aethereal

OP addressed that in his post. Starting from scratch, I don't know that there's any reason why hurdle/swift need to not be set compatible (while preventing then from taking the stealth procs). But starting from scratch, Swift and Hurdle probably wouldn't even be powers -- they more or less exist as speedbumps for powers that no longer are gated or even themselves required. And we don't really need to make the game yet more about everyone choosing the same set of io procs and slotting them in otherwise useless slots. Let's not make it yet easier to slot botz kb reduction. If someone wanted to make a few sets that could only go into Swift/Hurdle and had interesting tradeoffs, okay.

Click mez protects for the armor sets that have them work this way. So if you don't use practiced brawler proactively, and get held, you can just click it as soon as you notice and break free. This is one reason why on my Ninjutsu scrapper I neither put my mez protect on auto nor stress about it too much. I think but am not certain that rune of protection works the same way. Edit: Iron will from blasters' martial combat works the same way.

Yeah, actually pretty hard to do technically if the engine doesn't have it built in, and it seems likely that the CoH engine doesn't have it built in.

The door itself? Maaaaaaaaybe? But if so, just to a generic space, not a custom map -- if the door is used, it could be relocated to a different building.

The door right behind Stephanie Peebles in Striga Island could open into a small public space. I think Striga Island is kind of an appealing place and people might like to be natives of it. It's not likely to ever become a major RP hub, but it could have some occasional use, and I don't think it would take any extensive work to create something appropriate.

I think this is a great idea. It's really daunting to start from nothing.

But we don't. The problem sentinels have is that they do much less damage than other DPS-oriented ATs. If they did a little less damage than scrappers or blasters, they'd be fine.

I disagree. The question isn't "why would I want a Sentinel on my team instead of a Blaster/Scrapper." It can just be, "is a Sentinel pretty close to a Blaster/Scrapper"? They don't need a unique competence that they're better at. Just like there's really no reason to have a Brute on your team rather than a Tanker or a Scrapper -- but they're close enough, and that's fine.

People read too much into damage scalar. Corruptors have lower damage scalars than Sentinels, but they have Scourge, and they have their buff/debuff set. A Corruptor has a lot of ability to fine-tune whether they're AoE or single-target oriented, and probably do more damage overall than Sentinels (to some degree depending on their buff/debuff set and their priorities). They also have a role that's not damage. That appears to be basically an accident. Their sets weren't designed for this, it seems like the designers of Sentinels just overestimated how useful Opportunity was and probably underestimated the power of Scrapper crits as a basis for comparison. In contrast, the actual blast sets that Sentinels use were changed to have very short-duration mezzes that aren't very useful as tactical tools (though they're usually very solid ST attacks).

Being low damage but having high target caps isn't a completely unworkable role, but it's very, very specialized in a way that I think is less appealing than having the current target caps but better damage. This is a flawed idea and people should drop it. Corruptor/Defender numbers make sense for those ATs who have a buff/debuff set and can choose their blast set to compliment it. But Sentinels do not have the toolkit to make good use of even better secondary numbers, and in fact their blast sets have been altered to have even fewer tools than other blast sets. There are also sets like Archery and Fire that simply don't have a debuff associated with their blast powers. Some kind of bonus to their current abysmal secondary scales might be fine as little bonus along with a rework. Trying to make it central to their team function is really awkward and bad.

My wish-list for the Sentinel doesn't just include a damage bump, btw: I just think that's all it needs for its team role. The other thing I think Sentinels need -- which its inherent currently provides -- is a little bit of a mechanic for play. Some decision making. Something that keeps Sent gameplay from being just "press button 1, 2, 1, 3 over and over again." I'll note that some players may really like this. Willpower is a popular set. But it's not to my preferences, and I think it's overkill for an entire AT to be mostly very mechanical gameplay. Why should the Sentinel add interest through its inherent? Most ATs don't have that dynamic. In general, most inherents are pretty forget-about-it. That's true, but I think that Sentinel powers lead to particularly mechanical gameplay. Here are my reasons: 1. Blast sets are pretty mechanical over all. Other ATs with blast sets have lots of tradeoffs to make between using their blasts and using their other powerset (buff/debuff for corruptorss/defenders, manipulation for blasters, all of them very active). Sentinels, by contrast, have very passive armors as their secondary sets. 2. To the extent that blast sets aren't mechanical, the Sentinel versions often are. Blasters may choose to tactically use a low-damage mez to remove a combatant, for example, if they're using Electric Blast, Dual Pistols, or others. The Sentinel versions of mezzes are high-damage, short-duration attacks that will be routinely used in the mechanical rotation. Similarly, while snipes these days are always pretty mechanical, Sentinels just get a high-damage main rotation attack instead of the snipe. 3. Compared to other armored classes, Sentinels shouldn't have to worry as much about positioning/tactical movement -- their ranged powers and large cones are pretty forgiving of that. Also, since we've been working on the mechanical nature of melee sets for a long time, there are now plentiful options for melee powers that have mechanics attached to them (combos in DB/StJ, momentum in Titan, Energy Whatever in Energy Melee, all of the Stalker mechanics), while there are fewer in blast sets (Water and now Electricity are the only real options). So the result is that I think we should be looking more towards the inherent to provide a level of tactical decision-making for Sentinels than we do for other ATs. The current inherent is actually pretty good for this -- but it's a pretty terrible inherent on a mechanical level. We should want something that gives a similar level of rewarding attention (keeping an eye on it to see when it can be used) and has some kind of choice in use. I don't know what that mechanic is, and frankly I see very little sign that the developers of Homecoming are interested in people's specific suggestions even if I did have a great mechanic perfectly thought out. I think it's more productive to orient on what the problem is than provide detailed suggestions for solutions.

@Nerva I certainly agree that the Sent needs a boost, and a significant one, for its team role as DPS. I just don't think we need to conjure up a complicated mechanic or extremely specific role.

Yeah, I think you're right that there's a pretty big danger of making it be the case that armored sets that currently can easily achieve softcap, but have a "hole" in the sense of being vulnerable to defense debuffs, just become yet more unkillable and holes plugged. Now, it would definitely pain people to give up Musculature alpha. It might be that even for DDR, which is sort of "the last component that a lot of people need to become unkillable," it's still not worth giving up a global 20-30% damage boost. But I think it's generally a somewhat bad idea, given the ease of producing defense in this game, to also make it easier to come by DDR. I think if we want to lure people away from Musculature alpha, honestly the way to do it is give other, lesser damage bonuses in other Alphas. Or nerf the damage bonus in Musculature, of course, but I assume that would be an extremely bitter pill to swallow for people.

All the stuff about party roles are... true enough, just wildly overstated. Look, let's take a look at a Brute. What's its party role? Well, it can be a tank, of course, but it's not as good at tanking as a Tanker (less durable, worse aggro management). It can be melee DPS, but it's lower DPS than a Scrapper or Stalker. So, that's another way of saying that its party role is kinda bad. If you were talking, "How do we try to make a tip-top party that can perform at the absolute maximum in the hardest content in the game," you wouldn't put a Brute in that team. It turns out that lots of content in CoH is pretty easy, and you don't need tip-top tanking to be able to handle it, and a Brute is just fine as the main tank for 95% of the content in the game, and, with even minimal support, can indeed handle the rest of the content. And you also don't need tip-top melee DPS, so even if the Brute isn't being the tank, it's also fine. But people don't agonize about the Brute's party role. Because approximately 0 people care about making the perfect optimal team in CoH, and the Brute can pull its weight well enough. Teaming in CoH runs a gamut from "we genuinely don't give the tiniest shit about team composition, we'll take literally everyone, it doesn't matter if this team is eight Blasters" to "We'd kinda like to get at least someone able to tank, a couple of people who can DPS, maybe at least one support role, and then we don't really care about what else." People who care more about team composition than that are a tiny, ignorable subset of the game. The Sentinel's team role is just "ranged DPS." And all it needs to fulfill that role is a damage boost. If the Sentinel's damage is more-or-less comparable to other DPS ATs, all this stuff about "omg how do we make sure that we're leveraging the exact balance of its armor sets" stuff will evaporate, and people will treat it like they do all the other characters who , yes, aren't quite perfect for the party composition, but are good enough for the very, very, very loose composition requirements that we actually have.

It seems super unimportant to me whether Sentinels recapitulate Fortunatas or not. The Widow AT/Fortunata sub-AT or whatever we want to call it isn't a versatile way to bring to life a wide variety of superhero concepts, it's a narrow lore-tied thing. Sure, you can ignore the lore part of it and use it for some other psychic concepts besides literally Arachnos Widows, but you can't use it to make Iron Man. If Sentinels have a similar game role to Fortunatas, but also evoke Iron Man or a number of other ranged bricks from the comics with their aesthetics, then cool.

Because their damage is too low.

My recollection from another time someone parsed logs is that there are some powers that only report a log-line when they miss (ie, they don't mention a hit roll when they hit), which leads to an inflated view of the frequency of misses from the logs.

People have to be realistic that there's never been a change as drastic as switching the entire type of every primary for an AT and there never will be. Swap the sentinels to assault sets will never happen. There aren't even assault set equivalents for several sentinel primaries (like archery, dual pistols, or beam rifle).

Performance shifter predates the lockouts they've lately been putting on procs (procs: what they need are more illegible, complicated rules), so I imagine that just each power with the proc checks the proc on its own schedule and when one fires, you get your endurance.

It was created for last year's winter event, as I recall.

It can't create bias on the scale that people are looking for. It only create a large bias because you're working with unrealistically small numbers. If you take an actual 32 bit integer and mod by 10, it will, yes, be biased -- we'll be missing one 7, 8, and 9 out of about 4.3 billion.

It is my understanding that the code simply calls the operating system random number generator, it doesn't do anything screwy like implement its own random number function. It beggars the imagination to suggest that the random number generators in any major OS are so badly flawed that they would do something like "produce a noticeably skewed distribution of percentile values towards higher numbers." Like... that would be a HUGE problem that would affect many, many, very seriously more important pieces of software than an old MMO. Once you've gotten a random value from the operating system, all you do with it is basically multiply it and/or mod it so that it falls into the range of values that you want. Managing to bias the results there would be an impressively bad bug. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me on the basis of this that anyone who is finding bias towards missing in either their experience of the game, or in parsing combat logs, is detecting either: 1. Flaws in human cognition that make them create false patterns from random things. 2. Flaws in exactly what is logged and how, or what how the logs are parsed. rather than 3. Flaws in the generation of random numbers between 0 and 100.

I think you could make it do that or not? Normal wings definitely flap when you jump. Do the tech-style wings snap open when you jump? The ones that look like veritech pieces? Rocket boots don't turn on when you jump, do they?

It's definitely codeable. All (or most) wings do different things when flying vs not flying. There's clearly a "costume variant while not flying" and a "costume variant while flying" thing. You just make the one where you aren't flying have no actual geometry.

If Sents do have their AT threat modifer set to 1, like squishies, then they shouldn't -- it should be at least as high as Stalkers (2). All armored classes maybe except Sents have at least 2, and Sents should too. (EDIT: Thanks Luminara!) But these calculations are not, I think, particularly valuable -- they abstract away almost everything of note. The main reason that Tankers keep aggro isn't their AT threat modifier, it's Gauntlet + Taunt Aura + Taunt. Defenders and Controllers generate high threat because debuff and mez generate lots of threat, out of proportion to damage. And using the Sentinel's relatively high damage scalar as an estimate of their damage isn't very valuable -- they absolutely do not do 95% of the damage of Stalkers, for example. Threat is generated from actual damage, of which damage scalar is only one part. If a Blaster and a Sent duo and they both initiate against a large spawn by using an AoE, the threat modifier of the Sentinel isn't going to be relevant because the Sent will only damage somewhere in the 1/3-2/3rds of the mob due to their target caps -- even if they do more damage than the blaster, the blaster will damage everyone in the mob and will get substantial aggro as a result of that.