Lady_Sadako

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You dont' NEED all the badges in the game

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For the most part, I agree. Nobody 'needs' the badges in a PvP zone.

But consider this. The Megalomaniac accolade, which grants a special power, is the equivalent of the heroes' Vanguard. Positron said that the villain accolades were being made very similar to the heroes' for the sake of fairness. However, the hero version of Vanguard doesn't require mobs from a PvP zone. The villain version does.

You tell me how it's fair or balanced for villains to HAVE to go to a PvP zone in order to get a power equivalent to that which a hero can get from PvE alone.

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490 / 990 = .4949... or about 49% debt.

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Good point: but what if you were taken down to 2% several times over the course of the fight? It seems that ALL the NPC damage you take is 'remembered' for the purposes of assigning proportional debt. For a low HP class like a Dom, it would be possible to have a record of three or four times your total HP in NPC damage. Bang, a player kills you, the debt is way off the scale.

Yay. I just discovered a new reason why Doms suck in PvP.

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To all you people being upset: you DO know this is an improvement over the original system, right? Were you not aware that a single point of NPC damage meant debt when a player took away the rest of your health?

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No it didn't.

That was a myth or a bug. Being killed by a player never got you debt, ever. That's why Cuppa mentions being 'saved from debt' by a player blow at the last moment after you'd been fighting NPCs. I have been saved from debt in that manner several times, though the attacker obviously didn't know that they were saving me.

This is a bad, bad change.

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Further testing on my end indicates that there's a "timer" of some kind on the debt. Seems to be 60 seconds or 2 minutes. After that, no debt.

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That's just staggeringly bad.

In under 60 seconds: Fight a mob. Get whittled down to 2% health. Defeat the mob. Heal yourself back up to 99% health. Get one-shotted by a stalker. Get 98% of the FULL DEBT for an OUTDOOR DEFEAT.

By what demented standard is this acceptable?

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And, if I'm back to full health at some point after taking damage, does the 'debt counter' reset and start figuring the percentages from scratch again?

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My experience indicates that -all- NPC damage is cumulative, and healing naturally and by powers doesn't remove it.

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Which would mean that if you fought a sequence of NPCs (while healing yourself continually) and took more than your total hit points over the course of time, and then fought a player who killed you, even with a full health bar and no simultaneous interaction with NPCs you'd get full debt.

If so, that's bloody ridiculous.

If.

I shouldn't have to get debt from fighting NPCs ten minutes ago. NPCs who I DEFEATED.

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Being defeated in a PvP zone will carry debt if any of the damage to you was caused by NPCs. The amount of debt is directly proportional to the amount of damage you took from NPCs vs. how much was done by opposing Player Characters. The more damage dealt to you by NPCs means more debt when you are defeated.

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Whoa, wait a moment. Let's say I'm reduced to 10 hit points by a combination of equal amounts of player and NPC damage. Someone then heals me up to half hit points, and I then get killed by a player.

Does the healing remove player damage or NPC damage first? Is it a case of first dealt, first healed?

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AHEM! ****INFO**** if u'd bothered to look most of these last 15 minutes. So if u were solo and decided to make a ham sammich mid round oops!

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Yes, I know that they last 15 minutes. All of them do, by the way, not 'most of them' as you have it.

The Nemesis fight was in a building in Crey's Folly, about 300 yards from the point where the base teleporter drops you off. I chose it for that very reason. Quick to get to, so plenty of buff testing time.

It's not the duration that's the problem, it's the intensity. The buff had easily another 13 minutes left to run on it. You can check by right clicking on the icon in the top right of your screen.

Trust me, if I had gone to get a ham sandwich halfway through the testing and let the buff run out, I would have said so.

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Loved em in test, Loved em live!

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I'm not sure what you loved so much about a NONSTACKABLE 2.5% increase to run speed, or a 5% resistance to one type of damage. These things are broken right now.

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The second way is that smaller SGs will generally have a smaller total amount of salvage.

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Thank you, that's what I meant.

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Is that the point you're trying to make?

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The point I have made is that these stations are useless for small SGs, their main intended beneficiaries.

If you're arguing that they're not much use for large SGs either, then I'm not about to disagree. I'm just taking the design statement from Posi and working with that.

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But keep the size of the SGs out of it, it's a red herring at best.

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Sorry, it's totally relevant. Did you not read the stickied discussion at the top of the page in which these additions were first announced?

FYI: these stations were supposed to be the addition that brought base functionality to small SGs. They are priced so that small SGs can afford them. They do not require power nor control, because small SGs cannot afford power or control.

To quote Positron directly:

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Everything in this issue will be "reasonably priced". It doesn't make sense for us to set out to help small supergroups and then charge large supergroup Prestige for the items.

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I think you've misread my perspective here completely. I'm not having a rant about large SGs. I'm pointing out that a design goal has, in the current iteration at least, failed completely.

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They do provide a very cheap and easy way for SGs to convert their raw salvage into components.

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With which they can then do nothing useful.

... unless they can already afford a workbench, which in turn means they can already afford power and control, which in turn means that a teleport pad is about the only useful thing to build. If you're a small SG, that is.

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However, if you're going to argue that larger SGs have an easier time gathering salvage/player, then you'd have to come up with more than that "It's demonstrably so".

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Why don't we look at the point I was actually making:

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A small SG is much more likely to have a limited amount of salvage, which it can invest in very few buffs before stores run out.

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Is that really the case? Yes, it is.

I am not talking about larger SGs. I am talking about small SGs, which is the exact group for which these stations were supposed to be particularly useful. They aren't.

For the stations to be made useful, the buffs would have to be boosted or made less expensive. Boosted would be the way to go, IMO, as you can't slice a single piece of Salvage into smaller increments.

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Hold on a sec. Did you try stacking buffs from a teir 1, 2, and 3 empowerment station?

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Yes, tried that. Same result.

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So it's not actually working as intended, then, because the buffs DON'T stack?

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To answer my own question: I've been doing some testing, and the buffs are definitely not stacking, neither from the same station nor from different ones. I even hopped between Arcane and Tech. No dice.

'You failed to create the Increase Run Speed because your inventory is full.'

So, we're currently stuck with buffs that are too weak to use unstacked, and which refuse to stack! Obviously, this is going to need fixing one way or the other.

Till then, let's just put the word out not to use up Salvage on these things until they're fixed. Maybe this could be added to the known issues.

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These devices are for small SGs, right? A small SG is much more likely to have a limited amount of salvage, which it can invest in very few buffs before stores run out.

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Is that really the case?

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Yes, demonstrably. I have alts in a small SG, and the amount of salvage we have accumulated since salvage was first introduced to the game won't net us more than a few buffs.

I'm not saying big SGs have too much of an advantage over small SGs. I'm saying that Empowerment Stations were supposed to be a welcome addition for small SGs, and they aren't.

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With respect, have you seen the recipes? Do you know just how much Salvage needs to be burned to make a buff worthwhile?

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I don't know what else we're going to do with all that salvage we've been collecting.

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Again: have you seen the recipes? And how big a SG are you?

That salvage might seem like a big pile now, but it will NOT last if you try to use these stations the way they currently are.

Small SGs need something they can use. That was what these were supposed to be. As it stands, a small SG will get zero worthwhile use out of them.

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I got the buff the first time, but every successive time I tried to create the same buff at another station I got a message saying there was no room in inventory.

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So it's not actually working as intended, then, because the buffs DON'T stack?

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plus the salvage cost of FIVE of the 3rd tier empowerment stations

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WHOA. I just reread what Positron said. Multiple stations will stack? So to stack the buffs, you have to have more than one STATION?

... I don't know what to say.

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Well, while they could no doubt code them to not stack - it would go against the game's basic structure of "It (almost, see FF or Sonic bubbles for the main exceptions) always stacks".

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But that basic structure is itself dependent upon a limitation of resources by time (power recharge) or carrying capacity (inspirations).

Empowerment Station buffs are limited in a totally new way: by the finite resources that are consumed to make them. Even something as trivial as a Run buff consumes two Tech material. That's SIX Salvage drops. Let's say you need four to be worthwhile - that's 24 bosses' worth of salvage, just to up your run speed for 15 minutes!

Empowerment Station buffs already break the pattern. Rather than make them stackable and weaken them to the point where they need to be stacked, it makes far more sense (to me at least) to have them strong enough to be useful but not stackable.

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It doesn't seem *too* unreasonable for me.

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With respect, have you seen the recipes? Do you know just how much Salvage needs to be burned to make a buff worthwhile?

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Multiple empowerment stations will stack the buffs that are offered (by design). If we made the buffs as good as players "expect" right out the gate, they'd be WAY too good when stacked.

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But... why make them stackable in the first place? These devices are for small SGs, right? A small SG is much more likely to have a limited amount of salvage, which it can invest in very few buffs before stores run out. As things stand, the buffs NEED to be stacked multiple times in order to be worthwhile at all.

What small SGs need is a non-stackable, worthwhile buff for a simple, low Salvage cost. They won't abuse that, because they don't have the resources to.

The resources necessary for even ONE application of (say) the Hold protection buff are extremely rare. In our SG of a full seventy-five members, we could probably afford to apply four of those buffs before we exhausted the rare Salvage needed for them. That's our entire repository of rare salvage burned up. Compare that to what a tray full of Break Frees would offer.

What is gained for small SGs by making the buffs small and stackable, as opposed to substantial and non-stackable?

A thought: how about several alternative recipes for the high-end buffs, which use larger amounts of the common salvage instead of small amounts of the rare stuff? That would allow small SGs to stack buffs until they reach a decent level, without having to expend salvage that's very hard to get.

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Going off Positron's comment that the number of side missions is level-dependent and my experience of getting dud clues (I got a wanted poster) would suggest exactly that.

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The wanted poster is a special case. It doesn't give you a key because you can already get into the police station, and it doesn't set a waypoint because the police station is already on the map.

On Test, the buffs seemed underwhelming. I just had a chance to test them on Live in exactly the kind of circumstances for which they were meant.

Up against Nemesis, EB version. I brew up a couple of buffs: Knockback Protection (only a single tech material, good and cheap) and Disorient Protection (costly, but I don't want to be stunned).

KB protection seems to work, but halfway through the fight I'm suddenly reeling around, stunned. Couldn't pop the health insp that would have saved me. Hmm. Didn't I just invest some fairly rare salvage in some stun protection?

These stations have the potential to be really cool, but as it stands (whether by bug or by design) they just aren't worth the salvage it takes to make them.

Some stuff I learned from Archon_Voss:

The number of boss NPCs in Recluse's Victory will be lowered from its current level to about one third of the total NPCs, to make the 'defeat 100 enemies to reset zone' task easier for the losing side. (This will also mean that Insp drops are easier to get in RV, since you won't have to wade through bosses to get them.)

There may also be a set Prestige/Infamy award added to this task for the losing side, to give them a bit more incentive to turn the clock around quicker.

<-- not American or Canadian enough

/em makeacupoftea

/em sigh

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Can anyone tell me where the mission contacts are in RV?

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There aren't any.

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Level 50 heroes are supposed to be able to do PvP missions in RV so they can earn the badges, right?

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They can go to Warburg now to do that. The max level for Warburg missions has been set to 50 with I7.

OK, there are some things we haven't tested yet.

Take a look at this zone writeup.

Particularly this bit:

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Once a side has captured 6 pillboxes and wins the round, a timer clock of 5 minutes starts. This is hunting time.

Winners: you get double temporal points for each enemy slain- now is the time to bring that up to 1000, which will gain you a Temp power Robot when the game resets.

Losers: The battle is lost but not the war- you have the ability to reset the clock and position yourself for the next battle. Killing 100 things (enemy, critters, and turrets) not only gets you straight up temporal points values, but also resets the clock. Remember, if you have 1000 points when the temporal reversion happens, you too get a temp power Robot.

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My emphasis. If the losers defeat enemy players OR 'critters' OR turrets, and do this often enough to get 1000 points (should be possible, given enough timer resets) then they can get the temp power pet too.

So maybe the next time a side loses, there should be all out NPC slaughter, just to see what happens.

I've PMed Archon Voss to ask about the definition of 'critters' here, btw. I think it means NPCs, but I could be wrong.

EDIT: The splendid Archon has responded:

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Sorry- Critters is an in house term. yes all NPC's, IE longbow and Arachnos. the trick is to defeat 100 total "things" and this will automatically reset the clock. "things include NPC's enemy players, and Turrets.

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So, the more the losing side keeps resetting the timer, the more time the winning side will have to take down the remaining AVs/heroes. Hmmm....