Arcanaville

Have I ever mentioned that Oh, God! is one of my favorite movies?

There's exactly zero chance that Paragon Studios' new project could possibly release in the next year. I would be surprised if they were talking about beta testing in 2012, actually.

If by "bypass" you mean "attack while not rooted" that's always a bug, a bug that the devs have spent significant amounts of time trying to fix. I've sent them lots of data on it myself.

You're not supposed to be able to bypass rooting in that sense at all. Don't get used to it.

Thought experiment to exaggerate the effect. Suppose you only had two attacks, one that animated in 2 seconds and hit for 200 points of damage and recharged in 0.5 seconds, and a second attack that animated in 2 seconds and hit for 2 points of damage and recharged in 0.5 seconds. Obviously, its better to cycle the first one and ignore the second one rather than try to fill the 0.5 second gap with a power that will lock you into a 2 second animation for little damage and steal time you could be spending on a much better DPA attack.

At certain levels of recharge, this can sometimes happen to almost any powerset, but in particular when the set has higher cast times than average. Parry in particular has a cast time of 1.33s and therefore a MeTime of 1.584 seconds. That's a longish time to be stuck in one of the lower DPA single target attacks of the set if a better one is about to come along much quicker.

Of course, Parry is a pretty good power to use in general for its defense buff, but if we're talking about pure damage output its not ideal.

* Poof *

Where am I? Where's the emergency? Castle nerfing Electric Armor? Someone thinks taunt should debuff your height? What?


Oh. This? Jeez, ok, but let me get my morning coffee first.









Ok. Let's see here. First of all, I think some people have misinterpreted what ArcanaTime says about server clocks. In the original analysis I described this in more detail. There's a combat clock which is about 0.125 seconds long. And there is an animation clock that is about 0.033 seconds long. The game seems to align on server clocks but anything that *roots* has to align with the animation clock because rooting animations always run for a whole number of animation frames. Thus, to fire off an attack, you have to wait until the last server combat clock tick ends, then start the power on the next combat tick, but the animation will actually start on the next animation tick. So the alignment takes place four animation clock ticks later, or 0.33 * 4 = 0.132 seconds. That's the first animation clock that happens after one combat clock of 0.125.

Its a *little* more complicated than that due to a slight shifting in alignment over time, but since internal lag tends to blur that almost to the point of being undetectable and it always averages out, I didn't bother to provide a formula for being more precise. Its not worth it when calculating attack chains.

However, things that just happen and don't involve rooting animations either align with the combat clock of 0.125s per tick, or the server quantum clock of about 0.033 seconds (30 ticks per second), not the 0.132 "Arcanatime" clock. That really isn't a clock, but rather a "beat" of two clocks.


I *did*, however, actually look at the issue of rapidly ticking things. Not regeneration specifically, but damage DoT ticks and other effects that tick very fast. They do not have to align with those server clocks. The game seems to work backwards: on the next combat tick, it goes back and figures out what events were supposed to happen and does them. If a DoT (or a regeneration tick) was supposed to tick twice since the last time they occured, they just tick twice.


And actually, we have a hint for how this probably works. My guess is that all timers, including DoT timers, regeneration timers, and recharge timers, are decremented by the 30/sec server clock. When they reach zero, stuff happens. For things like regeneration and fast DoT, their timers could decrement to zero twice before they are processed. My guess is that when those timers decrement to zero a counter is incremented and they wrap around like an odometer in reverse. The next time the server comes around to check on them, it reads the counter, does their thing that many times, and resets the counter. So if the regen counter decremented to zero once, you get one health tick. If it decremented to zero twice, the game pulses you with two ticks. In this way, even though the game has a relatively slow combat clock (8/sec) it can process correctly (albeit in a slightly delayed fashion) events that take place much faster than that or events not aligned perfectly to that clock.

How do we know this? Hamidon raids. Pre-I9 Hamidon raids offered great insight into how the game processes things. Under the severe lag conditions of a packed raid, the server slowed down. Everything, including recharge, began to run slower. This implies the server doesn't literally back-calculate *everything* because if it did, the server would get more *jumpy* but not slower. Actually getting slower implies that things in the game that should be ticking at one rate are actually ticking at a slower rate. And that can only happen if the thing doing the ticking slowed down. Which is exactly what would happen when the server was so overloaded with things to do it actually took more than a 30th of a second to process everything that was supposed to happen in that 30th of a second. So the 30/sec server quantum clock couldn't run 30 ticks per second. When it started running at 10 ticks per second, everything in the game universe slowed down to 1/3rd speed, including recharge and probably regeneration and recovery ticks (of course, in those raids who would notice those).

So, my best guess: combat ticks are back-calculated. The game figures out what should have happened in the last 0.125 seconds, and does them. Quantum ticks are not back-calculated: they do the same thing every time they tick, which is supposed to be 30 times per second. If the game cannot do so fast enough, it starts slowing down and everything that relies on that clock slows down with it.

Which implies that things like regeneration ticks might be forced to align with quantum clocks. But not necessarily if their counters are wrap-around counters.

Let me see what I can dig up on this. This might be very difficult to test precisely, but I may have some old data that could be mined to figure out whether regeneration ticks are forced to align with anything. My hunch is, when the server is working correctly, its not.

Yep, probably not the same problem. The 9600 in that laptop has about a quarter the performance of the 9800 GT that Positron said was the minimum card necessary to enable all Ultra Mode settings at reduced quality levels. At the graphics settings listed I would expect very low frame rendering rates. That's not the same problem as apparently being described above.

Dial down settings or disable ultra mode altogether. Frame rates should improve substantially. If not, as Father Xmas advises, start a new thread so the problem can be troubleshooted independently.

One of these days, I'm going to redo this I7/I8ish pre-invention no-stamina build with cheapo inventions just to see what happens. Anyone actually trying to make a no-stamina build today and making the effort to slot down endurance should be able to do no worse than this by the time they are in their mid to late twenties (and stamina comes no earlier than 20). In the old days, this was a bit more difficult, but I think you could probably make a leveling build that was at least this good, if not better.

(Ah, the good old days, when SR scrappers didn't have inventions and actually used to get hit occasionally).

Define "in order to function."

For that matter, define "require." If you're worried about endurance consumption, and you're not heavily slotting endurance reduction, you've already left my definition of "require" in the dust.

I would be the most ludicrous disguise in existence. Ok, 9th most ludicrous disguise.


Plus, if Castle was willing to spend enormous amounts of time creating an anonymous public persona that spent a good deal of that time just fact-checking himself, he'd have to be pretty mental. Or I would have to be pretty mental if I was him. But of course this is exactly what a mental person would say, isn't it. But would I point out how mental it was knowing that people would believe that I wasn't mental enough to try to convince people I was mental enough to believe I was mental enough to act that mental?

No, I'm not that mental. Castle might be, though. You'd have to ask him. Or me, when I'm not me if I'm not me. I wouldn't know.


(Note: the devs are not allowed to astroturf. Of course, I'm sometimes an exception to the rules. But Castle isn't. Now there's a logical quandry.)

Well, technically speaking I guess Positron was in charge of Going Rogue when it was conceived and designed. And he's currently in charge of new systems design including but probably not limited to the end game system and Incarnates. So yeah. Wish granted I guess.

Show mercy. As simple as this game is portrayed the ins and outs of analyzing and judging things like damage output are not trivial to someone that hasn't done the math a few times before and hasn't played all the sets before to provide background experience. Even now, very few people get everything consistently correct. We were all this uninformed once.



Well, you all were, anyway.

This one particular fact really says more about Willpower than Kinetic Melee. Kinetic Melee's mitigation can sometimes help Willpower much more than most other defensive sets, but that's true of all offensive sets' damage mitigation.

15 feet radius, so the arc can jump a maximum of 15 feet to another target. But it will preferentially jump to targets closer rather than farther due to the way AoE targeting works (from the center outward until it hits the target cap, which in this case is one).

One more little tid-bit I just noticed. The accuracy of the first jump arcs is 2.0, meaning it has double the normal accuracy. The accuracy of the second jump arcs is 1.5 (or +50% accuracy if you prefer). The accuracy of the third jump arcs is 1.0, or normal accuracy. Jolting Chain itself has standard accuracy.

So if you can hit the first target, the first two arcs that come out of that target will have very high accuracy, and that accuracy will decay with each successive jump. The intent seems obviously to front-load the chaining: the first jumps are very fast and very accurate, and the back end deeper arcs are successively slower and less accurate. Still, you're very likely to end up with close to fifteen total strikes against the spawn eventually assuming there are enough targets to go around.

I do not know with 100% certainty, but I presume, that accuracy and tohit buffs that the player has "follow" the arcs. I never got around to testing that specifically.

Also, just in case anyone wants to know, Jolting Chain arcs require line of sight to the target. They cannot (or rather should not) arc around corners to other targets. But that line of sight is from target to target, not from player to target. It can wrap around corners if the targets collectively wrap around corners.

This has to be one of the worst powerset comparisons I've read in a long, long time. Its worthlessly skewed in its comparison between Soul Drain and Power Siphon (in ignoring the mandatory requirement to have the correct number of targets available at the moment of recharge, in not accounting for the actual duration of the damage buffs intrinsic in Power Siphon mechanics), comparing Shadow Maul and Burst as AoEs without any caveats (like the fact that Shadow Maul is only melee ranged, has a lower target cap, and is harder to get more than a couple targets in its effect), failing to account for tohit being resisted by rank, and mentioning AVs at all when they practically ignore tohit debuffs these days and usually can't be feared except outside the triangles, knocking out two of the the primary damage mitigation effects in Dark Melee no differently than stun or knockdown. They don't generally resist damage debuffs, although they can if they have specifically high resistances. Not all do.


Dark Melee is actually one of the best all around utility sets: I've said so myself for years. But to see it blindly swung around like a sack of potatoes is rather annoying. The bottom line is that consistently fully saturated Soul Drain is going to beat Power Siphon, but its far, far easier to saturate Power Siphon under nearly all conditions than Soul Drain. A drinking bird can achieve more than half the maximum possible benefit of Soul Drain. Soul Drain usually operates at or lower than that level.

Everyone knows Shadow Maul is broken. Its a single target attack that somehow managed to trade its soul into becoming an AoE that actually gets discounts for the trouble, rather than having to pay anything. But compared to any actual real AoE, Shadow Maul is going to come up short. Its the best AoE of all the single target attacks, but also the worst AoE of all the actual AoEs. Shadow Maul is best compared to single target attacks favorably. Trying to compare it to actual AoEs suggests the person making the comparison simply has no experience with Shadow Maul or actual AoEs.

And the rest of the comparison doesn't get any better. I'd say DM's strengths lie in its overall general purpose utility, with Siphon Life, Touch of Fear, and Dark Consumption. Kinetic Melee is a more straight forward offense and offensive mitigation set. I don't see a clear winner between the two in general, although they appeal to very different playstyles and so are likely to have adherents and detractors aplenty.

Kinda wondering about that myself.

I've never tested this, but I'm going to say probably not because the jump distance of the arcs is ultimately the radius of a PBAoE surrounding the target the arc is coming from. Radii of spherical or PBAoEs are not enhanced by range slotting in the general case.

Probably worth testing to be sure.

During I11 beta, I commented that Brutes may have been perceiving a much higher performance level than Scrappers than their health difference would suggest because Brutes were testing with essentially Tanker offensive sets which tend, on average, to have higher offensive damage mitigation than the average Scrapper primary. RTTC is basically a race: each target you add increases your regeneration, but also increases the damage you take. If the regeneration is higher than the damage, saturating RTTC is a net win. If the regeneration is lower than the damage, RTTC softens the impact of having more things attack you, but you're still going to die quicker if you try to saturate it.

This means anything that can get the per-target damage down to a level equal to or lower than RTTC's incremental regeneration buff per target is going to have a dramatic impact on anything with Willpower. A relatively small difference in damage mitigation can have a disproportionately high effect. And in particular, that made Willpower almost a completely different powerset for Tankers than Scrappers in I11 beta, when almost no one was testing with ultra-IOed Scrappers (which could have had enough damage mitigation to "cross the RTTC horizon").

Let me put it this way. When you level from level 40 to level 41 and the critters start doing more damage, does that hurt defense sets more or resistance sets more? When you exemplar down from 41 to 40 and the critters start doing less damage, does that help defense sets more or resistance sets more?

Damage debuffs don't stack with resistance or defense. They just make the attacker weaker. They shouldn't favor one type of mitigation set over the other, at least not to a first order approximation (being less predictable, defense sets can suffer from a higher vulnerability to burst damage than resistance sets under certain circumstances, but that's not the effect most people are talking about when they refer to -DMG helping one kind of thing over another: in that sense -DMG helps regeneration sets even more).

The math you're referring to above is what happens when you stack 5% resistance onto a resistance or defense set, and this does help resistance sets more than defense sets. But damage debuffs don't do that. They just make the incoming attacks equally weaker for everyone. Unless you want to talk about corner cases like very specific alpha strike conditions, -DMG should have about the same net benefit for everyone. They'll help defense sets and resistance sets equally.

And they will even help defense sets at the soft cap and resistance sets at the resistance cap equally: incoming damage will still go down, because the attacker will still be weaker before those mitigations are applied.

Off topic, but I just remembered that once being able to magically change hair styles ultimately led to one of the bigger heroic moments in (web)comicdom.

My information may be out of date: I haven't checked since about two patches before beta closed. I'll double check in a bit.


Hmm. Sorry, my memory must be playing tricks with me. I just checked the current live version, and the jumps aren't 2 seconds apart. The jumps start off fast and ramp down. The initial jumps are delayed 0.25s and 0.5s from the initial target hit. The step 2 jumps are delayed 0.5s and 1.0s from the moment the initial jumps hit. And the step 3 jumps are delayed 1.0s and 2.0s from the moment the step 2 jumps hit their targets.

Weirdly, the target of the attack is set to avoid jumps for 4 seconds, the targets of the tier 1 jumps are set to avoid jumps for 5 seconds, and then the targets of the tier 2 jumps are set to avoid jumps for 4 seconds again, and then the targets of the tier 3 jumps are set to avoid jumps for 2 seconds. That's weird: I think it used to be all the same (5s) earlier in the beta. Oh well.

At the moment, the -DEF is not enhanceable. This is deliberate, as the devs did not want to change the sets slottable in CAK (which would have required more testing and design review before being able to release the change into the beta). It might become slottable in the future; its less that I think anyone thinks its bad to be slottable, and more that I think no one is sure its ok.

Its not just me. The powers quantification project (an early attempt to, among other things, try to measure activation times for powers) measurements made in late 2004 and early to mid 2005 relied on this premise and if recharge worked differently those measurements would have been thrown off. And in 2005 and 2006 some of the measurements badge hunters were making to farm immortal would also have detected if recharge worked differently.

The only bug that could cause an attack to recharge before it was apparently finished casting is if they were set with low or (more likely) zero cast time. A power starts recharging when cast time expires, but the power itself will take however long its animation is coded to take to complete. While the rooted part of the animation is playing, the player can take no other action, and it can seem like the power is still "casting" when its actually just running an animation.

That's the only explanation I have for why somone could have observed a power recharging while it was "casting." It wasn't casting, just animating.

I was mostly commenting on the fact that stopping felonies is not technically a crime. There are a great many liability issues, but even Observe and Report Man/Woman would probably be advised to obtain legal counsel if he doesn't have a secret identity, because even there if he involves himself or herself in too many crimes life is likely to become litigious. I'm assuming a superpowered crimefighter would be more concerned about the rule of law rather than the letter of the law. Otherwise just flying to the scene of the crime could trip over who knows how many city ordinances.

Actually, you don't have to be completely passive. Citizen's arrest laws allow you to use force to stop a felony and detain suspected criminals that you personally witnessed commit a crime until the police arrive, or transport them to a police station. Batman can't hunt down criminals just because he thinks they are criminals, but he can use reasonable force to stop a criminal that is actually in the act of committing a crime. And he can use reasonable force to defend himself from said criminal if that criminal threatens him with physical harm.

The definition of "reasonable" is somewhat subject to context.

In your example, if Batman blocked the exit to the alley and told the criminal that he called the police, and to stay where he was, if the criminal decided to attack Batman to escape, Batman has no legal requirement to get out of the way if he is attempting to make a citizen's arrest.

Actually, the best example of a citizen's arrest model for superheroes is probably Spiderman. That "web them up and leave them for the police" is the very model of using only enough force to restrain without unnecessary harm that is the requirement for a citizen's arrest.