macskull

It seems like the "how often are you off the ground though?" camp has never run missions in caves, where all the geometric oddities make the game think you're off the ground way more often than you actually are. Building for extra knockback protection can be done, sure, but that brings up two problems: if you build for additional knockback protection for while you're not on the ground, it will be redundant while you are on the ground, and you're now spending three or four slots on knockback protection that only a few other sets have to deal with (except theirs isn't made redundant by whether they happen to be on the ground or not). Or maybe you get Acrobatics, but that still means you need another 1 or 2 -KB IOs to match the protection you're getting from Grounded, and you have to invest three power picks to get there. That might be fine in later builds, but early on you're getting Grounded at level 16 (8 on a Tanker) and you don't have the power picks to devote to Acrobatics unless you want to seriously skimp on your primary and secondary.

Oh, with context this makes more sense.

How is this a bug?

An even-con or lower minion will have a 5% chance to hit against any amount of defense 45% or greater. Higher-rank and higher-level enemies get an acc bonus - to figure out their chance to hit if you're at softcap, multiply 5% by the rank and level acc multipliers (example: +4 boss is 5% x 1.4 x 1.3 = 9.1%). Here's the wiki link to the relevant data tables.

So, just like... every other melee AT in the game? "Some changes to Stalkers over the years" completely redefined the role, playstyle, and abilities of a Stalker. Prior to the Issue 12 Stalker crit changes a Stalker had decent first strike capability and was after that point a shittier, squishier Scrapper (and since the two ATs use the same values for their defensive powers that squishiness was simply the smaller HP pool). After the Issue 22 assassin's focus changes, and combined with the two ATO procs, today's Stalker behaves almost nothing like the Stalkers of Issue 6 except that they can still get guaranteed crits from a hidden status (oh, and two other ATs can do that now too). Only in the rarest of circumstances were Stalkers ever really about "hit and run, stealth tactical play" and that's pretty much not at all true these days. Stalkers weren't the redside equivalent to Blasters since Blasters don't have an analogue with the redside ATs. Arguably the closest thing is a Dominator. "As long as it gets used" is a really shitty argument to think a set shouldn't get a buff. Regeneration is one of the most popular Scrapper secondaries in terms of characters created, but you can't seriously argue that it's a good set relative to the other options. That being said, I'm going to take this opportunity to exit this discussion. It's clear to me based on what I've seen in other threads that you're very opinionated but usually wrong (I seem to recall a quote something like "I'm Bentley goddamn Berkeley and I don't care what you think") and your grasp of how the game is actually played is tenuous at best. Does the set need Grounded fixed? No, no set in this game needs anything - but there is no good argument against making the change. "It's a thematic weakness!" No, lower negative energy resists is a thematic weakness. "That's how electricity works though!" No, it isn't, and even if that were the case then the other aspects of the power, or even other powers in the set, would work the same way. "It'll make all the sets the same!" No, it won't.

The Performance Shifter and Theft of Essence procs both stack with themselves, so you can get multiple +end procs in a single cast of a power. Power Transfer specifically doesn't stack, which has the unintended side effect of not working at the same time from multiple sources in the same server tick. I don't know whether that's an unfortunate and unfixable result of the way the proc works, or if it's not working as intended, but that's why it acts the way it does.

The results people were posting in the thread I mentioned were all done using a script that ignored streakbreaker (easy to do since the way it appears in combat logs isn't the same as a normal hit). I ran my results through that same script but the sample size was small so the results weren't super accurate - some of the posters in that thread had months of logs they could dig through but all I had were about 3000 attacks over a six-hour period from the aforementioned proc testing I was doing. The 95.02% was including streakbreaker, though my sample size was only 2732 attacks. I'd need more data to nail down a final number, but the issue with running through months of combat logs is that things start to get skewed. It's easy enough when you're running through logs and only using one power that you know shows hit rolls for hits and misses, but there are a large number of powers that don't show hit rolls in the combat logs unless they miss so it's extremely difficult to get actual numbers unless you go through and ignore every hit roll from those powers.

There's a thread somewhere around here where the OP's premise is about how the game's RNG seems to be broken and weighs rolls above 95 more heavily, based on parsing combat logs... but two things came from other posters there: The odd results only happened for players and not NPCs (even though they use the same functions) Some powers do not show a hit roll in the combat logs unless they miss, leading to rolls above a 95 being incorrectly over-represented Based on those observations I'd say it's working fine and it's all in your head. For another data point, a few months back I did some testing in response to a Discord user who thought a certain proc was firing less often than it should. I loaded myself into a test AE mission and let it run overnight. Not only did my testing show the proc was firing at the expected rate, but it also showed that 95.02% of my attacks hit.

I mean, this isn't entirely true. If you're just messing around in zone PvP you definitely don't need voice chat and I don't remember the last time I was actually in voice while zone PvPing. Team arena stuff is a little different but even then as long as you're at least listening to the other players you can use game chat to communicate.

What is this change supposed to even accomplish? Higher-level enemies don't present any specifically harder challenge other than taking longer to kill.

Literally laughing out loud that you think any of this is true

Using the /maxinactivefps command/launch parameter helps too, it'll cap any inactive instance at whatever framerate you specify so it uses less system resources.

From what I can tell based on City of Data info, each scaling resist power gives 2% resistance for each % HP below 60%, so at 24% HP you'd be looking at capped resistance. That's assuming no resistance from any other sources, but if I'm on an SR there's no way I'm not slotting the Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses uniques, and you're probably also running Tough because why not. The resistances take a little bit to kick in so you could still potentially be two-shot in rapid succession but it's not likely and as a Tanker you're looking at about 2250HP at level 50 with only the +HP accolades and no other set bonuses, or about 2390HP with the accolades and the Unbreakable Guard unique.

SR was historically considered a "late bloomer" because Scrappers and Stalkers don't get the AoE defense toggle until level 35. When the set was ported to Brutes the power order was changed a bit to address this (Brutes get the AoE defense/taunt toggle at 20 and Tankers get it at 12). SR has the potential to be exceptionally powerful on a Tanker because as other posters have said you can softcap to all three positions relatively early in the game without any IOs, and the sliding resistance passives combined with Tanker AT scales mean you get some impressive damage resistance as your health dips low. This sometimes ends up in a weird situation where you are more survivable at 20-30% HP than you are at 100% HP, but at low HP an SR Tanker with all 3 scaling resistance passives is nigh unkillable outside of psi damage. You are correct that the majority of SR's mitigation is defense and other sets can get that as well - but SR is the only one that can easily reach and maintain capped defense debuff resistance, so other sets that just happen to build for defense have difficulty when subjected to cascading defense failure. SR shrugs it off and keeps on going. SR's real weaknesses are multiple rapid attacks getting lucky and landing, no self-heal, and no +max HP power but since SR is so trivially easy to softcap (especially on a Tanker) that frees you up to chase whatever other set bonuses you want.

PvPers aren't their own separate group and have never been.

I'm going to say that I'm not sure MM pets should be the same level as the MM in non-Incarnate content. In Incarnate content it sort of makes sense considering you spend a ton of time fighting level shifted enemies. There was a discussion about this exact topic on the Homecoming Discord yesterday so I set off to do some math. A user claimed that Masterminds had the lowest damage scale of any AT (true) and their pets had even lower damage scales (also true) and this therefore meant that MMs did no damage and had weaker buffs/debuffs so they were the weakest AT, period. The flaw in that reasoning is you can't look at the pets or the MM on their own since that's not how they actually work - that lower damage per individual is actually really really high when combined, either against a single target or multiple spread-out targets. As it turns out, even when you take the purple patch into account a Mastermind has the potential to significantly outdamage almost anything else. Where that starts to get dicier is against anything +2 or higher relative to the player since the tier 1 and 2 pets' hit chances drop dramatically - but if you can raise those hit chances the MM is still going to output impressive damage.

So a couple things here: 1) until Issue 13 all Defender debuffs were unresisted in PvP and 2) movement slows don't do anything in PvP anymore to the point where you can basically walk through Tar Patch like it's not even there. Additionally, even though a resistance debuff may be lessened by resistances or the purple patch, you're still doing the same percentage increase in damage.

Elec and Mental require hit rolls on their sustain power as well.

Stone Mastery for Dominators please

Also, a bit more on topic - at some point late in the game's life defense set bonuses got buffed to their current state. Positional and typed defense haven't always shared set bonuses like they do now, and even the admittedly huge defense bonuses in some of the ATO sets either existed already while the game was live or were going to go live with Issue 24. Additionally, resistance set bonuses got buffed across the board with Issue 24 in an attempt to make them more competitive with defense set bonuses when another option could have been to simply reduce the values of the existing defense bonuses. It's pretty clear where the trend was headed even back on live. If you nerf defense across the board, either through adjusting set bonuses or raising enemy hit chances, congratulations, you've made the game more difficult, but... do most players want that? I'm still sitting over here in the "nope" camp and I know I'm in the majority. As I've said in this thread a few times, the options to make the game more difficult are there but players don't use them because they don't want to. Goldside isn't super popular at least in part because it's substantially more difficult than the older content. Certain enemy groups are avoided because they are harder than others. Seriously, broadcast in LFG that you're running Council at +4x8 and see how many bites you get, and then try the same thing but with Rularuu, Carnies, or Malta.

Ah, that's fair. I wonder what the draw distance is. TP Foe's base range is 200 feet and I'm reasonably sure you can target enemies much further away than that.

What's to stop someone from targeting through a teammate across the zone then?

I'll post one last time before I waste any more time in this thread. @Naraka's argument is that since sets need to have weaknesses to balance out their strengths, Grounded is okay the way it is. Nevermind that Elec is also weak to negative and toxic damage and regeneration debuffs despite resistance and regeneration being its two main mitigation tools. Look, I'm all for sets having thematic weaknesses, but Elec already has them before you even consider its knockback protection. Almost every armor set already has thematic weaknesses, even the ones that have more comprehensive mez protection. There's no reason for Elec's to be different. Yes, it's an auto power, which is why the lack of knockback resistance isn't a huge deal, but the inconsistent knockback protection kind of sucks. The only other armor sets in the game that have knockback holes are Fire, Dark, and Stalker Ninjitsu - Fire and Dark are relics of an era where that was considered an okay tradeoff for the extra potential offensive output of the sets, and while I'm not sure of the original justification for lack of KB protection on Stalkers, Scrapper and Sentinel Ninjitsu gets knockback protection.

Sorry to put a damper in the "combine Recall Friend and TP Foe powers into one power" discussion, but it's not possible to retain the current functionality of both powers after combining them into one. You can't make the range of a power different depending on its target so you either have a Recall Friend with a very short range or a TP Foe with a zone-wide range, neither of which is desirable.

I'm not saying that, but I'm giving a reason why the "you have to be on the ground for the knockback protection to work" doesn't need to be a thing. Like I said earlier, there is nothing lost by fixing this hole. People that didn't care before will continue to not care, but people that did care will find themselves with a more functional character that doesn't need to devote slots or power picks to knockback protection "just in case." Win-win.