TheShifty

Thanks for being awesome Cuppa! */e fan adulation* You'll be remembered.

Cuppa slapped me once at a party! *proud*

I /love/ this idea.

Conga Rats you guys!

Something to consider is that the Tanker version of Fiery Aura is even worse than the Brute version. Brutes can utilize Blazing Aura much more powerfully than Tankers since it deals some pretty respectable damage with fury. We also get shorter recharge on our Burn as well as patron power AoE immobs to couple it with in I7, plus there will be fury on Burn too. It may be late-game where it really starts to count, but Fiery Aura does serve up some added offense for the Brutes, whereas the Tankers are not getting the same level of benefit from the offense/defense trade-off.

If Healing Flames is moved to 25% I think I'd feel fairly secure defensively with the fighting pool and the leaping pool. I personally am not making any big sacrifices in taking these pools to fill the holes.

However, it chafes at others that their choices are so limited by the relative penalty they suffer for foregoing these pools. The resulting build involves 5 toggles, 3 pool and 2 FA(It takes approx 10 seconds to activate them all by the way, not a big deal until you fight end-draining enemies who force you to retoggle after every fight. Not counting Blazing Aura since it's an optional offensive toggle.)

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As I recall, he thought it was bugged, but checked with some other devs and found out it was working as intended.

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Ahhh, thank you.

I thought this was the other way around?

I thought Healing Flames was supposed to be 25% and was bugged at 17%, while the animation time was working as intended but was being looked at to see if it was worth changing.

Good news nevertheless!

Castle acknowledged that Healing Flames is bugged at 17% heal instead of 25% as intended. He also said he would refer it to the animation department to have the long animation time looked at.

It'll happen, it'll just take time.

I would also like to see the toggle animation times shortened. I rolled up a /elec in the RV test, and I turned on the toggles...then turned them off. Why? Because they toggled on so suprisingly quick that I assumed lag must've started the toggle-light spinning without actually turning on the toggles. FA takes the entire length of a Burn to turn on all its defenses, 8+ seconds. It's a pain the [censored]. I was stunned to see toggles activate so quickly.

Are these long toggle animation times really balancing anything out? It seems like they only serve to annoy the player needlessly. But this is just a quality of life issue, very very low priority.

Some folks have both toggle-dropping ATs, and melee ATs on their account. Surely there can be some middle ground here.

In particular, the numbers for the toggle drops have been changed into some really wonky percentages that don't seem to take into account the power that percentage is tied to. For example, the blaster /dev de-toggle chances, time bomb in particular. Given the highly mobile nature of PvP, such powers won't hit all that often. When the toggle-drop chance is that low, it may as well not be there at all.

Similarly, brawl at 5% chance to detoggle 1 toggle. 20 hits to knock a toggle off, and players will be running multiple toggles, the one toggle that gets knocked off may not even be useful. So the power doesn't really have a point aside from Brutes charging fury on mobs.

I can understand arguments for making controllers weak at detoggling, but defenders? They deserve a reasonable shot at detoggling.

"Defender Storm Summoning: Thunder Clap: 12% and 2% for 1 Toggle; 0.4% chance of 2 Toggles "
It's on a 45 sec recharge, 2.35sec animation, has an accuracy penalty, and is a moderate-sized PBAoE, note that it's a PBAoE so it's also not easily applied. It'll take roughly 6 applications before Thunderclap drops 1 toggle. Assuming it's 3-slotted with recharges for a rough 20ish second recharge time, it'll be 120 seconds before this power will knock off 1 toggle. Also, it might not even be an important toggle. There's no damage component in Thunderclap either, just a minor disorient.

The disorient is useful for the controllers to help deal with hotspots and such, controllers are effective with mezzing. However, for the defenders, this power lost the bulk of it's usefulness against enemy players.

De-toggle powers that also do something useful like damage will still be highly desired. Thunderclap's main contribution was toggle-dropping.

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Toggle dropping powers is bad, period.

Why you ask, because it takes away the fun for all those AT:s that need to spend 70% of the time putting on toggles after having them dropped.

Now, there are four AT:s that still should have powers that drop toggles and those are:

Defenders, Dominators, controllers and corruptors.

The reason for this is that they do not have the damage needed to be effective against toggle heavy AT:s unless they can drop toggles.

Dominators and controllers should have less chance then defenders and corruptors with toggle dropping powers because they also have holds as a primary.

Blaster, scrapper and Stalkers already have unresisted damage that bypass all toggles so there is absolutely no need for them to have toggle dropping powers.

Tank and brutes could be discussed, especially tanks since they are low on the damage side.

The change was absolutely needed, toggle dropping could not remain on the current lvl if Cryptic wanted toggle heavy AT:s to PvP.

What ticks me off is that Stalkers are the ones who still have the highest chance to knock toggles off. That is just so wrong.

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It's sad that while this reasoning is sound and I agree completely, I'm fairly sure it will be overwhelmingly overlooked, and ultimately forgotten.

My current mains are a /Stormer and a Brute. One that's big on toggle dropping, and one that relies on not getting toggle dropped. It feels like things went from way too much toggle-dropping, to way too little. I mean, there couldn't have been some reasonable in-between values we could try first?

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5) i'm not sure what the "this happens too fast" stuff is about. everyone has access to the same movement powers in this game. if the storm was giving your team such problems, why not just follow them and kill them? how could it be that the storm repeatedly "surprise attacked" the other team? wouldn't they start to get the idea after awhile that the storm was gonna do his/her thing? could nothing be done about it 'cuz it happened too fast? i'm sorry, but this doesn't sound like a very strategic criticism of a power. furthermore i'd be curious to hear what tactics were explored as a counter to this perceived threat. did the team consider spreading out a bit? did non-melee toons take to the air? did you guys send a spines scrapper/stalker after the storm to slow him/her down? from the sound of it the team just sat there and was repeatedly surprised by the storm and their exploitative tactics. i really have a hard time buying into this.

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Just to be very clear on this, this is all in regards to hurricaners that ONLY use hurricane+Bf+a travel power, and nothing else. They intentionally avoid using anything else because they can apply hurricane to an entire battle in seconds without getting travel suppressed, then run away to reapply the debuff after the 10 seconds are up. Meanwhile villains can't chase since they've been battling and are travel suppressed.

Hurricaners who stay and fight are not a problem at all. If anything, /storm defenders need a buff.

My main is ill/storm, and I've seen this happen from both the dealing end and the receiving end.
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I did give some thought to this:

This is a long post because I had spent a long time mulling this over trying to justify doing this myself. If I could find reasonable ways of being stopped, I wouldn't have to feel bad about doing it.

Naturally all of the suggestions from the quote above were thought of, but they don't work. You can't send fliers after them because they have Snow Storm to -fly you. It's auto-hit. Spines is effective only if they don't bring break-frees, but these running huricaners are already running because they don't want to give villains a chance to fight back, of course they'd bring break-frees. Spreading out means the running hurricaner won, because it's disrupted the villain team's effectiveness with minimal risk of retribution which is exactly their goal.

Part of the problem is poor villain composition of course, but that's the playerbase's problem and shouldn't be considered. Let's make the very strong assumption that we always have the necessary villain team composition and power loadout. For this discussion, let's assume there's dominators and corrupters available as needed.

Let's assume the hurricaner has already done the swooping and caused grievous annoyance to the enemy team. Hopefully only one swoop+run is needed to alert the villains that this is not a stay+fight hurricaner, and must receive special treatment to be brought down. Let's also assume that the villains are highly organized, communicative, and can stick to a role, this isn't too unreasonable to expect on some servers.

Now, the villain team is annoyed and has rallied their teammates to wait outside the fight to kill the hurricaner on the return trip. These villains who are waiting can't contribute to the battle at hand because using their attacks would travel suppress them so they can't go after the hurricaner when it shows up. This means those waiting are removed from the fight because of the hurricaner.

Killing runners is tricky. Mezzing won't kill them, breakfees are cheap and plentiful. You need to use slows instead since BFs can't protect against them. There aren't many /effective/ slow powers that can be used on someone running away, there's a very good one in Snow Storm, but that's a /storm power, in fact, the chaser can count on being hit by this until the stormer escapes out of toggle range. But this only happens when one player is chasing the hurricaner because the long animation time of snow storm will get them killed if multiple enemies are chasing. Multiple enemies chasing the hurricaner, means that the hurricaner has taken multiple enemies out of the fight into a long chase. Removing multiple enemies from the fight like this is the goal of the swooping hurricaner anyway, they're not unhappy with this outcome. Also, if enemies hit by this 10-second debuff leave the fight to shake it off, the hurricaner also got what it wanted.

Note also that attacks supress travel powers, so whatever attacks are landed, have to be enough to either slow the hurricaner down enough to be killed, or hurt hard enough to kill them outright. One player can't do this since it's too slow, you fire one attack, get suppressed, and the hurricaner, still unsuppressed gets farther away. Also note, if one player is moving at a hypothetical 10 units per second, and the another is chasing at 10 units per second, then the two players will never close unless the second player finds a shortcut to get to where the first player is going, but the first player knows where its going, while the second does not.

Let's assume the hurricaner isn't using Fly, because Fly travels slowly and there's an abundance of -fly powers. These are easy to kill if you have flying villains with ranged -fly attacks.

What kills a superjumper? A -jump power. However, this -jump has to be able to hit a runner, because you can't put one down and ask the hurricaner to run into it, the problem at hand is that the hurricaner has already been constantly moving, dropped -jumps won't stop it. There are -jump attacks that can be used on them, but there aren't many.

What if they're using SS? The -fly and -jump won't stop them, and again, a ranged slow attack has to be enough for villains to kill the SSer while the villains are travel suppressed. If the hurricaner has SS, they're probably going to get away.

What if they're using teleport? No -teleport attacks. Not a big factor, the problem at hand is hurricaners who only hurricane then run. They probably won't want to do this with teleport, too difficult, they'd probably only use teleport to escape, if they do escape there's not much you can do. Let's ignore phase shift because of the long recharge.

Some more problems: If the battle is near the hero base, you've got very little time to catch them and act.

Even bigger problem, if you do kill the running hurricaner, they just need to respawn and continue to swoop, so your anti-running-hurricaner squad has to remain constantly in place until this running hurricaner chooses to stop. If the battle is near the hero base, killing them doesn't delay them anymore than if they had simply escaped to return later. If it's far from the villain base, it buys a brief respite.

-----What DOES work?:
All the above does not mean there's no way to kill this swooping hurricaner! 2 things can kill most of these swooping hurricaners.

-Cast a -jump power on the ground, then have someone TPFoe the hurricaner onto it. The TPFoer gets debuffed, but then a 2nd villain can now kill the hurricaner! If it's a flier, hit it with -fly as well.

-Have the waiting counter-attack villains buy up temp power web grenades and use them on this runner. However, these have crappy accuracy so +acc powers are recommended. (Keep in mind that if you use buildup and/or aim, the enemy would need to be TPFoed back since they'll escape during the animation).

SSing and teleporting huricane runners are rare since they're probably only taken as back-up travel powers. They'll get away, but there aren't too many of these in the first place.

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Yes, I have thought up counters, but look at how awkward they are to employ and how many assumptions were needed to carry them out.

The poster that had brought this up (DuskA) was from the X-patriots on Virtue. I'm on the same server, I'm pretty sure I've seen the same running hurricaners that he's got in mind. Heck, I might've been one of them before I stopped doing it after I realized how difficult it was to counter.

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When I mentioned a stormer swooping in it means we were already in the middle of a fight and he decided to drop in. It doesn't mean that he affected every single one of us, but it does mean that those of us affected had no clue why our attacks were not working all of a sudden. The affect of hurricane negated all of the attacks of those in its range and while everyone was trying to figure out where that stormer went/was we got killed by a large group that followed him in.

That stormer most likely would just jump in and jump out, leaving the lingering effect of his -range/acc debuff on us long enough to get us killed, but staying alive because he ended up out of range (or most likely went into invis).

I said we had lost before, which means we didn't complain as soon as we started losing (to paraphrase your kind way of putting it). It was when we kept losing due to the same swoop/drive by tactic (abuse of hurricane comes in here) that we began to complain.


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I'd have to agree on this. It was silly how easy it was to do this. The speed you can move through and disrupt the battle was too fast. It's a suprise attack, and you're gone before they know it, and they're probably still travel-suppressed from having been fighting. Snipes get LOS broken since the hurricane doesn't need to stick around, they can just go around a corner, and ranged attacks were already reduced in rage and accuracy from the suprise debuff. Click to-hit buff powers take too long to activate since I'd already be gone by the time the animation ended.

The other parts of hurricane that got nerfed didn't bother me nearly as much.

Well, he might try putting in a different effect to make up for a possible repel nerf. Perhaps it'll screw up melee accuracy.

From Castle in dev digest:
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This is as good a place to put this, as any:

I checked in a few Hurricane changes today that QA is going to look at. In Theory, these changes should mean that for PvE, Hurricane acts Exactly as it did before the previous change, while in PvP, it should act exactly as it does currently. Hopefully this change will get a green light from QA -- I've spent quite a bit of time on it over the last few days.


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At least we'll have the repel effect back for PvE. I'm guessing the to-hit debuff change is going to stay in place though since he's only talking about a change specific to hurricane. I wonder how this change is being put into effect exactly, and what this will do the endurance costs in PvP vs. PvE.

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I haven't had time to get on test, but I was wondering what people are reporting about the changes to hurricane. Anyone have any stories?

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This is as good a place to put this, as any:

I checked in a few Hurricane changes today that QA is going to look at. In Theory, these changes should mean that for PvE, Hurricane acts Exactly as it did before the previous change, while in PvP, it should act exactly as it does currently. Hopefully this change will get a green light from QA -- I've spent quite a bit of time on it over the last few days.

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HOORAY!!!!

It's mostly a knockback effect and AS interrupter now. If you move around, the repel still helps to make you a little harder to hit. It's low endurance, and it's still worth running as long as you don't mind being easily seen and you're able to avoid aggroing mobs with it.

It's nothing like it was before, but I'm sure most people will still take it and use it(though they probably won't want to use it all the time like before). The changes are in now and there's very little chance that they'll be removed. Players will just have to adjust, there's little else you can do.

After using the new hurricane in Siren's for awhile I made the following observations:

-It still seems as though most melee attacks miss, perhaps one every 4 swings hit me on average. A great deal more than before, but not too serious. A to-hit buff or multiple ACC SOs should give them the ability to land most hits.

Those with such to-hit or multiple acc SOs hit consistently enough that they don't have to joust anymore. I noticed that some players would miss constantly, while other other players hardly missed at all. The ones with high accuracy builds just walked right into the hurricane and pounded me down. The others would spend a lot of time missing.

-Moving around constantly as if I was a non-storm player while still keeping hurricane up still kept me from being defeated by melee attacks. The repel isn't as near-invincible like it was before, but it still makes a constantly superjumping hurricaner a very slippery target.

-Landing in a hotspot with hurricane on costs a LOT of health now. Most mob attacks still missed, but I'm taking much more damage than before when I tried to help in hotspot battles using hurricane. This hurricane change must /really/ suck for those still engaged in PvE, luckily my ill/storm hit 50 a long time ago, before the kheldians were added.

Things I did to try to adapt:
-Don't stand around the squishies. This was advisable before the change in case of jousters dropping directly down on you, but is absolutely necessary now. Don't protect squishies from melee by letting them sit in the hurricane with you, the repel just isn't enough. You'll just have to jump around in the immediate vicinity of the squishies to protect them. The hurricane island melee-free zone doesn't exist anymore.

-Something that helped a little to create an AS-free zone for the squishies was to TPfoe a lieutenant mob into your team, hold it, then Snow Storm it, and have your teammates stay inside the snowstorm. This also helps a bit when TPFoeing fliers, this way you don't need to undergo that incredibly long Snow Storm animation to apply the -fly(Also, snow storm's activation range is much much shorter than my TPfoe's range). Now you've got Snowstorm to foul up AS, it'll give -spd and more importantly, -recharge to melee ATs that try to get in there to attack the squishies, and you'll still be buzzing around with hurricane to apply the acc debuff and knockback.

You'll need to work with teammates who won't kill the lieutenant, and though lts take a little while to kill, you'll have to replace it occassionally. If they choose to attack your lt to kill it, then at least that lt. is taking a hit that a teammate would've taken instead.

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I'm just leaving my /subjective/ observation on my trips in Siren's thus far. I'll withhold my opinion of the changes to hurricane for awhile. Perhaps the player-aggro effect of hurricane will be reduced when opponents notice that it's not as devastating to them as it used to be and isn't as high a priority to remove from the battlefield as it used to be. Maybe somebody will find some new adaptations to the changes. Maybe just more time is needed to get an accurate observation of how much this truly affects us in actual application. Just a buncha maybes I still need to see first.

Hmmm, is it at all possible to just make the repel effect correspondingly stronger so that the average push speed is the same while the slower ticks still allow enough time for players in PvP to escape pinning?

Hmm, he's using 2 SOs for the example. Once you've got slots to spare, wouldn't folks be using 3 SOs? What would the numbers in these circumstances be compared to the 2 SO example?

Also, people are wondering on how PvP has changed. Let's generously assume there's only 1 acc SO on a player's attack. What's their new chance to hit you in PvP in I7 compared to now?

Upgrade the visual graphic on AV resistances:

-Those tiny purple triangle are too hard for controllers to see. Controllers must stand next to the tanker to see them, exposing themselves to the AoE damage that the tankers is trying to draw away. As it stands, most simply spam their control effects so they'll take effect once the resistance drops. Very many are not even aware of the triangles since AVs are difficult to see due to the power spam involved that prevents us from seeing them. Quality of life issue, not too important.

Have AVs spawn minion backup:

-AV fights are rather boring since they will primarily attack the tanker. There isn't a sense of risk in these battles due to this. Just a long drawn out battle of damage vs. AV regen rate. Giving AV's backup adds chaos to the battle for controllers to control. Adds a little movement to the battle instead of everyone standing still and spamming powers. AV fights should be exciting! And I think this would be a great way to help that happen while helping controllers out.

Non-illusion controllers to have 1 solid attack:

-I'd like to see if the non-illusion controller types could have at least 1 solid attack in their sets for soloing. They'd still really want groups since it'd be /much/ faster xp than grinding based on a single attack. But at least it gives them something to do while waiting on seek team.

Thanks for asking!

Mmm and help in the use of our pets would be BEAUTIFUL!

Woo nice!

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??!!!! That's what you post?!!! You have paniced 10% of the community with your NERF hammer on poor Regen Scrappers and you post this first?

*smacks forehead*

Oi vey!


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Actually, I'm responding to my PM's. Remember - I was at Gen Con for the past few days. First I collect my PM's, then I go to the boards.

PLUS - I'm spending more and more time on City of Villains.

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Poor Statesman, he just amped up his PM rate by about 400% with that comment heh...

He really does read all his PMs, if you check the box that informs you when your PMs are read, you'll see that he does read'em even if he can't reply to all of'em.

Kheldian endurance is drawn from others? When did Statesman make that comment? Can ya give a link?

Kheldian endurance is drawn from others? When did Statesman make that comment? Can ya give a link? Not calling you a liar, I just wanna see the exact wording before I relay the info to my friends.

Blaster,scrapper,defender,controller,tanker. These are 5 generic archetypes found in comic books. The word archetype was pretty well applied here, and it avoids the use of the word "class."

However, Statesman wanted to add 2 more classes, but really, things hint that they're blending roles of pre-existing archetypes so that they can't really live up to the word "Archetype" on their own. However, the word "Archetype" has become the equivalent word for the "Class" you choose at character creation.

He could say, magic, science, natural, tech, mutation...Kheldian. That doesn't fit either, and origins don't really affect powers in this game. Archetype is the word that fits best.

The key descriptive part of epic AT is "epic". In the interviews, Statesman zeroed in on the word "epic" to have to do with story. As well as being powerful in epic proportions, these new classes/epic ATs will be tied into the story as they are made available. And as you can see from the articles on the main page. The Kheldians are now tied directly into the story.


So when you have 5 generic archetypes, and 5 origins. When you add a epic class, what do you call it? Just say class and people will respond, "Come again? Is that just another word for Alien?" It's a little less confusing this way. He uses the word archetype to convey to the CoH player that this will determine what powers are being made available to the player.