macskull

It's only -res if the target is/was slept, the debuff is different for each type of mez. One very important aspect of this power that is not mentioned anywhere in the patch notes is that the magnitude of mez and strength of debuff get lower for each target affected. This really does seem more and more like a "random bullshit go!" power.

I haven’t tested personally but my feeling is these changes won’t affect a 4* team all that much since the Tanker isn’t really the primary AoE damage dealer on those teams anyways.

This is all WAI, you’re gonna have A Really Bad Time if you are the only one taking aggro and the team can’t kill the target quickly.

I said this because that was the information I had from the lead powers dev at the time. Apparently this is incorrect, and any taunt from Gauntlet maintains its full strength.

The patch notes for the Tanker changes are pretty sorely lacking in detail, but I wouldn’t expect them to explicitly state the changes affect damage and proc rates.

@Greyhame: Yes, the bonus provided by Gauntlet is going away and the increase in power sizes is part of the base numbers now. This does three things: Reduces power base damage since that is based on areafactor Reduces proc chance since that is also based on (a slightly different) areafactor Removes Tanker cones being wider and makes them longer instead, which accomplishes both 1 and 2 above but also makes the powers less likely to hit their maximum number of targets. (This one is actually a separate change but it’s doing the same thing so I included it here.) Oh, and another thing which isn’t clear from the patch notes: the effectiveness reduction of the overcap mechanic doesn’t just reduce damage on the extra targets, it also reduces the effectiveness of secondary effects (including Gauntlet’s punchvoke).

It's not so much control powers, it's just that in the rare cases where CC is actually needed you can get enough from the other ATs on the team to where the presence of an AT with an entire powerset devoted to control is redundant. I don't need to bring a Controller or Dominator to a 4* LGTF for the Hami mission or K'Ong fight when every character on the team already has at least one hold to stack. Believe me, we tried - while the HM LGTF was still in beta we experimented with bringing various Dominators for the extra mez on the K'Ong encounter but eventually decided it the extra mez didn't make it faster or safer and it wasn't worth dropping a Blaster for. People gravitated toward Plant Control because it was one of the few control sets that still let you feel like it was doing something on those teams. I suppose it remains to be seen if the upcoming Creepers change improves the situation substantially, but as it stands there is now one less option for players who want to play a Controller or Dominator on those sorts of teams without feeling like they're just along for the ride. EDIT: I'd like to think I'm pragmatic most of the time, and I understand a full-scale rollback of these changes is extremely unlikely now that they've hit open beta, despite everyone and their mother warning the devs during closed beta. There has got to be a middle ground between where we were and where we are.

I'm one of those people, but I will admit that was before I fully understood the "overcap" mechanic and I was testing the Tanker changes in conjunction with some other changes that ultimately got pulled before open beta so my testing wasn't exactly apples to apples.

That portion of @Psyonico's post was correct, the powers which ignored radius and arc increases no longer ignore them. They've just had the base numbers for the powers adjusted.

Gauntlet no longer buffs any powers.

The current arc and radius buffs Tankers get is handled by Gauntlet, so damage and proc rate is higher than you'd expect it to be for the power's actual area. That is getting changed so the bigger values are baked into the powers. The patch notes leave a lot to be desired and aren't very clear on any of these things.

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.