aethereal

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.

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.