ZemX

Probably the opposite actually. With the new re-evaluation mechanics for threat, having Taunt may be the only guaranteed way to get new aggro when you're already aggro capped. Reason being is that most mobs you are already aggroed on might have been affected by your taunt auras and punch-voke taunts. So you've got pretty high threat on them already. The only way to get new aggro with the new mechanic is to generate even more threat on the new mobs so that it pushes others off your list. Taunt is a sure-fire way to do that because of the way threat is multiplied by remaining taunt duration. Taunt, the power, has a base 41 second duration. Punch-voke and taunt auras are around 15 seconds. That means anything you hit with Taunt is often instantly bumped to the top of your threat list even over other stuff you might have less recently taunted with lesser taunt effects.

Not quite. The "ranged volleys" where the mobs don't pursue only apply to aggro capped teammates when nobody else is around to share the aggro. If there are teammates, the aggro will spill onto them in full. i.e. Mobs will chase non-aggro-capped teammates down if they need to and melee if they want to. This is exactly how aggro sharing on teams worked before the patch. That's why the patch notes claim that not much should change on teams. This is mostly a concern for soloists whether they are soloing normal content, farming, or "soloing" on a team. Not "still". Prior to the patch it would usually be the case that, e.g., an aggro capped tanker would toss a taunt at some new mobs attacking a teammate and be entirely ignored by them because they couldn't get any more aggro than the 17 they had. Now after the patch, the aggro list gets re-evaluated and the newly taunted mobs are likely to be high on the list (due to the way taunt duration magnifies threat). Hence the tanker in this example is likely to gain the attention of those new mobs... and lose an equal number of other mobs lower on their threat list to maintain the total of 17. Taunt, of course, still applies its -range debuff regardless.

These sliders don't correspond to decibel levels. Depends entirely on your sound system.

I have this problem when I am set to multiple speakers in Windows settings and/or if I am using a surround processing (HRTF) in the sound driver. Then every sound is like it's happening inside my head. Very annoying. I created a profile to use 2-speaker setting and disable surround processing. Now at least I get left/right panning. Can't tell if a sound is in front of me or behind, but it's better than nothing.

WHAAAT?! Not a joke actually. Windows volume is at 20% when I play CoH though so it's not blasting my ears at all.

Weird to see people spending $1000 or more on video cards and remember that PC audio hardware companies went out of business because nobody (except you and me, it looks like) were willing to buy actual sound cards instead of settling for the crappy onboard shit.

Hmm... also not at home right now but I could swear I did exactly this after finding my old costume files. You get some errors but just check "fix" in the costume screen to load them.

The cap is still 17. The "in some manner" is this: Once past the aggro cap, mobs can still stand and shoot you from range if they are in-range of you but they won't pursue, not even right around a corner to re-establish LOS. But this behavior will still only occur if there's no one else on their threat list. On a team, other teammates that have aggroed those same mobs will be attacked instead as normal. In other words, same way it worked before the patch. Doesn't matter if you've taunted the mobs or not. You can still only keep 17 max and the rest will attack teammates. Only if we're doing what those Fire Farmers are doing, which is aggroing multiple spawns solo, probably. This is definitely a change any soloist, farmer or not, should pay some attention to because they can't just rely on the aggro cap to limit incoming fire while they whittle away a huge mass of enemies. I suppose on a team you could still run afoul of this change if you run ahead of the team to pull multiple groups. If nobody else on the team is in aggro range, you're going to get all the incoming fire.

The toHit debuff is only on the main target, unfortunately. Also, if we're even bothering to worry about survival, we have to be talking about at least +3 level mobs. Against those, the debuffs are cut to about 65% of their normal magnitude while any buffs like +def are full strength no matter what. Still, you can easily stack up more than 10% -toHit on at least a single target and that might be a big deal if it's an EB or AV. MA's +def isn't stackable. This is probably the bigger deal than the -toHit. While Invuln has Dull Pain, it's on a relatively long timer so Siphon is great at patching up what little gets through.

In no particular order: Stamina/Health are overslotted for Rad Armor. I usually leave it at Panacea in health and Perf Shifter in Stamina. It doesn't need more recovery or regen, mainly because... Move those slots to Rad Therapy. Proc that sucker out. I usually put in two Heal set IOs for some heal and recharge then the rest are damage procs except for one slot which is reserved for Theft of Essence:+End. Slot that and Rad Therapy heals both the Green and the Blue bars (with a few enemies to hit). It's also a mini proc nuke. Ground Zero... same proc treatment. It's much more impressive as a proc nuke than a team heal. This sucker can hit THIRTY targets in a 22.5ft radius (including allies, but still). Recharge is life. Consider getting Hasten and putting it on auto. I manually key Particle Shielding when I need it instead of having it on auto. You could get Hover instead of CJ and free up a pool choice. Because recharge is life, consider also trying to boost slow resist to 100%. Easy way to do this is to take one of those slots from Health/Stamina and put it in a travel power, then slot Winter's Gift slow resist. That alone would put you at 95.4 which is probably enough but if you wanted to hit 100, trade two of the superior winters in Maiming Slash for the non-superior versions. This doubles up on the 2-slot bonus of slow resist. It loses you a bit of defense, which is okay because... Defense on Rad Armor is mostly bullshit anyway. You don't have DDR. Yeah, you can get a little with Ageless Radial but for half its duration, it's a paltry 21% DDR. You'll still get your defense flattened against anybody with defense debuffs... and frankly Rad Armor doesn't need defense against anything BUT defense debuffers. So it's kind of useless except as a base to build on for things like Melee Hybrid, Barrier, or team buffs. And any amount of defense is a good foundation. Doesn't have to be soft-cap by itself. Really anywhere you are going for defense or anything else at the expense of maxing resists, like Neg or Psi, reconsider. Play to the set's strengths for survival: Resist, recharge, absorb, hit points. If you can, try to squeeze in an Aegis: Psi Resist and a few more Impervium Psi Resists (which are not unique) to boost up psi resist. Regeneration set bonuses are tiny. Not even sure they make much difference especially when you've got good regen already and a reasonably fast self heal that doesn't even need to be slotted as a heal to be decent for what little health you're every going to lose. Focused Accuracy. Because you can't rely on defense to shield you from debuffs, you want FA, even if you leave it off until needed. When up against toHit debuffers like Tsoo Sorcs, Storm Mavens, or CoT ghosts, you will love it. Trust me.

I swear I was just trying to get the Isolator badge!

Storm Kick is +10% def(all) on a Tanker, which is probably why it was chosen for an absurd survival build.

This. Not saying there's no anti-farm smugness in there somewhere but mostly it's just lazy for people to hop in, click through the big dialog saying "Stuff just changed! Click here to find out what changed!" and then to stand there, slack-jawed, wondering where the AE building went? Come on, folks. Lift at least ONE finger to find out for yourself, yeah?

Prior to the patch, in a team setting, that aggro should have spilled onto your teammates and it still should. Is this not how it's working?

I see this rarely. But yeah, sometimes someone will join the team from Atlas then... nothing. Often they don't even respond to "are you coming?" queries in team channel and then after a bit are either kicked or quit.

I don't see how non-suppressed stealth is impacted. If anything, it does what it always has done and keeps you FROM aggroing nearby groups unless you really want to. It also doesn't affect teams much because excess aggro will spill onto teammates just the same as before. Only situation where you are getting more incoming fire than before is if you solo and intentionally pull multiple x8 sized groups, previously relying on the aggro cap to "regulate" the incoming fire. That's why it's mostly farmers talking about it.

On a team it shouldn't be any different. Aggro spreads to teammates, so outside of the same 16 targets you've always been able to hit with it, anything you aggro beyond the cap should spill onto teammates like before, not just stand there shooting you.

This hasn't been my PuG experience. KB scatter is rare. Controllers/Doms immobilizing spread out spawns is more common but still not an every team thing either. That stuff doesn't just affect AoE tankers but ANY melee AoE and half of ranged AoE powers too.

Oh no... not touching that. (a) Wasn't really involved the first time, but also (b) I am sure the "answer" to that question is a whole flame war all by itself (and HAS been a whole flame war in the past). Not at all interested in re-litigating now. Point though is that nobody should have to. If one has a solid argument for or against a nerf, on the specifics, then they don't need to be attacking anyone's motives. Generally, doing so is a dead giveaway that one doesn't have a better argument and is appealing to emotions instead. And nobody HAS a solid argument on the specifics of this alleged Bio nerf because... there aren't any. Not any that we've been shown, at least. Nobody has come forward to say it's happening and why. So there's nothing worth the time debating... yet. And even then it would be best to carry that on in another thread.

I started out talking about Bio and I am still talking about Bio. If you want to move the goal posts somewhere else, feel free to have that conversation without me.

Looking at all available data is not generalizing. Generalizing is looking at a small section of that data and saying it is representative of the whole. Regardless, there doesn't seem to be much point in carrying on a hypothetical nerf debate about something that is only rumor. Until someone states there's definitely a nerf happening and why they decided there should be one... this is kind of a waste of time.

If it's taking time away from damage output then that shows up in slower XP gain rate. If it's too difficult for the average player to use then the set as a whole won't overperform in the data as few people will be using it to its fullest potential. Well, nobody is "invoking" this nerf as far as I've seen. It's just a rumor. And "sufficiently large context" shouldn't be a problem for the devs who have access to all the data. If people playing Bio are overperforming everything else then they are doing so despite whatever hurdles you think Bio puts in place. Then again to read some of the whining in the beta threads and in General sometimes you'd think people believe the HC Devs are fickle power-mad overlords who swing the nerf bat just because they once saw someone do something too cool in game.

Reconcile what? The skill/clicky/whateveryouwannacallit nature of Bio has nothing to do with the needing nerfs. The needing nerfs thing is also just a rumor at this point. Infinitum was just listing a couple things to be aware of about his current #1 rating of the set. Not that they were all related to one another. Whether or not Bio does take much skill to play is kind of irrelevant in a nerf. If they are going to nerf it, one would hope it's the general player data they are looking at rather than a few outliers. In other words, whatever skill it takes to extract that level of performance is already accounted for in the "how is everyone doing with Bio" data.

Not what I meant. I mean in most cases ONLY the defense check was changed. In a few cases, which I listed, the damage was also shifted from one type to another. You can read the patch notes yourself in the beta section if this is confusing. That's all I did.

It's only the defense check that was changed for most things. There are a few adjustments to actual damage listed in the patch notes but not to Ice Blast: