To-Hit messages: the good, bad, and ugly

As of February 12, the new combat log messages reporting To-Hit rolls are live on the CoX servers. This is a mixed blessing for HeroStats users. As of right now, the unstable builds (3.9.9.12 at the moment) use these messages, and by this weekend the stable builds will as well.

The Good: I previously posted about accuracy tracking improvements when these messages were on Test. Pretty much all of that still applies. For many powers, the To-Hit messages are going to make accuracy tracking better.

The Bad: There are some powers have no To-Hit message when they hit (Blazing Aura, for instance). That makes it difficult to track accuracy for those - it could be done, but it requires us to count damage messages as hits. That's an ugly kludge that I was hoping to get rid of.

The Ugly: Then there's powers that have a chance for a secondary effect to occur (for example, the chance to disorient on Barrage). For these, you see two To-Hit messages - the first for the secondary effect, the second for the actual damage. The power name is exactly the same in both cases. To make it worse, the secondary effect message only shows up for misses, and unlike the powers mentioned above, there's no damage message to use.

Because of the ugliness mentioned here, I'm leaving the old Power Accuracy calculations in HeroStats as well as using the new To-Hit message method. You'll be seeing two sections for accuracy now, one called Player Accuracy (the To-Hit message method) and one called Power Accuracy (the old method based on power activation/damage/miss messages).

What I'd like to see is a fix on these To-Hit messages by the CoX devs, so we can use only those for all powers and ditch the "Power Accuracy" section altogether. Suggestions:

• Refer to what the roll is actually being used for - i.e. "Barrage Chance to Disorient" or "Barrage Damage".
• Always show the To-Hit message, whether it's a hit or a miss.

That's pretty much all it would take.