Aim or Build-up (or the like) allow accuracy above 95%

[Luminara]

The purpose of missing, in the original design of the game, was to ensure that the brainless idiots we fight always have the barest possibility of defeating us.  That was the extent of the design philosophy behind missing.  Not to reflect a "natural 1 on D20 roll", or to impose a consequence for failure, just a basic effort to ensure that there's at least some minute potential for defeat, to compensate for the AI being dumber than the a rock.  Missing was the first and rawest attempt at creating a sense of challenge.

 

But both Cryptic and Paragon recognized that missing was also a poor type of challenge, or that their implementation of that challenge was not up to stretch.  They created the streak breaker.  They removed numerous ToHit Debuffs from player-owned and -affecting powers.  They added Beginner's Luck.  They packed the game with Accuracy and ToHit buffs.  They gave us origin attacks, they removed the endurance cost from Brawl, they reduced Brawl's recharge time, they added more temp powers so we'd always have another attack to move on to after missing...  And then they moved away from that flawed challenge when they started working on Going Rogue and all subsequent content.  The challenge in newer content doesn't come from missing, it comes from enemies actually designed to be challenging.

 

Missing doesn't make the game harder, it makes the game harder to enjoy.  Missing doesn't impose a challenge, it imposes a time out.  Missing doesn't increase player or critter survivability, until and unless the player imposes specific conditions on him/herself to create a situation in which missing is hazardous (increasing the Notoriety well above default, eschewing Accuracy in powers, refusing to use inspirations or temporary powers, and having a build reliant on damage mitigation with hit checks when real danger of defeat is a possibility), so it only serves to decrease our desire to play.  The player has to work at it to make missing represent a real hazard, because of all of the ways Cryptic and Paragon strove to minimize missing as a challenge, and that's telling.

 

Missing doesn't cause an energy blast to backfire, or a broadsword to twist and rip into the wielder's shin, or a targeted effect to affect the "wrong" target, it doesn't do anything noteworthy or interesting.  The game was designed to be fun, per the commentary of every Cryptic and Paragon developer who ever posted, and missing just... isn't fun.  There's no meaning or weight to missing.  There's nothing happening to make it important.  It's appropriate in a tabletop game with a human being acting as game master and coming up with interesting results and consequences when a player rolls a 1.  The Cryptic engine doesn't have a brain, it can't devise an interesting result on the fly... it doesn't even have a list of results to randomize and select from.  It does absolutely nothing noteworthy or of merit when we roll that 1.  The story doesn't evolve in a different way.  The next mission isn't different.  We don't have to buy new gear or replace torn clothes.  We don't lose all of our gold.  No giant ooze sneaks up behind us and crawls up our anuses, laying eggs which hatch later, zombify us halfway through a dungeon run and force us to eat our party's brains.  The horses don't bolt and leave us stranded in the Dread Forest of Doom in the middle of the witching hour.  Our characters don't sport fascinating scars resulting from our catastrophic failures, because we have no catastrophic failures to create those scars.  Nothing fucking happens, and that is the real problem with missing.  If missing had any impact beyond making players grit their teeth and firmly press the next key in the chain, it wouldn't be the single most discussed and reviled mechanic in the history of Co*.  But it doesn't.  And that's the core of the problem with missing.  It just doesn't have any meaning or real impact on the game.  It spends our time and gives us nothing meaningful in return.  Missing is a vestigial mechanic which the game itself outgrew a long, long time ago, but which we still retain simply because "this is how the game was designed", irrespective of the fact that it's a bad design.

 

There are better methods of challenging players, as evidenced by newer content (Praetoria, First/Night Ward, Incarnate missions and trials, etc).  It's not even a good control on player progression because we always have another key to press.  If we had fewer options, if we had the limits imposed by other games or by an active game master, if we were even limited in the ways we were before all of the Cryptic/Paragon additions and alterations, missing would matter.  But we don't, and missing only slows our progression by a fraction of a fraction, with the greater impact being on our blood pressure than on our leveling speed.  It is, in fact, a worse control on power creep than critical failures/fumbles/backfires would be.  At least criticals of that type would force us to reach for more specific keys, rather than simply moving on to the next one in the sequence, and create a greater possibility of defeat and put some of that power creep to better use than simply permitting us to wander into one spawn after another, absent-mindedly pressing the same few keys over and over again.

 

Every time I spend 4.75 seconds animating Inner Light and Incandescent Strike only to miss, it's another pebble in my glass of patience.  I busted my hump leveling this character, I went back into the costume editor over and over again to perfect her look, spent 250,000,000 inf* to perfect the build with set IOs, purples and ATOs, and all I feel when I play her is disappointment, regret and rage, because the end result of my efforts is... watching her float.  I'm not infuriated by missing because I'm in danger of being defeated, but because I feel that my time is being wasted by the game I play to watch enemies experience the fate of a banana in a high speed hydraulic stamp press.

 

Yeah, either change misses to critical failures/fumbles/backfires, or apply ED to the hit clamp.

[Naraka]

3 hours ago, Black Zot said:

 

The only thing it removes is RNG-based stupidity.

 

LOL at anyone boneheaded enough to think that a debuff that needs to connect in the first place to matter, and that everyone and his dog has some degree of resistance to, somehow matches up well with boosting one's to-hit chance.

 

 

The funny thing is, using debuffs to get the desired effect (100% hit chance) is more balanced than just wanting it all the time. That a debuff can miss is partly why it would be somewhat more balanced than the current suggested removal of the clamps.

[Naraka]

48 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The purpose of missing, in the original design of the game, was to ensure that the brainless idiots we fight always have the barest possibility of defeating us.  That was the extent of the design philosophy behind missing.  Not to reflect a "natural 1 on D20 roll", or to impose a consequence for failure, just a basic effort to ensure that there's at least some minute potential for defeat, to compensate for the AI being dumber than the a rock.  Missing was the first and rawest attempt at creating a sense of challenge.

 

But both Cryptic and Paragon recognized that missing was also a poor type of challenge, or that their implementation of that challenge was not up to stretch.  They created the streak breaker.  They removed numerous ToHit Debuffs from player-owned and -affecting powers.  They added Beginner's Luck.  They packed the game with Accuracy and ToHit buffs.  They gave us origin attacks, they removed the endurance cost from Brawl, they reduced Brawl's recharge time, they added more temp powers so we'd always have another attack to move on to after missing...  And then they moved away from that flawed challenge when they started working on Going Rogue and all subsequent content.  The challenge in newer content doesn't come from missing, it comes from enemies actually designed to be challenging.

 

Missing doesn't make the game harder, it makes the game harder to enjoy.  Missing doesn't impose a challenge, it imposes a time out.  Missing doesn't increase player or critter survivability, until and unless the player imposes specific conditions on him/herself to create a situation in which missing is hazardous (increasing the Notoriety well above default, eschewing Accuracy in powers, refusing to use inspirations or temporary powers, and having a build reliant on damage mitigation with hit checks when real danger of defeat is a possibility), so it only serves to decrease our desire to play.  The player has to work at it to make missing represent a real hazard, because of all of the ways Cryptic and Paragon strove to minimize missing as a challenge, and that's telling.

 

Missing doesn't cause an energy blast to backfire, or a broadsword to twist and rip into the wielder's shin, or a targeted effect to affect the "wrong" target, it doesn't do anything noteworthy or interesting.  The game was designed to be fun, per the commentary of every Cryptic and Paragon developer who ever posted, and missing just... isn't fun.  There's no meaning or weight to missing.  There's nothing happening to make it important.  It's appropriate in a tabletop game with a human being acting as game master and coming up with interesting results and consequences when a player rolls a 1.  The Cryptic engine doesn't have a brain, it can't devise an interesting result on the fly... it doesn't even have a list of results to randomize and select from.  It does absolutely nothing noteworthy or of merit when we roll that 1.  The story doesn't evolve in a different way.  The next mission isn't different.  We don't have to buy new gear or replace torn clothes.  We don't lose all of our gold.  No giant ooze sneaks up behind us and crawls up our anuses, laying eggs which hatch later, zombify us halfway through a dungeon run and force us to eat our party's brains.  The horses don't bolt and leave us stranded in the Dread Forest of Doom in the middle of the witching hour.  Our characters don't sport fascinating scars resulting from our catastrophic failures, because we have no catastrophic failures to create those scars.  Nothing fucking happens, and that is the real problem with missing.  If missing had any impact beyond making players grit their teeth and firmly press the next key in the chain, it wouldn't be the single most discussed and reviled mechanic in the history of Co*.  But it doesn't.  And that's the core of the problem with missing.  It just doesn't have any meaning or real impact on the game.  It spends our time and gives us nothing meaningful in return.  Missing is a vestigial mechanic which the game itself outgrew a long, long time ago, but which we still retain simply because "this is how the game was designed", irrespective of the fact that it's a bad design.

 

There are better methods of challenging players, as evidenced by newer content (Praetoria, First/Night Ward, Incarnate missions and trials, etc).  It's not even a good control on player progression because we always have another key to press.  If we had fewer options, if we had the limits imposed by other games or by an active game master, if we were even limited in the ways we were before all of the Cryptic/Paragon additions and alterations, missing would matter.  But we don't, and missing only slows our progression by a fraction of a fraction, with the greater impact being on our blood pressure than on our leveling speed.  It is, in fact, a worse control on power creep than critical failures/fumbles/backfires would be.  At least criticals of that type would force us to reach for more specific keys, rather than simply moving on to the next one in the sequence, and create a greater possibility of defeat and put some of that power creep to better use than simply permitting us to wander into one spawn after another, absent-mindedly pressing the same few keys over and over again.

 

Every time I spend 4.75 seconds animating Inner Light and Incandescent Strike only to miss, it's another pebble in my glass of patience.  I busted my hump leveling this character, I went back into the costume editor over and over again to perfect her look, spent 250,000,000 inf* to perfect the build with set IOs, purples and ATOs, and all I feel when I play her is disappointment, regret and rage, because the end result of my efforts is... watching her float.  I'm not infuriated by missing because I'm in danger of being defeated, but because I feel that my time is being wasted by the game I play to watch enemies experience the fate of a banana in a high speed hydraulic stamp press.

 

Yeah, either change misses to critical failures/fumbles/backfires, or apply ED to the hit clamp.

 

You're way over-philosophizing this. Missing exists in the game because the devs decided they wanted mechanics and powers to alter the ability to make attacks miss (i.e. -ToHit/+ToHit, -def/+def, accuracy mods, etc) to simulate various types of effects.  Missing exists to emulate dodging, blocking, deflecting and lowered accuracy. To try to equate fun or enjoyment out of every mechanical effect one way is just setting your own mind trap for your failure.  OMG missing isn't fun? But I bet being missed is. You love being missed so much, I bet you regularly attempt to reduce your being-hit chance to its minimum...which points to the reason why the clamp exists: It's so you don't break the game (as much).  It's so you can't make powers recharge instantly or buff an attack to one-shot every enemy in the game or reduce damage to 0, etc etc.

 

This constant flapping about how missing isn't fun is just dumb and you all know it! You've just got no other argument to grasp at and will pull at any useless point to stick it to the system or catastrophizing an encounter that the player likely completed regardless of the 3-miss streak that got their panties in a bunch. And no, complaining how every possible mechanic in a game isn't hand-crafted to deliver maximum fun and enjoyment straight to the bloodstream isn't a good argument either lol

 

And I keep saying the whole 5% miss chance is a 1st-world problem, because the reason you grow impatient with a miss (and streak breaker not kicking in) is because you feel entitled to never miss.  If the enemy has powers that reduces your chance to hit lower than 90%, then what are you going to complain about? That the enemies have +def? Or they have debuffs? So if anything, the problem is that you can soft-cap hit chance which apparently is not enough.

[Vanden]

4 hours ago, Naraka said:

This constant flapping about how missing isn't fun is just dumb and you all know it!

 

Yeah, we're all just foolishly wanting to have fun in this video game, like dummies do.

 

Edited March 20, 2022 by Vanden

[Naraka]

17 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 

Yeah, we're all just foolishly wanting to have fun in this video game, likes dummies do.

Yeah, see my comment about wanting every miniscule mechanic hand-crafted for your specific enjoyment straight to your bloodstream.

 

If you weren't having fun, you wouldn't be here.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, Naraka said:

 

The funny thing is, using debuffs to get the desired effect (100% hit chance) is more balanced than just wanting it all the time. That a debuff can miss is partly why it would be somewhat more balanced than the current suggested removal of the clamps.

No, the funny thing is you thinking using debuffs will ever get you to 100% hit chance. That mandatory 5% miss chance is still there. Always will be.

 

(Edit: Now if you are proposing that debuffs enable getting to 100% hit chance? Then I apologize for my misunderstanding.)

Edited March 20, 2022 by Rudra

[Vanden]

22 minutes ago, Naraka said:

Yeah, see my comment about wanting every miniscule mechanic hand-crafted for your specific enjoyment straight to your bloodstream.

 

If you weren't having fun, you wouldn't be here.

 

I don't put much stock in ad hominem. Hyperbole doesn't make it any more compelling to me, either.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Vanden

[Naraka]

25 minutes ago, Rudra said:

No, the funny thing is you thinking using debuffs will ever get you to 100% hit chance. That mandatory 5% miss chance is still there. Always will be.

 

(Edit: Now if you are proposing that debuffs enable getting to 100% hit chance? Then I apologize for my misunderstanding.)

I never said it does, I said it could. To clarify, if the OP or others are looking to give the player a means of obtaining 100% hit chance, it probably should only be possible using debuffs or at the very least a combination of both buffs and debuffs.

[Rudra]

As said, I apologize for my misunderstanding. That proposal makes sense. It won't be implemented any more than the OP's request, but it makes sense.

[PeregrineFalcon]

3 hours ago, Naraka said:

...the reason you grow impatient with a miss is because you feel entitled to never miss.

 

[Rudra]

3 hours ago, Naraka said:

catastrophizing an encounter that the player likely completed regardless of the 3-miss streak that got their panties in a bunch.

I've actually been defeated on multiple occasions because I kept missing. It is a rare occurrence since normally I can run away, but it has happened. Because for the entirety of the fight, the only hits I was landing with accuracy boosted attacks, were the streakbreaker attacks. It is a rare occurrence. However, it does happen. And the missions were run at +0/x1, so I wasn't even running on a difficult setting. Health goes red, one enemy of three hurt because I keep missing, I run, and the follow up attacks finish me. (Yeah, I should have run sooner, but seriously, how many times in a row can RNG say a person has rolled less than the 5% chance to miss? Answer: enough times, obviously. I even shared the combat log on the chat channel I was on when I died.)

 

So I wholly understand why people post on the forums complaining about the miss chance. It is why I nominally support those posts.

 

As others have pointed out though, the miss chance does serve a purpose. (In the provided example, it was to see to my character's defeat.)

 

(Edit: To clarify, multiple does not mean frequent. It simply means more than once in this case. As I said, it is a rare occurrence.)

Edited March 20, 2022 by Rudra

[srmalloy]

On 3/19/2022 at 11:08 AM, Rudra said:

Then players complained their squishies were getting one-shot fairly routinely. So now no target can be one-shot.

I think the anti-one-shot code was introduced much earlier, but not as a combat effect -- I remember there being a brief surge of jerk behavior very early in the game with players inviting other people to team, and using Recall Friend to teleport them to the top of a tall building, but just off the roof, so they'd fall to the ground; the code was tweaked so that an uninjured character could not be defeated by falling damage, leaving you at 1HP. Extending it to combat came later -- I remember having a Katana/Regen Scrapper one-shotted by one of the Praetorian AVs several issues into the game.

[Doomguide2005]

     So let's say they did remove the chance to miss.  How would you expect that to change the purple patch?  How about damage and damage resistance?  Would missing still be a foe thing?  What sort of changes to the numerous powers in the game would you expect?  Seems to me that nevermind whether you're in favor of it or not the amount of changes necessary to the power sets alone makes the idea a non starter unless the plan is to lobby for CoX 2.0 several years down the road. 

[Vanden]

Nobody here's talking about removing missing entirely, and the OP isn't even asking for the tohit cap to be removed, only allowed to be surpassed in specific instances.

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Vanden

[Naraka]

2 hours ago, Doomguide2005 said:

     So let's say they did remove the chance to miss.  How would you expect that to change the purple patch?  How about damage and damage resistance?  Would missing still be a foe thing?  What sort of changes to the numerous powers in the game would you expect?  Seems to me that nevermind whether you're in favor of it or not the amount of changes necessary to the power sets alone makes the idea a non starter unless the plan is to lobby for CoX 2.0 several years down the road. 

 

To clarify the OP, they simply proposed having Aim (and other self ToHit buff powers like Build Up) to grant an ancillary bonus of bypassing the diminishing returns of the hit chance calculation.  I don't think it would  require a whole other version of the game to accomplish but I could be wrong.

 

I think the dispersion occurred when posters suggested just getting rid of the clamp (i.e. the 5% miss chance since the soft cap is 95% hit chance).  I feel that would certainly require a whole change to a lot of things, purple patch likely the exception.

 

Personally speaking, I don't have a huge issue with limited exception like during Aim or Build up...but not every set has such powers and further still, not enough enemies use these powers to make this change justified. Players don't miss enough to really need this overall. 

[Doomguide2005]

Fair enough.  I guess all things considered I don't necessarily have an issue with some sort of limited bypass of the clamp or a higher such clamp (i.e.99% or such) under thing like aim and bu.  

[Vanden]

25 minutes ago, Naraka said:

To clarify the OP, they simply proposed having Aim (and other self ToHit buff powers like Build Up) to grant an ancillary bonus of bypassing the diminishing returns of the hit chance calculation.  I don't think it would  require a whole other version of the game to accomplish but I could be wrong.

 

I think the dispersion occurred when posters suggested just getting rid of the clamp (i.e. the 5% miss chance since the soft cap is 95% hit chance).  I feel that would certainly require a whole change to a lot of things, purple patch likely the exception.

 

The ToHit cap isn't a soft cap, and there's no diminishing returns in the formula. I'm not really sure where you got that idea?

 

A soft cap at 95% instead of a hard cap doesn't really make sense, anyway. ToHit isn't like Damage Resistance, where the closer you get to 100%, the more valuable every extra point becomes. It's actually the opposite, where every extra point of ToHit increases your overall DPS less the closer you get to 100%. Changing the cap from 95% to 100% would only increase player DPS at the cap by a little over 5%. It's really not an amount worth fretting over.

[Naraka]

4 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 

The ToHit cap isn't a soft cap, and there's no diminishing returns in the formula. I'm not really sure where you got that idea?

 

A soft cap at 95% instead of a hard cap doesn't really make sense, anyway. ToHit isn't like Damage Resistance, where the closer you get to 100%, the more valuable every extra point becomes. It's actually the opposite, where every extra point of ToHit increases your overall DPS less the closer you get to 100%. Changing the cap from 95% to 100% would only increase player DPS at the cap by a little over 5%. It's really not an amount worth fretting over.

 

Then maybe we're at odds in our understanding.

 

From what I recall, you can't get higher than 95% hit chance, right? So any point over is just a buffer to counter any -ToHit.  Same thing occurs with +def where once you hit 45% +def, any points over only counter -def and that only augments the hit chance of an enemy dependent on their level (so even levels will be reduced to 5% hit chance if you have +45% def but that floor is shifted when faced with higher foes). To me, that is the definition of a soft cap, i.e. it shifts depending on outside circumstances of the buff whereas resistance will always reduce damage by a certain amount.

 

But I agree, changing the cap from 95% to 100% doesn't affect much which is why I'm not really rallying against it, moreso rallying against the justification for such a change.  If the cap were changed to be obtainable to 100% (or 99%) it wouldn't affect me much...but it also wouldn't affect anyone else much except the elite builds to which that is reason enough to not bother putting forth such a change as those builds don't need anymore help but rather might be needing to be reigned in.

[Vanden]

9 minutes ago, Naraka said:

From what I recall, you can't get higher than 95% hit chance, right? So any point over is just a buffer to counter any -ToHit.  Same thing occurs with +def where once you hit 45% +def, any points over only counter -def and that only augments the hit chance of an enemy dependent on their level (so even levels will be reduced to 5% hit chance if you have +45% def but that floor is shifted when faced with higher foes). To me, that is the definition of a soft cap, i.e. it shifts depending on outside circumstances of the buff whereas resistance will always reduce damage by a certain amount.

 

The difference is mostly semantic; I'll try my best to explain it. Basically, Defense has a soft cap because it's just a variable, which can go higher than 45 (i.e. the game will track it). However, increasing the value higher than 45 no longer changes the final result. ToHit chance has a hard cap because it isn't a variable, it's the final result of a formula, and the game won't ever allow that value to be above 95 (or below 5).

Edited March 23, 2022 by Vanden

[arcane]

Let’s try another compromise. 
 

• Tentative yes to Aim/BU offering a mechanism for ToHit chance higher than 95% but lower than 100%.
• All enemies now have Aim and Build Up.

That sounds just about fair.

[Black Zot]

10 hours ago, arcane said:

Let’s try another compromise. 
 

• Tentative yes to Aim/BU offering a mechanism for ToHit chance higher than 95% but lower than 100%.
• All enemies now have Aim and Build Up.

That sounds just about fair.

 

That's yet another nerf-players-to-the-ground suggestion and you know it.

 

You need to stop getting your ideas of "fair" from the Souls franchise.

[Rudra]

If players should be allowed to hit 100% accuracy, why not mobs?

[Vanden]

48 minutes ago, Rudra said:

If players should be allowed to hit 100% accuracy, why not mobs?

 

That's not the same thing as giving every single mob +130% damage and +70 ToHit.

[Naraka]

24 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 

That's not the same thing as giving every single mob +130% damage and +70 ToHit.

 

If you take into consideration that mobs are mostly neutered to start, is it so different? The devs had to put in difficulty setting just to challenge the upper-echelon of teams.

 

I'd personally rather give foes better powers and/or IA instead of just activating cheat codes for the enemies. One is intuitive to gameplay, the other is just basic counter measures. 

[Vanden]

26 minutes ago, Naraka said:

If you take into consideration that mobs are mostly neutered to start, is it so different?

 

yes