Luminara

Several months and pages of discussion, and only a couple of brief DS9 mentions and side conversations. YOU ARE ALL DISAPPOINTMENTS TO ME AND YOUR OTHER PARENTAL UNIT.

Do you see this, boys and girls? This is your brain on pineapple pizza.

Any attempts to stage a coup d'état in my Lumiverse will result in having the walls of reality collapsed on and about your head. Now remove yourself, and your gastronomical horrors, from your cubicle. And you just lost your severance pay.

You're both fired. SECURITY! Escort these people from the building.

Keep up, slowpokes. 😛

It's bad in Croatoa. Striga wasn't much better. I think tweaking powexec_location to raise the target location slightly above ground level would probably fix that issue, as well as others reported when using other powers with the command.

The fuckiness to which I was referring was the DDoS activity, which was definitely occurring.

4/6 Clouded Senses and 18% +Def, or 4/6 Dark Watcher's Despair and 16% +Def is all that takes. Combat Jumping/Hover + Weave + both 3% +Def (All) IOs nets you everything you need to complement Flash Arrow. But that really emphasizes what I'm saying - 18% isn't much without Flash Arrow, and if you're waiting for Glue or OSA to recharge, you're going to see a lot more incoming damage when that ambush comes waltzing up from behind, intent on giving you a thorough physical by removing your organs and checking them visually. TA is pro-active, not reactive or passive, which creates the mechanical hole that other sets don't experience. They have heals, they have toggles which persist on defeated foes, they have PBAoE Defense/KB/whatever, they have reactive and passive options which help them mitigate damage even when they aren't actively aware of or countering it. TA is definitely not overpowered. As long as we're weak to ambushes and summons, we'll never have to worry about nerfs. The debuff values of every power could be quadrupled and we'd still have that the potential to be squashed like insects on a windshield by an ambush or a critter summoning reinforcements while our key powers are recharging. Us knowing how to manipulate the game to make TA perform well doesn't equate to TA performing above standard, or above the HC team's expectations.

This was followed by a redirect to a Captcha page. Definitely some fuckiness occurring.

Heh. Parthenia's +Def is shit. I refuse to build for soft-capped Def and maxed -ToHit at the same time, it renders one or the other pointless, and I refuse to allow Flash Arrow to be pointless. I play TA to use TA powers, not to have a bunch of mules for set bonuses so I can run around not using TA powers. +Def, for me, on my TAs, is extra, not a primary goal. Just enough to close the gap between Flash Arrow's debuff and the soft cap, and no more. That allows me to build more well-rounded characters and pursue set bonuses I want, rather than spending my entire slotting budget on mitigation and leaving them weak in a wider variety of ways. I'm perfectly comfortable with TA having a weakness, and having to live with that weakness in order to build my characters the way I envision them, because I spent years dealing with multiple TA weaknesses and having to find ways to compensate for them. I just wanted to point out that TA is not god mode, that it does have a hole, just like everything else in the game. That hole is with certain mechanics, rather than damage types or positions, but it's no less a limiter than other holes in other sets. If anything, it adds to the game, expanding on what we define as a weakness/hole, and offers the potential for future sets with similarly unconventional weaknesses.

Forums were as slow as a standard mid-day for me, at 4 a.m. this morning, which was abnormal. Nothing unusual in my latency in the game, so it wasn't on my end, or, for a change, Verizon being the king dick of the universe. Then a DDoS prevention screen from the server came up when I refreshed one of my open forum tabs a few minutes ago, and several pop-up post peeks just say "there was a problem displaying this" or something when I hover over posts. DDoS seems most likely, given that page that came up. Questions are, who and why?

Glue Arrow's pseudo-pet disappears at the 30s mark. The patch persists for the full 60s duration, but there's no visual indicator that the patch is there after 30s. When using Glue Arrow with powexec_location target, the pseudo-pet typically spawns under the terrain when the power is used at any elevation above whatever the current map defines as 0'. This causes Glue Arrow to appear on the ground, for example, when the player tries to use it on a balcony or elevated platform. When used in large outdoor maps with hills, it goes under the ground and only affects foes half of the time (presumably, it's falling all the way down to the "bottom" of the map).

Regarding the potential for TA being overpowered with the revamp: Ambushes. I've been running the Croatoa arcs for the last few nights and run into several situations which led to my defeat. A single ambush neuters my TA/Dark more effectively than mez. I either can't debuff everything quickly enough to save my skin, or the ambush spawns are too scattered to debuff fully. Buck Salinger's arc is particularly brutal, with hidden Red Cap ambush spawns, multiple ambushes when objectives are triggered... I just /quit in fury, my head aching from grinding my teeth and blood pressure skyrocketing, after yet another series of ambushes put me face down. TA, in and of itself, is extremely good now when the player is in complete control of the battlefield. That can change in a heartbeat. The moment an ambush spawns, the tables turn and you're in trouble. And summons which occur after you've debuff, like Red Caps or Council critters despawning and summoning a higher-tier foe, like a Fiend or Warwolf boss, or summons like Master Illusionists calling up their Illusionists, are in the same category as ambushes. Your "my ToHit debuff is HUGE, son" Flash Arrow doesn't apply to those because they didn't exist at the time you used Flash Arrow. Your PGA might have expired by the time they pop. You have a split second to react, then the pain comes rolling over you if you were a little too slow on the draw. Ambushes (and post-debuff summons) are TA's weakness, and they're a devastating weakness because TA is still reliant on both recharge times and player reaction. Even if you're maintaining perfect awareness of your surroundings, you're at the mercy of having key powers recharged, you're reliant on being mobile and capable of responding to sudden changes, you're even limited in how you can counter an ambush by where it's coming from (does no good to have a Glue patch or OSA down in front of you, where you're fighting the existing spawn, if the ambush comes from behind and you can't reposition yourself). As long as there are ambushes and critter summons in the game, TA will never be overpowered.

You get used to it. You also get scars. Chicks/dudes dig scars. "Yeah, this one is from the Battle of Caphalos Five. This one is from when I was held captive by Orritez, Butcher of Aritax. And this one, a chainsaw jumped me. Oh, that one? Ginger. I was certain I was done for that time, with the water torture and all. She loved me in the end, though." 👍

Do that. Contain the mess with a tray of some kind under the bowl. Jessica plays with water, she paws when she's drinking, moves the water bowl halfway across the cabin sometimes with her antics, it's just normal behavior for her. If it's normal for Ginger, then taking away the ability to play water or paw at it while drinking will create stress. If it's not normal, it will resolve itself over time, when she's more comfortable in her new home, and you can remove the tray then. Either way, the simplest solution, that of containing the mess with a tray, is the best. If you don't have a cookie sheet, sheet tray, serving tray or wide, shallow dish in which to set the water bowl, try putting it in the sink. She'll find it.

Sext with your phone next time, the screen can be squeegeed.

The tier 1 and 2 attacks, Aim and tier 9 attacks, all of which can be directly compared, are identical in animation times. Umbral Torrent has a lower target cap than Fire Ball (10 versus 16), but the same animation time. Tenebrous Tentacles is over a second faster than Fire Breath. There are no Dark powers which can be directly compared to Blaze or Rain of Fire. Blaze has a 1.188s animation time, Rain of Fire's is 2.244s. Dark has Abyssal Gaze with a 1.848s animation, and Life Drain, 2.112s animation time. I think Dark's snipe is ~0.4s faster than Fire's, but I can't log in to check. If Moonbeam isn't faster, it's identical to Blazing Bolt.

Everything above +0 resists all varieties of debuffs. The greater the level differential, the stronger the resistance. At +4, critters resist debuffs by more than half. So yes, and no. There aren't very many foes which specifically resist -ToHit, primarily AVs/scaled down EBs, but fighting enemies above your current level causes your debuffs to have less effect. More information on debuff resistance due to level differential. Also of note, a few power sets have the capability to debuff -ToHit resistance (this was added to Trick Arrows in the most recent update), but all lieutenants, bosses and AVs/scaled down EBs have limits to how much their resistance to -ToHit can be debuffed. Consequently, debuffing resistance to -ToHit is of limited value outside of AV fights. One can debuff minion/underling -ToHit resistance significantly, but the time spent doing so is rarely worthwhile when it's simpler and quicker to just beat the snot out of them. Well, +Def is never comprehensive, covering all types and positions. Most Defense is mitigation to either positional attacks or attacks with specific damage types. There are +Def (All) powers, which do exactly that, provide Defense to all positions and damage types, but even +Def (All) doesn't provide any Toxic Defense because there isn't any Toxic Defense in the game. -ToHit, on the other hand, affects every attack and every damage type used by the debuffed foe, which makes it far more effective as a mitigation tool. With -ToHit, there is no Psi hole, or Toxic hole, or any hole. -ToHit bypasses all of that, granting mitigation to every type and position equally. If it weren't for the purple patch, -ToHit would be absolutely superior to +Def in all situations. Even with the purple patch, -ToHit is excellent mitigation, but most players prefer passive mitigation in the form of toggles/set bonuses, rather than active mitigation which potentially interferes with their dee pee ess. I can't address the value of -ToHit or +Def in Hami raids. I don't attend them and I haven't researched Hami's mechanics since Paragon updated it. I'll get around to it eventually. Dark Blast is an excellent set, for defenders and corruptors. Blasters lose access to Night Fall, which significantly reduces the value of the set, in my opinion. Being limited to mostly single-target attacks makes it much more difficult to stack -ToHit on multiple foes, which reduces the mitigation it could provide. But if you're comfortable with limited AoE options, it can provide plenty of -ToHit to layer with +Def, even accounting for blaster debuff scalar values. With Umbral Torrent to back it all up with reliable KB (or KD with a KB->KD IO), it should turn the tables on the Psi critters for you. Fire, though... you really have to pair it with something which provides more mitigation than /Devices, or go all out and take every high damage power you can so you can obliterate spawns before they can hit you. Fire's only bonus effect is MOAR DAMAGES NAO PLZKTHXLOL. Damage is mitigation, but it has to be quickly delivered and in sufficient amounts to defeat everything before you're defeated, or it doesn't do the job. For controllers, try /Trick Arrows. I rather enjoyed my Fire/TA controller on the original servers, and with the improvements to TA in the latest update, it's undoubtedly an even better combination than it was then. Between Smoke and Flash Arrow, you can build up over 30% -ToHit when slotted, and that's enough for you to soft cap versus +0 critters with only 15% Defense (All). 6% of that can come from the two 3% +Def (All) unique IOs. Maneuvers offers 4% slotted. You can find more +Def in a variety of powers and set bonuses, and one of the Interface options in the Incarnate system also adds -ToHit to every attack (including your pets'). Oh, and /TA also has two powers which debuff Defense, so you'll see fewer miss streaks in the long run.

Then the key to success is to spin Co*'s resurrection as NC's decision and effort. Face saved, management alive, corporate happy, gamers happy.

You do realize that -ToHit is almost identical to +Def (All (including Toxic, which has no Defense typing)), with the difference being the purple patch's effects on debuffs, right? By using Dark/Dark's -ToHit as mitigation, you're not actually avoiding Defense, you're just using a different version of it.

The legal budget available to the HC team for the purpose of negotiating a licensing or usage deal for the IP eight years after said IP was effectively killed is not even remotely related or comparable to the asking price of the IP if it were being sold outright. These two aren't the same and whatever figure NC put on the table previously has no bearing on the talks they're currently engaged in with the HC team's legal representation. And considering that the IP is essentially dead by NC's reckoning, they stand to lose nothing by agreeing to allow people to license it and potentially revive it. They do, however, face the prospect of gaining some small increase in their revenue stream, as well as reversing some of the ill will garnered when they shuttered the servers, which may lead to more revenue, and significant press coverage portraying them in a positive manner, which represents yet another potential revenue increase. These points have been made several times in this thread. The precedent was set decades ago. There are numerous "private" servers for various MMORPGs, some dead IPs, some still active IPs, and many of those some have been endorsed by the developers/publishers and allowed to continue. This isn't new ground we're talking about here, it's just another day on the Internet, and the examples set by other "private" servers can be used to indicate unspoken approval of the practice in a court. By knowingly continuing to allow these servers to operate without a license, NC is doing exactly that. If they were really serious about retaining private ownership of the IP, they would've acted immediately and continuously, driving a stake through the heart of every resurrection effort, rather than tacitly approving of the situation with their silence. Instead, they've permitted several Co* server groups to operate without a license for over 18 months, entered into negotiations for use and/or licensing of the IP with one of those server groups (Homecoming) and created the situation you claim will never happen, the potential for legitimizing the use of the IP. Here's a thought - if you're in the legal profession, instead of telling everyone to give up and let the game die, why don't you try to contribute something useful and worthwhile? Find some other precedents, a loophole in copyright law, something to help that might be passed on to the HC team's tiny legal staff. Do something positive to keep this game around if you have that capability and desire to see it thrive. All you've done so far is argue and insist that we're doomed. Do better.

Homecoming isn't big money. They don't have an on-staff legal team. They don't have hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars to throw at legal negotiations, filings and procedures. Legal matters are not going to move with the same speed or efficiency with the tiny budget they have.

The first attack, Throwing Knives, was at the hit rate cap, but any roll in the 95.01-100 range is a miss and the roll was 98.74, so it missed. The second attack, Blaze, had a lower hit chance, 87.00%, and it also missed when the roll came up higher than that number, 94.52. The streak breaker kicked in properly when you missed two attacks in a row and the lowest hit chance of the two was within the two miss allowance range, 80.01-90.00. Had that second attack had a 90.01% or higher hit chance, the streak breaker would've forced a hit, bypassing any result of the hit check. More information on the streak breaker and hit chance thresholds.

No idea. Never used it. On the original servers, I used Dark Mastery on my TA/Dark, so I could stack Dark Pit with Oppressive Gloom if I needed more mitigation. I've only played one character with access to a boost-type power, an Energy blaster, and after I started playing a Rad/Energy defender, I never leveled the blaster up high enough to play with that power. But if it worked before, it should work now.