[Unique IOs] IO effects with a duration? Ick...!!
By
2hawks,
Posted on: 2007-03-01 10:22 in The Market and Inventions
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One thing I've said for quite a while now is that while its nice and all to be the Numbers Maven, the players of the game would be much better served if there was no need for a Numbers Maven. So much of the game's mechanics are not just non-transparent, but non-intuitive or difficult to explain, that it creates opportunities for people who know the numbers to get more out of the system than people who don't. Not just min-maxers, which is always true to an extent, but even concept builders, who have a tremendous advantage in executing concept builds when they know what everything does and how well, over someone shooting in the dark.
The devs need to understand that when Iakona and I lose, everyone else wins.
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I agree 133.33% (reduced by ED to 100%).
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You owe me a new monitor 
That was awesome.
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Castle, what are the current unique enhancers if you don't mind us asking?
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Can't say yet! I can say that the list is in flux and may change during testing.
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changing.....???
in flux...???
/e thowing planning papers across the room
<QR> To the OP. Then don't slot with IO's. Or slot with the IO's you want to slot with not what the set dictates. HO's will be available through the abyss in a couple weeks, in droves no doubt, so there's really nothing to complain about. Besides if you aren't using the buffs then why do you want to use IO's? The devs said that IO's will offer some buffs to some powers but that you needn't and shouldn't slot all your powers with the corresponding IO set.
In summary:
If you don't like it, don't bother with it.
Roxy On DA...Finally!
Is there any data on how long the buffs lasts from click powers for example ? Say I got one in Dull Pain, and activate Dull Pain, the way I understand it, the second I click Dull Pain, the bonus applies for a fixed duration (which isn't tied to, in this case Dull Pain).
Will the specific invention list how long the bonus lasts ?
Maybe make the IO click buff duration a variable that sets itself to equal the duration of the power you slot it into?
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Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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Maybe make the IO click buff duration a variable that sets itself to equal the duration of the power you slot it into?
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Eww, please no. I slot +20% Regen into aid self. Aid self duration? Very short. Total +20% health regened: 0.1 
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Heck, if the maths in this game weren't so secretive and screwy, there wouldn't be any need for people like Arcana and myself on these forums. 
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I've never understood why Statesman doesn't understand this.
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Because then you might make uninformed decisions! 
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In a way.....yes. The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to. I know personal friends that hate getting lots of numbers thrown at them, as they feel it is sometimes just a major distraction from fun at times. Whether they pulled it off or not is up to you to decide.
(I am neither defending nor condenming the Devs, just giving a proposal of a likely point of view)
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The devs need to understand that when Iakona and I lose, everyone else wins.
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I want to stop thinking.
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In a way.....yes. The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to. I know personal friends that hate getting lots of numbers thrown at them, as they feel it is sometimes just a major distraction from fun at times. Whether they pulled it off or not is up to you to decide.
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But ultimately, the game has to be balanced around the numbers. The haves and have-nots of number knowledge are going to be fighting the same enemies, so you either have to accept that the number-crunchers aren't going to get a challenge, or balance the PVE aspect around having a reasonably optimal build.....or provide enough information directly to put both groups on an even footing.
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The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to.
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The devs think that to a degree, but its not true. Or at least, its not as true as it should be. If you want to make a "marathon build" that is a conceptual decision. But can you, if you don't know the endurance numbers and how endurance reduction works and what stamina does? You can try, but a numbers-aware person can do better. If you want to make a non-stop shooting blaster, can you do that if you don't know how recharge works? If you want to make a scrapper that sacrifices offense for defense, and you are willing to hit softer if you get hit less often, can you do that if you don't know how defense works, and how defense stacks? If you want to make a flying tank, can you do that effectively if you can't figure out how the balance the endurance costs of fighting while flying?
The problem is that its all fine and good to say "we want players to design by concept" but how can they do that if there are no accurate textual description of what any power does, and more importantly, how every power interacts - even qualitatively - with every other?
Which one protects you more: tough or weave? If you are a blaster? A super reflexes scrapper? An Invuln tanker? Not easy questions to answer, and very difficult to encapsulate into the text descriptions of the powers even in theory. But knowing that can be important to someone's concept, even if its not a min/max concept.
How do you translate a mental concept for a character with the powers you have to have, unless you actually know what the powers do?
Honestly: the devs original design for this game was not to encourage building for concept. It was actually to be forced to explore the powers system. In effect, the game wasn't designed around you eventually building exactly what you wanted, it was designed around you getting bitten by a radioactive spider, and not knowing if that was going to allow you to walk on walls, or grow eight legs. You were not *supposed* to know what you were going to become.
If you were supposed to get exactly what you wanted, respecs would be unlimited.
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or provide enough information directly to put both groups on an even footing.
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DingDingDingDingDing!
We have a winner!
You know those information boxes, and the Menu->Help, and the power descriptions? Why don't they tell us half this stuff?
Yes, some powers are complicated. 99% aren't. The remaining 1% would still be helped with better imperfect descriptions. Make Information boxes (yeah, that thing you haven't seen since the tutorial) that tell how some mechanics work, and give more in-depth power and mechanic information.
[starship troopers] "Would you like to know more?" [/starship troopers]
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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[starship troopers] "Would you like to know more?" [/starship troopers]
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Surprisingly, no. I already know more. At points, I've known more than Statesman, or at least more than Statesman was willing to post.
What I want is to be able to find that information without having to drag it out of Statesman's brain, or look through Iakona and Red Tomax's wonderful data. I want to be able to simply pop open the Help->Menu text, or check the Official Powers page (which hasn't been meaningfully added to since I joined). I want to know how much Stone Skin is worth without having to go through five or six guides to get up-to-date values.
I don't want to know more, so much as I want to have normal players get a chance to know.
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[starship troopers] "Would you like to know more?" [/starship troopers]
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Surprisingly, no. I already know more. At points, I've known more than Statesman, or at least more than Statesman was willing to post.
What I want is to be able to find that information without having to drag it out of Statesman's brain, or look through Iakona and Red Tomax's wonderful data. I want to be able to simply pop open the Help->Menu text, or check the Official Powers page (which hasn't been meaningfully added to since I joined). I want to know how much Stone Skin is worth without having to go through five or six guides to get up-to-date values.
I don't want to know more, so much as I want to have normal players get a chance to know.
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QFT&E. I'm in very much the same boat. I read the forums digilently and I constantly check City of Data when I am curious about a power's workings, but not all my friends do that, and not all my friends would even understand most of what's said even if they did go to those lengths.
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The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to.
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The devs think that to a degree, but its not true. Or at least, its not as true as it should be. If you want to make a "marathon build" that is a conceptual decision. But can you, if you don't know the endurance numbers and how endurance reduction works and what stamina does? You can try, but a numbers-aware person can do better. If you want to make a non-stop shooting blaster, can you do that if you don't know how recharge works? If you want to make a scrapper that sacrifices offense for defense, and you are willing to hit softer if you get hit less often, can you do that if you don't know how defense works, and how defense stacks? If you want to make a flying tank, can you do that effectively if you can't figure out how the balance the endurance costs of fighting while flying?
The problem is that its all fine and good to say "we want players to design by concept" but how can they do that if there are no accurate textual description of what any power does, and more importantly, how every power interacts - even qualitatively - with every other?
Which one protects you more: tough or weave? If you are a blaster? A super reflexes scrapper? An Invuln tanker? Not easy questions to answer, and very difficult to encapsulate into the text descriptions of the powers even in theory. But knowing that can be important to someone's concept, even if its not a min/max concept.
How do you translate a mental concept for a character with the powers you have to have, unless you actually know what the powers do?
Honestly: the devs original design for this game was not to encourage building for concept. It was actually to be forced to explore the powers system. In effect, the game wasn't designed around you eventually building exactly what you wanted, it was designed around you getting bitten by a radioactive spider, and not knowing if that was going to allow you to walk on walls, or grow eight legs. You were not *supposed* to know what you were going to become.
If you were supposed to get exactly what you wanted, respecs would be unlimited.
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I dunno I agree with Raph Koster, players will reverse engineer a game and do so very quickly.
At least a certain set of the players will.
Purposeful obfuscation rarely works and so anything designed with that in mind is a three legged stool missing one of its legs.
Humans are pretty smart when they want to be.
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Honestly: the devs original design for this game was not to encourage building for concept. It was actually to be forced to explore the powers system. In effect, the game wasn't designed around you eventually building exactly what you wanted, it was designed around you getting bitten by a radioactive spider, and not knowing if that was going to allow you to walk on walls, or grow eight legs. You were not *supposed* to know what you were going to become.
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I think you are talking about concept mechanics wise, while the post you are responding to meant concept as in, "I am an alien from the planet XYZ, and being in Earth's atmosphere gives me superhuman strength and resilience" or "I was trained from birth as a cage fighter, I know martial arts and have incredible reflexes". Marathon builds and the like are a different kind of concept that I don't think people like Statesman and Positron even think about. I do think they wanted people to build characters based upon the other kind of concept.
I think that set design is at odds with this, however. I play with a lot of people that make characters based on non-mechanical concept and ignore numbers completely. One guy, when he reached level 35, looked at Evasion and asked "should I take this defense power and dodge more, or another attack?" He actually had no idea that Evasion only works against specific attack types (AoE)-- he thought it was "more defense".
Is that his own fault for not reading the power descriptions? I suppose, but I believe this thought process is actually what Statesman wanted to see, while Geko designed the system in a way that works against this type of player by requiring an understanding of how attacks break up into melee, ranged, and AoE, how frequent and how dangerous each type typically is, and how toggles are over twice as good as passives. You can say it's my friend's fault, but when the man in charge of the "vision" during beta and at release wanted this kind of ignorance to be commonplace, the system should have been designed around it. That's what balance is all about, in my opinion: allowing someone to say "I want Captain Archaic to use a mace, and he'd totally be able to Clobber people!" and not be penalized relative to his buddy The Amazing Dynamo who can create energy fields around his hands, and has no interest in Stunning people.
If all the SR toggles provided an equal (but multiplicitive instead of additive) amount of defense, and all the passives provided an equivalent amount of surviviability via the "near-miss" capability as you describe, people who ignore the numbers would get much better performance, and those who pay attention to them would have a much smaller advantage. Someone who thinks "I'm about 2/3 as good at dodging as him because I took 4 out of the 6 defensive powers available to me, while he took all 6" would actually be pretty accurate.
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I think you are talking about concept mechanics wise, while the post you are responding to meant concept as in, "I am an alien from the planet XYZ, and being in Earth's atmosphere gives me superhuman strength and resilience" or "I was trained from birth as a cage fighter, I know martial arts and have incredible reflexes". Marathon builds and the like are a different kind of concept that I don't think people like Statesman and Positron even think about. I do think they wanted people to build characters based upon the other kind of concept.
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I think most people's visions of their characters is something in between "I'm from outer space and punch things" and "I evade sixty-two point seven percent of the punches thrown at me." Its often a "I envision my character being able to stand toe to toe with her opponents and hit them way more often than she gets hit back" sort of thing.
That sort of thing probably creates circumstances where the player would sacrifice some offense for some defense, if it significantly improved that feeling of not getting hit. But do they know how to do that? Do they know which trade offs will work and which ones won't?
I recently posted about a no-stamina MA/SR build I experimented with for a few months. You do not stumble into such a thing by accident, and you don't just try it out with random slotting until it works. You might not need a calculator, but you do need to know what things cost and how endurance reduction works, and especially how ED works, to have any shot at doing something like that.
If someone's concept involved taking so many powers that there was no room for stamina, could they pull that off if they didn't fully understand how everything worked, at least with regard to endurance?
And Inventions will only make this worse, in many ways, by giving players so many more options to build non-optimal concept builds, but making it very hard to figure out how to do it at all.
Being from Planet X is backstory: you fulfil that by putting it in your character description. Being super strong has mechanical implications. So does being super evasive, super sturdy, etc.
I remember reading once a long time ago where Buffy (of the Scrapper/Tanker guides) said that her original vision was a Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) like character, which sounded Reflex-like. But in retrospect, her vision was actually more Invuln-like when she saw how the sets played. That's a case of the numbers and mechanics not connecting with the mental concept, which has nothing directly to do with mechanics, but much more visual/conceptual (but perhaps less abstract) character vision.
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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.)
So whats different about the game now that makes it okay for these types set bonuses to exist that wasn't there when you nerfed the hamidon enhancements and said they were too powerful based on the PvE aspect of the game needing to be so high that it was easier to drop the Ho's power than crank up the bad guys? I mean outside of making room for the sets... It would seem that a good alotment of set bonuses would certainly push people right back into the realm of 6 slotting bonuses if you count 3 per power plus the group bonus from sets.
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Castle, what are the current unique enhancers if you don't mind us asking?
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Can't say yet! I can say that the list is in flux and may change during testing.
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changing.....???
in flux...???
/e thowing planning papers across the room
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Don't be. I'd expect a flux capacitor or two to be involved. Why else do you think they brought the Professor in? We're talking 88 mph, gigawatts of power and flux capacitors...
Virtue: multiple characters.
CoH/V: Woot! Maybe Fun is to be had once again.
Ack! RUN! Regen is glowing mean & green!
If it reduces you, it's a nerf.
If it buffs the mobs, it's challenge.
They are not the same.
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Because then you might make uninformed decisions!
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In a way.....yes. The less you know numbers wise, the more you are likely to just pick powers that go for flavor, which is what this game was attemping to appeal to. I know personal friends that hate getting lots of numbers thrown at them, as they feel it is sometimes just a major distraction from fun at times. Whether they pulled it off or not is up to you to decide.
(I am neither defending nor condenming the Devs, just giving a proposal of a likely point of view)
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What you're describing is fine from a design standpoint (not one I agree with, but it's legitimate design if done deliberately), but it's based entirely on obfuscation and forcing people to make 'uninformed decisions'. It's annoying because of how Statesman keeps saying how he doesn't want players to make these 'uninformed decisions' yet the game is littered with design decisions that force players to do just that.
Gothika (Grav/Kin) Marionette (Ill/Rad) Terra Firma (Earth/Storm) Alana Dale (Arch/Nrg)
Iceblink (Ice/Dark) Fantasia (Mind/Fire) Shadow Minx (Claws/Nin)
--Virtue
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Castle, what are the current unique enhancers if you don't mind us asking?
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Can't say yet! I can say that the list is in flux and may change during testing.
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changing.....???
in flux...???
/e thowing planning papers across the room
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Don't be. I'd expect a flux capacitor or two to be involved. Why else do you think they brought the Professor in? We're talking 88 mph, gigawatts of power and flux capacitors...
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You fool! You'll kill us all! It's JIGGAWATTS, not gigawatts!
Agua Man lvl 48 Water/Electric Blaster
"To die hating NCSoft for shutting down City of Heroes, that was Freedom."
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Set Bonuses are always active. The special powers from IO Enhancements which grant them are not.
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What about in passive powers? If I slot +20% regeneration in Fast Healing do I get that bonus all the time?
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Passive powers are always on, therefore any enhancements of this type would always give their bonus.
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If I slot +20% regeneration in Dull Pain do I get that bonus only when I click Dull Pain?
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Right. A Set Bonus which gave +Regeneration would *always* be active in Dull Pain, while an Enhancement which grants +Regeneration would only work for a set period of time after Dull Pain was activated.
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Forgive me if this has been asked, but to get the Set Bonus, does one have to have the whole set slotted into ONE power, or can they be scattered throughout your powersets?
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Forgive me if this has been asked, but to get the Set Bonus, does one have to have the whole set slotted into ONE power, or can they be scattered throughout your powersets?
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They need to be in one particular power. You can slot the same set several times across different powers to get the set bonuses more than once (though only up to 5 of each specific bonus will count).
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Castle, what are the current unique enhancers if you don't mind us asking?
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Can't say yet! I can say that the list is in flux and may change during testing.
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changing.....???
in flux...???
/e thowing planning papers across the room
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Don't be. I'd expect a flux capacitor or two to be involved. Why else do you think they brought the Professor in? We're talking 88 mph, gigawatts of power and flux capacitors...
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You fool! You'll kill us all! It's JIGGAWATTS, not gigawatts!
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Nit pick: "giga" is pronounced "jigga"
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One thing I've said for quite a while now is that while its nice and all to be the Numbers Maven, the players of the game would be much better served if there was no need for a Numbers Maven. So much of the game's mechanics are not just non-transparent, but non-intuitive or difficult to explain, that it creates opportunities for people who know the numbers to get more out of the system than people who don't. Not just min-maxers, which is always true to an extent, but even concept builders, who have a tremendous advantage in executing concept builds when they know what everything does and how well, over someone shooting in the dark.
The devs need to understand that when Iakona and I lose, everyone else wins.
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I agree 133.33% (reduced by ED to 100%).