Blood Widows suck
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2006-02-02 18:55 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
My PvP-Builds with 2 ACC's in every power and several To-Hits in buildup have wiffed on these Night Widows enough times that I only hit when Streak-Breaker code intervened. I've never caught the animation of which DEF powers they use, or if they use any (could be an Inherent stat like rikti Drones ... in which case, SHAME!!, BAD DEVS, *hits one with a rolled up newspaper*) but perhaps a Defense power that's already pretty generous; getting a Boss-Class Modifier on it, coupled with Smoke Grenade (also with a Boss-Class Modifier on it) could be filed under "broken". ...just maybe 
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I think it was a Blood Widow. I was doing a door mission in Bloody Bay with a couple other people and we ended up with a Blood Widow boss - a claws/something stalker-type boss. I was playing an ice/energy blaster. She was +3 to me, +2 to the other players.
When she stealthed and I lost targeting, I hit an insight and retargeted her, ran up, hit build up, hit:
Bonesmasher
Energy Punch
Power Push
Ice Blast
Ice Bolt
Freeze Ray
in no particular order. One of those attacks hit...I have two accuracy DOs in each attack, I had an insight for +25% to-hit buff, and build up for another +66%, and as far as I can tell, my accuracy was floored. She then turned around and two-shotted me.
What's up with this?
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J00 R TEH WIN3R!1! L3RN T0 PL4Y J00 T00N1!!1!six!11! 
Brother of Markus
The Lord of Fire and Pain
The Legendary Living Hellfire
Fight my brute!
I know stuff like Night Widows' smoke grenades and that Chill of the Night -perception cloud in some Croatoa missions can be annoying, but this sort of challenge is SO MUCH BETTER and more fun than mezzing I can't even express it. Mez is heavily overused, throughout CoH especially. It's very unfair to squishies, because mez is basically a non-issue for meleers. And chain-mezzing... don't get me started, it should be removed entirely. Plus detoggling is just annoying, not challenging. Stealth and -perception powers, or heck, even Illusionist phasing or PP's MoG, are 1000% better ways to add challenge.
The devs would be doing us all a big favor to remove the overreliance on mez and add in more interesting foe powers instead.
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Wow....yeah missions in the PVP zones are really tough- I have only PVP'd with my tanker or stalker and with my tanker the mission difficulty HAS to be set to like the middle or lowest one cause the end baddie is gonna be a widow and they suck a$$!! They are straight Kill. On. Sight. Kill fast, kill hard and cremate the damm corpse. You had a great attacks against her- but it sounds like the only thing you had going on for you was the insight- that once you "lost" her, she completely negated all your accuracy DO's and build up. That is the only thing I can think of. It doesn't sound right at all- but again only thing I could think of.
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That's not what happened. I targeted her once, lost targeting, saw her a second time, lost targeting, hit the insight, hit build up, fired off seven attacks, missed six times, got taken out in two shots.
And stealth doesn't negate to-hit buffs at all. It does reduce the value of accuracy boosts via defense.
I mean, defense can obviously reduce to-hit buffs, or to-hit debuffs can reduce to-hit buffs.
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I encountered my first Stalker-type Mob not long ago. It was one of the most fun battles I've had. Not sure what everyone is complaining about. Isn't winning a difficult fight cool? I think it is. Most of the Mobs in this game are predictable, dumb, and easy to defeat. When I met one that spun my head a little, I was practically giddy...
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Er, I didn't win.
I didn't win with +36% bonus to accuracy, and +91% to-hit buffs. It's not that I want a +3 boss to be easily defeatable. It's just that when I stack the to-hit buffs that far in my favor, I should have better than 5% accuracy.
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Fortunata Mistresses: These level 30+ Bosses look like Fortunata Seers, but the detailing on their costumes is bright red instead of black. They are Fortunata Seers on steroids, whipping off nasty attack chains from the entire Psi Blast line of powers. Prepare to be stunned, knocked back, immobilized, slept and generally be dealt a boatload of damage at range. They do not use melee attacks. They also have both Leadership/Tactics and Leadership/Maneuvers, and (at close range at least) they can see through at least pool stealth with Tactics.
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I'm still having nightmares about running across one of these ladies +1 to me. She wiped the floor with my Dominator 4 times before I took her out. More challenging than any elite boss has been so far (except Aurora Borealis as an EB).
They also seem extraordinarily resistant to mezzes (at least the ones I have). Even with Domination up, it took multiple hits to lock her down. Her damage was scary. The mez resistance was compounded by the -recharge she has on a number of powers. All in all a scary opponent (for a dom), which required Domination and a trayfull of Inspirations to defeat. In other words, I needed to treat her like a tough EB.
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I know the "mobs" don't play fair, but if my Smoke has a crappy amount of acc debuff in it, they shouldn't get elude lvl defense out of theirs.
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If only. I could've hit Elude with my setup.
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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations, with the possible exception of Jack in Irons. geko designed them, and I built their powers. (Jack was a big team effort, I just love the way he looks.)
The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.
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So they have about 4% from stealth, and then a really big debuff from smoke. On top of that, they have precognitive abilities that grant them a fairly large defense bonus?
That makes sense. What's getting me is that I had a pointlessly large to-hit buff and it did no good. 
I could be overreacting, because it was +3 and thus the debuff was much more effective.
I'll see what happens against an even-level.
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Night Widows are broken. I'd say bugged, even.
I was running around in Nerva with my Mind/Psi Dominator (I think I was 35 at the time)...and came across a spawn with 3 Night Widows, all of which were -10 to me.
I knew they had high def, but something else is up. My single target attacks could hit them fine. Terrify could hit them fine...
But I could not touch them with Psychic Scream. That one power was totally and completely floored...by a -10 boss. I bugged it at the time, but I can't understand why it was only Psychic Scream that was so horribly floored, and not terrify also. If they had super high AoE def, I'd assume Terrify to behave similar to scream. If it was Psionic def, I'd assume the same thing.
Smoke Grenade wasn't even a factor. They didn't even need to turn on stealth. I just could NOT hit them with Psychic Scream.
As I said, I bugged it at the time, and I still don't understand it.
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To OP, I do think the fact that it was a +3 boss vs a blaster might have played a *minor* role in your quick death. How does your blaster fare, generally speaking, against +3 freakshow bosses?
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Please state a little more of the obvious? I didn't complain about getting two-shotted. I complained about getting two-shotted after I used every attack available to me (one of them twice), buffed with build up and an insight, and having zero impact. If I'd even taken a third of her hit points before she turned around to hit me, I wouldn't be annoyed. However, my contribution was completely irrelevant - I wasn't even able to stack Freeze Ray with any holds from either of the controllers I was with to lock her down for a few seconds.
I'd do much better against a +3 Freakshow boss because I could at least hit it every time, or maybe miss once or twice.
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However, as I said earlier... these new difficulties DO suck. Mobs with -percep, mobs with fear, mobs with confuse... These are things that it seems were never planned for, and have very few counters. I know I'm not the only brute that's splattered a pet or two accidently when hit by a succubus.
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-perception has counters. I used one in the fight. That's not a big deal. Confusion does, too, in powersets as well as inspirations. Several powersets have had +perception, confuse protection, and fear protection added with issue 4 and later updates.
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I don't remember which one it was. I just know that I had +33% accuracy and +91% to-hit buff, and my accuracy was apparently floored after all that, and that is plainly ridiculous.
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Sample size is too small to draw such a conclusion. Short run statistics lie, once again:
Binomial probability distribution
Let's say your changce of hitting is 95%. Your 1-hit-of-6 scenario is unlikely, but not impossible:
p=0.95 N=6 k=1 or less
p=1.8E-6 A long shot (half a million to one), but far from impossible...and almost guaranteed to happen in CoX to someone several nightly, given the number of rolls we all generate.
Let's say your chance of hitting is somewhat reduced, to 50%
p=0.50 N=6 k=1
p=0.10- Now it's only 9:1. You'll see this one a DOZEN times a night, if you're defeating a lot of villians.
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Draw a bigger sample, at least. Six rolls tells us virtually nothing about Accuracy, and is nowhere near a large enough sample to draw conclusions from.
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The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.
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Hey, big guy?
You might wanna take a look at how excrutiatingly painful Smoke Grenade stacking is, especially since it's an AoE. Full team with quad-stacked Smoke 'nade? Yeah, no.
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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations, with the possible exception of Jack in Irons. geko designed them, and I built their powers. (Jack was a big team effort, I just love the way he looks.)
The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.
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So starting from +3 (you are starting off with only 55% chance to hit), and then adding +91% tohit, gives 146% base chance to hit. Then there's about 8% defense due to stealth, and indetermined (but implied significantly higher) inherent defense (precog), and then a +3 smoke grenade (which I think is operating at something like 150% of normal). Hmm, it sounds like a bad luck streak; I don't think I can get that to work out to very low net accuracy without presuming extremely high inherent defense on the night widow, or a really really strong smoke grenade.
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Speaking partly form memory here, but it could have just been a bad luck streak. I'm thinking back to the conversation we had with a several devs about how the streak-breaker works. Without digging that post back up, the basic premise was that the lower your acc (on your lowest attack) the longer the streak needed to be before the breaker kicks in.
So, before you poped that insight and BU... did you fire off even 1 shot? If so, you were probably at the 5% floor at that point. That puts you somewhere around 50-100 misses before the breaker kicks in.
So, chances are you had no streak-breaker to speak of...
Lets assume your final acc (to-hit, whatever) was in the neighborhood of 50%. It is completley feesable (however unlikley) that you could whiff 6 outta 7 with a 50/50. Hell, you can flip a coin and get heads 6 out of 7.
I say chalk this one up to terrible luck, and being -3 lvls to a nasty debuff. However, if you start seeing this kinda thing often... that might be cause for alarm. Or at least enough to warrant a kindly Dev to double-check the debuff numbers on them 
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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations
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BTW, Castle... you're are a sick, evil, [censored]! I knew there was a reason I liked you 
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Speaking partly form memory here, but it could have just been a bad luck streak. I'm thinking back to the conversation we had with a several devs about how the streak-breaker works. Without digging that post back up, the basic premise was that the lower your acc (on your lowest attack) the longer the streak needed to be before the breaker kicks in.
So, before you poped that insight and BU... did you fire off even 1 shot? If so, you were probably at the 5% floor at that point. That puts you somewhere around 50-100 misses before the breaker kicks in.
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No. I didn't use a single attack before I used the insight, or before I used build up. All of my attacks had exactly the same slotting (two +3 Accuracy DOs).
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Sample size is too small to draw such a conclusion. Short run statistics lie, once again:
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Sorry, I'm going to stick with my intuition here.
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I am betting someone didn't check the decimal point for smoke grenade when giving them powers. If its a 10.00% debuff, it could be 100.0% and when the npc is higher it only gets worse trying to defeat their defences. Of course, my AR/Device's smoke grenade is completely worthless as I miss the intended target most of the time and it hits all the mobs around it, but that just could be me.
Okay, aside from the kvetching in my initial post, followed by all the discussion: I have to wait and see how an even to +1 level Night Widow does, because it might all just be the +3 level boost.
The whole point was just to vent some (hopefully) harmless steam. However, as such threads always do, it drew people to explain game mechanics and offer helpful advice and such, and of course polarizing arguments.
It is possible the Night Widow is debuffing too much - but a +3 boss against characters with DOs is going to be a pain in the [censored] no matter what.
I'm not upset that I couldn't finish her off, I just wanted to get a few good hits in. It surprised me that I didn't get any in. With as much buffing as I had, my experience is that I should've been sitting at to-hit overkill.
But it's probably not all that big a deal.
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I can't stand night widows. Even with powers with 2 ACC SOs in them I miss frequently (I am dark blast btw so maybe their def is higher for that).
Someone else pointed out that they missed more with their aoes, and that was the case for me as well.
They are cool looking, but something is up with them. Things that aren't smoked (like acid mortar and trip mines) are missing left and right. And these are not even the boss ones, only lts.
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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations, with the possible exception of Jack in Irons. geko designed them, and I built their powers. (Jack was a big team effort, I just love the way he looks.)
The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.
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Just want to relate something that happened to us in an Arachnos mission once.
We went in to fight a group that had a Night Widow in it. Being the brute that I am, I rush in, start clubbing away and after a little bit all the bad guys are gone. Being the brute that I am, I start making my way down the hallway. Then I notice that my teammates are taking damage. Then I notice that I'M taking damage. Then Ms. Widow's smoke grenade wears off and I understand why. The group I thought was gone because we'd effeciently and brutally dispatched them was, in fact, just temporarily invisible...and the new group I had unknowingly run into wasn't too happy to see me either. :P
Teach me not to pay more attention!
Formerly "Back Alley Brawler"
Speaking of smoke grenade problems, I wonder if they're using the original version of smoke grenade. The original smoke grenade had a decimal error such that it, alone, could cap a blaster's defence. I know, I soloed AVs using it. If this is the case, that may explain their exceptional defence.
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They also seem extraordinarily resistant to mezzes (at least the ones I have). Even with Domination up, it took multiple hits to lock her down. Her damage was scary. The mez resistance was compounded by the -recharge she has on a number of powers. All in all a scary opponent (for a dom), which required Domination and a trayfull of Inspirations to defeat. In other words, I needed to treat her like a tough EB.
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Aww, crap, here I did that big writeup and I forgot to mention that incredibly important piece of info.
All Fortunatas are highly mez resistant. Lieutenants take two mez applications to affect, and bosses take (I believe) three (or two "dominating" holds). This makes soloing any of them with a control-oriented character incredibly painful, and the Mistresses doubly so, since they will turn around and hit you with control powers in response. Repeatedly.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Speaking of smoke grenade problems, I wonder if they're using the original version of smoke grenade. The original smoke grenade had a decimal error such that it, alone, could cap a blaster's defence. I know, I soloed AVs using it. If this is the case, that may explain their exceptional defence.
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I have a feeling it is something of this nature.
I have dropped rain of fire on a night widow and watched not a single damage number pop-up over her head.
Considering how many ticks are in Rain of Fire, I would say that is pretty good statistical evidence.
Kali, I went up against one with my Fire/Elec with SOs and even useing Build-up and aim whiffed an entire attack chain. It wasn't until I came back with a tray of insights and popped 6 of them combined with aim and build-up that I could actually hit her. They have screwed up the nightwidow defense somehow and I think it merits looking into.
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Speaking of smoke grenade problems, I wonder if they're using the original version of smoke grenade. The original smoke grenade had a decimal error such that it, alone, could cap a blaster's defence. I know, I soloed AVs using it. If this is the case, that may explain their exceptional defence.
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I have a feeling it is something of this nature.
I have dropped rain of fire on a night widow and watched not a single damage number pop-up over her head.
Considering how many ticks are in Rain of Fire, I would say that is pretty good statistical evidence.
Kali, I went up against one with my Fire/Elec with SOs and even useing Build-up and aim whiffed an entire attack chain. It wasn't until I came back with a tray of insights and popped 6 of them combined with aim and build-up that I could actually hit her. They have screwed up the nightwidow defense somehow and I think it merits looking into.
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So, you need 166% (aim + build up) + (6x25) = 316% to-hit buff on top of your 75% x 1.33 accuracy to reliably hit her?
What level was she relative to you?
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Night Widows are probably my favorite creations, with the possible exception of Jack in Irons. geko designed them, and I built their powers. (Jack was a big team effort, I just love the way he looks.)
The majority of their defense come from their Precognitive abilities. The Stealth doesn't add anymore than three slotted Stealth would for a player. The Smoke Grenade, on the other hand, is brutal if you are lower level than they are.