Super Strength: Jab

It means "The stun is very minor and has a tiny chance to activate, so stack it up with other stuns." Which is kinda funny since aside from Hand Clap, there are no other Stuns in SS.

That's what I mean.

Perhaps it was copied and pasted from a similar attack in another powerset? Possibly Energy Melee. Also, a lot of the original powersets used almost the same flavor/descriptive text with just a few words altered for similar attacks.

Then there's the fact that some powers had different effects back during CoH beta and not all the text was updated when the powers changed. There are still some player and NPC quick power descriptions that refer to effects that the powers haven't had since before CoH went live. Minor descriptive errors, especially ones that aren't technically incorrect, just slightly misleading, are obviously even lower on the list of things to fix.

While it would be nice to make sure all power descriptions are correct and relevant, it would be a Herculean task to actually do so. Someone would have to through all the power descriptions and not only confirm that what it says is actually what it does, they'd also have to be familiar enough with the set/critter each power is associated with to also check that any references to the rest of each set in the text is relevant. Not the sort of editing job i'd want to wade through unless it paid rather well.

Not to mention updating the damage scale of all of the powers. I've seen "Minor" outdamage "Moderate" in many cases, even from powers in the same power set! Of course, I no longer pay attention to this since we have hard numbers to look at now.

I wouldn't mind seeing the power descriptions/text completely redone to get rid of the "Very Fast/Fast/Moderate/Long/Very Long" descriptors. These terms really don't tell the player anything useful. Showing a power recharges in 10 seconds is more informative than a player scratching their head trying to figure out how long "Fast" is.

I agree, and the damage descriptors are vague as well. For instance, both a blaster's tier 9 attack and a defender's will be listed as "extreme" damage, but there's no question about which is more extreme than the other.

However, it is true that the tier 9 is the most "extreme" attack in the set.

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge - Don't get eliminated!

The problem is, we only get the new numbers if we actively look for them. The text descriptions are the first thing we see. That would be fine if they were at least usually correct and informative. In actual practice, they are quite often neither, straying far too often into the actively misleading.

Ideally, either the text descriptions would be systematized into something that actually meant something, or they would be replaced by actual numbers. Either works, I'd prefer the second, but either works. In practice, though, I think the devs have enough on their plates that even if they consider this a problem, they're still gonna give it a pretty low priority.

Well, Jack was apparently of the opinion that the less players knew how powers actually worked the more fun and balanced it would make the game, at least partially by preventing math fanatics and powergamers from having an advantage over casual players. Of course what actually happened was that the powergamers and math fanatics ended up being pretty much the only people who understood how powers worked and how to best use them. In fact, it was through the efforts and analysis of players like Arcanaville that the early Dev team became aware of a number of flaws, imbalances and unintended consequences in CoH's powers system. (Fun through obfuscation, much like security through obscurity, doesn't work so well in practice.) It would seem that the original powers code and formulas weren't well documented. Most of this was fixed in the first couple of years, but some of the things that came to light during this time were pretty amusing. Much of the quirkiness was in the area of how defense and tohit functioned in actual play as compared to how they were intended to work.

At one point defense worked by adding together all applicable types when determining the target number an attack had to beat. So an attack tagged as being Energy, Smashing and Ranged would be defended against by adding all the defense types together that the target possessed. (For example, Energy Blasters hated going against Sky Raiders with their Force Field Generators.) This was eventually changed by making it so that only the highest defense value was used when defending against an attack. And then for a little while teaming with a Force Field Defender was almost pointless for an SR Scrapper because SR was all positional defenses and Force Field only granted typed defense. Of course SR was already hit hard by mobs getting tohit bonuses instead of accuracy bonuses for rank and level increases. And so on and so on.

In my opinion the current state of the game's mechanics and balance is worlds better than it was at launch, and the Dev team now has a pretty solid handle on how everything works. There are still some things that are very hard to alter because they're so deeply embedded in the game's code and basic design, but the team has done an amazing job finding workarounds to many of them, and/or finding the resources to revise the systems.

...

It's my impression that CO continued that early philosophy of balance by obfuscation in a way by giving numbers for some aspects of the powers (because it was finally accepted by the Cryptic Devs that players won't tolerate any less in current MMO's), but making the actual algorithms that determine power effects and interactions so complicated that even the sort of statistical analysis done by players in the early days of CoH will not easily pin down power numbers and rules. In some ways it appears to have bitten them in the *** even worse than the original approach of not giving the numbers in that it's made balancing and adjusting powers and interactions between powers even harder.