Arcanaville

Probably should have just reposed to begin with:
+95% damage slotting plus Build Up plus +48% damage from somewhere kills level 50 Lts with no resistances at even con. BU + Aim will get there (Aim = +62.5% damage). Note that BU + Aim + 95% damage slotting is *not* a guaranteed kill on Lts with Nova now. I said above it kills 50% but that's a misstatement: it kills 87.5% of Lts (7 out of 8) with just Build Up and a small defiance damage buff now (because obviously when all waves hit that's a kill as well).

So for you, stacking BU and Aim all the time, if you are using a nuke that deals the same damage as Nova, in I24 you will still kill all the minions, you will go from killing 7 out of 8 Lts to killing all the Lts, and you will deal about 18% less damage against Bosses than you do now.

The real actual damage loss for you could be in the single digit percentages, because most of the bonus damage Nova is doing now is being wasted on dead targets in the way you use it (for that matter, in the way most people probably use it).

No, its 18%. Nova has an average damage of scale 4.875. The version demonstrated in the stream did 4.0. That is 82% of the damage of the average version of the current Nova. That's factoring in the contribution of all waves of Nova at their percentage chance to trigger.

What I said was that the devs haven't identified your specific issue as a an explicit problem, but thanks for making it much more obvious what your problem is.

I know you think I'm just going to hit everyone with a wall of text, and I just want you to know that you're absolutely right.

My thought.

My other thought.

Feeding the community information to appease them is like feeding a school of sharks chum to appease them.

Is that technically even a derail?

I think a reasonable compromise might be to have, in the case of Nova and its cousins, a 33% chance for a 50% crit on Bosses. You only had about a one in three chance of having a lot more damage in the first place, and concentrating that extra damage against bosses would mean the actual damage of the power in most situations would not go up by much, but it would go up where it counted the most.

If the power doesn't crash, its much less necessary that the power have a guaranteed chance to disable targets for extended periods of time.


The changes being made to Dual Pistols are intended to counterbalance the snipe changes being made to other sets. That change is fundamentally a single target DPA/DPS change. What you're talking about is your opinion that dual pistols doesn't appeal to you, something that the devs haven't specifically identified as a problem yet.

I think there should be a better way to resolve the invention situation myself (I said so from the beginning when Freedom's features were announced) but I think its disingenuous to claim the invention system is a minute part of the game when it comes to giving it away, but a huge part of the game when it comes to people's enjoyment of the game. Its a self-defeating argument to claim its just a very tiny part of the game: if it is, it should be ignorable. The *only* reason to consider revisiting the invention system situation is that its *not* a tiny part of the game, but rather a more fundamental part of the game in terms of its core gameplay.

The same reasons why they added any content to the game back then. So people didn't get bored, and because its their job to continue expanding the game.

Late last year I was getting a lot of "wait till I24/I25" responses from the devs on a whole variety of topics. I was beginning to think "wait till I124" was Paragonese for "stop bothering me" but apparently I24 does in fact have a gigaton of various changes.

And they are not done announcing things yet. As Zwillinger said in another thread, these are just the things Marketing can't really hype to anyone but the veteran experienced players.

Nova has a 12.5% chance of doing scale 3.0 damage, 50% chance of doing 4.5 scale damage, and 37.5% chance of doing scale 6.0 damage.

Slotted to +95% damage and with +100% damage from build up, Nova does 553.66 damage at scale 3.0, 830.48 damage at scale 4.5, and 1107.31 at scale 6.0 with the current version at level 50. It will do 738.21 at scale 4.0 in the new (unconfirmed) version. Level 50 Lts have 857.5 health. With +10% defiance, the current Nova will kill even con Lts with no resistances 50% of the time. The unconfirmed I24 Nova wold need an additional +48% damage to kill Lts 100% of the time (assuming it hits).

So: kill 50% of the Lts with minimal extra effort, or kill 100% of the Lts with moderate effort fairly reliably. Which would be better for blasters even factoring out the crash?

What you think is an appropriate level of damage depends on what you think nukes should do. I think they could do a little more damage, but I don't think Scale 4.0 is disproportionately worse than what we have now. Its 18% less damage, but in terms of its kill factor its entirely reasonable that many players would consider that a guaranteed kill of all minions and Lts (that you hit) with BU and Aim is better than leaving half the Lts behind with just BU (and Aim can't improve that situation).

Maybe when it hits test we can consider asking for the long recharge nukes that used to have waves to have a chance to crit bosses.


I'm also kinda wondering if all that work I did on nuke calculations accelerated this change. I honestly don't know, but it would be nice to think it helped a little, since Arbiter Hawk suggested the changes were driven by attempts to alter the balance formulas for edge case nukes.

The fact that City of Heroes a) still has significant number of players and b) still generates profits for the publisher and c) is still in strong active development are "technicalities?"

Technically, except for the breathing and pulse thing, you're dead.

WoW is a subscription game past level 20. You get access to essentially of it when you subscribe. City of Heroes is a Hybrid game. You get access to most of it when you subscribe, but there are additional extras that you can optionally pay for. If you cannot tolerate a hybrid model game, then you should in fact find another game more in line with your preferences. But don't blame NCSoft for your need to have everything for a single price. Most people don't have that particular issue.

And unless they started working on it yesterday, there is no City of Heroes 2.


On the other hand, it is a shame the game isn't vibrate anymore.

Technically that is an announcement about announcing the announcement of the date of the Issue 24 announcement page. Its an announcement that the announcement of the announcement of the date of the Issue 24 announcement page is being planned. Are there other planning announcement announcement announcements being planned for announcement? Or are you just going to announce the announcement announcement without further announcement announcement planning?

The way you're describing it, 90% resists doesn't let 10% damage in, it lets 5% damage in. 50% of attacks from critters with base 50% tohit miss the player before resistance can act.

If we count everything, half of all attacks miss, and then 90% resistance lowers the damage of the remaining attacks from 50% of the initial amount to 5% of the initial amount. 45% defense does the same thing: 50% miss, and then an additional 45% of the initial attacks miss, and that leaves 5%.

If we don't count attacks that would have missed anyway, then out of 100 attacks 50 hit, 90% resistance reduces those to 10% of their damage. 45% defemse reduces those 50 to 5 attacks, or 10% of the original amount.

When you throw accuracy into the equation the math becomes slightly more complex, but regardless 45% defense is 90% damage mitigation.

Well, now the community wants the actual announcement before the actual announcement. Surprised?

I don't recall that, but I'm guessing that whatever the argument was caused traumatic amnesia.

Unless it was players who couldn't control anything faster than base hover in caves.

To be honest its going to be anticlimatic anyway, because minus the details I was pretty sure there was going to be an Issue 24 for quite a while now.

Those were the only three things you were ever for?


Also: who was for Hover speed getting nerfed?

Humor: it is a difficult concept. It is not logical.

Nova currently averages scale 4.875 damage. The revised version they showed on the stream was doing scale 4.0 damage consistently. So basically the modified Nova will do about 82% of the damage of the current Nova on average, but recharge just about 2.5 times faster.

Rain of Arrows does, in adjusted terms, 3.6 scale damage. Its still going to do better damage over time, but it won't be quite as absurd, and recharge will close the gap between them slightly (because RoA's cast time is more of a factor in its cycle time than Nova).

What I hope gets looked at at some point is the fact that 3 seconds is a bit too long for a Blaster PBAoE. Blackstar, Nova, Inferno, and Atomic Blast should all either be reduced to less than 2 seconds like Dreadful Wail and Psychic Wail, or should get some benefit for being locked in a long animation while almost certainly surrounded by attackers like Hail of Bullets.

They're trying to see how long it will take for Zwillinger to notice he's the only one left on that side of the office if they all leave one at a time.

What did I tell you about mathematical oversimplifications? Looks like someone needs a timeout.

But you generally find KB to be so disadvantageous it will neutralize the advantage of any power for which there exists an alternative. There's nothing about Bonfire that is particularly special in that regard.

Back when I was playing round robin with the epic pools, because I had nothing to do with freespecs, I took bonfire to act as a keep away power. Because I intended it to be a keep away power, there was no power more useful to take at that time.