Arcanaville

Assuming no regeneration, the right column is the effective damage buff when the average attack hits for a percentage of total health equal to the left column. Notice that between 10% per hit and 24% per hit its between 5 and 17%, averaging about 12%. That's actually closer to my guestimate for scourge's true average benefit under normal gaming conditions (my guestimate prior to today was about 15%). Notice also that once you start hitting for more than about a third of total health scourge stops doing anything. That's because you have to get at least two hits below 50% for scourge to do anything: if you only deal one hit below 50% scourge has no future hit to buff. (Note also that hitting for exactly precisely 25% of total health with no regeneration factored in is a special edge case).

This is a monte carlo version of the analysis Starsman mentions above, and generates somewhat different results. The analysis code is pretty straight forward:

(python 2.x)

With 1,000,000 trials per case, the estimates appear to be accurate to one part in a thousand.


** Highlighted by the fight with Tyrant in the Magisterium trial, where peculiar mechanics makes the exact opposite thing usually happen.

Go to your room.

According to Arbiter Hawk, the heal (relative to melee Energize) is being lowered, but the +regen is being improved (I presume by being increased in uptime to make it easily perma and probably increased in magnitude to make it plus the heal competitive with the other sustain toggles).

I already know my I24 Nova recharge is going to be about 40 seconds. But BU+Aim+Nova+Burnout+BU+Aim+Nova is living the dream.

Conserve Power is becoming an Energize variant, with different numbers for heal and regen, but with most likely a better uptime (the intent is for the buffs to be easily perma).

My preliminary I24 Energy/Energy build has Burnout.

I've been saying Energy looks to be the overall winner in I24 buffs from the beginning, but I don't think the gap is as large as you think it is. For one thing, the conserve power effect in Energy is going to be partially offset by recovery buffs in the sustain toggles. For example, Field Operative was showing effectively +92% recovery in the stream demo (1.53%/sec recovery). That's not *quite* as good as a very strong conserve power (although we don't know the Energize numbers yet) but its really really good: even if that's a slotted number its twice as strong as slotted stamina.

The reason they are called sustain powers is that Arbiter Hawk wanted Blasters to still be vulnerable to bursts of damage, but outside of that he wanted them to be the energizer bunny: go and go and go.

I keep forgetting how lazy we are: I probably need to make it into an animated gif.

And I put actual effort into that: I didn't just add two words to the alien guy's face or google a picture of a cat. I have to get some sort of return on investment there or I won't be able to write off the time.

Don't blame me if you're crazy enough to get into this industry; I'm not taking the fall for that one.

I have often volunteered to be the anti-Zwillinger. My title would be "Community Mismanager" and my job would be to give everyone asking for a red name response the specific response they deserved at that moment.

Positron vetoed the idea, because he's thinking he can get at least 25000 paragon points selling the position in the Paragon Store.

Does this count?

Really only SR can "stop" cascade failure in most cases. Shields is only up there because the devs haven't gotten around to fixing Active Defense yet (or at least I don't remember that getting fixed). At 52% DDR or so things get hazy: its certainly better than nothing and its strong resistance in a relative sense, but it won't really "stop" cascade failure because the debuffs will still hit too hard to prevent coming rapidly off the floor. It'll slow it down a bit but you're likely to be popping lucks periodically to stave off cascading downward.

So you're limiting yourself to Shield and SR tankers?

Historically, I do not believe XP multipliers have ever stacked with double XP events. I would assume they would not unless the devs explicitly stated otherwise.

I thought so too, but this is a really tough room.

36% chance to avoid two ticks in a row. 21.6% chance to avoid three. 13% chance to avoid four. 7.8% chance to avoid five. 4.7% chance to avoid six, which is now below the 5% minimum chance to avoid getting hit by powers that normally require a tohit roll (Bonfire is autohit).

It would be nice if they had no target cap and I could fx-effect kill my client while cackling like a maniac (ah, demon room memories).

Probably not likely to happen, though. The target cap, not the cackling; that's still going to happen for other reasons.

Some people are not ready for the internet. Some people will never be ready for the internet. Some people don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything; sell anything bought or processed, buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

You know, as a career.

In fact FA at its target cap will have roughly the same damage over time as I24 Nova at its target cap for reasonable levels of recharge.

The current formula arbitrarily normalizes damage above scale 0.36 (incidentally, the formula predicts brawl should have zero recharge) and arbitrarily picks 6.25 as the damage to recharge ratio.

It may be arbitrary, but it might not be arbitraily arbitrary. 25% (and its -20% inverse) come up a lot when it comes to special case alternatives. Its comparable to the accuracy penalty for AoE mezzes, the (original) arbitrary bonus given to Claws. Many such adjustment factors live between 20% and 50%, and cluster around 25% and 50%.

There's also a curious coincidence to scale 4.0 damage that may be a coincidence, but it may also have some numerical hook to the devs thinking. Scale 4 is almost exactly what Nova should do *if* it expended all your endurance in one blast: its the *maximum* damage you should ever be able to do in effect. 100/5.2/4.75 = 4.05.

In actual fact I24 Nova was shown to cost 27.72 end in the stream. Assuming that's unslotted and not discounted, another odd coincidence is that the current cost of Nova, 20.8, is what a scale 4.0 single target attack would cost. 27.72 is almost exactly 33% higher than what a scale 4.0 single target attack would cost.

So one way to describe I24 Nova is that it does the maximum damage that endurance would allow, coincidentally also what Nova should do today if it was a single target attack obeying its non-crash endurance cost, but it now costs 33% more than what a single target attack would cost, and recharges 25% slower than a comparable AoE would cost.

The numbers may seem arbitrary, but there does seem to be a train of thought to it. And there is an inverse relationship to 33% and 25% whether its strictly numerically appropriate in this case (1/1.33 = 0.75 = 1-0.25: 33% and 25% are dual inverses of each other).

Four years ago I would have been sure this was a coincidence. Today I'm not so sure, particularly because feels like something Arbiter Hawk might have done if he was looking at it (Synapse is less chatty about how he thinks about numbers, although I know he thinks about them).

If I recall correctly Synapse stated in the stream that for ultrahigh damage powers like the nukes, they couldn't use the standard formula because it generates unpalatable results, but they didn't want to just arbitrarily remove crashes, so they made a new formula that in net terms roughly increases recharge by some percentage relative to what the standard formula would predict for nuke-like powers, which I think is about 25% (he might have said offhandedly 50%, but the numbers suggest 25%).

It sounds efficient, but I don't think I have the heart to do that to my Nova. To me, its just not the same if wriggling feet aren't sticking out of walls in all directions.