Primaries/secondaries

[Xanthippe]

How do the powersets compare? 

If I have a controller with FF secondary, does it work as well as a defender with a FF primary?  Or are primary powers more powerful somehow?

[Trippy]

The Controller secondaries are supposedly roughly 80% the effectiveness as the Defender primaries.

[eldaec]

The  effectiveness of a power is only indirectly linked to being a primary/secondary.

All powers have a base 'value', Deflection shield has the same base defence no matter which list it appears on.

*However* all ATs have modifiers for all types of powers.

eg.

Defenders have  +Heal/Buff, -Damage.
Blasters have +Damage, -Heal/Buff
Masterminds have -almost everything

It doesn't matter whether the power is in your primary or secondary as such, but secondaries will, in general, contain more things you have a penalty to.

Most bonuses and penalties are in the region of 10 to 20%.

AT bonuses are multiplied on *before* the enhancement/insp/buff effects, meaning they are multiplicative with those other effects. A basic formulation looks something like....

(Base Power Damage * (1+AT bonus)) *  (1 +(Enhancement modifiers + Buff modifiers + Insp Modifiers)

[Xanthippe]

Thank you.  That is exactly the information I was looking for.

[Glazius]

How do the powersets compare? 

If I have a controller with FF secondary, does it work as well as a defender with a FF primary?  Or are primary powers more powerful somehow?

The defensive and/or acc debuff component of the powers is going to be a little weaker as a controller.

However, I think knockback is considered a crowd-control element, and will be stronger with a controller.

Not that anybody uses force field to knock stuff back, of course.

--GF

[eldaec]

Since ragdoll was introduced, the distance knocked back has dropped, but the time a mob is knocked down has increased.

Knockdown/back is now much more useful as a result.

[Xanthippe]

On my merc/ff mastermind, I use ff for knockback all the time.  Gets those pesky mobs off of me.

[ClydeJr]

I like killing things right on the edge of rooftops. That way when they collapse, they'll slowly slide off the edge, plummet 5 stories, and bounce! It makes me giggle in a very villainous way.

[Fargull]

On my merc/ff mastermind, I use ff for knockback all the time.  Gets those pesky mobs off of me.

Personal Bubble + Mercs(well any, but I have the same build) = The cheese.

[Glazius]

I like killing things right on the edge of rooftops. That way when they collapse, they'll slowly slide off the edge, plummet 5 stories, and bounce! It makes me giggle in a very villainous way.

Heh. Many people share that sentiment, but somebody did it one better.

A few Longbow managed to spawn on a walkway at the edge of Fort Cerebus in the newbie zone, so a high-end grav dominator who was back there for a cape mission or something used Lift on one, and got _just enough_ horizontal movement from the power to carry the Longbow over the edge. So he falls, down, down, down, to the shoreline, bounces on the top of a cliff, and caroms down the rocks, right into a group of Infected. (the n00blers of Darwin's Landing who think drinking sewer water will give them powers but just become Lost All My Hair And Teeth Man) Now, nobody likes Longbow. So one of them pulls a shotgun and takes off the guy's last sliver of health.

Moments like this are why I slot knockback in my stone tank.

--GF

[Alkiera]

The other day, my last day in CoH, I was on my Energy/Energy blaster.  I got a Vahzilok mission in a sewer.  In one room, there were those metal catwalks with the chain railings all around the room... I shot one, which knocked him up and back on to the railing.  I hit him again, which did knockdown, rather than knockback... at which point the zombie fell down, off the chain... except for his foot got caught on the chain.  He hung there, upside down, by his foot, kinda wiggling, until I shot him again, and he died and fell loose.  I laughed for quite some time.

I later had a similar thing happen, with a clockwork in a warehouse mission.  He hopped up on a railing, I knocked him down, and he fell off the railing and got caught by the foot.  He wiggled around there, caught, for several seconds, then finally got loose and fell onto a box, rolled off and onto the floor.  he finally stood up again before I got off a final shot... but he was out of commision for quite a while.

Alkiera

[Cuular]

I wonder what happens with the knockback/down ragdoll stuff if you have a group and some people have it turned on, and some have it turned off in the options?  Or have they made it on "all" the time now?

Will people with the effect turned off see the object fall normally, and be able to engage it, while the person with ragdoll turned on see it stuck on the railing/catwalk and engage it there?

I haven't logged into CoH in about 2 months, so I haven't taken a look at the options screens in a while.

[Llava]

I would imagine the object stays in the same place on both screens, just the one with ragdoll animation activated sees that the target has caught their hand on a rail while the other just sees a prone target seemingly stuck in midair.

[Miscreant]

The ragdoll's done server side, so everybody sees the same thing.  Crazy, I know.

[eldaec]

In related news, the devs have just discovered that ragdoll is 'bugged' and that mobs stay knocked down to long.

Sketchy reports from the test server indicate that npcs are now jumping back up again the instant they hit the deck.

A wailing and gnashing of teeth is now in progress.

[Trippy]

In related news, the devs have just discovered that ragdoll is 'bugged' and that mobs stay knocked down to long.

Sketchy reports from the test server indicate that npcs are now jumping back up again the instant they hit the deck.

A wailing and gnashing of teeth is now in progress.

Working as intended.

Edit: Here's Positron's reply:

When ragdoll went in during the CoV beta, it was immediately noticed that knockbacks were "longer" and that characters could lock down a single foe with KB powers. A bug was created for this, and it was recently fixed.

The bad part about this was that we had already two and a half months of users playing with the "new" ragdoll knockdown, and thus an expected form of gameplay.

Now, I really wanted this bug to be fixed back in CoV beta, where it could be fully tested and all the kinks worked out, giving the final product a knockback that was both cool looking and not overly powerful. The bug got fixed recently, and yes, it was missed in the patch notes.

Since this is a big disruption in gameplay, we are going to revert the knockdown back to the "bugged" code, and discuss with you all different solutions (or even if any solution to this is warranted).

This fix is in the next full build of CoX, which unfortunately is 2 patches away for you guys (we have a patch in QA right now, and going on training room soon, and then this will be fixed in the one after that).

[Llava]

I could swear I remember one of the devs specifically mentioning the addition of ragdoll as a buff for knockback, because of the extended knockdown duration, on the CoV beta boards.

But since I can't remember the exact quote or who said it, I'm probably attributing player statements to a dev or something.

[schild]

Wait, patches for both CoV and CoH are called CoX? Awesome.

[Llava]

Wait, patches for both CoV and CoH are called CoX? Awesome.

Heh, I missed that.  It started among the community, i think, hadn't seen a dev use the term until then.

So I guess that makes it official- it's okay to call them CoX now.