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.

I mean... yes? Like, I don't know what to tell you, I understand the appeal of, "Let's just do one gigantic change and rip it all up from the roots." I think that PPM was a misbegotten system. But when you have a shit-ton of work to do, spreading it out is just straightforwardly a good approach.

I'd like everyone who is saying, "Well, then they should nerf procs" to just... imagine what an epic clusterfuck it would be for the devs to post a thread titled this: FOCUSED FEEDBACK: We invalidated every single performance-oriented build in the game lol

Without Unleashed Might, there have been no changes to these powers. With Unleashed Might, not sure.

I think this is disingenuous. People aren't chasing procs for "sets that are low damage," they're chasing procs because procs are a huge damage add, no matter what the base damage of a set. And Super Strength is perfect for procs because it removes the need to slot for accuracy. Katana's "Soaring Dragon" on a Scrapper does 112.6 damage, double if it crits. If you assume 100% damage enhancement and a 30% crit rate, that gives you an expected damage of 292.75. Super Strength's Haymaker (not one of the "good" powers, and on a slightly shorter recharge than Soaring Dragon) on a Tanker does 86.6 damage. It can accept 4 non-unique damage procs (Touch of Death, Mako's Bite, Perfect Zinger, Explosive Strike), and still have enough slots left over to two-slot damage for 90% damage enhancement. Each of those procs has a 55.4% chance to activate, and does 71.75 damage when it activates. Also then you take 70% damage enhancement from (single-stacked!) Rage. The total damage here is 86.6 * 2.6 + 0.554 * 4 * 71.75 = 384 damage, way more than the procless Scrapper with a great crit rate. I don't mean this to be the be-all, end-all calculation for Super Strength as a set, and I'm pretty agnostic about whether Rage needs changes. But let's not pretend that procs are just a way to shore up damage for low-performing sets -- they're crazy powerful, and Super Strength is a really good set (and Tanker a really good AT) to go proc-heavy on. And that has to be taken into account somehow. Now, maybe even with all that, it still doesn't need changes -- like I said, I'm agnostic. But we need to start from the principle that you can't be blind to this unique potential of this set.

No, they aren't guaranteed. You're adding +50% to the chance to crit for each attack initiated in the window. So if you have no other crit modifiers, for most attacks, the attack will have a 60% chance to crit LT's or higher, 55% chance to crit minions and lower. If you have Superior Scrapper's Strike and the attack crits normally, you'll be talking 66% chance to crit LT's or higher, 58% chance to crit minions and lower. There are some attacks that naturally crit at a 15% rate no matter what enemy rank, so those would be, with the superior Scrapper's Strike proc, 71% chance to crit everything.

It is clearly the case that Brutes (and, yes, potentially in the future Stalkers and Scrappers) get more out of Unleashed Might than Tankers, as they're able to leverage the additional base damage to a far greater degree with Fury buffing it (and, maybe, in the future, with critical hits if it does get ported and crits do double the extra scale). EDIT: For Brutes, it's straightforward. Fury buffs the extra damage from UM's added-damage-to-powers, while Fury and Rage don't interact, except potentially negatively by putting you closer to the cap. For critting classes like Scrappers, it's less straightforward, because if they were given Rage, it would buff their critical damage, too, so even if UM-extra-damage is also added into crits, Rage is effectively also added in to crits. I think it's not at all clear that UM would offer an additional benefit to Scrappers if SS were ported to Scrappers and also Scrappers were given the UM vs Rage choice. But for Brutes, UM is like twice as good as it is for Tanks.

Re: Rage crash, I think it's helpful to keep in mind: Tanks tend to have more mitigation than they need most of the time. Even if incoming damage does triple when in crash, in most situations most well-built tanks can handle triple damage for ten seconds. And if you are in an unusually high damage situation where you can't handle that crash, an orange or two mostly or completely mitigates it.

Note that it just straight up doesn't work on Nukes, so PBAoE or otherwise, it won't do anything. Probably the "right" thing to do with Shinobi-Iri as it is on Beta is to launch your best non-nuke AoE and then immediately go for the Nuke. @Captain Powerhouse a possible compromise here: what if Nukes had a 0% chance to crit normally, but it was still modifiable by Shinobi-Iri, so you had a 30% chance to crit with Shinobi-Iri + Nuke?

For whatever it's worth, I think it would be foolish not to agree that Bio is among the more singular sets, and I don't think it's crazy to look at it for balance adjustment. I think it's the best offensive armor set. But there will always be a best offensive armor set, and that set will always have pressure to be chosen in contexts where offense is all that matters. I don't think it's correct to say that Bio is obviously the best overall set, and I don't see sign that Bio's offensive abilities are so strong that, for example, it overshadows other ATs or otherwise warps the overall gameplay experience. Like, back in the heyday of TW/Bio scrappers, you might say, "Seriously, what is the point of playing anything other than a TW/Bio scrapper besides just boredom with playing the strongest character?" I don't think that any such sentiment applies today.

There are plenty of missions where my Ninjutsu Scrapper had an easier time with survival than my Bio Brute. It's certainly not difficult to find situations where Bio really struggles defensively.