macskull

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):

The fault with this logic is that the Scrapper version of melee and armor sets is often at least a little different than the Tanker and Brute versions, and Scrappers have an entirely different playstyle. For the most part, Tanker and Brute powersets are identical, their playstyles are identical, and they fill the exact same role on a team. Sure, Brutes technically have an edge in single-target damage, but the difference is extremely small and it’s often not worth losing all the benefits of a Tanker. You buff Brutes by making them different from Tankers enough that people no longer feel the need to compare them side by side.

These changes make very little difference in an AE farming scenario, and Tankers are still a better choice than Brutes for farming. EDIT: I'm coming back to edit this post a week later to give some more information: I was one of the people who initially was saying these changes made little difference compared to live performance, but that was before I fully understood the changes. Also, the testing I was doing was entirely AFK farming, not active farming, and since I don't have any active farming builds on the live servers I'm unable to make a direct comparison, and the focus of my testing was more towards a different set of changes that ultimately didn't make it into this update.

I still think it's a little weird that the stated reason Tankers didn't get Energy Aura was because it would be too good, but Tankers now get a better version of the set than any other AT.

I would be fine with it becoming a location-based AoE if and only if a second cast didn't make the first one disappear.

I do wish they'd address control being less-than-useful in a lot of scenarios before they nerf one of the best control sets, but here we are. Deep sleep and the AoE mez changes are a decent start but until other changes happen in who knows how many years we're going to be stuck in the current state. Oh well.

Bruh wtf

TL;DR version: Base damage scale remains unchanged, but any power which gives +dmg will be weaker than it is now. “Overcap” is just a fancy way of saying damage is reduced on targets past 5 for cones and 10 for AoEs. Tankers still get higher target caps (10/16 instead of 5/10 that other melee ATs get). In the initial Tanker buffs a few years ago some but not all AoEs got higher arc or radius which was handled by an external power, which effectively meant you got better-than-the-base-numbers-would-imply proc performance and damage. The increased AoE sizes are now baked into the power base values, which has the effect of both reducing proc rate and reducing base damage. The overall effect of these changes is small, and Tankers still handily outclass Brutes in most scenarios.

The discussion is about cones, not PBAoEs.

The Blaster version of Black Hole still incorrectly has a 10ft range instead of the expected 50ft.

I’d have to do some digging at the proc formulas and damage formulas to be sure but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Not a dev but when I asked this exact question in closed beta the response was that proc rates use the base recharge of the power. This means for powers with adaptive recharge they’ll always use the shortest possible recharge time regardless of how long the power actually takes to recharge. Adaptive recharge ends up being an apparent buff for a lot of powers that has the side effect of effectively being a pretty huge proc nerf. Also while I’m here, can we get Ground Zero’s animation sped up? 3 seconds is way too long for what it does now.

Since this isn’t immediately obvious from the patch notes, I’ll add a note for anyone who happens to read this: in addition to the overcap mechanic and damage buff scale reduction, the changes to arc and radius do two things: Lower AoE proc rates. Lower all AoE damage, since damage scale of AoEs is tied directly to areafactor. No, this change doesn’t magically make Brutes relevant again, unfortunately.

The only items that are probably worth using merits to buy and then sell on the AH are some of the winter pieces. Buying that LotG for 50 merits and selling it for 5 million inf is leaving millions of inf on the table compared to just getting 3 converters per merit and selling them at 50k each (which iirc is on the low side). TL;DR: the exact numbers will vary with AH price changes but generally any enhancement that costs less than 20 million inf on the AH is not worth buying directly with merits.

80 merits per character, 240 total.

They’re the best bang for your buck for enhancing travel powers, and they only drop from a few pieces of content.

In order to make them able to be converted, they would have to be made power-unique like set IOs are. That’s not a trade I’m interested in making.

It would change their value though. The price of Provocations went down a decent chunk when they added a second way to get them and rebalanced the drop pool.

To prevent them from doubling up on effort and having to unlock all the accolades twice. These are tied to specific badges, and the premise makes complete sense in that context.

I play mostly at level 50 so the actual level availability changes didn’t matter to me and I haven’t respec’d any existing characters solely because of it. The biggest actual impact of that change is allowing me to pick which secondary power I want first, which has resulted in fewer dead power picks in my builds.

I log on and do whatever I want with my character and am “playing the game.” Do I get the accolade?

This does the typical ChatGPT thing: it straight up makes up powers sometimes and the generated build files don’t actually load. Even on the off chance you get one to work, the build is going to be completely shit.

I’m going to agree with the poster on page one who suggested new accounts should not be able to start threads until they’ve engaged with the community in some way (certain account age or number of posts, perhaps). They’d still be able to support in the help/support sections for technical issues of course, but it would keep some topics from being repeatedly brought up by people who don’t know any better. Now, I’m sure someone’s going to come in here and say that such a system would be “unfair” or “gatekeeping” or something similar, but it’s… a standard anti-spam practice on plenty of forums and Discord servers. In this case it just has a bonus side effect of reducing repeat threads about problematic topics.