aethereal

I have some bad news. (The chance for a proc to fire is capped at 90%.)

So, here's a suggestion that I do mostly endorse. The problem with procs as I see them is: First, they may need some fairly mild nerfs. Definitely not a 75% reduction in damage. Second, the interactions with recharge time are bad. They're terrible. They lead to all this proc bomb stuff, they lead to things that are supposed to be disadvantages for powers being advantages instead, they lead to the absolutely insane local/global recharge time break and focus the meta even more on global recharge. So, solution: 1. Procs go back to having a percentage chance instead of a PPM. 2. Powers have a multiplier to that percentage chance, that is noted in the in-game info for that power. 3. That multiplier is based mostly on recharge time and area factor, but it's like damage -- there's a formula for it, but it's an instantiated value in the power definition, not an instantaneously calculated formula. It doesn't vary depending on actual recharge time, and it can be set to a different number than the formula indicates, if the power designer feels like that's important to do. 4. We create the percentage chances and the formula to hit whatever overall damage numbers we feel is important. So for example, a normal damage proc might have a base chance to proc of 20%, and Neutrino Blast might have a "x1/2 proc rate," so that damage proc procs at 10%, while Cosmic Burst might have a "x3 proc rate," so the damage proc would proc at 60% in Cosmic Burst. Advantages of this solution: 1. It is vastly more legible to the players of the game who do not read the fora obsessively. They can see in-game one number, multiply it by another number, and know the proc rate. They do not have to know about whether a power has local or global recharge, whether it has a pseudopet or not, and then use a fairly complicated formula. One multiplication, no external sources of knowledge, done. 2. It can neatly sidestep the pseudopet problem. 3. It neatly solves the epic attack problem. 4. It allows individual powers that are "too good" or "too bad" with procs to be tuned individually. If we don't like DNA Siphon being able to be a proc bomb, we can just reduce its proc multiplier. 5. It returns fast-recharging to, ceteris paribus, being an advantage, not a mixed advantage/disadvantage, and vice versa for slow recharging. Disadvantages of this solution: 1. It means juggling one more number for every power, there are opportunities to get it wrong, and it's work to set up the right number in the first place. I think it's a manageable amount of work, if we use the current proc rate formulas as a design formula, but we are still going in and having to individually set the proc rates on hundreds of powers. 2. The current system to some extent "auto-balances" based on local recharge. With the new system, you'd have to just kinda set some values and then someone improving local recharge would make their procs better in that power. That doesn't bother me (it's how normal damage enhancement works, and the idea that this is a really meaningful balance in a meta of 180% global recharge is kinda laughable), but might bother other people. 3. Damage proc rate and non-damage proc rate are still conjoined. If you want a hold to be able to proc Lockdown +2 Mag at a decent proc rate, it'll also necessarily be able to proc the four Hold damage procs at a decent proc rate.

So here is one view that I kind of generally hear people hinting at. I don't endorse this view, just saying that I think some people have it: "Procs in normal damaging powers are fine. My problem is that certain powers that do a trivial amount of, or no, damage or which have recharge times that are very different from the recharge time they 'ought' to for that power (such as epic attacks) can be loaded with damage procs and do a lot of damage." Proc rate is based (mostly) on recharge time. When the PPM system kind of mostly works, it basically scales a proc's effective damage to the power's effective damage, since (most) powers base their damage on their recharge time. So one way to satisfy someone with the above view would be to cut out the middleman. Instead of proc rate being based on recharge time, it could be based on actual damage. Some (depending on what you think of the problem) advantages here: 1. It cleanly provides a solution to both epic attacks and things like using DNA Siphon as a proc bomb. Epic attacks would have a normal proc rate for a power with similar damage, not a really high proc rate. DNA Siphon, which does trivial damage, would have a very small proc rate. Powers that do no damage at base would either have a 0% proc rate or some floor (5% or whatever). 2. It removes some of the current ambiguity about recharge time from the game, where like, if you have a shorter recharge time than you "should," is that an advantage? Well, kinda, but for procs it's a disadvantage. We could meaningfully say like, "Hey, an advantage this power has will be that it breaks the design formula by having a shorter recharge time," or "a disadvantage that this power has will be that it breaks the design formula by having a longer recharge time." 3. It would probably remove at least some of the current problems with pseudopets, which don't interact well with recharge-time-basis for PPM. 4. It at least starts to unwind some of the insane recharge time shenanigans that we get with PPM. But there are some significant flaws in this idea: 1. Recharge time is a (mostly) unitary value. Powers have A Recharge Time. A very limited number of powers have some complexity to their recharge time (like, it's unenhanceable, or the power can be insta-recharged in various ways), but that's nothing to the many, many, many ways that powers can deal damage. There really isn't a damage rating that a power has, there are just a number of effects, many of which are conditional in various ways. Writing code that decides what the damage rating of a power actually is for the purposes of proc rate would be challenging and would probably have a bunch of weird corner cases where the code's interpretation of "what damage does this power do" does not correspond to a reasonable person's intuition of "what damage does this power do." 2. We at some point have to grapple with the fact that there are 3 normal damage procs and 1 purple damage procs in Hold sets. The overwhelming majority of Hold powers do low or no damage. It is clearly by design for these hold procs to do damage, and it would be weird and bad if we made them into traps by making them have extremely low proc rates in most hold powers. Similarly for damage procs in immobilize and slow powers. 3. Also, what about non-damage procs? Surely nobody objects to people using Lockdown's hold in a Hold power, we don't want that to have a floored proc rate because the Hold in question does 5 points of damage. We could perhaps continue to have non-damage-procs be based on recharge time but damage procs be based on damage, but that creates yet more complexity in the proc system. Ultimately, I can't endorse this kind of solution (and I'm not sure I agree with the framing of the problem). But I think there is an important insight that the use of recharge time as a limiter on proc rate creates some real issues.

I don't think that CoD plays games like that (human-readable short-descriptions in game definitely do play those kind of games, but CoD works off the actual power definitions). For example, here's Concentration (the build up equivalent from Mental Manipulation): https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=blaster_support.mental_manipulation.build_up&at=blaster It doesn't call out psi damage separate from other damage bonuses -- surely though Concentration does not fail to buff psi damage.

Why on earth does it give more of a bonus to psi/toxic damage?

Here's the revelation I had with my Ninjutsu scrapper (which also has clicky mez protection): you don't actually need to click it every time it's up. You don't need to put it on auto. I promise. I was chasing DPS, and decided I didn't in fact want to break up my attack chain just because my mez protection happened to be available -- especially since that would have resulted in significant double-stacking. So I tried to get in the habit of checking to see if the power was available while I was going from spawn to spawn, and clicking when it was, and not clicking it during combat. I wasn't perfect at keeping the coverage up, and occasionally I did get mezzed. But not very often, because defense sets like the three that get clicky mez protection dodge most mezzes. And when I did get mezzed, I just... clicked my mez protect. You can click it while mezzed, and it breaks you free. Honestly, really, try this. It makes the clicky protects much less of a chore, and it adds some layers of strategy to the game.

Nope. There were some aborted stabs at specific changes for procs (like setting an "internal recharge timer" to, yes, further complicate PPM), but they were rolled back. There was apparently a Burn change that was also rolled back. I don't think that there have even been specific point-fixes to any powers that I can remember that made it to live, much less a general pass. The closest thing I can think of to a proc fix has been a concerted effort not to have, for example, Enflame in Sorcery have an Irradiated-Ground-like proc interaction, and introducing new procs with lockout timers to prevent for example the Power Transfer proc to function as a high-power heal when put in an AoE endmod power.

Recently, a few people have asserted to me that Savage Melee is, on Brutes, Good, Actually. I wanted to investigate whether this was true. I built this spreadsheet, comparing Savage Melee with Fiery Melee, Energy Melee, and Dual Blades. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fc1udA5UVacIFGWOz5MkA4aQublmLhO7tn9Jwp3WLJ4/edit?usp=sharing Some disclaimers: I built this spreadsheet by hand-copying-and-pasting data from City of Data. It is definitely possible that there are mistakes in it! You shouldn't take it as gospel. What follows is some commentary by me about Savage Melee. I don't know that I have a particularly strong thesis statement here, just I thought there were some interesting things. Savage Melee vs Fiery Melee I thought this was a useful comparison because, first, Savage and Fiery share a bleed/burn DoT mechanic on their attacks. This DoT is affected by Brute Fury, and I think some component of the claim that Savage is good is based on this interaction. Fiery is I think fairly universally acknowledged to be a weak set, so it would be useful to compare why, if we contend that Savage is good and Fiery is bad, they don't benefit from the same mechanic. (The spreadsheet has a filter, and you can set the first column to only show Savage and Fiery to help ride along on the comparison). So first, despite the conceptual similarities between burn and bleed, there are a surprising number of differences in practice. Savage scales bleed damage to the base damage of the power. Fiery gives a constant burn damage for all powers except Greater Fire Sword, which gets double the normal burn damage. Savage gives a pretty constant three ticks of bleed damage, with a 75% chance of proceeding to the next tick every time, while Fiery gives 2 ticks to Scorch, 4 ticks to Greater Fire Sword, and 3 ticks to the remainder, with an 80% chance of proceeding to the next tick, except Cremate always gets all three ticks. Also for whatever it's worth burn damage starts half a second before bleed does. In general, Savage does pretty solidly overperform Fiery. A couple of caveats on comparing them: lethal damage is generally considered pretty bad, and I'm not really trying to quantitatively compare that. And Fiery gets a normal Build Up, which is probably better than Savage's Blood thirst, which gives a much less powerful to-hit/damage buff in return for five stacks of Blood Fury and increasing Bleed chance to 100% for 15 seconds. But the bleed bonus is better, and the damage bonus is less consequential, on Brutes. Fiery also presumably gets a better interaction with Fiery Aura's Fiery Embrace if that feels consequential to you. But I think the power-by-power differences swamp the above paragraph. The powers in Savage are for the most part one-by-one comparable to Fiery. Scorch vs Savage Strike: Savage Strike has much better DPA due mostly to much more attractive bleed compared to Scorch's abbreviated burn. Fire Sword vs Maiming Slash: Maiming Slash has much better DPA due to animation time and more attractive bleed. Cremate vs Vicious Slash: Vicious slash has much better DPA due mostly to the fact that its bleed is triple the damage of Cremate's burn. Incinerate vs Hemorrhage: Incinerate is I think basically the winner here. Hemorrhage has higher DPA when fully enhanced with Blood Fury, but Incinerate has better DPA in its base stats, and a much lower recharge, so you can use it more. This is mostly because of animation time. Hemorrhage is clearly one of the worst attacks in Savage. Breath of Fire vs Shred: Shred has much better DPA. Breath of Fire has a bigger overall area that it covers, but I think most people agree that the long, narrow cone is a bad shape for a melee set. Despite Shred's fairly slow animation time, Breath of Fire is yet worse. Fire Sword Circle vs Rending Fury: They have similar DPA (FSC is in the middle of Rending Fury's range of possible values, depending on Blood Fury), but FSC obviously doesn't get the chance for an enlarged radius and I think more importantly has a 20 second recharge vs the 14 second of Rending Fury, making it much slower to spam while taking down a mob. So then finally the two powers that aren't a very straight-up comparison are Savage Leap vs Greater Fire Sword, and while they're very different powers, there's no doubt in my mind that Savage Leap is better -- its DPA can actually be better at its maximum range, it's AoE, and it procs better, and more importantly it's very unclear that Fiery Melee really wants its T9 to be a mediocre ST attack, when it already has four ST attacks including the pretty good Incinerate. Savage Melee vs Dual Blades Dual Blades is a much less straightforward comparison to Savage Melee than Fiery, but I chose it for a few reasons: 1. They're both lethal damage sets 2. Dual Blades is generally a "good" set without being necessarily an arguably-overbuffed meta set like WM, TW, or Energy 3. I have some recent experience with DB and thought I could be reasonably nuanced One thing that I was frankly not expecting was what a baseline DPA advantage that Savage has vs DB! Like, I knew that Nimble Slash was not a gem of DB, but its DPA is 29.5 compared to Savage Strikes' 39.4. Yikes! For almost every reasonably comparable power, Savage has a strong DPA advantage. However. Dual Blades doesn't really need to care that Nimble Slash and Power Slice have pretty terrible DPAs, because its strength is the ability to make an attack chain that consists mostly-or-entirely of Ablating Strike, Sweeping Strike, and Blinding Feint. Now, Ablating Strike and Sweeping Strike have pretty good DPA, but not amazing ones -- 46 and 48 compared to 53 from Vicious Slash, for example. But of course the deal with DB is you're getting a constant damage increase from Blinding Feint as well, and Sweeping Strike is a cone. DB vs Savage in any non-Brute class is pretty clearly in DB's favor for the ST attack chain, with Blinding Feint being better for non-Brutes and Savage's bleed being worse. But how about on Brutes? I think it's pretty close. If you get the full on three-attack chain that DB is capable of with very high recharge, I expect DB outperforms Savage in ST. But in lower-recharge situations where you aren't actually triple-stacking BF all the time, Savage's high base DPA seems like it at least keeps things going pretty well. In the AoE front, Savage looks pretty good. Typhoon's Edge's DPA is atrocious. Rending Flurry can actually (with 5 blood fury) outperform the DPA of 1000 Cuts. And Dual Blades has nothing comparable to Savage Leap at all. It is worthwhile to note that Sweeping Strike makes Shred a sad little pathetic thing and has a slightly larger area to boot, but one cone does not make for an AoE set. I'd overall say that Savage and DB are pretty close to each other. Savage has better AoE (but Sweeping Strike means that DB has decent AoE and I know from my own experience can very successfully close a lot of AoE holes with a single epic AoE attack), but somewhat worse ST. Savage Melee vs Energy Melee Finally, I wanted to compare Savage with a meta set and just see how close it is. Obviously we aren't expecting Savage to have Energy's ST damage, but what does the comparison look like? And really, the answer is that it's surprisingly close! Vicious Slash has basically the same DPA as Total Focus (!!). Energy Punch and Bone Smasher have DPAs that are much more competitive with Savage than Dual Blades manages, but both have lower DPAs than Maiming Slash, much less vicious Slash. Hemorrhage also has high potential DPA on paper, though in practice it still sucks. Obvious, Energy Transfer blows everything out of the water -- fast ET has more than triple the DPA of Vicious Slash, and even slow ET has better DPA than anything in Savage. That's just Energy Transfer for you. Some caveats: Savage is getting this ST performance dragged out over several seconds with bleed, Energy gets it all up front. Lethal is a less attractive damage type than smashing/energy. Savage gets this and only this, while Energy is piling stuns on top of its ST damage. This is why Energy is the best ST damage set in the game. On the AoE front, Power Crash is competitive with Shred, but a bit behind, while Whirling Hands is anemic compared to Rending Flurry. Obviously Energy gets nothing like Savage Leap. Summary I don't have a super strong conclusion. Savage has much better DPA as a Brute than I was expecting. It's definitely better than Fiery Melee. Aside from that, there are a lot of judgment calls to be made.

Note that Freeze Ray is such a good damage power that a normal damage proc is really no better than a SO damage enhancement in terms of total expected damage to add (assuming no local recharge). A proc does all its damage up front instead of DoT, which is good, but is unreliable, which is less good. Once you're hitting ED, of course, procs can effectively add damage when normal enhancement can't. And purple procs are effectively better than a damage enhancement. But I wouldn't six-proc Freeze Ray, personally -- it's one of the rare powers where you can get better damage enhancement by not six-proccing. (On blasters. Other blast-set users will find it better to proc with their lower damage scalars).

That's not QoL, it's balance. Quality of life means "does not meaningfully affect combat balance, just makes the user experience a bit nicer." And we should not make it easier to build defense.

What's that CoD screenshot from? It's not for Blood Frenzy, which doesn't add damage (it adds recharge time and endurance discount.) The global chance mod that it gives is for "shred recharge," I don't think it does anything? Maybe there was at one point a mechanic, now discarded, that insta-recharged shred when you went to 5 Blood Frenzy? Here's the CoD page for Blood Frenzy. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=temporary_powers.temporary_powers.savage_melee_blood_frenzy_stalker&at=scrapper Blood Frenzy stacks up to 5 times, so you don't just get 6% endurance discount etc., you potentially get 30%. It's still not a great deal. Savage Melee is definitely better on Brutes than Scrappers due to the fairly significant effects of Fury on the Savage bleed. Scrappers in general are kinda meh compared to brutes until they get to level 50, get the superior ATO, and slot it somewhere useful, at which point they get just insane numbers of critical hits. The scrapper +50% ATO is maybe the single biggest biggest game changer for one slot in the game, and the superior version is 50% better than the non-superior version.

Since this is totally academic and there's no way they'll revisit it, I'll just vote for Smoke Bomb being: PBAoE -to-hit/-perception Self-teleport (short range) (the PBAoE is at your initial position, not your final one) and +def For your classic ninja vanish move.

If we wanted to really hack the shit out of things, we could do this: The toggles have minimal, but non-zero, endurance cost. Combat-Jumping-level. They also have an unenhanceable negative endmod effect on self. Since this is an effect, not a cost, it would be suppressed while powers are suppressed. Set this at 50% of the current cost of the power. Since the toggles would still have an endurance cost, if you got drained to zero, they would still detoggle. The cost would still apply while they were form-shifted, but it's small enough that it doesn't matter. They would basically get a modest endurance reduction from current levels "for free" in human form, and then a very small endurance penalty while in dwarf/nova forms. All in all, a buff, I think, but not a crazy one. We probably don't need to worry too much about the power level implications. I don't really endorse this level of hackery, but it's an option.

I mean, in a fairly unimportant way, sure (Edit: this was unclear. The cast time of a power has a non-zero, but fairly unimportant effect on the proc rate). I have no idea if interrupt time is counted in proc rates, but if it is, shaving a couple of seconds off of the combined cast + cooldown time of, what, slow snipes and slow assassin's strike seem deeply unlikely to make anyone sad. If it does, they could, you know, not slot interrupt time reduction -- we have the same dynamic, but much, much, much more relevantly, for recharge time reduction.

The damage formula does not include animation time.

The reason that people don't use defensive mode is that defensive mode is bad, not that offensive mode is so great. Anything that will kill you in offensive mode is going to also kill you in defensive mode -- a little slower, but your ability to kill them first drops so much that they have plenty of time for it. This might be different if defensive mode closed major holes in bio, like giving it DDR as someone was suggesting.

Honestly, I think people get very wrapped up in kill speed differences that don't seem to me to be a big deal in play. Like, yes, if you're farming and are all about optimizing playtime/reward, you should care about this. If you're in it for pylon speeds, totally. But when I compare my /bio characters in ordinary mission play with other armor sets, it doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me. I like bio, I enjoy soloing AVs, and it's a good set for that. Other than that, we're saying the same thing. Bio is significantly squishier than other armor sets, but you have to seek out particularly dangerous voluntary challenges to have that really matter. That's just the state of the game. Bio is plenty survivable. Fiery Aura is plenty survivable, and blasters are plenty survivable. I don't think that it's a good idea to make there be no offense/defense tradeoff among the armor sets, but as long as there is some offense/defense tradeoff, people are going to complain that the most offensively-oriented sets are "best."

So, for example on Praetorian Clockworks, I generally have to be below +4/x8 on Bio, at least until considerable incarnate, while on Ninjutsu I don't do anything special. They debuff regen and defense and use energy attacks, so in my experience Bio goes, "Click shield oh shit it's gone, click heal okay now I'm dead." It seems uncontroversial to me that Bio is significantly less tough than, say, Invul, SR, Rad, Energy Aura, and, on brutes/tanks, Electric Armor. It's just that we're currently in a game in which blasters can build tough enough to do +4/x8, and of course bio armor is tougher than blasters.

Bio enjoys a defense and resistance debuff when it gets its offensive boost, in addition to having no DDR in a set that relies on defense for its mainline damage mitigation to non-S/L damage. It is noticeably squishier than other armor sets. The environment right now is that it's relatively easy to build strong damage mitigation through sets and power pools, so you can generally build Bio to acceptable levels of toughness, but there are definitely a variety of situations where my Ninjutsu character, for example, is much more durable than my Bio character.

Rad has high-end resistances (and one of its major holes, cold, is really easy to accidentally fix just by getting winter/purple sets for other reasons, plus a generally low number of cold-damage dealing enemies), plus really solid heals/absorbs, plus a T9 that gives you an offensive bonus instead of a useless-in-PvE godmode. I'm not sure that it needs a nerf, but I think it's a really good armor set for tanks/brutes, combining highend mitigation with okayish offensive potential and hey, a little team support too. I think people are overstating the impact of proc-bombing its clicks, and it would remain a quite good set even if you couldn't proc-bomb them. If it had a damage aura, it would almost certainly be overtuned.

Maybe make there be one toggle and the other powers add capabilities to it? Edit: So, the toggle would still be turned off, but you'd just have a single toggle to turn back on when you resumed human form.

This seems not true to me. Yes, Rad Armor has two proc-bomb-able AoE powers. But Burn gets like triple-duty out of procs and has a base cooldown of 25 seconds as opposed to the 60 and 90 second cooldown of Rad Armor's PBAoE. Fiery Aura also has a damage aura and fwiw fiery embrace. What's the evidence that Rad Armor has similar offensive firepower to Fiery Aura? We don't see Rad Armor on farmers, we don't see it getting particularly fast pylon times. I think people are mixing up Rad Melee's high offensive potential through proccing Irradiated Ground with Rad Armor's offensive potential.

I think it'd be nice to have a whole different set with its own plusses and minuses. I expect that some players would be willing to alter concept slightly on characters between DB and DS depending on which set of mechanics appealed to them more, and DB is a somewhat polarizing set. Plus it's always nice when the game mechanics reflect aesthetics (so your clubs do smashing rather than lethal damage, etc).

Mockingbird, Nightwing, Daredevil sometimes/sorta, there are several fairly prominent comics characters who fight with paired sticks/short staves/clubs. Making a weapon for this would be easy: it's just a short featureless rod. You could also use a few of the smaller war mace weapons, and potentially the sai and hook swords weapons from DB. The animations could mostly/entirely be reused DB animations. While War Mace can potentially be used to sort of hit the same thematic elements, War Mace seems pretty clearly to be principally aimed at simulating super-strong characters who fight with a blunt weapon, with its slow-paced, high-impact strikes. There are a class of martial-arts-oriented superheroes that are clearly more "fast and agile" than "strong and tough" that use sticks, and the DB animations are a good match for this conceptually. So I think that there's a niche here and compared to many other "create a powerset" suggestions, there aren't big blockers on the art side of thing.

Everyone sees enhancements to reduce interrupt time and imagines that they will, you know, reduce the time you spend sitting around waiting to cast your interruptible power. They don't. They just reduce how much of that time is interruptible. So if there's ordinarily a 3 second interrupt period, with 100% interrupt enhancement, it's still a 3 second period, but one half of it is interruptible (the first 1.5 seconds) and the second half still happens, but if you get hit during it your power isn't interrupted (the second 1.5 seconds). With Assassin's Strikes and Snipes now mostly skipping the interrupt period in combat situations, it feels like we should make it do what people expect: actually reduce the amount of time you spend waiting around. This would help make Snipe sets, which include interrupt time reduction, feel a little less like a waste of an enhancement bonus. Not a LOT less, because it's still meaningless in combat, but at least you get something from it. Alternately: Replace all the interrupt-time-reduction components of snipe sets with range eenhancement.