All You /SR Pros, You're Knowledge is Needed

I wholly agree with Motley. /SR is such a fragile flower and at best a wooded vine, that gambling on the edge like that is too dangerous, imho.

I've been near 60% health and gone from kicking *** to eating floor with a flick of the Dark Ring Mistress' wrist.

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

It doesn't give you any Psi resist whatsoever, as BrokenPrey's screenshot shows.

Powers -> Combat Monitor

From which you can select items to be monitored in their own window (the small box on the bottom)

I want to know what the "Mary" button does.

I assume 'Mary' is Amy Jonsson Ward which you get from beating Mary MacComber in the Katie TF, but I'd like to know what 'flip' and 'Boss2' do.

The scaling resists are there to allow you to survive long enough to top your health bar off. If an enemy is pounding on you for 100% damage, you might only be able to survive two hits getting through defense. With the scaling resists, you might be able to survive 3 or 4. That can make all the difference in getting a heal off.

Well the photo is old and that was back in the day when I would run Katie Hannon all the time. So the Mary button was so I could target Mary MacComber faster.

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

didn't see this till just now, was posting with my photo earlier

Flip was just a emote macro I was playing around with at the time, all it did was have my character do a back flip.

Boss2 was another auto target macro just to find bosses, for kill badges or in a Mission. I don't know why there is only boss2 guess boss1 was deleted.

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

The question of how useful the scaling resistances are has come up lots of times. This is a table I used to use to help explain what was going on back in I6 and I7 when it was more hotly debated:

This table shows, given a particular level of health, how much resistance you'd have if you have all three passives, how much damage, relative to a full bar of health it would take in one hit to kill you at that level of health, and the same numbers if we assume slotted tough is added (and the damage is smash/lethal).

We can see that, for example, a single hit that would normally hit you for 1/3rd your health is survivable all the way down to about 20% health, 1/5th of a bar. That's not bad. 1/3rd of a scrapper bar is about 450 points of damage, which is a very large hit which the passives are making survivable all the way down to about 270 health. That's significant.

If you stack tough, the results can be even stronger. When you are down to 25% health, it still takes a smash/lethal hit of over half your base health to defeat you. That's surviving a 670 point attack while at less than 335 health.

Sometimes the passives mean a little, and sometimes they mean a lot. For some reason people get hung up on examining the corner cases, where either you are being pelted with peanuts for 2 points of damage or being hit by a giant monster for a thousand points of damage. In reality, most damage comes in packets of a hundred, to a couple hundred points of damage. Against those attacks, the passives do have time to scale up and work. Interestingly, one corner cases in which an SR scrapper can see those passives scale up and work is while trying to solo a pylon. Pylons do a lot of damage, but not enough to outpace the passive resists. You can actually see them fight against the damage, and make consecutive hits look a lot weaker than they might have been otherwise.


PS: missing from the screencap is the fact that the scaling passives have no resistance to toxic either. They are smash, lethal, fire, cold, energy, and negative resistance only. No toxic, and no psionic resistance.

PPS: those holes are contrary to the powers' intent, but someone somewhere overrided that objection in CoV beta and they were changed at the last instant. Whoever did that was wrong, but I never found out who that was.

I did actually notice this when I was fighting my first pylon. I thought "Ah, that must be the resistance kicking in" if I got hit by two consecutive blasts before I had a chance to heal myself.

Its not an oversight. In CoV beta the passives actually offered resistance to all types (for stalkers, of course) but were changed literally just before CoV and I6 launched with no testing or warning.

And also: the passives used to offer +25% resistance maximum, not +20%. So SR scrappers would have been able to scale up to the res cap in theory (at a sliver of health).

Someone looked at that and said two things: one, there's a design rule that says scrappers should not be able to get to the res cap on their own without power pool powers or buffs (or inventions, today). This is true. And two: there's a design rule that says toxic and psionic resistances are exotic resistances that have to be there by explicit fiat; in particular psionic resistances are only added to things deliberately strong against psionics and toxic is normally associated with healing. SR is not specifically strong against psionics and explicitly barred from having healing.

So the passives were knocked down from 25 to 20, and toxic and psionic resistances were removed. However whoever did that failed (in my opinion) to understand either the intent or the math behind the passives. First: the concept of the scaling passives was actually some kind of time dilation effect: as the SR scrapper got closer to being defeated, time would seem to slow down for the scrapper and give them more time to finish the fight. You obviously cannot manipulate time like that in an MMO, so instead it was incoming damage that was slowed down to give the SR scrapper more time to react to the incoming damage.

This means the resistances aren't "resistances" but a form of deceleration of incoming damage. And that should be type-blind. Whoever decide to remove the types didn't understand these were not normal resistances, but just a game mechanic used to simulate something else.

Separately, reducing them from 25% to 20% maximum was not really necessary. Testing suggested the original values would have been fine, but someone decided to enforce the "do not cap automatically" rule, even though to reach the cap you'd have to have less than 1% health remaining. And the rule about capping resistances should really apply to static resistances. They have the same strength all the time, and are far stronger than resistances that scale with health. Both analytical analysis and numerical discrete calculations (simulations) suggest that the three passives combined offer, on average, and also averaged across all possible incoming damage situations, the equivalent survivability strength of having about 25% resistance. That doesn't mean they actually deflect 25% of all incoming damage (for the appropriate types). In fact, they actually deflect *even less*. But the important thing to note is that at full health, you don't *need* resistances as much as when you are at half health or quarter health. By working harder when you're more likely to need them, their effect is magnified (in one scenario I analyzed, the passives averaged deflecting about 3% of the total incoming damage and outperformed 20% static resistance).

In either case, they should have treated three stacking 0-25% resistances as about 25% total average resistance, and not 75% resistance, when thinking about game balance. This one is more of a judgment call than an actual error, but I consider it an error because it could have gone either way, but someone changed it without allowing the change to be tested. Such changes should only be made when there is an overriding critical reason to make them, and there wasn't one.

Which also suggests to me that there are only so many possible reasons why this change went in.