Issue 19 - Patch Notes for build 1900.201011102104.11

Well, I was just on another Tin Mage TF, and several times I wasn't given any warning at all the prox mines were going to go off.

Except any explosive near the exploding mine also goes off, so a good portion of the room becomes a damage zone. And in the time you peel yourself off the floor, another bomb is planted at your feet.

Oh, and during the rezzing process you get the -4 level shift, even if you have the alpha slotted.

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

Fine. Then the following would be possible within the game.

Put a LONG RECHARGE on the mine power. Add in a LARGE activation time to actually lay the bombs. Put a DELAY between Director 11's summoning of the Mine layers. REMOVE leaping from the mine layers (they have it to get into the rafters).

REDUCE the Area of Effect of the Bombs. LENGTHEN the time between the warning text and the actual explosion. DO NOT allow the bomb to chain react.

Everything I've mentioned in this post is either a critter stat or otherwise within developer control.

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

I like everything I see here. Additionally, make the bombs count down and go off automatically when the pet power's recharge cycle is complete, minimizing the total number of bombs on the screen.

That pic you posted earlier? That's what the fight looked like for me this weekend. It was... unpleasant.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

That is definitely worth looking into, I think. Sorry to hear that.

Just thinking, but they can set a use limit for temporary powers. No idea how they do it though, so may well not be part of the powers code. I wonder if they can give Temp powers to enemies (and have them use them)

Nope, pets were definitely NOT feared or confused.

So you're saying its perfectly normal for Prot Bots, Phantasms and other range only powered pets to run into melee to use their non-existent melee powers?

If doing the dishes were easy, my roommate would've done them by now... oh wait, nope, they're pretty simple, and he hasn't. Sometimes the fact that nobody's gotten around to doing something that needs to be done has nothing to do with the complexity of the matter... For instance, I doubt there's an overwhelming level of difficulty to finding all the powers that say they provide Damage Resistance to *all damage* and yet only provide resistance to Smashing/Lethal, and then correcting the text that says *all damage* to accurately reflect what the power actually does... and yet it hasn't been done yet, and probably never will, because it's not directly attached to whatever new, shiny problems are getting the hairy eyeball since they're new and shiny.

It would take special case tech to script the behavior of any AI controlled entity in any way remotely resembling what you've described, unfortunately. The game simply isn't designed to handle such constructs.

At least not yet to the best of my knowledge. Heck, I'd volunteer to work with Television to add such capabiity to the critter AI, since I think it would be a worthwhile addition to the end game bag of tricks.

The critical issue with modifying the brains of any AI controlled critter is the brain cannot burn too many CPU cycles, and the devs do not likely want to explicitly code special case brains for every end game boss, which would have the potential to be a debugging nightmare of it's own (as in game-stability problems, not misbehaving AI problems).

All doable, but possibly not consistent with the design intent. The devs know its harder to ratchet upward than downward, so they might want to see if there is a way to preserve intent before blanket-weakening them.

Although, while the isn't a way to directly keep count of deployed mines, there might be a creative non-procedural way to get that behavior indirectly. I'm not in a position to verify that at the moment (I'm actually waiting for my flight at the moment) but as soon as I have a chance i'll look into it.

The issue is if you GOTO bots to a spot , they will fire off their attacks and then close to melee. They will ignore any commands to return to you until they've killed their target. On most enemies this isn't an issue, and if you are running a mission on the easiest settings they will kill their targets before you even notice them running anywhere.

Now, on TFs , fighting certain avs and fighting at, oh, say 8 man spawn +1 this is an issue because if their target has a massive pbaoe attack they close into melee and die. GOTO is supposed to lock them into a spot to keep them safe, but the ai "enhancement" from I17 makes GOTO useless.

And if their target runs into the next mob, well if you are on a team they get pissed because of your aggtard pets and if you are solo, well it can make things tough.

They've already ratcheted the design up from the beta test. They did it with this patch. The fact that players used other means to target critters that were invisible and not able to be targeted directly by players shows a clear misunderstanding between what is actually reasonable to expect players can do with the game system.

The INTENT of having invisible bombers on crack was wrong to begin with.

I've ran with teams on Issue 19 beta that didn't get all the glowies. Ouch.

Actually it is only 40, not 100. It might seem like that though.

Unless for some reason you are the only player of the team of 8 that didn't get the badge. I didn't last night, yet I was in mission the whole time. The incident is currently under review...

This, more than anything, sums up the problems of this encounter for me. And it is one that players have been saying since the beginning of the Issue 19 Beta.

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

Depends on how shallow and easily (and quickly) fixed the bug is.

A patch was coming out Tuesday, period. So the crammed all the stuff they could fix before them into this patch. The more serious stuff that takes longer will come out on a subsequent Patch Tuesday.

Moreover, you have multiple groups of people contributing to the patches.

Note that you don't put your storyline people to work writing code to fix toggle-drop bugs and the like.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

The mines could spawn like ambushes, or be a power directly under Director 11's control: plant bombs. This power would tell the mine layers to plant bombs. Or they could do what I suggest below.

Actually I thought of one more way and it should be feasible inside the existing powers structure. Even better, it would preserve the intent of having SOME bombs (not a warehouse full of them) while not being an overwhelming reaction to the players "winning" against a "pet" creation.

Give each proximity bomb an AoE -Recharge to all mine layers in the warehouse while the mine is "alive". Seeing that the mine layers only plant mines, -Recharge shouldn't have any other effect on them.

This should fit the game as -Recharge is a standard debuff. In addition, debuffs can be targeted to specific entities.

Yes, it requires 1 "new" power, but it doesn't require code beyond that power. It doesn't eat up (much) more game cycles.

If the actual intent of the encounter is to have the director throw out some mines for the players to dodge, then this AoE Recharge debuff preventing mine layers from literally carpeting all the surface of the warehouse should be put into place as soon as possible. Otherwise, it is like Zombie Man has said: "This smacks of those Dungeon Masters who, when they find their players discovered a clever way to get past the dragon, make up on the spot a new dragon to force the encounter to go they way they planned."

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

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

PvP was shelved as a Non-Concern a long time ago. So if something suddenly decides to stop working there, I wouldn't count on a quick fix. Not trying to be pessimistic, but realistic. Though I really don't care about PvP very much myself, I do hope they fix that for everyone that does pretty soon.

this pvp drop bug has happened before and was fixed fairly quickly.

PBAoEs with huge radii and very large target caps are potentially very computationally expensive. Collision detection and target checking in general are one of the larger sources of server-side lag in high density zone events, I've been told in the past.

Also, although I haven't checked yet, in making the minelayers immune to AoE damage, they might have made them impossible to affect by debuffs. They might have gone from being untargetable to intangible.


Edit: yep, intangible. Also, recharge debuffs would not work on them either way, because the mine laying power is not a click.

I'm trying to at least come up with solutions that could be put into place that falls within the observable scope of the game's abilities. I may not know the exact mechanics, but it shouldn't be as difficult as you are making it out to be.

In my mind it wouldn't be a PBAoE debuff, more of a zone-wide "Slow Mine Layers" power that makes them use the power less. Why the heck isn't the mine laying power "not a click"?

The way it has been explained in this thread is that Director 11 summons the 3 minelayers, then the minelayers summon the proximity bombs. Is this an accurate description of what is happening in your view? If it is, then the AI controlling the minelayer's summoning is currently in overdrive and unchecked. In other words, broken. Even a Master Illusionist summons on a controlled cycle. The minelayer's AI looks like it only has one power: "summon mines". So every attack it gets, another mine is planted.

There should be the possibility that a zone-wide counter (debuff that only affects minelayers or some other mechanism) is increased with every mine dropped and decreased with every mine that is destroyed. The minelayer's AI could then check that counter to determine if they can drop a new mine. A slow to a minelayer would accomplish the same thing. The only time a check would occur would be when the minelayer goes to drop a bomb. If you are saying that the AI is dropping mines every few seconds, then that is a problem in an of itself.

And are you going to seriously tell me that the minelayers dropping 100+ mines or the mines being dropped far from the AV is intentional? Because that is what is happening. Something has to be done. Not only is it wrong from a balance point of view, but it is also breaking critical warnings to players. On a Tin Mage run Wednesday night, I didn't get several warnings that mines were about to go off due to the excessive amount entities in the area.

I actually suspect that I might not be able to SEE all the bombs planted. I know for a fact (Hami Raids before Issue 9), that critters disappear if there is too many for the game to render. From my understanding this is a means to protect CPU cycles.

As to the notion that this would be a one-shot code would also be a mistake. There are a number of "infinite" spawning mechanisms that seriously need to be looked at that this could be applied to.

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

This made me laugh like Agent Smith in my office this morning. Thanks, Schismatrix. Now my boss knows I'm freakin' nuts.

@TURGENEV - Freedom Server / IRON / B.A.N.E / HORDE

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If it was easy, someone would suggest something that would actually work.

And in any well designed programming environment, what I am suggesting would actually work.

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

Bots MM say hello to shelf, shelf, please make room Soldering Iron, Left Leg, Right Leg, Left Arm, Right arm, Torso, and Head...

Hey Fire tank! Share some room!

When the devs find their box of wonderful and fix your motherboards, I'll find interest in playing you again.

Hopefully they will install that much needed "Gestalt" button. <GLARES @ G1 DEVASTATOR>

Until then I will break out the duster from time to time just to make sure the details don't get too corroded with particles of non-playable.

Ciao!