ZemX

Who cares about noticeable? You think anybody else would agree to a 10% nerf for no good reason just because they'd need a stopwatch and a spreadsheet to know the difference? Now maybe you don't agree with the "no good reason" and that's fine, but this is my argument here at least. Why should I accept any nerf, however small, because of a balancing metric we've never used before? Since when is x8 solo and/or farm performance a reason to nerf an AT? My point is that any Brute was already contributing more offense on any team I've been on, so why I am getting any nerf at all? And this doesn't touch on the argument nobody seems to want to have, which is that Brutes SHOULDN'T just be assumed to solo faster than Tankers at max difficulty. Soloing isn't purely a damage affair, so what exactly was the problem with Tankers and Brutes being so close to the same average performance on x8 solo clear speed in the first place? Not to mention if x8 solo clear speed is the new metric around which we should be balancing melee ATs... uh... my Stalker wants to see the manager!

Who? Because that is not what I am saying. I am saying, in fact, that is what I EXPECT to happen... but only when soloing or farming. I have not seen this happen in teams. Almost the opposite in fact. I have trouble getting teammates to bring stragglers like rezzing Freaks to the next spawn even. They single-mindedly want to grind each spawn to dust before moving on. And they sometimes even get upset I've moved on to the next spawn to get it all taunted-up and clustered up on me. Then there are controllers/doms doing confuses and immobs and what-not, further preventing enemy clustering. There's no chance to keep AoEs saturated on a team like that. Not in my experience.

This is what is particularly annoying about the nerf and it's why I say it can only have been motivated by the extreme corner-case of +4/x8 soloing and/or farming. I don't see how, in any other situation, Tankers outdamage Brutes. It HAS to be a situation where the larger Gauntlet AoEs could be kept cranking up to their target caps constantly. They even said so in the dev notes. I accept the proc change. That's fair. And indeed some AoEs always suffered that, like Foot Stomp, because they were naturally 15ft radius even before. Or already wide enough cones they were denied Gauntlet's boost. So this puts everybody on the same page. It's fair. But the overcap damage cuts aren't. I'd need to see data that proves that was ever a real problem outside of farming/soloing and I accept neither of those as valid for balancing because nowhere is it writ that Brutes should solo team-sized groups faster than Tankers. Soloing involves BOTH damage and survivability. It is not clearly in the domain of one or the other AT. And even Ston's testing did not show a significant difference in clear speed anyway.

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.