UberGuy

Try signing in to beta, or reading the beta forums. Your outlook seems ridiculous in light of simple facts.

* shines the lasers through TonyV to see how he polarizes the light

That I can mostly agree with, though Electric Melee and maybe Dual Blades have respectable AoEs that might change that. Even though I play Martial Arts and Dark Melee, the MA (who's 50) I still gets plenty of runners when, say, I throw Judgement on stuff. And any time I'm fighting something I can't just melt (there's going to be less of that in I22), my Interface DoT still sets it running.

Materials for the (non-classified, as far as I know) armor testing folks at Los Alamos National Labs. They were doing material properties testing on various targets that they were shooting with high-velocity gas cannons and trying to measure the changes the target material went through at the instant of impact. It turns out you can figure out useful physical properties of surface material by figuring out how it polarizes reflected light. The light needed to be oscillating so we could ignore the light from the projectile impact, sunlight, etc., and oscillating fast enough to keep from introducing aliasing in the signal for the high-speed physical changes introduced by the impact.

We did fun stuff at that company. We had lasers that could melt bricks. You should see what they do to plastic army men. Warning: do not inhale the resulting fumes...

(Sorry for the threadjack.)

Bah, I designed high-speed analog signal processing electronics! This digital stuff is a fad, I tell ya!

(Just kidding, naturally. Even the stuff I built fed into a computer, and I wrote the software that read the data in, which has a lot to do with why I'm in IT today and not EE, but when you've got a 100 MHz laser signal bouncing off a material sample and polarizing optics collecting its four polarization states, you need something between the laser optics and the computer to turn the light into analog voltage levels for the ADC cards in the computer to work with. That was the kind of stuff I used to work on.)

I don't know, man. I think you had to have lead about 25%* of the BAFs I've ever been on.

* I have no idea what the real percentage is. It just seems like a lot.

For what it's worth, I have never tried to play that card. There are things I don't like about iTrials, but the inability to socialize at them is not one of them. I agree that they're not social. Getting 20 people on a team together is not particularly social, IMO.

You may not have context for this, but to me this is like the old Hamidon raid and the I9 version. In the old one, most people huddled together and followed one player who targeted yellow Mitos. They usually all had ranged attacks on auto, and so were free to chat away while their characters moved and fired automatically. In the new one, there's little time for that, as there are different teams for different foes, autofollow isn't always smart, and most people really need to be rapidly chaining multiple powers. There's not much time for chatter in the new one. Because of that, some people preferred the old one, even though we weren't really playing at all for most of it. I vastly prefer the new one, because we're all racing around doing lots of stuff as fast as we can.

As an aside, it might interest you to know that, prior to iTrials, most of my play time was spent solo. I've "incarnated" all my 50s as much as I want to (and probably much more than is typical) and am back to leveling a new character to 50 ... solo. I do have a circle of in-game friends and acquaintances I chat with daily, but when we get in a mission together, we move like the wind. We chat, but not as much as when we're all off doing our own things.

Ooh, yay, we can get into an argument about who has bigger math cred! The MBA versus the career electrical engineer! Fight!

But wait, before we do that, maybe you should forget math for a moment and try reading comprehension.

You compared someone with 1/2 the softcap losing 3% defense to someone at the softcap losing 3% defense, and claimed if it was no big deal to you (at 1/2 the softcap), it should be no big deal to them at the softcap. The only way you can claim that is if you do not understand the math that underlies defense and "softcapping", because it is an invalid comparison. I didn't say you didn't understand math in general. I said that you making the above claim suggests you do not understand the math relating to defense.

Instead of breaking out an unprovable appeal to authority on an internet forum, prove me wrong. I'd be interested in seeing you defend the above claim with math.

To me, if there's time to stand around and chat, that means I'm not playing the game.

I chat plenty in CoH, but I do it while waiting on things to start or while in my own (solo) missions chatting with people who are all doing their own things. If we're chatting as a team while there's no reason we couldn't be fighting, IMO we're doing it wrong. I have IRC and facebook and Skype to chat with people outside of game. I'm not here for a chat client with 3D avatars. I'm hear to beat stuff up. Anything that has lots of action is good with me.

I know a particular trial player who might represent the bottom half of one unconscious player... >.>

External sources of fiction aside, I do believe this is actually what in-game rezzes are supposed to be. Consider, the alternative is that you go to the hospital! OK, sure, you show up at the hospital fully healed - that's a concession to the video game nature of the medium. But the whole fiction around the medical teleporters is that they teleport the wounded, not the dead.

Being "dead" (the game pretty consistently refers to it as defeated), seems to be an indistinct state between being so injured you're unconscious and being actually dead. You're "almost dead". "Rezzes" compete with the hospital for bringing you back from the brink of death.

There may be in-game stories that violate this which I am not recalling, but the main violation I do recall is Numina actually bringing Manticore and (accidentally) Statesman back from being honest-to-goodness dead in the official CoH comics. (I haven't read the novels, so it may be in there too.) Even in that case, you had to rez them soon after death or their soul wouldn't come back.

If you care about common or uncommon salvage at all (and I concede most people don't), /vault remains a place you can stash it inside a mission instance. I use this mostly on lowbies, as I often want to use their low- and mid-level salvage for crafting. (I tend not to care about high-level salvage unless it's a rare.) I pull up /vault and throw a stack of something in there, and pull it out later for my crafting activities.

There's a lot of subjective claims about the impact of stuff like this made in what seems to be ignorance or at least dismissal of the actual mechanical interactions of the numbers.

A -20 max end change is, for a lot of characters, 20% off of everything endurance-related they do. That's 20% less max endurance to work with, and 20% less recovery. (I think this last point in particular is lost on a lot of posters.)

There are several ways you might not notice such a reduction in your character's endurance management facilities. Ultimately, they all come down to either your build or the way you play your character not approaching your character's endurance recovery envelope. The way the math for this stuff works out, the closer your recovery is to matching your burn rate, the more the time you can fight without stopping approaches infinity. That's not hyperbole - there's a 1/(burn-recovery) term in the forumula. As (burn-recovery) approaches 0, that term approaches infinity. If the combination of build and playstyle walks that line, that means a a small change in your recovery can have immense change in how long you can fight.

Edit: Another way to look at this is that, in terms of how fast your blue bar empties, it is mathematically identical to every power you have costing 25% more endurance per activation. How fun does that sound on a lowbie, let alone a tricked out 50?

Similarly, the claim above about being half-way to the softcap suggests a fundamental lack of awareness in how that math works. If you're at 22.5% defense, losing 3% defense means you take about 11% more damage on average. If you're at the softcap of 45% defense, losing 3% defense means you take about 60% more damage on average. That's a much more noticeable change in how your character plays.

For some of you this debuff is ignorable. For some of you, playing some other character is fine. Don't assume that everything that's good enough for you is good enough for everyone. Twenty hours was not a very smart thing for this in my opinion. One hour? Ouch, but I wouldn't have much to say about it. A day? I think that's overly harsh. Clearly, YMMV.

No they are not.

I understand what you said. It was a factual error. At the very absolute most minimal level, it is a problem they share with Stalkers. In fact, if we're going to go riffling through all their powers, even ones builds don't often prioritize, Scrappers have at least one tool for stopping Runners that Stalkers don't - confront. It also dawns on me with this post that Stalkers have exactly zero taunt auras, making it pretty clear to me that they are the ones least equipped to deal with runners.

Seriously? You're going to suggest that multiple builds factors into this? Wow, dude, talk about reaching. I'm going to concede the general point on Banes, but either you don't play a melee Widow or you have very strange definition of what a "ranged arsenal" means if you think a Night Widow spec character has tools that help a lot with runners. I compare it directly to what my Scrappers with epic ranged attacks get.

If you think terror keeps mobs who are debuffed or on fire from running, I question how much you ever use any terrorizing power. And Placate keeps one mob in place until you attack it. News flash - nothing runs until you use powers on them that cause them to run. Placate factors into that absolutely not at all, since it is canceled as soon as such a power affects them.

Do you even play a Stalker?

I know how it worked. I was here! Plus that system didn't go away all that long ago.

However, I did misread your previous post. I missed that you said "wanted" to be 6-8 levels down for best XP. I somehow read it as that when you SK'd you were (treated as) 6-8 levels down for XP purposes, and that was what confused me about what you were saying.

So... nevermind.