tidge

Vulnerability is a pretty awesome power. If there is anything wrong with it, I'd say the inability to change the color of the effect may be it.

When I was a new player: Endurance is an issue! When I was a slightly experienced player: Taking Hasten before level 20 sure makes Endurance issues worse! When I was an experience player: Hey, thanks for inherent Fitness pool, and slotting my powers with enhancements really helps! Where I am now: Oh yeah, it is up to me to plan to handle Endurance burn.

I was very disappointed when playing a Scrapper using Dual Blades. The most disappointing element of the set for me was the lack of an inherent Build Up. So maybe I'd like it better on a Stalker?... of course it is still pretty much only Lethal damage :P

MMV, but most of my Controller builds with 90s AoE controls were almost never slotted with %damage... I either needed the set bonus in that power and/or the nature of the power made it such that I'd want it slotted with control and recharge anyway.

This is how I felt about what was happening with Maintenance Drone. I've got a long-used routine with my henchmen, and every once in a while I get the sense that there have been some subtle tweaks to henchmen AI (robots are all ranged, so it is pretty easy to notice when something is different).... but without any notes it seems really paranoid to ask about this sort of thing. For example: The Giant Monster ToHit chances were buffed... so when Maintenance Drone wasn't repairing the henchmen, it wasn't as if I could get a huge sample size, but it certainly felt like henches weren't getting healed by the drone as in the past... because Protector Bots were still casting their heals (which aren't great). This turned out to be an introduced bug. A similar 'new' effect I've noticed, but could be attributable to the new ToHits (but feels like it isn't) is that repositioning henchmen, even within Supremacy range (so also FFG, MM auras), seems to make it much more likely that a GM is going to hit them... I'm basing this off of the GM AoEs, when I have a Barrier up on the henches, This isn't the sort of thing that is easy to monitor, and after a week of i28p2 I've basically stopped repositioning henches and getting results (defeat times, hench survival) closer to what I experienced from the previous year.

I don't like this argument about increased resistance... specifically because "85% -> 90%" is referring to an AT that has already extremely high HP, such that the player shouldn't be ignoring how much HP they'd be Regenerating (or gaining, through something like a %Heal), or extra resistance they might gain through a Scaling Damage Resistance effect, or whatever. This specific "math claim" about resistance seems to be ignoring half-a-dozen other features of the game.

I see Hasten as burning a pool choice. On the character I referenced above, I have 4x from Force of Will, 2x Concealment, 1x for Combat Jumping and 1 for Aid Other. Only the Force of Will powers are holding more than 1 slot. EDIT: I also want to add (since it only occasionally is brought up) that the slotting of any Recharge IOs in Hasten will have their potency scale down as a player exemplars. Practically this often means that for some lower content and some builds it becomes necessary to have 3-slotted Hasten in order to have it be "perma". As a practical matter, I rarely take Hasten before level 20 (Hasten doesn't really help most lower tier primary/secondary powers IMO, other pool powers provide more bang-for-the-choice IMO below 20) so I'm pretty comfortable having something like perma-Dom tied to the lowest level an attuned LotG will work at. For such low-level content perma-Dom isn't really necessary IMO, especially if I've got my attacks and controls 5-slotted.

perma-Hasten does not interest me, but perma-Domination does. A recent build: 5x +7.5% from LotG 4x +10% from Purples (3x Damage, 1x Control) 1x +10% sATO 1x +8.75% Reactive Defense <- 6 slots 1x +7.5% Gladiator's Net <- 5 slots 1x +7.5% Basilisk's Gaze <- 4 slots 1x +6.25% Decimation <- 5 slots 1x +6.25 Cloud Senses <- 4 slots 1x +6.25 Positron's Blast <- 5 slots 1x +6.25 Expedient Reinforcement <- 4 slots. I', not crazy about this, because of the set level (and there is a Force Feedback in a power as well)... all this is slight overkill, but I found that the target of +136.25% was covering all my attack chain shenanigans. Perma-dom would be easier, and might scale down below lvl 20, if I used Hasten... but I rather like the sets where I have them, even without considering the global Recharge. I will note: I have at least one Dominator where I didn't catalyze the ATO so I could get 5x +10% and another +8.75%. Practically this typically results in a net of only +1.25%

But on how many characters? I have seen the price over 2M each, but typically the price sits below that point.

It wasn't that long ago that the supply of Prismatics was 800 or fewer, and then over the course of a few weeks I'd see filled bids of 2Minf or so. This supply was about 2K yesterday and over 3K today. Selling Prismatics is one of the lowest overhead ways to make Inf... and I'm not sure that this is a place to try to make a fortune from flipping.

There was a recent set of days where a player was routinely (and repeatedly) asking for someone to run a Seige mission for their level 50... and I can guess why. I would have thought that sometime in the 36 hours of them near-constantly asking they'd just run the necessary missions themselves (direct or via Ouro) of join a BAF... but no, "too much effort".

Me too, as players gobble up prismatics on the AH. It does appear that folks have again flooded the AH with them, but it looks like the prices have been set too high for most of them.

I interpret 1.0 base accuracy as "against even-level enemies, with no other buffs or debuffs in play, the character will have the default ToHit chance"... and also as "I'd had better slot accuracy". Most attacks have a base accuracy of 1.0... the powers to watch out for are the ones that are much worse. There were a few with incredibly high base accuracies. The most recent page (i28p2) address some powers on both sides of the 1.0 divide. If the character had some +ToHit or global accuracy, you might be able to avoid slotting for accuracy, but mileage will vary depending on what you are facing.

So, about the +ToHit bonus... I couldn't tell what was actually going on under-the-hood, only what I could see from attribute monitoring and/or gui icons.

The only unexpected thing I noticed immediately after i28p2 was that something was seriously wrong with the Maintenance Drone from Robotics, but this appears to have been an introduced bug that has since been addressed. It was so bad, and so unexpected that it certainly felt like a 'nerf'. For a while there I thought it was an unannounced change to give that one user (who missed seeing his Protector Bots cast heals) what they wanted.

Per CoD it has a base accuracy of 1.0 I'd slot it for Accuracy, unless somehow the range was the reason for taking it.

I'm not sure what this would accomplish: in team mode Tanker damage never mattered, unless the Tanker was off by herself... other ATs (e.g. Blasters) are pretty much nuking entire spawns. This is the reason why it is sort of easy to believe that it was the solo performance of Tankers (with large spawn sizes) that was the motivation for the wholesale changes (as initially proposed, as rolled out). Bluntly: I'm surprised that the devs even care about what players do solo, especially in instanced missions (AE or otherwise)... it's not like Solo tankers were en masse routinely running 'defeat all' solo Tinpex, ITF, BAF, whatever. I mean... I've taken my Tankers through some pretty long, painful TFs filled with 'defeat all' missions, but it isn't like such things are particularly enjoyable to me. I suppose *if* the devs were actually concerned about a Tanker out-DPSing other ATs *on teams* (for 'roleplay' reasons?), then this would have been a fine suggestion. At this point in the game, the ONLY AT-centered knob the devs seem interested in turning is the damage knob. I don't think there is any appetite for making other ATs more likely to take damage, be controlled, or be hit... except for a smallish number of critters that get improved ToHit chances (or AutoHit powers). Based on the wholesale nature of most of the recent Tanker changes, it doesn't look like the devs are particularly willing to focus on specific powers unless something really gets their attention. Not appropriate for Tankers, but like many folks I felt the change to Seeds of Confusion was way overdue... yet the scale-back of Plant Control was accompanied by a general boost to the usability of long-range AoE controls... it doesn't bring them anywhere close to the utility of the crashless, fast-recharging Blaster nukes, but it was something. I didn't see any signs of dev interest in offering the Tanker AT anything similar to offset the scale backs of i28p2 (again, the PPM Gauntlet fix was necessary for balance).

It's possible that the whining had something(*1) to do with it, but I get the sense that whenever the devs think rewards are outstripping effort, they try to turn the dial back(*2)... Tankers were recognized as being slightly better farmers and it wasn't hard to see a bajillion 'in mission' level 50 Tankers, so I suspect they felt the need to smack down Tankers just because they had become the most popular farming choice. Frankly, I think the efforts in i28p2 to curb Tankers have failed to teach some important lessons to the dev team and community: Tankers got where they had been because of an excellent, but over-tuned change to their inherent. There are a bunch of other AT inherents that are terrible, and deserve to be looked at (ehem, VEATs) The dev team has been really slow to make Tanker primary T9s worthwhile across all sets. I can't imagine an AT like a Blaster skipping or under-slotting their primary T9s like Tankers do. If there is a dev vision that Tankers are supposed to have some role other than 'do damage', maybe the T9s ought to reflect that. I find it janky that the Blaster t9s removed crashes to improve performance, and yet the Tanker t9s can basically be afterthoughts in almost every build. (*1) Not exactly whining, but the Scrapper/Tanker/Brute ATO discussion always sounds a little whiny to me... Scrappers only hold their ston times because of their ATOs, yet somehow folks still think Brutes deserve better ATOs (more like Tankers' is sometimes suggested). I agree the Brute ATO look lackluster in comparison to Scrapper and Tanker, but this ignores some of the other crummy ATOs to focus on "wah Scrapper/Tanker". (*2) see also the GM changes in i28p2

MMV, but I'd dump the Speed pool before Leadership. Tactics also provides +Perception... I feel like it helps my MMs, but others may not notice. The Leadership pool has offers places to put Defense IOs.

I was always hoping that Goldside would get the equivalent of VEATs and HEATs, let's call them PEATs... that followed a similar trajectory of the VEATs... with the two initial choices leading to 'specializations' where the player could end up as a Seer or IDF (with their 'pets') or an experimental Hamidon-Hybrid fusion with its 'pets'. The fourth would probably just be something like a Carnie of Light, so the paths would be 'Resistance' -> Seer or Carnie, 'Loyalist' -> IDF or Hybrid.

As was pointed out by @ZemX : Aside from the PPM formulae mess-up, It's hard to see where Tankers were 'over-performing' except on solo x8. It's hard to imagine x8 and not think 'farming' (of one sort or another). Hey that was my joke about the animation times needing a 2% increase for 'ston-parity'! The argument about 'roles meaning less damage for some' has a fundamental flaw: 99%+ of the game's rewards are based on defeats from dealing damage... so for solo play, I like when similar ATs achieve similar completion times for similar rewards. Another drawback with 'roles'... nobody is calling for 'survival nerfs' to all non-Tankers. We have seen some of the more ridiculous stuff (Rune of Protection) get hit, but that wasn't specifically to give Tankers a more important role.

So what I'm seeing... Tanker animation times should have been increased by 2% to achieve parity with Brutes?

MMV, but I got the sense that there was some disingenuity in the (various) stated rationales for the changes targeting Tankers in i28p2. The radius fix for PPM was a no-brainer. The change to buff/debuff scales... as opposed to looking at specific powers... um okay? The "Tankers will be AoE specialists" made no sense given the initial round of changes... and it isn't as if the Tanker secondaries suddenly got new AoE attacks. I feel like most of the Tanker changes could have waited to allow the i28p2 focus to be more on Controllers and KW.

(some of) This mirrors what I am seeing: I definitely feel like this was a LOT of extra effort applied across-the-board to target one AT that simply happened to be doing what other ATs could already do (and still do). I don't typically farm(*1), but I did happen to have a Tanker just about ready to hit level 40 when i28p2 went live. Historically: by the mid 30s my characters have enough slots to handle both the offensive and defensive side of "turning up the spawn size"... and characters with armor sets (of Blasters) can usually crank that dial up more than other ATs. My soloing Tanker did have to turn spawn size back a notch after p2, I felt like I couldn't defeat (too big) spawns fast enough to stay on the green side of the grass before things would go pear-shaped. For smaller spawns (under the newly established cap) I don't notice much difference otherwise. (*1) For me: The closest regular activity is occasionally running Tip missions at x8, to most quickly get a daily Catalyst drop.