Codewalker

Because if there was an instant activating power with no recharge on it, there's no way it would be toggled rapidly and bog down the server. I mean, it would take a real jerk to try such a thing. It would be like spamming emotes in a busy area to try to lag people out and disconnect them, before they added a chat throttle. And nobody did that, such a thing would be unheard of!

/sarcasm off



(and yes I know the post I'm replying to was being funny as well)

I'm sure this is part of it. Staff is an entirely new weapon type, which means it needs new walk/run/fly/swim/ninja run/etc animations while it's drawn. Some of those can be modified from existing ones, but others I bet they had to make whole new animations for. Not to mention the labor of hooking up new modes, and testing all the edge cases to make sure they don't conflict with anything else in the animation system.

Also, there's the matter of scheduling. Without selling them in the market, say they only have the resources to make two powersets a year. So how do the decide which two? Part of it is low hanging fruit, like Posi mentioned. Part of it is how many players want it. But I'm sure another big part of it is balance. If they can make a new set for an AT that really needs it, or yet another melee weapon set when there are already more of them than anything else, which do they choose?

So assume they're still using the same logic they always have in order to pick the Free for VIP powersets, and then also making others that are much requested and they think will sell well enough to justify the cost.

Yes, when TW came out, the pack was free for a while. I think partly because of all the noise people made on beta when they put the pack up for testing there.

Which is precisely why I think a staff pack might be in the works but delayed a bit, so they don't end up having to give it away for free to placate everyone like they did with TW.

The controversy surrounding the TW pack is probably exactly why we won't see a Staff weapon pack for a while, even if hypothetically speaking the models were already made.

Remember that we got that one for free after people made a huge ruckus about them selling a weapon pack on day one for a newly released set -- one that some people felt didn't come with enough customization options in the first place.

Oh, I'm sure they will do one. Too lucrative of an opportunity to let slip by. I just don't think it will be next week (or the very near future for that matter).

We have always been at war with Eurasia. This is goodfact.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

The flags themselves have definitely existed since at least late I13, possibly even earlier. There's actually six: a master "Allow Resistance" and "Allow Combat Mods", as well as separate "Use Magnitude Resistance", "Use Duration Resistance", "Use Magnitude Combat Mods", and "Use Duration Combat Mods", all of which can be flipped individually. I'd assume that the latter 4 do nothing if the corresponding master "Allow" switches are off.

As for what powers designers have direct access to, that I can't say. It depends what process is used for getting the data from excel into text files, because they should definitely be present in those.

Out of curiosity, I did a quick check to see if any existing powers had this set in a manner that's inconsistent with the type of the effect. As of today, they seem to be rigidly consistent, which support them being set in an automated fashion. Type = Duration all have the duration flags set, Type = Magnitude and Type = Expression have the magnitude ones on, and Type = Constant have both set. Interesting.

I'd say it's possible that the flags exist only as a hint to the UI and don't control engine mechanics, except that the UI doesn't actually take resistance or combat mods into account when displaying real numbers... Likely only an engine programmer would know for sure.

Technically, it's very mutable. Each effect has 4 independent flags on it that determine if magnitude or duration is affected by resistance, and/or by combat mods (purple patch). These are usually set to mirror whether it's a Magnitude or a Duration scaled effect, but not always. They can even bet set together so that a power is affected by both, and the purple patch reduces both magnitude AND duration. Dimension shift was like that for a long time, but nobody noticed because, well, it's dimension shift.

Now when it comes to PvPDR... I'll be the first to say I have no clue how that works. There aren't any flags for it that I know of so it probably works like you said.

What, they're not robots?

Sure, now you tell us.

Edit: ARGH, Beaten by a few seconds! At least I quoted them though.

Welcome to the forums!

Then you should know that very few people at a design studio actually code anything, or have even seen the source. 90% of the work is created using developer tools by non-programmers.

Besides, they've already told us that the vet badges and the other problems with the subscriber rewards are in the hands of NCSoft billing, which is a completely separate group.

Yeah, it needs to get fixed, but whoever changed the toggle powers is not a person who can do that.

Maybe they just don't remember being at the BAF...

The game already sort of does this when you're on a mission map. All available evidence points to instance servers being allocated on demand from a pool that is shared between all the various shards, making the term "server" a complete misnomer. We can't prove that of course, but it certainly fits observed behavior. Consolidating everything into the Dallas datacenter makes this even more the case.

The only remaining thing that affects performance on individual shards is the number of people in a city zone together. The game seems to require geometrically more processing power the more players you have in close proximity. There have been some engine improvements lately to mitigate this, but things like Hami and MS raids can still cause slowdown.

I do like having the separate servers because it opens up more naming options for players, and I don't like what some games do and display a ridiculous name like (Character @ Global).

That said, I would really like to see cross-server teaming at some point in the future. Since most missions are instanced, I think it should be possible, once some tech hurdles are cleared. I could see it working where you send an invite to a global name, and while you are unable to go to the same open zone as them, you could enter a mission and end up in the same one. There are some questions of course, like how to deal with two teammates with the same name. However the game already has plenty of NPCs that share names so it might not be too big of an issue.

As Jeremia said, the damage for the burn patch is what it says. The psueopet is its own class, so it uses those damage mods rather than any specific ATs. It's slottable for damage, so it should inherit damage enhancements that are slotted into the Assault Bot.

Unfortunately, 38.16 is wrong. For player powers it works fine, and for the base pet powers as seen on the summoned pet page it will be accurate. However for powers that are granted by an upgrade, CoD currently has no way to know what class's damage tables to use. A while back as a workaround I modified the dropdown to just show all three MM henchmen types, so you can pick the right one. In this case, the power is being used by the Assault bot, so you need to change it to Class_Boss_Henchman in the AT dropdown.

So Swarm missiles is a 20' targeted AoE that does 8 * 7.49, or 59.92 damage to each target in the radius.

Incendiary Swarm missiles, however, does 30.56 damage to each target, and from the looks of that power, it also summons a burn patch... under each target hit. That's why it does such insane damage when it hits a lot of targets. The burn patches themselves can hit up to 5 targets with each tick (8' radius).

And it was very broken for the people who had it. Wrong animations, invisible weapons, powers doing the wrong thing, you name it.

If Staff had been available at any point until it went into beta testing, it probably would have been similarly broken / unplayable. Just because they had some animations or power names implemented doesn't mean that it was anywhere near complete. It still doesn't even work 100%, there are reports of disappearing weapons on recent betas.