Luminara

Oh, also, for thoroughness, toggling Evolving Armor off and on while Efficient Adaptation is active also works. Since this seems to be an issue with Evolving Armor, rather than Efficient Adaptation, I'm revising the thread title.

Still more testing: Inexhaustible, Hardened Carapace and Ablative Carapace all respond to Efficient Adaptation correctly without requiring the Adaptation to be cycled. Evolving Armor is the only one not working correctly (so far, only level 22).

That was the point I was making. If one just looks at the different versions of the attack and compares the archetype scalars, that's the impression it gives, that the blaster version is using a higher than normal ranged damage scalar. Or, from the other perspective, that the sentinel version is using a lower ranged damage scalar than the listed 0.95. And the base values and scales aren't exactly front and center in any of the sources, nor do as many people enjoy playing with the numbers as we do, which makes it even more unintuitive. The relevant information isn't presented as clearly or neatly as it could or should be.

Further testing: Logged in, Efficient was still toggled on, as is normal. Moved to the nearest critters, no change in Regeneration or Recovery. Toggled Efficient off and on, Evolving Armor began buffing Regeneration and Recovery as expected. Accepted a mission, entered mission door, moved to the nearest spawn... no change in Regeneration or Recovery. Toggling Efficient off and on had the same effect as outdoors, Evolving Armor's Regen/Recovery buffs began functioning. Third test, exited mission, went to nearest critters, exactly the same behavior as described in the first post and the two previous paragraphs. Had to cycle Efficient to get Evolving's buff working. One difference, though, was that Evolving's buff was intermittent this time. It would show up in the combat attributes, then disappear. It kept doing that until I cycled Efficient yet again, at which point it settled down. I queued Efficient while it was still recharging on this test, though I can't see that making it behave so oddly. Looks like Efficient has to be turned off and on again every time the character zones, which includes logging in, in order for Evolving to register that it's active.

Trying out a Savage/Bio scrapper, playing in Faultline. Was about to log out, but decided to verify the numbers against Mids'. Stood in the middle of three Clockwork and watched the combat attributes window for a while, waiting to see Evolving Armor's Regeneration and Recovery buffs apply. Both relevant toggles are active, no buff to Regeneration or Recovery. As an afterthought, I killed Efficient Adaptation, then toggled it back on. Regeneration and Recovery buffs evident, Evolving Armor now shown in the window.

This is affecting Lightning Rod, too. The teleport functions, but nothing takes a single point of damage. 72% global +Accuracy and 5/6 Armageddon in Lightning Rod, critters are +0 or +1 to the character, so we're not talking about horrendous slotting or an insane miss streak.

I said Snap Shot.

As I noted, they were generalized, not standardized. Some have higher recharge times, others don't. Snap Shot is an excellent example of the discrepancy. The recharge time, animation time and endurance cost are all identical on all three archetypes, but blaster Snap Shot's damage indicates that it's at scale ~1.39, whereas sentinel is at the correct 0.95, and defender at 0.65. If the player looked at blaster Snap Shot damage and presumed it was using the expected 1.125 scalar, it would make it seem as though both sentinel and defender Snap Shot were markedly below their presumed scalar values.

They're not saying there's nothing wrong with them, Snarkums. Most of us agree that sentinels aren't all sunshine and roses. They're saying that... you're misinterpreting the damage on the attacks. For example, Aimed Shot for defenders deals 36.15 damage. For sentinels, it deals 52.83 damage. 36.15/0.65=55.62, which is the base value of Aimed Shot. 55.62*0.95=52.83. Now, the blaster ranged damage scalar indicates that Aimed Shot should be dealing 62.57 damage, and, in fact, it did, a long time ago. But Paragon did a pass across all blaster T1 and T2 primaries when they revamped Defiance to allow blasters to use those two attacks while mezzed, resulting in a generalization of all T1 and T2 attacks. They're not all identical, but most of them deal roughly the same damage, have the same recharge times and endurance costs, etc. So you can't make an accurate assessment of sentinel T1 and T2 attacks by comparing them to blaster attacks. Blaster T1/T2 attacks are just leagues ahead of where they would otherwise be, if they stuck to the standard formulae. If you look at other attacks, you'll see that the base damage and scalar values are more properly represented. Blazing Arrow, for instance. Blaster: 161.7 ; sentinel: 136.6 ; defender: 93.44. All of those perfectly reflect the base damage of the attack and the relevant ranged damage scalar. And, frankly, a small increase to the scalar portion really isn't going to make them rock your world. Increasing the sentinel ranged damage scalar to 1.00 would only improve Blazing Arrow to 143.75. It's just not going to be appreciable. This is where sentinels are, in regard to damage. They're functioning at the set scalar value, but some blaster attacks are operating at significantly higher than their appropriate scalar value, and that's skewing your perception.

That wasn't the point that I made. You're deliberately obfuscating the facts. Again. If you can't support your argument otherwise, you can't support your argument at all. Defenders aren't healers. They never were. I don't take comments like that on face value. It reeks of hyperbole. And given that I didn't encounter this kind of behavior, and I was playing some very strange defender builds, teaming frequently in those days and spending time on seven different servers, that alone provides evidence that it was not, in fact, the norm, nor even somewhat common. Being mentally ill myself, I'm the last person on the planet who would deliberately attempt to fuck with someone else's mental state or make them question reality. Asking for proof isn't gaslighting. Refuting anecdote with anecdote isn't gaslighting. Insisting that there was a deliberate campaign to force every defender into a healer role, providing not a single iota of proof of said campaign and saying, "You'll just have to take my word for it" when asked for evidence, that's gaslighting. Pot, kettle, black.

T1 defender primaries are available at level 1 as controller secondaries. Of the entire roster of defender primaries which both contain at least one healing power and which was available prior to I5, that only leaves Storm with a healing power unavailable to controllers at level 1. Even if you were to constrain the argument to Empathy, Heal Other is available to controllers at level 2, Absorb Pain at level 4, representing an availability differential of 2 levels (Absorb Pain is available at level 2 for defenders) for controllers to function as "healers" at the exact same efficiency and strength as defenders when the game was released. Not really a foundation for proclaiming a significant advantage, even in that era, when it was "harder" to level. Sure, if you blatantly ignore that the development team refuted that notion, that argument could be supported. Ah. Well, in that case, my hearsay and anecdote counters your hearsay and anecdote, and the information I've provided, and which can be verified both on the wiki and in the Wayback Machine, has certainly proven your disinformation to be what it is, so it doesn't appear you have any basis for your assertion. Defenders aren't healers. They never were.

Heal scalars (ranged and melee) for defenders and controllers were identical until Issue 3. Vigilance wasn't added until after Issue 5, and Cryptic's response to our objection to an endurance discount tied to team health, which we disliked because a) it did nothing for us when solo, unlike every other inherent, and b) it offered no tangible effect for primaries like Force Field and Trick Arrows, was "Blast more.", thus directly informing us that the inherent was not, in fact, intended to be a "healer bonus". Never happened to me. Never happened to anyone I played with. Wasn't a common complaint on the old forums (i double-checked, just to be certain my memory wasn't failing me). Can you support that assertion, that non-healing defenders were "often rejected by teams" with any evidence (independently conducted poll with a large sample size, or records of in-game metrics, or any unbiased collection of data indicating a trend)?

Defenders aren't healers. They never were.

I miss mice with balls. I liked balls. They felt good. They felt right. You could do things with balls that you can't do with lasers and infrared LEDs. Yeah, sometimes you had to pull your balls out and clean the gunk out of the hole, but it was worth it. 😕

*shrug* https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/08/21/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-2 https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/09/17/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-3 https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/10/16/city-of-heroes-diary-volume-4 These articles, written by Emmert eight months before the game launched, walk us through the design process behind creating the archetypes available at launch. Of particular note is how, in the second article, he outlines the thought process behind categorizing abilities and how that influenced archetype creation itself. "Next, we took these very narrowly defined abilities and grouped them into larger categories. Things like rooting, mezzing and sleep were all related to controlling the behavior of the AI characters. So we dubbed that category 'Crowd Control' (to be honest, I call it now just 'control' but we didn't want to confuse it with our previous named control powers). We ended up with six basic areas: Melee Attacks, Ranged Attacks, Personal Defense, Buff/Debuff, Crowd Control and Movement abilities. At the time, we didn't quite know where we were going with this; we were just trying to get a handle on what exactly the things were that MMORPG players could do - and would want to do - in our game. Pretty quickly, we decided that an individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories." They didn't start with a trinity model. That's of critical importance. There was no tank/damage/heal categorization in mind when they began, no foes requiring a perfect blend of the three in order to win. They began with a freeform selection model, noted the flaws and addressed them by gradually and carefully pulling things together, into general categories, then further refined those into classes. Moreover, CoH launched before WoW, and the trinity model hadn't really be fully cemented at that time because there weren't nearly as many MMORPGs (Everquest, Runescape... those were the only big ones, as i recall). Cryptic had no-one to copy, no game to inspire them (beyond P&P RPGs and tabletop board games), so they weren't eyeing some other wildly successful game and hoping to replicate the success by copying the design (as so many have done since EQ and WoW blew the gaming world up). But the key here is in the final sentence of that quoted material. "An individual hero should be able to have powers in two of those categories." This is significant, because those categories, essentially, correspond to the more basic tank/damage/heal categories. The process of narrowing down the power selection process and creating classes inherently required them to combine two of the three trinity aspects in order to make each class, due to the way they laid out the categories and how they assigned them in pairs. The blaster was the exception that appeared to adhere to the trinity model, but it did so within the constraints of Cryptic's archetype model, being Ranged Damage/Melee Damage, and as such, isn't a true representative of a trinity model class. In the third article, Emmert says, "Early this year, when we made some changes to the design, these ideas were knocking around the back of my head. As I explained in earlier columns, we came up with Archetypes - and each one had two "roles."" That sentence is even more clear. Every archetype specifically and purposefully fulfills two roles. And with everyone fulfilling two roles... the trinity simply doesn't exist. Our characters are, by design, too diverse to be narrowed down to the simplistic categorization of tank/damage/heal. There are also numerous interviews archived all over the Internet, and in the Wayback Machine, some even linked on the wiki, in which Emmert and other Cryptic developers outline an intent to ensure that players aren't forced to dedicate hours of their lives to playing, to making the game as "casual friendly" as possible, as we'd refer to it today. They wanted to create a game which people could log into for brief periods, feel like they accomplished something, and log out again. They didn't want to create a game which required players to log in, patiently wait for a trinity team to assemble, go beat their heads against WoW-style Elite mobs for three hours, et cetera. "Casual friendly" was always one of the most important design goals. The trinity model is not casual friendly, it never has been and as demanding as it is, it simply can't be. I don't have a direct quote from a developer, a link to the old forums in which one of them says, "Yeah, fuck that holy trinity stuff, we do what we want!". I don't have it because I'm just not going to dig through tens of thousands of posts on the Wayback Machine to find it. It's there, if you want to go digging, because I do clearly remember it being said several times over the years, but I'm not going to look for it. Nor will I e-mail any of the former developers to ask (all of them are quite easy to find with a few minutes of searching). I don't need to. The evidence, both in actual play and in looking at developer comments like the ones I've linked, speaks for itself. This is not and never was intended to be a trinity model game.

If you mean how long will they continue to hop on boxes and fences, trying to reach you as you hover just out of range, they'll do it until the server is reset, as far as I've been able to determine. Note, though, I've never stayed logged in continuously for an entire week, so I haven't tested it to the full extent possible. I have had the little buggers running around in circles below for several hours, on the original servers. If you mean how far will they chase you, they despawn once you put a certain amount of distance between you and them, but I don't know exactly how far that is. They won't cross entire zones to give you your small inspiration and little inf* bonus. They're not that grateful (they're going to be mugged again in a few minutes anyway (we're the worst crime-fighters in history, apparently)).

People were accustomed to the trinity mindset, since that's how every other MMORPG worked, and expecting CoH to conform to it. Of course they were forming trinity teams. People do what they're trained to do, or what they know works. They stick to a tried and true method. But that's not how the game was designed, it's how some people chose to play it because the MMORPG market revolving around the trinity model and mindset trained them to play that way. That was the alpha stage. It was changed not because Cryptic felt that a trinity model was better, but because play testers were making characters with all four travel powers and no attacks, or every heal available and no attacks, or all defensive powers and no attacks, and they couldn't level. The alpha was trashed and they started over, with archetypes designed around the basic concepts used in comics to guide players as well as guarantee they'd never find themselves incapable of progressing. It was never to impose a trinity model on the game, it was to prevent players from shooting themselves in the foot. They talked about it several times on the original forums. I'm sure you can find the posts if you dig around in the Wayback Machine. IO sets didn't break the trinity model, they just made it more obvious to more people that it wasn't applicable here. Words of truth.

More frames per second.

And no-one receives the Power of Greyskull. 😞

It never was.

Concurrently, the flow of electricity through the body results in muscle contractions which can't be relaxed until the electricity is removed. Having one's musculature subjected to such leads to general weariness, amongst other things. This is why taser devices are widely used as a less than lethal means of subduing people. Not only is the subject briefly incapacitated by the jolts of electricity, but they're also far weaker after regaining control of their limbs, making it easier to subdue and restrain them. This feeling of weakness translates into endurance loss in Co*.

If I had to make an objective assessment based on the ready availability of -Res for all characters, in pools, procs and Incarnate abilities, I'd surmise that the fact that specific archetypes, and specific sets within those archetypes, allowing significantly greater amounts of -Res than external sources can provide was what was considered important during the original development cycle of the game. In other words, my TA/Dark's -Res is always going to be higher than your Punchy/Dodgy's -Res, and guaranteed in both availability and application, and that's what the developers considered important. Everyone can deal damage, but some specialize in dealing damage while others deal just enough damage to "get by". In the same vein, everyone can apply -Res, but some specialize in applying -Res while others work within a more limited application framework (from a single-target pool power, or from a long recharge *PP power, or rolling the dice on procs). I believe the only people who would consider it important to rely on a support character for -Res are the ones with the specific agenda of making teams "need" or want support characters. No-one else really gives a shit, as long as the job is done at the end of the day.

-Res what?

Mohair, as requested.