Remembered one of the things I hate about CoH... its RNG.

[tidge]

28 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Dark Blast is an excellent set, for defenders and corruptors.  Blasters lose access to Night Fall, which significantly reduces the value of the set, in my opinion.  Being limited to mostly single-target attacks makes it much more difficult to stack -ToHit on multiple foes, which reduces the mitigation it could provide.  But if you're comfortable with limited AoE options, it can provide plenty of -ToHit to layer with +Def, even accounting for blaster debuff scalar values.  With Umbral Torrent to back it all up with reliable KB (or KD with a KB->KD IO), it should turn the tables on the Psi critters for you.

I run a Dark Blaster with Umbral Torrent as the primary attack. It's trivial to pick up range boosts, and with Knockdown it is an easy soft control as well.

[TimesSeven]

55 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Also of note, a few power sets have the capability to debuff -ToHit resistance (this was added to Trick Arrows in the most recent update), but all lieutenants, bosses and AVs/scaled down EBs have limits to how much their resistance to -ToHit can be debuffed.

 

 

 

Dark Blast is an excellent set, for defenders and corruptors.  Blasters lose access to Night Fall, which significantly reduces the value of the set, in my opinion.  

 

Oh, and /TA also has two powers which debuff Defense, so you'll see fewer miss streaks in the long run.

Thank you for the response. 
 

My love for Fire as a blaster is the quick animation. It feels like you're throwing everything at blazing speed. Dark always felt slow to me -- and AR is downright painful to play. It's animations are SO SLOW!! Is Dark as fast as fire?

 

Very few NPCs have TA. I've always speculated that a team with TA secondaries would(ve) been able to wipe out anything on the planet. The new nerd with only one Disruption arrow at a time REALLY stinks. I love(d) using my TA controllers!

[TimesSeven]

1 hour ago, Grindingsucks said:

If I went back and did the calculations, it would likely average out properly to a 95% hit rate, but  the way it manifests during combat feels weird.  😁

I absolutely agree. I know the math is solid, but perception is a funny thing. I just feels off even though it's not -- kind of like walking through the spinning tunnels in a fair and falling down. Mathematically, the floor is still and you're walking normally, but your perception causes the fall. 
 

Still, I'd rather have it this way than the way Champions does it. EVERY attack is a hit unless you are equipped with high-level avoidance. 

[Luminara]

52 minutes ago, TimesSeven said:

My love for Fire as a blaster is the quick animation. It feels like you're throwing everything at blazing speed. Dark always felt slow to me -- and AR is downright painful to play. It's animations are SO SLOW!! Is Dark as fast as fire?

 

The tier 1 and 2 attacks, Aim and tier 9 attacks, all of which can be directly compared, are identical in animation times.  Umbral Torrent has a lower target cap than Fire Ball (10 versus 16), but the same animation time.  Tenebrous Tentacles is over a second faster than Fire Breath. There are no Dark powers which can be directly compared to Blaze or Rain of Fire.  Blaze has a 1.188s animation time, Rain of Fire's is 2.244s.  Dark has Abyssal Gaze with a 1.848s animation, and Life Drain, 2.112s animation time.  I think Dark's snipe is ~0.4s faster than Fire's, but I can't log in to check.  If Moonbeam isn't faster, it's identical to Blazing Bolt.

[TimesSeven]

32 minutes ago, Luminara said:

 

The tier 1 and 2 attacks, Aim and tier 9 attacks, all of which can be directly compared, are identical in animation times.  Umbral Torrent has a lower target cap than Fire Ball (10 versus 16), but the same animation time.  Tenebrous Tentacles is over a second faster than Fire Breath. There are no Dark powers which can be directly compared to Blaze or Rain of Fire.  Blaze has a 1.188s animation time, Rain of Fire's is 2.244s.  Dark has Abyssal Gaze with a 1.848s animation, and Life Drain, 2.112s animation time.  I think Dark's snipe is ~0.4s faster than Fire's, but I can't log in to check.  If Moonbeam isn't faster, it's identical to Blazing Bolt.

And this is the reason why when YOU say something works or if something is broken, I just accept it and move on. LOL

[Grouchybeast]

4 hours ago, Grindingsucks said:

If I went back and did the calculations, it would likely average out properly to a 95% hit rate, but  the way it manifests during combat feels weird.  😁

People in general are notoriously bad at recognising real randomness.  We're just awful at it.

 

One of these patters is random, one is not.

 

 

[Player2]

On 7/29/2019 at 11:07 AM, jubakumbi said:

This game is already so easily exploited to make our characters powerful, clamping at 95% makes at least some impact on our immortality, I like it.

 

The Universe is fickle, our characters play with the very nature of reality.

Even the best Supers miss at times and it furthers the story.

 

That's true that even the best supers miss... although there's usually a reason for it other than "you miss because it would be boring if you could have any "no chance to miss" moments for the sake of being random.  I mean, if you're at a safe distance and buffed with Aim + Build Up and hit a couple of accuracy inspirations for good measure and the target is not protected by any defense measures that would reduce your chances to hit... then missing because someone arbitrarily decided that everyone misses sometimes is just stupid.

 

And if there are times where people insist that there MUST be a chance to miss no matter what, then there should also be times where auto hit is guaranteed... like say a stalker in hiding about to strike a held target from behind, who could not possibly be doing anything to defend.

 

Sometimes random for the sake of random is just too random with no good reason, and if that's what people think is fun...  well, I have some stocks for you.  Send money and I won't give you any details but will invest it for you, and we'll see if the random aspect of life is fun then.

 

[Kazuuk]

2 minutes ago, Player2 said:

 

 

That picture literally made me laugh out loud.  I absolutely love that game (and series), and that pic is so true, lol.

[tidge]

9 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

People in general are notoriously bad at recognising real randomness.  We're just awful at it.

Being bad at recognizing 'randomness' is one of the reasons why I don't like streakbreaker, which I see as a human-imposed mechanism that further screws with both our human perception and our ability to analyze actual results.

 

If the RNG is resulting in a 'flat' distribution (like the top image) then it is actually getting in the way. I believe the CoX RNG is giving us extremely 'flat' results (as in the top picture).

 

If the RNG is resulting in random clusters, why do we care?

 

Why would we keep streakbreaker? Either the RNG is so messed up that it needs streakbreaker to 'fix' some (rather undefined, from my PoV) issue, or the RNG needs streakbreaker to hide what is really happening. Streakbreaker is a post-hoc fix for some undefined issue... and a clumsy one IMO.

 

Spoiler

I can completely believe that (because of underlying maths) that there could be some extremely subtle effect in RNG results (0 < p <1) because of either 'edge effects' (at both ends) or a slight weighting at one end (over the other) because of something like using (or not using) a scale-invariant prior... but I don't believe that either of these types of effects would be particularly noticeable. If such effects were big enough to be noticeable, there is no need for a clumsy 'streakbreaker'... the simplest fix would be to apply a fixed linear adjustment (under the hood, one way or the other) to the final result that would overcome whatever bias was present.

 

The top picture illustrates why I believe streakbreaker is 'getting in the way' (although picture a histogram rather than a scatter plot)... if a 'to-hit' roll lands in the p >0.95 space, a flat RNG is likely to put your next result in 0 < p < 0.95 range more than 95% of the time... yet (for folks with toHit chances at the ceiling) streakbreaker essentially acts as if 50% of the time when you got a 'roll' of p >0.95 that your next 'roll' was also going to be p > 0.95 and forces a hit (and resets the streakbreaker count).

 

I'd really like to see streakbreaker disabled (or just have the count index increased to the same high value for all 'to hit' chances) to be able to do some testing. I accept the possibility that for some arbitrarily low to-hit chance that a streakbreaker might increase the quality of life... but at the higher end of the scale I think it is hurting.

[Snarky]

10 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

People in general are notoriously bad at recognising real randomness.  We're just awful at it.

 

One of these patters is random, one is not.

 

 

THe Jackson Pollock is the random one.  The other is computer generated.  Easy to spot.

[Grindingsucks]

11 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

People in general are notoriously bad at recognising real randomness.  We're just awful at it.

 

One of these patters is random, one is not.

 

 

The top one looks more evenly spaced to me, therefore computer generated and less random.  The bottom one looks a bit like a representation of a shot of the night sky, and therefore natural / random.

[TimesSeven]

11 hours ago, Player2 said:

 

LMAO. And that's the reason why it dives me crazy when I miss hitting a door when I'm standing right in front of it. 
 

As much as I love CoH, the system wasn't designed to recognize distance. I'd love to see point blank range added, but I don't know if the system could accommodate something like that. 
 

But I LOVE this picture!!