aethereal

I think it would be reasonable for the critting classes to get the crits on fire melee and savage melee to include their bleed damage in the crit. Brutes get to enjoy fury bonuses on the bleeds, after all. (I guess the counterargument is that it's nice to have sets that push you towards particular ATs)

7.5% if playing a Brute.

It is possible to make some kind of decision about what they are "worth" and then make things balance an equation there (so, like, we could say that a to-hit debuff is worth 5 damage per -1%, while healing is worth 0.5 damage per 1 hp healed, then convert everything to a damage equivalent, then make every power have the same damage-equivalent-per-combination-of-activation-time-and-recharge-time). But, first: all that does is take the exact same judgments that people make now on an ad-hoc basis and codify them into the false rigor of a formula. There is no way to determine how much a to-hit debuff is "really" worth compared to whatever else except human judgment. And second, the formula still won't capture the complexity of the game, and two powers that, per the formula, are balanced, wouldn't actually be balanced. Like, ignore multifaceted secondary effects for the moment. Just think about the denominator of that formula. Is it activation time or recharge time? Well, activation time is probably more important than recharge time, but recharge time isn't meaningless! If you can make an attack chain out of two powers because they have a really low recharge time, that's a big advantage to a powerset, giving you LOTS of room to skips powers/use them as mules/get situational powers. And, again, any formula that someone might make couldn't just be a single-power formula, it'd have to be a powerset formula, because it's obviously true that a big part of the balance of CoH is about "holes" in a powerset. But this just makes any implementation of a formula yet more multifactor and complex, and you're going to have to codify yet more human judgment into what this balance "means." How valuable is it to have a self-heal somewhere in your attack powerset? Your armor set? Trying to create an inflexible equation to balance CoH would be a gigantic undertaking, probably months of effort, that would result, after all that work, in bad balance.

I feel like people have been talking around the reason for this. Mids defaults to showing your global recharge as though any force feedback proc you have anywhere in the build is actively giving its +100% recharge. People who don't understand the actual game mechanics assume that this will be reflected in play. They are wrong. It is not worth slotting FF recharge in kick. FF does not proc unless the power it is allowed in is used, and it has a low PPM and is unlikely to proc in kick.

Not just SO's, though that's part of it, yes. Someone here wanted them to balance around SOs, with a specific slotting scheme, and no epics. And, like, here's my question: what is the good that people imagine will come from it? Are these people actually advocating for unbalanced sets? Like, do they appreciate the fact that in the game-as-it-is-actually-played, some sets are way better than others? Is that a virtue in their mind? Because that would be the result of balancing around arbitrary constraints that nobody actually plays under. Balancing around equations is, you know, nice and all, except that you can't. What equation tells you the value of, say, a self-heal versus a resistance debuff for your opponent versus a bonus to your own smashing and melee defense? There isn't one, and if you did create some kind of equation around that, it would be garbage-in, garbage-out. Sets also need to be balanced holistically -- a set with two very good attacks and three bad attacks is better than a set with five decent attacks.=

People's determination to demand balance around "stuff that is not remotely how the game is played" kind of baffles me.

I feel like a revamp of Electrical Melee should spend some time on Thunder Strike. It's a cornerstone power of the set, and one of two big reasons why the set is considered "good at AoE" (the other being Lightning Rod), but I think it's been kinda left behind. It still has the 3.3 second animation time that Total Focus and other powers that share the "jump in the air, bring down two fists" animation have, despite Total Focus being reduced to 2.53 seconds. Its single-target damage is fine (but not comparable to Total Focus), but its AoE damage is not great, especially for its animation time. It has a nice 80% chance of KD, but that's really all it has going for it (especially for non-critting ATs (Total Focus benefits from now-obsolete limitations on crits, so its crit damage is all of its (good) ST damage applied to even the AoE recipients, so if you do crit, it's nice). An animation time change would be great, but also I think that Electrical Melee could use some kind of relatively reliable AoE damage. Lightning Rod is great, of course, but it's once-per-spawn if that. Chain induction gives you a little bit of "bonus" AoE, but it's not a game changer. But both Thunder Strike and Jacob's Ladder aren't great AoE, and I think the set could really use one of them being solidly good. Maybe some kind of gimmick mechanic that let Thunder Strike do bonus AoE or wider AoE when certain conditions were met.

Hide suppresses offensive auras.

Dual Blades is a strong set as well. Savage has bleed already (and isn't very good).

Energy melee update.

I mean, you asked, I answered. Could I imagine the game being so buggy that I wanted to pause future feature development to improve existing quality? Sure. Is CoH at that level? Not even remotely, in my experience. When I take hiatuses from the game, it's because it's feeling stale, not buggy. What draws me back in is chances to use new powersets, newly revitalized character possibilities, and new missions against new enemies, not "that nagging problem is resolved."

Albeit a 15' radius, so it's not like Vorpal Judgment or anything where you've got a huge kill zone.

I have a question for @Number Six about the actual mez effects of this vectored knock system. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that while you're being repelled, you can still use powers as normal, while if you're knocked, you can't use powers until the "stand back up" animation has finished playing. Is that just "magic" in the code? Like, there's not a switch for it in a power effect? You mentioned replacing repel with the vectored knock system, how does that interact with the mez effect of knocks versus repels? Is there technology for keeping people mezzed while they're being moved around in a slower-than-usual way? Ki Push does this by combining a repel with a hold and then a knockdown at the end, but, while it's cool when it works, the fact that these are three totally separate effects ends up being clumsy (like, a character with hold resistance may be unmezzed for the latter part of the repel, and then re-mezzed by the knock).

I don't think it's a good idea. CoH has bugs, sure, but my experience is not majorly impacted by them. I would prefer new content to bug-fixing, to the extent that that's a tradeoff.

It seems a little meh to me? I guess it does okay damage and with its long recharge time procs will be at capped chance to fire, but also with its long recharge time it'll only be up every several spawns, and its animation is glacial at three seconds. Do people get good use out of it?

A setting on the path auras that was "when travel power is active" like we have for the beast run/ninja run/slide stances would be cool. Then you could have your streak with superspeed.

I'm not sure that I want this idea implemented, but let me advocate for its virtues. I think it's crucial to understand that this is an idea that's about Energy Blast, and not about "all knockback powers." There are plenty of KB powers where when people are like, "Oh, I have to pay a slot to convert to KD," I'm like "cry me a river, dude." Powers that are very powerful, powers that are in a very powerful set. Energy Blast, on the other hand... kinda sucks. Let's compare Energy Blast with Radiation Blast, which has very parallel powers -- T1, T2, a high-damage blast, a cone, a TAoE, and a point blank pretty traditional Nuke. (Energy Blast has Power Push instead of Rad Blast's PBAoE). Rad Blast isn't setting anyone on fire as the best Blast set. Here's a doc with the comparison: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E5F1lQBiNeUWl5SqNjOSBsmhJ1UvchKl5Gx1lEJpYyE/edit?usp=sharing We see that they're extremely comparable, with very close DPAs and so forth. But Energy Blast has a secondary effect of very unreliable, low-mag KB. Now, look, reasonable people can differ on exactly how good or bad KB is. But I think the range of reasonable opinion varies from "potentially useful as long as you pay a lot of attention to tactical positioning" to "it's just a slot tax." The (reliable) defense debuffs from Rad Blast aren't setting the world on fire in terms of their utility, but they are never bad. You never get people angry that you didn't pay a slot to change them. They offer a chance to slot a -res proc which seems to me to be at least comparable to the Force Factor proc as a unique slotting opportunity. And the big ST blast and the nuke in Rad Blast offer useful mezzes. And again, Rad Blast isn't, like, amazing. If Energy Blast had some unique strength to offset its difficult secondary, okay, cool. But it doesn't. It's the world's most standard blast set that gives you nothing besides a kind of frustrating, difficult-to-use secondary that is likely to slot-tax you for at least some of its powers. It's okay to give it a mild buff.

I think the nice thing about this idea is that it preserves KB for people who want it, even preserves it situationally for people who, say, want it when solo but not in groups, while "solving" Energy Blast for those who currently avoid it due to KB.

You could do it like DP, where there's a default effect (KB) when no toggles are on, then you get a power that lets you turn on toggles to override it with other effects (KD or DoT). You could also just grant all three toggles "for free" at level 1 instead of replacing Power Push -- we have that technology, though there's no precedent for it.

The way it would work is that there would be three different effects coded onto each power (kb, kd, and dot), and they would be made conditional on having an effect that the appropriate toggle gives. It's technically quite doable as the OP describes it. Edit: So that is too say, the toggle itself doesn't do anything. For example, if you had the kd toggle going and you used a kb power that wasn't part of energy blast, the "kd toggle" wouldn't convert it to kd. This is how these kind of stance toggles work in dual pistols, bio, and staff.

Back before the teleport pool revamp, I was advocating for "mid range teleport," which would allow you to teleport to the neighborhood markers in your current zone (as a replacement for the then-long range teleport, which was eventually replaced by fold space). Obviously now overtaken by events, but something like that still seems like people would love it. Maybe a P2W moneysink? Buy uses of it for 10k inf each?

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.