Yomo Kimyata

@Riverdusk asked something similar on Troo's deleted thread. First, some mea culpas. I love finding unloved sets and making them good to great. I take pride in it and I am a prideful creature. So I admit I get a little grumpy when they really buff a set more than I think they needed to. That's a bias of mine, and I'll work on it, but basically that's what you are going to get from me. Also, since it didn't say anything in the Beta notes about Pendulum's damage changing (it has been lowered on Beta as I verified today), I had assumed that the damage had remained the same and the power just moved from T9 to T5. I have played it on Beta a fair amount to verify the new mechanics, but I hadn't paid attention to the damage. So both of those are my issues. That said, my beef is partially with the changes to Battle Axe and partly with the changes in the level requirement changes, but I'll start with having Pendulum moved from a T9 power earned at level 32 currently to becoming a T5 power earned at level 8. Admittedly, the damage is lower (now 84.2 damage and 42.1 damage per activation on Beta versus 118.9 and 59.4 on Live HC). This is crazy overpowered for a T5, but on line with the T7 of Spinning Strike from StJ. Honestly, Cleave and Pendulum were relatively weak in comparison to their counterparts of Shatter and Crowd Control from War Mace. Cleave has a smaller arc of 10 foot radius of 20 degrees versus 8 foot radius of 45 degrees for Shatter, and Pendulum has a shorter radius of 7 feet versus 8 for Crowd Control and has a limit of 5 enemies versus 10 for CC. They made up for it with higher damage. Was that a fair tradeoff? Probably not but it was a tradeoff. The easiest way to "fix" Axe would be to mirror the specs from Crowd Control. But changing Pendulum now means you have twice the area (I'm going with area rather than volume since most damage is going to be coming from the ground plane and because I cannot remember the formulas for the volume of a solid angle of a sphere.) to hit enemies, and your effective range on Pendulum is now 14 feet (with a target 7 feet away you can now reach the mob 7 feet behind it). Changing Cleave means that you now have almost twice the area to hit five targets than you did with the current Cleave. (Changing Cleave to 8 foot range with 45 degree arc like Shatter is approximately the same volume area the proposed Cleave.) Other reasons that Axe was weaker than Mace was fewer abilities to slot interesting stuff. Mace has some stun and knockdown and Axe only had knockdown. Adding defense debuff was smart and fair and part of me thinks that Axe actually shipped with def debuff on Live before it was removed. The actual changes to Axe probably aren't world beating, and again, part of my beef is "Well, I made it work, why can't you?" and that's a bit of me being overly prideful. Mea culpa. But this would have made an interesting *NEW* power set that was based on ranged melee attacks. Twevs. Regardless, it's very effective as a hover blaster scrapper. Your damage is great, your survivability is through the roof since no one will touch you unless you get hit with -fly, and you've pretty fantastic in melee range as well. But even a lower-damage Pendulum at T5 is ridiculously overpowered. Should be T7. If they move Hard Mode to all TFs eventually, it will be all Yins all the time for the rewards and there will be many axe scrappers!

I will go on record as saying I think these Axe changes in Beta are ridiculously overpowered and are about to lead to a whole new round of quantum power (cr)leaps. But it's too late Mom, the crowd has spoken. We're getting a monorail. So if I can't stop it, I'm going to figure out how to exploit it as best I can. I introduce Higher Ground, my hover blasting Axe/Ninja farmer (NOTE: build order is different on Beta because of the other tremendous power (cr)leap of easified power level attribution): Attacks? Well you have to take Chop, but it only gets two slots as a mule. Swoop? Three slots because you may have to use it against AVs. Your neverending attack chain will be Cleave, Whirling Axe, Pendulum. Three Concealment powers? No Hasten?! Six-slotted Blinding Powder?!? A PLACATE POWER?!??! I went with Weapons Mastery because ninjas need Caltrops and Exploding Shuriken, der. Hover at 12 feet in safety and bomb the crowd below with Cleave, Whirling Axe, Exploding Shuriken and drop an occasional Caltrops on them (if you use "powexeclocation me" in a macro they drop straight down). Or zoom within 7 feet to drop Pendulum as well. I'm still playing around with it on Beta but it's ridiculous. I doubt you could AFK farm with this but you can clear mobs like my fat cat clears off the butter tray when I'm not looking. Additional ideas: Air Superiority to keep anyone else from flying near you. Web Grenade instead of Caltrops for the same reason. Blaze Mastery with Char/Melt Armor/Fireball for more damage/debuff at the expense of less to hit and -to hit resistance. I, for one, welcome our new Battle Axe Ninja overlords and I encourage you all to make one. I highly doubt it will win this contest, but it is interesting as all getout.

Curses! You have figured out my secret plan!

I'm not 100% exactly what the System channel covers in terms of messages, but they all seem to be important. Well, except for converting an IO. Is there an alternate channel that we can move this to? When doing a bunch of converting I get these huge walls of pink text and sometimes I miss other important System messages.

I've got a bunch of Trap of the Hunters to give away!

Yeah High_Beam, some *magical* animal. rolls eyes.

If I'm reading things right, you want to look at not the total animation time, but the animation time before effect. Vengeful Strike has a 2.433 sec total animation time, but only 0.467 second time before effect. So if the CS proc activates on VS, then there is 1.966 seconds of "dead time" in the rest of the VS animation that eats into the 3.25 duration. So you want the next power to have an animation time before effect of <= 1.284 seconds. I think that is enough time for any one of the other attacks in DB to trigger, but probably not two.

I did some testing after you reverted the recharge back to normal. Ran similar paper missions on lvl 50 StJ/Fire scrapper at +4/x8. Burn: I was expecting complete disaster, but I found it to be pretty much on par with how it was before. Now keep in mind, I'm not a farmer and I'm not trying to exploit anything. I didn't notice significant changes in proc activation (but I wasn't parsing logs either). Before, you could trigger Critical Strikes proc on cast even when there were no mobs in range, and they fixed that. To me, that seems to be pretty much working as intended. After a few missions, I couldn't really see any offensive changes on my strategy, which is generally Burn, Spinning Strike, stay alive and ST attacks until Burn, Spinning Strike. Everything else: when I mention "stay alive" as part of my attack change, it is noticeably easier with the changes to Temp Protection, Healing Flames, and Consume. But it's not OMG I am invincible either, so I like these changes a lot. I'm mixed on Consume as auto-hit. I'm used to (and like) endurance mod powers that are auto-hit but don't do damage. I get it that damage procs still need to roll to hit, but non-damage procs like Fury of the Glad or Overwhelming Force do not. I'd suggest either: removing all damage OR keeping accuracy but increasing damage. Consume does have a rather long recharge time, and Fiery Aura could use a little more help with endurance management IMO. Again, I speak as a missions-based character. I do not doubt that these changes seriously reduce the utility of Burn for AFK farmers.

So, I spent some time on both Beta and current the last few days on a lvl 50 BA/Energy scrapper v. +4/x8 carnie paper missions. Some thoughts: - I almost overlooked the power order changes. You are going to give a formerly T9 power to scrappers at level 8 now. I'm not sure if you are saying that it was a terrible T9 power or that you have improved Swoop, Axe Cyclone, and Cleave drastically. This re-ordering is INCREDIBLE power creep and seems like a precursor to do the same thing for every melee set. Big dislike. - Beheader and Chop, looks good. In my opinion, the only thing you really needed to do to bring this entire set up a bit would have been to add defense debuffs to every power and allow slotting of DD and ADD IOs. But to every power, not just the T1 and T2. Thumbs up for adding DD on these two powers but thumbs down for not adding it elsewhere. - Gash and Swoop, pretty neutral to slightly positive. Slightly faster recharge, lower proc chances by a few points. - Axe Cyclone. Big hit on proc chances. I see that trend in a lot of the changes you have been making, and I guess it's one way to revamp the PPM system so they go off less frequently. I'm a proc fan myself, so I don't like to see that. I'm not sure what the benefit of the tractor beam is when the radius has been expanded -- maybe to draw them in so your other attacks in your chain can hit? I dislike the radius change a LOT because, well, we're already in melee range with these jokers so it really comes across as you trying to come up with ways to reduce PPM proc activation. - Pendulum and Cleave. I want to say that this is an interesting concept of adding more range to melee sets, and I'm all for it *as a new power set*. Start from scratch and work from there. Cleave at 40' range is terrible for attack chains, especially if that is what you lead off with, and is immersion breaking for me. Am I throwing my axe? Is my axe now an Arachnos Mace? Changing from a cone to a targeted AoE makes it much simpler to get more than one target in the attack, but it cuts the proc activation rate significantly (I'm seeing a trend). If you are fighting a big mob, it's not difficult at all to get 2-5 people in that cone. [EDIT: the cone that is currently is. The new sphere makes it several times easier, which is just too easy]. Please, PLEASE don't dumb this down like you did with Shadow Maul. Pendulum becomes a worse power, since your effective arc is now significantly smaller than 180 degrees. If I were a lot closer to my geometry and trig days, I'd probably be able to figure out what the effective arc is now, but I'll make a quick guess at 90? And if you are going to make these a targeted AoE, you really should switch over the IO slotting to targeted AoE sets. Overall, and plenty of you are going to dislike my opinion, there are some really interesting ideas in this proposal, and I strongly encourage you look to institute them in a brand new set. I doubt that is going to happen, because I have seen that when something has been introduced on HC, it's pretty much going to happen one way or another. If we have to have a targeted AoE set, make it pendulum, and make it Targeted AoE IOs like Spinning Strike. Keep Cleave as it [EDIT: currently, not as proposed] is, maybe add some more damage or something else interesting if it's going to be the T9 signature power. Add DD and ADD to every power, not just the first two ST powers. If you are going to intentionally reduce proc chances, add more base damage to the power. If you are going to move a T9 to a T5 then cut the damage and power accordingly and if you are going to move a T5 to a T9 make it significantly stronger. These are my opinions and experiences from having played a lot of Axe. Yours may differ. I agree that it is not as good a set as some others as currently stands, but these changes will completely change playstyle and seems to be one step towards making all characters extremely powerful at extremely low levels, as well as one step towards reducing the effects of procs without revamping the PPM system.

I haven't parsed the combat logs (and I'm not gonna!) but I assume that you can get bonus crits off of damage auras as well. Then again, I think some of the combos I use don't fit into the 3.25 second window, so I should probably check into that. Like Atom Smasher --> Devastating Blow. Looking at City of Data (all hail uberguy) Atom Smasher has 1.1 seconds of time of animation after effect, and Devastating Blow has 2.2 seconds of animation time before effect. Missed it by *that* much!

This feedback is more unfocused than a 120 degree Shadow Maul.

I totally agree. But the only changes that have been made to make it harder are optional, and then everyone still goes crazy about how they don't want things to be harder but that they want the rewards associated with hard mode anyway, but not so hard please. And 95% of the changes made/proposed in the past two years are to make the game simpler. Again, I don't mind those changes if you need them, but make it opt-in instead of mandatory. It's insulting to assume that we all are so terrible that we really want to be buffed all the time, or that we can't figure out how geometry works. And, again, it would be nice for someone in "control" to make a statement like, "We are going to actively discourage AFK farming, and that's why we are doing the following things." Or "We hate brutes" or whatever. (I don't think they hate brutes). For example. And lots of people would wring their hands and some would quit and we would move on.

I'm not the OP, but my observational bias is that players fall into three categories: Grueling Challenge, Fair Playground, and Easy Peasy. I think there is room for all of these. But I don't think the Gruelers are clamoring that everyone has to play +4/x8 from Outbreak onwards, but it seems to me the Easy Peasers ARE clamoring that everyone has to get nukes at level 1 because how else are you going to beat that Skulls LT? Again, just my opinion and I accept I have observational bias.

Solid.

I guess as long as the powers that be never try to bring hard mode and their rewards below level 50 TFs it shouldn't be so bad. So what if people do Citadel or Yin TFs in half the time?

That's my point. For as long as I've been on HC, people claim that all balance changes are made based off of SO slotting. That is clearly not the case here. So maybe we are entering a scary new world where developers and players admit that people use IOs.

Based on my understanding, a normal damage aura checks for proc activation on trigger and then every ten seconds. I think the chance of activating is something like 30.7% for a 3.5 PPM. IR summons a pseudo pet every 5 seconds (or that is what I have been told), so every five seconds it is "activated" and checked for procs. I do not know if it then checks for proc every ten seconds after that -- I don't think so. But I am stating, not suggesting, that this power on auto checks for activation twice as often as a standard damage aura.

Like I said, the game is about IOs. Slot Fury of the Gladiator, and enemies are exposed to a -res debuff twice as often. Slot Achilles Heel, and enemies are exposed to a -res debuff twice as often. Slot Analyze Weakness and get a +10% to hit bonus twice as often. Slot Avalanche or Overwhelming proc and knockdown people twice as often. Then there are damage procs, I guess. There is a reason it doesn't take ATOs. If the argument is, "We need to balance around SOs" then that is a BS argument. If the argument is "We tested and IG is stronger than Blazing Aura!!! OMFG" then ok, buff up the rest of Radiation Melee. I'd suggest cutting animation times mostly -- only two powers have activation times 1.5 seconds or less. Extend range of Radiation Siphon, which feels like it has a 5 second animation time and a 30 degree cone, but doesn't since it's range is so short.

The advantage that IR has traditionally had over other damage auras (IIRC) is that procs get checked for triggering every 5 seconds rather than every 10 seconds (which I think is due to the summoning every five seconds). If they are balancing due to "everything needs to be balanced as if everyone is using SOs" then that's nonsense, since only IOs make this a better power. I said this in another thread: IR is overpowered but almost everything else in Radiation Melee is underpowered. I thought that was by intention. In my opinion, bringing IR back from overpowered levels is fine, but you would need to bring some/all of the other powers in Radiation Melee up to snuff. In my opinion.

To answer the question in your title, there's no creep about it. It's an instantaneous quantum jump easier. I've got no problem if other people want things easier, but I dislike it when it is enforced as a default. Make an easy mode that you can opt in to if you are having a hard time. Play at +0/x1 and don't feel bad about it. Don't make everything easy mode then cop out by saying "Well you can make it harder by playing drunk and left handed and with training enhancements." Pfft like *THAT* is a challenge.

Well, I would say that it depends on the powers in question. I'd ideally like to put it in a relatively low damage AoE if there is a higher damage AoE on deck. If I'm looking at Stone Melee (and yeah, I'm looking at you, you sweet thang!), I'd want to put it in Fault rather than Tremor. Both would pretty much guarantee a trigger, but you are going to get more aggregate damage getting the crit on Tremor. And if you want to use Tremor next on the mobs or Seismic Smash on the AV, up to you. If you are only a ST scrapper, then I'd totally understand using a different strategy. In that case a 90% chance of activation on one target is better than a 70% chance on three targets because, well, there aren't three targets. But I guess everyone is going to have a slightly different strategy. Mine works really well for my playstyle.

You are only governed by power slots if you are playing through it the first time. If you exempt down you've got it all at a much lower level. I am scratching my head why this was needed. I know why it was *wanted*.

I suspect that part of the problem is that SCORE and Homecoming dumbed things down enough that now we are possibly inadvertently bumping up against constraints? When Live instituted pay per packs and the Character Items menu, I doubt they considered that people could afford to buy 10k winter packs and open them. no complaints here, but it’s like using an ATM from 1990.

DPS isn’t high on my list of concerns. I’m not trying to solo GMs and taking down AVs isn’t too hard to slot for. I’ll probably end up trying everything and respec out of anything that isn’t fun.

Better odds of triggering. ST at 90% means you miss 10% of the time. 3 targets at 70% means you miss 0.3 x 0.3 x 0.3 or 2.7% of the time. I don’t personally go for pylon times, and any AV is usually swimming in activation bait. But against pure single targets, you will probably have a different system than I will!