Corebreach

[ QUOTE ]
After about 48 hours I stopped the scheme.

[/ QUOTE ]
Why?

Was it still profitable?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It says right on the box "Children under the age of 13 are not permitted to play"

[/ QUOTE ]
No, it doesn't. Try actually looking at something before saying what it says.

[/ QUOTE ]
It seems to depend which edition you look at. I have the original, and it does indeed have that restriction, verbatim, on the back in the lower right.

[ QUOTE ]
All powers except powers that directly ignore recharge bonuses (Against All Odds, pet's powers (not the powers we fire, but the powers THEY fire), etc.) are affected by global recharge.

All powers are affected by global accuracy/tohit.

Vet powers are not affected by any other buff. They can, however, have their damage increased by having the TARGET get resistance DEBUFFS.

[/ QUOTE ]
"Any other buff" is too extreme. The only effects of the Vet. powers that ignore buffing are:
damage (including all situational bonus damage)
-ToHit debuff of the Blackwand and Sands
Knockback strength from the Nemesis Staff

All other buffs apply normally, including things like Vigilance, Conserve Power, and Boost Range.

[ QUOTE ]
I did not have easy mobs that gave higher than normal xp. I did not have any NPC allies in the mission, much less ones that simply followed and buffed. I did not have object that blew up and killed everything while giving me xp. I did not use "the easiest mobs I could find. I didn't use any of the "PL'ers tricks". I made a map with the toughest bosses I could find.

[/ QUOTE ]
Did you make it using Bosses exclusively? A map filled with multiples of exactly one custom Boss enemy can afford less challenge than one with a mix of Minions and Lieutenants possessing varying attack and support powers, while at the same time providing greater payoff due to the MA's totally-inflexible-and-often-wrong one-size-fits-all XP/ticket reward scheme. Someone may have believed you arranged your mission the way you did for precisely this reason.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm going to make a pile of level 1s and level pact them to people. Then I'm going to take my absolutely ridiculous SS/Fire Brute and my Fire/Kin Corruptor and go into all boss maps of enemies who do pure fire damage. I think I can get my level 1s to level 50 in under 10 hours despite being level pacted to logged out toons.

I'm also sure with this approach that NCSoft employees would be willing to kindly explain to me if this behavior is "not allowed."

[/ QUOTE ]
First and foremost, if you want NCsoft answers, ask NCsoft questions, privately and directly. Asking us won't give you official answers, leaving an implied question floating on a forum for NCsoft to stumble upon and reply to at their leisure won't reliably get you an answer, and demanding an NCsoft answer in a forum question is against forum rules.

Anyway, bearing in mind that I Am Not An NCsoft Employee, I expect the activity above would be judged abusive. We know the devs feel it is abusive to go from creation to max level in four hours by fighting enemies that can't attack, and here you propose going from creation to max level in less than five effective hours by fighting enemies that are custom-designed to attack you only with powers you are maximally resistant against. I really don't see how they could sensibly place the OK/Not-OK dividing line between those two alternatives.

[ QUOTE ]
Then again one of the perks of being a game developer seems to be never being wrong no matter how wrong you are.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is demonstrably false. MMOs do go out of business if their design or management are bad enough. See: Earth & Beyond, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa. The market's tolerance for error is simply not as low as you apparently wish.

[ QUOTE ]
My theory is that blasters are REALLY EASY in the first 24 levels or so, and that they require a change in playstyle (definitely after level 30.)

[/ QUOTE ]
That is a theory much like gravity is a theory.

[ QUOTE ]
How long is a 'tick' anyway?

[/ QUOTE ]
Every power that works in ticks -- which is all toggles and all auto powers, as well as many click powers that create a continuous effect on a fixed area, like Blizzard -- defines its own tick rate as part of the power's data. Some are as rapid as five times per second, others are as slow as once every ten seconds, or even slower.

Toggle power Endurance costs are reported in a normalized End/second format by the Real Numbers power info system. NCsoft did you the favor of factoring in different tick rates for you so you'd have directly comparable numbers. As far as I can tell, though, it doesn't report tick rate directly for any power. You'll need to go to a site like Red Tomax's Guide to find it, then work it into the math yourself, if you want summaries like DPS.

[ QUOTE ]
It would be interesting to see how many people would call it an exploit if a mission has very effective rewards - and nothing else. No comm officers. No units that can't or don't fight back. Nothing specifically wrong with the mission - just really good xp/rewards with possibly a lame story.

[/ QUOTE ]
That's easy. Run a PUG through some random missions with the word "Freakshow" in the name, and ask what they think.

GDC09: Mission Architect in-depth
Massively.com interviews MA's lead designer, Joe Morrissey, at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Includes PowerPoint slides!

Mission Architect: How Are You Going To Manage That?
Article written by Joe himself on NCsoft's initial plans on dealing with offensive and abusive content.

[ QUOTE ]
what I am wondering is why are there standard SOs in the merit vendors?

[/ QUOTE ]
The third question answered this.

[ QUOTE ]
Poster: KeepDistance
Q: Would you consider removing items from the merit purchase system that already have direct-inf purchase availability through vendors? (Specifically, I mean SOs and common IO recipes.) If not, what do you see as the benefit to offering them through merits?

A: We understand that there are some players who prefer to not use the invention system at all, so we’d like the Merit Reward system to mean something for these players too. Common IO recipes are there for players who don’t like to worry about IO sets.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
I would like to know why we can't have the choice of either a number of merits or a random roll for a rare recipe at the end of a TF/SF.

[/ QUOTE ]
Synapse answered this in post #2 of this thread.

[ QUOTE ]
Poster: macskull
Q: What is the intent and purpose of the merit system? Originally it seemed intended to be an alternate, additional, avenue for those who did not wish to use the market, or for a deterministic way to get a recipe you wanted. Now it seems like it's replacing the current system instead of adding onto it.

A: The basic intent for the Merit Reward system is to more accurately reward players for their time invested doing missions. Ultimately, what it came down to is that not all Task Forces and Strike Forces were created equal. Some take 30 minutes, some can take upwards of 10 hours. The fact that all of these Task Forces had been granting the same reward made us realize we needed to incorporate time into the reward equation. That’s essentially where Merits came in.

[/ QUOTE ]

The devs wanted everyone to get more recipe drop reward from doing a long TF than from doing a short TF. If they left the system as "random recipe or X merits", then only players saving to buy specific recipes would get more reward from longer TFs. Players taking random rolls would get the same reward from long TFs as from short TFs. The devs didn't want it to work that way.

[ QUOTE ]
As for splitting hairs over terminology-- there're a whole bunch of terms people use and throw around, and sloppily at that. I wanted to give explicit terms for all the distinct properties I could think of and note the disputed ways they're used. For specialized conversations about what a controller can do, ... I think having hard, soft, partial, total, debuff, and all the real control components (hold, stun, intang, confuse, immob, sleep, terrify, afraid, etc) nailed down is good.

[/ QUOTE ]
I agree, but I suggest using your own terms in place of "hard" and "soft" (perhaps "stable" and "unstable"?), or, alternately, making it abundantly clear that you are defining them solely for the purpose of this guide. I fear too much confusion will result from using these terms in ways players won't encounter anywhere else. I can count the players who'd call Web Grenade a "hard control" on the thumbs of one hand.

[ QUOTE ]
In I7, all critters have base tohit of 50%, and have intrinsic accuracy bonuses based on rank:

Monsters, Giant Monsters, AVs, Controller Pets: 1.5

[/ QUOTE ]
(emphasis mine)

Do you have any confirmation from a dev that pets work that way now? Iakona's Issue 7 data still shows them having the same base hit chances as players and a 1.0 multiplier.

I searched the thread and didn't see this:

Ice Control

Arctic Air's confusion is not boosted by Domination.

[ QUOTE ]
If i missed it in there, dominators can also get perma domination if they slot their build correctly.

[/ QUOTE ]
You will probably not achieve a consensus that that's a concern.

I'm not Arcanaville, but I know the answer to most of these.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The base tohit of heroes in PvE is 75%.

[/ QUOTE ]
I can't seem to find in your guide where modifiers to this base are discussed.

[/ QUOTE ]
They're in post #2, since one post couldn't hold the entire guide.

[ QUOTE ]
For example, I know that it's harder to hit a +1 minion than an even-con minion. Do you know what those values are? Do they scale the same way the mob-vs-player accuracy scales?

Furthermore, I had thought that it was harder to hit a boss than a minion. Is that true?

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes (in post 2), no, no.

[ QUOTE ]
But the fact is that the animation time for every power in every set which includes a redraw is intrinsically tied to the fact that they have to account for the redraw, and like it or not, animation time has a very real, tangible effect on DPS

[/ QUOTE ]
I think that's a red herring. Activation times drive DPS for non-redraw sets too.

What I mean is, if Attack A has an activation time of three seconds, and Attack B also has an activation time of three seconds, then both of them could be balanced properly, or neither of them could be, or only one could be, but in no case would it matter why either of them came to have that three-second figure in the first place. It would be utterly irrelevant if, for example, Attack A takes three seconds because your character always goes through three seconds of arm-waving, but Attack B takes three seconds because your character only waves his arms for two but requires some slack in case he needs an extra second to be shown pulling a sword out first.

...unless, of course, the devs originally designed Attack B without time for the sword-draw, then went back and lengthened activation times without adjusting any other figures. I have no evidence they did this. If they did, I'd call it a concern. But only if.

[ QUOTE ]
Simple demonstration: roll a Broadsword Scrapper and take Hack at level 1. At level 2, take Slash. Walk up to a mob somewhere in Atlas with the sword not drawn, click Hack and queue Slash while the animation's still playing. Let both powers recharge and then click Hack and queue Slash. There's a noticeable delay in the second cycle between when Hack seems to be finished and when Slash's animation starts playing.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes. I know.

But in these two cases, is there a difference between

a) when you press a hotkey to start Hack and when Slash can first begin?

b) when you press a hotkey to start Hack and when Hack's damage occurs?

A redname recently said the answer to a) is "no". If the answers to both a) and b) are actually "no", then redraw has no effect on damage output whatsoever, either burst or sustained.

If the answer to a) is "yes", then BAB is either wrong or lying, and neither I nor anyone else can meaningfully contribute to this issue without extensive personal testing of the entire Thorny Assault power set starting entirely from scratch.

To be thorough, b) is a different but no less important question, and neither BAB's post nor any thread I've seen on the issue actually addresses it.

[ QUOTE ]
Another discussion, the oft bemoaned redraw on Thorns:

[ QUOTE ]
Does Thorny Assault receive something in exchange for the redraw animation?

[/ QUOTE ]
I have to admit that this doesn't bother me at all, in fact I don't even notice it. Do others find it to be a problem? What exactly would the issue be? How are other sets with redraws handled?

[/ QUOTE ]
Please see this post by BackAlleyBrawler. Redraw does not affect the activation time of any power. It only affects the length of the purely graphical animation played during it. Thorny Assault gains nothing in exchange for its redraw animation, but it doesn't need to since it loses nothing either.

[ QUOTE ]
Based on the Damage per Endurance numbers my Attack Chain Generator (see my sig) spits out, I'm happy to add the issue "Icy Assault is too endurance intensive". Do people support this?

[/ QUOTE ]
No.

Having poor AOE performance is something I'd expect of a set focused on ST damage.

All Icy's DPE figures for single-target ranged and melee attacks are standard, except for Bitter Ice Blast, which is only overcosted by about 1 point (it should require 11.85 End for the damage it does, rather than 13). It burns through endurance because all its ST blasts activate so fast.

[ QUOTE ]
No. Not possible. In fact, since you're asking, I can only assume that you didn't actually look at the links I provided you. Or, I dunno, maybe you need more proof.

[/ QUOTE ]
I looked at them. Then I looked at just AOEs, especially Thorny-vs.-others, and found much less of a pattern, thus reinforcing my idea that the devs used different costing mechanics when they created the Thorny Assault set (since it's newer and isn't just recycled old powers).

So I pulled out an old CoD-based spreadsheet of all Dom Secondary attacks, zeroed out all DOT bonus damage (but not the damage on pure DOTs), and looked at DPE figures. Single-target figures are amazingly consistent from that angle. Most of the ST melee attacks cost 8.02 End per damage. Most of the ST ranged attacks, including the snipes, cost 6.95 or 6.96. AOE attacks, though, as I mentioned, don't show that. Part of that is that many of them are pure DOTs, which have more efficient ratios. (There's only one pure single-target DOT: Incinerate.) Psychic Shockwave is way too efficient -- it's 6.95, suspiciously like an ST attack, which leads me to believe someone switched its attack type during development and forgot to adjust the numbers. Its Endurance cost is basically half what it should be. Whirling Hands is inexplicably inefficient given its short range, which usually correlates to a lower cost or some other balancing benefit. And Fling Thorns and Thorn Burst have the two absolute lowest DPE ratings on the entire page.

I will concede that Thorny's two "ranged" AOEs don't follow the same costing pattern as all other Dominator attacks. I'm not convinced it's a problem, but I'm not going to say everything looks fine.

[ QUOTE ]
I know -Def and Toxic DoT sounds too good to be true, but when you also consider that without the DoT /Thorns only has Lethal damage, it doesn't sound so much like you're making out like a thief in the bargain. (It's also the only Dominator secondary that's so heavily Smashing/Lethal.)

[/ QUOTE ]
I was considering that Thorny already accounted for that by having larger DOTs than Fiery relative to the up-front damage. (Example: If a Fiery attack hits for 60 and the DOT happens, the DOT will add another 20. If a 60-point Thorny attack hits, the just-as-likely DOT will add about 29.) That plus -Def would be two bonuses for the price of one.

[ QUOTE ]
The DoTs on Thorny Assault are a bonus - they're not taken into account when factoring the Recharge/Endurance rates. (If you don't believe me, compare Skewer to Bone Smasher.)

[/ QUOTE ]
Then I'm at a loss how to do meaningful analysis of any CoX powers, as the distinction between primary effects (which should influence the Endurance cost) and secondary effects (which apparently were, and allegedly should be, considered totally free fringe benefits) seems arbitrary. I'm particularly unclear on how to consider damage attacks that are all DOT (Fire Breath) or are some DD and some guaranteed DOT (Flares, Tenebrous Tentacles). I think the devs themselves have changed their approach to this over time. Could it be that with Thorny Assault, they considered only the -Def the free secondary effect? I know I do. Nearly half again as much extra damage, plus a huge Def debuff, is too much extra benefit to all be free.

[ QUOTE ]
Fling Thorns is underperforming. If compared to Psy Scream (the other Dom Cone attack with a 12 second recharge), it's more expensive and does less damage, while having shorter range.

[/ QUOTE ]
You're not taking the toxic DOT into account. On average, Fling Thorns deals more damage than Psychic Scream, not less. Also, while it has half the range of Psy Scream, it has triple the arc. So it has 3/4ths the coverage area, not 1/4th, which isn't nearly so dire. If Fling Thorns got a longer base range, it would likely be made slightly narrower to compensate, which would make it harder to use in conjunction with the other two AOEs in the Thorny set. Right now the footprints overlap nicely.

[ QUOTE ]
didn't we even get a badge for playing during the second anniversary of launch?

[/ QUOTE ]
Celebrant was for the first anniversary.