Luminara

*envisions Daleks in an elevator, with the Muzak version of The Girl from Ipanema playing* WHAT IS THIS SOUND? EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! EXPLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!

Batman is a vampire in DC's Gods and Monsters. No darkity dark, just punches and kicks... and some neck nibbling.

That occurs with all melee cones on all targets, regardless of cone length or target size. AoEs (all melee cones are AoEs, despite not always being categorized as such in power definitions, because they all have radii and that's what the engine looks at) use a different prediction algorithm than that used by single-target powers (which is why we don't see oddities like Rain of Fire's graphics curving to hit a moving target, or Fistful of Arrows' projectiles swerving to nail something moving to the side, whereas we do see Moonbeam arcing gracefully to catch up to a runner), and when rooting and movement are thrown into the mix, the engine sees the target as always being out of range and out of radius. Moving slightly ahead of the target permits the AoE to activate because it places both the player character and the target at points which can be considered static, from the engine's perspective, at the instant of power activation.

I don't manage. I'm just not adept at it, and there are things out there which need to beaten to a quivering pulp, so I don't really have the time to manage anything. I find it easier to glare until the situation corrects itself. Messy storage bins? *evil eye* Scattered salvage? *baleful look* Disorganized inspirations? *withering glance* Incomplete base? *menacing glower* Pants scattered everywhere? *brown chicken, brown cow* Wait... strike that last one.

I also tested manually targeting on the vault door. Same result. It's not the bind/macro (i use a bind for Shield Charge, macro for Lightning Rod), it's the (s)hit box.

No error message, but they deal no damage and there are no Missed notifications in the ToHit channel or any of the Pet channels, so neither Shield Charge nor Lightning Rod are considering a vault door to be a target (testing now on my Shield/Elec tank).

A romantic comedy five millennia in the making.

I wouldn't. That story's been done to death (pun intended). Every angle and variation imaginable has been explored, there's nothing fresh or interesting to draw from it at this point. But that doesn't mean the concept of vampirism itself is sucked dry (also intended). I have considered delving into that. For example, why do vampires feed on the blood of living creatures? If we strip away the mysticism and magic associated with that, what's the real motivation behind it? Hemoglobin isn't exactly the most nutrient-rich substance, even taking into account that it's a delivery route for nutrients. So why the "need" for blood? What if we give it a combined physical and psychological motivation? What if vampires suck blood not as food, but to counter the chill of death? Their bodies are room temperature, at best, and warming up in front of a fire takes forever to increase the body's core temperature. One can imagine, then, that being afflicted with vampirism means always feeling cold, miserable, and the sensation of hot blood running down the throat, pooling in the stomach, spreading throughout the body... feeling, even if only for a brief time, the lassitude of the native hypothermic state falling away, the sensation of being warm and comfortable. It would drive the entire story, wouldn't it, that overwhelming desire to recapture the essence of normalcy that was lost. That addiction to feeling alive. Dracula is old hat. Try a fresh approach.

That would fix that mission, but it doesn't deal with the other missions with poor design, oversights or deliberate cactus-up-the-ass situations which create arbitrary failures independent of player action.

The NPCs in this game shit their brains out of their ears when they encounter a single stair step. Even using external scripting tools, I can't imagine bots being any more competent at navigating through the complex terrain of the cities, in Co*. You can only buff stupid so much.

This is something I'm only now noticing, as I tended to play TA characters on the original servers, which was... shall we say, less than optimal for soloing certain content in the past, and ranged, with plenty of AoE, so any issues related to hit boxes were undetectable from that perspective. Playing through content on my main now, a Staff/Willpower brute, and being both melee and engaging in content which I used to avoid, I've noticed that two of my powers are essentially useless when I face extremely large enemies. Foes such as the Eye of the Leviathan, the Thorn Tree and, unexpectedly, bank vault doors, can't be hit with Eye of the Storm, and aren't in range of Rise to the Challenge's radius. I'm pressing my character's face against these enemies, and neither of those powers is affecting the target. They're not missing, there's just no target there as far as those powers are concerned. The target point in those hit boxes is at a height which puts them out of range for small radius PBAoEs. Consequently, builds reliant on small radius PBAoEs are at a disadvantage when facing enemies with these messed up hit boxes. Build-critical powers are effectively non-functional when facing over-sized foes with bad hit boxes. That's not balanced, as it deprives melee characters of damage mitigation tools and damage dealing/increasing powers while not subjecting ranged characters to the same restriction, and it's disorienting for the player, who see their powers fail to have any effect and no explicable reason for it.

The critter who put him/her in a time-out still has that power when spawned as a lieutenant. That's how Notoriety works. The rank is reduced, so HP, damage and things like control effect durations are lower, but the critter is still, from the perspective of powers available, a boss, despite conning as a lieutenant. Detention Field also reduces the target's Threat, which means the NPC would be taking the full aggro. Additionally, reducing Notoriety would also affect the NPC, reducing its HP correspondingly, which would make it easier for the critters to defeat. And, lastly, the critter most likely to be responsible for this festival of shit was probably an Ascendant, so it would have -Res attached to several of its attacks. Even if we're just looking at that one downscaled boss accompanied by a single minion, with the player out of action for ~15s, at -400% Threat and the NPC subject to -Res while hindered by reduced HP due to the lower Notoriety setting, it's unlikely that running at minimum difficulty would make any difference.

And that's a critical observation in this context. Failure can move a plot forward, failure can change the direction of a story, failure can provide incentive. If we had an extra mission to rescue Lady Grey from the renegade Vanguard after she's captured in the bait mission, or failing the "Prevent 30 Firbolg from escaping" mission ultimately led to Eochai spawning in the final Croatoa mission, or the PPD hostages in safeguards dying meant EBs/AVs spawned in the jail cells, those would be examples of proper storytelling and its use in mission failure. Even if we assume that the intent was for us to fail these missions, they're poorly done because they lack consequences. When we fail these missions, nothing happens. We move on to the same mission we play if we succeed. A mission being difficult can be positive, too, from the storytelling perspective. Succeeding against the odds is a key element in many hero/villain narratives. When players win the day despite having the deck stacked against them, they feel empowered, capable, exhilarated. Clumsy spawn placement and bad mission design aren't substitutes for good storytelling, though, because they don't engender the appropriate feeling of success. When spawns drop right on top of a hostage the instant we free it, give us no time to prepare and no opportunity to succeed, that's not a difficult situation, it's a deliberate attempt to ruin the player's day, to take a big, steaming dump on the player. Going back to the possibility that the intent was for the player to fail, there are already ways to create the situation in which that spawn appears right on top of that hostage, such as Teleportation, but instead, the designer chose, chose to immediately spawn the enemies in place, thereby denying the player even the briefest moment of respite in which he/she could turn the situation around. And, as noted above, failing doesn't alter the outcome in any way, we move right along to the same mission that would otherwise follow. People don't dislike these missions because they're "harder", they dislike them because they deliberately impose conditions which lead to failure without making use of any of the established methods of increasing difficulty (tougher foes, like EBs/AVs; higher level foes; ambushes; spawns Teleporting to the location), and they do so with no narrative purpose. That 30 Firbolg mission doesn't suck ball sweat because it's hard, but because it's a massive outdoor map with dozens of spawn locations and two enormous corridors to the escape point. It's bad because it takes half an hour to complete even at -1/x1 and actively wiping out every spawn rather than waiting at the escape point. That Lady Grey mission isn't irritating because it's hard, but because it was intentionally designed to be failed unless the player drops to minimum difficulty, and the way it was designed is only one step short of automatically killing Lady Grey when she's freed from her captors, without any corresponding change to the story arc as a result of either success or failure. Having hostages die from combat damage, despite being in a non-combat state, before you're finished defeating the spawn holding them doesn't make a mission hard, it makes a mission an annoyance that we'd prefer not to deal with. The Faultline arcs have several EB/AV encounters, including the final mission with three EBs/AVs. Those are hard, but they were also designed properly and enjoyable. The missions which essentially fail themselves, the ones we're discussing in this thread, aren't hard, or harder, because they were designed to be hard, they're just ineptly crafted or willful attempts to screw the player, and the failure itself serves no narrative purpose, it's just a kick in the groin. "Oh, you wanted to play our game? Well, fuck you very much."

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...