Warp_Factor

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actually, in a strange way, that's good. It means we probably get to keep those numbers for I7

and those numbers will still be prety solid.

Though I won't be dropping fitness for leadership anytime soon

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Agreed. That's a drag about EC, but 3.75% is still very respectable for defense against everything and 8% would have been a nerf magnet as soon as the other AT forums found out about it. It's still worth the slots to me, just to scrounge up a little defense against psi.

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Ok, you probably can't fit in hasten to speed up overload, but WOULD YOU NEED IT?

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You need Overload. A level 50 Hero does almost 1700 points of damage with Knockout Blow (think Statesman). If you have Dampening Field with the base slot in it, that still leaves about 1550. A level 50 Brute has only 1500 health. Without Overload to buff your health, you will get one-shotted (ok, left with 1% HP) if KO Blow gets through.

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I think he means "Why would you need hasten to speed up overload?" I don't think he's suggesting leaving overload out completely. Though your argument is a pretty good one in favor of keeping hasten, as well. Being overloaded more often is good.

Wow, that's some good numbers on energy cloak. I'm glad I slotted that sucker up now.

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EDIT: Wanted to make sure I got all my props in ... and Colbert? Yeah, I've seen the show once or twice...

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Wow... now I really wish I'd made it to this.

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Well, thanks for the responses an' all. Don't want to sound ungrateful, but uh, why not just tell us the defense of each toggle by itself?

I.e. Kin shield is blahblahblahblah
Pow Shield is blahblahblah
etc.

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I do appreciate the response, Castle, and like Natsuki I don't mean to sound ungrateful either. But I really don't think it's too much to ask that if you're going to give us this information, please give it to us in plain, understandable English that most people can clearly understand. It's very cool of you to post any numbers at all, but as I think you can see the confusing nature of these responses has been kind of counterproductive. We need straight answers in plain, conversational English, please; anything else is really worse than no answers at all.

"Look... jus' don't let on where ya got this info, OK?" the greasy little man fidgeted nervously as he slid a smudged manila folder across the table. The black and purple leather-clad woman he spoke to took the folder, frowning at the unidentifiable smears on it's surface. "So this is all you were able to find on them?" she asked skeptically.

The little man coughed. The air of this hole-in-the-wall bar was thick with all varieties of smoke and the stink of stale beer. He hated it here, but at least no one asked him questions about who he was meeting or what he did for a living. In the Rogue Isles, too many questions could be a dangerous thing, for both parties. "That's it," he answered quickly. "Everything I could find on Alpha Sanction. I got a couple personell dossiers, mostly complete, some notes on operations in progress. Somethin' about some British reporter an' some guy in Japan. Wetworks, sounds like." He glanced around them. "An' a little bit a' background on some guy named Saka. I couldn't get much, but I think he's the one behind the operation."

The woman smiled, finishing flipping through the folder and stowing it in a purple knapsack. She stood up and looked down at the man, her eyes glowing behind black wraparound sunglasses. "Good enough," she hissed. "The funds should be in your account by the time you reach the ATM. Is there anything else?" The man shook his head. "Good. It's been a pleasure doing business with you." She turned and walked out of the bar.

The man didn't wait long before leaving via the back entrance. He was glad to get out of that horrible smell, and relieved to have concluded the night's business. He unlocked the door of his beat-up old Jetta and slid down into the seat, starting the engine and turning the heat on. It was a cold night in Port Oaks, and the fog made for poor visibility. He turned on his headlights and made his way out of the parking lot, turning toward the Rogue Isles ferry and home in Cap Au Diable.

The flickering, ghostly image appeared in the car's headlights too quickly for him to react. The car struck the transparent figure at full speed, and it's front end shattered and bent around it. The little man was thrown from his seat through the windshield, landing hard on the asphalt. He rolled over onto his back, crying out in pain from his injuries. The figure slowly crossed the distance between them, standing over him and lowering her cloaking field. She dropped her purple knapsack next to her feet and grinned cruelly down at him.

"I'd give you the speech about how you're going to talk sooner or later," she began, "but the fact is we already know you've been selling classified Arachnos files to the highest bidder. We know about your contacts within the Marcone Family, and your business relationship with the Goldbricker cell near your home. Which should be a burning husk right about..." she looked at her watch, "...now. Oh wow. I sure hope your girlfriend wasn't waiting up for you. Valentine's Day and all." He let out a choked cry, and she laughed. "All we really needed to know... was how much you'd found out about us."

The man turned his neck painfully, looking around the black-and-purple clad woman's boots to see a squad of robots opening fire on the wreck of his car with their laser cannons, melting it into an unrecognizable lump of slag. The woman nudged his face roughly with the toe of her boot, forcing him to look back up at her. She placed her foot on his neck and bore down hard. "If it was just Arachnos you'd sold out, that might be one thing. Maybe. But you should've known better than to go digging up intel on Alpha Sanction."

The woman activated the communications implant her in inner ear. "Wildshot, the apartment taken care of? Compiler and I are done here. I'd like to get this mess cleaned up in time to grab a drink."

The voice on the other end of the comm chuckled. "Without a hitch. Final Rest and I left the scene 10 minutes ago." Fractal Rift grinned. "That's what I like to hear. Meet us at the Pocket D, then. First round is on me."

Alpha Sanction is a medium-to-heavy roleplay VG with a covert ops/secret police theme. The concept is loosely inspired by the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and the Wildstorm comic Sleeper. We accept all ATs and origins. More information can be found at our web site http://alphasanction.guildportal.com, or you can PM me. We're aiming for a smallish roster and looking to develop player-created storylines as well as to enjoy the roleplay and story material already present in City of Villains. Check out our Alpha Sanction Info section for the beginnings of what we think will be some really creative stories. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to PM me here or on our site, or send a global /tell to @Warp Factor or @Starblind.

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For the defense case, I have to be hit 10 (or more) out of 20 times. The chance of that happening is around 1 in 100, which is an astounding 10,000 times more likely than the resistance case.

So, if you the question you are asking is "what is the average damage taken?" 25% defense is the same as 50% resistance. However, if the question you ask is "how likely am I to die?" then 25% defense is no where near as good as 50% resistance.

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You're going to drag us all through binomial theory aren't you.

truly thou art evil!

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Average lifetime analysis is a Markov Chain analysis, not so much binomial theory. Last time I said that, someone actually did it. I'm pseudo-lazy: I didn't want to calculate it, but I was willing to write a simulator to model it.

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I have been using 1D random-walk theory, but in the world where there are only two possible outcomes (hit or miss), Markov chains, binomials, and random-walks all work out to be the same thing so it ends up not mattering which notation you use.

The trick I am using to vastly simplify the caculations is to approximate the damage distribution as a gaussian. That way all I need to keep track of is an average damage and a standard deviation. The method may be a tad mathematical for these forums, but if you can handle a square root, you can use the results.

On a side note:
Yes the range of possibilities for a defense build is much wider than for a resistance build. While you will sometimes die in a situation where a resistance build never would, if you get lucky you can do things that are impossible for a resistance build. One particular event triggered my investigation down this road:

I went into a mission to fight Luimary. This is the Elite Boss version not the Hero version (after the patch). The first time I faced her, she downed me in seconds. I came back from the hospital to try again and I took her down with barely a scratch. The difference in the two attempts was so striking that is really piqued my interest in the topic.

Of couse, the second reason I have been doing this investigation is to answer the question many people have asked: Are the EA passives worth taking?


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And the answer is?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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Energy protection is not. Dampening field is a good power IMO, it's not crazy good like energy drain or a must-have like the defense toggles but it's a solid choice. Some people disagree and think it's crap, but I'm reasonably happy with it.

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EC doesn't stack with other stealth powers, so removing it from the stalker set was presumably less of a balance issue and more about not wanting a completely worthless power in the stalker set.

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i think it was more of a "removing repulse from the brute set was less of a balance issue and more about not wanting a completely useless power in the brute set".

Stalker EA predates Brute EA. and Havind Hide and another stealth power in a stalker secondary would be absolutely huge for stalkers. no more dipping into concealment for stealth to stack for pvp. EA would be FOTM.

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That's right, I forget stalkers got EA before brutes. I stand corrected.

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I would only want Repulse on a Brute if the knockback scaled according to your Fury level.

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Would depend on my build, my DM/EA would skip repulse, it's hard enough to keep them together in a team with knockback for the high efficiency of things like SM, DC, SD, and ED

4 powers that rely on closely packed mobs for max effectiveness means no repel for me thanks. Maybe on other combos it would be a better choice though.

I haven't fiddled with my /ea stalker enough to tell - but you'll notice that none of the stalker sets have stealth aside from Hide. If /EA for stalkers had EC, it would be the de-facto set for staking Hide+EC+Stealth to avoid perception.

Conceptually, EC is a better fit for stalkers, but they get Hide as one of their signatures - replacing the stealth power made the most sense for balance.

That said, don't expect to see cloak of shadows in DA for stalkers either.

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EC doesn't stack with other stealth powers, so removing it from the stalker set was presumably less of a balance issue and more about not wanting a completely worthless power in the stalker set.

Those numbers do sound awefully low for a brute set.

I gotta say, my main hero is a controller and I agree with those who say it's not right for controllers to use defender primary powers more effectively than defenders do. I can see the reasoning behind it, but I think it'd be more balanced and appropriate to make control-ish powers more powerful in defender primaries than they are in controller secondaries. They are primary set powers for defenders, after all, and I don't think any reasonable person would dispute that controller primaries are far and away more powerful than defender secondaries. Controllers using defender powers more effectively than defenders do (even if it's only certain powers) really seems very unfair to defenders.

The obvious solution to the entire matter is just to get rid of the defense debuff altogether. It's just silly to give the character that little bit of resistance and then hit them with that large a defense debuff. And I really don't buy the idea that we shouldn't compare unyielding to other similar powers any more than I buy that idea that we shouldn't compare similar power sets overall. Unyielding as it stands now is inferior to practiced brawler, far inferior to integration, and is at best equal to entropy field (which is gained at an earlier level, to boot). There should be no need to get into a discussion of whether the scrapper/brute version should have a lower debuff, because the debuff itself is silly to begin with. It might have been a reasonable balance measure back before I5 when unyielding's resists were higher, but not now.

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One thing that has always seemed odd to me is if you need a respec it is generally because you made a mistake in your build. I realize that there are other reasons to do this sf/tf other then the respec but at least 75% of the time people do it for the respect.

You would think that making strike/task force very difficult would be counterintuitive.

So my build is gimped and I need to team with a bunch of other gimped toons and complete a difficult set of missions to fix my toon….

Have the dev’s been eating retard sandwiches?

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The first hero respec started out way too hard, as well. It was made easier at least once, I'm thinking twice but I'm not 100% sure about that. The point being, I wouldnt' be shocked if the Nerva respec is made somewhat easier as well.

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Actually the deal is this:

We removed Recharge Enhancements from all Henchmen powers because it WOULD affect the recharge rate of the summoning power itself, and NOT the recharge rate of the Henchmen's powers.

This is inconsistent to ALL other Enhancements that are slottable for Henchmen... the Enhancements ALWAYS affect the powers of the Henchmen, and not the summoning power itself.

To avoid confusion, we just removed the option.

And I believe it was a good call, seeing as how many people would be confused as to how it would work if we left it alone.

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Is that true for other AT's pets as well? I'd read that recharge enhancements were affecting my singularity's powers, and not just how often I was able to summon it, but I haven't timed it or anything. I'd be nice to know for sure.

Outstanding stuff, I'm glad you reposted this since I'd forgotten how to set it up since the CoV boards went down. Thanks, Sandolphan.

Incedentally, this power is still bugged such that disorient duration enhancements have no effect on it. Any word from the devs on whether a fix is coming down the pipe?

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No recent response to an issue -

Many times, if you do not see a response from the dev team about an issue then either investigation is ongoing and no conclusions have been made yet or the dev team is satisfied with the issue as it is. I want to stress that even though this may be the case, they are always reading your feedback and taking it into consideration.

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I can understand this, and I appreciate the fact that you're posting about it here. However, I'm not sure you guys (i.e. you as CC, the devs, etc) appreciate just how demoralizing it is for players to post well thought out and constructive feedback, negative or otherwise, to a change that is important to us and see absolutely nothing from the dev team about it. The fact that you mention the regen testing and changes underscores this: while I don't want to take anything away from the concerns regens and other scrappers have, for some of us it really send a message when regen scrappers recieved 10+ posts and a round or two of in depth testing in response and others recieved nothing. I'm thinking specifically of gravity controllers, but I have no doubt others felt the same way as well. When one particular group of players recieves a great deal of particular attention, and another recieves exactly nothing, it creates suspicion and hostility on the parts of players, and in my view it's hard to blame them. It's understandable that some community issues require more attention than others, but it doesn't take long to drop a post saying "Hi, just letting you know we have been reading your feedback." and letting us know either that there's more testing and evaluation going on, or that the devs have made a decision. Even this small gesture would do a lot to retain the confidence of players, even if the actual changes to the game don't go the way a given player would have liked.

It would make things so much simpler if they'd just change the knockback to a knockdown, there's no need for all this level and number based complication in the first place. It's not like either version of this power was so powerful that it needed some kind of drawback like this.

I'll have to test that out tonight and see if I get similar performance. I'll still miss the functionality of the old wormhole, but losing the knockback should open up a lot of possibilities that were sketchy and very terrain-dependent before.

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Here's an idea. We want precise target control with Wormhole, devs want AoE disorient with Wormhole.

We can have both.

Wormhole teleports one enemy, single target and precise. But the exit spot gets the AoE disorient, weak AoE control at level 26. We all get what we want.

The single target grab allows us to throw FF gens, auto-turrets, and DE stumps away from the team. The AoE disorient on exit allows a fig leaf of AoE control. They can even split the to-hit rolls like they do with Blind's hold/sleep setup so the teleport has the normal accuracy and the disorient has the AoE penalty accuracy.

Wormhole gets a clear buff instead of a 50/50 berf. Vote!

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That's a really good idea, I know it's been mentioned somewhere but it may not have been on this thread. I think it'd keep everyone at least reasonably content.

Though I'd say we honestly don't really know what the devs want, they haven't communicated with us on this at all. We know they obviously want to give us another AoE control power, and that they considered wormhole ripe for changing. Now, who knows what they want? No one, until they decide to actually talk to us.

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But you'll have to forgive me if I find it very difficult to accept that when Statesman said he was going to send some AoE control help our way that this "porting, knocking back, disorienting, terrain dependant, team aggrivating" wormhole (at the expense of it's previous scalpel like function) which we did not ask for is what he meant or what we had hoped for.

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You just put that far better than I've been trying to do. Well said.

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Sure it could control more by slowing or holding... I wouldnt be mad. But then it might be a bit to powerful.

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You know.... the more I think about it, the less I buy that. If it held them, sure it'd be overpowered. That's obvious. But if it slowed them? Look at the secondary soft control powers other power sets get. Giving us an AE slow would not be overpowered in any way, shape or form. Whether or not it were attached to an AE teleport that's a liability at least as often as it's an advantage.

Really, I think people should stop evaluating this power by whether or not, in their opinions, it's better than what we had before, and instead compare it to the other controller primaries. Does this bring us up to par with other controller primaries (discounting particularly synergistic combinations of sets like ill/rad)? If not, then it fails to do what it's supposed to do and the devs need to know that. That's the bottom line. We shouldn't be required to use expert play skill just to get ourselves up into the same league as other controller primaries, we should be using expert play skill to excel.

Another thought would be to leave wormhole as it is, remove the damage from crushing field, and add a recharge rate slow to crushing field. It'd come at a level where the controller could really use it, it'd have effects that are consistently useful (as opposed to just being an AE root with crappy damage) and with any luck removing the damage might help mitigate the suicidal aggro factor of the current crushing field.

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It seems clear to me the overwelming majority do NOT LIKE the new Worm Hole. Why have the devs seemingly ignored this little insight?

Please STOP wasting dev time on WH. Remove the new WH code before you patch it live. Read this thread. The Majority would prefer the I4 WH not go live. Look into Propel as an alternative AoE stun or even DShift. Please.

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Agreed. God forbid we actually go back to considering changing D-shift to something worthwhile, like a gravity-themed power similar to ice slick. Or an AoE slow. Or something that doesn't combine, disoriented running around, knockback, and potential for imprecise targeting to guarantee that we piss off melees and send our targets all over the place anytime we don't have a convenient corner to use. Not to mention the fact that the old wormhole was actually a good power, and it's previous uses are lost with the new wormhole.

I know this has been argued, and I really don't want to revisit those arguments. But my experience has been that, in fact, dimension shift is not very popular. I don't remember ever having seen it on another grav controller's build (I often take a look at other characters' power selections if they have the same power sets as my main characters), and I haven't ever heard a grav controller in game ever argue for it's utility. So I very strong doubt that lots of gravity controllers love DS.

I realize some grav controllers claim to have reason to think otherwise, and that's fine. That's their perspective. But as my experiences in game are pretty consistent with what's been said on the forums, I'm inclined to think it's pretty accurate. It's not proof, but it's the closest to proof any of us is going to get on the topic.