UberGuy

Well, take this with a large grain of salt, because my test was not very scientific, but I copied to test, went into a mission, and seemed to have the problem. After a couple of suspicious dips in my endurance, I deleted the Life Insurance (Debt Protection) temp power.

I then played quite normally.

I am going to repeat the test and make more certain that I am having the problem with LI.

Note that this could explain the issue on high-level Brutes, as this is a level 40-44 Mayhem temp power.

This does not explain the issue on any Hero, or any Villain that's not completed that mayhem mission. Explanations I can think of there is that the problem is independant but made worse by the temp power, the problem is triggered by other temp powers as well (I have many and never use them), or this is all just a coincidence.

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I've noticed it most while running PvP missions in Siren's Call. The more I use a temp power inbetween missions, the more it seems to 'bleed off.' After the 14-15th mission, I'm resting between every other spawn to get back endurance. This is without Stamna in the build, so it goes pretty quick.

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Oh my. I just got Debt Protection, which is an auto power. I had no significant playtime between getting the power and noticing the problem yesterday.

If I still have this issue when I get home, I will copy to test, validate it still happens there, and delete the temp power.

Hey, I don't want to delete it on live for nothing.

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Recalling one quick event...I was in a mission and my fury bar was about 1/2 full and my end. bar was full (I think I used blue inspirations) and I targetted a foe around a corner and I hit 'tp foe' but I accidentally moved so that cancelled it out and I used tp foe again and this time the mob got tp'ed to me and I used KO Blow and then one other attack (I think Haymaker) and I was pretty much out of endurance after that one minion (probably either yellow or orange conned to me...don't remember).

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Out of curiosity, how is your KOB slotted? Does it have any end reducers in it?

If there is any way I can collect detailed information from a client perspective, let me know. The effect is crippling. I've tried a few things and it wouldn't go away.

Since there was a patch today I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing if I still have the problem. I know that (obviously) there was no fix meant to be loaded for this today, but then again it's not like yesterday's patch should have miraculously infected my character, either.

On the off chance it's any help, I did do one vaguely endurance-related thing before I started playing in earnest yesterday, and subsequently noticed the problem. I slotted an endmod enhancement in Consume (I went from 2ACC/3RCG/1ENDMOD to 2/2/2). I did not try reverting it; it didn't occur to me it could have been related until now.

Like Fury? That would be hard to correlate with intermittent extra endurance costs, but who knows.

In as much frustration over the impact this has had on my Brute as intent to get a comparison, I switched to my Dark/Dark Corruptor, who's 38. I ran some missions and saw nothing comparable. Whether that means this is restricted to Brutes or not I don't have enough info to say. I'll try my Inv/EM Tanker tonight, and maybe compare that to my EM/Dark Brute.

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I think the devs are looking into this... I remember reading somewhere that someone got a pm from a dev saying that they've been getting these reports from a lot of reliable people. So I dunno... have you send say _castle_ a pm with the details of your testing and results?

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I sent one to Cricket asking her to pass it on to whoever seemed like the right folks. Hopefully that'll include Casltle if he's right folk.

Sadly, replacing my enhancers didn't do anything. Given the nature of the behavior I'm seeing, I didn't really expect it to, but it had occured to me to try it even before seeing it here, so I tried it. Fortunately I only replaced the enhancers in my toggles and in Seismic Smash.

I went into a Freakshow mission and attacked a LT. The first guy was a Freak Juicer Champion (not sure that was his name, but he was one of the guys with the Tesla coils on the shoulders). These guys actually drain endurnace. I watched my endurance bar durung the fight with him. Nothing untoward happened, and by the time he was dead I had a net use of about 25% of my endurance bar.

Then I moved on to a Freak Smasher minion. During my fight with him, Seismic Smash did that thing again. There was a huge drop in my endurance. I was running Hasten, and I checked but it had not dropped yet (I had activated it when I attacked the Juicer). By the time this minion was dead, I was at about half my endurance bar.

Both these foes were +2.

You can see something went wrong there. I netted as much or more endurance use taking down a minion as I did an endurance draining LT before him, including the recovery I would have gotten in the 5-6 second gap between them as I moved from one target to the next (they were separate spawns).

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This would probably be a better thread for the OP to check out...

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Yep, I knew I had seen this discussed, and I went looking, found that thread again, and updated it with this info. I also sent a PM the way of the devs.

Something is wrong.

I have been playing my Stone Melee/Fiery Aura Brute consistently for several days. I have not just leveled. I am not using new powers. My character is level 40, so I have a very good feel for how it plays.

And I am running out of endurance far, far faster than I was yesterday.

Every one of my attacks that is part of my attack chain has two even-level endurance reducer SO enhancements in it. That means they cost 60% of their base cost. I have 3-slotted Stamina, again with even-level SOs.

My most expensive attack is Seismic Smash. It has a base cost of 18.512 endurance per activation. With two endurance reducers in it, it should cost 11.111 endurance per activation. Still expensive, but quite manageable.

This is a character that yesterday I could easily run through four to six spawns before needing to rest, because I have a self-heal and an endurance recovery power. Tonight, I am running out of endurance on single +2 spawns. I end such fights in the lower 1/3 or 1/4 of my endurance bar.

Something is wrong.

In trying to quantify what I am experiencing, I did the only thing I could, which was watch my endurance bar move around as I use powers. Since this is a Brute, I have toggles, so my bar moves down in little increments all the time, then jumps back up when I regain endurance on my Stamina-augmented schedule. My attacks clearly move my bar down, and most of the time the movement seems reasonable for the power.

Most of the time.

I have, several times now, seen Seismic Smash empty my endurance bar a huge amount; much more than the 11 and change endurance it should cost me. It is difficult to estimate accurately, but I would put it at roughly double that, 20 or so endurance. I was not fighting end-draining foes. (I carefully chose a Council paper mission, for example, for just that reason.) I was careful to check each time that I was not reasonably suffering some other effect, such as a Hasten crash. We've all seen paranoid posts about nerfs to accuracy and endurance before, and I don't want to be such a poster.

These observations give the appearance that, inconsistently, I am paying either double the reduced cost or the full, unenhanced cost of my attack; the small difference in those two numbers makes it difficult to know which on a visual scale like the endurance bar. But I have now observed it several times. I also observed a similarly huge cost on Heavy Mallet, my next-largest attack. This leads me to believe it may be occurring on my less expensive attacks as well, but I cannot clearly resolve the matter with them, because they move my endurance bar less due to smaller cost.

I've spend a lot of time getting this character to actually have manageable endurance burn, and I can tell that something is dramatically different tonight.

Something is wrong.

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If respecs are going to be "sacred", fix the underlying problem of poor (and often misleading) in-game power and enhancement info.

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A-freaking-men.

I mean, come on, how many newbie players know what is going to happen when they get SOs and they six-slotted Resist Elements, Fast Healing or (God help them) Brawl?

I think we knew this day would probably come some day. Your continued presence on these boards for such a long time has been, IMO, a great thing for the forum community. You have a rapport with the community here born of what seems a genuine interest in the game and your long history of interacting with us.

We'll miss those things, along with you.

ED. "Enhancement Diversity." This was the change introduced in Issue 6 (and at release for CoV) that introduces true diminishing returns on enhancements when you slot "too many" of one type of enhancement in a power.

This post is not about the merits or pitfalls of ED. It's about how ED works. While I've seen a few posts about this topic, and asked around about it on the forums a while back, I've never seen it actually described. So I set about determining it for myself. Presented here are my findings.

Something we known all along is that ED applies a "tax" on the value of enhancements. Most of the examples we've seen involve Schedule "A" enhancers. For those who don't know, there are four "schedules" of enhancements.

Schedule A: An SO is 33.3%
Schedule B: An SO is 20.0%
Schedule C: An SO is 40.0%
Schedule D: An SO is 60.0%

Schedules C and D are uncommon, with examples being Interrupt Reduction and Knockback Increase, respectively.

For each Schedule, ED assigns what I'll call "tax brackets". These are brackets against which the value for the sum of all enhancemets of a certain type in a power are compared.

For now, lets look just at Schedule A. Damage enhancers use Schedule A, so if you have three even-level Enhanced Damage SOs in a power, the sum of the enhancement is 99.9%. If you have four, the sum is 133.2%.

From what I can tell the game appears to do this:

1) Compare the "untaxed" value of your enhancements to the four tax brackets.
2) Find out how much falls into each bracket
3) Subtract out the amount of tax based on how much value was in each bracket.

When doing this, each type of enhancement is considered separately. If your power can be slotted for damage, accuracy, recharge and endurance, the "tax" on damage enhancements has nothing to do with the one on accuracy, and vice versa.

Here are the tax bracket boundaries by schedule. These are known to be exact, and were not determined experimentally.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Sch B1 B2 B3 B4
----------------------------------
A &lt;70% 70-90% 90-100% &gt;100%
B &lt;40% 40-60% 60-80% &gt;80%
C &lt;80% 80-100% 100-120% &gt;120%
D &lt;120% 120-150% 150-180% &gt;180%</pre><hr />

Here's the amount of "tax" taken out for each bracket:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>Total in Tax
---------------
Bracket 1: 0%
Bracket 2: 10%
Bracket 3: 30%
Bracket 4: 85%</pre><hr />

By using this data and calculation model and comparing it to how various in-game combinations of enhancements display, I find I my values match to within about 0.5% of what the game shows when you hover over a power on the enhancement screen. I'm not sure if that difference is due to rounding differences on my side or the game's, or if there is a subtle difference between my math and the game's.

By the way, take a close look at the bracket table. Two Schedule A SOs is 66.6%, which is in the first Schedule A tax bracket. But two Schedule B SOs is 40%, which is exactly where the second Schedule B bracket starts. The same holds true for Schedules C and D.

This has a (very) small impact on greening up your SOs. It turns out you can have two +1 Schedule A SOs without incurring any tax, but greening up any other Schedule incurs a small tax. We're talking about very small amounts here, however (less than 1%), so the observation (like most of this thread) is mostly academic.

As a final comment, ED thoroughly limits the value of greening SOs when you have three (or more!) in a power. In the old days, three +3 Schedule A SOs would have been worth an extra 15% enhancement bonus. Under ED they are worth only 2.3%. I would think long and hard about greening up any Hamidon Enhancements you have if you've got three slotted already. If you insist on eking out more bonus, slot more than three instead of combining them.

I suspect that:

* For a long time QA did not play like many "in the wild" players did. And especially not like many forumites did.
* Everyone we can see from Cryptic apparently has a very, very full schedule.
* Bugs are prioritized in ways we really, truly do not like much. See Positron's recent comment that bugs caught internally by NCsoft and Cryptic are always prioritized first. (I imagine there's an exception process for this, but still.)
* The test and production environments are sufficiently different that some bugs go untested until they hit live. (Global chat bug)

None of these things are excuses. They're just things that impact quality of delivered product and system stability.

GW's does damage and Sirroco's drains a wee bit of end. I wouldn't really consider hers "worst". You want worst hold? Try Petrifying Gaze. It does zero damage (to any stat), zero debuff, and has the worst duration/recharge ratio out there.

GW's hold is fine.

I note with pride at this juncture that my Ice/Dev has never, not even briefly, had Smoke Grenade.

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Whoa. Those Stalkers I've seen with that patron are going to be TICKED when that happens and no respeccing out of it. yeesh!

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Unless they're like.. eight years old, I really don't have an ounce of pity for anyone who takes that spin on this. Someone had to have been nuts to think that the current behavior was intended or balanced. That it would be corrected was so totally obvious to me it's just not funny.

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The problem is that the floating portion prevents you from using breakfrees similar to the way a knockback does. It's only supposed to be a hold + DoT, not a 10 second long knockback.

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Oh, trust me, I'm intimately familar with what the problem is.

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Which part is a bug, the BF beforehand negating the power, or the power negating the ability to use a BF and free oneself?

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Heh, I think we'll need a redname to give the final word, but I'm certain it's the second part that's the bug.

The floating, spinning action is supposed to be the visual manifestation of the hold. If you're not held, poof, no manifestation.

I seem to recall the original design included that you had to provide a set of times when you were open to be raided. The raiders chose one of those.

I suppose it allows for a sort of "schedule grieving" where you say you're only open to be raided at 4AM. But then when someone takes you up on that, you'd have to buck up.

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Thorn Tree is easy once you realize you need to sit out fighting it until the reinforcements stop coming.

Pretty much all there is to it.

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Huh. We actually have tended to kill it so fast the first wave just reached us (and started to maul us) as someone clicked on the seeds.

Of course that was before the AV change. Given the old timing, I suspect we'd have to fight the ambushes now.

Pos, I have to say, have you guys actually played a controller much since you instituted Containment?

For any of the crossover sets, Controllers have much better damage per attack much more of the time. The only way doms get the nod here is they have more attacks to spam, but that doesn't work out numerically for all the sets.

As a PvP player I'd rather be beat on by a non-Domination Dominator any day than by a Controller. And the Controller has an easier time holding because of greater base hold durations.

The feel is different indeed. The Doms feel gimpy.

Oh, trust me, I'm not worried about being able to get it. My complaint is that I have to resort to meta-game boring mindless BS I can literally be AFK for.

There shouldn't be things like that which provide reward.

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Meh. My TANKER didn't get Unbreakable over the course of going from level 1-50, only after several more months of regular Hamidon raids and helping others level. This Accolade still won't be useable over the course of a normal toon's leveling, it'll likely be attained after 50.

It's nice that I can actually GET it now, but it's still too high.

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Agreed.

Tankers are getting this badge in CoH post-50. Including ones who took 1-2 hours of pounding from Hamidon every night for about four months.

It means that people will do unfun and boring things to get it. The kind of behavior they discourage.

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Im curious how Rad infection/Darkest night and force field/Sonic field are gonna stand up now?

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Darkest Night isn't a huge debuff to begin with, so what you'll notice, I think (and this is based on my own experience) is things still hit you, though certainly less so. Remember that they added in a toHitDebuff resistance on things like AVs and Bosses.

What Dark has going for it is that it can stack lots of small to moderate toHit debuffs on people. A Corruptor's Dark Servant's Chill of Night is a 30% debuff according to Prima, DN and Fearsome Stare are both 15%, and Twilight Grasp is 5%. FS and TG's toHitDebuff both last 20s. (The above are all Corruptor numbers. Defender numbers should be 25% higher.)

Dark Blast + Dark Miasma users are, IMO, likely to be the game's premier toHit debuffers, because every standard, damaging Dark Blast attack is listed as a 7.5% toHit debuff lasting 6-10 seconds. (Again, Corruptor numbers.) Combining that stacking capability with the stacking in Dark Miasma means a Dark/Dark can potentially floor the accuracy of even resistant mobs.

You can stack DB with sets like Rad Emission as well, but Rad fewer stackable toHit debuffs. It's the stacking thats key.

There is an interesting balance factor in there. To perfom this stacking (and maintain it) the D/D user has to constantly cycle attacks and other powers on a target. It's expensive, and it draws aggro. But in scenarios where you can afford it, the effect is powerful. I thought it would be on paper and I can say my play experience backs it up. (I have both a DDD and a DDC.)

I'm a little surprised by this statement:

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It is unclear why Defense was lowered as part of the Global Defense reductions in I5, but tohit buffs were (apparently) not. If they were, this fact was not reported, nor has it shown up yet in anyone's testing.

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Quite simply, the reason is because the nerf was, in fact, a defense nerf. It did not (in and of itself), reduce our offense. And our final toHit against a given foe is a dominant factor in our offense.

If you meant to append "in PvP", you might want to mention it. Because the reasons are quite obvious to me. These powers are simply the only way you can sometimes overcome the toHit debuffs that are slathered on you (in PvE especially, but this can be an issue in PvP). Since toHit debuffs and defense are indentical from a mathematical perspective (if not a full mechanical one), and at least some characters should have a way to combat toHit debuffs, that leaves toHit buffs as a direct counter to defense as well.

Moreover, as you mention, many critters have outrageous defense powers, in many cases apparently posessing completely unnerfed versions of the powers heroes had when the game was launched. Powers like Aim and Build Up are the only way heroes (and villains) can sometimes affect these foes.

In other words, these powers appear balanced in PvE.