Luminara

Enough speculation. Enough of the "procs are gonna be nerfed" doom-crying. Enough of the "we all know" nonsense. Prove that there's a problem before you say one more word. Define the nature of that problem, set yourself test parameters, document results and lay down incontrovertible evidence that this problem exists, what the problem is and how the proof can be reproduced. We've been rehashing this thread for years now (years. multiple), and not one person has conclusively proven that procs are a problem, or the problem, or that a nerf actually is coming, or that a nerf is necessary, or that there even is a problem. In fact, no-one has even given a solid example of what could be construed as a problem. On the contrary, all existing evidence has indicated that there is no problem. The HC team has never made an unwarranted change to proc behavior, despite those years of proc panicking and fear-mongering, and we're still on this same ridiculous merry-go-round? What the fuck? An unusually open and cooperative development staff has been the hallmark of this game, from its first days on the original servers to the HC team we're blessed with now, people who granted us insight to the game's systems and mechanics in a way unprecedented in MMORPG history... and this is what we do with that legacy, wring our hands and bemoan an imagined future of proc nerfs that we don't even know will happen, much less given any reason to expect, like we're a bunch of WoW players. You want the proc system changed? Prove that it needs to be changed. You believe there's a problem which needs to be fixed? Define what the problem is, prove that it exists and show exactly how it's detrimental to the game. You want ridicule and scorn? Keep doing what you're doing, I'm right here.

That was the original implementation of the PPM mechanic. It was changed because we aren't always in control of our global +Recharge. Example: You and I team up, you have a specifically crafted proc build which works exactly the way you want it to... and I buff you with Accelerate Metabolism, throwing your build and proc chances into disarray. You are, understandably, displeased with that result, and write a strongly worded missive to the development team (Paragon, at that time) saying so. Perhaps even posting about what I total dick I was, buffing you with AM when you didn't want to be buffed. That's why the PPM mechanic was redesigned to ignore global +Recharge. Penalizing players for being buffed is bad design, not just for making players happy, but for promoting teaming.

Individual problems should be addressed individually, not with mass quality of life reductions. If there are problems with some powers being slotting in certain ways, we address those powers and slotting possibilities, because a global attack on the problem doesn't actually change the situation. Those individual powers will still be outliers when the dust settles. Nothing's fixed, and no-one's satisfied when it goes down that way. I addressed that scenario thoroughly in the last two proc nerf-herd threads, showing mathematically that the final result was not, in fact, grossly more powerful. Will that high damage attack hit harder when it's used? Most likely, yes. But it's also usable less frequently and has a higher cost associated per use, and in the end, we're looking at a miniscule improvement, a few damage per second. The end result is negligible in terms of DPS, expensive in terms of endurance, requires jumping through multiple slotting hoops, imposes a longer recharge time on the power, and in the end it's still only "winning" the imaginary dick measuring contest by a millimeter or two (and then only if the player doesn't hesitate to use that ultramegaboomy attack every time it's up, rather than hold it in reserve for the bosses). In essence, it's just playing the game a slightly different way. As many times as I've seen you step in to have your say when others are demanding that we all play their way, or that the game be redesigned or rebalanced to force us to play a certain way, I know that's not your preference or position. And given your adamant opposition to ED and GDN back in the day, it's hypocritical of you to advocate global nerfs to address outlier situations now. You're better than that. I know you're passionate about balance, but this isn't the way to achieve it.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree. Damage-dealer archetypes are still dealing more damage, and procs don't benefit from inherents, such as Containment, Scourge or Vigilance, nor are they guaranteed to trigger, despite the misinformation happily thrown around by people who either: require real-life validation from pretendy-fun accomplishments in a video game ("my procs are absolutely reliable and always trigger, i'm awesome!"); or who are determined to see damage procs nerfed ("your procs are absolutely reliable and always trigger, you're awful!"). They are improved by -Res, but applying -Res requires additional time and the characters leveraging procs in that manner aren't winning any races, they're simply not running as far behind as they would be without procs. A defender can sometimes deal almost as much damage as a lazy blaster, after a lengthy set-up and dependent on randomized occurrence, and some people believe we just have to nerf damage procs into the ground to stop that, so those lazy blasters don't lie awake at night, agonizing over imaginary dick measurements. Because, of course, it makes perfect sense to impose massive restrictions on everyone just to prevent a few peoples' fragile egos from being lightly bruised. The emotional equivalent of a paper cut is the end of the fucking world these days, after all. Some powers can be slotted as "proc bombs", and the proposed solution by those same people is to grind damage procs into dust, rather than address the powers themselves to make them perform less like outliers, because kicking entire archetypes in the balls is a better solution than bringing individual builds into line, and even that is predicated on the presumption that these people can reasonably prove that there is a problem... which, to date, no-one has done. The attempts to do so have been shown to be deliberate efforts to misrepresent the entirety of the situation, with facts swept under the rug, cherry-picked datum held up and loudly proclaimed as the end-all and be-all of evidence... the epitome of scientific misconduct, which would have those people permanently barred from publication if they tried to submit the same "research" in a respected scientific journal. It's all nonsense.

I expected a picture of Bill to be significantly more grizzled... and less anus-rockety. Guess those Texan chilis took their toll.

Huh. Never seen a flying turtle before. 😁

Not too shabby. You manage to hold on to enough global +Recharge to keep the impact minimal. One Force Feedback +Recharge, I'd guess, since my Shield/Elec tanker has 140% global +Recharge and the slotting differences between EM and Elec aren't sufficiently unique to account for that extra 100% otherwise. Could do with more Accuracy/ToHit in both cases. You move like a possum, though. I have one good lung and I can catch a possum. That Run Speed, that's like, what, six years to run from one spawn to the next, taking reverse time dilation into account?

I AIN'T SEEIN' NO GLOBAL RECHARGE, ACCURACY/TOHIT OR MOVEMENT SPEED COMPARISONS BETWEEN THOSE TWO BUILDS, BUBBLES! You're on the clock. Let's go. 😛

Global recharge, global Accuracy/ToHit, movement speeds and stats without Hybrid and Destiny? Also, that recovery rate in comparison to the endurance usage is abysmal. Turn off Sprint, you numpty.

*waves rolled-up magazine* Do I need to smack you on the boop-snoot again? I will. You know I will.

They're just washing him off. That's basic medical practice. Never expose your donor organs to unnecessary, avoidable infection vectors. That bucket is probably a "bath bomb", containing salts, iodine and other anti-bacterial and anti-fungal compounds. Good hygiene matters!

FUD-mongering? You? You? Wow, I guess it has been a slow start to the week.

Hopefully, zero.

It is necessary, and it's more helpful than you realize. Think it's tough to find a moved thread? Imaging what it would be like if every thread was in one category. No order, no topical division, just thread after thread you have to scroll past to find the one you wanted, and they're always moving, always bouncing threads up and down, off to the second page, then back to the first when you're looking on the second... Proper categorization and location of threads is what keeps forums like this in a readable format. It might be momentarily inconvenient from time to time, but it's less chaotic and confusing. And there are plenty of ways to find a moved thread. As @Greycat said, you can click the "Topic was moved to" link; if you've posted in that thread, you can go to your own profile (see that picture of yourself at the top right? click that) and click the link(s) to your post(s); if you recall the name(s) of the poster(s), you can check his/her/their profiles and click a link to the post there; there's a Search box at the top right of the page (every page).

Ditto. I left when they started talking about changing to the F2P model. I had no idealized objection to that, at that time, but in concert with the efforts to pigeonhole classes into the trinity, the lack of content at max level (was in a guild, was participating in PvP, and was still spending most of my time just standing around, waiting for something to do), and the game not meeting my expectations for a Bioware product (wanted Star Wars, not Space-WoW), it was enough to convince me that it was time to move on. Never returned, still don't regret leaving.

Essentially, yes. Everyone associated with space exploration realizes that it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. A former NASA administrator once stated that going to Mars meant going back to the Moon, and going back to the Moon meant privatizing low Earth orbit. But that's not what politicians and mass media can sell to the public, because it's not sexy, and it's not what the public wants to hear, because it's not sci-fi. That's what people want. The Enterprise. The Millennium Falcon. Battlestar Galactica. The Apollo LEMs weren't sexy, they weren't sci-fi, they weren't sleek. They were effective, but not "cool" (except to nerds (me! me!)). So there are always the problems of funding, waxing and waning public interest and convincing capitalist corporations to participate. The Challenger and Colombia losses exacerbated the problems, as did the cost overruns and overly long construction of the ISS. The Hubble telescope has done a lot to grab public attention, but it's also frustrated a lot of people. They see those glorious images and want to go there in person, right now, not eventually, not in a slow rocket, but in their personal space yachts or on space cruise liners. So yeah, it's a horizon problem. I believe the Artemis program and the Chinese Moon landing program will bring our attention back to what's in front of us, though. It won't be jaunting around in the Horsehead Nebula in a brainship, but it will be a nibble at what's to come, and the billions of us who were born just a little too late to watch the Apollo missions on television are starving for that. Sexy or not, being able to watch people land on the Moon, seeing people go back, witnessing the construction of the first Moon base... that will grab attention. I'm all tingly now, just thinking about it.

A light year is ~5,880,000,000,000 miles, and the closest star (Proxima Centauri) is more than four times that distance from Earth. Using nearly light-speed travel, it would still take almost 4.5 years to reach it. But we can't even do that, yet. We could pack a few very young people into a ship, point them in the right direction and send them off, but they'd die of old age centuries before the ship reached that star. We simply can't fly fast enough to make the journey in a reasonable time. The Voyager 1 probe has been in continuous flight since September 5, 1977, is the most distant human-made object, and the fastest object we've sent out, and it only recently passed the heliopause boundary (the point at which pressure from the Sun's solar winds is too low to push back interstellar gases). After ~45 years, it's still only about ~13,000,000,000 miles away from us, roughly 0.00225% of one light year's distance. We can't do it with what we have now. We just can't. There are only three realistic possibilities for space exploration outside of our Solar System. Light-speed/FTL travel, sleeper ships and generation ships. The laws of physics won't permit us to travel at the speed of light, so we're investigating ways to sidestep those laws, such as the Alcubierre drive. If we can prove the existence of the Higgs field and understand how it functions, we might develop a method of altering it to increase or reduce mass, which could also lead to light-speed or FTL ships. Sleeper ships are out of our reach, for now, because we just don't know how to make that idea work. How, exactly, do we make people go to sleep for several centuries, then wake them up, and not subject them to extreme aging throughout the process? Right now, we can't. There are some animals which undergo various forms of hibernation, and others which can survive sub-freezing temperatures without experiencing organ and tissue damage, but we don't understand how to adapt those to human bodies yet. Generation ships offer the highest probability of success with the currently available technology, but they're not economically feasible (the expense of sending trillions of tons of mass into space would be greater than the combined GDP of all of the nations in the world), nor would they be environmentally viable (refer to my previous post, regarding the strip-mining of the planet). Even confining our exploration to within the Solar System, we're looking at having people in ships for years. Years. Plural. Sure, we can reach the moon in about 4 days, but beyond that, we're looking at long journeys. Mars, the next closest body of interest, would be around 18 months round-trip, minimum, and that's not including the time spent in orbit or on the surface, doing what we went there to do (just going, then turning around and returning would be an enormous waste of resources). That's a very long time to be in space, bombarded with ionizing radiation, living off of pre-packaged food, recycling water and air, enduring low or no gravity, etc., after having been blown into space by riding a column of explosives (which you hope won't simply detonate en masse during launch). Every time we launch people into space, we have to (try to) conceive of every possible situation and account for it, and what we've learned from our limited experience is that we just can't foresee everything. No-one had even imagined the Apollo 13 situation, for instance. There was no strategy for dealing with the explosion of the oxygen tank, for the carbon monoxide build-up in the LEM, for the re-entry startup sequence with dead fuel cells on the CM... What do we do if there's a situation when the ship is 11 months away from a return to Earth? If someone has to perform an emergency procedure and requires communication with ground control, they're going to be dealing with communication delays of several minutes, so they won't be able to rely on ground control to assist them. We can plan for a wide range of situations, but we can't plan for everything, nor can we send everything to deal with every potential scenario. And we've lost enough brave men and women to haste and poor planning. Sending people into space just to die won't be of much use. Corpses are terrible explorers. They can't record observations. They can't perform experiments. They can't collect samples. All we can learn from corpses is what we did wrong. So we're taking it slowly. We're crawling, because we fell down, got our boo-boos and learned that we're not good at walking yet. We're not walking on Mars yet because we can't provide a reasonable assurance that the people we send will still be alive when they reach Mars, or when (if) they return. There are also places where we simply cannot send humans. Not because of the distance, the time it would take to go there, but because they're so hostile to us that they're impossible to explore in person. The temperatures and pressures of the Venusian and Jovian atmospheres, along with other considerations, such as the composition of Venus' atmosphere and Jupiter's radiation belts, take them off of the list of candidates for human exploration. Probes are the only way we can explore many places in the Solar System. It was only (relatively) recently that we learned there are living organisms which can thrive in conditions previously thought to be inimical to all life. Entire ecosystems living around black smokers on the ocean floor, utterly independent from photosynthesis! Extremophile bacteria living in salt, and rock, and acids and alkalis, even exposure to gamma, X-ray and UV radiation which should kill them, environments which we can't survive without protective equipment! Even without leaving this planet, we're discovering relevant, important information which will aid us in future space endeavors. Exogeology, exobiology, applications of particle physics and quantum theory to space exploration, fusion power... in the last 50 years, research fields have been created and developed due primarily or exclusively to interest in space exploration, areas of critical importance to our future in space. Our fascination with space never waned, it grew, but what we learned in the second half of the 20th century taught us that we need to learn more, and in more diverse fields, to build a better scientific platform on which to engineer our space programs. We haven't stopped trying. Every nation capable of putting a probe into space has done so, and continues to do so, and the nations without space programs are working toward building them. We have cooperative programs between nations, building and launching probes and sharing data. China wants to send people back to the Moon before this decade ends. NASA's Artemis program, which is a combined effort from several nations' space agencies, is still funded and progressing toward a return to the Moon by 2025. Despite all of the obstacles thrown into our path by governments run by bureaucrats and politicians, the wars, the uneasy tensions between various nations, the secrecy inherent in patents and state interests, the dreamers and thinkers are still pushing forward with human space exploration. Including us, the ordinary, average citizens of the world, who won't stop asking, "When?", who can't stop looking up at the sky and feeling that breathless anticipation, who haven't stopped dreaming of the wonders awaiting us in space. We haven't given up. We're not waiting, we're limited to making do with what's available. Every probe we send into space, to Mars, to the Moon, to a comet, to an asteroid, to Pluto, every mission helps us, even if they're not as exciting as building a Moon base or colonizing Mars. Every time we discover something new about this planet, it gives some knowledge we can apply to other celestial bodies. Every experiment in particle physics, quantum theory, fusion technology, nuclear isotopes, chemistry, biology, metallurgy and other sciences bring us a little closer to the stars. We're learning more about the Solar System, we're testing different propulsion methods, we're confirming hypotheses, we're discovering things we didn't know, we're conducting experiments, we're learning and growing and developing a better global space program, one which will take us into the galaxy, some day. We're much closer than we were 50 years ago, and advancing constantly. We will get there, in due time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The reality is, we won't be flying around the galaxy in the Enterprise, we'll be going in hollowed out asteroids. Our first generation or two of space dwellers will live in the Moon. The Moon has much of what we'll need for our Solar System ships, things like titanium, silicon, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, things we don't want to rapidly deplete on our home planet by shooting them into space because it would be burning our bridge before crossing it. We'd never make enough ships, or ships large enough, to transport the entire population, but we would be forced to, essentially, strip-mine most of the Earth for ship-building resources. Acquiring those resources from the Moon is a much more attractive option, as it ensures the continuity of Earth, the quality of life for the people still on it and allows us to start at a convenient planetary body with lower gravity (thereby reducing associated costs). Those Moon dwellers will spend their lives in subterranean complexes. We're going to have to dig for some of the things we need. Copper. Silver. Zinc. Lithium. Things desirable for electrical cabling and wiring, solar panels and batteries. If we don't have power, we're not going anywhere, so we'll be digging. And since we're digging, we might as well live in the tunnels we dug. There wouldn't be any regolith in them. The mass surrounding our miners would be more than sufficient to block all forms of ionizing radiation. We can seal the surface-connecting sections of the complex with airlocks, fill the tunnels with breathable air, light and heat, and barring impact events, we're unlikely to experience any geological instability. If something did happen to crack one of our tunnels, we'd have tons upon tons of tailings and slag to seal it up. With an underground complex, we could also address the question of growing things. And we will need to grow things, to keep our air breathable without relying on chemical processes or machinery; as well as the food we'll require; and we can turn the excess into useable and necessary products, such as plastics to insulate those cables and wires we'll be making. Plants won't grow on the surface if they're bombarded by UV, and a dome thick enough to filter out UV would also refract and distort any sunlight passing through, so we're not going to see much success doing it that way. Underground, we can provide them with grow lights, just like we do here on Earth, and they'll be much better protected in our warm, dry environment under the surface. Those grow lights will be good for us, too, helping alleviate the claustrophobia of subterranean dwelling. We'll still have to deal with the low gravity, but we'll adapt or create solutions (creating artificial gravity via Higgs field manipulation, for instance, when we learn how to do that). And then, we'll move on to Mars. Not because we really want a Martian colony, or because it will be an economically feasible next step, but to prove that what we learned in the Moon is applicable elsewhere. We'll build another factory/colony underground on Mars, verify that we know what we're doing and then, then we can start looking at other stars as destinations. By that point, we will have developed sufficient skill and knowledge in the fields of mining and tunnel construction in space, and as cool as it would be to build giant starships, we'll take the practical route of hollowing out asteroids. We'll extract useful minerals and elements, create our living and operations areas on the go and supply ourselves with all of the repair material necessary, all in a single stroke, and then fit engines onto our self-sufficient, self-contained, radiation-proof flying rocks and cruise off into space. Sure, the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy might look at us as space hoboes, but we're not going to space to impress them, we're going because we're explorers and adventurers, and arriving alive is more important than arriving in style, dead.

We were discussing the potential for challenge which exists in the game in the form of mez and how that challenge is not utterly obviated by the existence of status protection. I gave an example of exactly that. I have no idea how you went from there to "stop asking for brute buffs". Seriously, where did that come from? Here's a summarization of the discussion up to this point: You said, "I don't think we should allow everyone to be completely immune to mez. That's power creep!" I said, "No-one's completely immune to mez now. I'm mezzed through mag 10 protection regularly." You said, "NO WAY!" I said, "I fight enemy groups with multiple critters who can mez, like Carnies, Rikti, Arachnos and Malta. A character with 10 points of protection to Hold/Sleep/Stun can still be Held/Slept/Stunned, so the challenge provided by mez still exists for everyone, and allowing the minority with zero status protection to stay active through a single mag 3 mez isn't power creep, it's just making the difference between the haves and have-nots less pronounced." And now, two days later, you come back with the above-quoted material, which has absolutely nothing to do with that conversation. I play that character at that level and against those enemies specifically because they can do that to her. It's in keeping with the character concept. And I know what I'm doing. Save the HOW2PLAY advice for the newbies, if you would, please. Not one person in this thread has complained about soloing, or being incapable of soloing, +4/x8, GMs or AVs. Well, I do have two people on /ignore, but no-one who isn't on my /ignore list has said anything even remotely like that. You're not normally this erratic. Is something wrong?

This concurs with my test (am currently watching combat attrib window, relevant set IO slotted in a toggle which is deactivated). The status resistance is global, the regeneration is procced.

-KB enhancements are globals, always on, even if the power's toggled off. As long as you don't exemplar more than 3 levels below the enhancement's level, of course.

Eh, might as well take it. I'd say donate it to the Paragon Orphans Rehoming Network, but we don't have any orphans, or children, and the P.O.R.N. was driven out of Paragon City over a minor misunderstanding leading to a moral panic. Seriously, how was the COO supposed to know that marshmallow cream would do that? @Luminara in-game, send nudes inf*.

That's not the burning sensation you'd be able to cure with penicillin. 😱

You had five months to claim it before I picked it up. Never letting it go now, I love it. 😛 Carnies, Malta, Rikti, Arachnos at +1/x8 solo. They all have more than one critter with mez, and at x8, there can be two of each in a spawn. Every mission I play with those enemies results in at least one instance of being mezzed, and I actively seek out missions with those enemies, so it's a regular occurrence. Power creep is inevitable in any game involving improvement to the character. Holding back a small percentage of characters doesn't prevent power creep, or make the game more challenging for those who have already crept far above that small percentage's capabilities, it just punishes the minority unnecessarily. And the HC team is addressing power creep right now, creating and adjusting content to provide challenges for the creepiest creepers. That minority should be lifted up to the same level as everyone else so they can participate in the creepy content at the majority's level, not pushed down as a justification for holding power creep at bay. That ship sailed as soon as one person level up to 2 on launch day, it's not coming back.