear off. A weekly drop off of like 40% implies it might stick around longer than average, while a drop of 50% suggests to me it won't. -
Quote:If its actually magnetic fields, it could be lots of tangled shapes. In fact, very powerful *and* moving magnetic fields are all but guaranteed to end up tangled messes. The sun's magnetic field is constantly being tangled due to its non-uniform rotation, and when those tangles break and realign you get huge discharges of energy, and the precise geometry of those discharges are highly variable.Originally Posted by MentalMaden
Actually it's a cone attack.
Magnetic fields are a bit weird because unlike electric fields which mostly radiate outward magnetic fields are always encountered as looping structures**. That's what makes their dynamics far more complex. They can twist and bind themselves into complicated structures electric fields really can't.
** A magnetic source that either emits or terminates magnetic field lines exclusively like charged particles emit electric lines of force would be a magnetic monopole. Some theories strongly suggest they exist but they have yet to be detected. -
Quote:Technically, Matt isn't a publisher. Positron has graduated from designing games to having lots of meetings about designing games.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
We'd all agree that anyone playing pen-and-paper RPGs as a kid as already been making games, as far as an imaginative pastime. You've graduated to publishing them. Congrats!
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Quote:Gratz on that. Also, soon you'll be able to say most of your career has been spent on just one game. Hmm, that might not be a good thing: I would recommend working on a tick-tac-toe variant in your spare time to take the edge off.Originally Posted by Positron
Thanks everyone. Today's the big Four Oh.
I started working in the video games industry when I was 20. Man, I have been making games for half my life.
Wait: I'm older than Positron?
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Quote:Another concern is that without perma-DP - which you cannot assume for balance purposes - during DP downtime the Regen tanker that took the resistance toggle would be weak to fire, cold, energy, negative, and psi, and lose instant healing to fill the gap. Making DP perma out of the box would mean Regen would have an effective 28.5% damage mitigation to everything out of the box unslotted, and 37.1% damage mitigation to all slotted. That's closer to mitigation levels tankers tend to need to take alphas, and then you have two heals and enhanced regen on top. Knocking out IH would mean separate from base performance Regen would only have MoG as its tier9 overdrive, which is not competitive due to its very short duration. IH + MoG might be too strong combined with perma-DP, but I'd probably tweak downward from there rather than upward from a set with non-perma DP and trading IH for resistance only to s/l/p.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
That is a concern yes. But Instant Healing is the power to sacrifice. Perhaps for Brutes/Tankers move IH/APD to Tier 3 and move QR to Tier 7.
As to moving APD to tier 3, I could see APD in tier 3 separate from the objection above, but IH would have to be eliminated as even an option in that case, because IH at tier 3 would be both too strong when it was up and not up often enough at low levels. That would be like saying SR can have focused senses, or Elude. -
Quote:The power would probably come too late for Brutes and even Tankers.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
I would add a second tier 7 power called Absorb Physical Damage. It would be a Scale 3 (22.5% for Scrappers) smashing, lethal, toxic resist toggle. It would be mutually exclusive with Instant Healing. Take one, you can't have the other, similar to how Night Widows cannot have both followup and build up.
I thought about just plain cutting Dull Pain's base recharge (in Regen for tankers specifically) to 120 seconds and calling it a day, but even though I think it would probably work, the devs' heads would explode before they would do it. -
Quote:I learned that lesson ages ago running Eden, and the ITF provides a nice refresher course.Originally Posted by rsclark
While that is true, in normal content, there usually aren't 30-40 mobs running around looking for someone to aggro on. Sure, formerly sturdy characters need to learn "I can't jump into that group alone", but squishies need to learn "I can't stand here in this empty area and do nothing and hope to live".
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Quote:I'm not specifically making any attempt to change your mind. I'm simply stating that it appears to me what you find unrealistic actually occurs in real life, and thus there are cases where you'd find reality itself unrealistic. Its not an uncommon phenomenon. I had friends tell me Apollo 13 would have been better if they didn't embellish the story in unrealistic ways, and it turned out some of those unrealistic ways were actually real events. I remember many people saying the original Karate Kid movie was insulting to Japanese people because of the unrealistic caricature of Mr. Miyagi, when I and many people I know actually know people that pretty much act and sound like that (except for being a superhuman Karate expert of course).Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Still not buying it, and you're not going to get me to change my mind.
People's ideas of reality are based on their perceptions of reality and not actual reality, which is why no one uses real gunshot sounds in movies, why courts will ask potential jurors if they watch CSI on television (and often excuse them if they do) and why Dan Brown has a writing career. In my experience plausibility is probably the most difficult thing to debate in real life much less when discussing fictionalized events. -
Quote:I don't specifically recall a dev making that explicit distinction - origin of character as opposed to origin of powers - but BaB's statement doesn't address either in any case. The demons might be magical in origin, but it leaves open the question of whether the actual ability the players possess is magical in nature.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I believe it's been said by multiple developers that "origin" stands for the origin of your powers, not necessarily the origin of your character, nor necessarily the nature of his powers. The latest I hear was in regards to Demon Summoning, where I think it was BABs who explained that a character could have acquired the ability to summon demons through magical, technological, scientific or any other means and that would be perfectly acceptable, but what the actual demons are remains the same, at least in regards to powerset thematics. So a technological character who has scanned the Demon Prince dimension and developed a mental override projector which could control demons remotely would still be stuck using magical demons requiring summoning rituals, but his origin could still be Technology. Mostly, this was said to explain the summoning runes.
The alternate perspective is to look at the one element of gameplay that origin affects - specifically enhancements - and state that origin is the means by which player powers evolve. It nullifies the actual term origin, and implies its really a reference to "source" or "path" of power. The problem with this explanation is that while it aligns with gameplay, it does so by aligning with something we know to be a gameplay simplification - namely that all the important tools of a superpowered character will likely have the exact same nature as their intrinsic abilities. The Batman is the obvious counter example, but it goes a lot farther than that because the origins can be interpreted both as things and as modifiers. I might have a natural ability to defeat criminals, or I might have a natural ability to use technology to defeat criminals. That distinction has no reconciliation.
Because it doesn't have a reconciliation, my preference is to use the interpretation of origin that has the greatest chance of being singular without massive oversimplification. But this is one of the reasons why I think origin ended up being a mess, and Origin of Power was an even greater mess. Instead of admitting that origins were a gameplay simplification, like health bars, Origin of Power tries to make the case that the massive oversimplifcation actually represents something real, like as if a contact tried to explain there's an actual cosmic reason why higher conning things con purple, like their cosmic life force blue-shifts the light emitted from their bodies. You're left wondering why a contact is even talking about critter targeting information when they aren't supposed to be aware of its existence. -
Quote:They would be a superposition of Science and Tech. But the act of observing them to create them in the character creator forces them to collapse into either Science or Tech at the moment you pick an origin.Originally Posted by FlashToo
Excellent way of explaining it. Now we just need to figure out whether my two quantum physicist characters are Science or Tech origin
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Quote:Cyclops needs *glasses* to function normally, and I don't normally consider glasses to be technology in this sense. The visor allows him to control when he emits the energy and how much of it with more precision, and that is a more functional piece of technology. But he's been shown to be able to use his optic blasts with just ruby quartz glasses with no mechanism.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
Not entirely accurate. Cyclops actually needs his visor just to function normally, because he can't shut the optic beams off. Without the visor he'd have to live as a blind man, because the only things that can stop the beams are ruby quartz or his own eyelids.
I'd consider him Mutant/Tech, because his visor is a gadget that is necessary to control the beams, without it he wouldn't be able to be a hero due to the sheer amount of accidental destruction he would cause every time he opened his eyes. The only "natural" thing about him is he learned to aim his optic blasts, which is literally as simple as looking at something. He also has some hand to hand combat training, but it isn't anything your average Army Ranger wouldn't know.
And this thing about any power involving eyes just requiring "looking" is a double myth that needs to die. First of all, its *extremely difficult* to stare directly at an object. The eye tends not to fixate on a single direction as part of how vision works: it moves in various autonomic ways. Second, the presumption that all eye-based powers would emit perfectly in the direction of vision is an assumption and it has a problem: if your eye powers are visible and move in exactly precisely the same direction as your eyes look then as you activate your power you'd block your line of sight to the target.
In fact there are tests you can do with sensors that can project precisely where the eye is facing at any instant in time and even people asked to stare at one specific spot and believe they are doing so aren't. The brain censors out that motion, so the conscious mind usually can't even tell its happening. This makes the notion that aiming via line of sight is trivial basically not consistent with reality. Cyclops could definitely hit a target by looking at it with trivial effort, but without training he'd also randomly destroy a large orbit surrounding the target involuntarily. Even the conscious act of concentrating on not looking in a particular direction can cause the eyes to glance in that direction without any conscious control. Aiming with the sort of pin-point precision that Cyclops demonstrates in the comic books is not just non-trivial, but bordering on biologically impossible. -
Quote:That specific element of Ang Lee's Hulk is something I did like. But both movies make major depatures in the core story of the Hulk. Ang Lee's Hulk gets the psychological element right, but not the origin story. In the comic books Banner is a victim of his own creation, the gamma bomb. No one did this to him: he ultimately did it to himself. To me that's significant.Originally Posted by RemusShepherd
Wait, waitasec. Which part of the Hulk's backstory are we talking about?
In the comics, Banner was irradiated while saving Rick Jones from a nuclear bomb test. In the TV show he experimented on himself trying to unlock hidden reserves of human strength. So in that respect, yes, the movies were closer to the TV show and I think that's a good thing.
But the movies kept the feel of the comics. Hulk is one of Banner's multiple personalities, arising from the trauma he recieved from his abusive father. That is one aspect of the Hulk that Ang Lee presented perfectly and I love his movie just for that. It's much better than the 'all people are strong and green when angry' backstory of the TV show.
In the Norton Hulk Banner is a victim of his own experiment as in the TV series, which is at least spiritually closer to the comic books, but the Norton Hulk goes farther. It specifically incorporates the Fugitive aspect of the TV show as Banner on the run and searching for a cure. The comic books didn't focus on Banner trying to find a cure for the Hulk although that occasionally happened, they focused on The Hulk. In effect, the comic books are about the Hulk, while both movies and the TV show are about Banner. That's a vast shift in focus. Its a good one for the medium in my opinion, but it comes at the expense of basically lifting Banner from the comic books and picking up the Hulk as only a secondary actor, not the star of the show.
In fact, in the movies and the TV series they ditch Rick Jones because Rick plays better off the Hulk than Banner, and is not as necessary when focusing on Banner.
Are these just minor tweaks? In my opinion, its no bigger tweak than which specific mutants are members of the X-Men at its founding: the core story is still the same for the X-Men: mutants who serve the very people who consider them outcasts. And its the same for the relationship between Xavier and Magneto: rivals for the soul of mutant kind and its relationship to the rest of humanity. But in both the X-Men movies and the Hulk movies the specifics are changed around significantly. -
Tangent: for a long time I did exactly what Paragonwiki mentions, although I used the P key: I bound p to screenshotui 0$$screenshot and shift+p to screenshotui 1$$screenshot. However, I tend to sometimes take two pics: one with and one without the UI, so I'm often hitting p twice. Its honestly never occurred to me until recently to just bind p to "screenshotui 0$$screenshot$$screenshotui 1$$screenshot". As long as you have a computer reasonably fast enough to take two screenshots in rapid succession, which I do, I now always get a pair of screenshots. What's more is they tend to pair themselves nicely by filename: screenshot_X.jpg and screenshot_X_1.jpg, again as long as your system can take the caps quickly enough.
I have absolutely no idea why this never occurred to me in seven years until not that long ago. -
Quote:In actual play, 45% defense can make you nearly twice as hard to kill as 41.4% defense. However, in actual play you don't face a constant level of threat. The threat goes up and down. It starts high when you first engage a spawn and then drops as you defeat things. Its higher when fighting AVs than minions. Its entirely possible that in normal play 41% defense is plenty enough with your resistances and regen most of the time, but only occasionally do you need more than that and only for short bursts. If you need it all the time, most people try to build for that. But if you need it only some of the time, many players stop at a level of defense that is high enough to work most of the time, and then pop lucks for those few moments when you need more protection. 41% might be "good enough" in the sense that it works 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time you always can use inspirations for. If you only had 35% defense, you might need inspirations 50% of the time and would tend to run out. At 45% you might never need them. So between 35% and 41% and 45% you might have a case of going from inadequate, to good enough with occasional insp use, to capped out.Originally Posted by Kinetoa
In a previous thread, I found and tried to tweak a WP/WM build I was interested in. Here, however, I wanted to get away from specifically asking for help with that build and focus on a broader principle.
With all the focus on "getting capped", I am confused about when it's "good enough" to say "ok I am not capped, but still pretty hard to kill" specifically regarding /WP. Keep in mind this is from a person who has not experienced playing a Brute at 50 and I am trying to get my build in order ahead of time.
The build in question went to 41.4 to S/L/E/N w/o PVP IO (44.4 with it). This was with 49.7% S/L res and 684-1115% Regen (depending on RttC targets).
Is 41.4% "good enough" for most content? Under what situations do you need to be at 45% enough to feel the difference? I am trying to figure out if I need to keep poking and poking and pulling to get to 45.
Thanks.
All of this is based on the player, what kind of things the player does, and at what difficulty level the player normally plays at. So what is "good enough" varies depending on the player. At the numbers you're talking about, you're way above standard difficulty, and generally above even standard task force difficulty for most situations. You'd need to be running at higher than normal difficulty or fighting particularly harsh special cases to have situations that build can't fight its way out of.
For a long time I ran my SR scrapper at only 40% defense just because I knew one luck would put me to the floor and if I was fighting enough stuff to need more than 40% defense it would also probably be raining inspirations anyway. Only relatively recently (I19) did I update the build to a 47ish build, and honestly I notice the heightened regeneration from the build more than the heightened defense, simply because I already knew what 47% would look like: it would look like my old build after popping a luck, which was not an uncommon circumstance.