aethereal

(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. 😛

Presumably someone could also use their second build to pick an ancillary power pool hold power.

Minor update: With the latest page, you can now more easily find exploration badges by typing their coordinates (which you look up in the wiki) into chat in square brackets. So for example, if you say: [135, 317, -313] Then the result (in Local, say) will come out as a clickable link. If you click it, the game will put down a pin at that coordinate location (in this case, if you're in Atlas Park, it will be the location of the Top Dog badge). Then you simply follow the mark on your compass to the badge. In my experience, this is significantly easier than trying to find the marker in Vidiot Maps (which has the problem of not being exact enough to get you quickly to the actual area of the badge, especially if there's a lot of vertical around the badge), or following the location with /showfps 3 (where you have to mentally transform the difference between your current location and the target one into directions).

M1-based Macs can run tradtional Mac software. However, they don't typically get the excellent performance that one sees attributed to them except for software designed for the new architecture. (There's some kind of translation or emulation layer that lets them run "normal" Mac software). Since CoH is so old, we generally aren't depending a lot on high-end performance in order to have a good game experience. But I'd be interested in people who have run CoH on the existing M1 Macs chiming in about their performance experiences.

It means "I think your idea is bad and I don't want it to be implemented."

I am 100% sure of how resistance debuffs work. I'm not 100% sure of what you're saying about how it works. There are negative resistance caps (I forget what they are offhand), and resistance resists resistance debuffs, and the purple patch applies to resistance debuffs (so a +4 enemy takes approximately half of the listed debuff value), all of which can limit the total damage that you do against a heavily debuffed enemy. But you seem to be imagining that they work more like how damage enhancement works, and that's not true.

I'm not sure exactly what you're suggesting here, but I'm pretty sure that it's wrong. Resist debuffs are a multiplier on total damage that an enemy takes, including all damage buffs. If you have an attack that does 100 base damage, you have it enhanced with 95% damage, and there's a team buff that does +20% damage, plus a proc triggers for 71.75 on that attack, and the enemy has a -20% damage resistance debuff, then total damage is: (100 * (1 + .95 + .2) + 71.75) * 1.2 = 344.1 damage

Total Focus. If you feel the need to put it into an AoE because you live in AoE land, then, first, stop playing Energy Melee, and second it's better in Whirling Hands than Power Crash. I guess there's some kind of argument for saying, "I really want to get crits on TF, so I don't want the proc there." The other choices are I guess Energy Transfer and Bone Smasher. Neither are particularly attractive in my opinion. They have base recharges of 10s and 8s respectively, so with a 3 PPM proc, you are way down in "not very reliable" land. Note that Bone Smasher actually does more critical damage (pure critical, I mean, not crit + regular damage) than either TF or ET, so I think it's actually more valuable to get the crits on BS than the low damage, but bonus special effect stuff for TF or ET. If you want to be able to count on the double-charge or energy focus or the heal, play a stalker, who can choose to pretty reliably get those bonuses, not hope that BS procs a +50% crit and then hope that TF or ET crits.

This isn't based on gameplay, just was examining CoD, so it's possible the problem is in CoD, not the actual game. Or it's possible it's WAI, but I don't understand why it would be. Repulsing Torrent https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.kinetic_attack.repulsing_torrent&at=scrapper Repulsing Torrent's PvE damage is: 17.2044 points of Energy damage 51.6132 points of Smashing damage That's a total of 68.8176 damage Its critical damage is only 50.0492 points of Energy damage. I think that it should be the normal 68.8176 (that is, a crit should double the damage of the power). Commentary: There are a few powers that have lower-than-usual crits because they are extremely strong powers. For example, Energy Transfer has a small crit. Repulsing Torrent is no Energy Transfer. It has one of the lowest DPAs of any scrapper cones (only Titan Weapon's Defensive Sweep comes in lower). Its secondary effect is an 80% chance of mag 6-ish KB, which is arguably a disadvantage of a power in a melee set, not an advantage -- certainly not so strong that it needs a nerfed crit. It's certainly a very big cone (with a 40' radius and a 45 degree arc), but compare to Throw Spines, which has a 30' radius, a 90 degree arc, a 20% better DPA, and a full-strength crit. Honestly, I'm not sure if this was a straight up mistake in coding the power or an ill-conceived balance decision, but it seems egregious enough to me that I'm at least floating the idea that it's a bug. Frost Scrapper: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.ice_melee.frost&at=scrapper Stalker: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=stalker_melee.ice_melee.frost&at=stalker For Scrappers, Frost's PvE damage is: 16.8916 points of Cold damage (all affected targets) every 0.2s for 1.1s That's a total of 101.3496 damage Its critical damage is only 87.8363. Stalker situation is basically the same, to its own scalars. I think it should be the normal 101.3496 (that is, a crit should double the damage of the power). Commentary: Frost is a better power overall than Repulsing Torrent. Its DPA is middle-of-the-road for a cone, it has a somewhat better-than-usual radius (that is also enhanceable), and it's frankly in a better overall set than Repulsing Torrent. But it isn't an outlier crazy good power that needs special treatment like Energy Transfer, and it seems unlikely that anyone will really notice a 15% bonus to crit damage on Frost as a special thing. This seems like another situation where it should just be regularized.

Correct, the "dampened" area factor means that you take less of a penalty to proc rates due to AoE than you would otherwise. That is, the proc rate is higher for AoE power than you had been calculating (that's why you saw my numbers as 15-20% higher than yours for the spreadsheet). I added a note to Touch of Fear that it may be incorrect data.

I calculated the area factor (undampened) in one column, then dampen it when used in another column to calculate proc chance.

I added a separate column for Area Factor and used a hopefully easier-to-follow formula for the proc chance. No change in overall numbers. Assuming that the formulae in Bopper's linked thread are correct, I think these are correct values. EDIT to explain my calculations a little further: 1. I'm using the "combined" formula for AF, of AF = 1 + Radius x (11 * Arc + 540) / 30,000 (This formula basically just lets you treat spherical powers as cones that have arc = 360) 2. I'm using IF statements in two ways: first, to substitute in 360 for any arc value that's left blank (since I thought it was ugly to fill in the value 360 for all spherical powers), and second, to substitute in the value of 10 for the activation + modifiied recharge time for a power that's a toggle or pseudopet. 3. Finally, I'm using MIN and MAX functions to coerce the value into the range of 90% (max), and 5% + 1.5% * 3.5 (PPM) (min).