Arcanaville

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I await your collective discoveries eagerly. I have been assembling this math into a set of programming libraries so that I can quickly produce numbers for arbitrary situations. I'm looking forward to being able to "finalize" the tables and math involved in a useful way.

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Last night, I discovered how long a level 38 Dark Armor brute gets to stay alive in a full team of level 40s doing a Mayhem mission full of 42s: about 20 seconds at a time.

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Few questions have I. Others have probably asked, but until I have time to search all the way through;

Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players? If so, there are several things that need to be 'tweaked' to be more defeatable.

Hamidon - Major defense versus everything, hard to imagine it's hide being even tougher.

Tank type AVs (Infernal, Brawler, Siege, Shadowhunter, Diabolique, etc.)

Many of the 'boss' type critters with already strong defenses like; Trolls, Frostfire, Pumicites, Vaz, Tsoo, Skyraiders, Malta, Devoured Earth, and Carnival of Souls.

Pets (like the guns Malta Engineers drop), as well as cairns, and swarms.

Simple solution is this, the higher the defense, the less health they require. High Health (hundreds of thousands) + Uncapped Defense = ugly problems.

The toughest part is not in attacking, but maintaining the attack long enough to wittle them down. If their defense is even higher (and many scrappers damage is way down) team wipes could be far more numerous.

Just want to be prepared in either way. Thanks in advance for your help.

[/ QUOTE ]hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.


i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.

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Actually, for the record just about all the things listed above do not have "high" Defense. Many have significant Resistance, though.

Hmm, how to put this...

My current testing of I7 is not inconsistent with critters getting +10% accuracy per level, to +5, and then holding at +50% acc and getting tohit buffs from +6 higher.

Its also not inconsistent with LTs, Bosses, and AVs getting 1.15 (+15%) 1.3, and 1.5 accuracy bonuses on top of that.

And its not inconsistent with accuracy bonuses being multiplicative: a +2 Boss would have net accuracy of 1.2 x 1.3 = 1.56

And it seems Iakona is going to have difficulty confirming those numbers.


That is all for now.

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Ok arcana answer this.....

Will slotting MoG and Elude with ANY defense enhancements be a waste with I7? From what we understood, just using those powers without any slots would give you the maximum defense you could possibly have, so slotting them with defense would do absolutely NOTHING.

Is that really the case? If so, perhaps the devs need to take away the ability to slot them with defense?

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Slotting defense in either Elude or MoG will help counter high tohit buffs in PvP. In PvE, there are very few tohit buffs high enough to overwhelm either (DE quartz eminators would be one). And as EvilGeko said, it also helps with defense debuffs. MoG has no protection from defense debuffs, and SR has something they call defense debuff resistance but seems to have the same effect on defense debuffs as prayer does.

Edited typo

I think given the costs the empowerment stations would make much more sense if instead of granting a 15 minute buff, they created a special 5 minute inspiration. That way, you wouldn't waste what they made, and you could save the buff for the right time to use - which is often at the end, not the beginning, of missions.

Costs are still way too high in any case, though.

Just echoing that the Mayhem missions were very fun for me also. Here are my observations:


1. Its too easy to accidentally hit the exit button when there is still time on the clock, and if the bank heist is complete, you can't re-enter. I had a team mate do that: hitting "exit" is so instinctive for some of us, I think there should be a confirmation dialog before exiting a mayhem mission, just because of the nature of the mission.

2. Eliminate the dampening fields in the jails. Its a timed mission designed explicitly to give fun to the players to go out and smash things. While the jail concept itself is great, let people break out of jail fast. There is no game-play breaking issue with allowing fast jailbreaks, beyond the trivial conceptual "why would they let you break out fast" - which is counterbalanced by the "why do I only have 15 minutes to smash things in Paragon City" issue.

3. I did two where I didn't get any time at all for destroying objects. I did one where I obliterated practically everything on the map and never got a key. Seems to be glitches here.



Overall, though, I think its a great concept. Its been a long time since I've genuinely gone "whoa!" in CoX, but seeing a +2 Infernal round the corner just to break up a bank robbery almost gave me a heartattack.

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Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players?

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Positron, Castle, Pohsyb, anybody else I might have mentioned it to in the past? I might have been joking before, but consider this my formal petition to change the name of this thing from the I7 Defense Scaler, to the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler. It is going to be a lot easier explaining to everyone how the change to critter accuracy will help defense sets, than it will be explaining for the next six months *what* this change affects.

I know I'm not supposed to petition the devs in the forums, but this is a special case situation where I think a large chunk of the player base is about to get really confused about what's going on (in spite of fifty billion forum posts about it).


* This change does not affect Defense at all. Its a misnomer.

* This change does not alter any Player power, at all

* This change does not alter any critter power, at all

* This change does not, and cannot affect Player accuracy in any way

* This change does not, and cannot affect PvP in any way

* This change only affects Critter Accuracy. Only Critters are affected. If it doesn't have a Player directly controlling it, its a Critter.

* In I6, different critters had different Base tohit, based on Rank (LT, Boss) and Level Difference. In I7, Players have base 75% tohit, unless they are attacking another player, in which case they have base 50% tohit. Everything else has base 50%, period.

* In I7, instead of getting higher Base tohit, critters will now get Accuracy Bonuses instead, for all Ranks, and for all level differences up to +5 (beyond +5, they will start to get tohit bonuses again).

* Accuracy Bonuses are different from tohit increases in that tohit increases just add to Base tohit. Accuracy is multiplied after all tohit and defense is factored in. Accuracy is fair to Defense, relative to Resistance.

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I understand the reason for the first floor operation, of course, you don't want the to hit to go negative and then apply an accuracy modifier that would have the opposite effect. Why not floor it -- the first time -- at 1%, though, instead of 5%? The second calculation, and thus the total still floors at 5%, just like before, but a Boss or AV can't get above that 5% unless he has like 500% Accuracy.

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Having fought forever on a dozen fronts for something basically like the I7 scaler change, I can offer this perspective, take it for whatever its worth.

The reason for the I7 scaler change in the first place is an issue of fairness. Defense and Resistance work differently, and more important its good that they work differently. The purpose to the I7 scaler is not to make them work the same. But the game had a weird way of creating critters of higher Rank (LTs, Bosses) and higher level than you. The devs wanted these things to be more accurate, so they hit you more often. That's fine, but what they did at the beginning of time is gave them higher base tohit. Minions had 50%, bosses had 75% (in I6, 65%). Higher level things also got higher tohit: +5% per level (to +5, then it goes up even faster).

That creates a problem for Defense, because now, "higher accuracy" things don't just hit more often, they hit Defense sets disproportionately more often than non-Defense sets. The big question was, was that intentional? Were ATs that relied on Defense deliberately supposed to be less effective than ATs that didn't rely on Defense when fighting Bosses, or higher level critters?

There's no good reason for that answer to be "yes" - *all* Bosses weren't created to be "Defense bypassers" but that's what they did.

The problem was that its fine to make Bosses more accurate in the sense of hitting more often. But they had two ways to do that: hand out tohit increases, or hand out accuracy increases. At the beginning of time, they picked the wrong one.

Its important to note that the I7 "Defense" Scaler does not change how Defense works at all. It changes how the more "accurate" critters become more accurate. Its really a misnomer: it should be called the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler.


Ok, so we get the I7 Scaler so that Defense doesn't fall apart against high level things, or higher ranked things. Now, if a Defense set and a Resistance set are roughly tied against minions, they should be (more or less) tied in performance against +3 minions, or +2 Bosses. But that's not quite true.

Theoretically, you can stack enough Defense to do *more than* floor your target. Against an even level minion, 45% defense gives you 90% mitigation, and more Defense does nothing (its a form of pseudo cap). However, what happens against a +2 AV? If the intermediate floor didn't exist, a high Defense set could floor *that* to 5% also. But a +2 AV has a base 90% tohit on things without Defense. Flooring to 5% is 94% mitigation - better than against minions.

It would be hypocritical to ask for Defense to scale as well as Resistance for all low values of Defense, and to scale consistently better than Resistance for all high values of Defense. Therefore, the intermediate floor acts to ensure that Defense is never more effective against higher Rank and higher Level critters than it is against even minions - the level of accuracy that Defense is calibrated against.

If this causes certain powers to work less well than intended, then the powers should be changed, not the intermediate floor (although, I've suggested certain modifications to the intermediate floor for other reasons unrelated to this one). It probably hurts MoG more than MoG should be hurt. It might, or might not, hurt Elude more than it should. It depends. But its not because the "new floor" is an unintended consequence of the I7 scaler (and as I said earlier, it isn't a consequence of the I7 scaler at all, but a change made a long time ago that few people took notice of). The "new floors" is both a deliberate, and necessary, feature of the tohit mechanics to make sure Defense doesn't suddenly gain an unwarranted advantage over Resistance in the tohit formula.

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The floor is no longer 5%. It's now 10% of the foe's base accuracy. So 6.5% for a +0 boss, 7.5% for a +0 AV, and so on, up to 9.5% "cap" on the floor.


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Ok so we have yet another stealth nerf? Awesome.

Yes, I know that this has been mentioned in random threads in the last few months. I also know that 99.9% of the player base did not read those threads. The devs listed the changes that came with I7. This wasn't listed anywhere. You know what that's called? A stealth nerf.....something they claim to "NEVER" do.......yet we have like 5 in every single issue lol.

Oh well......let's wait a month...maybe a developer will actually make a reply. Usually takes about that long.

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If you want to call it a stealth nerf, then fine, but its not a stealth nerf for I7. Its actually a stealth nerf for I4 that no one noticed.

The "new floor" is not a consequence of the I7 scaler, its a consequence of the fact that the tohit equation now performs an intermediate floor. Instead of just flooring the entire thing to 5%, it now floors the intermediate sum (BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - Defense + DefenseBuffs) before accuracy is factored in, and then again after. As a result, the lowest that intermediate number can ever be is 5%, and therefore the actual "worst case" accuracy is always going to be 5% x NetAccuracy. If NetAccuracy is more than 1.0, worst case accuracy will always be higher than 5%.

This intermediate floor/ceiling was put in shortly after the arenas went live, but wasn't really explicitly noted as a change. A lot of people testing acc back then performed tests that straddled the time between when the intermediate bounds wasn't in, and when it was in, which certainly created puzzling results (it almost certainly messed up some of mine).

What I7 does do is trade tohit buffs for accuracy buffs, so more villains will be affected more strongly by the intermediate floors. But even now in I7, you can't "floor" a Malta Gunslinger LT to 5%: the best you can do is 10%, because they have +100% accuracy (2.0). Thats right now, on live.

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Make that AV +5 and his final accuracy is 95% (bounded from 100%)

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I was not under the impression that accuracy was ever capped. Capping (or bounding, whichever name you prefer) only applied in two places I thought:

1) After the addition/subtraction of baseToHit, Defense and ToHit Buffs/Debuffs.
2) To the final chance to hit, after everything else has been applied.

Which would mean a +5 AV had a full +100% accuracy (x2, meaning a floored 10% chance to hit). Incidentally, do we know for certain if it is treated as two separate accruacy buffs (1.5 (AV) * 1.5 (Level) = 2.25, floored 11.25%) or one combined buff (1 + (0.5 + 0.5) = 2.0, floored 10.0%)?

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The confusion (my fault) was that I was struggling for a term for the final, this is their chance to hit you number.

As for your question, I believe the accuracy mods are additive. I would swear that I read that somewhere, but that might have been in my fevered imagination.

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You've read that several times, a couple by red names. The definitive one was by pohsyb, who gave an example that added them up.

Then, after carefully discussing it with him, he explicitly told me that was an error, and accuracy buffs are all multiplicative, a fact that's in my Guide to Defense, and he gave me specific permission to state as such.

In other words, if you are fighting a +2 AV in I7, he gets a 1.2 acc bonus for being +2, and a 1.5 acc bonus for being an AV, and his net to hit on you will be 1.2 x 1.5 x (50% - YourDefense). Similarly, if you are attacking with a Katana attack, you have a 1.05 acc bonus (the weapon draw bonus) and if you have two-slot acc, thats 1.66 acc (enhancements are themselves added up), and your net tohit is 1.05 x 1.66 x (75% - CritterDefense).

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Wait, what's the difference between a To-Hit Buff and an Accuracy bonus? I don't understand what you guys are saying... Does Defense Scaling not mean that all enemies have the same accuracy or to-hit or whatever no matter what level they are? Doesn't this mean that your Defense powers don't have the normal -% effectiveness for fighting guys above your level?

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The guy who posted just above this post of yours has an excellent guide to defense linked in his signature. Read it, get confused. Then read it again, get confused again, by the third time it usually clicks.

If you're a super smarty smart like Arcana and Stupid Fanboy you'll be able to pick it up in the first read. Idiots like me need a few reads.

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If S_F got it all the first try, more power to him: I had a slight advantage over him when it came to reading it.


The difference between accuracy and tohit buffs are relatively straight forward. Making things really simple, to calculate your chance to hit something, its just this:

ACC x (BaseToHit - Defense)

You're a player, your base tohit is 75% (except in PvP: its 50% there). If your target has Defense, you subtract. Then you multiply by your accuracy. Those acc SOs you're slotting? That's accuracy. If you put two acc SOs in an attack, that's +66% acc, which in math terms is 1.66 acc. So, if you're attacking a critter with 30% defense, you're tohit is:

1.66 x (0.75 - 0.30) = 1.66 x (0.45) = 0.747 = 74.7%.

Now, the difference between an accuracy buff, and a tohit buff? Tohit buffs go here:

1.66 x (0.75 - 0.30 + tohitbuff)

Accuracy buffs go here:

AccBuff x 1.66 x (0.75 - 0.30)


Notice, tohit buffs happen first, before acc is taken into account. Accuracy happens last, after everything is taken into account.

Accuracy is "fair" to defense. If you have 10% defense, and I have 30% defense, a 20% (1.2) accuracy buff will make the attacker hit you 20% more often, and me 20% more often. That's fair. A 20% tohit buff is not "fair" to defense: your tohit will go up from 0.75 - 0.10 = 0.65 (65%) to 0.75 - 0.10 + 0.20 = 0.85 (85%), a net 31% increase (85/65). Mine will go up from 0.75 - 0.30 = 0.45 (45%) to 0.75 - 0.30 + 0.20 = 0.65 (65%), a net 44% increase (65/45). He'll hit you 31% more often, and me 44% more often. Tohit buffs hit high defense "harder" than low (or no) defense.

Now (in I6), minions have 50% base chance to hit you. But bosses have a higher chance: 65%. In effect, they have a +15% tohit buff. +4s have a +20% tohit chance over even level minions. Higher "Rank" (LTs, Bosses, AVs) and higher level things have implicit tohit buffs, and therefore hurt high defense things more than high resistance things (aka no defense). That was the imbalance that the I7 scaler was meant to fix: in I7, *everything* now has base 50% chance to hit you, and higher Rank and higher Level things now have accuracy buffs instead of tohit buffs, which make the critters more accurate, but in a way that hits high defense sets the same as low defense sets (i.e. high resistance or regeneration sets).

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So if i'm reading this right, defense still sucks at PvP?

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I wouldn't say that, but no there are no changes that are relevant to PvP other than SR scrappers losing their big AoE buffs.

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Just to be clear: the defense scaler itself does not affect PvP at all. One change in I7 that *will* affect PvP (and is off topic) is the SR passives increased from 5.625% to 7.5% defense, a slotted difference of about 3%. It sounds miniscule, but it amounts to 15% more damage mitigation against opponents with no tohit buffs for scrappers, and about 18% more damage mitigation for SR stalkers. Against opponents *with* high order tohit buffs, its not really that significant.

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For instance, your defense powers will work equally well against a Boss or any critter up to 5 levels higher than you, as it does for an equal level minion.

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Doesn't that mean that everything will have the same 5% chance to hit, regardless of whether they're a minion or AV? I mean....that's what that sentence says. And it's posted by a red name.

Are we not being told something?

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You're thinking "works just as well" means "dropped dead to the floor all the time." It actually means the same thing it means when used in the context of Resistance. If Resistance "works just as well" against even cons and +4s, that means regardless of the level, Resistance will still deflect the same fraction of total damage. 40% resistance means you take 60% of the damage from an even, and 60% of the damage from a +4.

In the case of Defense, this means if 20% defense means you evade 40% of all attacks that would have normally landed if you didn't have Defense, that's true against evens and +4s alike.

And that means if you can floor an even con from 50% to 5%, the very best you can do against a +4 that normally hits 70% of the time is reduce him to 7% - in both cases evading 90% of the attacks that would normally have hit you if you didn't have any Defense at all.

If Defense were allowed to "floor" even +4s down to 5%, and we called that "working just as well" that would be tantamount to a Resistance power deflecting 90 points of damage out of the 100 points an even con threw at you, allowing 10 points of damage to hit you, and then when scaled up to +4, that same Resistance power deflected 130 out of 140 points, so you were still hit with the same 10. That's not "same as," thats "much better than."

Regular Defense used to be "much crappier" against higher leveled villains, but extreme Defense like MoG and Elude used to be "much better than" against higher levels, because both so deeply floored the villains into the basement, in effect the level scaler didn't do anything at all: MoG and Elude nullified the Rank and Level Scaler in I6. At the cost of the Rank and Level Scaler obliterating "normal" defenses, like the entire SR set besides Elude.

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I asked this the first time this change was announced, but never saw an answer.

When facing a +6 enemy, will defense (and to-hit/accuracy debuffs) work at a similar level as they do now against a +6, or will they work at a similar level as they do now against a +1?

In other words, will there be a steep dropoff in effectiveness between a +5 and a +6, or will +6 be where a gradual decline in effectiveness begins?

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I would guess that starting at +6, critters are very likely to stop getting accuracy bonuses (which is how the I7 scaler works), and start getting tohit bonuses (which is how the I6 scaler works), without an abrupt change.


In this particular case, you should consider that a very very good guess.

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Momemt of Glory needs to be changed. This power depends on the mobs being at 5% final to-hit. The defense bonus was formerly high enough to make that so. Now with the changes this is much less likely to happen. Only even conned minions can be capped at 5%. Every other rank of mob will be higher.

Since MoG is rarely needed fighting even cons this is a significant downgrade. Any additional damage is meaningful to MoG since the power does not allow healing or regeneration.

I recommend one of the following:

1. Remove the HP drop

2. Remove the -heal, but keep the -regen

3. Throw the power out and replace it with Overload

4. Throw the power out and make it an actual regen power

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1. Don't use MoG.

2. Use Reconstruction, a fast charging heal power.

3. Get Drunk.

4. Profit.

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MMO players are not different.

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I beg to contest. While there is some crossover, I highly doubt any less than half of the people I've met on CoX, SWG, EQ, AO, or MxO would be able to sit through two sessions of D&D or M&M.

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MMO players are not different with regard to the degree to which they seek out individuality.


Statesman:

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If I were to wax philosophical for a moment – I wonder whether it’s the genre (super heroes), the medium (City of Heroes) or the nature of the internet which has led to a greater demand for individuality.

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How is this different from tracking hits from DoT, like poison/spines? Having a toggle (integration or whatnot) that allows that do help you more than others?

I'm not 100% FOR this suggestion, I just don't think the excuse given by _Castle_ holds water. And I'm 100% AGAINST hypocrisy and double-talk, fwiw. So, is the IDEA worth considering, programming-be-danged?

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He's not giving an excuse. He's saying it would require changing the engine, and it would take a lot of work to change the engine. You can toss the IDEA around, but its worth noting for context that it doesn't matter how good of an idea it is, if it cannot justify its own cost to implement. So the idea either has to be really really really good, or demonstrated to be really really really necessary. Something worth keeping in the back of your mind while kicking the idea around.


I don't see the hypocrisy in pointing out that a particular idea has an extremely high hurdle to overcome before its likely to be seriously considered as an option.

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Each attack from Spectral Wounds damages the target, then after a set period, heals the target. Thus, it's all handled by the attacking power. Regen, however, is a defense set, and would need to track all incoming attacks in order for this to work as described.

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Logic error?

Spectral wounds - TRACKS EACH HIT - then heals after specified time.

Regen - to do this, we'd have to TRACK EACH HIT...

Per'aps me Eeengleesh ees no good? Iddn't dat de same t'ing, mon?

Or, in simpler terms... This one is a hammer I made. For that to work, I'd have to make a hammer...

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What Castle is saying is that the behavior of Spectral Wounds is tied to the power; all Spectral Wounds attacks behave this way no matter who they land on.

What you are saying is any game that can track SW attacks on everyone, ought to be able to track all attacks on someone - that it shouldn't be impossible to code.

And that's exactly what Castle is saying: it would require "new tech" - additional coding - to make such a thing work. At the moment, the game engine doesn't work that way.

If you think you understand how the game engine is written, and can judge how easy or difficult it would be to alter a fundamental piece of it, try exercising that keen mind on determining why toxic defense doesn't exist yet. I've suggested quite a number of ways to make it work myself: all have been judged to be problematic in one way or another.

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You think too much.

How many times do I have to tell you.

Give SR and Invul a reconstruction like self-heal; get drunk; profit.

You never explain why that won't fix the problem better than any super smarty pants complicated nonsense you would come up with.

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1. There's no place to put it without restructuring the sets.

2. With the right values, it might make SR equal to regen, but would still make SR too slot-heavy compared to regen.

3. Its very difficult to balance with Invuln, because high +RES + fast heal is much more powerful than +DEF + fast heal; both can have equal damage mitigation, but Invuln will have the best alpha-strike/alpha-volley survivability.

4. It combines too strongly with Elude, and I think the devs don't really want to create an easier way to Elude+AidSelf than there already is. It combines almost as strongly with Unstoppable, and can instantly bail you out of the unstoppable crash.


Putting a half-strength Dull Pain into Practiced Brawler (my current best quick-fix) is probably better for SR. Adding a small amount of scaling RES into invincibility (very small, very very very small) would be better for Invuln. Assuming you were trying to send both sets upward towards Regen.

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He points out that PnP RPGs had arbitrary rules (like "Mages can't use swords or wear armor"), and that MMOs have followed suit. A mage in World of Warcraft CONTINUES to be a "Cloth wearer." Your clothing determines your stats, so WoW characters wear stupid hats for the bonus. The only customization most MMOs give you were a few changes to your face.

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My point was that the arbitrary rules in PnP RPGs are not the straitjacket they are in CoH. "Wizards can't wear armor" in D&D was practically the equivalent of "men can't wear high heels" in CoH. Wizards could be just as unhittable as Sir Clanks-a-lot if they really wanted to be.

But even that is really secondary to the point that in PnP RPGs, players were just as demanding of "customization" as they are in CoH, not less. In PnP RPGs, that expressed itself in asking GMs to extend things, because there was an infinite number of ways to extend things. In MMOs, that is often expressed in breaking the rules because in computer MMOs, everything is governed by "rules." There are no rules in D&D that says men can't have shoulder kitties: the game is silent on that topic. In D&D, that which is not prohibited is allowed by default. In CoH, that which isn't explicitly allowed is prohibited by omission. That, more than anything else in my opinion, governs what people ask for in CoH (and MMOs in general).

There are lots of ways to give people a sense of uniqueness, and if they have any one of them, most players will channel themselves into it. WoW has crafting, and while you are certainly not the first person to make the Potion of Blowing Green Bubbles Underwater, you might be the first person of the people you know to do so. CoH has costumes, and I cannot tell you how many [dozens, hundreds of] hours I've spent in Icon. To the extent, though, that costumes provide a unique flavor but not a unique experience, costumes alone will probably always be somewhat insufficient to tame people's need to generate a unique experience for themselves.

MMO players are not different. MMOs are different, because they are much more rigid than even the most restrictive of PnP RPGs.


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He didn't say this was a bad thing. In fact, I get the impression he's pleased. He's patting himself on the back for making a game where people feel so attached to their characters that they bristle at any percieved railroading or taking away of conceptual independence.

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I've argued several times in the past that taking the position "Isn't it great that people love their characters so much" and simultaneously "Things change and if you don't like change, perhaps this is not the game for you" is probably not a good idea.

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What fascinates me is how new this discussion is to the MMP world. I’ve played lots of games over the years, and usually customization wasn’t that big of an issue. I won’t use any particular game as an example, but rather I’ll take D&D 1st edition to demonstrate a difference. Magic Users then couldn’t use swords. Just couldn’t. They couldn’t really wear armor, either. The major reason for this was balance: a sword wielding, armor wearing mage rendered any regular ole fighter pretty darn useless. There was certainly some grumbling – after all, didn’t Gandalf wield a sword? – but pretty much it’s been accepted. In fantasy games today (online and other), the same limitations continue to apply…When designing City of Heroes, I remember a lot of people telling me that it was just plain wrong to give people so many costume choices in the beginning. People wanted to earn individuality over time, not receive it. Yet, to this day, I think character creation is the single most praised element of the City.

If I were to wax philosophical for a moment – I wonder whether it’s the genre (super heroes), the medium (City of Heroes) or the nature of the internet which has led to a greater demand for individuality. MMP’s, for the most part, are simply direct descendants of D&D, as described above. The gameplay, the mechanics, have pretty much followed the same pattern for ALL computer RPG’s. There’s certainly some demand for customization in other games (as I read on their boards), but it’s never quite the same as it is here for CoH. Maybe it’s because super heroes, by definition, are unique; thus, to play a super hero game a player wants to have those choices. But then I look at the internet, where we demand customization even down to our e-mail address. No one wants to be given a particular address, we almost always choose our own “handles.” Heck, I use the same name in nearly every MMP game to this day, as if it were my own digital shadow. Hopefully, some academic will look for this in the future.

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Fundamentally, paper and pencil RPGs are different from CoH in four fundamental ways:


1. RPGs are essentially always teamed. Solo RPG? That's a little weird. No one cares if the magic user can't wear armor or not, because each class could do its own thing, and only its own thing, and that didn't matter because they were essentially designed to always work in groups. CoH's attempt to keep one foot in the solo-friendly side, and one half in the balanced-vulnerabilities side, often causes it to shoot itself in at least one of those feet (and occasionally, in the head).

2. RPGs have a human at the wheel. GMs aren't blind implementers of the rules, they interpret, and where necessary, break them, for the benefit of the players of the game. The rules are less important in PnP RPGs, because the rules are subject to human intervention. If people sometimes rage against the rules in CoH, its not because CoH is different, its because in a PnP RPG, they would have a *dialog* with the GM, which would tend to defuse arguments. The rules are really much less restrictive than they are in a computer RPG, for obvious reasons, and the comparison to "mages can't wear armor" overlooks the enormous amount of things they *could* wear that doesn't exist in CoH. So what if they couldn't wear a giant metal suit: they could go on a quest for the legendary Cloak of Schwarzenegger instead.

3. In PnP RPGs, the rules don't say what customization is allowed. Instead, in PnP RPGs, the rules essentially say what *isn't* allowed, and players are free essentially to do anything else, within the limits of what the GMs will allow. CoH might have 16 million different costume choices, or whatever, but D&D had an infinite number of them.

4. PnP RPGs are often, and D&D in particular was surprisingly light in terms of combat. I've almost certainly killed more than a million heroes and villains in CoX since release: I kinda doubt there are many D&D players who can say that even if they've been playing it continuously for 30 years. And the non-combat aspects of D&D and other PnP RPGs can be fabulously open-ended, and make up for the relatively mechanical combat. That open-ended nature is, in effect, a highly unique and custom experience: even if two separate groups with two separate GMs play the exact same module, they were very likely to have two completely different experiences. That sort of uniqueness (I did something you didn't) doesn't really exist in CoH - and usually, its pretty clear that that is something Cryptic actively tries to avoid.


People want different experiences, they want control of their destiny, the want their digital avatars to be unique. I think this is true in every MMO. But in other MMOs, if you want to be unique, there are ways to try to be: crafting, lets say, or pursuing unique loot. In CoH, we have to *ask* for ways to be unique, because we can't create any on our own. This isn't WoW, so I can't make whatever you're supposed to make with a bag of fish. This isn't Second Life, or I would have macroed my own Martial Arts animations by now. This is CoH, where we have to beg for CAK to look a little less goofy, or for a rifle that slings on our backs instead of being apparently pulled out of our butts, and the answer is usually "no."

We want to be unique, but there are always problems - usually scarcity-related problems. Why if it take four attacks to make a complete attack chain, does the Martial Arts set only have five? How unique can MA scrappers be? This isn't "unique" to MA scrappers, either.

Why do we ask for so much customization in CoH, relative perhaps to other games? Because in CoH, unlike other games, if we want to be unique, all we can do is ask.

Or try to play a MAN build.

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If you took Instant Healing and changed it so that it made each hit act like illusory damage -- i.e., for each hit you take, a second or two after the hit you 'instantly healed' part of the damage, then what you'd have would be a defense that would scale the same way that Resistance and Defense did, and could be balanced against them -- 40% Resistance, 40% Defense, and 40% Instant Healing would all, over time, protect a character from 40% of the incoming damage. Unfortunately, doing a rework this fundamental to a powerset seems to be more than what the devs are willing to do, since it would entail rebalancing the other powers in the set as well.

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That wouldn't balance the sets exactly, because there is an inherent deficit to taking damage as opposed to avoiding it.

I have lots of ways to balance regeneration with Defense and Resistance. So far, all of them suffer from one of four problems:


1. The suggestion makes regeneration work *too much* like either Defense or Resistance. We don't need a resistance clone that just has a regeneration sticker on it.

2. The suggestion uses such complex math that I could never convince the devs to implement it, and I'd be arguing its merits on the forums until Kingdom Come.

3. The suggestion runs afoul of what I understand to be certain critical limitations in how the game engine works. When I suggested replacing tohit buffs with accuracy buffs for bosses and +5s, say, I knew that that ability didn't exist, but I also knew all the components to make it work did exist, and therefore the modifications necessary were not out of the question. Some ideas (like creating an attack heal-back queue to implement the "instant healback" idea) require inventing mechanisms completely out of whole cloth, and probably not easy to construct ones in a real time game.

4. It actually works, and its actually implementable even with the current game engine, and its provably balanced. And 99% of all regen scrappers would probably want to kill me for even voicing it.


If I had a way to do it that avoided these four things, I would never stop talking about it.

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Thank you CuppaJo for that lovely introduction

And hi everyone! Many exciting times lie ahead and I'm happy to be here with you all.

An avatar contest is an excellent idea. Help this "newb" out and give me your ideas... just post your avatar here and I'll pick one out. And just an FYI-my name is based off of the bug-not the sport.

And thank you again for the warm welcomes.

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Suddenly, "hearing the sound of Crickets in my thread" has a whole new meaning on the forums.

Welcome aboard.

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Sounds like a much need hand in the MM's direction

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Sounds like something Tankers should also be able to for their team.

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A long while ago, I suggested a related mechanism specifically to replace "taunt" as aggro/damage control for tankers (called "shielding" instead of "bodyguarding").

Specifically, the idea was that with taunt, the most dangerous place to be was near the tank, which makes no sense. With shielding/bodyguard, the safest place to be is near the tank (because of the effective radius of the effect, in this case, supremacy range).

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Looking back on Statesman's post, his numbers for the current tohit calculations don't match up with his explanation. Using the numbers he posted, it looks like ToHit is
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre> RankToHit + (CombatMod - 1) </pre><hr /> for a higher level target. This still doesn't match up with the tested values in your guide, though.

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Yes, this is the correct formula. Its corrected in my Guide, but for a specific reason I haven't posted the updated version yet.

Rule #1 is that if it boosts all your attacks, its a tohit buff/debuff, and if it alters a single power, its an accuracy buff/debuff.

Rule #2 is that all tohit buffs are additive, and all accuracy buffs are multiplicative.

The level scaler appeared to be a contradiction in that rule, so a while ago I investigated around the edges, and it turns out the multiplicative rule we've all (or mostly) assumed is wrong - its additive just like all other tohit adjustments, and as you've discovered.

There is a natural conclusion that comes out of this: if the I6 level scaler is additive (tohit), and the I7 one is multiplicative (acc), then the previously operative statement about the I7 change:

"Players with zero Defense will see no change from I6 to I7"

is not *exactly* correct. That's only true for minions. Its not true for any higher rank villain: higher ranked villains will be very slightly more accurate in I7 than in I6, against players with zero defense.