aethereal

IGNORE THIS I'm using Scrapper Energy Melee as a lowbie. I do NOT have Total Focus yet and so no guaranteed stun. Bonesmasher is suspposed to have a 60% chance to stun (per the detailed info) when not used with Energy Focus. I noticed it didn't seem that reliable, so I started watching. In my last several fights, I've used Bone Smasher at least 10 times, against minions and lts (both should be stunned by one application, it's mag 3), and have not seen it proc its stun so far. This seems wildly unlikely if it's just RNG bullshit, so I'm posting here. EDIT: Update: I have combat log turned on, and I did just stun someone with my bone smasher, so it's not 0% rate. So far, it still seems massively under 60%, though I suppose RNG shenanigans are possisble. EDIT2: Do Arachnos have some stun resistance? I once again got the "you stunned Arachnos Kidnapper with your bone smasher," in the combat log, but he wasn't actually stunned. He's an lt, so rank shouldn't do it. EDIT3: Okay, nevermind, sorry for the report. I think it was some combination of attacking a mix of enemies who have some higher-mag stun protection and getting mildly unlucky with stuns on other enemies in the mix. Now that I'm fighting different enemies and watching the log, I see about the correct proc rate for the stun.

Crit mechanics are as follows: Scrappers have a base chance to crit of 5% against minions, 10% against lts and up. We'll ignore minions now, since you don't really need crits to quickly kill minions. One of the scrapper ATOs increases this crit rate (on lts and up) to 14% with the non-superior version or 16% with the superior version. The other ATO gives a crit rate of 50% (it says +50%, but I think it's just a flat 50%, not 50% + 10%/14%/16%) for a short time (5 seconds, I think?) with a PPM of 2 (non-superior) or 3 (superior). Stalkers have a base chance to crit of 7%, and it increases for every additional person on your team -- I forget how much, but I believe it ends up a bit north of 30% on an 8 person team. (Most) Single-target attacks have a 100% chance to crit out of hide and (most) AoE attacks have a 50% chance to crit out of hide. The stalker chance-to-hide ATO has 4 (non-superior)/5 (superior) PPM. So much each AT crits depends a lot on a bunch of things. If a scrapper can find a really good attack to get its critical strikes proc in and abuse global recharge, they might reasonably see 6 activations per minute, so that's like 50% uptime. But another scrapper might get a lot less. A stalker on an 8 person team gets an enormous crit rate.

No +to-hit at +5, and thus no +to-hit at +5/+6 but most people are level-shifted.

That's probably why I said, " But then, there are characters who really thematically work without travel powers," yes. You can cap speed with the temp powers. You can't put a LotG in any travel power, and you can put a KB protection in every travel power. Travel powers are pretty low down the list of major imbalances in CoH! But it's still a bit of a bummer that you might very much want a travel power for theme but the power serves no real purpose in terms of utility.

I know. I didn't like it then, either.

Cyclops. Iron Fist. I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other examples. The travel power thing is complicated. On the one hand, I don't really like that there is optimization pressure to skip travel powers in the game. A lot of these powers are very core thematic elements to the characters: Superman isn't Superman if he can't fly[1]. Nightcrawler isn't Nightcrawler if he can't teleport. We don't have a really good equivalent of Spider-Man's webslinging, but the kind of urban mobility at least vaguely represented by superjump is central to a lot of characters as well. And of course superspeed is completely defining to a LOT of characters. On some level, I guess I'd like it if we all got one slot that had to be used for a travel power, so that people couldn't sacrifice it for a bit more defense or whatever. But then, there are characters who really thematically work without travel powers, or who would genuinely like more than one. Probably the amount of change made to really make them "work" would be vast compared to the reward. [1] Yes, I know he couldn't fly very early in his character history. He wasn't Superman as we think of the character, then.

Yeah, it was compared to a "mini-nuke" like lightning rod or shield charge, but they just meant that in terms of AoE damage, not the teleport effect. That change was rolled out, tested, and deemed too strong. When they tried to significantly weaken it, people kept referring to the original "mini-nuke" damage and -- putting together some things Jimmy said -- I think they felt like they couldn't get useful feedback on it, because people just kept saying, "This isn't Lightning Rod." This seems to have contributed in part to the decision not to publicly test Page 6 so far, and only invite trusted testers to the closed beta, with public beta pushed way back to the part where they're doing final passes for bugs and perhaps fine tuning numbers, not exploring concepts.

In terms of the mitigation, rather than the offense boost, you have to understand that Bio lives and dies by its clicks. Ablative Carapace gives you both a chunky absorb shield and a big regen boost. So while people are working their way through your absorb, you're healing up your actual hit points. DNA Siphon gives you a big heal (in a crowd) and a big regen boost (if there are DEAD targets to hit). And Parasitic Aura also gives absorb and regen. You simply won't have the same defense/resist numbers that an equivalently slotted other set will give you, and you have to use these powers, and use them well. You'll want to get the recharge of all of them down to the point where you continuously have your regen boosted, and you need to think about when to activate each one. It's pretty easy to get Ablative Carapace and DNA Siphon into an "every spawn" cadence, while Parasitic Aura is on a longer recharge cycle. DNA Siphon has big swings in what it does based on the number of alive and dead targets it has. If all your clickies are on cooldown, you will absolutely be more fragile than other sets. And regen is really important for bio armor -- I keep it monitered so I can see if it's debuffed, because the way this set works is it gives you relatively little passive resist/defense, good regen (if you're metering out your clickies) and then absorb shields to let the regen do its work. If your regen is floored, you will die as soon as your absorbs get eaten through, which they will fairly fast. Like other regen-based sets -- and I think that bio is best understood as a regen-based set with a sideline of defense/resist -- bio rewards max hitpoint super hard. Plan to do the accolades for this one. Slot your max hp stuff aggressively. In general, I find the defensive side of Bio to be a bit black and white. One mission, you're a god, just tearing through your enemies. Next enemy group hits one of your holes, and it's all you can do to stay alive.

In fairness, elec/kin gets enough -recovery that they can in fact lock down opponents via sapping. Not utterly completely, but you can get good extensive mitigation through sapping. However, you still take alpha, and it's not fast enough for teaming. I played an elec/kin on live, but the world was very different then.

I believe that Spines does too.

Guys, nobody is reading your current-max-length bios.

I had savage leap, it's great, but it didn't save the combo for me.

I ran a Sav/WP to the late 30s, and just ended up finding it boring. With no clicks in the secondary and savage's light combo system seeming like something i should mostly ignore, it was just click the same three powers over and over again. Felt reasonably strong, just not engaging.

I know this post is a month old, but resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch (AVs have no special resistance to resist debuffs because resist debuff resistance is just resistance -- for AVs to have special resist debuff resistance they'd have to have high resistances. But purple patch is different and does affect resist debuffs).

I don't want to tune the game back down to the point where most people need to solo at +0/x1, no bosses. That's a just fundamentally less interesting solo experience than we have today. And reasonably powerful superheroes should absolutely be able to jump into a crowd of bad guys and finish them off. But I wouldn't mind if the a typical forum-build could manage +1/x4 or +1/x5, with the very toughest soloers were struggling to do +2/x6 or so, with +4/x8 laughably out of reach for any single player.

Making a full-on, "you may not pass this encounter unless you mez this person" is probably not a great mechanic for general play across lots of spawns. But you can I think pretty validly add softer but significant rewards to the table for mezzes. Give an enemy a toggle that gives them +30% or +50% resist-all, suppressed by mez. Give them an aura that gives +30% or +50% to damage to all their allies, suppressed by mez.

How's this for a problem statement: "For controllers and dominators to be useful with their control-set powers, there need to be enemies which are fundamentally more vulnerable to controls than they are to damage, and such enemies are very rare in CoH."

Uptime and "what power you click most" seem like they're over-prioritized by people in this thread. You can be a key contributor to a team by having a suite of three powerful powers that you use one of on every other spawn. Like, that's at least theoretically the case. We can imagine a world in which a dominator spends most of his actual playtime using assault-set powers, but every other spawn or so fundamentally changes the dynamic with a long-cooldown power that neuters some major threat or rescues the team, and that that is a worthwhile character even if the majority of his button-clicking is doing DPS and that DPS is much worse than a blaster. And similarly, we can imagine a troller who mostly heals or buffs or debuffs, and his heals, buffs, or debuffs are worse than a defender's, but again, he has these rescue power that get broken out only once ever few spawns but they are still super useful. Now, I think it is the case that the current meta, or at least what people see of the current meta, is: a. A world in which you don't need rescues, not every spawn, not every other spawn, not even once every two or three missions, because what happens is the team deletes every spawn in a few seconds. This is probably most true in things like PI radio missions or a few very commonly played, very well-understood TFs, but there's an undeniable element of it happening across the game, at least in high-level 8-perosn teams. b. The kinds of things which aren't just easily-deleted-spawns, which do provide some kind of threat that might need a rescue, are not necessarily well-handled by control sets. The escalating ability to simply ignore controls brought on by rank in CoH is not super-well tuned to a reality in which the team has a LOT of ability to instantly kill minions. c. The all-or-nothing aspects of control makes it very hard to thread the needle between "My supposedly powerful control does literally nothing" and "I can city-of-statues the entire game." But the solution to these problems is not, it seems to me, to throw up your hands and say, "A dominator is just a blaster with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its damage up to blaster levels," and "a controller is just a defender with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its buffs/debuffs/heals up to defender levels."

There's always a spectrum. Sometimes you're on a team with 7 great players. Sometimes you're on a team where the sets really synergize well, or the enemies can't attack your team's weaknesses.

Sadly, Rubi's power API does not appear to contain this kind of information, it has no hint of any kind of delay to damage from Neutron Bomb. It does confirm that activation time (not merely displayed activation time) is 1.67 seconds, but I was hoping to find that it showed like projectile speed or something, and it does not.

There is one way to make -resist debuffs "not work," which is give people overcap resists. I have no idea if Reichsman has overcap resists, but it is not quite the case that you can always expect someone with -resist-all to add X% to team damage output.

If the OP has softcap or a bit more without weave, then by all means skip weave. If not, get weave.

Drop placate and take kick, tough, and weave.

I mean, sort of. They look like DoTs, but they're actually set up as pseudopets, and they actually are doing a separate power activation for each pulse of damage. As opposed to other DoT powers (like say ball lightning), which actually only have one power effect and apply an actual DoT effect and check scourge only once.

I feel like you're reacting to the weakness of control sets in the current meta, which was not true at release of CoV and leads you to discount the fact that Trollers and Doms have, after all, almost entirely the same powers in their primary and surely most important powerset. Trollers are meant to be control-first, with buff/debuff to fill in the holes of stuff they can't keep fully locked down. Dominators are meant to be control-first, with damage to kill the stuff they can't keep fully locked down. Dominators get pets just like Trollers do. Like, yes, things evolved and perma-dom became a thing achievable to anyone who worked hard for it and blaster nukes got buffed and now a control-first playstyle, at least on teams, is kinda bad. So successful trollers lean more heavily on their secondary, and dominators lean more heavily on their secondary. And I'm not saying that there aren't significant differences between Controllers and Doms. But also, Masterminds only "spend a lot of their time buffing/debuffing" because their primary, AT-defining powers do not take a lot of combat-time to use, and they do not lock down opponents. They just aren't that much like Controllers except, perhaps, in a loose, thematic, "Oh, this is kinda how my playstyle works, man" way. And at that point we go back to Stalkers are the Blaster correspondents -- sure, their powers are very different, but they're high-DPS, one-shot, run if you don't kill everyone kind of way. Like, if you look for "mirrors" in terms of just straight up "whose powers are most like whose other powers," then you get Tanks/Brutes, Scrappers/Stalkers, Defenders/Corruptors, Controllers/Dominators, ???/MMs and Blaster/???. If you look for "mirrors" in terms of roles, you have all kinds of possible thematic matchups, including Tank/MM, Blaster/Stalker, and Blaster/Corruptor. I think the people suggesting that villain ATs are a blend of heroic ATs are the closest to accurately describing the how things came situation, but I don't think that there's much sign that they are describing a unified design intent. Rather, I think that the designers probably took inspiration from the heroic ATs, tried to come up with things that "felt villainous," and, if they ever had an intention to provide 1:1 mirrors of the heroic ATs, abandoned that as a design goal as they refined the ATs.