seebs

I totally thought I asked, but I guess not:

Does fast snipe on the Beam Rifle snipe still have the 100% chance to spread disintegration? Because that 100% chance was REALLY nice.

Barely a year and a half after someone pointed out that you could stack the huge defiance buff from a gun drone on another gun drone, I've updated to point out that this is possible, and no longer matters because gun drone's defiance bonus has decreased from 39.6% to 6.6%. Also put in some notes about the i24 changes.

Huh. I usually just bid 1234567 on all the teens and forget about it, a while later I have a few kismets which I sell off for 10-20M and forget about it.

I have been unable to figure out the rules for when these show up. I found a thread claiming it was every month on your billing date, but it's not; I have two accounts, and they get their monthly points on different days but both get their token on the same day.

I saw someone do nrg/ff corruptor or defender with yellow coloration, it was pretty good.

I generally regard the Kismet as Just Plain Awesome for all characters. I don't think I've gone past about level 20 without one in ages.

My impression is that in CoH, the basic monetary unit is the inf cap.

That said, you don't really need that much. I just spent a bunch of idle time IOing out a mid-level brute to improve performance a bit (and free up a slot by improving bonuses in other ways), and my net expenditure appears to be about negative two hundred million.

If you are not attacking a single tough target against which you want maximal sustained damage over a longish period, your attack chain is situational. I assume people don't tell scrappers that because of scrapperlock; it's good enough to have them pushing more than one button.

Seriously, if you are using a fixed rotation, you are almost certainly doing less well than someone who is taking circumstances into account. You will be facing a target that you can massively overkill with a 2-second attack, or kill adequately with a 1-second attack, and if you use the 2-second attack because it's in the rotation, you are wasting time before you get to the next target.

Couple questions:

1. 22% to-hit-bonuses, or +22% to-hit? Which is to say: Do -tohit penalties count against the snipe bonus effect? Because if they do, they will make this a lot more complicated.
2. Maybe a solution of sorts could be to give blasters a couple-few percent inherent +to-hit, to make up for the lower tactics number, so that slotted tactics + kismet = 22%, or thereabouts.

I am pretty enthused. Two of my oldest characters are /dev blasters, although only one has a snipe.

But both will really, really, like the improvement to cloaking device.

There is a definite distinction between "unfair" and "hard". I don't object to things being hard, even really hard; I do object to "unfair".

I'm not sure exactly how I would define the boundary, but I think the key is, it's not the same thing as difficulty or chance of failure. A mission which is really tough, and where I would typically be able to complete it 50% of the time is unusually hard for an MMO, but it's not necessarily unfair. A mission which is cakewalk easy, except there's a 10% chance of being automatically killed without any chance to react or do something about it, is not nearly as "hard" -- but it's unfair.

I do think the tendency for absolutely all ambushes to ignore hide is "unfair" -- it violates the character premise. The game offers me a chance to play a character who picks when to fight, and then says "oh, but you don't actually get a vote in that in these missions". I would have similar feelings about, say, mobs who were completely immune to controls when playing a controller. Or if I were playing a scrapper, I'd feel that way about mobs that were somehow able to guarantee that they were always out of melee range; not just able to get out sometimes, but who could not be contained, or taunted, or anything, and were never in melee range. That wouldn't be fun anymore.

I generally figure that I come into a mission, or the game, with a baseline notion of what the terms of engagement are. Missions which violate those terms are not a fun break in routine; they're just cheating.

Imagine, if you will, that we were talking about PvP, and some players had cheats that let them break the rules. Would people be talking about how awesome it is that the game had this kind of variety, or would they just complain that it was cheating? I'd guess the latter.

I recognize that there are often alternative tools available to make it at least possible to beat these, but after stalking my way through Praetoria, and spending 5-10 minutes of many missions just hanging out near a corner waiting for the five or six ambushes to all wander through, then a couple more minutes waiting to be sure they were done... Yeah, that wasn't actually fun, it was just annoying. Timed glowy-hunt mission with insanely huge waves of ambushes if you aren't fast enough? Nope, not actually fun, because "random item that could be anywhere from here to three map changes from here" is not a fair puzzle; I think it should be at least in principle consistently possible to succeed with skilled play.

CoH is hardly the only offender here, but I think it sort of stands out for two reasons:
1. Lots of very erratic mechanics and quirks due to engine limitations.
2. Baseline experience is so very easy to begin with.

No more than I'd regret time spent on crossword puzzles, out playing frisbee with friends, or anything else.

I often have a really hard time with names -- ask anyone who's ever been in a D&D game I was running.

I don't really think CoH is particularly broken here, though, as I regularly think of characters and get one of my first few name ideas for them.