nihilii

Gotcha. Yeah, this is a long-standing debate and I guess we sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. I believe in determinism and not in free will, which doesn't help. 😉 Still, I find it easier to stomach pseudo randomness than dynamic stat changes. "Enemy may hit or miss" is easy to justify as the simulation limitations in CoH, as we don't target enemies manually. It can even be satisfying as a mechanic. "Your stats go up and down in a predictable manner according to the number of foes you're facing" kind of takes you on a longer loop for the system to make sense. Are we being flanked? Is this supposed to reflect the increasing chaos of combat as headcount goes up? Why are *our* stats debuffed and not the mobs buffed? I think that last one is a sticking point, too, if psychological. Turn player -def/-res into enemy +tohit/+dam and it doesn't seem so bad. 🤔

As a deterministic scaling -def -res per added mob, you should have perfect predictability on what happens to you according to the size of the encounter. Hence the Excel spreadsheet in my perspective, you're down to minmaxing the number of mobs you want to engage. In a larger sense, if you meant to argue unpredictability makes for difficulty, I can't disagree with that. But getting oneshot also makes for difficulty. Having 19 chances out of 20 to miss also makes for difficulty. Difficulty in itself isn't inherently interesting. It's no surprise computer RPGs eventually moved away from their dice roll tabletop roots. Winning through random events (whether true randomness or something you can't control in practical terms) just isn't as satisfying as winning through deliberate choices. Global mob buff through dynamic stat change is likely to result in everyone sticking to the same fire farms or council radio missions, maybe taking a little more pain, probably bitching at other players more often. The game used to be harder by virtue of player characters being weaker, and that didn't encourage better behavior. If anything, we had more healbots and tauntbots then than we do now. Enhancing rewards for harder mob groups stands a greater chance to push players towards harder content. TFs are highly popular thanks to the merit system. Mothership raids went bananas when Homecoming had fantastic Vanguard Merits -> Merits conversion rates. Even with say, -20% def and -30% res, a Council map isn't remotely as threatening as an Awakened or Praetorian mission.

Honestly, this is a pretty important consideration. I build all my characters for ST damage with a couple AoEs, and in my experience lieutenants and minions die as a side effect while I focus on bosses. Numbers tend to support that experience, too. A standard x8 group has 2 bosses. A level 54 boss has 2730 HP. A level 54 lieutenant has 870 HP (that's less than a third of boss HP). Given that AoEing 2 bosses to death isn't so efficient, intuitively you should need at most a third and at least a sixth of your ST damage in AoE damage to defeat lieuts and minions while you focus on the bosses. It's not always so clear cut because mobs aren't neatly packed for you to hit them all from start to finish, so having some AoE overkill can be useful. But I think people build for a LOT of AoE overkill (outside of an AE farm; it's absolutely justified to go full AoE if your focus is on farming AE). Something like Titan Weapons, which does great AoE damage as a side effect of running its ST chain, has an obvious advantage in that regard. Traditional AoE combos on Stalkers are also good candidates because fast AS pushes any combo in 400+ DPS territory. But Stalkers don't have aggro auras to keep everything nice and tight, which is an added factor.

I kinda want this just for the challenge of starting as a level 1 and immediately streetsweeping in Dark Astoria.

I think Lore pets are going to be better than most characters, in ideal damage situations. The Pylon thread is skewed with people specifically building high ST DPS builds. Plus, a 8:20 time means ~200 DPS, while a 2:20 time means ~400 DPS. Because of regeneration (as you've seen with your envenomed dagger), the difference isn't as large as looking at times alone might suggest. With your current DPS, you should be able to take down most level 50 AVs; and close to all of them if you're willing to use Lore and/or Envenomed Daggers. GMs are trickier with their humongous regen, but once again using Daggers and if you have the incarnate materials to spare, getting the Longbow robot for its significant -regen, might carry you through them. That being said, no question some builds could work better than MA/SR. TW/bio is obviously two notches above anything else.

I was being confusing: I meant you only need to be alphaslotted for Apex or Tin Mage, yet people specifically ask for characters that are at least levelshifted.

I'm starting to believe oedipus is Jack's secret account. :P The playerbase rejoiced when the "1 hero = 3 minions" guideline was slain for good. IMHO, that was for the best. Dynamic stat changes on mobs ruin immersion, at least for me. It turns every encounter into an Excel spreadsheet. There's better ways to do difficulty, many of which are already in the game. Take unresistable damage for example. The Apex TF is a prime example of content forcing "faceroll-keyboard" melee players, without trivializing them completely. Incarnate trials in general tend to make melee work harder, without obliterating squishier characters. Debuffs and buffs also work great in limiting the ability for a single character to be thoughtless. +4/x8 Awakened are far above and beyond any fire farm. It's tempting to reinvent the wheel when we see a problem, but is the problem properly defined? Given that we have numerous options for higher difficulty content yet players prefer to run easier content, it suggests the problem may not lie with difficulty, but rather with attracting players to harder content. Rebalancing risk/reward by buffing rewards of harder mob groups or harder difficulty options might achieve more than introducing complex mechanics that will push players to abuse the new rules in a way it stays as easy as before.

I think this is wishful thinking. The rise of challenge necessary for the maxxed brute to *need* the SO defender would likely be so drastic it would obliterate the SO defender. In practice, I feel it would just push certain people to only look for fellow maxxed characters. You already see people being picky about who they take on Master STF/RSF runs, asking for 50+1 on Apex/TinM, even demanding certain requirements for ITFs.

If you set out to build tough factions in AE, making something challenging to anyone but the most minmaxed teams is trivial. Ever fought a mob group of cold, rad and FF mobs in a bank map on +4/x8? (If you're confused by FF, think: force bubble pushing you against the walls) The game has difficulty, the rewards for seeking that difficulty just need to be higher - starting at the malta/carnie level, as mentioned. Mechanics are in place to give greater rewards on a per mob basis, Paragon Protectors give +40% XP for example. Adding new enemies with harder powers - yes yes yes. Giving incentive to fight more diverse stuff - yep! I'm not so fond of blanket stat scaling, on the other hand. 1) it penalizes adding more players to a team unless you're confident they'll contribute. This is a dynamic CoH purposefully avoided from inception, with XP bonuses for teaming. It's easy to make a MMO team friendly, it's harder to make it social friendly. 2) it's never fun (IMHO) from an immersion perspective to have mobs artificially become stronger or weaker. Levels are an acceptable stretch because they're clearly indicated with color coding, but various extra buffs, meh. I much prefer the "mob as a constant unit" school of thought CoH follows, which dictates you add difficulty by adding foes or by designing harder foes. Once you start tweaking mob stats on the fly, you make reference points muddier and it starts to be a little too minmax-y as you peer behind the curtain of what's going on.

Sentinel SR has Master Brawler, capped DDR, scaling res, higher base HP. All of it as a passive save for Master Brawler. To reduce SR to just defense feels like cherrypicking if you're going to list all other boons for Time. You're kinda dodging the point several of us made about animation times and teammate willingness to stick around, too. Assuming no opportunity cost to PBed Farsight is a little like taking Storm pylon times as indication of general game performance. There are constraints to PBed Farsight. I think you may have a valid case regardless of my personal opinion, but being selective with facts hurts your point. Re: FF, FF doesn't care about a Time nerf. FF needs +absorb on bubbles. 🙂

This was the "masterplan" I selfishly kept under wraps as I read you all talking about opening the packs and selling the stuff. Figured the least competition, the more volume for me to sell. Then one day after the event ends, they're already selling like hot cakes for 20M a piece. Ha! Goes to show how little we matter compared to the population at large. Organic market activity dwarfs our various schemes. 🙂

I'm with Force and aethereal. Had my own "wow, PBed Farsight is broken" phase through May - June. Until I realised I was spending so much time casting PB and Farsight. Granted, PB isn't the longest cast in this equation. But you really feel the drag when you slap an exta ~1.5s on a ~2.5s cast. Which you have to do every 90 seconds. As info on procs streamed on the boards, I actually stopped running PB on my Time characters. They're using Dominate now, to eke out more damage. Farsight and Fade feel broken until we play the sets long enough and notice the numbers we weren't paying attention to: animation times. Fade is an even worse offender, as it's a 60s refresh rather than 90s.

AFAIK, they scale to the minimum of the trial. So in Lambda it's a Marauder scaled for 8.

I don't believe there is currently an endurance management problem in CoH. To be fair and to account for bias, I've never believed there was one. But surely we can agree with all the tools at our disposal... - inspirations - 0 end Brawl - inherent Fitness at level 2 - cheap Homecoming IOs - free attunement through the market - Recovery Serum at P2W - amplifiers - ATOs - easy incarnates (-> cardiac/vigor/ageless) ...endurance management is less of a problem now than it ever was at any other point in the history of the game, provided you use available options. I have actually never managed to run out of endurance on a lowbie before picking up Hasten. And I really only feel the crunch once I'm running a full attack chain with Fighting and Leadership toggles, but before incarnates and a full IO build. So for me the puzzle of endurance management definitely works on a rising curve.

Devs have the data no matter what. A few months back, Leandro was datamining whether forum posters who reacted to changes on the Test server had actually logged to the game accounts tied to those forum accounts. In comparison, mere players having access to data doesn't seem that big of a deal. Designs can be as nefarious as possible but from a player they'll be just that, designs. Without the power to actually implement change, the potential for "malevolence" amounts to little more than nothing.

Wow! Now that is true dedication. Good job. If it were me, I'd probably mess it up walking on an exploration badge right before taking the screenshot...

XP scales with level and rank faster than HP does. That is to say: a lieutenant will be worth more than a minion in "experience per damage point" (EPD?), a boss will be worth more than a lieutenant in EPD, a +2 boss will be worth more than a +1 boss in EPD. I *think* this breaks down with elite bosses, unless you run your farm at a very low level so HP scaling doesn't kick in too hard yet. So generally speaking, you want as many bosses as possible, and you want to raise the reputation as high as you can handle. Before incarnates this is usually +3/x8, and every ambush/patrol set on Hard. You probably don't want to fight +4s before the level shift, because the purple patch kicks in hard.

I go doublehit on every alt, simply because it's an unique source of damage. +DAM you can get through build, buffs, insps, amplifiers... and the Hybrid +DAM requires you to keep those stacks up for full effect. Doublehit is like an extra ~2 damage procs for free, no matter what.

Sentinel Bio Armor is the fastest possible character under these constraints. While in Offensive Mode, Athletic Regulation enhances every other +RUN or +FLY power you have. With Swift, this brings you to 49 MPH. Adding Sprint, you get to 80 MPH. This is close to the speed cap (92.5 MPH), and entirely unsuppressed during combat. Activating Ninja Run even without Sprint will cap your speed with ease.

Ninjitsu has the most complete mez protection, and the highest magnitude if you doublestack the antimez power (which is a click). If you don't like a click for mez protection, Willpower has the most complete passive (toggle) protection.

Beyond appeals to emotion being bad for conversation in general, this is such a harmful way to look at your fellow man. For yourself more than others. Dismiss any opinion that makes you uncomfortable as "hateful", soon enough you end up in a closed inner loop of your own. We're on a video game board and all, but this kind of thinking has gotten too pervasive in other aspects of society.

As a certified armchair psychologist, I think it might help to be more verbose if you want to convey a message. "take out player A" "she will bind the team" Even ignoring the typo: - "blind" isn't so explicit. Players may or may not know what it means. - you're giving out orders rather than suggestions. People don't tend to follow orders as well. - "take out player A"? Might be confusing. "Target their clone" might make more sense. The average MMO player has their attention split between 2 computer screens where the second one is playing cat videos, and their actual cats/children/wives/husbands. You're fighting for their attention. If the team has been quietly steamrolling content, you might need more than a couple words to grab their attention. If you start with a question... Like "is anyone doing this fight for the first time?", you're putting the onus on people to answer - which makes them more involved, and you need just one answer for you to then say "ok [(yes answer) remember / (no answer) be wary] that the clone of Player A will have Smoke Grenade as a Widow, which will blind us and debuff our accuracy. Let's take her out first". (But then, like oxmox and parabola point out, it's way too much fuss for the actual challenge at hand.)

Ludicrous power: TW/bio scrapper. Nothing else comes close in my roster, even other TW scrappers. I find it necessary to limit my playtime with this character, lest my standards are thrown out of whack and I can't enjoy anything else. Most enjoyable: fire/rad sentinel. My very first character on HC, it was quite a journey to learn this new AT. She went from a beloved underperformer to a death machine taking on any solo feat I could think of. There is something really fun in living your very own zero to hero progression on a single character.

100% onboard with the above idea. In fact, weirdly enough, I had that same "marked target should switch during opportunity" thought just yesterday playing my sentinel. I don't think it's necessary for attacks to become autohit, because you can't miss Opportunity itself. If the attack that was supposed to trigger Opportunity misses, you keep your full bar until you land a T1/T2.

What Widows need IMHO is no redraw option on their claws. Same goes for Soldiers. Night Widows should be allowed to get Build Up and Follow Up together, too. In the age of Gaussian BU procs, Fortunatas walk all over that initial balance decision by stacking Gaussianed Aim with Follow Up (on top of all the other nice toys they get).