Defibrillator Test Team Task Force

[Bopper]

  

16 hours ago, Jimmy said:

@Replacement, @Wavicle, @Myrmidon, @Vanden, @oedipus_tex, @Bopper, @Galaxy Brain

 

Mass ping!

 

If any of you have time, it would be incredibly helpful to get some heavy testing done of Defibrillate to ensure it's working properly under various different circumstances.

• Do all components of the power work no matter who the initial target is?
• Do all components of the power work while exemplared?
• Do all components of the power work if cast while you or the target is moving?
• Do all components of the power work in PvP?
• All components = 
  • Allies resurrected
  • Foes drained
  • Static consumed
  • 20ft radius
  • VFX on everyone involved

There's a lot of technical complexity (and new tech) being used in the implementation here, so it needs a thorough looking over 🙂

@Replacement @Wavicle @Myrmidon @Vanden @oedipus_tex @Galaxy Brain @Sir Myshkin

 

All, as per Jimmy's request, I thought it might be a good idea to work a separate thread where we can coordinate and discuss how to best test Defibrillator under the circumstances mentioned. I added Sir Myshkin as I've seen his work in the past when testing procs, and he has one of the best eyes when it comes to finding details that are not obvious to the naked eye. So if he's up for the task, the more the merrier. I also didn't want to make this a private message as others could monitor and contribute if they like.

 

Personally, I don't get much time to test and when I do it is in off hours. I tend to log into the game around 10pm-12am Pacific during the weekdays, then I have much more time available to me on Sundays for test. If anyone is on when I am on, I'd be happy to test with you (I'm good at playing a dead ally). My in game Beta handle is @BopperCOH or on the COH Homecoming Discord as @Bopper. Replacement is also on Discord as @Replacement.

 

Below I will put in spoilers the testing that was reported back already as an easy to find reference.

 

Oedipus Tex (Found end. drain and sleep WAI when targeting enemy or dead ally. Sleep is possibly too strong. Ally Rez did not work when targeting enemy)

Spoiler

  

15 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

I did my best to test Defibrillate. It works as far as I can tell, altho there is a lot going on with this power so I couldn't confirm everything. For example it's not clear to me how much endurance it should be draining per stack of Static.

 

 

• Do all components of the power work no matter who the initial target is?
  • The end drain and sleep work correctly when the power is cast at an enemy target or at a dead player.
    • What's the Mag of the Sleep supposed to be? Power descriptsays Mag 3 but It seemed to be Sleeping bosses (Warhulks), altho its not super easy to tell if that's what's happening. I don't think that enemy has a special weakness to Sleep. 
  • The resurrection effect seems to work if you cast directly on the dead player.
    • When I used Defib on an enemy target, it failed to rezz the player consistently. Meaning it sometimes worked sometimes not. Here's the range the dead player was at when it failed, tho it seems like it should be within 20 feet:
  • Possible discrepancy: the power is auto hit when used on dead players but rolls to hit when used on enemies. I can't tell if this is an actual issue in practice though.

Overall: it might be a good idea to just make Defribrellate a PBAoE with no target at all and resolve any discrepancies with different target types.

 

• Do all components of the power work while exemplared?
  • Didn't test
• Do all components of the power work if cast while you or the target is moving?
  • As far as I can tell, yes
• Do all components of the power work in PvP?
  • Didn't test

 

 

 

 

 

Replacement (Confirms stacks increase end drain, all targets sleep, end. drain and have FX. Found possible bug when casting Defibrillate then immediately going out-of-range)

Spoiler

  

4 hours ago, Replacement said:

Some Defibrillate testing on a Defender, completely ignoring the Ally revive (because I have no friends).

 

The good: Defibrillate is taking stacks, is sleeping targets, draining end from all targets, is playing FX on all targets (I only attempted against a pack of 3 freakshow.  I have no idea what the target caps are, here).  Stacks are definitely affecting the end drain:  544.43 points of their endurance with 10-11 stacks.  Versus 60.48 points of endurance each without any stacks.

 

The weird: As I think @Myrmidon mentioned, the description should be updated taking a cue from the electric melee attacks or electric control's static field to explain the Sleep portion.

 

The bug: Jousting causes the power to waste.  

Steps to reproduce:

1) Fly toggled on

2) Activate Defibrillate from far away from target enemy

3) Fly past enemy (buzzing close enough that the power tries to activate)

 

Result: Power goes on cooldown, Static stacks are lost, sound effect and animation plays, no hit chance is played in chat log, no effect on enemies (no idea if allies are revived).  Enemies don't even register a hostile action occurred.

 

 

 

Edited March 19, 2020 by Bopper

[Replacement]

I'm on board.  I'm in eastern time and usually available any time between noon and 10, so I won't be overlapping any with Bopper during the week days.  Can be around on weekends though, including late.

 

My job consists of about 4 hours every day of "regular person work" followed by about 8 hours of intermittent reactive stuff that's easy to shuffle around to prioritize important things, like video game testing.

[Galaxy Brain]

I'm currently quarantined so I'm game. Just @Galaxy Brain me 🙂

[Bopper]

I just did a very small and informal test, and already I feel like I'm gonna need to perform video recording to playback, as it is too difficult to know the exact number of stacks I have while also monitoring the enemy's combat attributes using a Power Analyzer.

 

My test was looking at the magnitude of the sleep as well as the duration when having varying number of stacks.

 

At 0 stacks, I got a magnitude 3 sleep that lasted about 10 seconds.

At 6 stacks, I got a magnitude 6 sleep that lasted about 55 sec

At ~13 stacks, I got a magnitude 9 sleep that lasted about 80 sec

At ~15 stacks (really hard to tell, but seemed like more than 13), I got a magnitude 3 sleep that lasted about 105 sec.

 

There seems to be something funny there that needs to be looked at. For the most part, I had 3 enemies in my vicinity and I usually had the Sentinel out when I cast it (I can't say for sure if any of the above results had the sentinel leaving just before cast). Again, this is an informal test that might get some of the other testers an area to look at. I'll set up video recording later and provide follow up testing where I can get down to the nit-noid details of duration and magnitude of sleep, the number of stacks used, and the exact conditions of the test (was sentinel out, was I in the Faraday Cage, etc).

[Vanden]

Unfortunately, I don't generally have time to do any really in-depth testing, only superficial stuff. I wish you guys good luck, though!

[Bopper]

Did some additional tests with the magnitude and duration effects. 

 

Big take away, the more stacks, the longer the duration. The duration of the recovery debuff does not last as long as the duration of the sleep, but they are generally close. The chain jumps are causing stacks of both these debuffs.

 

Tests:

0 Static, 1 Target Hit, Magnitude 3 Sleep, 10 sec Sleep Duration

7 Static, 2 Target Hit + 1 Sentinel, Mag 9 Sleep, ~60 sec Sleep Duration

0 Static, 2 Target Hit, Mag 6 Sleep, 10 sec Sleep Duration

9 Static, 5 Target Hit + 1 Sentinel, Mag 12 Sleep, ~75 sec Sleep Duration, -200% Recovery, ~55 sec Rec Debuff duration

19 Static, 2 Target Hit + 1 Sentinel, Mag 9 Sleep, ~135 sec Sleep Duration, -150% Recovery, ~95 sec Rec Debuff duration.

0 Static, 9 Target Hit, Mag 3 Sleep, 10 sec Sleep Duration.

Lots of Static (maybe 10-15), Lots of Rikti Monkeys, Mag 57 Sleep (unknown duration), -950% recovery. Basically I had 19 stacks of debuffs from my 1 difibrilate.

 

I am not sure if this is the intent of the mechanic. But I tell you what, it sure is fun watching multiple groups of Rikti Monkeys napping at my feet.

 

@Jimmy, the power description does not give a duration for the sleep nor recovery debuff. Can you tell us how long it should be and I'll cross verify with my numbers?

Edited March 19, 2020 by Bopper
added results for my 19 static test (in italics) and a 0 static test on Rikti Monkeys

[Myrmidon]

I’m game. I have plenty of time in the afternoon/evening Tuesday-Friday and morning to evening on Saturday.

 

@Myrmidon

Edited March 19, 2020 by Myrmidon

[Sir Myshkin]

22 hours ago, Jimmy said:

If any of you have time, it would be incredibly helpful to get some heavy testing done of Defibrillate to ensure it's working properly under various different circumstances.

• Do all components of the power work no matter who the initial target is?
• Do all components of the power work while exemplared?
• Do all components of the power work if cast while you or the target is moving?
• Do all components of the power work in PvP?
• All components = 
  • Allies resurrected
  • Foes drained
  • Static consumed
  • 20ft radius
  • VFX on everyone involved

There's a lot of technical complexity (and new tech) being used in the implementation here, so it needs a thorough looking over 🙂

Someone else will have to see about the ally resurrection aspect of it, but I did spend around an hour and a half bouncing around between mobs and testing time and triggers with a couple of the procs that can go into the abilities, and the impacts. So Respectively:

 

• Component Targeting: Did not appear to have an issue with targeting, was able to get it to fire off under multiple circumstances with live bodies, no dead partners to test off of (leave that up to someone else who can schedule a time for that purpose).
• Component Movement: This seemed off to me, when is the power truly activating? I have to break this down into sub-bullets...
  • If I queued up Defibrillate out of range and ran into an enemy and jumped past them, the entirety of the spawn I lanced through would not have any impact from the ability by the time I landed. It was activating, and I was doing through the animation, but no event triggered on any enemies as would usually occur in a lancing scenario.
  • If I stood within a spawn and activated Defibrillate, and any mob in the spawn started to run away from me, there was a chance they would not get impacted by the effect. This typically seemed to be around the point where if they got outside of the 20' radius before the animation showed me coming back down from the jump, they wouldn't get impacted.
  • In both cases I'd considered this failing to work correctly, but also... at the same time does make it feel more realistic that I couldn't abuse a lancing tactic to rez/sleep a mob to avoid melee/getting trapped.
• Mixed Components:
  • Draining: At a certain extent it was strange to be hitting for 300-400 point endurance reductions at just a few stacks, but it worked consistently, and ramping up to 12-16 stacks is so easy that getting a high number was pretty much a guarantee. I did try this against a range of enemy levels from 40 to 50, and then also against a Monster class Devouring Earth up in Peregrine Island. The Monster DE massively resisted it, but with 16 stacks, Power Boost, and then hitting Defib, I was able to notch out maaaaaaybe 6-8%.
  • Static Consumption: Whether 2 or 20, never had an issue consuming the entire stack.
  • Radius: Where is the radius for the ability triggering from? I was using Faraday Cage as a guide since it's 25' (which, btw, feels a bit small for a team, especially on a MM). I want to assume the ability is striking its effect based on player position, but without seeing lines of impact more closely, I couldn't say for sure that I was getting 20' or not, just a rough idea of it. Essentially if something didn't get impacted in Faraday, I was trying to adjust accordingly, but there were several cases that something would be just inside the edge, and not get hit (which would make sense), so I tried rotating around enemies and wasn't necessarily sure it was me, because using the same base target, got the same result despite trying to inch close to the missed target physically. I didn't spent an enormous amount of time on this aspect as it was a bit of "splitting hairs."
  • VFX: Shouldn't we be getting a sleep animation, not a stunned? With the electric effects "chaining" the target to the ground, the positioning and lul-stance sort of work, but it doesn't thematically mix with the fact they're supposed to be sleeping. Also, isn't sleep the one thing AV's have the least resistance to? If I can super-stack Static, are we opening up a window against AV's that probably shouldn't exist?
    • Sub notes on the VFX aspect of things, but also a question of the duration, mag, and overall effect of the abilities in question... Noticed repeatedly that if I go in, Defib with the Sentinel out and it keeps discharging, but I don't do anything else, the mob will just sit there in that stun-chain position indefinitely. Attempted to Defib with minimal stacks to keep the shortened duration, and they'd still stick like this for an extended period of time. If I go in with no Sentinel, and no stacks, I get a 15-20/s ish duration sleep, and then they move like normal. Hit a Fake Nem and a Warhulk in PI and just sat there for a good two minutes with not an inch of movement. Without being able to really see the duration of the sleep effect remaining, or knowing what that duration even is, hard to determine where the breaking point on this issue is. All I know is that I shouldn't be able to sit there for the entire duration of Faraday cage waiting for them to "wake up" and run away. Whether that's a bug in the effect, or revolving around the duration of the sleep and its magnitude, whatever, it's too long.
      • Also, Gewehr Jaegers are immune to sleep?
      • 
      • That Cuirasseur sat for seven minutes in the "effected" state, and now is just sitting there with the electric VFX, still hasn't run or attempted to attack me since impacted, and lost aggro long before it mattered.
• Component Autohit: In-game combat log files Defibrillate as auto-hit, but then rolls an accuracy check, and I've now seen it MISS and still impact a mob, and also HIT and not impact a mob. What component actually uses the Accuracy calculation for this ability, or is it all auto-hit and the accuracy check a null thing that shouldn't be checking? Also wanted to bring up Procs in this power, what formula is Defibrillate using for its effect? I've had pretty fairly consistent luck getting one, if not both Perf.Shifter +End and Sandman +Heal to trigger in the power when only one mob is in the effected radius, which doesn't line up with most AoE/Cone trigger consistency. Typically I'd need at least four mobs together in the area of effect to see even just one proc trigger, let alone two. I've also slotted the thing up to the gills with recharge reduction for faster testing.

 

Apologies in advance if some of my questions have been answered elsewhere up to this point, but they're a bit nitty-gritty so I was guessing that to probably be a no. I haven't been as ingrained in this Beta patch as the last one due to time and other things going on.

 

Small Edit: I did Record the majority of my time on Brainstorm testing stuff, maybe another 30-40 minutes I didn't cause I knew the file was going to get too long to sort through. Since we're on upload restriction, I'm not putting it anywhere, but if it were wanted/needed, I have it.

 

tl;dr Bugs.

Edited March 19, 2020 by Sir Myshkin
Note

[siolfir]

5 hours ago, Sir Myshkin said:

Also, isn't sleep the one thing AV's have the least resistance to? If I can super-stack Static, are we opening up a window against AV's that probably shouldn't exist?

AVs have no special resistance or immunity to sleep beyond boss level protection plus whatever is within their powers, so the window is already open to every set with a sleep. And even super-stacked, they wake up when you hit them, so it's no better than any other sleep you can perma.

Edited March 19, 2020 by siolfir

[Replacement]

I get the sense Defibrillate is coded similarly to Corrosive Vial from Experimentation: there's an autohit on target, and then the game just uses that to check that it's legal to spawn the targeted aoe pseudopet/power patch.

If I'm correct, that means the missing part is that the aoe patch is being created at player location instead of target location.

 

And also, I think most powers like this in CoH start early (like at or near the start of the animation) and then have a delay on all the effects synced to when the animation finishes. This essentially means targets are all acquired the moment the button is pressed, but aren't visually impacted until the correct moment arrives.

 

@Sir MyshkinMyshkinMake sure.... Listen, I'm leaving that weirdness. Forum @ 's do not play well with Android Vivaldi.

 

Attempt #2: make sure you get some of that (like Cage radius) makes its way back to the feedback thread if you haven't already. Can confirm the jaegers and a lot of other robots show under power analyzer to have something ridiculous like mag 90 sleep protection.

 

[Jimmy]

Does Defib sometimes not firing off sound like the issue being described here? (if you move out of range, that part of the power does not fire off).

[Jimmy]

That may explain the insane variance in sleep mag / duration / etc too. I think it's actually firing off the AoE for every target in melee range.

[Replacement]

I mean, it could be the same underlying cause, but this feels pretty different. That linked bug reads to me like the targeted aoe is being located based on your starting position, and in fact would probably be fixed by changing the location of the damage effect to instead play out as "powexec_location me" after the player teleport instead of calculating in parallel. Contrast to Defib which feels like the issue is that the power waits until the animation is almost entirely complete before firing off the daisy-chained power effect.

 

That's all just my Tech Hunching, but it feels different enough that if I'm not right, I'm at least on the right path.

[Jimmy]

Turns out we had a few different issues with Defibrillate.

• One was similar to the Savage Leap issue. The extra components of the power had limited range, so would not fire off if you weren't in range of the target.
• The other was that the initial cast was an AoE, rather than single target - meaning it was applying the entire power for every single target in the vicinity, not just around the main target.

Thank you all for testing and reporting back! 🙂

[Bopper]

14 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Turns out we had a few different issues with Defibrillate.

• One was similar to the Savage Leap issue. The extra components of the power had limited range, so would not fire off if you weren't in range of the target.
• The other was that the initial cast was an AoE, rather than single target - meaning it was applying the entire power for every single target in the vicinity, not just around the main target.

Thank you all for testing and reporting back! 🙂

You're welcome. Do you still need feedback for the other areas (ally rez, pvp, and exemplar might be lacking)? Or shall we wait until next round of edits/updates?

[Myrmidon]

31 minutes ago, Bopper said:

You're welcome. Do you still need feedback for the other areas (ally rez, pvp, and exemplar might be lacking)? Or shall we wait until next round of edits/updates?

Maybe another round while Exemplared. Ouro-leveling down and a few street/hazard runs would give that. 

[Sir Myshkin]

6 hours ago, Replacement said:

And also, I think most powers like this in CoH start early (like at or near the start of the animation) and then have a delay on all the effects synced to when the animation finishes. This essentially means targets are all acquired the moment the button is pressed, but aren't visually impacted until the correct moment arrives.

That's why I was pointing out the discrepencies on when the actions were actually, or not at all, occurring. Typically everything is synced and ready to load out and we get the animations and damage at set intervals after the fact, but none of that was happening when lancing jousting a target, and it was even more irritating to run into when something just flat out ran beyond my radius faster than I could literally jump up in the animation.

 

As for the Jaeger, I am honestly not surprised that a robot (thematically) wouldn't get put to sleep, it was just interesting to note that the ability was hitting, even with an absurd mag and duration, and not effecting it at all, but I could take out a Fake Nemesis.

 

6 hours ago, siolfir said:

AVs have no special resistance or immunity to sleep beyond boss level protection plus whatever is within their powers, so the window is already open to every set with a sleep. And even super-stacked, they wake up when you hit them, so it's no better than any other sleep you can perma

I know that the Sleep ST in Mind Control is a big gun for AV hunters that prefer that set due to its ability to actually stick through a lot of stuff, is the only reason I brought that up. I've never personally done any specific analyzation of its use, or looked into the resistance totals for the average AV when it comes to any one mez outside of Immobilize (knowing that's typically the only one that can readily be stacked for containment).

 

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

The other was that the initial cast was an AoE, rather than single target - meaning it was applying the entire power for every single target in the vicinity, not just around the main target.

Imagining that visually in my mind is just hilarious explosion of bubbles like a pile of cluster bombs going off and all we get to see is a spawn going "duhr..."

 

Going to have to rename Defibrillate into "The Jericho."

[oedipus_tex]

Would it be easier to make Defib just a PBAOE, centered on caster, rather than fiddle with the different target types? Another headache you'll likely encounter with the current targeting is a person can be dead and rezz themselves and interupt whatever action is going on. I also didn't do any testing to see what happens if the dead person /hospitals mid Defib animation. 

 

That's a lot of possible avenues to have to maintain. Seems like it might make sense to eliminate all these variables just center the effect on the caster.  

Edited March 19, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Myrmidon]

Just tested this one an EA/Sonic Defender (using Experimentation) with level 50 common IOs to get a casual play ratio.

 

Exemplared down to the 20-24 range and the play was exactly the same as Myshkin found at 50. This set feels like it will be a lot more fun on a Mastermind right out of the gate, although, I expect things to really pick up when using an IO build and/or playing in teams. 
 

And yes, fix that jousting issue, because that would be highly annoying if that went live.

[Sir Myshkin]

3 hours ago, Myrmidon said:

This set feels like it will be a lot more fun on a Mastermind right out of the gate, although, I expect things to really pick up when using an IO build and/or playing in teams.

I rolled as a Defender just on principle without thinking about alternative AT choices, but after I'd already started leveling up and actually checking the stats on each ability, the values, what everything did, that's when I went "Man... This would've been so much better to try with a MM."

 

And now I want a Electric Gremlin style MM Pet set. T1 as a trio of Gremlins, T2 as "Electrical Engineers" (humans or robots) that buff/debuff, and the T3 being Deathsurge that summons a couple of Voltaic Sentinels. Filling in the MM attacks would be pretty easy too, grab a couple of blasts, Jolting Chain for sure, heck lets do something different and make one of them Conductive Aura, but have it benefit pets  in the radius too. Give the pets a unique attribute revolving around electrical currents or being electrified if a mob gets impacted they take more damage from the pets, and also applies a -dam -res debuff on the mob.

 

taps microphone Testing, Testing, is anyone hearing this? It practically builds itself!

[The Godchild]

17 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Turns out we had a few different issues with Defibrillate.

• One was similar to the Savage Leap issue. The extra components of the power had limited range, so would not fire off if you weren't in range of the target.

Thank you all for testing and reporting back! 🙂

Yay! I'm helping...even if I'm not on beta or even had a clue it was related! 😄

[Bopper]

Would anyone like to test ally rez with me today? I should be mostly available, just let me know what time (with time zone) works for you. 

 

I atleast want to try solo rez, targetting the dead ally, targetting an enemy, and targetting a living ally (sentinel perhaps).

 

Then I'd like to repeat with multiple dead allies. I'll probably come up with a table of test conditions, but we can start there.

[Myrmidon]

6 hours ago, Bopper said:

Would anyone like to test ally rez with me today? I should be mostly available, just let me know what time (with time zone) works for you. 

 

I atleast want to try solo rez, targetting the dead ally, targetting an enemy, and targetting a living ally (sentinel perhaps).

 

Then I'd like to repeat with multiple dead allies. I'll probably come up with a table of test conditions, but we can start there.

 

This Sunday, I have time available between 7am and 5pm, just let me know your availability and what you would like to have along (minus Kheldians since I don’t possess any at the moment).

 

 

You know, I can also bring my Katana along so that we can kill two birds with one stone.

Edited March 21, 2020 by Myrmidon

[Bopper]

45 minutes ago, Myrmidon said:

 

This Sunday, I have time available between 7am and 5pm, just let me know your availability and what you would like to have along (minus Kheldians since I don’t possess any at the moment).

 

 

You know, I can also bring my Katana along so that we can kill two birds with one stone.

Sunday can work. I had stuff come up today that didnt let me get to it. What time zone are you?

[Myrmidon]

CST, so two hours ahead of you.