aethereal

Sonic Blast underperforms, at least for blasters. There are several reasons for this and probably the set needs some retuning in general, but one specific thing is pretty straightforwardly addressable: the major secondary of the set, damage resist debuffs, does not have associated IO sets. This creates substantial headwinds for damage in the set (due to fewer applicable damage procs) and generally lower versatility due to smaller number of available set bonuses. At the same time, making a "Resist Damage Debuff" IO set sounds crazy. There are a lot of REALLY GOOD powers that debuff damage resistance, across a lot of really good powersets, and we might change the game's balance substantially by making a Resist Damage Debuff set. So what if we just... made a couple of Sonic Blast IO sets? One yellow, one orange, the orange one with probably a straightforward damage proc in it? With some modestly good set bonuses in them. They would be applicable only to (most) Sonic Blast powers. This contains the number of balance points to one underperforming powerset. Is this a little hacky and on-the-nose? Yes, it's a little hacky and on-the-nose. But there are worse things than hacky solutions. I've heard that fire blast has similar problems, and a similar solution might be good, though I'm less sure how true that is, since fire has a snipe and a ton of AoE.

So you get a new pool or APP or patron power for your character. And you change its color. Then you save your power colors and copy it up to nine more times. Or you realize that your original customization wasn't quite right and you tweak one of your powers. For most (not all) characters, powers want to be consistent across most if not all of their costumes. It'd be handy if we could just have a button on the powers customization screen that applied the changes to all costume slots. It's even more of a pain in the ass if you've ever realized that you wanted to tweak a scale value for your character after creation. Now your only real recourse is to save a costume with the tweaked scale, copy that costume to all the slots, and then reapply the actual costume pieces that you want in the other slots (or muck around with the text files), if you want that scale to be consistent for your character. Again, a button in the interface to apply a scale change to all costume slots would be welcome.

I have continued to have costume pieces linger between costume changes after the afternoon hottie. Specifically, I had a female character in a costume with s shirt (I think it's called gunslinger? The one with no shoulders), my other costumes used tights with skin options, and the shirt remained until logging out and back in.

Energizing circuit buffs can not be canceled by right-clicking the buff icon under your status bar, the way you can with similar buffs from other support sets.

Double their salary!

But not necessarily good DPA, I think.

Same logic could apply to the epics.

I don't think TW needs anything other than an endurance tool in the armor set to be strong. Lots of armor sets have endurance tools.

Just spitballing, but maybe a good deal with at least T1 power pool attacks would be if they broke the damage formula in a bad way by like 50% (so they had half as much damage as they were "supposed to" from their (long) recharges), but good-to-excellent DPA? My thought is that then if you've got a spare power in your build, you can take a power pool attack and, like... actually use it some of the time. But because they don't contribute very much to an attack chain, they don't become mandatory you-gotta-have-em powers. This is a random idea that I haven't put a ton of thought into, but maybe something like that could give them a niche.

Even if one were to accept that TW is less popular on tanks and brutes than scrappers, there's a pretty plausible explanation in which: People find it a difficult set to play due to momentum mechanics/high end cost/high necessary global recharge, and those who persevere are doing so because they want to put up really big numbers. Those people find that the biggest numbers they can put up are through TW/Bio scrappers, and so they disproportionately push there. But if TW/Bio scrappers were nerfed specifically, rather than TW in general, they would find that, whatever, TW/Bio brutes, or TW/Energy Aura scrappers or whatever is the now the next thing, and you just shift all those TW/Bio to that next thing and see a radical redistribution of what specific combos are popular without moving away from TW. I'm not saying the above thing is necessarily true, I'm saying that looking at the specific AT/powerset/powerset numbers for popularity and saying, "Oh, this one thing is the problem" presupposes that a targeted, narrow nerf won't change the proportions of all the other AT/powerset/powerest combos, and that's not true.

Thanks @Manga! Appreciate the help. I upgraded to Catalina and downloaded the Catalina version from your site, and that worked.

@Manga fwiw a fresh update to Catalina 10.15.3 does not resolve the problem.

Is there a working version that can be downloaded somewhere?

I don't get how you get a 20.83PPM from 36.9% once every 17 seconds. I assume that you've got some baked-in assumption about number of targets? But I don't see you specify it anywhere. 60 / 17 = 3.53 activations per minute. If you had just a single target that had a 36.9% chance of activating, that would come out to 1.3 procs per minute. So I guess we're assuming... 16 targets? Fully saturated? Yes, that comes out to 20.83 PPM. (OH. You call out the number of targets in your proposed system, just not the existing system). I am not convinced that there is a problem with the current system in a no enhancement, no global recharge situation. I'm somewhat unenthused by a proposal that makes procs much worse in that base case, rather than shaving off some of their effectiveness in highly globally recharged systems.

Lots of people want armor sets that have little or nothing in the way of clicks. It's thematic to at least a certain conception of how superhero defenses work, and there's some utility when dealing with sets that have redraw or busy combos. Willpower is extremely popular despite having zero clicks.

I know that you didn't suggest moving to click mez. I was just giving an example of a change which is at least arguably a QOL change while affecting a combat power (as opposed to for example QOL changes that are about moving through zones easier). However, you did suggest adding two new powers to SR, Enduring and Master Brawler. Yes, I know, they exist in sentinel SR. Adding them to other SR sets is adding new powers to those sets, and is a balance-affecting change that is not QOL.

Do you mean "agree to agree on the first two"?

No, they can't. The only useful meaning of "QOL" changes is, "Benefits that do not affect or only negligibly affect main combat balance." Going from click mez protection to toggle mez protection? At least arguably QOL. Moving AoE defense earlier in the set purely by rearranging powers? At least arguably QOL. Introducing a new power with new significant combat functionality? The very definition of "not QOL." It'd be nice if people could stop trying to sneak balance changes into proposals for QOL just in terms of usefully labeling threads so people can know how to map their interests to which threads they read.

These aren't quality of life changes, they're balance changes. I agree that SR needs some mild buffs, but I'm unconvinced that these are the right buffs, they feel like they just push for greater armor set conformity. I'd rather that SR got some weirdo buff that wasn't a heal, absorb, or end tool. If you want a defense set with heals and end tools, Ninjutsu exists. So does Energy Aura. If you want a minimal-fx, good armor set that can be themed to natural characters, willpower exists, and honestly invul isn't terrible for this. I'd rather we combined two passives and gave SR, like, a targeted telecharge attack that, I don't know, did minimal damage and gave a short-term recharge buff or something. 5 second duration 1 second cast, 30 second timer crashless god-mode? I don't know, something weird.

I don't feel like I understand the design goal for procs. What are they supposed to do? Is the idea to allow people to improve average performance at the cost of unreliability? Is that... actually something that anyone wants? Certainly, in practice people seem pretty dedicated to maximizing reliability. Is it just supposed to be a complicated system that allows people who have additional systems mastery to improve their performance by demonstrating mastery over fairly complicated game mechanics? Is it supposed to make powers more diverse (if so, we have too many damage procs), and the unreliability is beside the point? I don't really get it.

Sirens song, I believe. It's a big cone sleep in sonic blast.

Everyone can skip this reply unless they are interested in some musing about how balance works in CoH. * * * So something that this thread has been really helpful for is making me think very long and hard about how relevant it is to get a certain capability "for one power pick." I find it a surprisingly nuanced question. Like, let's take SR. What if we took one of the toggles of Super Reflexes and folded all of its abilities into another toggle, and then replaced the first toggle with some kind of utter garbage power. Is SR better as a set? I mean... yes? Kind of? But not a lot better? You get 24 powers by level 50. That's enough for all of your primaries and secondaries, hasten, combat jumping (or hover), a travel power, and boxing/tough/weave. If you want powers from your epic pool, or stealth or maneuvers, you've got to find primary/secondary powers to drop (or get by with ninja run/P2W powers). But there are few (no?) primary/secondaries that currently really demand 18 power picks, so... If you have 3 skippable powers in your primary/secondary, you can get to the final tier epic power. If you have 5 skippable powers in your primary/secondary, the marginal value of an additional power pick is very low indeed. Much more important than power pick efficiency is overall set efficiency. SR currently has 8 pretty takeable powers, you definitely skip Elude and might skip the power that gives +20% recharge. If it replaced Elude with a good solid self-heal, it would be a better set, despite having fewer skippable powers. If it combined two of the toggles and replaced one of them with Elude 2.0, people would still kind of say, "Well... it's FINE, I guess." It's obviously the case that Farsight is a good power. Would Time as a set be much worse if it had Farsight I (with 6% defense) and Farsight II (an auto-power that buffed Farsight I to 12% defense, or a toggle that gave 6% defense, or something like that), and gave up Temporal Selection or Time Stop? I mean... it would be worse. I'm not sure it'd be much worse. People get caught up in "This power is worth THREE OTHER POWERS," and that sounds like a bigger deal than it is.

Hell, I would even say like a slash command for like so: /postallsalvage [common|uncommon|rare] [price] So for example: /postallsalvage common 250 This would take all your common salvage and put it on the AH at a sell price of 250. You could then macro these. And it would be sweet.

Dude. It was the fourth sentence of the post.

I recently got Savage Leap on a character. In terms of UI/playstyle, it's a lot nicer than other teleport-type powers, since it pops you to a target instead of a ground reticle. Obviously, there are things that are nice about the ground reticle, but it's just fussier. And powexeclocation doesn't fully solve its problems, since that's still a line of sight reticle under the hood. For example, I often, in buildings, jump up a bit to see some mobs on a different floor and then savage leap into the middle of them. I'd never try that with powexeclocation, even if there theoretically was a line of sight at some point, my experience is I'd almost certainly teleport nowhere. So it'd be nice if we had an option to get at least other short-range target-focused teleports (Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Burst of Speed) to behave the same, and honestly I wouldn't say no to having the OPTION to have all teleports, even plain old vanilla travel power teleport, work the same. Some ideas for how this could work: A Null the Gull flag changes the behavior of the power. (most preferred) When you take these powers, you get two powers (a la switch ammo), which share a cooldown, one of which is a ground-target and the other of which is a target target. (least preferred) if you use them while targeting someone they pop you to target, otherwise they bring up the ground reticle. A new powexec command, or modifier for powexeclocation (like /powexeclocation target:force lightning rod) that worked for these powers only that let you create macros and binds that give the full Savage Leap-style experience. Mutually exclusive chosen-at-power selection versions of the powers that work differently, a la how Sentinel mez protection works in Super Reflexes