ZemX

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?

It's not a fundamental flaw. It's an opinion. My favorite AT in this game after a brief stint post beta and then returning for City of Villains... was Stalkers. And Stalkers suuuuuucked at everything but ganking people in RV. Now this many years on, Stalkers are in a much better place. But they don't really compete on solo clearing +4/x8 do they? Should they? It's never bothered me that they don't. I like HOW they play. I don't feel bad that they can't hoover up a fire farm full of bad guys as easily as a Brute or a Tanker. So yeah, I know you think it's a flaw. I don't. It's a difference of opinion and that's cool. If I want to solo, I pick an AT that's good at soloing the same way I pick a Stalker for stabbing bosses in the back and a Tanker for laughing when people stab me in the back.

It's not a leap. I explained that up thread. I specifically pointed out why I think farming and x8 soloing allow Tankers an advantage. The devs also allude to this in the patch notes by pointing out that AoE saturation is what allows Tankers their edge. Not going to repeat myself any more than that.

Duuuuuude!!!!!

Except this same point goes for soloing. "Part of the game" or not, the various ATs are not, and never have been, designed to have parity in solo +4/x8 map clearing speed. So why start now? Forget Defenders. Should a Scrapper without a taunt aura demand a taunt aura because he can't solo Trapdoor as well as a Willpower Scrapper? What about Stalkers? The fact is this game was designed around the team. The various ATs were designed to fulfill different team roles. CAN some of them solo? Yes. Can they all solo equally well? No... and they never have. If you can do a targeted buff that helps with soloing and doesn't unbalance teaming the way they did for Defenders, great. Knock yourself out. But that's not what happened here. Because of this corner case where Tankers could just slightly edge out Brutes with their bigger AoEs by farming/herding enemies, every Tanker gets an AoE nerf? If my Tanker needs a nerf, it should be because Tankers were doing better than Brutes on regular teams. Not because of farming or max-difficulty soloing.

Recall that Brutes were conceived as the heavy melee of redside back when the sides were strictly separated. They weren't always an in-between AT. That came as a result of the unification of the game. So now they are absolutely an in-between melee AT. Less durable than Tankers but more durable than Scrappers. Hence their damage output should be somewhere in-between those as well. And that does appear to be the case on Pylons. Stalkers don't show an average here but glancing through the times (too lazy to compute) they look pretty similar to Scrappers. And Stalkers really are pretty close to Scrappers in durability as well now-a-days. Basically, Brutes were always doing more damage per target and only lost when Tankers are able to hit more targets than Brutes could. So these Pylon results were a proxy for not just ST performance but also any time the Brute could hit as many targets as the Tanker, which happened most often against single or at least less than 6 enemies. And that happens plenty in teams where spawns can be scattered or just not willing to clump up for nice big AoE disposal 100% of the time. This is why farms are so ridiculous. They are designed precisely to feed the meat-grinder an endless stream of capped AoE destruction.

[Laughs in Sky Splitter]

No, I would not agree. I've said "On a real team..." twice now and you keep bringing up a solo map clear test in response. Why? I don't know how else to explain what's wrong with using Ston's data as a proxy for ALL game performance. Ston's testing, because it allows maximizing Tanker AoEs, is pretty much a worst (or best depending on your perspective) case for the Tanker AoE advantage over Brutes. In ANY other scenario, therefore, Tankers lose to Brutes' superior ST and small group damage output. You might want to notice how badly Brutes destroy Tankers on the pylon test. Tankers are 2% faster at Trapdoor and 22% slower at Pylons. Same goes for any group of five or fewer enemies, which happens all the time on teams once the initial bulk of the spawn is destroyed. You have bosses and/or scattered enemies all over the place. It's never the ideal of Trapdoor and clustered enemies. Not 100% of the time. Not even 50% of the time. There is no doubt in my mind that if you long term parsed Brutes and Tankers on the same team, you'd find Brutes out-damaging Tankers easily. Then and now. What I meant by that comment is that it seems to have been a nerf caused by overperformance in farming/soloing. But the nerf affects everybody because it reduces every AoE that hits over standard caps now. Even if it's just some of your attacks, some of the time. It's still a nerf. And it's unnecessary because, as I said, I seriously doubt Tankers were ever out-damaging Brutes on teams. It's just not an ideal enough scenario to maximize the Tanker AoE advantage. And even when you do, Tankers only just barely edge ahead of Brutes.

What I said was, "On any real team..." Ston's test was +4/x8 solo Trapdoor with IOs, procs, and Incarnates in the mix. And even then, roll your eyes down to the bottom average completion time for each AT: Scrappers: 5:10 Tankers: 5:10 Brutes: 5:18 Eight seconds different. Hence why I pointed out Tankers were all of 2% faster. That's smaller... MUCH smaller than the difference between the powersets themselves. Effectively the three ATs in this test are pretty much neck-and-neck. To which I have to ask, "So what?" Because this isn't strictly a damage output test. You'll notice Stalkers aren't invited. Why? Because they don't have a taunt aura available to them. Indeed, only Willpower was tested so that Scrappers could join the fun because without it, you lose too much damage output to runners. In other words, Scrappers without a taunt aura are going to fail much harder than Tankers and Brutes on this particular test. It is NOT a test that isolates only damage output. Survival is also a factor. And survival, frankly, is the Tanker's specialty. The fact these three ATs get this close to the same in solo max-difficulty performance with all the stops pulled out should maybe not even have ever been controversial. Because this is the best case for Tanker "big AoE" benefit. Keeping those AoEs target-cap saturated means always having a crowd around you. You can't really achieve that without just a ridiculous absurd crowd of enemies (farming) or x8 soloing where you can optimize the crowd by dragging it spawn to spawn instead of wasting time soloing bosses. That's why I said , "On any real team..." Tankers will not see capped AoEs all the time. The intended "pyramid effect" of dwindling crowd size each spawn should assert itself. The inability to always crowd every spawn around you. Hell, some enemies REFUSE to be herded into melee range. And this is not even getting into that old saw, "This game is balanced around SOs" because nix procs from this situation AND capped damage AND Incarnates and then see who wins. My money would be on Brutes. Though it might require turning down difficulty because again, survival was a factor here.

It also affects proc math. In the same way global recharge is not considered in proc rates, neither was global radius/arc strength. Now that it's cooked into the power directly, Tanker 12ft and 15ft PBAoEs actually proc like 12ft and 15ft PBAoEs... rather than 8ft and 10ft PBAoEs, respectively. Any way you slice it though, this appears mainly to have been a farming/soloing nerf. To constantly hit those larger target caps for Tankers, you had to constantly have enemies clustered around you. Where else does that happen as reliably as farming or soloing at x8? And even with that, Tankers were a whole 2% faster at Trapdoor in Ston's old tests. On any real team, it's not a contest who is doing more damage. Was Brutes back then and is even more so now.