nzer

The secondary is just as important, if not moreso. Thugs, Bots, and Demons to a lesser extent have enough survivability to work with almost any secondary, but the rest don't, and will need to be paired with a secondary that plays to their strengths.

I'm going to be very bold and propose that scaling resists should always take full effect no matter how large the hit is. The way they work now defeats the primary advantage resists have over defense.

They're basically arbitrary, I just wanted something that looked mostly sane at a wide range of PPMs. Definitely play around with it, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts.

@Bopper, here's a better explanation of what I'm suggesting. It's a graph of a modified version of the proc chance formula for a single target click power where y is proc chance, x is modified recharge time, TA is the power's activation time, P is procs per minute, L and E are scale factors I've added, and the green line is the current formula. I'm not saying we should go back to flat percentages, just skewing slightly in favor of faster recharging powers.

No, I'm suggesting something in between the original method and what we have now, where how far in between it is can be tuned by adjusting the weighting. PPM would decrease as recharge time increases, but not to the degree that the proc chance is constant.

We can solve all three of these at the same time, I think, by applying a weighting to recharge time in the PPM formula to skew the proc chance more in favor of short recharge powers. This will make it harder to turn long recharge powers into nukes, compensate for the cost of animation time in short recharge powers @oedipus_tex mentioned, and lower the damage loss of additional recharge so people aren't avoiding slotting recharge because it will hurt their proc damage. The downsides are that it turns procs into even more of math problem than they already are, and renders the actual PPM text meaningless, as the number of procs per minute would depend on the recharge time on the power.

Presumably the second option, but I don't see it as rewarding mastery over obtuse systems as much as providing build tension for minmaxers to chew on. In that I think it's pretty successful, while having the side benefit of allowing support ATs to build for some damage if they want to. The problem is that offers so much benefit to abilities that aren't meant to be relied on for damage that they can end up superceding abilities that are.

I've never argued FF competes with Time in practical scenarios...

Or we could look at +4s, which is what people actually run. Or we could look at +4 incarnates, which is the closest this game comes to actual difficulty, and where FF's def is twice as effective as Time's. But both of those are bad for the argument you're making, so sure, +3s are fine. And let's certainly ignore that in a real team either set will likely put everyone well above 80% def to everything.

Time gets significantly less defense than FF, significantly less -def and -tohit than Rad, no mez protection, and very little -regen. I'm not going to argue it's not better than both (though that's not a terribly high bar, especially for FF), but it's nowhere near the entirety of both. Maybe if you just look at buff/debuff types and ignore the amounts.

Good thing we're not talking about armor sets then. Again, Force Field provides 53% defense to the entire team without IO sets or incarnates. Are we pretending that would be allowed in an armor set?

Yeah, that actually sounds right now that I think about it, and it does seem generally correct from a balance perspective; defense provides resilience to def debuffs by making them less likely to hit, res should also provide some kind of innate resilience to res debuffs. But it's still icky. The better way to handle that would be for all sources of resistance to also provide resistance to -res, that way if the team wants a particular source of resist to not do that, they have a way to make that change.

Yup. Ultimately, damage resistance and damage should just be separate attributes. It really, really doesn't make sense for damage resistance to be implemented as res(damage) if you think about it for more than a few seconds. This isn't even the only problem it creates. How would resistance to -res be implemented under the current system? Can it be?

Assuming I understand the system correctly, this would also prevent those powers from having their damage/damage resistance increased by enhancements, which defeats the point.

Oh for sure, the cat's out of the bag now

Hmm. It seems to me like the real problem here is that damage resistance is implemented as Res(DamageType) rather than as its own attribute.

The quoted patch notes seem to indicate the bug is that certain abilities with enhanceable resists were being affected by outside buffs when they shouldn't, not that damage buffs were improving resists. Is that a thing that was happening?

Uhm, no. Night widow can get it with 5 LotGs, a full Reactive Defense set in mind link, and three recharge IOs in hasten, whereas a fort gets it at roughly the same time as perma hasten. One takes ~50 mil, the other takes 500+ mil. They both get it, but one gets it at level ~32 with minimal investment, and the other only gets it with a fully purpled endgame build. What you're suggesting, on the other hand, would allow night widows to get it with a standard endgame build, but prevent forts from ever getting it. Something's definitely unintended here, but I don't think it's that defense/tohit IO sets with recharge reduction affect the recharge of mind link. Again, IOs were added in issue 9, VEATs were added in issue 12, and the game shut down during issue 23. What you're calling an "oversight" could have been fixed before VEATs shipped or at any point in the four years after they shipped, and it wasn't. Frankly, there's no reason for mind link not to take recharge enhancements directly. Farsight, the exact same buff but stronger, can be perma'd without any global recharge at all.

If you mean forts and night widows, the difference in base recharge makes it significantly easier to perma on a night widow than on a fort. IOs predate VEATs, so I'm not sure why you think this.

As far as I know recharge enhancements do affect Mind Link, you just can't directly slot recharge IOs. Defense sets with recharge and hami-Os will both work. Edit: It just occurred to me you probably want it "fixed" so recharge from enhancements doesn't affect it at all. Personally, I don't see a lot of value in restricting perma Mind Link to 800+ mil builds.

You and @Vanden have made a pretty convincing case for recovery set bonuses being undertuned, so I think the logical next step here is making some proof of concept builds to explore exactly how larger recovery set bonuses would be leveraged. In addition to @MunkiLord's questions, I would ask: Are there common slotting patterns that can be easily modified to grab additional recovery, and what are the tradeoffs? In what situations, if any, would stacking recovery set bonuses become a viable replacement for Ageless? Does an across the board gain in recovery meaningfully affect the player's resilience to end/rec debuffs? (This is actually a valid concern @Infinitum, though I expect the answer is no)

I'm trying to get you to make a more substantive argument than "buffing recovery set bonuses breaks the endurance economy because I say so," because you don't seem to realize that isn't compelling to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. God forbid we actually, you know, discuss, rather than just shouting at each other.

Good, keep going. How does the ~0.3 end/sec most builds would gain from this change break the gameplay dynamic of end/rec debuffs?

Uh... you realize there's no functional difference between the blue bar barely moving and the blue bar not moving, right? Adding recovery to a build that's already self-sufficient doesn't change its effectiveness at all.

Nowhere in this thread has anyone provided an example of how the extra recovery would allow them to slot differently. What you quoted doesn't say endurance issues should just go away, but I understand how you could misinterpret it as saying that.