Luminara

We're playing where it would have ended up. Everything we've been talking about was in the I24 beta. Planning for those changes began (at least) seven months prior to the game's closure. There were three I24 beta patches to the test server before Paragon stopped working on things - the PPM changes were in the first and not a single change was made to it after that. These changes weren't something they whipped up on the spur of the moment and dumped on the beta server as an afterthought or last minute addition. Nor was left incomplete, or untested. It was finished before it left the alpha stage. If anything, Synapse likely expected to have to buff it, if there were too many complaints, but surprisingly, very few people who tested it (or understood the math) considered it to be anything other than a talking point. Almost everyone either felt that it had little or no impact on them, or saw it as an improvement (moar damageses!). The PPM system we're working with right now is exactly what Synapse envisioned, outlined, created, implemented and was satisfied with. Since the HC servers opened, people have been running around, waving their hands in the air and screaming about proc nerfs looming on the horizon... but the changes to PPM and folding IO set procs into the PPM system in I24 was the nerf. It's an example of nerfing done right. It reined in the most extreme outliers at the top end without hurting anyone else, and it didn't even cost those outliers so much that they couldn't play without constantly worrying about being spanked (again), as evidenced by the constant fear expressed by people on these forums. No two sets are going to have the same slotting options. Nor should they. Nor will they, ever. Perfect balance between power sets will never happen. Calling for proc restrictions in order to impose your sense of equity between sets isn't balance, it's homogeny. Not interested. It doesn't work that way. The formula isn't applied to powers, it only checks the relevant aspects of the power to determine a proc's final maximum chance to trigger. You'd have to rework the formula to create new checks and trigger modifiers, and come up with a way that didn't turn it from a neat, compact equation to a massive, bloated, processor-hanging nightmare.

PPMs were being increased for every proc. Increased, not lowered. For every proc, not only ATO procs, or only Winter procs, or only purple procs. This would've permitted procs to be slotted into powers with faster recharge times and/or shorter animations, without sacrificing PPM rate, due to how the PPM formula is calculated, allowing for more frequent use of powers with procs across the board, in addition to the increased likelihood of procs triggering. That's a net increase in damage potential. The PPM formula was being adjusted to account for Recharge Reduction slotted in powers, which would've been a net improvement for the overwhelming majority of players. Even the outliers, the people who relied entirely on global +Recharge buffs and eschewed Recharge Reduction in proc-heavy powers, would've been able to adapt to this system and still see beneficial results, not the least of which was far less work (no need to juggle Hasten and Ageless and Lore pets with +Recharge buffs and second account pocket Emps casting Fortitude and whatever else they did to keep their recharge times manageable without slotting Recharge Reduction) and far less variability to their damage output. That looks suspiciously buffy to me. Proc chances were being capped at 90% chance to trigger, rather than guaranteed X/minute. Small nerf, but in conjunction with the adjustment to the recharge time part of the formula, unlikely to matter to anyone who didn't have a proc monster build. This would've evened out the curve a bit, bringing the most extreme proc monster examples slightly lower, but not really affecting most players. Lastly, all procs which had a % chance to trigger, rather than a PPM number, were being switched to the PPM mechanic (and as noted above, PPMs were being increased). IO set damage procs were especially well positioned to benefit from that, with their fixed 20% chance to trigger. That buff might actually have been over-powered, but I would've had to have my hands on it to say for certain. As I said, they had plenty of opportunities to nerf set bonuses and procs into the ground. Not seeing that in their last look at IOs.

In a team, everyone's responsible for dealing damage. It's everyone's job. You don't have an exclusive license to deal damage simply because you're playing a certain archetype. And in a team, your damage output is just one part of the whole. You don't matter, what your team does as a cohesive unit is what matters. Making it about you, about how much damage you do, about whether or not "your" territory is being invaded, is your problem, not the game's, not the developers'. If the team is functioning and everyone is participating, then why should you care whether or not a defender dealt 10% of your damage output, or 59.24%, or 90%? As long as everyone's doing something and it's all working, why does anyone else's damage output concern you to any degree? Solo, it's not your business. Low damage archetypes using procs aren't going to skew the reward metrics, ESPECIALLY not with fire farming being such a major enterprise. Other people using procs in solo content doesn't affect you, so don't go out of your way to affect them.

I click the big, ugly blue button in the navigation window, the one labeled Exit Mission, and use the buffs to beat the shit out of things outside. Makes more sense than letting the buffs, and thugs, expire without my intervention.

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. It's odd that the focus is on low damage archetypes using procs to achieve near-blaster damage output. Specifically, it's odd because tanks, brutes, stalkers, scrappers, Kheldians, Soldiers of Arachnos and sentinels all have comparable survivability, which allows them to slot in the same ways low damage archetypes can... and potentially exceed blaster damage output, not just almost match it, because they also have comparable proc slotting potential... but no-one's complained about that in this thread. No, the complaints are about the archetypes which actually need the kind of help provided by damage procs. I understand now that this isn't about procs, it's about blasters being upset because they're not special. Because they're in the same rickety dingy with the rest of us. Because they're experiencing what "support" players have gone through since the game was released, that realization that they're no more necessary than anyone else because the game was designed to marginalize everyone, every archetype, in teams. And instead of asking for buffs and giving rational arguments for those buffs, they're kicking and screaming and demand nerfs to procs, and repeatedly pointing their fingers at the ones who suck the hind teat, insisting that they're the real problem while crossing their fingers and hoping no-one mentions that every high damage archetype is just as much of a threat to their pyrite- and paste-studded tin throne. Reality check - procs didn't steal your job, blasters. You're still blowing spawns to pieces while those low damage archetypes are staring at their power trays and gnashing their teeth in frustration because the rest of the team has run to the next spawn before they've even finished clicking/toggling on those debuffs, or chasing after others so they can do something with those buffs that they can't use on themselves. Or they're giving up and following after your one-track mind example, just trying to hit something while there's still something to hit, and still not doing it as well as you do. And they're wondering when you're going to notice that the dudes with status protection are pumping out as much pain as you are, and just as fast, and thinking that you're an idiot for shouting at them for trying to keep up. "HOW DARE YOU, PUNY DEFENDER! YOU DEFEATED THAT LIEUTENANT WITH A SINGLE USE OF THAT HOLD YOU SLOTTED WITH FIVE PROCS! YOU HAVE STOLEN MY TRASH KILL! I'LL HAVE THE DEVELOPERS NERF YOUR PROCS, YOU DIRTY CHEATING CHEATER WHO CHEATS! Uh... carry on, mega damage dealing tank/brute/scrapper/stalker/sentinel/Kheldian/SoA. Wonderful work you're doing, big fan. All thumbs up." Paragon had five years to do something about set bonuses and procs. Five years. What did they do? Buffed set bonuses. Buffed procs. Add more and stronger set bonuses and procs. And we know they weren't shy about nerfing things, sometimes to the point of outright gutting them. Strange, isn't it, that they didn't consider set bonuses or procs to be so detrimental to the game that they were in need of nerfs, when they were so quick to nerf anything else to oblivion when it threatened any aspect of the game. And still, we have some players who think the game needs to be redesigned around the "holy trinity" model, shoving low damage, low hit point archetypes into the back of the bus (while ignoring seven other archetypes who do the same thing (faster, as fast as blasters)). And people wonder why I seem a bit cranky from time to time. Hm... Yeah, procs do make blasters less exciting as an archetype, in that they reinforce the game's expectation that everyone, every player and every character, deals damage, by allowing everyone to deal damage better. And IO set bonuses make support less exciting by reinforcing the expectation that everyone be capable of bringing their own support (what, you thought the Medicine pool was only accessible to Empathy/* defenders? that the Concealment pool was planned out to be used as LotG unique IO mules four years before IOs entered the game? that the Leadership pool was only available if you lead X number of *Fs? that all of those "sustain" powers and controls liberally offered to every archetype were just there to fill space in the character creation screen?). But that's not the fault of IOs, it's the fault of the game. This is how it was designed. Teaming will always marginalize every archetype in the game. IOs, set bonuses and procs just made that a little clearer to some people... a decade plus after IOs were released, in some cases, but hey, better late than never, right?

Coming soon, to a Wi-Fi hotspot near you - City of Negotiated Settlements and Peaceful Resolutions! Calmly discuss issues! Rationally debate perspectives! Achieve lasting peace through diplomacy and understanding! Welcome to Paragon City, the most peaceful place in the world, where nothing happens that can't be resolved through dialog!

Blasphemer.

Not going into another archetype versus archetype debate. Start another thread, or dig up the last one that discussed it (in which i mentioned that Scourge is just as shitty as Vigilance... and neither really plays into procs, though at least Scourge can benefit from the lower HP of targets resulting from random procs triggering, as opposed to the zilch that Vigilance does in respect to procs (they neither use endurance nor benefit from +Damage)).

Defenders have to work for their supper. Buffing/debuffing/controlling takes time, and with lower HP and lower damage scalars, defenders are required to spend that time if they wish to both achieve decent results and survive to move on to the next spawn, especially with increased difficulty settings or in Incarnate/* Ward content. Like @Apparition, you're completely dismissing that and presenting this argument from the perspective of defenders waltzing into spawns and blowing them to bits like blasters do. They can eventually deal appreciable damage, after they've enabled the conditions for that to happen, and when the RNG gives it to them. Damage procs only do one thing. And all archetypes were designed to deal damage as part of their play style. The earliest version of CoH, as a matter of fact, used a free-form power selection model, and it was scrapped because testing showed that it was possible for players to create characters which couldn't deal any damage. Cryptic specifically steered the game away from that by implementing archetypes as a means of forcing all players to take at least one attack so they could deal damage. The intended play style is to deal damage. That's true for every archetype, every player. That is one of the constants of this game. But that's just pedantry. You meant we're doing something "wrong" by playing defenders who deal more than minor damage. Nope. Defenders were never intended to deal minor damage, they were intended to deal appreciable damage after putting in the appropriate time and effort to make it possible. Using the tools the developers gave them, deliberately and knowingly, to set up those conditional environments which amplified their damage output. Tools like -Res at the highest scalar value, pseudo-pets like Lightning Storm and OSA which deal far more than minor amounts of damage, and the same blast sets that blasters had. Procs don't alleviate the requirement to create those conditional environments. We still have to use our tools to make those procs worthwhile, and to stay alive long enough to see them do something. We're not shitting on blasters' lawns because we're not moving at blasters' speeds. All of the archetypes were designed to be flexible. They had to be in order to avoid the tank/healer/damage dealer standardization that was occurring in the industry at the time. And, again, all archetypes were designed to deal damage. Relying on archetypes to provide a sense of uniqueness is like relying on a Social Security number to provide a sense of identity. Roles are for people who need to be told what to do and how to play.

An archetype which has exactly the same opportunities for slotting exactly the same procs. Procs don't invalidate corruptors simply because defenders have access to them, any more than defenders are invalidated by corruptors using procs. Shitty inherents and poorly differentiated scalars are what create a sense of invalidation between the two, not access to procs, or procs working how they do. Yeah, I'm sure everyone who plays blasters is furious over the fact that what they can do in 5-10s, a defender might manage to reproduce after investing 20-30s, if the RNG decides to smile upon them. 🙄

When a defender still has to spend more time setting up to deal that damage than the blaster spends just getting on with it, and then only has a chance to deal as much damage as the blaster, no, there's no problem. Zero. Animation times matter, and expecting players to spend two to four times as long doing something just because they picked the "wrong" archetype is crap. This isn't 1997, Co* isn't EQ or WoW and the idea that there should be a greater damage penalty to accompany the existing animation time penalty associated with playing archetypes which are already dealing lower damage is antiquated.

Nerfing proc damage means increasing the number of attacks the low damage archetypes are forced to use. And as low damage archetypes, they're already forced to spend more time attacking than higher damage archetypes, plus they have to spend time buffing/debuffing/controlling just to stay alive, since they can't one-shot anything, or ignore status effects, or even shrug off incoming damage. The whole point of using damage procs on low damage archetypes is to shorten the time spent defeating each spawn. Compensating by increasing the trigger rate is like offering alcohol wipes after stabbing them in the genitalia. Bad nerf.

That's not the first step. The first step is devising an inf* sink, or sinks, to replace everything involved. Recipe costs (crafting table and market), salvage costs, crafting costs, SO costs... no sinks, no economy. No economy, no game.

Never spent any merits on ATOs, but I do use ATOs on every character I create now. They haven't changed anything for me. The bonuses aren't significantly better than purple sets at 50, or rare sets below 50, and I tend to run out of appealing powers to put slots into before I run out of slots, so having the occasional option to pick up a 10% +Recharge bonus for 2 or 3 slots doesn't make much difference. It's nice to have something to pick up and have level with the character, but with the easy availability of attuned IOs, ultimately no different from regular IOs. If the economy were in a bad state, reflective of how it was on the original servers, then I'd say that having ATOs readily available would matter. With inf* oozing out of every crevice of the market, though, and converters allowing players to vacuum up that inf* so rapidly that they can have everything they desire as they level (as opposed to waiting until 50, then farming for months to pay for things), ATOs are just the sprinkles on the rosettes on the icing on the cake.

No, because the premise, reasoning and conclusion are all flawed. IO sets aren't a/the problem. They never have been, they never will be. The problem is that this game is old. Face it, boys and girls, we've had nearly 20 years to find ways to beat the game, and we've gotten ridiculously good at it. We were so good at it that we had to live through drastic nerfs like GDN and ED when we were just starting to settle into the game, and even those didn't do more than sort of, kind of slow us down slightly. And that little hiatus that we had to spend without the game didn't really slow us down either, it just gave us more time to imagine new ways to break shit. Nerfing Defense isn't a/the solution. Defense has already been so heavily and thoroughly nerfed that the last development team had to partially reverse the nerfing just to bring it into a good position as damage mitigation. Reducing either the hard or soft cap isn't going to fix anything. The workarounds for that are way too easy to pick up, and they don't actually force the player to make any hard choices about slotting or power selection. It accomplishes nothing, other than irritating people and wasting development resources. Furthermore, attacking Defense without addressing all of the other forms of damage mitigation is biased and unbalanced. It utterly ignores every other kind of mitigation, including the inverse of +Def, -ToHit, and adversely affects players using power sets which are entirely reliant on Defense while doing nothing to any other form of mitigation. Doubling a Defense-based character's chance to be hit equates to doubling the damage that character is going to take, yet there's no corresponding suggestion for doubling the incoming damage for characters using other forms of mitigation. If survivability is a problem, it's a problem across the board, not just a problem for a single type of mitigation, but this approach singles out one form of mitigation and gives everything else a pass. It's narrow-minded, poorly thought out and never should've been proposed in the first place. So dismiss away.

I did it in 2005.

They can. I tanked AVs and soloed GMs with a melee-only defender. The problem, for defenders, is the melee damage scalar. It's shit. We can play defenders who use melee attacks now, with powers like Air Superiority, Cross Punch and *PP melee attacks. With a 0.55 scalar, though, they're not impressive, even with piles of -Res. A melee defender is, essentially, a petless mastermind with slightly higher HP pool and better buffs/debuffs. That's why almost no-one bothers. TA. And with enough status effects of your own, you can get by without protection. Pairing Dark Pit with Oppressive Gloom, for example, makes for extremely safe play in melee range. So there are more options than just the few primaries.

If you have a bow, it's a heel to the crotch. And yes, it is ever so satisfying. For all of you sad little people who don't use bows, it's the same animation as Kick (Fighting pool).

Inf* sinks aren't there to directly control inflation by themselves. They're there to act in concert with other inflationary control measures to maintain a healthy economy. All of the measures working together - the salvage seeding and pooling on the market, the auto-attuning done by the market, converters, inf* sinks of all types - do the job. Remove one and you alter how the control functions, but more importantly, you affect different groups of people in different ways. Some people don't use the market well. Some people don't use converters at all. Some people only purchase crafted IOs, never craft them for themselves. Every part of the inflationary control system affects everyone, and in different ways, but the overall result is to keep inflation from affecting any one group significantly. Because we have multiple overlapping methods of controlling inflation, no-one is punished for "not doin' it right".

The economy is massively deflated in comparison to the original servers. @SwitchFade! Sic 'em!

They wouldn't make that choice. You're ignoring the history of Co*. How many missions were changed to use timers to prevent players from farming? How many critters have had their XP reduced because players abused the bonus they offered? Every glowie in the game had its XP removed specifically because players saw an opportunity to reap increased rewards with less risk, and they didn't just take that opportunity, they dosed it with roofies, bent it over and hammered it until the developers dragged them off of it. How many times have we been down this road, with anything offering a reward above and beyond the norm being taken out behind the wood shed and beaten into submission because players went to town on it? Do we really need another lesson? They would not choose not to farm the enemy groups with increased rewards. And that would, absolutely, lead to a lot of archetypes and power sets being completely sidelined because they didn't fit the new farming meta. People would line up for it, abuse the fuck out of it and, inevitably, come to the forums to complain about everyone playing a limited number of builds, builds being overpowered, teams being hard to find, the enemy group being boring, everything is too easy, et cetera. All of the drastic nerfage caused by players abusing everything which offered increased rewards occurred before IOs existed. IOs don't cause abuse/exploitation of reward structures, or enable it, nor does not having IOs mean players wouldn't abuse/exploit an increased reward from an enemy group. I'm looking at it from the perspective of having proven that anyone can build for anything, without relying on set bonuses, and neuter any enemy group if that's their intent; and the historical perspective of having personally witnessed just how readily players will exploit the tiniest reward advantage when it's available. It's all happened before, and if you tempt fate, it will happen again.

Your tanks date Hami? Ew...

Isn't that how the housing bubble happened? DID YOU JOIN CORPORATE AMERICA?! I can has interest-free no repayment necessary loan?

Too mundane. As I mentioned previously, Legionette stomps Carnies day in and day out. Nothing slows her down when she's fighting them. Does she deserve more XP/inf* for beating on Carnies? No, because she's not being challenged. Parthenia, on the other hand, is a different story. She doesn't have the piles of extra hit points, the massive amount of +Regeneration, the status protection (the new and improved EMP Arrow helps with that, when it's available), that Legionette sports. She has to work for her XP/inf*/drops, and Carnies are more work. One mezzer too many, or one Strongman not Immobilized (they resist Slows, so we have to open with the first attack, instead of debuffs, which is riskier), or a group a little too spread out (cones have arc limits), or a Master Illusionist phasing or summoning at the wrong moment... it can all go sideways in a hurry. She is challenged by Carnies, and she does deserve better rewards. Legionette would be excessively rewarded by a broad, general increase to the rewards for defeating Carnies. Parthenia might not be rewarded enough for the amount of extra work it takes. A simple reward structure may be superficially appealing, but it's ultimately unfair and far too easy to exploit. It wouldn't have to be terribly complex. Half a dozen to a dozen flags to account for the important variables should be sufficient. The biggest factors would be mitigation flags, which would calculate an average of the character's total damage mitigation potential at the beginning of combat (active or available buffs (including heals), available debuffs (note that "available" would indicate fully recharged and ready to go), max HP, status protection, etc.), and damage flags (primary damage type, number of damage procs slotted, single-target or AoE, currently recharged or not, etc.). A few flags to indicate the enemy spawn's special attributes, like specific damage Resistances, heavy use of mez, summons (things like Warwolf spawns in place of almost defeated foes would count as summons (because they are, technically)) would be necessary. But I'm not suggesting a redesign of the Co* engine with a learning algorithm to tailor the rewards as the player goes, or to let SHODAN out of the bottle. Just flags and comparisons that wouldn't even slow the servers down a jot. It could even be as simple as counting the number of flags of certain variables and adding/subtracting enemy spawn flags to create a reward modifier. With such a system, Legionette could go poke Carnies with her big stick and accumulate the typical rewards, never missing out on anything. Parthenia, since she'd be struggling more, would reap larger gains for her successes, commensurate with the reality of having to do more to accomplish the same result. The two characters would, over time, achieve the same general totals - Legionette through speed and safety, Parthenia through increased rewards for the increased difficulty she faces. Won't ever happen, though. It would be nice if it did, but it's just a thought exercise.