Arcanaville

That's the ending of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie, and technically a spoiler if you've never seen the movie.

I think the set will be reasonable, but judged on more modern criteria for performance in the game than has operated in the past. By past criteria, Willpower is a bit overpowered. By modern criteria, its about center of the bullseye for defense sets. I believe that within that context, Radiation Armor will have reasonable performance within the general vicinity of that mark.

Well, yes and no. Reasonable guesswork can take you quite far actually. The devs are usually safe to drop hints because players tend to go all-out epileptic trees on them rather than reaching the more reasonable conclusions. Otherwise, the powers that be would probably have us all hanging by our feet by now.

That seems to be comparing which layer of hell is more annoying.

At +5 enhancement strength is increased 25% across the board. So a level 50 defense IO which normally enhances defense by 25.5% would increase to 31.875% enhancement strength.

I don't mind sacrificing the lives of the powers team to get a well-done revamp of blasters, but then there would be no one left to take a closer look at teamed tanker mechanics and peacebringer power synergy in I25, and I don't think the sound effects team is up for the challenge.

Terrorize powers are generally linked to negative energy damage and negative energy attack typing in this game as the closest conceptual match.

In the spirit of the challenge, I was thinking about more conventional "four-color" names and not the sort of names I normally look for. "Deep Friar" is more the sort of thing I would normally be thinking but I threw out any name (without checking) that didn't seem to be of a "Human Torch - Firestorm" sort of vintage.

My names aren't usually quite that conventional, but almost always available. I'm not sure I would even make a name that was as general as "fire-based." I'm more apt to name a fire controller called the Pyronanny (available), or a fire/ice tanker called the Cindercicle (available), or a Fire/Rad corruptor called Meson Inferno (available), or if I was going all fire maybe a Fire/Fire Blaster called Farrah Fireball (available).

Although if you try to do that all in one issue the end result might be that you kill the powers team.

Interesting challenge. Ok, here's literally the first ten names off the top of my head:

Gigaburner (available)
Radiant Wave (taken)
Hyperplasma (available)
(The) Ignitioner (available)
Hyperflame (taken)
Hyperflames (available)
Arc Burst (taken)
Blitzfire (taken)
Blitzflame (available)
Lord Inferno (taken)

I think these are pretty solid fire based names that don't involve foreign languages or obscure references. They are actually pretty plain by my standards, but I aimed in that direction. I think a 50% hit rate is pretty good considering I ran this test on Freedom.

Seriously: Gigaburner is available on Freedom? That kinda surprised me to be honest.


Also, Florid Uvula is more appropriate for a Sonic Blast character rather than a fire-based one, to be honest.

What if you take Spring Attack and always use Void after SA, and conceptualize it as a bonus damage effect of Spring Attack, like extra radial damage around the impact point? Its not perfect because Void's animation is so long, but it could work. Just color tint it to something appropriate if you don't like the black hole-like effect.

Graphic artists are too unpredictably crazy for me to bet on what they'll do from one day to the next.

They have never, ever had problems with a powerset's accuracy or endurance consumption somehow operating differently from how the powers were defined. Any such report was erroneous.


These types of problems are trivial to prove, if they exist. A combat log and a demorecord basically encapsulate all the information necessary to document them, and no system is incapable of generating them (unlike video recordings, which not all systems that can play City of Heroes can generate). I have an open door policy on examining documentation of a bug in game mechanics, but in general they tend to prove the opposite: that the mechanics work exactly as our current understanding indicates.

But as I said, its trivially easy to record such problems if they exist. Enable logging on all channels, and demorecord tests when you conduct them.

In any event, not liking something is not a bug. Not liking accuracy is not the same thing as claiming it doesn't work exactly as described, for every single powerset. Saying one powerset draws more endurance than another in normal attack chains is a quantitatively verifiable statement. If its true, there's no reason whatsoever to produce evidence of that fact. If MA does burn more endurance than other primaries for the same output, that would be a bug worth tracking down. But its a bug I've never seen.

The short answer is yes: if you can't play at higher difficulties you should turn down your difficulty.

However, its a tad more complicated than that. The game balances for the average player in the playerbase. Which is none of us (well, none of most of us). Most of us forum posters have skill levels high enough that we can't tell the difference between a "good" powerset combination at 0x1 and a "bad" one. Its easy to fall into the opposite trap: if I can't see a problem, there must not be one.

These discussions often end up talking about what players can do at higher levels of difficulty because the presumption is that if there are problems with blasters (or any other archetype) that the average player sees at 0x1 or 1x2, its a problem that will likely show up more strongly for experienced players at higher difficulty.

The game makes no guarantee, and no promise that you'll be able to solo at +2x6. However, its *suggestive* when a player with comparable skill in two different archetypes finds they can solo easily with one archetype at +2x6 and only with much more difficulty with the other archetype. It suggests the two archetypes have very different strengths, and that difference will show up for other players at other difficulty levels.

But whether its visible or not, the presumption is that it shouldn't exist. Higher difficulty levels are sometimes necessary as a "microscope" to magnify and see them more clearly.

That's true and there are other secondary effects such as alpha strike advantage dilution and lower critter regeneration. But I don't think that's what people are thinking when they say increasing blaster damage by, say, 15% would improve survivability by increasing the amount of inspiration stacking you get per spawn by some percent.

The secondary effects don't all lean one way. Critters deal less damage over time as they run out of endurance, and their attacks fall into cycles of recharge (initially, they can launch full volleys because all attacks are available). So facing a spawn for twice as long doesn't increase damage by twice as much. Its significantly less, which also means average damage over time goes down.

My suspicion is that this effect nets strongly against increased damage improving survivability, because its currently the best explanation for how blasters could be outperformed by non-debuffing defenders with presumably significantly lower damage. Not only do those types of defenders tend to have better defenses, but their slower offense ironically makes them more survivable overall. In the hands of the average player, that difference is significant, whereas in the hands of experienced players the damage differential is more important.

It does not. There's a specific rule for setting endurance costs for single target attacks. 5.2 endurance per 1.0 damage scale. AoEs have the same costs but factoring in the AoE factor of the power. Most attacks follow that formula, including MA's attacks. There are no endurance cost bugs I'm aware of in MA for any archetype, with the exception of the Storm Kick one I mentioned above.


I should point out this is the single largest collective mass observer error in the history of the game. It has been proven to be an illusion in almost every case. People's perceptions are simply not trustworthy in this area, and I say that as one of only two or three players to ever discover any issue with accuracy in general.


Both accuracy and endurance mechanics are sufficiently stable and well understood at this point that it would require either game logs or video evidence to support a claim that either was not working exactly as described. If you have such evidence, I would be happy to review it and bring any problems discovered to the devs attention.

They do so much the way I want, its inexplicable why they don't go all the way and just do everything the way I want.

My problem with that line of thought is that I don't believe damage increases actually increase survivability in the way people think.

I realize this is an extreme oversimplification to illustrate the concept, but consider this. Imagine two blasters, one of which kills one minion every ten seconds, and another which kills one minion every twenty seconds. Obviously, the first one is more survivable, right?

Not exactly. The first blaster faces three minions, then two, then one, then zero. The *average* amount of damage that blaster takes is the damage of two minion, assuming that when damage reaches zero, the blaster moves on to the next spawn. So that blaster sees three, then two, then one, then three, etc, assuming negligible travel between spawns.

The thing is, the second blaster faces the same average amount of damage: two minions. He faces three for longer, but he also faces one for longer. To a first order approximation, they face roughly the same amount of average damage per second. The second one will face more damage overall, because their missions will last twice as long, but that's an *offensive* deficit, not a *survival* one.

If we approximate the act of running a mission as facing a sequence of spawns, the survival of the blaster is going to be based in large part on the average damage *rate* they face, and killing faster doesn't automatically reduce that. Instead, it just causes them to face alpha strikes more often and that cancels out much of the benefit of killing faster.

The only way killing faster improves survivability in this case is if the faster blaster "spends" their increased offense by deliberately standing around after finishing off the spawn and regenerating. If both take sixty seconds to defeat a three minion spawn, the first killing everything in thirty seconds and then resting for thirty, and the second killing everything in sixty seconds flat, then the first would be obviously more survivable. But that's not how people play the game in general. They "spend" their offense by going faster instead of resting for more survivability, and those two benefits are mutually exclusive.

Increasing offense can help survivability - particularly when damage is frontloaded - but it is such a tricky thing to improve survivability by tweaking damage upward that to a first order approximation I believe you should assume damage doesn't improve survivability at all when it comes to archetype buffs.

And that means if you want blasters to be more survivable, you have to either directly make them more survivable, or give them offensive tools that ironically reduce incoming damage without increasing kill speed.

The saying that death is the best mitigation actually has a deep kernel of a lie. Because in a way, the faster you kill, the more survivable you have to be, to survive the accelerated rate at which you face full strength spawns.

Except that is not my premise. My premise is that statement is absurd. Saying its also moot is mostly redundant.

The same set of features comes up in discussions about every hypothetical set, including new manipulation sets and new control sets. Its the normal stone soup feature creep that always happens. But that doesn't mean those forum conversations remotely represent what most players would be happy to play. The people who expect every set to be game-breakingly fantastic will always be disappointed, but I also don't think the devs should care about the people who expect every new set to be game-breakingly fantastic. They have expectations you can't meet, so don't bother trying.

I'm not sure where the perception arose that MA was more endurance-hungry than other sets. Because it has less AoEs than most melee sets, it actually burns less. The only endurance-related oddity to MA is that for a time from launch until a few years ago Storm Kick burned too much endurance. It should have burned about 6.864, and for some odd reason it burned 7.0044. But that shouldn't have been enough to make the set seem to be end-hungry, and ever since they buffed Storm Kick to have an additional 5% critical rate that's also no longer a real issue.

If its an old IDE drive and there are no IDE ports in the new one, I would partition image it to a new USB drive. Its simpler than getting an enclosure, and if you're buying an external USB for backups anyway, its basically cheaper. I've seen 500 GB USB drives on sale for under $70 and you could image an entire 120GB drive onto one partition on that disk, leaving over 300GB left for backing up the new system. And you can get rid of all the old hardware.

Note: whenever possible, you should wipe out hard drives before giving them away or throwing them away. You don't want someone recovering critical personal information from a discarded hard drive. Another good reason to image the old drive and keep it around: once you do that, its safe to wipe the old drive and chuck it.

That would be unfair to Scrappers. You would need to make all blaster attacks knock Scrappers just as far, so they land next to their targets. Then they couldn't complain they had to chase after them.

In that event:

Actually, that's an incredibly dumb statement itself. You're saying if a particular blaster build claiming to perform something is miraculous, then all other archetypes doing the same thing are equally miraculous. That's tantamount to saying all archetypes and all powerset builds have the same capabilities: that its not possible for one particular build to be basically unable to do something that other builds can do. That's obviously false: I can say something is essentially "miraculous" for a specific Blaster combination to do without saying anything about any other archetype.

That's not a sideways sarcastic remark. That's an actual statement of fact. Which brings me to:


No, its not just a build. What I said specifically wasn't that no Ice/Energy build could possibly solo a +4x8 Carnie spawn. I made a specific statement about *how* that could happen, or rather how it wasn't going to happen. There's a difference. My remarks were in response to this:

The one thing I know with certainty is if someone is claiming to be able to solo +4x8 Carnies, either they have an extremely loose definition of soloing a spawn that involves not actually facing a +4x8 spawn, or they most definitely aren't just "using 2 holds to lockdown the boss." First of all, because +4x8 spawns don't have just a single boss unless the mission you're in has deliberately dialed down spawns. The general spawn generator generates two to three bosses in +4x8 spawns. That's a fact. And since we were talking about the fact that you will face multiple MIs in a +4x8 spawn, I also know that standing there trying to lock down a single boss with a single target hold when that boss is an MI is bordering on ludicrous: while you're doing that the rest of the spawn is going to kill you. The other MI will spawn Illusionist LTs, and you will then have at least four separate sources of non-positional psionic attacks with holds that last about 13 seconds each.

Now, its bad enough for most anything that doesn't have direct psionic resistance or defense, but at least melee archetypes won't be instantly held. Most blasters will, if they face that spawn with that sort of tactics.

Another fact I tried to point out is that nothing you do at +1x6 is remotely meaningful. You're far more likely to face only one or two bosses rather than two to three bosses, and the entire spawn will be hitting you less often for less damage. Your damage and mez will be significantly more effective: 88% stronger due to the purple patch, or almost twice as strong. That's damage, mez duration, all strength effects. At +4, Bitter Freeze Ray's base hold time is only 4.6 seconds. Even if you're normally walking around with 300% hold time, that's only 13.8 seconds and that has to stack with another hold to affect a boss.

Those facts add up to the fact that nothing you do at +1x6 has anything to do with +4x8. It would be no different if I said it would be a miracle if an Ice/Energy could bring down a level 50 giant monster with just its own damage without some form of regen debuff, and you said that since you can bring down an Elite Boss with Ice/Energy it should be no more miraculous if Ice/Energy brought down a GM. Its a mathematical fact that's an equally irrelevant situation: the threshold damage numbers are too different to make them remotely analogous.