MajorDecoy

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Tasks

<ul type="square"> Tech. Naylor’s souvenir clues should unlock Rularuu Weapons for the appropriate powersets.[/list]
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Quick couple of questions: Does this only count for Heroes? Or is it a cross-game change? If so, if we have already completed the arc and recieved the souvenir will we have to redo the arc in Ouro to get credit for it?

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I'm pretty sure it's Villain only. If you can get Technician Naylor on a Hero, there's a bigger issue at hand than the Rularuu Weapons.

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Just a head's up for everyone, we're going to be buckling down to get Issue 12 done...so you may see a lull in redname activity on the forums for a bit. Might not get as many immediate responses to PMs...mailboxes will probably fill up...posts demanding immediate answers will undoubtedly go unanswered

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Meanwhile, the world's seals, left alone by the busy devs, are able to multiply in record numbers. The massive seal population becomes emboldened, and starts encroaching on cities across the globe with newfound confidence. Soon seals take over the planet and become the dominant life-form, eclipsing mankind. Humanity becomes extinct, and a rain of seals is visited upon the earth the likes of which has not been seen since the early 1800s.

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Well, someone is a fan of Lewis Black (or one of the other two comedians).

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Give any self +ToHit an equal an opposite -Dmg effect to caster.

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That makes certain sense for melee characters, in that, if you're swinging harder, you've got less control over whatever it is you're swinging with.

However, for ranged characters, I don't see how taking a moment to improve your aim will reduce your damage. It makes sense for +to hit to be coupled with +damage. If your am has improved then you're more likely to do more damage with the attacks you use.

Thematically, it would make more sense for +to-hit to be coupled with either something that increased the amount of time it took a power to activate (which would be a hell of a bother to program) or increased the amount of time the power takes to recharge.

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I heard that's how they do it on Justice.

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That's how we do everything on Justice, including hamidon raids.

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Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

And the funny thing is, an exemplar/sidekick system like yours is something that would be even easier to implement in every other MMO in the market. In every other game on the market, most of your combat stats are derived from character attributes that go up more or less linearly per level, and from the stats on equipment of whatever level you're using, which also increase more or less linearly per level. This means that for them, adding the ability to sidekick up to a friend's level, or exemplar down, could be added with not much more than one line of code, not counting the code to track distance between the mentor and sidekick. Because of the freeform power selection, City of Heroes has to memorize what order you picked your powers in, store that information as part of the character data, and adjust your power list on the fly as your level jumps up and down. (I do go back just barely far enough to remember when this didn't happen.) You went to the trouble of doing it, though. That's nothing less than amazing, now that I realize it.

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To be fair, Everquest II does have Exemplaring. Multiple higher level players can exemplar down to one low character's level and the low level character will earn bonus experience for each mentor. The mentors also earn experience, but at a reduced rate.

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The simplest suggestion I can think of, that would require very little real work, would be to hand out to everyone a new inherent power, called "LookAtMe" (well, something cool), that was a zero endurance burning toggle that suppressed self-stealth.

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I want that power and I want it called that.

And in a build that can use Energy Transfer twice in one activation of build-up.

That's very wrong.

I don't see the IO sets that provide a -Endurance cost that you're talking about.

Also, the build I posted really only has 6 attacks, and 5 of them are already 5 or 6 slotted.

That leaves Energy Transfer to slot with Endurance reduction, but that's not really the most endurance hungry power that Energy Melee has.

Sure, it helps to slot it with Endurance Reduction, but then you can't do the obscene damage you could do if you'd just slotted it for accuracy, damage, and recharge.

You don't seem to have terribly many options for slotting with this build.

Well, the true problem with the EM/SR scrapper is that you'll be out of endurance almost as quickly as a blaster who uses a nuke.

And you'll be losing 9% of your health every 6 seconds, which is rather painful.

I kind of wish I had an Energy Melee/Super Reflexes to try that with.

If you're going for offensive advantages, don't look at Tanks.

Keep SR, because the Defense powers and Quickness are both important.

Go Energy Melee/Super Reflexes.

This is an odd build, and definately only a respecification build, but it looks interesting.

Get the prescence pool, Intimidate gives you Glimpse of the abyss and 1 orange recharge.

Energy Punch can be slotted for stun, it gets stupefy and 1 orange recharge.

The AOE Patron Pool Power gets Positron's Blast, and 1 orange recharge.

The Snipe Patron Pool Power gets Sting of the Manticore and 1 red recharge.

Aid Other gets Doctored Wounds and 1 black recharge

One Defense gets Kismet and a blue recharge, another gets Red Fortune and another blue recharge.

The Single Target Patron Pool Power gets Decimation and an orange recharge.

Total Focus gets Crushing Impact for a black recharge.

That's a 50% recharge bonus.

With 5 7.5% recharge enhancements, you get a 37.5% bonus.

The build fits hasten, for a 70% bonus.

And quickness for 20%

First off, hasten has a recharge of 120.8 seconds with this build, so it's effectively permanent.

Things of note about this build: it skips both Placate and Assassin Strike.

In fact, it only has Energy Punch, Build-up, Energy Transfer, and Total Focus from Energy Melee.

This isn't a detriment though, with 3 recharge SOs, Energy Transfer recharges in about 5.4 seconds.

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its even going to get stacked for short periods of 15 or so seconds.

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Yes, Stacked Hoar Frost is really not all that impressive. Stacking Hoar Frost means you go from 3212 Health to 3212 while Hoar Frost is stacked.

Yes, Dull Pain and Hoar Frost are nice powers, both good to have, but the only real advantage in having them stack is that the heal comes much more often.

90% of the time, that heal will be wasted if you have Hoar Frost on Perma.

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With SR:
DM: soul drain close to perma,

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This one is an interesting combination.

With Dark Melee/Super Reflexes/Darkness Mastery

You can go:

Touch of Fear: Glimpse of the Abyss, 5 Slots, 1 orange -Recharge

Boxing: Stupefy, 5 slots, 1 orange - recharge

Tenebrous Tentacles (or Torrent I suppose): Positron's Blast, 1 orange - recharge

Siphon Life: Doctored Wounds, 5 slots, 1 black - recharge

Tough: Impervious Skin, 5 slots, 1 black - recharge

Any defensive toggle: Kismet, 5 slots, 1 blue - recharge

Another defensive toggle: Red Fortune, 5 slots 1 blue - recharge

Dark Blast: Decimation, 5 slots, 1 orange - recharge

Smite: Crushing impact, 5 slots, 1 black - recharge

That's 4 orange - recharge, 3 black - recharge, and 2 blue - recharge.

That's good for 47.5% bonus to recharge rates, then you've still got slots left to put 5 of the +7.5% recharge speed enhancements in.

So thats:

47.5% set bonuses
37.5% recharge IO
20% Quickness

With Hasten to that, you've got a recharge of just about 121 seconds.

So almost Perma hasten again.

The only problem is that it is an exceedingly tight build, power wise. Only after doing a quick build to see if it had the slots for it did I notice that I hadn't been able to include Hasten.

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Not an advantage... hardly. You looking at hasten have 20 seconds of down time tops... so 120 on 140 off. Even better apply it to ice/* tank with the same numbers - 20% for quickness. In which you will get perma hoarfrost. Or even here for other sets: maneuver, CJ, Stealth, Weave, grant invis. There is 37.5% on its own. Add that to regen or any set with a dull pain for pretty close to perma dull pain with hasten.

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Couple things:

1) I didn't say it's not an advantage. But 37.5% recharge isn't even roughly comparable to 15% defense in terms of affect on a character.

2) I wouldn't take all that crap as a Regen just to use the APEs. There an opportunity costs to each slot you devote to APEs. Whoever asked before if you would rather have a large non-stacking bonus or several smaller stacking bonuses, I'll go for the large one everytime because you only take up one slot. If you give up a bit on the max side that's OK.

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Not only that, but that's 4 power pools there, and Fitness isn't one of them.

And without Hasten, that 37.5% recharge buff isn't doing all that terribly much for dull pain.

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This is also on the second hoarfrost... So you have Hoarfrost up 240 / 249 seconds.

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This is also wrong. There will be 240 seconds of uninterrupted Hoar Frost, yes. And then an 8 second gap between the second and the third hoar frost. But there will also be an 8 second gap between the third and the fourth. Following something out to the third iteration isn't really enough to establish a pattern.

There will continue to be an 8 second gap between recharges until the patter entirely resets and Hoar Frost and Hasten are both up at the same time.

It looks like it might reset completely on the 6th cycle of Hoar Frost.

So 24 seconds of hoar frost down over 632 seconds of play.

My math has hasten down for 38 seconds, not 29.

But that still only has hoar frost down for 8 seconds.

Still, perma Hoar Frost isn't really the most impressive thing in the world, especially with all the +health availible in IOs.

Perma Hoar Frost with the accolades (with the +10% and either of the +5%) hits the tanker hit point cap of 3212.

Meanwhile, a tanker slotting IOs to benefit their existing powers best (and not just trying to get recharge or +Health, but instead using the full defensive sets on defensive powers, damage sets with damage powers, a hold set) can easily get +14.25% to be riding around at 2519, without any endurance cost.

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Also: Hasten + 0.375 speed + 3-slot recharge is not perma-hoarfrost. Not since I6, anyway.

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HoarFrost

1.0 - base
.375 - IO
.70 - hasten
.95 - slots

3.025

Hoar frost 360 rechage 120 up. 360 / 3.025 = 119 recharge

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But since hasten isn't Permanent, it's not really perma Hoar Frost.

Sure, you'll have two consecutive Hoar Frosts without pause, but Perma- Hoar Frost is when you constantly have Hoar Frost up.

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a system that doesn't make every MM player in existence's brain hurt emerged from the chaos.

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That's a kludge of a phrase.

I'd have gone this way with that:

That doesn't make the brain of each and every Mastermind in existence hurt.

Or

That doesn't hurt the brain of every Mastermind in existence.

That aside. I don't see how having a during on a click hurts the mind of a Mastermind.

"Oh, it's been 5 minutes since I've summoned. I should hit this button again"

That's all there was to it, it doesn't seem to be all that difficult. You don't have to have less than the maximum possible number of Henchmen. You just needed to click the button.

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Ok thanks. That does clarify what was said earlier about stuff in click powers always being on.

So quick rule of thumb.

Set Bonus' = Always On in clicks / passives
Set Bonus' = Only On in toggles when toggle is on.

Special IO's = Always on in passives
Special IO's = Only On in toggles when toggle is on / Only on in clicks when the power is clicked.

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No, Set Bonuses are Always On in clicks/passives/toggles.

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Gah! My head hurts already!



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It's easy. If it is a bonus visible on the enhancement. "This enhancement adds 20% recovery" then it is active when the power is active (or has a set duration in a click power)

If it is a bonus not directly tied to a specific enhancement, then it is always active.

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I posted this *after* it was discovered that some IOs were marked "unique" and therefore you could only slot one of them, and *before* it was discovered that (at least for now) the Res+Def IO wasn't one of them (the smart money said it was going to be one of them).

Edit: also, the duration-based click-buff thing.

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Well, invulnerability only has two click powers, and I don't think anyone is going to slot things into Unstoppable.

Dull Pain, well, sure, I can see where if you slotted all 6 of Numinia's set into it, you might be annoyed that you only get the +Regen/+Recovery for a duration while Dull Pain is active, but you can stick that into Health and only miss on on the Ranged Defense (which doesn't stack with any of Invulnerability's defenses anyway)

All the rest of the options will slot into either toggles or passives with ease.

I don't see how any of this information alters things for Invulnerability at all.

(Also, on the Paragonwiki page, the Res/+ 3% def is marked as unique, which means I won't get to slot one into each of my passives like I had planned. Oh well, it probably wouldn't have stacked with Tough Hide anyway.)

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Hmm. Well it looks like Invuln took quite an IO-beating in the last two days. DA and Regen still look pretty good though. Time to go to plan C for my Invulns on build optimization.

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What happened to Invulnerable? I don't see what changed with this information.

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Lighthouse worked for Sony, whom removed his soul and sent him over to us, which is why he is the way he is.

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No, hours upon hours of playing EverQuest and PlanetSide did that (not to mention all those other games that I shouldn't mention, cause well these are the CoH forums). But then, I don't design the game, so you are safe!

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Yeah, working at Sony wasn't really all that bad.

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Rage is an awesome power, but 10 seconds of inactivity (nuisance), -25 end (um ouch on the blue) AND -20 defence is a horrid penalty.
And SS was balanced to rage. without rage, SS sucks. Better to go stone/ or axe/

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/stone or /axe, but that's nitpicking.

Without rage, Super Strength does better damage than War Mace and Ice. Super Strengh also has better control than War Mace.

With rage, Super Strength does better damage than anything else, ignoring resistances.

Perhaps then, Super Strength should be reblanced to be less reliant upon Rage?

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Actually, I've yet to use a second respec on any character I own, most of them have 3-5 'banked' against future major changes.

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You can't have 5 respecifications 'banked'. The free respecs don't stack. If you can do the respec trial 3 times and get the earned respecs to stack, you can have 4, but I don't know, when I do the respec trials, I just grab the single origin enhancement.

If you know that there's going to be a free respec soon, then you should log onto your characters and see if they could benefit from using the one the have already.

I have Admiral Whiskers.

And his original costume. I got his new costume after Resilience provided some small damage resistance.