Liquid

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Yes, Wet Ice and Energy Absorption provide relatively small DEF buffs. This is not a bug and by design. Wet Ice provides a base defense of +.5%; Energy Absorption provides the same buff for every foe within melee range (up to a maximum of 14 targets).

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Wow. I'm really shocked to see this as "working as intended" and not a bug.

0.5% is not a bonus, it is less than the typical margin of error encountered when testing the base accuracy of minions against a completely unbuffed hero. The idea that an SO enhancement in such a power would provide a 0.1% bonus... wow.

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One shotting by AV's. In a word, you are ALL correct. It's not a good thing for an Ice Tanker to be leveled by a single blow. So we're going back and changing the damage done by AV's so that it's no longer possible for a Tanker to be one shotted.


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This is great news, thanks for listening to us.

Please, instead of just lowering all AV damage by X%, could you consider taking a look at each AV and evaluating them on their own? Some actually need to be boosted in number of melee attacks (but not base damage). Examples would be Nemesis and Terra.

Please do tell your brother thank you from those of us here who respect the sacrifices he makes for our country.

By the way, I didn't find your response insulting.

I did find it confusing, as the spawn he described is far smaller than most 5-6 person mission spawns.

Edit: and yes, I appreciate what you say NOT being filtered through PR.

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Glue Arrow: Reduced Duration of Glue Arrow from 45 seconds to 30 second and Increased Recharge time from 20 seconds to 120 seconds to prevent multiple stacking.

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Once again...

I blame Hasten.

New badges are good!

Admittedly, I haven't had time to test these changes, but they look great on paper.

Boosting Blasters was necessary, but I'm not sure this helped them, survival wise. As someone pointed out earlier, It's not often that a blaster below 40% is alive long enough to fire again at higher levels. Also, I think that at such a point, accuracy might be as important as damage. A friend suggested halving the damage boost, and giving an acc boost in its place.

Also, this encourages Blasters to tell people not to heal them, and to rush into combat before the Tanks. This isn't exactly going to help their survival either.

Anyway, I'm sure it's helpful at times, but they probably could have used some defense instead.

I really enjoyed this set, except for the sounds, which really should be the most important part of a sonic set.

Please consider giving the females more feminine sounding effects. The second attack sounds like they used the male Tarzan sound and raised it an octave or two. Do that with the female Tarzan sound, for example, for the female version, and that power would be set.

Similarly, the Howl doesn't quite sound right coming from a person's mouth, nor does it sound particularly harmful. The character animation brought an opera singer to mind, perhaps you might consider a sound similar to the end of a particular Looney Tunes episode, where Bugs Bunny forces an opera singer to maintain a single note that winds up bringing the auditorium down on his head. Obviously the female sound would be more feminine sounding (and likely higher pitched). Try not to dwell on the fact that it comes from Looney Tunes, the sound was very professional.

This is, of course, entirely subjective, and may not be liked by most people either. I just feel the wolf howl is very out of place.

The graphic effects are perfect, I feel, and most of the animations are satisfactory, or great (I really like the Howl animation itself).

This set was VERY fun, and gave the feel of a comic book archery superhero.

I do have a few complaints, and one bug to report:

First, as I said in the Archery response thread, females with bows out run like men, just like the Katana set, but NOT like AR, Broadsword, or any other weapon set. This has kept me away from the Katana set, and will keep me away from the Bow set as well.

Second, the Entangling Arrow is pretty useless when compared to the Ice Arrow. This is the only Defender set I know of that has a redundant first level power, and it is also the only Defender set I know of that has a single target immobilize. This power might be something people would consider if it had a small AoE or a significant debuff of some sort (does it have a recharge debuff? I forgot to check and am at work).

Third, if you jump and fire Ice Arrow (it may happen with others as well) in mid air, but are out of range, it will go through a firing animation, but not fire the arrow.

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If you have 40% Lethal defense, and 20% fire defense, and are hit by a fire/lethal attack, you get the higher of the two applied: you get 40% defense, even if the attack is 99% fire damage and 1% lethal.

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I'm not sure this is really a logical way for it to be dealt with in the first place. At least I survived 32 levels with prestacking rock armor by itself for this very reason.



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Typed defense in itself isn't something I have an easy time explaining anyway. I think SR's method of handling defense is great.

Honestly, I wish they'd stayed away from the D&D style of "defense", where armor makes you harder to hit. It's especially odd to mix it with resistance. I have an Invuln Tanker friend that won't take Tough Hide or Invincibility because she doesn't want her character to be "dodgy".

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First of all, 40% resistance is equal to 20% defense, not 40% defense. The ratio is 2:1.

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I know. I didn't want to confuse him any further with the explanation for that. But thanks for preventing anyone else from suggesting that defense is too powerful. Indeed, many people would say it was the opposite:

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If this screws Ice Tankers then put this energy into looking for ways of fixing Ice Tankers, not wishing for the broken mechanics back.

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Yes. Ice Tankers getting a defense boost, or resistance added to the set is the right way to respond to this, not to ask for it to be impossible for Frozen Fists to hit a bubbled Rikti Drone again.

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The way I see the problem is resists do stack, defense now does not.

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If you have 40% Lethal defense, and 20% fire defense, and are hit by a fire/lethal attack, you get the higher of the two applied: you get 40% defense, even if the attack is 99% fire damage and 1% lethal.

If you have 40% lethal resistance and 20% fire resistance... Each component is modified by the appropriate amount.

Fire Sword is 62.12% fire. If you get hit for a 100 damage fire sword attack from an even con minion, the defense character mentioned has a 10% chance to get hit-- therefore taking 10% damage over time, which averages to 10 damage per attack.

The resistance character has a 40% resistance to 37.88 damage, and a 20% resistance to 62.12 damage. When he gets hit, he takes .6 * 37.88 + .8 * 62.12 = 72.42 damage.

He also has a 50% chance to get hit, so he takes half of that over time, or 36.212 damage per attack.

So, the resistance character is taking 3.6 times the damage the defense character is.

Resistance of the same type stacks just the same as defense of the same type stacks, but you get to pick the higher defense type when you are hit by a dual typed attack. This is an advantage over resistance, NOT a drawback.

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When Rage expires, your ATTACKS ARE SLOWED for 10 seconds (-25% attack rate from exhaustion) and you are slightly more vulnerable (-5% def debuff).

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Personally, I'd prefer a damage debuff. I'd take a 100% damage debuff for 10 seconds over the can't-attack thing. Just let me hold aggro and keep punching the bad guys. A slow is just going to cause aggro issues as well.

If the goal is to make us not have any offense for 10 seconds after the power wears off, fine, do that through a damage debuff, but don't remove our tanking ability as well by shutting off toggles or not allowing us to affect anyone with taunt, taunt auras, or punch-voke.

I still believe that the power should simply be an endurance for damage swap to make us compare with an Axe or Energy Melee tanker that slots buildup as much as we slot rage. No need for a drawback at all if this is all it does, just adjust the damage boost accordingly.

However, if we can't have this, I want a solution that doesn't make me not-a-tank for 10-15 seconds every 2 minutes. A damage debuff would be ok, an increased recharge time on the power itself would be ok, and a higher defense debuff would be ok, but accuracy reductions, slows, toggle drops from stuns or endurance drains, and being unable to attack/taunt/use auras for aggro control are counter to the ATs purpose.

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Don't limit the SG to 75 characters...limit it to 75 unique accounts. This would clear up pretty much everyones complaints about super group size.


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I really hope that if they consider this, they still leave us with a way to have our characters be in different SGs if we want them to be.

I have varied character concepts, and I'd hate to be stuck with a silver-age, semi-cheesy do-gooder themed SG for my extremely reckless and cocky main character. Yeah, the people are fantastic, but it just wouldn't feel right to me, and I think they would secretly not want characters like her in the SG.

Also, I know people with characters in several different SGs, and I think they like it that way.

I'd still want Alliance Chat, even if we were stuck with one SG per account, as a lot of the coolest people we meet that aren't in our SG are already in another one.

Lots of good suggestions here, but I want one thing above all else:

Alliance Chat

I want this for a simple reason. My main character has a certain "flavor" that doesn't fit with the SG all of my alts are in. Leaving her (now completely vacant) SG and putting her in the other one would be as wrong as putting Ghost Rider, The Hulk, or Wolverine in the Fantastic Four.

Well... for more than just a really fun 4 issue gimmick to increase sales, anyway.

I want to keep her current SG for flavor reasons, but have an alliance so that I still can easily get ahold of competent people to help me with the AVs that show up every other mission these days.

Alliance Chat would allow us to maintain a comic-bookish size to Super Groups, but have the benefits of a standard MMORPG Guild.

Beautiful. Thank you Statesman, for listening to us.

Choice is indeed the key. It's what brought many of us to this game (see the costume designer).

I'm going to say that I'd prefer something that didn't have a drawback that made us unable to tank. In fact, I'd prefer no drawback at all, and just have it be balanced with Buildup.

Please consider raising our base damage/endurance/recharge to compare to Axe and Energy Melee in DPS, and just give us a double length, double recharge Buildup, or even Buildup as is, and call it Rage if you want.

When I say to raise the damage/endurance/recharge, I mean make Jab have Punch's stats, Punch have Haymaker's, Haymaker have Cleave's, and Knockout Blow have Total Focus's.

This, if we had Buildup, would balance SS with the other sets.

We don't want a power that leaves us helpless-- we can't run out of combat when it wears off like a Blaster, Defender, Controller, or even a Scrapper can. Everything is attacking us.

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If flyspeed had the same max as runspeed, why would anyone ever take superspeed?

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To make things clearer regarding the differences between the two powers, lets view the two travel powers in "drawbacks" (even disregarding the fact that hasten is far, far better than any other travel pre-req), assuming that combining the benefits of the two would be the ultimate (and an unbalanced) travelpower (effectively superspeed with full vertical movement):

Flight:
1) Requires 4 SOs to reach the base speed, and only has 60% of the max speed.
2) Costs nearly 4 times the endurance (-2 EPS as opposed to -.53)
3) Acc penalty
4) No stealth

Superspeed
1) No vertical movement.

See the problem here? Now, the stealth component of Super Speed is there to offset the inherent danger of the lack of vertical movement, but it doesn't offset the lack of vertical movement in itself. So, Flight should have one more significant drawback aside from the lack of stealth.

So, Geko, please drop two of the flight drawbacks. Preferably the -Acc and the lower speed base and cap. I say to leave the endurance cost because if Flight didn't have either the endurance cost or the -Acc, hover would be worthless, and with the -Acc, Air Superiority's usefulness as a pre-req is diminished.

The end result would be:

Flight
1) no stealth
2) nearly 4 times the endurance cost

Superspeed
1) no vertical movement

Edit:
This leaves Super Jump as a nice halfway point between the two, as it gains limited vertical movement in exchange for the stealth and some speed.

Teleport needs to fit into this as well, but I don't know very much about it, so I will leave that to someone else.

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Like I've said, I'm going to review the missions this week and see how many have bosses at the different level ranges.

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Statesman, please read this! This doesn't help any if the missions are randomly intermingled. Please have a separate listing for the group missions on the contact's mission screen.

The key here is not "I want to solo X% of the time in the life of my character", it is "I want to solo when my friends aren't on, and group when they are".

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As for why we put Bosses in missions at all – in other words, why isn’t everything solo-able – the answer is simple.

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Statesman, please understand that a lot of us aren't asking for everything to be soloable. What we want is to be able to solo interesting story-based missions when we choose.

This means having soloable instanced missions separated from the group-encouraged/required ones. Make 3 (or 4 if you want to split defeat Xs by city/hazard zone) different mission options available from contacts at all time, and simply label them group missions by the separator as "group missions". So, Imagine the contact mission listing like this:


The Trolls are getting out of hand in Skyway City, please defeat 10 of them
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The Trolls have crashed a party! Please save the attendees and prevent any damage if you can!
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Group Missions:

The Faultline Security Chief wishes to speak with you (defeat 10 Vahz in Faultline)
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A Vahzilok Eidolon named the Ripper has this magical book that you have to get back! (named Boss mission)

This is a great idea, I'm glad you thought of it.

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The Nova/Inferno/Thunderous Blast issue is a different issue altogether, which raising minion hps by 28% will not even come close to solving. You would need to change the purpose of these powers (kill everything in a 15' radius instantly) to solve this problem.

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I'm an advocate for getting rid of those powers altogether in exchange for something that does wide spread damage but dosen't drain the blaster of endurance... or some sort of defensive or control based power. I don't see how you can "fix" these powers without making them useless.

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I agree. Definately eliminate the endurance drain on these powers for one thing, "drawbacks" just result in people doing everything they can to avoid being affected by them, to the point that they don't balance the power provided.

Thunderous blast would be fine as simply a high damage ranged AoE, maybe 2.5 times the total damage/endurance/recharge of Ball Lightning.

You can't really just do that with Nova and Inferno without making them ranged as well, and I like the Nova animation, effect, and concept. I would like Inferno if it looked cool and explosive instead of just like combustion (heck, just use the fireball graphic centered on the character).

So, maybe these two powers should do similar damage to the adjusted Thunderous Blast, but have some controlling aspects to them so you can get back out after using them. I love the Knockback on Nova, but lets face it, the way the game currently is, knockback on AoEs just makes your teammates angry if it also doesn't kill them outright. Maybe Nova should knock down and have like a 2-3 second disorient (wish they'd fix the freaking superspeed on disorients), and Inferno should leave a 2-3 second copy of Bonfire in the spot that knocks them down (to simulate rolling around trying to put out the fire). Their animations could stand to be cut a tad as well, melee range attacks should have lower animations than ranged ones, since they put you at more risk, I'd cut them by 1/3.

Many people want Blizzard to be adjusted anyway, so maybe you make it a very high damage version of Ice Storm, that only lasts a few seconds, to ensure that those near the edges take about 75% the damage of the other final powers, but those near the center take about 125%. Just so it has a different feel, and a slightly different purpose than the others.

Full Auto will probably be just right after the hitpoint increase, though it's animation could stand to be cut by 1/3 if it won't be killing most even-con minions before they can get into melee with you like it does now.

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Please, raise single target damage and/or lower single target endurance across the board. Single Target Blasters (Energy, Electric, Ice) and Scrappers (MA, DM) are dwarfed by their AoE counterparts, and many of the AoE sets have single target attacks (Flares, Barb Swipe) that are skipped due to their massive DPS and DPE inefficiency (sometimes compounded by animation length imbalance), so please don't leave them out.

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On another note, how does this solve the AoE power problem?

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If minion hitpoints go up (as they are), and single target damage and/or endurance go up, it shrinks the gap between single target DPS and/or DPE and that of AoEs.

If you are referring to the "level 32 Blaster AoEs can kill everything before it has a reasonable shot at retaliating" problem, It doesn't address those issues at all unless minion hps are raised to the point that you cannot one shot them with these insanely damaging powers, which would be really absurd.

My issue is with single target vs normal AoE/Cone balance, which can easily be fixed by raising villain hps and increasing single target DPS and/or DPE (though it would be simpler and easier to just lower the AoE/Cone DPS and/or DPE).

The Nova/Inferno/Thunderous Blast issue is a different issue altogether, which raising minion hps by 28% will not even come close to solving. You would need to change the purpose of these powers (kill everything in a 15' radius instantly) to solve this problem.

Statesman!

Can you please tell us if there will be a TF, Story Arc, or some kind of in-game event that goes in to detail about how and why the Council took over the Fifth column? A single yes or no post would be very appreciated.

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I'm just about to leave to catch a flight back to the West Coast...

Right now, Tanker changes have highest priority. The Design team tested some stuff last week while I was in Philly, and I'll personally test some more things this week. I'll post an update on this stuff on Friday.

We're still analyzing the numbers for Defenders & Controllers. We need to get a better picture of the impact of the mob hp/damage increase. If we make any changes, I can't say whether it'd be an Endurance decrease or a Damage increase or both.

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Statesman, please, realize that this isn't an AT specific issue. The issue is that Single Target attacks are dramatically less efficient compared to AoE and cone attacks. The goal of this change in hitpoints was to solve the AoE imbalances, yet you are only considering solving it for 3 of the 5 ATs?

For example, Fireball does slightly less damage than Fire Blast, yet it does it in a HUGE radius, and for only a little over twice the endurance. Haymaker vs. Foot Stomp, Lunge Vs. Spine Burst, Slash Vs. Slice, they are all like this, the only time a single target attack is better is if you are only facing two or less foes, it isn't much better, and that only happens when you are soloing.

Please, raise single target damage and/or lower single target endurance across the board. Single Target Blasters (Energy, Electric, Ice) and Scrappers (MA, DM) are dwarfed by their AoE counterparts, and many of the AoE sets have single target attacks (Flares, Barb Swipe) that are skipped due to their massive DPS and DPE inefficiency (sometimes compounded by animation length imbalance), so please don't leave them out.

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I just said this wasn't because of the German market. If it was, the 5th would be gone completely and the replacement wouldn't just be another pseudo-Nazi organization. Oh, and there wouldn't have been evidence of the Council's existence since beta.

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I would be very very interested in seeing this evidence that you are referring to. Got a source? Screenshot? Story Arc stuff?

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People have mentioned on these forums seeing The Council on the data booth things in beta. I wasn't a beta tester, so I can't say I saw them firsthand.


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Just because they may have planned on removing the 5th since before release doesn't mean they aren't doing it to appeal to the German market. These are smart people. They may have planned this in advance and done it to appeal to the German market. One possible scenario is that they made all this 5th content, and then when someone at NCSoft found out about it, they said "We want you to remove that from the game if/when we release it in Europe." So, maybe they made an escape plan.

I'm not saying this is what happened, but it is a possibility that refutes the "It was planned, therefore has nothing to do with the European release" argument.

I don't think these changes are some sort of knee-jerk reaction. I think they were planned. Why they were planned, however, is what is up for debate.

And to the person in the first quote, the Council is pseudo-Nazi? Whatever. All references to WWII in their descriptions and story arcs are gone, and they are now aliens. They are as Nazi-like as the Lost are now.

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I have actually seen 5th in Peregrine Island in Update 3 with my own eyes. I didn't think to take a screenshot. Next time I see them, I will.

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Don't bother. We know they exist. The issue isn't that the 5th isn't in the game in any form at all, it's that it isn't in the game in any interesting form, beyond the 2 minutes of amusement watching a couple of factions in a spawn kill each other. All the Story Arcs are now Council Arcs. The 5th TF is now a Council TF. 5th Column bases are now Council Bases. This is what we mean when we say they are gone.

It's like if someone ate your meatlover's pizza except for a piece of crust, and then put some cheese bread in it's place. You may like the cheese bread better, but I don't, and telling me that my meatlover's isn't gone because of one piece of crust is insulting.

Besides, I'm sure those spawns will be removed a month or two after Issue 3 comes out, if not sooner.

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Have you considered that maaaaybe...JUST MAYBE...
There might be an event about it on the live servers?

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I have considered it. Does that mean it's going to happen? I mean, come on, all they have to do is say "there will be an event/TF/Story Arc about it on the live servers, it will be much, much more significant than two spawns, and it will explain the hows and whys of the war between the 5th Column and the Council". Is that so much to ask? No spoilers necessary, just tell us that we will get in-game content explaining what is going on. The fact that they won't say something this simple makes me think it isn't going to happen.

You seem to think it's logical to assume that there will be an interesting event explaining the change.

I think it is logical to assume that there will not be anything more than some spawns, a couple newspaper articles, and a couple forum posts, ala the Rularuu invasion, because that's what they've given us in the past as an "event".

If we got spawns as frequent and widespread as the invasion, I'd be happier than I am with what is on test, but really, I want story, not just more combat that I can get anywhere.