[Sudden Acceleration: Knockback to Knockdown]

People feel that they arent getting a damage bonus or a set bonus from slotting KB>KD so they call it a slot tax to make it sound negative.  But it does increase your damage if the enemies dont have to be chased after.  Slot a damage enhancement or slot KB>KD,  it really changes very little in the overall damage of your character.

 

Giving damage proc to KB>KD would mean the actual damage proc in the other knockback set would need something to compensate.  Do we give it KD also?  Or give it proc damage and the chance for +recharge and then give chance for +recharge something too.  And every other damage proc will need something since KB>KD gets damage,  why doesnt every other damage proc get something.

 

So thats a no from me.  The flood of power creep suggestions if we got our foot in the door on this one is too much.

[Costume Character names]

Names can be 20 characters long and counting all the letters numbers and some of the special characters you can use in a name is more then 40 potential choices but ill just use 40 characters for this example.

 

40 characters in 20 slots is      40^{^}20    which equals 109,951,162,777,600,000,000,000,000,000,000  potential naming possibilities

 

Alot of that will just be gibberish but lets just over estimate and say that 1 in 1 trillion combinations actually contains a name.  That leaves us with 109,951,162,777,600,000,000 names.  And go a step further and say that only 1 in 1 trillion names is actually a good name.  Then we have 109,951,162 names that are potentially good names left on a server.  Nearly 110 million 'good' names are out there and people say everything is taken.  I dont think character slots should have their own names but there is plenty out there for everyone to get good names for all their toons if they want to.

 

And that was just for names that use the full 20 characters.  You have all the names that are shorter than 20 as well.  You cant over estimate and divide by trillions as the names get shorter but there are already millions available just from full length names and that just increases as you add in shorter names.

 

 

[Regen for the Masses]

For a regen overhaul i was considering having an effect as your hp dropped.  But i was thinking more along the lines of increased recharge and enough regen debuff resistance to finish filling the gap once you are around 30-40% hp.  Something like a frenzied regeneration vibe - your regeneration cannot be stopped as your hp decreases and all of your abilities recharge more quickly as a result.

[Regen for the Masses]

On 3/5/2022 at 8:57 PM, aethereal said:

The key reason that both regen-oriented sets that postdate Regeneration (Willpower and Bio) aren't 100% pure regeneration is because pure regeneration is a highly thresholded system.

 

So like, let's say that our goal is to reduce 100 DPS to 20 DPS for a normally-functioning armor set.

 

So for a resistance set, we'll say it does 80% resist.  (So 100 DPS in attacks becomes 20 DPS in damage).

For a defense set, we'll say it does 40% defense.  (So instead of 50% of attacks hitting, 10% will, so damage is reduce by 80%, so 20 DPS)

For a regen set, we'll say it does 80 HPS.

 

Great, they all are now taking 20 DPS.

 

Now let's say that the player aggroes two spawns.  Whups.  Instead of 100 DPS incoming, we have 200 DPS.  Oh shit y'all.

 

The resistance set now takes 80% of 200 DPS, or 40 DPS (twice the damage as one spawn does).

The defense set now takes 10% of all hits, so 40 DPS (twice the damage as one spawn does).

The regen set...  heals 80 HPS, so it takes 120 DPS (six times the damage as one spawn does).  And just instantly melts.

 

Armor sets are much, much, much more robust to small variations in challenge if they scale to the incoming damage.  Willpower accomplishes that with some baseline resists/defenses/-to-hit and also scaling its regen to number of enemies around it.  Bio does it with baseline resists/defenses/-damage and scaling its heals/absorbs and regens (primarily through DNA Siphon, though also Parasitic Aura).  A fixed Regen will need something like this, something that lets it scale up its heals/regen when more damage is coming in.

 

As discussed, the power system lacks any real method to have a power's damage itself trigger a larger regeneration.  You can count the number of attacks since last pulse, as Brute Fury does.  You can scale up by percentage of currently available hit points.  And you can scale up by number of nearby enemies.  But defense/resistances offer a lot more fluid, built-in scaling that don't have as many special-case issues (for example, Willpower's scaling by number of nearby enemies makes you notably weak to single high-damage opponents).  So...  having defenses/resists/-to-hit/-damage is a pretty helpful tool in making the armor set non-fragile.

 

This is probably the best example of how regen is interacting with incoming damage as a form of mitigation.  You are unkillable if incoming damage is less than your regen.  But any DPS that is greater than your heal per second isnt mitigated at all while resistance and defense continue to provide mitigation.

 

I tried to address this with my original suggestion by letting players gain some regen debuff resistance through usage of their abilities.  A set with low defense and low resistance shouldnt have a huge 'off switch' in the form of a regen debuff.  They are going to hit you and you are going to take damage.  Moment of Glory and instant healing made the set invincible back in the day and the set was gutted to balance it afterward.  I may attempt an entire regen overhaul someday,  but for now i tried to leave the set alone and offer improvements from a different direction.

[Missions in TF Set to +0 When Someone Entered Before Leader Was in Zone]

I thought you changed the difficulty for those 2 missions for some reason.  But i dont call it App-less park for no reason.  Of course someone else would get to the mission before u made it to that zone.

[Geometry in Arachnos Base mission map]

Yes that specific room would be reused in several maps but knowing what map it is on can make the search for it much faster.  All arachnos rooms compared to only ones that are used on that map.

 

 

[Long Range TP Requirements Are Killing My Altitis (Maybe that's a good thing?)]

If you just completely despise getting all the explore badges in a zone to unlock LRT,  then purchase the long range teleport from p2w for 1 million.  Then you just have to grab a single badge as you move around the zones.

 

Some characters i get all the explore badges in a zone and sometimes i just buy it.

[Geometry in Arachnos Base mission map]

If you do /whereami    and have it visible in the chat,  it will be easier for the devs to track it down next time.

[Regen for the Masses]

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

Unless, of course, you're one of those players that figured out how to cap your defenses as a /Willpower.

 

For a savage melee/willpower brute,  the totals can look pretty good.

 

Spoiler

 

Of course your power selection has almost no flexibility.  It makes me wonder if a tanker can do better but i havent tried.

 

 

[Null The Gull -> Knockback to Knockdown]

49 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

And it can work the other way, too. The HC staff added 'pull' to Singularity; I regularly see mobs in MSRs getting pulled into the air in the middle of the bowl,and less often during other content. There are a number of powers that require the target to be on the ground. The moment a Singularity yanks a mob off the ground, Seismic Blast loses a power against it. Is this annoying? Yes; in the roil of power effects, it may not be noticeable that a mob is airborne. It can be caused incidentally by other powers, too -- a mob standing on the object produced by Propel is not "on the ground" for targeting purposes. Some holds lift the target off the ground.

 

In a group that works together across an extended period of time, it's reasonable to expect the members to tailor their actions to work together to best effect. For the vast majority of grouping in CoH, a teammate could be 'Fred from the planet Fred' for all you know about them, and expecting them to tailor their abilities to your prejudices about how you want fights to go is setting yourself up as the arbiter of the One True Way to Play...

 

I made a suggestion awhile ago for arc of destruction to be usable while near the ground and flying but it didnt go anywhere.  I probably should have researched all the powers that worked that way.  Overall the whole player/target needs to be on the ground probably should get looked at but im not incharge of such decisions.  In the end it should probably be changes to the specific powers and not an addition to null.

[Regen for the Masses]

1 hour ago, aethereal said:

IH has a duration of 90s and a base cooldown of 650 seconds, it is impossible to perma.

 

I should have given this more consideration in my original post.  Im not sure how long the individual stacks from the buff i suggested should last but IH should keep its stack refreshed for the entire duration as its not a power that is recharged for another click very often.

 

On 3/2/2022 at 10:10 PM, aethereal said:

I think an easier way to accomplish the same basic thing would be to give a damage buff effect to all the clickies.  Take the edge off the dps loss.

 

While recovering a portion of the damage loss was part of my consideration i was mainly trying to come up with a way for regen to reach 'normal human' levels of reaction time.  Having the power of regeneration and you cant heal while you punch seems counter to the idea.

[Null The Gull -> Knockback to Knockdown]

Null doesnt let u disable things because they were annoying.  Its because those things can force a change on your character that could potentially prevent you from playing.  Players would teleport people that did not want to get teleported,  sometimes teleporting them into a group of mobs that would kill them or off a tall building.  This was addressed well before null with the addition of the teleport prompt.

 

Group fly prevents players from using abilities that require being on the ground.  My titan weapons scrapper cant use Arc of Destruction if someone on my team runs group fly.  I literally lose a power if i couldnt disable group fly from others.  Several other powers in the game require being on the ground as well and a few still work if you are flying near the ground.

 

Kinetics speed boost and intertial reduction can make movement difficult for some players,  especially on cramped mission maps.  I rarely move faster then sprint speed in a mission even though i can handle speed boost speed.  There are players that dont have the reflexes to move that quickly and getting stuck by a box and some rubble to only get stuck again by a trashcan and a desk when u try to back up can be frustrating.

 

Even the popup tray is a change forced on you personally by moving elements of your UI around depending on your setup.

 

Each of these can easily be grouped as quality of life improvements.  They let you play your character without other players being able to force a change to your character that alters the way it plays.  A Null option to change knockback to knockdown doesnt prevent someone else from forcing a change to your character that alters how it plays.  An enemy being knocked back doesnt prevent you from ever using some of your powers or potentially make you move faster then your reflexes can handle.  KB to KD would be considered a buff and not a quality of life improvement.  Null doesnt offer any buffs unless you consider being transformed into an all powerful gull as a buff.  There is already a system in place ingame for players that want to play powersets that use knockback but dont want their powers to knockback.  There are many more powersets that dont have any knockback at all for players that dont want to use that system and also dont want knockback.

 

[Market Crash tips]

6 hours ago, TheZag said:

Bonus points for dragging super stunners over to your team on a character with end drain resist so they all get drained and you can keep fighting.

 

3 hours ago, golstat2003 said:

 

Optimal teaming right there. 😄 

 

And thats tame for things my friends do on teams.  My buddies routinely 'accidently' pull the crimson prototype while we are fighting castillo the second time.  Or herd as many extra mobs as they can while we are fighting Bobcat and Neuron.  Skip deactivating security on pandoras box 5.  And any number of other things to spice up some of the missions.  Usually everyone on the team isnt a PUG though so we all know what we are getting ourselves into when we do missions.

[Market Crash tips]

Bonus points for dragging super stunners over to your team on a character with end drain resist so they all get drained and you can keep fighting.

[Regen for the Masses]

52 minutes ago, aethereal said:

I think it'd be fun to have a power in Regen that automatically healed all attacks over the X seconds since they happened (so, like, when you got hit by an attack, it looked at the damage you took and healed you over time/regenned you by exactly the amount necessary to heal that attack over say 12 seconds).  But that's definitely not possible within the current powers code.

 

Possible or not,  thats exactly what reconstruction makes me think it should be doing - rebuilding what was lost and not just X amount every time.

[Quick Question about Group Fly]

Doesnt group fly hit MM pets at any distance or can they get too far away and fall?

[Windy]

Wind control was teased quite awhile ago by the team.  It looks like the powers are 'done' in city of data.  Maybe they dont have animations yet.  Whatever the reason,  the team hasnt hinted at it in some time.

[Keep peace in Boomtown]

18 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Clearly you don't remember The Hollows. Where we'd go at level 9 and have to sneak past level 14 mobs just to get to our mission door.

 

Taxi Bots, players who would help other players by teleporting them to their mission doors in The Hollows, were a big deal back then.

 

People would also take hover to fly across the zone.  The good ol' days back when it took 25 minutes to get everyone to the mission.  3-4 team deaths when moving between missions.  And the mission itself wasnt enough xp to clear the debt you earned trying to get there.

[Quick Question about Group Fly]

They can all fly.  Even crabberminds spiders can fly.  Their legs kinda go limp and tuck under their bodies slightly.

[Dual Builds - Do You Use Them?]

I have multiple builds on some characters.  My tank has his hamidon tank build,  an AoE faceroll build that can farm S/L if desired and a general tanking build.

 

I feel the main thing is to get familiar with the select build command so you dont have to go back to the trainer every time you want to switch.

 

/selectbuild 1

/selectbuild 2

/selectbuild 3

 

And remember that all your abilities go on cooldown.  All your toggles will drop,  your pets will be dismissed,  everything.  So if you plan to team transport or long range teleport,  do it before changing builds.

[Stone armor no fx option]

When i took stone armor on my controller i was suprised that it didnt have the minimal fx option.  I didnt want no fx but i figured that minimal fx would have been available.  So instead i changed the animation to crystal and colored it a retina burning shade of blue and pretend that its ice all over my character.

[What comic book character can you NOT create?]

Its been all about powersets but there are alot of comic characters that you could do a close match to their costume even though power selection may not match up very well.

[Enemy singularity causing very strange behaviour]

Then what you described was different.  I would probably blame that on packet loss but i couldnt be sure.  I do enjoy rollercoaster mode when we get a couple enemy singularities though.

[Enemy singularity causing very strange behaviour]

Enemies attack air all the time if you keep moving around.  If you were in range and they activated a power then it will hit or miss anyway even if you are nowhere near them when the animation finishes.  It has always been like this,  the singularities moving you around just makes it more apparent.

[Its hard to talk about Vigilence.]

The fact that an archtype over performs while solo isnt a reason to get a buff while teaming.  If you are in the character creation screen and look at a defender attack that does 100 damage and then look at that same attack when on a team it will still be 100 damage.  You 'got what you paid for' in terms of defender damage.  Because they give you 30% extra for free sometimes doesnt mean you get 30% extra all the time or the 51% from the suggestion either for that matter.

 

But im fairly certain that the current devs wont be giving defenders 2/3 of build up damage at all times while teaming so all of this is just for the sake of discussion.