Stargazer

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The textual descriptions are wrong: very very wrong.

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Nice to know.

My first impression is that these numbers feel more "appropriate" than the ones given in the text descriptions.

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My guess is you'll see it around the same time as the Giant Tape Worm.

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Woot, we're getting a Giant Tape Worm!

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Um, could we just get Shadow Maul turned into a single target attack then? It's way too expensive for a very, very stupid cone that it has right now.

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Uhm... I really don't think you want to go there...

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Chain Induction is only partially affected by Fury. The initial hit is affected by the Furies Strength, however, any 'chained' blasts are not. They *are* affected by the strength of the opponent who is chaining the power, though, so an arc from an AV will be stronger than an arc from an underling by quite a margin.

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Unless the chained blasts are autohit, will their accuracy also be affected by the (relative) level/rank of the opponent who is chaining the power?

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and we actauly aquire less prestige the higher level we are...

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No we don't. "Base prestige" (subject to modification by rank/level/mob-type modifiers) is actually lower at low levels. It increases with level and reaches a maximum towards the middle levels. After that it remains the same.


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So thats what I want to know....I could care less about the Initial costs...i want to know how much these things will take to keep them.

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Well, rent is based on your "net worth" - this includes the value of your rooms/items and your "free" prestige. So how much these things will contribute to your rent depends on their cost.

I don't know if these numbers are still accurate, but in beta it was said that rent started out at 0% at 0 prestige, and ramped to 1% at 1,000,000 prestige.
Positron quoted a cost of 130,000 prestige for Total Cost for working Salvage storage and a working Empowerment Station.
At 1% rent, that would mean that the amount of rent due to these items would be 1300 per rent cycle. Rent is due every 4 weeks, so that would lead to an added cost of 1300 per 4 weeks.


If you're content to only have these items in your base, the rent would be much lower. Without knowing exactly how the rent rate ramps up it's impossible to say for sure, but it should probably be closer to around 300 prestige per month.
So one mission per month should more than cover it.

The maximum rent rate was quoted as 3.8% (at a total worth of around 170,000,000 prestige). With this rent rate, the items described above would contribute with 4940 prestige per 4 weeks.



I think that it's safe to say that the rent generated by having the items Posi listed above would be negliable.

I guess it all boils down to what your intent is with the empowerment stations.

If you intend for them to be used in the following two situations:

A) Yikes! See that AV/Monster/Huge spawn over there? We'd better go to our bases and buff up before we fight them!

B) Oh drat. That AV/Monster/Huge spawn really wiped the floor with us. We'd better go to our bases and buff up before we try this again!


then yes, I can see how they would fulfill that intention.
If that's their intended function, then I'm ok with that.


I don't think that they'd generally be useful for missions where your contact tells you "This will be a tough mission, you'd better bring some help" however. The reason for this is that more often than not the "tough" part of the mission is towards the end, and unless you stealth/rush through the mission, you might not get there before the 15-minute timer runs out.
But there's nothing that says that they have to be useful for those situations.

Nor will they be very useful for "emergencies". When half your team suddenly drops and you try to contain the situation, having an empowerment station in your base won't help a bit.
This might actually not be such a bad thing though...



Something else to consider is that the A)/B) situations described above usually have an above normal risk of dying associated with them.
Will these buffs act as passive temp powers with a time limit, or as click buffs with the same duration (or something else entirely)?
In the case of passive temp powers they'd continue to be active after a death, in the case of click buffs... not so much...

It's not clear that either case is inherently "better" than the other, but I can imagine that the latter case might result in some player frustration at times.

Player: <buffs up>
Player: Ok, now I have 5 empowerment buffs on me! Infernal, beware!
Infernal: <one-shots> (ok, two-shots then)
Player: Drat.


Again, It's not clear that either of these cases is better than the other, but I'm somewhat curious which one will be used.
(Well, from a Plz Posi make me teh Ubar!!1!-perspective, the passive temp power would clearly be "better", but if that definition of "better" was used in all game-design decisions, then we'd all be running around with powers that made us invulnerable to all damage and allowed us to one-shot Hamidon from 3 zones away)

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Empowerment station buffs are currently set at 15 minute durations (far longer than any other non-toggle buff in the game). They are bestowed on you as soon as you craft them, and last 15 minutes from there. The idea is to have enough time to get you past that sticky part of a mission that was giving you trouble.

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The buffs would definitely be more useful if they were one-shot click self-buff temp powers with shorter duration (and non-stacking so that you could only have one per type).
My first impression is that a buff with 15 min duration from when you craft it would have extremely (and I'm not using that word lightly) limited usefulness, but I can see several uses for a temp power that I could activate at any time and lasted 3 minutes.

On the other hand I can't help but wonder if a 3 minute "buff on demand" might not be too good.
(depending on the magnitude of the buffs of course)

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Trainers currently don't care what faction you are a member of.
Walk a villain up to Ms Liberty, and she'll gladly train you. (A couple of my villains were trained by Ms Liberty in Beta)
Currently they avoid that issue by not allowing villains to enter areas where hero trainers are placed (and the other way around).
If there was a hero trainer and a villain trainer in the same area on the other hand...

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Fix the Talos island glitch and place them at the entrances...

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As others have pointed out, there would still be the issue with people being able to use Recall Friend to bring others to the "opposite" entrance.
Now, they _could_ prevent this by applying "anti TP fields" (constant AoE effects with -TP) around the entrances (or make it a zone-wide effect that covers the entire Pocket D).
This would of course be a (minor?) inconvenience for people using TP...

That would seem to cover the most apparent technical issues, but there may still be other things that would have to be considered too.

Aside from the technical aspect, the "story" would also have to be taken into consideration. Would the factions place trainers in Pocket D?
I suppose Arachnos could easily order Arbiter Fred to stand around there, but who would the heroes place there?

I suppose they could ask CuppaJo...




edit:
Another problem: Even if they'd make changes so that you can not get into the "wrong" entrance, people who log out there before said changes are made would still appear there when they next log in. They could probably work around this too, but it might not be pretty...
Of course, there's the question if this would present enough of a problem to dismiss the idea...

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We will probably slip in some NPCs who can buyback Enhancements at somepoint, but the trainer issue is a little more difficult from a technical standpoint.

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Add arbiter uh...Paul to the villain's side, make war witch the hero trainer
i think that'd work?

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I think the issue is this.
From a "concept" point of view, there would "have to" be one Hero trainer and one Villain trainer (Security and Threat levels are "story-wise" "faction dependant", can't very well have a "neutral" trainer giving both). So there would have to be one Hero trainer and one Villain trainer. That would be very well unless for one thing.
Trainers currently don't care what faction you are a member of.
Walk a villain up to Ms Liberty, and she'll gladly train you. (A couple of my villains were trained by Ms Liberty in Beta)
Currently they avoid that issue by not allowing villains to enter areas where hero trainers are placed (and the other way around).
If there was a hero trainer and a villain trainer in the same area on the other hand...

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I'm thinking (hoping) he looked up the Stalker numbers and the Brute modifier is actually 0.1.

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Don't get your hopes up.
Every single scrap of information I've seen indicates that Scrappers/Brutes/Stalkers share the same AT-modifier for defense/resistance.
You're stuck with 0.075.

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The actual numbers for defense and resistence powers are not a function of your health, hence they need to have different base values across the ATs.

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In general, powersets that are shared do not seem to have different base values across ATs. The difference between them is usually only in the AT-modifier used. Just look at Invulnerability for Tankers/Scrappers.

That said, sometimes powersets are manually changed for some ATs but not for others. This would seem to be the case here since we have patch notes mentioning just the Brute version. It is however not the general case.

Hmm.

Hmm.

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Anyway, I had mortar out (~25% resist debuff) and several of my attacks scourged on the scrapper.

However, instead of the two numbers being identical (doubling my damage as in PvE), the second number was 25% less than the first. Anyone care to explain that?

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Criticals are generally unresistable in PvP. This means that they bypass the entire resistance part of the equation, and thus also the debuff (which affects this very same part).

At least that'd be my guess...

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I'm still sticking by my earlier statement, though; this is a really cheesy mechanic, particularly when you consider how long we've had this "resistance debuff resistance" - it's even worse when you consider how new "defense debuff resistance" is.

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I don't really like the way it currently works either. Before I got Freezing Rain on my Controller, I had imagined that resistance debuffs would be particularly useful against foes with high resistance (i.e. the debuff would be unresistable). I was very disappointed when I found out this was not the case.

I think I might prefer it if resistance debuffs were made to always be unresistable, and lowered somewhat in magnitude to compensate for this added bonus (say that a 30% debuff would be reduced to a 20% debuff). This would make resistance debuffs less powerful against foes with low or no resistance, but more powerful against foes with higher resistance.
IMHO, this would feel more "appropriate".
Of course, this would remove an advantage Defenders currently have in PvP, so something would have to be done to compensate for this. Maybe double (triple?) their res debuffs in PvP? Alternatively make all res debuffs unresistable in PvE, but keep only Defender res debuffs unresistable in PvP...

(There's also the weird interaction between resistance and damage debuffs that currently makes it harder to debuff the damage of my sword if I'm wearing a bullet-proof west. Yeah, that makes sense. )


I don't have much hope that this'll be changed though. Balancing would have to be taken into consideration, and unresistable resistance debuffs would be insanely good against AVs with 90-ish% resistance...
(I suppose AVs could be given separate debuff resistance though...)

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Resist Debuffs are resisted by Damage Resistance.

If your 100 damage attack hits someone with no resists, it does 100 damage.
If that person had a 25% Resist Debuff, damage taken would be 125.

A 100 damage attack vs someone with 50% resists would take 50 damage.
If that person had a 25% Resist Debuff on them, damage taken would be 62.5.

EDIT: The above assumes the Resist Debuff is resistable. Defenders debuffs are not resistable in PvP.

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Finally. Now I have something to point back to when I start making a list of why defenders underperform in PvP as far as -res goes. -dmg also seems to be affected by this as well when the damage and the resistance are the same.

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I'm confused. You're making a list of why defenders underperform, and are planning to use a definite advantage to show this?

Defender res debuffs are not resisted in PvP.
If a Controller and a Defender both use a 30% resistance debuff against a player with 75% resistance, the player will take 32.5% of "base damage" when debuffed by the Controller (an effective 30% increase in damage taken), and 55% of "base damage" when debuffed by the Defender (an effective 120% increase in damage taken).
How is this a disadvantage for the Defender?

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Unless resistance inspirations work significantly different from resistance powers, yes, what _Castle_ has said is accurate.
I haven't tested the Controller versions of -resistance powers, however, so that's something to add to my todo list.

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Let me save you some time.
What _Castle_ said already explains this, but if you want in-game verification too (which never hurts...), Pennelope and I already tested this a while back.
We tested Defender and Controller resistance debuffs (specifically Enervating Field and Tar Patch for Defenders and Enervating Field and Freezing Rain for Controllers) and concluded that Controller resistance debuffs are resisted by damage resistance in both PvE and PvP, while Defender resistance debuffs were resisted by damage resistance in PvE but completely unresisted in PvP.

Or just like _Castle_ said:
Resist Debuffs are resisted by Damage Resistance.
Defenders debuffs are not resistable in PvP.


I don't have access to the actual numbers we used at the moment, but if you want I could give them to you at a later time.

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In another redname post several months back, it was clearly explained that aim+buildup does NOT stack. IE. if aim gives 100% to accuracy and 25% to damage, and buildup gives 100% to damage and 25% to accuracy, the total would be the combined best of both abilities, IE. 100% accuracy and damage.

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Wrong.

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I'm pretty sure +100% to both was right. But instead of just flatly stating WRONG and leaving it at that, why don't you state what the correct values would be? Are you saying both Aim+BU would give +125% to dmg and acc?

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The non-stacking part is wrong. Aim and BU stack just fine.

BU has a 100% Dmg buff, and Aim 60-ish %. It's often said that the tohit buffs are 60/100%, but I can't verify that to a large degree of certainty. It could be 60/100, or it could be something else.

With Aim+BU you have a 160-ish % dmg buff.

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Pretty sure that he is talking pets here, actually.

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In a post from over a year ago, Weirdbeard clearly and unambiguously stated in a way that left no room whatsoever for even the tiniest sliver of doubt that the streakbreaker also applies to enemies.

I think he is saying the same thing now.


Edit just because:

WeirdBeard 8/17/04:
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The streak-breaker code breaks only miss streaks, and it breaks them for both heroes and villains.

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WeirdBeard (about the same time):
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The reason you're not seeing the number you expect is due to one important factor: the omnipresent streak-breaker code. The streak-breaking code is operating at all times over the entire range of possible hit probabilities, for players and for villains.

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In another redname post several months back, it was clearly explained that aim+buildup does NOT stack. IE. if aim gives 100% to accuracy and 25% to damage, and buildup gives 100% to damage and 25% to accuracy, the total would be the combined best of both abilities, IE. 100% accuracy and damage.

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Wrong.

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Oh I was SO there, too!

WW

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I noticed .

Had some issues logging out, did you?

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However, its generally been the case that when Statesman or the devs in general state a very specific change like this, it generally happens. I'm more inclined to believe that if a specific announced change doesn't occur in precisely the way described, that's a backend error on their part, or sometimes an additional overlapping change they just forgot to tell us about, and not something especially nefarious. Its still not a Good Thing for the devs to ever announce something specific and not have that specific thing happen precisely as announced without followup, because that's misleading, but I don't think its deliberately so on their part.

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One can wonder if .10 becoming 0.07 was unintended, or something that the one actually changing the power decided was fair.
There might be plausible explanations for both those eventualities.

Accidentaly typing 0.07 instead of 0.10 seems kinda unlikely, but maybe the "debuff efficiency" of Tankers is 70%?
If that is so, then it is possible that the value that was entered into the power really was 0.10, but that the effective value becomes 0.07.

If the value was intentionally set to 0.07, then it is possible that the one entering the value thought it would be more balanced that way.
And what could be the reasoning behind that?
Well, let's compare two combinations of recharge/damage debuffs.

A recharge debuff of 0.4 means that if you only consider the recharge time, you will be attacked 60% as often as usual, and thus will on average take 60% of the damage.

With a recharge debuff of 1/3 together with a damage debuff of 10%, you would be attacked 66.67% as often as usual (again only considering the recharge), and each hit would do 10% less damage. Again, you'd end up with on average taking 60% of the damage.

They both seem equal.

However, this is only the case when the activation time of a power is small compared to the recharge time. Recharge debuffs only affect the recharge part, so whenever we have a greater than zero activation time, recharge debuffs fail to live up to their "maximum potential".

Take for an example a power with 3 sec activation time, and 7 sec recharge. (pretty much picked out of the air)

Without any debuffs, the "cycle-time" (activation + recharge) of the power is 10 seconds, leading to 0.1 attacks per second.

With a recharge debuff of 0.4, the cycle time is:
t = 3 + 7/(1-0.4) = 14.67 sec
and the number of attacks per second would be:
1/t = 1 / 14.67 = 0.068

We'd take 68% of the original damage.


With a recharge debuff of 1/3, the cycle time is:
t = 3 + 7/(1-1/3) = 13.5 sec
and the number of attacks per second would be:
1/t = 1 / 13.5 = 0.074

Now add the 10% damage debuff:
0.9*0.074 = 0.067

We now take 67% of the original damage, slightly better than the case with pure recharge debuff (97.8% of the damage).

So, a combination of damage/recharge debuffs that give the same effect as a recharge debuff when we only look at the recharge times, will actually perform better when we take activation times into consideration.
How much better will of course depend on the relationship between activation time and recharge...

This could be one possible motivation for having a lower than 10% damage debuff. The difference between 7% and 10% seems too large for this to seem likely though. That would require some pretty odd activation/recharge ratio to even things up...

It also fails to take into consideration that the damage/recharge debuff combo would be more sensitive to scaling, and that damage debuffs are much much more likely to be resisted than recharge debuffs.

OTOH, damage debuffs help against alpha strikes while recharge debuffs do not.
Assuming that you can get the debuff going before you are hit....


So my guess would probably be simple mistake or unforseen scaling...

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So, while Recharge = Base_Recharge*(1 + "recharge debuff") gives the correct answer for one special case, it is not how the game appears to handle recharge debuffs.

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Now step back, and read the title of the thread. We're only talking about one power here and one particular debuff the power offers. Nowhere did I say "this is how Recharge debuffs work for the entire game". I was keeping it context of a specific conversation I had with Statesman, so that when he hopped here (because I asked him to) he'd be able to jump right in and grasp what I was saying right away. Which he did.

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Here's the thing. You gave an incorrect value for the recharge debuff of Chilling Embrace along with an inaccurate description of how the recharge debuff works. I corrected you. I don't see what the big deal is.

Statesman is an intelligent person, he can read, he has access to data of all powers, and if needed he can ask the people working with powers. I don't think he would have any problems giving us the correct recharge debuff. Which he did.


Many may have noticed that there's recently been a debate on the (non-)stacking of defense powers. A main complaint from the players has been that because of a lack of information we have not until recently fully known how this stacking has worked.
How can we on one hand say that it is unacceptable that we are not given enough information, and on the other hand encourage the devs to give us incorrect information?
That doesn't seem to make much sense.

Misinformation is worse than a lack of information.
A lack of information can be targeted for investigation, misinformation can be much harder to isolate. Misinformation also tends to spread, and once it has done so it can be hard to "get out of the system".

About a year ago it was common that people claimed that recharge worked in a way so that when you used Hasten you just multiplied the recharge times of your powers by a certain number to get the new recharge. Invariably this would lead to incorrect results outside the trivial situation, and there could on occasion be lots of confusion on the issue. People who made this claim were generally corrected, and fortunately that claim does not pop up often today.

When someone makes such a claim today, it is usually corrected.
When such a claim is accompanied by 40 numbers that are based on the faulty model (and thus also faulty), it is pretty much a certainty that people will object.

And that makes me wonder.
If this faulty description of recharge debuffs has been thrown around for a longer time, then why haven't people objected? Why is it still being used?
But maybe people have objected....




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And level scaling does not seem to fall within that special case.

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Debuffs are affected by level in a different manner and falloff rate than other powers, and it may be quite possible that different debuffs fall off at different rates, though certain debuffs may use the same falloff rate as well.

I was given a specific debuff falloff rate (as you can see from my other post) by Statesman to use in my calculations. So its handled.

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But you use an incorrect model for recharge debuffs in your calculations. That means that the falloff due to level scaling that you calculate is also incorrect.


On the off chance that the third time really is the charm:
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When fighting higher level mobs, our powers work at a fraction of their original efficiency.
Say that we are fighting a foe of a level that means that our powers are at 50% efficiency.

Apparently Statesman essentially says that CE will have this effect on recharge times:
1+0.5*0.5 = 1.25

The game seems to tell us that CE has this effect on recharge times:
1/(1-0.5*1/3) = 1/(5/6) = 6/5 = 1.2

1.2<1.25

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Ok, so what does this say?
This is how both the proposed models would handle a scaling factor of 0.5.
As you can see, they produce different results.
We generally expect only one result to be correct, hence (at least) one of the models give incorrect results for level scaling.
Care to guess which?



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The way I look at your posts on this thread are simple: at least you didn't derail the conversation to the point where I wasn't able to get my point across to Statesman.

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Funny, because the way I look at it, we got the real debuff numbers for CE. I see that as a good thing.

And it was of course very silly of me to derail the conversation by actually discussing the topic at hand instead of adding to the close to 20 posts about merging Tankers and Scrappers. Or maybe I should have talked about food...
Silly me...

IMHO, this is only sweeping the problem under the rug.

In my opinion, changed stacking rules would be preferable.
This also has the added side-effect of giving all those powers effective defense against many AoE attacks.

And what about powers such as Steamy Mist and Shadow Fall?

And will Fortitude be given Positional (melee/ranged/AoE) defense to stack with Super Reflexes defenses?


Things are getting more and more complicated instead of the other way around....