UberGuy

No. Pseudo pets use auras. That's what the are. You summon the pseudo pet, and it attacks stuff around it with an aura.

Rain of Fire is like summoning something that attacks with Blazing Aura several times a second.

They can't. It's the same mechanic. Rain and patch powers are critters using an aura that "ticks" its activations very rapidly. They can't change how it works for rains/patches without changing how it works for damage auras on characters. There's no current tech for flagging them separately.

I think you're (maybe) missing the point that times like that weren't that impressive before. For a Master Of, they're pretty good, but I've been on "speed Master" runs before Incarnate powers even came out. You just do a speed run and pay a bit more attention to not dying. (If you're playing characters who are good at speed runs, that's not a contradiction in concepts.)

I won't deny that Incarnate abilities have made that easier, but the biggest culprit on that has been the level shift we got with Alpha. The other big culprit allowing speed increases right now is Interface, which we know is being changed. When everybody with a damaging rain or patch power can melt whole spawns in seconds (especially when the spawns are -1 combat level to you), that's just going to speed things up a lot.

I'm suggesting that a low enough participation score might effectively override your league bonuses, giving you a "low participation" table. The reason I'm thinking there might be such a direct relationship (at least over a small range of participation), rather than there being some other factor in between that's creating a non-causal correlation between participation and league score, is that having another factor seems to require yet another measurement of our personal activity besides just participation. Even in your example, there's an indirect measurement of some sort suggested - some criteria that the way support characters are played often causes them to not get full credit for what the league does as a whole. While that's certainly possible, I don't think we've been told anything to suggest that is the case.

I find it easy to be cynical about the detailed correctness of what we've been told, not specifically because I expect error or deceit, but because I suspect that significant effort was put into "laymanizing" the explanation. Going into all the curves and interactions is probably not just considered undesirable in order to hide the details from us, but also possibly because they're actually rather complicated.

We were told we can't control our ability to get a Rare or Very Rare, and that what we get is random. We were not told we cannot affect that chance. I'm just assuming that participation is the means by which that any such affect would be determined, because it's the explicit, individual measurement we know about. That and because we weren't told it had no affect at all, just that it didn't have so much affect we could produce deterministic rewards.

Assuming that there's only one thing measuring activity, and that thing is the participation metric, my idea was that there might be a band of low participation scores (below which you get Threads) which effectively dictates a reward table that has a higher chance of commons and a lower chance of rares and very rares than the table(s) presented to people with higher participation. Above this band of participation, the odds of uncommons, rares etc. would be dictated not by participation, but by league activities.

So I think what I was thinking and what you're describing are compatible.

There are degrees of random. Which is to say, it may always be random, but the distribution of rewards based on the random roll may be affected by various things. We don't know what any of those things might be specifically, but we can get a hint of it by looking for correlations between things we can control and the probability of rewards given.

If you look at the thread from my post, linked above, and check out the data from myself, Lobster, Arcanaville, and one other post I linked to data for in another thread, there are some suspicious-looking trends, particularly for Masterminds. If participation only controls whether you see Threads or not, once you filter out all the times someone gets Threads only, there should be no reason for Masterminds to see Common salvage more often than other characters. However, tentatively, based on data available at this time, it looks like Masterminds might be seeing more Common salvage than other ATs. This is interesting because we think we know that there is something wrong with the system's measurement of Mastermind participation. If that is true, and Masterminds are more likely to get Commons than other ATs, then it suggests that participation score may have some influence on reward, because it looks like a low participation score may make Common salvage more likely.

What I would say seems likely at this point is that participation does not appear to have any significant impact on reward beyond some level. In other words, the theory that Masterminds are prone to get Common salvage due to low participation seems likely to be specific to low participation scores above what you need to avoid the Thread-only table. If participation can indeed influence your reward distribution, I believe it must reach some maximum contribution, at which point any further influence over reward distribution would come down to things at a league level. In other words, low participation may make Commons more likely, but there is probably a hard limit to the degree which high participation can make Rares more likely.

I don't believe this theory is incompatible with the things Baryonyx said (or didn't say).

Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward. I don't remember how I researched it initially, but I couldn't figure it out at the time. Maybe I couldn't find the unresistable flag for some reason.

I certainly only notice my Regen rate go red on non-regen characters. Maybe I am not noticing it happen unless it drives me to zero. Even on characters that happens with, it doesn't seem to affect me often. It seems like something they may only do in melee range, or something. I don't think I've ever noticed it on my FA Brute, though, and because of the strength of HF, I haven't intentionally accumulated any +regen bonuses on her.

I'd like to point out just on this very narrow subject of the probability of getting Uncommon drops, "fixed" seems to be ... conditional? Take a look at my recorded drop statistics, and check out my ratio of Uncommon to Common salvage. The 1st character was run through trials mostly before the change to Uncommons, the 2nd straddled the change, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th were after it.

Agreed with the above. Ageless should affect Domination. Honestly, I don't think it's possible for it not to without Hasten being flagged to reject recharge (de)buffs. As Obitus mentions, Spiritual is different. Its like slotting an enhancement in every power that accepts enhancements of a given type. You can't enhance Domination, so Spiritual doesn't work on it.

Interestingly, all the survival-oriented Destiny powers, with their step decay from insane down to modest levels, are just about custom designed to give us fits because of the stochastic model things Arcanaville was talking about. Popping Barrier at just the right time to saturate the living daylights out of your defense and resists is potentially far more effective at keeping us alive than averaging its benefit (and/or just popping it as soon as it recharges) suggests. I'm sure the same is true of Rebirth, though its optimal trigger time will be different.

It's all quite fascinating stuff.

I bring Regens to Hami raids regularly. I've never figured out why it works this way, but Greens can't debuff a Regen's heals, either Recon or DP. (They don't debuff FA's Healing Flames, either.) They do debuff Regen, but it's very small compared to a Regen's normal rates, let alone what we're talking about here, and only seems to happen infrequently.

I don't. I have no intention of using Incarnate Trials to unlock Alpha. I'm running the living bejesus out of them already for my post-Alpha stuff - I don't have any interest in running them more per character looking for Very Rare drops to build Alpha. I like the fact that I can still build out Alpha running other content.

I normally agree on this point, but in this particular case, I disagree. What the 100% resistance to all but Psi on Marauder means is that you must bring enough DPS to force him to use Unstoppable early enough to have it expire. In other words, it affects the time vs DPS requirements for getting the MO badges. Now that it no longer explicitly singles out the Lethal/Smashing damage types, it's more or less a universal requirement. It leaves the alternative of building a Psi-heavy team, but that wasn't required even before.

Black Scorpion, are you aware that this same 100% DR thing happens with The Honoree in the Lady Grey TF? His Unstoppable comes back pretty fast. It's not unheard of for LGTFs to effectively fail because they brought too much L/S damage to that fight.

Maybe. I think sometimes the problem is that QA gets specs that are too literal. It's almost like they tend to be derived from the power definition spreadsheets (if that's still how they do it). If the power does what the spreadsheet says, it works!

That may not really be the case, but it seems that way. It's like there's no one internal who does a balance pass after initial design and implementation.

Except that, as far as I know, no one has ever done that.

Most of them actually do both. They have an aura that delivers an attack as an auto power every fraction of a second until the pet despawns. That how the Rain of Fire/Ice powers work, for example.

The color emphasis is mine. That section strongly suggests that league successes can improve your individual success, even possibly to the point of raising you above having low "valid" activity for the participation system.

I know I ran a Trial recently with two people who padded with alt accounts which were largely on autofollow, and both got non-Thread reward tables.

I have to say I am with you on this.

I'm not an MMO person, really. If I stopped playing CoH today, it's incredibly unlikely I would replace it with any MMO. Either I'd probably find an FPS community to re-join, or my other hobbies would just get a whole lot more time back.

CoH has a lot of things that appeal to me that, honestly, I don't think any sane MMO developer would recreate the way they are here. I think that by rather well-established criteria, CoH's mechanics are pretty broken, but in ways that I love. The fact that it was both broken and a ton of fun seems to have been an incredibly unlikely combination of factors - the equivalent in my mind of throwing a sheet of paper and having it stand upright on its edge. It's possible that a non-broken system could recapture the same feel, but I have very low hope for that, because I think it would be really hard to achieve.

I suspect that the devs leave a lot of what's broken here like it is because they didn't have the manpower to even think about it for so long, by the time they did, fixing it would probably cause more disruption in our community than it's worth. After all, we players have stuck around for 7 years, right, how bad can the brokenness be? Well... if it limits what you can do with your game, the temptation will be there to fix it because a game with fewer limits may be a game with more subscribers. When you build a new game, you worry less about keeping the old community happy, assuming you worry about it at all.

I've been through the remake of games before. You usually get a new creative team who think of all these ways they can fix, expand, and improve the old game, and in the process, the some of the most loved features of the old game have almost always been mutated or outright removed to an extent that the core reasons I loved an original were missing in the follow on.

So I'm not excited about a CoH 2. If it does come along, I'll certainly check it out, but I'm setting my bar low on its ability to replace what I've loved about this game.