aethereal

Because range is not a very valuable enhancement category for many powers. In general, besides certain cones, if you have the choice between a range enhancement and, say, an accuracy or endurance or recharge or damage enhancement, for most powers and most builds you want the other enhancement category. It would nerf these sets to give up some of their existing enhancement bonuses in order to add range.

They don't. They lose comparable enhancement values from other categories. So here are Positron's Blast enhancement values at level 50: Damage/Range - 26.5% damage, 15.9% range Accuracy/Damage - 26.5% damage, 25.5% accuracy Damage/Recharge - 26.5% damage, 26.5% recharge Damage/Endurance - 26.5% damage, 26.5% endurance Chance for Energy Damage - none Accuracy/Damage/Endurance - 21.2% damage, 21.2% accuracy, 21.2% endurance Which total up to (ignoring ED): Damage 127% Accuracy 47.2% Endurance 47.2% Recharge 26.5% Range 15.9% And if you compare to Annihilation at 50: Damage/Recharge - 26.5% damage, 26.5% recharge Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge - 18.5% damage, 18.5% accuracy, 18.5% endurance, 18.5% recharge Accuracy/Damage - 26.5% damage, 26.5% accuracy Accuracy/Damage/Recharge - 21.2% damage, 21.2% accuracy, 21.2% recharge Accuracy/Damage/Endurance - 21.2% damage, 21.2% accuracy, 21.2% endurance Chance for -Res - none Which total up to: Damage 114% Accuracy 87.4% Endurance 39.7% Recharge 66.2% So Positron's blast "pays for" higher damage, endurance, and range enhancement with much lower Accuracy and Recharge enhancement. Range isn't free, you give up another enhancement category in that enhancement.

I don't think it's much of a benefit, no, unless you have a power that's irritatingly shorter-ranged than your others or you always find yourself oddly positioned in a group. Which is why you don't see these kind of threads demanding range enhancement in all ranged damage sets.

I'm not sure that range buffs are a particularly desirable enhancement for many targeted AoEs. Obviously fireball-type circular AoEs don't get any particular benefit from them, and I think many cones are wide and long "enough" at base that it's easy to saturate them. There certainly is a class of cones that really loves range bonuses. But they can get them today. Making all the sets uniform seems undesirable to me.

The +damage in follow up is as good for proc builds as it is for non-proc builds, unless you use some power with no essentially no base damage like the blaster holds. But you won't do that as a scrapper.

...What in EM is sub-par? I mean, the AoE, certainly. But ET is far from the only good ST attack in Energy Melee.

I mean, lots of people do get travel powers, still, and SJ is at least arguably the best travel power. And all of those things pale compared to getting Hasten (unless you're crunched for a power to buy SJ with). Or people who get one defense power in their primary/secondary (or who only care about getting four defense powers) can get Leaping ( CJ, SJ, Acrobatics), Speed (Hasten), Leadership (Maneuvers, Tactics or Assault if they want it), and Fighting (T1, Tough, Weave) instead of having to get Stealth instead of Leadership, because they need a pool with two defensive powers. Or many other things. We just shouldn't be taking already-desirable pools and adding defense powers into them. That just sharpens the existing meta.

I don't think we can offer another power in Leaping that gives +defense. It'd be fine for power pools that currently don't offer +defense to offer +1.88% def-all (because you can already get 5 +def powers in pools, using all your pool choices). But if you offer another +def power in a pool that already gives one, you allow people to hit all five LotG def spots plus get valuable improvements towards soft-cap plus free up a power pool choice, and that probably shifts the meta too much. (So, a character who presently has CJ + Weave + two stealth powers + Maneuvers can drop Maneuvers, get Acrobatics, and also pick up Hasten -- or many other alterations depending on what their actual primary/secondary powersets allow). Yes, you can already get two defense powers with Hover + Afterburner, but Afterburner can only -- when attacking -- mule a LotG, it can't also add 2% def-all, and hover is a less generally useful power than CJ at least for melee characters.

Yeah, it's not ideal. I'm not a huge fan of the stance system for that reason. So. You can make two versions of your primary costume, which differ only in terms of their stance (one normal, one ninja run). Then you can make binds or macros like this: /macro on "powexectoggleon super speed&&cc 1" /macro off "powexectoggleoff super speed&&cc 0" Assuming that costume 1 has ninja run stance turned on and costume 0 has ninja run stance toggled off.

Does superspeed override ninja run stance? If not, you can get ninja run animations with superspeed, albeit clumsily.

So for example, here's a somewhat clunky proc system that preserves some of the basic intent and logic behind PPM but unwinds a lot of its ridiculousness: Powers have a proc schedule (let's say A, B, C, D). Procs have their own schedules (call them 1, 2, 3, 4). You can cross-reference power schedule and proc schedule to find a chance to proc. So A1 might be 90% and D4 might be 10%. Convert the old PPM rating of a proc into a proc schedule, so something that was PPM 2 might be proc schedule 4, something that was PPM 7 would be proc schedule 1. Use recharge time and AoE to roughly set the power schedule (so short-recharge time and/or AoE powers would be schedule D, long-recharge time single target powers are schedule A). But then... everything's static at that point. You can use recharge -- global or local -- freely. There are no questions about whether a power uses a pseudo-pet behind the scenes. It doesn't matter, the power just says, "Hey, I'm schedule C." People don't have to do math to figure out a proc rate, they just look at a simple chart. If procs are overpowered (or underpowered) in a given power, we just straightforwardly reduce its schedule, we don't initiate a bunch of second-order changes by fucking around with its recharge time or area.

That would help but not resolve the legibility situation, since part of it is "understanding why the numbers would change in one way or another when I do certain things." It wouldn't change that the system remains a nightmare, arbitrarily rewarding and undermining certain strategies for no real reason, creating way too much incentive to build in weird ways, and, hilariously, offering Yet More Reward For Global Recharge. (It's impossible to imagine who looked at the state of CoH at like i23 or whatever was right before PPM and said, "I think that what this game needs is more emphasis on achieving higher global recharge.") What PPM tried to do was "make procs roughly equally good in all powers" what it actually did was "make procs good in a small subset of powers that were already some of the best powers in terms of overall damage," this both inflating the power level of the game and putting increased focus on an ever-smaller number of powers.

The old way certainly gave advantage to some powers over others -- though perhaps less overall advantage than the current system does to people who have invested in learning it. The old system also had the advantage of being basically legible: it was much less complex and much easier to understand how it worked without investing a few hours on forums learning from secondary and tertiary sources. But I'm not necessarily advocating for going back to pure percentage chance procs. I'm just saying that PPM is a disaster.

PPM is bad: change my mind.

It's so that you don't have another place to put the stealth ios or botz kb reduction.

So, it, what granted you a temp power that you could then use, presumably once, to do recall friend? That seems kinda redundant in today's game of having several P2W teleport options and also just people not being super desperate for recall friend in general.

Combat Teleport's to-hit bonus is 5 seconds after a 0.5 second delay and does not go away when "used." EDIT: Hah, no, I'm lying, it does go away when used. cancel_events "Attacked." God, I wish they had made this power better.

Okay, but seriously what did it do?

What's it supposed to do?

That set seems, at first glance, overtuned to me. It's hard to tell with buff/debuff sets because they're so accumulative, and maybe I'm missing something that would actually play weaker than it looks, but it seems like it's a laundry list of "power" buffs/debuffs, including defense buffs, resistance debuffs, recovery and regeneration buff/debuffs, a seemingly quite powerful AoE confuse, and several sources of KD. EDIT: Actually, on second read, it doesn't seem so bad. I missed that one of the big defense powers was ally-only, the confuse is super short duration per pulse, and some of the powers are difficult or impossible to perma.

I don't have a big issue with Sent durability (they're certainly plenty durable for "ordinary" content), but if you're going to have a class that's kind of at its best in long, drawn-out fights against single hard targets, it kinda sucks to be a bit less durable than Scraps and Stalks as well as lower damage than them.

I agree with @oldskool, and also add to the list of issues: ST/AoE incoherence. Sents have their inherent currently tuned to be strongly ST-focused, and their AoE target caps (and lack of ability to cluster enemies) obviously punish their ability to be a premiere AoE AT. However, in general, in order to excel as a ST-class, because of the general dominance of AoE, you need to have really strong ST damage, which Sents don't, and their lack of durability compared to other armored classes hurts their ability to handle very hard targets (tough EBs, AVs, GMs). The can compensate to some extent for their lack of durability by hover-blasting, but that's kind of an obnoxiously narrow way to have a role. In addition, word of @Captain Powerhouse is that they're supposed to be "sustained AoE"-oriented. I remain unsure that "sustained AoE" is a useful role -- burst AoE seems like the only AoE that matters, at least on teams.

You're right, Fury does do that. I wonder if it's some kind of hardcoded exception or if my info is wrong. So I looked into Ruby's Power API, and it suggests that there is some kind of hook set up for this: "requires": [ "target.EventCount>AttackedByOtherClick > 0" ], So that seems like it's a hook you could use for other powers.

I am told that CoH currently has no concept of "triggered" effects on getting attacked or hit. That is, there's nothing in code that examines a character that you just attacked to see if they should trigger some power of that character. Obviously, it would not be impossible to add such a thing, but it'd be a big change.

Were you running a damage aura? What may have happened is the sequence actually went: BU > attack1 > aura rolls to hit > attack2 Streakbreaker hits the aura attack roll and so then it's just a 1/400 chance of getting two 5% attacks independently -- which is certainly rare, but not so rare that one won't see it.