Rhygadon

Hmm, interesting. This was just a plain old first build (indeed, I had no idea we even had third builds now).

Anyway, yes, will /bug it.

All of my power buttons just vanished from my trays, except for the two Holiday powers which are set as powers 1 and 2. All three trays are now set to tray 1. This happened the first time I zoned (using the Pocket D teleporter) with this toon.

Any idea what's going on here? I could try dragging all my powers back into place, but worry that they're just going to vanish again.

I heard and SGmate mentioning that she had the same problem yesterday, but I had no problem then (on two different toons). Though I only moved between PI and missions on those toons - never moved between city zones or used a zoning power.

I'm not sure what factors could be relevant. None of these toons had been logged on for months before this. Both very likely already had the Holiday powers from last year, though I couldn't swear to that.

Oh dear, I appear to have killed the thread with words!

Or are all the marketeers just too busy trying to drink away the pain of the i17 interface? I know that's where I am ... <pours another shot of Ardbeg>

Just thought I'd add my voice to the choir.

After 5 years, I don't play nearly as heavily as I used to, but until i17 I still tended to pop in a few times a week, putter around with the market for a while, and maybe start playing if a friend showed up or the mood took me. I can no longer do this.

The new interface is shockingly unpleasant to use. Like others here, I've made good faith efforts to get over the learning curve, and to separate the predictable new-issue bugs from the fundamental design. And it's now clear that the problems run much deeper than that. For all the reasons others have cited, the interface itself is just a usability nightmare; its basic design choices make it physically inefficient and mentally fatiguing.

On top of which, the ugly, uninformative, all-text layout is so utterly un-game-like that I find it destroys the pretense that my character is shopping at some high-tech auction house, and leaves me instead with the experience of being myself typing numbers into boxes.

I wouldn't have thought that difference would matter so much, but apparently it does. Since i17 I've made about eight attempts to play, and given up and quit within about 15 minutes each time, entirely due to the market. The one exception was my most recent session, when I made a new toon and forced myself to just ignore the market entirely.

About 40-50 bil here, which I'd say falls somewhere short of "obscenely" but may qualify as "absurdly." Especially since I tend to retire my toons at 50 and thus have no use for purples.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that the limitations of the Market (especially as population declines) prevent massive wealth from *feeling* as empowering as I imagine it would in RL. I put this down to at least two factors:

1) Buy It Now, which would be the most natural expression of profligacy, is far FAR more of a price multiplier than it is in any RL context that I'm aware of. In RL, paying full price at the most convenient outlet (instead of waiting for a sale or comparison shopping) feels pleasingly self-indulgent because you get your new toy instantly at a premium of perhaps 10%-100%. In CoX, depending on the item, you may be looking at more like a 100%-1000% premium over the patient/skilled marketeer's price.

1.5) Plus, when you Buy It Now you're essentially taking the role of the "suckers" who've funded your career as a marketeer. So chances are you'll just feel stupid, rather than lavish.

2) While the very top-tier items and 50 recipes will generally always have availability at SOME price, in the mid-game there are many useful items (e.g. parts of Thunderstrike near your level when you're in the 30s or 40s) which often have zero availability at any given time. So no amount of wealth can get you instant gratification. I think this kind of situation is very rare in RL. (The only examples I can think of offhand are "collector" domains (art, comics, antiques) where the ratio of available items to population size is astronomically smaller than anything in CoX.) If even my untold billions can't get me a full set of non-unique kit for a mid-30s toon without my having to log out and wait, I just don't feel like much of a plutocrat.

On the other hand, there's one thing that DOES feel like a truly impressive show of wealth, and that's giving it away. Nothing in the game produces dropped jaws as reliably as handing out 10+ million to each of your teammates on a PUG, or to anyone who happens to be in-zone when you broadcast your offer. It's not just the gratitude; it's that combined with the knowledge that this really IS pocket change to you, that you could make it back in less time than it took to give it away. THAT feels like ludicrous wealth.

(I'd also say there's an earlier and more important breakpoint: the point where you never need to "stop and sell," since any but the rarest of drops is just trivial compared to your market earnings. This is probably equivalent to something like US$100-200k income, where the prices of everyday consumer goods like meals and clothing become insignificant. In-game at least, I found that this was by far the biggest QoL gain from wealth.)

Has anyone else had this experience of feeling that mega-wealth doesn't feel as qualitatively different as one might have expected? Any other ideas as to why this might be so?

I did try a petition ... we'll see. If they weren't willing to refund people's losses to the 60-day market timeout (which wasn't documented when it first hit), I'm not optimistic that they'll do so here. But worth a try.

I wish I'd made the discovery on a less expensive set of refunds, but oh well. I'm still probably somewhere up around 12 billion total (inf and sales) across all toons, so I suppose I can count this as an investment towards the "1 billion inf lost to bugs or errors" badge ...

Interesting, though. This means that with some of the purples now selling for 250+ mil, you could exceed the cap by claiming the inf from a single stack-of-10 sale. A sale which can never be fully redeemed. Gruesome.

(Granted, I'd imagine this is one of those problems that's likely to summon up a chorus of tiny finger-violins ... "Oh, to have such problems!")

I had about 1.6 billion on one of my toons, canceled 6 bid stacks worth about 250 mil each (I was experimenting with lowball purple bids), and wound up with .... exactly 2 billion inf.

Is this common knowledge, and somehow I just never stumbled across it?

I petitioned, but somehow (by analogy to the old undocumented 60-day market vacuum) I doubt I'll get any sympathy.

Really?? The market just tosses your bid refunds into the void without notice, rather than letting you know that canceling a bid will just throw the money away?

/e is severely discouraged.

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Well for LR couldn't you use a simular bind as for teleport?

/bind SHIFT+LBUTTON "powexec_name Lightning Rod"

Would that work? For teleport it automaticly casts the power where your cursor is

Also, the chat binds dont seem to be working for me; example:

/bind tilde "local &lt;color red&gt;&lt;bgcolor #000000&gt;WARNING: $target spotted!$$em whistle"


Puts this into chat: &lt;color red&gt;&lt;bgcolor #000000&gt;WARNING: $target spotted!

But using &lt;color red&gt; etc. manually in chat seems to work that way. Wtf am I doing wrong?

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The teleport bind does work for LR -- quite nicely.

As for the chat bind, you can't enter binds containing $$ in-game; the parser chops the line up and executes the last command before it realizes that you're trying to enter a bind. Binds with $$ must be manually entered in your keybinds file. (Or at least, that's been my experience.)

Has anyone confirmed whether the "one check per ten seconds" rule applies to a proc slotted in a pet with multiple qualifying powers?

For example, I have the Dark Watcher proc slotted in Dark Servant, who has one qualifying toggle (Chill of the Night; the pet version of Darkest Night apparently doesn't inherit tohit debuff enhancements) and three qualifying attacks. Do all the attacks each get a normal individual chance to fire the proc, or does the check for Chill of the Night suppress the proc from firing in the other powers for the next ten seconds?

I've also been assuming that as long as none of the qualifying powers is a toggle, e.g. for Achilles' Heel proc in Fly Trap, all the powers get the full normal independent chance to fire the proc. But has anyone empirically confirmed this? Just curious ...

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Does Decimation: Chance for Buildup actually work? And if so, how do you know?

I have it in my Dominator's Psionic Dart, which gets used many times per fight. Over five hours of play (not lk'd/mal'd), I've seen no visual indication of anything happening. I kept the combat monitor open for tohit and damage, and saw not a single fluctuation in either value (aside from when I triggered Dom).

If anyone else has seen it work, what does it look like? Since I haven't seen anyone else mentioning this, I'm assuming it must work for most people ... could it be a specific problem with the AT or power?

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There's no visual indication. You'll have to monitor your healing delivered channel (I believe it's that channel, otherwise it's healing received) and watch for the text "Your attack strength has increased temporarily" or something similar. The build up only lasts for 5.25 seconds, and has only a 5% chance to fire, but AFAIK it's working properly.

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Just a long overdue followup to say thanks for this! Monitoring the Healing Delivered channel does indeed reveal that the proc is going off every now and then.

Given the tiny bonus duration and the lack of control over when it kicks in, though, I've concluded that it's basically worthless. Even if there's no other power that needs the slot, the Ranged Defense set bonus from a 6th Thunderstrike IO would be far more valuable ...

No worries! This is one of those little details that almost nobody seems to notice, even though it makes quite a difference in the real effectiveness of certain powers.

Incidentally, the same principle applies to other damage buffs like Fury and Build Up. That "+100% damage" that a blaster's Build Up advertises is really only adding about 50% to the normal output of a fully-slotted power; Aim is only yielding an extra 30%. Still very nice, of course, but a bit less essential than they seem, especially in PvE where it's not uncommon for IO sets to leave people at or near the to-hit cap most of the time.

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But really, I'd take Assault instead. Getting close to the Defense "soft cap" is great, but adding 18.75% to the ENTIRE TEAM'S offense all the time is way better, IMHO.

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Bear in mind, though, that that figure is an enhancement to *base* damage, not slotted damage. Since everyone on your team is likely to have their attacks fully slotted for damage by the time you have powers to spare for Assault, this means that you're actually adding less than 10% to your team's effective damage output.

i.e. the calculation (assuming 95% damage enhancement from SO/IOs) is:

Base damage x (1 + .95 + .1875)

rather than

Base damage x (1 + .95) x (1 + .1875)

You can test this for yourself by checking your damage (with a fully-slotted attack, not Brawl!) before and after you turn on Assault.

Still not bad for a power you don't have to slot, but less impressive than it looks ...

Agreed, Spirit Tree is fairly useless in practice. It can make a noticeable difference during AV fights and Rikti raids, but not enough to make the power really worth taking. At low levels, if I have a spare power choice I'm more likely to drop it into Spore Burst, since it's decent emergency crowd control (for second-group aggro and other "run away!" situations) and works fine 1-slotted. Later, I drop it when I'm ready to respec into some pool powers.

As for the single-target buffs ... yes, it's pretty maddening. Setting up binds for selecting and buffing teammates can help a lot, e.g.:

NUMPAD1 "team_select 1 $$ powexec_name Thaw"
SHIFT+NUMPAD1 "team_select 1 $$ powexec_name Forge"

Once you've used the above to select the teammate, you can then hit whatever other keys you use for the shields to buff them before moving on to the next one. That way you have fastest one-key access to the buffs you need in combat, and multi-key access to the shields.

(I myself use a variant of this, with the G15 keyboard's "G keys", using the default macro set for the in-combat buffs and the secondary macro set for shields, but the principle is the same.)

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Ok, so I have another (stupid?) question: Taunt and procs.

In PvE, taunt is an auto hit targeted AoE power. If I slot a proc, like Perfect Zinger, does it have an automatic chance to proc on all targets that get hit by the taunt effect? I'm not talking about gauntlet, but specifically of taunt/confront etc powers.

It seems that it should. Does anyone have any experience with this?

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I just noticed that nobody answered this. The answer is yes. Taunt + Perfect Zinger proc + a few recharge IOs = very nice autohit damage. At 50, you'll be averaging about 14 damage (70 x 20%) per target, on up to 5 targets, every 5 seconds. Especially nice for those of us who are already in the habit of spamming Taunt whenever it's up.

The fact that it's autohit is particularly gratifying when you're dealing with AVs, drones, and other high-DEF annoyances.

The PZ proc is also autohit in tanker/scrapper taunt auras ... though that fact is only relevant if you snuck 'em in before those powers lost the ability to slot Taunt sets.

This seems like a sensible guide overall, but ... 5 slots in Integration and 2-3 in Revive??

Integration is perfect with 3 (2 heal, 1 end/heal) and a single rech in Revive should be ample. So that's 3-4 slots spent for nothing but the associated set bonuses. Unless you're 50 and have slots to burn, you're probably better off using those slots on powers that actually need enhancing ...

Guides do seem to come out much less frequently nowadays. Even DB, which really cried out for it, saw much less guide-writing than I'd expected, and WP even less.

My own (highly speculative) pet theory is that two game changes have indirectly contributed to this decline: Real Numbers made guides less essential for explaining what the powers actually do, and IOs made it harder to give simple, concise slotting advice that would be useful for a wide audience. So it's harder to write a genuinely useful guide nowadays, and of course there are also fewer people to do it.

That said ... what glaring weakness? Plant, in particular, is an awesome set. True, about a third of the powers are meh, but I think of that as a blessing in disguise: the set is still fine without them, and meanwhile you can use those power choices to play with pools or your secondary.

Short Plant guide: Skip Entangle, Roots (at least until late), Spore Burst and Spirit Tree. Slot the hell out of Seeds of Confusion and use it to open every fight. Slot Vines to taste, I reserve it as a panic button so I only give it 2-4 until I have slots to burn. Carrion Creepers is awesome, mix sets like a mad scientist to max it for Acc/Rech/Dmg. Fly Trap is OK, and can use the def debuff procs (which are relatively cheap and apply to all its attacks).

How's that?

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But for those of you out there who may wish for a simplified step-by-step guide to the process ... try this link:

Extended Doorways

Enjoy!

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Link appears to be down ... you've piqued my interest, any chance you'll be putting it up at (what appears to be) your new site?

Does Decimation: Chance for Buildup actually work? And if so, how do you know?

I have it in my Dominator's Psionic Dart, which gets used many times per fight. Over five hours of play (not lk'd/mal'd), I've seen no visual indication of anything happening. I kept the combat monitor open for tohit and damage, and saw not a single fluctuation in either value (aside from when I triggered Dom).

If anyone else has seen it work, what does it look like? Since I haven't seen anyone else mentioning this, I'm assuming it must work for most people ... could it be a specific problem with the AT or power?

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Small note here. Ignite does not have the accuracy that you have listed here. Not really. The summoning of the Ignite pseudo-pet has an accuracy of 2, and never misses. Selecting Ignite summons "pets_flamethrower"
http://coh.redtomax.com/data/powers/....Flame_Thrower
And the pet has standard accuracy. If you don't slot Ignite for accuracy, you'll be missing out on a lot of potential damage. You'll never get "missed" messages regardless since you never get those from pseudo-pets, but you won't get as many orange numbers as you could have with accuracy slotted.

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For what it's worth, I once asked Castle about this (while pursuing other anomalies in City of Data, having to do with Burn). My question was whether, given the way it was coded, Ignite was in fact auto-hit, and whether this meant that Accuracy enhancements were doing nothing. His brief reply was that Ignite, like Burn, is "effectively auto-hit." So make of that what you will. My one AR toon isn't high enough to test it yet ... anyone want to check with and without Acc and count the damage ticks?

Arcanaville: I do understand what did and didn't change in i7 (due in no small part to your own clear guide on the subject!); I didn't mean to suggest that the i7 changes somehow directly imply a change in CC.

What I had in mind, rather, was that it would be unsurprising if the conclusions that people reached a year and a half ago regarding CC turned out to be inconsistent with the new data, since there are at least two plausible ways this could have happened:

1) The players' more limited understanding of the to-hit calculation may have introduced errors in the inferential chain between their empirical measurements (i.e. % of foes held per tick) and their conclusions about the underlying mechanic of CC.

2) Given that CC seemed to be "anomalous" in its scaling against target level, it's possible that this was an unintended behavior that was subsequently discovered and fixed. The fact that the devs were paying attention to to-hit scaling in the months before i7 would explain why they might have caught a bug in that neighborhood around that time, even if it had nothing to do with the specific mechanism that they eventually settled on for recalibrating critter-vs-player scaling.

Personally, I'd bet on option 1. But given how incomplete the patch notes tended to be until recently, I think option 2 is certainly a possibility.

Oh, and while I've got you here ... did you ever see this response to your ruminations on Taunt?
Re: So you want to know about Taunt...

That discussion seems to have petered out, but I'm curious whether the definition I proposed would fit with the behavior you were observing ...

&lt;comes up in a daze, two hours after reading iakona's post and clicking the link&gt;

Very, very nice. I like the format, and having access to the pool, pet and temp powers is just glorious. I've already found a number of little details that will be useful in combat and character design.

(For one thing, I'd never noticed that DE Fungi emanators provide protection from *Taunt*. Ouch! That explains a lot. And the huge difference in -Def effects between Gleaming Bolt and Glinting Eye is enough to make the latter clearly superior, given how they fit into the PB attack chain.)

Oh, and thanks for the reply re: Choking Cloud. I'm surprised that the empirical tests were so far off, but perhaps the independent stacking hold chances were throwing people off. I remember there was discussion of a "critical hold" mechanic, even back then, but I don't think anyone had considered the possibility that the Mag 1 component (which is "invisible" by itself, since it only shows up when stacked with the other component against LTs) had a *higher* probability than the Mag 2 component ...

Cheers, and keep up the good work!

Hi Iakona --

Another question for you:

Back in the Dark Ages of purely empirical testing, I remember there being endless debates over what does and does not affect the hit chance of Choking Cloud. It certainly behaves unlike most powers with a to-hit check. If I remember correctly, the general consensus was that it *wasn't* affected by many of the normal factors (e.g. defense debuffs or the relative level of the target), but *was* affected by to-hit buffs.

Of course, this was before we had official confirmation on the to-hit calculation; it was also before the recalibration of defense scaling, so it's even possible that the system itself may have changed since then. But in any case, I was wondering if anything in your data might shed light on this question.

(Just to be clear: I'm not talking about issues of duration or magnitude, which clearly *do* interact with properties of the target critter. The question is just about which factors modify the chance that, on a given tick, CC will apply its effect to a given target in the area.)

Any insight?

Has anyone found the loop sound for Chilling Embrace? (I'm interested in the Blaster version - not sure if Tanks get a different sound.) It's a nice sound, but gets awfully obtrusive after a while.

Thanks!

OK, I think I may let CE wait until the 20s, then. Too many attacks to fit in before then, anyway!

Thanks again for the info ...