PoptartsNinja

Mids numbers, which is [base damage] / (recharge + casting time) So Knockout Blow is 188.1/(25+2.23) = 6.908~ The rage numbers are also modified roughly by a really rough estimate of Rage's up/downtime, so: Rage x1 was 338.5 / 27.23 = 12.43 * (120/130 (~0.92 [120/130]) = 11.5 ish (I'm not re-doing the math) and Rage x2 was 489 / 27.23 = 17.96~ * (~0.83 [100/120 (in hindsight I might've flubbed this as 110/130 which would be 0.85? I don't remember)]) = 15 ish Mostly I pulled the numbers right out of mids, using unenhanced values for all sets. However mids averages out the DPS for that, yeah. I think it does something like Damage / some assumed proc rate, but that isn't one I tried to do actual math on. The actual math isn't my forte. It's doing something similar with vicious slash, but being a lower damage 'heavy hitter' that's up more frequently kinda inflates Vicious Slash's numbers. I just didn't want to not include Savage Melee on the list. Edit: What I really wanted to do was post every set's actual base damage scale, but I couldn't find them anywhere.

While they're at it, they could give it an alternate animation of spraypainting the player character's teeth silver. We already have spraycans and I'd bet one of the texting emojis or maybe even the newspaper salesman shout and arm swing would get pretty close...

And I understand that you don't like being told how to play. Which is why, not once in this thread, have I ever used the words "forced," "have to," "required," "required to," "must" or any other synonym of the same in relation to whether or not you voluntarily choose to select Rage during a level up. I also understand that words and definitions are important. Which is why, when people use words like "must" or "have to" and very often "all" and "everyone" they're speaking in hyperbole. An obvious and intentional exaggeration that isn't meant to be taken literally. Hyperboles and other figures of speech are common, and I'm sorry that over-using the word must seems to be as much of a pet peeve for you that people saying "begs the question" when they really mean "raises the question" annoys me. I get it. I do. The problem is that arguing semantics distracts from the actual point. In this case, the point is that Super Strength's design has been crippled by a power that is pretending to be the set's crutch. The set wouldn't need Rage to prop it up 'in emergencies' if it didn't have Rage propping it up. It could get some actual love, and I'm very glad the developers have chosen to pay attention to it and try to polish it into something that will be better than it currently is.

Rudra, you know as well as I do that no one is forced to take anything beyond a T1/T2 of their primary and their secondary. No one is literally held at gunpoint and forced to take Rage, but: and this is the big but? You are intentionally arguing in bad faith. And I'm only giving you the time of day because I believe you are genuinely a good person with valuable insights and I don't believe you're the sort of person who argues in bad faith on purpose. I totally understand that you like Super Strength, and that's ok! My favorite powerset has always been Forcefield, and I liked it even back when it was genuinely bad and offered almost nothing of value to most teams. I still think Forcefield is still saddled with two of what may very well be the worst powers in the game and it's still my favorite set in spite of that. I really miss Force Bubble. It was a much better power than anyone ever gave it credit for, it just had an extremely high skill floor (with a commissurately high skill ceiling that made it fun to use). Whether Super Strength is your favorite set or not, the goal isn't to make the set worse. Because the only way it could be is if it dealt psi damage. Knockout Blow is in such a poor state at Rage x0 that the only heavy-hitters it beats in terms of DPS are One Thousand Cuts (against a single target only) and 0 to 1 combo Crushing Uppercut (which is mostly a condemnation of the state of Street Justice's combo system), and while Footstomp is a legitimately good attack and there are a fair number of individual powers it outperforms, the only full powersets Super Strength as a whole outperforms as an AoE damage powerset are Stone Melee and Psi Melee. Tremor is notoriously dire (it was 15ft before anyone else was but didn't get a damage increase when other tanker AoEs got pushed up to 15ft) and Psi Melee is so heavily penalized for doing Psi damage that it is genuinely just the worst melee powerset. But I'm not asking you to take my word for it, so here you go: Here are the base values (no enhancements, just pure base DPS) of Super Strength's two best attacks. The ones everyone loves. And then compare them to where they wind up with 1x or 2x Rage. I'll let you draw any conclusions you want from those numbers.

Rudra: True or False To your knowledge of the game's numbers, are Super Strength's base damage numbers lower than those of most other melee damage sets?

Now. I was talking back at launch when Family topped out around level 35. Forgot about the Tsoo, though, Ancestor spirits did persist up to level 40. I also remember them being the lowest target priority of everything in the faction (back then it was definitely a game of "dogpile the Sorcerer").

Current Super Strength does cover one base really well: Its values suck, so they can give it to mid-tier enemy groups without those groups being too strong. But it's really kinda telling that the classic mobs with Super Strength get phased out in the mid 30s for mobs with War Mace, which was perceived (incorrectly) as the worst melee set at launch and that the set didn't reappear in the endgame (Statesman and Tyrant notwithstanding, not to mention Black Scorpion who barely counts). IIRC Statesman and Tyrant didn't even have Zeus's lightning back when they were introduced, they had to give them a second energy-damage version of Footstomp to make them somewhat dangerous. Did you know Black Scorpion is the only one of the OG Super Strength AVs who had/has Rage? It's +20% ToHit / +15% damage for 30 seconds on a 60 second recharge.

Finally, a use for Detention Bubble. (Just in case anyone can't tell: this wasn't a serious response)

Good for you! My favorite power in the game was Force Bubble. Force Bubble was legitimately too strong and was replaced with a less fun but much more practical power that gave Forcefield something it legitimately needed (a source of DDR). We'd never have gotten the ZTF train mission if Force Bubble still existed. Imagine just turning on a 40 foot radius bubble and instantly killing everything that wasn't an AV just by walking forward in a straight line. Rage is exactly the same sort of problem-tier power.

The game has outgrown rest, and I'm so glad it has. The original design was: Fight a spawn or two, spend a minute resting. Fight a spawn or two, spend a minute resting. Endlessly. It was a mind-numbing way to keep people subscribed for just a little longer, to inflate play times at the expense of actual enjoyable game design. The Fight-Fight-Rest gameplay loop was the reason why I quit the first time, way back during I0 or I1 (I forget), and came back a few issues later when Health and Stamina were made universal.

And that is an even bigger problem than it appears. The poor base scaling Rage requires in order to not be stupidly broken makes team buffs worth less on a Super Strength character than other powersets. To toss out the hypothetical max fulcrum shift/damage cap/max fury/etc: Super Strength's values are so low that being at the damage cap just benefits every other powerset more than Super Strength. I understand not wanting Rage to change because it makes proc bombs easier, but the whole set is just stuck in a vicious circle: Rage enables proc-bombing, so that's what "everyone" (doing harder content) does to try to make Super Strength viable. Super Strength requires both rage and procs to achieve basic functionality The set wouldn't need to proc bomb as hard (especially in harder content) if it had better scaling Rage's very nature will always prevent the set from ever getting better base scales (Go back to #1)

I can understand why people are frustrated and a bit depressed about this one. Even if you do plan on re-touching Super Strength for Page 3, you showed people two things they were really interested in (Armor T9 changes and a Super Strength rework), and both got pulled. One of which was pulled with a very spitefully worded: "At least at this point there are no plans to revisit them in the future." I'm still hopeful wasn't actually intended to be spiteful, but it's easy to misread a text's tone and for me, that is how it came accross. What's clear to me from the current situation is: Interest in seeing Super Strength reworked is very high. I'm glad that one's not going away. People are passionate about it because they want Super Strength to be good, feel good to play, and to keep the core of its identity. It really feels like Unleashed Might and the Handclap change really fit, so people are genuinely upset to see them go (however temporarily). I think the powers team is capable of delivering on a Super Strength rework, so I can be patient. People really do want to see the Armor T9s improved. They just: Don't want the Armor T9s to be homogenized because different powersets need different tools Maybe want to see Armor T9 changes trickled out one or two sets at a time so that we can focus our testing time on a set or two instead of all being handled at once in a way that makes it difficult for anyone to test every change to see how it actually works Would appreciate a bit more dev / power team feedback about what their vision is for each armor set's T9. Having a bit more insight into the design intent would help us provide useful suggestions to how to achieve developer goals without losing the powerset's flavor; or at least would allow us to better explain why we felt a change wasn't meeting the rework goals and offer suggestions for alternatives that did. The Electric Armor changes went over really well, because Electric Armor has never needed a 'panic button' style power. It's a very durable set, so turning Electric Armor's T9 into a shorter-duration utility tool suited the set's needs pretty perfectly. But just because that design worked for Electric Armor doesn't mean that same design works for other powersets. For example: Ninjutsu already has a good utility toolset, has inherently worse DDR values than Super Reflexes, and it doesn't have the added durability that Super Reflexes' scaling armor provides. Ninjutsu probably really does want a long-duration panic button in some form. It could absolutely use a panic button that's better suited to its actual strengths, but over-capping Ninjutsu's defense values is genuinely useful because it isn't basically immune to -def the way Super Reflexes is. I'm glad Super Strength's rework is still on the table, if a bit sad it won't be a (slightly post) Christmas present (that's fine, my birthday's in the spring so it can be a birthday present instead 😄 ). I really hope you reconsider "not touching" the Armor T9s. People feel strongly about them because most of them really do need an overhaul. Crashes feel awful and aren't good game design, T9 self-rezzes are generally bad, and some sets really do need something that lasts longer than 30 seconds.

Put me in the column of people who were really interested in seeing Unleashed Might. "Rage" as a concept is better represented by Brute fury anyway. Just give Super Strength the full overhaul it's needed since Issue 1, and make sure it has a consistent design intent. We've already got best-in-show single target and DPS sets, and people like Super Strength currently because of its AoE toolkit. So as long as Super Strength keeps a strong AoE toolkit I think people will still probably be ok with it. ... And let Hurl pull from a random selection of objects, like rocks, cars, lamp posts, crates, villain group ragdolls (if you can figure out a way to get it to 'see' the primary villain group of whatever mission you're in), and etc. Showing the set some genuine love and care by giving it something fun (even if it's only aesthetic) will help lessen the sting of loosing its crutch (especially, to maintain the analogy, if you actually rehab the set enough that it can run again).

/macro ATT "powexec_toggle_on attune" solves Sonic's biggest problem: accidentally detoggling Attune and/or needing to constantly watch your power bar to make sure you didn't bump it on accident. Just click the macro as part of your standard rotation. If attune's on, the button does nothing and won't interfere with the rest of your rotation; if attune isn't on, the macro will activate attune. It basically works like a normal power that way.

People are allowed to run their teams any way they want, whether that be tankers only, level 55 newbies welcome, no kheldians, or LF1M healer only. Looks like that team filled up almost instantly, so there would probably have been takers if you started your own team. I totally get not wanting to, though. Leading teams can be a lot of pressure, and all it takes is a bad experience or two to sour you on a player, a playstyle, an AT, or even leading teams at all.

You're right, I should have prefaced that with "it's my belief that," fixed. The devs are very stingy with telling us their intent behind some changes, so it could be punitive. I'm just of the opinion that that particular change isn't intended to be. Being a toggle, Unleashed Might could still use handclap as a mitigation tool (by turning off Unleashed Might) or a damaging tool; but Rage doesn't have that option. I personally believe that's why Rage doesn't get the changed version, but unless a dev steps in and tells us their actual intent we're left with wild speculations. It's one of the reasons I do think the current patch notes are often unfortunately inadequate. I'd love to see the reasoning or intent behind certain changes, so if something doesn't work we can help find solutions that will still work towards the devs' goals rather than counter to them. Edit: That's what I was told when I suggested it be turned into a timed toggle. Since the timed toggles can't stack magnitude, it would remove Detention Field's "use case." That's why I suspect there's a similar logic at play here. Whether I personally agree with that logic or not.

It's my personal belief that this wasn't changed because the current Hand Clap does have an "accepted" use (albeit one a lot of the sets that pair well with Super Strength don't utilize). One of current Hand Clap's only use cases is to give Super Strength something to use to help mitigate the Rage crash, scoring a PBAoE knockdown and buying themselves an extra 3-5 seconds of not taking damage while the crash timer ticks down. If a power has even a single valid use case, the devs have been fairly consistent in not removing that use case. That's why Detention Field still exists in its current form, since that has a single valid use during the MLTF: stacking phase shift on the least dangerous Recluse tower to prevent it from buffing Lord Recluse without killing it.

The problem with "Place it further away" is: Category Five has a damage radius (25') where it does roughly the same damage as Blizzard (over 30 seconds rather than 15), and a much bigger damage radius where it does roughly the same damage as Fireball (over 30 seconds). If the targets aren't in the Eye, they're not really taking anything significant. And because it's a DoT nuke, it's triggering the AI's "run away" code, not necessarily the "charge in and attack" code.

Intensify makes one of the set's random elements slightly less random. During lightning cooldowns it adds nothing, so its effects aren't really all that visible from a player perspective. We can see that the eye is roughly 2/3rds of Category 5's DoT damage, with the rest of the storm making up the remaining 1/3rd. The numbers were low because this was from a pylon test, so smacking a single stationary target for two minutes until I ran out of end: So yes, you've made the worst part of Category 5 bigger; but you've also made the best part of Category 5 smaller since it's now a 25ft radius. That's the same as the other AoE nukes so that's a bit of a whatever, but the larger area of Category 5's damage is just... it Exists. The increased area on Category 5's worse DoT make it far more likely that it will aggro adjacent packs, or that you'll be minimizing your damage by placing carefully to avoid them. Or not using it at all unless the team splits and the blasters all decided to go the other way, which is Category 5's current use case. "Biggest nuke" isn't necessarily an advantage. Big is hard to control. Especially since Storm Blast has no native means of knocking enemies into the eye on its own. Jetstream might have been usable for that, but Storm Cell turns it into a knockdown. The three powers that form the core of the set's AoE soft control don't work synergistically, and instead actively hamper one another. If it was a knockback that Storm Cell turned into a repel and the Category 5 Eye fired an instant auto-knockdown at any target in the area under a repel effect I'd like it more. That's the sort of working synergy that would let Storm Blast pair pretty well with a friendly mind controller or even blaster martial assault. I've played the heck out of Storm Blast. I think it's currently in an OK place on live. It isn't amazing, but it's functional and on a Defender you can leverage Storm Blast's high debuff values to get good team support out of the set. I don't even hate the idea of a Soft Control Nuke. The stated goal of these changes was making the set play better on teams, and I don't think that's been accomplished. It's been changed to work differently and while I don't think the changes were negative--they're mostly just neutral? So if all you're really doing is cleaning up Storm on the back end so it's easier to code? Great! That's a good enough reason for these changes to go live. I'm not trying to talk any of the powers team out of any of the tweaks you've made, if this went live as-is, people would deal with it. As you've said, Storm Blast's performance is about the same as before. I just personally think there are things you could do that would make the set shine without necessarily increasing its damage or making a big change to your design intent. Adding some -Recovery to pair with the set's surprisingly strong -End would be a good one. So would fixing Jetstream's interactions with the rest of the set, to make it reliable instead of an auto-skip. You could turn Cloudburst's slow debuff into a small AoE if it hits a target inside both Storm Cell and Category 5, to give the player a different option to help control runners. It sounds like improving high winds generation is already on your radar. If so: thank you! High Winds are the bulk of the set's debuff potential and as a Defender I like them a lot.

I've asked for this, the devs said it was left as-is because certain speed teams use it to phase one of Lord Recluse's towers in the MLTF and they couldn't stack the phase if it was a toggle, removing Detention Field's only actual use case. Since it's a power with precisely one use case, I'm ok with anything that sees Detention Field tweaked, fixed, or removed and replaced with something that doesn't suck. Or, I would be, if Forcefield wasn't saddled with Repulsion Field, which is the 3rd or 4th worst power in the entire game.

Storm Blast will never be a top damage performer, it's a set that doesn't get a meaningful AoE until Tier 7 (level 18 / level 24), and that AoE's a chain (the worst and slowest form of AoE). The biggest boost to clear times the set just got was critical failure protection on the chain so Chain Lightning will actually chain to the most targets it possibly can--as long as they're reasonably bunched up--rather than hitting a half-dozen things and then failing because it hit that 1-in-20 guaranteed failure chance. Edit: Yes, I genuinely did just forget that Jet Stream existed, but that's because I find repel incredibly annoying. I feel the best way to make Storm Blast more relevent would be to turn it into a blast set with a strong debuffing toolkit that takes good advantage of AT debuff modifiers. I personally feel the set already performs best on a Defender, so I guess I'd ask the devs to consider play into that strength. Giving it more secondary debuffs that trigger on targets inside Storm Cell, or some way to accelerate high winds gain so High Winds can be the primary debuff source. Something like: Gust: Add 4-8 seconds of -Perception to targets struck in Storm Cell, encouraging them to run closer to the tank; or let Gust generate 2 High Winds stacks instead of 1 if the target's in a Storm Cell Hailstones: Add -Res(Debuffs) to targets struck inside Storm Cell Jet Stream: Remove Repel, let Jet Stream generate 0.33 to 0.5 High Winds stacks per target hit instead of a flat 1 so Jet Stream can accelerate the High Winds debuffs rather than being a frustrating and unpredictable pain. Keep the knockdown in Storm Cell Storm Cell: Live and test iterations seem to be as good as they'll ever be allowed to be, so this is fine, whatever Intensify: I'll be honest, I still don't really understand what Intensify actually does other than being a tweaked Aim. This should probably either add high winds stacks directly or boost the proc rate for Storm Cell's attacks to trigger lightning strikes. Direct Strike: Probably fine, but with all the -end the set has it would be nice for a power to do some -recovery and I think Direct Strike is the best candidate Chain Lightning: No changes needed, probably the strongest power in the set Cloudburst: Does good debuffs against targets in Storm Cell, no changes needed. This is the power that makes me wish the other powers had similar debuff performance. Category Five: A DoT Nuke is always going to be inferior to a burst damage nuke, but Category Five pairs that with unpredictable damage and damage that's concentrated in a small area that the set has very little means to force targets into. I really wish Cat Five either came with a guaranteed controllable and reliable damage boost. Something like: -Res(Cold, Energy), to targets in both Cat 5 and Storm Cell To boost the power of the rest of Storm Blast without boosting common powerhouse sets; or that it came with some form of occasional trawl effect (like a semi-random vectored knockback towards the center) that would slowly "encourage" things to move towards the Eye. The set is already good enough on a Defender that I feel like it could be a genuinely good low-damage team support blast set if the Devs were willing to take a little time to talk about what they wanted it to be. Play into the Storm Cell interaction a little harder. To use a dumb analogy: the set is never going to be a Zweihander, but it could still be a fun Swiss Army Knife. Edit: You could even sneak in something funny like +Res(Fear) (Not Terrify, the 'forced flee' fear that makes mobs try to escape burn patches or other lingering effects!) to encourage enemies to stand in burn patches because they're wet and cold and a bit numb. It would be a really niche interaction and not very powerful, but also unique and kinda funny

Automatic Lightning triggers up to three times per cast of Storm Cell, and then stops. At least, that's how it was explained to me. The patch notes are very bad at explaining what's actually been done to the set. They reduced the cast time of Storm Cell but we'll be recasting it more often.

Having had a chance to test this more fully, I can say that Storm Cell is genuinely doing more than it did before. It's just doing so much less safely. Live (Mission, vs Rikti, +1/x6): Test (Same Mission / Settings): Live (Pylon, yellow-con): Test (Same Pylon): The timers aren't mission completion times and the pylon times aren't *kill times* (It would take 10+ minutes for my build to solo a pylon), this is just where I'd felt I'd fought enough packs of Rikti back to back without stopping (at +1/x6, my Storm/Storm is a Defender) / nearly ran out of end blasting the Pylon and stopped recording. Storm/Storm on a defender will run itself out of end before it successfully kills a pylon, but I had my test pylon down by roughly 20% at the 2 minute mark and called it good. Roughly a 10 minute pylon time for both, but the new version is a little bit slower thanks to the less frequent lightning from Storm Cell. Storm is best on a Defender and I don't think this changes that. It's too lacking in AoE capability to be a go-to for a Blaster, Sentinel, or Corruptor; and its single target damage suffers because Storm Cell's lightning immunity lockouts make it bad at fighting single targets. Overall impression: The increased size of both Storm Cell and Cat 5 makes both more likely to agro unseen groups. They are big enough to be difficult to control, especially if you're using Powexec_Location Target macros (which I do, placing Storm Cell is a huge chore without those macros, especially now that I have to cast it more often). Cat 5 is much more likely to aggro stray spawns, which it's also far less likely to significantly impact thanks to the reduced radius on the Eye. I'm not the best player in the world, but I genuinely like Storm (mostly for the visuals, but I feel it's actually in an OK place on Defenders). That said, I don't have planned attack rotations or anything like that. I was able to keep myself alive on both (with the help of Break Frees), but the increase in damage on the Test run was due more to Storm pulling extra spawns that I didn't fight on Live than an actual significant performance increase. I've got Fold Space, I'm used to accidentally pulling extras; but Fold Space also makes the Cat 5 Eye look significantly stronger than it would be for anyone who doesn't use Fold Space to keep spawns in the heart of the storm. TLDR: I don't feel like this change did anything significant for Storm Blast. It's still going to be Ok to Medicore on Defenders, who get the most use out of its secondary effects, and bad for every other AT. The lack of significant AoE (Chains are the worst form of AoE) is a real killer. Storm wasn't anyone's go-to for performance before and it's still going to be one of the worst (if not the worst) performing blast set after this change. I still feel like a more significant change would be to either make Storm Cell non-rooting or reduce its cast time to basically nothing.

What this actually means for Storm Cell's lightning: Lightning will proc one big hit on one single target when you make attacks with the Storm Blast powers, at significantly reduced chances over the live version. Gust - 20% (down from 40%) Hailstones, Jet Stream - 30% (Down from 55%) Direct Strike (Fast), Chain Lightning - 40% (Down from 70%) Cloudburst - 50% (Down from 70%) Direct Strike (Slow) - 80% (Down from 90%) Over the course of Storm Cell's lifespan, it can fire up to three additional lightning bolts at random targets within its radius as long as your High Winds is at 3 or higher. Storm Cell is bigger and casts nearly twice as fast, but is still a pain point for the set's design. Now, it's practically guaranteed to be available when you need it for the next spawn without needing to excessively slot for recharge What this effectively means: Chain Lightning is now Storm Cell's only 'every spawn' AoE I didn't have enough time in closed beta to test how heavily this actually impacts Storm's gameplay.

All powers are the same size, and have nothing to do with the size of your character. A smaller character will have a smaller weapon (if you're using a weapon set) unless they use the Legacy weapon models, which don't rescale, but the size of the weapon doesn't have any impact on the size of the power.