aethereal

I don't think you're calculating this right. It looks like you've got something mildly wrong with the base damage (I calculate 80 DPA for Vicious Slash), but then you're doubling the damage for the crit, and the crits don't fully double the damage because they don't double the bleed damage. So I get 140.987 DPA for Vicious Slash on crit. Hemo potentially has the highest DPA of Savage Melee attacks, but to get it above Vicious, you have to blow your blood frenzy wad and suffer through lockout, which means you don't get that damage very often, and there's an opportunity cost in terms of using your AoE. And of course it's over a five second DoT. Meanwhile, use it with less than 5 blood frenzy and you don't get particularly great damage, you still have to rebuild your blood frenzy from zero, and it's still over five seconds. As a Stalker, you can at least use your mostly-controllable crits to be very likely to crit with hemo and thus get your crit damage all up front instead of over the DoT. But a scrapper can't predictably do that. It's not like... the worst attack in the world. But it's awkward and even if you use it optimally you aren't that much better off than using your ordinary three ST attacks.

Hemorrhage isn't broken -- it was broken on Stalkers for a while, and that made it good for Stalkers. Now it's just pretty bad for everyone.

Savage is pretty high damage on a brute. It's mediocre on a scrapper. This is one of those cases where the DoT being affected by fury, but not multiplied by a crit, makes a big difference.

I'm deeply uninterested in arguing it with you, I'm just saying that those are the stakes at play here. People who feel that taunt auras are already overly accessible to scrappers are not likely to want to give everyone a taunt aura at the cost of just one slot.

It is technically possible, yes. I very much doubt that they would make it. Basically, I think that the difference of opinion here is between "people who think that a taunt aura is the natural right of every character who wants it/thinks that it's a quality-of-life thing that just makes the game fun" and "people who think that taunt auras are a powerful ability that you should have to pay a significant opportunity cost to get." People who are concerned that taunt auras are already too accessible to scrappers are not going to want to make the "cost" of a taunt aura be only one slot.

I believe you can set the arena to disable incarnates (you might want to double-check), just the default is that it allows them.

Vengeful Slice and 1,000 Cuts both do knock"down," which is to say low-magnitude (0.67, in this case) knockback. Basically it's knockback with no actual distance, so they immediately cut to the end-of-knockback animation where they fall down and then get back up again. Knockup is a relatively rare power effect. The power that immediately comes to mind that has it is Air Superiority from the Flight powerpool. Superstrength's Knockout Blow has it as well, plus Crushing Uppercut from Street Justice and Jawbreaker from War Mace. I'm sure there are other examples, but most knocks in the game are back/down. What the dev in this thread is talking about should be basically unchanged in terms of the effects that you see on screen. Maybe very subtle differences. But they aren't talking about removing knock effects from powers, they're talking about making changes in the way that the game represents the same or very similar effects.

Correct, mob rank (ie minion, lt, boss, av etc) is not part of the purple patch, just mob level. Rank affects other things that can accumulate with the people patch (eg you get some bonus accuracy from being a boss and some more bonus accuracy from the purple patch), but rank does not increase your effective level.

Did she say she was going to do zone PvP? The arena allows incarnate powers. To the OP: I think it's worth asking yourself, "Do I want to hilariously destroy my husband in PvP, where it's not even a match-up and he can't do anything I could win 20 times in a row? Or do I want to go in for a real fight, but maybe the odds are in my favor." Assuming your husband is not an experienced PvPer and is not building specifically for PvP in mind, some of the suggestions you're getting here are going to bias towards the first scenario. Like if you hover-blast him and use web grenade to keep him grounded and Poison to debuff the hell out of him, I mean... Unless he is himself pretty experienced with PvP, you won't really be fighting any more than you're fighting if you attack a gray-conn opponent.

Your bit about the purple patch doesn't really make sense and I'm wondering if you typoed it, but: No, AVs do not have any special resistance to resistance debuffs (as they do to most other debuffs) Yes, Resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch, so they will be reduced against higher-level foes

I have no opinion on whether the taunt in Entropic Aura "should be" the 13.6 second taunt that Invul, Bio, Rad, and Shield get, or the smaller 2.25 second one that's coded into the power. Willpower, for what it's worth, also gets a low duration taunt. But the taunt should presumably be mag 3, not mag 4.

It's based on data from Homecoming. If this is a CoD bug of some kind, obviously that's not a HC bug, but it's very likely that it's accurately reflecting a bug in HC powers data. This is all wrong. Brutes have several inherents. They have Fury (as in, the "+2% damage per point of fury bar" power). That power is not being invoked by Scrapper Entropic Aura. They also have a punch-voke power that taunts things that they hit. That is the power that is being invoked here. Assuming CoD is accurate, Entropic Aura is doing a weak-ish taunt by itself (2.25 seconds, mag 3) by itself and also invoking the Brute inherent taunt (13 seconds or so, mag 4). That would be inappropriate and pretty certainly unintended. It's possible -- I don't know how the powers coding works -- that when Scrapper Entropic Aura tries to invoke the Brute inherent punch-voke, it doesn't actually happen because there's some check that says "Scrappers should not be able to invoke this power," and nothing actually happens (ie, the superior taunt does not actually apply). If so, this is a pretty harmless bug, and it's likely just using a very small amount of server resources to keep trying to invoke the power and then aborting out of it. It should still be cleaned up, but it's not very important. If it does actually successfully execute the Brute power, then Entropic Aura gets a meaningfully greater taunt effect than any other Scrapper aura in a way that certainly looks unintended. No other scrapper taunts attempt to execute this power.

This is just coming from inspection of CoD, so it's possible it's not "real." https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=scrapper_defense.energy_aura.entropy_shield&at=scrapper If you look at the last power effect on that page, it's an execution of the Brute Inherent taunt effect. I remain a little unclear whether this actually means that scrappers do actually execute this power, or whether it's a no-op, but it shouldn't be part of the scrapper effect groups for this power at all.

It's in the middle and I probably don't remember the details exactly right, but I think it's something like "you get protection against kb once you've been kb'd," and then "you get protection against common mezzes (hold/sleep/stun?) once you've taken any common mez," and "you get protection against exotic mezzes (terrorize/confuse?) once you've taken any exotic mez." Again, that's probably not exactly right, but the point is that they've lumped mezzes into a few categories and taking any mez in that category protects you against all mezzes in that category for a while. Edit: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Player_vs_Player#Status_Effect_.26_Knockback_Suppression So the categories are "kd/kb/ku", "confuse," and "everything else, including terrorize and immobilize." The protection timers are 15 seconds for the two mezzes and 10 seconds for knocks.

Mezzing is really different in PvP vs PvE. Unlike in PvP, he won't have outright protection to holds/stuns/sleeps, so your first mez will mez him (and detoggle RttC). But it will only last like 1-2 seconds. And then you won't be able to re-mez him for a while. So, I don't know how terrorize will work, but the role of mezzing in 1v1 PvP, especially if you're not a troller/dom, is like "detoggle and set up one attack," not "lock him down."

Yeah, it looks a lot like it's copy-and-pasted from Brute Energy Aura. The Brute taunt (assuming it actually happens) is much stronger than the taunt in the actual power (13.6 second Mag 4 taunt from the Brute inherent instead of 2.25 second Mag 3 taunt from the actual power).

No, I mean the question from the original post -- when Entropic Aura redirects a Scrapper to a Brute inherent, does the power actually activate? Or do you have to "have" the power that you're redirected to, so it's a no-op?

Anyone know about the power redirect?

Blasters are very strong in sort of naive PvP, where you aren't using any complex tactics and just banging on each other. Compared to PvE, his brute will lose a ton of durability, while your blaster will gain a bunch of resistance (though maybe lose defense). Hit him with a hold to detoggle Rise to the Challenge and back away from him between attacks.

Got it, so basically even the basic non-stacking +5% recharge time of Entropic Aura will only go into effect if it hits at least one target, since it's in Standard Effects rather than Activation Effects.

Using Scrapper Energy Aura's Entropic Aura as our example case: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_defense.energy_aura.entropy_shield&at=scrapper I noticed that this has two categories of power effect, "Activation effects" and "Standard effects." I haven't gone hunting, but I assume that other powers also have these distinctions. What's the difference here? Anyone know? This power also has a redirect to the Brute inherent Fury proc aura (https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=redirects.inherents.fury_proc_aura), last power effect on the Entropic Aura page. That seems like an error, but my question is, is it a harmless error or a harmful one? When a power redirects to another power, do you have to have that power? Or does it execute regardless? Does this do nothing because Scrappers don't have the Brute inherent, or does it execute the Brute inherent anyway?

You're right. That also has a redirect to the brute inherent, seems sketchy.

As far as I'm aware, Brute taunt auras have target cap 10 as usual. Both Brute and Tanker Taunt actual power has a 5 target cap. It would be weird, admittedly, for a Confront replacement to target more than Taunt does, but hear me out: in this world, scrappers would get no taunt aura, and hypothetical 10-cap Confront would be non-perma out of the box (while Taunt is way, way, way more than perma out of the box), and it would be PBAoE rather than targeted. So in this scenario, I think that Confront would be more comparable to the (10-target) taunt auras that Brutes and Tankers get rather than the (5 target) Taunt that they get. You'd use it when enemies started running to pull them back so that you could kill them before the taunt wore off. Note also that Brute and Tankers both get punch-taunt effects. The concept I'm trying to get at is, instead of having some scrapper armors having Really Good Taunts and everyone else has no/really pathetic (Confront-only) taunts, try to normalize Scrappers to "way less taunt than Brutes and Tankers, but still something."

Scrapper armor sets with taunt auras: Bio (Evolving Armor) Invul (Invincibility) Rad (Beta Decay) Shield (Against All Odds) Willpower (Rise to the Challenge, smaller duration than the others) Pretty sure there are 5, not 6, but maybe @Bill Z Bubba can clarify what he thinks the 6th is, possible I missed somthing. I just triple-checked in CoD, but there's no way to search as far as I can tell and maybe a taunt is hiding in some power I didn't think to check. All Brute and Tanker armors have taunt auras (there remain people who don't know this. Also, Willpower's taunt isn't really weak on Tanker/Brute anymore). No stalker or sentinel armors have them. Scrapper Dark, Stone, and Ice have mez or slow auras that arguably help against runners without being taunts. I am personally not particularly invested in Scrapper armor sets having taunts, but it's obviously something that people feel strongly about in both directions. I wonder if a synthesis viewpoint might be for all Scrappers sets to get weak taunt auras like Willpower's, or for Scrapper sets to get slow/mez auras but not taunt auras, or for scrappers to get PBAoE powers that taunt but which aren't toggles (like maybe Energy Drain could have a taunt effect, but you don't get the effortless taunting that Brutes/Tanks get). Replace Confront with a not-perma-out-of-the-box ten-target PBAoE taunt?

Correct. The only effect that "Exhausted" has is that while you have it, Savage Melee powers will not grant Blood Frenzy. Here's the power description for Exhausted in CoD: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=temporary_powers.temporary_powers.savage_melee_exhausted&at=scrapper