Luminara

I believe I just pointed that out, by saying that the build was otherwise identical, with only the slotting in Seismic Smash changed. And the math showed that having a pile of global +Recharge and +Accuracy only resulted in the proc bomb offering a minute increase in DPS. In other words, the traditionally slotted Seismic Smash benefited from the same global bonuses that the proc bomb Seismic Smash did. Capping the damage on the build, the proc bomb hits harder. Per individual use. When you use it, it hits for a lot. The Hecatomb Seismic Smash also hits harder when it's also at the damage cap. Not quite as hard as the proc bomb, but it's still a lot. But it also cycles faster. Cycling faster, the Hecatomb Seismic Smash narrows the gap by 2.1 damage per second, rather than falling farther behind. With all other things being equal between builds, at less than capped damage, the proc bomb is slightly better damage per second, only slightly, than the traditionally slotted power. At the damage cap, that lead diminishes, not increases, because the more rapid cycling of the traditional slotting brings it closer to parity. Yes, you can find ways to increase the proc bomb's cycle time, but those same improvements would apply to the Hecatomb slotting. I suspect the only slotting which would show a clear and sizeable advantage for the proc bomb would be if both powers were examined at the damage cap and very near the recharge cap. The Hecatomb slotting would hit the recharge cap sooner, at which point the procs would finally begin to edge ahead, and possibly display a sizeable advantage when it hit the recharge cap. But at that point, we're talking about extreme edge cases, and we both know the HC team isn't going to nerf procs because of edge case performance. Which you also used in your example. You can't use them to demonstrate a high DPA proc bomb, then disallow them in a DPS comparison. Barring the 10% from Hecatomb, the builds I compared had otherwise identical global +Recharge. The difference in cycle time, and therefore DPS, wasn't due to that 10% global +Recharge, it was due to the 89.92% Recharge Reduction in Hecatomb. And if you're going to test with additional global +Recharge, it has to be applied equally, to the comparison build as well, to ensure that the comparison is accurate.

I happen to have Seismic Smash on my Grav/TA. I took her existing build and replaced the 5x Hecatomb with 6x procs to make a comparison. No other changes were made. With 6x damage procs, which includes the Hecatomb and Unbreakable Constraint procs, 41.15172835729581 damage per second. The endurance cost is 17.84, the recharge time is 11.36s, the hit chance is 131%. With 5x Hecatomb (excluding the Damage enhancement) and the Unbreakable Constraint proc, 35.60713561727144 damage per second. The endurance cost is 13.52, the recharge time is 8.15s, the hit chance is 189.2%. 5.5 damage per second gained, at the cost of 4.32 extra endurance, 3.21 slower recharge and 68.2% lower hit chance. There's nothing to fix here. The DPS increase isn't huge, it's miniscule. That miniscule gain isn't free, it has costs associated. And capping damage doesn't give the proc bomb slotting a lead, it actually decreases the gain. Just switching the secondary from TA to Kin and bumping FS up to 10 targets to cap damage, as a quick and dirty analysis, I see a DPS differential of 3.46336754116357 in the proc bomb's favor. 2 DPS lower than my previous calculations. If this is the shining example of why procs "need" to be nerfed, I'd advise the nerf-herders not to hold their breath. The HC team isn't going to be hornswoggled that easily.

We covered that in the other thread, too. "Bad" is subjective. Someone disliking a KB proc doesn't mean someone else can't like it. Someone finding little or no utility in a ToHit Buff proc doesn't mean someone else's build doesn't rely on it. There are no bad procs, because a proc is just "something extra". There may be procs which aren't right for you, or me, but they aren't bad, they're just not the bonus we want. Going werebear on spawns may be one of the foundations of the game, but it's not the only foundation.

Ah, yes, the slightly larger cousin of the Shire. Have to be careful when giving out the scritches to those, though. That's how earthquakes happen.

What kind of animal murders red boxes? I'm calling PETRB.

An observation isn't an attack. That and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee. In the initial beta for Issue 5. You can't draw this correlation because that version of TA existed for a very, very short time and disappeared with the first I5 beta patch, and the majority of Co* players at that time never used the test server, never participated in beta and never had the faintest idea what TA did or how it worked, nor is it possible that even a single player who joined after the first I5 beta patch could have developed that impression since that TA never existed for them. Sorry, but no, you can't say that a couple hundred thousand people who never saw TA with 4/9 location-targeted powers shied away from it due to that. Additionally, you didn't say the set had that many location-targeted powers "for a while", you said: You use the present tense in this sentence, not the past tense. You make no reference to that brief period during at the outset of the I5 beta, you don't say, or imply, that the set had location-targeted powers "for a while", you discuss the set in the now. Just not buying this backpedal. Still not seeing the weird. I have seen numerous requests for more power interaction of this nature, both on the original forums and here, though. Give players an interaction between, for instance, Ice powers and Water Blast powers that causes the Water Blast powers to do something different and I can guarantee you that no-one's going to say it's weird. OSA could always be ignited by either Fire or Energy damage. Always, even in the first I5 beta release. It's never been restricted to only Fire damage. The power says "may burst into flames if fire is used near it", but it's never been restricted to Fire as the only ignition source. You left out Radiation Blast, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols with Incendiary Ammunition, Electrical Blast, Energy Blast, Sonic Attack, two Assault Rifle attacks and two Water Blast attacks. As well as the Magic and Tech origin powers. And temp powers which deal Fire or Energy damage. And critters using Fire and Energy attacks. And Arcane Bolt and Enflame. And everything in the *PPs. The game was overflowing with ways to ignite OSA if you happened to play it without any Fire or Energy damage in your primary or secondary. I mained a TA/Dark for six years. /Dark is one of the three defender secondaries without any Fire or Energy damage. Number of times I couldn't ignite OSA: 0. This was a far greater concern to /TA controllers than it was for TA/ defenders, and even for them, it wasn't really a problem due to the abundance of options. That was not your original contention. You stated that it was You implied that the purpose of EMP Arrow was to affect targets flagged as Electronic and that affecting other targets was just a side-effect. That was wrong. Veering off on a three paragraph monologue about AVs and blaster nukes doesn't correct the misinformation, or distract the reader from the fact that it was wrong. You're making the mistake of conflating the current state of the game with how it existed before Incarnate abilities, before the P2W vendor, before IO set recipes and enhancements were easily available and affordable. Again. We didn't have soft-capped blasters soloing Master of * runs at +4/x8 in those days. We didn't have rotating Judgement nukes on teams. We didn't have a lot of what we have now, and we didn't have the leeway to consider EMP Arrow to be inconsequential when it was capable of doing with one power what all eight of our other powers couldn't do even a tenth as well (mitigate damage). On the contrary, it was significantly better than blaster nukes. Blaster nukes, during the period in question, had a crash - a complete drain of the endurance bar - in addition to the -Recovery applied to the character. EMP Arrow had a sizeable cost, true, and a 15s -Recovery penalty, but there was no crash. No, not even in the I5 beta. Wrong. The negative aspects of EMP Arrow existed not because it dealt damage, but to balance the insanely long duration of the Hold (controller primary AoE Holds have a base 14.9s duration at level 50, EMP Arrow for a controller had a base 27.9s duration at level 50 (base 22.35s duration at level 50 for defenders), the 50% chance for +1 mag Hold, the sizeable -End applied to targets, the higher base hit chance than other AoE Holds... the fact that it also dealt a pitiable amount of damage to Electronic targets wasn't even a factor. It meant absolutely nothing to the developers, it was just flavor. One: soloing AVs wasn't the norm on the original servers, and it wasn't because of a lack of -Regen, it was because the economy was a hideous mess with individual IOs going over 3 billion inf*, preventing players from acquiring set bonuses like they can now, which means you're once again referring to the current state of the game as though it's the only version of the game that's ever existed (losing track of how frequently you do that); and two; TA could maintain two stacks of Disruption, toss on Acid and throw in a couple of -Res procs (which were dirt cheap in those days, compared to other valued IOs), using only TA powers. 100-120% -Res (extremely high +Recharge builds could triple-stack Disruption for a few seconds) tends to work rather well as a substitute for -Regen. That's not, of course, including other options, like Sonic Attack stacking more -Res, or pool powers. Or adding in the damage from a burning oil slick acting. Storm defenders and controllers could solo AVs, with stacked Freezing Rains and two pseudo-pets dealing bonus damage for them, and Storm had 0% -Regen. TA couldn't, but not because they lacked sustainable -Regen, rather because the total mitigation offered by Flash, Glue, Entangling and PGA was horribly insufficient. We had enough stackable -Res and additional damage output to do the job, we didn't have enough survivability. EMP Arrow applies a mag 3 Hold with a 50% chance for +1 mag, not a Stun. Oh, are you're going to bring some expertise to this discussion? That would be a refreshing change.

Not if it was part of a meatplot.

I discovered a place on horses where you can scratch and make them kick their back leg like a dog.

And head cannons.

In 2004 and 2005, I played a couple of the "least effective" characters it was possible to play at that time, a Trick Arrow defender before the buffs to TA in Issue 7, and a defender who only used melee attacks. I learned a lot from playing those characters, but the most important thing I learned is that most people honestly don't care what you're playing or how you're playing it, as long as everyone is having fun. You're good enough. And if you're having fun, you're doing it exactly right.

Are you playing for your own entertainment, or to impress others and meet their expectations?

It's Wormhole doing the work for my Grav/TA. Even though critters aren't supposed to overlap, for a brief moment, they do when they're teleported as a group and dropped at the reticle. In this shot, I'm hitting one well outside the range of melee attacks. That's Wormhole in action. Sands of Mu is queued before Wormhole's animation is complete, and it activates before the critter models are even fully visible after Wormhole's teleport moves them. They stack, my cone hits the melee cone limit and then the spawn spreads out to a normally spaced distribution, but they're still taking damage from Sands. Should work similarly with Fold Space. Can't say for certain, though, haven't taken that power on any character (yet).

Yes, they stack. Use Siren's Song first, though. It deals damage, damage breaks Sleep, there won't be a Sleep to stack if you use it after Mass Hypnosis.

I keep misreading the title of this thread as "Meatplot". Which suggests a whole other kind of story. Or seven.

Is that the thread in which I examined one of those proc bombs, compared it to traditional IO set slotting with one additional proc and found that the damage output was not, in fact, better when the power had six procs, but also that the hit chance, endurance usage and cycle time were all significantly worse when used as a proc bomb, and that the proc bomb's recharge time (which was already worse than the traditionally slotting) was dependent on the Force Feedback proc in another power, which could miss and drop the proc bomb's performance over time even further? And this is evidence that procs need to be nerfed? Hm...

Switch to IOs, obey the Law of Fives, apply the Rule of Threes to survivalism (an extension to the rule which practicing survivalists typically follow is that one should always try to have at least three possible survival uses for every item carried in a survival situation), win at the game and life.

You're not a blaster.

Some characters are just experiments - am I going to enjoy this, does this work with that, can I do this kind of thing, etc., and I'm not terribly attached to them (yet). Some are recreations of characters I had on the original servers, and I want them more for the sense of recapturing what was lost than because I need them or care about them deeply. But when the costume is just right, the name is on point, I'm really enjoying the way this works with that, the concept I had in mind suddenly coalesces, and there's a real sense of attachment... a story happens. Something comes to mind and has to be written for the character to feel complete.

Not sentinels. I didn't say it was unplayable. In Issue 11, BAB revamped almost all of the weapon animations in the game and rejiggered the sequencers so with or without the weapon drawn, the total animation time was identical. And even if he hadn't, it wouldn't have been relevant for TA because TA's debuffs weren't powerful enough to allow a player to drag out the process of debuffing by cycling blasts between debuffs, the set historically required the player to go full monty to achieve a reasonable modicum of survivability. Debuff, debuff, debuff, then blast. I mained a TA/Dark for almost 6 years. I played more TA/* and */TA combinations than I care to think about, including the TA/Archery defender I leveled to 50 before Issue 7. Redraw was never a real issue for TA. The abysmally low debuff values, the long recharge times, the lack of any means of aiding a team more directly if the controls/debuffs failed to mitigate damage sufficiently, the overabundance of control in a defender primary, the years-long bug which prevented OSA from being used as a reliable damage source and deprived the player of the OSA target when he/she had an ignition failure, the migraine-inducing pulsating ring graphics in Disruption Arrow, the lack of any customizability of the powers themselves... take your pick. I'll also note that Archery had buggy post-animation pauses in Aimed Shot and Ranged Shot which were fixed multiple times (they didn't stay fixed until near sunset). Getting a TA or Archery bug fixed was never a priority, either, it typically took months (if not years) even with me and others talking with Castle on a weekly basis. So any imagined time saved from redraw by pairing TA with Archery was lost in the periods when the Aimed/Ranged Shot animations were on the fritz, which was a not inconsiderable portion of the life of the sets. Disruption Arrow and OSA were the only location AoEs in the set. And Disruption Arrow wasn't restricted to ground placement, you could put it anywhere, including straight up in the air. It would just hang there, a big, pulsing globe. You activate OSA, it creates a target, you hit the target with Fire/Energy damage, fire happens. Or you use the target as a focal point for targeted AoEs, then make fire happen. That's pretty straightforward. EMP Arrow wasn't an "anti-machine" power. It had a damage component which only affected critters flagged as Electronic, but that was flavor, not the primary purpose of the power. EMP Arrow was a mag 3 Hold with a 50% chance for an additional mag 1 Hold. It also had a comparatively long duration (nearly 30s base at level 50, twice the duration of controller primary AoE Holds), and being able to use it at range, rather than in melee (EMP Arrow was copied from EM Pulse (Radiation Emission T9)), made it the hands down best AoE Hold in the game. "Machines" had nothing to do with what the power was or how it was intended to be used. I wrote the book on TA. Twice. You... give the impression of having just read some power descriptions on the very recent iteration of TA and mistaken it for the historical version of the set. I don't think this is a conversation you want to have. Mechanics have no specific board. And if you don't want to veer off into a side discussion, don't start a side discussion.

So, basically, you made a pole dancer who carries her pole with her.

You have enough inf* to pay someone to abuse you, if you're really that into it. Or, hell, skip the carpal tunnel syndrome and really abuse yourself by watching something like Jason X or The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

I use /powexec_location self Wormhole on my Grav/TA controller, queue Sands of Mu while Wormhole is animating and achieve full target saturation (five critters in the cone) every time, and Sands has a narrower cone than Cross Punch.

Because players strenuously objected when the 5th Column was replaced by the Council and frequently requested their return, and Paragon saw an opportunity to do that while adding to the depth of the game and richness of the Column/Council story.

There are things that aren't fine and far more desperately in need of redress, and the HC team is not only unpaid and doing this in their spare time, they're also an extremely small group of people. This isn't a game development studio working together in an office building. They're not working with practically unlimited resources. They don't have 25 hours in the day and 8 days in the week. And they're not going to drop everything to polish sentinels while leaving everything that they consider to be more critical twisting in the wind. Sentinels aren't unplayable. Other things are, in the context of the current direction in which the game is going and where the HC team would like it to be. So those other things are being addressed first. I lived with TA being the absolute bottom of the barrel for six years on the original servers, you can put up with sentinels being less than perfect for a while.