Hopeling

There is (or was?) a bug that can cause very high time-played numbers; I think it had something to do with counting time logged out if you were in task force mode. So if you see numbers are WAY too high to be accurate, they probably aren't.

Anyway, today I finally took some time away from moping and getting ALL the screenshots to gather a time-played total. I only bothered to total up the hours from my 50s (of which I have... wow, seriously? 21 of them? Didn't seem like that many...), but this should still be the majority of my total time played. That doesn't mean I spent the bulk of my time *at* 50, but rather that most of my characters tend to either stall out early or make it all the way to 50. When an NPC told me a number that was obviously way too high (6436 hours on the character I barely got to 50 and then abandoned? Hm, no, probably not...), I replaced that with 200 hours (this seems to be a roughly median value for my other 50s). Man, why did they never get rid of that 30-second logout timer...

I broke 2000 hours before I even finished counting the ones I've retired and moved off my main server. The fewest hours on one character was 34 (that one got powerleveled, from the days before I noticed that I didn't actually enjoy jumping to 50...), the most (other than the erroneous ones) was 592. Hopeling, my namesake and the closest thing I have to a main, has 923 hours if I combine the hours from his original version (BS/Inv scrapper, created in 2004) and the rerolled version (TW/WP, created last year).

My grand total is 3830 hours. Not as impressive as some here, but still over 5 solid months. It really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say this is losing a home ;_;

Unless you expected CoH (and every other thing that has ever advertised "forever" or used similar terms) to last beyond the heat death of the universe - no, probably not.

"Flailing", not "failing". Although one tends to lead to the other.

And Kitsune is right. We're all upset, but random screaming won't save the game. "At least I'm doing something!" isn't actually an excuse when what you're doing is actively counterproductive and everyone else isn't exactly sitting on their hands.

A few other games have sidekicking or something like it, but not nearly enough.

And... yeah, after being exposed to the CoH method of doing things, the design decisions in most games seem just bafflingly bad.

Screw those blue caves.

...and yet, in no other game do I get to play an 8-foot Norse giant in a 6-foot cave and complain in-character to my team that whoever built these caves should spend a thousand years buried beneath Odin's odorous underpants.

"Radial Omega Godzilla"? Now that would be worth fighting Battalion for.

RiverOcean, the post you're quoting dates from 20 days before the announcement.

From what the announcement has said, I don't think everybody is completely kicked out of the building yet. All development has stopped, but they only said they're "beginning preparations" to sunset the game (there's a euphemism if ever I've heard one). If nothing else, they can't very well just leave the servers on, the forums and website unchanged, etc, and hope that they magically turn off at some point without server techs/web designers/etc to actually do that.

I will get my total tomorrow; I can't bear to log in tonight. But it surely numbers in the thousands of hours. I've spent more time in Paragon City than in several of the places I have actually lived.

My brain decided it wants to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSMeUPFjQHc

I think there is a good reason that the Scrapper forum has more posts than any other AT, and almost as many as the AT general discussion. Among the many things we're losing, this loss is one of the... loss-iest.

I actually would often read this forum even during the times I wasn't subscribed.

You have my sword and/or wallet, as needed.

The EULA technically gives them the rights to characters created in this game, I think, but I have no idea if that extends to remaking the character in another MMO. Even if it does, in a legal sense, I really, really doubt anyone is gonna be cross-checking a database containing millions of characters with another game's database of millions of characters and then trying to figure out which ones infringe. And then even if they did THAT, they'd almost certainly have to go to court with the other company to do anything about it, and what are they going to get out of that exactly?

So yeah, you're fine. I know a lot of players tend to make the same characters in multiple MMOs, and I've never heard of anyone getting any kind of trouble for it.

If anyone ever happens to want to reach me, I'm HopelingCoH at gmail dot com.

Willpower still has access to inspirations, Archmage, Destiny, Hybrid, Wedding Band, and any other out-of-set panic buttons you care to name, but so does any other set, so it's still true that WP has less ability to react to bad situations than most sets. Now that Resurgence isn't unusably terrible, it does have decent capabillity to recover from them, though.

IMX, it would be silly to claim that Willpower underperforms overall in any meaningful sense, but I can see why some might simply dislike that aspect of it.

Keyes gives 2 astrals when it's on cooldown. I've never run UG twice in 20 hours, but paragonwiki says it also gives 2 astrals.

Everything after that gives one emp during its cooldown, AFAIK.

But your procs are already not going off as often as possible, if you don't use the power as often as possible. That has little to do with the i24 changes.

The real question is "does the PPM system give me an equal or better proc chance than the current flat 20%?" (Or whatever other number, as appropriate to the proc.) And in most cases, the answer is either "yes", or "yes, if you move it to a different power". For some things (huge fast-recharging AoEs like Fire Cages) it's a nerf, for many things it's a buff, in some cases a huge one (Gaussian's proc, anything resembling a nuke, mininuke, or telenuke, long-recharge AoE control powers, many single-target attacks). Procs in Hot Feet will be marginally worse (20% -> 18%); procs in Choking Cloud will be marginally better (20% -> 22%). Overall, odds are pretty good that you won't even notice the changes unless you're specifically watching for the difference, and odds are also pretty good that you can turn it into a significant net buff by respeccing for i24-optimization rather than i23-optimization. And frankly, with the new IO sets in i24 and the set bonus changes and the second round of ATOs, odds are pretty good that you'd want to respec anyway.

The numbers you've posted are wrong, because the formulas you used to calculate them are wrong. You're subtracting defense from resistance for some reason, but that's not how this works; defense and resistance are effectively multiplicative. So you need to do something more like 1000*(.5 - defense)*(1-resist)
75% resistance, plus base miss chance, means avoiding half the attacks, and resisting 75% of what actually hits, so only 25% of 50% of the 1000 damage is actually taken. So that's 125 damage taken.
Similarly, 90% resistance avoids half the attacks, and resists 90% of the hits that land, so it's taking 10% of 50% of incoming damage. So that's 50 damage taken.

With a -20% res debuff, the character with 75% resist goes down to 70%, so they're taking 30% of 50% of the incoming damage. So that goes up to 150 damage taken.
The character with 90% resistance drops to 88%, so they're taking 12% of 50% of the incoming damage, which means 60 damage taken total.

Meanwhile, the defense-based character avoids 95% of incoming attacks, but has no resistance. So he takes 100% of 5% of the incoming damage, which is 50.
With a -20% res debuff, he takes 120% of 5% of the incoming damage, which is 60.
Note that this is exactly the same amount, in both cases, as the character with 90% resistance.

Edit:

Ah, okay, those are questions and concerns specific enough to address

The changes don't make procs less worthwhile as you add more recharge. The thing is, under the current system, fast recharge makes procs dramatically better. The changes just make it less dramatically better. The changes mean that *slotted* recharge will leave your procs roughly the same as they were in the first place, and global recharge will still make the procs better. Slotting more recharge reduces the proc chance, as a percentage, but the power recharges faster and can thus be used more often, so it will still go off roughly as often overall. (You can game the system a little bit on this, by slotting as little recharge as possible in your procced-out powers and relying on global recharge bonuses, but in most cases this doesn't make a huge difference.)

You suggested increasing the % chance based on recharge, but that IS what the PPM system does. PPM is not a set number of procs per minute, nor is it an upper limit, or any such thing. It's just an average. A 3 PPM proc could go off ten times in any given 60-second period, or it could go off zero times, or whatever other number. But on average, it will go off three times; more than that, actually, if you have global recharge bonuses.

Making procs less effective (per target) in AoE powers than in single-target powers is consistent with the design of AoE powers in general, which is that they are less effective per target, but make up for it by hitting multiple targets. (A decent case might be made that the proc's effect should be reduced by the power's areafactor, rather than the proc chance, but that probably has additional technical difficulties and definitely doesn't work as well for procs that do things other than dealing damage. But that's mostly academic at this point.)

Will all of this change build strategies and alter the build metagame? To some degree, yes. But honestly, most builds that I see now don't stress out a lot over optimizing their use of procs, and I doubt that will change dramatically post-i24. A Hecatomb proc will still be awesome, but the optimal place for it will be Haymaker or Knockout Blow, rather than Jab. And in a large majority of cases, even if you don't go out of your way to game the system, you'll still be at least as well off as you are under the pre-i24 rules.

"I think it's ridiculous" =/= "it didn't happen".

Was it an egregious bug that happened to slip through the cracks of converter testing, and was panic-fixed as soon as somebody at Paragon realized it existed? Maybe. Is my memory and the memory of several other posters here coincidentally fabricating the same false memory? Maybe. But I pretty distinctly remember converting some SBEs. Asserting that it didn't happen just because it would have been a bad idea is silly; things that are bad ideas frequently manage to happen anyway.

If you have firmer evidence than my simple recollection, that's another matter, but your post doesn't mention it.

Possibly, yes. The idea of average damage isn't perfectly applicable to the actual survival of defense-based characters, since they are particularly vulnerable to things happening in non-average ways.