aethereal

You'll fine the AoE in DM improved on all ATs compared to when you played it, and Tankers will get a wider cone and I believe a bigger AoE on Touch of Fear, plus greater target caps for them.

Well, Tankers get their usual AoE bonuses. I don't know if you played the DM on Scrapper before or after the DM tweaks, but Shadow Maul was improved and Touch of Fear got an AoE damage component.

Correct, though Bio does have both a taunt aura and a damage aura (but the taunt is not actually in the damage aura, per @InvaderStych's point).

The double XP buff removes a completely trivial amount of inf. You can earn plenty of inf while leveling while keeping double XP running -- merits are the easiest way, but there are others. Common IOs are cheaper than constantly upgrading SOs. However, I really encourage people to, even if self funding, even if allergic to learning slightly complicated strategies for earning inf, buy at least cheap sets. It's a trivial amount of money and it improves the leveling experience so much. SOs are the lazy strategy, not the cheap one. Sentinel sets are pretty forgiving while leveling, with lots of endurance tools etc. Energy Aura and Ninjutsu both are defense sets (good, powerful) with heals and endurance heals (useful, forgiving). Electric for the primary maybe? But honestly, if I were you, for the primary I'd just go with whatever looks good to you. I don't think there are serious trap sets that are terrible.

They're left/right mirrored, not front/back. That said, I think people continue to make too much of the coding work necessary to make them unmirrored. There are plenty of parts of the costume that don't use mirroring. I don't think it's a huge amount of work: I think the problem is, okay, let's say they unlock this technological capability. Then what? HC for whatever reason has been reluctant to greatly expand the costume options. Who's going to make and QA some giant number of asymmetrical textures in order to make this change pay off?

There are plenty of asymmetrical head patterns, too, not just detail 1 and detail 2. Both the base face and the colors that you can apply to the face are asymmetrical for a variety of patterns. It obviously would require coding for chest and lower-body patterns to be asymmetrical, but there's no reason to believe that the coding challenge is insurmountable.

I played an elec/elec scrapper and respecced out of Fitness in the early 40s. I joked that my character's autobiography was going to be called, "Seven Toggles and No Stamina: The Terry Watt Story." But we got inherent fitness when the character was like 49th level.

You're right about the stacking. That suggests that if four players had Ageless Radial and were pretty disciplined about applying it in rotation, they could achieve high DDR all the time (or almost all the time, considering imperfections in rotations). One character on the team who applies significant defense (Forcefields or Time or whatever), or a whole team of people who all have Maneuvers, or a few players with Barrier or whatever, plus four players with Ageless seems like it could put you into very high defense situation that's very robust -- but you're right that it's a high-team-coordination thing.

So I believe this is the power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=incarnate.destiny.ageless_total_radial_invocation&at=tanker Looks like the DDR is 85% for 15 seconds, then 42.5% until the 30 second mark, then 21.25% until the 60 second mark. 85% will generally protect you strongly from defense debuffers, 42.5% will protect you from weaker debuffers or if you have a significant overcap amount, and honestly I don't think you'll notice the 21.25% DDR -- the cascade will make it irrelevant. So holistically I'd say, "It'll get you through alpha once every 2 minutes with your defense in good shape, but not more than that." It doesn't stack with other people's ageless, if I'm understanding CoD correctly, but an eight person team could theoretically with good coordination keep 85% up all the time, and 42.5% with many bursts up to 85% seems pretty plausible (if and only if the entire team, or like 6+ of them, have Ageless Radial).

Well, gosh, that's the weirdest way to eat the animation time of weapon redraw that I can think of, but you're right, I can clearly see it happening. I stand corrected.

Pretty sure that's not true. There was a time when redraw had no impact on performance, but that was patched away and now you do in fact pay a penalty of animation time to draw a weapon (except katana and Titan Weapons, due to a yet-later patch that Homecoming made). EDIT: I just figured I'd double-check and took my staff stalker out to punt some Hellions in Atlas Park. It's a non-scientific test, but it seemed pretty clear: when my staff was not drawn, it was much longer before my damage arrived than if my staff was already out.

I have heard, but can not confirm, that healing set bonuses, unlike healing enhancements, only affect actual healing: not regen and not absorb.

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.