macskull

Almost everything in this game is additive. Hasten's recharge is affected by recharge bonuses (which includes Hasten itself) - it has a 450-second base recharge and a 120-second duration. Recharge time follows this formula: RechargeTime = BaseRechargeTime / ( 100% + Buffs - Debuffs ) In order to make Hasten (or any power) recharge as soon as its duration expires we need RechargeTime to be equal to or less than its duration. We know everything in this equation except for what "Buffs" should be. RechargeTime is 120, BaseRechargeTime is 450, and we'll assume Debuffs is 0%, so after doing some algebra to get Buffs by itself you're left with Buffs equaling 2.75, or 275% total recharge enhancement. Obviously ED imposes a practical limit of about 95% recharge enhancement so we have to get the other 180% from somewhere else. Luckily, Hasten itself makes up 70% which means we only need another 110% from any other source - less if you have an alpha ability which reduces recharge since a portion of the alpha bonus ignores ED.

No, I think the only Hasten-specific nerf happened a looooooong time ago when they made it not stack with itself.

Wanted to address a few issues here: These are additive bonuses - they used to be multiplicative but that behavior was adjusted sometime last year. "Power Boost"-type powers basically add extra enhancement to aspects they affect which allows you to effectively bypass ED for slotting. If I had a power that granted 10% defense ED would cap that at about 16% (60% defense slotting). Now let's say I also had Power Boost (another 50%, to throw out a random number) and Clarion (another 50%) - my defense power would now give me (10*(1+0.6+0.5+0.5)) = 26% defense. Accuracy for player powers comes from three places - a power's inherent accuracy, slotting, and accuracy bonuses (from IOs or other powers). In order to get your final accuracy you 'd do the same sort of math I did in my defense example. This is untrue, you need about 110% recharge from non-Hasten sources to make Hasten recharge before its duration expires, assuming you have Hasten slotted with two 50+5 recharge IOs. The recharge cap is 400% - to determine if a power can be made "perma" take its base, unenhanced recharged and divide by 5 and if that number is longer than its duration it is not possible to have it recharge before its effects expire. This is because enhancements are treated as buffs and are functionally identical to damage bonuses. It can be a bit confusing at first but once you realize everything modifies your base damage it's a bit simpler. These are actually 400% for Defenders, Dominators, HEATs/VEATs, 500% for Scrappers, Stalkers, Tankers, Blasters, Corruptors, Sentinels, and 700% for Brutes, but the number in your ingame combat attributes will turn blue at 100 points below that because your ingame numbers are tracking your damage bonus and you always start off at 100% damage (since it is possible for damage to be debuffed below its base value).

Alpha powers act as a build-wide enhancement for the attributes they boost. If a power can't be enhanced for something the alpha ability boosts, it won't be affected. This includes things like IO procs and incarnate abilities. If your attack does accept immobilize enhancements (something like most Blaster T1 immobilizes or Impale) then it'll boost the immobilize duration as well as the damage.

I don't think that's a power BM casts on herself, from what I can find in CoD it's related to a portal of some sort.

In 99% of this game's content melee is functionally immortal and can just roll their face on the keyboard and still be successful. Having 1% where they have to put a bit of thought into it isn't a bad thing.

Making fights take longer isn't the same as making them more difficult. One is an actual challenge and the other is a waste of time. The game already offers plenty of options to make things harder going for crazy-well-built characters (at least on TFs/flashbacks) but the vast majority of players ignore those options. Why? Because they don't offer any incentive for using them aside from bragging rights and possibly some badges. It's the same thing as raising enemy levels - it isn't really any more difficult and you get less reward for the same time spent. Why would anyone who's chasing rewards use any of those options if they get nothing for it?

There are two basic ways to make the game more difficult: Nerf players. This is a very tricky thing to do since any sweeping nerf is A) going to be very unpopular and B) will probably open whole different cans of worms Make enemies harder. This is probably the way to do it but with the combat mechanics of this game it basically requires giving NPCs "cheat" powers like in most of the incarnate trials. Raising enemy level relative to yours won't make things substantially more difficult, just a little slower, due to the way your powers scale against higher-level enemies. Raising enemy spawn sizes won't make things more difficult either because of the aggro cap, and raising the aggro cap/target cap on AoEs just means it makes farmers' jobs easier.

Zapp is flagged with the correct crit attributes for Stalkers.

After digging around in CoD, it's because Zapp (both slow and fast versions) is missing the "MLCrit" and "BossCrit" tags which allow crit rates to be modified by other powers. This means Zapp's crit rate isn't being boosted by either of the +crit rate IOs or the crit rate buffs from the Ninjitsu secondary.

Sort of - a Brute will end up with higher-scale damage in melee when each AT is at its respective cap, but Blasters generally have higher-DPA melee attacks because Blaster melee attacks tend to have longer recharges than the versions in melee sets. Lots of +recharge buffs will end up biasing toward the Blaster.

Numbers looking off damage scale and damage caps: Brute has base scale 0.75 melee and ranged, and a 700% damage cap (+600%). This results in a maximum damage scale of 4.5 to melee and range while at damage cap. Blaster has base scale 1 melee and 1.125 ranged, and a 500% damage cap (+400%). This results in a maximum damage scale of 4 to melee and 4.5 to range while at damage cap. You can look at that and go "oh wow a Brute outdamages a Blaster in melee" and that's true at the cap, but any +dam bonus is going to favor the Blaster because of their higher base damage scales (and Blasters get higher numbers out of Build Up than Brutes to begin with). Blasters also have attacks in both their primary and secondary so they're able to put out more damage more consistently.

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.