macskull

A few problems with this example: Even if the 90% proc chance cap didn’t exist, a single-target power with a 30 second recharge would not have a 100% chance to trigger a 2PPM proc unless that power also had a zero-second cast time. You can use the PPM value of a proc to get a rough idea of how often a proc will trigger in a single-target power (again, because cast time affects proc rate), but what about an AoE? That percentage is a fixed number for a given proc slotted in a given power with a given amount of slotted recharge. Here’s the rub: while the PPM value shown by the game for a given proc is true, it isn’t usually useful on its own and rarely provides enough information for a user to make an informed decision. Showing the actual chance a proc has to trigger would be far more user-friendly.

One nice thing about the CoF change is that enhancements affect magnitude and not duration, so if it's enhanced you can actually affect bosses with it now. It's not as strong as it was during some of the earlier beta builds but it's still pretty good. It does all do -str(knock) which makes your existing knockback protection go further in addition to doing -dmg, all in a larger radius than before. CoF was an obvious, no-brainer skip before these changes but skipping it now would be a mistake IMO. At the very least I'd recommend most people swap out Oppressive Gloom for Cloak of Fear.

I can't remember if I've already said this here or if it was somewhere else, but when they post patch notes they just post what the change is instead of what it actually does and that second bit is what's not immediately obvious for these changes. Hell, even I immediately realized it would affect proc rates but didn't put two and two together with it also reducing base damage until someone else pointed it out to me. There should probably be a "design note" in the Tanker section of the patch notes for this update.

Again, not a dev so I don't know the exact details, but the damage formula is not some dynamic thing where you plug in the power's base stats and it spits out a damage number. The damage formula is used to determine what a power's damage should be, but the actual final numbers are manually entered when creating or modifying a power, so it would not be possible for both the radius and the final damage number to change without it being an intentional act. Sure, a dev could have just bumped the radius and left the damage alone, but at that point you'd have almost every AoE power for an entire archetype ignoring the damage formula. Given the current dev team's insistence that everything follows the rules, I highly doubt this would have happened. EDIT: I read your linked comment and it's saying the exact same thing. There is zero chance this was not intentional. I can also refer back to dev statements made during the original round of Tanker changes where they explicitly acknowledged having the radius and arc buffs added by a separate power after the fact meant powers would both deal more damage and have a higher proc chance than they'd otherwise suggest. It was an intentional change then, and the changes on test are an intentional change now.

It is absolutely intentional. The patch notes only say what the change is and not necessarily what the actual effects of the change are, which is pretty normal for patch notes - it’s just that the Tanker changes are kind of abstract so it’s not immediately obvious from the patch notes what the change actually accomplishes.

Show me an instance of this occurring, and I'll show you an instance of either you using a power that doesn't always show hit rolls or you misunderstanding how streakbreaker works.

It would mean: You're able to figure out how much damage, on average, a given proc is adding to a given power, which helps you make an informed decision of whether a straight damage enhancement is better than a proc You're able to best determine where to slot a proc which can only be used once per build You're able to determine if it's even worth slotting a given proc in a given power or if you should just focus on another IO piece for a set bonus instead You're able to determine how recharge enhancements affect that proc rate You're able to do all the above things without needing to pull in external resources like players do now You have never been able to miss two consecutive hit rolls >90%, and streakbreaker's existence means the top end of actual hit rates is higher than 95%.

Except "this effect will trigger approximately x times per minute" is completely meaningless on its own. There is no way of knowing the actual chance for a proc to activate in a given power without the use of outside resources. You can guesstimate for some single-target powers but that requires you to have some underlying knowledge of how the system works, which again... outside resources.

I promise you the difference between a high-end Tanker and a high-end Blaster is far less than "3-5x longer." And here you're once again vastly overstating the gap between a Tanker and "a DPS." There is a gap, for sure, but a lot of that is simply due to Blasters essentially having two power sets full of attacks. Your concern has more to do with the game's underlying combat mechanics than anything else, specifically how easy it is for characters to reach defensive caps. Any sweeping change to address something like that would rightfully make a whole lot of people upset (see the I13 PvP changes for a great example of the fallout from a change like that). This game's population exists almost entirely because of nostalgia, and once the game is sufficiently different from the version people remember, they're not going to stick around.

I think at that point the biggest challenge the game would offer would be finding teams, since I would expect a ton of people to leave over something like that.

For a lot of people this is a feature, not something to be eliminated.

TL;DR: I wouldn't. Maybe keep the "overcap" mechanic but make it a flat damage reduction instead of an exponential dropoff, and then revert the rest of the changes. I think instead of nerfing Tankers we should be looking at Brutes and finding ways to make the two ATs more unique. Right now you kind of have this situation where the idea is supposed to be that Tankers are better at AoE and Brutes are better at single target, but the ST difference in many scenarios is so small it's not worth mentioning.

At the end of the day the only extra cost incurred with extra servers is having Reunion on separate hardware. The team has already said that if the financial situation ever requires it the closest thing they'd ever do to a server merge would be to move Reunion to the same hardware they're running everything else on. As far as population goes... eh, I don't particularly want to play on a server where there isn't a large enough population to just hop on and do whatever I want at most times of the day, but some people enjoy quieter servers so they're not hurting anything.

I don’t think the author took the best (or even a very good) approach and he didn’t really do himself any favors because of that, but what I’m getting out of the article is an underlying frustration with how Homecoming approaches powers design and balance.

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.