Scrapulous

_brev_, do you care about confirmation of existing knowledge, or do you only want to hear about ones that haven't already been reported?

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Ah, gotcha , that's the bit I didn't follow


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By the way, I wasn't trying to suggest that you're dumb, I just generally figure it's easier to explain everything in a guide post. Plus at work I am rewarded for documenting assumptions, so it's an easy habit for me to fall into ;-)

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I was thinking in general terms where you might be mixing several enhancements in a power (say the default attack slotting acc, rchg, end, dmg, dmg, dmg) where you don't have the space to do this.


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Yes. And that kind of slotting also limits how much you can execute the efficiency-optimal blended x2/x7 + x3/x8 strategy, because it relies on combining enhancements at the x2/x7 levels, which is only possible if you have 2 of the same enhancement slotted into a power. So your standard attack slotting would only free up one slot (maybe two if you combined all the damage SOs) at the x2/x7 levels, while acc, end and rchg would all have to wait until x3/x8. That's actually how I do it, and the big step up in effectiveness for me tends to be at x3/x8 levels.

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To be pedantic for the sake of thoroughness: Your notation and examples all assume 100% combination success. Another way of looking it is that a + indicates an enhancement that you've tried to combine, whether it was successful or not. I am going to stick with that assumption for ease and consistency of notation.


Most of your understanding was correct. I'll mention only the ones where your understanding deviates from mine (and, I'm pretty sure, Catwhoorg's).

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Combining at x3/x8 means going from:
XXX
to:
Y+Y+Y+


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To be pedantic again: For any enhancement level after you switch to a new enhancement type (12 for DOs for most people, 22 for SOs for most people), it means going from:
X+X+X+
to:
Y+Y+Y+

This is because those Y+s that you made become X+s for the purposes of your next enhancement event. Does that make sense?


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4SO hybrid - well this strategy uses 4 slots instead of 3 (downside), but gives enhanced performance and reduced variability over the 5 level cycle. At x2/7 combine to give 2 spaces and replace, then at x3/8 combine.


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This is where you lose me :P


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I'll explain more in-depth.

One of Cat's underlying assumptions was that he was testing for a power that is optimally 3-slotted. The most accessible example I can think of is Stamina. The most efficient use of slots is to add 3, because due to Enhancement Diversification any more than 3 SOs in this power run into such burdensome diminishing returns that you're better off putting those slots into other powers.

Unfortunately, this means that there is an oscillating potency for your powers. At the levels you enhance, you go up in potency, then gradually diminish over time as your level gains in relation to the level of the enhancements. So there is an every-five-levels step up in effectiveness with steps down for the levels in between (the stepping varies with different strategies, but this one describes the "replace at x2/x7" strategy).

But if you have slots to spare and you don't want Stamina's effectiveness to fluctuate, you can add a fourth slot to Stamina and put an SO in there. This effectively eliminates fluctuation, because your four SO enhancements, even at their weakest, are still, taken together, at the ED cap.

So what it looks like is:

x2/x7:
X+X+XX -> X++X++OO -> X++X++YY

x3/x8:
X++X++YY -> Y+Y+YY

And, of course, the Y+Y+YY becomes X+X+XX in the notation of the next enhancement event, which explains our starting point at x2/x7.

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Unless you want to fly around and SB the whole PA team between drops, but that would get old really quick !!!


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That's what I do, and yes, it does. This is why I'd rather have AM ;-)

If you really want to make a Hami Drop Team specialist, this is what I'd recommend:

Primary: Illusion
Phantom Army, slotted with 3 recharge SOs

Secondary: Radiation Emission
Accelerate Metabolism, slotted with 3 recharge SOs

Pool: Speed
Hasten, slotted with 3 recharge SOs

Pool: Flight
Fly
Group Fly

That's about it.

This setup allows you to fill a lot of roles in the Drop Team. Obviously PA allows you to drop. Acc Met allows you to buff everybody's recharge without the kind of click-intensive distraction from dropping that Kinetics or Empathy require. Group Fly allows you to get non fliers on the team (it's usually a good idea to have two Group Fliers in a drop team, in case one of them disconnects. It's bad news when the drop team suddenly plunges into the good).

Speed Boost provides a better recharge buff, so if you prefer Kinetics to Radiation, it's a decent option, too. I'm usually in drop teams with my Kin, and I'd rather be able to use Acc Met.

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Leaping – I recommend taking Combat Jumping, Super Jump, and Acrobatics. These powers are always good for squishies and provide good defenses against immobilize, hold, and knockback. Watch your endurance if you leave CJ on.


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(emphasis added)

Why? CJ is notoriously cheap. You'd have to run five toggles that cost what CJ does in order to equal the drain of Sprint. It's 1/5 as expensive as Dark Embrace and only 11.5% the cost of Acrobatics.

Did you mean Acrobatics? Now that is a somewhat pricey toggle, costing the same as any two Tanker toggle shields, and any two Brute toggle shields (except Dark Armor, whose shields are inexplicably less expensive than other Brute secondaries).

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Really? So it really only makes sense to START looking for IOs AFTER you reach level 50 (so you dont have to go out and get the same IO's again) ?


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If you think the game begins when you hit 50, then I suppose that approach makes sense. But if you think it's beneficial to have a decent boost to your powers before you're 50, then it probably makes sense to slot things as you get them.

For example: when you're 23, you get a recipe for a level 22 set IO that gives you +Recovery. The boost isn't as much as it would be if it were a level 50 recipe, but then you couldn't slot a level 50 recipe at 23 anyway. So do you invent it and slot it, or ignore it because it isn't good enough?

Incidentally, do you buy and slot DOs?

Tic,

You wouldn't know it to meet me now, but I used to be a prolific vandal when I was a teenager. I mention this not because I'm proud of it (I'm not), but because it gives you a bit of context for why I see the following points the way I do.

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How often is Lusca griefed? When people actually get together to take him down I mean, how often does someone show up to grief? Never. Why? Because it's not a rare occurance and it's not something a player can actually affect.


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I don't believe scarcity has anything to do with it. If I'm a griefer, the more opportunities the merrier. Why wouldn't I grief Lusca? Because it's more or less impossible. Here's why: 1) there isn't any really deadly aggro in the area to train on people, and 2) because taking Lusca out doesn't require any particularly advanced tactics or large-group coordination that I can exploit to create a lot of orange names. It's lack of opportunity, pure and simple. If Lusca spawned near Monster Island in PI, or if Lusca required Hami-style coordination, you'd see a lot more Lusca griefing.


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I think it's very likely that there will always be at least 2 instances, possibly 3, 4, maybe 5 instances when this first goes live and everyone's trying to raid at the same time.

That means that Hamidon is no longer just one thing in one place at one time as a big target for some griefer. That automatically makes it much harder for a single person to grief a raid.


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If somebody told me as a teenager that I would have to browse four different versions of my neighborhood to find some good things to vandalize, I'd have been delighted. Why? Because it means potentially four times as many things to hit. If things aren't working out in one zone, then I have one, two, three, maybe four others to try.

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Add to this that Hamidon is spawned by player action...presumably he can be spawned at any time. It's very possible that when Hamidon is defeated in Hive 1, he could be immediately respawned in Hive 1 and defeated again. There could be 4 zones open with back to back Hami raids in all of them. That also makes Hamidon raids a lot less unique.


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I'm not with you on the "unique" argument. I don't see why uniqueness is a draw for griefers. If you've played other MMOs, surely you've seen plenty of griefing that didn't rely on large raids or other "unique" events.

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Third, and most importantly, no more monsters in the hive when Hamidon spawns.


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Why do you think so? Other people seem to think so, too, and I'm not sure why. I think either I've missed something in the article or I'm not up to date on my informed speculation. Is it because of this statement in the Curse Gaming article?

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The Devouring Earth monsters that roam in The Hive and The Abyss need to be defeated in order for Hamidon to spawn.


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Are folks assuming this means that all the GMs in the zone have to be defeated? I can see why somebody might read this statement that way, but I also see that it doesn't necessarily mean that.

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Leeching only works now because you can jump in on the tail end of a raid that's going to succeed whether you help or not and get your free reward.


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This confuses me. To me, somebody who shows up at the start of the raid, doesn't lift a finger except to get his hit on Hami during the hold phase, and then collects his HO is still leeching. You seem to be assuming that people wouldn't leech if the door to the Hive closed and locked after a raid started. I think instead leechers would show up at the beginning of a raid. Just because it's most convenient to pop in at the last minute now doesn't mean that's the only way a leecher will do it.

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If you don't get there early, you're not going to be a part of that raid and you're not going to get in later.


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Why not? I'm not sure how you can know this. Are you assuming that raiders will always have groups of precisely 50 people who enter the zone in a coordinated fashion? Or are you figuring that the people who join after the main raid group is in will all be participants? Let's say a raid group of 32 people, 4 full teams, shows up and starts working the GMs in order to spawn Hami. So far you've suggested that no griefers will appear, but you're also suggesting the zone will fill up. Who will be doing the filling, in that case? And why couldn't some of those people be griefers and leechers?


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How likely is it that swarms of players are going to hang out on the door for 2 hours or however long it takes to raid, trying to click on Hive 1, Hive 2, or Hive 3 so they can slip in just in case someone DCs? Sure, it's possible...but is it really that likely?


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You don't have to hang out. When you see 3 or more hives in the search list, head to Eden and try each of them. If you can't get in, then go back to what you were doing. Heck, if you have a dedicated griefing toon (tankers work so well), just always log him out at the Eden entrance - then finding out if you can get into an Eden zone to grief is as quick as a relog.

I'm still confused by why you think every raid instance will fill up with people who are earnestly trying to participate in the raid. Even if your mental model is "participants show up early, leechers and griefers show up late," once the leechers and griefers find out that being late doesn't work, they'll stop being late.


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I'm willing to just wait and see if that's actually a common problem before demanding they implement a solution to prevent it (and postponing Issue 9 going live for even longer).


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I don't remember making a demand of any sort, particularly not requesting any particular implementation. What I do remember writing is that I find it odd that they eschewed instancing, which would solve leeching and griefing categorically (as per your "If there's no longer an effective way to grief at Hamidon raids, then they won't grief them" statement), because of a dubious "social" benefit which would be present in an instance anyway.

Put another way: if an open zone is more social than an instance, then it's because people you didn't expect show up. If people you don't expect show up, then there is certainly a chance that some of them will be griefers, leechers, or gawkers. If your predictions that it will be practically unfeasible for leechers or griefers to show up are accurate, then the social benefit of an open zone over an instance is negated. One way or the other, it doesn't make sense: either you've got an open zone that is more social and prone to griefing, or you've got an open zone that only participating raiders can get into and so it's no more social than it would be if it were an instance.

As presented in the article, it looks to me like a clumsy design for questionable benefit. It raises the bar somewhat for leechers and griefers, but it's a little more social. I'd rather have the solution that 100% stops leeching and griefing and is only 80% as social as an open zone. Wouldn't you?



I suspect that something else has been done to prevent the leeching problem and it just wasn't mentioned in the article. The omission of a solution for that particular problem was a little too obvious for me to believe they didn't account for it in the design. I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps something similar to the "You haven't been on the mission map long enough to qualify for a reward" feature.

Even if so, griefing is the bigger issue to me.

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From the article:

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The Problems
<ul type="square">[*] Hamidon raids are a hotspot for griefing[*] Hamidon raids reward Leeching [/list]

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It's unclear to me how this new implementation solves these problems. The word "leech" (and variants) doesn't occur again in the article. Griefing is explained away by this vague bit:

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We’ve also changed the way Hamidon spawns Mitochondria to protect himself as he’s damaged. This change will prevent a raid from ever reaching the dreaded sea of orange names or “yellow dawn,” which also greatly reduces the impact of rogue players attempting to grief a Hamidon raid.


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So what's to stop a lone griefer from training giant monsters on the raiders? Or monkeying with Hami or mito aggro?

Instancing would have stopped both griefing and leeching much more decisively, but

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We recognize that Hamidon raids are a big social event as well as a PvE encounter. They're a unique opportunity for a lot of players to congregate in one place and fight one common enemy. Because of this, we chose to not go with an instanced trial.


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I'm not sure how 50 random people defeating Hami is any more social than 50 people who know one another doing it. If you instanced it, it would still be x people (where x is however many required to defeat Hami) being social. As it stands now, it will be x people and (50-x) griefers, leechers or gawkers.

I don't know, but it seems like instancing was eschewed for questionable benefit in a case where it would have solved two explicit problems.

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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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Wow, yeah, very tight. I found it hard to get both a travel power and stamina in there (I assume that 8-9 SR powers are mandatory). I suppose with so much recharge and Dark Consumption you can argue that stamina isn't needed, but then again you're looking at opportunity costs, like not having a passive that you can slot Numina's Convalescence into.

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SR is a mugging in a dark alley.


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This reminds me of when I introduced a co-worker and friend of mine to CoH. I was explaining the three types of defense to him. He has done high-level systems design and administration for the NSA and has a good head for system redundancy and robustness, so he grasped the value of layered defenses before I even mentioned it. His first comment was "Can I get defense, resistance and healing on one character?" I said "Yes." He said "Is it common?" I told him most sets had at least two of the three, and a few had three. He asked if any had only one. I said "Yes," and he said "BOHICA*, baby! BOHICA."

* BOHICA = Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

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If people are currently just labelling them as unique on paragonwiki based on nothing but conjecture then I think that isn't a good idea - let's just wait and see what they actually are.


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FYI, you can check who has modified a wiki entry by clicking the history tab at the top of the entry. Disciplined contributors like iakona add comments describing what they edited, so it's usually easy to verify the source of new information in a Paragonwiki article.

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Castle is saying that didn't work out too well in testing, so its being changed so that when you slot those powers into pet casting powers, you'll *always* get the buff - to your pets - instead of only getting the buff when you activate the pet casting power.


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"Always" in this context meaning "as long as the pets are within the buff effect radius."

Not trying to be pedantic, just aiming for completeness of information.

_Castle_, this is great news. Thanks for the update!

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I took Courier New and threw it into the CoH/data/fonts directory, renamed it to verdana.TTF and started the game, and my chat bubbles were unchanged. So it must be hiding under another filename. Is there a reliable way aside from trial and error to learn what that filename might be?

This is a fantastic guide. Not only does the kerning on the default font drive me freaking nuts (some of the characters outright overlap the characters next to them), but I hate the l/I problem.

I tried both the Comic fonts and Tahoma, and I found Tahoma to be more useful, mainly because the Comic bold font was too small on mobs that I had targeted at long range. Tahoma bold is just right on my system, however.

Thanks for the guide! It gets five stars.

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But imho, Healing Flames wasn't the problem with FA.


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Of the issues with Fiery Aura, the most salient seems to be general lack of damage mitigation. Other problems (lack of native knockback protection, a couple of the powers are real dogs) are significant, but are shared by other sets that are emphatically not gimped (Dark Armor in the first case, Regen in the second).

This change to Healing Flames suddenly makes Fiery Aura much more viable because it is now a resist/heal set, whereas before it was primarily a resist set. Why is that such a big deal? Because reliance on a single type of damage mitigation is a serious weakness, while layering different types of mitigation increases the strength of a defensive set considerably because you get the strengths of both types of mitigation and you diminish the weaknesses of each.

This healing power on top of the resist is considerable. Try it out, I think you might be pleasantly surprised. Does it fix all of people's complaints about Fiery Aura? No, of course not. Does it make Fiery Aura competitive with the other tanker primaries/brute secondaries? I think so.

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burn is borked so hard to tell.... it sticks to where ever you first used it so when you move (even past 100') you reburn the first spot used.


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I didn't see this at all on my fire tank. Burn dropped where I was standing every time I used it in my mission (about seven times). My fire brute doesn't have Burn yet, so I can't check that aspect of it.

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is it possible to get more adjustments to make Fire more in line with the other sets defensively?


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Test it out. It is extremely effective right now. Fully slotted, it heals half your hit points every 27 seconds or so. That's a huge boost to effectiveness.

My fully-slotted Tough/Acrobatics/Stamina tank noticed a considerable boost to survivability.

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I think it's pretty clear that the game designers didn't have much awareness of the impact of animation time on game balance or power effectiveness. For example: Gravity Control had only one power (and a soft control, at that) that animated in fewer than 2.1 seconds, while Fire Control had only one that took appreciably longer than one second.

Given that, I suspect that the original use case for the novas was as a last-ditch panic button, and the designers weren't aware of the impact that varying animation times would have on the practical application of the power to that scenario.


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Yea but when the Human Torch goes nova, he can melt Ultron to slag.


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Really? Things have changed in the past 14 years, I guess. The only time this happened when I collected comics ('86 - '92) was during the Secret Wars crossover/miniseries, and the Torch emphatically didn't melt Ultron to slag, he only incapacitated him. "I guess something non-adamantium inside him must have melted" was his comment.

But then, the real miracle in that scene was that Captain America was able to hide behind his shield not 20 feet from the action and emerge unscathed

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How come? Don't you just yearn to nerf history itself??


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"We have decided that the Roman Legionnaire archetype makes the game a boring snoozefest. Because of this, the Legionnaire's Scutum has been replaced by a red handkerchief emblazoned with golden eagles and silver lightning bolts. This is a principal component of the Legionnaire's new "Hanky Wave" power, which has the power to beguile opponents with his or her coquettish ways. This power replaces the "Shield Wall," "Shin Cut," and "Scutum Block" abilities. Also, the Roman Discipline ability now only provides immunity to fear and confuse effects 20% of the time.

I would like to stress that this is how we always envisioned the Legionnaire archetype to work. It was never intended for the hanky to become a large tower shield - this was a bug and has finally been corrected."

This has been a useful discussion for me. I've done a lot of thinking in a lot of different directions for my human-only PB, and I still have three candidate builds (she's only 14). I'll take another crack at narrowing it down to one build again with all of these points in mind.

One comment: I strongly recommend Swift over Hurdle for the second build you've posted. Swift will boost Energy Flight, Combat Flight and SuperSpeed. Hurdle boosts no other power and only helps with your default jump speed and the GvE Jump Pack.

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There are other posters that have attempted similar comparisons. Starsman has looked at things with somewhat less depth, but across all the melee sets instead of just scrappers. He's currently attempting a more in-depth analysis, I understand (and I understand even more how much effort that takes). Circeus has looked at much more situationally applicable circumstances for tankers in the past, and his work (based partially on Havok's old spreadsheets, if I remember correctly) actually formed the basis for getting Ice tankers fixed. Hard to match that accomplishment.

In the european forums, there's a poster Dr Rock that has a program that automates some of the calculations that form the basis of this analysis; an interesting tool I didn't have the patience to write (in a way anyone else would find especially useful to use). He also has certain perspectives on comparing the performance of various mitigation sets.


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Thanks, I'll dig around for some of those.

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If there's a unique thing I've contributed in the various threads that lead to these analyses pieces, I think its that I've laid bare all of my thought process involved in all of the calculations, all of the judgement calls, and all of the qualitative comparisons.


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This is an integral part of the value of what I read in your posts above, and part of what lay behind my "I can't expect to see something like this again" statement. Unless the process is transparent to me, I have a hard time getting behind an analysis.

Thanks again for the work.

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This analysis is astounding. The depth, attention to detail, and effort that have gone into this are unmatched by any guide or analysis I've seen on these boards. Many good guides or analyses set a new bar for those that follow them, but I don't think it's reasonable to hope for this kind of a feat to be repeated.

Thanks for doing this. I've done some calculations on my own to try to measure the relative benefit of various tanker primaries and scrapper secondaries under various situations, but my work is very basic compared to this, and I was never able to quantify the effects of +regen in any meaningful way, mainly because I was shy about introducing an explicit time dimension. Some of your conclusions demonstrate things I've suspected but never been able to demonstrate to myself mathematically (Health is worth taking and worth slotting), some things I knew (Tough is of considerable benefit as both a stacked resistance and as a burst-attenuation layer on top of defense, recharges instead of heals in self-heals provide a nice Keynesian effect on health over time), and some things I never knew (Weave's relative value to Regen is very small).


I may try to make similar analyses for the Tanker primaries. If I can do it in a way that doesn't look too ham-handed, and assuming that I have the requisite skill to follow your methods, I might even have something postable. Then again, that may be irresponsible - if I do make an error, I'm not sure I'd have the ability to correct it. Statistical analysis isn't for the inexperienced ;-)


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I'm looking forward to pouring the boiling oil, rather than climbing up the ladder.


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I'll keep alert for opportunities to send the barbarians to your gate.

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This is a good guide. I like the format you used for powers.

When planning my Ice blaster, I was toying with the idea of using Flash Freeze from the Cold Mastery pool in addition to the standard Frozen Aura tactic you mention. For example, jumping stealthed into the middle of a group, dropping Flash Freeze (because of its longer act time) and then Frozen Aura right after to sleep everybody. From that point on, keep dropping Frozen Aura whenever it's available to maintain the sleep. Meanwhile, select an individual target, lead with 1 or two holds, and then take it down. Have you tried anything like this?

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Disclaimer: Speculation (just for fun.)

For which EAT it would be, the Incarnates are already ruled out because Positron said it didn't fit in with the storyline. Wings in I8, so maybe Avilans, but it's very very unlikely because they're not even in the game yet, but hey, you never know. Coralax is another possibility because they're the furthest in being implemented in the game as far as having a cameo at all. Blood of the Black Stream will be the second in the running since they have some history in the game already, just like the Coralax.


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This is interesting conjecture. I wonder if your correlation between in-game teasers and implementation priority is accurate. It seems intuitive, to be certain. But I can't help but observe that the only epic AT that we have any empirical knowledge of was introduced without any kind of previous in-game teasers. We just woke up one day and all of a sudden there were Kheldians and Quantums and Voids and Cysts and the whole hoopla. So it's not entirely clear to me that the designers feel a need to build up a backstory before introducing an EAT.

Then again, maybe they didn't like that "while you were sleeping everything changed" phenomenon, so now they're trying to compensate with preliminary back-story.

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