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You might want to look up what the word "initially" means. As for the damage buff to Burn, you will note that that buff took the form of up front damage, which is not decreased by things running away.

It makes sense, as otherwise some of those mini Melee Cones such as Head Splitter would be the worst punch-voke powers around. Too bad PBAoEs (which have no target) miss out. But since most (all but Burn and Soul Drain?) have 16 target caps for Tankers, that's not a big loss.

For the record, Burn was initially there to provide Fiery Aura with Immobilization Protection in a unique way.

I did a bit more testing with a Fiery/Staff Tanker and a Stone/Fiery Tanker. It appears to be timing as you say. Some powers are consistent (Barb Swipe gives one of two reports depending upon whether the Immob chance fires or not) while others aren't (Mud Pots will list the proc then damage after the Immob most of the time, but occasionally reverses the proc and damage reports). The important thing is that it always procs, it was just a parsing issue on my end. I did notice something I thought was odd though. Staff Fighting / Guarded Spin and Staff Fighting / Innocuous Strikes (both Melee Cones) are both reporting "Gauntlet's Area of Effect" (which I had associated with ST attacks) firing while the PBAoEs tested don't (Staff Fighting / Eye of the Storm, Fiery Aura / Burn, Fiery Melee / Combustion and Fiery Melee / Fire Sword Circle); they report one instance of Gauntlet firing for each target hit (the Melee Cones tested also do this, they just toss in that "Gauntlet's Area of Effect" message as well).

[Edit:] It appears to have been my log parser that was at fault. I saw it right before damage messages for Quills and Blazing Aura, I didn't see it there for other attacks. I decided to test in a more sedate environment to confirm - RWZ dummies. Interestingly, upon entering Quills was taunting, while Blazing Aura was not. Toggling Blazing Aura caused them both to taunt. Anyway.... It appears that the taunt report IS there on the other powers. It's just inconsistent how it reports so my parser assumptions were wrong. Here are a couple of examples... BARB SWIPE CAST 1: You activated the Barb Swipe power. HIT Practice Dummy! Your Barb Swipe power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 21.88. Bad News Bear grants you 7.5 points of endurance with their Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance! You grant Bad News Bear an infusion of 7.5 endurance! You hit Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe for 0 points of Lethal damage. You Immobilize Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe. You Taunt Practice Dummy with your Fury. You hit Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. BARB SWIPE CAST 2: You activated the Barb Swipe power. You Taunt Practice Dummy with your Fury. HIT Practice Dummy! Your Barb Swipe power was forced to hit by streakbreaker. You hit Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe for 0 points of Lethal damage. You Immobilize Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe. You hit Practice Dummy with your Barb Swipe for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. IMPALE CAST 1: You activated the Impale power. HIT Practice Dummy! Your Impale power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 64.62. You hit Practice Dummy with your Impale for 0 points of Lethal damage. You Immobilize Practice Dummy with your Impale. You Taunt Practice Dummy with your Fury. You hit Practice Dummy with your Impale for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. You hit Practice Dummy with your Impale for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. You hit Practice Dummy with your Impale for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. You hit Practice Dummy with your Impale for 0 points of Toxic damage over time. It appears to typically report immediately after the cast and before the ToHit report. But if something procs, like the chance to Immobilize, it reports after that.

I tested this with a purpose built Spines/Fire Brute. Both Quills and Blazing Aura were taunting if toggle cycled after zoning and didn't taunt otherwise. No runners to speak of with that in the Bloody Rainbow farm. The Fury taunt message only appears for the toggles, not for other punch-voke effects; is that working as intended?

This is what I meant: that the proc should be reliable, not that its effects should reliably stop runners.

I tested this briefly. Nothing ran when I used Burn (and only Burn) on a fire Tanker. But then, this Tanker only had trouble on teams before, so that doesn't mean much. I'm surprised none of our hardcore Fire farmers have tested this yet. [Note: I'm not crazy about he "improved the reliability" part of the note. It makes it sound as if it's only more reliable, not absolutely reliable. I hope that's not the case.]

Same. I had this happen back in the olden days and fixed it simply by moving the entrance then moving it back.

It's a meaningless change in that Cleave won't hit even the lower caps unless mobs somehow stack on top of each other. It's a 10' 20 degree cone, so even theoretically it's hard to hit four; in practice you'll rarely hit more than 2. The change was made to have it be consistent with kindred powers. Those are Broad Sword's Head Splitter and Katana's Golden Dragonfly. (Note that Cleave is not as comparable to War Mace's Shatter as it does about 20% more damage while Shatter is an 8' 45 degree cone.)

Most people don't know the internal names. Patch Notes should probably refer to powers by the name that people know them by, rather than the internal labels. In this case that's a pretty minor issue, but it's never too soon to adopt good practices.

I believe those may be PvP effects; which shouldn't appear unless you click that button.

I assume "Head Splitter" is the internal name for Katana's Golden Dragonfly. Correct?

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?