Vanden

I was finishing up the badges for controlling Heavies in Recluse's Victory before /ebfp goes away, by grabbing a Heavy and going straight to an SG base so the Heavy despawns (since you can't dismiss them). On the last one I needed for the badge, when I came back from the base the Heavy had not despawned, it was still alive, but not showing up in my pets window. I couldn't grab a new one from the same platform, so I decided to just run to another platform and grab the last Heavy I needed. After I did that, however, the not-despawned Heavy suddenly showed up in my pet window, too. I found myself in control of two Heavies at the same time. The second one seems a bit lackadaisical about following my orders, though.

Well that's not really the same thing as removing the cap, is it? Suppose you roll a 98, but your final chance to hit outside the cap would've been 96.5%. That should still miss, but if the code is to just force a hit in a certain situation, it would be giving you a hit you didn't need.

So Infernal's Behemoths in that one Maria Jenkins mission should no longer become nigh-invincible if both you and Ms. Liberty have the gall to be in melee range at the same time?

This bug is still present in Release Candidate 2.

This bug appears fixed in Release Candidate 2. 👍

Still seeing this bug in Release Candidate 2.

Still seeing this bug in Release Candidate 2 - the time between power activation and the hit is still 600 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds later than expected.

The price goes up as your character levels up. And just to point it out, because I don't think anyone has yet, every Blaster secondary gets some minor protection to at least one kind of mez in i27 (a few already have that much).

I don't think there's likely to be anything wrong with the underlying math that makes the game run. If the game rolls enough dice when the chance of success should be 95% it will most likely end up actually being 95%. I just think that that capping it at 95% is unnecessary and makes it more frustrating than it needs to be. The 5% threshold is still necessary, though. While it wouldn't change players' behavior at all if it went away, the AI needs it so they can still, at least on paper, threaten us.

Hence this thread. What's still canon from the lore bible? Dream Doctor's letter in the Midnight Club makes it sound like the shaved-off dimension origin is still canon, but then we have Dream Doctor himself talking about just stabbing a dude.

@Eva Destruction Well, if you'll recall, the thing that started that topic of conversation was the lore bible itself being vague. It's written in 3rd person omniscient view, and its whole purpose is to have all the backstory. If an answer to a lore question exists, it should be in the lore bible.

Not according to the lore bible; Rularuu's infusion of the shadow shard only made it into a duplicate of what it had been shorn off from. The soldiers and aspects came afterwards, once Rularuu realized he had lost so much power that he was no longer nigh-omnipotent or nigh-omniscient. He needed an army for invasion, and logistical support to make it work, hence the soldiers and the aspects. I'm not sure what you mean here. According to the backstory, humans from the primal dimension only found the Shadow Shard shortly after the Rikti War (Nemesis possibly sooner, but he'd have kept it to himself if so). If you mean the humans that lived there to begin with, Lanaru's rebellion set them back to essentially tribal times. I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to.

Blaster Temp Invul might seem on the weak side, given its S/L resists aren't much higher than the S/L resists given by armors that also resist a third type, but don't forget that it can be stacked with Force of Nature from the same epic.

I always found the Shard fascinating, and wanted to know as much as I could, but the stuff in-game leaves a whole lot to be desired. The descriptions on the exploration badges read more like it's just your character aimlessly wandering the Shard and gradually losing their mind, and the clues in the TFs just give some basic history on what Rularuu's aspects have been up to while they were in the shard, with no elaboration on their origins beyond they're "Rularuu." There's nothing in there about Rularuu dimension jumping across his duplicates, or the Midnight Squad creating the Shard.

I don't really think much of writers intentionally being vague. It usually comes across as lazy, like they wanted to get the plot and characters from point A to point B, but couldn't be bothered to explain how that happened. And if the author doesn't care, why should I? If there actually is an explanation, and the author just doesn't write it down, that's a little different, as long as there's a justification for it; for example, the story is written from the perspective of a character who never learns the answer and wouldn't care to find out.

I was thinking about more practical concerns, like, why did both the Shard and Earth still exist after the ritual went off? The whole reason Rularuu used a massive portion of his power to make the shard real was because it was too late to simply stop the ritual. Also, how did he actually end up in the Shadow Shard? He would've been on Primal Earth to conduct the ritual. I guess the best explanation would be something like this: prior to gaining the power to simply jump dimensions at will, Rularuu could only travel between dimensions by locking onto duplicates of himself in other dimensions and essentially telefragging them, absorbing them and taking their place in the new dimension. Rularuu himself (and particularly clever duplicates of him, like Dream Doctor) has wards in place to prevent this from happening to him, so perhaps when he infused the shard with existence, he had to physically travel there, and by using his own power he extended the protection from being absorbed into the whole shard.

I assure you, I take accuracy slotting seriously. I still miss enough at the 95% cap that it gets on my nerves (and I do verify that I am at the cap). That's why it gets on my nerves so much; it's literally not my fault that I'm missing so much, and there's nothing I could've done about it. I don't see this as a big concern. You're already well into near-instant death territory when the AI starts making tohit rolls with chances to succeed in just the 80s, let alone the 90s. Letting them get to 100% isn't gonna make them game any harder.

I get the impression that @Wavicle is right, it's just not meant to be a very strong power, and Dark Melee's strength is supposed to lie in its single-target damage and utility. It's just there so that the set actually has AoE potential to speak of.

Swap the power order of Jab and Punch.

Psst... I said downgraded AVs, as in EBs, as in, so you can solo them is the entire reason the downgrading happens.

True enough, it's "fair" in that it affects all players equally. But when a game sets out its rules, in this case that you can hit more often with accuracy buffs, tohit buffs, and defense debuffs, and you follow those rules, and despite that you reach a point where the game says "It doesn't matter that you followed my rules - I say this attack was a miss, and there's nothing you could've done to change that," that is still unfair, unless there's a compelling reason that it has to be that way. An example of such a reason is the earlier discussion about the chance to hit floor; we actually do need that minimum 5% chance to hit, because as earlier stated, otherwise we could become literally invincible. The example you gave here: Removing the chance tohit cap does, with enough buffs, remove this particular source of challenge, but it doesn't eliminate that challenge from the game. Player error in targeting, ambushes, enemies above the target limit, enemies that are spread out, all of these still exist to throw a wrench in players' plans. And none of them happen because the game removed player agency from the proceedings.

I have, actually, and that other reason also directly relates to this: It is unfair, because missing at the chance to hit cap takes the odds of success out of the hands of player action or skill, and puts it into the hands of random chance. It is, in fact, unfair that the same preparations and actions can result in either success or failure based on the whims of the RNG.

True, it would be a bigger boon to Controllers and Dominators since their controls can shut down enemies instantly. But the design of those ATs kinda requires them to be able to land their controls. Consider how weak Controllers are when they can't get containment, or how much harder it is for those ATs to solo downgraded AVs with the purple triangles than it is for other ATs. They also tend to spiral into failure because of random misses much more readily than other ATs because they don't have a lot of defensive powers to fall back on. But I don't think that necessarily discredits the idea. I see the transition of their odds of success entirely into the hands of player skill, with random luck having less impact on the outcome, as a pure positive.

To be fair, Greycat, who I was responding to when you quoted me, hasn't actually provided any reasons that tohit should be capped, only "stuff happens" and a whole lot of strawmen. I have not, in fact, handwaved anyone else's feelings away, and I've responded to actual, non-strawmen arguments against. But what exactly is the problem with that scenario? Yes, it would let these characters guarantee kills or controls. But that's the whole point of the powers they're using, to kill or control enemies. It's a matter of expecting your abilities to work as advertised. If a Blaster's powers make them capable of wiping out a spawn, why shouldn't they expect to be able to? So many of the responses in this thread to the suggestion are "but then you could guarantee that your attack would kill or control the enemy," and obviously my response is, "yes, I know, that's literally my suggestion." The question is, why would that be a bad thing? Yes, it makes the game easier. But as numerous posters have pointed out, the game is already very easy. When you miss an attack you just queue up the next one. 99% of the time you win anyway. The suggestion gets us the same results with less aggravation.

According to the CoH Lore Bible written for the game by Rick Dakan, the story of the Shadow Shard is this: One day, Rularuu's tummy was making the rumblies that only dimensions could satisfy, so he headed to Earth's dimension and set up his dimension eater ritual. In response, the Midnight Squad, led by Dream Doctor*, used an artifact called the Dagger of Jocas, which could cut dimensions, to slice an infinitesimally small layer off our reality. They planned to trick Rularuu's ritual into absorbing this tiny layer of reality; it superficially resembled our dimension, but was essentially nothing. If Rularuu absorbed it, he would be absorbing nothingness itself and be destroyed. Rularuu, however, noticed the trickery, and so he infused this shadow shard with an enormous amount of his godlike power in order to make it a real, substantial dimension. The lore bible is pretty vague on how, exactly, this resulted in Rularuu being trapped in it, but the end result is Rularuu's power is greatly diminished and he's stuck there. The thing is, this doesn't really seem to jive with other mentions of the shard in the game. In one of Maria Jenkins's missions, she says Black Swan has a shadow dimension she created using a similar method to what the Midnight Squad did to create the shard. However, it's pretty clear that Rularuu ended up doing most of the work, and I don't think Black Swan has that kind of power. She does, however, have an artifact called the Quills of Jocas, which is likely some Praetorian equivalent to the Dagger with similar capabilities. Also, in Dream Doctor's personal story, it's revealed that Rularuu was trapped in the Shard due to Mender Silos sabotaging the Midnight Squad's plan; however, Dream Doctor claims to have simply stabbed Rularuu with the Dagger of Jocas, intending to destroy him, no mention of using it to create a dimension. So what's the actual story behind it? The old devs had a policy that any lore that hadn't actually been revealed to players could be changed freely if it made for a better story; the lore bible was written in 2003 or so, so the stuff we actually see in the game should trump stuff in the lore bible if the two conflict, but even the stuff in the game seems to contradict itself. What are we to conclude, then? *The lore bible calls this character Gerard the Green, but we know him as Dream Doctor.