Sunstorm

Interesting. A rather nice, very thorough, analysis.

Yes, the effects of Rage versus Defense builds have been known about for a while. By being able to stack significant amounts of To-hit, a character can largely ignore Defense. This is something which Resist and Regen builds are less susceptible to.

This has lead to issues getting reliable information on how Elusivity is working. It's difficult to track how Defense is balanced when there is a very big divide between normal damage powerset performance versus the very common Superstrength builds.

The problem with defense as a survivability increaser, is that it is extremely susceptible to bad luck. The probability that a character will be defeated "on Time" is actually rather small. It's more likely the player will be defeated early or late.

In PVP, Since many attacks can deal extremely high damage, a bad streak of hits can cause a player do be defeated long before they should be. On the flip side, a lucky streak of misses can make a Defense build seem nearly invincible.

Yep, thanks for posting that Fire Away, that pretty much sums it up perfectly.

It was great talking with you and Cende at the Con as well!

I'm still working on content for bases, and we have some very big plans waiting in the wings, but for right now my main focus is on GR. (In fact, the projects I'm working on are so big I barely have time to get away to post.)

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Hope springs eternal and you have brought some sun into my dark places.


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*snicker* No straight lines, PLEASE! So not going there.

/JK

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We're all losing focus on the important issue here. Convincing someone in NCSoft to write up the full proposal for the Dark Manipulation secondary for blasters.

1) Gravimetric Snare (it needs a name change)
2) Shadow Punch
3) Smite
4) Soul Drain
5) Dark Consumption
6) Shadow Maul
7) Midnight Grasp
8) Cloak of Darkness
9) Fearsome Stare

Go Sunstorm! Go Castle! Go someone else!

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Actually Synapse and I have been puzzling over the dark sets. Just for fun, I'll shed some light on the subject.


So, lets start this with a riddle, since the explanation is just as incomprehensible. Why does Dark Miasma overlapping Dark Control powers make a straight port of Dark Manipulation problematic?


The explanation is, there are a couple powersets that would be sharing an interesting combination of powers. For example, Controllers want Dark Control and Dark Miasma, except Dark Miasma is already a very control heavy set which would supply a lot of Dark Controls powers. Combining Dark/Dark this way could lead to a lot of overalap.

Dominators would want Dark Control and Dark Assault, so Dark Assault would have to be careful not to include control powers from Dark Blast or Dark melee.

Blasters are easier, however the powers that go to blasters would likely be included in Dark Assault, which goes opposite dark control.

Then there are the general AT wide no-no's. Such as: giving armor powers to non-armored classes, or overlapping powers alread in patron pools.


So in the end, it's not designing one powerset. It's designing 3 different powersets:

Dark Control/Dark Miasma for Controllers
Dark Control/Dark Assault for Dominators
Dark Blast/Dark Manipulation for Blasters


Well, that's enough "dark" for several posts. And no, nothing is in the works yet.

We've looked into this one. Apparently the AI reacted funny to the phase changes. Currently the AI thinks everyone is a valid target, even though it can't actually deal damage.

Code is looking into it, and Bab's might be able to do something to make them a lot more transparent. That should make it much more apparent that the targets are phased out.

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but other than that they were able to directly port everything over or at least pull powers and visuals from existing powersets.

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Then I really don't get earth assault for doms. I know we have the melee attacks from stone melee... but where are the stone blasts coming from?

Or are they using the same animations as other blasts with new particles, which you don't consider different animations?

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Earth Assault is a special case.

When Sunstorm first started, we gave him some training (read: shackled him to the desk and forced him to look at spreadsheets) and gave him a bunch of bugs to fix to learn the systems.

Fixing Bugs doesn't teach everything, though, so he put together Earth Assault as a set to experiment with and learn the ropes. Eventually, he got it into shape and it turned out to be quite a fun set. We wrote it up as a full proposal for the next round of proliferation, since all the work had already been done...and, here we are.

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Lol. The Shackles I didn't mind, but the IV's were obnoxious.

No "Eventually" about it, I was play testing it after the first round of proliferation and have been waiting anxiously till I can build one on the live servers. Never played a more "tankish" feeling dominator, despite it having no armors.

Some very good guesses here on the powers, but Earth Assault will be a very melee heavy set. Also opted for the regular Hurl boulder Animation, since the Propel Boulder animation uses the full 3.5 second long propel animation. Now I may be a huge fan of propel for my grav doms/Trollers, but the thought of having 2 versions of it didn't seem too fun.

Yes, sorry all, this is a bug. Before the changes, Dom's had a slightly higher then normal PVP damage bonus. This was to compensate for the low damage outside of domination, and the domination damage bonus being perma with heavy set bonus slotting.

Since the changes permanently apply the damage bonus and add a little extra, dom's are now doing much more then intended damage.

The damage will be brought a bit more in line with other AT's. Should look more like this after slotting:

Charged Bolts after changes: 181 damage at lvl 50
Charged Bolts for Blasters: 191 damage at lvl 50

Wanted to give everyone a heads up so no one gets attached to it and keep it from becoming an unpleasant suprise.

Sunstorm

Lets see, this weekend I was about as far away from a computer as I could get: Swimming out on the sunny cali coast, enjoying parks around the bay, watching old Enterprise episodes, housecleaning that's been neglected, helping the wife cook a ham dinner and drinking wine from our trip to Napa Valley a few weeks back.

Gotta come back refreshed for another week of spread sheets, word docs, planning meetings, and especially reading the forums and PM's.

Btw, Excellent list of bugs here, I've been keeping an eye on it. Just wanted to give a big Thank You to Lazarus for some very hard work. LaserJesus has been doing some nice work in some other threads as well.

Sunstorm

Ahh yes, saw that in the greeting thread, it's an extremely nice piece.

Being a NASA/Sci-fi junky, the other avatar had me with the SOHO image used in the background though.

I'll definitely want a full size copy of that though

Excellent Suggestions

I'll ask Ex Libris to sticky this thread.

Just a couple more answers for now. I'll continue to keep an eye on this thread and threads in the base forums and elsewhere.

Plasmastream asked:

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Q. Are you guys aware of the general view point on your movement to the new invention system?


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Extremely

We are in fact watching this very closely, and looking at options to improve it.

The Rent payment system is also being looked at closely as well.

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Q. It's understood there are 3 seperate building communities, PVP Base Raiders, Casual Raiders and DEAR GOD KEEP PVP AWAY FROM MY BASE!! correct?


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Yes.


Mad Scientist asked:

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The secure and hidden plots have the same prices for the same sizes. Bug? or can you give us insight into a design goal?


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Good question. This relates to the original goal of the base repricing, which was giving players access to make better raidable bases.

The smaller Secure plots are the same price, however the larger secure plots are more expensive. To make it official, this is what the correct prices are supposed to be: (I've seen them posted around the forums already.)

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Hidden base costs:

Size Cost
8x12 84,500
12x12 312,500
12x16 722,000
16x16 1,250,000
16x20 1,984,500
20x20 2,812,500
20x24 3,872,000
24x24 5,000,000
24x28 6,384,500


Secure base costs

Size Cost
12x16 722,000
16x16 1,250,000
16x20 1,984,500
20x20 2,812,500
20x24 5,000,000
24x24 7,812,500
24x28 11,250,000
</pre><hr />

Ad_Astra Asked
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Welcome, Sunstorm!

I do have a question regarding the elimination of Base Salvage:

Base Salvage is currently also used for Empowerment Buffs. Those buffs are therefore really "cheap". Do you anticipate that in the future use of Empowerment Buffs might decrease due to the higher cost of the Invention Salvage used in those recipes? If so, would you consider a change in the recipes to salvage that might be less expensive?

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...or a buff to the buffs to make them worth the cost?

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Empowerment stations were limited to common salvage, so they would still be fairly cheap (With a few exceptions). However empowerment buffs are on my radar to be looked at.

Greyhawke asked
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I understand the limit of 30 invention salvage in the rack, thanks for the feedback. However, are there plans to return event salvage to their own tabs with larger limits? The inability to store costume salvage and candy canes without impacting invention salvage storage is a big inconvenience.


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Yes, Holiday salvage was a big concern when we converted the salvage racks, but we thought it more important to give players access to invention salvage racks. Unfortunately, the code to create different salvage caps for each is non-trivial, so we will need to address this in another way.

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How are items in a players personal inventory, but not yet placed, affected by this. Will they have their placement cost reduced, or do we need to place them before issue 13 goes live?


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Items in personal inventory will be placed at the reduced price after the issue goes live. Merry Christmas!

Woot!

Hey everyone! It’s a real pleasure to finally be able to address everyone in person.

Aside from being involved in the game industry for some time, I’ve been a long time fan of City of Heroes since Issue 3. I’ve been through the rough patches and the great issues, and it really is an honor to work with such a great crew of developers and work with such a great crowd on the forums and in game.

I’ll be working with Castle on designing new game features and setting up new powers. I’ll also be primarily responsible for Bases and a number of other things to come.

Simply said, here’s looking at the future and all the great things to come.


And yes, it really is all a Nemesis Plot.

There have been many posts on the Closed Beta boards and here that I’ve wanted to answer. I’d like to answer as many of those critical questions as I can.

Here is a quick Q&amp;A based on those questions, but first, some really good news:

Prestige Refunds: The programming team has set up a refund system for all base plots, rooms and items. As soon a player loads into a base, that base will automatically refund the Prestige difference. This is crucial: the base must be entered in order to trigger the Prestige refund. If your base is not loaded, then the refund will not happen until someone enters it.

Teleporter recipes: The Rare salvage requirement on these should be removed in the next patch.


Now for the Q&amp;A:


Q. Why re-price bases?

A. Bases were priced in a way that prevented many players from accessing the larger size bases they would like to build.

The goal here was to allow everyone to build larger and more interesting bases on a smaller budget. (I’m really looking forward to seeing all the new base pics!)


Q. What has been re-priced?

A. Primarily the Plots, Rooms, and many Energy and Control items. Plots received a large reduction in cost, and rooms were significantly reduced. The cost of energy and control items is also reduced, and is now based on the amount of energy and control they provide.


Q. Base salvage, why replace it, and what will happen to it?

A. Base salvage has little value to most players. Since there are a limited number of base items to construct, once those items are built there is little need for any further base salvage.

As a result, base salvage tends to either gather dust on salvage racks, or be a source of confusion with Invention salvage. Base salvage will not be removed though, so anything not converted to Brain Storm tokens will remain in game.


Q. Salvage Storage Racks, Why only 30 pieces of invention salvage?

A. In short, the market. The market system is designed to have a steady supply of salvage coming in. If large salvage racks were added, it would create a temporary supply problem of unknown duration until the salvage racks filled up.

Since having salvage temporarily dry up would be a big problem for all players, this number was intentionally kept low. Once the impact on the markets as a whole can be measured, we will look at adjusting these numbers again.


Q. What’s happening to Rent?

A. Rent still exists, but it has been reduced dramatically. Rent is no longer charged by plot size, and is instead based on the number of utility items in the base.

These are the items that charge rent:
- Storage bins: 100 prestige per bin.
- Workbenches, and Enhancement terminals: 100 per tier
- Medical Items: 100 per item, excluding Basic Reclaimator

No rent is charged for basic utility items like Teleporters, Teleport beacons, Medical Reclaimator's, Basic Work Tables, and Invention work tables. Rent free bases of any size can still be built, with all the normal utilities available. In the future, we will be looking into improving how rent is charged as well.


Q. Base Pathing issues, why was pathing changed?

A. The base pathing was never intended to be changed. The fix for it was not simple though, so it took some time for the programming team to get the fix in. We are actively looking at ways to make the pathing system easier for base builders, however, in the future there may be pathing requirements for raiding.


Q. Why was X feature not looked into?

A. Actually, we looked at a lot of features. We have plans for not only Base Raiding and the Cathedral of Pain, but also the base editor as well. We want to add new base decorations, new permissions features, and a few more goodies as well. We are still working on these, and they will be added in as we can get them completed.


So, beyond that, I’ve been a long time reader of the base threads, and am looking forward to seeing the new bases that will be built. My goal is always to make base building better, and we will keep working to bring in new features to improve bases.