Arcanaville

Taking a step back for a second, in my opinion games like physics puzzlers are not pure sandboxes per se. They have much more open-ended gameplay, but they still have structured goals most of the time.

I don't play MineCraft so I can't pass judgment on its gameplay, but from what I've heard of the game its close but not quite in my opinion. It has strong exploratory elements, but it does have a structured gameplay goal in partial disguise: you have to survive. You could argue that its a sandbox, just a very dangerous one, but I think most people don't treat it like a dangerous sandbox, they treat it like a game you have to continuously complete the goal of surviving in, which then gives you sandbox-like open gameplay elements to play with when you aren't trying to specifically survive.

It *looks* like its designed to provide open gameplay but with certain structural elements that make it an actual game, if a very loose one. Going back to the physic puzzler comparison, I think the difference between a true sandbox and something that offers open-ended play is that open ended gameplay games offer many options to accomplish gameplay goals, while sandboxes don't have explicitly designed goals leaving players completely free to decide what to do within them.

There are of course shades of grey, and definitions are there to be smudged by innovative game designers. In fact, I can imagine a game that highlights the very subtle weakness in my own judgment of MineCraft. Suppose there was an MMO where you made sandcastles on the beach. That's it. You can build whatever you want, but of course eventually the tide comes in and destroys it. If you build it in the right place and big enough, though, it might survive until the next day, whereupon you could repair it and continue on.

For me, the very subtle difference here is that in this hypothetical game the designer isn't designing the tide in a specific way to promote specific strategies to combat it. It isn't "gameable." On the other hand, I think the monsters in MineCraft *are* designed in a tactical non-random way by the game designer. That means they are an actual gameplay element with a purpose that overrides anything the players choose: if you don't survive them, you don't survive them. You have to metagame the monsters to eventually be able to earn the right to do whatever else you want. So maybe MineCraft is a game within a sandbox in that sense.

Casual is vague, but most people don't argue about hardcore too much. I have no idea how themepark came up here, but there is a generally accepted definition of "sandbox" as it pertains to game design. A sandbox game is a game which is explicitly designed to promote exploration of the interactivity of the environment over reward-driven or story-driven directed gameplay. While elements of sandbox-like design occur in many games, technically speaking only MMOs like The (late) Sims Online and Second Life qualify as genuinely sandbox MMOs. MMOs are not sandbox games just because they *can* be explored: they would be sandbox games if exploration - and specifically interactive exploration - was the *primary* or *sole* point to the game.

I don't mind waiting, but I have only so many market slots per character. If they are all filled selling and buying with optimal bids and asks, I'm stuck (unless I start transferring stuff around between characters with open slots, which I don't want to do). So at some point, I sometimes have to decide whether I want to save a couple hundred thousand inf on a piece of salvage, or buy it now and clear the slot to put in a lower bid on a millions of inf (or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions) recipe that can sit in that slot for however long it takes for that bid to execute. I'm willing to wait to a degree, but I'm not willing to wait for something to execute, so I can put another order that I have to wait to execute so I can put another order that I have to wait to execute. That's the point when I start to buy the cheap stuff now and let the expensive stuff bake in the market slots freed by buying the cheap stuff now.

I had an order for a long time on the Shield +3% proc (the res, not the Glad def) that executed recently for 1.6 billion**. The buy now price is usually closer to 1.9 billion or 2.0 billion. Letting that sit and wait saved maybe 400 million. It'll take me years to save that much inf buying salvage at optimal price points. That's worth tying up a slot for a long time. Tying up the same slot for days or weeks trying to save half a million inf on a piece of salvage? Worth it if I have the slots. Otherwise, not for me.

(Note: that one purchase took about 70% of all the influence I have on my top four inf earning alts combined. It was worth waiting for the savings given that even for me 1.6 billion is not chump change.)


** Specifically, the 1.61B order on the crafted enhancement recently was me. Weirdly, the crafted enhancement is sometimes cheaper than the recipe is. Not by much given the numbers, but still. Probably because more people craft it and sell it than just sell the recipe, which means the recipe is ironically slightly rarer. Thin market psychology always serves me better than Adam Smith does in the CoX markets, which is why I'm always slightly amused by attempts to describe the current market conditions in classical terms (as opposed to what people might want the markets to be).

When the exclusively solo softcore posters arrive, I'm outta here.

That would make me a hardcore casual hardcore hardcore. I'm a hardcore player knowing the ins and outs of the game. And I'm really hardcore about being a hardcore player, having invented a lot of the ins and outs of the game.. But I'm pretty casual about being a hardcore hardcore player, usually not playing explicitly to leverage that knowledge. And I'm very hardcore about being casual about it: I go far out of my way not to become a hardcore hardcore hardcore player.

Sometimes you really have to wonder though. Tom Cruise seems to play nothing but Tom Cruise. Its easy to wonder if he used up all his acting skills in Risky Business. Sometimes he seems not to even be able to play Tom Cruise correctly. Then he shows up in Tropic Thunder.

Tom Hanks is probably the example everyone loves. He tends to play himself, sometimes loosely disguised. He is the everyman, and that's what he's good at playing, but well. George Clooney seems to do a good job playing variations of George Clooney, sometimes disguised much better than Tom Hanks.

But then there's Russell Crowe. Who is apparently a dick, but plays a rather diverse set of characters, most of which are not nearly as dickish. And Matt Damon, who is definitely not playing the same character in the Bourne movies as he did in Courage Under Fire or The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Although to my mind, the best character actors are the B-listers who seem to show up in movie after movie always playing different interesting parts. The late J.T. Walsh, for example. Chris Cooper. J.K. Simmons. Gary Oldman. Those guys. Everyone knows them, even if not everyone can remember their names. Hardly a bad performance among the lot of them.

My favorite Brin novel: Kiln People. YMMV as to whether the story leaps off a cliff at the end, but its one of the best science fiction novels of all time in my opinion up to that point. The narrative is very thought-provoking and creative.

On the subject of the OP: I can see Costner as Pa. As long as he doesn't try to do an accent.

On the subject of movies "loosely based" on novels, the one I think that was the worst translation of the source material that ended up nevertheless transcending the original material in a weird way is The Running Man. When you base your movie on a short story by Stephen King, and you all but shred the story itself, its usually a bad sign. But that movie is just so darned over the top wild its hard not to like.

Also, I actually liked HBP, although I know that it, and for that matter all of the movies, are highly simplified versions of the novels. They did, in fact, touch on the subject of the Half Blood Prince in the book, but just not as much as in the book.

I also agree. The OP mentions Sonic Resonance. Some support powersets are more "passive" - particularly the ones that buff (anything but heal) and grant damage mitigation - damage *prevention* specifically. Any time you're preventing something from happening, you're going to be a little more passive, as I think the OP defines passive. Sonic and FF, for example, tend to be more "passive" sets. Empathy also probably falls in this category.

On the other hand, sets like Kinetics and Dark are more "aggressive." They focus significantly on debuffing - "attacking" as it were - the targets. You "siphon" power from the target to buff yourself. You "drain" the target to give endurance to your team. You nullify your target's healing to heal your team mates. You Fulcrum Shift to just plain cheat.

And then there's sets that are structured not just to debuff, but to debuff in a manner that is highly *evocative* of attacking. Trick Arrow, for example. Everything you do shoots an arrow into someone's face, or near their feet, or sets something in fire. Its definitely not a "passive" set.

Some sets are a bit of both: Cold Domination for example. But I believe there are lots of different support sets that support a variety of different play styles.


I've been playing my TA/A defender more lately. If you want feedback, there's no feedback like seeing one of your "support" powers set every foe in the area ablaze and incinerate them. Now that's some serious feedback.

Anything that has martial arts-like attacks or assault rifle-like attacks will have accuracy bonuses. Off the top of my head, I believe Council minions have them.

As to the idea of making a cheap high performance scrapper, I think my choice would be Katana/Invuln. When I get home, I will try to strip down my current Katana/Invuln build to its raw cheap essentials. It slots things like Pounding Slugfest and Pulverizing Fisticuffs, which makes it pretty cheap in general. But it also slots Scirroco's, which is a little more expensive (but not too bad). It has HOs because the build dates all the way back to I9 when those were not hard to get. I'm curious to see how cheap the core elements of the build can get, and I think I can go pretty low given how many slots are already slotted with relatively cheap enhancements.

I specifically went out of my way to state the case for the proc completely separate from averages.

The recovery cap is 500%, or 8.33%/sec. That's not too much recovery, that is just enough recovery.

Although if you manage to slot three shifters, you could have 8.93%/sec recovery. Dark Melee could slot theft of essence and panacea and build for the recharge cap (don't know, not my problem) and end up with an additional 17.5% endurance every 20 seconds on average, 0.875%/sec. You could also slot procs in Dark Regen.

Then of course there is recharge capped Transference. Theoretical maximum 12.1%/sec, or the equivalent of 726% recovery. You might find it difficult to burn that much endurance.

You're going to average one recovery tick every 50 seconds if its slotted into a passive like Stamina. That is the equivalent to 0.2 eps (compared to 0.177 eps earned by slotting a 42.4% IO into stamina with no ED). Whether you prefer the continuous performance of enhancing Stamina directly or the stronger pulse from the proc is somewhat of a matter of personal preference, but its certainly "strong enough" to compete directly with IO slotting.

Keep in mind that recovery is not continuous either. You get one recovery tick every 4 seconds at base recovery, and recovery slotting will decrease the tick time. So lets look at the real picture between the shifter and slotting stamina.

A player with stamina gets +25% recovery, which reduces the tick time by 1.25, or from 4 seconds to 3.2 seconds per tick. In 50 seconds, you'd get about 16 recovery ticks - 15.625 to be exact.

Slot Stamina with +42.4% enhancement, and recovery increases to +35.6%, and tick time drops to 2.95 seconds. In 50 seconds you'd get just under 17 ticks of recovery - 16.95 to be exact. So that slotting will get you about one more recovery tick of 6.667% of your endurance.

The proc would instead average giving you one additional tick of 10% endurance. Of course, some windows would have less and some more, but that would be the average. So lets see: worst case scenario you lose about one recovery tick in that period of 6.7% end. Average case you lose one tick of 6.7% end but gain one tick of 10% end. Is that sort of irregularity really that bad? Ironically, if you care about time frames shorter than 50 seconds, which is the average time between shifter pulses, the difference between slotted and unslotted stamina is even less, because its going to amount to less than one actual tick of endurance recovery.

In exchange for its slightly irregular performance, you get two benefits:

1. Its stronger, by a slight amount (if its the third slot its a significant amount)

2. Its unaffected by recovery debuff. Even if your recovery is debuffed to zero, this proc can still tick away because its not technically recovery. it is, for lack of a better way of putting it, a heal for endurance, much like transfusion is also completely unaffected by recovery debuffs.


My four-slot Stamina slotting pattern for characters I'm concerned about recovery for is Shifter End, End/Acc, End/Rech, Proc. That gives me 91.78% end mod after ED, plus the 0.2 eps average from the proc, plus a 2.5% recovery set bonus. Total recovery: 2.71 eps from that slotting. By way of comparison, four common IOs would be 2.52 eps, and three IOs plus the proc would be 2.70 eps. And I get +health as another set bonus.

Just three slots of IOs would be 2.50 eps. Adding 0.21 eps is more than adding the very first +42.4% common IO, so unless you are running out of slots for critical powers I think the extra slot and slotting with four shifter IOs is worth it.

It does explain some things. Every time someone would say "City of Spies" around Castle that one eye of his would start to twitch and then he'd start to tremble, and whenever someone asked about an underwater zone BaB would say "no underwater zone! no underwater! underwater bad!"

I always thought it was because they were finicky, I didn't realize these were actually side effects of the hiring process.

Even when I choose to see things from a casual point of view, I cannot help but *also* see it from a hard core point of view. I can never "unsee" anything.

Of course, my version of hard core is not the same thing as most people's version of hard core, I don't think.


Although at my heart I'm a soloer, I don't mind teaming, and I team when I can and when I feel like teaming. There's two situations in particular that make me appreciate teaming. The first is when I'm on one of my "suboptimal" teams and I'm fighting to keep it alive, and succeed. Sometimes it feels like the other players were just another challenge to overcome, and I faced it down. That's a lot of work, but it feels like an accomplishment.

The other is when I find myself on one of those teams that really honestly doesn't need me at all, and I can just play, without thinking, and just be there as my character flinging powers around in mostly a reactive manner. Nary a thought about numbers, mechanics, or anything else except shooting, buffing, and just inhabiting the character for a while. Its in times like that moreso than perhaps any other that this feels most like a game and I'm just another player in it. Those are probably the moments I enjoy the most, and it has nothing to do with being hardcore or casual. I'm not sure I would call that *either* hardcore or casual.

Well, if I'm soloing half the ITF on my MA/SR, that's pretty hardcore, but all the hardcore stuff happened before I logged in that day. In terms of what's going through my head, its kick, kick, punch, backflip, sweep, kick, kick, punch... In fact, you could say that ironically my hardcore build allows me to play a casual session, because I don't have to care as much about what I choose to attack or how. I'm going to live either way.




Portrait of an MA/SR Incarnate, having a relaxing stroll through a park.

I hear if you make "City Of..." jokes they immediately hand you over to the community management team.

If you have the inf, there's no such thing as too much recovery, so passing on the Numina's and the Miracle is looking a gift horse in the mouth. If you have a lot of defensive or resistive mitigation, there's also no such thing as having too much regen. About the only melee I wouldn't consider putting all three into are regen scrappers and stalkers: I might skip Regenerative Tissue. But even with stamina and quick recovery, I'm slotting Miracle and Numina's eventually. Maybe as a lower priority, but eventually.

Only after I said repeatedly I would in response to other posts. I always give fair warning. And actually, the only post that was really moderated was the post where I answered your direct question asking whether I enjoyed crushing other players. Cinco de Modo has no sense of humor.


It actually even stopped looking like an actual English word after I typed the ninth or tenth one.

Others have echoed that sentiment, a sentiment I agree with. Perhaps I started off incorrectly by listing effects, perhaps it would be better if I were to list the kinds of situations I think Ill/Rad excels in, and see if others can list alternate lists for other things. To me its less interesting to debate whether a perma-dom dominator is more or less versatile than an Ill/Rad controller, but in what ways specifically are they versatile. Its bound to be in slightly or significantly different ways.

My Ill/Rad can:

Stealth and recall a team with Superior Invisibility and Recall Friend (or vet recall)
Teleport to safety and rez with recall and Mutation
Tank single hard targets like AVs and Giant Monsters with the Phantom Army
Defeat things with zero aggro with deceive and the PA
Apply permaable and high order regeneration debuffs to high regeneration targets with Lingering Radiation
Debuff single targets or clustered targets with Rad infection and Enervating Field
Generate an emergency high order AoE hold with EMP
Buff damage, regen, and recharge with Accelerate Metabolism

She's good in:

Hami Raids: buff, AoE heals, regen debuff, holds, ranged damage
Task forces: good AV aggro control and debuff tools
General teaming: decent team buffing with AM and GI, recall and rez, some control, decent healing ability
Mothership raids: good against pylons, good with clickies (PA and ST outside the grate, click in relative safety), good against the Rikti. Rez gets a workout here also.
Stealthable missions: the only thing better is a stalker with stacked stealth
Soloing: reasonably balanced offense and defense for this
Giant Monster fights: PA + LR + Toggles
STF: Good against AVs in general, GW cannot heal off of PA. PA and decoy can tank LR in a pinch (with difficulty).

Weaknesses:

Soloing large numbers: the chaotic control of Illusion and the toggle dependence of some of the debuffs can easily overwhelm Ill/Rad. EMP is there for emergencies, but it cannot be used continuously.
Soloing extreme melee threats: good at AVs in general, but while the PA can tank things like Envoy of Shadows or Ghost Widow, the phantasm is an all-ranged pet that suicidally closes to melee range anyway, and is not strong enough to survive up close. Without the Phantasm, Illusions is very low on damage to take things out solo. My Ill/Rad can solo a pylon, so I can defeat such targets eventually but my Ill/Rad is actually not that much faster than my MA/SR even with Lingering Radiation.
Pet limitations: PA require very high global recharge to be available continuously. The spectral terror doesn't move.
Controlling in a large team: Illusion has only two hard controls: Blind and Flash. One single target and one AoE control. The rest comes from pseudo controls: the PA and the Spectral terror. These combined controls can be very powerful when focused, but when diffused throughout the large numbers of a large team, that control can be minimized. Rad has a PBAoE hold, but it also has limitations (disclosure: my current build doesn't take it).
No ranged heal: the only way you can heal anyone is to be standing fairly close to them and hit them with a PBAoE heal. You can't substitute for something that has a strong single target ranged heal.
Limited ability to improve tohit: my build takes tactics, but Ill/Rad in general does not have the ability to hit hard to hit targets except for the use of Radiation Infection. It takes significant time to deploy for that purpose, and has limitations due to being a toggle debuff.

Who's got two thumbs and just betrayed his best friend? This guy!

"I bet I can fix that in a week."

I said she said what I said she said was not what I said she said, she said what I said she said not what she said I said she didn't say.

If what I said what she said I said she said was not what I said she said, what she said I said she said was not what she said. But as I said, I said she said I said what I said she said I said she said I said.

I don't see what the problem is, its pretty straight forward.

That would be massively overpowered.

You said the only way I could say what I said is if I deliberately misread what you said. I delivered an alternate explanation, which means your assertion, and the certainty with which it was delivered, were both in error. Whatever caused you to be certain about something that was false is something you should consider eliminating from your thought process.

If *I* say "the only way" its because I'm prepared to prove it upon request. Separately, I do not tend to assume people's thought process is faulty unless they give repeated unambiguous proof of it. Its not the first thing I think to type as a response. Its not a reasonable assertion to make against another poster without proof.

Its not, you know, a casual attitude.

Yeah, this is one of those things I notice many masterminds don't seem to be aware of. Its not well known: you have to be told this or stumble upon it by accident (or been in CoV beta), because there's no clue I'm aware of in-game that lets you know this is possible. If there's something in the tutorial or something, I've forgotten about it. Although, this does sound like something that *should* be in the tutorial for beginning masterminds.