macskull

I'm aware of this debate, I've read the last few pages of this thread. If you have a >90% chance to hit, the game will allow one miss before the streakbreaker forces a hit. If I throw a 16-target-maximum AoE at 16 targets and have a 95% chance to hit each one, here is what would happen: Because each target's hit roll is calculated separately, and each target should have a 95% chance of being hit, the chance that all sixteen targets get hit is (0.95)16, or about 44%. That's before streakbreaker is factored in. You may be saying "but how can that be a 44% chance if my hit rolls are 95%!?" Well, that's probability at work, and streakbreaker exists to remove a little bit of the "R" from the "RNG" that is this game's combat system. Let's say I missed the first target. We'll assume this is a targeted AoE power, in which hit rolls are checked from the center moving outward until the target cap is reached. I miss the first target. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the next-closest target. The third-closest target is checked against. Let's say I miss again. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the fourth-closest target. This process repeats until all targets in radius have been checked or the target cap of the powers is reached. These hit rolls are calculated by the game in the order I described but it happens so quickly as to be essentially instantaneous, resulting in what to your eyes looks like multiple simultaneous misses. Is it theoretically possible for every one of those rolls to result in a miss except the ones streakbreaker forces hits on? Sure, and then you'd end up hitting 8 of the 16 targets, but the odds of 8 straight 95% hit rolls missing is (0.05)8 or about 0.000000004%. That's 4 in one billion. Given that, it is possible for you to miss the initial target of an AoE and then miss that same target with a follow-on attack, but that's because streakbreaker only looks at individual hit rolls and not individual powers.

Yes it is. That is literally how the streakbreaker works. It is impossible for you to miss more than once in a row if you have >90% chance to hit with all the attacks you use in that window. I was going to reply to your earlier post about missing multiple 95% hit rolls in a row but I figured someone would accuse me of being pedantic, but now I realize I should have.

People complain about the 95% hit chance and missing a lot, but the funny thing about streakbreaker is that if you consistently have 95% chance to hit over time streakbreaker will make your final hit rate higher than 95% because every miss is followed up by a guaranteed hit.

I think it was hit on earlier in the thread but... I'm pretty sure the lowering population numbers are due to the lack of new content (it was what, 6+ months between Page 5 release and I27 going to open beta?) and not so much the ease of leveling and building new characters. Hell, that second point is a plus to me and it's one of the biggest reasons I haven't seriously played on any of the other servers.

Apparently modifying the existing zones requires a non-trivial amount of under-the-hood work.

Scrapper in this situation, Brutes don't get the full benefit of their higher damage cap with Shield Charge/Lightning Rod and the higher Scrapper damage modifiers make Against All Odds work way better on a Scrapper.

I think there are a few key differences between what is happening now and the Issue 13 changes (since I assume that's what you're talking about). Prior to the I13 changes PvPers had a list of "these are the things we think you should look at to help PvP in this game" and that list was largely ignored in favor of sweeping mechanics changes that were implemented with little to no feedback from the PvP community. At least with this round of changes 1) they're not drastically changing the way PvP works and 2) have been implemented due to direct dialog between the dev team and the PvP community. You keep saying "kickballers" as if that is a group of people that exist. You could break up the PvP community into zone PvPers and arena PvPers and that would be a more accurate representation but there's usually quite a bit of overlap between the two groups. I would expect zone PvP to become more active with these changes implemented since some of the really stupid stuff that can happen in zone is going to be curbed. Re: slows - yes, I'm pretty sure there's a broad consensus from the PvP community (both zone and arena) that movement slows are not anywhere as good as they used to be. That's a mechanics change though, and right now the changes we are getting are ones that require little to no powers tweaking. The general agreement right now seems to be something like "take what we can get for now and see what we can get done in the future." For what it's worth I don't like the Jaunt meta either. On the one hand, you can argue that everyone having an "oh shit" button raises the skill ceiling because it requires more coordination to take down a target but on the other hand you could argue that it lowers the skill ceiling because things like positioning no longer matter as much as they did. Given the current damage-centric meta though I don't think Jaunt is the worst thing in the world and it does have some limitations that prevent it from being too good. Having to give up Hasten in a build is a pretty big tradeoff too.

Doesn't matter anyways, accolades have worked below the level you earned them at for a long time now.

Right now one of the big things keeping a lot of people on one alignment or the other are the alignment powers, which will be swappable after this patch hits so I can go villain and keep the Call to Justice equivalent.

This also lowers the barrier for entry to those who are interested in trying out PvP, since zone PvP is usually the first place they'll experience it and it tends to be horribly unbalanced.

You... do know that it's only "KB" because it's "captains pick teams," right? The goal of these changes is to provide more balanced, deterministic encounters without having to deal with large-scale mechanics changes which would certainly be more difficult to implement. Incarnate powers are absolutely not balanced with PvP in mind (hell, most of them don't even have separate PvP effects flags) and using the higher-tier ones tends to break things more often than not, allowing a single character to do the work of multiple people. Like, why would I need a support character with me if I could just run T4 Incan and bring a tray of T3 greens that heal me for my entire HP bar every time I use one? For what it's worth, I'd be on board with allowing empowerment station buffs to still work since they are of pretty limited duration, but it makes sense that there's just a blanket rule for "if it's not an arena temp power or power you can get in a zone, it's not allowed."

Believe it or not, that command existed back on live as a veteran reward (and later as a Paragon Market reward), it's just that everyone gets access to it now. I24-based servers still require reward tokens to unlock it though.

Okay, I wasn't able to duplicate this. Apparently there's a short 5-10 second window before powers switch.

Don't forget you're also earning charges of both the base TP power and the base portal power when you log out in at an SG base portal, effectively making that day job a 2-for-1 special. As Jimmy outlined above, you've got options already and would only really need to dip into the day job powers if the other options were on cooldown and you were in an area where traveling to some mode of transport would be prohibitive (like the Shadow Shard, but even then jumping off the islands will drop you near the zone entrance which is where the SG base portals are). Worst case you have to spend a few days logged off by an SG base portal to get some charges of those day job powers, and then you go back to whatever other location you prefer.

As far as I'm aware, that sort of thing is usually tied into combat status which doesn't differentiate between players and non-players. There's a PvP timer, but that's an all-or-nothing setting. That does seem like more work on the code side of things.

When transitioning from a PvE zone to a PvP zone and vice versa, it seems like it can take up to a minute or two for the game to recognize you're in the correct "type" of zone and give access to the appropriate powers. This could theoretically allow you to pop both versions of the click accolades.

I think what the poster was trying to say is that they used to use the two powers combined, because Shinobi-Iri wasn't flagged to be exclusive of other jump powers (which it should have been but is now a moot point).

Echo Faultline was floated as a potential map/zone but the geometry in that map would make things... challenging. Those crevasses would be a nightmare. I also don't think turning DR off is a solution that will solve any problems. Post-I13 PvP in this game before they added options for no DR/TS/HD in the arena was some of the worst PvP I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Because of the way the I13 changes are coded, it would be an all-or-nothing change. One thing people also seem to forget is the game has changed so much since December 2008, even if you just flipped a switch and went back to the old system it wouldn't be the same game anymore.

I think the "leave everything alone, let the people that want it have an anything-goes zone" argument was why these sorts of changes weren't implemented before Homecoming's release when the game was still "secret" (at least that is my understanding of it). Given the time that's passed and how PvP in Recluse's Victory tends to go, it seems obvious in hindsight that maybe that wasn't the best idea. Most PvPers avoid RV because of balance issues. At this point, if two players really want to get into a knock-down drag-out fight where anything goes, the arena will be the place to cater to that. Yeah, it's backwards of how it was, and zone PvP will still have its issues, but I feel like the experience will be a lot less frustrating for most players involved. A second high-level "anything goes" zone would be cool at least at face value but my fear is that it would further divide the existing zone PvP population, which isn't too big to begin with (though these changes should help!).

The people who made the change do know that, which is probably why the change was made in the first place.

If you are going to disable non-arena temp powers in PvP zones I would consider adding a vendor to the zones that provides the same temp powers as the arena vendors, minus the inspirations (so you'd still have to at least zone to get inspirations).

I've been approached by @Faultline about some potential adjustments re: zone PvP and incarnate powers. The initial suggestion floated was creating a new zone, capped at level 44, so that players could still keep all their powers but incarnate powers would be out of level range. Initial feedback on the PvP Discord pointed out that the majority of players there at least would simply prefer incarnate powers to be disabled in RV because most players already build for level 50 PvP and would not want to make a second build or spend crazy amounts of inf on boosters. That being said, I'm posting this thread to gauge wider feedback from the community. I've been told disabling incarnate powers is not terribly difficult from a code standpoint but the devs wanted a reassurance that such a change wouldn't be met with a dozens-of-pages-long feedback thread complaining about the change, so I'm offering this one up to the community.

Apparently this may be the plan for +/-special powers going forward but I don't mind the current scales (minus Corruptors getting hosed). At least with Controllers having a higher modifier than Defenders it results in cases where a Controller can situationally make their buffs/debuffs almost as strong as a Defender's for a short period of time every so often.

According to the patch notes posted on one of the testing Discord servers, most of the Blaster sustain auras that also have a debuff component will be suppressed when the Stealth power is active.

You might like the next beta build patch.