Vanden

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.

Cauterizing Aura is the correct one. The player character is one of the targets of the power, and counts against the limit.

Question for the devs: do the changes made here make it possible to customize the visuals of IO procs, or is that even more work to code?

I dunno. It sounds like the people who bought hundreds or thousands of the things can't be bothered to actually open so many, so that's basically inf that was deleted. Maybe that's actually better for the economy after all!

My feelings are not invalid just because you don't share them. Go away, Mr. Strawman. You are unwanted here. I am not saying any of those things, I am saying that in City of Heroes, the maximum chance to hit your target shouldn't be capped.

I've actually discovered that you don't even have to rob the banks. After grabbing the exploration badge in the mayhem mission, just earn enough bonus time to bump the timer above 15 minutes, then make it back to Lord Schweinzer before the timer drops below 15 minutes and he'll let you abandon the mission and grab the next one, as long as it's not the active mission. (If you're solo, using the /leave_team command in the mission will let you immediately exit and mission and deselect it as the active task.)

Not so! The attack does less damage because of something the enemy did - it has resistance to that damage type. But if you miss an attack when your hit chance should be above 100%, it's not because of something you did, or something the enemy did; the computer simply decided that you missed, end of story. That is the key difference. "Stuff happens" in life, because life is not fair. This is a game, and games should be fair. This isn't about difficulty. As I've said, the effect removing the cap would have on difficulty is minuscule. This is about eliminating a source of player frustration.

The DPS increase isn't the goal, it's a side effect. A side effect that can be countered by just increasing mob HP a similar amount. Exactly. In large teams, we're already at the point that enemies can do nothing to stop players from wiping them away like they're nothing. We're fooling ourselves if we think that 1-in-20 chance of missing is doing anything meaningful at all to add challenge. The only thing it's adding is frustration.

I'm not sure if what you think "arbitrary" means is what it actually means. So this change would somehow also remove the enemy's ability to attack or debuff us? Make it impossible for enemies to be so spread out our AoEs can't reach them? Stop ambushes from spawning while we're in the middle of the fight? No, it wouldn't do any of those things. All it would do is take that X dps you're packing and stop turning it into X * .95 dps.

In what way is it not a "screw you" if you've built up enough accuracy and tohit bonuses to have a final chance to hit over 100% and still miss? Removing the cap doesn't remove all challenge or make every attack automatically autohit. You still have to get there with your build. The only difference is that now it's actually possible.

There are literally hundreds of examples of old game practices that were deprecated because they were inconvenient or unfun. Just because it's a venerable mechanic doesn't mean it's a good one. The fact is, we don't need the chance to hit cap to have the chance to hit floor. We can have one without the other! As for the tabletop games that CoH takes its tohit cap from, in that context it actually does serve a purpose: it's funny. When you're in a social setting with friends, and you roll that one, and your game master comes up with a funny explanation for how your character slipped on a banana peel and crashed through a storefront, good times are had by all. And since you were the one that rolled the die, it feels like you had a role in the outcome. In CoH, it's just you and the computer. You do an attack and the computer just says it missed. There's no laughs or good times. Just you and the computer that decided you failed.

So you're saying the critical function provided by the 95% to hit cap is "screw you?" No, I won't accept that. Games should not arbitrarily punish players.

Think about it, though. Really think about it. We need that 5% chance to hit floor, because otherwise you could get 50% defense and you'd be literally invincible to any enemy up to +5 that doesn't have access to autohit defense buffs. But what does the 95% chance to hit cap actually do? What equally important function does that serve? The answer is nothing. There's no critical function it serves to the game balance. It just makes your victory take a little longer. And if it actually costs you the victory, that's fair? That you did everything right, and still lost?

I actually posted another thread where I tried to make breaking the 95% hit cap into an actual game mechanic. Ultimately though, I just don't feel like the cap and its effects on gameplay are a mechanic worth preserving. It's just an infuriating, unfun aspect of the game.

It's funny, every time I miss an Assassin's Strike from Hidden, or a BU+Aim-buffed snipe, my muscles tense, my blood pressure spikes, and then I think of this old justification, and it just makes me madder. No, this doesn't make the game more interesting. It just makes fights take longer. And what is the problem with that? Is this not a game of numbers? If I spend the time to design and implement a build that reaches the performance caps, and a plan that puts that performance to good use, am I not entitled to the expectation of success?

The ramifications are that enemies will die approximately 5.3% faster than they do currently. We can mitigate this by just increasing mob HP by 4-5%. The only other potential effect is reducing the random chance of a control or debuff missing a mob, which in the worst case can lead to a player death. Which would have, again, due to no fault of the player or strength of the enemy.

The patron saint of games that f*** you over with RNG.

I know you think you wrote reasons for the chance to hit cap to be 95%, but you didn't. I'm serious. The closest you came was: But you know what? Plenty of conveniences in this game make "zero sense." It makes "zero sense" for a hero to buy enhancements for a villain to make them stronger, but there's nothing stopping you. It makes "zero sense" for a time police organization trying to stop the literal apocalypse to recruit fresh heroes that are still focusing on stopping muggings and drug deals, but there's nothing stopping that happening. It makes "zero sense" for radiation, well documented in real life for being anathema to living organisms, to be able to buff and heal heroes, but there are multiple powers that do so. It makes "zero sense" for a player to put a wizard's robe up for auction and another player to buy it as a robot arm. It makes "zero sense" to send a highly-trained soldier to fight a flying brick with the powers of Zeus, but that was literally a mission in the game for years. So while it might make "zero sense" to you for it to be possible to attack well enough that missing is literally impossible, that's not a particularly good reason to disallow that. Maybe I am worked up because I keep missing big attacks with major tohit buffs behind them, and sure, I could take a break until I calm down. But I know that after I do that and come back to the game I'm just gonna keep missing my attacks through no fault of my own or cleverness on the part of my enemies, and I'm just gonna get mad again. There's a reason Champions Online built its combat system around never missing. Because missing sucks!

You didn't give me any reasons, just a bunch of strawmans and slippery slopes, like that suddenly accuracy enhancement doesn't have any value or that the accuracy floor shouldn't exist either.

And why would that be bad?

To get to that 100% hit chance, Mr. Strawman.

When using Laser Beam Eyes, there's a noticeable delay between when the eye beam FX appear between your character and their target, and when the target takes damage from the attack; the damage happens too late. This happens on both the Body Mastery and Energy Mastery versions of the power.

No, Mesmerize definitely has that problem too - the sleep is applied 1/4th of a second after the damage hits, and the AI usually isn't allowed to queue up an attack within that window, but sometimes it does.

Sure, and we can just scale the damage before resistance is applied to whatever the final chance to hit would've been, outside of the cap or floor.