Fleeting Whisper

If your area of expertise is in data transfer, you should realize that there is no difference in data transferred with any graphical effects on or off. That is, unless you're talking about transfer from RAM to the GPU, in which case we're really getting into the realm of computer graphics and parallelization.

Ask an ye shall receive!

You mean the two percent tohit debuff that comes with The Fool?

Yup. With external buffs, it's possible to get Trip Mine down to a 4s recharge. That plus a 5s cast gives it a 9s cycle. Each mine lasts for 260s, so it's possible to get 28 mines out at once.

With just 96% recharge enhancement, you can do 17 at once. Hasten, IOs, empowerment stations, and teammates can make you do even better.

Stuff, and things.


...


But mostly stuff.

Also, 4chan does things like rickroll baseball games (and invent rickrolling in the first place). Slashdot... posts things.

But Trip Mine doesn't suck. That's part of the problem.

Actually, very few things have +per in PvE, even at the high levels where Time Bomb is available.

After they buffed Auto Turret and turned it into Gun Drone, I wouldn't skip it any more.

Envenomed Dagger is better -regen than most regen-nullifying powers in the game. Kinetic Dampener is as good as S/L defense toggles in a melee character's set. Does that trivialize Kinetics, Dark Miasma, Ice Armor, Energy Aura, ...?

Web Grenade is available to Soldiers of Arachnos. Are they trivialized by the PvP temporary version?

Cold Mastery contains powers from Storm Summoning, Ice Armor; Flame Mastery contains powers from Fire Control, Fiery Aura, Thermal Radiation; Stone Mastery is basically a cut-down Earth Control. In fact, almost every APP is similar. Do all these APPs trivialize all the sets the pull powers from?

No. -heal reduces your ability to heal others. +res(heal) reduces your ability to be healed.

Benumb (Cold Domination) has -heal
Weaken (Poison) has -heal
Envenom (Poison) has +res(heal)

Eh? You suggested compressing MP3 files. MP3s are already compressed. Trying to play an MP3 that had been compressed by the game would require decompressing it before playing it, so the extra compression has become a waste of your time. Not to mention the space gain you get for compressing an already-compressed file is minimal at best, and can even cause you to lose space, depending on the compression methods in question. (If the second algorithm can't compress the file sufficiently, but the compressed filetype requires the overhead of some bytes specifying the compression type &c., the resulting file will be larger than you started with.)

Any way you slice it, trying to compress the MP3 causes more issues (several) than it solves (none).

Now, if you want to instead suggest that the game JIT converts the file from MP3 to OGG, that's something approaching a reasonable suggestion. But implementing direct support for MP3 would be more effective and, ultimately, run faster on your computer. Using an actual conversion tool would be more effective and wouldn't add such bloat to the game; in fact, players are already doing essentially this to replace in-game sounds. There's even a guide on how to do it.

Hitting your 'W' key uses more cycles than the visual effects of a full tray's worth of inspirations.

There's no difference.

My mother has been using the internet for longer than I have, and she doesn't know what slashdot is. My father is a hair's breadth away from one of those people who uses and posts on slashdot every day. Their computers are about 6 feet apart.

It's really not a very hard concept to grasp.

Why would you use in-game tools to compress a file that's already in a compressed data format, especially since you'd just have to un-do the compression before running the audio player?

Also: what everyone else said.
Also also: why try to force the game to run a patented media format when it already supports an open standard format?

(Preface: In this post, I am not referring to particle effects. While some things I will say can relate to particle effects, the sheer mass quantities of the particles puts them in another category of speed analysis.)

There's really two kinds of 2D elements: user interface, and billboarded textured quads. (Or in some cases, textured quads without billboarding.)

UI is (generally) rendered on top of the 3D scene, and requires a change in several parameters on your graphics card. In computing terms, this is a slow operation, but a human still wouldn't be able to notice it unless it's happening a hundred time a second or more, or if your graphics card really sucks.

Textured quads are simple quadrilaterals with an image on them; they're generally billboarded as well, which means that the quad is always facing your screen. Unlike UI, this doesn't require changing the graphics card's presentation parameters. In fact, it's just like drawing a 3D model which only has 4 vertices/2 polygons. Generally, that's exactly what it is.

Neither UI nor textured quads add enough to your computer's workload to make any difference. The ONLY way you'd notice the removal of the 2D elements would be if you were running a debug version of the program and measuring the CPU timing with and without the 2D rendering. -- And this is speaking from experience.

Your slowdown is not being caused by the existence of the 2D elements in the game, unless:

1. The 2D elements are causing a memory leak, in which case everyone else would have noticed such a glaring problem, and removing them from rendering wouldn't help anyway.
2. Your graphics card's pixel shader is broken*, in which case it's a problem with your computer.
3. The dev team switches between rendering modes repeatedly during a single frame, in which case everyone else would have noticed such a glaring problem.
4. Your graphics card sucks.

* It is possible to write pixel shader code which slows things down substantially on a perfectly fine GPU, but I can't think of any effects in the game which would require a pixel shader that complex.

Now, #1 and #3 are unlikely, or else everyone in the game would be experiencing severe problems. I know you don't want #2 or #4 to be true, and for all I know, they aren't. It is safe to assume that any speed problems you have are not related to any 2D elements in the game. That leaves 3D elements and networking, both of which are very good at slowing things down. If you want to make suggestions to help seed up your computer without upgrading it, I suggest you concentrate there.



tl,dr: Even removing every single 2D element in the entire game won't speed up your game enough for you to notice the difference.

fix't

That's actually a pretty good analogy.

I'd never heard of the 'slashdot effect' before j_s posted the link, and if you mentioned 'slashdotting' to me, I would assume you meant posting on slashdot.

"the person" is wrong.

Yes, it does. I don't think Repel (the effect, not the power) does, though.

Killing enemies faster is surviving longer. Death is the ultimate debuff.

No, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm talking about absolute damage, not averaged damage. 234.94 > 225.21

Tohit debuff, actually, and tied with Darkest Night for one of the strongest in the game. (Of the powers available to players, I believe it's third behind Blackstar and Chill of the Night; Blackstar is a nuke and Chill of the Night is only available via Dark Servant.)

And considering Terrorized can only be broken at most once every 5 seconds, while Sleep is broken whenever you're hit, KBed, or healed... there's a distinct difference there. And the Terrorized effect stays even if you run away; if you get knocked out of the sleep patch, you're awake for good.

For some people, sleeps (especially AoE sleeps) have redeeming value with Call of the Sandman: Chance to Heal Self*. However, since it's chance to heal self and your proposal has a pseudopet casting the sleep, it's the pseudopet that would be receiving the heal, not you.

* I must admit, I am in the process of building a Sonic/Ice/Cold Blaster with 3 AoE sleeps (Siren's Song, Frozen Aura, and Flash Freeze) each with a CotS proc, as well as 5 ranged attacks slotted with Entropic Chaos: Chance for Self Heal.

Sorry, I missed that line. I apologize.

Actually, Masterminds, Corruptors, and Controllers are just about equal for all of their secondaries. There's a little bit of variation, but not too much.

The main difference that sets Masterminds apart from Corruptors and Controllers (with regard to the secondary sets) is that their powers cost more endurance. Unlike Corruptors and Controllers, Masterminds don't need to constantly cast their primary powers (so long as things don't go south, 5 of your 9 primary powers will only be used a handful times during a play session), so you've got a bunch of extra endurance to play with.

Nope. All three Nictus Essences have the same model.

I think they always start in the same locations when they spawn, but that quickly goes to **** when the fight starts.