aethereal

Controllers don't have "aggro" control (except Illusion), they have crowd control -- through almost entirely exactly the same powers that Dominators have crowd control. Like, yes, I get it. I can see what you're saying. But also obviously Controllers play a ton like Dominators, using the same primary powersets to lock down opponents the same way. Especially when you do straightforward play of the kind that we had more of back when CoV was released and fewer people had perma-dom.

I mean, it's super obvious that a Controller plays more like a Dom than a Mastermind. Is anyone willing to say with a straight face that this isn't true? But more to the point: you're still making the assumption that each villainous AT has exactly one "pairing" with a unique heroic AT. That's just... not necessarily true. It seems clear to me that some kind of pairing and mirroring was a concept in play at some point, like it's not crazy to point out that some of the villainous ATs look a lot like some of the heroic ATs, but there's a big jump between there and, "each villain AT was designed from beginning of Cov development to release of CoV with a mandate to mirror one unique heroic AT."

This presupposes that someone said, "All five ATs must have a one-to-one mirroring." And what's the implication of the rest of your post? That Masterminds are a mirror to controllers?

Being first at a very specific challenge that is relatively far from ordinary play is a data point, but it's hardly the beginning and end of the matter.

They buffed max hp, added Assassin's Focus, added the ATOs, added crit-chance, added chance-for-AoE terrorize & minus-to-hit, and gave fast-Assassin's-Strike out of hide. You are correct that most of those bonuses are offensive bonuses, not defensive (though note that the ATOs add 5% S/L Defense, 6.5% S/L Resistance, and 5% AoE defense as well as their offensive bonuses).

Stalkers have also moved closer to Scrappers over time. Originally, they were considerably more glass-cannon-y than they are today. Yes, they have always had melee and armor powersets, but they weren't the toe-to-toe fighters that they became, and the comparison to blasters made more sense. (Of course, blasters also became less glass-cannon-y).

I mean, I think one of the big differences between this is just that enemies don't tend to run toggles, where any armor-set character and honestly a lot of non-armor-set characters will run 7+ toggles. And the difference between running those 7+ toggles and running 0 of them tends to be like an order-of-magnitude to 2 orders-of-magnitude difference in power and mitigation (I mean that literally: incoming damage that would, with all your toggles running, reduce your health by 1-10% will just kill you if you don't have your toggles running). This is a weird asymmetry. Having your endurance briefly touch zero for a critter is like a fairly short-term soft mez, where you can move but not attack. Having your endurance briefly touch zero for a player is very likely death. If I were trying to balance this, I might have player toggles suppress when they can't draw endurance instead of toggle off -- that way, if you eat a blue, next second all your toggles unsuppress at once. I'd also probably convert a few toggles in each armor set to auto powers. I'd make critters actually pay endurance for their powers, lower their base durability somewhat, and give them all a toggle that got them back to their current durabilty, so they'd have at least a somewhat symmetrical durability loss to what players have. And I'd probably give them all a 0 end cost, 15 second recharge time 30% endurance heal with a 1.5 second animation time (that they'd only use at 5% end or less), so it isn't the case that you can statue them by draining them once and then keep them on their heels forever. But that's a lot of changes to make to support sapping.

Resistance resists resist debuffs, so it's impossible under current mechanics to have high resistance debuffs resistance without also having high resistance. It doesn't seem thematic to me that regen has high DDR, and as a mechanic it sounds either useless or exploitable with very little space between.

This doesn't seem a lot better than the current power? I mean, it's neat and all, but you have 15 seconds of invulnerability to turn your toggles back on, debt isn't that big a deal, and it seems better to choose whether or not to use the power than have it be automatic?

You can, I think, make this work in detail. It doesn't have to be something where you need to go deep in the red to get good use out of it. Imagine it's a 30% damage boost plus 1% per percent of life you are below 60%. Use it at 40% life, 50% damage boost. Heals can scale with maxHP if they're coded to (some are, some aren't). And of course, even if current IH were 3x stronger that would certainly make it stronger when it's there. But the complaint about IH is not that it's a weak power when it's active, it's that a lot of the time, when you need it, it's not there, it's on cooldown. The virtue of my proposed version of IH is it's always there when you need it. You aren't going to spend time using my version of IH when you're at max hp, and you aren't going to be at 20% health and look and say, "Oh shit, it's on cooldown." This is essentially the same thing we'd get from turning IH into a toggle, but with more ability to tune cost and reward -- because your point that heals/regen as a mechanic have a thresholding problem is well-taken. One of the issues with IH as a toggle is that it's going to be hard to get the values right. A little too good and your character is unkillable, a little too bad and the set remains weak. With my version of IH, there's more flex. It's more okay if a character is "unkillable" if they also can't do much because they're pounding IH for all their animation time -- we can make it more powerful because it comes with a built-in tradeoff. Now, might it be "right" at 7% heal instead of 5% heal? Sure. That's what testing would be for. But if it's a little too weak (or a little too strong) in terms of basic numeric power, then you could increase the heal or decrease the animation time slightly. That kind of thing is only really discoverable through playtesting. People who want a set that mixes healing, regen, and absorb have bio available. It's right there. It's a great armor set. I'm not arguing against heal + absorb, I'm arguing that we already have heal + absorb. Regen needs to differentiate from bio and willpower, hybrid sets that are significantly stronger than it is. If there were a form of mitigation to hybridize with that weren't well-represented in the other armor sets, I'd be fine with hybrizing with that form of mitigation.

I was thinking like a 1 second animation time. But the idea would be very sensitive to small changes in animation time, heal amount, endurance cost, and recharge time, so ultimately the answer would really be "depends on testing." The idea is that it's certainly not something you want to auto-cast, all you'd be doing is instant-healing over and over again. Your ideal case is that you can just use Reconstruction for your heals, which would be more efficient in, like, "HPA" (heal per activation time, think of it as an equivalent to DPA). Instant Healing would be bad HPA, but good HPS, as it were. Thematically, think of it as one of those times when Wolverine is getting his ass kicked all over the place, and healing up, he's not gonna die, but he's on his heels, just getting hit and healing, not counterattacking.

I don't think that more than one sapper is ever put in a single spawn.

It's a tradeoff. If you find yourself using it a lot, it means you're in over your head -- but it gives you a chance to recover from being in over your head.

Yes it does. You're thinking of AV resistance, which doesn't affect resistance debuffs.

HC has literally hundreds of players on a shard. This isn't to say that I disagree with your points, but I think you're underestimating the population of the shards.

I use AS (with chance to hide) followed by Moonbeam like literally all the time, it has never forced slow-snipe for me. Moonbeam doesn't get slow because you're hidden, like AS does, it gets slow if you have neither attacked nor been attacked for 8 seconds.

If you want heal + absorb, go Bio. It's a great set, it covers this schtick well. I avoided absorb for the same reason that I doubled down on clicky powers instead of passive ones -- give Regen a unique identity.

This is an attempt to make Regeneration a mid-to-top-tier armor set, while retaining its identity as click-heavy and not passive. Willpower is fine as a passive regeneration set. If you just want your health to climb in the background without you doing anything, choose Willpower. T1: Reconstruction (Self Heal, Resist Toxic). Reconstruction is a good solid cornerstone power and honestly everyone (well, Scrappers and Brutes) should just be told up front that they're fuckin' taking it. No changes necessary. T2: Revive (Self Rez). This is a suggestion from the other Regen redesign thread, and I think it's a good one. Move the revive up to a point where it's potentially more useful, where you can't improve your damage mitigation with IOs and so forth, and then let people respec out of it when they stop needing it. I'd also cut the cooldown on this dramatically, maybe to two minutes, or even to one. If you wanna spam Revive, go with god, man -- there are obvious downsides. I guess that would mean cutting the debt protection down, but does debt have any bite these days anyway? T3: Quickened Metabolism (Auto: Self +regen, +recovery, +resist(regen debuff), +resist(slow)). This is a combination of the old T1 and T3, plus a bit of slow resistance. T4: Integration (Toggle: Self +Res(Knockback, Disorient, Hold, Sleep, Immobilize), +Regen). This is unchanged, but moved up earlier in the set because frankly it armor sets want their goddamn mez resistance. T5: Dull Pain (Self Heal, +Max Health). A great power as-is, but it requires some serious recharge reduction to be good, and so delaying it a bit is not a big deal. You want good enhancement values and some spare slots before Dull Pain comes into its own. T6: Burst of Energy (Self: +Damage, +Recovery, +Regen). So this is a big part of my sense of this being a radical revamp of Regeneration. Armor sets that give people access to offensive abilities are in high demand, and create an incentive for people to work around some flaws in the pure mitigation aspects of the set. Rather than trying to make Regeneration be top tier in pure mitigation, give them a reason to come to the set besides theme. This would be a rapid recharge (maybe 30 seconds base recharge) clicky that gives a short (10 second) bonus to damage that scales to current hitpoints (so it gives more of a bonus the lower your current hitpoints). It wouldn't stack, just replace. It would give some +recovery and +regen just to stay in theme, but the draw would be the +damage. T7: Instant Healing (Self: Heal). The other part of why this is a radical redesign, and why everyone will hate this proposal. My idea is the exact opposite of the "make it a toggle!" calls. Instant Healing in this mode would be potentially huge amounts of mitigation at the cost of constantly clicking. It would be lower base heal than Reconstruction, maybe as low as 5%, but spammable. Maybe literally spammable, like with 0 cooldown, or maybe just a very short cooldown, like 4 seconds. The idea is that if you want, you can sit there and do nothing but click Instant Healing, and it would be very hard to overcome the mitigation that this provides, but it's at the cost of you, you know, doing things. This gives you, with Burst of Energy, a playstyle that is hopefully like, "Let my health dip, fire Burst of Energy, try to damage my way out of this, oh shit shit stab instant healing a bunch of times to hopefully get out of trouble!" A lot of risk/reward management tools, basically. T8: Resilience (Auto: Resist (all damage, stun)). As-is. Not an exciting power, but this set needs some passive mitigation. T9: Moment of Glory (Self +DEF(All DMG but Psionics), +Res(All DMG but Psionics, Disorient, Hold, Sleep, Immobilize, Knockback, Repel), +Recovery). No change. So the end result of this set is designed to be one that really embraces low-level play, with Quickened Metabolism giving you very efficient low-end healing and recovery and Revive giving you a kind of dramatic power for low levels, and then as it hits mid-high levels Burst of Energy and Instant Healing giving you a bunch of ability to customize your offense/defense tradeoffs to your style of play and type of enemy. It cedes passive regeneration as a concept entirely to Willpower and doubles down on active clicking, and tries to present in Instant Healing and Burst of Energy some unique powers that "feel" different from the heals that other sets give. Explain why this is a terrible idea below.

Correct, +damage does not change proc damage. Almost nothing affects the damage of procs -- the only thing that really will cause an enemy to take more damage from a proc per se is a -res debuff. Aside from that, all you can do is try to get the proc to fire more frequently (ie, global recharge + using the attack as soon as it's off cooldown). One generally gives up a lot to really proc out a character, because you need to, first, give up all set bonuses in several attacks that would normally carry some global recharge/defense, and second, you tend to want to build heavily for global recharge, since that's what really improves procs, and that tends to leave you Very Short On Mitigation. I had hoped that the secret sauce of proccing a character was to just build a tank, since they simply don't really need significant amounts of mitigation from their set bonuses, and their lower damage modifier doesn't affect procs, but both my own few experiments there and the overall feeling of the board seems to be that, you know, procs can be good on tanks, but they still won't be competitive with other melee ATs even with a very heavily procced build. (This is why I don't really believe that procs need a nerf. I do think they need some rounds of simplification, because holy shit are they complicated.)

All that assumes you're fighting even-conn opponents, and that you're achieving 50% uptime on opportunity on all opponents that your party is fighting. Defenders are also hurt by the purple patch, of course, so that's somewhat apples to apples (their buffs aren't affected by it though). But it's important to note that if you're comparing sentinels resistance debuffs in a +4 world, you're doing half those numbers.

Okay, some actual suggestions: 1. Base proc rate (or scalar) on unenhanced recharge (plus animation time) Due to ED, it is fairly trivially possible to get more global recharge than local recharge. We don't gain much "balance" by scaling proc rate to local recharge, when global recharge is the controlling factor for how fast the power actually recharges. Doing this removes complexity and newbie traps. Reduce PPMs or change the formula as appropriate, and then just let recharge be recharge. 2. Either replace proc rate with a scalar, or create schedules of proc damage For procs that do damage or healing or other scalar values (as opposed to ones that, for example, proc a stun or +2 mag hold or whatever), introduce something that allows a low-damage, fast-recharge power to proc at a reasonable rate, but for lower damage (or healing value, or whatever). That might mean just changing the proc formula to being a modifier on the damage. So instead of proccing for 71 damage 50% of the time, proc for 36 damage 100% of the time (or instead of 71 damage 10% of the time, 7.1 damage 100% of the time). Or perhaps fix proc rate to 50% and then scale damage appropriately. Or create a few schedules, so schedule A might be 30 damage, schedule B 50 damage, schedule C 70 damage, schedule E 90 damage, and have powers define which schedule they proc. This gets us out of being so interested in "sweet spot" powers that are more than 10 seconds, and ideally more than 15 seconds, of recharge time. You can also use this to tune the AoE stuff a little better, I think.

T2 revive is actually a neat concept, I'm into it.

So the devs have stated that they're going to take a look at procs. It seems possible that we're at the right time in the dev cycle to actually have an impact on what, conceptually, they do (unlike Energy Melee, guys, you really need to let it go). So I thought I'd create a clearinghouse thread. Here are my problems with the current PPM framework: 1. It really rewards a narrow range of powers. You kinda want a power with like a 15-20 second base recharge time. Any more recharge time than that is wasted, any less and your proc rate drops precipitously. If you have a power that is perfectly hovering at the edge of the point where you get a 90% proc rate, then a normal damage proc adds 64.575 damage expected to the power without any ED concerns -- that's way more than a damage enhancement at that scale of power would add (roughly: even a high end IO adds at most about 50% damage to a power, powers with a 15 second recharge time don't do 130 damage). But get longer recharge, damage procs are less exciting, get shorter, they're less exciting. This is just... weird. We shouldn't be pouring through sets looking for powers that have a 15 second recharge time. 2. They're very independent of the actual power. The only thing a proc cares about is "can I be slotted in this power," "what's this power's AoE," and "what's this power's recharge time." A minimal-damage hold is exactly the same as a high damage blast etc. It kind of robs sets of individuality. A lot of normal CoH is about managing factors that build up your damage normally -- it sucks that procs ignore scrap/stalk crits, ignores build-up and other damage boosters, ignores almost everything except getting into a power with the right recharge time. 3. It puts more pressure on slotting for global recharge Global recharge was plenty good before it was a way to triple the DPS contribution of your procs. Here are things I do not mind about procs: 1. They allow low-damage ATs to close some of the damage gap with high-damage ATs. The supremacy of blasters and scrappers/brutes does not seem to me to be empirically threatened by current proc mechanics. We aren't seeing everyone just run defenders. You give up a lot to cram 3+ procs in your five main attack powers, and I think there's a pretty good tradeoff right now in terms of how much you have to give up to get a damage boost. My testing with, for example, extremely heavily procced out tanks does not suggest that they can get brute-like damage from procs.

PvP procs are normal damage procs, they don't get anything special. They're 3.5 PPM, 70-whatever damage instead of 4.5 PPM 100-whatever damage. So it's way worse.

Here is a change nobody will like: Instant Healing becomes a 5% (enhanceable) heal with a 1 second animation time and a 4 second base recharge time. It gives a 2% damage bonus, stackable, for 5 seconds, for every percentage point of health below 50% you are (so, +100% damage bonus if below 0.5% health). If you have not attacked or been attacked in 8 seconds, it does 100% heal and gives 100% endurance.