aethereal

Hey, honest question: What's being solved with the teleport phase thing? Were people finding teleport unsafe as a travel power? Or is this an in-combat thing?

This sounds potentially quite hard, but it'd be cool if there was a command that was like /matchcooldownbyname <power name>, which, if included in a macro, caused the macro in question to cooldown and show the normal grayed-out-and-smaller-icon representation of a power being on cooldown, matching the cooldown of the power named in it. So for example you could do: /macro ice "powexeclocation target ice storm$$matchcooldownbyname ice storm" and thus have a macro that actually behaved like a power.

Sorry for the triple-post. So I'm starting my first mission with (four-slotted) Energy Transfer available, level 33. My very initial impressions are that oh my god, my health is so swingy. As a /invul scrapper, I don't have a ton of healing/regen, so depending on if I crit or not with ET makes a huge difference. Without the superior versions of my ATOs, my crits are somewhat less reliable than they will eventually be (my +50% crit chance proc is in Total Focus, which I think is The Right Move for scrappers), but it feels like they'll never be so reliable as to avoid this -- getting a little unlucky with crit rates for ET seems like it's gonna be big. Stalkers have more ability to near-guarantee crits, which may be a big deal for them -- I was thinking that the ideal stalker move was AS (hide) > TF > ET (fast), but maybe it's TF > AS (hide) > ET (fast), to near-guarantee a heal in your ST attack chain (at the cost of a second fast ET). (I mean, or maybe invul is just a bad pairing with EM -- I'm increasingly feeling that way. Energy Aura is obviously to some degree "the canonical" pairing here, and if I had a big regen boost from Energize, I presumably wouldn't be feeling these ET hits as much.)

How does ET's "health cost" interact with to-hit debuffs? If you miss, do you pay the health cost? I assume you can't "crit" on a miss and self-heal.

Regen debuffs aren't like resist debuffs, where they magnify based on team size. If a regen debuff is "worth it" in terms of your own lost DPS solo, it's "worth it" on a team, and conversely if it's "not worth it" solo, it's "not worth it" on a team. (With a possible exception for enemies who get a regen boost per opponent, but as far as I know those are rare as hen's teeth.)

Okay, walked my EM/Invul scrap through the first Croatoa arc to level 29, then cheated to 33. I finally started to feel a little less fragile towards the ends of the twenties, probably due more to getting Invincibility than anything to do with EM. I continue to think that EM could use a little more polish and care at low levels, though. The move of the guaranteed stun to Barrage is nice, but between endurance issues and very unreliable mitigation, those sort of late-teens, early 20's doldrums were particularly bad. Not a ton else to say, really. Ghosts with their to-hit debuffing suck, you don't like missing on this character. Combat Teleport was only a weak help. Looking forward to having Energy Transfer to play around with.

I am pretty unconvinced that anything would be too horrible if taunt auras allowed procs to auto-hit enemies. Back before PPM, when procs in auras were good? Maybe an issue. Now? Checks once every ten seconds with a low proc rate? One available damage proc? Who cares?

Defense is obviously thematic for combat teleport, and it would not need to be balanced differently. Combat teleport, if it provided defense, would replace hover or combat jumping in some builds. People who are hardcore looking for a fourth pool to add another defense power (after speed, leaping or flying, and fighting) already have concealment and leadership as options.

I remember @Bopper speculating, with seemingly decent evidence, that stalker hemorrhage might be badly coded, and that some of its larger damage might be a mistake. Does the fixing of scrap/stalk savage melee powers nerf any power?

It would be nice if, when you used powexeclocation target combat teleport, if you were teleporting from a lower floor to an upper one, it put you with your feet at the same vertical level as your target's feet. Right now, what happens if you appear beneath the floor of the target.

They mean it won't use up an EF stack that you hope to reserve for ET.

Well, good news, it's radically less time now. Just one exploration badge per destination zone + one full zone exploration. In other news: I've been running a mission against Croatoa Ghosts (who are heavy to-hit debuffers), so I've been just spamming the shit out of Combat Teleport to avoid getting into the floored to-hit you lose cycle. At first, I was feeling pretty negative about it, but I remembered that this is to some large degree because my to-hit monitor doesn't accurately reflect combat teleport. Once I stopped paying attention to the monitor and started to just, you know, kind of eyeball it, it's been.... okay. It's a real pain in the ass to use -- I have to spam CT madly to have its relatively small bonus stack up against the debuffs, and the fact that I don't really know when I've got "enough" to-hit bonus sucks. But I have avoided the negative-to-hit spiral that you get with spawns of entirely to-hit-debuffing enemies.

Very initial feedback on build 2 based on like literally 10 minutes of play: I like the stun being moved to barrage. Makes it easier for me to move to a secondary target, stun them, and then keep my big hitters on the main target I'm taking down. EDIT: Also if I crit on TF, I can lay down two guaranteed stuns in pretty rapid succession, which sometimes is what I want.

I mean, I'm not upset about the accolade power change, but I ran around and got the Atlas Park ones a couple days ago so that I could easily move my beta character back to getting P2W double XP, and it took me considerably more than 5 minutes.

LRTP is still available as an accolade power for picking up all the exploration badges in a zone.

I've been remiss in updating my feedback on my slow grind up levels. For those just joining us, this is an EM/Invul scrapper, I've been entirely solo, currently level 27. So I got TF at level 26. That's a big difference in the fun value of the set even right as you get it, just moving the number of big hitters in the set up from one to two. Honestly, I'd probably switch the positions of it and Whirling Hands. PC provides you with enough AoE (given its fast recharge) for the early 20's, and with TF carrying all of the mechanic of the set, I think it'd be nice to get it earlier. Not that the mechanic is a huge deal for me right now. Without Energy Transfer, there's no DPS add from EF, you either get a bigger area for PC (which I don't really need as I'm not yet facing large groups of foes), or guaranteed stun from BS, which is sometimes nice, but not really amazing, given the single-target nature of it and the plethora of stun options in Energy Melee. It helps my survivability when dealing with bosses, otherwise not a huge deal. If I were teaming, and thus facing larger spawns, I presume the bigger PC would be nice. That said, TF is still welcome with or without much help from the mechanic because, like Bone Smasher is great, but then you go for a long time before you get your next single-target tool, and having another big hit is super nice. With the new animation, it doesn't "feel" slow to me anymore. I mean, it's still a long animation, but it somehow gets under the threshold of feeling glacial. Speaking of survivability, mine still sucks. Almost certainly more to do with Invul than EM, but jesus. Not able to advance the difficulty above +1/x2 so far, and I have deaths from time to time. I'm not playing super conservatively or anything.

The underperformance of brute bio compared to scrapper bio may be a mitigating factor there.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we should be designing the game around track pad usage. I do want to push back, however, on this idea that you're getting enormous actual benefit from combat positioning with the mouse + macro + combat teleport option, rather than "it seems cool to teleport around the combat." Lining up cones is just not that hard, and in my experience is probably faster with normal movement than it is with combat teleport's animation time even if your precision is perfect with CT. My setup is clearly much less than ideal! But the only time I've found it to be a significant problem is in PvP (where tactical movement seems like a much bigger deal than PvE).

Do you mean Jaunt or Combat Teleport?

Yeah, I'm monitoring to-hit chance, but it appears to not, uh... work most of the time. I posted a bug about it in the bugs forum. For whatever reason, specifically the to-hit bonus from Combat Teleport does not seem to show up in the monitoring most of the time, and when it does, it's with a significant-enough lag that for a 5 second buff I'm unconvinced that I'm getting useful information.

There's no "primary target" to power crash. It's a cone, not a TAoE. Well, nevermind, obviously it could work on the actual person targeted. I guess new eagles class works that way?

So I've spent the last few hours of the game trying to see if I can grow to like Combat Teleport's to-hit effect or other tactical usage. I remain unconvinced. I've been spamming it in combat quite a bit to try to maintain the to-hit uptime, but goodness it's so short. Because of the frustrating way that the monitor doesn't usually show my to-hit bonus, I have to either keep my eyes glued to the tiny and ever-changing buff icons, or just guess when I'm needing it. It continues to not "feel" impactful in terms of gut-check "am I seeming to hit more often" (even though I enhanced it with an attuned Gaussian's To-Hit buff). I've been facing opponents with to-hit debuffs (flash grenades from Rogue PPD), and even stacking Combat Teleport's buff doesn't seem to win out against their debuff. The same enemies also have a patch effect, but I usually find it more advantageous to stay in it and cluster my enemies up for AoEs than escape it with Combat Teleport. I almost invariably find keyboard movement more precise to line up my cone attack (though I might again find it different with a mouse). It continues to be a great travel power (with Ninja Run), to the point where I am uninterested in getting actual Teleport. I don't know. I more-or-less like the power, but I can't help but feel that it's not great at what's supposed to be its core role. I'm going to try messing with my binds a little and see if I can find a more productive use for it.

Here's a very speculative suggestion: Increase the percentage chance of stuns for Energy Punch, Barrage, Power Crash, and Whirling Hands, decrease the duration of the stuns. Why: I'm feeling weirdly squishy as I do my lowbie explorations of this set. I've been running Roy Cooling, which has as its opponents rogue PPD and Sky Raiders. These guys are shooting a lot of guns at me, and I'm a EM/Invul scrapper, this feels like it should be a good matchup. I have 47% S/L resistance and 11% or so S/L defense. But, at +1/x2, I'm ending a lot of fights at about 10% health. I recently ran a Kat/Invul scrapper through these same levels, and it felt considerably safer in these kinds of matchups. So, I asked myself, why am I feeling so squishy? My tentative conclusion is that it's variance in the mitigation of Energy Melee, which of course is mostly in the form of stuns. All early powers in EM besides Bone Smasher have a fairly low chance to stun. Here are the numbers from my detailed info screen: Energy Punch: 30% chance, 2 mag, 4.88s duration Barrage: 10% chance, 2 mag, 5.86s duration Bone Smasher: 60% chance, 3 mag, 7.81s duration Power Crash: 20% chance, 3 mag, 4.88s duration Whirling Hands: 30% chance, 2 mag, 4.88s duration What happens is you get a kind of on-and-off cycle of mitigation. If you get lucky with your stuns (many members of the spawn stunned by the first 2-3 attacks), then a given spawn is VERY safe, hardly touching your health, as you kill most members of the spawn before their stuns wear off, or they get only one or two attacks. On the other hand, in the more likely case where your first few attacks stun few or no opponents, you get almost no mitigation. I think it would be better if stuns (besides Bone Smasher) were more reliable but less long-lasting, making it less likely that you'd get very little mitigation and less likely that you'd get a ton of mitigation, more somewhere in the middle. I'm thinking like take the chances up about 20% for EP, Barrage, PC, and WH, and knock a second or so off the duration.

For all characters, I set up power tray 9 as a vertical bar on the left-hand side of my screen and fill it with my toggles. Typically, sprint on top, a travel power under it, and then armor and utility toggles. See attached picture. On live, it is consistently the case that when I log in, the top power (sprint) does not respond to clicks. I have to click some other power on that bar, at which point the top power becomes clickable. On beta just now, I found that the top two powers were not clickable when I logged in (so sprint and ninja run in this case). I clicked one of my armor toggles off and back on again, at which point sprint and ninja run became clickable. This is regardless of the state of the powers -- they just don't respond to clicks on the power icon, it's not like "sprint is turned off." If it's on, it doesn't turn off. If it's off, it doesn't turn on. On live, this never affects the second power, only the top one, so it was mildly concerning to see the problem, uh, grow or whatever on beta. I use the 64 bit Mac client.

Lowbie explorations update (this is with my EM/Invul scrapper): I did the Graham Easton arc, with difficulty increased to +1/x2. This is with some powers slotted with ATOs and other sets, other powers unslotted or slotted with trash that happened to drop. This is how I play on HC live, more or less, so I'm aiming for verisimilitude here. The arc brought me from 18->20. Got a little more experience with having the new, improved Whirling Hands as well as PC. AoE feels Just Fine on EM to me. I mean, certainly not top-tier, but I've got solidly hitting AoEs that do respectable damage, check. You will be shocked to hear that +1/x2 is significantly more difficult than +0/x1! This manifested mainly in terms of my endurance problems resuming with a vengeance, as I had to cycle through more powers for each spawn, and used my end-hungry AoEs more. The final battle of that arc (four one-on-one combats against Lts then one against a Boss) was predictably a breeze with Energy Melee. I sometimes have problems with that just in terms of attrition, ending up starting the fight with the boss at low enough health and/or endurance that it's a bit of a problem (never really bad, just sometimes I pop more insps than I'd like). This time, I didn't come within a mile of touching an insp. The stuns really prevented any of the lts from touching my health, and when the boss came along I popped build-up and killed him in a rotation-and-a-half. I then cheated up to 22 and will be looking to see how much I can push difficulty up through the 20's.