macskull

I mean, it can be both, but saying it's arguably better than Tactics just isn't true. The accuracy bonus might be nice at lower levels where slots and powers are at a premium (like Eagle Eye, which is available for Tac Arrow Blasters at level 20, or Combat Training: Offensive for Widows at level 2) but by the time you hit level 50 and have the slots, powers, and enhancements it's a different ballgame. ED-capped Tanker Tactics gives everyone 16% tohit and ED-capped Focused Accuracy gives you 8% tohit and 20% acc. There are cases where FA will give you a higher final hit chance but this only occurs when you're seriously underslotting acc in your powers (like, less than an SO's worth). Regarding the Leadership prerequisites being "almost ineffectual," I'm not sure I agree. Enhanced Tanker Maneuvers is about 4% defense which isn't a lot but it does add up especially when stacked on a team and you can use it as a set bonus mule. Assault... sure, I'll give you that one. The way damage bonuses in this game work make Assault pretty unappealing unless you're a VEAT who can double-stack it. Arguing from a tohit debuff and perception debuff resistance, the decision starts to make a bit more sense... but those are fringe cases and I'm not sure it's worth the opportunity cost. Sure, going into Energy Mastery means you don't have to take Leadership but that means you lose out on Soul Mastery or Fire Mastery.

To clarify, are you saying the reason to pick Focused Accuracy over Tactics is because of the tohit debuff resistance, or because of the accuracy bonus?

I think comparing mez protection to everything that affects yourself and is obtained via a pool power is a bit different than your examples - you'll notice every targeted ally mez protection power did not get the "all ally buffs are now AoEs" treatment. Increase Density did, sort of - the mez protection portion only applies to the main target. Faraday Cage and Dispersion Bubble have their own drawbacks but at the end of the day the design intent seems to be "if you do not have mez protection through your own sets you need to team with someone else who does if you want it more than just a short amount of time."

I still think that's very unlikely - Powerhouse explicitly stated during the Blaster secondary rework that those secondaries which granted mez protection intentionally only granted protection against one, maybe two, types. I don't see any reason why that same logic would not be extended to the rest of the ranged ATs.

Yeah, still not worth the end cost unfortunately. But it's at least more justifiable than FA.

I'm a proponent of the "I'm not going to use an entire power pool for a power that is only situationally useful and even then can be replaced by an inspiration or two" method here. FA might be worth it if its end cost were cut in half or more, but it's almost no contest between FA and Tactics - unless you're a Sentinel in which case their version of FA is AoE and that's sort of cool I suppose.

I dunno, it's a stupid high end cost for a small acc and tohit buff. The tohit debuff resistance is nice I suppose, but 99 times out of 100 you're better off just taking Tactics. FA might've been worth it back when it was a straight tohit buff, but it's been kind of underwhelming ever since.

Hi, it's me. The numbers from my post you referenced were referring to Burn without any damage procs slotted. I generally refrain from talking about Burn because I'm going to be big sadge when it finally gets nerfed and it's already got a giant target painted on its back, but the power itself is bugged (even without procs) and the interactions with procs is just a side effect of that bug. It's been two years or something but I recall the conversation when the nerf-via-bugfix got pulled being something along the lines of "the power is bugged but we are going to fix it when we do a balance pass of the set as a whole." Fiery Aura is probably going to remain the standard farming set even if Burn does get nerfed. In non-farm content Fiery Aura can be surprisingly tanky when built right. Hell, my Rad/Fire farmer does decently in normal content because of all the incidental AoE defense I got while chasing F/C defense bonuses, but the set does require some investment and sets like Rad and Bio tend to be better out of the box.

Generic IOs are not fungible. I assume this is because the buying power of a level 50 is going to be much higher than the buying power of a lower-level character and generic IOs (and SOs) are intended to be the most basic enhancement types. Fungibility across origin would be nice for SOs though.

Speed up Sonic Siphon and add a secondary effect (maybe -dam), reduce the cooldown on Liquefy, slightly reduce Clarity's animation time. There, set's fixed. It's already a criminally underrated set that's capable of applying more -res more quickly than any other set. Sure, Cold and Poison will beat it but those require setup time and multiple power casts where Sonic just has to toss Disruption Field on an ally one time at the beginning of the mission and then occasionally use Sonic Siphon on hard targets.

I was looking at PB/PBU from a +special perspective - I wasn't even looking at it from a +dam perspective because Soul Drain exists and is the superior choice unless you do a lot of AV/GM soloing. Doesn't play as well with sets with lots of cones but... those sets are for the birds anyways. >.>

If it did, it would possibly affect the hold portion and maybe (depending on how the power is coded) boost the magnitude of mez protection you get from the Faraday cage effect, since Power Boost does boost mag for other mez protection powers. Neither of those are particularly useful and I'm still convinced the only support set that really gets any decent mileage out of Power Boost in a PvE build is Time Manip.

To clarify, the change only applies if you are running a dedicated concealment power so things like Super Speed and +stealth IOs won't have this effect. Don't know if that helps or not.

I don't know if there's a way to empirically test this, but I would not be surprised if the behind-the-scenes changes to the way knock* works ended up affecting the way enhancements interact with distance.

Power Boost has never worked on any of the powers you've claimed it worked on. Power Boost doesn't affect -regen, period.

Biggest issue I see off the bat with this one is it removes variance between the defense-based sets and especially the hybrid res/def sets like Willpower, Bio, and Ice. It'd require quite a bit of work to tweak those sets (and every enemy and player attack in the game) which seems like a bit much for a solution to a non-issue.

I used the Wayback archive to find the most recent pre-shutdown snapshot of the old forums and dug through until I found a post from myself.

This is the correct answer and in pretty much any non-DoT power a -res proc will not affect the power or other procs regardless of where they're slotted. Burn is a special case because that power is, let's just say... weird and broken.

There is that, but I am not nearly as active in general as I was back then.

Yikers, I just checked my post count on the old boards and I was at about 10.5k over a five-year span. So I guess at least I'm posting 25% as often now...

If I'm unlocking patron pools on a character my only goal is to get the arc done as quickly as possible, so I choose Black Scorpion. Auto-complete the single defeat-all mission and as long as you know what to look for in that other weird random Malta boss mission you can knock the entire thing out in like 15-20 minutes.

I dunno about other people but I like Vengeance for the damage bonus and mez resistance/protection. The defense is cool too, but I don't usually need more of it. Honestly, even if this were still "live CoH" it wouldn't happen. ED/GDN took a pretty big chunk off the playerbase back in issue 4-5 and it never recovered. A further sweeping global nerf to character survivability would do the same and it's not like the game had a particularly large playerbase near the end. I'm with you on the rest of your post though. Also, more toward the discussion that's been going on the last couple pages, specifically re: 45% defense being a "problem" on squishies... Squishies have a much smaller HP pool and generally lack any meaningful DDR. The chief issue here is how the argument of defense being overpowered compared to resistance is being presented solely on the basis of math - while math is always a good thing to bring into a discussion it does not always represent reality. For example, I can state that under certain conditions a Ninja/Storm MM does over two and a half times more DPS than any other build in the game and use math to prove it. Believe it or not, this example is actually true exactly as I've described it - but you're not seeing teams full of Ninja/Storm MMs because the math does not reflect actual gameplay conditions.

Your argument keeps coming back to a variation of this, which is based off spreadsheet math rather than the reality of how the game is played. It's been pointed out to you multiple times that dramatically reducing defense hard caps 1) kneecaps defense-based builds, 2) reduces build variety, 3) eliminates the usefulness of many support powersets, and 4) doesn't actually solve even the perceived problem because tohit debuffs still exist. For a great case study in what happens when you impose harsh limits on character survivability and the ability of support characters to actually provide support, take a look at this game's Issue 13 PvP changes.

So I'm not 100% in agreement with this - it was definitely not intended to be easy (see: Jack Emmert's "1 hero = 3 even-con minions") but it's pretty clear the initial developers had no idea what they were doing re: game balance and this game ended up being a Bob Ross-esque happy accident. When either one of them makes you functionally immortal as long as you're not standing there letting mobs bonk you on the head, the difference between the two is more or less irrelevant.

This would be the case in a vacuum, but in an actual gameplay scenario both Scrappers are going to be actively trying to defeat the enemies they're surrounded by and they only need to live long enough to stop the incoming damage. In other words, the Scrapper's primary powerset is going to be contributing to their survivability. To borrow the skydiving analogy: the resistance-based Scrapper's going to deploy the parachute immediately after jumping and fall at a relatively predictable rate. The defense-based Scrapper does the same, except the parachute might not deploy right away and even if it does there's the possibility it fails after an indeterminate amount of time.