aethereal

Scrappers should in fact get some baseline bonus in exchange for reducing the power of the +50% crit rate ATO. Lower the power of the tip top of Scrapper builds and increase the power of less optimized ones. For people who argue that Scrapper doesn't depend on the ATO to hit benchmarks, I would genuinely enjoy seeing some tests without it slotted. My guess is that Trapdoor times would be worse but not catastrophically so, but pylon times would crater. People could also see what they get from a non-superior ATO to split the difference between using it and not slotting it at all.

Energy Focus makes Barrage do a guaranteed stun instead of a chance to stun (and also some -regen which won't be relevant unless you're fighting a GM or AV, and some -special which is unlikely to be very noticeable). It can also be consumed by Power Crash (increases possible number of target), and most notably by Energy Transfer (reduces the cast time from 3 seconds to 1 second).

I remember an early play experience with a Brute (like... back on live, I can't remember when but probably 2010 or so) where I really felt like I was killing it but I was pushed into the next group early in order to keep my fury high. It was distinctive and fun. But the much faster overall pace of play means that's not accessible now. Everyone careens from group to group without pause. Brutes need a new identity because their old one has been overtaken by the state of the game.

You just don't like the animation or something? Shin Breaker is the best combo-builder attack in the set. Can you get by without it? Sure. You can use Initial Strike, Heavy Blow, and Rib Cracker to build your combos and everything will be fine. You probably won't be able to get by without Initial Strike if you don't take Shin Breaker. You will be weaker than if you took it. But like... if you just want "viable," and not "high performance," I'm sure it'd be fine.

The problem with moving nukes to T1 isn't that it'd be overpowered, it's that it'd be a bad leveling experience! You don't want to have a character who has a nuke but nothing else at level 1. You'd have multi-minute pauses between each action. Like, look, I'm not saying that there is absolutely nothing to having some exciting powers as the capstone to a set (though plenty of sets really don't have exciting capstones). But, empirically, I'm sorry, the game does not put very much weight at all to what tier the power is in terms of the overall strength of that power. Especially like "T4 vs T8." Placing a power in a tier is almost entirely about not the strength of the power, but laddering the character into a play experience.

Tier of power is just not a big factor in the balance of the power, sorry. Tier is mainly a consideration in terms of how to have a relatively smooth leveling expy.

Totally agree. That was why I brought it up. I think that Stalkers are, numerically, as bad off as Brutes are or worse, but they play differently than Scrappers, while Brutes play largely the same as Tanks and Scrappers, and I think that makes all the difference in terms of people's overall satisfaction with the AT.

First of all, a note of self-correction: there are "only" 49 Scrappers whose times are better than the best Stalker on your list. Second: There are 55 Stalkers on your list, from a wide variety of players. It's not like there was zero interest in validating Stalkers. And again, people here are claiming that Stalkers have strongly superior ST DPS to Scrappers -- of 55 tries from dozens of players we are saying that despite Stalkers actually being strongly better than Scrappers at this, none of them could get into the top, say, 20? Does this actually pass the sniff test? Third: What actual affirmative evidence does anyone have that Stalkers have better ST DPS than Scrappers? Like, I think that the pylon times are pretty good evidence. I'll also say that my own experiences with Stalkers -- I like Stalkers and have played a bunch of them -- have never suggested to me that holistically they had superior ST DPS than an equivalently-optimized Scrapper (I have also played a bunch of Scrappers). I'm seeing a lot of people assert that Stalkers outclass Scrappers here, cite no evidence, and then try to come up with elaborate theories for why the other evidence shouldn't count. But is there any affirmative evidence that Stalkers in fact have better ST DPS than Scrappers? Fourth: I think the relatively larger number of people interested in optimizing Scrappers for pylons than Stalkers is a pretty straightforward story: people tried both, found that Scrappers were superior, and then the kind of player who wanted to post a really good pylon time focused their efforts on the AT that was best for the job. Fifth: I mean, are you willing to apply this kind of logic to any other combo of ATs? Maybe Brutes actually outclass Scrappers in ST DPS! Yes, okay, Scrappers post better pylon times than Brutes, but aren't all of your above arguments equally valid if you plug in the word "Brute" for Stalker?

a. I mean, this feels to me like you're reaching. Your claim is that stalkers do "much better" ST DPS than Scrapper. But nobody can actually demonstrate this? b. I'm not comparing Stalkers to Crabberminds or Masterminds. If there's some reason to believe that Pylons are a bad comparison for, very specifically, scrappers vs stalkers ST DPS, I think you need to point out what that reason is, because I'm not seeing it. There are certainly limitations to Pylons as a test, but I think they're a good test for this specific thing that we're talking about.

Your spreadsheet has about 80 scrapper times below the lowest stalker time.

Why do you think Stalkers consistently perform much worse than Scrappers on Pylon tests if they do far better ST damage than Scrappers?

Yellow insps will indeed improve your accuracy (so will global accuracy bonuses, tactics, the kismet to-hit unique, etc. Global recharge (including Hasten) should improve the recharge time of the temp power. What you can't improve on the temp power is its damage: red insps etc won't affect it.

Okay, so Battle Axe is endurance-heavy. Bio is an overall strong set that gets an early Recovery power (Inexhaustible at level 1), then Efficient mode and at 24 can get DNA siphons which is another endurance tool. It also has a damage aura (albeit not until level 28) which is strong on Brutes and just generally a good set. Its hole is dealing with debuffs/controls: it has holes in its mez protection to exotic mezzes and and has no debuff resistance. Psi is a new set so you aren't sick of it yet, and it gets what's reported to be a pretty powerful endurance tool in Consume Psyche at level 10. I've never played it and some people I think don't love it, but you might want to try it out. Other sets with endurance tools are Willpower (overall simple set, I think it lacks some performance ceiling but comes together fine) and Regeneration (I think still weak unless you pair it with very specific pools and incarnate choices, but better than it was). Electrical, Energy Aura, Ice, and to some extent Dark have good endurance tools eventually, but not by the 20s.

The concept that I believe the OP has is that this enables people to cover defense holes in their builds with high-end inspirations. You open AH between every mission and fill your insp tray with purple/orange insps, and if you run out you grab more from your email even in the middle of a mission.

You're just gonna love the new update where all enhancement values listed in the games are lies. And so are the power descriptions.

Just to be clear, Blinding Powder doesn't work on lieutenants (without stacking). And has only a 50% chance to confuse (and the sleep is only mag 2 as well). Having it be mag 4 ("works on bosses") would clearly be a stretch for an armor power, but working only on minions makes it a not great power IMO. This isn't an indictment of the set, just the power. I have extensively played level 50 /Ninj scrapper, stalker, and sentinel toons.

It being mag 2 kills it for me.

Ninjutsu has lower defense values and much worse DDR, and no recharge bonus, in return for a heal, an endurance tool, and a stealth bonus with a once-per-combat crit chance increase. SR gets resistances too via scaling resists, so, meh, call that a wash. (EDIT: Oh, Ninjutsu gets good psi resist too, which is nice.) I like Ninjutsu. It's a good set. But it definitely has a much, much bigger problem with defense debuffers than SR does.

You can also proc bomb Bio's DNA Siphon, though I feel like doing so significantly impairs survivability.

What sets are you thinking of? Besides Stalker sets, I don't think any melee set is in a truly dire AoE situation. Fireball and Ball Lightning in the epics are good, solid attacks.

I think there's a real difference between "near-perfect knowledge" and "Does this proc which advertises a rate of approximately 3.5 procs per minute proc massively more commonly or massively less commonly than that." It's fine not to have players be able to figure out the exact proc rate based on in-game numbers. It's not fine for players to have no way of knowing whether the proc will activate something vaguely like its advertised rate or not. A solution to all of this would be: 1. Revert procs to having a percentage chance to fire. 2. Give powers an (advertised) multiplier to that percentage chance. So you might have most procs have a baseline 20% chance to fire, and then powers have a x0.5, x1, x2, x3, or x4 chance to activate procs, with a cap of 90%. Base the multiplier on the base recharge time and area factor today, but make it like the damage formula: it's a design principle, not an algorithm that the code follows. If you then wanted to make a given power that seems basically fine but procs too well a little less good, you could just adjust the proc chance multiplier for it. The builder types could go searching for powers that were "near the line" of a multiplier -- so like if a power with a 4-6 second recharge had a x1 multiplier, they could go look for powers that are right at 4 seconds. I think this would have the following effects, all salutory: 1. Vastly clearer to the player 2. No local/global recharge time shenanigans 3. Makes it simple to tweak proc rates and gives another route to adjust powers 4. Shake up the build minigame, let builders take a fresh look at a bunch of powers to try to wring optimization out of them, without, if numbers are chosen right, totally invalidating most current builds

To be clear, procs do function in most pseudopet powers, they just have a bad activation rate. But yeah, it's just a welter of confusing information that you have no way of getting through the game itself. My favorite proc fact: the Superior Critical Strikes: Recharge/+50% Critical Hit Chance Proc has always claimed to have a PPM of 3. Its actual PPM is 4.

I agree. Feels like a sweeping change to the Brute AT would anger lots of people even if it set things on the right path, and would just be objectively hard to do. I'm more... commenting on why this is hard than trying to provide a solution.

To me the issue with procs is primarily the illegibility. Look how many engaged, frequent posters don't know things about procs. To understand whether a proc is amazing or worthless, you need to understand not just local vs global recharge and the basics of PPM formula, with special casing for auto-powers and toggles, but also things like pseudopets, executions, and various kinds of special cases, lockouts, and more. It's as though we decided that damage enhancements would not only depend on a moderately simple formula, but would look at the number of letters in the internal name of a power and use that as a big component in how much it enhances the power. Nobody would think that's a good idea! Why do we think it's a good idea to do the same with procs? I think there are an engaged group of ultra-mechanics-oriented builders who love this complexity -- it lets them broker obsessive levels of systems knowledge into performance that exceeds normal levels of the game. And I get that, obviously "making builds" is in a lot of ways a fun minigame. But I don't think it's actually healthy to cater to that minigame as much as procs do.

There's a suggestions and feedback forum if you want to put it somewhere where devs might read it. I do want to reiterate that various suggestions around allowing swordless/all sword (and other various suggestions around swords) have been made and made and made again, with no apparent effect so far. But if you want to throw in your two cents, it won't hurt besides whatever time you want to invest in it, and again the Suggestions & Feedback Forum is the place for it.