Void_Huntress

What, did a player who goes by 'Supergamble' die or something?

The Gimp (free) can manipulate PSDs. So can Paint.NET (free) with a plugin. So can PaintShop Pro ($60).

There's undoubtedly others.

We still haven't convinced the devs how -maxHP works, though, have we?

This isn't a direct match to your question, but the PnP inspired game has been leaning towards producing regular interval deterministic quest arc/raid reward choices. Every 3rd time you do a normal quest arc, the randomized table at the end includes ALL of the named/unusual rewards for selection. Every 20th raid, etc. It's a QoL change that assumes farming the content.

They've also largely not cared about players lowering quest difficulty to make it easier to try to get rare encounters (that can produce rare drops) over repeated runs, although they sometimes (but not always) adjust the drop table for chests based on difficulty.

I still agree there's a conjunction of unusual factors that results in a unique environment, both from a play perspective and from a development perspective.

Our carte blanche capacity to ramp up self/team buffs/enemy debuffs/crowd control essentially without limit doesn't show up anywhere else, and the nature of how these things are distributed amongst (non-Blaster) ATs means essentially anyone coming to the party has brought treats to share.

The total combination of ease of joining teams AND large world AND rapid travel doesn't show up anywhere else; the scale of what we can cross so fast has its own impact on the psychology of 'I can go ANYWHERE, at ANYTIME'. (The best counterexample I have for equal ease of joining teams existing in other MMOs has a very small world in comparison; it doesn't need fast travel accordingly, but the lack of it results in a subtly different experience).

This is a common issue. Some people don't believe proactive mitigation actually _IS_ effective mitigation unless it completely prevents attacks from happening.

This viewpoint is often reflected in how people see things like World of Confusion: Its activation interval is notably higher than its confuse duration, so obviously that's not useful because it's not going to keep anyone confused long enough to matter.

But it does matter. It causes small hitches and gaps in enemy attacks aimed at the players. This is small, but it adds up, even without things like Contagious Confusion in the mix.

Whether I used World of Confusion or not, even before I got a lot of my invention slotting done, significantly contributed to the question of "Did I die in this mission? yes/no".

What concerns me is the apparent resolution we're dealing with. 'procs per minute' is not a very fine grained measure when we look at the base recharge of powers that range from 4 seconds to multiple minutes.

With the way that they're stated to work, for any given PPM there's clearly an optimal base recharge at which recharge buffs and enhancement give you free guaranteed procs. The only apparent escape valve we've been told about is an AoE factor, and it isn't at all clear how that affects things.

I've floated the idea in the direction of devs a few times, but I just don't have the fortitude to push an idea so that it actually gets seen and considered.

That takes more doing than I tend to have.

You do know the point was to time the trip, right? :D

Repeating what Arcana said in another way: We know that blasters collectively sucked unbelievably badly prior to the Defiance redesign. We know that there were people who were able to excel very well playing blasters.

Here's the problem: If there were as many blasters succeeding well as the forums believe, then in order for blasters to collectively fail to perform to the extent they did, then there would have had to be a _VASTLY_ higher number of people sucking incredibly worse.

That sounds bad, but we have to look at the facts we've been given. All powerset combinations, on average, were outperformed by all defender combinations. With 'outperformed' meaning 'getting more XP and inf'. Considering the damage throughput deficit Defenders appeared to have before the damage buff to Vigilance, this warrants further consideration.

Defenders were, as a whole, outpacing blasters. Badly. Even solo. Not 'some defenders were outpacing some blasters', but 'collectively, defenders outpaced blasters'.

This leaves us with a limited number of conclusions. Either everyone who was able to succeed viably with blasters was a very small number of unlikely elites surrounded by others who could not manage the AT, or most people who THOUGHT they were succeeding weren't succeeding as well as they thought, or some combination of the two

Arcana's assertion wasn't condescending, it was acceptance of the reality so far in the interests of trying to fix it.

But hey, this exchange is more supporting evidence that the best way to get condescension from Arcanaville is to throw stones at her when she's being factual and objective.

I got into some balance and 'feel of game' discussions with a friend not too long ago about City versus other MMOs, and I noted that in a lot of MMOs, power design is around a unit of One Encounter.

I then argued that in City, because of the way health, regen, and recharge works, we're really dealing with a unit of One Mission, because of the aggregate effects.

I don't know that I would say inf on both sides 'stabilized'. I'd say the redside market was fully subsumed into the blueside market.

Whether that's good result or not is a separate question from whether that's the result they wanted; they held on hope for a long time that each side could have a functioning economy.

What implication are you perceiving? There's no superiority, no 'slap' in the statement you quoted.

All she did was reiterate that she doesn't experience an issue playing blasters. That she isn't trying to get blasters fixed because she EXPERIENCES a problem that you do not experience, but instead because she's AWARE of a problem.

By my math, that build has 62.5% global recharge plus Spiritual Alpha (I can't tell which from the information given). Which is pretty good, but some powers aren't going to be up nearly as often as a more recharge intensive build. For instance, Drain Psyche isn't perma.. but with the higher degree of resistance this build has than mine, it isn't going to be leaning on the regen as much.

Also, Fire has enough DPS available to it even at only moderate recharge that I don't think it'll be dangerously damage anemic, if the attacks have any substantial slotting.

Of course, theory crafting from a screenshot isn't the same thing as seeing it in action. I'd really like a video.




Defenders get all of these things and more.


Those complaints about being 'hard to solo' are usually more along the lines of 'I feel like I'm not putting out damage at a rate I want'.

Some people want big numbers, and blasters have that. But big numbers sometimes and zeros others can easily average out to less than the non-damage ATs if there's enough 'zero' time.


The devs themselves told us circa I11 that blasters were the worst performing AT as a whole, amongst all powerset combinations for the AT. That the best blaster powerset combination was outperformed by the worst powerset combination for any other AT. Including defenders.

The adjustment we got was Defiance 2.0, which undoubtedly helped. The question is if it helped more than the buffs all the other ATs have received since helped them. It seems unlikely.

There's also the question of the new content (Praetoria, First Ward, incarnate, etc), and the increased threat level those enemies present, and how that threat weighs against the various ATs and playstyles.

Barring exceptional builds like feather_of_sun and myself deploy, blasters as a whole just don't have the tools to deal with large swaths of problems with any reliability.

That's impressive. You approached that an interesting way, from what I can pull from this. I know I never would have considered six-slotting Gladiator's Armor a viable option. I assume that's in Fire Shield?

I'd love to see you in action for this. Are you able to record a video of one of your fights? Or if not video, a demorecord?

Ummmm.


^this.

Can you share with us a build that shows how to manage this that doesn't involve 'and I checked my combat monitor after hitting Barrier' ?

And I'm with Arcana. I can outperform typical pug scrappers and brutes on my DP/Mental, but I'm not going anywhere near top end scrappers and brutes, and I remain highly dubious it's possible with the limited number of ways to gain -- and limited kinds of -- mitigation on solo blasters.

But hey, for anyone who missed it, they can now pick up Afterburner!

Given Snow Globe's forum presence, it'd be kind of neat if this option was taken for once: Express concern to others that it's possible that it isn't functionally adequately, and attempt to actually gather data (in a coherent, consistent fashion) between yourself and others to get a large enough sample to actually do statistical analysis instead of chicken little routines.

Yes. Listen to Arcana, he knows what he's talking about there.

Perma-Clarion was a godsend for my blaster. It was the final piece of the puzzle that enabled her to solo x8 of factions with mez (instead of x8 of, say, Romans only).

I got all of the Elemental Order pieces as of my 11th pack, just like in beta.