Binary110

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You're pinging an enemy down with the .6 attack. It gets to a point where the 1 attack with scourge would fully kill the enemy with only a tiny (If any) bit of damage overkill. But you use the .6 attack twice instead. It scourges both times, and the enemy is left with an almost full overkill scourge. That means that the scourge on the 1 scalar attack yielded close to 100% effective bonus damage, but the scourge on the .6 scalar attack only yielded 50% effective bonus damage (Total over the two hits).

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This is assumes that the foe has an HP which is a multiple of the 1.0 factor. (after true damage is factored in) While this may be the case, it is probably only likely at particular levels. (For instance, foes might have 3, 3.2 and then 3.5 times the damage factor at each of three levels, just for an example)

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It simply assumes that after the previous damage the foe has that much health remaining. This means it could be ideal for any of the three (four for rad) blasts, which is why it would need to select the one that would have the least overkill.

Starsman: The exact same scenario applies to the 1 scalar attack with regards to the next strength up, just replace the .6 with 1 and 1 with 1.64.

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Jade is right, the most skilled ever scourger would indeed get the results from the .6 table, and then again that is if he is a rad or is willing to waste endurance from AoE, but that second option wold be highly counter productive. After all, using your lowest damage attacks tend to also mean your slowest ones, at that point you are not optimizing for damage but for endurance efficiency.

The 1.0 table is the most realistic one to look at because thats the weakest attacks most blast sets have.

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This is not automatically true. Let me present a scenario:

You're pinging an enemy down with the .6 attack. It gets to a point where the 1 attack with scourge would fully kill the enemy with only a tiny (If any) bit of damage overkill. But you use the .6 attack twice instead. It scourges both times, and the enemy is left with an almost full overkill scourge. That means that the scourge on the 1 scalar attack yielded close to 100% effective bonus damage, but the scourge on the .6 scalar attack only yielded 50% effective bonus damage (Total over the two hits).

Would the % chance of the 1 damage attack scourging be better for damage boost from scourge than the overkill damage from the .6? I think in some situations yes. That is what the test would identify. But it would require an intelligent selection of that final blow, not just pinging with the weakest attack -- because when you're just pinging every single case, of course the .6 is superior in the long run.

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Second, if any of those attacks tend to come up at just the wrong point for overkill, even the .68 damage attack could be wasting a noticable fraction on a minion.

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It's interesting to note that according to the table, even the weakest attacks are usually overkill against a Minion. You can't get more than about a 14% bonus in any condition. This is because for the most part, even a basic attack is a large portion of a minion's HP.

I've actually underestimated this effect myself. However, it applies to Scrapper/Stalker/Controller Criticals and Brute Fury, as well. So I'm not sure it compares Scourge unfavorably to those Inherents.

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You asked what it might show to do specific attacks for less overkill, I was answering that. It has no relation to being favorable or unfavorable to criticals or fury, simply to seeing if an "ideal real world" test achieved different results (It's informative however it turns out, imo) than simply hitting a minion to death with one attack.

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You would make your program smart enough to figure out the best attack to deal the lowest overkill deathblow via scourge.

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Well, I may be misanalyzing this, and Starsman can say if I'm making a mistake, but I think likely this would have no effect on just using the best possible table for that rank of foe. He's not really considering DPS or time to kill in these tables, merely what portion of the damage is overkill. If we assume that that portion is the same for every single table until the point where the foe dies, that is, there is no overkill prior to where the foe dies, then the only difference would be in the last shot. That difference would then be in the appropriate table.

So your best results would be for the 0.68 table, or if you want to say it is more likely you would use ONE of your weaker two powers (and they are not likely to both be available at all times) then an average between 0.68 and 1.0.

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Doing it would accomplish two things, I think.

First, it would show more realistic numbers for a skilled scourge user - you're not going to be pinging the enemies down with a certain attack constantly, and there's going to be more variance in when their life reached deathblow range.

Second, if any of those attacks tend to come up at just the wrong point for overkill, even the .68 damage attack could be wasting a noticable fraction on a minion.

If nothing else, it would be interesting to see if choosing your attacks to deathblow just as scourge triggered was better for not overkilling than just spamming your weakest on enemies near death. I don't know if much would change, it just seemed like a last thing to set up and he has most of the tools in place already.

Awesome work.

I have one last thing you might try for interest: Ideal results.

You would make your program smart enough to figure out the best attack to deal the lowest overkill deathblow via scourge. Given the way Scourge chances increase as the target gets weaker, I'd say this should just kick in when the enemy can be single shotted by it - so against minions and Lts primarily (Though bosses should show a little change) have them be pinged down via random attacks until any of the standard blasts can one shot them if scourge triggers, then use the "best" (Least overkill but still fatal with scourge) attack rather than the random order in use until then.

This would simulate a player who has become very comfortable with their corrupter and is able to pick out attacks to try to trigger scourging for final blows without doing too much overkill. I try to do this, when I can clearly see a stronger blast is going to overkill I'll go for my tier 1.

Basically, it would be the corrupter "ideal" damage bonuses without going completely overboard and unrealistic on attack chains (Figuring out the exact attack order to use to get the best possible chances of scourge == unrealistic, imo).

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I have a slightly different take on PBs that what seems to be the majority opinion here.

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I share your opinion on them, for whatever that's worth. The PB just is too mediocre at everything, without really the bursts of excelling that WSs or other ATs can generally manage.

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I can offer this as a possible reason why Trial Accounts are locked out of MA arcs. I was taking a peak at creating a story and saw that the button to start creating is on the same screen as the one you access MA arcs.

Rather than setup code to delete the Create Story button, I suspect they blocked all access to the MA arc screen. Makes sense to me.

[/ QUOTE ] Blocking the create button (graying it out) would probably have been just as easy as disabling the console. I think they didn't want people creating trial accounts and running their missions with them. Even if they disabled ratings too, there is still another counter for how many people have run the arc.

Maybe they will decide to do something to allow trials some kind of access later, but this was probably the easiest thing to start with.

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The biggest problem I have with it is not that I couldn't access it, but that I was directed specifically to the contact who then told me to go ahead and try it out -- and only then did I discover I couldn't.

That it was just a silent failure and there wasn't even a message telling me I needed to register to access this feature was a bit annoying too.

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Maybe they're worried about ratings fraud but can't simply not let you rate stuff? I'unno, but I agree that they shouldn't direct you to it if you can't play any of it.

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I did eventually get in - but I had to have someone invite me to a team and start it for me. If the concern is ratings fraud and they do allow rating (I have no idea if it works or not, I know rating yourself silently fails) they don't have it fully blocked.

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(None of the outdoor maps do, and very few of the single level maps do. Its seems to be somewhat consistant tho that multi level maps have each floor tagged as one of the zones).

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Somewhat but not always - I have a hero lab map that will occasionally put a back spawn as the first spawn in the map.

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And you can use the search button on your my published mission instead of moving to the public search.

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That's good to know, I'll edit my original post to reflect it.

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Where are you seeing ratings? I'm kinda confused here. I tried exporting from the published version to a local copy, but there's nothing in the storyarc file that's related to the ratings.

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I'm sorry, let me clarify.

Under the "My Creations" tab is "Published Arcs". That shows the ratings your published arc has received -- and those ratings can be different from the ones found under a global search for it. But that's the place you go to Edit a published arc, and it highlights the desync between the actual live version and the version on your machine.

I believe it's just an in-memory thing and it would clear up if you closed and reopened CoH also, but I didn't test the problem enough in-depth to verify that -- I just did a public search, then back to the "My Creations" version and it fixed it up.

Over the course of the weekend, I got my arc published. Then I started republishing it based on feedback I received, and ran into a problem.

Basically, when you edit an already published arc, you still end up with a local copy on your machine somewhere. It may just be in CoH memory, but it's stored. I'll describe what this looks like:

I went to My Creations, selected the published arc, and hit Edit. Made a couple minor changes. Published the arc. Waited until I received notification that it had been updated, went back to My Creations, hit Edit, and checked -- and my changes weren't there! This means if I had continued editting while believing it was current, I would revert the previous changes, because the in-memory version didn't have them.

Related, I was doing work on it and noticed that the local version had 4 ratings listed. A friend checked and found that the live version had 5 ratings listed. The local copy apparently includes the ratings -- this information is not always pulled from the server just because you opened the MA window fresh.

To fix this, do a search for your arc (Just be sure to hit the Search button so it downloads it again). You don't have to play it or anything. Then you can edit your arc, and it will be sync'ed with the live version.

I hope this will eventually be fixed (I15 maybe?) but until then, if you plan on editting further after republishing I strongly recommend taking these steps.

I'm currently on a week trial of CoH, and ran into a frustrating issue.

At level 5 a new contact was added for me, the Mission Architect guy. So I went to see him, and he gave me a mission - run around and take the tour of the AE building. I dutifully completed this tour, and was told to just click the computers to get started. Looking forward to trying out some players' creations, I did so...and nothing happened.

So I clicked a few more times. Eventually, I decided it was because I was on a trial account.

I think either the contact shouldn't be showing up for trial users, should have a different arc, or they should be allowed to play arcs (And just not vote?) like everyone else can. At the least, the final message should have a note, "If you're on a trial account you won't be able to access the actual missions so don't bother clicking the computers." Being told I could play it and not being allowed to was a major disappointment.