aethereal

You're correct.

If you have difficulty set low and don't care about the side quests, mayhem missions are fast. They toss an ordinary boss hero at you, and where you need to go is clearly marked on the map. You can skip the enemies in the way there, knock down the vault, kill the hero. Maybe 3-5 minutes.

I take it you didn't actually ready my post? Should I have simplified it for you? Lots of words can be hard, I know. I'll knock it down to one sentence: Fewer toggles, more clicks, the toggles that remain are harder choices that have to be more actively managed -- this is more complexity in both build and game than a bunch of low-cost toggles.

What are these "number of other factors"? And nothing about making some powers be autos or "things that add to another toggle" would defeat a layering of armor coming in as you level. Endurance management is an interesting one, and something that feeds into my thoughts here: So, first of all, if we wanted something that was "just like CoH1, but with less dumb button pressing," you could easily make a hypothetical CoH2 to allow effects to "join" toggles that were fully separately enhanced. In CoH1, we can't really do that (an effect can "join" a toggle, but its enhancements won't affect the power that joins the toggle, and it won't change the endurance cost of the toggle) because the system was never set up for that, but it would be trivial if you were making a new game planning for it from the start to make it so that, say, my "weave" power could join a generic defensive toggle and add both defense and endurance cost that was controlled by enhancement on the weave power. That'd make this a pretty much pure QoL change -- less button pressing, same dynamics. But that's not actually entirely what I want to argue for. I think that some toggles really should be made auto powers, and some should be made non-perma clicks. I assert that clicks are obviously way more complex than toggles: you not only still have to manage the endurance cost and the benefit of the power, you also have to manage the recharge and timing, which toggles don't require. Anyone going to argue otherwise? So, auto powers. It is of course true that with an auto power, you don't have an endurance management concern. And you could imagine a scenario where right now, we're agonizing about the deets of endurance management, and going to auto powers considerably simplifies character building. But I don't think that scenario has anything to do with modern CoH. Does anyone say, "Oh man I'd like to take Combat Jumping but I just can't afford the endurance cost?" I mean, come on, no, obviously. Nobody says that about Weave, much less Combat Jumping. Endurance management has become plenty generous in CoH that, outside of small handful of uncommonly-used toggles, everyone can just walk around with 7+ toggles on. (And those uncommon expensive toggles, I'd say should definitely stay toggles). In a hypothetical CoH2, I'd like to get back to the point where we managed our toggles more actively! I think it's a more interesting game if we might say, "I'm going to turn off this toggle right now," or where our toggles were suppressed, or toggled off antagonistically, or where some are mutually exclusive with each other. In today's CoH, that's... a big cliff. A scrapper with his seven to ten toggles turned on might have 90% mitigation. If you toggle everything off, or suppress it, he suddenly takes 10x the damage that he was taking, and dies instantly. I think that if we take a bunch of the effect of those toggles and move them to auto powers, then it opens up design space to then be more aggressive about requiring him to manage the remainder. If someone gets mezzed and it suppressed his toggles and he takes 2x the damage he was taking before, that's survivable, an interesting tactical challenge. If he takes 10x the damage he was taking before, he probably just faceplants (and then goes back to the hospital or gets rezzed where it's safe and spends 20 second clicking 10 toggles). The result of toggles being so effective and so omnipresent is that we have to be deferential of them. By moving some of the durability that most characters get through their toggles to auto powers or clicks, we allow ourselves the chance to be much more aggressive at making people actually manage the rest of the toggles (including increasing their endurance cost significantly so that there's either a strategic decision to invest heavily in endurance reduction, or else a tactical decision to turn off the toggle when it's not needed).

Hexapodia is the key insight.

I just... really didn't. I'm not totally sure why you think I did! If someone put me in charge of CoH2, I think that one of my biggest concerns would be that my ideas would make it too complex, too hard to understand and manipulate the mechanics of. I think that there are some areas of CoH as it stands that are persistently misunderstood that I don't think are very complex. (The accuracy vs to-hit thing is the exception, I do think that should be simplified. I think it's potentially super complex as it stands, and that we actually end up with kind of dumb mechanics here precisely because it's so complex that we have to limit the number of moving pieces in order to keep it from having weird results.) But, like, I genuinely don't know why you think it's more complicated to activate three toggles that, combined, give you let's say 13% defense-all, instead of having one toggle and then two auto-powers that modify the toggle to have 13% defense-all. It seems straightforwardly the case that those are basically the same, just one of them involves less unnecessary button-pushing. And it seems clearly the case to me as well that if you have one toggle that gives you +8% defense-all, and then a non-perma clicky that gives you another +12% defense-all, that using that clicky is more complicated than the toggle-on-and-forget 13% defense-all of three toggles.

I feel like you think I'm attacking you. I am not, I promise! I have no beef with you. I'm sorry that I upset you with my post about mechanics. If it makes you feel any better, there is not going to be a CoH2, and all of this is very academic.

I super didn't, my friend! I really suggest that you try to read it without it feeling like an attack. There's nothing complicated about increasing-returns curves. They're simplifying! They mean that you don't have a hard tradeoff when you consider "should I push for more defense (or resistance, if that's my thing), or should I diversify." There's certainly nothing complicated about the current meta for recharge, my god can we get more cookie-cutter than "drop in five LotG procs, five 10% global recharge bonuses, get Hasten, find the other 20% in a couple of standard places"? Mez protection would get a TON more complex if you, like... actually had to worry about being mezzed? Activating ten toggles isn't complex, it's just tedious. If you activated four instead to get the same effects, it'd be a nice QoL. If you couldn't get the same effects as the current 10 toggles but actually had to think about when to time clickies for some of them, then it'd be more complex, not less!

That wouldn't be my summary of it, no. I think the only thing I really suggested simplifying there was the to-hit calculation, which strikes me as complexity without purpose. I think there was a period, maybe... gosh, at this point 15 years ago... where there was enjoyable complexity in figuring out the invention system and that you could do things like softcap S/L even for squishy classes or build to perma-Hasten, and you could make the argument that even though the result here wasn't really a great thing, the process of unravelling that ball of yarn was diverting enough for a big chunk of the playerbase that it "paid for itself" as it were. To the extent that we're taking seriously the counterfactual of a CoH2, we should recognize that we'll get that kind of problem solving for free! Anything that's actually a real from-scratch rewrite of CoH would change enough that character building will be de facto more complicated than CoH1, at least for a while, until people sink a few tens of thousands of man-hours into it and figure out how it works. To the extent that this isn't really about CoH2, and is simply a rehash of complaints about CoH1, we should recognize that the time when there was enjoyable complexity in building for defense and global recharge was ages ago, and now it's just a matter of typing a Google query and walking down a well-trodden path. But... I wasn't actually just complaining about CoH1! I do think that the game is in pretty good shape for what it is, and trying to attack the problems I highlighted doesn't really make a lot of sense in the context of this legacy game. We're just spitballing about a thing that'll never happen, here.

I mean, look, there's a balance here. I'm absolutely here for a power fantasy of a superhero game, and the whole early modus of "a hero should be balanced against three minions" is dumb and bad. But on the other hand, there's no actual game if the deal is that you get "invulnerable to all harm," "instakill anyone I attack," and "travel anywhere instantly" at first level. We gotta find some kind of middle ground. The way that CoH was as of whatever, about two years ago, was that a well-built level 50+3 character was so strong that it could solo all content, and high-end teams were basically a eight different people going off in all directions and speedrunning objectives. ATs like Defender were pretty superfluous, and those high-end builds all looked pretty similar to each other. The response to that has been the introduction of content that has ludicrous counters to Defense in particular (I believe that it is a case that if you bring a character into 4-star hard mode content who is at 45% defense to all positionals and all types, every enemy on the map will have a 95% chance to hit you with every attack. That is, you get literally no mitigation from soft-capped defense without additional buffs on top). I don't think that's the best meta we can get if we give ourselves the freedom to imagine a place where we're starting over and building up from scratch. My vision is that there's some rough power-level that's maximally attainable, call it X, and: 1. There are several different ways to get your character to roughly X. It's not just Defense + Recharge. We want there to be diversity in people who are at power level X. Now, there's always going to be a best, it's impossible to have a perfectly balanced meta, but the gulf between the best and the second and third and fourth best should be relatively narrow. 2. Characters at power X can feel nicely superheroic. They can wade into large groups of foes and defeat them, and they can fight cool-seeming named villains one-on-one and defeat them. 3. But there is content that is intended for groups of 4-8 characters at power X, and that necessarily means that one character, no matter how well-built, won't be able to do that content solo. And that content doesn't achieve this difficulty level by unceremoniously ignoring the schtick of any characters. No "lol, your defense does you no good," no "mezzes just don't work here," etc.

Nope, you can't auto-activate a macro.

It's intended not to be. You can approximate it in some cases by activating a power and then setting another power to be your auto-activate power.

I feel like nobody has really gone all-in on a big mechanical discussion, so here I go: The basic sins of current CoH on a mechanical level are the way defense and recharge work. They distort everything in the game. Too much stuff is built on top of them to really rework them in CoH as it stands, it would just be too disruptive. But if you're starting from the beginning, you should definitely change how they work. It should not be possible for carefully built high-end players to divide the cooldown of every power by three, while a "normal" 50 gets about 40% off the cooldown. It should also not be the case that there's a hard increasing-returns curve towards 90% mitigation available to everyone in the game. So, recharge reduction: This is probably relatively simple. Strongly limit the amount of recharge available, very especially global recharge, then rebalance everything to lower base cooldowns. A power like Hasten (high global cooldown available to everyone) should simply not exist. If you feel the need to thematically support super-speedsters in globally available pool powers (and I'm kind of dubious that we've ever had a great experience with that, instead of building a speed powerset), then the way to do it is not a perma-able cooldown reducer, it's probably something more like a brief buff that reduces animation times (which is not possible in current codebase, but in a hypothetical CoH2 could be). Defense: Somewhat less simple, and more so than global recharge you have to make real decisions about playing off the power-fantasy of superheroes who can wade into groups of foes with some level of niche protection for more armored classes and challenge level. But broadly speaking, removing the increasing-returns cycle would be great. Make it easier to build meaningful amounts of defense for low investment, harder to build defense that achieves >75% total mitigation. Probably entirely remove the confusing accuracy/to-hit distinction (do we in fact need two different traits that both represent being better/worse at landing a blow, that trade off with each other in impossibly nuanced ways?). Probably have class-by-class caps on defense values. Maybe make armor sets that are defense/resistance oriented raise the normal cap for the chosen type of mitigation, but have lower caps for building either outside of your actual powerset. Then, in response to a sane amount of mitigation based on Defense, we remove the doctrine of building content that responds to that defense mitigation by essentially entirely removing Defense (whether through gigantic to-hit/accuracy bonuses or huge defense debuffs). Some bonus mechanical changes that aren't the two above: 1. Remove the increasing-returns cycle on Resistance, too. This is a little less extreme than for Defense and probably only a really big deal for the high-resistance ATs, but it still should be easier to build moderate mitigation, harder to get to 90%. 2. Revamp how mezz protection works. We currently have a situation where armored classes are mooooostly immune to mez and unarmored classes are horribly screwed over by it, we should move both towards the center a little, making mez less problematic for the unarmored classes, but less ignoreable for the armored classes (this probably looks something like armored classes mostly get mez resistance, not protection, so they still get mezzed but for short periods of time, plus everyone gets a period of invulnerability or nigh-invulnerability after they get mezzed, like in PvP, so that large mobs don't lock you down). 3. End the City of Toggles. This game has way too many toggles. Make a focused effort to say that all-in, most characters should have at most two toggles from pools and, if they have a toggle-heavy powerset, two toggles from their powerset. Convert lots of powers that currently are toggles to being auto-powers, or to adding an effect to another toggle, or just rethink whether this power needs to be an always-on bonus to begin with. This should be aided by a decreasing-returns curve with defense/resistance, in which we aren't chasing every last 2% defense obsessively.

Dark melee does debuff to-hit. Unfortunately, you're kinda backwards: it would be a nicer pairing with defense sets like Shield if it debuffed accuracy instead. (As far as I know, nothing debuffs accuracy). Basically, moderate accuracy bonuses are much more common than moderate to-hit bonuses, and while to-hit debuffs are wasted against most enemies when you're soft-capped, accuracy penalties would increase your durability. Notable cases where enemies do have to-hit bonuses (like hard mode or Devouring Earth Quartzes) usually involve a ton of to-hit, such that the mild Dark Melee debuffs don't really make a dent.

I think Bio probably offers the best endurance economy. A good passive early, then a really powerful click later on. Energy Aura and Electric armor eventually get top tier, but their endurance tools come late.

Pet classes have a big unearned benefit in pylon runs specifically, which is that the level deficit of pets doesn't apply to Pylons (which are always even-level to everyone). It's similar to, but much more dramatic than, the overperformance of -res procs (and -res in general) in Pylon runs. So it would be similar for this: if you talked about an "everything-capped" run against a pylon, then pets classes would do amazingly. If you talked about everything-capped stuff against a +3 opponent, then pets classes would have much less of an advantage.

So, important Bio tip: DNA Siphon gives you endurance and health for every living enemy it hits, but recovery and regeneration for every dead enemy it hits. Getting the most out of Bio, in my experience, means using DNA Siphon carefully, when you have a good mix of alive and dead enemies for it to hit. If you hit only alive enemies in a large spawn, you easily fill up your endurance and health bars fully, but then you've got a long time before you get any more use out of it. If you hit a mix of alive and dead enemies, you still refill both bars, but then you get a bunch of regen and recovery to tide you over until it comes off of cooldown. I do not suggest proc-bombing DNA Siphon unless you largely work in big groups in unchallenging content. It's a powerful survivability tool, you need it on the relatively fragile Bio armor.

Yes, you can activate Active Defense through mez. In the case of Super Reflexes and Ninjutsu, I wholly endorse not worrying that much about clicking your mez protection power with absolute infallibility, since you can activate through mez if you screw up a little it's NBD. For Shield Defense, a lot (all?) of your DDR is tied up in the click protection, and there's MUCH more value in double-stacking it than there is for SR or Ninj, so it's probably the one get a little more religious about than the other click-mez-prots. Honestly, some people really, really, really seem to be bothered by click mez protection. Energy Aura and Stone (or Ice!) are fine defense-oriented sets that have toggle mez protection.

Yeah, the way it works is that powers have a "time before effect." That's the difference between when you start the cast and when the first mechanical effects start to resolve. Procs will go off at that point. But each effect of the power can optionally have a further delay between when the effects start and this particular effect goes off, and it's possible for damage to be delayed further. But proc damage won't be, because procs have no idea what each individual effect group does, or what one they "should" go with -- they just go off at the start of effects.

So, to be clear: I said that you'd get a 58% proc rate with a power that had animation plus cooldown including local recharge of 10 seconds. You, in contrast, said that a power that had a 30 seconds cooldown would have a proc rate of 35-50%. You then used a power that had animation plus cooldown of 7.5 seconds, and got a proc rate of 44%. And you are claiming that this proves you right?

AoE attacks get a penalty to the proc rate based on the size of their area. Since Axe Cyclone has quite a large radius, it takes a pretty hefty penalty to rates, but I haven't done the math on it to figure out what it'd be. It also depends on the PPM of the proc! EDIT: My spreadsheet says that the proc rate of a 3.5 PPM proc in Axe Cyclone with no local recharge should be 42.9%

What? No, this is seriously wrong. With a typical damage proc (3.5 PPM), and a single target power, then if the power's cooldown including local recharge + animation time is: 5 seconds, proc rate is: 29% 10 seconds, proc rate is: 58% 15 seconds, proc rate is: 87.5% Higher: maxed out at 90%

Blizzard (on Sents) looks like it has a 90 second cooldown and an 8 second duration, so at maxed recharge it'd be 18 seconds of recharge, so basically about 40% on, 60% off. That's with maxed recharge, usually impossible to achieve without a pocket Kin or something. Ice Storm has a 60 second cooldown and a 15 second duration (and about a 2 second cast time), so it's theoretically possible to perma it.

Yes, it's true, and yes, it does have other bonuses. For a comprehensive look at the mechanics of the Electric Blast set, you'll want to look at the patch notes from the issue where it was overhauled.

...and has had a heal for like 10 years.