aethereal

If you slot recharge reduction on Voltaic Sentinel, does it affect how fast the VS's own attacks recharge (ie, if you give it 100% recharge it fires twice as many bolts during its 1m lifespan), or does it just affect how fast the summon itself recharges (ie, useless, since it's perma out of the box)?

How sure are we that this raises mob levels? I've teamed with someone who had her team-size set to 256 for months, she said it was just the same as x8. EDIT: Hmmm, no I confirm +5 and +6 mobs with my team size set very high.

There is no mechanic in the game which prevents multiple procs from firing on the same power activation to the best of my knowledge. There are procs that will fire on only at most one target of an AoE power, but no powers that will, if slotted with two different procs, prevent one of the two from firing.

Deranged little psychic could also refer to Praetorian Penny Yin/Mayhem, right?

Chance to proc (on you) once for each target affected by the toggle, every slightly more than 10 seconds, per standard PPM math, with a 10s "recharge" time.

This also, I think, highlights some of the limitations in the current approach of trying to push mechanics through global procs of various kinds. Scrap and stalker crits are set up by hand-coding the crit onto every power. Since it's just another power effect, you get kind of "for free" the fact that it's enhanceable and you can tune it in various ways (like there are some powers that have non-standard crit chances), and the damage type can be set to match the power, and if the power breaks the damage formula the crit can match, etc. Downside is that it's a lot of work to create those power effects and it's prone to failing to code it correctly (like, Bopper has fairly convincingly demonstrated that Hemorrhage on stalkers just is incorrectly set up). There's another world in which offensive opportunity works as Just Another Effect on sentinel attack powers and thus is enhanceable and potentially has a few additional bells and whistles. But in our world, it's a global proc and works kind of strangely.

So here's the deal. Let's say you have a 100 scale damage power, without damage enhancements. A scrapper does this kind of damage: 90% 112.5 base damage due to damage scalar + 10% chance of 225 damage due to crits = 118.125 expected damage A sent does this kind of damage Outside of opportunity: 95 base damage * 1.05 for resist debuff = 99.75 damage Inside of offensive opportunity: (95 base damage + 0.2 * 95 proc damage) * 1.25 for resist debuff = 142.5 damage If you assume you're inside of offensive opportunity 50% of the time, we average 99.75 and 142.5 = 121.125 expected damage, marginally better than the scrapper. However. That's not actually how it works when you take into account enhancements. Because the scrapper damage all scales with damage enhancement, while the sent damage doesn't. With 95% damage enhancement, a scrapper does: .9 * 112.5 * 1.95 + .1 * 112.5 * 2 * 1.95 = 241.3125 expected damage But the proc damage of sentinels does not scale with damage enhancement, so we get: 95 * 1.95 * 1.05 = 194.5125 damage outside of opportunity (95 * 1.95 + 0.2 * 95) * 1.25 = 255.3125 damage inside of offensive opportunity And if you assume 50% offensive opportunity uptime, it averages to 224.9125 damage, noticeably lower than scrapper. And note also that this assumes a pre-ATO crit rate for scrappers and also only applies to the target of sent opportunity and does not count purple-patch decreases in sentinel resist debuffs, so... it ain't great. EDIT to add: Also scrappers get build-up while Sents get aim, and damage bonuses like build-up/aim scale scrapper damage but do not scale the 20% proc for sents. And if your power breaks the damage formula in a good way (ie, does more damage than it should for its recharge), the scrapper gets that damage while the sentinel falls further behind.

A +4 boss has a 9.something% chance (with a normal accuracy power) of actually hitting someone at at softcap (or who has some combination of -to-hit and defense that adds up to 45). It's the 5% (clamped) chance after defense and to-hit, times like 1.4 times 1.3 due to purple patch accuracy bonuses. Additional -to-hit does not affect that. (And, to address another point, the -to-hit on Dark is "wasted" if you are already at softcap, just like more defense is. To hit debuffs can be thought of as essentially "defense that's applied to the attacker instead of the defender." As a result, Dark blast or Dark melee is not a broadly a good choice for players who are already going to be firmly at softcap defense (or, especially, those who might get beyond softcap)).

However, there are two separate clamps on the to-hit formula. -to-hit does nothing (literally) to opponents who do not have +to-hit and if you are already at softcap. As a result, -to-hit isn't great on teams at high levels where lots of people have built themselves to softcap or beyond, or are affected by substantial team buffs (barrier, maneuvers). None the less, high-conn, high-rank enemies have pretty substantial modified chances to hit because of their accuracy bonuses (a +4 boss has 9%+ chance to hit, a +4 AV has more than 10% chance to hit, without high-base-accuracy powers). Since some of the criticism of sentinels is that they bring less to the table than blasters in the endgame, I wanted a debuff that increases mitigation for even those teams. You're also incorrect about baseline chance to hit -- it's 50% for critters, not the 75% chance that it is for players. And note that I suggested a very large accuracy debuff that would in fact provide substantial mitigation at low levels. Yes, a -50% to-hit debuff would lower chance to hit even more at low levels, but it would do nothing or relatively little at high levels.

Is it possible to debuff accuracy? Not to-hit, accuracy. Or is it not a global stat or something for enemies? I've been thinking about the sentinel as an initiator. Like someone who can be at the fringes of a group creating a little space for the group to deal with enemies. And my thought was this: Hitting an enemy with any damage power as a Sent does the following, in this order: 1. If the enemy does not have the Warded Off status, gives them a -50% accuracy (possibly unresistable, definitely not stackable) for 5 seconds. 2. Gives the enemy the Warded Off status (which does nothing) for 45 seconds (or longer). So thematically, the idea is that the sent keeps watch, and if an ambush or something comes, the sentinel slams them with a short-lived but powerful debuff that gives the group time to react. More realistically, the sent has an ability to survive alpha strikes/do some initiation if you lack a tank, without getting a general increase in durability. Why -accuracy? Basically, because it stacks with defense, so it would be a welcome ability even for people/teams who are at or beyond softcap, giving sentinels a unique, potentially useful ability that nobody else can replicate, but not trying to make them be better blasters or anything. Because it's a kind of mitigation that nobody has right now, it lets sentinels of all powerset combos bring something to the table. Because it's so short-term and can only be applied once during the expected lifespan of a spawn, it's not overbalanced. In practice, if accuracy even is debuffable, I doubt that the HC team wants to open the door to accuracy debuffing. Plus give sents damage scalar of 1.05 or 1.1. Remove all existing inherent abilities.

This is happening right now (may be coming to the tail end, not sure).

I believe that the way it works is there is a global lockout after it fires once, in which it can not fire again. It's fairly short -- seconds. But if you had say two click endmod powers and had power transfer slotted in both, and you fired them off one after another, the second one would guarantee not to fire. Disclaimer: I'm putting together some stuff that I've seen in the forums with some supposition. Please do not take this as gospel.

Yes, so you don't have the catastrophic fall down the increasing-returns curve that defense has at softcap. A 10% resist debuff means you take 10% more incoming damage, not like 100% more (ie, it moves you from 90% resists to 89% resist, not from 90% resist to 80% resist, if you're right at the 90% cap). That said, there are big resist debuffs out there. If you're a tanker who has survivability vastly in excess of what is challenged by ordinary content, you may never really notice resist debuffs. But if your damage mitigation is well-tuned to the damage that's incoming, you'll certainly notice it when resist debuffs come in.

Longbow does resist debuffs.

While regen is pretty different on sentinels than it is in other classes, it's worth noting that on the melees, the "regen" set is more focused on clicky heals than on passive regeneration. WP is the premier set for passive regeneration (the combat stat). This is obviously confusing, terminology-wise, but there it is.

I think the proc rate is pretty low in caltrops (it's a pseudopet). But if you could keep people in its radius for 10s, you'd get another chance for it to fire. I haven't looked up the numbers and done the math to see how well it it actually performs. But yeah, it takes a -res, so that's exciting. And yes, KD plus slow seems like it might keep them there for a second chance of firing. I've also heard, but never confirmed, so take this with a giant grain of salt, that Overwhelming Force KB2KD isn't PPM and thus may fire better in low-proc-rate powers.

The OP was asking about mostly solo play. You certainly won't have any trouble taking a NB stalker to 50, solo, if that's what you want to do. Would you find it frustrating to play with your notoriety turned to large (x5->x8) effective team sizes? You might. Having minimal AoE certainly makes dealing with large groups considerably slower, and increases the burden on your defensive choices since you have to endure attacks from minions and so forth for longer. You can to some extent compensate for smaller amounts of AoE by aggressively finding AoE opportunities not in your primary (for example, Ball Lightning from the patron powers, maybe turning caltrops into a proc-bomb). To a large extent the answer is a personal one. Are you someone who is going to find it frustrating if you can't build yourself to effortlessly melt large mobs, or feel like it's a nagging problem if someone else's character does better than yours? Are you someone who's perfectly content doing the whole game at +0/x1? Somewhere in the middle?

I have heard someone assert that non-combat, non-targeting NPCs such as hostages are coded not as normal characters but their own thing and don't even have stats like perception. Can't personally verify.

Changing the hospital point seems fine to me -- I agree that that's just annoying that the enemies essentially spawn-camp you. Move it outside the mission if necessary. But the ambushes are an interesting part of the mission.

Can we have a few missions in the game that pose some additional difficulty or unique challenges? Nobody has a gun held to their head making them do this specific mission out of hundreds available.

I can't tell if you're imagining that this change would itself debuff people's defense, or if you're just worried about the interactions of this change with already-existing defense debuffs. I agree (and said back to someone else a page or so ago) that one possible negative effect of this would be that existing minor defense debuffs on like gun/bladed-weapon mobs that currently are too small to cause cascading failure would, with this change, become more significant and start to cause cascades (at least on non-SR sets).

Players who aren't pretty near softcap would almost certainly not notice this change. So let's say you're at 30% defense. You're fighting a +0 minion. Its base chance to hit you is 20%. If it procs the to-hit bonus, its chance to hit you is 30%. Let's say that, because you are a less optimized player, you let a minion get four attacks off before disposing of them instead of three. If each attack does 100 damage, without the proc you expect to take 80 damage. With the change you expect to take 83 damage. Yes, again, expected damage isn't really the right metric here, but just to be clear, it's a tiny change for anyone who isn't right at the softcap. Which, again, was what this was actually intended to do -- not add a ton of challenge, to soften the incentive to be exactly at the softcap, no more, no less. Give some more value to above-45% defense, give some more value to below-45% defense.

Yeah, looking at the Afterburner power in Rubi's API thing, it looks to me like it only affects max flight speed, not current flight speed. Though I'm not sure I fully understand how flight coding happens. You just see a current flight speed increase with normal flight because normal flight already "would" take you past cap (which is now raised by AB).

So the math for this isn't so much hard as there's a lot of it. Let's go through some of it to see how daunting it is to get a really good grasp of what's going on. So first of all, chance to hit. HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) Let's plug in some numbers: +0 Minion fighting a character at 45 defense: Accmods: Power Accuracy * 1 * 1 BaseHitChance: 50 ToHitMods: presumptively 0 DefMods: -45 HitChance = 5% for a power with 1.0 accuracy (note that even minions may have higher-accuracy powers so even against even-conn minions, you may actually have a higher than 5% chance of being hit at softcap) +0 Minion fighting a character at 45 defense who has procced a +10% chance to hit, then, is all the same except ToHitMods is +10%, leading to 15% chance to hit. +4 Boss fighting a character at 45 defense: Accmods: Power Accuracy * 1.3 * 1.4 BaseHitChance: 50 ToHitMods: presumptively 0 DefMods: -45 HitChance = 9.1% With +10% chance to hit, that raises to 19.1% Okay, so one way to describe this change would be to say that the expected damage of an even-level minion, after the alpha strike, would be 15% higher (95% chance of 1x damage, 5% chance of 3x damage). If a minion gets 3 total attacks off, then we'd say that their total expected damage would rise by 10% (since the first attack has no chance of proccing). This is for a character right at softcap, exactly 45% defense. A character with say 43% defense would experience only about a 5% expected rise in damage in the same scenario (3 total attacks), and a character with 47% defense would similarly experience about a 5% expected rise in damage. A +4 Boss gets 2.12x damage against a character exactly at softcap from this change, and procs is 15% of the time, so about a 17% rise in expected damage after the first hit, and here we might reasonably say that a boss doesn't die after just a couple of attacks, so maybe we just ignore the first hit and say it's a 17% rise in expected damage altogether (for a character exactly at softcap. Again, someone a few points of defense higher or lower will experience decreased damage changes). But expected damage is maybe the wrong metric for defense calcs in general. We plausibly care much more about what we in the software industry would call P90 or even P95 or P99 damage -- that is to say, the damage that you experience at your 10% unluckiest sets of rolls, or your 5% unluckiest, or 1% unluckiest. That is to say, if you survive 9 spawns out of 10 fine, but the 10th spawn you run into kills you every time, my guess is probably players end up turning down difficulty there. Do they turn down the difficulty if they die to one spawn in 20? I'm not sure. One spawn in 100? Probably not, unless maybe it's a farming toon. How do you calculate P90 or P95 damage? Well, it's doable as a pure math calculation, sort of, but it's quite complex. The way I'd do it is write a monte carlo simulation and then just order the results of a 1000 or so runs by the total damage the player experiences and choose the 100th from the end or the 50th from the end. But what should we simulate? Well... shit. I mean, really what you want to do is simulate an entire spawn. Which isn't just generic minions or lts or bosses firing scale 1 attacks, it's... a lot of stuff. It's different mixes of enemy classes firing different attacks, and you also need to figure out how fast do they die. So there are a lot of variables here. A selection of them: What level difference between player and critter What mix of critter types What attacks do the critters have - Do these attacks debuff defense? - Do these attacks have inherent accuracy or to-hit? How long do critters of each class survive Exactly what defense level does the player have (to each of the attacks the enemies have) A really useful tool, I think, would be a simulator that allowed you to plug in even rough answers to these things. Like where you could say, "Okay, here's a stylized +4/x8 spawn of Council, and here's some metric of how fast they'll die to the player attacks, let's run a few thousand combats." It would be necessarily imperfect, but I think it would be a useful tool to try to attack the complexity here. However, it'd be a hard tool to write, and it involves data that's not right at my fingertips, at least, about the details of enemy attacks. Even if you had it, trying to really understand the spread of possible scenarios would be a big undertaking.

I do not feel that you "ought" to need the Body pool as a /bio Brute. It's got several endurance tools, and as a Spines brute, you'll be wanting more hard-hitting ST attacks unless you only care about AoE. As a result, I took Soul Mastery for Gloom with my spines/bio.