Hail of Bullets Change?

Yo Joe!

Are those posted officially somewhere? If not, they need to be. I PM'd Ocho about that lack (as with the merits for explore accolades). Not sure if that's how Synapse found this or not, but I do hope that this gets posted officially somewhere. The devs have said they don't want to sneak things in and want to be told when they don't have stuff in the notes, so I'm doing my part!

Ah, interesting.

How so? It was merited by how the power was set up and it makes sense for why they did it. There aren't a whole lot of situations where they would want this setup, really. It'd be nice if the real numbers system could reflect it better (since the animation isn't really 0 seconds), but that's the only real problem with it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Santorican This game's numbers would make an OCD person go into a convulsion. Where do you get a number like 3.63 from lol? Why not 3.65 or 3.60? lol

From complicated formulas that calculate standard damage, recharge, endurance, and activation based on various other factors.

It's documented. We also force the designer who does such things to put a flag with their name in the power that explicitly states they did that on purpose. That way, without having to look into documentation, we can tell at a glance it was done on purpose.

Needs a 50% chance for double damage imo.

Why? Its damage is on par with other similar blasts: the only thing "worse" about it is that its animation is a bit longer than most of those same blasts (though it's the same as Shout's animation from Sonic). At most, it needs a half second trim or so, but there was some discussion about how that animation would look if it was shortened (aesthetically).

It's still a power worth taking... I'm not sure why people hate it so much.

It also needs floating combat text that says "Executed" over the targets head, such as how Controller's Overpower or Chain Induction's Chain Shock does, when it deals double damage.

Why? For flash, for more bang for the buck, for taking 2.57s to cast within 40 feet of your target. Bitter Ice Blast in comparison has 10 feet more range, slightly more damage, and 1s less cast time along with it's own attached secondary effect.

But I'm not saying it's horrible, I'm only saying I'd like to see "Executed" over enemy's heads and a bigger chunk of damage. I'm also not going to say that would be balanced lol.

They were mentioned at some point in Beta. Sometimes, Castle would chime in and say, "we did this", which never got into the Patch Notes. Or players would post that "we found this" to the Patch Notes threads and they never got acknowledged.

Near the end of Open Beta, the number of unacknowledged changes which should have been in the Patch Notes was huge. To the credit of who ever is in charge of keeping track of such things, much of those missing patch notes did finally get included in the Live Release Notes.

However, to their discredit, some things mentioned over and over again (like the missing emotes) never did. And even though I posted a correction to the patch notes in two places (a separate thread to correct the version on the main web site, and another in the Patch Notes thread) -- they're still not corrected.

After Positron publicly admitted that the Patch Notes process had to be improved, it wound up that Lighthouse eventually took charge of Patch Notes and became very responsive in that regard... posting them ahead of time and correcting them immediately when mistakes were made or stuff left out.

Then when he left, the job seemed to have gone to Ghost Falcon, who did a so-so job. Then when he got promoted and Doc Delilah took his place, it seems no one is publicly stepping up to take responsibility for Patch Notes, not Doc, not the Mods, not War Witch. And it's not just the person saddled with the responsibility for publishing them -- it's very clear that the check-in process at the studio has collapsed since so many Devs are making very obvious and purposeful changes to the code and it never winds up on the Patch Notes. Not to mention those Devs who have always seemed immune to the Patch Notes check-in such as JLove and poshyb whose changes they make (especially bug fixes) almost never show up in the Notes.

It's got nothing to do with game balance or aesthetics. When I would write code, I'd try things like this that SHOULD work in theory, and usually would, but sometimes just wouldn't work the way you want at all.

Just as an overly-simplified example, imagine you had a text file with a word in it. You'd have one part of the program read the word, then erase it and write another word. Then another part of the program would read that word, and erase it and change it to something else. Imagine it's absolutely essential that the two parts read what the other wrote, so they need to always alternate and never have one go twice in a row. You'd think that'd work fine, but sometimes because of what other people wrote or the system you're using or because of the arcane things the compiler does with your code to make it into a program, sometimes part A will go twice in a row for some reason.

I don't know if the Hail of Bullets change is actually a sort of similar situation, but that's what gets conjured in my head when I read it.

It's one of those "Best practice" things, where it's better to code a system in a uniform fashion unless you're making an explicit exception.

At least with it documented, when this is inevitably broken by a code change to the animation system down the road, they'll be able to tell at a glance why Hail of Bullets is suddenly not working as intended.

Please don't compare anything to BiB or Blaze because whoever made those two powers was smoking crack. Babs stated a while back that BiB is not a normal Tier 3 blast lol.

While these concerns are valid in the general case, they aren't in this specific case. For one thing, the game engine supports zero cast time powers already: they already exist. Objects that go boom often have zero cast time detonation powers, and many critters have zero cast time powers.

For another thing, the game engine has never really cared about cast time matching animation time, because animation time itself is actually something of a colloquial fiction - it doesn't actually exist as far as the game engine is concerned. What we call "animation time" is actually the amount of time that the animations that the power executes are flagged to be "rooted" which prevents us from taking any other actions. Activating a power triggers an animation sequence, and that sequence points to another animation, which points to another animation, which points to another animation, until you are pointing at the "stand around and do nothing" animation. Technically, if you fire a power and then do absolutely nothing else (and nothing else attacks you) that power could trigger a five minute long sequence of animations.

But what's important to players is the rooted time, because the other animations can be interrupted by another power activation. The thing is: the game engine doesn't care about this at all. The game engine doesn't even *know* if the rooted part of the animation happens to match the enforced cast time of the power or not.

In fact, until just a few years ago, it was probably 50/50 on whether a player power's cast time and rooted time agreed or not. I know I've sent in probably close to a hundred cast/animation discrepancies to BaB, and he's addressed lots of others besides. Perfect alignment was probably just not a high priority during the days of the gang of 15.

So: setting a power's cast time to zero is unlikely to cause weird problems, because there are lots of them already. Setting a power's cast time to be different from its animation time is unlikely to cause weird problems because there really isn't any such thing as "animation time" that the game engine recognizes, and because until recently it was a minor miracle if they matched in the first place.

The only problems that are likely to crop up are the very predictable non-weird ones: specifically those involving power recharge and animation errors (a power with zero cast time has no double-check on the animators: if they accidentally forget to flag the animation as rooted or remove the flag by mistake, or if a special set of flags, states, and modes causes a different animation to play that is not rooted, then that power will probably have an effective 0.132 execution time - one "ArcanaTime" tick; that would probably make the power just a little too good.)

More developers need to smoke more crack imo.

The Devs are getting 8-balls for christmas.

8 months early.

Or it could just have been a matter of the devs not factoring in root time (i.e. animation time; as far as I care, it's a semantic difference between the terms that is easy to differentiate based on context) back in those days. There's a reason the dam/rech/end formula doesn't account for animation time at all. The devs didn't realize that it was actually important.

The question about Shield Charge (which I really wish Castle would weigh in on one of these days, because, honestly, no matter how you look at it, it's either way stronger than it should be or everything else is way weaker) isn't so much a question of low root/animation time (which is what BIB and Blaze "abuse" to achieve such incredible performance) so much as a question of whether the dam/rech/end formula can properly be applied to powers of that kind and whether there should be any "penalty" levied on the power for it being in a defense set (of which there is actually a large degree of precedent for).

For just an instant I thought to myself that was actually possible, but I there are three catches that make it not so simple.

1. Target resistances. Just because the target has 20 health left, doesn't mean 20 points more damage will defeat it. The math would have to factor that in, which would be non-trivial.

2. Abs calculations. Executioner's shot doesn't actually "know" how much damage it deals. Powers are defined in scale units. But it could be used by a level 50 Blaster or a level 3 Corruptor. The power would have to factor its own user's damage modifiers into the calculations.

3. Combat modifiers. Things like the purple patch would attenuate the damage delivered to the target, which would further complicate calculations.

Not to mention funny edge cases like what if the target is phase shifted or cannot be affected by the damage: the message might be delivered at times when the bonus damage is triggered but can't actually kill the target.


This is sufficiently complicated that the best way to do such a thing, if you were to ever want to try, might be to make a power that:

1. Delivered its base damage.
2. Delivered its bonus damage.
3. Delivered a zero damage effect that only delivered its effect if the target was at zero health, and whose sole effect was to deliver the "Executed" message.
4. Delivered a heal which immediately healed back its bonus damage.

In that exact order.

But there's enough voodoo in the combat timing of events to make this very twitchy to pull off correctly. I'm not sure if anyone alive currently knows with certainty the minimum event interval the combat engine will honor both the ordinality and the dependency of (which is a sufficiently complex question it would take a couple of pages of text just to explain what the question means).