Alouu

I really liked that post Sunsette, your "in a vacuum" arguments make perfect sense to me. I also agree that we need to preserve what made us all come back to this game after such a long time, I dont know if you also saw the post on turning defense into a logarithmic system but I think it was a perfect example of something that while it may technically be better balanced if implemented well, it would lose part of what makes the game what it is. In the case of the clamp though, its not iconic in any way, or nostalgia invoking, or even noticeable really unless you know what to look for. Its just a nuisance. Regarding your appraisal of support and dissent about the change, the situation you hypothesised where there are 70% who mildly want the change and 30% who vehemently oppose it doesnt seem right to me, I would say it's more like a 10 / 80 / 10 split. I havent taken a full tally of supporters and dissenters in this thread yet but it does look quite evenly split and I would say what we are seeing here is the two 10's at each pole clashing (very vocally..). If thats true then all that is needed is a majority of that 80 in the middle.

You're confusing me with someone else. My previous two posts also don't apply to the arguement you made, they address two specific non-arguements made by others.

If I hadn't acknowledged that I was being disagreed with, I wouldn't have made any responses. The point is from what position does the disagreement come from. The arguments "this is the way it's always been" and "why bother" can get thrown out in opposition to any idea ever made and are equally invalid every time they do. If you want a look at what a sound argument looks like take a read of @justicebeliever's post. From that post I accept the conclusions since they are logically made and thus have to accept as a result, that if anything this should be a back burner suggestion. You do understand you would still be able to miss... right?

For those of you dissenting based on arguments such as “Why is this change worth it?” or “This is just the way RPGs are!” I invite you to consider a scenario in which my suggestion is already implemented in the game. That is to say, you hit when you are supposed to hit and you miss when you are supposed to miss. Assume that this has been the status quo since launch day. Then a suggestion comes along which goes along the lines of “Hey guys, lets make it so if we have a 100% chance to hit, it gets rounded down to 95%!”. I hope you can appreciate what a singularly unpopular suggestion this would be. Personally I can easily imagine that not a single member of this community would take to such an idea. It would be universally scorned and rejected as anti-fun in its arbitrary randomness, unnecessary as the formula for missing already works fine and so on. If you have an ounce of integrity I hope you can admit to yourselves you would be right there among us, rightfully calling out what a stupid bloody suggestion it was. From there it is but a single logical step to acknowledge that rejecting proposition A in favor of keeping status quo B, translates directly into accepting proposition B at the expense of status quo A.

I went out of my way to show the falsity and hyperbole of your initial response because I knew there would be people on the fence not knowing what to make of the whole thing, who would be swayed if I did not. The benefit is clear, its just also very small. If the effort involved to make the change is also very small as I assume it is, this is not a factor.

I think if the amount of work ive put into falsifying your bs each time has shown anything, its earnestness. As for this time, you added an amount of elusivity needed to bring the value back to 0.95... What of it? The arguement for this is that gaving a hitchance of 95% to 100% generally happens against enemies that show as grey to yellow, and having hit chances lower than 95% will generally happen against enemies that show as orange to purple. If we take that as true, then since those grey to yellow enemies get steamrolled anyway it wont make any challenge difference having the hit chance cap raised against them. Additionally it wouldnt make a difference to the fight against orange to purple enemies because you dont have high enough hit chance to reach the threshold where removing the clamp would be noticed. Admittedly this does break down in certain situations like if a team is stacking tactics or if we are talking about a full team of 50s with accuracy set bonuses. But for that I would argue that since the clamp applies to enemies too, removing the clamp also increases their lethality a tiny bit in response, giving back whatever challenge was lost.

These two points seem similar enough to address in one package. Previously in my response to @Rylas, I explained my personal reasons for disliking the clamp. You can go back there and read it if you wish. If you piece that together with the sentiments of the other posters who support my suggestion you can see that it all boils down to pretty much the same thing. Perhaps to sum it up this statement might work: Something doesnt have to be very bad, to count as a bad thing. On the other hand the sentiments so far in support of keeping the clamp in place have been somewhat illogical or based on a lack of understanding of it, which has led to some testy responses. With that in mind the question becomes whether this admittedly minor nuisance is worth fixing or not, my assumption is since it only requires the change of a single variable in the code it would be rather easy and therefore is well worth doing. If that assumption turns out to be wrong, no harm done making this suggestion to find that out.

You're wrong again... Im gunna transform the PvP formula into something that can be worked with on wolfram alpha to show this: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ReplaceAll%5BA+%C3%97+(1+-+E)+*+minimum+%7B0.95,+(+0.75+%2B+T+-+D+)%7D,+%7BA-%3E1,+E-%3E+0,+C-%3E0.95,+T-%3E0.0,+D-%3E0.0%7D%5D A = Accmods E = Elusivity C = The unchanged inner Clamp T = ToHit Buffs D = Defense As you see I presented the formula with default values set, and the chance of hitting is 0.75. Now I change the tohit to simulate aim being used: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ReplaceAll%5BA+%C3%97+(1+-+E)+*+minimum+%7B0.95,+(+0.75+%2B+T+-+D+)%7D,+%7BA-%3E1,+E-%3E+0,+C-%3E0.95,+T-%3E0.5,+D-%3E0.0%7D%5D The inner clamp has now done its job and restricted the chance of hitting to 0.95 Now I will change the accmods from 1.0 to 1.3 to simulate the addition of an SO: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ReplaceAll%5BA+%C3%97+(1+-+E)+*+minimum+%7B0.95,+(+0.75+%2B+T+-+D+)%7D,+%7BA-%3E1.3,+E-%3E+0,+C-%3E0.95,+T-%3E0.5,+D-%3E0.0%7D%5D Lo and behold the chance of hitting has busted straight past its 0.95 barrier! Never mind that it reached a value over 1, that's just because I was having problems putting two "minimum" functions into wolfram, naturally my fixed clamp would be clamping that value from 1.235 down to 1.

If you cooked a delicious meal but spotted a small improvement you could make for next time that would take almost no effort, would you try that improvement out the next time you cooked the meal?

Except that time and time again in my original post I stressed that only the upper bound of the clamp is in need of a change, the lower bound which affects the cap on defense would and should not be touched. So no, the comparison made is completely ludicrous. That is dependant upon having enough of those debuffs in each mob that the duration allows multiple of them to stack and from there snowball into a defense cascade. You can see in some of my tests where the mobs were able to debuff my defense slightly for short periods but not enough to cause such a cascade. The inner clamp which affects tohit and defense would prevent me from reaching a 100% hit chance if I had no acc enhances slotted and just used aim. However if the outer clamp had its upper bound set to 100 and I slotted just 1 acc enhancement then that would then change and allow me to reach a 100% hit chance. Edit: By the way I don't know if NPCs get "accmods" or not (perhaps you can tell me?) but if they dont then this would also cause NPCs to remain clamped whilst the player would not be.

There are 2 components to the clamp, the suggestion essentially boils down to removing one of those components. Missing will still be possible, you will miss when your accuracy and tohit isnt sufficient. Hitting 100% of the time will also be possible, you will hit 100% of the time if your accuracy and tohit is sufficient to do so.

You didn't read my post.

@Jack_Nomind Here I go getting baited into debunking you again! Here are the results: https://imgur.com/a/UVeW4e6 I wasnt as scientific as I could have been about it since I wasnt too enthused about having to do this just to show that even your cherrypicked examples dont "kill resistance-based players noticeably faster", but I posit that I was rigorous enough to show you were mostly wrong, again. My methodology was as follows: I disabled all toggles that gave resistance to defense debuffs, leaving only weave and CJ on.* I would then pop 1 purple and enough oranges to reach cosy levels of resistance as well as break frees to allow me to give myself sustain. I then sat in a mob of each enemy group (+4 x8) for roughly 15-20 seconds, enough for defense debuff stacking to take place. I then quit the map restocked on insps and repeated the test, usually 3 times for each enemy group. *I mistakenly left energy cloak on once. Here are the groups tested and the results: Arachnos: Depending on the composition of the arachnos group, these enemies are indeed able to reach a 95% hit chance in some circumstances. In 2 tests out of 3 this was achieved, with the other test being against a group with less defense debuffers in it. Note: Each time I fought this group I died not because my defense was dropped, but because my endurance was completely sapped. Lethality Increase: ~3.4% Banished Pantheon: The banished pantheon failed 2 tests out of 3, again the amount of defense debuffing depended upon the composition of the group, however they did manage to succeed in one of the tests. It would appear that when stacking -defense a lot depends on the initially low chance of hitting the debuff getting through and being stacked twice, allowing it to snowball into more. Lethality Increase: ~2% Carnies: Similar to the Banished Pantheon, the carnies failed 2 tests out of 3. The snowballing effect I mentioned before seems to be the determiner of success or failure with this enemy group. As with my experience with the arachnos group, it was not the defense debuffs that were the threatening thing about this enemy group, as anyone who has ever faught against carnies will know. Lethality Increase: ~1.7% Cimerorans: This group was only tested once, due to how clearly it would have succeeded on all tests. The composition of the groups or the inital hits needing to coalesce was not a factor with this enemy group since basically all of their attacks do -defense. Lethality Increase: ~5.2% CoT: The Circle of Thorns groups I tested failed all 3 tests, they do not appear to have defense debuffs as claimed. Lethality Increase: 0% Council: The Council groups I tested also failed all 3 tests, they do not appear to have defense debuffs as claimed. Lethality Increase: 0% Crey: They crey group I tested against clearly had no defense debuffs, however I expect it was an atypical mob (almost all "tanks" with a couple of paragon protectors) possibly due to being out of the normal level range crey are encountered in. I only bothered to record my results for tests on this enemy group once. Lethality Increase: 0% Overall the lethality increase from all groups tested was 1.75% Yes thats right, even with cherrypicked enemy groups, cherrypicked stats for the "resistance-based" tank I am supposed to be, and with the hardest enemy groups possible +4 and x8, a measly 1.75% increase to lethality was produced. Clearly with anything less, such as enemies at +3 or +2, this result is even less marked. To compound this, two of the groups that actually somewhat succeded in the test (Arachnos and Carnies), have other more threatening qualities in their powersets which would drown out any noticability regarding the lethality difference of their defense debuffs. As a final thing to note, for these tests I did leave my alpha on again, which reminded me that for a long time throughout the history of the game the "level shift" provided by tier 3 alphas did not exist. I would expect that not even you would argue a 1.75% increase in lethality would undo the decrease in difficulty that was introduced through the introduction of level shift, and the incarnate system as a whole.

Yup my bad, I forgot to turn my alpha off. Well considering your point was that this change would neuter resistance based sets, running into a pack of +4 enemies with powers based around debuffing defense whilst having having around 30 defense myself is a rather rare sitution to have crop up in standard gameplay and whatever result it happens to produce is also a far cry from substantiating the position you've decided to take. With that in mind, ill pass on that for now. Inconsequential, only the outer clamp need be changed in order to enable hit chances of 95-100% Editing this post to squeeze in a response to @Rylas: Firstly yes it changes very little and is only a minor annoyance. In PvE. I would like to point out though that the smaller the chance of something like this happening is, the more of an important event it is when it does happen. For example if you are soloing an elite boss or something and lets say the clamp was set to 50% rather than 95%, well then both you and your opponent would clearly miss a ton of your powers in that fight you wouldnt be surprised when that happened. However with the clamp set as it is where it only happens to kick in 5% of the time, you and your opponent fight and this time you both hit all your attacks except for one which misses. Since the chance of that miss happening is now low it has become an unexpected event, and also likely not to happen to both parties participating. So not only is the miss unexpected, but it also becomes a determining factor in the outcome of the fight. That is my reasoning as to why the clamp is particularly bothersome, however you dont have to accept it. I think even if it is only a minor nuisance, if it only takes the tweaking of a single variable to fix then why not! That is why I did not focus on the why but rather on debunking the "why not" arguements I expected to find.

Reading this comment, I had the distinct feeling you were talking out your backside, so to put it to the test I went on a char with 0 defense, went into an AE farm with the level set to +4 and popped a bunch of oranges. The results are as follows: As you probably know, at +4 enemies get an accuracy and hit chance bonus against you, so this is as accurate as they can get unless their powersets also include things like targeting drones and such. Looking at the picture you can see that out of all the attacks I took, only one power from the bosses even had a chance of hitting that was affected by the clamp, all other attacks from all other mobs were not affected. At difficulties lower than +4 this will be even less of a factor. For now let me say, no it bloody well wouldnt and you can find me in RV most days. If you require further proof ill spend a while collecting combat log data to throw your way.

Greetings all, since this subforum came into existence I have been watching and waiting eagerly for someone to make this suggestion and do my work for me! Sadly and to my great surprise this has not come to pass so here I am to put it forward. So, moving on – what is this Clamp thing anyway? Part 1: What is the Clamp? In City of Heroes, the chance for any actor be it NPC or Player to hit each-other is determined by the same formula. This formula can be found on the wiki for anyone interested, but I wont go into explaining it in detail here as it isn't necessary to explain what the Clamp's role in it is. Suffice it to say that using the attributes of ToHit, Accuracy and Defense, the final chance of one actor hitting another is derived. It is this formula in which the Clamp can be found, its role is to prevent players from achieving unlimited damage mitigation through accumulating Defense bonuses. This is achieved by creating a lower bound on the final chance of hitting, arbitrarily set at 5%. This lower bound is akin to the upper bound found on resistances, which varies from 75-90%. The necessity of this lower bound is not in question, without it Defense would become far more potent than resistance could ever hope to be, however the Clamp also does something else in the formula, and that is to create an upper bound! The upper bound imposed by the Clamp is designed to add a factor of “randomness” into combat, this bound is again arbitrarily set, this time at 95%. What this means is that even if the Accuracy and Tohit an actor has is enough to give them a chance of hitting their target equal to 95% or greater, their actual chance of hitting will still remain at 95%. To clarify, even if an actor has sufficient accuracy to hit their target 100% of the time, they will still have a final hit chance of 95%. It is this property of the Clamp I take issue with! Part 2: How should the Clamp be “fixed”? The image below gives an example of what an organic miss looks like in the combat log. I say that this miss is organic because it is a simple product of my Tohit & Accuracy, as well as the NPC Galaxy's level and its Defense. To put it simply, I basically missed because I wasn't accurate enough and that's all there is to it. Laenc, a level 50 brute uses Smite on a level 54 Council Galaxy: This second example demonstrates what a miss manufactured by the Clamp looks like. While it is not possible to determine from this picture alone that this miss is a product of the Clamp, it is highly likely that this is the case considering the level gap and the exactitude of the displayed 95% hit chance. In other words I claim and expect no argument to the fact I would organically have a 100% chance to hit which has been artificially reduced by the Clamp to 95%. Laenc, a level 50 brute uses Smite on a level 3 Hellion Blood Brother Slammer: Following my explanations of the mechanics of the Clamp thus far, it should hopefully be obvious what my suggestion is for it. I request that the upper bound be changed from 95% to 100%, whilst the lower bound be kept exactly as is. The supposed reasoning for adding random chances to miss into combat where they don't belong is an archaic concept and adds only frustration into the game when a powerful attack you know had no business missing flies right past your target's head! Part 3: Addressing anticipated qualms. 1: “Misses are part of the game!” If this is your response then you've grossly misunderstood my suggestion. Misses will still happen all the time in the game with this change implemented, however they will happen at times when the Accuracy, Tohit and Defense of the actors involved dictate that they should, rather than being doled out randomly in addition. While is is true that in general there will be less missing happening overall in the game if this change is implemented, all of those misses that previously were forced by the Clamp were by definition unfairly imposed. 2: “Now I'll have to build for 50% defense to soft cap instead of 45%!” Nope! That would be the case if I had suggested altering the lower bound of the Clamp, however I did no such thing, and would not dream of ever doing so. Altering the upper bound of the Clamp as no impact whatsoever on the current effectiveness of defense stacking present in the game. 3: “Now everything will die faster!” Provided you have a 95% or greater chance to hit your opponents, yes it is true that on average lethality is slightly boosted. However I argue that this isn't a problem for two reasons. The first is that this only really takes place against enemies conning Grey to Yellow, which almost any player or team can steam-roll without any issue regardless and a miss every now and again only slows the process down rather than adding any challenge. When enemies con Orange to Purple, this increase in lethality would indeed be a problem, however at this level of difficulty it also becomes less likely that you do in fact have a chance to hit that is actually above 95%. The second reason I argue this isn't a problem is that removing the clamp works both ways, if an enemy previously had a 95% chance or higher to hit you then that chance also is allowed to go unconstrained now. The effects of this will apply in the same way in regards to the level differential between you and your enemies, where it only really comes into effect against foes conning Orange to Purple. That's all! Thanks for hearing me out!

Oh so thats how it is, unfortunate. Thanks for clearing things up.

Im talking about these here: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Experimentation https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Force_of_Will https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Gadgetry https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Utility_Belt The wiki mentions that these power pools were intended to be sold on the Paragon Market, however I wasnt able to find them in the P2W store on the i25 server. :( I'm quite interested in these pools because each offers an alternate method to get a Travel Power, with Experimentation giving an alternate way to attain super speed, Force of Will as a different route to get Super Jump, and Gadgetry as an alternate means to aquire Flight.