Vanden

Destined to fail? Hmph!

a-RA-khen, more or less. It's actually based on two words from Vietnamese: "arak," which means "star," and "khn," which means disease. I know a Vietnamese origin seems weird, since the Council is supposed to have originated in Italy, but a fairly obscure high-level standalone mission explains the connection. Spoilers!

Hard to say if this is really a bug or not. I believe this is a result of some under-the-hood changes to the power system. In a nutshell, pseudopet powers like Sleet would count as coming from different entities, but some new tech allows them to count as coming from the player. Since Sleet now always counts as coming from the player character, instead of a pseudopet, this is exactly the kind of behavior you would expect to see.

You seem to think you’re being a lot cleverer than you are. First, I know you were being sarcastic. That’s why I didn’t respond to your first post. It doesn’t change that fact that you made a bad faith argument. Second, nobody here thinks this isn’t power creep. Nobody thinks raising the ToHit chance cap would benefit mobs anywhere near as much as players. You’re attempting to refute a point nobody was making. The fact remains that raising the ToHit chance cap would be, on paper, an extremely negligible boost that could be easily compensated for. The far more nebulous loss of “uncertainty” would be harder to compensate for, and I could see why you wouldn’t want to lose it, but you could’ve found a way to say that without being a smartass.

I think it’s interesting how Toggle Man is actually a lot more viable now than when that post was written. Back then, Toggle Man couldn’t get Stamina, because it isn’t a toggle, and since ED hadn’t happened, all endurance costs were higher. Several individual toggles also had their costs reduced. They also activate faster now in a lot of cases; Toggle Man originally couldn’t finish turning on his toggles before he ran out of endurance.

I could say similar to you. This part of your post: ...makes me think you have an extremely flimsy grasp on how the game works. Players easily reaching the ToHit chance cap while mobs rarely getting anywhere near it is how the game works now. If you really believe this is causing major imbalance, where’s your feedback thread suggesting this be fixed? Either you have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re still arguing in bad faith. Which is it?

Just a blatant bad faith argument. Mobs don't get anywhere near the current ToHit cap on a regular basis, so why should they suddenly get massive ToHit buffs to help them reach it (and massive damage buffs along with it) if it were to become a little higher? If you were really concerned about the minor power creep that a higher max ToHit cap could introduce, you could have simply pulled up a calculator for a second and proposed mobs get slightly higher HP to compensate, or perhaps Build Up and Aim get slightly reduced damage buffs if they were going to be the method to surpass the current cap. You certainly made your own true intentions clear, I'll give you that.

yes

That's not the same thing as giving every single mob +130% damage and +70 ToHit.

The difference is mostly semantic; I'll try my best to explain it. Basically, Defense has a soft cap because it's just a variable, which can go higher than 45 (i.e. the game will track it). However, increasing the value higher than 45 no longer changes the final result. ToHit chance has a hard cap because it isn't a variable, it's the final result of a formula, and the game won't ever allow that value to be above 95 (or below 5).

The ToHit cap isn't a soft cap, and there's no diminishing returns in the formula. I'm not really sure where you got that idea? A soft cap at 95% instead of a hard cap doesn't really make sense, anyway. ToHit isn't like Damage Resistance, where the closer you get to 100%, the more valuable every extra point becomes. It's actually the opposite, where every extra point of ToHit increases your overall DPS less the closer you get to 100%. Changing the cap from 95% to 100% would only increase player DPS at the cap by a little over 5%. It's really not an amount worth fretting over.

Nobody here's talking about removing missing entirely, and the OP isn't even asking for the tohit cap to be removed, only allowed to be surpassed in specific instances.

I don't put much stock in ad hominem. Hyperbole doesn't make it any more compelling to me, either.

Yeah, we're all just foolishly wanting to have fun in this video game, like dummies do.

A common deflection we frequently see on these forums. There is no reason to suspect that the forums don't represent an accurate cross-section of general player opinion, but there is reason to suspect that anyone who posts on the forums is at least somewhat passionate about the game. Therefore, if we frequently see threads complaining about accuracy, it's reasonable to conclude that a significant portion of the playerbase is annoyed by this issue. We can either take majority player opinion into account or not. Which would you prefer? I think on this topic it's a good call, since the practical effect of the tohit cap in gameplay is so minor. So you would claim the developers of 18 years ago are a respected authority on this topic? That would chiefly be Jack Emmert. I don't believe his name carries much weight in this community.

The alternative is to disregard the opinions of the players. Not a course that should be taken without very good reason, IMO. Removing the ToHit cap doesn't remove the ability to miss in the general sense, only in the case where the player has maximized their ToHit chance. If the devs still want misses to be a big factor in gameplay, they can give mobs ToHit debuffs and Defense buffs; things that players can take action to overcome or negate. Appeal to Authority, then.

Caps need to serve a purpose. As an example, Resistance caps keep players from being immortal. They notably vary based on AT, and are low enough on most of them that even at the cap, defeat is still realistically possible in many scenarios. A pretty reasonable cap. If the ToHit cap was low enough to have a more tangible effect on combat, I would find this a stronger argument, but the game would also be much more aggravating. What fallacy would that be? I guess that you don’t want me to point out that this is an Appeal to Tradition fallacy.

You can save the strawmen. A sliding scale of chance to hit based on statistics that the player can manage and affect is a way to engage players. In other words, a thing that players can proactively do in order to reduce the chance of a miss. It removes a major source of player aggravation. These threads don’t keep popping up for no reason. There’s plenty of games where if you dot your Is and cross your Ts, you can be guaranteed your attacks will not miss, even games where attacking is based on RNG, like XCOM or FTL. Those games are still plenty fun.

Right. Not because of a mistake the player made, or because of some trick or maneuver the enemy pulled, but because of random bullshit.

Yes, they do. But those things still add to the game overall, because avoiding those results gives a sense of accomplishment. Despite their negative aspects, they are still worthwhile additions. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t. It absolutely does not increase the challenge. In virtually all game scenarios where the player would have a 100% chance to hit, the cap preventing the chance from going above 95% does not change the outcome. And in the vanishingly uncommon scenario where it does change the outcome? That means the player loses because of literally random bullshit. That’s supposed to be a worthwhile addition? That seems like good design? I say, no.

Why? What does it add to the game? We know players hate missing. We’ve seen threads complaining about accuracy, asking if there’d been a nerf for as long as the game’s existed. What does the minimum miss chance bring to the game that makes it worth the aggravation? I say, not a damn thing.

Oh I think a mission that tells you to do X and then doesn’t complete when you do X is very much a bug.

You mean like a bunch of bug reports?

The vast majority of the time “Defeat X and Guards” means defeat the named mob and every mob in the room it spawned in. If you’ve found a specific mission that says that but is in fact a kill all, submit a bug report and be specific about which mission it is/what contact gives it. Manually going through every mission in the game and double-checking that the victory conditions match the text is not a particularly realistic goal.

Even if you reduce the minimum possible chance to miss to 1 in 400, you’re still enforcing the dogma that sometimes you just have to miss, for no reason.