Arcanaville

Devs all the way up to Positron have said in the past that sometimes a power is more powerful than they would ordinarily make a power now, and thus no one should consider it anything but an outlier, but nevertheless its not worth altering.

As far as I know, there is no higher up than Positron when it comes to the game's design.

The "certain people" the devs are telling that Drain Psyche is whacked is everyone on the internet: Arbiter Hawk stated such in the twitch stream last week. But he was only stating the blatantly obvious.

Robocop was Verhoeven's brilliantly satirical film. If Starship Troopers satirizes anything, its over the top goofy war movies.


I don't mind a PG translation of Starship Troopers if its more faithful to the material. Scratch that: if its faithful to the material, as it would be impossible for a sixth grade stage play to be less faithful to the original novel.

It doesn't matter why: the reason it can't be reversed is because that would require revising too many powers. So even if you could disprove the rationale for is existence, that would at this point be irrelevant.


That sidesteps the issue. If your objection is that the single sniper attack power shouldn't be invested with such a high amount of damage, it should not matter what it takes to unlock it. Too much is too much. If snipers have too much damage concentrated into them, then if anything the insta-snipes are *better* than Clobber because that concentration is hedged against another enabling mechanic: the snipes are not as strong as Clobber for that reason.

If you're objection is that the snipes have too much power gated that's a separate issue, but that has nothing to do with them being too powerful intrinsically.


You haven't stated an objective reason why the current values are too high. You've only stated why you're equally comfortable with lower numbers. You're looking for the lowest possible value that still works. I'm not. I myself pointed out to Arbiter Hawk that sniper rifle and psionic lance would likely need to be tweaked, but a 1.74 DS/sec single target ranged attack that is sometimes interruptible and has a 12 second recharge is, in terms of overbuffing blasters, a squirt gun.

If the interrupt window was removed completely, permanently, for blasters and I had to set the DPA of the sniper blasts under that condition, I would today probably set them to about 1.3-1.4 DS/sec given the context they live in now. That's *without* the disadvantage of ever reverting to interruptible.

Well, technically since it happens here, it does in fact happen.


As I recall, the devs mentioned selling over half a million super packs at one point. I suspect that qualified the program as a major success.

I would call something a slap in the face and then immediately ask for a staff.

I would probably make Drain Psyche a targeted AoE, and have its regen and recovery buffs be staircased and duration-based rather than magnitude based.

We all must manage our expectations in whatever way we're capable.

Sorry, gotta go; event starting.

The same can be said for chat channels.

The idea is to make them more worth taking, not reduce the penalty for people who happened to take them for situational reasons. If the DPA of the snipe was anywhere near the normal DPA for blaster attacks they wouldn't be worth the fact that they could still revert to their interruptible state.

Plus, I fundamentally disagree with a design rule of the game that the insta-snipe change counteracts. Melee DPA is significantly higher than ranged DPA, all things being equal, and that's not an accident or a mistaken perception: its deliberate. Outside of fire, its extremely rare to find ranged DPA higher than 1.3, and the average hovers just below 1.0. Conversely, melee DPA rarely drops much below 1.0, and in fact averages significantly higher. Most melee attack sets have at least one attack with a DPA at or near 1.3, even excluding assassin's strikes in stalker sets. Most ranged sets don't.

That insta-snipes, which in most builds will only be available 50-75% of the time, elevate ranged DPA by about as much on average as the invisible ranged penalty embedded in the game design is in my opinion a fortuitous accident.

To put it another way, if Insta-snipe is a problem, what's Clobber?


Also, insta-snipe at 2.5 seconds of cast time would have a net arcanatime adjusted DPA of 1.045. That's only trivially higher than Power Burst at 0.945 (10.6% higher). And also incidentally lower than more than half of all melee single target attacks. For the tohit cost to make it insta-snipe in the first place, and the fact that it reverts to interruptible outside of that window, I probably wouldn't take the snipe for that benefit alone, and I already know how to make the snipe insta in my energy build.

Somehow I doubt there are going to be very many coach seats on the first shuttle to the moon.

7.1

More specifically, a +4 MI should hit for about 355 damage with Blind at 54 vs level 50 player. 325 if you're +1 shifted to 51. The Lts 145-155. You should at least notice if four or five of them are firing at you with ~800 point volleys even through the haze of scrapper lock.

I've noticed Blind hitting through SR since before I knew what "non-positional typing" was. Now that I think about it, I might have been the one to coin the phrase "non-positional psi" specifically to complain about this problem.

2.5 seconds? For a power that deals 2.76 DS? Thanks, but I already have plenty of those in energy blast. That would make the insta-snipe have limited value even in Energy Blast. In some sets, it wouldn't even be the third best single target attack even if it was perma-instant.

Anything higher than the maximum snipe insta-cast of 1.67 seconds would enter the realm of the problematic. The only reason I'm not complaining about the 1.67s snipes is because one belongs to Fire Blast, and the other belongs to Archery, the set with the broken nuke. And honestly even Archery is a little too high to me.

Yes.

I've apparently been teasing the Water Blast set for years now.

Technically, by any sort of logic the devs got Blind and Spectral Wounds reversed on typing. Technically, Blind is a physical attack on the eyes. Spectral Wounds is an illusory attack on the mind.

In fact, Blind is actually a physical pseudo-AoE.

In fact getting older all the time. Certainly no player expectation surprises me anymore. If a player stated they were disappointed the devs haven't created a moon base yet, as in a real live moon base on the actual moon, that would score a 4.5 on my 1-10 City of Heroes entitlement scale.

Shuttle service to the moonbase for 80 paragon points would be a 5.2.

Its news to me that Assault Rifle, Kinetic Melee, and Ice anything were nerfed to uselessness recently. Or ever.

If one is going to be disappointed every time the devs add something to the game that isn't an always up, always on, always available, always maximal, always free of counterbalance, always highly popular effects, I hope being disappointed is something they enjoy experiencing. Because that's not going to change. That would be staring into the east every morning and hating sunrises.

Blind and the Mind Control attacks that have historically been typed psionic only are still psionic only as of I23. There is frankly no way for an SR scrapper to not notice +4 illusionists and MIs scoring with Blind short of having a huge amount of psionic defense from somewhere else. I would need video evidence for that one.

The same amplifier does that also.

From the wrong spreadsheet. That's an "experimental number" I grabbed by mistake analyzing a mechanical change to cones.

Or possibly I was thinking of making Power Blast a cone with -42.5 degrees of arc.