Lucks and Insights do not work the way you think
By
Amarsir,
Posted on: 2006-06-06 11:23 in Player Guides
A Tennis player using instincts is using "Muscle memory", not traditional memory.
This is a very different thing than "instinctually" knowing that a random sequence of numbers is wrong.
If I came here and claimed that Blasters have half the normal chance to hit on 06/06/06, are you going to claim that you should consider it just because I'm a longtime player who's instincts are honed so I know how things should be? Of course not. I either have numbers, or I have nothing.
Bugs exist. What the "stats" people constantly argue with is the people who don't have numbers...and the people who do have numbers disagree. That's very different than this situation here where nobody had the numbers either way.
Frankly, if people start giving more credence to instincts based on this thread they want to, rather than it being a good idea. I respect you in general Fraktal but in spite of your claims to being a stats person you jump on to the "instinct" bandwagon far too fast.
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Or perhaps there is a core group of a dozen or so players the Devs should always 'listen to'-- even when those players disagree with each other?
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When in doubt, they should always listen to me and do whatever I say. Its not always the best thing, but its a good rule of thumb. And not just for the devs, either.
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It's true. Also, they should never listen to me. Ever.
Oh, look, they already aren't. 
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A Tennis player using instincts is using "Muscle memory", not traditional memory.
This is a very different thing than "instinctually" knowing that a random sequence of numbers is wrong.
If I came here and claimed that Blasters have half the normal chance to hit on 06/06/06, are you going to claim that you should consider it just because I'm a longtime player who's instincts are honed so I know how things should be? Of course not. I either have numbers, or I have nothing.
Bugs exist. What the "stats" people constantly argue with is the people who don't have numbers...and the people who do have numbers disagree. That's very different than this situation here where nobody had the numbers either way.
Frankly, if people start giving more credence to instincts based on this thread they want to, rather than it being a good idea. I respect you in general Fraktal but in spite of your claims to being a stats person you jump on to the "instinct" bandwagon far too fast.
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I think, in fact, that Fraktal is actually correct in this case, the poor example aside.
If fifty diehard baseball players and fans are noticing there's something wrong with their swing and saying, "The bat feels light", you don't just check the weight of the bat by looking at the number printed on it. You don't demand that they each take 10000 swings and report the results.
You get a scale and check the bat, then call the factory and get them to fix their manufacturing process.
The only reason I'm not going to join the "[censored] IT LISTEN TO ME" army is an example that _Castle_ used at one point:
Someone sent in a demorecord designed to prove that "thing X got nerfed". And the demorecord was a deliberate fraud and a forgery.
I'd say there are more lying scumbags out there than there are good, careful scientists by a factor of 10, at least. The entry barriers are lower. . .
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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As someone who does bug testing, it's actually very easy to miss bugs that seem blindingly obvious once they are discovered. Especially in software that is being constantly tweaked by multiple people. As much as people like to rant about this sort of thing, it really does fall under 'these things happen sometimes'. And they happen to everyone.
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I have a friend who is a doctor of computer science. He knows inside and out the development cycle, QA, and so forth, and he's always the first person to correct me when I show up spouting whatever new conspiracy theory about how The Devs Are Out To Ruin Our Game that I've read on these boards and probably should have known better about. He's the first to remind me that actions that seem to make sense on the surface often have unintended consequences that people never even realized.
In a discussion I had with him the other day, he has noted that he now believes Cryptic's QA process to be so ineffective as to be nearly nonexistent.
The problem is that development and QA are handled separately, and firewalled off so that they don't talk to each other much. And where this might be a good idea for large teams working on monolithic software that doesn't change much--facilitating better separation and validation--it's not such a good idea for smaller teams working on a very dynamic code base. It's like those old EDS commercials about herding cats, building airplanes in the air, and/or running with squirrels. Very tricky to do--and at this point, Cryptic isn't doing it at all well.
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The only reason I'm not going to join the "[censored] IT LISTEN TO ME" army is an example that _Castle_ used at one point:
Someone sent in a demorecord designed to prove that "thing X got nerfed". And the demorecord was a deliberate fraud and a forgery.
I'd say there are more lying scumbags out there than there are good, careful scientists by a factor of 10, at least. The entry barriers are lower. . .
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No one's saying you should listen to all players with a cockamamie story.
We're just saying that if a great deal of people are saying they smell smoke, especially ones that have proven in the past to be reliable, it's a good idea to actually *check* for fire instead of saying, "Well, the alarms aren't going off".
At the very least, you check the alarms' batteries, or say, "oh, yes, there is smoke, but it's because we're all high, not because the basement's caught fire." 
How many "alarms" can we check per day, while also generating and testing new content? I can guarantee we get more "alarms" than we have time to look at properly.
An easy reply to that is 'Hire more people.' Ok, so who do we let go to keep this in our budget, and isn't that just robbing Peter to pay Paul? Increasing the budget means either Cryptic or NCSoft loses income OR we increase the monthly charge for the game. None of these are really good ideas or feasible.
There is an old engineering adage to the effect of "You can have it Fast, Good, or Cheap -- pick two." It basically refers to the fact that time, money and quality are all inter-related. Time and Money are often fixed quantities ("We need this in three weeks! No, we aren't increasing your budget for it.") which means features are designed to, or cut to those parameters.
One last thing to consider, you as players represent thousands of times more manpower than we have here. No matter what, you will almost always find bugs that we miss here. Statistically, that is almost a certainty.
None of this is meant as an excuse. We have a lot of bugs, and as many get introduced each new patch as get fixed. So long as new content is being added, that will likely remain the case (although, since we have had a QA dept. here at Cryptic for the last 10 months or so, things are improving in that regard.)
We are trying to make CoH/CoV the best game possible -- we work on it every day, and constantly discuss ways to improve the various systems we have and how to prioritize changes and/or fixes. Sometimes, we screw up, but most of the time, we succeed.
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How many "alarms" can we check per day, while also generating and testing new content? I can guarantee we get more "alarms" than we have time to look at properly.
An easy reply to that is 'Hire more people.' Ok, so who do we let go to keep this in our budget, and isn't that just robbing Peter to pay Paul? Increasing the budget means either Cryptic or NCSoft loses income OR we increase the monthly charge for the game. None of these are really good ideas or feasible.
There is an old engineering adage to the effect of "You can have it Fast, Good, or Cheap -- pick two." It basically refers to the fact that time, money and quality are all inter-related. Time and Money are often fixed quantities ("We need this in three weeks! No, we aren't increasing your budget for it.") which means features are designed to, or cut to those parameters.
One last thing to consider, you as players represent thousands of times more manpower than we have here. No matter what, you will almost always find bugs that we miss here. Statistically, that is almost a certainty.
None of this is meant as an excuse. We have a lot of bugs, and as many get introduced each new patch as get fixed. So long as new content is being added, that will likely remain the case (although, since we have had a QA dept. here at Cryptic for the last 10 months or so, things are improving in that regard.)
We are trying to make CoH/CoV the best game possible -- we work on it every day, and constantly discuss ways to improve the various systems we have and how to prioritize changes and/or fixes. Sometimes, we screw up, but most of the time, we succeed.
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Castle, I completely agree, but this: "you as players represent thousands of times more manpower than we have here", is precisely why the immediate kneejerk and rote "this isn't the problem you're looking for" /em Jedi hand wave is a very poor solution.
I'm certainly not suggesting that you chase down every claim that "I missed three times in a row; it's a nerf!", but when we see solid information and testing ignored or simply reported as working when we know there's more to it than that, it's quite vexing.
Off the top of my head, I'd say any report of strangeness voiced by Arcana, Circeus, or Fraktal is probably worth paying attention to, especially if there are a large number of people nodding in agreement. 
As a sidenote: isn't there a QA department that's specifically tasked with tracking down and testing for bugs of this nature? I would certainly agree that Pohsyb or yourself shouldn't be the ones who have to do this on their lunchbreaks or whenever. 
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A Tennis player using instincts is using "Muscle memory", not traditional memory.
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Untrue.
You did not read my example carefully enough, or you are confusing two different things. "Muscle memory" is about the swing motions and other physical movements you execute to hit the ball. "Player intuition" is about knowing WHERE to hit the ball to make a winner, or knowing "I double faulted a lot today." Those have nothing to do with muscle memory and have everything to do with having a feel for the game.
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This is a very different thing than "instinctually" knowing that a random sequence of numbers is wrong.
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So it's your contention that is is not possible to get a "feel" for a system whose underlying behavior is in part dictated by a computational random number generator? I simply disagree. Anything that is repeatable, one can get a feel for.
Heck here at work where I run models that use Random Number Generators (RNGs) all the time I still hav e a "feel" for the models I have built. I have watched them over and over for more than a year. When, contrary to every bit of experience I have ever had with these models, one of them starts pumping out imaginary numbers, I know something is wrong. I don't just toss up my hands and say, "Oh it must be the RNG and I just can't instinctively know what a random sequence of numbers should do."
I *do* have a feel for it. I have generated thousands of datasets using this model. They've never given me imaginary numbers before. Therefore, although something might *not* be wrong... it sure as hell is worth investigating.
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Frankly, if people start giving more credence to instincts based on this thread they want to, rather than it being a good idea. I respect you in general Fraktal but in spite of your claims to being a stats person you jump on to the "instinct" bandwagon far too fast.
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Numbers are great to have but one cannot always get them in the desired format (not everyone has a logger -- for example I flat out REFUSE to use them because I do not trust them not to bug my install, and I don't feel like having to re-up all the damn patches -- paranoia maybe, but I rather play the game than re-install it repeatedly). But when 20, or 30, or 40, or a hundred, veteran players all say the same thing -- "I do not seem to be flooring bosses the way I should with 3 def insps" -- it's worth looking into even if they don't have the logged numbers to back them up.
I am a stats person, thank you very much. I was party to a very long thread on chi-square analysis of AT frequencies explaining that the chi-square showed that what people "felt" was true was incorrect. But I didn't just wave my hand at them and say, "Because you don't have data you must be off your rocker." I accepted their feel for the game as presumably valid until the numbers showed they were not... and then I explained WHY the numbers showed they were not.
I'm not talking about asking the devs to nerf a power because players have a "feel" for it. But I am saying they, and their apologists, need to recognize that just because someone didn't do 50,000 trials vs. the level 1 thugs in Outbreak, doesn't mean his "feel" for the game should be dismissed. Veteran players do have an innate feel for "how the game usually plays," and if they, as a large group, start saying that their feel for the game is telling them something is wrong, the devs should look into it and stop blowing it off.
Want proof I'm right? It's right here in front of you. A large # of people had a very correct "feel" for the games. And as we saw, a simple check of the SQL database by a dev demonstrated that something people had "felt" was correct.
Again. I'm not asking them to nerf a thing, or even consider nerfing a thing... or buff a thing... or do anything of the sort. Just look at the damn code when vet players flag something as having "odd behavior" and stop dismissing them out of hand because they don't have "datamining" quality numbers. It's not the players' jobs to do statistical analysis -- it's the players' jobs to play the game and report bugs if they find them.. and the devs' job to want to track down those bugs, rather than putting their heads in the sand and pretending the bug is not there.
I would think fans of the game would want bugs or errors fixed... yet so often they try to shout down those who find problems as if we are enemies of the game. I want it to play right too.. and if vet players are saying, "This doesn't play right given my experience," the devs need to listen.
F
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So Insights SAY +25% _Accuracy_ but what they mean is +25% (or not even that, but whatever) _To_Hit_Buff_.
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An interesting theory is that lucks *are* "+25% defense" relative to base 50% tohit. Perhaps in the distant past, all critter types had base 50% tohit (and they do again). Lucks date to that time when a player popped a luck, he was reducing net tohit by 25% for all attackers; +12.5 percentage points DEF = "+25% defense" colloquially. Given other things I've seen and heard, this is not a bad theory.
Insights, though; good luck coming up with a theory there.
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I have a question after reading through these posts. I won't even pretend to know how all the math works in this game, but this post from Arcanaville made a little warning light go off in my head. (Granted, the light could simply have been a "brain is overheating" warning, but I still would like to know for sure from some people who know more about this than I do. )
OK, here we go...
I just created a sample Super Reflexes Scrapper using the City of Heroes Character builder by Sherk Silver. I took every single SR power and 3 slotted them for defense (at least the ones that can be slotted for defense), even level SO's. Now it lists the defense totals for Melee, Ranged (both at 27.3%) and AoE (46.8%) attacks against this character. Elude adds (at least I'm assuming it stacks) another 70.2% defense to Melee, Range and AoE.
Now after all the long windedness, here is my question. Is it possible that the defense numbers without Elude (27.3% and 46.8%) are based on Arcanaville's theory here? Could it be possible that SR defense numbers are based on the To-Hit numbers and not actually making the attacks against SR miss 27.3% of the time, but actually only 13.7% (rounded up) of the time? And if this is the case, where does that leave the often cited "1 defense is more or less equal to 2 resistance"?
But if defense as a whole is based on the percentage it takes away from the critters base to-hit, doesn't that mean that basically every single defensive power in the game is actually only doing half what we think it is?
I admit that I could be completely off base about this as I've never played a SR Scrapper, though I do have one sitting ready to be played since I heard about the new Defense Scaling in I7.
I apologize if all I'm doing is being an uninformed n00b causing fear and spreading DOOM! where it didn't belong.
Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.
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How many "alarms" can we check per day, while also generating and testing new content? I can guarantee we get more "alarms" than we have time to look at properly.
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Then maybe you should prioritize those incoming alarms a bit more. There are a lot of players who you trust to test properly and pass along results, so perhaps you should be flagging reports from those players as "important, investigate now".
When people go to the trouble of verifying bugs and showing that they're reproducable, it's worth taking a look at. As it is, we're left with the choices of either posting them to try to generate a few hundred posts and pray a developer takes it seriously (exemp situation), argue with QA for weeks (knockdown in things that shouldn't have knockdown, like Freakshow pistols and Vampyre brawl; lieutenant-bosses in Heroic-level PvP zone missions with boss-level status protection), or PMing our favorite developers and hoping they have enough good will for us to spend a little time fixing the problems we find.
You have an untapped resource, the players. Use it. And I don't mean just /bug, because we're all getting the distinct impression that 99% of what we /bug ends up in the trash.
Or I can keep nagging you, Cuppa, and the QA team until you all go flaming mad. 
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I think, in fact, that Fraktal is actually correct in this case, the poor example aside.
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Thanks for pointing out that my example sucked, Foo.
(Heheh... Foo and I are friends... I'm just teasing him.)
Actually I'm glad you came up with a much better one:
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If fifty diehard baseball players and fans are noticing there's something wrong with their swing and saying, "The bat feels light", you don't just check the weight of the bat by looking at the number printed on it. You don't demand that they each take 10000 swings and report the results.
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This reminds me of a story my father told me many years ago.
Ted Williams was one of the best ball-players of all time. He had supposedly "perfect" vision -- it's why he was such a good batter. He played in the outfield (Left Field to be specific). He played for the Red Sox. Thus, Ted Williams was used to standing in the Fenway Park outfield looking toward home plate... he did it for thousands of hours.
One day, as the story goes, Williams and the team's owner were out walking in the outfield, talking about something or other to do with the team. They were all the way back by the left field fence, when Williams stopped, gazing at home plate. Then he turned to the owner and said, "Home plate's off-center." The owner laughed, and thought it was a joke. But Williams insisted that home plate was off-center.
Now, home plate was supposedly where it had ALWAYS been, and thus in the correct position. There was just no way the plate could be "off center." Impossible.
Or so they thought.
Williams was so insistent though, and his eyesight was so legendary, that the owner finally agreed to have a team come out with precision instruments and measure it. And it turned out home plate was in fact off-center... by some 6 inches. And Williams could see that from the outfield.
Did Williams have surveying equipment out there? No. Was he a surveyor or a field attendant? No. Instead, he was an experienced ball player, who had stared at home plate a billion times from that position, and he could see that it "didn't look right." Fortunately the owner listened to him, and they fixed it... but the point is, long experience does give you a "feel" for these things.
Again, I am NOT saying "ignore the numbers" or "the numbers do not matter." I'm saying that the absence of numbers does not make the claim automatically false... especially not when it comes from an experienced player.
F
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I think, in fact, that Fraktal is actually correct in this case, the poor example aside.
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Thanks for pointing out that my example sucked, Foo.
(Heheh... Foo and I are friends... I'm just teasing him.)
Actually I'm glad you came up with a much better one:
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If fifty diehard baseball players and fans are noticing there's something wrong with their swing and saying, "The bat feels light", you don't just check the weight of the bat by looking at the number printed on it. You don't demand that they each take 10000 swings and report the results.
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I have a rule. I just made it up right now, but it's a rule, nonetheless: If you're going to explain something to an American, use baseball or football analogies.
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Off the top of my head, I'd say any report of strangeness voiced by Arcana, Circeus, or Fraktal is probably worth paying attention to, especially if there are a large number of people nodding in agreement.
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Just to reiterate what I said previously: in virtually every case, every red name I've brought a specific problem to has listened and checked it out carefully, so I have no specific complaint there. Of course, I try not to bother them too much unless I have a smoking gun. Often, I try to give them a picture of the bullet actually hitting the target. That makes me, I hope, a good risk/reward candidate.
Of course, my "change it, it sucks" reports go into the same pile everyone elses goes to.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
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I just created a sample Super Reflexes Scrapper using the City of Heroes Character builder by Sherk Silver. I took every single SR power and 3 slotted them for defense (at least the ones that can be slotted for defense), even level SO's. Now it lists the defense totals for Melee, Ranged (both at 27.3%) and AoE (46.8%) attacks against this character. Elude adds (at least I'm assuming it stacks) another 70.2% defense to Melee, Range and AoE.
Now after all the long windedness, here is my question. Is it possible that the defense numbers without Elude (27.3% and 46.8%) are based on Arcanaville's theory here? Could it be possible that SR defense numbers are based on the To-Hit numbers and not actually making the attacks against SR miss 27.3% of the time, but actually only 13.7% (rounded up) of the time? And if this is the case, where does that leave the often cited "1 defense is more or less equal to 2 resistance"?
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SR isn't *that* bad. Its defense numbers check out fine.
Except SherkSilver, and probably every builder out there, has wrong numbers for SR.
SRs toggles are 13.875%, not 12.5% like everyone thought they were. SR's passives are 5.625%, not 5% like everyone thought. That makes 3-slot defense 30.4%, not 27.3%.
Also, from I5 to I6 SR had higher AoE defense, but in I7, its AoE defense is now exactly the same as its melee and ranged defense.
[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]
In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
/signed
/agreed
now back to the 7th ininng stretch where the Marlins are two touchdowns away from from the world cup.
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None of this is meant as an excuse. We have a lot of bugs, and as many get introduced each new patch as get fixed. So long as new content is being added, that will likely remain the case (although, since we have had a QA dept. here at Cryptic for the last 10 months or so, things are improving in that regard.)
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This is the part that scares me. I hope you (Cryptic) have had testing coverage throughout the release cycles. I'm going to assume that you guys outsourced testing or something (or had test off-site).
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Off the top of my head, I'd say any report of strangeness voiced by Arcana, Circeus, or Fraktal is probably worth paying attention to, especially if there are a large number of people nodding in agreement.
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Just to reiterate what I said previously: in virtually every case, every red name I've brought a specific problem to has listened and checked it out carefully, so I have no specific complaint there. Of course, I try not to bother them too much unless I have a smoking gun. Often, I try to give them a picture of the bullet actually hitting the target. That makes me, I hope, a good risk/reward candidate.
Of course, my "change it, it sucks" reports go into the same pile everyone elses goes to.
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Red Names do an outstanding job for the load they currently have. The long awaited attention to the TA set by castle was because of Goofy_Parrot and the TA thread with absolutley amazing work on it, BY PLAYERS!
Cuppa has been kind enough to respond to several issues I have had. I try not to use the boilerplate "change it...it sucks" technique as those are filtered to the recycle bin techs. But if you speak intelligently, a red name will come. ...er um...usually
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You have an untapped resource, the players. Use it. And I don't mean just /bug, because we're all getting the distinct impression that 99% of what we /bug ends up in the trash.
Or I can keep nagging you, Cuppa, and the QA team until you all go flaming mad.
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Couldn't agree more, most people do not even bother with bugging because it is a waste of time in most peoples opinions. Even opening petitions you get either working as intended or a carbon copy response which has nothing to do with what you posted. PMing CuppaJo gets results BUT it should not take her getting flooded with PMs in order to get those results. People have bugged many issues for months, mission rewards for missions that reward bonuses inside vs outside, the disoriented mobs which move at lightning speed, getting stuck in large elevators, (contaminated mission from Kalinda, Hess TF mission). I saw quality before quantity, stop trying to do so much at once. I7 was delayed in large due to so much on the table at once. It was bad enough that you added the level 40-50 content for villains but then you added everything else on top of it.
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Couldn't agree more, most people do not even bother with bugging because it is a waste of time in most peoples opinions.
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Which is a shame, because the vast majority of all the things I've /bugged get fixed eventually in patches down the line. /bug does work
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Couldn't agree more, most people do not even bother with bugging because it is a waste of time in most peoples opinions.
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Which is a shame, because the vast majority of all the things I've /bugged get fixed eventually in patches down the line. /bug does work
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My point is that many things went unnoticed even though they were bugged numerous times, ie ignored until they added more features. The disoriented mobs did not take notice until they added more of them, like flying groups which flew off at mach speed.
hmmmmm
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but when we see solid information and testing ignored or simply reported as working when we know there's more to it than that, it's quite vexing.
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amen. loads of testing was done prior to the GDN all of it was ignored. for a fix that caused much heartache, and not a few long term players leaving the game for good over it. (_Havok_ anyone?)
Let the players help listen to what they say. Some of them are darn good at testing, and reporting the results.
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I hope this little nugget will be a lesson to the Doubting Thomases who arise to shout down anyone without a 5 MB file of 10,000 hits and misses to back him up. The people who were correct in this case were, not the statistical gurus (sorry Arcana, but then I am in this group most of the time too), and not even the devs themselves, but rather, the people who KNOW the game inside out from many hours of playing it, and could tell just by feel, that something odd was going on with inspirations. So maybe from now on people will be a little more open-minded when the more intuitive, but experienced, gamers have something to say about these things.
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The problem is that very often, many many players "feel" wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I feel that many situations described by players (including this one) merit being looked into, but how are the devs supposed to distinguish those from the myriad of frivolous claims out there? For every "legitimate" claim, there are (at least) dozens that lack any merit whatsoever. This is especially true concerning matters of accuracy. In some cases (possibly this one) the situation described is different enough to warrant looking into, but is this always so apparent? After reading hundreds of posts about how "accuracy is broken!!1!one!", I'd be a bit sceptic too.
So what should the devs "usually" listen to? A select few?
Arcanaville is usually correct, listen to her. Fraktal will often be correct, but sometimes wrong - listen, but take anything said with a pinch of salt. Never listen to that no-good troublemaker Stargazer.
You mention "intuitive experienced" players. I've seen "intuitive experienced" players that are so far disconnected from reality that I'm amazed they can even log into the forums.
(there's another problem right there. Hyperbole.)
And things aren't usually that clear-cut. People tend to be correct sometimes and wrong sometimes. That makes it even harder. Sometimes people make obviously incorrect claims in reports about issues that actually exist (I'm pretty sure I've seen that in discussions regarding this very issue).
And how are the devs supposed to tell the difference between a "good" poster and a "bad" poster? Do we expect them to spend as much time on the forums as we do? It's relatively easy to get an impression about some posters, but very hard to do the same for the general populace.
I'd also hesitate to draw any wider conclusions from one isolated case. "See! A poster was right, you should listen to us!" doesn't necessarily carry much weight if posters more often than not are wrong (about issues similar to this). Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn...
Again, I'm not saying that it's ok for devs to generally ignore claims by posters, but we should understand that it is not trivial to tell legitimate claims from absurd ones. There's bound to be mistakes made.
On a separate note, I find it to be a bit of a stretch to use your analogy for a situation as random as the one described here.
It works well for cases with a stronger connection between cause and effect, but not so well for cases like this.
It'd work great if there was something wrong with Super Jump.
I've been using Super Jump for over a year now, and I usually land within 5 ft. of where I aim. Now I suddenly fall 15 yards short on every jump.
Or maybe for Stealth.
I can usually get much closer than this before being noticed. Something must be wrong.
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Because it would be interesting:
Time to death against a "reliable" "fast" damage source (PBAoE DoT, ...).
I can't say for sure how easy it'd be to find a damage source that's "just right", but it'd be an interesting approach.
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I got lucky. There's a level 50 contact that just happens to give out a mission very early on that generates a large number of attackers in a very small area that cycle attacks very quickly that an unstoppable scrapper can survive when using at least three small lucks.
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You tested using the infamous Infernal portal mish?
Liberty
Mister Mass - 50 Inv/SS/NRG Mut Tank [1236]
Doc Willpower - 50 Grav/FF/Psi Mag Controller
Baron Wonder - 50 SS/Elec/Mu Mag Brute
Sound Bight - 50 Son/Son/Mu Tech Corrupter