Arcanaville

I long time ago, when I first signed up to play the game, the game client asked me to pick a server, and I picked the one on the top of the list.

And here I am.

That's like asking what would happen if you wore your loudest Hawaiian shirt to the Exotic Erotic Ball.

Based on how they roll, I think that will have limited deterrence value.

Difficult to say. Based on my understanding, the 250 should run Ultra Mode in some fashion, but my guess is that it'll be somewhere between low-end Ultra Mode and medium-range Ultra Mode, depending on whether Ultra Mode ends up more texture bound or pixel fill bound.

Positron says the GTX 260 is probably a "middle of the road" performer in Ultra Mode. The 250 seems to have comparable texture performance, but a much lower pixel fill rate. That's forming the basis for my guestimate that the performance will lie somewhere between the low end of Ultra and the middle of Ultra. It should at least run Ultra at some level because it appears to have support for the latest OpenGL rev (version 3.2) and Ultra Mode is probably targeted a bit lower than that (somewhere between 2 and 3 would be most people's guess I think).

The classic non-positional psi attacks you can face are:

Mesmerize
Dominate
Total Domination
Blind
Terrify

These are more common than many people think, especially in the later game; Carnies and Rikti in particular wield them, as well as a lot of special critters and AVs.

Less common, but occasionally wielded by things like AVs and other special critters are:

Deceive
Levitate
Mass Hypnosis

Succubi tend to have special non-positional psionic attacks.

In terms of melee/psi, outside of player powers (which you could face in the AE with custom critters) are the attacks wielded by the various Spectres: some of their melee attacks seem to be typed melee/psi/neg. These would be defended by the 40% negative defense in the build in question than the 23% psionic defense, though.

I was being a bit facetious there. It probably happened around the end of '03 or maybe the beginning of '04. SR was *literally* changed in the go-live build as far as I've been told.

The manual is a hodge-podge of half-truths so that description doesn't *prove* when the actual change in philosophy was made. The manual looks like it was written by someone who was told what to write but didn't play the game or understand the mechanics well enough to avoid many fundamental misunderstandings**. Its less that description and more they had to actually change the secondaries to their current form as part of that philosophical change, and that didn't happen overnight.



** The way the Prima Guides were written could serve as textbook examples of how *not* to communicate technical information for documentation purposes, for those that actually know how they were written. And no, I really can't say.

Critter damage modifiers are designed so that you take a lot less damage at range than in melee, all other things being equal. The ranged damage scale is generally 60% of the melee one, so being at range you'll likely take 40% less damage.

The problem is that is not singularly enough to outrace bosses in a slugfest. But it does do something (there are other complications, though, that make this less of an advantage than the damage modifiers alone portray: but the effect is still there).

I should also point out that throughout the history of the game, defensive powers in general and super reflexes in particular have been described in exactly the same way: they help, but only kind of, only sometimes, and not when it really counts. One thing I'm generally glad about is that I no longer have to deal with the mathematically dubious assertion that defense only helps "sometimes" while resistance helps "always."

Shadowfall is tagged to ignore Strength buffs and debuffs. You can buff it with enhancements, but not with global (player) strength changes. Most powers that have a +Res component to them are tagged this way to prevent damage buffs on the player from simultaneously increasing the Resistance buffs.

I made one of those in I14 beta and they took it away from me.

It sort of works.

I wasn't in the beta, but over the years I've become very well informed by people who were in the beta. There's also Jack's dev diaries which document a lot of the early design thinking:

- September 17, 2003.


I've been told that the change from "Melee" to "Support" happened right before launch, probably on the same day Super Reflexes traded in most of its defenses for a lucky rabbit's foot and some rosary beads.

According to Castle, and I'm paraphrasing, Blaster tools are meant to keep enemies out of melee, throw things out of melee, or kill them while in melee. Moreover, that design position has never really changed over time.

The whole "ranged-focused killer" thing was always very iffy. Take my Energy/Energy Blaster. In the primary she has access to three single target ranged attacks (power bolt, power blast, power burst) not including the snipe. She has two AoEs: one short ranged cone and one long range AoE. Rounding out the set is a self-buff (Aim), a ranged soft mez (power push) and a nuke (Nova).

However, in the secondary she has access to three legitimate melee attacks (energy punch, bonesmasher, and total focus) and one power most don't count as a melee attack but does a surprising amount of damage (power thrust does scale 0.8 damage, which is a higher amount of DPA than power bolt used to have). It also has one melee mez (Stun) and four self buffs (Build Up, Conserve Power, Power Boost, Boost Range). Its questionable as to whether En/En has significantly better ranged options than melee options, unless you allow for both torrent and EB to start hitting lots of targets.

Although */En got a lot of the blapper love, that was mostly on the strength of the mag 4 total focus. In terms of pure damage, */Elec was probably always better (and as a long time En/En it pains me to say that). It does have a ranged single target immobilize. But it also has four legitimate melee attacks (Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, Thunder Strike, Shocking Grasp) plus a PBAoE damage aura (lightning field) plus two PBAoE mez/debuffs (Lightning Clap, Power Sink), plus Build Up. Its unquestionably far more focused on killing things in melee range than trying to keep things at range or eject things from melee. And Energy Manipulation and Electric Manipulation are the rule, not the exceptions to the rule. Only Devices is really far more focused on supporting ranged offense than supporting melee offense (some people back in the day called Devices the only "true" Blaster secondary because of that).

As you point out, they started off Ranged/Melee. Although they were eventually changed descriptively to Ranged/Support, they are in actual fact Ranged/Melee-Support.


Ice Blasters and Sonic Blasters can't do that. They can do significantly better things than that, though.

Fortunately for symmetry's sake, you wouldn't lose that bet. Actually, blaster secondaries have a very precise operational definition, that unfortunately is tied to a completely vague one. Blaster secondaries are supposed to support the blaster archetypal definition with tools other than ranged damaging attacks (which are the purview of the primary). The problem is, if you aren't 100% sure what blasters are supposed to be doing, there's no way to be 100% sure how the secondaries are supposed to help.

Single target melee attacks are a safe bet. Self damage buffs are a safe bet. Self other buffs are mostly ok. Ranged utility is iffy, but usually ok in small amounts. Then it becomes a crap-shoot, because you are now approaching the very fuzzy edge of the archetype definition. You can have burn, but not burn's immobilize protection. You can have cloaking device, but not superior invisibility. Thunder Strike, but not Foot Stomp. Sometimes, your guess is as good as mine.

The best way to represent my opinion on this is to say that some design philosophies want very wide "borders" between classes to distinguish them, and I don't.

Suppose that we decide blasters should be something, and scrappers should be something else. Visually, we could design the archetypes like this:

|<--- Blasters --->|<--- no mans land --->|<--- Scrappers --->|

In other words, even the most blastery scrapper was very far away from the most scrappery blaster: the two classes don't come anywhere near each other. This makes all scrappers, as a class, very distinct from all blasters, as a class. All Blasters play more like each other than they do like any scrapper.

I'm more of a:

|<--- Blasters --->|<--->|<--- Scrappers --->|

I prefer enough safety margin buffer to make sure an accident doesn't make a scrapper into a blaster, but I *don't* mind that there might be Blasters that play more like some Scrappers than some Blasters. The most scrappery Blaster at the far right edge of their allowed behavior is closer in style and performance to the most blastery Scrapper at the far left edge of their allowed behavior than it is the most blastery Blaster at the far left edge of their performance, and that's fine with me.

I absolutely don't want this:

|<- buffer ->|<- B ->|<- buffer ->|<- buffer ->|<- S ->|<- buffer ->|

In other words, placing all blasters and all scrappers very close to dead center of their defined range, with lots of buffer all around them making them as far away from all other classes as possible. This means most, possibly nearly all conceptual options are actually disallowed.

The problem with CO, by the way, is that in my opinion their system is essentially this:

|<------ Scrappers ------>|
|-|<-------------------- Blasters -------------------->|

Not exactly. I direct you to this answer I just wrote in the bounty hunter thread.

Summary: benumb doesn't specifically reduce mez magnitude or resistance, it actually debuffs mez strength. That will affect the green mito's ability to buff itself with its own mez protection power. In the case of the green mito, I'm pretty sure (based on my recollection) it will reduce the magnitude of that protection. However, I should point out that if I remember correctly, green mitos also have mez resistance, and that mez resistance will resist not only all mez attacks (cutting their duration), but Benumb's attempt to debuff mez strength also.

Also, on the subject of mez resistance, I believe player mez resistance caps were increased to 100.0 (10,000%) but I don't think critter mez resistance caps were increased at the same time.

The aforementioned Benumb and Weaken both debuff the magnitude of protection powers.

This is tricky, because they *also* debuff the *duration* of mez attacks. This can be confusing to players that don't understand how the game engine actually works.

Benumb and Weaken both reduce mez Strength - sleep, hold, stun, etc. Strength increases or decreases your ability to affect those attributes, just like damage strength makes your attacks hit harder. Hold enhancements increase your Hold Strength for the purposes of that one power that they are slotted into.

Importantly, enhancements and strength buffs/debuffs cannot be told to affect the Magnitude or the Duration of a power (specifically, an effect of a power). Its actually the *power* that gets to decide that. Every effect of a power is tagged as to whether its a Duration effect or a Magnitude effect. The damage in attacks is essentially always tagged as a Magnitude effect, so buffing damage strength increases the damage of those powers. Mez effects in mez attacks are almost always tagged as Duration effects, so Strength increases or decreases the duration of those effects.

Benumb and Weaken reduce your hold/stun/sleep/immobilize Strength, so when you attempt to use a hold attack or a sleep attack, the effects will have reduced duration. But mez protection powers like Integration and Practiced Brawler are *not* tagged that way: the protection effects are tagged as Magnitude effects not Duration effects. As a result, when you debuff a player's mez strength, you debuff the Magnitude of those effects.

In PvP, those powers offer Resistance and not Protection, but they are still tagged as "Magnitude" effects so debuffing them with Benumb or Weaken reduces their resistance values, not their duration.

(Its possible to debuff the duration of a toggle effect in theory, because all toggles are actually periodic "pulsing" powers: they apply an effect for a certain duration every tick of the toggle. Integration, for example, applies a mez protection effect every half second that lasts for three quarters of a second. Because the effect overlaps, the protection is "continuous." But if it were possible to debuff that duration by 50%, it would be granting a protection buff for 0.375 seconds every 0.5 seconds and there would be flickering gaps in the protection. But since the mez protection effects in Integration are Magnitude effects, not Duration effects, its literally impossible for any power possessed by anything to affect the Duration of those protection ticks. No player, no critter, not even a dev with debug rights can do that. That may even be *why* those effects were tagged as magnitude effects at the beginning of time: to prevent them from ever being debuffed in that way in the future even by accident.)


In any case, the answer to the general question: is it possible to debuff the magnitude protection of mez protection powers? The answer is yes, if the protection powers themselves are designed as magnitude effects, and most are. Conversely, there is no way, in the current game engine, to hit a target with a debuff that would turn all their mag 3 holds into mag 2 holds (short of some crazy power flag trickery). Holds have duration-based effects, and you can only debuff their duration. It is literally impossible for Castle to put any number anywhere that would create a power that could debuff the hold magnitude of (nearly all) hold attacks.

Each power (each effect in each power, actually) gets to decide for itself what you can buff or debuff, and it has to pick exactly one thing: magnitude or duration. It cannot pick both (or neither).

At the moment, that's true. But I'm wondering if Ultra Mode introduces them. I find it difficult to believe that the game client will, say, render water with the standard rendering code and then overlay Ultra Mode on top of it. I suppose you could do clever things with the OpenGL state engine that wouldn't require multiple rendering paths, but is that the best way to handle advanced graphics like that? I don't know how this is conventionally done, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do it that way myself.

You can kinda do that now. You can pick on greys and level at 10% of the speed of the rest of us non-tree sloths in nearly perfect safety. A -3 would have to be a Ring Mistress to be a threat.


Not nearly to the degree I think would be a good idea.

No idea. But my non-sequitur klaxon just got a lot easier to find.

Yeah, this is all speculative based on Sam's Faust C-41 from Advent Rising:



Its supposed to be a "concussion pistol" with "armor piercing rounds." Sam was just asking what a "concussive armor-piercing round" might actually be. Its supposed to fire a 0.90 caliber round, which is practically half a grenade.


Of course, firing grenade-sized armor-piercing rounds doesn't even register a three on the projectile weird-o-meter. Shooting pulses of light that make you invisible:



is at least a seven.

(Michael Crichton: inventor of the "placate" effect and the one of the greatest adolescent boy fantasy gadgets of all time.)

You aren't being forced to side switch. There is nothing in Going Rogue that will force you to lose anything, or change anything. They may provide some mechanism to transfer things over besides what's in your pockets, they may not. But the one thing I would bet real money on is that its extremely unlikely they would add special code just to allow single-player SG bases to be teleported from one side to the other.

In any event, anyone taking any action now, to prepare for Going Rogue later, is taking their fate into their own hands. If you do something which later turns out to be deleterious after Going Rogue's feature set is frozen and released, you will have no one to blame but yourself. I would wait until Going Rogue launches before doing anything to my characters that was irreversible in preparation for GR.

There have been lots of posts over the years by players who said basically that they heard/thought/read/guessed the devs were going to do X, so they deleted/purged/sold/moved/erased/swapped/rerolled something, and now they are upset because it turns out they were wrong and believe they are entitled to compensation for being wrong. Don't be one of them. Speculate all you want, but don't act based on anything you read on the forums. None of use without the Red Name knows anything about side-switching authoritatively, and even the Red Names can't be certain, because they are in fact still working on it, and designs change during development.

Perhaps half of all the features of the invention system and the markets changed during I9 beta, and a significant number of the invention sets changed as well. So even if you had the absolute inside word on the feature set for Issue 9, if you made plans based on that info prior to I9 Open Beta, those plans were probably messed up by I9 release.

If I were a professional game designer designing a game from scratch, I'd probably focus a lot of my attention on core balancing concepts like this.

Suppose I have two attacks: one does 100 points of damage per shot, and the other does 10 points of damage per shot but also stops the target from shooting back for 4 seconds. And lets say recharge is out of the picture: both attacks have no cooldown or recharge to worry about. All attacks take 2 seconds to cast.

If I have 1000 points of health and attack a critter with 100 health and fires 10 points of damage per shot back at me per shot (also 2s per shot, no recharge) then I'm going to kill it in the first shot. It makes no sense to use attack #2, because there's no reason not to use maximum firepower in this case.

But if I attack a critter with 2000 points of health and also has a 100 point per shot attack, now I'm going to lose if I use maximum firepower. I can only trade shots with the critter if I have more health than it does, because we are both firing with the same strength attack. So one way for me to defeat this critter is to use attack #2 over and over again until the critter reaches 990 health (which will take 110 shots and 220 seconds, by the way) and then blast away. Trading shots I can now defeat the critter before he defeats me, but it'll take about 120 shots and 240 seconds (4 minutes). That's not the best strategy solo, though. A better strategy is to fire attack 2, then fire attack 1, then repeat. This keeps the critter idle but with an average damage output of 27.5 dps. After ten cycles of this (40 seconds) the critter will be left with 900 health, and we can now unload, taking nine more shots to defeat him (18s). Total time: 58s. That's only 18s longer than the optimal time.

In effect, when I'm soloing I might have to forgo my maximum damage output (50dps) in favor of a lower output (about 35dps) to stay alive. In a team, I could drop the utility attacks for the max damage ones. So my baseline is X, and my teaming peak is about 45% higher. Perhaps that could form the basis of the definition of a blaster: has the best damage, but isn't the best soloer and has to sacrifice some of it to solo without dying. A scrapper might work out to be 42 dps all the time, because their passive defenses don't require an offensive sacrifice. But conversely, they don't gain much from having those defenses become redundant.

As ultra-simplistic as this exercise appears, its a workable foundation for designing something like a blaster powerset that has quantifiable balances between offensive damage and offensive damage mitigation. If they were designed this way, I could tell you something like: Blasters are designed to have a particular soloing speed, but be able to unleash 200% of their soloing damage output when teaming, if their team can keep them alive and eliminate the need for the blaster to use its own mitigation tools. Scrappers always solo at 125% of the damage that Blasters are calibrated to deliver, but can only increase to 150% of that level of damage in teams. Thus, Scrappers are better soloers, but Blasters are the ultimate offensive specialists given sufficient support to reach that potential.

This sort of thing isn't impossible, but it requires the game implementation bend to the game design philosophy, not the other way around. If I were Castle, I would try to do this but be ultimately limited in how much of it I could really do. If I was Positron, I would make it the long term goal of the design of the game, but there would be practical limitations on how fast I could get there.

If I were Jack, we'd have launched that way if I had to set Geko on fire to do it.


And by the way, since I hate homogenization so much you might wonder why I would design a game which was so precisely defined by numbers in this way. And the reason is that I actually *want* some powersets to do a little more damage, and some to have a little more mitigation, for variety sake. But to my way of thinking, that's impossible to do unless you actually *know* how much of each your powerset designs possess. Its fine to believe this is a magic art that cannot be quantified, but I'd rather *know* that Fire Blast has 125% of normal blaster damage and only 40% of average blaster offensive mitigation than to just guess. It would be even better if that was my intent. You can't quantify everything, but you can at least try to make sure you quantify what your players can quantify. If something is truly unquantifiable, by definition you can't possibly be blamed for unbalancing it. So that which can be quantified gets balanced quantitatively, and that which cannot be distributed qualitatively and we call it a day.

Don't go agreeing with me too quickly. In my world, if you focus all your attention on the optimal balance of offense and personal defense, you will solo better and probably faster than someone that diverts any attention elsewhere. And the difference could be sizable.

It is that specific point that the disagreement seems to be rooted in. I don't believe "soloing" is a specific "ability" that everyone should have the same basic amount of. I believe soloing is an activity that people can choose to build towards. Everyone should have some baseline *minimum* amount of it, but past that point there could be a wide spread in soloing effectiveness depending on the choices players make.

And some choices are likely to open some doors while closing others. That is a critical difference between what I'm thinking of in my head and what Champions Online implements. You cannot pick both branches in the VEATs simultaneously. That makes the choice significant. No choice is very significant in CO, because every option (after a small prerequisite hurdle is achieved) stays on the table indefinitely. That's what I meant when I said "somewhere between VEATs and CO" and its I think another point of disagreement we have in terms of what we see as the next step in evolving something like CoX.