UberGuy
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Posts posted by UberGuy
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50 minutes ago, ScarySai said:
I assume this is to prevent some sort of cheesing with open sky maps?
Actually, it's to allow people to do things like use Rest in a lava patch for damage badges.
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The usual source of this is that there are differences in how your character's current data (including inventory) is persisted vs. how various "external" storage mechanisms like global mail or base bins are persisted.
When you add or remove something from global mail or a base bin, the new state of those things is updated immediately. Your character, however, is mostly only updated when you leave a zone, or are logged out (which, behind the scenes, basically are the same things).
If you update global mail or a bin, and then the mapserver your character is in crashes, then the external storage is updated, but your character is not. This can either duplicate inventory, or cause it to be lost.
- If you dropped something from your inventory to a bin / mail, then the zone crashes, you will have the item(s) in both places.
- If you take something from a bin / mail and the zone crashes, the item(s) will be lost.
There was a time pre-sunset when some folks figured out a way to crash mapservers in a repeatable way, and used the above rules to dupe rares on purpose. They were dumb enough to do it in a city zone rather than some mission / base map, so it was hugely noticeable, and they got themselves banned.
My guess is that the zone crashed (or was otherwise terminated) after you logged, but before the mapserver kicked your character out for being disconnected from your client.
Edit: If your client crashes, it won't cause this. That just eventually leads to your character disconnecting. If your client stops responding and you eventually get "Lost Connection to Mapserver", that can mean the zone crashed. If multiple people in the same mission or zone all experience that at the same time, but only people from that mission or zone, it almost certainly means the mapserver crashed.
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Personally, I don't think +absorb as a mechanic really adds that much to Regen as a powerset.
The really key thing to bear in mind about absorb is that it's basically just more HP. Sure, it's usually proactive, where both healing and +regen are reactive (they replace HP after they're lost), In a steady state where you're taking damage such that your +absorb is totally gone every time you replace it and then it starts being eaten by damage again, the result is almost exactly like you were being damaged without the +absorb, but had a same sized heal.
The one thing I'll grant that +absorb does differently is that it shifts how much HP you have left when you need to optimally activate it. With +absorb, you'd be at max non-absorb HP, where with healing, you're at roughly half health. That sounds significant, but if you're in a place where that's a big deal, you're probably dying so fast that the extra starting HP that going into battle with the +absorb primed isn't going to change your time-to-defeat very much.
Frankly, I see changing integration into ticking +absorb as a nerf. Using the same "under fire" analysis as above, you can map ticking +absorb directly to a heal-over-time, but this has two problems. (1) AoTs don't normally scale with maxHP changes, so you will recover HP under fire proportionally slower when DP is up. (2) because neither damage nor AoT stream in continuous average values, you can lose the AoT equivalent to healing up HP if you tick multiple times without taking damage. Those HP are "lost" which only happens with regen or heals if you're at or near max HP. If your main HP pool was actually damaged when you ticked your +Absorb, then you're not regaining HP.
As mentioned in the other thread already linked. I think folks who want toggle IH back should just play WP. I'd rather see different changes to Regen to retain its current click-happy nature. And in any case, I think we view toggle IH through the rose colored glasses of pre-I4 concepts of what was challenging. Even always-on, pre-ED levels of IH isn't all that without defense or resist to cover for it. It's still HP recovery, and that just can't scale to the DPS we find ourselves facing at high-end notoriety and in the face of debuffs. The powersets who can do that without breaking a sweat are doing it by reducing incoming DPS by a factor of 40-100 or more, which lets them get by with relatively low levels of HP replacement/time.
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Don't overextend the meaning of "balanced around SOs".
- All powersets are designed with the founding assumption that they must work well if the player builds only with SOs or maybe common/generic IOs. A set will never be designed with the notion that it will only work reasonably (for some notion of reasonability) if shored up by IOs.
- What a powerset can do when supplemented with IOs is never ignored (though sometimes implications can be missed - our devs are human).
Sets are not necessarily balanced for equal performance with IOs attached. That's almost impossible anyway due to the non-linear behavior of stacking progressive damage resist or defense.
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Listing entities that have given tags should be super easy, and I can make a page for that. Figuring out that a power cares about critters with a certain tag is less obviously simple. If it can be reduced to "if power condition contains tag lookup" then it should be no problem. If it gets weirder to detect ... maybe. 🙂
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All of what I show is based on the actual game files. Barring bugs (or something I haven't implemented a display for) If it's not on CoD, it's not there in the game either. (If I haven't implemented a display, it's still almost always visible in the raw JSON display.)
I see the same thing with these powers, including looking at the latest Beta build. Probably worth a post in the bug report forum.
One thing I'll note is that some of the effects have other tags. For example, the Scrapper critical on Boxing is tagged "Scrapper". I don't think tags like this do anything functional, and seem to me to be more like code comments, but I have never seen a power with multiple tags, despite the fact that the tag structure is an array. So I don't know if having these current tags preclude adding the MLCrit one.
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This has always been an occasional thing. It happens with Babbage in the Synapse TF too. Sometimes the GMs just don't show up.
It's not clear if they simply never spawned or if something happened to them like spawning under the map. (My money is on the latter.)
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The power could, instead, be changed to a stacking power with maximum charges, similar to what we see with temp powers available at the P2W vendor.
For example, if it granted 10 charges, with a maximum of 20, then folks with leftover charges from a previous run would still get 10 more charges. Only someone with more than 10 charges going into the TF would not get more.
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So I realized I misread TG. It not longer summons a pet. There's a different way to do this that avoids pets, and TG uses it. It's a special attribute called "kExecutePower" and it does basically what it says. You execute a power, immediately, whether or not its a power you "own".
And we're told that this is a code level bug with kExecutePower. It simply does not check if the caster is alive or not (and whether or not that should matter for the power) when it triggers the execution.
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Without seeing it in action, this sounds a lot like a long-standing bug (like since pre-sunset) that afflicts Paragon Protector Elite critters. They get into a state where they do this weird back-and-forth sliding thing near the ground and mostly won't attack. Usually they reset by losing aggro, though sometimes they'll break out when still active in combat mode.
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Yeah, a bit of a necro, but the for powers where you can boost +def on powers that also grant +res, the +res cannot be enhanced.
- If the attribute itself is flagged, that flag blocks both external boosts and enhancement.
- If the entire power is flagged to refuse external boosts, the +res can allow enhancement without interaction from +dam effects like Build Up or red inspirations.
Right now, those are the only two options.
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I may see the issue. TG has been changed to use the relatively new Pseudopet rules, where the pet is defined only by a redirection to another power. It seems possible to me that this pseudopet, which inherits its characteristics from the caster, treats "Self" as the original caster.
That target should probably be removed. It made no sense for a pseudopet that can't be affected, and it's probably doing something unintended with the new pseudopet mechanism.
Edit: After morning coffee it dawns on me that removing the self target might make TG no longer heal the caster, if the "thin" pseudopet is behaving the way we think it might be. Instead, fixing this might require a target condition on the heal effect. Something like "if target>kHitPoints > 0".
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4 hours ago, Wavicle said:
It was not HT, it was definitely TG, but everything else you said, Uber, is undoubtedly true nevertheless.
Did know if you rezzed at anything other than full health?
The heal for TG, like HT, is also cast by a pet summoned at the caster's location. The heal it emits is not for 100% health. So it should be easy to see if it rezzed you by healing you for its normal amount. If you were at full health, it wasn't TG that did it. (Fully slotted Defender TG should heal for around 470HP, not accounting for set bonuses or other global heal boosts.)
I would not expect this to be possible, since the targets for the power used by the pet are
- Self
- Ally (Alive)
In this context, I would expect "Self" to mean the pet, not the caster of TG (which would not do anything). However, if that's somehow not the case, that would potentially explain how TG could rez you.
There is 1000000% no way in hell it's intended that TG should rez the dead.
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This isn't happening with Twilight Grasp, but with Howling Twilight.
Fundamentally, this is possible because the power summons a pet, and it's the pet that casts the heal that serves as a rez by granting defeated allies 100% of their health. This pet mechanism is used because it's the way in this game to make a different PBAoE happen at the caster's location for an otherwise ranged effect that targets distant foes.
Because of how this works, there is a small delay between the casting and when the rez heal takes effect. The power is cast, the pet appears, and the pet fires off the rez. (Like mos pesudopet powers, the rez is actually an auto power, but the pet only lives long enough for it to "tick" once.)
Notably, the pet summon, which lasts for 1s, is flagged to persist past the casters' defeat. This is also common with such "ranged power with effect at caster" powers, to keep the effect from failing because the caster died, even though they successfully cast the root power. (Normally, even if you die after casting something, it still affects the targets, but the delay in effect here could prevent that if the pet was dismissed on caster death.) In this case, though, that means the effect rezzes the caster too,
Personally, I think it's likely that this behavior wasn't intended simply the power's somewhat unusually detailed effect description doesn't say that it can rez you too. Most likely, I think no one thought about it when designing the power. And if rezzing yourself really was intended to be more than an accidental feature of HT, I think it would be easier to make it happen on purpose. The timing window for pulling this off is extremely small - It's extremely hard to do this on purpose.
It's for this reason that I also think no one would ever think to "fix" this. It's basically impossible to abuse, and the only way to "fix" it would be to make it so HT could fail to rez anyone if the caster dies right after popping it off.
I have many thousands of hours played on six Dark Miasma characters. I've maybe had this happen once or twice. It's cool when it happens. I'm not advocating for any change to this.
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4 hours ago, gamingglen said:
Thanks. But I'm fairly certain it was fine back on Live. Then again, my memory ain't.. what were we talkin' about? 😉
I can see why, all the ledgesit emotes have legs spread wide, quite unladylike if wearing skirts.
It wasn't. You sunk into ledges and what not as far back as I6.
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They absolutely do. Everything that is usable in crafting does. If you craft IOs with a crafting salvage bin open, the same thing happens. In fact, last I saw, it even complains about things you can't even store in a bin, like Empyrean Merits, if you consume them with a storage bin open. (It says or said something like "you can't store that here".)
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Six got in touch with me via DM. There was a brief problem last Saturday where the auth system decided (through a misconfiguration or bug) that no one had privs to play on the private servers. I had left my Cryptic-managing launcher running - something I don't normally do, and it apparently polls or otherwise gets notifications about changes like that, and decided to whack my install.
I'm not a fan of the installer actively removing installs in such a manner. Note that this behavior is by design, as is it removing your Cryptic/Paragon installations if you click "log out". When the game clients themselves are not a secret, I don't really see the point in these deletions.
Maybe it's to do with the current lack of association between the launcher and game login. Meaning you can be removed from the private server config for the launcher but, in theory, still have game login privs. That seems like something that could be solved by blocking game logins first, but maybe that's not always practical for some reason. I know if I really wanted back in, the launcher deleting client files would not keep me out of the game if I still had a login.
Here's hoping that once the launcher and game auth are more unified, the launcher can be less aggressive by design about whacking files.
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1 hour ago, Incursion said:
I wonder if all of the old patch notes from live archived. I would imagine so, this community in general was so good about holding onto everything. I would love to find a log of all of the changes over the years. AR changes caused quite a stir from what I vaguely remember.
They have been preserved on the Wikis, but Cryptic/Paragon didn't publish everything that actually changed in those patch notes, so a lot of relatively small but individually important changes have no public indication of when (or sometimes that) they happened.
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Ignite does not cause Terror, which is the status effect cause by what we call "Fear" powers, like Fearsome Stare. Ignite causes Afraid, which is the effect that makes NPCs want to run out of it.
Most place powers (read: "pseudo-pet") which inflict unpleasant effects on NPCs generally also cause Afraid, because, realistically, you would not expect remotely intelligent beings to stand in such effects. Location-based damage fields like Rain of Fire, Ice Storm, Sleet, Caltrops, etc. all cause Afraid on NPCs.
Ignite, however, has limitations those powers do not. All of them also inflict slows on the NPCs, either for theme (cold, caltrops) or just to keep the NPCs from fleeing out of the effect too quickly for it to be useful as a damage power.
Ignite could have a slow attached, but the power's radius is very small, so that's not likely to be useful.
Unless the design goal is for the power to have very low practical damage, I think the change to mixed TAoE + pseudopet that inflicts DoT probably is the way to go.
* The TAoE up-front damage ensures you get a certain fraction of damage dealt against targets in the target area
* The pseudo-pet could apply something like this:
* set_mode(ignited) on all affected target(s) for 5s
* X damage every 0.5s for 5.1s (if !target.mode?(ignited))
So anything that wandered into the fire after the original cast would be set on fire for several seconds, even if it was not there when the patch landed, and that would stick to it even if it ran out of the patch. Standing still in the patch would not, however, stack DoTs on it due to the condition. (There may be some better way to do this than modes, which would, among other things, preclude stacking ignite from multiple players. This is hopefully just an example.)
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Any word on this? This still happens. I just had the launcher fail to login, and it once again completely removed my Cryptic assets installation and erased all my customized launcher settings (which servers are hidden, auto-update, etc.)
I know how to prevent it from deleting my i24 assets, but most people are not going to do this, and will have to reinstall everything every time this comes up. And even though I can save myself the full download, having to rebuild my launcher config each time this happens is frustrating.
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More fixes.
- Effect stacking by key is now displayed. Previously, there was no visual indication this was happening in a power unless you looked at the raw data. The new icon tells you the stacking key string on hover, and indicates when the stacking is both per-key and per-attribute. (The default is per-key only - a flag on the effect has to be set to cause it to also be per-attribute.)
- Effect target modifier indicators have been added. These are similar to the inner/outer radius indicators, but look like archery targets. Black rings around a red dot mean the effect is restricted to the main target of the power only. Red rings around a black dot mean the effect excludes the main target. The hover text says these things.
- Some effects are explicitly flagged to not appear in the in-game power info. There is now an effect icon for this (an eye inside a red circle).
- Previously, effect targeting of "Self and Own Pets" was not displayed correctly - it simply appeared as "(unknown)" in the effect line where effect targeting normally appears. This has been fixed.
- Icons were missing for inspirations, because I wasn't extracting them from the pigg files. I noticed this and fixed it.
Help is not yet updated for the new icons. At this point there are now so many supported icons on the effect line I really need to revamp the powers help page. (I also need a page that describes all the attribmod icons the site can display, and what they mean.)
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CoH's phasing mechanics honor group settings too, but only sort of. If someone is in one of these areas, no one outside it can see them until they also enter the area. Since it "phases them out" in your map and team/league list too, that makes it annoyingly hard to find them unless you happened to notice where they were just before they entered the "forbidden" zone. Once you do find them, you see what they do.
Honestly, I'm not sure why it acts like that, where they disappear off of your team lists that way.
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I can confirm that she does not have a definition above level 20, so that's why she caps out there. She exists from level 11-20.
It should be relatively simple to extend her level to 24. (Note: this is not something I can do, however.) I agree she should exist that high, given her arc range. (Realistically, she should exist up to around level 30, to account for people with their notoriety settings cranked up.)
This, by the way, is basically always the source of unintentionally low critters in missions - they don't exist at the level of the mission owner + notoriety. Very occasionally, low-level things are explicitly placed in missions, but never allies / hostages like this who can be defeated by NPCs.
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I get that it's blocking outgoing mail, but I believe that's a "poor man's" way of limiting the size. Letting it grow unbounded beyond that can have all sorts of unexpected consequences. While I doubt the mail file is going to grow large enough to cause actual storage issues (the entries are likely very small), it certainly could cause issues for global mail. Like so many things in CoH, we know it's implemented with the code equivalent of baling wire and duct tape. (Last we were given details, mail goes into a flat text file that's updated whenever a mail is written or deleted.)
Just you having an oversized mailbox isn't likely to cause a problem, but if lots of people start doing it, that's something else.
Focused Feedback: Power Changes (Release Candidates)
in [Open Beta] Focused Feedback
Posted · Edited by UberGuy
That's "fixed" by this, but it's not relevant to why using it drops you out of the air, which is what I was answering. That's not an exploit fix - it's actually a nod to a way players use Rest to get damage badges.
Beyond even that though, fixing the ability to move using BFs is not the motivation for the change to Rest. (I don't think anyone actually cared that you could do that.), But Powehouse would speak to that if he wants to at this point.