Replacement

Ok, so the part that wasn't clear to me was that you think unenhanced aoe damage is where it needs to be. Or to put it another way, you think aoe's scaling is radically stronger than ST, and I think I see what you mean... Since aoe damage multiplies with targets hit, it will naturally gain exponential scaling as you become able to take on larger and larger groups. Ok, i feel like I'm coming at this from a different frame of mind than you, but I can find some a lot of logic here.

Errr lower base damage lowers how far damage boosts can multiply. I am all for nerfs when their impact is invisible (which a 5-10% knock would be), but I don't see the obvious value of making aoes feel less aoe, which is the impact of lowered target caps. @golstat2003 this is more of a sidebar conversation, more interested in the actual-play effects and differences between nerfing enhancement schedules instead of base damage.

Well, that's not a fallacy on my part; that's straight up disagreement. The problem I'm highlighting is that it's not actually min and max damage you're attempting to curb -- the difference between baseline to ED is 100% for ST and 60% for AoE in your example.... but critically, that's before other damage increases. My concern is creating unhealthy incentives. Fortitude should now always prefer allies with the most aoe, because the proportionate damage boost is much larger for them. It also allows Kins to completely disregard your adjustment, since when all damage is capped, the reduced enhancement schedules evaporate.

I'm glad this thread slowed down some, I was only like an hour late and there were already 6 pages! I'm gonna dump some thoughts. @Redlynne your write-up on page 1 was a great read. If nothing else, it's good to have something like that to spell out why we prioritize damage enhancements. As I thought about it though, it seems to me it mostly accomplishes the same thing as simply nerfing aoe damage numbers slightly across the board, except it returns to the same levels in high buff situations (when damage capped, the window between ST and AoE would disappear). But I think the big advantage is clearly that changing the damage schedules like you pointed out would probably be less Dev time than going through literally every aoe power to adjust the numbers. @Galaxy Brain interesting as always. I find it a bit curious that you went to buffing bosses but not the already-molten minions. One thing I saw mentioned a few times in this thread but hasn't really seemed to "stick" is this notion that no damage dealer is bad at ST. I have this sense that much of the intended drawback of aoe attacks was intended to be endurance management. You know, that stat that stops mattering between 22 and 35. But maybe those aoe-heavy sets have much lower ST DPS than I'm giving them credit for. AoE suggestion: +10% aoe defense on bosses, increase all mob HP by 10% (except AVs and GMs). Increase ST damage attacks by 10%. No one will stand for an aoe damage nerf, so we'll just buff enemy HP and flag ST to ignore it! And buff energy melee. Ok this was rambly enough. I'll leave off my half-baked thoughts on mez for now.

Here's something to consider: None of the advantages you outlined here go away under my proposed rework. IO Bonuses tend towards defensive and procs skew back to offense? unchanged. It's a damage proc that aims to add roughly as much DPS as they are "supposed" to currently. Procs help out lower damage ATs more? Unchanged - Doublehit ignores AT modifiers. Procs help recover offense for sets that lack attacks? Since the Doublehit mechanism only cares about the power's recharge, Controls and power pool attacks and even MM attacks will all proc for the same amount of damage DPS. So... Unchanged. I acknowledge they're fulfilling a role. The problem is that it seems like a Rube Goldbergian implementation.

Thanks, I had forgotten about this bit, which had occurred to me while reading Hopeling's guide. Yes, there is a PPM to Doublehit, but that's more a part of the specific implementation of that power. You would simply replace that part with your desired % chance like the Enhancements of Yore. As for Epics with their doubled recharge - you're right, this would certainly require work. If there was something flagged in those powers (e.g. if they were programmed as normal but with a +100% recharge penalty added into the power) it would be fine. But they were implemented by hand, with the dev simply understanding they need to add double value (or "subtract 5, then double, then add the 5 back" in the case of Knockout Blow). The other thing @Zeraphia mentioned was carpet effects -- I don't think this would be problem except there's gotta be truncation floor somewhere. I'm concerned that a bunch of hits for 1 would cause a trillion little procs that a) will devour a mapserver and b) will either get rounded down to nothing or rounded up to significantly higher-than-anticipated performance. This doesn't kill the idea for me yet, but any required special-casing for Epics and DoT-patches are definite and valid Cons. EDIT: yeah, I don't see any incidental hit to AoE as a bad thing. They would still function powerfully with weaker procs - they would simply return to their originally-intended scaling.

Yeah, thanks, your first post really highlighted how unclear my OP was. About "don't fix what ain't broke" - well, there's 2 issues with that. The first is that the "Everything is PPM" is an i24 change, to my understanding. It never touched the live servers en masse (only the special enhancements had it; not everything). The second is, my understanding was there's a general consensus that PPM is currently quite broken. It's a ridiculously large amount of power that locked behind a high level of inaccessibility (spreadsheet optimization). Particularly, the intentional decision to omit global recharge from the PPM formula makes the most powerful stat in the game even more an overshadowing force (and reinforces the "noob" inaccessibility of having Recharge enhancements actually weaken your procs, which the game makes zero effort to warn you about). Either way, I appreciate the input even if you don't agree it's worth the price of admission.

Topic edited and clarified to make it more clear what I am suggesting. I don't want a return to the old world; I want to make more use of the more advanced code that entered the game late in its natural life.

Yes, I follow. You seem to think I'm advocating a return to the old system. I am not. More procs = more damage because the proc always processes for the same amount of damage. My suggestion is changing the proc's damage dynamically based on power's recharge. We already have the code for this: it's called Doublehit. EDIT: Specific to proccing controllers: since the damage is based on recharge ("how much this power would do if it were an attack power"), it would automatically give, proportionately, more damage to a Control attack than it would a Blast.

This may be an open-and-shut discussion; I'm very open to having my mind changed, here. Doublehit tl;dr: Doublehit works by fetching the recharge of a power, and plugging that into the standard (benchmark) damage formula, and multiplied by a coefficient to get you a percentage. (77%, in the case of DoubleHit). @Hopeling does a great job of outlining the mechanics in this thread, which is highly suggested reading: My understanding of why PPM rose in the first place: If a power has a 20% chance to proc X damage... attacking more often means more 20% dice rolls = more damage. PPM weights powers with longer cooldowns towards a similar end result. >>>This part is the actual suggestion--- The Doublehit mechanism already does this (and so does, I believe, Envenomed blades, et al). Why not go back to static percentages (that can be understood by actual humans in-game without consulting spreadsheets!), and instead replace the damage components with scaled damage? Use Doublehit's mechanism, with a coefficient that matches our target DPS. The end result should be that faster powers trigger more frequently, but for lower damage. ------------------<<< The flaws with this plan: I have no idea what numbers all of these enhancements should be converted to. Do you? Seriously, is this something we know? It seems to me even if we recover the old %s, we still don't know what the target DPS addition from it should be. This baseline would need decided, and then it'd be pretty easy to scale things to match that mark. I have no idea what to do with "chance for Build Up" and such. CoH seems to struggle with dynamically altering duration lengths, or else I'd say that would be the best way to go for those sorts of effects. Failing that, PPM may still remain for non-damage/heal procs. Again: I put this in Suggestions because it seems so much simpler - not just for a player to understand, but for a dev to balance performance. BUT, I acknowledge this is a half-cocked thought and I could be overlooking glaring issues that kill this idea on arrival. I'm all ears.

It would work with a drawback (which I wish we would see more of!) E.g. keep the irresistible +10% damage proc, but gain a universal damage -30% debuff. Depending on the value of ignoring resist (or pushing the damage cap!), I could see the debuff going higher.

Yeah I figured something intentionally generic and baseline to make up for the fact that you don't have a Support set. As for specific benefits above and beyond that: that's where the 2 "cash in" powers come in. What you outlined is the advantage of having those 2 powers give set-specific benefits.

Funny you mention it, @Leogunner! I had a bunch of specifics and I needed an excuse to post them! (but specifically the "trading out Equip powers was high on my list) Here's a "stub" of a Manipulation/Summon AT: Inherent builds up a bar on attack and when pets are attacked. Effect is a minor +resist aura, also gives the same benefit to minions as a buff regardless of distance, which means nearby minions get a doubled effect. Say, average of +15% resist (30% to nearby minions). Numbers and effects obviously subject to change. Ranged attacks from the Summon set have better damage and end costs. Fewer pets and slight rearrangements. Get your 2nd tier 1 pet at level 10. Never get a 3rd tier 1. Never get a 2nd tier 2. Tier 3 pet moved up one slot so it comes online at 28. IIRC, MM gets pets at 1t1, 6t1, 12t2, 18t1, 24t2(?), and 26t3. This "Commander" would instead get them at 2t1, 10t1, 20t2, and 28t3. Pets themselves adjusted relative to MM versions. One of your t1 pets would hit you with Injection or similar - a cooldown-based mez protection with low mag and no KB protection. T2 and/or t3 would have additional tricks to help keep you alive. "Warning Shout" absorb shield, Pet Numbers version of Darkest Night if the power budget allows, etc. Pets come out already upgraded (you get fewer of them, afterall) Probably longer cooldowns on pet resummoning. It takes you less time to get them back to combat-ready, and this enforces the idea that you need them present to ensure no gaps in your own defenses. Upgrade powers are replaced with specific Minion buffs that consume amounts of your Inherent bar (unusable below that point). Specifics of Upgrades could either be universal or based on the set. Half of the Sustain numbers from Manipulation moved to "out of combat" or similar mechanisms.

To be clear: I do not think it's realistic to expect we'd see a Manipulation/Pet AT. But theorycrafting is fun, so I'm going to continue discussing the possibilities! Consider: Pet sets are actually extremely rigidly defined (you basically know exactly what you're getting out of each tier in the set), and Manipulation sets start out mostly-identical and then branch out from there. You would be able to count on beginning play with a Ranged attack (guaranteed from your secondary) and your choice of melee or ranged immobilize. That already sets the tone for how you intend to play (whether or not you stay the course; it allows a player a sense of progression). You could also count on having a Sustain power online by around level 10 to help with sharing aggro with pets, and it would be expected you would eventually grab some pets in the same way Scrappers are expected to eventually grab all their necessary armor toggles. As you would level up, you would see an axis of control vs melee emerge, and the amount melee is enabled is going to be based heavily on your ability to have and keep pets (and of course, other tertiary details like pool investments, slotting, and the particulars of your powers). Essentially: your performance baseline is "weak blaster with pets. Captures the 'Ranger' sense we see in other games." From there and based on build, you are able to blend that into increasing control, ranged attacks, or melee. -- But that's in evidence literally nowhere. Defender Holds (from their blast set) are mag 3. Manipulation controls are mag 3. Tanker Touch of Fear is mag 3. You really cannot reasonably assert that "Control sets are different" because we have a sample-size of zero secondary Control sets. The design paradigm is the corollary between secondaries being less impactful than the primaries; not a hard-fast rule of how that is achieved. I have a lot of respect for Castle, but his outlook at that time does not match the realities of how the game evolved. He can call you and tell you every night before bed that "you cannot have secondary Controls because the Mag would need to be reduced" and he would be misapplying his own design philosophy. The correlation should stand, but the "how" is abstract. This is "how" Dominators had to evolve with the game and gained the ability to punch harder than a tanker, despite having less right to the melee. This is "how" blasters came to have Sustains enter the pipeline, allowing them to survive while still being "the glass cannons." The game evolves and so the methods to maintain the correlation change. --- Also, please everyone try to be civil. I don't really think Leo's "happily criticize your interpretation" line was intended as a character attack, but this can be a really fun and interesting conversation of differing opinions if we leave hostility at the door.

Good info, there. It sounds like this turned into arguing with others, and I think you know I'm not interested in stirring up stuff with you are making you feel piled on. But sadly, my very thorough post on this discussion was destroyed when I interrupted it to make my Father's Day call. So here's a short version: my issue with your message is that it reads as absolutes. But they're not - they're guidelines. You calling out the exceptions for Dominators and Blasters actually illustrates where they were wrong and needed to break things. You can even see how their ideas on design matured over time. I promise I had some really thought out examples here, but I am not doing that again on mobile. I tried to stay away from specifics but I do have one I want to mention: about manipulation specifically and secondary control: remember that was in the context of the artillery class. Those constraints will not be universal.

I prefer manipulation primary/summon secondary. I imagine a setup where your pets contribute something to you. So slightly modified pets to give them more Support options. Imagine if every set gave you a pet early on that gives you a fitting mez protection buff. Instead of relying on toggles, you would need to manage your troops and keep them alive so they prop you up. @Steampunkette I think you're drawing a correlation between secondary set and the strength it's "allowed" to have. First off, I don't think that correlation is very strongly followed (brute 90% resist cap, Dominator melee and ranged multipliers, blaster melee multipliers). Second, I disagree that lowering durations (or increasing recharges!) Isn't viable. If your other set is pets, then minion HP is essentially another layer of control that you're spiking with occasional controls. For these reasons and more, I absolutely think Manipulation can work as a primary and control as a secondary. Covering as much new ground as possible with as few new ATs as possible, my votes would be: * Melee/support with some sort of identity-based gimmick. * Manipulation/Pets as a commander type. Manipulation is a bag of tricks almost as diverse as Support sets, creating strong opportunities to decide how you'll lead on the battlefield.

Yeah, stuff like the taunt auras that scale based on number of nearby enemies would be nice to see take enemy rank into account (so soloing an EB would give me 3-4 stacks instead of making a wildly inconsistent build between horde and challenge fights). I understand you're talking about having two always-on benefits, but I want to put out there that "buff on disable" is two mutually exclusive toggles. I actually feel if we're going to have more stances, I'd like to see us lean more into this off/on state instead of cluttering up our powers with multiple mutually exclusive toggles. I like that Chaining has been getting a face-lift, and I feel like there's a lot of room to use chaining on effects that are not thematically chains (example: imagine if Savage Leap chained to nearby enemies. Meaning chain teleport-melee attacks).

That's a good build, but the problem is it's just a build. It's not a set of options designed and endorsed for the play style. When folks ask for a support/melee combo, we typically do so coming from a place of already having the fiction we want fulfilled. That's much larger than a radioactive time traveler with electricity powers. It also sucks to wait until your 40s to fulfill your fiction. Meanwhile, I think Manipulation/Support would be easier to build and balance... But then we would need Medieval Manipulation to make the Time Gladiator.

I've never seen the 7 layer burrito room on any other map but blurple caves. Maybe a red side thing? I don't get over there much.

It goes without saying but.... Also add SG entrances to gold side. Atm, the only way into your SG is Studio > Pocket D (or passcode).

Strongly agree. There's clearly never going to be any ties with Thunderspy specifically, but I can always dream Ourodev and HC may some day share resources. To stress my point though: the thing about a "move fast and break things" server is they'll basically always get to call "dibs" if you let that matter. So it just seems it's in HC's best interest to do what they want to do and ignore the coxg as hard as possible. Any similarities would be incidental.

Thank you, @Bopper. EDIT: pointlessly dismissive original comment here. My apologies, it wasn't helpful. Updated version: I'm welcome to debate this further if there's anything more to be said that's not name-calling GIFs, but except for one post I had that got eaten somewhere, I think I've said my piece.

Clarify, please. You're saying facepalm is not a derogatory action?

/jranger leaves a post I can quote. Even responding with a Facepalm picture would leave a post that can be quoted and used to display to other users how this person thought a denigrating picture would excuse them from logic. Even the very complaint I just levied at you is an example of something I wouldn't have felt and been able to articulate if you just followed me around facepalming. It's absolutely true that adding a Confused reaction to someone's post creates the same lack of involvement as any other Response. But no one said the responses as they are are perfect. But, by declaring the current responses as equivalent to a facepalm, you willfully ignore that facepalming is done almost exclusively to mock someone. We often see people use the Confused react for posts they don't agree with, and it's not perfect. But it's never been assumed to exist for the sake of declaring "this person is making a dumb declaration." That's what a facepalm react is, and that's 99% the use case. It's an embrace of calling someone names, without the ramifications. While people try to force Confused into that space occasionally, or even Haha, no one thinks these are the primary use cases, and there's a clear difference in how they are intended and how Facepalm would be used. If this is a distinction without a difference, I believe the onus is on you to prove to the Powers That Be why an entire memetic culture views a facepalm as a mocking response but these boards would not. Failing that, I believe my arguments before your post sufficiently show this is a feature that would do more harm than good. Additional caveats: 1) I'm not thrilled with adding some sort of simplistic "no" Response because it has some of the same engagement issues, plus there's a reason most forums have moved away from downvoting and the negativity implied. I would still support it over a Facepalm, but at the end of the day, negative reactions are better suited as responses. 2) As I mentioned at the start, I do not denounce posting a facepalm image as a reaction. I think it's immature and unhelpful to discussion, but the act of making the post still makes you a participant. It leaves the person facepalmed the option to tell you "you're being immature and unhelpful."

I can't imagine you think "Confused", "Sad", or "Haha" have the same derisive connotation as a facepalm. All you need to do is read the 2 portions you quoted together to see how much different this is. Edit: Doc, you pretty consistently generalize my opinion down to such a basic degree that you can reframe my attempts at nuance as inconsistency. It makes it feel worthless to give concessions and attempt deeper discussion with you.