Luminara

We can't have this discussion without including the mission to rescue the Nemesis defector, too. He's categorized as a Pet, thus vulnerable to combat damage despite being coded not to engage in combat until he's owned by your character, and he's in the hands of Nemesis forces, so you have to aggro the spawn and pull them away from him or he'll be murdered by the AoEs coming from the Jaegers. If you do manage to keep him alive while attempting to free him, the follow-up ambushes, coupled with his aggressively suicidal combat script, make escorting him all the way to the exit an exercise in frustration. I've lost count of the number of times I've been jarringly kicked to the load screen while in the midst of combat in this mission (at +0/x1, no less). The same thing happens to the PPD in safeguard missions, and if they're defeated before you defeat the spawn holding them captive, they don't count toward that badge.

I'm imagining Lift being redone with high mag KD instead of KU, and dribbling critters from one end of a map to the other.

That's true, we don't see scrappers screaming when they work to fill the Crit Bar, activate Crits by switching to starter attacks, spend their Crits on a single target (which they may not have wanted to spend it on), and then are locked out of Crits until they refill the Crit Bar. I wonder why...

Wait! Stop! Everyone pause! This show has Walternate and Batman? WHY DIDN'T I WATCH THIS WHEN I WAS LIVING IN A CITY?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The purpose of missing, in the original design of the game, was to ensure that the brainless idiots we fight always have the barest possibility of defeating us. That was the extent of the design philosophy behind missing. Not to reflect a "natural 1 on D20 roll", or to impose a consequence for failure, just a basic effort to ensure that there's at least some minute potential for defeat, to compensate for the AI being dumber than the a rock. Missing was the first and rawest attempt at creating a sense of challenge. But both Cryptic and Paragon recognized that missing was also a poor type of challenge, or that their implementation of that challenge was not up to stretch. They created the streak breaker. They removed numerous ToHit Debuffs from player-owned and -affecting powers. They added Beginner's Luck. They packed the game with Accuracy and ToHit buffs. They gave us origin attacks, they removed the endurance cost from Brawl, they reduced Brawl's recharge time, they added more temp powers so we'd always have another attack to move on to after missing... And then they moved away from that flawed challenge when they started working on Going Rogue and all subsequent content. The challenge in newer content doesn't come from missing, it comes from enemies actually designed to be challenging. Missing doesn't make the game harder, it makes the game harder to enjoy. Missing doesn't impose a challenge, it imposes a time out. Missing doesn't increase player or critter survivability, until and unless the player imposes specific conditions on him/herself to create a situation in which missing is hazardous (increasing the Notoriety well above default, eschewing Accuracy in powers, refusing to use inspirations or temporary powers, and having a build reliant on damage mitigation with hit checks when real danger of defeat is a possibility), so it only serves to decrease our desire to play. The player has to work at it to make missing represent a real hazard, because of all of the ways Cryptic and Paragon strove to minimize missing as a challenge, and that's telling. Missing doesn't cause an energy blast to backfire, or a broadsword to twist and rip into the wielder's shin, or a targeted effect to affect the "wrong" target, it doesn't do anything noteworthy or interesting. The game was designed to be fun, per the commentary of every Cryptic and Paragon developer who ever posted, and missing just... isn't fun. There's no meaning or weight to missing. There's nothing happening to make it important. It's appropriate in a tabletop game with a human being acting as game master and coming up with interesting results and consequences when a player rolls a 1. The Cryptic engine doesn't have a brain, it can't devise an interesting result on the fly... it doesn't even have a list of results to randomize and select from. It does absolutely nothing noteworthy or of merit when we roll that 1. The story doesn't evolve in a different way. The next mission isn't different. We don't have to buy new gear or replace torn clothes. We don't lose all of our gold. No giant ooze sneaks up behind us and crawls up our anuses, laying eggs which hatch later, zombify us halfway through a dungeon run and force us to eat our party's brains. The horses don't bolt and leave us stranded in the Dread Forest of Doom in the middle of the witching hour. Our characters don't sport fascinating scars resulting from our catastrophic failures, because we have no catastrophic failures to create those scars. Nothing fucking happens, and that is the real problem with missing. If missing had any impact beyond making players grit their teeth and firmly press the next key in the chain, it wouldn't be the single most discussed and reviled mechanic in the history of Co*. But it doesn't. And that's the core of the problem with missing. It just doesn't have any meaning or real impact on the game. It spends our time and gives us nothing meaningful in return. Missing is a vestigial mechanic which the game itself outgrew a long, long time ago, but which we still retain simply because "this is how the game was designed", irrespective of the fact that it's a bad design. There are better methods of challenging players, as evidenced by newer content (Praetoria, First/Night Ward, Incarnate missions and trials, etc). It's not even a good control on player progression because we always have another key to press. If we had fewer options, if we had the limits imposed by other games or by an active game master, if we were even limited in the ways we were before all of the Cryptic/Paragon additions and alterations, missing would matter. But we don't, and missing only slows our progression by a fraction of a fraction, with the greater impact being on our blood pressure than on our leveling speed. It is, in fact, a worse control on power creep than critical failures/fumbles/backfires would be. At least criticals of that type would force us to reach for more specific keys, rather than simply moving on to the next one in the sequence, and create a greater possibility of defeat and put some of that power creep to better use than simply permitting us to wander into one spawn after another, absent-mindedly pressing the same few keys over and over again. Every time I spend 4.75 seconds animating Inner Light and Incandescent Strike only to miss, it's another pebble in my glass of patience. I busted my hump leveling this character, I went back into the costume editor over and over again to perfect her look, spent 250,000,000 inf* to perfect the build with set IOs, purples and ATOs, and all I feel when I play her is disappointment, regret and rage, because the end result of my efforts is... watching her float. I'm not infuriated by missing because I'm in danger of being defeated, but because I feel that my time is being wasted by the game I play to watch enemies experience the fate of a banana in a high speed hydraulic stamp press. Yeah, either change misses to critical failures/fumbles/backfires, or apply ED to the hit clamp.

I have no idea what Evil Fitz is, but you piqued my interest with the Fringe reference. Beans. Spill. NOW.

Or because it was your attack with the longest animation time. Or because it was your attack with the longest recharge time. Or because it was a PBAoE/AoE attack with one target. Or because you switched to another target while the attack was queued, missed,, switched back to the missed target and queued another attack, then switched target again, missed again, switched back to the missed target and queued another attack again, switched target again, missed again...

As I recall from his posts, he expected players to consider them irrelevant. He figured players would treat Co* the same way they treated other games... games with locked abilities which were only affected in specific ways by other specific abilities. Games with combos which unlocked after pressing certain key sequences. Games with static cooldowns on spells and attacks. Games which weren't mechanically similar to Co*. It was only after Red Tomax put up the first City of Data and gave us the first real numbers that Emmert finally (grudgingly, going by the lack of commentary about the subject from that point onward) accepted the relevance of power stats in the eyes of players, but only because he couldn't put the djinn back in the bottle. I don't know if he ever realized that hiding information from players, in a game which created the necessity for that information by giving players so much flexibility, was a mistake. But he did eventually stop trying to prevent us from having that information. So there is that, for what it's worth.

When people are looking at power stats, they want to know the actual current stats, not the stats minus global effects, or the stats minus someone else's buff, or the stats if they're standing three feet to the left. The point of Detailed Info is detailed information, it exists solely to give us the full revelation on the power. We're not interested in base stats, we can get those by typing [Power Name] in the chat box (which brings up the unenhanced, unbuffed version of the power's Detailed Info window), or looking at City of Data, or checking Mids'. We're looking at a power's info window because we want real totals, we want to know exactly when a power is going to recharge, we want to know exactly how much endurance it's going to cost, we want to know exactly what our hit chance is, et cetera. To date, it hasn't done that, which leads to confusion like what @Ukase experienced when looking at Fault's hit chance stat. And they already had everything they needed to make that happen, including the distinctions you feel are important. The combat attribs window is dynamic. They could've used the same code to make the Detailed Info window dynamic. One look would tell you that your hit chance equaled X%, which Accuracy modifiers were in effect, the amount of each modifier, everything. That's been possible since Real Numbers was in beta. So, respectfully, I disagree with your disagreement. Oh, and if anyone on the HC team is reading this, fix the goddamn Regeneration stat display, please. The way it's currently presented is horribly inaccurate. It should be displaying time between Regen ticks, not HP/s. That's how Regeneration works in this game, that's how it should be presented to the player. As it is now, it's only barely useful, and then only if you're willing to grab a calculator and do the math yourself.

Real Numbers was released in early 2008, which means it was started some time in 2007, before NC acquired the IP (at the end of 2007) and Cryptic started pulling staff out. Emmert was still in charge at that time. If he hadn't had the sale of Co* and development of the Marvel game (which eventually became Champions Online) in front of him, he undoubtedly would have put the kibosh on Real Numbers before the first line of code was written. I really don't think it's far off from the truth to say that Real Numbers was only implemented because his attention was split between multiple objectives at that time (sales talks, trying to get a foot in the door with Marvel, and keeping Co* going), or that it exists in its current form because, as you note, he despised giving players hard numbers, thus the odd obfuscation of global effects. That was what I was referring to when I made that comment. It's the sort of restriction he'd insist on, just to hold something back from the players.

Exactly. They deliberately made it confusing so players wouldn't be confused when checking the Detailed Info specs at times when they might be confused about what was going on with their powers. Because it's less confusing to make it more confusing, thus preventing confusion. You can actually smell the Emmert every time you open a Detailed Info window.

Because we already have evidence of that behavior. A feedback thread is opened, players begin posting there, then they start new threads, the mods merge those threads with the feedback thread. A feedback thread is opened, players post, the thread derails, the irrelevant posts are removed, players start new threads repeating their removed commentary from the feedback thread. A feedback thread is opened, players post, then they go post the same thing in other existing threads, sometimes threads which aren't even relevant to the feedback they're posting in the non-feedback thread. This is the cycle we already experience. Example: the changes to the Sorcery pool, specifically Rune of Protection, sparked multiple additional threads (some of which are still floating around on the forums), and commentary and discussion in completely unrelated threads. This happened despite the only posting restrictions on the feedback thread being "Don't be a dick" and "Try not to drag this too far off topic". Example: one player has a particular passion for his pet project of having the Defense hard cap reduced to a value below the soft cap, and for several months, he would pop into threads and post his suggestion. It started with threads about Defense, then it expanded. A thread about something completely different, like a discussion of difference between the flavors of Oolong and Earl Grey teas, would suddenly have a post about nerfing Defense and how it would make both teas taste better. When people have something to say, they're going to say it. They'll say it by starting a new thread. They'll say it by posting from another account. They'll say it by jumping into different threads and posting off-topic commentary. The harder you try to force people to "behave", the harder they'll fight back. This is human nature. Your naïve portrayal of people as obedient and docile creatures who will calmly abide being caged is the problem here, not my response. While there are ways to control certain behaviors, denying people the right to speak is not one which works. It's never worked. Throughout the entirety of human history, we've seen that, and in the short span of these forums' lifetime, we've seen it in real time and in person. You cannot silence people when they want to speak, they always find a way to make their voices heard, and the more control you try to exert over their ability to speak, the more determined they will be to defy your authority, and the more there will be defying that authority. Oh, and your own post history shows that you don't restrict yourself to posting once per 24 hours in feedback threads, yet you expect everyone else to abide by a restriction which you personally ignore. And you lampoon me, paint me as running for Homecoming Queen, when I vociferously object to having my right to do the same thing you do stepped on, when I point out that human beings do not respond well to being constrained, when I stand up to defend your right to disagree with me without restriction? That, sir/ma'am, is not only hyperbole, it's also hypocrisy.

Detailed Info doesn't account for global values, and rounds up/down. 0.80 * (1.0 + 0.18) = 0.944 0.944 rounded down = 0.94

The purpose and function of forums like these is to promote open discussion. Someone says something, another person responds, the first person responds to the second person, counterpoints are made as points are raised, new ideas and understandings are achieved, and so on. This... this isn't a proposal for open discussion, because it removes the openness of discussion. It's like telling people not to speak up unless they agree. Not only would it fail to provide real feedback, which frequently leads to discoveries of potential abuses/bugs/oversights, it would be far more likely to engender the opposite effect as people who might have otherwise had nothing to add turn around and launch an all-out assault on the thread simply to voice their disapproval of being told to shut up and accept the status quo. Furthermore, restricting posts to a 24 hour interval would slow discussions down to the point of taking months, instead of days, and people would bypass the restriction by starting new threads ten or a hundred times as frequently, or making alternate accounts (Gmail is free) and posting from those, fragmenting the feedback as a whole. It wouldn't be less work for the moderators, it would be significantly more (and potentially more difficult, since there are limited ways to conclusively determine whether multiple accounts represent the same person (and even those methods aren't guaranteed to work)). It isn't even humanly possible to conceive of everything one wants to say before making a post, nor to anticipate every possible response and include responses to responses in a post... that's why we engage in discourse in the way we do. Right now, a few threads have to be merged, or closed with a final post directing players to the feedback thread, when an update is in testing. Right now, the moderators have to excise an occasional sidetrack in a feedback thread. With this proposal, they'd be closing threads all day, every day, because people are not going to sit and wait 24 hours to say something; and they'll be chopping out massive sections of threads, because people who disagree with the way they're being restricted will be that much louder and prolific in derailments. Functionally, I see this as a bad idea, one which would backfire hard. On a personal note, there are only so many limitations I will accept on my right to express myself, my individuality, my freedom to speak. And the harder someone tries to quash those things, the more combative I will become. I have a voice, and having spent my entire life struggling to use it in the physical world, I value the ability to speak online that much more. Not only for myself, but for everyone, including the people with whom I disagree.

OP: "Gimme reward merits, nukes, Shivans, bonus XP, defeat badges, PvP badges and in-zone buffs for free!" Everyone: "No." OP: "ZOMG, I'm not asking for free shit, I'm just asking for free shit, why is everyone being contrary???" Yeah... The PvP zones themselves are content. The exploration badges in those zones are content. The map geometry, the pretty trees and flowers, the hills and buildings, are content. Your PvP Off flag already exists. You turn it off by not going to the zones with that content, and you don't get that content if you turn it off, as you just noted. If you want content which is available in PvP zones, go to PvP zones to access that content. If you don't want to go to PvP zones, you don't get the content within them. That's simple. You're the one complicating it.

Exploration badges are only one facet of PvP zones. The mini-games which grant badges or extra powers, the 25% increase in XP for running PvE missions in the zone, the bonuses granted to your "side" when you complete those PvE missions, the purchasable powers, the critters which count for specific badges, all of these and more are encompassed within the basic concept of PvP zone. If a PvP flag were added, permitting what you outline, players could waltz into Warburg and picking up nukes with absolutely no effort or risk, to make one example. That's not balanced. All of that additional content would have to be removed, disabled or otherwise made unavailable to players with the PvP flag set to "Off". All of the badge-related critters, all of the mini-games, all of the PvE missions, essentially everything in PvP zones. XP from open world critters is meaningless in comparison to the other things you can obtain in/from PvP zones. Can that be done? Yes, with the phasing code, the HC team could set your PvP Off flag and remove access to everything except the exploration badges. But it's not likely to happen. The HC team strives to maintain the core design philosophies and intentions of the previous development teams, and that includes expecting players to "risk" PvP if they want their exploration badges, to accept being exemplared to the zone's level and fighting PvE critters if they want their Shivan Shards and Warburg nukes, to put themselves to the hazard if they want Heavies and turrets in RV, etc. If you want your exploration badges, you have to acquire them within the existing balance framework, just like you do for everything else in those zones. With the population as low as it is (compared to the original servers), you're unlikely to encounter people very often. And, per my personal experience, most players will leave you alone if you ask them nicely. Some will even help you, despite being on "the other side". Asking the HC team to go to the trouble of emptying the zone for you is unnecessary.

That was beautiful. Thank you.

Yar.

+Damage from IO set bonuses is a global effect. Every damage-dealing power which is not flagged to ignore +Damage, like Sands of Mu, will benefit. For further information: Damage is additive and cumulative, it takes all sources of Damage and pools them collectively. If you take Air Superiority, slot it up to 95% Damage, then add a 3% global +Damage, Air Superiority's final damage output will not increase by 3%. What actually happens is, that 3% +Damage is added to the 95% you slotted in the attack, bringing its final value up to 98%. That's how +Damage works. If you rack up 24% +Damage from set bonuses, every damage-dealing power you use will have 24% added to the slotted value. If you're playing a defender in a solo environment, you would also receive 30% +Damage from Vigilance, so your character would have 54% +Damage added to the slotted value of all damage-dealing attacks. If you then popped Aim, your damage-dealing attacks would receive a total of 104% +Damage on top of their slotted Damage. Note that even if you have 0% slotted Damage in a damage-dealing power, the game still reads it as 100% +Damage. This is because Damage Debuffs exist. The game has to consider an unenhanced power to be at 100% in order to subtract damage, so the debuff can function when dealing with unslotted attacks (what critters use, to highlight the most important example). Consequently, in slotting your attacks to 95% Damage (using SOs, IOs, set IOs, makes no difference, it's all the same to the engine), you're actually at 195% for those attacks. So that means, when you hit that magic 104% +Damage on your soloing defender who popped Aim, you're not actually doubling the damage of your attack(s), you're only adding about 1/3rd more damage (a bit less, in fact, because Vigilance is always active) because your attack, slotted for 95% +Damage, was read by the game as being at 195% Damage. 195 + 104 = 299. Additionally, +Damage does not bypass the damage cap. The damage cap is the damage cap is the damage cap. Damage enhancements, buffs like Assault/Aim/Build Up, Vigilance's +Damage, Fury's +Damage, set bonuses adding +Damage, it's all pooled together and it all counts toward your character's damage cap. Most of the time, this isn't an issue, as the damage cap is intentionally higher than most characters can achieve without significant assistance from other characters, but there are a few builds which can run head first into the damage cap. It can occasionally cause some confusion when players use powers which buff Damage in amounts which would make it appear that they exceeded the cap. Fulcrum Shift and Soul Drain, when used by defenders/masterminds/controllers/corruptors, and when their attacks are well slotted with Damage, can easily take them up to their respective caps and cause consternation when they realize they've "wasted" extra Damage. -Res, being multiplicative, allows players to sidestep the damage cap, by multiplying the final damage output of attacks by 1.amount (meaning, if you apply 20% -Res to a critter, your damage output will be multiplied by 1.2 (Resistance Debuff caps at -90% (you can apply more, but you can never reduce anything's Resistance to less than -90% (and Resistance resists Resistance Debuffs, so if your target has Resistance, that Resistance resists the debuff by the percentage of that Resistance, but only for the damage type it resists (totally not complicated, right?))). Containment effectively doubles the damage output of controllers, even if they're at the damage cap, thus also sidestepping the cap (which is why most controller damage-dealing powers are comparatively weak. they can double their damage through Containment, then they can multiply that by 1.9 with Resistance Debuffs. the final result can be very impressive when all variables are properly set up).

Enhancement categorization is irrelevant in this context. There are 9 powers in every primary, and 6 of those powers are not T1, T2 or T9 (which has a sufficiently long recharge time to prohibit working it into a repetitive attack chain). Most secondary power sets include at least one power which can be cycled into an attack chain, if not as an attack, then as damage mitigation. There are also pool attacks (Arcane Bolt deals more damage than half of the sentinel T2 primary attacks, plus has that Arcane Power proc thing going on now (which offers higher damage output over time, and is not tied to recharge times, so it's of even higher value for SO-only builds)) and *PP powers which can be used in attack chains. There's no code in the game, not a single line, which reduces the number of powers available if SOs are used, nor which restricts us to only using primary powers when using SOs. With IO sets, we can whittle down our attack chains to only the most powerful or utilitarian attacks, but that's really just a reduction in complexity and focus on something specific, such as maximal damage output or archetype hybridization (playing a character as though it were a different archetype. examples: deftroller, scrapfender). Anyone can build a full attack chain, without T1/T2 attacks, using only SOs. That is a guarantee built into the game itself, because, as you noted, it is balanced around SOs. That SO-limited attack chain will be more complex, such as 1-2-3-1-4-2-5-repeat instead of 1-2-3-4, but it will still be perfectly viable, and it will not have to lean on the T1/T2 to be seamless. That's why I refer to the T1/T2 attacks as starter attacks. That's exactly what they are. They're training wheels, designed to get us through the low levels and teach us how our attacks work, what recharge time is, what secondary effects are, et cetera. Sometimes we continue to use them, for thematic reasons, for the secondary effects, for fun, but they're optional once we're out of the easy mode levels. The game practically dumps better powers into our laps, hands us what we need to build attack chains without T1/T2 powers, even if all SOs are the only enhancement option available.

Every other inherent was designed to be available at level 1 without restricting utility at level 50. Marrying Opportunity to the starter attacks to ensure early availability isn't necessary. It doesn't matter if its activation method is similar to that of other archetypes. No-one grumbles about Gauntlet and Critical Hits both being activated simply by attacking. There are no outcries due to Fury and Defiance both increasing damage as the player uses his/her attacks more frequently. People who play dominators aren't going to raise a ruckus if sentinels click an icon to activate their inherent. We, the players, may be enthusiastically individual in our approach to play and rosters of characters, but we all share similar interests, a love for this game in particular, and want all archetypes to thrive. And why would it have to be similar to Dominate, anyway? There are numerous ways to define a trigger for an inherent. As a player who doesn't use that power, it's not a concern from my perspective. When I talk about removing the starter attacks from my tray and ignoring Opportunity entirely, it's not because I'm padding my attack chain with Dominate, it's because I've recognized that sentinel primaries encourage players to eschew the use of T1/T2 attacks entirely, which can be accomplished entirely within the primaries, without leaning on the *PPs. My level 35 Fire/Rad sentinel doesn't use Flares or Fire Blast in her attack chain, and with Electric Fences as her first *PP selection, she's not leaning on that, or pool attacks, to pad out the chain, to provide one example. That character has an attack chain developed from primary powers alone. That's how I build all of my sentinels, because that's how the archetype was designed. The design of the primaries directly conflicts with the design of the inherent by restricting its usefulness to the early game. We don't need *PPs or pool attacks to bypass the starter attacks, simply having more powers is sufficient to obviate the inherent, and we acquire more powers natively, through the process of leveling up. *PPs, even proc-bombed Dominate, are therefore irrelevant. No other inherent is restricted to functioning only with the starter attacks. Opportunity shouldn't be, either.

Restricting Opportunity to those attacks was poor initial design. Being forced to switch to one of the lowest damage attacks available at regular intervals is an unnecessary restriction on damage output for an archetype which is already operating under tightly controlled damage output. The inherent needs to be separated from the starter attacks if it's to provide benefit for all players, at all levels.