macskull

June 6

15 minutes ago, Forager said:

When I say false, I'm talking about the assertion that ppm is accurate.

That is false.

I understand that, and my point stands.

June 6

Thumbs up for listening to feedback and making the overcap reduction a flat value, but thumbs down for making it such a low value. Why not just 50%?

June 6

2 hours ago, Forager said:

That's the funny part. They won't address this.

It's just such a weird thing to argue. It is just plain false, then they do a bunch of math and post formulas proving it's false... and still argue that it's true.

It's an approximation... of an average... using a set of variables that are rarely true... just... how?

So I lol.

Well… it’s not false. They are technically correct, but once again as I’ve been pointing out that information on its own isn’t useful.

June 6

2 minutes ago, Rudra said:

This thread, first page.

It would seem so, but that seems like an entirely different thread at this point. Anyways, care to address the facts of the argument, or is the weight of evidence still not enough to convince you?

June 6

2 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

He showed you. What does that screed about streakbreaker have to do with anything?

A different thread in which they misunderstood how streakbreaker worked seems to have leaked into this one.

June 6

41 minutes ago, Forager said:

Lol... ok... wow.

For what it's worth, he's not wrong, and the PPM value of an enhancement does tell you how many times on average a proc will fire in minute assuming you're using the power off cooldown every time. It's just that that's... not very useful information on its own.

37 minutes ago, Rudra said:

You know what this means? Streakbreaker allows the character to miss once before it corrects a miss into a hit. What that means? The character with a 90%+ chance to hit has to miss twice, in a row, consecutively, for Streakbreaker to trigger. You see a hit after the miss. If that was a Streakreaker hit though? It means you missed consecutively and that triggered Streakbreaker.

Alright, so we went there despite it being wildly off-topic and your understanding of the system being demonstrably false. You're even contradicting yourself within the same three sentences - in one sentence you say streakbreaker allows one miss before forcing a hit but two sentences later you say you need to miss twice before streakbreaker forces a hit. Which is it? Thankfully, that's really easy to figure out.

The numbers in the post you are quoting are the number of misses allowed before streakbreaker forces a hit. If I have a greater than 90% chance to hit, I can miss one time and the streakbreaker will force a hit on the next attack. If you want to test this in game, bring your level 50 into Atlas Park and start throwing single-target attacks at random low level mobs. Eventually you will miss one of those attacks, and the next attack will always be forced to hit by streakbreaker. Just in case you don't want to go ingame and check for yourself, I'll dig through the 100,000+ data points I have saved in combat logs from when I was doing some streakbreaker testing earlier this year. Hell, I'll even send you the log files and the source code for the tool I use so you can check for yourself, if you want.

Anyways, here's the results of those:

If streakbreaker actually needed two misses with a >90% hit rate to trigger, the number of total misses would be double the number of streakbreaker hits. Clearly you can see that's not true. Once again, receipts.

June 6

2 hours ago, Rudra said:

To quote you though: show it to us.

Hi it's me, a person who does not make claims without the receipts to back them up. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

June 5

Saying PPM is the basis of the calculations for the chance of a proc to trigger is no more true than saying power activation time or AoE radius is the basis of the calculations. They’re all just parts of the equation.

At the end of the day, this discussion is entirely irrelevant, since the lead powers dev has already said they want actual proc chance to be displayed ingame.

June 5

18 hours ago, Psyonico said:

The thing is, the PPM is true. The chance to proc is variable and the most accurate way to explain how often it will proc is through PPM.

If you have a ST power that has a recharge of 30 seconds and you slot a 2PPM proc in it, the chance that proc has to fire is at the proc chance cap.

if you then slot enough recharge that the same power only has a 15 second recharge, well then that same proc will have about a 50% chance to proc in the power because if you can activate the power 4 times in a minute, but the proc is set to 2 PPM, well then 2/4=50%. Hence the PPM is accurate.

I’m not against the idea of being able to see the actual percentage chance a proc goes off, assuming that is possible to display, but you are stating false information.

A few problems with this example:

Even if the 90% proc chance cap didn’t exist, a single-target power with a 30 second recharge would not have a 100% chance to trigger a 2PPM proc unless that power also had a zero-second cast time.
You can use the PPM value of a proc to get a rough idea of how often a proc will trigger in a single-target power (again, because cast time affects proc rate), but what about an AoE?

1 hour ago, Psyonico said:

Except that percentage is not set in stone it is based on an average procs per minute

That percentage is a fixed number for a given proc slotted in a given power with a given amount of slotted recharge.

Here’s the rub: while the PPM value shown by the game for a given proc is true, it isn’t usually useful on its own and rarely provides enough information for a user to make an informed decision. Showing the actual chance a proc has to trigger would be far more user-friendly.

June 4

8 hours ago, tidge said:

I'm not testing in Beta. I've got one Scrapper that has Cloak of Fear for theme, and a Tanker that has it as an extra enemy-affecting aura effect for teams. I've tended to delay the choice of Cloak of Fear until later levels... for all the reasons everyone knows and a few reasons that most people can figure out after playing with it. I generally have it 2-slotted, one 53 HO Accurracy/Mezz and one boosted 50+5 Acc/Endurance Reduction. I don't think I'm going to start recommending this power based on the proposed i28p2 changes, even if it is an improvement

Each of my Dark Armor characters ends up with+14 KB (passive) protection from set bonuses that scale down below level 10 (PVP sets, etc.), and I see no reason to (early-build) swap into a toggle that relies on enemies in PBAoE to get a little bit of KB protection from each enemy. This effect will be appreciated when facing the FREEM-tossing Council, because I'm typically facing at least 6 of those guys. The only thing in my current builds that looks like a "compromise" to achieve the +14 KB is using a Karma where otherwise I might use a LotG global recharge... so I suppose that other players that want to make different choices (using three pieces of Gladiator's Armor and Fury of the Gladiator in Dark armor is a sort of no-brainer for me) might make use of the toggle.

The big change I'm facing is "how to fit in Soul Transfer"?

One nice thing about the CoF change is that enhancements affect magnitude and not duration, so if it's enhanced you can actually affect bosses with it now. It's not as strong as it was during some of the earlier beta builds but it's still pretty good. It does all do -str(knock) which makes your existing knockback protection go further in addition to doing -dmg, all in a larger radius than before. CoF was an obvious, no-brainer skip before these changes but skipping it now would be a mistake IMO. At the very least I'd recommend most people swap out Oppressive Gloom for Cloak of Fear.

June 4

3 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

Fair.
However regardless of whether it's intentional or not; if they're keeping things as-is then they'll need to be a damn sight more clear about it in the patch notes.

Because it's pretty clear that this:

just means "we've tweaked Tanker AoE radius a bit" to most people.

If the reader cares about min-maxing and/or is inclined towards using spreadsheets then they might realise that this will negatively impact proc activation likelihood... but I can count the number of people who have realised it means a reduction in AoE base damage on one hand. So far the rest have needed it pointed out and/or screamed at them.

I can't remember if I've already said this here or if it was somewhere else, but when they post patch notes they just post what the change is instead of what it actually does and that second bit is what's not immediately obvious for these changes. Hell, even I immediately realized it would affect proc rates but didn't put two and two together with it also reducing base damage until someone else pointed it out to me. There should probably be a "design note" in the Tanker section of the patch notes for this update.

June 4

9 hours ago, Maelwys said:

It might well be a (very poorly documented!) intentional change, but I still think it could also just be a byproduct of someone in the powers team bulk adjusting the radius values and either forgetting to renormalize the damage numbers afterwards or not realising that they needed to do so.

As has been pointed out in another thread, whilst the design formula for AoE damage includes area factor, if it's not recalculated at runtime then the base damage per activation of each affected attack could have been left as-is if all the Devs wanted to do was bump the radius. Given the amount of changes being made in this page and the other errors and omissions that have already been highlighted; I'm currently giving them the benefit of the doubt and not (yet) ascribing this one to malice. But IMHO if this particular change is staying in, then the patch notes 100% need clarified here.

Again, not a dev so I don't know the exact details, but the damage formula is not some dynamic thing where you plug in the power's base stats and it spits out a damage number. The damage formula is used to determine what a power's damage should be, but the actual final numbers are manually entered when creating or modifying a power, so it would not be possible for both the radius and the final damage number to change without it being an intentional act. Sure, a dev could have just bumped the radius and left the damage alone, but at that point you'd have almost every AoE power for an entire archetype ignoring the damage formula. Given the current dev team's insistence that everything follows the rules, I highly doubt this would have happened.

EDIT: I read your linked comment and it's saying the exact same thing. There is zero chance this was not intentional. I can also refer back to dev statements made during the original round of Tanker changes where they explicitly acknowledged having the radius and arc buffs added by a separate power after the fact meant powers would both deal more damage and have a higher proc chance than they'd otherwise suggest. It was an intentional change then, and the changes on test are an intentional change now.

June 4

3 hours ago, Maelwys said:

It's up in the air whether this side effect of the radius changes is intentional or not as base damage reduction is not expressly mentioned in the patch notes.

It is absolutely intentional. The patch notes only say what the change is and not necessarily what the actual effects of the change are, which is pretty normal for patch notes - it’s just that the Tanker changes are kind of abstract so it’s not immediately obvious from the patch notes what the change actually accomplishes.

June 3

Just now, Rudra said:

Then I need to go play the lottery because it actually happens a lot. And on characters that don't have an offensive aura to be eating up the hit rolls.

Show me an instance of this occurring, and I'll show you an instance of either you using a power that doesn't always show hit rolls or you misunderstanding how streakbreaker works.

June 3

2 minutes ago, Rudra said:

And knowing the exact chance of firing would mean what exactly?

It would mean:

You're able to figure out how much damage, on average, a given proc is adding to a given power, which helps you make an informed decision of whether a straight damage enhancement is better than a proc
You're able to best determine where to slot a proc which can only be used once per build
You're able to determine if it's even worth slotting a given proc in a given power or if you should just focus on another IO piece for a set bonus instead
You're able to determine how recharge enhancements affect that proc rate
You're able to do all the above things without needing to pull in external resources like players do now

3 minutes ago, Rudra said:

In a game where we can miss consecutively with a maxed out 95% chance to hit triggering Streak Breaker to force a hit.

You have never been able to miss two consecutive hit rolls >90%, and streakbreaker's existence means the top end of actual hit rates is higher than 95%.

June 3

2 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Which makes me wonder what information the author is left having to guess over since the proc' itself says what it does and how often.

Except "this effect will trigger approximately x times per minute" is completely meaningless on its own. There is no way of knowing the actual chance for a proc to activate in a given power without the use of outside resources. You can guesstimate for some single-target powers but that requires you to have some underlying knowledge of how the system works, which again... outside resources.

June 3

4 hours ago, Neiska said:

And to that I say is part of the problem. Not that people feel that way, that its now seen as a "feature" rather than something that arguably should be corrected. If we are going to discuss over the pretense of balance, how are Glass Cannons with enough defenses to obliterate hardest difficulties balanced to the opposite end of the spectrum where it takes a tanker 3-5x longer to do the same thing? If both can be equally survivable, and the tanker has excess, why is not the excess DPS if we want to call it that, reigned in as well?

I promise you the difference between a high-end Tanker and a high-end Blaster is far less than "3-5x longer."

4 hours ago, Neiska said:

My theory? It isn't about balance. It's about pushing the meta to "gotta go fast." Things barely hit hard enough to even warrant a tanker, unless you are on hard mode. A DPS can just enter a mission with a tray full of purples, pop one, and just go to town, while the Tanker does not have the same option. Popping a Red will not make a Tankers dps on par with the DPS, not even close.

And here you're once again vastly overstating the gap between a Tanker and "a DPS." There is a gap, for sure, but a lot of that is simply due to Blasters essentially having two power sets full of attacks. Your concern has more to do with the game's underlying combat mechanics than anything else, specifically how easy it is for characters to reach defensive caps. Any sweeping change to address something like that would rightfully make a whole lot of people upset (see the I13 PvP changes for a great example of the fallout from a change like that). This game's population exists almost entirely because of nostalgia, and once the game is sufficiently different from the version people remember, they're not going to stick around.

June 2

On 5/31/2025 at 11:08 AM, Crysis said:

Take away trivial targeting and actually make selecting the correct target and hitting it count, you'll see systemic challenges across the entire playerbase.

I think at that point the biggest challenge the game would offer would be finding teams, since I would expect a ton of people to leave over something like that.

June 2

35 minutes ago, Neiska said:

Out of all the games I have played, the "glass cannons" here do not feel "glass cannon" at all. They can do absurd amounts of damage and still feel fairly durable.

For a lot of people this is a feature, not something to be eliminated.

June 1

TL;DR: I wouldn't. Maybe keep the "overcap" mechanic but make it a flat damage reduction instead of an exponential dropoff, and then revert the rest of the changes. I think instead of nerfing Tankers we should be looking at Brutes and finding ways to make the two ATs more unique. Right now you kind of have this situation where the idea is supposed to be that Tankers are better at AoE and Brutes are better at single target, but the ST difference in many scenarios is so small it's not worth mentioning.

June 1

At the end of the day the only extra cost incurred with extra servers is having Reunion on separate hardware. The team has already said that if the financial situation ever requires it the closest thing they'd ever do to a server merge would be to move Reunion to the same hardware they're running everything else on. As far as population goes... eh, I don't particularly want to play on a server where there isn't a large enough population to just hop on and do whatever I want at most times of the day, but some people enjoy quieter servers so they're not hurting anything.

June 1

4 minutes ago, gameboy1234 said:

This was my take also. I read the article, and it seemed like more of a hot take, or a deliberate attempt to manufacture controversy. I don't know if that's just the author's bias, or if there's an editorial policy to gin up articles. They basically contradict themselves several times. "I know that A is true and there's a lot of good reasons for it, but I'm going to deflect to B anyway!" So it's an "ok" article if you take it as an opinion piece, but it seems like the article just doesn't reflect reality, it's got a definite slant to it.

All we need now is Wolf Blitzner reporting from the street, saying "Patch notes! I see patch notes here!! There are patch notes!!"

I don’t think the author took the best (or even a very good) approach and he didn’t really do himself any favors because of that, but what I’m getting out of the article is an underlying frustration with how Homecoming approaches powers design and balance.

June 1

1 hour ago, Wavicle said:

Has anyone playing on test ACTUALLY found it to be a slog? Or is that simply an assumption based on the patch notes?

I have seen several posts on these boards already showing slower times on missions, but it is hard to tell how much of that is due to the regen rate change or anything else. It’s worth pointing out that the change is literally doubling regen rates for most critters, which isn’t entirely insignificant.

May 31

7 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

Content roadmap?

To be fair, "early spring" has come and gone and by the time Page 2 actually goes live it'll basically be summer. There's a good chunk of stuff in Page 2 that was originally slated for Page 1 - at the time this was supposed to mean a faster turnaround for Page 2, but here we are ten months later and it's just now gone to open beta.

May 31

7 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

And I'd like to point out that he's completely correct about that. In the past we've asked for a 'roadmap', or whatever you'd like to call it. A dev even told us there'd be a roadmap, but there's no roadmap. Now if the Council doesn't want to publish a statement, a roadmap, or whatever you want to call it because plans change then that's completely understandable, but then you can't complain when someone says "we have no idea what the devs plans are and we're not sure that they have any idea either."

Can't deviate from the plan if you never have a plan in the first place!

Jokes aside, I think the "Game Balance & The Endgame" thread from almost five years ago is the closest thing we have to a public-facing roadmap. The closed beta forums and Discord are chock-full of dev comments on things they'd like to do but it's often impossible to tell whether those comments are simply spitballing by the dev in question. Some of the issue, I think, comes down to the absolutely glacial pace of updates over the last couple years. Since the NCSoft license announcement almost a year and a half ago there's been a total of one major update - yes, I27P7 went live about a month after the announcement but that update was supposed to be out months earlier. The HC powers team seems to have an attitude of "nerf things now to support buffs later," which I can understand even if I don't agree with it, but when there's only one or two updates a year "later" is some unknown point in the future and it just means you have things stuck in limbo until "later" actually comes around. An example of this: Arsenal Control was designed with the deep sleep mechanic in mind, but deep sleep got pushed back from that update, so the set launched in a pretty rough spot and is only now going to function as it was actually intended a year and a half later.

20 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

In this very long comment she basically claims that, in the Homecoming Discord, the players who are there advising the devs and in closed beta are a bunch of "short-sighted", "arrogant", and "toxically positive" people with a "fuck you I got mine" attitude, to use Bree's words, who shout down any critical feedback, and call anyone critical of any change as haters or old players who hate change.

There is definitely some of that going on, but there are still players who are critical of changes even in closed beta. Unfortunately some of those players lack the tact necessary to have their feedback taken seriously, which doesn't do anyone any favors.

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