Vanden

The only possible way swapping Ice Sword for Frozen Fists could halve your punchvoke output is if you only use one attack. I don't think that's what you're doing.

Even if I was convinced that setting off a punchvoke aura slightly less often was a "terrible" change (I'm not, and I'm dubious anyone else is), we know that Stone/Ice Tankers are less than 1/5 of 1 percent of all Tankers rolled on Homecoming, so even if this one powerset combination has the secret sauce to be negatively affected by this change, it's in a vast minority.

You should probably re-do your math taking activation time into account this time.

Okay, sure. If a player wants to regularly spend millions of inf on empowerment buffs and super packs, hundreds of threads on super inspirations, or have a pocket buffer, all completely normal and typical Tanker behaviors, then sure, we can say that the AT has been fundamentally changed.

Because unless they chow down on an entire tray of reds that amount of damage buffing is unattainable.

What's your point? Like I said, those Tankers can't take advantage of the new damage cap.

And how many Tankers would you say don't duo with a well-built Kin controller? Do you think it might be most of them? The damage cap changes nothing about the base Tanker gameplay. It only means that damage buffs aren't so easily wasted on them.

No, balancing around the extremes rather than the most common situations is how you break things.

The Tanker has no ability to take advantage of the increased cap on its own. Even double-stacked Rage, 95% damage enhancement, and Musculature Core Paragon is still below the 400% damage cap they have currently. It won't make a difference outside of extreme team buff situations. Punchvoke doesn't even kick in until level 10, at which point you can have Taunt and will have had plenty of opportunities to have taken both your T1 and T2 attacks, and I don't see why you wouldn't with Ice Melee, since it loses an attack to get Ice Patch. I really don't think the swap is a bad thing for Ice Melee.

If you're typing /showfps2 instead of /showfps 2, with a space, it won't work.

That's just how the damage formula works. Doubling the recharge doesn't double damage, it's the same for every power. By that logic Jab is a better attack than Knockout Blow.

? Ice Sword has both higher DPA and higher damage than Frozen Fists, how is it terrible compared to Frozen Fists?

What an albatross it is, the opportunity to improve one's characters. Personally I'm ecstatic at the prospect of finally being able to drop my hated T1 attacks and pick up powers I actually want. The T1/T2 power swap is the thing I'm looking forward to most, by far.

That's a new level of optimized DPS then, not the old one.

I'm not seeing the difference? If a player had an optimized attack chain that took advantage of Bruising, it should produce the exact same damage numbers with the proposed change.

That's not what you were saying. You were saying: You said players would have to respec to reach the DPS they had with Bruising. Which isn't true.

I don't understand what part of it you're not getting? All tanker attacks do 20% more damage at base now. That's the same amount Bruising adds. If you use the exact same attack chain damage should be identical. In fact, it should be higher, since the first hit will also be 20% stronger, where before the first attack to apply Bruising didn't benefit from it. And if you use a better attack chain that doesn't use the T1 attack with its probably worst DPA, higher DPS still.

So you completely misunderstood? The new T1 power picks don't change your powers until you respec. Good riddance. It sucked.

You're missing the point. Nobody got excited about bruising. It was a consolation prize for being forced to take the worst attack in every set. And nobody's being forced to respec, every Tanker's DPS will be the same since their damage scale went up by the same amount that bruising added.

It's true that removing Bruising is a bit of a change, but let's be honest: nobody invites a Tanker to their team thinking, "Oh boy! We'll do 20% more damage to the occasional enemy!" And everyone knows Titan Weapons is borderline overpowered anyway.

It doesn’t dramatically change the entire AT to give it bigger AoEs and a little higher base damage. It still plays exactly the same and brings the same thing to a team that it always has.

The increased areas of effect are buffs from the new Gauntlet.

Yeah, I like the idea of a built-from-the-ground-up melee support AT more than trying to half-ass the Tanker into that role.

Super Strength is not the only Melee set for Tankers and Brutes. If you run those numbers with no Rage, which is going to be the typical case for every other set, you'll find that Tankers are almost exactly at 75% of Brutes.