Luminara

Stealth maxes out at ~16% fully slotted on defenders, and ~12% of that suppresses. If you're losing ~20%, then it's suppressing part of the Defense from other powers as well. I'm not seeing that behavior on the characters I've tested. Take a screenshot of your Combat Attributes with Defense showing while at full value and after being suppressed and post it here.

The aggro cap provides near perfect parity for comparison on that front. You can pull aggro from multiple spawns, but since debuffs only have target caps, not total limits, they're functionally comparable (by which i mean i can Flash Arrow one spawn, then Flash Arrow another spawn and the first spawn's debuff is not removed. this can be done to as many spawns as can be debuffed within the duration of the power). A theoretical self-affecting FF trifecta could protect you from hundreds of foes, but so could Flash Arrow.

There are more than enough tangible, directly comparable effects to provide accurate and reasonable comparison points. Using Calvinball rules doesn't change that. The debuffs I listed in those examples are autohit. Every debuff I listed has a significantly longer duration than recharge time. Two of them are flagged to set one half as irresistible. Three have additional components which alleviate aggro issues. All of them are superior in strength when compared to click buffs like FF/Cold/Sonic shields, some so much stronger that reducing them by half (+4 foes) still leaves them at a higher value than comparable click buffs. And that was just a quick list. It does if you actually know what powers do. Let's cut this short. You're going to disagree with everything I said, make up new rules, accuse me of saying something I didn't or not saying something that I did, then throw out another deflection. You're too obvious, and I'm not going any deeper down your rabbit hole.

Flash Arrow: 18.75% -ToHit, autohit, 15s recharge, 60s duration Weaken: 37.5% -Damage, autohit; 18.75% -ToHit, autohit, 16s recharge, 30s duration Poison Gas Arrow: 50% -Damage, autohit, 45s recharge, 60s duration Hurricane: 37.5% -ToHit, autohit, 8s recharge (if detoggled), 10s duration (per tick, 0.75s interval) Deflection Shield/Insulation Shield/Ice Sheild/Glacial Shield/etc.: 15% +Def (not all) Sonic Barrier/Sonic Haven: 20% +Res (not all) The facts, not impressions or guesses or hearsay, based on this sampling of defender powers, don't support your assertion.

That's not what I said. I said they haven't been improved in the same way all of the other archetypes have been improved, by which I mean there are basic problems inherent in how support archetypes interact with the game, problems which were resolved on all of the other archetypes, and the same solutions could be given to support archetypes. Those solutions have been categorically denied to support archetypes to date, with the reasons given (by players, never by developers) that "it would be overpowered" or "but mah power creep". The buffs the support archetypes have received have never addressed the disparities between click debuffs and ally-only click buffs, between non-damaging debuff/control toggles and self-buffing toggles. There are glaring differences which have been left untouched for the entirety of the game's life. I'm not calling for status protection for all support archetypes, or piles of +Def/+Res, or increasing damage caps. I'm saying that the mechanics, the functionality of powers, should be equivalent throughout the game. Suppression for all non-damaging toggles, and the ability to use ally-only click buffs on oneself. Basic mechanical functionality that support archetypes have been denied, and shouldn't be, because of all of the archetypes in the game, they're the ones most in need of those mechanics. I don't give a shit about damage buffs, set improvements, snipes, nukes, proc builds, hot dogs on sticks or anything else. I'm extremely concerned about, and entirely focused on, the mechanical discrimination leveled at support archetypes and rationalized with comments about being overpowered or power creep. Forcing support archetypes to wait out recharge times on debuff/control toggles, then go through the animations for them because they lack suppression, isn't keeping power creep under control, it's keeping the archetypes less enjoyable to play. Restricting them from utilizing their own buffs might aid in reducing power creep, but realistically, we're right back at those shitty damage scalars and shitty HP totals and not only are they still heavily restricted in progression speed, it just doesn't make sense to say "No, you can't be safer while you're slogging through content at half the speed of other archetypes", especially when it's hypocritical in light of click debuffs. "No, you can't be safer, unless you're playing a set with click debuffs, in which case, it's all good, dawg!" - that's the kind of bullshit that has me up in arms. The inane and completely unbalanced restrictions which are all over the place in how they're actually interacting with players, and completely non-existent for players of other archetypes. I'm not angry with you, @PeregrineFalcon. I'm angry with the attitude that's become prevalent regarding support archetypes, that it's okay to sweep their problems under the rug, that they should be ignored if fixing these issues might affect the game in any way, that a status quo which grew out of Cryptic's casual disregard toward support archetypes is somehow right, just or proper. I'm angry because no-one wants to stop and consider how drastically different click debuff sets play compared to click buff or toggle sets, how much the current situation favors those click debuff sets and how easily parity could be restored with a couple of simple changes. I'm angry because everyone defaults to "it would be overpowered" without really stopping to analyze the situation and variables and realizing that it's not true. Ultimately, we're not just talking about archetypes, we're talking about people. People play support archetype characters. Human beings. We shouldn't be blindly accepting that some of these people "need" to be kept down for the betterment of all, that some people have to suffer so everyone else can be happy, because, goddamn it, that's just wrong. If the game can't survive without this kind of classism, it doesn't deserve to survive. And as far as power creep goes, everything the HC team has been doing has been aimed at eventually addressing it. The only reason they'd buff something like TA, or spend time rebuilding Sorcery, or nerf TW, is to create a general baseline in which all are roughly equal, so they can do whatever it is they have planned to either alleviate power creep (general buffs to critters?) or justify it (new hard mode content?). They're not just buffing their favorites and nerfing the stuff they don't like, they have a defined plan that they're following, and they are going to do something about power creep. That's obvious from looking at their work to date. So everyone relax on the power creep freak-out parties, HC will deal with it.

@arcane, still need support for your bizarre claim that I ever said that.

Stealth IOs are unaffected in any way. They still stack with Stealth, and they stack with Infiltration. Tested on several of my characters.

Infiltration is a clone of Athletic Run (which is a clone of Ninja Run), so the base speed is identical. Half of each added together would equal one whole Infiltration or one whole Athletic Run. Slotted Infiltration would be faster, by itself, than half of slotted Infiltration plus half of Athletic. Even with the math in this game, half plus half doesn't equal two.

Considering that everything, up to and including glancing sidelong at the keyboard while briefly considering taking an action, causes the 19' buff to cancel itself, perhaps the appropriate name would be "Invisibility", with the quotation marks, and the icon changed to a couple of hands doing air quotes. "Invisibility"

Support archetypes have been strictly constrained by multiple restrictions devised to complement toggle mutual exclusivity and promote teaming (low HP, low damage, ally-only buffs, vulnerability to mez, lack of suppression on their non-damaging debuff/control toggles) since the day the game launched, and power creep is not only here, but has increased with every Issue from release to now. Every other archetype has been buffed, improved and upgraded over the years, culminating in tankers engaging brutes in dick measuring contests, but not the support archetypes, not in the same ways the rest have. They're still restricted to pre-creep rules and forced to play ten times as hard, because "it keeps power creep from becoming a problem". Instead of kicking support archetypes in the teeth over and over again, blaming them for power creep or holding them back in a mistaken belief that doing so restrains power creep, address the power creep itself by bringing these archetypes up to a point of parity with other archetypes so we can see what's actually causing problems in the game and deal with those problems properly. Make all non-damaging toggles suppress, rather than drop, including debuff/control toggles (if click debuff/controls like Flash Arrow and PGA aren't overpowered, then suppressed toggles wouldn't be). Remove the ally-only flag on click buffs, or make them caster-affecting PBAoEs/AoEs. Support archetypes aren't going to crash the servers if they can self-buff or skip a few seconds of animation time every spawn, they're still restricted by low HP, low damage scalars, low damage caps and lack of status protection comparable to other archetypes. The game didn't collapse when toggle mutual exclusivity was abolished and tankers/scrappers received a huge buff simply by being allowed to use multiple toggle buffs simultaneously. Nothing was ruined when blasters were given the ability to use their T1/T2 attacks while mezzed. The world didn't end when Containment gave controllers 2x damage. Tankers being bumped up to solid damage output and unparalleled AoE more recently hasn't destroyed anything. None of the improvements to non-support archetypes have made the game worse. So allowing support archetypes to move forward with the rest of the game isn't promoting power creep, it's promoting equality. Power creep has been here since the game was released, it's going to be here until we're all in our graves and Co* is a footnote in gaming history, and given the massive restrictions imposed on support archetypes, it's clearly not their fault, so why don't we stop abusing them and start treating them like the valued members of the game that they're supposed to be so we can get on with the business of fixing real problems?

Stealth is still called Stealth because it's still in the power pool position occupied by Stealth and it doesn't behave exactly like Invisibility did. Stealth provides varying levels of -Perception and +Defense, dependent on the player's actions and the current situation, as opposed to Invisibility, which was always a set -Perception distance and 50/50 in/out of combat +Defense split. It's not Invisibility, it's Stealth + situational bonuses. Renaming it to Invisibility would have only caused confusion amongst experienced players who were accustomed to the way Invisibility functioned.

You didn't have to clean it up. 🤪

220, 221, whatever it takes.

I'm thinking of making: Critters my bitches. Enough noise to bring the roof down on said bitches. Love... but I don't have anyone for that. 😞 A not insignificant amount of tears, thinking about all of the characters I'm going to have to respec into Infiltration now. The era of bouncing around with no travel powers has come to an end. A mess in my pants after experiencing Infiltration stacked with Combat Jumping. Another cup of coffee, so I can stay awake this afternoon. Respecs to plan and all that.

Sharks don't have skulls.

Female with all sliders at max, named Gorilla My Dreams?

Which Robin? There have been five (six if you consider The Dark Knight Returns to be canon). I wouldn't categorize Tim Drake as a pet. He displayed above average intellect, figuring out who Batman was; superior empathy for the Dark Knight, realizing that Batman needed a companion to keep him on an even keel; and proved that he had the skills necessary to fill that role. This Robin was definitely a teammate, and a friend, not a sidekick or pet.

Under the impression? You're using hearsay as your debate points? Do you know the mechanics and math, or not? The purple patch brings some parity to debuffing in comparison to buffing, but it doesn't neuter debuffing to the extent you believe. Take Radiation Infection when used by a defender. It can be enhanced to ~49% easily, which only drops to ~23.5% on +4 foes. It's still ridiculously strong. Meanwhile, the Force Field defender, who can't self-buff, is limited to ~15.5% for the comparable power, Dispersion Bubble, enhanced maximally, because he/she can't use his/her other +Def powers on him/herself. The purple patch doesn't even out the buff/debuff differences, it just makes them a little less drastic. You guess? If you don't actually know what's going on under the hood, why are you arguing about how things should be changed? How can you reasonably suggest something like reducing buffs to 1/4th value if you don't know what they're really worth in relation to other options? All debuffs are affected by the purple patch. That includes -Res and -Regen. -ToHit, -Defense, -Damage, -Recharge, -Special, even debuffs flagged as irresistible, it's all reduced by the purple patch when used on critters above the player character's level. The greater the level differential, the lower the final value of the debuff. And despite that, there are many debuffs which are still ridiculously strong against anything below an AV, and some which are still fantastic even at that tier, and they still function without the "no, you can't use this to benefit yourself" restriction applied to buffers. Support archetypes are forced to adhere to a rule set which was modeled around and based on toggle mutual exclusivity being the standard in the game. The purpose of support sets containing ally-only buffs was specifically to complement toggle mutual exclusivity, and the purpose of toggle mutual exclusivity was to promote teaming. Toggle mutual exclusivity was removed and the game was redefined around an entirely different set of rules, except for support archetypes. The archetypes with the lowest HP, lowest damage output, no status protection and slowest progression were left with the legacy restriction of not being able to use their own powers on themselves, for no reason beyond Cryptic's determination that they weren't unplayable as they were, so there was no reason to bring them into the new rule set unless or until they reached that point. And that is exactly the mentality that I'm referring to in the paragraph above. "Everyone else is good, maybe even too good, so we're not going to address the glaring problems with these archetypes." No. NO. Fucking over entire archetypes and all of the people who play them just because it would be inconvenient to deal with the other problems in the game? NO. Repair the foundation of the house by addressing the discrepancies in support archetypes (lack of status protection forcing them to spend inordinate amounts of time animating low or no damage mez of their own just to prevent themselves from being mezzed (which is functionally scarcely better than being mezzed), inability to benefit from many of their own buffs), THEN work on fixing the house itself (tone down power creep, or add sufficient challenge to the game to justify power creep). If the only way you can maintain the status quo is by deliberately keeping someone at the bottom of the heap, you're maintaining the wrong status quo. Applying one set of rules to one group of people, and a different set of rules to another group of people, while expecting them to work together within a common framework, is discrimination. You're online, Google it.

There are auto-hit debuffs, unresisted debuffs, toggle debuffs, vanilla debuffs with hit checks, all with massive values which stomp the ever-loving shit out of the limited values the support characters could gain from changing their ally-only buffs to PBAoE/self-allowed buffs. Most of them have been there since release day. The game hasn't imploded. There are sufficient IO set bonus options for any archetype to self-buff every notable attribute, often multiple notable attributes simultaneously (Accuracy, Recharge and Defense, for example). All of this has been possible since the day the Invention system went live. The game hasn't imploded. If we can use ludicrously powerful debuffs to mitigate damage, if we can permit soft-capping Defense or building to over 200% global +Recharge with IO set bonuses, and not see the game collapse in on itself, then denying support archetypes access to their own buffs, adamantly forcing buffers to adhere to a rule set which was only applicable in the earliest days of the game, isn't maintaining balance, it's enforcing discrimination.

And still be limited to 0.65 ranged/0.55 melee damage scalar values, 400% damage cap and extremely limited access to high damage attacks. If the game can survive tankers, who already have status protection, excellent Defense/Resistance, self-healing and options for improved recovery and regeneration, being bumped up to 0.95 melee/0.80 ranged scalars and increased AoE radii, instead of being told to "get a team" so they can progress at a reasonable pace, it can handle defenders being allowed to survive more comfortably while they plink away with their shitty blasts. Shit delivered more rapidly (100% +Recharge in Adrenalin Boost) is still shit. Shit with a pitiful +Damage buff (Fortitude) is still shit. The game isn't going to collapse in on itself if defenders survive combat more comfortably or pewpew more quickly, any more than it has with the improvements made for other archetypes.

No, it wouldn't be overpowered, nor would it break anything. It's a mantra entrenched in 2004 release day mentality, stuck in the oldest rule set on which the game was founded, when toggle mutual exclusivity was a major balance factor. Toggle mutual exclusivity was specifically intended to encourage players to team, and click buffs were restricted to not affecting self on support archetypes so they couldn't bypass that encouragement. Toggle mutual exclusivity was removed because Cryptic put so much mez in the game that tankers and scrappers were skipping everything except their status protection toggles and T9 god modes, those being the only powers they could keep active due to that obscene amount of mez. But after removing toggle mutual exclusivity, Cryptic left support archetypes twisting in the wind by failing to make their click buffs affect themselves. Auto-hit debuffs which perform the same general function, such as -ToHit and -Dam, are ongoing evidence that comparable self-buffing capability wouldn't make a damn bit of difference, but, curiously, the fact that those prove that the idea of support characters would be overpowered if they were safer or less reliant on others is never mentioned when people start arguing against making click buffs like Ice Shield or Fortitude self-affecting. In other words, it's holding some people to one set of rules and allowing others to ignore those rules. The word for that is discrimination, and people who advocate it don't typically look for or accept proof that they're wrong. Like the mez situation. 2004 release day rules for support archetypes, 2021 rules for everyone else. "And when everyone's special... no-one will be." - Syndrome

Nor did I construe it as such. We're good.

I'm not worried that I might be seen as less of a <whatever> because I'm not one-shotting everything in sight. That's not what I base my self-worth on.

Staff Melee. Two cones and a PBAoE. Guarded Spin -> Innocuous Strikes -> Guarded Spin -> Toe of the Camel -> repeat. No need to Tab, just stick to the chain. Its's like shoving bad guys into a Cuisinart.