macskull

It doesn't really matter if I can get a name I wanted if there's no one there for me to play with, unless I'm predominantly a solo player. At the end of the day, Victory is just going to remain a low-population shard like everything else that isn't Excelsior or Everlasting. If even a year's worth of bonus XP on the smaller shards didn't do anything to spread population around, why would adding a new one?

Mez resist bonuses have the same weird quirks. It doesn't help that the combat attributes values for those are displayed in a different format than how powers which actually give mez resistance display it.

Some players build for survivability because they don't want to have to think about inspiration management (or they think inspirations and temp powers are cheating, or they think procs are cheating, or whatever else). It's not as potent as it used to be with the typed defense changes, and to be entirely honest it doesn't really matter in almost any case in this game whether you lose some DPS to get that survivability.

Hey, turns out a little bit of playing around with Python makes this whole thing a lot easier and I can just run it on an entire folder of logs at once! Still relies on manually inputting the strings to search for, but hey it's virtually instant compared with trying to Ctrl-F a 5000-page Word document.

43434 hits out of 45560 attempts, for an overall hit rate of 95.33%. Unfortunately log file sizes start to get really big with that many entries (this file was over 30MB for just 6 hours of data) and my normal means of analyzing the results slow down a lot when working with files that size.

Redside has less players than blueside because redside has less players than blueside. Barring any massive, game-upending changes, this is always going to be the case. It's the same reason Excelsior is the highest-population Homecoming shard, and the same reason Homecoming is the highest-population CoH server.

Did some more overnight testing that was ended by today's surprise maintenance - apparently weekly restarts also affect the beta shards. Up to 1614 misses out of 33732 attacks, for an overall hit rate of 95.22%. I think we can put this one to bed.

The wiki is incorrect, those were replaced by regular Emerge inspirations a looooooooong time ago (and I just double-checked before I made this post).

They do, and quite a few people got third degree burns when items that were previously nonexistent suddenly became existent (hello, level 53 Hami-O's!). Many billions of inf changed hands the day that change went live.

Assuming PvE here, the only set where it really makes sense to take Power Boost is Time. Otherwise it either doesn't affect enough of the kit to be worth it, or it ends up being massive overkill, or the opportunity cost of not being able to take a better epic/patron pool is too high. Looking at Empathy, Power Boost only affects the heals, Clear Mind, and Fortitude. The heals are already fine - overkill, arguably, for Absorb Pain; Clear Mind already stacks with itself and there are almost no NPC mez effects that won't be prevented by one normal application; and Fortitude is probably the best use case but you'll be able to use PB at best every other cast and every 4th cast if you were a Defender or Corruptor unfortunate enough to decide you wanted to take Energy Mastery. A "PvP-style" Empathy character is very, very different because the focus there is almost entirely on healing and making sure the team has Clear Mind since ally mez protection buffs actually grant mez protection again in PvP. Those builds are not particularly useful in a PvE environment because they usually lack any real amount of offensive output and the burst damage they're built to protect against really doesn't happen. I mean, sure, they'll be useful for buffing the team, but they'll still bring less overall than any other support character would.

This isn't while Hibernate is active, it's while the "nophase" effect is on that character, which kicks in 30 seconds after you activate any phase shift-like power and lasts for two minutes afterwards. The bug OP is describing has been around since 2008 or so.

I was basing these off your suggestions that I quoted in the previous post - from what I can tell the number of attacks in this data set results in 95% confidence and around 76% power to confirm the null hypothesis of 0.05 and reject the alternate hypothesis of 0.055. I think I would need another 1000 or so attacks to break past 80% if the calculator I was using is correct. I will fully admit stats is not my strong point so this is mostly me guessing at things. It does track that the overall hit rate once streakbreaker is factored in is actually higher than 95%, though.

One of the reasons I like AE is because it makes doing long-duration testing like this a bit more practical. In this case, I dropped a character into a mission against NPCs with no attacks, put Fire Blast (with a 95% chance to hit) on auto, and walked away. The instance mapserved after a little over 16 hours but I got some numbers well in excess of what you were looking for: Stat 1st run 2nd run 3rd run Totals Attacks 4248 2980 14533 21761 Misses 174 133 695 1002 Forced hits 174 133 695 1002 Total hits 4074 2847 13838 20759 %acc 95.90% 95.54% 95.22% 95.40% %missed 4.10% 4.46% 4.78% 4.60% (The "runs" are just how I had the chat logs broken up. The first instance was proof of concept, and the second instance ran through the night so the logs automatically generate a new day's file at midnight.)

Yeah, the numbers in that thread skewed higher above 95% since there are a lot of powers that don’t display a hit roll in the combat log unless they miss. Unfortunately I still have not been able to dig up my results from back when I was testing the Theft of Essence proc. I may still have the raw chat logs floating around somewhere, but whatever spreadsheets I used to do the math have been lost to time.

I have done long-term testing with hit rolls and proc chances in the past (think leaving a character in an AE mission overnight with a single attack on auto), on the order of thousands of attacks. I’ll have to see if I can dig up the results of those tests. I’m also not sure if streakbreaker simply overrides the hit roll calculation for that attack, or if it’s entirely separate thing - I would need to look at the code to confirm.

So you are saying the streakbreaker mechanic makes you miss more? That doesn’t make any sense either, and the math is fairly straightforward. If I attack 100 targets (it doesn’t matter if it’s the same target 100 times, or 100 targets once, or 10 targets 10 times, since streakbreaker only cares about who is attacking and what their last hit chance was) with maximum chance to hit I should hit 95 of those 100 attacks. Each of the five attacks that miss will guarantee a hit on the follow-up attack, which means that I will essentially land 100 hits with 105 attacks, which is higher than 95%. Yes, you’d need a lot of data to accurately test that, but that’s true for any RNG testing.

Not really, the effect of streakbreaker actually increases the the number of attacks a player with max hit chance will land. Given enough attacks at 95% chance to hit, you’d expect your overall hit percentage to be 95% but streakbreaker makes it 95.24%. If the player has a 90% chance to hit, streakbreaker turns that into 90.91%, which means at the low end of the top bracket streakbreaker is actually helping a player hit ten percent more often. Yeah, that was meant to be a quick back-of-the-napkin thought experiment. I could do it again with only the toggle power but the results will stay the same - the point of the math was to show that streakbreaker does not force hits at a rate higher than the attacker will already be rolling.

Are you upset because you thought NPCs getting access to the streakbreaker mechanic was a recent change, or are you upset because NPCs get streakbreaker at all? This reply makes it seem like the former but your OP definitely says otherwise.

That just ends up being due to their relative lack of mobility and having to constantly micromanage pets to prevent them from dragging extra mobs in. I don't know how you can improve on the mobility portion short of either reducing the "leash" distance for your pets to teleport back to you, or making your pets inherit your travel powers.

So, I'll give Ultimo the benefit of the doubt on this one. He said he didn't have Practiced Brawler yet, so odds are pretty good he's below level 10 and I really wouldn't expect a character at that level to have any enhancements slotted unless they got them as drops. Granted, any character at that level is going to be awful to play.

OP probably did not play back when your pets needed to be resummoned every time you zoned (and the recharge times of the pet summon powers were 60/90/120 seconds instead of 5/10/15 seconds) and the upgrades needed to be applied to each pet individually.

PB doesn’t work on Cold shields.

There is no case in which the streakbreaker mechanic will force hits at a higher rate than what the attacking character should already be hitting. To use OP’s example: A Super Reflexes Scrapper with its auto and toggle powers active has 16.65% defense, assuming no other sources of defense - and no slotted enhancements in any of those powers. If that Scrapper is being attacked by an even-con minion, that minion will have a (50-16.65=33.35%) chance to hit, or roughly 1 in 3. A 33.35% chance to hit puts that critter in the streakbreaker bracket that requires six misses before forcing a hit. The chance of an enemy missing six times in a row with that hit chance is less than 9%. In other words, in this specific scenario it’s more than three times as likely for your character to simply get hit because of a successful hit roll than it is for your character to get hit because of streakbreaker.

Wait, are you seriously saying BFR isn’t that bad because its cast time is shorter than some nukes? Surely you understand why that is a completely useless comparison?

Quitting a TF isn’t griefing.