Arcanaville

What's the point of power blast when power bolt is up twice as often.

No one thought they would reexamine blasters either.

Well, except for me.

There are limits to what the devs can do, and will do. But within those limits, good things can happen, or I wouldn't still be making the effort after eight years. Progress is slow and halting sometimes, and its never as fast as anyone would like, but it happens.

I wish I could say "this is where the devs were, and this is where they are now, and rational design principles are much stronger today than eight years ago" but most of my justification for that statement involve stories I can't repeat. Each iteration of the powers team has been increasingly more quantitative-minded, while simultaneously being increasingly flexible around those quantitative judgments. They aren't quantitative minded in exactly the way I would hope for, but then again no one is.



Sometimes, you have to be happy with 44%.

Observation: Anyone says any set looks too weak.
Conclusion: I should roll one and find out for myself.

If forum judgment was always right, all Kinetic Melee/Willpower characters would kill themselves shortly after players created them out of sheer despair.

Mechanically speaking, there's no such thing as resistance to damage and resistance to resistance debuffs. What Temp Invuln does is grant resistance to smashing and resistance to lethal. Not resistance to smashing damage, resistance to smashing.

What does "resistance to smashing" mean? It means whenever someone tries to land an effect on you that tries to change "smashing" that effect is reduced by the resistance. So when someone lands smashing damage on you, that effect tries to subtract from your "smashing attribute" which is linked to your health: it damages you. That effect is reduced by the resistance. When someone lands a smashing resistance debuff on you, that is *also* a change to the smashing attribute** which the resistance reduces.

Why do all resistance powers have resistance to resistance debuffs? Because really, all resistance buffs *are* resistance to resistance debuff buffs. They are literally the same thing.


What's the difference between defense and resistance when it comes to debuffs? A curious twist of the mechanics. When your resistance is debuffed, the *non-debuffed* value is used for resisting debuffs. If you have 90% resistance and you're hit with a 10% debuff, that gets resisted down to 1%, and then your resistance drops to 89%. But if you're hit again, the next debuff is still resisted by 90%, and your resistance drops to 88%. The reasons are complex.

But when you have 45% defense, you *avoid* most defense debuffs, so only 10% of them actually land relative to having no defense. But when you are hit with a 5% defense debuff (the equivalent of a 10% res debuff), that lands at full strength, reducing your defense to 40%. You now avoid less debuffs than before, which means more land. Which means your defense drops faster. Which means more debuffs land. This is known as cascade failure and it only affects defense, because defense's ability to avoid debuffs to itself get lowered when those debuffs land: that's a uniquely defensive situation.

It is for that reason specifically that DDR was invented. Not because resistance resists debuffs and defense doesn't. Its more specifically because while resistance resists debuffs and defense avoids them, resistance gets to keep its full strength against debuffs while defense does not.



** All attributes have values, they have resistance parameters, they have strength parameters - that's what damage buffs alter. These things - Current value, Res value, Strength value - are referred to as Aspects of the Attribute in the technical lingo of the game engine.

90% resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 45% defense at standard base tohit but resistance mitigates damage, while defense mitigates whole attacks which includes secondary effects.

Basically, at base 50% tohit, defense tends to be stronger than resistance. However, the number of things that can alter that situation is remarkably high. Tohit buffs and defense debuffs in particular.

Its more proper to say that even though X defense and 2X resistance mitigate approximately the same amount of damage on average, X defense tends to be better sometimes, and 2X resistance is better at other times.

From there, it gets complicated. If you avoid high defense debuffing situations and tohit buff situations and extreme single attack damage, the defense will tend to be better. If you find yourself in high defense debuffing situations and aren't SR (or something else that manages to acquire ultrahigh DDR), the resistance will tend to be better. In incarnate content, moderate resistance tends to beat moderate defense because the enhanced tohit of many critters significantly weakens defense. But high defense tends to beat high resistance because even with that weakening, high defense deflects more of the large amount of debuffs flying around in incarnate content.

I feel for you there. I've seen the Mac client, and sometimes it seems to work fine, and sometimes it seems to be a particularly bad CoV beta build.

On reasonable hardware, the game client should usually be pretty zippy on Windows even in Ultra Mode these days. They've actually increased the performance of the back end, so things that were server-side laggy are less so in some (not all) cases.

The thought process was that there was a desire to make some of the archetypes ala carte for premium and free for VIP as a VIP subscription advantage, and the logical thing to do would be to lock one archetype from each faction. Controllers and Masterminds became the obvious choice on each side due to their higher than normal computational requirements on each side, their higher primary powerset construction costs, and the feeling they represented a more advanced playstyle in general.

Why were Dominators not locked if Controllers were? Because for faction fairness it was only going to be one from each side. If people want to know why, that's why. If people want to debate way, they'll need a time machine, as the decision was made quite a while ago.

Then there exist options available to you, including subscribing for a month to see what the game is like, or buying unlocks for just the critical components you need to test the game out, like an invention system unlock which is much cheaper than a month's subscription.

Only until December 21. And then the world will end and presumably all blaster primaries will perform similarly.

I'm sure you don't want everything for free. But you do want things to be freely accessible on your own terms.

If you don't want everything for free, it should be possible to name something you want that you would be willing to pay for, not hypothetically or possibly sometime maybe in the future, but now. What do you want, that you are willing to pay for now?

Testing showed that the PPM procs seemed to be working more or less as the devs described for single target powers and spherical AoEs, but they generated wildly differing results for cones which seemed to be difficult for player testing to decypher.

I did a suite of tests on cones and concluded there were two bugs in the cone formula for PPM procs: one affected the calculation for the proc chance, and the other was due to the game engine not correcting for the fact that cone arcs are stored in the game database in radians not degrees.

1. The notion that blaster problems only materialize in the 30s or 40s is a myth. If a player is going to run into problems it could be at any time.

2. We know that Blasters are getting a major survivability boost in I24: Ice Manipulation in particular is getting an Absorb effect in Chilling Embrace (and a significantly expanded Chilling Embrace in general). Ice Patch + slow + even more slow in Water + knockdown in Water + Absorb toggle is actually a ton of damage mitigation.

3. Beginners aren't going to be soloing EBs and AVs anyway.

4. There must be more to that situation than just Water's single target damage, because AVs don't have enough regen to overcome four anything shooting anything at them. Four blasters with well-slotted brawl could come close to taking out an even con AV in 20 minutes.

No matter the archetype in question, no matter the powersets in question, I consider it rude to tell someone to reroll that isn't even expressing a problem. You have no idea if the OP will like or be good at playing blasters.

Water has decent mitigation and a heal. Slows plus Ice Patch would make a really good ranged option. There's no reason to believe that with a little guidance the OP wouldn't do just fine, and the I24 changes coming will only make it better.

Also: there are no Water Dominators, at least not yet.

To the extent that it is different than what you appear to expect from an F2P game, its not one.

The PPMs are a situation with which I'm directly knowledgeable, and I can state categorically that is not what happened. They were investigating the issues players were bringing up with the PPM system right from the start, but as no decision had been made as to whether they were actually going to change the system or not nothing could be stated about those changes until they were actually finalized.

I'm generally aware of the work the devs were doing on the PPM system because I was working with them to find the cone bug. But I was not at liberty to discuss the fact the devs were well into the process of reexamining the PPM system within the context of player feedback to the system, nor were the devs themselves at liberty to discuss unannounced future feature changes, particularly ones that could affect the in-game store.

The argument surrounding the devs' inability to freely make forward-looking statements about future development much of the time is a separate discussion.

I like torrent myself, but its not available while mezzed on Blasters.

Boost range is good to pair with Energy Torrent for people who think it scatters too much: from that range everything is basically traveling in the same direction.

Actually, in this case you did explicitly pick a fight.

That was the first instance of using actual fighting words.

And as far as I can tell, Hyperstrike wasn't arguing semantics, he was explaining why he was responding to what Nal wrote, as opposed to what he might have hypothetically meant. I also assumed Nal was referring to targeted advertisements and it only occurred to me much later that he could have been referencing the mode of advertisement altogether. In fact, I *still* don't know for certain which it was.

It is not kosher to challenge someone's interpretation of what was written and then automatically accuse them of arguing semantics when they explain their interpretation.

No one is treating Water Blast like a "genre staple" the devs refused to give to us. What I think you are failing to realize is that most people don't care whatsoever what you or anyone else thinks is a genre staple. City of Heroes is inspired by comic book superhero stories, but it is its own universe. Water powers might not be common in the Marvel or DC universe, but neither are steampunk robots. Paragon Studios decides what is and is not a genre staple to the City of Heroes universe, and that makes the question of genre staples completely irrelevant.

No one datamines comic books for the relative percentage appearances of purple dresses or sashes or radiation buffs. At least, I doubt most players do. We take inspiration from other comic books, but we're governed by what makes sense for the City of Heroes universe.

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for a water or fluid themed powerset. Why they wanted it is a matter of preference, not a matter of logic. Whether Water Blast really is "overdue" in the literal sense, I don't think it should come as a surprise that the players who waited that long for one would think it was. I honestly don't see what the mystery is.

Phil's Power Pool Pre-release Promotional Preamble is Pending for Prime Paragon Public Production?

Whatever it is, I don't think its working.

I have to be careful about those. Arbiter Hawk strongly considered taking my blaster bet and then delaying the blaster changes until I26. So I had to start dropping hints about the changes to force Production to lock in the schedule.

This is me, dealing with our dev team:



You really have to be thinking at least two moves in advance.

That's really more of a KB position than a Bonfire-specific position I suspect.

That seems fairly obvious to me. Here are the original blast sets (for Blasters and Defenders combined):

Assault Rifle
Dark Blast
Electric Blast
Energy Blast
Fire Blast
Ice Blast
Psychic Blast
Radiation Blast

Added were:

Archery
Beam Rifle
Dual Pistols
Sonic Blast

There's four weapon sets: Archery, Assault Rifle, Dual Pistols, Beam Rifle.
Five project energy-like beams or bolts: Electric, Energy, Dark, Radiation, Beam Rifle
Two project obvious visible physical projectiles: Archery, Ice
Three project special projectiles: Fire, Psychic, Sonic

There are physical, energy, and psionic blasts. Flame, ice, arrows, sound waves. Solid beams, bolts, projectiles. What's missing? Fluid-based blasts, projectiles, or themes.

We have solid, plasma, and even air-based powers (gale, hurricane, tornado). No liquid. We have Fire, Air, and Earth based powers, no Water. Its not the only thing missing, but its an obvious thing missing. And I'll bet Water Control is not all that far behind.

After only twenty minutes, I would expect Imperious to face palm and ask Montague Castanella to send him the Mystery Men instead.