BellaStrega

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Dark Miasma is ridiculous. Dark/Dark is even worse. The only thing that keeps a Dark defender in check is the lack of mez protection. Rad is really really good as well. I think those sets are almost too good.

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I don't believe "ridiculous" is the correct adjective to use. Dark Miasma with the ability to perma-hold bosses, keep two spawns Feared consistently, and stack two tar patches under any AV fight while trailing three dark servants might have been ridiculous (lots of healing power there, plus fairly strong offensive boosts).

However, the current slotting required to even approach that in the current game means sacrificing other things. Going Dark/Dark means sacrificing a considerable amount of offensive potential in exchange for a relatively trivial amount of control. If you want Petrifying Gaze or Fearsome Stare to have the kind of control it had before (or, more realistically, only approach it), you need to slot them up. You only get one Dark Servant at a time, now, and it is not perma like Controller pets. You have to recast it every four minutes or so if you want to keep it around.

To be honest, I think the only real advantage my D3 had over an Empath in issue 4 was the ability to protect a larger team, where an Empath would have to pick and choose buff targets. Even so, recovery Aura, Fortitude on three or four targets and adrenaline boost on one was and remains fairly potent. My D3 can't help any reach their damage caps (the 18% boost from Assault is pretty minor by itself), boost recharge rates, boost recovery, and so on. The only real buff the set has is resistance against energy, negative, psi, and protection from fear. The debuffs are good, but I'm not sure that they're "too good" or even "almost too good." There's also the fact that the debuffs only work at full power against even-level stuff, and drops fairly quickly as the levels increase.

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I'm amazed the power... debuffs defense.

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:cough:

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* Graphics: Oil Slick's description says that it provides a defense debuff, however, there is no enemy graphic to indicate this. (Concern)

[/ QUOTE ]The Defense Debuff was removed before the power went live. The referrence in the short help is a mistake.

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[/ QUOTE ]You know...I knew I had read that and I was hoping it was a dream. Alas.

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No happy dreams for trick arrow defenders.

It would be unbalanced.

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While it is fun to see this new costume piece being added , it still makes me wonder why devs still havent given us back the OLD SKIRTS from launch .

Why is it soooo hard to get them back ? Ill give them back the Toga anytime for my old skirt in exchange ...



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I believe Statesman has indicated this is coming.

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Just stop, you lost this thread, I told you they have evasion, and you questioned it, and the red name slapped you up side the head with the numbers

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The AoE defense they have is a tangent to my own post, which was about a chain of single-target attacks.

Please explain in as much detail as possible how 250% AoE defense has any effect on:

Ice Bolt, Ice Blast, Freeze Ray, Power Thrust, Energy Punch, and Bonesmasher?

That is to say, get with the program: We're not talking about the AoE defense.

Edit: Removed Bitter Ice Blast, as I hadn't picked it up yet.

Also edit: I did not question whether they had evasion. I questioned whether the AoE defense that people were coming up with for Night Widows was reasonable. From Castle's post, I overestimated, but not by very much.

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I'm sorry you feel frustrated by the questions. It wasn't intended to doubt your observations, but to look for an explanation for them. Since you didn't describe the situation in total, there were a lot of details that would be potentially significant to me in looking at an accuracy problem. For example, you don't specify if the boss was the first thing in the spawn you attacked; its possible looking from my end that the boss might have been the last thing attacked, and you were already debuffed by smoke; that might have been enough to lower your to hit against other targets low enough to cause the streakbreaker to be "off" when you switched to the boss. Or its possible that you attacked an LT with sufficient defense to drive accuracy-slotted attacks to 40% without needing debuffing prior to attacking the boss: arachnos LTs sometimes seem to have significant defense from what I've noticed. Without being there, there's no way to be sure without clarification, and I double-checked very carefully to see if at any time you made a definitive statement about any of these conditions before mentioning them.

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Well, until that specific fight, I wasn't having any trouble hitting stuff. I mean, I wasn't hitting them every time, but I was hitting more than half the time, which isn't bad. In this particular fight, I tabbed through the targets until I got to the boss, lost the boss, got the boss, lost the boss, hit an insight. As I recall, the first target I hit in the spawn was the boss - I know this because a) build up was up, and b) I was at full health.

A lot of my frustration comes from the guy who felt the need to lecture on the obvious. I do feel that my accuracy was floored or close to it, rather than simply reduced to 30-40% (as the streak could imply), but that's also due to the fact that my teammates were having similar issues.

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Sorry, I was a bit on the defensive after Arcana's posts - which were intended to be helpful, but the second covered something I'd already addressed.


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All I said was that it was theoretically possible for the streakbreaker to admit 6 misses in a row in that scenario. What matters in that situation isn't whether you hit build up before attacking the boss - I got that part - but rather whether the last swing before attacking the boss was a miss, and against anything that might have had any defense at all, which is possible in a mission like you're describing.

The streakbreaker will allow 6 misses in a row (breaking the streak at 6 by forcing #7 to be a hit) if the previous swing was against something with about 25% defense. Base tohit was running 55%, and the streakbreaker limit for net 30% to 40% tohit is 6, so if the last thing you attacked was something with at least 25% defense (or you were somehow debuffed), and that swing was a miss, then your streakbreaker limit going into the boss - even if your accuracy was fully at the ceiling - would have still been 6 until you recorded your first hit, based on my understanding of the streakbreaker (55% - 25% = 30%. 30% * 1.33 for accuracy slotting is 40%).

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And consider the mathematical odds of that happening?

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If you had said "the last swing I made before attacking the boss was a hit" or "at no time in the recent past prior to attacking the boss did my tohit ever fall below 40%, definitely" then the streakbreaker would have been forced to break that streak, but I didn't know if either of those two conditions were true.

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I don't know why I should have to clarify that my ~73-75% accuracy against everything else in the mission was not below 40%. I mean, fighting Arachnos minions and lts who are mainly hitting me with attacks that don't seem to have to-hit debuffs in them and I'm hitting them with my attacks because I slotted for accuracy.

I feel like I'm going over the same ground again and again. That's because I am. I am also more than a bit tired of it.

Also, Castle confirmed that the smoke debuff is pretty harsh and that they also have good defense on their own (admittedly, not the 250% AoE defense).

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You can have capped accuracy (95%) and still miss 5 of 6 attacks, with perfectly fair dice...the entire point of the original response. It will "feel" exactly the same as floored accuracy (5%), if you put trust in your intuition and not accurate data.

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However, you cannot have capped accuracy and still miss 6 of 7 attacks in City of Heroes, thanks to the streakbreaker.

In the future, just pretend you popped out your patronizing lecture on probabilities, k?

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Uh, yes, like the math I posted said.

Nevermind, it apparently does not matter what I say, it'll get nitpicked to death and relevant points will be ignored.

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Um, I don't really see any significant math in your post. I read the formula you gave as shorthand, not an equation. You commented that you'd sort of forgotten the math, so I was explaining it.

If that's not what you meant, sorry. In that case it's not clear to me what you were saying.

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Well, I did say having an SO in an attack would leave me with about 6% accuracy after getting floored and multiplied.

Sorry, I was a bit on the defensive after Arcana's posts - which were intended to be helpful, but the second covered something I'd already addressed.

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That's actually well understood because the accuracy ehancements (and inherent bonuses like MA and Archery get) are multiplicitaive on the net total of tohitbuffs, tohitDebuffs, and foe defense. If tohitDebuffs and foe defense floor you, or even just come "pretty close" to cancelling your base toHit, then all those multipliers are multiplying a very small number.

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Uh, yes, like the math I posted said.

Nevermind, it apparently does not matter what I say, it'll get nitpicked to death and relevant points will be ignored.

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That's backwards, but also meaninglessly so. 55% base to hit and 91% tohit buffs means 146% base tohit before accuracy. To get anything approaching flooring you would require on the order of 140%+ defense and tohit debuffs combined.

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I forgot this:

My recollection of the math is not perfect, but defense and accuracy debuffs appear to be more effective against accuracy + enhancements (base accuracy *1.enhancements) than against to-hit buffs. I've always found - for example - +25% to-hit buff to be more valuable than +33% total accuracy (or a 25% boost over 75%).

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Its possible, especially across all players, to see an event like that. At first, I thought the streakbreaker would make it extremely unlikely, because the only way for this to happen would be for someone to switch from very low accuracy to very high accuracy, so it can only happen under those conditions. But in fact, thats exactly what's happening when you go from attacking something with base 55% chance to hit and possibly high defense to +91% tohit buffs. It could happen *once* if you hit the lottery (my guestimate is that this scenario might happen to someone somewhere once or twice a year). Anything above two people seeing this phenomenon would place it outside the realm of reasonable probability, though.

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That's not what happened. I conned the boss, lost targeting, targeted her again, lost targeting, hit an insight, hit build up, and started the attack chain. I hadn't attacked prior to buffing my accuracy.

I know for a fact that I've said this at least once. I have this habit where I don't hit bosses - especially purple bosses - until I've hit build up.

So, er, no way to get that miss streak on 95% accuracy.

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it's my cracked out conspiracy theory du jour. i think there is no castle or at least, he's a patsy set up the main man so they can play good cop/bad cop with us.

like i sad, cracked out.

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Yeah, I was just recalling the old days, the bad days when people accused random posters of being secret dev shills.

I was accused of that.

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That's backwards, but also meaninglessly so. 55% base to hit and 91% tohit buffs means 146% base tohit before accuracy. To get anything approaching flooring you would require on the order of 140%+ defense and tohit debuffs combined. Nothing I know of has a combination of defense and tohit debuffs on the order of 140%, which is why I thought it was a bad luck streak. But if its happening repeatably, then its more likely a bug.

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It is not possible to have a miss streak that long with capped accuracy, which discounts the idea of bad luck, or should have right off the bat.

If I'd had something like 1 hit, 2 misses, 1 hit, 2 misses, I would've been annoyed, but not like "miss x 6 + 1 hit"

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The truth is out there.

Honestly that would be sorta cool. Statesman playing good cop; bad cop with himself. Hmm... interesting. But does anyone know Castle's real name?

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i friggin TOLD you!!!!!

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Wait, are we accusing a dev of being a secret dev?

Because that'd be kind of cool.

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*insert wild conspiracy theory about how Castle really is Statesman and how he's content to allow the Statesman board name to draw fire while he takes care of the everything else without getting flamed off the board for every little thing*

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The truth is out there.

Honestly that would be sorta cool. Statesman playing good cop; bad cop with himself. Hmm... interesting. But does anyone know Castle's real name?

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Yes.











No, it's not me.

I played Spines/Regen in beta.

Loved it, too.

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Now that's interesting. An initial op featuring six single-target attacks leads to the discovery of an AOE defense bug...

Nice work Castle, and interested data-gatherers.

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It is kind of weird. But cool, too.

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Sample size is too small to draw such a conclusion. Short run statistics lie, once again:

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Sorry, I'm going to stick with my intuition here.

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Yeah, wouldn't want the FACTS to cloud your judgement...LOL

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Those weren't facts. Those were statistics based on assumptions on top of a nastygram about how my sample size was too small to conclude that my accuracy was floored.

I've seen floored and capped accuracy in action. I know what it looks like. That fight looked like floored accuracy. Who cares about some lies and damned lies when we're not talking about statistics but a real event? No one cares unless we're actually trying to establish exact numbers, k?

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So you're telling me that 35% def to AoEs is making -4s dodge 30 some odd ticks of 130%acc ?

--Suichiro

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As I recall it, the Defense first lowers from your to-hit chance, and therefore could potentially floor it. Then you get to add in Inspirations and Enhancements, but it may be too late if it's floored already.

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I have a base 55% chance to hit the Night Widow I mentioned. Say she has enough defense to floor me - 5%. Now I have approximately +33% accuracy, which raises that to 6% maybe. (if I have it backwards, the difference is microscopic).

Now, I add 91% to-hit buffs with the insight and build up, which caps at 95%.

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And it's possible that, just as NPC Brawl does a ridiculously higher level of damage than PC Brawl, NPC Evasion is much stronger than PC evasion. Remember that their Unstoppable doesn't crash, that MoG is about 90% resists, etc. They didn't suffer the Global Defense Nerf, we did.

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Yes, but against MoG and Elude, I would have capped to-hit because buffs are applied after defense.

I believe it's 45% aoe.

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Night Widows have evasion, the SR's massive boost to AE defense...

Well I think that solves that :P

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Solves which?

That the night widows have something like 400% defense or to-hit debuff going on?

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Night Widows have evasion, the SR's massive boost to AE defense...

Well I think that solves that :P

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Solves which?

That the night widows have something like 400% defense or to-hit debuff going on?

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Bitter Freeze Ray is a power that's routinely skipped, and when it is taken, its only real use is a combat opener, much like a snipe however it does really low damage incomparison to one too...

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BFR's animation used to be shared with Twilight Grasp, but it was changed because the animation made it too difficult to use TG as a heal.

I suspect that BFR's long recharge/animation was intended to balance the fact that Ice has two single-target holds, which allowed you to hold a boss right off the bat.

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But you still can hold them "right off the bat" if you open with bfr. I think bfr's animation is to balance its longer ranger, much more damage, and I believe stronger (in mag) hold.

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Well, how many powersets have two single-target holds?

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Never had too much trouble with Blood Widows. Night Widows on the other hand... pretty sure it's Night Widows that pop smoke. Hate that.

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Echo that. Never had anything vaguely resembling a problem on lowest or highest difficulty setting. Is there some BW boss I'm missin?

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To clarify the topic:

This happened the same day I posted, about 6-8 hours before the post. Later, I asked if anyone knew the name of the really tough Widow bosses, and someone told me it was "Blood Widows," so I went with that.

The thread is really about Night Widows, though.

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Bitter Freeze Ray is a power that's routinely skipped, and when it is taken, its only real use is a combat opener, much like a snipe however it does really low damage incomparison to one too...

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BFR's animation used to be shared with Twilight Grasp, but it was changed because the animation made it too difficult to use TG as a heal.

I suspect that BFR's long recharge/animation was intended to balance the fact that Ice has two single-target holds, which allowed you to hold a boss right off the bat.