aethereal

These are really exciting changes (more exciting, to me, than anything in the first three builds), and I think it should be a big counterexample to people who are concerned that feedback is not being heard. (Er, speaking of in general all the changes in build 4, not just the ones excerpted above).

You could set a passcode for your base (you don't have to tell it to anyone) and then set up a macro or keybind to enterbasefrompasscode for your own base. That should get it to one keypress, albeit not by clicking on the portal in your view.

That makes sense. But, vice-versa, it seems like you're tacitly acknowledging that right now, RoP does carry three power picks. If the RoP nerf came alongside a revamp to the Sorcery power pool, and you could make the case that nerfed RoP was carrying its weight as a T3 power that has good, solid T1 and T2 choices leading up to it that it doesn't need to carry, that's one thing. But if you're saying, "RoP is now balanced if you imagine a world in which the T1 and T2 sorcery powers were good," aren't you admitting that now in the real world RoP is bad? Not balanced, but bad. Pools have to balance as a whole. Of course the presence of Hasten, or, to a lesser extent, Combat Jumping, or the manifold defense choices in Stealth play into the balance of each power in those pools.

I walked through, I dunno, ten or so AVs solo with my ice/bio stalker, and only a few of them ran from me. Like, it definitely happened, it's not like I was a tank, but lots of them just stuck around to fight it out, and it was only rarely the case that there was much running.

You can't really proc out lightning rod or shield charge. They both summon pseudopets, which means they proc as though they had a ten second recharge instead of a ninety second one. Caveat: at least, that's how it used to work, haven't checked to see if the powers were reformulated to avoid pseudopets in recent builds.

There seems to have been a lot of confusion about this. Dark Consumption was never going to be a teleport attack. It was going to be a PBAoE with damage similar to Lightning Rod -- that was the comparison they were making -- but not a teleport attack.

The powers I identified -- the non-free P2W powers -- should get a benefit over the free P2W powers. Right now, they're largely worse. And the free P2W powers are getting the ability to stack with actual travel powers, which the non-free P2W powers don't get because they're exclusive. So, while panther form shouldn't be as fast as Superspeed of course, or jump as well as Super Jump, it should be better than Athletic Run -- both because it costs money and Athletic Run doesn't, and also because Athletic Run can be run alongside Superspeed (to get the jump of Athletic Run and the run speed of Superspeed) or alongside Super Jump (to get the run speed of Athletic run and the jump of Super Jump), and panther form can't. These are not powers that I think we need to worry very much about the balance of. Just the fact that they detoggle you, and can't be used with any attacks, is going to keep them niche choices. They shouldn't be The Very Best travel powers, but making them solidly better than Athletic Run or the jetpacks is fine.

It'd be nice if the various P2W travel powers (panther form, coyote form, void skiff, rocket board) got a buff here to be midway between the free runs and the full-on-for-real travel powers.

A level 50 character with super jump can get substantially above the roof of city hall on live, albeit not vastly higher. 127.8 is my jump height per combat attributes on a rando level 50 character. A level 50 character on brainstorm gets similar jump height to me, 122.27 feet (I probably have a jump enhancement in hurdle or something on live). Seems to me like it's working as intended.

Sure, but who cares what its damage is now? It's like fifth in Ice Blast's DPA rankings. Cast BFR and one of Ice's good powers in the same amount of time it took to cast just BFR before, win-win. Long recharge so you have to think about it, fast cast time so that when you want to hold something, you hold it now, not after you take another 25% of your health. It wouldn't be anyone's favorite power in the set, but it would have a role (available to stack onto FR when needed), put one accuracy in it. And the point is, Ice Blast doesn't need another mainline, "holy shit this is amazing" power. Having a marginal power that nevertheless has a role sounds like an improvement. Edit: Current listed (ie, not arcanatime) DPAs for ice blast, blasters, level 50: Ice bolt: 62.56 Ice blast: 61.44 Frost breath: 32.80 Freeze ray: 137.64 Ice storm: 57.53 Bitter ice blast: 133.31 Bitter freeze ray: 69.07 Blizzard: 205.46 So, it's really the 4th, not 5th, and one of those is the nuke. But it has 2.5s animation time, so if its animation time was reduced to 1.25 seconds or so, you could literally cast new BFR and one of Ice Bolt, Freeze Ray, or Bitter Ice Blast in the same amount of time that it used to take to just cast BFR. It's not as bad as I was remembering (especially once you take into account arcanatime, which will help it against all the other powers). But by the same token, I don't think we can just give Ice Blast another fast-animating, high-damage hold when it already has Freeze Ray and Bitter Ice Blast. Edit2: The corruptor version doesn't really do 230 damage, just in-game help counts corruptor scourge damage -- BFR's base damage is half that, 115.

I get wanting to make BFR better, it's certainly not very good right now. I think that maybe something like "decrease cast time to somewhere around 1.25 seconds, give 30 or 45 second recharge time, damage = 0" would give it a role -- you could hit dangerous bosses with FR/BFR and quickly hold them, but you wouldn't get incidental boss-level holds throughout your ST rotation just "for free," which I don't think Ice Blast needs.

Not 100% clear what you're suggesting. Basically faster animation (assuming you're in combat) + more damage if your to-hit bonus is higher? Ice is quite a good blast set already, albeit perhaps not at fire's tier. Not sure it needs a buff that makes it trivial to stack holds on a boss with no or little ST DPS loss.

Range is very valuable in certain, relatively infrequent, situations. Thus, it is good design to allow players to choose to prioritize range vs other enhancement categories, rather than providing mechanical incentives that say, "Every power will get a small range boost."

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.