Kung_POW_Chicken

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(Begins rant)
Go straight to bank, find elevator to 2nd floor and take out boss & helper before they blow the safe. I get to the bank, get the message the bank is being robbed, run/leap past all of the looters in the bank and head straight to the vators. when I get to the 2nd floor I get the message that the looters are getting away. It was physically (game-physics?) impossible for me to get up to the vault any faster, yet even as I fought (and beat) that lovely pyromaniac lady and her looter friend I knew I was going to fail the mission.
(Ends rant)


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Sometimes when I slam into a wall and can't figure out why things are so messed up, it helps to remmber that *I* might be missing something. Even though that something might not be that obvious.

You have to stop the looters on the bottom floor as well. I'm not sure if it includes every, single, last, one, or just the one that's carrying around money bags, but there is definately at least one that you have to stop on the first floor.

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It's a PvE greifing problem. No less than three days ago, some idiot was TP Foeing level 43 Malta turrets around high traffic areas in Skyway (or was it Steel? Doesn't matter -- low level zone), causing quite a bit of debt.

Rather than code the damn things to die with the Engineers or at least give the stupid things a TIMER, they chose this solution, and apparently it would have been difficult to code it such that it didn't affect player powers. (Who knows why...)

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I fail to see how this solves the greater problem of PVE griefing. There are other solutions to this, including social ones of hunting the griefers down and banning them, to making worldspawn malta turrets not be permanent.

The griefing issue is still there, it's just a lot harder to pull off now. Just have to get the ambush where you want them before engaging so the engineers drop the turrets.


Seriously though, if it was griefing that was causing the issue, then that's what they should list it as. As closing a method of Griefing, not calling every single item an exploit. It's like even minor criminals being called terrororists. The word is losing all meaning when we see it.

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Perhaps we should PM the red names as to when blasters are going to get a real look at and not a nerf to an already underperforming set.

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Personally, I'd just prefer if they'd start taking a look at whats fun and not OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DO THAT I DON'T WANT THEM TO DO THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

I mean, recalling a turret is an exploit? The word has become so water downed that it's near meaningless.

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Give me a break. The reason Stalkers don't get invites to the freakin' RSF is because people fail too often as is, and the more precise the team, the better chance you have. Maybe this is a reason why they picked up less then Dominators, but I have never sent an invite to a Dominator or a Stalker unless there was already a strong team of 7 and we bring them along for the ride. A Stalker is never as useful as a brute, just as a Dominator is never as useful as Corruptor. The need to succeed is what make it where you don't get invites.

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I'm trying to figure out if you are disagreeing with me that Stalkers aren't really balanced and needs work, or if you think brutes always being more useful than stalkers is fine.

What I'm talking about goes beyond just the RSF. Do you think you can do the thorn respec with 2 stalkers, 2 MM's, and a corrupter? Replace one or both of those stalkers with brutes and you'll do OK.

The RSF just takes the PVE balance problems ineherant to the AT's and magnifies them.

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Another reason why they hate us is because due to how the Devs designed us we have to go after the weak or hurt characters.


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Exactly. The stalker is custom made for cheap and easy kills, which attracted a certain playerbase to them. There are some good players that play stalkers, but there are a lot of bad players that latched onto stalkers and are more common.

The reason why /rads do so well against AV's, is that those AV's have specific boosts that rads are designed to counteract. Stalkers do so poorly because those same strengths happen to be a stalker's achille's heel.

I don't think secondary effects to the attacks will help. The only real solution I see to balance stalkers is reducing reliance on AS'ing into oblivion to survive. E.g. reducing the AS damage while raising hit points, and then giving a bump to regular attacks to make up for the lost damage from the AS.

It'd make stalkers a lot more scrapperish, but would still maintain a lot of stealthy flavor.

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is it their fault though? I think not. The SF's design doesn't favor Stalkers since they're just pure damage. But ya know what? I've had three successful RSF runs and we had one stalker in two of the three time. Masterminds and Doms can't get a invite? that's a load of [censored], same thing for other Brute types.

I find your "fact" not only flawed, but stupid.

My first successful RSF team consisted of...

3 Brutes - 2 Stone, 1 Fire
2 Masterminds - 1 Dark, 1 Bubbles
2 Corruptors - none were /Rad or /Kin from what I remember
1 Dominator - believe she was Ice

the other stone brute, the dominator and one of the corruptors were people that completed the SF successfuly and knew what to do about pulling.

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If that was indeed true then we would see everyone being invited to do the RSF instead of just Stone Brutes and Corruptors with the occassional pity slot for a friend. It stretches the imagination beyond all reasonable belief that the team you list above could do it currently.

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For full disclosure, you also need to specify whether those were lvl 52 heroes or the full blown lvl 54's. Unless it was recent, then the data is stale due to more recent changes.

Also, are MM's really undesired on the SF? I can understand limiting to 1 or 2, but a poison, dark, or force field MM should find some use with buffs and debuffs.

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No one has explained yet why its a DEVELOPERS problem that people dont look at their [censored] tray?


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Answer this question. Before the original change removing rewards from the Phalanx, how many empty tray slots did you need to recieve your shoe?

If you said 1 or 2, you are way off. From what I understand, you had to have 3 slots open. (or was it 4?). The original version had some unfortunate effects that made it ridiculously easy to lose your shoe. The quick fix to remove rewards was bad because it killed big inspirations.

This is a good change. Not perfect, but it's still good.

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If I remember he also said a couple of the devs are in player run SG's, but he wouldn't give up any names. Seems no one knows who they are which would be hard to pull of if they used a cheat code, and they like the anonymity.

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Actually, it was my understanding that they are not allowed to tell anyone who they are due to company policy.

I remember a _Castle_ post where he couldn't reminisce with someone from beta because it would've pegged him as _Castle_.

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I solo pretty much all the time, my attention span is too short to group and hafta always be here

But you could be right, because my oni has a hold so that may be why. One would think that if the arrow wasn't enough to freeze right off the bat though, if a second hold did hit it would show the animation for the second and not the first *shrug*

I think I have just frozen bosses with the arrow alone coz I use it as a lead in usually then send the pets in for the attack, so I know the oni isn't doing anything then. Now I'll hafta check on that to make sure tho.

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Technically, it does both of the animations because it's not one or the other, it's both. I was running in a group and the -4 controller was amazed that he was able to hold the bosses with his earth set holds by himself (big animation, Blind's hold effect is a little harder to notice) and didn't notice the bigger controller stacking holds on the same mobs

First off, the regen balancing should really be moved to its own thread

As for where res/def comes into play, it depends on your perspective. There are different types of defense. In Regen's case IIRC the new message is Absorbed which indicates that it's more of an instantaneous healing than anything else. (But I'm kind of guessing on that.)


I also think that people will scream bloody murder no matter what changes were made. Lower IH's numbers? I can hear the explosion. Change to a click? Same explosion.

In IH's case, it was the original intention that the power be turned on and off as the need arised. The problem is that it quickly became turn on and leave on. Turning it to a click forced the original vision of the power on to the players.

I forgot to say this earlier, but Gratz on completing the SF. Great job putting the beat down on everyone while taking screenshots

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As opposed to as often as possible with Hami?

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No server defeats hamidon more than once a day. Some cant muster a proper raid but once or twice a week. You need that 75-150 heroes to get the proper mix and number of AT's to defeat him. Raids are cancelled due to lack of turnout as often as they are conducted at times.

For this SF you ONLY need 8 villains. Thats it. That means villains can easily throw down and get thier sHO every single day if they want. Heroes dont have that luxury as we are far far more dependent on other players at a raid. If we cant rack up that 30'ish controllers and a decent set of AM's, and a strong group to clear the mitos away the raid will fail.

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I'm not dissing anyone, but for a hami raid you really need only a handful of people that are really good to organize, a few more that are capable of following directions, and pray that not too many people that are completely brain dead show up to ruin things.

Before I7, Pinnacle was running daily raids (we have a lot of good people who can organize) and occassionaly a 3AM crew would come in for a second helping. Multiple weekends we've tried for twice or thrice a day raiding (though Hamidon always picked those days to have 16 hour spawn times.)

I've cut back because I've filled too many alts up with hami's in their tray while I'm getting another scrapper up to 47 to slot, not to mention I'm finally hitting the COV side of the fence again.

Bottomline, the 24 hour timer is a bit extreme. I would've went with 12 or 16 so people could hit it 3 times in one weekend.

They also need to make sure the timer is Absolutely Clear and Pointed out somewhere in the game. I can't imagine how "upset" I would be if I found out about the timer the hard way. To reveal it in this thread now is Not Good.


I can't express how much I would prefer a selection screen. Out of around 100 hami drops, I've gotten a single Ribo and that seems to be about the standard from the small group of people I compare notes with. In the meantime, a third of the drops consist of centrioles and lysomes, with perixomes following not far behind.

To spend this amount of effort and get the same kind of semi-random drops as from hamidon just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. since I'm not pvping with a villian, I can't see myself doing the SF more than once. It's just not worth the effort at all.

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If that's the case... considering the required team setup and the fact that there will be only 8 people to trade with at the time, can we please have the option to CHOOSE our SHO? It'll definitely be a huge quality of life improvement.

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QFE.

Honestly, my MM can use up to 4-6 synthetic lysos, maybe a few centrioles, but other than that getting the right set is going to Suck.

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Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall are sure ways to get a ton of attention, even with melee characters in the middle of the foes. Only AoE taunts are likely to prevent a reaction.

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Did you mean to make this as hilarious as I find it?

(Also, I know what you are meaning, but the straight reading is great.)

Just a note, but a lot of these level based concerns would go away if accolade powers were kept when exemping.

As is, organized pvp based groups will get the appropriate accolades for their hardcore pvp toons at the absolute smallest level.

Those groups will have a permanent advantage over people that didn't develop those types of contacts until much later in the game.

Not only would the gap between the Have and the Have Nots be shrunk if we kept accolade powers exemping, it would reduce the number of silly comparisons between heroes and villians based on levels badges were gained at.

From all the descriptions, I'm guessing that this power is coded very similarly to confuse, and is actually causing the targetted mobs to attack another mob with a special power for each jump.

The effect is that damage is dependant on the mobs being chained, and there is an unintended XP drop.

There are also reports of so-so damage, but I haven't played it enough to really comment.

What I would do instead, is code the power to use invisible pets. The pet is summoned inside of the target, and performs the attack and causes the attack animation in the targetted mob.

Thanks fo the pet buff copy code, the pet can retain buffs like enrages, and possibly fury.

From this, the average damage should go up and CI would no longer cause the XP loss because it would be the invisible pets attacking and not the mobs themselves.

Scott, I can't understand how you can refer to this as a nerf for FF. Defense has been improved as a whole.

Your argument seems to be that a Squishie can't tank an AV with a FF defender, but a counterargument is that the squishie shouldn't be doing that anyway.

If you just straight look at the numbers, it's a huge improvement for defense based sets. To say it is unacceptable because it is now impossible to floor an AV/Boss/Lt at 5% through defense is just kind of silly. (because unless we're talking multiple FF's on a def based set, it wasn't going to be floored before the change anyway.)



Now here is my new worry. Has anyone considered what this is going to do to mob's debuffing defense? With the Accuracy modifiers it will also magnify the debuff through the exact same mechnisms. I think those numbers will need some tweaking. My /SR will gladly take on large groups solo, but runs if he sees two earth thorn casters because quicksand is such a brutal debuff.

If you are going to complain about soloability, don't compare the buffs that FF gets that it can't use on the caster. Those debuffs still outshine the protection Dispersion Bubble grants the FF'er.

Also, for a team of 5, we're talking about clicking 9 times for the ff'r, while people are comparing against 1 to 3 clicks for the debuffers. Buffers have to hit each teammate, debuffers each mob.

The relative merits of each are debateable, but to say that FF is suddenly going to be the "best" set is just silly.

<edit> This wasn't directed directly at UberGuy directly, but I do think it's important to note that those fun lines being drawn up may or may not be the same for soloing. Or, I could just be on drugs and misreading the various complaints I'm seeing.

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So yeah, I'm soooooooo inclined to believe this nerf really affects I7's timeline. If you believe that, I have a bridge I can sell you in San Franscisco *wink*.

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I'm a professional software developer, and depending on their build protocols and source control tools, rolling back one specific change could indeed throw the schedule off. I don't know any of their specifics, but it's believable.


Let's get to the heart of the matter.

Defense is getting a Huge increase in I7, and it was desperately needed to bring it in line with other powers.

tohit debuffing was riding the same gravy train, and I'm guessing that the devs thought it would be too godly. You have two choices to fix it. Nerf the base values, or reduce the enhancement schedule.

Which one would you want?

From what I'm seeing, the lower end mobs are affected less by tohit debuffs, but they are still going to be brought down pretty low.

On the other hand, debuffing more powerful mobs (like AV's) debuffers are coming out ahead of where they are today.

The only part that I feel sorry about, is the time period where this patch goes live and before I7. That is the only time where your powers will be reduced significantly. Once I7 hits, the low end won't hit the caps but you'll be stronger at the higher end.