da5id

Give me a shout when you do, I'd like to coordinate our methodologies for these tests. (And steal/brutalize your demolog python parser scripts)

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Then how is it possible to miss 3 or 4 attacks in a row while using Aim and Buildup?

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Aim and Buildup only affect the attacks you make after using them. If you missed with an attack before using Aim/Buildup, that miss is part of the miss streak tracker. Say it fell in the range where 5 misses are allowed. You can then miss the next 4 attacks no matter what their accuracy is - so the result you see is miss-Aim-BU-miss-miss-miss-miss. That's fine as far as the streak breaker is concerned. It's still an unlikely scenario, but it's working as designed.

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I had accepted this answer until I thought about it a bit. I am refering to an elec/energy blapper. Attack chain is Lightning Bolt, Power Thrust, Energy Punch, Bone Smasher and Total Focus. All attacks have 1 ACC SO in them, +3, never dropping below even level on him. So then against even con minion ACC never drops below 95%, Lt even con never below 90%. Unless I am fighting a lot of defense heavy enemies then I should not have 3-4 misses in a row.

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Remember (and this is for everyone else as well asking "how can I miss if...") based on how the streakbreaker works, if you attack even one thing that has any defense at all you could, under the right conditions, find yourself "stuck" at the lowest streakbreaker setting for the next one hundred swings.

I.e. if you are in a high level Rikti mission that has drones in it, unless you use build up or Aim on every single drone, the streakbreaker might be effectively turned off throughout the entire mission.

You don't have to fight "a lot" of defense heavy enemies. Just one every so often is enough.

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Right. But before the non-mathheads in the audience get their panties in a knot. The change in the effective Accuracy due to the higher streakbreaker is miniscule. (You WILL see larger streaks, say ~3% of the time for 75% net-tohit attacks that have been somehow put into a bad streakbreak mode, however the mean itself only drops from 75.29-> 75. In order to see this change in the mean in a statistically signficant way, you'd need ~20600 attacks.)

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Reality always trumps theory.

Looks back at the testing of a single characters view of things from the developers themselves:
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That is a 75.22% overall to hit chance against an even level critter with no defense powers.


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Low order bits, high order bits, entropy, better generators, none of that theory matters because of what reality shows. Theories and guesses about their random generators being broke and the effect of streak breakers doesn't match reality which means you need to reconsider your theories. Again, rand() is fine. It produces the desired results.

It's easy enough to get wrapped up in theory being reality, heck, I used to get wrapped up in that problem too. Theory is there to mimic reality not the other way around.

Theory is that this game should be fun. Hope that matches reality.

Kick back, enjoy the game for the highs and the lows. Bad streaks happend. Good streaks happen. Plenty of people see bad streaks. More people see good streaks.

Lets be heores and kick some villanous butt!

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Just because they achieved close to the desired average doesn't mean that the entropy of the RNG is fine, or that Def/Acc isn't being calculated wrong for different cons.

I mean I don't think there is really all that much wrong with the RNG itself, but there is certainly a lot more to it's characterzations than a single average value. (an RNG could have crap entropy and still have the correct average, for instance 25 misses in a row and 75 hits in a row)

22.525% -> 25.0435% modified to hit, with a 3.2% chance of any given attack in an ensemble being the 8th miss in a row.

(The worst deviation (from the perspective of DEF sets) occurs at exactly 20% to hit:
20% -> 23.100% modified to hit with a 3.87% chance of any given attack in an ensemble of being the 8th miss in a row.)

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The issue hurts you more in PvP. For example, using a 5% accuracy attack and a string of 50% accurate misses is probably going to be very painful.

From my understanding (<- sucks at math), there's major bonus from the streakbreaker around 50%. However, at 5% tohit, the chances of the streakbreaker kicking in are about nil.

EDIT: of course, the most advanced math I've done in a few years now is subnetting/wildcard masking, so it's quite possible I'm off by a large amount.

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That's why I made the pretty plots for you to look at Blueeyed old buddy

From earlier:
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Here is a plot of the effective accuracy vs accuracy. The Red line is the effective Acc. The Green line represents the regualr Acc.
The Blue line is the probability of having a swing be the first miss. Other lines could be plotted, but I am lazy.

Here is another plot of the same thing, except this time in blue is the probability that streakbreaker will become active.


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Of course sb provides a marginal advantage at each of the steps. Particularly at the step at 0.1.

Still even if our entire 50% accurate attack chain were somehow forced to use the 5% accurate streakbreaker, there will be virtually no difference between the exepcted peformance of your attacks at 50% and the effective accuracy of 50%.

With steakbreaker alone YOU CANNOT have an average below the net-toHit for any sufficiently large ensemble of attacks. (If your RNG or there are other funny conditions on the toHit themselves that is a seperate issue).

There is only a 3.125% chance of any given attack being in a miss streak from 5 to 100 misses long.

The most likely time streakbreaker will be triggered is of course when we have Acc = 90%.
90% -> 90.90909090909090.....%
with of course a 9.0909090909090909....% chance of 1 miss, and hence triggering streakbreaker.

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Cross posted from another discussion:


To be honest I don't think that screwing up with a low Acc attack is going to hurt you all that much. Let's take a look at the math.

Let's say you have a bunch of regular attacks with the same net-to hit of 75%. And one crappy attack with net to hit of 20%. Let's say you unknowingly manage to utilize this attack each time after you hit, thus adopting the higher number for the streakbreaker value.

Effective to-hit falls from:
75.2941% to 75.0003%. ~0.3% difference!
The chance for a given attack to be somwhere between the 4rd and the 8th miss is 0.390%. (streakbreaker for 75% is 3)

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The thing is (as I understand it) is that your to-hit numbers are only quasi-random.

If you have a normal spread of numbers, the streak breaker has no effect (you are breaking th streaks naturally).

The problem occurs when you get a really power set of numbers in a row *and* you opened with a low total accuracy attack. So you use that low-ACC AOE on your firt hit (and miss) you now have a potential 5 streak of misses. Most of the time, you naturally roll high enough to hit.

Everyone once in a while, you just happened to miss. Because you opened with a low ACC attack, you potential miss streaks are much larger.

I do hope that the idea of hit-streak breaking for mobs against your defense is added though.

That should get rid of all the mobs just "lucking out" and flooring your ice tanker because they all just happened to roll in their 5% chance to hit you.

Continually.

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My analysis on this takes high-Acc attacks and applies a low-Acc streakbreaker. It provides a LOWER bound for effective accuracy for these attacks. (ie this is a worst case scenario, in that you've managed to get into the higher streakbreaker number all the time)

You have to understand the long streaks ARE natural. Streakbreaker BREAKS the natural streaks that occur in random number generators. And this one breaks it in such a way that effective accuracy can only increase. In this case the increase is 0.3% for the normal streakbreaker. No matter what "bad" streak" potential you accidentally started your accuracy cannot fall below 75% in this example. As shown the effective increase that we get from an sb of 8 instead of 3 is a measly 0.0003%! but it still is an increase.

If your complaints are about the quasi-random nature of RNGs that really has nothing to do with streakbreaker.

Cross posted from another discussion:


To be honest I don't think that screwing up with a low Acc attack is going to hurt you all that much. Let's take a look at the math.

Let's say you have a bunch of regular attacks with the same net-to hit of 75%. And one crappy attack with net to hit of 20%. Let's say you unknowingly manage to utilize this attack each time after you hit, thus adopting the higher number for the streakbreaker value.

Effective to-hit falls from:
75.2941% to 75.0003%. ~0.3% difference!
The chance for a given attack to be somwhere between the 4rd and the 8th miss is 0.390%. (streakbreaker for 75% is 3)

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Thus for a to hit of p = 75%, with a given intial distribution across the ensemble (say every enemy in an ensemble starts with streakcount = 0) the deviation from the affected statistics described above should decay proportional to (0.25)^n.

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(entire intesting quote omitted for brevity sake)

The only part that's missing from this equasion is the fact that the strikebreaker itself impacts the probably while the set is "in play". For instance, if the current odds have the strikebreaker at halting a losing streak at four misses, and the dice rolls were going to come up:
[*] hit miss miss miss miss miss miss miss hit

Then the strikebreaker would force the outcome to be:
[*] hit miss miss miss miss (hit) miss miss hit

Only the current equation doesn't take into account that there are going to be some misses that are turned into hits. This means that there is less of a random set to read from for the equation. These inhibited miss-streaks are going to be rare, but they will lower the percentages just a bit.

I believe this is why your equation says that 75% will lead to 75.29% and the simulations show that it's more like 75.27%.

I just don't have the math background to point this out more eligantly.

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Incorrect. Taking this into account is precisely what Markov Chains are designed to do.

The long term steady state ensemble distribution is what is given by the formulas I presented. This is far after any transients have died out in an ensemble. (The transients are the effects you describe of starting from a a fixed condition). The transients themselves can be seen to fall off exponentially as q^n, where n is the number of attacks.

My results are exactly the same as Pippy's.

Streakbreaker is actually relatively easy to analyze looking at it as a markov chain.

Such an analysis shows that the modifed effective to hit probability (long term) becomes:

Modified P(hit) = 1/(Sum((1-p)^n) from n=0 to sb) = p/(1 - q^sb + p*q^sb) = p/(1 - q^(sb + 1))

where p is the net toHit, and q is 1-p, and sb is the value for streakbreaker.

The chance for a hit to be the Nth miss in a row is:

P(Nth Miss in a row) = p*q^N/(1 - q^sb + p*q^sb) = p*q^N/(1- q^(sb + 1))


(These form the eigenvector for the Probability Transition Matrix eigenvalue of 1, thus indicating a steady state ensemble solution.)

Note that this is different from the distribution of streaksizes. (ie the Nth miss may be part of any streak with length > N.)

Lastly it is interesting to note that the next largest eigenvalue is -q. Hence modes outside the stable ensemble distribution decay as q^n, where n is the number of attacks. Thus for a to hit of
p = 75%, with a given intial distribution across the ensemble (say every enemy in an ensemble starts with streakcount = 0) the deviation from the affected statistics described above should decay proportional to (0.25)^n.

Here is a plot of the effective accuracy vs accuracy. The Red line is the effective Acc. The Green line represents the regualr Acc.
The Blue line is the probability of having a swing be the first miss. Other lines could be plotted, but I am lazy.

Here is another plot of the same thing, except this time in blue is the probability that streakbreaker will become active.

Some example calculations:
50% to hit -> effective 51.6% to hit.
Each attack has a 3.22% chance of being the 4th miss in a row.

65% to hit -> effective 65.99% to hit.
Each attack has a 2.82% chance of being the 3rd miss in a row.

75% to hit -> 75.294% to hit.
Each attack has a 1.176% chance to be the 3rd miss in a row.

85% to hit -> 85.29% to hit.
Each attack has a 1.918% chance to be the 2nd miss in a row.

95% to hit -> 95.238% to hit.
Each attack has a 4.762% chance to be the first miss. (duh).

20% to hit-> 23.10% to hit.
Each attack has a 3.88% chance of being the 8th miss in a row.

Floored acc suffers almost no effects from SB:
0.05% to hit -> 0.05028% to hit.
Each attack has a 0.0297% chance of being the 100th miss in a row.

Accuracy only multiplies the (Tohit-Def) value, it does not add to it. I think Arcana has a nice guide that explains it.

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This was PM'd to me by a user who got the info from Pohsyb.
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The streakbreaker will force a hit if there has been a long series of misses (only for heroes)
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ACC / Length of miss streak before we force a hit
>90 / 1
80-90 / 2
60-80 / 3
30-50 / 4
20-30 / 6
10-20 / 8
1-10 / 100
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The random number is calculated simply by the C stdlib rand().

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Of course if you examine that chart closely then what you said originally would be accurate for even cons with no special defense.

If the allowable number of misses for a 60-80% accuracy is 3 then that certainly fits the original comment, since the chance to hit an even-con is a base 75% for players. I assume the chart was purposely made simplistic for convenience. Obviously it can't be referring technically to the player's "accuracy" in a vacuum, but to the players final chance "to hit" after all of the variables are accounted for such as force fields, bonus defense, buffs, level differences, and so on.

So, if you for example were fighting a +3 Rikti Drone or Death Mage (both of which have notoriously high defense), then it is quite probable that you would have to miss more than the 1-3 times it would be if it was purely based on your power's beginning accuracy before the streak breaker forced a hit. Apparently he said "accuracy" meaning "final chance to hit".

That makes perfect sense, is a reasonable way to do it, and seems to line-up with my own arguably subjective experience.

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That chart isn't quite correct either (missed the 50-60 range). It's actually:

Final to-hit : misses allowed
>.9 : 1
.8-.9 : 2
.6-.8 : 3
.4-.6 : 4
.3-.4 : 6
.2-.3 : 8
0 -.2 : 100

You're correct, it's the final to-hit chance (in the range [0.05 .. 0.95]) of an actual executed attack against a specific target.

Auto-hit powers are not included in the system.

Critters get the benefits of the system as well.

The system does not track each power individually; instead it tracks every miss you make in a row, regardless of power (or target). Otherwise you could have nine different powers, each with a 0.95 to-hit, and if you executed them all in a row you could miss each attack (note a caveat at the bottom of the post regarding this).

AE attacks are considered distinct sequential attacks on indivudual targets for the purpose of the system (so if you AEd two targets and had 0.95 to-hit for both, you be guaranteed to hit one of them).



To determine the to-hit used in the table above, you take either the current to-hit, or the worst to-hit in your current miss series, whichever is lower.

As an example, imagine that your first attack of the day had a final to-hit chance of 0.91, but missed. Therefore you are currently in a miss series of length 1, with a minimum to-hit of 0.91.

For your next attack you choose to use an auto-hit power. It is ignored for the purposes of the system, so you are still considered in a miss series of length 1 with min to-hit of 0.91.

For your next attack, you use a normal attack with a final to-hit chance of 0.95. Since the worst to-hit of the entire series is 0.91, and 0.91 (miss series) < 0.95 (current attack), you find 0.91 in the table. The table states you are only allowed one miss, and so this attack is forced to be successful. The attack lands, and your miss series tracking is reset.

However, imagine that instead your last attack was less accurate, or you attack a different target which has more defense; lets say the final to-hit is 0.89 instead of 0.95. In this case, 0.89 (current attack) < 0.91 (miss series), so you have to use 0.89 when you look at the table. In this case, you are allowed two misses in a row, and therefore the attack is NOT forced to hit.

If you hit anyway, your miss tracking is reset.

If you do in fact miss (unlucky you), you are now in a miss series of length 2, with a min to-hit of 0.89. If your next attack has a final to-hit of 0.80 or higher, it will be forced to hit (because you're only allowed two misses). If the next attack has a to-hit less than 0.80, then it hits or misses like normal, and so on and so forth.



Something to note, for those inclined to note such things. Because we do the lookup based on your worst to-hit in the series, the streak breaker is a bit less aggressive about breaking streaks than it might initially appear from the table. If you miss an ill-advised attack with a final to-hit of 0.15, you would in fact be allowed to continue the miss series for another 99 attacks, even if all the followup attacks are of capped to-hit, should you be unlucky enough.

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Wonderful, thanks for clearing that up. We've been trying to work off the data pohysb sent us, but were not quite sure as to some of the ambiguities of the system. I think you cleared up most of them. Now we can get testing..

One question. You say it works for critters too, does that mean it works for enemies? Or just us and pets?

Calm down guys. Castle has it wrong.
Here is what I got from Pohsyb a few weeks ago:
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The streakbreaker will force a hit if there has been a long series of misses (only for heroes)

ACC / Length of miss streak before we force a hit
>90 / 1
80-90 / 2
60-80 / 3
30-50 / 4
20-30 / 6
10-20 / 8
1-10 / 100

The random number is calculated simply by the C stdlib rand().

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Now there are a few things that are unclear, such as is streakbreaker stored for each attack, when is a streak considered broken (any attacks hits, or just when that attack hits etc.)

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Streak Breaker (I just talked to Poz about it
If you miss three times in a row, then your next attack will always hit.

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Not quite true. I had a PM from pohsyb about it a while back when i was doing my autocorrelation analysis of streaks in accuracy (showed nothing was wrong with the streakiness in and of itself). It is actually a look up table for different streakbreaker values based on a given Acc. (Not sure if it was Acc or Net ToHit). Thus streakbreaker can vary from 100 (1-10% acc) to 1 at 90-100% if I recall correctly. The largest jump is from 100 (1-10%) to 8 at (10-20%).*

*I could have the numbers slightly off, I saved the values on my other computer.

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OK, in light of the changes to the INV, Ice and Stone sets posted yesterday on Test, we've got a few decisions to make:

1) With these changes being proposed but not live yet, should we figure that they're going to go live unchanged and go ahead with our testing on Nov. 26?


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Unless there are some major bugs, I don't think there will be much difference between Live and Test.

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2) Has this changed the abilities of non-Fire Tankers enough that we can be confident that we now are survivable enough to be useful on a team? (I know, Fire got nailed, sorry guys.) In this case, do we really need to run the tests?


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I need to rerun some numbers buffed and unbuffed vs other ATs once we have some solid numbers for Invince, but my gut says the DP change either closes the gap by a fair margin, or eliminates it all together. So the answer is, we don't know yet, it will require testing (and is very dependant on the net buff/nerf to Invince/EA) but it does help to alleviate a lot of concerns I personally had.

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3) Can we assume that this is the change to Invincibility that we've been anticipating and now include INV tanks in the test?


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I believe so due to the note about the change in the rate at which Invince is activated. I am curious as to the relative and absolute magnitudes of EA and Inv changes were. If we can get a crew together for a test tonight in the Arena to sort this out it would be nice.

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If we're going to go ahead, I will start the recruiting this afternoon in a separate topic.

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Let's get it on!

EDIT- We should definately be testing the viability of Fire. It was already lower than ice in most cases post I6, and now is most certainly the bottom of the defensive barrel.

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We are Tanks not tanks... notice I captialized Tank. Tank is the CoH archetype. tank is the MMO class/role of meatshield. I want to be a Tank not a tank.

I wanna be a fighter... one who is touger than he is strong. Slow and powerfull with a heavy fist and slow feet. The big guy with tough armor and a strong arm. I dont want to be a wall of hitpoints walking around screaming obscenities at folks and relying on people to keep me alive.

I want to Tank not tank.

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Well, some of us are 6'5" masochistic dominatrices, light and nimble on our feet, who run into the middle of a sea of pain and misery, and deal a little back out, simply because that's what we enjoy.

But that's neither here nor there.

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Say, have you met Ivy's Brute?

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Yes, I have the scars to prove it!

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Noticed that too Tom. Stopped posting didn't see the point. I totally understand and agree with much of the feelings but it isn't getting us anywhere. Chatman thanks for trying too.

Nov 16 put your post up and we'll give this a whirl. I might try and do some this weekend if my pals are about to help, if not then I'll wait.

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DO, any good data is a good thing. They're already doing some interesting stuff with the AV thread. I'll make a hardcopy of the team construction thoughts so they're not lost if something happens to the thread.

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Agreed, thanksgiving is too far away, and I think most of the useful planning we can do 3 weeks in advance is already done. All this good testing talk has brought my testing/analysis motivation back up after all the dev stonewalling sapped my enthusiasm. I'll see if I can finish coding my TTL analysis package, and find some extreme cases to test.

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There was a bug found near the end of beta where it was realized that the Upgrade powers did not benefit from Enhancements in the Henchmen powers.

This was fixed and was in the version that was on test last week. Unfortunately the patch note did not go with it, AND no one told me the fix was up there.

Anyway, long story short is that the fix is now LIVE, and your Henchmen should be fully Enhanced when you use your Upgrade powers.

Sorry about this screw up. I wanted you guys to test it before it went to Live to see if it made MM's too powerful.

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*Gasp* a stealth buff! I don't know how to react!

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That's an interesting thought. What would be tests that would be biased in the tank's favor? Pocket defenders?


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Heavily in the tanks favor? Shield-type defenders with no access to heals or other regen type buffs. Maximize the survival difference between the tanker's 90%RES and (??) def cap and that of everyone elses.

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No sonic here. Specifically using a sonic though could seem like we're weighting the test to prove our point. We might want to take what comes. Its more random and less looking let we're out to skew the results. If a sonic comes great, if not if our point is to be made and valid it shouldn't matter what defender. Unless we're saying that sonic defenders have taken the special place tanks used to have on a team.

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No I'm just particularly curious about them is all.

I was actually hoping to be able to get one of each type of defender primary. Barring that because of logistics, it would certainly be nice to have a few defenders representing a broader range of abilities ie a healer, a buffer/bubbler, and a debuffer. (and the same goes for every other class)

It's not so much as important to get every KIND of character in particular as it is to try to represent each of the gross styles. Of course how far you want to go along this line is limited by how long we want to test, and how many people we can get involved.

Before the event, Tom should probably draw up a list of team combinations/scenarios so we can quickly run through each of the tests. Otherwise it will easily take more than a single weekend.

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Well Foo has a 31 Ill/Kin Controller that he says can get to 32 soon. You have a 32 scrapper. I have a 32 defender and 32 fire tank. Certainly not claiming anything here but I could certainly run the fire tank then my defender to see if we have a change. We need a blaster for certain at this point and while I have a defender that I would happily use as the team's standard defender we then need 3 tanks all 32, keeping the levels the same seems a really good idea to me.

So lets post what we need and see who can help.

Fire tank (I really think secondary should be the same for all tank if at all possible) (I have Fire/Fire)

Stone tank

Ice Tank.

Then we need

Defender to replace tank
Controller to replace tank
Scrapper to replace tank
Blaster to replace tank

All 32 if possible but I think the power sets of the non-tanks shouldn't matter other then no /Inv scrappers.

As for the tank secondary if we could simply roll level 32 tanks I would say take /Axe as its a pretty solid and yet well rounded set. I would avoid /SS because of Rage and Fire because its so heavily based on AoE. That said we can't so I suggest we take the one we can fill the three slots with.

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Personally, I'm very curious as to how well Sonic Defenders in the test. Does anybody have a high enough level sonic? Mine is only 18.

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What if neither had Tough? That puts Fire at roughly 48.1% S/L res, and Ice at 0 S/L res.

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Oh god, now I have to go start up my python script again!
Actually now that I have had a coke, I'm not so sure about my caveat.... grrrr... stupid brain! (i still think fire comes out slightly ahead for higher con mobs, but ice for lower-even con ones. I have to double check, because I don't remember the exact results anymore)

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I think this is a good idea, DO as far as it goes, but I think the pentad team is a bit too small to get the most out of it.

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Don't kid yourself there. The pentad, and in fact any 5 character team is exactly the sort of testing the devs want to see. Especially Statesman.

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Circeus knows things man.. he knows.

I forgot about that until now Circ, good point.

Caveat: Smash/Lethal is slightly better on Fire (with tough) than Ice (with tough) is I believe, but I am going off my no-sleep memory, rather than my actual TTL calculations. But the it really depends on the number and con you are facing.

It's because it wasn't really a test, it was propoganda.

okay, kidding aside, we don't actually know what states was being asked to look into. He just told us his experience where he happened to play a tank. Maybe he was trying to focus on something else? Either way I agree that coming on with that as an example of succesful tanking is ludicrous.