aethereal

Stone Mallet has 37.01 true DPA (Brute version). It could have 0 recharge and it would not affect level 50 performance in the slightest. It's at best filler. If you use your filler more, that's not a good thing. It has worse DPA than Stone Fist.

We could give every melee and blast set 2s/4s T1 and T2s, without changing any damage, and everyone could enjoy a decent attack chain at lower levels, without changing level 50 balance meaningfully. This is what i mean by it's just a dumb convention.

Because at least we wouldn't be going through this charade where we pretend that the difference between a three second and six second cooldown is at all meaningful and needs to be balanced around.

When you touch a power or a powerset, changing its balance, you use the new formula. You don't go back and change everything in sets that aren't being rebalanced. That's not complex. It's imperfect, of course, but the status quo is too. And to be clear, they effectively are doing this -- nobody is putting in a 2s animation, 2s recharge-time power, putting the damage according to its recharge time, and calling it a day -- even though that's fine per the formulas. It's just that they're eyeballing everything instead of having a formula.

Did you read what I said? I'm not proposing changing the back catalog of powers.

No radical redesign necessary. We could decide on a new formula that weighted activation time, endurance cost, etc more heavily than recharge time, and then start designing to that when we make powersets, proliferate them, or rebalance them. Older powers wouldn't agree with the new formula, but that's not the end of the world. We'd just stop propagating this ridiculous, innumerate design decision onward and onward into the future. EDIT: Honestly, we could just say, "Actually, there IS NO formula," and that would still to a large degree be better than what we have today. What we have today is that we pretend there are rules, but the rules are unmoored from the reality of the game so we're actually eyeballing everything, we're just eyeballing in based on manipulating a largely meaningless number that derives other numbers (badly), instead of eyeballing it based on the numbers we actually care about directly.

We just... really badly need to come up with a new damage formula that isn't principally about recharge. The recharge shenanigans in this game are getting ridiculous, where everyone searches out longer and longer recharge powers. Meanwhile, we continue to just eyeball activation time. It's really kind of absurd.

Well, what I believe happens is that it's a defeat-all, and it slowly aggros every spawn around the map. It's a big map. It's not actually a timer. So in terms of speeding it up, you could leave the map partially empty or reduce the timer between when a spawn gets aggroed. The latter would make it more difficult. I don't know, I wouldn't exactly say that I like that mission, it's definitely more of an endurance test than anything else, but it's certainly a unique mission, and it's nice to have unique stuff in the game.

The odds of three 5% events in a row, if they are independent of each other, are only 1 in 8,000. Certainly the audience of this thread alone have made several orders of magnitude more attacks than that on HC, so it doesn't seem particularly unlikely that someone has noticed one of the doubtless many times that a three-miss-(ignoring-streakbreaker-attacks)-streak has happened to them. Now, an 8 miss streak like someone suggested above, that's a different story, and feels unlikely to have happened if misses are uncorrelated. (It's 1 in 25,600,000,000).

It is impossible to miss 8 times in a row if your hit chance is 95%. The streakbreaker kicks in after one miss if your chance to hit is 90%+. If you saw a multiple miss streak, that necessarily means that you did not have capped to hit chance.

I mean, they don't. Brute and Tanker get defense in Thunder Kick in Martial Arts. Brute and Tanker have different T9s in Ice Armor than Stalker and Scrapper. I'm sure there are a bunch of other differences. But there are a TON of melee ATs and a TON of both melee attack and armor sets. If you make each set substantively a different set for Tank/Brute/Scrap/Stalk, you're talking about making like 50ish differently balanced powersets. It's just clear that the HC team doesn't have the capacity to do that.

Nope.

From the patch notes: Working as intended. If you had recall friend, you'll have Teleport Target.

Just saw this in Pocket D, it's not my portal, so don't know how to repro:

Could we get some details on what used to stack and no longer stacks in Invincibility?

Blasters get 40% resist-all in PVP.

I don't have a strong answer to this, but comparing everything to War Mace (which may be the best melee set with TW nerfed) isn't productive. However, does Staff have better AoE than Claws? Savage? Spines?

File a bug? I was able to successfully use Slide stance.

I think that on a thematic level, the difference between regen and healing is pretty small, and absorb of the type offered by bio is also not very different (rapid-tick absorb shields like blasters get feel different from healing, bio's big chunky one-off absorbs don't). SR and Ninjutsu remain good, popular sets despite their clicky status protection, but also I think there's a pretty notable difference between a strategically used mitigation click and a status protection click. I'm not suggesting that we need a bunch more sets with clicky status protection.

We have good healing-oriented armor sets in Bio and Willpower, one click-heavy and one click-nonexistent. I understand that people have historical affection for the regen powerset and gravitate to the name instead of modeling their Wolverine-like characters as Willpower, but a Regen rebalance would bring relatively little to the state of modern CoH, and a radical reimagining of it wouldn't be much less work than building a powerset from scratch, and would be more contentious. So, no, I don't think that's a good prioritization.

Sure. Regen, but good, and with a focus on defense/resist instead of heals/regeneration.

I'm saying, imagine an armor set where you got a (lower-than-usual) baseline level of mitigation through toggles and autopowers, and then supplemented that with a series of medium-duration clicks, one where, say, you got a defense bonus per enemy around you, one where you got a flat resist bonus, and one where you did a short-lived AoE Terrorize and a heal. Or something like that. Maybe a short-duration crashless godmode. And so, like you had to think about how to layer or ration out those clicks so that they're available in the situations you need them the most.

Yeah, the way it works for my bio armor characters is, I mean, it's not a super reactive save-your-ass thing, each one has a fairly long cooldown and somewhat different conditions needed to activate it for best use. Ablative Carapace is agnostic to conditions around you, DNA Siphon wants a few alive and a lot of dead enemies around you, Parasitic Aura wants lots of live enemies around you, and is on a longer cooldown. It's not rocket science to get coverage from them, but it's not just completely blind "click when they're off cooldown," either. That's the kind of thing I'm asking for. Just injects a bit of variance into your attack rotation.

Sure. That sounds healthy, as long as it wasn't all-or-nothing.

I don't think the meta is that strong in CoH. It seems within the realm of reason to imagine a few different ATO sets where a given build/powerset would benefit from one ATO and another would benefit from another. Just have an ATO that juggles its big defensive grants would create some diversity, I think: if you had one that grants positional vs typed defense, and another that doesn't grant as much defense but does grant more resist, there are clearly ways that all of those would end up being sought after for different characters. You might have to make the procs very similar.