UberGuy

I imagine that most of that old data is still correct, unless the sets have been mentioned in a patch note here. (I may have a copy filed away too - I mostly look at the old code). But if I can read recipe data out of the game files, I can get a view that's guaranteed to match whatever data files the devs used to build the bins. That's the only reason to go that route.

What "consequences"? Before on teams: "I often have no choice but to play in a way that doesn't leverage my AT's key features. Before solo: "My AT features work fine here" After on teams: "On teams, if they won't let me leverage my original AT features, I have new ones I can use that make me effective in this context" After solo: "My original AT features still work here, or I can use the new ones if I prefer" If the "consequences" are that using the old way isn't as rewarding per unit time, that says something about the issues with the original mechanics. Yes, they could have tried to buff the original mechanics instead of adding a combo system on top, but retaining the reliance on being Hidden and the interruptable wind-up limits the options. Such "improvements" would have potentially removed the ability to play the old way at all.

Yeah, OK. So we're going to switch from debating the facts to attacking the debaters. Classy. And please don't try to put lipstick on that pig. You're saying I don't get the issue because of a failing or weakness on my side. Otherwise, you would just explain what you think I'm missing. I was playing Stalkers from days after CoV release - 10/31/05 when it came out on 10/27/05. I still play Stalkers today. A Stalker was the second CoV character I created. I know what features they had, and how well (or not) they "scrapped". I also played (and still play) a number of Scrappers. I have a thing for melee DPS ATs, and play Scrappers more than the others, but Stalkers (and Brutes) both get their time. I have made Scrappers and Stalkers with the same powersets. I have a good feel for how the two ATs play in relation to one another, and a strong grasp of the power mechanics. And I disagree strongly that, in objective, measurable terms, a Stalker on a team - which is usually a fast moving affair, had anything like a Scrapper's performance. Teams often prevented AS from going off. Between killing stuff before you could hit it, to aggroing spanws while you were still animating, causing AoE retaliation that both interruped the AS and broke hide, a great deal of the time I had to just scrap the old fashioned way with no special benefit for doing so. That's not a way to match Scrapper performance, when they have a higher base damage scale and random critical hits. I get that liking how something plays is not objective, and performance does not imply enjoyment. But the ability to play Stalkers the original way is not much changed. Demoralize still exists, but was reduced in duration - a change that may have happened regardless of the other changes. I am not saying they didn't change. I am saying I don't see how the degree of change is so bad that the old way of playing, if someone prefers it, is somehow ruined.

You said: ... in response to Bopper talking about not liking combo mechanics. In context, that sounds like you were saying "If you think that was bad..." If not, my apologies for misunderstanding, but I hope you can see where it looked like that was your point.

Good news - it looks like the recipe data is in the client files. I think I know how to read it. However, creating code to do that is not something I'm likely to get to for a few weeks. I need to figure out if/how I would use this info on CoD. Even if I don't, I could still extract it for diagnostic purposes.

Let's remember - nothing actually changed about Placate or slow AS. They're still there. What changed was players were given an alternative to them. You can totally ignore Assassin's Focus if you want, and just occasionally get a critical hit you wouldn't have before. Anyone who enjoyed the old way was probably not getting a lot out of it on teams - Stalkers were basically weaker Scrappers with less AoE, features they paid for in abilities that a lot of teams would prevent them from using. Now, they can "scrap" and actually deal serious damage while playing with teams who don't wait around for them to sneak ahead and AS something. Solo, they can still be played the "old" way if their players want. So the woe here doesn't make much sense to me. The one thing I'll concede the new mechanics took away was the "controlled" bonus crits against mezzed foes. That's not something most Stalkers could leverage well solo, and IMO it was not really a noticeable contribution on teams, so I don't miss it, but maybe some do.

I think that's just the crafted and attuned versions.

In cases like Gaussian's and PShifter, it may be necessary to cross reference what levels the recipes for a set exist down to. Based on those patch notes, I'm guessing those two sets really exist down to level 20, but their boostset definition still says 21. There are three places that this level is defined, that I can think of. In the boostset definition - it includes the min and max existence range of the set In each boost (enhancement) - there is a minimum slotting level field In the form of what recipes actually exist. Unlike boosts, which are a kind of "class" with its level characteristics set as fields, there is a unique recipe per level of enhancement they can craft. Mismatches in these three places will naturally create surprises. If the lowest level recipe that exists is lower level than the boost's minimum level setting, you could craft an enhancement you then can't slot. If the recipe/enhancement exists below the level given in the boostset, then conversions may not work as expected, and the set bonuses will cut off at an unexpected level. I will have to go digging to see if I have access to recipe data in the client. If I do, it's not something CoD's tooling currently extracts.

Do you mean Stalkers? Because, if so, I could not possibly disagree more. Hide/Placate + Slow AS was completely out of step with other DPS ATs' performance and pretty incompatible with large team play. The Assassin's Focus mechanic made Stalkers playable for me.

Wow, what the blazes. So, first of all, deciding what level something should be sucks. Here are the rules I used: If it has "Superior" in its name or its boostset says its minimum level is 50, it's either a catalyzed ATO/WinterO or a purple, and it should only be slottable at 50. (None of these were wrong.) If it has "Attuned" in its name and the boostset says its minimum level is 0, it's a regular ATO/WinterO, and its minimum slot level is 10. I had to infer this one from convention. (None of these were wrong.) Otherwise, it should have a minimum slot level equal to its boostset's minimum level -3. So, so many of these are wrong. Not only are whole sets wrong, some of them vary within the set like Gladiator's Net, but worse. The vast majority of these let us slot them before we should be able to, so fixing this may be a nerf for some, though I bet very few people slot most of these sets at low level. Here's the whole list. I'm listing their internal names so they're easier for devs to find.

I don't think so. AI doesn't interact with things that aren't critters. (Things we interact with are almost always critters, even if they seem inanimate - like glowies.) But the fix to flying MM pets did involve some AI / critter physics changes. Maybe that's negatively affected Singy somehow? The fact that it flies seems like a bit too much of a coincidence.

I feel like the biggest thing stuff like this needs is automation. Like, by default, there should be a programmatic way to tell what everything's slottable sets are by default or by inspecting it. It should be possible to override defaults, but the override should be inspectable and testable. The fact that so much of this is manual and not self documenting (and was even more manual even in Paragon Studios' day) is the root of many evils.

Did he start this after the most recent patch? Or was he doing it right after Page 2 came out?

Confirmed. This seems specific to this enhancement. Not only does a quick spot check of the rest of the set look fine, the crafted version of the same thing looks fine. I'll see if I can't use the data I have for CoD to programatically scan for issues like this across all set enhancements.

So, here are all the player powers that take Accuracy and -toHit enhancements, but don't take Accurate To-Hit Debuff sets. Blaster Support.Devices.Smoke Grenade Controller Control.Fire Control.Smoke Controller Control.Illusion Control.Spectral Terror Dominator Control.Darkness Control.Haunt Dominator Control.Fire Control.Smoke Mastermind Pets.Jounin.Blinding Powder Mastermind Pets.Lich.Fearsome Stare Mastermind Pets.Lich.Life Drain Mastermind Pets.Lich.Tenebrous Tentacles Mastermind Pets.Protector.Seeker Drones Mastermind Pets.Skeleton Warrior.Gloom Mastermind Pets.Skeleton Warrior.Siphon Life Mastermind Pets.Spec Ops.Flash Bang Mastermind Pets.Zombie.Siphon Life Mastermind Summon.Necromancy.Grave Knight Mastermind Summon.Necromancy.Life Drain Here are the powers that take -toHit enhancements, but don't take ToHit Debuff sets. Dominator Assault.Savage Assault.Call Hawk Dominator Control.Darkness Control.Haunt Incarnate.Alpha Silent.ToHit DeBuff Rare Incarnate.Alpha Silent.ToHit DeBuff Very Rare Mastermind Pets.Alpha Wolf.Growl Mastermind Pets.Jounin.Blinding Powder Mastermind Pets.Lich.Fearsome Stare Mastermind Pets.Lich.Life Drain Mastermind Pets.Lich.Tenebrous Tentacles Mastermind Pets.Protector.Seeker Drones Mastermind Pets.Skeleton Warrior.Gloom Mastermind Pets.Skeleton Warrior.Siphon Life Mastermind Pets.Spec Ops.Flash Bang Mastermind Pets.Zombie.Siphon Life There is overlap in the two lists - some powers, like Haunt, have both things going on.

Seems like an oversight to me. That's not a place the devs would usually turn in order to give an edge between ATs. If they wanted to do such a thing, I think they would remove the actual -toHit from the Dominator version. (Which I think would be a weird thing to do and I'm not advocating for it, because -toHit is "Dark" sets' thing.) The fact that it has the -toHit and the -toHit is enhanceable on both ATs is what really suggests to me that it's just a miss.

While I agree that "impossible" needs to be used with care, I think we need to be careful not to assume that someone with access to the source code can't know how something works well enough to know that certain correlations cannot be causation. What we can present to devs is evidence, not proof. It's worth remembering that "veteran levels" were added by this team. They actually do know how that code works. If they didn't add a check against vet level to the pre-existing rewards code, it really is impossible that it's checking that. If we use our imaginations, we could perhaps envision a situation where there's an out of bounds memory access going on, and code that should be looking at something else is looking at the vet level integer. However, in such a situation, it's just as likely that the misbehaving code would look anywhere else, would be looking at that integer as if it were something else entirely and do really weird things as result (including crash). In a situation where statistics are involved, the best tests are ones that involve gathering lots of appropriate data. The lower the probability of a given thing (like a purple drop), the more samples you need. The player can do that in a farm or something. Or the dev can do it in a test environment, which gives them access to spawn rates and kill rates players can't achieve. (Having a 0.5s recharge fireball that does 40,000 unresisted damage isn't going to invalidate a drop rate test.) The request for character information is so that the devs can clone the character exactly. Same AT and powersets and badges and temp powers and you name it, and make sure it's not something specific to the character that's tripping up some obscure branch of code that causes an issue.

I don't know the formal definition for it, but non-unique minion/LT/boss/EB mobs don't give everyone a drop. They drop one thing from each reward category (enhancement, recipe, salvage, etc.) and each only goes to one person. AVs and GMs normally only have special drop rules for SOs, in which they give everyone who damaged them (or perhaps met some damage threshold). DE Monsters have special rules where everyone on a team that damaged them is eligible for an EoE drop. Incarnate rewards are different. I forget the specifics. I believe everyone on a league can get Threads from an iTrial critter defeat, for example. I'm not aware of anything that drops a recipe or invention salvage per person. Only special rewards, like EoEs or Ambrosia, or SOs from AVs. Edit: Doing some digging, it seems like there are two places unusual rewards can be attached to a critter. Either in its EntityDef in the "additional_rewards" field, which is something you can see on City of Data's raw data view, or in the spawndef that sets up the enemy for an encounter. For example, EoEs and Ambrosia drop assignments come from the spawndefs in The Hive or Eden Trial. "Normal" rewards seem to be specific to a critter's rank (really, its archetype, which is correlated with rank), and unless overridden in one of the two ways mentioned, every critter of a given AT does actually have a standard, "normal" reward distribution. Invention salvage is a bit different, as it's defined on a per-villain-group basis, because different groups drop tech, magic or both.

Yeah, it's very possible the root time previously ended before the activation time. So we couldn't use powers any faster, but maybe we could move sooner.

Every normal critter has a chance to drop one recipe on defeat. When you are on a team, which teammate gets that drop is random and evenly distributed*, and doesn't care what level the person is, how much damage they did, or whether they even have room for the drop. On a team of 8, you get 1/8 of the drops, on average, than you would if you defeated all that stuff yourself. Of course, it's very likely you defeat it all faster, but maybe not always 8x faster. In a raid, its much more complex. Which team is given the chance to get the drop from a critter does depend on how much total damage was done by each team that damaged it. (A team is considered to have damaged a critter if any member of the team did damage to it.) My experience is that ship raids give me jack squat for drops. I consider myself lucky if I get 1 drop. 3 is outstanding. (The point at ship raids is to damage as many things as possible before they die rather than focusing fire on single foes, because every Rikti that dies that anyone on your team damaged at all gives everyone in reward leash range of it a VM on defeat.) The point is teaming is almost always butt for drops compared to solo, unless you're soloing on something that kills stuff slowly. * There are caveats here - you have to be on the map and, if it's in an open zone, you have to be within a certain distance of the critter when it dies, unless you personally damaged it, in which case you get your (random) share of the rewards at any range.

I haven't actually noticed that office maps have a problem with this. I know I do see these markers on them, but maybe not always. Maybe this is a thing and I just don't miss the spawns. I have noticed that sometimes spawns that did show on the map disappear. I've never pinned down the pattern for why. It seems maybe to related to it showing more than one "last" spawn, and defeating the first hides the second? Also worth noting, ambushes count against the threshold, so if you're down to the last "static" spawn but there are 3 ambushes waiting for you to release a hostage, the map won't reveal the static spawns.

Very minor update to the above post - after chatting with some folks we decided it made more sense to call the Cryptic test server "Alpha". That's actually always been its designation, but during issue/page testing rounds a lot of us me included) have taken to calling it "beta". But there are totally different "beta" servers (Brainstorm and Paragon), so I'm jumping in early to correct the convention on CoD. The site and the post above have been updated to reflect this naming.

That's just the nature of unbiased (pseudo) randomness. And by "unbiased" I don't mean it's not got a chip on its shoulder. Rather, I mean that the shape of the distribution of numbers over time looks like a nice Gaussian curve. Streaks of similar outcomes are actually completely normal in the short term even for completely random systems. A lot of folks assume "fair" randomness won't do that, but it totally does. And, yes, when that turns against you on conversions or missing a dangers foe a bunch or something, it really stinks.

OK, this update is kind of a big one. CoD can now show data for both Live ("Homecoming") and Alpha ("Cryptic") The "revision" string in the top right of the screen is now clickable. When you click on it, a popup appears offering a link to change to other servers. Right now, the only two options are Live and Alpha. Clicking anywhere outside of these links will dismiss them without changing your current data preference. You can also change this on the settings screen. (This was the original way to do this, as the popup version was harder to implement.) Full disclosure: CoD wasn't really designed for this sort of switch to be dynamic. While the data source was always configurable, the site was designed with the assumption that each data source would have its own dedicated site, and for that site the source would never "swap". This is what we did for a while with the alpha site, which originally hosted only alpha/Cryptic data. So the behavior of this feature is sort of limited. When you change data sources, it reloads the page, and now you're using that data source from then on until you change it back. Your browser history will not remember that previously viewed pages were viewed with a different data source. The ways of switching described above are the only ways to go back and forth. Note however that if you want to compare a power between data sources, you can open it in two tabs or browser windows and switch one of them. The other view won't reflect the change in data source until you reload it. Hotlinks to specific data Recognizing that it may be useful to hotlink directly to a power as defined in a given datasource, without regard to how the viewer may be set up, the site accepts a URL query parameter on any page that causes it to display just that page using the specified data source. Query parameters are things in a URL that come after a question mark, usually in the form of "name=value". If you have multiple query parameters, they are separated by the "&" character. For example: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.dark_melee.siphon_life&at=scrapper This has a two query parameters power=scrapper_melee.dark_melee.siphon_life at=scrapper Here's how you would specify that link should show live (Homecoming) data: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.dark_melee.siphon_life&at=scrapper&data=homecoming and here it is for alpha (Cryptic) data: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.dark_melee.siphon_life&at=scrapper&data=cryptic So you just add "&data=<SOURCENAME>", where "<SOURCENAME>" is currently either "homecoming" or "cryptic". (If there are no other query parameters, you would use "?" instead of "&".) This should work on any page driven by game data - powercat/powerset/powers, sets, entities, and attribute/modifier pages. If a URL conflicts with your current data source setting (eg: the URL points to alpha while you're set to view live) only that page will display using the data source given in the URL. Navigating away or manually removing the query parameter will revert you to your previous setting. There's no way to build these data links in the UI. You'll have to add the query parameter in the address bar or a text editor of some kind.

It feels about the same to me. The root time matches the cast time according to CoD, so I wouldn't expect surprises there. I took a quick vid with a recharge timer running, activated Vorp then held down space. Watching the countdown on the power it seems like I jump just before the 3s mark. That seems about right for a 2.5s cast.