Maelwys

FWIW, it's been confirmed by a Dev (although I shan't name them just in case Moogly Googlies me! 😛) that the Offensive Mode debuffs, DNA Siphon recharge and Evolving Armor +regen are all bugged currently on Open Beta. So expect a fix for those in due course. ((It won't take the sting out of the Parasitic Aura changes, but there should at least be a little positive clawback to baseline survivability whenever those fixes land!))

♫♫ "I could have been someone", well, so could anyone ♫♫ ♫♫ You took my procs from me when I first saw panel #2 ♫♫ ♫♫ I kept them with me, babe, I put them with my own ♫♫ ♫♫ Can't clear four stars alone, I've built my toon around you... ♫♫

(i) At present for a like-for-like attack it's adding lower average damage until your damage is being buffed by +233.33 damage or more. Live: Any 100 damage attack gets 40%*100=40 additional damage all the time. Test: An ED-capped 100 damage attack gets 0.4(100*1.955)=78.2 additional damage 30% of the time. Which is an average of 0.3*78.2=23.46 additional damage. Test: A damage-capped 100 damage attack gets 0.4(100*5)=200 additional damage 30% of the time. Which is an average of 0.3*200=60 additional damage. Test: With a +233.33% damage boost a 100 damage attack gets 0.4(100*3.33333) = 133.333 damage 30% of the time. For an average of 0.3*133.333= 40.00 additional damage. (ii) At present it's not applying against Nukes; so you have to use it on something else, such as an AoE instead. Live: Unbuffed Sentinel "Overcharge" with Shinobi-Iri = 306.60 Test: Unbuffed Sentinel "Overcharge" with Shinobi-Iri = 218.96 (a loss of -87.64 damage) Enhanced 'Refractor Beam' = (50.0555*1.95) = 97.61 damage Test: Enhanced 'Refractor Beam' with Shinobi-Iri = 1.4(50.0555*1.95) = 136.65 damage (+39.04). @30% chance that's an average gain of +11.712 damage Damage-Capped 'Refractor Beam' = (50.0555*5) = 250.28 damage Test: Damage-Capped 'Refractor Beam' with Shinobi-Iri = 1.4(50.0555*5) = 350.39 damage (+100.1) @30% chance that's an average gain of +30.03 damage So if you currently use Shinobi-Iri to boost one single big non-Nuke attack? It's worse. And if you currently use Shinobi-Iri to boost a Nuke? It's way worse. And if you currently use Shinobi-Iri to boost a Nuke and are prepared to adapt your playstyle to cope with the change by swapping to an AoE? It's still worse. Sure... sometimes it isn't worse on the occasions that you get lucky and actually happen to crit. But spending ~8s re-entering Stealth to now only have a 70% chance of bugger all gain? Yeah, worse. We can debate the exactitudes of the semantics all day; but realistically I'm not seeing a bright side unless you're Fulcrum Shifted and intentionally using non-Nuke attacks.

"Like Blaster Shinobi" is similar to the way it works on Live - granting a +40% damage buff (Sentinels) and a +25% damage buff (Blasters) on your first attack out of stealth. However the Blaster version also gains a separate Lethal proc (with a flat 20% activation chance, not PPM) on all their attacks (not just from stealth) The Sentinel version on Test now seems to be modelled after the Scrapper version, which grants their AoE attacks +30% chance to Crit and ST attacks +65% chance to Crit. Unfortunately since Sentinels only deal 40% damage with their Crits compared to Scrappers 100%; this is a very bad deal for Sentinels even on their AoEs. In practice on my BR/Nin Sentinel it's about ~90 less damage on their Nukes in return for a 30% chance to deal ~48 more damage on a non-Nuke AoE (averages to ~14.5).

I've gone on record as saying I'm distinctly not a fan of the T9 changes as-is. There are aspects of the changes I can get on board with. Losing the crashes? Great. Standardizing them around similar levels of duration/recharge? Takes away a bit of the uniqueness, but since they don't all have completely identical effects... Sure. Lowering the durations from 120s and 180s to 30s and 40s? HELL no. They have tweaked the durations a little bit (Unstoppable went from 30s to 40s for example) but it's been far too slight thus far. IMO the duration should be at minimum 60 seconds for the powers that previously had 120s duration (like One with the Shield and Strength of Will) and 90 seconds for the powers that previously had 180s duration (like Overload, Unstoppable, Kuji-In Retsu and Elude). Because anything less than that completely upends the original point of these powers - they become comparatively useless for surviving an occasional prolonged difficult encounter (think: fighting a BBEG) in favour of becoming a more generic short-term "spike survivability" boost (think: weathering a nasty alpha strike). It's the devs' sandbox we're playing inside of; and they can certainly choose to upend things like this. However it's still a bad idea (in my mind at least!) to upend things this much whenever they could tone the changes down and/or implement mutually exclusive T9 powers - and that approach would seem to be the best one, frankly. Consider: + Two versions of each T9 per armor powerset. + One with short duration/recharge [say 30s/120s; if non-enhancable] + One with long duration/recharge [say 120s/360s; if non-enhanceable] + Neither with an utterly crippling "-100% endurance and most of your health" crash + Win/Win. Please?

Clarified this in the Ninjitsu Feedback thread; but yes, it stacks additively. So you can have anything from 5% (no opportunity) to 40% (full opportunity) plus the 30% from stealth. However Shinobi-Iri requires an eight second break in combat to re-enter stealth, and its +30% Crit Chance boost wears off as soon as you re-enter combat. So just like on Live, it's good for exactly one attack (and that's assuming you're taking 8+ seconds between one mob and the next one!). And the really sucky bit is that Sentinel Shinobi-Iri's buff has become far more unreliable (it's now a 30% chance of increasing your damage rather than guaranteed) and its buff no longer applies to Nukes (which was the typical use case for it on Sentinels). So it's objectively worse now by every metric.

I've posted this on the Discord already, but copying here for completeness/visibility: (i) The Offensive Stance Debuffs are definitely borked. My Tanker on Open Beta is currently being subjected to -13.33% Resistance and -6.66% Defense rather than -7.5 Res and -3.75% Def. Last I checked it was working fine on Scrappers but much too high on all four of the other ATs (Tankers/Brutes/Stalkers/Sentinels). Although the -resistance is (correctly) "unresistable" now, at least. (ii) The hit to Parasitic Aura's regeneration/recovery buff uptime (45s/270s --> 30s/300s) is hurting it a bit too... but I can kinda-sorta understand that since it's in line with the other T9 armor set changes. (iii) However by far the biggest pain at present is DNA Siphon. On Live, the recharge is 90s and the regeneration buff lasts for 30s. On Test, it's supposed to have adaptive recharge up to a maximum of 90s. Which sounds fine in theory. However the current recharge mechanic on this appears to be BROKEN. It is adding too much recharge for each enemy hit, and it also does not appear to be correctly respecting recharge aspect slotting nor global recharge. As an example versus One Single Hostile Target: With 89.9% local and +125% global recharge; it should be 11.91s (20s base plus 17.5s for the first target = 37.5s, multiplied by 1/3.149). But it's actually 36s. With 89.9% local and +55% global recharge; it should be 15.31s (20s base plus 17.5s for the first target = 37.5s, multiplied by 1/2.449). But it's actually 46s. With 0% local and +125% global recharge; it should be 16.67s (20s base plus 17.5s for the first target = 37.5s, multiplied by 1/2.25). But it's actually 50s. With 0% local and +55% global recharge; it should be 24.19s (20s base plus 17.5s for the first target = 37.5s, multiplied by 1/1.55). But it's actually 1m14s. (Testing performed on my Bio/Staff Tanker on OB) The recharge appears to be the same regardless of the number of mobs hit with it. And it's also simply too darn long. In practice; on Live after defeating a big batch of foes, my Tanker can trigger DNA Siphon every ~30s (90s recharge time reduced to 28.58s with slotting/global recharge) and gain a 30s duration regeneration buff. Which ends up being effectively permanent, so helps to keep their HP bar topped up. On Test I would expect to be able to do the same thing (since it's supposed to cap out at 90s recharge time) but it's at most jumping down to ~36s after power activation instead of ~28s. I can understand there being a tiny bit of discrepancy here due to the way adaptive recharge takes a moment to actually kick in... but 8 additional seconds for DNA Siphon to become available again is owch-inducing. I'm having to try to rely on Ageless and multiple Force Feedback procs (yuck) to bring it back down under the 30s mark. In addition; the regeneration buff granted by DNA Siphon appears to be missing the "does not scale with enemy level" flag. vs a Level 50 mob in PI (-1 to me) it's giving my Tanker +5.55HP/Sec. vs a Level 1 mob in Atlas Park (-51 to me) it's giving +30.00HP/Sec. (iv) Also worth noting that Evolving Armor is (apparently incorrectly) granting +regeneration whenever I'm in Offensive Stance; not just Efficient Stance. Which is very slightly offsetting the other negatives but still appears to be unintentional so I'm mentioning it here for completeness sake! 🙂 (v) Finally - Ablative Armor. It seems to be working as intended... unless you try and activate it again before the first instance has worn off. Which is the same headache it's had on Live for years and appears to be a long-standing bug with +Absorb stacking in general (Rad Armor's "Particle Shielding" suffers from the same issue). The first +Absorb instance will give full effect... but the second buff instance applies before removing the first and will encounter the Absorb limit (100% of your base HP) and so grant a reduced Absorb figure. Then the original buff instance finally vanishes, leaving you with less absorb than you had previously. In practice, this rarely matters in combat as your absorb buffer is long since depleted before you trigger the power a second time. But I've encountered multiple cases where a Bio armor toon has it set to autofire and ends up with artificially-reduced Absorb before leaping into a big GM/AV fight. ((Again, this one is at least a long standing bug. See here and here)) Illustration: (Live) First Instance: Second Instance: (Test) First Instance: Second Instance: Tanker Base HP at level 50 = 1874.07 1727.36+146.71=1874.07 1067.63+806.44=1874.07 Whilst the version on Test is not providing as big a chunk of +Absorb (since it's working off your BaseHP now rather than your "boosted" MaxHP) it's still more than capable of running up against the Absorb limit with that 2nd application.

My testing showed that Shinobi-Iri requires the usual eight second break in combat to re-enter stealth, and it's being stealthed that grants a single +30% Crit chance boost that wears off as soon as you re-enter combat. It does appear to be additive with the inherent Crit boost from opportunity, so you can have anything from 5% (no opportunity) to 40% (full opportunity) plus the 30% from stealth. The sucky bit is that Sentinel Shinobi-Iri's buff has become far more unreliable (30% chance of increasing your damage rather than 100%) and its buff no longer applies to Nukes (which was the typical use case for it). So it's objectively worse now by every metric. Scrapper Shinobi-Iri isn't quite as bad since their Crits inflict +100% attack damage instead of Sentinel's +40% attack damage. And they don't get Nukes.

AFAIK the Devs are intentionally leaving Kheldians well enough alone until they have sufficient time to devote to a complete rework.

Is that a typo for Bots perchance? Getting ~30s faster seems a bit iffy!

They'd need to pick something to make it mutually exclusive with, and Jacob's Ladder is too low tier and Chain Induction has a much faster cycle rate. So I suspect it'd be Thunder Strike. Which I'm not against per say... just pointing out that something has to give on Stalkers to fit in Assassin's Strike.

Hopefully just slipped through the cracks. Might even be fixed internally on a different branch. There were a LOT of power changes in this one after all!! 🙂

This was using the wrong values on CB and it looks like it's still busted on Open Beta. Tanker: (that's -13.33% Res, -6.66% Def rather than the predicted -7.5% Res, -3.75% Def) Scrapper: (that's -5.62% Res, -2.81% Def which matches the predicted -5.63% Res, -2.81% Def) Stalker/Brute: (that's -10% Res, -5% Def which is considerably higher than the predicted values for a Tanker, let alone a Scrapper) Sentinel: (that's -9.33 Res, -4.67% Def which is considerably higher than the predicted values for a Tanker, let alone a Scrapper) Currently the only correct "Offensive Adaptation" debuffs are the Scrapper's. The values of the rest are far too high/harsh.

I mean, it's getting +1.5 KB Protection now instead of +1.4 from 3x Gladiator's Armor. And that's considerably better than before when fighting +2s and higher because reasons. But you still need a Set Bonus (like 3x Gladiator's Armor) rather than a Global Bonus (like Karma/Steadfast/Zephyr) which grants KB protection for them to inherit it.