macskull

+End/-End shows up in the (oddly enough) healing given/healing received channels of your combat tab. Performance Shifter doesn't actually affect anything that combat attributes monitors except current endurance but it won't show up there because that's just showing you a fixed value.

If this was really a PvP concern they would've returned it back to its original state as soon as they were able to separate out PvE and PvP effects on powers. The "blame it on PvP because it wasn't originally in the game" argument is tired and incorrect - it was stated from the beginning that this game would have PvP and the game had PvP for 7 years of its original 8.5-year run (so really, it's had PvP for 15 of the last 16 years). Phase Shift has worked the way you describe since 2009 or so. I think the auto-shutoff and long recharge are fine but the "nophase" power needs to go away.

Enforced Morale is supposed to provide its target with a small, stacking +rech/+spd buff in addition to the mez protection and +percep but this is currently somewhat broken. From what I can see on City of Data the +rech/+spd buffs are defined in the power but they will only have an effect if the target's total recharge buffs and movement buffs are less than a certain value, which pretty much means if the target already has some sort of movement or recharge bonus Enforced Morale's additional bonus does nothing even though the power description says it's supposed to provide those buffs, albeit with reduced results for each cast.

Does this mean the changes from last patch which made it only trigger once in an AoE are reverted, or is it still "trigger once but 15%?" I can't get on to test but this seems to be a reasonable compromise.

This is likely because of two reasons: Shock, Galvanic Sentinel's Discharge, and Defibrillate do not follow normal rules for end drain. Instead of draining a percentage of a target's end as is typical for end drain powers, they drain a flat amount (this is not how it normally works in PvE). Those three powers do not have separate PvP flags and this is the big difference - normally PvP end drain is a fixed value instead of a percentage but is usually about 1/2 to 1/3 of the PvE value. For example, Transference on a Defender drains 56.25% end on PvE targets but 20.84 end (note that's a fixed value and not a percentage) on PvP targets. Shock and Defibrillate for sure need separate PvP flags for end drain that follow the normal rules. Discharge is less an issue since it's only 3 end.

Math got me again, it seems. I guess a better way to put it would be "the debuff is 25% less effective."

Hey, a nerf is a nerf.

I think reducing the end cost of Disruption, lowering the recharge of Liquefy, and speeding up the animation of Sonic Siphon would go a long way to helping that set out.

I'm pretty sure the tech is already in place to do both these things (you can set targets as waypoints to get distance and you can use the Combat Analyzer to see enemy stats) and I think it'd be awesome, it's just a matter of how it'd be implemented. Buff/debuff bars would probably get pretty cluttered for some encounters.

That's... not how math works. Adjusting the -res component from 30% to 22.5% is a 25% reduction in effectiveness, not 7.5%. This means that all the targets in Tar Patch will take 25% less damage - not just from you, but from everyone else as well.

That was how I had it set up originally and will probably go back to tomorrow. I’ll add that info to the spreadsheet. Just wish it were possible to allow anyone to edit only a few cells while leaving the rest of the sheet protected.

Updated the link to do just that but you now (obviously) need to be logged in to a Google account to view your local copy.

With Electrical Affinity on the test server and actual chain powers getting implemented, I went ahead and updated my PPM list (also linked in the OP) to include a PPM calculator in a new tab. The updated spreadsheet includes calculations for single-target, PBAoE, TAoE, cone, chain, and auto/toggle/pseudopet powers. Of note: just like @Bopper said in the OP, the current area modifier for chain powers pretty heavily penalizes procs as max targets goes up, but it looks like the biggest single drop in proc effectiveness (at least for the Electrical Affinity powers) is after the first stack of static where max targets goes from 4 to 7. EDIT: Removed the "make a copy" portion of the link so you can view the calculator without logging in, but you'll need to make a copy to make any changes to it.

So why not take a look at the sleep mechanic, and leave the proc alone until there's meaningful reason to take a sleep power other than this interaction? What's going to end up happening here is AoE sleep powers will once again become relatively useless until at some point in the future they're looked at, if that ever happens, because I'd bet it wasn't even something being considered. Changes to the Call of the Sandman proc right now just mean some powers become pretty much useless again where at least now they have some utility. Honestly, I'm all for going back to the pre-PPM system if only because PPM is leading to several weird interactions which end up causing nerfs simply because of an interaction with a specific type of power. I'm still not entirely sure what problem PPM was supposed to fix but it seems like it's caused more problems than it solved (assuming you see proc interactions as an imbalance, and I don't). That being said... if we are really going to neuter the Call of the Sandman proc like this, it should honestly be a higher % heal and be unique. Make it, say 20% heal unaffected by enhancements and buffs, make the proc a unique IO, and possibly adjust the 6th slot set bonus to account for it. This makes the proc actually useful in single-target sleeps while not completely neutering its performance in AoE sleeps, and since it's unique you don't have to worry about people multi-slotting it to chain heal themselves. Just to be clear, I'm not against this change because it affects me personally (I generally skip sleep powers and don't think I've ever slotted the CotS proc) but because nerfing a proc because of a specific interaction between that proc and some powers seems like bad design.

Tar Patch was already worthless in PvP so this nerf won't change anything.

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.