aethereal

It'd be nice to be able to have an asymmetry mode for sleeves of jackets and shirts in the same way that we can for boots/gloves/shoulders.

I'm amused that Stalker skipping Hide is such a huge problem. You can make petless Masterminds! I 100% guarantee you that a Stalker without hide can be better than a petless Mastermind.

In fairness, I think he meant that it was not an option to selectively remove the forced-first-power-pick on Tanker secondaries, not that it was not an option to remove it for the whole game. Not that I'm in favor of this proposal. I'm not. But I think it's at least a little worth discussing how few places this game does use speedbump powers as a balance point, and whether that's a particularly desirable balance lever. There are only a few places in the game where you might be forced to take a power you don't really want to gate access to ones you do want. Boxing/Kick. Secondary T1s. Then maybe a few pool T3's. Practically, I think that's about it (like, there's probably SOMEONE who wants Tactics but just hates Maneuvers and Assault, but not a lot of people). It's not a very favored kind of balance and for good reason.

I'm putting the +50% ATO one in Blinding Feint, which I'll spam on cooldown even in AoE situations for the to-hit/damage bonus.

A 3.5 PPM proc that's slotted in a 30 second recharge (no local recharge) 15 foot radius sphere has a 65% proc rate. It wouldn't stun everyone. Still possibly too powerful, but not like you'd do mag 4 to 90% of your targets.

Okay, I understand where the 80 damage is coming from: it's showing enhanced damage on my slotted scrapper, not unenhanced. But note the total damage and DPA calculations at the top, which again double it (I thought it was showing the unenhanced damage in the line detail and then the enhanced damage in the unparenthesized Average Damage and DPA/DPCS lines at the top). So... PROBABLY what it's doing is showing the correct detail lines but the Average Damage and DPA lines at the top are incorrectly showing the damage including Fiery Embrace?

I saw a pylon video of someone doing it with Bio. I guess it's possible he had Spiritual or Agility alphas, which could pretty easily get you there, but seems unlikely since it was a good pylon time and I assume that means Musculature. Even with Ageless, you only get 10% recharge buff half the time. It just seems nuts to get to 322% recharge. Even with 30% from a +20% recharge secondary and 10% from Ageless, if you only have 95% local recharge, that's still an insane 127% global recharge from set bonuses!

The detailed info for Ablating Strike in Scrapper dual blades shows "two ticks of 80.81 damage." The actual power effect is two ticks of 41.29 damage. I looked at the power definition (in Rubi's API) and could not figure out why the detailed info thinks it's 80.81. It's not fiery embrace, it's not critical damage, both of which show up on separate lines in the API, and neither of which would take it from 41.29 to 80.81. Maybe it's something to do with the code for the two ticks, which is somewhat confusingly coded as: 41.2906 points of Lethal damage (all affected targets) every 0.4s for 0.6s after 0.125s? Though again, I don't see how that gets us from 41.29 to 80.81. It's weird that 80.81 is almost-but-not-quite double 41.29. I'm sure this is a bug that's existed for a while, but, anyway.

So the holy grail for dual blades attack chain is Blinding Feint > Ablating Strike > Sweeping Strike > Ablating Strike > repeat, right? How is this a possible attack chain? Ablating Strike has a six second base cooldown. SS and BF have 1.42 second cast arcanatimes. That implies more than 300% recharge in Ablating Strike (ie, 300% recharge = divide cooldown by four, six divided by four = 1.5 second cooldown). Can any scrapper sustain more than 200% global recharge?

Oh, got it!

I'm confused by what part of the existing save/load costume setting you want to change. It seems like you can already do this: save a costume, load it, see where all the pieces are, then click back to revert the change.

That has... elements of truth, but it's certainly not unconditionally true. In PvE, the job of target selection is mainly done through threat mechanics, and all else being equal, control and debuff generate a lot of threat and will pull target selection to defenders/controllers. (I don't remember how much threat healing/buffing generates, but certainly some, and it could be tweaked). Taunt overrides threat, and forces target selection of the taunter for the duration of the taunt. If you play a melee character without taunt (some scrappers and all stalker), you will in fact find that the enemy mostly ignores you and goes to the bank rank. Of course, the entire point of tanks is that they are supposed to be able to force themselves to the top of the target selection, though we could quibble about exactly how easy that should be. Taunt functions in PvP.

Quicksand is a pseudopet. It procs poorly. I don't think this is the right explanation. The -def on quicksand is considerable (-25%)! It might just not take defense debuffs because they don't want it to floor all defense all the time.

I've done this mission multiple times, in my experience you can talk to the surviving enraged Tsoo after you beat him and he turns to blue reticle. That's certainly the normal win condition of the mission, and it usually works. Just as a data point that it's not universally broken.

I think in this discussion it's important to differentiate between true procs (having a chance to fire an effect on power activation) and other forms of special enhancement, like the the ones that apply a continuous effect such as LotG, Shield Wall, Gladiator's Armor, Steadfast Protection, Reactive Defenses, Miracle, KB-KD, etc. And the really weird ones like Preventive Medicine and the Stalker chance-to-recharge-build-up one.

There are lots of non-damage procs that are good, but I think you specifically means things like the entropic chaos chance-to-heal and the chance-to-mez ones, which are I agree terrible. (But note that there is also the Gaussian's proc, and the Force Feedback proc, and the +2 Mag proc, and of course the Scrapper and Stalker ATO procs, and various other non-damage procs that are very good)

I am not arguing for a return to flat percentile procs. Though I will note that the oft-derided effect of that was to reward T1 and T2 powers, while now T1 and T2 powers are pretty universally garbage. So we went from a system that encouraged diversity in power choice to one that centralized on powers that were "already good." But I disagree that the theory behind PPM is sound. It's further overloading the already overburdened recharge time element of powers. One of the basic problems here is that we've made recharge time hugely central to CoH's balance (it controls damage of a power. It's the parameter we vary to try to make epic/pool powers less central), in an environment in which approximately all good builds build 180% global recharge, and another 95% local recharge is easily available, without even getting into Incarnates. We could imagine a system in which a power applied a modifier to PPM ("this power halves PPM." "This power multiplied PPM by 1.5"), or one in which powers had proc schedules, which could certainly holistically take recharge time into account, without being an inflexible formula, and in which their multiplier or schedule was easily viewable in power details.

That's usually the difference. You can look up in CoD whether it uses a pseudopet. But let's note that is not like pseudopets are some kind of considered balance approach to preventing procs from being overwhelmingly strong in certain powers. They're a backend approach to making some powers work, and they just don't really work with PPM. The fact that pseudopets complicate procs so much is one reason why we should not have the PPM system.

Yeah, I'm suggesting stuff that actually makes you engage in PvP, not just exploration and PvE content in PvP zones. Win X matches. Win a 2v2, a 3v3. Damage taken in PvP. Time mezzed in PvP. Fight 6 distinct globals in PvP. And, to be clear, I'm sure that a large number of badge hunters would try to do the content in the most expedient manner possible and never come back to it. Some people just aren't going to enjoy PvP, and that's okay. But something like this might encourage some folks to try it out and they might find they like it.

I'm sure a large percentage would. But, if someone makes a second build, does a variety of PvP actions, and hates every second of it? Then I think we maybe should stop trying to get that person to PvP.

I dunno if would work, but a big passle of badges seems like it might motivate people to try out PvP enough to see if they like it. I'm talking like 20+ badges that you get by doing a large variety of arena PvP activity, not just one thing that you can get by collaborating with a friend.

People keep mentioning this like it's a deal changer, but it's not. Like, if you get good results from straight-up damage enhancing a power (as blasters, scrappers, and to a lesser extent stalkers will), then you can spend two or three slots reaching ED for damage, then use the other 3-4 slots for procs. It's maybe a little less dramatic than six slots of pure procs, but that's still a proc build.

You mean the "embraced lightning rod" thing? I think that has to do with Fiery Embrace.

There's no way to move crits from the +50% ATO to the inherent or the other ATO without either giving top-end builds an unconditional buff or giving a nerf to some level of proc uptime.

I mean, this proposal makes it significantly more likely to get criticals at low levels. You don't need to use math. It just takes the performance of high-end scrappers and pushes some of it back down to lower-end scrappers. The math is to show that it doesn't nerf high-end scrappers significantly, and that it doesn't go overboard on the buffs. It's not, however, a reimagining of how scrapper crits would work. It doesn't make them controllable like Stalkers.