seebs

Masterminds are probably the most obvious room for a ton of innovations; clearly, there's a need for Mouse Control (but you only get one, and he's sort of a tard -- but at least you can play to the strengths of the current pet AI, NARF!). And clowns. And pirates.

Rubber/stretching powers are completely lacking, and there's lots of those in the literature.

Light powers as-such would be sorta neat. We already have the robots using lasers, why not lasers for player attacks? I guess you could do those with something like radiation blast, though.

That's just because the sun never set on the British^WRoman Empire.

Well, it'd be expensive, but it'd actually be a pretty significant effect.

Huh. So, basically, it sounds like these procs are pretty much worthless, because they don't really have a 20% chance to do damage, they have about a 4% chance to do damage, in practice. Except presumably on click powers, but most click PBAoE have enough higher damage that the marginal benefit is trivial anyway.

Yeah, already planning to get a stealth IO, because nothing says "effective tanking" like complete invisibility. :P

FWIW, I have a DA/DM tanker for whom I picked the fade-out variety of Cloak. I have:

* Death Shroud: Fuschia/Green
* Dark Embrace: Cyan/Lime
* Cloak of Darkness: Fuschia/Magenta
* Obsidian Shield: Yellow/Orange
* Murky Cloud: Blue/Green
* Oppressive Gloom: Blue/Red
* Omega Aura: Full body, all the time, medium-dark purple

All are taken with the brightest full-saturation color available, except the omega aura, which turns whitish if you have it too bright.

Captain Chroma is, shall we say... visible.

I do particularly love that the stealth effect makes him shockingly bright fuschia when he runs.

I'll have to get him into a dark room (where you can see him better) or bright daylight (where the colors really pop) so I can post pics.

I was totally unable to get into scrappers for a long time, and I still have a hard time "getting" them. The first character I managed to get past 20 was an energy/devices blaster.

IMHO: The best toon to start with is one where the CONCEPT grabs you. You can always team with people who can help you out, carry you a bit if you're a bit weak at low levels, and so on. What's gonna make it fun enough for you to stick around and learn your options is that the character concept makes you happy.

What I mean by "fire at the same time" is that both procs are always checked at the same time. Because they're in the same power; both are checked when it starts up, then every ten seconds, both are checked again. So I don't have one tick where the lethal damage proc is checked, and another tick where the energy damage proc is checked.

As to energy efficiency: I ran with death shroud from level one, originally slotting mostly for end redux. Yes, it's expensive, but it was pretty effective.

And yeah, looks like when I19 comes out, I'm gonna be swapping these out. Next up, determining whether procs work any better in caltrops. The relative damage is higher, but caltrops does not derive its primary value from damage done.

So, every 10 seconds (every 5 ticks), there is a 20% chance per enemy of taking the proc damage? That fits, and explains why it seemed to be triggering less often than I expected -- about 1/5 as often, in fact.

It also explains why it's bursty -- both procs are firing at the same time, if they fire, so every so often I have, for each target, two 20% chances of about 3x-4x the usual tick damage.

So because it's every-5-ticks, it's about 1/5 as good as I thought it would be, and I would probably be better off replacing them with either slots in other powers or better slotting in this power. (That's a separate consideration from, say, the benefits of any set bonuses.)

So, every 10 seconds, it has a 20% chance of doing damage... to who, exactly? It seems to sometimes hit several people, other times only one, so I'm not sure what it's checking.

I'm trying to figure out how effective Death Shroud is or isn't, but I don't know a crucial thing: The interval between its attacks. It looks to be about three seconds.

I'm currently trying to figure out whether this is, slotted up a bit, in fact my most efficient attack in damage-per-endurance. Numbers are:

Shadow punch: Average damage 33, endurance 2.94.
Smite: Average damage 60, endurance 5.22
Shadow Maul: Average damage 124, endurance 5.41
Siphon Life: Average damage 84.89, endurance 8.64 (but it's also a heal)

Shadow Maul is clearly the best of those attacks, giving about 22dpe. (It's also the only one six-slotted.)

Right now, death shroud is costing 0.37 end/sec, and average tick is 10.61. If ticks are about 3 seconds, that's only about 10 dpe -- better than smite, not quite as good as shadow punch.

But wait! I have two procs in it. Eradication energy damage and Scirocco's Dervish lethal damage. The energy damage hits about 3.5x as hard as the basic damage ticks, and the lethal damage ticks seem to be more like 4.5x as hard. Specifically, against a given target (below my level), I got 22.95 negative energy damage from death shroud, 89.74 points of bonus lethal damage, and 74.78 points of bonus energy damage.

I am not entirely convinced that the "20%" number is accurate -- it doesn't seem like I get those hitting 20% of the time. But between them, they come pretty close, so on average I'm getting pretty close to double damage over time. That gets us to about 20dpe, which is comparable to shadow maul per target.

... Does any of that make sense? Am I overlooking something?

You know, I just realized -- all the time I spent being immobilized was while trick-or-treating... meaning I didn't have cloak of darkness up.

Heh.

I've got a steadfast -KB in one of my resist toggles, and a kismet +acc in cloak of darkness. I may well move that to combat jumping, though, as cloak of darkness is incompatible with costumes. I guess next time I get free respecs, which will probably be I19.

Sounds like it is worth looking more closely at defenses, so I'll put some more thought into that. I was planning to take boxing/tough/weave as time allows, although the endurance cost is gonna be pretty noticeable. It'll get a lot easier once there's inherent stamina, because that'll free up three power picks for cool stuff.

I'm running a dark/dark tank, currently about level 28. I'm wondering whether I should be trying particularly hard to get defense. I'm nowhere NEAR softcap, but I suppose with the to-hit penalties I could be pretty well defended against a couple of things.

I took combat jumping mostly for the immobilize protection -- I was finding being immobilized pretty frustrating, as I could taunt things to just outside my range. With that on, and cloak of darkness, I have about 8% defense, more if I slot up cloak of darkness a bit more. That's... pretty far from 45%.

Presumably it's not too hard to get capped at 50 with sets and purples, but in the mean time, should I be paying attention to that, or focusing on my resistances

A lot of people got Praetorians to 50, which would presumably result in them entering the market for purples but not having been creating them all along.

Long story short: File a support ticket and they'll eventually fix it.

It does proc, and it seems to do a fair bit of damage. In particular, it adds damage components to a lot of stuff that doesn't otherwise do noticeable damage.

Brooklyn has an actual place to buy superhero stuff. Sort of.

Thinking about it, it may be easier to specify as "20 * (x/10 - y)". That way, you're pretty much just lopping the last digit off x, which is easy, and subtracting y, and then multiplying. (Or, if you're a programmer, just do two left shifts, one base two and one base ten.)

If you get zombies, you can also shop at Sears.

See, this is when I start really missing the purely hypothetical not related to another MMO I used to play thing of having a completely programmable user interface in Lua. Because it'd take all of a minute to hack in a "N (listed at M)" thing.

Hypothesis: It should be possible to calculate what you listed something at, by looking at the messages when you collect inf.

My belief is as follows:

* When I list something, I pay up front 5% of the price for which I list it.
* When I sell something, I pay WW 10% of the price for which it sold, LESS that initial deposit.

Imagine, then, that I list something for 100 inf, paying a 5 inf deposit.
* If I sell for 100 inf, I should collect 100 inf, and pay 5 back to WW.
* If I sell for 200 inf, I should collect 200 inf, and pay 15 back to WW.

What this gives us is, I believe, a formula for figuring out what the listed price was, in the cases where we've forgotten. Specifically:

For a sale at x inf, with y paid back to WW, listing fee f, and initial price p:

* The sale fee is x / 10.
* The money actualy paid to WW (y) is (sale fee) - (listing fee)
* So I now know that ((x / 10) - f) = y
* Therefore, ((x / 10) - (p / 20)) = y
* Therefore, (x / 10) = y + (p / 20)
* (x / 10) - y = (p / 20)
* 2x - 20y = p

So if I listed at 100 inf, and sold for 200, I should see x 200, y 15. 400 - (15 * 20) = 100.

VICTORY FOR ZIM!

... Assuming I had the base numbers right. Do I?

The knockback has never been a big problem. Sure, there is some, but it mostly just means that a minion will fly through the air to land in a crumpled heap instead of dying where it stands.

Yeah, I do actually sort of enjoy stalker; I have a km/nin at level 20. Spent an hour or two on my dark/dark tank last night, ToT would be fun except everything's neg-resistant. But it was fun on a team. On groups with less dark resistance, though, that would stay pretty fun for a while. I might see if I can get him up closer to 30ish so he can have better enhancements, I think he still has at least one level 16 IO (not counting special procs).