Sniktch

As a...sidegrade? idea to this: Make the MM ATOs be, instead of "Pet Set". Universal Damage. Can still be slotted in pets - but can also be slotted in the attacks. While the MM attacks will still be eh at best, this might maybe possibly get them to be something other than a hardpass or concept gimmick. Mechanically, this is a lot easier than changing what sets the upgrades can take, and gives them parity to all other ATOs except Controller and Dom (which have their own issues, sadly).

Stability. Dependability. Permanence. All else is bonus.

That is exactly the intent the original devs had - Rage is powerful, and stacking it should come with a cost. I am OK with this implementation; it's not perfect, but nothing is.

The 17 is not a hard cap, but it IS a global cap - it changes for ALL ATs or none.

After some thought, I have to maintain my stance that this IS a breaking of the cottage rule. Mechanically, yes, it's still a click - but gameplay wise? To players, it's the same as a toggle. Get it, set it, forget it, same as Practiced Brawler and Kuji-in-Rin. While the cottage rule might technically be kept by leaving it a click, such technicalities are sophistry. Further, it's a 'toggle' with a ridiculously low END cost - at exact-perma, .04 EPS. Half of Combat Jumping. For 20% ToHit and 80% Damage. As a comparison point, Offensive Adaptation gives a ~32% Damage buff and a ~8% ToHit buff, costs 0 EPS, but requires you take multiple other powers from the set and reduces your resistances by ~8% across the board while it's active. It also prevents Efficient and Defensive from being active, but that's a minor cost overall. Now, this proposed change won't alter how I play my SS characters in the slightest, so I could just let it slide - but it's a bad precedent to set, a bad way to balance, and I'm invested in the longevity of Homecoming, not my own personal immediate benefit. If Super Strength is 'balanced' with an effectively no-cost boost of that size being permanently available, then I'm sure it'd be a fine way to give Energy Melee its single-target throne back, right? Obvious sarcasm, I hope - but a good illustration of where these cats are going to stampede when the bag is opened.

Even at launch, there was an END crash - to balance the power of a Build-Up lasting two minutes instead of ten seconds. AFAIK, all Build-Ups have ~5 END cost. So does Rage - but you have to cast it 1/12 as often for saturation. Mathematically, you can't perma any Build-up, but even if you could, you'd be looking at 60 END vs. Build-Up's 5. The original END crash was 25%, making the total cost of the power 30 assuming no +MaxEND buffs. How do you balance the cost of the power dropping to 1/6th of its current, while remaining the same buff with functionally a longer duration?

This would be the first 'refreshing' power in Cities, as far as I know. Even removing stacking, however, you're tapdancing on a land mine by removing all negatives from the power. Unless the upfront END cost is a hell of a lot higher, this is a pretty big break of the cottage rule. This would also spawn a tsunami of "why can't we have it too?!?!"

AH access won't happen - because of the way the AH server loads, it would have to load in EVERY SINGLE BASE on all servers every single time anyone tried to access it from a base. Yes, even bases with nobody in them. They'd have to entirely rewrite the AH code, possibly also the zone and base code, to make that not happen, and that's a timescale measured in man-YEARS, not man-hours.

Thing is, I DO think one thing needs to change - the mitigation debuff DOES need to be armor-agnostic. As it sits, it's disproportionate on the sets that rely on Defense, with resist and healing sets not caring much. Ice, Energy Aura, and SR don't necessarily deserve that sort of punchdown - Shield's a slightly different story, due to Against All Odds. But thusfar, every attempt to get to that has run into a screaming wall of 'donwannitanymore!', thus my patience running a bit thin and leaving me a little snappy. Apologies.

Page 15, last post. Stone Melee vs. Super Strength. Not going to do the Mids damage number comparison again; it's been done, and you're capable of doing it yourself if you wanna; would quote the post, but the forum software eats things if I try to change pages during a reply. And regarding 'near-perma' being good enough: The folks pissing and whining in this thread are doing so because of the old Live bug that made first all of the crashes, then just the Defense crash, 'skippable' by having it back on before it wore off, thus requiring actual perma, not 'near'. That bug got fixed by SCoRE during the dark years, via a large-scale rewrite of the powers code - that's powers plural, not "just Rage"; they had to rebuild the block that handles power activations and falloffs at the very least, probably a lot more besides, as the reason Castle never fixed the def debuff dodge was NC/Paragon suits would not permit him AND THE WHOLE POWERS CODE TEAM to do nothing but that for 3 months, preferring instead they focused on making new shinies for release. Note that would have been fix attempt #2 - the first try is the one that made the END and damage crashes unavoidable, but the Def one evaded it due to spaghetti code.

The reason Bloodlust stacks don't refresh is because nothing in the game actually refreshes, aside Vengeance and even then I could be wrong about that; been a while since I used Vengeance on anyone. If you look at Broadsword/Katana/Claws for example, Parry, Divine Avalanche, and Follow-Up don't refresh, they just add another stack. The reason you get the behavior noted is because Bloodlust has a max-stacks cap, just like Street Justice Combo and Water Blast Tidal; when you hit the max, you generate no more until you're not at the cap. ...actually, that might be one reason the set feels so off - quite frequently, you generate multiple stacks at once, and they all fall off at the same time. Sudden big swings in a stack-based gimmick, rather than slow-build, slow-fall, always feel funky; doubly so when it's recharge and END costs that are affected. Honestly, my 'feels' about Savage is Street Justice and Dual Blades had a baby, foisted it off on Fiery Melee to raise, and the kid learned the wrong thing from each 'parent'.

Very close is not is, and the devs did not assume everyone took Hasten, or had purples/ATOs/LOTGs out the wazoo, or were playing Elec Armor. They balanced in-set, on SOs. Not Common IOs - because A: that's pushing folks into Inventions whether they want to be there or not, and B: after Freedom, all Invention system access was a subscription perk or a la carte purchase, so they HAD to balance 'not including Inventions', because some players flat-out could not access them. Hasten is an entire kettle of worms, and has been since closed beta. And pre-ED, you in fact COULD perma-hasten - with 6 Recharge SOs. Didn't even have to be up-level, even was good enough. You could also perma Unstoppable, Elude, MoG, and Instant Healing was a toggle. This was also when Rage was a lot easier to perma - it got changed by ED, and that's when this particular shitstorm FIRST started blowing, Tankers flipping out cause they wanted easy perma-rage back. This was also when it only had an END crash, nothing else. So they whined and raged and frothed, got told there'd be a tradeoff for it, said fine - and got the first 'damage crash' added, which was Only Affecting Self. Of course, this prompted an even bigger explosion of waaaah. And on down the years it rolled. The waaaah is still going, and to be blunt, I'm just a little tired of hearing it.

Sort of? Brute Fury works off of that - doesn't care about aggro, mind, just attacks. So an AoE targeted on your neighbor ticks Fury just as much as a knuckle sandwich with your name on it. But yes, you COULD jackleg a 'defensive Fury' power in, depending on how much code time and dev sanity you're willing to feed Cthulu. Note, it's not 'tracking' anything, it's just a buff in response to any attack roll made at you. And it won't help you soak an alpha at all, which is kind of what is being looked for, so...clarifying, the answer is "probably, but that's not exactly helpful for the problem at-hand."

SRU: read my post. It's not tracked on the player at all, it's tracked on each individual critter. And there's no way currently to hook from the critter aggro sheet to a buff on the player without risking a nuclear fireball of code meltdown.

They aren't. Every player character in the game, every player-spawned pet, all have the exact same aggro cap - 17 entities. Now, if you're asking how the game handles that, it checks every active critter in an instance every pulse, compares their aggro sheet to viable targets, and picks the highest number to target - grossly simplifying, cause code is ugly, of course. If a player is on 18 sheets, then the critter with the lowest hate for them stops seeing them as viable until they're not on 18 sheets. A lot of people WANT the aggro caps changed on an AT-by-AT basis, but that's asking the devs to tapdance into a heavily mined spaghetti factory to play with a Jenga tower at best, thanks to how messy the CoX code is. As an example, the option to numerically show recharge remaining on powers is a Homecoming addition. That took a long time, and blew up the beta server at least twice. Just to add a countdown on your power icons if you flip an option. Now, if you're asking how the game handles different aggro GENERATION, that's a threat multiplier inherent to each AT - tanks and brutes have 400% bonus aggro, Scrappers have 300%, etc. and all those are actually coded into the powers, activated by the AT hooks. Kind of like Fiery Embrace - if you look at the "Detailed Info" on a power when on a character who could have chosen Fiery Aura as an armor set, you'll see "+x Fire Damage, ignores enhancements and resistances, only when Fiery Embrace is active" on every damaging power. The AT aggro modifier is done the same way; you can actually see it on Pool attacks. They'll list the variable "+x% taunt for x seconds" on them, and say "only if character is Tank" for example.

As has been demonstrated several times in this very thread, SS isn't 'trash'; it's on-par with Stone Melee, which is a set people aren't bitching ceaselessly about at all. It's arguably on-par with mace if your benchmarks aren't just DPS/DPA, ahead of Ice on Brutes... but it's not Titan, so 'it sucks', and the folks howling for the brakes to be cut never seem to address comparisons that show it as being solid if not eye-popping, no matter how often they're raised. So to answer your question, Megajoule, the latter is the cynical and logical deduction. Fortunately, the devs seem to have also drawn that conclusion, as others have noted; the last functional interaction with them regarding this 'problem' and I use the term loosely was basically a 'keep on topic' in early July. Closing on 2 months of silence is, to my perception, a pretty hard "nope". As to 'balanced around Rage all the time' - you ever Mids, Zot? The original devs balanced around SOs and without factoring pools. Actual 'perma' Rage takes 4 +3 SOs, and that's a gap time of 1.8 seconds Max SO gap time is barely higher, and even going full 6 level 50 Recharge common IOs - which is explicitly outside the original balance math - only gets you 10 seconds of grace. So can we bury that fucking bullshit yet, or is it gonna be the new 'weekly Rage thread' meme?

Honestly, I think Savage overall suffers from the Exhaustion mechanic a lot more than it should, and Stalker Savage has even worse issues due to the DoTs messing with Placate and the ATIO Hide, and the leap being either a weak attack if you're in close or a bad way to start a fight for a Stalker if you're at max distance. The set feels more END-heavy than it says it is on all ATs, and I think it's the constant up-and-down Exhaustion/Bloodlust cycle that does it. No great ideas on fixes, sadly, just observations on what seems to make it lag so badly I've dropped two Savage Melee characters already.

I'd be onboard with either buffing the damage of the attacks OR reducing their END costs by 50%; as it sits, the only MM attacks ever taken outside "petless" MMs are the Demon ones because -Resist. You don't even see them being used as set mules because MMs benefit so little overall from set bonuses, and honestly even the whips are fairly atrocious effect-to-END-wise. Lash does roughly as much damage as a Brute or Tanker tier 2 attack, and it costs 10 END, for example. The Tanker/Brute 2's generally cost 5-6. I do get the thematic the devs were going for originally - problem is, it gives the entire AT 3 hard-pass powers per Primary from a strictly numerical view, and even a character-focused player has to do SOME degree of 'filtering' within the game framework for the things that just don't give enough bang for buck, purely due to the limited number of powers and slots we have. So yeah, make the MM attacks worthwhile in one way or another.

To paraphrase one of the live devs: "Stacked Rage made Scrappers with SS do....ugly things." Stone I'd be fine with, Super Strength only if Rage got changed to Build Up or similar for them.

I believe that's a code related issue - you ever notice how sometimes you'll see   in ingame text?

Don't feed the trolls, Kimuji - it just encourages them.

Some things to point out regarding 'how it was on Live': The damage-crash skip fix was intended to fix the def debuff crash skip at the same time. It didn't, because CoX code is Jenga in a mined, exploded string factory. Why didn't they fix it again? Because it would have taken a hefty rewrite of multiple sections of the powers code, which is what SCoRE did during the dark years - and Castle could never get the greenlight from NCSoft/Paragon suits for a calendar quarter with no new content, just fixes for old problems, for understandable if lamentable reasons. SCoRE could, because they weren't beholden to bottom-line financial concerns. So SCoRE did, and now we're here. Even so, perma-Rage was never intended to be the norm - the devs balanced around SOs, did not assume Hasten was always included, and did not assume 80-90% global recharge buff was somehow the norm. Rage, on SOs, goes 'perma' at 4 +3 SOs - but the last one only gets you 3.5 seconds reduction in the recharge time, bringing it from 121.7 to 118.2. Even maxing out on 50 Common IOs only drops the recharge to 110 seconds; the last 3 get you a net of 10 seconds. You have to slam into the ED cap like a Titan V to get there, and one sneeze of -Rech and you fall off that wagon. Of course, LOTG, Hasten, purple/ATO +10% recharge bonuses all blow that up - but they weren't used as baseline assumptions for good reasons. Not everyone wants Hasten, for a variety of reasons. Purples and ATOs were extremely scarce on Live. LOTG was an easy 8 digits of Inf. which was a significant investment for anyone but megagrinders. Homecoming changed a lot of this, and now the folks who back then either could afford the crazy slotting we now can consider 'normal' or couldn't resist burning a pool for yellow hands want their bug back - 99% of the time, it's to be paired with Shield for even more +damage/tohit/AoE spam, and a Def debuff impairs their survivability. IT'S SUPPOSED TO! That is the tradeoff you make for Rage's massive boost - a brief but noticable vulnerability and an enforced 'timeout' from spamming that huge damage boost. Super Strength isn't a 'top-tier' set, but it's also not 'weak'; part of this is because the original 6 Tank sets were a spectrum of damage vs. control, with Energy Melee at the damage end and Ice Melee at the control end; Mace, Axe, Stone, and Super Strength were various shades of tradeoff between the two; generally speaking, Axe and pre-rework Mace were the next steps inward from EM and Ice respectively, and SS and Stone the two 'middle-ground' sets; they're very similar as a previous poster noted, with Stone slightly more control-capable and SS slightly more damage-capable. SS is still very good soft control, especially if you actually use Handclap - whether via immobilize or -KB IO or simply smart positioning - on a semi-regular basis. Combine Handclap's stun, knock, and taunt with regular taunting and/or Jab/Punch spam, and you've got your 'filler' for the damage crash that lets you keep aggro, keep enemies off-kilter, keep influencing the fight. Stomp, Haymaker, KO Blow, Punch when the crash is over for more control, more damage - it's not a 'suck' set, no matter how you try to paint it. It's just not Titan Weapons - which is a damn good thing, because Titan Weapons is fucking broken. And a note on "I don'wanna use Insps every two minutes!" - if you're not getting your tray completely refilled on a regular basis just from kill-drops, you're doing something wrong. The devs set the droprate on Inspirations high; they wanted them to be USED, not hoarded. It doesn't take much - one small purple negates over half the def-crash. Now, do I think the mitigation crash should be armor-agnostic? Hell yes - but every single time anything of the sort gets suggested, the response is shrieks of "just take it out!" instead. -Resist instead, a split of Def and Resist, whatever makes it armor-neutral, fine - but an 80% damage buff that last two minutes and can be functionally stacked four times in extreme circumstances needs a goddamn heavy balancer. That's not even factoring in the ToHit buff.

Doubtful, as it's part of the torso, not a separate dongle; you get Imperial Dynasty capetail and jacket from the same selector. If it was like the Tech Knight belt, with a separate selector, it might be doable - but it'd still be 'cut' to the female torso sliders, not the male, so you'd have gaps/mismatches.

The problem with the bolero at least is it isn't just the 'jacket, cape, ruff' - it's the entire torso. The back of the jacket is the back of the character model; whatever chest you pick actually doesn't have a rear-piece, so the female torso geometry is baked into the piece. To port to males would require scratch-building a male Bolero torso, and as far as I know, they haven't quite got 'entirely new piece' things sorted. I'd LOVE to see it - that sweeping robe just SCREAMS Ric Flair - but I think at current it's out of reach, as are most gender port-across parts.

Basically, the stack-builder sets have a cap on how many max you can have, and new ones don't overwrite old ones - Titan Weapons Build Momentum is the specific exception to this rule; it expressly overwrites any current Momentum with its twice-as-long special version. So if you Water Blast someone, you get 1 stack. Timer starts on it. Hit Tidal Forces, it tries to give 3 stacks - but you already have one, so it only gives 2. THEIR timers start. If you faff about for 6-ish seconds before firing an expender, the first stack will decay. Street Justice works the same way.