Diellan_

Except that they can't make a survey that is actually representative of the player base. All that they've got here are the forumites, who are by far a minority, and are skewed towards very specific areas of the player base. This is, in fact, what caught everybody by surprise back when Defiance 2.0 came around: the forumites are, as a whole, above average-to-excellent players, highly dedicated, and as such, we either have long since internalized and ignored issues, found obscure ways to work around them, or have gotten so familiar and/or skilled with the game that we don't see them. We Forumites can be good canaries, but we have many limitations.

That's where data analysis comes in. You look at the data, then try to find the reason for the behavior you see.

I don't think anybody is saying that building a model isn't helpful, or isn't something that should be considered. But you don't use the model to determine if a problem exists, you use it to investigate the problem and to help define your solution. We're still at the point where we need to convince the Devs that a problem exists and that the problem is large enough for them to fix it.

It's an anecdote because it is subjective. It's a test being performed by a single person who is aware he is testing, which means that it tells us something completely different from a blind test subject. It is certainly helpful, but not as a representative for the issues the average players face. It's representative of the issues that THB faces when working within various self-imposed constraints. If we get other Forumites involved, then it's representative of the issues that the Forumites face when working within vairous self-imposed constraints. These are going to be different from the average player, who, for instance, might not make use of inspirations much (or at all!) - maybe there are a large amount of them who don't know you can buy them, or don't know you can convert them. The average player also might not have access to many Vet Rewards, either.

It's called numerical analysis, and is totally part of science. Most real world modeling is built from curves found to fit data. Religion is when you alter the data to fit your models.

This was Mids' first application, and he was using it to teach himself stuff and never expected it to be used beyond a circle of friends... He winces when he thinks about it now, but it's what we've got. St0n3y was in the middle of making a new UI layer for it, but didn't get far enough for me to use it. I've been focusing on refactoring the database and business layers, and don't intend to get to the UI until after.

We've had similar issues with black squares from overwriting images before, especially in the mouseover texts. The power selection controls are all the same control, so that at least narrows down the codebase. Sadly, the solution to the earlier problems was "Paint and Refresh a few times randomly until it works" - a solution I really don't like.

This is my biggest restraint.

I'm pretty sure it's just file association and registering it in the Control Panel.

It's going to be an experiment. Maybe it'll work, maybe not, but along the way, I'll be refactoring most of the code into more efficient and more logical object oriented system, and finally build the Mids DLLs I want.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't hop on board the Titan team for a temporary period to assist in Mids development.

Ah, yeah, Street Justice and a couple other powers are showing the damage of all their combo levels combined. I'll fix that next release.

This is an unintentional side effect of a change I made to the way Enhancement powers are stored. You can actually find them in the standard powers editor now, under a category called Boosts. It's a PITA to work with right now, though, due to the fact that every single enhancement is its own powerset (don't ask me why, ask the Devs, I'm just using their naming convention). The enhancement window isn't saving changes to powers because of this move, but that's something I'm going to fix next version. In the meantime, you'll have to go there to edit it.

Well, Nova does a base damage scale of 3, and can reach 6. According to my notes, a power of radius 25' (Nova) should have a recharge of 27.4375 per damage scale given Damage:Recharge Formula... so anywhere from about 90 seconds to 180 seconds (depending upon the value given to the % damage). The actual recharge is 360 seconds. For 360 seconds, it should do something closer to 12 damage scale.

Lightning Rod has a 90 second recharge, deals scale 2.55 damage in 20' and an extra 1.05 DS in 3', making it vaguely proportional to the value given in the formula (a 90 second 20' aoe should have a damage total of 3.69, so the total damage is about right... except that a good portion of it is only in 3'). Ditto Shield Charge. And neither of those have crashes.

Also, the point that ArcanaVille likes to make is this: Tier 9 armor powers make you invincible for 3 minutes in exchange for a similar crash. Is a single variable damage aoe attack worth as much as 3 whole minutes of invincibility?

Check to see if your Assassination power is toggled on. That'll determine whether or not you get crit-from-hide damage.

Except that this system would deal with chain mezzing, while simply changing the duration formula would not.

1. I don't know anything about how the wineskin wrapper works, but most of the time, I'm updating all of the dll files as well as the Mids executable itself (because the Devs keep coming up with entirely new mechanics), which is why I need to do a full install instead of an internal update.

2. See below.

3. That could be arranged.

2. I didn't actually write that part of Mids at all - I think it's all legacy code from Mids himself (as opposed to me or St0n3y, the other guy who worked on Mids before me). I've been wanting to redo the graphics code, but it's a massive undertaking (and would probably require me to change from .Net 2.0 to a higher version if I want it to be efficient and pretty).

Scaling mez resistance like this is something I think every character should have (maybe as part of Health, instead of its current Sleep resistance?), but I wouldn't want to implement it if only because it'd encourage the Devs to start giving out even longer duration mezzes in order to counter it. One of the things I liked from new other MMO in space is that all mezzes in that game are a matter of seconds, whether from an enemy or a player.

This is the reason that I don't like the idea of tying these things into BU and Aim: I don't want to ever be in a position where I decide not to use those powers because I know that I'm going to be facing mezzers. Blasters are not currently in a position where their damage is superior enough that they should have to hold back some of it in order to gain the survivability that everybody else takes for granted.

So far, my favorite anti-mez mechanic is the one where a Blaster has a passive mez resistance power that has a self-stacking component, but is normally suppressed, something like (the numbers are demonstrative and would have to be adjusted):

Activation Period: 1s
+50% Resist(Mez) for 10s (does not stack from same caster)
+50% Resist(Mez) for 10s (only when mezzed; stackable)

That way short duration mezzes don't get reduced by much, but long ones get cut down severely. This is basically the way I felt PvP Mez Suppression should have been handled back in the day, as it basically applies a diminishing return system to mez duration, and even helps with the issue of chain mezzing, since the stacked resistance will still hang around for 10 seconds.

EDIT:
The above is assuming we're even wanting to go with some kind of passive way to deal with mez. I much prefer something more proactive.

The reason it's disingenuous (and please, don't just start being condescending here, ad hominems are not useful to discussion) is that a petless MM requires you to specifically avoid taking the powers that are the keystones to your entire AT, the thing that they are balanced around. The closest analogy to that example is a Stalker not taking Assassin Strike, and that's basically it, because MMs face decreased buff/debuff strength and increased endurance costs (something no other AT faces outside of epics) in their secondary, due to their pets. It requires you to not take powers that the Devs base the entire AT around (and you wind up skipping anywhere from 5-6 powers from your primary, as a result). Choosing to take, slot, and regularly use your melee range powers on a Blaster is about using the 5-6 melee range powers the Devs put into your Secondary.

It's a player choice, sure, but so is whether or not you went Soul Mastery or Mu Mastery on your Brute: if you have a hard time because you went petless on an MM, people won't care; if you have a hard time because you chose Soul Mastery instead of Mu Mastery, people have a right to complain to the Devs about it (not that they seem to care too much about Epic Pool balance).

Also, I think it's rather disingenuous to compare petless Masterminds with "Blasters who want to use their secondary regularly".

Well, yes, I did leave off hover as an option, which was kind of silly of me, given that back when the RWZ test of "3 +4 Rikti bosses, no temps, etc." (before Incarnate powers existed), I was the second one to be able to manage to do it with a blaster (that I know of): the first guy did it with a ton of trip mines, I did it with my Energy/Energy/Electric Blaster and Hover (the fact that Hover no longer suppresses with Mez made this possible). It just took so long that most of the time, I failed due to the bosses running away or even despawning mid-combat (something I'd never actually seen happen before).

Can it be put in there in game? I don't think so. Ditto epic powers.

Likewise, there are bunch of Dominator powers that don't accept the Dominator set, even though they should.

I don't think this is the average experience for a Blaster. Simultaneously soloing multiple +3 Fake Nemesis on a Blaster requires (a) very high defense IO build, (b) Incarnate powers (e.g. Barrier), (c) popping Lucks like Bubble Bobble, or (d) some combination of all of the above.

Also, not every Blaster can operate at 80' all the time, nor should they - that turns all their melee and PBAoE powers into situational ones, and no other AT has that many situational powers.

The problem stems from the fact that Mids has custom enhancement data, in the sense that it doesn't do enhancements the way that the game does enhancements (where enhancements are simply powers). It faked the game data pretty well, but the problem arises with the introduction of PPM and Attuned Enhancements. So I changed the Mids DB to use actual enhancement power data (which is why that file is so big) and associated all the enhancements with the appropriate power, based upon the name of the enhancement. That last part is the reason it takes so long on your machine, since it requires a lengthy lookup process that isn't even necessary, since all powers have unique ids associated with them in the Mids db, which I could've used instead.

I was slowly planning on moving all the enhancement data to the new system (right now it's only used for Procs and to determine if an enhancement is Attuned), but it looks like I'll need to move faster.

Odd. The enhancement database is actually smaller now, because I moved a lot of the enhancement data over to the Powers section... Oh, I know what's happening. It's because the references are by string instead of by static index. I'll fix that. Oddly enough, that happens really fast on my PC, but the update check takes a while.

My bathroom is being remodeled starting today, and I've just been told it might take two whole weeks, so I probably won't be able to do much development until that finishes. Once that's done, I'll be able to change the references.

Hmm... I think there's an issue with the update checker. I'll look into it.

Good catch. Spring Attack also has a similar problem, it has been pointed out to me.

Do you have Mids open?

Well, I went live with that formula for now. Hopefully, we'll figure out the correct formula in the near future and I'll update Mids with it.