UberGuy

There's no drop suppression. Not for invention stuff. There's drop suppression for a few things: Threads, Shards, Catalysts and one other thing - maybe converters? - have suppression mechanics. (All of the suppression mechanics for each of the things that have them are different.) Stuff like recipes, IO salvage, and SOs are all fixed probabilities checked on every defeat of a standard rank critter. The specific odds vary by critter rank and only by rank. However, your personal odds of receiving a given drop, once one is determined to happen, vary with team size, and, in multi-team contexts, whether another team did more damage to the thing that was defeated (which means the random choice of who gets the drop is given to someone on their team).

Just a status update, I'm working on building the code to perform dedicated data exports that will facilitate a set bonus search/lookup interface. However, I'm pretty tied up with work for the next few weeks, and then I go on vacation, so I probably won't get a lot of new feature work done for the next month or maybe two. Obviously, updates will appear here when I have them. 🙂

Personally, it wouldn't really bother me - I certainly don't consider it trash. But I also don't tend to rely heavily on snipes as an opener. If one's primary goal is to use your snipe as a high DPA booster to your regular attack chain, it's not especially valuable that it have long range, since you can't use your other powers at the snipe's regular range. Remember - snipes exist on ATs other than Blasters, and not all of those ATs have the damage scales (or an Aim/BU to use with it) to reliably one-shot snipe even just minions (at least at high notoriety). So having it as a hard-hitting opener, while still useful, is less transformative. It really comes down to your character and what your playstyle priorities are. Personally, I don't slot this set because I prefer the bonuses from others. If the bonuses were right for my build, I'd probably give it a good think, especially on non-blasters.

Fast mode turns any snipe into a high DPA attack that you can consistently use in your attack chain (assuming you can absorb the cost of doing so), which for a lot of sets can significantly improve their DPS. I don't think it would fail to improve DPS on any set, but some sets get more mileage out of it than others. The original behavior for fast snipe was dependent on your toHit bonus. If you could get to a consistent +22% or more toHit (from Tactics, Kismet, etc.), you simply always had fast snipe all the time. While the new, combat-dependent version of fast snipe is lower damage than the original, you can get it back to its old fast snipe damage if you can still get to +22% toHit. So you can basically get the old fast snipe behavior back - except you always have to open with some other attack (or get attacked) before you can start using it in "fast" mode. Some people prefer having the fast version all the time, because its simpler and can never be interrupted. This is who this IO is meant for - people who liked the old behavior and basically want it back.

Yep. That's the point of that enhancement. It keeps you in "in-combat mode" so the behavior of the snipe is consistently the fast version.

Yep, was just looking at this due to another report of the same. It grants temp powers, and those temp powers are flagged with "disable_temp" as a disable mode. I think they should probably have that removed. Admittedly, that means you could rez and then zone into a context where temps are disallowed, but I really don't think that would be an issue, since most of the effects last 60s and the mez protection lasts 90. An alternative might be to change the base power to use ExecPower instead of GrantPower. I think if it did that it could point to the regular inspiration powers - if so the temporary versions could be dispensed with entirely. (I was thinking an Emerge lasted longer than the equivalent granted by RtB, but they're the same.)

Are you on teams or at large raids? If so, low drop rates are typical. If you are soloing, especially at high notoriety, then I'd personally want to see some evidence, like a video, and confirmation you don't have any drops disabled. Because the claim flies in the face of other evidence.

@altenate, in the video, what is the "deaths head" icon I see in your status tray? Is that the countdown to the vigilante alignment power? Just trying to make sure that EB isn't affecting you with something that could cancel the placate. I made an ElM/SD Stalker on Cryptic and couldn't seem to replicate this, but I didn't slot everything you mention above.

I think if that was it, it would break Placate on every Electric Melee Stalker. I know a lot of us skip Placate these days, but surely someone would have noticed / reported that before now. I hope.

There doesn't seem to be anything amiss with the actual definition of the Placate power for Electric Melee. It's not missing anything that it should have set up in order to function properly. So whatever is going on, it's not that the power itself is misconfigured.

I don't spot any obvious issue with the power itself.

Punchvoke and the auras can miss their taunts against AVs. Also, punchvoke has a target cap of 5. If they were over-level, there's also a chance that any misses or critters out of range causing any taunts more distant AVs did get to wear off. Edit: But yeah, them just wandering away does seem odd.

Actually, I was misremembering that Taunt proper only had a chance to miss against players. So I guess we'd need to know what Bill was up to in terms of taunting to know if the punchvoke behavior could explain it.

Taunts can miss AVs and GMs. Even though they're auto-hit, they have a condition expression on them that still checks the toHit roll outcome, and if it was not sufficient to hit, the taunt doesn't happen. My guess is that this was what was up, especially if you were counting on any taunt auras you wouldn't normally slot for accuracy.

In no way to diminish the efforts made to protect our characters and other server-side data, it makes sense that there was zero data loss with this issue. By all reports, this is a networking issue only, along with an unplanned reboot of the auth server. Basically everyone who was connected timed out or was booted, much like for the regular server restarts. It stands to reason that everyone would reappear in the same places (at least in the open world zones) that we were when things went south. Backups (off-site ones in particular) would really only come into relevance if our servers were physically damaged or wiped clean. And I'm certain there would be data loss in such a case. Even the most aggressive backups are a snapshot in time, so there would be "lost" time between the event an the date/time of the last backup. But we would not lose everything, and most importantly, we would not lose things that had been around a long time.

Teensy tweak - the far end of the search input boxes now show how many entries are matched by your current input. Usually what you type in the box is way shorter than the input box itself gives room for, since its width is set to display your final selection, so I don't expect this number display to get in the way visually. (Plus, the number should get smaller the more you type.) Let me know if you run into places where it does interfere. There were some more small fixes. Mainly, using a link to a search selection on the main page (or navigating back / refreshing the page) wasn't populating the powercat/powerset/power links. Also, I shortened the text for each of those links to only display the name of the thing in question, rather than the fully qualified name. This was done because the full name of some powers is huge, so the power link in particular would sometimes overflow and mess with the page layout.

I pushed a few small changes over the last few days. Most were tweaks to search to improve performance and reliability of some of its behavior. I also went through and made sure all the pages that work off of URL query parameters show useful messages if you give them bad (or no) parameters instead of just giving you a mostly-blank page and a spam of errors in the browser console. This also cleaned out a legacy input box on the power page that would appear if the requested data couldn't be found - that's super redundant and inferior to the search interface that's now on the power pages. I've been peering at my copy of the game's code to make sure I really understand rules for things like when a set piece's bonuses stop working, so I can add more of that info to the boostset / boostset groups pages. Fun fact - the game uses the rules for SO/DO/TO degradation with level difference to determine if a crafted IO will give you bonuses or not. This is where the "IO level -3" cutoff comes from. An SO more than 3 levels lower than your combat level gives you 0 boost. The code says (paraphrasing) "include this boost in the power's set piece count if that logic would give you more than 0 boost." (This made it hard to find the logic in question - it's not at all clear from a casual perusal that this is what that bit of code is doing.)

From old discussions, I think Sentinels were supposed to be around Scrapper levels of DPS, but with more of a (limited range) AoE focus. They're not as durable as other melees, because they do get to hang back. They're definitely not at those target DPS levels, and and I am sure CPH knows it. But no idea when they'll get attention again.

It is. CoD's display data is extracted directly from game files. We have all that powers-related data on the clients for Real Numbers in-game display purposes - they publish the client with the same raw power data used by the servers to actually manage and execute our powers. The site is currently up-to-date with the live Homecoming release version of that data.

That was all before any kind of real numbers, so all we had were dev comments and the published guide. And the latter was really innacurate. (I forget who the published that - I'm sure someone remembers - but they were well known for publishing inaccurate stuff in their guides.) But as far as I know, Stalkers have always had the same base scales as Scrappers on all armor-related modifiers.

The settings page now has a help section.

Some updates today. Some minor fixes to the search boxes to help them behave more like they did on the previous (scrolling without a scrollbar) version. There's a lot of variables and state management to keep track of, so bugs are kind of easy to cause. So if you see anything wonky, let me know. The help pages have been updated to cover the recent search updates. Search has its own dedicated section in the help. I cleaned up the styling on the help pages so they only show one scroll bar, and are hopefully more mobile friendly. I still need to add a help page for the settings page. Also, I used collapsible sections in the new search page that I think might help make some of the other long help pages look more manageable, so I might update a few of them with it.

Seriously, just play Willpower. I don't mean that to be a dismissive response - I'm saying it because Willpower is functionally very similar to Regen with toggle IH. Yes, I know, the fact that it scales with foes means its basically not as strong at +regen on its own, but it's close in a pile of foes (and why aren't we always in a pile of foes?) and it gets +defense and +resist to boot. Willpower is very nearly the ultimate "toggle up and go" powerset, with a single toggle and just one click you can't even make recharge faster. This was, basically, how old toggle Regen played. It was vogue (and completely practical) to skip Reconstruction, so your only click was Dull Pain (and MoG, which you learned to try not to use.*) You fired up Integration and IH and did your thing. I don't want that playstyle back for Regen. We now have it in WP. I actually enjoy click-happy Regen. I'd like the changes it gets to let it keep that flavor. I really do think it can be more competitive with res/def-based sets without toggle IH. Or at least toggle IH that did what the old one did. * Old MoG was kind of like SR's Elude, but actually made it very likely you were going to die while it was running. You could not heal, you still took auto-hit damage like caltrops, and it did not block Psi damage. Perversely, the low HP but capped resists it gave you meant you were functionally exactly like you were at full health, but unable to heal or regenerate (and stuff that could miss could still hit you), except that Psi damage was unblocked and functionally caused 4x damage. Old MoG had its place, but mostly it wasn't a great idea unless you knew very well what you were up against.

Yep, not a bug. It's right in the power description.

Nothing short of immuity to Regen debuff resistance will make a difference, because the -regen debuffs the game tosses around tend to be huge. What needs to happen instead is that the regen debuffs need to be reduced to something like 20% of their current scales - this would make Regen's current resistance levels more useful, though I wouldn't complain if they were raised. Malta Titan plasma blasts need to be reworked completely - they are random so they don't always land, but they cannot be resisted for scale - your resistance only makes them last less long. I think resistance to recharge debuffs is far more critical for such a click heavy set, and I see the -recharge resistance given to Fiery Aura in Temperature Protection when FA was buffed by Paragon Studios as precedent. IH should do more, and also probably recharge faster. I'd like it to have an up-front heal so it's more useful as a reactive power. If you don't hit it in anticipation of your being in mortal danger, it often cannot save you on its own if you're already near death. All self-rez powers should do something useful when used when you're not dead. I despise self rezzes, and consider them a waste of a power pick when you could carry inspirations and instead take something that either keeps you alive longer, or fight longer, or helps you kill things faster. If self rezzes all did something truly helpful if used when you're alive, this complaint would be nullified. People have suggested Regen's rez could be another MoG or IH like power. That might be a bit much, but I certainly like the general idea. In order to ever compete with sets that have meaningful defense or resistance, Regen either must gain those (and I think Resistance is the only sane one to give it more of), or develop some healing mechanic that acts more like them, healing % damage taken over a past time interval. This is simply due to the math invovled - X points of HP recovered / sec (whether healed or regenerated) counters X incoming DPS. Defense and Resistance counter a percentage of incoming DPS - the more DPS is coming at you, the more DPS you avoid/resist. This means even someone with Scrapper/Stalker can theoretically avoid something like 97.5% of damage coming at them (at resist cap and defense soft cap), which when faced with 1000 DPS would mean taking 25 DPS. You can survive that with Health and a couple of +heal/regen procs. A synthetic and extreme example, since few builds could cap both defense and resist. But 1000 incoming DPS is not synthetic (foes like Cimerorans can achieve that easily), and Regen simply can't achieve that kind of HP replacement rate with help from Incarnate powers. Because of the last bullet point above, I don't think any sane amount of healing over time or (suggested in other threads) ticking absorb is going to do anything for Regen. Those are just more HP replacement. That's not going to meaningfully change how the set plays under DPS stress unless the HP replacement / padding is huge. An aside, but I ... don't run away when I use MoG. I use it proactively, on entry to a dangerous fight. Regen has to clear out foes because more foes = higher incoming DPS. Pretty much nothing is killing you while MoG is up, so it gives you time to thin the ranks of the enemy so that by the time they start being able to hurt you, fewer of them are there to do so. (If I have Shadow Meld, I use it for this since you can move while activating it, and then use MoG if the fight is still painful. Activating MoG mid stream in combat is not so bad - the animation is long-ish, but not terrible, and if you're in the middle of your foes, the root is not a big deal. Activating Shadow Meld in combat is painful, though, because that animation is brutally long.)