UberGuy

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?

So does this one. But a search is coming.

This reference to their role as a meat shield is based on early dev commentary from Cryptic back in the earliest days after MM's appeared in CoV, possibly during the beta period. It's not clear to me that they actually intended MMs to play tank in any formal way, particularly since they have no in-powerset aggro management tools. The mention of them doing so was seemingly based off the idea that pets represent a theoretically "infinite" supply of Hit Points to be fed into the grinder of foes. I think there's pretty strong evidence against this notion in practice, since Brutes actually got most of the Tanker-like features that let Tankers play the meat shield role pretty directly. To wit, AoE Taunt as an in-powerset power, Tanker-level resistance caps, and the highest base HP of the original CoV ATs. (Bear in mind that, for most of their pre-sunset existence, CoH and CoV's respective AT sets were exclusive to each sub-game.) It's also important to remember that MMs didn't go live with Bodyguard, so they actually couldn't use that to support their efforts to tank foes when they first came on-scene. I'm sure an MM could "off tank" to a degree, and possibly do it better than other CoV ATs at the time (especially if they invested in Presence). But I don't think that was ever really a practical design goal that made it to any live implementation of the AT.

These inspirations already exist and "clog up the tray" of all players of all ATs participating in the quoted content. This isn't adding new inspirations. It's making existing inspirations work better for MMs.

Currently there are two "special" inspiration types unique to certain content: Essence of the Earth (used to cap resistance to damage types output by Hamidon and his Mitochondria) and Ambrosia (used to protect against the special damage of the Crystal Titan in the Eden trial). Both Hamidon+Mitos and the Crystal Titan are extreme damage environments. In the case of the Crystal Titan, lacking the inspiration is explicitly designed to be nearly instantly lethal, while Hamidon can be survived without EoEs, but the bar for buffs and tactics is significantly higher without them. Like most standard inspirations, these special inspirations only work on the user. This is impractical for Masterminds, who would need far more of these inspirations to feed to their pets than a regular character. Unlike most other ATs who can have pets, MMs are designed with having and using pets in mind, and if their pets are consistently wiped out, the MM is far less capable than some other AT in the same situation. This creates a situation where it's exceptionally hard for an MM to keep up. This post proposes a simple mechanical change for these inspirations to make the playing field a bit more level for MMs. There is an attribmod kModTarget_CastersOwnerAndAllPets. If I understand this target mode correctly, when the power target is "Self" the result is that the attribmod would apply to the caster and all their pets. Combining this target mode with a power p_affected+p_autohit of "Self+OwnPet" and changing it to a radius effect would make these inspirations into a PBAoE that would protect both the caster and their pets. If we consider it inappropriate that these inspirations should affect all pets, and not just those belonging to Masterminds, we can add in conditions on the effect along these lines. if target>enttype eq player || target>arch eq '@Class_Minion_Henchman' || target>arch eq '@Class_LT_Henchman' || target>arch eq '@Class_Boss_Henchman' Note that this suggestion is intentionally narrow and mechanically specific. MMs have challenges in other parts of the game. This is just an attempt to address a specific area of them.

Yeah, we found that out back pre-sunset based on the old City of Data. -Regen from any source is useless on him, so -res and -maxHP are the only debuffs that help take him down faster.

That was one of the things, yes. That and I'm a slacker for working on builds in the office. (Yes, that was then, but now I'm posting on a CoH forum during my work day. 😄)

Uhh, I can think of lots of things that it means. Which one were you thinking of? 😄

Yeah, I figured it had to be. The backup image I got the install date from had its file creation date April of 2004, and that's the release month of the game. I remember using it to mess with builds at work on the laptop that backup is from. 😄