Futurias

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The mag 100 Stun is being replaced with a more standard stun (duration based, normal magnitude.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you very much.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, great for the melees, worse for those without status protection.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have always found it interesting that the few mobs that prove difficult for melees, they complain about them and get them adjusted. (Sappers and now this specific Longbow). The kind of mobs by the way that actually make something like a controller or dom feel useful. Having problems Mr. Melee? Here I'll hold that one for you, no problem anymore. At least they haven't touched Tsoo sorcs, my controllers/doms love them as well.

However, the reverse never seems to happen. I've (and others in a thread someone started) complained about specific ones that my corrupter/MM feels are way overpowered for their level (scrapyarder demolitionists in particular not too long ago) and it is met with deafening silience. The longbow that blow my dom away are the ones that run the inherent (not a toggle so holding them doesn't even shut the darn thing off) leadership toggle that makes the whole group virtually immune to my confuse and much tougher to hold. That power being an inherent, instead of a toggle that with some strategy could be taken out, seems broken to me, but does that get "adjusted?"

Just a curious double standard I've observed. Now awaiting the flames in response.

[/ QUOTE ]

As someone that played a Dark Defender to 50, I'd say that drones aren't really that big a deal. Mezzing is a far (very, very very far away) bigger problem.

As mezzing is right now, it is (like many people have noted) basically totally binary.

You are either perfectly fine or usually dead or useless.
<ul type="square">[*]Placate = unable to attack a target.[*]Knockdown/back = unable to activate new powers (minor irritation mostly and fairly short duration.) The *bane* of some Melee defensive sets that get no protection against it.[*]Immobolize/slows = unable to position in combat easily. Can be death to melee characters who *require* moving into short range to be able attack.[*] -travel powers = deactivate travel powers. Fairly life threatening at times.[*]Fear = unable to initiate any actions until attacked. Only slightly more irritating.[*]Mesmerize = controls who you can attack, but non-attack powers are totally unaffected.[*]Terror = unable to attack until it wears off. Less resisted than most mezz abilities.[*]Stun = slow ability to move, but all toggles drop. Unable to activate powers (and unlikely to escape.) Usually death in mass combats ensues.[*]Holds = absolutely the most hated status effect because you can do absolutely *nothing* except click a break-free. All toggles are dropped. Almost always a death ensues.[/list]
This is a list in the order of least to greatest hated mezzing (IMO). I'm sure things can move around a little, but I think it's pretty accurate.

All of these have one basic thing in common, they take away in varying degrees the ability to play your character. From what I can see, people really don't mind seeing their characters health move at times.

But they *really* hate having no control over what is going on.

I'd dare say that thematically, outright denying characters control is even counter to the genre.

Yup, even mind-control. How many times have you seen a hero/villian strike out while "mezzed" for a heroic finish? Quite a few.

I think that mezzing powers need to be looked at as only *inhibiting* a percentage of movement, damage, protections or powers while effects are active.

Being able to do nothing in one of the most frentically inter-active games is thoroughly unenjoyable.

[ QUOTE ]
I rarely see Fortunas, and even more rarely do I see them do anything, speaking as a villain who has to fight both Arachnos and Longbow, they're both not easy, but longbow, with it's bosses that hit for monster damage and random crap from minions like Spec Ops and the LT Nulifiers, it's much more painful, debt giving and annoying then any other NPC group.

[/ QUOTE ]

My INV/SS tanker definitely notices, as their psi damage is definitely a "MUST BE STOPPED AT ALL COSTS" sort of damage.

[ QUOTE ]
4) The Sonic Concussion power blows through anyones Hold protection, but it only lasts 1/4 of a second. It is working as designed, however, I'll pass this to geko to see if it is too strong of an effect.

[/ QUOTE ]

Um, yay for Energy Armor and Defense! I hadn't noticed this except for a couple of odd times. Think I *might* have noticed the toggle drop and bugged it because I thought some power was toggle dropping from PvP accidentally.

Like almost everyone else noted, toggle dropping is *not* fun for melee character.

Actually, toggle dropping is not fun for any characters. Probably one of the biggest reasons that all of my newer characters have some sort of mezz protection except my human-form peacebringer.

You guys may want to really rethink mezzing and toggle dropping.

I would suggest replacing toggle dropping and do the oft-suggested toggle suppression. (Suppression in this case being a reduction in resistance/defense (of active powers) to 1/2 their effectiveness.)

Toggle dropping offensive toggles (Ie. Darkest Night) would not terribly hurt my feelings.

Superman getting punched and becoming Clark Kent is just wrong on so many levels.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Carnie Ring Mistresses pwnzzz all.

[/ QUOTE ]

I had a big [censored] moment when running into just a Lt-class Ring Mistress during my Aura mission. [censored] is up with giving them a power that not only drains your health and endurance, but also kills your recovery and regen for over a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, that seems to be about what it does. Doesn't miss either.

My brute just tries to take her +0 self down ASAP, use all inspirations.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Wanna hear something funny? Heroes are making an all-too similar point about arachnos troops in this post.

Coincidence? I think not. I'd wager both groups are functioning exactly as intended.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, villains fight both longbow and arachnos a fair amount, while as far as I know heroes never fight longbow (that would be weird).

Having fought alot of both I can confidently say that I find longbow to be much harder. Arachnos sure looks cooler, though...

[/ QUOTE ]

Carnie Ring Mistresses pwnzzz all.

CoT Spectral Minions are a pain, Ringies are death. I'll face hordes or Longbow, Wyvren *and* Arachnos any day before facing Psi attacking Endurance vampires.

[ QUOTE ]
I've played most archetypes at all level ranges, but as far as character I've considered 'main': I was ILL/KIN through beta, then switched to ILL/EMP for live (that was my grouping character). My solo (and also PvP) char is a BS/INV scrapper Later I swtiched to AR/DEV ( after smoke grenade was fixed ^^; ). I was playing a RP PB through Striga and Croatoa, up intil CoV. Now I'm an evil preaching Robot/FF.

Kudos if you understand all that (;o_0)b

[/ QUOTE ]

Robot/FF! That is one tough set to crack and great for teaming!

[ QUOTE ]
Individual letters as wall hangings/signs
Originally suggested by: me
Category: Wall decoration
Customizable? N
Type: purchased
Description: Square shaped signs with a capital letter in each one. All letters of the alphabet plus numbers 0 through 9. That way we can spell stuff on the walls. Like over Zone TPers.. We could spell "ST M" and know that goes to St. Martial as one weak example.
Limitations: wall placement

[/ QUOTE ]

Probably *not* going to happen. Too much chance of people spelling out inappropriate items.

Might be why we don't have SG Emblams to put on the wall too, now that I think of it.

[ QUOTE ]
I tested this and it is possible to reach full fury for a brief period of time. You need to get attacked by several critters (preferably bosses) at the same time and will probably die by the burst damage but you can hit the 1.0 fury mark. Some of you may have experienced this but were too preoccupied with the whole dying thing without realizing you were at max fury.

I think what's misleading is that the fury bar isn't as precise as we'd like it to be. It goes up and down in increments of .1 so even though you're at .99 fury, the bar will look as if you're at .9 fury.

For all you numbers people, we're going to change fury to display in the 100s. When you right-click on the fury bar, you'll no longer see it display as 0.0/1.0. It will be displayed as 0/100 so you can see how close you are to hitting the max. Please keep in mind that this won't visually change the fury meter.

Note: Edited post so it says you need to get attacked by several critters instead of hit by several critters.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wonder if we could get this changed so that our Fury has an "over-flow" option so that we have a slightly easier time to stay at 100%.

And getting fury on a full team can sometimes be a bit problematic... at time. On some teams I'm lucky if I can get to 20% fury (usually those without secondary buffs.)

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

This seemed to be the easiest badge to get. Just a team of 8.. 4 bosses, 4 lackeys doing a few missions seemed to unlock it

[/ QUOTE ]

Good. That was the intention. We want players to feel like they earned their mission computer, but at the same time we want to make sure that groups can get it and use it.

[/ QUOTE ]

What about healing badge? That was has hardly budged.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In CoH Beta, players were able to push NPCs rather than the other way around. Quite reliably, players would then herd the NPCs all into a small area, causing AI issues and horrible server lag.

I hate being pushed around, too, but I don't believe it will change any time soon. (NOTE: I could be wrong!)

[/ QUOTE ]

I've been informed that whoever told me the above misinformed me (well, the language wasn't quite that polite. ) In any case, the true reason appears to be physics collision checking (Players check collision, NPCs do not.)

I apologize for any confusion!

[/ QUOTE ]

Strange, that was what we were told in BETA was the reason (and why we don't have destructible/movable terrain).

People stacked up cars in front of the NPC pathings and could greif that way.

[ QUOTE ]
A pet is not a minion.

[/ QUOTE ]

Maybe it was just confusing me, but I know that recharge only speeded up how often (or how many pets you could stack) on Dark Servant.

Still upset that Dark Miasma didn't get perma-pets.

It's discriminating for a very expensive pet.

[ QUOTE ]
Actually the deal is this:

We removed Recharge Enhancements from all Henchmen powers because it WOULD affect the recharge rate of the summoning power itself, and NOT the recharge rate of the Henchmen's powers.

This is inconsistent to ALL other Enhancements that are slottable for Henchmen... the Enhancements ALWAYS affect the powers of the Henchmen, and not the summoning power itself.

To avoid confusion, we just removed the option.

And I believe it was a good call, seeing as how many people would be confused as to how it would work if we left it alone.

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh? Since when did Dark Servant recharges make a bit of difference in how the powers recharges. As far as I've ever seen, they just cycle a particular set of powers in a row. Over and over against slavishly.

[ QUOTE ]
Cross posted from another discussion:


To be honest I don't think that screwing up with a low Acc attack is going to hurt you all that much. Let's take a look at the math.

Let's say you have a bunch of regular attacks with the same net-to hit of 75%. And one crappy attack with net to hit of 20%. Let's say you unknowingly manage to utilize this attack each time after you hit, thus adopting the higher number for the streakbreaker value.

Effective to-hit falls from:
75.2941% to 75.0003%. ~0.3% difference!
The chance for a given attack to be somwhere between the 4rd and the 8th miss is 0.390%. (streakbreaker for 75% is 3)

[/ QUOTE ]

The thing is (as I understand it) is that your to-hit numbers are only quasi-random.

If you have a normal spread of numbers, the streak breaker has no effect (you are breaking the streaks naturally).

The problem occurs when you get a really low power-set of numbers in a row *and* you opened with a low totalled accuracy attack. So you use that low-ACC AOE on your first attack (and miss) you now have a potential 5+ streak of misses even with high accuracy attacks (as you can *always* miss 5% of the time.) Most of the time, you naturally roll high enough to hit, but not always.

Everyone once in a while, you just happened to miss badly. Because you opened with a low ACC attack, you potential miss streaks are much larger.

I do hope that the idea of hit-streak breaking for mobs against your defense is added though.

That should get rid of all the mobs just "lucking out" and flooring your ice tanker because they all just happened to roll in their 5% chance to hit you.

Continually.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So what you are advocating here is a reverse streak-breaker for hitting PCs. Basically, if you have a +70% DEF *all* NPCs attacking you should have a very hard time hitting you and it should force misses based on that chart against their probability to hit.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not quite what I had in mind, but it was just a vague concept to begin with. I was thinking something more like: if I get missed X times in a row by all attackers, then the next single attack against me will auto-hit. It's kind of the same system, but it considers everything attacking me as one attacker. I'm not sure exactly how X would be determined. It probably isn't fair to base it solely on the defenders defense value. I suppose it could be like the existing system in that it could just use the lowest accuracy of all the attacks in the current streak (regardless of source). I can see potential problems with that, but it's just a basic idea.

[ QUOTE ]
It's an interesting thought and probably would make defensive sets better. It may be a bit powerful

[/ QUOTE ]

It certainly would need to be worked out so as not to be overly powerful (and I can see how it could be).

[/ QUOTE ]

But a streak-breaker for hits against PCs defenses would basically make sure that after a hit (or number of hits) that the mobs are forced to miss so many times.

Realistiacally, this probably *needs* to be implemented to keep defense based characters from "sudden death syndrome" of lucky number of hits in a row that whacks you.

Any chance of such a system being implemented to keep us poor defense toons alive, Weird_Beard?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Critters get the benefits of the system as well.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]

Pretty sure that he is talking pets here, actually. But you do bring up a good point.

[ QUOTE ]
Assuming "critters" means enemies (as opposed to pets), I have to say that I think this is a bad idea. Actually, I think the streak-breaker in general might be a bad idea. I realize long miss streaks are bad, but I'd be willing to live with them as long as the average accuracy was correct. However, I can live with the streak-breaker for players, but I think it's a bad idea for enemies (at least as implemented).

The reason it seems like a bad idea to me is it appears biased against defensive sets. First of all, my SR Scrapper and Ninjitsu Stalker have spent many powers and slots to greatly minimize their chances of being hit. The fact that minions will always get to hit them after enough misses, just seems wrong to me. Being that it's not easy to push minion to-hit below 20% anymore, it doesn't take long before that auto-hit happens.

Second, there's a more significant implication here that may not have been considered. To illustrate, here's a phenomenon that I've experienced many times with my scrapper and stalker (especially in the low to mid levels): I spot a mob of say 10 white or yellow minions with maybe a LT or two. I jump in the middle and do not take one single hit for 20 seconds or more, then all of a sudden - WAM - I suffer several hits all at the same time. This concern has been voiced by myself and others in the past, but it has generally been shrugged off as random bad luck, or biased observation. However, it now appears that what's happening is that during those first 20 seconds or so the misses are all legitimate, then suddenly the streak-breaker kicks in for all of them at the same time! This concentrates the damage into a very short window and makes it very difficult to deal with. I think this is completely unfair to defensive sets. I would think this problem would be even more apparent with Ice Tankers, who are supposed to have many minions attacking them at the same time.

Since regeneration and resistance sets have lower defense, they will naturally get hit more often, but because of that the streak-breaker will rarely come into play and the hits they experience will be more evenly distributed (something that regeneration sets, in particular, excel at dealing with). So the bias is that defensive sets will tend to have their damage clustered, which is always bad. So, I guess this is just another reason why regen and resistance are superior to defense.

Just off the top of my head, a better system might be to reverse the way the streak-breaker works for enemies, i.e. tie the streak to the defender, not the attacker. So, if my SR scrapper gets missed X times in a row, then the next attack by a single attacker will get an auto-hit and then the streak resets. This would help spread the auto-hits out over time, instead of concentrating them. There might be an issue with the lowest accuracy thing, as it might then be beneficial to keep minions around while fighting a boss, but something can probably be tweaked there. I'm not sure if this is a better solution or not, just a thought.

Has anyone looked into how the streak-breaker should affect overall accuracy? Many people have done accuracy tests without factoring this system into the equation, but the streak-breaker should inflate accuracy to some degree. I'm not sure how to calculate what the actual hit-ratio should be, but it should be higher than the accuracy. It would be interesting to know what the effect would be.

[/ QUOTE ]

So what you are advocating here is a reverse streak-breaker for hitting PCs. Basically, if you have a +70% DEF *all* NPCs attacking you should have a very hard time hitting you and it should force misses based on that chart against their probability to hit.

It's an interesting thought and probably would make defensive sets better. It may be a bit powerful, but it would even out the chances of being clobbered all in one batch of hits, even if they probably couldn't hit you for five minutes after that.

[ QUOTE ]
WOW!!!!eleven!

I had no idea my brawl attack was LOWERING my effective hit rate [thus DPS], due to slotting &amp; accuracy differences o_0

Brawl aside, this definetly explains how I can miss an entire buildup attack chain against blue minions (I think). I guess I need to be a bit more careful on my slotting &amp; attack chain used.

[/ QUOTE ]

That does seem to be effectively what is happening. O.o

So you don't ever want to use a low accuracy attack at all, if you can help it. Which is probably why the developers have always stated that you should slot accuracy first as the most important slotting.

[ QUOTE ]

Castle, I am not seeing any problems with even cons, but I am seeing a large drop with cons that are scaled up or down. Sometimes I will whiff against greens several times, and yellows are a pain to hit with strings of 4 or 5 misses sometimes with green DOs.

Can you confirm the current Accuracy penalties for +1s, +2s, etc? The last values we saw were around 7.5% reduction per level difference but as far as I can tell it is higher than that now.

[/ QUOTE ]

From what I can tell, it's the purple patch applied to your accuracy. Ie. -10% to +1s, -25% +2, etc. Down to a base of 5%.

So your +4s are *really* tough to hit without good buff on base accuracy.

[ QUOTE ]
I have to agree with Reality Check. Bases do seem to be violently skewed to large SG/VG's. One of the most attractive elements of the 'City' games, IMHO, has been the ability to affiliate and identify with a small group but still feel like you make a difference. Now, if you associate with a small group you are at a distict and SEVERE disadvantage.

*shrug*

I, for one, am disappointed...

[/ QUOTE ]

My SG is on the "modestly small" size too. And we really have to scrimp and save most of the time. We aren't even planning on PvPing for the most part, but even a good PvE base can be discouraging.

Larger rooms for millions. Buggy SG badge earning (I think the tree of wonder/autodoc requires a badge for healing. A badge that we can't seem to earn.)

Very frustrating.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
You're wasting your time. Reason, fairness, and other silly things like that are foreign concepts to developers. Remember, such foes are the equivalents their characters, and they're not going to gimp their characters vs. the Enemy (players).

[/ QUOTE ]

I trust you'll be happy to learn that I changed Ballista based on feedback in this thread.

[/ QUOTE ]

PWNED!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Statesman, so it's expected that the rest of the team will still be getting hit even with a Tanker? Not complaining or fighting with you, just asking.

I know this isn't every other game, but this is a question of expectations. In most MMOs, a tank that can't handle most to all aggro is not considered to be much of a tank unless the rest of the team is off throwing Ice Comets (silly Wizards ).

It seems that what you're saying is that the tank is there only to return the majority of the team to the solo standard of 3 white minions or slightly better.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with what you said, but there's more to it. Just as there's synergy between members on a team, there's also synergy within an 16-enemy spawn for a team of 7. On rugged, that spawn would have been 52 carnies, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The tank can pick and choose which of the enemies to get the aggro from, while the scrapper cannot. This does give the tank an advantage.

The question is, is this a big enough advantage to be important?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not so sure about that. As a Scrapper you can perform a role very similar to the Tank that Statesman presents. Give me some proper support (i.e. a good defender or controller with resist or def buffs) and many Scrapper can tank major targets (AVs and Monsters) as easily as a tank. As for large spawns, Tanks have a slight edge in aggro creation, but I wonder if these days, if I couldn't generate enough aggro with Energy Torrent and Whirling Sword to keep a good portion of the spawn occupied.

Interestingly enough with extreme support (say a sonic defender and a FF defender) I wonder if my Blaster wouldn't make the best tank. Ice Storm and Frost Breath and you got more than five mobs ticked at you in seconds. If you really have some good support why not just Blizzard to kill the minions and then tank the Bosses and stray Lts.

I don't mean this to be overly argumentative, but it seems that Tankers, while being the best at tanking, have so little to bring to the table (i.e. an advantage in HP and aggro generation) that a team would be better off with more damage, more control, or more support.

[/ QUOTE ]

A super-buffed blaster versus a non-buffed tank? You probably would be about equal, from what I can see.

But an equally buffed tank would be like playing under i5 still.

There's a really good chat log in the general forum from 11/02/2005 from some site that talks about some of the questions (Statesman and Lord Recluse were in that chat.) Its very insightful.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For those players who have reached the Salvage Limit with one or more pieces:

Is your SG capable of making a Worktable so you can consume some of that Salvage into the raw material? (Raw material has a limit of 99 currently).

[/ QUOTE ]

Not even close

[/ QUOTE ]

Indeed. I'm fairly close to the limit of 99 myself. I personally have 79 pieces of salvage, and several other members are getting close to that. Our base has an empty power room and an empty control room, and about 98,000 prestige right now. We need 225,000 prestige for power and something like 150,000 for control before we can even consider placing a workshop for another 100,000 plus tables.

I sincerely doubt that the salvage will have much market value because everyone will have more salvage than they need or can use. About the best thing we can figure to do with it is to dump it on less-played alts in the SG.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, this is what I'm seeing too.

Too little prestige to actually *do* anything with your base. That could be because of the totally bug or what not, but bases seem to be about 100% too expensive. I'm not that close to maxing my salvage, but I'm not that far either. And my SG is pretty relaxed about things.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Is your SG capable of making a Worktable so you can consume some of that Salvage into the raw material?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, not even close.

Granted the limit is only being reached by our mules, but the limit makes the entire concept of "salvage mules" far less appealing and hurts those people who want to focus on being crafters for their SG.

[/ QUOTE ]

That may be part of the purpose. Muling isn't considered a "good" term, after all.

[ QUOTE ]
For those players who have reached the Salvage Limit with one or more pieces:

Is your SG capable of making a Worktable so you can consume some of that Salvage into the raw material? (Raw material has a limit of 99 currently).

[/ QUOTE ]

We were having problems changing the permissions so that someone other than "overlords" could work on the base. I think the latest patch fixed it though.

[ QUOTE ]
Me? What do I think is next?

Hmmm. It isn't Spies quite yet...

[/ QUOTE ]

Bad Jack! Quit torturing us like that!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Bug. We neglected to give Stalkers and Brutes the immunity to the Range Debuff that Scrappers and Tankers get. I fixed it internally yesterday...it'll hopefully make it to you folks "Soon(tm)"

[/ QUOTE ]

Why is this the conceptual solution? Wouldn't it make more sense to make MELEE attacks, regardless of source, immune from range debuffing?

There is no reason why Scrapper ranged attacks are immune to range debuffing

There is no reason why Blaster melee attacks are vulnerable to range debuffing.

[/ QUOTE ]

It was explained that powers are split up for ATs, so you can apply a "global" change to AT powers easier than you can all powers that are melee.