macskull

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.

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.

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. 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.

I'm not saying they get anything out of this, just they tend to be less affected by nerfs.

I'm not talking about just this patch, I'm talking about Homecoming's design philosophy as a whole. Making NPC groups harder or player powers/powersets weaker has very little impact on the "high end" of performance, but it does make things more difficult for players who are already running into hard spots.

To the author's point, those are the players who are most hurt by negative changes to their existing characters. The "high end speed runners" just go "oh, okay" and have a completely new character leveled and built within a day or two of the patch dropping. I don't necessarily agree with the author on everything, and I think it's weird it's the Plant changes they're choosing as their line in the sand, but it seems like the author and others are finally starting to see what some of us have been seeing for the last six years.

I don't really understand why the set had to be toned back to be ported to Tankers when they could have just made the base number for the Tanker versions slightly weaker. Of course, none of that really matters all that much considering Tankers got a completely unchanged version of Super Reflexes which allows you to softcap all three positional defenses without a single IO. EDIT: For disclosure purposes, I should point out that I don't have a horse in this race. The single Energy Aura character I have is a PvP Scrapper that I have barely touched in the last five and a half years, and porting the set to Tankers isn't going to get me to make another one.

I also don’t think the “boo hoo you can’t proc bomb Seeds anymore” comments hold any water because 1) it only holds 2-3 procs and 2) who’s going to pass up the purple confuse set for procs? Today is first time I’ve ever heard of people slotting Seeds that way, so I can’t imagine it’s something many people actually did.

Acrobatics takes knockback enhancements. Those enhancements always increase magnitude. It's an odd power that is intentionally random, which means it's difficult to predict what you're actually going to get out of it.

200 hit points is less than half of a level 50 minion's health. If that's a nuke, it's a pretty disappointing one.

Not really, no, but that would also be good information to put in the patch notes.

It's only -res if the target is/was slept, the debuff is different for each type of mez. One very important aspect of this power that is not mentioned anywhere in the patch notes is that the magnitude of mez and strength of debuff get lower for each target affected. This really does seem more and more like a "random bullshit go!" power.

I haven’t tested personally but my feeling is these changes won’t affect a 4* team all that much since the Tanker isn’t really the primary AoE damage dealer on those teams anyways.

This is all WAI, you’re gonna have A Really Bad Time if you are the only one taking aggro and the team can’t kill the target quickly.

I said this because that was the information I had from the lead powers dev at the time. Apparently this is incorrect, and any taunt from Gauntlet maintains its full strength.

The patch notes for the Tanker changes are pretty sorely lacking in detail, but I wouldn’t expect them to explicitly state the changes affect damage and proc rates.

@Greyhame: Yes, the bonus provided by Gauntlet is going away and the increase in power sizes is part of the base numbers now. This does three things: Reduces power base damage since that is based on areafactor Reduces proc chance since that is also based on (a slightly different) areafactor Removes Tanker cones being wider and makes them longer instead, which accomplishes both 1 and 2 above but also makes the powers less likely to hit their maximum number of targets. (This one is actually a separate change but it’s doing the same thing so I included it here.) Oh, and another thing which isn’t clear from the patch notes: the effectiveness reduction of the overcap mechanic doesn’t just reduce damage on the extra targets, it also reduces the effectiveness of secondary effects (including Gauntlet’s punchvoke).

It's not so much control powers, it's just that in the rare cases where CC is actually needed you can get enough from the other ATs on the team to where the presence of an AT with an entire powerset devoted to control is redundant. I don't need to bring a Controller or Dominator to a 4* LGTF for the Hami mission or K'Ong fight when every character on the team already has at least one hold to stack. Believe me, we tried - while the HM LGTF was still in beta we experimented with bringing various Dominators for the extra mez on the K'Ong encounter but eventually decided it the extra mez didn't make it faster or safer and it wasn't worth dropping a Blaster for. People gravitated toward Plant Control because it was one of the few control sets that still let you feel like it was doing something on those teams. I suppose it remains to be seen if the upcoming Creepers change improves the situation substantially, but as it stands there is now one less option for players who want to play a Controller or Dominator on those sorts of teams without feeling like they're just along for the ride. EDIT: I'd like to think I'm pragmatic most of the time, and I understand a full-scale rollback of these changes is extremely unlikely now that they've hit open beta, despite everyone and their mother warning the devs during closed beta. There has got to be a middle ground between where we were and where we are.

I'm one of those people, but I will admit that was before I fully understood the "overcap" mechanic and I was testing the Tanker changes in conjunction with some other changes that ultimately got pulled before open beta so my testing wasn't exactly apples to apples.

That portion of @Psyonico's post was correct, the powers which ignored radius and arc increases no longer ignore them. They've just had the base numbers for the powers adjusted.

Gauntlet no longer buffs any powers.

The current arc and radius buffs Tankers get is handled by Gauntlet, so damage and proc rate is higher than you'd expect it to be for the power's actual area. That is getting changed so the bigger values are baked into the powers. The patch notes leave a lot to be desired and aren't very clear on any of these things.

Yes, absolutely. They already had the increased arc and radius from their inherent, but those are now getting baked into the powers themselves. This means their AoEs will deal less damage and the proc rates will be lower (on top of "extra" targets taking exponentially decreasing damage and weaker secondary effects).

This is it, giving Regen some sort of offensive boost was a common request during Closed Beta and this is how they chose to do it. Would still much rather have recharge, but oh well.

Proc rates going down due to the larger AoE size being baked into the powers instead of being added on by Gauntlet afterwards, and proc damage going down for any targets past the normal 5/10 caps. I don’t remember if it’s been posted in this thread already, but here is the effect of the “overcap” mechanic on damage (left numbers are standard AoEs, right numbers are cones):