aethereal

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.

Global recharge is definitely better than local recharge for procs. If slotting some local recharge and lowering the proc rate is what it takes to use an attack twice in an attack chain instead of once, it's usually the right decision to slot the local recharge. Very long recharge powers (>20 seconds for ST, >30 seconds for AoE) can generally absorb some recharge without meaningfully lowering proc rate. Doesn't appear to be a real thing, you can ignore, except maybe specifically in Burn. Reactive's DoT is I believe the best in terms of flat damage. The -max hp (Degenerative) is better for working on Archvillains or GMs (or Pylons), but not normal opponents.

I thought it was around 70 too. 18 seems too low. I will say, if your concern is specifically tanking MLTF as a tanker who doesn't have access to KB resistance, you can stock up on Escapes (the T3 breakfree inspiration). Each one lasts 90 seconds and adds 10 to your KB protection. You can eat 7 of them and have 70 + your normal KB protection for a minute and a half, then do it again for the next minute and a half with just your normal tray of insps at level 50 (ie, no email shenanigans). IDK how far three minutes of immunity to Recluse's KB will take you, but it's something. If you're an electric tanker with 15 KB Prot natively, you can probably do 3x6 for 4.5 minutes and tank his KB.

What is the mag of KB that Recluse does in MLTF? Most versions of his Spider Smash have a base mag of 18, but I think it's higher in MLTF?

For anyone unclear: most armor sets have both (VERY HIGH) KB resist and KB protection. KB resist divides mag of KB, and then the resulting KB mag has your protection subtracted from it, and you're knocked if the final result is above 0. So if you get hit with a mag 10 KB, and you have 100% KB resist and 4 KB protection, you do get knocked with mag 1: 10 / 2 - 4 = 1. But most armor sets have KB resist of 10000%, and then 10 points of KB protection on top of that, meaning that they are theoretically only knocked by a mag 1000 KB (which does not exist in game). Electric Armor has (in Grounded), KB protection (15.something mag on tanks), but no KB resist. That means that it's immune to KBs 15 and under, but vulnerable to a few very high KBs in the game. You get KB protection from the common IO sources (BotZ, Overwhelming Force etc), but not resist. I think Evasive Maneuvers provides some KB resist? The result is that most Tank armors are immune to all KB, Electric is vulnerable to high-mag KB but not other ones, and fire/dark have to build it from scratch and are thus potentially vulnerable to more KB.

It's listed three times so that it improves your crit chance vs minions, vs lieutenant+, and vs players.

Yep, guess that's true.