gameboy1234

It sounds a bit to me like they need some sort of EB+ that is designed to be scaled up.

Say, add extra HP, some small resists, and a small damage buff for each extra person on the team. The EB+ is tougher than a regular EB, but doesn't give AV level rewards. But don't go further than that.

Don't increase debuffs or secondary effects, and don't push the total resistance to anything over 85% or so. You want to increase difficulty, not completely shut a team down.

You *might* increase the mez protection a bit, but probably not more than say +2 total for a full team. Just enough to require a bit of mez stacking.

The difficulty settings could affect this. Higher level difficulty results in a higher level EB+. Extra spawn (x2 to x8) results in an EB+ with the HP and resists and damage for that number of people. "Allow AVs" gives +2 to level, up to a maximum of 4 counting other level increases. But still no AV rewards.



So basically design a way to make EBs slightly tougher, without going all the way to AV, and without hard coding AV rewards either. I think you can get by with just a bit of scaling on the powers and such, without scaling everything.

I'm avoiding other ideas here, like adding gimicks to a fight, mostly because I don't think every single fight should have to have a gimick. And because trying to come up with a lot of gimicks might be difficult, and therefore result in poor quality.

I'm also avoiding "summons" or extra EBs, because I don't think that's going to add enough challenge to a fight, and it could be hard on the designers (folks showing up for no good story reason).

I guess an easy fix would be to add an "echo" to PI or Talos, so Rogues can enter it. Probably don't want to remove the echo from Ouro. It actually does make sense there.

It sounds a bit to me like they need some sort of EB+ that is designed to be scaled up.

Say, add extra HP, some small resists, and a small damage buff for each extra person on the team. The EB+ is tougher than a regular EB, but doesn't give AV level rewards. But don't go further than that.

Don't increase debuffs or secondary effects, and don't push the total resistance to anything over 85% or so. You want to increase difficulty, not completely shut a team down.

You *might* increase the mez protection a bit, but probably not more than say +2 total for a full team. Just enough to require a bit of mez stacking.

The difficulty settings could affect this. Higher level difficulty results in a higher level EB+. Extra spawn (x2 to x8) results in an EB+ with the HP and resists and damage for that number of people. "Allow AVs" gives +2 to level, up to a maximum of 4 counting other level increases. But still no AV rewards.

Just thinking out loud here...

So I double checked with the wiki and, yup, Accuracy does multiply your opponent's defense. If you take the formula and distribute algebraically:


= Accuracy * ((Base to Hit + To Hit buffs) - Defense)

= Accuracy * (Base to Hit + To Hit buffs) - Accuracy * Defense

= Accuracy * Base to Hit + Accuracy * To Hit buffs - Accuracy * Defense


You can see that it clearly does. Which is dumb.

No. Accuracy does not multiply your opponent's defense.

I see what you are saying, but this is not quite accurate. Several powers have a To-Hit bonus. If a buff "helps you hit," then it likely does have a ToHit bonus. Leadership: Tactics and a Fortunata's Mind Link both grant a bonus to ToHit.

I think what you mean was than when you slot a power, the enhancements grant accuracy rather than ToHit.

This is exactly what I was going to say. Also the comment above that ToHit is applied essentially "before debuffs" is correct too. In situations where an opponent has a large To-Hit debuff (Circle of Thorns), the ToHit is actually better. Most of the time Accuracy is fine.

The base formula is:

Hit Check Roll = (1+Accuracy) * (Base ToHit + ToHit Buffs) - Defense.

There's more too it than that. There's a couple of "clamps" where a calculation is not allowed to go over 95% or under 5%, and there's ToHit debuffs, and debuffs to your opponents defense, and level figures into your base ToHit, and probably a few more things, but that's the gist of it.

Your base ToHit against an even level opponent is 75%, or 0.75. Let's say you or someone on your team is running Leadership: Tactics for + 10% ToHit buff. Let's also say you just activated a power with two +30% Accuracy IOs slotted into (and maybe some damage IOs too, but damage only takes effect after you score a hit). Your target has no defense.

Your roll is:

= 1.60 * (0.75 + 0.10) - 0
= 1.60 * (0.85)
= 1.36

or 136% chance to hit. However the "clamp" takes effect here and limits you to a 95% chance. The extra 41% here is "extra" and just counts "in case". In case you had a to hit debuff, or your opponent was higher level, or in case your opponent had some defense, you'd still have the maximum to hit, 95%, until one of those values exceeded 41%. Then your actual to hit would start to go down.


Lastly, besides the Combat Attributes, there's also a chat pane in the same area as the General Chat and the Help Chat, called Combat. You can actually see your to-hit and damage rolls there (along with other stuff). So if you want to see the "final result" of any attack, you can just look at that pane and it will tell you if you had a 95% chance to hit or a 45% chance to hit, along with the actual "roll" random number the server generated.

If you already have some Commons built up, I'm finding the Merit roll (2 Astrals or 1 Empy) or 10 Threads to be the better option.

Remember, 8 Empy = a rare, and I do have pretty good luck with the Astral/Empy roll.

Just to point out: in my very brief test on Beta yesterday, I was often finishing up a single boss in a spawn, and on a single target I saw no change in the frequency of the proc. It was always 100%.

I strongly suspect that whatever you think you are seeing as a bug here doesn't exist. For melee attacks, a small radius does NOT change the chance to proc. It does not knock down the chance to proc. I had 100% proc rates the whole time. Likewise, this "puch-voke bug" certainly wasn't affecting Crowd Control.

There may be an issue with actual large radii AoE. I'll make another copy and test with Shield Charge.

This is very odd. Mine basically fires every time I use it. I hope it's you that is bugged and not me, I'd hate to lose the way the proc is working now.


EDIT: Here's a weird thought: The text says that the proc fires up to 5 times per minute. How does it do that? Does it consider the recharge time of the power it's slotted into?

Crowd Control has a base recharge of 12 seconds, and 60 seconds / 5 = 12 seconds on the money. Whereas Jab has a recharge of 2 seconds, which would yeild a proc chance of about 16.5% if you wanted 5 of them per minute. Hmmm.

OK, good to know. I'm not familiar with that combo, but hopefully someone can add some thoughts as to the best Incarnate abilities for you.

I'm a little shocked. What times during the day do you play? Have you tried posting on the Justice server forum (here on these forums) to ask when the iTrials do form up?

If Trials are filling right away, to me that says there's lots of folks wanting in, but not enough leaders. Leading is not really hard, just a pita. You might have to bite the bullet and be the next Trial leader on your server. BAF is not hard. Lambda is a little harder due to the need to know where the Acids and Grenades are. But neither are very hard to run.

BaF goes like this:

1. Kill War Warks walkers.
2. Everybody to tennis court. One tanker pulls Nighstar to courts.
3. Team 1 North, Team 2 South
4. Back to courts, tanker pulls Siege. Please wait until Siege is close to Nightstar.
5. After Siege and Nightstar revive, Team 1 on Nightstar, Team 2 on Siege. Please keep the health bars even.

It's about that easy. As long as a few people have done it before, they'll head in the right direction and the rest of the folks can follow. You just have to remind people what to do and provide a bit of command. Who's north and who's south during the prisoner escape is about the only actual decision to make, the rest is required by the trial.

I thought it was a design team in Seattle that actually modified and tested the software, and Austin just installed it.

But yes, this isn't Paragon Studios. Someone at NC Soft decided on a corporate level to use the Seattle team for this and other NC Soft games' forum software (at least Aion too, I think). All I can say is I hope they got a super cheap price.

I'm not saying that TA is as good as Traps. I have a low level Thugs/Traps MM and it's certainly much easier than TA, no question. It might depend on playstyle or aesthetics, but I am saying TA wasn't bad. If you wanted a "natural" looking weapon to go with your animal pets, you won't be gimping yourself too much with TA.


Absolutely true. But mostly my comment was that I thought /Poison and /TA should be rated closer together. In the brief time I used /Poison, I found its heal extremely weak. The huge AOE debuffs in TA are leaps and bounds over the single target /Poison debuffs for everything outside of AVs, and I soloed easily at +0/x4 with /TA. I don't think I could with /Poison.

This is also true, but funny in that most people until recently were saying to skip the mastermind attacks.

This is the one bit I think I will agree with once I start running my incarnate newbie. Getting a Tier 3 seems like it will be very tough. (OTOH, getting a Tier 3 or 4 via the regular trials can be pretty tough too.)

Something like the WST where once per week you could do an arc and get a guaranteed Rare/Very Rare pick might be one possible answer.

Oh, sorry. I missed all of the replies to this somehow.

I'm Shield Defense/War Mace, and I'm thinking of removing the Chance for Leathal proc from Crowd Control and replacing it with the Might of the Tanker proc.

I'm already 50%+ Def to all positions so I thought some resistance to back it up might be nice.

I played a Beasts/TA on beta to level 32 and found it ok. The comment about Oil Slick might be on target, or might not, but otherwise the combo is ok. I had a worse time with my Zombie/Poison on live, because of the single target debuffs are fairly tedious to keep up, and the small single target heal wasn't enough to make up for it.

Yes, I noticed that their voting app is so poorly written, and slow, that I seemed to have voted three times trying to get the page to refresh properly.

I guess these guys will be doing the ballots for the national elections this fall, eh?