Arcanaville

They said that temp powers were disabled so they didn't have to balance around them, and they also said that they were open to enabling powers that did not have serious balance consequences to them (like costume or travel powers for example) and the only real issue is that it would take a lot of time to do that.

I would recommend watching the video again before making additional high school debate comments. It was trivially clear to me what they were saying about temp powers when I watched the live feed.

I think Tim was referring to powers not slots, and I think he was off by a factor of two in his recollection. If all the slots follow the same pattern we should have 360 total incarnate powers. That is 10 slots, four trees per slot, nine total powers in a tree. 9 * 4 * 10 = 360. Not 180 slots: that would be ridiculously too many incarnate slots.

You also can't level unless the trainers decide to train you.

In this case, though, its not a question of the Well directly controlling your access to power, its more a case of the Well reflecting the nature of the being or beings its focused upon, so when we tap it, the power we get is colored by that focus. Its not so much that the Well is deciding to give us Praetorian pets, its that the well is currently green, so all the water we take from it is green. The Well is focused on Cole, so the power we take from it is tinged with Praetorian sensibilities.

Personally, I can't think of a worse way to do it, and I'm including assigning everyone a random set of digits as their character name.

My sheer animosity towards the general concept is a not insignificant part of the reason we have a /ghide command.

If the devs ever implement a global@local system, I doubt I'll be able to stop them, but I will change my global handle to the most creative protest I can muster that would withstand the EULA, and I'm a very creative person.

Technically, they also implied that there will be future story lines in which we basically defeat or significantly weaken Cole, and the source of Incarnate power will shift to other sources, opening the door to other Lore pets. Which if you put two and two together suggests Nemesis might become or be discovered to be an incarnate in soon to arrive issues, and also suggests the Well of the Furies might be empowering various threats over time to challenge us, the Praetorian story line being only the first of many in that vein.

That's exactly what I said above, which is syntactically invalid. As opposed to being a syntactical invalid. Or a valid tactical sin. Or a daily ensign tic-tac vid.

Gathering the data is not really a problem for me. More critically important is weighting it, which would require making a lot of potentially controversial judgment calls.

They seemed more intrigued by the typo-ed version but I think Black Pebble was mouthing "T for Teen" off screen and making throat-slitting gesticulations.

Colloquially perhaps, but not in proper English. "With" is a preposition, so which side "only" appears on changes what it refers to unambiguously. "Only with" makes the prepositional condition a limit, "with only" limits the conditions in the preposition.

"With only" not "only with."

Whoa.

1. Because of ED (enhancement diversification) more than about 3 SOs worth of anything will have diminishing returns. Basically, 3 SOs of recharge is +95% recharge. Five SOs of recharge is like about 105% recharge. That's why attacks tend to be slotted with circa +100% damage and then other stuff like accuracy, endurance reduction, and recharge.

2. What do you have four slots in quickness slotted with? It can really only be slotted for run and fly speed, and you cannot even put sets in it.

3. Perma-hasten is a build that can have Hasten up all the time. Hasten has 450 second base recharge and 120 second duration. It takes slotting Hasten to about +100% recharge plus quickness plus about 80% global recharge bonuses to get enough recharge to get Hasten to recharge just as it expires so you can keep the bonus up permanently.

4. Soft cap is a term used to describe the fact that for any level of tohit of the attacker there is a maximum amount of defense that will do any good. Defense can only reduce tohit to 5% before accuracy is factored in. So since most critters have base 50% tohit, 45% is the most defense you can benefit from - more doesn't reduce incoming damage. This is an oversimplification because critters can sometimes have higher tohit or tohit buffs or defense debuffs,but its a useful rule of thumb.

5. PvP has different rules in more ways than one.

Strangely, it almost seems to be modeled after our Paragon City.

I definitely recognize the architectural sensibilities, i.e. no area is complete without a globe on a stand:



I'm pretty sure I've had to superspeed around this many times:



And oh look, there's even a Malta standing around on a street corner:



And just as in our Paragon City, the safety of its citizens is a priority:

Before endurance slotting, all single target attack chains burn basically the same amount of endurance per damage point, unless you have intrinsic discounts like Claws (and not counting criticals). Single target attacks cost 5.2 endurance per damage scale (for scrappers, that's essentially per 62.56 points of damage on melee attacks at level 50).

Interestingly, that means a 1 DS/sec chain that burns 5.2 eps before endurance slotting will be dealing about 140 dps with crits but before damage bonues and damage procs. That probably seems anemic to a lot of people, but that's what it is. That's why the highest DPA scrappers slot resistance debuffing procs or have huge damage buffs in their builds or are Fire, which has a circa 40% damage increase due to Fire DoT that comes free (as in no increase in recharge or endurance costs).

Double-procing SK doesn't help on endurance, although it does provide a damage boost to the chain.

Its already in my version, which I hope to be uploading this weekend sometime. Its actually part of a special section that also provides for type distribution of debuffs. The calculations are getting ugly with that, so if I don't finish that I'll be uploading what I have anyway and continue working on debuffs next week. Types are not coupled: you could theoretically make smashing 90% of all damage and negative energy the other 10% if you want.


The thought has crossed my mind more than once, but there are methodological problems I would have to think through first and that's a bit more work than my laziness quotient will currently allow.

Venture is just supremely confident and easily annoyed. He's like if Yahtzee was the love child of Ed Asner and Jamie Oliver.

I think when we're talking about tough tankers, we're usually talking about how tough they are in those situations where there isn't supplemental team buffing. You're not always going to have that buffing and its probably in those circumstances when you'll have the greatest need for a strong tanker. So the question of which builds are the strongest outside of that buffing isn't entirely moot. In teams with a lot of buffing, the odds are that you'll have more than enough regen and heals, and you'll probably be soft-capped defensively no matter what you are. It then all comes down to who has the highest health and resistances. That's where again Granite comes out on top, having the easiest time capping all resistances (except psi) and being able to cap health with enough speed. Dark and Electric become very strong all around contenders just below that, and Invuln essentially ties Granite on smash/lethal.

Incarnate-level content does throw wrinkles that the standard content tends not to, however. For example, click powers can become highly unreliable in Tin Mage due to the absolutely insane amount of -recharge the critters possess. A Granite tanker is probably going to lose EE a lot of the time, but conversely an Electric tanker may discover that Energize is reduced to an out of combat heal (even with recharge resistance). Separate from the I20 trials, its entirely possible that future Incarnate-class content will throw very powerful situations at the players that are more exotic than what tankers have to deal with now, besides 8600 point damage attacks.

In any event, its possible to compare builds vs at least Praetorian class critters by adjusting the base tohit in the spreadsheet: that's what its there for. Change it from 50% to 64%, and you can see how the builds change in relative and absolute performance. To stack maneuvers on everybody, you'll have to do that manually though. In the next iteration of the sheet, I plan on adding defense and resistance bonus rows so you can apply a blanket buff to a build without tweaking its individual numbers, specifically to compare that kind of thing. But I'm currently working on incorporating debuffs.

Honestly, whenever I hear that Bioshock scene what comes to mind is he sounds an awful lot like another narrator from the past..

Definitely a valiant effort. I bet it must have tortured you being unable to find that last 1.5% smash/lethal resistance.

Well, sort of:

What concerned me is that you sounded like you were saying even when it makes sense to be in a particular zone, it never makes sense for an arc to be in more than one.

When zoning is genuinely pointless, like especially when its random meaning the mission author didn't even care where you went, I think there's no harm in re-evaluating whether that zoning is really necessary or not.

However, you seem to be stating not just the suggestion that unnecessary zoning should be removed, but the stronger statement that zoning is never necessary, and therefore it should always be removed. That's extreme. If the story calls for a mission to take place in zone X for context purposes, it should take place in zone X. If the next mission is supposed to take place in zone Y, then that's where the players should go. It should be, for sanity's sake, uncommon for people to be sent all over creation with very little activity in between, but that's a matter of degree.

Its a point of reference for people that don't want to do a lot of calculations themselves to customize the numbers to their own personal experience. Because my experience and your experience can be totally different *no* rating will accurately state which tanker is "best" that everyone will agree with on a personal level, because on a personal level the best tanker might be a different tanker.

But that doesn't mean there aren't valid singular reference points that people can agree upon in advance as reasonable for discussion purposes. Its the vague "well I think this is more important than that, but by some unknown amount" that is worthless for discussion purposes. What my, and for that matter Dechs spreadsheets offer is a metric by which to compare. Even if those metrics are imperfect, they can prompt other people to create different ones and attempt to justify them. That's useful for discussion purposes.

Even metrics people disagree with or don't strictly conform to their preferences can be educational if sufficient detail and discussion surround them, because that gives many people enough information to take those metrics and incorporate them into their own evaluations. In that respect, I believe many people critical of these quantitative discussions don't fully appreciate their point, which is to share information, not to prove one thing is objectively the best.

There's a reason I don't show *only* composite scores, even though the detail makes the sheet three times longer. It would take no time at all for someone to make up their own weighted score from the detail. The important thing is not the score, but why you think anyone else should care about your score. That's the interesting part of the discussion. I've explained why I think my score is meaningful, but people are free to take my numbers apart and come up with different ones. That's why the spreadsheet is downloadable.

Its always round up.

Not bad. I'm trying out different builds for my EM/Dark brute, and I'll see if I can flip that around and meet or beat that build as a Dark/Energy tanker.

Energy is not really linked to defense debuffs. Lethal is, but not really energy. The linkage between energy and defense debuffs is concentrated in radiation which is not a common critter attack form. And while regeneration debuffs tend to appear in energy attacks when they appear at all on the critter side, they aren't common enough to be considered "linked" in remotely the same sense defense is associated with lethal or recharge debuffs are associated with cold or psionics.

And while energy is likely more common than psionics in those task forces, its extremely unlikely negative is more common than psionics and extremely unlikely energy is three times more common than psionics as you're suggesting.

I would also bet real money that across the entire playerbase more player minutes are spent on mission content than task forces by a wide margin. So no matter how popular any one task force is, they are all swamped by the rest of the content overall. I would make that bet even after the advent of WSTs. People have a very skewed view of what the average player does or plays. Every time the devs released statistics about the game, from influence earning to leveling to archetype popularity to content running to alts to powerset performance conventional forum wisdom has always been not just wrong, but not even close.

So while I cannot be certain I'm correct without hard evidence, I'm disinclined to trust anything except direct extrapolations from the few bits of actual data we have about the game.

Also, I never said people specifically spend equal time in carnie missions as fighting cimerorans. You're suggesting a hurdle far higher than I assert or require to come to the conclusions I do. Let me perform the same mental gymnastics in reverse. What makes you think carnies are the only critter type with more than a tiny bit of psionic damage?

If the average player spent more time in ITFs than in Carnie missions, that's something I would consider factoring into generalized comparison. However, I'm fairly certain they do not.

Incidentally, psionic damage is a significant percentage of damage for not just Carnies, but also Rikti, Arachnos, Longbow, and Circle of Thorns, in terms of high level critters. You'll see significant psionic damage in the LGTF, STF, LRSF, and Barracuda.

Psionics especially are just as important if not moreso than energy in actual play because while energy is linked to endurance drain, psionics is linked to -recharge. If you lack genuine psionic defense or high positional defense, then not only will you eat a lot of psionic damage but any click heals you have will be greatly slowed.