Umbral

Well, if the abilities of enemies were manipulated to such a point that effects that prevented them from doing so actually affected them (i.e. -spd to prevent kiting) I think it would be a good idea. However, this would require that there be a much more comprehensive analysis of all of the effects in the game as it applies to all effects, which isn't really likely to happen.

The only thing that I really think the game needs in terms of AI "improvement" would be a certain reluctance to remaining grouped up after being hit by a big, nasty AoE. Many enemies will simply remain grouped up as you lay waste to all of them with giant, angry attacks, which doesn't make much sense even in the most basic tactical sense. Making it so that enemies will actually consider dispersing after they're hit by an AoE would not only add a bit of realism but make immobilization and slow effects be much more useful, not to mention making intelligent KB use incredibly valuable for forcing enemies to remained tightly clustered (as in, the only real way).

I blame VexXxa for not posting like normal people.

That is quite quizzical in fact. I wonder how the game would treat it if you had more than 100% of a penalty to a resistance value, since that would cause the final duration to be negative. Of course, I doubt it matters much since I can't recall all that many debuff resistance debuffs in the first place (much less any, in fact). It's an interesting thought experiment though.

You had all of the accolades turned on which is why you had such high defense numbers and recharge. In reality, you only have 8.7% +def(all) and 62.5% +rech.

Next time you put together a build, don't turn every accolade on. The only accolades that you should ever bother turning on are the passive accolades because Mids' assumes that, if you have the click accolades, then you are using them (i.e. that they are on at all times rather than the pittance of time they are really on).

Do you mean Follow Up rather than Focus because (1) Focus actually does more damage than Slash and (2) Focus and Slash don't accept the same IO sets?

Assuming I'm reading you correctly, the answer to your question is, in fact, a resounding "no". First off, the purple set, as I have slotted it, actually provides less +dam than the set up for Slash, not that 8% +dam is actually going to be doing much anyway. Secondly, +dam isn't the only thing that is being enhanced in the powers. The real reason to use the purple set in FU rather than Slash is because the purple set provides 90% +rech while the rare set only provides 43% +rech.

Slash, thanks to its already low base recharge time (4.8 seconds), has no real need for a huge amount of +rech beyond what it is given globally. FU, however, with its incredibly long (comparatively) recharge (12 seconds), has need for as much +rech as humanly possible so that you can stack up as much +dam and +tohit as possible (not to mention that the "real" damage contribution from FU is actually much higher than that of Slash simply because 37.5% +dam for 10 seconds more than makes up for a 5 point deficit in base DPA).

Spin and Evis don't have purple sets in them because of the set bonuses. Meaningful enhancement value differences between Obliteration and Armageddon don't really exist (all the purple set really provides is more end redux and that's not something Claws/Regen really has need of). All you would really save on that end is a single slot, which is more than made up by Obliteration's 6 piece set bonus.

Armageddon provides a bit more +recov (redundant), a tiny bit of fire and cold resistance (ignorable to useless), 15% +acc (redundant thanks to FU being so friggin' awesome), and 10% +rech. Obliteration provides stun resist (useless), 3% +dam (quite nice, especially when you stack it up), 9% +acc (largely redundant for reasons previously mentioned), 5% +rech, and 3.75% +def(melee). The comparative benefits of Armageddon to Obliteration are 6% +acc, 5% +rech, and 1 more slot while losing out on 3.75% +def(melee) and 3% global +dam. 3.75% +def(melee) simply blows the loss of 5% +rech out of the water (considering those are the only real comparisons) which is why I went without.

Yes. You most definitely want to enhance both the recharge and healing of IH. The only times I wouldn't put 5 piece DW into IH would be if I was really short on slots, and, even then, I would do it reluctantly.

Your numbers are wrong and it should be pretty obvious to you. What you're looking at is one of those wonderful problems with Mids that you would actually realize is going on if you actually looked at the Effects tab or knew how IH operated rather than trusting Mids explicitly when those numbers obviously make no sense whatsoever (especially when you should know from in-game numbers that IH provides a base of 800% +regen).

IH's base +regen is 800%, only 200% of which is actually enhanceable. Giving IH 3 level 50 IOs will, in fact, give you an additional 198.16% +regen, not the 2% you apparently believe would be given to you, for a total of 998.16% +regen. This 198.16% +regen is not meaningless whatsoever, especially when you realize that it actually equates to an additional 54% +regen on average using only SOs. With a decent IO build, that 198.16% +regen would equate to roughly 94% +regen (thanks to the increased uptime), which is more than you could get by enhancing FH.

No, it wouldn't. That's 100% less sleep resistance, which means that all sleep effects are doubled in duration.

I'm not entirely sure how that got taken out. I'm thinking it must have been an errant click as I was exporting it because the saved build has Hasten in that spot.

Editing it now.

It's thanks to SSK allowing you to use powers 5 levels above the level you are exemp'd to (allowing you to have access to your travel power) and the mission itself being incredibly short. IIRC, the mish grants 2 merits and can be completed in roughly 5-10 minutes. That's about as good as most task forces and it can be done as often as you like without any diminishing returns or need for organization.

Yes, but considering that all it's going to be doing is running some simple calculations, the actual difference isn't going to be all that noticeable. When you're running such small scale programs, it's still going to be a difference of seconds, at the most.

The calculation to determine this (which I call the extension threshold) is actually pretty simple. Take the animation time and damage of the big, nasty power in question (in this situation, Blaze), and the animation time and damage of another attack in your string (in this situation, Flares). Now, determine the DPA of Flares (63.2/1.188 = 53.2). After that, you then determine how long you would have to wait to give the two equitable DPA (because any inhibition of using Blaze that doesn't contribute more DPA than Blaze would be is going to mean lower DPS) using the same formula (dam/(anim + wait)= DPA) with some algebraic manipulation ((dam/DPA) - anim = wait). Plugging the damage and animation numbers in for Blaze and the DPA for Flares ((170.5/53.2) - 1.188 = 2.017), we see that it would take a 2.017 sec increase in Blaze's animation time in order to make Flares an even choice. Essentially, it takes a 2.017 seconds wait to make Blaze and Flares be even on DPA. Any wait under 2.017 seconds will make doing nothing and waiting Blaze a better alternative and, since Flares animates faster than that, there's no reason to ever delay Blaze by using Flares.

A more demonstrative example (because comparing anything to Blaze is simply saddening) is comparing Smite to Midnight Grasp. Smite (for Scrappers) has a DPA of 76.4 (90.8/1.188). Midnight Grasp has a DPA of 84.6 (189.9/2.244). The extension threshold for Midnight Grasp compared to Smite is .24 seconds ((189.9/76.4) - 2.244 = .24). So, if Smite is up and MG has only .24 seconds left to recharge, you're better off just waiting. If the wait is any longer, you should animate Smite and follow up with MG.

I only ever bother with DPA. DPS is too variable in its real applicability to make a viable metric with which to choose powers.

My general method is to first find an "anchor" power (generally the longest recharging and hardest hitting power) that the entire attack string will be based around (occasionally I find myself having to design an attack string with 2 anchors, which only really happens with low recharge builds that are using AoEs to fill in time). After that, the problem becomes generating the most efficient use of time to fill in the time for the anchor power to recharge. Sometimes this includes finding another "anchor" power for the internal attack string and other times it is simply alternating or cycling other powers, depending on recharges and animation times. To determine whether a wait is necessary, all you have to do is compare the DPS of the string with the wait to the DPS of the string without. Most of the time it's actually pretty obvious whether a wait will be beneficial or not.

It doesn't matter what you think of Tim Buckley or his webcomic(s). I still think that it's awesome to have a specific season of gamertastic celebration.

Merry Wintereenmas everyone! Now go play some games!

Either that or you can choose to take a -7 mag penalty to your sleep protection and -100% to your sleep resistance.

Except that you're simply saying that they should solve the problem without addressing the fact that the solution generates a number of other problems in solving the initial problem.

As someone that has actually lead raids of all kinds throughout the years, it's my experience that you almost never actually have everyone when you're ready to get started. Most people that are willing to raid won't even think about even heading to the Hive until Hami has already been spawned (at least on Freedom).

As someone that has lost out on HOs by disconnecting in the middle of a capped raid, I can empathize with you and agree that it would be nice if there were some way to avoid losing your spot from a DC. As someone that has actually led raids and noticed a number of people taking up spots but not doing anything (i.e. leechers) or simply trolling the raid, I can agree that it would be nice if there were some way to kick people that aren't contributing to or are inhibiting the raid out of the zone. The problem is that you can't let someone save their spot if they dc because then the leechers would simply zone in for the Hami spawn and then dc themselves, and, no matter if they came back in time, they'd still be taking up a spot.

The current system isn't perfect, but it works well enough.

And I've now figured out how to get around that specific problem, though, in implementing the algorithm, it's going to take up a lot more memory while activating because I'm having to use a recursive loop rather than a simple loop to determine and compare the internal attack string options. Still, it shouldn't be too bad. All I had to do was create a "Wait" attack with an animation of 0 seconds (Arcanatime'd up to .132 seconds) and a recharge of 0 seconds. Any wait period is going to be accounted for as a series of .132 second waits rather than a single discrete period of the required time.

I actually thought of the solution about 3 days after the problem was introduced. My biggest issue now is getting the time to code it in between everything else life is throwing at me.

I have a specific method that I use that involves generating external and internal attack strings that lets me figure out the most effective attack string for a specific subset of attack pretty easily. I'm currently working on putting it into algorithmic form so that I can develop it into a tool for other people to use.

That's what we've all been saying all along!

This generally happens to me when I've accidentally somehow forced all of my chat tabs to go onto the top half. All you should need to do is pull one of the tabs "down" to the bottom area of the chat window in order to cause it to bisect again.

That was the original idea behind my Dark/Ice/Psi. I did some elementary number crunching and figured that I could generate roughly 60 mag of hold on a single target cycling those 4 holds with all of them fully slotted and Fluffy contributing as well. I was tempting to try to convince one of my other friends to build a similar toon just so we could perma-hold an AV even through its PToD.

They've done a number of them over the course of the years. Freedom actually has the most powerful servers which is the reason why you'll occasionally see Virtue with a yellow dot and Freedom with a green even though Freedom still probably has more people on at the moment. The last one I remember was more than a year ago, however, because I remembering it tying in with the reactivation weekend before the reactivation weekend that accompanied AE being introduced.

They're not "emotions". They're "emotes", as in, to emote, which, for those of you with less than stellar vocabularies, is used to mean to dramatize or act emotion. The term itself grew out of MUDs giving players a specific "emote" channel for them to act actions out through (which is actually how CoX does it as well) with specific commands pre-macrod in for quick reaction (rather than typing "/em $name is in love with $target.", you would instead be able to type "em love $target").

On another note, "emoticon" is a completely different term that grew out of keyboard based chatting rather than online, text-based roleplaying and is a portmanteau for the term "emotive icon".