City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Greater Devoured To-Hit bonus: bug or WAI?

Arcanaville

By Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2010-09-19 20:22 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bringer_NA View Post
That sort of proves the point even more so. They might not be "our" Devouring Earth, and the new dimensional access points are allowing more than Praetorians to come through.
Frankly, I don't see how Tip mission is related to Praetoria.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wavicle View Post
But honestly, it seems strange...why should these particular mobs have a higher hit chance?
They are not the only ones. Pets (including enemy pets) and turrets (like the ones Malta engineers spawn) still have 75% chance tohit. I think its partially that they always had higher tohit (even moreso than other things prior to I7: at one time turrets had 105% base chance to hit), and partially that the devs wanted to keep some things around that still made life a little harder for defense sets, just like certain damage types tend to do for resistance sets. Its reasonable for such threats to defense to exist if it doesn't get out of hand.

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Posted

I noticed the increased difficulty in the first tip missions I ran with my SD scrapper, specifically against DE and malta. There is already plenty of stuff that makes defense useless in this game, I don't see any reason to increase these instances, especially in groups that already make defense based sets feel like tissue paper.

This is an obvious attempt to weaken soft capped defense survivability. The problem with defense is, it doesn't take much to go from feeling invincible to feeble. The game already has enough enemy groups and instances that make defense toons weep. If people want to find a challenge in this game, they can find it easily enough. This trend I see, especially with the praetorian content, where it seems the devs want to create a higher difficulty game at any level, where it is a struggle to survive, is a really bad idea.

 

Posted

Certainly it's fine for some enemies to have exceptions to the 50% base To-Hit and/or accuracy bonuses beyond the standard values, or the ability to self buff above 50%. As noted above, the list is quite long already:

> Rularuu eyes
> Many gun-based enemies including snipers for Nemesis and Crey, some Malta, and Turrets
> Longbow, CoT, RIP (probably others) with buffs such as Fortitude and Tactics
> Devouring Earth when quartz pet is summoned, and Crystal Titan inherent
> Pets (all? some? summoned vs pseudopets? inherited accuracy may convolute this)
> Certain attacks by normal enemies which are designed for autohit or elevated acc / to-hit, such as Nemesis death explosions, gasseous AoEs by Nem and Crey, Freak super stunner boss rez, several Longbow AoE debuffs, CoT earth controls, KoA caltrops, etc.
> AE enemies with self-buffs such as build up
> Dopplegangers (tip missions & maybe elsewhere) with self-buffs such as build up
> Probably more I'm forgetting.

These can at least "make sense" to the player (with the possible exception of pets) because they are story-driven based on enemy abilities and are consistent in all zones/instances. The right amount of def-breaking powers in game is a different matter and I'm not going to touch that topic.

However, I am left confused and suspect a bug since Devouring Earth already have a means to buff their to-hit via the quartz pet, DE in zones were unchanged, and an inconsistent list of DE in tip missions have the elevated to-hit without any in-game reason or patch notes.

That list of other new enemies with 64% to-hit could be revealing. Since I'm only aware of this one new oddity with the tip mission DE, it looked more like a bug than a pattern of intent.

 

Posted

Any word on which other factions have the higher tohit? I'd like to know which missions not to take.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
They are not the only ones. Pets (including enemy pets) and turrets (like the ones Malta engineers spawn) still have 75% chance tohit. I think its partially that they always had higher tohit (even moreso than other things prior to I7: at one time turrets had 105% base chance to hit), and partially that the devs wanted to keep some things around that still made life a little harder for defense sets, just like certain damage types tend to do for resistance sets. Its reasonable for such threats to defense to exist if it doesn't get out of hand.
I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, I absolutely agree with you, resistance has holes and defense should too, on the other hand it feels like there are enough autohit powers and/or powers that shoot at the existing holes in my defenses (I'll admit my defense experience weighs fairly heavily towards typed defense, which seems to have more holes then positional) and my defense based characters tend to already have factions they "avoid" on par with my resist based characters (if only I had enough self preservation instinct to actually avoid them :P). And back on the other hand, if they were going to buff accuracy on a faction maybe its a good thing they did it to a faction that is already capable of brutalizing defense characters rather then spreading the love. I need to stop rambling, this is what happens when I post late...

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
There's a couple new critter types with base 64% tohit. Its not something specific to the DE. However, I don't have a list of what uses those critter types off hand.
Interesting... this may explain why I haven't seen something I've seen in these DE tip missions elsewhere: the bosses don't downgrade to lieutenants, even solo with "no bosses" set. I /bugged it when I first noticed it was happening, but it was still happening as of Tuesday.

 

Posted

I think alot of things got accuracy buffs a couple issues back these included. Sent a few pms to castle about this issue in the past but with no replies. Maybe its his way of nerfing defense without applying a direct nerf. It feels like it sometimes. Luckily I grabbed aid self and it seems to help with alot of this crap.

I know that if my softcapped sr is having issues than the folks that aren't softcapped must really be going through hell.

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