Arcanaville

Level 50 doesn't unlock fun. Level 50 will be about as much fun as levels 1 through 49.

Unlike some other games for which the level progression is the means to unlock a different game, in CoH racing to 50 is like trying to race to the end of your vacation.

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This ties in to something I've been noticing on my /SR. I don't faceplant very often, but when I do it's not the slow draining of HP down to zero. No, it's the migrating goose hit by the 747. The little baby meets the eighteen wheeler. Flak jacket vs. H-bomb. Try evading that Dodgy McDodgypants.

I just don't remember any specific instances where any reasonably attainable regen would help me.

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Sometimes the only way to explain this convincingly is to suggest that someone play an SR scrapper with *no* enhanced regeneration at all. No invention bonuses, no procs, and no slotted health. The slow unnoticable drizzle of damage quickly becomes a fast stream of damage that forces you to use inspirations quickly or rest. The *reason* you don't notice the damage of the weaker foes is due to your higher regeneration that is recovering that damage as fast or faster than you're taking it.

It isn't that +regen isn't helping you, its rather that +regen only helps to a point, and at very high levels of regeneration that point starts to become the one-shotting things. Ironically, the fact that you notice things either having no effect or quickly killing you is usually the *result* of high regen. At low regen, there is a much wider continuum. Basically, you're seeing the effects of +regen by virtue of seeing everything below a certain level of damage disappear.

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Hey, Arcana, you would probably be the right person to ask - do you think variable damage types are a strong enough mechanic to bother with coding into a set? If an attack powerset potentially had the ability to turn half of its damage into another type, to put in some rough numbers, do you think it would actually be more useful than it is a bother?

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By itself, swapping damage types is the sort of thing that will likely to appeal to only a tiny fraction of the players, and most of those probably won't even be correct in evaluating its relative utility. On its own, I think in the general case its not a strong enough idea to be worth coding the effects into a powerset.

Now, if the damage types came along for the ride with adjustments to other secondary effects, that might be more interesting. But to do so in a way that doesn't homogenize the powers themselves (the powers you're adjusting with the type-switchers) would be the tricky thing. I could see swapping DoT for recharge/slow and as a consequence swapping Fire with Cold, that sort of thing. But even that by itself doesn't seem interesting enough to base a powerset on. You'd want to do more.

And you'd fall dangerously close to asking the question: if dual pistols gets to swap its power effects in a balanced way, why can't, say, Energy Blast do so at least as a power customization decision at character creation time? That's where this gets tricky in my opinion.

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Have they set a lower ticket cap for smaller maps? When did this happen?

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There is a lower ticket cap for smaller maps. Whether it is intentional or not is unknown, because no redname has commented on it. Arcanaville did some testing on it, as have others. If you want to see a really painfully low cap, try one of the police station maps. I got a "one or more tickets were not awarded" message after receiving about 40 tickets from defeats. I /bugged it in-game. When you run across it, do the same and include the map name (/whereami will give you the information they need to isolate problem maps, if this is indeed a problem).

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Technically, its not based on the map itself but the number of spawns the map generates. And its intentional, although its value is subject to balance tweaking. Very roughly, the ticket limit I've tested so far is around 40 tickets per spawn, plus or minus (for a solo player). I don't know how ranks and other factors affect that number, but my testing suggested that the number of critters that spawn per spawn point are *not* one of the factors (its easier to hit the limit on unyielding than on invincible, for example).

Hitting the cap after just 40 tickets - before the mission bonus - would be a bit unusual. Can you tell the the precise circumstances of that mission: the precise map and other parameters?

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The only way to make this workable would be for the powers to be linked to the "real" power (in your case, Ammo Diversification) in the same manner that the Nova and Dwarf attacks are linked to the selection of the choice of the Nova/Dwarf toggle. It still creates the problems posited by Samuel and myself earlier insofar as only being able to slot end redux and possibly recharge (I described all of the problems with this several pages back). The other problem is that, unless the selected power actually had some effect, it would be a pointless placeholder (which I don't think the devs want to have).

The best workaround for the second problem (there isn't really one for the first) would be to just make the power something that actual has a real effect of some kind. I would suggest renaming the power "Reload" and having it be a mid-long self buff of some kind, possibly a small non-stackable, easily perma recharge buff. All it would need would be an additional note on the power description that taking this power also gives the user access to several other special rounds.

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Another possible two for one solution would be to make those powers level zero unlockable, which means the player would get them immediately upon selecting that powerset (basically, an inherent power tied specifically to that powerset).

I'm not sure I'm crazy about the idea in general, but I don't think there are technical impediments to implementation. I think its more a question of whether this is the right way to introduce this type of mechanic to the game. 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**. Giving it to anyone else would devalue Dual Blades. Similarly, giving this kind of effect to Dual Pistols and making it the central effect of the set also has the potential to eliminate the effect from any more general adoption down the road. So I'd be cautious about using it unless I was sure that was the one and only way I wanted it to be used.


** Not guessing

The DR factors seem to be identical to the last time I looked, with just a couple of changes mainly to the untouchable/intangible/OnlyAffectsSelf/Teleport attributes, where I think they removed DR effects from resistance (not sure why they had them in the first place anyway).

Aside from that, the numbers are I think the same as when I added the DR calculator to my mitigation spreadsheet (the link in the OP still points to the latest version of it). I added a tab with a rudimentary DR calculator back in Februrary, and I think almost all the calculations (except for the Res calculations noted above) are still valid.

Note: although the mitigation spreadsheet only calculates values for the four melee archetypes, the DR calculation sheet calculates DR for all archetypes.

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The fact of the matter is: she said she was there working late getting the Scoop ready for publication. The Scoop was shown to be already completed earlier in the day.

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That was the somewhat ambiguous part. The proof that editors get for a newspaper is often a proofreading proof to check for errors, not a sample copy of the final run.

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Again, sorry if the end result was a disappointment. I'll try to do better next time.

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I don't consider it really a disappointment on the whole, just a bit disappointed the clues didn't line up completely for me. The fact that I played it twice (to be sure I got all the clues) and thought about it for a day and a half makes it one of the more engaging MA arcs I've ever played. I'd definitely play the next one.

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If the dev team of CoX is smart, they won't try to outdo either CO or DCUO. They will tack into directions CO and DCUO can't pursue, and develop in those directions.

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Would you care to elaborate on what directions those might possibly be?

I've been a player of COX since Issue 1 and I don't really see anything that's been done here that CO could not. Apart from MA...which is still a rehash of the same mission types we have had all along with player-made stories and custom critters.

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CO is aiming in certain directions for their gameplay, like all games do. Their endurance-building mechanic, for example, promotes a certain kind of combat that they are most likely going to build upon, and its unlikely they will attempt to add radically different gameplay to their base combat system. CoH could develop endurance management in a completely different direction to promote different kinds of gameplay entirely. In that event, regardless of the technology limits, CoH would be developing in a direction CO really couldn't - or more precisely wouldn't - follow.

Another long-term possibility is to leverage the archetype system. As much as players bemoan the archetype and powerset system as unnecessarily limiting, it does provide theoretical opportunities that don't exist in an open system. Its possible to introduce powers and effects that are either very difficult or impossible to introduce in an open system because of balance concerns or mechanical limits. Fundamentally, open systems have to obey different balance rules, which CO seems to have been grappling with since alpha.

Basically, every time you make a gameplay decision, you close off other opportunities. There's no such thing as an MMO that can do everything, even in theory. CO isn't a superset of CoH, nor can it ever be. The only question is whether the CoH developers can find the right things to pursue to take advantage of that fact.

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maybe the games mechanics do not apply to the OP

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What I've noticed is that the game mechanics always kick in when the player starts paying careful attention and is in a position to record the activity with herostats or chatlogs. Running herostats or simply knowing the /copychat command seems to save an inordinately large number of SR characters' lives. At this point I consider it to be a form of survivability buff.



(Once, several years ago, a poster actually suggested that perhaps the random number generator on the game servers worked differently when herostats was running on the client because the problems he noticed only occured when he wasn't recording. I told him to always run herostats then, just to make sure he always had the herostats buff.)

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/SR has actually been through quite a few changes.

Issue 0 it was at passives: 5%((11% enhanced) toggles: 10%(22% enhanced). Yes, really, this is what Gecko thought was balanced compared to toggle instant healing.

sometime down the line, they go up to 10% and 20% respectively. I-5 was the global defense nerf which brought them to what they are now, which is close to what they used to be(go figure), and I-6 was ED. The magic 45 was not in effect until I-7, and it was a rough 2 issues for some defense characters.

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SR has been through more changes that most people think. SR was 10% passives and 20% toggles right up to the point where the Rikti were banging on the door, as far as I know. Between turning off the lights in beta and launch they cut the numbers in half because they saw that SR fully slotted could tank a ton of stuff (in effect, fully slotted SR with a power pool or two was Eluded against even level anything). Somehow, Geko thought cutting the numbers in *half* was the right thing to do there. Problem was that the game conspired against him, when it became clear that a) that was too deep of a cut and b) no one was fighting even levels anyway. So around I1 SR was doubled back up again.

However, if you think SR wasn't changed between then and I5, think again. SR was in effect stealth nerfed by a change everyone knows about but almost no one thinks about: SR couldn't have stayed 10/20 forever, because the scrapper modifiers couldn't have been 1.0 all the way to I5: at some point the scrapper modifiers were made 75% of tanker modifiers and the numbers had to go down to 7.5/15. It probably happened at the same time the devs made the first of the Invuln changes in I1, but no one mentioned that those changes would affect anything besides Invuln (in retrospect, they had to).

There was also the short-lived AoE defense buff post I5 as part of the devs' attempt to deal with the scaling tohit of critters (back when they were fiddling with critter tohit, which started off 50/62.5/75/95 for minions/Lts/Bosses/AVs and migrated to 50/57.5/65/75) before the I7 critter accuracy scaler.

Also, there's the I2 change of Elude from Superspeed+PFF to the click defense power it is now (but originally perma). When you throw in scaling resistances, debuff resistances, and that unfortunate bug with quickness, SR has actually been changed practically every issue from beta to release to I7.

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What I was shocked at however, that while some people guessed correctly, it wasn't for the one clue that I put in to point to the killer.

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Two things threw me off:

1. If the secretary did it, its extremely unlikely she would leave the office to "plot the crime" since the debt appears to be a long-standing one, and she would have had lots of time to do so. Even if it was a crime of the moment, there's no need to leave the office to think about a crime in your head. Most importantly, there is no reason to lie about not being there, since its not a crime to go to lunch. She could have simply said she didn't know if the second appt ever showed up, or better yet, simply ask Snow Globe if he showed up: a reasonable question for a secretary or assistant to ask.

2. If the Scoop was completed at noon, then its not true there's no reason for the secretary to be there late. Actually there's no reason for Snow Globe to be there late. So why did Snow Globe stay late to be murdered? The only reason I could conclude is that there was a problem with the proof that required last minute corrections. If not, Snow Globe should have left at the normal closing time. Contrawise, whatever reason Snow Globe had for staying late is the same reason the secretary could claim for staying late: there's no reason to manufacture an excuse when the actual facts are just as good.

If *neither* of them had a good reason to stay late, she really should have called the police earlier, rather than waiting for hours before doing so (eventually, she probably would have been caught by simple forensics establishing the time of death). Even better: it would have prevented her apparently slow-bus boyfriend from potentially incriminating himself.


This is sort of the problem I mentioned to you in my PM: everything adds up except the secretary, who (now) seems to be doing some inexplicable things. Specifically, she is (apparently) lying when unnecessary, and that's very unusual. I couldn't tell if those were red herrings or trying to say something, because she's the only one acting in a somewhat disjointed fashion.

Ironically, I think I deduced what everyone was doing except the secretary, which caused me to guess incorrectly at the end. All the other clues seemed to be written at just the right level of implication to deduce the motives and actions of everyone else. At the end, both Karl Rove Man and the Secretary have motive and opportunity, but only Karl Rove Man seemed to have the means based on the evidence.

In my opinion, the thing that is missing that would have made it perfect is one or two small clues somewhere that would have provided Karl with an alibi or defused his opportunity and pointed the finger back at the secretary. Maybe the Scoop had a new alarm system recently added that Karl wouldn't have known about. Maybe Obsidius would have let slip that the secretary was a Fire/SS tanker somehow. Small hints like that could have made it a bit more definitive without necessarily being too obvious.

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Ok, I just did a run through a Grandville door mission. Here's another theory. I kept track of the number of opening attacks from behemoth overlords. Of the 14 opening attacks I was subject to they should have only had 6.6% chance ot hit me, though they succeeded in rolling under that 6% a total of 6 times. That number seems oddly high. So I ran other door mission to test it again. And of the 15 opening Behemoth Overlord attacks, they managed to roll under that number 5 times in the opening attack. Perhaps there's a hole in defense on initial attacks, or there's something bugged with the random number generator that calculates some of the enemy attack rolls. Out of 31 opening attacks, 11 hits seems a bit high when they should only hit me 1/16 times. That or there's something buggy with my account.

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Post chat logs please.

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Look, the bottom line is if you were given a choice of power sets and these were what they offered, which would you choose?

Column A: Soft cap defenses. Some resistence after you lose more than half your life, some resistence to slow effects.

Column B: Soft cap defenses, a self heal, additional HP, 90% resist to smash / lethal, and decent resist to all other dmg types, an oh @#$ button which caps all resists for 3 minutes, resists to end drain and the same resistence to slow effects.

SR is really just Invuln without any real resistance. Given that, doesn't that mean that SR is pretty well garbage? SR should at least have higher defense than invulnerability...that's their whole point. If a set doesn't offer any benefit and is only lacking compared to another power set...why's it an option in the first place?

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That's so skewed and biased I'm not sure it deserves a response.

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How is it biased or skewed? Honestly...compare the two sets and explain to me why SR is better than or on par with Invuln. What reason would someone have for legitimately choosing SR over Invulnerability? If all SR has is pure soft capped defense with little to no other migitating ability...why shouldn't we all just take Invuln? SR needs something to set it apart. Right now it is just a drastically weaker set than an existing one.

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How?

1. Neither SR nor Invuln actually has "capped defenses." Both have to work at it. SR less than Invuln, and Invuln's defenses won't be capped to Psi, and Invuln will have to saturate Invincibility to get there.

2. SR gets to 95% defense debuff resistance, which makes it just short of immune to resistable defense debuffs. Invuln does not.

3. If you're going to compare powersets based on the absolute best possible performance achievable, you might as well throw in Willpower as Choice C and give it high defense, high resistance, and perma-instant healing from RTTC.

Both SR and Invuln have pros and cons, and both are valid choices for Brutes (or Scrappers). Invuln is much more resistant to smash/lethal overall, when built accordingly, while SR will have better overall protection and be easier to max out with inventions. Primary synergy also plays a factor: SR in particular synergizes well with a primary that can offer extra healing, such as Dark Melee (and stop showing off, Werner ).

Also, Werner notwithstanding, I would probably not choose a primarily defense-oriented set to herd as my first choice due to the fact that you can get unlucky, and surrounding yourself with tons of stuff is a good way to get eventually unlucky. However, since Brutes aren't explicitly designed to herd, that's not a problem. If you the player want to herd, and can't do so with SR, I'd recommend choosing a different powerset or choosing a different in-game vocation. However, its not explicitly a failing of SR that you can't make it do something its not explicitly designed to do (Fire/ tankers would not be my first choice for herding either: neither Tankers nor Brutes are explicitly designed to herd: herding is a playstyle option that players can choose to attempt, or not, and in neither case are the powersets designed to accomodate that playstyle explicitly).


The bottom line answer to your question is that SR is a valid option because:

a. A lot of people enjoy playing it.
b. Its performance is reasonable given its peers.
c. It provides a completely different mechanical, build, and playstyle option to players
d. Its demonstrably not lacking in high-end performance, although everything has weaknesses/issues with at least some high-end situations.

I'd probably tweak the lower-end performance a bit. But the ultra-high end? SR doesn't have too much to complain about there.

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See, For me, what makes AV soloing worth bragging about is the fact you've achieved enough Damage output, enough Survivability AND enough End Recovery.

Miss any one of those three and it's not possible. (without insps at least)

So coming full circle, I just don't think an SO build could pull off all three, but it could come close, very close.

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I believe DM/Regen could do it. I might try to make an all-SO build in build slot 2 just to try it. I know way back in the day my DM/Regen soloed Maestro as an AV, although it took forever, and that was back in 2006 long before inventions (but also before AVs were made more resistant to tohit debuffs I believe). Not the toughest AV in the world, but I think the most important point is that over a very long fight I managed to not run out of endurance, which is one of the sticking points for scrappers with enough damage in theory.

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4. You need to use a hero designer, and use it well... mid's is the obvious choice.
5. You need to know what to build for (generally, defense and recharge).
6. You know to know how to achieve high levels of those things in your build.
7. You need to play your toon up to level 50.

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When I started soloing AVs (without insps, mind you... saying it before anyone else flips out), none of these statements were true about me.

I believe it's possible to do without 2., 3. and 9. too, if you're willing to use inspirations and temp powers.

So, basically, I agree with "you have to believe it's possible" ; and I have to thank Werner and you for that.

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"You have to believe its possible" is really the only mandatory requirement: the others are just helpful. In fact, when I soloed my first AV (like back in I1 I think) I didn't even know *that*. I was just willing to try. Over and over again. So perhaps "you have to be willing to make the attempt as many times as it takes" is really the only actual requirement (I once took 30+ attempts to solo the Envoy of Shadows as a +2 AV with my level 37 Ill/Rad).

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Haven't forgotten, will try to compile something this weekend.

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Responding to the "too little too late" comment made earlier.......

It's just my opinion, but some people still would have gone to CO, even if we did have everything anyone ever wanted, just for the fact that CO is new.

And I'm not saying that it's how the poster is, but some people are quick to jump onto something new and wish death upon the place where they came from. (From what I see on the CO boards when I read them, they want this game to crash and burn, and see CO as the end all be all of future MMOs. I don't see them comment too much on DCUO.)

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CO and DCUO are probably more direct competitors of each other than either is of CoH in all but genre. If I were a CO developer, I would be far more concerned with positioning against DCUO, which likely has more money and name recognition than CO, and is apparently targetting a similar style of play.

If the dev team of CoX is smart, they won't try to outdo either CO or DCUO. They will tack into directions CO and DCUO can't pursue, and develop in those directions.

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Who banned all of these accounts and deleted all of these characters? The Dev team? Possible, but highly unlikely. The Community team? Very doubtful, although I imagine Avatea, Nivienne, Moderator08 and EMpulse were quite busy along with the rest of the forum moderators in trying to enforce the existing (not new) forum rules. Customer Service? Very probable, which likely means this was handled either through Austin, TX (if NCSoft-NA still has offices and CS staff there) or Seattle, WA if NCSoft West is handling CS staffing now.

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From all that I've read, it sounds as if a script was used that looked at specific criteria to base the actions on. From what I know of scripting, this would have likely been the easiest way to do these actions. But ... you have to be very specific in what criteria you are basing the actions on, and make sure that there are NO other possible situations that may set a True value on those criteria. Such as being in a Level Pact.

Positron and others could well have intended that each situation be looked at individually before performing any action. Those MAY have been their exact instructions

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"Make us happy" doesn't work because making everyone happy is impossible.

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Its possible for the person that wants everyone else dead.

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Fact; Gauntlet is broken

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Broken in what way specifically? As far as I can tell, Gauntlet works in exactly the way I believe its designed to work.

By the way, since I'm not sure this was ever directly touched upon, Gauntlet isn't actually a "special" effect. Actually, all single target tanker attacks are designed to be AoE taunts. What's special about them is actually the *damage* that is specially coded to affect only the dead center of the AoE which is presumed to be the targetted foe.


Well, there's also that odd 20% penalty for certain kinds of targets, but I've never specifically gone out of my way to figure out which kinds of critters are appropriately tagged.

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Okay, someone bring me up to speed. What are we debating here? The OP was asking which aspect of that taunt was enhanced, correct?

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Generally duration. However (and I don't know if this was covered originally) whether the magnitude or the duration of an effect is enhanced by enhancements or other buffs is not "baked into" the game engine directly. Its actually a function of how the power is designed.

By convention, for example, hold duration is enhanced for hold powers, because that is how all hold powers are designed. However, interestingly its actually hold *magnitude* that is (theoretically) enhanceable in mez protection powers. Keep in mind a mez protection power is nothing more than a power that applies a mez to yourself, but with negative magnitude. If you could somehow slot practiced brawler with hold, it would increase the hold magnitude of the protection, not the duration.

One way to see this in action is to note that when mez protection powers are under the effects of a mez strength debuff (such as benumb) it actually reduces magnitude protection, not duration.

Colloquially, enhancing taunt always increases duration of taunt (indirectly, that affects the strength of the taunt anyway due to taunt mechanics). But its always *possible* that the devs could create a taunt effect that enhancement would increase magnitude instead of duration, so this rule should be applied carefully when talking about potential bugs or new in-game effects.

(This is either-or. You cannot make an effect that enhancements will boost *both* duration and magnitude of. Its not possible because that is essentially a radio button in the devs powers design: there's no way to say "both" at the moment).

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What IF the game is actually a loop that is set to trigger once every .125 seconds. (Most modern games are basically designed this way)

What IF nothing gets changed in between those cycles other than, off course, ongoing processing of the previous cycle.

What if the DoT is explained by the cycle clock simply saying "this many ticks will go on during this cycle, send the client the time stamps it should display them at"?

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Its possible and probable, given the evidence. However, I haven't ruled out faster clocks yet. In theory, there is a way to do so that's on my todo list, but haven't gotten around to yet. I have demorecords of oldschool Hamidon raids, which operated under a wide range of server lag and clock distortion. Such clock distortions should provide evidence of the size of the clock quantum under certain circumstances. It just hasn't been a priority to investigate that particular element of it yet.

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In that light, I think it is perfectly alright if one of you says "Castle and Crew have been working really hard on the Custom Critter Creator, so there is no time for Powerset Proliferation this time around" when you really want to say "Castle and Crew have been working really hard on the Custom Critter Creator AND something you guys have been asking for for a loooong time, but if I even say that much the Marketing guys will kill me, so there is no time for Powerset Proliferation this time around."

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If power customization occurs, Castle and the Powers Team probably won't get involved much, if much at all, until the very very end (in terms of specific implementation). Most of the work will initially involve the code team to add the tech for it, and the graphics team to create the user interfaces for it. Then BaB, anyone else fluent in tools, and the other graphics elements people will have to create the resources for it.

The custom critter features of the MA were much more squarely within the realm of what Castle's primary responsibilities are, and would have more directly diverted resources from any attempt to proliferate powersets, which is also squarely within Castle's (and the Power Teams's) area of responsibility.

Keep in mind that there are powers people (i.e. Castle, Sunstorm), coders (pohsyb, ghost widow, the dark watcher), graphics people (Sexy Jay), animation people (BaB and all the voices inside his head), reward system designers (Synapse stepped backwards slower than everyone else here), as well as UI designers, story writers, producers (Ghost Falcon), and others. Some people clearly work on multiple things (War Witch), while others no doubt specialize much more. Individual projects require differing levels of resource expenditure, tapping different groups of people in different ways.

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Following the clock tangent...

How would that work with a power like Phalanx Fighting? Reason I ask:
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Activate period 1 seconds
* DEF(Melee, Ranged, AOE) +3% for 0.81s
* DEF(Melee, Ranged, AOE) +5% for 1.25s [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
[/i]Effect does not stack from same caster[/i]

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That looks like it's not perma, but if you ArcanaTime it (did I honestly just make that a verb?) it comes out to 1.056s - scraping the bare minimum to be considered perma. (I keep forgetting to test in game if PF twitches like Invincibility does - and that has an activation period of 1s and the stacking def component lasts 1s. That'd be a 0.188s stack if it uses the 0.125s clock.)

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Well, keep in mind "ArcanaTime" factors two things in: the cast time expiration, followed by a clock delay before the next attack can fire. Presumably, even if Phalanx Fighting obeyed ArcanaTime clocks, it wouldn't have to wait for a clock for something else to happen, because nothing else is going to happen. So the power would really last for RoundUp(0.81/0.132)*0.132 = 0.924 without the "+1" delay.

Moreover, the 0.132 ArcanaTime clock is probably a representation of the game engine's attempt to align player actions to the animation clock, which might not need to be true for attribmod ticks (in fact, I know its not true based on the behavior of very fast DoTs). So really, its more likely that the "true" duration of that effect is closer to RoundUp(0.81/.125)*0.125 = 0.875 seconds.

What would be interesting would be to see if a power that lasts 0.9 seconds and ticks at 1.0 seconds is actually perma. If it is, it suggests that durations obey a faster clock, probably the 1/30th second clock. I'm not sure if there is a power like that off the top of my head (or something with similar circumstances).

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I'm still speculating whether it happens because of threat decay, because a server tick is missed, or because server ticks, as Arcanaville measured them, are .132 seconds instead of the supposed .125 seconds

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Just a note: that number is the combat action clock that governs player commands (like activating a power). There are other clocks: the 1/30 sec animation frame clock for example. There also appears to be a 0.125 second internal clock that relates to things like DoT ticking, although that is *extremely* difficult to determine as the other clocks blur attempts to measure this (one way to attempt to measure the clock that governs effects such as that is to record such activity and look for "aliasing" where multiple ticks happen simultaneously, which implies a case where the animation clocks and the internal clocks misaligned, giving a hint as to the structure of the internal clock). And I have hints of a 0.5 second (or multiple thereof) clock governing AI decisions.

When the IWill bug occured, I was able to measure the rapidfire heals as occuring at 0.118 second intervals, plus or minus 0.01 seconds. That's consistent with a 0.125 clock, and the IWill bug was likely pushing the internal attribmod clock to its limit.

(The Iwill bug essentially created a situation where a power granted a heal with a duration which essentially told the game engine "heal that character, constantly." The fact that the heal pulses occured at 0.118 second intervals suggests that is as fast as the game engine can apply ticks of things, at least where it involves power effects).

In any case, there are multiple clocks that govern different things, so the 0.132 second clock isn't likely to be responsible for oddities unrelated to player activity. But other clocks, like the 0.125 second clock, might.