aethereal

Power Crash is a cone regardless of whether you use Energy Focus. With Energy Focus, it's a 10-max-targets cone instead of a 5-max-targets cone (though the area of the cone does not change).

I mean, it's absolutely not. I jut double-checked to make sure I wasn't dreaming (or that there's been a recent change) and grabbed my level 50 spines/bio group and took it out. Just in case, I overcapped aggro by pulling two groups onto me and made sure. My fury did not get above 90, full stop, even when I had 17 people on me and however many more sniping from the sides.

Unfortunately, Staff doesn't have great AoE. It has three AoEs, which isn't the same thing. Three mediocre AoEs add up to... three mediocre AoEs. Eye of the Storm does middling DPA for a PBAoE, albeit to a somewhat larger-than-usual area. Guarded Spin and Innocuous Strike do middling DPA for cones, on mediocre angles, to slightly-better-than-usual ranges, with short enough recharges that you honestly don't need both. It's nothing terrible, but it's not great. Sets with better-than-Staff AoE are like Claws, Titan Weapons, War Mace, Ice Melee, Savage Melee, to some extent Dual Blades, and I think new Battle Axe. Maybe Katana. Maybe Spines or Rad Melee depending on how you feel about including damage auras in their AoE. Electrical Melee depending on how impressed you are with specifically Lightning Rod.

Quick stylized math: Take a power that does 100 damage at scale 1: 95% damage slotting +30% damage from Alpha Slot Normal crits (ie, 10% against LTs+, doubles the damage of the power) Scrapper Damage: Non-crit damage: 112.5 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3) = 253.125 damage Crit damage: 225 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3) = 506.25 damage Brutes today: (So that means 85 Fury for 170% damage bonus): Damage: 75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 1.7) = 296.25 damage So what's the crit rate that Scrappers need to have in order to exceed Brute damage? 296.25 < (1 - x) * 253.125 + x * 502.25 296.25 < 253.125 - 253.125x + 502.25x 296.25 < 253.125 + 253.125x 43.125 < 253.125x x > 17.037% So Scrappers need to have a better effective crit rate than 17% to outdamage Brutes. A normal power, against LTs and higher, does 16% with the ATO1. ATO2 then has very different results on different Scrappers (and I do think that people overestimate how likely it is that you can get "high end Scrapper pylon times performance with ATO2" in ordinary play), but especially in well-build cases gives Scrappers a substantial damage advantage by raising effective crit rate to potentially 40%+ Brutes who could max out Fury: (Let's say you could get 100 Fury instead of basically being capped at 85) Damage: 75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 2) = 318.75 The quicker version of the inequality above is: (Brute damage - Scrapper non-crit damage) / (Scrapper non-crit damage) = Crit Rate for equality (318.75 - 253.125) / 253.125 = 25.93% effective crit rate needed for Scrappers to hit Brute damage Brute who could get to 250% damage bonus from Fury: Damage: 75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 2.5) = 356.25 Crit rate needed for equality: 40.74% Brute who could get to 300% damage bonus from Fury: Damage: 75 base damage * (1 + 0.95 + 0.3 + 3) = 393.75 Crit rate needed for equality: 55.56% Some notes on the analysis above: 1. This is the crit rate needed for Scrappers to equal Brutes. Scrappers need to have a damage advantage over Brutes, because they're defensively inferior. So you need to look at getting a crit rate higher than that by whatever you think the appropriate damage differential is. 2. This analysis is necessarily incomplete. It ignores Build Up, which is massively better for Scrappers than it is for Brutes, for example. It ignores damage procs, which are significantly better for Brutes than they are for Scrappers. It ignores non-critting damage like Savage or Fire DoTs, and damage auras, which are an advantage for Brutes. It ignores Scrappers powers that have a >10% chance to crit (of which there are a reasonably high number), and are obviously an advantage for Scrappers. It ignores powers that don't have "full crits" and do less than 2x damage when they crit (of which there are also a reasonably high number). Etc. etc. It's not the last word on anything, but it does touch on the broad, most common cases when comparing Brute and Scrapper damage. 3. Because of ATO2, it's not trivial to calculate what the effective crit rate of Scrappers is. Here's a veeeery rough approximation: Let's say that you activate a power on average of every 1.5 seconds. That means that you can do 40 powers per minute. Superior ATO2 Proc has 4 PPM. Let's say you get 10 activations per minute (because of global recharge). Let's say that every time it activates, you can fit two powers in its activation window. So you have 20 powers that are affected by ATO2, and 20 that are not. Powers that are affected by ATO2 have a 66% crit rate, powers that are not have a 16% crit rate, your total effective crit rate is 41%. This obviously assumes a level 50, perma-hasten Scrapper. The real highest-end scrappers prioritize their high-damage powers into the activation window of their crit proc, and potentially get three activations per crit window, and maybe get more than 10 activations per minute, for a yet-higher effective crit rate. But that's not necessarily possible for all sets, and assumes machine-gun-style power activations with no repositioning, etc.

Depends a lot on what exactly you mean by "a slower ramp." If you mean, "for the first 30 seconds (1 minute? 2 minutes? 15 seconds?) of a mission a Brute is bad, and then after that they're better than a Scrapper until the next mission or until you faceplant," that doesn't sound like a great dynamic to me. If you mean more just like "Brute damage fluctuates, Fury at its maximum reasonable value is great, but it's hard to get it to stay there, and at their peaks Brutes are better than Scrappers but it's impossible to be there all the time," then sure, I mean on some level I think that's what most of everyone wants. My question is, how does that actually operationalize? It seems to me like it's a really hard target to hit. How do you prevent it from being the case that someone with a really careful build or disciplined playstyle doesn't just have a character who's better than a Scrapper in every way? If you do make it so hard to get that even people with very careful builds and disciplined playstyles can't max Fury all the time, then does that mean that a basically competent Brute player is way below that baseline? What exactly is the operational principle about how you do and don't max Fury? I'm not expecting you to answer this with a detailed proposal, because I basically don't think that there are answers. I think we could force fluctuations in Fury in various ways (there could be a random component to Fury gain/decay, or there could be a lockout after X period of time above Y Fury), but I don't think they'd "feel good." The classic old-school good-feeling Brute experience was that you careened from one group to the next little or none of the pause that, at the time, was often the default playstyle of CoH, and which had tangible benefits. The big thing to recognize is that that's no longer the default playstyle of CoH. In a group now or at well-built, relatively high-level solo play, everyone careens from group to group. There's little sense that you need to let your health or endurance meter recover between fights. So the old-style Fury play, where you were pushing your luck on your health and endurance meters in order to maintain your fury meter, is pretty fundamentally broken. I think that now even in very challenging content, the dynamic is not usually pauses after every group.

Theft of Essence is an accurate healing set. Stamina does not take accurate healing. Nor does Health (which takes healing but not accurate healing).

Then it seems likely that scrappers and to a lesser extent Stalkers would be obsolete.

700% and theoretically 200%, but in practice more like 170-180%.

Sorry about mixing up the words Fury and Rage. I'm not sure that you really got the point of my post. I am fully aware of how Fury works now -- as I said in the post you quoted, it goes to 85 and then basically never moves, up or down. In an ideal world, Fury would fluctuate. It shouldn't just feel like Brutes get an extra 170% damage enhancement, the end, as the entirety of the mechanic. But I think it's genuinely hard to make a mechanic which fluctuates satisfyingly, that doesn't feel frustrating, in the current CoH environment.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=boosts.superior_attuned_superior_critical_strikes_f.superior_attuned_superior_critical_strikes_f Seems like they should both be 4PPM or both be 3PPM. 3PPM seems like a more correct value than 4 to me, but not sure.

...wha? I just looked at CoD (https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=boosts.superior_attuned_superior_critical_strikes_f.superior_attuned_superior_critical_strikes_f), and you're right that it's 4PPM. It's stated to be 3PPM in the description of the enhancement, and it, uh, frankly seems like a bug for it to be 4PPM.

66% in ordinary powers. 10% base, 6% from ATO1, 50% from ATO2. There are some powers that have 15% base chance to crit, so they can get to 71%. I guess that /Ninjutsu scrappers can get +65% chance to crit from "hide." So looking at that instead of ATO2, you could get to 71% for ordinary powers or 76% for high-crit powers. If someone you could get both the ATO2 and the pseudo-hide to happen at the same time, you could get 100% chance to crit, but I don't think that's possible.

I think it's really tough to hit exactly the right sweet spot on Rage. Make it a bit too hard to build and, it's a frustrating nerf for a class that already is marginal. Make it a little too easy to build and then everyone is at 100 Rage all the time instead of 85 Rage all the time. That's not to say that the current situation -- where the Rage meter goes instantly to 85 and then stops moving -- isn't bad. It is bad. But I think that people are overestimating how easy it would be to make the Rage meter fluctuate significantly. Back when Brutes came out, we had a lot less overall power and more downtime. In the current environment of pretty easy access to even high-end IOs and incarnates, cannonballing from mob to mob isn't a high-risk tactic that Brutes might thematically use, it's common play experience. And remember the reason why we got the latest Rage buff -- because otherwise when you had two Brutes on a team they were essentially fighting over who got to build Rage. I think it'd suck to be in a situation where you didn't want to team with other Brutes. I don't think that players, empirically, like "shoot your wad then suffer a lockout period of lowered efficacy." Look at how people wail and gnash their teeth over the lockouts in Savage Melee and Psi Melee. Look at how categorically people reject crashing T9s, or the Rage crash.

Yeah, I don't rant about it often because I don't get the impression that the HC staff is particularly interested in revisiting it as a design choice, but I think that it's been a big mistake to use differing target caps as an AT differentiation point. It's too large a balance point, it's artificial and gamey, and it creates very awkward distinctions between ST and AoE performance. If I were going to nerf Tanks, I'd keep the AoE area bonuses but drop them to normal target caps. If I felt like this left them at a significant deficit of aggro management compared to Brutes (and I'm far from convinced that tanks pre-buff had any problems with aggro management), then I might allow a higher target cap on Taunt -- but not on damage-dealing powers. (And similarly, I'd maybe give sentinels smaller AoEs, but normal caps for their AoEs). But as I said, it doesn't feel like this is a point worth trying to argue about.

idk if it's bugged or anything, but per CoD, it should only last 10.25 seconds.

Something that I'm always tempted to try on Claws/DB is to heavily slot Follow Up for accuracy (to land that initial hit) and then tank accuracy slotting for the rest of the powers. It never ends up feeling quite worth it, since it's generally so easy to build global accuracy and get accuracy slotting into even abbreviated sets. But it's an interesting idea, and someone more devoted to procs than I am might make it work.

I find that people are strangely unwilling to approach Brutes from a perspective of "what powersets really work well on a Brute"? Like, everyone's happy to say that the Brute is a marginal AT, but it seems like few people are willing to say, "Okay, so how do we play to its strengths?" Like, I see people recommend Energy Aura on a Brute. Energy Aura is of course a solid set anywhere, but it's like the number one example of, "You might as well make it on a Scrapper." It's defense-based, so the Brute higher resist cap is largely irrelevant on it. It retains its taunt aura on a Scrapper. It has Energize, which makes some use of Brute's higher hp, but honestly a Scrapper is going to be 99.5% as durable as a Brute in Energy Aura. Invulnerability is a little more tilted towards Brutes, but not much. I want to see several of these things checked on a Brute: 1. Armor set can reasonably get above 75% resistance in several different resists. 2. Damage aura (or two!) 3. Armor set leverages Brute hit points by having significant heals/regen. 4. Armor set has no taunt aura on a Scrapper. 5. Attack set has an advantage on a Brute vs a Scrapper You don't have to check all five of those boxes to tip the balance towards a Brute vs a Scrapper, but if you don't check at least two or three, you should be asking yourself why not a scrapper. Attack sets whose gimmick is a damage bonus should be avoided on Brutes: Claws, Dual Blades, Super Strength, maybe Kinetic Melee. Some armor sets that clearly work better on Brutes than Scrappers: Electric, Fire, Dark, maybe Willpower and Rad. And Regen, but Regen is pretty bad regardless. Probably the only attack sets that are clearly better on a Brute than a Scrapper are Savage and Spines, but Martial Arts, Rad Melee, Fire, and Energy Melee provide some upside to Brutes. On the flip side, why a Brute rather than a Tank, you again want to talk about damage auras, and having some kind of solid single-target chain, since it's going to be an uphill battle for a Brute to outperform a Tank solely in AoE.

I don't actually believe that this is true. There's no way they bothered to write code to inspect the damage types of characters (over how many powers? how would they determine which powers you actually use and which ones are just in your build as forced choices or mules?) before spawning a DE mob. Like, is it theoretically possible that this could be done? Sure. Would anyone have bothered to do it? Nah.

I think this is easy to overstate. Yes, top end scrappers do a ton of damage (honestly enough to need a nerf). But scrappers outdamage brutes only with very efficient use of the Superior ATO2. Before level 50, before perma-hasten, or with somewhat inefficient choices of where to put the ATO2, scrappers do equal or less damage than brutes. A good change would be to move some of the performance of the ATO2 into the ATO1 or into the base inherent of scrappers to both nerf very high end scrappers and buff all other scrappers.

I assure you that brutes benefit more from procs than any other melee AT, if you're just looking in isolation at how much more damage they get from slotting a proc. To the extent that tanks have a proc advantage, it's simply that they can throw away more set bonuses and still hit survivability goals, while Brutes (and Scrappers, and Stalkers) need to use many more set bonuses if they're going to survive solo at high difficulty. So it's easier for tanks to fit large numbers of procs into their build. But each proc benefits a brute mildly more.

CoH gets its random numbers with a system call to the O/S nonsecure random number generator. People's fantasies of persecution by the RNG are entirely in their own minds.

The entire point of the PPM system is that you're not supposed to have to worry that much about what the proc rate is for a power. It's higher on longer-recharge powers and lower on shorter-recharge powers and it ends up being the same. Some people get extremely neurotic about having high proc chance in their powers, and thus avoid it in short-recharge-time powers, but that doesn't (with some exceptions that I'll get to below) actually matter. It evens out. The exceptions: 1. If you have your power sit around off cooldown but unclicked for a long time, that means you get fewer procs per minute with it. Basically, the PPM system assumes that you click your power on cooldown. If you have a power that "wastes" cooldown by recharging much quicker than you actually want to use it, it would ceteris paribus be better to replace it with another power that does similar things but only recharges just in time for you to use it. 2. If a long-recharge power uses a pseudopet to accomplish its effects, you get a bad PPM rate despite your long recharge, which sucks. That's the origin of "don't put it in rain powers." 3. If the proc isn't just a scalar increase in something, but has a dramatic effect that you want to plan around, then obviously you can plan better if your proc rate is more reliable. But seriously think hard about does it actually matter if it goes off On This Activation, or does it just matter how often it goes off at all? 4. There are various complications that are one-off affairs unique to certain procs or certain power that you somehow just have to memorize all of. (PPM is a kinda terrible system). That said, the staff have quashed some of these unique things.

You can replace the "glowie sound" file with a louder version of the sound file, which will have the effect that you want. You have to do it as a process of replacing the sound file, not, like, through an in-game control.

So the deal is the costume effect of granite is part of the power effects, it's not either an animation or a particle effect of the power. The existing powers customization system has no way to change the effects of a power. Some kind of fairly serious code change would be necessary to either bring a complete costume replacement effect into the animation type of the power (which the customization code could then affect and swap into a different costume replacement) or else make the customization code be able to swap out some power effects. That's why this long-standing complaint has never been addressed.

Yes, of course, but not during the existence of Homecoming.