csr

No, those, like red inspirations, ignore the AT multipliers.

Is the -Regen going to be tied to the T1s, or a more general ability?

Some get little benefit (Dark Melee, for example). My point is that some sets do much better than the average with the AoE improvements (Kinetic Melee and Staff Fighting) and some sets do much worse (Dark Melee, Spines, Stone Melee, Super Strength and Titan Weapons). I don't think there should be as much set-to-set variation for an Inherent (counting the target cap increases as part of the Inherent, which I wasn't doing) as there are. I think it's fine that there is some variation from set-to-set, I just think the variation is too large for those seven sets. This is especially true of those where the target cap increases aren't all that effective. Perhaps I'm undervaluing the increase in the target caps for Titan Weapons (Whirling Smash will hit more than 10 fairly often and Arc of Destruction more than 5 a fair bit of the time), but does the target cap increase of Shadow Maul and Dark Consumption really amount to all that much? I'd say no. The only sets I can see knocking off my list of seven due to the target cap increase are Spines (the increases for Ripper and Quills aren't big, but that for Throw Spines is substantial) and Titan Weapons. I can also see Super Strength being removed as it's in line for a more general reworking. That would leave just Dark Melee, Kinetic Melee, Staff Fighting and Stone Melee as outliers with regard to the Inherent AoE buffs. I think those sets really need adjustment (DM and SM up, KM and SF down).

I don't remember Captain Powerhouse's exact comment, but I believe he thinks that stacked Bruising would be massively OP. I'm not going to dig back through that old thread to find the post, maybe somebody else will. AE can provide testing opportunities. Just make a simple mission with a +3 Boss/EB/AV with no noticeable powers and beat on it.

The problem with this is that they get less from the Inherent than other sets. You seem to be basically saying that the AoE heavy sets shouldn't benefit from the Inherent at all. Still, Claws gets as much as most due to Spin being so good, but Spines gets too little (4 AoEs and only the one that benefits is the least affected) and Titan Weapons gets nothing. Here are the changes I would suggest so that each set gets at least something from the arc/radius buff, and that the set-to-set variance isn't too large: Dark Melee - Dark Consumption made to do DS 1 with a 60s recharge. Like Energy Absorption and similar powers it becomes dual use, in this case damage and +END. Kinetic Melee - Make Repulsing Torrent ignore the buff. Increase Burst's radius to 10'. Spines - Both Spine Burst and Quills should get the buff. Review the set as a whole later. Staff Fighting - Both Guarded Spin and Innocuous Strikes should ignore the buff. Eye of the Storm, like Spin for Claws, is good enough to carry the set with regard to the Inherent buff. Stone Melee - Make Fault do damage. Perhaps in the DS 0.5 range. Super Strength - Make Hand Clap do damage. Perhaps in the DS 0.75 range (it has 50% longer recharge than Fault, no range and Foot Stomp didn't get a damage boost as Tremor did). Rework the set later. [Note: I don't really like either this or the suggestion for Stone Melee, I just couldn't think of any other simple fix.] Titan Weapon - All three melee cones get reduced to 90 degrees but use the buff. The set needs to be reworked for all ATs. Don't nerf it just for Tankers, let it get a reasonable boost from the new Tanker Inherent's main buff, and then decide what needs to be done with it for all ATs at a later date, a la Super Strength. This would mean that all sets would get something significant from the Inherent while none would be insanely blessed (as KM and SF are now).

One issue is that Bruising doesn't stack. Effectively making it 1/2 as good with 2 tanks, 1/3 as good with 3, and so on. I think that is one of the main reasons Captain Powerhouse wants to get rid of it.

IMO, this patch should address two issues for Tankers: End game performance. Low-to-mid level solo performance. The patch seems to handle the first fairly well. It doesn't do so well on the second. It seems to be relying on the Damage Scale buff alone for low levels, and the DS and AoE buff for mid levels. It fails miserably at the first as the full AT DS multiplier doesn't kick in until level 20. For example, the new DS buff is only 3.1% at Level 1, doesn't top 10% until level 12 and doesn't really offset the loss of Bruising until about level 16* for ST based builds. Only Spines and Fiery Melee have full PBAoEs at low levels, and both of those got the reciprocal treatment to offset the AoE radius buff (they have higher target caps, but those will be largely meaningless soloing at low level). Which means the AoE advantage at low levels is mostly melee cones with increased arc and largely meaningless (at that level and solo) target cap increases. The bottom line is that many sets/builds will be worse at low levels than they are on Live. In short, this patch actually hurts the leveling experience of the vast majority of Tankers up through about level 15. In the mid levels (I usually consider that level to be 22 to the mid-to-late 30s, but here it's 16 to whenever the Tanker gets significant AoEs that are buffed by the Inherent) the AoE buff starts to help, but the nerf to BU also starts to become apparent. You are probably doing a bit better by level 20, then the weaker BU starts to drag the Pineapple Tanker back down, especially where burst damage is useful such as Boss fights. Until you have the AoEs, and toughness to herd or raise the difficulty level, the new Pineapple version of Tankers is little better or actually worse than the Live version. In my opinion the BU nerf should be lessened or eliminated to help at mid levels, and a buff specifically useful for soloing at low levels should be added. Maybe scaling down as you level so as to be trivial at level 20 and beyond. A return of Bruising in some form would likely be popular. Just the old Bruising that scaled down to 1/4 strength at level 20 would work. * I calculated the value of Bruising as having a 75% chance of being applied (due to misses and cycle inefficiencies), half of the targets being even level and half +1, with 40% of the attacks against the former and 60% against the latter (+1s have more HP, take less damage and are harder to hit). That gave (20% * 0.4 + 18% * 0.6) * 0.75 = 14% (rounded). This is just back-of-the-envelope stuff, not a detailed analysis.

One thing I found interesting is that the DS was not changed for most of those powers that had their area reduced. Only SM/Tremor got an increased DS (ooppss, I see a false assumption in my spreadsheet that results in an error there, SM actually should have increased AoE). SM/Fault and SS/Hand Clap do no damage to begin with. The other seven - BA/Pendulum, BS/Slice, FM/Combustion, Kat/Flashing Steel, Spines/Spine Burst, SS/Foot Stomp and WM/Crowd Control - all remained the same DS.

The table was mainly to... See how wide the variation is. It's pretty big. See if Claws and Spines still got as much benefit - in absolute terms, not relative to their beginning AoE - as a "standard" set. Claws does, Spines doesn't. Find places that might need testing in the wild. For me that will be checking to see if KM's Repulsing Torrent actually gets the arc increase and deciding whether it should or not. Hopefully get Captain Powerhouse to clarify some of the issues such as whether the buff passes to pseudo-pets like Lightning Rod, Savage Leap and Shield Charge (based upon the Burn comments, I'm assuming it doesn't). Find bugs in the power descriptions/info (I found some for Rad Melee and Staff).

To get an idea of how much benefits from the Inherent +Arc/Radius buff varied from set-to-set I put together a spreadsheet to calculate Damage Scale * Area / Cycle Time for each power and the total for each set and then looked at the difference between Live and Pineapple. This is just a benchmark value and should be taken with many grains of salt. Target caps were not taken into account. And most notably the new Tanker Damage Multiplier was backed out as I was only interested in the new Inherent buff. And mostly just the change, which is under the "Increase" column. You can see there is in fact a wide variation with 3 2 sets getting no buff at all (Stone Melee, Super Strength and Titan Weapons) and Kinetic Melee and Staff Fighting getting big boosts. Dark Melee and Spines also do quite poorly with the Inherent, for different reasons. [Correction:] Stone Melee actually got a small buff from Tremor having increased DS. Nine powers are tagged to ignore the buff and ten eight were reduced in reciprocal ratio to the buff so that the net is zero increase in area. This accounts for more than 1 in 3 powers. [Correction:] There are actually only 8 powers that were reduced in this way, so just less than 1 in 3 (18/55) got no area increase. [Edit:] To be clear... the "Reduced" column only includes those powers reduced in reciprocal ratio to the Inherent buff. The two that had their arc reduced from 130 to 90 but get he buff (Slice and Flashing Steel) are not included. There are quiet a few issues and caveats with the table that need to be noted... Notes: Dual Blades does not include the Sweep combo, as I don't know if it is affected. I think it is. The DS*A/Cycle numbers for DB are probably a bit low in each instance. Electrical Melee does not include Chain Induction and Lightning Rod, as neither is a true AoE (the former is a chain and the latter a pseudo-pet) and I don't think they are affected by the buff. Radiation Melee does not include Irradiated Ground. I don't know if it is affected or not. Savage Melee does not include Savage Leap (another pseudo-pet) and more importantly has no damage info for Rending Flurry; so it's numbers are way off. These numbers are actually with Quills ignoring the buff rather than Spine Burst. The Titan Weapons calculations were done with Defensive Sweep, Titan Sweep and Arc of Destruction using the slow cast and Whirling Smash using the fast. It's AoE is slightly under-estimated as a result. Live Pineapple Set AoEs Total DS*A/Cycle Enlarged Ignores Reduced Total DS*A/Cycle Increase Rank Battle Axe 3 7.5 2 0 1 13.1 5.7 13 Broad Sword 3 8.7 3 0 0 17.6 8.8 10 Claws 3 25.7 1 2 0 34.9 9.2 9 Dark Melee 3 2.3 3 0 0 4.9 2.6 17 Dual Blades (1) 3 8.4 3 0 0 18.1 9.7 6 Electrical Melee (2) 3 3.3 2 1 0 7.1 3.8 16 Energy Melee 1 3.9 1 0 0 8.7 4.8 15 Fiery Melee 3 26.4 2 0 1 38.6 12.2 3 Ice Melee 2 9.5 2 0 0 20.6 11.1 5 Katana 3 9.6 3 0 0 19.2 9.6 7 Kinetic Melee 2 20.2 2 0 0 41.6 21.4 1 Martial Arts 1 4.9 1 0 0 11.0 6.1 12 Psionic Melee 2 9.7 2 0 0 21.4 11.7 4 Radiation Melee (3) 2 7.7 2 0 0 17.0 9.3 8 Savage Melee (4) 1 1.80 1 0 0 3.6 1.8 20 Spines (5) 4 42.8 1 2 1 44.9 2.1 19 Staff Fighting 3 15.7 3 0 0 33.9 18.2 2 Stone Melee 2 13.0 0 0 2 15.4 2.4 18 Street Justice 2 4.2 2 0 0 9.1 4.9 14 Super Strength 2 14.5 0 0 2 14.5 0.0 22 Titan Weapons (6) 4 32.6 0 4 0 32.6 0.0 21 War Mace 3 9.3 2 0 1 15.9 6.6 11 Average 2.5 12.8 1.7 0.4 0.4 20.2 7.4

A few powers are including conditional damage in the "Average Damage" info: Guarded Spin is including Fiery Embrace damage. Eye of the Storm is including each form bonus as well as Fiery Embrace damage. Innocuous Strikes is including Fiery Embrace damage.

This power is including the Fire damage that would occur with Fiery Embrace as part of the "Average Damage" in the detailed info window.

You can't? The last I checked on Live every foe I hit with my T1 was Bruised. Or at least acquired red triangles.

At one point it was, but it was changed. I don't know when.

Nope. My average Rage buff, counting crash, on my Ice/SS Tanker is 94%, and that's a fairly modest +Rech build. My next best tested average is 55% for a DM/Regen Brute with high Recharge. I have SS being hurt roughly twice as badly as Claws, DB and DM and about four times as badly as everything else by the +DMG self-buff reduction.

A question for Captain P: One thing I tried to test, but couldn't get a definitive result for... do Dual Blades Sweep and Weaken combos benefit from the Inherent +Radius boost?

Captain P said that that is not the case, he said he was considering it all along for some other non-stated reason.

Other sets have BU powers too. You need to factor those in if you're assuming perma-Rage for Jab. You should also factor in enhancement and the crash time. Jab with 95% enhancement, perma-Rage and 8.3% at 10% damage gives a DPA (not using ArcanaTime) of 71.5. That's with the Live numbers rather than the reduced +DMG from this patch. Assuming 20% up time for basic BU powers, 50% with just 3 targets for Soul Drain, 100% for Follow Up and Blinding Feint, 30% for Power Siphon with 3 stacks, Staff Mastery at 2 stacks, and the Live buff scale we get: Beheader 69.9, Hack 115.8, Swipe 100.0, Shadow Punch 102.2, Nimble Slash 81.6, Charged Brawl 95.0, Barrage 93.2, Scorch 96.5, Frozen Fists 70.5, Sting of the Wasp 93.1, Quick Strike 95.9*, Thunder Kick 95.0, Mental Strike 97.5, Contaminated Strike 139.4, Savage Strike 116.7, Barb Swipe 117.1, Mercurial Blow 76.6*, Stone Fist 113.1, Initial Strike 95.8, Jab 71.5, Defensive Sweep 32.1**, Bash 70.6. Those that are unusually bad (85 or less) are in red, those that are unusually good (105 or better) are in green, with 95 as the nominal standard. * I didn't double check this calculation for Power Siphon and Staff Mastery, but went off memory for the damage buff. It may be wrong. ** A misfit power that is AoE with a significant secondary effect and I assumed was never used in fast mode, since I don't know what the animation time is for that. So, Jab ranks in set context as bad, but there are three other sets that have a T1 just as bad: Battle Axe, Frost Melee and War Mace.

Ignoring the rest of the issues with this, which were addressed by others, you've miscalculated the Rage buff with the current Beta patch. It should be 100 * 0.95 * 0.6 (not 0.8) = 57 (not 76).

Interestingly, much of the aggro generating improvement has been backed out. Taunt is back to the way it is on Live, the punch-voke in Gauntlet is down to a 10' radius (which is actually smaller on ST attacks with 12s+ recharge times - e.g. KO Blow went from 17.8' to 10'), many PBAoE powers had their radii reduced so that with the Inherent there is no change, quite a few arcs were reduced so that the buff results in less or no change, and several others were marked to ignore the buff. The biggest remaining aggro generation improvement now appears to be the larger Gauntlet radius on fast charging ST attacks. The Inherent AoE buff, increased targets caps, and +10% still help as well, so there is still a lot of improvement in the overall Taunt ability, but the amount of that has dropped dramatically from the initial version. Far more than the reduction in AoE and at-the-cap damage output has been reduced. I have to agree that any Brute buffs are sort of out of left field to me. Still, I believe Tanker damage needed to be boosted. The ratio of Brutes to Tankers in the end game content was laughable. I was at one Hami Raid before the zone cap change where there were 25 Brutes between the 2 leagues and *1* Tanker. Now with the zone cap, having a Tanker doing little damage is a luxury. The bottom line is that Tankers simply aren't bringing enough to the table for end game content. They also suffer from being hard to level solo, due to the dearth of attacks and low DS. So, basically: fine in low-to-mid level team content, bad at low-to-mid level solo and in end game content. These changes fix both of those problems to a large degree.

From some earlier comments from Captain Powerhouse it seems he felt Spines was over-performing with the changes. As it stands Spine Burst is pretty bad. It's really a worse attack than Mu Mastery's Electrifying Fences, which is primarily an Immob. EF beats SB's DPA 44.11 to 20.01 (on an unslotted 50 with no buffs). And comes close on the DPC at 2.44 to 3.16 (with +Rech that gap narrows). They both have 10' radii with 10 target caps. EF has a 40' range. The only real advantage for SB is the front-loaded damage. And even that is mitigated by having an activation time nearly 2s longer. When Captain Powerhouse re-did Thorny Assault he had a poorly balanced first pass that had Impale and Ripper way too good, but then did a second pass where it was so well balanced it was hard to decide what to skip. Hopefully, he'll do the same with another pass on Spines. In my opinion he should have followed the Claws example and made Ripper ignore the buff, not Spine Burst. And Spine Burst should get the 16 target cap (since it's not as good a power as Ripper the aforementioned swap would be a net nerf that should be counter-balanced). Nerfing mediocre powers such as Spine Burst is a bad idea. Unless he's got a new animation with half the cast time for Spine Burst. Then ignore everything I said. (In other words, he may know of something in the offing that we don't that leads to it all making sense.)

Well, SS I think ranks last as to how much buff it gets from this patch, but a lot of sets come up relatively short one way or the other. Titan Weapons gets absolutely nothing from the new Inherent +Arc/Radius buff, though suffers less from the Dmg self-buff change than most and gets target cap increases as well as the new Damage Scale and Damage Cap. Stone Melee had the radii of it's two AoEs reduced so that it gains nothing from the Inherent either (SS got a similar treatment). Many just get one power affected. Claws gets Spin buffed in radius. Spines gets Ripper and Quills increased, but Spine Burst was actually decreased from 15' to 10' and made to ignore the buff. Even some sets with two AoEs get such small area increases that the target cap increases seem pretty irrelevant, such as Street Justice and Dark Melee. In a quick pass, here's what I came up with... Sets with no increased area from live to the patch: Stone Melee, Super Strength, Titan Weapons. Sets with one net power increased in area: Claws, Energy Melee, Martial Arts, Spines. Sets with perma, near perma or stacking +Dmg that are hurt the most by the self-buff nerf: Claws, Dark Melee, Dual Blades, Super Strength. Sets that have trouble making use of the target cap increases due to small areas or mediocre powers with the buff: Dark Melee (Shadow Maul isn't likely to hit 10 in a 7' 90 degree wedge and the area increase has only marginal utility for Dark Consumption on someone with a Taunt aura), Street Justice (Sweeping Cross is 7' 100 degree with 10 targets and Spinning Strike 9' radius with 16 targets). There are no real "losers" in this as every set can use the new Damage Scale and Damage Cap, just sets that didn't come out as well. In my estimation those are Claws, SS and TW in the bottom tier. With DM, EM, MA, Spines, SJ and SM in the tier above that. In that first one you can make an argument as to why each should be there. In the second only Spines seems like it belongs.

It looks like the nerfs relative to the last Beta patch are: Reduction in PBAoE radius (50% instead of 60%, giving 225% area as opposed to 256%). Reversion of the Taunt target buff down from 7 (which was down from 10) to 5. Reversion of the Rage change. Reducing Tanker self-buff damage buff strength by 25% (so standard BU does +60% instead of +80%). Presumably this was done to make stacked BU powers be less effective. But even the worst case scenarios will be as good. If you slot 75% damage (this gives close to the worst case) into powers with set bonuses, then the Live version of a double-stack Raged SD/SS Tanker would cap at 3.20 [0.8 Damage Scale times 400% Damage Cap] and the patch version would be at 3.19 [0.95 (1 + 0.75 + 2 * 0.6 + 0.4125)]. Due to the damage cap additional buffs will cause this patch version to pull ahead. Even a single small red makes it about 7% stronger. Other set combos and even an SD/SS with more enhancement slotted will do better. That SD/SS with 75% slotted is as bad as it gets, and that's break even versus Live.

Those powers not affected by the inherent arc and radius buff are already noted in their descriptions. The detailed info for Gauntlet in the power status tray also includes the buffs under Detailed Info. So the information is there, it's just that the latter doesn't appear until you enter the game and know where to look. It would be nice if the information was more in-your-face and available during character creation. But then other ATs don't have that inherent info available either. A good inherent description on the power set/power choice screen at creation would be nice.

The arc (cones) and radius (PBAoEs only) increases are part of the Tanker inherent, not actual changes to the powers themselves (such as the target cap increases are). Some of the powers themselves have been changed (reduced arc and radius) so that the inherent will affect them giving a net buff. While others have been flagged to ignore the inherent buffs to tone down sets such as Titan Weapons, Claws and Spines that would over-perform with the buffs. As a result, the detailed info on the power doesn't tell the whole story.