Arcanaville
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Quote:Before Castle's cottage post, I used to quote the devs (in particular Castle) as stating that when powersets are examined, the devs are extremely reluctant to radically change how a power worked, on the presumption that lots of players probably want it to work that way or have developed playstyles that incorporated that functionality. They will, of course, change the strength of powers for balance purposes, but they are loathe to remove a feature from a power altogether, or significantly alter its activation mechanics (i.e. changing a toggle to a click).Originally Posted by Jade_Dragon
Coined by Positron, I believe, or maybe Castle. To paraphrase, he said something along the lines of, "We could change the power 'Build Up' so that it builds up a cottage at your location, but that would be confusing, so we won't do that." That became known as the "Cottage Rule".
The basic idea is that a power must still be understandable to anyone who is currently using it. While it's usage may be changed, it doesn't end up doing something totally different.
This rule came up when I made a set of suggestions for improving Super Reflexes and Invulnerability, in particular by suggesting fundamental alterations to Evasion and Resist Energies/Resist Elements. I asked for and received permission from Castle to essentially quote this design rule: changing the purpose of a power (besides adding functionality) or altering the order of the powers in a set are changes of last resort.
People quoted me for a while, until Castle made his infamous cottage post, whereupon the rule became known as the cottage rule, where Castle essentially stated that if a power does Build Up's effects today, it should not summon a cottage tomorrow. Its an exaggeration of the rule I mention above.
Its not a silly or obscure rule. The fundamental point is that before the devs either remove functionality from a power, change the way it functions, or alter the order in which the players receive the power, it must be demonstrated to their satisfaction that (as I understand it):
a. Some change is mandatory to address an issue the devs agree is a sufficiently high priority
b. No other change that doesn't remove functionality or alter order will work
c. The change itself unambiguously addresses the problem.
Just demonstrating that suggestion A would be appreciated by more players than current power B is not sufficient to satisfy these criteria. MoG is a case of a situation satisfying the cottage rule requirements: the devs felt the issue of MoGs problematic mechanics was a sufficiently high priority to address, those issues automatically mandated a change to the power itself, and the change was designed to address the specific issues the power created. Energize is not a case of the cottage rule being applied at all, because the devs added functionality while preserving the endurance discount benefit of the original power.
The spirit of the rule applied to dimension shift states that before the devs change the power to something else completely different, it must first be demonstrated that the power itself is problematic (debatable, but at least a reasonable assertion), that the suggested change would be beneficial and resolve the problem (not difficult), and no other suggestion that preserves the intangibility aspect of the power is likely to work. The last part is the difficult hurdle, and I did suggest a possible way to address the problems of foe intangible powers without eliminating the actual foe intangibility aspect of the power for people who use it as such. So I believe its not true that all other possible solutions have been reasonably addressed. -
Quote:I'm currently working on something else, but I'll make it a point to update the mitigation spreadsheet to I16, hopefully in a couple days.Originally Posted by Rejolt
Ok, Arcanaville, clean up on Stat Line 3!!
Can you punch up some numbers to see if it's enough?
At first blush, though, the numbers seem reasonable. "Enough" is subjective: in my opinion the recovery, drain, and offensive capabilities of the set are enough to mean that it doesn't have to be "equal" to the other sets in the area of direct damage mitigation, which means even if it lags the other sets on my spreadsheet, that doesn't mean it lags overall.
Prior to Energize, it lagged *enough* for me to state that it was highly unlikely that drain and recovery were enough to make up the huge amount of numerical ground. But energize seems to put Electric within striking distance of the other sets, and to a first order approximation that's all it really needs to be fair competition for the other damage mitigation sets. -
Quote:I interpret the definition of the term "mitigate" ("making less harsh") to include the case where the consequences, and not the literal magnitude, of the thing being mitigated are reduced, as in the phrase "mitigating circumstances."Originally Posted by Starsman_NA
The dictionary defines Mitigate as:
1 : to cause to become less harsh or hostile : mollify
Both of these denote reduction of pain, not removal of pain.
2 a : to make less severe or painful : alleviate b : extenuate
Now, Alleviate itself, noted as a synonym of 2a, happens to have two meanings on its own:a : to make (as suffering) more bearable <her sympathy alleviated his distress>
b : to partially remove or correct <measures taken to alleviate a labor shortage> synonyms see relieve
However, mostly I only care to the extent that I'm clear. If everyone knows what I'm talking about, that's all that matters.
FYI, when I first jumped into the fray on damage calculations, a common forum assertion was that only Resistance was true "damage mitigation" because Defense doesn't reduce the damage of incoming attacks, it only causes some of them to miss. The notion of what "mitigate" is defined to be has a lot of lattitude for debate. Its just not really productive debate in my opinion. -
Quote:I'm fully aware of the intent of the adage. However, neither it nor its fundamental intent are always applicable. For example, thinking the customer is always right is why the Big Five are now the Big Four. And in the IT professional services arena, "the customer is always right" is not a motto, its a punch line. As much as that adage ought to operate in some industries, it should equally be discarded in others.Originally Posted by Kruunch
Arc anyone can come up with a scenario where any axiom is not 100% correct. That's the nature of axioms ... they apply as a thought process, not a literal.
The customer *is* always right. Your (the merchant's) job is to make sure they are "right" in whatever you and the customer come to agree upon. If you've done your job correctly the customer is *always* right.
If you're the fry guy at a White Castle and nerdrage over what anonymous fools say on a message board, then I'm thinking you not only don't get it but don't want it either.
Shrug.
There's no "rage" behind that statement; its a simple statement of fact, backed by many years of professional reputation built on the notion that if the customer was right, they wouldn't need me.
Also, now that I think about it, I've never actually stepped foot in a White Castle before. -
Quote:It depends. If your job is to take direction, then the customer's direction is always right. However, if your job is to provide expertise, then the customer is not always right. They are paying you to be always right.Originally Posted by Kruunch
The customer is always right is an axiom used by those who understand that they are depending on other people for their livelihood. Failing to understand this is why I assume your management experience is in the past tense.
My motto is not "the customer is always right" but something closer to "the customer pays us to prevent them from being wrong." -
Quote:If you have logs of a level 26 missing a level 10 three times in a row without being debuffed or the level 10 being *highly* defense buffed, post logs. That would be consistent with a bug in the streakbreaker.Originally Posted by GibberingLunatic
They are credible cause its happened, several times where I would even miss a level 10 3 times in a row.
Anything short of actual logs, however, is simply going to be dismissed, and with good reason. Every time such logs are requested, they are virtually never actually produced. I'm very willing to investigate *any* accuracy error in the game that can be substantiated, but none have been in a very very long time**. Since it is a trivial matter to produce chat logs (even after the fact, since /copychat pulls the last 1000 entries) it would not be difficult to generate these logs the next time such an occurance happens.
** By that I mean accuracy issues that were not quickly acknowledged and addressed by the devs. No unacknowledged once have been discovered to my knowledge since the luck/insight inspiration issue. -
Quote:1. The fact that I have questions about making Rest zero-recharge does not imply any of the gibberish you've stated above ("It's fine the way it is so deal with it"). In fact, I've suggested more than once that endurance costs need to be looked at, especially across archetypes.Originally Posted by Vicar
*blink*
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Not really sure what to make of that response.
If I read it correctly your saying that having rest with no recharge (but still all of the crippling penalites) would cause game balance issues.
Um . . . how? If being able to rest whenever you are not fighting instead of having to wait for your bars to regenerate slowly is unbalancing that would mean that speed boost is the most broken mechanic ever to grace the game.
Your example of what that would do to endurance drain I think would be a moot point. Why the heck would you try and rest when critters are actually attacking you. Due to the massive defense and resistance debuff's its basicly a death sentance. So who really cares how it would effect endurance drain. You would be dead before you would find out.
Now common sense would dictate some kind of time would have to elapse between the last combat act you did/recieved and the activation of rest but thats about all I think.
Sorry it just disturbs me when someone who has the ear of the devs and so much of the forums respect posts a response like this. In short what you said boiled down to "It's fine the way it is so deal with it." My tap in the kitchen may leak a bit which does not cause me any real incoveniance but you know what? I still take the time to fix it.
Levels 1 to 10 are not too bad. Levels 11 to 20 are for most players the most painful in the game. IMO due to damage per endurance issues they are even more painful for tanks. Many of you veterans forget too easily the days when you were a noob and throw out responses that basicly equal "Deal with it and learn how to play the game."
The problem with that attitude is that many new players end up with a crippled build that they are forced to grind through the worst levels in the game with till they get to 24 and then they burn one of their only 3 respecs. Yes they can use their second build option to essentially give them a 4th chance and could be used at level 10 but often somewhere between levels 10 and 20 they use this and again make mistakes because they are new, or they simply find out late about stamina and use that build to fit it in because no where in the early levels is their a sign saying "You MUST take the fitness pool if you wish the majority of your characters to have the ability to function for more than 30 seconds of combat."
So my final comment is as follows.
Just because you had to deal with it does not mean a new player today has to deal with it. Where would we be in this world if our ancestors had that mentality?
2. The fact that I actually suggested an option to provide zero-endurance combat options in this very thread should have been a bigger and less easy to miss hint.
3. There are lots of things that are balanced for buffs that are not balanced for solo players of all archetypes. That's why we aren't all walking around with instant healing and elude as inherents.
4. Since the point of discussion is not endurance costs across all levels and all players, but more focused on endurance costs at lower levels for less experienced players, I think it is relevant that zero-recharge rest can be trivially used in between fights providing an option for especially solo players to engage anything so long as it cannot defeat them within the scope of a single spawn. Since the *actual* balancing of the game isn't around what the player can defeat singularly (most of the time) but rather how much they can defeat sustainably this is an important factor to low level balance. Its triply important because the devs may have factored in the endurance bottleneck implicitly when they datamined player progression and altered the XP tables. If zero-recharge rest boosts the performance of enough players, it will skew those datamining numbers. Eventually, that *will* force an XP alteration. Not "may." Will.
5. Separate from the balance issues, we may not want to create situations where the recommended way to deal with a high-order threat in a mission (like say the end of mission boss) is to engage for ten seconds, run away, rest to full, and repeat. Before you say that's silly of course its silly but that's the point: if the system rewards that type of behavior, it can inadvertently encourage it, and with it all the baggage that comes from unrealistic expectations that surround it. This is a lesson I really hope the devs do not need to learn again. -
I'm not sure which alt has the coolest name, but the name I was most surprised I actually got was Crystal Lynn, my Ice/Ice Dominator.
The oddest name I have for an alt is OFFLINE. It was created in the days before global hide.
The only alt I specifically created when a name popped into my head I decided I had to grab (and I haven't really had a chance to play her yet) is Damsel of Distress, my thugs/poison MM. -
Quote:The short answer is probably that this game has so many other endurance-manipulating mechanisms that a zero-recharge rest would trivialize many of them. Its unclear what that does to things like endurance drain, for example. It also significantly alters the value of endurance reduction enhancements and recovery boosts, especially for soloers. Such a change would require a significant amount of thinking and testing for collateral effects, which is not the sort of change the devs like to do without a massive payoff for it, which this change does not appear to have.Originally Posted by Vicar
Ive always wonderd why one really cannot rest whenever they need to. . . I mean really your tired so you stop to gain your breath. Why does rest have a recharge rate. Making rest have no recharge rate would help the low levels tremendously. Many MMO's have a system where if you simply stop moving in between fights your health and endurance( or mana as many of those games call it) automaticly kick into an accelerated recharge rate.
It would also make stamina less of manditory selection than it is now. Heck rest might even be worth a slot or two if the recharge rate was gone or significantly diminished. -
Quote:Actually, I consider your work on Claws (along with Circeus' work on Ice Tankers) to be the exemplar for how to work with the devs on powers suggestions (even if you don't always get what you want out of it).Originally Posted by Stupid_Fanboy
Heh, ditto. My main contributions are long past and well overshadowed by the numbers work by Arcanaville.
That and Iakona giving me the AoE formula were the prime motivators for me actually looking at offensive power balance in the first place. And its possible to infer at least some connection between your Claws work, my work on attack DPA and animation times, and Castle's work on cast time balancing which led to Claws becoming an AoE monster (due to a glitch in Castle's balancing equation); and my repeated suggestions to BaB to look at animation times for MA and BaB's animation/weapon draw shaving which led to all the melee attack sets getting sped up.
Technically, you've managed to buff Claws three times with one suggestion. -
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I'm already on record advocating DPE normalization between archetypes (which I think is an intrinsicly more fair approach overall), but I've often wondered if the "wait for endurance" mechanic shouldn't have been softened by making Brawl cost little or zero endurance. Brawl has a relatively low DPA; at low levels its an interesting power but at higher levels (prior to the advent of IOs) it was largely an orphaned power (although some Tankers and Brutes still used/use it for aggro/fury reasons).
Perhaps the best way to resolve the psychological issue of waiting within the balance limits of the game is to simply remove the endurance costs from Brawl and the Origin ranged power, and perhaps boost the origin power's damage slightly. That would ensure low level players would always have an attack available (within the limits of the recharge of the two powers, which is relatively short), even if they ran out of endurance (and at least one of them ranged). If the DPA of the two attacks is sufficiently low relative to primary/secondary/pool attacks, they then eventually become mostly irrelevant at higher levels when they aren't capable of significantly contributing to the average DPA of normal attack chains.
Interlacing them with primary/secondary attacks would generate continuous attack streams that weren't exclusively focused on Brawl/Origin, but burned much less endurance, so this doesn't preclude using the "real" attack powers altogether. The main objection, that brawl and the origin power are either boring or inconsistent with the rest of the attacks, is an issue that I16 could theoretically address.
(More radically, I used to think that perhaps the best way to resolve this was to radically reduce the endurance costs and decrease the DPA of most archetype's first two attacks, with appropriate changes in powersets to counterbalance. However, that would be problematic today as there are other balance issue intertwined with tier 1/2 attacks such as defiance.) -
Quote:Ironically (because of your upstream post regarding regen activation times) my primary objection to Castle when he introduced the new MoG was that MoG needed to last just a bit longer than 15 seconds: its activation time means the regen scrapper is rooted for 17% of its total protection time (actually, factoring in Arcanatime, its closer to 18.5%). For rather complex balance-calculation reasons, I suggested that MoG's cast time be reduced to 1.97 seconds and its duration increased to 20 seconds, in order to reduce its rooted time to no more than 10% and its total unrooted protection time to at least 18 seconds (there were specific performance calculations also involved, as well as duty-cycle issues).Originally Posted by Umbral_NA
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Maybe if we were using I8 rules, and no IO's existed, WP definitely. But since IO's, its been easy to softcap defense therefore making Regen the winner. WP has the regen rate, but lacks the big heals. On the other hand Strength of Will beats MoG by a long shot. And of course the mitigation.
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Considering how much has to be sacrificed by either secondary in order to achieve the softcap (and it not even possible, iirc, without DA or Parry), I'm not sure you actually know what you're talking about, plus, MoG is much better than Strength of Will.
SoW is 120 sec duration with a hefty end crash, 18.75% +res(s/l), 9.375% +res(all but s/l), an unimprovable 40% uptime, 30% +recov, and a bunch of largely redundant mez protection. MoG is pretty much capped resist and defense to all but psi, a similar degree of largely redundant mez protection, 100% +recov, and 240 sec recharge on a 15 sec duration (6.25% uptime, that can be taken, with IOs, up to 20+% uptime).
SoW might have better uptime, but in every other facet, MoG wins handily. There's a reason a lot of */wps skip SoW while no */regen in his right mind would think of skipping MoG (nor do I think anyone that had it available would skip it). It's quite easily one of the best Scrapper tier 9s out there.
As I pointed out in I11 beta (and Werner seems to have reproduced above) SoW should not be judged in isolation, but stacked onto Willpower. It is its differential performance when used on a slotted Willpower character that should be compared to other tier9 class powers (judged similarly) because that is how its intended to function. And when you do that, SoW generates very respectable overall benefit compared to the average tier9-class power.
Its worth noting that Willpower starts off with about 35% resistance to s/l to begin with: the 29% that SoW adds is not insignificant for that reason: you're at 64% RES to s/l, which is essentially cutting incoming damage nearly in half. So at least for s/l the difference between SoW and MoG is the choice between being twice as strong nearly half the time, or being 4 times as strong less than 20% of the time.
MoG is going to do better in the energy/elemental area, and of course worse in the psionic area.
Incidentally, I don't accept the premise that far more players skip SoW as skip MoG. If I had to bet I would bet that a similar number of players take either. -
Quote:So is this.Originally Posted by Surgepoint
This is a test
(Hmm, going to have to fix signature links next) -
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Perhaps I am just burned out but I have kept my subscription active in support of what I believe has been a truly great game. I just have not logged in for about 6 months and I still find no desire to log back in which is why I have finally canceled my account. I just feel there is nothing I can make anymore that I have not already made.
Like I said the ability to color change completely is what I wanted and would have opened many possibilities in what I could have made. I use that rubies thing as an example. It may be their decision for artistic reasons not to do it, but they lost me because of it. It would be fair to say that they may have lost me after a few months even if they allowed it, but I guess we will never know.
I suppose my problem boils down to the fact that I feel like there is not a single thing in the game that I have not already done or explored, and even the content I have not done doesnt feel different from everything else enough to get me excited. I suppose it's just my time to move on. Owell, I can't really bash the game, I have about 60 months in vet rewards. Can't say I didnt enjoy the time. I just wish there was something they could do that would save me from leaving so that I could enjoy the game again and I was hoping Issue 16 would be it.
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You know... There is a whole boxed expansion coming with several NEW ZONES in it?
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I'm having a serious cognitive dissonance moment here. I hope I'm not having a stroke. -
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Castle's in the Defender forums! *throws a net over him*
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Once in every so many issues, the devs come in and acknowledge that this forum exists. Anything more and then we really start to question why Vigilance hasn't been changed to benefit defenders.
And Castle, add in +recharge(helps damage^H^H^H^H^H^Hbuffing/healing, but not in a broken way) and make Vigilance work solo and the vast amount of hate toward Vigilance would be gone.
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Fixed. Sometimes I think the Defenders need to take Arcana's "How to Trick^H^H^H^H^HCommunicate with the Devs" course. -
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Just for the record, I own two laptops which are side-by-side. I use one for CoH and other games, and this one for IRC, AIM, forums. I can do both at once without changing windows, because they're on different computers. I can type with only my right hand, and play CoH with only my left hand.
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...
Where did you pick up that skill? huh?
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12+ years as a computer nerd and over half a dozen as a programmer.
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I was implying porn...
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I'm not sure Dispari wasn't implying porn as well. -
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Am I the only one disappointed in the limitations of the color system.
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You're probably not the only one, but probably in the astronomically small minority.
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If they spent so much time redoing everything they could have at least taken a bit more to do a total overhaul.
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You're implying that the amount of effort to completely redo everything would have only required a little more effort. To some extent, what you want are things the devs decided not to do for artistic reasons, not for lack of effort. In other cases, what you want would have required a lot more effort than what was put into it because it would have required completely redoing graphics resources.
However, suppose I grant that it would only have taken, say, 30% more time. BaB's been working on this in earnest for at least six to nine months if not longer, which means a two to three month delay in getting power customization to us, even using extremely generous estimates for additional time.
*My* estimate is probably closer: I figure a total recreate of the geometry models factoring in the enhanced options of color customization would double or triple the time (if I had to bet real money, I would bet triple). By my estimate, that would delay power customization by an additional year or so, at least.
I'd rather have the options now, and have them improved over time, rather than wait for perfection. Perfection should not be the enemy of the good.
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Anyway, I am just disappointed but I feel this game is falling on the "feels archaic" gameplay spectrum. The stuff we get is becoming increasingly stale in my opinion. I am one of those who is going to try CO, if it sucks then my Superhero MMO's experience is over for now at least because this game is just all over the place now.
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Sounds like you're just burned out. It may be time for a break either way. Hoping that CO somehow saves you from genre burnout is probably not being fair to CO. You might be better able to appreciate both CoX and CO after some time off. -
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It has an advantage in gaining from recharge buffs
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Yeah and too bad it gets debuffed to hell along with it's other primary form of mitigation, regeneration.
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The game still sets pet-class base tohit to 75%, not 50% (everything from Frostfire's pets to Malta turrets) which for SR scrappers "immune to defense debuffing" the relative equivalent for Regen would be having an entire class of foe which upon targeting you made all your enhancements vanish.
Everyone's got problems. Overemphasizing one of them suggests a lack of awareness of all the others. -
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Ok then fine, whats the hold on illusion control for doms? This is the most wanted powerset for this AT and it gets denied again and again. Dont give me that crap that most of the power wouldnt work with domination, because with the recent changes to the AT its really a non-issue now. Give us dark illusion and dark assault.
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And here I thought it was the most wanted powerset for masterminds.
To say it "gets denied" implies its ever even been visited:[u] its possible its simply never come up as a proliferation target yet for someone to say "no" to.[u] Picking other sets first as higher priorities for proliferation is not the same thing as saying no to Illusion.
Also, I'm not sure there actually are major problems with proliferating Illusion to dominators (at least, not balance-related ones) but if there were, Domination would not be at the top of my list. Giving Superior Invisibility and indestructible tanks to something with assault sets would be higher.
And finally, "if you weren't full of crap you'd give me what I demand" is only sweet talk in the original Klingon.
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Except, again, it's the last already existing control set to proliferate. Controllers only have a secondary, because they only have secondaries left. They have all currently existing control sets.
Dominators got a sorta brand new set versus a set that already exists.
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That still doesn't mean its actually been refused. One could have asked the same question about Blasters and radiation blast until it was actually announced that blasters were getting radiation blast. In this case, there is the special circumstance that Dominators were already getting Earth Assault, which was the path of least resistance to giving them a proliferation set (of a sort).
Its still my belief that the devs haven't directly said "no" to Illusion for Dominators: they've instead been kicking that can down the road as far as they can before having to actually make a decision on it. The decision might still be "no" but I don't think it actually is "no" yet. -
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Can my lists be tweaked, sure. Some valid objections are raised. What I threw together wasn't meant to be a painstaking final draft.
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I think the point is that Sunstorm and Synapse could probably come up with similar starting points. The problem Sunstorm is mentioning is that its from there that the hard part takes place. It actually not that difficult to make powersets that aren't intrinsicly broken, which your suggestions are not, but rather that your suggestions do not appear to be addressing Sunstorm's assertion that its the tweaking and satisfying multiple objections from other designers during the design process that is the difficult part. It doesn't seem to provide guidence on how to address the issues that Sunstorm claims exist.
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Tar Patch as a secondary would obviously be nerfed: perhaps the AoE made smaller, longer recharge, etc... Does every Support set have to start with a ST Immob? We all know that we all wind up respecking out of it the first chance we get. Wouldn't it be nice to have something one would keep?
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As others have mentioned, devices gets caltrops. The problem isn't that its an AoE (energy does not have a single target immobilize at all) but rather that Tar Patch itself is a much stronger power than any blaster gets, especially at level one. It might be more acceptable as, say, a level 20 (tier 6) power where it would be competing with Ice Patch. But still: a location AoE resistance debuffer for a blaster is also probably questionable.
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Two extracted pets being somehow unlikely: The Illusion Phantom and Phantom Army are also two similar pets in the same set. One of the fundamental 'flavors' of Dark is using one's foes in a vampiric and leeching manner to power one's own abilities. Dark should be inundated with those types of powers.
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The Phantasm is the tier 9 Illusion pet, and it does ranged energy blasts: one single target and one cone. Its effectively permanent (unless killed). The Phantom Army are a set of pets that are indestructible and do illusiary (i.e. mechanically spectral) damage, all single target, and (usually) are not perma. Tactically speaking, at least the way I use the powers, the Phantom Army and the Phantasm are further apart than Blind and Deceive are. And no: that's not intended to be an exaggeration: the phantom army is often cast directly into spawns (or let into them) to draw aggro and act as a tanking utililty. The Phantasm is generally used as a standoff ranged attacker, as its a little weak to engage in close-in combat. Their superficial similarity masks their radical difference in usage. In fact, in terms of usage, the phantom army bears a closer resemblance to the spectral terror than the phantasm, even though the terror can't move and does no damage.
The closest thing Illusion has to "similar pets" are the phantom army and the decoys that the Phantasm itself casts. But that's not a case of the controller having two virtually identical powers: its the case of one of the controller's pets having a similar power as the controller itself.
But more to the point is that regardless of what we think, Sunstorm hinted that duplicate powers were a problem for them. Your proposal includes that very kind of duplication without any rationale for why it shouldn't be a problem. If you disagree that it *ought* to be a problem, that's one thing. But it does mean your suggestion doesn't actually help the devs, as they disagree. What would be more helpful is an argument for why the dark set ought to have two essentially identical powers that is more compelling than the devs reasons for avoiding duplication. I'm just not sure what that might be. -
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The alternate MA animations aren't looking too good in that video. The SS ones, on the other hand, look great.
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I agree on the Martial arts animations, but the devs have surprised me in the past.
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I'm going to withhold judgement on the MA animations until I see them flowing in an MA attack chain. With MA the individual animations are difficult to judge out of context. If the punches flow well, that could be a bigger consideration than what they look like individually. -
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Claws could probably get away with calling Focus and Shockwave "defensive crutches" because of the knockdown and knockback respective though I don't think anyone actually uses them as such.
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You'd be wrong.
EDIT: At least in my particular case, of course.
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Bill doesn't use Shockwave as a crutch. Bill uses it like a gold-plated stair lift with a mini bar and an iPod dock. -
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Umbral brings up something I forgot. When is /regen ever good without mitigation from the primary?
How do you even make it good if you don't have a super crutch like parry or divine avalanche?
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"Good" is relative. Way back when (somewhere in the I7-I9 era, but this is definitely a no-invention build) someone suggested many times on the forums that Regen was so weak the burst damage from just one strong boss would kill it "in seconds." So I decided to test that theory with a regen I had that was around level 37. I tank two even Rikti Bosses in melee range (cycling melee and ranged attacks) and a third even level mesmerist boss firing at range.
It takes them about three minutes to kill me while I do not fight back at all (I originally did the test with just the two bosses in melee, but it took too long for them to kill me for a demo video so I added the third ranged boss).
That's obviously not "RWZ Challenge" good, but its plenty good enough for a lot of players. And regen gets that level of power much earlier than most scrappers do.
What people choose to value is a personal preference decision, but Regen's advantages tend to be:
1. Regen gets early QR (for scrappers). This has benefits for soloing speed, and it also eliminates the need to acquire power pools very early in the build to set up stamina (Regen can certainly pick those powers anyway as an option if desirable). This is an especially noticable advantage from about level 10 (when endurance starts to become a higher bottleneck than attack recharge) to about level 20 (when stamina becomes theoretically available to everyone). The advantage lingers subtly (due to the lower power choice cost of QR) probably until 30.
2. Regen tends to start off stronger than most defensive sets. It tends to have a defensive edge against most other melee mitigation powersets until at least the upper 30s.
3. It has an advantage in gaining from recharge buffs, and the primary buffing advantages of Willpower (its closest rival in performance and architecture) can sometimes get saturated away (i.e. Willpower's defensive stacking advantage is only an advantage until there is enough defensive buffing to exceed the situational soft-cap, whereupon Willpower's own intrinsic defenses deliver no additional benefit).
If you are a solo min/maxing build jockey, Willpower or SR will probably give you better maximum potential than Regen (Invuln situationally so). But that doesn't mean Regen will lag Willpower (or any other set) at all times in all circumstances as you are levelling the build. -
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We want ice to look like 'ice' and because of how the FX were created when you apply a very saturated, non-cool hue to them they no longer look like ice and instead look like a cartoonish jewel.
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Funny you should say that, because there is a well-known comic book character that can be described as fighting with what often looks like cartoonish jewels. -
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Redside needs more love. That's not exactly a mystery.
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IMO it's fundamentally flawed. It's supposed "virtues" make your efforts seem small and unimportant. I shall rejoice when GR allows me to redeem my villains and hopefully start the ATs in Paragon.
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I'm not sure I completely agree with that general sentiment, but I do think that the red side is a little too much "Lawful Evil." And when it isn't Lawful Evil, it usually jumps to Chaotic [censored].
I think the better target for City of Villains should have been "Neutral Selfish." Although after The Dark Knight came out, Bat-[censored] Crazy would have been popular as well.