General Idiot

It's worth noting that powers are not typically balanced against the same power in a different set. Assault sets particularly often have powers with different values entirely from their counterparts in ranged or melee sets - in Sonic Assault this is only true of Shockwave and Shout, both of which have longer recharge and correspondingly higher base damage than the original versions in the ranged set. Yes, the ranged powers in Sonic Assault have lower debuff values. But, or balancing purposes they're also not considered to be the same powers as the ones ranged ATs get even though they share names and animations. The argument that the debuff value isn't consistent with what dominators get from other resistance debuffs holds a little more water, but without any other AT getting Assault sets to compare relative values with its really hard to say for sure if the lower -res values are an oversight or an intentional decision when balancing the set.

One of the other servers has an option for something like this that actually ends up looking really cool. Their answer to the 'where's the rifle?' question was to just rename the set to beam blast instead. It's still visually and mechanically distinct enough from other ranged sets to work just fine. Honestly in my ideal world every set would have options for firing from a weapon or not, but as I understand it the amount of work involved in making alternate animation options is quite significant. And yes I even include stuff like dual pistols and assault rifle in that statement cause it opens up options for a character with arm mounted weapons like what War Machine has in Marvel comics and movies. Edit: Also, the eye beam alternate animation they added to Energy Torrent in the melee AT epic pools is literally just Cutting Beam fired from the eyes, too.

Hard mode MSR with new mechanics and upgraded rewards similarly to how they did for the Imperious and Lady Grey taskforces would be cool. Would probably have to only be doable in the instance version, and even then they'd need to put something on the UI for enabling it which as I understand it is a pain to work with.

Envisioning such a set is one thing. Actually creating the whole new models and animations it'd almost certainly require is quite another. It'd be cool but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

People are loving it precisely because it doesn't happen that often. If they made them a regular thing they wouldn't be nearly as special. And honestly, it's not like leveling on Homecoming is all that slow to begin with that it needs speeding up even more.

If you want a specific name, you're usually better off doing a /getglobalname on it ingame and sending either a tell or an ingame email to that global asking nicely if they'll let you have it rather than just hoping they see a message on the forums.

Looking at the numbers in your other post a little further back, I can't help but come back to the discussion we had previously about some powers receiving a base damage reduction and others not. Putting consistency with design formulas aside for a moment, at least of the two examples you provided the net effect of the current levels of overcap damage reduction appears already balanced, but only on powers which didn't receive a base damage reduction as well. And I just have to wonder if the harsh numbers on the overcap mechanic are an attempt at keeping those powers balanced overall, which then hits powers that did see a reduction in base damage too hard. Using your numbers for Axe Cyclone as an example a -1% to -11% difference to a brute assuming both hit target cap to me seems alright, given the relative difference in survivability between the two ATs. Tankers have more hp and higher resistances (But not defense - assuming IO builds, both are going to be defense softcapped if they build for it) so they survive slightly better, while brutes do slightly more damage overall. That seems fair to me. It's only in the powers that also do less base damage now where the overcap mechanic really seems too harsh, the -24% to -32% difference on your Frozen Aura numbers feels like way too much when the survivability difference between the two ATs isn't nearly that much in a world where IO sets are as easy to acquire as they are. At present at least from my perspective it feels like one of two things needs to happen. Either they roll back the radius and associated base damage changes and restore the radius buffs in Gauntlet, or they leave the radius changes in and significantly lower the damage penalty from the overcap mechanic. Of the two, the latter is probably more consistent with the design formulas but it then requires them to look at further changes to specific powers later, plus makes tankers feel weaker in situations where they're not hitting full target saturation. Which do happen, not everyone plays on a team or at x8 to be able to always have 16 targets available. So personally I'd like to see the radius changes reverted and overcap left as is, at least for now. Unfortunately, since the curent build is already labeled release candidate I doubt we're going to see any further adjustments for this page.

Let's not mince words. Seeds of Confusion was always objectively overpowered. That it wasn't changed until now doesn't change that fact. It was overpowered the day it was first put in the game and it's arguably only gotten more so over the years with more and more sources of global recharge being available. It needed to be brought in line with other area effect controls, so the endgame enemies don't need to be balanced around its existence. The whole thing of control being useless at endgame? At least partly the fault of this one power being so, so much better than any other area control in the game. Balancing such that Seeds of Confusion isn't always an automatic win button renders all other control completely useless, and conversely balancing such that other control would be useful would leave every group completely trivialised by Seeds of Confusion. With it brought into line, they now have the option to design content where control will be more useful. And Carrion Creepers was objectively broken. Not just overpowered, but straight up broken. Invention procs are set up to only go off so often on average, but the way Carrion Creepers was made with pseudopets spawning pseudopets spawning even more pseudopets allowed it to have up to triple the proc rates it should ever have been allowed to have. As an upside, the creeper vines now do containment damage where they didn't before. Maybe try slotting it for damage rather than just procs and see if that makes up some of the difference. Also? No set should ever be reduced to one or two good powers while the rest are just filler. Any set that is, is an objectively badly designed set and needs to be reworked. No matter how long it's been left in its broken state.

I made the same request in the patch notes thread for one of the earlier builds and the response was it's on the to do list but not for this page.

Also I'm pretty sure 'inadvert' should be 'inadvertent'. I almost want them to leave one or both typos in the final patch notes just because a note about potential typos having some itself is hilarious.

This is precisely the point I keep trying to make. Surely, if there was ever a time to bring this and other outlier powers into line it was in the patch that changes all the others in a way that now makes the outliers even more so by comparison. Because as I said previously, the net result of this patch is that the gap between the ones that follow the formulas and the ones that don't is now wider than it has ever been. And I thought the general goal was to make the game as a whole more balanced, not less.

Except they're not doing that though. That might be their intention, but the actual effect is some sets have been nerfed and others haven't. If the intention is to adjust the archetype as a whole, either -all- sets should be subject to the same reduction in damage on their aoes or none of them should. I'm not qualified to say whether the archetype as a whole is currently overperforming, I'm just saying that if the whole archetype is overperforming, then the whole archetype should receive whatever change is made. Not just some of it. Yes, the standard power design formulas mandate a reduction in damage if the radius is increased. I get that. I thoroughly disagree with Homecoming's devs being as unbreakably married to the formulas as they are and never deviating from them even a tiny bit even when dealing with something like the tanker's increased target caps which already explicitly break from standard rules, but that's a whole different discussion. The point I'm making is, relative to what currently exists on live, no actual adjustment to aoe radius has been made in this patch. At all. We can argue the semantics of an 8 ft or 10 ft radius buffed to 12 or 15 by the inherent (and thus getting to cheat on the power formulas) vs just having a 12 or 15 ft radius all we like, but the fact remains that when I actually press the button, the power on live activates with a 12 or 15 ft radius. When I press the same button on test, it activates with the same 12 or 15 ft radius but does less damage. The radius when I use the power has not changed, but the damage has. That's a nerf here and now, even if it's still above what tankers had before the last round of changes. The fact that they were previously buffed too much might justify nerfing them slightly now, but that doesn't make the current changes not a nerf. But more importantly, it's an inconsistent nerf because it's only applying to some power sets. And, again, if doing the damage they were previously doing was unbalanced then why have other sets been allowed to continue doing that damage? If we accept the idea that doing the damage that currently exists on live is unbalanced, the only logical outcome here that I can see is some tanker secondaries are now more unbalanced than they were before. And I just don't see how that's a change that should be allowed to go anywhere near live, whether looked at relative to current tankers or pre i26p4 tankers or old live CoH tankers or any other historical form of tanker you might care to consider. To illustrate the point I'm trying repeatedly to make, consider the two powers I mentiioned in my first post on this: Frozen Aura (live) has a 10 ft radius, costs 18.512 endurance and recharges in 20 seconds. It does 75.23 points of cold damage and a secondary effect of a mag 2 sleep. The radius is buffed to 15 ft by Gauntlet, making that base number something no player will ever see in actual gameplay. When activated it will always be 15 ft. Foot Stomp has a 15 ft radius, costs 18.512 endurance and recharges in 20 seconds. It does 75.02 points of smashing damage and a secondary effect of an 80% chance for knockdown. The power's radius is exempt from being buffed by Gauntlet, and when activated will always activate with a radius of 15 ft. Frozen Aura (beta) has a 15 ft radius, costs 18.512 endurance and recharges in 20 seconds. It does 57.87 points of cold damage and a secondary effect of a mag 2 sleep. Gauntlet no longer buffs radius so when activated it will always be 15 ft. My question is this: With the same radius both now and previously (as I said, the discussion of base number vs buffed by Gauntlet is purely semantics), same endurance cost and same recharge, both powers having a control secondary effect, why does one power do so much more dmaage than the other if both are considered balanced? The only possible answer I can see is that one of them is in fact not balanced, which in turn begs the question of why it wasn't changed as well. And that's my point. If they're changing tankers they need to change all tankers. Not just some tankers.

Which, again, merely reinforces my point that the changes they're making now aren't really changes at all. Every pbaoe in every tanker secondary has the same radius when you use it after the change as it did before, but somehow baking it into the powers instead of being an external buff from the inherent justifies nerfing the damage on some of them but not on others. If they all got nerfed similarly it'd make more sense with the idea they're trying to balance tankers against brutes such that both ATs have appeal to players. But inconsistently nerfing only some of them while the stated reason remains the same makes no sense to me.

Okay so I didn't look at the versions on other ATs and you're right on one of them at least, on other ATs Spine Burst is in fact 15 ft. But on tankers, on current live Homecoming, it's 10 ft. I assume that was done at some point to account for the current version of Gauntlet buffing it back to 15 ft. Which honestly just adds more weight to my point of this change being only a change in implementation to no actual effect on gameplay as far as the AoE radius is concerned. So effectively it's just a very questionably justified nerf to damage on some powers. Might be worth noting however, other melee ATs don't get Combustion. The only version of fiery melee that gets it is the Tanker version, and it has a base radius of 10 ft on live. Yet it doesn't get its damage nerfed for being changed to 15 ft while other powers even within the same set do. And yes, Blasters get it in fire manipulation and Dominators get in in fiery assault and it's 15 ft there, so maybe that makes some sense. But it's again quite dubious to balance a melee set based on ranged sets' version of the power.

What worries me somewhat more than just the damage reductions is that they're applied so incredibly unevenly. Sets that already had 15 ft aoes are doing the same damage they did before, while other sets have seen the damage of their aoes reduced. In the previous version this was accounted for by making some powers exempt from the radius buff part of the inherent, but in this version I feel like it's been ignored? For example, the current version on live has both Super Strength's Foot Stomp and Ice Melee's Frozen Aura doing nearly identical damage, with Foot Stomp having a base 15 ft radius unaffected by Gauntlet and Frozen Aura having a base 10 ft radius buffed to 15 ft by Gauntlet. The current version here on beta however sees Foot Stomp doing the same damage it's always done while Fozen Aura now does approximately 77% of its previous base damage in exchange for a radius buff it effectively already had in the previous implementation. But now because it's part of the power rather than applied by the inherent it somehow justifies a severe reduction in the base damage? If the intent was to have -all- tankers doing less damage with their AoEs, I wouldn't like it but I could at least understand the logic of trying to rebalance them as an archetype compared to brutes. But since it's applied so inconsistently it's not strictly a nerf to tankers overall but rather a nerf to specific tanker power sets while others remain untouched, in exchange for a radius buff that doesn't truly exist because the live version already had it. It coming from the inherent vs being baked into the powers directly is a change that to most players isn't a change at all, the end result is the radius when they activate their power is the same on beta as it is on live and for some but not all sets they just do less damage now. And then what's up with Spines? Spine Burst on live is 10 ft base, buffed to 15 by Gauntlet. On beta it's 15, but the damage is unchanged at 60.02 total. Why was this one power exempt from having its damage nerfed like the others? Or Fiery Melee, where Fire Sword Circle saw its damage reduced but Combustion didn't even though they both received the same increase from 10 to 15 ft? If there's logic there, I'm not seeing it. This whole change feels very inconsistent in a way I'm not used to seeing from Homecoming. And I just can't help but wonder if the implications regarding balance between different power sets have actually been thought through all the way because that's the net effect here, relative performance from one set to another has changed. Changing the radius increase from being an inherent power to just increasing the base number doesn't actually change anything, at all. So from the perspective of the average player who might not even read patch notes, they've just decided for whatever reason to nerf the aoe output of some sets heavily, some sets more lightly, and a few sets not at all. And again, none of this is even mentioning the overcap mechanic which quite frankly to me seems entirely overengineered for what it's trying to achieve. If you want to nerf tankers' aoe damage, just nerf tankers' aoe damage and be done with it rather than inventing a whole new mechanic for it. But even before considering that, if the intent is to rebalance the archetype overall and not specific power sets then whatever changes are made to base damage should be applied evenly to all sets rather than haphazardly a little here, a lot there, none at all over here. And if, as I've seen some people speculate, these changes are really at least partly about adjusting the performance of IO procs in aoes for some sets.... just a crazy thought. Maybe we really need to rip the bandaids off already and actually do a proper rebalance on IOs instead of tinkering around the edges of all the problems they cause by being as horribly unbalanced as they are. I know that's not a popular opinion, but more and more I feel like its what needs to happen or these kinds of haphazard bandaid solutions to problems that don't exist on SOs are just going to continue to proliferate. But that's a whole other discussion that's likely beyond the scope of this particular feedback thread.

I think you may be misremembering that, given that customizing spines and thorns is located in the power customisation section of the tailor rather than being a weapon option in the costume section like all the weapon based sets are. It's also not mentioned in the issue 11 patch notes (at least as preserved on the wiki) like all the other weapon sets that existed at the time are. However both Spines and Thorny Assault are mentioned by name in the list of sets for which customisation was added in the issue 16 patch notes. Spines sits in a weird in between place between weapon and power customization, I think. The spines FX is technically a weapon with an associated draw animation, but the FX themselves weren't customizable until they added the full power customization in issue 16. The harder part of adding a no thorns option for the various powers I originally mentioned I think is the animations used for them in the plant manipulation versions are different, they include that weapon draw animation at the start that plays conditionally if the thorns aren't already drawn. Whether an alternate animation can just remove that I'm not sure but in theory it should be doable given that Entangle, Strangler and Vines have the same animation time as their plant control counterparts and should thus be able to just use those animations. Similarly Toxins has the same animation time as other build up powers and should be able to use the generic build up animation. But that might be harder than it sounds with how spaghetti this game's code can be.

So I had a character I was going to make using just the non-thorns powers in plant manipulation, but those powers still make you sprout thorns even though they don't use them at all. And that makes sense if you're using all the powers in the set but if you want to use just the control and self buff powers (entangle, strangler, toxins, spore cloud, wild fortress and vines) without using any of the thorn attacks, you're just stuck sprouting thorns you'll never use on three of those powers - specifically entangle, strangler and vines. So I was wondering, how feasible would it be to add a customization option for those powers to not have the thorns. Presumably something similar to what's been done to eliminate redraw from weapon sets could be applied to plant manipulation so it won't cause redraw issues if you use these options, and then just use the animations from the original versions in plant control? Might be harder than it sounds but I'd love to have the option if it could be done.

I could be wrong but I'm reasonably sure the heel button on the UI intentionally does follow passive, not stay passive.

You're not wrong, but at the same time I'd still love to be able to do that concept without having to stick a spider logo on my chest. And yes I know you can have a costume without that but my point is you're still limited to the specific weapons and powers the Arachnos Soldier has.

Additionally, I'd love if we could get the onehanded hurl animation used by characters with shield defense as a customization option for everyone. It looks way better than the normal one to me, but you have to have a shield to see it.

This is true, sets in several other categories include damage despite it not being their primary purpose. However, this was never true of endurance modification sets until Homecoming added the two I mentioned. All the endurance modification sets the original devs created were only that. When they added the two new ones with damage, the stated reasoning in the patch notes was "two new Endurance Modification sets with a damage focus, designed to be useful in endurance-draining attack powers". The use in dual purpose powers was very much the intention, just as it presumably would be were the devs to make a dual purpose heal/endmod set. Or dual purpose defense/resistance for that matter though on that one I do agree it's unlikely, mostly because there's only I think four powers in the game that take both enhancements anyway. Powers that take both heal and endmod are far more common. In short: I disagree with you that it's something the devs would never be willing to do.

There's already precedent for sets doing two things despite some powers wasting one of them though, in the form of Power Transfer and Synapse's Shock. Both are endurance modification sets that also enhance damage, with the latter aspect having no effect in many powers that can take those sets. Most notably in Stamina, since that was your example. And personally I'd classify it as a healing set, because all the powers I can think of that'd benefit from both aspects are powers I tend to think of as heals with endmod attached rather than endmod with healing attached.

Yeah, for this to fit the mold of a normal pet set you'd need to pick either Dogs of War or Berserk for the level 18 power, move Crack Whip to level 8 and add a second single target attack at level 2. And personally, I don't think I'd want a whip as my weapon for a set like this. Though admittedly I'm not sure what else would work. A bow is the obvious one but ninjas already has the bow. They could recycle some weapon models from the Circle of Thorns and give it a crossbow perhaps, the existing rifle stance and animations from Beam Rifle would at least mostly look right for one so it'd just need the particle FX to be done.

If i recall correctly from the original devs' discussions of how it worked when we first got power customisation, the bright and dark options utilise seperate base textures. One uses additive colours and the other uses subtractive colours but I forget which is which. But only one of those currently exists for costume auras. At a bare minimum they have to duplicate the uncoloured textures for every aura and adjust them to match what's used for dark powers. And then port the code over from powers to costumes which with how spaghetti this game's code is might be a non-trivial task in itself. But in theory it's doable, just potentially a lot more work than it sounds.

Every time they make one of these posts I can't help but wonder how many people go and make a character with the least popular powersets. Was there a sudden surge in sonic/archery defenders today?