Numina Bug Fixed

That loophole/bug has been around a long time, and may cause a few folks to adjust their builds.

I'm assuming Health would be one.

That's the main, popular one currently. It's not somewhere most people would slot one of the relevant IOs, but you could also achieve this in a power like Drain Psyche.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion at all. This wasn't really widely exploited until quite recently, when Physical Perfection was introduced. I think that's why it's been left alone until now.

You could easily make use of this with Regen Tissues in powers like Health, but it was really Phys. Perfection that made the practice what I'd consider fairly common knowledge.

Also, the devs themselves may not have picked up on this until it started popping up on the forums more, which again started with the introduction Phys. Perfection.

Finally, duration something goes before being changed really isn't clearly indicative of anything. Look at Energy Melee.

The Miracle: +Recovery and the Regenerative Tissue: +Regeneration procs still have their effects amplified by appropriate enhancements slotted into the same power. I'd expect them to be similarly changed Soon(tm).

They were informed about it just over 2 years ago. I'm sure they get a lot of reports though, and they have to prioritize which ones to act on (sometimes I get the feeling that they down-prioritize my PMs somewhere around "Hi").


Anyway, I agree with you. I wouldn't conclude that this fix is because of any upcoming game additions. The situation definitely became much more known after the addition of Physical Perfection, and that may have been the extra nudge that was required to make the devs do something about it.

There are relatively few powers (PP is one of them) that accept both Heal sets and Endurance Modification enhancements, so it's relatively rare that you can boost the Recovery given by the Numina (and the Miracle) proc.

However, any power that accepts Heal IO sets also accepts Heal enhancements, so the Regeneration bonus given by both the Numina and Regenerative Tissue procs could (and still can in the case of Regenerative Tissue) always be boosted in any power you can slot them in (i.e. all powers that take Heal IO sets).

Well, I agree with the other posters that this doesn't necessarily herald system-wide change, but it would be interesting if the HO issues were addressed.

As far as I am aware, Shields getting to the DDR cap with HOs is the "hot" use right now of the way HOs currently affect more aspects than their description indicates.

While I don't wish nerfs on anyone ( I have numerous shield characters myself), it seems to me that some slight adjustment to Shields is in order when the answer to every question is "Shields is clearly superior," as has been the case lately. A (theoretical) HO change would relegate Shields to the basic level of DDR (defense debuff resistance) which the powerset can reach without HO use -- that's already more DDR than anyone but SR, isn't it? Something like 67%, compared to 50% for Invulnerability and 95% for Super Reflexes. That would still leave Shields quite strong -- my Inv Tanker does fine against defense debuffs with his measly 50% DDR -- but at least give SR some kind of area where it's not matched or outclassed by Shields.

Frankly such a change wouldn't even knock Shields out of the top spot for melee defensive powersets anyway.

I really don't have anything against Shields per se, I just dislike it when a new powerset is so souped-up it completely outclasses all previous powersets. Ideally, it should take its place as their peer in functionality, and the shininess of being new would still make it popular.

Diablo 2 did this (made a new "powerset," or in its case, class, clearly superior) somewhat notoriously when they introduced changes adding a lot of elemental resistances and immunities to endgame monsters, and applying a whopping penalty to the resistances of all characters in high-level areas...and then added two new classes with superior ranges of elemental damage types (so they'd be likelier to "get around" a given foe's elemental immunity) AND skills that boosted their own elemental resistances. The Assassin and Druid were much more potent than many of the older classes in the new end-game environment.

The easy fix here is to simply make the Defense Debuff Resistance unaffected by enhancements (this is already the case for the majority of powers that give DDR). If you like, you could increase the base DDR given by these powers to offset the change a little.

That is of course assuming that you want to prevent the DDR from being enhanceable. It's possible that it's a desired effect.


Shield is however also subject to something related that I have a hard time believing is a desired effect.

The Recharge debuff resistance given by Grant Cover is also affected by buffs.
This has the interesting side-effect that any Recharge debuffs placed on the user will actually reduce their Recharge debuff resistance.


Grant Cover gives a 30% Recharge (debuff) resistance.
However, since this resistance is affected by Strength modifiers, both from enhancements and from outside sources, we get the following behavior:


1) The Recharge resistance is increased by Recharge buffs (from */Rech enhancements slotted into the power, or from buffs such as Hasten or Recharge set bonuses)

2) The Recharge resistance is *decreased* by the very Recharge *de*buffs it's intended to resist.
This leads to a recursive decrease in Recharge resistance as the effective Recharge debuffs increases for every server tick (as the resistance goes down).

Here be math. The specifics aren't really all that important (the general behavior is), so if you'd like you can probably skim the next part.

Example:
A 50% Recharge debuff (D).

After one tick, the effective debuff (E) is 50%*(1-30%) = 35%
This reduces the Recharge resistance, and after two ticks the debuff is 50%*(1-30%*(1-35%)) = 40.25%
After three ticks the debuff is 50%*(1-30%*(1-40.25%)) = 41.04%
After four ticks the debuff is 50%*(1-30%*(1-41.04%)) = 41.16%
After five ticks the debuff is 50%*(1-30%*(1-41.16%)) = 41.17%
After six ticks the debuff is 50%*(1-30%*(1-41.17%)) = 41.18%

This is to where the resistance will converge.

We can calculate the effective debuff (E) for a given applied debuff (D) by:
E=0.7D/(1-0.3D)

(much like how Accuracy buffs stack recursively in Combat Training: Offensive, and used to in beta i13 Focused Accuracy)

For D = 50% this gives us E = 41.18% (as mentioned above), which is an effective 1-41.18/50 = 17.6% Recharge resistance (down from the base 30%).

The stronger the Recharge debuffs on you are, the lower your effective Recharge resistance will be (i.e. the more you need it, the less it'll give you).

Note that the formula is only valid up to an applied Recharge debuff of 81.08% (at which point you'll reach the 0.25 StrMin for Recharge). This also means that at an applied Recharge debuff stronger than 81.08%, you'll get no benefit from the Recharge debuff in Grant Cover.
(at a 81.08% debuff, the effective Recharge resistance is 7.5%)

If you want to know the Effective debuff (E) from an applied Debuff (D) when you also have a Recharge *buff* (R),
E = D*(.7-.3*R)/(1-.3D)

(with Hasten, a 50% Recharge debuff is reduced to a 50%*(.7-.3*70%)/(1-.3*50%) = 28.82% debuff, for an effective resistance of 1-28.82/50 = 42.35%)

bottom line:
The Recharge resistance given by Grant Cover increases with Recharge buffs or slotting, and decreases when you're affected by the very Recharge debuffs it's intended to protect against.

To me, this seems strange.
It's a potentially interesting mechanic, but I don't think it was intended to behave this way.

Yeah, but there have been a few things I know we told them about that they still didn't "know" about until they read what people were doing here on the forums, or saw it in game.

Yeah, that's my guess too. It was somewhere on their priority list, and an increase in people taking advantage of it got them to bump it up. After all, I'm thinking this was super easy to fix. They just needed to flag the boosts as unenhanceable and unaffected by buffs.

I think that sometimes there's a breakdown in communications, sometimes between players and devs, sometimes between players and QA, and sometimes between QA and devs. This is unfortunate, because often you could avoid a lot of grief by changing something right away (when fewer people are affected by it) instead of waiting until it becomes relatively common (not infrequently because people discover that they can take advantage of it, and flock to it because "it's good" and "it's been this way for such a long time that it's probably not going to change").



This current situation is a fairly good example of that.
The behavior was noticed, /bugged, and PMd within days of the Real Numbers system being introduced. At the time people were already benefiting from it (and had since the IOs were introduced), but they generally didn't know about it, and if a change had been made they probably wouldn't even have noticed. Moreover, since people weren't aware, they weren't actively building towards it, and only got the bonuses by accident.

Fast-forward two years, and the situation is entirely different. The behavior is fairly well known among people who are interested in IO mechanics, and people are knowingly taking advantage of it in their builds. There was probably an upsurge of this when Physical Perfection was introduced, and I'm pretty sure that it's been an important factor in how some players have planned their builds.


If the change had been made back then, most players probably wouldn't have noticed. The ones that did would probably have been surprised that they ever had the bonus, and would probably for the most part be understanding (though I'm sure there would have been exceptions).

Now, it's changing something that people have planned builds around, and lots of players are knowingly taking advantage of it.


Bugs should of course be fixed even (maybe particularly) if people benefit from them (and seek them out for this reason), and people should have definitely seen this change coming (so I'm not really feeling sorry for them).
However, there *will* be people who are upset about this (to varying degrees of course), and it will at least inconvenience the players who'll change their builds because of this (again, not a reason to not fix the issue).

This could have been avoided if four flags (two for the Numina, one each for the Miracle and the Regenerative Tissue) had been changed two years ago.

My impression is that Shields isn't the powerhouse you describe, for most characters. It's certainly possible to turn Shields into a beast, but I would bet real money that if we had access to the devs' data mining tools we'd see that it's not done much.

It's true that the HO trick is known among the folks who min/max builds on the forums, but only a minority of players ever read the forums to begin with. A still smaller percentage actually follows through on optimized builds.

I just don't see shields characters outperforming, as a rule. But maybe I'm just hanging around with the wrong crowd.

Fascinating. That definitely sounds like a bug (or at least unintended behavior).

Loose lips sink ships.

If only we could block the Devs forum access...

I avoided getting caught by this by probably about two weeks. I had a build planned with PP slotted with Numi and Miracle uniques, and had just gotten the power, and was trying to figure out when to respec to move the IOs (which I already had slotted elsewhere) into PP. Had I already respecced into that build and then immediately lost a reason to have done so, I think I'd have been fairly annoyed.

Of course, the change also saved me having angst wondering what I'd do to deal with exemplaring below level 39 and thus losing the benfit of both uniques.

(I'll eventually lose the extra benefit of slotting Regen Tissue uniques into Heal-slotted Health on a whole bunch of characters, but I'm not sure I'll really notice.)

I and probably many experienced people on the Scrapper forum would disagree that the answer to every question is "Shields is clearly superior". Shield Defense is flavor of the month and a very strong set when IOd to the teeth. But it isn't blowing the curve. Outside of single-taret DPS contests (pylon soloing), people are doing just as impressive things with other powersets.

Fortunately, Shield Defense also won't be gimped if the probably very small portion of the player base leveraging massive recharge and Hamios to get 95% defense debuff resistance have to settle for merely high defense debuff resistance. I'm not sure there's enough talk to say we have a consensus, but probably many would agree that 95% DDR in Shield Defense is too much considering everything else it can do.

If you do want to nerf the DDR of Shield Defense, I agree with Stargazer - just make the DDR in Active Defense unenhanceable, as appears to have been intended by the devs. Don't make strange changes to Hamios. What sense does that make?

As for other "misuses" of Hamios, I don't think changes are warranted. Hamios have long since lost the enhancement wars to IOs. They only have a few niche applications now, and many or most of those niche applications were probably never intended by the devs. So? It's not even close to game breaking. It's been that way forever. Devs, let it slide.

Back on the original topic, I'm not happy. Granted, I don't read dev stuff, but I've had no reason to suspect that the Numina (and related IOs), we not functioning as intended. Apparently it should have been obviously a bug to me? Well, it wasn't. It was unusual, but everything in that category seemed to behave that way, and it wasn't nonsensical behavior. It's also been that way for years. I very intentionally build taking advantage of that effect. The endurance use on my hyper-expensive Katana/Dark is carefully tuned, and still just under what it should be. I still have to slow down slightly occasionally in long fights. I don't have the Numina in Physical Perfection (it's in a full set in Health), but I do have the Miracle. I assume that's next. And although we're only talking about a difference of 0.17 EPS, that spells doom for Scrapper challenge play, so it'd be time for an overhaul or retirement. I HATE overhauls. I also hate retiring a character after only having them up and running at full strength for a single issue. No, I'm not quitting over this. I realize that it's a basically trivial change that just happens to impact me significantly. But it definitely goes in the "I'm getting tired of CoH; maybe it's time to move on" column of my life.

That's kind of a bummer. It won't change my WP builds, i'd slot it in health anyways.

I haven't been planning to slot any Miracles/Numinas into Physical Perfection myself, partly because of the RSK issue (having them in PP means not having them in Health), and partly because the characters I have that can get PP don't really need any extra Recovery (even more-so if I get PP on them). Had my /Dark Brute been able to get PP on the other hand...

I do however have quite a few characters that benefit from "slotted Regeneration" from the Numina and Regenerative Tissue procs (usually in Health). I'm not likely to change their builds over this change though, since I'd generally slot the same way even without the Regen being amplified (and some of them were already slotting this way before I even knew about this behavior).

I think I'd be able to notice it (at least when actively looking for it) on at least some of them (0.95*(20%+25%) = 42.75%, slightly more than unslotted Health) since the characters that slot this way tend to be the ones without any self-Heals, but I'm not expecting it to be too much of an issue.

I feel the same way.

Nerfing something thats really not breaking anything in game, or really doing much of anything exept improving play for a character who is end game slotted seems like a waste of dev resource and only serves to annoy the playerbase.

Annoying a already small playerbase never seems like a good business model for a game that is competing with many other time sinks for players time- people tend to move on due to "the straw that broke the camels back" effect.

So the short version is devs: fix the stuff we ask you to fix. Dont go on crusades against HOs, or fix "bugs" that really arent hurting anyone, and in fact make many players game time more fun. Fix the stuff that really needs fixing, and spend your development time wisely.

I am not a I quit!!11!! type either, but the additive effect of too many changes (read: nerfs) is a real turnoff to me putting what limited time I do have into playing this game instead of something else.

The respec system is awful, and when I am forced to respec each issue/patch it takes away from me enjoying actual gameplay, and worse yet, I know that I will just have a few months to use the newly respecced build before something else is changed and I have to do it all over again...

Each patch is like a scheduled root canal to me. Not something I look forward to.

Ok my rant may be irrelevant after looking at my stats between live and dev

Ok what i think they did not make clear on the bug fix this does not look to effect the recovery rate you get from Numia. I am still receiving the same end buff from it being slotted in health on live and test. Does anyone have it slotted in Physical perfection to test ? What they may have done is that PP was getting an additional +recovery buff % from numia you have your +end buff that turns around and also enhances the endurance rate in PP(this is a guess because their post is not clear and from what i see on my toon from live to dev)