Nihilii

That would explain why the "VIP until..." line is missing. I hope you are right. Thank you for sharing.

Bug: Burn ticks twice everytime it ticks, for a total of 26 ticks instead of the advertised 13 (resulting in double DoT damage).

I expect I'll keep making Mids builds and spreadsheet calculations for months after this game is closed, just like I did during each of my CoH breaks.

Come to think of it, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make a mockup program simulating (1vs1) AV fights.

Creeping around the Hollows in the European beta, slowly tiptoeing near walls, wary of those purple trolls. The entire zone oozed atmosphere and made me want to learn more about what happened here.

This is what most newer games are missing; by feeding you the plot right away, not giving you the time to wonder and ponder, they remove the sense of being part of a real, bigger world that doesn't (yet) care about you.

I don't know who coined the term "theme park MMOs" for these games where the only super powered individuals are Captain Exposition and his numerous clones, but it's an apt way to put it.

I remember my first encounter with the Psychic Clockwork King, as a regen scrapper. The entire team wiped with his initial AOE nuke, including three other regen scrappers... Save for me as I was in perma MoG (it worked against psi at the time, but blocked your regen and put you at 25% HP). Managed to hold out until they all got back.

In the same vein, herding entire maps on my I4 Inv/EM tanker and killing them - and myself - with one Energy Transfer, using the stacking bug (mobs were literally into each other, and due to the way Tanker gauntlet worked, your damage on ST attacks would apply to each and every mob in the stack).

I remember being part of the second group that beat the LRSF (germans beat us to the punch), which on Vigilance, limited population and all that, involved much organisation, alliances and strategies - couldn't expect people to play specific builds, getting 8 people online and motivated was often hard enough.

It also meant we were the only group with access to HOs, as hami raids were a rarity on that server; which created much drama and rivalries. Some of us being relatively successful PVPers at the time got flak for being "all HOs and no skill". The high point for me personally was when I rerolled a dominator with a name a friend suggested to poke fun at that, Agent G183HO ("G" sounding like "j'ai" meaning "I have"), and people started flamewars on the forums about that character being utterly unfair to other players due to her HO slotting... Even though she was level 30.

I remember pretending to be a woman for three years simply because I was too embarrassed to tell my friends I had been lying to them. It didn't even start on purpose, when people asked "are you a girl in real life?" I would answer "does it matter?" and they'd take it as a "yes". I guess I should have just said "no", but while I'm not a roleplayer I tend to get immersed into games, and if I validated this kind of real-life intrusion to my pretendy game time it'd have spoiled my fun.

As time passed I grew more and more annoyed with the situation and acted more and more like a stereotypical guy-pretending-to-be-female - flirty in ridiculous ways, obvious lies about myself, "girl talk" only a boy could think was genuine, overly aggressive, obsessive over numbers, etc., hoping people would get the hint. The result wasn't exactly what I hoped for: my at the time best ingame friend "fell in love" with me and went around behind my back telling his RL friends we had met and slept together... Never underestimate a man's credulity when boobs might be involved.

I remember moving to the US servers, making a brand new account (unrelated to the above, I have commitment issues with people in general and wanted a fresh start), only to run into the same people I was playing with on Vigilance, and become friends with them again, using a completely different personality, speech mannerisms and such. After a few months, one of my pals confronted me, although with hesitation, and I 'fessed up to it. What gave it away? "You're still the charging ahead maniac you've always been". Turns out changing your whole personality is much easier than changing your CoH playstyle.

I remember spending all my liquid influence at the time, 300 millions, right as I...13? was released to buy one of the first Gladiator's Armor +3 defense listed - and going around telling my friends how silly I was to have paid this much for it. Within days, prices went up, eventually all the way to the influence cap and above and stayed at that point for years.

I remember TFs most of all, the numerous TFs I've done with friends, the heated arguments as to what strategy worked best - said strategies often being about how to coerce one player who went AFK half of the time to actually play, or trying to turn a few others who played like Leeroy Jenkins on speed in the right direction. Actually accomplishing the mission objectives was secondary. Minmaxing people - people you like - is so much more fun than crunching numbers; especially when it goes horribly wrong. It often did.

Thanks for making this thread. I thought I had done everything I wanted to in this game, but this reminded me I still haven't played Sister Flame's AE arc.

I'm going to miss the ski slopes as well. Damn.

Sidekick system, which still hasn't been looked at by most games (whereas it should be an industry standard by now!).

Fast travel and movement. No timesink having to talk to Whatshisface to get quests.

Customization.

Loot and power system complex enough no single option could be determined as the absolute best.

Woah. Certainly didn't expect that. Heh, and a few days after I implied in a F2P topic the new payment model must have been a resounding success...

...How about Kickstarting the code source release?

It seems silly to forgo Lore Pets entirely to me. Testing is the entire point of tracking pylon killing time. On an AT like dominators, you can make the choice to sacrifice damage for perma-holding the AV as to let your pets live. How would you determine whether that sacrifice is worth it or not if you never test Lore?

That said, for the results to be relevant to anyone but yourself more information is needed. Exact powers, attack chain, etc.. Also a good idea to include the formula for calculating DPS in the very first post, so people don't have to dug it up somewhere.

Throwing a vote in for the DB/Elec. You should be able to get very high resistances to S/L/F/C/E come I24, while also softcapping S/L defense. DB can do decent damage with minimal recharge, Elec is end and heal sustainable by itself, so you can shoot for maximum mitigation with your IOs and incarnate powers.

I'd strongly suggest not picking Chilling Embrace as it breaks the ATO proc.

Some fairly disturbing morality you're expressing there, khorak. "No grey area" indeed.

So much hate against the green-skinned.

Use your own words, theheat.

I can't think of a single set using endurance drain as a primary mitigation mean. Compared to other secondary effects, i.e. recharge debuffs and such, it seems OK to me. There might be some room for improvement, but keeping the enemy from attacking entirely would be equivalent to an AoE hold... Even strong tohit debuffs don't quite get you to that level of mitigation.

For me, it never did. Momentum proved to be as tedious at level 50 than at level 10. I can handle TW in small doses, like say a few hours every few months, but couldn't imagine making a "serious" character with that primary. There is only so much annoyance one can handle even if it results in being overpowered. Perhaps TW is designed as a psychological experiment first and game powerset second...

I'll spin the debate around the other way: I doubt you can make a tanker as efficient with Fly as you could with Super Speed. A tanker should be the first into the fray, and SS (along with CJ + Hurdle) is the best way to accomplish that goal.

There is nothing more annoying as an AT without "movement control" (aggro management or AoE mezzes) to have to either wait for a brute or tanker lagging behind, or initiate the fight and risk getting killed/scattering things to the four winds.

Two bombs are enough to spawn the GM.

Solo mothership raids have been done. You need about 500 real pylon DPS to do so, which is attainable by some builds without insps or temps.

I could swear the pylon respawn time is 30 minutes, or somewhere close to that, rather than 20, but I can't remember exactly and I haven't noted it down anywhere, so... I don't know. 20 seems impossible because you'd have to kill each pylon *and* travel to the next in about a minute.

STUPID FORUM ATE MY REPLY. Raaarrrh, angry, caps. :@

The way I see it, there is two reasons for that.

First, sustained DPS is only relevant to specific situations.

When you're looking at guaranteed damage, as most of your attacks do, you can calculate DPS over a long period of time and derive your actual damage, not necessarily directly, but giving a relatively accurate idea of it.

Once you deal with chances to do damage, it's more complicated. If every proc has the same chances, it's as you said yourself: power used most get most out of procs. With different and proportional chances, higher probabilities to do some damage are better than lower probabilities to do more damage, because they are more reliable and end up doing more actual damage as a result.

For example, if you have a 300 damage attack and stick a proc with a 90% chance to go off for 100 extra damage, you're going to know you have a really good chance at doing 400 damage everytime this power goes off, and you can plan the way you use it accordingly; whereas if you have a 100 damage attack that you use three times as often as the previous one, and stick a proc with a 30% chance to go off for 100 extra damage, while it might seem as good on average it's nowhere near as reliable. Most of the time you will do 100 damage, sometimes you will do 200 damage. This makes it harder to plan, and will inevitably result in some overkill, making the actual damage actually lower than the estimated average.

Another thing highlighted in this example would be smaller attacks not only have a lower chance to proc, but also do less damage than bigger hits, making the proc damage a proportionally much bigger variation, adding to the unreliability/overkill of it all.

The second reason is you don't tend to use your small attacks as often as you could. Generally speaking they have lower DPA and serve to complete an attack chain. You might use, say, your 2s recharge attack every 8s, whereas you might use your big hitter recharging in 8s every 10s (I'm adding a hypothetical animation time in there, if you're wondering why I'm not just saying "every 8s"). This means much of the recharge on your smaller attack is wasted, and hurts your chances to proc, whereas higher tier attacks will generally be much closer to optimal recharge per actual use (and hence, optimal proc chance).

...Rereading it it kind of sounds like I'm saying procs are better in bigger attacks, period, whereas I meant to say "this is why a proc might be more or less efficient based on which power you slot it in". Due to the maximal chance it's not as simple as bigger is better, especially once you do care about sustained DPS. As a rule of thumb for ST damage I'd rank middle tier attacks > high tier attacks > lower tier attacks, for proc usage. Assuming you use those middle tier attacks twice as often as those high tier attacks.