aethereal

I don't want to get too sidetracked into this -- there seems like there's absolutely no appetite from the dev team to do anything with the ATOs, including even just "make the claimed PPM accurate on the Scrapper ATO," which is wild to me. But just to be clear: In a well-optimized build for a level 50 scrapper, the ATO2 is worth at least as much as the base inherent + the ATO1 combined. Probably more. Like, if you dropped the base rate of criticals to zero, and removed the effect of the ATO1, (but kept the ATO2 as it is, so increasing crit rate by 50 percentage points) you'd remove less than half of the criticals that Scrappers would get. That being the case, I think it's really impossible to address Scrapper balance without going through the ATO2. The entire class hinges on it. Which is exactly what I think is nuts -- I think it'd be way more healthy to have a higher base rate of criticals and the ATO2 is a noticeable improvement on top of that to reward good builds, not have it be so incredibly dominant.

Your gloss that I proposed "nerfing the Scrapper ATOs so that Scrappers don't outperform Brutes" is a misreading, however -- what I proposed was that the power budget of Scrappers be redistributed from the ATO2 into the ATO1 and the base inherent, primarily for reasons of intra-Scrapper-set balance. Lower the ceiling on the very best Scrapper builds (which are extremely high DPS) in service of increasing the floor on most Scrapper builds. To the extent that I do propose inter-AT balance changes, I'd actually suggest that it's Stalkers who suffer the most from high Scrapper DPS -- they really do have an AoE deficit compared to the other classes, and it's a little sad how much their ST DPS lags behind Scrappers.

Scrapper's ATO2 is really bad design. The fact that it doubles in effectiveness from normal to superior is weird. The fact that it's, like, entirely responsible for Scrapper overperformance compared to Brutes and Stalkers -- that so much of Scrapper performance comes down to this one proc -- is weird. The fact that it's so incredibly sensitive to having a power which has a decently long recharge time and little animation-time-after-effect is frankly kinda dumb. I get that from the perspective of the build minigame and only that, it's fun to agonize over exactly which power should take this AT-defining proc in exactly what rotation, but for everyone who's not an all-in micro-optimizer of builds, this just makes wild annoying power swings. The Superior ATO2 should be dropped to PPM 3 (as it has always claimed it is!) and probably dropped to like +35% crit chance and the Scrapper inherent and/or the ATO1 should get steady bonuses to their crit chance to smooth out Scrapper performance (and lower performance a bit for the best builds). Also Stalker's chance-to-hide should have the lockdown period removed (and perhaps the PPM tweaked if that means too great a performance). And Brutes should be given ATOs they can get a little excited about, even if they don't greatly change their performance profile.

AV = Archvillain, one of the hardest classes of enemy in the game. Most TFs end with a fight with an Archvillain, which aren't really intended to be fought solo. That doesn't mean you can't fight them solo: it's very possible. But if you are new to the game and especially if you have a build that you just kind of threw together, you'll probably find them functionally impossible.

Yes, I believe it's the only armor set with unbalanced lethal/smashing resistance. Certain melee powers (the parry-lookalikes) sometimes provide unbalanced lethal/smashing defense, and other armor sets give other unbalanced pairs (like, obviously fire and ice armor give much more fire and ice resistance, respectively, than the other in their pair, similarly Energy Aura and Dark Armor), but I believe this is the only lethal/smashing resistance disparity. EDIT: Unbalanced lethal/smashing resistances are fairly common among enemy groups, just not player sets.

I don't know why MIDS is showing you as having the same lethal and smashing resistance, that seems wrong to me. Psychic Wall provides Scrappers, unenhanced, 22.5% resistance to Smashing and Psychic, and 15% resistance to Lethal. Does that constitute a "hole"? I mean, I dunno. But unless you somehow got lethal-only resistance from some other source that exactly makes up for the difference between the Smashing and Lethal resistance in Psychic Wall, I don't think you should have the same resistance values, like MIDS reports you do.

Savage Leap doesn't use a pseudopet, and Shield Charge copies boosts. The big issue with pseudopets in this regard is that they sometimes have lower caps than actual character entities, so while your Fury is copied to the Shield Charge pseudopet, some of it may be wasted.

I feel like Ninjutsu really benefits from going a bit overcap on positional defenses, given low DDR this gives you some buffer to prevent defense cascade. It won't stop your defense from slipping against enemies that really heavily debuff defense, but it helps a lot against opponents who just do sort of "normal lethal attacks that have a small defense debuffing component."

That is my understanding, but I have not tested it myself and it's a brand new power option, so like... the duration of it is super unclear and things like City of Data don't really know how to explain it. EDIT: But whatever the details, it is absolutely the case that you are supposed to get a "free" rez after you click Second Wind -- the power doesn't need to be off-cooldown. Basically the idea was that you sort of got the rez power "for free," because it's iconic to Regen but they know that people feel bad about using a power choice only for a rez.

The way it's supposed to work is that if you die while its buff is active, it offers you a chance to rez. There were some bugs with that in beta, but I believe it is supposed to be working now. If you die while in its activation period, and you don't get a chance to rez, you should report that as a bug.

Can I interest you in, "Willpower has the lowest ceiling of all armors in the game," rather than "Willpower is the worst"?

Pool and Epic attacks crit, at least for the most part. If an attack does Damage over Time as its main effect, generally it has a crit which does all of the damage over time that it "would" do in one up-front package, if it crits. Damage over Time secondary effects in Fire and Savage do not crit. Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, and Concentrated Strike don't crit. Damage auras in armor sets don't crit, except maybe Stone's deal.

It is totally wild to me that Scrapper's Superior Critical Strikes proc continues to claim to be 3 PPM while actually being 4 PPM, and that adjusting it to 3 or 3.5 PPM doesn't seem to be on the table. Clearly a strong way to reduce Scrapper overperformance for the most optimized builds while not affecting the average player very strongly. @Maelwys's account of Tankers vs Brutes is pretty good, but I think you also really have to consider damage procs. Procs are really strong! A big chunk of Tanker overperformance came from: 1. AoE procs in Tankers having higher proc rates than they "should've," due to area factor. 2. Just the ability of Tankers to hit durability goals without searching for lots of +resist/+def bonuses in their attack slotting, so being able to put more procs in their attacks than scrappers/brutes were able to. (This was maybe mitigated by Hard Mode. It is underrated how weird Hard Mode is.)

People on the beta were talking about Cupids Crush?

Generally better to look at City of Data than Mids for this kind of question: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.regeneration.instant_regeneration&at=brute I don't know where MIDS gets a 2.5 second recharge, CoD shows a 10 second recharge. The activation period is what I think you're actually concerned about, it's 2 seconds (that's how often the power "pulses"). So every two seconds, it looks back and says, "Were you damaged in this 2 second period" and if so it applies another stack to you. (I think, it's sometimes a little hard to interpret the CoD notation, not sure what it's checking for with the missed-since thing). Stacks do not update the duration of previous stacks. It auto-hits self and doesn't target any other entity, it's not like checking whether someone else is still close to you. Accuracy is irrelevant.

I think there's something to this, and I argued before and during the beta for, instead of adding a toggle, to let IH be more useful as a survival button (I think IH as a survival button kinda sucks because you probably don't need 90 seconds of "oh shit things are going badly," and then the downtime for the power is inconveniently long to make up for the long duration that you probably are ignoring the back half of). That said, I think there are some styles of play/goals issues here: 1. There are players who really want to have a thematic regenerator. They aren't interested in making a character who builds a thick layer of resistance with Rune of Power and Melee Hybrid and then supplements that with regeneration, they want Wolverine. They are much more interested in a character who mostly relies on their regeneration for day-in-day-out mitigation, and to the extent that they supplement that with a layer of defense or resistance, they want it to be "invisible," so it doesn't interfere with the class fantasy. 2. Then there are players who just want to be a regenerator and who also don't want to do active clicking (and who for whatever reason don't like Willpower). 3. And finally there are people who are mostly concerned with performance, particularly performance on team content (probably mostly hard mode). These people have different preferences and I think people in group 1 and 2 will clearly prefer RR, while people in group 3 might find IH more appealing.

You mean Instant Healing rather than Fast Healing, right? Fast Healing is the auto-power that is frankly kinda bad, Instant Healing is the click power that is mutually exclusive with Reactive Regeneration. You're right that Reactive Regeneration's utility degrades if you rarely get hit. On the other hand, if you rarely get hit, then, uh... do you need it? In general, in high-level, large teams where people are giving substantial amounts of defense through support powersets, Maneuvers, or Barrier, you're going to find that you're highly durable with or without these powers except in situations that cut through a lot of defense (like Hard Mode content or highly defense-debuffing mobs), in which case... you're back to your usual tradeoffs because you are getting hit pretty often. Instant Healing is more powerful when it's up, but Reactive Regeneration has 100% uptime and Instant Healing does not.

I'm not sure about this, but I think the "updates durations" part of the stacking rule means that when you apply a second stack, the first stack gets its remaining duration reset to 45 seconds? Worth checking out, at least. EDIT: I just ran a quick test on Brainstorm. It does appear to work like that: I put 100% recharge enhancement in the power (so recharge time was 30s), then clicked it, and stacked three icons in my buff bar, with none of them blinking or anything, at the end of my 1 minute period of clicking every 30 seconds (so, t=0, click once, t=30, click second time, t=60, click third time, three buff icons, none of the icons blinking at any point).

Check out City of Data! It gives you this info. Hover over or tap the icon that looks like a clock on that power effect that you screenshotted: "stacks and updates durations of current effects up to three times."

Note that, somewhat uniquely for Scrapper sets, Concentrated Strike does not crit. So there's no benefit in having Concentrated Strike be one of the "heavy hitters" set up by Critical Strikes. Concentrated Strike has reasonable fundamentals for slotting Critical Strikes: its animation time is long, but only about half a second of that animation time is after the effect, so it doesn't waste much of the window of Critical Strikes. Maybe the biggest problem with putting the proc there is that if Concentrated Strike does recharge your Power Siphon, you would want to delay your use of Power Siphon until after the proc window, which seems fiddly.

It has lower Lethal resist than Smashing. Not necessarily enough to constitute a "hole."

Willpower also doesn't have a click heal, unless we're counting Resurgence.

Y'know what's totally hilarious? Repulsing Torrent also has a weak crit on top of everything else.

I think you're misreading that. It's a change to "-Res" modifiers, to powers that debuff resistance, not to armors that increase your own resistance. So for example Temporary Invulnerability gives a base +30% resistance to Smash/Lethal on both live and beta (while Brutes/Scrappers/Stalkers get +22.5% from the same power).

We see that in practice, this does not nearly make up for the Tanker advantage. Those people don't actually care about melee classes, to the extent that they believe this they can play Blasters and Corruptors. It's also broadly sophistry. People are like, "Four star content is the hardest in the game." Sure, by some measure, but it's hard in a very specific way (and a way that was specifically designed to undervalue mitigation in general and defense in particular). It's not representative of the rest of the game. This is kinda like saying, "The hardest thing in baseball is to do a super-fastball pitch (arguably true), so we don't need to care about whether someone can hit or catch a ball." Perhaps true if you only care about pitchers, but ignores 90% of the game.