Author Topic: Best Controller  (Read 41550 times)

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #40 on: September 18, 2014, 04:00:41 AM »
You asked Arcana to elaborate ???!!!!!!!!

oh boy.. this will be good..

Lol. Am I asking for it?
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

HEATSTROKE

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #41 on: September 18, 2014, 04:20:02 AM »
Lol. Am I asking for it?

Arcana has an understanding of the mechanics of the game that is far greater than anyone I have ever seen post. She makes my head swim sometimes and I tend to think I have a decent grasp on the game.

SentaiRed

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #42 on: September 18, 2014, 05:01:33 AM »
Earth/Trick Arrow was a blast.

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #43 on: September 18, 2014, 06:35:05 AM »
 

Arcana,

If you have the time, would you elaborate on the -Dam to resist thing? That's something I've just about completely forgotten over the years and was having difficulty finding the info on.

For instance, if you were fighting an AV states and he had unstoppable going he would have a smash Damage resistance of 90%? If you could throw 100% -Dam on him, it would hit reduce his damage by 10%?

I'm sure I'm not correct, cuz that would be too simple a formula.

Short answer: if your debuff was resistable, yes.

Longer answer:

City of Heroes worked on a system of attributes and aspects.  Attributes were things that could have some value, like your health (Hit Points) or your regeneration rate.  Aspects were, well, aspects of those attributes.  Take Hit Points.  That Attribute had a value: your current total health.  But it also had an aspect called Max.  Max was your maximum health.  So if your character had max health of 2000, but had taken damage and currently had 1000 health, then the value of Hit Points was 1000, but Max Hit Points was 2000.  And hey, you could theoretically buff your max health, like with powers like Dull Pain, right?  But only to some limit.  That was MaxMax, the maximum amount you could buff your health to.  We called it the Health Cap.  City of Heroes called it the MaxMax of HitPoints.

That's attributes and aspects.  What about damage; how did damage work?  Well, on top of an attribute called HitPoints there were these special attributes called Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative_Energy, Toxic, Psionic.  They also had a value, and that value was always identical to the current value of HitPoints (not exactly, but close enough for our purposes).  Why did these exist?  Well, when someone hit you for 10 points of smashing damage, what that power did was deduct 10 points from your Smashing attribute.  Since that was linked to the value of HitPoints, it caused your health to drop by 10 points.  Good so far.

One of the aspects that existed was called Res.  Res was the amount that you Resisted changes to that Attribute.  So if you had a Smashing Res of 50%, that means when someone tried to deduct 10 points from your Smashing value, they'd actually only deduct 5 points instead.

Another aspect was Str.  Str was your Strength when it came to that Attribute.  Suppose you have a power that does 10 points of Smashing damage according to its definition.  If your Smashing Str was 2.0, then that power would actually do 20 points of damage, not 10.  The Smashing Str(ength) would boost the effects of powers you used that affected the Smashing attribute on any target.

Now, here's where it gets a little funky.  Suppose I am trying to debuff your Smashing Str - basically debuff your damage strength.  I am using a power that is trying to lower the value of the Str aspect of your Smashing attribute.  Its an attempt to modify the Smashing attribute, so your Smashing Res kicks in and tries to reduce that effect.  So if I try to reduce your Smashing Str by -20%, your Smashing Res would reduce that also by half, reducing it to -10%.

See, the game doesn't care if you are trying to change my Smashing *Value* or my Smashing *Strength* or my Smashing *Resistance* or for that matter any other Aspect of Smashing.  All it cares about is that you're trying to change some Aspect  of my Smashing attribute, so it uses my Smashing Resistance to counter that.

The game sees "Smashing Strength" and "Smashing Resistance" as just different Aspects of the Smashing Attribute.  *Players* see those two things as totally different things: one's damage and the other is resistance.  We don't normally connect the two.  But deep within the game, they are just two different "Smashing things." 

And that's why Smashing resistance will resist Smashing Damage Debuffs.  As long as those debuffs are actually resistable, and most debuffs designed to affect enemies are.

Note: most *self buffs* were flagged unresistable, and this is why.  If they were not unresistable, you'd resist your own buffs.  That's undesirable.  They were also flagged "unaffected by strength buffs" and the reason was that obviously the game did not want someone using Build Up to suddenly boost their resistance toggles.  If that flag wasn't set, that's what would happen, and occasionally the devs would forget to flag something correctly and these things actually *would* happen.  And in one interesting instance, the devs did this on purpose and caused an interesting effect.  Combat Training:Offensive for Widows buffed player Accuracy, and that buff was affected by strength buffs.  That means since it buffed Accuracy Str, and it was affected by Accuracy Str it actually buffed itself.  The game did not spiral that buff infinitely; the engine had an intrinsic limit where that buff could buff itself, but that buffed value couldn't then buff itself again and again.  But to correctly calculate what your accuracy buff would be, you needed to take this buffing-the-buff effect into account.

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #44 on: September 18, 2014, 06:36:21 AM »
You asked Arcana to elaborate ???!!!!!!!!

Let's not scare them away before I've had a chance to lay some elaborate on them first.

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #45 on: September 18, 2014, 08:16:48 AM »
Short answer: if your debuff was resistable, yes.

Longer answer:

City of Heroes worked on a system of attributes and aspects.  Attributes were things that could have some value, like your health (Hit Points) or your regeneration rate.  Aspects were, well, aspects of those attributes.  Take Hit Points.  That Attribute had a value: your current total health.  But it also had an aspect called Max.  Max was your maximum health.  So if your character had max health of 2000, but had taken damage and currently had 1000 health, then the value of Hit Points was 1000, but Max Hit Points was 2000.  And hey, you could theoretically buff your max health, like with powers like Dull Pain, right?  But only to some limit.  That was MaxMax, the maximum amount you could buff your health to.  We called it the Health Cap.  City of Heroes called it the MaxMax of HitPoints.

That's attributes and aspects.  What about damage; how did damage work?  Well, on top of an attribute called HitPoints there were these special attributes called Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative_Energy, Toxic, Psionic.  They also had a value, and that value was always identical to the current value of HitPoints (not exactly, but close enough for our purposes).  Why did these exist?  Well, when someone hit you for 10 points of smashing damage, what that power did was deduct 10 points from your Smashing attribute.  Since that was linked to the value of HitPoints, it caused your health to drop by 10 points.  Good so far.

One of the aspects that existed was called Res.  Res was the amount that you Resisted changes to that Attribute.  So if you had a Smashing Res of 50%, that means when someone tried to deduct 10 points from your Smashing value, they'd actually only deduct 5 points instead.

Another aspect was Str.  Str was your Strength when it came to that Attribute.  Suppose you have a power that does 10 points of Smashing damage according to its definition.  If your Smashing Str was 2.0, then that power would actually do 20 points of damage, not 10.  The Smashing Str(ength) would boost the effects of powers you used that affected the Smashing attribute on any target.

Now, here's where it gets a little funky.  Suppose I am trying to debuff your Smashing Str - basically debuff your damage strength.  I am using a power that is trying to lower the value of the Str aspect of your Smashing attribute.  Its an attempt to modify the Smashing attribute, so your Smashing Res kicks in and tries to reduce that effect.  So if I try to reduce your Smashing Str by -20%, your Smashing Res would reduce that also by half, reducing it to -10%.

See, the game doesn't care if you are trying to change my Smashing *Value* or my Smashing *Strength* or my Smashing *Resistance* or for that matter any other Aspect of Smashing.  All it cares about is that you're trying to change some Aspect  of my Smashing attribute, so it uses my Smashing Resistance to counter that.

The game sees "Smashing Strength" and "Smashing Resistance" as just different Aspects of the Smashing Attribute.  *Players* see those two things as totally different things: one's damage and the other is resistance.  We don't normally connect the two.  But deep within the game, they are just two different "Smashing things." 

And that's why Smashing resistance will resist Smashing Damage Debuffs.  As long as those debuffs are actually resistable, and most debuffs designed to affect enemies are.

Note: most *self buffs* were flagged unresistable, and this is why.  If they were not unresistable, you'd resist your own buffs.  That's undesirable.  They were also flagged "unaffected by strength buffs" and the reason was that obviously the game did not want someone using Build Up to suddenly boost their resistance toggles.  If that flag wasn't set, that's what would happen, and occasionally the devs would forget to flag something correctly and these things actually *would* happen.  And in one interesting instance, the devs did this on purpose and caused an interesting effect.  Combat Training:Offensive for Widows buffed player Accuracy, and that buff was affected by strength buffs.  That means since it buffed Accuracy Str, and it was affected by Accuracy Str it actually buffed itself.  The game did not spiral that buff infinitely; the engine had an intrinsic limit where that buff could buff itself, but that buffed value couldn't then buff itself again and again.  But to correctly calculate what your accuracy buff would be, you needed to take this buffing-the-buff effect into account.

Well that was just... smashing. :)

So when you say "if the debuff was resistible". Is -Dam from chem rounds (dual pistol) then an aspect of Toxic damage? Meaning that it is only resistible to those with toxic resistances?
If so, that should make chem rounds even more effective generally since there was not a lot of toxic resistances around (assuming same percent-wise for mobs as for players).
Nevermind. I was thinking bass ackwards.

So, was it by design or a design flaw that all those attributes were together? (my little way of asking just how dev you actually were.)

And most importantly, why am I on this forum at 3:00 am instead of reviewing for my Linux Sys Admin test I need to take tomorrow?
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #46 on: September 18, 2014, 08:33:21 AM »
So, was it by design or a design flaw that all those attributes were together? (my little way of asking just how dev you actually were.)

It was by design, although I do not think they completely thought out what the ramifications were.  Its actually a neat little system that has the advantage it can be computationally optimized in a lot of ways a more general system can't be.  But it does have a lot of catches that go along with that: this confluence of resistance and damage buffs being one of them (although if I call those "damage resistance" and "damage buffs" the interrelatedness starts to become more obvious).

Quote
And most importantly, why am I on this forum at 3:00 am instead of reviewing for my Linux Sys Admin test I need to take tomorrow?

I can help you there.  When you want to rm -rf *.txt, never accidentally add extra spaces to that command string.

blacksly

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #47 on: September 18, 2014, 01:36:57 PM »
AVs resisted regeneration debuffs.  The resistance scaled with level, but at level 50 it was 82% (at level 55 it was I think 85%).  Even Lingering Radiation's -500% regen debuff was reduced to only -90% when facing a level 50 AV (and you were level 50 so no purple patch combat modifiers were in play).  Radiation was *far* stronger than Dark against most AVs for this reason.  I know a lot of Dark debuffers that couldn't figure out why their in-game performance was far lower than what they thought it should be, because they failed  to take regen debuff resistance into account (note: I don't remember off the top of my head when regen debuff resistance was added to AVs, but it had been there for a long time by shutdown).

Rad could stack LR and shut down AV regen.  Even at very high recharge Dark might do half as well against high level AVs.

Oh yeah, AVs also resisted tohit debuffs to the same degree.  I think there's no question Ill/Rad beats Anything/Dark on most high level AVs.

(Also, most AVs had at least some damage resistance, and by a quirk of game mechanics damage resistance acted to resist damage debuffs.  So if you were fighting an AV that had high resistance to the kind of damage they themselves liked to pump out - which was very common - they could also make it difficult to debuff their outgoing damage by as much as you think you could).

Yes, I know (though I think that at Level 50, AVs resist 85%). But Radiation's debuff is 500%, resisted down to 75% effective.
Dark is around 200% (plus an average of 250% if Howling Twilight has a 50% uptime), which is resisted down to 67% or so. It's actually less effective, because you can over-stack Dark's -Regen, at which point the additional -Regen is wasted, so its average Regen debuff on a Level 50 AV is probably only around 60%.

However, Dark has a stackable -Resist, which increases damage more than the 15% difference in AV regen rates (since the AV regens about 100 DPS, the difference is only worth about 15 DPS), so in terms of dropping HPs from an AV, /Dark is as good as /Rad, or better. Not as good against GMs, because at triple the Regeneration, GMs would probably regenerate 40-50 more HPs against /Dark as against /Rad.

As for the -Dam, it's true that AVs resist -Damage with their base resistance. But that's also where Dark's stackable -Resist increases its own -Damage debuff. The -Resist debuff pretty much cancels out a 30% resistance from an AV (although most AVs have higher resistances against the damage type that they commonly do). I have a Fire/Dark build that uses Twilight Grasp once every 7 seconds, and stacks to about 106% -Damage against an AV that has -30% Damage Resistance... clearly it would not do as high against AVs with 40% or higher, but it would still put out very noticeable -Damage.

mrultimate

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #48 on: September 18, 2014, 03:57:10 PM »
Earth/Storm ftw!

Fossilizing and Snow Storming and Stone Cageing and Steamy Misting and Quicksanding and Freezing Raining and Stalagmiting and Hurricaning and Earthquaking and Thunderclapping and Volcanic Gassing and Zippy the Mega-Tornado chucking things around and Pooey the Wonder Pet smashing and great epic Lightning Storms zapping everything.. throw in a little Stone Epic for Boulder Hurling and Seismic Smashing...

EarthWindandIre was by far and away my favorite troller to play.  Felt like I could lock down the entire screen (or freeze it up graphically lol)

I absolutely loved my Earth/Storm. She was so much fun to play and you are right it felt like you could lock every mob down.

Codewalker

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #49 on: September 18, 2014, 04:11:47 PM »
Agreed, Earth/Storm is one of my favorite controller combos, and one of only two characters that I took the time to purple out (and fully incarnate). It's definitely one of the most "controllery" feeling combos. Fairly low damage, but can lock anything down, in multiple ways.

You've got lots of hard control with Stalagmites and Volcanic Gasses. Some very nice soft control from Earthquake and Freezing Rain, slow (Quicksand/Snow Storm), and the second best tank pet behind perma Phantom Army. If things really go bad, you've got Tornado and Hurricane for emergency chaos backup. Lightning Storm for damage and to help out with personal defense. Oh, and a ton of -Res and -Def debuff on top of all that, with some -ToHit for the icing.

I could easily lock down two, sometimes even three full x8 spawns at once. Genius -- my animated stone -- could easily tank AVs and even giant monsters with some help from O2 boost.

Earth/Storm also has a lot of location AoEs that can be dropped around a corner in perfect safety, for those really tough missions. I even went Ice Mastery to get Ice Storm for one more.

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #50 on: September 18, 2014, 04:52:45 PM »
It was by design, although I do not think they completely thought out what the ramifications were.  Its actually a neat little system that has the advantage it can be computationally optimized in a lot of ways a more general system can't be.  But it does have a lot of catches that go along with that: this confluence of resistance and damage buffs being one of them (although if I call those "damage resistance" and "damage buffs" the interrelatedness starts to become more obvious).

I can help you there.  When you want to rm -rf *.txt, never accidentally add extra spaces to that command string.

Awesome explanation Arcana, thanks for that. I think I mostly got it. I'll have to let this settle in my brain for a bit though (ramifications and whatnot).
Interestingly, it seems that a lot of those ramifications they may not have fully thought through are some of the more frustrating and genius areas of the entire game... to me anyway.

Oh, and I can top that. I jokingly called on of the test admins to ask him to run a rm -R / on a machine. His response was priceless.
Ok, Arcana, you so smart. what actually happens if I run that command? Will it erase the machine entirely or will it crash at some point before finishing (i.e. remove the rm command and confuse the system)? I've never gotten to test that.
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #51 on: September 18, 2014, 06:54:10 PM »
Oh, and I can top that. I jokingly called on of the test admins to ask him to run a rm -R / on a machine. His response was priceless.
Ok, Arcana, you so smart. what actually happens if I run that command? Will it erase the machine entirely or will it crash at some point before finishing (i.e. remove the rm command and confuse the system)? I've never gotten to test that.

rm -rf / will wipe your system.  In Unix (and POSIX-like systems) rm will unlink the file and free its inode from the filesystem.  However, if the file is still open then the file handle will still point to the file correctly and act to prevent its blocks from being freed.  As soon as the file handle is released, the last pointer to the inode goes away and the file is ultimately freed.

An inkling of what will happen if you rm -rf / a Linux server is to note a trick many programs use on temp files.  You open /var/tmp/mytempfile.txt for writing.  Then you delete it.  Believe it or not, the app still has an open handle to the file and can still read and write it, even though it doesn't appear in any directory listing.  This prevents other applications from accidentally touching the temp file.  Even if another app opens another temp file in the same directory with the exact same name, it won't affect your temp file.  The moment you close it, its gone.  In the same way, every file the OS need to keep running that is open at the moment you mass delete everything will still be open and useable, at least for a while, until they are closed or something else needs to open a file.  That's usually long enough to make your system go bye-bye.

In any case, since rm runs in memory on invocation, deleting its executable will not affect its ability to run to completion.

Just to make sure this is not a trick question, rm -R / won't necessarily wipe the entire system, because without the force switch you will likely get prompted a lot for files that rm ordinarily wouldn't delete.  Also, rm can't delete files and directories from read only mount points regardless of how you invoke it.  But on the whole, your system will be basically gone.

Codewalker

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #52 on: September 18, 2014, 07:09:12 PM »
In Unix (and POSIX-like systems) rm will unlink the file and free its inode from the filesystem.  However, if the file is still open then the file handle will still point to the file correctly and act to prevent its blocks from being freed.  As soon as the file handle is released, the last pointer to the inode goes away and the file is ultimately freed.

That behavior is not completely consistent across all flavors of Unix. Some systems, HP/UX comes to mind, will prevent you from removing the last link of a file that is memory mapped and has pages resident, of which the most common case is a running executable. For HP at least, the reasons have to do with the non-overcommit VMM implementation.

Linux is one of the variants that will happily let you delete or even write to running executable (the latter will usually cause the process to fault). On the other hand, Linux systems also tend to have lots of random pseudo-filesystems mounted, most commonly /proc and /sys, which tend to cause a recursive rm on the root to choke before finishing. It will definitely get far enough to leave the system in a mostly unusable state that won't be able to boot again.

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #53 on: September 18, 2014, 07:40:28 PM »
Yes, I know (though I think that at Level 50, AVs resist 85%). But Radiation's debuff is 500%, resisted down to 75% effective.
Dark is around 200% (plus an average of 250% if Howling Twilight has a 50% uptime), which is resisted down to 67% or so. It's actually less effective, because you can over-stack Dark's -Regen, at which point the additional -Regen is wasted, so its average Regen debuff on a Level 50 AV is probably only around 60%.

However, Dark has a stackable -Resist, which increases damage more than the 15% difference in AV regen rates (since the AV regens about 100 DPS, the difference is only worth about 15 DPS), so in terms of dropping HPs from an AV, /Dark is as good as /Rad, or better. Not as good against GMs, because at triple the Regeneration, GMs would probably regenerate 40-50 more HPs against /Dark as against /Rad.

As for the -Dam, it's true that AVs resist -Damage with their base resistance. But that's also where Dark's stackable -Resist increases its own -Damage debuff. The -Resist debuff pretty much cancels out a 30% resistance from an AV (although most AVs have higher resistances against the damage type that they commonly do). I have a Fire/Dark build that uses Twilight Grasp once every 7 seconds, and stacks to about 106% -Damage against an AV that has -30% Damage Resistance... clearly it would not do as high against AVs with 40% or higher, but it would still put out very noticeable -Damage.

Hmm, lets work out the math on this one, since its been a while since I've done it.  Also, with Codewalker lurking around if I make a mistake somewhere someone will likely catch it.

Twilight Grasp has a -50% regen debuff.  The debuff lasts 20 seconds and the power has an 8 second recharge and 2.37 cast time.  That means its base cycle time is 10.37 seconds.  You're suggesting you can keep it quad stacked on average, and that requires getting TGs cycle time to about 5 seconds or less.  However, since powers start recharging after they cast, that means reducing recharge from 8 seconds down to 5-2.37 = 2.63 seconds.  That implies total recharge of about 3.04 or 304%.  That's difficult, but not impossible.  Presuming about 100% global recharge, that checks, but with some effort.  But hold this thought.

Howling Twilight has a -500% regen debuff that lasts 30 seconds.  HT has 3.17 seconds of cast time and 180 seconds of recharge.  You're suggesting 50% uptime which presumes about 60 seconds of cycle time.  That requires 317% total recharge, also possible.  You're up to requiring close to 120% global recharge in the build to get this far, which is starting to push it, but still not impossible.

Lingering Radiation has a -500% regen debuff that lasts 30 seconds.  LR has 1.5 seconds cast time and 90s recharge.  If we presume the same level of global recharge (Rad should always be able to at least equal if not exceed Dark on recharge for the same build effort because of AM) LR's cycle time should be able to drop to 90/3.17 + 1.5 = 29.9 seconds.  This means given the same assumptions put into Dark above, /Rad should be able to keep LR stacked continuously.

According to my notes, I  misremembered AV res; you're correct on AV resistance: 85% at level 50, increasing to 87% at 55.  So we have /Dark doing about -700% debuff about half the time and -200% debuff the other half of the time.  Actually, a little less than that because every time you use HT, you will lose stacking on TG: HT's cast time is longer than the recharge time of TG in this situation.  The sequence TG->HT takes 5.54 seconds (even longer with Arcanatime) which is longer than the 5 second cycle time we're running TG at to keep it quad stacked.  We'll let that go for now, but its probably worth a couple percent lost -regen.  When HT is up, your net -regen is 700 * 0.15 = -105%, which is effectively capped at -100%.  When HT is down, your net regen is 200 * 0.15 = 30%.  Thus, your net average -regen is (100+30)/2 = 65%.

Rad's calculations are a bit easier, since LR is always stacked we're going to just state Rad's -regen is 100%.  I will point out, however, that with stacked LR Rad's -regen is strong enough that it remains basically strong enough to halt AV regeneration even at +3 (where it would be -97.5% with purple patch combat modifiers).

Now, to counter the -regen advantage, Dark has some advantages.  It can stack Tar Patch.  Tar Patch's resistance debuff is -30% and it lasts 45 seconds.  TP's recharge is 90s and cast time 3.1 seconds.  To fully double stack that would require reducing TP's net cycle time to 22.5 seconds, which would require 464% recharge.  Now I'm going to call that one out of bounds.  Assuming we stick with the same 317% total recharge we assumed for HT, TP's cycle time drops to about 31.5 seconds, which means it overlaps about 30% of the time.  That means 70% of the time the debuff would be -30%, and 30% of the time it would be -60%, and the average would be about -39%.  That's 16.5 percentage points better than Rad.  Is it enough to overcome the difference in -regen?

Well, there's a really big catch I alluded to earlier.  When you're spamming TG at the rate we're discussing, you're actually spending 2.37/5 = 47.4% of your time doing just that.  And even if we ignore Arcanatime and the fact you can't do two things at once, even if it was possible to spam HT without interfering with TG you'd be spending 3.17/60 = 5.3% of your time doing that, and 3.1/31.5 = 9.8% of your time just spamming Tar Patch.  That's 62.5% of your time just doing those three things, assuming you could even do them as fast as the calculations above suggest without interfering with each other, just to get the numbers we've estimated.  That means you only have 37.5% of your time to do anything else, including attack.  And Arcanatime lag ensures you won't even get to use all of that.  A rough estimate of the true time you have to attack would be closer to 35%.  And that's assuming conditions we know are mathematically impossible, because even one use of HT disrupts the TG cycle.  But assuming those disruptions are small, only 1/3rd of the time the */Dark controller can attack.  That won't affect pets of course, but the Controller himself or herself would be losing substantial damage due to not being able to shoot attacks.  The Rad controller would only be spending about 1.5/45 = 3.3% of their time spamming LR, and the set up time for the two toggles is small relative to the length of an AV fight.

Now, the one thing I haven't taken into account is the Dark Servant.  It also can use TG and therefore contribute to -regen, and it also has damage, but I don't have time at the moment to fully analyze what its net contribution would be.  That would take more time.  But I do think that setting it aside for now, there are significant questions about whether the edge in resistance debuff would be enough to overcome the huge opportunity cost of not being able to attack.  In effect the Dark is getting 16.5 percent more total damage, but losing about 65% of all his non-pet damage potential.  I'll have to think about that a bit more before making a conclusion.

I should also point out that this comparison assumes very high recharge on the */Dark controller which ironically the */Rad would have a much easier time reaching than the Dark (AM offers +30% recharge and is not difficult to perma).

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #54 on: September 18, 2014, 07:43:12 PM »
That behavior is not completely consistent across all flavors of Unix. Some systems, HP/UX comes to mind, will prevent you from removing the last link of a file that is memory mapped and has pages resident, of which the most common case is a running executable. For HP at least, the reasons have to do with the non-overcommit VMM implementation.

Spend a lot of time on Bobcats, do you?

HP-UX was always a weird unpredictable one.

Quote
Linux is one of the variants that will happily let you delete or even write to running executable (the latter will usually cause the process to fault). On the other hand, Linux systems also tend to have lots of random pseudo-filesystems mounted, most commonly /proc and /sys, which tend to cause a recursive rm on the root to choke before finishing. It will definitely get far enough to leave the system in a mostly unusable state that won't be able to boot again.

I remember someone accidentally nuking all of /sys once, but it was a while ago.  I'm now tempted test what happens on something more recent.

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #55 on: September 18, 2014, 08:13:57 PM »
rm -rf / will wipe your system.  In Unix (and POSIX-like systems) rm will unlink the file and free its inode from the filesystem.  However, if the file is still open then the file handle will still point to the file correctly and act to prevent its blocks from being freed.  As soon as the file handle is released, the last pointer to the inode goes away and the file is ultimately freed.

An inkling of what will happen if you rm -rf / a Linux server is to note a trick many programs use on temp files.  You open /var/tmp/mytempfile.txt for writing.  Then you delete it.  Believe it or not, the app still has an open handle to the file and can still read and write it, even though it doesn't appear in any directory listing.  This prevents other applications from accidentally touching the temp file.  Even if another app opens another temp file in the same directory with the exact same name, it won't affect your temp file.  The moment you close it, its gone.  In the same way, every file the OS need to keep running that is open at the moment you mass delete everything will still be open and useable, at least for a while, until they are closed or something else needs to open a file.  That's usually long enough to make your system go bye-bye.

In any case, since rm runs in memory on invocation, deleting its executable will not affect its ability to run to completion.

Just to make sure this is not a trick question, rm -R / won't necessarily wipe the entire system, because without the force switch you will likely get prompted a lot for files that rm ordinarily wouldn't delete.  Also, rm can't delete files and directories from read only mount points regardless of how you invoke it.  But on the whole, your system will be basically gone.

it's the last part that interests me. I figured (never actually read it anywhere) that it would remain in memory and go to completion but at a certain point there must be a failure if there wasn't files that were immune from the rm command even with a force envoked.

it did seem unlikely that it would just eat the whole system clean and save itself for last.
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #56 on: September 18, 2014, 08:21:07 PM »
That behavior is not completely consistent across all flavors of Unix. Some systems, HP/UX comes to mind, will prevent you from removing the last link of a file that is memory mapped and has pages resident, of which the most common case is a running executable. For HP at least, the reasons have to do with the non-overcommit VMM implementation.

Linux is one of the variants that will happily let you delete or even write to running executable (the latter will usually cause the process to fault). On the other hand, Linux systems also tend to have lots of random pseudo-filesystems mounted, most commonly /proc and /sys, which tend to cause a recursive rm on the root to choke before finishing. It will definitely get far enough to leave the system in a mostly unusable state that won't be able to boot again.

Oh, now the HPUX safeguard is interesting. Kinda goes against the whole "you know what you're doing" impetus of unix. Not that that isn't broken quite often.

Glad I'm not the only one who gets curious about ridiculous questions like that.

How in the world is it that you (and Arcanus) can keep the details completely in your own ready memory really baffles me. I can follow both of you mentally but when I attempt to correspond it comes across more like the country lawyer. "Well, I'm no high falutin' big city lawyer, but I recon'..." :)
Cogito, Ergo... eh?

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #57 on: September 18, 2014, 08:59:40 PM »
Linux is one of the variants that will happily let you delete or even write to running executable (the latter will usually cause the process to fault). On the other hand, Linux systems also tend to have lots of random pseudo-filesystems mounted, most commonly /proc and /sys, which tend to cause a recursive rm on the root to choke before finishing. It will definitely get far enough to leave the system in a mostly unusable state that won't be able to boot again.

So apparently Ubuntu on a 3.13 kernel will not allow rm to delete the proc or sys filesystem, but neither does it halt rm: rm happily skips them as "Operation not permitted" and keeps on trucking.  At the end of rm -rf / you'd still have those file systems, although I'm not sure how you'd know that since none of the commands you'd use to see them would be there anymore.

Codewalker

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #58 on: September 18, 2014, 09:13:58 PM »
Oh, now the HPUX safeguard is interesting. Kinda goes against the whole "you know what you're doing" impetus of unix. Not that that isn't broken quite often.

It's not so much a "keep the user from doing stupid things" safeguard so much as it is necessary for the OS to do because of certain guarantees it makes about memory management and about all pages in memory being backed by something on the disk that can be addressed, whether it be in the swap partition or in a file on a file system.

HP/UX is definitely a bit of an odd duck in the way it implements non-overcommitted memory, but commercial Unix systems have always had their own idiosyncrasies.

So apparently Ubuntu on a 3.13 kernel will not allow rm to delete the proc or sys filesystem, but neither does it halt rm: rm happily skips them as "Operation not permitted" and keeps on trucking.  At the end of rm -rf / you'd still have those file systems, although I'm not sure how you'd know that since none of the commands you'd use to see them would be there anymore.

That's what I would expect, since /sys is not real but is merely a VFS-like interface to some kernel info. However, I wouldn't have put it past them to have complex machinery to emulate the "files" being deleted despite there being no good reason to do so -- Linux does some silly things at times.

After the rm -rf / completes, you can use "echo *" to get a listing of files in the current directory. Both cd and echo are shell builtins, so they will continue to work even in a completely empty filesystem. A handy trick for recovering from broken systems where "ls" can't be executed due to things like missing or corrupt shared libraries, or ABI mismatches.

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #59 on: September 18, 2014, 09:19:01 PM »
After the rm -rf / completes, you can use "echo *" to get a listing of files in the current directory. Both cd and echo are shell builtins, so they will continue to work even in a completely empty filesystem. A handy trick for recovering from broken systems where "ls" can't be executed due to things like missing or corrupt shared libraries, or ABI mismatches.

<---- too much out of practice to remember that trick.