aethereal

Can't you bet on the monkeys in the original MFC in Sharkshead? NPC dialogue suggests that you could, but I never actually tried it.

They have not so far implemented the name clearing service, but if it were implemented as-described, it basically would allow a name to be taken from a character based on a combination of how long it is since the... account? That specific toon?... had been logged into, and what level that toon was. So if you made a level 1 character and never played it, the name would fairly quickly be back in action, while if you took a character to 30 and then took a hiatus for a few months, the name would be safe. At the other end, as you said, if you reached 50, the name would never be freed up.

I remember an SG-mate telling me, with some pride, that now that her character was at or near 50, she had blown her lifetime earnings on some sets. What were her lifetime earnings? 30M inf. I was like, "Oh, uh... no. No, that's not what needs to happen. How many merits do you have?" She had like, I dunno, 120, she had already blown a bunch on ATOs at 100 merits per ATO. So I walked her through converting her merits to enhancement converters and selling those, turning those 120 merits into let's say another 24M inf and making her aware that she'd blown several times her "lifetime earnings" already. This is not an uncommon story. While the people reading this message probably broadly know that you can net a lot of money per merit via simple strategies like "buy enh converters, sell on market," or yet more money by slightly more complicated strategies like actually using enhancement converters, this is by no means an obvious fact to new players, or indeed older players who don't read the fora. Let's just... let people sell their merits for a reasonable price. It's not like we're adding gameplay challenge by making people go through the process of converting them. It doesn't even add grind, the difference between: Go to merit vendor > buy enh converters > put on market and Go to merit vendor > buy inf is like maybe 30 extra seconds of work. We can seed enhancement converters on the AH if this means that the market for them dries up. I don't think that we gain anything by making players who aren't aware of the market for converters (or boosters or whatever the currently-optimal thing is to sell) jump through this hoop.

That's not my understanding of what a "pseudopet" is. My understanding of a "pseudopet" is that it's something that a naive player of the game would not think of as a pet, but which was coded as one in the game because it's a way to get continuous effects and other things that are hard to code as a single power activation. So, patches like Rain of Fire are pseudopets (that is, there's an invisible pet that sits there and applies damage to everything in a radius around it). Voltaic Sentinel and other untargetable pets like Lore Radials and Phantom Army are still, to my understanding, pets.

I don't think we really disagree on this. I'm absolutely not advocating for a wholesale shift of everything to balance around IOs. I'm saying, we can bring up the reality that IOs exist and are used by some huge percentage of the userbase (my guess is it's the large majority of relatively active players, but that's just a guess). We don't have to pretend that IOs are the exclusive province of the top 1% of the playerbase.

My original suggestions are flagrant cottage rule violations, though. Like, they aren't arguable. It's not like, "Oh, well, it's a change, but they are pretty similar." The powers for the most part wouldn't even be able to keep the same names. And I do think the cottage rule has a lot of value. People should not, in general, log onto the game and find that their character is no longer recognizable. But the cottage rule has the least value for powers that really suck. Between "the power irresolvably sucks" and "we have to break the cottage rule," we should break the cottage rule. Between "we should homogenize the sets by making all T9s provide def/resist/absorb," and "we have to break the cottage rule," we should break the cottage rule. I think it's really hard to save the god-mode T9s without either breaking the cottage rule or making them overpowered. Maybe someone smarter than me can figure out a way, but this is my best attempt.

I see how you could think I'm making that kind of slippery slope argument, but I'm not. My affirmative argument is: 1. Crashing "god mode" T9s are currently not useful to anyone, SO or IOs. 2. Non-crashing "god mode" T9s are marginally useful to SO builds and not very much at all to IO builds. 3. We should change T9s to be marginally useful to all builds, which mostly means not god-modes (but perhaps a few god modes that will play well with IO builds, depending on the set). 4. We should do this without making T9s huge amazing powers because armor sets are basically fine. To which you and others have responded with black-and-white slogans like "This game is all about accessibility" "The game is balanced around SOs." My comments that you're now responding to are negative arguments saying that we should dismiss a strict view of "only balance around SOs." Those comments aren't the reason we should make these changes, they're just the reason we shouldn't automatically dismiss the changes. I don't think that my suggestions are irrefutable. They ignore the cottage rule, and I think the cottage rule is pretty valuable! I'm just tired of people saying, "only balance around SOs" as though some comment made by someone not currently involved in the game 10+ years ago in a very different environment were an unalterable law of nature.

Genuinely: consider that maybe I'm not missing the point. I don't feel like you're actually engaging. I did read your suggestions for changing the powers. The conversation I'm trying to have is about why I think those are bad suggestions.

Then I assume that you're advocating for my "balance around people who simply are unable to wrap their heads around slotting at all?" Or perhaps we can balance around exclusively slotting what drops to you, but never going to the store. My 4.5 year old daughter wants to play this game. She does not currently understand the state of a power being in cooldown and unable to be used -- she just mashes the buttons and hopes for the best. Also, she can't read and definitely can't understand slotting. There are changes we could make to make the game more accessible to her! Should we? Obviously not. This is not because my daughter is not a wonderful human being who deserves fun and excitement -- it's that there are tradeoffs in this world, and by making the game accessible to illiterate, innumerate people who don't understand the screen iconography of powers, we make the game less fun for people who are literate, numerate, and able to understand and absorb the interface. We have to pick a line, and what line we pick is somewhat arbitrary. I argue that picking a line which recognizes the availability, popularity, and ease-of-use of sets (not multiple-hundred-millions builds, just the use of some sets) is: 1. A game that is more interesting and appealing to the people who play it the most often and most avidly. 2. Not actually particularly disenfranchising to the people who stubbornly insist on using SOs for whatever dumb reason -- they will not stop being able to run the game at low difficulty levels because T9s give a different benefit than a short-lived god-mode.

1. Sure you can. You can do anything you want to, including prioritize the needs of the broadly engaged players instead of the stubbornly unengaged ones. 2. You can get plenty good slotting to soft-cap any defense set without using its T9, using maybe at most 100M in inf. Will that build also perma-hasten and have every unique proc in the game? No. But there's a huge excluded middle between "no IOs at all" and the very tip-top builds. 3. Also, why is it unreasonable to ask people to spend, I don't know, 30 minutes a week or so doing their money-making and slotting? Should I get to demand that the game be balanced around literally no enhancements at all because I find it too mentally challenging to figure out how ED works and what it even means to slot a power for endurance modification, man, and also I don't make enough money to buy SOs, and also it takes too long to go to the store and buy SO's? I mean, obviously not. We get to demand that people put some work into their characters or else we balance past them. Why is it this particular line? Why SOs and not "a few sets"? The fiction that the game isn't balanced around IOs is thin already, and it is in many ways cheaper and certainly less time investment to build with low-cost sets than it is to keep yourself in SOs. And you don't broadly speaking even need to understand ED! 4. Nobody really needs tip-top builds to be "helpful in a team situation."

Time will be fine without Power Boost, sure. Will Power Boost be fine without Time? What is the role we see for PB?

I agree with you more than I don't, but I do think you want to be careful. Is SR as good as Energy Aura or Scrapper/Sentinel Ninjutsu or Shield? No. Is it awful? No. Even the worst armor sets don't need enormous buffs, and we don't want to make Bio the floor of armor set efficacy. That said, we don't need entire powers for people who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of IOs. There was never anything engraved on a stone tablet that said, "Thou shallt provide a way for Scrappers using SOs to softcap their defenses," and people who only want to play at +0/x1 or on 8 man teams don't need to soft-cap their defenses.

Is this addressed to me? What do you see as a big buff, of my suggestions? I would say that only the SR one is much of a buff, and that's largely because SR has become the least-good of the defense sets.

Maybe the rezzes should be able to be used while still alive and under 50% health or something. Or they have lower offensive effects when used while still alive. I forgot Ninjutsu. Ninjutsu Suggestion one: Change name to Ninjutsu. Suggestion two: T9 is a very fast-cast, short-duration (10s?) pet that has very small numbers of hit points and a powerful AoE taunt and no attacks. It might have very high AoE defense. Recharge is maybe 30 seconds? It uses the Phantom Army power tech to be a transparent duplicate of the caster. Basically, it appears and takes a hit or two and then dies. Rationale: Ninjutsu is a fine set for scrappers and sentinels, and the fixes needed for Stalkers are out of the scope of T9. This is flavorful, not very good, and gives a unique type of mitigation to Ninjutsu which is often basically in theme, "Like SR."

Okay, guys, real talk: 1. Any player willing to spend a few minutes learning to make inf and buy set IOs, and either read through set descriptions or copy builds off the forum, can already make a character who is significantly more durable than "godmode" was back in the day. There are only a few sets that benefit to any real degree from a short period of increased durability (mainly, pure-resist sets on the 75% resist-cap classes). For other power-sets, you're at most benefitting the people who stubbornly resist using IOs. 2. Given #1, almost nothing is going to be worth a crash. Even if a careful player could get value out of a crash-power, they're just OBNOXIOUS and fiddly and most people are not going to want to play a crash power. Look at the wailing and gnashing of teeth that we had here when there was a suggestion made to make Rage have a totally avoidable crash! 3. Also, armor sets and armor ATs are strong! We do not need to give Brutes a big buff. Like that is literally the last thing we need. There are all kinds of fun offense-oriented T9 powers you could give, but they would take already extremely strong characters and give them a big buff.

The old crashing god-mode T9 armor powers are broadly bad. This is a suggestion for thematic, choosable powers. This suggestion flagrantly violates the cottage rule. In general, I have been looking for relatively low-power T9s, just not utterly useless, because in general armor sets are quite good, and huge buffs for them are not necessary. Super Reflexes Clickable +to-hit (maybe 10%), +recharge (maybe 50%), +damage (maybe 20%), mez protect all to a high degree (clickable while mezzed). 20 second duration, 4 minute recharge, no crash, moderate endurance cost (maybe 10?). Rationale: SR needs a little oomph. It doesn't need any more defense, obviously, and I think giving it heals or resists is a bad idea, but the common complaint is that all it gives you is defense. This gives you a thematic burst of speed to help you deal with tough enemies, and damage and recharge are basically always welcome. It's not perma-able. Invulnerability Auto-power. When enemies attack you with a melee-tagged attack, they have a small chance (10%) to proc a knockdown on themselves as they literally bounce off you. For Brutes only, the same proc gives you a mild bonus Fury amount (5ish?) Rationale: Invul is fine, but kind of low-key. This doesn't really have that much game effect, but it feels like it's a flavorful, prestige ability. Like, "Suckers!" The Brute thing is to keep it from being a net negative to fury gen for them. Electric Armor For Scrappers/Stalkers/Sentinels: +10% def-all, +big number regen (I don't know regen numbers well), +20% self heal at initiation, no crash, moderate endurance, 30 second duration, 5 minute recharge. For Tankers/Brutes: Not sure, honestly. Maybe just the above. Rationale: Electric Armor is a good set for tanks/brutes and a not-so-good set for the 75% resist-cap ATs. Those ATs really could use a burst of survivability, but giving more resist is unlikely to help survivability in the current environment (they'll already be at or close to cap in most resists), and the crash isn't worth it. So we give them a no-crash power that is likely to substantially improve their survivability. For Tanks/Brutes, the set doesn't really need a buff, but it would be nice to give them the opportunity to turn into a lightning monster every once in a while. Energy Aura Toggle: When active, -10% def-all, and you proc energy damage on all of your attacks for an expected bonus of +20% damage. Rationale: Energy Aura does not need a buff, this is a flavorful but not-very-good power that you could take some prestige factor when steamrolling content.

Scrappers crit less often, not more often, than Stalkers under basically realistic conditions (which is good, because Stalker base damage is lower). The math is really complicated, but long story short, a scrapper has a 16% base chance to crit better-than-minion-class PvE enemies (assuming Superior Scrapper Strikes ATO), and it would take extraordinary abuse of the PPM mechanic and a textbook perfect attack chain to get the uptime of their other proc to be more than one attack in four, so 16% normally plus 50% one time in four. A stalker has 10% base, plus every fourth attack can be an auto-crit AS, plus the PPM of the "go into hide" ATO is twice what the PPM of the Scrapper "get 50% crit rate" proc is, so if we imagine that Scrappers can get to one attack every four uptime of their proc, stalkers should be able to get one-attack-every-four of auto-crit-from-hide, and that totally swamps the lower base rate. That's without imagining a team, in which case a stalker can get 30% crit rate totally ignoring their actual crit mechanics.

As far as I'm aware, nobody has yet demonstrated the ability to add animations to the game. Maybe we'll get there eventually! But you'll be more likely to get immediate gratification if you suggest animations that already exist and can be repurposed.

I think it reduces diversity of builds and harms immersion. I like being able to make some connections between what I see and what a Toon's strengths and weaknesses are.

I'm fine with, like, an alternate fire armor set in the vein of Soul Noir -- that is, a very different fx that is none-the-less thematic for fiery aura. And yeah, I guess spines-without-the-hand-spines doesn't upset me, but I don't like spines-with-only-the-hand-claws. I'm just saying that I don't want the fx and the numbers to become wholly disconnected from each other. It shouldn't be "you can use the sonic blast numbers with the energy blast fx." That's doesn't seem to be what you're specifically arguing for, but I do see a lot of people who say like "nofx options for most things really."

I'm not super into minimal FX for everything. The core logic and concepts of CoH is that specific power types do certain things better. Fire blast isn't "DoT blast," it's fire blast. Some things make a lot of sense to have minimal FX, like yes, you should be able to have SR characters who don't glow, that's intended to be a powerset that could represent just being exceptionally good at dodging. And some power FX seems like it's... just UI, not IC? Like that weird circle of lines that goes around you with one of the invul toggles. But I don't really want it to be the case that you can have fire armor and not have it look like fire armor, or there are claws-that-are-really-spines and spines-that-are-really-claws.

So here's an idea for how to make MA a little better and have its own thing. Yes, it's a light combo system. Design Goals: A lot of the draw of MA is that the animations are both quite unique in CoH (hardly any other melee sets have any kicks at all (StJ has two)) and also in my opinion, quite pretty. We would like to incentivize people to use those attacks -- this is particularly relevant since MA has a lot of single-target attacks and in the natural environment of CoH, high performance tends to mean building a short attack chain that never uses some of MA's six (!) single-target attacks. We would like MA to have its own unique mechanic, that is not a clone of how any other set works. We would also like this not to heavily compromise the current simplicity of the set. We want to make it a mechanic that you can use pretty easily and fluidly. We'd like to give MA a modest power-up. It's not a terrible performer, but it's not a top performer either. Proposal: Each attack in MA grants a separate short-lived (maybe 10 seconds) status effect to the caster. The status effect is non-stacking, so you can get the Thunder Kick and the Cobra Strike statuses, but not 2x the Thunder Kick one. Most of the status effects do nothing in and of themselves. Some of them maybe do a very minor buff, like give you some immobilize or knockback resistance. Focus Chi (aka Build Up) consumes all of these status effects. If it is triggered by itself, with no status effects, it's a normal Build Up. For each separate status it consumes, its damage bonus increases probably 5% (maybe up to 10% if this seems undertuned) and its duration increases... 1 second? 1.5 seconds? Somewhere in there. (Stalkers, with their drastically increased uptime for BU, may need lower values than other ATs). And that's it! Effects: There are 7 different attacks in MA. I don't think you can animate them all in under 10 seconds, so let's say that a reasonable person could get 5 buffs, meaning that their build-up gives +105% (or up to 130% if testing indicates that 105% is too low) damage for 15 seconds (or up to 17.5 seconds based on tuning) instead of +80% damage for 10 seconds. That's a big chunk more damage. It's a straight buff of the set. If you're happy with MA the way it is today, then you can continue to play MA the way it is today and you will occasionally see mildly better values out of Build Up. You don't need to engage with the system unless what's keeping you away from MA today is its performance. As a result, the simplicity of MA isn't particularly compromised. The very most complexity that anyone would engage with is "use Focus Chi after you attack several times." At the same time, it doesn't add more AoE and the extra damage is limited to Focus Chi's uptime. It's hard for me to imagine that this would be so good that it would be overpowered and shift the meta. Maybe Stalkers would require somewhat lower numbers, though this is a set with literally zero AoE, so it's kind of hard to see that as a terribly serious risk.

There thing down in attack type are the tags used for the purposes of determining which defenses are calling to this attack, if I'm not mistaken. So crowd control is defended by Merle defense or smashing defense, and frost is defended by aoe defense or cold defense. There is no "cone" defense, and cones will typically be defended by melee if in someone's opinion they're basically just big melee swings, and aoe if they seem more like area-covering powers. Which is clearly a judgment call.

Thanks. The names of the scales feels like it's a misnomer. When does the difference between ranged and melee actually cleave to the damage scale used? Just in (non-epic) pool powers? By powerset rather than individual powers?

One thing that I never saw discussion on during the focused feedback threads: are ranged attacks in the main powersets (not epics) of Brute and Tankers now doing more damage on test than they are on live? Like the claws and staff and kin melee and spines attacks? Or do they use melee damage scale despite being ranged?