FupDup

I just got another compromise idea. Melee ATs get the toggle but call it Expert Brawler, so it doesn’t interfere with Sentinel’s Master Brawler. MB stays as-is on live. PB also stays as-is on live so that both choices are relatively competitive without risking power creepage. Everybody wins.

I know what’s done is done, but I would argue that if PB had no absorb, the vanilla MB toggle would not have been a pure upgrade over it. PB would still be stackable for higher protection, would be unsappable, and would drain less endurance (which matters on melees because they don’t have a recovery power like Sents do via Enduring). It was just the added sustain and heal slotting on PB that skewed the comparison, which could have been offset in a few different ways proposed earlier in this thread (ie a bit of regen or w/e on MB and some kind of buff to Enduring to compensate Sentinels for the loss).

If we were to pack up Obscure and stick it in a different power set, I can concede that it would look better from a relative standpoint than it does when it has to compete against the almighty lord and savior Dark Regen. That's not going to happen, of course. I don't remember who it was who said it, but I remember a dev saying that powersets are balanced as a whole collection rather than as individual powers (in response to people comparing individual powers from Set A to Set B). So that's why I mostly do "internal" comparisons to DR for it. If we are gonna compare to other sets, we can also make the same argument for Dark Regen too (instant heal from 1% to 100%, PBAOE proc bomb, very short recharge). If the concern is "too many things" in the power budget, that's why I suggested lowering the upfront healing potency in order to free up a little more space in that budget. How much budget would we need to free up (via burst heal reduction) to get the regen/recovery to around 350/35 or so? In the Dark Armor FF thread, I also made an alternate compromise suggestion for adding more debuff resists (like endurance and recovery, since it's meant to be the option to keep your blue bar happy, maybe toss in slow resist or something else etc.) to the list since the theme was already established with the tohit/regen parts. I don't expect to get that one at the same time as the one above. Just another option.

Currently it can, but the current beta iteration only gives you 25% recovery. For comparison, the majority of passive recovery powers in other armor sets give 30%. Since Obscure is meant to be a sustain over time power instead of burst heal power (that's what DR is for), I think I'd rather see the upfront heal portion take a hit if that meant we could keep a bit more of the regen/recovery side. Bonus round: Finished builds solve DR's endurance cost using tools like Theft of Essence and using Cardiac/Vigor alpha incarnates, in addition to just having more recovery and endurance slotting in general.

Toggle MB could’ve been saved in a few different ways like a small bit of regen, absorb, or max HP so the comparison would be less one-sided with a clearly blatant winner. And Sents could’ve gotten a little extra stuff added to Enduring to offset the nerf they’d feel (since Enduring is Sent exclusive). It’s unfortunate that many beta cycles end up as “You need to take everything exactly as proposed or we scrap it all” (see also: T9 changes scrapped instead of tweaked around 60s durations).

Double stacked Rage would get the current proposed 10/20 penalty, which is definitely harsher than live in most cases. Single stack would get 5/10.

The game would have to track how many stacks of Rage you had active at the time of crash, and scale the crash based on your stacks. Obviously, getting the 10s window to line up normally is a tall order.

Another idea: Make the penalty only half the size, but make it stack twice. The dev fear is double Rage, so this would let single stack Rage have some more breathing room (in exchange for less cowbell).

I come here with an offer of compromise. Well, two offers really. A. Reduce the burst heal of Obscure a bit in order to preserve more regen/recovery over time. If you want burst heals you’ve got Dark Regen. B. Add more debuff resists, which keeps the theme since it already offers a bit of to-hit and regen resists. (Or combine the two, I won’t stop you…).

As I said on the first page, the click having more oomph than the toggle is logical, but the issue is that the toggle barely does anything at all. Ironically, the melee ATs who just got it don’t have the Sentinel recovery power to help manage the endurance cost anyways. It’s just a dead pick.

Here's the breakdown of the benefits of each: Master Brawler: -Less attention needed (toggle) Practiced Brawler: -Stackable mezz protection -Cannot be disabled by sapping -Lower endurance usage over time -Small absorb when clicked -Slot healing sets (namely for PrevMed's proc) It conclusion, it's Joever for Master Brawler. Never been more over.

I can deal with "medium crashes" like One With The Shield on live, or softer ones like Meltdown. Of course I prefer none, but I can live with medium to soft. I definitely will not put up with hard crashes that drain your full blue bar and disable recovery for 20 seconds, or extreme ones like Unstoppable that do that plus also delete 90% of your health bar. The sticking point of the beta changes is mostly the new durations being too short. This game is paced a lot slower than most others, so 30s goes by a lot faster than it sounds on paper. Should probably be 60s, or at minimum like 40-45s.

Most likely, since I vaguely remember somebody stating that Rage was the reason for those ATs not having SS ported yet.

In addition to reducing the def/res penalty in general, I think another angle could also be making it scale based on your AT modifiers. Bio Armor's new nerfs have the def/res penalty stronger on ATs with higher modifiers because those ATs can more easily compensate for it. Perhaps that could be employed here as well, since a Tanker can more easily eat the penalty than a Brute.

One of the powers devs said that "branching" style choices won't be offered for T9's here and that it's more of an all-or-nothing sort of deal. If there's enough feedback it might all just get yanked.

What he's saying is that defense sets still get hit eventually, and they of course have lower resists, which means that any hits that get through are gonna be nasty.

The thing about Bio is that nearly all of the other armors in the game have been revamped and buffed around it, including a few in this very patch. Once upon a time, some years ago during the days of Titan Weapon dominance, a big Bio nerf would've made more sense since it stood so far above its competitors. But flash forward to today, and all of its competitors hit the gym and bulked up. The gap today is a lot smaller than it once was even though Bio stayed the same the entire time. Game balancing is ultimately about relative comparisons rather than absolute ones, and Bio's relative position is not nearly as high as it once was despite the absolute stat values being unchanged until now. Some other armors like Stone, Elec, Dark, and Shield are already more or less equal to it. It's basically a change that got delayed by several years that is now being deployed at a time when it's no longer needed.

I feel like Meltdown on live is already almost perfect as it is, since the crash it has is a pretty small one. The -recovery part could be annoying but you had a few tools to deal with that, and the -end was only 10%. This one definitely doesn't make sense to put in the same bucket as stuff like Unstoppable that were suicide buttons that stopped you from playing the game for 20 seconds.

My only complaint is that I think the KB protection should go into Temp Protection, like most other armor sets are set up. The other Burn buffs already make the power very desirable to have. It's definitely not getting skipped if that protection goes in a normal place (skipping it now is already silly).

My waifu is finally getting buffs, hallelujah. I really have only two sticking points at the moment: 1. Given that the def/res modifier went up, I think the debuff resistance should also go up to match Scrappers (currently weaker). 2. Nukes should be able to crit, even if the damage bonus is smaller. Make it something like a 20% damage bonus "mini crit."

I think we should try nudging down the crash to around 7.5/15 to make it a little more manageable. 10/20 is pretty big, but 5/10 might be a too low?

That's not what the devs are talking about. The patch notes are referencing an internal multiplier that determines how strong your armor powers are, not the max res cap. Currently, Scrappers and Stalkers have 0.75 as their multiplier. Live Sentinels are set to 0.7 (beta buffs them to 0.75). Live Brutes are also 0.75. Tankers are 1.0. The halfway point between 0.75 and 1.0 is 0.875, but that was judged to be stepping a little too close to Tanker territory. 0.85 is also a more normal looking number that feels good to my OCD brain.

Rage is balanced around the drawbacks of the crash and is only allowed to be as strong as it is due to that. Resistance armors being able to ignore that drawback made them a must-pick pairing with SS and made defense pairings pretty bad most of the time. Making it more equitable across the different armor types makes sense. The specific values chosen for the crash, however, can and should definitely be scrutinized. They can probably be softened up a bit.

As somebody who previously asked for Sentinel Shinobi to be crits instead of a % damage buff...I'm sorry. I assumed that Sent crits would also apply to the nuke in some capacity, and was more fixated on the ability to go over the damage cap since % buffs can be capped out by teammates/insps. If nukes aren't gonna crit, I'm gonna have to do a hypocritical 180 and sheepishly ask for a reversion on that power since the potential benefit (crit nukes) doesn't appear to be coming. As it is, you'd have to open up a fight with a filler AOE before the nuke to actually use this.

Sentinels losing the old MB is gonna sting. As Bubba mentioned, there's definitely a chance that the tables will turn and MB will be the inferior one now. Powers with less input should generally be less effective than ones that need you to pay attention and click stuff, but it's not really much of a tradeoff here with how stark the strength difference is. Perhaps MB could get either some basic regen or small continuous absorb (like Sent Regen used to have) so it's a little less one-sided. PB should probably still have the bigger effect in the end due to needing to click it, but it shouldn't be night-and-day.