BillyMailman

And now, without having relogged, zoned, anything, it's changed. I looked back after chatting with folks, and it now has the hint text of the Deincarnated badge, which I've already earned.

I was in Cimerora on my main badger, idly killing Minotaurs/Cyclopses for the new badges while waiting for friends to get online. I opened the Closest to Completion menu, and saw this. That's two badges saying I needed to "Defeat 100 minotaurs in Cimerora to earn this badge.", with different progress. The second one shows '1 (25.00%) of 4 complete!". Which basically means it's Master of the Dr. Aeon Strike Force, since that's the only badge of the new ones which is out of four. Zoning didn't change it. Nor did relogging. That badge is just showing Minotaurs as the hint criteria. For the record, if it is MoDASF, I have only Power Overwhelming towards that.

Why? Incarnate stuff is so easy to earn now. iXP starts awarding instantly on hitting 50, and threads drop everywhere. Plus, Vet Levels mean anyone can have an Alpha Slot power as soon as that first ding happens for Vet 1. Was there really enough problems around these TFs that their interesting unique part needed to be removed? I was always hoping for a couple more incarnate-ish-grade TFs, not to lose these two.

You don't even need me on this one. I literally reported this as a bug months ago. Full explanation for the devs as to why it's not working, links to City of Data, etc.

A Beast Mastery MM gets the Summon Lions power, which summons two Lionesses. We're gonna ignore that the power ought to be called Summon Lionesses, and instead focus on the slotting options. Summon Lions takes defense enhancements, as well as heal, move speed, stun, etc. Any +Defense or +Heal or whatever that you slot into it, gets slotted into all the lionesses' appropriate powers, and boosts their stuff. Healing boosts Lick Wounds, stun boosts Ferocious Growl, etc. Except Defense. The lionesses have one power that has a defense buff - Lion's Roar. Lion's Roar doesn't actually benefit from Defense enhancement (see the icons in the upper-right, there's just the Endurance Reduction one), so the power always does a flat 6% defense, no matter what. Any slotting for increased defense, does nothing. I've confirmed this in-game separate from City of Data; my Summon Lions power has a 25 defense buff IO in it, but the buff is still just 6% per lioness. I dunno whether the better solution is to make defense slotting work (almost nobody seems to slot any, since MM slotting is often pretty tight anyway, which is likely why I could only find one post even mentioning this problem, which was from mid-2020), or just make Summon Lions not take defense enhancements/sets any more.

Ahhh, yeah. See, I was thinking something like what's in Bonfire/Whirlwind/Tornado/etc. with the ReduceIfKD tag, where knock powers would have one component at 100% chance with ReduceIfKD and the normal vector, and another component at a 0% chance with the same magnitude, tagged IncreaseIfKD and set to vector downwards. Then the KB-to-KD IO becomes purely the tag chance changes. It would mean KD-ifying things wouldn't actually change the magnitude, and a six-piece Sudden Acceleration wouldn't be a massive contradiction. And Bonfire/etc. just need their KD component set to something like -60% starting chance, or whatever, to still have the lower chance when KD'd. I realize the crazy amount of work that would be needed to get that rigged up in every single player-usable power, of course, and hoped there was a less ridiculous way I wasn't seeing. Unfortunately, while you might be able to automate some of the changes, a lot of knockback powers also have complicated crap, have two knockback effects for PvE/PvP, etc., so probably a lot of it would need manual adjusting. Ah, well. All of this is still damn awesome. Thanks again, Six!

Okay, I know the answer is probably completely useless, but the power math nerd in my heart has to ask: Why 38 distance 7 - - 19 / dup dup * * and not 45 distance - 19 / dup dup * * ? Is there some magic where the - operator is removing non-negatives and resulting in distance 7 - being a minimum of zero, and that's what stops the magnitude from going off to infinity? Because if so, that's both terrible that it clamps out negatives that way, and also a fantastic hack to prevent infinite magnitudes, even though the inner radius 7 should do that anyway. And if not, that just seems like a really odd way to do the subtraction. Actually, City of Data (the main view, or the raw power definition) shows (45/19 - distance/19)*(45 - distance)**2/361 but I'm assuming that's just weirdness with whatever processing he has to do to get the expression to not be in RPN. Same end numbers, though. Oh, and as an addendum because I realized I hadn't mentioned it: Thank you for this entire post. As my group's resident powers/math nerd and City of Data Interpreter, I am super happy both for the explanation, and to see the work being done on improving how Knock/Repel work. I look forward to the day when you're hopefully able to have the KB-to-KD IOs just change the vector stuff, so a KD-ified power doesn't still knock Clockwork backwards. Because that would be amazing if you could eventually make it happen

Oh! Then yes. Ageless Radial. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=incarnate.destiny.ageless_radial_epiphany&at=tanker Resists debuffs to defense, endurance, to hit, speed, regen, recovery, and recharge.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.bio_organic_armor.inexhaustible&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.dark_armor.murky_cloud&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.electric_armor.static_shield&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.fiery_aura.consume&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.invulnerability.resist_energies&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.radiation_armor.gamma_boost&at=tanker https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_defense.stone_armor.rooted&at=tanker I may have missed something, but I believe SR, Shield, WP, and Ice are the only tanker primaries without an end-drain resist. Recovery-drain resist (being entirely separate) is more rare, but still present in a few.

I haven't gotten onto beta, and likely won't for a bit, but still wanted to jump in early and say a huge Thank You. Been an Elec/Elec Blaster main since live, and just the change where I don't need to keep an eye on Voltaic Sentinel to know when to recast, is nice. Because it didn't stack, and didn't show up in the pet window, it was a constant guessing game if I was wasting my time re-summoning it too early, or losing DPS by summoning it too late. Has it despawned? Is it just wandered off? Always a pain in the ass. Even if 90% of this gets rejected and reverted, even if VS ends up entirely changed before release, that all doesn't matter too much to me. As long as the guessing game isn't a problem any more, THANK YOU.

I've been running some iTrial runs lately that Bill's been on, and his SR/Claws Tanker has main-tanked several of them. The whole thing Werner was talking about is that SR really isn't just that one trick. The scaling resistances, along with the scaling resistance IO and a little bit of slotting, gets you, as Bill himself put it, "capped SL and 89.1 FCEN" with a decent amount of HP remaining. You definitely need to get used to riding much lower HP numbers than many are comfortable with, and for some trials that's pretty damn dangerous, but there's not a whole lot of places in the game that have both autohit attacks that bypass SR's main purpose, and unresistable damage sources that ignore the resistance protecting the tail end of your HP bar. At least, not all together. Oh, and you need some way to handle psi/tox. MoM will do nasty things to his tank, since it's basically just an iTrial of autohit psi damage.

Nah, Bill's Claws/SR, not SR/Claws. The man's very heart is a Scrapper. Per the discussion that spawned this thread, I still assert that it's probably because the folks that want to play Claws or SR are just going with another AT. After all, it's not like original-flavour Bill Z Bubba is really all that much less sturdy than your tanker, and the damage output's much higher. Neither set is bad on a Tanker at all, just that if you wanna play one or the other, you probably want to be a scrapper, where both Claws and SR did quite well. Aside: The brute versions also don't see much more use than Tanker. Stalker sees a decent bit of SR, but not of claws. Though the latter makes sense; Claws isn't really Claws without Follow Up. Really, the two sets both mostly get used by Scrappers. Maybe they're all following in your footsteps, Bill? 😛

The /unbind command resets a given button to default, so /unbind rbutton should fix it. But also, 'rotate' isn't a command. Per https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/List_of_Slash_Commands there's no such thing. And per https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Default_Key_Bindings, the default for rbutton is '+mouse_look'.

A bunch used to! Including Moonbeam, interestingly. It was a bug with the fast snipe thing that'd never made it live before shutdown, and was patched in August 2019, assuming I've found the right patch: Prior to that patch, my Elec/Elec blaster main's Zapp dealt its damage instantly on activation, then animated itself long after the enemy was possibly already dead. And Moonbeam is called out there as being one that was supposed to have been fixed.

Minor correction: The mez bit doesn't stack. Having one ally is needed, but CoD shows it as tagged not to stack at all.

Providing some numbers (some duplication, I started typing before Cobalt posted): Phalanx Fighting is the old name for the power the Cims always had, which is in no way like the player Phalanx Fighting. It's just a flat amount of defense to SLFCEN, no psi and no positional. Exact numbers may vary by specific unit, and it also gives some resistance defense debuff. This power was renamed to Roman Armor. Energized Shield is the old name for a power that the Cimerorans had at one point, but that got removed. It's added back, and renamed to Phalanx Fighting. This one works like player Phalanx Fighting, and gives all Cims a bit of mez resistance as long as they have at least one ally nearby, and a scaling amount of defense based on the number of nearby allies. For a Centurion, e.g., this is +3% defense to SLFCEN per ally within eight feet, up to a maximum of +48% defense. Adding their base defense of 15% from what is now named Roman Armor, they have a whopping 63% defense to all those types. In teams, this probably won't matter too much, and runs I've been on bear that out. First, because having seventeen enemies within eight feet of each other is ridiculous, so the numbers won't be quite so astronomical. But also, most people have some +ToHit in their builds from set bonuses, there's tactics stacking up, someone might be on a Time character using Farsight, etc. Plus, any time someone opens a fight with Build Up and then a nuke power, they'll have a solid hit chance on the nuke, which will thin out minions and drop a lot of that defense off the Lts/Bosses. For a large team, that kind of opening can be happening every fight. But for Bill Z, soloing a +4x8 ITF is his way of relaxing. And this change means he's gonna be missing a lot of attacks, at least until he can thin out the minions in a given group. NB: The numbers above are based on the Alpha data on CoD, which is from Aug. 11th. I'm assuming it's the same numbers as made it live, but CoD hasn't updated its live data yet since that patch, so I can't actually 100% confirm.

Man, retirement has changed you.

As an update, having just checked on a completely new browser to the site, the main data still shows no Roman Armor on any of them, but does show it if I flip to the Alpha Data. So yeah, definitely not syncing the live CoD data from the live game data.

Yes, I'm talking about that power. It's now been renamed, which should at least show up in its display name, if not the URL. And it's been given to a bunch of the Cimerorans, none of whom had it in the prior patch. But the Entity Data section doesn't have it on any of them. Just the old Phalanx Fighting power that most of them had, which is a fixed flat amount of defense. No amount of refreshing fixes any of this, so it definitely looks like CoD has gotten out of date.

Any ETA on when the data is going to get updated with the latest patch? I went looking to see exactly what the numbers are on the updated defense thing on the Cimerorans, but it's still out of date.

Bug Report: The Entity Search knows that 'Super Stunner' exists, but their internal name is apparently something like 'freakshow_supr_st|_|n3r', and the link produced by clicking the result in the search is https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=freakshow_supr_st%7C_%7Cn3r, which doesn't load.

Adding some more detail, once you look into things, you find that SR tankers/brutes effectively don't have a taunt aura. Depending on behaviour. Every taunt aura other than Evasion, does two things taunt-wise. One is that it fires off the Gauntlet/Fury proc on all enemies in the aura. The second is that it taunts those enemies directly. Evasion is missing the latter part. But Gauntlet/Fury doesn't stack with itself. So, e.g., if an SD/SS tanker jumps into a group of mobs and fires off Foot Stomp, those mobs all get the Mag 4/14.96s Gauntlet taunt. A moment later, Against All Odds goes off, resetting the duration on Gauntlet, and adding another Mag 3/13.6s taunt of its own. The tanker now has Mag 7 total taunt on the enemies, which should maintain itself for the whole fight. On the other hand, if an SR/SS tanker does the same, Foot Stomp will still add the Mag 4/14.96s Gauntlet taunt. Then, when Evasion goes off, it will reset the Gauntlet taunt's timer. That's it. The enemy is left with just a Mag 4 total taunt on them, and that will be all they'll get for the whole fight. As long as a Tanker is attacking, Gauntlet's proc will be hitting most of the enemies around them, anyway. So SR's "taunt aura" power only doing Gauntlet/Fury is, at least for some tankers, equivalent to not having a taunt aura at all. Now, if a Brute is single-target focused and not hitting many enemies, Evasion's really useful, since it'll keep the Fury proc up on everything. But all it takes is the occasional Spin/Foot Stomp/Quills/Whirling Smash/etc. to keep that up anyway, and now Evasion's not really helping you keep aggro.

I will admit that I haven't actually tested this out in-game, since I don't have a KM brute. But City of Data shows that the Brute version of Kinetic Melee's taunt power has the taunt aspect set up to stack with itself, which would let a KM brute stack up way more taunt on an enemy than they should be able to. I have no idea how you'd ever actually abuse this, so it's almost certainly a really minor thing, but I still figured I'd toss a report out there about it. As a related note: Brute KM, TW, Rad Melee, and Savage Melee are the only four Brute attack sets whose taunt power applies the -range component to all enemies. This one definitely is actually a buff to those four sets, but because it's four of them, not just one, I have no clue if this is intentional or not. I'm not sure if the HC folks would even know if it was, but it's an interesting little inconsistency, so I figured I'd mention it here.

So, normal Hive/Abyss Hamidon has a power called Cell Death, which fires on death, and uses a pseudopet to fire a secondary power, which then kills every DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Blaster, DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Controller, and DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Healer, which is all the mitos. LGTF Hamidon, on the other hand, fires a different power on death, which summons the same pseudopet as above, and does the same mechanics to kill the mitos. There's other effects in there (they spawn different versions of the Buds, which are internally called Cytoplasms), but the mito-killing is handled identically. Which means it doesn't work, because LGTF Hamidon has DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Blaster_Mission, DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Controller_Mission, and DevouringEarth_Mitochondria_Healer_Mission instead. Those aren't what's killed by the chain of powers above, so the mitos stay up when Hami dies, which they shouldn't be doing. It's definitely possible (but quite difficult) to kill the weakened Hami without bothering with the mitos. I've been on TFs that did it before, back when regular Hami was still being done that way by 100+ people, but we realized the mitos need manual killing anyway, so stopped bothering. But now that I can look at the powers in CoD, this is clearly not intended, so it should probably be fixed to kill both types of mitos, normal and mission.

(Edit: And I'm not bothering with a fresh photo for 1549. Don't really think it's needed, what with how easy the new one is. 😄)