aethereal

Scrappers currently have a very weird effect with their ATOs: a high-end Scrapper build can get 50%+ uptime on their +50% critical chance proc at level 50. (The way you do this: So let's say that you're putting the ATO in Total Focus (or some similar power). It has a 20 second recharge time and a 2.53 second cast time, that means it will have a 90% proc rate down to about 15.5 seconds of local recharge. If you have the recharge the ATO comes with and another +180% global recharge (perma-hasten), then that means that your total recharge time of the power is about 7 seconds, with a 90% proc rate. Count the 2.53 second cast time, you can use the power 6.5 times per minute. With the 90% proc rate, that's 5.87 activations per minute. Times five seconds per activation is 29.4 seconds of uptime per minute -- half of your time, you're in +50% crits. And this isn't the very best you can do). But this is only possible at level 50 (the non-superior version of the ATO is 2 PPM, so only 2/3rds the uptime of the superior version), and only if you have an appropriate power to slot it into (most but not all sets do) and only if you're building tons of global recharge. It's a huge boost in scrapper performance -- +50% crits is REALLY powerful, and it creates weird cliffs. My proposal: Change non-superior ATO's PPM from 2 to 2.5 (leave superior at 3). Reduce the effect of the ATO from +50% proc rate to +40% proc rate Increase basic scrapper critical rate from 5% (minions)/10% (non-minions) to 6% (minions)/12% (non-minions) Increase the effect of the other scrapper ATO from +3%/+6% to +4%/+8% Total effects: A character with 50% uptime on the proc today has 58% (minions)/66% (non-minions) crit rate half the time and 8% (minions)/16% (non-minions) the other half of the time. So a blended total crit rate of 33% (minions)/41% (non-minions). Under this proposal, the same character would have a crit rate of 50% (minions)/60% (non-minions) half the time and 10% (minions)/20% (non-minions) the other half of the time. So a blended total crit rate of 30% (minions)/40% (non-minions). An extremely minor nerf (or perhaps no nerf at all when you consider that you can't start with your proc up). Characters who have less than 50% uptime would get a mild buff. Characters who have more than 50% uptime would get a larger nerf. Scrappers at less-than-50 levels would get a substantial buff, able to sustain a higher uptime with their proc and being less dependent on the proc. Sets that do not have a great place to put the proc would be less disadvantaged.

You're being weird. I didn't suggest that SR was obsolete. I said that, with SR of all things, you can build yourself well above softcap on all three positionals without needing DM's debuffs. And with SR's DDR, adding more to-hit debuffs is basically useless. DM's to-hit debuffs seem like they're potentially very useful -- on sets that can't easily softcap themselves. If you want to improve SR's mitigation, you should look for anything besides to-hit debuffs. Now, obviously, SR can still use DM's heal. But I don't think that brings that much value to the table if you're making a mitigation play with your primary. You mentioned getting impressed with DM/SR back in the days of SOs. I imagine it was indeed a great combo in the days of SOs -- before you could softcap yourself without recourse to DM's to-hit debuffs.

I mean, it's not, though. Like, was there a time on Live when the to-hit debuffs from DM were useful with SR? Sure. Before it became very easy to build plenty of defense without relying on to-hit debuffs.

Well, as far as I know, it's not at all a top end DPS set. And that's, I think, emblematic of sort of the problems we have in these kinds of discussions. I'm sure that there's some kind of experience that backs up that poster's praise of DM/SR (not a combo that I'd recommend, since the -to-hit from DM becomes largely obsolete once you're about level 35 with SR). But there are so many different noches within playing this game, and so little visibility into how other players play, that people make these confident assertions that seem kinda crazy in someone else's game niche). For another example, I think a lot of the people in this thread who make assertions about how proc builds give up a ton of mitigation or whatever else don't quite understand how much people have been able to achieve with really sophisticated proc builds, perhaps because those builds are rarely very thematic or only function at 50 or whatever.

I find the assertion that Dark Melee is obviously superior to Claws to be weird.

Throw the endurance drainers a bone. Make an enemy with a passive power that checks their endurance and gives them a damage bonus (maybe and to-hit) based on their current end level.

I think that an enemy faction with some lieutenants that spawn with an aura power that gives gigantic AoE defense (like: +50%, say) would be a little change-up of gameplay. The aura would supress if mezzed. So when you came against spawns that had those LTs, you have to focus down the lieutenant or mez them before blowing your AoE wad. Obviously not the be-all, end-all of difficulty, but something that could be sprinkled in with other ideas.

Uh, did someone suggest that we do?

I mean, I think also that a lot of content is SO easy. Like, if you can solo +4/x8 (and a lot of people can), then 8 people on the team who all can solo +4/x8... that's a lot. It's gonna take an enormous amount of increased difficulty to catch back up to "about ten times the power necessary to overcome this mob." Against the right opponents, bigger bags of HP can be a potent difference -- there are enemy types that, with some characters, I definitely rely on "kill enough of them to lower incoming damage before my defenses get overwhelmed" (much of my high-level play has been with bio armor, where your defenses are clicky-based. It's presumably less important to apply the death debuff with mitigation that's more steady-state).

The purple patch definitely scales down your offense much more strongly than it scales up enemy offense. Comparing a +4 to a +7 enemy, you do about 1/6th as much damage to the +7 enemy. They do about +20% more damage to you. So, I mean, I don't exactly agree, I think it's certainly possible to challenge people through level differences, but I agree with you that with the current purple patch, it definitely becomes a case of "you can't hurt them," long before they are pushing your defenses hard.

I mean, they do more damage and hit you more often. Like, are you so ferociously damage-mitigated that that's not a big deal? Sure, I can believe you are so ferociously damage-mitigated that that's not a big deal. But if "doing more damage and hitting you more often" do not constitute more difficulty, I'm not real sure what does.

I think the slight complication of this is that because most medium-end and higher builds build a lot of global recharge, the value of fast-recharging powers quickly gets capped in a way that slow-recharging powers do not. If you're running permahasten (180% global recharge), then a power that has an 8s base recharge recharges in 2.86 seconds. A power with a 4s base recharge recharges in 1.43 seconds. A power with a 3s base recharge recharges in 1.07 seconds. Since recharge doesn't start until animation of a power finishes, you can't have a one-power attack chain in CoH (and other factors work against that too -- like you want a power that can hold -res, but that's not your highest DPA power, etc). If you have a 3 power attack chain, the smallest that people realistically ever have, that devalues recharge that's < the summed animation times of the other two powers. But you still pay for that recharge time both in base damage and proc rate. This is part of what pushes people towards 15 second recharge time powers. (The other is reliability in your damage output when not at the infinite limit).

I just don't get the design goal here. Why give Sentinels shorter range but then wink and say, "Oh, but seriously though, we didn't actually mean 60', we meant 70'"? Personally, the short range on sentinels never bothered me much, but I know it's a huge issue for some people. Let's make the range be whatever the range should be, and set it there, rather than having the ATOs change it.

That's a perfectly sensible design approach. It's just not the one that we have. Nobody believes that all the ATs are at roughly level A, and then all the ATO's raise them to roughly A+X. Nobody thinks that Brute ATOs are as good as the ATOs of any of the other melee classes. Starting from a place of "well, let's just ignore the reality of the state of the game" is not a good way to make game design choices. If a massive nerf to Scrapper and Stalker ATOs were coming down the line, then sure. But I don't think any such nerf is coming (nor do I think that Scrappers and Stalkers would be very attractive compared to Brutes and Tanks if their ATOs were down at Brute/Tank level).

Yep. As low as like 0.97ish against +4s. You can buy the ATO for 100 merits or about 8M inf. You don't need the rest of the set, you don't need a complex build. It will make a huge difference in performance even if you use it at 3PPM with no global recharge. Players in SGs I was in who didn't make "builds," who mostly used common IOs or SOs still bought the ATOs for their AT, with merits. I also want to be extremely clear to both you and @Naraka: Do you think that well-build Scrappers with the ATO make Blasters have laughably bad damage? Are blasters obsolete because Scrappers are the only kings of DPS, once we're talking about the kind of play that includes ATOs? That's not my holistic impression. Mine is that at a given level of build sophistication, blasters, scrappers, and stalkers are all fairly close to each other in terms of performance. If anything, people tend to think that blasters are a little ahead of scrappers, in environments that don't highly value mitigation (soloing TFs at hard difficulties, for exaample). So it's very convenient to use Scrappers for mathematical comparisons. Their mechanics are simple compared to Stalker or Blaster mechanics. But if we accept that Blaster ~= Scrapper ~= Stalker, then comparisons between Sents and Scrappers are implicitly comparisons between Sents and Stalkers or Blasters.

I removed the -5% resistance debuff. Wishing away the Scrapper ATO doesn't change the reality of the game. They have it. I'm not a huge fan of just how much of Scrapper performance is locked behind the ATO either. But it exists. I think this is totally fair, but it's hard to come up with dimensions of the AT beyond direct damage that don't just make them "bad defenders or controllers" instead of "bad blasters."

I think that people really overestimate how much of the blaster damage excellence is due to their scalar, and how much is due to other things. Blasters have both aim and build up. They have defiance. They have full-strength nukes. They have snipes. And they have a bunch of very attractive attacks in their secondaries. Compare Sentinels to Scrappers. Scrappers have 1.125 damage scalar, and then they have crits. The superior ATO for Scrappers gives +50% to-hit rate with 3 PPM. If you have just 100% global recharge (ie, much less than perma-hasten, which is 180% global recharge), then you expect to have 6 procs per minute. Each proc lasts 5 seconds, so that's 50% uptime of your +50% crit rate. Your base crit rate is 8% (minions)/16% (non-minions). So during your proc uptime, you have a 58-66% chance to crit, and otherwise 8-16%. Let's call it 60%/10%. That's a 35% overall chance to crit. Crits mostly double your damage, but they don't double procs or a few weird powers. So all in all, your damage is increased by let's say 25% by crits for a competently slotted level 50 Scrapper. If we translate that back into scalar, that's the equivalent of a 1.4 scalar! Another way to say this is that if you created a total clone of Scrappers (the Shmapper), but just said, "No crits anymore, we'll just give you all the damage directly into your scalar, otherwise literally exactly like a Scrapper," then you'd want to give the Shmappers AT a damage scalar of 1.4. It's harder to calculate the damage that Blasters and Stalkers get beyond their damage scalar -- it's not as clean and simple as Scrapper crits. Like, you have to go into a lot of very specific assumptions. But if we say that Stalkers and Blasters are not crazily far behind Scrapper damage (and, for example, Stalkers get pretty comparable pylon times to Scrappers), then it stands to reason that their effective damage scalar is not way off from 1.4 either. I think it's really important to understand this when talking about Sentinels. An increase to 1.125 damage scalar -- without other bonuses -- still puts them way behind the other damage classes!

The game is easy. You can play it successfully with vastly underperforming builds (certainly including Sentinels, my first 50 on Homecoming was an archery/ninj sent, and I soloed AVs and so forth). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider how ATOs affect classes, and very specifically how they differentially affect classes. Again, I didn't propose gigantic, game-changing ATOs. I proposed broadly useful ATOs, not broadly useless ones like Sentinels have now. Scrappers have more of an aggro-management role than Sentinels, they are protective of the group in a few ways: 1. Some scrapper sets have taunt auras. 2. Just being in the middle of melee means that AoEs that get sent a scrapper's way will not tend to hit the fragile ranged classes who are keeping their distance. Sentinels who do draw aggro will tend to draw AoEs into the fragile folks. 3. I guess confront, but who cares. At any rate, well-built Scrappers have ST damage that I think is comparable to or exceeds Blaster level. Blasters have nukes and 16 target-cap AoEs.

I did. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

Scrapper and Stalker damage without their ATOs would collapse compared to Scraps and Stalks who do use their ATOs. A basically competently slotted Scrapper who uses their chance-for-+50%-crit-rate ATO should get around a +20% to their damage just there (that is: it's not particularly difficult to get 50% uptime with this proc. A crit is roughly +100% damage for a power, but not including procs etc so let's call it +80%. So if you crit 50% more often, that's +40% damage. Half uptime, +20% damage). That's not a tip-top, I'm going to actually get the most out of this ATO build, it's a basically competent build. Their other ATO gives another +2-5% damage just by itself. It's harder to put exact numbers to the Stalker ATOs, and probably certain sets value the chance-to-hide one more than others (it really shines if you have another really big hitter in your set that you can crit with), but it shouldn't be hard to get +15-20% damage just by using the two ATOs for most Stalkers. Scrappers without their ATOs would be comparable to or worse than Brutes in damage output. It's a big deal. (It's worth pointing out that I'm NOT proposing huge-deal ATOs. I'm proposing ATOs that are broadly useful and support damage dealing, without being game-changers like Scrapper/Stalker ATOs. As opposed to current Sent ATOs that don't really add any damage.) If Sentinels are to provide a team benefit based on "merely damage," then their damage should be comparable to Blasters (who also provide mere damage). That'd be a HUGE damage increase for Sentinels, something I don't think anyone has much appetite for.

Just as a point of order, that's @nihilii's idea. That's a bad assumption. Hope this helps! Look, it's everyone's God-given right to make unsourced, dubious assertions. It's hard or impossible to back up every point with rigorous data, and we all have limited time to talk about imaginary superheroes on the internet. But trying to take victory laps and declare the conversation over after you decide to make one-sentence dismissals is just dumb. EDIT: About tactics, I agree. I was just trying to take seriously the previous poster's claim that tactics was more prevalent than maneuvers, not commenting on my assessment of the likelihood that they were correct that tactics was more prevalent than maneuvers.

You really haven't. You made a bunch of dubious assertions with no sourcing and people mostly ignored you.

The inherent is interesting, and I'm worried that my proposed inherent is less interesting. But also, the current inherent is baaaaaaaaaaad. So bad that trying to fix it is I'm not sure a workable approach. Problems with the current inherent: 1. It's really confusing. You have to increase the meter to full, then use a T1 or T2 power. Then the visible effect that people notice is a heal/end heal for defensive opportunity, or a damage proc for offensive opportunity. So much so that people don't necessarily even realize that with either opportunity, you're also doing a -20% res debuff on your main target. People have a LOT of questions about the sent inherent. 2. It's single-target, and comes late in a fight. In most situations, by the time you can get the inherent off, the person you want to target with it is half dead or more. The actual -res effect is useless for AoE. 3. You have to slot your T1 and/or T2 to at least well enough to hit things, which is often a waste -- specifically, in the context of sentinel blast sets that almost invariably have at least two powers that are on rapid-enough recharges to be in your main rotation and do a lot more damage than your T1 or T2. So it kinda doesn't play well with the basic dynamic of sentinels. 4. People get excited about -res as a mechanic, but we should note that against a +4 opponent, your debuffs are at 48%. It scales really badly against high-level opponents. 5. They sacrifice one of the ATOs for it, and it's an underwhelming proc. I mean, that's one concept for design, but it's not CoH's one. Scrappers' damage collapses without their ATOs. So does Stalkers'. I feel like the inherent is the weakest part of my proposal. I'm pretty hemmed in. Powerhouse is on record as not wanting to give sentinels any kind of taunt, and wanting to be somewhere between rolling back the -res and at least no more of it. I'm trying to give sentinels a role as sentinels, as like watchful guardians, and do it without taunt. They'll never be allowed to have blaster-level damage, so giving them some kind of protective role without taunt is tough.

It's a 12-13% increase in damage outside Opportunity (packaged with things that remove Opportunity). Let me suggest that if you buff the damage of a class by significantly less that 10%, nobody will really notice.

If people are taking tactics more than maneuvers, that seems like it's very likely due to procs.