csr

You appear to be referring to me. In which case your assertion is flat out wrong. "I don't think", "I suspect", "maybe" are not assertions of fact. All of my sentences not describing my personal experience included such terms. But for the record, Captain Powerhouse has been wrong in the past, and will be wrong in the future. If he is, then I won't hesitate to point that out. Telling someone they are wrong is not an insult. Suggesting they may be wrong certainly isn't either. In this case, I think he may be wrong. Or it may be that the Brute taunt toggle bug does account for all of it. It just doesn't seem to fit perfectly with what I'm seeing, since I'm having trouble holding things in close with a Tanker, not a Brute. If the Brute toggle is all there is to it, then I'm wrong. It won't be the first time, nor will it be the last.

A LOT of changes were made to the powers database in this patch. I can think of four things that went wrong right off the top of my head. (The Brute taunt toggle is likely a database error. The Jump Kick KU percentage certainly is. The missing PPM entry causing 100% chance for KB also is. The new Phantom Army effect where two pets fail to respawn on zoning could be code or data.) I personally don't expect Captain Powerhouse to be perfect. Unfortunately, I don't think he could get a good beta test of the last changes because the holidays slowed things down so much that we just got to a "push it live ASAP" point. So some things slipped through. With the current development environment with a shortage of beta testers due to the relatively low overall population of HC that's just going to happen with large sets of changes like this. 🤷‍♂️ On the plus side, this dev team is far quicker to fix things than a commercial studio would be. But for them to fix them, someone has to tell them that it's broken.

I don't think the target cap is involved here. I was in a Synapse TF earlier tonight with another Tanker and 2 Brutes. I was playing a FA/SF Tanker. If I hared off solo I could keep aggro for the most part when I used Burn, but if I was with the team and used Burn, then more often than not things took off running, despite the fact that we had 2 Tankers running taunt auras right in the middle of the critters. The DoT explanation would account for most of that. Though I suspect it might simply be frequency of attacks rather than actual DoT that causes the AI to run for the hills. The real question though is why aren't they being stopped from doing so now, when they were before? Captain Powerhouse did add a Taunt effect to the initial Burn (not the patch). Maybe something went wrong there. Heck, it's almost acting like he added Placate instead.

To be clear... is this just Brute taunt toggles? Or all taunt toggles?

I tried the following on my Fire Contoller: With Bright Fire Imps I used Ouro, Base-passcode and Base Portal zones and all three remained. With Original Imps I used a tram and all three Imps remained. With Dark Fire Imps I used a tram and all three Imps remained. On Illusion Controller: With Bright Phantom Army I used a tram and all three remained. With Mirror Phantom Army I used a Tunnel and two disappeared. With Phantom Mirror Phantom Army I used the tram and two disappeared.

I was thinking it might be an AI change. The first time I noticed it I deliberately hit a Sky Raider Porter Lt with Taunt hoping he wouldn't teleport. He then proceeded to run about 50' down a hall, turned around, came back into range to use his gun and then stayed there for a bit until I Taunted him again, then he closed in. Throughout the rest of the arc I was having similar issues with Porters and Wing Raiders. It was the fact that the Porters actually ran away rather than teleporting that led me wonder if perhaps they had new AI. Only a couple 'ported. This was in the Roy Cooling arc. Then later on my Stone/Fire Tanker in the Envoy of Shadows arc pretty much every single Spectral Demon Lord that I didn't hold with Char ran at 20% health or so and not one of them stopped when Taunted. I repeatedly had to wait for them to return to their start position and drop Invisibility to finish them off to complete missions. As Summers said, foes continuing to run sometimes happened before, but with nowhere near the frequency and the duration that I encountered. It might have just been a run of bad luck. I mentioned it only because it was so irritating and because it wasn't explained by the Toggle issue. Mostly because it was so irritating.

Another thing that seems odd to me is that the use of Taunt on mobs running away doesn't seem to stop them any more. They just keep going. This has happened on both my Dark/Stone Tanker and my Stone/Fire Tanker.

To be clear, I said the changes to the Tanker melee caps are so great that the caps will rarely prove a factor. The arc increase at 50% is still a significant buff, it's just that the target cap increases don't mean a whole lot at that level of arc increase. In a saturated environment such as farming, they mean something, but in a more sparse environment where a team wipes stuff out before it can fully clump up, the caps don't mean all that much. My 8 to 9 square foot benchmark was for the farm environment, since I was talking about being able reaching the cap at all. A higher number of from 12 to 24 square feet per target is needed to estimate targets hit in a sparser environment (I use 12 even for my farm benchmark). And when you start getting to 16 target caps, the number of targets actually available gets to be important. Even at 10 that means something at lower levels. Here's a list of the Tanker melee cone attacks I have hitting more than 5 on average even in a farm environment: Battle Axe / Pendulum, Staff Fighting / Guarded Spin, Staff Fighting / Innocuous Strikes, Titan Weapons / Arc of Destruction and War Mace / Crowd Control. Note that Crowd Control was already at a target cap of 10 (and Pendulum was probably supposed to have the cap of 10 that Cleave got, since BA and WM are otherwise very similar). So only 4 Tanker melee cones are likely to benefit from the cap increase even in a fairly well saturated environment. And two of those are in one set. I have limited access to data mining; just from a private server with me playing solo isn't good for much except coming up with estimates of square feet per target and such. So I'm using a theoretical benchmark. In that benchmark the target cap for Tanker sphere's and ranged cones has a significant effect on the result. Those caps for Tanker melee cones do not. Staff Fighting is the only set where they're more than a small adjustment. Prior to the arc reduction, that wasn't the case. Before that about half of the sets were significantly affected by the cap. Hopefully Captain Powerhouse is using data mining for his performance measures. And if he isn't, then hopefully he isn't simply assuming these powers can reach - or in many cases, even approach - their target caps. I'm not sure how long whatever patch that hits live will remain untouched. But I have to say I think that it is likely going to be later rather than sooner that such matters get addressed. As I think the next set of AT wide changes to Tankers will likely have to wait until all the melee sets that need tweaking are done. Given that other matters are also on Captain Powerhouse's plate, including some that require pretty extensive amounts of work (such as addressing the passive resists of all critters), I don't think that the melee set tweaks will be done soon. Super Strength sure. Energy Melee hopefully. Beyond that?

I get the very same feeling. My biggest complaints right now are: Some sets benefit far more than others from the Tanker Inherent due to it being mostly about AoEs now. The rules regarding target caps seems to need readdressing as Tanker melee cones in general aren't going to be able to hit their caps while most spheres now will hit them easily. It's really just that the target caps are 1, 5, 10 or 16. As it stands now that makes caps meaningless for most Tanker melee cone attacks. When the arc was being increased 100% rather than just 50%, that wasn't the case. I'm going to run down the list of Tanker melee cones (note the "melee" there) to support my main assertion in point #2. I'm going to use square feet per target as my metric. I think you need around 8 or 9 square feet per target to hit the cap based upon experience and some basic testing. Battle Axe: Cleave 2.62 (with the corrected max targets of 10), Pendulum 7.70. I doubt Pendulum will hit 10 often, but it can probably do it. Broad Sword: Slice 5.77, Head Splitter 2.62. Good luck with either hitting 10. Claws: Eviscerate 3.85. Eviscerate won't hit its cap. Dark Melee: Shadow Maul 2.89. Shadow Maul won't hit its cap. Dual Blades: Sweeping Strike 5.77, One Thousand Cuts 3.61 Neither will hit their caps. Electric Melee: Jacob's Ladder 3.21. You won't hit 10 with a 7' 75 deg arc cone. Katana: Flashing Steel 5.77, Golden Dragonfly 2.62. Neither will hit its cap. Psionic Melee: Psi Blade Sweep 4.49. No capping here either. Radiation Melee: Proton Sweep 4.81. Again, it's not hitting 10. Savage Melee: Shred 5.13. No capping. Spines: Ripper 5.77. Like all the other 135 deg 7' cones, you aren't likely to hit 10. Staff Fighting: Guarded Spin 9.54, Innocuous Strikes 9.54. They should be hitting the cap occasionally. Street Justice: Sweeping Cross 3.21. Nope. Titan Weapons: Defensive Sweep 20.94 Titan Sweep 20.94, Arc of Destruction 10.47. And yes, TW is OP. War Mace: Shatter 3.77, Crowd Control 10.05. Crowd Control can cap with its 8' 180 degree cone and 10 targets. So that's 7 of 23 that can hit their caps. Though 1 (Pendulum) will only do it rarely and for 2 (Staff Fighting's pair) it will be uncommon. Only Titan Weapons trio and Crowd Control can routinely hit their caps. You'll note that there are few powers that fully "win" under the I26.4rc5 set up. They either can't hit their new caps (the 16 with metrics under 7.7 above), don't have new caps (Defensive Sweep, Titan Sweep and Crowd Control) or don't get an arc increase (Pendulum and Arc of Destruction plus the three from the last group). That leaves just two powers as "complete" winners: Guarded Spin and Innocuous Strikes. These are the only two that can approach the 100% increase in targets hit available with the new Tanker melee cone target caps. Just for completeness... The spheres all have either 12' or 15' radii and 16 targets with the exceptions of Thunderstrike with it's 10.5' radius and Spinning Strike with its 9' radius. The 12 footers have a metric of 28.27, the 15 footers 44.18, Thunderstrike 21.65 and Spinning Strike 15.90. They can all cap, and the 15' ones can do it easily. Only Spinning Strike will have any trouble capping. Think of the 12 footers as having 5 Ripper-sized areas to hit 16 instead of Ripper trying to hit 10 in just one of those areas. The ranged cones are a bit different. Most can hit their caps. Those that get the buffs received a 50% area and 60% target cap buff, so aren't changed much in their chance to cap versus I26.3. Shockwave and Throw Spines don't get buffs, so they're the same as I26.3 with a metric of 70.69 and if you're not hitting the cap, then you aren't trying (i.e. you're using them in melee). Repulsing Torrent is at 58.91 (compared to 62.83 in I26.3). Breath of Fire has a metric of only 5.52 with its 15' 45 degree arc cone and 16 target cap. The range can be buffed though, so with that you can probably get to the cap (one 20% range buff increases the metric 44% to 7.93, so you likely need more than one to cap regularly, and even then you'll have to wait for foes to clump and then move to line them up - that 8 to 9 square feet per target benchmark is about being able to, not about being able to routinely). Frost is a 10' 135 degree cone with a metric of 7.36. Like Breath of Fire, it probably needs range enhancement to hit its new caps, but it can do it. The buff to Tanker melee cones is now on par with that to spheres (and ranged cones) as the effective capping factors are the 50% area increase for melee cones and the 60% target cap increase for spheres. So it may be what's wanted. It's just odd to me to see an almost uniformly meaningless target cap for melee cones.

If it simply made Brutes easier to play then it would be a QoL change. It doesn't do just that though, it actually makes Brutes better in a fair bit of the end game content - or anywhere there is competition for aggro (which includes control, which reduces aggro).

This is a typo, the actual new target cap is 10.

In the above I note some oddities... Cleave, as I mentioned in my previous post, seems like it's breaking the new rules. Then we have a melee cone in One Thousand Cuts that is breaking the rules a la Crowd Control for other ATs. However it gets the target cap increase that Crowd Control is denied despite having a smaller arc (90 deg buffed to 135 instead of 180 ignoring the buff) and length (7' instead of 8' for War Mace), so that its area 57% as large while its target cap is 160% that of Crowd Control. Breath of Fire, Frost and Repulsing Torrent are all ranged cones. I believe the only other ones in the melee sets are Shockwave and Throw Spines, which aren't getting the target cap or arc increases (presumably because the sets do a lot of AoE to begin with). So these seem like they establish a rule for ranged cones getting 16 targets like spheres. Spinning Strike hitting 16... good luck with that. Pendulum and Crowd Control keeping the 180 degree arc and ignoring the buff seems odd. Couldn't you have changed them to 120 degrees and let them have the buff a la Slice and Flashing Steel? Lightning Clap and Hand Clap get fixed radii and hence no proc benefit, but Fault gets the proc benefit of the smaller base radius and offsetting buff? That seems inconsistent. Of course, Fault is ranged instead of PB, recharges 50% faster and only does KD instead of KB out of the box, and so is already a better power (it does have a longer animation/cast though). Lastly... I'm not sure why Slice and Flashing Steel are picked out for getting little effective buff. They could easily have been given a 120 degree arc instead of 90. Perhaps BS and Kat are over-performing in AoE too?

I hit 2 quite often with Golden Dragonfly, Head Splitter and Cleave. Hitting more than 2 is a challenge though. And even hitting 2 more than once in a single fight isn't that common, it's usually just the first use in a fight that gets 2. Hitting 5 is all but impossible. Anyway, I'm assuming that Cleave retaining its 10 target cap on Brutes and Scrappers and getting 16 on Tankers is an oversight, since it is essentially the same power as Golden Dragonfly and Head Splitter.

I'm not crazy about this at all. Cones now get a 50% area increase with a 100% target cap increase while spheres get a 125% area increase and 60% target cap increase.

This power now has a buffable 15' radius while it's kindred powers - Stone Melee / Fault and Super Strength / Hand Clap (which is identical to Lightning Clap) - had their radii reduced to 10'. I'm all for diversity, and the larger radius is offset (at least to some extent) by the lower proc chance. However, I wonder if that was intentional.

I was the one who posted the explicit details, not Biosphere. There aren't that many exceptions if you consider the rules to be those Siolfir noted: Cones with 5 target caps in I26.3 get increased to 10 Cones and spheres with 10 target caps in I26.3 get increased to 16 If you use those instead of "Cones = 10 / Spheres = 16" then the exceptions are limited to just unchanged target caps in the following powers: Claws / Shockwave - 10 instead of boosted to 16 Dark Melee / Soul Drain - 10 Spines / Spine Burst - 10 Titan Weapons / Defensive Sweep - 5 instead of boosted to 10 Titan Weapons / Titan Sweep - 5 As far as the target caps are concerned, it appears that Captain Powerhouse applied systematic changes based upon the design choices noted by Siolfir to the I26.3 powers and then dialed some of them back for balance purposes in sets he deemed to be over-performing: Claws, Spines and Titan Weapons. It appears Soul Drain is the only power that was singled out as being an issue on its own. All of the other oddball target caps exist in I26.3 and aren't new to this patch. I personally would like to see the benchmarks too, as my general sense is that they differ a bit from what I think. Captain Powerhouse's seem to value target cap increases more, while mine value area increases more, for example. [Edit:] Probably just a difference in how we play the game. I solo a lot and try to move through the fights quickly, which means clumping things up is less important to me and my metrics. His metrics may be more like the wider player base, but herding seems to be all but dead, so I'm not sure if my play-style is really much different than the norm. If anything, I'd say I like to clump things more than most. As evidenced by the frequency with which I was using Hurricane to pack groups during the Penny Yin TF I ran during the latest stress test (I was playing a Fire/Storm Controller and we had two Scrappers and two Brutes but not a lot of aggro management).

The Tanker Inherent doubles that arc.

There's no reason to deviate from the practice if the deviation is meaningless or otherwise unnecessary. Captain Powerhouse only appears to be deviating from the rules when he considers a set OP and in need of reigning in. He, unfortunately, isn't changing things for the under-performing sets at this time. Nor does he appear to be going power-by-power. Repulsing Torrent, for example, doesn't get the Throw Spines/Shockwave treatment, presumably because CP doesn't think Kinetic Melee is over-performing. Frost, btw, can hit its target cap. It's a 180 degree 10' cone that is NOT treated as a melee attack for Range enhancement. So you can easily get it to half of a 14' sphere. You won't hit 16 often, but it's possible, and hitting more than 10 isn't uncommon at all.

Simply to stick to systematic rules instead of having to craft every power individually is reason enough. It's just good design practice. As for Quills, it is an oblate sphere (vertical distance is doubled, resulting in a flattened sphere, as can be seen in Dispersion Bubble and similar powers), so there is some possibility that you might be able to pack 11+ fliers in the volume around a flying Spines Tanker. I just don't think it will result in more than a tiny, tiny increase in average number of foes hit.

No, but I think it is pretty clear that it is due to Spines having lots of AoE to begin with. Now it gets a meaningless target cap increase to Quills (try hitting more than 10 with an 8' radius AoE where you are occupying the middle of that space yourself), a proc chance increase (and nothing else) for Spine Burst, a target cap increase for Throw Spines, and a full buff for Ripper. It appears that Captain Powerhouse is using the buffs to narrow the gaps between the best AoE sets and those behind. Unfortunately that means the best AoE sets get relatively less from the buffs due to all of the exceptions applied to their powers, while the AoE light sets get relatively less due to having little to benefit from the buffs to begin with. So new gaps are opening up at the bottom end as the gaps at the top end narrow. Dark Melee, Energy Melee and Street Justice just don't have much to benefit from the buffs. Two of the three are good at ST at least. Energy Melee is just not good at anything any more. It will rank near the bottom in ST and area damage, Mitigation is not especially good, as the reliable stuns are tied to very long animation times and a power that does very little damage and is taken by absolutely no one. And even aggro generation will be in the bottom 3 with Dark Melee and Street Justice. In the next group Stone Melee and Super Strength have little more to benefit and have those powers not getting area buffs (as their radii were reduced in reciprocal proportion), just proc chance and target cap increases. With only one of the two powers in each set being a damage power to boot. So those five low AoE sets and Spines aren't doing very well with the buffs, relatively speaking. At least Energy Melee and Super Strength should be on Captain Powerhouse's short list of sets needing reworking. The more I look at Energy Melee the more I wonder how it has made it to this point as is.

I'm definitely in favor of more specific information instead of rules with numerous exception you have to track down yourself.

Here are the exceptions to the area attack target cap rules (10 for cones, 16 for spheres)). And a possible explanation as to why. Battle Axe Cleave gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a cap of 10 in I26.3, rather than 5. However, you're unlikely to hit 16 with a 40 degree, 10' cone. Dark Melee Soul Drain gets 10 targets instead of 16. It's primarily a target-scaling self-buff rather than an attack. Dual Blades One Thousand Cuts gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. Fiery Melee Breath of Fire gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. Ice Melee Frost gets 16 targets instead of 10 Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. Katana Golden Dragonfly gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. (Broadsword / Head Splitter hits only 5 in I26.3.) Kinetic Melee Repulsing Torrent gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. Spines Spine Burst only gets 10 targets instead of 16. I believe this was done because Captain Powerhouse felt Spines was over-performing with the changes. Throw Spines gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. Titan Weapons Defensive Sweep only gets 5 targets instead of 10. Again, I think Captain Powerhouse believes Titan Weapons over-performs with the standard changes. Titan Sweep only gets 5 targets instead of 10. As above. War Mace Crowd Control gets 16 targets instead of 10. Has a target cap of 10 in I26.3. One power not listed above that obeys the stated rules, but would be an exception if we used "a target cap of 10 is increased to 16" as a rule instead, would be Claws / Shockwave; which hits 10 in both I26.3 and I26.4rc3. I believe the buff to it was also skipped because Captain Powerhouse felt Claws was over-performing otherwise. Note that it also ignores the arc increase buff, and so is unchanged from I26.3. Making it one of only three Tanker melee set AoE damage powers (the two early Titan Weapons cones listed above being the others) that get no buff at all in I26.4rc3. Every other one either gets more targets, more area, both or just a proc chance increase due to reduced area regained through the Inherent buff. Spine Burst is the only power in the last category, as all the other spheres reduced from 15' to 10' also get target cap increases. Those are Fiery Melee / Combustion, Stone Melee / Tremor, Super Strength / Foot Stomp and Titan Weapons / Whirling Smash. [Edit:] I missed the non-damaging powers that had there radii proportionately decreased. Those are: Stone Melee / Fault and Super Strength / Hand Clap. Interestingly, Electrical Melee / Lightning Clap still owns a 15' radius and in this latest patch no longer ignores the buff. I suspect that is a mistake. So, yeah, there are a lot of exceptions to the stated rules, but many of those are because there are exceptions to the rules in I26.3 to begin with.

This should probably state that the Ranged modifier was increased to match the Melee modifier, and what that modifier is (0.75).

Ever? I find that hard to believe unless you never play at low levels and also never play BS, DB, Elect, Energy, Katana, Spines or Titan Weapons. All of which have decent T1s. Or Ice Melee, which has a hard time building an attack chain below level 28 without using Frozen Fists. Anyway... The hit in performance is at levels 1-15. Or perhaps more pertinently, the first one or two play sessions for a new player on a Tanker. Many people give up on Tankers as they are now within that time frame. And this patch will make them a bit worse at those levels. As I stated, it's more a matter of principal than practicality, but I think having Tankers get worse at one of the things they are already bad at is an unfortunately side effect of the form these buffs have morphed into.

Actually, they do. The DS doesn't kick in enough to offset the loss of Bruising until level 15. The AT modifiers scale in over the first 20 levels, so the Tanker DS increase from 0.8 to 0.95 is muted at low levels. At level 1, for example, the base damage is only 3% higher, and you've lost Bruising, so you are doing about 13% less damage (based on testing) on Pineapple than Live. Even at level 10 you are still doing about 10% less single target damage than on Live. So, it can take noticeably longer to level a Tanker by actually playing solo out of the box. Say, by running the David Wincott Hollows arc with its two early "Defeat All" missions. Or even by running an AE arc such as "Tunnel Witches". Mostly just a theoretical concern, except for the possibility of putting off newbs. And I hope that the devs want lots of new players to come play the game.