Arcanaville

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I'm not sure I understand what your theory is, but Arcanaville wrote a guide on how recharge works, it's in the Guides section somewhere.

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Right here.

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It may seem that way, but what does the description for regeneration say? I'm at work, and so if someone could quote from the ingame description that would be awesome, but I got this from Paragon Wiki:

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Regeneration lets you regenerate more quickly from damage and effects. Regeneration offers almost no actual damage resistance, but your Hit Point and Endurance Regeneration can become so incredibly fast, that your wounds heal almost instantly. Those who possess this power set have little downtime, but risk the effects of spike damage.

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If I remember correctly that is the quoted description text from in game. I have a mind like a steel sieve, however, so anyone with access to the game feel free to correct me.

My point is that the original intent was that burst damage was clearly Regen's hole. It isn't a hole for other sets like SR and Invuln, since the damage has to land for it to take down an SR scrap, and is resisted for an Invuln scrap.

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I don't remember what the original in-game description for Regen was (I can probably look it up somewhere) but I do remember what the description for SR was: SR in the in-game text description was claimed to have *no* weaknesses: its defenses were explicitly stated to work against *all* attacks. That was also false, because the guy who wrote those had little or no idea how the powers in the game actually worked. Alone, out of context, those descriptions are not especially reliable without significant corroboration.

Regardless of the original design intent of Regen at launch, it is unambiguously true that -regen was added to the PvE game as a specific foil to Regeneration. I specifically remember discussions at the time in which it was pointed out that -regen was practically non-existent (while -Def was highly ubiquitous) and having a dev (Jack, I believe) point out (either in a PM or on the boards) that that was going to change, deliberately so. Whether it was done to the degree that was desired, or ended up too high or too low, is a separate debate.

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Or is that just an elaborate way of saying "I can throw any numbers out there I want, even if they're completely and utterly mathematically incorrect, but you have to believe me because I'm invoking Arcanaville's name in the middle"? Because that's what it looks like.

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Someone tell Werner that we found someone that calculates attack chains and hasn't heard of "ArcanaTime" yet.


FYI the reposted version of the original "ArcanaTime" post (I didn't call it that, but the name seems to have stuck) is here in the guides section. I wish I had saved the original discussion thread, but I keep forgetting to tell the forum admins when I want something marked to save (my archetype population analysis thread went bye-bye also, so I'm reconstructing that one and going to repost it soonish and get it flagged to keep, since I get requests for that one as well periodically).

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(I'm attacking your logic here that if it's a buff, it should be supported. Basically calling everyone who doesn't agree with you a retard doesn't sit well with me.)

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There are a lot of people who believe there exists a meta-game called "squeeze the devs for stuff" whose progress is measured by how much buffs the playerbase convince the devs to grant. Obviously, for that segment of the player population, anyone arguing against any buff must be either a traitor to the cause, or insane.

It doesn't occur to them that game design discussions on the forums might revolve around what people debate are good design decisions for the game as a whole, without explicit regard for profit-motive.

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Defense debuffs were the Achilles heel of the SR set. They were given resistance to said debuffs out of balance concerns.

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That's not actually quite true. SR was given resistance to defense debuffs for the twin reasons that cascade failure was not an intended mechanical result combined with the fact that SR underperformed at that time and needed some sort of buff. Resistance to defense debuffs was not specifically intended to "close a hole" in SR's protections as such: the devs do not tend to think in those terms (at least, they did not back then).

At the time defense debuff resistance was formulated, the presumptive SR weakness was bad luck vs the random number generator. Basically (and I have PMs from that time period that state it directly) SR's intended weak spot was, to put it colloquially, that it "didn't always work" due to the randomness of its mechanics.


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Recharge debuffs are the Achilles heel of the regen set. Why should they not be given similar treatment?

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At virtually the same time the devs were formulating buffs to SR (this was circa I5) they were also specifically adding -regen debuffs to the game; prior to that such debuffs were practically non-existent. The notion that -recharge (outside of PvP) was Regen's "achilles heel" is a relatively new notion: it isn't a common perception until I9 (coincidentally or not when inventions are introduced) long after Regen had the basic structure it has today (which was basically I5).


SR still has an entire class of attacks for which it has *zero* protection of any kind under all circumstances, a situation that is mostly unique: non-positional psi. If it has an "achilles heel" its probably that. Defense debuffing and cascade defense wasn't an SR achilles heel: it was an achilles head, arms, legs, and torso. And SR is *still* weak against two other defense crackers that are if anything more common now than in the past: pets/turrets (which have base 75% tohit, not 50%), and tohit buffs (which were rare blue side, are more common red side, and are at least an order of magnitude more common in AE missions).

Would you like to trade -recharge resistance for having all pets and turrets to start packing -regen, all non-positional psi attacks debuff heal strength, and all critters with BU, Aim, and tactics to start debuffing Dull Pain's strength? I didn't think so.

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If you want this suggestion to have any real weight, perhaps you can come up with alternate tier 9s for all the other secondaries. Then folks could comment on balance. Without a balance discussion, I don't see something like this ever happening.

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The logical extension of my idea for Soul Transfer, but I suppose also extensible to Claws' idea, is to make the other scrapper/brute/tanker/stalker tier9 powers castable when dead (with appropriate modifications to make that functionality make sense).

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Well, since you've posted here Arcana, is the power I outlined in my OP at least decently well balanced?

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In my opinion, its not terribly unbalanced although I think the proper way to describe it is that its a bit aggressive - meaning it attempts to do a lot more than the devs are likely to be comfortable with, even if all of its effects are explicitly numerically not overpowered.


If I was going to muck around with Soul Transfer at all, I'd probably still do what I suggested years ago: change Soul Transfer so its castable even if not dead. However, today if I were going to do that, to balance the power I'd tweak it so that if you're not dead the stun is reduced to mag 4, and the heal and endurance are cut to 1/3rd their normal values (today I know that's probably possible with the appropriate AttribRequires magic).

This way people who like the rez will still get to keep it, and just have the extra bonus of being able to use the power at other times. Those who don't like the rez will just get a rez for free regardless. And the overall character of the powerset doesn't change dramatically, its just enhanced a bit.

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I had a short exchange with Arcanaville concerning something along this lines (I'm reasonably sure that she ended it in disgust, but I was just arguing because I like arguing).

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Actually, my last response to you went unanswered. If you'll recall, your last question to me revolved around whether I intended to expand on the amount of debuffing that the damage mitigation spreadsheet included, and I responded that it was unlikely I was going to add very sophisticated debuff computations, as they would have made an already borderline spreadsheet too unwieldy.

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With just SO slotting it will kill your endurance pretty quickly, and if you are taking enough damage fast enough you will probably die while it is animating. I speak from experience on that one. I have repeatedly gone to activate Dark Regen while at around half health and was on the floor before the heal was applied.

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My own experience suggests otherwise. While there's no question dark regen is a trickier power to use than average, most accounts of its difficulty are exaggerated, and usually include significant observer skew. In particular, circumstances such as described above if interpreted literally are unsustainable regardless, and therefore no heal would allow one to face such situations often. At best, a better heal would allow a player to run from such a situation and not return, which by defintion makes such situations rare.

There's also the presumption that the full power of dark regen can only be utilized under ultra-extreme high damage environments, which presumes high burst damage as a consequence. However, even at lower levels with just SO slotting dark regen can be leveraged by skilled players in other ways. *Prior* to getting SOs I ran a Dark Brute with the strategy of never (rarely) using Dark Regen *during* or *near the end* of fights, but rather at the *start* of fights, when I was guaranteed the maximum number of targets. All I needed was enough health to survive long enough to get into position, and get full health without even heal slotting: just accuracy and endurance DOs (mostly endurance DOs: you don't need much accuracy if you only need to hit about half the targets to get back to full). Not many scrappers or brutes - even regen scrappers - get to start essentially every fight at full health.

Its not just an end-game tanking tool. It just has a reputation of being such.

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Perl's abuse of line breaks, spaces, and tabs are it's complete and total abstinance from using them. Python abuses them the exact opposite way.

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Actually, the issue isn't one of white space compression. Its more of a fundamental philosophy perspective in the language design. Its often referred to as the "line noise" problem: although perl programmers don't consider it "a problem" they do tend - when religion doesn't get in the way - to recognize source of the perception.

Larry Wall puts it very succinctly: "the essence of Perl is really context sensitivity." Contained within that one sentence is a thousand man-years of language debate. Factor in the additional underlying philosophy that the more common the operation, the less characters it should take to represent it (which is also not-so-coincidentally the colloquial definition of dictionary-based compression), and the general notion that structure should be optional whenever possible, and you have a recipe for a language that has the same utility as Darth Maul's dual-bladed light-saber: great if you are an expert, and suicidal if you are not.


Note: I'm not religious about perl myself: I've been using perl since perl one dot oh.

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If you decide to come back, don't worry, there won't be any reduction in the effectiveness of any powers due to you changing any of the colors.

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Changing the sound effects, though, that's a different story.

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But, do we get a buff by using the Visual Sounds we were promised a while back? I mean, FREEM!!!! has to be pretty damn powerful!

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I think Visual Sounds were delayed until they could implement Visual Smells as well.

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i think colors will probably be the main meat of the issue.

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I've heard there's some potatoes and gravy coming as well. Mmm, gravy.

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http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/
Comes with a windows installer, you can run it from cmd.exe

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Now that's what I'm talking about Good advice and it should be enough to get a new person ready to run the given copy-paste script.

Still more a fan of writing programmes in an editor, though

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Honestly, perl has always given me a headache. I don't mean its hard, I mean it literally gives me headaches: even LISP only abuses parentheses, perl abuses the entire keyboard.

These days I do all of my scripting in python unless I'm paid enormous sums of money to script in perl, or I've been dumped into a PHP web environment.

This I think will work in python, and it has the extra bonus of renaming the really old school targa screen captures into the same format (with name collision avoidance) for the people who've been here forever. I've commented out the actual renaming operation, so anyone attempting to use this script (which I just whipped up, but it seems to work on my system) can see what it does before actually trying it out (just delete the hashes before the two rename commands). Needless to say, I'd back up my files before using some bit of code I downloaded from the internet written by someone pretending to work while killing time before the long weekend.

Note for the python-unaware: python uses tabbing to denote the beginning and end of code blocks. If the text alignment of the code snippet below is messed with, it won't run.

Its a heck of a lot longer than the perl version, but moderately more understandable for those for whom regex is not a second language. And there is a native python for windows from the official site with a nice code editor and everything.


<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>import os, datetime

screendir = 'C:/Program Files/City of Heroes/screenshots'

os.chdir(screendir)
screenshots = os.listdir(screendir)
for screenshot in screenshots:
if screenshot[0:10] == "screenshot" and screenshot[-3:] == "jpg":
sar = screenshot.split('-')
snew = "screenshot_"+sar[0][-2:]+sar[1]+sar[2]+"-"+sar[3]+"-"+sar[4]+"-"+sar[5]
print "Renaming",screenshot,"to",snew
#os.rename(screenshot,snew)
elif screenshot[0:10] == "screenshot" and screenshot[-3:] == "tga":
sstat = os.stat(screenshot)
sd = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(sstat.st_mtime).st rftime("%y%m%d-%H-%M-%S")
snew = "screenshot_"+sd+".tga"
if os.path.exists(snew):
counter = 1
while os.path.exists(snew+"-"+str(counter)):
counter = counter + 1
snew = snew+"-"+str(counter)
print "Renaming",screenshot,"to",snew
#os.rename(screenshot,snew)
</pre><hr />

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So, in general, the Praetorian Name of a character is a reflection of their current name, but with a more...aggressive, sinister twist.

Given that:

Castle == Checkmate

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Not aggressive enough by half!

The evil Endgame!

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I think the real question is whether the Praetorian version of Castle is missing a beard, or has an even larger beard.

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If you decide to come back, don't worry, there won't be any reduction in the effectiveness of any powers due to you changing any of the colors.

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Changing the sound effects, though, that's a different story.

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Have the dev's said anything about I16 other than color customization?

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I heard that in I16 the devs are increasing the level cap to 50.99.

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Actually wouldn't Castle = Fortress?

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Castle is a reference to the chess maneuver of Castling, rather than to the architectural structure called a Castle. Hence my forum Avatar.

I was actually looking for a term synonymous with "Discovered Attack" for the Praetorian name, but settled on "Checkmate" when I couldn't find anything suitable in the 2 minutes I allowed myself to look.

EDIT: To add clarification:
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In chess, a discovered attack is an attack revealed when one piece moves out of the way of another. Discovered attacks can be extremely powerful, as the piece moved can make a threat independently of the piece it reveals. Like many chess tactics, they succeed because the opponent is unable to meet two threats at once. While typically the consequence of a discovered attack is the gain of material, they do not have to do this to be effective; the tactic can be used merely to gain a tempo.

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Taken from Wikipedia

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Actually I would of thought:

En passant

When a pawn advances two squares, if there is an opponent's pawn on an adjacent file next to its destination square, then the opponent's pawn can capture it and move to the square the pawn passed over, but only on the next move.

So while Castle is a defensive move, En Passant is an offensive one.

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Alternatively, Castling is moving two pieces to protect one, the aggressive opposite would be a Fork: moving one piece to attack two. But playing an evil villain named "Fork" makes it sound like you're in an episode of The Tick.

Another possibility along the lines Castle was originally thinking is Battery which is often (not always) when two rooks line up to attack a King or a King's defenses. I think playing a Praetorian called Battery would be better than one called Fork, and the word is also synonymous with a crime.

Slightly more esoteric, since Castling is generally an early defensive move, another Praetorian opposing analog might be Endgame.

Battery, Endgame, and Checkmate all imply differences in style for the character, and none of them sound especially Blasterish (to me). However, they do all sound like they could be Dominators, so perhaps the Praetorian version of Castle is more of a Dominator than a Blaster (which actually makes a lot more sense with I15 Dominator numbers than the past would).

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Lets see, this weekend I was about as far away from a computer as I could get: Swimming out on the sunny cali coast, enjoying parks around the bay, watching old Enterprise episodes, housecleaning that's been neglected, helping the wife cook a ham dinner and drinking wine from our trip to Napa Valley a few weeks back.

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Watching Enterprise is as far away from a computer as you could get? Last week I managed to make it as far away as Apple Hill and Spamalot.

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For those still with us (all of you who haven't already canceled your accounts due to impending nerfs related to your choice of power colors)...

[blink]THIS WHOLE THREAD IS A JOKE[/blink]

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For those who have cancelled, power customization nerfed your sense of humor by more than 20%.

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Since changing you colors will be -20% damage how many of the non-carebears will actually do this?

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That 20% is a maximum value. Remember, it scales depending on how far you deviate from the correct color.

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You are misleading them with this statement, you forgot to tell them the correct color is NOT the base one all start with and they have to guess what the correct color is. Imagine my surprise while playing mega-closed-beta and find that the "correct color" for dark melee was bright pink.

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Actually the correct color was dark red, but diminishing returns reduced it to pink.



(Every time I leave town, some big announcement lands that I have to catch up on: by my calculations the I16 post was posted practically just as my plane's wheels left the ground).

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(On a personal note, I find this whole thing kind of funny, didn't I suggest this like 1 1/2 years ago? )

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I could be unclear on which thing you mean, but I attribute my 1st recollection of a conversion rate to Arcanaville in one of the 1st big discussions/arguments in here on whether/why/how to merge the markets.

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The specific thing I suggested way back when was that rather than merge the markets directly, continue to require blue-side items to be bid on with only influence, and red-side items to be bid on with only infamy, and allow players to buy and sell blocks of influence and infamy across the markets. Thus, if you wanted a hero to buy something from the red-side market, they would first need to buy infamy from a red-side character. The currency market would be the method for allowing cross market activity with some control. The main advantage of this is that it would tend to dampen the potential initial trade imbalance issues associated with a direct merge.

So that's why pohsyb was off Euro-tripping. This explains the last few of my PM exchanges with him:


Me: ... so if you could check on the published mission stats I'd appreciate it.

pohsyb: I'd really like to help but unfortunately I can't because I'm In Italy And You're Not LOSER!! Muhuhahaha!!



Me: Are you still in Italy?

pohsyb: Nope.

Me: Good, because I have a question about the custom settings algorithm for the Max Rank setting.

pohsyb: ... I'm In Greece Now!! Greece is the Word, is the Word, is the Word That You Heard; Its Got Groove, Its Got Me In It! PSYKE!!


Ok, those aren't exact quotes, but I'm pretty sure there was serious Cartman dancing in there somewhere.

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Even still if I took the same approach you did I would be just as unkillable with WP if not more unkillable

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All I can say is prove it.

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While openly admitting that NCsoft has the right to do with their money whatever they want, I hope that NCsoft has -- frankly -- smartened up enough to have noticed that they had been siphoning money out of City of Heroes to fund the development of other games, ever since they laid off everybody but the Freem 15. And that doing so has been, frankly, disastrous.

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Actually, NCSoft had no direct control over dev staffing prior to NCSoft's purchase of the game as far as I know. Those decisions were made by Cryptic. Cryptic was the developer and NCSoft was the publisher of the game, and the terms of that agreement ultimately ended up with X dollars going to Cryptic. How Cryptic chose to spend those dollars was entirely within their own purview, but I will point out that it *is* true that Cryptic was spending at least some of that money on something other than CoX: namely a side project called Marvel Universe Online.


Now, as to the question of what NCSoft spends their money on, Avatea's quote has to be taken with some real world accounting context. CoX makes a certain amount of money, and that money goes to NCSoft. NCSoft spends a certain amount of money on development and operations for CoX. If the former is higher than the latter, that means CoX is a profitable game. It would be nice if CoX turned a profit, I'm sure we'd all agree.

However, that money ultimately has to go somewhere. It can go into one of two basic directions. It can be spent on some other operational area of NCSoft, or it can be put into a bank account somewhere. Because money is fungible if it makes people feel better, they can think that CoX's profits go into some rich person's pocket instead, and some *other* game is funding other operations.

Whenever someone says words to the effect of "NCSoft should spend all of its CoX income on CoX" they are essentially saying they want CoX to be unprofitable. Now, if NCSoft was diverting too much resources from CoX to non-profitable ventures, that could have a negative impact on CoX's ability to be self-sustaining. But the fact that they seem to be spending an order of magnitude more on CoX development than Cryptic ever did since release suggests otherwise.

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The moment Dual Blades got combos, combos became effectively "off-limits" for anything else short of an act of god, because combos were The Cool Thing Dual Blades Got**.

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I'm actually curious about this. I understand why no other melee set would get combos because of Dual Blades' presence (with the possible exception of some type of Escrima or some other stick fighting power set), but I don't see any reason why a ranged set wouldn't be able to get combos. If the combos are considered to be the "secondary effect" of Dual Blades (which is how I've always interpreted it thanks to the lack of a cohesive secondary effect otherwise), then, because we've already seen secondary effects be shared across similar theme sets (all Fire sets lose utility and get mo' damage, Ice does -recharge, etc.), it would make sense for a ranged set to be able to use the combo mechanic as well, without taking anything away from Dual Blades.

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If you could make the case that Dual Pistols was the same "theme" as Dual Blades, it would be a relatively straight-forward sell. But there's a circular dependency problem here, in that if the devs coincidentally agree with you, the argument is automatic, but if they don't agree with you, there's no obvious way to convince them to change their minds, because the very fact that they disagree with you (that the two sets are the same theme) automatically nullifies any arguments that rely on them being the same theme in the first place.

I don't think this would be an easy sell just because both sets have the word "dual" in their names.


As to the analogy with Fire and Ice, those are conceptualizations on a different level. Fire and Cold as conceptual damage types have certain effects like Dot and recharge debuff associated with them, so powersets that incorporate those damage and concept types get those effects as a consequence. The association is with Fire and Cold, not with the powersets that use those effects.

To take a different example, Dark Melee was originally conceptualized as a lower damage, higher utility melee powerset. "Dark" itself tends to be associated with effects like tohit debuff and fear. The Dark Melee powerset thus has secondary effects that come from its association with Dark such as tohit debuff and fear, but it also has effects that are not always associated with Dark but are directly associated with the set specifically like endurance recovery and heals (neither of which Dark Blast possesses). So a separate question would be whether combos are associated with "dual wield" or with the dual blade powerset itself specifically. That's a question that I'm not even sure the devs have thought about very much.