UberGuy

Damage resistance is on "Schedule B", where single same-level SO enhancement strength is 20%, while damage is "Schedule A", where SO strength is 33.3%. It seems clear that your damage enhancement is obeying Schedule B. The problem here is almost certainly related to the fact that damage and damage resistance are, mechanically, the same attribute. This is why, for example, most powers with damage resistance are flagged to ignore external (non-enhancement) boosts - if they didn't, things like Build Up would boost damage resistance. Offhand, I can't think of examples of player powers that let you combine damage dealing and damage resistance in the same power. As such, I'm not even sure this can be fixed.

Not only can non-50s drop them, but non-50s can get them as drops. I've gotten them more than once playing lowbies on trick-or-treat teams in PI.

Played since pre-release headstart. Never a thing.

Both are good. A Corr that can self-buff is going to be more self-sufficient, and one that can debuff foes will probably be able to take down stronger enemies at the high end. I have Ice Blast characters of both ATs, and I enjoy them both. The damage output from the Blaster is noticeably higher (even though mine, an Ice/Dev has basically no damage boost from his secondary) and that higher damage is less fiddly to sustain. As a result my Blaster clears x8 missions more quickly. But the Corr (Ice/Dark in my case) can pull off "stupid character tricks" like soloing AVs and GMs much more reliably than the Blaster can.

As much as I feel this system is in need of change, if it were to be tweaked, I'd dig this approach.

One additional comment on this. The streak breaker is intended to have a narrow purpose - to reduce repeated missing. It biases attack roll outcomes so that, the better you are at hitting your target, the less often you'll miss multiple attacks in a row. This is important - it's not an arbitrary hit chance improvement, and it doesn't let you "bank" your automatic hits for future misses. It specifically seeks to break up runs of multiple misses that happen in a row. The fact that it forces a hit even when you might have hit anyway isn't particularly relevant to its job. A forced hit when you would have is still a hit, and a forced hit when you would have missed (and it was time for it to intervene) means it did its job. Checking to see if you missed before intervening isn't necessary for what the breaker was meant to achieve. We still can experience frustrating miss patterns that the breaker will not help with. For example, if your best DPA or otherwise most important attack is in your chain every third attack, even with a 90%+ hit chance, the breaker will happily let you miss just that attack several times in a row, which can devastate your short term performance and maybe even get your character killed. But this kind of outcome is perfectly possible even with the purest and most entropic of RNGs. Truly random things can "clump" certain outcomes in the short term, and those clumps don't have to be delivered in a strictly successive streak of events. The streak breaker only aims to modify immediately successive misses.

C's rand(). Which has been studied to death, and as long as it's properly seeded, is more than sufficiently random for things like game combat and random drops. True sources of entropy are critically important for things like cryptography, where it's essential that it be unreasonable to determine patterns in the generation of things like encryption keys. Such sources are both overkill for most gaming purposes, and also potentially impractical. Sources of entropy are easy to exhaust through constant polling for random bits - real-world entropy only produces so many bits of data per unit of time. When exhausted, calls to such sources either block the requester until enough bits of entropy are available (impractical in a game server) or they must resort back to pseudorandom data.

OK, final tally: 15098 attack rolls with Fire Ball 757 misses 757 forced hits 14341 total hits That's 94.99% average hit rate on a nominal 95%. (I confirmed that every attack roll message lists a 95.00% hit chance.) Attached is a zip file containing the attack roll logs and the files I used to create the arc. (I didn't create the costume you'll see just for this - it's a gag costume file I had and I couldn't resist setting it on fire for a few hours.) The only powers I was using during the test were auto powers like those in the Fitness Pool, Hasten, Accelerate Metabolism, and Ageless Core Epiphany, to speed up rate of fire. I didn't monitor the test the whole time, so I didn't activate these +recharge powers consistently, so if you go through the attack timestamps you'll be able to see my recharge vary. I also occasionally popped Secondary Mutation, and even got a Quick Reflexes at one point. Fire Ball had 5 pieces of Superior Winter's Bite, one of which was the immob proc, which I swapped out for a L50 common recharge. The foes in the attached mission are melee-focused AVs with no attacks and the resist+regen powers from Willpower. Since they have no attacks, you don't even need to use AE test settings to make yourself invincible. They'll run up to you and mill around. Eventually, most of them will find a "stable" place to be near you and sit still. During my test, one guy kept running around at the outside of the huddle, but I had 20 stationary targets clumped under me on a 16-target max power, which I achieved by dragging my aggro cluster onto another well-clustered spawn. Hit_Roll_Testing.zip

I'm planning to get to 15,000 hit rolls or there-abouts. I'm at a little over 11,000. I took stock a little after 10k, and the stats were... 10252 rolls 511 misses 511 forced hits 9751 total hits That's 95.02% average hit rate. One other thing I thought I should mention - the game doesn't check for forcing hits on auto check powers. (I confirmed this by checking the code.) This matters because it's the code that performs the force check which updates the lowest hit chance in the streak. Skipping this for auto hit effects means that they can't modify your hit streak, even though they do exercise the hit roll logic. (Auto hit powers roll a hit check that's never used.)

I plan to let this run for a while longer, and I'll share the cleaned up logs, but so far... 5038 rolls 264 misses 264 forced hits 4774 total hits That's 94.76% average hit rate on a nominal 95% probability.

Right. I've got that going on. That doesn't require "formal" targeting dummies. Basically, you can make your own. By the way, while I wouldn't argue the value in setting them aside for purity of testing, proc chances aren't hit rolls in the sense that they don't follow this toHit roll logic path at all. (Neither do damage "ticks" that can end, like those in lots of fire-themed powersets.) My current test is using Fire Ball, so it has damage "ticks".

My point is that this method is controlled. The targets are sitting still. They aren't dying. They aren't killing me, which means I don't need any other powers. I can repeat the same attack over and over ad-nauseum. If there's a way that's not adequately controlled, please explain.

Again, I don't understand this AE request. I am right now running this test in the AE with custom mobs. I have 17 things aggro'd (the cap) and have pulled them onto another spawn. My test AoE can hit a max of 16 targets. I'm up to 2600 hit rolls now. The streak breaker, as implemented, must make the player with a 95% hit chance hit more than 95% of the time. It makes you miss less than you would "naturally" by converting some natural misses into hits. It's a streak "breaker" for people with less than 90% chance to hit, because it allows miss streaks of >1 miss. And it seems nitpicky to go after it for the fact that it allows a degenerate definition of "streak of one" for very high tohit. Personally, I can't imagine why you have a problem with it. The last thing most players want is a way to miss more often.

lol, brain-o. Meant to type 1 in 20 chance.

Can you explain more fully what you mean here? What does "improve averages" mean here? Why do you need targeting drones? Why can't you just set up durable (but 0 defense) critters in the AE and spam attacks on them? Since you can make yourself invulnerable, you can spawn a mission full of +0 AVs if you want and they won't be able to kill you, and then fire AoEs on them overnight or something like that.

To address an earlier point, the streak breaker absolutely was introduced to address player perceptions, and has nothing to do with "correcting" any mechanical bias in the RNG. Players during beta reported desperately hating missing multiple times in a row, so the Cryptic devs threw them in a bone, introducing something that biases play towards hitting more often. We know this, because the devs told us on the old game forums.

That's correct. I'm looking at the code. * On a hit, (forced or not) the miss count is reset and the lowest toHit during the sequence of misses is set to 100. * During the check on whether or not to force, the current hit chance is stored if lower than the current lowest value * On an (allowed) miss, the miss count is incremented The actual force check says: * Pick the number of misses allowed by lookup based on the lowest hit chance recorded. It's broken into 10 ranges based on the "10s" digit in the hit chance. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 // Chance 10s digit 100, 100, 8, 6, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1 // Allowed misses * If the number of misses allowed is less than or equal to the number of misses, return "true", meaning force the hit. The force check is evaluated before the actual hit check. The actual hit check says it's a hit if: * It's an autohit power OR * It should be forced due to misses OR * The hit roll was successful So if you have at 90%+ chance, when you miss once, on the next attack roll, the force check will be "true" and the next roll will be forced to hit. Edit: for clarity, you don't have to actually miss a second time (1 in 400 chance at 95% hit chance) for the streak breaker to engage. With a 95% hit chance, you just have to miss once, (1 in 20 chance) and your next hit is guaranteed. You can game this a little bit, since you can use it to force a hit with something that would have a really crappy hit chance. Note however that the crappy hit chance will be remembered for purposes of your next streak. If you throw in one attack with a 10% hit chance, you're allowed 100 misses in a row, no matter how high your hit chance with the rest of them, until you either manage a hit or the streak breaker saves you.

When clicked, immediately after the activation time ends.

Try the AE. You can set up any foes you want, set them at +0 or even -1 and a fairly straightforward build should be able to cap hit chance against them. You can make yourself invulnerable in the AE's test mode, so absolutely any character should be usable.

PS: If you attune the Zephyr, its bonuses (and KB protection, which is implemented as a set bonus) will work down to level 7. You cannot, of course, both attune and boost the pieces, so this may not be an option for you.

Overwhelming Force is an attuned set, which levels with you and whose set bonuses apply at any level down to the set's minimum level -3. Its rules are, therefore different. I looked at the enhancements and the recipes in the AH, and the closest thing I see is the statement that "Effectiveness does not vary with level", which is standard on every crafted (not attuned) enhancement, even generics, and is a reference to the fact that they don't behave like SOs and stop working as you level past them.

The streak breaker kicks in at 90%, not 95. If you really have 95% change to hit against every target, then you should be missing no more than 1 in 40 times, since the streakbreaker will reject every other miss. That's not correct. It will only kick in every time you miss two or more times in a row. I can do the math on that after work. 😛 Any toHit check counts, including ones that are often invisible to players. This one has, I believe, been changed, but Tanker Gauntlet used to rely on hit rolls (taunt effects can miss AV/GM class entities) and this was messing with the streak breaker's perceived performance for Tankers. Also, remember, you can't go blast a bunch of trolls a few times and get a good view of the streakbreaker's engagement from that. You have to make sure you have a good sample set. Random doesn't mean "evenly distributed", and random things can clump or spread such that short term views look very different than the long term average. You probably need to blow up several hundred, or even a thousand trolls or what have you to get a clearer view of what's really going on.

It's far more likely that the timer on TT was wrong, rather than the one of the TF. "Event" timers like the one you're talking about here are simple "wall clock" timers. They are checked against the computer's view of "real world" time. So a 30 minute timer set at 5:00 pm would expire at 5:30 pm, as the computer understands it. While the computer clocks are probably slightly inaccurate, they're almost certainly not losing or gaining 2+ minutes per half hour. Power recharge timers are something else entirely. They're calculated using accumulations, where you add so much credit towards the expiry every "tick" of the server's game event loop. This is so that recharge time boosts can increase how quickly powers recharge - higher recharge boosts mean more accumulation on each tick. All powers work this way, even if they cannot benefit from recharge boosts, as is the case with TT. That measure of time is very sensitive to server performance. If game server "ticks" take longer than their nominal tick rate assumes (which can happen when the server is busy), you experience "time dialation", where your powers take longer in real world time to recharge than they're supposed to. This historically only showed up during large open world events like Hamidon or RWZ ship raids, and even there it's been rare lately on our more modern hardware / engine improvements. As mentioned, there are no game server ticks while you're zoning. Your character effectively doesn't exist for that period, though the remaining "credit" on your recharge times is preserved and usually "trued up" with the wall clock time when you reappear. This was why different map servers having different times due to server time offsets errors meant, sometimes, you could zone and see long-recharge powers already recharged well before they should have been. However, there is another factor here. Your client doesn't have perfect tracking on power recharge. It only gets updates about recharge time remaining from the server every so often, and the longer the recharge of the power, the more likely it is that your client estimation will be off. I do still think that 2+ minutes out of 30 is an unusual degree of error, but I think the error is much more likely to have been with the power's recharge than with the TF's challenge timer.

Yep, this is normal. From this page... Note that Dull Pain does not have this flag set, and (as mentioned) that's because it doesn't have any damage resistance included.

This set does not have Very Rare set behavior. It's a regular, non-PvP set, and it follows the regular rules for stopping working if you're exemplared too low below the pieces you have slottted, or below the level of the set. (The latter is harder, since this set goes down to level 10.) That set bonus phrasing seems unusual to me, and I don't see it on the actual enhancements. Where is it from?