Arcanaville

That was sort of the intent. The "minions" are there to cause trouble if you don't have control. If you do, and you use it wisely (or just superstack control all over the place) they can be picked apart like a puzzle.


The Forward Commander is intended to be not a big threat on his own, but to be a sort of "super mastermind" with his reinforcements being additional summons. Most of his power is from those. But, I wanted the FC to be a potential surprise threat by rapidly cycling through his pistol options. He has swap ammo on purpose. Two purposes, actually: one to be a constantly varying threat, and two the ammo messages would help players spot him in all the commotion when reinforcements start arriving. You should see what that thing looks like a 0x8.

Also, not giving the FC strong defenses is there to almost double-dare teams to kill him quickly, and as a consequence face multiple ambushes simultaneously (edit: I meant to say multiple groups simultaneously: his surround group and the ambush he spawns).

Plus, he's the amuse bouche.


So tell me: if you had a team of eight of you running it simultaneously, do you think it would it be a lot easier, or a lot harder? There would be more of you to stack, but more of them to stack also. My guess is that eight permadoms would be able to wipe out the minions and the FC. The next fight might be the harder challenge for them. I do give players a three second head start on that fight. You'll know it when you see it.


Edit2: I forgot to ask: what did you think of the "second AV?" He's an AV to make sure he doesn't die too quickly, and take out his pets with him, but he's not intended to have too much damage beyond that Of course, he's an AV, so he's going to hit hard with almost anything. I thought he would be an interesting foil: his offense is easy to take out large chunks of, but he himself is hard to take out. He's sort of an AoE hedge: AoE can partially but not totally neutralize him, particularly in a big team.

My big thing when it comes to design is "minimize binary effects." I want control to be useful, but not overwhelming. I want AoE to be useful, but not trivializing. I want defenses to be helpful, but not completely neutralizing. He's an experiment in AoE damage and control of sort. I have limits based on what the AE allows me to do, and I'm trying to see how far I can push those limits.

Monster class critters are a special class of critter, like "Boss" or "Archvillain." All Giant Monsters are monster class critters. All come with intrinsic levels, just like all other critters.

"Giant Monsters" are monster class critters that have been tagged to bypass the level scaler. That means in essence the purple patch ignores their level: they always act as if ther is no combat modifier difference between them and the players. That is all that "Giant Monster" means in this game. Because monster class critters were often used for zone events, the devs decided they should be as inclusive as possible, which meant eliminating the level scaler and the purple patch, which would make them too easy for players that were of higher level and too hard to contribute towards for players that were of lower level. The zone event critters all use the same "giant monster" code to make neutralize combat modifier differences, and for the exact same reason.

Historically we have a term for "monster that ignores combat modifiers." We don't have one for "Elite Boss that ignores combat modifiers" even though technically speaking things like the Rikti heavy come in two varieties: the standard EB in missions and the RWZ, and the invasion version that is exactly the same except for using the "giant monster" code. We just don't call them "giant EBs."

Still it pays to be specific, because if you go to monster island at level 42 thinking you're going to be facing giant monsters, you'll discover you are mistaken in a big hurry.

Basically yeah. You can have resistance to a particular defense type, but nothing debuffs just one type. All defense debuffs are base defense debuffs - you can see that in the combat monitor. So all DDR powers grant resistance to base defense (debuffs).

Its a handy shortcut and reduces both the workload of the devs and makes the game engine faster. They would debuff resistance in the same way if they could, but they cannot because there is no such thing as "base resistance."

The mission falls to a trivial exploit of sorts if AVs are disabled and you attempt to solo it. You could pull the three bosses individually into "soft" parts of aggro, and then kill them without incurring the wrath of any of the incoming reinforcements. You could probably also do that with AVs turned on, but it would be much harder. Its sort of intended that you actually kill what the mission throws at you, rather than kill the bosses out from under their guards. I tried to make that difficult to do, but I could not make it impossible and I could not make it a mandatory element of the mission because if I did that I couldn't provide a "bail out" computer. Without the bail out computer, any team that tries this has no choice but to quit for zero rewards if they fail to complete the entire thing.

As I said when I was building the Scrapper Challenge mission, you'd have to be insane to play this for tickets, but I'll still try to give them if I can. Technically, the mission should be a "mandatory kill on all three bosses plus escorts" mission but that seems unnecessarily cruel for a fun challenge mission.

If you can *clear* it solo even with AVs off, that's pretty good though. I have trouble doing that while invincibility mode is on but it is possible. Which is something I tested for. Everything in the mission is killable, even the AVs. If you can live long enough to kill them, and if you can neutralize their help. I know its not impossible. Just kinda hard. If it turns out to be stupidly hard, I'll basically leave it alone. If it turns out to be hard, but eventually doable with a tough team, I will crank it up a few notches. If people say there are teams that can steamroll it, I have a specific set of very nasty additions I will try to add to attack those teams head on.


Having said all of that, its there for people to have fun with. Run it any way you want, at any settings you want, and report back. Its *intended* to be run by a strong full team at even con. It can be run by a strong full team at +3. It can be soloed with bosses and AVs turned off (keeping in mind EBs don't downscale with either setting) set to -1x1. I'd like to see if a full team can beat it at 0x8, because that is what I'm aiming to challenge. But this is all just for fun either way.

I just read that myself. Lets just say that my testing of Dark Armor has been nothing short of excessive. I have, to put it bluntly, issues with the analysis of Dark Armor therein.

Also, critters do not perform perception checks when they have aggro. They only perform perception checks when they have nothing on their hate list. If a tanker taunts a critter, there is no amount of invisibility that can make the critter fail to notice the tanker. The only way for Oppressive Gloom to cause critters to "wander off and them start shooting at your team mates" is if you somehow managed to slot Oppressive Gloom with a placate procing IO from the future.

As to giving Dark Armor recovery and 80% s/l resistances?

That's not why. To understand why Fire is unlikely to get DDR, or Dark Armor for that matter, its important to understand why SR *did* get it. There are two reasons, one that justifies an addition, and one that quantifies the addition.

There is really only one ultimate reason SR got DDR: it was underperforming. Period. If you're not underperforming, the odds of getting a buff are slim, especially for melee anything. Dark Armor doesn't underperform, if anything it overperforms. So good luck getting DDR added to the set. You couldn't get swift added to the set at the present time. You could sooner get Cloak of Fear nerfed. Oh wait: they did that to Brutes.

If SR needed a buff, why DDR? Answer: cascade failure. Cascade failure is *not* defensive breakdown. In defensive breakdown, you are hit by enough defense debuffs to nullify your defense. Cascade failure is a special case of defensive breakdown. In cascade failure debuffs reduce defense, which makes additional debuffs significantly more likely to land, which makes even more debuffs land reducing defense even more. The effect cascades and causes an accelerating drop in defense. What's more, this comes automatically with a corresponding drop in damage mitigation.

5% defense cannot really cascade fail. It can fail, but that's what defense debuffs are *supposed* to do: hurt defense. Furthermore, Dark Armor cannot suffer a cascade defensive mitigation failure because it doesn't get very much protection from defense. Knocking out Cloak of Darkness means about as much to Dark Armor as knocking out combat jumping on a blaster.

So Dark Armor doesn't need DDR, and cannot justify DDR. The only way for Dark Armor to get enough defense so that it could possibly *see* cascade failure is with huge power pool and invention defense buffs. And we don't balance set requirements like DDR around those. If we did, blasters would get it if they range capped. That's ludicrous from a design perspective.


You could argue Fire underperforms. It might. That would suggest tweaking the set. But you cannot justify DDR, because the set simply cannot experience what DDR is intended to mitigate without resorting to things that we explicitly don't account for in powerset balancing of this form. Playstyle really has nothing to do with it. This is a case where its actually mathematically provable that Fire should not have DDR, because DDR is intended to prevent something Fire can never see.

If the devs ever gave DDR to Fiery Aura, they would just be admitting they put too much defense debuffs into the game and don't want to remove them, and would also be opening the door to *everyone* asking for defense debuff resistance. Because the only reason to add DDR to Fiery Aura is "why not?"

Its not even possible. There's no such thing as resistance to debuffs. There is just resistance. Technically, SR does not have resistance to defense debuffs. That's just what we call it. SR has resistance to defense. That means SR resists any and all changes to any of the attack types: melee_attack, ranged_attack, etc. It would resist its own toggles if those were not unresistable buffs.

Damage resistance is resistance to that type. So smashing resistance is not resistance to smashing damage its resistance to smashing, period. Smashing resistance resists changes to your smashing attribute. Smashing damage attempts to change that attribute, and smashing resistance resists that change**. Resistance debuffs attempt to lower your resistance to that type. They are, in effect, changes to that type. Smashing resistance debuff attempts to lower your res to smashing. Smashing resistance itself attempts to resist that change.

There's no way to make something that resists smashing debuffs that wouldn't also resist smashing damage. So the only way to make something more resistant to a resistance debuff is to increase its resistance to that damage type, because the two resistances are literally the exact same thing.


** Decreasing our smashing attribute reduces our health automatically. Think of your smashing attribute as a shortcut or a symlink to your health. Editing smashing edits health. Same for the other damage types. That is how each damage type can have its own attribute - and by extension its own resistances - and yet all of them ultimately affect your one health bar.

Its less than that, because if there are more than two targets in the area you'll only lose the streakbreaker advantage if the streakbreaker itself triggers on the last gauntlet target. If it doesn't but the last gauntlet target *misses* at 95%, you'll get a forced streakbreaker hit on the next attack due to that miss.

Actually, standing around in Wentworths is a misleading hypothetical. If you solo, say, and are running between spawns, what percentage you are in combat has a bearing on this issue. Because the proc only lasts 5 seconds, it could go off while you are moving between spawns, costing you that firing where slotted in Build Up that would never happen (because no one fires build up while running between spawns normally). If you spend 50% of your time fighting and 50% of your time moving, you could lose half the effective firings of the proc. The only time you can "stop the clock" so to speak is when the average time between fights is more than the recharge time of the click power in question. So if you're comparing BU to Tactics, and your BU recharges in 45 seconds, then so long as you aren't out of combat for more than 45 seconds, the ratio of time fighting to time moving and not fighting is relevant.

I should also point out that no matter what you slot it in, the proc sucks in terms of damage over time. Assault would be better even if you slot the proc in follow up. Its meant to be a nice occasional big boost.

In purely offensive damaging terms, I guess it will have some minor effect. Not by much most of the time, though.

Don't think so. The sleep is caused by a pseudo pet, which won't be created if the main power misses its target. Today, this power would be created as an AoE where the hold is restricted to the origin of the power (zero radius). But at the beginning of time when they designed Illusion, they didn't have that feature.

In a very real sense you don't. At least not on melee sets. BaB sped them all up so that they make up for redraw by being faster than they were before even without redraw. Unless you are literally redrawing every attack, I believe most if not all the melee weapon sets are faster now than they would have been if redraw was somehow magically eliminated at release.


Then your weapons would be out all the time: when standing, walking, and even animating other attacks. Dual Blades had an interesting visual bug in beta that I noticed where while superjumping the position of your hands by default meant you had skewered your own head with your blades. There are a lot of players that say they don't care about such things more than they care about weapon draw. However, at the moment none of the animators that work on the game seem to be counted among their number.


If you mean in a performance sense, as I said the devs actually compensated for that so that the melee weapon sets are actually better than if they didn't have redraw. If you mean in a visual sense, personally I think redraw is better than pausing, which is what the game used to do. I don't think there is consensus likely to be achievable on that one.

Having visual redraw without increasing the attack times is theoretically possible, but would take an awful lot of time to implement, and its unclear if that could be done in a visually non-odd way.


My perspective on redraw is probably a little different than most people's. I saw first hand what an enormous *benefit* redraw was. BaB looked at MA, which was and probably still is the most underperforming scrapper primary, and shaved a few frames here and there to improve its performance. With those changes MA would have ended up near the top of the pack on single target damage. Then he took a literal chainsaw to Katana, and suddenly Katana was out performing MA on single target *and* AoE. All because weapon redraw gave the devs higher discretion to accelerate that set to a far higher degree.

I believe every melee weapon set that has weapon redraw would be worse than it is now if it did not have redraw at all from the beginning. I can understand not liking redraw to an extent, but to complain about its performance issues is a bit unseemly if you know the history.

Usually 0.6 to 1.0 seconds. Dual Pistols, for example, has I believe 0.83 seconds of weapon draw. The Brute/Tanker ones are usually 1.0 seconds.


Generally yes.


Yes: recharge begins after cast time ends, no matter how long the animation takes.

The latter. Arcanatime is an approximation for the server clock alignment issue whereby the act of telling the server to execute an attack cannot be obeyed until a set of conditions is met, and those conditions are only checked at the start of a combat clock. There is always a gap between when an attack could theoretically be executed, and when the game servers would actually execute that attack, even if there was zero network lag.

Weapon redraw causes an extra drawing animation to play, which in effect lengthens the amount of time it takes to execute an attack before the next one can execute. But it does not add any more checking into the process, so no additional arcanatime-induced delay.


The most confusing thing about discussions surrounding weapon redraw is the fact that different people interpret the words "factor into" and "redraw penalty." Here's the entire scoop so everyone knows what is going on here, and what changed.

Weapon based attack sets have a special requirement on them that non-weapon sets do not, for visual purposes. In order for a weapon attack to execute, the player must be in the "weapon state" and have the weapons drawn. If the player is not in this state, the game will automatically put the player into this state. The act of doing so plays an animation which "draws" the weapons. This is what players call "weapon draw."

The best case scenario for using a weapon attack is you're already in this state, and you simply execute the attack. The worst case scenario is that you're not in this state, and have to execute weapon draw + attack, which takes longer. In the old days, the attack's *cast time* was calculated to be this worst case time. So if an attack takes 1.0 seconds and weapon redraw takes 0.6 seconds, the attack had a cast time of 1.6 seconds.

If you were not in weapon mode, the game would play redraw, then the attack, which would take 1.6 seconds. The attack animation and the cast time would expire a the same time, and you could use another attack after that. If you were already in weapon mode, the game would play the attack, and that's it. 1.0 seconds later the attack animation would be over but cast time would still be running. You could not execute another attack until cast time expired, because *both *cast time must be over *and* the attack must be finished playing. So you'd stand around for 0.6 seconds until cast time expired, *then* be able to play another attack.

So a weapon set would look like this: Draw -> Attack -> Wait -> Attack -> Wait -> Attack -> Wait. The pauses were as long a redraw, so whether you needed to redraw or not, the attack chain would take the same amount of time. But it was a little jerky. Some people described this situation thusly: there is no weapon redraw penalty. Obviously, whether you have to redraw or not, the chain takes the same amount of time.

BaB and Castle decided to reverse this. Instead, cast time was set to the actual running length of the attack, period. So now, what happens is this. If you are already in weapon mode, you just Attack -> Attack -> Attack with no need to wait around for cast time to expire. But if you are *not* in weapon mode, then what happens is this: you draw your weapon, which takes 0.6 seconds (in this example). Then you execute the attack, which takes 1.0 more seconds. 0.4 seconds after you start the attack, the cast time of the attack expires (1.0 seconds) and the combat engine says you can use another attack. However, the attack is still playing and because its rooted, you cannot do anything until its completed. So you really cannot attack anyway: cast time expires early, but the attack itself runs its full course. It costs you the time to draw the weapons when you are not in weapon mode, but there's no cost if you are already in weapon mode.

Weapon draw used to be factored into cast time and now cast time no longer includes redraw time. Because of this, there is now a weapon redraw penalty whereas in the past there was no penalty. But its more precise to say players always paid the penalty and now they only pay it when they have to. In other words, there has always been a weapon redraw penalty, but now you don't have to pay it all the time for no reason.

One interesting side effect is that weapon sets have always actually been pretty fast, because they were designed with redraw in mind. When redraw was eliminated from cast time, all weapon sets suddenly became much, much faster - and thus better. On top of that, BaB improved many of them by shaving frames and eliminating further pauses in the animations, making some of them - I'm specifically thinking about Katana here - amazingly better from what they were.


Incidentally, weapon redraw should have only a minimal impact on Fury, given the current mechanics of Fury. Fury is now much easier to build, and much harder to max out, so small redraw glitches in an attack chain should not dramatically change the equilibrium point for Fury. Changes in incoming attacks mean more.

All tanker single target attacks with Gauntlet taunt effects are AoEs, and definitely roll tohit rolls as AoEs against every target within range until they hit their target cap. These rolls don't show up in the combat chat, but they do affect the streakbreaker.

As to autohitting attacks, autohitting attacks do not roll tohit rolls and so cannot affect the streakbreaker on their own. However, if they have special effects that perform random roll checks explicitly, those rolls may affect the streakbreaker. I haven't tested to be certain, but I suspect they do.

I agree that is the most likely cause of the apparent streakbreaker malfunctions.

I'm honestly still studying the build, not in the sense of the numbers but the thought process and a careful comparison. I do agree with you that the difference between Scirocco's and Armageddon can be marginal and in your case your build leverages Scirocco a bit better than mine does Armageddon. A couple of points though: the accuracy difference is nullified overall by the fact that my build has a lot more accuracy than yours does (60% vs 31%). Also, the speed difference is a little less than hasten itself: yours has 152.5% with hasten up, mine has 87.5% with the original slotting in CAK, 92.5% with the alternate slotting. If I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of max health (mine current has slightly more, with the loss I would have slightly less) or a shifter proc, I can shift a slot from PP to LBE and get an additional +10% recharge in the build, taking it to 102.5%. That would mean your build has +50% more recharge than mine with about a survivability wash (yours has a tiny bit more psi defense, mine has slightly more resistances in most areas, both are basically soft capped to similar levels), except for Aid Self, which would have about a 7% faster cycling speed. Yours would still have the edge in total offense: you have +3% more damage to my +29% more accuracy, and the benefits of more speed in general. But I think my variation can also cut out Eagle's Claw if necessary which is the primary drag on single target damage. And the +3% extra damage buff is mostly canceled by the cast time of Hasten. The higher offense would probably show up more strongly in PBAoE with faster recharging EC+DT. Because my DT does more damage per hit, though, its probably not too bad for my build: I haven't done the math on that one yet to calculate the offensive delta.

One thing I can't really think of a good way to quantify at the moment is the different between mine and yours in a way my original posted build doesn't reflect. In actuality, I slot Winter's Gift slow resistance into Superjump, which your build has nowhere to place. I thought an extra 20% resist to slows would be helpful stacked on top of the 40% resist from quickness. But for that to wash the speed difference between our builds we'd have to be the victims of -250% recharge, which isn't likely. At best, it can shave a few percent off the gap under slowing situations.

Its still a really good build because it has Elude in there which would hurt my build where ever I tried to put it, but I think the builds are closer to a draw outside of Elude than it first appeared to me. I'd still give the edge to yours objectively, but by a narrower margin than I first believed. I actually find it interesting how the two builds get to almost the same place by very fundamentally different means.


PS: Unless I'm looking at the wrong version of the build, yours has +0.7% more melee, +0.3% more ranged, and +0.2% more AoE defense than mine. The big melee gap comes from that Mako set in Cobra, which is something else I need to calculate: the damage difference in single target damage given your higher damage global, but lower damage slotting on Cobra. My guess is that at best that's going to account for a half percent drop in damage total, maybe, which will be a marginal difference overall.

Either it would work, or I'm pretty sure the GrantPower mechanic could be altered to make it work. The semantics exist: set the grantpower to be a boost template. If the semantics don't actually do that, my guess is the programmers could make it work that way with nominal effort.

I'm not saying I'm using it, and I'm not saying I'm not using it, but Energy Aura Energy Drain is autohit. You can't use +DEF against all the drain out there.

On the subject of Soul Transfer: you can protect yourself against one of those going off if I were to give it to a boss. What would happen if I were to give it to the minions?

There are lots of angles to explore here, and I don't claim to have really thought them all through carefully. And I haven't yet taken the step of seeing where standard critters would synergize very well with custom ones. I will say that at one time I had thought to make the minions 50% nemesis LTs and 50% custom critters with soul transfer, then thought the better of it. But I'm not promising I won't use that sort of synergy to some degree.

I am promising that now that custom critters are compressed encoded, there's going to be a lot of variety of threat in there. I'm up to sixteen different critter types, and only about half done. The idea is to make sure no matter what you blanket them with, some of them will be immune to that effect. If you can construct a team with the ability to simultaneously high mag hold, sleep, confuse, terrorize, placate, and knockback everything in a wide area, well then I might run out of ideas except SS/Will. But we'll see: this is as much a learning experience for me as any team that might try this thing.

PS: Rad debuffs (the custom versions of the toggle debuffs specifically) also autohit. If I were to just create a mission with nothing but Rad/Rads, defense would probably be worthless in it. I won't do that, but I most definitely *am* making tactical use of Rad debuffs.

The Master badges continuously elude me, but I've been on many teams that have just literally charged the four AVs in the STF including Ghost Widow and just taken them out like they were medium grade LTs. That sort of thing is in the back of my mind when I'm designing something intended to be really tough for such a team.

On the subject of maps: I would rather challenge the players with the critters, and not exotic map locations. I want to balance giving the players options without letting them dictate the fight completely. That's why I like those ship maps for challenge missions. Each compartment isolates the different parts of the map from each other, which means the players cannot always see what's coming or what's next until it approaches. Conversely, high ceilings mean things like flight and hovering are not nullified like they are in caves. If teams can literally destroy anything I can put in a map like that, I would consider using map geometry to further reduce the options players have. But for now, I think the ship maps are a relatively even playing field.

This isn't so much a question of fairness, as it is the point is to give a strong team a challenge for their abilities, not constrain their abilities. A fight in a phonebooth can be advantageous for the players if they choose it, but it can also eliminate options and give the critters a huge advantage by taking away one of the areas players excel over them: smart movement.

Its very hard to control. Easier than it was, but still very hard to prevent spamming in some corner cases.


The problem isn't players being unaffected, but critters being affected. This is actually one of the hardest things to incorporate into a tough mission. you usually only find KB protection in the custom sets in self defensive primaries and secondaries - and you cannot have both an armor set and a buff/debuff powerset (as such) in the general case: they both exist only in custom critter secondary powersets. In my opinion, without buff/debuff, no set of critters is really tough enough to put up a tough fight against a strong team. Without KB protection no set of critters can't be neutralized by KB patches like earthquake or ice patch except fliers who could be grounded to make them vulnerable. This creates a challenge for balancing defensive protections.

Custom critter wormhole doesn't teleport, it only stuns and KBs. In general critters aren't good with powers that require making secondary decisions like "where should I teleport those guys" so those effects are removed from those powers. I bet a lot of rads wish they had the custom critter version of Radiation Emission.


I've concluded the fight needs to be nothing but bosses, EBs, and AVs. And the final fight is likely to be all AVs. The problem is that even in a thing like this, I need to make sure the AVs aren't trivially unbeatable without just single pulling the entire mission. I still intend to obey critter tiering: using AVs *everywhere* including as the minions of the mission would be excessive. Unless strong teams prove able to annihilate everything too quickly even cranked up to +4, in which case maybe.