Luminara

Working within the limitations pushes us to take a step back and look at our characters objectively. It encourages us to be more creative and flexible, rather than homogenous, and in doing so, instills in us a feeling of success and creates an emotional attachment to our characters which would otherwise be absent. Our characters are ours because we invest the time, effort and determination to make them work. Extra slots wouldn't synergize with that.

That's either software trying to connect to a site or download something the background, or your firewall trying to prevent access. My gut says software. Run a full virus scan, then monitor your running tasks, with attention given to network usage updated at 1s intervals.

I fiddled around with a couple of ideas, then decided to adapt my own Ill/TA build to this challenge. Ill/TA is good, really good, except for Phantasm. That useless ass dies like it's the reason you summon him. He dies so frequently that I rarely bother to summon him on my character. /Sonic addresses that without sacrificing what makes /TA work so well, the heaping piles of -Res, and having one set of pets which prefer melee combat, and another pet which prefers ranged, you can leverage the strengths of /Sonic at their maximum efficiency. PA can't be buffed by powers like Fulcrum Shift, Fortitude, Accelerate Metabolism or Forge, it's reliant on -Res to give it some real impact, and other than TA and Poison, you're not going to get that much -Res on every spawn (Ill/Cold goes higher, but only every other spawn, or every third spawn (unless you're dawdling)). Sonic also gives you access to status protection that you don't get from Poison or Cold, and TA can't give you until level 38 and only when EMP Arrow is recharged. The concept is an actor/actress/stage magician. Phantom Army should be clones of your character, Stunt Double, Stand-in and Drama Student or Personal Assistant. Rename Spectral Terror to Stage Lighting or Light Show. Fire APP for a flashy fireworks display. Hover/Fly are, in my opinion, crucial to the concept (you just can't pass up the chance to do some wire work in that industry). Buffing Phantasm with the two shields, Sonic Dispersion and the two pet Resistance globals counters his squishiness, completely negating the penalty to Negative Energy he's saddled with, plus some (he has a base -40%, this brings him up over +20%), and giving him enough of every other Resistance (except Psi) to ensure that he's not turned into paste ten seconds after you summon him. Sonic Repulsion and Sonic Dispersion also go on Phantasm, because he'll be hanging out near you. This keeps critters out of your grill and gives you status protections you'd otherwise lack. You shouldn't be pulling much aggro with PA out, but even with a ~54.5s recharge time on my Ill/TA's PA, I still take a hit every now and then, and hits tend to have some kind of mez attached to them in this game. This way, if something does make it through the KB field, it's unlikely to knock your toggles off with a soft tap on the shoulder. Disruption Field on one of your PA clones, and Sonic Siphon on the clone's target or the biggest wanker in sight. With a ~7s cycle time, you can throw Siphon on four targets and keep them debuffed, or spread it around. Below 50, PA won't be perma, so Sonic Cage fills the gap when PA drops mid-combat. After 50, it can still be used at your discretion, such as when you're struggling with your endurance bar or want to wait for something to recharge (Liquify). The build is somewhat endurance hungry. Consume will keep you going, and with PA pulling all of the aggro, you can dash into PBAoE range without concern. Consume is slower to animate than Dark Consumption or Power Sink, and Power Sink recharges in one third the time, but Consume has the largest radius of the three and is the only one with a Recovery buff (15s). You'll hit more foes with Consume and you'll get more return from fewer foes, due to that Recovery buff. Just remember to de-activate Sonic Repulsion on Phantasm before running in, and re-activate it when you back off. Though that probably won't matter if you're playing solo, those aggro monkeys will chase whatever's scattered anyway. You'll have plenty of key mashing to do with Sonic Siphon, Blind and Spectral Wounds, in addition to buffing Phantasm and summoning PA, plus toggling Disruption Field on PA, and once you have Fire Ball, you can add some AoE to your arsenal. It's not a "sit back and do nothing" build, but it's not quite as clicky as my Ill/TA. Post 50, and with Spiritual Core, you'll have sufficient global +Recharge to take one of those Recharge Reduction IOs out of Hasten. You can move the Sovereign Right global over to PA and put a KB->KD in Phantasm, or throw another 50+5 Recharge Reduction into PA to shave the recharge time down by another 1.03s, or try the Soulbound Allegiance Build Up proc in PA (from what i've read, it does buff them, and if that's the case, it would give a lot of return on the investment when viewed in light of the 45% -Res you can dump on foes). Or wherever. I'd recommend Support Core Embodiment for the Hybrid slot if you're still not happy with the build's endurance usage. The 10% global endurance reduction won't be much, but it will give you a little more breathing room. The other Incarnate slots are left to your preference. Based on my experience with my Ill/TA, this is an excellent solo build, and playing it the way I've outlined, with you staying at range and buffing Phantasm (who should be near you) with the KB toggle, mez protection toggle and shields, it should mesh well with teams. Ranged characters will receive the necessary buffs and safety provided by Sonic Repulsion, melee characters will benefit from PA carrying around Disruption Field with them, everyone's happy.

People on the forums already talk about skipping cones simply because they dislike the idea of moving forward to use them. Variable range on all attacks would be a counter-intuitive mechanic likely to spawn a lot of bug reports and furious posts.

Cool, easy answer. Thank you for digging that up. The difference between the two characters can probably be chalked up to bad luck on the widow.

New data: Taking my Night Widow through the Lady Winter mission, I noticed that my recharge times were wonky. I've got 100% resistance to -Recharge, so that shouldn't have been happening. Her Chill power appears to ignore -Recharge resistance, because my global recharge bonus was dropping by exactly 35% and only when Chill was on the character. So, apparently, it's not total immunity, or Chill is bugged, or something else is happening. Edit: she managed to drop my global recharge from 141.25% to 6.25%, and it wasn't stacked Chill. Definitely something odd going on because that didn't happen on my tanker.

Good nipple and bad nipple, two factors. WHERE'S THE SCANNER SO I CAN LOG IN?!

That's something I've put a lot of thought into over the past 18 months. Specifically, the question, "Is there any functional difference between never being hit, and only being hit so infrequently that base regen + unslotted Health is sufficient to bring you back to full HP before the next time you're hit?" Answer: no. Immortality is immortality. That soft cap served a purpose when the game was originally released. The design revolved around ensuring that critters had some semblance of parity with players, to instill a sense of challenge into the game. Then toggle mutual exclusivity was removed. Then Defense was adjusted. And then it was adjusted again. And then critter hit chances were adjusted. And then the Invention system was introduced... at which point, the original intent behind and purpose of hit caps had become so distorted, after so many changes, that it ceased to be relevant. But it remained in place and attempts were made to make it relevant, but it remained little more than a vestigial mechanic and a running joke about Accuracy nerfs on the forums. BUT, the irrelevance of hit caps wasn't immediately apparent back then because the methods of reaching the soft cap were financially difficult to achieve. Fast forward to today. The foundation of the economy has been shifted to merits. The inf* cap and one's ability to run a "rewarding" mission at high speed (farming) are no longer limiting factors on builds. IOs are cheap, and even for "broke" characters, easily obtainable via converters. Other enhancements, such as Winter sets, are still comparatively inexpensive. Even more changes have been made, such as allowing HOs to go up to 53 without requiring random luck, and other special enhancements being combinable with HOs. Achieving the soft cap has become so easy that we now discuss it as though it were the norm. The point I'm (finally) getting to is that we're not only now seeing that the soft cap, that the entire hit check mechanic, is flawed, because we've been playing this game for years and years and becoming bored with it, it's that the problem has been there since the first changes were implemented, and it's become blatantly obvious now that we're able to take a wide variety of characters and explore that problem in depth. The soft cap is irrelevant. It lost its purpose when the first changes to Defense were made, when the hit check equation was adjusted, when critter base hit was reduced, when IOs were added. It's a limit that we still have because it provides the perception of the possibility of being defeated, but in truth, that's all it is. Smoke and mirrors. Obfuscation of its irrelevancy. We tell ourselves that we need that 5% chance of failure to make us feel like we have something to lose, but the reality is, we're lying to ourselves so we don't feel as bad about being overpowered. Having an astronomically low chance of being defeated doesn't make the game feel challenging, it doesn't add excitement, it doesn't give us a sense of risk, it's just a balm we slather on our consciences. Yes, get rid of the soft cap if the hit check mechanic is addressed. It's outdated and it's time for us to find a better way to express critter challenge. Do we adjust the purple patch? Only to the degree necessary to ensure that it remains as in-force as it is currently. It makes no sense for us to be more capable against stronger and deadlier foes. We should be missing against +20 enemies. We should be hit harder and more often by +37 enemies. We should fear things so far beyond our level range that we turn and run. The purple patch is still relevant, and still serves a purpose. PvP, I'd leave with the existing hit check system. It makes sense to miss in PvP, and it serves a purpose to have a soft cap, because both ensure that the winner isn't the first person to make contact. If, and only if, PvP players agree that they need the mechanic addressed in PvP, they can have a roundtable with the HC team. If it were in my demesne, I'd allow slotted Accuracy or Accuracy set bonuses to scale the 95% limit upward, on a diminishing returns system. Not ToHit, as that's already powerful enough. It wouldn't have to go all the way to 100%, and it might take a pile of Accuracy to scale up to an "acceptable" value, but it would go light years toward addressing the frustration created by the hit check system. I'd also do the same thing with Defense. If you're rocking Defense in excess of the soft cap, that excess should represent some degree of improvement. Again, maybe not all the way to 0%, but some shifting of the cap downward. But I'd also completely remove the aggro cap. NOT the AoE cap, just the aggro cap. This would create the challenge which is lacking in the game as a whole, but especially for Defense-based characters and tankers/brutes. Go ahead, round up the entire map with your character who's pushed his/her Defense to the point of only having a 1.7% chance to be hit, but bear in mind that an infinite number of attacks coming at you is going to ensure that you'll eat floor at some point. Playing a Resistance-based or hybrid mitigation character? Well, now you can find out where your real limits are, rather than simply manipulating the aggro cap to give yourself the equivalent of Invisibility by aggroing one spawn and training it all over the map. We're sitting here in a twilight situation, not playing the game as it was originally designed, but also not playing a fully updated game. Some things were changed very quickly after launch. Other things were changed a year or two later. Bit by bit, parts of the game were updated, but the basic conceits and concepts behind some things were fossilized and left in the ground, and they lost meaning as the game evolved. The hit check system is one of the mechanics still trundling along in the Jurassic era of the game, never truly evolving, because the economical situation (rampant inflation) that existed on the original servers hid the problems with it from the general public, and the developers clung to the 5% chance idea like a starving tick on a hound. A 1 in 20 chance of being hit would mean something, if aggro didn't cap at 16 or 17. A 5% chance to miss might be useful, if missing actually put us at risk or had consequences beyond forcing us to use one more attack. Neither of these are true any more. They haven't been for a very, very long time.

But there is no chance to fumble in Co*. Fireball doesn't have a 5% chance to hit teammates clustered around the primary target. I don't have a 5% chance to deal damage to myself when I miss with Incandescent Strike. No-one puts NPC allies to Sleep 5% of the time when they use Frozen Aura. Fumbles don't exist in this game (though, they could, by tacking a short duration Confuse to misses (this would primarily affect teams, which would make it comparatively unfair and discourage teaming)). What does exist is an arbitrarily assigned waste of time, one which isn't even fairly constrained to that 5% across the board, since, as I've noted in this thread (and others), it's not applied to chains of mixed vectors (and this reality of the streak breaker is something which has always gnawed at the back of my mind... the game was specifically designed to require players to mix single-target and AoE powers, or to wait for powers to recharge if players wished to avoid mixing vectors, yet neither Cryptic nor Paragon ever made any attempt to address this, which implies that the waste of time was deliberate and intentional, and that we were deliberately and intentionally misled about it). That our time means so little that it can be thrown into the void with misses says something, both about the game itself and about how we value that time. And I don't know about you, but I've learned that my time is, in truth, far more valuable than I realized when I was younger. You know I love you, Bill (not that way, put your pants back on (please put your pants back on (put your pants back on right now))), but I strongly disagree with your assessment of the miss function being appropriate. As long as it represents nothing more than "Fuck you, your time is worthless", it's not appropriate, it's not worthwhile and it's not a useful mechanic for improving the game or our enjoyment of it. It really does need to go away, or be overhauled to represent something more than a middle finger salute.

What? People respond poorly to vaporware and undelivered projects funded by donations? No. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I'm shocked. Shocked, I say!

So is poop. Usually.

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Some environmental graphical and audio effects are applied to players by granting them a power which is, in essence, a pseudo-pet. This is a work-around which exists because the ability to apply global effects without an "owner" wasn't coded into the engine. Everything has to have a source, and in many cases, the source is a pseudo-pet assigned to the player. There are interdependencies buried in the way things function. This is what people mean when they talk about "spaghetti code". Changing one thing can inadvertently lead to something else changing. Making one thing subject to player control could, potentially, make other things function in a similar manner. So although it should be theoretically possible to flag all "owned" pseudo-pets as being player-controlled for the purpose of despawning, it's possible that that flag would unintentionally transfer to other "unowned" pseudo-pets, or pseudo-pets created for "mission owner". I'm sure one of the HC team would love to find out how this would work, or if it would work at all, if only for geeky interest, so make a note to yourself to ping one of them after the holidays.

You're tanking now? b05c88ad-f2af-4992-9636-bb3f9bf57f8e.mp4

In ~30 years, we've gone from spam which was easily discernable due to the broken English and atrocious grammar... to spam which is easily discernable due to the broken English, atrocious grammar and obvious copypasta detritus. Well, at least they learned how Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works. Should only take another 30 or 40 centuries to pass the Turing test.

A broad implementation would affect all pseudo-pets, and pseudo-pets are the functionality behind far more powers than people realize. The game is packed with pseudo-pets. Powers. Graphical effects. Ambush lures. Sound sources. They are, quite literally, everywhere. So the implementation would have to be done on a case by case basis to prevent, for example, a Grav/TA typing /petcomall dismiss and suddenly cancelling not just Singularity, but also Oil Slick, Glue, EMP, Disruption, PGA and any pool/*PP powers which he/she has taken, like Enflame, as well as special pseudo-pets, such as Overpowering Presence's Energy Font pseudo-pet, and some of the graphics and audio effects, and various others which happened to be out at the moment. Theoretically, it might also dismiss mission-assigned Hero/Villain pets, NPC hostages and escorts and other things critical to mission completion. So before this could even be started, a precise list of pseudo-pets to be included and excluded would have to be compiled. An inclusionary list will be significantly smaller than an exclusionary list, but the exclusionary list would also be necessary because if the functionality could be limited to the inclusionary list, the likelihood of bugs and unexpectedly dismissable pseudo-pets popping up would be extremely high. A worst case scenario would be something in a mission being despawned and either granting the player a ridiculously easy victory or crashing the client, or causing something just plain weird to happen, like a different pseudo-pet or a contact spawning in its place. Even if it were as simple as assigning a single flag to each pseudo-pet which everyone agreed should be affected, it's still going to be a lot of powers affected. Some of the pseudo-pet powers have multiple versions in existence (one for defenders, one for controllers/corruptors, one for *PPs, one for critters, etc.). There would certainly be a sizeable number missed in the first few passes, as well as the potential for exploitable bugs (imagine being able to neuter Cabal bosses simply by typing /petcomall dismiss and shutting off their Lightning Storms, or the Caltrops dropped by Knives of Artemis, because that pet wasn't on the exclusion list, or the critter was using one of the player versions and for some reason, it responded to the command). I'd expect the "easy" implementation to take at least a few weeks, and the "hard" implementation to take several months, potentially more than a year.

Can I have a "stomp on @Vanden's hat" emote, too?

Please note that I am not the doll. Do not use me to indicate anything.

There's a combat log parser somewhere around here. I've seen references to it, but haven't pursued it. For posterity, mixing single-target powers with AoE/PBAoE powers throws a monkey wrench into the works. The streak breaker prevents misses for single-target powers and for sequential checks in AoE/PBAoE powers (meaning, the next critter in the target list for the power), but it does absolutely nothing to prevent a miss when mixing single-target with AoE (meaning, using a single-target power, followed by an AoE/PBAoE, or vice versa). You can, in fact, miss an infinite number of times by staggering the vectors. I frequently encounter miss streaks of this nature, typically three but sometimes extending to five or six, because I rely heavily on both vectors on all of my characters, and I suspect that's the norm for players, since so few sets are perfectly suited for either. Frequent tabbing between targets can also create the illusion of miss streaks. You'll use a power on target A, immediately Tab to target B and queue a power, miss target A and tab back to that target while the power on target B is animating, queue power on target A again, tab to target C, miss on target A and immediately tab back, et cetera. Because the streak breaker is only countering your misses, not your misses on specific targets, you can continue to miss on target A until your head explodes from the irritation as you hammer on the keyboard and scream, "DIE DIE DIE FUCKING DIE!". The streak breaker is working, but it's applying the break on target B, then target C, and so on. These two flaws in the hit check mechanic are what lead to posts of this nature. You can have +1000% Accuracy and +1000% ToHit and still miss several times in a row when using single-target and AoE/PBAoE consecutively, and you can also miss a specific target several times when you're changing targets with each power. This information dump brought to you by the letter 4, the color & and sponsors like you.

Sorry. Cheeseburgers with everything, for bacon! P.S. People aren't bacon, they're long pork.

There was a comment in another thread about pillars of the community. One of those pillars has fallen.

Those toes. THOSE TOES. *squeesplosion*