MadScientist

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Pacing of the Turtle:
/Rech IO in the set shows "Slow Attack Speed" as its effect when slotted, not Recharge Time.

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that happens with every Recharge buff you slot in a power that does a Slow. it does actually buff the recharge and not affect the target's attack speed any more than the power normally does.

you don't need to copy to test it. get a slow enhancer, hover it over a slot, see what it tells you it will buff. (I don't have a Trick Arrow character to do this with.)



Edit: bah, let me rewrite the whole rest of this again, I shouldn't try to do math in the morning.

The trouble seems to stem from Glue Arrow rolling the Proc 3 times. If you do that, you have a 9.6% chance of seeing 2 successful procs per attack. There is a .8% (1 in 125) chance of seeing 3. So I don't think you can claim that not seeing 3 proves anything.
In fact, if you're seeing doubles often enough, it probably hints that the double really is 2 out of 3 proc rolls. If it's only doing 2 rolls, you'd see the double a lot less often (only 4% of the time). So it may be worth setting up a test in front of a targetting dummy in the RWZ to see how often it double-hits.

The real question is then whether Glue Arrow rolls 3 times because it does a Slow Run then a DisableFly and a -JumpHeight, or if it rolls 3 times because it does a Slow Run, a Slow Jump and a Slow Fly (so not rolling on the DisableFly or -JumpHeight). If the Slow enhancer doesn't show a Slow Jump or Slow Fly, then this is easy to answer. If the Slow does hit 3 attributes, then we should find a power to test this on that does a Slow Run and a DisableFly but no -JumpHeight or something, and see if that does a double often enough to indicate it's hitting 2-out-of-2 or 2-out-of-3.

But either way, it's the power that's the trouble. The proc is merely doing what procs do, rolling whenever the effect triggers. This is no worse than trying to say "my KB Proc is busted because it never triggers in Repel!" when really it's the nature of Repel that causes the odd behavior. The slow proc is not broken in every power, only in some, so the problem is those powers not the proc.
I guess the question is: which other powers take Slow and end up rolling the Proc more than once? and is that list large enough that they'd fix it if we start abusing this?

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Glue Arrow

-Runspeed, -Jumpheight, and -Recharge.

Only the -Runspeed is enhanceable.

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if you slot it with a Slow SO, does it list Slow Run, Slow Jump and Slow Fly?

That may explain it. It could be rolling the Proc 3 times per target.

Again, though, the Proc isn't technically what's broken, any Slow proc would have the same behavior.

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Impeded Swiftness: Chance for Smashing Damage is double-hitting once in a while. Meaning, it can proc twice on a critter for any given check. Saw it happen several times tonight, including once when I hit a spawn of 3 critters (with Glue Arrow) and saw 4 damage numbers.

It's not another proc (this is the only damage proc that can be slotted in Glue), it wasn't an attack, it was this proc.

Already reported to the developers. Enjoy it while it lasts.

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Does Glue Arrow do anything in particular that would make it apply 2 Slow effects?

I'm thinking before you go create a huge demand for this proc that the proc itself isn't doing anything different, and that the power has some odd effect that triggers it twice.

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*shrug* it would be an option.

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the devs don't spend a lot of time coding for bases at all. do you want that limited time to be spent on an option the vast majority of groups would either not use, or be hurt by?

I think the difference is in what, exactly, is rewarded.
I agree that the top badge is to award to the top healers. It should come in some reasonable time (the current time is way off, and even the 5 year goal of the Devs is off).
But the issue is really: What does it award?

If the badge awards someone who does nothing but heal, then I think the badge fails in the goal of all badges, which should be to improve the game experience.

Thus, the badge should award a highest performance healer for doing what they do. Not healing 24-7, but healing at a decent rate typical of normal gameplay.

Is that rate 80% of the potential max? 50%? 10%? I dunno.
Yes, this means someone can do out and get it 25%, twice, or maybe even 10 times faster if they play differently. So what? If they want it that bad, they can choose to either have patience or to force their build/gameplay to adapt - at least it's their choice, there is not just the 1 path to the badge requiring the build/gameplay to be used a certain way. It's very similar to, say, someone with an accolade at a very low level. Just because it's typically earned in a given time doesn't mean someone won't get it faster, and there's nothing really wrong with that.

You're trying to set the bar using the 2 extremes: max rate times max time. I'm saying that the bar has to be set a little lower because the goal is "in normal play" and max rate is decidedly not "normal play". Yes, this opens up a variety of total times, but I'm not seeing what they would be a problem. There's already a variety of times to get the badge since the max rate would vary by AT and powerset - I think it's better to set the badge at the middle of the range of AT/Powers who heal instead of pinning the number to one end of that range and having everyone else still working overtime.

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The only bad thing about market sales counting towards infamy badges, this can be exploited so easily. I can get a lowbie SO/TO and use my other account to sell it back n forth for 50 mil. Do that a bit over 40 times and u get both of the last 2 epic inf badges in no time at all. Don't get me wrong, i'd love to get the last 2 inf badges quickly, but i don't see that happening.

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and as I mentioned above, there's a transaction fee on that.

To do this back and forth on 2 of your alts to get the badge, you're going to be spending 400000000.

In other words, to even reach a point where you can consider exploiting this (and there are other issues with being able to do that) you're going to need to pay a lot of cash. Do *you* have 400000000 laying around? Heck, I'm not even sure I could spare 10 mil to pass it back and forth one time!

something to consider about the Inf badge...

as it currently stands, you get the last badge by GENERATING 2 billion inf.
that's significantly different than EARNING 2 billion inf.

To put it another way, every badge hunter who chases this badge adds 2 billion more inf into the economy. (Let's face it, you can't blow 2 billion on costume changes.) Plus that goes up as they get other drops they sell to NPC stores.
If they allowed market earnings to count, you could earn the badge without generating anything and in fact REMOVE up to 200 million from the market via transaction fees.
+2,000,000,000 vs -200,000,000. Which do you think is better for an economy where the rich stuff is climbing further out of reach?

Seems to me it would be in the badge chaser's favor AND in the Devs'/economy's favor to count earning Inf from the market. Perhaps from NPC stores, too.

(edit - restored the thread title.)

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Im stating..... That people CANT and should not always expect to have everything they want.

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You're saying the Devs bothered to code this Empath badge into the game so that we could... what? Look at it on a badge list instead of getting it?

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Sorry... Pulling a quote from a while back but I wasnt around. Was playing the game and working towards my epic badges. Priorities in my own entertainment and all.

Let me ask this..... IS there someone who actually has the empath badge at this moment in time? Not HOW they got it. Simply yes or no. Does someone.... anyone, have this badge on a character?

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Let me answer it this way:
There is no character that has been awarded Empath for using their healing powers on teammates.

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You should add another category of issues with IO's: misleading set bonus text, set bonus text that should be revised, or something of that sort.

Healing set bonuses from Numina's Convalescence, Harmonized Healing, Doctored Wounds, Miracle, Regenerative Tissue and Triage all have this text:

"Improves the Healing of all your powers by X%"

That text is INCORRECT. "All" does not mean "All" because any heal power that grants damage resistance (reconstruction, kuji-in rin, healing flames, high pain tolerance, etc.) does not receive that bonus.

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I'd be more inclined to list the bug as:
reconstruction, kuji-in rin, healing flames self-heals do not benefit from set bonuses that improve healing.
I don't care if the explanation is "oh, the code sees them as buffs not heals", they are described as healing powers in-game, so this should be fixed to work on them! Heck, it's called HEALING Flames, not Toxic Resist Flames, which do you think is the primary effect?

As to High Pain Tolerance or Dull Pain... since those are +HP power primarily I'm not sure what the intent is on those to be treated as "healing" powers. May or may not be worth raising a fuss over. would be nice if they get fixed at the same time, though, cause it's not like it's a huge gamebreaking amount of heal.



On a related note, what's the current status of the old issue with Transfusion recieving the set bonus buffs intermittently? Anyone kept an eye on that recently? (I just respec'd one kin and he's not slotted to test it anymore, and the other went to the great Alt Recycle Bin in the sky.)

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Back up a second. If the average gamer plays 10 hours/week.

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You quoted my own pre-response to that comment:

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In my opinion, 500 would be too low for the last healing badge, unless you subscribe to the belief that at least for anyone for which it was achieveable at all, all badges should be achievable in reasonably short periods of time by casual players. I don't think I subscribe to that specific restriction on [u]all[u] badges

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Did you skip over *my* response to that theory?

Let me sum up what I said above in different terms:
If the average gamer plays 10 hours a week, and you think the badge should be achievable in some given time (you stated 2 years), then do you think the gamer should do nothing but chase the badge for that given time frame?

Do you want the gamer to do nothing but heal for 10 hours a week for 2 years? I don't think a gamer would keep their subscription that long just to log on an click heal. So if they're healing at 40% of that rate, because of inefficient teaming, exemping, playing alts, messing around with holiday content, etc., then we're back to seeing 5 years of "normal play" in order to get the badge.

They may put in 1100 hours of play, but the badge should not be for 1100 hours of healing if your goal is 2 years. That's irrational to ask someone to forgo the rest of the game for that length of time.

So in the 1100 hours of play, is 500 hours of that spent healing an OK number for you?

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Back up a second. If the average gamer plays 10 hours/week. That is 520 hours/year. Seems pretty bang on.

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ya' beat me to it.

note that I'm talking about 500 hours of *dedicated healing* for the badge.
I fully realize that some people may *play* 1100 hours in a year, but given the number of alts and activities that don't lead to maximizing your healing potential, I wanted to aim lower than that.
The difference between "doing a lot of healing" and "doing nothing but healing". 500 is a lot of healing, and it's OK to expect a badge hunter to do something else over the course of a year.

Also, it has to be rather low for people who really do heal a lot, like a /Thermal with mutliple heals, so that for someone who doesn't heal a lot like a Storm they still have some kind of a shot at it with even more effort. If you start at 1000 hours for a /Thermal the Storm probably doesn't see any difference between 4000 hours in that setup and 40000 in the current setup, both are out of reach even to the most dedicated.

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30,000 Hit Points/hour (theoretical number!) at 500 hours is 15 million HP healed.

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And just to drive home my point about the 500 hour mark... should you have a non-theoretical number once you get data from the Vault, or if we do better computation on what an "ideal heal power" should fire for per hour, then you could adjust the 15 million total accordingly around the 500 hour mark.

In general, 500 hours should be all you need for the topmost badge for anything you're good at. For example, if you're a melee character, the top damage badge should be obtainable in 500 hours of serious melee. If you PVP, the top rep badge should be obtainable in 500 hours of PVP, or less. (probably it's actually a lot less, right?)


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It would bring the top personal healing badge under the top group healing badge (as it stands now, having the top group healing badge at 1/10th the top personal badge is a bit insane).

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I'm not so sure 100 million is balanced for that one, either.
Positron said that the 750 PVP kills for the fusion generator should be seen as 10 kills per person in a full group. Taking a full group, what percentage actually heal? Probably about 1/5th, considering the number of sets that don't have heals even within the Defender AT. So we're talking about (when this was created) 15 people splitting up the work for ~7 million each. 3.5 million each if you consider it in light of the new rosters.
Now look at 10 kills per person. That's HALF the first PVP badge! Instead, we have people expected to put in millions each? While passing up Inf gains?
To put it in another perspective, I'm in a villain SG that had one of the first Auto-Docs on the server. We have not used any sort of farming, and STILL don't have 100 million healing after all this time.

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This is why I wanted to wait until the CoH Vault opened, so I could get an approximate value of healing an hour by various means.

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Well, before we do that, how about a theoretical argument?

How many hours should one be expected to play a healer before the game recognizes that, indeed, you are a great healer?

That is, if I was to just do what I do, and heal a WHOLE LOT, at some point I should be naturally rewarded with this badge. Right? That's the entire point of keeping this non-farmed.
If I mentor a lot, I eventually get recognized for it with the highest badge. If I spend all my hours PVPing, I eventually get a badge for that. and so on.

So how much time should I spend healing? 14000 hours? 140 hours? Somewhere in between?

We need that piece of the equation anyways, no matter if the healing rate is produced by theory (some ideal setup with teammates taking max possible damage without dying) or by experimentation (on the Vault).


IMHO, the number should be 500 hours. If I set out and "be a healer" for 500 hours, I should expect that's enough to convince the game that I'm dedicated enough to deserve the last badge. Obviously, weaker healers (ie: Storm, Aid Other) may take longer, and stronger healers (those who average larger teams, or defender primaries instead of controller/corruptor secondaries) may be a little faster. But for an "average" Corr or Controller on an "average" team of 5, it should be 500 hours of gameplay.

What do other people think the badge's timeframe is supposed to be? since 5 years on a single alt is pretty darn silly, especially once they released COV.

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500k per hour! The number is 500k per day btw.

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oops, typo on my part.

Still, at 7 hours to get 500k, you're looking at needing 2000 times that, or 14000 hours, to get 1 billion.
which means my calculation was right, I just wrote "per hour" instead of "per day" on that 500k. my bad, it's been fixed. good catch.

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Because to get that the healers would have to get 500,000 hp healed/day at the very least. Outside of arena/lava/crystal farming, I doubt that you are going to get that without 6-8 hour day. Every day for 5 years. At that point I better be on NCSoft's payroll.

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Let's get some different perspective on that number...

At 6-8 hours a day totalling 500k we're looking at ~14 thousand hours to get 1 billion healed.
So instead of saying Empath is 1 billion, consider Empath as 14,000 hours running at maximum healing capacity.

That means you have to be on a large team, with the team constantly taking enough damage that your heal is not wasted. You should be 50. No exemplaring - that would reduce your heal power. You can't count time you spend running off to sell drops or anything else like that.

Does any single character actually have an expected lifetime of 14,000 hours?
We've talked about the Devs not correctly estimating the healing speed per hour, but there's also this other time-related problem of the Devs misjudging how many hours a character will spend doing that healing!

Is this making the problem clearer for people who think that Empath is as achievable as it should be?


(Edit: yes, 500k per day. the 14000 number is still the right result, the calculation was just written badly. sorry.)

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1. the "holding room" for crafted items while moving rooms.

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As I often say on this forum, seek solutions that are useful to many situations.

Simply: Don't delete items when they're picked up from a room, put them back in inventory.

So there we have a general improvement that can allow you to shuffle rooms, but can also alow you to remove things from the plot for longer periods of time if you choose. eg, we can swap out the Tech Generator for an Arcane one, then swap back in a month without re-crafting. It also helps prevent griefing, since someone can trash the room but not cost us Salvage from crafted items; or in kinder non-griefing terms, it makes the editor more forgiving.

See the improvement?


Also, there's a lot of potential problems using something only in the editor, as opposed to a permanent inventory. For example, you risk being unable to shuffle an item into the room because of pathing code. You also would have to worry about held items when you leave the editor (and remember, you can leave the editor unwillingly thru crashes, so you can't just put a warning "are you sure you want to lose the held items?")

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How long for non-farmers?

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This is a better question. When the developers encourage play the game improves. With a goal of 25 million for Empath, at 90,000 HP healed/day my suggestion would get the badge in 10 months (about 300 days). Given that those with aid other, that would be 2-5 times as long, but still should be doable in about 5 years, rather than the 30-60 it would take now.

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Save me the trouble of digging thru your posts, please...
How did you derive a the 90,000 HP/day as the rate of Maximum Speed Healing?
What did you establish as a per day rate of Full Speed Aid Other?



I agree that a dedicated healer you play multiple times a week should have the last badge in a year, which probably means 10 months at the level 50 rate. We may end up needing to debate what is an average play time per week of a dedicated player. Though I think both the healing per hour from such characters AND the play time could be datamined by the Devs and back-filled into the calculation if they accept the 10 month value by itself.

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And the point is that Empath SHOULD NOT BE intended only for a very very small few.

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I think it should, why shouldn't there be some badges that only a very few people will get? I think that makes those badges special. It's like bug hunter. The devs have to give you that badge. And that's what's so great about it. Not everyone is going to have it.

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But back up a minute here.
Sure, we have a progression of healing badges, just like a number of damage, selling, or mentoring badges. Obviously there's a scale that some are "easy" and some are "hard" and some are "really just for the truely dedicated/obsessed". And one can argue about where those levels should be set.

Empath is,
A) Not actually achievable by that top group within *any* reasonable time without farming,
and B) EASILY and TOO OFTEN achieved by people not in that group at all, namely farmers.
Ergo, Empath is not working correctly.
Right?

Before the issue of whether there should BE a category "really just for the truely dedicated/obsessed", the issue is that Empath doesn't *do that*.
Do you at least agree with that?

Then the debate as to how to fix it, and if the fixed Empath should have a "really just for the truely dedicated/obsessed" requirement, and just how high that requirement should be... that's all after the fact that you acknowledge that Empath in its current form needs to be addressed *some how*.

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BIG difference between coding things you may not want and coding things no one can achieve. If they coded transfers but charged $1,000 for them, it'd be a waste of code because so few people would care. Empath is the same - it's affecting far too few people to be of any use.

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How is that remotely comparable? Transfers are intended to be available widely. Empath is intended to only be available to a very, very small group of people.

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Funny, you ask "how" and then immediatly state how.
It'd comparable because I said "if.." *If* transfers had been intended for only a few.
And the point is that Empath SHOULD NOT BE intended only for a very very small few.

Or, at least, it's not CODED for a very small few who heal for 5 years, it's coded either for farmers or for those who heal for insanely huge numbers of (~20) years. Which means, back to my point, it's not serving it's *intended purpose*, since it's not available for "a few years of healing".
If the goal is "about 5 years" then you should be all in favor of the math that's done that shows exacly how much one can be expected to heal in that time, which is a number far lower than Empath's current value.

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It's pretty clear to me that Positron never intended for people to "catch em all". Otherwise, why make badges like that?

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Again, this is also not what was coded. Especially not the first batch before Empath even existed. If the Devs really did intend a system where people don't have access to everything, they didn't give us THAT, they gave us a system where certain things are of different levels of inconvenience.
(and really, not the first, nor I expect the last, of such things to be handed to us in a manner that doesn't quite match the design intent. For example, I'm sure last issue didn't intend for level 17s to get purple recipe drops.)

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I don't see how it's lowering my standards to accept that the badge requirements are extremely high and that I won't therefore have a badge.

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I didn't say that.
I rephrased your suggestion C and made it clear that you're asking the people who are crying over Empath to lower *their* standards and accept they'll never have them all.
I don't care about your standards. and I'm wondering why you're trying to dictate other peoples'.

Maybe, though, your advice can apply to you. Accept that you can't control how others play the game and recognize that you really can't win every argument and find a new thread.


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As for coding content that I'm not intended to use, the devs do that all the time. I've not used the rename or server transfer yet. Despite the fact that I whined for it for many years, I've yet to actually make use of the unlimited respecs now available to us. Not everything in the game is going to be things "I'm intended to use." And thank goodness for that.

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BIG difference between coding things you may not want and coding things no one can achieve. If they coded transfers but charged $1,000 for them, it'd be a waste of code because so few people would care. Empath is the same - it's affecting far too few people to be of any use.
This may be a shock, but that comment was not about what you PERSONALLY intend to use. This isn't about you.



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The last comment is simply petulant. With any MMO you have to find the enjoyment in it that you will and accept that in a game that's intended to appeal to broad groups of people, that there will be things that you don't like in the game. I hate ED, but I still enjoy the game as a whole. Are you really telling me, that giving up on Empath would mean you wouldn't enjoy the game? Is that what you mean?

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*sigh*. You're still trying to read into this and make it about personal opinions. It's not.
It's about the fact that Empath is far too high and beyond any personal opinion. The decision to want it or not is superceded by the fact that people *can't* get it in rational time.

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There is another option: (C) Recognize that you really, really don't have to "have them all" and just accept that you'll never have Empath.

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You mean, C) Lower your standards.
You mean, C) Consider that the Devs bothered coding content you're not intended to use.
You mean, C) Don't bother actually wanting to play and enjoy this game. Leave. Go somewhere else.
Right. Sure. Whatever.

And those EndMod sets that are broken, let's pull that off the known issues list and just tell people they should decide they didn't need to slot for that anyways, there are plenty of other IOs to slot. Oh yeah, let's all start a new campaign about how you don't really want more HP from your rez rings and you should scrap those Robo Surgeons instead of waiting for them to be repaired, you can put plenty of other objects in your base. Got lag in zones? The problem is that you're impatient, not that the game needs optimizing. Stalkers don't have enough HP? Let's forget AT balancing, let peoeple stop playing Stalkers and play more Brutes.

None of those make any sense.

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A while back I said I would support lowering the requirements if they could legitamately close the loopholes. If they can't, then I would rather they did nothing for pretty much the reasons you gave.

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Perhaps you could call out the piece where you explain why it matters how much someone farms?
If farming is possible, is it somehow a different achievement if they're farming 100 million instead of 25 million?

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Now, what happens if the epic badges are reduced to something possible through normal gameplay, without farming? Well, the people farming for them will get them easily, of course...

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unless they also cut off the farming methods since they're artificial and will be completely unneccessary for badges you can now earn normally.
however, they can't cut them off while they're the only way to get the badges.


for example, the only real way to get the last pillbox badge was to swap. they cut off swapping AND made the badge team-friendly so it could be reachable normally. you can't really do one without the other.

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But empath is a bit different, because there's no such meaningful progress you can make in conventional play, even as a dedicated healer. Its not beyond reasonable for even dedicated players to be getting only a couple of ticks on this badge in a year, and that is otherwise optimal players. Non-optimal players, except by using loopholes, have zero chance of gaining this badge in conventional play any time this century.

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That paragraph brings up an interesting related point.
Empath tells you *how* to play your healer.
If you're, say, a Controller with the Empathy secondary, if you're controlling well you may not even NEED to heal all that much. At least, compared to lower levels when you spam heals because the team needs them more than your low-level Sleep powr. If you want the badge, what do you do? Start letting your team take damage so you can get your progress???