Dz131

Originally Posted by CapnGeist

That said... I see Lord Recluse as somewhere between Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom. Even people like The Joker recognize that these are the top dogs around, and other villains don't mess with them, and they work with them when the price is right. And this isn't a question of loyalty to their organization, but it's the simple factor that working with Arachnos is all upside. Luthor loves hiring mercenaries, and he doesn't have a reputation for betraying them at first convenience like, say, Magneto does. With Archnos, like with Luthor, you know where you stand: As long as they're getting their money's worth, you're gonna be fine. And what's your last real task in the Rogue Isles? It's not "Become Lord Recluse's best friend." It's "Show Lord Recluse that you can't be treated like an underling anymore." Consider this line from the end of Black Scorpion's patron arc.

"Through your long struggle you have become a true villain, wielding power over all and beholden to none. Go now, and work your terrors upon the Earth!"

This says to me that your goal has ALWAYS been to be out for yourself. And come to think of it, you can go through the entirety of the Rogue Islands fairy easily without doing a SINGLE job for Arachnos. From the start you get the option of Kalinda OR BURKE, with Burke being a more Mercenary path. And in each zone, you choose your contacts. You can work for the Goldbrickers, the Sky Raiders, and the Family as you level, and probably others I'm forgetting.

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

So long as my characters who did the arc remember being told about Tyrant's and Dominatrix's extracurricular activities, it's there. There's no retconning. That's just more of Cole's massaging of the history! (Also, have you done the Power arc where you confront Duncan? Seriously, they don't say it directly, but she's in an inappropriate relationship with Cole and probably Anti-Matter too.)
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Originally Posted by Schismatrix

*heh* i love how the posts i see by you tend to alternate between asking fairly basic questions about the game's workings and stating (frequently incomplete or inaccurate) opinions and assumptions as facts. It's sort of charming even if it occasionally gets annoying because then someone who know what they're talking about has to set the record straight.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

The hard limit for defense is archetype based, just like the resistance cap. Except since defense is a buff, it can exceed the limits of what is *useful*. For most archetypes the defense cap is somewhere out around 200%, plus or minus. But since the base tohit of most even con critters is 50%, anything more than 45% defense doesn't help in those situations, because you cannot reduce the intermediate tohit value to less than 5%, the "floor."

So 45% is considered the "soft cap" to defense. Soft, because you can get more, and it can help sometimes - when the critter's tohit is higher (pets, turrets, and some special critters), when the critter has tohit buffs (Rularuu eye balls, bank guard LTs, some red side AVs with Build Up, etc), or when the critters have defense debuffs (which will lower your defense, meaning having more than 45% allows for a "buffer" against those debuffs).

The hard cap, on the other hand, is something you're not likely to see very often, because its very high. Although it also scales by level, so its possible to hit it at very low combat levels with a lot of buffs, but still you're not likely to see it often.


Good time to mention that the soft cap or the soft floor as its also called only allows you to reduce *intermediate* tohit to 5% and no lower. Its called the intermediate tohit because its multiplied by Accuracy afterwards, so the final value is potentially higher than that. That intermediate floor didn't always exist, but it was discovered in I3 (I4 testing) that in situations with high defense, specifically PvP, you could have enough defense to drive someone's tohit *negative*. If you did that, Accuracy wouldn't help such a person: stacking more accuracy would only make that negative number more negative. So they introduced the intermediate floor, so that Accuracy couldn't be made absolutely worthless with enough defense. You can't use defense to drive tohit negative anymore, and as a result accuracy always has a positive effect for the attacker.

So the tohit "floor" isn't really 5%, the intermediate floor is 5%. The final tohit floor is sometimes 5%, and sometimes higher for higher accuracy critters. Note: this isn't unfair to defense. The maximum mitigation from resistance for players is 90% (less for most archetypes). So you'd think that the best you could do with defense is 90% also. But for a critter that hits 50% of the time normally, 90% mitigation drops him to 5%. And for a critter that normally hits 75% of the time, its 7.5%. But in the old days, a high defense player could drop something like a high level AV that had 90% tohit all the way down to 5%, which is a net damage mitigation of 94.4%. That's what made perma-Elude much more powerful back then. Today, best you can do is 90%, which means the "floor" for a critter is usually one tenth their normal chance to hit, which is not always 5 percent.

Originally Posted by Camper

Of course, if you go to Freedom or Virtue, you have to deal with this sort of attitude, which is it's own problem.

Originally Posted by Aura_Familia

lol that's what I was saying.

People act like pvp dev wouldn't have to take AT LEAST 3-6 months to learn every other system and THEN convince the other devs to help him with stuff he didn't know how to do.

I'd rather we get the CURRENT dev team to focus on fixing pvp.

EDIT: Serious question, what specifically does anyone think a pvp would do that is different than what is being done now.

Come in here and post "we are looking into pvp . . ."

So then what? We're still stuck with waiting. and waiting and waiting . . . sound familiar?

As has been ALREADY pointed out both the AE and Bases had their own devs. How many base and AE issues have been addressed in the last 6 months? Riiiiiight.

Originally Posted by Steampunkette

Yes, I am aware of those facts, Optical Delusion. I'm also aware that while PvP -can- be done well in a gaming environment (as we plan to have in our own, eventually) it's either built in from the get-go or useless.

Balancing imbalanced classes for PvP is a juggling act, especially when they have diffent inherent toughnesses. Without heavy modification of the system every fight becomes "Lolnoob" as a damage class crushes a control/support class or a fight that lasts far too long when it's two "Tank" classes wailing at each other until damage classes come and even out the damage to HP loss ratio.

However you also run the risk of creating a homogenized mess where all classes play almost identically in PvP in order to try and make it fair for the "Weaker" classes.

However, unlike you I realize that each of those 80 members of the Dev team already has a project (or several) they're working on, and adding this sort of thing to their workload would just delay their efforts. I do not think hiring a new employee specifically to sift through a vocal minority's garbage and raving for actual facts from the few PvPers who truly understand where the system needs to be changed is the right answer.

Especially since that developer would basically have his hands tied on getting anything done until he stole time from the various teams who's expertise and effort he would have to call on to make any massive changes.

Do you understand that, or does it need to be broken down further?

-Rachel-

Originally Posted by Robo_Knight

Now why is it we can't have swords that big?

Originally Posted by Catastrophe

I hope I'm thinking about this the right way. ED doesn't discriminate based on level. You get less % benefit from the third enhancement of a type regardless of whether it's level 50 or 30. Overall you still get more benefit from the 50's since they're higher base %.

Originally Posted by warden_de_dios

The word Dz131 is looking for is

dramedy

I just got used to Julie Benz as Dexter's wife, now I have to get used to her being a superhero mom.

Originally Posted by castle

probably my favorite anime series (up there with lain and bebop) -- i hope they do it justice!

Originally Posted by Ironik

There is a certain unmentionable "similar game" by a studio which is... enigmatic... that used to be associated with this game who stole the idea and actually added it as a "visual sound effect" to their incredibly silly and stupidly subpar version of this game.

So, you know, go there if you want crap like that.