Jade_Dragon

Forum Cartel
  • Posts

    2627
  • Joined

  1. [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    Finally if RIP sets weren't intended to make pets attack faster how was adding them to the game exasperating the problem?
    "but then we introduced the Recharge Intensive Pet IO Sets and suddenly HUGE amounts of Recharge were available to certain pets." Castle

    something is not adding up here.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    It was exasperating the problem because they were not *intended* to boost the Recharge of pets' powers, but they *did* - contrary to the devs' intent.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    It seems to me that "Recharge Intensive Pet Sets" were meant to be slotted in pets that are "Recharge Intensive". That is, pet summons that take a considerable amount of time to recharge, and for which it is to the player's advantage to slot recharge. To faster SUMMON the pet.

    Without the RIP sets, you are forced to slot Recharge separately, since normal Pet Damage sets don't provide Recharge.

    And the word you are looking for is "exacerbating". "To make more violent, bitter, or severe."
  2. [ QUOTE ]
    And they have mentioned that, without doing a huge rebuild of various systems, the only other way to have it really work right would increase the CPU usage of ALL powers, pet and player alike, by 50%.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    And you realize, of course, that this so-called "better solution" would have the EXACT SAME EFFECT that the current solution does. You would no longer be able to slot Recharge in powers that do not take Recharge, and Recharge would not be passed on to pets. So LS's behavior would still be exactly the same as what everyone is complaining about.

    The only thing this would "fix" is that targettable pets would still be buffable, but no one complaining about LS is complaining about that. (That's a totally separate issue)
  3. [ QUOTE ]
    MMs have a lot of thorny balance issues like that though. For example: Having a red pill in the tray is worth less as it will only buff the damage of one of your pets if you use it, not all of the damage you are doing.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    I agree. Comparing MMs to other ATs is a little difficult, as there are major differences in the way they play. Just for starters, Mastermind henchmen are capable of using attacks while other henchmen are still animating theirs. This is true of all pet users, but since Masterminds essentially ARE nothing but pets, for damage dealing purposes, the difference is exaggerated.

    I tried to make a comparison between a Mastermind and a Blaster at the levels between 1 and 50 and found it was very hard. First of all, a Blaster's damage rises quickly as he gains more attacks and then levels off as his attack chain becomes saturated. Masterminds actually LOSE proportional damage as they level, reaching a very frustrating minimum at around level 22, and then their damage skyrockets at 32. This is typical of a Controller's damage curve, probably.
  4. [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    Castle himself said that being able to slot multiple type Enhancements in a power that doesn't take them is a "bug" and that it remains that way only because the fix is unacceptable. I wouldn't make the assumption that no other solution is ever going to come along.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Wait... It's a bug that I can slot three of a set, that say gives me:
    dmg
    dmg/acc
    dmg/acc/end


    [/ QUOTE ]

    It is a bug if that power does not TAKE Acc or End Enhancements. (I'm guessing it has to take Dmg, or it wouldn't take those particular IOs)

    Or to be more precise, it is a bug if the power is effected by those Enhancement types that it doesn't take. It should be able to slot them, but the Acc and End just won't have any effect. (And obviously, if the power is autohit or costs 0 end it won't have an effect. The problem is if the effect is being disallowed for some reason, but if slotted it takes effect)
  5. [ QUOTE ]
    *If recharge was never meant to boost a power like LS all they had to do was change it from using lightning bolt with cast+rech, to lightning bolt with activate period = 5 seconds akin to something like bonfire with an activate period of 2 sec.

    The question is "why" it wasn't done?

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Because you're way smarter than a dev, obviously.

    (And honestly, had I thought of it and been coding the game, that's exactly how I would have done it. Although Blizzard is an AoE, so the fact that the Lighting is selecting individual targets might have an impact. Still, cool idea)
  6. [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]


    Slotting for damage in an typical attack power ups both the DPS and DPE
    Slotting for endrec keeps DPS constant and ups the DPE
    Slotting for recharge keeps DPE constant and ups the DPS (though the amount is not consistent and depends upon attack chains etc)

    The bug of allowing recharge to affect the pets powers means that recharge slotting (through these partial rehcrage IOs) is upping both DPS and DPE.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    But pets don't benefit from global recharge reduction. We need to specifically put -recharge in pet power.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    And that is why.

    If something is specifically designed to give a pet -recharge (and that's won't be possible any more, unfortunately) then that's fine, because it doesn't effect the caster -recharge. If a pet is hit by a -recharge buff (and that won't be possible any more either) that's really the same, as if the caster happens to be hit by the same buff, he's still a separate individual.

    Any time you get both the caster's recharge AND the pet's recharge, though, you get this multiplication. If you get only the caster recharge and the pet is left alone, that's fine, and if you get only the pet's recharge and the caster is left alone, that's fine. One or the other, but not both.
  7. [ QUOTE ]
    I don't mean, work around them getting the enhance multiple effects carried through to their attacks...

    [/ QUOTE ]

    I don't either. Castle himself said that being able to slot multiple type Enhancements in a power that doesn't take them is a "bug" and that it remains that way only because the fix is unacceptable. I wouldn't make the assumption that no other solution is ever going to come along.
  8. [ QUOTE ]
    Opp. I forgot about. I thought VS wasn't grouped with them.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    What's wierd about VS is that even though according to CoD it is perma out of the box (60s recharge, 60s duration) I constantly see it disappear a short time before it recharges. And I might even have a Recharge enhancement in it, I'm not sure whether I do or not.

    Clearly it should not take Recharge if it does take longer to recharge than its duration, can't have multiples, AND can't have its own recharge buffed. Hopefully that's something that will be looked at.

    I'll also add that the long duration pets that cannot have multiples became long duration when that feature was added. Previously they had durations, which is why they could be stacked, but you couldn't just keep summoning them infinitely. I'm guessing that for whatever reason, Dark Servant, Phantom Army and VS (plus whatever other Controller pets with durations were effected) were given the same treatment.
  9. [ QUOTE ]
    Dropping RIP sets of course... One can work around not having them with other slotting options. I can't work around not being able to take advantage of some of my better secondary powers on those pets.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Well, I guess another possibility would be only to lock the recharge of psuedo-pets, and leave it alone for the unlimited duration pets, like MM henchmen.

    Note also that if you can "work around" the problem, likely the devs will continue to try to find ways to stop you from working around it. Just removing RIP sets doesn't mean other sets wouldn't get the tweaking treatment.
  10. [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    Rechage still makes since as you can get multiples out. Most people don't bother with the power or just 4 slotting is an leave it be.



    [/ QUOTE ]

    No. You can't.

    Controller Pets, Dark Miasma/Dark Servant and Electrical Blast/Voltaic Sentinel can no longer 'stack'.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    This does not apply to ALL pets. In fact, it does not, in general, apply to pets that don't already have an unlimited duration. It does not apply to Lightning Storm, Tornado, Gun Drone, Burn, Extracted Essense, and so forth. In general, it does not apply to any pseudo-pet. (A pet which cannot be targetted) (Can multiple Spectral Terrors be summoned?)

    Dark Servant and Phantom Army have a recharge time longer than their duration, much longer in the case of Masterminds, so you still have the benefit of summoning them more often. That leaves Voltaic Sentinel. Which, honestly, is just a little wierd. I don't know what the thought is there, but quite a few folks have said it needs a longer duration, and maybe a longer than the duration recharge to go along with that.
  11. [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    they can't leave things as they are.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Hmm, can't they? I think that's really a matter of opinion.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Yeah, but it's their opinion, so unfortunately it carries more weight than the rest of us. They are also getting paid for it and encouraging sales of it, which despite all the threats to quit over this, seems to make them lean towards continuing to fix issues they see as a problem.

    Note that the devs HAVE NOT left this problem alone, they have been constantly breaking the RIP sets trying to get them to work around this known bug. They can't just "leave it as it is", they will continue to try to come up with a solution until they either do finally find one (which they seem to be saying they have) or they drop RIP sets from the game entirely.

    Which do you prefer?
  12. [ QUOTE ]
    EE's are odd little things, and inherit some but not all buffs from the caster. They will inherit things like Hasten, SB, and the Mires, but not Eclipse or other +def/+res shields.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Hm. I wonder if the buffs can be categorized as "offensive" or "defensive", and if that's how they tell them apart. If so, +recharge might be considered an offensive buff since it increases your damage, and thus it's considered the same as a damage or accuracy buff power.

    It would be interesting to find a power that has both a damage, to hit or recharge buff, which we know is inherited, and the some other property which doesn't seem to be inherited, like defense, and see if it is applied. I actually thought Eclipse was both a Resistance and Damage buff... (not sure why, really)
  13. [ QUOTE ]
    Being able to buff the attack speed of an imp or stoney or MM pet is not unbalancing in the least (bugged though apparently for some of them due to poor ai programming). The only way it would be is if you could still stack multiple instances of them like the old days.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    In most cases, I'm dropping the "psuedo", and just saying "pet" where it's clear from the context which I mean.

    I must admit I didn't realize Fire Imps and the like have infinite duration, however (or near-infinite, you know what I mean) so I may have applied the logic there when it does not apply. On the other hand, having slotted Recharge apply to the recharge time of Phantom Army, and apply to the attack rate of Phantasm is inconsistent, and likely to cause confusion.

    At the very least, you have less time to wait before you can resummon a pet when the last gets killed, although that is so variable it can't be determines as a damage multiplier. And if you did slot Recharge and expect it to increase your pet's damage rate, I would argue you should NOT expect it to decrease your summoning time too.

    It is important to add, though, that true pets should NEVER inherit the attributes of their parent. Stoney should not be buffed because someone hit you with an AM, he should be buffed if HE is hit with an AM. So the Inheritance mechanism should still be blocked.

    That leaves external buffs, and again, while I'm all for that, it seems it ended up being sacrificed for the AI. The pseudo-pets are because you shouldn't be able to buff recharge, the true pets are because recharge buffs bork the AI. It's ugly, it's not fair, but there it is.

    (And you've also introduced a third category of pet to the mix, which MM henchmen are part of. There are psuedo-pets, true pets of limited duration, and pets of unlimited duration. Note the second set, PA being a good example, while they aren't pseudo pets, still get maximum benefit out of recharge)
  14. [ QUOTE ]
    The bug of allowing recharge to affect the pets powers means that recharge slotting (through these partial rehcrage IOs) is upping both DPS and DPE.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Well, that and it's doubling it yet again.

    Base damage: 100%
    3 slotted for damage: 200%
    Pet fires twice as often: 400%
    Pet summoned twice as often: 800%.

    Yeah. Mind you, in many cases the pet firing twice as often runs up against the limit of attack chains and animation time, as with a player with high recharge. There is also a pause introduced by the AI, which further limits how fast a pet can fire. My own testing with recharge, in fact, showed that MM henchmen didn't really get that much of a bonus from it, due to the number of attacks they have. The main place the bonus comes into play is high damage attacks recharging more often, and if the AI is usually only designed to give preference to one or two attacks that way.

    On the other hand, if you've for a pet with only one attack, and it has a fairly slow fire rate, you're going to get very close to 200% damage out of it. (And MM's without their henchmen upgraded can do this, too)
  15. [ QUOTE ]
    As I recall from the discussions with the devs, the code basically just cloned all of the current buffs (types, magnitudes and durations) of the player onto the summoned entity. That was to allow powers like Burn and Blizzard to buffable like other non-summoned entity attacks like Nova.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Actually, that makes a lot of sense. They can't just turn to the bufffs and say, "Hey, are you a damage buff? A recharge buff, maybe?"

    This would seem to suggest that yes, Lightning Storm and Burn and Blizzard and all the rest of them, if targetted, would have whatever defense buffs the player had on them.

    Ooo, Extracted Essense can be buffed? It's targettable, isn't it? So it would be interesting to see if it inherits the defense buffs. (They wouldn't last long, though, the WS shields tick every 0.75 seconds. Do an Eclipse, though, and then Extract... )
  16. [ QUOTE ]
    If no pet powers can be affected by recharge buffs, does that mean that all pet powers were balanced by this when they were designed? Powers available to players can enhance effect (damage, heal, mez, etc) and recharge. Simply enhancing both by +100% yields a theoretical 300% increase in effectiveness. If we no longer allow the recharge to be there, the increase can only be 100%.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    You will be able to summon the pet twice as often. So +300% effectiveness. (A total effectiveness of 400%, since the recharge stacks with the damage)

    MM henchmen excepted. (Unfortunately)
  17. [ QUOTE ]
    so is anything being done to rectify the nerf by proxy effect on power sets such as cold domination, ice melee, ice blast, ect... who's MAIN form of midigation IS -recharge debuff ???

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Most enemy pets will NOT be immune to debuff.

    This only effects player pets and those pets critters summon that are identical to player pets. (So you might want to be more cautious than usual when running a mission in the MA)
  18. [ QUOTE ]
    Based on discussions at the time, I was pretty sure they gave them "buff" inheritance. Primarily they were interested in damage and toHit, for things like Ice Storm or RoF. Doing that by letting everything through was probably just the shortest path to the goal.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Makes me wonder if psuedo-pets inherit the defense and resistance of their parent as well.

    If so, then it is probably hidden by making all such pets intangible and unable to be attacked, thus defense is irrelevant to them.

    It seems more logical to copy over damage, accuracy, maybe end recovery as well, but maybe it is an all or nothing thing. You clone a parent, and its attributes are just duplicated.
  19. [ QUOTE ]
    BTW, somewhere during all these exchanges my caffine has kicked in. I hope my earlier posts did not seem excessively cranky....

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Possibly, but after a few moments I picked up on your actual tone.

    And while the SoW point is a valid one, it's also kind of funny. Heck, I'm not even sure I'm right, but I thought it was likely enough that I didn't need my usual "I think this is the way it is" disclaimer.

    New code, though, that the devs have even promised they will avoid using. Now THAT is funny...
  20. [ QUOTE ]
    At first, I thought that the nerf to Lightning Storm and the others was an unforeseen consequence of fixing Pet AI, and so I was hoping the Devs might compensate by increasing Lightning Storm's base striking frequency. Then came Castle's post. So while this may be therapeutic to post, it will have zero effect on anything.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    It's not actually necessary to be quite so pessimistic. While Lightning Storm and Voltaic Sentinel may not be the strongest powers in the world, the ability to effectively square the effectiveness of Recharge put in them (whether IOs or not) may have contributed to data that exaggerates their usefulness. So if any pets NEED a buff, it will be after this change that such a need will come out.

    In other words, the devs didn't fix this issue because it would have been a problem to fix, and thus they left it alone as "okay". However, they didn't buff those powers either, except for a couple of changes to VS very recently. Now that the ability to leverage recharge for these pets is gone, they can work on buffing the pets so they are more attractive.

    Personally, I feel VS is just fine as it is, it was great when leveraged, and I felt it was fine just using it as I did. Lightning Storm I can't say, but instead of making it deal more damage, I would like to see it drop a massive debuff in the area of the storm, which will give it a constant effect independent of the occasional lightning strikes. Honestly, I thought that's what it always did, I'm actually shocked it's nothing but a damage pet with some minor control powers. It's doesn't seem to me like what a "storm" should be able to do for you.
  21. [ QUOTE ]
    However, I believe the LS Pet power Lightning could be flagged as unenhanceble for recharge (ala SOW), which is what it sounds like they just did. (My understanding is that with the current change, LS still inherits the +recharge buffs, but the buff does not affect LS's powers.)

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Ahem. The SoW flag was added for SoW. It didn't exist before then.

    OMG!!! First post after a redname!!!

    Hm. I don't think it's my first though.
  22. [ QUOTE ]
    If this change goes thru as is with no further tweaks to pets its just going to open the door for them to start lying to us again like how Jack did in the old days.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Wait, which is better, being up front and telling us exactly why they made the change, even if it appears to disagree with previous design philosophy, or sticking to the version that was posted in the patch notes?

    It seems to me the "lie" here is either Castle didn't work on Issue 7, therefore he doesn't know what the heck their "vision" was or was not, or the so-called "intended behavior" was a bug that slipped past QA. Damage can be passed on to summoned pets, accuracy can be passed on to summoned pets, who's going to put a lot of effort into checking that recharge is NOT?
  23. [ QUOTE ]
    Sneaky you, you edited in the quote from Castle after I went looking for it myself!

    [/ QUOTE ]

    I'm sorry, I intended to imply that I would go get the quote, then edit my post. I decided while writing it I wanted to quote it, but didn't have it available to copy. Sorry.

    [ QUOTE ]
    And while I do believe the devs are a great team who do fantastic work, a small voice in the back of my head screams at me to go study the code and find a better solution.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Oh, been there, done that. The only reason I'm not as active as Arcanaville is I can't seem to find the time.
  24. [ QUOTE ]
    Its called you just delete the part of the code that applies to recharge. If they can put it in they sure as hell can delete it. They could have just as easily done the fix and said pets inherrent just damage, accuracy buffs and not even include recharge in the listing at all.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Keep in mind that we don't know what code can be easily changed and what is currently "off limits" except in cases of emergency. A lot of what the devs do is editing tables and scripts. This change, for instance, is just a bunch of flags on the powers in the game's data files. No code is being changed to make this happen.

    Probably, recharge should never have been inherited in the first place. It was coded that way, and then the devs went around afterwards and added a bunch of scripts after the fact that goes back on what was code. It's bad, and it's ugly, and it's a kludge, but it's what these people do. They do it all the time, every day, in every release. At times, they are no happier with the code they've inherited than we are.

    Would it be cool if they went in and removed the recharge from the inheritance? Yeah, same as the change that was suggested would increase the lag, if that could be made to not be so bad. That's likely a code change, too. On the other hand, would such a change take a lot longer than I14? Oh, yeah...
  25. [ QUOTE ]
    Lightning Storm could have been fixed very simply at any time since I7, by making the changes on the power that were just made (and are not yet made to Defender LS).

    [/ QUOTE ]

    1) The devs may have considered it unacceptable to make such a change to only one, specific power.

    2) The devs may have considered it unacceptable to make that change globally to all pet powers, until they realized it would also help with the AI problem. In other words, the solution was considered as bad (possibly in a good way, in that it would prevent pets from being debuffed) as introducing the lag.

    Personally, though, I feel that it probably would have been correct to just make all psuedo-pets (not pets) immune to any kind of recharge. Not that that should be needed if they prevent it every other way, but again, psuedo-pets don't need to fire faster because their caster fires faster, the caster is able to fire the pseudo-pet faster.

    That solution may not have been thought of, though, or just believed to be heavy handed. (Kind of like when you set a test in code for a condition you know should always be true, you only double check because if there's a bug in your code you don't want to crash the system)