Arcanaville

Having the best ranged damage in the game is like having the best melee control in the game. They are supposed to have the best damage period, and if they do it would be a cosmically amazing oddity. Given that they don't have the best modifiers, don't have the best DPA, don't have the most AoEs, don't have the best damage buffs. But hey, my blaster makes really big numbers and the teams I'm on are always awestruck, so that must mean that blasters deal more damage (or my current costume is still showing too much skin)


I say we wait for Issue 24.

Siren's Song is theoretically massive mitigation, but I wouldn't say Sonic Blast is explicitly designed to be a mitigation set. Oil Slick Arrow deals a ton of damage but Trick Arrow isn't explicitly designed to be an offensive powerset. Ditto Lightning Rod. These are interesting (and sometimes powerful) extras.

In any case, for Siren's Song to be a good counter-example to the more general statement that Blasters don't get mitigation powersets, it should be valid to say that any primary blast set that doesn't have mitigation comparable to Siren's Song is broken, in terms of not fulfilling its design obligation.

No one says that.

Technically, is the window the hole in the wall or the glass in the hole in the wall? If the glass is the window when the window is closed, does it cease to be the window when the window is opened? If the window is the hole in the wall, is the hole defined by its perimeter or its extent? Do we see *through* windows, or *with* windows? We don't usually see *through* glasses, but *with* glasses.

Are glasses technically windows within glasses frames? In which direction does the window point when flipups are flipped up?

And yet their mastermind aphid pets will all be male.

I am referring to the sets in general, but as to those specific powersets I would say Dark Blast is a mitigation set in the same sense Dark Melee is a control set.

Of Dark Blast, Dark Manipulation, and Mental Manipulation, which is explicitly designed to provide survival? At best, I think you could say that Mental Manipulation was designed to do so. If any scrapper, tanker, brute, controller, dominator, defender, or stalker got their damage mitigation reset to what is included within Dark Manipulation they would scream bloody murder.

You say that like it made the Avenger's scriptwriter's job easier.

Whedon had extremely wide latitude on Avengers, and while there are two screenwriters credited with the script - Whedon and Zak Penn - Whedon has stated publicly that he threw out the original script and rewrote it as an entirely new story, and Penn publicly confirms those statements.

In fact Whedon was hired to direct after selling the producers on an entire new treatment of the movie in the first place. I don't see where his "freedom to indulge his stupidity" was curtailed at any point.

I'll take a step back a bit to answer this. At the beginning of time, the devs created five different power "classes" - Damage, Control, Defense, Buff/Debuff. Every powerset focuses on one of these, and every archetype has two of these.

Because Damage was split into Melee and Ranged Damage, Blasters became the only archetype that only received one of these. But more importantly, three of the four contain significant damage mitigation and survival tools. Every archetype gets at least one powerset that contains a lot of mitigation. Except Blasters.

This was a fundamental difference, but at the beginning of time it was thought that this would be balanced by the fact that Blasters had so much more offense than all other archetypes that it would make up for that deficit. This wasn't true, but you could almost believe it until the devs made another fundamental change to the way they balanced the game. They decided that everyone must have the capability to solo effectively. And that meant everyone had to have at least some minimum amount of damage. Tanker damage went up. Controller damage went up. Meanwhile, there was no serious effort to address the fact that soloing requires *two* things: enough offense and enough survivability.

In the current game, everyone needs to be able to kill, and everyone needs to be able to survive. And every archetype without exception has at least one powerset that is EXPLICITLY designed to kill, and one powerset EXPLICITLY designed to keep the player alive. *Except* Blasters.

That's what they lack. And its not just a trivial difference: its the largest fundamental difference between any archetype and all other archetypes in the game.

This is a slippery slope that doesn't exist. There is no justification to buff blasters in any way just because they lack something others have. There is a justification to buff blasters if they underperform, and that underperformance can be traced back to something they lack and everyone else has.

As a disclaimer I'm compelled to include, I do not advocate direct mez protection for blasters. However, the notion that buffing blasters just means someone else can ask for a buff under the exact same logic is false, because no archetype has ever been proven to underperform as badly as blasters. So long as that is true, blasters have a justification for buffs no other archetype has, and no other archetype will have after blasters are buffed. There is no slippery slope there at all.

You judge difficulty on a very subjective scale.

I'm a big fan of Nolan, and I believe Inception was an extremely well done project from story to scripting to shooting. However, to dismiss what Whedon did with Avengers is to conflate setting with skill. On many technical levels I consider Inception to be a far more intricate movie than Avengers obviously is. But Whedon wasn't tasked with making an intricate Avengers movie. Whedon was tasked with making an approachable and integrated Avengers movie. There's no specific reason to believe that Nolan would have made a better Avengers movie than Whedon did.


As to your statement: "any first year film student will tell you that Nolan is a better technical director" here's what I know. Nolan is known to work closely with a specific cinematographer - Wally Pfister has been Nolan's DP for virtually all his movies, and its well known that he collaborates with and relies heavily on Pfister for the shooting look of his movies (separate from the design work of his movies). What you see on the screen is Nolan's vision, but the technical skill you're seeing is Pfister. Whedon isn't as wedded to a single DP - the work he's done over the years would prohibit that anyway - but he's also known as being a stronger director than cinematographer.

Which is important, because when comparing, say, Inception and Avengers, to say any first year film student will tell you that Nolan is a better technical director" the strengths of these two directors is in overall look of the movie, and actual direction. Both are less in-camera directors and more actor-directors. So the evidence of their strength of their direction comes from their cues and direction for performances.

And if you were not there on-set, I don't see how you can directly compare the two directors on their technical merits in that area: it doesn't leave unambiguous footprints on screen, except to say that both appear to be extremely good at getting strong performances out of their respective actors.

I will say that its obvious to anyone who has studied both that Nolan is the technical film geek and Whedon is the more playful experimenter. But which one is better is something that shouldn't be "obvious" when dealing with two directors of that caliber.

As to writing, I'm curious how much of either director's writing you've actually read.

While I agree with most of what you said about Dark Armor's strengths, I should point out that while mag 12 KB protection is pretty good and proof against most (but not all) KB, that's not what sets with KB protection have. Sets with KB protection have some XYZ mag protection, whatever it is, and 100% KB resistance (actually, its usually 10000% resistance, but that's effectively the same thing). Because they have 100% resistance to KB, they are absolutely immune to all but unresistable KB. 12 points of KB protection from inventions will protect against any KB up to mag 12, but sets with actual KB protection cannot be knocked down by any amount of KB, no matter what their KB protection magnitude is, because 100% resistance reduces all incoming KB magnitude to zero.

By strange coincidence this is almost word for word exactly what I told a client last month. And in both cases, this statement is sort of true, but not in a useful way to most people attempting to emulate that form of paying attention.

Next week, in order to best leverage developer resources and respond to player feedback, the freebie friday giveaway will probably be a power that summons a warwolf wearing the princess hat.

Maybe X-Men, Spiderman, Iron Man, and Batman Begins have spoiled people, but while I personally didn't find Green Lantern offensive like some people did, I felt it was a very weak movie overall. Mostly, I think it tried to do too much and didn't give enough time for any of it.

For me personally, where the movie failed is that I simply did not buy Hal Jordan as a hero. As a popcorn movie it was acceptable, but I didn't leave the theater wanting to see more Hal Jordan. I suspect deep down that's where a lot of the negativity comes from. Fans want to see a Green Lantern movie that is full of promise; that makes them want to see more. But whatever else anyone says about Green Lantern, I doubt anyone can argue that the movie is full of promise for future stories.

That lack of potential turns to disappointment, and that disappointment turns to anger.

Fortunately, it won't come to that.

It now occurs to me that Arbiter Warrant never specifically said he read the forums more than he posted.

Looks like a cross between Electric Armor and Regeneration with a bit of Dark Armor. Whenever you stack significant resistance and regeneration you end up with something pretty good. Electric was considered very poor until Energize: with just a moderate heal it went from subpar to excellent.

Radiation armor seems to have a scaling regen (Gamma) and a dark regen-like scaling heal (Radiation Therapy) and something that looks like a click Instant Healing + Absorb power (Particle Shielding).

And a nuke that doubles as a self-rez (Ground Zero).

I haven't seen numbers yet, but somehow I'm not worried.

I'm not sure what tests you're referring to, but that's not how the GM code works. The GM code neutralizes combat modifiers. Its the critter equivalent to the IgnoresCombatModifiers switch for attribmods. If you saw anything other than a disabling of combat modifiers, I would /bug it. If the Halloween GMs actually work in the way you describe, that would require completely new mechanics just for them, unless the zone imposed a level 30 level on all the players. There's just no way for an enemy to treat an attacker that way that I'm aware of.

I think the big problem wasn't so much Ryan Reynolds specifically, but the fact that he had to play an unplayable character arc: it was just too much to accept in one short movie that Hal Jordan goes from being an irresponsible goofball with a heart of gold but a brain of yogurt and has serious PTSD combined with daddy issues, to the most powerful green lantern in the universe in about two days of movie time. Reynolds is not a strong enough character actor for that, and I'm not sure any character actor is strong enough for that.

That just makes seeing wind in outer space just that much more grating.

Which is a shame, because I think Mark Strong plays a pitch-perfect Sinestro. I found myself really wanting to see more of him at the end of the movie, not Hal Jordan.

I'm not sure how much damage they do to each other per minute, but I have seen situations where they've been going at each other for over two hours and yet a team was able to bring them down and get the badges. Although it takes some trickery. I was on my Ill/Rad when I was asked to help a small team get these badges, and what I basically did was not use Lingering Radiation for about ten minutes, and then started using it to bring down Eochai, then repeated that for Jack. In both cases, the act of pounding on them for the first ten minutes was enough to give them credit even though they had been going at each other for a very long time. By not debuffing regen, the team could deal an unlimited amount of damage to the monster without killing it, which meant they could rack up a higher damage credit.

But I don't know how to figure out how long you have to beat on them to get the credit if you don't know precisely how much damage they've done to each other. I just guessed in this case.

I wonder if there is a cap on how much healing gets credited against the health pool for the badge credit. If there was one, we could work backwards and say that for damaged GMs like the Jack/Eochai pair, a kill must take at least X minutes for the total damage to be guaranteed to exceed 10% of the maximum possible health pool.

Not with Chicken McNuggets all over the place and Coldplay on the stereo.

I decided to try to make all the tier 4 Lore pets on my main. Problem solved. New problem now: that'll probably take years.

Its the way of things. I was far more valuable when the mechanics were unknown and Real Numbers didn't exist and City of Data was extremely out of date. Now that most the mechanics are known and Paragonwiki documents things very well and CoD is pretty much up to date and anyone can get most of the powers data from Real Numbers, I'm 95% redundant, which is mostly good for the game.


Well, the way I look at it there are things I incarnate out, and things I don't or are not likely to. But I still enjoy playing new powersets, and Water Blast is looking like it will be a blast. And I absolutely love my Staff/SR Brute: it jumped all the way up to my second-favorite melee behind my MA/SR main the same day I started playing it.

Of course, I don't hate running iTrials either, so even though I solo a lot my situation isn't the same. I think my Staff/SR will *eventually* get incarnate-slotted, and it won't be as much of a chore when I decide to. Although I've been thinking about running through solo DA for that just to see what the process is like first-hand in terms of long-term progress. I know it ain't fast, but slow is a subjective judgment.