Arcanaville

Meltdowns don't imply any release of radioactive material in and of itself. It implies what it literally implies: reactor components heat to the point where they melt.

Why this is important for nuclear reactors is that they are designed to use uranium or plutonium to generate heat by placing the reactor fuel in close proximity while using a moderator to control the rate at which the reaction takes place. Obviously, if the fuel and the machinery its within is a molten puddle, control of the reactions becomes impossible.

I understand they are using seawater at some of the reactors to keep the reactors submerged. Water is a good heat conductor, which is why these types of reactors keep their active nuclear components submerged in water for cooling. If that cooling water evaporates and they are exposed to the air, among other problems they will begin to generate more heat than air can remove from them, which means they can overheat to the point of meltdown.

Use of seawater tells me they are past their normal emergency procedures due to the collateral tsunami damage knocking out generators and other systems, and are essentially writing off the reactors and trying simply to permanently shut them down. Seawater is literally the last thing you want to pump into the reactors, because seawater is corrosive especially at high temperatures. But it is probably literally the last thing they have left to use.

Even if the cores meltdown or have already melted down, a separate sequence of events would have to happen to generate a catastrophic release of radioactive material. Basically the melted fuel would have to generate a semi-runaway heat reaction (this cannot under any circumstances cause a nuclear explosion because the nuclear reactor fuel isn't generally pure enough to create a critical mass this way) which vaporizes the cooling water or causes a hydrogen reaction, either of which causes the pressure vessel to detonate from the pressure. That's a real threat, but at the moment still not a likely one.

On the subject of Chernobyl. Scientists and engineers hate to use the word "impossible" but the truth is that a Chernobyl-like accident is not just "unlikely" but literally impossible at these reactors. A catastrophic release of radiation is *not* mathematically impossible, but it is impossible to have the same sort of accident. Chernobyl used a reactor design I'm not sure was used at any commercial western power plant. Its a design I first learned about when learning about the Manhattan project. It stacked nuclear fuel rods and moderators within a graphite moderator rather than water. Chernobyl also was conducting dangerously weird tests at the time that had the reactor in a very unstable situation with the reactor control rods removed. Chernobyl was caused basically by a runaway reaction where the water in the reactor flashed to steam, which eliminated the one reaction moderator in the system, accelerating heat generation until the reactor exploded, then this was compounded by the actual reactor graphite igniting causing fires which carried radioactive smoke and ash from the reactor.

I believe the Japanese reactors are all scramed (shut down with control rods in place) and the problem is residual heat: the primary fuel is mostly shut down, but secondary nuclear reaction byproducts are still generating a lot of uncontrolled heat. That's normal for a nuclear reactor (except for losing access to normal external cooling systems), and if the heat is coming from those secondary elements, the reactors will slowly cool down over the next week. If its coming from uncontrolled primary fuel reactions due to partial meltdowns, the reactors could be in a critical state for much longer than that.

I wasn't originally aware the reactors in question were boiling water designs. Those are older reactor designs, although I'm not sure if that fact is significant in terms of cooling them off after a disaster like this.

I forgot to address this the first time around, but yes, "positional resistance" is not really possible with the current game engine. Its not a question of technology, and more a question of what resistance even means in City of Heroes.

The critical thing to understand is that the act of hitting something with an attack is a two phase process:

1. Determine if the power hits the target at all.

Defense works at this point to affect tohit rolls, if the power requires a tohit roll. Autohitting powers don't. Every power is typed with a set of types. These types could be anything, and in fact as far as the game engine is concerned they are just one, two, three, four, and so on. Defenses have the same typing, and a defense applies to the attack if the attack has its type as one of the listed types. If an attack fails to hit the target, none of its effects take effect on the target.

2. For each effect of the power, determine its net effect on the target.

Resistance works at this point, and notice that once a power hits its target, each individual effect can be and is processed separately. If you shoot an Energy blast at the target, the energy blast probably has a smashing damage component and an energy damage component. Each is a separate effect of the power, and each is processed separately. For each effect, Resistances are checked to determine how much of the effect actually affects the target. Targets can resist basically everything: you can resist damage with damage resistances, holds with hold resistance, etc. Again, the game engine doesn't really know about types in the same way we do: to the game engine its just one, two, three, four, etc just like for defense types (with a couple of interesting exceptions not important here). For each effect, there is a corresponding resistance.

Why "positional resistance" isn't really possible is that resistance is directly tied to the effect. Smashing damage has a corresponding smashing resistance. Energy damage has a corresponding energy resistance. By the time the game gets around to looking at damage, its no longer concerned with the original typing of the attacks. In effect, the effects part of the game engine has no idea what the original typing of the attacks was. Even if it did, it has no way to use that information to "resist" the attack.


Even were you to try to add "positional resistance" as a totally new concept and feature to the game engine there would be the question of what that would mean. Does that mean you would resist positional damage effects? How about positional mezzes? Positional knockback? Would you resist your own self buffing effects? Most self buffs are coded to be unresistable, so that, say, an Invuln tanker doesn't self-resist his own Build Up (which is a buff to the strength of all damage types: ordinarily an Invuln's resistances would resist those buffs and decrease them, which is why they are flagged unresistable)? There exist the possibility of some weird corner cases if you were to attempt to do this.


There was a semi-related question regarding Toxic Defense that I think most people didn't fully understand. The devs used to say that it was extremely difficult to add Toxic Defense, and that's why it wasn't in the game. That was actually not true. In fact, toxic defense *exists* now, deep in the game engine. Adding a defense type isn't all that hard really.

So it exists. So suppose I were to give it to Force fields today. What happens tomorrow? Absolutely nothing. And the reason why is that no attack is typed toxic. Having toxic defense is like having alligator defense, or chocolate frosting defense. Those things would only work against attacks designated alligator attacks or chocolate frosting attacks. There are no toxic attacks because the toxic attack type didn't exist when those powers were created. Adding it to player powers would therefore grant no benefit. The important thing is not that players lack toxic defense, but that no attack that deals toxic damage is typed with an analogous type.

In the same way, "melee resistance" would be something that would work against "melee damage." And there is no such thing as melee damage.

To make "toxic defense" work, the devs would have to do three things:

1. Tag all (actually: most - some attacks deliver damage type X but aren't typed with the corresponding attack type deliberately for conceptual reasons) attacks that deliver toxic damage with the toxic attack type.

2. Add the correct balanced amount of toxic defense to all sets that offer some form of defense. What that might be is not an obvious question to answer in all cases.

3. Ensure that this net typing doesn't create corner cases that subvert the original intent. For example, if a critter was specifically given toxic attacks that did not have non-positional typing for a specific strength reason, these designs would need to be reviewed and possibly modified.

Needless to say, that is a lot of work. Hundreds of player and critter powers would be affected by this, which would then need to be Q&A checked before being released. Attempting to make "positional resistance" would be an undertaking an order of magnitude more complex.

Been a bit busy lately and haven't had a chance to really study this, but this is quite a work of art. About the only things I would consider tampering with is shifting to get Lucky earlier if I was concerned about exemp, and about the only thing it loses relative to my build is the slow resist IO, which is mostly swamped by the higher overall recharge.

Going to be looking at this one for a while.

I should point out the devs considered this long ago and concluded it was a cottage rule violation for people who had slotted them for just one aspect, such as end reduction or recharge, as odd as that might seem.

The Alpha propagation technique, which makes individual buffs follow individual slotting rules, would work perfectly for HOs if the devs wanted to use it.

One potential problem with the build I just noticed is that it relies on Enzymes. My guess is that the devs won't touch those any time soon, but I wouldn't bet my life on them not correcting the buff bug with those, now that the technology to do it exists. Officially, that is still a bug. If you drop those to Cytos, AoE defense drops perilously to 45% defense. That's why my build uses a Cyto in CJ, by the way.

One more little issue: no interrupt reduction in Aid Self. That first one reduces the chances of interrupting it by a lot. But that is easily solved by shifting the Mako slot from EC to AS. Also, I'd shift regen tissue from PP to health, but that's also a minor point.

If I've done the quickie calculations correctly, your new build generates 175.41 dps. That's pretty good. It beats out the best I can do with just the quickie switch of slotting CAK for 5 crushings and one Mako as I mentioned above (same slotting as yours except Dmg/Rech instead of Dmg/End) is 174.33 with the same chain. A hair lower, but both better than the best I do with EC which is 164.25. EC is still underpowered.

I have to say, though, that if I could convince myself to take the risk on Enzymes (which I would say is probably a 80% chance it isn't touched in the next year) I would have been hard pressed to choose between my current build and this one.

My understanding is that the 6-set Gaussian is three separate set bonuses of +2.5% defense, and does in fact count against the rule of five for +2.5% defense buffs for each of the three positional types.

The tier 3 positional defense buff isn't that common though, at least I don't think I've ever run into a prototype build of mine that ran into that cap before. I guess if you want to use a lot of Titanium Coatings or Gladiator's Armor sets you could hit that cap.

Its not actually a snafu, its by design. I asked for them to be implemented that way in I9 beta. The original version, which only beta testers saw, was actually flagged unique and originally intended to be 5% recharge. I suggested that it be flagged non-unique and obey its own rule of five, for certain balance reasons having to do with, among other things, the existence of sets like SR that are pretty restricted in the sets they can slot. At the time, to basically just one. And Gift of the Ancient just wasn't going to cut it as an alternative (and it was flagged unique also, the most amazing example of over-conservative flagging in the history of the game).

Incidentally, Mids intrinsicly knows the rule, so when it allows you to take five LotGs and five +7.5% recharge bonuses on top of that, its actually implementing the correct rule.

By the way, CoH came out shortly after The Matrix Reloaded, so even though it took two issues to realize the dream, the first thing that pops into my head when I think MA/SR is still this..

I remember the first time I rolled out with I2 Elude, not really knowing how strong it would be, and taking on a solo spawn. Totally ludicrous.

Interesting. I'm going to study this, although this would have been useful to have 20 billion inf ago


The rule of five applies to the *names* of the bonuses, if you are not aware. For all set bonuses that offer +7.5% recharge, the bonus is actually called "Improved Recharge Time 5." Its the 5th tier of recharge buff. LotG's buff is special: its called "Luck of the Gambler." As a result, the game thinks its a different buff. You can have up to five +7.5% recharge bonuses from sets *and* up to five LotG's separate from that.

I think its canonically obvious that long range is better than or equal to short range, and that range is better than melee by definition, all other things being equal. This means not just in Apex, but everywhere: its never a disadvantage for your attacks to hit from farther away, period. It is thus logically inevitable that in any situation where shorter range attacks are disadvantaged, whether that is Apex or the Envoy of Shadows, the advantage of having ranged attacks will be amplified.

However, I'm not sure this is the best argument to prove the point, because even if melee characters are operating at less than 100% efficiency, its not obvious that ranged characters are operating at 100% efficiency. In the case of blasters, its not obvious that blasters can function in Apex with 100% efficiency on offense, because they too have to move. And to the extent that its likely their efficiency loss will be less than melee, its not obvious that their increased efficiency isn't due to some other player on the team taking enough aggro for them to use that offense.

The degenerate cases people are talking about where blasters and defenders and controllers can just tank the whole map and even draw aggro from the rest of the team are just that: degenerate cases. In the general case, ranged squishies who claim they have absolutely no problem with aggro or damage in this mission are in effect making the converse claim you suggested above: they are suggesting that they are so game-breakingly overpowered everywhere in the game that they can completely ignore the combined threat of the entire last mission in Apex, and its because of that moreso than the design of the mission that anything not them, in this case melee, is redundant.

In any team where the squishies are not indestructible, melee characters can be useful. In any team where the squishies are indestructible, melee characters will be less useful, because they bring defense to the table. Indestructible things don't need defense. But that's a truism, and not exclusive to Apex.

Modern nuclear power plants, of which I understand the Japanese ones in question are relatively state of the art, are designed with multiple safety systems and safety design features. My suspicion is that while the situation is very serious in the technical sense, its probably under more control than the general press is implying.

Most such reactors have emergency cooling systems that can be used to avert a catastrophic loss of cooling capacity. So far I haven't read or heard of any of the reactors in question using them, which suggests to me they still believe the situation can be contained, and doesn't warrant using the last card in the deck yet. If they've lost access to these, or attempt to use them and they fail, then I would start worrying.

Important distinction: when you gain level 20, there is only real way to measure progress from 19 to 20, or alternatively many different completely fungible ones: you earn linear XP to get from 19 to 20. When you gain level 20, you get exactly the same reward I do: you get to pick from a set of powers that is available within your powersets. Although you can pick different things, there is no way for you to change the way to get to level 20 in a way that would give you a different set of options. So the reward is essentially singular.

In the Incarnate system, the primary means of progress make a distinction between what you do, and what progress you make. I can do something that will present me with a totally different set of options than you will have. While you could argue that the order in which you take powers is not fixed and therefore non-linear, its possible to make a linear chart of progress from 1 to 50, and what specific reward you get for achieving each level from 1 to 50. you have no control over the order of progress through the system. With the Incarnate system, there is no way to make such a linear chart. it is, therefore, non-linear.


I wasn't aware RWZ was no longer level locked. However, one of the specific example I was thinking of was Cim, and the ITF which I mentioned. I'm assuming the Midnighter arcs that grant access to Cimerora still have minimum levels, and thus by extension Cimerora is level locked implicitly. I believe Ouroboros still has a minimum level as well, or has that been changed?

And even with sidekicking, task forces have always had minimum true level limitations which I believe are still in force.

The problem with 6-slotting Mako is that it underslots damage. One alternate slotting I was playing around with was 5-slot Crushing into CAK (all but Damage/End) and put the Mako proc in there. More recharge slotted, plus extra +5% global recharge, and with Spiritual Total Core CAK is recharging in 3.6 seconds, fast enough for SK->CS->SK->CAK, and I don't have to lose EC (which is actually a decent buff on DT when the darned crit buff works).

I lose a little bit of health and regen for a tighter chain, and I don't have to lose EC or take Hasten (which does require burning cast time to use, costing a little less than 1% total damage). Honestly, I'm still not sure if I shouldn't go that route, but I figured the costs to switch slotting if I change my mind are relatively small compared to the total costs of the build, so I decided to go with the Mako+PS for now. But you have me thinking I should have gone the other way.

I've probably stared at this build longer than I've though about all other builds for all other characters in seven years combined. Its really easy to get trapped in Mids and never get around to building and playing, so just decided to build it. And on the subject of Elude vs soft-cap, another decision I agonized over was Super Jump or Elude. Not a near-perma Elude of course, but a panic button Elude. I decided I wanted the travel, but I was biting my lip on that one also. Murdok's build now has me questioning the decision also. I wouldn't want to live within Elude's non-perma restrictions myself, but the more I think about the advantages of Elude, the more I think it would be nice to have around. I guess I could live with Ninja run and jump pack temp powers.

That's saying nothing more or less than there are more power pool defenses than resistances, and more +DEF than +RES in the invention system.

It says something Werner, it really does, that for a second there I had a heart attack when I misread that and thought you had figured out how to give that build 20% more s/l than your previous build rather than just 20% s/l (Murdok's build does have 2.5% smashing).

It was only a matter of time before you found somewhere to put the Shield wall. Mine cost 1.61 billion, by the way: the price on that fluctuates wildly. And its one of those that you can often get the crafted for less than the recipe. I got mine crafted when the recipes were going for 1.8. Go figure.

The pounding slugfests are there specifically because of their regen bonus. As this was a build focused on survivability, short of actually neutering my offense I was trying to build for maximum regen and health outside of reasonable soft-capped defenses.

Plus, someone (and I'm afraid its slipped my mind who first did this) actually did the calculations for an optimized MA chain without EC and with enough speed to close the chain vs a chain with EC, and discovered that while the non-EC chain, even with the crit bonus working perfectly, was better, it was only something like 10% better or less. Since going for enough recharge to do that was only going to improve offense by 15 dps or so, I decided not to go for that and go for incrementally improved survivability.

Plus, I would miss the backflip. If losing EC would buy me 30% more damage or something, I'd consider it. Closer to 10% - under ideal conditions - and I'll keep the backflip. The higher recharge would help Dragon's Tail, I will admit.

On the subject of underslotting attacks for recharge in general: by the time I finalized these builds, I already had a clear picture of Alpha. So since I had already decided to go Spiritual in the build, I didn't feel at the time that moderate recharge in attacks would be a big penalty. I'll be honest though, I've never actually done the thought experiment you describe, and actually hand calculated what the damage improvement would be. I guess I should, although it would be a pain in the neck to change now.

What nags at me more is the feeling that I've overlooked a way to improve survivability without completely neutering offense. I don't know why I have that feeling, its just a feeling that I'm missing something. I suppose you've just been staring at a build too long when your SR scrapper has 400% regen, and you're wondering if you've short-changed her somehow.

Actually, all of those level gates are to my knowledge still there. Zones are still level locked, and task forces still have minimum level gates.


That's a completely separate issue. The question *is* whether the change is a fundamental change in this respect, because that was the subject of my post. If you want to argue that we've always had gates, but you would rather we didn't have gates by personal preference, I don't have a specific counter-argument to a personal preference statement. and I wasn't addressing that at all. But as long as people call it a fundamentally different design direction, it calls into question whether that statement is true. And I believe the preponderance of the evidence says its not.

If you want to argue that MMOs in general, or this one in particular, would be a better game without any content gates objectively, that's a separate issue again, and on that I have a separate opinion.

There is one other set of things that is "bind on acquire" that is relevant to the Incarnate system: XP, Powers, and Slots.

The Incarnate system is not just an end game system in the sense that it was something the devs gave us to do. In that sense the badge system is a form of end game system. Its specifically an end game progressional system: its a system intended to extend character progress beyond achieving level 50. Rolling alts and doing end game task forces and trials are end game activity, but they are not progressional systems. The invention system comes close, but its more of a gear system than it is a progressional system because while it offers a way to increase the power of the player, it doesn't have a true progressional earning system attached to it. The standard progressional system is: you earn XP, XP unlocks levels, levels grant power choices and enhancement slots on a schedule. That is the progressional system of the game from level 1 to level 50. Its the only one we had prior to the Incarnate system. And all of its elements are non-tradeable. You cannot earn XP and grant it to other alts. You cannot earn powers and give them to other alts.

The Incarnate system is different in a number of ways, one of which is that it is non-linear. There are path choices and branching choices through the system that are created by using a middle layer between what players earn and what they gain from the system in terms of Incarnate XP or Incarnate Power components. But since these things are, in effect, middleware between XP and Powers, they can't be tradeable either.

Given that its intended specifically to be an extension of the standard progress system of the game, these things cannot be tradeable. Inventions could be, because it had no aspirations to be a progressional system. It was an extension of the enhancement system where things can be bought or sold to enhance the performance of the character. But we don't typically associate buying an SO with "progress" in the same sense we associate earning a bar of XP with "progress." The Incarnate power system incorporates the same concept of progress, but in a much more complex way. That complexity does not eliminate the need for character progress to be non-tradeable.

Going all recharge in Elude I thought about. You'd still be Apex and pet capped, but you'd lose some cushion on things like Veng, which are one of the reasons I would even consider this sort of thing. Tough call.


Probably, but its worth noting that the only situations that matter are the ones that a soft-capped build can't handle. So we're thinking about situations with heightened tohit already, and a lot of damage. 30% defense is not a lot of protection against 64% tohit plus accuracy.

One more thing: I don't know what happens if you trigger Hibernate *before* Elude crashes and then it crashes inside of Elude. Hibernate has recovery in it, but it also quixotically has end costs. I wonder if you can have a bad luck crash that takes out Hibernate itself? Sort of like the old school double DP/Unstop crash. That would suck: it would be like backflip death all over again.


Its scratching the recharge cap with Spiritual slotted. That's why Geas almost doesn't help Murdok at all: the build is actually so aggressive on recharge its too close to the recharge cap to get more than a fraction of Geas on Elude. That's pretty wild right there.

My best speed demon is my Ill/Rad, which is working towards a 212.5% recharge build (before Alpha) although my Energy/Energy blaster can see spikes of 257.5% recharge when the Force Feedback proc goes off (and I see that often, because its slotted in all four of my ranged attacks including both AoEs). When that happens, with spiritual core paragon she would be grazing the recharge cap on some attacks. For example, Bonesmasher for those five seconds is experiencing 4.86 total recharge.

A range-capped build would have been a more efficient use of influence, but 486% recharge, man.

I should have been more clear. Yes, some content that was gated eventually gets changed in terms of either being no longer gated or being gated in a different, lesser way over time. But in that sense, all the content gates on the Incarnate system would have to be judged in a similar light: namely that those gates are no different than the ones in the past if they eventually get changed several years from now.

What I meant, though, was that almost from the moment you roll a character, you're presented with content gates, and those content gates are not the weird exception in the low game: as you progress you continue to run into content gates, and that gating never actually stops short of players basically hitting the level cap (or close to it). Because players keep running into content gates throughout their game play experience, its inexplicable to claim that content gates are an unusual odd occurrence in the end game that implies a sudden shift in the way the game has developed. Someone may not like content gates specifically, but you really can't claim that content gates represent a change in the way this MMO has functioned, when content gates exist across all levels of standard progression.

Its left to split hairs to say that these content gates are different because of fill in the blank. But if you're going to claim that this is something that represents a dramatic shift by the developers, I believe you should be able to state why its not reasonable for the devs themselves to consider that difference to be generally irrelevant to the way they've always designed the game.


Lets put it in a way where I don't have to keep being clumsily referential. If I were designing the end game, it would be gated. I would do that with the full understanding that this game has gated content, and the gated content has followed certain design rules in terms of how strong and exclusive those gates could be. The current end game is, minus some details, consistent with my understanding of how the current game was designed. I would have no problem at all actually designing the system in terms of its participation in basically the same way it actually is designed.

So lets assume it was me that designed the end game, and not Positron. I can't ascribe thought or motivation to Positron, but I can take full responsibility for my own thoughts and motivations. I believe the game hasn't departed significantly from its core design philosophy, except to actual details of the end game, which are technical innovations and not radical alterations in content gating philosophy.

Players saying the devs have an obligation to explain their sudden dramatic change in philosophy or alternatively to explain how they intend to *return* to their original philosophy would be asking me, in that case, to explain how my thinking changed from the past to now, when my thinking didn't change from the past to now. So how could I possibly respond to that request?

Maybe Positron sees it differently: maybe he himself considers the end game to be a major departure from all the design philosophy that has come before. I can't say for certain either way. I can say for certain I don't see it differently. So its *possible* he sees it the same way, and if so he would be equally unable to really respond to these calls for explaining "the change" that would be satisfactory to anyone asking, because I can't come up with one and I don't think anyone else could. The request is based on the *assumption* there has to be a reason for the change, because there's been a change. If Positron said that there wasn't one, all that would do is cause people to grumble that he just doesn't get it: that he must obviously be out of touch with the playerbase if he can't see that we know better than he does that he's radically changed his development perspective.

And I couldn't do any better than him in this specific situation, because I'm clearly not doing all that well convincing anyone that there's no obvious shift in design philosophy.

You beat me to the tough thing. Also Hasten and Practiced Brawler. I should point out that Hibernate *still* doesn't cover the crash fully in real life because you forgot Elude's 2 second cast time and the fact that its not easy to trigger Hibernate at the same instant Elude actually crashes. Your gap is 30.06 seconds. If you use Geas, which you can only do every other cycle or so, recharge will drop to 205.64 seconds, which you now have a fighting chance of full covering, since the gap is now 27.64 seconds.

This probably is as good as Elude gets, but it still has close to 30 seconds of downtime in between cycles even with Geas, and it gives up a lot of regen and max health.

And here's something really weird, or at least interesting. Your variant of Murdok's build has 8.75 second cycle time on Aid Self, compared to 11.47 seconds for mine. That's expected. What's interesting is that I only four-slot aid self, including one interrupt reduction, and I end up with a 42.55% heal compared to the 6-slot version in the Murdok build generating 43.33%. The reason is basically we both slot Spiritual Total in our builds. So his aid self (or rather, your variation with the slightly more recharge) maxes out at 4.95%/sec or about 66.3 h/s, while mine peaks at 3.71%/sec or 49.6 h/s. His build has 13.9 h/s regen while mine has 32.31 h/s. The net total is 80.2 h/s for his, 81.9 h/s for mine, a tiny win for me but almost a wash.

The difference, then really comes down to resistances, psionic defense, and max health (while Elude is up). I have more s/l: 19.9% vs 17.9/15.4%. He has more f/c: 12.6% vs 8%. I have more psionic defense: 14% vs zero. I have more max health: 143.6% vs 127.5%. His build basically wins on elemental, mine edges out everywhere else. Outside of tohit buffs, I should keep mentioning. While Elude is up, his build is "Apex capped" and can resist a couple of stacks of veng, plus he's capped to turrets and pets which make a mess of my build. But its not so good against eyeballs and quartz, which basically shred both our builds.


Here's my current soft-capped build, which is basically done (finally). I haven't crafted the Very Rare Spiritual yet, but I have all the components to do so and then some. Just haven't gotten around to it yet. This way, people can compare a soft-cap build that tries to get as much survivability as possible without breaking something important somewhere. Whether I succeeded or not is debatable. And yes, Werner, I have recharge slotted in PB. I was going to swap it for endred, I swear, but I haven't gotten to it yet because I haven't run out of endurance yet with conserve power up as often as it is.


With higher health and slightly higher s/l, I think my build is a strong ITF build defensively, and a match for the Elude build. I wish I had those defenses in Nemesis tip missions though: I miss ~100% defense.


Edit: one other build variation I agonized over a lot before making up my mind: if you want more recharge and are willing to sacrifice some maxhealth, you shift one slot from PP to LBE, losing 25 points of max health and gaining +10% recharge. The 10% recharge ultimately didn't seem to do much for my build, though, because it wasn't enough to compress out EC from my attack chain. So I went with the +health. Considering recharge is not the focus of the build, I think +87.5% recharge is not bad, and its basically better than old school perma-hasten.

None taken.

Which is why I set the balance point to 3 targets. That's the number you'd face solo most of the time. In any other situation, you'd likely face more on average, even as a stalker. Even if you're only attacking one, there should be two more somewhere nearby within the range of ED much of the time.


Unless I'm misremembering something, Energy Drain heals for 3%, slottable to about 6% and its recharge is 60 seconds base. Energize is a 25% heal with 120 second recharge.

Assuming you hit just three targets with Energy Drain, slotting both to the ED cap with heal and recharge means ED will be healing for about 18% every 30 seconds, and Energize will be healing about 50% every 60 seconds. The "fake" heal is healing for about 72% of the real one in this circumstance. Hitting four targets would make it essentially a tie. Alternatively, using my 4.2% number would actually make ED heal for slightly *more* than Energize over time hitting just three targets.

I think people see 3% vs 25% and jump to the conclusion that Energize is vastly superior to Energy Drain. They forget Energy Drain recharges twice as fast, effectively doubling the strength of that heal to essentially 6% in an apples to apples comparison, and then it can hit multiple targets, making it actually worth 12%, 18%, or 24% hitting just 2, 3 or 4 targets. All of a sudden, that 3 doesn't look quite so small compared to the 25.

Balancing around SOs and standard content, balancing around three targets is usually the standard number, and I think its reasonable. At three, Stalker ED lags Energize, but not by an extraordinary amount. By about the amount I would want it to be buffed, basically. Leaving SOs and standard difficulty content, Energy Aura has an easier time building for more recharge because it has defensive powers, which means in higher end builds EA will tend to have an easier time getting more out of Drain than Ela will get out of Energize. I really don't think Energy Aura got the short end of the stick there. Stalkers may have a harder time leveraging ED than Brutes, but that's a separate issue. Its easy enough to get a credible level of heal out of ED to make the case that the only thing wrong with it is that its about one percentage point too low.

1. My experience suggested to me that unless you coupled Electric Armor with Electric Melee to stack up drain (which El has a little more of than EA), Electric Armor was actually weaker.

2. Calculations suggested Electric Armor was weaker as well.

3. Energy Aura had an easier time improving its situation by stacking power pool defenses than Electric Armor could by stacking resistances.

Brute Electric used to be so bad, it was actually the only Brute powerset to fail my maximum rest test for all damage types except energy. That means if you were to slot rest full of Heal enhancements and put your healing while resting at the regen cap, then you could survive more stuff indefinitely while resting than you could if you slotted all the defenses of Brute Electric with SOs and stood there with all your toggles on (discounting the effects of endurance drain). That's with rest's debuffs which makes you take quadruple damage.

Incidentally, Stalker EA and Stalker Ela were closer than Brute EA and Brute Ela, because while Electric was basically the same for both of them in terms of standard mitigation powers (except for Hide of course, which would not stack highly on Ela), Brute and Stalker EA were different in important ways. First of all, I think someone goofed when they desgned Stalker EA. I think they reduced the defenses in EA for stalkers to compensate for the fact that it would have Hide, but they didn't quite do it right. Net result: stalker EA has more s/l defense, but oddly less fire/cold defense. Conversely, someone seems to have forgotten that stalkers gave up dampening field to get Hide, which means they lost about 12% of slotted resistance to s/l. And I have no idea why stalker Energy Protection is weaker than Brute Energy Protection.

The net result is that stalker EA was a tiny bit weaker than Brute EA, and thus the gap between Brute Ela and EA was higher than the stalker gap between Ela and EA.

Lots of things "feel differently" to me simply because I personally care about some things more than others. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't represent my feeling as an objective reality that everyone should honor by default.

Its safe to assume that someone publicly objecting to something feels that that change or issue is fundamentally different than all others they didn't complain about, because this one is prompting a complaint. It has to cross a threshold the others didn't. But that is basically a truism, because all complaints are about issues that are fundamentally different from all other issues in the sense that they specifically elicited a complaint, that means the fact that they are fundamentally different in that way is not significant.

To put it another way, suppose I were to say that a particular issue was important because unlike other issues, this one made me want to object publicly. By itself that's sort of redundant, and its implying I think the problem is important because its specifically important to me. That's a dangerous assertion to make. Saying something is fundamentally different because its subjectively unpalatable, but not in an objectively novel way, is a way to attempt to craft a subjective complaint as an objective, and therefore universal, problem.

That's the part that bothers me. Not the fact that people feel differently about this issue as opposed to other issues. Rather: subjective complaints don't need demonstrative proof. Objective ones do. Crafting a subjective complaint as an objective one lets people have two bites at the apple: they can claim the complaint isn't simply a personal perception and thus more credible, then deflect counter-assertions as irrelevant to their personal perception foundation because they are subjective in nature. Or to put it in less circular terms, they can claim the game has an objective problem with tampering with people's subjective perceptions, and say the problem is important because its subjectively important and its universal because its objectively verifiable that it affects subjective perceptions.

As clever as that sounds, I don't find it to be kosher. Its not an impossible assertion to make, but I believe that rather than having all the tactical benefits of both arguments, it requires the asserter to overcome the weaknesses of both instead, which means it has an extremely high hurdle to overcome. No one's making any attempt to hurdle it, though. They seem to be taking the easier way around by asserting that if something looks like a problem, it s a problem by definition because the game is required to cater to players' perceptions as an entertainment medium.

I don't like that assertion because anyone can use it to assert anything they don't like about the game is wrong by definition.

That statement (the italicized one in the devs' voice specifically) has two problems: its highly subjective, so what one person feels demonstrates this will not satisfy others; and its extremist, because once you use the words "no matter how [much]" you make the assumption people will draw a reasonable line across that statement, and what people find reasonable is highly variable. So its unlikely that any evidence pointing in that direction would not be controversial, if not out-right rejected.

The system seems reasonably accessible, and far moreso than most of the end game systems I've seen in other games. It requires only moderate amounts of time to get the majority of the progress available. It even encourages the harcore players to pursue diminishing returns in a way that provides opportunities for less dedicated players to continue to receive significant rewards: things like the Very Rare slots and WST badges create long-term pursuit goals for players that, in the act of pursuing them will continue to create demand for WST teaming which increases the likelihood of other players to be able to participate. WST targets are not always level 50 task forces and strike forces, which means level 50s pursuing Notices are creating an environment where low level alts can participate and get an alternate reward: massive XP bonuses. All you really have to do to participate, is participate.

Is it accessible enough? That's subjective. Honestly, the only player group I think have a legitimate accessibility gripe are low activity soloers. And they have *always* been on the low end of reward and progress earning. That's not new, and while it can be tweaked, that issue cannot be fully resolved without basically disconnecting rewards from activity, which I would be loathe to do.