DrunkFlux

Writing this since when I run a search, I don't see anything on this topic. So lets considering the following scenario. Your a scrapper who reads your characters damage with that Claw strike doing 187 due to it having a base of 100 and enhanced up to 87% damage, a fulcrum shift is cast, you see your damage buff is blue at 400%, but then you only do 500 damage. What gives? Shouldn't you do 935 damage(187*5)!? Why is it lower? To understand this better, we need to understand how stat bonuses work. Or why a defender can hit 41% with power boost, clarion radial, and Farsight in Time manipulation, but a corruptor gets only 29%. Shouldn't it be a LOT more for either of them? This is a result of many power buff effects actually being cumulative, rather than multiplicative. Lets say a defender casts fulcrum shift, and achieves a perfect cast (10 targets, and next to enemies), the actual effects from the damage up to the cap is calculated as follows: Enhancements + Bonus damage This is because enhancements count as bonus damage. For simplicity I am using Enhancements + Bonus damage. The defender has a damage cap of 300%(Technically 400%, counting baseline). While you'd think with 85% enhanced damage to an attack with a baseline of 50 doing 92 damage suddenly only does 200 rather than 368. This is because the game is calculating the damage the power inflicts(before resistances and level difference) as follows: 50*(Enhanced damage + bonus damage). If ignoring that your playing a defender, this translates to the following: 50*(1.85+3) = 245.5 However, with us playing a defender we have to account for the damage cap: 300% (added to baseline). So, we are 85% over the cap, meaning it simply calculates the damage as follows: 50*4 = 200 In other words, the game is reducing our modified enhancement to 300%. The same applies with musculature. Assuming we are only getting 30% from musculature (45*(2/3)) 50*(2.15+3) = 275.5, the game reduces us to 200 because it again reduces our modified enhancement to 300% How the game is programmed to do this, I admit I do not fully know. But this effect is especially visible if you play a kin. This effect is also why brute fury may not seem as powerful as you would think, or why damage buffs on a brute seem significantly less effective than on other archtypes unless stacked significantly more. To compensate for the archtypes design of a lower base damage improved by fury, brutes have a higher damage cap than other damage focused archtypes. Higher damage enhancement from musculature only means as a result it is easier to achieve the damage cap. It will not raise your damage cap. This same phenomena can be seen in other effects as well. Clarion Radial, power build up and power boost, while powerful in there own right, do not boost quite as much as you expect and actually boost in the same way enhancements do. Accuracy bonuses from IO's on stacking only increase accuracy marginally due to them being added to enhanced accuracy. Accuracy is based on Power Base Accuracy *(Accuracy enhancement + global bonuses + power bonuses). Note that to-hit buffs are separate, and can greatly improve chances to hit. This has been discussed in another post in greater detail. Hasten cannot achieve permanent hasten due to cooldown cap being to low for it's cooldown to become shorter than it's duration. This is also resulted from enhancement IO bonuses and buffs only being added to it's enhanced recharge. (Edit: It actually can, global recharge max is a bit higher than I thought. Extra Edit: Now that I think about it, this was Elude I was thinking of.) Conserve Power only adds it's endurance reduction stat to the end reduct of each power it's effecting. This is still effecting effectively all of your powers however. In short, do not assume that bonus damage is multiplying to your enhanced damage like it often does in other games. With any bonus effect, it's enhancement + bonus, rather than (power+enhancement)*bonus. If it was, we'd be far far more overpowered, and damage numbers would be through the roof. Also of note: Separate abilities providing actual defense/resistance stats do stack. This is why many melee archtypes take fighting, leadership ect. Resist cap for brutes/tankers is 90%, other AT's 75%. Epics 85%. Damage Cap for archtypes(Note: This is BUFF max, actual caps are 100% higher for archtypes): 300%(400%) (Defender, Dominator,, HEATS and VEATS(correct me if I am wrong on VEATS). 400(500%)% Scrapper, Stalker, Blaster, Corruptor, Sentinel, Tanker 600%(700%) : Brute Edit: I should make one clarification. Incarnate powers are NOT effected by any kind of bonuses, be it from powers or otherwise. They are effected by most alpha slots except any recharge effects. Additional Note: IO damage bonuses count as part of the same effects. This is visible in combat attributes.

Means even more that sets on such a low tier need a buff then. Especially some of those that are meant to be good AoE sets like dual blades. Though people should be considerate of enemy mob resistance ratings. But AoE sets generally clear groups faster. But theres also I guess issues with practicality, my street justice character, understand I LOVE the animations, they are quick and feel practical but the whole "combo" mechanic has a comparable problem to dual blades, forcing attacks in situations where they make little sense imo and gameplay wise it becomes impractical sometimes. So that could also be cutting performance down drastically.

I agree with Helblaiz on this. People who have full time jobs often have half hour to an hour travel time to and from work, kids and family to take care of ect, don't have time to unlock everything. One of the core reasons mmorpgs are unpopular outside of WOW(and even WoW is slowly losing players) is the manditory grinds, sometimes even exploiting "Fear of missing out" on players to force them into playing and losing even more of there freetime. When a game becomes a job, it loses it's entertainment value fast. And to many mmorpgs and even other games try to do that. Grinds are exactly what the video i'm gonna share talks about as being "inhumane".

I thought i'd share this using a power analyzer. To those who are wondering, this is the reason people are using pylons to test the viability of sets regarding single target damage. The resistance is the same across the board. This does mean a lot of those sets, especially C and below, do need a buff to single target and are in fact vastly underperforming compared to S, A and B tiers. Very disappointed to see street justice at the bottom, makes me think I should shelf the bio/street justice character (yes, performance does matter to me a lot, no, i'm not someone who only uses the best of the best like someone else admits to here). Maybe i'll reroll her as a bio/titan. Also makes me strongly reconsider dual blades(in a bad way). This also makes me think of another point; how are sets being played with attack chains? Are you in this test making sure to use on high priority highest damage/activation time whenever possible? I mean, not all sets have a consistent chain to them, especially in SO range. And what about AoE testing?

So I managed to "Fix" the problem by picking up another mission and re-selecting it to reset it, by chance it spawned the bombs in different locations. I suspect the map has a fault with one of the bombs placed there during development, before pillars and wall decoration was put in.

So I am trapped on the mission "Destroy Main T.E.S.T. facility and the game won't let me skip or abandon the mission. There is a bomb stuck in a pillar and I am completely unable to access it in any way. The game also is not letting me abandon or skip this mission, it is a single player only mission to from what I can understand here. There is no option to abandon the mission. This mission is being forced on me before I can continue the warden arch, I cannot progress it simply because this mission won't let me continue due to this bugged map.

Nerfing high power sets in general would simply drive many players away as they like that power, and when you nerf something, the feelings players get is twice as bad as those feelings when something they like is buffed. This is the general rule of losses vs gains; losses always feel twice as bad as gains. I mean CO tried nerfing all the high performing powers and lost over 90% of it's player base in about a year or two. It lost another half of that when it nerfed overpowered vehicles when people felt it was baiting and switching. So here are a few thoughts on what could happen if some things I often use were nerfed. First, ancillerys and power boost/power build up. I wouldn't necessarily change it much, in fact, I would not touch it without also looking at scorpion shield and many armor powers in the ancillery pools. Many people only take scorpion shield because of its high defense vs smash/lethal and energy. Energy being very common in the 50s. And smash/lethal defense also works against many powers that are elemental based because they have smash and lethal components. This pushes scorpion shield and many defense based ancillery armor powers way ahead of the other ancillery powers. Power boost/build up allow energy mastery/power mastery to be an alternative to taking mace mastery. To nerf it heavily would remove power and energy mastery from being choices to a majority of players. Players don't often take underperformers. So now I want to go over tier 9 nukes. They were crap. Litterally crap, and were the most skippable powers in there sets. Tier 9 nukes before the change were crap even before judgement powers. Sure you wipe out 'one' mob with one shot, but then your completely useless for 20 seconds or more and even adrenaline boost does little to help until the first 10 pass. All the while the team at higher end skill levels will completely wipe at LEAST 2-3 more mobs in that same time frame. In effect, your SLOWING your team down and lowering your DPS overall. I always skipped the tier 9s even before judgement showed up in incarnate powers, because I'd always find many teams wiping at least a few mobs in the time it took me to get my end back, even with rest active. Tier 9 nukes were what you call "Awesome but impractical". The penalties back then FAR outweighed the benefits. Archery, assault rifle, psionic blasting and water blast ALL had far, far stronger tier 9s which could contribute far higher DPS. I understand people liked them, but they were useless in the meta even before issue 24. Fire blast with a blaster could one-volley most mobs with rain of fire + fire breath + fireball in that order while under build up and aim most people would use for an inferno. They'd die fast enough that it was more than enough lethal to get the job done and you'd never have that massive 20 second downtime. Many other sets also could do more in that same time span overall. Corruptors and defenders, due to the reduced damage no longer doing enough, would do even less. The 20%-25% damage drop for no end penalty and faster cooldowns made them useful enough to compete and be a worthwhile power pick. Incarnate powers I always felt were the closest things to equalizers for underperforming AT's/power set combinations. While they were end game power creep, yes, they still had to be earned and on live they were much harder to gain. But they aren't the be-all-end-all behind many top performing builds. It is the combination of powerset combination + IO bonuses/procs stacking on top of having those incarnate powers. It's easier to max defense stats with barrier, yes, but you still get a lot of defense from stacking IO bonuses. But they were end-game and most content is still lower than level 45. I'm honestly not bothered by incarnate powers much. If any incarnate set was OP, I'd argue destiny is. It's easy to make it's benefits perma, and even then some destiny powers didn't even need to be to truely be effective(ageless comes to mind). Also, I don't find the game boring being overpowered on a character. Especially when I IO'd the heck out of that character and loaded them with the best incarnate powers for that character. I earned it. I earned the right to be overpowered. It's when your overpowered WITHOUT earning that is when it gets very, very boring. Like champions online and solo you become invincible at level 8 even on elite difficulty, that killed its replayability and it was boring fast. If your bored of the character thats max level with IO's/incarnates ect, you can always roll a new one and homecoming gives plenty of character slots. Can even delete a 50 and start over if you want. Just pick different powersets/archtypes and the experience changes a lot. THAT is what I do to keep this game fresh for me.