Luminara

Yes, OSA causes critters to run away when it's ignited. It's a specific flag, Avoid, applied to the critter AI. They'll also try to escape a Glue patch, but that's an AI response when it can't reach a target (the AI has moments of unrelenting stupidity when its pathing isn't clear and concise), not an Avoid, so it's less reliable as an anti-alpha mechanism. PGA pulses a mag 2 Sleep, so there's little retaliation from minions. Historically, TA has only caused chaos when teammates realize the person with the bow and arrows isn't an Emp. It's really more focused on battlefield movement management and enemy debilitation.

Caltrops is T2. The commentary was about T1 powers, which aren't optional for three of the four archetypes with access.

A waypoint marker system would be easier to implement. The mini-map would need to be adapted to allow multiple waypoints to be selected, so the player could create a route, and TP would have to be reworked to make it use waypoints, but the actual teleporting from waypoint to waypoint would be dead easy, that's just a command to fire up TP again after X.X seconds. It would be up to the player to lay out the route without kissing buildings or cliff faces, or my private highway (power lines).

The engine doesn't allow that. In fact, I don't think I'd be off the mark in saying that it was specifically designed to prevent it. Obstacles would have to be actually removed in some way, because even if they were rendered without textures, thereby making them invisible, the geometry would still be present. Phase shifting could, theoretically, be adapted to work on geometry, but it would require completely new code and significant revision of a major part of the engine to integrate it.

I didn't donate. I haven't in the past, and I don't know when I'll be able to in the future, with my ~$80/week income. So I'm interrupting this thread to say thank you to all of you who do, did, have, and will. I love Co*, but I love the forums and community just as much. It's the only way I can socialize without risking panic attacks. All of this makes my life better in ways I can't easily explain, and won't waste this space trying to. I just wanted to say thank you. The HC team is doing the work, but there wouldn't be any work to be done if it weren't for the people who paid for the servers and services. You.

You people have four poses, and I've been doing the YMCA for years on my Hurdlers. BUFF JUMP ANIMATIONS! Wait, they'll probably animate the M, C and A and cycle through them automatically, just to irritate me... LEAVE JUMP ANIMATIONS ALONE! BUFF FLY ANIMATIONS (turn them into flies!) Ooo... that would be interesting. Instead of a flying character, the character model could be replaced by different things when Fly was toggled on, like Devouring Earth Swarms, or Lightning Storm, or those balls of light in Croatoa that I can't put a name to at the moment... and Superspeed could be particle effects, like the projectile from Fire Blast or Ice Blast... Oh, the things I could do if I weren't running everything on half dead 12v deep cycle batteries.

It's the inability to slot those powers that leads to them being described in that way. I look at it from a different perspective - I know that things like Defense debuffs or ToHit/Accuracy buffs can work around the limitation of not being able to slot Sands of Mu with Accuracy, so I look for ways to use those powers on characters which can leverage the appropriate mechanics to make the base hit chance jump up, or I slot IO sets to build up global Accuracy bonuses. Powers can be treated like slots, essentially. The right powers, powers which reduce enemy Defense, for example, can sidestep the lower hit chance on temp powers or low base hit chance primary or secondary powers. Sometimes those powers have a higher endurance cost, but realistically, the endurance you're not wasting on missed attacks pays for those powers, and then some. Global Accuracy/ToHit can also be treated like slots. And they too can sidestep the inherent limitation of lower hit chances on certain powers, and be a source of net endurance saved when compared to missed attacks, even when the global powers themselves, like Tactics, have endurance costs. The only real streak breaker breaker is inaction. Temp powers are as good as you choose to make them with the tools you can access, and there are a lot of tools, even for archetypes without strong debuffs or buffs. Controllers have access to defender powers in their secondaries. Many defender powers can debuff Defense, thus increase your hit chances. Check your secondary for Defense debuffing capability, and if it's there, make liberal and abusive use of it. And I'm relatively certain that the market in Praetoria is linked to the market in the rest of the game. You shouldn't have any trouble finding enhancements of any kind there, even if they're not being offered by vendors.

The title forced me to do a double-take. Thought it said, "Recipe drops butter?". I was both confused and delighted for a few seconds.

Take 1000 inf*, buy a yellow recipe of any kind at level 10. Take 10 merits and buy 30 converters. Convert out of set, as yellow, until a Defense set comes up. Convert Defense sets until Kismet comes up. Then convert in-set until the unique is created. Alternatively, follow the same sequence until a Resistance set IO is created, then convert Resistance until Steadfast Protection comes up, then convert in-set until it's either +3 Defense (All) or +KB Protection. Sell the IO, buy a Kismet unique, or buy a yellow recipe and repeat the process to make more inf*. If you run out of merits, collect exploration badges in two zones to get another 10 merits (5 per zone for collecting all of the exploration badges). That was how I made my first 1/2 billion, just buying yellow recipes and burning up merits converting the IOs to uniques and selling them (i sold 3 converters to fund selling the IOs). I started with zero inf*, no friends, no loans, no costume contest wins, no P2W stuff, no guides, absolutely nothing. I went from 1000 inf* to a couple hundred million in less than a week. And converters weren't in the game when I last played, back in 2011, so I had to experiment with those before I figured out how to use them efficiently, so I was behind the curve for the first 15 minutes I was poking around in all of that. It's that easy. I don't fund my other characters, I just take what I pick up by level 7-10 on each one and start amassing more inf* than I can spend. Or just turn your merits into converters and sell those. The market is overflowing with wealth for anyone who cares to stick a hand in and take as much as they want. Those P2W attacks have the same base hit chance as most of the attacks you're going to have access to in your primary or secondary. You can miss with a lot of powers, or hit more frequently with fewer powers. But you shouldn't be relying on temporary powers (P2W attacks are categorized as such, as far as i'm concerned. i still remember when they were temporary, and when they were made veteran rewards... really wish i'd had them when i was leveling my melee defender in I5). You should be taking powers from your primary, secondary or pools, and you should be slotting them. Something most people overlook is how much even a DO Accuracy enhancement can help. You don't have to chase inf* or IO sets or Tactics, you just have to slot your attacks with a little Accuracy to push them up to the next streak breaker plateau. Temp powers are there to help, but not to supplant your regular powers (you can, if you build for it, but it's better in the later part of the game when you can build up some +Acc/ToHit to make them hit more reliably). Instead of spending merits to roll for Kismets or Steadfast Protections, you could spend the merits to roll for Ranged Damage or Melee Damage, slot them in your powers and not need temp powers at all. They already are. Takes even my hardest hitting characters a while to break down a cell door. But, again, they're supposed to be that way. At least they don't punch you back. 😉

If there's only one enemy, the AoE works exactly like a single-target attack. It checks the last hit roll, and if you missed, forces a hit on the only target available. It's not actually the streak breaker breaking, it's the lack of a mechanic to determine "last targeted enemy" and compare it to the current targeted enemy. That's what allows an AoE to miss a specific critter after a single-target attack misses, and a single-target attack to miss after an AoE misses on that specific critter. The streak breaker is limited to recording last hit roll, or last X hit rolls to be precise, so it can reach whatever plateau is set as your maximum misses and force a hit at the appropriate time. There's no record, though, of "tidge missed with X power with Y hit chance on Z critter", so the streak breaker has no comparison, or even code in place, to check that and force a hit on Y critter. Obviously, the record is there, since it shows up in the combat log. It's not passed to anything else, though. As I said, no mechanic exists to compare hit checks on targeted enemies. The game just bases it all on X power and Z roll, skipping Y altogether. AoEs check each target one after another, so that's also possible, but with 95% clamped hit chance, very rare. No idea which target is checked first or in which order the check proceeds, either, but I can say that "that jerk in the middle" is not the first one checked, else I wouldn't be missing 3 times in a row with my sentinel's attack chain (Stunning Shot/Fistful of Arrows/Blazing Arrow).

Unlike Accuracy, which is typically something which is only applied to an individual power via slotting enhancements (typically. there are global Accuracy buffs and IO set bonuses), ToHit applies to everything with a hit check on your character. Your primary or secondary set powers, your pool powers, your temporary powers, everything benefits from any ToHit buffs affecting your character. So your P2W attacks have a 75% base hit chance, plus whatever +ToHit is currently affecting you. If, for example, you slotted a Kismet unique in an appropriate power (anything with +Defense, even as little as Combat Jumping or Hover), you would have a 6% ToHit buff applied to your character for as long as that power was active (toggled on), or permanently if in an auto power (a power which has no toggle cost and cannot be turned off). That would raise the P2W attack's base hit chance to 81%. If you also had Tactics, then the ToHit buff from that power would also be applied (Tactics' buff varies by archetype). That additional ToHit buff might be as low as 7% unslotted, or it might be 12.5% unslotted. Whatever the total is, it's also applied to the base hit chance for all of your powers, even powers you can't slot or alter in the costume editor, like P2W attacks. Let's say you're a stalker with the Kismet unique and Tactics. With no ToHit enhancements in Tactics, you'd still have an 88% hit chance (75% + 6% + 7%)with temporary powers, like P2W powers. If you slotted Tactics to increase the ToHit buff by ~43%, then it would be just over 10% +ToHit, which would raise all of your temp powers to 91% hit chance (75% + 6% + 10%). That's not advice to take Tactics on a stalker, just an example using an archetype with a low Tactics number. The simplest way to look at it is, ToHit = +base_hit_chance. It's directly added. Accuracy works differently, it's a multiplier, but it's weaker than ToHit because of how the multiplier is applied. Sometimes it's better because it's what's easily available, like in IO set bonuses, but ToHit is where the real power lies. Something as seemingly minute as Tactics or the Kismet unique (unique means you can only use one of the IO in your entire build) can, at low levels, dramatically change your experience, because they kick your hit rolls into the next higher streak breaker category. Again, all of this is presuming you're fighting +0 foes. As critter level differential increases, your hit chance goes down. That's a base function to ensure that players aren't beating the snot out of +9 enemies (it used to happen). Cell doors, whether they're in Arachnos bases, PPD or Longbow bases, Circle of Thorns caves, Portal Corps maps, wherever, always con +1 to you. That lowers your hit chance. They're supposed to be difficult to break. If it were easy to escape prison, there'd be no point putting players in cells, they could just be permitted to respawn at a hospital and run back. I'm not saying they're a good challenge, or fun, just that the idea was to add an interesting and unique way to respawn players, and repeated numerous times even if it was one of the more annoying features of those maps. And there are a lot of knowledgeable people here. Some make me seem almost imbecilic. I just happen to have a penchant for words and a passion for the mechanics (or is it the other way around...).

@arcanaville was the real hero. She's the one who laid down most of the math we use. I learned from her work, and her example, and focused on mechanics.

Too much hyperbole going on here. The streak breaker limits how many times you miss based on your total calculated hit chance. That hit chance is a combination of the base power hit chance, the critter's level in comparison to yours, any ToHit bonuses you might have active, any Defense bonuses your target might have active, any -Defense applied to your target, any Accuracy bonuses you might have active, and any ToHit debuffs which might currently be active on you. It's not as complicated as it seems, it's just numbers. Additionally, the Beginner's Luck buff applied to all characters adds a ToHit bonus as a global effect. It affects the character's set attacks. It affects temporary powers. It affects Brawl. It affects anything and everything the player can use from primary, secondary, pool or temporary powers. That ToHit bonus is largest at level 1 and scales downward until level 20, at which point it is removed. Beginner's Luck was added to the game specifically to counter the problems of too few powers, which forced players to rely on temporary or origin powers to fill gaps, and inability to slot sufficient Accuracy or acquire enough ToHit to make attacks reliable. You don't miss 4 times in a row at level 1. Or at level 5. Or at level 20, when the buff is removed, unless you're fighting something which alters your hit chance (critter with +Def or -ToHit, or critters above your level, for example). The base hit chance for most powers is 75%. Some powers have a 67% hit chance, some have base 90% hit chance, but almost nothing available to players has a hit chance lower than 60%, and anything above 59.99% is guaranteed to hit by the fourth attempt, because the streak breaker forces a hit after 3 misses for any series of attacks with at least a 60% chance to hit on each attack. The only exception to the streak breaker rule comes into play when mixing single-target and AoE attacks. Using a single-target attack, followed by a cone, AoE or PBAoE, followed by another single-target attack. In this sequence, a specific critter targeted by the single-target attack can be missed, then the cone, AoE or PBAoE can miss, and the following single-target attack can also miss. This is because the streak breaker doesn't check the target, it simply checks the previous hit roll, and AoEs don't treat any one target with priority. The fact that you may be targeting a specific critter with both the single-target and AoE attacks isn't something the streak breaker is coded to recognize. Due to that, it's possible to miss more than once even when your hit checks are clamped at 95%. Outside of that edge case, there are no miss streaks outside of what's allowed by the streak breaker, and between Beginner's Luck at lower levels and proper slotting for or usage of +Accuracy or +ToHit, players are already extremely well empowered to avoid miss streaks. If you are missing four times in a row, stop trying to fight enemies above your level, or trying to fight enemies with +Def or -ToHit. Or use Tactics from the Leadership pool. Or slot a Kismet unique (it gives a global 6% ToHit buff to your character). Or slot Accuracy in your powers. Or team up with someone who applies -Def or +ToHit. Or use IO set bonuses to increase your global Accuracy (global meaning it applies to all powers you use, including temp and origin powers). Hit rolls are not borked. The streak breaker is not broken. Lowbies are not penalized. The hit check system is not deliberately fucking with anyone (except me, because i make it do that by mixing single-target and AoE). And no, Accuracy was not nerfed (nor was ToHit).

Co* is a game. For most people, that's all it is or will be. Other games come along and they move on. Hobbies become more important and they stop playing games as much. Families are started or grown, and people shift focus away from games. Jobs change, lives change, interests change, things change and people change with them. A population decline in any game is inevitable, and it doesn't matter if the game offers max level on login or demands a heinous grind; if the development team never updates or if they update every few weeks; if the engine is the newest, shiniest available or some kludge of the Doom engine. Nothing can be done to prevent population decline in a game because nothing can change human nature. Most people don't watch the same movie every night, or even every week. They don't listen to one song on repeat for months or years. They take what they can from the entertainment offered, then they move on to find new entertainment. We're the outliers. We can't really expect average people to stick around like we do. All we can do is enjoy their company while they're here, wish them the best when they leave and hope someone else can fill their shoes.

Staff/Rad/Energy Mastery brute. Scads of AoE. SCADS. Status protection on a toggle instead of a click, +Recharge and -ToHt on your taunt toggle (taunggle? TAUNGGLE!), resistance, regeneration, extra Melee/Lethal defense and -Res in Staff (stay in Form of the Body), yada yada yada. Take all of that with a grain of salt, because I don't care to or need to farm, I just adore my Staff/Willpower brute and noted that Rad has extra AoE.

I take back three of the things I said about him typing with his nipples. Okay, four things. He's earned it. 😁

Part of the problem is that it's not properly canceling its own effects. It's not simply a stacking issue, it's always been odd in a way which suggested that it might be buggy. A critter can enter the pseudo-pet's PBAoE 29s after the pseudo-pet is spawned, and when the pet despawns at 30s, it doesn't remove the debuff from that critter. In fact, the debuff lasts until 59s, which implies that each tick applies a 30s Slow. If that is the case, changing the debuff duration to 0.25s (presuming a 0.2s tick rate) would resolve that issue, but would introduce the problem of the debuff no longer being present when critters exit the patch. Having Glue persist after the pet despawned has long been a crutch TAs have had to lean on to get more out of the set. Whether it's warranted with the set's improvements is another conversation entirely. Might be worth testing it with and without the persistence to see how it impacts play.

Point. None of the other defender primaries deal significant damage, nor "modest damage over time", nor are categorized as attacks. They're all buffs, debuffs, or controls (hard or soft), not attacks.

Of course not. If that were my intention, I'd say something like... Some say... that he was forced to cancel the private ceremony where he was going to marry himself, because he was caught cheating on himself and broke up with himself. And... that he keeps a tin of kippers in his left horn, for "emergency purposes". All we know is, he's called The Stank! You're the one with a lit match and a "home ion drive kit" tag hanging from your costume. 😄

Capacitor. Wiki it.

Looks like the bean-powered propulsion system is functioning properly. Angled slightly up so the thrust counters gravity, gaseous exhaust present, it's fine. 😁

None of the other defender primary T1 powers deal damage. Not one. If that rule is changed for TA, it has to, in fairness, be changed for all defender primaries. As a controller primary, it would probably work, but I'd recommend a mutual exclusivity flag like the one in Shield Defense which prevents players from using two-handed weapons with SD. TA/TA would, in all likelihood, be grossly over-powered in several ways, unless one or both were scaled downward (such as to current live TA levels). That would be delightful. Not having a bow in a single *PP has always been a sticking point for me.

As an "I just zoned into Atlas Park/Mercy Island" help pop-up window which can't be dismissed for 10s, like the current one, clearly explaining to players that the command exists, which modifiers can be used and examples provided (such as a default bind/macro the player can copy and use). Or in the GMotD. Somewhere right in the player's face, rather than buried in forum posts. Bottom line, if people don't know a command exists, they can't look for information about it. It needs to be up front and center, so players are aware of it. Or, better, a right-click option on the power itself. Right-click, select Bind or Macro, etc. THAT would be ideal, because it would be easily discovered or explained.

They'll be in beta until they're finished. There's no definitive time frame. They're specifically interested in bugs, exploits and usability feedback. The more people testing, the sooner it can go live. So that might be tomorrow (it won't be tomorrow), or it might be Christmas (probably not that late, but still possible). Typically a package deal. Go. Test. Kill bugs. And that doesn't mean only the things that interest you, test everything. More eyes on more things = faster beta process.

Those changes appear to be limited to powers which duplicate other powers' movement mechanics, powers which are essentially copies of specific movement powers, as opposed to powers which buff movement speeds. If that is the case, unless there's a Hover clone in either Fire/ or /Bio (i can't find one), neither set is likely to be affected. Bill' Stank will be fine.