Arcanaville

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Sting of the Manticore, for example, only works in Snipe or Assassin Strike powers (which I believe makes Stalkers the only AT that can slot it TWICE ).

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I hate to disappoint Stalkers out there, but Sting of the Manticore can only be slotted into Sniper powers, not Assassin Strikes. I don't know where that rumor started.

Assassin Strikes can slot in sets that are made for Single Target Melee powers.

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I suggest it would be a good idea to add a set or two meant specifically for Assassin Strikes - stuff with good Intrrupt Reduction, like the Sniper sets have. Presuming you haven't, already.

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So far, there's no reason to believe anything other than that IOs obey the same slotting and enhanceability rules as regular SOs, separate from their other special properties. So if an Assassin's strike set was created that had interrupt reduction as one of its members, I don't think it would actually do anything in an AS attack anyway: AS attacks' interrupt period can't be reduced by slotting.

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But be aware, soloing AVs with shivans is no more an accomplishment than lowering one's difficulty to turn them into EBs.

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Actually, for me AV + Shivan is, if not a greater accomplishment, then a more satisfying one than EB+insps. An EB+insps for my blaster is essentially a detonation: I pop every insp I have and pound on the EB as fast as possible to kill him in as few seconds as possible, to give him no chance to react, regenerate, run, or exhaust my insps.

AV+Shivan fights are generally longer, more involved fights, at least for my blaster and scrapper. They require a little more thought unless you also blow out the insp tray simultaneously. And there are not many things a solo player can have a long, drawn out fight with that can't just turn and kill them in the blink of an eye. I don't want a medal or anything: I haven't done anything that others haven't done before. But I don't do it for recognition, I do it for fun. Its an accomplishment to me, even if it is to no one else.

Whether they are called EBs, AVs, or whatever, I wish there were more "tactical" fights for solo or small team players. Something other than the insta-blink combat that dominates the game. And since the devs aren't making it, I tend to make it up myself.

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Using a temp power (Shivan) intellegently is a far cry from an exploit. The entire point of a Shivan is to use it against enemies. Fighting out of holes in geometry is exploiting an unforseen technical error in game mechanics to achive an unfair advantage over the opposition.

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The Shivan Temp Power is AS blatantly overpowered as the Original Nemesis Staff before it was adjusted. Therefore, its introduction into the game as it is now was a MISTAKE in the same way that a hole in the geometry is a MISTAKE.

Using a MISTAKE in the code is the same no matter how you attempt to rationalize it. It's an exploit.

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That's a very narrow definition of "exploit." By that strict definition, using Instant Healing or perma-Elude in I3 was an exploit.

I don't consider Shivans to be a "mistake" in the same sense as a map hole. The Shivans aren't bugged, or behave in any way different than designed. The designers may have made an error in judgement about whether they should given them to us, but they work as they are supposed to.

The maps, though, are not designed to have holes. That's a genuine error on the part of the map implementer, not implementing the map as designed, or the game engine not handling the map as implemented.

The Shivans do not specifically do anything the designers didn't explicitly design them to do. That places them in a different category than map holes. Map holes are not meant to be used. Shivans are explicitly meant to be used.

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Shivans don't have - regen ?

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Nope. I thought, against documentation, that they did, but after more careful testing, they do not seem to have -regen. They only appear to have -regen because they do as much damage as some AVs regenerate, which as far as a player trying to solo an AV is concerned, is basically the same thing.

I tested for this *very* carefully. If it has -regen, its some weird -regen that disappears under my testing conditions.

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They don't have -Regen you can even check it out at City of Data. Those statistics are straight from developer spreadsheets.

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I'm aware of the CoD data. I explicitly tested because its so overwhelmingly thought that they do, that it was worth confirming through testing.

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For those with the fire epic, or other knockdown patches, Snappy is just as ridiculously vulnerable to knockback as he was new years. Wait till he gets near a building, then drop the patch in such a way to shove him into the corner of a building. Perma-repelled Snappy. I did this on one of the runs to test it: its stupidly easy. Also, the patch keeps repelling his friends away.


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Seconded. My Em/Fire Brute had him on his butt with just AS most of the fight.

My BS/Regen after she stopped wasting time with MoG, was easily able to juggle the bastid.

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During one of the runs, in a moment of clarity/insanity, I decided to avoid his backup by just power thrusting him over and over again, pushing the fight away from the other red caps almost faster than they could pursue. I had to stop when I unknowingly pushed him past an executioner, and next thing you know: assassin's strike. That was one of the two runs that required respites, by the way.

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Shivans don't have - regen ?

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Nope. I thought, against documentation, that they did, but after more careful testing, they do not seem to have -regen. They only appear to have -regen because they do as much damage as some AVs regenerate, which as far as a player trying to solo an AV is concerned, is basically the same thing.

I tested for this *very* carefully. If it has -regen, its some weird -regen that disappears under my testing conditions.

So far, I've had a chance to try it with my blaster only. My blaster popping lucks like tic tacs can fairly easily complete the mission on heroic. Out of six tries, I got killed once because I forgot to pop the next set. The other five, I got through popping respites on only two of the runs.

For those with the fire epic, or other knockdown patches, Snappy is just as ridiculously vulnerable to knockback as he was new years. Wait till he gets near a building, then drop the patch in such a way to shove him into the corner of a building. Perma-repelled Snappy. I did this on one of the runs to test it: its stupidly easy. Also, the patch keeps repelling his friends away.

I was busy getting weed whacker on my main, so I couldn't test Elude. Hopefully sometime tonight I should have Elude tests on heroic and invincible. Plus, I want to see what happens when my Kat/Invuln lets them mob her, to see how long she lasts against all that lethal. That should be fun.

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BAH!!! What's the point of winning the fight if you don't get all tingly inside. What the hell kinda Scrapper are you!?!

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GM's used to seeing a fuzzy black ball just eat critters and spit them onto the ground: he's not geared for "flashy."

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Testing update.

Heroic spawn of Snaptooth AV and minions - Died in MoG in 50 sec.

Invincible spawn of Snaptooth AV and minions - Died in 13 sec.

That's all damage MoG is supposed to protect you from, folks. Same spawns with inspirations and or IH/DP led to victory.

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Worth noting: assuming you used dull pain inside of MoG (and I presume you would), the death in 13 seconds implies an eluded scrapper would have died in even less time, unless they immediately used respites. Even with fully slotted health, an SR scrapper would only recover about 130 health in 13 seconds at level 50. A MoGed scrapper with dull pain has the equivalent of 789 health more than a conventional SR scrapper.

I think actually that one thing you might be seeing here is accuracy cap-out. The combination of invincible, and AV accuracy, and archery accuracy, is applying so much accuracy to those foes that they might more than drive Regen to the ceiling. In effect, Regen outside of MoG doesn't get hurt proportionately as much as an Eluded or MoGed scrapper because the accuracy that is boosting Elude and MoG off the floor gets partially capitated by the tohit ceiling. Was Snaptooth even, or +2 in the invincible mission?

I haven't had a chance to try this out yet: it'll be interesting to see how Invuln, SR, Regen, and DA all work out.

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Dark consumption does not specifically have the same issues as consume in that light. It does not underperform its peers just because its endurance management is inferior - almost the opposite.


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I am somewhat curious, I have always felt that Dark Melee was the safest melee primary but also at the same time the weakest in terms of damage output. What does Dark Consumption add to the melee set and why is an end recovery power in the melee set to begin with in your opinion?

I realize you can only guess at what the original design conept was but what I am specificaly wondering is how you see Dark Consumption functioning with the set as a whole as it stands now after 8 issues of changes.

I'm just looking for your feelings on this, not a proof

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Well, the devs have stated multiple times that the original intent was for dark melee to have lower damage, but higher control than the other sets. Not utility: specifically control (martial arts is supposed to have the best "utility").

It makes sense for a set with high control and lower damage to have more endurance, because a set that has more control and less damage will fight for a longer time.

Also, the set's control is single-target in nature. It has a single target fear, and its debuffs primarily affect one target. In fact, the more they are stacked, the stronger they get. Which means the less targets it fights, the stronger it is, and the more targets it fights (beyond a certain point) the weaker it gets.

That's interesting, because its self buff (soul drain) and its endurance recovery (dark consumption) both are PBAoEs: they get stronger when you hit more things, and weaker when you hit less things. That means DC and SD vary in strength completely opposite to how the rest of the set performs, which creates a "sweet spot" where the set tends to want to be. You can go lower and safer, or higher and more dangerous, but the set has a built-in regulator on performance: it rewards the skill it takes to operate from its comfort zone, but it makes in increasingly harder to operate farther away.


The devs are not always - or necessarily often - quite that deliberate in their design choices: dark consumption might have simply been a cool idea they threw into the set they thought it was most appropriate for, but that's how I see the set functioning now. The mistake the devs made in dark melee was that they did not, and do not, tend to think about activation times carefully enough: specifically how they relate to recharge. Because Dark Melee has such fast attacks, it benefits the most from slotting recharge. That was a minor issue pre-ED, but post-ED with almost *everyone* slotting recharge, their notion that dark melee should be a low damage set goes out the window: any set with fast activation times and with the discretion to slot recharge is going to be a high damage set: its *impossible* for it not to be, given how the devs design attack powers.

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my example was Dark Armor, not Dark Melee, and has nothing to do with dark consumption per se.


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Ok, the example was just to illustrate the point that endurance can be and is used to balance sets.

Do the following statements bear any resemblance to your opinions? I may or may not agree with these statements myself, just trying to further discussion and gain a better idea of what people think.

Dark Consumption from Dark Melee has no counterpart in any Brute, Scrapper, Stalker, or Tanker attack set, and Dark Melee has no particular reason to require higher than normal endurance in order to bring it on par with those other attack sets.

Fiery Aura Consume does have counterparts in other Brute, Stalker, Scrapper, and Tanker sets, and it also requires higher endurance use than many (if not all) other defense sets in order to bring it on par to those other sets.

Fire Manipulation Consume does have counterparts in other Blaster secondaries, but does not require higher endurance use than those other secondaries to bring it on par with those support sets.

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Rephrasing those statements as I would put them:

Dark Melee does not have a specific balance requirement to have significantly more endurance than other scrapper primaries, so the inclusion of dark consumption should be seen as a "nice to have" and not a "critical to balance." Therefore, there is no specific requirement for it to be any stronger or weaker than it currently is, because its inclusion in the set is specifically to be a unique benefit to the set.

Fiery Aura does appear to have issues related to its performance relative to its endurance consumption. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the overall endurance management ability of the set relative to its tanker and brute peers. Under those circumstances, its clear that taken as a whole, Fiery Aura has less endurance management capability than other sets with comparable performance, and less performance than sets with comparable endurance management capability. In some cases, it lags in both areas simultaneously.

Fire Manipulation appears similar to dark melee: its performance relative to its peers is not limited by endurance, and therefore like dark melee the presence of consume appears to be a "nice to have" unique benefit, not a "necessary for balance" component. As a result, just because it shares the same name with Fiery Aura consume, doesn't intrinsicly mean it should be balanced by the same criteria.

The devs *could* buff both FA consume and FM consume. But those buffs would have two different net results. The net result of buffing FA consume would be to equalize the imbalance between FA and other tanker and brute sets. The net result of buffing FM consume would be that /FM blasters would be getting a substantial endurance management tool "for free" as a secondary benefit of taking the FM secondary. It would be an out-of-balance addition similar to the DoT damage of Fire attacks (which are considered "secondary effects" by the devs that are not explicitly balanced for in the same way as base damage when designing the various attack sets).

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Dark armor is a set that can easily approach its peers without burning very much more endurance than them. But it can *exceed* its peers by burning *more*.

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How can Dark Melee exceed the other attack sets by burning more endurance?

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Theoretically, by slotting a lot of recharge and closing its attack chain gaps with very fast attacks, but that's not what I said in the original post you quote above: my example was Dark Armor, not Dark Melee, and has nothing to do with dark consumption per se.

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Fire blaster /Fire attacks aren't specifically designed to suck more endurance.

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Is Healing Flames what you mean when you say that Fiery Aura relies on high endurance output to reach comparable performance, or is it more than that? What is it about Fiery Aura that deserves more endurance than Fire Manipulation (I am not disagreeing, just curious as to your reasoning)?

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There are a number of factors. Three of the tanker sets have a high cost damage aura: Fiery Aura, Stone, and Ice. Ice gets endurance recovery. Stone gets to eventually be granite, and outperform them all. FA gets neither massive tanking performance, nor endurance recovery to power all of its defenses continuously.

In addition, its performance only rivals the other sets when healing flames is spammed. That costs additional endurance: if slotted for maximum effectiveness (3heal/3rech) it can burn almost 0.5 eps. And when healing flames was buffed, it was simultaneously strengthened by increasing its heal (from 17.5% to 25%), and reducing its recharge (60 seconds to 40 seconds). Boosting the heal simultaneously boosts heal per second, and heal per endurance point, but reducing recharge only boosts heal per second, not heal per endurance point. So while the power was increased by a total of 114%, its heal per endurance point was only increased by 43%, and its endurance burn per second was actually increased.

In effect, not only does Fiery Aura burn more endurance for its performance, but the devs actually *increased* the endurance costs of the set by tying some of the buff to HF to higher endurance costs. The only justification for doing that would be that Fiery Aura was in danger of outperforming the other sets if it had too much endurance, but that's not even remotely true.

Fire manipulation does not share this property relative to its peers. It doesn't lag its peers in damage output unless it uses more endurance, and any deficiencies in the set (such as secondary effects) would not be resolved by having more endurance. The fact that they both have a power called "consume" or for that matter the fact that /Fire has significant endurance recovery at all is a coincidence, not I believe a signal that Fire manipulation is supposed to have vastly superior endurance management ability. From a game balance perspective, I believe fire manipulation consume has more in common with dark consumption than fiery aura consume.


There's a difference between being constrained by endurance costs, and being burdened by them. Dark armor is a set that can easily approach its peers without burning very much more endurance than them. But it can *exceed* its peers by burning *more*. That's a case where unlimited endurance would potentially unbalance the set, because endurance costs are what keep it within the rough performance range of its peers. But Fiery Aura is not like that: it doesn't outperform its peers but for the lack of endurance to do so.

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The logic behind buffing consume is that its in a defensive set, and specifically a defensive set that relies on high endurance output to reach comparable performance with its peers on average, both for tankers and brutes. In many cases, that is because many of its peers have significant endurance recovery and/or endurance management also.

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What about /Fire blaster's Consume? /Fire blasters fit into both of your justifications, as far as my experience goes. They suck down endurance to reach their potential and other blaster secondaries have endurance management powers as well.

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Fire blaster /Fire attacks aren't specifically designed to suck more endurance. There are more AoEs, which means they are only endurance-efficient when hitting multiple targets. Actually, giving endurance management to high-order AoE damaging things is counter-productive for balance. The devs can do whatever they want regarding /Fire consume, but it would be pointless to design AoEs to balance their endurance around a higher than 1.0 target-strike, then give out free endurance to sets with a lot of AoE attacks. That would be the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, and shooting off its thumb with a pistol.

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Consume could get a buff, but then Dark Consumption would deserve one too. Buffing both of these powers would make Dark/Fire overpowered.

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Consume and Dark Consumption only "deserve" the same treatment if the presumption is that all endurance recovery powers everywhere have to be identical for balance purposes. But that is not the logic behind buffing consume (at least, it isn't mine). The logic behind buffing consume is that its in a defensive set, and specifically a defensive set that relies on high endurance output to reach comparable performance with its peers on average, both for tankers and brutes. In many cases, that is because many of its peers have significant endurance recovery and/or endurance management also.

Dark consumption does not specifically have the same issues as consume in that light. It does not underperform its peers just because its endurance management is inferior - almost the opposite.

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Something tells me you've been getting way too many PMs on this

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That, and I'm getting cranky in my dottage. :P

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And here I thought I was being original with that PM...

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Five seconds after I read the burn normalization note, I thought to PM Castle about Consume, because its the obvious next thing. Ten seconds after I read the burn normalization note, I figured there was no point, because its a little too obviously next thing.

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i'm surprised to see so many devs playing WoW... aren't they the enemy?

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To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.

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"City of Heroes was very tightly focused on moment to moment combat," Rogers says. "The Marvel game will have more big components to it. It's going to be all the stuff we wanted to put into City of Heroes, and you'll get to run around in Marvel costumes. We've got more money now and more people. We'll add more depth. We want to take it to the next level."

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Now I really wish I had saved my "Open Letter" thread from being purged. I wonder what the "its impossible" crowd would have to say now.

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Can we fix Consume now that we're normalizing timers?

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There will be NO CHANGES to Consume at this time. Why? There are some essential datapoints I need to confirm which I have not had the opportunity to do yet. I *should* get my hands on the raw data after the Invention system hits.

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This is why I keep bothering Castle about Martial Arts and Super Reflexes: it adds some diversity to his complaint box.


Consume's recharge is wrong, though.

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The point I was making about inconvenience was that if the devs really really really really didn't want people soloing AVs, they wouldn't have them spawn when you were solo. Period. If they changed it so that an AV spawned if you were duoing on invincible, that would still meet the aforementioned requirement of having the option to take an EB or gather a team for an AV, but they didn't do it that way. To repeat: They have built the game so that someone playing on "Hard" mode will encounter AV's solo.

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As I said the first time: that doesn't logically follow. Just because they spawn for solo players doesn't mean they want solo players to be able to defeat them. The alternative possibility is that they want players to be confronted with something that requires them to gather a team.

Let me put it this way: if *I* wanted AVs to be unsoloable, I could make them unsoloable by any means, by making them mathematically unsoloable. *I* would still personally allow for them to spawn in [u]solo[u] missions specifically to require players to gather a team to defeat him. So the logical inference you are drawing would definitely be false if I was in charge of AV design for Cryptic. One doesn't automatically follow the other.

They spawn solo to "force" you to get a team to defeat them. The only do so at invincible, so that players aren't *literally* forced to team if they don't want to. That "force" only happens for people who want to play on invincible.


If they wanted to make sure no solo players *ever* had *any* chance of defeating an AV, they could do as you describe, but that would not be enough. Players that wanted to attempt to solo an AV would just park a second account in the mission to allow the duo to spawn the AV. I would. Knowing that, the devs have no incentive to create the barrier you describe.


If I want to attempt to solo it, and its mathematically possible to solo it, there is very little the devs can do to prevent me from doing so. I've soloed three task forces, including two with AVs, and there are significant barriers to attempting that also. They could add more: if I wanted to stop me, I could. But what would be the point? Its a lot of wasted effort to get into an arms race with me just to prevent me from playing the game in an unconventional way that does not actually *create* any imbalances in the game (it does not allow me to level any faster, or acquire anything much beyond what anyone else is capable of).


To emphasize: your assertion is: "If they changed it so that an AV spawned if you were duoing on invincible, that would still meet the aforementioned requirement of having the option to take an EB or gather a team for an AV, but they didn't do it that way."

That would *not* meet the requirement of having to gather a team for the AV, because if you're solo, you don't spawn the AV in the first place. The AV spawns at invincible to force [u]solo players[u] to gather a team. It does so *only* on invincible to give solo players a way to avoid being forced to gather a team if that is genuinely contrary to their playstsyle. The AV [u]MUST[u] spawn for solo players if the intent is to throw a team-required challenge at players who *happen* to be solo at that moment in time.

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They take time to get, but can really turn the tide of a single team vs team PvP fight.

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I agree they are useful, but I don't know if its all that good of an idea to have "tide-turners" that work against actual players. In the presence of tide-turners, the winner is the player/team that either has the most, or elects to use them first, and they minimize the effects of the actual characters involved in the combat. I believe the focus should be on the characters in general, as much as possible. In PvE, the length of missions and the number of fights guarantees that no matter how many of these things you have, you will ultimately have to fight without them eventually. That's not true in PvP, where there is no real penalty for fighting intermittently (in PvE, the penalty is slower levelling).

Moreover the way the PvP ratings system works, there is strong incentive to be the one that wins first, even if after that you lose second.

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4) (this is the most relevant point) The devs put in a feature that downgrades AVs based on difficulty and team size. It didn't used to be there and it is now. When they put it in, they made a deliberate choice to make AVs spawn when you're solo on invincible. If they really didn't want you soloing them, they wouldn't have done that. The only other possibilities are that they are stupid or that they want to inconvenience you by making you downgrade or get a team at the end of each arc.

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What some might see as the inconvenience might be seen as the whole purpose of the existence of Archvillains to others. You're dismissing that possibility because you only see it as an inconvenience, but creating the requirement to gather a team to defeat them might be the whole reason for the existence of Archvillains. Not everyone finds gathering a team to take on something a burden.

They don't spawn at all difficulty levels so that teaming isn't forced. They spawn at the highest level as a compromise solution to give players the ability to decide if they want to solo them as an EB, or gather a team for them as an AV. The fact that it allows some people to set for invincible and then attempt to solo them might be an inintended side effect.

Keep in mind, the devs designed giant monsters the same way and said so explicitly: they are designed to require players to assemble teams to take them down. And furthermore, because of health and regeneration, giant monsters are not soloable in the same way AVs are, so there is no appeal to the sense that the devs intend us to solo them, but just don't want to say so. They are telling the truth for GMs, so there's no reason to disbelieve their expressed intent for AVs. Archvillains are just the instanced mission version of the same content, on a smaller scale.

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PvP doesn't have stricter balance requirements, it has *different* ones.

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PvP has to be, on at least some level, fair. PvE combat does not. PvP's balance concerns are based having some equity in players defeating other players.. PvE balance concerns are essentially revolve around us not being able to kill the critters too fast: its not based around them necessarily having a good change to actually kill us. The PvP constraints on balance - whether the devs do a good job of it or not - are several orders of magnitude higher.

That's one of the reasons why ultra-strong short duration powers are intrinsicly fine in PvE, but less so in PvP. Something you can only use once, or every so often, resolves one fight or situation in PvE, but doesn't overly impact levelling. In PvP, it gets you a kill. Put it another way: the unit of combat in PvE is (typically) the mission: things only have to balance out on average over a mission. In PvP, the unit of combat is the engagement: PvP has to be balanced within that shorter time frame.

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Well, I consider the missions the only one of those three options directly as a result of the devs, so we're on the same page in terms of that, at least.

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They designed a powers system that allowed for those massive imbalances, and they designed an XP system that one-dimensionally rewarded only ability along a specific axis: speed of defeat (and as an underlying component: direct effective damage dealing).

A better reward system and a better balanced powers system could have allowed teams that were only a damage-dealing 50 to attempt to satisfy mission objectives in non-standard ways, for which they were a 250 instead. Or to put it in more direct terms, controllers could win with control, instead of having their control be a means to an end of delivering more damage while the targets were controlled.

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You just hit one of the biggest things that's wrong with this game... If most trials and task forces are designed to be challenge to a 150-200 team (and most TFs are pretty tough), and all the ultra min/maxers are running around at 350-500, what's the problem... the missions, the normal players (100-150), or the uber min/maxers?

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The problem is the devs, who made the difference between optimal and suboptimal the difference between 50 and 550.