Arcanaville

I was considering it for my Illusion controller. It was a slam dunk until Ion had its chain limit increased from "anemic" to "holy crap!" It simultaneously *looks* most consistent with illusion powers and has a critical hold, which provides additional control and containment generation.

Honestly, I don't, which is unusual. But out of context, that's not something I would ordinarily say. What I do say is that archetype and powerset decisions are immutable in the game currently, which means they should not normally be alterable. If you want something that the game doesn't have and you use a placeholder, when what you actually want comes out you'll have to reroll, because the game doesn't and cannot know what your original intent was nor honor it to be fair to other players it will enforce the decision on.

What I would say is you're martial arts not because the game says so, but because you said so when you rolled your character.

Also, unless this was *really* long ago, I wouldn't have been making any bets against MA getting punch animations. I had a pretty good idea those were coming eventually all the way back in '07.

Well, technically the alternate animation for Eagle's Claw was taken from an existing power: Stun (its also used by Impale). But what I don't like about it is that its *not* a basic, forward punch. Its actually an overhand throw, like a baseball pitch. In fact, the original animator must have been using a baseball pitch as the actual reference for the animation, because the animation is actually called "baseball_punch."

Here's Cobra Strike, which to me is more of a forward punch, and the punch animation of Eagle's Claw one after the other.

It might be difficult to see at full speed, but that's a downward arcing throw. I tried to make it easier to see in this set of frames:



Picasion seems to make it a bit grainy, but I think the downward throw is still clearly visible. Its really a throwing motion that was reused as a punch.

You say that like its a good thing.


There are tiny pauses in there that I wish the new animator could make more fluid, but that chain looks like this. Probably not the best videography, but I was in the middle of testing something in the AE and that was what was available. Strangely, when I decided to start fraps, the two vamps suddenly got a lot more accurate in their swings, like they knew they were on TV.

Eagle's Claw is slow, does too little damage, has a crit-boosting effect that malfunctions, and a stun that is so ridiculously short it wears off in almost as much time as it takes to stack cobra and EC in the first place.

On the other hand:



So, yeah. And on that note, the alternate punch animation... does anyone use it? I tried, really hard to get used to it, and finally just gave up. Taking EC and then using the punch is like like taking Siphon Life and slotting it for tohit debuff. I'm sure there are people that do it, I just will never understand why.

With minimal or no inventions, I think for Tankers its Granite first and then outside of tier 9s Invuln, no question.

When you toss in unlimited budget builds, I think Willpower and Dark Armor have a shot at taking the crown away from even Granite in many circumstances.

It is potentially confusing, but I was just brainstorming to demonstrate that shared channels do not require mandatory centralized moderation.

Alternatively, they could not interact in the same space. We could make a system where everyone had their own version of the "channel" and whenever someone joined, everyone "subscribed" to that channel would get the option of whether to add them to their version of it, like a reverse invitation. Which means if that new person then does idiotic things in that channel, anyone could selectively remove that person from their version of the channel. It would be a form of individualized censoring of an otherwise global channel.

This requires no central moderator, because there is no one version of the channel that requires central oversight.

1. I would have made the AE "alternate universe" content accessed by Portal Corp rather than holographic entertainment. By making it a video game, they essentially destroyed the in-game rationale for the stories to be at all meaningful because they don't really happen. Even if they happen in an alternate universe, they still happen. And it creates a potential loophole for content to be promoted to "real" content, because if the events are real, they can always "spill over" into the real universe. We could even discover that it *was* our universe all along.

2. The point to slot caps was to reduce the amount of fluff in the AE. But in my opinion that is contradictory to allowing everyone to post stories on a totally equal footing. What's the point of reducing slot count when you're going to allow half a million stories into the system by random people? I understand why it was done, but to me its clear evidence the devs were ruled too strongly by the "everyone can be an author" principle. Everyone cannot be an author. Or rather, everyone cannot be a successful author. Everyone can be an author of content for their friends. It should have stopped there. You could have allowed players to make dozens of arcs for their friends, as long as only a few of those if any would ever be presented to the public at large through searches.

3. You'd need the will to change it, but it could be changed. The very *fact* that they turned the AE into Aeon's Playhouse means they could reboot it in another, better context. But they really have only one more chance to get it right, if that. And it is specifically with things like the AE that the devs have to understand iterative design doesn't work. You have to aim at a target, and hit it, or you fail. You do not get second chances to build a cultural system, which is what the AE ultimately is.


The whole *notion* of iterative implementation is one of those things I'd crush from the souls of the developers with my bare hands if I could.

I was actually thinking of something I would more accurately call a review list. It would be a list of all arcs I decided to review and publish onto that list (it would not automatically place all arcs I review onto that list: you could review things pseudo-anonymously if you wanted to). That list would be the in-game version of what happens on the forums: people play the arc, write a review (it would have to be a generally shorter one, but could link to a deeper review out of game in some way) and maybe post an overall grade. This grade would only be useful to sort the arcs within that one list or reviewer. My four star arcs would NEVER, EVER find themselves on a list with Venture's four star arcs in a global search, because those ratings would be specific to a single reviewer. Which reflects a fundamental truth: no one's ratings are precisely, or sometimes even remotely, comparable to another reviewer.

But you could use them to sort all the arcs I've reviewed based on *my* personal assessment of their quality. However, for all of these arcs you'd also see my review. And it brings up an interesting possibility the current system really doesn't allow for. I could review an arc and give it one star, and then in my review say this arc is so hilariously bad I'm actually recommending people play it because it is so hilariously bad, just to witness the sheer awesome level of bad. Someone who subscribed to my review channel could read that, decide that's not for them, and pass. Someone else could decide they were bored that day, and play the arc looking for something weird. You can try to do that now by playing 1-star arcs, but the vast majority of 1-star arcs are bad in uninteresting ways, if they are even all that bad.

The stars are meaningful here because unless I'm an AE playing machine, my list might have thirty arcs in it, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred? I could only be adding a few a day or a week, if that. So my entire list fits within the limits of human attention span. Anyone following it deliberately does have the time to read the reviews or summaries to know *why* I rated it what I did. They may even explicitly want to know why I rated it what I did, because that is the actual *reason* for subscribing to my review channel. And that allows the rating stars to suddenly have meaning again. It means something because people who get to know me through my reviews learn what my stars mean, just like they do for any forum reviewer. They are not portable, but they are a useful data point within a single reviewer space. They could actually *encourage* players to investigate the arc more deeply by reading the review, whereas right now they do basically the opposite.


A superchannel of multiple players is an interesting notion. I'd want to think about the mechanics of how such a thing would best work. I'm not sure if the best way is to literally create a list everyone could post to. Managing that forces the creation of channel authorities, and those have issues that might be more trouble than they are worth in the AE specifically.

I didn't make a specific proposal per se, except to say that I believe the movie rating star system isn't the appropriate model in my opinion; the more multi-dimensional Youtube model for organizing and promoting content is the better model given the numbers involved.

The part of my post we've been discussing is however the details of such a model are formulated, what should its priorities be. And in my opinion, those priorities should be to present content to players that they actually want to play.

Which is a problem with the star system itself, which we all agree is problematic, in no small part because its one-dimensional, and the search bubbles aren't really a good way to alter that on their own. That means the current system fails for you as a player to deliver content you enjoy. But my point is that a *working* system should be more concerned with presenting content you will enjoy, rather than presenting all the authors wanting to target you. If a hundred authors are actually targeting you with content (by coincidence), its more important that the system present 50 of those arcs to you even if it misses the other 50, than be certain to present all one hundred if its also going to present a thousand other people's arcs to you at the same time.

Now, that is an oversimplification. The Youtube model might suggest this, at least when it came to global searches: there are hundreds of thousands of arcs. Thousands of them might be something you like. We can't present them all to you simultaneously. What we should do is take a reasonable guess as to what you want based on some input from you, and show you a small set of those. We can show a random subset of those every time you ask, so you will get different ones every time, or a weighted version looking for the best matches that will show the closest match every time. On top of that, assuming we guess wrong, we will also show you some related content and see if it catches your eye. Then we will let you explore the system by picking what you want to play, and as you do we will continue to try to show you related content. But always a small number of options at a time, so you are not overwhelmed.

Note that the Youtube model doesn't discriminate, but its also not fair. Which is to say, snowball effects can occur. Random chance can present an arc to players slightly more often, which grants it slightly more plays, which then causes it to show up higher in more searches, which eventually causes it to get increasingly more plays. That just means that authors won the lottery. The other authors that didn't? I don't care. Random chance alone cannot accelerate plays: the arc also has to be good enough that it gets reviewed positively, or the extra attention only causes it to eventually be played *less* often. The system doesn't find the best arcs, it finds the good enough ones and the bad enough ones and starts amplifying the difference between the two so players can distinguish between them.

Which sort of gets back to my original post. The reason why I believe there is no way for players to post comments about an arc that everyone else can see is that the devs are concerned about players griefing authors. That is a definite possibility. Its just that I believe its a possibility we have to stop caring about. Right now, in a very real sense, the AE griefs players by throwing the kitchen sink at them and sapping their entertainment in many if not most cases. And that's what I mean when I say when it comes to the presentation side of the AE, we should care about players and stop caring completely about authors, except for extreme circumstances. "This arc sucks, no one should play it because the author can't spell and the plot makes no sense" is not an extreme case. That's life. I would only protect authors from petitionable actions.

You seem to be deliberately angling for an argument here, where none exists. I don't see what you're trying to imply, except that players may make decisions on what to play based on incomplete information. The average player knows exactly nothing about you or me to start. If all one player knows about me is that I have some knowledge about how the game works and they know exactly zero about you, why is it inappropriate for someone to elect to try my arcs before yours or anyone else's that they know absolutely nothing about?


If I recommend an arc, and people play it based on that recommendation, I did not decide for them what to play. They decided to follow or ignore my recommendation. To believe otherwise is to say that the players are mindless sheep, and we should then stop bothering to discuss the matter because its totally hopeless. We're wasting our time even contemplating ways to improve the situation, because such a situation is intrinsicly impossible to improve. The only question becomes *who* gets to manipulate the sheep, and to what end. Even if you get them to magically play "the best" arcs in "a fair" way it will only be because they are following your plan like automatons. Which is a farce.

I can only consider providing ways for players to make up their own minds, to the extent that they can legitimately make up their own minds. To the extent they cannot be trusted to make up their own minds in the way we want them to a remedy for that is social engineering beyond my current pay grade.


But that is my point. If the AE is to be targeted at players and not authors, its goal should not be to make "high quality" arcs. It should be to make entertaining arcs. The playerbase may have no ability to judge what a "well written" arc is, but that is not their job. Their task is to find AE arcs that they enjoy playing, to encourage them to play more. The authors' job is to make such arcs. The fact that you don't think its your job to write arcs other people will conclude on their own are entertaining is, in fact, part of what I believe the problem with the AE is. Authors deciding what other authors' writing goals should be. If authors' goals are to impress other AE authors with their script-writing skills because the unwashed masses can't appreciate their work, the AE has failed in truly fundamental way.

You said earlier that while understanding game mechanics is potentially important, being able to tell a good story is also important. I content that the most important thing is to be entertaining, as judged by the players of this game. By definition, that means the players as a whole cannot be wrong. If they think you suck, its because you suck, at least at making City of Heroes content. You might be great at making other content, targeted at other people, in other contexts. But you'd be an AE failure, because the players said so.

The interesting question is where to draw the line. I'd say my knowledge of the powers system and game balance is a reasonable thing to judge whether I can make arcs that target a particular difficulty level, whether I can make interesting combat situations, whether I can accommodate a particular range of playstyles. It doesn't *prove* I can do that, but its a reasonable thing upon which to take a gamble.

Conversely, if someone decides to play one of Venture's arcs because they find his reviews interesting, is that an accomplishment "relevant" to the AE that is more relevant than my functional game knowledge? Does being able to review an arc mean someone can write one?

How do you decide what is relevant to whether an author is more or less likely to create a well-written and well-designed AE arc? Or, to put it in more specific terms, how much of a penalty would you be willing to assess to me to compensate for the advantage you think I have?

Here's something to ponder. Suppose someone were to say that they were willing to give my arcs a try because they like reading my posts. That's all. Would you consider that an unfair, irrelevant factor upon which to base playing choice that I need to be prevented from benefiting from? Suppose someone were to say that they were *not* willing to give my arcs a try because they don't like reading my posts. Would you consider that an unfair, irrelevant factor upon which to base playing choice that I need to be protected from?

You're phrasing things in an odd way. I did not specify a requirement for writing arcs. There is no such requirement currently or embedded anywhere in my post. I said people should be left to decide for themselves under what circumstances they will play an arc. You're saying if they choose to do so because they recognize my name that's unfair to people with less name recognition. I'm saying I agree: its not fair. I'm saying I don't care. And the reason why I don't care is that I've come to the conclusion that deciding for the players on what basis they will get to choose which arcs to play is intrinsicly wrong. If they want to pick mission arcs based on which author is taller that is their right. That is unfair to short authors. I still don't care.

The requirement on authors is not literacy or knowledge of game mechanics or the ability to add. Its writing what other people want to play. Nothing else matters. Nothing else should matter. The "best" arcs shouldn't be played, the arcs people want to play should be played. This is not a game design school.

It is within that context that it is up to the devs to set the ground rules. People don't get to play PL exploitive farms just because they want to. They don't get to play arcs that somehow violate the terms of service. The devs decide what is out of bounds. Everything else is then inbounds, and the players choose what of what's left they want to play. Its the only way to ultimately get them *to* play.


Here's something ironic. Just *thinking* about this thread has increased my motivation to write arcs again. I've been playing around with the AE recently, but thinking about the fundamentals of the AE system has me wondering once again if it can be a successful story telling medium. Just one month ago I was saying how the collective non-stop patch-breaking of my one real story arc after I14 release all but turned me off of writing actual stories within the AE. This, plus a lot of other things to be sure, has me thinking it might be time to blow the dust off of old story ideas.

As I said, I'm not arguing with whether its true or not, but rather if its relevant. I acknowledge the objection is technically true on some level, but I believe no one should care.

If people want to play my arcs, then the AE should make them easy to find if the AE cares about what players want, rather than what's fair to authors. Why players want to run my arcs is irrelevant, because players should not have to justify why they want what they want.

Once you start saying the AE should go out of its way to "level" the playing field between me and someone else, you immediately fall victim to the trap of thinking its more important to care if an author doesn't like the fact that I can get more plays than they do, than that players like what they play.

Fundamentally, ratings and review are reputation systems. People trust them if they have a reputation for being useful. A properly working system will include a way for players to decide what information is credible and what information is not credible, whether its Venture's reviews or someone else's walk throughs or a posting on the forums. Or my presumed reputation for not being illiterate and knowing which end of the Master Illusionist is supposed to point upward. The players have to judge for themselves. As I said during I14 beta, I would spend at least one year staying away from this subject as it pertained to myself personally. The year is long up, and observationally speaking I don't think I have any specific advantage in attracting players over any other "name" on the forums. All of us do have an advantage over a random unknown player. But no reputation based review system can eliminate the property that notoriety factors into reputation, one way or the other.

To put it another way, ratings and reviews require reputation, and reputation requires non-anonymity (at least as in-game identities go). If the author is anonymous, and the reviewers are anonymous, no one can know whether to trust the author or the reviewer. Once someone knows the author or reviewer is Eva or Arcana, the player must be allowed to decide if that author or reviewer can be trusted on their own or if they are willing to take a chance on that author or review or not. To take that right away from the player is intrinsicly incorrect in my opinion.

Yeah, its self-serving to a certain degree. But I think that's coincidental. Of course, people have to decide by reputation whether I can make a self-serving assertion without conflict of interest.

Interestingly, this may be suboptimal. If an attack is queued, it can be ready to fire when the server determines the player can use another attack, and network lag is not an issue. However, if you see the miss and decide to switch, you could slow down that attack by a fraction of a second. The precise mechanics of how this happens is something I do not know all the details of, but I know it happens because the enhanced crit in Eagle's Claw provides some visibility into the issue. A queued attack will be buffed, but if you switch attacks then even though you might think if you switch before the attack fires there won't be a delay, there is one and its just enough to take that attack outside the buff window of the EC crit boost. Its probably between an eighth of a second and a quarter second, but that might be a higher damage penalty than the benefit you get from using a better attack on a known streakbreaker forced hit.

How this happens exactly probably has something to do with "prediction"** although it might also be a similar but unrelated effect.



** Prediction is, without going into details I don't want to get into, essentially the difference between movement and attacks. When you execute a power, that command has to go to the servers, the servers decide what happens, and then tell your client. But when you move, you just move: there is no lag, because your movement is executed by the client immediately, and then the server is notified. The client and the server try to keep things in sync with prediction algorithms and animation mechanics, but when the client moves you and the server decides not to honor that act, you get "rubberbanding." Your client keeps letting you move, then the server keeps telling your client it thinks you're somewhere else because it doesn't know about or isn't allowing the movement the game client "tentatively" allowed.

The problem are the numbers involved, which is a side effect of the devs trying to make everyone an author, even though the odds that every player in the game should be an author are exactly zero, at least as it pertains to a general audience.

In the real world, usually about a dozen movies release in a week, from blockbusters to tiny indies. That many release in the AE every hour. Its impossible to view, review, or even browse them all.

The correct model, I think, for the AE isn't the film industry, its Youtube. Youtube releases content even faster than the AE, most of it is even crappier than what is in the AE. But they've figured out ways to manage that well enough to be usable. Sure, you can just search it, but imagine if the only think youtube had was search features that the AE had. It would be non-functional also. Youtube has channels where you can aggregate content, and playlists where you can see what other people are watching, and favorites so you can save lists of things you want to go back and see, and highlighted content to direct people to interesting things. It doesn't present you with a list of all fifty billion videos in it and offer to sort it by date or alphabetical order. That would be ludicrous.

The devs need to decide what the AE is supposed to be. If its supposed to be a source of content players want to play, the focus has to be on the consumers of content, not the generators of it. Or rather, the focus should be on the generators of content when it comes to content creation, but then on the consumers of content when it comes to content vetting.

I'm going to be blunt here. The authors deserve the best tools we can give them to write AE arcs, and I think there's tons of room for improvement there. And those tools need to be first class tools not second class tools, by which I mean the devs would never just randomly change how existing content works, and break seven years of writer effort for standard content. They have no problem doing that for the AE. That has to stop, period. Up to this point, we need to treat the people willing to put time into writing for the AE as valuable assets, and give them the support they need to write the best content possible.

But once the authors are given those tools, they are on their own. We shouldn't care about them one tiny bit. Screw them, in fact. If the players want a top 100 list of arcs, then the guy that wrote the 101st best arc is screwed. Too bad. If the players think his arc sucks, that information should be available for all to see. Author doesn't like it, author can grow thicker skin, or write better, or take ball and go home. I don't care either way. If there are too many arcs and players can't sort through them all, then we increase the thresholds necessary to show up in search lists. Authors don't like it? Too bad. On the consumer side, I don't care that the system is "fair" to authors. I don't care if all good content is played. I care that all played content is good.

The devs need to understand that the priority for the *tools* is the authors, but the priority for the *system* is the players. I honestly believe *one* of the restraints on the devs in terms of trying to make a better AE system for presenting quality content to the players is they are afraid of hurting the feelings of the authors. They shouldn't be. And I agree with Venture about one thing: the devs broke it, the devs have to fix it. The players alone cannot override the huge cultural inertia surrounding the AE at this point.

What I've said from the beginning is that my metric for success for the AE is this: 50 people writing, 50000 people playing is a massive success. 50000 people writing, 50 people playing is an epic failure. I think everyone should have the right to make an arc, upload it, and give their friends the arc ID number so they can play it. I do not believe everyone has the right to have their arc presented to a mass audience. That's a privilege that has to be vetted somehow, and an imperfect way of doing so is better than no way. What that imperfect way should be is a different debate, but the one thing I don't think that imperfect way requires is absolute fairness. It must generate good content first. It should then be as fair as it can be second. A very distant second.

In I14 beta, when I expressed something along these lines, I was told by some that it wasn't fair for me personally to express this idea because it was self-serving: Arcanaville could get people to play arcs by simply asking, whereas the average random player wouldn't have the same opportunity. After very careful consideration, I've decided that I no longer believe this to be a valid objection. Not because its not true, but because its irrelevant.

Perma-PA is not necessary. It depends on the AV to some degree and you need to have practice, but you can take on AVs with Ill/Rad without perma-PA. The margin for error can be a little low with some AVs, particularly mez-happy hard-hitters. But Illusion actually has *two* indestructible decoys: the Phantom Army, and the Phantasm Decoy. People often forget about the second one, or think he's too unreliable to matter. But in a one-on-one fight with an AV, with careful jockeying you can leverage the Phantasm Decoy to take enough heat off of you to take on an AV without dying, and without needing temps or insps.

I rolled up a test mission in the AE with our old friend Dreck. Not the hardest AV in the world, but I wanted something I knew I could do on the first try and in a short amount of time for the video. Actually, it took two tries because on the first one, even though I actually told myself "don't forget about Atomic Blast" I then forgot about atomic blast. You can see in the video, I didn't forget about Atomic Blast the second time (he goes boom right at the five minute mark, and I've moved comfortably out of its range when it does).

My build actually *is* basically a perma-PA build, so to simulate a non-perma build I turned off hasten, which created gaps comparable to the gaps created by Hasten's downtime in a non-perma build.

Voila. No insps, no temp powers, really its just Illusion and Radiation doing all the hard work. I didn't even turn on my epic armor (honestly, I didn't want to burn the endurance). So its possible. If you watch carefully, although I get hit with the odd stray shot, the Phantasm Decoy is drawing and holding aggro many times in that video. And you'll also see that at one point I got worried about the timing and just recast the Phantasm to reset him and force him to recast a Decoy.

But actually, I wouldn't recommend learning to solo AVs with Ill/Rad first either. A high damage tanker or high defense scrapper or brute would be the easier way. Until you learn how different AVs fight, or how to control your pets when you're not a mastermind, Ill/Rad is not the easiest build to learn on.

I usually don't critique build guide or build advice too much, but I was actually shocked to see a set of Touch of the Nictus slotted into Dark Regen. I can think of few *worse* ways to slot Dark Regen, especially on a Tanker.

TotN minus the damage proc ends up slotting Dark Regen like this:

68.9% accuracy
42.4% end red
97.49% heal
47.7% recharge

I literally can think of few worse slottings than that. Maybe six heal IOs. This massively overslots for heal while underslots for end reduction and recharge. In fact, the six-slot SO slotting of one acc, two recharge, three endred would almost certainly be better. The above slotting reduces the end cost of the power from 33.8 to 23.7 per use. The SO slotting above reduces end cost per use to about 20.3. An even better way to slot Dark Regen is focusing recharge/end IOs and some accuracy.

But the best way to slot Dark Regen focuses on an IO in the set that was explicitly tossed aside in the guide: Theft of Essence. Theft of Essence actually has a +END proc: it has a chance to return endurance for every target the power hits. Its 20% chance for 10% endurance. Or, assuming you have no endurance boosting accolades or anything, you could say it returns on average 2 points of endurance per target you hit with Dark Regen. And tankers are likely to be hitting lots of targets with Dark Regen.

Unless you're optimizing for fighting archvillains solo, you should always assume as a tanker you're going to be hitting three to six targets with Dark Regen. So lets examine this slotting pattern:

Theft of Essence +End
Theft of Essence Accuracy/Endurance/Recharge
Doctored Wounds End/Recharge
Numina's Convalescence End/Recharge
Touch of the Nictus Accuracy/End/Recharge

Everything level 50 except the ToEs which top out at 30. That ends up generating:

38.6% accuracy
89.12% recharge
89.12% endred

It now cycles faster, and only costs 17.9 endurance per use *and* returns 2 end per target you hit on average. If you average hitting just four targets per use as a tanker the net cost of Dark Regen will be just under 10 endurance. Ten. That's less than half the cost of the TotN slotting. Even averaging hitting just *two* targets will reduce Dark Regen's average cost to only 13.9 end, and with no heal slotting will still be generating 60% heal per use. If it bothers you that the accuracy is a little lower and the heal is unslotted, add Touch of Nictus Accuracy/Heal. Now accuracy is 65.10% and heal is slotted 26.5%. That means about 38% heal per target, 76% heal from hitting two targets, and three saturates the heal. Its one of your best powers, I don't know why you'd short it a slot if you were concerned about its performance. That's like complaining about SR's defenses while two-slotting Focused Fighting.

Its also not an expensive slotting pattern. The proc is actually only about 20 million, and the Numina's is nothing: end/rech is a throwaway Numina. An expensive slotting option would be to toss in the Panacea proc. But the above option is within reach of practically anyone contemplating IOs at all.


Since slotting a set of ToN is *worse* than even slotting with SOs for things like endurance management (or even utility, really, except maybe soloing AVs - maybe) any analysis of dark armor that incorporates that slotting pattern is highly suspect. I would literally rather run with one acc, three end, two rech SOs than ToN. Slotted into Dark Regen, the set bonuses ain't worth it. Hilariously, one of the set bonuses is +Heal strength, which is almost wasted on a Dark Armor build that slots ToN. The max health and max endurance are useful, but the cost in suboptimal Dark Regen performance is far too high. And my hypothetical slotting above that 6-slots DR and uses two ToNs gets the max health bonus with just two of the set. I only lose the +MaxEnd, which is more than made up for by the fact I'm using far less end.

I'm an infrastructure and mechanics person, so I would focus on those even though I don't necessarily think these are more important than, say, just writing a bunch of really good content.

1. Automatic custom critter generator

The important thing isn't so much the ability to generate custom critters on the fly, its all the ground work that has to be done to make this work. I have a pretty good idea how to do this, and the net result is a wide range of side effects: critters would be better balanced, better critter powers would be more easily customized, randomly generated missions could have randomly generated bosses and even critter groups, and there would be more flexibility in the AE to create custom critters.


2. Scriptable AE

Again, the important thing isn't so much the ability to do this, as the collateral benefits you get. Bringing powerful creation tools to the AE also provides them to the developers. And it forces them to outdo the players. Frankly, I think they could use the competition.


3. Improved critter AI

Of course, this is really difficult to do without overloading the game servers. But I have a pretty good idea how to do that also, so the SCR can go climb a tree. I think it would be nice if we could give Build Up to a critter without noticing the critters use it with all the intelligence of a quart of caeser salad dressing in a padded helmet.


4. Advanced game mechanics

I have a list of them intended to improve the kinds of powers we can get. Some would make what we currently have easier to manage (decaying buffs, coming in I20) and some simply don't exist at all but should (true deflection, ablative armor) and some would take a long time to explain what they would even be for (variable cast time, unrooting bits, attribmod suppression). High on the list of these would be a bucket of mechanical changes collectively called "non-binary mez." What this means to the average player: the end of purple triangles.


5. Cross server instancing.

I'm actually opposed to server merges. But cross server teaming, instances, PvP, and raids I'm all for.

Actually, its easy to express the concept in concrete terms: the streakbreaker is a Bernoulli trial serial dependency which alters the statistical distribution of successes for pseudo-random discontinuous samplings in a non-linear way.

Of course, no one will understand that, that didn't have an absolutely perfect understanding of it before.

The choice they made, at the beginning of time, was to build in a Base defense type that would affect all attacks, but not a Base resistance type that would affect all damage. That difference makes it impossible to debuff base resistance - no base resistance.

Irrespective of what the labels say, there is a very specific definition for "monster" and "giant monster." I wasn't sure if you were aware of this, because you said "they have GM HP and mez resistance, but come in distinct (but hidden) levels and don't scale." There's no such thing as "Giant Monster" health, because giant monster is not a critter class. The PI monsters on monster island have monster class health and resistances, because they are monsters. Giant monsters all have monster class health and resistances because they too are monsters. The PI monsters don't "scale" because they don't have the special flag that all giant monsters have to ignore combat modifiers.

"Monster" is about as meaningless as "accuracy." The term "accuracy" is abused to an even higher degree than "monster" is. But I wouldn't say the term "accuracy" is now meaningless. It just has a meaning that not all in-game documentation consistently honors. But we all know what accuracy is, even if the game itself is sometimes confused. In the same way, there is one and only one definition of "monster" irrespective of what some critter designer seven years ago decided to put in the text label of the critter.

Except that is not a resistance to resistance debuffs, which I said was impossible without buffing resistance. You're asking for a resistance buff that would kick in when your resistance dropped, which is just a resistance buff, not a resistance to resistance debuffs.

There's also no current way for the game engine to know how much "debuffs" are applied to you. It only knows the overall total which is buffs plus debuffs. It may *seem* like the game engine knows because Real Numbers knows, but actually Real Numbers is only pretending to know: Real Numbers grabs its numbers from two different places. It yanks the details from essentially the same place buff icons come from. It then shows the total from the game engine itself. Interestingly, that's why they don't always add up. Resistances throw the numbers off. If you have 95% DDR, then your Real Numbers combat attribute display might show -20% and -30% defense in the detail, but then -2.5% total. The detail is showing raw numbers, while the total is showing what the game engine actually knows the total debuff to be, including all calculations. According to pohsyb, there was no obvious way to show the detail as "-1%" and "-1.5%" factoring in resistances, because there was no way to get per power details from the game engine that way.

There's probably also no obvious way to say something like "if debuffs > 15% then apply effect X." The system would know your resistance net was 60%, but not if it was 80%-20% or 70%-10%.

Curiously, this would be easier with Defense. Because defense debuffs are always base defense and defense buffs are always typed (with only a couple of corner cases) you can always separate buffs and debuffs. You could say "if base < -10% then" knowing that is a 10% defense debuff. You cannot say that for resistance, because resistance debuffs are not similarly "segregated."


There's four different kinds of "impossible."

1. Cannot be done under current conditions. I.e. "the game engine currently doesn't support that ability."

2. Cannot be done given current resources. I.e. "the amount of work required to add this to the game engine is more effort than the devs could possibly afford to spend.

3. Cannot be done mathematically. I.e. "there's no way to set combat jumping so that it offers the same proportional benefit to blasters with no defense and SR scrappers with 30% defense. No number meets both conditions.

4. Cannot be done because request is nonsensical. I.e. "I don't know what you mean by balancing combat jumping against combat auras, but whatever you mean there's unlikely to be a game balance processes that is actually applicable."

"Can you add resistance debuff resistance without buffing damage resistance" is type one impossible on the surface, and type four impossible if you know how resistance works in the game engine.

Crazy (or "creative") options always exist, but they tend to run afoul of being type two impossible. For example, if someone were to ask for a way to buff their defense against lethal, but only for Katanas and not Bullets, that's just impossible (type one). The game doesn't distinguish between blades and bullets: a lethal typed attack is a lethal typed attack. Technically speaking someone could find all the lethal katana attacks and all the lethal bullet attacks and give the latter a special debuff that just coincidentally reverses the special buff being added for katana attacks so it all automagically works out, but as a practical matter that is impossible (type two).