Steampunkette

So a Smoke Bomb Clone. I don't see a reason we'd need to remove identity from that, though. Take Psi Projection for example: Just use the Mind-Link animation, make the enemy's head glow, and say you've erased yourself from his perceptions. For Fire use Combustion's animation and when it hits give NPCs a brief cloud of smoke around their heads that keeps them from seeing the Operative. Smoke bombs for Martial. Ice can lay out a thick mist. Earth can stomp up a dust cloud... And we could add a defensive benefit to each of those powers, as well, so that the archetype, overall, retains the benefit of having a 'Click Defense' at tier 3 or 4.

What I mean is there's no option to make a power you have just stop functioning because you've taken a different power. Mutual Exclusivity in the engine only works as a "Take one power and you can't take the other" That said, you could just slap a 20% recharge rate debuff on Hasten to cancel out the 20% global increase... But that doesn't help the core problem at all. Everyone's still gonna take Hasten. It's too good on it's own.

What does the Misdirection move -do- exactly? PBAoE Placate? Create a Pseudopet to taunt/distract? There's been a lot of suggested Misdirections. We need to narrow it down to explicitly decide what it is.

Not -exactly-. I'm looking at averaging out it's effectiveness as an autopower based on the unslotted effectiveness of the power's duration vs recharge rate. Then deleting Hasten from the Superspeed Power Pool and replacing it with the lower power recharge buff "Quick" as an 'always on' power granting +15%. You wouldn't be able to slot anything, you'd just be constantly somewhat faster instead of occasionally significantly faster. Cannot do it. The function of the Mutually Exclusive code is that if you have one power you cannot select another power that it is exclusive with. If you set it up that way, Hasten would be unselectable. And leaving Hasten in the game, at all, just means it'll continue to be the default power everyone picks at high end. (Or at least around 83% of everyone) That is true. We'd need to look at a few specific powers and potentially alter their recharge time to make Perma Possible, if Perma is Desirable. Whether Perma PA is actually a desirable thing for the game to have would be a WHOLE other kettle of fish! Though for what it's worth? I think Permadom is both awful and amazing. I feel like it should be lowered in function and in recharge rate. Instead of doubling the value of controls it should be +1 Mag and the recharge reduced by 40 seconds to make it easier to perma.

The more I think about this change... the more I realize how minor a nerf it would turn out to be... So to clear things up: Turns out I forgot to turn off my 3 Force Feedack Procs in my powers on Mids. The actual recharge time, with Hasten on, for Light Form is 85 seconds with a 90 second duration. I have 173% recharge on this character, not 300% recharge. I was SO CONFUSED when I started looking over her powers! Without Hasten, the recharge is 106 seconds. Meaning it's got a 16 second downtime. That's a 21 second difference! If I had the global +20% and a further +15% from Quick that's out to an 11 second downtime. But I could take the one slot I added to Hasten and put it into Lightform to bring it down to nothing. No downtime whatsoever... pretty swanky, since I could just set that one power to autocast rather than having to also worry about Hasten. And I'd wind up losing about 1 second on the recharge of my main attacks... which ain't the worst thing. I could just slot some other power in during the chain. Unless, of course, any of my 3 Force Feedbacks proc and then my chain is back to normal. All in all, it seems like the impact it would have on high end builds isn't as bad as it might initially seem. If only because of the Diminishing Returns of recharge rates.

Hilariously, your suggestion ultimately lead to me suggesting a larger global recharge rate buff to everyone than you initially suggested, but the removal of Hasten as the counterbalance.

Look at my first post in this thread. While I was against adding a global 10% recharge rate to everyone, I was down with the idea of adding some Recharge Mechanics to other parts of the Superspeed Power Pool. Specifically because it makes thematic sense that someone who runs at superspeed -reacts- at superspeed. But over the course of the thread my position changed. And when you presented the hard numbers of how overwhelmingly big Hasten is at high end, where it's a largely mandatory power, it made me completely reconsider my position... It's not that a 10% global recharge bonus would be a bad thing. It's that Hasten is -so- close to mandatory that is the bigger problem. My positions in this thread have changed from "More recharge isn't a problem, but we should make it thematic rather than global" to "Holy shit look at how overwhelmingly popular this +recharge power is, far beyond it's peers to the point where it's perceived as mandatory... shit. This is bad." I didn't "Pick a position and then aim for confirmation bias to prop myself up". I took a very loose position and then saw more and more evidence that that position was in the wrong and chose a much different, and a bit harder line? Position.

With SOs or IOs you can get the recharge down to 240 seconds. Which is why I suggested adding 'Quick' to the Superspeed Power Pool as an additional 15% recharge increase. 2 SOs or IOs gets you to about 50% uptime 70/2 is 35, so 20% base +15% from Quick. This change would be a fairly major buff to the majority of builds and a mild to moderate nerf to some extreme outlier builds. Including my badass humanform PB Build who currently enjoys a total of 300% Recharge over the baseline 100... She'd get a 35 point recharge hit and bring her down to 265%... which... y'know. Still more than enough for permanent Light Form. Permadom, on the other hand, would largely remain unaffected. It's right here:

Oh, no. This isn't about what I want, @QuiJon. You're guessing at my motives and missing wildly. I'm not a minmaxer and, frankly, I never reach the limit of my power pools. I usually take all of my primary and secondary, minus Taunts, Confronts, and Placates, and only grab a handful of pool powers. Hasten and Fighting are usually two of them, with an EPP as the third. But I never use Combat Jumping and only take Leadership for characters who will use both maneuvers -and- assault or tactics... Point is: I've never had a character with 4 pools in my life. Usually I try to get by with 1 or 2, I've never had a permadom (though I have some doms) and I have only one character who has Permahasten and it's a badass humanform PB rawr. I was talking in the "Swift +10% global recharge" thread when I saw that 90% of level 50 players have Hasten. That's an outsized impact by any measure. That's literally the reason that I brought this up. The total and exclusive reason. Also for Permadom you need a total of 123% Recharge Rate. This would be 20% of it off the bat, leaving you with 103% recharge rate required to maintain permadom. Dunno WHERE you got the 160% stuff from... Getting 3 LotGs gets you 22.5, you can get 10% from up to 5 Purple Sets (including the Dominator-Specific sets) which puts you at 72.5% meaning you need only 3 of the 6.25% recharge bonuses and 3 5% recharge bonuses and you're set. And hey. Since you won't have Hasten, anymore, you can just leave Domination on autocast with no more juggling! I'm not looking at a nerf. I'm looking at a globalization. Everyone gets it, like everyone gained Fitness. Again, not nerfing it because it's good because I'm not suggesting a nerf. I'm suggesting it be removed from the game, -entirely- and that all characters, whether they took hasten or not, get a 20% global recharge buff. Fitness got the same treatment, in fact. It's no longer a power pool, and is instead a Global Grant at level 2, with everyone getting it. I'm suggesting the global setup because giving everyone a power as strong as hasten from level 1 onward seems a bit OP, so I averaged it's function over time. But there has been some decent points brought up about the effects of hasten. So how about the power we replace Hasten with is an Autopower called "Quick". Always on, no Endurance cost, +15% Recharge Rate. Taking that power would be roughly equivalent to having Hasten 2-slotted for Recharge Rate. And while it might still be -super- popular at high end, it wouldn't be more powerful than slotting 2 LotG powers, and most people wouldn't 'need' it for their builds because they're already getting the +20% baseline increase.

I agree, fully. And I was using your unserious proposal as a joke. Before you posted it I had Rath's "Half Joking" ED removal comment in the same spot. You just gave me a better set up for the joke! Perfect Balance is impossible. Ballpark Balance is possible and should always be the goal. Catering to the minmax minority is... yeah. A bad idea. The amount of elitism it encourages can destroy a community.

There are about 60k characters at level 50. About 50k of them use Hasten. It's one of the single most used powers in the game, far outstripping most pool powers, though less people overall use Hasten than Fly. It's a power that is, essentially, never used for Theme but exclusively used for Function. Much as how Stamina, Health, and Swift were used before the Fitness Pool was incorporated into all characters. Instead, we should increase the baseline recharge of all characters by 20% and replace the power with something else. The 20% value is based on Hasten's recharge time being 3.75 times longer than it's Duration, then dividing the 70% hasten bonus by the time difference which is 18.6%. I rounded up the other 1.4% just to make it looks more presentable. This way everyone gets the 'full benefit' of unslotted Hasten by averaging out it's effect as a permanent autopower instead of a click power. With Hasten gone we'd need a new Super Speed power. I'd like to suggest some sort of 'Combat Superspeed' ability. Perhaps a weaker version of Martial Manipulation's "Burst of Speed"? I'm open to suggestions. To be clear: This is a serious suggestion at this point. Not a ruse or a joke meant to poo poo on a different thread. Seeing the level 50 numbers on Hasten compared to the populace showed me that Hasten is the new Fitness. It may not be MANDATORY. But it is too good in relation to it's neighbors in other power pools. EDIT: After continued discussion I have revamped my suggestion to the following: 1) Lower Hasten's Cooldown to 200 Seconds 2) Lower Hasten's Recharge Rate Buff to 25% 3) Grant all players a +20% Recharge Rate Buff starting at level 1 This would allow Hasten to be 'Perma' with 2 Recharge SOs at 45% Recharge Rate increase. But would also allow people to Double-Stack Hasten if they have enough recharge rate buffs to a full 70% total Recharge Rate Increase over the current baseline. The intent is to split out portions of the buff to make it less attractive, overall, while still retaining it's ultimate function, in the hopes that more people will take the 20% recharge rate increase as 'Enough' of a benefit that they feel they don't -have- to take Hasten. Also I made the title a little less drastic to better reflect the current leaning. Annnnnd here comes Version 3! We're back to Deleting Hasten, but also incorporating Permahasten into all builds... kinda. Topic has been changed to better represent option 3.

Could be... Could be... Or it could be that as you level even if you take your entire primary and secondary powerset you absolutely HAVE TO take a Pool Power at 24 and another at 30 and most pool powers kinda suck or lend themselves to specific builds while Hasten improves literally every build. Unless you're contending that all 53,000 characters are slamming their heads against the Recharge Limit and trying to get the absolute perfect attack chain... Huh... More than anything that kind of hints at the fact that Hasten, on it's own, might be too good as a power pool choice, doesn't it? Great Figures, Adjustor!

No one is forced to use their optimal attack chain. In fact, the majority of players don't KNOW their optimal attack chain... They just go through the game fighting and having a blast beating up bad guys (Or good guys) But the Optimal Attack Chain is forever going to be be held to the limits of what can, currently, be done. Because the absolute best Single Target Attack Chain for Super Strength would be Knockout Blow with no Cooldown. Just infinite punches over and over and over again doing 600+ DPS. And the best SS AoE would just be infinite Footstomps one after another 'til everything is dead with no cooldown. Not that I think that's where this is going. Just trying to illustrate that the current "Optimal" is only the best 'til the next big change, regardless of what it is. Optimal is only Optimal in relation to what can currently e done, and every change alters the optimal. Thank God no one Advocates for the removal of ED so there's no way my previous example could ever hap- Oh. Yeah... No. /Jranger to both. Let's start bringing stuff to parity through buffs and nerfs to get 'Ballpark Balance' and then we can revisit this.

900,000 characters. 150,000 hasten users. That's not "Practically Forced" That's not "Deep in Recharge Diminishing Returns" That's 750,000 characters that don't bother. And -significantly- less than 150,000 that are Min-Maxed to the nines trying to get the perfect attack rotation and feel 'forced' to take it. Your experiences are not universal.

*vibrates with the urge to get political* You can't tease me like that, Rath!

Did you Blap the same way before you got your 3 different defensive toggles? Did you stay in Melee at level 10 or 15 just as much as you do at 40+? Did you die more often at those lower levels, or have you spent your whole career almost never dying? I think that's where things might be at issue. You've got a specific experience based on a specific powerset combo -and- dipping into 2 different pools to get 3 defensive powers in order to survive as well as you do. Other Powerset Combos might not be as survivable. Mind/Psi, for example. Or Energy/Nrg. You're running a blapper with 3 defensive powers, 1 major debuff power, and a primary that focuses on wide area cone -ToHit that all augment your survivability. But I'm not talking about Power Pools and Ancillary Pools, here. I'm talking about the -BASELINE ARCHETYPE- and it's survivability. If you expect every player playing this AT to -need- Tough and Weave and other Defensive Powers that you're not giving them to survive... Imagine you're a BRAND NEW player. You've never played City of Heroes, before, but you've heard from friends how amazing it was and what a travesty it was that it got canceled so you decide to download it. Operative sounds like a cool class and you get a lot of flashy attack powers so you grab it. You don't know that you need Tough and Weave to survive. You don't even know how power pools work, yet. The Archetype has a BUNCH of Melee Attacks. Like 3-4 in the Primary and 2-4 in the secondary. So you grab them and run into melee and die. A Lot. Because you don't know that you -have- to do Tough and Weave and maybe Maneuvers and you're not high enough level to dip into the Ancillary Power Pools. You don't know that Scrappers and Stalkers have a separate powerset built on surviving, at this point. You just think you're doing it wrong. So you try jumping to ranged between melee bursts. And that -kind- of works but you still wind up dying a lot 'cause you don't have a lot of ranged attacks, just 3-5, and eventually you have to go into melee. There's no Armor in this game to put on to get higher defenses. What gives? Why are you still dying? How long are you going to keep running back from the hospital before you say "This is stupid" and either give up on the game or reroll to a new AT? If you want the AT to fight in melee, jump to ranged, dive back into melee, you need to give them the tools to survive, there. Yeah Tough and Weave exist in the game and anyone can grab them, but they're meant to be options, not mandatory choices for baseline function.

Ah, yes. The pointless rhetorical framing device meant to avoid acknowledging a point in favor of creating 'Floating Point' Goalposts. Love it. For some people it's too easy, already. For others not so much. But with more than a few people clamoring for more challenging content and increased aggro caps 'cause +4x8 isn't hard enough I think it's safe to say that we're over the hump of ease. If your position is "It ain't ruined, yet, therefore we should keep pressing further and further until we reach the ruined point" then I dunno what to tell you. There's good reasons not to do it (Power Creep being the top one), but the only reasons to do it are 'I want it' and 'It would allow more people to skip Hasten' There's 900,000+ characters. Around 150,000 of them have Hasten. 180k have Fly. It seems like Builds are already pretty damned diverse.

The reason to eschew it is because Power Creep ruins games by making everything too easy. It being present is a reason to Nerf.

@Replacement Can you describe your blapping style for me? How do you survive melee combat against multiple enemies as a blapper? Do you do a lot of Jousting, that is to say jumping or flying past enemies, clicking a melee attack, and landing some distance away when the attack hits? Do you typically fire off one melee attack, then bounce to range, then hit whoever gets near you once or twice, then fall back further? Do you teleport in with Burst of Speed, fling a single melee attack, teleport again, melee, teleport again, melee, flee to range? Do you use your Dark Attacks to spread -ToHit (essentially giving yourself some defense), then teleport into melee to fight, then run out to throw some more darkness?

Having Inherent Stamina was already a "Smidge More" recovery for everyone. You're just walking down the path a "Smidge Further" And yeah. Power Creep exists. That's not a good reason to pile onto it.

If armor is COMPREHENSIVE it will allow you to stand in melee shooting and punching people. If you've got a 22.5% resistance to Smashing/Lethal/Psionic you're still going to get chewed alive by CoT's Fire and Negative because it bypasses your defenses. So does the Freakshow's electric attacks and Crey's Cryo Beams and Energy Blasts. Also allow me to also direct you, here: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Hit_Points Blasters get more Hit Points than most of the ATs in the game. Scrappers, Brutes, and Tankers beat them out with Stalkers tied for fourth place. They didn't start out with that many HP, though. Originally they had the same number as Defenders. It was people's relentless Blapping that caused an HP increase to the AT overall, putting them on par with Stalkers. CoH has a pack logic. It isn't perfect, but it is present. Sometimes if the damage lands right during a clock-cycle the other members of the group won't register the hit because their ally will already be running toward you rather than being hurt, but if it has KB on it the whole group is coming your way. Also Holds and other mezzes. If you'd care to test the theory just take any regular blaster into the game and attack a group of minions from range with a single target attack. Blaster base range is 80, Hellion Minion perception is 45 and LT is 50. So you'll be outside of their sight-range when Snap Shot or some other single target ranged attack goes off. Sometimes the single minion will be the only thing aggroed. But usually the whole group will come running.

Also, I'm sorry! It was 12 Mag 1 attacks to kill at 8.6 with the 12th attack overcoming natural regeneration over the course of the TTD. My mistake!

You -cannot- give them Defensive Benefits as the core function of their Inherent Power apropos of nothing. NO ARCHETYPE gets anywhere -near- that level of benefit from their Inherent power. Not even Brutes with their Fury or Scrappers with their Crits. It would be akin to granting them the benefits of the entire secondary powerset of Scrappers -IN ADDITION- to their own Manipulation Secondary Powerset. Sorry it's not clear, the above outburst is in relation to trying to cram all of the defensive needs the AT will have into the inherent "Misdirection". As to Stealth: It only applies to Perception which determines initial aggro range. If you're a Stealthed Blaster firing a range-enhanced Sniper Shot from half a county away the entire group you're attacking is still going to aggro on you because you have engaged them. Doesn't matter if they can't "See" you by their perception range. They know where you are. And they're coming.

Time to Kill < Time to Die That's the most basic metric in City of Heroes. Every mechanic in the game is built around shortening one and lengthening the other. Every damage buff or res debuff is meant to make the Time to Kill lower. Ever defense buff or accuracy debuff is meant to make the Time to Die higher. The most basic piece of TTD/TTK for anyone to understand is that the player takes 12 Mag 1 attacks to die at level 1. A Mag 1 attack deals 8.3 damage modified by Archetype or Enemy Type. Some enemies and players throw Mag 2 attacks (16.6) at level 1. Sometimes those magnitudes are broken up, like 4 hits of 4.15 from a machine gun burst. But the total values remain the same. A character with 22.5% resistance to a given Mag 1 attack is going to take 6.5 points of damage from that attack. The number of Mag 1 attacks needed to kill that player goes up to 15. The number of Mag 2 attacks goes from 6 to 7. Mag 3s goes from 4 to 5. You get the idea. So you just take the average level 1 spawn of 3 minions and a Lieutenant, determine the recharge times, animation times, and damage values of their attacks, and create a timeline. These attacks include both ranged and melee attacks, both of which can be fired in melee. That timeline gets adjusted by movement rates and attack ranges. But since we're talking about melee it's fairly safe to say that you'll be within 6 yards which is the unadjusted move speed per second of NPCs and PCs so they'll be on top of you within a second. At which point they're all going to swing on you. Then you have the PC's timeline, which includes both brawl and their available attack power(s) as well as any defensive abilities they get. Blasters have at least 1 control based tier 1 power available to them. Whether it's a knockback attack or an immobilize, these attacks reduce incoming damage by a set amount (Immobs mean only ranged attacks can hit, KB means no attacks hit for a certain duration, then ranged attacks, then a movement period before melee attacks which could be interrupted by additional ranged attacks) Most other ATs don't. Scrappers don't immob or push enemies away, so they rely on a static defensive ability to reduce incoming damage by a relative amount (Defense means some attacks deal no damage, resistance means all attacks deal less) Set up the timelines and go. I used to have spreadsheets for this kind of thing, but that was several years and a hard drive ago...

So. Big thing! The AT is going to need some defensive powers to survive in melee. Blappers on the whole tend to eat floor until they've picked up some defensive capabilities unless they're fighting +0x1 solo. (I don't need someone to pop in and describe how their level 1 blapper soloed the ITF or some such, you are the exception rather than the rule). This is because Blasters aren't designed to Blap, players are just silly and stubborn. And a big part of the reason is AoE. Whether it's AoE control effects aimed at the 'Tank' (regardless of AT) or Fireballs and Whirling Hands. Blasters are designed to stay at range and keep enemies at range for the most part, with a few 'They got close and I can't get them away so I need to MURDER THEM FAST' powers particularly in the upper tiers. Your Total Focuses and whatnot. This archetype is built around having both ranged -and- melee attacks as it's primary. Which means that to do good damage they can't stay at range and plink, falling back as enemies get close. They've got to get into melee to mix things up for their full damage potential. And that means being exposed to more melee attacks and AoE attacks from level 1 onward. There's not a single Assault Set that doesn't have a melee attack available at level 1, so there'd be people who take that and go to to toe with whoever they're fighting. Without -some- defensive powers that player's probably going to feel like a weak scrapper. We'll also be giving them melee attacks in their secondary powersets as you can see in the suggested sets I put up there. Which weights the archetype, overall, -towards- being in melee. So yeah... some defensive capability is basically required, and we can't try to pile it all into the Inherent. Somethings got to give or else the AT will break. We can't leave all the defenses to level 50 on a character designed to hit things in melee. It's just not reasonable. All the positioning in the world won't save you from punching a boss and getting ganked by his 3 friends. Mez protection is something they might need, yeah. I didn't pass it out like candy because of powers like Inner Will. But if you peek over at Electric you'll see Grounded is one of the defensive powers they get. I think any mez protection they get should be fairly small, to start with, or narrowly aimed at hard control abilities like Holds or Stuns. Perhaps giving them an inherent +1 mez protection value (Giving them Mag 2 which would stop the -first- application of almost any control effect, but make stacking super effective on them) could work, with certain powersets getting other bonuses to specific mez protections, like Ki Projection's Inner Will as a form of Break Free or Grounded's increased protection against KB and Immob. You don't need to playtest an Archetype with no defenses and the presumption of jumping into melee to know there's going to be problems. Unless you plan to hand out hard control AoEs with low recharge times in their secondary tier 1 slot, they're going to get their butts kicked by simple math.