Arcanaville

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Whereas Arcana stated that it is a minor balance issue how Elusivity self-stacks, I believe that it matters very much how the proposed Elusivity stacks with itself.

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Its explained in the OP, but I'll elaborate on this point in more detail.

The reason why its less important how Elusivity/AA stacks with itself is because it very rarely *will* be stacking with itself, in my proposal. In my proposal, the two types of defense ("normal" and E/AA) aren't going to be given out randomly. They have distinct conceptual meanings. E/AA is designed to be resistant to tohit buffs, and have more stable performance in the presence of tohit buffs, similar to resistance buffs. The powers I *specifically* want to be E/AA are intrinsic powerset defense powers that buff the caster. Thus, SR defenses, EA defenses, granite armor defenses - these things are definitely candidates for E/AA-style defense.

However, external buffing powers, and optional power pool defenses, are *not* intended to be proof against tohit buffs. Those powers are intended to follow the model of "move/countermove" and those kinds of defensive powers are intended to be directly offset by tohit buffs. This allows insights to offset lucks, tohit buffs to offset defense buffs (in PvP and PvE).

If you buy into my way of partitioning defense powers, then the only time you'll have Elusivity stacking with Elusivity is in the specific case that a particular powerset has two or more self-defensive powers that stack with each other. And in a single powerset, you can always "work the numbers out" to come out to the right value in the end, regardless of how they stack up.

External buffs will still be conventional defense, and still "suffer" the same problems as now, but that's a much less problematic situation, because buffs aren't balanced around the *ally* having a particular permanent level of protection. *Self* protection sets are.

So for example, SR would have a certain amount of E/AA in its toggles and passives, and the amount will be such that whether E/AA stacks additively or multiplicatively, the numbers work out in the end. If SR takes a power pool defense, that's guaranteed to be conventional defense, which means its protection would *always* stack multiplicatively with whatever net total E/AA defense SR has, so power pools cannot "overstack" with SR.

The tricky situation is FF, because dispersion bubble buffs self *and* allies. But there, it works out fine if DB is E/AA, and bubbles are conventional defense (and I mention that situation in the OP), because once again, its not difficult to design those three powers in just the right way.

If you were going to convert *everything* into E/AA, you'd basically have to make all E/AA defense factors stack multiplicatively. But in the specific suggestion I lay out in the OP, that's less important. Nice to have, but not a must have.

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Im curious, for the DA supporters. What exactly is this magical "more return" point? What is it that DA can do, that the other sets can't do with a proper build/loadout? Thats my main issue with the set. I keep hearing "Its capable of so much!" but I don't hear any real examples.

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1. Its performance scales upward with spawn size faster than any other set. The jump in performance from solo to duo to three player teams (primarily due to dark regen, but also the auras) is very high, so the performance curve is much steeper. This makes it a very good tanking set vs numbers.

2. Its resistances/defenses are moderate, relative to its healing and defensive auras, which means it benefits more from external buffs, relative to most sets which can saturate buffing (probably only granite benefits more on average). No buff grants someone a heal (separate from regeneration buffs) but lots of buffs grant defense and resistance. Dark armor is more likely to benefit from a random collection of resistance buffs, defense buffs, and recharge buffs than most sets. And while under heavy recovery buffing, where everything can run constantly and at full speed, its extremely powerful.

3. It has the most diverse set of slotting options for inventions. That makes it simultaneously provide options for min/maxers, and concept builders that are looking for invention-based variety.

4. It has the best self-rez in the game. And statistically speaking, most normal players of the game do die occasionally. Soul transfer, as maligned a power as it is, can save the average team of average players from team wipes due to its mechanics.

5. On the red-side, having resistance to endurance drain is not a trivial form of protection.


As to what it can do that other sets can't do "with the proper build" that's a difficult question to answer, because it turns into a subjective build contest. But I can't think of any brute secondary that has significantly less weaknesses in performance than dark armor: I can't think of what I can't do with the set that all others can do. In a crowd, dark armor can deliver comparable performance to even granite: I've tanked the aggro limit of +3s with dark armor for extended periods of time in situations where even granite has a problem. At least until hasten runs out. Against one single AV-class target with no other targets around, granite definitely does better, and sets like Willpower and even Invuln probably do better when the damage is heavily smash/lethal. But those are situational advantages comparable to the ones that favor dark armor.

There is no "magical more return point" any more than there is one for Invuln, or Fiery Aura, or Willpower.

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A guide to the multiple and glaring weakspots in Dark Armor, and an assessment on why, despite any ideal numerical simulations, the set requires more effort for less return when compared to the majority of the brute secondaries?

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The set requires more effort for more return. No one says its an easy set to play. But the maximum return deliverable by the set is a purely numerical issue, and has nothing to do with player skill or game environment. Only how hard it is to get it is.

Also, whenever someone says "despite the numbers..." I tend to want to remind them that while there exist people who evaluate powersets numerically only, I'm not one of them. I've played dark armor on a brute specifically from level 1 to level 50, and specifically played her in all aspects of the game, from soloing to tanking to PvP to end game content. Other people can have different experience from mine, but no one can reasonably claim better or superceding experience in terms of evaluating the set.

The set performs basically the way the numbers imply it does. Of course, if you run your numbers correctly (i.e. the same way the game engine does), it basically has to.

There are lots of ways to improve dark armor. There are even more ways to ruin the set. The performance is so good, I would rather the devs stay far, far, far away from it. On the list of things I would want the devs to look at, Brute Dark Armor isn't even in last place on it: its nowhere on it.

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I don't think you wasted anyone's time, Pippy.

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I don't think that either.

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Nothing short of redesigning the combat mechanics from the ground up is going to fix the problems, and that simply isn't going to happen.

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That Other Game might encourage the NCNC team to consider expanding the mechanics, though. And expansion can be just as good as rewriting if its done correctly, because there's no law that says you have to use the old stuff after the new stuff is up and running in the long term. Think of it like building a set of extensions to your house that you then move into, and then proceed to tear down the parts of the original structure you don't need anymore. Its not as simple as building a new house from scratch, but it does have the advantage of always providing a place to sleep at night.

It also means we don't have to decide what we want to keep, and what we want to change, all at once today.

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I think the only thing that is going to convince the Dev's that defense needs to be looked at is Data-Mining. If the Data-Mining shows that defense is not working as intended then it will need to be "fixed".

What uses defense? SR Scrappers and....FF Defenders and EA Brutes......am I missing anything?

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Castle has said publicly in the past that he thinks the way defense stacks (and other things) causes headaches for him and the other powers designers, and makes it difficult to make certain thigns work the way they want them to. So Castle at least is aware that a problem of some kind exists, and its a problem generally of extremes.

This suggestion, in effect, tames extremes.

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The only thing about Arcana's idea that I find somewhat troubling is the question of how do you type Anti-Accuracy?

Because it seems like a much bigger job if you have to create Sm, Le, Fire, Cold, Eng, Neg, Psi, Toxic, Melee, Ranged, AoE typed Anti-Accuracy. Like Pippy said, it's at least as hard of a job as creating Toxic Defense.

And if you don't type it at all, then it's basically the cousin of base defense and you can be darn sure the devs will never give any character much more than 10% of it except in highly situational powers like PFF.

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It only really works if its typed. I'm presuming that any attempt to implement this will be a typed implementation.

I don't know if adding Elusivity/AA is as difficult as adding toxic defense. It might be. But since Elusivity/AA solves a lot more problems than toxic defense does, it might be considered worth it. After all, the I7 changes themselves were only done, I believe, after they exhausted all other possible ways to solve the problem, and it became the defacto only solution left, hard or not.

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If there is ever the case that there is more than one Accuracy modifier (not even sure if it would ever happen, but if there were to be more than one Accuracy modifier) then it would stack multiplicatively.

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Maybe so, and that's basically what Arcanaville is talking about adding, but the fact remains that as it now stands, every single attribute that can stack with itself does so additively.

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Accuracy factors from different sources stack multiplicatively. Since accuracy has two different stacking "rules" already coded into the game engine, it would not be difficult at all to make Elusivity-like accuracy factors stack multiplicatively.

The four kinds of "accuracy" that exist are Critter Rank Bonuses, Level Rank Bonuses, Attack Intrinsic Accuracy, and Accuracy Strength modifiers (enhancements, set bonuses). Only one of them has any possibility of stacking with itself in the first place (Accuracy Strength modifiers), and it currently stacks additively. Whether Elusivity stacks linearly with each itself, or multiplicatively with itself, is a relatively small balance concern, because it will *always* stack multiplicatively with conventional defense. So there's always going to be an opportunity to design around those mechanics by proper use of both defense types. The examples in the OP do not reuire a particular stacking system for Elusivity/Anti-Accuracy most of the time.

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If I were actually working for NCNC, I might feel more of a need to refrain from allowing design concerns to enter consideration of the mechanics. Since I'm not, I don't particularly see a reason to draw a distinction between the role of a game mechanic implementor and a game designer -- neither one of those is a role I can actually play unless I'm on the payroll.

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I think you're still missing the point of this entire suggestion. One element to this exercise was to illustrate my thought-process when communicating suggestions to the devs. It was a guide to fixing defense, but subversively, it was also a guide to the devs. As players, we often tend to treat "the devs" as if they were one single monolithic entity, when that is the farthest thing from the truth.

The truth is that game development as a structure, and different people are involved in different things at different times. Asking for the way tohit works to be changed fails to recognize that not only is that a massive undertaking, its a massive undertaking that crosses developmental lines. Your version asks for the code team to change the game engine, and the powers designers to rebalance the powers in the game, all at once. That's a huge undertaking, before even factoring in testing.

I think my way is better than your way for a lot of design reasons, which I articulate in the OP. But my way has another advantage over your way that is more significant: mine is possible, yours is impossible, when you factor in the practical realities of game development.

That's a pretty big advantage, most of the time.

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*cough*

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It would take too long, and be wholely uninteresting, for me to state all the ways this makes more mathematical sense. So let me put it this way, it makes me happy, and if it makes me happy, I won't complain as much when NCNorCal finally implements this solution. That's worth a lot, actually, especially to NCNorCal

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Ya still need to fix this, m'lady.

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Past the editing window. But heck, Cryptic should probably also fix this before I'm in a position to complain about it.

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I'm not sure that I agree with this argument. You seem to be advocating a wholesale change of the ToHit equation, while touting the fact that it's possible, under this change, to leave things exactly as they are.

If things are okay as they are, there's no need for a change in the first place. If they need to be changed, then rejecting a proposal on the grounds that it forces you to deal with wholesale balance changes is hardly a wise position.

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I'm not advocating a wholesale change to the tohit algorithm. I'm advocating adding one additional type of effect to it, while leaving the rest completely intact and functioning exactly, precisely as before. And I've given the reason why: so that the day after the change is made to the tohit algorithm the game remains exactly, precisely the same.


Things are not ok, which is why I'm advocating adding a tool that can help fix it. I'm not advocating changing the way all of the existing powers work wholesale because that's not the goal or the responsibility of the game mechanics implementers.

I'm recommending an addition to the existing toolbox of damage mechanics, and while I wear that hat, I have no right to dictate what the game designers do with it. Once its added, I'm free to take up the discussion of the best way to make use of it with the game designers, and as I've articulated in the OP, there are lots of good reasons for using a mixture of both, in a way that preserves certain behaviors that are *better* than any game that only uses one.

Better, at least, in my judgement, and I'm very specific as to why I think its better. All of this is better addressed in the OP.

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Also, this is a outtake of a response of a PT I sent Castle...

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5. With some confusing statements lately about groovy futres and what not....will this year be similair to last year? Should we expect issue 12-14?
Magic 8 Ball says, "Reply Hazy; ask again later."

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That struck me as odd, maybe I'm reading into it to much, but it seems like things are kinda up in the air right now. If not I think he would have responded with something like "yes, we will try to match last years content output, but it's not a garantee".

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You're reading too much into that. Castle is not normally allowed to make comments about the future developments about the game, since that information is strictly controlled by the marketing department. Question specifically related to future content are likely to be deflected by all of the red names in whatever matter they deem reasonably polite.

If you ask Castle something like "so, what do you think about Claws" he may or may not give you his unofficial opinion. But if you ask about his opinion about the moon base in Issue 12, he's not going to answer.

Not that there's going to be a moon base in Issue 12, but if there were going to be one, Castle couldn't comment on it.


In fact, Castle isn't always 100% certain what Issue the stuff he's working on will be in, which means he can't comment on that either. Sometimes, plans change, and commenting can get Castle into trouble if those plans change after he starts working on something.

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The tricky part then is looking at how they interact through stacking. As you note, they would stack differently than they do now: that's kind of the whole point, isn't it?

To do this, you have a number for overall mitigation from each set. You can find the overall mitigation from combinations by simple multiplication, and you just have to look and make sure these aren't broken. Obviously, then, you have to play test to make sure what you've got on paper ends up working in-game -- but doing the stuff on paper is a pretty simple process, and one which makes an overall defense rebalancing at least plausible.

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What I'm trying to say is that this is not a calculation problem, and therefore there's no mathematical way to get the "correct answer."

Picture an FF defender, with maneuvers. The FF defender has a certain level of mitigation X, all by himself, with dispersion. The FF defender provides a certain level of mitigation Y to his allies, with his bubbles. He provides a further level of protection Z, when those allies happen to stand under the dispersion bubble. And when the FF defender turns on maneuvers, everyone's protection changes again.

Its impossible for multiplicatively stacked defenses (Elusivity) to replicate that situation, period. You'll be able to exactly replicate just *one* of those situations, if any. A human being will have to decide which of those they want to preserve as the "right behavior" and then figure out which of the others they want to get *close* to, and which ones they don't mind changing completely, and *then* solve mathematical equations to get the values for all of those powers.

The math is easy. The "who decides which of those is 'working as intended'" is hard. Because you're going to end up screwing with somebody.

And that will kill the idea dead. Mine sidesteps that problem completely.


This was an interesting exercise, the first time I read it, because it took a while for the point of the post to really be recognized. The most difficult part about addressing these issues is not the technical work involved in implementing the solution at all. Its implementing one that everyone can buy into as not causing dramatic problems - and I say "everyone" to include the devs. As hard as it would be to tinker with the tohit algorithms, the political hurdles to making any game mechanical change are ten times higher.

This solution eliminates 90% of the problems associated with attemping any solution, leaving only the remaining 10% of actually doing it, which is itself not a trivial problem. But any solution that focuses on the 10% technical piece, while ignoring the 90% "its never going to happen" piece, is playing a purely hypothetical exercise.

Even as it stands, the odds of making a change to the core tohit algorithms is very close to a "never going to happen" just by fiat. But one that also requires Castle to rebalance all defense powers for players and critters in one single Issue and significantly alters PvE play across the board, and requires retesting of a significant amount of game content prior to release, is literally, 100%, absolutely never going to happen.

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With that said, I don't understand why there's this concept of "rebalancing every defensive power" as some sort of a huge project. It wouldn't be. You simply have to come up with a relationship between current defense and new "anti-accuracy" -- i.e., describe a transformation from current defense to new defense -- which gives the desired behavior -- i.e. comparable to current protection at moderate levels, less broken at the margins -- and then with that formula in hand, you just go through and change the values appropriately.

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Nope, and for the very reason you like the math: stacking works differently. Because stacking works differently with the two modes of defense, in a sense there is no "correct" correspondence between dispersion bubble with Defense and dispersion bubble with Elusivity/Anti-Accuracy because there is no value that would make Dispersion Bubble have the same strength relative to the defender and also the same stacked strength on all of his teammates that are bubbled.

So for all cases where defense stacks - FF, Invuln, SR, power pools, etc - a human being actually has to "redecide" what the "correct" strength values are, because +Elusivity cannot exactly replicate +Defense. That's actually the whole point. If DB is calibrated to add the same thing to bubbled teammates than it does now, the defender will end up with more self-protection (that's probably desirable). But if its straight-converted without taking stacking into account, team mates will have less protection than they do now.

A human being rebalancing defense sets one at a time is basically mandatory. If there was a way to do it automagically, I would have suggested it.


Edit: forgot to mention: debuffs, and critter defenses. Right now, its possible to buy your way past Paragon Protector MoG with BU and insights, and that is strictly intentional. Without *both* keeping the current mechanics around, *and* proper rebalancing, PvE changes dramatically, and its all fine and good to say "so what, its better that way anyway" but actual game designers functioning in a live game do not have that luxury. Again: *sometimes* balance means "stability" and sometimes it means "move-countermove" and both are important in different situations.

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Two problems with this: (1) you're basically assuming that positional defense always represents a dodge, and damage-typed defemse always represents a deflection. That's not the case -- look at Heightened Senses, just as an example. (2) More importantly, having any form of accuracy buff that "penetrates" defense additively is prone to imbalance.

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1. If I'm designing the game, *I* say what positional defense means.

2. "Balance" is not a singular objective. When balancing powersets the issue is stability. When balancing things like inspirations the issue is not stability, but counterbalancing.

In more mathematical terms, at least most of the time (short of "Kryptonite") when a powerset offers X mitigation with defense, it should offer that same proportional mitigation in the face of all attackers. But when an inspiration offers Y amounts of incrementally better protection, there has to be a counter inspiration that removes that same level of Y protection, or else PvP breaks down.

Those two requirements cannot trivially be met with a single mode of defensive mechanics. This was discussed in great detail in the original thread.

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Arcanaville, are there any cases where the Base to Hit is over 100%? Because that would make Accuracy and Elusiveness start to become much bigger buffs than ToHit or Defense.

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Sure: with sufficiently high tohit buffs, you could increase your net tohit before accuracy (and Elusivity) to over 100%.

As a matter of fact, tohit aint capped at all.

However, whether this would be true with the implementation of Elusivity is a complex issue: with Accuracy and no Elusivity currently, Accuracy can (usually) only make tohit larger (I'm aware of powers with intrinsic acc < 1.0), so its not very meaningful most of the time if the 95% ceiling is enforced on intermediate values. That's something that would have to be considered carefully, based on how the powers are going to be designed around it. It could go either way there.


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And are there any cases where the Base to Hit is under 5%? Because that would trivialize the effect of Accuracy and Elusiveness.

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In this case, no, because I'm not tampering with the current tohit algorithm, and the current algorithm places a 5% floor on interim tohit before Accuracy.

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My preference is to make the mechanics as simple (if I were being snooty, I'd say "as elegant") as possible. The whole point of the to-hit formula is to create a need to make sure that you can hit your targets -- and, conversely, to allow you to mitigate damage by dodging their attacks. You only need two things to do this: a way to make your attacks more likely to hit (either through acc buffs or def debuffs -- I count those as identical, since they are mathematically indistinguishable), and a way to make your enemies' attacks less likely to hit (either through tohit debuffs or def buffs -- again, mathematically identical).

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Technically, the only things you need after that are damage, and the ability to reduce damage. You don't need smashing, lethal, fire, energy, psionic - unless you actually feel making the game more complicated is worth introducing the ability to have different strengths and weaknesses.

Contrawise, if all defense was proportional, the one thing you *couldn't* model is the accuracy/defense-equivalent of partially unresistable damage. And I don't mean literally unresistable. An attack can be coded to do half smashing damage, and half psionic damage. That would affect someone with strong smashing resistances differently from someone with no resistances, in a way that is completely different from the situation where you only had untyped damage, and holistic resistances.

Due to the way defense works, there's no such thing as a "partially defended attack" nor is there such a thing as a "partial bypass of defense." There is an actual attack set - radiation blast - that is conceptually designed to partially bypass defense, but there's no actual way to model it. The only way to actually deliver on that description would be to allow individual attacks to have intrinsic tohit buffs rather than accuracy buffs.

If I was designing the game system from scratch, I might have considered making positional and damage-oriented defense multiplicatively stack with each other (basically, both get to be used separately against all attacks). I could then invent something called the "precision buff" that would act like tohit buffs, and counter positional defense, say, and something else called "penetrator buffs: that would act like tohit buffs, but counter damage-oriented defenses instead. They would be the accuracy-based versions of the concept of "armor-piercing" except one of them would represent the intrinsic ability to compensate for a moving target, and the other would represent the intrinsic ability to negate physical deflection-based protections.

All of that is neither here nor there, except to show that the diversity in game mechanics is not there simply as an abstract benefit, but rather to be able to model actual game complexity. Unfortunately, that's something CoH itself doesn't currently leverage very well (i.e. there aren't strong conceptual game "rules" for what you'd expect to have high smashing defenses vs high lethal defenses vs high energy defenses, and conversely what kinds of things should do well against them).

But on a pragmatic level, there is another reason to keep both types of defenses around. Its a failsafe to prevent external overbuffing from getting out of hand. All other things being equal, it should be a lot easier for player Y to negate (but no more than negate) what player X buys, than it is for player X to buy it. Without that negative reinforcement, protection powers become too powerful in PvP, and in PvE in high-buff teams. This duality of wanting to preserve "intrinsic designed strength" while making it easier to negate "externally buffed strength" is the basis of wanting to keep both types of defenses around. One is good at retaining its proportional strength under all circumstances. One isn't. I want both.


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Am I correct that the two primary issues that are to be addressed with Defense are (1) the ability of high-magnitude ToHit Buffs effectively to ignore Defense and (2) the ability of small amounts of Defense to add up to massive amounts of mitigation as you get close to the 45% soft cap (e.g., the ability to build perma-Elude SR scrappers, etc.)? Is there something else that I'm missing?

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That's a bit of an oversimplification, and the original post outlines the specifics in more detail, but that's not far from the truth. (2), for example, cripples power pool defenses, and makes Force Fields problematic. In fact, FF highlights two simultaneous problems: for the cost of maneuvers, FF can Elude an entire team. Conversely, its own self-protection tends to be low, unless it really stacks power pool defenses for self protection, and then it can be pretty darned high.

As to tohit buffs, there's a dual problem to those. If I get 100% defense, *no* amount of tohit buffs do anything, until you cross the magic 45% net tohit number, and then every point of tohit buff above that has *massive* effect. That's bad for everybody.

Technically, the two problems are stacking mechanics, and extrinsic balance design objectives. But there's a lot of game mechanics buried in those two phrases.


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This is a fair point.

I just question the extent to which "adding one thing" to an already combersome formula is a good idea -- at this point, I think subtraction would be more beneficial than addition.

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Whether it is or isn't is virtually irrelevant. The devs would not pull the mechanics of defense and rebalance every single defensive power and ability for both players and critters around a new version of it in a single giant patch if their very existence as a development house depended on it. Its simply outside of their concept of proper lifecycle support of the game.

And to be honest, even I wouldn't do anything that crazy.

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Aside from getting the right numbers for proper balance, can anyone explain why it would be preferable to have two kinds each of +accuracy and +defense?

To me, that just adds unnecessary complexity.

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Well, first of all, "getting the right numbers for proper balance" is a pretty good reason, and I explain what functionality each type of defense addresses in combination.

Second, the subtractive kind of defense already exists, so there is zero work involved in keeping it around as a game mechanic. Whether the powers designers decide to use it, and what for, is a separate issue from the need for a proper suite of balanced mechanics to be available.

Basically, I'm adding one thing, taking nothing away, and changing nothing about the game that a powers designer himself doesn't actively want to change. No other defense/accuracy/tohit balancing solution makes that claim.

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Of course, I believe according to the attribute monitor damage isn't capped either. I believe the popular theory that was posted about this was that maybe it didn't check/cap until attack activation, but that was guessing.

I don't have the link to the guy that reached +1575% damage by eating reds and posted his (very funny) screen cap of it....

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We know that damage is actually capped, even if the attribute monitor doesn't display that fact. But in this case, tohit really isn't capped; that was confirmed by pohsyb.

Like anyone that plays a defense set is surprised. Once, a while ago I said (in reference to the tohit buff decimal error in Geas) that I know more about how tohit works than anyone outside of Cryptic [aka NCNC], and probably more than most people inside of Cryptic, and yet I'd bet that there's probably at least one more way the game engine screws defense that I don't know about. Just because at no time in the history of the game would I have ever lost that bet.

Well, I win again. Sort of.

Note: biggest bug that the attribute monitor has apparently uncovered so far that I'm aware of.

Tohit isn't capped. Defense obeys the defense cap, but tohit is totally uncapped. Keep popping insights or using other tohit buffs, and tohit will just keep on going up. That's uh, yet another reason why defense is not the best defense in PvP, and why Geas seems to cut right through defenses it shouldn't be able to.

Thanks to Peritus for bringing this one to my attention, and thanks to pohsyb for locating the, uh, glitch. I'm presuming this will be fixed in some future patch.


Note: apparently, unless you were playing in beta, tohit has never been capped. Ever.

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Where in this suggestion does it nerf regen?

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Well, it probably would have weakened the previous version of MoG slightly, but Regen cleverly avoided that eventuality.

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My only real concern is Arcanaville is leaving open the option for bad balancing.

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At some point, the irony of good mechanics is that it theoretically allows for bad designers. If you try to force the designers into too narrow of a path with restrictive mechanics, you end up with, well, restrictive mechanics.

Also, an implicit assumption every mechanics designer should make is that they don't know everything about the best possible way to use them, just like people who make hammers don't presume to teach carpenters the best way to frame a house.

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Negative accuracy would basically work just like accuracy, but with different sign. If the attacker has +33% accuracy, and you the target has -33% anti-accuracy, the net chance to hit would be: (1+0.33) * (1-0.33) * 50% = 1.33 * 0.67 * 50% = 44.56%.

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It took me a while to parse this sentence until I realized that 'the target' is an apposition of 'you' and should have been set off by commas. I was then going to suggest an alternate wording that emphasized 'your attacker' and 'you, the target,' and 'chance to hit *you* would be....' But then I realized the simpler solution would be to remove the 'you' completely and just talk in terms of 'the attacker' and 'the target.' In fact, that would clean up a lot of the phrasing throughout all the examples. Just suggestin'.

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Its a typo, pure and simple. Scratch the word "you" from that sentence. Some of those may have gotten introduced when I reconstructed this from the original post.

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I corrected your apparent grammatical error.

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That was not a grammatical error. And I'm trying to be serious here, so stop making me look bad in front of Mr. Clayton, before I get BaB to mess with the body sliders on your perfectly proportioned female alts. This will not look good stapled to a feature request form.

Thank god at least Positron probably stopped reading after the word "improve."

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See Arcana, this is why all my ideas get done. I make it easy on the devs!

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Yes, I'm sure that's it. Just the other day Castle was saying "Arcana, why can't you be more like EvilGeko?" And after wiping my stomach contents off my keyboard, I replied "I'm just not that easy, Castle." And then Castle nerfed the SR passive powers.

If only I recognized the pattern sooner, so much pain and suffering could have been avoided. By the way, Castle wanted to know if you needed Revive to be replaced with Unstoppable, or Overload. Get back to him by Tuesday if you want to make the Issue 12 feature freeze date.