Vanden

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.

I am sick to death of this 95% chance to hit cap. This is not fun. It is, in fact, fun poison, reducing the amount of fun I have when I'm not arbitrarily missing attacks even though I've done nothing wrong with my build. Even XCOM, the patron saint of games that f*** you over with RNG, lets you reach 100% chance to hit.

I've made extensive use of Burn on my Fire/Fire Brute, but to me it feels like a power for the AT that likes to wade into melee and stay there. I don't really like to build my Blasters to live in melee, just for quick forays in when the opportunity presents itself, so it doesn't feel like Burn quite fits my playstyle. Do you guys think its so good it's worth adjusting my playstyle for?

The running is the whole point. Running enemies aren't attacking you or your allies. The slow keeps them from going far.

It should be possible, the Oil Slick pet you can attack only spawns the fire patch if something defeats it, not if it despawns on its own.

Power mechanics question time. AFAIK, the new Energy Transfer and Total Focus are the only examples of powers that do multiple things on a critical in the entire game. As I understood it, previously, it was only possible to tie one effect to critical hits. For example, a power that does damage as a DoT would have to do its critical damage in one big lump, out of sync with the base damage, because if, for example, a power that does X ticks of Y damage was told to have a 5% chance of doing W ticks of Z damage, every single one of those second set of ticks would have its own 5% chance of occurring. This is also why every attack that splits its damage over multiple damage types has a critical that does only one type of damage. Since I've seen no reports of Total Focus doing extra damage on a crit without giving 2 stacks of Focus, nor of Energy Transfer doing extra damage without also healing the player, or vices versa, and never experienced it myself, does that mean this old limitation has been overcome? Is it now possible for powers to do critical hits as damage over time, or critical hits split over multiple damage types?

From playing with the CC proc more, I think I've identified how the proc functions, if not the exact numbers. When the proc goes off and the enemy becomes "contagious," what happens is that enemy will periodically pulse an AoE confuse around themselves. This lasts a short while and it can pulse multiple times from the same enemy, over several seconds. The chances of a pulse happening, and how long the enemy remains contagious, however, I don't know.

A Range indicator in the Target window is something I've suggested in the past.

Well that's just Teleport Foe in a nutshell, innit