Captain Fabulous

So you're saying I'm only imagining my chance to hit is 35%?

Ok, let's say you're an INV/SS Tank. Or a DM/DA Brute. You maybe have one ranged attack. Maybe. And you're fighting CoT with Death Mages using their PbAoE tohit debuffs. Using reds does no good cause your chance to hit is 35%. Control or KB power, sure. Problem is they require tohit checks. 35%. Eliminate the debuffer? That requires being in melee, which puts you in the PbAoE debuff field. 35%.

So I'm really keen to hear how, as a meleer with possibly 1 ranged attack, you would deal with 1 or 2 overlapping PbAoE -tohit debuffs as seen on CoT and Carnies. Cause after 6 years the best I've ever been able to come up with is run away till they drop the toggles.

Is that your brilliant strategy? Run away?

And yes, I want to counter 35-70% tohit debuff. Make it maybe 10-15%. Enough to slow me down a little, but not enough to completely neuter me. I don't think that's too much to ask.

I don't necessarily disagree. I'm more concerned about getting the functionality back and less concerned about the delivery method.

Yes, but the smalls are only 7.5%, which isn't going to get you very far. The mediums are better at 18.75% (still would need at least 2 at a time), while the larges are a very respectable 37.5%.

But are we then expected to have a full tray of Uncanny Insights every time we fight CoT, Arachnos, Carnies, or anyone else that can debuff tohit 35-70%? How exactly does one do that considering you can only buy them in WW (if you're lucky)? And what happens if you run out halfway thru a mission? Are you supposed to excuse yourself to go get more?

If you have to rely upon inspirations to battle every spawn in a mission something is wrong.

I was never able to run it full time because of the really high end cost. But I know for some that's not an issue. Most of the time I used it to mitigate ridiculously overpowered tohit debuffs. Accuracy won't do it. Insights won't do it either. Only tohit negates them. And now that option is gone, which means fighting CoT, Arachnos, and Carnies is more trouble than it's worth.

While the tohit debuff resistance is nice and can often reduce the amount of the debuff, there really isn't much difference between a 50% chance to hit versus a 30% chance to hit. Both will get you killed real quick if you don't run.

I'd be all for changing it to a click power (20 second duration, 90 second recharge) if the old tohit value was restored. What I don't want to see would be something like a 15 second duration and 5 minute recharge, cause that would also just be worthless. If you're fighting things with high defense or stacking tohit debuffs you have an entire mission's worth of them and need the buff for every spawn, not just once or twice per mission.

So Focused Accuracy got eviscerated in effectiveness simply because he thought it made more sense for it to be nearly useless?

You are 100% correct.

If there is no aversion why all the changes after it was discovered he could do +accuracy?

OK, this discussion has already given me a headache. After careful deliberation I do believe you could change the upper bound without changing the lower bound, but I think at this point an expert is needed.

/em rubs magic math textbook

Arcanaville! Arcanaville! Arcanaville!

You and your links! It's old news. I don't keep a database of what Castle says, and the forums are too prone to purging.

It goes something like this (and I'm sure Arcana can back me up): Castle has always disliked tohit buffs because they trivialize defense. But it was believed for a long time there was no other option because the ability to globally buff accuracy was something that couldn't be done. Then at some point he figured out it actually could be done (and always could be done), and powers like Focused Accuracy got nerfed into near-uselessness. Honestly I'm surprised that Rage hasn't been hit yet. This is also why all the IO global tohit buffs were changed to +accuracy bonuses.

Small amounts of persistent tohit seems to be okay (Tactics) Large amounts of very short duration tohit seems to be ok (like Aim and Build Up). Large amounts of long-duration tohit is now verboten, except in cases where access is limited to unique powers, such as Rage and Targeting Drone, and teammate-only buffs like Fortitude and Forge.

The part of this that irritates me the most is that tohit is the only way to counter the massive stacking tohit debuffs critters throw at us. And without access to any significant amount of tohit we have absolute ZERO recourse except to wait until the debuffs expire. It's especially brutal for dark characters as pretty much every single power requires a tohit check. It's a lose-lose situation every single time. And it's no accident. It's specifically designed to be this way. Which infuriates me even further.

Castle has been wanting to get rid of tohit buffs for a long time. This would be the perfect excuse.

This game. The issue being discussed is the non-random nature of the game's random number generator that allows one to repeatedly miss targets even though you have a 95% chance to hit. And how that 95% cap shouldn't be there to begin with. While you might disagree, that is the discussion.

Defense and tohit are one in the same, just taken from opposite points of view. If you change the tohit formula you're also going to change the defense formula. It's the way the system is designed. Trying to change one side while leaving the other side alone would require a significant coding rewrite.

If you're really concerned about the soft-capped defense crowd there are easy ways to balance them should it become necessary, such as a hard cap.

Since tohit and defense are currently governed by the same formula, then yes, as it stands now removing the cap on either end would remove both. This is not to say the formula couldn't be rewritten tho.

So what if the cap were raised to 98%?

I'm sure it's long been purged. I think it was around I13, around when Shields came out and a few sets like Invulnerability were getting a pass.

People were complaining how he was adding useful abilities to unpopular powers in order to dissuade people from skipping them (for example, putting defense debuff and slow resistance in Grant Cover, a power that most people deemed otherwise skippable). His response was that he wanted every power to be useful and desirable, and that building your characters should be painful and rife with difficult decisions.

I'll see if I can find the post, but don't get your hopes up.

Yeah, there was just a tad bit of sarcasm left in there from the last time I played my MA/SR scrapper with 55% defense who was killed after being hit 3x in a row from an Arachnos Bane.

Hmmm, this I don't know. I do recall the devs limiting sappers to one per spawn and something about stopping a single minion from perma-mezzing you to death. Never heard of the toggle limit. I do know it was more than one spawn last night with the Death Mages cause we had one in front of us and one behind us.

I'm pretty sure I've had multiple Spectral Lords with stacked Chill of the Nights running. I'll have to pay more attention in the future.

Not *bad* powers per se, but powers that weren't always necessary to take. Optional.

For example, lets go waaaay back to pre-ED days. My main was an INV/SS tank. I was able to skip both the energy and elemental passives along with tough hide and unstoppable because I really didn't need them. I frequently had about 115% defense while fighting and capped out S/L resistance. So I was able to customize my build with all sorts of pool powers to give it some flavor.

After ED and GDN things were very different. With resistances and defenses cut to a fraction of what they used to be I could no longer afford to skip anything. So now I needed the 3 passives and Unstoppable. 4 extra powers and I was still less than half as mighty as I was. There went all those flavor powers. And it pretty much guarantees that all INV tanks will have the exact same powers. There is nothing that is optional anymore.

It's almost a philosophical debate. In CoX the base is set low with the expectation that you're going to drastically improve certain attributes. In WoW and other games like it, the base is set high and attribute improvement is focused only in a few key places depending upon class.

Now one might say that extra flexibility in CoX is a good thing, but at the same time once the most optimized slotting ratio is met you rarely ever deviate from it. For example, most people are going to slot their attacks the exact same way -- 2 accy, 3 damage, 1 end redux (or perhaps 1 accy, 3 damage, 1 end, 1 recharge). If they're collecting IO buffs they'll use very specific sets with the same types of enhancements in order to get maximized accuracy, damage, recharge, and end reduction in addition to the set bonus.

So really, while one has the ability to enhance you character to be more accurate or to do more damage I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most people not only do both, but also strive to recharge faster and use as little endurance as possible. When we're all working towards the exact same set of stats then there really isn't any flexibility left.

It's the same argument that comes up every time Castle re-homogenizes a set. Instead of providing opportunities to have different and creative builds we all wind up having the same powers slotted the same way. When I first started playing CoX it was very common to take pool powers. Yes, you'll always go for Fitness and a travel power. But sometimes you'd take Acrobatics. Sometimes Leadership or Medicine. Sometimes even Concealment, Fighting, or just adding in Combat Jumping, Hurdle, Recall Friend, etc. But that flexibility is all but gone, mostly because so many powers have been trivialized. We're no longer able to skip 3-4 powers in a set like we used to and pool powers provide so little benefit versus the sacrifice required to take and use them. Flexibility is an illusion in CoX. Castle himself has said he wants building your character to be painful. Really? Again I ask, what purpose does it serve to frustrate your playerbase? Especially when your competition doesn't.

I will do that. Because it happens a lot on low level characters, even with the beginner's luck buff and a few TOs slotted. I'll PM you anything that looks out of the ordinary. Hell, if just turning on the logs makes it go away I'll still be happy LOL!

Because stuff like this doesn't happen in WoW. And my previous comment about how rare it is to miss in many other MMOs compared to CoX.

Which for all intents and purposes is zero. Unless it was their chance to hit me, cause then they'd hit 5 times in a row.

Two things worked against us. One was that we were in a small cave. Two was that we were bookended on both sides in a tunnel. There was no way to move out of the overlapping PbAoEs and attack at range. The only reason I was able to escape is because I was able to teleport. It wasn't a matter of intelligence. It was literally being trapped in a situation where there was no option but to die because there was literally nothing anyone could do.

I admit it's pretty rare for stuff like this to happen to a team. It's much more likely to happen soloing, where your only option is to run away and wait for them to cycle off the debuffs. Carnies are terrible with this too, between the Dark Servants and their Rings of ******** powers.

My point is this: is it really necessary to have such powerful debuffs? Does it really make the game "better" in some way? If you're resistant to them then they're no big deal and you don't care. If you're not, then it's just pure frustration because there is often nothing to can do to mitigate it. Why on Earth would you willingly want to frustrate your playerbase?

I wasn't as verbose in my previous posts as I could have been. I was trying to keep it brief. I can see how my comment about Rogues could have been misleading.

I was being accurate. Base chance to hit with weapons in WoW is 95%. With spells it's 96%. In CoX it's 75%. Fight a +3 critter and your chance to hit with weapons is 92%; spells, 93% (+3 raid bosses ~83%). In CoX it's 48% against critters with no defense. Add in defense, such as many bosses and even a few LTs have, and that 48% drops fast. And let's not forget that CoX accuracy tops out at 95%. WoW currently has no hit cap, meaning you can easily hit 100% of the time. And with decent armor it's very easy to get an additional 2-3% chance to hit on top of the base. There are also a number of talents available to various classes to further increase your hit rating and/or chance to hit.

You are correct that dual wielding reduces your chance to hit to 76% (still higher than CoX). But it's more than made up for the fact that you're doing 150% damage (scale .95 vs scale ~1.14) and doesn't drop like a cliff when you fight higher level critters. The reason I said Rogues were designed to miss more is because they are the only class that was designed to be primarily dual wielders, getting that ability at level 10 while others must wait till at least level 20. There are also talents that will increase the amount of damage the off-hand does, making dual-wielding even more effective, especially when paired with +tohit talents.

Bottom line is, if you're not dual-wielding your chance in WoW of hitting something around your level is BASE ~95%, not factoring in any buffs, gear, or talents. My level 80 Death Knight with average gear has an extra 6.5% chance to hit, meaning she's at over 100% most of the time (translation: NEVER MISSES).

Of course none of this takes into account the vast prevalence of critters with +defense and -tohit debuffs in CoX, things you rarely see in WoW (and when you do see it the amounts are fairly small). A single CoT Spectral Lord can drop your chance to hit into the 30s or 40s. Add two of them (which is common in large spawns as they are LTs) and you're floored. There isn't one single WoW critter than can do that. And when your tohit is that low accuracy (including insights) doesn't do a damned thing. You need tohit buffs, which, sorry to say, have been nerfed to near-uselessness over the years. Lotsa luck with that.

As an aside, last night I was playing my Warshade on a level 50 team. We were doing a typical rescue mission. The ambush spawn had *5* Death Mages, each with their own lovely -tohit PbAoE. That of course stacked. Floored tohit doesn't even cover it. Can you say "team wipe"? I luckily was able to get away, but just barely (Nebulous Form FTW!) This wasn't some kind of raid or task force. This was a standard scanner mission. In 5 years I have NEVER ONCE had my chance to hit floored by critters in WoW. How is this not a broken mechanic?

So yeah, keep telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.

While better than nothing I'd prefer something that actually tried to fully normalize the % chance to miss, like force a hit ~15 times after a miss, not just once (provided of course each chance to hit was 95%). This would greatly smooth out the spikes you see if you analyze tohit metrics. That and get rid of all this "whiff, hit, whiff, whiff, whiff, hit, whiff whiff" crap. You see this all the time with the "beginner's luck" buff. You're fresh out of the tutorial, you have a 90% chance to hit (1 in 10 to miss), yet you'll easily whiff 3-4 times in a row, over and over again, with rolls of 93, 97, 95, 92, etc. Sorry, but that's just retarded.