[Power Build Up] don't boost the cold domi shields

[Zeraph]

Hi, I have notice a bug (I supose).

As Defender Archetype, with epic mastery "Power Mastery" we have the power "Power Build Up".

Power Build Up + Fortitude (Empath buff) = Def Buff boosted.

But in my case, I use Cold Domination :

Power Build Up + Ice Shield (or Glacial Shield) = NO def boost.

The def value don't move at all with Cold Domi shields with Power Build Up.

(Tested with friends to be sure)

Is it a bug or do I miss something ?

[Adeon Hawkwood]

So this isn't technically a bug, it's an unfortunate consequence of the fact that the Cold Shields have an enhance-able resistance buff. You see, any power than accepts Resistance enhancements will not benefit from most types of global buffs (they do benefit from recharge, I'm not sure about endurance reduction).

 

If you think this sounds absolutely crazy you're right, but it's an unfortunate consequence of a coding decision made when the game was first released. So the key problem is that resistance enhancements and damage enhancements are (as far as the game is concerned) the same thing. This means that by default if you have a Damage buff on your character that damage buff will also increase the effectiveness of any powers you have that buff resistance.

 

Now obviously this would obviously be insanely broken so the devs took steps to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately they only had two options for doing this. The first is to tag the entire power as "Not affected by outside buffs/debuffs." while the second is to tag an individual aspect of the power as "Ignores Enhancements and Buffs".

 

Now in Force Field the resistance buffs in their shields aren't enhance-able so they used the second route and tagged those aspects to ignore buffs but let the power as a whole benefit from buffs, so Power Boost increases the effectiveness. However for Cold Domination the devs wanted the resistance buff to be enhance-able which means that the entire power had to be tagged as not benefiting from external buffs and debuffs so Power Boost doesn't enhance the defense.

 

So basically the answer is that this isn't technically a bug, it's a known feature of the power system. Now is this changeable? In theory yes, in practice maybe. The ideal solution would be to fix the behavior I described above but that's probably not practical, from what I understand it's a pretty major overhaul to the powers system which is probably a lot of work. On the other hand the old devs managed to fix the Hamidon mis-slotting bug which I thought was to difficult to fix as well so maybe this one is fixable.

 

The shorter term solution would be to change the Cold Domination shield so that like Force Field shields they don't accept Resistance enhancements. While this would probably be welcomed by a lot of players it is a violation of the Cottage Rule so I don't know if the devs would want to do it.

[Zeraph]

Ok, I understand. Thanks you for your help.

[srmalloy]

If you think this sounds absolutely crazy you're right, but it's an unfortunate consequence of a coding decision made when the game was first released. So the key problem is that resistance enhancements and damage enhancements are (as far as the game is concerned) the same thing. This means that by default if you have a Damage buff on your character that damage buff will also increase the effectiveness of any powers you have that buff resistance.

 

If I'm remembering the discussion back on the original boards about this, there are several 'paired' enhancements like damage and resistance that are actually in the same 'box' in the database, just with opposite sign, and that this is one of the things that constrains what kinds of powers the game can have -- you can't have an attack power that boosts your Resistance on every hit, because the game wouldn't be able to distinguish between Damage and Resistance enhancements slotted in the power; it's a trait of the power that determines whether the enhancement is treated as Damage or Resistance.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

If you think this sounds absolutely crazy you're right, but it's an unfortunate consequence of a coding decision made when the game was first released. So the key problem is that resistance enhancements and damage enhancements are (as far as the game is concerned) the same thing. This means that by default if you have a Damage buff on your character that damage buff will also increase the effectiveness of any powers you have that buff resistance.

 

If I'm remembering the discussion back on the original boards about this, there are several 'paired' enhancements like damage and resistance that are actually in the same 'box' in the database, just with opposite sign, and that this is one of the things that constrains what kinds of powers the game can have -- you can't have an attack power that boosts your Resistance on every hit, because the game wouldn't be able to distinguish between Damage and Resistance enhancements slotted in the power; it's a trait of the power that determines whether the enhancement is treated as Damage or Resistance.

Yep, this is why it used to be possible to use Defense Debuff Hamidon enhancements to enhance Defense Buff powers. I know the devs fixed that, but I don't know what that fix means of possibly fixing this issue.