aethereal

It's really not me taking a stance on logic, it's me saying, "Clearly the devs actually care if the player base reacts poorly to changes," and "nerfing literally everyone's build is something the player base will predictably react poorly to." And I feel like everyone I say this to tries really, really hard not to address that point and instead say like, "But I really think that procs are a problem!" Okay! But that's not what I'm talking about.

There is a significant difference between discussion and completely losing your mind (yes, yes, figuratively obviously), and you are on the wrong side of that significant difference. It was more than 600 posts by people who overwhelmingly didn't try the change over a 10 second debuff for durability on Tankers. Guys, just get a grip. And, to be clear: maybe it was not the right move, I don't have a strong opinion on Tanker SS balance, but this was clearly an overwhelming emotional reaction, not a technical balance discussion. And, hey, look, if you have a big emotional reaction to balance changes, that's actually fine. I'm not here to police you. I just want you to take a really hard look in the mirror and say, "Do I, in my heart of hearts, truly believe that the solution to people having emotional reactions to mild nerfs is bigger nerfs that affect vastly larger numbers of people?"

"We proposed a mild and arguable nerf for one power and people, definitely including me, Erratic1, completely lost it for two solid weeks. I know what will make it better: we should do a much more serious nerf that will affect 20x as many people, I'm sure that will solve all the controversy." Listen to yourself, man.

Then, depending on the limits, you'd be forcing respecs on lots and lots of builds + making slightly different powers the most optimal ones. But it won't happen because you remember how we had 500 posts of people completely losing their minds over Rage? Multiply that by 50 to get the number of people who would be very upset over this.

Procs were very different during the entire original lifespan of the game, as the PPM system never made it live until the secret post-shutdown server. They were, to my understanding, sometimes very valuable! But in different powers than today. I think the PPM system was a bad mistake. There are a ton of problems with it. But it's just integral to the way the game works today, and the way it has worked for years now. I don't think they can effectively replace the PPM system now. What they're doing, I think, is dialing back some of the prominence of procs in specific cases with adaptive recharge, additional base damage scale (eg new power siphon), adjusting some cascading proc rules (carrion creepers, irradiated ground), and potentially adding internal cooldowns. And I think that reasonably, that's the only viable way to do it at this point.

Focused Feedback: We invalidated every performance-oriented build in the game lol You're welcome to imagine that the devs shouldn't care about pissing off every player who builds their character for anything vaguely like common performance goals. Or you're welcome to imagine that players shouldn't get mad if they now have 30+ characters who they need to laboriously respec. But I think that just empirically, you should resign yourself to the fact that devs do care, and players do care.

Okay, can we all please just agree though that if Super Strength had a "basically good set of attacks," like on the order of Katana or something, plus Rage-as-it-exists-today, it would be obviously overpowered? Like... the following are all reasonable positions: 1. Rage is very strong, but the Super Strength attacks are mostly weak, and on balance this makes the set-as-a-whole kinda weak. 2. Rage is very strong, and the ability to use two strong attacks in the set and one okay attack in the set and then attacks not in the set make the set-as-a-whole pretty strong (assuming that you don't use Jab and Punch very much). 3. Fuck Rage, let's get rid of it, bring the attacks of the set up to par, and replace Rage with something less user-unfriendly and also less powerful to go with the newly balanced attacks -- we could call this new power something like Shmunleashed Shmight. But this is not a reasonable position: 4. Rage should remain as it is today (very strong), plus the attacks of the set should be brought up to middle-of-the-road or better for a melee set (but KO Blow and Footstomp should also remain very strong attacks), such that you've got something that looks like any other melee set (or better) plus a vastly, vastly better Build Up Replacement.

In general I find that "bright" options with the darkest available colors in the shades you want tend to produce the most innocuous effects.

I am also bummed, was planning to try out an Unleashed Might Brute when the patch dropped. I really want to know how many people who vociferously argued against the Rage change actually tested it.

Under those implicit assumptions, yes. But I think those implicit assumptions are bad. You're doing those tests as though it were realistic that a character with 0% mitigation would be taking on the same raw damage as a character with fully capped mitigation. But that's not really realistic: we up the challenge level as we get more powerful. Nobody runs a minmaxed level 50 tank with a super sophisticated build solo on +0/x1, and vice versa nobody solos +4/x8 at level 1. The higher your defenses/resists (without overcapping), the worse the crash is for you on percentage terms. That is, if we assume that for each point of mitigation you obtain, you up the amount of raw incoming damage such that your mitigated incoming damage is constant, then the rage crash gets worse as you level, not better. I also don't think that that assumption (that you fully adjust for a constant mitigated damage stream) is realistic. This is a case where I'd actually suggest that I think it's going to be a little difficult to just think through the change. I think some of the people who are fearing that the proposed Rage crash is super punitive actually test it out. It might surprise you.

So, like, you're overjoyed by this change? You'll take Unleashed Might and not care about whether the Rage crash is worse or better because you don't take Rage? Just trying to make sure I'm understanding you here.

Sure, why not, let's go over it again. So what does "balance based on SOs" actually mean? There are two different ways to interpret this: 1. Hey, let's not making +0/x1 content prohibitively difficult to people who don't use IOs. Check. Let's not. 2. WE ARE PROHIBITED FROM EVER MAKING ANY BALANCE DECISION BASED ON INTERACTIONS WITH IOs FOR REASONS! This is dumb.

I always get amused when people decide to die on the hill of, "We should balance the game based on the way that absolutely nobody who pays any attention to balance decisions plays." Inventions are like old enough to vote, guys, I think it's maybe time that we admit that they exist.

This is incredibly minor, though. It's at very most 6% difference in total damage and actually realistically much less than that.

Yes, I think that the PPM system is baked in at this point. I don't think that they will ever fundamentally change it (I have no inside information, I'm not even in closed beta, everyone is free to laugh at me when "we changed the PPM system lol" goes into public beta in two months). It was a mistake but it's a mistake that too hard to fix at the root at this point (there are lots of things in CoH that are like this. Why do we have two separate, complexly entertwined ways to buff your chance to hit an opponent?? It's obviously stupid, but it's also obviously not something you can back out of at this point), so instead they'll mitigate the damage.