macskull

What

Hasten really only becomes "problematic" in edge cases involving high-recharge builds. With SOs it makes sense that people want Hasten. Sure, 83% of level 50s take Hasten. So what? Your proposed changes have merit, I will give them that, but as proposed you basically nerf everyone at worst, and maintain the status quo at best (except for nerfing a few high-end edge cases) at the expense of potentially weeks of developer time. If your argument is that the game is too easy with Hasten, and too many people pick it, then so be it... there are plenty of ways to make the game more challenging without completely overhauling power recharge and NPC hit points. You can ignore the IO system, you can run flashbacks and TFs with player debuff/enemy buff, you can run incarnate content, the list goes on. It should be obvious that the majority of the players of this game aren't necessarily looking for a challenge and that's not a bad thing. We no longer have shareholders or a company to appease - there's no reason to make things more difficult for difficulty's sake.

As another poster said upthread, the hit roll system is hardcoded. This change alone would be a massive undertaking, let alone then having to keep scenarios where the old rules apply. Sure, it sucks to miss when you've got a 95% hit roll against something, but that's part of the randomness that the game was built around. /Unsigned.

^ This right here.

Once again, the game is not balanced around the IO system.

Will be interesting to see how that "test" in the Scrapper forums turns out. From what I've seen so far in their testing conditions TW isn't a significant outlier.

The Sentinel inherent debuff is nice, but the inherent as a power is clunky and difficult to make sense of. That is why people aren't praising it.

No, but the game is not balanced around IOs or (except in incarnate content) incarnate powers. So... the game is balanced around your "terrible slotting." That's my point - people are calling for nerfs to powers based on what they can do with the invention system, which the game is not balanced around. EDIT: I think it was the "delete Hasten" thread where I posted about SO/IO balance, so I'll reiterate here. The invention system is a completely optional part of the game. Some powers are balanced around the IO system, in a roundabout way (for example the tier 9s from Willpower, Shield, and Rad Armor ignore recharge bonuses and can't be slotted for recharge, and all incarnate powers ignore recharge bonuses), but those powers are only balanced around the IO system because they pretend like it doesn't exist, and were designed that way out of the gate. If you go back and retroactively balance existing powers and sets against the IO system it's no longer an optional part of the game and turns CoH into the same grindy lootfest as every other MMO.

Right, because a set that has godawful animation times outside of the momentum mechanic and absoutely chews through endurance is in need of a nerf. Go play an SO'd and un-incarnate'd TW character and tell me how that works out for you. Yes, TW has bigger PBAoE radius and bigger cone arcs than most other sets - that's a thematic thing and it doesn't really unbalance the set.

People that want to bot already have ways of doing it (that are against the code of conduct, mind you). Making multiple powers autofire isn't going to cause botting, and you can already do clever things with binds/macros to make an effectively infinite number of powers autofire anyways.

This isn't a Hasten-specific phenomenon, any buffs can be stacked after zoning because the game "loses track" of who cast the buff (even if you were the caster). S'why I always tag teammates with a round of buffs right outside the mission door and immediately again after entering.

Well, even though I vehemently disagree with the OP's premise that Hasten needs to be nerfed or changed because everyone takes it, I understand her logic for wanting to make a change. Hasten is far and away the best single-pick option for any power pool and in the end the only real build sacrifice you've got to make is tying up one of your 4 power pool picks (assuming you don't take Super Speed, but why wouldn't you?). I'm with you though - it would be nice to free up an extra power pool pick if I didn't need to dip into the Speed pool, but I feel like if Hasten were made inherent it would be in a significantly less powerful form and that's not a compromise I'd be willing to make.

The powers that would be balanced by only being up some of the time are the powers that are mechanically impossible to make perma, or are unaffected by recharge bonuses. Let's stop kidding ourselves by pretending we know what the original developers' intentions were unless we have specific evidence to show them - and besides, most of those developers haven't been involved with the game for over a decade. If perma-[thing] was never meant to be, [thing] would have a recharge time greater than 5x its duration. Since that obviously isn't the case for Hasten, and it's been perma-able more of this game's run than not, that's a really bad argument. Hasten already doesn't stack with itself, and hasn't since day one, so obviously it was forseen that people would have enough recharge to make it perma. I'm aware that the above quote is your opinion but your opinion is objectively incorrect. EDIT: It's also worth pointing out the IO vs SO balancing discussion that's come up several times in this thread. Yes, the game is balanced around SOs (and incarnate content is balanced around that with incarnate powers on top of it) and as a result even a modest IO build makes the game easier. If players are still looking for a challenge they can simply not use the IO system, but to start to balance the game against "well, a cheap IO build can do this" is a dangerous path to start down. The game should never be balanced against the invention system because as soon as you start doing that the invention system is no longer an option and is instead a requirement.

The thing is, recharge is about the only stat that suffers from diminishing returns (that and mez resistance but that's kinda lol) just based on the mechanics of the game, which means more recharge is less useful the more you have. It's already balancing itself.

Yep. Even with these proposed changes I'd expect Hasten to be something that 90% of builds still pick up at some point. EDIT: Basically, as long as Hasten continues to be a single-pick power that provides a huge benefit to every single character regardless of build, a majority of players will still take it. The only way that's changing is if it gets significantly nerfed which I don't see happening and people would not like.

Does that allow you to double-stack it for its entire duration? If not, it's a nerf.

Well, the developers on live repeatedly said the game was balanced around SOs, so...

You can still set it as a launch parameter in Tequila in the options dialog.

I've never been paid to PL but if I did decide to offer it it'd probably be somewhere in the 200 mil neighborhood for 1-50.

I don't think comparing an incarnate power respec to a regular respec is a fair comparison - sure, you can change which powers you pick from your primary/secondary/pools/APP/PPP, but changing incarnate powers is more akin to changing what powersets your character has. You can already have as many incarnate powers as you want and they're pretty easy to get. The only semi-annoying part is at the T4 level.

Not a bug, power info windows will only tell you the values with the enhancements slotted in that power.

I suspect that 10 million inf would be way too cheap, considering you probably put in at least 276 Empyrean merits (30 for each of 6 very rare salvage and 8 for each of 12 rare salvage) to T4 each of your six slots, an Empyrean merit is worth 10 reward merits, and you could probably make around 250-300 million inf from buying and selling enhancement converters with the 2760 reward merits that'd be equivalent to. There are other, faster ways to earn Empyrean merits than just grinding out vet levels (which isn't really efficient at all once you pass vet level 50 or so).

Sure, but unless you're on a task force it's pretty easy to quit the team and then rejoin when you get to where you're going. Or if your entire team is moving from one piece of content to the next - like, "hey we just finished an ITF and want to do an LGTF now." I understand that LFG is not a catch-all but it's pretty damn convenient for most use cases.

Bio and Invuln are probably your better options for primaries (mostly Bio because having 3200 HP plus another 1600 HP in absorb is just silly). SS is the best secondary but you can make others work. You'll want to pick up Taunt (autohit -75% range debuff) and probably go Stone Mastery for Fossilize. There's a "general build philosophy" thread in here somewhere that should help you out, but you'll want to prioritize HP and movement speed on a melee character.

I already said it in this thread, but... I just don't see why this is an issue. Keybinds make cycling travel powers on and off trivial at worst, and Hurdle + CJ is indisputably the best in-combat movement you can get and requires virtually no endurance to use. Honestly, outside of RP reasons there really isn't a reason to not take SS/CJ on everything especially with the availability of all-you-can-eat jetpacks at the P2W vendors.