Veracor

I did say the majority of firefarmers that join my raids -- the positive firefarmers are open to ideas and discussions and follow instructions well, and I have no problems with them. It does raise an interesting observation, though, that there almost never seems to be anything inbetween: a firefarmer in league content is either completely fine and a helpful contributor, or a toxic and willful problem. In my experience it seems the problem-causers make up the majority, but I don't AE farm myself to confirm it. Keep in mind that when it comes to Hami raids, I handle problems privately as often as I can to avoid the rest of the league from piling onto the person, so multibox leechers being identified, politely reminded of the Code of Conduct and told to leave on their excess accounts, refusing to leave and hurling slurs and threats at me, and me getting a GM to remove them are all things not done in broadcast or league chats. The majority of multibox leechers in the Hive are firefarm accounts, and one guy once stupidly brought 13 bot accounts (!) to leech in a raid (that guy's accounts all mysteriously stopped logging in shortly after). One of the reasons why Chiasa gets so many hateful and vile responses as control targetter is because she is proactive with identifying leechers and they usually tell her to F off when she sends them an early tell asking about it. Some days it can be very discouraging (especially when there's no on-duty GMs), but the community we have created is worth fighting for and I refuse to give ground to anyone that willfully harms it. At any rate, this was just an explanation for why I personally have a negative opinion of AE farming in general. It is just my opinion and could be changed -- I used to think AFK farming was a strict detriment to the economy as well, but I was shown evidence to the contrary and now think it has a neutral impact. Regardless, I do think my point of losing a feature of the game (however pointless) to ToS-breaking bot farms is valid. If the solution to the double inf thing was a little more comprehensive than just flat-out disabling it all, we could have the damage from this behavior prevented at a mechanical level without harming legitimate farmers. As for your fear of being lumped in with the problem people, it wouldn't happen: we don't look for AT/powerset, we look at follow behavior, skill activation chains, and positioning, and we do account for people periodically AFKing due to real life issues or stopping to scroll up to review instructions. If the person's behavior is indicative of multibox leeching with another account (such as never having simultaneous non-follow movement throughout the whole raid), we give it a few rounds to confirm it before messaging them directly. We really take the time to identify detractors before raising an issue with the person, because a coincidental false positive would be really bad.

Since it seems I'm getting pinged, I'd like to clarify that the reason the xp change annoys me is because I have literally led about 700 Hamidon raids, 650 iTrial badge runs, and approaching 300 "Master of" TF runs on Homecoming, for no reason other than to help community members get familiar with iTrials, to help them get the harder badges, and in general to encourage people to team up and make friends. This is what I pride myself in: the community we have built. My 2700 vet levels are simply an amusing side effect of running so much content for people as regularly as I can manage, and are the closest thing to a metric I have for how long I have been at this. That said, I admit that my personal opinion of AE farming has been quite negative for a long time. The majority of firefarmers that join my raids are usually toxic to others and don't follow instructions, and often try to sneak in leech accounts to the Hamidon raids and lock out legitimate players. AFK farming is merely one step removed from full-on automation and there's an alarming number of reddit and non-HC forum posters who publicly admit to breaking the ToS and running bot farms on Homecoming. As pointless as vet levels may be for everyone including myself, I do not enjoy the thought of their integrity (or any other feature in this game) being lost to such practices. Hence, I'd love to see adjustments or a rework made to decouple incarnate rewards from vet levels, or AE xp gain changes or similar, in order to make such damage mechanically impossible. The positive firefarmers I know wouldn't mind changes being made, and often advocate for them when the topic is discussed in league or discord. Hopefully this clears up what I was pinged about as well as why I even have a strong stance on the subject.

I'd imagine TW is being looked at because it's the top melee damage against stationary targets. However, it only runs away with the melee game on Scrappers due to Tankers needing to reposition and Taunt/retarget, and Brutes needing to maintain Fury, with both of these dropping realistic dps due to the Momentum mechanic. Scrappers not only get the top dps with TW but they also don't suffer any drawbacks in the process. The difference between TW and Fiery/WM is staggeringly broken on Scrapper, but much more in line with the downsides on Tanker/Brute.

Thanks for hosting this Peanut, it was a lot of fun to participate in! And congratulations to Fake Gamers, they really took apart that Dr. Kahn TF!

Roman Bridge Foundation 3 luckily has a nice line-up with its top trim that makes the bottom and mid parts overlap with minimal z-fighting, and for taller walls these objects can be layered on top of each other like legos. The thinner top section has a gap when it doesn't have another wall on top of it, but this gap can be filled with a pillar of similar color. For parts like entrances and windows, some extra stuff like columns or blockwork had to happen to make it fit. I've been meaning to write a visual guide on the things I did to make the base but I keep getting drafted for speedruns, lol.

For a long time I've been wondering why Rebirth Radial doesn't seem to do much before a Hami raid starts, but seems to function at full strength during the Hami raid: It turns out it doesn't have the unresistable tag like most (all?) sources of regeneration. Ageless Radial being used by other people in the raid is what is reducing the effects of Rebirth Radial. With Ageless Radial active: You can see the total regeneration rate does not reflect the components being added together due to the regen resistance. Without Ageless Radial: Easy regen cap without Ageless Radial in effect. I've checked a bunch of other sources of regen from regular powers and they're all marked as unresistable. I don't know if this is by design or this is an oversight, so I guess I'm reporting it as a bug. Also, any armor set that has regeneration debuff resistance (Rad off the top of my head) will not get full benefit of Rebirth Radial.

Reading into this further, when character_ApplyPower calls CalcToHit, it does so with a reference/pointer on the *out_fDefense variable, but then only seems to use that variable in particular to determine the "missed by" chance, while it uses the return from CalcToHit for determining if the attack hit or not. So it may very well just be the combat log showing higher numbers globally than it should be due to defense being multiplied in it. Unless I'm reading this backwards the clamp case might only explain the ascending slope in your enemies' hit roll graph, regardless if it's a log problem or not, since I know you're often softcapped on defense.

CLAMP takes a value, a minimum, and a maximum, and then clamps that value to be within that minimum and maximum if it's out of range. It's doing this with the defense value after it's been multiplied, when (it seems) it should either not mulitply or be using fDefenseAbs instead. The function does return fToHit at the end, but that would be modified by fDefenseRel in one of the clamp cases as well. It's hard to understand what's going on here. It's possible there was originally something involving accuracy vs defense when at clamp values that was either abandoned or written out incorrectly.

(ToHitTotal - DefenseTotal) was already done earlier in the block. From my understanding from the wiki, it's supposed to be just (ToHitFinal * Accuracy) afterward. Unless the step on the wiki was simply omitted because critter Defense is usually low or zero, I'm not really sure why Defense is being multiplied here. Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding what the final line in the block does.

I'm going to assume there's something like a damage aura that's inflating the positives for the outliers, since they don't display chance to hit unless they miss. Regardless there is still a slope so I decided to look a bit at the source code. I did find something that might explain it. First, the combat handler uses this line to generate a number whenever it wants to make a hit roll, and never uses any other method: fRandRoll = fRand = (float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX; Which is completely normal, if a bit inefficient (two type castings per roll). CoH does have a library or two for generating floats but it appears the dev who wrote this didn't care and just used C's rand(). I'm going to assume C's rand() has no significant bias outside of what Google says with modulo operations. And I'm not seeing any operations performed on the randomized number other than comparing the hit roll to it. So I moved on and eventually looked at CalcToHit(), because I wasn't seeing anything odd elsewhere (there's some hackery with the streakbreaker but the data in this thread does not include the streakbreaker). This in particular handles the final bit of the hit roll calculation: fAccuracyFactor = (ppow->ppowBase->fAccuracy * ppow->pattrStrength->fAccuracy * combatmod_Accuracy(pcm, i) * (1 - fElusivity) ); fToHit *= fAccuracyFactor; fDefenseRel *= fAccuracyFactor; if(fToHit<0.05f) // Under clamp, penalize defense { fDefenseRel -= (0.05f - fToHit); fToHit = 0.05f; } else if(fToHit>0.95f) // Over clamp { fToHit = 0.95f; } *out_fDefense = CLAMP(fDefenseRel, 0.0f, (1.0f-fToHit)-0.05f); This caught my eye: I'm not sure if fDefenseRel is supposed to be getting multiplied by fAccuracyFactor when fToHit already is. I am not a programmer and I might be misunderstanding this block, but I see no mention on paragonwiki of accuracy doing more in PvE than just multiplying ToHit. If this is the case, it would mean CoH is biased towards missing a bit more than it's supposed to, because accuracy would be multiplying target's defenses positively. The chance to hit is generally a much larger value than defense though, so if correct this bias would end up being minor. If true, this would explain why the numbers seem to be predisposed to generating higher than lower if it is passively causing more high positives in the combat logs with powers (maybe not just auras) that only display a chance to hit if they miss -- this would generate the slowly-ascending slope seen in some of the graphs, especially Burk's enemy-only graph. These logs were also not all of powers confirmed to log both ways, nor of powers being used against the same enemy defense values/level difference, as well as the enemy hit rolls against players (who usually dodge) are being included with any number of non-player powers that might only show hit rolls if they miss, like auras do. If someone were willing to autofire a fast attack like Flares on a dummy in RWZ overnight with non-clamped ToHit, that would eliminate all potential false positives (until some rando runs by and buffs you, anyways). It would also explain why it feels that things miss a bit more often than they should in this game, even when accounting for selection bias. (Titan Weapons >_>) EDIT 1.5 YEARS LATER: In case anyone stumbles into this old thread via forum search or something and actually reads it all, Number Six happened to answer on the HC Discord what this particular portion of the code is doing (It isn't the culprit):

Hello again everyone! Today marks 9 months of me leading daily Hami raids and iTrials on Everlasting. Coincidentally today also marks the 600th Hami raid that I will have led. I am making this post now due to the fact that I am not entirely sure if I'll make it to the 1-year mark. I am trying, but the burnout is quite real (as are IRL issues resulting from COVID) and I may have to call it quits before then. That said, Everlasting has been a terrific community and I'm glad to have had the chance to help so many people in it get the harder badges and gear out their characters. I only ever played City of Heroes for a total of 6 months back in 2006 and only found out about the private server in March last year purely by random chance. I was a cynical, jaded, anti-social downer that had just recovered from a life-threatening illness, and frankly I just didn't want to be like that anymore: I wanted to be a new person. When Homecoming opened I took the opportunity to try and reinvent myself as an upstanding and professional leader to prove to myself that anyone can change and become whatever they want through force of will and constancy. I have tried my best to lead through example and to avoid clamping down or snapping at anyone giving me problems, and while I haven't handled every issue perfectly, I feel I've done a fair job of it so far and intend to keep at it to make it a permanent and natural lifestyle to me. Thank you all for your faith and kind words, and for giving me my initial chance to lead content (I was a newbie when I started)! Since there might not be another breakpoint for me to post it, here's the raid leader statistics / dragon hoard as of the 9-month mark: 598 Hami raids led 585 iTrial badge runs led 238 "Master of" task force runs led (counting Apex+TinMage as one) 2,507 Players eaten Veteran Levels 3,768 Astral Merits 2,934 Empyrean Merits 4,041 Incarnate Shards 10,000 Incarnate Threads 83 Very Rare Incarnate Salvage 166 Rare Incarnate Salvage 169 Uncommon Incarnate Salvage 811 Common Incarnate Salvage (A lot of these are from getting rid of excess Threads) Villains Defeated: 1,103,145 Damage Inflicted: 666,537,730 Damage Taken: 135,510,066 Healing Given: 12,272,806 Total XP Earned: 2,147,483,647 XP Debt Acquired: 5,065,580 --- Anyways enough about me, I'll see you all at the 600th Hami raid! Thanks to everyone who joins and especially to the regulars who target in Hami raids and attend iTrials to help with Incan chains and other required roles! (Outside of the daily ELTFs schedule, we are currently speedrunning on task forces with an end goal to get a full team of speeders to finally give the Excelsior runners some competition. If you're interested in playing the game super hardcore with min/max strats and builds, hit @Elmyder up, he'll proc your ears off about it!)

Thanks for hosting this contest! I was expecting Black Friday to win, personally. I will be writing a guide specifically to some of the techniques I utilized to build Simulacrum (and problems I encountered during it), perhaps it will be of interest to others looking to build an unnecessarily oversized base. I only saved a few in-progress screenshots so I'll have put Veracor Builds Base into a new SG to take screens of what I'm talking about.

I disagree, from my math and testing, /Cold Masterminds are among the best AV killers in the game in a speedrun setting (chaining team insps and facetanking), and with the recent Homecoming changes to leashing (goto unreachable area and follow/stay when you reach your destination) you can teleport pets to you on open maps without using Incan, in addition to the normal spamming of stay/defend commands to minimize aggro in cave maps that you can't set unreachable goto targets in (and you can still Incan on the ones that you cannot positionally force the leash teleport in such cases, I'm still memorizing all the locations here). Solo and group practice runs have me on top damage and these aren't coordinated Incan-chain runs like we were doing for records as Blasters anyhow. Nothing will beat Fire/Fire Blaster for clearing groups/mob count missions like ITF, but for things like Kahn and MLTF I could see a skilled Mastermind being extremely competitive. This thread is just a bug I noticed when investigating more about the AT's interactions.

So I'm taking an in-depth look at Masterminds and their mechanisms for speedrunning reasons and noticed some odd stuff with how Assault Hybrid, particularly Radial's Doublehit feature, is interacting with controllable pets, affecting Mastermind the most because their pets are meant to persist. Test cases and results: Summoning pets without Assault Hybrid toggled results in them never benefitting from it, even when you toggle it on later. Summoning pets with Assault Hybrid toggled results in them benefitting from it while it is active. Summoning pets with Assault Hybrid toggled and then toggling it off results in pets not benefitting from it. Summoning pets with Assault Hybrid toggled, toggling it off, then toggling it on later results in the pets benefitting from it. Summoning pets without Assault Hybrid toggled and zoning, results in pets never benefitting from it. Summoning pets with Assault Hybrid toggled and zoning before it expires results in the pets benefitting from it. Summoning pets without Assault Hybrid toggled, toggling it, and then zoning, oddly results in pets benefitting from the damage buff but never the Doublehit (tested this extra in case it was an unlucky streak). This seems peculiar. Summoning pets with Assault Hybrid toggled, toggling it off and then zoning and toggling it back on, results in the pets never benefitting from it. This affects MM pets, lore pets, and presumably any other that you can give orders to. I did not see any damage buff or doublehits on the uncontrollable Backup Radio and Signature Summon pets. I tested this with Support Hybrid instead and saw zero duplication of its buffs aside from the lone aura that the player is emitting while active (working as expected). Balance-wise I do not know what Assault's intended interaction is supposed to be with pets, but it only being conferred/consistent if the pet is summoned while it is active and thereafter only when the buff is active (and often only for that instance) seems like a bug.

Happy birthday, Homecoming!

My base sucks, wear a blindfold when you visit it. Supergroup: Simulacrum Base code: SIMULACRUM-6940 Ingame Global: @Veracor Description: A massive and mysterious castle on an island of perpetual night, trapped between dimensions, it's little wonder as to why its denizens delved into forbidden magics to escape their prison. But the dimensions beyond contained friend and foe, and the castle Simulacrum became a martial order of dark magics for little other than its own protection. Contact and suspicion eventually gave way to contract and politics, and the Simulacrum became allied with several factions of Primal Earth, usually acting as an interdimensional neutral ground. Nowadays the Simulacrum has opened its extensive library and knowledge for others to peruse in exchange for service, and Arachnos has mostly risen investment in a bid to take over the castle's dark order. But Arachnos will find that Simulacrum's ruler may be more than they can handle. Note: The underground labyrinth is accessed through the blood pit on floor 3 of the castle, the travel hub is accessed through a portal on floor 4, and the (currently connection-less) misty path is accessed through the tower on floor 10. As excessively huge as the base is, it wasn't actually designed at all for travel powers and everything is accessible via normal movement. Due to me hitting the 20k object limit earlier than expected, several rooms had to be omitted from the base. At a later date I will remove the labyrinth (it occupies about 4k objects) in order to make them. But for now, I'm taking a break from base building.

Sorry to hear that, you have always been a constant help for the roles of ranged and control targetting for Hami raids. Take a break from league content, do badges and story arcs, join Elmyder on TF speedruns (Elec Affinity is not used in any serious run), and maybe the Elec Affinity effects will be toned down on the next set of patches. You'll always be welcome in Hami raids if you decide to come back. Elec Affinity isn't annoying to me personally but I can totally see why people are starting to drop out of league content because of it. A lot of Elec Affinity players in Hami raids seem to have rolled their characters for the only purpose of being as irritating as possible. The sound effects can be removed, but I don't know how to remove visual effects. If Hami raiding were instanced, I'd do a channel vote to see how many regulars would prefer it if Elec Affinity characters were just straight-up restricted from it. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd expect an overwhelming Yes.

1530 now that the Nemesis event is happening!

Since you're talking about exploits, I'd like to weigh in and say that I consider AFK-farms to be one and I do not use them. And RIP me, the only reason I'm so far ahead in vet levels is because I never turned off inf and just always played the game that way. If there's no reason to turn off XP anymore, AFK farmers are going to shoot way past and invalidate the concept of vet levels for everyone. Call me selfish for tunneling on just this point, but I think HC gives plenty of inf for a build already if people aren't just powerlevelling to 50. It's that most do, simply because it's possible. Reward merits are all over the place with TFs and Hami raids and I've certainly tried my best to get them all to be accessible for everyone. I've never turned people down in my raids for being underlevelled/undergeared, as dangerous or more difficult as it makes leading a Mo run. I get that you want to reduce the gap between farmers and non-farmers and make an option in the menus function as was originally intended, but you don't have to shoot down the accomplishments of the non-farmers and the gains of active farmers in the process; instead you could reduce the excessively high payout of AFK farming, or make huge experience/vet levels not a thing in AE, or similar. Non-farmers accomplishing things in a game is healthy. Active farmers making more money in a game is healthy. But AFK farming is a strict detriment to the game in my opinion, just like botting is in other games. Please don't address the inequality issue with the blanket solution of simply disabling the menu function (as it is currently used).

You can take the 4 Empyrean Merits and 1 Hamidon Enhancement rewards once per 20 hours. For Reward Merits, it is 80 the first time, then halved for each time you take it within the same 20 hour timer. Most people bring different characters to the 7pm and 10pm raids to avoid this.

I hope when it comes to TW nerfs, you mostly hit the set on Scrappers and Bio / Offensive Adaptation, because TW is nowhere near as broken on Brute and Tanker as it is on Scrapper (and especially on Tanker, because we taunt and spend some of our Momentum time on repositioning).

I am constantly hitting the limit of 10k Threads have to burn them. I think I've led almost 600 iTrials on Homecoming? I'd have to go back and count. The 3.5k Shards are probably a better indicator of drop rate vs vet levels, since those aren't awarded anywhere. And no, I never pay attention to what the WST is. >.>

The game actually doesn't allow this powerset combination for some reason.

Hello there.

1. If not tanking, you should be using a minimum of 2 EoEs: one when you/your targetter first goes in, and one when we're attacking Hamidon to safeguard against the bloom of Mitos. An optional third can be used when killing Hamidon or if a double bloom happened. If you are tanking you'll likely be using more EoEs depending on your powerset/slotting, but should never need more than 8 EoEs unless things go horribly wrong like a triple bloom. 2. Lately we've been short on melee DPS, which is kind of odd. There's usually 5-8 tanks as the next least popular role. There's a ton of ranged DPS every raid, but we don't turn anyone down for their AT. 3. We haven't written a guide, but we have made brief comparisons to how other servers run their Hami raids. Everlasting's method of raiding is simplified via targetters so everyone is invited to join. Here's the process we follow: Wait until the league has filled then someone teleports the league to one of the Monster walls (if in the Hive) and we kill them until Hamidon spawns. There's three roles for targetting: Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, and Holds. The raid leader designates one person for each role as the "targetter." This person is usually one of the team leaders so that others can select them easily. If you any of those three things, you enable flight/jetpack and put that person on follow, and assist them by attacking their target through them (Just activate skills while targetting them). Tanks are independent and split themselves amongst the yellow Mitos. All of the Hami raids run regularly on Everlasting have the raid leaders as the Hamidon main tank. so don't worry about that role. Melee DPS kills yellows, Ranged DPS kills blues, Holds kill greens. If all of your color Mitos are dead, start attacking the greens as they're usually the last to go down. Your targetter should be handling this as well so just keep following and assisting through them. Use an EoE when you first go into Hamidon. When the last Mito goes down, the raid leader calls to bring Hamidon to 75% life to trigger the first bloom of new Mitos. Use an EoE here. Your targetter will deselect Hamidon when it hits 75% so if you're still assisting through them you don't risk over-damaging it. Everyone goes back to the Mitos to clear them out like before. When the last Mito goes down again, the raid leader calls to summon Lore pets and kill Hamidon, ignoring the second and third blooms. Optionally use an EoE here. We do two raids per session to get everyone 4 Empyrean and 80 Reward Merits, so we clear the Hamidon Buds and then immediately repeat the raid with the Monsters. There is a badge for killing 100 Buds. tl;dr: Put your targetter on follow, use an EoE when going in and when attacking Hamidon, and just activate your skills through your targetter. They handle the rest. Currently I run the daily Hamidon raids at 7pm EST and Elmyder runs the daily raids at 10pm EST. ROBOKiTTY additionally runs Abyss Hami raids at 3pm EST on Saturday/Sunday, if you are villainy-inclined. The schedule is posted to the MotD for the "Everlasting TFs" channel in case people forget the timing. Note that you need to be in the Hive about 20-30 minutes early to reserve your spot due to the cap of 50 players. See you next raid!