macskull

My response to that question is basically "it's not that simple." In 8v8 stuff, melee is not particularly useful because of the specific timing required to defeat a target (attacks are coordinated, all damage comes in within a 2-to-3-second window, etc.) and because having to get into melee range to execute attacks is a dead giveaway which will make the target phase or jaunt away and ruin the spike. In smaller-team (think 3v3-type stuff) melee can be just fine since the concerns I described for large-team stuff aren't really there. In duels most melee characters can at worst force a draw by simply playing intelligently, and many times can beat ranged characters. In zone PvP it's a free for all and none of that really matters, but melee ATs are popular because they can shrug off huge amounts of damage while getting some decent attacks in occasionally. It's a damage/survivability balance: melee ATs tend to be way more survivable when played well than any ranged AT, but dealing consistent damage with a melee AT is more difficult because of the game's pace. You can't really slow down that pace without slowing it down for everyone, and that takes away probably the most unique thing about CoH PvP.

It all depends on how any such changes are handled and implemented. The stated intention of the I13 changes was to make PvP more accessible to the casual player (via a combination of raising the skill floor, lowering the skill ceiling, and ostensibly making more builds viable) but we all know how that turned out. It seems unlikely that any sweeping changes can be made to accomplish this goal without having negative effects on what makes PvP in this game great. (Yes, post-I13 PvP is still leagues better than what you'll find in many other MMOs from a pacing standpoint, which is mostly what drew people to it in the first place.) The community can probably suggest tweaks on a power or powerset basis to improve variety, but in all honestly the perceived lack of variety isn't a thing aside from the more-competitive 8v8 scene, and even then you get at least some variation in what any given team is running. I know this is an example, but I think this is offering a solution in search of a problem. Melee doesn't have much place in high-end 8v8 matches, but you see melee characters show up more often in small-team stuff and even more in zone - it wasn't uncommon a couple years back for over half the population in RV to be Scrappers, Tankers, and Stalkers. It gets really tricky trying to balance things when you have a single character able to effectively hold their own against a team of 4-6 people without any outside help: should that character also get Blaster-level damage? I may catch some flak for this, but DR is a good thing. It's just very, very poorly implemented. DR means you can't buff someone's stats to astronomical numbers (anyone remember how hard it was for a character without Aim to hit a Blaster with two PB'd Fortitudes on them?) but for ranged ATs the curves for defense and resistance are so harsh support characters to provide them aren't needed. Pre-I13 you'd have a pair of Sonics on heroside teams (two Therms and a Sonic redside) but DR on resistance buffs means you can just drop those in favor of more damage. Adjusting the DR curves instead of getting rid of them entirely is the better option and could make running a Therm or Sonic worthwhile again, but remember ally buffs are now AoE instead of single-target so the job of a Therm/Sonic in the current PvP meta would be very different than it was 15 years ago. Getting rid of base resistances might help but it's a bandaid on the problem.

That's his old account, but there are a few other old players' accounts around still. The videos are getting harder to find these days though.

Ice Control powers have always had -runspeed, and Shiver had -maxrunspeed, which would totally destroy a target's move speed unless they had slow resistance (most characters didn't at the time). The -maxrunspeed was removed from the PvP version of the power in I13, but before that you could absolutely slow a target to a crawl. Here's an example (around the 3:30 mark, specifically): Tanks, on the other hand... Ice/EM was popular in the early days because of the slow resistance and phase/Hibernate stacking before the nophase changes and EM nerfs, but most Controllers and Defenders could make easy work of them if they were played intelligently.

...and then fast-forward to the post-shutdown AMAs where the devs admitted they hadn't had any further plans for looking at PvP after I13.

What are you talking about, the behavior you're describing literally existed from the day PvP was added to the game until the day I13 went live.

I'll address these parts of the post since the rest is too long to respond to: Sure does. This game's devs historically had a very bad track record of actually listening to PvPers to make improvements to the game. Hell, before I13 there was a pretty long list from the PvP community of desired fixes and suggestions, and they were almost universally ignored in favor of the I13 changes. The Homecoming team has been better about this, and I27 had some pretty hefty PvP improvements which were driven by player feedback but then much of that goodwill evaporated when the rooting/animation canceling changes happened. What do you mean "in an extreme way?" It's not built for PvE any more than any other MMO is. Damage type is largely irrelevant in PvP. Your point might have been kind of true prior to I13, but it hasn't been that way in 14 years. The first part of your statement here isn't really true - the game was always going to have PvP, it just wasn't in at launch. I'll dig up the source for this when I've got more time, if you want. As for the second part, the I13 changes alienated a lot of people because the game just didn't play the same between PvE and PvP. Finally, I want to address a separate comment I've heard over and over and over again: "more stuff needs to be viable" or "only a few builds are good in PvP" or anything along those lines. In a game with literally thousands of powerset combinations, you cannot make everything or even most things viable. You could potentially do something like LoL where there's significant rebalancing every so often to shake up the meta and keep things fresh, but that requires a ton of dev attention which won't happen here. What you find in CoH is the sets/ATs that are "good" vary by the type of PvP you're engaging in - different stuff is good in large team settings, small team settings, and anything-goes zone settings. For the most part, PvP favors sets which provide high single-target burst damage, so naturally the sets which are useful are going to be limited. It's the same reason I wouldn't bring an FF/AR Defender as a fire farmer - sure, I could make it work but it isn't going to be good at it.

Nah. There are people who don't want to lose their villain alignment power so switching sides is a non-starter.

Do Defenders get better buff/debuff values? Yes. Do their higher support modifiers give them stronger epic/patron shields? Also yes. The rub is for Corruptors those lower buff/debuff values are almost always enough already, and if you can make your character survivable enough, then those advantages are small. Higher Corruptor base HP means any +HP bonuses you might get are worth more, and on the offensive side of things you just can't build a Defender to do more damage than a Corruptor once you start factoring in Scourge. Yeah, we know Scourge isn't always reliable but it's far and away better than a straight damage bonus. Higher base damage, higher damage caps, and Scourge combine to make a Corruptor the clear choice for me. Obviously not everyone feels this way, and the fact there's so much debate about which AT is "better" tells me they're both in okay spots. This isn't like the Sentinel vs Blaster conversation where there's a clear preference one way or the other.

Meanwhile I'm over here wondering why anyone would pick a Defender over a Corruptor except in a few specific cases.

As I've previously pointed out, the population designations for specific servers did not happen until several days after more servers were added. If Indomitable actually did start out at a lower population (which we cannot know for sure without the actual population data from April 2019) it could not have possibly been due to its designation as "the PvP server" since that designation did not exist when the server was brought up. It's not that strange to me. City of Heroes has always had one of the most bizarrely toxic anti-PvP playerbases of any game I've ever played. This was true back on live, and it's true here. Excuses for these attitudes range from "PvP was added later as an afterthought" (it's on record from before launch that PvP was going to be in the game) to "PvP gets everything nerfed" (but none of these nerfs ever got rolled back once PvP power functions were split out) to "a PvPer killed me while I was badging" (strange that you, a player, are getting attacked by another player in a zone which you had to intentionally enter and that has a popup warning which explicitly tells you you can be attacked by other players). Lot of this game's players don't care either way but hoooooooo boy are the ones who do loud. I wouldn't say there's "a lot" of PvP on Excelsior. I can't just drop into Recluse's Victory and find other players to fight against. This is not entirely surprising, considering HC's population is only a fraction of what the live servers had even at peak hours.

This is a great platitude and all but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. Almost every player who shows up to a Hami raid is there for the rewards table at the end (some are probably there for a badge or two, and the odd one or two players might just be there because they're bored), and if they can get the same exact rewards in less time with less standing around on another server that's what most people will do. "Someone has to step up," you say, and this is true - but once you lose that critical mass of players to keep large events like this rolling on a regular basis it becomes harder and harder for anyone to do anything about it.

Excelsior is far and away the highest-population server even though it has no particular designation while Torchbearer, which also lacks a particular designation - and was the first server - has a population only slightly higher than Indomitable (about 20 more people at the time of this post). Given your argument that Indomitable's low population can be traced solely back to its designation as "the PvP server," how do you explain Torchbearer's similar numbers?

To counter your anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence, most people I've seen on Facebook, Reddit, or the HC Discord asking which server to play on get told either Everlasting or Excelsior because that's where the people are. You might get a few players on Indomitable who otherwise wouldn't be there if it wasn't designed as "the PvP server," but not enough to significantly impact the server's population. What's happening on HC now is similar to what was happening the last year or two of the game's live run, where the vast majority of the population consolidated on Freedom and Virtue with a couple other servers competing for a distant third place.

What you said: I was addressing that statement at its face value when I clearly should have been looking for a deeper, more insightful meaning. How silly of me. Regarding the rest of your post... not really. The number of active zone PvPers is smaller than the number of arena PvPers. PvP happening in zones tends to be in RV and mainly occurs for a little while every so often. You can't just jump into the zone and find people most of the time, even on Excelsior. Indomitable's low population has more to do with the game's playerbase as a whole shrinking than it does its designation as any particular this-or-that server. The best anyone can do given the lack of any publicly-available historical data about server populations is make educated guesses, but "un-designating" Indomitable as the "unofficial PvP server" isn't going to magically bring its population up. This is a pretty socially-oriented MMO and players will gravitate toward the servers with the highest population. Eventually all that'll be left on Indomitable and Torchbearer are the people who want to play on low-population servers. EDIT: And Reunion, I suppose, but that's kind of a weird case. You can see on Discord's live graphs that Reunion's peak player numbers happen several hours before the rest of the servers, which makes sense considering it's the EU server.

None that are publicly available. The Discord graphs are useful for 24-hour and 7-day trends, but don't give any historical long-term data. It is interesting to watch though. Right now I'm just manually inputting data from the server status page's population numbers into a spreadsheet, which automatically updates the graph in my signature. It wouldn't be too hard (I assume) for someone to write a script which scrapes the numbers from the HTML and then saves them somewhere, but what little programming knowledge I had is 15 years old and that's beyond my abilities these days.

This is categorically false. Unless the server somehow managed to collect a large population and then have a mass exodus in the space of three days, anyways. Indomitable and Everlasting were launched on April 28, 2019. Indomitable was designated the unofficial PvP server on May 1, 2019. Besides, double XP didn't get turned off on Indomitable for another week after the announcement. It is true that most zone PvP happens on Excelsior these days, but that's by virtue of being the highest-population server. In the first 18-24 months Homecoming was around there was a pretty big overlap between the people who PvP'd in the arena and in zone, but once the novelty of the game being back wore off lots of the arena PvPers moved on and there was a slow zone PvPer exodus to Excelsior over summer/fall 2021. The problem with zone PvP is that it isn't reliable and is rarely if ever balanced, but that isn't usually a concern for those who enjoy it. Most organized PvP still happens on Indomitable.

A lot of this is perception. Population is definitely lower than it was over the winter but it isn't that much lower. This thread has been at least part of the reason I'm starting to track player numbers though, especially since we haven't had a statistics update in over two years. I just need a good way to automate the data collection and publish it so I'm not having to manually check and input data every week.

As promised, here's the update to my previous post: Envenomed Blades uses the following formula for determining damage: (0.15*Melee_Damage)*(0.16*minmax(power.base>rechargetime, 0, 20) + 0.36)/power.base>areafactor The damage scale is melee_damage, which means it can change depending on the AT in question but since Dominators are the only AT with access to this power that number will always be 58.3907 at level 50. Thankfully, Dominators have the second-highest melee damage scale in the game behind Scrappers (1.05 vs 1.125). Power.base>rechargetime is pretty self-explanatory: EB damage scales based on unmodified recharge time, capping at 20 seconds (powers with recharge times longer than 20 seconds gain no extra benefit). Power.base>areafactor is a little weirder, but basically it uses the same calculation as PPM for reducing damage in AoEs. If you're curious how areafactor is determined, it's using the following formula: areafactor = 1+(0.15*Radius)-(0.011*Radius*(360-Arc)/30) where radius = 0 for single-target powers, which makes areafactor = 1. Since @Carnifax mentioned earlier they were disappointed with the results of EB on Haunt, I'm going to assume EB works like Assault Hybrid, where a pet summoned while the caster has EB active will have EB's proc damage ability carried over to it. Like I mentioned in my last post, EB using melee_damage is especially shitty in this case because melee_damage for "minion pets" is 55.61, so your pets will be dealing less damage to begin with and they tend to have shorter-recharge attacks, resulting in even less extra damage per attack. EB uses a slightly different formula for location/toggle/auto powers that uses activation period instead of recharge time, but I'm not going to list that here. Interface DoTs don't use a dynamic formula like EB, instead theirs is like this: (0.125 * Melee_TempDamage) The above example is for interfaces which state they deal "moderate" DoT, but every DoT interface is similar. The interfaces which state they deal "minor" DoT use scale 0.1 instead of scale 0.125, so about 20% less. Using melee_tempdamage here means every AT/pet/critter in the game will use the exact same scale - each entity technically has its own value, but they're all set to the same number: 107.0897 at level 50 (this ensures procs deal the same damage across ATs, among other things). Already you can see this is almost twice as much as EB before we start factoring in recharge time and areafactor. Interface DoTs don't care about recharge time or areafactor. They're always the same number. It doesn't matter if you have a 1-second-recharge AoE with a 1000-foot radius, the DoT ticks will never change. TL;DR: Envenomed Blades sucks - a lot. That's at least partly by design, and I would not be at all surprised if similar changes made their way to other powers, like Interface procs. --- At least for the Electrical Affinity powers, maxtargets for PPM calculation purposes is always set to 5 regardless of what the actual maxtargets is. I don't know if this is the case for all chain powers, or only the EA ones. I'll have to test it sometime. I can't find the source at the moment, and this may have changed in the last 3 years, but minimum chance for a proc is always 5% plus an additional 1% for each PPM, so in this case a 3.5 PPM proc would be 8.5%.

I’m on mobile so I’ll try and update this with the math and stuff later when I get back to an actual computer, but Envenomed Blades and the DoT interfaces calculate damage very differently. Interface adds a fixed value of damage per tick regardless of the power which triggers it, while EB uses a calculation based on the base recharge time and areafactor (if applicable). EDIT: Oh, and the lookup table is different beyween the two as well. Interface procs use melee_tempdamage while EB uses melee_damage. I’ll explain why that’s particularly shitty when I update this post.

From the I26P2 patch notes: Envenomed Blades: Fixed a bug where this power would sometimes proc more than once. Procs now ignores damage buffs and enhancements. That last part is what really did it in. Martial was a top-tier secondary before this but the EB change combined with a few other tweaks to the set make it low-to-midrange now. (This also answers my question about when Trick Shot got turned into a proper chain attack, actually.)

At present I only have a small number of data points so there's actual data but not a lot - Saturday evening player count right now is down about 10% from what I was seeing in December, a couple weeks after page 3 was released. This is true, but the spike in population lasts for maybe a month.

I'm neither Bopper nor a dev but the reason there are two different chaining mechanisms is because until Electrical Affinity was released chain powers didn't really exist, they were just powers which created pseudopets which "jumped" like with your Jolting Chain example. Electrical Affinity is the first set to use the actual chain mechanic, which is more desirable since it's way easier to define priorities and conditions for the chaining effects. This particular example provides a really interesting look into how Trick Shot has changed since it first showed up in the Issue 24 beta before shutdown - if you look at the CoD entry from 2012 it uses pseudopets and even shares some code with Chain Induction. At some point I don't recall, it was updated to be an actual chain power. More on topic for the OP: the distinction between "single-target power which triggers pseudopets" and "chain power" is really really important from a proc standpoint. Chain powers have their own calculation for proc chance purposes: =PPM*((Base_recharge/(1+Recharge_slotting))+Activation_time)/(60*(0.25+0.75*(1+0.75*Max_targets))) where "Max_targets" can be dynamically defined but is currently always set to 5 regardless of actual max targets. To put that into actual readable format, it means chain powers are pretty bad for proc slotting. A 10-second recharge time power with a 2.03-second activation time and no slotted recharge has about 18% chance to fire on each target for a 3.5ppm proc, which is even worse than a comparable AoE's 22%. As far as pseudopet powers go, I'm fairly certain for any "jumps" procs will use the calculation of the parent power for determining proc chances, but someone feel free to correct me here.

I don't see any reason why this command should not exist. It's /altinvite minus the extra steps and the validation to check whether the target character is on the same account as the requesting character is already there.

Veng bait is still contribution!