MHertz

I’ll do you one better. Why are you?

Stan and Lou, obviously.

Accidental double post.

Your health bar moves pretty fast. If you don’t look stop and around once in a while, you’ll miss it.

I am experiencing problems with multi-boxing and additional monitors that I haven’t seen previously. This may be due to a recent change in video display; I noticed it about 2-3 days ago. Some screen display options disallow Alt-Shift-Arrow (to move one instance of the game to the other monitor) Some screen display options are offset by the height of the Windows Task Bar, resulting in mouse displacement (what you hover over is not what gets clicked on) Activating an idle game window can cause the previously-active game window to spawn the Windows task bar I have not yet noticed if there are specific video settings (eg, 1920x1080, 1920x1080 desktop, Borderless monitor 1, etc) that tie to certain behaviors. Mostly, the options appear to work at first, but then experience problems after Alt-Tab occurs. I will keep testing.

You have to have hero banter! The trick is to fight a couple of groups first and see how it goes before opening up the floodgates to banter. Sometimes there isn’t time, but in many cases there is.

Sometimes other people just suck, and it makes me want to see fewer of them. Sometimes this happens in the game. Unlike real life, there is a solution for in-game drama: the ignore feature, and remembering that participating in the game is voluntary. Have you ever had one of those moments where you say, "No amount of entertainment is worth the human drama going on here" and want to take a healthy break?

It isn't. That isn't the system that I would call "inventing." It's more like gambling. Converters are just a slot machine that you hope comes up LOTG once in a while. Inventing implies the character or player has a purpose: "I need one of XYZ." They set themselves to getting it, scavenging for just the right parts, or just the right recipes, to target the thing they need — basically, quasi-customization of loot drops. The player specifies they want a better chance to create X type of IO, and a lesser chance of all other types. Of course, we don't have much to do in the game except combat, so the invention (loot drops) would have to happen by that path. Sitting next to a table and clicking the UI's brains out in order to defeat an RNG, well, that's video blackjack.

Yeah, but that feels more like buying something than inventing it.

If I were to change the system at all, I would do so from the opposite direction. Create a menu for inventors that says “what are you working toward right now?” and let them choose a particular category of item: Healing, Resist, or whatever. Tweak the drop rates so you are more likely to get that one thing, at the cost of a lower drop rate overall. Suppose the % chance to drop an IO from a minion is 2.5%. You set yourself for “healing” and your drop rate goes down to 2.0%, but when you do get something, you have a 40% chance of finding healing recipes. Maybe if you have invention badges you can boost that to 50%. That would feel more like an invention system to me, and less like a loot-drop gambling system.

So if Storm Blast suddenly did massive amounts of up-front nuke damage, what is it? It’s the same as everything else — just a competition to see whether you or your teammates can mash the button first. That’s not a bad thing, but it does make the game and the power set much less interesting. Is there a particular reason why every powerset must be built in that way?

There's that word again. I'm not trying to disparage the fact that people want to play the game and "have fun" (whatever that means to the individual), but if we are using "contributing" as our yardstick, we need to know what that means, and how we tell when it's happening for everyone. On my FF defender, I "contribute" by shielding, holding position to keep everyone in the big bubble, and using attacks whenever I feel like I can spare the time. On my Elec/Elec blaster, I "contribute" in different ways depending on the team I'm on — sometimes this means using my nuke, and sometimes it means rounding up strays that escaped someone else's nuke. On my Staff/WP Brute, I "contribute" by running headlong into big groups and taking enough of the aggro that the team doesn't wipe out. What is it about Storm Blast that makes people feel like they aren't "contributing?" Is it because on the very toughest teams, the big T9 power outlasts the bad guys? If so, what's the end goal here? How do we know when we have reached the proper level of "contribution?" How do we do this without crowding out some other powerset, like Ice Blast with its T9, Blizzard? And how do we do this without homogenizing all Blaster sets to become bland, insta-nuke lookalikes? To put it another way, what role in team dynamics does Storm Blast presently fill, and what would we lose if we turn Cat 5 into a copy of Thunderous Blast? Is Storm Blast really good at, say, propping up a team without a Tanker? Really good at dealing with add-on attacks or ambushes? Really good at dealing with maps when full-sized groups are too close together? What is it good at, and does it have to be good at insta-nuke too?

As I think about this, it occurs to me that a lot of team damage is wasted at current difficulty levels. Suppose a minion has 100 Health. The team is facing a group of 15 minions. A Brute rushes in with a 5-person mêlée AOE and hits 4 targets, because bad guys move and cones suck. Brute does 65 points damage to only 4 targets. The Blaster unleashes a nuke against 15 targets and hits 13, for 105 points each. The Controller throws out some AOE immobilize for 35 points including DOT, hitting 12 targets. All the minions are wiped out. Some take 100 points of damage, some take 105, some take 140, some take 170, and a few take 205. The team did 2,045 damage in total against only 1,500 Health. Who “contributed?” Whose power was “wasted?” Is it about who gets the orange numbers and who doesn’t? Why are we trying to bother looking at combat in this way? It’s not like you get the loot if you’re the one who gets the kill shot.

This is the 100,000 Influence Question. If one blaster has a nuke that can wipe out all the minions in 3 seconds, doesn't that mean that most team damage is essentially wasted? How can anyone else be said to "contribute" on such a team unless they have even-faster nukes? What ideal team scenario are we hoping for, here?

All of the back and forth about who made exactly which argument, and which arguments are strawmen, is tiresome. Let’s cut to the chase. Under what conditions should powers be balanced? Balanced so all powers are able to “contribute” to a fully-maxed out and slotted-up team that steamrolls everything? Or solo? With or without procs and purple IO sets? With or without Incarnate? With or without PTW powers? On what difficulty setting? Personally, I fear that balancing toward “contribute to a team that steamrolls everything in seconds” will lead to further power creep. If Storm Cell or Cat 5 are balanced to deliver more damage under those conditions, there will be some other set that falls behind, due to activation time or animation time issues or DOT or something else. Then they will start to say “hey, our T9 should contribute too” and get buffed and then someone else will fall behind. Honestly, it feels like the enemies need to be balanced to be harder overall — or at least have more Health so they last longer — because “we steamroll in seconds and I wasted a power” is not an ideal environment for gauging power utility or group dynamics. That move would slow down solo artists, so that would have to be considered as well. Maybe make enemy Health scale with group size? Or maybe make powers scale with team size?

Wouldn’t it be neat to have a power to float down carefully instead of plummeting like a cryptocurrency stock to the pavement in a trail of screams? You could have a couple different styles: soap bubble, magic floaty disc, military chute, etc. Yes, it wouldn’t be a super useful power, but it would be so awesome to jump off a ledge and deploy the Bat Wings or whatever.

Chance to hit isn’t the same as actual number of hits. In theory, if the target has equal defense to all damage types, and there are enough attempts, the percentage of actual hits would approach the percentage of expected hits. But it would be helpful to normalize the DPS across the tested (not theoretical) accuracy. You never know. There could be a bug with attacks using multiple damage types, or a run of bad luck with the RNG,

How did you adjust for hits and misses? Were all the primary sets comparably accurate during the test?

1. An AFK message when I’m in the editor. 2. Being able to change the contact on a per-mission basis. 3. A pony.

My advice, as someone who doesn’t play the market much and still has plenty of money: turn off 2XP. From a profit perspective, running content at 2XP is a fool’s game. Double XP means you defeat half the number of enemies to get to 50, which halves opportunity to earn drops of SOs, converters, salvage, and recipes. Going through the content at regular speed means not only do you earn more from defeats, you earn more by crafting the recipes you find. You spend less buying salvage to craft with. And if you’re buying as you go (as opposed to say, joining an AE farm) you’re increasing your total outlay while cutting your income and potential sales. I hate to say it, but if you do that, your cashflow problems are on you. At a certain point it's cheaper to join a farm team and ignore your slots until level 50. Approx. cost of SOs per every 5 levels* 12 — 394,749 17 — 691,843 22 — 1,045,598 27 — 1,503,118 32 — 2,152,913 37 — 2,916,547 42 — 3,794,036 47 — 4,785,376 Total spent by level 50: ~17,284,183 *Price of replacing all SOs at every 5th level, beginning with level 15 SOs and starting with 1 slot each in Sprint and Stamina. Cost per SO taken as weighted average, arbitrarily assuming Accuracy is 23% of slots, Damage/Healing is 31% of slots, Defense/Resist is 14% of slots, and Recharge is 9% of slots, with other SOs each weighted between 1-5% of remaining. I will also point out that when you go through content using +4 enemies, you make the number of effective drop chances even worse, because drop rate per enemy does not scale with XP. Fighting +4 enemies over the lifetime of your toon gives you ~40% fewer opportunities for loot drops. Combine this with 2XP and you're speeding through the content but you're getting ... what, 15-20% of the normal drop chances? It would only take a handful of good drops to fund your character with SOs or IOs, crafted from stuff the game basically gives you for free by playing the content at +0 level at 1*XP. If you want to maximize drops, go for -1/x8.

Thanks for the heads up. My SG is hosting an event on April 28. Will you announce when it will be possible to resume making alterations, in case any last-minute changes are needed?

So we're going to see a bunch of rock star characters with names on the theme of Nippleback.

Yes, kids, it’s that time again! A new build has hit the beta testing server and it’s time to complain about things that don’t exist. For one thing, I really don’t like the new Mastermind set, Government Attorneys. It’s supposed to debuff with -Speed and -Recharge but it only seems to affect my own team. And they also debuff each other. Plus, their Subpoena attacks just take forever to have any effect. I really don’t like how you replaced Echo Galaxy City with the set from “Cats.” I also didn’t need to see a bunch of citizens walking around dressed like James Corden or Taylor Swift in cat suits. I mean, to be fair, the giant catgirl statue can stay (rowr!) but everything else should get reverted. Can we please change the Water Blast power set back to water and not pies and glitter and seltzer bottles? I have a thing about clowns and I just know that I’m going to see a ton of them after this hits Live. The new mission arc for Justin Greene (Justin Lost His Cellphone) is terrible. Isn’t there a better mission plan than to run to all the contacts in his phone and give them his new number? IP is a huge zone and it takes forever. And you have to keep running back to him to get the next name. Why can’t I use his new phone number to call him? Why is a superhero doing this? The new Tantrum set for Blasters (secondary) and Scrappers (primary) looks pretty good animation wise, but I’m finding it doesn’t really do enough damage. The Footstomp doesn’t really do anything, the Door Slam doesn’t have a large enough radius, and Meltdown should be moved down to T6 or T7. It looks hilarious when you hit the floor and scream and cry, but the damage is not deserving of a nuke. The only animation that needs work is Rude Gesture, which looks weird without any separate fingers on the character model. But the really good part is that the set actually gets worse when paired with Regen, which totally fits the theme. I really appreciate how we got a new body model after all these years, but why couldn’t it have been Female Huge instead of Sports Mascot? They’re not much better than clowns, to be honest.

If you imagine it is bad, I would post your hypothetical results on the Focused Imagination thread. This is for feedback by beta testers.

While this is true, if Quickpunch were an attack set it could be paired with anything, even slow-as-molasses Stone Armor or I-can-walk-faster-than-that Ice Blast. This might yield weird results. You can’t guarantee people get the conceptually matching speedster armor unless you forced it to be so. Or, forbid combinations that don’t tie in (like dual blades + shield).