Arcanaville

Alright, if it bothers you that much you should consider making a list of them and PMing them to the devs.

Personally I want the crashes as well. Because I think the crashes create a conceptual opportunity to do something unique with the crashing overdrives.

I've been thinking about overdrives ever since Synapse suggested that crashing nukes might get looked at all those months ago. The problem with crashing nukes is that they leave the blaster basically offense-less and defenseless, at a time when the presumption is that there were lots of things around and some might still be kicking. There's nothing in the nuke mechanics that let blasters take steps to mitigate the crash: they have to engage lives targets to make the nuke worthwhile, but they have no means of reacting to any target that survives, at least not without resorting to workarounds for the crash itself, which is probably not directly intended (meaning: the crash probably isn't intended to be an inspiration depleter per se).

Overdrive crashes are different. Overdrives last for a long time, and the presumption is that you have time while being much stronger than normal to dispatch any threat to you before the crash occurs. Its a sort of bargain between the game and the player: I will give you three minutes of near-indestructibility, if you promise to use it to deal with what's in front of you and not keep going indefinitely because otherwise the crash will probably kill you.

The problem with the crashing overdrives in principle is that while they give you time to deal with problems, they don't give you the ability to deal with those problems. They don't improve your ability to defeat things in general. Also, the time period is long enough to try to give you a lot of latitude to deal with very strong threats, but its an awkward amount of time. What do you do if you kill off the spawn you're in within 90 seconds. Stand around for 90 seconds until the crash? Dive into the next spawn and pray?

There's one obvious way to deal with the time issue. Make overdrives expiring toggles so the player can choose when to expire and crash the power. But I find that to be a bit ugly. Its mechanically useful, but deciding to crash yourself seems ... icky.

Another possibility is to consider making the power stronger the closer it gets to expiration. The logic behind that is that since the last 90 seconds will be stronger than the first 90 seconds, you're more likely to not guess wrong if you try to take on one more spawn. The power will always be a little better than you might guess. By the time you get to having only 20 seconds left, its much more obvious that you should start looking for cover. When there's only ten seconds to go it should be really obvious if you can't kill it now, you should bug out.

I was thinking about Unstoppable specifically. Suppose that for the first 90 seconds Unstoppable did just what it does now. But then for the second 90 seconds it started to get an escalating set of buffs, that went something like this:

90s mark: +25% damage
135s mark: +50% damage, +10% tohit, +25% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
160s mark: +75% damage, +15% tohit, +50% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
165s mark: +75% damage, +15% tohit, +60% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
170s mark: +100% damage, +20% tohit, +70% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)
175s mark: +100% damage, +25% tohit, +80% Res(end, rech, tohit, def, runspeed)

As you got closer to expiration, Unstoppable would make you more, well, unstoppable. Your damage would go up, your tohit would go up, and you'd start resisting debuffs increasingly more. That might be worth a crash, and moreover it would partially solve the problem of the power having "bad" duration: you would rarely stand around for 90s, because the last 90s should be enough to take on that next spawn. The power will try very hard to finish whatever you start, unless you're foolish enough to dive into a new spawn with only fifteen seconds left on the clock. There could also be some visual indicator to show you're reaching each mark, so you would have a better idea how quickly the crash was approaching instead of having to stare at the buff bar.

We could use different effects designed to be conceptually tied to the powerset in question. If the above is intended to align with the concept of unstoppable, I might consider something like this for Elude:

90s mark: +25% damage, +50% acc
135s mark: +50% damage, +750% acc, +25% Rech, +50% recovery
160s mark: +75% damage, +100% acc, +50% Rech, +100% recovery
165s mark: +75% damage, +100% acc, +50% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)
170s mark: +100% damage, +250% acc, +70% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)
175s mark: +100% damage, +500% acc, +70% Rech, +150% recovery, Instant Recharge(Primary)

I'm setting aside the soft cap issues with Elude for now. If the idea for Unstoppable is resisting debuffs, the idea for Elude might be speed which is the other thing associated with super reflexes besides defense, and I stuck in recovery to power faster recharging offense.

Similar things could be done with Power Surge and Overload. Those are sort of off the wall numbers, more to illustrate the point than offered as an explicit suggestion. But the idea is escalating ability to kill with higher offense and tohit, and an additional set of escalating benefits that are powerset-unique designed to make it both easier to fight and easier to disengage if you guess wrong and have to. Something that instead of having a flat three minutes of constant performance grants an ever increasingly potent benefit that makes the power seem to be more worthy of the eventual crash.

The tricky part about Invuln/SS in my opinion is Rage, and in particular dealing with its two crash components. Also, for SO builds I think its a more noteworthy debate as to whether to stack fighting on Invuln than on SR, and the endurance cost tradeoff would be harsher on Invuln/SS than SR/Staff.

That's not a plural, that's a possessive. They are not working on the new AT's something.

The writers could be recruited to refill the vending machines and wash Positron's car, but I doubt the powers team would let the writers anywhere near the critters and powers design spreadsheets without making them take a test first.

And that's probably what's going to ultimate derail any attempt to proliferate Illusion to Doms. They will need to change things to proliferate, they'll take a lot of heat for making those changes, testing will be bogged down in people simply demanding things to be the way they want, the time would be better spent on carp melee.

1. It might not help your blasters. If more than 1% of all blasters follow that build trajectory I would be tremendously surprised.

2. Even with everything you mention the only way to not run out of endurance past 22 is to hold back on AoEs, not have AoEs, or stand around idle a lot. Or, it occurs to me now, you can die a lot.

Your vision of blasters seems to be extremely specific and marginal. Kiting Medicine Pool invention proc frankenslotters that DFB to 22 and then fight +4s. Those blasters don't need help and never needed help. The changes are for the benefit of all other blasters.

I think you're whipsawing between two extremes of possibilities. The base strength of Absorb is intended to be numerically higher than the numerical strength of the +regen sustains because the presumption is that you don't get the absolute full numerical strength in actual play due to the mechanics of Absorb. So they are numerically higher to equalize their value relative to the +regen sustains for normal play.

Once you leave normal play, the min/max opportunities for something like Energize and Frigid Embrace split: Energize can improve its performance through heightened recharge, and endurance discount becomes more meaningful at higher recharge where offense can burn more endurance. Frigid Embrace can improve its recovery a little through things that buff recovery powers, as nothing buffs endurance discount itself, and it can do much better at improving its defensive strength because it has far more room to improve absorb.

You seem to be suggesting that either one has to be vastly superior to the other, or vice versa, but I don't see that as being obviously true. I can't actually obviously demonstrate which is better at SO slotting, nor do I see which one will have the ultimate advantage at the very high end of building. For whatever builds you're contemplating, its probably true that one or the other will end up being better, but that's not likely to be consistently true across everyone's I24 builds.

Right now I think the most forgiving melee character you can play is SR/Staff. Because you only need to know a couple of things about that combination:

1. Take all the SR powers, and slot the defensive ones with three defense enhancements (whatever level you are) and one end reduction for the toggles. Slot Practiced Brawler with two recharge.

2. Turn on Form of Soul. Never turn it off. The end.

You'll be stronger than almost any other SO build out there, and you'll rarely run out of endurance, and you'll be able to shoot out an almost continuous stream of AoE which will mean things will die relatively quickly even at the lower tanker damage mod.

I can't think of a melee combo that is easier to play, easier to build, and easier to slot. And if you remember to take and slot combat jumping you'll be virtually soft-capped. Its not the strongest possible combination, but I don't think it gets any more straight forward than that. Under normal playing conditions you'll basically be vulnerable to high tohit buffs and situations with a ton of non-positional psi, and that's it.

That's not even remotely close to painting your hair mostly red and orange. He might have been aiming for the Joker but the moron landed on the Heat Miser instead.

Yes. Although not always outraged at me.


Yes. Although 5-7 is a trivially low hurdle there.


No. At least, not four times by the same red name.

And I still don't see the problem with the nazi dinosaur tank.


No idea.


I'm not at liberty to say.


+1

Paragon City? Around Here? Russia with Love?

No idea what you mean. Nope, not at all.

I have to admit if it happened to me I would probably appeal the situation. Significantly so.

Such as?


The "canonical" Bruce Wayne has also disappeared, died, and retired as well.

In The Dark Knight Returns Bruce Wayne comes to the same conclusion Wayne does in the Dark Knight Rises: that the world doesn't need Batman to save it: it needs to save itself. He stages Batman's death so he can go underground and work with the people as a "normal", if also smart and crazy person to bring order to Gotham and the rest of the world. The only difference being in The Dark Knight Rises Gotham didn't need an underground vigilante group to rescue it from a totalitarian government. Bruce could ride off into the sunset, whereas in The Dark Knight Returns Bruce still had a mission after the Batman "dies."

But in all the important ways, The Dark Knight Rises comes to the same conclusion that The Dark Knight Returns does: that Bruce doesn't need to be Batman anymore, that Batman served its purpose and the time came for him to go away.

That arrogant Miller really messed up didn't he?


I'm not questioning your preferences. What I like and what you like have no bearing on the objective fact of whether Nolan changed any aspect of the Batman beyond what is already canonical. If your impression of Batman doesn't match the Nolan movies, that's entirely within your prerogative. However, calling your impression the "real" Batman opens your assertion to the question of whether your version is actually canonical.

It can be significantly worse. The base absorb pulse is going to be 5% of blaster health refreshed every 3 seconds, enhanceable to about 10%.

Without stacked resistances many attacks hit for more than 10% of blaster health; those will eat up all the absorb and then hit the blaster's base health. On the next tick, the absorb shield will go back up but the damage done past the shield will only recovery at normal recovery rates, not the very high absorb rate. If you end a fight with half health, you'll start the next fight with a strong absorb shield and still about half health.

Regeneration can bring you back to full between fights in theory: it will certainly recover more than 5% health between fights normally. Absorb can't do better than refresh the shield.

So if you don't have resistances, the absorb can perform worse. In fact, you can kill a blaster dealing a lot less damage than the absorb shield can absorb in theory without doing so with a massive burst of damage. The key to leveraging Absorb is in making sure that each individual hit tends to deal less damage than the shield can absorb in that tick.

Since the tick interval is short - 3 seconds - there's a big difference between stacking high resistances on it and stacking high defense. High defense will make hits less frequent, but hit for full strength. In between those high hits absorb won't be helping to restore actual health. High resistance, on the other hand, keeps the hits coming frequently but reduces their individual impact. That can allow you to get more mileage out of absorb, by in effect by spreading the damage out among more ticks rather than concentrating it into a few ticks.

I am genuinely curious to see how the min/max meta game plays out between power boost/energize and frigid embrace.


At lower levels I think for most players the amount of recharge necessary to spit out enough high DPA attacks to radically increase endurance burn enough to make discount overwhelmingly better won't be available. Although discount will still be stronger than recovery for high AoE builds that obviously burn through endurance at a much higher rate.

Another factor that will make discount and energize in general not the unambiguous run away favorite is that toggles are immune to slows, while clicks can be reduced in effectiveness by slows. When it comes to the two sustain effects other than heals (+regen and +discount) in energize, while slows can reduce their effectiveness speed cannot improve them beyond making them perma - I believe Arbiter Hawk intends to make those effects non-stacking (the benefit to higher recharge will come from accelerating the heal in Energize, but not in stacking the regen or discount).

Batman hasn't looked like the Bob Kane Batman in decades.

So which one is the "real" one? The one in the current comics, or the one in the comics before they just rebooted the comic, or the DCAU Batman, or the Silver Age Batman, or the Golden Age Batman? Was the Year One Batman the real Batman? Its considered generally canonical, and Batman Begins parallels it in many ways.

But then again, who is Christopher Nolan to depart so dramatically from the current state of the comic books. I mean, the last time we let someone get away with that, we got The Dark Knight Returns. And look at how bad that turned out.

But that's not the Nolan Batman.

That ... would be an odd thing to celebrate the anniversary of.

That seems to miss the point. It sounds like you're saying the reason why we have continuity errors, typos, grammatical errors, and sometimes broken writing is because the writers are too busy world-building to spend time writing effectively.

But we don't allow them that excuse if there's a giant hole in the geometry or if the elevators in the missions don't work. If someone said the world-builders and map editors are spending too much time writing to make the missions work correctly that someone would be ridiculed, rightly so.

Or, as I mentioned when mentioning Absorb numbers, its because on average Absorb's efficiency is going to tend to be less than 100%, at least insofar as the devs believe (and its a reasonable belief) so that will tend to balance out. Where it will not balance out is in people who actually try to optimize their builds to leverage absorb. I assumed balancing with SO slotting, where the average blaster primary generates approximately 1.0 DS/sec and burns about 5 to 6 eps, with 0.333 end reduction on average and is in combat approximately 75% of the time within a mission. The in-combat ratio is significant when comparing recovery to discount because discount can only work during combat while recovery can continue to increase endurance during inter-combat travel. The more endurance you burn and the faster your offense is accelerated, the better discount looks relative to recovery. But there are other offsetting factors that complicate this comparison at higher end builds, such as the fact that there are incarnate powers that apply both +recovery strength and +end discount, both of which increase the benefit of recovery powers relative to discount powers (the latter by diluting discount). For example Musculature Radial would add at least 0.17 eps recovery to a blaster with +recovery sustain (it depends on whether the demonstrated blaster had sustain slotted or unslotted for recovery, if it was unslotted this would be closer to 0.33 eps).

A specific hitch at the high end is that while Spiritual Core might be the obvious Alpha choice for most Energy Manipulation blasters (assuming survival was being optimized) for Ice, say, Vigor might be the logical choice: it has more +heal strength than Spiritual and Absorb is fully enhanceable. Vigor Core also has significant endurance reduction. So the question is whether Ice with Vigor's discount and CE's +recovery ends up similar endurance management-wise, all other things being equal, to Energy's unenhanceable Energize discount.

I feel the need to state for the record that this game is not composed of 1 second fights surrounded by one minute travel. I feel compelled to state this because almost everyone that comments on regeneration seems to believe it has no significant in-combat benefit. In a 30 second fight, the 1.5%/sec regeneration of I24 sustain powers will be almost as strong as popping two small greens. That's a huge benefit *in* combat, and it happens continuously with no activation cost.

Aid self is currently interruptible, and to gain the same benefit from it as from the regeneration in the typical sustain toggle in combat would require using it once every 25 seconds. That's about 4.5 seconds of idle time every 25 seconds when you cannot act due to Aid Self's cast time, which is a whopping 18% idle time when you can't attack.


I can run out of endurance at level four once I have three ranged attacks if at least one is an AoE. Certainly by level six when I can have four.

The only way to not notice the endurance costs of offense without having a very strong recovery power is frankly to be idle much of the time.


I'm aware of Scorpion Shield. Scorpion Shield has 10.5% defense base. Power Boost will boost that by 78.7% to about +8.3% higher defense. That's the incremental benefit of power boost on Scorpion Shield. If we throw in CJ and weave in there the total base defense is about 15.8%, and power boost is offering an additional 12.3% defense, which is substantial.

But lets compare to /Devices. Cloaking Device offers 1.75% defense (suppressed) or about 2.73% defense slotted. Smoke Grenade has a -4.9% tohit debuff slottable to about -7.6%. Against even con critters without tohit debuff resistance that's a total of 10.3% additional effective defense.

Energy's defensive benefit is slightly higher and is immune to resistances and combat modifiers. But it can't generally be up all the time. /Devices benefit is slightly lower and drops with resistances and combat modifiers, but its effectively up all the time with minimal effort.

The stated balance point of the standard content is builds with the strength commensurate with SO slotting. Higher level slotting doesn't factor into that particular aspect of balance.

Invention slotting is considered in other areas of game design, but those are not conventional balance considerations as most players use the word "balance."