Blood Red Arachnid

Times like this I find myself unwittingly wandering in front of new's cameras... again.


For a bit of trivia, my comment on there being PB hate came immediately after I was denied entrance to an ITF on DXPW. The leader, immediately after broadcasting two open spots, asked for my AT and then waited... awhile... before sending a response about how they were probably full and if someone were to drop I would get in.

I went to Cimerora to see if anyone was forming an ITF alongside of him. They weren't, but upon arriving I was greeted with "Go away we don't want your KB". Though written quite a bit more n00bishly. And people wonder why I am paranoid...

If I am not mistaken, removing the hairstyles on hold hats wouldn't be too labor intensive since the majority of the work is already done. The hat is already designed. I don't know how the programming for the game works for objects, but wouldn't it be possible to just remove the hair section and save it as a new hat?

I read through this whole thing. I don't particularly care for DnD or the arguments about it. I just think it would be interesting trivia that may benefit me in some way in the future. Still an interesting read.

It happens.

Honestly I think you guys should be patient and wait for him to respawn. The fact is that glitches and hiccups will happen in servers. It is just the nature of the beast. While this may be somewhat inconvenient, losing Jack of Irons isn't some big detriment that makes NCsoft owe the player.

I liked the movie, and I LOVED the animated series. I remember having to rush home from school because it was on at an obscure time that meant no one could watch it... friggen network.

But as an adult, I can rent the DVDs and watch the whole series. Unfortunately they never quite ended it...


Friggen network...

Story of my life.

I know this pain. When darkness control first came out, I ended up on a team with 3 Umbra Beasts. The howling... never... ended! I moved away from the ghetto so I wouldn't have to put up with a dozen german shepherds howling all night. This is not bringing back pleasant memories.


It should be toned down.

You know, I have been thinking. While respeccing my troller build... again (spent 100mil on a respec recipe. Ow my wallet!)... something I noticed is that I am sacrificing a whole lot just to get my defenses up. This is the same with all of my recent re-done builds, which is why I suspect that I only get into the 30's and say "close enough".


I don't think I've seen this mentioned before, but I think what should be included is a tertiary goal of having a defense of 32.5%. Small purples inspirations are very cheap and very easy to get a hold of, so it is safe to assume that you can get a near limitless amount of them (though finite inside of the missions). A small purple can raise you from 32.5% to 45%, meaning that you can soft cap when the situation commands it, but also can have several other effective powers to aid in your combat if you need to.

This "hybrid model" is something that I shot for with my /ElA stalker. I didn't have the resources to go full soft-cap on him, but he performs just fine without losing some of his many other tricks.


EDIT: Another thought occurred to me: If you go for the hybrid model, then would it be possible to go with multiple 32.5% defenses? I mean, if you can pull it off, you could get a toon that has precisely softcapped Melee AND range defense? This defeats the whole purpose of preserving powers, though, since it would require just as many resources than if you were going to soft-cap a single defense.

Well, I solved the problem. The second it hits the trade window from one player to another it gives you the option to drop the boosters. All I needed was an unwitting catalyst, and problem solved.

I have heard about this passingly mentioned on the wiki, but I haven't heard any direct explanation.

If I have an enhancement that I want to trade out that is boosted, is there any way to get rid of those boosters without having to go through the direct player trade system?

For that, I thank you. Please do not call me BRA, though (as much as I would love to be a booby supporting mechanism).

The hardest part I always found was picking out the most efficient ways to build up defenses. Amongst all the information out there, it is hard to pick up all the nuances that make things work.

Definitely something I will consider. I usually end up in melee range, so I kind of went with melee and s/l defense.


Though I have to ask how you would go about soft-capping ranged defense without gimping all other powers. If you neglect the hold/immobilize for the ST attacks, then I can only get to the soft cap, which is 32% extra on top of combat jumping / maneuvers / steamy mist/, by using up almost almost all of the extra power slots. With 4 full thunderstrikes, the full ATO set, full trap of the hunter, two full Blood Mandates, Steadfast, and Zephyr, this eats up 42 of the 67 given slots. Slotting out Maneuvers (3), Combat Jumping (1), Steamy Mist (5), and 51 of the given slots are used up before you add things like LotG + Recharge. Dividing the remaining 16 slots into 14 powers is quite difficult, even with a ton of throwaway powers.

Alright, I am still looking at my troller build, and I have 1 respec left on him. I can't decide whether to go with Ice or Psionic Mastery.

For the build specifics, I have an ice/storm controller that uses Arctic Air and Glacier, so it ends up in melee range a lot. Global recharge is 52% before ageless and hasten. I recently re-did his build because all of his powers drew mad aggro and he didn't have the fortitude to take it. Now, for my final revisions, I am down to two choices that can have a big outcome on the set...


Psionic Mastery provides 43% damage resistance to smashing/lethal, and 31% resistance to psionics. With the set I have 26% defense in Melee and 26.6% defense in smashing and lethal. This set also provides some status protection and an alternating 17.9% to 40.4% defense to psionics. It also provides psychic damage in Mental Blast and Psionic Tornado. Cons are that the waning status protection can leave me vulnerable, and that the set doesn't do anything extraordinary.

Ice Mastery provides 30% more resistance to cold and 10% more resistance to fire. More importantly, Ice Mastery soft-caps s/l defense at 45%, and provides 25% melee defense. Hibernate is great for restoring endurance and as a panic button, and Ice Storm does some pretty wicked damage. Cons are that there is only 17.9% defense against psionics with otherwise no protection, and status effects are more likely to cripple the set.


Both sets can provide what I "need" but in different ways. But before I blow my last respec, I want to know what you guys think. Is the on/off status effect protection and defense/resist against psychics worth losing damage and softcapped smashing and lethal defense? Or vice versa?

I've been using the boosters sparingly. It is one of those things where I swear I'll need them if I use them up.

So far, I have been putting boosters in powers that have limited slotting but need a lot more of a kick. A recent rebuild of my ice/storm troller has less recovery bonuses and more s/l/melee defense. Ice/Storm can be VERY endurance heavy with the super-expensive toggles, and due to limited slotting options I have had to skimp on some places where I could really use it. So, I've boosted all of the endurance reduction enhancements that he's got, along with a few others.

The way I pictured it, the Netherworld was a necessary subspace component to the normal world. Resonating at a different frequency it is an area of inverse potential from the normal fabric of the universe. When this dimensional frequency overlaps with the normal universe, they interact destructively with each other. This preforms work, most of which deals with corroding away material by altering the basic quantum state of the regular universe. This happens when the dimensions overlap, and not the objects in them, however, so a being from the netherworld can pass into the regular world without much of a problem.

You know, I thought we were attempting to create challenge that scaled with teams instead of just making EBs cooler. I guess we could have a system where EBs get powers based on how many teammates are in the team. Anyway...

It is time like this where my ideas reach encounter the practicality barrier. I can come up with all sorts of solutions to these problems, but not all of them are very easy to implement.


Now, I figure the advantage of the team can be gauged in two different but related ways.

#1: The overall mitigation that the team has.
#2: The total damage that the team has.

The mitigation being the multiplication of the percentage of time that enemies are not mezzed, the accuracy of enemy attacks via changes to defense and to-hit, debuffs to damage and recharge rate that the enemy gets, and the resistances of the players that are drawing aggro. This creates a scale of how much damage that an enemy will actually be doing. So, if the group is mezzed 50% of the time, all their attacks have a 5% chance of hitting via softcapped defenses, their recharge rate is cut to 1/4ths their original and the tanker has 80% resistances, this means that the enemy will only do

.5 x .05 x .2 x .25 = 0.00125

Or 1/8th of a percent of their total damage output. More on this later.


The damage is the number of enemy debuffs and accuracy multiplied by the sum of each individual team member's DPS rate after calculating buffs to each member. So if an enemy has -30% resist, defenses debuffed to the point where all attacks have capped accuracy, and the team's cumulative average DPS is 500 per second, then this means the total damage will be

500 x 1.3 x 0.95 = 617.5 DPS

These numbers are drawn out of thin air. How long an enemy survives is their HP divided by the team DPS, though it becomes more complicated than that since there is a difference between AoE and single target damage and how enemies are targeted. This time tells us how much damage an enemy can do before they kiss the floor.


Why my haphazard and probably incorrect math lesson? Well, I figure that if we are going to scale enemy groups, we'll have to do so along those lines of damage mitigation and and damage output. The simplest idea I have is the following:

Enemy mobs receive an HP buff of the following: R + (X-1)(0.333R) = HP

Where R is the original HP, and X is how many team members there are. In non-math speak, each additional team member increases an enemy's HP by 33.3% of it's original. So, by having 4 team mates, you double the HP of enemies in the area. A full team of 8 will do a little more than triple the HP of enemies in the area. What this does is make it so enemies survive longer, which also means they'll spend less time mezzed and ultimately will do more damage. I think that this will help with a few more things, since it is more important to sustain debuffs and defenses against an enemy that poses more of a threat, as well as ST damage.

These are far from the final numbers. I picked 33% since it seemed like a nice place to start. Each team member added is undoubtedly an asset, however the enemies aren't just rolling over when there is enough of you. It'll be more like a battle than a curb stomp. This probably won't apply to all enemies, either (though it can). Archvillains will almost definitely have a different scaling system, since you aren't "supposed" to be able to solo those at all.


Now, as far as countering mitigation goes, I haven't really decided yet. Mitigation doesn't have something that is as plainly linear as HP increases. I've toyed around with a scaling accuracy buff, but I know that half the forum just raged at that idea. The only other idea I have had is scaling debuff resistance, and that may be the more viable one since accuracy debuffs and their kin accumulate much quicker than damage increases and resist debuff do. So for now, I'll leave my suggestion at scaling enemy HP.

I went through the thread, and I could've sworn that I had posted in this thread before, but couldn't find my post...

Anyway, I sign. Having female pets and customizeable pets adds to the immersion of MMs, and I would be glad to have it. Tired of my new thugs always being dudes...

I would like to see a guide that lays out the best ways to actually build for defense. Whenever I would read a guide about a particular AT or powerset, it's instruction to getting softcapped defenses was always "get softcapped defenses", which isn't any help. I can''t use mids, so whenever someone posts up a build it is just a large block of meaningless numbers.

I had to figure it out on my own, and I'm only so-so at it. I can't softcap any of my toons, but I can get their defenses into the late 20s, early 30s. That is good enough so far.

Was in the middle of respeccing and re-doing the build of a toon.

Thankfully I didn't lose much except my peace of mind.

You know, Quicktime has its own screen recording option. It is under file > new screen recording.


Can't say much about the quality, though.


EDIT: well, here's the video of me making the post. Judge quality.

Somewhere between Kinetic Melee and the alignment system. I had an idea in my head a long time ago, but I had to use Energy Melee. Once KM came out, I re-rolled.

Alright, I have three NPCs that are really worth noting. All of them pertain to an AE arc that pertains to my first character.

First is Natasha. She is a Crey Vigilant that was re-skinned to have a blue suit and skirt. Natasha handles incidents in concerning Crey by acting as a liaison between Crey and super-heroes, recruiting them to take care of manners that capes would normally oblige to. She really doesn't have that big of a role, except to act as a contact to the AE arc and all forseeable AE arcs I make in the future.


Second is the first "antagonist" of my series, Van' Ruhle.

At an astounding 8 feet tall, this guy is the secret inner demon that occupies my first toon. Van' Ruhle is an interdimensional astral being with a very peculiar trait: He's heavily dependent on the observer effect. His body takes form dependent on who is observing him, and likewise his power manifests in chaotic ways. Normally in space he's lucky to encounter just one person, but upon coming to Earth his power grew and corrupted him. He was fought off by another astral being, and before dying he poured himself into the nearest person to rescue himself. That person happened to be a homeless blind girl who gained super powers the next day that were eerily suited to her.

As to whom he was fighting, well, that is another creature that wanders space but otherwise has NOTHING in common with whom she fought. That would be Nim Nerathim.

Now, Nimmy here has the ability to glean zero-point energy from changes in potential differences of the fabric of the universe, giving her near limitless power. She is capable of detecting "potential" with those feelers of hers, which allows her to find focal points of hypothetical abstraction. Earth is a big collection of potential, so she frequents it a lot. She instinctively acts in a manner to preserve diversity, which can be both a help or a hindrance to superheroes. Upon meeting Van' Ruhle, she instinctively sought to kill it. She still does. Highly curious, Nim likes to play dumber than she actually is. She doesn't have as much of a critical plot point in any of my AE arcs, but nonetheless she exists.

The burden of proof isn't needed for personal statement of desire. That is self evident.


There are a few simple facts that can be stated:

#1: There are people who like to team in Dark Astoria, and this does not prevent someone from running the arcs solo.
#2: There are people who want to fight AVs in Dark Astoria, and this does not prevent someone from running the arcs solo.
#3: There are people who want to team and fight AVs in Dark Astoria, and this does not prevent someone from running the arcs solo.


Since this game is ultimately for profit, it is in the game designers best interest to allow people to feel fulfilled with the new content in the game, so they will keep playing the game or try to get others to play the game. This includes attempting to accommodate all types of playstyles and players, with the exclusion of one:

Players that demand other people play the way they do.

These individuals are bad for business, and are destructive to the gaming community. Players who want more choices and to allow more gaming are constructive to the gaming community and are good for business because they attempt to improve upon the game with their feedback. By making the game more enjoyable by having a community that allows everyone to play, it lets players enjoy the game more, and thus is more profitable for everyone.

So it is a good idea to give the players what they want, instead of needlessly excluding them at the expense of no one.