Ultimus

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

If you're going to play the min/max metagame against your players, you have to be better mathematicians. And that ain't hard for real mathematicians. We're still discussing the true benefit of Scourge years later, and the only credible answer anyone has to how strong the SR passive resistances are is "I think Arcanaville said something like 15% a few years ago**." And yet, there's nothing difficult to explain when it comes to how either works. They are just difficult to min/max around without complex math.

If you play this meta game for real, its actually easier to design a game difficult to min/max than it is to analyze a game made difficult to analyze. The advantage is with the system designer. But only if they actually play the game to win.

From a game design perspective, the problem isn't math. The problem is moves. CoH is designed for combat to resolve itself in a small number of moves (i.e. attacks). And that reduces the level of complexity of combat substantially. That puts the designers in a whole in terms of the maximum complexity horizon they can introduce. But its not impossible to still make a highly complex and unpredictable game within those limits.

Unfortunately, the main area we see this in CoH is in scaling stacking debuffs. A critter group that is a pushover at +0x2 suddenly becomes a nightmare at +0x6 when their debuffs start self-amplifying and the speed at which they can suddenly kill you rises exponentially.


** Closer to 24%, actually

Originally Posted by Starsman

The problem is: Energy Melee has no single target damage problems.

Look at the attacks and how good their DPA is:

Barrage: 0.99
Energy Punch: 1.2
Bone Smasher: 1.09
Total Focus: 1.08
Energy Transfer: 1.71

These are some great numbers.

However, there is a design flaw with many melee sets: At minumum, every set should have at least a cone and a PBAoE. You can rebalance and compensate (nothing wrong with having two PBAoEs if you want the set to excel in AoE potential) but no set should only have a single PBAoE.

Only exception I would grant is Super Strength, and the reason is Rage boosts it's only AoE (Plus any Ancillary one) to more than compensate.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Me too. Maybe one day I'll make one.

Originally Posted by Agent White

Nope. only Resistance aligned characters can enter, just like only loyalist aligned can enter the lounge in Nova Praetoria

Originally Posted by Father Xmas

One of my very first characters way back in Issue 1 had that power but the animation seemed very long and if you missed it became a "let me fan your face with my foot".

Originally Posted by _Pine_

Also, if you had mobs stacked on top of each other, ET would bug for some reason and AoE them. Got extra -HP for each mob hit too. Was nifty.

Originally Posted by Schismatrix

That's what i expected. To be honest i'm not sure if Ultimus was serious or just being silly by asking the question at all. The question seemed so absurd on its face that i was pretty sure it was the latter, but this is the intarwebz, so...

Originally Posted by Arbiter Hawk

It's centered on the target of the power - however, many pseudopet powers technically target the caster, which can cause the explosion to appear on the user. Not really what I intended, but it *is* hilarious, so I guess it's a feature.

Originally Posted by Starsman

Dont recall Total Focus getting any nerfs.

It was Energy Punch that was hit the hardest, despite people just screaming about Energy Transfer.

Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master

i think its a separate proc but extremely rare, ive never seen it happen yet