BitterCupOJoe

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To put it another way, imagine an AR blaster starting a fight with Full Auto and crippling your team, including any defense-based (ice armor, super reflexes) tanker or scrappers, with only a 5% chance of missing any of them, no matter how well buffed they are. It's also possible that they will kill weaker members, but I'd need to see the FA damage output of a level 50 blaster to know for sure. That's a likely effect an HO will have.

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Heh, sounds like Diablo 2 all over again.
Well once again, solution:
Don't play arena levels 45-50
OR
Make sure you don't fight anyone with hami-Os

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Problem with one is that I want to play levels 45-50. The problem with two is, unless there's an option to either display the number of HO/SO/DO/Training enhancments the other player has slotted or an option to turn off a certain level of enhancements, I don't have a way to do this. I can say, "Hey do you have any HOs," but this is about as likely to work as specifying "No Zerg Rushes" in Starcraft. Worse, in that if you Zerg rush me, I'll know I lost because you chose to disregard the requested code of conduct, whereas if you have a handful of HOs in the right places, I might never know at all.

It's not quite as simple as you put it, without some way built into the game to enforce a certain level of honesty on the people that want to use HOs. Until then, my only options are to play against people that I know and play regularly with or to not play. I don't want to do the latter, and if I wanted to do the former, I'd be playing Unreal Tournament on a password protected server.

So let's add a couple of options to your choices:

Get the devs to add an enhancement disabler (this would also allow people in the 10-15 and 20-25 range the option to turn everyone's abilities down to DOs or trainings, to prevent twinked characters from dominating against people that didn't have their friends/alts dump influence on them)

Get the devs to add an option to display the numbers of each rank of enhancement in a character's build. This allows for an honest and informed fight between HO and non-HO characters, if the players choose.

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Man PvP is way too much a fuss...
Everyone is now rushing to get to 50 and to get lots and lots of hamidon SO's for it.
Guys.... the arena WILL NOT revolve around of level 50 battles!
As a matter of fact, you shall probably notice very fast that the lower level battles (20-40) are most likely to be the funnest. (in my opinion of course)
Secondly, Hami-SO's shall be nice, but, they are not the only factor involved. Use your head and you may have a chance. Of course, I haven't gotten high enough level to see the effects of a Hami-SO, but, for all of you who were complaining about having to go hamidon farming, think of this, is the top 30 arena spots for the 45-50 level range really worth you spending countless hours doing something you don't want to do?

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HOs are obscenely effective. An attack six slotted with an Acc/Dam HO does 400% damage all the time and gives a total accuracy of 225%. That's enough to ignore, entirely, 130% defense. 130% defense is roughly the same amount that's given by three FF defenders casting six-slotted (SO) deflection shields on a single character. So while we don't fully know the effects that HOs will have on arena combat, we can have some idea just by looking at the numbers.

To put it another way, imagine an AR blaster starting a fight with Full Auto and crippling your team, including any defense-based (ice armor, super reflexes) tanker or scrappers, with only a 5% chance of missing any of them, no matter how well buffed they are. It's also possible that they will kill weaker members, but I'd need to see the FA damage output of a level 50 blaster to know for sure. That's a likely effect an HO will have.

If they coded their system even halfway sanely, it shouldn't require modifying every power, just a tweak to their enhancement/buff application system. Either they change the temporary stats to a power every time a buff/debuff is applied/ends (including adding enhancements) or every time it's fired. The latter would mean slightly more processor time, but would make for safer values. The former is the inverse. Coding it so that each power calculates with its own little function would be awful. If they did it that way, then... wow. That would be some really bad code. At any rate, it has to be checking now to see whether, say, an accuracy buff on the player should count towards the fire imps they summon, and they have to have a way to differentiate between buffs given by effects and buffs given by enhancements (since targetting drone doesn't make trip mine more accuracte, for example). And then...

Sorry, going system geek there. Anyways, the point is, it's very unlikely that it would mean a lot of code. I could see it meaning more mental gymnastics for the players, but if you're taking on Hami, you're probably good enough to figure out what the system means for you, and if you can't take him on yet, and you can't figure out the math, you're probably going to get crunched by Hami-O players anyways, regardless of whether there's a balancing system in place. The above system is really for those mid-ground players, like me, that want to acknowledge the hard work that Hami players have put out, while still having something resembling a chance against them in the arena.

Without seeing Cryptic's code, I can't say how hard or easy it would be. But knowing what they already have to store in memory (what effects will enhance a power and what enhancements are currently on a power), the pseudocode is very simple. The quick sketched out pseudocode I came up with was about 12 lines long. Of course, that's pseudocode, and based on how spaghetti their code is, who knows how intricate it will need to be. But saying, "That's hard! It'll take too long!" is, generally, not the way to go when you're talking about long term game survivability and balance.

I don't know how difficult it would be. I will say that they seem to already have something in place to ignore enhancement effects that don't work on powers, so it seems they've already got in place a system to let them know what enhancements should and should not work on a power. The easy way to test that would be to slot up someone's burn with Acc/Dam and see if there's any effect on how long it takes them to kill things.

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I'd much prefer it if Hamidon Origin Enhancements just didn't exist...

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Makes two of us.

PvP aside, the game's not balanced for Hami-O's -- and, since they're supposed to be rare, it can't be. Except that they're not rare for some people anymore.

It doesn't look like the designers envisioned people having more than a couple HOs at any one time. Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out.

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so because a few people are unbalanced, by your standards, you want to do away with the only end game content's reward?

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Uh. Look at the post directly above yours in flat view. That's not just a little unbalanced. Regardless, there's a better way to fix Hami-Os than to simply do away with them. There's basically two things that make HOs great: multiple effects and stronger effects. Therefore, the easiest way to make them fairer in the arena, while still maintaining their flavor, would be to modify, slightly, the way they work.

First, cap their total effect at 40%, or slightly better than a SO. If something is a 50% Acc/50% Dam, it becomes a 20% Acc/20% Dam SO. At first blush, that might look unfair, because it means the character is running a DO and half a training on each effect, but when taken as a whole (220% base damage plus enough accuracy to ignore 60% defense). If the power can't normally be affected by one of the HO's effects (for example, slotting a Dam/Acc in burn), then that effect is removed, and its points are redistributed to the other effects. In the case of Burn, the HO would act as a 40% damage enhancer, since Accuracy can't be slotted in burn.

This would allow HOs to give a very slight edge in the arena, but enough to still be overcome by skill and a small amount of luck.

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I still don't get how scrappers can have pistols, they're much more suited for blasters, IMO.

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Because pistols are a close range weapon. There are people that are good enough to use them out to 30 yards, but mostly in target practice situations where they have a chance to set up, etc. Most handgun fights happen within 21 feet of each other, for good reason. Handguns are inherently less accuarte at range than rifles. They're meant for close-in fighting, both because of their size and maneuverability and because of their complete uselessness at long range.

Now, if you want to play a blaster that gets within 20 feet of their enemies constantly, feel free...

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If you can't solo everythign your contacts give you then they shouldn't stop giving you stuff when you come up against somethign you can't solo, forcing you to either get a team or to not do any more missions. IMO, THAT, is what is horribly broken.


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I agree there are times when the contacts are not clear about what you can solo what you may be able to solo and what you cant solo. I would even go as far as suggesting there be a way to give missions back to contacts if they contain tasks you can’t perform solo.

But…

It’s obvious that even when people are given hints that they need a team they simply ignore them. If you go back a few pages you will see complaints from a fire tanker that he has three missions he can’t solo.

One said outright that it had an AV, and he apparently just assumed he could solo it until he found out it resisted fire.

One told him outright that he should bring along teammates.

He said the third gave him a follow up mission with an AV with no warning. My recollection of this arc is that the AV was hinted at.



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Yeah, that was me. And, yes, I was told in one of those cases that there would definitely be an AV in it. I just checked the other one, and it basically says, "You need to do this hostage rescue mission for the Carnival of Light (Praetorians CoS) and they'll give you some info about one of Neuron's schemes." Nowhere in there does it then say that you will have to immediately go fight him after you finish the hostage mission without stopping to talk to the contact again.

The Infernal thing? That's my mistake. I had soloed several AVs without much trouble, and, frankly, figured the guy would do lethal and fire damage with maybe some shadow. Maybe he'd be resistant to fire damage, but not 100%, since, you know, I'm not allowed to be anymore, even tho I picked up more than 100% resistance to it through my shields. Okay, my mistake, I can't touch him. I'll get a team for that.

On Neuron? I made the mistake of assuming that I'd get a chance to rescue the CoL, then maybe get a break before I had to go fight Neuron, as happened in almost every pre-AV fight up til that point. Nemesis Rex? Multiple missions before I faced him, each separated by a trip to the contact. Same thing with Dr. Vazh (it said flat out: He'll be there) and the Envoy of Shadows. Then when it's time to fight the Praetorians? All of that goes right out the window. Antimatter, you get a cryptic, "There's a HUGE surge in this dimension!" Adamastor, while a monster, also doesn't even show up in the mission briefing when you're supposed to rescue the hostages from that dimension. Infernal was named, thankfully, but then you've got the Neuron one, which I just mentioned.

And then there's the AV mission I picked up last night, fighting Nemesis (maybe, he's listed as Nemesis? when you get to him). That's the one where I was told to "bring some friends" and that I would be facing Nemesis, but when it said that, it used it in the context of the Nemesis faction, NOT Nemesis himself, particularly since they said explicitly several times during the arc leading up to it that Nemesis was dead. I thought that was probably incorrect, and that I would eventually have to fight him, but you know what? I should have had the option of NOT fighting him, instead of playing Russian Roulette with my mission choices. "Bring some friends! *whirrrr**click* "Yay! It's only a boss!" "Bring a team!" *whirrr* *click* "Yay! Just a couple bosses!" "Bring some other heroes!" *whirrrr* *bang* "Augh! Another AV!"

In short, it's not the AVs I mind, it's that trying to interpret the different writers attempts at letting you know there's going to be an AV that sucks. There needs to be a better way than trying to guess from the text what's involved in the mission, and the symbols idea I posted earlier is the best way I can come up with, expecially since it'll fix, "You've gotta hurry!" not actually leading to a timed mission and then another mission with "You've gotta hurry!" leading to a timed one, and having no real way to tell which is which.

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Note: It's very important that you don't get something like this in the contact's mission selection window:

Go Rescue the hostages from the Freakshow!

and then get this once you selected the mission from your contact:

By the way, you'll need help, because you'll be facing Dreck!

Or, seeing, once you select the mission for your nav bar:

Arrest Dreck and his crew, rescue 5 hostages.

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I got that! Or rather, one like it:

"Go rescue these hostages from the Banished Pantheon home dimension! You have two hours!"

"Okay, I'm on it!"

"Great. By the way, you also have to defeat Adamastor!"

Fortunately, I had a team at the time I took the mission.

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I currently have ALL of my missions slots filled with AV missions. One of them explicitly said, "Hey, you'll be fighting Infernal." Of course, they didn't mention that he was immune to fire, so that means my fire tanker's going to need a group for it. The second went from a "Rescue the hostages" mission to "Hey, go kill Neuron!" when I finished the first part, with no warning that I can remember. The last slot, which I had managed to keep AV-free for all of about 5 missions, got filled last night on a mission that said little more than, "You might want to bring along some friends." That's just messed up. "You might want to bring along some friends" could mean, "There's a boss!" or it could mean "There's a group of glowies that require multiple players" or, apparently, "There's a big frikking archvillain in the fourth part of your mission! Not the first part, when we said you might want to bring friends along, the fourth building you had to run to!"

There needs to be some system to definitively flag what's going to be in a mission. WoW has this and it works great. They flag some enemies as "Elite" and missions which contain those enemies are flagged the same way as well.

I propose a system of symbols, B for Boss, MB for multiple bosses, V for Archvillain, T for Timed, MP for multiple players. Just little icons that appear next to the mission when you get it that indicate that at some point during that mission, you'll be going up against that thing. And I don't mean just the first instance you go to, any of the instances in it before you can go back to your contact are counted for the purposes of the icons.

So if you go to your contact, and the mission he sends you on has four parts, and the first is a hunt 50, the second is timed, the third is a normal instance with a boss, and the fourth contains multiple bosses, the mission would have the T, B, and MB icons. If a player wants to be surprised, make Icon Display an option that could be turned on and off.

Thanks. One more thing I forgot, taunt is going to work on other players in PvP in some way or another.

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They will not be adding super strength to scrappers.

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Care to elaborate on this any? I would be interested to hear the reasoning behind this.

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He doesn't feel it fits the scrapper "feel." I disagree, but there you go.

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There will be origin-dependent missions, starting with Issue 3. Essentially, if you're a mutant, you'll get some missions that non-mutants can't get. Same with every other origin. The first ones for mutant and science will be in issue 3.

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Finally, something to distinguish the origins besides enhancements. I'm guessing/hoping there will be missions for all origins, not just mutant and science...


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Yes, there will be, but only for mutant and science in Issue 3. Going forward, they'll add more.

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Removing the accuracy penalty for melee attacks only from flight is very difficult to do. Since it's either no accuracy penalty or every attack gets an accuracy penalty, flight will be retaining its penalty on all atacks.

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Ahem.

Super Reflexes Scrappers have powers that only protect against melee attacks, and powers that only protect against ranged attacks. Clearly the engine distinguishes them at some level, why not on the player side?

-c.

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I thought of asking that, but then the discussion moved on. My guess is that's either A) a piece of spaghetti code that they wrote just for the SR scrappers and is therefore not easy to move elsewhere or B) the defense code is separate enough from the attack code that it's easier to apply a modification to defense than attacks. I'd lean towards the second of those.

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Don't suppose there were any comments on the upcoming fear change...?

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No, not that I recall, and I was paying pretty close attention the whole time.

On Sunday, my wife and I went to the Wizard World convention in Dallas, specifically for the panel run by Jack Emmert (Statesman) named "CoH: Past, Present, and Future." Statesman did an excellent job throughout, with a great self-deprecating sense of humor. At one point during the discussion, he got a call from Mrs. Statesman, which was, of course, vastly amusing.

At any rate, he went into some stuff about the designers' vision for the game, stuff that was put in that ended up not working (most of which was excised during beta), the state of the game now, and where it's going. Most of it is stuff that any long-time boardwatcher already knows, but among other fun little tidbits was the fact that no one really expected the badge system to be as big a hit as it was, and that he hadn't wanted it in in the first place. However, he was responsible for the accolades, saying that the badges should at least DO something. Then he opened up the floor for questions. Here's what I remember of the stuff that was said:

<ul type="square">[*]Tankers are still being worked on. The AoE taunt is pretty much decided on and (I think) largely finished, now they're working on the second system, which he wasn't very specific about.[*]Something is going to be done about the self-immobilize on Unyielding Stance and Rooted working in conjunction with Teleport Self. It wasn't absolutely clear, but it sounded like they were looking at doing away with the self-immobilize, although they might just be closing the TP loophole. Like I said, it wasn't clear. Roughly, his statement was, "There's these things that look really good when you're designing that just don't hold up. The 'perfect' tanker right now has to take provoke, hasten, teleport, and fitness. That's messed up."[*]AoE will be addressed. They know it's a problem, and they're looking at solutions.[*]Mobs will eventually be tuned to the point where three whites (or possibly slightly more) remain a challenge even into the high levels. [*]Bows and sonics will not be in Issue 3. The Epic ATs chewed up more time than expected.[*]Bows, sonics, shields, and magnetism were four that he listed as "must go in." When I asked about streetfighting/brawling, he said, "Oh, yeah, that's a given. That's (I believe he said) trivial to do." Someone else brought up pistols, and he added that to the "must-have" list. Pistols are going to be "probably scrapper." Shields are going to be "probably scrapper and tanker." Bows are going to be "probably blaster and defender."[*]No, pistols are not going to be a power pool. "I don't want it to turn into City of Guns."[*]Ultimately he wants to get every powerset up to (I think) 10 powers each.[*]There will be origin-dependent missions, starting with Issue 3. Essentially, if you're a mutant, you'll get some missions that non-mutants can't get. Same with every other origin. The first ones for mutant and science will be in issue 3.[*]When the power pools are expanded (I believe he meant adding more powers to pools, like a 5th power in the existing pool), teleport will probably get a "teleport to point on map" power.[*]Semi-regular zone-specific events are coming. The first 3 or so will be in Issue 3. He wouldn't give details on what they entailed, but his example, which he said was NOT one that was currently implemented, would be a gang war that occasionally erupts between the skulls and hellions in Perez Park. He said (I believe) that this was partially in preparation for giant monster attacks.[*]As mentioned before, web-slinging is very, very hard. Don't hold your breath on it happening anytime soon.[*]The Statesman epic AT won't be coming until after City of Villains.[*]As he's already stated on the boards, 2 epic ATs with 16 primary and 16 secondary powersets between them will be implemented in Issue 3.[*]Epic power pools are also coming in Issue 3. You don't get access to them until level 40. People already past 40 MAY get another respec, but that hasn't been decided yet.[*]The difficulty slider will only affect mob difficulty in missions, not mob spawn sizes. So you'll still have 3 mobs per spawn when solo, but they'll be higher level.[*]They will not be adding super strength to scrappers.[*]Making custom weapons is easier than making custom colors for power, because of how the artwork for powers is done. Those will be further out than custom weapons.[*]Removing the accuracy penalty for melee attacks only from flight is very difficult to do. Since it's either no accuracy penalty or every attack gets an accuracy penalty, flight will be retaining its penalty on all atacks.[/list]That's all I can remember off the top of my head, and I forgot to bring a note pad, so if anyone else remembers anything, please speak up!

Oh, and thanks again to Statesman! What could have been a dull, relatively uninformative panel was quite lively and useful.

In theory, if the new AoE taunt on hand to hand attacks is strong enough, all I might need is taunt to get the initial aggro on a group of enemies (assuming I taunt a boss, lt, or someone standing int he middle of the group), then start throwing punches to keep the effect up. As a burn tanker, I already use provoke mostly as a PBAoE taunt anyways, to keep them on me, rather than OFF of teammates. It's a subtle difference in playstyles between a true defensive tank and a burn tank. And, honestly, the character was designed to be a solo XP machine, so any loss of teamming ability is secondary to me. I've got storylining, team-based characters. The burn tank is not one of them. He was built solely to get to 50 before Issue 3, and the easiest way to do that post-40 is to head into portals and by myself and aggro everything. Teammates don't even really enter into it.

That said, provoke has been invaluable for when I have wanted to team and needed to keep teammates alive. But I usually wade in either way, and, again, provoke is just a way to keep the enemies on me. It's rare that anything gets away once it's in close, and I can't see that changing when I'm throwing 4 "provokes" every 10 seconds instead of 1.

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But with the exception of the "taunt" on Invincibility, which is probably not a true taunt and just acts similar to one, the aggro generated by those is tiny. At level 43, with blazing aura with 1 slot acc, 5 slots, damage, I'm doing in the mid to upper 20s in damage every tick. The ticks go every half-second to second. Assuming the best, 29 damage per tcik, 2 ticks a second, I'm only doing 58 damage a second. I believe I can be outaggroed by a blaster using nothing but power push. It's certainly not enough to keep the enemies from turning their attention towards a blaster that's firing even half-rate.

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I agree with what you're saying here, but wanted to point out that the taunt on invincibility is a magnitude 2 or 3, which puts it in the area of provoke. In my experience it holds mob aggro quite nicely.

I also found with my fire tanker that I could hold the majority of aggro with a fast punching set (SS), taunt, and blazing aura. You have to be on your toes to hold close to everything, but personally that made it interesting for me. The ease and simplicity of provoke is what creates Provoke-bots.

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How do you keep the aggro on 10 mobs at a time with 5 attacks, a taunt, and blazing aura? Not saying you can't, just curious. If you're doing it by making sure the blasters aren't doing as much damage as they're able, that seems a little inefficient. If you're doing it another way, I'd love to hear it.

For me, I chose provoke because I made a burn tank. Provoke just works better than any other tool I had available for the purpose. Blazing aura doesn't keep them angry enough to stay close by, but provoke does. Adding ice patch on top of that worked even better. Still, I'd prefer to ditch provoke and keep them angry by, oh, hitting them.

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As far as the Provoke on melee attacks for tankers, I think what would be better would be that one of their auras, like

a) Blazing Aura

b) Invincibility

c) Icicles

d) Mudpots

I think those should have the Provoke effect for those in range of it. INSTEAD of a PBAoE Taunt effect on all tanker attacks. What if you DON'T want to provoke everything?

What do you think?

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A. The dmg it does generates agro already.
B. Already has a PBAOE taunt on it.
C. Same as blazing aura. The dmg does generate some agro.
D. Generates agro based on the debuff.

Looks like you already got what you want =)

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But with the exception of the "taunt" on Invincibility, which is probably not a true taunt and just acts similar to one, the aggro generated by those is tiny. At level 43, with blazing aura with 1 slot acc, 5 slots, damage, I'm doing in the mid to upper 20s in damage every tick. The ticks go every half-second to second. Assuming the best, 29 damage per tcik, 2 ticks a second, I'm only doing 58 damage a second. I believe I can be outaggroed by a blaster using nothing but power push. It's certainly not enough to keep the enemies from turning their attention towards a blaster that's firing even half-rate.

The tank would need to gather that group. The scrapper does not. My BS/Inv scrapper tears through groups of 3 and 4, bounding from spawn to spawn in IP. My tanker goes through them about half as fast. Between the time it takes to get enough mobs together to make the tactic worthwhile and the time that it takes him to ramp up (this is very theoretical, since we just don't have the numbers yet) and the time it actually takes to kill the 4 or 5 gathered groups, MAYBE it'll equalize. If it does, that's fine.

It's not like giving the tank accelerating damage means that he'll suddenly have an AoE to take out the minions he gets together. If he tries to do it with an AoE, he's going to kill them way before he reaches critical mass. If he tries to do it with single targets, then eventually he will approach scrapper damage.

I see this speeding up tanks a lot, but pretty much no chance of having tanks eclipse scrappers in their role of damage dealer. Certainly not in an XP/minute way.

Are you planning to add the taunt/provoke effect to power pool attacks? It only seems fair, since scrappers have criticals added to theirs.