The_Gamemaster

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how is the baconator? I haven't tried it yet. I miss the BBC.

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The Baconator is designed to reduce your life expectancy by about two weeks per burger consumed. It lists at 830 calories and 51 grams of fat. Compare that to the Monster Thickburger's 1410*/107 (more calories and fat than a Baconator plus a large order of fries), and you see why I now regard the Baconator as being in the happy meal class...Uggghhhhh... The Baconator is still enough meat and grease to put you into a food coma.


*Some sources list the Monster Thickburger at 1420 calories, although after looking it up, Hardees lists it at 1410.

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because anything else hinges on the frequency one eats at McDonald's and not simply a single visit.

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Dude... when was the last time you hammered down two sausage, egg and cheese McGriddles and a coke?

It's so good goin down... but 20 minutes later you feel like you had ingested a 5th of drano with some shots of paint thinner.

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When I was a kid I ate 22 pieces of bacon in one sitting. Tasted awesome going down, but man did I feel like crap for several hours after that. (I didn't puke or anything, though.) That taught me a bit of moderation is a good thing.

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I had a Hardees Monster Thickburger (2/3lb burger, bacon, lots of cheese) last weekend with a large order of curly fries to boot. I felt groggy and sluggish for the entire day. Weighing in at 1420 calories (with nearly 1000 of those calories coming from fat), the burger is appropriately named. Of course, the burgers used in testing probably didn't have a gravy ladle's worth of mayo on them like mine did. Tack on another 500+ calories for the fries, and you have the makings for a bad day. I'm not a small guy (6'2"/215 lbs), but I'm not big enough to wolf down 2000 calories worth of grease and bread in twenty minutes without paying the price.

After eating that monstrosity, I decided that Wendy's Baconator belongs on the kids menu.

Nice. It's good to see that, with your return, you have jumped right back into the academic side of gaming. I was very disappointed to see you leave when you did, as I was just hitting the smooth part of my own learning curve, and to lose such a strong member of the community was a blow, from my perspective, anyway.

I like the fact that you have renewed your guide writing with a "training wheels" edition, covering a topic that is useful to the community, but not unneccessarily ambitious in terms of the depth and complexity of the content. Overall, a good effort.

I am looking forward to your next assay.

Hmmmm...I love Fire/EM, and, all-in-all, this is a reasonable build guide, although the cause would probably be better served by the inclusion of more strategic commentary. I have to make the observation that there are some interesting subjective gaffs in the content regarding animation times. In the text, you describe several attacks as follows with regard to their respective animation/activation times:

Barrage-Long animation
Bonesmasher-Fast animation
Whirling Hands-Short animation
Energy Transfer-Fast animation
Total Focus-Long animation
Laser Beam Eyes-Long activation

Actual animation times (taken from City of Data)
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Barrage 1.33s (Long)
Bonesmasher 1.50s (Fast)
Whirling Hands 1.67s (Short)
Energy Transfer 1.00s (Fast)
Total Focus 3.30s (Long)
Laser Beam Eyes 1.67s (Long)
</pre><hr />

Doesn't make much sense, does it? I'm not trying to nitpick, just to put some specific content into a clearer perspective.

You are correct. In practice, I would probably balance the slotting a little better than I did in the sample build, in which I simply slotted the attacks in the order in which I took them. It was really more of a product of creating the build in the planner than a reflection of intent. Call it a miss in the editing process. The same is true of your observation on Brawl.

While you are using Brawl, you should definitely stick an acc in the default slot. It was an oversight on my part. Overall, I could have done a much better job proofing the guide, but the desire to pronounce it done at some point overcame any characteristic perfectionism that I may possess (or be afflicted by, as it were). Despite possessing a reasonably strong command of the language, I lack the patience of someone with the natural writer's gift. That fact comes back to haunt me every time that I put together anything longer than about twenty pages.

As I recall, it took several sittings to write the rough draft, and I added several sections during the first (and only) revision, including the TO/DO leveling build section (suggested by Q'Arkhan). Frighteningly, as much as 30% of the guide might have never been proofread beyond a cursory once over (Hence my labeling of the MS Word version as rev .7). The version that was actually posted on this forum was even rawer.

On the whole, the guide accomplishes what I intended it to, but I definitely think that it could use more revision as well as an update to correct content errors and to include discussions of IO slotting and set bonuses.

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Thanks Luciferion! I hope you enjoy it.

In other news: my real life has become so busy that my gaming time has been reduced to pretty much nothing. As a result, I am parking my CoH/CoV account for the first time in three years so I can focus on the issues at hand. As you know, my ability to post to these forums will end as well. After 6/28/2007, I will be off the forums for the indefinite future.

All my best to the Earth/Sonics to come. May our rare but proud breed continue to bring justice to criminals throughout Paragon.

Best,

HBS

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Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

*faints*

How bizarre. Unless there is a need to directly accumulate as much level-specific 13w7 as possible in the lower levels, I fail to see the benefit compared with simply making money through trading and getting what you want from Wentworths. I can make millions in days through trading. It takes a lot longer your way. In the time you spent on making that video, you could have made a fortune trading in commodities...

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This is an AWESOME guide. I hope it is stickied and remains where everyone can see it forever!

Let's list all of its good points shall we?

1) No factual data at all. ("I'm not good at math!")

2) The entire guide is the OP's personal experience which is completely at odds not only with the factual data but with other people's experience as well.

3) When this gets pointed out the author of said guide abandons all veneer of courtesy and becomes aggressive and insulting.

4) Since the information listed in this "Guide" is at total odds with reality I personally consider it not just worthless but worry that someone may read it and actually take any of the OP's advice seriously.

5) Axe to the face for the win baby!!!

This post is not only the personal opinion of it's author but also contains factual data.

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All hostility, disrespectful behavior, and general lack of depth to the discussion aside, the OP accomplishes the most important thing he can with this guide, if we treat it as current as of I8--the Ghost Slaying Axe is the proverbial weaksauce. I would submit that five minutes of testing side by side with the Sands of Mu by anyone with basic Shadow Maul skills make that painfully apparent. Only under contrived testing conditions can the Axe measure up to the SoM.

Now, that said, post I9, look at the prices on Magic salvage and enhacements constructed from it in the Auction House. Certain pieces bring serious influence numbers. Look at Luck Charms, mere commons, often gross 50K apiece. That's significant cash to invest in enough Insights to make your CoT Radio Mission farming work for you until you can raise enough capital to begin trading in commodities. These are the conditions that the Axe begins to show its true value. For all other applications, I am still in the camp that says it's C-RAP.

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Its probably a simpler thing like not wanting to tamper with the more complex parts of the code. The guy who originally wrote it might not even be there now: software development is like that.

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I have often thought this might be the heart of more than one problem with the game for some time now. Superlative talent quickly abandons mediocre endeavors.

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Conversely I have seen the opposite happen more than once. A development team will tell you over and over that a particular thing just can not be done then a new guy shows up and all of a sudden he knows how to do it and it is simple and easy.

regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

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The question is, if he shows up, can they keep him? These folks appear to need some help...

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... the devs said that while adding toxic damage and toxic resistance was easy, adding a toxic_defense type ... would have been much more difficult.

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While I have no knowledge of the code whatsoever, this seems like a plausible excuse, and not just a way they decided to present it.

As attacking is probably the most common calculation that has to be done, I'd bet that they tried to optimize the bejeezus out of this code. It seems like no coincidence that if you group together the two damage types that have no associated defense, untyped and toxic (which originally was designed as untyped), you end up with 8 types:

smash, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative, psi, untyped/toxic

If you can fit all these flags into a single byte, then you can use a bunch of bit-wise operators to do some math and comparisons. Not only are those operators computationally "cheap" to perform, but it becomes very easy to do more things in parallel.

One could add another bit for toxic, but then you'd need to use a 16-bit value instead and waste a lot of bits, probably also reducing the number of computations that can run in parallel.

The alternative would be to have a form of defense that applied to both the original untyped and the "new" toxic, but that may be unrealistic either because it could imply a significant Hamidon nerf, or because that bit was used to detect certain special cases (by taking intermediate computed values and byte-wise checking if they are equal or not equal to zero).


Then again, maybe they aren't pulling any tricks like this at all. My background is in chip design, and instinctively I feel that growing from 6-&gt;7, and 7-&gt;8 are cheap, while growing from 8-&gt;9 is very expensive; likewise with 16-&gt;17 and 32-&gt;33. I'm out of my element with software, so my instincts could be completely off base.

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Somehow, I get the impression that they aren't coding the engine in assembly, and in any case not many CPUs have packed 8-bit byte ops, so an eight bit status register would probably waste 24 bits in a normal 32 bit word most of the time.

Its probably a simpler thing like not wanting to tamper with the more complex parts of the code. The guy who originally wrote it might not even be there now: software development is like that.

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I have often thought this might be the heart of more than one problem with the game for some time now. Superlative talent quickly abandons mediocre endeavors.

Very useful, general information; nice work. I was hoping for some graphs, but the algebraic method works .

I notice that you already have a link to this guide in your sig; hopefully those who need it will notice this fact as well.

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Since I'm going to resort to the same boring arguments everyone else does, I'll consider them to have been made and rejected. There is a certain opinion that MoG sucks and is so situational as to be useless and this thread manages to repeatedly dismiss any differing opinion. *shrug* Threads do that, I guess. Hence, I'm beginning to understand the forums.

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There's a big difference between "made and rejected" and "countered with facts about the power taken from actual experience". Despite what you've typed, the people that dislike the power aren't blithely dismissing the opinions of others. The people who don't like it, particularly the one who made this thread, know the power at least as well as the people who like it, if not better. They've played with the power for a long time now and have real reasons for preferring other methods of defense and for not liking the weaknesses introduced by the power. They aren't simply shooting down dissenting opinions without thought.

I also think you understand the forums very well already. Lots of people like to make ad hominem comments and play the victim. I think you'll fit right in here.

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I'm THE victim, dammit! Let's get that straight before we proceed. (Check)

MoG is great! I have plenty of facts and testimonials to support that argument. (Check)

MoG sucks! I have plenty of facts and testimonials to support that argument. (Check)

Your arguments should be disregarded out of hand, b/c you suck. (Check)

Mmmmmm... Pie. (Big Check)

That about covers forum dynamics and MoG arguments, No?

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I think that I would be happy if they did this:

A. Slightly reduce the effectiveness of IH as it stands, but turn it back into a toggle.

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I would be happy if they slightly reduced the effectiveness of Elude but turned it back into a toggle also.

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What if it were 30% defense but cost the same as the old IH? I think that would be interesting. I'm not even sure that would be overpowered.

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I'm...*wheeze*...too fast for you...*huff* *puff* Sur..render now, and *gasp* I'll...spare you...

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I am looking at a Dark/Dark Scrapper.

Being an oldtimer. Sands of Mu seems to fit and what about Nemesis Staff or the Wand? can a combo of the two Vet rewards change a build?

Also, the Temp Travel powers in the Safeguard missions 5-&gt;15 (Raptor Pack and Zero G boots). Would you consider moving the travel power till the 20s. This gives more utilitie powers earlier.

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The Veteran powers are helpful in the earliest level, but they will not be a factor again past L22 except when Soul Drain is up or you get Focused Accuracy. That said, you could go light on Dark Melee attacks, backfilling with the Vet attacks so that you can focus on getting all of the wonderful, non-attack powers available to DM/DA ASAP. I don't have access to the Nemesis staff yet, but I like the Sands of Mu; they are an excellent accelerant to a quick Level 12.

As for putting off travel, that is certainly a possibility for SS/Hover builds, but players building with an eye toward taking Acrobatics for KB Protection will probably not like the idea.

It's beautiful! Reading what translates into a 55 page Word Document (I copied, edited, and saved it out!) on the subject matter of playing a quirky AT combo brought a tear to my eye.

Thank you for your time and effort...as well as your Table of Contents! Only internal hyperlinking could have made it better.

Truly a masterwork of longwinded goodness!

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I said:I think Aracana should have an SR lounge for somewhere to post all her crazy ideas that the devs will never look at.

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EG said:I agree. If you're going to be ignored and shunned at least you should be comfortable.

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hahaha, this is my favorite bit of the whole thread. They actually went ahead and did this one. It's called the Discussion of Issue 9 Inventions Feature forum.

ah hahahhahahaha

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If I had been drinking from the toilet when I read this, I would have been killed!

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nope it is 40' on thier impale too

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Never speak again until you know what you are talking about.

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I thought impale was nerfed to 40'...

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It was indeed.

You have grossly underestimated the significance of both Mighty Death Shroud and Dark Regeneration. These two powers make Dark Armor a force to be reckoned with--add the Unbelievable Oppressive Gloom to the mix and you have the recipe for something that can change a player's religious views.

So EG is basically running around with his own, personal black cloud floating over his head. That sucks. On a lighter note, at least Snaptooth is obeying the rules...

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I was busy getting weed whacker on my main, so I couldn't test Elude. Hopefully sometime tonight I should have Elude tests on heroic and invincible. Plus, I want to see what happens when my Kat/Invuln lets them mob her, to see how long she lasts against all that lethal. That should be fun.

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That would be glorious! If I can muster up some time and energy this evening, I might do some MoG testing and see what's up with Snappy and Co. It should go pretty quickly, since I have both it and Hasten 3-slotted for Recharge... *runs away before SF and EG can pelt him with thrown vegetables*

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I fought Snappy (finally) last night, and as I noted the futility of popping any small number of purples, something occurred to me--Based on both of your MoG experiences, I don't think that Snappy and his gang got the message about the I7 changes to Defense.

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The only problem with that is that I would have saw better performance on the before the Mob accuracy changes.

My MoG is slotted with two membranes (I have a lot of slack slots OK). So my total defense buff is 99.75. I was also chaining Parry which is three slotted for defense. Let's just use one buff that's 23.4% Total Defense buff 123.15.

Pre I7, even con Snappy's to-hit was 65%, so he'd be capped at 5% and get his 1.1 acc from his bow/knives for a total of 5.5%. +2 Snappy would have had the same chance to hit.

His final to-hit today was 5% * 1.4 = 7%. That's the even con. The +2 was at 8%. There were some bosses around maybe one or two and their final to-hit would have been similar.

Like I said in the OP, the I7 changes hurt MoG and this was a particularly good place to show it.

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Are you sure of any of the information that you posted about the chance "ToHit" of the mobs that you fought...i.e. are you looking at statistical data that you recorded or are you just simply telling me what I (and everyone else) already know in terms of how it *should* work? I understand that the Accuracy changes hurt MoG (and Defense in general) at the floor, but they help it quite a bit when it counts.

Consider what I said, rather than regurgitating the obvious in support of the thread topic without bothering to put it into context (by extrapolating your own argument into an expectation) with what actually happened...to see if I might have been trying to make a point . We're not talking about comparing MoG now to pre-I7 MoG; we're talking about how MoG now versus a group of even cons compares to MoG with the same group at +2.

Why did you die so much faster to the +2's if their chance "ToHit" was virtually the same as the even cons? The expected incoming damage rate should have been increased by what, low 20%'s (damage-wise...all told, maybe 40-50%)? All other things being equal, against +2's, I would expect you to last a significant fraction of the time that you did against even cons. Even grossly overcorrecting for the slower rate at which you would lessen the incoming damage by killing off the opposition, you should have been able to last 50% as long. You guys weren't even close to that.

What was going on that made the outcome for two different players so bad? I think that you were not getting the kind of Defensive performance that you believe you were getting. What's more, the kind of dramatic difference in performance you saw looks to me as similar to the thing that happens when Defense debuffs or sufficient "ToHit" buffs unceremoniously overcome Elude: Sudden death.

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Testing update.

Heroic spawn of Snaptooth AV and minions - Died in MoG in 50 sec.

Invincible spawn of Snaptooth AV and minions - Died in 13 sec.

That's all damage MoG is supposed to protect you from, folks. Same spawns with inspirations and or IH/DP led to victory.

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I even went so far as to do my own testing with MoG against Snaptooth. I'll try and be as concise as I can.

Character: Salostophus

lvl 50 Spines/Regen
Spines powers all have 3 HO's in them (green at 50+)
Character has Freedom Phalanx Reserve, Atlas Medallion, Portal Jockey and Task Force Commander.

Fought lvl 51 EB Snaptooth on Invincible.

Dull Pain and MoG turned on with Hasten and began the battle.

Died in 29 seconds.



Fought lvl 50 EB Snaptooth on Heroic

Dull Pain and MoG turned on with Hasten and began the battle.

Died in 1 minute and 28 seconds.


Just to prove the point even further I then set the mish on Unyielding and played against a lvl 51 Snaptooth EB.

Using just Dull Pain, 1 small purple, Instant Healing, Hasten and Air Superiority on auto fire I defeated him swiftly and relatively quickly in just over 2 min. I never ONCE came close to death. If that just doesn't make you want to cry blood I don't know what does

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I fought Snappy (finally) last night, and as I noted the futility of popping any small number of purples, something occurred to me--Based on both of your MoG experiences, I don't think that Snappy and his gang got the message about the I7 changes to Defense.

I'll leave writing up the math as an exercise to someone who is interested in doing it, but I did a little bit of figuring that suggests that something is out of whack. If you look at the times that your fights with Snappy and his goons lasted, they do not line up with expectations of the performance of MoG in relative terms (against even cons v against +2's). I mean, sure you both died--that much was expected, but you both died a lot faster than I would have expected. Getting such a result from one player is one thing, unlucky dice, perhaps, but seeing the same sort of skewed result from an independent source is an attention grabber, at least to me anyway.

In an alt-rich world of gaudily clad powergamers and n00bs alike, this guide has been begging to be be written for some time. Nice work!

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BAH!!! What's the point of winning the fight if you don't get all tingly inside. What the hell kinda Scrapper are you!?!

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GM's used to seeing a fuzzy black ball just eat critters and spit them onto the ground: he's not geared for "flashy."

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Yum yum!