aethereal

You guys are acting like bio armor and rad armor aren't good, popular armor sets, or that shadow meld isn't a commonly used epic or whatever. Which is weird. Clearly there is a constituency for Willpower, SR, or Invul-like "absolutely minimal clicks" in CoH. But there are plenty of players who are fine with juggling a few clicks and using them at appropriate times. Most sets have a click heal.

I know that I'm in a minority here, but I like armor sets that give me things to do. Managing my clickies in Bio armor gives some added interest in play. Clicks in armor sets in CoH seem to be heavily heals/absorbs (and endurance tools). There are only a few cases I can think of where you get click defense or click resist, usually as a secondary effect of a heal or endurance heal. Doesn't seem any inherent reason why that would have to be the case, and it means that if you have my preference for a click-heavy set, you get pushed towards healing/absorb based sets like bio, rad, or regeneration. Which is fine, but sometimes I want to make a character who doesn't theme well with healing. I think it'd be cool to get a new armor set or two which are based on clicks rather than toggles but get resist/defense primarily through their clicks instead of healing. You could theme a "tactical defense" set kind of like a Batman deal where an intellectual fighter uses the positioning of their opponents to defend themselves with a +defense-per-target power, for example.

Sure. And we shouldn't make it even more so.

I don't really support a third set of ATOs, not because of any particular issues with the detail of your proposal, just because two sets of ATOs already pushes things a little far in the direction of "everyone slots the same." Having there be a little more variety and choice in slotting is I think more interesting. Another ATO that was mutually unique with one of the current ATOs would be interesting, though. So you could have any two of three or four ATO sets.

Yes, the old limitation has been overcome, there are now possibly multiple effects in each effect group. The effect group is the one with the random condition, then any number of effects can be tied to it. It's new in HC or maybe Score, was not available on Live.

Back in the NCSoft days, there was some general sense that people shouldn't have too many animated costume parts in part because it might be hard for lower-end machines to handle lots of animation in groups and so forth. And I'm sure that you can find people on HC who are still playing on decade-old machines that might have that kind of problem. But it's clearly much less of a problem in the year of our lord 2020 than it was in 2008 or whatever. It is doubtless also the case that those various capes would clip against various things. But capes do too, so.

You've also got some weird thing where you tried to blame your failure to read the first post on my editing. I edited the first post twice: the first time very shortly after I created it in order to add the link to the other thread (which I created after this one, so I couldn't link it in the original post). The second time, later, on rereading, to correct a typo where I described both fast-recharge and slow-recharge powers as "high-recharge." The whole substantive first post was there from the start. Nobody is being "defensively hostile" to you "asking questions." Where you provoke hostility is when you make claims about other people -- not their arguments -- that are not true.

I expressed in the beginning of the thread, and have expanded a few times, on why I'm making this suggestion. The PPM mechanic is extraordinarily opaque, rewards proccing a narrow subset of powers, overly rewards global recharge, and has to then have yet more terrible kludgey patches (like the global lockouts of various procs) on top of it. I'm also not really a fan of having everyone do this weird smattering of damage types. I don't think that damage procs are particularly too strong, and the sort of ur-mechanic of sacrificing set bonuses for more damage is a good tradeoff. To your actual substantive criticisms, rather than speculating as to my motives when I've described them: I think you're incredibly overstating the case for damage caps being a problem. No, teams do not "ordinarily brings both brutes and scrappers beyond their damage bonus maximums already." If this proposal were accepted, what scrappers and stalkers lose in occasionally going above their damage cap, they'd more than get back in having their crit damage be improved by "procs." Blasters would get additional performance in their nukes, which under PPM mechanics "waste" a ton of their recharge at the 90% ceiling for procs. All ATs would perhaps find that six-slotting an attack with damage procs was a little less rewarded, but that there were a large number of attacks that currently don't proc well that would be more rewarding to proc. Would it change balance? Certainly. I imagine some powersets would be winners and some would be losers. Would it be an overall nerf? I think it would be relatively straightforward to tune the numbers so that it wasn't.

Accusing people of bad faith in their discussion is spectacularly douchey.

Yep. So all told 490%. Below damage cap for I believe every AT, and that's for the 5 seconds that you have double-build-up, and assuming you devote 6 slots to pure damage, no accuracy, no recharge, no endurance. EDIT: It's actually above damage cap for many of the non-damage classes, though most of those don't get build-up.

Damage cap is quite high. You could conceivably get to 200% enhancement from this (two 50+5 damage enhancement and four ED-ignoring 25% enhancement things would be around 200%). Another 30% from T4 Musculature. 160% for 5 seconds from Gaussian's build up. That's still only 390%.

Yes, I know. See item 4 in the original post, and the linked thread.

Attacks that have 5 %damage procs do more damage than ED allows. We are down that road. But what you can't do -- in the game as it exists today or in my proposal -- is both exceed ED massively and get set bonuses from that power, nor get the kind of efficient enhancement bonuses that you get from multi-stat-enhancing set IOs. Are there any powers that take melee/ranged/pbaoe/taoe sets that do no damage at all?

I mean, sure. My ice/bio stalker has Frozen Touch slotted with 5xHecatomb (not the pure damage one), with +5s as necessary to get 100%+ damage enhancement, plus the Unbreakable Constraint proc, so two purple procs and 100%+ damage slotting before Alpha. But I feel like we're talking at cross purposes. This proposal is not to facilitate the ability to usefully slot Frozen Touch, it's to make procs less quirky and weird and hard to reason about (especially for people who aren't willing to build spreadsheets to check out proc rates), useful in a broader range of powers, and have fewer strange corner cases.

I mean, I think this is Just Wrong. Damage procs are a major performance boost to highly performant single-target DPS chains from scrappers and stalkers, and the only reason they aren't leveraged more for blasters is that there's a woeful lack of ranged damage procs. You have to read the tea leaves and put the procs in long-recharge attacks (long-recharge meaning 10-20s), and not do local recharge boosting, and you do it alongside normal damage slotting, not completely replacing it. My proposal is to replace the damage procs that are in melee/ranged/taoe/pbaoe sets exactly so that Controllers etc can still use their traditional damage procs in holds and so forth. I don't see this change hurting many low-damage-scalar ATs. The only "low damage scalar" AT that can slot melee procs is Brute, they'll be fine (and they can continue to slot a taunt %damage proc in literally everything). Ranged damage is only one non-unique proc, anyone who's building a proc-heavy build on a blast set is using holds/fears/confuses/immobilizes/slows etc. PBAoE and TAoE might hurt the low-damage-scalar ATs a little, though I also think that having more consistent damage from those powers is a big advantage of this proposal -- as it stands, proc damage tends to be nothing or overkill in minion-clearing AoEs. We would attempt to tune the numbers of the ED-ignoring damage boost such that it wasn't as good as current 90% proccing damage procs in the minority of powers that can really usefully leverage %damage procs, and is better than the current %damage procs in other powers.

Yep. You can, if you so desire, do literally 5 "much higher DPA-than-average" attacks (albeit at pretty brutal health cost) in a 10 second rotation, all but one of those attacks on less than 1.5 second arcanatime. Now, I dunno, maybe the lack of full-damage crits on two of those gets this down to not being as good as it sounds, but it sounds amazingly good.

I'm putting together a high-end EM stalker to test this, but my gut feeling is that Stalker EM is so good at single-target that its AoE shouldn't be buffed more. It's crazy for a set to have three super-hard-hitting ST attacks (Assassin's Strike, Total Focus, Energy Transfer), on timers that make it easy to get them all into a single 10s rotation (stalkers don't want a less-than 10s rotation because of the lockout on the chance-to-hide proc), one of them twice.

As far as I know, they haven't really said what they're going to change, though it's possible I missed something. Changing the rates is doomed to failure. PPM is a bad system. It's a bad system on a number of axes. As you and I have discussed, it's way overly complex, way overly obscure. It has failed in its primary goal. PPM was supposed to make it so that proc were roughly equally good in a much larger array of powers (the previous status quo having been that procs were really good in extremely fast-recharging, and bad otherwise). But while it's shifted which powers they're good in, it hasn't made them good in a large array. It's super exploitable with global recharge -- and god, this game did not need more incentives to make people invest in global recharge. You can't numbers-tweak your way out of that. It's baked into the system. Now, this is a hard problem and I'm not sure I know what to suggest to replace PPM in its entirety, but for damage procs there are better ways. Damage procs are just "more damage on a particular power." Yes, right now they're more damage of an arbitrary damage type that is largely disconnected from the entire rest of the system, but it's not like that cashes out in any particularly useful way. If people were doing very specific stuff with damage procs where they were like, "Oh, I need a ton of fire damage here because of X, Y, and Z, so I'm looking for opportunities for a fire damage proc," that'd be one thing, but nobody is. Everyone gets negative energy damage on their melee attacks -- everyone. Damage types ought to matter. If everyone is doing "all the damage types" because procs are prevalent and give your damage in a smattering of different damage types, then we might as well just collapse damage into damage and make resistance universal and be done with it. If you're a martial arts character, you ought to feel like your smashing damage is an advantage sometimes and a disadvantage other times. Why else do we even have the system?

Well, one of the reasons i bring this up now is that Powerhouse had intimated that a change to procs is coming down the line at some point.

It is possible to figure it out using all the knowledge in the world. It's definitely not possible just with in-game sources. I mean, I don't think that even the 5% floor/90% ceiling of proc chances is noted in the game. Much less the area factor, the global recharge/local recharge distincton, and lest we forget, if the power happens to be implemented with a pseudo-pet, then it has profound effects on procability. EDIT: Oh, and lest we forget, the patches applied on top of PPM, like the 10 second lockout on the chance-to-hide proc for the Stalker ATOs, or the however-long lockout on the power transfer heal. If you're designing for whatever percent of the players obsessively follow mechanical threads on the forums, this isn't a particularly valid complaint. If you're designing for what I presume are the large majority of players, whether a proc will work well in a power is basically just raw luck.

That's a debatable definition of "balanced," but yes, this would mean that procs are no longer best for defenders and brutes and worst for blasters and scrappers.

Right now, an effect can be tagged enhanceable or unenhanceable, which pretty much do what they say on the tin. We could replace that with a scalar multiplier instead of a on-off flag. So "enhanceability" for a currently enhanceable effect would be 1.0, and "enhancibility" for a currently unenhanceable effect would be 0.0. You multiply the enhancement power you get from an enhancement or from an alpha slot by the enhancibility of the effect. But why? We already have powers that we essentially want partial enhancibility -- we hack it together now by having, say, a heal for 7% max hp that's unenhancible and another heal for 3% max hp that's enhancible. We could more elegantly express this as a 10% heal that's 0.3 (30%) enhancible. This would somewhat reduce the complexity of power expressions, make the detailed info more clearer, and reduce chance of errors. But the real reason to do this would be to explore greater-than-1 enhancibility. For example, a possible benefit of the otherwise underperforming electric blast set is that you can put the power-transfer-chance-to-heal proc in every attack and get some healing out of your attack chain. We could instead give a very small actual heal in each attack -- so small that its base effect isn't very useful -- but set its enhancibility to 2.0 or 3.0, meaning that healing enhancements would affect this small heal at double or triple strength, allowing people to trade off damage performance for healing in a more flexible way than the decision to slot or not slot a particular proc in every attack. Particularly, I'm offering this suggestion alongside my damage proc suggestion If we want a power that currently has a very minor damage component that can be procced into a respectable damage power, we could redo that as having a very small damage component with enhancibility scalar 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever the math works out for that would allow people to make this tradeoff without using procs.

Basic Proposal Replace at least the damage procs in Melee, Targeted AoE, PBAoE, and Ranged sets with special damage enhancements that enhance damage by let's say 25% (subject to playtesting of course), but which ignores ED. Justification All damage procs really do is add damage. They do so via PPM, which is a super complex, weird system that attempts to basically scale the damage that the procs do to the power they're put in, so that procs aren't a waste in high-damage big hitter powers while also not being overpowered in rapid-recharge buzzsaw powers. This works to a point, but it does so at the cost of transparency (it's essentially impossible to figure out from just in-game sources whether a power procs "well" or "poorly"), it creates weird incentives to pick narrow ranges of powers, and the performance of procs in fast-recharge powers, even if it averages to the same as in slow-recharge powers, is avoided because you can't rely on it. It also has created weird additional emphasis on global recharge. Well, we already have a way to scale damage with the power of a power -- we can just, you know, enhance the damage. Replacing damage procs with damage enhancements which ignore ED gives the same basic design tradeoff: you can sacrifice set bonuses for additional raw damage. But it does so in a smoother, easier-to-understand way that allows more diversity in which powers people use for best effect. Additional Commentary You wouldn't get the damage type diversification with this proposal that you do with current damage procs. But do we want that? I've never seen anyone advance a build with, like, themed damage procs for particular damage types. Nobody seems to be using damage procs to create Frostfire-style characters who use fire + ice. Nobody even really seems to be picking and choosing procs for best utility with their damage type -- it's pretty much "every proc you can stuff in" or "whatever comes with your sets." And do we want every melee character doing negative energy damage because Touch of Death is a pretty good set? Why do we want that? If you value the randomness of procs -- and I see little sign that anyone does -- there could still be a random factor in this. Like, basically, "75% chance for +25% damage enhancement." The randomness could be a fixed amount rather than scaling with recharge, since the damage bonus scales with the damage of the power. That way, if we think that part of the intended effect of procs is that you can't fully rely on them, we can have that to whatever degree we think they should be unreliable. Purple procs could grant a higher amount of damage enhancement than regular ones. This would prevent us from using these procs with powers that do no damage, or from usefully using them with powers that have very low base damage. That's why I proposed only replacing the damage procs that are in the damage sets, not the ones that are in, for example holds, taunts, or fears. There are still a few powers that people turn into highly damaging attacks which have very low base damage, and this proposal would make that not work. Is this something we want? Should DP characters be able to proc suppressive fire or whatever it is into a high-damage attack? If so, I have a suggestion to continue to enable it that I'll put as a linked post. This would mean that you couldn't use procs as a way to partially get around damage debuffs such as a Rage crash. This strikes me as fine. This would also potentially somewhat reduce damage in cases where characters were at or near damage cap, since these "procs" would contribute towards damage cap instead of being separate from it. Again, this strikes me as fine. This would improve the performance of procs in classes with critical-like mechanics (stalkers, scrappers, and corruptors), since their crits would essentially magnify "proc" damage. That may be a significant concern, since scrapers and stalkers are already in very good place. Linked suggestion to allow continued enhancement of low-damage powers into good attacks via proccing (ie, additional commentary #4):

BTW, you can toggle on walk, and it overrides the stance, so that will straighten you up.

Yes, don't have to toggle on/can't toggle off. I get this. If you really just completely want to live in a stance forever and ever, the auto-power is more convenient. I see that mainly for beast run. Surely not even the ninja-iest ninja who ever ninjaed literally wants to be in ninja stance all the time? Similarly, characters who straight up do not ever move their legs to walk? A potentially happy(?) medium that may be too complex is to have both? An auto-power for people who want to live in their stance, and purchaseable toggles that override it?