Skullcracker

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Let's see, what other powerset in the game requires lmited, specific powersets to counter it? Hmm. Not coming up with much here. Oh, wait, TP foe! Something that anyone can get and is, despite that, much reviled.


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All of the stalker ones? People take power choices, like leadership, that they don't otherwise want just for the perception. Focussed acc is a decent power, but with +perception, it makes the other epics fairly irrelevant for pvp.

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sonic defender/controllers/corrupters, ff defenders/controllers, empaths, kinetics, ice/nrg blasters (on certain teams) and, if you're a storm guy...spines scrappers or stalkers. seriously, if you're prioritizing the storm above these other sets (and the sets are well-built) you need to question your tactics first.

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You aren't answering my question. Perhaps it was not clear.

Lets say you've got a mix of random heroes and villains. They are relatively evenly matched. Now add any one character to the hero side.

I contend that there is no other powerset in the game that you can add to the heroes that will affect their survivability and will reshape their team dynamic as much as a stormer will (or at least did). The effects of Hurricane on the battlefield are so powerful that any heroes that do not form up on it as the center of any massed action against villains are simply foolish. Correspondingly, the villains must muster a concerted effort to defeat the stormer to counter this. Thus, the appearance of that power on the field of battle completely changes the dynamics of play.

I have seen this many times. I consider it an indisputable fact. Every time Hurricane has appeared in ongoing play where one was not already present, it has single-handedly defined the lines of battle. There is no other power for which I have ever seen this be true.

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Any such power in any game inherently draws attention to itself from people responsible for balance.

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I'm not going to answer the question 100% in your terms. But nearly everytime I've been in pvp, the tactics, the battle, the whole thing, has been distorted into a game of how to deal with the stalkers. People are generally hiding in the hurricane to keep away from the stalkers.

I can't say what adding hide and assassination does to the battlefield, because to introduce it, it would need to go away first.

What is amusing, is that we hear from castle how stalkers dominate SC. So they get a trivial nerf, and stormers, who are the biggest nuisance for stalkers, and sadly brutes, get a big fat nerf for pvp and pve.

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That's right...so the penalty was not as pronounced as you faced higher level foes...which was why I originally posed the question that maybe the penalty wasn in fact not scaling up properly prior to this global fix.

Inv's should have been experiencing a higher penalty and were not. I'm not saying that the penalty is or is not justified, but that due to the defensive scaling problems, the penalty because less detrimintal based on its intended effect against +0's.


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This isn't a fix. It is a -change- in game mechanics to make defensive sets more effective vs. higher levels. Defensive scaling wasn't a bug, and it is only a "problem" because the players and developers came to the conclusion that it distorted and/or hurt gameplay.

Your "question" is utterly irrelevant. Nothing was per se broken, there is no reason to think there was ever any intention that the penalty scale for invuln. By far the most logical conclusion is that the effects on invuln of this change were never even considered. (Occam's razor/principle of parsimony) There is no reason to think this change is intended to do anything other than what the developers are saying it is intended to do.

Saying invulns should've been experiencing a higher penalty is an arbitrary claim, without evidence. It's like me saying the artists accidentally used the wrong shade of green for Earth Thorn Caster robes, and the designers really had something else in mind. Maybe someone somewhere someone intended differently, I don't know, but lacking any reason to think so, any such claims should be ignored.

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I'm well aware of how wrap-around works. There were several arcade games back in the '80s I had problems with this in as far as score went.



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Sorry if I sounded confrontational or condescending. When you said it would mean that blasters would never hit, you're thinking is that it would push the numbers into the negatives, and thus always floor the to hit chance?

It seems to me that only holds if there is nothing in the format or formula that forces the value to be positive.

Hypothetically, all I'm saying is that if negative values were disallowed, some sort of "wrap around" would give unpredictable results at high values, rather than uniformly missing. (ie. rather than the values wrapping around to negatives, they start at 0 again*) I'm not claiming this is happening, just that the evidence you gave (blasters not always missing) doesn't disprove all possibilites.




*it's been years since I did any programming, but it seems to me accidentally using a modulus instead of a minimum to "cap" a number would do this.


edited out the edit, because it made no sense

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There is no "Accuracy Wrap Around" -- otherwise Blasters with Targetting Drone + Aim + Build Up would never, ever hit, which is not the case.

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I'd like to point out, what's referred to a "wrap around" doesn't drop a number to zero. It hits some cap, then starts over again, resulting in an arbitrary number. I'm not saying the game does this, just that a wrap around won't consistently floor your hit chance. When I had target drone, at times it did make me suspicious though....



Back when I played WoW, they had perenial bugs wherein debuffs wouldn't always unapply themselves when done. People used this to debuff their stats lower than zero, wrapping it around to extremely high levels. (as I understand it the variable was unsigned, so -1 ended up being the maximum value)

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Can you expand a little on the bug and what it could affect?

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What is the bug?

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I honestly don't know. It was a fairly esoteric bit of code that one of the programmers fixed. Not wanting to explain it poorly, I'll leave it at that.

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When it's fixed, how will it make our lives better? Will we attack more targets? Miss less often? I'm not trying to pester, just trying to get a handle on how the attacks are (mis)behaving.

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Can you expand a little on the bug and what it could affect?

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BUMP!!!!


As it stands this thread borders on the absurd. I agree Castle is a good guy and all, someone who actually pays attention to people's concerns. But in between the complements, could we maybe get some real information about what the thread is supposed to be about. So far it's been everything but.


What is the bug?

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We found the bug and got it fixed on our side. I doubt you'll see it til after Thanksgiving Weekend, though. Just wanted to give a heads up to everyone. (I've gotten about 15 PM's on the topic over the weekend!)

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Um, cool. Could you please either explain, or link to a discussion of, what the bug actually is. (I tried searching for "cone" but got a lot of posts, but I cpuldn't find anything that looked applicable)

Are we talking attacks being calculated wrong, resulting in an abnormally high miss rate? Some sort of cone geometry/eligible target bug resulting in too few targets being attacked?


I've been pretty dissapointed in eviscerate as anything other than a (mediocre) single target attack, and I pretty much lost hope when you previously posted about the arc being wide enough. So if this bugfix makes it more usefull, I apologize for the angry post I hadn't gotten around to making yet.

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With Enhancement Diversification comes a benefit for ALL City of Heroes powers.

Every power, across the board, is getting a 13.33% reduction in its Endurance cost.

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So we don't need to slot end reducers now? And this whole thing helps "diversity" how exactly?

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For instance, there are issues with Defense builds; we’re going to look at that problem more carefully (the Damage Resistance Inspirations are a step, but there's a little more to come).


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Still with the resistance inspirations help defense builds.

Could you explain how these are going to benefit defense builds more than they will people who already have resistances? Preferably with math.