Arcanaville

... without good reason. In effect, the cottage rule says that the threshold for mucking with the mechanics of a power in a way that makes it impossible to use it like it was before in at least broad terms is to declare a situation essentially broken in a way that only changing it can fix.

The devs didn't ignore the cottage rule when they made Singularities, for example: they simply decided the need for them outweighed the need to preserve the cottage rule for Gravity Control at the time.

No. The crit buff actually starts about 1.3 seconds after *activation* of EC, not at the end of EC. There's only about a half second from the end of EC where you can activate an attack and be buffed. And in actual testing, it seems that if you haven't started queuing the attack by the time Eagle's Claw visually looks like its about to hit the target, the delay from the time you try to start the attack until when the command reaches the servers will be enough to cause the attack to fall outside the buff. In other words, the only safe bet is to queue an attack while Eagle's Claw is running, relatively early.

I've sent all my timing calculations and test results to Castle, and I'm hoping to squeeze at least another quarter of a second duration on the buff to buy more time to get that next attack off. I think that part of the problem is that what we see is delayed slightly from what the server knows (this is not quite the same thing as "lag" but a rather different offset) which exacerbates the problem, but I haven't fully quantified that yet. My hunch is that there's an additional quarter of a second in there to be had, meaning it would be safe to increase the buff duration by a full half second. Doesn't sound like much, but it would make a big difference: it would double the margin for error on starting the next attack.

The bottom line is that the intent is to only buff one attack, and the timing reflects that. But its just a bit too aggressively short in my opinion.

I've also read that its almost impossible to stack Power Siphon damage buffs more than twice.

First thing I suggested when I found out the devs were even doing customizable animations. But darn it, the way they are implemented makes this difficult, though.

If only the customizable animations used prefix bits rather than specifying their own bits directly in completely separate VFX block, a bitmask setting mapped to a UI element in the customization screen could have been used to map to the ALT bits setting any or all of the simultaneously, which would have forced the animation sequencer to choose one randomly as all of their bits would be set, and then...

Er... I mean: this is non-trivial.


Put me down for giving CAK something a little less ACK, alternates to the tricorder, and more visceral animations for assassin's strikes.


What I'd like to see, though, is some leverage applied. There are a lot of 0.83 second unarmed melee animations: basically punch attacks. Since there are a lot of powers that share that animation, it makes sense to make alternatives to that punch and make them things that could be applicable to all those sets. So by making three or four of those, a whole bunch of sets would then have access to multiple animations, getting more bang for buck. Things like that should be kept in mind: every time you make a custom animation for a power that shares that animation with another power, you're actually getting a two for one, or three for one, or more.


...Oh dear god not another cross reference. I didn't even finish the Fiery Embrace one yet.

Actually, with the average value of Power Siphon I measured, KM actually roughly ties Claws on endurance efficiency.

The only reason I'm hedging on single target is that I haven't done all the computations across enough recharge domains to be sure. If I had to bet money though, I would bet that at least Scrapper KM beats Scrapper Claws in ST with power siphon's average performance and without counting insta-recharge, which would help KM even more (by a little).

Claws isn't that much faster cast time wise, although it does have recharge discounts. At levels of recharge higher than SO slotted recharge, that becomes less of a problem for KM.


And once you say "AoE is always better except for fringe gamers" you've just placed yourself outside the realm I'm usually willing to discuss when it comes to set design. I won't usually argue the point, but I will generally reject it out of hand.

My guess is that an actual axe kick would look boring and be too quick given the animation time requirements. Actual Axe Kicks have to happen almost instantaneously or else they are suicidal. In expanding the animation, they made something that was longer, but also weirder.

In the past, it was also actually longer by about half a second: there was an even longer pause in mid kick which made it look visually even more goofy. BaB sped it up a bit when he tightened up the MA animations back around I11 or so (when he was also working on weapon redraw buffering).

There was never really any contrary rule. I don't see KM's stun durations out of line of some other sets, except for MA itself which at this point I'm filing away under "inexplicable" and calling it a day.

And those go back a long, long time. In July of '04, with the game barely two months old, people were posting "I remember back in the day when there was no level 50..." Sometimes in jest, sometimes not.

I think people were even reminiscing about beta shortly after launch, saying things like I remember back in the day when Illusion did no damage, or I remember when there was no game and just the old discussion forum. Then they would start muttering about cows and sabercat and other things no one else had heard of and have to be taken away.

Just to be perfectly clear, all accuracy *buffs* are added together. This includes accuracy invention buffs, accuracy enhancements slotted into a power, and accuracy buffing powers (like focused accuracy).

However, they do *not* add to the intrinsic accuracy of a power. If a power has 1.05 accuracy (i.e. +5% accuracy) intrinsicly in its definition, that is *multiplied*. So if you have three 10% accuracy buffs, slot 33% accuracy, and use an archery attack with 1.155 accuracy, your net accuracy becomes:

1.155 * (1 + 0.33 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1) = 1.88265, or about +88%.

Stalkers get Build Up, not Power Siphon, and their version of Concentrated Strike insta-recharges Build Up instead of Power Siphon. In both the scrapper case and the stalker case, Concentrated Strike does not crit for damage like scrapper and stalker attacks usually do: the insta-recharge is there as an alternative to criting for damage. Brute and Tanker versions of concentrated strike do not have the insta-recharge effect (because they had no crit to replace).

That may be so. But unless KM has conclusively higher single target damage at zero recharge, then its only true for sufficiently high levels of recharge.

Given sufficiently high recharge and good use of Power Siphon, I think so. But Claws DPA has significant advantages, especially with regard to Focus. If Focused Burst was as fast as Focus, I would be more inclined to give the unambiguous edge to KM. Claws still blows it away on AoE of course.

Fair warning: those lower cast times were backed out two or three builds ago: these are the current cast and root times for all the Kinetic Melee powers as of last week:

Quick Strike: 0.83s
Body Blow: 1.07s
Smashing Blow: 1.2s
Burst: 2.67s
Focused Burst: 2.0s
Repulsing Torrent: 2.0s
Concentrated Strike: 2.83s
Power Siphon: 1.93s (no rooting)
Taunt/Challenge: 1.67s (1.5s root)

Placate (stalker): 1.5s (1.33s root)
Build Up (stalker): 1.93s (no rooting)

All the powers now seem to have the same cast time and root time except where noted.

Also, small jargon note: what Real Numbers displays under "activation time" is what the devs call "Cast time." Its the amount of time the power is designed to prevent you from activating another power. "Root time" is the amount of time that the power's animation is flagged to prevent you from taking *any* action, including allowing you to move (under control: you can still fall or slide while "rooted").

And that early experiment he doesn't like to talk about, Frankenberry.

Cursory examination says all primary, secondary, and epic/ancillary attacks seem to have the fiery embrace damage component added. Pool attacks don't have it, and cannot be boosted by Fiery Embrace.

Its not a question of changing FE to work with all attacks: all attacks intended to work with FE must be individually changed to do so.

Someone should really do an extensive cross-check to make sure everything that is supposed to actually has the FE attribmods with the correct scale damage.


Sigh...

I got tired of waiting. And once we venture away from damage-related adjustments, my version of "doing it right" probably wouldn't match yours anyway, so at the end of another year of waiting, someone was bound to be even more disappointed.

The mechanic works a bit differently than the way the combo system works for dual blades. Short answer: you probably could, but only by redoing the effect in a completely different and more time consuming way.

Shorten? Last I checked, the stun duration was exactly the same as it always has been.

First of all, I would rather chew off my left arm than add another AoE to MA just to make it like all the other sets with cones.

Second, while I can appreciate that some people will dislike the loss of the 100% stun in Cobra Strike, I should point out that now Cobra Strike is a legitimate attack in your chain, and rather than having to pause damage periodically to deal CS you can get that stun for free, and it is going to be generated almost twice as often due to CS's much lower recharge. So while it's been reduced to 75%, an MA/DA is now going to be emitting a lot more stun mag overall, with or without EC.

However, no change can please everyone, and I don't expect that this will break that rule.

There were limits to how creative the changes could get because there wasn't time to add new mechanics for the powerset. It was use the mechanics that exist, or nothing.

Still, the single target damage of the set has improved, the AoE potential of the set has improved without adding another AoE and turning it into just another two AoE melee set, EC has a unique effect that doesn't even cost anything (the enhanced critical effect adds no endurance or recharge to the power, although the stalker version is different: it is straight-up boosted in damage with a commensurate increase in endurance and recharge, but with the net result of more alpha strike damage), and CAK isn't an embarrassment anymore. Plus the lower level performance of the set is greatly improved by not being saddled with a mez-carrier instead of an actual attack, and CS and CK are now essentially interchangeable attacks with different effects: those who do not like the knockback in CK can now swap it without cost for CS.

All of that without radically altering the nature of the powerset for those already familiar with it. All together, that's not bad as powerset revamps go.

Its also a good attack to use prior to using Dragon's Tail, if DT has more than one or two targets around to hit, because the damage boost of the enhanced critical is amplified by Dragon's Tail being a PBAoE.

The attack doesn't have to be queued immediately, but from testing unless you have a very laggy connection the next attack has to be queued prior to EC's kicking animation striking the target (if you are using that animation). If you initiate the next attack after that instant and while the backflip is occuring, its generally too late.

The effect probably needs to be about a half second longer or so at least.

I'm not exactly sure what you just said here, but I believe your understanding of how the tohit system works and what is happening in the game is faulty. Especially the part about being artificially "corrected" to 50% to hit. The random number generator generates a random number from zero to one. The tohit system multiplies that by 100 when it displays it to you in the combat chat (although my suspicion is that it just uses the fractional number in its calculations). That roll is then checked against your required chance to hit. Lower, and you hit. Higher, and you miss. There are no "correction factors" applied to the random roll. Every number comes up basically just as often, except for the extremely minor glitches noted above.

The streakbreaker breaks miss streaks based on what your chance to hit is and how many misses you're allowed to have before the streakbreaker kicks in. For example, if your chance to hit is higher than 90%, then the streakbreaker will kick in after one miss. Miss once, and the next swing (assuming it is also at higher than 90% tohit) will be forced to be a hit without bothering to roll anything.. If your net chance to hit the target is between 80% and 90%, then you are allowed up to two misses before the streakbreaker forces the next swing to be a hit, again without rolling anything. And so on.


Not really. First of all, that is theoretically gameable, because its no longer random. Second of all, a sequence in which no number ever repeats is the exact opposite of a random sequence. Third, its impractical because of the precision of the numbers required: the game computes random rolls and requirements to basically four decimal places (two decimal places in percentage notation). That means the random "tables" would have to be ten thousand entries long just to encompass one cycle.

Under no set of circumstances is this remotely a good idea. It would be better if all attacks were autohit than to do something like this, and I think having all attacks autohit is a bad idea in general. This is worse.


Net Chance to hit = Accuracy * (ToHit - Defense)

I actually tripped over that very bug when I first wrote my random checker for CoH a long, long time ago. In python, you get this oddity:

a = "0.23"
b = "0.24"
c = "0.25"

d = float(a)
e = float(b)
f = float(c)

What pops out is:

>>> d
0.23000000000000001
>>> e
0.23999999999999999
>>> f
0.25
>>>

So, int(float(x)*100) ends up being 23, 23, and 25 for those three numbers. Which means that code fragment never sees "24" as a roll, even though there are such rolls. Which was an obvious error once I saw it, and required adjusting the code to eliminate the round/truncation error. The question is, does the to hit system contain such an error? If it does, its a much more subtle one than that. But again, unlikely to matter to almost anyone in actual play.

More or less. The statistical oddity occurs with an anomalous pattern in the digit representing the hundredth of a percent (basically, the last one). Its not completely inconsistent with a binary random generator being asked to generate rounded decimal numbers, but I haven't looked closely enough yet. I only had time to look at the automatically generated correlated values.

So in other words, when you roll 67.18%, the problem exists with the "8." It seems slightly more likely to be odd than even for certain ranges, and slightly more likely to be even than odd for other ranges, in a repeating pattern. If anyone can figure out how to exploit that, or even detect that without using a correlation analysis, I'm all ears.

Except for 0.00 and 100.00, every possible random roll from 0.01 to 99.99 seems to come up equally often, and no matter what you roll, each number still seems equally likely to come up after that roll. There's no tendency towards streaks, opposites, or other patterns that I've come up with so far.

When I have more data collected, in a couple days, I'm going to do a better entropy test, a spectrum test, a differential test, and a set of sliding window tests. If those all pass, it basically means they are using the rand() like they are supposed to, and no one got the bright idea to implement their own, seed it stupidly, reuse numbers, or otherwise tamper with it, which means its good enough so as to be effectively random. If the only thing that fails is the LSB error above, its still good enough for no player to have a beef with it, because no player could possibly detect that.