macskull

I for one would be completely okay with this, it makes the proc system easy to understand again and eliminates further balancing of individual procs or powers based on their interactions with each other. It's worth pointing out though that per the post above mine it's pretty clear the current way PPM works is the way Synapse "intended" it. EDIT: Re: Call of the Sandman in an AoE - there are a few problems here. It seems like players' chief complaint is that if you nerf this proc it once again makes AoE sleep powers useless in most use cases and the proc is the only thing making those powers worth taking. Instead of changing how the proc has worked for the last 7 years maybe it's time to reevaluate AoE sleep powers (and sleep in general) first and look at procs later.

Sometime around I11 (either when it was in beta or shortly after it went live) Castle said the power proc'ing on the player was working as intended. Of course you can't really search the old forums and I haven't been able to find the post in question, but the point is there.

BA and WM were pretty bad sets until WM got buffed. BA is still sitting back there, relatively unchanged since Issue 0 while the game has evolved around it. AR being rebalanced around Ignite should tell you everything you need to know about the set being bad - on paper it's got the best AoE output of any Blaster primary but most of that AoE is tied up in awful, long-animating powers like Flamethrower, Ignite, and Full Auto. Ignite is good damage only if you can keep a target in it for its duration but its radius is so small that it's next to impossible. Pretty much the ability to go intangible whenever you wanted to, as often as you wanted to, didn't make a whole lot of sense from a gameplay/balance perspective.

Nope! PvE reasons there as well (but I think the nophase period needs to go away, there's not really a point to that when phase powers detoggle after 30s).

Correlation != causation Or, to provide more detail: the Energy Melee changes didn't happen until three years after CoV's release, and if the concern was really Stalkers, they would've left the power alone on the other ATs that got it.

Even if this were true it would still be the case now (at least for Energy Transfer) because animation time is one of the power attributes that can't be changed between PvE and PvP. EM was nerfed because it significantly outperformed every other melee set in single-target damage. Basically it was the single-target Titan Weapons of its time. If you stick around for the rest of this post, I'll explain more below. While ET itself was only a 1-second animation, AS was 3.67s with a concurrent 2s interrupt time. The only people that were dying to the AS/ET combination (4.67s at a minimum) against Stalkers were players who were deliberately standing still long enough to be hit by both powers (aka bad players). AS didn't stun you, and ET only had a 50% chance, and if you got hit by both the stun didn't really matter anyways since you'd be dead. The EM nerf was two separate parts: stun mag on Total Focus went from mag 4 to mag 3 - an entirely PvE-based change since there was zero functional difference between mag 3 and mag 4 mez in PvP but that extra mag allowed you to stun a boss with one power - and an increase in the animation time of Energy Transfer from 1.0s to 2.67s. The goal of the changes was to rein in EM's single-target damage, specifically in regards to Energy Transfer, which had a DPA roughly three times higher than any other melee attack. To be fair, the EM nerfs were heavy-handed and largely unnecessary because they took a set that was good at one relatively unimportant thing and made it good at nothing, and back when the changes first went to test I remember advocating for simply swapping the ET and Stun animations and calling it good because while it would've been a nerf it wouldn't have been nearly as bad as it ended up. TL;DR: Yes, the EM nerfs sucked (and still suck) and went too far, but saying they happened because of PvP is disingenuous at best. And with that, back to the topic at hand!

This is categorically false. In the entire history of this game there has only been one power which received a PvE nerf for solely PvP reasons and I'm betting almost no one here knows what that power is.

Needed to condense two bugs into one title so here goes: Melee Hybrid toggle is still giving mez protection and not resistance in PvP Phase Shift suppresses while mezzed in PvP Thank you for attending my TED Talk.

To be fair, the only thing that has a 5% minimum chance to hit is an even-con minion or lower enemy since all enemies get accuracy bonuses from their rank or relative level, to the point where, for example, a +4 AV actually has more than double that 5% chance to hit and there is nothing you can do to lower it. An interesting thought exercise would be to implement elusivity (currently a PvP-only mechanic which is basically "anti-accuracy") for PvE. This would mean for the most part defense remains entirely unchanged but if you run powers that give elusivity (almost every armor set toggle and the APP/PPP shields that give defense) you'd be able to actually reduce enemy chance to hit. That being said, I feel like this is a solution to a nonexistent problem since players are very rarely fighting against enemies that actually have a 5% chance to hit and it isn't possible to lower that minimum hit chance anyways.

Set bonuses got a pretty significant overhaul in Issue 24 - resistance bonuses were increased across the board and coupled with mez resistance, defense bonuses were tweaked to provide both typed and positional defense, and debt protection was replaced with endurance discount. Prior to I24, sure, defense and recharge were probably the most important things to build for simply because of how those interact with the game as a whole and you'd have to significantly alter the game mechanics to make that not the case. These days, yes, I think recharge is more important than it used to be but it comes at a tradeoff - you build in lots of procs and build for global recharge to help your proc rates but then you're missing out on other bonuses because you're slotting procs or hunting for slots to fit more recharge in. The changes to resistance bonuses mean it's easy to help shore up weak areas in builds (especially S/L/F/C) with IOs, and you've always been able to focus builds around damage, regen, and HP if you choose to do so. For example, most PvP-oriented builds already focus on building for max HP and range instead of recharge and defense.

Really? The additional damage proc is one of the reasons I'd roll a Corruptor over a Defender in many cases. There's only one non-unique ranged damage proc so every bit you can get helps and this is one of my chief complaints with the Defender and Sentinel ATO sets.

I think at that point it becomes a delicate balancing act and there's no guarantee there'd be any rhyme or reason. I guess if damage procs were flat-rate and non-damage procs used PPM, it might be okay, if the concern is how much extra damage things do now? Full disclosure: I don't actually think there's anything wrong with PPM in its current form and quite frankly it should just be left alone because whatever changes end up getting made are going to be immensely unpopular. The only scenario I think PPM is questionable in is PvP and even that could be solved by tweaking diminishing returns curves for damage resistance instead of messing with PPM.

I'm of the opinion that the current PPM system is more fundamentally flawed than the old flat-rate system if you're looking at it from a damage standpoint (and I think that's what most of the discussion revolves around). Sure, the old system favored fast-recharging powers and AoEs but the as-implemented PPM system doesn't actually result in that much of a damage loss in those same powers now while also providing a disproportionate boost everywhere else. The PPM system also has some pretty bonkers implications in PvP builds, to the point where damage procs are now resisted in PvP (they generally weren't back on live). Honestly the simplest thing to do from a balance standpoint is just to go back to the flat-rate system.

Enabling PvP in an SG base would be a potential nightmare with the current base editor. Back on live (before I13 when base raids were disabled) bases had to meet strict layout requirements to be able to be used for base raids to ensure base designers couldn't do things like have enemy players spawn into a room full of defensive items with no exits, for example. If any further development time is going to be spent on PvP I think the PvP community would like to see bugfixes and balancing passes first. EDIT: Obligatory plug for Phase Shift still being broken in PvP

VEAT leadership toggles have used the new cast times since VEATs were introduced in Issue 12. Every power that buffs or debuffs you has the same VFX you're talking about here. By default non-arena temp powers are disabled in the arena. The powers on this list are non-arena temp powers that have been bugged since time immemorial and have been available for use in the arena.

The lack of damage procs in the Sentinel and Defender ATO sets kinda sucks since the higher-damage ranged ATs get them (though that's really more an issue with the fact that there's only one non-unique ranged damage proc).

It's of some use defensively, I use it on my Grav/Emp as a kind of mini-phase if Phase Shift is down but it's tricky to get right because it'll detoggle if you get mezzed and if you run out of the bubble after you've cast it you lose the phase. It isn't really worth using offensively because the immobilize only lasts for a few seconds.

Keep in mind that the base value of any debuff is affected by the purple patch before any resistances are applied which makes debuffs less and less useful against higher-level-than-you enemies.

Plus, it's like... this is supposed to be a mini-nuke. The entire point of mini-nukes is to "remove hostile units."

Combustion's DoT is 7.1 seconds but it's also skipped by most Tankers and Blasters who have the opportunity to take it because it's got one of the longest animations of any power in the game and its DPA is pretty bad. (Nevermind that it has almost twice the radius as Dark Equilibrium.) Rain powers tick fast enough and (if slotted well) will be rolling close to 95% on each tick so that's pretty much irrelevant. Rain powers also have the unique ability to basically bypass the target cap - if one target dies another will start taking damage instead. The solution to "this power is advertised as high-damage but because of the realities of gameplay will rarely ever see most of that damage on a target" shouldn't be "use IOs."

Okay, fast-ticking DoT is nice. But... fifteen seconds is way too long for a power like this. I think the only other 15-second DoT powers are the rain-type powers and those are all location-based patches with higher radius and target cap and since they're location-based patches they can technically hit an infinite number of targets over their duration. Five seconds with a slower tick rate and more of the damage being frontloaded would make more sense, I think. If the original intention was to turn Dark Equilibrium into a sort of mini-nuke, these changes are getting further and further away from that.

Well... okay. But given the choice between a power that's more useful solo or on teams, or a power that's useful in any situation (because its damage is delievered up front, or at least mostly upfront) the upfront damage is the clear winner. EDIT: Dark Melee already has Shadow Maul as a DoT and having a set deliver most of its AoE output as DoT is a great way to run into the "punching dead things" problem on teams.

Back Alley Brawler is still a trainer in AP, isn't he...? EDIT: I am the dumb, nevermind. I misread the OP, or something like that.

There's a balance between teaming and soloing and the same powers won't perform the same way in both environments. DoT powers are fine when solo or on small teams because odds are good you'll get most of the damage out of them, but on larger teams most things just die before most of the DoT can take effect because of all the AoE flying around. I appreciate the attempts to bring up DM's AoE, but I don't think this is the right way to do it. If you keep the damage calculations mostly the same way they are now and increase the radius or target cap, you'll have a more useful power that contributes more meaningfully to AoE output. EDIT: Also while I have your attention (I assume) please please please please fix Phase Shift suppressing while mezzed in PvP. It's incredibly frustrating to the point where people are changing builds around to take Hibernate because of a bugged power.