ZemX

Few things: 1. It can take a Tanker a few rounds to get some kind of taunt effect going on all the aggro in a spawn if it's not exactly already packed together. It only takes a Controller one press of a button if they get there first. It is therefore a good idea to get there a few seconds, at least, ahead of the team. This means leaving slightly (but not a lot) before literally every enemy is dead. It does not mean playing several spawns ahead of the team like your story, but be sure you're not confusing the two. One is good team tanking. The other is soloing... on a team. 2. Rezzers: Nowhere is it chiseled in stone that if a freak tank decides to stand up three seconds after the tanker has left that you MUST stand and fight it there. Bring it to the next spawn and drag it past the explosions. It will peel off on somebody else if you don't want its attention. This is far more efficient than everybody wasting time standing around staring at dead freak and wondering if it might stand up. 3. Pulling in adds: Provided you never go over aggro cap, pulling in nearby enemies is potentially a good idea too. If they're that close, they might aggro on someone else in the team eventually. Better it's a tanker or other sturdy character who doesn't mind the attention. I do this sometimes in rooms with multiple spawns so that instead of aggroing two at once, I start pulling in the next group before the first is finished, so that we don't end up with groups two and three at the same time if the team is not particularly strong enough to handle that. Double pulls as x8 will go over the aggro cap. Doesn't matter if the tanker can survive that. Others might not. -- Circling back to point 1 there: Remember also if this is a PuG, it can take the Tanker a little bit getting used to how the team is rolling. Might leave one fight too early and adjust later. Point being: Don't be too quick to judge. Someone is not necessarily running off to solo just because they moved a little too quickly. Some teams move fast and you have to move fast to stay slightly ahead of them. It's a balancing act. Also... shit happens. Was on a team recently when the lead got bent a little out of shape saying the team had split when in fact someone had clicked a glowie and caused an ambush from behind. Half the team turned to fight it. Half the team didn't even see it until people started dying. That was the "split". That can happen. Roll with it.

Isn't "Fourth Ear Deaf" just a parody of "Third Eye Blind" though? Not sure which real band Golden Grain is referencing but I'd guess it's the same sort of thing.

One Thousand Cuts would sure look wild!

Doesn't look like it. Weirdly, there seem to be several modifiers that can be used by powers for -res effects. Evolving Armor uses melee_debuff_res_dmg. That one was nerfed to match the other melee ATs. Weaken Resolve, for whatever reason, uses ranged_res_dmg modifier, which has not been touched. Staff's Eye of the Storm bonus in Form of Body stance uses melee_res_dmg modifier to do -10% res for Tankers and -7.5% for the other melee ATs. Hasn't changed. I don't know what the reasoning here is unless it was to JUST nerf Bio.

On that note and while @Scarlet Shocker blathers on about armor, I will again remind everyone what we're REALLY missing in this game:

I think you ended your post on the right answer: This is a choice nobody has to make. Do both builds on the same character. Play both. See which one pleases you more.

Bingo. It just makes way more sense to decouple what the powers do from what they look like when possible. So you can be Invulnerable because your skin is invulnerable or because you're wearing really good armor. Up to you. Only thing we could probably use here is more "minimal/no VFX" options for various armor power sets that are still too overboard with particle effects. Like, as much as I love Rad Armor, for example, I haaaate the spinning ping-pong balls. Ugh!

I play mostly Tankers here. This vest would probably kill me.

Judging by the power description on City of Data here... yeah, I'd say there's something VERY weird going on behind the scenes. I cannot make heads or tails out of the code, so I have no idea how they managed to get mez enhancement to increase the magnitude instead of the duration. But my guess is that Mid's does not know how to decipher this power either and you'll just have to assume it's doing what the dev's claim it does and is enhancing mag.

If you were using this power on a Tanker prior to the Tanker nerf... it was. Tankers had a global arc/radius boost that would have affected this power and made it 22.5ft radius but still proc like it was a 15ft radius power. Now it's a 15ft radius power for all and it procs like a 15ft radius power. The proc chance should calculate based on the power's radius, not the inner radius of that one effect.

While convincing enemies to cluster together is *an* issue sometimes, it's not the one I was speaking of there. I mean even if you do manage to cluster them, they still obey their collision volumes and don't occupy the same physical space. Shoulder-to-shoulder, front-to-back, you still can't fit 10 of them in a 75 degree and 7ft deep cone. You may be lucky to fit 5. It, of course, depends on the cone. Some are quite generous. Staff Fighting has 9ft deep and 90 degree cones. Titan Weapons has three 10ft 120degree cones but two of them have always been target limited to 5, even on Tankers, and still are it seems. But most melee cones, even the ones that are wider by default, are melee-range deep, which is 7 feet. That, more than anything, is what limits how many targets you hit. In a crowd, you just can't hit deep into the crowd. Where the arc width buff we had before this patch helped was, at least, hitting enemies to either side of your target more reliably thanks to having a wider arc. This is especially helpful if you're in the middle of a big group of enemies and physically CAN'T reposition to get the most out of a cone volume.

Stealth nerfs?! But... my Stalker is already struggling!!!111

Crowd Control wouldn't change at all because it was never allowed to be bigger than 180 degrees even before the nerf. Like Foot Stomp, some Tanker AoEs were always disallowed from Gauntlet's arc/radius buff because they were deemed "large enough" already. No cone, that I'm aware of, manages more than 180 degrees and many weren't allowed to go bigger than 120 or 135. Flashing Steel, for instance is 130 degrees and a 50% bump would have put it over 180 degrees, so it was disallowed. So if they were to do for cones what they did for spheres and add to arc radius 50% on each power, I assume they'd follow the same rules Gauntlet did back before the nerf. Also, I expect shared pool powers like Cross Punch wouldn't be customized for Tankers and thus would stay at the same arc radius as other ATs even though I'm pretty sure they benefitted from Gauntlet previously. This is the rule they followed for pool sphere AoEs, it seems.

Hmm... am I doing the math wrong? This looks to be a pretty small difference in proc rate for something that might be used in an ST chain like, say Sweeping Cross. 3.5 PPM, 8s MRT (i.e. No recharge, say just acc/dmg and procs), 1.67s cast, 75 degrees base arc, 7ft radius = 45.5% proc chance. Expand that to 112.5deg arc (+50% arc) and you get... 43% proc chance. For that 2.5% hit to proc chance you get a much better chance to knock the teeth out of bad guys to the left and right of your intended victim as well.

Ultimo, man, it is time to embrace IOs finally. Doooo it! 🤪

It's... a little bit of a mess. A few Tanker secondary powers are ranged cones even though they have much shorter ranges than most ranged AT ranged cone powers. e.g. Ice Melee Frost is a ranged cone for some reason even though it's only 10ft range. Fire Melee Breath of Fire is 15ft. Oddly, both have 16 target caps on Tankers and 10 on others, which is the rule for Tanker sphere AoEs, not cone AoEs. Throw Spines, on the other hand, has a 30ft range and hits 10 targets on all melee ATs including Tankers. So there are general rules, but the target cap of a power comes from each individual power description. You can't know for sure unless you go look that power up.

No date that I've seen. Last beta patch was Saturday. GZ was figured out maybe Monday, so it has yet to appear on beta even.

When used like this, it refers to the coefficient that is multiplying an AT effect modifier to get the resulting actual number. Here is a snippet of Seeds in City of Data: So there's the "scale 8". It means "8.0 times the Controller's AT modifier for Ranged Stun effects" (which apparently gets used for confuse effects as well). Here's what that looks like when you select Controller in "Show for AT"

Well this part I get. It was just easier to nerf Tankers down than buff Brutes up because then they run into Scrappers probably. Scrappers are already hanging on by just their ATOs, I think. What I don't get is the need for the nerf in the first place. Or at least all of it. The one part that is fair is the proc rate fix. Tanker expanded AoEs now obey the correct PPM math when they are larger. I am VERY curious how that would have affected Ston's results because his builds all were pretty heavily proc'd. Considering there is already only a 2% average clear speed advantage to Tankers in his testing, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that wiped out by just the proc fix alone. Two things I hope they revert a little: 1. I want the arc width buff back (sunk into the powers individually with no base damage change, just like PBAoEs now). The over-cap nerf is still there to keep it from over-performing when more than 5 targets are hit but as it stands now, in many cases it's flat impossible to hit more than 5 with a standard melee cone even when standard sized enemies are clustered shoulder-to-shoulder. 2. But also that over-cap nerf is probably too severe given I think the above alone would put us at parity with Brutes even in the best soloing conditions. I hope this can be tweaked back up after we get more of a look at how this is performing. That 1/3 over-cap damage is a kick in the teeth (and elsewhere). The one piece of good news for me this week was hearing the Ground Zero proc problems were indeed a bug and that it's being fixed. I don't think even the damage nerf has made me sadder than not seeing everyone take a seat when I punched GZ with my purple KD proc in it.

This is what I was getting at. You can't cluster real enemies that closely. Even with the Gauntlet arc width buff, you couldn't hit 10 with Headsplitter. Maybe you hit as many as 5 with a good grouping. Without the arc width buff, it might not even be possible to hit 5. More like 2-3. And that's only if they are human-sized enemies. Most other cones aren't that extreme and some never benefitted from Gauntlet in the first place because they were already deemed "too wide" but I still suspect less than half of the cones in your "+target cap only" column can actually ever hit more than 5 targets now that there's no arc width buff.

I expect that very much depends on the Corruptor/Defender sets, but it kind of goes to my point about balancing based on IOs, Incarnates, and procs. Those things are going to absolutely bone any balance that is designed into the AT and powersets themselves. If you are a player wondering what to play to get top performance using all available means, tests like Ston did should matter to you. But for balancing ATs? Good freakin' luck. I don't expect the devs used ONLY that kind of information WRT Brutes vs. Tankers. I'm sure an SO Tanker would beat a SO Brute in a solo x8 scenario that both could survive using the old Gauntlet, because that is about AoE target cap which is just about the ATs involved. But throw all that other stuff in there and you can forget it, even talking about ATs that traditionally weren't sturdy enough to solo max difficulty in any amount of time, let alone quickly.

Yup. Huh... weird. I somehow always thought it was a cone. I guess the text description of the power was never updated.

Okay, everybody needs to stop fixating on farming. I am the one who first mentioned it in this thread and I very explicitly said BOTH farming AND x8 soloing. It can very much be the case the devs do not care a whit about farming over-performance and only did the nerf because they care about x8 soloing over-performance. I mentioned both simply because both are situations that match the devs' stated reason for the nerf: That being, continuously saturated over-cap AoEs on Tankers (i.e. 10 targets on cones, 16 on spheres). I would be curious to know if they had data other than Ston's to back this up. Because it's generally all players and posters on these forums talk about when trying to make the case that "Tankers out-damage Brutes". In fact, this only happens in cases where they CAN keep those AoEs always hitting max targets. And where is that besides farming and/or herding solo team-sized content? Any other team I am on invariably devolves into spawns that I can get a few good capped hits in on before half the spawn is dead or scattered... or never came together in the first place because Stoner McStoneycages used his favorite power like he does every spawn. The devs even called this their intended outcome from the original Tanker buff: i.e. That we'd see a big start with big AoEs but that they'd taper off as enemies were defeated or scattered, at which point the ATs who specialized more in solo and small-group damage per swing would outpace us. This is not to mention that even if a Tanker does solo faster... so what? Is soloing not an endeavor that involves both offense and defense? How are we just handing that one to Brutes without comment when it involves the specialties of BOTH archetypes? And what the data that Ston took did say was that the two ATs were within TWO percentage points on average in that test. Considering the sample size, you might even have called that a tie among all three of the melee ATs that partook. What exactly was the problem there?

Pfft.. I have been a tank on a four-tank team before. The Fire blaster still managed to find a way to kill himself. They are THAT good.

Were you actually able to hit 10 targets with all the others? Because unless I misunderstand how cones work, I'd be surprised if you could hit 10 with Proton Sweep or Jacob's Ladder. At least from a standing position without attempting any cone-extend shenanigans. Since I haven't played my Axer yet since the patch, I was slightly surprised perusing CoD to find that Pendulum was nerfed like a cone even though it's a sphere AoE around the target. I guess it's considered a pseudo-cone though, so it got "narrower". But what even is going on with Cleave? It's now a 3ft radius sphere AoE around the target instead of a cone??? That can't be right, can it?