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Well, frankly, it's clear that you won't be one of those last ones standing, unless you're being kept alive by someone with far more knowledge and less hostility toward his fellow men/women.

You aren't a practicing survivalist, that's obvious. You wouldn't be posting in a nerd fight, about a television show, on a game forum if you were, and you damn sure wouldn't be so quick to discount how useful other people are to have around, if for no reason other than to alleviate the stress of being alone. Survivalism is using every tool to lean the odds in your favor, no matter how worthless it may appear to be, because the least thing may prove to be the most important and useful, and that includes other people. You don't throw things away until they're beyond hope of repair and there's nothing else you can salvage from them, if you're trying to survive. That includes companions.

You also clearly don't have any military training, or at least none above scrubbing toilets and hating your drill sergeant for "picking on you". If you were properly trained, and any of it had penetrated, you'd recognize the value of troop morale, something which is definitely not best served by arbitrary executions or testosterone-fueled attitude. Or sheer stupidity, like wanting to murder other people simply rather than try to help them because they aren't offering any immediate benefit, despite the fact that they also aren't an immediate danger.

If you had any experience of any kind from either source, you'd also be aware that no-one, not even the most proficient survivalist or most perfectly trained soldier, has every skill necessary for survival alone, a point which the writers deliberately drove home by showing Andrea and Amy fishing, Daryl hunting, Dale and Jim repairing vehicles, Rick and Shane leading and Glenn bringing tactical skill to the group.

Bottom line, you can sit there and bluster into your keyboard until the cows come home, but it's not fooling anyone and if there were an "apacolipse", throwing adolescent bravado at the zombies won't save your ***. You don't have the experience, raw knowledge or skill to keep yourself alive, much less make decisions on who else lives or dies, so you'd best hope that anyone you do find yourself tagging along with are more humane than you want to portray yourself as being.

Andrea clearly knew what she was doing. She knew how long it would take for Amy to turn, she knew how to finish it, she had the gun cocked and ready. She was in control of the situation, and she needed the time to grieve.

That would be inhumane, and clearly, these survivors (excluding Daryl) are as concerned about retaining their humanity and compassion as they are about their survival. Jim wasn't suffering initially, he wasn't an immediate threat, so shooting him then and there would be a cold, heartless action. One which would lead to more extreme behaviors later, like shooting everyone who stubbed their toes or came back from the woods with a scratch, "just to be safe".

It's noteworthy that Daryl, after so vehemently stating that he'd expect someone to pull the trigger on him if he were bitten, couldn't do it when he had the opportunity to put Jim out of his misery. He looked at Jim, with that crossbow drawn, loaded and ready, and no-one to stop him... and he just lowered his eyes and walked away, sorrow for Jim showing on his face.

Humanity. Treating your fellow man/woman with dignity, even if they're dead or dying. If you sacrifice that, you're really no better than the zombies, you're just a different kind of walking dead. That message should be obvious by now. They've all but flat out said it at least once in every episode.

Ooo, I hadn't considered that. I thought he was working on the virus exclusively, the tissue being nothing more than a convenient source of the original strain, but if he's looking at how the virus interacts with living tissue... yeah, he thinks there's no-one else alive in the world, so no way to cure the infection and no reason to keep trying. Good call.

Have to wonder now whether encountering other people will dispel the despair and renew his sense of purpose, or push him to do what BBM suggested. Andrea was crying in the preview... PTSD or CDC man secretly infecting her while insisting that she was already infected, in order to get new tissue samples?

We'll find out in 166 hours and 17 minutes.

...

WANT TIME MACHINE NAO!

Shock? The camp was just attacked, half a dozen or more people killed and in the process of being eaten, friends and companions wounded or unaccounted for. These people aren't soldiers, they aren't trained to retain their focus and presence of mind while dealing with intense emotional trauma in battlefield situations.

Or it could be that it's a serial television show, not a movie, and expecting anyone in the camp to react to Amy's death in any other way than they did, in the seconds between her dying and the episode ending, is just a bit much. They can't tell the entire story or cover every detail in a single episode, nor would they have much of a series if they did.

Morgan's explanation of his wife's death indicates that "it" (virus, spell, zorgoquatoidians using extradimensional cellular control technology, whatever) doesn't change a living person into a zombie immediately upon infection. Infection, fever, death, then turning, in that order. So the short few hours portrayed really wasn't sufficient to address that even if Nurse Vato was infected.

They may revisit it in a later episode, though. Plenty of time for someone to explain it, or for the survivors to revisit the Vatos. If an explanation is never given, I'm content assuming that Nurse Vato, having witnessed the results of "it", was aware of the danger and skilled enough to sterilize the wound in time.

TT/NF/repeat is my single-target attack chain.

Last time I checked, there wasn't a single contact in the standard game that forced you to run AE missions against player-generated kill machines. You have to specifically and consciously choose to run AE content, and accept the associated risk. No reason to alter base code for the entire game to account for some players not wanting to accept risk.

That particular example is impossible unless the player is outside, herding, in a hazard zone or PI... or is in a mission solo with his/her difficulty ramped far above the default. Choice made, risk accepted.

+

Okay, I was wrong. There are a few bosses/EBs in the game capable of defeating players with one attack, if that player is not making use of any damage mitigation tools and the boss/EB crits, has damage buffs or in some other way exceeds the expected damage output. Thank you, Cat and Arcana.

I'm still not seeing a case for change to the one-shot code.

I don't think that really counts, for the purposes of this discussion. That one is supposed to be a PKer.

I'm hung up on your continued insistence that the ATs with the most powerful controls, buffs and debuffs are incapable of surviving damage spikes because they "can't do anything". The terminology and suggested change are irrelevant, it's the foundation of your suggestion that I find troublesome. You keep circling back to a correlation between low HP and lack of self-sustainability in combat, yet you sidestep or ignore the fact that those same low HP ATs have access to tools which mitigate damage, and do so well enough for even the poorest of them, such as TA or Empathy, to permit players to survive solo against bosses and EBs.

The only time when your only available action is to die is when you're under the effects of extreme -Recharge and -Speed, which has resulted in you using up all of your available powers and having nothing left to throw at the enemy and being incapable of fleeing. In no other scenario are you ever left with no option but to give up. And neither your original proposal nor your modified proposal will resolve that. It wouldn't matter if the enemy dropped you to 90% HP, 35% HP or 1 HP, you'd still be stuck with all powers recharging and zero escape routes.

In every other situation, you do have choices. You can choose not to face bosses while solo. You can choose to auto-complete missions with EBs. You can choose to avoid bosses in zones. You can choose to recruit teammates or join teams to deal with tougher challenges. You can choose to stay out of melee range of enemies with crits or extreme damage melee attacks. You can choose to use your damage mitigation powers to improve your survivability. You can choose to use a Break Free when or before you're affected by status effects. You can choose not to face enemies which you know will be a problem for you. You can choose pool powers to supplement your build and increase your damage mitigation potential. You can choose to flee an untenable situation.

You have a rather sizable array of choices that you can make. Refusing to make any of them and dying isn't the fault of the game's random number generator, or how Defense and Resistance work relative to each other, or how critters were designed, or anything but your choices.

I race myself around the room.

Some day, I'm going to win.

I addressed that situation in my original response, but it disappeared in one of my edits before posting. Cest la vie.

Regardless, the solution to this scenario is, as with every other, already available. If your low level *** is being handed to you in a high level zone, grab it with both hands and carry it back to a zone more appropriate for your level. It's that simple.

Bottom line, you can't be one-shotted outside of extreme scenarios, such as running a TF solo or meandering around the RWZ with a lowbie, and players who do put themselves in those types of situations aren't doing so ignorantly, they actively choose to face that risk. So redesigning the game to prevent that risk from existing at all is a waste of development resources.

If you don't want to risk being defeated with a single attack, don't fight AVs solo, don't fight Monsters solo, don't fight +4 or higher enemies solo, don't try to spawn the Hamidon solo (is that even possible?). If you choose to do these things, you accept the risk.

Not snarling at you, Bill, just making sure that it's clear this time.

Nope.

Yes it is exactly true.

Which, in reality, is not the case for any GM, elite boss, boss, lieutenant, minion or underling in the game. Not a single one of these critter classes has even one attack which can defeat a player in one shot. Not one. Even if the attack deals multiple types of damage or has an additional DoT after the initial damage is applied, the total is still less than a mastermind's base HP.

Nothing below AV/Monster status has the capability to one-shot player characters, in any way. They just don't deal that much damage.

True, the debuff can't be resisted, not even by AV Resistance.

HOWEVER... go to the last paragraph for more.

Better not have been. Those were MY chips. Get your own.

No, yes and yes, with the second and third being dependent on the levels of the AVs or Hamidon in relation to the level of the debuffer.

The purple patch reduces all debuffs, damage, everything that affects enemies. It's not resistance, it's an outright reduction by XX% (varies by level of difference), so Flash Arrow is still subject to that restriction. +3 foes would experience only... 65% of the debuff, if I recall, resulting in a final debuff of 6.3375%.