Arcanaville

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In GW you can often win with a "weaker" build if it takes advantage of a weakness of builds that are common for the current meta game. I like this kind of solution much better than one that changes the how effective a power is.

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But that idea is just a close paraphrase of the idea I originally presented: the only difference is that I suggested instead of such things happening by coincidence, they happen explicitly by design.

In effect, the balancing happens less at the powers level (although it ultimately has to be implemented at the powers level) and more at the meta-level of PvPers making decisions on what to build, and how to tactically approach combat. Those decisions currently are at least partially based on what the current prevaling build percentages are, and how likely you are to fight any particular thing. It would improve balance significantly if those decisions weren't just randomly based on player populations, but intimately tied to them directly by explicit design decisions. Right now, it just happens. A good design, in my opinion, would leverage the behavior for balance purposes.

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Open case.

I don't understand

Open box

I don't understand

Touch Crate

You open the box and a magic demon comes out and kills you.

Delete Zork....

I don't understand.

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You have insulted a cornerstone of interactive fiction. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

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Of course, there are people who think email was invented in 1991.

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That's because there wasn't anyone out there to tell us we had it until then. "You've got mail!"

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We kinda did. I remember some people doing ridiculously wild things with their biff alerts, too.

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In General, I think most of the “facts” quoted by people in this thread are about as factual as the cover of the Midnight Star. I’d really like to know who was taking a class in MMORPGs in the year 1979 when my college was still using punch cards to teach programming.

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This has to be a reference to me, and what I said was that I had a class in games theory then, not MMORPGs. It was actually a very basic introduction to games theory, and elementary games design. I was, err, significantly under eighteen at the time.

The precursors for MMORPGs, though, can trace back at least to the early MUDs; my first contact with those was back around 1989, although they were around for at least a few years before then (some of the early work on them I understand goes back to at least the early 80s, actually).


Of course, there are people who think email was invented in 1991.

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If you are a game theorist, then here's the principles surrounding effective 1v1 PvP balance. You'd want to exploit three separate player decisions. First, you'd want to ensure that the act of making a build decision has population-based negative feedback. Each person that chooses to build in a particular way reduces the value of that build. That's possible: ensure that every build contains its own specific weakness (trivial examples, Focused Fighting offers a tohit buff: Unyielding buffs character with unresistable smashing damage). This means even if a particular build is "better" than all the others, that fact is only true so long as not too many other players take it. By definition, the strongest builds are not the most popular, they are the least popular, and that's impossible to circumvent.

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The problem with this is that while it does use self correcting forces to aid in balance, it doesn't create a fun game. Who wants to play a game where the effectiveness of your power is determined by how many other people choose the same one?

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If its not fun, we already have that now: everyone has strengths and weaknessess, and the strength of a particular build is based on how common corresponding counter-strengths and weaknessess are in the opponents you are likely to face, not on the absolute lack of them. This idea above doesn't (necessarily) invent all new strengths and weaknessess, it simply shuffles them around so that its impossible to buy a strength package that arbitrarily makes you stronger than most, and at worst equal to those that replicate your build. Its the ability to make builds that are strong against most, equal to most of the rest, and weak to only a very few that encourages FotM builds: the decision for someone to specifically build to counter an FotM build is often hampered by such buillds being sufficiently specialized that there is a penalty for doing so in being effective against anything else. If there exists builds that are good against most things and weak against few, *and* the few that are good against it are not good against many other things, that is a bad positive feedback loop that encourages such building. If you eliminate such situations, you still have the same strengths and weaknessess you had before, you still have the same general range of effectiveness (at least in theory: you don't *have* to change such things if you don't want to, although if it were me, there are lots of such things I would want to change as a separate issue), but what you take away is the self-reinforcing that happens when some builds (or build strategies) become pre-eminent.

Its only an accident of design that, say, SR did not get intrinsic tohit buffs: in fact, its clear that *now* the devs are thinking exactly this thought in the invention system: the high order tohit buff enhancement is slottable in defense powers; the thinking was probably on the lines that there would be a neutralizing effect of doing so: tohit buffs would exist in PvP in proportion to the amount of defense powers. Problem is, its too clumsy in itself, and the stacking mechanics make such an attempt extremely difficult to pull off in isolation like that.

But to reiterate: you are only as effective as what everyone else decides to build for, today. This doesn't change. What changes is how the game uses the PvP players themselves as the backdrop environment for making PvP build decisions. Right now, you build on the assumption that most people will think (roughly) like you, and make similar build decisions. With this in place, you can't think like that anymore, because the feedback intrinsic in this design asthetic puts you into the position of having to think recursively: how will people build if they build like they think I will build to counter how they would originally build? And as a practical matter, that's a virtually impossible thing to predict.

One thing, though. This game isn't really rock/paper/scissors, because not all rocks have paper. For example, slows are highly effective in PvP because even those things with slow resistance don't have enough to fully counter the effects of slows, and slows simultaneously hurt an opponents offense, defense (most of the time), and maneuverability. Slows have no real paper. To follow this design principle fully, everything should be effective against at least a few things and be relatively ineffective against other things, or you don't even have the basics of rock/paper/scissors balance, much less more sophisticated forms of balance.

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While I have great respect for your mathematical ability I doubt you've been looking at game theory as long as I have. I can promise you this, if you can figure out an effective method of creating (much less effectively testing) 1v1 balance in an MMO setting then it will be worth much more than yearly salary unless you're already in the Donald Trump salary range

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My first "official" class in games theory was in 1979, but I was pretty young at the time. I've been studying it as an actual mathematical discipline off and on for approximately twenty-two years. I know people who've studied it longer, but they're all mathematics or economics professors.

Not at the Donald salary range yet, though. But if I thought someone would pay me Donald money for a PvP combat system, no matter what its properties had to be, I'd quit my job tomorrow to write it.

But whatever its worth to publishers, game designers don't generally make that kind of money. Castle could hit his coworkers with lightning and actually *give* them superpowers, and I doubt it would take him higher than the high five figures. Lead programmers can make more, but lead programmers don't normally get rich unless the game you end up writing happens to have "Quake" in the name.

Honestly, if Cryptic asked me to fix the game mechanics, I'd probably do it for free because the improvement in the game I'm playing would be worth more to me than what they can afford to pay anyway. I'd take a badge, though.


If you are a game theorist, then here's the principles surrounding effective 1v1 PvP balance. You'd want to exploit three separate player decisions. First, you'd want to ensure that the act of making a build decision has population-based negative feedback. Each person that chooses to build in a particular way reduces the value of that build. That's possible: ensure that every build contains its own specific weakness (trivial examples, Focused Fighting offers a tohit buff: Unyielding buffs character with unresistable smashing damage). This means even if a particular build is "better" than all the others, that fact is only true so long as not too many other players take it. By definition, the strongest builds are not the most popular, they are the least popular, and that's impossible to circumvent.

Second, design proportional stacking rules, so that no game attributes exponentially increase, and so incremental improvements always have constant incremental value. This prevents single-point balancing from being upset by odd combinations of things, and allows for linear balancing metrics. This takes away the incentive to overstack, or accumulate lots of one thing, and allows players to make diversity decisions on an equal footing with stacked decisions.

Third, create a requirement to commit to combat to achieve maximum effectiveness, and force the decision to commit to occur prior to gaining complete information about the combatants. This eliminates the ability to arbitrarily decide to engage in only fights where you have mathematically demonstrable advantages. This closes the exploitable hole in the first principle above: players have to decide to fight with imperfect information, which means they cannot precalculate overpowering advantages and decide to fight on that basis.


Under such circumstances, even if the raw numbers are not precisely mathematically balanced, the balancing happens in the decision trees of the players: the game forces players to diversify their builds, because no build is good if too many people have it, and it forces players to work harder to defeat anyone, because if everyone is different, few people will actually have each other's precise weaknesses, and most of all they will have to decide to fight before they are 100% certain what the mathematics of the situation are to make the precisely informed decision.

There are ways to force players to commit to battle. One example (and I'm not saying its a good one to implement in CoH, its just offered as proof of concept): reduce blaster base damage, then grant them a special click power that boosts damage to equal or higher levels - but roots. Mobility equals low damage, lack of mobility equals higher damage. If blasters want to stay mobile, they can attack other squishies, but they won't have the same overwhelming damage against them. If they want to attack hard targets like scrappers and tankers, they will need more damage to overcome their defenses, but they can only get it if they lose their mobility and simultaneously make themselves vulnerable to melee attacks. Its probably too radical an idea for this game, but it would work in a from-scratch game engine.

There are lots of untapped ideas for balancing capabilities in 1v1 combat, and all of them have the additional property that they make teamed PvP combat more interesting also: they are not specifically 1v1-targeted adjustments.

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Where I disagree is trying to work on 1v1 balance, its a waste of time and resources and always will be.

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There is no such thing as team balance without archetypal and powerset balance of some kind. "Balance" doesn't necessarily mean every single possible power set combination has an equal chance of killing every other single power set combination (but the notion that such a goal is intrinsicly impossible is something I wish I had the time to disprove, because I'd bet my annual salary on it), but there are specific design requirements for a balanced PvP environment that begin with individual power sets and archetypes, and work up from there. You cannot skip directly to "balancing" for teams: its blatantly impossible. Attempting to build on poor foundations is the only real waste of time and resources that exists; creating good foundations never is.

When people claim that PvP is "balanced" for teams, what they are saying is that for any given team, you can construct another team that is its approximate equal. That's no different than saying for any character build, you can construct another character build that is its approximate equal. There is no sense in which CoX PvP is balanced for teams but not balanced for individual combat. There's nothing about teamed combat dynamics that CoX implements that adds something to the balance equation that single combat lacks. In fact, in the specific area of stacked buffs, teamed combat actually breaks more weak spots in the game engine than single combat does.


Probably more to the point: I know of no fix to PvP combat mechanics that fixes teams without addressing a specific powerset issue in single combat also: there are little if any "team" fixes when it comes to game mechanics, only powers and mechanics fixes, which are blind to team/solo combat.

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Pretty sure Arcanaville is responsible for the testing of those numbers.

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I believe thats correct; I'd also seen those values, which is why I was comparing a medium yellow (18.75%) to triple slotted defender Tactics (~20%).

And purples, which I know he tested (I think he used the demon spawning Infernal alter to get a statistically significant number of attacks in a short time) are actually;

DEF
S - 12.5%
M - 25%
L - 33%

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I tested them enough to know they were far off from the purported strength on the text labels, and then pohsyb gave me the precise numbers for both lucks and insights.

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On the other hand, PvE environments are generally static, and not because they have to be, but because game designers claim they *must* be: that an evolving PvE environment creates all sorts of problems that would upset or unbalance the game. Can't have PvE players alterning the environment, because a constantly shifting backdrop to PvE would wreck PvE.

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I don't really know any developers who believe that. We look at games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, God of War or Shadow of the Colossus and the innovative use of terrain involved there and think "How can we get things such as that into our game?"

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On paper, I think everyone from players to developers thinks the idea of an evolving PvE environment - of which modifiable terrain is a very small part - is a good idea. But *specific* ideas about player actions fundamentally altering the game environment tend to be shot down as either impractical, or too subject to abuse.

In fact, the whole concept of instancing is antithetical to players having control of the environment. And its not just a compromise solution, because very little developer time seems to be put into non-instanced content. We have a bunch of wandering monsters, burning buildings (which don't even have the decency to actually fall down when they explode), and Hamidon (and even Hamidon is pseudo-instanced now). Players cannot save the warwalls, because they really can't *fail* to save the warwalls.

Its not *technologically* impossible to do these things in CoH, but I'll bet its not seen as either practical, sufficiently interesting, manageable, or casual-friendly (can't have the mutant store closed on thursday because insufficient numbers of players stopped the trolls from sacking it, because it will piss off the casual players who play on thursday).


You take a risk in PvP: the risk is that the players will fix it, whatever "it" is, and temporary problems will be seen by the players as something *they* have to fix, because the developers themselves are really not very important except essentially as weapon's dealers. But that risk doesn't seem to be calculated as worth it in PvE environments (at least the ones I've seen) because the PvE environment is either seen as just a stepping stone to PvP (and therefore simple and stable is what everyone actually wants) or its seen as critical to the core playerbase (and therefore too risky to tamper with in unpredictable ways, and players can be very unpredictable).

In PvP you don't complain if the enemy destroys your forward base of operations, because its an article of faith that the purpose of the other side is to make life difficult for you. But in PvE, I don't think I see the same desire to take the risk that what the players were counting on yesterday might not be here tomorrow because of playerbase activity, because the developers do not want to be perceived as the "enemy" that took something way.


But I would love to be proven wrong. No one would be happier than me to see player-influenced environment (not synonymous with terrain: "environment" includes any alteration in physical environment and the NPC critters within it: spawning larger groups when a larger team walks by is an example of a very tiny non-permanent environmental influence) happen in I10, I11, or I12, and have to eat my words.

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A PvE only game runs the risk of growing stale. Players will always be able to burn through content at a rate many times faster than a development team can create, and this creates situations of player burnout and constant cries for 'new content!' A great example: A WoW developer said at one point that it would take players as long to go from level 60 to level 70 as it took to get from level 1 to 60. And yet, within 48 hours of the expansion going live, there was already a level 70 player. While it is certain that he did not experience all of the content of that expansion pack in that time, it should be apparent that the rate of consumption is far greater than can be met by a development team working with realistic resources and budgets.

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I'm going to have to disagree to a degree. The guy who levelled from 60 to 70 didn't just miss some of the content in the expansion pack, for all extents and purposes, he missed *all* of it.

Content is not just combat. Its possible to make content that takes a significant amount of time for players to experience, provided that the players actually want content, and not a just a different randomized map and a slightly different amount of XP for a mission.

CoH makes it hard on content in a lot of ways. For example: when you team, often only one person experiences all the content. The other players see the combat, but not the actual story. They are along for the ride, from the perspective of content.

If it takes a hundred times longer for a designer to make a mission to save the reporter from the evil malta than it takes to run the mission to completion, then there's going to be a problem with exhausting PvE content. But I'm not sure it takes a hundred times longer to write a choose your own adventure book than it does for me to read every possible ending. I think people emphasize the enormous opportunities for leveraging PvP combat to create unlimited content, but don't spend enough time thinking about the massive improvements that are theoretically possible to develop engaging PvE content. In real terms, I think PvE content development, tools, and methodology are still in the stone age.


Here's a contradiction to ponder. One of the biggest advantages of PvP combat is that in PvP, the players *are* the environment, with respect to all other players, and therefore the environment and backdrop of PvP constantly changes. This is seen as a strength of PvP.

On the other hand, PvE environments are generally static, and not because they have to be, but because game designers claim they *must* be: that an evolving PvE environment creates all sorts of problems that would upset or unbalance the game. Can't have PvE players alterning the environment, because a constantly shifting backdrop to PvE would wreck PvE.

To me, this is probably one of the better representations of how preconceived notions of design and balance selectively winnow opportunities for improvement on both sides of the game.

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While I don't necessarily agree with everything you mentioned, I certainly agree with the character ownership. This keeps me coming back to this game and creating new characters, coming up with new backstories and costumes. I love it!

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Actually, NC Soft has property rights to everything we create here.

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Not an intellectual property lawyer, but actually, not really. What they have is a non-exclusive perpetual license to what I create. They can't grant themselves exclusive rights (meaning, they can't own it) to what I create because I'm implicitly granted copyright the moment I author anything, and the only way I can implicitly give that away is if I'm a work-for-hire employee. Even if I click OK to an agreement that says "you agree to sign your rights away" that's not enough to blanket lose copyright, because exclusive transfers must be done in writing, and explicitly. But NCsoft can ask for non-exclusive rights to anything I create.

Of course, I don't necessarily have totally clear rights to everything I create either: if I incorporate parts of their content, they can exercise their exclusive rights on them. I can write whatever backstory I want, but they could prevent me from publishing it if it mentioned the Crey, for example. Meanwhile, they could publish it themselves, because while they don't own my backstory, they do have an essentially unlimited right to use it themselves. They don't really have property rights, they have usage rights, and that's really all they need anyway.

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Walk over to the MUO design whiteboard, and under "Fun" erase whatever is written and write "balanced" and "mathematically sane."



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No I think those should perhaps be priority two and three. But priority one should always be fun. And more Fun should always or almost always trump the others. After you have considered the Fun aspect then you can worry about balanced and mathematically sane.

See to many times I've seen balanced and mathematically sane used to kill all fun from a potentially good game.

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That's why I said "under." Entertaining should be the primary goal.

But just because its the most important goal doesn't necessarily mean its always the most important task. I enjoy the living room of my house more than the foundation blocks, but its a very bad idea to rush the foundation of a house just to get to the "good parts."

Good game mechanics are not 100% necessary to make a fun game, but bad game mechanics unnecessarily eliminate so many possibilities to make one.

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I got a question for this post...again it is similar to do i understand this right?

I decided to respec into 6 slotted health on test. Right now, I have 2 SO, and one Heal IO, so my base health/regen is 99%. I have a Numina Proc in there, add another 15%. Since I also have 5 Sciro...they add 10% each....so that is another 50%.

I have the Numina Proc, if I add another Numina Heal in Health, and then slot 2 Numina again in Healing flames....12% bonus each set

Does the Numina regen bonus stack with that...or have I capped my regen secondary to the 5 Sciro D's? Can I add another 24% regen (to my already killer regen boost now...and it is killer)? Or is the only way to up that regen rate would be the other health procs?

edit: this is a fire tanker, and not alot of power sets in general, allow so many pbaoes. Ws, have multiple pbaoes, but the devs have limited the IO sets that can go in atleast one power. I am looking at the ws now. IA is a pbaoe but only takes stun for example. So it looks like this is anticipated/planned, when they limited some of the pbaoes in the ws.


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If I understand your question correctly, the rules are:

1. You can have up to five set bonuses *of exactly precisely the same type and magnitude*.

This means no matter what sets you slot, and no matter what powers they are in, if you have five of a particular buff, like +10% regen, the sixth one will have no effect. However, this does not affect all *regen* buffs, it specifically affects all +10% regen buffs. If you slot another set that has a +5% regen buff, you can have up to five of those also. As far as the set bonuses are concerned, a +10% regen buff is different from a +5% regen buff. This rule specifically *only* applies to the set bonuses: the bonuses you get for slotting more than one of a particular set into a particular power.

2. Procs and special IOs are handled completely separately from the set bonuses. They have a completely independent limit, totally separate from the set buffs. Some of them are specifically tagged Unique, which means you can only use one of them *anywhere in your build*. Once you slot one of Numina's +regen/+recovery IOs into a power, you cannot slot another one into any power, anywhere, in that character.

If the IO is not specifically tagged Unique, you can have up to five of them in your build, subject to the normal rules for special IOs (specifically, just like any other set IO, you can only have one of each specific one in a particular power: you cannot slot two Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge IOs into the same power, but because its not tagged Unique you can slot more than one into different powers.

All of the Heal specials are tagged Unique, by the way.


So I believe the answer to your question is that you'd get both Numina's set bonuses for having two Numinas in two different powers, plus the bonus of Numina's special proc, plus all five of Scirocco's Dervishes +regen buffs - because the +regen from Numina's set bonus is a different strength from the +regen from Scirocco's Dervish. If Scirocco's Dervish's bonus was +10% just like Numina, you'd be capped to five maximum, even though you had seven total sets with them.

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When we sat down to design CoH, we wrote on the white board: "fun." Seems obvious, but many games seemed to miss the mark. That's OK; some games don't need to be fun in order to be successful (I won't name them, but they're out there). We wanted to make a game that had fun moment to moment gameplay. Hard to quantify, but easy to identify when you find it.

Cool posts, BTW.

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Walk over to the MUO design whiteboard, and under "Fun" erase whatever is written and write "balanced" and "mathematically sane."

Then find a copy of my Open Letter to Cryptic and tape it to the board. Thanks.

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Right now people put 3 SOs a each power and know it is pretty much maxed out. It is very simple. You don't need tons of math to understand how to maximize an attribute. Whether you should is a different arguement.

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They don't know that, and its not that simple.

Example: Eagle's Claw. 142.64 points of damage, base. 278.15 points of damage with +95% slotting. 420.79 points of damage with build up. Slotting any more makes no sense, right?

Well, 4 +3 SOs would be +103%, and with build up that would be 432.2 points of damage. Most of the time 11.41 points of damage isn't worth much. Except, in this case, it might mean a great deal.

(Health of level 50 minion: 430 points)

I'm not making this up: with my current IO slotting my Eagle's Claw is currently hitting even level targets for about 428.9 points of damage. That's moderately annoying even if I don't fight even level targets often. More generally, against +2 targets there's a particular sequence of attacks I can make that leaves a +2 minion with about 3 points of health left. In actual in-game combat, some damage bonuses have almost no effect, and some have a big effect: its a fairly discontinuous jumpy behavior.


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Complexity is fine for the players who actually enjoy it but if you look at the games that succeed you will find that complexity is not popular. People need an easy path to get to more or less the same result or they will say it is too complicated. The example above shows that the Devs went back on their promise to keep SOs nearly as powerful as IOs and made it so that anyone using SOs will now be 1/2 as powerful as those using IOs. Effectively forcing everyone to not only use IOs but to use complex sets of IOs.

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They never made that promise.


You should know I've been fighting for colloquially simpler (if possibly technically more complex) powers mechanics for quite some time. This was and is a problem prior to the invention system: the invention system only makes it worse.

But some of that is unavoidable, and not even laudably addressable. The game mechanics need to be simple enough so that what a particular power, effect, or enhancement does is simple to express. But it does not, and should not, presume that players shouldn't be expected to exercise good judgement in deciding how to combine them. The effects of individual things should be easy to understand, and they should combine in relatively simple ways. But its perfectly acceptable for there to exist more combinations of things than the average person can or is willing to analyze. More options is always good, even if not everyone can fully explore them.

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I find this rather frightening. This just shows that virtually no casual player will ever be able to figure out how to use this system.

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You'd be hard pressed to convince me that the average player consistently makes mathematically informed decisions *now*. I still run into people in-game that say "hey, if I put three defense SOs into this power, it gives me 56% defense: that's good, right?"

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well, I've gotten salvage from one, and I could have sworn I remembered someone else in one of my hunts mentioning a recipe, but you may be correct. I think you're confusing the guaranteed drop with the random chance drop. I know GMs don't have a guaranteed drop like AVs, to prevent farming, however I don't think their random drop is nerfed.

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I think recipe drops are completely suppressed on giant monsters. I don't think they had two separate chances to drop (a guaranteed one and a random one) because I do not think it was ever possible for GMs and AVs to drop two.

Ghost Widow's Embrace: End/Hold, rare, Pool A.

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Has anyone checked to see if it's only IDENTICAL bonuses from sets that stack up to 5x, or if it's any bonus of that type (i.e. you could have 5x +0.75% AND 5x 1.25% HP bonuses simultaneously, or you could have 5 bonuses of +%HP).

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Checked? Heck no: I'm nowhere near being in a position to do that. But that's specifically how Castle said its supposed to work: you can only have a maximum of 5 +1.5% Health buffs, say, but you could have 5 +1.5% Health set buffs, and another 5 +1.0% Health set buffs, because those two set buffs are considered different.

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I know the "Quinfecta" is uber rare but is that supposed to happen that way? I don't remember seeing confirmation if its a bug or working as intended.

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I believe Positron was the one that gave us its internal-dev name, and all but directly stated that this was working as intended when it happens (insofar as the system independently decides randomly if you are going to get any of those drops, and therefore if you are lucky, it should be possible to get all five).

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Do tell? Brawl seems to only take Melee Damage sets...

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Hint: for most scrappers, brawl is the fastest activating attack they can possibly include in their builds.

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It's even harder than that for a Regen. My I9 guide is giving me a headache.

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As a rule - a literal rule - I don't write power set guides. But I've been scribbling notes on a guide to invention options for super reflexes. I'm not sure if I'm going to release it whole or in part yet, primarily because I'm not sure I can fit it into the forums. If I say it could theoretically be longer than the longest thing I've ever contemplated posting, that might help illustrate the scale of the thing.

The biggest problem: unlike DA, Invuln, and Regen, the most important synergistic invention options come from *outside* the defensive set, which means taking into account non-SR related build issues, like power pools and primary sets. And that, frankly, sucks in more ways than one.

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I hope that doesn't mean that SR is really up the creek with no paddle. I'm kinda hoping that you'll be able to find a way to salvage SR in zone PvP. If anyone can, it's you. I've tried, but every time all I see is a lot of nothing. Well, more like stuff that is okay, but the other guys getting the better toys that completely counter my defences.

Help us Obi Arcana-Kenobi, you're our only hope!

=. .=

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The way I've been thinking about organizing the options - because there really isn't a way to show *all* possible options - is to consider "archetypal" options (not in the sense of CoH archetypes, but in the general sense of the word).

For example: if you want to leverage speed, what's the best way to do that with inventions and SR as your secondary? And what's the best way to put that speed to use? If you want to go maximum defense instead, what's the best way to get the best possible defense, with the least cost? And is it credible to run with the limitations you're going to have to incur to get that defense?

Stuff like that. There are some interesting ideas in there. One interesting idea is that DM/SR, a set that is traditionally called a good PvE set but a sucky PvP set, has interesting possibilities, because its one of the best leveragers of speed (among other things).

I think while the options of the other scrapper secondaries are relatively straight forward, if tricky to calculate, SR is going to have to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube to really get the same sort of benefits. And I've been testing some really ... unconventional things (example: I bet I'm one of the few people that can tell you what happens when you slot Kinetic Combat: Chance for Knockdown into Crane Kick. Answer: unfortunately, not much: small mag KD + CK's KB = CK's KB, and occasionally just a KD).

I was tempted yesterday to post my half-serious analysis of brawl yesterday, actually, but something came up and distracted me from doing it. Before you laugh: brawl has some interesting surprises in it when you look at slotting it with inventions.

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It's even harder than that for a Regen. My I9 guide is giving me a headache.

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As a rule - a literal rule - I don't write power set guides. But I've been scribbling notes on a guide to invention options for super reflexes. I'm not sure if I'm going to release it whole or in part yet, primarily because I'm not sure I can fit it into the forums. If I say it could theoretically be longer than the longest thing I've ever contemplated posting, that might help illustrate the scale of the thing.

The biggest problem: unlike DA, Invuln, and Regen, the most important synergistic invention options come from *outside* the defensive set, which means taking into account non-SR related build issues, like power pools and primary sets. And that, frankly, sucks in more ways than one.

More Pool A drops:

Freebird: Endurance
Miracle: Heal/End


Also, I got the St. Louis Slammer temp power as a Pool A drop, which is the first temp power drop I've gotten ever (and I've seen a fair number of drops). Interestingly, it dropped from a level 33 mob, but the recipe was level 10. I'm guessing all the costume and temp power recipes are kinda like that, since they obviously do not have a specific power level.

[ QUOTE ]
Two separate Cryptic teams? Yeah ok. Whatever you say.

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I have fairly direct knowledge that this is in fact the case, as incredulous as you might be.