New efforts!

[Auroxis]

Weird, I remember trying to make an ultimate procer using Neutrino Bolt because it had a 1.5 second recharge base, 1 second CD (I believe this attack was the quickest recharge to animation), and made a have global rech build for it. I remember seeing the animation play out while the power itself would be fully recharged on the tail of the animation. Was Neutrino Bolt just a special case where it did have a delay like you stated, but the window is so small it seems like the power would insta recharge? From that I assumed all attacks worked in a similar fashion where if the rech was faster than the animation, you can catch it on the tail end.

My Emp/Rad ran something similar. A Neutrino Bolt-> Neutrino Bolt -> Cosmic Burst attack chain on a high recharge build.

Neutrino Bolt's recharge was pretty close to instant with Geas of the Kind Ones active, and fairly effective without it.

You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDSyHmLG-oA

[MM3squints]

My Emp/Rad ran something similar. A Neutrino Bolt-> Neutrino Bolt -> Cosmic Burst attack chain on a high recharge build.

Neutrino Bolt's recharge was pretty close to instant with Geas of the Kind Ones active, and fairly effective without it.

You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDSyHmLG-oA

This was the build I used (ya ya I know I didn't take Aim, but it was for science xD)

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1484&c=682&a=1364&f=HEX&dc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

I had a rech of +268.75 with build. I never got Geas of the Kind with this toon, but for fun with Mids I turned it one and it jumped to 368.75 rech, but even with that it only shaves off .01 off the CD

Edit: This was one of those I will buff and debuff, but only use Neutrino Bolt as an attack toon. For some reason the insta CD with the animation mesmerized me like a cat trying to play with a tassel. I am easily amused.

Edit 2: Also like in your vid where you show having 252 rech, by the time the animation finishes by hitting the target, the bolt is ready to go. Even seeing that now is mesmerizing to me xD

[pinballdave]

My Emp/Rad ran something similar. A Neutrino Bolt-> Neutrino Bolt -> Cosmic Burst attack chain on a high recharge build.

Neutrino Bolt's recharge was pretty close to instant with Geas of the Kind Ones active, and fairly effective without it.

You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDSyHmLG-oA

I liked to stack as many IO status procs in neutrino bolt, especially the chance for hold.

[brothermutant]

I wasn't.  Lots of people suggested it, but to me that was one of the most boring possibilities I could think of.  Technically, Alpha already did that to some degree.  I can think of all sorts of more interesting options for the higher Incarnate powers than just granting a couple of slots.


Edit: let me amplify.  If you could make the powers in any of the higher incarnate tiers *without* modifying the game engine from I24, I think you're not trying hard enough.  Those powers should have been interesting enough and original enough to actually require new engine mechanics of some kind.  If the game could already do it, why bother.  If you think about it, three of the six incarnate trees that existed in I23 required some form of new game mechanics to make work: Alpha, Hybrid, and Interface all do things that other abilities couldn't do prior to the introduction of incarnate powers (although in a broad sense some of what Hybrid does is similar mechanically to what interface does).  Meanwhile Destiny, Judgment, and Lore all grant in effect extremely powerful versions of "normal" powers: super strong buff, super strong AoE, and pets. 

I really hoped and expected that the higher tiers would continue the trend from Alpha (sort of a super-slot) through Destiny, Judgment, and Lore, and through Hybrid and Interface, to other more exceptional abilities.

I disagree. While I did like several of the Incarnate abilities (the team buffs, Lore pets, Nukes that don't cause crash on EVERY toon), I distinctly recall people building with their Alpha slot in mind, which to me was weird. How can you enjoy a toon that has that much dmg, acc or end issues UNTIL you get level 50+1? To me, that was more broken than giving everyone a few more slots.

Plus, I would think it would add another level of MinMaxing, which many of us loved. Who here wanted just ONE more slot to make that kickazz move perma or needed one more slot to get that IO set bonus but couldn't spare it in their build? I am not suggesting that all we get is slots and no cool new moves, but I think, instead of the lame "level-shift", unlocking a tier 4 could have given you an extra slot to be placed in your build along with whatever benefit the Incarnate ability was to give you anyways.

I think it would have been better to have multiple slots open up (you can make them only "available" if on incarnate trials if that is your beef with this idea) as you go up in incarnate status. The level shifts I thought were lame, and while I think the aforementioned abilities were cool, I think there should have been bigger limits on their use (LONG recharges, not team-wide buffs, pets you can't control ala MM style, Nukes take WAY longer to recharge and cannot be damage buffed ...although I don't recall if you could increase the damage of the "nukes"). Hell, it could be neat to just have them open up one more power "choice" once you get your alpha. Many of my builds were lacking in Hasten or some other highly useful power, and having that new power pick come up would have been well worth doing Incarnate stuff imho.

To me, the current Incarnate abilities, while cool, really broke the game in a lot of ways. When everyone can nuke/heal/mez protect/rez/cast controllable pets/buff/debuff, then why was any class special at that point? It really took a lot away from the other classes by making everyone good at everything and to me smacked of lack of interest from the devs. I am not saying they did a bad job, just that it wasn't the direction I would have taken it.

[Codewalker]

Was Neutrino Bolt just a special case where it did have a delay like you stated, but the window is so small it seems like the power would insta recharge? From that I assumed all attacks worked in a similar fashion where if the rech was faster than the animation, you can catch it on the tail end.

Recharge doesn't start until the power is finished activating, which is almost always after the animation on your character has finished.

With Neutrino bolt you have a very small base recharge, with enough +Rech it would be possible to get it to recharge quickly enough that it's available for use again before the projectile hits the target, if the target is far enough away. Projectile delay adds time to the hit effect which is independent of the activation time.

That's quite fast, but not as fast as if it had zero recharge, in which case you'd be able to activate it again immediately after the projectile was launched.

[Codewalker]

Although I had actually considered gaming the system very early on**, this fact wasn't actually fully exploited by the devs until Titan Weapons.  TW exploits the fact that the cast time of a power can actually be set to *zero* and then the actual speed of the power can then be determined by the animation.  Cast time cannot be changed on the fly, but animations can be (that's in part how custom animations work).  Titan Weapons have a slow mode and a fast mode, and the fast mode plays faster animations that root for less time, allowing the player to activate attacks quicker in sequence.

TW wasn't actually implemented that way. It might be possible to do it purely with animations, though since powers only have one set of state bits outside of power customization, it would take some tricky sequencer work involving the temporary 'Momentum' power setting a sticky bit while it's on the player.

Titan Weapons instead used power redirection, so the fast and slow versions were two separate powers, and the game decided at the last second during power activation which power definition to use. The power definition in the set itself only contained a special marker attribmod to tell the engine that it needed to do redirection (there are some debug messages left in the client's power parser that helpfully tell designers if they've set these up wrong). It does contain a copy of some of the other attribmods, but those are never used and only exist to make the in-game real numbers show something since those don't understand redirection.

Power redirection was also used for Stalker's in-combat assassin strike, and Issue 24 fast snipe. Resistance runesoldiers also have a rifle attack that uses redirection to randomly select between one that is tagged energy or negative energy attack type; probably an early test of the system before players got powers that used it.

[Pyromantic]

I hated Pb's and warshades. They both had MASSIVE endurance issues in human form, even if I turned of shields that were not needed

I can't speak much to PBs (never could get into them), but WSs had two extremely potent endurance recover powers: Stygian Circle and Eclipse.  Both required groups of enemies (dead or alive) to achieve a more substantial effect, but full end-bar refills were not at all uncommon.  So, WSs might have end trouble in long fights against single hard targets, but against larger groups they really shouldn't be.  To that effect I recall intentionally keeping groups of minions alive around harder targets in order to fuel powers like Eclipse and Mire.

[brothermutant]

Hey CodeWalker, how did you find out all that stuff about powers? Was it available info to all, did you test the info on test server or were you able to decipher their "code"?

[Pyromantic]

I disagree. While I did like several of the Incarnate abilities (the team buffs, Lore pets, Nukes that don't cause crash on EVERY toon), I distinctly recall people building with their Alpha slot in mind, which to me was weird. How can you enjoy a toon that has that much dmg, acc or end issues UNTIL you get level 50+1? To me, that was more broken than giving everyone a few more slots.

Plus, I would think it would add another level of MinMaxing, which many of us loved. Who here wanted just ONE more slot to make that kickazz move perma or needed one more slot to get that IO set bonus but couldn't spare it in their build? I am not suggesting that all we get is slots and no cool new moves, but I think, instead of the lame "level-shift", unlocking a tier 4 could have given you an extra slot to be placed in your build along with whatever benefit the Incarnate ability was to give you anyways.

I don't believe this logic follows.  If you keep adding slots, at a certain point you are reducing the amount of minmaxing, as you have less need to make meaningful decisions.  In other words, if you have enough slots to get as many as you realistically need for every power, then you no longer have to decide which powers don't get the extra slots.  If you were just a few slots shy of getting what you wanted, that suggests to me that the number of slots is ideal.

[Pyromantic]

On the subject of KB:

I don't think it can ever be simply classified as good or bad; it has the potential to be both.  You can think of knockback as having two significant effects.  The first is damage mitigation, which is pretty much universally a good (or neutral) thing.  The other is repositioning, which certainly can be good or bad, particularly in the way it can affect potential damage inflicted upon the knocked back enemies.  For example, KB might allow you to tighten enemy groups, making it easier to apply AoE damage to more targets.  On the other hand, it can also spread out enemy groups, having the reverse effect.  There are a lot of factors that influence whether you will have one or the other; obviously player skill is an important element, but you also have to consider terrain and consistency of the effect (Energy Torrent has a 60% chance to apply KB for example, while Shockwave is 100%).  You also sometimes are in a position that you don't particularly want to use knockback, but it is attached to a power that will do significant damage, and you may be trading off damage now for a somewhat decreased opportunity to do damage later.  In the worst case, knockback can have an extremely detrimental effect.  I have seen, for example, a /SS tanker use Hand Clap to spread enemies all over the place, making AoEs practically impossible to apply--not only for damage, but also for crowd control and aggro generation by the tank--resulting in player deaths.

The thing is that many forms of mitigation are relatively neutral in this regard.  It is unusual for holds to significantly impact your opportunity to deal damage, for example, except in the sense that the mitigation provided allows you to focus your efforts away from survival.  There are exceptions of course; holding an enemy that is already confused could prevent you from receiving a buff for example, and further crowd control on confused enemies might actually reduce your xp-earning rate, if not your damage output directly.  Immobilizing enemies before they gather tightly around an aggro magnet might also be detrimental to damage output.  But for the most part, other forms of damage mitigation tend to be at least as effective, without the potential downsides (or upsides) of repositioning targets.  For that reason, my personal preference is often for powers that have reliable knockback that I can use as a utility when the situation calls for it, such as Gale.

Note: It may be helpful to think of something that is somewhat similar in a more extreme sense, namely phasing.  Phase powers (in the original incarnation--the revised Dimension Shift being a different story) provided damage mitigation, but at the cost of not being able to deal damage to the target at all.  While these powers had their place, they were not at all popular.

[HEATSTROKE]

Must have been. I know I put endurance mods on the active defense powers. I guess I just suck.

No I wouldnt say you just suck. I would say you make one of the most common mistakes I see people who make builds make. And its a very easy one to make. That the toggles are costinh you more end than your attacks.

Ive seen this more times than I can count. Toggles do cost end and some of them have a pretty hefty cost. But in general they dont cost more than attacks especially if you dont slot attacks for end reduction.

Quick example.. Lets take that PB

Unslotted those toggles collectively cost you .26 end per second. So all three cost you .78 end per second..

Now lets look at attacks. Lets figure a standard attack chain of the first three blast powers in human form.

Gleaming Bolt-3.12 end per cast
Glinting Eye-5.12 end per cast
Gleaming Blast-8.53 end per cast

Total cast time abot 4.34 seconds.. Now lets total that...

Attacks in that span of time cost you 16.77 end

The Toggles cost you 3.38 end....

Now keep in mind that these are unslotted values with recharges or hasten..

So when you start building you add hasten.. so you can attack more often.. which costs you MORE end because your attacking more often..

But we tend to blame the toggles.. why.. because they are ON.. we see that little swirling thing going around sucking away end.. we dont SEE end cost from attacks.. so we really dont think about it in all honesty..

I learned a long time ago.. attacks cost WAY more end than toggles..

[Auroxis]

Except the opportunity cost of slotting endurance reduction in attacks is usually higher than in toggles. And toggles continue to drain endurance while traveling to the next mob.

[HEATSTROKE]

Except the opportunity cost of slotting endurance reduction in attacks is usually higher than in toggles. And toggles continue to drain endurance while traveling to the next mob.

However the rate at which they do is so much lower its not even funny. And your recovery rate should offset that easily. In our example unslotted stamina generates 2.08 end per second. The three toggles only drain .78 end per second. I could run all over Paragon City with toggles running and never drain the end...

The fact remains that attacks drain far more end than toggles.


Even with SO's you could slot one end redux in attacks and still do enough damage and have enough accuracy as well as recharge.

With IO's the point becomes moot.

[Ankhammon]

No I wouldnt say you just suck. I would say you make one of the most common mistakes I see people who make builds make. And its a very easy one to make. That the toggles are costinh you more end than your attacks.

Ive seen this more times than I can count. Toggles do cost end and some of them have a pretty hefty cost. But in general they dont cost more than attacks especially if you dont slot attacks for end reduction.

Quick example.. Lets take that PB

Unslotted those toggles collectively cost you .26 end per second. So all three cost you .78 end per second..

Now lets look at attacks. Lets figure a standard attack chain of the first three blast powers in human form.

Gleaming Bolt-3.12 end per cast
Glinting Eye-5.12 end per cast
Gleaming Blast-8.53 end per cast

Total cast time abot 4.34 seconds.. Now lets total that...

Attacks in that span of time cost you 16.77 end

The Toggles cost you 3.38 end....

Now keep in mind that these are unslotted values with recharges or hasten..

So when you start building you add hasten.. so you can attack more often.. which costs you MORE end because your attacking more often..

But we tend to blame the toggles.. why.. because they are ON.. we see that little swirling thing going around sucking away end.. we dont SEE end cost from attacks.. so we really dont think about it in all honesty..

I learned a long time ago.. attacks cost WAY more end than toggles..

Don't forget that Hasten itself costs 15 end every 120 seconds. Not a lot, but if it happens at a bad time it still kinda sux.

[HEATSTROKE]

Don't forget that Hasten itself costs 15 end every 120 seconds. Not a lot, but if it happens at a bad time it still kinda sux.

I wasnt even talking about hasten yet. but good point...

if I learned one thing.. it was how to manage end

[Ankhammon]

I wasnt even talking about hasten yet. but good point...

if I learned one thing.. it was how to manage end

and yep. My importance placement for slots while leveling up was always acc, then end, then rech and finally moar damage/Def/resist/other.

That usually allowed me to shore up end usage on most chars without even concentrating on the end usage.
Got dicey with Dark armor but then I just made it a priority to get Dark Regen it's ToE proc and that leveled out DA too.

[Arcana]

Edit 2: Also like in your vid where you show having 252 rech, by the time the animation finishes by hitting the target, the bolt is ready to go. Even seeing that now is mesmerizing to me xD

I'm seeing more or less what I expect to see, which is that the power starts recharging after it finishes animating.  Because the power is so quick, it might seem like it starts recharging before the attack "finishes" but that's because after the cast time of the attack finishes the animation fluidly continues a bit: many attacks do that where if you didn't actually attack again the animation would continue for a bit for visual smoothness, but most aren't as fast as Neutrino Bolt is in the first place: that fluidity plus the particle travel time makes it seem like Neutrino Bolt can be used continually.  It sort of can, in a visual sense, but not in the sense that its doing something special other powers can't do.

[Codewalker]

Hey CodeWalker, how did you find out all that stuff about powers? Was it available info to all, did you test the info on test server or were you able to decipher their "code"?

A number of sources.

1. Reverse engineering the powers data that the game uses; they contain all of the information about what each power does, but you have to figure out how the engine applies that information in order to really understand them. I started work on this around issue 14-ish and it took the better part of a year to fully decipher it. Sometime just before the F2P launch I took over maintenance of the then-abandoned City of Data site and refurbished it using my homegrown power data extraction and analysis tools. Later releases of Mids also started using that source; until we had 'in house' tools to do it, TopDoc was graciously providing CSV dumps for Mids of some of the data using his own tools.

2. Analysis of the client executable. This ties in with (1) in that a lot of it came from tracing the machine code that loads and processes the powers data, and using that to build what I call a Rosetta Stone of the otherwise undocumented binary formats that game stores that data in.

3. Good old fashioned in-game experimentation in order to test and validate or disprove theories about how the game engine uses that data to execute powers.

4. Reading forum posts. Arcana in particular has a lot of insight into certain parts of the combat loop, especially timing related, and was on my watch list back on the official forums.

5. PMs from developers. Some in the context of participating in the open betas. Especially once I started working on COD and the Mids backend, several were willing to answer questions about certain edge cases that I wasn't sure on.

[Arcana]

TW wasn't actually implemented that way. It might be possible to do it purely with animations, though since powers only have one set of state bits outside of power customization, it would take some tricky sequencer work involving the temporary 'Momentum' power setting a sticky bit while it's on the player.

Titan Weapons instead used power redirection, so the fast and slow versions were two separate powers, and the game decided at the last second during power activation which power definition to use. The power definition in the set itself only contained a special marker attribmod to tell the engine that it needed to do redirection (there are some debug messages left in the client's power parser that helpfully tell designers if they've set these up wrong). It does contain a copy of some of the other attribmods, but those are never used and only exist to make the in-game real numbers show something since those don't understand redirection.

Power redirection was also used for Stalker's in-combat assassin strike, and Issue 24 fast snipe. Resistance runesoldiers also have a rifle attack that uses redirection to randomly select between one that is tagged energy or negative energy attack type; probably an early test of the system before players got powers that used it.

This is the second time I've forgotten this; the devs experimented with the zero cast time thing, but ultimately used power redirection for Titan which didn't need it.  I stand corrected.

For the record, I had suggested long ago that the devs consider deliberately making MA's cast times shorter than their actual animation time specifically so that they would start recharging earlier: that would allow the "better" powers to be used more often than on-paper recharge calculations would ordinarily suggest, and it would also allow for some interesting additional modifications to Eagle's Claw, back when its DPA was pathetic (specifically, I was thinking about messing with the animations within chains).  They never went for it, in part because the whole idea was pretty radical at the time.  I saw them experiment with the idea (I think) with Titan Weapons, and it keeps getting stuck in my head that TW is implemented that way, even though I don't think it ever went live with low cast time fudging.

[Arcana]

I learned a long time ago.. attacks cost WAY more end than toggles..

...for strong players.

The catch on toggles is that most players don't toggle manage, and leave them on all the time.  That means when you're running through a mission the toggles are burning end all the time, and attacks are burning end during the fraction of the time you're attacking.  Its virtually always true that attacks burn more, but how much more depends on how fast you play.  If you play slower, then you're attacking for a smaller fraction of time relative to the time you're spending just walking around.

The rough rule of thumb is that for something with melee toggles, it costs about 1 eps to run them all without end slotting.  It costs about 5eps to attack continuously, more or less.  The average player spends about half the time attacking and half the time moving/exploring.  In the average map, toggles are costing 1eps and attacks about 2.5 eps averaged out.  In something like the cave map, that can be reversed for many players.  Things like AoEs can also dramatically alter the equation in some cases.

Still, people did tend to ignore eps for attacks a lot.  Interestingly, its a lesson that was learned in the heyday of HOs, and then mostly forgotten in the age of inventions.