aethereal

You're desperately wrong, but even if you were right that it's "foolish" to balance sets, not powers (and it is very much the opposite of foolish), they do in fact balance sets, not powers. If you want to go yell at the clouds regarding how it should be cool for let's say Claws to get Frozen Touch because powers should be balanced atomically, feel free. But recognize the fact that despite your preferences here, your preferences are not being followed. To go back to the (correct) point that you had at the beginning, regardless of the reason for things, facts are facts. ~100% of all Bio Armor characters have a taunt and a damage aura surrounding them. What actual difference would it make to anyone's actual play experience if those two effects were colocated into a single power versus being effects of separate powers? For sure! You said, "It's not a coincidence, it's by design," where the antecedent of "it" was "scrapper damage auras don't taunt." The wrong part is suggesting that there is a design principle for scrapper damage auras not to taunt. As we both agree, they don't (besides Bio), but it's not a design principle. Yes, I know. Jesus christ, trying to follow the conversation. You said, "[scrappers get] single target Confront vs AoE Taunt." I used that as an example of one of the things that you said that was straightforwardly correct, because you later asked why I was laser-focused on the thing about Scrapper damage aura/taunt as a design principle. I'm laser focused on things we disagree about. When you say things that are straightforwardly correct, I don't argue with you about them. Are you caught up now? You! Quoted above. Taunt auras are one-per-set. You don't get separate multiple taunts in any set in the game. Again, if you want, you can shout at clouds that sets are designed and balanced as wholes, nobody can stop you from having bad opinions. But the clear fact is that sets are balanced as wholes. So the question is, do sets get taunt auras, and do sets get damage auras. Scrappers usually don't get both, with one exception, Bio. But this is not because there is a design principle forbidding Scrappers from getting both, it's because taunt auras are only given to Scrappers in certain somewhat narrow circumstances, and it just happens that Dark, Fire, Stone, and Electric don't have that circumstance.

This is a distinction without a difference. Bio has a damage aura and a taunt aura. It doesn't matter if they're in the same power or not. Nor do you need multiple taunts in one armor set. It's really important for people to understand that sets are balaned as sets, not as powers. Because that's what you said that was wrong, or at least somewhat wrong. I'm not arguing with you about, for example, "Tanks get Taunt and not Confront" because, you know... you're right! It is a fact that Scrappers have only one armor set that has both a taunt aura and a damage aura. Which I agreed with, and said, in my original message, was a useful thing to note! But things like, "Under what circumstances do Scrappers get taunt auras" are interesting things to know about the game, and I don't think that you're correctly presenting the way the design works here. You decided to spend a lot of time telling me what I should or should not say, and didn't really seem to spend a lot of time actually thinking about what I did say. Think about the term "buff aura." What's a "buff aura"? There are all kinds of Scrapper sets that get toggles that buff the scrapper -- that's so unexceptional that we don't even have a name for it. Look at the Stalker version of Invincibility: it's a toggle that gives the Stalker +to-hit and +defense. Nice, simple, straightforward power. For something to be a buff "aura," it pretty much has to be a scaling power, because you don't need to count enemies in range of a buff power unless you're giving a scaling benefit. "Debuff auras" are different, and indeed Scrappers get plenty of debuff auras that don't come with taunt. Cloak of Fear in Dark Armor debuffs to-hit. Lightning Field gives end-drain. Mud Pots slows. Chilling Embrace gives slow and -damage. But none of those offer a scaling bonus to the scrapper. There could be various design reasons why some Scrappers get taunts, but there aren't! There's one. It's about whether that armor set as a whole gets scaling benefits from close enemies. It's not about debuffs, and relevantly, it's not about damage auras.

I totally missed the scaling recharge buff! Thanks for calling it out. This is again to the main point: Scrappers get taunt auras when their armor set is such that it's actively beneficial for enemies to stick close to them -- not just that the enemies' effectiveness is lower (as when their damage or to-hit is debuffed), but where you get a benefit against other enemies if this enemy stays close to you.

I'm looking at the whole set, not the individual powers. In Bio, the taunt is separated from the scaling powers, but the set as a whole is what matters. True! Again, whole set. Beta Decay debuffs foe defense and to-hit, but doesn't give scaling benefits. With, say, Invincibility, if you imagine having a foe that can do little or nothing to you, it standing next to you actually helps you -- it provides you mitigation and, as you say, to-hit against all of the other mobs. Beta Decay there's no benefit to having a foe stand near you... but there is with Radiation Therapy. True, but doesn't scale -- it only debuffs its own damage. If you didn't taunt it and it walked away, there's no disadvantage to you in terms of its own damage debuff, but there is in terms of your own damage buff. Similar to above -- true but not a scaling advantage. All true! This is why I think that Shield is kinda weird -- like, one gets why you might say, "Okay, Rise to the Challenge is central to the mitigation of Willpower, and Invincibility to Invulnerability. We need enemies to stick close in order for these sets to function, so they get taunt auras." In contrast, the +end from Power Sink is, like, nice. Nobody thinks that Electricity doesn't function if Power Sink fails to hit the maximum number of enemies. I'd argue that Shield's Against All Odds being saturated is hardly crucial to the set, and it's weird that it gets a taunt aura out of it. Let's take them one at a time: Dark Regen -- I think it's slightly odd that this doesn't get a taunt aura, since I think Dark Regen is pretty central to Dark Armor (and also because Dark Armor kinda sucks on Scrappers). That said, I guess the argument is that the heal on Dark Regen is so high it's really easy to get a full-heal out of it without needing to saturate opponents. Energy Absorption -- Notably compared to the very similar Energy Drain in Energy Aura, Energy Absorption gets a vastly better static Defense bonus (3.375% vs 0.75%) and then half as much scaling defense (0.188% vs 0.375%). I think that this difference was intended to make it less critical for Ice to saturate Energy Absorption and thus they didn't feel the need to give it a Taunt aura. Power Sink -- Easy to get a full energy refresh without saturating, and +end is more of a QoL bonus than a central feature of the set, especially given that it has another endurance tool in Energize. Consume -- Again, it's just +end, not central to the set.

So it is certainly the case that Brutes and Tanks are supposed to get lots more aggro tools than Scrappers, but the specific correlation of damage aura and taunt aura is I think basically a coincidence or to some extent a second-order effect of a couple of design principles. The design principles for taunt auras are: Brutes/Tanks -- Get them in every armor set Scrappers -- Get them in armor sets that have scaling mitigation/bonuses based on number of nearby enemies Stalkers -- Don't get them (and don't get scaling mitigation based on number of nearby enemies) So just to walk through the Scrapper taunt auras: Bio -- scaling healing, endurance, and absorb based on nearby enemies in DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura Energy Aura -- scaling defense and recharge time based on nearby enemies in Energy Drain and Entropic Aura Invulnerability -- scaling defense based on nearby enemies in Invincibility Radiation -- scaling healing and endurance based on nearby enemies in Radiation Therapy Shield -- slightly weird scaling damage bonus based on nearby enemies in Against All Odds Willpower -- scaling regeneration based on nearby enemies in Rise to the Challenge It more-or-less just happens that the damage aura armor sets (besides Bio) do not have a "scaling bonus based on number of nearby enemies" mechanic. This isn't really a design principle per se, though you can make the case that armors only get a certain number of goodies, and a damage aura counts as a "goodie" and so does a scaling bonus, so they do sort of push against each other that way. But, also, it is clearly the case that this isn't an inviolable principle: Bio exists. I'll also note that your characterization of Scrapper taunt auras as "debuff auras" is slightly incorrect: Invincibility has no debuff component and is nevertheless a taunt aura. A final note: design principles evolve over time. I think that if Shield were being made from scratch today, it probably wouldn't get a taunt aura -- it's the only scrapper armor set that gets no mitigation, only an offensive buff from nearby enemies, and I don't think that the Homecoming devs would consider that worthy of a taunt aura. Possibly Radiation would also lose taunt if it were being remade today, as its mitigation isn't super dependent on Radiation Therapy. And looking backwards, it might've been the case that much earlier in the history of the game the devs wanted to more tightly link damage auras and taunt auras than is now the case -- not sure, I didn't play early in the game.

I think Naraka's framing of the point is a little strange, but it seems valid to say, "Scrappers generally don't get both a taunt aura and a damage aura in their armor, with bio as the lone exception." I take Uun's point to be that that's somewhat coincidental: there was no design principle that forbade scrappers from having damage and taunt auras, it's just how it worked out. But, bio aside, it did work out that way.

Maybe describe what your build goals are. What play are you trying to support? Solo? Group? Do you want to exemp well? Normal content/TFs, or incarnate trials, or hard mode? Do you aspire to solo hard targets like AVs?

I got interested enough to test, as I happen to have a level 50 Archery sentinel. I went around in Peregrine Island and tried to snipe at small spawns with bosses in them to make it easy to see the numbers. It's a bit frustrating since the pseudopet indirection hides all the to-hit rolls from you in the combat window, so you just have to go by eyeballing the orange numbers. For reasons passing understanding, Sentinel Rain of Arrows does its damage in two packets of lethal damage. So for each "tick" that hits, you expect to see two orange numbers. My experience was: Most of the time, I saw 3 ticks of damage (six total numbers) A non-trivial amount of time, I saw 2 ticks of damage, in a way that does suggest to me that something might be off, here. Especially, in one case, I was shooting two different Warhulks and I did 2 ticks to each of them. Once, I saw only one tick of damage Based on City of Data, these are pulses of damage from a pseudopet autopower. Each one will roll to hit separately, so it wouldn't be crazy for one to miss. But I did think it was weird that as far as I noticed, I always saw the same number of ticks for everyone in the group. That seems unlikely if it's just a to-hit roll situation. So, contra @drbuzzard, I did not see a majority case of only one tick happening, but with @drbuzzard, I did see enough here to make me suspicious that there might be a bug. My understanding of the correct behavior is: All three ticks are guaranteed to go off (for targets that remain in the area of effect -- and they happen quickly, so I never saw anyone move significantly in the 0.8 seconds that it takes for the ticks to all go). They do roll to hit, so it is possible for some ticks to hit and some to miss, but that should be unlikely in the case of high chance-to-hit, and particularly unlikely for two targets to simultaneously get the same two ticks hitting.

I think it pulses two or three times, 0.4 seconds apart, but there's no conditionality on it that I can see. I don't think that your description of it is accurate unless there's something about the power coding that I'm fundamentally misunderstanding (which is always possible).

Huh, what makes you say that it's supposed to do 1, 2, or 3 hits? Both Blaster and Sentinel Rain of Arrows creates a pseudopet for 1 second (1.8 seconds after casting). Both pets have an auto-power that does damage, that has an activate period of 0.4 seconds (and an animation time of 1.167 seconds and an animation time before effect of 0.5 seconds, but I don't know if these actually do anything for auto-powers). Neither have any kind of rolled chance for effect groups within the autopower. I don't see anything that suggests that there's supposed to be variability in how much damage it does, nor that Sentinel Rain of Arrows functions meaningfully differently than Blaster Rain of Arrows (I mean, they do different damage and so forth, but they seem to deliver the damage in the same way).

200% status resistance would reduce a hold with a base duration to 10 seconds to 3.33 seconds. Duration = base duration / (1 + status resistance). So if status resistance is 100% (ie, 1.00), it's 10 / (1 + 1) = 10 / 2 = 5 If status resistance is 200% (ie, 2.00), it's 10 / (1 + 2) = 10 / 3 = 3.33 If status resistance is 300% (ie, 3.00), it's 10 / (1 + 3) = 10 / 4 = 2.5 There is a very strong decreasing returns trend here.

So: You can't minimize the stone effect on granite, just to be clear. You're going to be a big rock monster in Granite. Lots of people now just don't use Granite, or use it occasionally as a panic button. If you do want to move around in Granite, teleport (or just Combat Teleport) is probably your most straightforward option. I think you can, with effort, stack up speed bonuses to counteract the speed penalty for Granite, but not to my understanding the jump penalty Your characterization of the armor as resistance plus S/L defense is a little weird. In Granite, it's resist-all+defense-all. Otherwise, it's defense to S/L/E/N/P, resist to F/C/T

So like, here's the thing: If you're doing an 8 person team with high level characters on normal (non-hard-mode) content, yes, agreed, building defense/resistance isn't very necessary. And sure, I guess, if you proc out your attacks maybe each spawn will go from taking 3.2 seconds to 2.7 seconds. But non-hard-mode grouped, high level content is very easy. Honestly I don't really get why this would be your build target. Anything you do will be Just Fine. I just can't really see who will be bothered to care if you are less than perfectly optimized for faceroll content. Hard Mode was designed specifically to devalue defense, and as far as I can tell succeeded. If hard mode is your build target, that makes plenty of sense.

Remember that AVs resist -regen. Envenomed daggers give -250% regen, so -100% isn't insignificant, but it's a lot less. I think that not using quick Energy Transfer and instead using Barrage is unlikely to work out as a positive, even against an AV, but admittedly I haven't tested.

Wait, VEATs have fingers?