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[Auroxis]

Why do people always seem to think that toggles are the issue when attacks drain far more end than toggles do ??

Toggles were often more slotted for endurance than attacks simply because attacks had more valuable slots.

[Arcana]

Toggles were often more slotted for endurance than attacks simply because attacks had more valuable slots.

Its actually more the case that people slotted endred in toggles because there was often no other choice, but players always felt other slotting options were the better choice, like accuracy or recharge.  Then they would complain about endurance, as if it wasn't their job to fix that problem themselves.  If I'm missing, I slot accuracy.  If I want to attack faster, I slot recharge.  If I'm running out of endurance, I complain on the forums.

It was irrational, but it was what it was.

[Aggelakis]

If I'm missing, I slot accuracy.  If I want to attack faster, I slot recharge.  If I'm running out of endurance, I complain on the forums.

I love you, Arcana.

[Auroxis]

Its actually more the case that people slotted endred in toggles because there was often no other choice, but players always felt other slotting options were the better choice, like accuracy or recharge.  Then they would complain about endurance, as if it wasn't their job to fix that problem themselves.  If I'm missing, I slot accuracy.  If I want to attack faster, I slot recharge.  If I'm running out of endurance, I complain on the forums.

It was irrational, but it was what it was.

You have to take into consideration that when teaming up, if you slotted for endurance stability and had a single kinetic, rad or emp on your team that slot was wasted. The same cannot be said for damage, recharge enhancements and procs. I'm not sure what's more flawed here, the buffs or the enhancement design.

[Arcana]

You have to take into consideration that when teaming up, if you slotted for endurance stability and had a single kinetic, rad or emp on your team that slot was wasted. The same cannot be said for damage, recharge enhancements and procs.

To a certain extent, yes it can.  Its not really rational to complain that a single Emp can negate endurance reduction in toggles, without saying that a single Kin can negate a lot of your damage slotting in attacks.  Most archetypes had a 400% damage cap. Pre-ED players were often five-slotting damage in their attacks, taking them to net 266% damage.  One Fulcrum shift would often negate half or all of those slots.  And while it was rarer to be recharge-capped, recharge did not have linear benefits: it was possible for a single kin or even rad to negate much of the benefit of recharge slotting for all but AoE-heavy builds.

Not only could team buffs negate slots, they could negate whole powers.  If you were teaming with FF or later Sonic, were the defense or resistance enhancements you slotted doing much?  In many cases, I straight up turned off my toggles just because they were burning endurance for no reason.  You can always find a team where buffs negate powers: that's actually part of the good part of CoH teaming, that there was always multiple ways you could get different benefits, and some of them made your own powers redundant.  But you make builds to work everywhere, not just in some circumstances.

Controllers slotted for hold.  That slotting was worthless in steamroller teams.  Accuracy slotting was redundant in teams with a lot of tactics.  Damage slotting was often redundant in teams with Fulcrum shift.  If you had a couple rads, recharge slotting was mostly decorative.  Defense slotting was not useful in the presence of FFs.  We slot for those things because we wanted our characters to work everywhere, not just in certain teams.  That endurance was thought of in a completely different way is just not a rationally justifiable behavior.  It was an inherent bias in the way people thought about how the game should work.

The measure of that irrationality came when invention sets started allowing for multiway optimization, and players could try to optimize more than one thing.  Did they try to optimize the things they did before?  Actually, not in the same way.  Whereas in the pre-Invention days players thought about damage, then accuracy, then recharge, then lunch, then costume, then everyone else's costume, then finally endurance, in the post-Invention world the emphasis started to turn towards sustainable builds.  People were trying to get maximum mitigation and recovery.  Or maximum offense and recovery to sustain it.  Or a balance between damage and recharge and endurance management to power it.

When we had to compare endurance to anything else, we tended to pick anything else.  But when we were allowed to pick any three things, endurance management was almost always one of the three.  Even though it had been in dead last place before.  That too is not a rational calculation: its a recognition that endurance management as part of a systematic whole makes perfect sense to the very same people it did not make sense to try to get in pieces.  City of Heroes players were people who hated anchovies when they had to buy pizza by the slice, and loved it when they were allowed to buy whole pizzas.

You could make an entire psychology thesis out of the study of that phenomenon.

[Brigadine]

So is anyone else getting wind back into their sails because downix came out of the shadows or is it just me?

[Arcana]

Incidentally, this is another thing players didn't always have a good handle on: perspective.

Is it a good thing that one player can make another player redundant in a team?  Obviously not.

Is it a good thing that teams don't need any one particular player to function?  Obviously yes.  Except those are conceptually the same thing, worded in different ways.

Is it a good thing that buffers can provide strengths players don't have on their own?  Obviously yes.

Is it a good thing that a buffer can make your powers or slotting redundant?  Obviously not.  Once again: these are inseparably the same design feature.  You can't have one without the other.

A team that absolutely needs you fails without you.  Either you can be needed, or teams can function without special composition. You can only pick one.  Many of the things players wanted were mutually exclusive things.  They wanted two things you could only have one of, or they wanted one thing and didn't want something else that was ultimately the same thing.

[Auroxis]

I didn't play in the pre-ED era, so perhaps that's why reaching the damage cap didn't seem so frequent. I found endurance buffs that made you endurance stable were more common than damage buffs which got you to the cap and recharge buffs that buffed you without much of a benefit. Even defense buffs helped against defense debuffs.

Endurance buffs didn't have anything extra to them once you're stable really, unless they were super powerful buffs which negated nuke cooldowns. I'd have liked it if there was more to endurance, like a temp/vet power that costs 90 endurance and heals you fully or gave you a recharge bonus.

[Arcana]

I didn't play in the pre-ED era, so perhaps that's why reaching the damage cap didn't seem so frequent. I found endurance buffs that made you endurance stable were more common than damage buffs which got you to the cap and recharge buffs that buffed you without much of a benefit. Even defense buffs helped against defense debuffs.

Endurance buffs didn't have anything extra to them once you're stable really, unless they were super powerful buffs which negated nuke cooldowns. I'd have liked it if there was more to endurance, like a temp/vet power that costs 90 endurance and heals you fully or gave you a recharge bonus.

Well, technically speaking if you never needed endurance ever you could always combine your blues for reds.  Inspirations were actually very powerful all things considered, and yet most players didn't use them except sometimes as emergency measures, and not always then.

In fact, while you could theoretically make a strong herder/farmer that didn't need inspirations, most killed so fast they were constantly innundated with inspirations, which made them faster and stronger, which made them kill faster, etc.  I conjectured that there was a way to make a City of Heroes ramjet, where if you could kill fast enough and you were strong enough, at a critical kill speed the extra power from inspiration drops would accumulate faster than the buffs decayed, which would then cause a runaway increase in power to near the caps.  I tested the ramjet inspiration theory once by making a fire brute that had what most would call a good, but not terribly great build, preloading it with insps, and then trying to herd up a large map.  There existed a critical level of power such that at that strength or higher inspirations would push it over the top and keep it there, so long as you kept up a high kill rate.  I never got around to doing the calculations to figure out the quantitative theory of it, but I know the ramjet principle itself worked.

[Surelle]

So is anyone else getting wind back into their sails because downix came out of the shadows or is it just me?

He likely either A.) read about the Paragan Chat project in the mainstream gaming news and is looking around here now or B.) has been a secret tester for it all this time and feels he can finally peek out from behind the curtain.  Either way, I imagine certain PMs on this board are going back and forth where they hadn't previously since last year, if even then.   ;)

And even if NCSoft never takes Nate & Crew up on their offer(s), I wholeheartedly appreciate all their efforts (and those of the Hail Mary Team before them) equally as much as I appreciate Codewalker/Leandro/TonyV's all this time.

Our cuppeth runneth over with heroes, eh?   ;D

[Winter Fable]

We are going to need all the Emp,FF,Rads,Sonic and every buff/debuff we can get once the game comes back because the market
will be so expensive the first year or more.Any drops people get they will want to use them for their build which means every person on the team will be needed.Looking forward to it.

[Ankhammon]

Well, technically speaking if you never needed endurance ever you could always combine your blues for reds.  Inspirations were actually very powerful all things considered, and yet most players didn't use them except sometimes as emergency measures, and not always then.

In fact, while you could theoretically make a strong herder/farmer that didn't need inspirations, most killed so fast they were constantly innundated with inspirations, which made them faster and stronger, which made them kill faster, etc.  I conjectured that there was a way to make a City of Heroes ramjet, where if you could kill fast enough and you were strong enough, at a critical kill speed the extra power from inspiration drops would accumulate faster than the buffs decayed, which would then cause a runaway increase in power to near the caps.  I tested the ramjet inspiration theory once by making a fire brute that had what most would call a good, but not terribly great build, preloading it with insps, and then trying to herd up a large map.  There existed a critical level of power such that at that strength or higher inspirations would push it over the top and keep it there, so long as you kept up a high kill rate.  I never got around to doing the calculations to figure out the quantitative theory of it, but I know the ramjet principle itself worked.

Reminds me of the Fire Imp cave. That was a good weekend... followed by a bad week.

[Vee]

I wasn't around until ish 12 but I remember seeing things on the forums multiple times showing the relative benefit of end red in toggles vs. attacks for an so/generic io build with the general idea that if you had an extra slot end red in toggles was fine but that it was way more beneficial to add it to an attack. Just looking at the mids numbers a second in defense toggles adds half the endurance mitigation and a third 1/8th, which are some pretty hefty diminishing returns. Thirsty toggles like cloak of fear or mud pots would be a different story, as 2 end reds there might be the difference between being able to use them or not. Of course for most of our builds the question would be moot as end red is clearly going to be your second priority in defense toggles when using IO sets.

Oh and w/r/t dark regeneration - so glad I never had a dark armor toon prior to whatever issue accurate healing came out. That theft of essence proc turned it into both a health and endurance refill given a large enough mob. I couldn't believe until I slotted one that a 10% chance of a 10% endurance return would be so game changing until I slotted it for myself, and I'm suspicious to this day that that proc wasn't exactly working as intended in that power but was never of the disposition to check the in-game numbers. Gift horse and all that.

[Arcana]

I'm suspicious to this day that that proc wasn't exactly working as intended in that power

Many powers fall into the category of too powerful to ask for, but not powerful enough to nerf.  I think the TOE proc was one of those.  We'd never get it if we explicitly asked for it, but once it was made it wasn't powerful enough to incur the disruption of taking it away.

Sometimes developers have agendas just like players do.  I'm not saying this was one of those times.  I'm not saying this wasn't one of those times.  Have you ever had jury duty?  Often times, the verdict and/or award isn't explicitly what everyone wanted, but rather what everyone was comfortable agreeing to.  You have to see the developer actions in the game through that lens: most things we got had to survive peer review.  Most things we got taken away also had to survive peer review.  Sometimes the devs wanted to give us things, but couldn't figure out a way to do it that was acceptable to the jury.  Sometimes the devs gave us something by accident that wasn't acceptable to the jury, but the jury couldn't agree on whether to take it away. 

That's how collaborative development works.  Many players fell into the trap of trying to divine what the developers intents were as if the development team was a single mind.  It made more sense when you saw the devs as six friends trying to decide where to go for lunch.

[blacksly]

Its actually more the case that people slotted endred in toggles because there was often no other choice, but players always felt other slotting options were the better choice, like accuracy or recharge.  Then they would complain about endurance, as if it wasn't their job to fix that problem themselves.  If I'm missing, I slot accuracy.  If I want to attack faster, I slot recharge.  If I'm running out of endurance, I complain on the forums.

It was irrational, but it was what it was.

I six-slotted Forum Complaining, and had no endurance issues thereafter.

[blacksly]

Incidentally, this is another thing players didn't always have a good handle on: perspective.

Is it a good thing that one player can make another player redundant in a team?  Obviously not.

Is it a good thing that teams don't need any one particular player to function?  Obviously yes.  Except those are conceptually the same thing, worded in different ways.

I don't think that this is conceptually the same thing. Consider a decreasing scale of stacking buffs, where adding a 10% buff to someone who has 0% in that attribute gives +10%, but adding it to someone who has 200% in that attribute only gives 5%. What you end up with is a situation where stacking similar buffers makes each buffer less useful, but not redundant. However, neither of those buffers would be needed (including the case of self-buffing, such as a Defense-based defensive set compared to Force Fields). So it's possible to have a not-redundant AND not-needed scenario for stacking buffs in a game.

It's not what happens in CoH because instead of putting a decreasing formula, something like ED but applying to outside buffs in addition to enhancements (but allowing theoretically unlimited buffs to anything), they let the buffs add linearly until the stat's cap is reached, at which point the buffs are zeroed out. But some other game could have designed buffs in a decreasing-stacking fashion. It's how I set up spell buffs on a UO shard, and it wasn't too difficult in either concept or application.

[blacksly]

Azrael:

I have my AV-soloing builds for every AT, every powerset that I plan on running. Something like 30 characters, not counting the 100 or so builds that didn't make the top-30 list.

Care to share any? :)

Sure, but in the Builds Discussion forum, this isn't the thread. I can discuss AV soloing forever, so I don't want to take this thread off its smooth rails.

[LaughingAlex]

I don't think that this is conceptually the same thing. Consider a decreasing scale of stacking buffs, where adding a 10% buff to someone who has 0% in that attribute gives +10%, but adding it to someone who has 200% in that attribute only gives 5%. What you end up with is a situation where stacking similar buffers makes each buffer less useful, but not redundant. However, neither of those buffers would be needed (including the case of self-buffing, such as a Defense-based defensive set compared to Force Fields). So it's possible to have a not-redundant AND not-needed scenario for stacking buffs in a game.

It's not what happens in CoH because instead of putting a decreasing formula, something like ED but applying to outside buffs in addition to enhancements (but allowing theoretically unlimited buffs to anything), they let the buffs add linearly until the stat's cap is reached, at which point the buffs are zeroed out. But some other game could have designed buffs in a decreasing-stacking fashion. It's how I set up spell buffs on a UO shard, and it wasn't too difficult in either concept or application.

I suspect what separates good developer teams and bad ones is they think of a scope of what they want to do and don't let people de-rail them.  Like, I do notice that with CoX's developers, they knew how to compromise and still do what they ultimately wanted to do.  In contrast some developers try to please everyone to hard, and end up failing miserably, even implementing changes that a very clear and very small minority wanted at the expense of everyone else.

I think some of the bigger disappointments tend to fall into that trap.  MMO and otherwise.  I won't mention the mmorpg example, but Deus ex Invisible War was said to have that problem.  Some guys told Harvey Smith that Deus Ex 1 was terrible, asked for lots of over-unified stuff and he and the devs seemed to cave and we saw one of the biggest disappointments in gaming.  Then some games don't even have much fan feedback but try to be everything, see Duke Nukem Forever and it's never being completed and coming out a generic MMS.

[Arcana]

What you end up with is a situation where stacking similar buffers makes each buffer less useful, but not redundant.

First, I think you meant to quote this one:

Is it a good thing that buffers can provide strengths players don't have on their own?  Obviously yes.

Is it a good thing that a buffer can make your powers or slotting redundant?  Obviously not.

Since that appears to be more relevant to your point.

Second,  in terms of magnitude and stacking that's a qualitative distinction most players don't make.  For the players that do make it, the statements I made can be refined in a way to make the same point with more precision.  Replace "redundant" with "superfluous", for example.  If team buffs greatly reduce the incremental effect of my own powers, that in effect means another player can reduce the value of my own abilities.  That's a softer version of the same objection, and one that was actually expressed on the forums in connection with saturating buffs, but would equally apply to a game with diminishing effect buffs for a completely different reason.

[Sinistar]

Having fiddled around again with DCUO the other week with a SHIELD using character, I figured I'd ask if there was a reason COH's SHIELD armor didn't have a throw shield attack power?

Was the game's code too restrictive to allow it?

Did they just not want to have it?

If I were to change that set at all I'd have to look into putting in shield throw as a power and if a power had to go, perhaps Grant Cover.......