UberGuy

It's been a long-standing mantra repeated by many regulars here that patience will eventually win out on the CoH market. All the regulars here know there are some counter examples to that, but I have a rather impressive example of patience paying off.

Edit: I found the screenshots and logs and updated the misremembered values originally given. I was off by about a factor of 1.7.

When did we get the new market interface? Issue 18? So August 2010. There's been a bug with it that I deem associated with confirmation prompts. If you have prompts enabled, it sometimes lists or bids on the wrong row in the current item list. Back before I figured out how to avoid this (which is to disable market prompts, even back when we had to do it every game session), I once was trying to list a crafted Posi's Blast piece, and instead accidentally listed a stack of ten Masterwork Weapons for roughly 15M apiece. According to my chat logs, I did this on December 20, 2010. (While the transaction isn't particularly identifiable in the logs, my kvetching about it in globals was.)

Now, I was annoyed at the listing fee lost, but it was more the principle than the loss of money. I don't market a lot with the character in question, so I decided to just leave the listing alone. If I really needed some Masterwork weapons, I could pull these down later.

They sat there for a long time, until nine months later, someone bought 8 of them for about 55.55M apiece, in a clear typo purchase. (If you think this is bad, the eight they got from me were apparently the end of a chain of purchases - the last 5 sales was painted with 55.5M inf purchases.) Here's that sale, dated September 22, 2011.



But I still had two Masterwork Weapons listed. I left them there.

I just logged this character in, and some time in the last 30 days, someone bought the remaining two for 20M apiece, just shy of a year later. Right now the price for these is hovering in the 10k - 50k range.



So an ancient accident eventually turned into around 436M inf in income after fees. Awfully slow? Absolutely. Anyone trying to make money for a goal should never think this is actually what we mean when we say to "be patient". On the other hand, this was also completely effort-free income. Apparently, if you wait long enough, even the most ridiculous listings sometimes go through. Even in stacks of 10.

(In my defense for misremembering that I'd made 800M on the old sale, on the same day I sold LotG specials for another roughly 400M, so I seem to have remembered that total instead of what I sold the Masterwork Weapons for.)

This topic has definitely come up before. It's somewhat intuitive, if framed in the right way. Let's say you have 1500 HP. If you're taking 100 HP/s of damage and regenerating 50 HP/s, in perfectly continuous ways, then you're losing 50 HP/sec, and it will take 1500/50 = 30 seconds for you to die. That's the perfectly average view of mitigation.

Now instead imagine you're being swung at by attacks that deal 1000 points of damage, delivered once every 5 seconds, that have a 50% chance of landing. We'll leave the HP recovery continuous. That's still an average of 100 HP/sec damage actually landing on you, but the instantaneous amounts that land are very large excursions from that average. In this scenario, here's a 25% chance that any sequence of two attacks will both land in a row, dealing you 2000 points of damage in a 10-second window, which isn't long enough to recover enough HP to make up the difference. That's going to kill this character barring other healing.

Basically, the larger the quanta of incoming damage are relative to your remaining HP, the more likely it is that streak of hits over the next several attacks will kill you. Honestly, the same thing is strictly true of mitigation that's heavily predicated on resists (since foes have chances to miss even players with no defense), but we tend to consider this a dominant effect on defense-oriented mitigation because, at high levels of defense and low levels of other mitigation, large HP% excursions in damage are more noticeable because nothing else mitigates them.

Edit: The closer incoming damage and HP recovery are to continuous, the less likely this scenario is to arise in practice. If you're taking, say 20 attacks a second at 10 damage each, each with a 50% chance to hit, that's also an average of 100 HP/s damage that will land. But in this scenario, it's much, much less likely that you will suddenly suffer 2000 HP of damage in the course of 10 seconds, because the odds of that many of the attacks streaking hits on you in that timeframe is far lower.

I was thinking about this voice-over conversation while watching the cutscene in the Magisterium Trial yesterday. I am fairly confident that I was reading the text faster than it could have been spoken. If it were narrated / voice acted, I think the cutscene would have to be longer.

I agree with Sam's thoughts here - unless you really make a cutscene worth watching with characers who have body language (or who are engaged in some relevant physical activity) and facial expressions, I think spending the time and money for voice overs is largely wasted, unless the voice actors are fantastic.

I certainly agree with the sentiment that this game's ATs don't map to narrow roles. I think the very original release thought they did (or would), but it didn't pan out like that, partially because everyone was very powerful, partially because most everyone has been made at least halfway decent at dealing damage (a common role), and partially because this game lets us usually get away with "just" being decent at a role instead of massively qualified. I think the design of the CoV ATs was a clear recognition of that - most of them are generalists. (Stalkers were something of an outlier here, possibly because they were given a secondary role/capability that really didn't have much value in PvE.)

I think a lot of CoH's players really like that about it. Its one of the things that lets us take whatever character we're playing and complete most content with it, which lets those of us prone to such interpretations feel more like each character is a super-being in their own right. Not everyone who plays CoH likes a game to fit together this way, but it seems to have attracted (and kept) a decent core of folks who do like it.

I think the OP topic really gets us into the question of how far does this need to be taken? Does liking the ability to have lots of role crossover among ATs mean we should generalize them more? Or is there value in having a kind of role focus for characters of a given class?

I'm of the opinion that focus is good as long as it allows for diversification. I like the idea of having a core thing (or set of things) that a character is good at "out of the box", so that you can be very good at one thing if you want to. But it's also nice if you can choose to be passably good in enough other things that you're not constantly looking for help from other specialists. Making specialists attractive is fine, while making them required can be frustrating.

I believe that, once you have summoned the storm, the PPM will be based on the stats of the attack the storm entity uses. Here are the relevant stats from City of Data.

Cast time: 1.17 seconds
Recharge time: 4 seconds
Arc: 360°
Radius: 5'

Since most pets are now immune to recharge, I assume the recharge 4s recharge time is fixed for I24 PPM purposes.