Starsman

1. Hmmm, contact redirection (where a mission sends you to a different contact)
2. Outdoor missions (unlikely to happen)
3. Escort to glowie objectives.
4. In-mission contacts: like the new Cape mission where you engage in boxed dialog with a mission contact, personally I dislike this as only the leader gets to know what happened.
5. Simultaneous glowy clicks (many hate them but may have a use if smartly implemented and done as optional objective)
6. Doors
7. Doors with keys

That's all I can think off the top of my head, I am sure there is more stuff.

OK, this is confusing.... Going Rogue is comming in July... good to know... buit should I buy the expansion now... I can play during March and April a Dual Pistols character... but what happens in June? Do I loose the character? Do I loose the ability to create more characters?

Also, will the "Complete collection" be available only in July? If so, does this means if I want to go for that collection I'd be forced to wait and loose my head-start on Dual Pistols/Demon Summoning?

Given recent history from certain other forums, I actually feared for the stability of time and space as we know it when I read " Just to clarify before speculation runs toooooo rampant." False alarm though, wow... that was scary...

While we are at it:

Hide other players: Uniforms, make everyone but me look like a phantom illusion (minus FX)
Hide other players: I don't want to see them at all.
Hide world: I just want to see mobs and flat untextured ground for them to fall dead on.

That's only because of the general mentality of the FFXI community. I also played it, very long, long enough to know what I'm saying.

It could be clearly stated the mission in question contains or is entirely based around puzzles.

On that tangent, I would like to see AV designed as encounters and not as hard hitting HP bags. AVs that are entirely unmezzable but that don't hit THAT hard, instead having pets that can't be defeated but mezzed, and other pets that do heavy damage but easy to kill, and extremely vulnerable herds of debuffing micro-critters that debuff players while they last and are resummoned often and also have very high melee and ranged defense forcing players to need true AoE typed attacks to defeat them. Some of these things being immune to debuffing or do things that make debuffing irrelevant.

This to-do list would make these encounters more than just HP bags and the "critters" don't have to really be humanoid or animals but can also be fixtures and turrets and the like to make sense on the given environment and encounter. In short, things to make more than just plain damage or debuffing useful.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler I don't think a tetris-like game was what was suggested.

Perhaps. But it all goes down to "non combat advancement opportunities." Obviously for it to offer tangible rewards it would have to also have opportunities for failure.

Perfect example that even perfectly fits in the game's context: Bomb Assemble/Disassemble missions.

Make a small tetris/gems/columns like mini-game that works as an interface to activate and deactivate bombs. Once the mini game starts you would be on a timer regardless whether you are setting up or deactivating a bomb, loose or run out of time and the bomb blows up effectively failing the mission and killing you. This means just half end of mission xp and, off course, debt. After all, nothing is as boring as being perma-held, this may give players something to with the reward of breaking out of the loop!

Also, don't take me literally with the puzzle type, it can be a balance game of sort (trying to keep perfect balance between the liquids in an explosive device) or a wire cutting/connecting mini-game that works like a minesweeper (giving you clues what is bad to cut next, but not entirely giving it away.) Every bad choice would not insta-kill but it would "hurt" a health bar that once empty would make the thing explode.

And off course, story wise this can be attached to many things, from bombs in car trunks on a building basement to missile launch/sabotage.

Can also see computer hacking (this one can really be a tetris/gems clone) and lockpicking mini-games.

Combine them all together and you have to hack computers and lockpick doors to make your way through a building all the way to the silo/basement and disassemble/set that bomb in the trunk of a car or launch/sabotage that missile launcher.

Ideas keep flowing in right now, making the full gamble on a final bomb disassemble/assembly may sound a bit too harsh, how about 3 bombs where you got to, giving you no end-of-mission xp but instead a nice xp bonus for each properly disassembled bomb.

Then you can always mix these things into normal combat missions. Like lockpicking doors instead of having to find the keys, forcing players to actually do these puzzles for every single bomb activation/deactivation currently in the game and add these elements to TFs where cooperative Tetris is played to solve a huge minesweeper thing to, I don't know, permanently disable the Striga TF giant mek-man before you face the final AV. Oh and lock-picking prison doors! Or hacking the energy doors in Arachnos prisons. Or dispelling (with similar mini-games) doors in CoT prisons.

While at it, would be interesting to have a quick hold-breaking puzzle game that casted break-free effect on you if you manage to solve it before your hold/stun/fear runs out.

I didnt manage to get that badge on Starsman Prime last year, this year I tried again after a friend told me "it's impossible to do without the Ninja Run". At that point my head burst open and I ran back there and used Ninja Run, took me 3 attempts but got it. Ninja Run is PERFECT for this.

Yea, since I found a walk-trhough for Tetris, it lost all the fun!

I think this is a bug with the Real Numbers feature, would not be the first one I spot*.

I can say for certain that at least from the start taunt powers were set to enhance and work off duration, not magnitude. There is basically one field called Scale that determines the strenght of an attribute and another that is called Attribute Type, that determines if the Scale means Magnitude or Duration. Enhancements work on this field. There is a second Magnitude field that will be used only if the Attribute Type is set to duration. This field can not be enhanced by enhancements.

Taunt has it's Attribute Scale set to Duration and the Magnitude stored in the magnitude field. Even if Castle wanted he cant make enhancements work on the Magnitude field, he could, however, change the Attribute Type to Magnitude and blank out the Magnitude field (as at that point Magnitude means nothing) then setting a static duration in the Duration field (have I lost anyone yet?) but that's a very manual change and unlikely to happen without a big patch note, and it would also render taunt enhancements useless.

This is also how he allows Acrobatic to enhance it's magnitude, it's set to Attribute Type Magnitude with a fixed duration.


*Long time ago I found that Resist Magic/Mutant DO did not enhance Toxic resistance but Real Numbers were saying the resistance of Healing Flames was affected, not sure if it got fixed but I reported that bug a long time ago. Ironically, the combat Attributes window did display my true total Toxic resistance, that was just the base the Healing Flames power provided.

It's a shame Taunt magnitude cant be tracked on the Combat Attributes, would make for a very easy test. But you still should be able to test it in PvP, once it manages to land on the target the target should right click on the icon and see what magnitude and duration it states.

Lazy copy-pasters!

From what I gather the Ultra Mode is frosting on the cake everyone is eating now. Bending light means a new cake and your alternative means two cakes with a waitress to make sure you get the cake that wont kill you.

I'm sure it's possible but requires branching, I don't think there is any branching in the FX system right now, even Physx stuff is just more Frosting on the old FX Cake.

Yea, hard to calculate with spreadsheets, not to mention many would still call foul on the T9 usage. The immunity is not that big of a deal as is the entire inability to attack or protect allies.

I have not run much Roman content with my icer to comment on them but in the end I'd say its an issue with critter design more than with powerset issues. The content does not accommodate properly for purely defensive sets in a few situations. As popular as the ITF may be though, it's still the minority of the content.


I thought you knew me enough by now to know I treat HP as a form of universal damage resistance and am against measuring it as a "regen booster." +HP is accounted for in the first chart, but averaged for uptime meaning that during uptime of these buffs the set may be better than what I show and during downtime worse, but in average, that.

For the sets that have it, it's so important that I personally dislike the fact that it's not perma with 3 SOs. Although the idea of decreasing timer and healing power to have more regular healing bursts appeals me, I think it's too disruptive with play-styles and therefore would just prolong the duration of the +HP.

There is the issue of stacking but the cap is low enough for it to be a non-issue, so far that they may also as well flag the attribute non-stack-able.

Not even looked at my dark armor. That set was not around when I made her and never consider that in her growth plan. I may look into it once I decide to sit through her again.


CE is used and assumed to hit all foes. My calc can simulate situations where the foe is higher level (purple patch) but it's not trivial to see the impact on larger groups that don't fit CE (either cap or area.)

No tier 9s are used in the calculations (other than the isolated Granite benchmark).




I actually would love if it was easy to just make people trust it as a relative benchmark because that's sort of the point, but understand that many would love to understand the meaning of the numbers (I know I would be curious myself :P)



The only thing that can truly kill a def set faster than that is not the RNG playing nice, but pure luck. I know i know "same thing" but my point is that in average, the ice tanker WILL avoid enough attacks to survive normally, unless facing something like Lord Recluse that has one attack that can two shot you. Lets say you have a foe that has 10 distinct attack chances per minute. 9 of those chances just deal 1 point of damage, though, and one can deal 1000 points of damage. The RNG can easily make you miss 9 attacks and get hit by the one that can kill you. It's not bad on the RNG but actual bad luck. This is a scenareo that I think is common specially at lower end of the game and while facing certain AVs and monsters, it certainly can increase mortality but cant be averaged out properly (your luck may do the entire opposite and always make you miss the one big hit so in averages it wont work.) That's one of many things I hope to explore better with my new approach, that is more simulation based.

Regen is a different matter, but thats also why I inlude the first set of data. It does not only represents how well you take an alpha but how vulnerable you are to spikes in damage input. The case with defense is different. When talking about big spawns it's not the same as you split damage into multiple dice rolls, when facing a single tough entity with huge hitters, then things get complex but still "average-able" in theory.


I agree. +HP or Resist either helps a lot, at least as tankers. Scrappers are a bit different. I wish they increased the uptime of dull pain and like powers (hoarfrost/earth embrace) without increasing the healing.

Odd, I use Kinentic Combats on my dominators (i slot them to cap their smash/lethal defense) but I'm willing to take a few levels of difference too. There are always merits, too.

I do have a dark tank, and yes, I just went back and I made a mistake posting that. I did tell my calc to only slot the power for 3 acc/3 end, no recharge, no healing. After all, only 3 hits make the thing a 90% heal. If possible, I'd slot the thing for 5 end redux and just one acc enhancement.



Done. Only issue is these spreadsheets require me to keep multiple copies for each variation, meaning an update to one forces a manual update to the other. It can easily become a huge headache to manage them all.

Thats an epic definition of lame. "

Here is the base chart:
And here with the pools:

I can jump into an open discussion on it in a separate thread, only reason I would not love to do it is because I am now working on an entirely new approach at benchmarking and have left this project behind, not because it's bad but because my expectations have expanded beyond what spreadsheets can handle.

I can tell you a basic though:

The first chart takes all mitigation, no healing, and then weights this mitigation against rarity. The rarity I did based on extensive amounts of enemy data and the damage types they use. Smashing, for instance, is the most common type you will encounter therefore gets the highest weight. I tweak down the impact of the rarest types then sum them all then divide by the sum of all weights to get an average mitigation "to all situations". You should never see a 100% in that table.

The second table does similar only it also accounts healing (regeneration and heals.) In this table, 100% equals a naked tanker with no buff and no powers, just base HP and base regeneration. If you gave that character 2x the HP, he would go 200%, if you gave him 50% resist to everything he would also note 200% (if i didn't account for weight) In the end, 1000% means it can survive 10 times more DPS than the base tanker. It's a "basic" weighted immortality line calculation but one that really represents truthfully how much you can take. After all, no one cares how fast they will die, they just want to know how much they can take without ever dying.

Well, my last effort produced these numbers. Please dont ask me to explain everything behind them but in short, these weight how survivable the set is against damage types and then weights the rarity of different damage types. In specific situations, a set may be less survivable against certain enemy groups, but overall, against random foes throughout your career, these charts are rather accurate.

If google docs gave me the tools I'd allow for the player to pick an enemy to benchmark against, but thats just not possible with Google Docs.

Oh and there are 2 groups of numbers there. The most important one, generally speaking, is the second set at the bottom as it represents how much dps can you sustain (the higher the number the better, that's all that matters.) The first set is more specific to the act of tanking as it indicates how much damage you can mitigate with all healing and regeneration ignored. In other words: Alpha Absorption. The higher you are in that table, the better you should fare at tanking with support. Problem with that, though, is that if you have support you likely already got patched up to be much more survivable than this.

BTW, my main is an invuln. There are some groups that can slaughter me quickly, specially if there is pure psi damage, but the cases these are an issue are an extreme minority. I don't remember the last time Starsman died. I been actually tanking winter lords just for kicks, they can barely hurt Starsman Prime, then again, I have invested him into a few IOs. Nothing mayor but enough to take me out of the base survivability settings.

Edit: Starsman Prime has no fighting pool nor aid self, but takes the passives.

My tree is full of energy as I plugged it to the wall. It also has a war mace, as I think it looked prettier than weakling glass balls. That qualifies my tree as mace + energy aura strong!

Had not crossed my mind... perhaps some one was driving too fast on frozen roads and hit the wrong pole killing the lines...

Does Aion has west coast servers? Are they also dead?