Arcanaville

They started with Warcraft lore before WoW launched, and they have more people continuing to write lore than Paragon Studios would have in their entire building on take your child to work day.

I suggested this to Castle but he said it would take too much UI work.

They care about set balance, they just don't define it the way you do.

Ultimately, a lot of people have come thinking they could fix the game with a magic wand, and ultimately all of them give up disappointed often having altered basically nothing of the game. The players that ultimately end up making a difference are not those that believe they can fix the game, but those that believe they can improve the game, and are willing to do so over the long haul.

There is no reason why any player should subject themselves to doing that much work for so little return with so much uncertainty. Unless, of course, they want to.

There's a difference between evoking and emulating. An actual MMO cannot emulate comic book characters generally. That's why there are no controllers in comic books, no defenders, and no blasters. There are scrappers, but even there its just the best analog, not a particularly good analog.

As to them being weak rodeo clowns, the difference between a rodeo clown and a superpowered puncher is about ten thousand times larger than the difference between scrappers and tankers. Relative to your assertions about tankers as you perceive them, scrapper and tanker damage is essentially identical.

Also, NPCs are not tankers, blasters, or scrappers. They are minions, Lts, bosses, elite bosses, archvillains, or monsters. There's no such thing as an NPC tanker. Whether we call Statesman a tanker, a scrapper or a brute, his damage would be identical, because he's an archvillain class NPC in actual fact.

As to the first paragraph, you're only interested in comparing comics to the game when it suits you, but you then hand wave the mechanics when it doesn't. You don't get to decide how far to take the comparison. If things like combat levels all fall apart, then you cannot compare CoH combat to comic book combat at all. You can't say comic book characters do the same damage to "giant monsters" unless you're willing to prove all really big enemies in comic books mechanically work like giant monsters here. "Giant Monster" is NOT a critter class: Giant Monster is a Monster class in which combat modifiers have been turned off. Monsters have a level, and they do level scale. How do you know the monsters in comic books aren't Monsters, and not Giant Monsters? The difference isn't size.

The basic idea is that truth is a function of systems, not singular statements. Truth is determined by context. A statement can be true or false depending on the framework surrounding it. To prove an idea true or false requires bringing in other assumptions, which themselves could be true or false depending on other assumptions.

Its a short bus ride from being unable to determine the truth or falseness of a statement without resorting to exterior assumptions, to determining if a statement is contradictory without similarly bringing in other assumptions, each of which can be recursively challenged without limit.

When the writer says "everything I'm about to tell you is true" they could be an unreliable narrator. There's no way to declare the narrator as absolutely reliable without potentially unreliable narration.

In fact, since many stories specifically rely on unreliable narrators, you can never be certain if any particular story contains one.

Incidentally, the sentence "this sentence is false" is not necessarily a contradiction either. That's an English sentence, and whether it expresses a contradiction depends on what idea the writer attempted to express, because those words do not have a single universal definition in English. If the writer is using the word "false" to mean "not provably true" then the sentence expresses the idea "this sentence is not provably true." That sentence could be true but not provably true, or it could be false and not provably false, and neither meaning is a contradiction.

On the other hand he could have meant false to mean "provably false" in which case the sentence expresses "this sentence is provably false." In that case, its almost certainly false, just not provably so.

You have to be careful between constructing paradoxes in mathematical frameworks and attempting to prove them when uttered by human beings using a language without a singular formalized system for logical comprehension.

You do understand that the guaranteed damage from Nova today is scale 3.0, and the guaranteed damage from Nova in I24 is scale 4.0, correct? If you are concerned about guaranteed kills against *anything* I24 will *always* be better than I23, regardless of tactics. Since you mentioned certain kills except for misses, this is what Nova does with certainty today vs I24.

It only has a *chance* to do more damage today: 50% of the time it will do scale 4.5, and 37.5% of the time it will do scale 6.0. But 12.5% of the time, one out of eight, it only does scale 3.0. Tactics aren't the issue here, the expectation of a kill short of a miss is the issue here. I23 Nova only does an appreciably higher amount of damage than I24 Nova 37.5% of the time, about one in three firings. If you're concerned about average damage, I24 Nova does about 18% less damage than I23 Nova on average. But in terms of guaranteed kills, those averages don't matter. The minimum guaranteed damage of Nova matters. And that number is presumably getting universally higher in I24 for all nukes with damage waves based on developer statements.

And all those attacks start recharging slower, and you have even more gaps in the attack chain, and given how the recharge formula works your actual DPS over time will drop slightly.

No, you're missing the point. You still haven't given an example where the I23 nuke does what you say it does - kills bosses - and the I24 nuke would not. The difference is too small to matter in the situations you mention.

Today, you shoot up the boss and then pop Nova. Today, you only kill that boss *sometimes* unless you pump enough damage to *guarantee* that even if only the first wave hits Nova still kills him. And if you do, the I24 Nova will also kill him guaranteed.

If you don't, then its just possible that you will hit the boss with just enough damage that 87.5% of the time the I23 Nova will kill him while the I24 Nova will not. The odds of that happening are rather low: even if you were at the damage cap, the difference is about 150 points of damage on a target with 2570 health: its less than a single power bolt. Its only slightly higher than a single Brawl.

Now, if you're saying that you have this playstyle where you always shoot just the right amount of damage into the target such that the I23 Nova can kill it with two waves but the I24 Nova cannot at the damage cap, and you really really need to have the boss live at least one time in eight as opposed to shooting at the boss one more time before triggering Nova, then yes, your playstyle would be adversely affected by the I24 change.

But to be direct, I would want video proof that you can even tell that's happening. Its not possible to regulate your damage consistently on a target to within scale 0.5, since that's only a fraction of an attack. What sort of magic leprechaun do you have activating your attacks that this is even possible on a regular basis?

And no matter what, your assertion that your tactic can kill the boss with certainty except for the 5% chance of missing *proves* that the I24 Nova would do just as well, because the only way that statement is true is if you pump enough damage into the boss to allow a scale 3.0 attack to kill it, and I24 Nova will deal scale 4.0. Its mathematically impossible for you to be simultaneously telling the truth that your tactic works, and it won't work in I24.

Stop right there. Currently, toggles cost endurance. Currently, the game isn't designed around zero-cost toggles. But there's also no need for them to cost material end either. They could all cost 0.03 eps and still be detoggled by drain.

If melee had the right endurance burden before, didn't inherent fitness then cause that to break? Did it coincidentally fix a problem that just happened to be fixable with inherent fitness?

What if attacks just cost 5.5 end per scale instead of 5.2? 5.2 is a completely arbitrary number.

And there are other ways to differentiate archetypes in terms of their endurance management. Like, for example, giving all blasters almost unlimited endurance. Which is what they are going to get in I24 as part of Sustain.

Different defensive sets could still cost different amounts of endurance: the two biggest drains on endurance don't come from defensive toggles, they come from offensive damage auras and clicks. Dark Armor has below average defensive toggle costs. But its still considered a very high endurance costing set, for the obvious reason that Dark Regen costs a ton. Clicks are better endurance throttles, because as I said previously clicks actually present a real choice: each time you use me I will cost end, and deliver a certain benefit. That choice is blurry, if it exists at all, for defensive toggles.

Why would I want to roll an MA/MA scrapper?

Statistically speaking, in my experience pick up task forces tend to be far more efficient *and* far more enjoyable than pick up normal teaming specifically for the first two reasons. I haven't joined a pick up team in over a year that did not stop every mission for approximately as long as the mission itself takes. I can *solo* faster than most of the pickup teams I've been on. Which is ok, if I'm just relaxing and I'll literally read a book while the team goes and figures itself out. If I'm actually in play-the-game mode, I will join teams, and the first time they decide to pick their noses for ten minutes whoops, grandma died again, I have to log.

1. Defiance is meaningless. My calculations are for fully damage capped tier 9s.

2. The difference between the 87.5% chance of defeating a boss with the current tier 9 Nova and a 100% chance of defeating that same boss with the tactics you describe is scale 0.5 damage. Half of one blaster tier one attack. You're not going to notice the difference, except for the fact that in I24 the boss will be dead far more often than now.

Inferno can kill an even level boss at the damage cap if all waves hit.

Inferno damage first waves only (guaranteed): 1782.96
Inferno damage two waves: 2252.16
Inferno damage three waves: 2721.36

Inferno currently has only a 37.5% chance of killing a boss at the damage cap (at level 50). Slightly less, because the DoT has only a 99% chance of occurring and you need at least 8 of the 9 DoT ticks to kill that Boss. And the DoT is set to cancel on miss. (Meaning: the chances of defeating a boss by having all three Inferno waves hit and having at least the first eight DoT ticks land is about 34.6%: about one in three).

It is a bit better at lower levels since damage descales relative to critter health. The best possible result happens at level 32, albeit hitting a damage capped tier 9 at level 32 is problematic. At that level boss health is 1458.7 and Blaster scale 1.0 ranged damage is 48.03. It takes scale 6.07 damage at the cap to kill an even boss at level 32. Nova still can't do that (and neither can any tier 9 that does the same damage as Nova). Inferno can do that in theory by landing at least two waves and at least six DoT ticks (it can't do it with only the base wave). Your odds have improved to 82% chance of killing an even boss at level 32 at the damage cap with Inferno including the DoT (the boss will die about seven seconds after the initial activation of inferno).

And what nuke does that?

Edit: Absolute maximum Nova damage at the damage cap when all waves hit: 62.56 * 6 * 5.0 = 1876.8. Even level boss health at level 50: 2570.2.

Out of context that is a meaningless statement: Superman and Thor could be defenders and still punch harder than anything else in the Marvel Universe if they were high enough level above everyone else.

You cannot judge a comic book character by how much damage they deal or how much damage they can take alone. You shift my Blaster +20 and I will outtank any tanker. You shift my Defender +20 and my brawl will outhit Brute KO Blow. That's why I keep saying that the only valid comparisons to CoH have to look at a comic book character's offense relative to their own defense. CoH doesn't design or define characters in terms of how hard they can hit or how much damage they can take. When you get down to it, it comes down to modifiers. Modifiers say how an archetype performs on a relative basis: their combat level determines their absolute performance and combat level is something we really can't determine more than very generally for comic book characters, if at all.

If Superman is a level 100 character, then his punch will hit the hardest whether he was a tanker, brute, stalker, or scrapper. Or controller, defender, or mastermind for that matter.

The Saint of All Killers caught God away from the Throne Room and that evened the odds between them.

My vote goes to Azrael, aka the Death of Universes, from the Discworld novels.

I tried that but even if you do that, if the system idle logs you out the cookie alone seem unable to reauthenticate you, even though it contains all the auth information. I believe on log out the system is deleting not just the session id but also disallowing cookie reauth. At least that's what I see where I am: it seems different people are seeing different behavior for the forums.

As its not killing my posts as I try to post them nearly as often, my drive to fix the problem client-side is not as high as it was. If it starts acting up again rather than spend enormous amounts of time doing their work for them to find a solution, I'll just do what the web team does: I will take the path of least resistance. For me, anyway.

The first two questions, by the definitions given, are three and four. The second two are harder to answer: I'll incarnate things as I get to them. I have every intention of slowly developing incarnate status for about half a dozen characters, but it was only last week when I decided to add a character to that list: my Katana/Invuln. There's also a few characters I'm on the fence on, but I do know I'll never fully incarnate out all my alts. But I see no point in making decisions far in advance of when I'll have the opportunity to do something about it.

To me, calling all enhanced mode based mechanics "pushing stack level things" is like calling all buffs, debuffs, procs, and expression effects in damaging attacks "pushing secondary effect things." This set has knockback, that set has tohit buff, the other set has drain - why can't they make a set that just does one single tick of damage and nothing else?

The serious answer is that we have sets without enhanced mechanics. Now that the enhanced mechanics are available, the devs will use them whereas before they could not. New sets will do things the old sets did not. The devs are not going to replicate the mechanics, or the lack of mechanics, of older sets. That should be obvious.

That *was* true. Its not true any more because recovery is fungible. The moment the devs decided to ask themselves how much net recovery we should have, and then tried to give that to us (with global endurance cost reductions, and then inherent fitness) they made the question of managing endurance costs *of toggles specifically* basically moot, because toggle costs are constant and roughly similar across powersets.

Also, the devs made a design move that may look on the surface to support this design theory but actually shatters it. Willpower was originally conceived to be a passive-only set. That idea was eventually vetoed because of objections about a defensive set actually having to have toggles and actually supporting the passive/toggle pseudo-balance.

But when Castle was allowed to add quick recovery to the set with the specific intent of directly offsetting the cost of the toggles the fact that decision was supported completely destroys the idea of toggles being an endurance management metagame. Because Castle was allowed to eliminate the metagame in one way but not the other. And that means the meta game itself is not important. What was important was a stand-alone principle about the strength and cost relationship between toggles and passives.

Note: I'm specifically talking about primary and secondary defensive set toggles. Those are the toggles designed within a set intended for the entire set to have a particular set strength. This does not include things like power pool toggles which are optional toggles open to all players and have not been balanced as part of a defensive set. Whether Acrobatics or Weave should have endurance costs is a completely separate question (and the answer is yes, they should).

Defensive toggles and clicks are fundamentally different from a game design perspective because in City of Heroes, defensive toggles are up all the time: their endurance costs are fixed and can be normalized against. Clicks have variable usage and can more properly be said to scale effectiveness and endurance cost based on usage. You cannot use a toggle more and get more benefit at higher endurance cost: that capability is incompatible with toggle mechanics short of toggle management, which as I said is for defensive toggles no longer a relevant balancing context.

I'm more interested in meeting the person who invented the elevator on Primal Earth. Because whatever that box with the doors does in Paragon City, it functions like no elevator in our world.

If you want to spark discussion, post on the forums. The devs do read the forums, but their primary purpose is to allow players to discuss things with other players. Its not even a mandatory requirement that all developers have red names or forum accounts.

But if you want a personal response from a dev, you should PM your suggestion to the devs: preferably a dev that actually works on whatever area your suggestion refers to. They may respond, they may not always be able to respond, but your chances of actually getting a response are about a hundred times higher if you actually ask a dev politely for a response directly.

That assumption has been contradicted by pretty much everyone in a position to determine whether level shifts are added to the incarnate system.

Edit: unless by "more" you mean "one."

Looking at it in terms of cost is the problem. The difference between toggles and passives is that toggles can be turned off. But that can happen in two ways. The player can turn them off, and they can be detoggled by enemy action.

Question: do we design defensive sets on the presumption players will have random toggles turned off, or do we design them on the assumption their performance is balanced relative to the player turning everything on?

If you say we're balancing on the assumption the player turns everything on, and you *also* say we're going to give things costs that will force the player to choose what to run, you're on dangerous ground. You've just made your job a hundred times harder to balance things credibly. Fortunately, the players helped the devs out here. Most don't toggle manage.

Of theoretically greater importance is enemy detoggling. But for detoggling to be a viable in-game event the effects of detoggling must be controlled and within certain reasonable parameters. Its not because the vast majority of defensive strength in defensive sets is in the toggles. Detoggling is very close to taking your defensive set away completely. In fact, the devs have already started hedging detoggling: defensive toggles no longer genuinely detoggle on mez, they just suppress most - but not even all - of their effects.

How much defensive power should we allow critters to strip away through the act of detoggling. 50%? 25%? 10%? Its vastly more than that, because of the need for toggles to be stronger than passives, and then cost more.

Suppose we had a defensive set with just one passive and just one toggle. The passive offered 50% resistance to all. The toggle offered 15% resistance to all.

Crazy, right? That just doesn't make any sense. The passive is superior in every way: the player would be crazy to not take the passive over the toggle.

Except: we don't offer the player that choice exactly. Yes, the player will use their first power choice to take the passive. That's obvious. The question is what does the player do with their *second* power choice. They can choose to take the toggle to supplement their resistances, or not. They *don't* have the choice to take another passive and avoid the toggle.

In this game, some players will be running around with 50% res, and the rest with 65% res. A detoggle event will increase incoming damage by 50%, and decrease survivability down to the level of the former. The former is immune to detoggle events.

Now reverse those numbers. Some players will still be running around with 50% res - those who take the toggle - and some with 65% - those that take both. Theoretically some will have 15% - those that take only the passive - but we know that's not really going to happen and the powerset isn't balanced for that choice anyway: its exceptionally weak. Detoggling in the second case drops resistance from 65% to 15%: its a net increase in damage of 143%. It drops resistance from 50% to 0% in the first case, an increase in damage of 100%.

The choices offered here are qualitatively worse. You get the same strength for both versions of the set if you take everything. But detoggle events are easier to manage in the first version. And the options other than take everything are better in the first version. You can get a credible amount of protection with the passive-only choice. That's not true in the second version. But the toggle is still worth a lot in the first version: it increases survivable damage by 50%. In the second option the toggle-only choice is almost quixotic and the passive-only option is almost meaningless.

Once you start thinking about the passives as being the "base" strength of the set, and the toggles as being the "optional" part, the question of how strong they should each be and what they should cost has less to do with comparing them to each other, and more to do with seeing what each contributes to the powerset as a whole. Passives are always on. Toggles are not always on. That's the only important difference between the two, and its upon that mechanical distinction that the question of what each means to a defensive powerset should be determined. Comparing them to each other is like comparing power bolt to rain of fire.