macskull

I'm assuming you're talking about Energy Melee here, but even if you pretend "the gimmick" doesn't exist the set is objectively better than it was even before the infamous ET nerf. The good part here is if you were one of those "people who enjoyed the old set and just wanted number tweaks" you got your tweaks and every single power in the set is better now - again, that's completely ignoring "the gimmick." More on topic: I don't mind the idea of combo mechanics (specifically build/spend-type) but lockout periods are annoying. Water Blast's is handled well enough where it isn't a big deal, but Psi Melee's is just super clunky and like @Luminara said upthread, having to watch an icon in the buff bar to get a consistent experience with Savage Melee is more than a little frustrating. EDIT: I suppose I was incorrect above when I said every power in EM had been tweaked - Barrage is still total poopoodoodoo (but if you do care about Energy Focus it might be worth using in some very specific situations) and Taunt/Placate/Build Up weren't touched. The other 7 powers in the set (6 for Stalkers since AS didn't get changed either) are objectively better than they used to be.

Pretty much every non-offensive toggle power in the game has separate attributes depending on whether you're on a PvP map or not. Powers do not suppress while mezzed in PvP, only in PvE. The same powers which detoggle when mezzed in PvE will detoggle in PvP as well. You've got those backwards, for the first image the game is basically saying "these attributes are in effect if you're not on a PvP map" and "these attributes are suppressed while mezzed" and for the second image the game is basically saying "these attributes are in effect if you're on a PvP map and whether you're mezzed is irrelevant." Some powers with minFX options explicitly disable minFX in PvP environments, which makes it harder for players to hide what powers they're running and makes it easier for an opponent with a keen eye and good situational awareness to see what they're up against.

Your post is pretty much spot-on but a minor nitpick here, that exclamation mark next to "isPVPMap?" acts like a "not" as far as game logic goes. Nothing suppresses in PvP environments - it's either on all the time regardless of mez status, or it turns off when mezzed.

The only non-super pack items seeded on the market are invention salvage and I don't recall a time where those have ever been selling for the prices the seeded items are listed for. If I wanted to have to grind for every enhancement for every build I'd go play on a different server.

The funny thing here is speedrun teams will usually have 2-3 "support" ATs filling slots.

I feel like the PPM system is only counter-intuitive because it isn't explained anywhere ingame and all players have to rely on without using a spreadsheet is some vague text in enhancement descriptions. This can be fixed in two ways: 1) add a section on procs in the ingame help menu, and 2) add tooltips that show actual chance to proc for a given proc in a given power. In a game with thousands of possible powerset combinations it's damn near impossible to create an experience where every character can do everything equally. There's always going to be a powerset or build that's "best" for certain content and the effort should be focused on finding the sets that aren't good for much at all and look at them. I'm not sure if your Peacebringer/Brute statement is meant to be a metaphor or more literal, but... if I'm trying to, say, solo a +4x8 ITF I'm not going to bring an FF/AR Defender.

The zone PvP crowd mostly moved to Excelsior sometime last year but it isn't super active. There's Tuesday pick-up 8v8s on Indom still and they usually get enough people to fill both teams, but outside of that there's like one night of scrims each week between the two SGs that are still active and the occasional 1v1/small team stuff if you can find it. This is pretty typical of PvP in this game though - even before the live shutdown you'd end up in cycles where PvP would be pretty active for several months or maybe a year followed by long stretches of dead time. That Homecoming PvP managed to stay consistently active for nearly two years after it started up is pretty good, but it's not really clear whether the lull right now is dead time or just dead. Even outside of PvP Homecoming's population has dropped off significantly since its peak a few years ago.

Infrigeridoo Infridgidigimon Infrigerator Infrigidate is a good power on its own merits even before introducing procs into the equation but "it's really good with procs" hasn't been used as justification for not buffing a power, as far as I can recall. I mean, Fire Blast almost got a buff to let it slot more procs a few updates back. I mean, at the end of the day I'm not even sure why we're arguing about this. If a proc change is gonna happen it's gonna go through half a dozen variations while it's in beta before some even-more-convoluted-than-we-have-now solution makes it live. This is a troll thread with a clickbait title and we've all been pulled in hook, line, and sinker.

Based on Captain Powerhouse's previous comments and the never-made-it-out-of-beta Scrapper/Stalker snipe changes, epic/patron powers have double recharge compared to their in-set versions as a "penalty." This does make them good proc vehicles but again, I'm not convinced this is a problem when you can only use those powers half as often.

PPM was a buff to procs - sort of. The old-style "buzzsaw" builds that crammed procs into fast-activating/recharging powers a la Dark Melee aren't as effective as they used to be. Procs in rain and toggle powers often aren't as effective as they used to be. In most other cases, procs are better than they were - but in order to really leverage the effectiveness of procs one needs to build their character in such a way that foregoes set bonuses. I will concede there are certain procs that are probably too good but those are being looked at and adjusted on a case basis (Call of the Sandman, for one). There are also certain powers which interact with procs in odd ways that are also being looked at and adjusted on a case basis. At the end of the day, we're all playing a 20-year-old game of dubious legal standing and it doesn't really make much sense to implement a blanket nerf which negatively affects a large portion of the playerbase. I'd be interested to see the statistics on the Aeon SF and how often the increased difficulty levels are utilized. It's clear to me from beta and live feedback that the devs have managed to make challenging content for IO'd-and-incarnated-to-the-gills characters. I've always been okay with more difficult content but the content needs to provide meaningful rewards which will encourage players to participate, and it needs to be optional.

My opinion on this hasn't changed since last year: proc nerfs are a solution in search of a problem. "But the emphasis on damage output devalues crowd control," I hear you say. No, the game's combat mechanics as a whole devalue crowd control. Even before PPM procs and free range organic incarnate powers trash mobs died quickly enough that CC was largely irrelevant save annoying the Tanker who was trying to herd mobs, and the mobs where CC really did matter either took multiple stacked mezzes to nullify so a CC character could not reliably mez them or were functionally immune to mez. Procs, in their current implementation, help narrow the gap between "damage" ATs and "support" ATs so that even if a "support" AT is in a situation where their support abilities (be they CC, buff, or debuff) aren't reliable or useful, they can still contribute to the team on the damage front.

I'm preeeeeeeeetty sure that has more to do with all the psi damage, end drain, frequent mezzes, and annoying phasing bosses.

FWIW Gauntlet's non-AoE portion and Taunt are both autohit.

It's a self-defeating cycle that's only going to get worse as the number of players continues to stagnate and/or slowly shrink (and let's not pretend that isn't happening). HC spun up additional servers at the very beginning because the hardware for a single server couldn't support the demand, but fast forward a few months with much smaller player counts and more beefy server hardware and five servers were no longer necessary. The same thing happened during the game's live run especially once server transfers were introduced - players largely consolidated onto one or two high-population servers and everything else was pretty quiet aside from niche playstyles. I'm not sure it's possible to "spread out" the playerbase again similar to what happened in the spring/summer of 2019. The developers offered incentives for players to move to other servers then (double XP, mostly) but once that went away people slowly consolidated back to where the majority of other players were, and future attempts to do the same would likely end up with similar results.

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. >.>