srmalloy

It's not entirely inappropriate, but the mission introductory text that pops up when you enter should explain what's going on. For example, there is at least one Council mission where the door is a warehouse, but the mission is a standard council map, and the introductory text explains that you found an entrance to the Council base concealed in the warehouse. But things like the bank behind a tunnel door on Primeva should be sanity-checked a lot harder.

Even better, come up with some way to inject CoX characters into WoW servers and run roughshod over the game for a while and induce envy in the WoW players...

When I spoke with Positron about the maps at last year's SDCC, he confirmed my supposition that what has prevented a map editor from being released is that the editor doesn't force the tiles for each map type to line up properly when they're assembled. As a result, while the various tiles are already designed, the actual process of linking them together into a map is time-intensive, and even tiny mismatches can cause map glitches -- I'm sure that everyone who was around for the early days of CoV can remember all of the "black wall" bugs in the yellow office maps, which were the result of minor misalignments between adjacent map tiles.

Until the devs have the time to set up a data structure that will reference each tile and precisely define the location and type of its mating surfaces, an 'end user' map editor is going to be out of reach; while there are people who would be willing to make the effort to learn to assemble maps the same way that NCSoft does it in-house, without a 'snap together' editor, the only way for NCSoft to ensure that maps are glitch-free is to review each one by hand, which they don't have the staff for.

They'd need to be on a team to SSK them up to where they could expect to be able to defeat Rikti; done on their own, it would be impossible, since Rikti don't spawn below level 30. The Lost and Rikti are, under the hood, the same group -- if you're below 30 with a mission against the Lost, and the mission spawns mobs at 30 or higher due to team size and/or difficulty, you'll get Rikti as the higher-level spawns. The same thing happens in reverse -- if you are at 30 or higher with a mission against the Rikti, and the mission spawns mobs below 30, you'll get Lost; I've seen it happen several times back when missions could be bugged to have severely backloaded or frontloaded level distributions, and the mobs at the start or end of a mission could be several levels lower than the mission level.

On one Numina TF where we didn't have a tank, I used a Vanguard HVAS as our tank when we went up against Jurassik; letting him focus on the HVAS allowed our team to avoid dealing directly with his damage output while taking him down; it was much easier to keep the HVAS standing while we beat him into submission. Casually dismissing the temp powers is a mistake.

Although I still laugh every time I do the first mission of the "The Sky Raider Secret" story arc and get to the 'boss' of the mission, a Captain named 'Douglas'.

I expect it will be some time before the Midnight Club discovers that the portals to Cimerora are going, not only back in time, but sideways as well, with Cimerora actually being in the past of the Praetorian timeline, so nothing that is or isn't done in Cimerora can actually affect the history of our world.

...due to the Bullseye chest emblem spontaneously appearing on their chest as an unchangeable and uncolorable decoration.

Using Stealth to position yourself for Inferno/Nova and Hail of Bullets allows you to see the effects of aggro generated by that power alone, rather than from mobs aggroing on you from proximity or from other powers you're running, demonstrating that Hail of Bullets generates aggro on the targets in the beaten zone from the moment the animation starts, whereas Nova and Inferno don't generate aggro until the damage hits the targets.

750 Things Mr. Welch is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG

#90: My swashbuckling fop cannot take the flaw Dark Secret: Not Gay

Except that it's set up neither like Rain of Arrows nor like Full Auto. With Rain of Arrows, you target a location, go through your animation, (aggroing anyone in the beaten zone that you miss), then as soon as the animation completes, you're free to move while a pseudo-pet performs the rain, delivering attacks and damage against anyone still in the beaten zone. With Full Auto, you target a mob, start your animation, and everyone in the beaten zone that you hit takes all the ticks of the DoT while they all aggro on you. With Hail of Bullets, you start your animation, aggro everyone in the beaten zone, and stand there waving your guns around as a pseudo-pet performs the rain, delivering attacks and damage against anyone in the beaten zone. HoB is like a spatchcock combination of the characteristics of Rain of Arrows and Full Auto -- it has the circular AoE and 'rain' damage effect of Rain of Arrows with the 'stand their and take return fire' animation style of Full Auto.

The problem is that, with the rain effect for damage, where each tick is a separate roll, you average much less damage on an individual target than an all-or-nothing roll. If you have a straight DoT attack that has four ticks of damage and can expect to defeat a white minion, you have a base 75% chance to hit that mob, and hence a 75% chance to defeat it with the DoT. If you have a rain attack that has four ticks of damage which over the four ticks does the same damage as the DoT, each tick has a 75% chance to hit, making the overall chance that all four ticks hit to defeat the mob only about 31%. Raising the chance-to-hit to 90% only increases the chance of defeating the mob to about 65%. Where the rain gives you an advantage is that you don't entirely miss as much. With a straight DoT, you have a 25% chance to miss each target, doing no damage. To do no damage to a target with a four-tick rain, though, you have to miss four times -- a 0.39% chance. (For the number crunchers, a 31.6% chance of all four ticks hitting, a 42.19% chance of three hitting, a 21.09% chance of two hitting, a 4.69% chance of only one hitting, and a 0.39% chance of missing completely). You wind up with many fewer defeated targets, but many more wounded ones.

The purpose of using Stealth was to illustrate the difference in how the powers draw aggro vs. their outgoing damage, not on what happens if you jump into a spawn and immediately draw aggro from your presence, then stand there taking fire while you activate your nuke. The best approximation in game of analyzing the power's effects in isolation, since using a spawn of mobs too low-level to aggro on you when you enter the spawn doesn't give you good data for survival rate against incoming aggro. But sure, let's throw in the use of Fire Manipulation powers, and then continue to discuss the way Inferno and Hail of Bullets draw aggro versus their delivery of damage without other powers or the mobs' perception aggroing them on you.

This one breaks if you get one of the missions in Talos that are on the islands to the north, unless you use the 'complete this mission' escape to finish it without actually going there. You do cut yourself off from some badges, though.

I soloed Jurassik with a DB/WP Scrapper, actually one-shotting him, but I freely admit that a) it was on Test, and b) I exploited a bug to do it (having the Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy Damage proc for "4.08311 e+006" points of damage, it being bugged to deliver a huge multiple of the target's base HP when it went off -- 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot')

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288 people, to be more accurate... although that's only to the limit of what I memorized...

It could be reworked fairly easily with something similar to the 'lead to' objective mechanic, where you had a master control panel that could disable the individual assemblers, but you had to first find each of the assemblers and jigger their controls so that when they got a command that normally did something else, they'd respond by shutting down, then go to the master control panel and have it issue that command. But I don't know how much work that would be for the devs or how much interest they have in addressing it.

Go pay attention to what happens when you run stealthed into a group of mobs to fire off Inferno or Nova. You click the power icon, your character starts the animation, and all the attack rolls against the targets in the AoE are made. Any mobs you miss aggro right then; if you're lucky and hit them all, they all stand there clueless until the animation finishes. At that point, all the damage for the attack is dumped on your targets (modulo Fire's DoT effect). Then, the survivors get to shoot back at you. If you've done the standard Build Up/Aim/nuke routine, and the mobs are all even-level minions, there's likely not to be any survivors to shoot at you.

Now do this with Hail of Bullets. You run stealthed into the middle of the group and click the power, and you start your animation. The attack rolls against each target for the first tick of damage are made. Anyone you miss aggros at once; if you're lucky and hit them all, you do a fraction of their HP in damage because each tick of damage is nowhere near enough to defeat them, and they all aggro and shoot back at you while the remainder of the ticks of damage get rolled for. Meanwhile, you're standing there, frozen in the attack animation, unable to even try to get away, taking fire from every mob in the group, because you have to wait for the animation to complete before you find out whether you did enough damage to defeat them. If you've done the standard Build Up/nuke routine (no Aim), and the mobs are all even-level minions, every single one of them survives at least long enough to shoot at you once.

The issue with Hail of Bullets is that, unlike Full Auto, it's a PBAoE, which requires that you jump into the middle of the group you're going to attack, does damage like a Rain power (i.e., each tick of damage gets a separate roll to hit), and has a recharge time twice what Full Auto's is.

However, the power effects are already based on 'thematic' considerations. Just like Full Auto, the character is standing there unleashing a fusillade of bullets, unlike Inferno or Nova, which do all their damage up front, so a DoT effect is thematically appropriate, based on the mechanics of the powerset. There are several ways that the power could be tweaked to ameliorate the disadvantages. The power could give a Defense boost based on the number of opponents in the affected area (as with Rise to the Challenge) for the duration of the animation, simulating the targets' reduced accuracy while trying to dodge bullets. But, as you say, Blaster sets don't typically incorporate mitigation; however, players are still going to see the powerset as being like the Gunkata from Equilibrium, making them regard getting Defense from the powers -- if only during the animations -- as appropriate to the powerset. The power could apply Fear and Movement Slow effects, the same way Rain of Fire and Blizzard do; because this is already used in Blaster powers, adding this effect would be both relatively simple and not break the design considerations for Blaster sets. The damage mechanism for the power could be changed to the one Full Auto uses, which removes the wide variability in damage.

Overall, I think that the best change would be to buff HoB's damage some to bring its average damage up a little, then change Full Auto to use the Rain mechanic that HoB does, buffing its damage to keep its average the same, and apply the same Fear and Movement Slow effects that Rain of Fire and Blizzard have to both powers. I think the recharge time of Hail of Bullets needs to be reduced as well, but normalizing Hail of Bullets and Full Auto, which are both 'fill an area with bullets' attacks, work the same way even if they don't do equal damage would alleviate much of the creebing.

Confuse can be enormously more handy in many situations. Confusing Sky Raider Engineers is pure win -- they aggro on their companions, then set up force field generators... that buff you instead of them, then start shooting up their companions. And when you finish them off, you can whack the FFG for progress toward the badge for defeating 100 of them. Almost as much fun as confusing Rikti Guardians so they SB and heal you while you're attacking the rest of the spawn. Unfortunately, Rikti portals appear to be hardcoded to summon hostile Rikti; you can't confuse a Communication Officer and have the portal they summon bring in Rikti that fight on your side.

This was a direct consequence of the "video game end boss" mindset that Jack Emmert had about what was "fun" in a game -- he was locked into the idea that it was fun having end bosses that were always significantly more powerful than you, so that you had to make several attempts to defeat them, failing again and again, to learn how they acted and what their weaknesses were, and team up with other players to cover your own character's weaknesses in order to defeat them, and that only by playing this way did you get any real feeling of accomplishment, so this was how all the missions -- or at least, all the story arcs -- should end. This is equally reflected in his "Three minions = 1 hero" concept of balance.

Based on this attitude, he probably thinks that banging your head against a brick wall again and again trying to knock it down before you get the idea of going off and buying a sledgehammer to be the pinnacle of personal entertainment.

I'm waiting for the next round of nerfs on Behemoth portals; they're a favorite for my Illusion Controllers, because I can hit them with Deceive a couple of times to ensure that they won't trigger when I get close, then I can move in and hit them with Blind two or three times to hold them, and let my Phantasm and Phantom Army chew them up for a nice chunk of experience without having to deal with any of the Behemoths.

Back before ED, when high-level En/En Blasters could go to Atlas Park and engage in Hellion Golf -- lining up on a level-1 Hellion, hitting Power Boost then Power Push six-slotted for Knockback, and watch them sail across the zone...

Want to bet that the 'twirl gun' part of the animation is there so that the devs have someplace to trim that won't screw up the main attack animation if they decide to reduce the animation time?

Particularly since the 'nuke' requires you to stand there in the middle of a freshly-pissed-off group of mobs waving your pistols around firing bullets, unlike every other PBAoE nuke in the game, which let you fire off the nuke and at least try to run if there are still mobs standing after all the damage is immediately applied. Hail of Bullets is a 'rain' -- it may defeat each mob in the area, but it's certainly not going to defeat them on the first tick of damage, so that where with, say, Nova, you fire off the power and the survivors (or the ones you miss) shoot back, with Hail of Bullets you fire off the power and everyone in the area of effect gets to shoot back before they go down. This makes the power much less attractive by making it inherently riskier to use than any other nuke except Full Auto, which has a much lower recharge time.

So the character's cape disappears when engaged by a melee attack? Odd, but I don't see how that affects the character's survivability -- all of the examples Edna Mode cites to Mr. Incredible, for example, are of the hero's cape causing problems at melee ranges, so if it disappears when they enter melee, that would be advantageous.