Muon_Neutrino

The issue is still totally unresolved. At the suggestion of tech support, I have even gone so far as to completely delete the test server installation from my mac and attempt to re-download it from scratch. Every time, the very first thing the updater tries to download is that busted "cider-COHD-Updater-002591.tgz" file, even before it starts downloading *any* of the game files such as piggs. And, of course, as soon as it tries to download the busted file, it goes right back into that endless loop. Getting really annoying...

Quoted from the patch notes:

[ QUOTE ]
Energy Assault

* Power Bolt: Increased this power’s damage scale from 1 to 1.32, increased its recharge from 4 seconds to 6 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 5.2 to 6.86.
* Bone Smasher: Increased this power’s damage scale from 1.64 to 1.96, increased its recharge from 8 seconds to 10 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 8.53 to 10.2.
* Power Push: Increased this power’s damage scale from .4 to 1.64.
* Power Blast: Increased this power’s damage scale from 1.32 to 1.96, increased its recharge from 6 seconds to 10 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 6.86 to 10.2.
* Whirling Hands: Increased this power’s damage scale from 1 to 1.1, increased its recharge from 14 seconds to 20 seconds, increased its endurance cost from 14.4 to 18.51, and increased its radius from 10 feet to 15 feet.
* Total Focus: Increased this power’s damage scale from 3.56 to 3.88, increased its recharge from 20 seconds to 22 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 18.5 to 20.18.
* Sniper Blast: Increased this power’s damage scale from 2.76 to 3.56, increased its recharge from 12 seconds to 20 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 14.4 to 18.51.
* Power Burst: Increased this power’s damage scale from 2.12 to 2.6, increased its recharge from 11 seconds to 14 seconds and increased its endurance cost from 10.4 to 13.5.

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What does this mean? Well, almost all of your attacks will be doing a *lot* more damage, between the overall dominator buff and the specific buffs to individual attacks. Power push in particular got a huge buff, going from dealing almost no damage to dealing more than power blast used to - it's now one of the better attacks in the set when you consider its high accuracy, KB, and quick animation. Whirling hands also got a notable buff, nearly doubling in radius. Most of the attacks got somewhat longer recharges in partial exchange for the damage boosts, but you ought to have enough individual attacks for this to not matter very much, although a respec may be in order to pick up things like power push which weren't really worth taking before. In general, /energy made out like an absolute bandit with these changes, easily the most improved dominator secondary.

Of course, these changes are still on test, and won't be coming live until issue 15 goes live, which is likely still a few weeks away.

Yeah, the damage didn't go down, and in fact went up - but it still needs another looking at. It seems to have inadvertently lost the 'extra' damage it's supposed to have as a fire attack - without that, it's still decent, but not imo as good as it was before (but that's due to the increased recharge, it still does more damage than it used to).

One thing about aim which many don't realize is that the damage buff in the power is actually pretty good. The description makes it sound like it's got a 7% damage boost or something else similarly useless, but the damage boost is actually 50%. It's not just for hitting things, but for hitting things pretty *hard*. Ditto on power build up from power mastery, if you choose to take it - that one's got 80%, and lasts 12.5 seconds instead of 10, to boot. Not sure I'd take power mastery just for that one ability, as I personally feel that other epics may have more useful tools overall, but it's certainly an option.

Also, one other note - like ice storm, the 'real numbers' for blizzard's accuracy are misleading. It also has standard accuracy and needs acc slotted. Small price to pay in the long run, though!

Um, it *is* a pet - at least as far as the game's code is concerned. All 'persistent' powers of that sort are, it's just the way that the engine works. The only difference between blizzard and a 'normal' pet is that blizzard isn't targetable or affectable in any way, and vanishes after 15 seconds.

And seriously, you're complaining about the nuke which does blaster level damage *and* scourges?

Icestorm for defenders is very good. The thing about ice storm (and the nuke blizzard, too) is that they summon invisible pseudopets to do the damage since they have a duration. Well, when they ported ice blast from blasters to defenders, they didn't bother to make new pseudopets with lower damage - defenders get the *blaster* versions! This means that defenders using ice storm and blizzard get full blaster level damage out of them - which is very high damage for a defender. As well, as you noted, you have all of those tasty debuffs - after applying freezing rain, you will be doing *more* damage with ice storm and blizzard than a blaster would. Freezing rain (+ PBU if you have it) + aim + ice storm + blizzard = "OMGWTF how did that defender just do that?!?" It's great.

Make sure to slot some accuracy in ice storm, though - despite what the 'real numbers' say, it only has standard accuracy. You can't see the 'miss' messages since it's a pseudopet, but the ticks can and will miss if you don't have any acc slotted. Freezing rain will somewhat mitigate this, but you can't always count on that. Aka, as usual, don't judge the power before it's slotted up - damage and recharge, too.

Just to add my data point, I still can't. Currently doing the runaround with tech support...

Hmm, 10 minutes? Not sure exactly how the math works, but one of the scrapper gurus can probably come in here and give you a number for how much DPS you're putting out. Though the presence of regen debuffs complicates things....

Regardless, well done!

Thing is, it *says* it is downloading the full 12 point something megabytes - you can watch the download bar and see it creep up, and the numbers piling up until they get to 12 mb.

... and then somehow when it goes to look at the file it sees only 7.6k of it?

Oooook.... stupid computer!

Well, when I double-click on tgApplyPatch, absolutely nothing happens visually. With the console open, we can see that it is just echoing "Usage: <Patch tarball path> <Output path> <ProcessID>" and doing nothing else.

When I run the updater with the console open, every time it gets to the end and restarts these lines show up in the console:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Could not stat /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents
# /Resources/transgaming/f_drive (No such file or directory), ignoring drive F:
/usr/bin/tar: This does not look like a tar archive
/usr/bin/tar: Skipping to next header
/usr/bin/tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
/usr/bin/tar: Read 7653 bytes from /Applications/City of Heroes Test.app/Contents
# /Resources/transgaming/c_drive/coh/cider/cider-COHD-Updater-002591.tgz
/usr/bin/tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors</pre><hr />

If I let it go, it just keeps repeating the download-&gt;close-&gt;reopen-&gt;redownload loop forever, and keeps writing these lines to the console every time it restarts. Not sure what that means... somehow it can't read the archive once it gets it?

[edit: sorry for the wide lines. Fixed now; in the code block, if a new line is indented and begins with a #, it's a continuation of the previous line.]

Nothing impressive??!?!?? That's the fabled second +3% defense IO that everyone's going gaga over for soft capping their melee characters! And you got one at level 29!?!? You lucky little.....

As the thread title suggests, those are going for hundreds of millions, at least redside. I would personally not sell it, though... not like you're ever likely to see another one, and that is one of the secret ingredients in some really crazy builds. I'd save it until I had a place to put it, myself.

Well. two things: as mind, his staple AoE controls are both interfered with by damage. Therefore, you kinda have a conundrum: either you leave them alone, gaining the benefit of the control but losing out on some potential fury from them attacking you, or you wake them all up and get fury from their attacks, but don't really end up getting much benefit from the controls. You could realistically go either way here: Have both of you go for single target damage and just accept that you won't be attacked very often, or go for mass AoE and just accept that the controls are mostly to avoid the alpha.

In the first case, you would want a good single target primary that builds fury well. Dark melee immediately comes to mind here, with the very quick first two attacks, and the good single target chain. Possibly pair it with shield defense to get a damage boost from all the statues surrounding you? Other secondaries could work just as well, though. Just avoid anything with a damage aura. Aggro control would be less important in this case.

In the second, you want as much AoE as possible, and a good aggro holding secondary to keep them on you once you wake them up (read: anything but willpower and energy aura).

My personal preference would be a variant of the first: let the brute take the alpha and give him a few seconds for the mobs to clump up, then hit the sleep/fear and go to town with the single target attacks. This gives him some bonus fury and lets the mobs clump to fuel soul drain/AAO/etc type abilities, but still gets some benefit from the AoE controls. Any decent secondary should let the brute take an alpha considering the dom can shut off the enemies for the rest of the fight. Dark melee would give sustainability with dark consumption and siphon life so that you never have to stop, as well as good, quick, fury-building single target damage.

With this combo, tactics are going to be as important as builds - you must manage your control and damage use to get as much out of the controls as possible without denying the brute the chance to build fury.

The exact same issue is happening to me, and has been since the patch before this current one. If I remember correctly, it's the same file. And it's exactly the same behaviour. I posted about this in the patch notes thread, but it got lost amongst everything else.

CuppaManga, what exactly is clicking on tgApplyPatch supposed to do? What is that?

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Oh dear $deity, yes. I have been aching for more options for the legs ever since I made my first few characters. I mean, we can put things on our shoulders, heads, chests, and belts, but nothing whatsoever on our legs. I have wished so many times that I could put shin guards, thigh plates, or wrist guards (over the top of other patterns, anyway) on a character. My plant controller would really love to be able to extend her leaf motif to her legs, and two different MA baddies recently who are supposed to be covered in green spikes would love to be able to put them on their legs too.

And ditto on separating the shoes and lower legs. There is at least one boot (cant remember which one right now) which has a nice sandal on the foot, but heck if I want the lower leg that comes with it. I just want to be able to give her a sandal (bare feet are a bit much in a city) without covering up her lower leg and the pattern that she has on her skin. Ditto, I would love to give her a costume version with shin, thigh, and arm pads to go with her shoulder pads, but no dice.

Really, I think a *lot* of costume options should become 'chest detail' style options, just so that you can put them over the top of another customized piece. There's no reason that the wrist bracers for females, for example, couldn't be part of a 'wrist detail' category so that you could put them over the top of something besides bare, unpatterned hands (ditto the pad from the 'justice with pad' gloves). Several boots have shin guard type pieces as separate geometry on top of a more standard 'smooth' leg mesh (i.e. justice with pad), and those should also work in a 'lower leg detail' on top of any normal patterned leg (say bare legs). Etc, etc. Obviously you'd have to restrict such things based on the base leg, shin, or glove chosen, like no thigh plates on top of an 'armored' leg or shin detail on top of enforcer boots, but there would be a *lot* of new options that could be opened up.

In general, the XP you get for a mob which is partially defeated by a confused compatriot is not significantly reduced unless you let the other mobs do most of the work. If you or your team do at least 50% of the damage, you will get at least 80% of the mob's XP. And given how much safety the confusion provides, and how much the damage done speeds you up, it almost always works out to a net gain in XP over time.

[qr]

Thanks to those who suggested the will-o-wisps - I completely forgot those existed, but they're perfect. And now I don't need to use up file space on a custom contact model!

Now if only I could get the custom critters to cooperate...

[ QUOTE ]
You might look at Arachnoid caves or webbed caves. Also, the Eden outdoor map is pretty wild looking. There's also the Thorn Tree map from Nerva Archipelago. There's also the Ruladak cave, notable primarily for the intense fog. From the unique caves collection, you've got the cave of the shaper (with its freaky giant orifices), the arachnoid cocoon map, and the Nerva Isle respec cave. Any of these might meet your needs for something alien and bizarre.

[/ QUOTE ]

So there aren't any shadow shard maps? That's annoying. Well, I'll check out the ones you suggested, thanks. (Though I already tried the thorn tree map - it'd be awesome except you enter on a tugboat! Talk about immersion breaking.)

[ QUOTE ]
Whichever one you go with, I'd playtest it thoroughly first before publishing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, of course. This is more at the very rough sketching out stage at this point anyway.

[ QUOTE ]
I know which one you mean, it's an awesome map, I wish I could find it, but it doesn't appear available.

[/ QUOTE ]

Boo. It's a pretty map, and would be just *perfect* for what I have in mind. Hopefully they add it at some point...

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I don't know why sprites aren't available as contacts. Might I recommend using a storm elemental instead? Believe me when I say that they make for very striking contacts.

[/ QUOTE ]

They are awesome looking, I agree - the only problem is that I'm already using storm elementals as enemies. The custom group that's the main enemy has as its theme weird energy/shadow beings and magically mutated beasts, and I'm trying to use canon mobs to flesh it out where appropriate (planning to use, of course, the i15 renaming feature) so that I can get a good size group while still saving space for the various bosses. So, I've already grabbed black swan's minor shadows and the storm elementals as part of that. For the moment I've just got a major shadow as a placeholder - looks a bit like a dark servant and could be some kind of spirit, but shadows are all wrong.... he should be light-themed! Can't really get the effect I'm looking for with the character creator, either.... why can't they just have sprites or phantasms! Aggh!

I think I have a bigger appreciation for all those poor architects whose missions I've played, now that I've seen a bit of what they have to put up with!

He's complaining about how the fix to the 'drop costume toggle -&gt; bypass animation time' bug means that you can't drop out of a form toggle while a power animation is running. And, yeah, it did somewhat affect the 'form dancing' playstyle. As far as I remember, castle is aware of the inconvenience and was going to try and find a workaround at some point.

But seriously... there's a difference between disagreeing with a change and being a whiny emo [censored] about it. If your first thought on what to do with the three free months you've been given is to whine about the change daily on the forums, then I think you ought to reexamine your priorities.

Burst is also one of only two single-target blasts you get... and no, ignite doesn't count on an /em. Sure you've got blaps too, but it's also one of your 3 fire-through-mez attacks, can take the -res proc as noted above, and well, sometimes getting in close just isn't a good idea. Frankly, skipping burst is a bad idea.

Relatively new to the 'creating' side of the MA here, and I have some (I hope) simple questions:

First, a tangentially related lore question. Rularuu and his aspects - does anyone know if he's always existed as both one being and seven aspects, or does that have something to do with his imprisonment in the shadow shard?

Now, on to the actual MA questions. For the idea I have in mind, I would like some really alien looking maps - no office buildings or whatnot here. Something along this lines of the shadow shard, or something similarly strange looking. However, I don't see anything particularly good, and in particular, no shadow shard maps. Are there any shadow shard maps, and if so, where can I find them? And otherwise, does anyone have any suggestions for good looking 'alien' feeling maps - indoor and out, but nothing too techy.

Also, another map I want to use is that strange 'circle map in the sky' floating island style map from the last mission of Mage Killer Zuhkara's 'The circle plot' story arc. Does anyone know if that exists in the MA? I can't find it.

Finally, I originally wanted the contact to look like the phantasm pet from illusion control. I thought you ought to be able to do that, because I once saw a fire imp as a contact. However, the 'pets' contact category doesn't have the controller pets, and I haven't been able to find them anywhere else. Anyone know where these are hiding? My packup plan was to use a cabal sprite - the little things you see floating around kelly nemmers in croatoa. However, these are inexplicably missing from the cabal list. Anyone know why they aren't there?

If anyone can help a new MA user out, that'd be awesome.

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks!

Is there a resource on this? I went to Paragonwiki and couldn't seem to find a list of what IOs would drop for Silver and Gold rolls, only Bronze...unless I was on the wrong page or something. Also, BG was created after the original pools were, so I was in some doubt as to what pools the pieces fit into. That might be clear on the wiki, but I'm a hidebound creature of my past. :P

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Bronze rolls reward 'pool A' recipies, both uncommon and rare. The uncommon:rare ratio is not perfectly clear, the wiki article suggests approximately 5:1. Pool A recipes are normally awarded by defeating enemies.

Silver rolls reward pool B and rare pool A recipes, at a 2:1 pool Aool B ratio. Pool B recipes are normally awarded from completing missions.

Gold rolls reward recipes from the combined group of pool C and D recipes (said pools having been effectively merged at this point, since the only places you can get them award from both pools). Pool C and D recipes used to be awarded from task forces and trials, respectively, but are now obtained only through trading in tickets/merits, or as very rare drops from boss class enemies.

On this page, you can see what drop pool any given recipe is in. The key to the symbols for each pool is at the top of the page.

At the bottom of the page that UberGuy posted, under the 'See Also' heading there are links to similar pages for the silver and gold rolls.

This other page also lists the pool each recipe belongs to - you may or may not find it easier to read.

It's because controllers and defenders have other mitigation to fall back on in PToD fights, namely their buff/debuff sets. Doms, on the other hand, are effectively playing with no mitigation whatsoever beyond what little help immobilizing the EB may provide (which is not enough against the vast majority of EBs). That's been the perennial complaint. Controllers can buff themselves (or their pets) or debuff the EB to stay alive, doms can't. It's not complaining that we can't hold EBs, specifically, it's complaining that we have no effective mitigation against them.

This, by the way, will be helped in a sort of a roundabout manner by the changes. We still won't have any effective mitigation against PToD EBs, but at least we will be able to burn them down faster and so not have to fill up quite so much of our insp tray with purples on a regular basis.

That would also solve the problem of not being able to assign specific bosses/EBs/etc to guard hostages/etc. Put the boss in his own group, assign him as 'unique in spawn', assign that group to guard the hostage, and voila!

I like it.

Domination no longer boosts your damage. Instead, the base damage of doms has been increased so that, after slotting, you will be doing slightly more damage than you used to do in domination mode - all the time. In other words, everyone now has perma-dom, effectively, when it comes to damage. There are also hints that some dominator assault sets or powers may see a rebalancing - it's been hinted at by castle that: 1) /energy may see a buff on top of what the AT as a whole is getting, and 2) /psi may get rebalanced by weakening psi shockwave and buffing the rest of the set. For now, that's all we know, but there may be further changes that castle hasn't told us about yet.

As we all know, it can often a pain to play many ATs or powerset combinations early on. Power choices are lacking, travel is slow, accuracy is bad (although less than before), and endurance tends to vanish in a flash. I was curious as to how the domination and damage scalar changes would affect this region of play. So, I decided to find out.

At first glance, it would seem like an easy question to answer: nobody is a permadom in the pre-20 realm, so low level doms must be getting a pretty large damage buff, right? As it turns out, though, the answer is a bit more complicated than that.

The first complication is that at low levels, most attacks aren't very well slotted for damage. The normal slotting for the ED cap on damage tends to dilute the effect of current domination somewhat - going from 195% damage to 270% damage isn't as dramatic of a change as going from 100% damage to 175% is. So, the lack of damage slotting at early levels will tend to make the current domination's damage buff more important. Additionally, the multiplicative nature of enhancements yields a larger absolute boost when applied to a higher base modifier, so one of the major benefits of the new system won't come into play until later.

The other issue is that ATs don't start out with their final damage modifiers. While doms, for example, end up with modifiers of 0.65 ranged and 0.75 melee, at level one their modifiers are 0.93 ranged and 0.95 melee. This pattern holds for all ATs: damage modifiers start near 1.0 for both ranged and melee, and then slowly decay to their final values, reached at level 20. This will tend to dilute the effect of the new damage modifier buff, since low level doms actually had almost those damage scalars already.

Looking at the modifier tables available on city of data, I worked out the current damage modifiers for doms from level 1 to 20, ranged and melee. I also analyzed the patterns and figured out what the 1-20 damage modifiers should be for the proposed 1.05 melee/0.95 ranged modifier version:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Modifiers:
Current Proposed
Level Ranged Melee Ranged Melee
1 0.93 0.95 0.99 1.01
2 0.927 0.947 0.990 1.011
3 0.919 0.942 0.988 1.012
4 0.912 0.938 0.987 1.013
5 0.905 0.932 0.986 1.014
6 0.895 0.925 0.985 1.015
7 0.878 0.912 0.983 1.018
8 0.860 0.900 0.980 1.020
9 0.842 0.888 0.977 1.023
10 0.825 0.875 0.975 1.025
11 0.808 0.862 0.973 1.028
12 0.790 0.850 0.970 1.030
13 0.773 0.838 0.968 1.033
14 0.755 0.825 0.965 1.035
15 0.738 0.813 0.963 1.038
16 0.720 0.800 0.960 1.040
17 0.703 0.788 0.958 1.043
18 0.685 0.775 0.955 1.045
19 0.667 0.763 0.953 1.048
20+ 0.650 0.750 0.950 1.050
</pre><hr />

Using this data, I worked out the damage a hypothetical dominator would deal by using a scale 1.0 attack at each level from 1 to 20, with the following assumptions:

- For the current numbers, domination is used every time it recharges for a net damage buff of 33.75%.
- Attacks are slotted with no damage below level 12, with one level 15 damage DO from level 12 to level 16, two level 20 damage DOs from level 17 to level 21, and either two or three even level damage SOs (or level 25/30 common damage IOs - more or less the same) from level 22 on.

The damage is presented in scalar form: a damage number of 0.95, for example, means the damage that would be done by a character with a damage modifier of 0.95 using a scale 1.0 attack. This is done to suppress the overall scaling upward of damage with increasing level, in order to focus on the ways in which this upwards scaling varies in the two schemes.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Damage:
Current Proposed
Level Ranged Melee Ranged Melee
1 1.244 1.271 0.99 1.01
2 1.239 1.267 0.990 1.011
3 1.230 1.261 0.988 1.012
4 1.220 1.254 0.987 1.013
5 1.211 1.247 0.986 1.014
6 1.197 1.237 0.985 1.015
7 1.174 1.220 0.983 1.018
8 1.150 1.204 0.980 1.020
9 1.127 1.187 0.977 1.023
10 1.103 1.170 0.975 1.025
11 1.080 1.154 0.973 1.028
12 1.208 1.300 1.156 1.227
13 1.175 1.274 1.145 1.222
14 1.142 1.248 1.134 1.216
15 1.109 1.222 1.123 1.210
16 1.071 1.190 1.104 1.196
17 1.209 1.355 1.324 1.442
18 1.167 1.321 1.305 1.428
19 1.126 1.287 1.286 1.414
20 1.086 1.253 1.267 1.400
21 1.064 1.228 1.234 1.364

22+ 1.302 1.503 1.583 1.750 (2 SOs)

22+ 1.487 1.716 1.853 2.048 (3 SOs)
</pre><hr />

Looking at these values, several interesting facts are apparent. The net damage under the old system is actually noticeably higher than for the new system for the levels 1 to 11. In the 12-16 range, the two are roughly equal, and for levels 17 and up, the new system gives higher damage - and by quite a bit once SOs are slotted.

Effectively, what we're seeing here is the high early scalars and un-diluted domination buff combining to allow the current scheme to outweigh the new scheme's increased scalars in the very low levels. As the current scalars decay towards their final levels and more enhancements are slotted, however, the increasing gap between the new and old schemes combined with the higher absolute boost of enhancements on the new scheme allows it to first match, and then surpass, the old scheme. I did suspect that this would be the result. After all, the advantage of the new scheme is largely nullified at low levels where the scalars were already close to 1 anyway. How do we interpret this, though?

The most obvious conclusion to draw would be that the new changes are actually a net decrease in performance at the very low levels, and only become a buff once the scalars diverge significantly and decent amounts of damage enhancement are slotted. There are a few subtleties that occur to me, however.

First, this presumes that domination is used every 200 seconds, on the dot, as soon as it recharges. For a variety of reasons, that may not be a reasonable assumption in the low levels. In some situations, it may make more sense to hold onto dom for a period of time in anticipation of a tough fight. As well, endurance problems, more frequent faceplanting, and/or the need to rest or run away from a fight may sometimes make it difficult to build domination quickly enough. Finally, many simply don't play that way out of habit, forgetfulness, or preference.

Second, and similar in some ways to the first, is the way the new changes free you to use domination when you feel it would be the most useful. Since there is no pressure to use dom for the damage boost, it is more likely to be available for the dangerous encounters, which seems like it would be a hard-to-quantify, but real, boost in performance.

Third, there is the question of how important the 1-11 range is? It is the first exposure to the AT, and hence plays a big part in setting a first impression for new dom players. Losing damage is not a good thing from this perspective, although that may be compensated some by the use of the inherent perhaps seeming less difficult to newbies. On the other hand, that level range does tend to fly past pretty quickly - the teens are where it gets more draggy, at least for me. This is a question of perception, though, and thus inherently difficult to quantify.

With all of this, what is the net effect? It's hard to say: damage does go down, but there are some counterbalancing but difficult to quantify effects which may make make up for it. I tentatively feel that it probably works out as more or less a net wash, but that seems like it would be dependent at least in part on the playstyle and preferences of the player in question. One thing is for sure, though: it's not a substantial net buff like it is for higher levels. However, it is one of castle's design goals to "# Improve "feel" of low level play." (see, for example, this post) Does this qualify? I'm not sure it does, but it depends on exactly what he means by the 'feel' of the low levels - and I suppose that's something that only he knows at this point (or there may be other changes coming which we don't know about yet). It does seem, though, that there may be something here which should get looked at.