ZemX

[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.

Yeah, me neither. I even looked at the raw data since not all of that gets displayed even by CoD. But it seems much the same as other execute powers. There are a few proc-related boolean variables in there, but I've no idea what they do. They seem to always be set the same way in powers I've looked at. The only potentially weird thing here is that the power executes two other powers. The only other power I can think of that does this, right at the moment anyway, is Stone Melee's Fault. And it does it a bit differently in the coding. Fault uses two effects, each executing one of the subordinate powers. Ground Zero uses one effect that lists the names of two powers. But there's this that looks odd: Says type "power", count = 1, but then lists two power names to execute. Clearly this works because we're seeing both powers happen. But is this weird? Or just looks weird? Or maybe just a parse error at CoD? Interesting, but I guess the first thing that needs resolving is why Powerhouse doesn't see what we're seeing.

Actually, it's 3.5PPM. It's the Superior Avalanche Recharge/Knockdown proc. Unless that has changed, it should be 3.5PPM 0.67 knockback. Prior to the update, this sucker would put EVERYBODY on their butts. Now, I know it got a reduction from 22.5ft radius to 15ft radius for Tankers in this page and I am seeing that. It does not cover the same area. But in the area it DOES cover, and now that I've had more time with it in game, I am seeing at best half and frequently less than half of the enemies getting knocked down. So say a quarter to maybe half of enemies get knocked down in a big spawn (I use this whenever it's up as my opening shot). I have not done all the data logging you have. I have other 3.5PPM procs in GZ too, but the Sup. Avalanche is just really easy to see when it's not working. Pretty sure this isn't just perception. It was so reliable before the patch that something has to have changed now.

Yep, theory busted. It's not a separate radius. Usually they do that by making the power radius large and having an effect with an "inner/outer radius" tag to limit its effect. One weird thing is the power description says it hits 10 targets when it should say 16. But yeah, saw the same thing. The radius of both the heal and the damage portions is the same 15ft. I guess 255 is just a convenient way of saying they don't care how many allies, pets, etc. are hit with the heal. Has to be this. But there should be no need to set a fixed Activate Period. Savage Leap already works by executing a power that has the same recharge time as the parent and gets boosts (such as recharge) copied to it. I would think its proc calcs would run as they are supposed to even considering the recharge time enhancements of the parent. Not sure why they sometimes use Activate Period for executed powers. I thought that was only a thing for pseudo-pets like Lightning Rod used to be.

I have a suspicion that I haven't been able to test yet. The patch notes imply the damage and healing effects have been "separated" and the damage effects can hit 16 while the healing can hit a whopping 255. The latter sounds like an Incarnate heal cap and those heals are massively huge in radius. Rebirth Core Epiphany, for example, is 60ft radius and 255 target cap. Did... the devs increase the healing radius of GZ? And is the proc math using THAT to calculate all proc activation rates instead of 15ft for the offensive ones? I did a quick test before logging off and found I couldn't affect random players near me with GZ. Was that always the case? CoD says the old power was able to hit "Allies" which should be anybody. "Teammate" would be a more specific restriction and allow the power to only hit teammates. That's what I wanted to test and also its range.

It's looking like I should. Though it doesn't sound like they're still working on Ground Zero... they did something to the proc rate on it. It's abysmal now. I have a 3.5PPM KD proc in it that should be capped at 90% chance for a 15ft radius PBAoE with 60s modified recharge time. It looks like it's doing more like 25%. I don't see anything in the patch notes about nerfing the beejeezus out of GZ's proc rate. Just the change to max targets hit.

I'm not sure this was really about IOs and procs at all. After reading the dev notes, the part that stood out to me was this (emphasis mine): This to me sounds like a fancy way of saying "farming" or at least soloing x8. I don't know how else you keep consistently hitting over the standard caps of 10 for PBAoE and 5 for Cones except by herding on a farm or whilst soloing team-sized spawns all by yourself. This is the advantage Tankers had with the arc/radius buff. On any typical team, that Tanker is not "saturating" AoEs all the time. I know because that's how I play. Tanker Tuesday is about the only time, thanks to massive herding with 8 tanks, that I see those kind of concentrations of enemies on a constant basis. Every other time, my AoEs are really only hitting the Tanker caps of 16 and 10 when the fight starts. As intended all along. Pyramid effect. Even in Ston's venerable min/max melee comparison, Brutes were never significantly behind on average. None of the melee ATs were that different on average. Certain outliers were, but mostly, no. And that test was exactly the +4/x8 solo clear that can let you keep those AoEs saturated. But as a solo test at highest difficulty, it ALSO involved surviving the test, which is a Tanker specialty. So maybe they SHOULD have been close in that test? I dunno. Getting difficult to shake the feeling this nerf was more about knocking Tankers down a peg (certainly down below Brutes) on farming and soloing, more than it was about anything else. But thanks to that, I get to do less damage in my normal boring team play I guess. I suppose that's not a huge deal really since it's not a big reduction to the team's damage output and I mostly build tankers for... well... tanking.

Needs more Hand Clap!

You're going to get your axe kicked with puns like that.

I guess I'll eat some crow. I didn't know the base damage nerf had been revoked at the last minute. And SS may, in fact, be one of the least affected sets. Are you clearing at +4/x8 or much less than that? With the base damage nerf for PBAoEs revoked, the only change you'd see for SS is the slight reduction to Build Up and the over-cap nerf when you hit more than 10 with Foot Stomp. The cone change is a non-issue for SS. And if you don't regularly hit more than 10 with FS, you won't notice much difference at all. If you're not regularly hitting more than 10 with FS, then Ground Zero isn't going to be much affected either since it just went from 22.5ft radius down to 15ft and from 30 targets (lol!) down to 16. Rad Infection is heavily nerfed for proc rates, I think, by the adaptive refresh change. But again, that only affects damage if you proc-bombed it heavily for damage.

I'm curious as well since it seems like that whole "we added this new power to be mutually exclusive with (insert old power name here)" thing was specifically done to avoid violating the cottage rule.

btw, agree with this 100%. The excerpt from design notes below now seem at odds with this very point (emphasis mine): We can't now "easily" or, for a lot of cones, ever hit 10 targets due to nixing the arc increase. Some are generous by default, like ones in Staff and TW. Others, not so much. I'll have to try and see what I can do with Guarded Spin and a nice big group of shoulder-to-shoulder baddies. My guess is 6 or 7 tops now. And that's one of the larger cones @ 9ft by 90 degrees. Arc of Destruction in TW is probably up there as well with 10ft @ 120degrees default.

Wow... I didn't catch that. Some good news, at least. Guess you gotta follow it every day until release.

You expected negative because it WAS negative. The patch did exactly what it was intended to do and which plenty of people felt was long past due: It nerfed Tanker AoE damage output. The only way you can't be noticing a drop in performance is if you literally were not using ANY AoEs before. Even Foot Stomp and powers like it whose radii didn't change in this patch (and hence didn't get base damage nerfed) still get hit by over-cap reduction when they hit more than 10, for PBAoEs, and more than 5 for Cones. And cones lost the arc width buff so it should be a good deal harder to even hit more than 5 targets. Being "more active" doesn't surmount the damage nerfs. Unless by this you mean you weren't even trying to do well before and now you are because, okay, in that case maybe you are seeing what you are seeing. But don't expect anyone who was doing their best before to be thanking anyone for this massive damage nerf. Necessary? Fair? Hadda be done? Sure. But "more fun"? Come the hell on, dude. This nerf doesn't call for clever tactics. It just makes things slower. That's what it's supposed to do and it does it.

This is bait.

Not OP. since they haven't removed it from Dark Armor. But I wouldn't be surprised if they think it's not thematic or useful for a Tanker. And I have to say, I'd rather have the +maxHP/resists than a stealth toggle. Besides, any well-built Tanker already has TankerStealth(tm) which is exactly like any other stealth except everyone can see you as you run past them like this--->😁🖕

Yes. No. No. The first one was the intended purpose of the standard damage formula for powers. They just didn't understand that animation time should be part of the formula. Hence we have wildly different performance across sets with the biggest factor being the advantage fast animating sets have vs. slow animating sets. A few spot fixes have been done by HC devs to reduce some animation times for certain powers, but presumably just doing a tweak to the formula to incorporate animation time is... scary. It would touch every power in the game. But the concept behind it is fairness: If your big hitter 20 second recharge attack animates in 1 second and mine animates in 2 seconds, they simply shouldn't do the same damage. No to the second question because this is where variety SHOULD be. The composition of the powers in the sets should differ. It's really neat to have quirky shit like Axe Cyclone in one set and fairly standard just-hurts stuff in others like Foot Stomp. Having one set be more ST focused than another is fine. Some people dig that even if min/maxers will always tell you AoE is king. No to the last because... see previous answer. I think things are already varied enough by composition and workings of the powers to be interesting without needing to be foundationally unfair like we have now with balance having been largely decided by the art department when, for example, they made Sky Splitter a power you can activate and then go have a sandwich before it lands while something like Freezing Touch is "blink and you'll miss it" fast but still hits about as hard.

Well, I don't know the history... but I do know you won't see anything until you're below 60% health. Assuming you have all three defense passives (Agile, Lucky, and Dodge) then you should see +9% to resistances when you are at 50% health. And it goes up another 9% for every 10% health you lose from there. So +45% res(all) at 10% health.

I'm not disagreeing that Axe is a good choice, but that's not just because it's being nerfed less this go around. It's also because it was top tier before the changes. If Kinetic Melee were being nerfed less than other sets, hypothetically, that wouldn't make it a good recommendation. It was underperforming before. It might be underperforming still. What matters is where the sets end up when the smoke clears. Super Strength is in question. Yes, Foot Stomp didn't get nerfed for damage. But Rage did and since min/max testing that put SS in top tier probably relied on double-stack Rage, the nerf to damage buff scale hits SS harder than any other set. What it does to its position in the rankings is yet to be seen.

I don't think this is the case. Foot Stomp is an exception. It has always violated the standard damage formula and, so far, they haven't nerfed it to be in line with the other Tanker PBAoEs that are now 15ft. Axe Cyclone is relatively recent but it DOES obey the standard damage formula, it looks like. It does a lot less damage than Foot Stomp and is only slightly faster on recharge. I don't know of any other 15ft PBAoEs that don't already do standard damage for a 15ft radius AoE, though I can't say I've scanned the whole list. It's worth noting that Foot Stomp's extra damage goes for Brutes too. So it's been the case for some time that Brute 15ft Foot Stomp has done the same damage as other 10ft PBAoEs Brutes have access to in other sets. It hasn't been a hot button issue because Super Strength is otherwise seen as underperforming without things like Rage and too-good Foot Stomp. Now, double-stack Rage has always been a controversy, it seems. For Tanks at least, this is getting a bit of a nerf with the reduction to damage buff scale.

Pfft... defense is for people who can be hurt. To be serious though, double pulls of Longbow are especially dangerous to my fave Rad Armor tankers *because* of having no defense or defense debuff resistance. Not because of their -res but because of their mezzes. Enough of those popping off at once AND hitting me (see: no defense) means they can stack enough to break mez protection, even on a tanker. This is a great advantage high defense toons have because a lot of those mezzes miss. The -res is mostly no big deal if you have 100% smash resist. But the radiation-using Wardens have Enervating Field, which is tagged as not resistible. That means even with 100+% res, you can be debuffed by it. If they are +4/+5 to you, it's bad. Very bad. You can lose 40ish percent resistance from just one of them. Same goes for the radiation using Paragon Protectors in Crey missions (e.g. Manticore TF). There isn't much I run from in this game, but those guys scare me. If I get toggled by one of their Enervating Fields, I run away to drop it.

The part I really noticed is how ranged cones are getting nerfed into the ground. So now they get neither the arc width from Gauntlet (since that's going away) NOR the range/radius extension melee cones are getting in the beta BUT they are still getting diminished returns nerfing their damage. *pours one out for Frost*