macskull

It's clear to me after even a cursory glance over the patch notes you linked that you simply looked for a sentence which would align with your claim while completely disregarding the rest of those patch notes. If you'd read them beyond the one sentence you would have found an extensive list of powers changes (which were buffs) and then a separate section of PvP-only changes which had zero impact on PvE. If you were referring specifically to the Energy Melee changes (which was a reasonable assumption considering the rest of your post): Those changes happened during Issue 12, not with the release of Issue 4. Energy Transfer's animation time was increased because its DPA was far too good which was just as much a PvE concern as a PvP one. Lowering the stun magnitude of Total Focus was a change that had essentially no impact on PvP, If the changes had really been solely due to PvP, they would have been reverted in PvE in Issue 13 when the ability to completely separate PvE and PvP powers was implemented. Another point that I enjoy bringing up: ever since Issue 4's launch there has been exactly one power which was nerfed in PvE solely for PvP reasons - Hurricane.

If you think 10,000,000 inf is too steep, you're not the target market for those powers. You can get LRT, Ouroboros portal, and the day job base TP/base portal powers for 0 inf.

Counterpoints: If a player is participating in a competitive format, they will already have the accolades (at least the +HP passives). No one is showing up to competitive events without these and expecting to be taken seriously. If you bring a character that lacks the extra HP to an event, you will be a liability if it's a team event and you will be at a disadvantage if it's a solo event. They already mean nothing because it's a given every character will have them. The change just lowers that barrier slightly and makes it a bit more accessible since I won't have to grind out 3-5 hours' worth of extra PvE for a character that I don't PvE with. The cost is a one-time 10k inf payment per power (so... less than 100k total) if you choose to buy them from the vendor. That's a few mob defeats at level 50. In all fairness, the naming scheme for the PvE versions aren't at all crystal clear if you aren't already familiar with them, either. Where is this "renting" thing coming from? True but a player from either alignment can just go to Bloody Bay or Warburg if their alignment doesn't happen to have control of Siren's at the moment. I feel like these accolades being added as rewards for mission completion is to appease the very few players who would complain about any inf cost (I'm not saying these being mission rewards is a bad thing, since more ways to unlock them are good) even though it's trivial at worst. Again with the renting thing. I'm still confused. I see your point about "token" amounts of inf - and I'm pretty sure like I said in point #5 the mission reward accolade powers are the solution to this one. Getting the accolades as mission completion rewards requires no inf and is essentially zero-risk since there is little or no PvP activity in the lower-level PvP zones.

What is your concern with the accolades? While it is true that completely removing access to accolade powers is also a level playing field, you have two options: No one gets any accolade powers. This is A Bad Idea because it is essentially nerfing every build by 20% HP and things already die quickly enough as it is. Without the ability to meaningfully increase survivability due to diminishing returns on defense and resistance, HP is about the only thing you can make work for you. Everyone can get the accolade powers for a token amount of inf, or if even 10k is too much they can run missions in the lower-level PvP zones to get them for free. Everyone gets them, the playing field is still level. Yes, there's going to be a bit of a learning curve here as newer players enter PvP zones to discover their accolades don't work, but hopefully they should be smart enough to wonder why and find the PvP-specific versions.

We got I13 because a developer who didn't PvP decided PvP needed to be completely retooled to their own whims despite the PvP community already having a list of things to look at, and then the feedback of the PvP community was more or less ignored. These changes, at the very least, are coming from the PvP community. Making accolade powers purchasable removes at least one of the barriers to entry for PvP. There's literally no such thing as "arena pvp ganking" since all player involved have to intentionally join an arena match.

The reason these are decoupled from alignment for PvP purposes is because right now plenty of people keep a character on one alignment or the other specifically to keep a particular alignment power (usually Call to Justice) which means that if a PvP zone's population is unbalanced on one side or the other many players don't want to switch and lose their alignment power. This change at least makes them able to side-switch for zone balancing purposes. I do like your suggestion, since I feel like Frenzy disproportionately benefits a few ATs while not really offering anything that great to the other ones.

You're talking about zone PvP as if it is arena (Discord, coordinated targeting, etc.) and those things do happen sometimes in zone but they are the exception rather than the norm. Rather what this change is seeking to do is incentivize teaming and making it more difficult for one or two players to dominate the zone with powers that absolutely aren't designed with PvP in mind.

Jump Pack/Steam Jump are getting removed because it is possible to chain the two and therefore never touch the ground, ever.

No, no, "holy" in that context just means it puts lots of holes in the enemy.

You can buy a 2-minute version of the Raptor Pack for 10k inf at any arena vendor (I think they are going to be adding vendors that sell them in the PvP zones as well but not 100% sure).

I've found the best part about General is I can simply remove it from my chat tabs because 99% of the time there's nothing worthwhile being said.

Yeah as far as I know, AS's crit damage (slow cast only) is the only unresisted damage left in the game right now. I don't know that I'd make other Stalker crits entirely unresisted. Maybe 25% or 50% or something. That would definitely need some tweaking, and should only apply to melee attack crits. Can probably make similar arguments for Scrapper crits as well, and make a smaller (10%?) portion of Tanker/Brute damage unresisted. I can't comment too much on individual power tweaks since most of my PvP Stalker experience was either on an Elec/WP in RV on Freedom on live, or a PvE-built Psi/SR on Excelsior here. Exclusive of the table in the OP or my spitballing above, Greater Psi Blade is absolutely the best non-AS/non-snipe Stalker attack because it does about 33% more damage than the damage formula suggests it should (it's about 206 instead of 153) and it can occasionally gain another few hundred damage from Insight and it can take hold procs.

It was my understanding that the WB nukes were still allowed because they were temp powers you could obtain in a PvP zone. Same for Shivans.

Ehhh, if CoP buffs are out that one should be too, especially since you can get it an infinite number of times.

This is why the beginner's luck mechanic exists. There's also a huge difference between "feels like" and "is like," especially when the ability exists to prove one or the other. When people say they have issues like that ("I always pop Aim/BU/a tray of yellows and miss every attack!") I will ask for combat logs and inevitably find one of a few things is happening: The player is unable to produce the combat logs, making their claim unable to be tested The player produces combat logs, and after further examination everything checks out - this one can be tricky because there are some powers that do not show every hit roll in the combat logs so it can seem like you are missing twice in a row with 95% chance to hit but that is not what is actually happening The player produces combat logs that show an odd scenario which I'm unable to replicate The player has found a bug The first two options happen far more often, the third option happens extremely rarely (I think maybe once in the last year and a half), and the fourth option almost never happens. There was a thread several months back about how the game's hit roll RNG was biasing numbers >95 for players only and not NPCs, but the end result of that thread was "many powers only show a hit roll on misses and not hits so it would naturally bias numbers >95 if you're only looking at combat logs." EDIT: Another couple things go into this discussion. Perception bias is probably the biggest one, because you don't notice those 95% of times you hit a target, but you definitely notice the 5% of times you don't. The next one is simple probability and accepting that just because something is extremely unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. For example, there's an 0.25% chance I will miss two attacks with 95% hit rolls in a row (not counting the one in between where streakbreaker forced a hit) which means it is unlikely to happen but not impossible.

CT has half the range of Jaunt and isn't affected by range bonuses plus requires picking an extra power pool, so it's unlikely to see much use in organized PvP.

I think it's far less controversial in zone than in arena, but I think Jaunt's prevalence (and perceived necessity to the point where most PvP builds now forego Hasten to pick up Speed of Sound) is a symptom rather than the problem. What exactly that problem is is a different discussion and it's probably not one you'll get the PvP community (or arena community at least) to agree on completely.

I'm pretty sure those got removed from arena temps and whatever system was used to make that happen just made them not work, period. "Enable non-arena temporary powers" should allow you to use them for sure.

They are adding PvP-specific accolades to the arena vendors for 10k inf each. That way if you earned the accolades for PvE use you'll still have them, then visit the arena vendor and drop 50k on the PvP-specific ones. It was easier from a code standpoint to do this than to make the PvE and PvP versions mutually exclusive.

Gangbuster is minions and lieutenants now, not bosses (those have a separate badge). Still, if I'm in a "just get this done" mood I can get 3 of the 4 passive accolades redside in around 2 hours not counting damage farming time (another few hours that can be done while I'm off doing something else so I don't count it as time spent). I recognize that some of these badges are more difficult for certain characters to get (damage taken, debt, etc.) so I just knock them out all at once so it is the same process regardless of which character I'm getting them on.

Teleport's cast time and hover period make it pretty useless for that sort of thing.

Also worth nothing that many key powers in control/support sets have higher-than-normal base accuracy (for example, Controller single-target holds and immobilizes have a base 90% chance to hit instead of 75%). Not only does this improve their chance to hit right out of the box, it also means any accuracy slotting or bonus will be that that much more effective (1.2x more, in my example).

I'm aware of this debate, I've read the last few pages of this thread. If you have a >90% chance to hit, the game will allow one miss before the streakbreaker forces a hit. If I throw a 16-target-maximum AoE at 16 targets and have a 95% chance to hit each one, here is what would happen: Because each target's hit roll is calculated separately, and each target should have a 95% chance of being hit, the chance that all sixteen targets get hit is (0.95)16, or about 44%. That's before streakbreaker is factored in. You may be saying "but how can that be a 44% chance if my hit rolls are 95%!?" Well, that's probability at work, and streakbreaker exists to remove a little bit of the "R" from the "RNG" that is this game's combat system. Let's say I missed the first target. We'll assume this is a targeted AoE power, in which hit rolls are checked from the center moving outward until the target cap is reached. I miss the first target. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the next-closest target. The third-closest target is checked against. Let's say I miss again. Streakbreaker forces a hit on the fourth-closest target. This process repeats until all targets in radius have been checked or the target cap of the powers is reached. These hit rolls are calculated by the game in the order I described but it happens so quickly as to be essentially instantaneous, resulting in what to your eyes looks like multiple simultaneous misses. Is it theoretically possible for every one of those rolls to result in a miss except the ones streakbreaker forces hits on? Sure, and then you'd end up hitting 8 of the 16 targets, but the odds of 8 straight 95% hit rolls missing is (0.05)8 or about 0.000000004%. That's 4 in one billion. Given that, it is possible for you to miss the initial target of an AoE and then miss that same target with a follow-on attack, but that's because streakbreaker only looks at individual hit rolls and not individual powers.

Yes it is. That is literally how the streakbreaker works. It is impossible for you to miss more than once in a row if you have >90% chance to hit with all the attacks you use in that window. I was going to reply to your earlier post about missing multiple 95% hit rolls in a row but I figured someone would accuse me of being pedantic, but now I realize I should have.