How can a single Night Widow take down a team?
By
Azerrath,
Posted on: 2006-05-16 10:18 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Could you link to where the data for this test is? That's really interesting, because it's showing Flash Arrow as being three times more powerful as Smoke.
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Goofy_Parrot's guide to TA.
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Ah. First, he has the unslotted value listed as 8%, not 15%. Second, he only used about 500 attacks on a minion, with a target accuracy near 40%, which isn't sufficient to measure with any great accuracy. He got a value of around 8%, which with 500 attacks is a little better than 95% confident that the value is between 3% and 13% (which puts the expected value of 6.25% decently in the middle). For him to lock it down to actually being between 7% and 9% he'd need to test for 9,000 to 10,000 attacks.
If you didn't like the simple arithmetic from earlier, this is probably making your brain melt further, so I'll have to ask you to just take it on faith until you can take a college statistics course and get confidence levels explained to you.
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*cough* You did note, before you jumped on the Submit button to make nasty comments, that the 8% figure was the final defensive buff from the 15% accuracy debuff that he estimated from the tests.
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Assuming the formula provided—and my subsequent math—are correct, the base accuracy debuff would appear to be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent (meaning an even-con minion will hit 5-10% less often with an unslotted Flash Arrow applied than without).
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No, seems you didn't. Maybe instead of attacking simply out of a need to feel big, you could be a little more dignified in future conversations. And regardless of how close or off GP's tests were, he at least put some effort into trying to figure out why FA was performing so poorly. Denigration of others efforts without putting forth any of your own is little better than poo-pooing.
Please keep your poo-poo away from me.
Very well put Lumi...GP has done great work with TA and as far as the topic at hand is concerned, I call Balderdash on Castle. There is no way possible SG for the Night Widow is the same for players. I have gone blind with her SG and nothing, not melee, spitting, or even groping distance do anything to make me see anyone or anything! Certainly not the case with Flash Arrow. Currently Flash Arrow is more of a warning to the foes to tell them "Hey we're here" cause they're agro is 70% to 100% of the mob when engaged (for the mathematically challenged, that is in a mob of 10 odds are that a FA'd group will agro from 7 to all 10 when engaged) From that it may be once or twice in 10 tries where I can succesfuly range pull one maybe 2 minions. Tell me again how that is "the same as" Night Widow's SG.
If TA is only meant to be in any way effective for defenders, why on Recluses red earth did it become available for MM's at 3.5%?! MM's staple for survivability are the secondaries (pets alone without any help from your secondaries are not enough to survive a mob of even con for more than 3 mobs)
Castle, I understand numbers are a big thing but the gameplay is a different animal. There is an obvious issue with TA and the other blinding powers not applying as fairly as the NW SG.
Oh, BTW, any doubts on GP testing on TA should see the test boards on TA and how diligent he, Lumi, and several others are in testing it's effectiveness.
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This is so unfair that this mob does what it does. I dread Arachnos mission even more now, its not fair that she can single handedly cripple, and slaughter a whole team and not be an AV? I guess this is what would happen if they gave stalkers smoke grenade. I also believe the tohit debuff is too extreme most likely she is using that original smoke grenade that was pre-nerfed. If she gets Assasin's Strike I will quit the game. 
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Didn't you say you were going to quit the game if they changed the Sewer Trial Exploit, too? And, for that matter, on about a weekly basis since then?
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Yeah, but who carefully scans their iconbar after every fight?
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Maybe YOU should be, particularly after a fight with a Night Widow.
Does anyone else find it amusing that one message from EvilRyu sparks these huge pointless debates?
And that he never checks them again until next week's "change this unfair thing or I will quit" post?
(Yes I know the irony of posting in EvilRyu's forum to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.)
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Does anyone else find it amusing that one message from EvilRyu sparks these huge pointless debates?
And that he never checks them again until next week's "change this unfair thing or I will quit" post?
(Yes I know the irony of posting in EvilRyu's forum to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.)
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Meh. Morons beget morons.
What does that say about you and me?
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Very well put Lumi...GP has done great work with TA and as far as the topic at hand is concerned, I call Balderdash on Castle.
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Look above at the math I listed. _Castle_ is spot on the scales.
Once I've been hit with Smoke Grenade, and I can still see the Widow (via Perception) I don't whiff like crazy.
The problem most people are having is that we don't get the benefit of seeing our foes immediately after we're attacking if we've been hit by a -90% Perception debuff (Which is the same across all of the AT's.
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The Night Widow's Smoke Grenade is exactly the same scale for both Perception (-90%) and To Hit debuff (-0.5) as Smoke Grenade (and Fire Controls 'Smoke' and Trick Arrow's 'Flash Arrow'.)
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As you can see, the only "Scalar" that he listed is the ToHit Debuff, which -is- spot on, and GP's numbers agree with it perfectly.
The trouble their for us as players is the -90% Perception. After being hit, we don't "magically" gain back that 90% lost Perception. Is this a real issue? I dunno, I've never had -that- much trouble with Widows.
But then, on the flipside, if our Smoke Grenades worked like that to enemies, where they can never see us long as we're out of Perception range, it'd get changed mighty quick. So, maybe it's time just for fairness that the Perception debuff be SUPPRESSED when players are attacked (and not just for the mobs).
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*cough* You did note, before you jumped on the Submit button to make nasty comments, that the 8% figure was the final defensive buff from the 15% accuracy debuff that he estimated from the tests.
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You did read the full message of the person I was replying to before flying off the handle and assuming I was being nasty, right? You know, the guy complaining about his brain leaking out of his ears when I explained the multipliers?
There are people who don't like math. Acknowledging this isn't being nasty. It's kindly noting that the complete explanation of confidence intervals, z-values and p-values would generate reactions somewhere between pain and snoring, so there's going to have to be a certain amount of trust of the figures involved.
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No, seems you didn't. Maybe instead of attacking simply out of a need to feel big, you could be a little more dignified in future conversations.
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Healer, heal thyself. GP's misunderstanding of how ToHitDebuff works aside, the only significant number is how much a minion's final accuracy dropped -- in his tests, by about 8 percent, and although he didn't list error bars, his cited final accuracy and attack counts are enough to determine that it's going to be more or less +/- 5%. Maybe instead of attacking simply out of a need to feel big, you could be a little more dignified in future conversations.
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Denigration of others efforts without putting forth any of your own is little better than poo-pooing.
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I already explained exactly why it works that way, and exactly what the numbers are, and Castle confirmed them. Exactly what further effort do you want out of me?
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Currently Flash Arrow is more of a warning to the foes to tell them "Hey we're here" cause they're agro is 70% to 100% of the mob when engaged (for the mathematically challenged, that is in a mob of 10 odds are that a FA'd group will agro from 7 to all 10 when engaged
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yeah k. enemies keep attacking because of how the AI works, not because they can 'see' you - they cant. thats why MM henchmen attack invisible targets.
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And as long as the MASSIVE +DEF buff that NW's had is removed, then they'er only situational too and not game breaking. ...
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Do you happen to know the status on this fix? Personally I see that as the only issue. I have to agree with UberGuy that the difficulty of Night Widows is fine, as long as this defense problem is corrected.
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If there were AT modifiers at work on that 0.5 (50%), then a defender, the buff/debuff AT, would have a higher value, not lower. Certainly not 70% lower.
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Actually, about 90% lower, assuming you're talking about the base. The Defender multiplier (the highest) is 0.125. The Controller/Corrupter multiplier is 0.100. A scale of 0.5 means that Controllers and Corrupters should be seeing a 0.5*0.100=0.05 final base debuff (5%), and Defenders should be seeing a 0.5*0.125=0.0625 (6.25%) final base debuff. The blaster multiplier is only 0.070, so Smoke Grenade from /Devices is only providing a 0.5*0.070=0.035 (3.5%) final base debuff, which is the reason why every time that I've read about it being tested it has never shown up above the statistical noise even in large samples. It's literally so small it needs special tools and large amounts of time just to detect.
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That's essentially correct.
A 0.5 scale would be:
Defenders = 6.25%
Blasters = 3.5%
Masterminds = 3.75%, etc
A Defender with 3 SO's would be ~9.6% to hit debuff.
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Sorry but this just cant be right. There is no way 1 smoke grenade from a night widow is supposed to turn an entire team into Whiff Fest 2006. If it is this is not fair. You will not always have yellows or a teammate with tactics and in our case they only reason we even got past that part mission was because kept resummoning pets and let them kill. The only explaination I can give for this is your guys arent giving us all the information. Night Widow is using 20 slotted pre-nerf Hammi-Os in her smoke grenade.
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For the few days I had Smoke Grenade on my AR/Devices, I would swear on a stack of Bibles and Korans and, I dunno, Necronomicons...anyway, I'd swear that not only did SG not debuff anything, but it drew aggro once they saw you. I teamed a lot during that time, mostly facing Trolls, and I can promise that every Troll in the spawn, once aggroed would turn and throw rocks at me and only me, even if I hadn't attacked at all. It was not perception, it happened, and over and over.
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This is what happens to me every time I use flash arrow on teams. I have stopped using it. I could even have a tanker go in and taunt and yet I still get stoned to death by trolls when I am well outside the normal critter perception range.
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Sorry but this just cant be right. There is no way 1 smoke grenade from a night widow is supposed to turn an entire team into Whiff Fest 2006.
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I don't experience this happening in Siren's, and I don't even run Tactics at that level. If you have a mission where you can replicate this, you might want to log your actual hit/miss rate over a few hundred attacks against a night widow and send the results of that to the devs. It's possible that they're spawning an alternate version of a Night Widow inside some missions that has a decimal point misplaced somewhere.
Another thing to check for is to see how many debuff icons show up. It's possible that the attacks are stacking when they aren't supposed to.
I agree with the OP about the Night Widows being way over powered. I've also seen them take down an entire 8 man team, it's not a pretty sight. 
It was an 8 man pickup team (I was playing my lvl 24 mind/psy dom), and of course the leader sets the mission of the highest level person on Invincible so everything is red/purple to me. I had never fought NW's before, so I was surprised when the grenade hit and all the enemies vanished and we went from kicking butt to a team wipe within about 10 seconds. But I knew what had happened, and how to counter it. I asked if anyone had Tactics, and was greeted with silence so I assume no one did. I had 2 yellows on me and told everyone to make sure if they had them to use them.
So we try again. And again we're kicking butt until the smoke grenade hits and everything disappears. I pop my yellow and can see again, which does me no good since no one else can see and I still have the massive to-hit debuff on me. The only people with heals were 2 darks and a kinetic, so once the smoke grenade hit all the heals stopped since there were no enemies to be seen to target off of and we all die again.
3rd times the charm right? We all arrive back from the hospital angry and wanting revenge. I use my last yellow as the smoke grenade hits, and everything just...stops. On our side anyways... most of our team is standing around like useless dolts being beaten on by invisible enemies. Then my last yellow wears off and the enemies pull their disappearing act again. I see the brute is still able to fight (he must have some kind of built in +perception power) so I run up next to him to try and fight whatever he's fighting, hoping I can hit it if I'm in melee range and target through him but some error message pops up about the enemy being "too hard to see" before I die again.
We assemble again, there's only the boss and a few others left. The were 4 of us on the Night Widow, and she killed 2 of us before we finally put her down for good.
We move onto the next mob, another Night Widow and another team wipe seconds after the smoke grenade hits. I go to the hospital and log off in disgust, having just endured the worst pickup team ever. The players were fine, but those bosses are so ridiculously overpowered I wanted to rip out my hair in frustration. I like a challenge as much as the next person, but requiring us to bring along a full tray of yellows or have a certain power pool is not right. This isn't the same as having to bring along break frees, b/c most enemy mezzes only affect one person at a time, and wear off quickly. This one boss will cripple an entire team if they don't have the right powers, and if there's 1 NW per mob you'll run out of yellows very quickly. There was no way for that team, with the powers that we had, to beat that mission without incurring tons of debt.
Maybe player -perception powers should work that way too! My fire/kinetics troller could drop Smoke/fire cages on a mob, then run in with Hot Feet turned on and stand there while they all slowly burn to death, unable to attack me. Oh wait, that would be overpowered wouldn't it? Of course it would! So why do enemies get to do that to me?
Anyways, after that horrifying experience I changed my whole build and worked in Tactics so that would never happen again. Personally I think they should make the NW bosses appear only in the late game. How many players have Tactics in their build by lvl 24?! 
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The problem is, the Night Widow's smoke grenade is much more powerful than the player version.
The Night Widow's Smoke Grenade is exactly the same scale for both Perception (-90%) and To Hit debuff (-0.5) as Smoke Grenade (and Fire Controls 'Smoke' and Trick Arrow's 'Flash Arrow'.)
The issue you are describing of critters being aware of you even after you blind them is the same problem Stalkers have with Hide -- once you have Aggroed a critter, it always knows where you are, despite Stealth or Perception changes. It's how our AI has to work, currently. It is something I'd like to see changed, but it is 'difficult.'
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Ok... so then a change neds to be made to the mob version of smoke grenade. Once a mob attacks a player, the entire spawn should be visible. That is, in effect, what happens for mobs. You'd liel to see it fixed - excellent... but until then we're playing on a vastly uneven field. No player power can blind enemies with the kind of effectiveness that nightwidow smoke grenade has. This is not just a minor inconvenience, it's downright overpowered.
Perhaps, like I stated earlier, just make smoke grenade a targetted AoE, so you can at least get out of the area to be able to see again...
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actually stalkers dont get smoke grenade, the /nin secondary can get smoke flash, which is just a pbaoe placate, which doesnt add the "hidden" status to the stalker, AND requires a to-hit check
completely different 
i wish we could get smoke grenade in one of the patron pools though
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How many players have Tactics in their build by lvl 24?!
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Every Defender or Corruptor I've ever made 
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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How many players have Tactics in their build by lvl 24?!
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Every Defender or Corruptor I've ever made
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Heh, same, though in my case that only works out to two defenders I've ever gotten to 24+.
I don't get it.. did EvilRyu say "If Stalkers got smoke grenade"? ... Well... THEY DO.
If he wants to talk dirty tricks... there's MUCH WORSE things mobs could do that my PvP Corr already does all the time... which is:
-Spawn Seeker Drones... Debuffs ACC and PER worse than smoke grenade
-Seekers will attack whether I'm phaseshifted or Invisible... I don't even have to risk being targeted.
-Place Invisibility buffs on my "AS-capeable minions".
-Spam a Taunt while turning invisible, then switch to a Terrorize, then back to the Taunt+Invis when the Terrorize wears off again (BtW, Thx for the idea Castle!...it's ganktacular in a team fight!)
-Drop a Poison Trap with "pulsing holds"... anyone who's fought immobile Gas Turrets knows how quickly this attacks breaks every Mez protection in the game.
-Even if you kill me, the gas trap stays there...continuing to pulse.
-Pre-emptively Snipe from 225 yards away...Kite with Teleport... Snipe again.
-Teleport you almost 300 yards into: Caltrops, Poison, Mortar, TripMines, TimeBomb, and anything else that's handily waiting nearby.
-And there's no jumping out it either...I have -JMP debuff too.
None of this stuff is Uber either... It's just very effective when in certain situations.
And as long as the MASSIVE +DEF buff that NW's had is removed, then they'er only situational too and not game breaking. ...Like was already pointed out, some of the NPC's base stats on attacks can usually be more game-breaking than any of the tactics they use. We should be encouraging anything that strengthens the AI as an alternative to the hamfisted game design practices of just buffing HP/Regen/DEF/whatever else.