Optimator

Castle, you are the man for even considering the matter.

That said, schedule shouldn't be a huge deal. There have to be some players who are programmers and would gladly volunteer their time to work on coding such a thing. A few legally binding contracts to protect the game, and you're set. They would probably not need the entire source code for such a simple thing anyway.

Players love mini-games and whatnot. You'd be amazed by how much time we spend on seemingly trivial nonsense and enjoy every moment of it. For example, in DDO, a guildmate and I have this strange obsession with rooftop pioneering, and testing the geometry of the game to get into places we're really not intended to go. Usually, this means we end up on roofs and ledges in the public zones harassing other players with our returning throwing weapons and making them ask how the heck we got up there.

Just for the record, Feather Fall is very handy to have for these endeavors. Sometimes we get into spots that you can't get out of without a looooong fall.

Exactly, Myrmydon. I'm not outraged at the fact that debt happens in PvP zones. I'm not outraged by players being a**hats. As an extraordinarily cynical person, I expect the worst from humanity and am rarely disappointed. The fact that there are little turdmonkies running around seeking only to bring debt and irritation to players who are actually trying to PLAY the game doesn't even bother me that much. I can always get even with them.

What angers me so much is that the devs are giving tacit approval to go ahead and be a griefing d***head. I had honestly expected them to at least state disapproval, even if they won't taking any real action. Instead of trying to encourage decency as players, they are encouraging the negative side of people.

Even as recently as CoV beta, I remember Statesman saying that using the mobs tactically to win a fight is okay, but using them for the sole purpose of causing debt is not. And now he's gone back on that.

This leaves me feeling more disgusted than all the nerfs of I4, I5, and I6 put together. Those were just matters of mechanics. This is a matter of principle.

edited to correct spelling of myr's name and self-censor a couple of words

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See, she stated it clear and simple What I do is neither harassment or griefing! Practically any tactic is valid in PvP.

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Sure, it's[meaning any tactic you might think up] not technically harassment or griefing, but you are still a lamer. What the devs think will never change what you are.

Rulings like this make me just as glad my subscription is expiring. I'll renew just long enough to fiddle around with I7 powers and then I'm gone. Their insistence on anything-goes PvP in a broken system with asshatted rules only reinforces my disgust. It's been fun, but with every change, the fun is diminished.

Mods: Ban me now, delete this post, or let people see what I have to say. Doesn't matter to me.

For the accuracy of Chimera's bow, think of Hami's Mitos. They can and do occasionally miss(in a couple of hours of taunting a yellow Mito for a magnitude test, I recorded 2 misses), but for all practical purposes, they are autohit.

It defies the instincts of squishies, but the only way to survive Chimera is in melee range.

Yeah, for real world usage, having 2 Int/3 Heal/1 Rechg is going to be better, since attacks will keep you from being able to use Aid Self every time it's up. My Fire tank has both Aid Self and Healing Flames.

You can't underestimate killing enemies as a part of your mitigation. Dead mobs do no damage, so it's not realistic to build your heals purely around cycle time. Gotta take attack time into account.

The optimal slotting for HP/S for Aid Self is 2 Interrupt/2Heal/2Recharge. If I remember correctly from when I did the math, you get roughly 200 HP/minute more that way than with any other slotting. Pretty much blows away any other self-heal in the game.

The thought had crossed my mind. Too often in this game, they blunt the sharp knife instead of sharpening the dull knife.

Assuming the same level 40 Tanker with 1700 base HP, Dull Pain, Earth's Embrace, and Hoarfrost yield a heal of 1341 available every 182 seconds for an average of 7.36 HP per second. Of course, that average is not truly correct since the 60% HP boost increases regeneration by quite a bit.

Reconstruction and the PB and WS heals have already been discussed here, but Dark Armor has a very significant heal, as well. Dark Regeneration with 1 Accuracy SO, 3 End Redux SOs, and 2 Heal SOs yields a 52% heal per mob hit with it available every 30 seconds. Substitute a Recharge SO for a Heal SO and it goes to a 41% per mob hit heal up every 21.6 seconds.

Castle, as it stands now, Aid Self is superior to Healing Flames.

Using a level 40 Tanker with 1700 Hit Points as an example:

Healing Flames slotted with 3 Heal SOs and 3 Recharge SOs yields a heal of 582 available every 30 seconds.

Aid Self slotted with 2 Interrupt Reduction SOs, 3 Heal SOs, and 1 Recharge SO yields a heal of 651 available every 15 seconds.

Pretty significant difference. To further illustrate how underpowered Healing Flames is at its current level of effectiveness, let's look at what happens in a 5 minute period where the Tanker is fighting for his life, and using his heal as soon as it recharges.

Healing Flames will heal a total of 5820 HP over the duration, for an average of 19.4 healed per second.

Aid Self will heal a total of 13020 HP over the duration, for an average of 43.4 healed per second.

Now, as we all know, Aid Self is an interruptible power. However, in my testing, 2 Interrupt Reduction SOs makes the interrupt window negligible, provided you don't try to activate the power while moving. It is even able to activate between the ticks of many DoTs. But for the sake of fairness, I'll run the same scenario with Aid Self's activation being interrupted 4 times.

Total healing in 5 minutes is 10416 HP, or an average of 34.72 per second. Still nearly double what Healing Flames can achieve.

The old Healing Flames with the nonbroken AT modifier came much closer, with an ability to heal 8840 HP over a 5 minute period.

Fiery Aura's relatively low resistance has always been explained as a balance to its high damage output and excellent ability to retroactively mitigate damage. The damage output no longer exists, so we really need a strong healing ability to survive. The set as it sits now ranks dead last for survivability in most situations, and with Defense getting fixed next Issue, the gap is only going to grow. Buffing the base value of Healing Flames would do a great deal to alleviate that. I'm not going to attempt the math for calculating Time To Survive, but my gut feeling is that Healing Flames needs a base value right around the 30% mark for Fiery Aura to achieve parity with the other Tanker sets.

I'm suspecting that not having Tough is what hurt you most with your exemplaring. When you ex down to 23, you still retain all your slots in every power you have at that level, and your enhancements should all be functioning as SOs. Healing Flames is going to heal the same percentage of your HP with the same recharge as it does at lvl 50. If Tough is one of the powers you normally run and you picked it up at a higher level than 23, the added damage you are taking without it is only illustrating the inadequacy of HF in its current form. I could comment about how a Tanker should not be required to take 3 power pools(Fitness, Leaping, Fighting) to be effective, but that is not the point of this topic. The power Healing Flames is the sole focus. Other issues with Fire Armor should be addressed in another thread, or directly discussed with a dev via PM.

THANK YOU CASTLE!!!!!

Can I be your official fanboy?

Team of 6-7 can take Kronos down fairly easily depending on the team's debuffing capability. But if your team doesn't have those debuffs, forget it.

The named zone-spawn monsters(with the exception of Lusca) are generally killable with a team of 3-4, so I could see a buff to them being beneficial. Babbage in particular is a real wimp. Took 4 of us around 30 seconds to tear him down.

Balance-

Ice Manipulation provides a couple of useful control powers, but seems to perform poorly when paired with any primary other than Ice Blast. The melee attacks do significantly less damage than their counterparts in other secondaries, Devices excepted. Toggle drop percentages are also lower, though I expect with the coming changes to detoggling in Issue 7 this will become a nonissue.

Frozen Aura is virtually useless due to its PBAoE nature, small radius, and the fact that in most team environments, AoE slept mobs tend to get woke up pretty quickly.

Wish List-

Replace Frozen Aura with Greater Ice Sword. Balance the lower BI of Ice Sword(in comparison with Thunder Strike and Total Focus) by allowing it to hit multiple enemies, a la Headsplitter.

Alternately, replace Frozen Aura with Ice Sword Circle.

My main PvP character is an elec/elec blapper, and I don't think that this is a bad change. Quite frankly, I don't NEED toggle-dropping to take out most villains I've encountered in BB and SC. I do enough damage to squish the squishies quite nicely, and can do very respectable damage to brutes. And I'm only at lvl 26 with him, so I don't even have Thunder Strike yet, which means my damage potential is only going to go up.

Fact is, toggle dropping is currently ridiculous. Blappers consistently dominate melee ATs. I know some of you find the thought of this changing to be quite upsetting, but thematically, a melee AT should be superior in melee.

ZOMG!!!!!11

Some good changes announced yesterday, and now this?

*Explodes from the awesomeness of it all*

Thank you States. Good to know it's being looked at.

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Guys, I totally told you all that Jonyu is the man.

Seriously. He's more awesome than Castle.

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Ok, this is funny. Just had to post about it. Castle was always a prude though. She kept looking at me funny...

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Whoah, Castle's a she? All this time I had a serious misconception going on.

/em hopes he hasn't made any blunders in posts addressed to Castle

Anyway, this is fantastic news for DA. I played my EM/DA brute to 10 in a day then shelved him because of the massive headache he gave me. Now I can play him again.

Thanks Castle. Every AT should be so lucky to have a rep like you. Your attention to community concerns is exemplary.

Simple answer: They don't play the same game we do.

Their internal servers were using 3.5 rules while we were using 2nd Edition and calculating THAC0, something that didn't exist in their game.

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Those prone to scrapper-lock see the nerfs the same way they see Statesman ... errr ... a Boss mob ... a challenge to be overcome ...

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I've been trying to make Statesman mad enough to come duel me with the Regen build that was used to solo +7s on their internal test server, but thus far there has been no response. Maybe he's afraid that he'll have to summon his dev pets(like Hami) to beat me.

How powerful was Regen? We routinely tanked AVs, Giant Monsters and the Hamidon for hours on end with no external buffage. The maximum healing rate of an I5 Regen is around 50% of what an I2 Regen could acomplish with 6 slots in IH and one in FH.

We were debt magnets until level 28. Integration provided no healing whatsoever and Fast Healing was only 40% base(IIRC). Reconstruction and Dull Pain were the only things between the pre-I3 low level Regenner's face and the pavement. But once we passed level 28, the promised land opened to us. Vast new realms of possibilities came into being. Purple meant nothing. How purple an enemy was was how we conned our enemies. Pair of +5 bosses? Pffft, no contest, just took a little longer to kill them.

*sigh* Memory Of Glory is now the defining power for Regenners who have been around for a while. We don't suck now when compared to everybody else, but we are mere shadows of our former selves.

For I6, I predict:
<ul type="square"> [*]Reductions to QR and Stamina, since regen clearly has too much end now. [*]Proposed change to reharge of DP making it non-perma. This is a ploy to distract us from the aforementioned QR nerf. [*]Resilience base resistance is changed to 0.5% [*]The enhancable portion of Integration will be reduced to 50%, since the healing it provides is too good when combined with defense and resistance inspirations [*]Instant Healing is reduced to a base of 250% healing, and when active, negates all other forms of healing. [*]All scrappers will periodically roll Critical Misses, where for the next 10 seconds, all incoming attacks will do double damage.[/list]

heh, From what I've found, Khelds get even more debt than blasters, particularly when soloing.

My nrg/ice blaster is only lvl 29, but damagewise, he easily outclasses most khelds.

Savage, occasionally acting Feral. Solo or duo is the way to fly and my favorite partner for killing stuff is of course another BS scrapper. Glorious, glorious carnage.

It did take several trips to the hospital for me to decide that I just wasn't going to be able to take down psi Babbage solo. First trip was just from me running in without MOG to see if he could one-shot me.

He could

I hate to say it, but d20 might very well be more effective for a CoH tabletop. We're used to a certain level of dynamic combat, and it would be great if tabletop could emulate that. However, CoH has a great deal of mechanical complexity in how the combat turns wout. We as end users don't see the complexity since the software handles it for us, but for a tabletop game, I just don't see how anything but a d20 system or some proprietary equivalent can do the job. CoH is far more complex than most people would give it credit for.