Halae

Just to pipe in on this specific bit more than anything else, but this is pretty unusual. Based on my own knowledge of building MMs, checking out other peoples' builds, and testing things out (generally by soloing AVs - the Praetorian arc in Peregrine Island is usually good for that for testing purposes) by and large most people abandon MM primary attacks entirely as wasted power slots because they don't contribute anything significant over other options you could take. The fact that you've even 5-slotted them is something I've literally never seen anybody do in any build that I've tested, even the ones that didn't pan out as worthwhile; the ones that do take and slot them are usually those theoretical petless builds.

Depends on the base numbers for the attacks in question. Besides, I outright said in my suggestion on page 5 to turn Rage into a toggle that you'd want to lower the numbers on it first, and bring the sub-par numbers in SS up. Basically either that or have it cost extreme levels of endurance per second.

Actually, it kills defense sets too. When you design a defense-based build, you try for the softcaps (which, i believe, is 51% in incarnate content) and leave only a 5% chance of getting hit. I believe the math is a bit awkward on the subject, but a 10% reduction to that defense number means that the defense character will get hit by about 30%-ish of incoming attacks. That's a massively increased chance to take a hit on a setup that depends on getting hit as little as possible. And, lo and behold, the resistance debuff destroys them too, because they're taking increased damage in a window which they're more likely to be hit in. something that a lot of people don't seem to realize is that stacked defensive types are what make things survivable. Invulnerability isn't just resistances, it's also defense. Willpower is considered humongously powerful because it has all three types. And a lot of people don't particularly like Super Reflexes because it only happens to give you a single defensive layer, when you want two. Because of this, a debuff that applies penalties to more than a single defensive layer is incredibly damaging to a lot of builds, because it makes it so you simply cannot deal with the attacks coming at you. If it was just a resistance debuff, you could build for regeneration and defense to negate it. If it was just a defense debuff as it is now, you could build for resistance and regeneration, and negate it. You can negate regeneration debuffs by having high defense and resistance, to mitigate incoming attacks before they hit your HP bar. More than one defensive type being lowered is way, way worse for building and for your level of ability to cope with said debuff than having it only strongly affect one defensive layer.

That doesn't really matter much when you're relying on your resistance to keep you alive in the interrim. I've got two SS brutes, one that's /Willpower and one that's /Invulnerability. These are, notably, the two powerset combos that are the most selected of all non-farming brutes. For the Willpower one, she's mostly kept alive in most fights through a mixture of pushing 70% smashing/lethal damage (30% in basically everything else) and a high regeneration level. The crash change means that incoming attacks of the Smashing and Lethal variety will generally do about 80% more damage, and it takes away what little resistance I have in terms of the other damage types. This puts huge strain on her regeneration, since smashing/lethal damage are the most common damage types to come across. This is an absolutely enormous increase in incoming damage. My invulnerability character? She depends on negating as much damage as possible through high resistances (90% in Smashing and Lethal, 50% or below in most other things) because she doesn't have the HP recovery to take more. This change would mean that a crash can and will kill her, because from S/L sources she'll take as much as three times as much damage, and other damage sources she's getting hit with +60% damage. Yeah, the defense debuff applied by the live version of Rage sucks, but it's dealable if you have high resistances, which is what most people have built their SS characters for. This change just makes it so they both get hit AND can't take the hit.

There's no resistance penalty during the crash on live.

I believe that would make it, completely literally, a straight nerf.

Gonna be honest, Rage has always messed with the way that Super Strength works. I don't like this change, not because I don't think it's better, but because I don't think it actually solves anything (and, reading other posts in this thread, actually creates more problems). Rage as a power is not an isolated thing. It shouldn't be handled as an isolated thing - you need to take it as a whole with the rest of the Super Strength power set to be able to see what it is and why it does what it does. Rage has always meant that Super Strength's base damage has to be lower, to compensate for the fact that the Rage buff (+20% accuracy and +80% damage) is pretty much always on. Sometimes multiple stacks of it are on, even. This is actually really unhealthy, because it creates a baseline where in order to do the same level of damage as other powersets, the base numbers of the SS kit have to be much lower. This doesn't affect much when you're playing solo, but to explain the problem, let me lay it out with a bit of super-simple math. Let's say there's two powersets. Power Set #1 will be our Super Strength Equivalent, while Power Set #2 will be pretty much any other set. ---A power in PS1 is intended to deal, on average, 100 damage. Due to having a nigh-permanent buff that typically makes up 40% of its hitting power, the baseline for it needs to be 60, with an added 40 damage from Rage to make it work at the expected level. This makes it unfun to use when you don't have the buff up - perhaps you don't have the recharge build necessary for it, you're too low level to make use of the Rage damage buff, or some jerk is destroying your recharge total with goddamn psi attacks which is destroying the flow of your build. Whatever is going on, you NEED that power up, and micromanaging it to keep it up is paramount to your build. ---PS2, meanwhile, has no such issue. His 100 damage power deals 100 damage without heavy investment into recharge. It doesn't get destroyed by a particular enemy type, it doesn't require special investment in the build just to make it work in the first place, , and it doesn't force you to deal with a crash every two minutes just to continue using it at a respectable level This problem actually becomes worse when you introduce outside factors, such as what happens in literally any teaming situation. How many of us here have been in a team past level 15 and have gotten no buffs from our teammates? I'm sure it's happened somewhere, but it'd an incredibly rare occurrence. let's look at what happens to both of these powers after they receive a +100% damage buff due to teammates adding to your damage. ---PS1 has its standard 60+40 attack. Because the base damage for this is 60, adding +100% damage to it means you're looking at +60, for a total of 160 damage (60+60+40). This is perfectly fine for the most part... until you start comparing it to the other set. ---PS2 has its 100 damage attack, which requires no special management to be viable. When it's buffed by a +100% damage buff, its damage rockets all the way up to 200. This is easier to maintain, suffers no crash, and is more powerful in the end when you're in a teaming situation. This gets even worse when you examine what happens when you increase the damage further. +300% damage isn't something that's hard to achieve in a decent team with a lot of support characters, and if you're a Brute it's not unusual to see higher numbers than that due to the way Fury works in builds that make good use of it. With that in mind, let's see how our two powers stack up against each other at higher levels of damage buffs from outside sources: PS1 +0%: 100 (60+40) PS1 +100%: 160 (60+40+60) PS1 +200%: 220 (60+40+60+60) PS1 +300%: 280 (60+40+60+60+60) PS1 +400%: 340 (60+40+60+60+60+60) PS1 +500%: 400 (60+40+60+60+60+60+60) This is contrasted by the 100 damage power in the other set: PS2 +0%: 100 (100+0) PS2 +100%: 200 (100+100) PS2 +200%: 300 (100+100+100) PS2 +300%: 400 (100+100+100+100) PS2 +400%: 500 (100+100+100+100+100) PS2 +500%: 600 (100+100+100+100+100+100) The difference is a little stark after a while, isn't it? Now, this is oversimplified - I haven't run extensive tests on super strength or compared the base damage of things against one another, but I absolutely have noticed that my SS brute's top-end damage is nowhere near that of other brutes with the same buffs. And it's particularly brutes that get hit the worst by this, due to the SS powers being nerfed in terms of base damage to account for a higher damage percentage for outgoing hits. This means that not only does this power require Rage to be competitive (causing it to be a required power when in most other powersets I simply skip the Build-up power), it means that it suffers from all of Rage's drawbacks (Nasty crash, constant maintenance, and much higher endurance requirements to mitigate the -25% endurance you eat) on top of all its own drawbacks (lower base damage that kills scaling viability as well as whatever problems the power itself has, such as a long activation time or long cooldown) AND it even has the problem for an entire AT it simply works badly with the AT's inherent. Given I mainly play Brutes, this hurts. A lot. This isn't an unsalvagable situation, but the rage change being tested now is absolutely not going to help any of this. It solves none of the fundamental problems Super Strength has while making the power more confusing to deal with and even making some builds significantly weaker, per summers' post. My personal suggestion would be to either make Rage a short-term temporary buff like the other build-up powers with no crash, or to turn it into a toggle with a high endurance cost and a lower buff to damage percentage. Either one would neatly solve SS's issues with scaling, as long as the SS base numbers were brought up to work with that.