macskull

I think you'd be able to fix it by removing the ability to slot resistance enhancements.

I think the arrows do show up on mouse-over or target selection but I'm not 100% sure. I play with enemy names on all the time so I can easily pick out stuff without having to tab through everything.

There's that constant 20% damage boost from Targeting Drone though!

"Hey guys let's take the I13 PvP changes and make them apply to PvE, surely nothing bad will come of this" I mean, if you want to make the game "challenging" again even for stacked teams this is definitely the way to do it, but the mass player exodus to the servers that chose not to implement such asinine sweeping balance changes would probably kill the server.

There's already a system similar to what you're describing in addition to the color scheme. To quote the wiki: These arrows exists for up to three ranks above or below you. Note that just like the color system they don't correspond exactly to level (an even-con lieutenant will still show yellow, for example, and will have one upward-pointing arrow in the target window). All this being said, enemies do show their level in the targeting window and you can see your own level on your health/end/XP bar.

Skipping IR is a pretty big mistake IMO, it's basically free super jump that gives you great movement control and doesn't suppress when in combat like other travel powers. It's also a pretty great spot for muling IOs.

Disabling speed buffs at Null the Gull disables all ally-cast speed buffs, and since IR doesn't distinguish between the caster and any other targets it functions identically for all people who receive the buff.

Well, here's two specific examples. To elaborate: if a team is buffed to the gills the amount of damage a GM does is pretty irrelevant since they will only rarely hit a player anyways. If a team isn't buffed to the gills a GM still presents somewhat of a challenge especially at non-incarnate levels of power. Increasing GM damage would not make them any more difficult for the teams which are already easily able to handle them while making them much more difficult for the teams that can't. You seem to be stuck on this misconception of "enemies dealing more damage will make healers necessary" when that simply isn't the case. CoH isn't like most other MMOs where a "healer" is practically a party requirement. Sure, at lower levels where players are missing key powers or are underslotted, healing provides extra mitigation and survivability, but by the time you break out of the low-to-mid 20s "healers" are largely ineffective and a waste of space on a team. That's always been the case and barring a major overhaul of the combat mechanics in this game it's not going to change.

Healers have been obsolete in this game outside of low-level content since April 2004.

Yeah, even then it is not worth the time spent from a rewards standpoint. If a build were able to solo GMs at a speed which allowed a disproportionate rewards gain for time spent, that'd be a different story, but getting 6 merits in 10 minutes for something you can't really farm isn't a problem.

If your goal is to balance a GM so they're a challenge for a full team, you're going to end up with NPCs that a smaller team has zero chance of beating. Yes, some builds can solo GMs but those are specific ones that have had a lot of investment to get to that point, and the amount of time it takes to do it means it isn't worth doing from a rewards standpoint. I don't see it as a problem. Like, sure, my Fire/Cold Corruptor can solo most GMs, but I rarely do it because it's a long process for what, a little bit of inf and XP and like 6 merits?

I want to say the best you can get is about 20 seconds of downtime at the recharge cap (1000s base, recharge cap of 400%, giving you a 200s recharge on a power with a 180s duration), but it's not really possible to hit the recharge cap while solo except maybe in very short bursts. The crash at the end makes it not really worth even taking except maybe as an "oh shit" button.

The +HP bonus from Panacea uses Heal (0.67 * Melee_Heal) points of damage (all affected targets) where "melee_heal" is a modifier table that changes based on AT and isn't based on a percentage of HP or anything, like some other +HP procs are.

When I want to run tests like this I run an AE mission in test mode on something like the asteroid, make myself invincible, and put the attack in question on auto. I'll set up the game to log all my chat and then go back and look at the generated text file, doing a quick search in the word processor of my choice for the stuff I'm looking for. I did this overnight as a test for someone and on 2732 attacks I saw a 95.02% hit rate. EDIT: I'm also a bit confused what exactly you are trying to say. Streakbreaker isn't really there to improve averages but rather to prevent long strings of misses, though by its very existence it does improve actual % of attacks that land. The amount of improvement varies depending on the final hit chance. @Bopper and I had a discussion on this a while back and I don't remember the exact conclusions but they were basically "streakbreaker does result in higher-than-expected hit percentages but not significant enough to really matter."

There is no "invisible tohit check" to turn on. When the streakbreaker code determines the next hit is going to be forced, there's no check - it simply forces the power to hit (unless I'm misunderstanding how it works).

If I had to venture a guess I’d say you were playing in the arena without disabling PvP travel suppression (which disables teleport powers while active). Not sure how/why you managed to do that since travel suppression is off by default in arena matches and is disabled in PvP zones.

Yes, but the stealth is only active when Mystic Flight is toggled on.

It'd still end up favoring the Tanker because of their higher base damage modifiers. Any damage buffs are going to favor the Tanker until reaching that breakpoint where the Brute's higher damage cap allows them to pull ahead.

Let's start with the Brute side of the equation. Brutes have a damage cap of 700% (or +600%, since base damage counts as the first 100%) so you could realistically expect something like Greater Psi Blade to deal 673.788 damage at cap - 1010.6946 if you have Insight. If the +8 NPCs have no resistance that would deal 50.53 damage. The cap for -res is -300%, so at that point 50.53 damage becomes 202.14 damage (enemies at the -res cap take 4x damage). That seems okay, right? But how much -res actually needs to get applied to reach that point? Purple patch to the rescue again - with debuffs at 5% effectiveness you'd need to have 6000% -res stacked on a target to actually reach -300%, and that's assuming the NPCs in question have no inherent damage resistance. On a good day, a Cold Defender with Burnout can probably achieve -182.5% -res on a target (3 stacks of Sleet, 2 stacks of Heat Loss, and Annihilation and Achilles' Heel procs), and they can realistically only do that once every 5 minutes or so. If you assume all 7 support characters were Cold Defenders, well... you see the issue here. You're nowhere near the 6000% you'd need to actually be at the -res cap against +8s.

This is pretty much because once you start factoring IOs into things you can make a Blaster almost as survivable as a Sentinel while dealing way more damage.

6 Fire/Fire Blasters, a Fire/Kin Corruptor, and a Fire/Cold Corruptor.

The problem with Power Surge is that standard tier 9 rant applies - it's good while it's up but the penalty for using it is too severe, and I'm pretty sure the other armor sets with in-set KB protection also get extra KB protection/resistance in their tier 9 powers. I think the only exception there is Scrapper/Sentinel Ninjitsu. The lack of knockback resistance also means there are a few NPCs that will routinely KB you. Lord Recluse from the last mission of the STF is the prime offender there. Pre-I9 this was the only way to get KB protection on characters who lacked it (short of teaming with a Kin). It was still at least a little useful until I11 when it got nerfed from 100 points to 9 points. The extra hold protection/resistance are nice but not worth 3 power picks in a pool that has little to offer aside from Combat Jumping. For most builds the power picks are more valuable than the 2-3 slots you might have to devote to KB protection.

I think that only applies to enemies in incarnate trials. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary on tinpex or in DA.

To put this in perspective, you'd be fighting +8 enemies, which means all the enemy debuffs/attacks/mezzes/etc would have about twice their normal effect on you. Your powers, on the other hand? Those would be 5% as effective as when fighting an even-con enemy. You'd be looking at a base hit chance of 5% for your attacks as well, while the NPCs would have a 1.5x accuracy multiplier due to level difference (actually 1.725 for lieutenants, 1.95 for bosses/EBs, and 2.25 for AVs) as well as a 15% tohit bonus. This means you'd need 60% defense to be at the softcap and even then most mobs would still have almost a 10% chance to hit you. Is it possible? With a team, probably, but it would be extremely slow going. Solo, almost certainly not. You'd probably get stuck on the AVs because you wouldn't be able to outdamage their regen. Realistically with a stacked team you should have no problems surviving but you'd be doing so little damage and hitting so infrequently that it wouldn't really be a challenge but more of a slogfest. EDIT: Some actual numbers here - if you take Blaze (considered to be one of the best and highest-DPA Blaster attacks) and include all DoT ticks, you will deal 944.678 damage to an even-con target if you're at the Blaster damage cap (base damage x 5). Against a +8 that drops down to... 47.2339 damage. Woo. Procs will boost that though - but by like 5 points for a purple proc and like 3 points for a non-purple proc.

It's not really based on scaling unless you're talking about level differences, but rather based on the magnitude of knockback an NPC's attacks have. 4 points is enough to stop about 80% of all NPC knockback. 8 points brings that up to about 95%. This difference is because there are a lot of powers that do mag 4 KB or less and way fewer that do greater than 4. Keep in mind that's only true for even-level NPCs and if you are routinely fighting things 3-4 levels higher than you you should look for about 50% higher. According to the wiki page there are something like 1300 NPC powers that cause knockdown/back/up, and most powers that will punch through 4 points of protection are found only on bosses/EBs/AVs/monsters. There are certain things you might want to build more though - if you're doing lots of Hami raids on a Fire/Dark you might want to build for 12-16 to deal with the KB from the yellow mitos. It's also worth pointing out that the 10(ish) points most armor sets get in their mez protection toggle/click is a bit of a lie since they also tend to include 10,000% knockback resistance, which reduces incoming knockback to a magnitude so low that 10 points is more than enough. Dark, Fire, and Stalker Ninjitsu get no in-set KB protection or resistance, Scrapper/Sentinel Ninjitsu get a smaller amount of KB protection and a much smaller amount of KB resistance (like 130% to 180% I think, which realistically cuts incoming knockback magnitude more than in half), and Elec Armor gets KB protection but no resistance and only while on/near the ground.