aethereal

Hmmm, I did get a case where as far as I could tell, a fully drained Nebel Elite Oberst attacked me while he had 0 endurance. It wasn't while I was explicitly trying to test sapping, so I have nothing but my having just used Short Circuit and then Charged Bolts, glancing at him, thinking, "Oh, he's out," and switching targets, only to have him whack me. But after that, from the ground, I watched him, and it was several more seconds before he got any endurance back. It's possible that he briefly had endurance and then used it in the process of attacking me, but I didn't see his blue bar show anything. EDIT: My best guess is he attacked me with this power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=5thcolumn.fifth_column_lt_boss_solider_ranged.rifle_butt which costs 0 endurance (on prod as well, not just beta).

Yeah, I just went around and sapped about 10-15 enemies, minions lts and bosses, from Outcasts, Thorns and Tsoo and all of them correctly were unable to attack me when their endurance was zero. Please provide more info about your experience @DarknessEternal, and we'll try to reproduce it.

I'm on an elec/elec blaster right now, I'll try to repo.

EB's do NOT have 0-cost attacks, but DO have a recovery floor, so you can't fully incapacitate them with end drain -- they will always get a tick of recovery every 16 seconds minimum, and be able to use at least one attack before you can re-drain them.

If you slot Placate with the Perfect Zinger damage proc, and the proc fires, does it break the Placate?

And note that this includes "melee cones." In general, only cones that take ranged AoE sets will have their cones lengthened by +range.

Proc rate is based on animation time + recharge time (as modified by local recharge). Obviously, with the longer-recharge-time powers that we tend to focus on, recharge time dominates, but animation time does play in.

You don't need to run it "repeatedly," just once. I'm sure that you can find someone who's rocking a 50% chance to hit and plugs his ears and says, "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME" when people tell him to slot accuracy. But expecting people to make it so their powers basically hit some of the time is what we should balance around. This is not, at all, the same as assuming that everyone will be soft-capped or that all squishies will be immune to mez through T4 Clarion, or that tanks will be able to AFK in the middle of a +4/x8 spawn and not have their health bar budge.

I absolutely do, and "slotting enough accuracy that you're at near-cap" has been standard advice from the moment the game launched. At low levels, you get a to-hit bonus anyway and it's easy to pick up DFB bonuses to carry you until you have slot space to put in accuracy.

I mean, maybe! Or maybe it's a mistake -- god knows we've seen crit damage mistakes before. I think it's worth asking for clarification.

Enemy buffs to hit seem not that big a deal to me? Every time I'm on an 8-person team at level 50, my defense scores end up being like 80-100 from stacked maneuvers and other stuff. It seems unlikely that people will really get super exercised about the difference between Shield and SR given that. What I think the static enemy bonuses do do is put yet more emphasis on Leadership pool.

(This is in reference to the crit damage of Heavy Mallet being ~50% of the normal damage of the power) Is this in fact true that it's a balance difference? Heavy Mallet on Scrappers does 142.64 damage (per in-game tool-tip). That's a highly damaging power, but it's not one of the true outliers of Scrapper damage powers. In terms of comparison to other powers that get a crit damage reduction as a balance point, Total Focus does 222 damage, and Energy Transfer does 285 damage. Clobber does 182 damage and gets a full-strength crit. Freezing Touch also does 182 damage (albeit as a DoT) and gets a full-strength crit. Incinerate does 156 damage (as a DoT) and gets a full-strength crit. Greater Psi Blade does 172 damage and gets a full strength crit. I'm not necessarily arguing against Heavy Mallet getting reduced crits as a balance point -- I haven't tried the set holistically, and maybe in the context of that, it deserves it in a way that's not apparent in a point-to-point power comparison way -- just asking for word of god about whether this is in fact an intended balance point.

I'd be interested in hearing the philosophy behind this particular sleep change? Like, obviously everyone agreed that sleep needed some bonus, but why auto-hit? My guess at authorial intent is to make sleep powers functional with no slot commitments, so that you can pick one up, put an recharge, sleep length, or end redx in its default slot (or maybe the chance to placate proc), then ignore it. Is that the case? Auto-hit seems like a weird bonus to me, in as much as we generally expect players to be running with near-capped to-hit rolls already -- does it make a difference whether your sleep is 95% likely to hit vs 100% likely? (I mean, I guess it does if you don't put any slots on the power). Most (all?) sleep enhancement sets offer accuracy bonuses in them, that seems... somewhat at tension with this change. I don't know, it feels awkward and like it's not really what sleeps in general need, though perhaps there are a few sleep powers that this will really work for?

I get that the names of the levels of difficulty are a callback to the original difficulty level system, but I find them opaque. Is Ruthless or Vicious harder? I submit that there is no clue from the actual name of the level -- you can of course eventually memorize the order of them, but I think it would be better design if the name provided an actual description of where it was in the difficulty scale.

When I try to create a blaster and customize the appearance of the Upthrust power, it plays the cast animation, but instead of the on-hit effect showing up a ways from the model in the direction that the model is facing (like the other powers do), the on-hit effect shows up in the extreme foreground, so close that I can only see part of it, and it covers the entire screen, no matter which direction the model is facing. Expected behavior: it shows a ways from the model in the direction the model is facing, like other hit effects do.

The P2W vendor has a series of options to lower your inf awards for hour-increments and increase your XP awards accordingly. These temp powers cost 0 inf. At the most extreme, you can get double XP by turning off inf awards for mob kills entirely.

Knockback below 1.0 mag is knockdown. They aren't two separate effects. That is saying that there's a 67% chance for knockdown.

In fairness, the game's own descriptions of powers are often pretty deceptive. Sure, we who spend a lot of time thinking about the game and discussing it on fora understand that animation time is a huge deal in terms of DPS, but someone who sits down and plays it could surely be forgiven for thinking that the numbers and descriptions that the game itself front-and-centers are the important ones.

Yes. All percentage bonuses in the game are additive.

(This is how percentage bonuses work across the board in this game, btw. If you have a power that does 100 base damage and you enhance it twice with 2 damage enhancements that each give 30% bonus, and then you have a 10% global damage bonus from a set and you also activate Build Up for +80% damage, then your total damage is: 100 + 30 + 30 + 10 + 80 = 250 it is not: 100 * 1.3 * 1.3 * 1.1 * 1.8 = 334.62

I don't understand what you think in the CoD page you linked refers to knockBACK rather than knockDOWN. It's mag 0.67, that's knockdown. @Arisara so the deal is that knockdown is just low-mag knockback. There are a variety of situations where the magnitude of your knockdown can be magnified and thus turn back into knockback (by exceeding mag 1). The two most common ones are when you attack significantly lower-level enemies (gray-conn especially, but I think anything below white-conn can do it), or against enemies like Clockwork that have a vulnerability to knockback.

801s are a series of AE missions that @Linea created to be extremely high-challenge. They are VERY HARD. 801.0 is the easiest, and then they go up higher and I guess maybe after 801.9 they go to 801.A? Not sure, haven't been keeping up. I played one of them, once, in a group led by @Linea, with my twinked out ice/bio stalker and I faceplanted like five times before I adjusted to how to fight in an environment that was much harder than normal CoH, it was humbling.

But you need to go to the trainer to level the build if you haven't already built it, right?

An even-conn minion has a 50% base chance to hit you. So if you have 90% resistance (and no defense), you get hit 50% of the time for 10% damage, taking a total expected 5% of their base damage (or 10% of the damage they would do to you if you had no resistance or defense). If you have 45% defense (and no resistance), that same minion will hit you for 100% of their base damage 5% of the time, for a total expected 5% of their base damage (or 10% of the damage they would do to you if you had no resistance or defense). And it's generally true, not just for even-conn minions, that softcap defense mitigates 90% of damage, just like capped resistance.

Shows how often I build my second build. 😛