Vanden

Mot ate it all

Could it be coded to just have the character model rotate to face the direction of movement when there's no appropriate run animation? Or is the code too spaghetti to do that easily?

Oh I get it - Stance is an auto power, that you don't have to toggle on. That wasn't mentioned in the patch notes.

The point would be soothing the anxiety of an old fart who's afraid of change

I'm not particularly happy to see the Wentworths and Black Market teleporters deprecated; any chance they can be added to LRT as destinations with a badge unlock? Say, the 1000 sales badge?

I don't understand what the point of choosing Default for the stance power would be, if powers like Ninja Run still overwrite your chosen stance when toggled on? Isn't Default what we should have all the time? Edit: Suggestion: Whirlwind animation as a stance choice!

Sorry for the late reply to this; anyway, I totally see where you're coming from here, and I do agree with you to an extent. But with Street Justice, I don't think you can ignore just what a big deal Assassin's Strike is for the Stalker version. Unlike almost every Stalker set where they trade AoE damage for single-target damage (in a few cases AoE control for single-target damage), Stalkers lose a weak single-target attack for a strong single target attack. The set sacrifices practically nothing in the Stalker conversion, and it's a huge buff, akin to when Clobber in War Mace got its big damage. They do lose the -res in Rib Cracker, but that's trivial. I could see allowing Scrappers to get in on reducing the recharge of CU instead of excluding them like I did in my OP, but Assassin's Strike is too big a factor in the Stalker version to not consider it when buffing the set's single-target powers.

When I say the AoEs are annoying to use, it's because they are finishers. You want to avoid using them before combo level 3, which is an incentive to not use them. Making them builders and spenders is directly targeted at that, letting you use them both in quick succession without feeling like you're hamstringing yourself. It just doesn't feel good when it seems like the game is punishing you for wanting to use your AoEs as much as possible in AoE-ideal situations, when the AoEs are already so small to begin with by design. As for using nothing but the finishers, their recharge is far too long to make a full attack chain out of just them, and even if you tried, you'd still want to pay attention to when you're using CU, lest you use it below level 2 and end up with the damage penalty.

I considered it, but I didn't think that would go far enough to improve the feel of playing the set. You wouldn't be able to do that, using a finisher at level 3 would still end the combo and potentially affect future finisher uses. To be truly able to ignore the combo system while still getting nothing but max performance from the finishers, they would have to not reset the combo level from 3.

I didn't propose anything like that, only that using a finisher below level 3 would build combo instead of resetting it to 0. You'd still get the existing benefits of combo level 1 or 2.

On the topic of Street Justice, here's a fun anecdote: Nate "Second Measure" Birkholz was a player of CoH in addition to being an employee of Paragon Studios. Like many players at the time, he keenly felt the lack of a straightforward punching-and-kicking style melee set. After he became Producer for the game, he made development of Street Justice a priority for the team, and so some of the developers jokingly dubbed it the "Nate's Abuse of Power" set.

Street Justice is not a particularly great set. It has four single target attacks, all on the weak end of the spectrum, and a fifth that can't be used freely because it's a finisher. The AoEs are very small, and clunky to use because of the combo system. Combat Readiness is simply inferior to Build Up; you'll spend your level 3 combo on one attack at the very beginning of the buff, then you're stuck with a lower damage buff for the rest of the duration. And its heaviest hitter, Crushing Uppercut, is saddled with penalties to compensate for its damage on critting ATs. Notably, this set is much better on Stalkers; rather than an AoE, it loses one of its single-target combo builders to Assassin's Strike, which fills the role of a heavy-hitting, non-capstone single-target attack that StJ lacks. It gets a real Build Up, but doesn't suffer for the loss of ability to build combo because AS builds two levels of combo. And Street Justice's AoE potential, as weak as it is, is pretty much average for a Stalker. With all that in mind, Stalkers will largely miss out on the buffs I'm about to propose, because the set's already in a good place for them. Changes Rib Cracker Damage scale 1.32 -> 1.64 Recharge 6s -> 8s End Cost 6.864 -> 8.528 Shin Breaker (Scrapper/Brute/Tanker only) Damage scale 1.64 -> 1.96 Recharge 8s -> 10s End Cost 8.528 -> 10.192 Combat Readiness All combo level gains are doubled during the duration of this power. Sweeping Cross, Spinning Strike, Crushing Uppercut Using these powers at combo level 2 or lower now builds combo, rather than spending it. Combo level is still reset when using them at level 3. This allows finishers to be used more freely in combat, especially valuable considering all of the set's AoE is in finisher attacks. Crushing Uppercut (Brute/Tanker only) Recharge 25s -> 20s Crushing Uppercut is heavily based on Knockout Blow, and has the same 5-second penalty to its recharge time. However, Knockout Blow is in the same set as Rage, while Crushing Uppercut is not. Crushing Uppercut does have the ability to critical for the highest single-target damage in the game, even surpassing Hidden Assassin's Strike, but only on Scrappers and Stalkers. Since Street Justice Brutes and Tankers don't get Rage or critical hits, the recharge penalty is unnecessary on those ATs.

It does a full crit for its Combo Level 0 damage, which is significantly below where the standard damage formula would put a power with a 25s recharge, or even a 20s recharge.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here, the two equations are mathematically identical, one is just a lot easier to wrap your head around.

Statesman was the good doppelganger. Primal Marcus Cole was an anomaly in the multiverse, since most of the time he ends up being an outright villain.

I think it'd be better to add an entry to every power's data that just records the actual base damage of the power, like I suggested here, so powers like Shinobi don't have to calculate what the base damage probably is based on recharge and AoE. It's potentially a lot of work, but it would make procs like that no less desirable than straight damage buffs, and it would make it a lot easier to implement other creative global procs that do things besides extra damage.

I feel the same, the first attack after a Build Up seems to miss more often than 5% of the time.

Yeah, I have no idea why someone would multiply the formula by 5 and then divide by 5. Without that you can pretty much do the math for single-target attacks in your head, even for weird recharges ending in a half, quarter, or even eighth of a second.

Slightly off topic, but you could simplify that math. The (0.8 * recharge + 1.8) * 0.2 cancels out through the distributive property to 0.16 * recharge + 0.36. I think someone was playing some kind of mathy prank on Leandro when they gave him the formulas to post.

Specifically it was in the Nav Window; the mission title would change to Mission Complete, and the objective text would say "Click here to exit" or something like that; it was extremely easy to miss, hence the change to an actual button.

Not entirely true; Stun is a Mag 3 scale 10 stun, while Focused Barrage is Mag 3 scale 8 stun. Its duration is 20% shorter than Stun was. Also, if you had Stun slotted for stun and Barrage slotted for damage, you're losing out on one of those two things, you can't slot for both equally well; you're either losing out on stun duration, damage, or set bonuses.

The holds in the newer Blaster secondaries are a big balancing can of worms, I think it'd be better to just avoid putting more of them in Blaster sets going forward.

Yes, that's the main justification for TW being designed to be overpowered. Whirling Smash does scale 1.15 damage, plus 3 ticks of 85% chance for scale 0.1 damage (which averages out to about scale 0.219 damage) for a total of scale 1.369 damage on average. Numbers are from the in-game info window.

Isn't the 4-second phase going to take care of that?

Titan Weapons. Whirling Smash in Titan Weapons on live is about 45% stronger than an attack following the standard damage formula, has a DoT on top of that, and End of Time still did more damage, while being available 10 levels earlier than Scrappers and Brutes get WS.