Arcanaville

To be fair, that is very, very little.

Also, you've been having fun with some sliders there.

Heck: I spent three months working with BaB to make sure female animations weren't sometimes slower.** You want to talk sexist: in certain corner cases female characters actually did less damage due to this anomaly.

Of course, its hard to blame this on genuine sexism when the same problem cropped up just as often for fliers. I don't play enough male characters to know just how different the animations visually appear through experience, but I did analyze them very carefully at one time and I know there are some instances when they are different in actual fact. How dramatic that is for the purposes of clipping and such is something I'm less knowledgeable about.

Still, I did my part for gender equality. Now everyone hits like a girl.


** Not his fault: all of them dated from before BaB's time.

I'm not responding to everyone, though, but to what you said specifically about diversity:


But you're handwaving away that in the former case, you still don't get to play a female warrior. What's likely to happen is you will only be able to play a toga-party attendee. Nobody gets armor, and nobody gets dresses. Everyone gets robes. The bottom line is that each costume part is an option, and each costume part that exists is an option for that body type. The number of options is numerically constrained by the number of pieces, not whether they are identical in style to parts that other body types have.


I'm loathe to cry sexism automatically in this case. True, female costumes tend towards the more overtly sexual than the male costumes, but would you cry sexism if you saw the same distribution of clothing worn by real people? In other words, if you see the same skew towards more revealing clothing worn by women and girls rather than the men and boys at the mall, would you conclude all of them were making the sexist decision to wear inappropriately statistically distributed clothing?

If I were the devs, one thing I would do is actually datamine which costume parts were actually used, relative to their distribution within the game. If I saw a disproportionate amount of, say, female jackets worn in female characters then I'd consider making more costume options of that vein.

But if I were to datamine that the more "sexy" or revealing costumes were the ones disproportionately used (disproportionate in the sense that their usage rate was higher than their relative percentage of all costume options) then in fact I would conclude those options were actually *under represented* relative to what the players actually want. I don't believe in social engineering here: its too radioactive an area.

Nowhere do I say I'm not in favor of more cross-over options or not in favor of more conservative costume options for females (I actually said the opposite). What I object to is tossing the bogeyman of misogyny cavalierly. There are actual flesh and blood women on the art team making these costume options, and don't believe they are selling out their gender to work at Paragon Studios.

I don't have a good explanation for the cigar, though.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration where one isn't justified. I'm all for more cross-over pieces myself in the general case, but the diversity issue really comes down mechanically to something that was stated earlier: there really isn't any such thing as "porting" most costume pieces: they have to be created almost from scratch to fit the appropriate body models and animations. So if you are going to make, say, a jacket for male, female, and huge, you're really making three jackets that just happen to look superficially identical.

Because of this fact, the creation of costume pieces is somewhat independent effort-wise. So suppose you're someone on the art team making costumes for the male rig. You have a list of stuff you'd like to do, but whenever someone makes something for the female rig, you're told you *have* to make a version of this thing yourself. Conversely, whenever you actually find the time to make something original, the person making costumes for the female rig is given the same instruction: no matter what you want to work on, you have to make a comparable analog piece first.

If that's done excessively, it *does* reduce costume diversity from the perspective of the fact that the art priorities for the different gender models might be different but not expressed in that rule. *Why* the art team might make one thing a priority for one gender and a different thing a priority for a different gender is an artistic decision.

The answer to your rhetorical question is that sometimes priorities or thematic issues align, and sometimes they don't, and a rule that says "make everything completely different" is just as absurd as "make everything the same." There has to be a balance between those two, and that balance point can be debatable, but the one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that its not at either edge.


I'm not going anywhere near the other "sexism in female costume parts" issue itself.

Good point. That is 20% resistance to recharge debuffs. If you keep that charged up that's 80% resistance to slows achievable with just Quickness, Winter's Gift, and the day job power, and no PvP sets.

Scourge is tricky to account for in real-life terms, because its situational in its benefit. Specifically, because it only kicks in at low health, the benefit you're likely to get is somewhat dependent on the target being at low health for at least a few attacks. When you're killing everything in 4 attacks, say, then the minimum noticable improvement will reduce that to 3. Anything weaker than that won't be noticed (at least on average). Because players are running through multiple attack sequences as they attack different targets, this doesn't mean any buff lower than 25% will be unnoticable, but it does mean buffs that don't reduce the number of attacks you would have needed by at least one won't be: they will just contribute to overkill.

And the problem there is that its in solo situations where a player is more likely to be attacking weaker targets where Scourge will have a lower net benefit. Paragonwiki's article on Scourge suggests estimating Scourge as having a 30% increase to damage effect, meaning multiply your damage output by 1.3 (*not* +30% damage buff). However, I don't think that simplified analysis is likely to be correct, because of my prior experience with analyzing the SR passive resistances which are an inverse situation. Not just situationally, but also statistically the SR passives tended to be stronger than the simplified calculations suggested. I wouldn't extrapolate that to Scourge and say its also stronger than estimated, but I would say that it bears a much more indepth analysis.

Unfortunately, that's something that will take me longer than just a few minutes, so I'll have to find the time to do that later.

This is tricky. Benumb doesn't affect resistances. Benumb debuffs strength, specifically in this case the strength associated with the damage types. In other words, smashing strength, lethal strength, fire strength, etc. Its like having an anti-Build Up active. This does reduce the *damage* the critter can do for obvious reasons. It should *also* reduce the strength of any resistance powers they are running, just as damage strength *buffs* should increase the strength of any resistance powers running. This is not a separate effect: this is literally what a smashing strength debuff should so: reduce *all* powers that tamper with "Smashing" in some way, including powers that attempt to buff the Res aspect of "Smashing."

So why doesn't Build Up boost *our* Unstoppable or other resistance powers? Because all player resistance self buff powers are specifically flagged to ignore strength buffs: you can't buff them and you can't debuff them (you can slot them, however). Basically, damage-typed strength buffs and debuffs *should* affect resistances just like they affect damaging powers, but most of our resistance powers are flagged to be immune to that.

With critters, its a little more complicated. *Some* powers are flagged that way, and *some* are not. Powers flagged to ignore strength debuffs will ignore Benumb. Other powers won't. Mission Maker Unstoppable is not flagged to ignore strength buffs/debuffs, so Benumb can debuff the resistance of a custom critter using unstoppable.

But its difficult to predict when a power will show up flagged or not flagged. Honestly, its because critter don't complain so they can't /bug a malfunctioning power and players don't usually /bug situations when their powers work as they expect they should, even if that's unintended. So critter powers are a lot more inconsistent here.

Not sure what you mean. For everything the devs add, there will be a segment of the player population that want precisely that. They don't have to compromise anything at that moment in time. But its a certainty that some fraction of those people won't like what's coming next, and will have to decide if that's acceptable just like the people who don't like the incarnate system now have to decide if that is acceptable.

All this is true, but what I'm talking about is specifically the dichotomy between players who say "I want this" and players who say "I will not accept this." That's an independent mindset from the general one you mention above.

I take quickness and then slot the winter's gift slow resistance IO. That makes me 60% resistant to movement and recharge slows. Its noticeable.

That reminds me: does everyone know that its possible to become 100% resistant to slows in PvE? Quickness + Winter's Gift + Javelin's Volley x 4. Darkness Mastery can theoretically slot three sets of those. Pick a primary that can slot at least one, like Claws, and you can be impossible to movement debuff or recharge debuff in PvE. Can't really do that in PvP because recharge resistance is affected by DR in PvP, although you can get a pretty high value in PvP as well with quickness + winter + shield walls or FotGs. Actually, I don't know if you can do this in PvP or not: I never did the calculations to see if you can beat DR to 100% or not.

I doubt this will cause a sudden run in Javelin's Volleys, but its something I've always wanted to actually build in-game just for giggles. But as my SR scrapper is MA, I can't do this with my SR even in an alternate build: I can only get to 90%.

I do miss the days of perma elude, but an invention-powered soft-cap build can have advantages over perma-elude. At the high end, with ultrahigh recharge for aid self and ultrahigh regeneration it can be a much stronger and survivable build. And while it takes some build skill to mitigate toggle drain, on the flip side, no more elude crashes. No more backflipping every couple minutes. And no more unlucky backflip deaths due to the momentary blink of Elude.

Plus today, we get fitness for free and that saves us three power choices, so its a lot easier to take the fighting pool presumably for tough and weave: the power cost of a toggle -based soft-capped SR build is not too much higher than a circa I2 perma elude build.

I understand that. I'm just saying that advantage only matters in fights that end in less than the break-even time, which is six KM attacks. If the fight takes longer than that, the supposed disadvantage doesn't materialize in actual fact.

It would be like saying a click buff that activated in 0.3 seconds and buffed damage by +50% for five seconds has an advantage over Build Up in that Build Up takes longer to reach its peak damage buff.

Keep in mind I'm saying in six attacks the *total* effect breaks even. Power Siphon catches up to Build Up (for scrappers) in only about four attacks. It then surpasses Build Up and continues going upward until its doing over fifty percentage points more buff. After six attacks (meaning: on attack seven), a KM with Power Siphon would have dealt more total damage overall than a hypothetical KM Scrapper with Build Up. And the KM with BU would have no way of catching up with an equivalently slotted KM with PS scrapper. Power Siphon's uptime is higher than BU: BU cannot catch up. And I'm not even counting the effect of concentrated strike, which makes PS's uptime even better vs BU.

So basically, even if you can kill one boss in six attacks, if you're fighting two Power Siphon beats BU. BU's frontloaded advantage isn't even a mitigation advantage *unless* that boss is dead in six. If its dead in seven, KM will *swamp* BU's frontload advantage, negating it completely. Not only will it kill faster overall, it will also kill that first target itself quicker. *Power Siphon* will have the true frontloaded advantage.

Lets try an experiment. Given the build you posted above, post your attack chain and what you think the damage is for that chain if you start with BU. Then lets replace BU with Power Siphon and keep the chain the same and see at what point does the Power Siphon chain overtake the BU chain. In terms of kills, lets see which chain drops the first target first, which is the way frontloading is supposed to help, and what the kill speed for both chains looks like over time.

Eventually.

I should point out this is a revisit of a fundamental decision CoH made at the beginning of time that is fairly unique MMO-wise: non-functional costumes. Our costumes are so non-functional wings don't even mean we can fly. Powers and appearance are almost completely disconnected. The reason we have the freedom to look like whatever we want to look like far more than in any other MMO is actually *not* a function of our great and powerful costume creator. That's incidental. What is critically more important is that we can actually *pick* what we want to look like without power restrictions. I think that was the correct decision for a superhero game in a way that it might not be a good decision in say, a fantasy based MMO. Rift's functional costumes make as much sense in that game as CoH's non-functional ones do in ours.

The question then is to what degree should cosmetic options be gated behind something other than functionality. And that gets into the question of whether or not some subset of costumes or costume options should have any meaning at all. They don't usually have a functional one. But that doesn't preclude them from having an achievement-based one or some other kind of meaning.

I'm of the personal opinion that given the original decision for making costumes *mostly* non-functional, primary thematics should be generally available to everyone, and distinguished variations can be limited to some form of achievement. For example, if the magnetic aura was available to all, but you had to defeat Babbage to get a variant where clockwork parts circled around you (take notes, art team), I think that's acceptable.

Similarly, I don't mind ascendent armor being gated behind incarnate content specifically if it was explicitly designed to be thematically connected to incarnates, so long as alternate variations of similar thematic armor eventually was made available. Armor with coupled auras is really the technology I think should be made available to everyone. Ascendent armor specifically is something I'm willing to concede designer discretion to the devs.

My only aesthetic personal problem is this: I will give the devs the benefit of the doubt that the Ascendent armor is "Incarnate-like." But I don't see it. It looks like really cool Tron armor. But "Incarnates" and "Ascension" don't currently have visual touchstones to connect the Ascendent armor to. It doesn't visually say "Incarnate" because there's no visual style to being Incarnate. There are no incarnate enemies with a visual style. There's no Lair of the Incarnate with a certain visual look. There isn't even a connection between being Incarnate and armor at all.

Its this out-of-the-blue aspect of the armor that is the most disturbing to me, and I say that in the context of not being really bothered by any aspect of them except the current hypothetical prices. But something inside me says that armor is only "Incarnate armor" by fiat, and the players, with no touchstone to possibly make that conceptual connection, have some right to say "that's not incarnate armor, that's just really cool armor you're gating behind incarnates." Personally, I'm willing to go along with that because the lack of a visual incarnate theme is not the fault of the costume designers: its the overall fault of the design team in general that doesn't want to say "this is what incarnates are" but then says "but this is what they look like." But I cannot argue against the fact that while I would strongly support the devs' right to place thematic variations of cosmetic items that were gated behind thematically appropriate gates, I just don't get that strong sense here.

If we're comparing Power Siphon to Build Up, we should compare Kinetic Melee with Power Siphon vs a hypothetical Kinetic Melee with Build Up. Comparing the damage output of Katana with BU vs Kinetic Melee with PS is really comparing Katana to KM as much as comparing BU to PS. KM is a slightly slower set.

Going to -1 bosses would reduce the damage to defeat to about 90% of normal, which is significant but that's still about 390 damage per attack average, which is still fairly hefty.

300 DPS is also a lot of DPS even for Katana, and especially for Katana/SR. Even if your build somehow averages 250% damage on all attacks through slotting and something like Musculature, that would be a base scale dps of 1.9 DS/sec. Katana doesn't have any attacks with that much DPA. I'm as puzzled as Werner is at the moment: how did you manage to squeeze that much damage out of a scrapper with no intrinsic damage buffs? That sounds like a very interesting build if you can verify that damage number.

9713: Scrapper or Anything Else Challenge Mission v3.2

Its not the hardest mission out there: it was designed to be hard but theoretically doable with a very strong character.

I tried more recently to make a mission hard enough to provide a similar or harder challenge to an entire team: that one is 491922. Its actually possibly not as hard as the scrapper challenge mission when soloed, because of the way aggro works: its specifically intended for teams (but have a ball trying to solo it if you want).

The scrapper challenge evolved during I14 beta, while I was uncovering every nasty and weird trick that existed in the AE. At one point, there was no limit on the number of ambush triggers you could use up to the map limit, and the challenge mission was a tad harder. It had three modes: medium, hard, and ultra. This is pohsyb with a dev-tricked out character (its a controller with every single controller powerset and power) attempting the beta version of the challenge mission set to Ultra.

He lasted longer than I thought he would, actually.

I wouldn't go that far myself. I said I have concerns, and those concerns are two-fold: first, we shouldn't be selling powers that have balance-altering consequences. So selling a temp power that gave you Granite Armor, for example, is probably not a good idea. Second, powers that offer a significant advantage not achievable in an in-game way are dangerous.

So for example, is Ninja Run a problematic power to sell? In my opinion, not exceptionally so because its a movement power in a game that has lots of movement powers, and its only good compared to having no movement power. All the travel powers exceed it. So its less selling an advantage, and more selling a convenience of having travel at level 4 (I think) rather than waiting for level 14, or buying a temp travel recipe, or running a mission that awards a temp travel power like the early bank robbery/safeguard missions. You could make the case both ways, but I'm not overly concerned.

Self destruction is also not really what I would call a competitive advantage power. But what about things like Mystic Fortune and Mutation? That's where I think balance issues start to have to be considered. I'm of the opinion that Mystic Fortune is less of an issue because its an ally buff: you're paying for power, but its power you have to grant to someone else. That's intrinsicly less dangerous to me than paying to win personally. Mutation is more problematic because its a self buff. But its a random one with a long recharge, so its not a power you can plan around. Its random nature (coupled with the fact the buffs aren't that powerful) makes it more of a nice buff when it happens, but not something that will significantly alter your leveling path or the stuff you'll be able to take on. Its close, though, and about as close as I would be comfortable with.

The interesting aspect of this is that almost everything we can buy is permanent, and permanent things have special consequences. Consumable things, like the jetpacks, are a different matter entirely. No one wants to see players be able to buy an endless supply of nukes, say (or rather, few people do). On the other hand, you can only use a nuke once. Is there a correct price for the three nuke warheads if you can still only have one at a time? I would have to think about that very carefully. Although nukes are acquirable in-game, its presumed to take a significant amount of effort: specifically if lots of players tried to get them simultaneously, it would take a lot more effort than it does now. So its not like Ninja run where not only can you earn travel in-game, its *easy* to get travel, so the *competitive* advantage is low. Nukes offer a competitive advantage, and that's what makes them dangerous to sell.

So for things like powers, I would say its ok to sell if they do not offer a competitive advantage, either because they just aren't that strong, or they can be earned *relatively easily* in-game. If people want to buy medium lucks for 99 cents in the NCSoft store, I say let them spend their money.

*Or* if they are limited and don't cost a lot. Hypothetically speaking, suppose NCSoft were to offer all City of Heroes players a chance to buy *one* purple recipe for a buck as part of their seventh anniversary. Just one, and only one, of your choice. That's a significant competitive advantage item, and it takes a lot of effort to get them in the game. On the other hand, its open to everyone, the cost is low enough so that essentially everyone can get them, and it cannot be leveraged by people with a lot of money to just buy a hundred of them**. I can see exceptions like that potentially existing, so I don't think I can make absolute statements about what I think can and cannot be reasonably sold. It would depend on the precise circumstances.


** Of course, this sort of thing has other problems associated with it. People could try to buy them from other players, or pay other players to buy them for them. Or theoretically speaking someone could buy hundreds of accounts just to be able to buy hundreds of purple recipes, although you'd have to be pretty rich and pretty crazy to want to do that. It could get ugly, but I'm talking strictly about whether something is reasonable to sell, and not whether the mechanics of selling it have other potential side effects.

Over the lifespan of a boss? Unlikely. Power Siphon's damage buff averages out starting from zero to be about equal to Build Up in six attacks. In other words, Build Up's front loading is only an advantage of any kind in situations where you can defeat that situation in six attacks or less.

So if you're talking about attacking one boss, and only one boss, you have to defeat it in six attacks. Averaging, at level 50, about 430 points of damage per attack while buffed by BU. That's not likely outside of situations where you aren't highly damage buffed by other sources.

And that's the specific situation of attacking and defeating a single boss at even con with no resistances. Averaging out over an entire spawn, it just keeps getting worse for Build Up. Except, as previously noted, in situations where Build Up's tohit buff becomes significant.

The front loading advantage of BU would make sense if we were talking about my Energy Blaster, that has low defenses and is governed by DPnow. But on a scrapper, that advantage largely vanishes in favor of faster kill speed over all rather than short term kill speed. Because if you're fighting spawns where you need that frontloading, you simply won't have it every spawn. So you're not likely to be running missions where you need that frontloading often. But faster overall kill speed is always advantageous.

On scrappers, the damage power siphon damage buffs are +31.25% per stack. Which means while it takes five stacks to reach full power that full power is 156.25%, it only takes three to get to about the buff of Build Up (93.75%). So the ramp up time isn't as bad relative to build up, if we're comparing to the actual damage buff of build up.

It is a mechanical difference, but I'm not sure its a disadvantage per se. Most scrapper fights of any consequence tend to last long enough for the damage to average out. In fights that don't last that long the limiting factor tends to be not your own damage, but the rate at which you can move from target spawn to target spawn.

I'm of the opinion that cosmetic options should have a dual-path to acquisition most of the time: you can buy them, or you can earn them. I have stronger generally balance-related concerns with powers and abilities. Pay-to-accessorize I have no problem with. Pay-to-win I think is generally radioactive.

I doubt it'll be Mercy/Atlas/Galaxy.

Technically speaking, it isn't proper to fault power siphon *simultaneously* for having 20 second duration *and* ramping up and down. If you count the ramp up and ramp down, the total damage buff window tends to be closer to 30 seconds than 20 seconds. Conversely, if you average out the ramp up and down, the buff acts not too far off from being equivalent to being at its maximum strength for 20 seconds (assuming you can get it to that point in the first place). Overall, its a better damage buff in real world points than Build Up is even factoring in its mechanical disadvantages, and has better uptime. Of course, Build Up itself is not as good as most people think it is, but PS is, on average, better.

I did tests in beta with a scrapper that were able to get - by back-calculating true damage points delivered in combat logs - an average of 58% damage buff from PS. That's 58% damage buff all the time.** Meaning, the damage I delivered over time was the same as if something buffed me +58% damage permanently. KM attacks themselves have only moderate DPA, but with PS the set should deliver significantly above average single target DPS. Not the best, but definitely above average.

Power Siphon seems to have the sort of mechanics that psych people out. The calculations show its a strong buff. Testing shows its a strong buff. Specifically counting damage points from actual play shows its a pretty strong buff. But people seem to just look at it and know its not impressive. Its main weakness compared to Build Up is its significantly weaker tohit buff, which can degrade its performance against high defense targets: a definite weakness of Kinetic Melee in general.


** That doesn't count the cast time cost of Power Siphon itself, because that's more difficult to factor out of a combat sequence. But an averaging estimate similar to those used for Build Up calculations suggests that would create about a 10% damage buff penalty, reducing the effective overall average damage buff to about 45-48%.

The devs' responsibility is to make an engaging game. The problem is that some people find consequential content - content that has unique rewards and results - to be more engaging that content that generates the same results as all other content. That's mutually exclusive to the desire to have the freedom to pick any avenue of gameplay without altering the options for rewards and results. So every game must balance the two in some way, either by catering to one group or the other exclusively, or by having a mix of content with different reward dependencies.

Its easy to draft this situation as every player has a gameplay preference, and all we have to do is create options for every gameplay preference and have all of them generate the same rewards, and everyone will be happy. In point of fact, in the long run a majority of players will not be happy and leave. That's because players exist on a continuum of different balance points between "content is 100% optional relative to reward" and "cotent determines reward exclusively." The vast majority of players do not sit on any one particular point, so any game that devotes all its content to just one balance point will exclude just about everyone except the tiny minority at that point - regardless of which point you pick.

Including a variety of content with different dependencies means everyone will have some content which is at or near their preference point, and other content that is not. Who we get to keep are the players willing to play the parts of the game they find acceptable and ignore the parts they don't. Who we lose are players that decide what to play based on what they can't do, not on what they can do. The presumption is that the former group of players is higher than any narrow group of players with any specific reward dependence mentality.

Its a presumption I personally share. Its how I would do it if I was in charge.

I gave away many myself. But buying them? The only currency worth an HO back then was another HO. Realistically speaking, to get them you had to run Hami.