UberGuy

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Golden_Avariel View Post
    Who gets the temp powers? Is it random like in Lambda? If so do you have trouble with people not using them... like in the Lambda?
    Who gets the ones dropped from Goliaths is random. Who gets the ones from crates is partially random. Yes, sometimes this is a problem.
  2. Yeah, it was a bigger jump than a regen tick, and I don't think anything else heals him (does it?). That's what made me think that might be what happened. I'll do some digging around.

    Edit: Well, here's some actual info on the power.

    Disintegrated
    Anti-Matter's disintegration power will heal him if you die while under its effect.

    That does read like it would do what I thought happened. He grants you a temp power that affects foes with a 25% (flat rate) heal. Presumably it's triggered when you die. I can't see anything I know how to interpret that way, but I don't know of any example powers a character could be given that says "do this when a particular effect defeats you."

    Edit2: Hah! I always compared Anti-Matter's Atomic Blast to Nova Fist. Little did I know. Here's the description of Atomic Blast...

    PBAoE Unresistable DMG
    Marauder slams the ground, activating a wave of Nova energy which devastates all enemies around him!

    EditOnEdit: Yes, that's the decriptive text for Atomic Blast (not Nova Fist), saying it's Marauder using a Nova on you.
  3. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    Maybe. I'm not sure what that'd make the power look like at level 28, when you can first get it, for them to be satisfied with us running it full time at its current power at level 50.

    There's also the fact that we're talking about heavily IO'd performance. Arcanaville's Scrapper analysis puts Regen near the top of SO-grade performance. So what's our target here? And is it a target the devs care about?

    Stuff like this is why such dramatic changes to the set are so unlikely.
  4. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Vitality View Post
    It would be the same attentive playstyle...just smoothed over.
    But it would be a much higher survival level, unless either IH was reduced, or other powers were reduced.

    Quote:
    PBs get Reconstruction and Dull Pain to go along with good resists and a permable 85% resistance power.
    But they don't get high regen in combination with their self heal and Dull Pain powers. They get resists instead. (And on a Scrapper, that would be 75% resists - the EAT resist cap is higher.)

    Quote:
    Willpower gets Fast Healing along with Integration or Instant Healing (depending on the number of enemies) to go along with good resistance and good defense.
    And it gets no Reconstruction and a much weaker version of Dull Pain (which, because it's a passive, has no self heal component).

    Quote:
    I really don't think perma IH would make this set outperform others at high levels...I think it would just smooth over the playing of the set.
    The problem is not that it would outperform them at high levels. It's that it would outperform them everywhere else.
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arilou View Post
    It's not a lie, it's just misleading. It shows what it says it shows: The average time a person has to spend in the queue before joining. The problem is that since most leagues are pre-formed they skew the average time very low.
    I don't believe that to be the case. If leagues on which I play are at all representative, very few people join leagues via queues. I don't see how those few people explain why those who do join a league via the queue is likely to have a short wait in order to do so. That suggests that people only join the LFG queue at times when people are starting pre-formed, open leagues, and I see no reason that should be valid.
  6. It's an approach to AE mission design targeted fairly specifically at Brutes, that exemplars you to extremely low level. At very low levels, mobs give an exemplared level 50 much higher rewards/HP. Many ATs can't leverage this strongly, because at very low levels, you have few attacks, and your enhancements are degraded to miniscule levels. Brutes, more than nearly any other AT, function extremely efficiently at these levels, because Fury is a large damage bonus that almost no other AT can replicate, available at level one. If you ran into a mission hopped up to the damage cap on red inspirations, you could run around smashing boss-rank mobs, which pour inspirations on you and would also pop and sustain your Fury bar higher than normally possible.

    That's the essence of it, from what I understand.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by ZephyrWind View Post
    What I don't understand is why this was necessary at all. If maxing damage and defense was causing some people to be able to kill mobs too fast, isn't that explicitly what MARTy was introduced to combat?

    Or are we chalking MARTy up in the "phail" column?
    An awful lot of people seem very ready to assume that MARTy is supposed to clamp down on anything that looks like "exploitative" gains. It's not. It's possible for people who aren't farming to hit farm-grade reward rates, at least for short times. If MARTy stepped in on anything that looked like farming reward rates, it would hit high-end players who aren't intentionally farming fairly regularly. It would kick in on them only sometimes, like after a serious of large, powerful AoEs, while it would stomp on dedicated PLers and farmers most of the time, but that would still create a lot of backlash from players who aren't trying to "exploit" the reward system, per se.

    MARTy is there, in part, to step in for the kind of ridiculous reward rates that cause the devs to shut down the servers when they find out about them. Even the best Fire Cyborg variants didn't rise to that level. So MARTy is there to stop sustained reward rates that are probably decently above what good farmers produce now. It's probably supposed to kick in at the reward rates that CEBR creates, but there's a problem. CEBR is not like other AE PL methods. It leverages game mechanics in a way that MARTy may not be able to stop without interfering with much more normal play. I suspect that's why we got a very targeted, AE specific inspiration buff here: that's highly specific to CEBR.
  8. I have to say, after running the original, the new pulse is so much smaller it's almost ignorable on my characters. However, my L50 characters tend to have good (if not excellent) HP regen, even if that's not a specialty of their powersets.

    That's not a complaint. I was amazed at how reduced it was, but not disconcerted. The pulse was still something I had to pay some attention to in fights, whereas before it was frequently deadly to be hit with it in a fight if you didn't pay very close attention to its timing relative to your HP.

    I always thought the temp power / terminal phase was the most tedious and unexciting part of the trial. Now that part is a lot shorter. I still dislike the AV battle's over reliance on gimmicky effects for its challenge, but the change to Disintegration does help. The AV fight remains a challenge for PuG leagues - one I went on last night breezed well through the collection phases but had a touch-and-go battle with the AV.

    Does anyone know if dying while being disintegrated heals AM, even if you didn't die to the disintegration itself? Last night I had disintegration put on me, then AM immediately melted my face with Cosmic Burst. It looked like that healed him, which is kind of obnoxious if true. Although it sounds totally like the way a player would use their powers, heh.
  9. It's apparently inconsistent. My Scrapper's Disembowel seems to knock foes up just fine, at least foes in iTrials I was running last night. But I've seen the complaint about KoB several times.

    I would be annoyed if Disembowel didn't at least knock them over. (I wouldn't care a ton if it didn't also lift them 8' in the air, but I don't usually mind that it does.)
  10. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Moonlighter View Post
    Here's my problem with Regen.

    Because it requires so much relative time activating defenses it is the only secondary that actively reduces my damage output.

    Every other set has at least one power that boosts offensive capability, or a taunt aura to prevent you from chasing runners which I consider an offensive boost. Even SR has Quickness. Meanwhile the only offensive advantage Regen used to have, extra Stamina, has been watered down by inherit fitness, IO and Alpha endurance management tools, and even the sewer trial Endurance buff.

    While most soft sets have increased DPS as the reward for exceptional builds and playstyle, Regen still forces lowered damage with no real benefit.
    Two things.

    If you think you can't put QR + Stamina to good use even in the modern day, I think you're doing it wrong. I had a [Edit: Regen!] Scrapper that didn't have Fitness to maximize other things, and it was painful, even with a Miracle/Numina/PShifter. Inherent Fitness didn't water down that build, it made it more able to run non-stop, even including firing Incarnate powers off. On the flip side, I have a Stone/Fire Brute thats DPS suffers due to endurance drain without Cardiac [Edit: despite having Fitness and the afore-mentioned IOs]. Replacing Cardiac on that character with Spiritual (what I really want) then also requires me to swap out Barrier or Rebirth for Ageless. That's not a trivial exchange (though it's not unambiguously negative). On Regens with QR+Fitness, I go Spiritual and never look back.

    Second, while I can't argue the reality that Regen costs you DPS to perform, I think I can question how much of an effect it has in practice on anything but AV soloing and pylon runs. I've already conceded that, in my opinion, Regen isn't a good choice for those. But honestly I have never felt my damage watered down in other contexts because I played a Regen, despite playing other sets also. Barring obvious examples of +damage from sets like Shield and FA, I just don't see Regen as costing me anything meaningful in the area of damage dealing outside of going toe-to-toe with hard targets.
  11. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Werner View Post
    You'll never go and make a sandwich in the middle of the spawn like you might with Willpower, say. But oh, the satisfaction when you get it right.
    That's why I still play it. When they first took away toggle IH, I was mad as hell, not just because of the change in average survival, but because of the change in playstyle. Over time, though, I've discovered that I actually prefer the playstyle that forced me to discover. Fire-and-forget toggle sets can be fantastic, and I think a lot of regulars here view them as freeing you to do what matters most to them: flip out and kill stuff. There are times I crave that, but a lot of the time, I want to take control of how well I survive back from the RNG. Regen does that for me. Fiery Aura gets an honorable mention.

    Edit: I should mention that, back in early days Regen and SR were the only Scrapper powersets that actually qualified as what most of us would call "toggle and forget". Invulnerability was still saddled with "Unyielding Stance". Dark Armor had mutually exclusive toggles. And back then, SR sucked compared to its peers unless you were running perma-Elude, because of lower scale of defense in its powers, lack of DDR, and differences in critter attack mechanics.
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Captain_Photon View Post
    To address the original question: The ambush nerd is clearly whichever mission designer came up with the second mission in Who Will Die? Episode 1. I mean, what the hell.
    Hah.
  13. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    @Vitality: Well, I think there are things that Regen's nature makes it not as well-suited for as some other powersets. One that's a popular pastime around here is AV and other hard-target soloing. Regen's good at staying alive, but the way it's designed, doing so under the harshest conditions means you have to either defeat your foes really fast, or you need to run around and wear them down. By definition, you don't beat down a hard target really fast. (Well, these days some folk are getting damn fast, but we're still talking minutes.) And most hard targets also regen pretty fast, so backing off to heal some is going to let them regen enough to hammer your shot at a record takedown time.

    In more normal content, I don't find this to be a big problem. In standard missions, I can usually defeat my foes fast enough that they can't run me out of survival tools before I defeat too many of them (reducing their DPS) for them to overcome me. The more AoE-centric your primary, the better you can usually pull this off.

    One place that "normal" content becomes sort of abnormal is the Incarnate Trials. I've seen some of the best Scrapper builders in this forum contend that Regen is disadvantaged in those settings. I'll certainly say that you probably don't want to volunteer your Regen to go tank most of the iTrial AVs solo. Beyond that, though, I find mine perform very well in that content. Their high burst survival though things like MoG and strong (but limited) burst recovery tools let them take a hell of a beating before having to fall back, and high recharge means they can return to the fray quickly. (Two days ago I found myself soloing multiple Molecular Acid containers on a MA/Regen Stalker.) Of course, I have invested heavily in my Regens, so they are by no means representative of all Regens in the field, and having played Regen fairly consistently since just before Issue 2, I'm probably not representative of all Regen players in the field. But in this forum? I'm not all that. (Edit: See vid Werner linked to.)
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Vitality View Post
    Also...they may say this is a bug...but I can guarantee they did this on purpose to gauge our reaction...as there has been an ongoing thread discussing this very issue for some time now.
    Wow, dude, that's a big tinfoil hat there.

    This is a dead horse so old it has been beaten and revived by whole generations of necromancers. There have been so many other times there were big threads on this and nothing happened, it's nonsensical to correlate the current one with this event.
  15. UberGuy

    Regen...?

    I bet that horse is really tender by now.

    Now, having said that, let me explain that I have close to 6000 logged-in hours across four Regens, and play three of them regularly. Don't think I'm not interested in Regen's performance, or that I don't agree it has some issues. I think the public perceptions of those issues are rooted deeply in Regen's lack of in-set +defense powers, which limits how close it can get to 45% defense. The ability to get defenses in the 35% and higher range makes what I consider the largest, most immediately noticeable difference in survivability on any character.

    I think to a less-noticed extent, but more fundamentally, Regen is the only powerset that relies heavily on survival tools that behave linearly instead of proportionally and are reactvie to boot. By that I mean that defense and resistance both remove a fixed (average) percentage of incoming damage, while Regen mostly repairs/replaces a fixed (average) amount of it per time. Finding a balance between those two that behaves the same across all incoming DPS levels is just not going to be possible.

    Bear in mind that Regen just got some buffs. Personally I think they were nice to have, but not game-changing. But I think the conservative nature of those buffs may indicate that the devs don't feel that Regen needs a survival tool change on the scale of making IH (at its current strength, certainly) able to be always-on.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Laevateinn View Post
    Because they do not mind the lower performance, are willing to take the performance hit in exchange for e.g. concept or playstyle, or are unaware of the significantly higher performance that can be achieved with better control sets.
    The significant issue I take with this statement is that it implies strongly that "performance" can be defined without a role. Perhaps "playstyle" is a nod to this, but playstyle and role, while related, do not cover the same topics in my opinion. (Depending on your playstyle, you can potentially ignore your role, for example.)

    A Dominator's role can overlap with but is not identical to the role of a Controller. A Dominator's role is control and damage, where a Controller's role is control and support. Domination means that a Dominator can pump out more average mag per casting on any mez that benefits from Domination, but a Controller's controls last longer. And while a Dominator is significantly likely to to personally deal more damage, they are not significantly likely to be better at team or league support.

    The reason to play Mind Control on a Controller is because you want to benefit from the unique diversity of control aspects Mind Control offers in a vacuum, but you want a support role instead of a more direct damage contributor role.
  17. A "hard control" is typically a hold or stun. A "soft control" is usually a fear or sleep. "Hard" controls ensure an enemy can take no meaningful action (including fleeing or otherwise traveling significantly), while "soft" controls only partially disable them.

    I don't think confuse powers have ever had a clear place in this categorization, since they ensure a critter can take no meaningful action against players, but I usually infer that most players don't include it in "hard" controls, perhaps because confused targets can run around looking for targets.
  18. Oh, there's no question that Paragon Points are currency. They're currency we rather explicitly buy game goods and services with on the Paragon Market.

    I'm sure being a late comer in a long list of currencies in the game proper makes it easy for a lot of people to look at Paragon Points and sigh, but they make a ton of sense for an game purchasing system. They stand between actual currency spent and the in-game purchases that currency buys. Everything in the Paragon Market could have been listed in real-world currency prices, like USD, but putting PPs in as an intervening fictional currency allows Paragon Studios to do things like grant us a 400 PP/month stipend without explicitly tying a monetary value to it, let us buy lots of points at a discount, etc.

    It also avoids the need to deal in some fashion with other national currencies, and makes it harder to claim that anyone with points left on their account is owed a refund of real-world money if they are banned or something like that.

    Anywhoo, </threadjack> of own thread.
  19. I really think calling some of the stuff we get "currencies" is an analogy taken too far. I don't consider unslotters and boosters "currency". They're me buying X instances of the opportunity to do something. If by some chance they sell me a 5 pack of enhancement converters, I'm not going to bother thinking of that as currency. It's silly.
  20. My wild-***-guess... based on the lack of other components on the interface that you could be spending to perform a conversion, and the little counter between the top and bottom slots, I'm going to speculate that they plan to sell some sort of conversion widget, very loosely similar to enhancement boosters and unslotters, that we can use to convert an enhancement of one sort into another sort. Perhaps "in set" conversions will be cheaper in some fashion relative to "out of set" conversions, require different widgets, or something else.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Stormbird View Post
    BOOOOOO devs. /thumbsdown to stealth nerfs. You have just hurt people playing legitimate missions - AGAIN. If I know I've got a big fight - like, say, I've just come back from the hospital after getting stomped on - you've just removed my ability to buff up ahead of time and still have a full insp tray.
    While I agree with you in principle, I can't accept that this is a nerf to any but a vanishingly small number of players in "legitimate" missions. I have been playing since pre-release, and I have never felt the need to do this outside the mission. Probably more significantly as anecdotes go, I have never noticed anyone else do this, or ever heard anyone ever mention doing it except for specific AE farm maps.

    Does that mean no one ever made us of it? No, I'm sure it doesn't. But if it's rare enough that I've never even heard of it before, that means lots of other people are doing something else and getting along OK. I suspect they'll be all right.

    (I have no love of the nerf. But I can't buy that argument against it.)
  22. Maybe this is old news, but I hadn't seen it.

    Fire up the game and check out what you get when you use this command.

    /window_show convertenhancement

    If you aren't at your game machine, here's what it looks like.



    It appears docked to the top of your enhancement tray(s).

    "In Set Conversion" and "Out of Set Conversion" eh?

    None of the help icons pull up anything useful (they have placeholder text), and the drop down menu has nothing in it or won't open. The "slots" don't accept anything I had to try and drop on them. Changing between in and out of set conversions didn't change anything.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion View Post
    I don't remember seeing anything that said the interfaces were going to get buffed...
    The DoT damage on the Toxic and Psi ones was decided to be too low, and will be increased.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Talen Lee View Post
    I have never encountered this unless I am literally clicking too fast to see a reaction. Have you considered it might be clientside? Does this show up on multiple computers?
    There's no way it's client side on my system. I can run four copies of CoH, have a 2 megabyte/sec sustained download speed and a 500 kilobyte/sec sustained upload speed. (Burst speeds are better for certain things like HTTP file downloads.)
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
    Can anyone else confirm that this is occurring for them?
    I can. I kicked a -35 foe with Crane Kick on a level surface and it moved him like 5 feet. Normally he goes into low orbit. Not really, but normally he goes flying.