Maelwys

PPM calculations don't use radius as a straight multiplier. Taking Fire Sword Circle as an example: With a 10ft base radius (on Brutes, Scrappers, etc and Tankers before i28p2) each 3.5PPM damage Proc in it will have a 62.2314% activation chance. With a 15ft base radius (on Tankers post i28p2) that drops to a 49.2062% activation chance. Since 3.5 PPM Damage Procs typically deal 71.751 damage, that works out to an average loss of just -9.3 damage per proc per target, before resistances and Purple Patch. And due to the "Overcap" damage reductions, that number will drop even further whenever you're hitting more than 10 targets, for just -3.1 damage per proc per target. Even taken across the maximum 16 targets that's not a huge deal considering that FSC even when completely unslotted was dealing nearly 1500 damage before the patch. It's honestly a drop in the ocean. And it's even less of a concern for Cones if the Devs were to just manually bump the arcs up rather than reverting back to a global buff.

Active Farming builds can differ greatly depending upon the setup and map and just how active you're prepared to get. For example: If you're combining all insps to reds, you'll want more survivability from the build than if you're popping purples (and/or oranges and/or greens) as they come. Are you willing to permanently keep one or more base empowerment buffs up? What about popping situational survivability boosts like Shadow Meld? In any case, the ideal offensive powerset is going to be something with a few AoEs, at least one of which inflicts knockdown (for a Force Feedback proc) and normally the ideal defensive powerset is something with a few clicky damage boosters and/or AoEs, plus reasonable survivability (long recharge time clicks and T9s can work). The general idea is keeping yourself at the damage cap (via insps) whilst chaining procbombed AoEs back to back and maybe clicking the occasional survivability button to stop yourself taking too much damage. However note that Epic pools can only get a Scrapper one decent procbombed AoE (unlike Mu Mastery Brutes which can get two!) so your choice of Primary powerset will matter a bit more. Personally I'm rather fond of BattleAxe/RadArmor (even with the nerfs to RT and the currently bugged Ground Zero proc rate!). But lots of other stuff like MA/FA or even a TitanW/Bio can work. Heck, I've got an EnergyMelee/RA that until very recently could get through an asteroid map at a very decent rate.

Narrow cone arcs are annoying on any melee AT. But adding radius isn't going to help on anything with a Taunt Aura or punchvoke because the enemies cluster around you rather than queueing up in a nice neat 30 ft long line. Mobile characters that get to remain stay at range and can tag the whole spawn with Ranged cones? Or Hoversnipers that can fly directly above and essentially turn them into a targeted AoE? Sure, they might get milage from +range and +radius. But not Meatshields or Facepunchers. And the Tanker nerfs were NOT PROC FOCUSED. The Devs told us exactly why the nerfs happened within the patch notes (under "design notes") and there's a TL;DR summary here. The problem with Tanker overperformance was always "being able to deal full damage to 60% more enemies" (whilst simultaneously having more wiggle room in the build to ramp up their damage output, since they need fewer build compromises to meet survivability thresholds). Procs being king on Tankers is a very common misconception: Procbombing of attacks actually favours Brutes over Tankers, due to the former losing far less net damage whenever their attacks aren't getting ED capped for damage aspect.

That was indeed how it functioned between issue26pg4 and issue28pg2. But the global arc/radius buff has now been removed from Gauntlet. It's no longer part of the Tanker inherent. In i28p2 the aforementioned global buff was removed then each Tanker AoE and Cone was manually tweaked. Their AoEs with a base radius of less than 15ft had their radius increased by 50% (and their Cones originally also had their radius increased likewise before this was reverted due to outcry). Then at the 11th hour right before the patch hit live the Devs increased the base damage of Tanker AoEs so that their damage per activation almost matched what Tankers had previously been used to. As a result aside from a slightly lower proc activation rate Tanker AoEs were essentially unchanged (until you start hitting more than 10 targets and the new Overcap damage reductions kick in) and Tanker Cones had their Arc and Radius lowered to base level (eg the same as what Brutes get) but their damage and Proc activation rate were both left intact. There were a lot of changes that happened during Beta; and what eventually landed on Live is a very mild compared to the originally planned Tanker nerfs. I hate trying to catch multiple foes with a narrow cone arc as much as the next guy, but I very much doubt the Devs are going to be buffing Tankers again any time soon. IMO realistically most we can hope for is a slight reduction in the harshness of the Overcap mechanic (eg from -67% to -50%) and maybe a increase to the tanker aggro cap.

We're allowed 3 accounts running simultaneously per shard when servers are below peak usage (e.g "not red"). https://forums.homecomingservers.com/code-of-conduct/#multiboxing-policy So technically the best buck for your bang is probably running 2 AFK Farmers and one Active Farmer, whilst you're waiting for your buy-it-now AH listings to sell. In practice? Just play the game. (Though I'll sometimes have 1-2 AFK farmers going in the background whilst I actually play the game on my main account...)

Yes, you missed it. Increasing the Radius of AoE and Cone powers causes their base damage to drop. This was highlighted on test multiple times very, very loudly. Proc activation rate drops also due to the way PPM calculations work; but is not anywhere near as big a concern. They reverted the radius changes to Cones because of this base damage decrease. It was having a disproportionally severe negative impact on particular powersets like Staff and TW.

To be fair, they did that already. This appears to just be vocalising it to a wider audience. So at worst here IMO it's valid complaint; but questionable location for the soapbox. Thanks Arachne. As @Troo said in the OP; this was a biiiiiiiiiig patch and it's not surprising things were missed out. So less pointing of fingers + chanting SHAME! SHAME! etc; and more slight venting of frustrations in not getting the full picture of exactly what's changed + wondering if there's anything that could be done to address it without completely destroying the dev's motivation to sign into Git. ((And I 100% appreciate that "documentation" is the main downfall of many multinational professional software outfits...)) 🙄

Procs DO fire after the game determines targets hit; otherwise multiple targets wouldn't take damage from any procs slotted into an AoE. What's happening in the "variable recharge" powers is that they have a static base recharge time (typically the shortest possible) that the power always uses whenever it first activates... then the game checks what the power's valid targets are and triggers its effects on them. These effects all kick in more or less simultaneously, doing things like inflicting damage/debuffs/CC/etc, triggering the activation of any procs etc (based on the power's current recharge), and also triggering the variable recharge mechanic which waits for a second or two before manually adding an extra X seconds per target affected onto the parent power's current recharge time. The power always activates using its shortest possible (base) recharge time - the lengthening of that recharge time happens AFTER you trigger the power... whenever that power's other effects (including procs) have already been triggered. You can see this happening in the CoDv2 entry for stuff like Cinders.

STAHP beating on @Troo, dammit. They're making a good point. Not about the magnitude of MoG's protection reductions. But because those reductions weren't listed in the patch notes. I find it annoying whenever changes, even extremely minor changes, get left out of a change log. Because those minor changes can very often have side effects that aren't readily apparent. It's a very basic troubleshooting step: "I'm having an issue with XYZ" --> "OK. Has anything changed?" If the answer is "Well, we don't really know for sure because the list of changes doesn't include everything, only the changes that were deemed sufficiently important or far-reaching" then that's a failing. I realise that condensing down a bunch of GIT-commits to a list of human-readable bullet points can be very difficult (especially for a bunch of volunteers!) and so it's very likely that there's no easy fix to this one. But the complaint itself is a valid one IMHO.

The recharge time on Water Jet and the Epic Blast are the limiting factor. That's why I mentioned potentially swapping out Dehydrate if you have enough global recharge or if you're taking a ranged Epic attack that has a longer cast time... but Dehydrate actually makes a reasonably decent DPA attack whenever it's procced out. If you're sticking local recharge enhancement aspect into Water Jet and the Epic Blast rather than procbombing them then you'll end up with considerably more wiggle room with the timings, but by not procbombing WJ you lose out on a LOT of potential damage since you're using it twice per rotation.

FWIW I ended up with this: Scrapper - Kat_Regen IOed v2.mbd Above numbers are with one stack of Divine Avalanche and Reactive Regeneration set to 0. Doesn't need as much global recharge as before due to Instant Healing uptime not being a thing now; but it has just enough for a seamless Single Target attack chain GD > GC > SD > GC. At-will Melee Softcap (and that's without double stacking DA!) plus all that regeneration and MoG to fall back on keeps it ticking nicely. Debuff Resistance numbers with Ageless running aren't half bad either - I've definitely noticed the extra DDR from Ailment Resistance!

IIRC prior to the introduction of ATOs, Brutes were the top tier Melee AT. They were able to deal more damage than a Scrapper (or at least very similar damage to them - there were a few edge cases depending on your powerset and whether you were fulcrum shifted or not) but with better mitigation and inherent taunt. ATOs and the Stalker Crit mechanic revamp rocketed Scrappers and Stalkers ahead in terms of damage output. Tanks were never really on the board at all for damage output until the revamp on HC. They were simply low damage aggro magnets and a Brute could almost equal them in terms of mitigation with sufficient investment and/or buffs. Then i26p4 hit. Tankers got their base damage buffed and their damage limit increased and their target caps increased and their cone arc size increased and their AoE radius increased and their buff modifiers increased and their power ordering tweaked to provide better AoE capability. Brutes got a slight reduction in their damage limit (nerf) and their ranged damage modifiers were increased (buff) and Fury generation was tweaked so it built up faster and didn't decay as quickly (buff). Brute performance remained roughly the same (if Fulcrum Shifted they went from being slightly better than to slightly worse than a Scrapper, before ATOs) Tanker performance went through the roof. Overnight Tankers almost closed the gap on the other melee ATs in terms of Single Target damage; and began dominating in terms of AoE damage. At least when you discount ATOs. In practice, the Scrapper and Stalker ATOs are sufficiently powerful that those ATs were capable of remaining well ahead of Tankers (and Brutes!) for Single target damage... but for AoE damage things are very different. Because whilst a lot of ATO'ed-up Scrappers (and possibly an Elec/Shield Stalker) are capable of putting out very high big red numbers in their AoEs; without any inherent Taunt they find it more difficult to herd mobs up and cope with "runners". And whilst Brutes possess an inherent Taunt, they don't get anywhere the same level of damage boost from ATOs to ramp up their damage output. Tankers though now have inherent Taunt, decent base damage, larger AoE ranges and higher target caps. Mechanically-speaking there was no contest at all. Whilst it's possible to build an AoE-focused Brute, it generally relies on leaning into things other than the offensive powerset. Epic Pool attacks (which have a 15ft radius and 16 target cap by default) and/or edge cases where Fury affects a specific Secondary Powerset ability (like Brimstone Procs and Burn ticks) but Crits and Gauntlet do not. IMO Tankers needed their AoE damage output reduced because it was outright mechanically unbalanced (bigger target caps + larger coverage range + high base damage) I believe that currently Brutes are only really let down by their utterly rubbish ATOs; which are especially pants compared to the Scrapper and Stalker high-performing ones. If you took everyone's ATOs away then the four Melee ATs would actually be pretty well balanced now (barring a few extra minor tweaks to Tanker "overcap" values etc.)

Depends on the cone, but yeah it's comparatively minor unless you're using *lots* of procs. Crowd Control's the biggest (180 degrees) and from what I can tell a +50% arc increase would bring it from 54.30% to 47.98% base activation chance for 3.5PPM procs. That's about 4.535 average damage per activation, per proc... so realistically worst-case with 4x 3.5PPM Procs it'd be a loss of about -18 damage per activation. The likes of Innocuous Strikes (90 degrees) would go from 54.36% to 50.53%. That's about 2.748 average damage per activation, per proc... so realistically worst-case with 4x 3.5PPM Procs it'd be a loss of about -11 damage per activation. That's barely double figures; and obviously anytime you're not just fighting a single big sack of HP the wider arc itself would more than make up for it; but you just know certain pockets of the playerbase would start getting extremely irate about a few seconds difference on their pylon times... 🙊

1) I don't enjoy trying to catch multiple melee foes within narrow cones; and I think that increasing the Arcs again probably makes sense given that the Devs increased AOE radiuses again. However one thing to keep in mind is that if they increase the Arcs on a power-by-power basis rather than as a global buff then it'd negatively impact proc activation rates in those Cone attacks. So anyone who uses Procbombed Cones in their Single Target attack chain (and there are a fair number of sets that have at least one decent melee Cone) might notice a bit of a loss in Damage. 2) Agreed. I'm still of the opinion that a -50% flat "overcap" reduction would be more balanced than a -67% one. That said, whilst I think they overcorrected Tanker performance slightly; IMO it's not off balance by a huge amount now. Frankly if they just make the Overcap reduction 50% and then reworked the Brute ATOs I'd actually be pretty content now with the overall melee AT balance. [EDIT: Except for the Tanker Inherent. It's a bit lacking as it stands currently with just "Small AoE Punchvoke". Let it increase their aggro cap slightly too, please!] 😉

In short; "Magnitude". You can see it in any power in CoDv2 as long as you set the "Show for AT" box to "None". (it's visible in the Mids database as well but the raw stats there are a bit trickier to get at) (i) See the terms like Melee_Damage and Melee_Debuff_Def and Melee_Ones? Those are modifiers. The first two vary across different ATs and the last one stays constant. There are dozens upon dozens of these and you can see them all on the far right here. (ii) See the actual numbers like "1.0" and "0.67"? That's the magnitude or scale of each effect. It's an indicator of how strong the effect is (and it doesn't care what the effect actually is/does!) That's a good example. Here's the relevant bit for Seeds of Confusion. See? It's applying a "scale" 8.0 effect which gets multiplied by the AT's Ranged_Stun modifier. The upshot is that it inflicts a stun with a base duration of 8*1.863=14.904 seconds on a Controller; and 8*1.49=11.92 seconds on a Dominator [EDIT: ZemX and Uun beat me to it! You wait ages for a math-head then three come along at once... ]

Because the most you'll get out of putting Health IOs into Health is a few HP/Second extra Regeneration (it's the region of ~2.5 HP/Sec before procs and set bonuses) But by putting Health IOs into Frigid Protection you almost double the +Absorb that it grants you every two seconds (from ~18.1 to ~35.5) which stacks up to 6 times. The upshot is you gain about 4 times as much in terms of "sustained damage mitigation"; in addition to an additional ~108 Absorb which sits on top of your regular health pool (for ~212 Total) and acts as a "spike damage buffer".

Assuming that you're referring to the build linked in the OP (AA's original 2023 "AA_AFK_SL_Page5.mxd" build here ) Very rough comparative ballpark numbers WITHOUT Lore/Destiny/Hybrid or -Resistance debuffs factored in: >>> RadM/Stone Brute <<< Assuming 90 Fury (typical value when steamrolling) (Note: @90 Fury Brimstone adds roughly 24*3 damage to Atom Smasher; with a flat 80% activation rate) Atom Smasher (including average Brimstone Proc Dmg): 486.9/11.418 = 42.643 Mud Pots: 42.405 Irradiated Ground: 43.62 Total Average DPS = 128.668 Best case DPS (with all of the above being constantly applied to 10 mobs) = 1286.682 -------------------- >>> Elec/RadM Tanker <<< Atom Smasher: 311.6/13.038 = 23.899 Lightning Field: 28.45 Irradiated Ground: 34.35 Total Average DPS = 86.699 Best case DPS "pre i28p2 patch" (LF+IR applied to 10 mobs. AS applied to 16 mobs, with all taking full damage) = 1010.390 Best case DPS "on Live right now" (LF+IR applied to 10 mobs. AS applied to 16 mobs, with the last 6 taking 33% damage) = 914.792 However it's important to note that this Tanker build really isn't min-maxed for passive damage output. Whilst it has two damage auras and a PBAoE... it's not running Assault or stacking Damage Set Bonuses. It doesn't have a Gaussian Proc in Tactics or Focused Accuracy. It's procbombing Lightning Field and Irradiated Ground and Atom Smasher rather than slotting them up for Damage and Recharge Aspect; etc, etc. However it's still a perfectly effective AFK Farming build because it hits the required passive survivability thresholds. AFK farmers don't really need to do high DPS, even if specific defensive sets have a lot more wiggle room than others and let you push the envelope a bit more.

Nope. Procbomb Frozen Aura instead. It's also worth noting that any Healing Procs in Frigid protection only get the opportunity to trigger whenever there is a foe within range (due to the way its Absorb is coded). Globals like Preventive Maintenance are fine though; and Guaranteed 120s duration procs like Numina's Convalescence or Miracle can generally be kept up OK. A Power Transfer Proc is sorta bearable in it if you have no other active sources of Healing and you're constantly surrounded by foes. I'd always aim to ED-cap the Healing Aspect and slot at least one EndMod IO, Sticking some slow in it can be a good idea too (or taking an Intuition Radial Alpha slot). Personally I settled on this slotting for my own Fire/Ice Blaster; plus an Intuition Radial Alpha. [Heal, Proc; Heal, Proc; EndMod, Proc]

Yup.

No. If you have enemies around you then up to 16 of them will get damaged. AND If you have teammates (including your pets and/or your teammates' pets) around you then up to 30 of them will get healed. There is no effect on friendly NPCs, league mates, or any other friendly-but-unteamed players. However according to the patch notes for Issue 28 Page 2 this behaviour is not correct, as it should be affecting up to 255 allies, not up to 30 teammates. There is already a fix in the works for proc activation rate in Ground Zero. This targeting issue was mentioned in the same bug report but I don't see it being expressly acknowledged by the Devs. So it might be worth waiting until after that fix hits Live and then if GZ's target selection is still not correct filing a separate bug report.

I was just making a clarification to the target behaviour of Ground Zero; which you and Warboss were both discussing; and the reason I quoted you was due to your mention that non-teammate allies (like league mates) should be getting affected by GZ; which is older behaviour that isn't currently the case on Live. "Did you have all 30 targets (league mates, teammates, enemies) within a 15ft radius counted" "It can hit a max of 16 enemies within that radius, with the rest being allies" etc. (i) At the moment Ground Zero's 'heal' is only targeting teammates and their pets, not other allies like league mates. It's up in the air whether this is intended behaviour. (ii) Due to the way the Devs have recoded Ground Zero; it's now calling two separate power executions - one for the 'heal' and one for the 'damage'. The target lists for these are treated separately. So it's targeting "30 (alive) Teammates and Teammate pets" and "16 (alive) Enemies" rather than "30 (alive) entities, 16 of which can be enemies".

Prior to i28p2 Ground Zero affected "Ally (Alive)". However currently its buff component is only affecting "Player Teammate (Alive)" https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=redirects.rad_armor.ground_zero_ally&at=scrapper Testing has shown that it's currently healing your teammates as well as any pets (including Lores) belonging to those teammates. But it is not affecting nearby NPCs or unteamed friendlies any longer. The proc activation rate in Ground Zero's offensive component is also bugged currently (about 1/3rd of what it should be!) but a fix for that is on the way.

FWIW - CP has now confirmed the underlying cause of this has been found and fixed, so expect Ground Zero to start proccing properly again SOONTM.

Fantastic, thankyou!! 👍