aethereal

Thunder Strike is like a fireball. It hits a circular radius around its primary target (not a circular radius centered on you, like PBAoEs such as Whirling Hands). It's a small fireball, only 7'. In practice, yes, that means it won't likely hit people behind you, because you're between them and the primary target, and that means they aren't within 7' of the primary target. But it's not a cone. It's a circle, centered on the primary target.

So, compared to the other melee ATs, Tankers get a bunch less S/L defense from their ATOs than the others do (stalkers and scrappers get either 5% or 10% from their ATOs, brutes get either 7.5% or 12.5% (depending on whether they split), Tankers get 2.5%). But they get a huge amount of resists -- 12% S/L, 6% all others (including psi/tox) from their set bonuses and then 8%+ resist-all from their proc. Note that S/L defense is also plentifully available to melee classes through Kinetic Combat and Blistering Cold. If we're comparing EA to Invul, on tanks, I think this generally works to the advantage of EA. They won't have difficulty hitting overcap S/L defense even with their lower ATO numbers, they'll benefit from have lower base resists because Invul wastes S/L resist on the vast majority of high-end tank builds, and it helps them close their Psi/Tox holes. However, the higher S/L defense numbers that you get mostly "for free" in other ATs may make EA seem like a more powerful set there -- especially during leveling -- than it really is.

I haven't tried EA on brutes in a long time, but I have a 30s EA stalker right now, and it feels strong to me! I have north of 50 s/l defense, other defenses are 40+ (before any power sinks, and psi and neg energy are lower), okay resists, endurance tools and a heal. That's certainly with IOs, but obviously not level 50 modifiers, superior sets, incarnate, etc. I had a tough time with endurance management before power sink, and the heal not coming until 35 was a little brutal, but since about level 28, it's felt very strong. I imagine it'll feel stronger as I flesh out the slotting. The ease of getting S/L defense through sets is a really big deal, I think.

My loose understanding is that costume pieces attach to "bones." Each bone can attach a single costume piece, and then kinda can do either geometry or particle effects from there. You might be able to do a thing where selecting a weapon moved a new "weapon aura" bone to roughly the right place, but the aura would still not know the exact size/geometry of the weapon. This could all be wrong.

Correct, the P2W runs detoggle Combat Jumping. Do you actually play in any scenario where you care about accuracy/damage with CJ turned off? I get that it's not a huge deal to lose Kismet at low levels, but it also seems like it's not a huge deal to toggle CJ on when you're fighting.

That's strange, I'd have expected it to be global like LotG, but the aren't any click defense powers on your build besides Shadow Meld, are there? You could as easily put it on combat jumping.

Why do you want kismet in an auto-power? Just so it's not stealing slot space from something that could reduce endurance consumption/increase defense?

I haven't played an electric blaster, but one thing that was discouraging to me back on live with my elec/kin corruptor was my inability to end-frain AVs.

The minutiae of how procs work are a little confusing, but the general principle is easy. Longer recharge = greater proc rate. Single target = greater proc rate.

Overcapping that much seems pretty silly to me. You're 10% above incarnate defense softcap and I dunno how much over resist cap. Meanwhile, you're 9% under incarnate softcap and 16% under resist cap on energy. It seems clear that if you could knock 5-10% off your S/L numbers and add the same amount to your energy numbers, you'd drop incoming energy damage to less than 1/5th of its current value in incarnate content, and you would lose effectively no S/L durability. Now, sure, maybe that takes you from "who cares I'm unkillable" to "who cares lol I'm unkillable rofl." That's the life of a high-end level 50 tank. But if the thesis is that EA and Invul are pretty similar, then I'd prefer less S/L and more energy compared to an invul tank. I'll also note that Invul is a top-tier Tanker set, so saying that EA is very similar to it is a pretty high bar.

Right, so clearly that character would be better with lower S/L resists and higher energy resists. And somewhat more arguably lower S/L defense and higher energy defense. I mean, level 50 tankers are all fairly unkillable, so maybe who cares, but you have way past capped S/L mitigation (99%), even in incarnate environments, while your incarnate energy damage mitigation could get almost an order of magnitude better, and even in non- incarnate environments it could get more than 2.5 times better.

The Piecemeal arcs weren't perfect, but they were ambitious and a huge breath of fresh air. I'm super excited to see more.

Athletic run is a free P2W power that's in the game right now. It's ninja run minus the stance. There were no plans to make it possible to use CJ and ninja run stack together in i27p1. In fact, there was a whole bunch of making all kinds of minor movement powers that currently stack with CJ not stack with it. Those changes for rolled back. If i may editorialize, the idea that we need to avoid having minor movement bonuses from actual chosen powers (not P2W, but selected powers that take a slot) stack is nuts, and I hope the idea for permanently buried with i27p1.

Compared to invul, it's got endurance management, a heal that you can use tactically, and a bunch of regen, albeit none of the giant max hp buff. But also, it interacts well with the environment: invul on takers finds it easy to massively overcap s/l resistance and defense, while EA has better energy values, and you can get some of the prolific s/l resistance (tough plus sets), and defense (sets including kinetic combat and blistering cold).

As a utility thing, I like that BABs is pretty close to enemies. Makes it convenient to street-sweep for some of those early levels when DFB isn't happening, and it's just much more of a run to and from Ms Liberty from the enemy groups. A vendor would be fine as long as it doesn't push the bad guys farther away.

Yeah, the basic problem is EA is arguably overpowered on everyone, and with Tanker values would be crazy overpowered.

Are fallen bodies tangible? I can't remember ever being blocked by one.

This is literally unreadable. Why would you use black text?

Okay, I looked this up in the powers API. First of all, Frozen Aura has a grant assassin's focus effect group. In fact, a 100% chance one. However, it's flagged "main target only," which I don't understand how that would affect a PBAoE power, which has no main target as far as I know? It looks to me like the intent is to have there be a 100% chance of Frozen Aura granting one and only one stack of Assassin's focus. If it's not, then that looks like a bug to me. Second, Frost on Stalkers does 6 ticks of 15.01 damage Frost on Scrappers does 6 ticks of 16.89 damage Frost on Brutes does 6 ticks of 11.26 damage Anything else shown in the in-game detailed info window looks very strongly to me like a display error. All other effect groups are either non-damage, PVP, crits, or fiery embrace.

Yeah, I have a few quite different criticisms of this proposal: I specifically think that resistance debuffs should not, by and large, be unresistable. That makes them very up-and-down in terms of power in a way that's not at all legible to players. I don't think that this really ends up giving a very compelling team role to sentinels (single-target modest resistance debuffs aren't in high demand), and it potentially compromises the amount of buff we'd be able to give them in terms of raw damage, and thus makes them less capable soloers in return for a not-very-compelling team role. I don't think that this package of conditional effects and different benefits is easy for teams to work with. It just seems complex to me. Conditionally giving out small bonuses to damage and regen to allies and also if they hit their targets they potentially give heal/endurance to the sentinel? (this one isn't really mine, I don't have a problem with it) I don't think the dev team is going to go for "sentinels constantly give -15% resistance to their target," and that we shouldn't invest effort in routes that the dev team is opposed to. So those are all very separate criticisms. Like, I don't think that each one has anything to do with each other one.

I was looking at Rubi's powers API, not Mids. EDIT: I looked at the powers API for Corruptor charged bolts, it reports 41.71.

Is something weird going on with Corruptor Archery damage? It shouldn't be that much lower than Blaster damage. Specifically: Blasters should have 1.125 scale, so 52.55 normalizes to 46.71 Sentinels should have .95 scale, so 44.38 normalizes to 46.71 Corruptors should have .75 scale, but 27.82 normalizes to a painfully low 37.09 (Note that I double-checked, and Galaxy Brain is correct that those are the listed numbers for Corruptor Snap Shot).

What is the team utility they offer? Are you talking about the resistance debuffs? Current sents offer very limited practical increase in team damage. 5% resist debuff isn't a lot (2.5%, as it is against +4 opponents, is almost nothing). Opportunity's 20% is more meaningful, but it's still affected by the purple patch and still has mediocre uptime and is hard enough to apply that it's hard to get excited about it.

The initial proposal sounds pretty crazy complicated to me. We should be looking to decomplexify Sentinel, not increase its complexity. Also, I don't think that the devs would ever go for a significant unresistable resistance debuff. I get the impression that Cpt Powerhouse wants to remove most sources of -resist, such as removing the Tanker -resist in favor of a straight damage buff. I imagine that the same will happen to the Sentinel. PS: do "unresistable" debuffs still get hit by the purple patch? I don't know how that works. Giving allies +perception seems, I don't know, maybe flavorful but actually such a non-big deal that most people won't even notice? And can something you don't notice really be flavorful? Powerhouse has also said that he wants the Sentinel to be "sustained AoE damage" oriented -- better than a scrapper at sustained AoE, worse than a scrapper at sustained ST, presumably worse than a blaster at burst AoE. I don't really agree with this as a goal. I'm not sure that "sustained AoE" is a coherent source of strength. Burst AoE is all that matters, since good burst AoE kills all minions and most lts? Does it matter if you can follow up your AoE with more AoE once the minions and lts are dead? And I also think that it's hard to find a role for an AoE-focused class between Tanks and Blasters, especially since Scraps and Brutes are plenty good at AoE. My preferred role for a Sent would be sustained ST damage. Like back-loaded Stalkers. Instead of coming out strong with guaranteed crits from a hide, my preferred verssion of Sents would be for them to build up to a brutal cadence of high ST damage against hard targets, probably by applying a small-but-long-duration-and-stackable resist debuff on each hit to a target. (Yes, I know I said that the devs don't want to do more -resist, but I'm not a dev). I think that the defensive-opportunity-like small heal and endurance heal against a target could also play into this, making them a premiere class for duking it out with very hard targets. Like, your first hit to a target could mark them, and then once marked the second hit and later could have a chance to proc heal and end heal. I think this would be an interesting role, personally, though it's very much not the meta and I think it wouldn't do a ton to make the broad playerbase more happy with sents, and wouldn't necessarily make them great team players (since a full team generally chews through even very hard targets pretty successfully). If you want to give Sents more of an AoE focus and more of a "I watch out for my teammates" deal, then I like the idea of giving Sents a powerful, short-duration accuracy debuff on opponents on their first hit, followed by a long period of immunity to that acc debuff from the opponent (on a mechanical level, you'd have an effect that would give -accuracy if the opponent didn't have a particular status, then it would give that status to the opponent). So the next hit would not repeat the accuracy debuff. Why accuracy and not to-hit? Because -accuracy on opponents is useful even if the player is soft-capped, while -to-hit is not useful if you're soft-capped. I believe there are no sources of -accuracy in the game, so this would give sents a thing only they would do. It would help them survive alpha so they could sustain their AoE long enough to kill minions and lts, and it has a sort of flavorful thing of, "Oh shit, an ambush is coming in, I'll give my team a chance to recognize it and reconfigure to deal with it." You could also have sents have inherent +perception and give -stealth on hits, which I like more than them having an aura of +perception. Basically, since the sents are a damage-dealing class, I like as many of their abilities as possible be tied to hitting their opponents instead of just passively giving off auras.

It. Hopefully is stored as a hash. So the input size shouldn't really matter.