Provide travel powers earlier

Peacbringers can get Bright Nova at level 6 as well. Both versions (Dark, Bright) are at the flight speed cap. At level 10, Peacebringers get the equal to hover.

Warshades get Black Dwarf and both the dwarfs can also combat jump.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

All travel powers are unlocked at level 6 once you've kept your account active for 60 months.

Yeah, that doesn't really help with the "attracting new players" aspect.

The difference between Boxing and Jumpkick is that Combat Jumping is amazing and Kick is godawful. If Jumpkick were the only path into Super Jump, then I'd begrudgingly accept it as a necesarry evil like Brawl is. But it's not, and there's really no good reason to take Jumpkick over Combat Jumping.

Or you can, you know, take both. I'm not sure what your interpretation of "godawful" is, but it's a quick, weak attack not unlike pretty much every quick, weak attack in every melee set.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Continued content releases like "Going Rogue" will attract new players.

For a Scrapper, Boxing does a base damage of 47.5 with a cast of 1.07. Most of those quick, weak attacks scrappers get do more damage and animate in less time. Even Dual Blade's first attack with about the same cast time, does 10 more base damage, and Dual Blades has weak individual attacks that are overcome in combos. It's just weaker DPS than any of the first two attacks in any melee set. It's just all in all an awful attack. And it's awful on any toon: On a blaster, it does worse DPS than Blaster Attacks. RANGED attacks. It is a melee attack that does less DPS than most ranged attacks on the same toons.

First of all, DPS isn't what you want to look at. It's DPA. DPS is only useful if you find you always use your attacks as soon as they recharge, which, if you have an attack chain, is not the case. Recharge isn't the limiting factor, animation time is. As such, let's review.

So far as I can tell, Jump Kick does 62.56 points of damage and has a 1.5 second animation, which gives you a DPA of 41.706. Nimble Slash, since you mentioned it, does 52.56 and has an animation time of 1.03 seconds, which gives it a DPA of 51.029. Obviously, that's more, meaning Nimble Slash is better, but that's kind of how pool attacks are balanced. Let's look at something like Kick in the same light. It does 52.55 damage with a cast time of 1.83, which gives it a DPA of 28.716, which is actually significantly less. Even Boxing, which is generally faster at 1.07 seconds to to 47.55 damage, still gives you a DPA of 44.439, which is more, but more or less as much as Jump Kick.

That's pool power attacks for you. Unless you want to run an argument as to how pool power attacks as a whole suck and need to be taken out of the game or fixed, your argument against Jump Kick has no merit.

So far as my assertion that DPS doesn't matter and DPA does, let me know if you care and I'll explain with examples. Suffice it to say that subtracting a high DPA, low DPS attack for a hight DPS, low DPA attack lowers your damage output over time, and that's provable.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Isn't there the qualifier that you have to have a sufficient number of attacks to create an attack chain for that to be true?

Example, if you only have one-three attacks then DPS is or at least could be better, but if you have 8-10 attacks and you have to choose which 4-5 goes into your standard attack chain then DPA is better.

No. For plenty of reasons but the one I will lean on remains the fact that it's a kick in the junk for those that have been playing for 60+ months since they had to wait to get that as a vet reward I'm not even one of those players and have over 4 years before I can be and I know if I wait that long and then it gets changed I'ma be all kinds of pissed off.

It's not a bad idea... but it's beyond unnecessary. I would understand moving it back to say lvl 10 or so... but even then like I stated in a previous post getting to lvl 14 takes 3 hours 4 tops of solid teaming. That's nothing.

The simple explanation is that DPS metrics are only ever useful for attacks that you tend to cycle as soon as they recharge the majority of the time. From experience, this doesn't need a full attack chain to be true, as some attacks just tend to stagnate while you reposition, pick targets and wait for something more useful or more efficient to recharge. In general, you are correct, however - without a full attack chain, "per second" metrics like DPS and EPS are what counts.

However, it's a question of power uptime, if we want to go down into specifics. Let's take something like Archery, just as a random pull. Snap Shot has a cast time of 1 second and a recharge time of 2 seconds, which gives it a cycle of three seconds. It's up one second out of three, which gives it an uptime of around 33%. Aimed Shot has a cast time of 1.67 seconds, a recharge time of 6 seconds, which gives it a cycle of 7.67, and an uptime of around 22%. Just between these two powers, you have over half of your total time devoted to animating attacks, and you need a little under 82% of recharge in both powers (or global recharge) to fill your whole attack chain with just them. The smaller an attack, the higher its uptime because its recharge is faster in comparison to its cast. A large attack can recharge ten times slower than a fast attack (2 seconds vs. 20 seconds), but its cast time will never be ten times as much (ten times 1.67 is 17 seconds of animation. OUCH!)

Let me make up an example because I'm not familiar with attacks in the game enough to recall good examples offhand. Let's say you have ten attacks, each of which animates in 1 second, recharges in 9 seconds and deals 10 damage. That would give each attack a cycle of 10 seconds, a DPS of 1, a coverage of 10% (meaning you need 10 of them to form a full attack chain) and a DPA of 10 (10 damage per 1 second of activation). All of these attacks together give you a 10-second-long attack chain that loops at the end and deals 100 points of damage, 10 per attack, over its course.

Now suppose you have an attack that does 16 damage, animates in 2 seconds and recharges in 3. This would give the attack a cycle of five seconds, an uptime of 40% percent (which means it will replace four of the other attacks), a DPS of 5 (so five times more) and a DPA of 5 (so half of the others). Naturally, one would expect that adding a higher DPS attack to the attack chain would result in more DPS for that chain. But that's not true.

Let's experiment. Let's remove the first, second, sixth and seventh of the old 1 DPS attacks and insert the 3 DPS attack twice in the two 2-second blocks that opened up. Now in the 10 seconds, you do 6 attacks that deal 10 damage and two attacks that deal 15 damage, which gives you 6*10 + 2*15 = 90 damage over the 10 second period. 90 is less than the 100 damage we got over the 10 second period just using the lower DPS attacks, because their DPA was higher.

In practical terms, what we did was insert a crappy attack just because it recharged faster, causing us to drop out better attacks just because they recharged slower. The trick here is not to find the attacks with the best damage-to-recharge ratio, but rather to fill up our time with the attacks that do the most damage while they are active. DPA, therefore, is what counts in any attack chain that has any sort of overlap. DPS, by comparison, drops significantly as a power is left recharged by unused, as its cycle bloats and DPS falls like a rock.

Practically speaking, the smallest attacks have the best DPS in the game. That's how they are balanced. However, when your power has a cycle of three seconds, delaying just a few seconds more has the potential to HALVE its practical DPS. Even when you don't have a full attack chain, turning around to target another enemy and moving into range to attack him can cost you an extra couple of seconds if you're not foaming-at-the-mouth fast. And that's not unreasonable, as playing too fast can wear on people. But just that pause is enough to eat into your DPS in a not insignificant way.

"Per second" metrics like DPS are idealised estimate predictions, which will only hold true if you follow the ideal conditions they are estimated under. That's both not practical and not feasible, so "per second" metrics dilate badly in actual practice. "Per activation" metrics like DPA are static factological predictions, in that they depend not on variables under the player's control but on static parameters as defined by the game, or on variables that are predictable and affectable equally. You can alter recharge and you can end up waiting on it, but you cannot alter power animation times, and even though you can alter damage, you can do so in predictable, replicable ways. Per activation metrics do not dilate, and in this respect they are reliable. They aren't conclusive enough to perfectly calculate an attack chain, as gaps here and there will always occur, but there's nothing you can do to screw up or improve a power's DPA based on how and when you use it. You can very much destroy your DPS if you play slow, sloppy or get hit with a -recharge effect.

Basically, DPS is a good general estimate, but not something to decide on, as it's too easy to ruin. DPA is a static estimate that you can count on. You can't always count on the DPS of an attack chain comprised of your highest DPA powers, but again, that's the failing of a "per second" metric.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wow I've been here a little over 3 years now and I've never really thought about it, holy crap we have a lot of ways to get travel powers.

Is that all? We need more way to travel around the city!

MOAR I TELLZ YA!!!

I find the support of CoHs travel powers at a later level, odd. Having a travel power at an early level would be a fantastic QoL change. (I'm with Hume, I could careless if vets have entitlement issues.)

I like the idea and agree with Bhume and Jophiel completely.

Great thread.

P.s. We need alternative travel styles as well and I'd love to see unique dances for female and males across every ATT.

/signed

They could open up normal travel powers early for everyone and give vets the option to pick a free slotable travel power at creation.

This would certainly make everyone happy I'm sure... I just know if I were a vet I'd be angry but beyond that I still don't understand why it's even an issue... you can have a travel power within 4 hours of starting a new toon, much less than that if you start throwing in temp powers.

The vets could sit on their thumbs and twiddle the day away for all I care. I just think travel powers at an earlier level is a fantastic idea. d;D

Everyone can already get a travel power at an earlier level. No one is stopping us from getting them. The problem is that some people don't want to make the effort to get them. They want freebies.

1. Sell the inspirations you get from doing the tutorial and buy a jetpack from the vendor. This can be done at level 1.

2. Buy the mini-booster from the NCSoft online store for $4.99 and all your characters on your account will have a jetpack for 30 days.

3. Pay for your account using the $20. time card and the mini-booster jetpack is included as a part of the cards activation code.

4. Play the game for 45 minutes, and get a jetpack as your mission reward for completing thr safeguard bank mission in Kings Row or Mayhem Mission in Port Oakes.

5. Trade in 10 candy canes and 10,000 inf to the Candy Keeper when the Chalet is open and get a Jingle Jet.


Anyone that claims they can't fly before level 14 is making absolutely no effort to get that power.

*facepalm* I'm too lazy to explain. Someone else, please.

That pretty much sums up the argument people have when they make this suggestion.