aethereal

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).

Let me re-derive Bopper's "combined formula," I was blindly following it, but I agree that everything seems too high. EDIT: @arcane, it looks to me like you're using the "undampened" area factor. Per @Bopper's guide The simple sphere formula of AF = 1 + 0.15 * Radius, for example, which it seems like you're using above, is the undampened value, and the actual area modifier is 0.25 + 0.75 * AF.

Ice doesn't have a DoT secondary -- I believe that in all cases its DoTs will be considered for crit damage (I had an ice stalker, and certainly the important ones -- frost and freezing touch -- work that way). But in general Ice has a big feast-or-famine story. Freezing Touch is one of the best single-target attacks in the game. Frost and Frozen Aura are both solid attacks, especially if you enhance the range on Frost. Frozen Fists is traaaaaaaaaaaaaash. Ice Sword is, you know, fine I guess. Greater Ice Sword is mediocre.

To @arcane's request, I added a second sheet to the spreadsheet that tries to address procability of the powers in some way. Basically, I put in the proc chance for a standard damage proc (ie, a 3.5 PPM, 71.75 damage proc), and then put in how much of a damage enhancement that constitutes to the power in crit and non-crit situations. I'd appreciate some eyes on the (complicated) formula to determine proc chance. I've triple-checked it, but the calculated proc chances seem kinda high to me.

Fwiw, I considered adding proof chances to the spreadsheet and didn't not because of any philosophical objections to considering procs, but because I didn't feel like I could show useful information without cluttering up the sheet with lots of additional columns that made it harder to absorb.

Hah, it was a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm up to doing the much larger number of ST powers, but I'll consider it for some other lazy weekend. So this is just bothering me now, and I'm wondering: Frost, Repulsing Torrent, and One Thousand Cuts all have irregular crits for... reasons that are unclear to me. Like, they don't seem to have any terribly coherent reason why they shouldn't have normal crits. Frost and Repulsing Torrent are both "ranged cones" (that is, cones with unusually long ranges and those ranges are enhanceable), but Shockwave in Claws and Throw Spines in Spines, also "ranged cones," have regular crits. Frost is a pretty good power all told, so maybe it doesn't mind having a slightly low crit, but it's not amazing or anything. Repulsing Torrent is pretty bad and could use all the help it could get. One Thousand Cuts has a pretty complex damage (a bunch of DoT and then a lump-sum power at the end), so maybe either I just screwed up the regular damage calc or maybe the designers did, but given the low difference between its actual crit and what it "ought" to be, this just seems like an oversight? Anyone know anything about this, and why it is the way it is?

I got interested in how much that was true, so I made this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMSg3mw5r6Y0R1lD5c0fGnfaLnsQcU5r2zIm7rb0YdM/edit?usp=sharing My conclusion is that Savage Melee has decent AoE, but it's not one of the top AoE sets in Scrapper primaries. It looks better by comparison as a Stalker primary, since the field is weaker and it doesn't lose any AoE as a Stalker.

(Oh, why I did this, when the info is available in CoD and in-game pretty easily: The advantage of this spreadsheet is that you can more easily compare several or lots of powers together. CoD has better data, but you're only looking at one power per page, it doesn't show you DPA, and it doesn't sum up damage across various effects or DoTs. So it's hard to get a holistic sense of several powers by looking at it.)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMSg3mw5r6Y0R1lD5c0fGnfaLnsQcU5r2zIm7rb0YdM/edit?usp=sharing This is a google sheet I created that includes every AoE power in a scrapper primary, and compares their damage and other attributes. All DoTs are summed up and presented as a lump sum. I got this data by looking a CoD and, in many cases, handle-copying and adding up things, so there are several different ways it could be wrong. CoD could be wrong. I could be misinterpreting CoD's somewhat cryptic power effects (especially for non-standard things). Or I could simply have made mistakes/typoes/whatever in actually entering the data into the sheet. If something seems wrong, double-check it. Corrections gratefully accepted. I don't have info about non-damage secondary effects here. I do try to note in the notes when there's something strange going on. Some things that might be interesting to do: Sort by DPA. Filter out some of the powers by arc rating, if you're only interested in AoEs that are relatively easy to use (you can drop out the very narrow cones pretty eassily) Make your own copy and screw around to your heart's content Some things that were surprising to me: The number of powers that have crit irregularities, some of them not mentioned in the power description How non-standardized arc sizes were

Both of these sets are lackluster. On Brutes, their secondary effects (DoTs) get bonuses from fury, and that hasn't been enough to make them be overpowered or particularly sought after on brutes. Giving them either a second DoT on crit, or else an increase to crit damage lump-sum that's equal to the expected amount of bleed damage, would give both of them a mild bonus on scrappers/stalkers that would probably take them from "low tier" to "lowish-mid-tier" in overall power level.

As I looked into it to post a bug, I discovered that I was somewhat wrong before. DoTs that are the "main" effect of a power (like, say, Hemorrhage in Savage Melee) do get summed up and applied all at once when they crit. DoTs that are the secondary effect of a power (like the bleed damage in non-Hemorrhage Sav Melee or the burn damage in most Fiery Melee powers) do not get doubled on crit, and so they are better on Brutes than they are on Scrappers/Stalkers.

All numbers through City of Data: Savage Strike Normal effect: two ticks of 23.7734 damage (the two swipes of the claws), plus three ticks of 8.5709 damage, 75% chance per tick, cancel when a tick misses (bleed damage) Critical effect: 23.7734 additional damage Commentary: The critical damage should be at least twice as high (the combined damage of the two claw strikes), by vast precedent. The Stalker version of the powerset, for example, does a critical for the combined value of both claw strikes. I think that the crit should also double the bleed damage (perhaps simply as another DoT, now that we have that technology), but it looks like traditionally we have only had crits sum up DoTs when they're the primary effect of the power, not the secondary? Rending Flurry Normal effect: 73.948 with a 4% boost per level of blood fury, plus three ticks of 5.6931 bleed damage, 75% chance per tick, cancel when a tick missses. Critical effect: 73.948 additional damage Commentary: Somewhat more arguably, the critical effect should get the same bonus based on blood fury as the main effect. I know that there are other attacks that don't follow this precedent, such as Crushing Uppercut, but CU does off-the-scale large ST damage, it's not a mild bonus on a fairly ordinary AoE attack.

You're right about Savage Melee on Scrappers. I think it's a bug. Savage Melee on Stalkers, for example, crits for both ticks of damage on SS. I'm gonna put it into the bug channel.

I checked, it looks like that's pet AI, not something about the power -- it's just choosing to use an "affects ally" power specifically on their owner. I don't see how that could be used to make a power that was targeted on an enemy also cause an effect on the pet's owner. (I mean, obviously nothing is impossible -- but I think they'd have to write new powers code to do this, it's not something you can do by configuring a power's data.) The Ember Demon thing has a separate auto-power that only affects the entity "pet root owner." So it's an AoE that affects the owner. Again, I don't really see how you could use that technology to make something proc an effect from the Voltaic Sentinel's attack.

But then you can't select specifically your owner in that AoE as far as I know -- you could select *allies*, but not your owner? Unless there's a tech I'm not aware of, which is certainly possible.

I'm not sure that's within the technology of the game. A given power has a given set of targets, and it doesn't have two targeted targets. Maybe pets have some kind of special way to affect their master in the same way that you can have some effects affect "self" even when the normal target is someone else, but if so I've never noticed it in power effects.