Defense is usually 2x Resistance, right?

You must carry a lot of yellows. Five of them would give you +37.5% which would ALMOST recover you from one grenade. You'd need more if you were fighting +1s or +2s.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

See, I have yellows, too. Typically, fighting these guys, I run out. That's even on a Stalker, who can pick off one Ghost early. The biggest problem is that if you do the side missions, you get big ambushes of these guys who are naturally preemptively aggroed on you, so there's no option for sneaking up on them and picking off the obnoxious ones.

That's a tricky question. Let me ask a counter-question: we assume that players get stronger when in teams due to team buffs and other synergies. Would it be fair if the critters got stronger in teams as well?

The problem is often that its difficult to get the AI to produce good team work for critters. So critter teams often find themselves saturated out by player teams. To counter-balance that, the devs often give critters that are supposed to be "dangerous" foe debuffs and other foe affecting powers that are extremely powerful to counteract player synergistic buffs.

The -40% defense debuff that PPs have isn't likely meant to be similar to a -80% resistance debuff that other critters might have. Its more likely meant to be comparable to the counter for one FF defender's team buffs. Its scaled relative to what players can counter-produce, not relative to other critter debuffs.

This is what makes it so tricky to balance a game that doesn't have proportional or other scale-invariant mathematics. Powers can mean different things in different contexts and the balance requirements can be very difficult (or impossible) to meet simultaneously. Its very difficult to make critters that are a challenge for a team that aren't extremely difficult for (most) solo players. The game has a lot of instances where its clear the devs made judgement-call compromises to satisfy these requirements.

A better way technically would be to expand the requires clauses for powers to include the ability to suppress a power based on player team calculations.

So you could make a massive -DEF debuff "Require PlayerTeamCount > 3" or "Require PlayerTeamDefenderCount > 1" or something like that. If the critter doesn't face a team with the right requirements, they lose that power. This way the spawn system doesn't have to deal with lots of complex decisions and the powers designers don't have to make many versions of the same critter. They can just add an arsenal of powers to the critter, and turn on the ones appropriate for to the opposing team.

However, this would need some way to prevent exploitation via the standard mission entry spawn-manipulation strategies (this is also why you don't want to spawn critters based on team composition either: its exploitable). The best way to do that might be to push these requires calculations into the AI of the critter and evaluate them in (near) real time, so they cannot be gamed. That way even if you spawn the entire mission with a solo player and then add in the rest of the team, the act of doing so would immediately "enable" the suppressed powers.

My fortunata has no problem with them, don't know what to tell you.

It knocked my level 27 Widows Melee Def into the negatives. My ranged AOE (oh, look, all PPD have *guns*) is usually closer to -35%.

That's actually getting pretty dang close to the realm of auto-hitting.

PPD are insanely over tough for when you run into them.

My fortunata is capable of malefactoring, sheesh

Ah, I didn't realize we were talking about true level. In that case most of my characters did find them tough the first time through. But even so I like having the challenge there. I try to mez/kill them very quickly.

/em brain falls out

Most "hard" enemies I don't find hard or challenging. Just annoying. It's not exactly "challenging" to have to put up with -40% ToHit or -50% max endurance or floored move speed or enemies that ignore stealth. Most of that just makes things take way longer and it becomes frustrating. I don't think something is "challenging" if there's basically no way to cope with it. And things like floored speed, I don't see how that could ever be considered anything but annoying. What's challenging about walking slow? Unless you're trying to escape and die as a result. But again, there's no way to cope with it, so it's not a challenge so much as a situation you ultimately just deal with.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

On the one hand, I don't run into these guys very often. On the other, I did state that I kill them first. If I don't have enough yellows to at least get me hitting a third of the time or so (which doesn't take much) then I'll bolt until the debuff drops.

It's not rocket surgery.

My problem is not that its JUST a -40% to hit and def debuff but that it lasts for a minute - in a timed mission (15 mins) that means if I get unlucky and don't kill the ghost fast enough or if I don't have a character that can kill a ghost before he drops the flash grenade on me I have to stand around for a minute waiting for the debuff to go away. If they lasted a reasonable amount of time (what, 20 seconds maybe?) I could live with them - I still wouldn't like them but at least I would regard them as a challenge to be dealt with rather than something that makes me want to give up on mayhem missions because I can't stand sitting round waiting for effects to fade.

You know - I never really bought into the usual "the dev's hate villain's" tinfoil hat stuff but lately mayhem missions have been making me wonder about that. Between the PPD ghosts and equalizers, the constant ambushes by large groups of longbow and the fact that since i16 the ambushes have been even LARGER than normal I am starting to wonder.

Case in point - I was doing a steel canyon bank job on my mid teens ice/thorn dominator, taking my time moving towards the bank as usual so I could watch for ambushes and not get to many. I go a slightly different route than usual (back way to the bank instead of the main street where the smash and grab key placeholder usually sits) and see none of the usual longbow ambush chatter. I get into the bank, see the usual ambush message and think things are going well. Then I get hit by 6 longbow minions and 2 LT's. I am running this mayhem solo with my settings on base level (+0 x0) with everything turned off (no bosses, no av's, etc) - why am I getting triple sized ambushes?

Mind you - I am seeing larger ambushes hero side as well. I was starting out a low level blaster (7 or 8) and took one of the hunt skull missions from a kings row contact and while I was hunting skulls I was hit by the mid hunt ambush: 1 LT, 6 minions. Fortunately I could run away without it being a problem - but this is insane for a solo low level character.

To get back on topic - I think the debuff values that PPD and Longbow do are insane and way over the top but as I said, I could cope with that if the duration was just for 1 fight instead of 2-3.

Yeah. That's where I'm at with them. It's not like every character has a guaranteed kill method against them, or that there's always just one in a spawn - especially the ambushes. If their debuff was not both so extreme and so long lasting, that wouldn't be as much of an issue.

What usually happens to me is that if I don't kill the Ghost immediately, then his debuff means I can't kill him, and if that happens, he gets to stand around and refresh the debuff on me, because he can recast it before it expires.

I don't think the devs hate villains. I think the orignal CoV dev team seriously believed one of (or both of) two things. (1) That villains were perhaps more powerful than heroes, possibly because the devs made all of them all (conditionally) pretty good at damage dealing. (2) That heroes had it easy, and since they were making a new, separate game with new content, they were going to address that.

I am left with a nagging feeling there's a (3) here. It feels a bit as if, just maybe, possibly unconciously, some of the arcs are written with the idea that the good guys are supposed to be really powerful, and so if you're a bad guy, you've got to face really powerful foes to prevail. Having to face an AV signature Hero at the end of so many arcs really drives this feeling home for me. The original uproar over how common that was in CoV and how much earlier it starts compared to CoH seemed to have a lot to do with the original ability to downgrade AVs to EBs when solo.

The problem with all of these, but (2) in particular, is that many players of CoV are also players of CoH, and they got to compare and contrast the two games. If they liked where CoH's overall difficulty was at, then they were prone to feel that CoV's difficulty was punitive.

I'm aware of that. In hindsight, I should have used sarcasm tags.

Absolutely. My online sarcasm meter let out its magic smoke years ago.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

pbtbtbtbt

The real question is why do people insist on taking those spawns on when they're playing characters poorly suited for it?

There's been several complaints of "but what if I'm on a character that can't take out the ghost fast enough?" Don't take them on. Get the zone badge, save the bank and get the hell out of there. Why subject yourself to more annoyance than you have to?

Masochism?

Says the guy giving ATI "one more chance."

I admit. I LOLed.