Statesman_NA

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PLEASE add some or all of the great new options that Villains are receiving to Heroes' costume creator, at least for those players who own both CoV and CoH.

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Noted. We'll see what we can do...

Yes.

Yes...

BUT not right away. As soon as we get newspaper tech in, we'll get the mission completion sharing in...

Someone guessed this as the name for I6 quite a long time ago, in fact.

I've alluded to this in a couple of places, but I wanted to describe something we'll be doing for Super Reflexes quite soon...

Super Reflexes Auto powers (Agile, Dodge, and Lucky) now add some minor damage resistance. This Damage resistance starts at 0%, but improves as the caster loses HP. The Resistance kicks in at 60% HP (when HP bar first changes color) and markedly increases at 40% and 20% (again, when the bar changes color). We have not yet determined the exact values.

This change is in addition to the recent modification that gave most Defense Primary and Secondary powers resistance to Defense Debuffs (self Defense powers).

There have been a lot of posts about which Defense powers stack with other Defense powers; some of this has been accurate, but some of it hasn’t.

Seemingly, we lost sight of a basic principle of Design: players shouldn’t make uninformed choices. Namely, some buffs had no effect on a player if he had certain Defense powers active.

Intuitively, a buff such as a Force Field should provide protection to a player – whether he is a Super Reflexes Scrapper, an Ice Tanker or an Invulnerability Scrapper/Tanker.

As a result, we went through ALL of the Defense buffs in the game and ensured that they provide a benefit to players, regardless of build.

This means that every Defense buff WILL stack to some degree with a player’s defenses, regardless of his power set.

Taking your suggestions into account, I've added Defense to the Power Pools to EVERY single damage type EXCEPT Psi. In other words, the Pools are no longer limited to Smashing and Lethal.

Frankly, my original idea didn't account for the fact that some pools would have been situationally more useful to certain Tanker and Scrapper builds...This change addresses the inequality.

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Er, clarification please? I thought a 14% damage debuff would turn 100 into 86?


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Edited post - you're right. Typing in haste made me use the original 7% value.

Sorry it took an extra day...

Here's how the -Recharge debuff works (Circeus, I think, has explained this...but I'll reiterate).

New Recharge Time = Old Recharge Time/(1+Recharage Mod)

In the case of Chilling Embrace, the Recharage Mod is -.32. Let's take a hypothetical power with a base Recharge time of 10 seconds. Under the effect of Chilling Embrace, its new recharge time is 10/(1+(-.32)) or 14.71 seconds.

Just for the sake of it, let's take a look at what Chilling Embrace would do overall to such a power. Let's say "Power X" has a Recharge Time of 10 and a Damage of 100. Assume it hits 100% of the time with a Cast time of 2 seconds. Over the next minute it does the following damage:

(60/(10+2))*100 = 500 points of damage

As we've seen, Chilling Embrace would slow that 10 second recharge to a glacial (pardon the pun) 14.71 seconds. But the new Chilling Embrace also debuffs damage by 14%! So instead of 100 damage every blow, the mob would do only 93 points of damage.

(60/(14.71+2))*86 = 308.8 dmg


Not too shabby of a protection - almost like having a 38% Damage Resistance! Remember, though - this is ONLY when the mob is in the effect of Chilling Embrace (roughly melee distance).

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You answered most of your questions yourself. The writing is on the wall, all their eggs in one basket as you put it. I5 was the beginning of the transition of turning CoH from a PvE based experience into one focused on the PvP aspects to be introduced with CoV.

A majority of future content, I would wager especially end game content, is meant to be player generated...ie:PvP.

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Erm. No. PvP will be an optional part of gameplay. Always.

The changes in I5 had very little to do with PvP and a lot to do with boring PvE. It's that simple. No conspiracy there - I think I've stated this several times.

As for the supposed "emphasis" on PvP - I think you'll see that it's just ONE part of City of Villains. It has PvE content levels 1 to 50.

We'll continue to add new PvE content (which I5 did exclusively, I might add) in the future.

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No, I believe Statesman is saying that all power pool defenses, in parallel with providing melee/ranged defense, will also be providing smash/lethal defense.

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Yep. That's what it meant.

As for changing the way defense works...eek. That's not really an option. There's simply too many things that would break...It's just not do-able.

As for why only S/L? Because in these powers, that simply made sense - and because of the prevalence of S/L damage throughout the game.

OK...here's what Chilling Embrace ONCE did...

-0.4 to Recharge

We changed it to...

-.32 to Recharge
-.07 to Damage (thought it was .1, to be honest)

Needless to say, Circeus is right - it's a mild nerf! Eek.

We checked a change in so that Chillling Embrace will NOW be:

-.32 to Recharge
-.14 to Damage

I'll post tomorrow explaining these numbers...

Stealth, Grant Invisibility, Invisibility,Combat Flight, Weave, Maneuvers, Vengeance, and Combat Jumping will grant a Defense bonus to Smashing and Lethal Attacks in addition to Melee and Ranged attacks.

I added the same to Controller/Illusion/Group Invisibility.

The result of this is that ALL defense builds will benefit from Pool powers. Previously, Ice Tankers suffered somewhat because the Pool defenses did not stack with their defense powers. This is now rectified.

I'll doublecheck the numbers today and post something in this thread (hopefully today).

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Ok, so we were told that we would be getting bases when CoH came out, and all these great things would be coming.

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Being that I was here from the beginning, I can promise you that bases were NEVER promised. NEVER. It wasn't on the box, on the website or in any promo material. The most we ever said was - "someday we'd like to do bases."

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Do the resistances stack and apply to all debuffs?

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Yes.

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I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of this proposed change, but I think that it misses the primary problem with Defense-based sets (in PvP at least): the overpowering nature of toHit buffs. With a single click, an unslotted Aim, a moderately slotted Build Up, or a heavily slotted Focused Accuracy/Targeting Drone negates an entire Defense-based line, even fully 6-slotted.

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Understood; we're still working on this.

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Fantastic Statesman!

Question though, when you say lessened by 10.8% does that mean:

A def debuff of 10% is eliminated or;

A def debuff of 10% is reduced to 8.92%?

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The latter.

As some players have pointed out, Defense builds (Super Reflexes, Ice Armor, Stone Armor to a degree) have an inherent weakness in that there are a plethora of powers that debuff Defense in PvE and PvP.

In order to rectify this situation, we will be adding a Resistance to Defense Debuffs to a number of powers. This Resistance will not be enhanceable, but it will increase over level.

The Resistance % for the powers and Archetypes are as follows. The two numbers represent the Resistance at levels 1 and 50, respectively:

Scrapper
Super Reflexes
Focused Fighting: 4/21.6
Focused Senses: 4/21.6
Agile: 2/10.8
Dodge: 2/10.8
Lucky: 2/10.8
Evasion: 4/21.6
Elude: 10/54

Tanker
Ice Armor
Frozen Armor: 5.2/27.2
Wet Ice: 5.2/27.2
Glacial Armor: 5.3/27.2

Stone Armor
Rock Armor: 5.2/27.2
Rooted: 5.2/27.2
Crystal Armor: 5.2/27.2
Granite Armor: 13/68

The way this works is that the % above represent the amount subtracted from the incoming Defense Debuff. For instance, a level 50 Scrapper with Agile has any incoming Defense Debuff lessened by 10.8%.

Our general philosophy was to make it so that a player could achieve at level 50 high protection against Defense debuffs; a Defense build absolutely depends on the enemy missing his attacks!

First, a big thank you to everyone who played on the Training Room server and helped I5 to be one of our best launches ever! We’re extremely happy about how I5 went live.

Second, we’re still scouring the boards for bugs and other issues, but we’ve finished making large changes to the power sets. We’ll still be looking at issues as the arise. For instance, there are issues with Defense builds; we’re going to look at that problem more carefully (the Damage Resistance Inspirations are a step, but there's a little more to come).

Thanks for all your great feedback!

Um - I think Geko meant "in the coming updates." I'm not sure whether any of these will make it into I6 or not - so let's not set up any expectations!

Gang,

Decided to give Permafrost a protection against Slow instead of Toxic...

And we've tweaked Hibernate so that your toggles won't drop anymore!

Thanks for your feedback. As you know, we've already sped up the NPC's in Escort missions, which seems to be the number one request!

I've also noted that you'd like allies to fight sooner, more control over allies/NPC's, NPC's appearing on the map and better notification when protecting the artifact is over...I'm not sure how much of this we'll get done for I5, but if we don't, I'll put this into the quality of life fixes and try to get them done at some time in the near future.

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Circeus, there is something you (and many others) have glossed over about Statesman's numbers...they are off...WAY off.

As stated, invul passives are 7.5% (which has been tested and everyone agrees on that number) but where the error comes is in the enhancements. Statesman said that max with +3 level SO resists you would get 18.975% from the invul passives. Think that through everyone. To get 18.975% from +3 level enhancements each enhancement would need to provide 25.5% buff (((1 + (6 * .255)) * 7.5) = 18.975). This means that each defense and resist SO is gaining a 9.167% boost each level, as opposed to the accepted (and dev quoted from long ago) 5% boost each level.

Invul max on passives should be 17.85 = ((1 + (6 * (.2 * 1.15))) * 7.5)

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7.5% base * (1+ (6 Enhancements * .2 Enhancement increase)) * 1.15 for +3 Enhancements = 18.975.

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People have recorded the base of Invincibility at 3.5%, so I was only going by that, please feel free to give the correct number (for range too please!)

3.5% * (1 + (6 * .22)) = 8.12% per mob.

8.12% * 14 mobs is 113.68.


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The number isn't 3.5% base - it's 1.5%. To be honest - I don't know where the data came from that led to 3.5%.

Certainly, your points on Toxic and Psi are true; let's not forget that Invulnerability has an inherent weakness to Psi in Unyielding, though. It's safe to say that Ice is better (albeit marginally) because it lacks that weakness.

You're 100% correct about assuming 14 mobs in EA AND Invincibility - though something else isn't taken into account. Invincibility works only while mobs are in melee. So as the number of mobs decrease, Invincibility decreases. If a Tanker leaves melee range for 1 second, the buff from Invincibility fades...This isn't the case with EA; it's a click that lasts 45 seconds. The calculation of mobs is done at the moment it's used - and that buff carries throughout the 45 seconds. It doesn't decrease like Invincibility.

I posted this in the Dev Corner...just wanted to also post the info here

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Some have asked "have you looked at Circeus' numbers?"

Of course! Circeus does an absolutely terrific job of number crunching. His spreadsheets are great.

Here's my analysis of them.

The Defense given by Invincibility is incorrect in the table. Invincibility has a cap of 14 mobs; no more. The Invincibility Defense max for Tankers (with the Enhancement limitations Circeus placed) around 53% not 107.8%.

That changes the numbers significantly, but Invulnerability still ends up superior overall.

Now that assumes that the Invulnerability Tanker has 14 mobs within the slight range of Invincibility. Let's say that there's only 7 mobs within reach. Now Invincibility's defense boost (according to Circeus' chart) drops down to 26.5%. A quick scan down at the damage comparison shows that Invulnerability is superior only in Smashing, Lethal Damage and Fire damage; Ice bests Invulnerability in the other categories.

Unless an Invulnerability Tanker fires off Invincibility when 12 or more mobs are within range, according to Circeus' chart, Ice Armor will be superior to Invulnerability against Cold, Psionic, Toxic, Energy and Negative.

Also, Frozen Armor and Glacial Armor have a base 16% Def, not 15%.


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