UberGuy

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To me that feels worth doing as it'd only ever be an issue in sustained combat situations

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"Sustained combat situations" is what Powerforge builds Scrappers for. He soloes AVs. And he only just recently was looking for suggestions on how to improve the endurance efficiency of this build. MG was where we had him add end reduction.

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The thing is, that's the behavior you want if you're sharing a custom critter among multiple story arcs. Otherwise you'd have to hand-edit the story arc file on one or more of the arcs sharing the custom critter. Likewise, if you edit a critter outside of any particular story arc, you want story arcs to show the changes you made.

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I'm confused. What you're describing is essentially what I want to happen. I want everything to resolve to the locally defined critter definition. However, if anything is out of synch, it actually shows you a duplicate entry for each version of the critter with no way to tell which is coming from what source.

IIRC, this is exacerbated if you actually save a custom group file that contains custom critters with that group name in their definition. So if I make a critter Bob hardcoded as a member of group A, and then also save a custom group named A, I end up with two definitions of Bob. One is the standalone definition of Bob and the other is now a snapshot of the standalone Bob at the time I saved the custom group.

Additionally, if Bob gets published in an arc, and then I modify his standalone defintion, if I open any arc he was published in I see yet another Bob in my list - the one that's in my arc and the standalone one. This persists until I republish the arc (or resave, for test arcs) , at which point the arc is updated with the standalone copy.

I actually found myself in the situation where I had 3 copies - one standalone, one in a custom group and one in an arc instance. If I recall, it kept updating my arc with the copy from the custom group, which was confusing the hell out of me because it didn't contain changes I was making to the stand-alone critter. I didn't actually know that the custom group contained a complete definition of the critter till I went digging around for the source of the issue. My solution was to delete the custom group, because it was redundant, since the custom critters declared the group membership directly.

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Nope. But do you want to have a good scrapper, or a GREAT scrapper?

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As you might have surmised, we're a little...focused on performance in here. However, if IOs are not your thing (yet ), no worries. You can do well without them. You can just do ... a lot better with them. Of course that takes a lot of in-game influence/infamy or time spent aquiring IOs. For some of us that's a mini-game in and of itself, for others its a barrier to the end result. YMMV.

Swapping the slotting you have in Smite with that in MG increases the recharge from MG by about 0.71s because you have so much global recharge. That would move the Heca proc to a much more frequent component of your probable chain.

Could your attack chain tolerate that increase?

Also, what AT? Can you slot any PBAoE sets in it?

I'd say so. According to Mid's you lose around 9 points of damage per attack by replacing it with the proc, but gain 107 points of damage 33% of the time, or 35.3 points of damage on average. That's a net average damage increase of 26.3 points (about a 6% increase in average DPA), with a much better (but random) burst potential.

The proc would do you more good in a faster activating attack, but there's not really a good place for it in your build without major reshuffling.

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Of course, once that happens it'd make it much harder for people trying to flip things. I will say that to this day the single biggest thing that amazes me is how much more money people spend on crafted enhancements then recipes. How I can take a recipe worth $10k and sell it for $3M just amazes me.

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Even more odd to me is that the root of that seems to lie in people who honestly know what they're doing there when they do it. They just would prefer to throw the (vastly multiplied) money at it to get the final result rather than spend the time crafting it themselves. In some cases I can imagine that really being worth some folk's time. If they're a top-end farmer buying a crafted Thunderstrke for 3M, they might actually be losing money to spend the time to bid on all the salvage and craft it when they get it all. I find it hard to imagine that it's actually more efficient for the majority of players though.

...and then there's stuff like the L50 Numina heal I got, crafted and sold for 30M, meanwhile buying a L48 recipie for 6M.

I agree here with the undercurrent of folks who feel that PvP in the City lacks goals and direction. Essentially, it's perpetual team Deathmatch.

I played FPS games for years before I came here, about 5 years worth of it on teams that played in competitive leagues and ladders. One of those teams was top-flight, and undefeated in rated play, the others were pretty mediocre. In pretty much all cases, I was there at the teams' formation, and I stayed till they disbanded.

While those games had deathmatch, all the serious organized play was of gametypes with objectives beyond "defeat the enemy team". We had to destroy things in a base, capture the enemy flag a certain number of times or the most before a timer ran out, hold objectives longest, etc. People used deathmatch maps to hone their personal frag skills, not as a means to an end.

Having zones that are open deathmatch is fine, but the fact that, in essence, all the zones are like that is killer in my opinion. Even in the zones with side-based goals (RV and Siren's), those goals are there essentially there for their own sakes. Sure, if you take enough pillboxes, your side wins. Now... why do you want to win? If it's not more interesting or rewarding than pure (team) deathmatch, people will brush it aside. Right now you get rep and drops from people and pretty much nothing worth having from winning a zone. (The temp powers from SC are nice, but I haven't seen people try to take the zone back to get them since CoV was brand new.)

Similarly, stopping people from getting nukes and Shivans is not a goal, it's an anti-goal. It basically doesn't do anything for you so much as it denies it to someone else. Oh, sure, you get to steal stuff from them, but in my experience, unless you're wiping the floor with some noob, it's simpler to just get your own.

IMO they need zones with activities more similar to gametypes in FPSs. I think that would generate more interest and attract more people. They need more reasons people want to PvP and less focus on making them tolerate it to get stuff they want (badges, temps, PvP IOs).

Sadly, IMO, using the separation of PvP powers to make the powers system radically different from PvE was a radical mistake. I never wanted to PvP in this game for a variety of reasons, but I thought the mobility, speed and pace were excellent. Curtailing that with plus the effects of DPA normalization meant it went from something I wasn't interested in to something I actively dislike.

Memorization Badges

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The problem seems to be that the critter and cvg files get reloaded if they exist on the machine, even if they no longer match those in the storyarc file.

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This is correct. I have experienced this to my frustration several times. I have seen this result in a custom critter being loaded twice - once as defined in a misson, and once as defined in my critter folder.

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AND (IF) the MA system is accepting the file size your local machine is reporting, rather than the size the MA file will be when saved on the server, . . .
then the difference from machine to machine can be quite significant.

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You are trying to deny my argument, but to do so, you had to pretend that I had not included those "IF" clauses that I did clearly include in the conclusion.
It appeared that the physical filesize reported by the local machine was almost the only possible logical variant in this case. (The serverside reformatting, like the &nsbp and such, should happen from both local machines, and should not be a variant in this case.)

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No mainstream modern operating system should report the file size of a file containing 10,000 ASCII representations of the letter "X" as anything other than exactly 10,000 bytes. Filtering for the subset of Windows operating systems on which you can play CoH absolutely and completely eliminates any possibility that this is in play, unless as I intimated, some MA programmer actually called some other completely different API. I know of no simple streams/file API on Windows which would report the underlying physical storage size of a file - to my knowledge you would have to interrogate the storage subsystems to learn this information.

In other words, my point was that while this may be technically possible, I consider this vanishingly likely as the explanation.

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It could be possible:

that a rogue will earn both influence and infamy.

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While anything is possible with changes to the underlying game, right now this is actually not possible. The characters have only one wealth attribute. What it's called is just a label that's switched in the interface by a flag that says whether you're a hero or a villain.

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O,O omg. I had no idea you could do that! Thanks alot, that will help a great deal!

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Glad to help.

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Part two of The Fiendish Plot series is or was in the works but I am not going to work on it anymore until I get in the mood because testing them takes up so much time. In order to test the 3rd mish you have to run through the first two instead of just being able to test the third mish. If I could avoid having to do that then maybe it would get done sooner. I am just not aware of how to test just one mish in your arc without having to test them all.

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You can drag and drop your missions using the icons at the top of the arc editor. Drag the third mission to the front of the queue, try it out, and drag it back when it's satisfactory.

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Okay, where are they getting that info from? If they're assuming they're getting themselves worked up over nothing more then their own paranoia. If they're actually read an announcement that tells them what, please link the announcement.

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No one's getting that info. It's a response to people who suggest that the most fair way to enable side switching is to strip your existing characters of levels/enancements/inventory/inf/badges (take your pick).

I believe the most likely "barrier" to switching is going to be content, not penalties. To swtich you have to do something, like rack up enough "evil" points to be accepted in the Rogue Isles.

Based on the survey last fall, I actually expect people with a sufficiently grey/neutral rating to be able to switch back and forth with some degree of ease. Maybe not just walk up to the portal and click it ease, but certainly not dramatic undoing of your character.

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How are the Patron Powers granted? I assumed that the Patrons more or less just taught you how to use the powers and how to access their source (like a master wizard teaching an apprentice). I never really thought the Patrons were the source of the Powers themselves (as if they were mini-Gods or something)

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They never explain it.

Some of the villain ones make thematic sense for you to have to give up in a swap. Ghost Widow's are you calling up the souls of defeated foes. That doesn't sound terribly heroic, even in a world where heroes tote around assault rifles with underslung dry bars or weild the power of the netherworld.

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The short answer?
File size measures the size of a computer file. Typically it is measured in bytes with a prefix. The actual amount of disk space consumed by the file depends on the file system. [/b]
i.e. depending on how the drive is formatted, and designed, will make a file be a different length on a different drive.

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There's a big difference in the logical size of a file and the "physical" size it requires on storage media, filesystem architecture, etc.. Data applications should never care about the physical size, and indeed are typically completely blind to it. If I load a plain text file containing nothing but 10,000 ASCII letter "X"s into a programming text editor, that file will be exactly 10,000 bytes long no matter what storage media I store it on or even what OS I store it on. Nothing that is not an OS or disk management tool should ever know that the file might actually be taking up 11,264 bytes of storage on my disk drive due to NTFS's block size.

In short, whatever is up, that is most assuredly not it, or some CoH dev doesn't have enough to do if he/she is determining how much filesystem overhead the mission files incur on our individual systems.

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But my question is whether 1500 tickets is enough to fill a level 50's inventories, purchasing rolls similar to what would drop in a regular mission. They don't have to be scattered across type and origin for this test. Just similar in level to what that level 50 would get in regular content.

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It's hard to say, for a few reasons.
[*] you can use 1500 tickets to buy a lot of cruft for little cost per random roll.[*] you can use 1500 tickets to buy 2-3 nice things (rare recipies or specific rare salvage)[*] you can expand the salvage and recipie inventory of characters fairly significantly (I have L50 characters who have 70 invention salvage slots and 29 recipie slots), but you can't increase your ticket cap

Edit: Hm, yeah, it is 80 salvage slots.

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So, heroes and villains will get to change sides in the new expansion.

Villains are going to need some ancillary power pools for when they turn good.

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Way, way back, when side switching was first discussed in earnest (when they added names for the same badges on both sides), Statesman, who was still in charge, suggested that you'd lose EPP/PPPs and have ro respec into PPP/EPPs.

That was ages ago now, so who knows, but that makes sense to me.

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Copied from the other Thread. This is how I think it will go down as a whole.

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There's an moderate sidez thread on this in the Market forum. In summary of what's there, switching making you level one is a deal breaker. I would not buy that expansion unless praetorea was really impressive on it's own.

Why?

Because becoming level 1 again is not switching. It's starting a new character. Stripping me of my IOs, money and badges is this even more clearly.

So this version of "switching" is effectively deleting my character and starting over.

Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to do that with an AT/powerset I already played on a server I'm already on? That's not worth "switching" sides on. I would just create a new character, and I can do that now.

So this expansion would come down to Pratorean content and the ability to create ATs on the "wrong" side. But I already play the game on both sides. While it'd be nice, I am in no way desperate to create ATs on the other side.

What I want out of the expansion is the ability to switch existing characters and play around with the "alignment" stuff they're adding. If that stuff involves effectively deleting long-standing characters, they can shove it, and I do not believe I'd be alone in that perspective. As such, I think that would be an attrocious design approach.

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Now for someone like him, he would never know to sell the different DOs/SOs to the correct trainer, probably would never mess with the market and would definitely not know that if you respec you get full value of the DOs/SOs back.

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What would someone like this do with 65 million inf if they got it?

Yes, but what that tells you is that the supply of the item is so high that it is driving the price down under the vendor price. There's other stuff at work, but that's a strong effect. It would require people to create an artificial shortage to counteract that (recent MA phenomena nonwithstanding), and that's just not worth most people's effort. It'd be better for you to find something that's lower in supply.

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Why when they could just sell it to a vendor for 250?

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Because listing it at that price often leaves it in your market slots longer, and for some of us, getting another 50, 100 or even 249 inf for something is worth less than the value of what we could get by selling (or buying) something else in that slot.

The best value for those cases may be to not list the items at all and sell them to an NPC, but this has other side effects.
[*] You get badges for selling stuff, and dumping cheap, high-volume stuff on the market helps get them faster. They're useful badges for market users to have, too becasue ever other one gives you a bonus transaction slot.[*] Putting stuff on the market serves one of the big-picture communal purposes of the market - getting things other people need in their hands. Me effectively deleting my goods by vending them to an NPC helps no one else who might actually have a use for my trash.

In tandem with the 2nd bullet above, this essentially becomes an act of philanthropy for those of us with a lot of inf. It doesn't affect my bottom line enough to notice if I sell something for 250 or 5 inf. I'll sell it for 5 just to move it and never notice the actual profit - it's just too small.

Edit: as a note, I don't actually list things for 5. I pick larger, unusual numbers to reduce the likelyhood of other people buying my thrift store offerings just to vend them.

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But someone on the forums said that SD's defense debuff resistance was enhanceable and it's actually possible for an SD toon to cap defense debuff resistance. I don't know if that statement is true, but the whole thing has me thoroughly confused.

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You absoutely can not cap the resistance.

It is enhancable, and it also scales with level (it's only 17.3% at level 50 - it starts at a whopping 7.5% at a theoretical level 1). At level 50 with full slotting it's going to be around 27% resistance.

It's helpful, but it's still very easy to suffer cascade defense failures on a Widow, especially against +2/+3 foes.